Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan who was to visit Guwahati between December 15 and 117 for a summit that would also see PM Modi present, has cancelled his trip to the city in the wake of a deteriorating security situation and public protests against the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) 2019.

The discontent of the people of Assam with the BJP has taken a new turn, especially after the CAB 2019 had been assented to by President Ram Nath Kovind yesterday and made a law. Their protest has taken renewed vigor and people are defying the curfew, coming out in huge numbers against the same. Without caring for the curfew, the police warnings or impending danger to their own lives they are continuing their agitation against the ruling BJP government and its policies.
 

Current developments

The curfew was relaxed in Dibrugarh for five hours from 8 AM to 1 PM on Friday, it continues to be imposed in several other regions of the state.

At the call of AASU and the artists’ association, thousands of people have gathered at the Chandmari playground for an indefinite hunger strike against the CAB. Agitations have also continued in areas like Basistha Chariali, Thanapara and several other areas in Guwahati, notwithstanding the curfew.

Owing to the curfew, the availability of daily essentials has taken a hit. There are no vegetable vendors on the roads and all shots and market places have been closed down. Schools, colleges and offices are still indefinitely shut. Petrol pumps and ATM machines face closure and Assam has been pushed into a state of a complete lockdown.

As of yesterday, there have been three casualties – a youth was killed in Lachit Nagar, a woman lost her life in Hatigaon and another man from Basistha Chariali lost his life; all due to indiscriminate firing by the police. More than 50 persons have been injured in Guwahati itself, with 25 people having been admitted in a critical condition at the Guwahati Medical College and Hospital for treatment.

Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti leader Akhil Gogoi had been arrested from a house in Jorhat on Thursday evening and is currently being kept under preventive custody on the charge of inciting people to join the protest.

Assam’s neighbour, Meghalaya too has come to a halt after heavy police firing in Shillong yesterday and all internet and SMS services in the state have been suspended for 48 hours. All the petrol pumps in Shillong too have been closed down.

Movement has been completely restricted in both the states.

The anti-CAB protests in Assam have been going on for days now and the Army has taken over to maintain the law and order situation in the state. Many people have lost their lives and several have been injured in this fight to protect the identity of the Assamese people.

Related:

3 killed in anti-CAB protests in Assam
Massive Protests against CAB in Aligarh
Assam engulfed in smoke as protests rage on
Anti- CAB protest continues in Assam, Quick Response Team called in Dibrugarh
Students injured, army called in as anti-CAB stir intensifies in Assam
48-hr Mobile Internet Ban as NE boils Over Citizenship Amendment Bill: Tripura

The post Japan PM cancels Guwahati trip appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Shiori Ito. Photo: Noffar Gat/www.noffargat.com. All rights reserved.

“I was told not to bring shame on Japan, by spreading this story,” said freelance journalist Shiori Ito, at a meeting in New York City on the sidelines of the recent United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) talks.

In May 2017, Ito alleged publicly that she had been raped by a well-known television journalist two years earlier. She has spoken about her experience several times since, including in a book, ‘Black Box,’ (currently available only in Japanese).

Speaking out about sexual violence is not something that is frequently done in Japan, even in the age of #MeToo movements globally. “I face a lot of backlash,” Ito told me, “but this is something I have to share.”

In stepping forward with her story, Ito has been credited with opening space for profoundly difficult conversations about sexual assault in Japan, which remains deeply conservative socially and has a significant gender gaps in spite of its overall wealth.

“She broke Japan’s silence on rape,” said the New York Times. Tokyo Weekender, an English-language magazine, called Ito “the face of the #MeToo movement in Japan” and “one of the few brave voices to speak out” from the country.

Copies of Shiori Ito’s book. Photo: Noffar Gat/www.noffargat.com. All rights reserved.

Ito says that she was sexually assaulted in a Tokyo hotel room by a well-known journalist with whom she met for dinner to talk about job opportunities. (He has publicly denied these allegations).

She is one of a small number of Japanese women who spoke out publicly about their experiences of sexual assault in 2017, a year which saw a global wave of allegations against powerful men in media, entertainment and politics.

Journalist Akiko Kobayashi at Buzzfeed told her story of child sexual abuse. Blogger Haruka Ito (known as Hachu) talked about her experience with sexual harassment.

Ito talks about her experience with perhaps surprising openness. Though, she said in New York: “I have been introduced as a first ‘silence breaker,’ but it is not true. There have already been so many women who spoke up… Society had concealed the truth.”

