Jindalgarh: Jindal All The Way– #Jindalistan #sundayreading

 

Manic markers? In advertising the O.P. Jindal Setu, built by JSPL over Raigarh’s Kelo river, the firm has perhaps gone over the call of duty.

 OUTLOOK MAGAZINE | SEP 24, 2012

Jindalgarh: Jindal All The Way

JSPL’s attempts to alloy itself to Raigarh have met with a steely resolve

Debarshi Dasgupta

 

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Killed in a chopper crash in 2005, industrialist Om Prakash Jindal lives on in Raigarh, the heart of Chhattisgarh’s coal belt—not as Om Prakash, but ‘Omni Present’ Jindal. Visitors here are blitzed by O.P. Jindal’s name as also the green and saffron flag logo of Jindal Steel and Power Ltd (JSPL), which he founded in 1989. Now managed by his son and Congress MP Naveen Jindal, the firm has been on overdrive, stamping its mark across the city. It hasn’t gone uncontested, though.

Whether it is the bridge that JSPL built over the Kelo river, promptly naming it the O.P. Jindal Kelo Setu; the road that it constructed alongside the river called, in keeping with form, the
O.P. Jindal Marine Drive; or the controversial naming of a major city thoroughfare as O.P. Jindal road, none can escape the Jindal patriarch’s reach in the city. Arrivals at the local government hospital are treated in the O.P. Jindal OPD block and residents of the nearby Pathalgaon Bal Ashram received goodies like bags and cots with Jindal stickers on them. The locals here are incessantly reminded of the Jindals’ munificence.

The town’s Jindal Open Cast Coal Mines. (Photograph by Jitender Gupta)

“Naveen Jindal wants to transform Raigarh into Jindalgarh,” says Rajesh Tripathy, a local activist. Subscribers to this view point to how the firm encroached and installed O.P. Jindal’s statue at a public roundabout on the national highway near the city a few years ago without the necessary clearances and despite public opposition. “The National Highway Authority of India told us they had not been granted permission,” adds Tripathy. Finally, the statue was relocated in 2011 to another roundabout on a road that cuts through JSPL’s plant. Jindalgarh also happens to be the name the firm has chosen to confer on a colony of its employees on the fringes of the city.

The obsessive desire to leave a mark and vociferous attempts at claiming credit for every task carried out as part of its corporate social responsibility leave no one in doubt that the Jindals want to make Raigarh synonymous with Jindal. Ajay Athaley, a Raipur-based theatre artiste, says, “Why must they shout to say they have done this or that? The government should instead place a sign saying the firm was bound to do it. They are not doing us a favour if a certain section of the profits goes to the city.” JSPL currently has a CSR budget of Rs 25.73 crore for the whole of Raigarh district; its profits in 2011-12 was Rs 4,002 crore.

In this region of Chhattisgarh, it isn’t photographs of CM Raman Singh that one can’t miss. It’s the pictures of a beatific Naveen Jindal pasted on hoardings across the area. One may be forgiven for thinking it’s some strange dictatorial land with a leader obsessed with propagating a cult of personality about himself. Even the hierarchy on JSPL’s signboards on public roads emphasises its units first, subsuming entire towns that follow the units on the boards.

Jayant Bohidar, local Congress worker and president of the Raigarh Zila Kisan Congress, says Naveen Jindal suffers from a “mania for propagating his family’s name”. Deepak Mishra, a former resident of this city, adds, “He wants the name ‘Jindal’ to be seen everywhere. The people should forget Raigarh. Jindal, Jindal, Jindal, Kahan jaana hai? Jindalgarh.” On the other hand, Hemant Verma, manager at JSPL for liaison and PR, says there is no attempt to make a Jindalgarh of Raigarh. He even suggested the statue was relocated from the highway not because of public pressure. “It was because of a Supreme Court ruling that prohibited it,” he qualifies.

