India

Millions Of Indian Workers Strike Against ‘Anti-Labor Policies’

September 4, 2015 Al Jazeera, www.america.aljazeera.com Resist! Banking, India, Mining, Worker Rights and Jobs

By Al Jazeera - Millions of Indian workers launched a 24-hour strike on Wednesday against what they said were Prime Minister Narendra Modi's “anti-labor policies,” prompting billions of dollars in economic losses. Ten major unions called the nationwide strike over the government's pro-business initiatives after recent talks with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley broke down. The unions — which represent a wide range of industries, from banking to coal mining — are demanding the government dump plans to sell off stakes in state-run companies to boost the public purse and to shutter unproductive factories. “We are against these anti-labor policies. The government is going to change the laws to benefit the corporates,” said Gurudas Dasgupta, secretary of the Indian Trade Union Congress, which has 3.6 million members.

WTO Ruling Against India’s Solar Push Threatens Clean Energy

September 1, 2015 Nadia Prupis, www.commondreams.org Educate! Climate Change, Energy, India, World Trade Organization

By Nadia Prupis in Common Dreams - The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday ruled against India over its national solar energy program in a case brought by the U.S. government, sparking outrage from labor and environmental advocates. As power demands grow in India, the country's government put forth a plan to create 100,000 megawatts of energy from solar cells and modules, and included incentives to domestic manufacturers to use locally-developed equipment. According to Indian news outlets, the WTO ruled that India had discriminated against American manufacturers by providing such incentives, which violates global trade rules, and struck down those policies—siding with the U.S. government in a case that the Sierra Club said demonstrates the environmentally and economically destructive power of pro-corporate deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Shivaani’s Journey As A Transgender Indian Woman

July 3, 2015 Setareh Baig, www.fsunews.com Organize! India, LGBTQ, Liberation, Student Activism, usa

By Setareh Baig in FSU News - Ehsaan helped inaugurate Transgender Liberation Front, a Tallahassee organization that advocates for transgender women, specifically women in color. They advocated and helped stop FL HB 583, which would have prevented transgender individuals from using the bathrooms of their choice. In April, she gave a TED Talk entitled "Trans Liberation in Communities of Color" to over 500 students on FSU's campus. "Be real with yourself," Ehsaan said. "Be what you want to be, and don't allow societal constructs to hold you back. If you want to wear a dress and still wear your beard, do that. Express your authentic self. Admit to the world who you really are and not who they want you to be."

Thousands Of Farmers Demonstrate In Delhi Against GM Crops, Policies

May 7, 2015 GMWatch, www.gmwatch.org Resist! Farmworkers, Food and Agriculture, GMOs, India, Labor Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Thousands of farmers have taken to the streets in a Kisan Maha Panchayat (farmer meeting) in Delhi, India, in protest at the Modi government’s anti-farmer policies, which include uncritically promoting open field trials of GM crops. There is some speculation in India that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition, led by Narendra Modi (now prime minister), may have come to power with the help of generous funding of their election campaign by the GMO lobby. It is said that this may explain their conversion to the pro-GMO cause. Though there appears to be little transparency in political funding in India, we hope the Modi government will move to allay fears of corruption by publishing full details of its election campaign funding.

Vykom: Nonviolent Action Against Untouchability

April 6, 2015 Robert Burrowess, www.pressenza.com Strategize! History, India, Nonviolent Action

The Vykom struggle was designed by Gandhi to eliminate untouchability by ‘converting’ the high caste Hindus ‘by sheer force of character and suffering’. Within a decade of the Vykom campaign the narrative that emerged, and which has persisted to this day because of its unquestioned promulgation in several well-known books on nonviolence, is that this was achieved. However, after protracted research in sometimes obscure places, including the morgues of newspapers no longer published, the viewing of colonial and archival records, and interviews of a diverse and extensive range of scholars, Professor King presents new evidence that the suffering of activists – whether untouchable or caste Hindu – was ineffective in ‘converting’ orthodox upper-caste Hindus in Vykom.