Nearly 1 in 3 Japanese women have been sexually harassed at work, according to a 2016 government survey. But women who speak out against such abuse are often blamed for ‘putting themselves’ in risky situations.

“I was vilified on social media and received hate messages and emails and calls from unknown numbers.”

In January, Ito wrote on Politico.eu: “I was vilified on social media and received hate messages and emails and calls from unknown numbers. I was called a ‘slut’ and ‘prostitute’ and told I should ‘be dead.’ There were arguments over my nationality, because a true Japanese woman wouldn’t speak about such ‘shameful’ things.”

Eleven percent of Japanese men who responded to a 2017 poll by the national broadcaster NHK said that a woman who goes for dinner alone with a man is providing “sexual consent.” 27% considered a woman having a drink alone with a man to be providing such consent; 23% if she is wearing ‘revealing clothes; 35% if she is drunk.

There is an alarming tendency in Japan to minimise sex crimes by avoiding words such as rape altogether and referring to ‘mischief’ instead. Coerced sex without the use or threat of violence is not considered rape. The age of consent is only 13.

In her case, Ito says she went to the police who she said told her that these incidents are common but prosecutions rarely succeed. She says investigators later dropped her case despite having enough evidence to go forward.

In her article for Politico, Ito says the title of her book ‘Black Box,’ “comes from the term prosecutors and police officers used to describe how rape happens behind closed doors. They kept saying: ‘We still don’t really know what happened; only you two know.’”

In December 2017, the New York Times said: “Ito’s story is a stark example of how sexual assault remains a subject to be avoided in Japan, where few women report rape to the police and when they do, their complaints rarely result in arrests or prosecution.”

Yuko Watanabe. Photo: Noffar Gat/www.noffargat.com. All rights reserved.

Thousands of women from around the world gathered in New York during the CSW meetings, which ended on Friday 23 March.

Ito spoke at an event titled “Beyond the #MeToo movement: protecting silence breakers and changing social norms”; she also gave a talk at the Japanese-American Association  Women in Business group, in Japanese.

Lawyer Chris Brennan also spoke at the first meeting. He has worked on several sexual assault cases in the US. Where perpetrators are colleagues or employers, they may use their status to silence or threaten victims into quitting their jobs, he said.

At the JAA event Kazuka Ito, also a lawyer and the founder of Human Rights Now, said: “We are not supposed to be the ones who are blamed, the one who harassed must be blamed. But this is how it works in Japan, still.”

From the corporate world, a former director at the Eurasia Group consultancy firm Yuko Watanabe added that in Japan, human resources systems are not set up to respond to reports of incidents like this.

Japan’s sex crime laws were only recently amended for the first time in 110 years.

Japanese law is not a great help to survivors of sexually assault, either. Japan’s sex crime laws were only recently amended for the first time in 110 years.

The definition of rape was expanded to include oral and anal sex. Minimum sentences for rape were increased, but only from three years to five. Conviction rates remain low.

Shiori Ito said at the JAA meeting that women who have experienced assault or harassment need more resources, criticising ‘outdated’ investigation methods on behalf of police and a lack of sufficient crisis services for women even around Tokyo.

Investigators may not have much experience working on these cases, she added, and may not respond appropriately to the psychological impacts of such crimes or the investigation process, in which victims may be asked repeatedly to remember and describe in detail the assault.

A meeting at the UN CSW in New York City. Photo: Noffar Gat/www.noffargat.com. All rights reserved.

At the JAA Women in Business group, Kumiko Hasegawa recalled an old Japanese saying: “Iyayo iyayo mo sukinouchi.”

This means that even though women say “no,” “no” is “yes” just reversed. While this damaging idea is not unique to Japan, it contributes to violence against women by encouraging men to ‘push past’ resistance.

Amid negative population growth, Japan is trying to increase women’s participation in the labour force. The government must urgently address sexual harassment at work much more seriously.

This is a social rather than an individual problem, according to Ito, who talked about her campaign #WeToo to highlight how sexual abuse and harassment affects everyone’s lives in some way.

But for this campaign to be successful in Japan, many more women will have to come forward to expose the extent of this problem – and this won’t be easy.

Aya Takeuchi is a graduate student at the Centre for Global Affairs at New York University. Her concentration is global gender studies. She is from Japan.

Courtesy: https://www.opendemocracy.net
 

The post #MeToo in Japan: ‘I was told not to bring shame on the country, with my story’ appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The high profile journal says, Vajpayee’s “splashy” India Shining campaign highlighting the wave of optimism supposedly sweeping the nation failed because hundreds of millions of Indians failed to feel Vajpayee’s economic magic, and showed the BJP the door in 2004.

