South Asia Citizens Web

On September 2, 2009, the members of a nationwide alliance in Bangladesh—the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power, and Ports—were brutalized by the state police in Dhaka. More than fifty members were injured. The national committee was conducting a peaceful demonstration and march as part of an announced program to protest the Bangladesh government’s offshore gas and oil exploration deals with international oil companies.

Of late, one has been witness to the determined assault on the labour laws in India through judicial caveats or legislative measures. A decade ago the then NDA government led by Mr Vajpayee had formed the ’Second National Labour Commission’ (Oct 1999) to suggest rationalisation of existing laws relating to labour in the organised sector and also suggest ’umbrella’ legislation for ensuring a minimum level of protection to workers in the unorganised sector. And without waiting for this commission to submit its report important changes were announced in the Industrial Disputes Act and Contract Labour System (Abolition and Regulation) act.

This paper argues that the developmental NGO is the purveyor
of a new economic sovereignty that is represented by corporate capital
interests and local institutional interests (NGOs), and is an architect of
neoliberalism within a modernist developmental discourse of poor women’s
empowerment through the market.

While we all like to believe we live in a civilized world in India and that honour killings are something that savage Taleban do somewhere far away in the back of beyond, maybe Swat or Afghanistan or Timbuktu, we take account of these spine chilling incidents in our own backyard with surprising equanimity.

From Tehelka (September 2009)
What strikes you, personally, as the sharpest irony of the Jinnah- Jaswant Singh controversy and its fallout in India?
What strikes me as most ironic is the extent to which the ’’’secular’ Congress and the ’communal’ BJP end up subscribing to the same common idioms of Indian nationalism when it comes to Pakistan and its most potent symbol, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Jinnah of the 1916 Lucknow Pact where Sarojini Naidu hailed him as the “ambassador of (…)