The root causes of brutal crimes against women in India and Pakistan

Nasir Khan,  May 31, 2014

-How can such crimes be prevented? It seems there are no easy answers. On the one hand, there is much adoration and lip-service to traditions and family-values in tradition-bound Indian and Pakistani societies. On the other hand, in such tradition-bound patriarchal societies, the status of women is one of inequality and subordination. Women have no option than to obey the commands of their male family-members and comply with their wishes.

There exists a vicious circle of traditions and misguided use of old religious edicts to oppress and misuse women. No doubt, to seek retribution and show our emotional outrage are our justified responses to such events as has happened in India in this case and also in Pakistan recently when a young girl was battered to death by her relatives in the name of ‘family honour’ to justify such an abominable barbaric killing.

But the question remains: Can we improve the condition of women in traditional societies without pointing to the sources of oppression? In the name of old traditions every year, thousands of women are genitally mutilated, many are killed in the name of ‘family honour’ and countless millions suffer physical torture and oppression. That means the sources that lie in old traditions and the misuse of religious teachings should be publicly discussed by the media. Here comes the role of the enlightened members of society who understand the problem and who can use their knowledge and skills to devise strategies that can help us to spread the message amongst the people and help us fight against these social ills.

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Two Teenage Girls Gang Raped, Murdered, and Left Hanging from Tree in Latest Gruesome Sexual Assault in India

 By Elliot Hannon

Protestors rally after five-year-old girl was allegedly raped, tortured and kept in captivity for 40 hours in April 2013.

REUTERS/Adnan Abidi

India’s deeply troubling problem of sexual violence towards women sunk to a new, gruesome low on Wednesday. Two teenage sisters in rural northern India were abducted from fields near their home and gang raped before being strangled by their attackers and then left hanging by nooses from a mango tree. “The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home,” the Associated Press reports.

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Thailand: Human Rights Situation Rapidly Deteriorating as Political Impasse Continues

FORUM-ASIA Statement: 27 May 2014

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The Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), a regional human rights group with 47 member organisation across 16 countries in Asia, registers its deep concern at the rapidly deteriorating human rights situation in Thailand following the imposition of martial law since 20 May 2014 and subsequently a military coup on 22 May 2014. Increasing restrictions have been imposed on the exercise and enjoyment of basic rights and freedoms while violations continue unabated without any accountability or safeguard mechanisms put in place by the military government.

In a time of deep political turmoil and uncertainty, the restrictions on press freedom – through the initial silencing of TV stations and channels, sweeping restrictions on print, broadcast and online media, blocking of websites and threats to shut down social media – are particularly worrying as people are denied access to crucial information, critical analysis and the opportunity to discuss issues of national importance. This is further exacerbated by the recent summons and arrests of academics, journalists and other media practitioners who continued to report on or speak out against the coup and for alternative solution.

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Hindu Supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party Comes To Power In India

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By Countercurrents, 16 May, 2014
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Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won a landslide victory for Indian parliament election. BJP is set to win in 283 seats, eight more than the required half way mark in 543 member House. With its allies, the tally of National Democratic Alliance (NDA) is expected to go up to 335.

Narendra Modi, the BJP’s leader, will be the next prime minister of India.

The Congress party, that has run India for all but 13 years since independence, was set to crash to its worst ever result after a decade in power. Congress was virtually decimated as it bagged only 18 seats and was leading in 27 others. Party president Sonia Gandhi and Vice President Rahul Gandhi accepted responsibility for the defeat.

There was a record turnout in the elections, with 66.38 percent of the 814 million eligible voters casting ballots during several stages of the six-week ballot. Turnout in the 2009 elections was 58.13 percent.

Narendra Modi is the Chief Minister of Gujarat and a strong proponent of Hindutva. Hindutva is a virulent fascist ideology which holds a Hindu supremacist world view.

Narendra Modi’s role in the infamous Gujarat Pogrom, is still under legal scanner. The anti-minority carnage started following the gruesome killing of 59 Hindus on 27th February, 2002 in a train fire at Godhra. Modi’s alleged to have given free reign to rioters without taking sufficient steps to prevent the massacre. The Gujarat administration was accused by the opposition of taking insufficient action against the violence, and even condoning it in some cases.

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John Pilger: In Ukraine, the US is dragging us towards war with Russia

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Washington’s role in Ukraine, and its backing for the regime’s neo-Nazis, has huge implications for the rest of the world

A pro-Russian activist with a shell casing and a US-made meal pack that fell from a Ukrainian army APC in an attack on a roadblock on 3 May in Andreevka, Ukraine. Photograph: Scott Olson/Getty

John Pilger, The Gurdian, May 13, 2014

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Why do we tolerate the threat of another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”.

Every year the American historian William Blum publishes his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy” which shows that, since 1945, the US has tried to overthrow more than 50 governments, many of them democratically elected; grossly interfered in elections in 30 countries; bombed the civilian populations of 30 countries; used chemical and biological weapons; and attempted to assassinate foreign leaders.

In many cases Britain has been a collaborator. The degree of human suffering, let alone criminality, is little acknowledged in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications and nominally most free journalism. That the most numerous victims of terrorism – “our” terrorism – are Muslims, is unsayable. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of Anglo-American policy (Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan) is suppressed. In April the US state department noted that, following Nato’s campaign in 2011, “Libya has become a terrorist safe haven“.

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Indian General Elections – Fusing Hindutva With Corporate Power: The menace that’s Modi

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BIDWAI Praful, Europe solidaire sans frontiers, 12 May 2014

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As the momentum of India’s nine-phase Lok Sabha election shifts in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s opponents, a new bunch of writers and social scientists have risen to defend its Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. Some of them see virtue and talent, indeed even poetic genius, in a man who presided over the mass butchery of Muslims in Gujarat. (One of them compares Mr Modi’s ghastly poetry with Kabir’s!)

Yet others are shamelessly writing barely-disguised job applications anticipating a Modi victory. They include former diplomats and intelligence officers associated with the extreme-Right pro-Hindutva think-tank Vivekananda International Foundation [1], and Arvind Panagaria, a US-based neoliberal economist, and on his behalf, his mentor Jagdish Bhagwati.

Panagaria—who holds a chair at Columbia University named after (surprise, surprise!) Bhagwati—is lobbying for the post of chief economic adviser to the government. What little claim this undistinguished economist might have had to that post stands undermined by his recently propounded “theory” that Indians are genetically differently constituted from other human beings in that they are predisposed to being shorter and smaller. So standard international norms of measuring malnutrition or stunting by height-for-age and weight-for-age ratios don’t apply to Indians.

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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin

Respects to  Comrade  Vladimir Lenin on May Day, 2014

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