As for the major thoroughfare rechristened O.P. Jindal Marg, few refer to it by its new name. For them, it has always been Laxmipur-Dhimrapur Marg and that looks likely to remain so—at least in Naveen Jindal’s lifetime.

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Global Nuke-Liar Awards 2012: Nominations Invited !! #mustshare #mustvote

Dear Friends,

We are happy to announce the First edition of the Global Nuke-Liar Awards 2012

Your chance to nominate and vote for the most outrageous, the most logic-defying, the most stupendous lies that the nuclear industry propagates. It will obviously be a tough-fought battle, with many international contenders, but these prestigious awards will be decided, in true democratic fashion, by a combination of jury opinion and popular votes.

Please join in this global quest to find and expose Nuke’s Biggest Liars!

What to do:

In the nomination round, the readers are requested to send their nominations for the following categories:

– Best Nuke-Liar Politician

– Best Nuke-Liar Scientist

– Best Nuke-Liar Journalist

– Best Nuke-Liar Lie

– Best Nuke-Liar Truth (yes, it occasionally slips out)

– Best Nuke-Liar Factoid

– The Foot-in-Mouth Statement

– Best Nuke-Liar (Life Time Achievement Award)

You are requested to send us your nominations by email (nuclear.resource@gmail.com) or on the .FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE

The received nominations would be reviewed by a jury and tentatively 3 to 4 nominations in each category would be put up for online votes. You can also send your creative suggestions for including more award categories with possible nominees.

Readers can send their nominations either by commenting below this page or by sending an email to nuclear.resource@gmail.com

With each of your nominations, please also explain, briefly, your reasons for nominating a particular entry. Where required, please also send relevant reference about a particular nuke-liar statement or fact.

The closing date for the nominations is 25th September, 2012 and the awards will be announced on October 5th.

‘I will not trust #Facebook with my data’ – #mustread #privacy

Javed Anwer, TNN Sep 9, 2012

(Christopher Soghoian is…)

Christopher Soghoian is a man on a mission to expose how governments and private companies misuse or casually handle the data they collect from users. But his work has its risks. After he found security loopholes that allowed people in the US to generate fake boarding passes, the FBI hounded him for over a month. Soghoian, who is currently the principal technologist and a senior policy analyst with American Civil Liberties Union, tells Javed Anwer that many communication companies are helping governments spy on their own people:

You have said that US companies aid in surveillance across the world. Does it mean they sell technology that enable filters like Great Firewall of China or do they share user data with governments?

Well, it depends on the company and their market. Communications companies (email providers, search engines, social networks and phone companies) are required by law to provide assistance to governments. The legal standards for when they will hand over this data vary by country and the data requested. In some places, an order signed by an independent judge is required, while in other countries, a request from the police is enough. However, as a general rule, many technology companies tend to ignore requests from governments in countries where they do not have an office. In the case of India, most technology companies seem to have offices there.

There is also a growing industry of companies that sell surveillance technology permitting the government to spy on their own citizens (and also people in other countries, in the case of international espionage). These companies sell communications intercept equipment andspyware or other hacking tools. One company on my radar right now is Septier, an Israeli surveillance vendor that sells “off the air” cellular phone intercept equipment similar to the kind used in recent wiretapping scandals in India. Their only offices outside Israel are two offices in India. These surveillance companies sell their products to governments around the world, and their capabilities are truly terrifying.

Given how these technologies are used, don’t you think western countries like the US should forbid their companies from selling their tools to governments across the world?

While western companies (and governments) may have had an advantage, and even exclusive access to surveillance technologies in the past, this is no longer the case. There are surveillance companies in India, China, Russia, producing top quality surveillance technology domestically, which they sell on the global market.

However, I do think it is extremely short sighted for western governments to permit the sale of surveillance technologies that can then be pointed back at them and used to spy on their own citizens. While US companies can sell tanks in the Middle East without any real fear that those tanks will end up back on US soil, the same is not true for surveillance software.
Where do companies like Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft stand? After all, they have data in which governments are interested.

