South Asia Citizens Web

On September 28, 1991, Shankar Guha Niyogi put aside his copy of Lenin on Trade Unions and Revolutions, and fell asleep under a mosquito net in his room on the ground floor of an apartment in the Bhilai industrial township. In the early hours of the morning, a young man rode up to the house, looked in through the bedroom’s well-lit window and shot him dead.

The multinational refuses to be sensitive to the grievances of its Indian workforce, which generates the greater proportion of the company’s profits.

The workers of the Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s (MSIL) plant in Haryana’s Manesar have been agitating since August-end against the dismissal and suspension of more than 60 of their colleagues and the management’s insistence on their signing a ‘good conduct bond’ before they are allowed to enter the plant. The MSIL management’s obdurate refusal to recognise the MSEU lies at the heart of the dispute.

We write to protest the denial of entry to David Barsamian by Immigration Authorities at the New Delhi airport in the early hours of September 23, 2011, and we write to draw attention to the growing arbitrariness of the Indian Government in dealing with dissent of any kind.

Investigating your South Asian ancestors’ family history

The whole experience of the last 20 years is that over-reliance on economic growth for social progress is a recipe for disappointment. Even Bangladesh and Nepal (starting way behind, and with much slower economic growth) have made far more progress than India during this period, in terms of a wide range of social indicators. Greater attention to social support and economic redistribution is long overdue. Poverty lines, for their part, are best sent back to their statistical kennel.