We are excited to share that Sapan News is preparing for a name that better reflects our mission: Global Southasia. This change doesn’t alter our commitment to rigorous, cross-border journalism; rather, it clarifies it. We are emphasizing our focus on Southasia and its global diaspora. We’ll keep mentioning this shift in each newsletter as we roll it out gradually.

New paths

What happens when Pakistani and Indian creatives meet abroad? Find out in Sarim Kidwai’s article How a new film by a Boston-based immigrant is dismantling the model-minority concept. One of the artists for the hand-drawn animated film The Glassworker, he met up with filmmaker (Jam Boy, 22 min.) Sriram Emani, who also founded Indian Raga, in Boston. Why is it only in these situations that people remember that their ideas of home are the same?

After youth-led movements reshaped politics in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, India’s Generation Z has achieved something unprecedented without seeking regime change. New Delhi based journalist Rohinee Singh walked amongst the protestors at the recent ‘Cockroach Jayanta Party protest and learned How India’s Gen Z forced Modi to blink.

Readers’ corner

Azra Raza and ‘The First Cell’

Well known for her poetry recitations, Dr. Azra Raza, author of ‘The First Cell’, shared perspectives about her professional passion as a practicing oncologist at a book talk hosted by the online book club Readers Without Borders in collaboration with the Southasia Peace Action Network, Sapan. The bottom line: “Prevention is better than cure”. Yours truly, Regina Johnson, had the pleasure of participating. Read my article for Sapan News here: Paradigm shift needed in cancer research: Capture and kill the ‘first cell’.

The ‘Ibn-e-Safi phenomenon’

What lies behind the unprecedented cross-border popularity of the architect of Urdu noir? Scientist, poet and documentary filmmaker Gauhar Raza in New Delhi delves into this question, drawing upon childhood memories from summers in Allahabad, birthplace of the wildly popular and prolific detective novelist known as Ibn-e-Safi (given name Asrar Ahmed). Visiting relatives whose house included a storeroom full of Ibne-e-Safi’s books, Dr. Raza, like many, learnt to read Urdu because of Ibn-e-Safi’s riveting stories that generated a cult following.

Media Mirror

In response to the ongoing media ban that prevents readers in India and Pakistan from accessing news sites from each other’s countries, the Sapan News Media Mirror, a public service initiative, shares selected articles with permission. See our Press Statement: Access is not a threat: A call to lift reciprocal news bans in India and Pakistan.

Recent Media Mirror stories include two from the peace and justice worker Harsh Mander:

• The quiet stories of faith and forgiveness across India: The first Rehmat festival brought together accounts of courage, aching compassion, heroic solidarity and tender forgiveness. Originally published in the Wire

• Extending a legacy of compassion and service to humanity — Keynote address on Albert Schweitzer Day. Originally published in Scroll.

Also see senior researcher Christophe Jaffrelot’s take on How a 1970s movement in India connects with today’s ‘cockroach’ protests, originally published in The Wire.

Shoutouts

A documentary rollout

The latest film by award-winning filmmaker Mohammed “Mo” Ali Naqvi, a Sapan Founding Charter endorser, premieres August 28 in New York before playing in theatres across the U.S.A. - details here. The documentary, collaboratively made with the impacted community, recounts the harrowing 2023 story of a high-altitude cable car trapped in north-western Pakistan, when a wire snapped, leaving eight passengers — six of them schoolboys on their routine commute to school — dangerously hanging 900 feet above ground.

“At its core, the film is built around a universal idea: that in moments of crisis, no one survives alone. When people who have every reason to distrust one another choose to work together, extraordinary things become possible,” says Naqvi in his director’s note

A gendered Southasian vision

Shoutout to the pioneering women-led digital magazine eShe, founded by journalist and ace editor Aekta Kapoor in New Delhi, 2017, a Sapan founder member who also launched the SouthasianUnion website in 2021. The magazine launched in America last year in collaboration with two other Sapan founder members who, together with other volunteers, were critically helpful with Sapan News in its formational stages, Shailaja Rao in Seattle, and Sarita Bartaula in Washington, DC, former Sapan News ‘Lead strategy and development’. We wish them all the best.

Endorse the Sapan Founding Charter

Our Social Media Pledge

Members of the eShe team have also taken our Social and Digital Media Ethics and Responsibility Pledge - have you?

Go to the Social Media Pledge

Thanks for reading. Every other week, we aim to bring you a curated digest of the stories, developments and highlights from recent offerings. Until then, thank you for being with us.

With gratitude,

Regina Johnson
Coordinating Editor
Sapan News

Invest in our journalism! Donate today

Thank you!

By Sarim Kidwai / Sapan News

Tempers between India and Pakistan had barely cooled following the brief but dangerous military confrontation between the two nuclear powers in May 2025, when an Indian and a Pakistani met for coffee in Boston, bonding over a shared love for films.

Over that coffee session, I – a Pakistani creative – and Indian writer-director Sriram Emani talked about his new short film, Jam Boy.

I had met Sriram in 2025 at the Boston Asian American Film Festival and saw Jam Boy (run time 22 minutes) at a private screening later. The film is an introspective science-fiction allegory about the psychological cost of belonging to America’s “model minority.”

Its title comes from a disturbing colonial urban legend: In one version of the story, British golfers in India would have a local servant smeared with jam and stationed nearby, turning his body into a human lure for mosquitoes.

Whether literal history or apocryphal folklore, the image captures a recognizable colonial arrangement: One person is dehumanized so the other can remain comfortable.

Trailer: Jam Boy, by Sriram Emani, 2026.

The optics of our meeting carried their own irony. Here were two caramel-skinned fellows with the same jet-black hair, our names almost anagrams of one another, sitting on neutral Bostonian ground while belonging to opposite sides of an inflamed border. While we knew the quarrels of our sister nations all too well, I doubt any eavesdropper overhearing our conversation would have been able to tell us apart.

That irony became an appropriate entry point into Jam Boy. Sriram’s film distills the conflict between preserving cultural memory and pursuing opportunity in the West, a rock-and-a-hard-place dilemma familiar to Southasians regardless of which side of the Pak-India feud you fall into.

Beyond the explosive news pundits and cricket rivalries lies the shared condition of sacrificing connections with family and trading traditions once you’re part of the Southasian pack hoping for a career in corporate America.

What differentiates the film is how it reverses the conventional immigrant narrative. Many stories concentrate on crossing the border, securing the visa, and finally attaining the elusive “American Dream”.

Sriram’s protagonist, an indispensable Indian coder that he himself plays, faces a different terror as he fights for the chance to finally go “back home” to India after proving his worth to his new-found nation.

Taking the shape of speculative fiction rather than the grounded immigrant stories we are used to seeing, the world of Jam Boy shows us a near-future America and an opaque credit system that determines whether Sriram can work, travel, or visit his ailing mother.

He follows the rules with the belief that good performance will eventually earn him his freedom. However, the demands of his worth grow deeper the more utility he exhibits, and his goal remains elusive, continuously moving further away.

The film’s power comes from how little exaggeration it actually needs. While the flashy algorithms, bureaucratic restrictions and invisible ceilings are heightened in the body of the film, any immigrant watching it will recognize the feeling of suffocation and entrapment that kick in right at the beginning when we see Sriram’s character reveal his goal of being able to visit his home.

At its thematic core, Jam Boy dismantles the model-minority concept and reframes the immigrant’s idea of success in the West as little more than evidence of compliance with the status quo. The immigrant is praised for being useful, productive, and undemanding while the system quietly discourages dissent. Acceptance is only feigned at the cost of making oneself smaller.

If you gave image and music to the conversation Sriram and I shared at the coffee shop, it may well result in something like Jam Boy itself. The current socio-political sentiment that shrouds immigrants in the U.S. would lead you to believe that we are simply opportunists looking to impose our presence within the country with no intention of leaving. Nothing is further from the truth.

The new nuance that remains invisible in media narratives around immigrants does not have to do with the challenge of making it to the West. It is about the freedom to be able to move freely back to where we came from, once we are established here. Common conversations such as our longing for chai hangouts and time with family members is often followed by talk about visa types, citizenship processes and the latest national travel restrictions.

So, it’s no wonder that Jam Boy has received acclaim at festivals and in critical conversations. The film arrives at a time when the telling of the ‘resilient’ immigrant narrative no longer gels with the modern zeitgeist.

Sriram’s film is uncomfortable, claustrophobic, and deliberately unresolved because the experience it depicts rarely ever offers a clean resolution. It articulates a struggle that remains underrepresented: Not the struggle to enter, but the struggle to remain whole once inside.

The film had its world premiere at the DC Independent Film Festival in February this year, where it won the Best Film award. It also screened at the Boston International Film Festival in April, where it won the Indie Soul Special Recognition award.

Sriram and I have remained in touch, and we continue to support each other in our endeavors. The image of an Indian and a Pakistani sitting together stays with me, chatting not as representatives of rival nations but as two creatives trying to remain whole in a country that often flattens our differences anyway.

Jam Boy represents a much-needed question for our diaspora, about why it takes a third aggressor for us to see the common struggles that we share, and why it is only in these situations that we remember that our ideas of home are the same.

End Credits

Sarim Kidwai is a marketer, storyteller, and artist, born and raised in Karachi, Pakistan. Since getting an early start at age 16 as an artist for the critically acclaimed film ‘The Glassworker’, he has expanded his practice to the United States where he currently works at the intersection of film, business and marketing, while studying at the Business of Creative Enterprises, class of 2027, at Emerson College, Boston.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

By Rohinee Singh / Sapan News

New Delhi: The past few years have witnessed the emergence of a new political force across Southasia: Generation Z.

In Sri Lanka, youth-led protests against economic collapse forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country. In Bangladesh, students spearheaded a movement that ended Sheikh Hasina’s long rule. Nepal has repeatedly witnessed young people leading street protests that reshaped governments and altered the country’s political trajectory.

Now, the question being asked in political circles is whether India has entered its own Gen Z moment.

Unlike the movements in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Nepal, India’s youth were not demanding regime change. They were not marching against inflation or economic collapse, nor were they calling for the overthrow of the government. Their demand was remarkably simple: Accountability for the alleged leak of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), India’s highly competitive medical entrance examination, and the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Yet within just thirty days, they achieved what India’s parliamentary opposition had failed to accomplish in more than twelve years.

On 25 July, Pradhan resigned.

For Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the resignation was more than the loss of a cabinet colleague. It marked a rare political retreat.

Since Modi became Chief Minister of Gujarat in 2001, he has cultivated an image of unwavering authority and a refusal to bow before public pressure. Across nearly 24 years in executive office, only once before has sustained public outrage forced the resignation of a minister from his government: M.J. Akbar, who stepped down as Minister of State in 2018 after multiple allegations surfaced during India’s #MeToo movement.

There have been policy reversals, most notably the repeal of the three contentious farm laws in 2021 after farmers maintained an encampment outside Delhi for more than a year. But that retreat came only after one of the longest protest movements in independent India.

This time it took barely a month.

A movement driven almost entirely by students, amplified through social media and culminating in dramatic confrontations with police on the streets of Delhi, forced the country’s most powerful political leader to blink.

For perhaps the first time since Modi rose to national prominence, India’s youngest citizens demonstrated that organised street mobilisation could still compel a government long regarded as politically invincible.

Protest nobody saw coming

Narendra Modi was among the world’s earliest political leaders to understand the power of social media. His 2014 election campaign transformed Facebook, Twitter and later Instagram into political instruments that helped him communicate directly with millions of young Indians while bypassing traditional media.

Twelve years later, that same digital ecosystem became the source of his first major political setback.

A parody social media account called Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), launched only weeks earlier, unexpectedly became the organising platform for one of the most significant youth protests India has witnessed in recent years. What began as satire quickly evolved into a movement that resonated with students across the country.

Its founder, Abhijit Dipke, emerged as an unlikely face of the agitation demanding accountability for examination paper leaks and calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

Within weeks, what the political opposition had failed to achieve through Parliament, election campaigns and repeated criticism was accomplished by memes, Instagram reels, anonymous volunteers and students carrying handwritten placards.

By the time Dipke announced from the protest stage that the minister had resigned, thousands had gathered at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar while demonstrations had spread to cities across India.

Senior journalist and Modi biographer Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay believes the episode represents one of the most significant setbacks of Modi’s political career.

“This can be seen as Modi’s biggest setback in his entire political career. A man who did not give in to any public pressure was forced to bow. In the past, he has always responded on his own terms and at a time suited to him,” Mukhopadhyay told Sapan News.

Mukhopadhyay, author of Narendra Modi: The Man, The Times (2013 Tranquebar), argues that politically the Gen Z movement posed a deeper challenge to Modi than even the aftermath of the 2002 Gujarat riots because it punctured the carefully cultivated perception that he never yields to public pressure.

From the protest site

An hour before Dipke climbed onto the makeshift stage to announce that the minister had resigned; two young volunteers remained busy treating exhausted students. Many of the students at the sit-in had been on hunger strike for more than a week.

Twenty-four-year-old Priyanu, from Haryana, spends months navigating merchant ships across the world’s oceans. Beside him stood Arham, a newly qualified engineer and mountaineer.

One belongs to the sea. The other belongs to the mountains. Both had received first-aid training through their professions.

Now those skills were being used to treat dehydration, bruises and injuries sustained during clashes with Delhi Police.

“We never imagined our training would be used like this,” Priyanu said while handing oral rehydration salts to a student struggling in Delhi’s July heat. “People think we are here because protesting is fashionable. We are here because if this can happen to NEET today, tomorrow it can happen to any examination.”

Nearby stood Rajat, who had travelled from Prayagraj in Uttar Pradesh. He carried a fading bruise on his shoulder, the result of the 20 June police baton charge.

Standing beside him, his friend Sudhanshu seemed almost disappointed.

“I missed getting hit,” he laughed. “Rajat will become popular back in college.” He paused before adding another explanation. “I’ve got FOMO.” Fear Of Missing Out.

That expression perhaps best captured what the authorities failed to understand. Every measure intended to discourage participation achieved precisely the opposite.

The government shut down metro stations around the protest venue. Students walked.

Police resorted to baton charges and tear gas. Larger crowds arrived the next day. Those who had watched the confrontations online wanted to become part of them. Instead of creating fear, the police action created participation.

Students were seen standing smiling before police barricades. Many were posing for selfies with riot-control vehicles. Others posted photographs beside policemen carrying shields and batons.

Police officers whom earlier generations might have feared were addressed casually as “Bro.”

“Bro, why do you look so serious?” Ashita asked one policeman while positioning herself for a selfie.

A senior Delhi Police officer, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak publicly, admitted that the administration had fundamentally misunderstood the movement.

“We treated this as a conventional law-and-order problem. We thought these young people would disperse after police action. Instead, every baton charge became content for social media. Every barricade became a photo opportunity. We realised too late that this generation responds very differently to fear.”

Fear disappeared

That is why many observers say that this protest has ended the fear factor, on which Modi had built his aura to suppress dissent.

Public demonstrations that once defined India’s democratic tradition became increasingly rare as successive movements were branded “anti-national,” “Urban Naxal” or members of the so-called “Tukde Tukde Gang” -- perjorative for “break up gang” as in “anti-nationals” trying to break up the country

Author and journalist Prabhakar Mishra believes the NEET protests marked a turning point.

“Protest was always romanticised until fear overtook it. After more than a decade, we are seeing people let go of that fear. This generation simply isn’t bothered.” The placards reflected that confidence.

In India, since inception, there had been an unwritten rule in newsrooms and with opposition not to target the seat of the president, prime minister, chief justice and service chief. They have been treated as holy cows.

But this was perhaps the first time that Prime Minister Modi was subjected to ridicule.

Several mocked the carefully crafted political narratives that had helped build the Prime Minister’s image. For years, Modi proudly described himself as the son of a tea seller.

Generation Z responded with humour.

“Chai banao, desh hum chala lenge.“ (You make the tea. We’ll run the country.)

Another poster borrowed Amitabh Bachchan’s iconic dialogue from the 1988 film Shehenshah before adding a constitutional twist.

“Rishte mein toh hum tumhare malik hain. Naam hai We, the People of India.” (In this relationship, we are your masters. Our name is We, the People of India.)

The reference to the opening words of India’s Constitution was deliberate.

While not affiliated with the organizers, a crowdsourced public archive of the posters, placards and photographs called Democracy by Design allows users to save them for future reference.

Different from Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka

Comparisons with neighbouring countries are inevitable, but they can also be misleading.

The youth-led movements in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal emerged from broader economic crises and political demands that eventually challenged governments themselves.

