Comments

• How hate works

  Ravi, 06 July 2019

  An in depth and insightful reading of the book. Addresses the need to engage with the increasing polarization and communal violence . Inspired to pro...

  An in depth and insightful reading of the book. Addresses the need to engage with the increasing polarization and communal violence . Inspired to procure and read it.

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• Stranded in Geneva Camp

  Alal O Dulal, 05 July 2019

  For more background, see Dina Siddqi's essay.
  
  From the 2014 editorial statement: AlalODulal Editorial Board condemns in the strongest terms the vio...

  For more background, see Dina Siddqi's essay.
  
  From the 2014 editorial statement: AlalODulal Editorial Board condemns in the strongest terms the violence that left at least 11 Urdu Speaking people (“Biharis”) dead. Anthropologist Dina Siddiqi’s research on the conditions of “stranded Pakistanis” (inaccurately called “Biharis,” but more accurately “Urdu speakers”) after 1971 is newly relevant. In the current discourse around the 1971 war, the fate of the Urdu speakers at war’s end is elided. It is one of the zones of silence because it does not fit with the Bangladeshi discourse around the war. Nor does it fit Pakistan’s convenient discourse, especially after a 2008 high court decision granted them Bangladeshi citizenship. We at AlalODulal feel it is crucial to highlight those left behind in multiple nation projects.
  
  
  “The nation left them, even though they were still on the same soil. They could not follow. This paradoxical condition was rooted in the shifting relationships between national and territorial identities generated by partition. Ambivalence and tensions around partition were not only productive of identities; on occasion they erased claims to belonging altogether. For those in danger of permanent civil death, recourse to the idiom of sacrifice no longer sufficed. Both refugee and citizen at the moment of partition, Urdu speakers in East Pakistan were rendered non-citizens and non-refugees in independent Bangladesh.”
  
  
  https://alalodulal.org/2014/03/02/stranded-pakistanis/

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• The myth of the Assamese Bangladeshi

  Bishwanath Dutta Choudhury, 01 July 2019

  Excellent piece! Hopefully, some of those madmen who create these waves of heightened suspicion and anarchy for their political gains would read this ...

  Excellent piece! Hopefully, some of those madmen who create these waves of heightened suspicion and anarchy for their political gains would read this entire article!

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