In an opinion piece, William Pesek, a Tokyo-based journalist, who is author of “Japanization: What the World Can Learn from Japan’s Lost Decades”, warns, “Fast-forward 13 years, and it is easy to suspect Modi’s party is treading a similar path…”, underlining, “Modi’s team is veering dangerously toward ‘India Shining’ territory, hyping modest successes and resting on its laurels when it should be accelerating the epochal reforms voters in 2014 chose Modi to enact.”

Conceding that Modi has “pulled off some vital wins”, such as cut in red tape, privatization of aviation, defense and insurance sectors, and a national goods and services tax, Pesek says, “Missing, though, are the truly audacious moves Modi promised: revising labour, land and tax laws to raise competitiveness.”

“Nor has Modi’s ‘Make in India’ push created millions of high-paying jobs in export industries. Moves to upgrade infrastructure and reduce power costs are a work in progress”, the journal insists, adding, “Until Modi shakes up pivotal areas like retail, it is hard to gush about the outlook.”

Pointing out that “instead of the ‘Gujarat model’, voters are getting Gujarat light”, the journal says, there is a “reform vacuum” which is threatening “India’s long-term prospects”, adding, “In a sense, Modi has fallen into the same hubris trap as Vajpayee: the cult of GDP.”

Conceding that Modi is “widely credited with transforming the place into a free-market exemplar with faster growth, fewer regulations, less corruption and strong entrepreneurship” and “Modi’s mandate was to apply those successes nationally and drain the swamp in New Delhi”, the journal says, “Unfortunately, Indians may have to wait for a second Modi term.”

Pointing out that Modi faces several major challenges, the first one being “a mounting bad debt crisis” with “nonperforming loans at state-run lenders recently hit a 15-year high”, the journal says, “When New Delhi admits to about $200 billion of zombie loans, the odds are that the true figure is markedly higher.”

“That weakens India’s foundations by increasing incentives to misallocate credit, warping financial priorities and blurring lines between private sector efficiency and public sector bloat. Modi has relied on the central bank to sort out a problem his finance ministry should be tackling”, it says,

“Second”, it says, is the “demographic pressure”, adding, “Roughly 25% of India’s 1.3 billion people are under 15 and its labour pool will jump to 1.08 billion people from 885 million over the next 20 years. What is more, India will enjoy this swelling-workforce magic for roughly 50 years. Demographic dividends, though, become political nightmares if job growth does not keep pace. Hundreds of millions of young Indians taking to the streets in anger would be bad for business for Asia’s No. 3 economy.”

“Third”, the journal says, is “regional competition”. It explains, “As Chinese production costs rise, India’s chances of wooing those jobs are not assured. While Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam lack India’s scale, each is making a play for factories looking for cheaper and more pro-business locales. These upstarts are building better roads, bridges, ports and power grids at least as fast as New Delhi. Also, China’s push to recreate the Silk Road trade links may benefit East Asia more than South Asia.”

The journal regrets, despite a few reforms, “Modi should be accelerating market-opening efforts, not throttling back”, even as approvingly quoting Maitreesh Ghatak of the London School of Economics, who says, “Modinomics has turned into muddlenomics.”
 

The post Japanese ‘Blow’ to Modi’: Economic Policies Questioned appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Last coach (guard coach) of Jammu Rajdhani derailed on arrival at New Delhi Railway Station at 6 am; no injuries or casualties reported.
— ANI (@ANI) September 14, 2017

 
The largest passenger system in the world with 23 million passengers every day, the Indian Railways was hit by 78 derailments in 2016-17 with 193 people dead, the most in 10 years, IndiaSpend reported on August 22, 2017.
 
Although accidents in general have fallen over 10 years, from 194 in 2007-08 to 104 in 2016-17, derailments have risen over this period, an indication that trains are increasingly at peril.
 
The first six months of 2017 reported 29 train accidents, of which 20 were due to derailments, killing 39 people and injuring 54, according to this reply to the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house, on July 19, 2017.
 
Over the last decade to 2016-17, 1,394 train accidents were reported in India; 51% or 708 were due to derailments in which 458 people were killed.

 
Source: Rajya Sabha (unstarred question 3473, March 31, 2017; unstarred question 3007, August 11, 2017.)
 
