Cultural Imperialism And The Seeds of Catastrophe: Ripping Up The Social Fabric of India

Colin Todhunter

Foreign capital is dictating the prevailing development agenda in India. The aim is to replace current structures with a system of industrial agriculture suited to the needs of Western agribusiness, food processing and retail concerns (see this). The plan is for a fraction of the population left in farming working on contracts for large suppliers and large chain supermarkets offering a diet of highly processed, denutrified, genetically altered food based on crops soaked with chemicals and grown in increasingly degraded soils according to an unsustainable model of agriculture that is less climate/drought resistant, less diverse and unable to achieve food security.

Unfortunately, India’s political elites seem to be hellbent on capitulating to the needs of foreign players and their mindset that implies ‘poorer’ nations must be helped out of their awful ‘backwardness’ by the West and its powerful corporations and billionaire ‘philanthropists’. As with Monsanto and the Gates Foundation in Africa and the ‘helping’ of Africans by imposing a controlling system of agriculture, there is more than a hint of ethnocentricity and the old colonialist mentality at work.

The type of ‘development’ or ‘globalisation’ being rolled out by Washington and the World Bank is based on a need to homogenise cultures, production and consumption across the world because powerful transnational corporations’ business models rely on fast profits and global uniformity.

We need look no further than farming to see this at work. To understand what has happened to agriculture, whether in the West or in India, we must begin with the most basic element: how seeds have become increasingly uniform, less genetically diverse and subject to the control of corporate interests.

Eradicating seed diversity

In his report for The Ecologist, Oliver Tickell notes that for millennia, cereals were grown as ‘landraces’. Every field would include maybe half a dozen separate cereal species, divisible into as many as 200 varieties. Each would embody considerable genetic diversity. During the 19th century, however, farmers began to pick out specific lines that yielded higher returns under ideal agronomic conditions. Then, in search of greater stability and uniformity, crop breeders selected single seeds from these lines, bulked them up over successive plantings, then named and marketed them as distinct varieties.

Shortly before the first world war, these named varieties were hybridised in search of the ideal combination of agronomic qualities, putting together, for example, traits for large seed heads and short straw to increase yields yet further (under ideal conditions) and increase profitability for ‘efficient’ farmers.

As a result, plant breeders eradicated genetic diversity. As crops are genetically uniform, they can no longer evolve in the field to withstand insects and fungi and have to be constantly sprayed with pesticides. Moreover, the short straw length means that more of the plants’ energy goes into the grain – but then they can’t grow up above the weeds, so the system relies on repeated use of herbicides.

The use of these proprietary seeds and synthetic chemical inputs used to make them develop is a huge money-spinner for agribusiness companies. While in certain cases, yields have increased, there have been massive environmental, social and economic costs for the type of Green Revolution agriculture that has been rolled out, not least in terms of bad food and diets, degraded soils, water pollution and scarcity, poor health and the destruction of formerly largely self-sufficient rural communities and an increasing dependence on fossil fuels (transportation of food across greater distances, reliance on oil/hydrocarbon-based inputs) with all the implications that entails for climate change.

And as for climate change, genetically diverse crops are now needed more than ever; crops that have evolved to meet changing conditions, producing reliable yields all the time, rather than maximum yield when everything is just right but with the risk of total crop failure when you get flood, or drought, or some new insect or fungus or virus.

The eradication of seed diversity went much further than merely prioritising corporate seeds: it deliberately sidelined traditional seeds kept by farmers that were actually higher yielding. For example, the scientist R.H. Richharia was the director of the Central Rice Research Institute in Cuttack at the time of the Green Revolution in India.

Richharia’s research showed that several indigenous rice varieties gave high yields without the use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Unfortunately, these traditional varieties were ignored in favour of the newer corporate seeds. These traditional different varieties are ideal needed for different conditions. Richharia documented the existence of indigenous high-yielding varieties, early-maturing varieties, drought-resistant varieties, scented varieties, special flavour varieties and the like.

Once we began to see genetic diversity being eradicated in the field, what we also saw was a change in farming practices towards chemical-intensive monocropping, often for export or for far away cities rather than local communities, and ultimately the undermining or eradication of self-contained rural economies, traditions and cultures.

Cultural imperialism and the eradication of indigenous culture

Green Revolution technology and ideology imported from the West has merely served to undermine an indigenous farming sector that once catered for the diverse dietary needs and climatic conditions of India and it has actually produced and fuelled drought, degraded soils, illnesses and malnutrition, farmer distress and many other issues.

Environmental scientist Viva Kermani locates India’s traditional farming practices within the framework of deep-seated cultural and spiritual meaning. She notes that centuries before the appearance of the modern-day environmental movement, the shruti (Vedas, Upanishads) and smruti (Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas, other scriptures) instructed people that the animals and plants found in India are sacred; that like humans, our fellow creatures, including plants have consciousness; and, therefore, all aspects of nature are to be revered.

The Vedic deities have deep symbolism and many layers of existence. One such association is with ecology. Surya is associated with the sun, the source of heat and light that nourishes everyone; Indra is associated with rain, crops, and abundance; and Agni is the deity of fire and transformation and controls all changes. There was also Vrikshayurveda – an ancient Sanskrit text on the science of plants and trees. It contains details about soil conservation, planting, sowing, treatment, propagating, how to deal with pests and diseases and a lot more.

On the other hand, Kermani notes that the Western religions, especially Christianity, viewed this nature worship as paganism, failing to recognise the scientific and spiritual basis of the relationship between man and nature and how this is the only way to sustain ecological balance.

Similarly, Vandana Shiva outlines the traditional knowledge of women and the biodiversity that protects the earth are threatened by the monocultures, intensive chemical input, and large processing factories that come with GM Mustard – the next push in the treadmill of Green Revolution technology. Women’s caretaking of the seed, food and sacredness of mustard is to be stripped away, while local oil mills are shut down and corporations take over the value chain from seed-to-oil.

In trying to displace a traditional pre-existing system of production with one that is controlled by Western corporations (which, as Kermani implies, regards nature as something to be dominated and subjugated by corporations in a quest for power and profit), there is an underlying assumption that the Indian farmer is backward, ignorant and in need of ‘help’. This type of cultural hegemony helps legitimise the increasing economic domination of Indian food and agriculture by foreign interests.

But nothing could be further from the truth. As described in this paper in the Journal of South Asian Studies, for thousands of years farmers experimented with different plant and animal specimens acquired through migration, trading networks, gift exchanges or accidental diffusion. By learning and doing, trial and error, new knowledge was blended with older, traditional knowledge systems. The farmer possesses acute observation, good memory for detail and transmission through teaching and story-telling.

Moreover, the papers’s authors Marika Vicziany and Jagjit Plahe argue that smallholder farmers (the backbone of Indian agriculture) have traditionally engaged in risk minimising strategies. They took measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation, use self-provisioning systems on farm recycling and use collective sharing systems such as managing common resource properties.

Farmers know their micro-environment, so they can plant crops that mature at different times, thereby facilitating more rapid crop rotation without exhausting the soil. By contrast, the authors argue that large-scale industrially-based agricultural production erodes biodiversity by depleting the organisms that live in soil, and making adverse changes to the structure of the soil and the kind of plants that can be grown in such artificially-created environments.

Vicziany and Plahe note that many of the practices of small farmers which were once regarded as primitive or misguided are now recognised as sophisticated and appropriate. For instance, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that globally just 20 cultivated plant species account for 90 percent of all the plant-based food consumed by humans. This narrow genetic base of the global food system has put food security at serious risk.

It is no surprise that various high-level reports have thus called for agroecology and smallholder farmers to be prioritised and invested in order to achieve global sustainable food security. Instead, what we see is (despite progress in Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh) the marginalisation of organic agriculture by corporate interests, not least in India by the powerful agrochemical lobby.

