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Archives for October 2014

All India Dawah Centres Association (AIDCA) launched in Mumbai

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At the launch of "All India Dawah Centres Association" on 10th Oct 2014, at Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh. From left: Imran Shaikh, Ashraf Mohamedy, Umar Shariff, Adv. Faiz Syed, Ashraf Motlekar, Mohsin Khan

At the launch of “All India Dawah Centres Association” on 10th Oct 2014, at Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh. From left: Imran Shaikh, Ashraf Mohamedy, Umar Shariff, Adv. Faiz Syed, Ashraf Motlekar, Mohsin Khan.

Mumbai: The All India Dawah Centres Association (AIDCA), an association of various Islamic organisations, from across the country was launched today in Mumbai, with the goal of “standing up for the rights and security of the Islamic organisations and its members”.

Addressing the press here at the Marathi Patrakar Sangh on the occasion of its launch, AIDCA’s goals and objectives were elaborated to the Media.

Mr. Umar Shariff, the Program Manager of AIDCA, expounded about working with people across the country, to work on social welfare activities.

Mr. Shariff said that, AIDCA was established this year, in the month of August, soon after the second summit which was attended by the members of 70 Islamic organisations from states across India. AIDCA, he said was setup with the intention of uniting the Ulama (Muslim scholars), and community leaders to unitedly address issues concerning the community in the country.

“AIDCA would stand up for the victimised members of the Muslim community, who are picked up by the intelligence and authorities on the basis of suspicion alone. We would engage through all legal actions that are necessary to contest the actions of the authorities who take undue advantage of the much vulnerable Muslim community of India. All our endeavour would be within the framework of the constitution of India,” said Mr. Shariff, who is the president of Discover Islam Education Trust (DIET), an educational institute, which operates a school under its aegis in Bangalore.

On being asked about whether AIDCA would work with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he replied that it would work with him in all the good work the PM does in the country, like ‘Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’ campaign. He said the Association would work not only with minorities but even with the majority community, to remove “misconceptions about Islam and Muslims from the minds of the people.”

Mr. Ashfaq Motlekar, the National Correspondent of AIDCA spoke of conducting regular training programs for the youth to train them in equipping themselves with the knowledge of law to pursue their legal rights when they are violated.

One such “Legal Aid Workshop” is to be organized on Saturday, wherein experts from legal fields are to conduct workshop at the city’s Best Western Hotel Sahil, said Mr. Ashraf Mohamedy, the National Spokesperson of AIDCA. “Participants from all over India are expected to benefit from the same,” he added.

The Members of the Representative Council of AIDCA are: Ashraf Mohamedy, Idafa, Mumbai, Ashfaq Motlekar, Mumbai, Zaid Patel, IIC, Mumbai, Imran Khalil, Al Birr, Mumbai, Dawood Vaid, Burooj Realization, Mumbai, Umar Shariff, DIET, Karnataka, Moinudeen, Gujarat, Adv. Faiz Syed, Aurangabad, Alam, Kolkata, Mohsin Khan, Mumbai and Mujeebur Rahmaan, Tamil Nadu.

The coordination office of the Association is located at Al Birr Foundation, Mumbai.

On being R.K. Narayan

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The following is an excerpt from a series of interviews Susan Ram and N. Ram of The Hindu did with R.K. Narayan for over a decade. The author, it is said never liked the concept of a formal interview, so what follows is the result of “indirect method of dropping in for a chat.”

“Don’t seek to interview him. Don’t turn on your tape recorder. Don’t ask direct questions or ask him to explain his work. Just chat with him. Talk about yourself when he asks you questions.”

RK Narayan

On writing

I had no difficulty in writing. I had difficulty in finding someone to publish what I wrote. I’ve always written without any strain whatever, you know, without any deliberate effort. But to get a thing printed or published was very difficult in those days. In those days the difficulty was that the type of stories I was writing made no sense to my readers. It was a very disappointing reading for most of them, but I persisted because I couldn’t write any other way.

They were used to things like romance and plot – and everything was abolished in my style of work. And most of them would say, “What’s there in that story? There’s something interesting that you’ve written, but there’s no ending, there’s no powerful climax or anything. What are you driving at?”

But now I think the critics and readers are able to see my point of view. And they get a lot more out of the stories that I would have suspected. Because a piece of writing is not a thing a writer can judge fully himself. It’s for others – the impact, what it stirs up in your mind. It’s all very different.

On writing in English

I was not aware that I was writing in a foreign language. All those books (indicating the bookcase), they’ve influenced me and they’re in English. I could write more easily in English and I was fascinated with the London literary life of those days, the Thirties, when Shaw and Belloc and Bennet and Chesterton and a whole lot of others had interesting encounters. News about them would always be there.

On the writer’s struggle

When I look back at it, I wonder at my foolhardiness in deciding to become a full-time writer (in 1930).

For almost all writers, it’s a struggle. Tamil writers are now in this condition…. In spite of your foolishness, you survive if you have to. And you write, whatever the quality of the writing. There is some drive; otherwise, why write?

You must write. It’s not enough to start by thinking. You become a writer by writing. It’s a yoga.

On the creation of Malgudi

I really can’t explain its persistence, you know. Because it was just a casual idea. It’s not a fixation, a fixed geography. It has grown, developed. I think it has very elastic borders, elastic frontiers, elastic everything – with a few fixed points, that’s all….

I had an idea of a railway station, a very small railway station. You’ve seen the kind of thing, with a platform and trees and a station-master. The railway station to which Swami goes to watch the trains arrive and depart: that was the original idea with which I started Swami and Friends. But in the actual book it comes last, it’s at the end of the story.

And then what happened was I was thinking of a name for the railway station. It should have a name-board. And I didn’t want to have an actual name which could be found in a railway time-table. I wanted to avoid that, because some busybody was likely to say, “This place is not there, that shop he has mentioned is not there.” If it’s a real town it’s a nuisance for a writer.

And while I was worrying about this problem, the idea came to me – Malgudi just seemed to hurl into view. It has no meaning. There is a place called Lalgudi near Trichy and a place called Mangudi near Kumbakonam or somewhere. But Malgudi is nowhere. So that was very helpful. It satisfied my requirement.

On change in Malgudi

Instead of listening to a temple piper, people probably have a transistor radio. And then, instead of a transistor they may have a three-in-one recorder and play cassettes. You can watch villagers playing cassettes in the fields nowadays. But people have not changed.

Human types have remained the same. So they remain, my characters. At least in Malgudi there can’t be much change. And there are hundreds of little places like Malgudi everywhere.