India’s Gen Z movement was fundamentally different. Its objective was not to topple the government but to repair institutions.

“We have not gathered here to overthrow the government,” Akash told Sapan News, adjusting the handwritten placard resting beside him. “All we are asking is to fix accountability and make education affordable and employable. If examinations lose credibility, what future do we have?”

Around him, students spoke less about ideology than opportunity. Their posters reflected anger, frustration, and humour in equal measure.

Why Modi blinked

Since 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party has successfully countered many protest movements by portraying demonstrators as politically motivated, anti-national or disconnected from ordinary Indians.

This time that strategy proved far more difficult.

The protesters were overwhelmingly middle-class students between seventeen and twenty-five years of age. They represented different castes, religions and regions. Many came from families that traditionally voted for the BJP.

Most importantly, they will cast their first votes in the 2029 general election.

“My parents support the BJP,” said Kriti from Lucknow, who turns eighteen later this year. “But I will read the election manifestos before deciding whom to vote for.”

Avyan was more direct.

“After all this, it definitely won’t be the BJP for me,” he said. “At least Rahul Gandhi can speak in English.”

Whether such views ultimately translate into electoral outcomes remains uncertain.

But Mukhopadhyay believes the BJP has encountered an unfamiliar political challenge.

“The BJP’s politics of religious polarisation has taken a beating. These first-time voters are unlikely to forget this episode. Winning them back will not be easy.”

The NEET protests may not produce a change of government. They may not immediately alter India’s political landscape. Yet they have revealed something important about the country’s youngest generation.

Generation Z has shown that it can organise without established political parties, mobilise through humour instead of ideology, and confront authority without apparent fear. It is digitally native, politically irreverent, and remarkably difficult to intimidate.

If Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal demonstrated how youth movements can bring governments down, India has shown something different.

Its youngest citizens compelled one of Southasia’s most powerful leaders to retreat without demanding his removal. For Narendra Modi, who has spent nearly a quarter-century cultivating an image of political invincibility, that may prove to be the most consequential political message of all.

Jantar Mantar: India’s Hyde Park

For anyone following Indian politics from outside the country, one place appears repeatedly whenever protests erupt in New Delhi: Jantar Mantar.

Whether they are farmers demanding fair prices, pensioners seeking justice, government employees, minorities, women, students or environmental activists, almost every major demonstration eventually converges on this stretch of road in the heart of the capital.

Jantar Mantar is the name of a monument that was built in 1724 by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II as an astronomical observatory where giant masonry instruments measured the movement of the sun, moon and stars centuries before telescopes became commonplace. The road outside the monument’s walls tells another story.

Soon after Independence, the Indian National Congress established its national headquarters at 7, Jantar Mantar Road, transforming the neighbourhood into New Delhi’s busiest political corridor. First Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru used to sit in this office frequently, dividing time between his official work at South Block as head of government and attending to party issues in this Jantar Mantar building.

The road became a site to vent anger against ministers and MPs to draw Nehru’s attention.

But over time, protesters shifted to Boat Club near India Gate, as the Jantar Mantar Building changed hands and no longer remained the Congress party’s headquarters. But in 1993, the government banned demonstrations at Boat Club lawns in 1993 after massive farmers’ rallies paralysed the capital and redesignated Jantar Mantar Road as a protest venue.

Parliament lies barely two kilometres away, close enough for demonstrators to be heard without bringing government functioning to a halt.

Over the past three decades, Jantar Mantar has evolved into India’s democratic town square like London’s Hyde Park.

Inside its walls stand scientific instruments once used to observe the heavens. Outside its gates gather citizens trying to move governments on Earth.

This summer, it became Generation Z’s classroom in democracy.

End Credits

Rohinee Singh is an independent journalist and author based in New Delhi, with more than 18 years of experience across national and international media. She writes on politics, governance, and issues of regional and global relevance for leading domestic and international outlets, in both English and Urdu. She is also engaged in India-Pakistan Track II peace initiatives and reconciliation efforts.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

By Gauhar Raza / Sapan News

My parents were voracious readers, so it was natural for us siblings to develop a desire to step into the world of books early on. We grew up on the Aligarh Muslim University campus and spent summer vacations in Allahabad (now Prayagraj) with our maternal and paternal aunts – Khala and Phuphi who lived just a staircase and a door apart from each other.

Their houses were large, with plenty of room and open space, and the freedom to have a wonderful time. Little did we know that these were not just vacations, our elders were educating us far beyond the four walls of a school.

And that is how we were introduced to the detective novelist Ibn-e-Safi whose stories appeared in a tantalising series called Jasoosi Dunya (The Spy World) and achieved unprecedented popularity. What I witnessed in Aligarh on publication days was not unique. Long queues formed outside bookstalls in cities from Karachi to Lahore, from Delhi, Lucknow and Allahabad, to Meerut, Agra, Kanpur, and beyond – testimony to the geographical spread of what I call the “Ibn-e-Safi phenomenon.”

The publications were independent books. It did not matter which one you read first. Most appeared after a month, but between some, the gap was longer.

Allahabad summers

Our maternal uncle, Khaloo Abba, Nawab Mahmood Agha, had a large circle of friends; writers, poets, politicians, teachers, businessmen, and even judges. They would gather to chat in the evenings, some regularly and others occasionally, in the open courtyard, in the mardana part of the house reserved for men. They discussed every topic under the sun till late into the evening. We children were expected to arrange the chairs for them in a circle, keep their huqqas (water pipes) warm, and continuously serve tea and water.

As we learned to read Urdu, I realised that books fell into two categories: For children and for adults. Copies of publications lying around included titles that we children were not encouraged to read, Jasoosi Dunya, and Rumani Dunya (The Romantic World). The office of the publisher for both, Nikhat Publications, was barely a hundred paces away. One summer in Allahabad, I asked my mother what these books were about.

“Why don’t you read one?” she responded. “Read Jasoosi Dunya, not the romantic ones.”

I didn’t know the difference, but it felt like I had received a graduation certificate. I was now a member of the book club my older siblings and cousins belonged to. I must have been in class six or seven. As a slow reader, it took me two days to finish one volume, but I found it difficult to stop once I started.

Soon, Ibn-e-Safi’s novels introduced me to the fascinating characters of Imran, Sir Rahman, Zafrul Mulk, Safdar, Julia, Tanvir, and Suleman. I loved Imran, the central character, but the others also left a deep imprint.

Sir Rahman was Imran’s father, the Director General of the Central Intelligence Bureau. His boss. Zafrul Mulk was another intriguing character, he could disguise himself as Imran and mimic his voice and walk and act like him so convincingly that even Imran’s own team members could not tell the difference. I also loved Suleman, the caretaker and cook who somehow never cooked a proper meal for Imran!

The Faridi and Hameed series I found later were just as addictive, but they never evoked the same enthusiasm in me. Eventually, I read all Ibn-e-Safi’s detective novels, many of them more than once.

The excitement of visiting Allahabad during vacations was augmented by the fact that Nikhat Publications stored copies of Jasoosi Dunya and Rumani Dunya in a room in Khala’s house. Abbas Husaini, the publisher and owner of Nikhat Publications, and Syed Mujawir Husain Rizvi, the writer of the Rumani Dunya series, were neighbours and regular visitors to the evening discussions. Their children were friends with my brothers and cousins.

The dark, spacious room where the books were stored was always locked, but pushing in the heavy, old-style two-part door created just enough space along the chain to peep inside. We younger kids made a game of seeing who could use a bamboo stick to fish out a book we hadn’t read. This stealth operation would be carried out after lunch, when the elders retreated for their afternoon nap. Whenever our “theft” was discovered, a half-hearted scolding followed, and we were instructed to return the book after reading it, which we always did. After all, it is practically a universal law that “stealing a book is not theft.”

Coming back to Jasoosi Dunya, both in school and later at university, I found many friends and even a few teachers who were hooked on it.

One friend in Aligarh had an unmatched love for the series. Whenever a new one arrived, he would head straight to Anwar Book Depot, ask for two or three books including the new Jasoosi Dunya, and stand there for two hours or so until he finished reading it from cover to cover. He couldn’t afford to buy the books, so he developed a rapid reading habit purely for this purpose! Eventually, Anwar Sahab, the shopkeeper, stopped giving Jasoosi Dunya to him.

Personally, I owe my fluency in reading Urdu to Ibn-e-Safi, and I am certain this holds true for most Urdu readers of my generation. My mother understood how vital this was when she allowed me to read Jasoosi Dunya, it was the first major step in developing a lifelong reading habit. Ibn-e-Safi’s ability to seamlessly blend international espionage, science fiction tropes (like mind-control rays and advanced chemistry), and deep-rooted Eastern values gave his work a universal appeal that transcended borders.

A quiet revolution

Even a cursory look at literary history tells us that in the mid-20th century, the Southasian literary landscape was dominated by sweeping romances, historical epics, and heavy socio-political realism. Even popular writers considered it undignified to write detective novels.

Yet, beneath the surface of this traditional literary world, a quiet revolution was brewing in the realm of popular fiction. The pioneer of this revolution was the extremely creative and prolific Asrar Ahmad. Although he adopted more than one pen name while writing poetry and articles, he ultimately became Ibn-e-Safi to his readers. During my Allahabad days, I heard from many people that he would dictate an entire novel in one sitting. The book was sent for publication without editing or revision. I never believed it.

He did not merely write detective fiction; he single-handedly built the genre for Urdu readers, transforming it into a cultural phenomenon that remains unmatched. Long before Indian cinema mastered the technique, his characters, first Sing Hi and later Imran, had already learned to duck approaching bullets.

Despite his immense popularity, his books were never accorded the status of “high literature” during his lifetime.

His popularity was unprecedented.

Once, an interviewer asked him where he thought his books should be placed, in a bookshelf holding philosophical memoirs literary histories political-religious ideological critiques like Abul Kalam’s Ghubar-e-Khatir, Muhammad Husain Azad’s Ab-e-Hayat, and Maulana Maududi’s Khilafat-o-Mulukiyat.

Avoiding the literary comparison, he placed his books high on the popularity scale, responding: “My books are not kept on shelves; readers keep them under their pillows,” recounted by his son Ahmad Safi.

Ibn-e-Safi acknowledged that the publishing of Urdu detective novels began with translations from other languages, mainly English, with the pioneering detective fiction writer Munshi Tirath Ram Firozpuri (1885–1954) topping the list of translators. However, these translations were literal, and did not gain much popularity; the language was crude, and readers could not grasp what the author wanted to convey.

There is no dearth of books and articles about Ibn-e-Safi’s life and literary legacy. Born on 26 November 1928, in the United Provinces of British India, he became a teacher and poet by training. His entry into detective fiction was fuelled by a unique challenge. Legend has it that during a literary debate, a colleague remarked that popular Urdu literature was solely sustained by cheap, vulgar romances. Ibn-e-Safi disagreed, counter-arguing that readers only turned to such material because thrilling, clean, and intellectually stimulating alternatives did not exist.

To prove his point, he began writing under the pseudonym Ibn-e-Safi (meaning Son of Safi). His literary empire rested primarily on two monumental, long-running series that spanned over 240 novels in total.

He was by no means the first author to write detective novels in the region. By the turn of the last century, several such novels had already appeared in Bangla and Urdu. Historians tell us that Riyanath Mukhopadhyay was the first writer to serialise crime and detective stories in an Indian language (1890). Panchkori Dey was probably the first to write full-length original detective novels in Bangla (1900). In Urdu, Zafar Omar wrote Neeli Chhatri (The Blue Umbrella) in 1917, which is widely considered the first original detective novel in the language.

However, Ibn-e-Safi was the first to serialise detective novels in Urdu, and once he started, there was no stopping him. Over 28 years, he wrote roughly nine books per year. It would be fascinating to calculate how many words he wrote per day on average. I am certain he had little time to mull over, refine, or finalise the plot of a book before starting to write; the two processes of thinking and writing must have occurred synchronously.

Universal appeal

The first Jasoosi Dunya book was launched in 1952, introducing the iconic duo of Colonel Faridi and Captain Hamid. As I remember, Faridi had a rather dry personality, the quintessential aristocrat-detective: Highly educated, deeply philosophical, stoic, and wealthy, with a mysterious personal life (and a penchant for keeping pet lions). Hamid, his trusted companion, provided the perfect foil, spirited, impulsive, and deeply human.

Together, they navigated complex criminal webs that blended urban crime with global espionage. Though Faridi was portrayed as the hero, the novels often revolved around Hamid. His simplicity and his conversations with Qasim, reminiscent of Obelix in the Asterix series (launched later, in 1959), kept readers glued.

In 1955, Ibn-e-Safi created Ali Imran, arguably the most beloved character in Urdu fiction. Some critics believe that he merged the two characters, Faridi and Hamid, to create Imran. I disagree with this simplistic view. Imran is a very complex character who reflects Ibn-e-Safi’s extraordinary creativity and ingenuity.

On the surface, Imran is an eccentric, goofy, and seemingly buffoonish young man holding a doctorate in criminology, constantly ridiculed by his family and peers. However, this persona is a brilliant facade. In reality, Imran is “X-2”, the secretive, razor-sharp chief of the Secret Service. The contrast between his hilarious, witty dialogue and his lethal, tactical genius made the Imran Series an instant, roaring success. A comparative study of the two series would require an entire book, so I will leave that here.

While often categorised as “pulp” or popular fiction, Ibn-e-Safi’s work transcended the typical boundaries of the genre in several profound ways. His prose was immaculate. He wrote with a conversational tone with highly sophisticated vocabulary, making his novels a gateway for younger generations to fall in love with the Urdu language. He was a devout Muslim, a believer not favourably predisposed toward ‘progressive’ writers, yet he weaponised literature for social reform.

Ibn-e-Safi maintained a strict personal rule: his stories never relied on vulgarity, graphic sexual tones, or cheap gore. He wanted his books to be read aloud in family living rooms. His villains were rarely caricatured bad guys; they were products of societal failure, greed, and psychological trauma. Through humour and satire, he frequently mocked the hypocrisy of the elite, the corruption of bureaucracy, and the decay of post-colonial morality.

Ibn-e-Safi passed away on 26 July 1980, but his universe never died. Decades later, his books continue to be reprinted, digitised, and translated into English and other languages. He achieved what few writers ever do: he created an escape world so vivid, witty, and intellectually vibrant that generations of readers continue to seek refuge in it.

He remains the undisputed King of Urdu Noir, a man who proved that suspense did not need to be crude to be captivating, and that popular fiction could hold a mirror to the soul of a society, which any piece of literature is expected to do.

While detective novels rely on elements of surprise and suspense, the finest literary classics also possess these qualities. Like many others, I consider Ibn-e-Safi’s writings to be an integral part of Urdu literature. Maybe I’m biased, but I have never been ashamed of my biases. Only an undiscerning reader could be unbiased.

Ends

Gauhar Raza is a New Delhi-based scientist, author, poet, and documentary filmmaker who, since the 1980s, has been a prominent figure in the National Science Movement and has conducted extensive large-scale surveys in India and internationally. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Scientific Temper and has served as Chief Scientist at the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India. His best-selling book ‘From Myths to Science’ (Penguin Random House India) has been translated into various Indian languages and will be released in the US on 1 September 2026.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?

Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

By Regina Johnson / Sapan News

The call to make a radical change in how cancer is treated has been coming from inside the house for years. Trailblazing oncologist Dr. Azra Raza has long been calling to shift attention “from the last cell to the first cell” cancer treatment.

Last Saturday, Dr. Raza passionately reiterated this stance and her rationale for it in a conversation hosted by Readers Without Borders, an online book club initiated by Boston-based entrepreneur Ambereen Mirza. The event was organised in partnership with the Southasia Peace Action Network, sister organisation of Sapan News (yes, we are working on a new name to eliminate confusion, so watch this space).

Sapan is a volunteer-driven, global, intergenerational group that aims to support cross-border dialogue and build spaces for empathy and collaboration. Dr. Raza has endorsed the Sapan Founding Charter, as had many of those present. Readers Without Borders is among the more than 150 organisations to have done so.

ENDORSE THE SAPAN FOUNDING CHARTER

Dr. Raza has devoted her life to researching Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) and leukemia, commented discussion moderator Haris Ahmed, a Chicago-based business and community leader. As Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and the Director of the MDS Center at Columbia University, New York, Dr. Raza has built “the largest tissue repository in the world, where she hopes that it will contain the secrets for unlocking this terrible disease that afflicts so many human beings,” said Ahmed. Nearly 50 people from across the globe joined the Zoom call to hear Dr. Raza’s expertise and ideas on how to change cancer treatment. Some, however, entirely oblivious to her medical background, had joined because of her acclaimed poetry recitals. With references to Ghalib – about whose work she has co-authored a book with her dear late friend, the acclaimed writer Sara Suleri -- and other poets sprinkled in through the discussion she did not disappoint them.

