[sacw] sacw dispatch | [India Special] (30 Nov 99)

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Web Dispatch | [India Special]
30 November 1999
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#1. Carbide factory in Bhopal still a toxic hotspot
#2. The Use of Religion in India
#3. Conversions: why so much hue and cry in India
#4. 15th Anniversary of Delhi Massacres & "War Against Terrorism"
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#1.
Indian Express
Tuesday, November 30, 1999

Carbide factory still a toxic hotspot

ENS & AGENCIES 
NOVEMBER 29: Fifteen years after the diasater in which the methyl
isocyanate leak killed an estimated 16,000 and injured 5,00,000 others''
in Bhopal, there is still a toxic pall hanging over the premises of the
old Union Carbide factory and its surroundings.

Greenpeace International, which had been operating in India for the last
five years, has released a study called `The Bhopal Legacy' based on the
findings of laboratory tests conducted from soil and water samples taken
from the area. Greenpeace is on its maiden visit to India with the aim
of establishing the Indian chapter of the organisation on a permanent
basis.

According to the report released simultaneously in Mumbai, Bhopal and
Amsterdam today, seven soil samples and 12 water samples were collected
from the former site of Union Carbide factory. These were sent to the
University of Exeter, in England, for testing.

``Some of the organochlorines found in the groundwater feeding the
neighbouring communities of gas victims are known to have been used at
the plant during routine operations,'' the report states. The levels of
mercury found in a sample taken from conjunction with Bhopal support
groups in May 1999 from a location within the factory, were between
20,000 and six million times higher than background levels which would
be expected in uncontaminated soil. Mercury is highly toxic to the
central nervous system.

Greenpeace has declared the former Union Carbide factory in Bhopal a
``global toxic hotspot'' and calls for Union Carbide to clean up the
toxic legacy and hazardous wastes left at the site when the plant was
shut down 15 years ago on December 3, 1984.

``The results of the survey indicates severe contamination by toxic
chemicals at a number of locations within the old plant. The extent and
nature of the toxic chemicals found in the groundwater indicate the need
for immediate action to be taken to provide clean drinking water for the
local communities, and to prevent further release of chemicals from the
factory itself,'' says senior Greenpeace research scientist, Ruth
Stringer, in a release issued in Mumbai.

In the worst contaminated sample of groundwater taken from a handpump in
Atal Ayub Nagar along the north-east corner of the factory,
concentrations of carbon tetrachloride, a substance sucpected to cause
cancer, exceeded limits set by the World Health Organisation by 1,705
times. Chloroform in the sample exceeded the USEPA standards for
drinking water by 206 times.

According to the report, the presence of the chlorinated chemicals in
the well water near the Carbide plant is ``undoubtly due to the
long-term industrial contamination of surrounding environment'' by the
Carbide factory. The report concluded that long-term consumption of
water contaminated by chemicals found in the study could cause
significant health damage.

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#2
Hindustan Times
28 November 1999

The Use of Religion
by Suhel Seth

The last few weeks have seen a seemingly tolerant India toss and turn at
the prospect of the arrival of the Pope. The Pope has come and gone and
our religions continue to exist. I have often wondered if our religions
are so intrinsically weak that they can be threatened easily and this
brings me to a conclusion that we all know for real: religion has had
its most perverse use in India, it continues to be manipulated for vote.

It is (and this is true) a benchmark of someone's position in society
and it is often used in the most vindictive manner. I am a Hindu and I
need not wear this on my sleeve but a situation arose when it was
fashionable to start and end conversions with Jai Shri Ram. I can't
believe mere utterances will make us better devotees. But this is what
we are seeing on the rise. There were slogans which used to abound
beginning with the banal one which said "Garv Se Kaho, Hindu Haain"
(With pride say you are a Hindu): why should I say it? Only when one is
insecure does one make statements such as these. Only when a religion is
insecure, it indulges in religion-bashing to protect its flock. The
rabid amongst us have no place in society: we must learn to shut up.
People in India are fed up of being reminded of their religion: it's
almost as if religion and not belief were the end motives of all faiths!
I also believe our education system needs some tweaking which will
ensure that religion is what it should be: a private prayer: to that
extent I would advocate banning all public displays of religion, whether
they are puja marches or all-night bhajans (which have their own
remarkable contribution to noise-pollution) or the proliferation of
places of worship: that too most of the time on subsidised government
land. Why should the average taxpayer fund religion? If I wish to
contribute to a cause I will, but my government has no business in
granting prime land to Gods and Godmen. And that too of one dominant
religion! We cannot hope to build an edifice of a secular India on the
planks of divisive religion-based politics and that is precisely what we
are doing. We are shaping an India which will become increasingly
intolerant: an India where religion will continue to preside over what
is logical and just: an India where the Gods you worship will decide
your destiny. This is something we need to stop. And we need to educate
our children about this first. We need to tell them that this India was
founded as a union of religions: it was not founded to promote one at
the cost of others. We need to revisit the ideologies of our great men -
be they Raja Rammohan Roy or Mahatma Gandhi. We need more of our cities
to turn into the Malerkotlas that are such fine examples of tolerance.

