Indian Fishermen have warned of the harmful effects of the Adani project even as Australia to be wary as Queensland's Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk prepares to decide whether to proceed with the Carmichael coal mine ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)News has reported.
Several Indian fishermen have pointed out that a local Adani project has not just displaced them but harmed the environment
Noor Mohammad said the Adani project's coal dust, stream discharge harmed the community
Adani has been heavily criticised for a series of environmental breaches during construction of Gujarat project
Comment was sought from Adani on measures it had taken to address the ash problem, but the ABC received no response
Ms Palaszczuk and eight regional mayors are preparing to sit down with the chairman of Adani Enterprises, Gautam Adani, ahead of the company deciding whether to proceed with the proposed mine.
The Queenslanders will be shown the Adani's Gujarat port and power station, which itself has a chequered environmental record, of which the local fishermen said Australia should be wary. Noor Mohammad — a fisherman in coastal Gujarat —said his home used to be in Mundra, where Adani's port and power project now stands.
He was forced out when the Adani project started, and relocated with his wife, two sons and their families to a camp nearby. But he and other fishermen, like Buddha Ismail, said the destruction of tidal mangroves and ash from coal burnt at the power station had damaged the fishing.
"The Adani project is harming us. Their coal dust and stream discharge are harming us," Mr Mohammad said, adding he now caught a quarter of what he used to."There are no fish in the sea water near the coast. All living creatures are dead."
Adani was heavily criticised for a series of environmental breaches during construction that included destruction of mangroves, failure to regulate the ash generated by the power plant and altering the flow of waterways to the fishing's detriment.
At Hazira, another site on the Gujarat coast, early last year a court ordered the company to pay nearly $5 million in reparation for illegal construction work, which damaged the environment and deprived 80 fishing families of their access to the sea.
Mr Mohammad and Mr Ismail said based on their experiences Australia should be wary of Adani."From our side, we want to tell them that they should force [the] company to run away," Mr Mohammad said.
"I want to suggest them to not allow an [Adani] plant there," Mr Ismail said.
The ABC sought comment from Adani on measures it had taken to address the ash problem, identified in a key environmental report in 2013, but received no response before the deadline.
Mundra is slated to receive coal from the Queensland Carmichael mine if it goes ahead.
Adani said coal would help expand power generation, providing some jobs and critically, cheap electricity to 100 million Indians still without.
Despite their criticism, the fishermen both admitted they would see things differently if their sons worked with the company.
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that interprets EU law issued a landmark judgment on March 14 that upheld the right of private companies in EU member countries to enact policies barring employees from wearing “religious, political and philosophical signs” in the interest of “neutrality.” The EU ruling could increase discrimination at work. Pascal Rossignol
Such visible signs range from Jewish kippahs to Sikh turbans and Hindu bindis; Christian crosses, can, perhaps remain hidden under clothing.
The court decision was a response to two legal cases, one from Belgium and the other in France, where a Muslim woman was dismissed by her employer because of her headscarf.
So what will be the impact of the Court of Justice’s ruling on an already beleaguered minority of headscarf-wearing Muslim women?
History of headscarf legislation
It was in the 1990s and early 2000s that the headscarf started to be seen in France as a violation of secular, “neutral” space. It also became a symbol of political Islam and the oppression of women.
Debates over the issue continued for years, until the Conseil d’Etat (France’s highest administrative court) recommended the ban on all conspicuous religious gear in public schools in late 2003. In 2011, the state also banned the face veil, worn by an extremely small minority of Muslim women, in all public spaces.
Demonstrations against France’s ban on visible religious symbols in Paris in 2003. Charles Platiau
Efforts to have the headscarf removed expanded from public schools to workplaces. But dismissing women on the grounds of wearing the headscarf remained legally ambiguous or unchallenged. The March 14 ruling gives clarity and legal justification. With an official policy of neutrality that applies to everyone, companies can prohibit the headscarf without being considered discriminatory.
