One Indian rapper is taking on corporate giant Unilever with an environmental protest song set to the tune of Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda”. It has become the protest anthem in India over Unilever’s mercury contamination.
Chennai-born rapper Sofia Ashraf partnered with the grassroots organizing campaign Jhatkaa to create the video “Kodaikanal Won’t,” calling on the corporate giant to clean up its mess and pay restitution to workers of the thermometer factory that was responsible for a giant toxic waste dump in the Indian city.
Sofia Ashraf had earlier released a rap song attacking Dow Chemicals for the Bhopal gas tragedy.
In the song, which has completely new lyrics, Ashraf employs the occasionally crude idiom of the genre to argue that Hindustan Unilever has skirted responsibility to look after the workers and properly clean up the soil and water around its former thermometer plant. “Kodaikanal won’t step down,” Ashraf warns Hindustan Unilever, “until you make amends now.”