And here, not just the citizens but also our religious heads need to act
responsibly. We cannot and must not tolerate edicts issued from minarets
imploring an entire community to vote en-masse for one political party:
neither can a dastardly act of pulling down a place of worship be reason
enough to elect a government!

We must make this paradigm shift if each one of us wishes to be true to
his or her religion! If we behave as we currently do, using and abusing
religion, then God save us!
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#3.
The Tribune
29 Nov 1999

Conversions: why so much hue and cry

HAVING been a devout atheist most of my adult life, I was in the
enviable state of being free from the fears and anxieties of most
religious people. Now that state of bliss has been disturbed by the
clamour and controversy that surrounds faith of all kinds. The Pope's
visit, far from soothing excited feelings, has only worsened the
atmosphere.

What did he mean by 'great harvest of faith on the vast and vital
continent (Asia)'? Harvest by whom? the Vatican? For what purpose? By
what means? Jesus may have asked his disciples to be 'fishers of men'
but fishing is always on a small scale. Harvesting suggests an operation
on a grand scale. Whatever the Pope meant, such talk is indiscreet, to
say the least.

But then, one shouldn't be surprised at such talk coming from the
Catholic Church, the richest and most commercialised and centralised
branch of Christianity. It is also traditionally the most dogmatic and
intellectually intolerant. There are, of course, among Catholic leaders,
progressive and even revolutionary men, like those who propagate
'liberalisation theology' in Latin America. There are also distinguished
scholars who have studied world religions and have tried to build
bridges between Christianity and Hinduism and Buddhism. But their
influence has been negligible among the Catholic hierarchy.

The Pope has on occasions asserted the importance of religious tolerance
in the maintenance of peace. But in his early years at the Vatican he
was mainly concerned about the struggle for religious freedom in the
Soviet Union and in the countries of the Warsaw Pact. It is interesting,
however, that when Ayatollah Khomeini condemned Salman Rushdie to death,
Osservator Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, was one of the few
journals in the world to express solidarity with Ayatollah's views.

There has been, of course, a very slow and gradual change in the
conservatism of the Catholic orthodoxy over the years, but yet on vital
issues like birth control or papal infallibility, the Church, and
particularly the Pope, has held on to dogmatic position. In Europe,
Catholic priests who have questioned the wisdom of opposing
contraception or who have dared to question the doctrine of papal
infallibility have been subjected to punishment.

In Catholic universities in Europe, distinguished professors who have
advocated a scholarly and open-minded approach to Biblical studies have
been deprived of their licences to teach.

The religious tolerance that the Pope advocates for the Communist world
and non-Christian faiths, apparently doesn't apply to the Pope himself.

If Churches, both Catholic and Protestant, don't attract large
congregations these days in the Christian world, it can only be because
the Church, generally speaking, has not aligned itself with the major
concerns of modern youth. In the West, young people when they discard
traditional teachings of the Bible occupy themselves with issues such as
racism, protection of wildlife or the promotion of environmental health.

But sermons in churches still are efforts to make the congregation hold
on to their faith in every story in the Bible, even if they are
fantastic fiction.

In England, I'm told, for instance, one of the favourite stories of
evangelical preachers is that of Abraham's wife, Sarah, giving birth to
Isaac when she was over 90 years old. They seem to get away with it, and
the audience, made up of the professional class, doctors, nurses,
teachers, sit silently without ever questioning the stories, because
they are in the Bible.

Of course, all religions dwell on such stories, and because they are
part of the scriptures they acquire sanctity from rational scrutiny.

