Communally secular or secularly communal? by V. Sundaram

SPECIAL STORY: "'. "
Communally secular or secularly communal?

V SUNDARAM

'If India has to be saved from total destruction, Election Commission of India will have to derecognise the Congress Party first for its unabashed Communal Secularism'

- All the People of India.

If Muslim terrorists destroy the Madurai Meenakshi Temple in Tamil Nadu or Guruvayurappan Temple in Kerala or Puri Jagannath Temple in Orissa, the communal Congress Party or all the Islam-Embracing, Christianity-Coveting or Hindu-Hating political parties forming part of the so called non-communal coalition UPA Non-Government (in actual fact an NGO!!) in New Delhi will not view such criminal deeds as unprovoked acts of religious fanaticism or communal vandalism but as noble deeds of Islamic humanity and compassion forming a legitimate and indivisible part of 'Minority Rights'. What is shocking is that the CBI, IB, RAW, Ministry of Home Affairs and all the other enforcement agencies of the Government of India will also be equally enthusiastic and perceptive and smoothly slide along the same path with the same pseudo-secular fervour! All these disgraceful enforcement agencies under the indirect political control of a coterie having direct links with Italian Mafia will only get unduly disturbed by a routine RSS peaceful Baitak anywhere.

Against this known and 'solid' background, I am not at all surprised that the Congress Party and all the other pseudo-secular political parties are raising a big 'Hangama' against a CD that was sought to be released by some functionaries of the BJP Party in UP. If the BJP Party is communal, Congress Party is also equally communal. The Samajvadi Party, RJD, CPI (M), CPI, LJP, DMK, and all the other political parties supporting the Congress are no less communal. But the Election Commission of India will treat only the BJP as 'Saffronized and Communal' and all the other political parties, including all brands and shades of Muslim political parties as 'Non-Saffronized, Secular and Non-Communal'. In my view Dr.Manmohan Singh is communal. Sonia Gandhi is communal. Arjun Singh is communal. Shivraj Patel is communal. Mulayam Singh Yadav is communal. Lalu Prasad Yadav is communal. Ram Vilas Paswan is communal. Prakash Karat and Brinda Karat are communal. Thus we can go on without end in the murky cess-pool of our low level national politics today.

I was looking into the internationally accepted definitions of 'Racism.' All of them uniformly point out that any form of discrimination against any particular religion within a country or a State is a definite form of condemnable and reprehensible 'Racism'. Even the United Nations has adopted this approach. In Turkey, the Kurds have been the victims of 'Racism'. In Bosnia, we have the disgraceful phenomenon of racial discrimination against the Muslims.

In the light of this definition, I can adduce irrefutable documentary evidence to show that the surrogate UPA government in New Delhi (under the power without responsibility stranglehold of an Italian woman in absolute ownership of a Private Unlimited Company called the Congress Party!!) is a government which actively practices undeclared, unstated, undefined but definitely politically promoted 'Racism' founded on Minority Communalism against the peace-loving HINDUS in majority in India.

Nowhere in the world can we see the national disaster of a duly elected government officially announcing and promoting a pernicious policy of 'Racism' derived from Minority Religious Communalism particularly against the majority. Are we not having State-sponsored Communalism against the majority? Let me give some concrete instances to substantiate my major charge of 'Communalism' against the majority' which I am raising against the UPA Government, the Congress and all the other so called secular political parties:

1. In the dastardly name of 'Minorityism' on paper and petty vote bank politics in practice, the Congress Party under the leadership of Jawaharlal Nehru, a sworn enemy of Hinduism, surreptitiously slipped in Articles 29 and 30 of the Constitution in order to convert the Hindus in Majority in India into serfs of the 'Minority' in perpetuity. Does it not show that the Congress Party has been 'communal' ever since our Independence?

2. After declaring India as a secular State, the Congress Party under Jawaharlal Nehru introduced Haj subsidies for the Muslims in 1959. We do not have Haj subsidies in any other Islamic or non-Islamic country in the world. Was this not truly 'communal'? In this context, the poor Hindus of India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Rann of Kutch to the Bay of Bengal, would like to pose some simple and straight questions to the UPA government in general and Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi in particular: 'What crimes or sins we have committed as Hindus not to qualify for subsidies to visit places of our pilgrimage like Kasi, Manasarover, Haridwar, Rishikesh, Badrinath, Kedarnath, Dwaraka, Puri, Kancheepuram, Madurai, Srirangam, Rameswaram, Kanyakumari, etc.? Are we in minority in India? Are we not discriminated against on the ground of the religion of our forefathers from times immemorial? Are you suggesting that we would instantaneously qualify for these subsidies only by converting ourselves voluntarily and cheerfully to Islam under the direct supervision of two Union Cabinet Ministers like Arjun Singh and Antuley?

3. Was it not an announcement of religious discrimination against the Hindus in majority - the recent policy pronouncement of Manmohan Singh that government of India will always follow the philosophy of 'Muslims First' in the matter of apportionment of development funds? As a responsible Prime Minister, is he not taking India on the treacherous path of fragmenting the country on 'communal' lines just in order to corner some Muslim votes in different parts of India? The real truth about the 'communal' fraud, the whole fraud and nothing but the fraud about the disgraceful Justice Sachar Committee has come out into the open. Why is the Election Commission keeping quiet when Congress leaders talk about the 'communal' glory and the grandeur of Justice Sachar Committee Report?