The authors conclude that traditional food production systems depend on using the knowledge and expertise of village communities and cultures in contrast to prioritising imported, industrial–commercial inputs. The widespread but artificial conditions created by the latter work against the survival of traditional knowledge, which creates and sustains unique indigenous farming practices and food culture.

Given that India is still very much an agrarian-based economy with the majority still employed in agriculture or agriculture-related activities, what we continue to see in India is an attack by foreign capital on the social, economic and cultural fabric of the nation.

Whether it is fuelled by Bill Gates, the World Bank’s neoliberal-based rhetoric about ‘enabling the business of agriculture’, or The World Economic Forum’s ‘Grow’ strategy, the implication is that the world’s farmers must capitulate to the West and its powerful corporations and a globalised, corrupt system of capitalism that will funnel profits to these companies while hooking farmers on a chemical treadmill.

What we currently see is the capturing of markets and global supply chains for the benefit of transnational corporations involved in food production. We see the destruction of natural habitat in Indonesia to produce palm oil. We see the use of cynical lies (linked to palm oil production) to corrupt India’s food system with genetically modified seeds. We witness the devastating impact on farmers and rural communities. We see the degradation of soils, health and water resources.

And, in places like India, we also see the transnational corporate commercialisation and displacement of localised productive systems: systems centred on smallholder/family farms that are more productive and sustainable, produce a healthier and more diverse diet, are better for securing local and regional food security and are the life-blood of communities.

Farms worked by farmers who Viva Kermani says have “legitimate claims to being scientists, innovators, natural resource stewards, seed savers and hybridisation experts are being reduced to becoming recipients of technical fixes and consumers of the poisonous products of a growing agricultural inputs industry.”

The same farmers whose seeds and knowledge was stolen by corporations to be bred for proprietary chemical-dependent hybrids, now to be genetically engineered.

We also see the ripping up of India’s social fabric all for the bottom line of corporate profit.

Climate Change Could Be Fatal: An Open Letter To Canada’s Business Community

Bill Henderson

This third essay on my new metaphor for effectively treating climate change is about climate change being potentially fatal for all we know and love, potentially fatal for civilization as we know it, maybe even for humanity itself. Do we need to consider a major disruption in our society and economy for effective treatment of what could be a fatal disease?

Cancer, without treatment, is almost always a terminal disease.  A diagnosis of cancer is not something easily accepted; not something that rests easily on your mind. This could be fatal. In fact, depending upon the cancer and how early/late it has been diagnosed, it might prove fatal no matter how vigorously treatment is begun. Senator McCain’s brain cancer, for example, is predicted to kill more than 90% of those unfortunate enough to get it despite treatment. Fortunately, today the majority of  cancers can be treated successfully.

During my cancer treatment this summer, David Wallace-Wells published a very scary essay called ‘The Uninhabitable Earth’ at New York magazine. In reaction there was a storm of controversy about how accurately he had interpreted the climate change science followed by many essays about communicating the doom and gloom aspect of the building climate problem. I’m going to try and pass on the best of that debate within what I think are the key factors for analyzing the risk of potential climate fatality for civilization, humanity and other forms of life, and why I think getting to effective treatment quickly must be top of mind for everybody on the planet – especially the business community.
First of all, Wallace-Wells wrote about the suite of climate change dangers that pose existential, fatal risks to civilization, if not humanity itself.  He wrote with emotion and urgency in keeping with the cancer-like threat. Most climate change commentary focuses upon temporal and spatial frames where climate change is merely inconvenient: extreme weather today, sea-level rise in the short term, effects on crops or ocean acidification or desertification, and where adaption is possible in our presently configured world. Only so-called ‘doom and gloom’ commentators venture into writing about possible dangers such as methane feedbacks or abrupt climate change that are possible but low probability, at least until temperatures rise more substantially.
These possible fatal dangers have for several decades been labeled as dangerous climate change and have been the subject of international treaties going back to the Rio Summit in 1992. Just as it is possible for newly diagnosed cancer victims to study up on how possibly fatal their particular cancer is, those concerned – because you could now consider climate change as a possible fatal problem for everybody – can and should study up on the climate science and commentary concerned with dangerous climate change. But unlike cancer, there is a lot of uncertainty, because human caused climate change has never happened before; scientists use proxies from paleo-history and models predicting how warming will play out, but climate change is an experiment that has never been run before, and the risk of fatality will never be as knowable as cancer.

What is known is that there is substantial reason for concern and Wallace-Wells wrote up scary scenarios that deserve attention.  Unfortunately, he made both factual and analytic mistakes, and climate scientists such as Michael Mann and others wrote pointing this out, and questioning whether his pessimistic focus was useful or detrimental in enlightening interested readers on a subject that the public isn’t well informed about.

Wallace-Wells wrote about heat death and an uninhabitable Earth. James Lovelock made a prediction more than a decade ago that warming would leave only a few hundreds of millions of humans clustered around the still liveable poles. But most climate scientists see this as at best only a very long term risk and only if climate mitigation continues to be ineffectual. Wallace-Wells wrote up a worst case vision of methane from melting permafrost and clathrates where the state of the art climate science predicts only gradual and minor carbon feedbacks from such sources, unless or until temperatures rise more than the 2-4C rise expected this century. He postulates agricultural, economic and global security concerns that are valid as climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’. As climate scientist Kevin Anderson has expressed:  a 4C rise in temperature, which is possible in the second half of the century with projected greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is incompatible with civilization as we know it. 

‘Sam Carana’s’ 10C rise in temperature by 2026 is another example of exaggerating the science and foreshortening timeframes – while maybe possible theoretically, in reality there is an extremely low probability of such a rise in temperature happening so fast. Wallace-Wells mistakenly over-exaggerated at least the degree of danger to humanity in the short term. To his credit he acknowledging that. But his essay drew massive attention to the possibility that climate change could be fatal to civilization and humanity, maybe even to most of the life on the planet.  Many experts wrote to defend if not his text scientifically, at least his vision of how serious a threat climate could get to be.

Going back at least to Rio in 1992, and central to the agreement at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, our governments have agreed to limit green house gas emissions and landuse change so that temperature rise would be kept below a reasonable ‘guardrail’ to limit the possibilities of dangerous climate change. The guardrail was to stay under a 2C rise in temperature, under  a 1.5C rise if possible. But what if this guardrail is too high?

Personally, after decades of reading and learning as a climate activist, I find James Hanson and colleagues have had the best insight into climate change as a possibly fatal problem requiring urgent treatment. After the unprecedented ‘Big Melt’ of the Arctic icecap in 2006, Hansen and co. published papers including Atmospheric Targets: Where Should Humanity Aim? that used paleo-climate studies and modelling to suggest that a melting Arctic icecap and, hence, even a 1C rise, would eventually push us out of the Holocene Era that has been the cradle for civilization since the end of the last ice-age 10,000 years ago. With potentially fatal consequences.
Our climate is a system, and follows common system dynamics. Climate change  is non-linear and there are feedbacks and tipping points and points of no return. Small changes in Earth’s orbit and inclination – Milankovitch cycles – instigate latent CO2 feedbacks that have been instrumental in whipsawing the very dramatic changes we see in the paleo record of the past 100,000 years of ice age / warming cycles.  Human caused GHG emissions threaten similar feedbacks and urgent action to return to below 350 ppm is needed to protect the planet’s ice sheets and present carbon sinks before it is too late.
Hansen’s warning is very much like a cancer diagnosis where the cancer is treatable until it begins to migrate through the body and metastasises upon a vital organ. The past decade of extraordinary temperature increase in the Arctic is to many climate scientists ever increasing evidence that the Arctic is the ‘vital organ’ in danger and that because we haven’t done the emission reduction heavy lifting that should have been done to limit and warming, climate change should now be regarded as an emergency.

To me, Hansen”s science and warning gets more alarming every year of melting icecaps and ineffective mitigation. Rising temperatures – even a 2C rise – could lead to Wallace-Wells scary fatal scenario.  It would be on par with a person like myself with a cancer diagnosis, aware that time is vital and that the danger is growing, but blocked from effective treatment.

