Initiated on 20 April, the online petition is addressed to all the judges of the Supreme Court, urging upon them to reconsider the verdict on the Judge Loya case. The full text is pasted below.
The powerful feedback mechanism of raising growth and inequality simultaneously combines restraint on government welfare spending, wilful default of bank loans by corporate houses and land acquisition for them. This creates not just a vicious circle but a rising and expanding spiral driven by a strategy of promoting the climate for private investment.
Infusing the institution of democracy with the ideology of higher growth without considering the fate of the majority results in a dangerous mutualism between private corporations and the government. The inclusive democracy of "one adult, one vote" is reconciled with the economic power of corporations by price rationing out the poor from any possibility of direct representation. Choice is closed through the institution of democracy and an ideology which equates higher growth with development.
Changes in the climate of economic policy affect more directly and immediately our everyday life compared to changes in the global physical climate. And, yet, while physical climate change receives a good deal of attention and research, economic climate change is seldom noticed and rarely commented upon. The sustained attack on Keynesian demand management in the name of "sound fi nance" has re-established the dominance of fi nance capital the world over, except in a few Latin American countries where social democracy has forced its way into policy in a new guise. India's subservience toWashington and to global fi nance is shameful because even as its economy has done well on the growth front, the people have not.
The eurozone crisis has been reduced, according to the mainstream diagnosis, to a fiscal crisis caused by excessive public spending and a competitiveness gap between North and South. The mainstream solution is to close this gap by means of “expansionary fiscal austerity” and wage reductions.
We are appalled at the police repression unleashed on the people protesting peacefully against the Koodankulam nuclear plant. The repression has forced them to take to a jal satyagraha.
We write to protest the denial of entry to David Barsamian by immigration authorities at the New Delhi airport in the early hours of 23 September 2011, and we write to draw attention to the growing arbitrariness of the Indian government in dealing with dissent of any kind.
The anti-corruption campaign has shown that a desperate public demands an immediate solution. Citizens have got a taste of direct democracy which is frightening for the privileged manipulators of the system, but liberating for the poor who are usually manipulated. While what the future holds cannot be predicted, the prize at this juncture of the history of Indian democracy is indeed so great that the compulsion in favour of the Jan Lokpal Bill is overwhelming.
We are shocked at the government’s sheer insensitivity in announcing on the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl catastrophe that it is going ahead with the Jaitapur nuclear power project.
In post-colonial societies, decolonisation merely changed the direction of a centuries-long violent hunt for natural resources. The more successful of the newly independent nations join the march of "development" only to become colonisers themselves. The formerly colonised countries are relatively new in the race, so the direction and the target of the hunt changes. Regions inside the country are identified for the hunt of natural resources. Imperialism turns inwards, and the latecomers in the race wage war against their own citizens, but this time in the name of developing them. With the hunt for resources turning inwards, history begins to repeat itself, but this time perhaps as a farce.
