Features
A cry for Gaza, and for our loss of humanity
by Amal de Chickera
At the very centre of the catastrophe, are the people of Gaza themselves, caged in, bombed out, starved, parched, killed. Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Palestinian diaspora, Israeli allies who are anti-occupation, anti-authoritarianism and pro-peace, citizens of the world with a conscience – all of us are shaken to our core. Helpless, we watch genocide play out on our tv screens, cheered on by warmongers, as those calling for peace, freedom, proportionality and respect of international law are attacked, doxed, criminalised.
I am a Sri Lankan human rights lawyer and activist, now living in London. My work is predominantly on the right to nationality and the rights of stateless people. I am writing this piece because my conscience doesn’t allow me to stay silent. I don’t have a big platform but I will use what platform I have to stand in solidarity with victims of senseless violence, terror and criminality. My own lived experience of growing up with Sri Lanka’s civil war, and my work experience on statelessness globally, shapes my perspective on this catastrophe.
Hopefully my reflections will bring some comfort or clarity to those who read this.
Lessons from Sri Lanka
I belong to the ethnic majority Sinhala community of Sri Lanka, though I’m from a Christian religious minority. There’s no denying my privilege which is rooted in language (English speaking), geography (Urban, Colombo), family and ethnicity. My parents are well respected for their work in peace and social justice, and it was this family grounding which shaped who I am. Without attempting to make any comparisons between Sri Lanka and Palestine/Israel, here are some insights from Sri Lanka which I’d like to share:
Navigating the deep polarisation in Sri Lankan society was extremely difficult. As a Sinhalese who rejected and fought against structures of discrimination and violence that predominantly targeted Tamils and Muslims, I felt deep anger and shame towards the ethno-nationalist views that pervaded Sinhala society and the Sri Lankan state. But I also knew that my privilege was rooted in this very reality, which meant that whatever threats my family or Sinhala colleagues and friends endured, they simply paled into insignificance when compared to the risks taken by Tamil and Muslim compatriots and friends.
I empathise and stand with Israeli citizens who reject the occupation, the colonialist expansionist project and who are committed to fighting rising authoritarianism in their country. I understand how difficult a dance this can be, calling out bigotry among family and friends, finding ways to grieve loved ones who are victims of violence – while always being mindful of sinister agendas to weaponise your grief to further the very things you are fighting against.
I learnt that the self-serving logic of violence only enriches the powerful, only justifies the otherwise unjustifiable, and only causes deep pain,s suffering and harm to our communities. The tragedy of seeing my country being reduced to a cheap parody of itself – watching the evening news and comparing the number of casualties in order to claim another day of ‘victory’ – will always stick with me. I am aware that as the language and logic of violence become the norm, the risks of standing with the oppressed or speaking the language of reconciliation, justice and peace only heighten. We then sometimes engage in self-censorship or are pressurised into caveating ourselves – to fit into a discourse framed and policed by those who espouse ethno-nationalism. Sometimes we succumb to the pressure – we don’t say what’s on our minds, or we say it differently.
For anyone feeling this way today, who are self-censoring for fear of being doxed and of reprisal, I say, don’t be hard on yourself. Self-care is a crucially important skill that we need to learn, and re-learn, and re-re-learn. Sometimes, the odds are stacked so heavily against you, that you just cannot risk the fallout. This is ok. The fact that you go through this thought process is important. Preserve yourself, refresh, renew and find another way.
The reduction of discourse into absolute, polarised binary opposites is another huge challenge. As George Bush famously said, ‘you are either with us, or against us’. The ‘terrorist’ label is used by warmongers and supremacists as an argument clincher, a conversation ender, a moral higher ground claimed, completely obtuse to the sewer we’ve thrown ourselves into and are burrowing deeper into still. In Sri Lanka, all Tamils and those fighting for social and political justice, were expected to denounce the terrorism of the LTTE, before they would be allowed to speak. This is a performative, reductionist nonsense, which is both intellectually and morally dishonest. The requirement stemmed from the racist viewpoint that all Tamils were presumed to be terrorists (or terrorist sympathisers), who therefore had to first redeem or distance themselves in order to be viewed as legitimate. This was, of course, both a trap and a deflection. A trap because it disregarded the complex history of state violence and structural discrimination against minorities which had brought us to where we were; a deflection because it then set up the discourse to focus on the terrorism of the LTTE.