Several participants shared stories about personal losses and struggles due to the dreaded ‘C’ word.

“I lost my wife -- two days from now it’ll be nine months exactly -- to pancreatic cancer, which is probably one of the worst cancers. So, I will read your book. If only to give myself more consolation,” said author and businessman Mohammed Azher Siddiqui originally from Hyderabad, India, joining from Boston.

Dr. Azra Raza and ‘The First Cell’: Discussion with online book club Readers Without Borders and peace organisation Sapan discussion, 18 July 2026.

In her opening remarks, Dr. Raza talked about coming to the U.S.A. and landing in Buffalo where her older sister, the well-known Chicago-based physician Dr. Atiya Khan then worked and to whose support she owes everything. While the siblings grew up in Pakistan, their parents were born and grew up in undivided India -- father in Lucknow, and mother in Aligarh.

“Money matters,” said Dr. Raza, who has been studying and treating cancer for nearly 40 years. What she is trying to do needs not just vast resources but also people who believe in it and support her views on how and why the medical profession needs to change.

This is the premise of her innovative approach to cancer treatment, outlined in her book “The First Cell and the Human Cost of Pursuing Cancer to the Last” (Basic Books, USA, 2019).

Typically, the war on cancer begins too late in the disease process because it targets visible tumors instead of the precursors to cancer cells, explained Dr. Raza. “Stage one is visible cancer. We should be the last generation to deal with this visible disease.”

What we need, she added, is precision oncology, to prevent the disease. The idea resonates with William Shatner, who famously played Captain Kirk in the cult 1960s TV series Star Trek, and was diagnosed with stage four cancer. So was his daughter. They both read Dr. Raza’s book. That is why she had joined the discussion from Los Angeles—Shatner had interviewed her for his podcast and invited her to LA to introduce her to people who might be able to help her fulfill her mission.

Dr. Raza has many friends and admirers in high places, like Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the physician, scientist and entrepreneur who owns the Los Angeles Times and funds the endowed chair for Dr Raza at Columbia University. Another dear friend was the late Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, whose groundbreaking book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011) catalysed a paradigm shift in how we look at the human brain.

In her research geared towards shift focus from treating advanced cancer to detecting and eliminating early cancer cells, she has been working on a device she calls the “sentinel stent.” or the “Stentinel” which looks like a syringe.

In an “era of implanting intelligence” -- a term she laughingly said she has trademarked -- the Stentinel would be capable of detecting and destroying cancer cells. She and her team are working on making it available by 2028. And she emphasised, it must not become a luxury for the rich -- “The stent literally costs $80,” she said.

Hearing Dr. Raza speak, it’s clear that she wants a global healthcare ecosystem where early detection and prevention is the standard -- universally accessible and not limited to wealthy individuals -- or nations.

Cancer, she noted, “is not one disease” and “different bodies have different responses” both to the disease and the treatment. But because we don’t always know how to treat it, the way we currently fight it is to “slash, poison, and burn.”

She views the issue through “the prism of human anguish”, having watched countless cancer patients suffer and die, including her own husband Dr. Harvey David Preisler, also an oncologist, to cancer when their daughter was just 8-years old.

Highlighting the financial and intellectual waste in current cancer research, she termed the way we currently wage war on cancer as “financial toxicity”.

There is, as Dr. Raza observed, a huge “financial incentive for the last cell strategy”. During “the last 50 years, 90-95% of cancer drugs developed have failed at a cost of about $60 billion in phase one cancer trials alone,” she pointed out, noting that Pakistan’s entire budget, she pointed out, is $32 billion.

As for the intellectual waste, young scientists are “locked into a late-stage treatment-centric model” which is where the money is, diverting talent and funding away from the early-detection research that patients need.

Throughout the 90-minute discussion, it was obvious that she cares about scientific and technical expertise. But as Haris Ahmed noted, Dr. Raza is also an “empath”.

“I have never come across a physician who doesn’t care about their patients,” she said. But everyone is different and has a different way of dealing with situations. Some doctors withdraw when there is nothing more they can do – they see it as a personal failure. As a practicising oncologist who still sees several patients a month, she has a different approach, upholding the importance of “empathy and presence” in healthcare.

To a question about whether oncologists should tell terminally ill patients and their families the truth, Dr. Raza quoted a line from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

Tell the truth, she said, especially bad news about cancer, but deliver it gently and in stages with explanations so that patients can absorb it emotionally.

“Know that your presence will matter,” she said. “Just go stand by the bedside, hold the patient’s hand. That requires nothing except your presence.”

To another question about the use of artificial intelligence in medicine, Dr. Raza said that AI is essential in this field and is already streamlining routine work by drafting clinical notes and ordering tests. However, the actual power lies in analyzing the data generated by continuous biological monitoring.

In her lab, machine-learning systems are being trained on vast numbers of normal cancer cells so that, one day, AI can instantly flag a malignant cell long before a tumor forms. This, she implies, demonstrates that AI finds its best application in improving human welfare within medicine.

In the final analysis, Dr. Raza reiterated that cancer treatment must pivot from chasing the last cell to preventing the first. The science to do so already exists. What’s needed to take it forward is money and imagination.

Ends

Regina Johnson is coordinating editor, Sapan News. She has extensively reported on America’s energy policy at S&P Global. A versatile journalist specializing in feature writing across multiple beats, her articles have appeared in LATINA Style, Advisors Magazine, and Thrive Magazine. Email: regina@sapannews.com

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

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From the Port of Colombo’s pressing need to strengthen its competitive edge to the enduring significance of Amazing Grace as America commemorates its 250^th anniversary - and the lasting legacy of screen icon Dilip Kumar. Discover how ‘Think Like a Journalist. Build Peace’ highlights the role of thoughtful reporting and revisit Bhagat Singh’s legacy through Urdu.

Industry perspective

Sri Lanka-based freelance writer Madhuri Peiris on Why Sri Lanka keeps missing its maritime moment, with interviews of maritime experts and an analysis of how the Port, at the crossroads of global change, faces a defining challenge: Transform or fall behind.

Commemorative

Last month, America celebrated ‘Juneteenth’, followed by the Fourth of July and the 250th anniversary of the nation’s independence. The historic event led Aamir Butt, a poet and writer based in Hull, birthplace of the British abolitionist William Wilberforce, to recall the universally beloved hymn-like anthem: ‘Amazing Grace’: The story behind a universally relevant redemption song.

A lifelong fan, scholar and former diplomat Akbar Ahmed reflects on the film icon Dilip Kumar’s visit to Quetta and why the Peshawar-born actor remains a symbol of peace and inter-communal harmony: Remembering a champion and symbol of Southasian harmony.

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Cross-border ‘Media Mirror’

Check out the new section in the Sapan News website, Media Mirror, a public service initiative that helps promote cross-border understanding between India and Pakistan since both countries continue to ban each other’s news websites. See Press Statement: Access is not a threat: A call to lift reciprocal news bans in India and Pakistan. Articles recently republished with permission include:

• ‘Satluj’ chases truth of Punjab’s bounty killings by New Delhi-based journalist Bharat Bhushan, first published in the Deccan Herald. The film’s message is that a ‘cash-for-kill’ does not eliminate militancy, it ends up killing innocents and spreading militancy and makes criminals out of security force personnel. See also Anuradha Bhasin’s article in Sapan News, A Tale of Two Punjabs, about extrajudicial killings on the Indian and Pakistani sides of the border.

• Peace activist and writer Chintan Girish Modi interview of Navdeep Suri, a former diplomat who translated his grandfather Nanak Singh’s Partition literature into English. His piece first published in Scroll, ‘Ties of language and culture are stronger than political borders’ remains relevant in today’s fractured world.

Brown Pundits features ‘Think like a Journalist. Build Peace’

Zach Zavidé, founder of the established blog Brown Pundits, flew to Stockholm for Mela Nordic peace conference, “Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace”, 4 July 2026, and wrote this thoughtful piece, Reading Dawn in Delhi, based on Sapan News founder and chief editor Beena Sarwar’s presentation ‘Think Like a Journalist. Build Peace.’ The title draws upon our Media Mirror section. The concept includes our Social Media Ethics and Responsibility Pledge. Have you endorsed it?

Endorse the Social Media Pledge

Bookshelf

The Southasia Peace Action Network and Readers Without Borders invite you to an interactive literary session with physician, scientist and author, Dr. Azra Raza to discuss her book, ‘In the First Cell’.

Date: Saturday, 18 July 2026 | Time: 10:30 am EST (US and Canada) / 7.30 pm Pakistan/ 8 pm India / 8.15 pm Nepal / 8.30 pm Bangladesh

Join the Zoom meeting

Literary notes

The Urdu version of Professor Chaman Lal’s Shaheed Bhagat Singh: Dastaveezon Ke Aine Main (Martyr Bhagat Singh: In the Mirror of Documents), first published by Publications Division and the National Book Trust, in 2014, is now available online through Academy of the Punjab in North America (Apna). Apna also added 132 new Punjabi and Punjab-related e-books and magazines to their site in June.

Honouring rural photojournalists

The People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI) initiated by the journalist P. Sainath and the musician TM Krishna in 2024, this year jointly honored seven emerging photojournalists with the PARI-TM Krishna Award for documenting the lives, struggles and resilience of rural and working-class communities. The awards, in recognition of their exceptional work at the intersection of art and journalism were presented on 10 July at the inauguration of the People’s Photographers Collective exhibition at the Lalit Kala Akademi, Chennai.

Thanks for reading. Every other week, we’ll bring you a curated digest of the stories, developments and highlights from our weekly coverage. Until then, thank you for being with us.

Thank you,

Regina Johnson
Coordinating Editor
Sapan News

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A Sapan News syndicated features available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com

By Madhuri Peiris / Sapan News

COLOMBO: Situated at the cusp of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, barely a degree north of the equator, Sri Lanka has a geographical location that port planners pay fortunes for.

Yet for all the strategic plans drawn up over the past three decades, the island has progressed little beyond its role as a transshipment port --more than 80% of the cargo on ships docked in Sri Lanka is never unloaded here, but transshipped onward.

Most of this cargo is bound for Indian ports, through terminals run by Sri Lanka’s state-owned Ports Authority, the China Merchants-backed Colombo International Container Terminals, and India’s Adani Group-linked Colombo West International Terminal.

Stalled deal

Efforts to change this situation include a 2019 trilateral India-Japan-Sri Lanka agreement to develop Colombo’s East Container Terminal, scrapped in 2021 under pressure from trade unions.

For all its facilities, Sri Lanka remains far from being a true logistics hub, where goods are stored, consolidated, processed, and redistributed. This is partly due to project timelines being repeatedly pushed back — the stalled East Container Terminal deal being the most prominent example.

In contrast, rival ports in the neighbourhood, from India’s newly commissioned Vizhinjam International Seaport to Dubai’s Jebel Ali and Singapore, sharpen their ambitions.

The asymmetry was on full display at a business roundtable in Colombo hosted by the Delegation of the European Union to Sri Lanka, the Delegation of German Industry and Commerce in Sri Lanka (AHK Sri Lanka) under the theme ‘Global Gateway and Sri Lanka’s Role as a Regional Maritime and Logistics Hub.’ The meeting took place on 27 May 2026, but the issues it raised there remain relevant.

The Port of Colombo handled a record 8.29 million twenty-foot equivalent units, or TEUs, in 2025, up from 7.79 million in 2024, keeping it Southasia’s busiest container port and among the world’s top 25, according to data from the Sri Lanka Ports Authority.

The Ports Authority projected that the port’s total capacity would double to 15 million TEUs by 2026. However, delays in tendering and equipment procurement mean it is now on track to fall well short. Dig deeper, and the picture gets murkier.

Much of the Port of Colombo’s international business remains dependent on transshipment cargo that merely passes through. The containers handled at the Port are not destined for Sri Lanka --they are unloaded from one ship and transferred to another ship to continue to their destination.

Bureaucracy: The silent saboteur

If geography is Sri Lanka’s greatest asset, bureaucracy may be its most stubborn liability.

In its 2023 Logistics Performance Index — the last edition to rank countries head-to-head before the World Bank retired the single-ranking format in favour of a broader, non-ranked scorecard — Sri Lanka placed 73rd out of 139 countries.

Congestion at customs examination yards creates a ripple effect on Colombo Port, causing containers to pile up. Complex regulations add costs, slow down operations, and lead to a shortage of skilled personnel. All this hinders technological advancement, and leads to disqualifying factors for global shipping lines choosing between regional hubs.

Colombo’s role as the transshipment gateway for Indian cargo, which accounts for roughly 70% of the port’s transshipment volume, is now under direct threat. Vizhinjam, just 10 nautical miles from the Suez–Far East shipping route and only 135 nautical miles from Colombo, has a natural depth of 24 metres that lets it berth ultra-large container ships with little dredging, an edge Colombo cannot easily match.

In 2023, New Delhi unveiled the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, an alternative to the Suez Canal route that India is still building and promoting.

Experts hold that what’s needed is government reforms to fundamentally redraw established trade flows in which Sri Lanka has long played a central role.

What would a real hub require?

The EU roundtable identified key reforms: Streamlined customs, transparent regulatory frameworks, accelerated port infrastructure, and deeper inland connectivity. Sri Lanka must move beyond transshipment toward value-added services, ship repair, re-export processing, and logistics services. This requires the investor confidence that only consistent, efficient governance can produce.

Sri Lanka currently provides only basic port and maritime services. Besides transshipment, these include bunkering, ship services, small-scale boat and ship repair, freight forwarding, warehousing, limited cold-chain storage, air cargo and crew supply.

However, the scope for expansion is huge, according to Gamini B. Herath, Chief Advisor, Competency-based Economies through Formation of Enterprise known as CEFE Net Sri Lanka, a non-profit business and entrepreneurship-training network.

“None of the higher-value services are currently available in the country,” he told Sapan News in a written response.

These opportunities include ship repair and construction, maritime finance, offshore services, digital logistics, pharmaceutical-grade cold storage, e-commerce, and green fuels such as LNG, methanol, and ammonia. That absence, Herath argues, is not a failure but a tremendous, untapped opportunity.

To seize the moment, he says the sector must become the top priority in Sri Lanka’s development strategy, guided by a new 10-to-20-year vision drawn up jointly by government, state enterprises and the private sector, and underpinned by long-term political commitment.

Policymakers need to tackle land, tax and fiscal policy, investment promotion, regulatory bottlenecks and human-capacity development together rather than piecemeal, he says. There is also a need to digitalise trade-facilitation services across customs, exchange control, immigration, and flag registration.

Herath’s proposed vehicle is a new Maritime and Logistics Hub Development Authority, led by the executive alongside a council of ministers and an expert committee drawn from industry, with the power to clear the way for private and state investment. He frames its mission as consolidating and expanding port capacity, deepening multimodal connectivity and scaling up value-added logistics services in support of an economy worth USD 500 billion or more in nominal GDP by 2035.

The two most urgent moves, he says, are building an investment and finance ecosystem that lowers the cost of capital and expands serviced investment space, and creating a transparent trade-facilitation regime — simplified tariffs, digitalised customs, risk-based controls — that cuts costs and clearance times.

The market needs to be fully liberalised, noted Sean Van Dort, Chairman of the Global Shippers’ Forum, a UK-based trade group. Adding that it can happen by opening the sector to full ownership for “the principals who are willing to invest and bring their technologies, innovations, and world-class operating processes,” he told Sapan News via WhatsApp.

Missed opportunities

Experts also note that Sri Lanka has repeatedly missed opportunities because of a persistent failure to enact meaningful reforms, a pattern the IMF has flagged across multiple sectors of the economy.

“Backward decisions and delayed action” have hampered infrastructure upgrades, the modernisation of laws, and the creation of a predictable investment environment, Rohan Maskorala, founder of Shippers’ Academy, Colombo, told Sapan News in a telephone interview.

He pointed to restrictive ownership clauses as a key deterrent, drawing on the models of Singapore, Hong Kong and major European shipping hubs, which have embedded openness to investment into their foundational laws. With current disruptions in the Middle East pushing global shipping lines to seek alternatives, he warns that the window is open — but not for long.

“Business happens in the environment, not in the location,” said Maskorala. “We cannot sit on it and wait. Sri Lanka has every natural advantage needed to be a great maritime hub. What it lacks is the institutional discipline to turn promise into performance. Policy makers and experts have identified the solutions.”