These firms all assist governments in spying on their customers. The big difference among them is the degree of transparency. Apple is secretive (not a surprise, as it is secretive in all areas), and will not really discuss the scale of requests it receives or the kind of assistance if can provide.

Facebook is generally pretty open, and even has its law enforcement handbook online. However, the one negative with this company is that it won’t publish statistics on the number of requests it receives. Google publishes fairly detailed statistics on the number of requests it receives from different governments, but the company is highly secretive when probed on the specific legal standards the company follows before handing over different types of data. Microsoft has not released statistics, but will generally talk to privacy advocates about their standards and policies.

I personally find it more pleasant to deal with Facebook’s lawyers than any other company in this list. However, I still won’t trust them with my data. Twitter is by far the most transparent and pro privacy of the big technology companies. They are about as good as you can hope for.

Do backdoors exist? For example, Julian Assange has claimed that Facebook is a spy machine for the US government…

There is a big difference between a backdoor and a conspiracy.

Do I think that Facebook intentionally collects data at the behest of the FBI or another US government agency? No. Do I think that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies get to benefit from Facebook’s commercially motivated retention of vast amounts of private data? Certainly.

Facebook is now one of the most useful resources for divorce lawyers, but we don’t go around accusing Facebook of secretly being a spy machine for the divorce lawyer industry.

73-Year-Old Woman Raped and Beaten for Daring to Photograph Public Masturbator #Wtfnews

There’s a price for sticking your neck out on harassment: the risk that the situation will escalate. September 14, 2012 |

 

This article originally appeard on xoJane.com.

Roughly 10 days after photographing a man who exposed himself to her in Central Park, a 73-year-old woman was beaten and raped in broad daylight by an assailant who said “Do you remember me?” before attacking her. Sure, she remembered him; “Moms,” as a Central Park employee calls her, could hardly forget the experience of being threatened and intimidated by him after she took his picture.

This case is attracting a lot of headlines because it’s a perfect storm of circumstances, illustrating that many of the myths about rape are just that: myths. Her rape happened in the middle of the day in a highly crowded area of the park, not in a dark alley somewhere. Her rape was about an exertion of power and control, not sexuality, as demonstrated by the fact that she was savagely beaten and her camera was stolen. The rapist’s goal was to punish her for daring to document his earlier harassment.

And it brings up some interesting questions about street harassment, for me.

I’ve been getting harassed since about the age of 16; it’s included not just cat calls, whistles, and comments, but groping, flashers, comments on my tattoos, and the whole gamut of charming human behavior. I suspect a lot of xoJane staffers and readers could say the same. Harassment is pretty much a way of life if you have breasts, no matter your age, size, disability status, or race. Thanks to the fact that bodies like ours are considered fair game, it’s always harassment season, and there’s no bag limit.

Which is why a lot of organizations have started focusing on harassment specifically, trying to empower people to expose and report it. Holly Kearl’s Stop Street Harassment is one example, along with Hollaback, which has spread across the world and now even has an app so people can discreetly take photos of harassers and share them across a network. But, as Emily pointed out when we talked about this case this morning, there’s a price for sticking your neck out on harassment.

And that’s the risk that the situation will escalate. It’s something I’ve worried about on the few occasions when I’ve been willing to push back on harassment, and I know a lot of women who will say nothing in the face of harassment because they are understandably terrified that the situation could get even uglier. Cases like this are a stark reminder of the very real dangers involved in telling harassers to get stuffed.

Recently, UnWinona on Tumblr posted about exactly what happens when these situations escalate, and it’s terrifying:

Then he’s up out of his seat and things go from bad to worse. He begins pacing back and forth in front of his bike, alternating between screaming something about his mother being dead and calling me a slut, a hoe, a bitch. I am frozen in place. There is one other person in the car, and I’m not sure if trying to change seats will draw more attention to me or less. I trust my instincts and show no fear, doing my best to appear to be calmly reading my book, never once looking up to acknowledge the abuse he’s hurling at me.