What about the perspectives of those who wear it?
As researchers have long demonstrated, women have many diverse motivations for wearing a headscarf. But for some, the headscarf is not merely a “symbol.” It is instead an act of piety and a way of being. Forcing them to remove it as a precondition for gaining work puts them, it can be argued, in an unfair and potentially harmful situation.
Muslim women’s voices
In the communities of French Muslims that I observed for my book on Islam and politics in France and India, the beginning of anti-headscarf legislation marked a major turning point in their hopes for integration and acceptance.
I began doing research in France in 2006 in the southeastern city of Lyon. Since then I have returned several times, totaling 14 months of ethnographic research in two different mosque communities. In both of these communities, most women I knew chose to wear a headscarf.
I had many conversations with people about the headscarf ban in public schools. Most felt demoralized when it was passed. As Ismat, a young woman of Moroccan descent, recalled, “we realized then…that Islam in France is going to remain difficult.”
A Muslim woman reads in the Arrahma mosque during Friday prayers in Istres, France. Jean-Paul Pelissier
Ismat, like almost every headscarf-wearing woman I met during my time in Lyon, had faced employment discrimination. When she went to see a lawyer for legal advice, the conversation quickly turned to his interrogating her about why she wanted to wear it in the first place.
According to the women I spent time with and interviewed, employers were explicit in their demands that the women take off their headscarves. There were eight women whom I knew well and who shared these stories with me. But I interacted briefly with many more who casually mentioned their experience with this kind of discrimination. Some women were willing to remove their headscarves to keep their jobs or continue their training, but many were not. Those who refused sometimes faced personally devastating consequences.
For example, Aisha, a lively young woman active in the mosque community, had long dreamed of becoming a psychologist and had studied hard to pursue her dream. In 2009, after moving to Paris with her husband, she found that no hospitals or clinics would accept her for clinical training in her headscarf. So she abandoned her ambition. Aisha lamented to me,
“We women are psychologically exhausted.”
In the working-class suburbs of Lyon, where I spent time with Muslim women with much stricter forms of veiling, the situation was more dire. Some had dropped out of high school, even against the wishes of their parents, because they did not want to remove their headscarves at the door of the school.
Suffering both poverty and stigma, they struggled to find work as child-care and domestic-care workers. Occasionally, informal employers temporarily tolerated their veiling before eventually placing conditions on them. Asma, an Afro-French woman, went back and forth with her employer over the issue until finally, her employer fired her. She warned Asma,
“You will never be accepted here.”
Why this will isolate women
The Court of Justice’s ruling seems to validate such social and economic exclusion.
The ruling gives a stamp of approval to the discriminatory atmosphere that shapes the lives of women who choose to wear a headscarf as part of their faith. In my research, the women who managed to hold onto a job were those who found work only among other Muslims who tolerated or simply ignored their clothing.
Muslim woman take part in a demonstration against France’s banning of full face veils from public spaces outside the French Embassy in London, 2010. Luke MacGregor
What does this imply, then, about the ideal of integration?
These women will be further estranged from the formal labor market and are less likely to feel they “belong” in France – even though many come from families that have been in France for three generations. Maryam, an observant Muslim who said she worked hard to reconcile her French identity with her Islamic faith, had a few years ago insisted in an interview with me,
“I am just as French as ‘Jacqueline,’ even with my religion.”
The question is, with yet another legal defeat, will she continue to believe this?
Fueling discrimination?
The court’s ruling will likely undermine religious freedom. And it will reinforce the arbitrariness of defining what practices are “political,” “philosophical” or “religious.”
In today’s globalized world, it is murky at best to distinguish between the religious and nonreligious. Many symbols we don’t think of as religious are, in fact, sacred in some traditions. For example, the yin-yang symbol is considered sacred in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. Will companies prohibit employees from wearing the yin-yang on a shirt or ring?
