By TCN News,
New Delhi: The Association for Communal Harmony in Asia (ACHA) has decided to honor Dr. Mohammad Arif, Jatin Desai, Ashfaq Fateh, Faisal Khan, Dilafrose Qazi and Awais Sheikh, all peace and harmony activists from India and Pakistan, with the ACHA Peace Star Award 2010.
The awardees for this year (Dr. Mohammad Arif, Jatin Desai, Faisal Khan and Dilafrose Qazi from India, and Ashfaq Fateh and Awais Sheikh from Pakistan) will join the ranks of reputed peace, harmony and human rights personalities from India and Pakistan, like Karamat Ali, Sayeeda Diep, Dr. Asghar Ali Engineer, B. M. Kutty, Dr. Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Dr. Ram Puniyani, Dr. Lenin Raghuvanshi, and Dr. Ingrid Shafer from the U.S.A., who have been honored with this award in previous years.
Also for his services to ACHA, Sharafat Ali of Karachi has been accepted for the ACHA Award.
The awards are given every two years. The ACHA Peace Star Award is given to individuals
(and organizations), that have performed meritorious work in promotion of peace and communal harmony, while the ACHA Award is meant for individuals (and organizations), that have performed substantial service to ACHA.
These Awards do not have any financial value. They have been set up to recognize some of the unsung peace and harmony heroes and heroines, and those who have performed substantial service to ACHA.
ACHA is a 17-year-old, U.S.-based, nonprofit organization, which is dedicated to promoting
peace in South Asia, and harmony among South Asians everywhere.
Brief information about this year’s recipients:
Dr. Mohammad Arif of Varanasi, inspired by Gandhian philosophy, abandoned his academic career to promote communal harmony, composite culture, secularism and democratic values. In this pursuit he has built alliances of Dalits, Tribals and minority groups.
Jatin Desai of Mumbai has organized Tribals in Maharashtra to help them fight for their land, forest and water rights; Dalits for their right to draw water from the community well; his fellow journalists to struggle for better wages as well as resistance against curbs on their freedom of expression, threatened by certain fascist organizations.
Faisal Khan of New Delhi, a lawyer by professional training, is a key member of Asha Parivar and National Alliance of Peoples Movements (NAPM), and has the responsibility for organizing and coordinating their programs in the states of Gujarat, Haryana, Jammu and Kashmir, and those in the north-eastern India. He has organized several peace marches and has fasted in order to draw people’s attention to the victims of communal and gender violence, state repression or skewed development in India. He has led goodwill missions at the recent Kumbha Mela and Ajmer Sharif Urs, where he and his colleagues discussed with groups of pilgrims the importance and ways of maintaining communal harmony.
Dilafrose Qazi of Jammu & Kashmir has persisted in single-handedly trying to empower women in the conflict-ridden state of Jammu & Kashmir. In pursuit of this goal, she has established schools for girls, an engineering & technology college as well as embroidery classes for women, camps for medical and psychological treatment of women battered by daily violence going around them, a dairy farm for rape victims, and rehabilitation programs for militancy-hit families.
Ashfaq Fateh of Pakistan has been engaged since 1992 in efforts to bring together Muslims and Christians of his area to work on such issues as the rights of minorities in Pakistan, restoration of the joint electorate system, abolition of the religion column on the national identity card, and amendment of the discriminatory blasphemy laws in Pakistan Penal Code.
Awais Sheikh is President of Pakistan-India Peace Initiatives. Just after the 2008 Mumbai
terrorist attacks, he organized a peace demonstration at Lahore Press Club, and helped organize as well as participated in a peace march at Amritsar. He has authored Samjhota Express, a book about peace and friendship between India, which has been translated in Hindi and Punjabi. As a Punjab High Court Advocate, he is representing Sarabjit Singh, an Indian convicted of spying, currently lodged in Lahore Central Jail.
For more information about ACHA click:
www.asiapeace.org,
www.indiapakistanpeace.org