| Al Jazeera, Oct 7, 2009 | ||||
Anger and desperation are growing in southern India as villages continue to be swamped by floodwaters that have left 2.5 million people homeless and left more than 250 dead. Thousands of soldiers and relief workers have been trying to get much-needed aid to survivors, distributing food, water and medical supplies where they can. Millions of people are crammed in overwhelmed temporary government shelters after heavy rains last week triggered what some officials have called the worst floods to hit the area in a century.
With vast tracts of agricultural land, including sugarcane and paddy fields, under water, the authorities estimate the damage across the three sprawling states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra to cost billions of dollars. |
Posts Tagged ‘India’
Desperation grows in India floods
October 7, 2009
Where freedom means a chance to work
October 2, 2009With Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas in mind, Ela Bhatt raised hope when she organized female labourers in India
By Daphne Bramham, Vancouver Sun, October 2, 2009
Ela Bhatt
Photograph by:
Ian Smith, Vancouver Sun
Ela Bhatt never met Mohandas Gandhi, but as a child she caught a glimpse of him leaving her family’s home in Ahmedabad.
Her grandfather and great-uncle were among Gandhi’s followers who were jailed for civil disobedience. And it’s Gandhi’s philosophy that has profoundly influenced Bhatt’s own thoughts and actions.
As a young lawyer in 1972, she helped found a trade union for the 93 per cent of female labourers whose efforts aren’t counted as part of the Indian economy.
Kashmiris’ revolt against Indian occupation and military terror
October 2, 2009The Socialist Worker, October 2, 2009
Arundhati Roy is the renowned author of the novel The God of Small Things, for which she won the prestigious Booker Prize in 1997. But Roy is equally well known as a determined social movement activist and leading voice of the global justice movement.
Roy’s new collection of essays, titled Field Notes on Democracy: Listening to Grasshoppers, examines the dark side of democracy in her native India. It looks at how religious majoritarianism, cultural nationalism and neo-fascism simmer just beneath the surface in a country that projects itself as the world’s largest democracy.
Here, we republish an essay from the book that provides a brilliant account of the summer 2008 uprising against Indian occupation by the people of Kashmir–a disputed region partitioned between India and Pakistan, and subject to Indian military rule in the section it controls.
FOR THE past sixty days or so, since about the end of June, the people of Kashmir have been free. Free in the most profound sense. They have shrugged off the terror of living their lives in the gun-sights of half a million heavily armed soldiers, in the most densely militarized zone in the world.
Raina: Kashmir Ripe for Endgame?
October 1, 2009
By Badri Raina, ZNet, Oct 1, 2009
I
I have before me the full text of the report on Kashmir prepared by Beersman Paul, President, Human Rights Council, Geneva, submitted to the Council at its 12th session, 14th Sept.,-2nd October, 2009.
The report, which is titled “Belgian Association for Solidarity with Jammu & Kashmir: Solution Under the Indian Constitution,” encapsulates the interactions and findings of Mr. Beersman during his “study tour through Jammu & Kashmir State from June 30-July 27, 2009.
After a brief, factual introductory, Beersman lists the individuals and organizations he interviewed during what must clearly have been an exhausting job of fact-finding, covering all three provinces of the state of Jammu & Kashmir and most shades of opinion, although I do not find any entries either for Syed Ali Shah Geelani (the only separatist leader who holds fast to the objective of accession of the state with Pakistan, via, no doubt the formality of self-determination), for Yaseen Malik (JKLF, who steadfastly espouses “independence” from both India and Pakistan) or any interview with a Kashmiri Pandit spokesperson (remembering that the Pandits, at the other end of the spectrum, want the state’s accession to India to be unambiguously cemented.) The text can be accessed at http://basjak.org.
Hereunder is a bullet-point summation of the significant points made by some significant Valley leaders other than those whose allegiance to the accession with India remains firmly in place, often referred to as the “mainstream” parties and political groups. My catalogue is clearly not intended to reproduce the full text of what each individual/organization is recorded to have said in Beersman’s report, but to highlight what seem to me the chief concerns of each.
UN says caste system is a human rights abuse
September 29, 2009United Nations is to declare discrimination based on the Indian caste system is a human rights abuse.
By Dean Nelson in New Delhi, Telegraph.co.uk, Sep 29, 2009
The UN’s Human Rights Council, meeting in Geneva, is expected to ratify draft principles which recognises the scale of persecution suffered by 65 million ‘untouchables’ or ‘Dalits’ who carry out the most menial and degrading work
Many of them work as lavatory and sewer cleaners and in remote villages as “night-soil carriers”.
They are considered unclean by many higher-caste ‘Brahmins’ who regard their presence, and sometimes even their shadow as ‘polluting’.
Roy: What Have We Done to Democracy?
September 28, 2009Of Nearsighted Progress, Feral Howls, Consensus, Chaos, and a New Cold War in Kashmir
Arundhati Roy, tomdispatch.com, Sep 27, 2009
While we’re still arguing about whether there’s life after death, can we add another question to the cart? Is there life after democracy? What sort of life will it be? By “democracy” I don’t mean democracy as an ideal or an aspiration. I mean the working model: Western liberal democracy, and its variants, such as they are.