Sri Lanka has every natural advantage needed to be a great maritime hub. What it lacks is the institutional discipline to turn promise into performance. Policymakers and experts have identified the solutions.

The urgent question now, for the sake of Sri Lanka’s future, is whether policy makers will act on the island nation’s geographic advantage, being situated at the cusp of major trade routes. That reality is no longer enough on its own.

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Madhuri Peiris is a freelance writer in Sri Lanka covering the arts, travel, finance, and the environment. She has worked as a full-time editor and journalist at leading Sri Lankan newspapers. She has a BSc in Environmental Science from the University of Delhi, India, and a Post Graduate Diploma in Environmental Science from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

A Sapan News syndicated feature, available for republication with due credit.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word? Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one

By Aamir Butt /Sapan News

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved

Over the past nearly three decades that I’ve lived in England, I have attended half a dozen or so Christian funerals. Something common among them – besides the bereavement, of course – is that they always play the popular hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, leaving not a dry eye in the house.

This is such a powerful song that once when it played on the public address system of an HMV record store I was in, everyone stopped what they were doing and stood silent listening. When the song ended, they just resumed their activities.

On the surface, it is a Christian religious song that praises God. Some mistake it as a song from the Bible. In fact, it has nothing to do with the Bible at all. It has long been popular in Black American churches for its theme of redemption, but is also often sung at civil rights gatherings.

The lyrics are by John Newton (no relation to Issac Newton), an Englishman born in 1725. He led quite an eventful life, having been forced to work in the Royal Navy as a sailor. When he tried to escape, he was brutally flogged and humiliated. He worked on many ships and eventually ended up on the Ivory Coast. There, working for a white slave trader. Newton was kept in bondage for two years, starved and mistreated. His biographer Dr. Michael H. Yeager refers to this period of his life as being the ‘slave of slaves!’ (John Newton: Grace That Saved a Wretch Like Me: The Astonishing Journey of the Man Who Wrote Amazing Grace, Independently published, 2006).

Eventually a British ship rescued him. As they sailed back to England, there was a severe storm. The sailors were convinced the ship would sink. Newton, who had not been religious, prayed to God to save him. As if by a miracle, the storm receded.

This was the start of Newton’s spiritual awakening. He renounced drinking and gambling and became a practicing Christian. However, he remained entangled in the highly profitable slave trade, making three voyages as a captain of slave ships between Africa and Americas. The difference was that he made sure the slaves he was transporting on his ships were treated well.

He stopped working in the slave trade in 1754, and a few years later joined the clergy. By this time, he was a vocal supporter of abolition and repented his own participation in the slave trade.

By 1754, he repented his own participation in the slave trade and renounced it, becoming a vocal supporter of abolition. A few years later, he joined the clergy.

It was as a clergyman that Newton first met William Wilberforce. Following the death of his father, Wilberforce at the age of 11 or 12-years old was sent to live with family near Milton Keynes, and attended the church pastored by Newton. Wilberforce admired Newton, prompting his mother to bring him back to Hull for fear he might become a clergyman.

Years later, during a spiritual crisis, Wilberforce sought Newton’s counsel. When they met in December 1785, Wilberforce had already served five years in Parliament but was considering leaving politics for the ministry.

Newton agreed to mentor him and urged him to remain in public life, encouraging him to see political service as a Christian calling. Many historians believe this advice helped direct Wilberforce toward the campaign to abolish the slave trade, giving his parliamentary career a renewed sense of purpose.

Born in 1759, Wilberforce was a native of Hull, where I have lived for over 26 years.

In September 1780, at the age of 21, while still a student, Wilberforce was elected Member of Parliament for Kingston-upon-Hull.

Wilberforce passionately and untiringly worked towards the abolition of slavery within the British Empire. For the next 20 years he lobbied extensively and introduced bill after bill in the parliament aimed to abolish slavery. He was defeated each time, but he refused to give up.

In February 1807 Wilberforce witnessed the British Parliament pass the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by a vote of 283 to 16, tears streaming down his eyes. Newton died in December that year.

The British Royal Navy, which then controlled the world’s seas, established the West Africa Squadron in 1808 to patrol the coast. Between 1808 and 1860 they seized approximately 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans who were being taken to the New World for slave labour.

The Act was a major breakthrough as it abolished the inhuman trade in slaves throughout the British Empire. However, it did not abolish slavery.

Wilberforce and his allies continued to work towards that goal. Along the way in 1824, Wilberforce also became a founding member of the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

On 26 July 1833 the House of Commons passed the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 freeing all slaves in the British empire. As if his mission in life was now complete, Wilberforce died three days later, on 29 July, at age 74.

In the US, 19 June is commemorated as ‘Juneteenth,’ marking the day in 1865 when American slaves in Texas were finally told of their freedom – three years after then President Abraham Linclon signed the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. Slavery officially ended across the US with the passage of the 13th amendment on 6 December 1865. On 4 July 2026, the US marked the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

In 2006 when a group of American and British filmmakers collaborated to make a movie on the life of William Wilberforce, they appropriately named it Amazing Grace. And for the soundtrack of the movie lines were added to the song including “My chains are gone, I’ve been set free.”

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End Credits

Aamir Butt, a retired consultant and medical academic from Pakistan, is the author of two books, Lahore: Places, People, Stories (2024) and Evolution of Progressive Urdu Poetry in Lahore (2025), both published by Aks, Lahore.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?

Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

Dilip Kumar: 11 December 1922, Peshawar - 07 July 2021, Mumbai

Commentary

By Akbar Ahmed / Sapan News

Who does the legendary actor Dilip Kumar belong to? Born in December 1922 in Peshawar, he passed away in Mumbai, on 7 July 2021, at age 98. Millions on either side of the India-Pakistan border adored him. Pakistan honoured him with the Nishan-i-Imtiaz in 1988. India conferred upon him the Padma Bhushan in 1991, followed by several other awards.

In 2014, Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif declared Dilip Kumar’s family house in Peshawar’s Qissa Khawani Bazaar, a national monument. After his passing, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi termed him a “cinematic legend” of “unparalleled brilliance.” Then Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan, and former President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai expressed their condolences.

Five years after Dilip Kumar left us, let us pause and reflect on the iconic actor and his vast contribution towards peace in Southasia and wherever Southasians live.

As a believer in inter-religious, inter-communal harmony, when I see the popularity of contemporary films like Dhurandhar and Dhurandhar: The Revenge with violent themes which focus on the destruction of Pakistan, I despair.

But then I remember meeting Dilip Kumar in Quetta, Baluchistan, where I was then Commissioner.

One-on-one

Dilip Kumar and his wife Saira Banu were visiting Pakistan in 1988, at a time of tensions between India and Pakistan. As his escorting officer during their visit to Quetta, I received them at the airport, took them to visit the local hospital, had lunch in the Governor’s House, then to their guesthouse, before seeing them off at the airport that evening.

We moved into the Commissioner’s car. Saira Banu and the rest of the party followed in separate vehicles. During these drives where I had the opportunity for one-on-one conversations with Dilip Kumar, he engaged with ideas like a practiced diplomat or polished artist used to the media, making me feel as if we were old friends.

Using my brief but extraordinary access, I asked Dilip Kumar what he considered his greatest role. Devdas, he replied. Not because he played the title character, he explained, speaking softly and slowly, as he did on screen. The story, based on a popular classic novel, captures a central conundrum of our Southasian society. Set at the turn of the century in rural Bengal, it is the simple but tragic tale of two lovers trapped by the immutable laws of their caste.

After Devdas‘ beloved is forced to marry a man chosen by her family, he turns to alcohol. But he keeps his promise to meet her once before he dies, and arrives outside her home to take his last breaths. The story has seen many film versions, including one starring the Bollywood superhero Shahrukh Khan.

There was also a personal reason why Kumar mentioned Devdas, released in 1955, for which he won the Filmfare award for Best Actor, the Indian equivalent of the Oscars. He said he prepared for his film roles by inhabiting the character and in the case of Devdas he became the doomed lover. The character’s pessimism stayed with him, affecting his personality.

The physicians he turned to for advice recommended taking up different kinds of roles, lighthearted and jovial. A string of hits followed which were more of the typical Bombay song and dance cinema, like Kohinoor, Ram aur Shyam, and Leader.

Over a career spanning five decades, Dilip Kumar worked in 57 films. But it is as a serious actor that he is remembered - the tragic lover, with many songs picturised on him based on themes of pain, loss and defeat. Besides Devdas, other classic tragic 1950s’ films like Uran Khatola, Babul, Daag, Dedaar and Andaz, established him as the “king of tragedy.”

The other big stars dominating the Indian cinema then included Raj Kapoor and Dev Anand. But no one could really match Kumar.

Even after the 1970s when a new kind of hero was in demand and younger stars like Amitabh Bachchan and Shashi Kapoor became popular, Dilip Kumar still won awards after awards. In fact, he has received the most Filmfare awards for Best Actor - eight; besides 19 nominations and holds the Guinness World Record for receiving the most awards by an Indian actor.

A Rediff readers’ poll in 2011 voted him “The Greatest Indian actor of all time”. In 2013, on the centenary of Indian cinema, a Filmfare poll placed Dilip Kumar as “the biggest superstar of all time”. Cinema directors and critics have ranked his Mughal-e-Azam as the greatest film of all time in poll after poll.

Abbottabad, Aan and beyond

I grew up in Abbottabad in north Pakistan in the 1950s, considered the golden era of Indian cinema, which Dilip Kumar dominated.

Most of these films were black and white and are now considered classic cinema. Aan was an exception. India’s first colour movie starring Dilip Kumar, it was so popular in Pakistan that it played in Karachi for several years.

Decades later some of his major films like Naya Daur and Mughal-e-Azam were converted into colour and re-released.

The movie Aan gained huge popularity with the boys at my boarding school, Burn Hall, now called Army Burn Hall, particularly the film poster - Kumar, hands on hips, defiant smile, hair on his forehead, and dagger at his waist, all of which screamed the dashing romantic hero.

A student from Pakistan’s northern areas, named Chu, a nod to the Chinese Prime Minister Chu En Lai, took a poster and cut out Kumar’s face, replacing it with his own. He placed it next to his bed. The boys in the dormitory were furious: How dare Chu replace Dilip Kumar!

Dilip Kumar’s very name became a byword for a heroic, tragic figure. Students from my school days would tease each other with phrases like, “So you think you’re Dilip Kumar!”

Posted to East Pakistan later, I saw a great big portrait of Dilip Kumar in the main lobby of a cinema in a remote area. There was no film of his playing there; the picture was a stand-alone tribute to him.

I saw Devdas in London as an undergraduate in the 1960s, with friends at a special Sunday show and again marvelled at Dilip Kumar’s star power. His lines from the film were still widely recognized and quoted, like: “Kaun kambakht hai joh bardaasht karne ke liye peeta hai ... Main toh peeta hoon ki bas saans le sakun“ (Which unfortunate drinks to tolerate life? I drink so that I can breathe).

It was in London that I met Dilip Kumar and Saira Banu again, just after I finished serving as High Commissioner for Pakistan there, when they were guests of honour at a farewell dinner for me in the year 2000. This was at the farm of prominent Pakistani-origin landlord Mohsin Akhtar outside Cambridge.

Dilip Kumar’s personal life had the quality of one of his film scripts. Muhammad Yusuf Khan, as he was originally named, assumed the stage name Dilip Kumar in his debut film Jawar Bhata, 1944. The film made him almost an overnight screen sensation.

In the public imagination he was paired with Madhubala in her beauty and brilliant acting. Their falling out during the shooting of Naya Daur ended in a bitter court case.

In 1966 he married Saira Banu, 22 years younger, and an ardent fan. His 1981 marriage to Asma Rahman, a Hyderabad socialite, lasted only a couple of years. His life-long companion remained Saira Banu.

Pluralist identity

But the name of Dilip Kumar was greater than the sum of its parts, an individual personally and publicly acknowledged by presidents and prime ministers of several countries, besides his own. With his towering reputation he was made a member of the upper house of Parliament (2000-2006) and offered many other honorifics. He was even appointed honorary Sheriff of Mumbai in 1980.

Entire generations of actors copied his style, including his hairstyle and way of speaking, from Amitabh Bachchan to Shahrukh Khan. In Pakistan the leading actor Santosh Kumar took his name to reflect Dilip Kumar, and film star Nadeem’s popularity rested on his imitation of Kumar.

Dilip Kumar’s very name was redolent of romance and tragedy while confronting the essential beauty of humanity in each one of us. Seeing him on the silver screen, males wanted to be Dilip Kumar, and females yearned to be the object of devotion that he conveyed in his language of love with its purity, consistency and selfless nature.

His commanding and dignified presence on the screen became characteristic of his brand, contrasting with the flamboyant style of other popular actors like the Kapoors and even Dev Anand. The contrast is clear in Andaz, the only film Kumar starred in alongside Raj Kapoor. Raj gets the girl but it is Kumar who emerges as the real tragic hero.

Dilip Kumar’s stature as possibly the greatest movie star produced in India is virtually unchallenged. So is his reputation as a legendary figure that helped shape modern India and its idea of itself as a pluralist and tolerant society. Like Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, Dilip Kumar symbolised pluralist identity in the new nation. The relationship between them was widely known. Nehru often turned up at the launch of a new movie.

When the censor board demanded an impossible number of cuts in Ganga Jamna, the only movie Dilip Kumar produced, Dilip went to Delhi and met Nehru. They saw the film together. The film, set in rural Bihar, was entirely shot on location, with the characters including Dilip Kumar in the lead, all speaking the local dialect Poorbi. This was method acting at its finest.

Nehru got the film passed without a single cut - a story Dilip Kumar recounts in a video clip doing the rounds on social media.

In fact, social media today is replete with videos testifying to Dilip Kumar’s stature and iconic position. In one clip, he is with the popular actor Dharmendra, himself a superstar, who always adored Dilip Kumar as his personal hero. “I asked God why did you not make me as handsome as Dharmendra?” asks Dilip Kumar. The look of pure joy on Dharmendra’s face is priceless as he bows to touch Dilip’s feet in respect. Saira Banu has recounted how she and Dharmendra would argue about who loves Dilip Kumar more.

While Dilip Kumar was never a stage actor, he brought a certain style of acting which hinted at the stage. He spoke slowly and in measured tones, and his diction would satisfy the strictest purist. He did not move too much in front of the camera, compared to his contemporaries. Above all, he brought a sense of gravitas and dignity to his roles.

In the 1950s several prominent British stage actors went on to dominate the screen. These included Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Alec Guinness. But the transition from stage to screen was never smooth. Recall Olivier warning Burton that he could either be a household name or a great actor. Dilip was both. He remained choosy about his roles - his 57 films are few compared to those of his contemporaries; Dharmendra made over 300.

After Dilip Kumar refused director David Lean’s offer of the lead in Lawrence of Arabia, the role famously went to Omar Sharif. Dilip has said that he thought Omar Sharif played the role far better than he himself could have.

This remains one of the “what if” questions of history. Had Dilip accepted Lean’s invitation, would he have gone on to play the roles Sharif later got, like Dr. Zhivago?

Complexities and depth

Southasian society is complex, changing, and dynamic. It also has deep structures, like the reality of religious identity. Many Muslims from Kabul to Calcutta see Dilip Kumar as the ultimate screen hero and a source of pride. Many non-Muslims question his loyalty to India and his obvious affection for the land of his birth, Pakistan. He never flaunted his religion, but never abandoned it either.

There have been ridiculous attempts to paint him with the brush of treason. At one stage during the 1965 war with Pakistan the Indian authorities raided his home in Bombay and confiscated a radio, claiming that it allowed him to speak directly to the Pakistan Army. Some Indians vociferously condemned him for accepting Pakistan’s highest civil award.

Yet Dilip Kumar was not deterred from the persona he represented off and on screen, and remained an immutable cultural bridge between nations and communities. The saying ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ is widely known, and Kumar remains an icon of peace.

I remember being mobbed everywhere we stopped during his Quetta visit, by wives of senior ministers, and elders, imploring a picture with him. There was no shyness or notions of rural or tribal modesty about them. They were fans and they wanted to convey that. Dusk was falling as I took them to the airport. A sizeable crowd had gathered to take pictures and bid them farewell.

I close with comments from the historian Rajmohan Gandhi, a grandson of the Mahatma and a prominent public intellectual promoting dialogue and inter-communal harmony, shared with his permission:

“Through this piece you bring to life a proud priceless past, dear Akbar. Very few today can claim the relationship with Dilip Kumar that you had. One day it will again become possible for Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians to cry for one another, laugh with one another, and together create songs and movies that stir human beings everywhere. Meanwhile, we weep over what’s happening in hallowed places. Stay well.”

