Author: Priya Saha

Echoing solidarity in light of the global Black Lives Matter movement against racial injustices, ‘The Black Story’ – an ongoing virtual interactive exhibition organized by the Gallery Cosmos and supported by Cosmos Foundation, hosted a special webinar recently, as part of a series of intellectual interventions for the interactive exhibition. The webinar, titled ‘Dismantling Anti-blackness in South Asia and the Diaspora’, took place on March 2 at the YouTube channel of UNB and the Facebook pages of UNB and Gallery Cosmos, with a vision to examine, explore, and embrace the historical ties between the Black and South Asian communities through…

Shilpi Das’ life has been divided into two segments for more than 10 years now. The 33-year-old Catholic mother of two from a village under Queen of Fatima Church in Bangladesh’s Thakurgaon district looks after her family with her husband. She is also a catechist who travels to remote villages near the Indian border. Dinajpur Diocese has about 100 full-time and volunteer catechists. Shilpi became one of them against the will of her farmer husband. She gets only travel costs as an honorary monthly payment for a host of services she renders as a volunteer catechist. Subscribe to your daily…

According to the 2011 Census, West Bengal had over 24.6 million Bengali Muslims, who formed 27.01 per cent of the population of the state. Bengali Muslims form the majority of the population in three districts — Malda, Murshidabad and Uttar Dinajpur. The Bengali Muslim population in the state (West Bengal) soon after the Partition in 1947 was around 12 per cent. After Partition, some Bengali Muslims from West Bengal emigrated to East Pakistan (present-day-Bangladesh). However, the Muslim population of several West Bengal districts did grow between the decade of 1941-1951, despite the migration of two-thirds of a million people, to…

By Hoang Tao  &nbspMarch 9, 2021 | 06:23 pm GMT+7 A tour of a village inhabited by the Ruc ethnic minority, once known as one of ten most secret tribes in the world, has debuted in Quang Binh Province. The central province licensed Oxalis Holiday Co. Ltd. to pilot the tour for a year starting March this year. Oxalis is a renowned adventure company, operating exclusive tours to the world’s largest cave, Son Doong.The village tour will last for one day. In the morning, visitors will be taken to On Village in Minh Hoa District by bicycle to experience the…

Mehmood Ghaznavi remembers rejecting the case of a Pakistani Christian girl converting to Islam for marriage four years ago. “She knew nothing about Kalma [the Islamic proclamation of faith], there was no inspiration. I suggested she study the Quran and the life of the Prophet Muhammad before marrying her Muslim boyfriend. She never returned,” said Ghaznavi, who chairs the National Peace Committee, an interfaith group. “Although there is no age limit for conversion to Islam, we reject first marriages without consent from the parents. Disagreements can be handled with grace.” The cleric was speaking on March 8 at the protest…

India’s Partition was one of the major tragedies, not just in South Asia but for the world. The causes for it can be traced to a dangerous triangle formed by the British policy of divide and rule combined with the belief of Hindu communalists in the primacy of a Hindu nation, and of Muslim communalists who were demanding the formation of a separate nation in the form of Pakistan. The falsehoods that underpin the theory that religion can be the basis of a united nation-state were demonstrated by the breaking away of East Pakistan from Pakistan, which led to the…

03/08/2021 Nigeria (International Christian Concern) – According to Vanguard news, The Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP) carried out multiple attacks on the town of Dikwa, Borno State in northeastern Nigeria this past week, causing residents to flee for their safety. “Most of our people have moved from Dikwa to Ajiri in Mafa Local Government Area.” Kallamu Musa Ali, Director-General for the Center of Justice on Religion and Ethnicity in Nigeria told SaharaReporters, “ISWAP terrorists have re-strategised now, there is really no Christian in that place. If you see Christians, it’s those who work with NGOs or the military,…

03/08/2021 United States (International Christian Concern) – Freedom House, a well-known think tank, has downgraded India’s freedom status from “Free” to “Partly Free.” The decision came as a result of India’s deteriorating human rights record. The decline of human rights in India has been widely reported by various watchdog organizations and news outlets, including International Christian Concern (ICC). Freedom House is a leading think tank based in Washington, D.C. and monitors global changes in freedom at the country level in its annual Freedom in the World report. The new report is welcomed by observers like ICC, who have seen religious…

WE SPENT a few days in the Chilonga area of Chiredzi, visiting and listening to compatriots in Chiredzi South and East constituencies. We met with ordinary citizens, community leaders and traditional leaders. We travelled huge distances to places such as Chikombedzi, Malipati, Boli and Gonarezhou. We saw and heard from a tortured, insecure and angry citizen in the Shangaan communities so dominant in this part of the Lowveld. This is a community that has suffered displacements twice before. In the 1960s, they were removed from the Hippo Valley area to make way for sugar estates. They were then ejected to…

It is impossible in all probability to find a woman who has not been sexually harassed online even once, but try finding one who had sought legal recourse for it under the Digital Security Act, and one would realise it is quite akin to finding a needle in a haystack. Amina is one such needle. A final year student at University of Dhaka, she had taken the step to file a case under the Act against the person who sexually harassed her online in 2020. But she is still waiting for something, anything, to happen. She requested anonymity to avoid…

An Israeli-Canadian lobbyist hired by Myanmar’s junta has downplayed the military’s coup in the country, claiming the generals will leave politics shortly, seek to improve relations with the US and plan to distance themselves from China. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli Military Intelligence official who has previously represented Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe and Sudan’s military rulers, told the Reuters news agency that the military junta also wants to repatriate Rohingya Muslims who fled to neighboring Bangladesh, amid attacks on the minority that UN officials have termed genocide. Almost a million Rohingya live in sprawling camps in Bangladesh, with many having fled…

Suchitra Vijayan undertook a 9000 mile journey over seven years to India’s borderlands to write Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India. India shares borders with a host of countries including Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, Myanmar and so forth. From the densely populated border that India shares with Bangladesh to the highly disputed one with Pakistan, she meets men, women and children who tell her how they live, struggle, fight and survive. She also offers notes on how the lines came to be and why some of them are arbitrary and still being contested. The award winning photographer – there are…