Robert Mackey- Indian Rapper Sofia Ashraf Calls Out Unilever Corporation for Mercury Poisoning
Sofia Ashraf, a young female rapper from the Indian state of
Tamil Nadu who rose to fame by riffing about social justice while wearing a
burqa, released
a new single this week about corporate responsibility that draws
inspiration from an unlikely source: the risqué Nicki Minaj hit, “Anaconda.”
For the song, “Kodaikanal
Won’t,” Ms. Ashraf borrowed the tune to “Anaconda,” but crafted entirely
new lyrics, with which she calls on the multinational corporation Unilever to
help former workers at a thermometer plant that its Indian subsidiary closed 14
years ago, after mercury contamination was discovered there.
Hindustan Unilever has
acknowledged that it shut the factory in 2001 — when Greenpeace and
other environmental groups made the company aware that tons
of mercury-contaminated glass from the plant had been sold to a scrap
dealer near the plant in the town of Kodaikanal — but disputes the claims of former workers who say
that their health has been adversely affected by exposure to mercury. The
former employees attribute
dozens of subsequent deaths to toxic pollution at the site.
In her new rap, posted online by Jhatkaa, a
nongovernmental organization that leads campaigns for social justice, Ms.
Ashraf employs the occasionally crude idiom of the genre to argue that Unilever
has shirked its responsibility to look after the workers and properly clean up
the soil and water around the former plant. “Kodaikanal won’t step down,” Ms.
Ashraf warns Unillever, “until you make amends now.”
A local environmental monitoring group reported
last month that high levels of mercury could still be found in
vegetation and sediment in the vicinity of the former factory in Kodaikanal.
The company disputed those findings in a
statement posted on its website, calling them “in contrast to the results
and conclusions of several site assessment and risk assessment studies that
have been done by independent experts and institutes over the years.”
In another internal publication, a former Hindustan Unilever
executive even called the company’s response to the “Kodaikanal issue,” an
example of its “strong values and beliefs.” “When the local NGOs drew our attention to improper and
unauthorized disposal of scrap from our mercury thermometer factory,” the
company’s retired director of corporate affairs, Gurdeep Singh, wrote in
the Hindustan Unilever employee magazine in 2009, “we could have easily chosen
to sweep the matter under the carpet. But that’s not the way we work. We
immediately shut our factory operations and initiated, with the help of leading
global environment experts, a thorough investigation and remediation which is
even now ongoing.”
The rap song is part of a wider social media campaign aimed at
shaming Unilver, and its chief executive, Paul Polman, into looking again at
the complaints of the former workers.
For Ms. Ashraf, rapping about chemical companies that do
business in India is nothing new. She first
attracted attention in 2008, with “Don’t
Work for Dow,” in which she excoriated the chemical company for its
response to the
Bhopal disaster in 1984.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/01/world/asia/indian-rapper-calls-out-unilever-to-a-nicki-minaj-beat.html
