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Washington DC Action: Rally Against Dow Chemicals, June 24, 2014

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Most people have heard at some point of the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, 30 years ago.  Tens of thousands of people were scarred.  Dow Chemicals, which bought Union Carbide, is resisting calls to follow a summons issued by an Indian court.

Here is the call to action in Washington, DC at 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, June 24, 2014 at 1776 I Street NW:

 

Urge Dow Chemicals to Respect Criminal Summons for Bhopal Gas Leak Deaths

Please join Amnesty International to rally on Tuesday (24th) outside DOW Chemicals in Washington DC to urge them to respect a Criminal Summons for Bhopal Chemical leak deaths. The Court have summoned DOW to appear on July 4, 2014 for a hearing in Bhopal, India.Tens of thousands of victims of one of world’s worst industrial disaster – the 1984 catastrophic gas leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India – are still waiting for justice. Thousands died and even after 30 years over 150,000 people are still battling chronic health problems.Background:

DOW Chemicals bought Union Carbide in 2001.
A court in Bhopal issued a criminal summons to Dow Chemicals to appear on July 4, 2014 for this case.
Urge DOW Chemical to respect this summons and appear before the Court.

The gas leak, which occurred 30 years ago killed between 7,000 and 10,000 people in three days and further 15,000 are believed to have died over the following years.

There are still close to 150,000 people battling chronic health problems. Over 40,000 people are still living next to the factory, and have been exposed to the toxic waste for the last 30 years.

The site has never been properly cleaned and continues to poison the residents of Bhopal.

The industrial skeleton of the former Union Carbide factory today still lies abandoned in the center of Bhopal, with more than 350 tons of toxic waste untreated inside.

Red, White and Saffron

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A little birdy gave me a copy of the materials Hindu American Foundation is using to lobby U.S. Congresspeople.  Lobbying is a process involving visiting with policymakers that groups like corporations and non-profits use to push their agendas on the American government.  HAF is a ‘soft’ right Hindu nationalist organization that uses human rights rhetoric.  Critics argue that HAF is linked to militant Hindutva organizations in India such as the RSS by forming an arm of the sangh parivar, or, family, of groups.

As you will see in the materials, there are some surprises (jointly lobbying for religious worker visas with Council on American-Islamic Relations, among others) and some of the old, familiar Hindutva rhetoric (“India first faced Islamist violence, dating as far back as the 8th century, to the time of the Mughal invasions…”)

A quick and dirty assessment: the rhetoric is often fine and might work perfectly well to inform an American congressperson of, say, the most salient points of anti-minority violence in Bangladesh; at the same time, the materials are one of several ways that the slanted agenda and ideas the intellectual framework of virulent sangh organizations can make their way into American policymakers’ minds.   Why, after all, does one need to lobby U.S. Congresspeople on the alleged need for a uniform civil code in India or defend Narendra Modi against claims that he was involved in religious pogroms?  The answer is that one doesn’t need to.  So why is HAF doing it, if all it cares about are human rights of Hindus?

Bonus: a list of donors to the HAF is included on the last page of their newsletter, including someone with the same name as Obama appointee Sonal Shah, whose nomination was controversial in South Asian progressive circles exactly because of alleged ties to Hindu right organizations.

On second thought: a conversation about fascism and the 2014 Indian elections

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In the aftermath of the Indian elections, South Asia Labor Watch was one of many groups and individuals to be dismayed by the victory of Narendra Modi based upon an analysis that emphasizes the role of the RSS as the shock troops of prospective fascism.

I recently had the opportunity to discuss the issue with Shamik Sarkar, a Kolkata-based activist, who put things in a different light.  Sarkar argues that a true understanding of the idea of fascism in India has more to do with state-media-corporate collaboration than it does with the foot soldiers of Hindu nationalism.

As you’ll see, ‘fascism’ can have very different meanings to different people, and their analyses for the process for making change can differ alongside that.  On to an edited transcript of the conversation:

SALW:  Greetings, Shamik.  I’m very curious what you make of the elections.

SS:  For us, election is not a big thing, you know. Whoever comes to power, life of the working people in this country will remain same. Moreover, electing, and electing a ruler, and electing a powerful ruler in this election are agenda of powerful middleclass (almost 30 pc of total electorate/population) in our country. They always decide the election, as they swing to here and there. In most of the time they are fractured, thanks to their attachment with regional powers. In this election, in most of the states they overwhelmingly opted for a ‘strong’, ‘decisive’ ruler in the Center (barring a few, like TN, WB, Odisha, Punjab, Kerala). Their idea of being governed by a stick-yielding one, of being ruled by a strongman, of getting f**ked by a hot rod in the a** is indeed an indication of fascist mindset. Our electoral democracy and party system has every element of making this wish fulfilled. But I think their lust of self-repression will not get a go as a diverse country like us cannot be governed with iron hand, and BJP is wise enough to understand this. Rest of the people are least interested about electioneering apart from casting their votes, sometimes calculating immediate material gain out of it.

Thus, I am not in the chorus of Fighting Fascist Ruler, which in my opinion is more ideological than practical or real life. But we will surely fight the fascist tendencies of middle class and common working people, not only in their politics but in everyday life as well, and will watch the liquidation and reform of fascist ideology of RSS by their own man.

SALW: What do you think is the answer to the kind of class tyranny you describe and won’t conditions for organizing worsen under RSS-rule?

SS: We are in favour of organizing at grassroot level, with whatever popular issues are in hand. It is not wise to fight them face to face. Actually, for some years (2008 onwards when people’s movement against land acquisition subsided), face-to-face fight against any ruler has become almost impossible for common people. Perhaps since 2001. The State has turned into a fascist direction since the War on Terror has arrived. The RSS today is not more powerful than State-Corporate-Media, and thus people are under a systemic fascism and a little change would occur if RSS is made a little more powerful organisationally. Left in India is still visualizing RSS as the face of fascism and doesn’t see the actual structural fascism through state-corporate-media combination. That is pity.

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There Is Nothing Left To Say

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India has elected its first fascist government.  

At no point in the last three decades had the electorate given such a resounding mandate to a political force so hardline.  The previous BJP governments were dependent on coalition partners and a need to softsell the party’s hard right partnership with RSS.  No longer.  With the award of a clear mandate to Narendra Modi, the hard right of the hard right is now in power.

India has elected its first fascist government.

RSSurgent

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“If the BJP becomes dominant in the next government, the Sangh juggernaut will likely begin rolling, entering a period of potentially unprecedented activity to fulfil its broader social goals.”

The quote above is from an excellent article in the Caravan on the RSS, the political mobilizing force behind the BJP.  If the BJP is the electoral arm of the Hindutva movement, the RSS is its torso and its legs, keeping it strong and keeping it moving.  In conjunction with the BJP, the RSS represents the threat of fascism in India.  As the head of the organization said in the article, if the BJP wins this election, it threatens to rule for 25 years.

Whether or not that belief is accurate, the 2014 Indian election is an enormous moment for India, for the future of apolitical Hinduism, and for secular politics.  Those concerns make this election important for Indian workers: you can’t have political consciousness in the working class if they are brainwashed into rightwing religious politics, especially once that politics descends into national or international violence as in Sri Lanka and the U.S. imperial wars.  Avoiding that kind of catastrophe, among others, is what this election is about for the international working class.

If you want to save India, start this year, by defeating a prime ministerial candidate that is already linked to religiously inspired pogroms and a fascist ‘volunteer’ organization.  He, Narendra Modi, is the poster child for the RSS-BJP alliance.   And if he wins, RSS will have at least a few years to start implementing ‘Phase 2’: rolling out out their policies and programs with the imprimatur of the Indian government.

I don’t want to wake up in a couple of decades wondering how it all went wrong, why a national and maybe even an international humanitarian catastrophe wasn’t prevented.  I don’t want to see a repeat of the Gujarat pogroms of 2002 on an international scale, I don’t want to see an increasingly aggressive nuclear-tipped standoff between India and Pakistan, I don’t want to see an entire generation of ordinary people brainwashed into rightwing lies through schoolbooks and the media.

Do you?

Big up, BIGUF

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Nomita Nath is the 26-year-old President of the Bangladesh Independent Garment Workers Union Federation, the largest garment workers’ union federation in Bangladesh.  BIGUF has 42 unionized factories as member unions and several more pending.  Nath was recently in Washington, DC for an International Labor Rights Forum conference on women’s rights and worker rights as well as several meetings with U.S. government officials.  Outspoken, clear, and committed, Nath is a leader of and an ally to garment workers in Bangladesh and elsewhere around the world.

 

 

Global Day of Action: Wal-Mart, Children’s Place, Pay up!

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On April 24, 2013, Aklima Khanam was forced to go to work despite serious structural problems at Rana Plaza, the building her garment factory was in.  A half hour after commencing, the electricity went out.  When the backup generator was started, the building collapsed, pinning Khanam under a machine for 12 hours.  1,136 others died in one of the biggest industrial disasters in the history of the industry.

Khanam and the other workers have received a few promises from brands like Children’s Place and Wal-Mart, but they have yet to receive full and fair compensation for their physical and mental traumas.  Moreover, the physical infrastructure of the Bangladeshi garment sector is in a dire state according to union activists like Aleya Akter of the Bangladesh Garments and Industrial Workers Federation, and another disaster like Rana Plaza is just a matter of time.  Even so, companies like Wal-Mart refuse to sign on to the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh that would provide the most effective means to prevent future tragedies like this one by promoting independent health and safety inspections and providing workers a voice in their workplace through a union.

Stand with Khanam, Akter, the BGIWF and many others this April 24, 2014, at an action in your hometown that will tell the brands that it’s time to pay up and additionally to sign the accord!