I never met M.F. Husain. And I am not among those lucky ones, of whom there are quite a few, who received as a priceless gift from him a sketch or a drawing to hang with pride on their walls.
I never met M.F. Husain. And I am not among those lucky ones, of whom there are quite a few, who received as a priceless gift from him a sketch or a drawing to hang with pride on their walls.
June 12, 1996 — it was the day of the national election in Bangladesh, an occasion marking/celebrating democracy. Yet, the Chittagong Hill Tracts was under occupation. In some ways, it still is. Democracy is not the rule of the game here. People pay terrible price here for speaking up, for resisting tyranny, and for simply struggling for their right to exist.
From the partition of British India to the civil war in Sri Lanka, the attempt to impose national borders in accordance with ethnic, linguistic or religious identities in South Asia has spawned civil wars and crimes against humanity, resulting in almost unimaginable suffering and bloodshed. This is all the more preposterous in a region where migration and the mixing of peoples and cultures have been occurring from time immemorial. The Left potentially has a conceptual and theoretical framework which would allow it to propose solutions to these conflicts, yet flawed interpretations of ‘the right to self-determination’ have led many on the Left to compound the problems instead. A different interpretation suggests that the key goals should be less violence and more democracy, and taking down barriers between peoples rather than erecting more and more of them.
Why are secular and civil liberty activists disappointed with the NAC Draft Bill Draft ‘Prevention of Communal and Targeted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill, 2011
The rapid GDP growth rate of the country, its new found "prestige" in the international arena, and the globalisation of its elite had created an impression that the Left position was wrong, a single incident, of four senior central ministers kow-towing most abjectly to a "Baba" who threatened to go on a fast-unto-death against black money, should have dispelled it. The incident did not just underscore our lingering pre-modernity; it expressed something infinitely more disturbing, namely that neo-liberal India, far from countering pre-modernity, is actually strengthening it. We have seen a revival of khap panchayats, and now we have a "Baba" demanding Constitutional amendments of his personal choice under the Damocles sword of a fast-unto-death; and the government of the day, which proudly proclaims our growth performance, rushes in to appease such a Baba.
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