South Asia Citizens Web

Recent weeks have witnessed horrific events in Myanmar. Mobs have targeted the Rohingya population, resulting in the brutal murder of scores of Rohingya and displacement of tens of thousands of children, women, and men. Appallingly, the Myanmar military leadership has labelled Rohingyas as an ethnic and religious minority not deserving of full protection as citizens. Neighbouring Bangladesh behaves most callously, forcing thousands to live in hiding or squalid refugee settlements along the border.

We the people from various parts of northeast residing in Delhi, along with concerned individuals, university members, various students’, teachers’, trade union, women’s, civil and human rights organisations from Delhi, strongly condemn the ongoing ethnic conflict with serious communal undertone that has erupted in four districts (Kokrajhar, Dhubri, Chirang and Bongaigaon) of Lower Assam. This has been the most widespread and alarming conflict in the recent history of Assam.

We are shocked to read in the report “India asks Beijing gallery to censor art show” (The Hindu, July 25, 2012) that the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) has asked the organisers of “Indian Highway,” the travelling exhibition of contemporary Indian art, to remove a video work from the show, currently in the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

The events of 18 July in the Manesar plant of Maruti Suzuki which ended with the murder of a manager were not a sudden conflagration. Anger at the plant had been building up for months over the management’s refusal to recognise an elected union; workers were increasingly frustrated over their inability to exercise their constitutional rights and the demand of equal pay for equal work was falling on deaf years. Rather than portray the workers as villains, managements in this industrial belt of Haryana have to ask themselves why they have not been able to develop a democratic industrial relations framework that can address the concerns of workers.

To any old-timer, the earliest image of the Bihar caste wars is from 1977. Belchhi in Patna had seen 14 Scheduled Caste workers killed, and the enduring image is of a visit by Indira Gandhi, otherwise lying low since the post-Emergency defeat. She had to ride an elephant to the small hamlet of Dalits, the monsoon having waterlogged the approach road.