So, we must get back below a 1C rise in global temperature before the polar icecaps melt irreversibly. Canada and the world have agreed only to stay as far under 2C as possible.  But pledges to date will leave us far above 2C. Canada, for example, has a 30% of 2005 levels by 2030 target (which most experts expects us to fail to meet).  Furthermore, the carbon budget left to burn before we cross a 2C increase is shrinking rapidly due to advancing climate science (for example, Rogelj et al,Tan et al, MacDougall et al, Friedrich et al, Proistosescu et al, and Schurer et al) and continuing emissions of just under 10GT per annum. Therefore emissions must decline by something like 100% by 2030 to even stay under the 2C guardrail.

The present mitigation strategy relies upon decarbonization aided by carbon pricing to do the heavy lifting. Decarbonization requires a long timeframe such as the now obsolete 2050 of the Kyoto Accord era. Fossil fuel use still accounts for over 80% of global energy use to at least 2040 in informed projections (US Energy Information Administration, for example). The decarbonization strategy is clearly not the necessary treatment for what looks more and more like a possibly fatal problem. Market driven decarbonization which allows continued unregulated fossil fuel use is clearly pretend mitigation. If we treated cancer this way I and millions of others would just die. We have decarbonization and not effective mitigation because only market friendly mitigation is allowed.

A scheduled wind-down of all fossil fuel production and use, responsibly and fairly regulated in accordance with carbon budget science is a last chance to keep us safe from the suite of dangers we know imminently threaten. A scheduled wind-down could be not only effective – the best path to reducing GHG emissions at a scale now needed – but also the best mitigation path using and protecting our market-based governance.

I am addressing this open letter to Canada’s business community (and business globally, especially within the US) as the particular group in our society that has done the most to obstruct effective climate mitigation. Business organizations and leaders have repeatedly led in financing and spreading climate denial and have repeatedly used their powerful influence with governments to block any and every climate initiative that they thought might get in the way of business. Whether it was ideology or fear of potentially negative financial consequences, no one group has done more to keep us from effective treatment than business.  (Of course, there has always been businesspeople providing climate leadership, but only a minority and within business constraints.)

One of my favourite books is WHY STATES FAIL (Acemoglu and Robinson, 2012) which explains why ‘Goldilocks’ sized government – big enough to protect property rights and the rule of law, but not powerful enough for elites to seize the gains from innovation/investment virtuous circles – enabled the industrial revolution and the exponential growth that led to our incredibly wealthy and complex modern society. Except that Acemoglu and Robinson don’t mention how business elites have captured governance globally in our present era, and are stymieing mitigation of escalating problems such as climate change. Governments everywhere nurture business and put on the Golden Straitjacket to protect investment and innovation for good reason, but effective treatment now requires draconian regulation of fossil fuels.

Business leadership needs to recognize climate change as a rapidly building threat to all of society, to all we love and care about, and recognize the need for effective mitigation. Business has to get itself out of government’s way for everybody’s sake. Otherwise climate change could be fatal.

Gauri Lankesh Assassination: Attempt In Establishing Rule Of Sword

T Navin

One of the English phrases says that “Pen is mightier than the sword”. The attempt by sword to put down pen is purely a result of fear that Pen has created. Starting from Dabholkar, Pansare, Kalburgi and Gauri Lankesh, the series of attempts to put an end to their lives is a result of this fear. Each of them had taken on the conservative rightwing forces – aiming towards ending irrationalism and superstition, re-interpreting the historical figures in a secular light, building in rationalism into literary work and taking fight with the Hindutva forces. These very ideas of rationalism & scientific temper, secularism, respect for pluralism goes against the basic values of the rightwing. They believe in power of the sword and re-establishing the power of Sword was their natural necessity. A pen taking up fight with a sword was something unacceptable for them.

Establishing a fascist regime in society demands an imposition of new social norms. The new social norms seek to reduce the democratic spaces to those using pen and increasing spaces to those using sword. It depends on the ideological side one represents. In this despotic society, some are more powerful than the other whether in terms of religion, caste, class, race or region. An ideology based on supremacy of the few is sought to be imposed through use of the Sword. Sword
represents an effort in this direction. Those using pen and representing rational voices are sought to be crushed through the Sword. The democratic spaces available to those using pen are sought to be ended.

Lankesh represented a rational voice in society. She was highly critical of Hindutva forces and sought to expose them. She strongly opposed the communal politics of Sangh Parivar. In 1992, Lankesh voiced against the polarization that took place following Babri Masjid demolition. In 2003, she opposed the Sangh Parivar campaign to hinduise the Sufi shrine Guru Dattatreya Baba Budan Dargah located at Baba Budan giri. She headed Koumu Souharda Vedike, a forum for promotion of communal harmony. She openly campaigned against caste system and exposed the double standards of Hindutva groups.

Lankesh carried forward the legacy of her father in the form of the tabloid ‘Lankesh Patrike’. It ran without any dependence on advertising money. Following the death of his father, she carried the legacy in the name of ‘Gauri Lankesh Patrike’. The paper was vocal on issues of secularism, communalism, and the rights of the Dalits and downtrodden. Her editorials were a reflection of her strong political views carried under the title ‘Kanda hage’ (As I saw it). Her last editorial dealt on the fake news propagated by the rightwing and the efforts undertaken by alternative news sites to expose them.

Combining activism with journalism, she went on to expose the rightwing through her paper. She also participated in various rights and justice issues. Her support to social movements and struggles across is well known. Lankesh also supported the movement carried out in JNU and Gujarat following Una. She considered Kanhaiya Kumar, Shehla Rashid, Umar Khalid and Jignesh Mevani as her adopted children. She was increasingly being perceived as a threat by right wing forces for exposing them.

The assassination of Lankesh is an attempt at crushing viewpoints that go against Sangh Parivar brand of politics. The act of imposing power of the sword is an integral part of training provided by the saffron forces. The shakhas rather than preaching the usage of pen and its related attributes like debating and discussion, seek to provide training in usage of arms, thrishuls, sticks, guns to their upcoming cadres. In one sided lectures around the greatness of the past, critical discussions are hardly allowed. It is natural that devoid of rationality and logic and an emotion built around religion interpreted in its extremities, such people go on to commit acts which result in such incidents.

While the act of ending lives of rationalists may at first look as an attempt at instilling fear by those who took up the act, on the other hand it is only a result of the fear that has filled the spine of the rightwing forces. A BJP member had even went on to state that Gauri Lankesh faced death for being critical of BJP. Internet trollers who support BJP even went on to use abusive language against her through their tweets.

Inclusive of the lynching incidents, the acts of killing rationalists, the targeting of intellectuals are a means adopted by the BJP regime to impose the power of the sword. It is thus natural that more than on focus on pens, it is the tanks which is sought to be brought into Universities. More than extension of support to progressive groups, it is the lynch mobs who acquire an important space in the current regime. More than Social activists, it is the Bajrang activists who are given a free reign.

The assassination of Gauri Lankesh is sad. But it should also be an alarm call to all those who want to protect the idea of plural, secular and democratic India. It also needs to go beyond that to have a just and egalitarian India. It is only by bringing back the might of the Pen through protecting people such as Lankesh, that a fascist India can be prevented from emerging.

Visions Of Europe: Macron In Athens

Binoy Kampmark

The myth can have a greater effect than an untruth, and those who are in the business of manufacturing and building them never go out of business.  France’s President Emmanuel Macron has, for months, busily promoted a new myth: that of being European saviour, the man with healing visions and supportive panaceas, a counter weight to the toxicity of Trumpland.

