India Against Negativity Very recently a galaxy of 5-star people gathered at a 7-star venue in Bhubaneswar to form a 10-star club called ‘India Against Negativity’ (IAN). The noble but untold intention of the promoters of this club is to protect the land grabbers, mining criminals, chit fund looters and last but not the least the commoditizers of education & health. According to the considered view of this august club, a person opposing an injustice or evil prevailing in the society or in the administration is automatically a negative-minded. Probably the first such person was Prahlad who revolted against his own father Hiranya. From Buddha, Vivekananda, Rammohan Roy, Phule down to Ambedkar and Periyar who opposed the evil orthodoxies and superstitions in the society can rightly be branded as negative-minded. Tallest among the list will undoubtedly be the eternal rebel and compulsive anarchist called Mohandas Gandhi. The fight against Apartheid in South Africa, Satyagraha against foreign rule, anti-salt tax march, fight against casteism & untouchability, call to banish the foreign goods and call to boycott offices, factories and schools during 1942 movement were some his horrible negative deeds. On civil disobedience and dissent he observes, ‘’An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.” His greatest disciple, Martin Luther King Jr, in his autobiography records,“I became convinced that non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” Ultimately, Mahatma Gandhi paid a heavy price for all his negative deeds to the great positive-minded Nathuram Godse. Less we say about the great thinkers, social reformers and civil rights & social activists like Hendry Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Robert Ingersoll, Ruskin, Bertrand Russell, Jiddu Krishnamoorthy, Nelson Mandela and Noam Chomsky the better. We also witnessed hundreds & thousands of negative-minded people staging anti-war demonstrations across the world during the last stages of Vietnam war. Some of the negative minded are still demonstrating against the dropping of atom bombs over Hiroshima & Nagasaki, aerial spraying of the lethal herbicide Agent Orange over the cultivable fields and pristine forests of Vietnam, the perpetrators of the world’s worst industrial accident in Bhopal, aerial spraying of Endo-sulfan over Kerala’s plantations, mining of Uranium in Jharkhand’s Jaduguda and coal in MP’s Singrauli that maims people and destroys rivers. Recent examples of this negative mindset: Occupy Wall Street and anti-GMO & anti-nuclear power demonstrations. Add the two decade long insurgency in mineral rich states of Central India and the farm suicides from 1995. Our Supreme Court has all along been the perfect example of this negativity. Years ago it ordered shut down of polluting industries in Kanpur, Vellore, Tirupur etc though the units were earning huge internal revenue& foreign exchange and providinglarge scale employment. Cancelling 2G licenses, stopping iron ore mining across India, allowing tribals to decide the fate of Vedanta’s Aluminium plant in Odisha and the whole sale scrapping of coal mining permits issued from 1993 are some of the landmark negativities. Delhi – Bench of National Green Tribunal had stopped about a month ago all coal mining activities in Meghalaya noting that right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India is far more significant than economic interest of a state or an individual. The tribunal adds, “It will be travesty of justice if in our country, the largest democracy in the world, economic interests are to take precedence over the fundamental right to life and to live in a healthy environment. More so, when the reason for such precedence is that non-permitting of an illegal activity is likely to hurt a section of the society economically.” The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that “even a state cannot be permitted to take shelter of the economic limitations where it comes to protection of life and liberty of the citizens of the country.” Please note that members of India Against Negativity belong to that section which was hurt economically by the public agitations, media exposures, judicial inquiries and court decisions. A few photographs attached herewith explain volumes about a socially divisive, politically undemocratic, economically exclusive, environmentally unsustainable and ethically immoral Development Model relentlessly being pursued by these IAN warriors. Howard Zinn (the great American play writer & social activist) advocates for the negativity -much hated by the Bhubaneswar august club - this way: “Civil disobedience was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the publics acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it... In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as anti-war protesters did.” Only when the last tree disappears, the last river dries up and the last fish dies, the members of India Against Negativity will realise that they cannot eat the scam-tainted iron ore, coal, bauxite or the bogus engineering and medical degree certificates thrown by the Doomed Universities for a hefty price.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 23:46:05 +0000
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