Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Afghan Taliban, AfPak, Benazir Bhutto, Buner, Chand Bibi, Colonialism, Fata, Feminism, Flogging, Honour Killing, Imperialism, Iran, ISI, Madrassa, Malakand, Maulana Fazlullah, Militarism, Mujahideen, Mullah Omar, Nizam-e-Adl, Pakistan, Pakistani Army, Paternalism, President Asif Ali Zardari, Protests, Punjab, Racism, Saba Mahmood, Sharia, Shirin Ebadi, Sindh, Sufi Mohammed, Swat, Swat Flogging, Swat Taliban, Taliban, Tehreek Nifaz e Sharia Mohammadi, US bombing, US Drone Attacks, US Invasion, War, Women's Rights, Yusuf Raza Gilani
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( Dated Piece | 30 April 2009 )
Source: Open Democracy
The distorting glare of the mainstream media obscures a more complex reality in restive Pakistan
Who are the ” Taliban” in Pakistan? Islamist militants in the country have won significant international attention after wrestling control over the Swat Valley, the restive region in northern Pakistan where elements of sharia law are now in place. Yet these militants do not self-identify as “Taliban”, unlike the Afghan Taliban who chose the name for themselves, and preferred it to the then generic term “mujahideen”. The term “Taliban” means students; the original Taliban were educated in madrassas, religious schools. Groups and individuals that are being labelled the “Taliban in Pakistan” (TIP) are very different from their Afghan counterparts in important respects. It is pertinent not just to think through the implications of these differences but also to raise questions about why distinguishing details are being lost in the media frenzy of recent months.
In Swat, the group that has gained the most notoriety in recent months calls itself Tehreek Nifaz e Sharia Mohammadi (TNSM). This can be roughly translated as the “Movement for the Continue reading
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Abducted Women, Africa, Ashis Nandy, Babri Masjid, Bengal, Bengal Famine, Calcutta, Colonialism, Concentration Camps, Cyprus, Development, Dispossession, Empire, Gandhi, Gandhian, Genocdie, Gujarat, Gurkhas, Hindu, Hindu Militants, Hindu Nationailsm, Hinduism, Holocaust, Hybridity, Imperialism, India, Ireland, Islam, Lahore, Middle Class, Migration, Modernity, Muslim, Nazi, Oppression, Pakistan, Palestine, Partition of Bengal, Patriarchy, Postcolonial, Punjab, Racism, Rajputs, Saadat Hassan Manto, Sikhs, South Asia, Victims, White Supremacy
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Source: Manas
Outside South Asia, the partition of India evokes little recognition. As the British left India, the largest single migration in history took place: well over ten million, and perhaps as many as fifteen million, people crossed borders, and a million or more became the victims of murderous assaults. Both the Governments of India and Pakistan established commissions for the “recovery” of abducted women who numbered in several tens of thousands. Numbing as these figures are, they barely register in world histories: perhaps that indifference to the calamity that afflicted India and Pakistan betokens the view that Continue reading
Filed under: Indian Subcontinent | Tags: Anticolonial Nationalism, Azad, Bengal, Colonialism, Divide and Rule, Gandhi, Genocide, Hindu, Imperialism, Independence, India, Modernity, Muslim, Nation-State, National Liberation, Nationalism, Pakistan, Partition, Punjab, Racism, Self-Determination, Violence, White Supremacy
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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 Continue reading