This is what some people deal with on a regular basis. When you’re alone out there, which you are when you’re in a public place and you don’t know anyone, no matter how many people are around you, there’s no way of knowing what’s going to happen when you expose a harasser. Maybe the person will be shamed and will stop it. Maybe that person will get extremely aggressive and threaten or hurt you. And maybe the people around you won’t do jack shit to help you. And that’s what I worry about, because there’s no guarantee, when someone speaks up, that a bystander will back the victim up.

 

In fact, there’s pretty ample precedent indicating that the opposite is true; the bystander effect, as it’s known, explains why things like the Kitty Genovese murder happen. Women can be murdered in crowded areas, screaming for help, with multiple witnesses, while no one lifts a finger, not even to call the police.

This woman was raped because she dared to confront a harasser. She’s a park regular who goes there to go birding and take photographs, and she’s known by staff at the park. She has a favorite bench. She sounds like a nice, civic-minded person who just wants to be able to enjoy the park without willy-wavers, and she paid a high price for standing up against harassment.

Moms, there’s already a lot of speculation swirling around you, making this your fault somehow. You should have done this, you should have done that, why didn’t you report the first incident to the police, etc. So I want you to know this: I am so sorry this happened to you.

I am so angry this happened to you. This is not your fault. You did a right and good and brave and bold thing when you documented your harassment and I salute you for that. I hope they catch this guy, and I hope you make him squirm at the trial.

s.e. smith is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in Bitch, Feministe, Global Comment, the Sun Herald, the Guardian, and other publications. Follow smith on Twitter: @sesmithwrites.

#SoniSori on hunger strike after being strip-searched in front of other prisoners

Lodged in Raipur Central Jail she has been on a fast since 21 August, demanding an audience with CM Raman Singh, says Shazia Nigar in tehelka 

In a letter to a Supreme Court judge, Soni Sori has said that it would have been better had she been handed a death penalty. Lodged in Raipur Central Jail she has been on a fast since 21 August, demanding an audience with Chief Minister Raman Singh, to report harassment faced by her and other tribals in the state.

Her lawyer, Amiy Shukla, said, “She was forced to undress in front of 100 other women prisoners on 21 August. She is made to undress for the authorities to search her person. She is usually subjected to such humiliating searches before being taken to the Dantewada court for her trial hearings.”

A teacher in a government primary school in Jabeli, Dantewada, Sori was arrested on 4 October 2011, in Delhi by the Delhi Crime Branch and the Chhattisgarh police on charges of being a “Maoist on the run”. Her tryst with the police began with their hunt for Lingaram Kodopi, her nephew. An activist and journalist documenting the atrocities committed on his people in this war, Lingaram, was arrested on charges of collecting money from the Essar group for the Maoists. Sori was also charged in the same case. The irony of the situation lies in the fact that while Soni Sori and her nephew were battling police charges of being “Naxalite accomplices,” the Maoists attacked her father’s house and shot him on the leg.

She is currently fighting charges under IPC section 121 (waging war against the state); 120(B) (conspiracy); 124(A) (sedition); section 39(1) and 40 of Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (offense related to contributing to terrorist activity and raising funds for terrorist activity).

Last year, in a chilling case of harassment in custody Sori had sustained head and back injuries, and later a medical examination had revealed forceful insertion of stones into her private parts. Following this incident the Supreme Court had ordered AIIMS to constitute a Special Medical Board to look into her treatment and to ascertain the charges. The findings of the report will be presented in the next hearing.

In a letter addressed to the Supreme Court Judge on 28 July, Sori had alleged that she is “made to sit on the ground naked”, that she was “suffering from hunger,” is “frisked in an uncomfortable manner” and “each part” of her “body is touched”. She also claimed that she is being labelled as a traitor and a Naxalite.

