South Asia Citizens Web

a statement, that can well be taken as a threat, made by the head of the Sangh Parivar, Dr Mohan Bhagwat, that conversions will be “reversed”, a challenge he has knowingly thrown to the Christian Church in India. The last is a claim by the Sangh that they have indeed made as many as 200,00 Christians, mostly Dalits and tribals, into Hindus, a process they call “Ghar Wapsi”, a Return Home in the mistaken belief that all Dalits and tribals are anyway Hindus.

SACW SPECIAL ON TAKSIM SQUARE PROTESTS IN TURKEY
:: a compilation of relevant commentary for readers in South Asia
14 June 2013
contents:
a) Memories of a Public Square (Orhan Pamuk)
b) Erdogan, Gezi Park And the Headscarf (Tulin Daloglu)
c) Turkey’s protesters proclaimed as true heirs of nation’s founding father (Luke Harding)
d) Behind Turkey’s Viral Revolution, There Are Mad Men (Actually Women) (Emre Kizilkaya)
e) Educator’s jailing reveals Turkey at crossroads (Trudy Rubin) (…)

Not long before last month’s elections, dozens of workers (the youngest was 12) were burned to death in factory fires in Karachi and Lahore. Pakistan’s rulers were unmoved: there were token expressions of regret but no talk of tough new laws being passed after the election. There is barely any safety regulation in Pakistan, and if any legislation does impede business a modest bribe usually solves the problem. Factory inspections were discontinued during the Musharraf regime in order, it was claimed, to protect industry from harassment by state inspectors. Ali Enterprises, the factory that burned down in Karachi, somehow passed an inspection by a New York-based body called Social Accountability International.

There has been a high rate of violence against women all over Bangladesh in recent years. Kapaeeng Foundation figures for January 2007 to December 2012 reveal that Jumma women and girls endured three times higher violence rates than their indigenous sisters living in the plains of Bangladesh, writes Kabita Chakma

This 2009 article revisits the figure of the ‘third world sweatshop worker’, long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the ‘culture of global moralism’ that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the ‘sweatshop economy’ have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor.