Patna civil society meet seeks anti-BJP joint action with political parties to fight against "undeclared" emergency

Jignesh Mevani at NAPM meet

By Our Representative
The National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), India's premier apex body of several mass organizations, has called for an urgent coordination between India's different people's movements and political parties in order to fight against what it called “increasing attacks on freedom of expression” by the Narendra Modi government.
The three-day NAPM annual meet at Patna's Anjuman Islamia Hall, which began on December 2 with its main leader Medha Patkar saying that political parties were becoming increasingly “opportunistic, exclusive and anti-poor”, ended on December 4 seeking political support in the presence of several non-BJP leaders.
Among politicians who shared the NAPM meet included Jharkhand's ex-BJP chief minister Babulal Marandi; Janata Dal (United) spokesperson KC Tyagi, known to be close to Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar; representatives of Left parties of different shades, including the CPI, CPI-M, CPI-ML; and from representatives from different mass organizations.
No Congress leader was present at the meet. It is not known if any of them were called. More than 1,000 representatives from 200 organizations from across 20 states participated in the meet, whose main theme was Save Natural Resources, Constitutional values, and Principles of Equality and Justice.
Patkar asked the gathering to gear up not just to “fight the battles” for lands, forests, and rivers, but also be prepared for “larger ongoing struggles the world over”, citing how unity of different forces has helped score some successes in land rights in Chattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha and the Narmada valley in Madhya Pradesh.
She stressed, there was a greater need to coordinate for the struggle for “self-determination in Kashmir, the fight for transparency and accountability, and Dalit students movements across campuses”, adding, “The younger generation is rising and speaking up. We old ones should learn to sit back and gave them space, they are not a force that can or should be stopped.”

Teesta Setalvad

Once part of the Sangh Parivar, Marandi, who left BJP in 2006 to form Jharkhand Vikas Morcha, said he came from the “same political school as that of Modi” and knew it did not have “anyone who could understand people's problems” related with the “loot of natural mineral resources in Jharkhand.”
Tyagi stressed on the need to “open a dialogue between democratic political parties and people's movements”, even as pointing towards how efforts were being made to “create an atmosphere of discord by spreading communal hatred”.
CPI-ML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said, efforts were being made to bring an end to “all types of freedom”, seeking “a common programme on which political parties and people's movements”. CPI's Shameem Faizi and CPI-M's Avdhesh Kumar said there was a need to save the Constitution, which is under stress.
Eminent human rights activist Teesta Setalvad, who is the target of attack of the Gujarat government following her major successes in legal battles in several 2002 communal riots cases, said there is an “undeclared emergency” in India against the “marginalised groups, such as women, Muslims, Dalits and adivasis with weapons like gauraksha, love jihad, and ghar wapsi.”
Gujarat's top Dalit rights activist Jignesh Mevani said there was a “parallel between Mohammad Ayub’s murder by cow vigilantes in Ahmedabad recently that of Akhlakh’s lynching in Dadri, the public shaming and beatings of Dalit youth in Una and extra judicial killings in Bhopal, the unresolved disappearance of Najeeb”, adding, all this reminded one that of “the unholy trinity of BJP, RSS, ABVP are the biggest internal security threat in the country today.”
The NAPM ended with the formation of a new coordination committee, with Patkar as the veteran adviser.
Those in the team included Bihar's Ashish Rajan, Dorothy Fernandes, and Mahendra Yadav; Kerala's SV Venugupal and Vijay Raghav; Delhi's Nanu Prasad and Faisal Khan; Jharkhand's Jamyanti Barla; Odisha's Lingraj Azad; Bengal's Amitabh Mitra; Gujarat's Krishna Kant; Maharashtra's Suhas Kohelkar; Rajasthan's Kailash Meena; and UP's Richa Singh, Vimal Bhai, Dr Sunilam, Madhuresh and Meera.
Special invitees included Kavita Shrivastav, Arudhati Dharu, and Kala Das.

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Green revolution "not sustainable", Bt cotton a failure in India: MS Swaminathan

Counterview Desk
In a recent paper in the journal “Current Science”, distinguished scientist PC Kesaven and his colleague MS Swaminathan, widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution, have argued that Bt insecticidal cotton, widely regarded as the continuation of the Green Revolution, has been a failure in India and has not provided livelihood security for mainly resource-poor, small and marginal farmers.
Sharply taking on Green Revolution, the authors say, it has not been sustainable largely because of adverse environmental and social impacts, insisting on the need to move away from the simplistic output-yield paradigm that dominates much thinking. Seeking to address the concerns about local food security and sovereignty as well as on-farm and off-farm social and ecological issues associated with the Green Revolution, they argue in favour of what they call sustainable ‘Evergreen Revolution’, based on a ‘systems approach’ and ‘ecoagriculture’.
Pointing out that Evergreen Revol…

Rejoinder: Inescapable to have Central Water Commission as strong technical body in India

By BN Navalawala*
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Some Hindu bodies in US defending BJP-RSS' divisive, violent activities: Agnivesh

Counterview Desk Last week, Washington DC saw speakers at a religious freedom roundtable, chaired by the US Ambassador for Religious Freedom, Sam Brownback, express concern over "eroding" space for religious freedom in India. Dr Mike Ghouse, executive director, of the Center for Pluralism in Washington DC, referring to the roundtable, said in an email alert that Indian-Americans have "a moral duty to prevent India from being labeled as a Country of Particular Concern by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF)".

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By Rajiv Shah
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Counterview Desk
Well-known civil rights organizations, Right to Food Campaign and Jan Swasthya Abhiyan, have sent a letter to the Union minister of human resource development, the Chief Minister of Karnataka, other concerned ministers and officials of the state expressing concerns regarding the mid-day meal (MDM) to school children, insisting, all contracts to the Akshay Patra for supply of MDM should be immediately terminated.

India's rewritten textbooks talk of demerits of democracy, praise Hitler, underrate Mughals

Counterview Desk
A detailed, 3,800-word review of the books rewritten under directions of the BJP rulers across India since Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in May 2014 has suggested that one of aims of the books is to instill a sense of doubt about India’s democratic polity among the country’s young minds. Reviewed in the prestigious US journal, “The New York Review of Books”, in its latest issue (December 6, 2018) by Alex Traub, the scrutiny insists, the effort has also been to paint Indian history from the angle of “Hindu triumphalism”, even as creating “Islamophobia”.

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Counterview Desk
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By Our Representative
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Counterview Desk
Peoples’ Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) has said that the forest department police’s crackdown, allegedly without any prior notice, on Dalit and Muslim households in Dakhin Tola, Churk Bazaar, Sonbhadra district, Uttar Pradesh, beating up “children and old people, women, and men in an inhuman way”, has led to “forced displacement, starvation and discrimination”. This has reportedly affected about 350 people.

Vedanta is out but corporate loot continues in Odisha: Local activists tell NAPM yatra

By Our Representative
Lok Shakti Abhiyan leader Prafulla Samantara, winner of the Goldman Environmental (also known as Green Nobel) Prize in 2017, has regretted that though Sundergarh in Odisha, like other forest areas, is a fifth schedule area, where Forest Rights Act (FRA) and Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA) is applicable, but these laws are being “outrightly violated to facilitate corporate loot.”

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