Author: Priya Saha

Human Rights Watch said today has said that authorities in India have adopted laws and policies that systematically discriminate against Muslims and stigmatize critics of the government. In a statement, the global rights body said, “Prejudices embedded in the government of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have infiltrated independent institutions, such as the police and the courts, empowering nationalist groups to threaten, harass, and attack religious minorities with impunity.” HRW that said 23 February, 2021 marks the one-year anniversary of the communal violence in Delhi that killed 53 people, 40 of them Muslim. “Instead of conducting a credible…

KARACHI: When the history of genocide is finally written, it often seems like it manifested out of thin air. Like the concept of temporary insanity in all but settled criminal cases, popular imagination conjures up images of fleeting madness on a national scale. But genocide, like all developments in history, is a gradual process. Its foundations are laid brick by brick by generations of ideologues until the divide between ‘us and them’ reaches fever pitch. Hidden by the sands of time are the tales of the politics of division, and of mass deception and denial across generations that cultivate the…

An 11th century AD painting from the Kathmandu Valley depicting the mandala of the Buddhist tantric deity Chakrasamvara. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) By Bibek Bhattacharya I dispel the three worlds by means of amorous play And I fell asleep in the sport of sexual union How lovely, o Dombi, is your coquetry The twice-born is outside, the kapalika is inside your hut By you, o Dombi, the whole world has been disturbed And for no reason, the Moon has been agitated Some are there who speak ill of you But those who are discerning do not remove you from…

In the final days of the Trump Administration, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced China for carrying out “genocide” against its Uighur minority. He accused the Communist Party of China of engaging in “forced assimilation,” providing a laundry list of alleged crimes but no proof. Antony Blinken, Biden’s secretary of state, told a Senate committee that he agreed China was engaged in “genocide.” Uighur students learn computer skills at the government supported Muslim Institute, Urumqui, Xinjiang. Photo: Reese Erlich Experts say Washington has escalated human rights rhetoric as part of a wider anti-China campaign.  Zhun Xu, an associate professor of…

— BBC Future My mother’s cellar was Full with harvest and joy! Bangla is my mother tongue Bangla, my motherland. Kaykobad, ‘Bangabhumi and Bangabhsha’ cited from Amar Bangla Boi, Class IV edited by Professor Kabiruddin Ahmed Mazumdar, National Curriculum and Textbook Board, Reprinted September 2005, Page 8-9, Translated from Bangla   ON FEBRUARY 21, schools are closed to celebrate International Mother Language Day. After having his breakfast with thajong alu (wild potato), George Chiran, a student of the Pirgacha Saint Paul’s High School is memorising the above mentioned poem by Kaykobad. George was born in Chunia Mandi village in Madhupur’s…

(Reuters) – Opponents of Myanmar’s coup took to the streets again on Saturday with members of ethnic minorities, writers and poets and transport workers among those coming out to demand an end to military rule and the release of Aung San Suu Kyi and others.People take part in a protest against the military coup in Yangon, Myanmar, February 20, 2021. REUTERS/StringerProtests against the Feb. 1 coup that overthrew the elected government of the veteran democracy campaigner Suu Kyi have shown no sign of dying down, with demonstrators sceptical of a military promise to hold a new election and hand power…

| Updated February 19, 2021 | According to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) 2018 Fact­sheet on Blasphemy, roughly one-third of the world’s nations maintain a law, or a set of laws, punishing the crime of blasphemy. In Pakistan—one of three countries where blasphemy is punishable by death— these laws are widely abused to settle personal scores and incite religious hatred. Due to widespread reli­gious intolerance and bias, members of Pakistan’s religious minority communities are disproportionately accused and punished under the country’s blasphemy laws. In 2018, Asia Bibi, a Christian woman, was acquitted of the blasphemy charges…

Dhaka, Feb 19 (efe-epa)- Bangladesh’s hardline Islamist group Hefazat-e-Islam on Friday demanded the release of extremists convicted earlier this week of killing liberal writer and blogger Avijit Roy, calling their trial “flawed.” A local court had on Tuesday handed death sentence to five members of a banned Islamist outfit, linked to the Al Qaeda terror group, and life imprisonment to another for killing Roy in 2015. American-Bangladeshi Roy was hacked to death on the campus of Dhaka University while returning from a book fair. His wife Rafida Ahmed was also injured in the attack. In a statement, Hefazat-e-Islam spokesperson Azizul…

Even as Kerala Maritime Board (KMB) is readying to charter a vessel to invigorate coastal shipping, many port officials and entrepreneurs in the field say the agency has much to do to shift cargo movement to the approximately 550-km-long coastal waterway that the State has.The shift of cargo to waterway transport could bring about lesser transportation cost, higher energy efficiency, and subsequently negligible carbon footprint as compared to the highly polluting and accident-prone road transport, they claim. “The prospects of coastal shipping will improve once Vizhinjam port is completed. Azheekkal port will further improve its potential. One needs a proactive…

DHAKA: Bangladeshi officials have sought the removal from online platforms of a controversial investigative report by Al Jazeera after a high court ruling cleared legal grounds for the move. The report, “All the Prime Minister’s Men,” broadcast by the Qatar-based TV channel on Feb. 1, alleged that Bangladeshi Army chief Gen. Aziz Ahmed had offered aid to his fugitive brothers, who are wanted for the murder of a rival politician, with the tacit approval of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. The high court in Dhaka on Wednesday ordered the country’s telecom regulator to remove the content from several online platforms, including…

From describing the positions of prominent Muslim actors and singers to Sufis and Pirs in Assam, Zafri Mudasser Nofil’s book The Identity Quotient: The Story of the Assamese Muslims attempts to recount the history of the Assamese Muslims, including their socio-political standing. Nofil describes the Assamese Muslims as distinct from those in other parts of India since their socio-ethnolinguistic identity precedes their religious identity. “This book tells how Muslims of Assam are different from the rest of the country. They take pride in calling themselves Assamese first and never consider themselves to be lesser Assamese than Assamese Hindus,” Nofil writes. Over…

Kiran Bassi was excited and keen when she joined Aon as a financial consultant in 2016. But within 12 months in the London office, during which she regularly fielded inappropriate questions from senior managers about her sex life and was groped by a colleague at the summer social, she felt “mentally unsafe” and deflated.Bassi raised her concerns with her manager, a white man, who she says asked if she had been bringing it upon herself, by being quite “boisterous and very talkative”. She says he and the wider management team ended up giving the men who harassed her a “slap on…