On how his writing has developed

The development of my writing? That I can’t very precisely analyse now. It’s not possible to give any accurate analysis. But I think it gains in depth as the years go and your experiences change. I won’t say it has gained in profundity or literary value, but in some sense, in depth, there is a little more in the recent stories than in the previous.

I don’t know if it’s a development or a retrograde step. I’m not sure. I’m really unselfconscious about my writing. It was really unconscious writing earlier. Even now, when I write, I’m not sure as to what’s coming. But technically I’ve a little more control over my writing now.

On ‘purposive’ writing

Everyone thinks he’s a writer with a mission. Myself, absolutely not. I write only because I’m interested in a type of character and I’m amused mostly by the seriousness with which each man takes himself. I try to write from the inside, of even a villain, and then see his point of view, that’s all. Some amount of identification… their identity is recognised. I can’t be hostile because I see it from his point of view. That’s why even if I write about a politician, it would be a justification for him (laughs).

Politics is the least interesting aspect of life, in my view. I don’t attach too much importance to it as literary material. Because most politically inspired novels die in good time. They don’t last. It’s only the human elements which last, not the political concepts or the pressures. They become just insignificant.

On Talkative Man

Talkative Man – he’s in many of the short stories: where some incredible experience has to be narrated, it’s the Talkative Man who talks. He’s a good link, he can link people up, he’s a man who goes through the city like a breeze everywhere, who knows lots of people. He links up a lot of background and personalities and landmarks very convincingly. Everybody is his friend.

On being around

You see, fifty years is nothing. It might look very big for you, who are quite young. But when fifty years end, you find it just the same – the illusion of time, you know. We are what we are. Whether you grow older, more decrepit, inside, the sense of awareness, of being is the same throughout.

I don’t see any difference between myself when I was seven years old in Madras and now here in Mysore. The chap inside is the same, unchanged. Others see a little baldness, a little stooping and say, how’d you manage to live at all?

Father, son buried alive as house collapses amid heavy rain and superstition

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bangalore-rain

Bangalore: A 37-year-old man and his son were buried alive after a two-storey house collapsed in Jogupalya in Ulsoor amid heavy rains.

The deceased — M. Sumbramani and his 10-year-old son — ran out of the house to safety when they heard the neighbouring building collapse, but went in again to take out a bike and a bicycle when the wall collapsed on them. Two residents of the building that collapsed – Komathi Devi (51) and her son Kiran (16) – escaped with minor injuries.

A police officer said, “It was a 60-year-old building and a creeper had grown along its wall till the terrace. The occupants of the house had refused to remove the creeper as they considered it sacred. The creeper had dampened the wall which made it feeble and weak.”

However, Komathi Devi was adamant about residing in the building, neighbours said.

In another incident, a 40-year-old priest at the Sri Sai Temple in Basaveshwara Nagar in West Bangalore was electrocuted on Thursday morning when he was trying to pump out water that had collected in the cellar of the temple due to heavy overnight rain. The priest Shankar stepped on a live electric wire in the cellar while pumping out water and was killed at the spot.

Silencing Caste, Sanitising Oppression – Understanding ’Swachh Bharat Abhiyan’

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– by Subhash Gatade

What is important to note that the Conference of the Untouchables which met in Mahad resolved that no untouchable shall skin the dead animals of the Hindus, shall carry it or eat the carrion. The object of these resolutions was twofold. The one object was to foster among the Untouchables self respect and self esteem. This was a minor object. The major object was to strike a blow at the Hindu Social Order.

The Hindu Social Order is based upon a division of labour which reserves for the Hindus clean and respectable jobs and assigns to the untouchables dirty and mean jobs and thereby clothes the Hindus with dignity and heaps ignominy upon the untouchables.

(The Revolt of the Untouchables, Excerpted from Essays on Untouchables and Untouchability : Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, Vol 5 (Mumbai : Govt of Maharashtra, 1989, 256-58)

  1. The inauguration of the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, (Clean India Campaign) with much fanfare, with ministers, bureaucrats and others holding Jhadoos evoked an interesting reaction from a ragpicker Sanjay who lives in Mehrauli with his parents. “These are the same people from whose houses we pick up garbage every day. This is part of our life. We don’t really understand why they are making it such a big deal,” (PM’s Swachch Bharat Abhiyan has no place for Delhi’s 3 lakh rag pickers,Mallica Joshi , Hindustan Times New Delhi, October 03, 2014))

Sanjay happens to be one among a population of around 3,00,000 rag pickers (according to rough estimates) in Delhi, who are largely invisible and as expected live on the margins of society. It is a different matter that they play a major role in garbage management – right from collecting waste to segregating it for recycling. NGOs working with them feel that the city can easily come to a halt without them because they are the one ’who perform the basic task of taking garbage from people’s houses to dumps in most parts of the city.’ At the time of Commonwealth Games held in Delhi few years back, the then state government had even provided few hundred ragpickers with dress and safety equipment etc ’acknowledging’ the services they rendered to keep the city clean.

Time seems to have changed now. As the above mentioned report further adds :

’The government seems to be in complete denial of their presence even as they reap the benefits of their hard work.’ (-do-)

The complete marginalisation of the ragpickers from the much tommed tommed Swachh Bharat Abhiyan does not appear surprising. It is rather symptomatic of the many other ’silences’, ’erasures’ which accompanied its launching. While analysts have rightly pointed out the manner in which legacy of the Mahatma is being ’reduced’ to cleanliness obliterating his lifelong struggle against colonialism and communalisms of every kind and for an inclusive polity not much attention has been paid to the fact that the thrust of the campaign is to project a very samras (harmonious) picture of our society where cleanliness or the lack of it is connected with our ’duty’ (Kartavya) towards ’Bharat Mata’.

Perhaps one can have a look at the oath administered by the PM to everyone who joined this campaign.

“Ab hamara kartavya hain ki gandagi ko dhoor karke Bharat Mata ki sewa karein.” (Now, it is our duty to serve Mother India by removing the dirt.)