4. Why did the Union Finance Minister, recently announce a new 'Communal' programme of 'COMMUNAL LOANS' by asking the Banks to refashion and restructure their lending policy by earmarking 15 per cent of the priority sector loans exclusively for the minorities? Will it not throw open the gates of all the Banks in India to the Mullahs and the Moulvis to bring to bear their religious influence even on routine technical and financial matters relating to loans and advances in the banking sector?

5. Having declared India a 'secular' country under the Indian Constitution, will it not be illegal on the part of government of India to talk of religious minorities?

6. Was not Sonia Gandhi practicing 'Communalism' against the Hindus in majority in India when she described the RSS as a rightist organisation with a long track record of stoking the religious prejudices, inflaming the religious passions and polarizing the Indian society? Was she not aware of the Supreme Court verdict to the effect that the RSS is a purely socio-cultural organisation meant for the promotion of Hindu unity and Hindu solidarity? Does she not have contempt for this considered verdict of the Supreme Court?

7. Soon after the Mumbai train blasts, Sonia Gandhi visited Mumbai and declared that 'the feelings of the minority Muslims should not be hurt,' in spite of being fully aware of the fact that these acts of terror were perpetrated by the Muslims with the full backing of ISI in Pakistan. Is not the UPA government treating the peaceful and law abiding Hindus of India as the Jews in Nazi Germany?

In order to counter the impact of the 'Communal' (!) CD floated by BJP, a known and rabidly anti-Hindu group of 27 celebrities under the leadership of Shabana Hashmi has brought out a new CD for selling their anti-Hindu secular message in the on going UP Assembly Elections. Two young Anhad volunteers, Mohammad Zabeeh Afaque and Mir Basit Hussain, have made the VCD, one-and-a-half hours in length, with �stop hate� messages from these celebrities. The most spectacular thing about the fraudulent secularism of Shabana Hashmi, her husband and their other Muslim friends and non-Muslim colleagues in the Anti-Hindu Secular Brigade is that they will never take up the cause of the organized genocide of Kashimiri Pandits in Kashmir.

To sum up in the sharp words of Mohan Iyer:

1. UPA announcing quota for Muslims, on the basis of religion, is not communal.

2. Manmohan Singh, giving a clarion call that Muslims must have first access to national resources, is not communal.

3. Postponing Afzal's hanging, for the sake of UP elections, is not communal.

4. Releasing the communally doctored Justice Sachar Report is not communal.

5. Lalu, releasing Banerjee Commission Report on Godhra carnage (when Nanavati commission was enquiring into the incident) on the eve of Bihar Elections is not communal.

6. Rahul, telling that Babri Masjid would have been safe under Gandhi dynasty, is not communal.

7. Mulayam Singh's current attempt to close the criminal cases against SIMI terrorists is 'not communal'.

On the other hand according to the Election Commission, the Congress and all the other 'Secular Parties':

A. Talking about ethnic cleansing and massacre of Hindus in Kashmir is communal.

B. Talking about Bangladeshi infiltration is communal.

C. Talking about Bombay, Varanasi, Coimbatore, Delhi Muslim terrorist bomb blasts, is communal.

D. Talking about the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh is communal.

E. Talking about the greatest genocide on earth - i.e. the massacre of more than 100 millions of Hindus, during Muslim Rule for 700 years, is communal.

IF THIS IS GOING TO BE THE PHILOSOPHY OF OUR SECULAR POLITICIANS AND PSEUDO-SECULAR JOURNALISTS, EVEN GOD CANNOT PREVENT THE SECOND PARTITION OF INDIA.

(The writer is a retired IAS officer)

