India

India’s Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) has confirmed in a new study that the abandoned site of the massive 1984 gas leak that caused the deaths of at least 20,000 people contains large quantities of deadly chemicals. The Hindustan Times reported on February 7 that the board found high levels of chloroform and benzene in underground water close to residential areas around the site. The report stated that “In some cases, the toxins were found to be several hundred times more than the permissible limits in drinking water”.

Report from www.cpiml.org
Activists of the All India Students' Association (AISA) were arrested for organising a protest demonstration at the Australian High Commission on 12 January against the recent spate of racist attacks on Indian students and workers in Australia.

Narendra Mohan Kommalapati, Green Left Weekly

The plains of peninsular India are ringed by two rows of hill ranges with their bases in the south, spreading up the coastlines in two great arcs west and east. The eastern ranges, “eastern ghats”, start in the state of Tamil Nadu and cross the states of Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa and trail off into Bengal.
The forested regions are home to some of the oldest communities of India, described variously as adivasi (aboriginal), vanvasi (forest dwellers), girijan (people of the hills) and, in the sanitised language of the Indian constitution, under the collective name of “Scheduled Tribes”.

Kerryn Williams, Green Left Weekly

Twenty-five years after the worst industrial disaster in history, the people of Bhopal, in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, are still fighting for justice.

On December 3, 1984, a leak at Union Carbide's Bhopal factory sent a barrage of toxic gases through the city. The streets were flooded with people desperately trying to flee the clouds of poison, choking, convulsing, vomiting and writhing in pain.

20 November 2009, Green Left Weekly

Tata, the transnational Indian conglomerate whose wholly-owned subsidiary Tetley makes the world famous Tetley Teas, has taken 6500 people hostage through hunger, IUF.org said on November 12. The se include 1000 tea plantation workers and their families on the Nowera Nuddy Tea Estate in West Bengal, India. The workers have been locked and denied wages for all but two days’ work since early August

Kavita Krishnan is the national secretary of the All India Progressive Women's Association and a former president of the All India Students' Association. She is also a central committee member of the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist (CPI-ML) and editor of Liberation magazine. Krishnan will be an international guest at the World at a Crossroads conference in Sydney, April 10-12. For more information, or to register, visit World at a Crossroads.
Green Left Weeky's Jay Fletcher spoke with Krishnan on the crises of war and economic collapse, and the response of India's rulers.

By Kavita Krishnan
In the aftermath of the November 29 Mumbai terrorist attacks, sections of the media have made much of “people’s anger against politicians and the system”. What do we make of this claim?
Sure, people are angry. Anger with those who rule us and with the system is surely a healthy emotion. Anger at those who are putting us in a position where we never know when our loved ones could be subjected to sudden and violent death; anger at those who circled around the Mumbai tragedy for votes, with the eagerness of vultures spotting a meal; anger at Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi of the Hindu-chauvinist Bharatiya Janata Party who dismissed the people’s anger in loaded gendered language; anger at the Kerala chief minister who could not gracefully accept the feelings of a bereaved parent who wasn’t interested in meeting him, and instead indulged in unwarranted and contemptuous abuse.
Armed marauders indulging in random shooting at public places and killing nearly 200 people is surely just cause for rage.

By Dipankar Bhattacharya
CPIML-Liberation, December 15, 2008: The recent siege of Mumbai for nearly three days by a small band of well-trained terrorists has almost universally come to be described as ``India’s 9/11’’. In terms of sheer audacity of planning and execution, the places targeted and the scale and range of people killed and injured, the Mumbai terror siege can surely be bracketed with the original 9/11, and in terms of the duration of the skirmish it can also claim to have left the original way behind.
The analogy between New York 9/11 and Mumbai 26/11 must not however be confined to these operational details. What is most important is to recognise the Mumbai attack was an extension of the same terror trajectory that struck New York seven years ago. What should we learn from this?

By B Sivaraman
"Indian economy is insulated from the crisis… The global financial crisis will not affect us much," [Indian Finance Minister Palaniappan]Chidambaram said, at first. Chidambaram went on in this vein until both he and his boss [Prime Minister] Manmohan [Singh] had to reluctantly admit that no developing economy could possibly remain immune to the global crisis. Still, it was projected primarily as a financial crisis or at best a precursor to a mild recession. But no financial crisis is ever a mere crisis of the world of high finance alone. Just as the gloom on the trading floors soon spread to the shopfloors in the factories, financial turbulence is just a symptom of the turmoil in the real economy.

"The contagion is truly global in a globalised world. How can the high
priests of globalisation in India expect to insulate the country from
this all-pervasive crisis?"

By CPIML (Liberation)
September 2, 2008: The Nitish Kumar regime's boasts of 'Bihar Shining' are now submerged by the cries of Bihar Drowning. The National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government's claims of 'good governance' have proved a washout in the face of the floods, and now the Chief Minister is trying to paint the floods as a 'natural' calamity or divine 'Deluge' ('Pralay'). Nothing could be further from the truth. The flood devastation was highly preventable – and is a direct result of callous negligence of basic flood-prevention strategies by Governments both at Patna and Delhi . Despite the fact that every year breaches in embankments cause floods in the State, maintenance and repair of embankments were rampantly neglected.

• Sign the online petition for a judicial inquiry into Bihar floods