South Asia Citizens Web

UIDAI is lying to a billion Indians. And the plain truth is that people running the show at UIDAI are aware of the humongous scale of social catastrophe, which a project like UID could unleash in India. Behind the mask of a cool and confident exterior, some UIDAI officials seems to be constantly grappling with feelings of immense insecurity and uncertainty. We can get a sense of their feelings by closely reading the draft National Identification Authority of India Bill 2010.

Noted playright, actor and scholar Girish Karnad is to deliver the First AK Ramanujan Lecture, as part of a National Seminar, to be held on March 21, 2012 at Ramjas college, University of Delhi. This seminar is being organized by The History Society Ramjas College, in wake of the recent decision of the Academic Council of Delhi University to suppress AK Ramanujan’s scholarly essay, ’300 Ramayanas’ from the Undergraduate syllabus of the University, and in appreciation of the vast range and depth of AK Ramanujan’s intellectual contributions. The seminar will underline the significance of Ramanujan’s work for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and its importance for the understanding of India’s histories and cultures.

The world is still worried about Fukushima. But does Pakistan worry? Even as explosions tore through the nuclear complex, the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Commission flatly declared that a Fukushima could never happen here. It issued the following vanilla guarantee: “Due to geographical differences between Pakistan and Japan, the likelihood that similar extreme natural events may occur in the vicinity of the country’s nuclear plants is quite small”. Since two extreme natural events are unlikely to be similar, this is technically correct. But how would Pakistan deal with massive radioactive release after deliberate sabotage, a terrorist attack, equipment failure, or operator error? Floods and earthquakes have shown that the country can make piteous calls for international aid but lacks the capacity to deal with disasters, natural and human-caused.

On March 4, Sunday evening, Dr. Jayampathy Wickramaratne spoke at a public meeting titled, ‘Post-war Sri Lanka: The Political Solution and its Historical Context’, organised by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) at the Brecht Forum in New York City. We were fortunate to engage Wickramaratne, a long-time member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), a former senior advisor to the Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, and a member of the team that drafted the 2000 Constitution Bill and signatory to the Majority Report of Experts Committee to the All Party Representative Committee in 2006. Wickramaratne gave us a fascinating account of how the story of devolution – sharing of power with the minorities particularly Tamils and Muslims – has repeatedly come up in the context of Sri Lanka and unfortunately remains an elusive goal at the current moment under the present Government.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s seemingly unfounded allegations about the funding of the people’s movement against the Koodankulam nuclear plant has shifted attention away from the real issue: the huge divide between the government and the policy elite that seems to have decided on expanding nuclear power, and the opposition to this way of generating electricity among local communities that live near these facilities. This opposition is in part due to the real and proven risk of catastrophic accidents that nuclear power plants pose to these communities.