Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Flooding in Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar and Nepal has killed scores of people, destroyed homes and structures, drowned entire villages, and forced many to crouch on rooftops hoping for rescue.
When heavy floods started inundating her riverside home last week in the village of Madarganj, (...)
In the last week, simmering tensions on the Indian-Chinese border in the Himalayas have escalated to open conflict, with fatalities on both sides. India’s foreign policy, and not just China, deserves much blame for the escalation.
Tensions have been simmering on the border between India and (...)
The laws that were created by the British Raj are still being used to stifle dissent on the Indian subcontinent.
It appears to be sedition season on the Indian subcontinent. A relic of the colonial era, the sedition law has become a potent weapon in the hands of the Pakistani and Indian (...)
The world today is witnessing a fascinating rebirth of popular republicanism. The central feature of this phenomenon is the mass public participation of citizens in defence of rights guaranteed in the constitution.
From India to Lebanon and from the US to Chile, movements have invoked their (...)
These movements merit our thanks and our support. However, the state has brutally repressed many of them – in Niyamgiri, Thoothukudi, Vypeen, Kashipur, Sompeta and many other places.
The climate justice movement in South Asia, and India in particular, took a significant step forward last (...)
The unraveling of civil liberties under Modi’s government has shocked many international observers who viewed India as a model of liberal democracy for the Third World.
The blatant use of force on Kashmir and the concomitant vitriol against dissenting voices has only confirmed the rapid (...)
Feminists are concerned about women being subjected to power apparatuses, which are used even in the so-called liberal world. And still today in the developing world, power is used to silence women with diverse methods, especially in the context of the subcontinent. Sometimes the power of (...)
Frenzied use of communal card signals the weakening of democracy.
It was once common wisdom that India had succeeded in developing a viable form of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy whereas Pakistan had failed. Pakistan has indeed suffered a succession of military governments (...)
Ever since the bloody partition of the South Asian sub-continent in 1947, the endless history of hostility between India and Pakistan has been a curse for the oppressed masses. Periodically, either one of the two regimes turns this mutual hostility into episodes of acute confrontation — mainly (...)
Activists, celebrities urge both governments to avoid military confrontation as tensions rise near disputed region.
There are growing calls for peace and military restraint on social media as tensions have escalatedbetween India and Pakistan after two Indian fighter jets were shot down over (...)
A review of Farooq Sulehria’s Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan.
Farooq Sulehria’s Media Imperialism in India and Pakistan is published by Routledge, 2018.
Theoretically, the media are regarded as the fourth pillar of democracy whose job it is to act as a bridge between citizens and the (...)
In South Asia, regimes are destroying democratic institutions to push illiberal ideologies.
SOME decades ago, as an expatriate journalist in West Asia, I found the newsrooms from which the two leading English dailies of the region were published to be an ideological melting pot, an excellent (...)
On July 30, India’s Union Minister for Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi offered an ‘apology’ for using the term “other ones” while referring to transgender persons in the nation.
After having sniggered, nervously chuckled and dehumanised the community, the minister stated that she was embarrassed by her “own lack of knowledge”.
In addition to her reaction, other parliamentarians thumped and laughed in parliament while discussing the Trafficking of Persons (Prevention, Protection and (...)
THE disputes between India and Pakistan have cast a long and dark shadow over their relationship since the two countries stepped out of colonial bondage in 1947. The circumstances surrounding their birth made it inevitable that ill feelings would mar ties and make coexistence difficult.
But (...)
Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy
We, the delegates to the 10th National Convention of the PIPFPD, held at Bhubaneswar on February 10-11, 2018 under the overhang of the rapidly deteriorating relationship between Pakistan and India, renewed our commitment to the joint (...)
The Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide by Azeem Ibrahim, with a foreword by Muhammad Yunus Hurst, revised and updated edition, 239 pp., £12.99 (paper)
Islam and the State in Myanmar: Muslim–Buddhist Relations and the Politics of Belonging edited by Melissa Crouch Oxford University Press, 345 (...)
The rise of the religious fundamentalist forces has been mainly due to the failure of the new national bourgeoisie-led states; the plight of the oppressed classes has only worsened since their caricatured independence.
The rise of religious politics and tendencies with increasingly vicious and (...)
The Land Boundary Agreement (LBA), if it eventually comes into fruition, will certainly be a matter of rejoice for numerous populations in the Indo-Bangladesh enclaves.
Our nationality or citizenship is so innate that we rarely need to reckon about what life would be otherwise. Yet, numerous (...)
Eighteen years after it rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Indian government remains implacably hostile to it, and bristles even at attempts to raise the issue of its entry into force (EIF). This was demonstrated again last week when a member of an eminent persons’ group, (...)
This region is termed ‘poor’ not because it lacks any potential – natural or human – but it has not been able to guarantee accountable democracy.
In a few days from now, the 18th Saarc summit will be held in Kathmandu, Nepal. November 26-27 will witness the head of states arriving at this (...)
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