MANY MIGRANTS FEEL BRITISH – IPPR
By Jill Rutter
Britishness to be meaningful and progressive needs to be fostered
both at grass roots and national levels
In most European countries, policy debates about migrants’ integration have intensified during the last five years, as a result of concerns about the growth of religious extremism. There is also growing interest in ‘Britishness’ among political leaders and the media in the UK – Gordon Brown is among many who have initiated debate about how migrant populations can be encouraged to feel British. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how migrants and refugees themselves feel about integration, and becoming and being British. Research recently undertaken by the Institute for Public Policy Research aimed to redress this gap in knowledge. It showed that most refugees feel British, albeit often alongside other identities.
Islam, Women, and the Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan
By Dr.Nyla Ali Khan
Despite international pressure, the India-Pakistan crisis has not been defused, on the contrary, is highly volatile.
Over the years, successive Congress governments may have made every attempt to highlight the purported illegitimacy of Article 370,* but have taken no serious measures to revoke it from the constitution of India. Surprisingly, even when the Hindu right-wing organization, the Bharatiya Janata party, assumed power in New Delhi, it avoided succumbing to the pressure put on it by its more fanatical cohorts to eradicate the special status enjoyed by the Muslim-dominated state of Jammu and Kashmir.
The world in one country – South African Indians integrate
By Eric Jethro
Indians are now an integral part of the post apartheid nation
and are found in all spheres of public life
Indians first arrived in South Africa in the nineteenth century to relieve the labour shortage in the fledgling sugar industry. Before them lay an unknown land and unfamiliar people. They landed between two cultures and races at opposite ends of the human spectrum. At one end were the whites, mainly British, Christians, technologically advanced and in control. At the other end were the blacks, technologically underdeveloped and with no defined religion and recently dispossessed of their land. Hinduism, the religion of the majority of the new arrivals, could not slot easily into either of the aforementioned people’s culture, language or religion. Hence the three cultural-racial groups had to coexist in parallel with each other, rubbing shoulders only in the marketplace or workplace. After nearly a century and a half the situation hasn’t changed much.
Race and Faith: Challenges of post 7/7 Britain
Gautam Banerji
If at all we remain strongly committed to Peace and Solidarity, our traditional thinking on race needs to adjust to the new realities post 7/7.
There was a time when race relations in Britain could be symbolised by the very simple reference to there being "no black in the union jack". White people had the power, control, resources and the empire; black people were perceived as exotic immigrants doing the low-grade jobs and disfiguring the landscape as well as the labour and housing markets. But no longer can a simple analysis be made of the state of race relations, as Britain's changed demography reflects new generations of multi-ethnic origins and heritage.
Over the decades different groups of people have had to assert themselves to get their grievances heard, sometimes engaging in uprisings. The last significant disturbances occurred in the northern English towns of Bradford, Burnley and Oldham in 2001. They highlighted resentment, hatred and ignorance, and the gulf between poor white and deprived Muslim communities.
THE DEVI RAJAB COLUMN
Indian South Africans, imbued with a sense of pride in their ancient culture, far from developing feelings of inferiority have cultivated their own brand of ethnocentrism.
Life in Durban must be a quaint experience for Harsh Shringla, Durban’s new Indian Consul General who has recently arrived from the high life of a United Nations posting in New York. The unique combination of Sir Benjamin Durban’s find, in colonial African setting still lingers on despite the massive transformation of the new SA. In a richly cultural tossed salad of Zulu, Indian and English traditions, Durban is a great location for the consular corps of any country. Although Shringla is wise in saying that his mission is not only to serve Indians but people who fall into the jurisdiction of his consul, his presence here will no doubt kindle nostalgia from the local Indians for the mother country. He recently observed that the local Indian community was “calcified and its people were wedded to a culture no longer relevant in India”.
After Benazir Bhutto: Some reflections*
Amin Mughal
The urge for sharia is a protest against the western, particularly American domination, and their corrupt urban collaborators who rule over them.
I confess, in the least uncharitable terms, that I was never fond of Benazir Bhutto. In fact, I was inimical to her politics. In death, however, she has redeemed herself. In the imagination of the masses she has acquired a mystical significance that is destined to be a never-ending source of inspiration in their struggles ahead.
Most authentic martyrs in history were reluctant to die. All of them were, however, prepared to accept death. Benazir went further. Her detractors have accused her of being foolhardy. That is not true. She only embraced what she had in the last days of her life come to perceive to be her destiny. Hers was an act of courage steeled in deliberation and schooled in the imagination. It matters who killed her, but what matters more is that she knew she would be gunned down. Had she escaped death that day, the suicide bombers would have done her in sooner than later. Yet, she decided to take the risk. Again, it matters whether she died of the gun wound or was later levered down into death. But what matters more is that she was there, facing a possible killer. She did not flinch.
Read MoreJewish Identity in Independent India - The Cochin Jews
Usha Kishore
The first mention of Jews in India occurs in The Bible (The Book of Esther) – dating from the 2nd Century B.C.E. Due to their numerical insignificance, Indian Jews are sometimes unfamiliar within and without the Indian subcontinent. This leads one to question whether Indian Jews are in jeopardy of double marginalisation?
THE GALLE LITERARY FESTIVAL 2008
January 2008 – When all roads led to Galle
Yasmine Gooneratne
“There is no island in the world, Great Britain itself not excepted, that has attracted the attention of authors in so many distant ages and so many different countries as Ceylon. There is no nation in ancient or modern times possessed of a language and a literature, the writers of which have not at some time made it their theme.”
Sir James Emerson Tennent, Ceylon (1859)
“If life is a festival, Sri Lanka is next door to Nirvana.”
Brian Keenan in Galle, January 2008
Galle, the port city built in south Sri Lanka by Dutch invaders in the seventeenth century, provided the venue in January this year for the second international Galle Literary Festival. This event, dubbed the “No. 1 Literary Festival in the world” by Harpers Bazaar after its inception last year, elicited world-wide interest of a nature that was a welcome change from the images associated with violence and ethnic warfare that have dominated headlines for the last twenty five years. A nation that formerly exported English teachers to schools and universities all over the world had suffered deep cultural wounds inflicted by a brand of politics which had placed expediency and power-games above the welfare of its young. Three generations of students had been cheated of their intellectual birthright while politicians plotted and prospered. Amazingly, in a curious reversal of a downward trend that had been believed to be irreversible, an English-language literature has been gradually reviving in the island with local writers learning to abandon their colonial prejudice, and publishers and booksellers perceiving that they have more to give the nation than Government-prescribed textbooks.
