South Asia Citizens Web

Reports on police violence on the anti nuclear protest movement in Koodankulam

In this paper I inquire into how the disposition of public spaces and informal oral communication, can together create a commonsense mobilizing support for spectacular events of violence. The built form of the city, urban planning and resulting forms of social segregation, and popular linguistic practices, can combine to instantiate new political formations such as what I am calling a Special Political Zone, where the form of rule exercised is both modern and democratic, but undercut through exceptions which a majority of citizens participate in reproducing, wittingly or unwittingly.1

Mr. Islam’s killing remains under investigation. There have been no arrests in the case, and the police say they have made little progress.

On the day he disappeared, Mr. Islam was trying to resolve a labor impasse at factories that stitch shirts for Tommy Hilfiger, American Eagle and other global brands. his labor advocacy had collided with powerful interests in Bangladesh, now the second leading exporter of apparel in the world, after China. Cheap, nonunion labor is essential to the export formula in Bangladesh, where the minimum wage for garment workers is $37 a month. Unions are almost nonexistent in apparel factories.

The hysterical synchronicity of these happenings is typical of the Pakistan encountered nowadays in the news. It is also Manto-esque, which is to say that it feels like it could have been imagined, in exactly these tones, with just such a flatly ironic counterpoint for an ending, more than fifty years ago by a man called Saadat Hassan Manto, the writer whose centennial is being marked this year in Lahore amid an unshakeable and vaguely shaming sense of déjà vu.

Vapi tops the list of critically polluted areas in the country as per the Comprehensive Environmental Pollution Index of the Central Pollution Control Board. According to a report submitted by the Gujarat Pollution Control Board to the Central board, the estate houses 759 industries, of which 70 per cent manufacture chemicals such as dyes and dye intermediates, pigments, pesticides, fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The report also includes an action plan to curb pollution.