South Asia Citizens Web

Farooq Haider Maududi, son of the founder of the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan in a scathing interview says that his father founded a fascist party and he thinks states based on a religious ideology are always oppressive.

India’s first great automobile success story, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd (MSIL), has plunged into notoriety. Its factory at Manesar in Haryana witnessed terrible violence on July 18, which led to the death of a manager and injuries to over 100 people. The violence must be condemned, strongly and unequivocally. The MSIL management has imposed a lockout and is demonising its workers as criminally irresponsible and violence-prone. It wants to sack about a third of the 1,000 permanent workers and half the 2,000 contract workers. It has mounted enormous pressure on the government to arrest as many workers as possible and guarantee industrial peace, failing which it could pull out of Haryana.

[In India] authorities aggressively pursue targets, especially for female sterilization, by threatening health workers with salary cuts or dismissals. As a result, some health workers pressure women to undergo sterilization without providing sufficient information, either about possible complications, its irreversibility, or safer sex practices after the procedure.

Any blanket waiver to the foreign suppliers will make the Indian liability act a cruel joke. Russians claim that the Koodankulam reactors are the “best” and the “safest” in the world. If that is so, why should they shy away from offering any liability for their technology and components, but keep insisting that the Indian operator, NPCIL, is responsible for all damages?

It would be sad if the ghastly violence at Maruti Suzuki’s (MSIL) Manesar plant on July 18, 2012, in which a HR manager died, were to be understood simply as a ‘murderous workers’ vs ‘rational management’ kind of an incident. There is a history and a context to this violence, and how that is understood, and acknowledged, by India Inc. will indicate how serious we are about preventing such incidents in the future.