South Asia Citizens Web

Last few weeks have witnessed an intense struggle in the Koodankulam district of Tamil Nadu in India against the nuclear power project. Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP) extends is solidarity to the struggling people in Koodankulam and with their demand. We demand that the Central and State Governments stop harassing the protestors immediately. We also demand the Central Government should hold a democratic and transparent national consultation on nuclear power projects in the country with proper assessment of economic, environmental and human cost of such expansion.

There are more than 35 sectarian terror groups and 25 illegal tax collecting religious and ethnic groups who have besieged the city from all sides. Arms are being smuggled into Karachi via the Gulf and the Arabian Sea. The underground networks of Afghan, Irani, Pakistani and Central Asian arms and drug smugglers has created a warlike situation in the city. Finally: these are some factors behind the killing, burning, battering, and smashing in Karachi over the last three decades. As the state and its institutions are mired in corruption, violence is spreading across the country.

Her circumstances are many times more adverse. Perhaps that is why in her fight for justice Zakia Jaafri outshines the four heroic American women of 9/11 who became known as the Jersey widows.

. . . This is my 24th year in the IPS. I was allotted to the Gujarat cadre during a time when the State was passing through the throes of widespread and sporadic communal violence. Having been baptised by fire, I have been since trying to understand and deal with the likes of you, who deal in the divisive politics of hatred. It is my well founded observation that the polity of Gujarat has now crossed the stage where communal violence can accrue electoral benefits to any political party, as the process of communal polarisation is very nearly complete in Gujarat. The experiments in the divisive politics of hatred have been very successful in the Gujarat Laboratory. . . .

After Fukushima, it’s natural and pertinent to ask if nuclear power has a future anywhere, including India. But whatever the future or present, Srikumar Banerjee [a top official of India’s atomic energy establishment] will surely find a place in the past for declaring on April 14 [2011] that the unfolding multi-reactor Fuk­ushima me­ltdown was “purely a chemical reaction”, not a nuclear emergency.