Did anyone hear any word about the pernicious ’caste system’ during all the media frenzy which witnessed its launching ? Definitely not. In fact caste and related discriminations have become so common and ingrained in our psyche that the media did not find anything newsworthy in it. Perhaps when every other officer was getting ready to have his/her own moment with a broom in hand the mediawallahs decided not to talk about this unique system of hierarchy – legitimised by the wider society and sanctified by religion -which has condemned a section of its own people to the ’profession’ of cleaning, sweeping and scavenging. What to tell the outside world that half of India still defecates in the open and there are lakhs of people who are still engaged in this ’profession’ of shit collection. In fact, we have designated communities who have been ’forced’ in this dehumanising work since centuries together

On closer look we can find that they go by many names in various parts of the country. As Gita Ramaswamy discusses in her book ’India Stinking’ (Navayana, 2007) : They are Bhangi, Valmiki, methar, chuhra in Delhi, Dhanuk in UP, han, hadi in Bengal; mehtar, bhangi in Assam; methar in Hyderabad; Paki in coastal Andhra ; thotti in Tamil Nadu; mira, lalbegi, chuhra, balashahi in Punjab. Names may be different but they share the same fate : they belong to the bottom of the Hindu social hierarchy and are untouchables. And under the caste hierarchy, castes that consider themselves superior does enjoy a wider range of choice of occupations but the erstwhile untouchables, today’s dalits have the least desirable occupations – removal of human excreta, cleaning, sweeping, leatherwork, skinning of dead animals, removal of human and cattle corpses, rearing of pigs etc.

We know that despite sixty plus years of independence, while moneybags here can easily compete with moneybags in the advanced world, while rulers of India yearn to make 21 st century as India’s century, there has not been any qualitative change in the lifeworlds of the majority of the dalits who are still lying at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Yes, a small section among them has definitely taken advantage of the affirmative action programme and is on the path of upward mobility, but for the majority amongst them, their is no qualitative change in their situation marked by deprivation and discrimination.

2. Interestingly in his hurry to ’do a Gandhi’ Mr Modi launched the campaign from the same Valmiki Basti where Gandhi had stayed for a while, without bothering that such a move would further stigmatise the community. And this at a time when there is a great churning going on within the community especially its youth to leave this ’profession’ and take up other dignified work. Not very many people outside the community are even aware that there is growing talk of ’Jhadu Chodo, Kalam Uthao ( Leave the Broom, Hold the Pen) reverberating within them. Organisations like Safai Karmachari Andolan and others have even undertaken the task of demolition of dry latrines at various places and there have been occasions when people have spontaneously come forward to collectively burn the broom and basket which is used in scavenging.

While media did not bother to question the venue chosen by PM to start his campaign, many close watchers of the situation did not feel surprised as they knew how Mr Modi, looks at this occupation, which finds mention in his book ’Karmyog’ where he calls it as some kind of “spiritual experience”.

Not very people know that it was the year 2007 when collection of Narendra Modi’s speeches to IAS officials at various points of time were compiled in a book form named ’Karmyog’ and were published by the Gujarat government. Gujarat State Petroleum Corporation, a top ranking PSU was roped in to fund 5,000 copies of the book. (http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/true-lies/entry/modi-s-spiritual-potion-to-woo-karmayogis). Sample one of his speech, where talking about the Safai Kamdars Modi exhorts:

“I do not believe that they have been doing this job just to sustain their livelihood. Had this been so, they would not have continued with this type of job generation after generation….At some point of time, somebody must have got the enlightenment that it is their (Valmikis’) duty to work for the happiness of the entire society and the Gods; that they have to do this job bestowed upon them by Gods; and that this job of cleaning up should continue as an internal spiritual activity for centuries. This should have continued generation after generation. It is impossible to believe that their ancestors did not have the choice of adopting any other work or business.” (Page 48-49, Karmyog)

Later Modi’s remark got published in the Times of India in mid-November 2007, which were translated and republished in few Tamil newspapers. There was a massive reaction of Dalits in Tamil Nadu for calling their menial job “spiritual experience”. Modi’s effigies were burnt in different parts of the state. Sensing trouble Modi immediately withdrew 5,000 copies of the book, but still sticked to his opinion. Two years later, addressing 9,000-odd safai karmacharis, (cleanliness workers) he likened the safai karmacharis’ job of cleaning up others dirt’ to that of a temple priest. He told them,

“A priest cleans a temple every day before prayers, you also clean the city like a temple. You and the temple priest work alike.”

It would have been enlightening for Mr Modi if he could have browsed through Dr Ambedkar’s writings just to know how he had reacted when Mahatma Gandhi had similarly praised ’scavenging as the noblest service to society’ and said ’How sacred is this work of cleanliness !’(Navajivan, 8 th January 1925)

To preach that poverty is good for the Shudra and for none else, to preach that scavenging is good for the untouchables and for none else and to make them accept these onerous impositions as voluntary purposes of life, by appeal to their failings is an outrage and a cruel joke on the helpless classes which none but Mr Gandhi can perpetuate with equanimity and impunity. In this connection one is reminded of the words of Voltaire ..:”Oh! mockery to say to people that the sufferings of some brings joy to others and works good to the whole. What solace is it to a dying man to know that from his decaying body a thousand worms will come into life.”

(What Congress and Gandhi have done to the Untouchables, Dr Ambedkar : Writings and Speeches, Vol 9, (Mumbai : Govt of Maharashtra, 1990) P. 290-93

3. The ’silencing’ or ’sanitising’ of the discourse of caste in the packaging and presentation of Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, or the dominant discourse around it reminds one of the persistence of untouchability in Gujarat and the manner in which it was made to ’disppear’ sometime back . (As an aside it may be mentioned here that Modi served as chief minister of Gujarat from the year 2001 to 2014.)

Appears unbelievable?

Perhaps you can have a look at a Gujarat government sponsored report titled “Impact of Caste Discrimination and Distinctions on Equal Opportunities: A Study of Gujarat”, authored by Centre for Environment Planning and Technology University (CEPT) University scholars led by Prof R Parthasarathy, which calls caste discrimination a matter of “perceptions”.

In his blog ’True Lies’ senior journalist Rajiv Shah (http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/true-lies/entry/untouchability-and-modi-s-babus) has provided detailed critique of this study.

To put in a nutshell this CEPT report was a governmental response to an exhaustive study titled ’Understanding Untouchability’ done by Ahmedabad based NGO ’Navsarjan Trust’ with the help of Robert F Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. (2009) which demonstrated with concrete data the wide prevalence of untouchability both in public and private spheres in interaction between scheduled castes (SCs) and non-scheduled castes (non-SCs), as well as within SCs: among the several jatis in rural Gujarat.

It is important to note that the results of the Navsarjan study were widely covered by the media .

Looking at the fact that the ongoing debate had the potential of putting a spanner in the well cultivated image of a Samras (harmonious) Gujarat under Modi, a panicky government asked CEPT to review and verify Navsarjan’s findings. In fact, the government seemed so keen to give a clean chit to itself that it adopted a two pronged approach to tackle the uncomfortable situation in which it found itself. Apart from commissioning the above mentioned study it constituted a committee under the chairmanship of the then minister for social justice, Fakirbhai Vaghela and secretaries of different concerned departments to refute the findings of the report. The government instructed its officers to get affidavits from scheduled caste village residents regarding non-existence of untouchability.