e-mail the writer at vsundaram@newstodaynet.com

Unseemly race in arms

People's needs for food, health and education ignored

India on Wednesday test-fired the Agni-3 from Chandipur near Balasore on the
Orissa coast. It has a confirmed range of 300 KMs, and carries an explosive load of 1« tonnes. It is capable of carrying a nuclear war-head, and DRDO engineers claim that its range can be extended upto 5000 KMs. India's first experiment with it, in July last year, had failed. Now its success enables India to hit, if required, the main cities of Asia, from Turkey to Japan.
It qualifies India as an Asian power capable of projecting its military power far beyond the border. But, why so much of effort for something which is never likely to be used? Apparently, it was in response to the Pak experiment with its nuclear-capable, radar-avoiding Babar (HATF-VII) cruise missile, with a range of only 700 KMs. It, carries an explosive load, if necessary even a nuclear war-head of 500 kgs, although nuclear war-heads usually weigh around a ton. Though sub-sonic in speed these cruise missiles can avoid any anti-missile defence system. It is a product of Sino-Pak techno-cooperation, and is Pakistan's visible response to India's on-going experiments with the Brahmos produced with Russian cooperation. The Brahmos have a shorter range of 300 KMs, and can carry a lighter war-head of 300 kgs, but are super-sonic in their speed. So, the hing-cost race goes on.
Formerly, it was restricted to the armies and air forces of the two countries, but the same competitive attitude has now been extended to the realm of missiles, also. The purchase of tanks, planes, or highly sophisticated gadgets by either of the two countries immediately provokes the other to go in for their latest equivalent, in one way or the other.
Just as nothing is ideally hygenic to a doctor, and nothing is really sacred to a bishop, similarly nothing is really secure to the men in uniform. You may ask any of them and he will expatiate on the growing danger to the country's independence and integrity to protect which we should spend the last drop of our sweat and blood. There is nothing Indian or Pakistani about it. The military top brass, every where and always, smell danger and ask for more troops and equipments. But, in that process, the reality of the danger imagined and the remote possibility of the use of these highly expensive arms are usually lost sight of.
Let us take the case of India and Pakistan. Are they going to use their Brahmos and Babars against each other? If there was any chance of their misuse in the past, obviously there is none since 2004. The ruling establishments of both the countries and the masses, though usually mute, have realised the pleasures and privileges of peace. The utter futility of a war between two nuclear-armed states is obvious even to the blind. The people in the two countries want peace and an opportunity to make profit through investments. So, another major war between the neighbours of South Asia is presently out of question and these hi-tech weapons of the 21st century become obsolete within half a generation. Besides, when the highly developed nations of the world indulge in an arms race, they actually pander to the interest of their industrial -military complex. But, not so in our case. Virtually every single piece of these highly expensive sophisticated gadgets has to be bought from rich countries round the world, with the foreign exchange earned by the sweat of the brow of our poor. And, both India and Pakistan are buying these weapons with resources which could and should have been used for the upliftment of the poor neglected masses. Even now nearly 48% of the population of 'shining India' are under -nourished and only 61% are effectively literate. If in Pakistan the number of those under -nourished is around 10% less the proportion of illiterates is over 10% more. In both the countries there is much to be done to provide the majority with potable water, proper sanitary facilities, old age case and access to schools, medicare and markets. The masses in both the countries are crying for these basic needs of theirs. When these are neglected well-armed states, like the Shah's Iran and the USSR, collapsed, while a completely demilitarised Costarica, which disbanded its army in 1949, is an oasis of peace, progress and stability in the whole of Latin America notorious for insurgencies, coup-d'tats, blood-thirsty guerrillas and state -sponsored killers.
The frontiers of a state can never be protected as long as the foundations of its freedom and future are not based in the hearts of a happy population committed to save it in their own interest.

SEZs: One More Anti-Bharat Act by India

Gmail - [Aid-awareness] SEZs: One More Anti-Bharat Act by India

'Judiciary should be brought under RTI'

'Judiciary should be brought under RTI'

Forbes.com - Magazine Article

Forbes.com - Magazine Article





The World's Richest People
Plugging A Math Gap
Megha Bahree 03.26.07

Harvard mathematician Shing-Tung Yau says China trails the pack in his field. He's tapping money and power to change that.

Americans suffer from an inferiority complex when it comes to math. They see China's students scoring higher in international comparisons and Chinese professors populating the math faculties at the best U.S. universities. But Shing-Tung Yau, a Chinese-born Harvard mathematician, doesn't see it that way. At the highest levels, he says, mathematicians in China are far behind their Western counterparts: "Most Chinese still use technology from America. I want them to create their own research so they don't rely on others and don't copy."

A dozen years ago Yau set out to make that happen. He's been building three advanced math institutes--in Hong Kong, Beijing and Hangzhou, 100 miles southwest of Shanghai--and conducting a relentless courtship of wealthy moguls. Thanks to millions chipped in by Li Ka-shing (No. 9 on the billionaires list), Robert Kuok (No. 104), brothers Ronnie and Gerald Chan and others, Yau's institutes have trained hundreds of postgraduates. Many are going on to teach in Chinese universities, slowing the brain drain that has long had China sending its smartest students abroad, never to return. "I hope these students will have an influence on the future of China," he says. "For China to become a society built on technology, it needs a solid background, and math is the basic language for that. Physics, software, engineering, banking, insurance--all depend on math research."

The flow of funds has helped Yau persuade Chinese math minds from around the world to sign on as associates of his institutes. But a big attraction is the 57-year-old Yau himself: He's the leading Chinese mathematician and ranks among the top ten in the world, says Phillip Griffiths, a math professor and a former president of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Yau has been a professor at Harvard for 20 years, specializing in geometry, differential equations and mathematical physics. A U.S. citizen, he won the Fields Medal (the equivalent in mathematics of a Nobel Prize) in 1982, a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1985 and the President's National Medal of Science in 1997. "Yau is like God in China," says Tony Chan, the assistant director for mathematics and physical sciences at the National Science Foundation outside Washington, D.C. and a visiting professor at the Hong Kong institute. "He goes to China and he can see the premier. In the U.S. even the director of the NSF cannot see President Bush."

But in the past year Yau has gotten into two very public spats. One was with Beijing University, which he accused of corruption. The other was with the New Yorker, which in August portrayed him as trying to steal credit for proving the Poincaré conjecture, a 103-year-old problem that was the holy grail of topology. The theorem concerns a three-dimensional space with no boundaries. It says that if in this space any closed-curve object, such as a rubber band, can be shrunk to a point, then the space is topologically equivalent to a sphere. Yau says the magazine's charge is completely false; other news outlets looking into the issue found evidence to back him up.

