Recent content by Achin Vanaik

The Japanese crisis is a wake up call for India, which is currently building of one of the world's largest nuclear power plants at Jaitapur, despite massive popular protest. When such a disaster can occur in an industrially advanced country like Japan, India, whose atomic agency is notorious for its poor safety standards, needs to rethink its nuclear ambitions.

Around a hundred thousand people perished in Chernobyl. The toll from the nuclear disaster in Fukushima is likely to be high. The CNDP demands a moratorium on all further civilian nuclear activities in India and thorough review and transparent audit of the safety performance of all nuclear reactors.

The hyped up discourse at this month's nuclear summit centred on preventing the transfer of nuclear weapons to non-state actors or “irresponsible” state actors, thus skirting away from the primary problem – that of state terrorism in both its nuclear and non-nuclear forms.

The discourse of concern about nuclear non-proliferation by the biggest and most obscene of all nuclear culprits – the US – serves admirably as one line of attack on countries like Iran and as a disguise for the US’s deeper and wider motives in West and East Asia.

Let us talk about torture and how three countries, widely considered to be remarkable democracies – India, US and Israel – hush it up. Israel, unlike the other two, is not a democracy by any genuine legal or moral standard. It denies a fifth of its population (Israeli Arabs not living in the occupied territories) equal citizenship rights. It is in fact a non-secular, explicitly communal “Jewish state” which Constitutionally-legally discriminates on the grounds of religion.