“Thirty two years ago, the worst accident in industrial history took place in the city of Bhopal. A gas leaked from the pesticide plant of Union Carbide killing thousands, maiming hundreds of thousands who still have not had justice.
Today, Union carbide has been bought up by Dow which is merging with DuPont. Dow-DuPont, with Bayer, Monsanto, Syngenta Chem-China, are now the «three poison cartel» trying to control our lives through poisons. But, their violence and their crimes, is most dramatically, and in a concentrated and ugly way, continuing to live in Bhopal.
That is why, we continue the tradition of the peoples assembly we started at the Monsanto tribunal in the
Hague, from the 14th to the 16th of October 2016. On the 29th of November, a few days before the tragic anniversary of the accident, we will be holding a people’s assembly to hold Dow and DuPont accountable. But knowing that their power of corruption is so huge, we also know that the true justice, for this planet and it’s people, will come from not becoming part of their poison economy, their poison industry.
In fact, it was because of Bhopal, and because of the Punjab violence in 1984 that I started to look at why was agriculture so violent. I wrote a book called “The Violence of the Green Revolution”, started a campaign in Bhopal, simple campaign; “No more Bhopals, plant neem,” because neem can help us control pests without killing people.
We have the ecological alternatives in this amazingly rich land which has given the world biodiversity, where the knowledge of that biodiversity is still with us. Through that biodiversity, through poison-free farming, we will create an India that is free of corporations. In 1600 the East India Company was created to loot India, to steal India, to rule India through brute force.
We had the first independence movement in 1857, the second one, which concluded with political freedom in 1947, now we begin the third independence movement and this is independence from corporate rule of every kind and rule of the poison cartel. We will shape a poison free future, a corporate free future, based on «swaraj swadeshi satyagraha» our self-organizing capacity for true freedom, our self-making capacity without poisons, and our ability to say «no» to violence, to poisons and to brute force.”
Transcript kindly provided by Sophie Perillo
Related campaign:
People’s Assembly on Dow-DuPont crimes of Genocide and Ecocide
Learn more: http://peoplesassembly.net/category/dow-dupont/
