Statements by senior functionaries of Pakistan including Prime Minister Imran Khan threatening war and violence against India and in Jammu and Kashmir are irresponsible, escalatory and dangerous. Mr. Khan has even spoken about the possibility of a nuclear war, albeit couched in language purportedly meant to be about the dangers of it, while a Minister went to the extent of announcing a time frame for starting a war. Several diplomats have called for jihad. Pakistan’s reputation as a reckless nuclear power is reinforced in all this, and its continuing support for Islamist terrorist outfits is not doing any good for the people of J&K. Pursuit of military parity with India has ruined Pakistan economically, though the compact of generals and clerics that controls it has flourished. These vested interests have placed Kashmir as central to Pakistan’s national identity that they understand as exclusive and Islamist. Now under fire for being ineffective in the face of India’s recent
The publication of the final National Register of Citizens on Saturday brings no closure to the vexed issue of illegal immigration to Assam yet. Those left out are not foreigners until the tribunals set up to determine their fate pronounce them so. The process could go all the way to the Supreme Court. The Home Ministry has also extended the time to file appeals against exclusion in the Foreigners Tribunal from 60 to 120 days. The point, however, is that the process has yielded an updated register, and a figure. It has had its warts and all even as it left over 1.9 million people staring at statelessness — in a continuing saga of glaring omissions, a serving lawmaker, a former legislator, and retired Army man Mohammad Sanaullah, whose case propelled NRC excesses into the spotlight, did not make the cut. But protests across the spectrum expressing concern over the excluded, suggest the judiciary-led process was perhaps largely robust and the errors were more procedural than
Our kitchen, now, was whiter than even a pathology lab. The walls were antiseptic white, the ceiling was ICU-white, and everything else was so acutely unpigmented
Ashu Prakash
A few years ago, as an undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, I went to Russia on a research project. I was excited about going aboard, performing research and making friends from all over the world. My project was in the Department of Physics and Higher Mathematics at the National Research Tomsk Polytechnic University in Siberia. It was winter, and the temperature used to fluctuate between -40 degrees Celsius and 0. Rarely would I go out of my dormitory, except to