Occupying three floors of the simply named Academic Building No. 1 of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in the New Territories, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences started slowly. "In Hong Kong most rich men [who give to schools] want a building named after them," says Yau. "But we didn't even have a building."

An undergraduate at Harvard led Yau to his first big donor, one who didn't ask for naming rights and turned down an honorary degree. That donor was the student's father, Malaysian tycoon (but Hong Kong resident) Kuok. He gave $6 million that started an endowment and attracted the institute's first full-time faculty member in 1998, a professor from New York University. Then Kuok introduced Yau to his friend, Asia's richest resident, Li Ka-shing, who donated $1.3 million. Ronnie Chan, a Hong Kong real estate magnate who had known Yau since the professor's days teaching at Stanford University in the 1970s, introduced him to his uncle, Thomas Chen, who dished out another $1.3 million.

A $2 million check came from William Mong, owner of Shun Hing Electronic Holdings in Hong Kong, a Panasonic distributor since the 1950s. The Japanese brand's technology "made me wish we had more capable engineers in Hong Kong and China, and that's my aim now." The money helped endow a chair and hire another permanent faculty member. Today the institute gets 100 applicants from China and elsewhere in Asia for each class of 20 in its five-year master's-and-Ph.D. program. The program includes such novel topics as betting on horse races, creating 3-d images of people and predicting the weather.

For Yau's Morningside Center in Beijing, he got help from the Chinese government and the Chan brothers. The government donated a plot, and the brothers put up the money for the building that the center shares with the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It trains 250 researchers a year in six-month sessions. Now, in a bid to take on research institutes abroad, it offers an award that it hopes will someday rival the Fields Medal.

Yau is one of eight children. His family fled across the border to Hong Kong after the Communists took control of China in 1949. Growing up without electricity and running water in a village near Chinese University--where his father was a professor--he was more interested in skipping school than in learning arithmetic. But when he was 14 his father died and he became serious about his studies. He enrolled at Chinese University and in 1969 moved on to graduate school at UC, Berkeley. In 1971, at just 22, Yau earned his Ph.D.

---

Next to his math talent, the most remarkable thing about Yau is his ability to collect money. "Yau knows how to sell," says Peter Li, a math professor at UC, Irvine. "He is relentless in his pursuit, like a car salesman." Yau says he is very practical about it, although his friends say a better term is "too direct."

"Normally you have to go to ten dinners with these rich people before you can ask about a donation," says Yau. "But I don't have that kind of time, so I ask after the first dinner." He tells potential donors: "Money is nothing. It's all about your legacy." Over breakfast at a Howard Johnson motel he once persuaded a Chinese engineer living in New Jersey to donate $2 million to his Center of Mathematical Science in Hangzhou.

And maybe it's this bluntness that got him into trouble with Beijing University--which he accused of inflating the value of its research--and the New Yorker. "He's a very forceful personality, and in academia they may not be used to a bulldozer of a guy," says a friend of Yau's. The magazine alleged that Yau was taking credit for solving the Poincaré conjecture away from a Russian mathematician, Grigory Perelman. Yau demanded an apology, but the magazine issued a statement saying it stood by its story. "That article was a misunderstanding of the culture of mathematics and a misunderstanding of Chinese culture," he says. Perelman had posted the answer online, but he didn't fully show how he solved it. That set off several teams in a race to recreate Perelman's discovery and fill in the details. Two of Yau's students, spurred by Yau, won this race in 2006.

Yau is an impatient man. Sitting in his office in Harvard Square, he answers e-mails while chatting with a visitor. "There is a fear in the news media that China is rising," he says. "But it's better to create understanding between cultures, and math is a common language for that." His vision, he says, is to make his Hong Kong institute--his only one that awards doctorates--the Harvard of Hong Kong. "It took Harvard a few hundred years to be built. Hopefully, it won't take us as much time."

Click Here for List of Billionaires from Asia and Australia.

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Opinion - Santa Claus Visits Tatas - Ashoke Mitra

The Telegraph - Calcutta : Opinion

Santa Claus visits the Tatas
- Freebies from a debt-ridden government
Cutting Corners - Ashok Mitra

The uproar over Nandigram — and Singur — in West Bengal will not die away soon. Competitive democracy has its own laws; those opposed to the party ruling in the state will try to squeeze the maximum advantage from the discomfiture it has brought upon itself.

Speculation continues on the riddle as to why, despite repeated assurances to the contrary, the state administration fell back on a colonial-type police offensive to re-assert its authority in Nandigram. The underlying reason, informed sources suggest, was a strong message from the Salim group, who were promised vast stretches of land in the area for their chemical hub project; they might move away elsewhere, the message said, if the land was not handed over to them within the next few weeks. That set the panic bell ringing; the sequel has been horrifying.

Nothing illustrates more glaringly the spell globalization has cast on the country, even on those whose ideology and praxis should have prepared them to cope with it in a better manner. Industrialization, the rationale of which few will dispute, is being taken to be synonymous with industrialization under private auspices. To talk of industrial growth in the state sector is assumed to be heresy. Questions such as whether a particular private project will actually lead to a net increase in employment or output are discouraged too. Fables are having a field day: the private sector means efficiency to the nth degree, public enterprise is the other name for sloth, incompetence and wastage. The stunning achievements of the National Thermal Corporation, Bharat Heavy Electricals, Nalco, the Oil and Natural Gas Commission, the Gas Authority of India or the Indian Oil Corporation in recent years are conveniently ignored. Also brushed aside is any reference to the huge resources at the command of public sector fiscal agencies such as the Life Insurance Corporation of India and the Unit Trust of India.