Things, however, have been rocky. The sheen is coming off, as it was bound to. He is slumming at approval ratings similar to the man he replaced, François Hollande, at around the same time of his tenure. (That is hardly surprising, given that his victory over Marine Le Pen was very much a vote against her, rather than a full hearted endorsement for the youthful opportunist.)  He is overseeing a salad-days assembly of freshly elected candidates that make the radical project for renewal less than smooth.

This has led to such cosmetic gestures as the speech on Pnyx Hill in Athens, delivered with the note of warning we have come to expect from the former banker.  “In order not to be ruled by bigger powers such as the Chinese and the Americans, I believe in a European sovereignty that allows us to defend ourselves and exist.”  So, from this ancient summit of previous assemblies conveyed in antiquity, Macron reflected and even directed.

Central to this is a collective, even civilizational one: Europe, together, wary and ready to combat any threatened sandwiching, or even absorption, by other powers.  “Are you afraid of this European ambition?” he asked rhetorically.

One way of doing so is to draw out the populist sentiment, the cynics, the sceptics, and anyone who feels that the European bloc has begun to drift into bureaucratic, self-imploding oblivion.  “I don’t want a new European treaty discussed behind closed doors, in the corridors of Brussels, Berlin or Paris.”

When a crisis develops and takes hold, the managers and public relations terms counter with a “road map”. This is Macron’s hope: to generate some form of plan that will convince European leaders to open the floodgates to public debate.  Gather, insists Macron, the views of European citizens on the bloc.

The European vision Macron insists on pushing is a turbocharged version of centralisation, integration and consolidation, coated with a good amount of liberal market philosophy. It breathes and sings (in so far as visions can) to the same song sheet that populists have trashed and suspected. It panders to a market vision in a manner that edges out, rather than brings in, the social welfare softening that might dull revolution.

His proposed reforms also entail bowing, in some small measure, to the critics Europe’s mobility principle, which he feels has been unduly exploited.  The European Commission’s “posted” workers directive, for instance, permitting companies to dispatch employees to other EU countries while still paying taxes and benefits in their own country, is being flagged for reform. To totally remove it would be tantamount to violating a key feature of the EU bloc, so Macron and his tacticians prefer what might euphemistically be termed tightening.

The reason for this, claims Macron, is that cheap labour from member states located in the east – the old story of the European integration project – tends to flow to affluent western states.  The result is, horror of horrors, unfair competition and spectre of unemployment in the west.

This issue became the basis of an indignant exchange between France and Poland in August, one that showed the European family is a far from happy one.  Macron has taken it upon himself to strut the European theme bossily, lecturing eurosceptics and nationalists with enthusiasm.  The Polish government that took office in 2015 was one such target last month.  As he claimed in the company of his Bulgarian hosts, “Poland is not defining Europe’s future today and nor will it define the Europe of tomorrow.”

As part of his central and eastern Europe visit, Macron deemed Europe “a region created on the basis of values, a relationship with democracy and public freedoms which Poland today is in conflict with.” Conflict, in so far as Poland has shrugged off suggestions that it should accept migrants from the Middle East.

Poland’s Prime Minister, Beata Szydło, preferred to turn the tables on the French upstart on the topic of such values, suggesting in no small part that the French president, not Warsaw, was intent on disrupting European unity: “I advise the president that he should be more conciliatory… Perhaps his arrogant comments are a result of a lack of (political) experience.”

Closer to home, the troubles are not better for Macroland and its adherents.  One political thorn, and getting thornier by the day for the Macron project, is that figure of the French left, Jean-Luc Mélechon. His La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) movement, it can scant be forgotten, received a respectable 20 percent of the vote.

For him, Macron is the target, to be repelled and contained by means of an insurrection.  Some voters, if one is to take the polling of Paris Match and Sud Radio seriously, suggest that Mélechon is even more of a formidable obstacle than the Front National. Should he going with any degree of impassioned enthusiasm, Macron may well find himself not only short changed but outdone.

Children Can’t Wait: Taking Steps Towards Their Protective Present

Mahima Sukheja

On a Sunday morning, I woke up to a plethora of messages on social media about the increased outrage amongst parents in Gurgaon against a top school of India. The issue concerned the murder after an attempt to sexual assault of a 7 year old child within the school premise by a bus conductor. With no other available option, I had to browse through media channels to get the latest update. For a minute I wondered, if the haste could be shown by the media and society at large on these issues during normal times as well.

Nevertheless, my point here is not to comment on the functioning and ethics of news channels but on the trajectory a society follows whenever an issue is popped up. Looking at the past incidences, I am not really confident of a continuous public discourse on children’s issues. I hope I am proven wrong here.

The magnitude of Child protection issue and sexual abuse in particular hasn’t surfaced recently in our country, but gained attention now largely because of availability and accessibility of internet and instant message sharing amongst people and in ways through passage of POCSO Act and subsequent guidelines by government andawareness campaigns by NGOs.

For those not much acquainted with the magnitude of the issue, quoting Women and Child Development Ministry’s data from Study on Child Abuse in 2007, India has the world’s largest number of Child Sexual Abuse cases; for every 155th minute a child less than 16 years is raped, for every 13th hour a child under 10, and one in every 10 children sexually abused at any point of time. While a previous UNICEF’s survey stated that in India, every second child is being exposed to one or the other form of sexual abuse and every fifth child faces critical forms of it, a recent survey of a sample of 45,844 respondents by World Vision India an NGO, also reiterates one in every two children in the age group of 12-18 years is a victim of child sexual abuse and one in five don’t feel safe due to the fear of being sexually abused. It is also crucial to note that in majority of cases, the child is known to the perpetuator and there may remain underreporting of the cases.

The incident in question brings into limelight the risks that children face and a larger issue of “Schools being safe spaces for children”. While parents look for the ‘best’ schools for their children, this best is mostly defined in terms of available facilities, quality learning and environment and the school’s performance in board exams. The participation of parents is (willingly) reduced to attending PTA meetings or to the most following up on home assignments leaving their children to the mercy of school taking management decisions. The school is itself not forthcoming on including the diverse voices. Unfortunately, the relationship has become more power and money driven in majority of the institutions. The situation is worse in low cost private schools which not only don’t have quality learning but suffer from unsafe physical infrastructure. The comprehensive concept of safe schools is yet to arrive in these mushroomed schools. The State government schools are no better with narratives of physical beating and humiliation being quite common amongst children despite a blanket ban on corporal punishment under the RTE Act 2005.

While the current case demands timely justice, if there is at all for the parents; this case along with others which were not highlighted in the media but took place on similar days, such as rape of a 5 year old girl in East Delhi or a school bus that crushed 6 year old girl after dropping her home should stay as nerve wrecking in the minds of individuals and must remain a starting and an active milestone for individuals and community to bring about and push for the changes at their and at the systemic level. I have heard similar response or rather a question by people, on what they could do with these cases.In fact, each stakeholder has a vital role to play in protection and responding to the rights and needs of children for Children Can’t Wait.

Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Rules, 2007 mandates every school to abide by guidelines issued by the Centre and the states for the prevention of sexual abuse of children. Even now, the schools remain unaware of the guidelines. The State thus not only needs to make aware and disseminate the guidelines to the schools but also make sure that the guidelines are adhered with. The monitoring committee needs to be made active not only on paper but in its true spirit and functioning.

State Commission for Protection of Child Rights (DCPCR), set up in each State to promote, protect and defend child rights needs to monitor the set of rules established by the State to be followed in schools. And if there is none, it is their mandate to provide the ‘recommendations’ for the necessary action to be taken. SCPCR should be open in taking the support of the NGOs to be their extending hand for disseminating awareness on children’s issues, bring up cases of abuse to them.

Schools need to form ‘child safeguarding policy’, build mechanism for its implementation and strengthen the capacity of its staff (teaching and non-teaching), children and parents and associated stakeholders (vendors) on the awareness and the usage of the policy. Specific sessions on abuse prevention and reporting should be a part of life skills/sports/arts classes. Little interventions such as ‘buddy system’, ‘anonymous suggestion/complain boxes’ have shown multi-faceted effectiveness. Schools taking these steps, though low investment can help build and maintain their repute and sensitivity towards children.

