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Rightwing-Rightwing ‘Bhai Bhai : Who Fears Javed Akhtar?

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A ‘unity of purpose’ has been witnessed between Hindu and Muslim supremacists, who consider themselves the sole spokespersons of ‘their community’.

There are rare occasions when literary academies associated with governments wilt under mob pressure.

Rarer are occasions when they even cancel the very programme they had organised with much fanfare.

It has been more than 10 days that West Bengal witnessed such a spectacle, when the West Bengal Urdu Academy suddenly postponed a programme where it intended to discuss ‘Urdu in Indian Cinema’ for four consecutive. Javed Akhtar — one of the foremost living Urdu poets — was also invited as a key speaker in the programme.

Two prominent Islamist organisations in Kolkata, Jamiat Ulema-e-Hind and the Wahyahin Foundation, had protested the invitation, as they considered Akhtar’s views on religion problematic, labelling him as someone who “speaks against religion and God”.

Akhtar is a declared atheist and openly talks about it on public fora, and that had irked these people.

The organisations even threatened to launch a state wide agitation — much on the lines of their agitation against Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen which as everyone knows had forced her to leave the state (2007) — if the government did not heed their demand.

Mamata Banerjee, the West Bengal Chief Minister, did not want to take any risk as elections to the state Assembly are not too far.

( Read the full article here : https://www.newsclick.in/rightwing-rightwing-bhai-bhai-who-fears-javed-akhtar)

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Burma – Lest We Don’t See, A Genocide Is In The Making: Bonojit Hussain

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“We have to ask ourselves whether we may have over-romanticized its (Burmese pro-democracy movement within and outside of Burma) battles against the junta as a broader quest to bring pure, universal human rights to Burma, when in fact we had little evidence of a wholesale commitment to the principle of tolerance.” – Francis Wade (Thailand based Journalist and a keen observer of developments in Burma)

Since the summer of 2012 Burma has seen pogroms, massacres, riots of unprecedented scale against religious minorities, the latest being on the 30th April. Few hundreds have been killed and few hundred thousands have been rendered homeless.Much has been talked about how it is a ploy by the hardliners in the army and the post-reform government to stall further reforms. It might be true to a large extend, but the silence of the pro-democracy opposition is intriguing. While many from the “pro-democracy” camp have remained either silent or ambivalent; many others have shown that they actually belong to the ranks of fundamentalist who in the pretext of unfounded “sense of self-victimization” are fomenting a near genocidal situation in the country.  Continue reading Burma – Lest We Don’t See, A Genocide Is In The Making: Bonojit Hussain →