3,000 Muslims stranded as Bangladesh turns away refugees fleeing Burma unrest

3,000 Muslims stranded as Bangladesh turns away refugees fleeing Burma unrest Thousands of Burmese Muslims fleeing deadly attacks on their homes were stranded in the Bay of Bengal after Bangladesh barred their entry to the country over fears many of them are illegal immigrants.  80 per cent were found to be trafficked people and only 20 per cent genuine refugees fleeing violence. As many as 3,000 Rohingya Muslims were reported to be waiting off the coast of Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh in around 50 boats after fleeing attacks by Buddhists in Burma's Rakhine state. According to official reports, 84 people have been killed and...

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Circling the Issue: South Asian connections to Tibet

Circling the Issue: South Asian connections to Tibet By Iona Liddell and Samdup Tenzin in Issue 5 - July 2012 The town was under complete lock down that cold January day when two young Tibetan men ducked into the courtyard of a hotel, doused their bodies in kerosene and set themselves alight. Running out into the streets of Ngaba in Sichuan province they shouted “His Holiness the Dalai Lama must return to Tibet” and “May His Holiness the Dalai Lama live for 10,000 years!” as they burned. Tennyi, a monk of Kirti monastery, died of his injuries that same day, and Tsultrim, thought to be an ex-monk of the same monastery, passed away the next day. Tennyi and Tsultrim’s self-immolations were the first of 2012 in Tibet. There have been 23 more since then, taking the total...

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Soul Suicide

Soul Suicide By Abeed in  The pogrom-like atmosphere gathering apace vis-a-vis its minorities in Pakistan is a far graver threat to society than is commonly realised. Sunnis, the majority community, do not appear to perceive that what is at stake is not an ‘altruistic’ concern for some weak, insignificant others. The larger framework of our lives—capitalism, and its partner in the abomination of our collective existence, nationalism—works to make us think and act as if ethical action towards others is reserved for exceptional moments of ‘altruism’, rather than being the everyday condition of a decent life. This destitute conception of ethics has come to pervade more and more of our lives, including our ‘religion’, which increasingly appears as a domain distinct from...

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Poetry and Politics at a Time of Transition

Poetry and Politics at a Time of Transition By Jyotirmoy Datta in  Turning and Turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold:Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.— From ‘The Second Coming,’ by W.B. Yeats Do poets see further ahead than the rest of us? From the evidence of “The Second Coming,’ the much-anthologized poem by the great Irish poet W. B. Yeats, poets indeed do. Written almost a century ago, the poem, which can be read on many levels, can also be construed as a prophecy of the cracking up of India that seems to be in process in 2012....

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Sale Value of Religious Zeal Blind spot of Pakistan’s media activism

A throng of supporters rally in favor of blasphemy laws in Karachi (Fatema Tabassum / IPS) Sale Value of Religious Zeal Blind spot of Pakistan’s media activism By Zainal Abedin in I The former Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer was murdered by a religious extremist. The late Governor sought to initiate positive changes in Pakistan’s controversial blasphemy law, introduced by late General Zia-ul-Haq, the former military dictator who sent populist President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to the gallows and used Islam to legitimize his autocratic rule. Urdu press coverage of the bigotry and harangues of his murderer, Mumtaz...

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