Commenting on the report Rajiv Shah says that

“[t]he nearly 300-page report, ..far from being a review of “Understanding Untouchability”, is more of an effort to justify the evil practice.”

As opposed to the survey of 1,589 villages done by Navsarjan, the CEPT team was made to survey just five villages, dig out a plethora of caste-wise data on agriculture, irrigation, employment and distribution of government schemes but were instructed not to collect any data on “”caste discrimination” – a term used by them in lieu of untouchability.

The reluctance of the scholars to even mention the U(ntouchability) word can be gauged from the observations made by leading sociologist Ghanshyam Shah as well, who has also written a critique of the CEPT report ’Understanding or ignoring untouchability? How Gujarat government-sponsored study examines discrimination in a ‘very casual way’’ (in www.counterview.org, Nov 13, 2013) :

..[i]n the scholars’ view (and that of the government) there is nothing wrong if the Dalits are forced to carry own vessels or are made to be served at fag end of the festivity. In fact, if the scholars are to be believed, Dalit elders advise the “younger ones” not to participate in village festivals like Navratri or Garba, celebrated in other localities, “for fear of possible quarrel with non-Dalits.” The youth agree in order to maintain social peace and order. To quote from the report, “Those Dalit youth who go there, do so as spectators and not participate in Garba…”

He also adds :

“CEPT has completely ignored to study the practice of untouchability. Perhaps for them like the Government of Gujarat it is a non-issue. And, they have carried out mainly a socio-economic survey in five villages. The authors do not feel the need to argue why they have confined their study to socio-economic survey. Why have they not correlated socio-economic data with the presence or absence of untouchability?”

While the CEPT experts could not discover untouchability in the five villages covered, the Navsarjan team which toured these villages in June 2013 found how the dalits live under subjugation and a state of helplessness as they know that the government would not protect them if they assert for their rights. Ghanshyam Shah adds:

In fact, an important omission from the CEPT report was that of Valmikis themselves, who are considered lowest in the social ladder under a Varnacracy. As opposed to these worst victims of untouchability, the report focuses on the Vankars, a “socially acceptable” Dalit community, a weaving class.

The omission of Valmikis in a report commissioned by the government cannot be considered inadvertent. Their still remaining confined largely to the work of sweeping and cleaning ; collecting and handling dust, garbage and filth of the cities, towns and villages to make them livable for other dwellers and in the process facing daily humiliations and even deaths by ’accidents’ or getting afflicted with occupational diseases is a reality which cannot be ignored anymore. Perhaps the scholars might have felt that their sheer presence in a governmental report was anachronous to the media propelled image of ’a best-governed state, occupying number one position in the country on ‘development’’.

4. Commenting on the ’Clean India Campaign’ Rohit Prajapati, an environmental activist from Gujarat, has raised an altogether different point in his writeup ’Mr. Modi Preaches a Clean India, But His Record on Waste management and Pollution in Gujarat is Dirty’ (http://sacw.net/article9679.html). He has discussed a similar campaign launched by him in 2007 calling it ’Nirmal Gujarat -2007’ and looked at the track record of his government in controlling pollution. According to him Modi similarly made ’..tall claims during that campaign. But reality is best seen in Ahmedabad at illegal solid waste dumping site, the ‘Gyaspur-Pirana Dumping Site’ – a Waste Mountain near Sabarmati River adjacent to the main road.’

The writeup discusses basic facts as they were revealed in the ‘Report of the Task Force on Waste to Energy’ dated 12 May 2014 by the Planning Commission of India which states

“As per CPCB report 2012 – 13 municipal areas in the country generate 1,33,760 metric tonnes per day of MSW, of which only 91,152 TPD waste is collected and 25,884 TPD treated.”..“Further, if the current 62 million tonnes annual generation of MSW continues to be dumped without treatment; it will need 3,40,000 cubic meter of landfill space everyday (1240 hectare per year). Considering the projected waste generation of 165 million tonnes by 2031, the requirement of land for setting up landfill for 20 years (considering 10 meter high waste pile) could be as high as 66 thousand hectares of precious land, which our country cannot afford to waste.”

It would be opportune here to quote a large extract from the said writeup here :

Mr. Modi, things are not as simple as you say. This waste generation figure covers only 31.15% population of India. Considering the waste generation figures of all of India, these figures will be even more daunting. The Planning Commission (which Mr. Modi wishes to abolish) of India’s report further states “A study, of the status of implementation of the MSW Rules 2000 by the mandated deadline by the States, was carried out in class 1 cities of the country. It revealed that in 128 cities except for street sweeping and transportation, compliance was less than 50% and in respect of disposal compliance was a dismal 1.4 %.”What about the government’s major role in policy making for the reduction of waste and implementation of ‘The Municipal Solid Wastes (Management and Handling) Rules 2000’? Your track record in the implementation of these rules in the Gujarat is worst.

The consistent follow up by the pollution-affected people, people’s organisations and NGOs regarding the increasing pollution levels in the industrial areas of India forced the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and the State Pollution Control Board in 1989 to initiate the process of indexing the critically polluted areas. At that time 24 industrial areas, including Vapi, Ankleshwar, Ludhiana, were declared ‘critically polluted’. In 2009 the CPCB and IIT-Delhi, in consistence with the demands of the people’s organisation’s working on environmental issues decided to use a new method of ‘indexing the pollution levels’ of these areas, which is now known as the ‘Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index’ (CEPI). The CEPI includes air, water, land pollution and health risks to the people living in the area. However, our demand has been to include the health of the workers, productivity of land and quality of food / agriculture produce in the index since the presence of high levels of chemicals and heavy metals in food produce has severe health implications. This is affecting not only people living around the industrial area but anyone consuming it – hence not restricting the impact to the particular industrial area.

In December 2009 the CEPI of 88 polluted industrial clusters was measured; it was then that the CPCB and the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MoEF) of Government of India were forced to declare 43 of those as ‘critically polluted clusters’ and another 32 industrial areas as ‘severely polluted clusters’.[6] Following this study the MoEF on 13 January 2010 was forced to issue a moratorium (prohibition on opening new industries and/or increasing the production capacity of the existing industries) on the 43 critically polluted areas. Similar reports were prepared by CPCB in 2011 and 2013 but these reports are completely ignored by past government and also by Modi Government.