Accidents of consequence in the current financial year ending August 2, 2017, have decreased by 51.2%, from 43 in 2016-17 to 21 in 2017-18, according to this reply (starred question 216) to the Rajya Sabha, parliament’s upper house on August 4, 2017.
 
“Accidents per million train kilometres, an internationally accepted yardstick of safety, has declined from 0.23 in 2006-07 to 0.11 in 2014-15, 0.10 (approximately) in 2015-16 and further declined to 0.09 (approximately) in 2016-17,” former minister of railways Suresh Prabhu told the Rajya Sabha in his reply.
 
Derailment was the second-leading reason for train accidents and casualties between 2003-04 and 2015-16, according to the Twelfth Report of the Standing Committee on Railways on ‘Safety and Security in Railways’ presented in the Lok Sabha on December 14, 2016. The leading reasons for accidents was human error.
 
One of the cause for derailments is the lag in addressing what are technically called “defects in the track or rolling stock”.
 
Only 54% track renewal may have happened in 2016
 
Of 114,907 km railway tracks, 4,500 km, or 4%, should be renewed annually, the committee said. However, of 5,000 km track length due for renewal currently, no more than 2700 km, or 54%, would be renewed, it said.
 
“Track renewal covering 5900 km of track have been sanctioned as on March 31, 2016,” said the Fifteenth Report of the parliamentary standing committee on the action taken by government on the recommendations/observations contained in the 12th Report, presented on August 3, 2017. “…Accordingly, physical targets have also been increased from 1500 km to 2668 km.”
 
Track failures and subsequent derailments are caused by twin factors–excessive traffic and underinvestment in rail infrastructure, IndiaSpend reported on April 3, 2017. Up to 40% of Indian Railways’ 1,219 sections are utilised beyond capacity.
 
Here’s all you need to know about the Mumbai-Ahemdabad bullet train.
 

 

 

The post As India Prepares For Bullet Train, 9 Derailments In 27 Days Reveal Safety Crisis appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Anti-nuclear demonstration in front of the Japanese Diet, June 22, 2012. Matthias Lambrecht/Flickr, CC BY-NC

In late 2016 the government estimated total costs from the nuclear accident at about 22 trillion yen, or about US$188 billion – approximately twice as high as its previous estimate. The government is developing a plan under which consumers and citizens will bear some of those costs through higher electric rates, taxes or both.

The Japanese public has lost faith in nuclear safety regulation, and a majority favors phasing out nuclear power. However, Japan’s current energy policy assumes nuclear power will play a role. To move forward, Japan needs to find a new way of making decisions about its energy future.
 

Uncertainty over nuclear power

When the earthquake and tsunami struck in 2011, Japan had 54 operating nuclear reactors which produced about one-third of its electricity supply. After the meltdowns at Fukushima, Japanese utilities shut down their 50 intact reactors one by one. In 2012 then-Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda’s government announced that it would try to phase out all nuclear power by 2040, after existing plants reached the end of their 40-year licensed operating lives.

Now, however, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who took office at the end of 2012, says that Japan “cannot do without” nuclear power. Three reactors have started back up under new standards issued by Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority, which was created in 2012 to regulate nuclear safety. One was shut down again due to legal challenges by citizens groups. Another 21 restart applications are under review.
 

In April 2014 the government released its first post-Fukushima strategic energy plan, which called for keeping some nuclear plants as baseload power sources – stations that run consistently around the clock. The plan did not rule out building new nuclear plants. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), which is responsible for national energy policy, published a long-term plan in 2015 which suggested that nuclear power should produce 20 to 22 percent of Japan’s electricity by 2030.

Meanwhile, thanks mainly to strong energy conservation efforts and increased energy efficiency, total electricity demand has been falling since 2011. There has been no power shortage even without nuclear power plants. The price of electricity rose by more than 20 percent in 2012 and 2013, but then stabilized and even declined slightly as consumers reduced fossil fuel use.
 

Japan’s Basic Energy Law requires the government to release a strategic energy plan every three years, so debate over the new plan is expected to start sometime this year.
 

Public mistrust

The most serious challenge that policymakers and the nuclear industry face in Japan is a loss of public trust, which remains low six years after the meltdowns. In a 2015 poll by the pro-nuclear Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization, 47.9 percent of respondents said that nuclear energy should be abolished gradually and 14.8 percent said that it should be abolished immediately. Only 10.1 percent said that the use of nuclear energy should be maintained, and a mere 1.7 percent said that it should be increased.