Activist Himanshu Kumar, who was forced to leave Chhattisgarh after his ashram, the same one where Sori received her education, was razed to the ground, says, “Sori in her letter said that the other women in Jagdalpur jail with her are treated even worse. They tell her that at least people outside are speaking on your behalf.” The story of Soni Sori is not her’s alone. It symbolises the very nature of the war that the state is waging on its people.

shazia@tehelka.com

Bombay HC to form guidelines on sedition law

By Ganesh N | ENS – MUMBAI 15th September 2012 09:22 AM

Censuring the decision of the state, police and lower court to book cartoonist Aseem Trivedi on sedition charges, the Bombay High Court said that it would frame guidelines for the application of sedition charges.

A Division Bench of Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justice Amjad Sayyed said the guidelines would prevent the police and the courts from invoking the provision of sedition on ‘arbitrary’ and ‘frivolous’ grounds as in the case of Trivedi. “If there are no parameters, there will be serious encroachment of a person’s liberties guaranteed to him in a civil society,” the Bench observed.

The guidelines announced by the court would be significant as the outdated law has been going unchallenged since Independence. In a PIL filed by advocate Sanskar Marathe, the court held that the law regarding sedition was a pre-Independence provision, when the British government wanted protection from the citizens. The Bench said that it would lay parameters for the police and courts before booking someone on sedition charges.

The court was markedly peeved by the way the state government, police and the lower court handled the Trivedi case. Without mincing words, the Bench said; “How can you arrest people on frivolous grounds? You arrest a cartoonist and breach his liberty of freedom of speech and expression. Today you attacked a cartoonist, tomorrow you will attack a film maker and then a writer. We live in a free society and everyone has freedom of speech and expression.”

Praising Trivedi’s courage to raise his voice against the ‘arbitrary’ prosecution, the court wondered if there were more cases similar to this where the arrested persons have not made their plight known as their voices were suppressed by the police. The court has now asked the police to file a detailed affidavit by October 12 on the cases pending under sedition charges.

The state counsel informed the court that the police commissioner was in discussion with the Law and Judiciary Department to explore if sedition charges against Trivedi could be withdrawn. Meanwhile, another FIR was lodged by a social activist against Trivedi with the Beed police under the Prevention of Insults to National Honour Act, 1971. Trivedi is likely to be arrested in this case too.

Fishworkers destroyed model of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant

Appeal against nuclear power project

Thiruvananthapuram, September 15, 2012 : THE HINDU

Activists of the Kerala Swathanthra Matsya Thozhilali Federation
destroyed model of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant at a
demonstration in Thiruvananthapuramon

Fish workers’ bodies plan agitation

September 17 to be observed as protest day

Kerala Swathantra Matsya Thozhilali Federation (KSMTF) and the
National Fishworkers Forum (NFF) have urged the State and Union
governments to drop the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project and set up
wind farms along the coast to generate power.

Addressing reporters here on Thursday, T. Peter, secretary, NFF; P.P.
John, State president, KSMTF; and J.P. John, district president;
questioned the motive of locating the nuclear plant in the densely
populated Kudankulam coast. Highlighting the possibility of a nuclear
accident as the major cause for concern, they feared that the constant
discharge of hot water into the sea from the plant would deplete fish
stocks.

KSMTF and NFF were embarking on a State-wide agitation from Friday to
express solidarity with the ongoing stir against the project. Fish
workers and their families would take out a march to the Secretariat
here on Friday and stage a dharna. The agitation would be extended to
other districts over the next few days. NFF would observing September
17 as protest day in New Delhi and in coastal States.

KSMTF urged the State government to adopt a stand against nuclear
plants. Mr. John said the oceanarium project in Kochi showcased at the
Emerging Kerala meet would pose a threat to the fisheries sector.

The office-bearers said the Chief Minister’s announcement that the
coastal waters would be opened up for movement of cargo vessels had
led to concern among fishermen who used gillnets along the coast from
Thiruvananthapuram to Kasaragod. Mr. John urged the government to
restrict the movement of cargo vessels beyond the 12-nautical-mile
limit.

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