There are other popular symbols we hardly notice, like the Apple logo or the Nike swoosh. In my view, these too raise a question, whether corporate logos like these could be seen as symbols of worshiping the market. If so, should such logos be banned from employees’ clothing?
To be sure, the court’s ruling leaves specific matters to be decided by EU member states, who may interpret the issues differently in individual cases. Nonetheless, it is not a step forward.
I argue that the values and ideas of inclusion, democracy, freedom, or women’s rights, that the EU claims to uphold will not be advanced through this ruling. It might, in fact, undermine these values by allowing companies to discriminate against people in the name of “neutrality.”
Hollywood star Angelina Jolie has called for the need to keep fighting the ‘riding tide in nationalism masquerading as patriotism’ at a speech delivered at the Annual Sergio Viera de Mello Momorial lecture at the UN Assembly Hall in Geneva, Switzerland.
She stressed on the importance of inclusion and internationalism at a time when social tensions in the US and Europe are at an all-time high, according to Breitbart.
Jolie, the special envoy for the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) called upon people to “keep the flame of internationalism alive”, while also saying, “I am a proud American and I am an internationalist. I believe anyone committed to human rights is”.
“We are grappling with a level of conflict and insecurity that seems to exceed our capability, with more refugees than ever before, with new wars erupting on top of existing conflict. We are seeing a rising tide in nationalism masquerading as patriotism and the reemergence of policies encouraging fear and hatred of others”, she added.
In a sensational revelation, Goa Governor, Mridula Sinha, has confessed to having called Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley before inviting the BJP to form the government in the coastal Indian state.
Speaking to Mumbai Mirror, Sinha said, “..I felt I should speak with Arun Jaitley, and I called him around 9.30 in the evening, discussing the situation. I informed him I had verified the numbers and was satisfied and that Congress leaders hadn’t arrived yet. He said that if any party comes with the numbers, it has to be considered. So that settled it.”
Sinha, a former member of BJP’s national executive, had come under criticism from Congress, which blamed her for not inviting the party that had emerged as the single largest entity post assembly elections. Her confession comes barely days after Jaitley had taken a dig at Congress for complaining ‘too much.’
In a blog, Jaitley had written, “The Congress Party complains a bit too much. It accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of ‘stealing’ the mandate in Goa. It unsuccessfully petitioned before the Supreme Court. It attempted to raise issues in the Lok Sabha. What are the facts?”
The governor is now facing social media heat with users demanding her sacking. Congress, for its part, has decided to raise her conduct in the ongoing parliamentary sessions in Delhi.
The victorious BJP has yet to name a person to be sworn in as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. But at least one BJP MLA is all ready to table a bill in the UP Assembly soon as it is convened.
The newly elected BJP candidate from Deoband, Brijesh Singh wants to see the city renamed as Dev Vrand.
Deoband, generally known as the epicentre of the revivalist Deoband movement born after the 1857 revolt is home to what is considered the most important centre of Islamic learning in south Asia.
But Singh who has a different take told the Indian Express: “Deoband is just a perception as this town is always famous as Dev Vrand only. We have Mahabharat’s Rankhandi here and the five Pandavas have worshiped here in Dev Vrand. Even the village named as Jarwala is actually Yakshawala and is the same place where ‘Yaksha’ has questioned Yudhisthir.”
One of the five constituencies in Saharanpur district, 65 per cent of Deoband’s populace are Muslim.
Singh emerged victorious from this majority constituency secured over 1,02,000 votes defeating his nearest rival from the BSP, Majid Ali by a margin of 29,415 votes.
The BJP MLA claims his victory is owing to the fact that a majority of Muslim women too voted for him as they are pleased with the Narendra Modi-led NDA government’s support for ending the practice of triple talaq (instant divorce). “Meri Muslim behnen Modi ji ke sath hai aur woh bhi chahti hain ki teen Talaq band ho,” he said.
