Friday, June 18, 2010
Why Obama is angry? Why Sonia is hibernating?
The British Petroleum undersea oil well explosion has robbed US President Obama’s sleep for days and weeks now. He has treated the oil disaster that had taken the lives of 11 workers and is now impacting livelihood of thousands around America’s Gulf coast states’ beeches and fishing grounds, as a war on the USA. Obama has directed all his ire on British Petroleum, even though British Petroleum has changed its name to BP, possibly to hide its national identity in a globalized world. But that has not detracted Obama from naming British Petroleum again and again without any quarters being given to any ‘special relationship’ that British always claimed having with the USA. Obama has forced BP to stop any dividend that the company has announced earlier and instead to place an initial sum of US$20 billion in a special fund to clear the resulting mess, to rehabilitate the affected people and compensate for their livelihood and business losses.
It reminds one how Ghalib would have said:
Dekho is tarah se kahte hain sukhanwar sehra
In contrast, since the storm blew up over the court judgment, sentencing the accused in Bhopal’s biggest historical industrial disaster of the world, where thousands died and generations of hundreds and thousands are suffering the leakage of lethal gas that poured out from the US owned Union Carbide plant, India’s highest political authority, the President of the ruling coalition Congress, Sonia Gandhi is for all purposes hibernating. Her valiant soldiers are fighting a losing battle with public opinion and opposition political parties and trying to make the issue the usual blame game to erode public attention, she has shown no sign that she is at all concerned with any measures that remotely match the zeal and passion of an Obama.
The difference is that Obama has stakes, while Sonia is secured in her throne, complacent that India’s democratic feudalism will not touch her or her party. The people in the estimation of our political oligarchs, are just nothing.
The other extenuating factor is India’s very standing with the US and its political establishment. Thanks to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
US can roar. India can only mew.
It does not matter that India’s case is just and fair and equitable in demanding similar rehabilitation package from a US corporate and/or its successors for the human sufferers in India; it all depends if the feudal Congress really believes Indians are as much humans as the Americans are.
Indian politicians and other member of the corporate oligarch can think in big money terms commensurate with the going terms in the globalized world, but turn extreme misers and stingy when it comes to valuing their vassals that dutifully vote for them in regular elections and work for them in their burgeoning enterprises. Even Naxals have not shaken their hibernation.
India should immediately send a tough talking Ramesh or Kamal Nath or a diplomat Tharoor to meet Obama for a dual agenda --- to first and foremost sympathise with the people of the USA, that are victims of the money grabbing greed of the big Corporates that cut on safety measures and --- at the second instance, to enlist Obama’s active assistance to chalk out a legal and political strategy to inveigle a similar Relief Fund for the Bhopal victims.
India should not be ashamed of valuing the lives of its people and their property in international value terms. Let there be no compromises on that.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai
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