Today, commentors are expected to preface any statement with a condemnation of Hamas atrocities. As the Palestinian ambassador to the UK has articulately conveyed in several interviews, the very premise of this question must be rejected. What is particularly galling, is that these types of questions are repeatedly put to people with proven track records of anti-violence and working for peace in extremely challenging circumstances, while those who openly espouse supremacist and genocidal agendas are rarely asked the same.
I’ve also seen the ultimately terrifying force that an unconscionable state can unleash on an impoverished, traumatised and terrified community, trapped and targeted by the very state that claims its mission is humanitarian. Truth and meaning are among the first casualties of war. This was true of Sri Lanka, as it is true of Palestine/Israel. Dehumanising the ‘enemy’ is an essential prerequisite for the barbarity that follows. But dehumanisation isn’t a one-way street. The more violence is justified, tolerated and cheered, the more that suffering is ignored, minimised and gaslit, our collective humanity suffers. The sequence of events and the narrative that the Sri Lankan state built, culminating in the horrific end-stages of the war, was a deeply dishonest one, which mainstream society bought into. It was also ‘allowed’ by an international community that was ultimately complicit through its failure to do everything possible to prevent the committing of atrocities against Sri Lankan citizens.
Look for the voices that speak against the grain. Israelis whose loved ones were killed, who denounce Israel’s vengeance filled indiscriminate retaliation. Palestinians who have endured multi-generational trauma but still see all taking of life as tragedy. The cry for peace and justice, for preserving the sanctity of life, which is all around us, but on a frequency that isn’t being picked up by a media that legitimises violence and war.
Lessons from statelessness
My work on statelessness has also given me a range of perspectives and experiences. It cannot go unsaid that Palestinians are perhaps the largest stateless community in the world. The establishment of Israel in 1948 marked the beginning of the ethnic cleansing, forced displacement, and statelessness of Palestinians. The ongoing Israeli settler-colonialism and occupation of Palestine deny Palestinians their collective national rights and the right to self-determination, leaving millions of Palestinian stateless. Ironically and tragically, Palestinian statelessness was born out of centuries of racism, antisemitism, pogroms and citizenship stripping against Jewish people in Europe, that culminated in the holocaust, one of the lowest points of our humanity.
The crimes of the Israeli state have ratcheted up under its current far-right government. The crime of apartheid, the expansionist and violent settlement project, and the Israeli state’s complete control over all facets of Palestinian lives from the mundane to the extreme are all well documented; even as this government openly attacks democratic institutions in Israel, violently dismantling citizen protests. This administration has openly and unashamedly articulated its genocidal intent, and is now following its words with actions. There is no scenario in which a serious and honest assessment of the situation can overlook this reality.
So, here we have a situation in which a people, made stateless, dispossessed of their lands and ghettoised, are now being indiscriminately attacked in the pursuit of the genocidal ideology of an authoritarian and extremist group that has grabbed power in Israel. The world – led by powerful countries such as the US and the UK – is looking on, cheering, and vilifying anyone who shows the temerity to stand for humanity.
Again, while a direct comparison should be avoided, the genocide of the Rohingya gives us some perspective. All aspects of Rohingya lives were controlled by the illegitimate military Myanmar state, which ghettoised the community, subjected it to extreme forms of cruelty, violence and restrictions that became normalised in the eyes of the world over time. They were stripped of their nationality and made stateless. They were dehumanised to the extent that UN agencies and world leaders even refused to use the name ‘Rohingya’ when speaking of them. The ground was laid and genocide followed. After the fact, there was plenty of handwringing, feigned surprise and faux solidarity by the very actors who had the information and the power to prevent this tragedy.
