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Inadequate news coverage of environmental/wildlife issues
This is a subject so oft-debated in our circles that it is beginning to lose its significance. The basic factors responsible for the virtual non-existence of environmental/wildlife issues in the news media are the same today as they were some years back. Recycling the same issues again would do nothing more than fill up space for Green Voice.
It is time to take things further, to develop a strategy, and work on – not towards – it.
The fight for news-space is not a battle, it is a game. It is a ruthless mind game. What we keep forgetting is that it is not we who set the rules for this game. We indulge in too much rhetoric and create a ballyhoo about ethics and all that. Who cares? Trust me on this one – no one does; for if they did, things would have been different. If we are to play this game, then we have to do so by the rules that are not to our advantage.
What Nagaland doesn't need is a Neroesque politician
The tragedy of the Naga political movement has been the annihilation of Nagas by Nagas themselves.
The Nagas have remained cleaved along various schools of thought. Between radicals and moderates (from the killing of Theyieu Sakhrie to that of Kaito Sema) among the insurrectionists themselves. Also between those underground and those overground (from the killing of Imkongliba Ao to that of the Kevichusa brothers).
And somewhere complicating all these delicate equations and rendering all calculations awry are the perennial inter-tribe schisms. Exploiting all these to the hilt are politicians, giving all internecine killings a tribal hue. The blight continues.
This is one of India's most blacked-out stories
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It ought to be counted as one of India’s most downplayed stories of the day. It is about the struggle to save an ecosystem called Niyamgiri in Orissa from mining, deforestation and devastation. It is about indigenous people and the rights over their land.
Vedanta Resources, a stinking rich British company owned by NRI Anil Agarwal, intends to dig an open-pit bauxite mine in Niyamgiri. This mine will destroy the forests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and wreck the lives of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. The Supreme Court has given the go ahead for the project, but the battle rages on. Albeit silently. This project, by the way, will also see the death of the centuries-old sacred groves of these people. The Dongria Kondh do not live anywhere else and there are just 8,000 of them left.
The mills and our loss
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A disaster becomes a farce when the underlying tragedy gets buried, for whatever be the reason. That is just what has happened with the Supreme Court order paving the way for more malls and luxury apartments in the congested metropolis of Mumbai that should translate into billions of rupees for mill owners.
It is not just the court ruling which will be environmentally calamitous for Mumbai. The real tragedy lies in the fact that all voices of reason have been drowned in the Babel of eulogies that have been flooding the newspapers and the news channels. Trust the media to slut themselves for the shortsighted interests of the real estate mafia.