Rural India Fights For Its Rights

March 18, 2015 Saif Khalid, www.aljazeera.com Resist! Food and Agriculture, India, Land Rights, Worker Rights and Jobs

It took eight days of walking for 80-year-old Dhanmatya Mumat to reach New Delhi. Like thousands of other farmers from rural India, Mumat - from the state of Bihar - made the 1,000km-long trip to the Indian capital to protest proposed changes to a little known land law that he said would destroy his life. "We came with the hope that our land will be saved, if the government takes away our land, we will die of poverty," Mumat told Al Jazeera. "I request the politicians of the country to kill me rather than taking away my bread and butter." Organisers say some 7,000 people arrived by foot to demonstrate in New Delhi to coincide with a parliamentary session on Wednesday that will decide on proposed changes to the land act - revisions that have raised the ire of many rural Indians.

The East India Company: The Original Corporate Raiders

March 5, 2015 William Dalrymple, www.theguardian.com Educate! Capitalism, Imperialism, India, United Kingdom (UK)

It was at this moment that the East India Company (EIC) ceased to be a conventional corporation, trading and silks and spices, and became something much more unusual. Within a few years, 250 company clerks backed by the military force of 20,000 locally recruited Indian soldiers had become the effective rulers of Bengal. An international corporation was transforming itself into an aggressive colonial power. Using its rapidly growing security force – its army had grown to 260,000 men by 1803 – it swiftly subdued and seized an entire subcontinent. Astonishingly, this took less than half a century. The first serious territorial conquests began in Bengal in 1756; 47 years later, the company’s reach extended as far north as the Mughal capital of Delhi, and almost all of India south of that city was by then effectively ruled from a boardroom in the City of London.

Indian Journalist Offers Harsh Critique Of Globalization

October 28, 2014 Amitabh Pal, www.progressive.org Create! Finance and the Economy, Globalization, India, Neo-Liberalism

Sainath is pessimistic about India’s new government, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with its combination of neoliberal economics and rightwing nationalism. He predicts that it will gut the social programs that the previous center-left government put into place, such as a rural job program that provides employment to a member of each rural family for 100 days a year. “The upper class, industry, and landlords hate the scheme, since it provides a floor wage,” he said. “Joseph Stiglitz [the Nobel Prize-winning economist] recently told me that Modi can’t hope to expand the economy while at the same time lowering wages.” Sainath says Modi intends to “reform” the financial sector, which would open up India to the very calamity that took down Wall Street.

Jadavpur University Student Boycott Enters Third Week

September 26, 2014 BBC, www.bbc.com Resist! Education, India, Student Activism

Students at Calcutta's Jadavpur University say they will continue a boycott despite a government vow to set up a panel to investigate a sexual assault on a female student. What began as anger over last month's attack has snowballed into fury over the authorities' response. Protests reached a peak at the weekend when up to 25,000 marched through Calcutta's streets. Students say they will not return to class until the vice-chancellor quits. Dozens of students were injured when Vice-Chancellor Abhijit Chakraborty called in police last Tuesday night to quell a protest on campus. The classrooms at Jadavpur university are empty. There are students walking about but they are all boycotting their lessons. Some are tattooing the word "shame" on their arms.

Coca-Cola Forced To Abandon $25 Million Project In India

September 3, 2014 India Resource Center, www.indiaresource.org Resist! Coca Cola, Corporatism, India, Water

The Coca-Cola company has been forced to abandon a $25 million newly built bottling plant in Mehdiganj, Varanasi, India as the result of a sustained campaign against the company's plans. The $25 million plant - which was a significant expansion to its existing plant in Mehdiganj - had already been fully built and the company had also conducted trial runs, but could not operate commercially as it did not have the required permits to operate. Coca-Cola required permissions, or "No Objection Certificate (NOC)", from the Central Ground Water Authority (CGWA) - the national groundwater regulatory agency, and the Uttar Pradesh Pollution Control Board (UPPCB) - the statewide pollution regulatory agency. The Central Ground Water Authority rejected Coca-Cola's application to operate for its new facility on July 21, 2014, and had sought time till today, August 25, 2014, to announce its decision before the National Green Tribunal (NGT), India's green court. Somehow having learnt that its application had been rejected, in order to save itself major embarrassment, Coca-Cola sent a letter to the CGWA on Friday, August 22, 2014 - two days before the rejection was to be made public on Monday, August 25, 2014 - stating that it was "withdrawing" its application.

