Disclosures about the ‘superbug' should jolt the government into paying attention to fast-spreading antibiotic resistance that could leave millions defenceless.
Plenty of Dogma, Little Rethinking: CPM’s crisis deepens
What the Communist Party of India (Marxist) dreaded the most in West Bengal, its bastion for 33 years, has happened. Ms Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress Party (TCP) held an extremely well-attended rally at Lalgarh in the Jangalmahal region bordering Jharkhand on August 9, enlisted the support of the People’s Committee against Police Atrocities (PCPA), and threw down the gauntlet to the Left Front. She stridently read out an elaborate political chargesheet against the CPM and announced the end of Left “hegemony” and the beginning of “a new era” in West Bengal.
A tightening noose?
Evidence is emerging of Narendra Modi’s involvement along with Amit Shah’s in crucial police postings in the Sohrabuddin case cover-up, which could politically prove extremely damaging.
Brutalising A City, Unleashing Sleaze: The Games are India’s self-goal
The Cassandras have proved right. The Commonwealth Games have turned into a gigantic multi-billion rupee racket, under which Delhi’s landscape is recklessly ripped up, inappropriate and wasteful projects are shamelessly promoted, public funds massively looted, workers sadistically brutalised, the poor summarily evicted, and human rights egregiously violated—supposedly to enhance India’s global image in pursuit of hollow notions of prestige. The CWG, far grander than the Asian Games of 1982, will be monumentally irrelevant to the future of sports. But they will leave a toxic legacy of empty public coffers, disused stadia, and a battered mass of underprivileged people.
Real costs of false prestige
A rash of scandals has broken out over contracts for the construction of infrastructure and sports facilities for the Commonwealth Games in Delhi. This raises disturbing questions about transparency, accountability and governance failure and the existence of an Indian kleptocracy which sets no limits to how low it will stoop in looting the exchequer. But the Games must also be criticised on grounds other than corruption. They will be a hollow, tawdry 12-day spectacle, which does nothing to promote sports, or to earn India any goodwill or prestige, which the elite craves.
Wrong call on nuclear liability
The government is set to move the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, 2010 in the current session of Parliament after withdrawing its earlier draft on March 15 without explanation. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology headed by Congress MP T Subbirami Reddy has since heard various proponents and opponents of the Bill.
While the former mainly comprise Department of Atomic Energy officials, who stress the importance of moving the legislation quickly so as to encourage investment in the nuclear power programme, the objectors are a more plural group, including “official” experts such as former chairman of the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB) A Gopalakrishnan, and independent experts and activists from the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), Greenpeace India and the Delhi Science Forum, as well as political parties.
The opponents have raised a number of issues of vital public importance. The Standing Committee must faithfully and earnestly incorporate their suggestions and the government must pay heed to them if there is to be an informed and intelligent debate on the Bill. Any attempt to rush the Bill through would be thoroughly misguided.
Kashmir: defusing the crisis
The protest wave that gripped the Kashmir Valley has abated with the calling in of the army. But public anger against the killing of 15 young Kashmiris, including a 9-year-old boy, isn’t likely to vanish soon. The restoration of order has claimed a high price: the army had to be called into Kashmir for crowd control for the first time since the azaadi movement erupted in 1989.
To rebuild lives
The Group of Ministers' proposals fall short of recommending the minimum the victims of the Bhopal gas disaster deserve in reparation.
Terminal folly
Delhi's ecologically unsound new airport terminal does not represent progress; rather it marks the Indian elite's dependence on false symbols of grandeur.
Double standards on aid
Indian leaders trumpet their nation’s recent global ascendancy in a variety of ways. They: highlight the importance of India’s membership of the G-20, claim a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, and demand India’s inclusion in what they for long, derisively, termed “cartels” like the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group. Not least, they build gigantic, spectacular, exorbitantly expensive projects like Terminal-3 at Delhi airport. In line with this is their boastful aspiration to transform India from an aid recipient to a donor.
A perverse notion of modernity
The subcontinent’s leaders never learn from mistakes—their own, or one another’s. Nawaz Sharif’s White Elephant M-2 expressway was one of the greatest scandals in global infrastructure development history. Now, India is about to produce its match—in aviation, by building a $4 billion (Rs12,700 crore) new terminal at Delhi airport. Terminal-3, to be opened soon, is claimed to be the world’s fifth-largest airport terminal, and bigger than Heathrow’s Terminal 5 and Singapore ’s Changi. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh euphorically described T-3 as signifying the “arrival of a new India , committed to join the ranks of modern, industrialised nations …”.
