South Asia Citizens Web

How does one live with the recurring memories of a gruesome past? Of the hideous acts of mass murder, rape and destruction of properties and livelihood? We have recorded all such stories, as each one, the victims, and all kith and kin of the dead, narrated with tears in their eyes and with no hope of any future, in our report, Crime Against Humanity.

We strongly deplore the PM’s recent statement that the people’s struggle against Koodankulam nuclear power plant is instigated by foreign agencies and funds. We cannot accept our PM to stoop to such low levels.

Text of intervention by Anny Poursinoff in the French Assembly on 9 February 2012 against the deal between France and India on civil nuclear energy and to extend support to the people of Jaitapur who refuse the installation by Areva of two EPR nuclear plants in a seismic zone 400 km from Bombay.

Ten years after the 2002 violence, the results of judicial proceedings have been very few in Gujarat. While the heaviest sentences have been handed down in cases where Hindus in Godhra had been victims of violence, a very large number of cases have been closed before prosecution and many others remain pending, with only a handful completed or near completion. The reasons for this failure of the rule of law – whose magnitude will have to be qualified since proceedings are still under way – lie in the grip that Hindu nationalism (as an ideology and a political movement) holds over the state machinery (including the police and the judiciary) in Gujarat and the central authority’s relative powerlessness (both at the executive and judicial level) to counteract it. This is so despite the repeated attempts that the Supreme Court has made (including the appointment of the Special Investigation Team), and the activism of non-governmental organisations and some media persons.

Mukul Sharma’s book on the confluence of environmental politics and Hindu nationalism has arrived to raise yet another storm. Through case studies of three contemporary environmental movements in India – the anti-dam movement in Tehri, Garhwal, Anna Hazare’s Watershed Management Programme in Ralegan Siddhi and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature’s Vrindavan-Mathura Revival Project in Uttar Pradesh – Sharma has shown how the powerful metaphor of saving ‘Mother nature’ has been appropriated by Right-wing political forces for arousing Hindu nationalistic sentiments amongst the masses.