If Bollywood had demanded strict action against Karni Sena after Bhansali was attacked, second instance of violence could have been prevented
Sanjay Leela Bhansali's film Padmavati is attacked once again. This time, the film set was torched and almost reduced to ashes with the use of petrol bombs. In the early hours of Wednesday at Kohlapur a group of two dozen men wearing masks have indulged in this act of vandalism. In January, director Bhansali was assaulted by the Rajput outfit Karni Sena while filming at the Nahargarh Fort at Jaipur. The film production was allegedly shifted out of Rajasthan following the attack.
The incident is said to have occured at the set spread over 50,000 sq. ft. at the picturesque Masai Pathar, 10 km from Panhala. Props and costumes have been burned down, but crew members were not injured. This entire incident wrapped up within 15 minutes, but the loss could cost the maker approximately Rs. 4 crores say the members of the crew. It has also been reported that since the fire brigade could not reach the disaster site quickly, nearby villagers helped douse the flames and moved the people and animals from the set avoiding casualties.
Reacting once again to the attck on Padmavati, filmmaker Karan Johar said that he hopes "steps are taken to prevent such incidents" at the trailer launch of Baahubali 2: The Conclusion on Thursday. SS Rajamouli, who is presenting the Hindi version of the film, said at the same venue "Freedom of speech is a fundamental right of the people of this country and any artiste, any filmmaker should be able to express his views".
Both Karan Johar and Rajamouli have raised reasonable concerns. But, if Bollywood had demanded immediate punishment of Karni Sena members after Bhansali was manhandled in January, the two dozen men who vandalised the film set would have thought twice. Bollywood stars like Deepika Padukone, Ranvir Singh and Shahid Kappor pleaded innocent. They claimed to have not intended to hurt the sentiments of Rajputs and played the sympathy card in January.
Karni Sena has welcomed this crude act of vandalism and has also stated that if wrong facts are continued to be presented, the protest will continue. Karni Sena had earlier claimed that the film was distorting the history of their Godess Padmini. They reasoned out the attack on Bhansali by stating that he was portraying a romantic sequence between 14th century emperor Alauddin Khilji (played by Ranvir Singh) and Rani Padmini (played by Deepika Padukone).
Instead of demanding strict action against the members of Karni Sena after he was attacked the first time, Bhansali went onto have an agreement with the criminals. He bowed down to their demands of "no intimate scenes in Padmavati", "no distortion of history" (more like "no distortion of Karni Sena "story"") and "Padmavati name be changed". Will Bhansali have more negotiations with the outfit that torched his set?
Luckily there was no casualty of life. But there were several horses and few camels in the set, and one horse is said to have been injured. Can luck be relied on every time? The attackers and Karni Sena spokespersons who legitimise violence should be punished otherwise such instances will continue to grow, as the cultural space for violence seems to ripe at present.
Sruti M D is part of the editorial collective of Indian Writers' Forum
A village in UP is on edge following emergence of posters calling for Muslim residents of Jianagla near Bareilly city asking Muslims from the village to “leave immediately,” the Times of India reported two days ago.
Meanwhile, another report in today’s print edition of the Times of India says tension arose in Bulandshahar city when a group of men beating dhols in celebration of the BJP’s stunning performance in the UP Assembly elections tried to hoist a party flag on the roof of a mosque on Wednesday night.
In the first instance, the Muslims-get-out posters in Hindi have reportedly been put up at over two dozen places warning Muslims of “dire consequences” if they did not leave the village before the year-end. Around 200 of the village’s 2,500 residents are Muslims.
Taking their inspiration from the US travel bans attempted by President Donald Trump, the posters put up by BJP-bhakts read: :What Trump is doing in America, we will do in this village because BJP is now in power.
The posters put up over the last weekend are signed, “Hindus of the village”. The posters also identify a local BJP MP as their “guardian”. In the Bulandshahar incident, police and Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) jawans have been deployed in the area and senior officials are closely monitoring the situation, it is reported.
