New deals

• The Africa summit should bring India closer to the African continent, and open new frontiers of economic cooperation. It will be unrealistic to expect that India will catch up with China’s lead in Africa any time soon. But a beginning in the right direction has been made and these regional initiatives are very relevant in the “post American era”, as Fareed Zakaria calls it. Another epoch-making development is going to take place with the commissioning of the Sittwe port in Myanmar’s waters which will enable the northeastern states of India to access the Bay of Bengal through the Kaldin river in Mizoram. This may end the land-locked status of the Northeast with the narrow chicken’s neck passage to the mainland. This port may even usher in a new era of prosperity for the entire region.

Terror without tag

• Terrorism knows no faith, ideology or caste. It only endorses mass killings under the names of different terror outfits such as the Maoists, the LTTE, the Taliban or the ULFA. Most of these outfits are killing their own people .

Unfortunately, some people promote the idea that the only terrorism in the world is Islamist terrorism. Is it not unjust to censure all adherents of Islam round the world because of a handful of wrongdoers?

Maya unfair

• This refers to the editorial ‘Wash it away’. Mayawati’s attack on Rahul Gandhi’s visits to Dalit homes underlines the painful fact that, despite her recent inclusive rhetoric of “Sarvajan Samaj”, she essentially retains her old and offensive hate-based casteist tendencies. She refuses to recognise that the fathers of the Constitution, despite their often upper caste status, incorporated provisions for the uplift of Dalits. These provisions were meant to wipe away the inequities of the past, promoting a just, egalitarian social order. The mass media and the bulk of the Indian people are the strongest advocates of this social transformation.

Of course, we still have many miles to go before the ancient orthodoxies and prejudices are fully overcome.