On Palestine today, it’s more than silence. It’s the shameless endorsement of the narrative of a regime that is not even pretending to hide its genocidal intent. It’s giving them carte blanche to kill. It’s – at best – talking about ‘humanitarian corridors’ and access to relief, as if somehow, it is more humane to tend to the wounded and feed the starving so they can be made ‘fit enough’ to again be indiscriminately attacked and killed. When the only appropriate response is calling for an immediate cessation of violence, the moral contortionism displayed by world leaders is abhorrent.
Statelessness exists because of state violence. And State violence is easier to perpetrate (and justify) against stateless people. This is a self-fulfilling cycle, which can only be broken through intervention by a responsible, principled international community. While the obligation to prevent genocide is unqualified and absolute, there’s an argument to be made that this obligation is even sharper when the victims are stateless.
This is larger than our views
I know where I stand on the Palestinian issue – the right to statehood, the right to self-determination, an end to occupation, and the opportunity for Palestinian people to build lives of dignity, without outside interference or control. I also know there are sensible and good people who have very different views. This is not about reaching consensus on resolutions to this deeply entrenched and polarising multi-generational crisis; certainly not in the heat of this catastrophe.
This is about something much more fundamental. It is about the lives of people, which once lost can never be regained. It is about the irreparable trauma of those who remain. It is about hundreds of thousands of children who cannot make sense of the language defying terror they face. It is about those in high office publicly calling Palestinians animals and pursuing their collective punishment in the most violent and indiscriminate ways, simply for existing and desiring freedom.
This is a struggle to preserve the floor, or even the basement, of our humanity. Whatever our political views, whatever our perspective, whatever lived experience we carry with us, if we cannot do everything in our power to resist this, our humanity too will be lost.
Do what we can
Catastrophes of this nature are so huge, that it is easy to be completely overwhelmed into a state of helplessness, paralysis and depression. I have been navigating these feelings and emotions for the last several days. And so, I try to pick myself up and do what I can. And that raises the question, what can we do?
We all have our spheres of influence – some relatively small, some quite significant. Our families, work-spaces, political representatives, communities etc. We can try our best to push the needle of change through these spheres, by speaking, educating, standing up. My experience is that many such attempts will be shut down, but nonetheless, it is important to persevere.
If you know anyone impacted, either directly or indirectly, reach out to them and show solidarity. It can be incredibly isolating to endure trauma and grief, particularly in societies which are indifferent or hostile to experiences and viewpoints that contest dominant narratives.
We need to educate ourselves on the histories of the conflict and the experiences of those who have fought for justice and peace on all sides. Resist the temptation to reduce intergenerational traumas to polarising slogans. Search for and amplify the voices that simmer just under the surface, that have been suppressed because they counter the logic of violence, colonialism and occupation.
I would like to conclude by sharing the words of two colleagues and friends I am in close touch with:
“They’re all in one room on the 3rd floor of the building so when they bomb, they die first thing all together”
A Palestinian friend with family in Gaza
“I’m really scared, they are gonna wipe out Gaza”
An Israeli friend who works for peace and against the occupation
I want to believe that our collective humanity has the power to save us form ourselves.
But I am shaken to the core.
In one of India’s coldest and most remote regions, a group of women have taken on an unlikely role: protecting one of Asia’s most elusive predators, the snow leopard.
Snow leopards are found in just 12 countries across Central and South Asia. India is home to one of the world’s largest populations, with a nationwide survey in 2023 – the first comprehensive count ever carried out in the country – estimating more than 700 animals, .
One of the places they roam is around Kibber village in Himachal Pradesh state’s Spiti Valley, a stark, high-altitude cold desert along the Himalayan belt. Here, snow leopards are often called the “ghosts of the mountains”, slipping silently across rocky slopes and rarely revealing themselves.
