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 South
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is the largest region of the world with disputed frontiers. It is not because agreements or universal principles do not exist to help settle disputes; it is because the largest country in the region - India - just does not recognise any principle or honour any agreement. It has border dispute with China (North East India); with Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir that it occupies in defiance of the UN Security Council Resolutions since 1949; and with Bangladesh over rivers’ water and several islands and enclaves. It interferes more blatantly in the internal affairs of all its other smaller neighbours. It has annexed Sikkim; it has installed its puppet in Nepal and put a cordon around Bhutan disallowing it contact with the outside World. It has helped maintain the most brutal insurrection in the world i.e. by Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. India operates a kind of ‘doctrine of limited sovereignty’ in its relations with its neighbours vetoing their plans to arm or trade freely with other countries of the world. This causes perpetual instability and economic misery in the entire region of South Asia. The Indian armed forces are brutally suppressing at least 17 freedom/reform movements Killing hundred of thousands in Jammu and Kashmir, the Punjab (Sikhs) and the States of Assam. Yet it has been able to maintain its image as a pacifist society - the birthplace of Lord Buddha and followers of Gandhian non-violence. It is time that India’s neighbours and the peoples held captive within had a platform and a voice.
Pakistan, which is the second largest country of South Asia and has been seen by India as its nemesis ever since the partition in 1947, has singularly failed to rise to the occasion to meet the challenge. It has not only failed to unite the victims of India’s internal and regional imperialism, it has been unable to maintain its internal unity in the face of subversion from India. It is pointless trying to find reasons why India succeeded in its imperial designs and Pakistan failed to resist them. The important fact is that India is a scourge for its neighbours as well its own people. If the state apparatus is oppressive and international law and agreements impotent, justice is obtained and rights secured often by violent strife. The victims that are not protected by law cease to be loyal to the state and to be bound by law. Peoples do not need permission to be free; every people with a distinct national personality have a birthright to be free. In 1947, it was only the Muslims of British India who had crystallised their national personality. British India was divided into two nation states one Muslims, the other ‘everybody else’. But ‘everybody else’ is not one nation; it is many nations. As and when a people crystallise their national personality, they have a right to self-determination.
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London Institute of South Asia - is dedicated to peace in South Asia through national self determination. It operates as a non-profit publishing house that brings to the market the work of leaders and academics, philosophers and thinkers, political scientists and historians who share its objective of freedom for the peoples of South Asia. lisa hopes to represent South Asia’s many peoples whose voice has been throttled by India. Their hopes and aspirations, their political case, their cries of anguish from the bottom of the caste pile have been ignored far too long by the world. Even today when the non-Hindu majority in India is gaining self-confidence under the leadership of regional and caste based political parties, the Hindu minority is still able to impose it anti-Islam and pro Zionists agenda on India. There is no place like London for political ferment because it provides an environment rich in history that attracts thinkers of diverse orientation and origin. This is where leaders and thinkers from all the countries of South Asia can meet and confer to crystallise their thoughts.
lisa
Some of our Sikh friends objected to the picture of Baba Guru Nanak in the title of this web site on the grounds that the Sikhs are not idol worshippers and all the other pictures are of political leaders. The objection has been met by replacing the picture of the Guru with that of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale
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