As in the other poorer countries, here too fiscal devices are introduced at the behest of US-led international financial institutions to compel ruling politicians to desist from taking new initiatives in the public sector. The Fiscal Responsibility and Budgetary Management Act is being applied to admonish both the Centre and state governments not to ‘fritter’ resources on public sector extravaganzas. There is, in consequence, a gradual maturing of the belief that industrial activities are a natural monopoly of private entities, foreign as well as domestic.

The Left Front in West Bengal is the product of a historical movement which had as its credo the expansion of public goods and industrial growth through the deus ex machina of the public sector. Those currently in charge of the Front government in the state have apparently convinced themselves that, in the era of globalization, ideological shibboleths are poison, development ipso facto is development sponsored by the private sector, the government has only the residuary obligations to acquire land, on behalf of private tycoons, on which industry is supposed to be set up, and, in addition, provide costly infrastructural facilities the private sector will not build on its own because of their low profitability.

Once development is defined in such constricted terms, maximizing the rate of return for private operators becomes the only criterion by which to judge success. The logic is simple: if private profit expands, capitalists feel good; if capitalists feel good, they will expand their activities and the economy will have growth. The state government does not dare to enquire whether activities undertaken by capitalists will be on the basis of any careful analysis of costs and benefits, or whether in deciding the technology for the investments undertaken, alternative choices will be considered. Fifty years ago, when official faith in economic planning was still extant in the country, any investment proposal would be examined, taking into account the expected rate of income growth, the expected rate of employment growth and the expected rate of surplus or profit. With the eclipse of the planning era, such elementary practices have gone the way of all flesh; the only desideratum regarded as relevant is the expected rate of generation of private profit.

This transformation is illustrated most luridly by the details the state administration in West Bengal has finally been forced to disclose concerning the agreement it has reached with the Tata group apropos the small car project at Singur. The Tatas are, of course, rolling in money. Only a couple of months ago, they invested a sum roughly the equivalent of Rs 50,000 crore to take command of a giant international steel complex. To persuade this fabulously rich group to start a modest-sized car factory here, the state government has already spent something around Rs 150 crore to acquire close to 1,000 acres of land. The least that was expected was that it would recoup this amount from the Tatas. Nothing of the sort. Instead, the Tatas have been handed over this entire tract of land on a ninety-year lease without any down payment at all. For the first five years of the lease, they will pay only one crore rupees; for the next twenty-five years, the payment will increase by 25 per cent at five-year intervals; for the next thirty years payment will be raised at five-year intervals by 33 per cent; for the final twenty years, the rent will be only Rs 20 crore per year.

The discounted present value of what the Tatas have agreed to pay, any respectable accountant will vouchsafe, will hardly exceed Rs 50 crore. Equally necessary to take into account here are the historical trends in the rate of inflation and the likely explosion of real estate values through the decades of the 21st century. The conclusion is incontrovertible: the government is, really and truly, making a free gift to the Tatas of the land in Singur.

That is, however, only a minor part of the story. The state government is, in addition, offering the Tata group a gift coupon in the way of a loan worth Rs 200 crore carrying a nominal interest of only 1 per cent (as against the rate currently charged by the banks of at least 10 per cent); the principal, one suspects, is never intended to be returned. Finally, in terms of the lease agreement, the entire proceeds for the first ten years of the value-added tax on the sale of this precious car in West Bengal are proposed to be handed back to the Tatas, again at a nominal interest of only 1 per cent. If 40,000 cars are sold every year in West Bengal — not an unreconcilable assumption — with a value- added tax at 12.5 cent, this particular act of magnanimity on the part of the state would ensure an extra bonanza of more than Rs 500 core for the Tatas.

All told, therefore, the group is being offered the allure of around Rs 850 crore by the state government, apart from their being spared the bother of acquiring the land through their own efforts. The deal does not though mention what the Tatas are, in exchange, offering West Bengal. There is not even a stray reference to the likely employment, direct or indirect, consequent to the setting up of the plant. Were the employment generated not to exceed 10,000, that would just about equal the number of share-croppers and landless farm workers displaced at Singur following the acquisition of land. The state’s outlay of Rs 850 crore would be for nothing.

Suspend the debate over the ideology of development. Also steer clear of the pastime of apportioning moral responsibility for the deaths and other incidents in Singur and Nandigram. Forget for the moment the dubious economics too. What about one’s sense of aesthetics though? Does it not appear obscene that a state government, carrying a burden of debt of more than Rs 150,000 crore and with a countless number of problems, would offer a freebie of Rs 850 crore to an industrial group which has made an outlay of over Rs 50,000 crore only the other day to satisfy their expansionary ego overseas?

1971 War: How the US tried to corner India

1971 War: How the US tried to corner India
The Rediff Special/ Claude Arpi

1971 War: How the US tried to corner India

December 26, 2006




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'India won a glorious victory against Pakistan in the 1971 war. It was the first decisive victory in a major war in centuries. And it was won singlehandedly, in the face of opposition and threats from a majority of the UN member-States, including a superpower. Every Indian patriot felt proud of this glittering chapter in the nation's history.'