For generations, the animals were seen largely as a threat, for attacking livestock. But attitudes in Kibber and neighbouring villages are beginning to shift, as people increasingly recognise the snow leopard’s role as a top predator in the food chain and its importance in maintaining the region’s fragile mountain ecosystem.
Nearly a dozen local women are now working alongside the Himachal Pradesh forest department and conservationists to track and protect the species, playing a growing role in conservation efforts.
Locally, the snow leopard is known as Shen and the women call their group “Shenmo”. Trained to install and monitor camera traps, they handle devices fitted with unique IDs and memory cards that automatically photograph snow leopards as they pass.
“Earlier, men used to go and install the cameras and we kept wondering why couldn’t we do it too,” says Lobzang Yangchen, a local coordinator working with a small group supported by the non-profit Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF) in collaboration with the forest department.
Yangchen was among the women who helped collect data for Himachal Pradesh’s snow leopard survey in 2024, which found that the state was home to 83 snow leopards – up from 51 in 2021.
The survey documented snow leopards and 43 other species using camera traps spread across an area of nearly 26,000sq km (10,000sq miles). Individual leopards were identified by the unique rosette patterns on their fur, a standard technique used for spotted big cats. The findings are now feeding into wider conservation and habitat-management plans.
“Their contribution was critical to identifying individual animals,” says Goldy Chhabra, deputy conservator of forests with the Spiti Wildlife Division.
Collecting the data is demanding work. Most of it takes place in winter, when heavy snowfall pushes snow leopards and their prey to lower altitudes, making their routes easier to track.
On survey days, the women wake up early, finish household chores and gather at a base camp before travelling by vehicle as far as the terrain allows. From there, they trek several kilometres to reach camera sites, often at altitudes above 14,000ft (4,300m), where the thin air makes even simple movement exhausting.
The BBC accompanied the group on one such trek in December. After hours of walking in biting cold, the women suddenly stopped on a narrow trail.
Yangchen points to pugmarks in the dust: “This shows the snow leopard has been here recently. These pugmarks are fresh.”
Along with pugmarks, the team looks for other signs, including scrapes and scent‑marking spots, before carefully fixing a camera to a rock along the trail.
One woman then carries out a “walk test”, crawling along the path to check whether the camera’s height and angle will capture a clear image.
The group then moves on to older sites, retrieving memory cards and replacing batteries installed weeks earlier.
By mid-afternoon, they return to camp to log and analyse the images using specialised software – tools many had never encountered before.
“I studied only until grade five,” says Chhering Lanzom. “At first, I was scared to use the computer. But slowly, we learned how to use the keyboard and mouse.”
The women joined the camera-trapping programme in 2023. Initially, conservation was not their motivation. But winters in the Spiti Valley are long and quiet, with little agricultural work to fall back on.
“At first, this work on snow leopards didn’t interest us,” Lobzang says. “We joined because we were curious and we could earn a small income.”
The women earn between 500 ($5.46; £4) and 700 rupees a day.
But beyond the money, the work has helped transform how the community views the animal.
“Earlier, we thought the snow leopard was our enemy,” says Dolma Zangmo, a local resident. “Now we think their conservation is important.”
Alongside survey work, the women help villagers access government insurance schemes for their livestock and promote the use of predator‑proof corrals – stone or mesh enclosures that protect animals at night.
Their efforts come at a time of growing recognition for the region. Spiti Valley has recently been included in the Cold Desert Biosphere Reserve, a Unesco-recognised network aimed at conserving fragile ecosystems while supporting local livelihoods.
As climate change reshapes the fragile trans-Himalayan landscape, conservationists say such community participation will be crucial to safeguarding species like the snow leopard.
“Once communities are involved, conservation becomes more sustainable,” says Deepshikha Sharma, programme manager with NCF’s High Altitudes initiative.
