South Asia Citizens Web

Indian diamond barons, the Surat Rough Diamond Sourcing India Ltd (SRDSIL), has announced plans to buy $100 million worth of Zimbabwean diamonds every month. The minister of mines of Zimbabwe, Obert Mpofu, was warmly welcomed in Mumbai recently, and it’s clear that the Indian cutting and polishing industry sees the potentially mammoth Marange fields as a crucial source of supply in coming years.

Investigations of wrong doing at the New Delhi Commonwealth Games of October 2010 must also include himan rights violations. Full text of the Press Release by Human Rights and Land Network

U.S.-led forces have been unable to provide security or protect Afghan civilians in many areas. As the scale of the military intervention has increased, the insurgency has become stronger and the influence of the Taliban and armed groups has spread. The presence of foreign troops has been identified as a major factor driving the insurgency, along with widespread resentment of a corrupt central government and the abuses of predatory strongmen. The climate of insecurity and impunity has produced new forms of powerlessness for many Afghan women and girls, who have been widowed, displaced, trafficked, and forced into marriage as a direct or indirect result of the conflict.

On 31st October 2010 while working at a loader and unloader machine in ENO final assembly section [Nokia’s plat at Sriperumbadur in Tamilnadu], a worker named Ambika met with an accident and later died in the night. She was 22 years old, a permanent employee and had been working at the factory for past 4-4.5 years.
From talking to the workers it seemed quite apparent that this accident was waiting to happen due to the negligence of the management and the intense production pressure on workers. If not a sweatshops, these factories are not any better. A worker jokingly mentioned, ‘our factory is the biggest producer of Nokia mobiles and our pay are the lowest’. (There is 45 times difference between the pay of Indian Nokia workers and what Nokia pays globally)

This paper explores the issue of political violence and Muslim vulnerability in Gujarat under the explanatory rubric of the ‘Special Political Zone,’ an informal analogue to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the latter being a site exempt from prevailing regulations, purportedly to enhance economic growth. The political ability to endow specific sites with exceptional legal status for economic outcomes implies the ‘Special Political Zone,’ a site where select laws of the land are voided to ensure specific political outcomes, for example the staging of violence to dramatize the restructuring of the relationship between majority and minority. This paper offers a limited examination of this hypothesis taking Ahmedabad as a privileged site where much of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 was concentrated.