21 February 2003
Financial Times – London Edition
By Edward Luce and Demetri Sevastopulo
India’s leading Hindu nationalist group – the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or Organisation of National Volunteers – told the country’s Muslims last year that their future safety lay “in the goodwill of the majority”.

The warning, made towards the end of one of the country’s worst episodes of sectarian violence, in which up to 2,000 Muslims died, fuelled allegations that the RSS and its affiliates were implicated in the pogroms. Yet far from deterring the Hindu nationalists, the controversy has encouraged greater militancy – including, in December, the landslide election victory of the BJP, the political arm of the RSS, in Gujarat.

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Blood and moneyRead More »

Tuesday, June 17, 2003; Page A12 | Special to The Washington Post
By Rama Laxmi
MUZAFFARNAGAR, India — Three months ago, Ejaz Husain Jaan was just another Kashmiri student living away from home, nervously studying for his finals and taking short breaks to catch the World Cup cricket scores on television.

Now, he is in jail, facing terrorism charges for allegedly aiding a plan to blow up important government buildings, an accusation he vehemently denies.

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Kashmiri students in India face discriminationRead More »

9 June 2003
Reuters AlertNet UK
By Sugita Katyal
NEW DELHI, June 9 (Reuters) – Priya was just 12 when she was drugged by an aunt and dumped at a brothel in New Delhi.
“I thought it was a cinema hall but then I realised they wanted me to do bad things,” said the young Nepali woman, now 21, who was brought from her poverty-stricken village with the promise of a job as maid.

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AIDS fuels traffic of Nepali girls to IndiaRead More »

5 February 2003
Financial Times – Asia Pacific
By Edward Luce in New Delhi
Rightwing Hindu groups in India are to launch a national campaign to build a temple in the town of Ayodhya on the site of a former mosque that was demolished by amob 10 years ago.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, India’s prime minister, yesterday said he wanted the dispute – which has aggravated relations between the country’s majority Hindu and minority Muslim communities – to be resolved through peaceful mediation.

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Hindus to reignite Ayodhya disputeRead More »

January 15, 2003 | The Hindustan Times
By Ravi Nair
The recent signing of a bilateral agreement between the US and India — not to surrender each other’s nationals to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC) — once again emphasises the lack of informed Indian foreign policy thinking, if any, on such issues. The South Block’s readiness to sign on the dotted line at Washington’s foggy bottom diktats once again underlines how isolated the present Indian government’s foreign policy is. 

The fact is that the European Union has collectively rejected such immunity agreements. With all its arm-twisting, Washington has only been able to enlist 16 acolytes to offer it absolution.

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Big bully finds another slaveRead More »

16 December 2002 | Dawn
By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK: Asian human rights activists ended a week-long conference here on Friday determined to stall what they call the steady erosion of human rights principles and practices within the UN system.

Most troubling to some of the over 500 participants who attended the Asian Civil Society Forum 2002 here was an assault by governments on the global body’s human rights mechanisms and institutions, including the Geneva-based UN Commission on Human Rights (CHR).

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HR principles erode at UNRead More »