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End Credits

Dr. Akbar Ahmed is a distinguished Professor of International Relations and Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University and a Wilson Center Global Fellow. He has held appointments at Brookings Institution, the U.S. Naval Academy, Cambridge, Harvard, and Princeton. Earlier, he spent more than three decades working with the Civil Service of Pakistan, including as Commissioner in Balochistan, Political Agent in the Tribal Areas, and Pakistan High Commissioner to the U.K. and Ireland. This article for Sapan News draws upon his piece published last month in Viewsnewsnow.com and The Friday Times.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

A new section in the Sapan News website features articles from India and Pakistan that promote cross-border understanding, since both countries stubbornly continue to ban each others’ news websites. See Press Statement: Access is not a threat: A call to lift reciprocal news bans in India and Pakistan).

In Media Mirror, we republish such pieces, with permission, as a public service initiative. Recent articles in this series include Karachi-based social entrepreneur Ahsan Jamil’s analysis on the need to invest in the nuclear family from Dawn, Pakistan, and dancer and choreographer Aranyani Bhargav on the importance shared spaces for creativity and cultural expression, from The Wire, India, sparked by a recent vitriolic article attacking Pakistani Odissi dancer Sheema Kermani

Visions of the future

Our most recent article Maps of memory: The political battle over Southasian’s place names by New Delhi-based journalist Rohinee Singh reminded me of all the places that have changed in my own country, but not in my memory. From Delhi’s renamed roads to Lahore’s restored landmarks, the politics of place names reveals a larger battle over identity, history, and who gets to define the past.

After a 15-year social media hiatus, Southasian expatriate Ali Azad returns to the fray, aiming to fight back with empathy and love. In Looking within to find love and tolerance in a ‘post-truth’ world he asks why, whether Israeli or Palestinian, Hindu or Muslim, do we not give others the same grace we give to ourselves?

As migration reshapes economies and societies, the World Migration Report 2026 highlights the growing need for safer migration routes, international cooperation, and policies focused on humanitarian and economic realities. Read my review in From Gulf labour to climate pressure: Southasia’s migration story.

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Community events

This weekend, Mela Nordic in collaboration with the Southasia Peace Action Network (Sapan), will host a day-long event at Filmcentrum, titled ‘Divergent Voices of South Asia: Rethinking Partition, Reimagining Peace’. The international gathering is dedicated to exploring cross-border issues, art, and alternative histories.

Presentations include ‘Think like a Journalist. Build Peace’ by Beena Sarwar, Sapan co-founder and founder editor Sapan News, ‘Songs of Love’ by UK-based writer Dr. Aamir Butt, and Dr. Amrita Ghosh’s book launch ‘India’s imperial formations. Race in South Asia’. Online presentations include ‘Bridging the Noise: Media and the Art of Solidarity in South Asia’ by Kashmir Times editor Anuradha Bhasin

Date: Saturday, 4 July 2026 | Time: 10 am to 9 pm CEST | Venue: Filmcentrum Riks, Bredgränd 2, Stockholm | Admission FREE and open to the general public.

See Southasia Peace Action Network for more details.

Join Kultura Verse, this weekend for South Asian Heritage Month celebrations in Southend-on-Sea! This year’s theme is Unity in Diversity. Shahid Nadeem, shared his observations with Sapan News on the community event in 2024, where the theme was Free to be Me.

Date: Saturday, 4 July 2026 | Time: 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm BST | Venue: Saint Peter’s Community Hall, Eastbourne Grove, Westcliff, Southend-on-Sea, SS0 0QF | Admission: FREE and open to the general public but registration is mandatory. | For more information: Email kulturaverse@gmail.com or info@kulturaverse.org. | Phone: +44-7790673877

REGISTER HERE

Readers Without Borders

The Southasia Peace Action Network and Readers Without Border invite you to an interactive literary session with physician, scientist and author, Dr. Azra Raza to discuss her book, ‘In the First Cell’.

Date: Saturday, 18 July 2026 | Time: 10:30 am EST (US and Canada) | Zoom Meeting ID: 432 852 3698

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By Rohinee Singh /Sapan News

NEW DELHI: In 2001, during peace time, for two full days, a Pakistani journalist wandered the bustling lanes of Delhi, searching for Shradhanand Marg.

Locals shrugged, rickshaw drivers feigned ignorance. Even seasoned city dwellers drew a blank.

Then, in a whisper, the journalist quietly confessed to a passerby what he was really looking for - a red-light area. Guidebooks listed Shradhanand Marg as one.

“Arrey haan (Oh, yes!), GB Road,” someone replied instantly.

Within minutes, a cycle-rickshaw was taking him toward Ajmeri Gate and even guided him to the brothels. The journalist realised that people didn’t know that the name of GB Road had been changed to Swami Shradhanand Marg.

The state had changed the signboards in 1966, but not the memory.

A similar story unfolded in Lahore in 2005, when an Indian visitor landed in the city with a singular goal: To eat at the famous Butt Karahi restaurant. A friend in Islamabad had told him to head to Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Chowk, where the eatery was located.

The search proved hopeless.

Taxi drivers were confused, pedestrians shook their heads, and auto-rickshaw drivers had never heard of the place.

Finally, the visitor called his friend again. “Just ask for Laxmi Chowk,” came the response.

The taxi driver burst into laughter. “Aisa hi bolo na (Then say it like this),” he said in characteristic Lahori style. “Yeh Zafar Ali Khan Chowk kahan se aa gaya Lahore mein?” (Since when did Lahore get a Zafar Ali Khan Chowk?)

Minutes later, the traveller was seated before a steaming karahi.

The identities of both the Pakistani and the Indian are being withheld for security purposes.

Politics of naming

Official records may describe the intersection as Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Chowk in 2019 but in the collective consciousness of Lahore, it remains Laxmi Chowk.

These stories reveal a simple truth: Governments can rename places, but they cannot easily rename memory.

Across the world, states have long used maps, monuments, and place names as instruments of power. Roads, cities, railway stations, airports, and public buildings become political canvases onto which ruling governments project their preferred versions of history.

Renaming is one of the least expensive political exercises available to governments. A few notifications, new signboards, updated records -- and an ideological message is sent.

“Renaming is a low-cost exercise but sends a clear signal of ideological positioning,” Professor Ajay Jhulka of Ashoka University told Sapan News.”It honours the part of history that suits the politics of the time.”

India offers numerous examples.

After 2014, Aurangzeb Road became Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Road. Mughalsarai Junction became Pandit Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Junction and Rajpath became Kartavya Path. The Hall of Nations at Pragati Maidan, an architectural symbol of post-independence India, was demolished in 2017 and eventually replaced by Bharat Mandapam, inaugurated ahead of the G20 summit in 2023.

Bangladesh underwent a similar exercise after independence in 1971. Jinnah Avenue in Dhaka became Bangabandhu Avenue. Ayub Gate was renamed Asad Gate.

Pakistan also experienced a sweeping renaming drive during the 1970s and 1980s.

“It was during the eras of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and General Zia-ul-Haq that Pakistan witnessed a major ‘Islamisation’ of public space,” Lahore-based oral historian Faizal Naqvi told Sapan News over the phone.

“Names associated with Hindus and Sikhs were replaced. People who had lived through Partition often welcomed these changes. But today there is a growing feeling that Pakistan should reclaim its history rather than erase it.”

Heritage versus ideology

For Delhi-based heritage conservationist Sohail Hashmi, the phenomenon is universal.

“Renaming places is political positioning,” he said while speaking to Sapan News in New Delhi. “It is often presented as correcting historical wrongs or overthrowing an oppressive past.”

Russia discarded names associated with the Tsars. Post-colonial nations removed symbols of empire. India replaced numerous colonial-era names after independence.

But Hashmi argues that the logic often changes over time.

“What begins as historical correction frequently becomes ideological selection,” he says.

He points to Delhi’s Pragati Maidan, a convention centre that opened in 1972 as an example.

Built during Jawaharlal Nehru’s era and home to the Nehru Pavilion, an exhibition hall and museum inside the Pragati Maidan complex, it represented a particular vision of modern India. Its demolition in 2017 and replacement reflected not merely urban redevelopment but also a shift in symbolic priorities.

“In this cycle of naming and renaming,” Hashmi says, “people who made major contributions are often replaced by figures who are politically useful in the present.”

The pattern is visible across the region.

Names associated with medieval dynasties, Islamic rulers, colonial administrators, and pre-partition histories are increasingly being reconsidered. In their place emerge names drawn from mythology, nationalism, religion, or contemporary political icons.

The contest is not merely about geography. It is about which memories deserve permanence.

Defying the eraser

Ironically, while India continues to rename roads and institutions associated with its medieval and colonial past, Pakistan’s Punjab province has begun moving in the opposite direction.

The provincial cabinet met in May of this year and approved the Lahore Heritage Area Revival Project, aimed at restoring several older place names.

Lahore’s Babri Masjid Road is set to revert to Jain Mandir Road. Rahim Gali will once again become Ram Gali. Fatima Jinnah Road will recover its colonial-era identity as Queen’s Road.

For many Lahoris, these changes simply formalise what never disappeared.

Speaking to Sapan News from Lahore, author and journalist Ashraf Sharif recalls that after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India in 1992, a section of activists in Lahore demolished the city’s Jain Mandir and renamed the adjoining road.

“But within a few years the temple was restored,” he says. “People continued calling the road Jain Mandir Road anyway.”

The official name changed, but popular usage did not.

Professor Irshad Ahmed of Punjab University believes this resilience is deeply rooted in Lahore’s cultural character.

“People here never took renaming drives too seriously,” he told Sapan News on a call from Lahore. “The original names remained part of the local lexicon regardless of what appeared on official records.”

In Lahore, memory proved stronger than bureaucracy.

Parallel tracks

The divergence between India and Pakistan is striking.

In India, recent renaming exercises largely reflect a broader project of cultural and political redefinition. Islamic and colonial references are being replaced with names rooted in Hindu mythology, indigenous traditions, or figures associated with contemporary nationalist narratives.

Pakistan, meanwhile, appears to be rediscovering parts of its pre-partition inheritance.

Professor Jhulka sees this as part of a wider repositioning.

“Pakistan wants to be seen as reclaiming a larger Southasian identity,” he says.

“There is a growing confidence in acknowledging histories that existed before 1947 rather than viewing them as inconvenient reminders of another era.”

The shift, he argues, is also tied to Pakistan’s efforts to project itself differently on the international stage.

Sohail Hashmi interprets it more simply.

“It is a sign of maturity,” he says.

A nation, he argues, cannot selectively amputate parts of its past without impoverishing its future. Whether it is Mohenjo-Daro, Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Bhagat Singh, Buddhist heritage, Sikh history, or pre-partition urban culture, these inheritances remain part of Pakistan’s story.

The same principle applies elsewhere in Southasia.

History rarely conforms to contemporary political boundaries. It spills across borders, communities, and generations.

“It takes only two generations to forget what has been named and renamed,” Hashmi warns.

Yet the stories of GB Road and Laxmi Chowk suggest another possibility.

Governments may alter maps. They may replace signboards and rewrite official records. But ordinary people often carry a different archive, one preserved in memory, language, habit, and everyday conversation.

And sometimes, when you ask for directions, that archive quietly reveals itself.

End Credits

Rohinee Singh is an independent journalist and author based in New Delhi, with more than 18 years of experience across national and international media. She writes on politics, governance, and issues of regional and global relevance for leading domestic and international outlets, in both English and Urdu. She is also engaged in India-Pakistan Track II peace initiatives and reconciliation efforts.

This article was written and edited by humans. Click here for the Sapan News AI policy.

Note: The year 1996 initially mistyped in the story has been corrected to 1966. We regret the error.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

Commentary

By Ali Azad /Sapan News

After a 15-year hiatus, I recently rejoined social media and found myself hooked on short-form videos from strangers. I had come searching for my friends.

With each swipe, I revealed my history, culture, and interests. The algorithm served me music videos from the 80’s Pakistani band Vital Signs and sound bites from Fareed Zakaria, identifying my nostalgia for the past and my interest in the present.

It is in this context that I was served what I consider my first rage-bait video.

The one-minute clip featured a man — the academic Norman Finkelstein, I would later learn — speaking with calm certainty. He declared that Israeli society is a “lunatic society,” backing his claim with statistics: A poll showing that 47% of Israeli Jews support killing everybody in an enemy city when the IDF enters it, and another where 70% of Jewish respondents said there are no innocents in Gaza.

My gut clenched as I heard these statistics. How can Israelis be so cruel? Believing there were “no innocents” and “killing everybody” implied that they were fine with the murder of women, children, and even babies.

Core beliefs

I fact-checked the polls and read up on Finkelstein, hoping the polls he cited were fabrications.

One of my core beliefs is that humans are, by and large, inherently good but often misled. Figures like Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King held this as a central tenet.

Even if this tenet were not empirically true, I would still act as if it were. Believing in the goodness of others, we offer them more than just the benefit of the doubt; we give them a reason to be good. Distrust begets distrust. Hate begets hate.

But it turned out Finkelstein wasn’t making up the polls. Millions of Israelis hold, what I consider, deeply troubling beliefs. Growing up in Pakistan, I had encountered prejudicial views about Jews. Not all Muslims think this way, but some do. And I wondered if perhaps the prejudiced views were more right than I’d realized.

Ultimately, I looked for more context. I asked, how did Israelis come to hold these beliefs? Did they always think this way?

Here’s what I found: The polls were conducted after Hamas’s brutality on 7 Oct 2023 resurrecting the ghosts of the Holocaust and centuries of violent antisemitism, touching the deepest nerve of Jewish historical trauma. In addition, the Israelis are in their own media bubble; their screens were dominated by the faces of hostages and the funerals of their soldiers.

They saw very little of the starvation in Gaza because they are trapped in an echo chamber that relentlessly reinforces their own existential fears and prejudices. And, finally, the polls do not capture the nuanced, complex emotions of living, breathing humans. It reduces them to numbers and simple, unambiguous statements.

In this context, I concluded that Israelis are not a lunatic society. They’re regular humans going through something extraordinary.

Humanising ‘the other’

Now, imagine a young Muslim man seeing the same clip. He might never fact-check Finkelstein; he may just log it away as definitive proof validating everything his parents had told him about Jews. That they are not to be trusted because they once betrayed the Prophet, Muhammad, may peace be upon him. The tragic irony is that even if this individual fact-checked the claim — as I did — he would have found the data to be accurate. How can we stop someone like that from thinking Israelis are less than human?

One way is to look within and give others the same grace we give to ourselves.

Polling by the Pew Research Center shows staggering prejudices in the Muslim world. Take Pakistan, for example. As many as 75% believe draconian ‘blasphemy’ laws are necessary, 76% support the death penalty for leaving Islam, and a mere 7% accept the persecuted Ahmadi minority as fellow Muslims.

Muslims often bend over backward to explain such numbers away, contextualizing them as poverty, illiteracy, brainwashing by the state, and other factors.

Why not give Israelis the same grace?

The irony is that some of Israel’s supporters, while contextualizing Israeli society’s disturbing beliefs, do not extend that courtesy to Palestinians. They make the case that Finkelstein makes about Israel, but in reverse. Muslims, they suggest, are a lunatic society.

The American philosopher and public intellectual Sam Harris has greatly influenced me. I’ve used Waking Up, his meditation app, to establish my own daily meditation practice, and also to learn about Sufism, Stoicism, and Buddhism from the countless practitioners and teachers he’s featured.

So, it is disappointing to see Harris adopt a partisan stance similar to Finkelstein’s.Take one small example from a long post, in which Harris asks us to undertake a thought experiment that will, he claims, immediately make the moral calculus clear and lead us to side with Israel. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel, he writes, is that “If the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide.” And, he adds, this “happens to be true.”

By imagining disarmament in a contextless thought experiment, Harris gives Israelis the benefit of the doubt — that they put down their weapons — but doesn’t extend the same benefit to Palestinians.

Let’s contextualize his thought experience.

Imagine that the context of the thought experiment is that Israel dropped their weapons as part of a process in which the two sides had meaningful dialogue, built trust, and healed wounds.

Is Harris still certain that Palestinians — as a group — will commit genocide?

Just like he cannot guarantee that every single Israeli will drop their weapon in any realistic context of peace, there is no guarantee that every single Palestinian will abide by it. But there is no reason to think, in any realistic context that includes a real peace process, that one side would behave better than the other.

