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This is one of India's most blacked-out stories
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.
Today's International Tiger Day. Did anyone tell you?
It is hardly surprising that International Tiger Day, today – September 28, has almost passed by without even a purr. Few know about it, still fewer remember. In all likelihood that is what is going to happen to the tiger too – it will disappear sans even a protesting growl. Its howls, when trapped or killed mercilessly, are never heard anyway. For a nation that cannot even remember its own national animal on International Tiger Day, perhaps that is the fate that starkly awaits the royal beast. Our Prime Minister is too busy getting ready to sleep himself cosy with George W Bush in Washington. Our political leaders back home are too busy tarnishing each other with communal brushes. Our media is too busy writing about them. And in this din, the tiger can hardly make its voice heard.
SC gives clean chit to author of Shivaji book
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Lost in the din over the FTV ban and the targetting of couples in Mumbai was the Supreme Court judgment quashing the criminal proceedings against American historian and Professor James W Laine. The Maharashtra police had filed an FIR against Laine for “defaming” Maratha king Chhatrapati Shivaji and "attempting to disturb the communal peace and harmony" through his controversial book, Shivaji, Hindu king in Islamic India.
The book was relased in India in 2003, but was withdrawn from circulation following protests against it for making “wanton and malicious” comments against Shivaji. The controversy took a political turn on January 5, 2004 when a mob of more than 100 people ransacked the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute (BORI), Pune, and destroyed 18,000 books and 30,000 rare manuscripts.