-- Dr S N Prasad in his introduction to the Indian government's 'restricted' Official History of the 1971 War.

I am not usually a great defender of United States policies, but I have to admit that in the field of right to information, the US is far ahead of the Indian babus who obstinately block access to Indian archives under the lame pretext that this could 'endanger national security'.

A few months ago, the Office of the Historian at the US State Department released Volume XI of the Foreign Relations of the United States devoted to the 'South Asia Crisis, 1971': in other words, the Bangladesh War.

Flashback: 1971 War, 35 Years On

This 929-page publication groups together documents which were already known like the minutes of Henry Kissinger's secret visit to China in July 1971 as well as scores of freshly declassified material available for the first time to the public.

It throws light on a less known angle of the India-Pakistan conflict: The role of the nascent friendship between the United States and China. This is a welcome new piece in the puzzle of the history of the 1971 War.

Another piece is the Hamidur Rahman Report, ordered by the government of Pakistan after the war, which analyses the Pakistani defeat. 'Due to corruption... lust for wine and women and greed for land and houses, a large number of senior army officers, particularly those occupying the highest positions, had not only lost the will to fight but also the professional competence necessary for taking the vital and critical decisions demanded of them for the successful prosecution of the war.'

The US administration saw the unfurling events differently.

According to Kissinger, then American President Richard M Nixon's national security adviser, 'When the Nixon administration took office, our policy objective on the subcontinent was, quite simply, to avoid adding another complication to our agenda.'

But events in the subcontinent and the Chinese factor forced Nixon to change his stand. The new closeness between Washington, DC and Beijing and the involvement of the Pakistan president as a secret go-between greatly influenced US policy.

Then US President Richard Nixon According to the State Department historian, 'When the fighting developed, the Nixon administration tilted toward Pakistan. The tilt involved the dispatch of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise to the Bay of Bengal to try to intimidate the Indian government. It also involved encouraging China to make military moves to achieve the same end, and an assurance to China that if China menaced India and the Soviet Union moved against China in support of India, the United States would protect China from the Soviet Union. China chose not to menace India, and the crisis on the subcontinent ended without a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union.'

The first US documents deal with the background of the conflict. Nixon's position was clear: 'We should just stay out -- like in Biafra, what the hell can we do?'

But everybody did not agree with him. In a telegram sent on March 28, 1971, the staff at the US consulate in Dhaka complained, 'Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government... We, as professional public servants express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation's position as a moral leader of the free world.'

When US Secretary of State Will Rogers received this 'miserable' cable, he informed President Nixon that the 'Dacca consulate is in open rebellion.' This did not change Nixon's opinion: 'The people who bitch about Vietnam bitch about it because we intervened in what they say is a civil war. Now some of the same bastards...want us to intervene here -- both civil wars.'

From the start, the Nixon administration knew 'the prospects were "poor"... the Pakistani army would not be able to exert effective control over East Pakistan.' Washington believed India was bound to support Mujibur Rahman. The CIA had reported that 'India would foster and support Bengali insurgency and contribute to the likelihood that an independent Bangladesh would emerge from the developing conflict.'

It is here that the Chinese saga began. In a tightly guarded secret, Nixon had started contacts with Beijing. The postman was Pakistani dictator Field Marshal Yahya Khan.

When on April 28 1971, Kissinger sent a note defining the future policy option towards Pakistan, Nixon replied in a handwritten note: 'Don't squeeze Yahya at this time.' The Pakistan president was not to be squeezed because he was in the process of arranging Kissinger's first secret meeting to China. The events of the following months and the US position should be seen in this perspective.

Indira GandhiIn May, Indira Gandhi wrote to Nixon about the 'carnage in East Bengal' and the flood of refugees burdening India. After L K Jha, then the Indian ambassador to US, had warned Kissinger that India might have to send back some of the refugees as guerillas, Nixon commented, 'By God we will cut off economic aid (to India).'

A few days later when the US president said 'the goddamn Indians' were preparing for another war, Kissinger retorted 'they are the most aggressive goddamn people around.'

During the second week of July, Kissinger went to Beijing where he was told by then Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai: 'In our opinion, if India continues on its present course in disregard of world opinion, it will continue to go on recklessly. We, however, support the stand of Pakistan. This is known to the world. If they (the Indians) are bent on provoking such a situation, then we cannot sit idly by.' Kissinger answered that Zhou should know that the US sympathies also lay with Pakistan.

On his return, during a meeting of the National Security Council, Nixon continued his India bashing. The Indians, he noted, are 'a slippery, treacherous people.'

The State Department historian says, 'in the perspective of Washington, the crisis ratcheted up a dangerous notch on August 9 when India and the Soviet Union signed a treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation.' It was a shock for Washington as they saw a deliberate collusion between Delhi and Moscow.

During the following months, the situation deteriorated and many more refugees came to India. The Indian prime minister decided to tour Western capitals to explain the Indian stand. On November 4 and 5, she met Nixon in Washington, who told her that a new war in the subcontinent was out of the question.