Parents of their school going children independently or if a part of school management committee need to make an extra effort of monitoring the school functioning and raising collective voices regularly. An open atmosphere at home for discussion and sharing on issues by children needs to be created. Gone are the days when discussion on sex was considered a strict no-no.

Last but more importantly, NGOs and civil society groups such as child rights lawyers are important stakeholders since they play multifaceted roles due to their positioning and influencing power and capacity in the society. From being the watchdog of the implementation of guidelines/protocols, raising awareness amongst communities on preventing child abuse, to raising issues and pushing for the State agencies to bring culprits to justice, it is important for all the NGOs, working directly on children or without to keep the ‘protection issue’ at the core of their development spectrum strategy than bucket it for other specialized child rights NGO to take the momentum forward.

For the present case, society and media at large needs to maintain a hue and cry to keep the issue burning, bring into forefront through narratives, pictures and complaints of cases that may have gone unnoticed, hold discussions in your welfare associations/community groups to bring measures for ensuring child protection in your area. In my organization’s words, DO ANYTHING WHAT IT TAKES TO REACH TO THE LAST CHILD. SINCE CHILDREN CAN’T WAIT.

British Columbia NDP government abandons $15 minimum wage pledge

Roger Jordan 

After less than two months in office, British Columbia’s New Democratic Party (NDP) government has junked its election pledge to raise the province’s minimum wage to $15 over the next four years, i.e., by 2021.

The NDP’s failure to enact this meager reform—which would still leave minimum-wage workers well below the poverty line— thoroughly exposes the fraudulent claims peddled by the trade unions and pseudo-left groups like Fightback and the International Socialists (IS) that the installation of an NDP government in Victoria represents a step forward for workers.

Labour Minister Harry Bains made the announcement after the government was criticized by the Green Party for stipulating a four-year timeline for the wage increase. The NDP, which holds 41 out of the 87 seats in the BC Legislative Assembly, is dependent on the support of three Green MLAs to govern. Andrew Weaver, the Greens’ leader, insisted that a so-called Fair Wages Commission, which will undoubtedly be stuffed with representatives of big business, be given full authority to determine the timeline for future minimum wage increases.

Bains quickly fell into line, telling the Vancouver Sun less than two weeks after publicly committing the government to the four-year timeline, “I think Mr. Weaver made a pretty good point. We’re going to work with him. He’s saying that we should not be prescriptive of the Fair Wages Commission and I agree with him. I think we should give them the authority and mandate to decide when we reach $15, and how we reach $15.” As if to underscore the point, Bains added that the timeline could be “anything they come back with.”

The fact that the NDP is incapable of implementing such a meagre reform speaks volumes about the anti-working class, pro-big business character of this party. After 16 years of Liberal rule, in which public services and social spending were cut to the bone, Premier John Horgan has repeatedly boasted that his government will enforce the Liberals’ reactionary fiscal framework, as enshrined in their most recent budget, including by presenting “balanced” budgets for at least the next two years.

The NDP has already quietly dropped other parts of its election program. Its first Throne Speech, delivered last Friday, made no mention of a promised $10 per-day province-wide childcare system, saying instead that the government would work to provide an “accessible and affordable" daycare program.

A promise to give a $400 rebate to renters, who are being hard-hit by massive rent increases in Metro Vancouver and Victoria, was also conspicuously absent. In August, Horgan also softened the government’s tone significantly on its opposition to the environmentally destructive Kinder-Morgan pipeline expansion.

Not surprisingly, the NDP’s about-face on the minimum wage has been warmly welcomed by the corporate elite. Ian Tostenson, head of the BC Restaurant and Food Services Association, a body representing employers in a sector where workers are ruthlessly exploited for low pay, enthused, “It’s a good sign for the government to say let’s have some flexibility on how we get there. I think they really truly want to have a process where they can work with industry.”

Even if a $15 minimum wage were adopted tomorrow, it would hardly begin to address the widespread poverty in British Columbia, which has the highest poverty rate of any province in Canada at over 12 percent. In Vancouver, the living wage, i.e. the minimum wage for a worker to avoid living below the poverty line, is over $20.

The NDP’s pseudo-left cheerleaders, who declaim incessantly on the need to push the party to the “left” and even claim that it can serve as an instrument to fight for socialism, have responded to the BC government’s abandonment of the minimum wage timeline with an embarrassed silence. IS, which applauded the NDP’s four-year timeline announced in mid-August as “undoubtedly a win for the larger Fight for $15 in Canada and the United States,” has not published any article addressing how and why this “win” could so quickly vanish into thin air. Instead, IS continues with its desperate efforts to cover the NDP’s exposed posterior by urging its members to participate in the upcoming federal NDP leadership contest.

The BC Federation of Labour, which pumped vast resources into election ads targeting Liberal leader Christy Clark and promoting the NDP, found the time to release a statement on the NDP’s Throne Speech which noted vaguely that the union federation wanted to see the minimum wage increase “as soon as possible.” The NDP’s retreat from its election promise did not stop the union bureaucrats from applauding the government for advancing a “new approach that puts people first.”

The “new approach” which is being so enthusiastically welcomed by the unions and pseudo-left organizations is the integration of their leading personnel into government committees and commissions, and even in some cases into government office.

Horgan made clear during his first meeting last month with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he is fully committed to close cooperation with the big business Liberal federal government, which enjoys close ties with the union bureaucracy.

Bitter experience across Canada has shown that workers’ lives will see no improvement under an NDP government. Rather it will serve as an instrument of big business in enforcing the ruling-class agenda of austerity and war. Whenever Canada’s social democrats have held power during the last four decades, they have come into headlong conflict with the working class, including by slashing public services, imposing wage-austerity and breaking strikes. In neighbouring Alberta, where the NDP has governed since 2015, it has offloaded the economic crisis caused by the oil-price collapse onto the backs of working people, while maintaining the low-tax rates for big business and the wealthy for which the province has long been notorious.

The NDP’s record in power underscores that even the most immediate demands raised by workers to resist the never-ending assault on their jobs, living conditions, and social rights can be realized only in struggle against all of the pro-capitalist parties and their defenders. Workers cannot shield themselves from the capitalist crisis, let alone reverse the years of concessions and cutbacks, by pressuring the NDP politicians or union bureaucrats, but must rather fight for wage increases, job security, a vast increase in public spending, and access to social and cultural services as part of a broader struggle to bring to power a workers’ government committed to socialist policies.

Australian High Court sanctions deportations of Sri Lankan refugees

Mike Head

Australia’s supreme court last week approved the forced removal of asylum seekers to Sri Lanka, even though it was proven they face appalling conditions of imprisonment, including “torture, maltreatment and violence.”

In last week’s case, by a four-to-one majority, the judges rejected appeals by two Sri Lankan refugees to being deported back to the country they had fled because of ongoing repression by President Maithripala Sirisena’s government.

The ruling is an indictment of the last Greens-backed Australian Labor government. Labor launched a vicious program, in violation of international refugee law, to forcibly transport more than 650 Sri Lankans to Colombo, denying them the right to apply for asylum, knowing they would be punished and persecuted for trying to escape the country.

One of the majority judges, James Edelman noted that since November 2012 all “returnees” had been “arrested after their return,” held on remand and charged with an offence under Sri Lanka’s Immigrants and Emigrants Act1945.

Edelman said Australia’s Refugee Review Tribunal, whose decision the court endorsed, referred to official “country information” which indicated that prison conditions in Sri Lanka did not meet international standards.

There were documented concerns of “overcrowding, poor sanitary facilities, limited access to food, the absence of basic assistance mechanisms, a lack of reform initiatives and instances of torture, maltreatment and violence.”