The incident took place at Chahcrai village in Bulandshahar. Mohsin Ahmed, a villager who was witness to the incident told the Times of India: “It was around 9.30 p.m. when a procession of men with tilaks passed through the areas. A few of them first stood in front of the mosque gate and then began installing the flag on the roof of the mosque. We objected and this led to the altercation”.
Though timely intervention by cops tempered the situation, there is palpable fear in the village. “When police arrived, the men left the place but not before warning that they word come back with swords the next time. Ther is peace right now due to presence of the PAC contingent and the police force, but there is a sense of uncertainty prevailing within the Muslim community here,” Furkan Ali, another village resident told the Times of India.
The district unit chief has denied its involvement in the episode.
Prime Minister announced that his policy henceforth would be to empower the poor by providing them with opportunities, instead of handing out doles to them, which, he believes, is what the various “pro-poor” welfare programmes amount to.
In his speech to the Bharatiya Janata party workers in Delhi after the Assembly election results had been declared, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that his policy henceforth would be to empower the poor by providing them with opportunities, instead of handing out doles to them, which, he believes, is what the various “pro-poor” welfare programmes amount to.
Newspapers were quick to underscore, and in general laud, this shift in approach from “welfarism” to “development”. Since government policy is set to reflect this shift from now on, its implications are worth examining.
Nobody obviously prefers “doles” to development, neither the recipients of these “doles” nor those who advocate them. The real issue is how to bring about the kind of development that actually empowers the poor by providing them with opportunities.
The petty production sector that has been under attack during the period of neo-liberal economic policies, of which the more than three lakh peasant suicides over the last two decades alone is a tragic expression, can hardly be expected to enlarge employment opportunities for the poor, unless there is a decisive break from neo-liberalism; and PM Modi who is closely linked to corporate houses is certainly not contemplating such a break. Indeed so deep is the faith of corporate India in this Prime Minister that his election victory has led to a rally on the stock market.
He has of course made two big promises for the agrarian economy: to waive loans of marginal farmers, and to offer interest-free agricultural credit; but let us examine these. Let us assume for argument’s sake that he keeps these promises. Even so, the former is only a once-for-all measure which does not lead to a revival of the agrarian economy.
What such a revival requires is a general restoration of profitability of agriculture, and also its protection against the vicissitudes of market price fluctuations, including fluctuations in world market prices which at present get freely imported into the Indian economy under the neo-liberal regime.
In fact in PM Modi’s own state of Gujarat, which is ruled by his own Party under a Chief Minister handpicked by him, groundnut farmers are in deep distress at this very moment because of a price-crash. Unless these basic problems of peasant agriculture are tackled, once-for-all actions like loan-waivers, though no doubt beneficial, will not overcome the agrarian crisis.
The UPA government too had effected a major country-wide loan waiver, but that has not stopped the agrarian crisis, of which one important expression has been the drop in per capita foodgrain production in the country after 2011-12.
As for his second promise, it is obvious that foreign banks and private banks, which flout priority sector lending norms for agriculture with impunity, will hardly provide interest-free loans to this sector; it is only the public sector banks that may be pushed into doing so. But just as their being pushed by the government into giving loans for “infrastructure projects” to favoured corporate players has saddled them with large amounts of “non-performing assets”, likewise their being pushed into giving interest-free loans to farmers will only further worsen their financial position.
This per se should not matter and the government should fiscally support them; but a government that has been pushing for increasing the share of private equity in public sector banks (in the name of fulfilling the “Basle norms”), will, instead of providing such fiscal support (that may come in the way of so- called “fiscal responsibility”, that is keeping the fiscal deficit down to 3 percent of GDP), simply use their financial stress as an excuse for privatizing them, in which case the interest-free loans too would just dry up. PM Modi’s promise of interest-free loans for agriculture, which normally should have been welcome news, carries therefore a huge sting in the tail, if it is at all implemented.
