Sharing a feature I co-wrote with Priyanka Singh in Delhi about Sapan’s last event on the first anniversary of the Southasia Peace Action Network. The next one, on labour rights and democracy, will take place on the last Sunday of April.
Artists, journalists, sportspersons, healthcare workers, educators, businesspersons, students, gather for the first anniversary of a Southasian peace coalition.
By Beena Sarwar and Priyanka Singh
April 9, 2022, Sapan News Service: “Each of our countries is facing moments of total insanity and the only recourse is laughter – one big roar across Southasia,” said arts educator Salima Hashmi of Lahore, speaking at an event organised recently to mark a year of Sapan, the Southasia Peace Action Network.
“To see the ludicrousness of Southasia right now,” she said, we need the “dark humour” of the great storyteller Saadat Hasan Manto.
The online discussion tackled various themes in nine breakout sessions, even as Pakistan plunged into a constitutional crisis and Sri Lanka into an economic tailspin.
“It’s us the little people who can say the emperor has no clothes, and laugh at the demi-gods pretending to be gods — because they…
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Thousands attended her funeral in Lahore on Feb 13 – women, men, rich, poor, workers, lawyers, journalists, farmers, ambassadors, ministers. Those who couldn’t attend in person held prayers and vigils in different cities – Karachi, Hyderabad, Peshawar. More are planned in cities around Pakistan and the world. Below, a list of some memorial events planned that I know of, to give a flavor of what she means to us – us being Asma’s tribe, peacemongers who love and fight for peace, democracy, equal rights, human rights and freedom. 
Raza Khan’s disappearance, like that of Zeenat Shehzadi earlier, is part of a new phase of such illegal abductions in Pakistan, violating due process and rule of law. Targeting young people from ordinary backgrounds, without social capital or networks, signals the 
Email from friend Jaspal Singh on June 25, 2017 that I meant to post earlier about a situation that feels all too familiar to Pakistanis. The long-running democratic political process in India – interrupted only by Indira Gandhi’s three-year long Emergency in 1975 is one of the reasons the country has done so much better than neighbouring Pakistan. Until the current scenario where, fuelled by signals from the top, mob lynchings and vigilante violence in the name of religion are rising. Some argue that the Emergency sowed those seeds. Read on. 
Journeys to democracy 