Today, at our "Asia in the Headlines," there is a disturbing, though not entirely surprising, study from The New York Times showing that Muslims in India are near the bottom of the social ladder. Those who helped to found India, particularly Mohandas Ghandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, were trying to found a multi-ethnic, secular society for all Indians. This was proving difficult even in their own time. A radical Hindu assassinated Ghandhi for this dream. However, especially as tensions with Pakistan have seemed to cool recently, I had hoped that India was moving forward.

However, it is a good sign that people in India are taking this seriously as a problem to be addresed. In the past, when Hindu nationalists were in the positions of power, it might have been ignored entirely. Moreover, similar data could probably be found about blacks in this country. Here it may be racial instead of religious, but these kinds of inequalities are damaging none the less. Here's hoping that India finds a way to be the truly multi-religious state that Ghandhi and Nehru dreamed of.

Just a quick introduction: I am a second year graduate student at the University of Louisville, and the graduate assistant for the Institute for Democracy and Development at the political science department here. My particular focus is on Chinese politics and security politics.

Now, of actual interest, it seems that in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands there is a lot more unrest than normal. Between the coup in Thailand, talk a coup in Fiji, and unrest in Tonga,, things are a lot more unsteady than normal. I have no actual explanation to this, other than to point at indigenous factors in all three, but it is particularly striking.

Welcome!

This is the introductory post for the Center for Asian Democracy's newest feature, a blog. Herein, our contributors and some of our students will post their takes on the news and other developments in Asia. We hope to turn this into a forum for more informal discussion on Asian related topics, to go along with our more formal book series and other endeavors.

We hope that you enjoy this; more than that, we hope it provokes discussion and thought.