“These women are not just assisting, they are becoming practitioners of wildlife conservation and monitoring,” she adds.
As for the women, their work makes them feel closer to their home, the village and the mountains that raised them, they say.
“We were born here, this is all we know,” Lobzang says. “Sometimes we feel afraid because these snow leopards are after all predatory animals, but this is where we belong.”
[BBC]
If elephants are truly to be given “freedom” in Udawalawe, the solution is not simply to open gates or redraw park boundaries. The map itself tells the real story — a story of shrinking habitats, broken corridors, and more than a decade of silent but relentless ecological destruction.
“Look at Udawalawe today and compare it with satellite maps from ten years ago,” says Sameera Weerathunga, one of Sri Lanka’s most consistent and vocal elephant conservation activists. “You don’t need complicated science. You can literally see what we have done to them.”
What we commonly describe as the human–elephant conflict (HEC) is, in reality, a land-use conflict driven by development policies that ignore ecological realities. Elephants are not invading villages; villages, farms, highways and megaprojects have steadily invaded elephant landscapes.
Udawalawe: From Landscape to Island
Udawalawe National Park was once part of a vast ecological network connecting the southern dry zone to the central highlands and eastern forests. Elephants moved freely between Udawalawe, Lunugamvehera, Bundala, Gal Oya and even parts of the Walawe river basin, following seasonal water and food availability.
Today, Udawalawe appears on the map as a shrinking green island surrounded by human settlements, monoculture plantations, reservoirs, electric fences and asphalt.
“For elephants, Udawalawe is like a prison surrounded by invisible walls,” Sameera explains. “We expect animals that evolved to roam hundreds of square nationakilometres to survive inside a box created by humans.”
Elephants are ecosystem engineers. They shape forests by dispersing seeds, opening pathways, and regulating vegetation. Their survival depends on movement — not containment. But in Udawalawa, movement is precisely what has been taken away.
Over the past decade, ancient elephant corridors have been blocked or erased by:
Irrigation and agricultural expansion
Tourism resorts and safari infrastructure
New roads, highways and power lines
Human settlements inside former forest reserves
Sameera
“The destruction didn’t happen overnight,” Sameera says. “It happened project by project, fence by fence, without anyone looking at the cumulative impact.”
The Illusion of Protection
Sri Lanka prides itself on its protected area network. Yet most national parks function as ecological islands rather than connected systems.
“We think declaring land as a ‘national park’ is enough,” Sameera argues. “But protection without connectivity is just slow extinction.”
Udawalawe currently holds far more elephants than it can sustainably support. The result is habitat degradation inside the park, increased competition for resources, and escalating conflict along the boundaries.
“When elephants cannot move naturally, they turn to crops, tanks and villages,” Sameera says. “And then we blame the elephant for being a problem.”
The Other Side of the Map: Wanni and Hambantota
Sameera often points to the irony visible on the very same map. While elephants are squeezed into overcrowded parks in the south, large landscapes remain in the Wanni, parts of Hambantota and the eastern dry zone where elephant density is naturally lower and ecological space still exists.
“We keep talking about Udawalawe as if it’s the only place elephants exist,” he says. “But the real question is why we are not restoring and reconnecting landscapes elsewhere.”
The Hambantota MER (Managed Elephant Reserve), for instance, was originally designed as a landscape-level solution. The idea was not to trap elephants inside fences, but to manage land use so that people and elephants could coexist through zoning, seasonal access, and corridor protection.
“But what happened?” Sameera asks. “Instead of managing land, we managed elephants. We translocated them, fenced them, chased them, tranquilised them. And the conflict only got worse.”
The Failure of Translocation
For decades, Sri Lanka relied heavily on elephant translocation as a conflict management tool. Hundreds of elephants were captured from conflict zones and released into national parks like Udawalawa, Yala and Wilpattu.
