South Asia Citizens Web

Nearly nine years after the carnage of Gujarat (Feb 2011), a perception has been created that Gujarat is developing with rapid strides, there is all peace and harmony and minorities are happy. Like ‘Shining India’ a word has been coined, ‘Vibrant Gujarat’. Nothing can be farther from truth. In the aftermath of the violence, the death of over two thousand Muslims, the rapes, the humiliation at the hands of instigated mobs, are still fresh in the air as the state has totally been unjust to the victims of the violence. There was no rehabilitation worth its name, the ‘refugee camps’ were closed too soon. State totally washed its hands off the rehabilitation process.

A compilation of articles demolishes the myth of a ’Vibrant Gujarat’

We, the undersigned individuals and organizations condemn the Maharashtra Police firing on protestors who were demonstrating against the proposed Nuclear Power Park at Jaitapur, Ratnagiri, Maharashtra.

Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Milosevic Modi has again demonstrated that his capacity for setting new lows in politics remains undiminished. His government has banned Great Soul, a new biography of Mahatma Gandhi by former New York Times India bureau chief and editor Joseph Lelyveld. The ground for the ban, passed after a unanimous vote by the Gujarat Legislative Assembly, is based on hearsay—a review by Andrew Roberts, a British practitioner of canned imperialist history and vulgar celebration of royalty, in The Wall Street Journal, one of the world’s most wretchedly Right-wing papers.

Asian Centre for Human Rights, Special Report on Jammu and Kashmir that includes Abuse of Article 370”, Order Extraordinaire of the NHRC on J&K, status of J&K State Human Rights Commission and deplorable conditions of the Sikhs and Hindu minorities who have been denied citizenship of J&K despite their migration in 1947

Instead of a rational resolution by a peer group based on evidence, what we often get is a soap opera, where scientists slug it out, utterly indifferent to their professional roles. Consider the superbug controversy. It begins as an article in The Lancet, a prestigious and professional British medical journal, in August 2010. The journal publishes an article by Cardiff university scientists which observes that the water supply in Delhi has doses of the NDM-1 gene, which creates superbugs that trigger cholera and dysentery. The Indian medical establishment, politicians and the media reacted with concern but the concern was for Delhi’s reputation. A city barely having recovered from the scandal of the Commonwealth Games could hardly afford a new scandal—especially an epidemic or a virus that is difficult to control. The superbug threatened a variety of egos and interests. The naming of the bug after Delhi was seen as an insult.