In the concluding part of the article the writer discusses how after assuming reins of power, Mr Modi instead of undertaking the task of improving environment of these 88 industrial clusters, the government led by him started ’lifting of the moratorium of industrial cluster like Ghaziabad (UP), Indore (M.P.), Jharsuguda (Orissa), Ludhiana (Punjab), Panipat (Haryana), Patancheru – Bollaram (A.P.), Singrauli (UP & MP) and Vapi (Gujarat) as a first order of business on 10 June 2014. He underlines Vapi’s track records which demand more ‘stringent action’ against the polluting industries of Vapi & concerned officers of Gujarat Pollution Control Board and definitely not lifting of moratorium from Vapi. According to him ’the murky politics and economics of ‘GDP growth’ continue to prevail over the cause of ‘life and livelihood’ of ordinary people and ‘environment & conservation.’

His write-up concludes with few more figures and a BIG question:

In 2009, the Ankleswar’s industrial area, with 88.50 CEPI, topped the list of ‘critically polluted areas’ of India.

In 2011 and 2013, Vapi industrial area, with CEPI of 85.31, topped this list.

Thus Gujarat is able to top in 2009 in ‘critically polluted areas’ in India and continues to maintain its position in 2011 & 2013.

The Government of Gujarat deliberately ignored to comment or engages ever on these issues.

Mr. Modi what about the clean up of these industrial clusters of India? Do you have any plan to clean up this CRITICALLY and SEVERELY POLLUTED INDUSTRIAL CLUSTERS OF INDIA?

5. To conclude, one can talk of similar silences, erasures if we probe further deep.

But that is not the aim of the article. The nationwide campaign which has been taken up is going to involve tremendous human as well as financial resources. We are being told that government employees are being exhorted to devote at least 100 hours every year – or two hours a week – to do this work and send proof to their seniors. It is going to cost 620 billion rupees ($10bn; £6.1bn) – the government has earmarked 146 m rupees and expects to get the remaining amount from the corporate sector, international development organisations and elsewhere. It is also being said that main goal of the programme, is to end open defecation in the country – as nearly half of India’s 1.2 billion people have no access to toilets.

All sounds good and especially very soothing to the ears of NRIs who seem to be worried over the image India carries in the comity of nations.

But all these efforts do not seem to go anywhere because as we already said there is a conscious attempt not to address the key issues.

It appears that Mr Modi seems to be in a big hurry to leave an impact on history.

He might be successful like his predecessors. If today we remember or associate Garibi Hatao with Ms Indira Gandhi or ’Age of Computers’ with Rajeev Gandhi, similarly future generations would remember or associate the ’Clean India Campaign’ with Modi while still debating the ’dirtiest country in the world’ tag associated with the country.

Subhash Gatade is the author of Pahad Se Uncha Aadmi (2010), Godse’s Children: Hindutva Terror in India,(2011) and The Saffron Condition: The Politics of Repression and Exclusion in Neoliberal India (2011). He is also the Convener of New Socialist Initiative.

Boy set ablaze by army men in Hyderabad dies

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army-ablaze-hyderabad

Hyderabad: An 11-year-old boy, who was set ablaze by unidentified military men, died at a hospital here Thursday, police said.

Sheikh Mustafauddin, who was found with critical burn injuries at garrison area in Mehdipatnam in the heart of the city Wednesday, died at DRDO Apollo Hospital.

The body was shifted to government-run Osmania General Hospital for autopsy. Police have tightened security around the military area to prevent any untoward incident.

The boy, a student of a madarsa, told a magistrate in his dying declaration that some army men poured kerosene over him and set him ablaze.

A resident of Siddiq Nagar, Sheikh was called inside the garrison area by two military men. They allegedly beat him and later set him ablaze. He sustained 90 percent burns and was found lying near the main gate of the garrison.

A case of attempt to murder was registered against unidentified military men at Humayunagar police station. It will now be turned into a murder case.

Police formed a special team to conduct the investigation. Hyderabad police commissioner Mahender Reddy said the guilty will not be spared.

The incident led to tension in the area as people came out on streets to stage a protest against the military personnel. Police used baton charge the protestors to disperse them.

The army authorities have denied involvement of any military man in the incident.

“On investigation, it is found that this allegation is absolutely false and no army personnel is involved in this incident. The army condemns this act. All necessary assistance is being provided to the police authorities to carry out a detailed investigation to arrive at the truth,” said a statement from the army authorities.

(IANS)

Israel’s occupation is more complex than a Genocide

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Israel-Genocide

– by Jonathan Cook

Israeli officials were caught in a revealing lie late last month as the country celebrated the Jewish New Year. Shortly after declaring the most popular boy’s name in Israel to be “Yosef”, the interior ministry was forced to concede that the top slot was actually filled by “Mohammed”.

That small deceit coincided with Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas’s speech at the United Nations. He outraged Israelis by referring to Israel’s slaughter of more than 2,100 Palestinians – most of them civilians – in Gaza over the summer as “genocide”.

Both incidents served as a reminder of the tremendous power of a single word.

Most Israelis are barely able to contemplate the possibility that their Jewish state could be producing more Mohammeds than Moshes. At the same time, and paradoxically, Israel can point to the sheer number of “Mohammeds” to demonstrate that at worst it is eradicating the visibility of a Muslim name, certainly not its bearers.

As distressing as it is, hundreds of dead in Gaza is far from the industrial-scale murder of the Nazi Holocaust.

But the idea that Israel is committing genocide may not be quite as hyperbolic as is assumed. Last month a “jury” featuring international law experts at a people’s court, known as the Russell Tribunal, into Israel’s recent attack on Gaza concluded that Israel was guilty of “incitement to genocide”. The panel argued that Israel’s long-term collective punishment of Palestinians was designed to “inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the incremental destruction of the Palestinians as a group”.

The tribunal’s language intentionally echoed that of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and lawyer who after fleeing Nazi Europe succeeded in introducing the term “genocide” into international law.

Lemkin and the UN convention’s drafters understood that genocide did not require death camps; it could also be achieved gradually through intentional and systematic abuse and neglect. Their definition raises troubling questions about Israel’s treatment of Gaza, aside from military attacks. Does, for example, forcing the enclave’s two million inhabitants to depend on acquifers polluted with seawater constitute genocide?

The real problem with Mr Abbas’s use of the term – given that it conflicts with popular notions of genocide – is that it made him an easy target for critics. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the Palestinian leader of “incitement”. The Israeli left, meanwhile, decried his wild and unhelpful exaggeration.

But the critics themselves have contributed more heat than light.

