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From: yogi sikand <ysikand@yahoo.com> Date: Wed Jul 6, 2005 Subject: Imrana, the Maulvis and the Shariah: Bangalore Muslim Voices Imrana, the Maulvis and the Shariah: Bangalore Muslim Voices Yoginder Sikand & Vijay Sai The controversy surrounding the alleged rape of Imrana by her father-in-law and the Deoband fatwa calling for the dissolution of her marriage has been further complicated with some sources now claiming that Imrana might not have been raped after all. While the actual facts of the case are, therefore, not clear, the controversy seems to have shifted from the particular case of Imrana to the larger question of whether or not the ???ulama have the authority to pass legal opinions on criminal matters and whether the state and civil society should allow them the ???right??™ that they seek for themselves to control ???ordinary??™ Muslims, particularly Muslim women. To read the whole article visit: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Mahajanapada/message/7581 ------------------------------- [2] From: EMPOWER - INDIA <ttn_empower@sancharnet.in> Date: Wed Jul 6, 2005 Subject: Survey: Attitude of Teachers towards Indo-Pak Conflict: an exploratory study of India and Pakistan". e Survey: Attitude of Teachers towards Indo-Pak Conflict: an exploratory study of India and Pakistan". Subject: My visit to India for my research "Attitude and Practices of Teachers towards Indo-Pak Conflict: an exploratory study of India and Pakistan". For this study I have to interview public school/college teachers, preferably the ones teaching Indo-Pak history. Also I have to interview the students from the schools where the teachers are working. I am conducting this study with my fellow research Michelle Baxter from Chennai for WISCOMP, Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness The Dalai Lama, New Delhi, India (www.furhhdl.org ). The study wants to see the impact of textbooks of history and social studies in Public Schools of India and Pakistan on the mindsets of students in those institutions. Therefore, in this research we will analyze the textbooks from both countries, and in the field will interview teachers about the historical distortions and the way we are creating hatred in the minds of upcoming generations. Can you help me in approaching public school teachers in New Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai, according to my travel plan? Travel plan of Zahid in India: ?· 3-6 July 2005: New Delhi = 4 days ?· 8-14 July 2005: Mumbai = 7 days ?· 16-23 July 2005: Chennai = 7 days Once I complete my research in October 2005, I would love to present it to anyone interested. With regards, Zahid Shahab Ahmed (Program Officer Print-Networking) Address: Sahil, No. 13, First Floor, Al-Babar Centre, F-8 Markaz, Islamabad, Pakistan. Tel: +92-51-2260636, 2856950 Cell: +92-300-8506527 Fax: +92-51-2254678 shahab_zahid@... www.sahil.org Cross posted:Karmayog Forwarded by : ---------------------------- Yours in Global Concern A.SANKAR Executive Director EMPOWER. 107J / 133E, Millerpuram TUTICORIN-628 008 INDIA Phone: 91 461 2310341 Telefax: 91 461 2310151 Mobile: 094431 48599 EMPOWER is a Non-profit, Non-Political, Voluntary and Professional Civil Society Organisation . - Registered in the year 1991- Engaged in developmental work for the past 13 years in Southern Tamil Nadu. -------------------------------------- [3] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com Date: Wed Jul 6, 2005 Subject: Jadavpur Refuses to be Tien An Mened From: "Soumitra Bose" Subject: Joy of Jadavpur Lathir badale gaaner sur : Dekhiye dilo Jadavpur. The students have won a spectacular battle. Students of Jadavpur University unanimously boycotted their semester examinations and classes in support of the demands to the authority against the promulgation of suspension notice meted out to five student leaders. The students sat on a fast-unto-death-strike. The authorities retaliated by police baton charge, thrashing fasting students in make- shift concentration camps within the hospital premise, molested women protestors and beat up whoever they could lay their hands upon. The students exploded. The entire West Bengal rose up in wrath, indignation and in revolt. The students of all major colleges in North and West India roared. Even students abroad lodged their protests. An epic movement started. For about 3 odd months the movement went on un-deterred. Students called off the regular classes, exams and all kinds of academic activities. The final year students, who were all ready to jump into very lucrative salaried engineering and other jobs, called off their final exams and plunged into the uncertainty of a limbo. The general students took it even further than that, they did not agree to any conditions and carried the movement much beyond what the organization leaderships were prepared to. It was an upsurge, a veritable rising up against all kinds of injustices. The so-called Left