Category: South Asia

  • Maoist ministers sworn in

    New government, but is it a “new Nepal”? In a twist of history, the Minister of Information and Communication in Nepal’s new government is the former spokesman of the Maoist People’s Army, Krishna Bahadur Mahara. Along with four other Maoists, he was sworn in at a ceremony on Sunday 1 April. The oath, lead by…

  • Tamil MP killed for speaking out

    High profile assassination demands massive response socialistworld.net On Friday morning, 10 November, a prominent Tamil MP in Sri Lanka, Nadarajah Raviraj, was killed . He was shot outside his home in Colombo soon after he had appeared on a breakfast-time TV programme. One of his four bodyguards was also killed. The assassins arrived in a…

  • Fourth Eelam War under way

    Government isolated; workers need solutions Sri Lanka is now most certainly experiencing its ’Fourth Eelam War’. But neither side – the Sri Lankan Government nor the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – is prepared to accept this. According to the Sri Lanka Monitoring mission (SLMM), over 4,000 people were killed in the 15 months…

  • The other India protests against Bush visit

    Bush seeks to boost business deals and allies in the region It was spectacular from the point of view of huge numbers of people participating spontaneously in the anti-Bush protests. As the popular environmental activist and writer Arundathi Roy commented before the arrival of Bush, he was “just not welcome”! It was not just the…

  • India: A disaster made worse by poverty

    INDIA SAW more than 15,000 killed as the tidal wave pounded southern fishing villages with Tamil Nadu and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands the worst hit. Thousands are still missing. In Andhra Pradesh alone, 400 fishermen were missing immediately after the first strikes. The Hindu newspaper, published in southern India, reported that 40 children playing…

  • Kashmir conflict: Capitalist Crisis Threatens Nuclear War

    The world is nearer to nuclear war than at any time since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The United States and the Soviet Union came close to a nuclear exchange, when Khrushchev based nuclear-armed missiles on Cuba. Fortunately, US imperialism and the Soviet bureaucracy negotiated their way out of the crisis, despite pressure from…

  • Raising the stakes in Kashmir

    IN THE aftermath of the 11 September carnage in the US the world situation has changed significantly. Half-a-million soldiers have been massed along the Indian-Pakistani border, including Kashmir, the largest mobilisation of armed forces since 1971. “We don’t play soldiers on the border… what I’m doing is for real. I have not gone to do…

  • Kashmir Crisis: Regional Powers Threaten New War

    TONY BLAIR’S shuttle diplomacy to resolve the longstanding Kashmir crisis that has brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war has been an abject failure. Even as he tried to defuse the political tension, shelling continued along the disputed Line of Control forcing 50,000 to flee their homes. And while the prospect for an…

  • India/Pakistan conflict: Only Socialism Can End the ‘Madness Of War’

    GLOBETROTTING TONY Blair has jetted off in a bid to avert a looming military conflict between Pakistan and India. But it is the US-led Afghan war – backed by ‘lieutenant’ Blair – that has further destabilised central Asia, risking an India/Pakistan war. IN THE most serious conflict between the two nuclear powers since the Kargil…

  • The Kashmir Battle Zone

    This summer’s clashes between India and Pakistan, the world’s newest nuclear powers, claimed hundreds of lives. Then, as tensions seemed to be easing, on 10 August a Pakistani navy plane was shot down, leading to further retaliatory action. KEVIN SIMPSON and JAMAL KHAN explain the latest twists and turns in this 52-year conflict. “TWO MONTHS…