Bangladeshi counter-terrorism authorities announced the arrest in Dhaka April 7 of Abdul Majed, who faces the death penalty for involvement in the 1975 assassination of the country's founder, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Independence leader "Bangabandhu" Rahman served as the country's first prime minister from 1971 until the 1975 coup in which he was killed along with his family. Only his daughters Sheikh Hasina Wazed and Sheikh Rehana Siddiq survived, as they were in West Germany at the time. Although forbidden from returning to Bangladesh during the subsequent 15-year period of military rule, Sheikh Hasina became prime minister in 1997 and then again in 2009. Majed has publicly admitted his involvement in the massacre, but, like the others involved, faced no legal consequences during the period of military rule. After Sheikh Hasina first became prime minister, Majed went into hiding. In 1998, he was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. The Supreme Court of Bangladesh in 2009 upheld the sentences of Majed and 11 others convicted in the case. In 2010, five of the convicts were hanged; five remain at large, and one has died of natural causes.

At least 27 are dead in five days of communal violence in Delhi that coincided with Donald Trump's first visit to India as president. The violence began as protests against India's new citizenship law sparked a reaction by Hindu militants, who began attacking Muslims and torching Muslim-owned shops. Delhi judicial authorities have opened an investigation, and ordered police officials to view video clips of incitement by local leaders of the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). (Jurist, India Today)

Sri Lanka's Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa announced Feb. 19 that his government will withdraw from co-sponsorship of a 2015 UN Human Rights Council resolution calling for an investigation into war crimes committed on the island during the internal conflict with Tamil rebels. UNHRC Resolution 30/1 was actually a compromise measure, after the Sri Lanka government rejected calls for creation an international tribunal. Withdrawal from the resolution is seen a response to the US imposing a travel ban on Sri Lanka's army commander Shavendra Silva and his family over complicity in human rights violations during the conflict, which ended in 2009 after 26 years. (Jurist, NYT, Feb. 19)

In Episode 47 of the CounterVortex podcast, Bill Weinberg speaks with Punnag Tej Hazarika of the Brooklyn-based small-press imprint Coolgrove and affiliated BorderTalk blog, which explores questions of cultural intersection. Among Coolgrove's recent titles is Winged Horse: 76 Assamese Songs, a collection of translated lyrics by Tej's father, Bhupen Hazarika, the "Bard of Brahmaputra," who campaigned  through his music for a dignified place in India for the peoples of Assam and other minority ethnicities. Last year, Tej traveled to New Delhi to receive the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian award, on behalf of his late father. But the honor came with India—and especially Assam and the restive Northeast—on the cusp of exploding into protest over the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act. The politics of the situation, and the dilemmas of interculturality from Assam to New York, are discussed in a wide-ranging interview. Listen on SoundCloud, and support our podcast via Patreon.

India's northeastern state of Assam has exploded into protest over the Dec. 11 passage of a new national citizenship law. The army has been deployed, a curfew imposed in state capital Guwahati, and internet access cut off. At least five people have been killed as security forces fired on demonstrators. The new law allows religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan to apply for Indian citizenship. This means it effectively excludes Muslims, and mostly apples to Hindus and Sikhs. Critics of the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) say it therefore violates India's founding secular principles. But while secularists and Muslims are protesting the Citizenship Amendment Act on this basis elsewhere in India, the biggest protests have been in Assam—motivated by fear that the state will be overrun by an influx from Bangladesh, threatening its cultural and linguistic identity.

Nepal over the past weeks has repeatedly seen both anti-India and anti-China protests, concerning charges that both of the country's giant neighbors are claiming pieces of its territory. On Nov. 19, President Xi Jinping was burned in effigy at one protest. Confusingly, nearly all accounts (seemingly drawing from one report by Asian News International in Hindustan Times) placed the protest in "Saptari, Bardiya, Kapilvastu district," but these are actually three different districts, not even bordering each other, and all along the border with India rather than China. (See Wikipedia entries for Saptari, Bardiya and Kapilvastu districts.) This may loan credence to claims that the anti-China protests were fomented by India. A week earlier, protesters in Kathmandu burned a map of India, Al Jazeera reports.

The Supreme Court of India issued a unanimous ruling Nov. 9 in the decades-long Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid land case, finding for the Hindus. A small plot of land, of about 1,500 square yards, in the city of Ayodhya in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh has traditionally been believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the god Ram. The location is also venerated by Muslims because it was the site of the Babri Masjid, a mosque built in the sixteenth century by the first Mughal emperor Babur. Both religious communities have fought over ownership of the site since the beginning of the British Raj in 1857. The current case came out of appeals of four different suits filed from 1950 to 1989.

Police in south India's Tamil Nadu state have detained nine Tibetan activists, apparently in a move to pre-empt protests ahead of the upcoming visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping for bilateral talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Among those arrested was Tibetan writer and poet Tenzin Tsundue, who was detained Oct. 13 in the town of Kottakuppam, within 100 kilometers of Mamallapuram, the city where the three-day summit is to be held. Tenzin had been arrested twice previously during visits by Chinese leaders. In 2002, Tsundue unfurled a banner reading "Free Tibet" at a hotel in Mumbai where Chinese premier Zhu Rongji was speaking. He was again arrested in Bangalore in 2005 for protesting then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao. Police in Tamil Nadu said he was planning a similar action during Xi's visit.