The ‘Comparison Trap’

In Finkelstein and Harris, we see a manifestation of what the American depolarization group Braver Angels calls the “Comparison Trap.” Democrats and Republicans hold up the most uncompromising, extreme fringe of the opposing side as the true representative of that entire population, while evaluating their own side strictly through the lens of its most peaceful, well-intentioned citizens.

This explanation applies not just to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict; it has historical resonance for the Southasian community.

In 1924, Hindu-Muslim polarization reached new heights in pre-Partition India. Author Ramachandra Guha, in his 2018 book, “Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914–1948” noted that Asaf Ali, a prominent Indian independence activist, and the first Indian Ambassador to the United States wrote to Gandhi deploring the “disgraceful outburst of distrust and passion which has engulfed” the people. He blamed partisan local language newspapers in which”...every street brawl is a communal fight, and every worthless delinquent who bears a Hindu or Muslim name is held up as a type of the civilization which each name is supposed to represent.” In other words, the Comparison Trap is an age-old phenomenon that’s rampant today. One hopes we — especially the public intellectuals — would know to avoid it.

Abiding by Sapan News’ Social Media Ethics Pledge, which I signed, and urge other writers to adopt, I give Finkelstein and Harris the benefit of the doubt. I assume good intent; that they believe they are doing good by speaking out the way they are. But I think they forget that speaking truth is a virtue that often competes with other virtues, such as teaching, persuasion, connection, and peace.

To quote a popular Pakistani journalist, Munir Attaullah, “The bitter pill of fact must dissolve in the sweet solvent of our beliefs if it is to be absorbed in our bloodstream of reality.”

Finkelstein and Harris may be speaking some hard truths, but they are, in my opinion, definitely not persuading or connecting with the “other” side. They are mostly fueling the partisan flames.

So, why am I back on social media? Because there is too much fear, anger, and hate on social media. And I want to fight back with empathy and love.

End Credits

Ali Azad is a Pakistani-origin writer living in the United States, writing under a pseudonym for security reasons. Find more of his work on Substack, Spotify, & Apple Podcasts, and follow his latest updates on Twitter and Bluesky.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

By Regina Johnson /Sapan News

A review of the recently released World Migration Report 2026 makes it clear that Southasia today is one of the most influential areas shaping global migration patterns.

The region is home to some of the world’s largest migrant populations, and sits at the crossroads of labour mobility, economic dependence on remittances, climate vulnerability, and displacement. Southasia is not only a source of migration but a region increasingly central to the future of global mobility, according to the report.

As of mid-2024, about 304 million people were living in a country different from the one where they were born, or about 3.7 percent of the world’s population, according to the migration report. Launched 5 May by the International Organization for Migration, it was released during the International Migration Review Forum in New York in early May.

“The aim of this report is to put migration into perspective,” IOM spokesperson Zoe Brennan said during a 5 May press briefing at the UN. Brennan went on to say that when people come into communities, those communities must be prepared to support them. “When migration is well managed, people feel that there is a sense of control, because everybody benefits when migration works well,” she added.

One of those benefits is financial. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka send millions of workers abroad each year, particularly to the Gulf states, Europe, Southeast Asia, and North America. The labour demand in construction, healthcare, domestic work, and hospitality drives most of this migration. Those workers also send billions back home, which helps sustain not just families but economies across the region. In fact, India continues to rank as the world’s largest recipient of remittances, while other Southasian countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan are not far behind, according to data provided in the report.

The report also sheds light on the vulnerability of many Southasian migrants, noting that limiting legal pathways increases risks for migrants, raises costs for states, and reduces the broader benefits migration can provide. Recruitment costs, exploitative labour practices, wage theft, and unsafe working conditions continue to affect migrant workers.

Women migrants working in domestic labour remain especially vulnerable to abuse and limited legal protection. Expanding safer and more regular migration opportunities, alongside stronger labour protections and fair recruitment systems, is essential to reducing exploitation, says the report.

Climate change is another major driver reshaping migration in Southasia. Bangladesh and Pakistan are experiencing growing levels of climate-related displacement, with millions forced to move internally following environmental disasters. In 2024, there were 45.8 million new internal displacements triggered by disasters, mostly by storms (25.2 million) and floods (19.1 million). But people also moved within their homeland for better jobs, improved living conditions and education. These displacements occurred across 163 countries and territories, according to the report.

Recognizing that the key challenges to addressing this problem are limited funding and political support, experts suggest strengthening city and local government leadership in areas like planned relocation. They also call for improving regional and international cooperation to manage displacement and mobility more effectively and ensure that people in the affected areas participate in decision-making processes.

Jonathan Prentice, Head of Secretariat, United Nations Network on Migration at IOM stressed in the press briefing that most migration is not a crisis and happens through “legitimate, safe pathways” but problems start when people feel like they must move and “enter irregular situations” like entering a country on a valid visa and overstaying. That “fuels public concern and anti-migration sentiment” he noted.

Prentice argued that governments should strengthen and improve legal labour and cooperate more effectively to combat trafficking and smuggling networks that heighten migrant’s ricks.

Conflict and political instability also continue to shape migration dynamics in the region. Afghanistan remains one of the world’s largest displacement crises, with millions of Afghans living as refugees or migrants across neighbouring countries like Tajikistan and as far away as Virginia in the U.S. The Afghanistan-to-Iran corridor has seen over 3.7 million migrants on the move over the last four decades according to the Washington, D.C. based non-profit Migration Policy Institute.

The World Migration Report highlights the strain that long-term displacement places on both migrants and host countries, particularly in regions already facing economic and political problems. By the end of 2024, global displacement surpassed 120 million people, including a record 83 million internally displaced persons.

Alongside international migration, internal migration within Southasian countries is growing. Urbanization, industrial growth, and environmental pressures are driving millions from rural communities into expanding cities. This movement is reshaping labour markets, housing systems, infrastructure demands, and social services across the region.

The World Migration Report 2026 portrays Southasia as both deeply dependent on migration and transformed by it. Migration continues to generate economic opportunities, but it also exposes widening inequalities and vulnerabilities.

Southasia’s future will depend heavily on whether governments can create safer migration systems, strengthen worker protections, and prepare for the growing pressures of climate and displacement in the decades ahead.

End credits

Regina Johnson is coordinating editor, Sapan News. She has extensively reported on America’s energy policy at S&P Global. A versatile journalist specializing in feature writing across multiple beats, her articles have appeared in LATINA Style, Advisors Magazine, Thrive Magazine and Cargo Facts Magazine. Email: regina@sapannews.com

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

Spanning Southasia’s diverse culture and histories, the stories we recently shared explored various forces shaping society today, from cultural exchange and intellectual discourse to post-war reconciliation and political upheaval. And we are so excited to have participated in the Institute of Nonprofit News’ annual conference, INN Days, held in Pittsburgh this year. We are proud and privileged to be a member of this wonderfully supportive journalistic community which supports some 500 nonprofit, independent newsrooms around the U.S.A., including Sapan News.

Conversations on identity and the future

Retired Pakistan Air Force officer Pervez Akhtar Khan, who wrote ‘Salute Across the Skies’ in tribute to a fallen Indian Air Force officer last November, shares his vision of identity and a homeland at peace with its neighbours. The dream: A Southasia defined by cooperation, prosperity and shared opportunities. Read: Many rivers, one dream: Reflections of a wanderer.

Lahore based journalist R. Umaima Ahmed on how Literary festivals inject oxygen into Pakistan’s constrained intellectual spaces . These vibrant events, she writes, call attention to scarce publishing avenues, and the increasing demand for diverse, locally produced voices.

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Turning points

Colombo-based journalist Kamanthi Wickramasinghe, Deputy Features Editor, Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka, revisits the Sri Lankan military’s rehabilitation programme for former militants which ended five years ago. The main objective, as Maj. Gen. (rtd.) Dharshana Hettiarachchi, former Commissioner General of Rehabilitation tells her, was to reintegrate them into society “rather than punish them for supporting the LTTE”. Read: What has a little-known post-war rehabilitation programme for former combatants in Sri Lanka accomplished?

In The assassination that changed India, Karachi-based educator Naazir Mahmood reviews the tumultuous events that led to Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and its aftermath, reflecting on the man, his politics and the impact of those tumultous times on India. Readers in India could not access this insightful analysis, first published in The News on Sunday, due to India and Pakistan’s ban on each other’s news websites. Re-publishing this piece with additional context led to our new section Media Mirror. More about that below.

Media Mirror

The ongoing media ban which prevents readers in India and Pakistan from accessing relevant writings from each other’s countries spurred Sapan News to start a new section where we republish selected articles, with permission. This is a public service initiative for articles that deserve to be seen and read across borders. Check out and endorse the Press Statement: Access is not a threat: A call to lift reciprocal news bans in India and Pakistan

• Knowledge knows no borders: The case for free academic exchange in Southasia Nandini Sundar on how no country in Southasia will be intellectually free unless there is free academic exchange across the subcontinent. Originally published as: Academic freedom in Southasia requires a regional canvas. Here’s why. The Wire, India.

• Reading the signs: For peace, democracy, human rights and justice in the region: Rita Manchanda on the cross-border civil society activism that counters India’s myopic and hubristic policy of isolating Pakistan which has emerged as an important player in the Trump administration’s global calculus, and in the diplomatic and collective security structure of the extended region. Originally published as: How Civil Society Reads India-Pakistan Signals Amid the West Asia War, The Wire, India.

• Weak labour protections fuel growing health crisis across India by Kanika Gupta. Experts say that recent labour code changes in India fail to adequately protect workers or deliver enforceable heat protections that could help them prevent developing chronic kidney disease. Originally published as: Labor’s kidney connection, Asia Democracy Chronicles.

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Sapan News

*Why do we write ‘Southasia’ as one word?

Because our histories are intertwined, our futures interlinked, and our struggles deeply connected.

Thank you for reading! Would you share our work and help us reach more people?

Commentary

By Pervez Akhtar Khan / Sapan News

As one grows older, identity becomes a curious thing.

When I was young, the answers seemed obvious. I knew who I was: A Pukhtun, a Muslim, a Pakistani, a fighter pilot. A son of a particular family, tribe, and place.

Age, however, has a habit of complicating certainties.

The more I travelled, read, and met people from different walks of life, the more I realised that identity is seldom a single stream. It is many rivers flowing into the same sea.

I am Pakistani by nationality, Muslim by faith, Pukhtun by culture, Yousufzai by ancestry, and Southasian by civilisation.

And perhaps, after a lifetime of wandering through skies, countries, books, and ideas, I have become something else as well: a traveller of questions.

Every worthwhile journey changes the traveller. Every unfamiliar book, every distant city, every unexpected friendship leaves its mark. The older I grow, the less interested I become in choosing between my inheritances.

Cultural inheritance

I claim Mohenjo-daro and Taxila.

I claim Rahman Baba and Bulleh Shah.

I claim Tagore and Iqbal.

I claim the music of Lata Mangeshkar and Mehdi Hassan.

I claim the shared cultural inheritance of Southasia in all its richness and contradictions.

History divided states.

It could not divide memory.

The food we eat, the stories we tell, the languages we speak, and the melodies that move us still carry echoes of a shared past.

Yet I do not see this shared inheritance as being in conflict with my faith or my nationality.

Islam did not erase my older identities. It became one of them.

Nor did Pakistan require me to reject the civilisation that preceded it.

On the contrary, a confident nation should be secure enough to embrace the full breadth of its inheritance.

Perhaps that is why, as the years pass, I find another identity rising quietly above all the others.

I am Pakistani.

Not merely by passport.

By conviction.

To me, the central idea behind Pakistan was never hostility towards another people. It was an attempt — however imperfect — to create a political order in which dignity, citizenship, and security would not depend solely upon numbers.

Whether we have succeeded is a matter for honest debate.

Like every nation, Pakistan remains a work in progress.

The creation of a state was never the destination.

It was just the beginning of a journey.

The destination was always a society governed by justice, protected by law, and respectful of the dignity of all its citizens.

Measured against that aspiration, we still have far to travel.

But then, so do many nations.

And so I find myself reflecting upon a final irony.

I share with my neighbours a civilisation stretching back thousands of years. We admire many of the same poets, laugh at many of the same stories, and inherit memories shaped by the same cultural landscape.

Yet we continue to confront one another across borders guarded by armies, missiles, and nuclear weapons.

As someone who spent much of his professional life studying conflict and strategy, I understand why nations seek security. The world is not always kind to the weak.

But age has also taught me something else.

Security is necessary.

It is not sufficient.

Sooner or later, every nation must answer a larger question:

What kind of future is all this security meant to protect?

The civilisation we inherited produced saints, scholars, poets, musicians, and dreamers. It produced ideas that travelled across continents and works of beauty that survived centuries.

Surely that inheritance deserves a future more imaginative than perpetual hostility.

Those who have studied war closely are often the least romantic about it.

They know that modern conflict rarely resembles the heroic myths nations tell themselves. They know that victory is usually more expensive than expected, and that loss is rarely confined to the battlefield.

And those who have contemplated a nuclear exchange know something even more sobering.

In such a conflict there would be no meaningful winners.

Only different degrees of tragedy.

I sometimes wonder what the great poets and sages of our civilisation would make of us.

Perhaps they would remind us that nations are necessary, but they are not ends in themselves.

They are instruments through which human beings seek security, dignity, justice, and the freedom to pursue their dreams.

That is why I remain unapologetically Pakistani.

Not because Pakistan is perfect.

Not because its journey is complete.

But because I still believe in the nobility of its original aspiration.

Pakistan was not the end of a dream.

It was the beginning of one.

And perhaps that is why I continue to wander.

From flying machines to philosophy.

From military strategy to novels.

From Khushal Khan Khattak to artificial intelligence.

From farm ponds to questions of civilisation and identity.

Somewhere along the way I acquired more questions than answers.

I no longer regard that as a problem.

At my age, certainty appears somewhat overrated.

Curiosity remains remarkably useful.

Looking back, I realise that the most interesting parts of my life were rarely planned.

They were wandered into.

Pakistan remains a work in progress.

So do I.

Yet despite all the noise of politics, the bitterness of history, and the anxieties of the present, I remain hopeful.

For all our divisions, the peoples of Southasia still laugh at many of the same jokes, weep at many of the same songs, and dream many of the same dreams for their children.

A parent in Lahore, Delhi, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Colombo, or Kabul does not wake up wishing for conflict.

They wish for opportunity.

For dignity.

For safety.

For a future a little better than the past.

Perhaps that simple truth is worth remembering.

Nations will continue to compete.

Governments will continue to disagree.

History will continue to cast its long shadow.

But none of these absolves us of the responsibility to imagine something better.

The purpose of strength is not war.

It is peace.

The purpose of prosperity is not wealth alone.

It is human flourishing.

And the purpose of patriotism is not to hate another country.

It is to build one’s own.

Not a bad state of affairs for an old wanderer.

Or, as a Sindbad Jahazi of ideas might put it:

The sea is still there.

And the sail still catches the wind.

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End Credits

Pervez Akhtar Khan is a writer who has served as an Air Commodore of the Pakistan Air Force, and former Defence Attache in Paris, France. He focuses on defence policy, strategy, and social issues, and has authored a book on Khushal Khan Khattak, the 17th-century Afghan Pashtun poet, chief, and warrior. His article ‘Salute across the skies’ in tribute to a fallen Indian Air Force pilot last year was widely read across borders. Email: pervezak52@gmail.com.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

By R. Umaima Ahmed / Sapan News

LAHORE: As heat waves pulverise the region, I think nostalgically back to the cooler months, marked by literary festivals across Pakistan.

Having long experienced terrorism, economic instability and political upheaval, this country has also made efforts to stay afloat by holding on to literature, critical thinking and social gatherings over tea in urban centres.

This year, some happiness and colour were sprinkled into Lahore’s literary festivals with the revival, after almost 20 years, of Basant Panchami, the centuries-old kite-flying festival celebrating spring.

Inspired by the Jaipur Lit Fest, Pakistan’s first literary festival took place in the country’s largest city Karachi, in 2010. Subsequently replicated in Lahore and Islamabad, such festivals now take place around the country, from the agricultural and industrial hub of Faisalabad, formerly Lyallpur, to the port city of Gwadar on the Balochistan coast.

There are even festivals for children in cities around the country.

The trend began in 2011 with the Children Literary Festival, co-founded by Baela Raza Jamil who heads the educational institute Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi (Institute for Learning and Awareness) and well known publisher Ameena Saiyid who started the Karachi Literature Festival and now runs the Adab (Culture) Festival. The children’s lit fest, now called the Pakistan Learning Festival, aims to provide a comprehensive experience beyond textbooks and tests, promoting the culture of reading, creativity, imagination, and multi-sensory stimulation.

