Dear Friends:
India Ink, New York Times, has the following today(19 03 2012): Newswallah (Copied below) Putting Tendulkar's Hundredth Ton in Perspective In Delhi Rushdie Issues a Battle Cry (My comment: Does it matter?) Newswallah: Long Reads Edition By NEHA THIRANI “I live in a house of slamming doors and broken dreams. I am no longer myself, I am convinced that I am starring in somebody’s tragic film,” Meena Kandasamy writes in an intensely moving and personal tale of domestic violence in Outlook magazine. Kandasamy, a poet, activist, translator and scholar, shares her harrowing experience of being married to a violent man and subjugated to severe emotional and physical abuse. Having discovered that he was previously married and has yet to divorce his wife, she leaves him and finds that her marriage is not valid – there is no point in asking for a divorce. Finding no recourse in the law, and no possibility of punishment, she seeks solace in family, friends and poetry. In a piece entitled “The National Counter Terrorism Centre: The Creation of the Indian Stasi” in the Economic and Political Weekly, the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Center weighs in on the debate surrounding the central government’s attempts to expand the jurisdiction of the Intelligence Bureau. The piece argues that the discussion around the creation of the National Counter Terrorism Center and its being granted policing powers under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act has been limited to norms of federalism and the constitutional division of power between the center and states. While this remains a vital criticism, the piece points to a larger issue at stake, which is the incremental expansion of the central government’s policing powers through the Border Security Force, the Central Reserve Police Force, the Sashastra Seema Bal, the Railway Protection Force and the National Investigation Agency. In granting intelligence bureaus policing powers, argues the author, the government is putting at risk the civil liberties of ordinary Indians. Ulrik McKnight takes an in-depth look at a recently released collection of documents from the private intelligence and forecasting firm Stratfor related to their client, Dow Chemical, in “A Wicked Leak: Stratfor, Dow Chemicals, and India” on The India Site. The firm, known as a “shadow C.I.A.,” for a reputation of thorough and effective private spying, was hacked by the activist collective Anonymous. Among the documents that surfaced from that hacking is a roadmap of a very expensive and lengthy investigation undertaken by Dow Chemical related to their subsidiary Union Carbide and the Bhopal disaster. Commonly referred to as the Bhopal gas tragedy, Union Carbide India’s 1984 Bhopal pesticide plant leak is one of the most disastrous industrial accidents in history, which killed 2,000 people instantly and affected more than 500,000. Dow Chemical, which bought Union Carbide in 1999, claims that it should not have responsibility for cleaning up the leak or compensating the victims, in part because Union Carbide reached a legal settlement with the Indian government in 1989 over the issue. Residents say they have not been properly compensated and the site is still believed to be contaminated by hazardous waste. A small but persistent group of activists continues to bring attention to the matter. The documents leaked by Anonymous show that Dow had hired Stratfor to conduct extensive online surveillance of Bhopal activists, and sent updates to officials at Dow Chemical on a regular basis. In an extensive analysis, McKnight examines Dow Chemical’s actions. _______________________________________________ assam mailing list [email protected] http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