government meted unprecedented police brutality to the students, and the more they did so, the students joined in increased numbers. The authorities could never think things would take this turn. Thanks to the social democrats the present government is totally alienated from the general mass of educated and skilled students of the state. After all these, at long last the suspensions were revoked. The authorities demanded unconditional apology from the students showing some flimsy unaccounted and un-supported claims of misdemeanors. Students did not budge, they showed a two-year-old leaflet where they expressed their displeasure in general terms if some untoward event unrelated to the movement occurred, and stuck to their guns. The authorities construed that as an apology more to save their own faces and then on pressure of the movement revoked all punitive measures. The students won clearly. The movement was clearly spectacular in nature, richness and style! Every day, Jadavpur campus became a Mecca for all those who wanted to take some energy to live, some elixir to fight. The campus was an open-air incessant convention of students with Guitar, singling, snuggling, protesting, dancing, acting for street dramas, reciting, and composing poetry, painting and what not. Hordes of intellectuals poured in to empathize with the students, they came, they discussed, they met the press, they delivered speeches. It was a Woodstock where revolution was being sowed every minute, every moment. When the authorities were trying to penalize the students in various extra- institutionalized ways, the students were composing lyrics and songs. They were in a festival of protest. " Lathir badale gaaner sur, Dekhiye dilo Jadavpur". [ Our Rhythms for your batons, that's what Jadavpur reckons]. The force of creativity was manifested by the zeal of protest against misrule, against institution, for values, for justice. The students created moments, moments of protest, moments of camaraderie, moments of shared values, moments of pride among the people. Students created songs, created poetry. Students are preparing for bigger battles, for deeper values, for increased commitment and are definitely proving to become conscientious and conscious citizens. Students again are forming our consciousness, leading us! Creation is much stronger a force than any force on the earth! ----------------------------------------------- [4] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Wed Jul 6, 2005 Subject: Rage ar Refusal to Spin Stories (as yet) http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200507061413.htm?headline=Police~in~dark~more~than~24~hours~after~Ayodhya~attack Police in dark more than 24 hours after Ayodhya attack Ayodhya, July 6 (PTI):Well after 24 hours of the terrorist attack on the Ramjanambhoomi complex, the police are still groping in the dark and have not yet been able to establish the identity of the slain militants. "Documents and other things seized from the possession of the slain militants are not sufficient enough to provide a clue about their organisation," state police chief Yashpal Singh told reporters here. He said the driver of the jeep used in the attack, Rehan and another driver Rajkumar have also not provided any clue to the investigating agencies so as to establish their identities. Rehan had said during interrogation that he was approached by the militants while he was filling fuel in his vehicle at a petrol pump in Faizabad. The DGP, however, said that there were some contradictions in Rehan's statement and expressed confidence that his sustained interrogation could provide valuable clues. He said that the second driver Rajkumar who had transported the militants in his Marshall jeep to Faizabad from Akbarpur, 70 kms from here, has also not revealed much. When asked as to why the militants chose Akbarpur, he said they might have wanted to avoid getting down at Faizabad railway station where security was tight. --------------------------------------------------------------------- [5] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com> Date: Wed Jul 6, 2005 Subject: 'Star Wars' Premiers in India! http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/070505C.shtml 'Star Wars' Premiers in India! By J. Sri Raman t r u t h o u t | Perspective Tuesday 05 July 2005 The "Star Wars" program of the current avatar may soon kick start yet another round of a dangerous arms race in South Asia. The George Bush regime, which prides itself as the patron of the India-Pakistan "peace process," has given a powerful impetus to forces seeking a revival of the race in both the countries. It has done so by luring India into its global missile defense (GMD) program with the bait of a weapons system that is bound to destabilize the subcontinent. On June 27, in Washington, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and India's Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee signed a ten-year agreement titled the New Framework