A former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture reported on “severe overcrowding and antiquated infrastructure” in Sri Lankan prisons. And a press report quoted “returnees” who said they “slept on the floor in line” with their “bodies pressed up against each other,” that they “could not roll over” and that some nights they had to take turns sleeping due to lack of space.

Despite this officially-acknowledged brutality, Edelman and his fellow judges concluded that the abuse and maltreatment was not “intentionally inflicted” and therefore did not entitle the refugees to protection from being deported. Engaging in legal sophistries, the judges insisted that the Sri Lankan authorities did not “directly intend” the harm, even if it resulted necessarily from the appalling prison regime.

The judges rejected the obvious reality that Sri Lankan officials knew of the “shocking conditions in custody” and therefore intended that the detainees be subjected to those conditions. According to the judges, it could not be assumed that the officials “could be said to intend to inflict severe pain or suffering or to intend to cause extreme humiliation.”

Instead, the court insisted that the prison conditions were the result of a lack of resources, which the Sri Lankan government acknowledged and was taking steps to improve, “rather than an intention to inflict cruel or inhuman treatment.”

None of the judgments considered what happened to the detainees after their initial period of imprisonment, which the judges said lasted “possibly two weeks.” There is ample evidence that the Sirisena government has continued the systemic police frame-ups and brutality, as well as the military occupation of the island’s north and east, that was instigated under Sirisena’s predecessor, Mahinda Rajapakse.

This violence is particularly directed against the Tamil and Muslim minorities, but also has increasingly targeted workers, rural labourers and students fighting against attacks on their jobs, wages, conditions and basic rights. Last month, for example, shortly after the Sri Lankan army was mobilised to crush oil workers’ strikes, security forces set up roadblocks and checkpoints and arrested about 100 people across the Tamil-majority Jaffna peninsula, sowing fear and terror among the population.

Successive Australian governments have been complicit in this repression. In a documented case in May 2016, the Liberal-National Coalition government handed over 12 Sri Lankan asylum seekers to the notorious police Criminal Investigation Department (CID), which immediately imprisoned them. The CID has a documented record of psychological, physical and sexual torture of government opponents.

Last week’s High Court ruling applied provisions that the Gillard Labor government introduced into the Migration Act in 2012, with the Coalition’s support, to help fast-track the deportation of refugees.

The Labor government did so on the pretext of incorporating into one process all applications for protection visas, whether they be under the provisions of the 1951 Refugees Convention, which covers “persecution,” the 1984 UN Convention against Torture (CAT) or the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).

In reality, Labor’s “complementary protection regime” undermined these global treaties by giving the immigration minister the power to refuse visas unless he or she had “substantial grounds for believing” that “the non-citizen will suffer significant harm” by being deported.

This “significant harm”—whether via “torture,” “cruel or inhuman treatment or punishment” or “degrading treatment or punishment”—had to be “intentionally inflicted” and “intended to cause” cruel or inhuman treatment. The CAT and ICCPR do not expressly require any such direct intention.

Australia’s removals of Sri Lankan asylum seekers are continuing with ever-more brazen contempt for international law. On June 26, the Turnbull government forcibly deported six Sri Lankans to Colombo on a chartered plane from the Indian Ocean outpost of Christmas Island, where their refugee boat had arrived.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull seized on the event to boast of the ruthlessness of Australia’s anti-refugee regime. He told the Australian: “Our message is very clear—if you try and come to Australia on a boat you will not be allowed in.”

The High Court has a long record of rubber-stamping the tearing up of the fundamental legal and democratic rights of refugees by successive Labor and Liberal-National governments. Just last month, a full bench of seven judges unanimously dismissed a challenge to Australia’s prolonged detention of refugees on Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) impoverished Manus Island in defiance of a PNG Supreme Court ruling that the incarceration violated the country’s constitution.

While displaying particular contempt for the law of PNG, a former Australian colony, that High Court ruling effectively gave a green light to Australian governments to flout the law of any other country, as well as international law, in their escalating measures to prevent refugees from seeking protection in Australia.

Australia’s militarised “border protection” regime involves repelling asylum seekers or incarcerating them on remote Pacific islands. It has set reactionary precedents that other governments, including that of Donald Trump in the United States, are using to scapegoat immigrant workers and incite poisonous nationalism as the global refugee crisis worsens.

Personal data of 143 million US consumers compromised in massive Equifax server hack

Kevin Reed 

In possibly the largest and most damaging data breach ever, the credit reporting company Equifax announced on September 7 that the personal information of 143 million US consumers—including their names, Social Security numbers, addresses and birth dates—had been hacked and stolen from its servers between mid-May and July of this year.

According to a company press release, Equifax executives discovered on July 29 that cybercriminals “exploited a U.S. website application vulnerability to gain access to certain files.” However, the company did nothing to immediately notify the public. Instead, Equifax “engaged a leading, independent cybersecurity firm that has been conducting a comprehensive forensic review” for six weeks before reporting the data theft.

In other words, the $18 billion corporation with principle responsibility for storing and protecting the most sensitive personal information of more than half of all US adults had its servers hacked, covered up the breach for two-and-a-half months, and still claims to not know what happened.

In a hastily prepared video statement posted Thursday on YouTube, Equifax CEO Richard F. Smith made the remarkable claim that his firm is “focused on consumer protection” and has “developed a comprehensive portfolio of services to support all U.S. consumers,” including one year of free credit reporting and identity fraud protection, a service that normally costs $19.95 per month.

However, Smith’s offer has since been exposed as a ruse to get individuals who sign up to accept terms of service that effectively relinquishes their right to seek any future legal action against the corporation. A class-action lawsuit worth as much as $70 billion was announced in Oregon, and the value of Equifax stock fell by nearly 14 percent on Wall Street on Friday.

The extraordinary security incompetence and legal swindling at Equifax has now been combined with a report that a few days after the July 29 discovery of the breach, three company executives sold off $1.8 million of their company shares.

Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Equifax CFO John Gamble; President of US Information Solutions Joseph Loughran; and President of Workforce Solutions Rodolfo Ploder sold stock worth $946,374, $584,099 and $250,458 (13%, 9% and 4% of their holdings), respectively, by August 2. The company has since made the claim that the executives had not been informed of the hack.

Equifax is one of three major US consumer credit reporting agencies (the other two are TransUnion and Experian) that track, evaluate and rate the borrowing and repayment history of individuals in the US and internationally. Financial institutions such as banks, mortgage companies, auto and other consumer lending organizations use the information provided by these agencies—summarized as a FICO (Fair Isaac Corporation) score of between 350 and 800 points—to make decisions about credit limits, interest, and insurance rates.

The Equifax data theft follows a series of hacking episodes that have impacted sensitive consumer information: 500 million Yahoo accounts, 145 million eBay accounts, and 76 million Chase accounts are among the most notable.

In addition to the primary personal information, Equifax reported that the data breach compromised 209,000 credit card numbers and the drivers’ license numbers of possibly as many as 182,000 consumers. Other stolen information could also include credit account security questions and answers.

This is not the first security failure at Equifax. According to security expert Brian Krebs, hackers were able to access tax data of employees at companies using Equifax’s payroll service subsidiary TALX last May. According to Krebs, the credit bureaus have “shown themselves to be terrible stewards of very sensitive data” due to a lack of government oversight and regulation.

As an arm of the investment services industry, the consumer credit reporting agencies exist to serve the interests of the giant banks and the financial oligarchy and view the public as a target of exploitation and source of profit. Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian have been used increasingly since the Great Recession of 2008 as an instrument for intensifying economic inequality and squeezing ever more wealth out of the pockets of the working class and into the coffers of the superrich.

Identity theft is a serious threat for millions whose information is now circulating and can be used to fraudulently validate their identity and open bank accounts or take out loans in their name. This information can also be used by hackers to change passwords and other settings on existing bank and credit accounts.

