The BBC is likely to stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy over a programme due to be broadcast this week on Sikh history.

An hour-long documentary presented by Sonia Deol titled ‘1984: A Sikh Story’ will ret-tell the story of the year the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent troops into the holiest and most revered of Sikh shrines, The Golden Temple.
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A new book by the Paris-based Panos Institute offers a broad survey of media and cultural diversity in key West European countries together with Canada and the US.

It is also hosting a debate next week on the issue of cultural diversity in European media (details below).

How successfully is the media responding to the challenges of cultural diversity in countries such as France, Britain, Germany and the US?
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This is an extract from London based journalist Salil Tripathi’s new book: ‘Offence – The Hindu Case (Manifestos for the Twenty-first Century)‘

Near the end of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus tells the reader: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it call itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use—silence, exile and cunning.”

For the Indian artist Maqbul Fida Husain, these words now carry a special meaning: opposition to him and his work has now travelled beyond India’s borders. In 2006, a group of Hindu activists attacked two of his paintings at an upscale art gallery, asserting that if Muslims could ban cartoons of Prophet Mohammed made by Danish artists, why couldn’t Hindus do the same with Husain’s art?
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The thorny question of faith schools will not go away. Every time there is a debate on this subject , the supporters and those who oppose it lock horns without reaching a conclusion.

It is not until you see it in reality that you realise how this system of education actually affects children.
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So the BNP has won a couple of seats and the radio phone-ins are in melt down. I have listened to at least two phone-ins on the BBC, and it was interesting to hear the reactions.

Some seemed surprised at the win and some were angry. Most of the callers were slightly embarrassed and some were offering reasons. And there were those who have voted BNP and were eager to tell us why.
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