Not only do experts like Richard Falk and John Dugard view Israel’s actions in genocide-like terms, but notable Israeli scholars have done so too. The late Baruch Kimmerling invented a word, “politicide”, to convey more safely the idea of an Israeli genocide against Palestinians.

Israel has nonetheless successfully ring-fenced itself from the critical lexicon applied to comparable situations around the globe.

In conflicts where a mass expulsion of an ethnic or national group occurs, it is rightly identified as ethnic cleansing. In Israel’s case, however, respectable historians still equivocate over the events of 1948, even though more than 80 per cent of Palestinians were forced out by Israel as it established a Jewish state on their homeland.

Similarly with “apartheid”. For decades anyone who used the word about Israel was dismissed as an extremist or anti-Semite. Only in the last few years – and chiefly because of former US president Jimmy Carter – has the word gained a tentative foothold.

Even then, its main use is as a warning rather than a description of Israel’s behaviour: diehard adherents of two states aver that Israel is in danger of becoming an apartheid state at some indefinable moment if it does not separate from the Palestinians.

Instead, we are told to suffice with the label “occupation”. But that implies a temporary state of affairs, a transition before normality is restored – precisely the opposite of what is happening in Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, where the occupation is entrenching, morphing and metastasising.

Those guarding the critical lexicon strip us of a terminology to convey the appalling reality faced by Palestinians, not just as individuals but as a national group. In truth, Israel’s strategy incorporates variants of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide.

Observers, including the European Union, concede that Israel continues with incremental ethnic cleansing – though they prefer the more obscure “forcible transfer” – of Palestinians from so-called Area C, nearly two-thirds of the West Bank.

Israel has mastered, too, a sophisticated apartheid – partly veiled by its avoidance of the more visual aspects of segregation associated with South Africa – that grabs resources, just like its famous cousin, for one ethnic-national group, Jews, at the expense of another, Palestinians.

But unlike South African apartheid, whose fixed legal and institutional systems of separation gradually became torpid and unwieldy, Israel’s remains dynamic and responsive. Few observers know, for example, that almost all residential land in Israel is off-limits to Palestinian citizens, enforced through vetting committees recently given sanction by the Israeli courts.

And what to make of a plan just disclosed by the Israeli media indicating that Mr Netanyahu and his allies have been secretly plotting to force many Palestinians into Sinai, with the US arm-twisting the Egyptians into agreement? If true, the bombing campaigns of the past six years may be better understood as softening-up operations before a mass expulsion from Gaza.

Such a policy would certainly satisfy Lemkin’s definition of genocide.

One day doubtless, a historian will coin a word to describe Israel’s unique strategy of incrementally destroying the Palestinian people. Sadly, by then it may be too late to help the Palestinians.

Jonathan Cook is a Nazareth- based journalist and winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. http://www.jonathan-cook.net/

China just overtook the U.S as the World's largest Economy

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Photo: Reuters

Photo: Reuters

– by Mike Bird, Business Insider

Sorry, America. China just overtook the US to become the world’s largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He’d also alerted us back in April this year that it was all about to happen.

Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here. The simple logic is that prices aren’t the same in each country: a shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than San Francisco, so it’s not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist’s Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.

So the IMF measures both GDP in market exchange terms, and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world’s biggest economy.

We’ve just gone past that cross-over on the chart below, according to the IMF. By the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world’s purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion):

IMF, Google Public Data Explorer

It’s not all sore news for the US. It’ll be some time yet until the lines cross over in raw terms, not adjusted for purchasing power. By that measure, China still sits more than $6.5 trillion lower than the US, and isn’t likely to overtake for quite some time:

IMF, Google Public Data Explorter

But in terms of the raw market value of China’s currency, it still has a long way to go.

Contractors ready to cash in on ISIS war

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Obama pledged that the war against ISIS won’t be fought with U.S. ground troops. He didn’t say anything about contractors, who see this as “the next big meal ticket.”

ISIS

– by Eli Lake, The Daily Beast

America’s rapidly-expanding war against ISIS won’t involve large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground, President Obama is promising. And it’s clear that airstrikes alone won’t beat back the extremist group. Which means that if the President wants to have any hope of meeting his far-reaching goal of destroying ISIS, he’s going to have to rely on private military contractors.

At least, that’s what the contractors are hoping.

At the height of the Iraq war, these firms hired hundreds of thousands of people: guns-for-hire, IT geeks, logistics specialists, interrogators, and short order cooks to ladle out the slop at the military cafeteria. Over time, some of those contractors became the symbol for everything that was wrong with the Iraq war: hugely expensive, ineffective, and indifferent to Iraqi life. Contractors were at the middle of the war’s biggest scandals, from Abu Ghraib to Nissour Square. And it was the abductions and murder of Blackwater contractors that sparked one of Iraq’s biggest battles.

None of the five current and former contractors who spoke with The Daily Beast expected a replay of last decade’s Iraq war. But they all said a major opportunity was coming—both for them, and for Obama, who could use the private armies as a way to conceal just how many people will be fighting in this new conflict.

“Iraq this time around is not going to be as big as it was before,” said Roger Carstens, a former special operations officer who has served as a contracted military adviser in Somalia and Afghanistan. “That said, this new war will present an opportunity for the companies that have a resident train and advising capability to contribute to this new effort.”

President Obama has asked Congress to authorize $500 million to train a new Syrian opposition out of Saudi Arabia. That money would be part of a $5 billion fund Obama requested this spring from Congress to help train and equip U.S. allies to fight terrorists.

One U.S. military contractor working in Iraq who asked not to be named said, “I can tell you the contractor-expat community is abuzz thinking this will lead to more work. We expect a much larger footprint than he is showing right now.”

Those expectations were whet earlier this summer, as ISIS was gaining ground in northern Iraq and the first U.S. special operations teams were arriving in Iraq, when the Pentagon asked military contractors to participate in two important surveys.

The first one, issued in July, asked the industry to give a rough estimate of the costs associated with building a new network of ten ground based communications satellite stations, known as VSATs in military lingo. VSATs were used by the U.S. military in the last decade throughout Iraq to provide forward operating bases with secure internet and voice communications.

The second one was more specific. It asked for estimates of the cost for “Security Assistance Mentors and Advisers” for Iraq’s ministry of defense and the Iraqi Counterterrorism Service.

A Pentagon spokeswoman told the Daily Beast that the notice was not meant to be a request for proposal or the formal opening of the bidding process, but rather a chance to gauge the interest and capabilities of contractors down the road.

But contractors tell The Daily Beast that these bureaucratic notices—plus a pledge from Obama to wage a long war against ISIS and train up Syrian and Iraqi fighters—represent a business opportunity for an industry that has shrunk in recent years.

