The very title of this book recalls to one’s mind the four articles of the eminent Pakistani journalist, the late Altaf Gauhar published during September-October 1999 in the Pakistani paper Nation under the heading ‘Four Wars, one assumption.’
N. Manoharan prefaces his book with the lament that not one study links ethnic violence and human rights in the Sri Lankan context. This is exactly what he then sets out to do. The relationship between escalating (or de-escalating) ethnic violence and levels of human rights protection is both an obvious and challenging subject of study. In and of themselves,
India-Sri Lanka relations have witnessed a paradigm shift especially since the mid-1990s. The shift has taken place fundamentally in two key areas: politico-strategic and economic. Absence of Cold War hangovers, nonexistence of diplomatic irritants on the ethnic issue, and phenomenal growth in trade and investment ties were the principal reasons for improved bilateral relations.
This book is about empirically testing the ‘incompatibility thesis’ on democracy and Islam or Muslim societies, through the study of non-Arab, Muslim-majority, Asian countries of Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Malaysia.
Webster has written a valuable and outstanding supplement to his earlier The Christian Community and Change in Nineteenth Century North India (1976). The study of Christian communities in India, their history, culture and social structure has recently acquired an independent identity within the academia.
India’s colonial connection is paradoxical—on the one hand, we celebrate the severance of this tricentennial relationship and on the other we perpetually savour its overwhelming nostalgia. Reams of publications in Modern Indian history castigate the colonial interlude as one of a massacre of a glorious tradition,