for US-India Defense Relationship (NFDR). The agreement has a provision for India's induction into the missile defense program. In concrete terms, the provision is likely to spell the transfer of one of the latest additions to the "Star Wars" arsenal - the Patriot Advanced Capability system (PAC 3). The PAC 3 has been peddled as a vast improvement on the PAC 2. The latest model is a lighter and low-noise missile built on a hit-to-kill technology, advertised as the sure terminator of all incoming enemy missiles. Despite its drooling lip service to the "peace process," Washington has thus initiated military-diplomatic maneuvers that the people-driven process may find hard to survive. What South Asia faces is an accelerated arms race with a dangerous nuclear dimension. The Pakistan establishment has lost no time to respond with a panicky threat to retaliate. Pakistan's ambassador in the US, General Jahangir Karamat, said: "This will be a new element in South Asia.... If India gets PAC 3, we will either have to ask the US also to provide the same system to us or we will have to think of other ways to have our own missile defense." Pakistan's External Affairs Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri soon added that the agreement would "introduce a new weapon system which will disturb the balance of power in South Asia and lead to an arms race in the region." The pact has shocked and upset Islamabad all the more because of the fact that the Pervez Musharraf regime has always presumed Pakistan's superiority in missile development, considered to make up for the lesser number of weapons in its nuclear arsenal. Propaganda on this point has accompanied Islamabad's "pro-peace" noises ever since the "process" started. Official Pakistan has not let the "process" deter it from carrying its missile development program forward. On March 19, 2005, even while protesting its "peace" intentions, the military rulers staged a highly publicized test-firing of the Shaheen II missile, noted by observers for its capacity to strike at deep-interior Indian targets. Declared General Musharraf: "The capability was here to stay, will continue to go from strength to strength and no harm will ever be allowed to come to it." The origin of the agreement can be traced back to a denouement in US-India defense relations in the days of the far-right National Democratic Alliance government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in New Delhi. The NDA regime was one of the very few governments in the world, and probably the only one in the Third World, to welcome the Bush version of the "Star Wars" program. The Vajpayee government went out of its way, in fact, to accept in public the untenable proposition that the program was actually an attempt at effecting "deep slashes" in the US nuclear arsenal. The idea of India-US missile defense cooperation was pursued in regular meetings of a joint Defense Policy Group. In January 2004, Washington promised greater Indian access to US missile assistance. In March, just two months before India's people replaced the NDA regime with a government of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), even a simulated missile defense exercise was conducted. Several US and Indian experts then predicted bleak days for India-US missile defense cooperation. The UPA government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has now proven them wrong. It threatens to betray the popular mandate in this regard and to breach a Common Minimum Program (CMP). An independent foreign policy and a striving for a multi-polar world figure among the new coalition's objectives in the CMP. Partnership in Washington's Global Missile Defense is patently at variance with these objectives. The agreement followed a visit to India by US Assistant Secretary for Arms Control Stephen Rademaker. After talks on the subject, he said: "We are willing to talk to India about missile defense. Missile defense is very expensive. So, it is not something that India will enter into lightly." The astronomical expenditure the program will entail, however, does not seem to weigh heavily with the government. It has not long ago inflicted the largest-ever annual defense budget on India's poor millions. The devoutly desired association with a program of the scale of the "Star Wars" promises no lightening of the people's burden. ---------------------------------------------------------- INDIA THINKERS NET quote To fight evil one must also recognize one's own responsibility. The values for which we stand must be expressed in the way we think of, and how we deal with, our fellow humans: - From the Christmas Message 2001 of HM Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands ------------------------------------------------------------ |
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July08, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net]Yugal,Yogi,Sukla,Parvez' posts >> |
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