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A pre-empted epitaph of foeticide
The backdrop of ripples music to my ears
The strain of a new life beyond my creativity
Flower blooming in the aching pain of my crust
Breath of fresh air a phoenix from my aspiration of dust.
Imagination runs livid in the sepulchre of the mind
My fire will not take roots in your life so exceptional
You were destined to born, live and die in this tomb
My unconceived daughter, this angry father’s mind was your womb.
• Collection:
Accursed in Twilight
• Originally written on
June 26, 2002
[ First published: November 22, 2008
Last updated: November 22, 2008
]
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.
Struggle of the Dongria Kondh people: The media blackout continues
On August 10, a frantic message landed in the mailbox of members of a Facebook group called Save Niyamgiri. Two leaders of the Dongria-Kondh tribe’s resistance to a controversial mine in Orissa’s Lanjigarh were said to have been abducted, and had subsequently gone missing. The two men were reported to have been ambushed at the base of the hill range where they live, bundled into a vehicle at gunpoint, and driven away. They were not being held at local police stations, Lanjigarh or Muniguda. A third person accompanying them was left alone.
HERE'S AN ENCOURAGING UPDATE