Riot relief scam: Gujarat HC verdict today

by Anupam Chakravartty, Indian Express, 19 Jul 2010

The agony continues for survivors of the 2002 riots in Panderwada, whose houses were razed by killer mobs. Even the much-delayed compensation for them was systematically pilfered and they are left pinning their hopes on the judiciary now.

A taluka of 60-odd villages, Panderwala now awaits the Gujarat High Court's verdict — expected on Monday — on five taluka development officials who allegedly siphoned off funds from riot rehabilitation packages meant for the victims.

A growing politics of intolerance

by Nalin Mehta, Mumbai Mirror, 19 Jul 2010.

We make a great deal about India being the world's largest democracy but the fact is that the moderate space for dissent may actually be shrinking in our increasingly intolerant society. After independence, Nehru went out of his way – despite a life-long history of political animosity – to back Ambedkar as the architect of the Constitution and then appointed him Law Minister. Even when Ambedkar quit the government and subsequently lost a Lok Sabh election to the Congress, historical records indicate that Nehru quietly encouraged local Congress bigwigs to help his eventual election to the Rajya Sabha election from Mumbai. Though Ambedkar's views were anathema to much of the Brahmin-dominated Congress, Nehru recognised the value of protecting alternative points of view in a liberal polity.

by David Devadas, Hindustan Times, 21 July 2010.

The Centre used propaganda to handle the recent uprising in the vally. This could lead to a fresh and more lethal insurgency. The most dangerous divergence in narratives is that while Kashmiris believe that stones-for-bullets constitutes a non-violent response, the rest of India sees pictures of security men cowering before violent mobs. If these perspectives finally converge in these boys picking up guns, the fresh insurgency would be far more lethal than that of the 90s.

Indian Express, 21 July 2010.

Locked up in an Egyptian prison in the early 1960s, Sayyid Qutb wrote a book that has inspired succeeding generations of radical Islamists.In this early phase Qutb, a Muslim who had come under the spell of Sufism, subscribed to the essentially secular nationalism of the day, the focus of which was opposition to British rule in Egypt and to Zionist colonisation in Palestine. But by the late 1940s, disillusioned with the failings of the nationalist parties, he had become an Islamist and — as exemplified in his first important book, "Social Justice in Islam" — an Islamist of originality and power.