Anil Kalhan

This weekend, The Guardian reminded us that “[b]ehind the headlines of wealthy westerners fleeing Mumbai’s terror frontline, it was ordinary Indians who bore the brunt of the bloody attack[s]” in India’s financial and cultural capital this past week. Those same headlines might easily lead one to conclude that the Bombay attacks are significant only or primarily for their geopolitical, economic, and personal consequences for people in the West.

However, the attacks and their aftermath are certainly being experienced rather acutely throughout the South Asian subcontinent itself and within South Asian diaspora communities in other parts of the world. Take, for example, Sri Lanka. Certainly, the people of Sri Lanka have plenty else on their minds these days, with military clashes between the government and the Tamil Tigers proceeding apace and major floods destroying thousands of homes and displacing tens of thousands of people, many of whose lives already had been disrupted by the ongoing fighting. Nevertheless, these serious events — each worthy of greater international media attention in its own right — have not kept Sri Lankans from also experiencing the ramifications of this week’s Bombay terrorist attacks.

Continue reading at SAJAforum…

On Monday, November 17, 2008, Pakistan’s ousted Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, will be in New York to speak at the New York City Bar Association and to accept an Honorary Membership, which is one of the Association’s highest honors. The invitation to receive the award was originally extended to Chaudhry in October 2007, following a unanimous recommendation by the Association’s honors committee a month earlier, but Chaudhry was unable to come to New York to accept the award, since he was detained for several months under house arrest after General Pervez Musharraf’s extraconstitutional suspension of the Pakistan Constitution in November 2007. The New York City Bar ultimately conferred the award in absentia in January 2008, breaking with the Association’s longstanding policy requiring honorees to accept the recognition in person.

Chaudhry is the eighth individual to be conferred honorary membership by the New York City Bar. Prior recipients include former Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist, former Chief Justice of India P.N. Bhagwati, and Judge Thomas
Buergenthal of the International Court of Justice.

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One year ago today, Pakistan’s former President and Chief of Army Staff Pervez Musharraf imposed an extraconstitutional “state of emergency,” which his critics described as a full-scale, martial law crackdown. To refresh your recollections, have a look at last year’s SAJAforum posts on both the imposition of emergency rule itself and the world’s reactions.

Musharraf himself is now gone from the political scene, having resigned in August, but the legacy of his Emergency is being remembered today in Pakistan and around the world.

Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Director, Sam Zarifi, laments that one year later, Pakistan “is still suffering from the abusive policies [Musharraf] put in place” during last year’s crackdown:

In Pakistan, lawyers and others have marked the occasion with protests. Lawyers have rallied across the country, calling on new President Asif Ali Zardari‘s government to fully roll back all of Musharraf’s extraconstitutional measures, including his removal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry:

Continue reading at SAJAforum….