South Asia Citizens Web

Varavara Rao, poet, writer, activist and long-time speaker of truth to power has been imprisoned for two years now, along with ten other scholar-activists. They have been charged with inciting violence in Bhima Koregaon, a charge widely regarded as false, and over the past two years, the government has failed to bring the charges to court and start the trial. Rao, who is 80 years old, has now tested positive for COVID-19 and is seriously ill with several co-morbidities.

Be prepared, Pakistan! Imran Khan’s government is poised to inflict damage upon this country’s education system in a manner never seen before. Its so-called Single National Curriculum (SNC) hides systemic changes going far deeper than the ones conceived and executed by the extremist regime of Gen Ziaul Haq. Implementation is scheduled for 2021.

We, the undersigned are lawyers practising in different places across the country, who also believe in creating a robust criminal justice system, which is responsive to the needs of survivors of violent sexual crimes. We have received news of a very disturbing incident in distant Araria, and involving a 22-year-old, who was violently gang-raped on July 6th, and her two caregivers/friends. While recording her S.164 statement on July 10th, the learned magistrate perceived her disoriented state of mind as a personal affront and remanded her (and her two caregivers) into custody for contempt of court. The three have been remanded into judicial custody in Dalsinghsarai Jail, about 240Kms from Araria. The survivor’s details, including her father’s name and full address, have also been disclosed in the local press. The news reports cite the Court staff as having provided the details.

Current times aren’t exactly favourable to revolutionary politics, whatever banner it may be. Revolution is a term of reproach, a supposedly ‘discredited’ idea that always leads to more disastrous results than before. Among stolid liberal wiseacres, it is convention to excommunicate Thomas Paine and embrace the grandiloquent Edmund Burke. After all, drastic, large scale social and political change inevitably fail, with misery, bloodshed and needless chaos being its only result.

ON APRIL 26, 1986, one of the reactors at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploded, scattering highly radioactive materials into the surroundings. As the fire ignited by the explosion in the reactor core burned, more radioactive effluent was expelled and swept by the winds from the Ukraine and neighboring Belarus, to much of Europe.