The consequences for working people of having their credit data compromised are devastating. For example, with millions of people relying upon credit to make ends meet—average household balance-carrying credit card debt in the US is $16,000—a fraudulent transaction or change in a credit score can lead to a dramatic reduction in living standards or a forced personal bankruptcy.

As US threatens North Korea, NATO chief warns of “more dangerous world”

Peter Symonds

While the US continued to provocatively intensify tensions with North Korea, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg joined the chorus of condemnation against Pyongyang over its sixth nuclear test on September 3.

Speaking to the BBC yesterday, Stoltenberg denounced North Korea’s “reckless behavior” as “a global threat” that “requires a global response and that of course also includes NATO.” While saying he would not speculate on whether NATO members would be required to join a war against North Korea if the US were attacked, he did not rule it out.

Stoltenberg told the Guardian on Friday the world was “more dangerous” than at any time in his 30-year career. “It is more unpredictable, and it’s more difficult because we have so many challenges at the same time,” he said, pointing to “weapons of mass destruction in North Korea,” as well as terrorism and “a more assertive Russia.”

The NATO chief was visiting British troops stationed in Estonia, having toured NATO battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. He claimed the troops were in “defensive” mobilisation as Russia and Belarus prepared for large-scale military exercises this week. In reality, Washington’s military push into Eastern Europe via NATO is fueling a confrontation with Russia.

Similarly, US President Donald Trump, following on from the Obama administration, has dramatically heightened tensions with North Korea, threatening last month to engulf it in “fire and fury like the world has never seen.” In response, the Pyongyang regime has concluded that its only means of preventing a US attack is to develop a nuclear arsenal as quickly as possible.

Speaking to the BBC yesterday, British Defence Secretary Michael Fallon hinted the UK could become involved in a US-led war against North Korea, saying the country could pose a threat to London. “This involves us,” he said, because “London is closer to North Korea and its missiles than Los Angeles.” He admitted that North Korean missiles could not reach the UK, but said their range was getting “longer and longer.”

While emphasising the need for a “diplomatic solution,” Fallon insisted: “We have to get this program halted because the dangers now of miscalculation, of some accident triggering a response, are extremely great.” If attacked, the US “of course, under the United Nations, has the right to ask other members of the United Nations to join in its self-defence.”

The danger of catastrophic war in Asia is provoking deep fears in Europe and exacerbating divisions with Washington. In an interview published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung on Sunday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested that the deal struck in 2015 with Iran to limit its nuclear program might form the basis for negotiations with North Korea. “Europe and especially Germany should be prepared to play a very active part in that,” she said.

Merkel’s proposal of an Iran-type deal with North Korea will not be welcome in Washington. Trump has repeatedly denounced the agreement with Iran, threatened to pull out of it, and dismissed the possibility of a negotiated end to the standoff with North Korea.

Washington has ratcheted up pressure on China and Russia to agree to a new US resolution to be discussed in the UN Security Council today. The resolution is expected to include a full embargo on oil exports to North Korea, as well as a partial naval blockade that would give UN member states the right to board and inspect ships suspected of breaking sanctions.

China and Russia are expected to oppose a complete oil export ban, which would precipitate an economic and political crisis in Pyongyang. Beijing and Moscow fear that the US and its allies would exploit any breakdown in North Korea to instal a pro-US regime in their backyard.

Last Thursday, Trump declared that US presidents had been “talking, talking, talking” with North Korea for 25 years, but its nuclear program had continued. “So I would prefer not going the route of the military, but it’s something certainly that could happen,” he warned.

Trump boasted that “our military has never been stronger.” In another threat to North Korea, he stated: “Each day new equipment is delivered—new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world, the best anywhere in the world, by far. Hopefully we’re not going to have to use it on North Korea. If we do use it on North Korea, it will be a very sad day for North Korea.”

Based on senior White House and Pentagon officials, NBC News reported last Friday that the Trump administration was “readying a package of diplomatic and military moves against North Korea, including cyberattacks and increased surveillance and intelligence operations.”

Trump was also “seriously considering adopting diplomatically risky sanctions on Chinese banks doing business with Pyongyang” and “not ruling out moving tactical nuclear weapons to South Korea should Seoul request them.” South Korea’s defence minister last week suggested the US could place tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea.

Not only would such a move end US claims to be seeking to denuclearise the Korean Peninsula, but greatly heighten the danger of nuclear war, through accident or miscalculation.

According to NBC, the White House had reviewed the full gamut of options, including attacking North Korea with nuclear weapons. The article stated: “A first use of nuclear weapons would be extremely aggressive and lack support domestically or among international allies, the senior administration official said.”

“We talk about all kinds of crazy stuff we never do,” the official told NBC. “Then you know why you rule it out.” No one should accept such assurances. The very fact that a nuclear first strike on North Korea is being discussed indicates it is under active consideration. Washington’s constant mantra that “all options are on the table” shows that nothing is ruled out in a US attack on North Korea.

NBC also reported that China warned Trump administration officials that if the US struck North Korea first, Beijing would back Pyongyang. If North Korea hit a US target, however, that “changes everything,” a senior administration official said. In other words, if the Trump administration can goad North Korea into making a military move with its provocative threats and actions, China might stay on the sideline.

This situation highlights the extraordinary recklessness of the US administration. As it prepares for war with North Korea, the US government knows full well that it could rapidly come into conflict with China, which it regards as the chief obstacle to global American dominance.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Nobel Prizes And The Rohingyas

Binoy Kampmark

Scratch the skin of a saint, claimed George Orwell, and you are bound to find a sinner with an extensive resume.  Such resumes are evaluated in these modern times by accolades, awards, and summits.  The Noble Peace Prize tends to be crowning affirmation that somewhere along the line, you sufficiently fouled up to merit it.

The calls, some even shrill, to have the Nobel Prize taken off Aung San Suu Kyi, are distressed lamentations of misplaced loyalties, even love.  The de facto leader of Myanmar is showing what others have in the past: partiality, a harsh streak, and a cold blooded instinct. The saint, in other words, has been scratched, and the unquestioning followers are startled.

When asked to respond to the arrival in Bangladesh of almost 150,000 stateless Muslim Rohingyas since August, the result of violence in Myanmar’s northern Rakhine state, the leader sternly rebuked suggestions that there was a problem.  After all, the initial violence had been perpetrated by assaults on an army base and police posts by Rohingya insurgents since October.

The problem she sought to address was that others were faking the record to advance the interests of terrorists, supplying the world with “a huge iceberg of misinformation”. (How delightful is Trumpland, with its tentacles so global and extensive they have found themselves in the speeches and opinions of a secularly ordained saint.)

Faking the fleeing of tens of thousands of persecuted souls would surely be a challenge.  The response from Suu Kyi is a salutary reminder that genocides, atrocities and historical cruelties can be often denied with untroubled ease. Her statement in response to the crisis was one of conscious omission: the Rohingyas barely warranted a mention, except as a security challenge.

The statement issued from her office on Facebook claimed that the government had “already started defending all the people in Rakhine in the best way possible.” The misinformation campaign, she insisted, was coming from such individuals as the Turkish deputy prime minister, who deleted images of killings on Twitter after discovering they were not, in fact, from Myanmar.

The approach to misinformation taken by the government has been one of silence and containment.  National security advisor Thaung Tun has made it clear that China and Russia will be wooed in efforts to frustrate any resolution that might make its way to the UN Security Council.  “China is our friend and we have a similar relationship with Russia, so it will not be possible for that issue to go forward.”

As for calls of terrorists sowing discord, Suu Kyi may well get her wish.  Protests organised in Muslim regional powers are already pressing for the cutting of ties with Myanmar.  Turkey is pressing for answers.  The Islamist tide, should it duly affect the Rohingyas, will itself become a retaliatory reality.

This sting of crisis and realpolitik was all too much for certain members of the Suu Kyi fan club. It certainly was for veteran Guardian columnist George Monbiot. He, along with others, had looked to her when jailed (house arrest or otherwise) as pristine, the model prisoner, the ideal pro-democracy figure.  When held captive, the purity was unquestioned.

