Home
Weiye Loh's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
India’s awkward attempts to control its citizens’ activities online are shifting further and further away from the liberal democratic principles that inform the US-India relationship, and towards the cliché of “Asian democracy”, where individual freedoms and rights are secondary to societal cohesion.
India has always believed that legal form should follow the substance. A legally binding agreement, by itself, is no guarantee for increased ambition or its implementation. Some Kyoto Protocol Parties have recently made unilateral announcements to renounce their legal obligations under the Kyoto Protocol. This is a clear pointer to the fact that a legal form is useful only as long as the party is willing to abide by it. Moreover, India has always taken a stand that India cannot agree to a legally binding agreement for emissions reduction at this stage of our development. Our emissions are bound to grow as we have to ensure our social and economic development and fulfill the imperative of poverty eradication.
Some Parties led by the European Union wanted to delete the option relating to ‘legal outcome’ which was originally mooted by India., We successfully resisted this pressures and in turn suggested a similar expression ‘agreed outcome with legal force’ which found acceptance with all the Parties. The post 2020 arrangements, when finalized, may include some aspirational CoP decisions, binding CoP decisions, setting up of new institutions and bodies, and new protocols or other legal instruments as necessary to implement the decisions covering various issues with various degrees of binding-ness as per domestic or international provisions of law under the Convention.
I must clarify that this decision does not imply that India has to take binding commitments to reduce its emissions in absolute terms in 2020
India is now the leading opponent of a new comprehensive global-warming treaty, it became clear at the weekend after the first week of negotiations at the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa.
The world's second most populous country has resolutely set its face against a fresh climate deal that at some stage would involve every country in the world cutting its carbon emissions in an effort to bring climate change under control.
The Indians are refusing to approve anything that might put a brake on their economy, now expanding with growth in 2010 estimated at 10.4 per cent. Its carbon emissions are growing at more than 9 per cent a year, the fastest of any major nation, and the country has shot up to become the world's third biggest carbon emitter, after China and the US.
But the Indians are relying on this growth to take hundreds of millions of their nearly 1.2 billion people out of poverty and they want nothing to do with curbing these emissions.
“What should be done when a woman uses her power over her own body to discriminate against female fetuses?”
-
Indian couples have a strong cultural preference, bordering on obsession, for sons over daughters – despite the strides in education and employment that women have made over the last few decades. Education and wealth have nothing to do with it – in fact, some of the worst-affected areas are in India’s wealthiest cities. However discomfiting a possibility, the real culprit might be Indian culture and tradition itself.
-
The expenses and pressure of the dowry system, and the fact that, in most joint families, only sons inherit property and wealth, contribute to this favoritism. Perhaps just as important is that sons typically live with their parents even after they are married, and assume responsibility for parents in their old age. Daughters, who live with their in-laws after they marry, are viewed as amanat – someone else’s property. In short, sons represent income and daughters an expense.
- 4 more annotation(s)...
We appear to have built a system where cops leak whatever information and speculation suits their case, but have no obligation to make the facts of a case public when the accused are innocent.
The debate surrounding Joseph Lelyveld’s biography of Gandhi, Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi’s Struggle With India, is a sad reflection on the nature of public discourse.
None of the commentators in this country claim to have read the book (which is yet to be published in India).
The entire controversy is based on one review by Andrew Roberts in The Wall Street Journal in which the reviewer drew his own inference that the author of the Great Soul had described Gandhi as a ‘racist’ and a ‘bi-sexual’.
-
As one of those who have in fact read the book, I would like to place on record that Lelyveld at no place in the book has described Gandhi as a racist.
In fact, as one of the foremost authorities on apartheid and racial discrimination, Lelyveld has shown the cultural distance that Gandhi traversed in a short span of only four months in his understanding of the ‘native question’ in colonial South Africa.
-
As we seek to ban the book on the ground that it constitutes insult to the Father of the Nation, we should remember that the book itself makes no statements of the kind which are attributed to it. But, that cannot be the sole ground on which the decision to ban or not ban a book rests.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in India
Highlighter, Sticky notes, Tagging, Groups and Network: integrated suite dramatically boosting research productivity. Learn more »
Join Diigo