In 2008 there were 242,558 contractors working in the countries for U.S. Central Command, the area that includes Iraq and Afghanistan as well as Somalia, Pakistan and Yemen, three countries where the United States has helped train local forces and conducted air strikes, according to the Pentagon’s official estimate.

That was during the height of the last round of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. By this July, that number had shrunk to 66,123, according to the Pentagon’s latest estimate of military contractors working in the countries covered by Central Command, with only 14,634 contractors operating outside of Afghanistan.

But that’s only a fraction of America’s privatized security apparatus operating overseas. The State Department also offers billions of dollars to conduct security for diplomats and other officials.  In 2011, the State Department awarded Triple Canopy a four year deal worth up to $1.5 billion to provide security for the airport in Baghdad, U.S. diplomats and other Americans in the country. A State Department audit of the contract (PDF) found that at a minimum the State Department overpaid for those services by millions.

“There has been consolidation after conflicts,” said Doug Brooks, the president emeritus of the International Stability Operations Association, a trade association for professional military contractors. “There is going to be business, you could say these are shoes instead of boots on the ground. But as in most cases these are going to be local faces who will be hired by these companies, who bring professionalism and training. They have been there already helping to build up the air force in Iraq. It won’t be like the past ten years, but there will be growth in services.”

The shrinking market for military contractors led some of them to seek new patrons. In 2010, for example, an African based military contractor named Saracen began training an anti-piracy force in Somalia with funding from the United Arab Emirates. When this reporter visited the base in 2012, it was a privately-run outpost in Puntland with its own electricity generator, barracks, armory with former South African military officers giving basic training to locals.

But that experience led to some instability. After one of the South African trainers was murdered in 2012 by one of the recruits, the United Arab Emirates pulled out of the project.

One reason why the new war on ISIS won’t be like the old one against al Qaeda is because for now Obama has promised not to send ground forces to Iraq or Syria. The presence of U.S. forces overseas presents a number of opportunities for military contractors in providing everything from the dining facilities to the logistical transport for U.S. soldiers at war.

Also the budgets to fight al Qaeda and other groups expanded dramatically after 9/11 when many government institutions did not know exactly how to fight the new war. Blackwater—the private military firm founded by former NAVY SEAL Erik Prince—became a virtual extension of the CIA’s special activities division working to develop the deadly capability to target and kill al Qaeda operatives all over the world.

It was also Blackwater contractors working in Iraq to protect diplomatic convoys that shot what the Iraqi government said were 17 innocent protestors in the heart of Baghdad at Nisour Square. (This summer, in the U.S. trial of the contractors, former employees of the company said they were responding to fire from the crowd.)

The legacy of Nisour square contributed to the decision of the Iraqi government in 2011 to decline to offer legal immunity to U.S. soldiers and military contractors. Carstens said that any new military contracts for Iraq that would involve training units of soldiers would have to include iron-clad guarantees that the contractors themselves would not be targeted by Iraqi courts. “The companies will need to know that their contractors in Iraq and other places will have legal protections in case anything happens,” he said.

Iraq recently promised immunity for U.S. troops—and it’s likely Baghdad will do the same for contractors too. After all, Iraq’s government has also formally requested U.S. assistance in fighting ISIS and that help was clearly going to include military contractors.

“They are looking for the next big meal ticket and this could be it,” said Sean McFate, a former military contractor for Dyncorp and the author of The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order. “The things they will provide are logistical support, training or retraining security forces.”

McFate said contractors gave Obama the opportunity to accomplish tasks normally associated with the U.S. military without sending boots on the ground. He said the training missions in particular “would look like Iraqi military boots on the ground and not the U.S. military.” But he said, “It’s a political disguise. This is an industry that is a proxy, it is creating the environment of security and protection without too many U.S. soldiers on the ground.”

Key Democrats, led by Hillary Clinton, leave no doubt that endless war is official U.S. doctrine

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Photo: Reuters

Photo: Reuters

– by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept

Long before Americans were introduced to the new 9/11 era super-villains called ISIS and Khorasan, senior Obama officials were openly and explicitly stating that America’s “war on terror,” already 12 years old, would last at least another decade. At first, they injected these decrees only anonymously; in late 2012, The Washington Post – disclosing the administration’s secret creation of a “disposition matrix” to decide who should be killed, imprisoned without charges, or otherwise “disposed” of – reported these remarkable facts:

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaida continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight. . . . That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism.”

In May, 2013, the Senate Armed Services Committee held a hearing on whether it should revise the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). A committee member asked a senior Pentagon official, Assistant Secretary Michael Sheehan, how long the war on terror would last; his reply: “At least 10 to 20 years.” At least. A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed afterward “that Sheehan meant the conflict is likely to last 10 to 20 more years from today — atop the 12 years that the conflict has already lasted.” As Spencer Ackerman put it: “Welcome to America’s Thirty Years War,” one which – by the Obama administration’s own reasoning – has “no geographic limit.”

Listening to all this, Maine’s independent Sen. Angus King said: “This is the most astounding and most astoundingly disturbing hearing that I’ve been to since I’ve been here. You guys have essentially rewritten the Constitution today.” Former Bush DOJ lawyer Jack Goldsmith – himself an ardent advocate of broad presidential powers – was at the hearing and noted that nobody even knows against whom this endless war is being waged: “Amazingly, there is a very large question even in the Armed Services Committee about who the United States is at war against and where, and how those determinations are made.”

All of that received remarkably little attention given its obvious significance. But any doubts about whether Endless War – literally – is official American doctrine should be permanently erased by this week’s comments from two leading Democrats, both former top national security officials in the Obama administration, one of whom is likely to be the next American president.

Leon Panetta, the long-time Democratic Party operative who served as Obama’s Defense Secretary and CIA Director, said this week of Obama’s new bombing campaign: “I think we’re looking at kind of a 30-year war.” Only in America are new 30-year wars spoken of so casually, the way other countries speak of weather changes. He added that the war “will have to extend beyond Islamic State to include emerging threats in Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and elsewhere.” And elsewhere: not just a new decades-long war with no temporal limits, but no geographic ones either. He criticized Obama – who has bombed 7 predominantly Muslim countries plus the Muslim minority in the Phillipines (almost double the number of countries Bush bombed) – for being insufficiently militaristic, despite the fact that Obama officials themselves have already instructed the public to think of The New War “in terms of years.”

