Everyone agrees on the importance of holding Nepal’s Constituent Assembly elections on 22 November, and it’s beginning to look like we’ll get there

Perhaps the most crucial roadblock to Nepal’s Constituent Assembly elections in November is in the Tarai plains. The possibility of a deal lingers, but the Kathmandu government needs to move quickly and honestly.

As Nepalis look towards the long-awaited Constituent Assembly elections later this year, the aspirations of myriad communities are coming to the fore – as are the twin promises of opportunity and strife.

Modern Southasia’s ‘cartographic anxiety’ is traceable directly to colonial-era machinations. It is time for the region’s people to make their own decisions about how to define their territories.

In June, a public hearing proved that construction on India’s largest nuclear-energy project faces similarly massive opposition – but officials seem undaunted.

Between a lack of regulation on the part of the government, and unscrupulous and often criminal practices in the thriving underworld of unregulated labour export, Bangladeshi migrant workers are left quite unprotected. 

The new administration in Patna is finally taking flood preparedness seriously, but its thinking is still disastrously narrow-sighted

The Lal Masjid operation has intensified Gen Musharraf’s problems.

Bangladesh’s interim government is becoming more illegal by the day.

A combination of colonial mythmaking and contemporary lack of historical rigour have left the Battle of Plassey entirely forgotten, even on its 250th anniversary.

Sixty years on, we have barely begun to deal with our collective guilt from the events of Partition.

The State, Democracy and Anti-Terror Laws in India by Ujjwal Kumar Singh SAGE Publications, 2007

Essays on the Sociology of Nepal by Chaitanya Mishra Fineprint, 2007

Bhagat Singh: Liberation’s blazing star by P M S Grewal Left Word Books, 2007