So, is there life after democracy?
Attempts to answer this question often turn into a comparison of different systems of governance, and end with a somewhat prickly, combative defense of democracy. It’s flawed, we say. It isn’t perfect, but it’s better than everything else that’s on offer. Inevitably, someone in the room will say: “Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia… is that what you would prefer?”
India’s Ugly Underbelly
September 19, 2009By Badri Raina, ZNet, Sep 19, 2009
“He that will not reason is a bigot; he that cannot reason is a fool; he that dare not reason is a slave.”
(H. Drummond)
I
India’s Tamilians have always considered themselves a distinct race. Distinct from the Aryans who, history tells us, displaced their Dravidian ancestors after the conquest of the Indus-Valley civilizations. The Tamil language and script are perhaps of greater antiquity than Sanskrit and have remained largely free of its influence. Not to speak of Tamil literature which may be the richest India has to offer, both in depth and scope.
Which is why Tamilians break into passionate protest when any Tamilian anywhere be perceived as being under siege. Sri Lanka offering a prime example, as well as the situation of Tamilians in Malysia.
So, would it be right to infer that Tamilian civilizational homogeneity brooks no breach?
Wrong.
In the Peraiyur taluk of Madurai district in Chennai is a place called Uthapuram. And there, for the last two decades a ten foot high wall segregates Tamilians from other Tamilians, namely, caste Tamils from those without caste (“untouchabes”).
This wall was built to deny access to casteless Tamils of Uthapuram to public places and facilities frequented by caste Tamils on the other side.
A Different Perspective on the U.S.-India Nuclear Deal
September 4, 2009Peter Custers, Monthly Review, September 2009
The U.S.-India nuclear deal was initiated through a framework agreement signed by India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and U.S. President Bush in July 2005. India, at the instigation of Washington, agreed to separate its civilian and military nuclear production facilities, and place all civilian production facilities under the inspection regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in return for U.S. economic, technological, and military cooperation. The nuclear deal, which took three years to complete, is officially aimed at promoting India’s access to uranium and to civilian nuclear technology, through enlarged importation of both. Whereas nuclear energy contributed a reported 2.5 percent of India’s energy requirements in 2007, the deal is expected to boost the contribution of the nuclear sector to India’s electricity supply, without reducing India’s primary dependence on coal. From its very start, the U.S.-India nuclear deal has generated huge controversies, both in India and internationally. The intent here is to lay bare the implications of the deal for the creation of waste, while putting aside, for the moment, other important controversies associated with the nuclear agreement.
Yet He Could Not Equivocate to Heaven
September 2, 2009
By Badri Raina, ZNet, September 1, 2009
“That you may smile and smile and be a villain”
(Hamlet)
I
His great contribution to politics: pulling his party, the BJP, from two to some one hundred and eighty seats in parliament—all on the back of a hate-filled, anti-Muslim pogrom.
Hitler did as much.
His great contribution to “thought”: coining the phrase “pseudo-secularism,”—defined as any activity on behalf of the state to ameliorate the abysmal social and economic situation of India’s Muslims.
The Constitution be damned
This lean and hungry man, unctuous in speech, guilt-ridden finger-tips gingerly touching across his chest, watched over by foxy moustache, affecting gravitas with tentative stoop and bended head within which breed impulses of self-serving small-mindedness—this undeserving man who would be India’s prime minister has finally been found out.
And, like the priest who forged the gun-powder plot (and justified, during his interrogation, equivocation as sanctioned religious practice), he no longer can equivocate either to the nation or to god. Perhaps to himself as well. Although that must be in doubt.
Four members out of five that constituted the Cabinet Committee on Security during the Vajpayee regime in 1999 have made public averment that he was always present in the meetings that deliberated the hijack of the IC-814 by terrorists, and, contrary to his denials, was wholly in the know of and in agreement with the decision to let the then foreign minister accompany three high-value terrorists to Kandhar.
Thus, the Lauh Purush (iron man) has been found to be an abject equivocator merely, and a cowardly one at that.
Peace and Justice Post 
Raina: India’s Left-Wing Extremism
October 15, 2009What Came First, Chicken or Egg?
By Badri Raina, ZNet, Oct 14, 2009
Badri Raina’s ZSpace Page
I
Even as the Indian state ponders the situation along its international borders with Pakistan, China, Bangladesh, and Nepal, it is increasingly challenged by the spread of left-wing armed extremism at home.
The strongholds of Indian Maoists are, not surprisingly, in the forested hinterlands of central states, such as Chattisgarh and Jharkhand, where the Adivasis (originary tribals) have through six decades of independent India remained almost wholly outside the consideration of the state, except often as brutal victims of influential land-grabbers and aspiring mining and other corporates, backed by the state in collaboration with multinational companies.
Extremist violence, popularly referred to as Naxalism or Maoism, indeed straddles as many as some 180 of India’s 600 or so districts in lesser or greater intensity, along an north-eastern arc stretching from Bihar through West Bengal to parts of Orissa, down to Andhra and Gadchirolli in Marharashtra that touches the Andhra border. With Jharkhand and Chattisgarh as the heartlands.
Continues >>
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Tags:Badri Raina, India, Naxalism, the Adivasis, violence
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