Put differently, unless profitability is restored in agriculture, unless farmers are protected against price-fluctuations, unless all banks, including foreign and private banks, are made to give interest-free loans to agriculture, each one of which entails a departure from the neo-liberal regime that the pro-corporate Modi government is totally incapable of attempting, any revival of the petty production sector, and the creation of employment opportunities for the poor within that sector, is simply out of the question.
Indeed far from reviving petty production, the Modi government has just dealt a huge blow to it through its demonetization measure. The fact that the BJP has nonetheless won in Uttar Pradesh with a vote percentage that dropped only by 2 percentage points compared to 2014, which is less than what many expected, does not negate this.
Likewise the fact that the CSO’s third quarter GDP estimates do not show as large a drop in growth rate as many had expected, does not negate this. In other words, whether the adverse political fall-out of demonetization is large or small is irrelevant to the entire question of its effect on petty production which has been unambiguously and severely adverse. Indeed in Modi’s own Gujarat peasants have been on the streets demonstrating against demonetization and have even faced police repression for doing so.
It follows therefore that when Narendra Modi is talking of creating opportunities for the poor, he is thinking essentially of employment opportunities through an expansion of the corporate sector. And since no significant expansion of the public sector is on the cards, it is the private corporate sector that is expected by him to be the location for such new opportunities. Now, if the private corporate sector is to be relied upon for providing such new opportunities, then it will demand additional “incentives” from the government.
So, when PM Modi is talking of shifting away from giving “doles” to the poor, what he has in mind is that the money being currently used for welfare schemes for the poor should be withdrawn from such schemes and handed over to the corporate magnates. Given the entire framework of his thought and his economic strategy, this is the only conclusion that one can draw from his remarks.
But let us pursue the matter a little further. Suppose such a regressive fiscal transfer does happen; could it increase employment opportunities for the poor? The only way this could happen is if there was an increase in private corporate investment brought about through such a transfer. But private corporate investment occurs only in response to an expected growth in the size of the market for the goods that the sector produces. (If private corporate investment is undertaken to supplant petty production, then that will only worsen the conditions of the poor by causing a net shrinking of employment opportunities via a process analogous to the “deindustrialization” of the colonial times).
A mere transfer of funds from welfare projects for the poor towards “incentives” for the corporate magnates, not only does not expand markets but has the opposite effect of contracting them since it causes an overall reduction in consumption. The transfer would therefore make the corporate magnates simply pocket the money that has come to them, without their actually undertaking any additional investment.
In fact this entire distinction between “doles” and “development” is a wholly erroneous one, which is propagated by corporate capital and by the media controlled by it and which is now being mouthed by Modi, precisely to bring about a transfer from welfare expenditures to “doles” for capitalists in the name of providing them with “incentives”.
In order to boost investment in the economy, not just in the corporate sector but in the economy at large, demand has to increase. Welfare expenditure plays that role. It is a means of boosting demand in the economy, and thereby bringing about larger investment and higher growth as well. Welfare expenditure does not stand in the way of growth; it is a means of bringing about growth. It is therefore a means of bringing about growth in employment, and hence enlarging opportunities for the poor.
PM Modi’s distinction between “creating opportunities for the poor” and undertaking welfare expenditure for their benefit, his pitting one against the other, his suggestion that the latter stands in the way of the former, lacks any theoretical basis. It betrays not only a lack of understanding of economics, but also an acceptance in toto of the ideology of corporate finance that what is good for itself is good for the country too, including for the poor.
The “inversion of reason” that has characterized the Modi government is thus being carried further now. Demonetization which actually hurt the informal sector and the poor, was portrayed by it as being against the rich, as constituting, in the words of some journalists, a “class war” against the rich.
Likewise a cutting down even of such meager welfare expenditure that is undertaken for the poor and a transfer of such funds into the pockets of the rich is being portrayed as creating opportunities for the poor themselves. We must brace ourselves for more such instances of “inversion of reason” in the days to come.
