Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
Commemorating Human Rights Day, the founding of SAARC and 50 years of Bangladesh’s independence, discussion organised by SAPAN highlights the commonality of human rights issues across the region.
Activists from across South Asia have expressed concern at the deteriorating human rights situation (...)
Moving beyond Convention 189 and towards municipalization
After the euphoric moment of ILO deliberations that culminated in Convention No. 189 of 2011 concerning “decent work” for domestic workers, the feminization of paid domestic work, the concentration of the most vulnerable sections of women (...)
With protests becoming catalysts for anti-authoritarian struggle, the air is ripe for new visions of rural emancipation
Those familiar with the systematic attack on agriculture in South Asia over the last decades will not be surprised at the ongoing farmers’ protests in India. It could have (...)
As India is trying to manage the fallout from the first major border skirmish, since 1975, with China in which substantial number of troops were killed it would do well to assess its broader political and economic impact on the regional situation. Both China and India, with their growing (...)
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 (...)
Colonial-era sedition laws used to criminalize dissent to protect imperial sovereignty. Now that “The People are sovereign” in independent India and Pakistan, why are they still being charged with sedition?
The recently concluded Students Solidarity March in Pakistan created excitement across (...)
Location: 2172 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC 20515 Subcommittee: Asia, the Pacific, and Nonproliferation
Witnesses
Panel I
The Honorable Alice G. Wells Acting Assistant Secretary Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, U.S. Department of State Witness Statement [PDF] (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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