Elephant deaths
The logic was simple: remove the elephant, remove the problem.
The reality was tragic.
“Most translocated elephants try to return home,” Sameera explains. “They walk hundreds of kilometres, crossing highways, railway lines and villages. Many die from exhaustion, accidents or gunshots. Others become even more aggressive.”
Scientific studies now confirm what conservationists warned from the beginning: translocation increases stress, mortality, and conflict. Displaced elephants often lose social structures, familiar landscapes, and access to traditional water sources.
“You cannot solve a spatial problem with a transport solution,” Sameera says bluntly.
In many cases, the same elephant is captured and moved multiple times — a process that only deepens trauma and behavioural change.
Freedom Is Not About Removing Fences
The popular slogan “give elephants freedom” has become emotionally powerful but scientifically misleading. Elephants do not need symbolic freedom; they need functional landscapes.
Real solutions lie in:
Restoring elephant corridors
Preventing development in key migratory routes
Creating buffer zones with elephant-friendly crops
Community-based land-use planning
Landscape-level conservation instead of park-based thinking
“We must stop treating national parks like wildlife prisons and villages like war zones,” Sameera insists. “The real battlefield is land policy.”
Electric fences, for instance, are often promoted as a solution. But fences merely shift conflict from one village to another.
“A fence does not create peace,” Sameera says. “It just moves the problem down the line.”
A Crisis Created by Humans
Sri Lanka loses more than 400 elephants and nearly 100 humans every year due to HEC — one of the highest rates globally.
Yet Sameera refuses to call it a wildlife problem.
“This is a human-created crisis,” he says. “Elephants are only responding to what we’ve done to their world.”
From expressways cutting through forests to solar farms replacing scrublands, development continues without ecological memory or long-term planning.
“We plan five-year political cycles,” Sameera notes. “Elephants plan in centuries.”
The tragedy is not just ecological. It is moral.
“We are destroying a species that is central to our culture, religion, tourism and identity,” Sameera says. “And then we act surprised when they fight back.”
The Question We Avoid Asking
If Udawalawe is overcrowded, if Yala is saturated, if Wilpattu is bursting — then the real question is not where to put elephants.
The real question is: Where have we left space for wildness in Sri Lanka?
Sameera believes the future lies not in more fences or more parks, but in reimagining land itself.
“Conservation cannot survive as an island inside a development ocean,” he says. “Either we redesign Sri Lanka to include elephants, or one day we’ll only see them in logos, statues and children’s books.”
And the map will show nothing but empty green patches — places where giants once walked, and humans chose. roads instead.
By Ifham Nizam
SAARC or the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation has been declared ‘dead’ by some sections in South Asia and the idea seems to be catching on. Over the years the evidence seems to have been building that this is so, but a matter that requires thorough probing is whether the media in South Asia, given the vital part it could play in fostering regional amity, has had a role too in bringing about SAARC’s apparent demise.
That South Asian governments have had a hand in the ‘SAARC debacle’ is plain to see. For example, it is beyond doubt that the India-Pakistan rivalry has invariably got in the way, particularly over the past 15 years or thereabouts, of the Indian and Pakistani governments sitting at the negotiating table and in a spirit of reconciliation resolving the vexatious issues growing out of the SAARC exercise. The inaction had a paralyzing effect on the organization.
Unfortunately the rest of South Asian governments too have not seen it to be in the collective interest of the region to explore ways of jump-starting the SAARC process and sustaining it. That is, a lack of statesmanship on the part of the SAARC Eight is clearly in evidence. Narrow national interests have been allowed to hijack and derail the cooperative process that ought to be at the heart of the SAARC initiative.
However, a dimension that has hitherto gone comparatively unaddressed is the largely negative role sections of the media in the SAARC region could play in debilitating regional cooperation and amity. We had some thought-provoking ‘takes’ on this question recently from Roman Gautam, the editor of ‘Himal Southasian’.