Then we have Hillary Clinton (whom Panetta gushed would make a “great” president). At an event in Ottawa yesterday, she proclaimed that the fight against these “militants” will “be a long-term struggle” that should entail an “information war” as “well as an air war.” The new war, she said, is “essential” and the U.S. shies away from fighting it “at our peril.” Like Panetta (and most establishment Republicans), Clinton made clear in her book that virtually all of her disagreements with Obama’s foreign policy were the by-product of her view of Obama as insufficiently hawkish, militaristic and confrontational.

At this point, it is literally inconceivable to imagine the U.S. not at war. It would be shocking if that happened in our lifetime. U.S. officials are now all but openly saying this. “Endless War” is not dramatic rhetorical license but a precise description of America’s foreign policy.

It’s not hard to see why. A state of endless war justifies ever-increasing state power and secrecy and a further erosion of rights. It also entails a massive transfer of public wealth to the “homeland security” and weapons industry (which the US media deceptively calls the “defense sector”).

Just yesterday, Bloomberg reported: “Led by Lockheed Martin Group (LTM), the biggest U.S. defense companies are trading at record prices as shareholders reap rewards from escalating military conflicts around the world.” Particularly exciting is that “investors see rising sales for makers of missiles, drones and other weapons as the U.S. hits Islamic State fighters in Syria and Iraq”; moreover, “the U.S. also is the biggest foreign military supplier to Israel, which waged a 50-day offensive against the Hamas Islamic movement in the Gaza Strip.” ISIS is using U.S.-made ammunition and weapons, which means U.S. weapons companies get to supply all sides of The New Endless War; can you blame investors for being so giddy?

I vividly recall how, in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s killing, Obama partisans triumphantly declared that this would finally usher in the winding down of the War on Terror. On one superficial level, that view was understandable: it made sense if one assumes that the U.S. has been waging this war for its stated reasons and that it hopes to vanquish The Enemy and end the war.

But that is not, and never was, the purpose of the War on Terror. It was designed from the start to be endless. Both Bush and Obama officials have explicitly said that the war will last at least a generation. The nature of the “war,” and the theories that have accompanied it, is that it has no discernible enemy and no identifiable limits. More significantly, this “war” fuels itself, provides its own inexhaustible purpose, as it is precisely the policies justified in the name of Stopping Terrorism that actually ensure its spread (note how Panetta said the new U.S. war would have to include Libya, presumably to fight against those empowered by the last U.S. war there just 3 years ago).

This war – in all its ever-changing permutations – thus enables an endless supply of power and profit to flow to those political and economic factions that control the government regardless of election outcomes. And that’s all independent of the vicarious sense of joy, purpose and fulfillment which the sociopathic Washington class derives from waging risk-free wars, as Adam Smith so perfectly described in Wealth of Nations 235 years ago:

In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace.They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory from a longer continuance of the war. 

The last thing the Washington political class and the economic elites who control it want is for this war to end. Anyone who doubts that should just look at the express statements from these leading Democrats, who wasted no time at all seizing on the latest Bad Guys to justify literally decades more of this profiteering and war-making.

India and Pakistan must immediately stop ceasefire violations: PIPFPD, Aaghaz-e-Dosti

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India and Pakistan must immediately stop ceasefire violations: PIPFPD, Aaghaz-e-Dosti. © REUTERS/ Mukesh Gupta/Files

India and Pakistan must immediately stop ceasefire violations: PIPFPD, Aaghaz-e-Dosti. © REUTERS/ Mukesh Gupta/Files

New Delhi: While both India and Pakistan continue to accuse and shell each other of violating ceasefire agreement, killing more than 18 innocent civilians and injuring about 60 till date, civil society initiatives from both sides have reprimanded political forces and media for “worsening the situation” and have appealed both countries to restore peace and harmony.

Pakistan-India People’s Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD) and Aaghaz-e-Dosti, have appealed to both India and Pakistan to immediately stop ceasefire violations.

Since October 1, there has been an exchange of fire on the Indo-Pak border. It is not clear, who had started the ceasefire violation, but as usual, both countries claim to be only responding.

Terming the violation as a “matter of grave concern”, the New Delhi based PIPFPD, accused both the nations of resorting to ‘border nationalism’ to boil political temperature among the people. There are elections round the corner in key Indian states including Jammu and Kashmir and the political turmoil in Pakistan.

The Forum said that wars and military actions have yielded nothing but death, destruction and misery for the people of ‘divided’ Jammu and Kashmir. “The experience shows that the dispute will not be resolved through use of military means and can only be resolved through political dialogue based on mutual trust.”

“We call upon the governments of India and Pakistan to allow the United Nations Military Observers Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) to play an active role in monitoring the ceasefire. UNMOGIP is meant to supervise ceasefire line established under Karachi Agreement in 1949. Joint monitoring of the border is the best option in the prevailing situation. It is required at this point that a team of UNMOGIP brings out a status report after visiting affected areas on both sides of the border.”

Far away from the international border the waters of the Indian Ocean and the fishing activity their have been severely impacted by the increased number of orchestrated arrest of fishermen by India and Pakistan. In last one week Pakistan has caught 22 Indian boats and arrested around 125 Indian fishermen. Indian authorities have also arrested six Pakistani fishermen and one boat. This goes on to prove that the tension on the border is directly impacting fishing communities of both the countries.

Aaghaz-e-Dosti, a joint initiative of India-based Mission Bhartiyam and Pakistan-based The Catalyst – TC, reminded that this is not first time when such violations are happening, and said, “we must know that for both the countries, peace is of utmost importance and also our common need is to being focused on development rather than spending huge money of taxes for arms and ammunition. We also see that how through reducing such tensions, both of us can save billions of rupees and can divert this amount for development. We believe that any dispute can be resolved only by talk and mutual negotiation and agreements and not with violence. Any war like situation will only benefit arms manufacturing companies and will be harmful for both the countries, their development and their people.”

The organisation cautioned saying, “by such news of ceasefire violation, people become provoked, they also express their anger, but at the same time, we also view it as our right to know about the correct situation and the reasons responsible for it. We all have the right to know it because it is our money that is being spent and result in the loss of lives. Also, since such instances affect us, our society and harmony between our countries, we must be concerned about this and we must have the right to know the situation in detail.”

Both organisations appealed to both India and Pakistan to urgently stop ceasefire violations and implement ceasefire agreement in letter and spirit, and asked the media to stop using the event as another opportunity to “proliferate hatred for the sake of their TRPs”

They said that “restoration of dialogue and peace talks at the highest level alone can bring back normalcy and peace to the thousands of suffering people, living in border areas and also the fisher people who have been a casualty to this increased hostility.”

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