Isolated Israel Eases Gaza Blockade: Victory for civil society and Palestine
When Israel launched a commando attack on the Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip, its leaders could scarcely have imagined that they would have to beat a retreat on the Gaza blockade issue in less than three weeks. Yet, such was the global public revulsion at the murderous assault on the Mavi Marmara in international waters—even among Israel’s allies and supporters—that Israel had to relax the blockade. The blockade banned more than 2,000 items, including cement, glass, paper, iron, pencils, cancer medicines, toys, chocolate, fabrics and fruit juice.
India Inc’s silence deafening
It is extremely distressing that the only articulate response from India’s corporate world to the recent Bhopal criminal case judgment has come from HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh. (The Times of India, June 18) Parekh, one of our most respected CEOs who sits on many corporate boards, did not comment, as might be expected of a conscientious person, on the gross unfairness of the verdict, which diminishes an industrial mega-disaster to a mere traffic accident punishable with two years’ imprisonment and a trivial fine (Rs 1 lakh). Rather, he spoke of the unfairness of holding company directors, including former Union Carbide India Ltd (UCIL) chairman Keshub Mahindra, criminally liable for corporate negligence.
Bhopal still waits for justice
The contrast between BP’s response to the outrage over the oil spill in the US and Union Carbide’s attitude to the uproar over the Bhopal disaster of 1984 couldn’t have been sharper. Confronted by a hostile public and a president who wants to “kick ass”, BP has pledged $20 billion in initial remediation and is mobilising another $50 billion — although its legal liability is only $75 million.
Hindutva politics in disarray and decline
THE Bharatiya Janata Party, once cohesive and disciplined, is now so faction-ridden that it often ends up damaging itself by pandering to particular leaders.
Stooping low
The murderous attack on the Gaza flotilla highlights the Israeli government’s criminal character and its illegal and deplorable blockade of Gaza. The episode will globally isolate and delegitimise Israel.
Major Blow To Carbide’s Victims: Bhopal’s unended tragedy
The victims of the world’s worst chemical disaster abandoned hope of securing real justice a long time ago. As someone who covered the gas leak at Union Carbide Corporation’s pesticides plant in Bhopal from an early stage and has probably written more on the issue than any other journalist, I would put the date at February 1989, when the Indian government reached an atrociously inadequate out-of-court settlement with Carbide for $470 million, totalling no more than UCC’s insurance cover plus interest. The Supreme Court put its imprimatur on the deal and extinguished Carbide’s liability, civil and criminal, thus shattering the victims’ hopes of getting enough compensation to pay even for their medical treatment, leave alone damages for prolonged suffering
Yawning nuclear void
The Mayapuri cobalt-60 episode shows Delhi University scientists were reprehensible and proves again that the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board is too inept, unreliable and compromised to perform its assigned functions. We need another agency.
Regulating the regulator
One of the greatest failures of governance in India lies in appalling poor regulation of entrepreneur activities in the public interest. This is as true of vehicular pollution—less than 200 inspectors for Delhi’s 5 million-plus registered motor vehicles—as it is of such diverse areas as natural gas, education, and the higher judiciary. It is often comfortingly thought that self-regulation is the answer given the near-impossibility of reforming our lethargic and corrupt bureaucracy. Alas, this is largely an illusion.
Zionism’s alliance with apartheid: Secret Israel–S. Africa N-Deal Exposed
As the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference concludes in New York, there is no expectation that the world will rapidly eliminate these mass-destruction weapons. But the focus has sharply turned on West Asia because the Western powers, led by the United States, are keen that Iran freezes its nuclear activities. Yet inevitably, attention has also got riveted on Israel, the region’s sole nuclear weapons power. In the limelight too is the issue of nuclear material falling into the hands of extremist groups like al-Qaeda.
Against this backdrop comes the hugely important, sensational, but not sensationalist, disclosure that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to South Africa’s white-racist apartheid regime in 1975, and the two states coordinated their military programmes and strategic approaches. This disclosure, contained in a just-released book The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, is based on “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior South African and Israeli officials. These were uncovered by a US-based scholar Sasha Polakow-Suransky through documents recently declassified by the South African government. The Israeli government tried hard to stop their declassification, but failed.
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