Such events start cropping up around the country as the weather turns cooler, starting in late November and going into the end of February.

Anticipation

For me, the tradition feels like meeting up with old friends. I may be biased, but I believe that Lahore, an ancient hub of literature, architecture and culture with a multilayered history, has a vibe of its own, with its trendy contemporary architecture, food shops and retail stores, Mughal and colonial structures.

The major literary events in this city are the Lahore Literary Festival which began in 2013, Faiz Mela, since 2015, Afkar e Taza (New Thoughts) ThinkFest, since 2016, and the Asma Jahangir Conference, since 2018, commemorating a beloved human rights advocate, besides a host of other bethaks or social gatherings.

Authors, analysts, poets and Nobel Prize winners from around the globe join these events. Visas were easier earlier, as Pakistan attempted to create a soft image, having experienced the worst form of terrorism.

Pakistan’s literary festivals can’t be divorced from politics, Miranda Husain, a Lahore-based editor and journalist told Sapan News, noting the soft image Pakistan has been trying to promote, like the recent Islamabad talks between Iran and US amidst the ceasefire.

“Both the Lahore Literary Festival and the Faiz Festival were launched when the country was awash with billions of dollars of civilian aid and investment as part of the ‘democracy dividend,’” she said.

“Foreign panelists joining the sessions showed a soft image of Pakistan and proved the security situation was under control. The presence of foreign panelists, overwhelmingly from the West, has consolidated these as soft-face projects while signaling control over the security situation.”

Today, political tensions between India and Pakistan have drastically restricted cross-border exchanges.

Last year several Indian participants joined these festivals – before the Indo-Pak war of May 2025. Since then, both countries have obstinately denied visas to each other’s citizens.

Cross-border participation

‘ThinkFest On Campus’ is a unique strand initiated in 2024 which brings speakers to campus events around the country. One such event last February featured filmmaker Nandita Das from Mumbai at NCA, the National College of Arts in Lahore, in conversation with Pakistani filmmaker Sarmad Khoosat talking about the iconic writer Saadat Hasan Manto and his views on the Partition. They also shared their love for Manto the Faiz Festival a few days later.

In January 2025, Indian origin filmmaker Mira Nair recalled her connection with Lahore before a full hall at ThinkFest. A year later, her son Zohran Mamdani was elected as the mayor of New York City.

“Thank goodness she was here earlier, the event would have got overshadowed by Zohran otherwise,” as ThinkFest founder Dr. Yaqoob Bangash quipped in a chat with Sapan News.

Such cross-border discussions give some hope to ‘peacemongers’, who would like to see easy visa policies between Pakistan and India. This constituency got a boost some years back with the Aman ki Asha campaign jointly started by two leading media houses, The Jang Group of Pakistan, and The Times of India.

“The decline in international participation reflects broader bureaucratic and political constraints — including visa hurdles, security concerns, and occasionally the perception of ideological scrutiny,” commented journalist Raza Rumi, a distinguished lecturer at the City University of New York and editor of The Friday Times.

“When international authors, scholars, and journalists participate in these festivals, they bring global perspectives and create cross-border intellectual exchanges that enrich the local discourse,” he said in an email to Sapan News.

This year, all the festivals deeply felt the absence of Dr. Arfa Sayeda Zehra, revered historian and cultural critic, who passed away on 10 November 2025. She was an ardent believer of ‘Iqra’ - an Arabic word meaning ‘read’. She believed that the reading culture has not ended but shifted to a different medium that does not involve holding books physically or turning pages but scrolling on screens.

“Pakistan still sustains a reading culture, but it is far more fragmented than it once was,” believes Raza Rumi. “Traditional institutions that historically nurture literary engagement have weakened, while digital platforms and independent initiatives have gained more attraction by intellectuals. The appetite for ideas has not disappeared; it has simply migrated into different spaces.”

Another highlight of these festivals is the bookstalls offering books of every genre, ranging from the lowest to the highest prices. Booklovers crowding around gives a sense of hope that the reading culture still exists. But Pakistani publishers and authors are often heard sharing their struggles about getting their work published.

Many people may have a book under their belt, but writers rarely make real money, as Miranda Husain notes.

“Instead of relying on foreign-funded annual spectacles, why not invest in local writers and build a sustainable publishing industry? It would be a real legacy,” she suggests.

Temporary civic openings

These battles are not just about the cost involved but also freedom of expression. While Article 19 of Pakistan’s Constitution guarantees freedom of speech to all citizens, with certain restrictions, censorship leaves little space to produce new work.

Students of politics flock to these spaces to hear new perspectives and these events have proven over time that not all is lost, believes Rumi. He notes that such festivals play an important role in keeping intellectual conversation alive in the public sphere. They create moments where writers, scholars, artists, and readers can engage in debates on history, politics, literature, and identity.

The literary festivals also function as “temporary civic openings rather than permanent transformations. They cannot substitute for a robust publishing industry, academic freedom, or strong cultural institutions,” as Rumi says. “Their significance lies in sustaining dialogue and signaling that intellectual curiosity in Pakistan remains vibrant despite structural constraints.”

Freedom of expression ultimately depends less on visiting speakers and more on whether local writers, academics, and journalists feel able to speak freely, he added.

“International participation broadens the conversation and signals openness, but the real measure of intellectual freedom lies in the strength of domestic institutions and the willingness of local voices to engage critically with society’s challenges,” noted Rumi. “In that sense, literary festivals remain valuable platforms — but their long-term impact depends on whether they are complemented by stronger academic freedom, publishing ecosystems, and cultural institutions within the country.”

Lahore’s literary events largely take place at Alhamra Arts Council barely three kilometers from the historic Pak Tea House, once was the hub of literature frequented by famous poets and writers.

Pakistan’s festivals also celebrate these writers and poets. Saraiki, Sindhi and Punjabi poetry bethaks and mushairas – poetry recitals – are often concluding highlights of such events. This provides space for many voices that have been overlooked for decades.

Still, festivals held in Lahore, the heart of Punjab rarely feature Punjabi writers, poets, or intellectuals.

Peace activist Saeeda Diep believes that the absence of Punjabi at many literature festivals “reflects a deeper cultural imbalance”.

“Punjabi is the mother tongue of the majority of people in this region, yet it is often missing from spaces that claim to celebrate literature and culture,” she told Sapan News. “This is not accidental. It reflects a long-standing social hierarchy where elite circles have privileged English and, to some extent, Urdu, while regional languages are sidelined.”

Despite their limitations, Pakistan’s literary events are a respite for many, giving people something to look forward to.

Until the next season of festivals commences, their charm lingers like a flavour to be savoured.

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End Credits

R. Umaima Ahmed is a freelance journalist in Lahore with over ten years of experience focusing on minorities, survivors of terrorism, digital literacy, and animal rights in Pakistan.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

See article on our website!

By Kamanthi Wickramasinghe / Sapan News

She was 16-years old when she joined the militant Tamil Tigers group in January 2009, just months before the brutal 30-year war ended that they were fighting against the Sri Lankan state.

Now married, with two children, Kopiga (not her real name) works with the police department in her hometown Oddusudan, in Mullaitivu District bordered by the Jaffna and Kilinochchi districts in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka. Many of her seniors are officers of the island-nation’s majority Sinhalese community, who she had been conditioned to see as the enemy.

The change in Kopiga’s outlook and circumstances came about after she was injured during the final days of the war. The victorious Sri Lankan Army placed her, along with others, in a mandatory, year-long rehabilitation programme for Tamil Tiger cadres, titled Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration, a curriculum providing education, vocational training and psychological support.

Kopiga was sent to the Air Force Camp in Ratmalana, a suburb in Colombo District where she learned first aid and studied for the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level examination – the senior secondary completion and university entrance exam in Sri Lanka.

She left the programme after completing it in 2010. She credits the rehabilitation programme with helping her change her attitude towards civilians and enabling her to find a decent job, she told Sapan News over a recent phone call.

“We couldn’t study or stay with our parents during the war because we continued to be displaced and the environment was not favourable to engage in studies. We lost many things in life due to the war,” she said.

We spoke in Sinhala, the language of the majority community, and one of its official national languages. There are two national languages in Sri Lanka, the other being Tamil while English is widely spoken as a link language.

“We do not want any more tensions in this country,” she said.

Seeing society differently

The rehabilitation programme also inducted Tamil civilians who were arrested for allegedly assisting the LTTE. They included Thayaparan, 52, who worked as a medical volunteer at the Kilinochchi Hospital, a government hospital in Kilinochchi, a town in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka.

He has also volunteered in government-run camps for internally displaced persons such as Menik Farm in the Vavuniya District in the Northern Province. These camps served as a shelter for thousands of civilians who fled the final stages of the war in 2009. The camp officially closed in September 2012 after all its residents returned home.

Arrested by the Terrorism Investigation Division of the Sri Lanka Police in 2009 Thayaparan had been incarcerated in various prisons – Boossa, Anuradhapura and Welikada – prior to being placed in the rehabilitation programme in 2016.

He told Sapan News over the phone that the counseling programme and various courses including aluminum fitting and IT allowed him to see society differently.

He completed the programme in 2017. At home, he had to look after his daughter who was two-and-a-half years old when she had sustained a head injury as the family fled from one place to another during the final phase of the war. The child ended up in a comatose stage and is still unable to move or speak and needs continuous care and treatment.

Like their fellow combatants, Kopiga and Thayaparan had been conditioned to see the Sri Lankan Army as the enemy.

But “the colonels and other high-ranking officers treated us with respect and dignity,” Thayaparan told Sapan News. “Both sides suffered during the war and I feel there shouldn’t be conflicts in this world, because it is the people who suffer in the end.”

As many as 12,000 LTTE cadres who surrendered and consented were placed in the programme, through Protective Accommodation and Rehabilitation Centers, 24 of which were established islandwide at the initial stages. There were separate ones for children, females and males.

“What is quite unique about the rehabilitation programme is that the Sri Lankan armed forces militarily defeated the LTTE, and the same security forces took the initiative to rehabilitate them,” Major General (Retired) Dharshana Hettiarachchi, former Commissioner General of Rehabilitation told Sapan News in Colombo.

The main objective, he said, was to reintegrate these individuals into society rather than punishing them for supporting the LTTE.

He added that a majority had no idea about the civic culture as they had joined the militant group as children.

“They hadn’t had any interactions with civilians. All that they knew was to hold a gun and fight with the enemy,” he recalled.

They were brainwashed and thought that armed forces personnel were “very wicked,” said Hettiarachchi. Many had been conditioned to take their own lives if captured.

The rehabilitation programmes concluded in 2021.

Complex task

What is unique about this programme is that “they fought with us for 30 long years” but today, 17 years since the war ended “none of the rehabilitees have opted for militancy again,” added Hettiarachchi.

The war took place between militants from the minority Tamil community (approximately 15-19% of the Sri Lankan population) and the state of Sri Lanka which has an overwhelming majority Sinhalese population. This led to an ethnic rift as both sides perpetuated atrocities during the conflict.

The post-war reconciliation process in the aftermath of the conflict has been a complex task. It entails rebuilding national unity and bringing about transitional justice mechanisms. These mechanisms included setting up the Office on National Unity and Reconciliation operating under the Justice Ministry to promote national unity, lasting peace and harmonious coexistence among all ethnic groups and the Office on Missing Persons.

While there were heavy civilian casualties during the final stages of the war, many individuals also went missing. Families of the disappeared have been staging protests over the years, demanding that the state find their loved ones.

Some state mechanisms failed due to administrative challenges and lack of funds allocated from the national budget. Meanwhile, the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime, which was defeated in 2015 when the ‘Good Governance’ regime led by President Maithripala Sirisena assumed power, focused more on infrastructure development with projects such as ‘Uthuru Wasanthaya’ (Northern Spring) in 2009 and ‘Nagenahira Navodaya’ (Reawakening of the East) in 2007 which included mass resettlement programmes in the Northern and Eastern parts of the country for families displaced during the conflict.

That was when the armed forces began the rehabilitation programme to reintegrate individuals like Kopiga and Thayaparan into society.

Counseling and therapy was a major aspect of the rehabilitation programme. Additionally, participants had the option to join around 15 different vocational training programmes.

Many of them obtained the National Vocational Qualification, - a practical, work-based certification focused on advanced technical skills.

“They were encouraged to join sports. Females could train as hairdressers and take beauty culture courses,” said Hettiarachchi.

“We even organized beauty pageants. We were so kind to them and that was something they never expected. By the end of the programme they were speaking Sinhala and everybody became one family,” Hettiarachchi added.

The programme included cricket matches and trips to the South to enable the former militants to mingle with different ethnic communities.

The organizers also held public workshops to prevent discrimination once the rehabilitees returned to society. Communities were encouraged to accept them as they were still vulnerable.

By 2013, many of them had been rehabilitated and rejoined society in the North and East. According to the Bureau of Rehabilitation, a total of 12,196 LTTE rehabilitees have completed the rehabilitation process and were reintegrated to society. Today the focus of rehabilitation programmes have shifted to rehabilitating drug addicts.

What about the soldiers?

It was not only the LTTE cadres that were at the receiving end of conflict and trauma. Having battled in the frontlines, the soldiers of the Sri Lankan army were also exposed to violence and bloodshed. Many developed undiagnosed chronic combat-stress reactions.

“Like the LTTE cadres, soldiers should also have undergone some kind of counseling and sensitization programme,” said Hettiarachchi.

There was no rehabilitation programme for soldiers, partly due to funding constraints, lack of civilian infrastructure, untreated combat trauma and the state’s continued reliance on the military for governance and logistics.

“The service period in the armed forces is 22 years and there are some soldiers who have served for 21 years. They were in the jungles and would go home once every two or three months and return in five or six days. So, one could imagine their mindset,” added Hettiarachchi.

However, they did have some community support as they would go home to their own villages. Unlike India, Pakistan or Bangladesh, Sri Lanka has no major army cantonments, except for one in Panagoda town, around 20 kilometers from Colombo.

Army soldiers played a crucial role in post-war reconstruction efforts by clearing debris, repairing destroyed infrastructure. But due to lack of formal education many were underemployed and had to rely on odd jobs like farming or manual labor to support their families.

Reintegration for Tamil rehabilitees was a particular challenge in the Sri Lankan context as many didn’t have peaceful memories from their childhood. Some villages they came from were destroyed by the end of the conflict. Their loved ones had either died during the war or were missing. Women were reluctant to return to their communities due to the stigma associated with working for the LTTE or Tamil Tigers.

“One of the challenges faced by the rehabilitees upon being reintegrated into society was that they couldn’t find proper employment,” said Hettiarachchi. “With the vocational training they received, they were able to start self-employment projects such as brick-making, poultry and so on.”

Well-known Colombo-based rights activist Dr. Dayani Panagoda, former Director (Policy) at the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process, believes that the reintegration efforts have been 70% effective.

Certain gaps were identified, she said, like some rehabilitees returning to the same Tamil community in the North and East. “Women were released before men and were discriminated against.”

“Some women had no support, and ended up becoming sex workers. In certain areas, rehabilitated individuals were given financial support to start their own businesses. But instead, they bought bicycles and motorbikes and were racing around the villages. Such behaviors traumatized people in these villages,” she told Sapan News.

Subsequently, mechanisms were put in place, like the Office for National Unity and Reconciliation and Office on Missing Persons which were established in 2015 and 2018 respectively, which allowed civilians to provide testimonies.

“But many feared coming to these offices because they thought the military were watching them,” said Dr. Panagoda. “The process could have been more open and transparent, she noted, adding that the East was “somewhat left out in these processes.”

Since 2015 there has been no proper monitoring of the rehabilitees, said Dr. Panagoda. There should have been follow-ups to assess their lives over the past 10-15 years to determine the effectiveness of these programmes.

Like Kopiga and Thayaparan, many Tamil civilians benefitted from the rehabilitation programmes — which also benefitted Sri Lanka as a whole. Ethnic tensions still simmer, but whether the programme will be revived or remain a one-off process is a question that lingers.

End Credits

Kamanthi Wickramasinghe is a Colombo-based journalist and Deputy Features Editor at the Daily Mirror, Sri Lanka, where she has worked for 12 years. She writes on a range of topics including environmental conservation, gender equality, and social justice.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

Why ‘Southasia’ as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

By Naazir Mahmood / Sapan News

In May 2026, India marks the 35th death anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi. For many in India, his assassination belongs to a national archive of grief. For me, it is also lodged in a small domestic memory in Malir, Karachi.

