A different sort of Apartheid

 

Subject: A different sort of Apartheid



With missed opportunities at COP26 and failing to get nations to make real commitments to stop burning fossil fuels and especially India and China’s refusal to set a date on stopping to use preferring to the phrase ‘phasing out’ the hope of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degree perishes, as do millions of people living a hand to mouth existence in Africa or close to the water line on the Indian delta.

The pragmatism of protecting coal burning industries now and the jobs which go with them, with a climate change policy of putting off the pain of today’s action and rather  inflicting untold misery for their children’s generation speaks more for the contempt Modi and his BJP party of Hindu hardliners hold towards those myriad poor who live in his country. Perhaps the Hindu have a god, or gods to represent the phases of deprivation inflicted by a Caste system, larger in scale than Apartheid but one in which the world is strangely silent about it.

When white people in South Africa were accused of disinheriting the black population with legislation designed to prevent them from sitting on an equal footing, the world rightly had a fit and reigned abuse on the government and its white citizens until, through economic pressure until fresh elections were held and a black government installed according to what is called the ‘natural law’ of democracy.

All the citizens in India have the right to vote providing the following :

(a) Proof of residency,

(b) Proof of voter registration

(c) Proof of age.

All are normal in a normally functioning society but with a society so skewed by birth and with 25% of the people designated ‘Untouchables or Dalits’ people may of whom live on the streets with no fixed abode making their ability to pass muster to be  fit for eligibility is limited. Add to this the political and religious malice of the Hindu BJP towards not only the Dalits but Muslims and the many women who fail to get on the voter registration lists, add to this the widespread purchasing of votes and you see democracy in India is a sham.

With such shameful attitude to the rights of citizenship and the right to representation is it any wonder the government play fast and loose with the conditions children will be forced to live in by 2070.

Authoritarian China has no need for democracy, it’s one party state and a President who has just secured a life Presidency, the states dogma over the size of families, tinkering with the number of babies a couple can have and a public surveillance    system which marks everyone’s card as to their willingness to conform we can hardly expect the Chinese authorities to worry about such prosaic issues as life and death, 50 years from now.

Perhaps by then they will have colonised the world and chosen the best climatic sites for themselves, or pushed off with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos to their holiday retreat on Mars.