Why is religion (and the superstition that goes with it) so necessary to
mankind? To say that only religion can show the moral path is, to my
mind, absurd. Or, if religion is important, why not leave it to our
children to choose one that they fancy when they are old enough to
discriminate?

In one of the newspapers recently a reader remarked that imposing your
religion on your children is a form of forced conversion. He is
absolutely right. Some 25 years ago, writing in the Illustrated Weekly
on the 'humbug of secularism' I advocated the principle of allowing
one's children to have a choice in the religion they adopt for
themselves, or none, if they so choose. It raised a howl of protest from
all quarters, especially from some of my Christian relations who were
obviously shocked at the waywardness of one of their progeny.

There is, in my view, only one way to create religious harmony in the
world, and that is to allow a free flow of ideas between religions and
between the atheist and the religious person.

I support the idea of conversion. If a man or woman wants to change his
or her religion, it should be at least as easy as changing their
passports. After all, thousands of Indians emigrate to the USA and
Europe and sooner or later opt to become citizens of the country they
have settled in. No one gives it a thought, so why the hue and cry if a
few people want to change their religion? -Abu Abraham

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#4.
The 15th Anniversary of the Delhi Massacres and the "War Against
Terrorism"
(Statement issued by the AIPSG on the occasion of the 15th anniversary
of the Delhi Massacres)
New York November 5th, 1999

Fifteen years have now passed since one the darkest episodes in
independent India, when thousands of innocent Sikhs in Delhi and other
cities were hunted down and butchered following the assination of Indira
Gandhi. To this day, the perpetrators of the massacres remain free,
while the survivors and families of the victims remain traumatised and
unrehabilitated. The AIPSG calls upon all people to demand that the
Indian government take immediate measures to bring the guilty to justice
and to rehabilitate the victims of the 1984 massacres.

Over the past 15 years, there have been six general elections in India,
leading to eight separate governments, under which over 30 different
political parties have shared in state power. The local administration
in Delhi has also changed hands a half dozen times. But neither the
frequent elections nor the variety of political parties wielding power
at different levels has brought about justice for the victims.

The numerous independent and official commissions of inquiry that have
investigated the 1984 massacres have long-since revealed that they were
orchestrated and led by senior officials, including ministers, police
officers, administrators and functionaries of the ruling party. Many of
the culprits have been identified and named by the survivors and their
prosecution has been long been sought by victims as well as human rights
activists.

The attitude of the political establishment to the November 1984
massacres is best characterised by former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar
who recently said that such incidents from the past are best left
forgotten. A similar self-serving argument was made a year ago by the
Shiv Sena government in Maharashtra, who refused to prosecute those
responsible for the Bombay 1993 riots on the grounds it would "reopen
old wounds".

State Repression on the Rise

The fact that the culprits of a massacre in which the state agencies are
so closely implicated have so brazenly evaded justice has been a
festering wound on the Indian polity with very negative repercussions.
One manifestation of this has been the intensification of violence in
diverse forms by the authorities upon the people, through police
executions committed through custodial and "encounter" killings, the
riots such from Meerut to Mumbai, the daily atrocities in Kashmir,
Assam, Manipur, Andhra, and elsewhere. The demolition of the Babri
Masjid in 1992 and the current wave of attacks on Christians are also
outcomes of the refusal to prosecute those guilty of similar communal
attacks in the past. Fifteen years after November 1984, it is clear for
everyone to see that massacres and riots of this kind have become a tool
that successive governments have relied upon to divert and divide the
people and to attack the unity of their resistance to economic, social
and political attacks.

It is a matter of note that such repressive measures have always
escalated in the immediate aftermath of an election. Every new
government has introduced fresh measures under the guise of their new
mandate, to reorient politics and the economy and to suppress the
resistance to this. The election in 1984 was followed by a fresh launch
of terror in Punjab and the introduction of the notorious Terrorist and
Disruptive Activities Prevention Act, (TADA) by the Rajiv Gandhi
government. V.P.Singh's new government launched an army offensive in
Kashmir in 1989. Narasimha Rao launched an unprecedented wave of
encounter killings and custodial killings in Punjab with M. S. Gill and
Beant Singh as his executioners. The United Front government stepped up
counter-terrorism in Andhra, Bihar and UP and even got the notorious
counter-terrorist Kukka Parrey elected to the Kashmir Assembly. The
Vajpayee government began its first term with a "pro-active" approach of
state terror in Kashmir, Andhra and Manipur, and encouraged all state
governments to adopt their own mini-TADA laws.