Ten Reasons To Say ‘No’ To North Over Trade

August 5, 2014 Ravi Kanth Devarakonda and Phil Harris, www.ipsnews.net Educate! Food Security, India, Trade, WTO

India’s decisive stand last week not to adopt the protocol of amendment of the trade facilitation agreement (TFA) unless credible rules were in place for the development issues of the South was met with “astonishment” and “dismay” by trade diplomats from the North, who described New Delhi’s as “hostage-taking” and “suicidal”. It obviously came as something of a shock for representatives of Northern interests that any party should have the brass neck to place the interests of its constituents on the negotiating table. After all, why should such banal issues as food security and poverty get in the way of a trade agenda heavily weighted in favour of the industrialised countries? New Delhi was demanding nothing more than credible global trade rules to ensure that “development,” including the challenges of poverty, in the countries of the South take precedence over the cut-throat mercantile business interests of the transnational corporations in the North In fact, it was India’s firm stand for permanent guarantees for public stockholding programmes for food security that turned this trade agenda upside down at the World Trade Organization (WTO) last week, putting paid to the adoption of the protocol of amendment for implementation of the contested TFA for the time being.

Bhopal Victims Can’t Sue Union Carbide

August 3, 2014 Earthrights International, www.earthrights.org Educate! India, Law, pollution, Union Carbide

New York, NY – Last night a New York federal court found that Union Carbide Corp. (UCC) could not be sued for ongoing contamination from the notorious chemical plant in Bhopal, India, despite evidence that construction of the plant was managed by a UCC employee – evidence that the plaintiffs are confident will lead to a reversal of the erroneous decision on appeal. EarthRights International (ERI) filed the lawsuit Sahu v. Union Carbide Corp. on behalf of residents of Bhopal whose land and water are contaminated by waste from the plant. A poisonous gas leak from the same chemical plant killed over 5,000 people in 1984, and UCC largely abandoned the site, allowing toxic wastes to leach into the local water supply. UCC was intimately involved in the creation and disposal of toxic wastes at the Bhopal plant, and the manager who oversaw the construction of the plant confirmed that he worked for UCC, not for the Indian subsidiary that officially operated the plant. Nonetheless, federal judge John Keenan ignored this evidence, ruling that UCC was not sufficiently involved in the acts at the plant and that the project manager actually worked for the subsidiary. “The evidence demonstrates that Union Carbide was intimately involved in every aspect of designing and building the Bhopal plant, including the waste disposal systems that caused the pollution,” said Marco Simons, counsel for the plaintiffs and Legal Director for EarthRights International.

India: Leaked Intelligence Report Calls NGOs Threat

July 12, 2014 Paromita Pain, www.occupy.com Resist! Activism, GMO, India, National Security, NGO

What do oil and reports have in common? They can both sometimes leak and cause great unrest. In India last month, a furor erupted over a leaked intelligence bureau (IB) report which claimed that NGOs and civil society organizations like Greenpeace were a threat to national security. Other organizations named in the report included the Indian Social Action Forum, Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace, Popular Education and Action Centre, Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture, India For Safe Food and Navdanya. Not surprisingly, all of the organizations are involved in mobilizing Indians to demand a GMO- and nuclear-free future. The Navdanya GMO Free Campaign, for example, is leading the country's movement against the planting of GMO crops in the country.

Seeds Of A New Financial Structure

July 8, 2014 Ariel Noyola Rodríguez, www.voltairenet.org Create! Brazil, BRICS, China, Finance, India, Russia

On the day following the end of the World Cup in Brazil, the Sixth Summit of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will be held in Fortaleza and Brasilia, on the 14th, 15th and 16th of July, to establish a financial architecture under the slogan: “Inclusive growth and sustainable solutions”. In contrast to the initiatives of financial regionalization in Asia and South America, the BRICS countries, since they do not have a common geographical space, at a time when they are less exposed to simultaneous financial turbulence, can increase the effectiveness of their defensive instruments. A monetary stabilization fund called Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA) and a development bank called BRICS Bank will operate as a multilateral mechanism in support of balance of payments and investment financing. De facto, the BRICS will distance themselves from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, institutions created some seven decades ago under the orbit of the US Treasury Department. In the midst of the crisis, both of these initiatives open space for financial cooperation in the face of the volatility of the dollar, and financial alternatives for countries in critical situations without subjecting themselves to structural adjustment programmes or economic reconversion. As a consequence of the growing economic slowdown on a world level, it has become more complicated for BRICS countries to reach growth rates above five per cent.

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