Hopes were entrusted, and not counterfeit ones.  “To mention her was to invoke patience and resilience in the face of suffering, courage and determination in the unyielding struggle for freedom.  She was an inspiration to us all.”

Not so now. Crimes documented by the UN human rights report of February have been ignored.  The deliberate destruction of crops, avoided.  Humanitarian aid has been obstructed.  The military, praised.  When violence has been acknowledged, it has only been to blame insurgents who represent, in any case, an interloping people who are denied their ethnicity by the 1982 Citizenship Law.

“I believe,” writes Monbiot, “the Nobel Committee should retain responsibility for the prizes it awards, and withdraw them if its laureates later violate the principles for which they were recognised.”

How often has history shown that the prison is merely the prelude to a recurring nastiness, political calculation, and revenge?  Far from enlightening the mind and restoring faith, it destroys optimism and vests the inmate with those survival skills that, when resorted to, can result in carnage and misery.  Suu Kyi, in other words, is behaving politically, fearing the loss of her position, aware that behind her is a military that needs to be kept, at least partly, in clover.

Other Nobel Laureates have also added their voices to the roll call of concern, less of condemnation than encouragement. One is Professor Muhammed Yunus.  “These are her own people.  She says ‘these are not my people, someone else’s people’, I would say she has completely departed from her original role which brought her the Nobel Prize.”

Yunus, however, is more optimistic that the selfish, distancing leader will return to her peaceful credentials.  From a dark sleep, she will rise. “I still think she is the same Aung San Suu Kyi that won the Nobel Peace Prize; she will wake up to that person.”

Another is Desmond Tutu, who took the route of an open letter: “My dear sister: If the political price of your ascension to the highest office in Myanmar is your silence, the price is surely too steep… We pray for you to speak out for justice, human rights and the unity of our people.  We pray for you to intervene.”

The Nobel Institute, obviously moved by a sufficient number of calls to comment on the status of the award for the 1991 recipient, deemed the decision immutable.  “Neither Alfred Nobel’s will nor the statutes of the Nobel Foundation,” confirmed its head Olav Njølstad, “provide the possibility that a Nobel Prize – whether for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature or peace – can be revoked.”

As for the prize itself, it is long axiomatic that persons who tend to get it have blood on their hands.  The terrorist, reborn, is feted by the Nobel Prize Committee. Before ploughshares came swords.  Before peace, there was the shedding of blood.  But, in some cases, it may well be the reverse: from the ploughshares come the swords, and the Rohingyas are tasting that awful fact.

A Wild Flower in the Indian Wasteland, Gauri Lankesh: 1962-2017

Satya Sagar

On that dreadful evening of 5th September, if Gauri Lankesh had seen her own corpse lying in a pool of blood outside her house she would have -I am very sure- simply smiled

For even in her death she had done what was closest to her heart – expose India’s saffron supremacists for what they really were.  A sorry bunch of cowards, whose idea of valour or honour was to shoot an unarmed woman in the back and disappear into the dark.

In fact, such was her chutzpah, if Gauri had known there were a group of men waiting to kill her she would have invited them home for a cup of coffee. In chaste Kannada then, she would have asked them to explain whether her dying would be of any use to the ordinary citizens of this land. If convinced by their arguments, maybe she would have happily paid for the cartridges in their guns and requested them to go ahead.

Instead, in the end, her opponents remained true to their cultural roots and usedthe chosen methods of suppressing rebels and ‘rakshasas’ prescribed by hoary Hindu mythology. Like Vali, slyly shot by Ram, from behind a tree or a defenceless Meghnad murdered by Lakshmana, as he sat worshipping Lord Shiva – Gauri, daughter of Lankesh, was silenced only through low cunning and treachery.

Very appropriate perhaps in some ways. Nothing, after all, has really changed in this country, so many millennia since the Ramayana happened. The racist Aryans, whom Gauri fought all her life, are in power and consolidating by the hour.

Not one of these ‘Ram bhakts’ though, had the guts to look her in the eye – for who knows what mighty powers that may have provoked? Gauri, despite her own professed rationalism and atheism – had silently become through her life, work and audacity- what ordinary Indians have respected from time immemorial – a fearless and even fearsome Mother Goddess.She had to be eliminated – the Gods themselves were feeling the heat way up there, from the fires she had lit all around.

Gauri would also had a hearty laugh at the sick characters on social media celebrating her death, their green tongues dripping poison, using the vilest of terms to abuse her. The ethos of these proponents of  ‘Ram Rajya’, are now so visible for the whole world to see.

These are the rabble claiming to be upholders of India’s great spiritual heritage, culture and morality and who distribute the Gita to visiting dignitaries from distant lands. They stand stark naked now, proven to be nothing more than hate-filled misogynists, men without mothers or sisters, born to stone and not of flesh and blood.

Even so, I think,  Gauri was large-hearted enough, to forgive them. For despite the biting language she often employed – her battle was nothing personal at all. Instead she stood for whatever she thought was just and humane and against all that reeked of raw greed for oppressive power. She harboured no ill will against anyone and would have fought like a tigress to defend the human rights of even her foes.

Gauri’s heart would have filled with genuine happiness to see the thousands upon thousands who turned out across India to protest her brutal murder – again, not as a boost to any ego but as sign of hope they hold for the future. What she had tried very hard in nearly two decades of activism – to mobilize and unite fellow citizens against the politics of religious bigotry– happened within twenty four hours following her death.

She would have loved especially all those young girls coming out with ‘I am Gauri’ placards. In the instant the bullets pierced her frail body a million Gauris were already born, resolving to carry on her fight, with similar courage, commitment and passion. India indeed has a bright future, despite the descending gloom at Gauri’s departure There are many indeed many wild flowers, inspired by her, blooming in the dry wasteland this nation has become and they will have their day too.

Gauri, would have known though, given the vast challenges of fighting injustice, deprivation and venal racism of caste in a country like India, even all this outpouring of grief, anger and resolve may not be enough. It will take much more energy, intellectual honesty, courage and conscience to overcome the forces of darkness enveloping our nation.

It will be first of all crucial – to follow in the footsteps of Kalburgi, Pansare, Dabholkar and Gauri – to go to the field to study, mix with common citizens to understand what is really needed and how it should be done. To listen to and speak the language of the people in their own idiom, to truly communicate– in a way that transforms hearts and minds.

How is whatever we see all around us today in the country linked to what is happening in other parts of the world? Is there not a long history of religious, ethnic, racial hatred everywhere and how were they challenged? What were the responses forged by ordinary folks in their fight against fascism or other similar ideologies that pit the weak against the weak to cover up the crimes of the high and mighty?

How does nationalism or religion intersect with the economy, both local and global? Where does the money trail behind the assassins of our democracy really lead to? Who are the corporate babas, who make all their wealth, by distracting the population from its immediate problems using the politics of hate? How can we beard these monsters in their ‘deras’?

What role does religion play in all these stratagems and is religion just one single monolith or can it also contain myriad memories and possibilities of both good and evil? In this ancient land of the Buddha, Mahavir, Nanak, Kabir and Basavanna, is there anything we can learn from them – their outlook, methods and action – that can give us the strength to fight contemporary battles?

We also need to ask today, are we going to confine ourselves to merely protesting injustices or do we also construct alternative institutions and processes to shape a new reality? Do we even have the skills to make such a contribution and have we bothered to develop them sincerely – so that we do not remain mere creatures of rhetoric without any tangible substance to offer anyone?

Are we being honest enough with ourselves, when we point fingers at others while ignoring the various faults in our own midst? Do we have the will or energy or courage to first change our own ways of working?

If we are to be true to Gauri’s memory, it is urgent today we ask questions not just to those in power but to ourselves. It only through the process of putting own feet to fire that we can fly high – like Gauri ultimately did.