The next day, Nixon and Kissinger assessed the situation. Kissinger told Nixon: 'The Indians are bastards anyway. They are plotting a war.'

To divert the pressure applied by the Mukti Bahini on the eastern front, the Pakistan air force launched an attack on six Indian airfields in Kashmir and Punjab on December 3. It was the beginning of the war.

The next day, then US ambassador to the United Nations George H W Bush -- later 41st president of the United States and father of the current American president -- introduced a resolution in the UN Security Council calling for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of armed forces by India and Pakistan. It was vetoed by the Soviet Union. The following days witnessed a great pressure on the Soviets from the Nixon-Kissinger duo to get India to withdraw, but to no avail.

The CIA reported to the President: 'She (Indira Gandhi) hopes the Chinese (will) not intervene physically in the North; however, the Soviets have warned her that the Chinese are still able to "rattle the sword" in Ladakh and Chumbi areas.'

Henry KissingerFor Kissinger it was clear that Indira Gandhi wanted the dismemberment of Pakistan.

On December 9, when the CIA director warned Nixon that 'East Pakistan was crumbling', Nixon decided to send the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal to threaten India.

Let me recount an anecdote related to me by Major General K K Tewari (retd), Chief Signal Officer, Eastern Command, during the 1971 War.

General Tewari was present at a briefing the three defence services held for Indira Gandhi. She was seated at a large table. On one side was General S H F J Manekshaw, the army chief, and on the other Admiral S M Nanda, the navy chief.

During the course of the presentation, the admiral intervened and said: 'Madam, the US 8th Fleet is sailing into the Bay of Bengal.' Nothing happened; the briefing continued. After sometime, the admiral repeated, 'Madam, I have to inform you that the 8th Fleet is sailing into the Bay of Bengal.' She cut him off immediately: 'Admiral, I heard you the first time, let us go on with the briefing.'

All the officers present were stunned. Ultimately, their morale was tremendously boosted by the prime minister's attitude. She had demonstrated her utter contempt for the American bluff.

On November 10, Nixon instructed Kissinger to ask the Chinese to move some troops toward the Indian frontier. 'Threaten to move forces or move them, Henry, that's what they must do now.'

This was conveyed to Huang Hua, China's envoy to the United Nations. Kissinger told Huang the US would be prepared for a military confrontation with the Soviet Union if the Soviet Union attacked China.

On December 12, the White House received an urgent message. The Chinese wanted to meet in New York. General Alexander Haig, then Kissinger's deputy, rushed to the venue, but was disappointed. Huang just wanted to convey his government's stand in the UN, no words of an attack in Sikkim or in the then North East Frontier Agency (now, the northeastern states).

The myth of the Chinese intervention is also visible in the secret Pakistani dispatches. Lieutenant General A A K Niazi, the Pakistani army commander in Dhaka, was informed: 'NEFA front has been activated by Chinese although the Indians for obvious reasons have not announced it.'

Until the last day of the war, Pakistan expected its Chinese saviour to strike, but Beijing never did.

In Washington, Nixon analysed the situation thus: 'If the Russians get away with facing down the Chinese and the Indians get away with licking the Pakistanis...we may be looking down the gun barrel.' Nixon was not sure about China. Did they really intend to start a military action against India?

Finally, on December 16, Niazi surrendered to Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora. Nixon and Kissinger congratulated themselves for achieving their fundamental goal -- the preservation of West Pakistan. They were also happy for having 'scared the pants off the Russians.'

Kissinger's South Asia policy upset many in the US, not only the American public, the press but also the State Department, and more particularly, Secretary of State Rogers who was kept in the dark most of the time.

It is worth mentioning an episode which, of course, does not appear in the American archives -- The Tibetan participation in the conflict. After the debacle of 1962, the Government of India had recruited some Tibetans youth in the eventuality of another conflict with China. The Special Frontier Force was trained in Chakrata in Uttar Pradesh under the command of an Indian general.

In 1971, nine years after its creation, the SFF was sent to East Pakistan to prepare for the arrival of regular Indian troops. Their saga is one of the least known parts of the Bangladesh war.

Late October 1971, an AN-12 airlifted nearly 3,000 Tibetans who later assembled at Demagiri close to the India-East Pakistan border. On the other side of the border were the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Armed with Bulgarian-made assault rifles, the SFF was given the task of organising guerrilla raids across the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Opposite the SSF, in thick jungles and leech-infested marshes, was stationed a Pakistan brigade, including a battalion of its elite Special Services Group.

The Indian army knew this brigade was a threat to one of its corps preparing to advance on Dhaka.

During the second week of November, Operation Eagle began. Leaving Demagiri in canoes, the Tibetans commandos entered East Pakistan. The SFF then started overrunning one Pakistani post after another.

By the time the war was officially declared, the Tibetans had already been inside East Pakistan for more than three weeks. Using both their Bulgarian rifles and native knives, they advanced swiftly. Their Indian commandaner, Major General S S Uban later said, 'They were unstoppable.'

On December 16, the SSF was 40 kilometers away from Chittagong port, having successfully managed to neutralise the Pakistani brigade.

After Pakistan's surrender, they paraded through Chittagong. Unfortunately, 49 Tibetans lost their lives for a nation which was not theirs.

