RACISM & NATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS | NEWS/COMMENTARY


Pakistan’s War on Taliban and America’s Af-Pak Gameplan | Tapas Ranjan Saha

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June 2009

Source: Liberation

Even as the US military offensive intensifies in Afghanistan, a parallel offensive by the Pakistani Army, clearly under US pressure, in the country’s autonomous region of Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is underway. Estimates suggest that over 10 lakh civilians are being forced to flee the Swat Valley, one of the major theatres of the war, in what is being called the biggest displacement of people since the Partition (1947). While US air strikes recently massacred 150 civilians, mostly women and children, in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s military strikes are said to have killed hundreds of (more…)

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THE DEATH OF AN EMPIRE – Ashis Nandy

partition-genocide-india-pakistan1

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Source: Sarai

Independence did not come to South Asia as a single, identifiable event in 1947, though that is way most South Asians like to remember it. The slow, painful process of dismantling British India began with the great Calcutta riots and ended with the genocide in Punjab.

I was (more…)

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A psychological study of India’s Partition – A sketch of Ashis Nandy’s recent lecture at UC Berkeley

india_partition_genocide1

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Source: Sanhati

A sketch of Ashis Nandy’s recent lecture at UC Berkeley. March 13, 2009

It was not hatred, but a strong undercurrent of humanity, that was the surprising finding of research on the traumatic bloodbath of the Partition, iconoclastic Indian researcher Ashis Nandy told an audience March 3 at the University of California.

Nandy made some unconventional points: Even in the terrible bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions, as many as one in four people among survivors said they were saved by the other community, and their fondest memories were still of (more…)

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Land And Freedom – Arundhati Roy
The gathering at Idgah maidan for Friday prayers and a rally that was addressed by leaders of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference.

Srinagar, August 22: The gathering at Idgah maidan for Friday prayers and a rally that was addressed by leaders of the separatist All Parties Hurriyat Conference.

August 24, 2008

Source: Guardian

For the past 60 days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarised zone in the world.

After 18 years of administering a military occupation, the Indian government’s worst nightmare has come true. Having declared that the militant movement has been crushed, it is now faced with a non-violent mass protest, but not the kind it knows how to manage. This one is nourished by people’s memory of years of repression in which tens of thousands have been killed, thousands have been “disappeared”, hundreds of thousands tortured, injured, and humiliated. That kind of rage, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and sent (more…)

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