No sooner were the most recent elections concluded, than the new
government quickly identified "internal security" and counter-terrorism
as one of its key preoccupations together with a "second generation" of
economic reforms and increased military spending.

The last fifteen years have witnessed the reorientation of the country's
economic, political and military policies, giving rise to the
liberalization and privatization program as well as war preparations,
including the nuclear and missile development programs. During these
fifteen years, the poverty level in India has also worsened, both in
relative and absolute terms, as India slipped further in the UN's human
development indices. Taking into account the fact that each of the past
five elections since 1989 have only produced minority governments and
highly indecisive electoral verdicts, it stands to reason that elections
have provided no mandate, but only a cover for the use of division,
diversion and naked force to facilitate the accumulation of wealth by a
few and the accumulation of poverty by the many in India.

The AIPSG appeals to all the people who are concerned about the future
of India to take note that the current government has stepped up its
drive to strengthen its security apparatus to maintain "law and order",
fight "cross-border terrorism" and establish "su-raj" in tandem with the
second generation of economic restructuring. The arsenal of laws such as
Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA), National Security Act (NSA),
Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), and so on are being
supplemented by an agenda to modernize the police, paramilitary, armed
forces, the intelligence wing etc. and institutionalize
"counter-terrorism" operations using recruits from among the insurgents
who have laid down their arms.

Doctrine of War against Terrorism

Within the present international situation, the Indian government has
openly embraced the U.S. doctrine of "war against terrorism". This has
come in recent years to replace the Cold War era doctrine of "containing
communism" which was used to justify the war in Vietnam, the coup in
Chile, the massacre in Indonesia, apartheid in South Africa and
subversion and terror by the CIA across the globe. The new doctrine of
war against terrorism justifies all violation of international law by
the US and other big powers under the pretext of combating terrorism in
general and Islamic fundamentalism in particular. The cruise missile
attacks by the US against Sudan and Afghanistan and the Russian bombings
in Chechnya have been justified on this basis. Even the NATO aggression
against Yugoslavia was presented as a measure to contain Serbian terror
in Kosova. India, too, is now anchoring its domestic and international
policies to the doctrine of "war against terrorism." and has used this
to sharply escalate the suppression of insurgent forces in Kashmir,
Assam, Tripura and elsewhere under the pretext of uprooting cross-border
terrorism.

During the Cold War years, this doctrine had been used internationally
to portray the freedom struggles in Palestine and South Africa as
terrorist, while the crimes committed by U.S.-backed Israeli and South
African authorities were justified as part of the war against terrorism.
Countries like India actually opposed this doctrine at the time and
defended the struggles of the Palestinian and Azanian people. The
reversal of the Cold War era positions by the Indian government and its
embrace of this doctrine today must be viewed with great suspicion
because it is part of Indian government's plan to maintain "internal
peace" at a time when it plans to take "hard decisions" on further
liberalization and privatization as well as war preprartions.

In the opinions of the AIPSG, there is a close link between the official
apathy to investigate the Delhi massacres or Operation Blue Star, and
the more aggressive use of terror and "counter-terror" against the
people of India today. The war against terrorism that the present
government is espousing is meant to criminalize popular political
struggles further. The police and paramilitary forces as well as their
surrogate armed bands and agents provocateurs in Kashmir, Punjab, Assam,
Manipur, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh and elsewhere are targeting peasants,
trade union leaders, civil rights lawyers, communists, environmental
activists and ordinary people resisting the social cutbacks, job losses
as well as arbitrariness in governance.

The divisions being inflamed between peoples of different religions or
languages are calculated to undermine the unity of people fighting for
change. It is only through the broad and consistent opposition of the
people to all acts of state terror and individual acts of terror that
this policy can be defeated.

Demanding justice for the victims of the Delhi massacre is not, as
Mr.Chandra Shekhar suggests, a vindictive quest to reopen old wounds. It
is an important demand that all people can unite around. Bringing the
guilty to justice will be a giant step towards seeking political
solutions to many problems India faces today.

__________________________________________
SOUTH ASIA CITIZENS WEB DISPATCH is an informal, independent &
non-profit citizens wire service run by South Asia Citizens Web
(http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex) since1996.