South Asia Citizens Web

A series of floods hit India this the past monsoon season, from Bihar, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh to West Bengal — it wasn’t only Uttarkhand. Javed Iqbal travels to the Narmada valley, the site of one of the recent disasters, where political forces and the administrative system revealed a worrying lack of motivation when it came to responding to the man-made disaster.

If one goes through majority of the mainstream media reports on the Muzaffarnagar riots, which displaced nearly 40000 Muslims and killed at least 50, the most important discourse that emerges is one of ‘administrative failure.’ Most reports rallied behind the notion that the riots could have been prevented if not for the state government’s laxity and delay in deploying troops in and around the riot-prone areas. However, while part of this hypothesis has some merit, it has also become a sophisticated way to couch the Sangh Parivar’s diatribes against Muslims. ‘Administrative failure,’ presented as the ‘most important angle’ of the riots has had a shrouding effect on the role of Sangh Parivar-led communal campaigns such as ‘love jehad’ in perpetuating the riots.

I submit that we were all present at that concourse of humanity in Nairobi. We were present by the side of every maimed and fallen victim, among who was a distinguished one of us, one of the very best that have defined us to the world. We were present in Mali even before this nation, to her credit, joined in stemming the tide of religious atavism and human retrogression. We were beside the students of Kaduna, Plateau, Borno, the school children of Yobe, the mangled okada riders and petty traders of Kano, beside all those who have been routinely slaughtered for so many years past in this very nation. In Nairobi’s hub of commerce we were present, confronted yet again with that same diabolical test that was applied to school pupils in Kano many years ago, where those who failed to recite the indicated verse of the koran were classified as infidels, and led away to have their throats serially slit. We have been present at the travails of Algeria, recorded for posterity by that lady Karima Bennoune in YOUR FATWA DOES NOT APPLY HERE. We were beside Tahar Djaout, author of THE LAST SEASON OF UNREASON, cut down also by religious fanatics. We are the mere survivors who continually ask, when will this stop? Where will this end? The ones who echo Karima and that miraculous survivor Malala in declaiming – No indeed, your fatwa can never apply here. We have been beside the children of Cherchyna in the Soviet Union, innocents who, taken hostage, were reduced to drinking their own urine, then deliberately gunned down as they made their way out of a school gymnasium that had turned into an inferno. We continue to remain beside all who have fallen to the blight of bigotry, religious solipsism and spiritual toxicity. We shall continue to stand beside them, denouncing, condemning, but most critically, urging on all who can to anticipate, stem, and ultimately eliminate the tide of religious tyranny. We have taken the side of Humanity against those who are against.

This paper was written in 1998. the history of employees’ unionism in the Bombay region has to a large extent been dominated by an endemic hostility to independent unionism among managements in the area. By ‘independent unionism’ is meant the sector represented by the stronger employees’ unions and their federations, where these exist.