Indian editor a casualty of proposed US-India nuclear pact

Mubhashar Jawed Akbar, the wordsmith who once cheekily suggested that Bombay should establish diplomatic relations with the rest of India, has been eased out of his position as editor-in-chief of a pioneering experiment in Indian journalism, The Asian Age.

Indian journalist Seema Mustafa, and her editor, shed more light on this.

Seema Mustafa writes, "the reality is that the government cannot go ahead with the nuclear deal and hope to win an election. ...The minorities are particularly unhappy with the repercussions of the global war against terror, and are definitely amongst the first to have climbed on to the anti-imperialist plank. The poor and the oppressed have seen little in five years to convince them that the Congress party is working for their uplift. We have 53 of the worlds billionaires, ranking fourth in the list of countries, even as 300 million plus Indians live on less than one dollar a day."

Seema's editor writes: "The Asian Age editors have been sacked by the new management. Mr M. J. Akbar, the founder of the newspaper, has been unceremoniously replaced with T. Venkatt Ram Reddy. As an immediate impact the above column was not allowed to be published under the new management."