The articles, the opinions, the stories and the cartoons, Ovi magazine covers for Thursday 21st, 2021
Religious extremists in South Asia are a threat to regional stability by Dr. Habib Siddiqui
Religious harmony is becoming an illusion these days with the election win of extremist forces in some parts of our world. Organized violence directed against vulnerable minorities, scripted by ruling power, is often the norm than an exception. Nowhere in South Asia is this fact more plain than in Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled India where the ruling party is in a competition of its own to prove to the Hindu-majority India that it is the only trustworthy political party to represent Hindu interest. Hindutva, or militant and political Hinduism, has become the party’s religio-fascist ideology to make India Hindu again (akin to Donald Trump’s slogan for making America great again!).
Through a series of bigotry-ridden and anti-Muslim laws and acts, touching the lives of hundreds of millions of Muslims from Assam in the east to Kashmir in the western flank of India, Narendra Modi and his BJP have proven beyond any shadow of doubt that they are serious about making India for, of and by its Hindu majority in which people of the other faiths (esp., Muslims and Christians) have little to no rights in this country of nearly 1.4 billion inhabitants. Since Modi’s ascendancy in 2014 as the head of the government, India has tattered and dropped its pretense as a secular democracy. It is less hypocritical today about what modern India stands for than any time before in its checkered history. Political parties must now prove how anti-Muslim or pro-Hindu they are to be relevant in Modi’s India.
Continue reading HERE!
“A fast” #poem by Bohdan Yuri
“Cosmic order, young or old,
eternal life shed from bright,
move along on stilted visions,
swiftly set our hearts afire.
Speck our path, give us quarrel,
make us guess, create our best.”
Continue reading HERE!
Funeral Rites for COVID Zero by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
It was such a noble public health dream, even if rather hazy to begin with. Run down SARS-CoV-2. Suppress it. Crush it. Or just “flatten the curve”, which could have meant versions of all the above. This created a climate of numerical sensitivity: a few case infections here, a few cases there, would warrant immediate, sharp lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, the closure of all non-vital service outlets.
Then came mutations and variants. Delta became the word mentioned like a terrorist saboteur, placing bombs under the edifice of the health system. The pro-market factions within governments receptive to using lockdown formulas could claim that harsh stay-at-home rules were not working. It was time to open up the economy; time to live with the virus, and, consequently, a good number of deaths. It was time for the epidemiologists to do more modelling.
Continue reading HERE!
Tang & Ram 21#19 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas
For more Tang & Ram HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!
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