I was asleep at home when a family member woke me up and said that my colleague and friend Nazeer Leghari, then magazine editor of the Urdu daily Jang, wanted to speak to me urgently. There were no mobile phones. The landline was in another room. Such calls carried a certain weight even before one picked up the receiver. When I did, Leghari’s voice carried the shock of history. Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had been assassinated. For a moment, I could not absorb it.

The horror of the 1984 assassination of his mother, then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, came flooding back. The killing, the subsequent anti-Sikh violence and the sense that India, so proud of its constitutional stability, was also a land where politics could suddenly turn murderous.

Leghari asked me to write a detailed article for a full-page coverage being published the next day. I wrote through the night. I still believe that my piece on Rajiv Gandhi, which appeared the following day in Jang was perhaps the best coverage in any Pakistani newspaper of that assassination.

India in transition

The India of 1991 was a country in distress. The economy was near collapse. Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to a level that threatened national humiliation. Gold had to be pledged. The Soviet Union, long a pillar in India’s global imagination, was disintegrating. The old world of state planning, non-alignment, and Congress dominance was cracking. The independence activist, lawyer P. V. Narasimha Rao would soon become prime minister and then finance minister Manmohan Singh would begin the reforms that opened the economy. Those reforms later acquired a heroic glow, but at the time they were born from crisis, not triumph.

Rajiv Gandhi belonged to the old order and also tried to transcend it. He was young, urbane and technologically minded. He spoke of computers, modernisation and taking India into the 21st century. To many middle-class Indians, he seemed to represent efficiency after the tired rhetoric of old Congress politics.

Yet his years in power had also weakened the moral authority of Congress. In 1986, the government passed the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act that effectively reversed the 1985 Supreme Court decision in the Shah Bano case that had established alimony rights for Muslim women. The change suggested capitulation before conservative religious pressure. Also the unlocking of the Babri Masjid religious site in 1986 gave Hindu majoritarian politics an opening. The Bofors scandal about alleged kickbacks from an arms manufacturer damaged Gandhi’s reputation for clean government. His intervention in Sri Lanka ended in blood and bitterness.

In a cruel irony, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam anger over that intervention returned to kill him in 1991.

To understand the rise of these majoritarian politics, one must place Rajiv Gandhi’s death beside three other eruptions: Mandal Commission, Ram Mandir and the market.

The Mandal Commission came first as social justice and social shock. Then Prime Minister V. P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1990 brought reservations for Other Backward Classes into the centre of national politics. For historically disadvantaged communities, this was overdue recognition. For many upper-caste groups, it felt like dispossession. Indian democracy was forced to confront caste not as a village leftover but as the central grammar of power.

The Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, faced a problem. If politics became principally a contest over caste justice, its upper-caste and urban trading base would be exposed. Its answer was Mandir, Hindu temple.

BJP’s then President BJP L. K. Advani’s Rath Yatra, the ‘pilgrimage’ he led in 1990 to construct Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, converted a temple campaign into a national political spectacle. It offered a larger Hindu identity to counter the fragmenting force of caste politics. The message was simple and potent: Hindus might be divided by caste, but they could be united by grievance. Ayodhya became less a place than a weapon of mass mobilisation. That memory returns now because Rajiv Gandhi’s death was not only the end of one life. It was one of the events that helped close one age of Indian politics and open another.

The BJP did not rise because Rajiv Gandhi died. That would be too simple. But his assassination removed the last Congress leader who still carried a national emotional inheritance from the Nehru-Gandhi line. It deepened the uncertainty of the early 1990s. It accelerated the erosion of the Congress system. It helped create the political vacuum into which the BJP, already mobilised by Ram Mandir, stepped up with growing confidence. His assassination in May 1991 changed the election that was already underway.

The Congress gained sympathy but not revival. In the 1991 Lok Sabha election, it won 244 seats, enough for Rao to form a minority government. The BJP won 120 seats, a remarkable leap that showed how far it had travelled from the margins.

The state elections told the same story in sharper form. Uttar Pradesh was the central battlefield because Ayodhya lay there and because the state sent the largest number of MPs to parliament. In the 1991 assembly election, the BJP won 221 of 425 seats and Kalyan Singh became chief minister. This victory gave the temple movement a government in India’s most politically important state.

After the demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque in December 1992, BJP governments in several states were dismissed by the central government, led by then Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao. In the 1993 Uttar Pradesh election, the BJP remained the largest party with 177 seats, but Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party and Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party kept it out of office through a caste-based alliance.

That result showed both the strength and the limit of Hindutva. It could mobilise a vast Hindu vote, but it could still be checked by Mandal politics. Elsewhere too, the BJP’s rise was uneven but unmistakable. In Madhya Pradesh, Sunder Lal Patwa had led the BJP to power in 1990, but the party lost to the Congress in 1993 after the Babri backlash, the violence following the Babri mosque demolition and Congress leader Digvijaya Singh became chief minister.

In Rajasthan, the BJP swept state elections in Rajasthan, Delhi, and Gujarat between 1993 and 1995.

These state-level advances mattered because they gave the BJP administrative experience, local networks, and a wider cadre base. It was no longer merely a party of protest. It was becoming a party of the government.

The Left parties, by contrast, remained important but regionally confined.

The Left thus held ground in West Bengal, regained Tripura and remained competitive in Kerala, but it could not convert Mandal Commission, market anxiety or anti-communal sentiment into a wider national surge.

Its tragedy in the early 1990s was that it understood both class and communalism better than most parties, yet the political energy of the decade moved elsewhere: Towards caste-based regional parties on one side and the BJP’s Hindu consolidation on the other. When I remember that night in Malir, I remember not only the shock of a killing.

I remember the feeling that the Southasian region had entered another dark passage. In 1991, we could not yet see the full shape of what was coming: Babri, Bombay, coalition politics, liberalisation, nuclear nationalism, Gujarat and then Modi. But the foundations were being laid down.

The BJP rose from the ashes of the early 1990s because those ashes were everywhere: In a broken economic model, a shaken Congress, a wounded secularism, a caste revolution, a religious mobilisation and an assassinated leader whose absence left India more vulnerable to forces already waiting at the door.

End credits

Naazir Mahmood is dean of the faculty of liberal arts at a private university in Karachi. He posts on X @NaazirMahmood and can be reached at: mnazir1964@yahoo.co.uk. An earlier version of this piece was first published in The News on Sunday

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit https://www.sapannews.com.

Why 'Southasia' as one word?
Because our histories entangle, our struggles intersect, and our futures are bound together. It is not just a spelling choice, it’s a political and poetic one.

All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

Sapan News syndicated stories shared over the past fortnight focus on voices often overlooked in public discourse, from migrant workers and women’s rights advocates to communities affected by international conflict. Together, these articles explore how power, representation and civic participation can shape lives.

Labour rights

In Beyond remittances: A rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers, sociologist Nida Kirmani, who teaches at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, offers an in-depth review of Shankar Ramaswami’s ‘Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of Migrant Workers in Contemporary India’ (University of Pennsylvania Press 2025). A rich, multi-layered book that provides a window into workers’ lives in India, including some hopeful strands within the destructive churnings of global capitalism.

Gender rights

Police heavy-handedness, delayed permissions, and restrictive conditions cast a shadow over an annual women’s rights demonstration in Karachi this year. But women’s involvement and spaces of resistance will keep growing, say analysts. “Nobody can stop it,” says well known town planner Arif Hasan, quoted by Sapan News intern Abdullah Zahid in RIGHTS-PAKISTAN: Demands for gender justice merge with the right to protest.

International engagement

Sri Lankan human rights activist Pavithra Perera WJA writes about the roundtable discussion she attended in Amsterdam, European Palestinian-Israeli Trilateral Dialogue Initiative (EPICON), where peace activists, policymakers, journalists and international law experts from these regions brainstormed on what a meaningful European engagement and political solution to the ongoing crisis might look like. Read: In From Brussels to Southasia: Who shapes the future of Israel–Palestine?

In other Sapan News

Resolution on Labour Rights, Dignity, and Justice passed to mark Labour History Month

Trade union leaders, researchers, and civil society voices from across Southasia passed a Resolution last Sunday, 31 May, at the end of an online seminar organised by our sister organization Southasia Peace Action Network, Sapan.

Watch the discussion here:

Namrata Sharma, award-winning journalist, activist, and Sapan founding member in Nepal hosted the event. Executive Director of Women’s Development Innovators, Nalini Rathnarajah from Sri Lanka moderated the discussion with panelists: Syed Sultan Uddin Ahmmed, Executive Director of the Bangladesh Institute of Labour Studies, Rakhi Sehgal, veteran trade union organizer in India, feminist leader Chamila Thushari in Sri Lanka, labour leader Farooq Tariq in Pakistan and Sita Lama, Vice President of the General Federation of Nepalese Trade Unions.

Sapan Bookshelf

A call for compassion and a nuanced look at history

An online book talk with Boston-based writer Shilpi Suneja discussing her debut novel, House of Caravans (Milkweed 2025) with Ambereen Raza, founder of the virtual book club Readers Without Borders and Sapan co-founder and curator Beena Sarwar, Saturday 30 May highlighted the importance of compassion and nuance even when researching history. The book explores Partition’s enduring impact on families, memory, and identity through literature, history, and dialogue across generations.

Upcoming events

PUNE, 04 June: ‘Re-emergence of Democratic Socialism in Urban America – the Maani Phenomenon’, talk by Lahore-born retired scientist Dr. Vinod Mubayi at the Shankar Brahme library. New York-based Dr. Mubayi is a staunch peacemonger and Sapan supporter and advisor.

STOCKHOLM, 03-04 July: Mela Nordic — Southasian art, culture and human rights

Scandinavia, here we come! Sapan will collaborate with Mela Nordic on the second edition of their upcoming Aman Festival. Several members of the Sapan network are expected to attend this unique diaspora event. Stay tuned!

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Regina Johnson
Sapan News

Sapan Bookshelf
Souls in the Kalyug: The Politics and Cosmologies of
Migrant Workers in Contemporary India
By Shankar Ramaswami
University of Pennsylvania Press 2025
Pp. 304; Price: USD 64.96 (Hardcover); USD 64.96 (Kindle)

I first met Shankar Ramaswami more than two decades ago when we were both conducting our Ph.D. fieldwork in the interstices of South Delhi. While my fieldwork in the Muslim locality of Zakir Nagar was completed in a year, Shankar’s fieldwork, just a few miles away in the Okhla Industrial Estate, carried on for several years (2002-2006), a considerable length of time even for an ethnographic study.

The depth of this research is apparent in his recently published book, Souls in the Kalyug, which meticulously documents the multi-layered struggles of men employed in a metal-polishing factory, which supplied home décor and artware largely for the American market.

This ethnography captures the everyday struggles of migrant male workers largely from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkand, and Uttarkhand who like millions of others, moved to Delhi as a result of agrarian displacement in search of a better life for themselves and their families back in their villages.

Unique view

The book provides a unique, in-depth view of the lives of these men who occupy the bottom-most rungs of global capitalism. An economic system that has pushed them to the city by decimating their opportunities for decent livelihoods in their villages, and which continues to exploit their labour while also gradually decimating their bodies.

However, Ramaswami takes great care not to present his interlocutors as hapless victims. Rather, he draws attention to the various ways these men are both entangled in and resist their ongoing exploitation as they try to make cosmic sense of their lives.

Each chapter draws the reader into a different layer of these men’s lives. Beginning with the factory itself, to the networks of labour organizing that connect their factory to the wider city and the globe, to the cramped rooms they occupy with other workers, The reader moves with these workers as they navigate through these complex webs of power in search of secure livelihoods. These navigations come with considerable costs particularly to their health, as their bodies are gradually hollowed out by the grueling conditions of the factory.

The first two chapters immerse the reader into the dark, hazy world of the B156 factory where workers must contend with the ‘forces of life and death’ amidst the dust, grime, and sweat that permeate the factory floor. Ramaswami paints a gloomy picture of factory life, describing how these men alternate between day and night shifts as their bodies are constantly squeezed by increasing expectations of productivity from the management.

Ramaswami shows the workers not solely as victims of exploitation, but as thoughtful actors who alternate between speeding up and slowing down the pace of their work. This is reminiscent of the foot dragging described by anthropologist James Scott in his discussion of ‘everyday forms of resistance’ and who struggle to maintain a public image of respectability despite the ‘dirty’ nature of their jobs.

One of the richest and most thought-provoking chapters in the book, sheds light on the role of humour (mazak) in making factory life bearable for his interlocutors. As with the case with most male humour, much of this mazak too was sexual and degrading in nature while other jokes centred on ethnic/religious stereotypes of Biharis and Muslims in particular. Ramaswami describes the role of humour as a lubricating force that helped the workers resist becoming lifeless cogs in the machine of production.

Collective resistance

Ramaswami’s book also focuses on noncooperation and collective resistance through unionization. Chapter 3, “Collectivity” documents how workers’ frustrations about their low wages and grueling working conditions gradually coalesced into unified action. Through Ramaswami’s thick description of workers’ shift from compliance to auto-regulation and finally outright refusal and resistance, this chapter provides rich insights into the micro-politics of protest.

Chapter 4, “Warp and Weft,” continues the discussion of resistance as work in the factory was disrupted due to the company’s legal disputes, and workers were forced to once again shift strategies to preserve their livelihoods. This chapter describes the expansion of protests beyond the factory itself. Workers took to the streets with placards in a demonstration of non-violent resistance along with forging alliances with labor rights activists in the U.S. where the corporation itself was based.

It provides an intimate portrait of the lives of two workers as they move between their neighbourhoods in Delhi and their villages in Jharkhand. Ramaswami draws an analogy between the workers’ movements within the city and between the city and the village to the warp and weft of the handloom. As workers struggle to weave together their social lives and preserve the health of their kin and themselves from the disintegrating forces of capitalism.

While the overall picture is depressing, Ramaswami also describes hopeful strands within the social fabric of workers’ lives such as the mutual support and bhaichara (fellowship) between men across ethnic, religious and caste boundaries—that become more fluid within the city. The inter-religious and inter-caste ties forged between workers can be seen as small glimmers of hope in the context of the rising tide of Hindutva politics over the past decades.

The concluding chapter delves more deeply into the cosmic understandings of Ramaswami’s interlocutors. The concept of the Kalyug (or Qayamat for the Muslims) — the end-times in which souls were caught in a self-destructive battle characterized by violence, oppression and injustice — is a thread running through the entire book.

Cosmic interplay

Ramaswami carefully unpacks this concept with regards to the workers’ self-understandings of truth, justice, and agency amidst the forces of disintegration that constantly threaten to envelop them in their folds. This discussion of the cosmic interplay of spirituality and politics within workers’ self-understandings is one of the most valuable contributions offered by the book.

Despite the incredible richness in detail provided by Ramaswami’s account, I did feel that the book missed some opportunities particularly with regards to the discussion of gender and sexuality. While the author certainly highlights the role that patriarchy plays in structuring workers’ lives and their relationships with their wives, more could be said about the pressure exerted by the ‘breadwinner model’ on working class men and the role this plays in self-destructive patterns such as the abuse of alcohol.

Similarly, while the chapter on mazak vividly describes the central role of sexuality in workers’ social interactions, the analysis of the role of gender and sexuality in the formation of working-class masculinities could have been deeper.

Overall, Souls in the Kalyug is a rich, multi-layered text, which provides a rare insight into the everyday lives of migrant workers caught within the destructive ‘churnings’ of global capitalism. In the Postscript of the book, Ramaswami provides a broad overview of how life has unfolded for his interlocutors in the two decades since he completed his fieldwork with only nine of the original workers remaining in the B156 factory.

While the workers’ strivings for a ‘good life’ seem to be largely in vain in the face of increasing capitalist exploitation, environmental degradation, and the expansion of right-wing Hindutva politics, some events do indicate the ongoing struggles of workers and marginalized groups in India to resist the destructive forces of capitalism and fascism that characterize our current epoch. These pockets include the Maruti auto workers’ protests in 2011-2012, the Shaheen Bagh protests of 2019-2020, and the farmers’ movement of 2020-2021, to name some.

The struggle for justice in the age of the Kalyug continues.

Nida Kirmani is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She has published on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies.

Also see: Histories of struggle, futures of solidarity — Labour rights in Southasia.

This is a Sapan News syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to www.sapannews.com

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All content published by Sapan News is reported, reviewed, and approved by humans in accordance with the Institute for Nonprofit News’ standards for transparency and accountability. We do not publish fully AI-generated journalism, and we remain responsible for the accuracy and integrity of our reporting. We may use artificial intelligence tools in limited ways, such as for transcription, translation, or data organisation.

ENDS