Gautam was delivering the third of talks on February 2nd in the RCSS Strategic Dialogue Series under the aegis of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, at the latter’s conference hall. The forum was ably presided over by RCSS Executive Director and Ambassador (Retd.) Ravinatha Aryasinha who, among other things, ensured lively participation on the part of the attendees at the Q&A which followed the main presentation. The talk was titled, ‘Where does the media stand in connecting (or dividing) Southasia?’.
Gautam singled out those sections of the Indian media that are tamely subservient to Indian governments, including those that are professedly independent, for the glaring lack of, among other things, regionalism or collective amity within South Asia. These sections of the media, it was pointed out, pander easily to the narratives framed by the Indian centre on developments in the region and fall easy prey, as it were, to the nationalist forces that are supportive of the latter. Consequently, divisive forces within the region receive a boost which is hugely detrimental to regional cooperation.
Two cases in point, Gautam pointed out, were the recent political upheavals in Nepal and Bangladesh. In each of these cases stray opinions favorable to India voiced by a few participants in the relevant protests were clung on to by sections of the Indian media covering these trouble spots. In the case of Nepal, to consider one example, a young protester’s single comment to the effect that Nepal too needed a firm leader like Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seized upon by the Indian media and fed to audiences at home in a sensational, exaggerated fashion. No effort was made by the Indian media to canvass more opinions on this matter or to extensively research the issue.
In the case of Bangladesh, widely held rumours that the Hindus in the country were being hunted and killed, pogrom fashion, and that the crisis was all about this was propagated by the relevant sections of the Indian media. This was a clear pandering to religious extremist sentiment in India. Once again, essentially hearsay stories were given prominence with hardly any effort at understanding what the crisis was really all about. There is no doubt that anti-Muslim sentiment in India would have been further fueled.
Gautam was of the view that, in the main, it is fear of victimization of the relevant sections of the media by the Indian centre and anxiety over financial reprisals and like punitive measures by the latter that prompted the media to frame their narratives in these terms. It is important to keep in mind these ‘structures’ within which the Indian media works, we were told. The issue in other words, is a question of the media completely subjugating themselves to the ruling powers.
Basically, the need for financial survival on the part of the Indian media, it was pointed out, prompted it to subscribe to the prejudices and partialities of the Indian centre. A failure to abide by the official line could spell financial ruin for the media.
A principal question that occurred to this columnist was whether the ‘Indian media’ referred to by Gautam referred to the totality of the Indian media or whether he had in mind some divisive, chauvinistic and narrow-based elements within it. If the latter is the case it would not be fair to generalize one’s comments to cover the entirety of the Indian media. Nevertheless, it is a matter for further research.
However, an overall point made by the speaker that as a result of the above referred to negative media practices South Asian regionalism has suffered badly needs to be taken. Certainly, as matters stand currently, there is a very real information gap about South Asian realities among South Asian publics and harmful media practices account considerably for such ignorance which gets in the way of South Asian cooperation and amity.
Moreover, divisive, chauvinistic media are widespread and active in South Asia. Sri Lanka has a fair share of this species of media and the latter are not doing the country any good, leave alone the region. All in all, the democratic spirit has gone well into decline all over the region.
The above is a huge problem that needs to be managed reflectively by democratic rulers and their allied publics in South Asia and the region’s more enlightened media could play a constructive role in taking up this challenge. The latter need to take the initiative to come together and deliberate on the questions at hand. To succeed in such efforts they do not need the backing of governments. What is of paramount importance is the vision and grit to go the extra mile.
The SSC finally steps out of the sunshine and into the floodlights
SAARC journalists meet in New Delhi
Governor of Gujarat met with Sri Lanka PM to discuss exposition of Devnimori Relics
India chase sixth Under-19 World Cup title, England their first since 1998
Meet the women protecting India’s snow leopards
Louvre Museum crown left crushed but ‘intact’ after raid
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
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