Another survey by the newspaper Asahi Shimbun in 2016 was even more negative. Fifty-seven percent of the public opposed restarting existing nuclear power plants even if they satisfied new regulatory standards, and 73 percent supported a phaseout of nuclear power, with 14 percent advocating an immediate shutdown of all nuclear plants.
 

Who should pay to clean up Fukushima?

METI’s 22 trillion yen estimate for total damages from the Fukushima meltdowns is equivalent to about one-fifth of Japan’s annual general accounting budget. About 40 percent of this sum will cover decommissioning the crippled nuclear reactors. Compensation expenses account for another 40 percent, and the remainder will pay for decontaminating affected areas for residents.
 

Under a special financing scheme enacted after the Fukushima disaster, Tepco, the utility responsible for the accident, is expected to pay cleanup costs, aided by favorable government-backed financing. However, with cost estimates rising, the government has proposed to have Tepco bear roughly 70 percent of the cost, with other electricity companies contributing about 20 percent and the government – that is, taxpayers – paying about 10 percent.

This decision has generated criticism both from experts and consumers. In a December 2016 poll by the business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun, one-third of respondents (the largest group) said that Tepco should bear all costs and no additional charges should be added to electricity rates. Without greater transparency and accountability, the government will have trouble convincing the public to share in cleanup costs.
 

Other nuclear burdens: Spent fuel and separated plutonium

Japanese nuclear operators and governments also must find safe and secure ways to manage growing stockpiles of irradiated nuclear fuel and weapon-usable separated plutonium.

At the end of 2016 Japan had 14,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel stored at nuclear power plants, filling about 70 percent of its onsite storage capacity. Government policy calls for reprocessing spent fuel to recover its plutonium and uranium content. But the fuel storage pool at Rokkasho, Japan’s only commercial reprocessing plant, is nearly full, and a planned interim storage facility at Mutsu has not started up yet.

The best option would be to move spent fuel to dry cask storage, which withstood the earthquake and tsunami at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Dry cask storage is widely used in many countries, but Japan currently has it at only a few nuclear sites. In my view, increasing this capacity and finding a candidate site for final disposal of spent fuel are urgent priorities.

Japan also has nearly 48 tons of separated plutonium, of which 10.8 tons are stored in Japan and 37.1 tons are in France and the United Kingdom. Just one ton of separated plutonium is enough material to make more than 1,200 crude nuclear weapons.

Many countries have expressed concerns about Japan’s plans to store plutonium and use it in nuclear fuel. Some, such as China, worry that Japan could use the material to quickly produce nuclear weapons.

Now, when Japan has only two reactors operating and its future nuclear capacity is uncertain, there is less rationale than ever to continue separating plutonium. Maintaining this policy could increase security concerns and regional tensions, and might spur a “plutonium race” in the region.

As a close observer of Japanese nuclear policy decisions from both inside and outside of the government, I know that change in this sector does not happen quickly. But in my view, the Abe government should consider fundamental shifts in nuclear energy policy to recover public trust. Staying on the current path may undermine Japan’s economic and political security. The top priority should be to initiate a national debate and a comprehensive assessment of Japan’s nuclear policy.

Tatsujiro Suzuki, Professor and Director, Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition, Nagasaki University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The post Six years after Fukushima, much of Japan has lost faith in nuclear power appeared first on SabrangIndia.

With 54 per cent of the country’s wealth owned by millionaires, India is the second most “unequal” country in the world after Russia, according the latest report of the Johannesburg-based wealth research firm New World Wealth.

India is among the 10 richest countries in the world with a total individual wealth of $5,600 billion, the average Indian is quite poor, the report said. "The higher the proportion the more unequal the country is. For instance, if millionaires control over 50 per cent of a country's wealth, then there is very little space for a meaningful middle class," the report added.

Globally, Russia is the most unequal country where millionaires control over 62 per cent of the nation's total wealth.

In what might come as a surprise to many, Japan ranks as the most equal country, with millionaires controlling only 22 per cent of total wealth and even the US is "surprisingly" equal, with millionaires controlling around 32 per cent of the nation's total wealth. "This is surprising low considering all the negative press that the US gets in terms of income inequality," the report observed. Britain is just a bit less equal than the US; its millionaires control around 35 per cent of the total wealth there.

Russia also tops the list of a country's wealth held by billionaires (with net assets of $1 billion or more) with 26 per cent of the total Russian wealth held by this category of high net worth individuals. Once again, Japan is the most equal in this group, with billionaires controlling only three per cent of the total wealth of the country.

The post India is the Second Most “Unequal” Country in the World, after Russia appeared first on SabrangIndia.