The release of the State Department volume on the 1971 conflict is a posthumous homage to the courage of the Indian Army which despite heavy odds and the might of the United States freed Bangladesh from Pakistani clutches.

Some aspects are still missing to make the puzzle complete.

First, the Indian history from the Ministry of Defence does not detail the political compulsions of Indira Gandhi's government. Second, the secret operation involving the Tibetan Special Frontier Forces in the Chittagong Hill Tracts is virtually unknown. Lastly, the Chinese involvement from the Chinese point of view remains unexamined.

Like the Henderson Brooks' report on the 1962 border war with China, it may take a few decades more to be revealed.

India Together: SEZs: Lessons from China - 9 February 2007

India Together: SEZs: Lessons from China - 9 February 2007
ECONOMY
SEZs: Lessons from China
While single-minded pursuit of exports has helped China touch record growth figures, millions have been left behind, besides incurring huge environmental costs. And without even the limited dose of welfare that China offers its poor farmers, India must wary of copying China's SEZ-approach, writes Bhaskar Goswami.

9 February 2007 - China's record economic growth rate fuelled by the Special Economic Zones (SEZ) is often advocated as the reason for India to adopt this approach. Since the 1980s, China implemented a series of measures and policies with the sole purpose of achieving rapid economic growth. As evidence over the years has shown, this single-minded pursuit of growth has lowered the efficiency and effectiveness of economic policies, besides incurring huge resource and environmental costs. The Chinese experience offers a valuable lesson for India.

Cost of Export-driven Growth

China has to feed 22 percent of the world's population on only 7 percent of land. In July 2005, China's countryside had over 26.1 million people living in absolute poverty and was home to 18 percent of the world's poor, according to Chinese Minister Li Xuju quoted in the People�s Daily. Every year, an additional 10 million people have to be fed. Despite this daunting target, between 1996-2005, "development" caused diversion of more than 21 percent of arable land to non-agricultural uses, chiefly highways, industries and SEZs. Per capita land holding now stands at a meager 0.094 hectares. In just thirteen years, between 1992 and 2005, twenty million farmers were laid off agriculture due to land acquisition.

As more arable land is taken over for urbanization and industrialisation, issues related to changes in land use have become a major source of dispute between the public and the government. Protests against land acquisition and deprivation have become a common feature of rural life in China, especially in the provinces of Guangdong (south), Sichuan, Hebei (north), and Henan province. Guangdong has been worst affected. Social instability has become an issue of concern. In 2004, the government admitted to 74,000 riots in the countryside, a seven-fold jump in ten years. Whereas a few years ago, excessive and arbitrary taxation was the peasants' foremost complaint, resentment over the loss of farmland, corruption, worsening pollution and arbitrary evictions by property developers are the main reasons for farmers' unrest now.

UNEP worked with Google to produce before-and-after satellite images of a hundred 'hotspots' and integrate them into Google Earth.

Titled UNEP: Atlas of Our Changing World, Shenzen's before and after pics are for the period between 1979 and 2004 are available through this program. (See: the UNEP site for more.)
While rural China is up in arms against acquisition of land, SEZs like Shenzen in Guangdong showcasing the economic miracle of China, are beset with problems. After growing at a phenomenal rate of around 28 percent for the last 25 years, Shenzen is now paying a huge cost in terms of environment destruction, soaring crime rate and exploitation of its working class, mainly migrants. Foreign investors were lured to Shenzen by cheap land, compliant labour laws and lax or ineffective environmental rules. In 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme designated Shenzen as a 'global environmental hotspot', meaning a region that had suffered rapid environmental destruction.

There's more. According to Howard French, the New York Times bureau chief, most of the year, the Shenzen sky is thick with choking smoke, while the crime rate is almost nine-fold higher than Shanghai. The working class earns US$ 80 every month in the sweatshops and the turnover rate is 10 percent � many turn to prostitution after being laid off. Further, real-estate sharks have stockpiled houses which have caused prices to spiral and have created a new generation of people French calls "mortgage slaves" in an article in the International Herald Tribune on 17 December 2006.


Illustration: Farzana Cooper

The mindless pursuit of growth following the mode of high input, high consumption and low output has seriously impacted the environment. In 2004, China consumed 4.3 times as much coal and electricity as the United States and 11.5 times as much as Japan to generate each US$1 worth of GNP, according to the The Taipei Times. Some 20 per cent of the population lives in severely polluted areas (Science in Society) and 70 percent of the rivers and lakes are in a grim shape (People�s Daily). Around 60 per cent of companies that have set up industries in the country violate emission rules. According to the World Bank, environmental problems are the cause of some 300,000 people dying each year. The Chinese government has admitted that pollution costs the country a staggering $200 billion a year - about 10 per cent of its GDP.

While export-driven policy for economic growth has helped China touch record growth figures, the income gap is widening and rapidly approaching the levels of some Latin American countries. Going by a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China's Gini coefficient � a measure of income distribution where zero means perfect equality and 1 is maximum inequality � touched 0.496 in the year 2006. In comparison, income inequality figures are 0.33 in India, 0.41 in the US and 0.54 in Brazil. Further, the rural-urban income divide is staggering � annual income of city dwellers in China is around US $1,000 which is more than three times that of their rural counterparts.

In certain areas such as asset distribution or years of schooling China's levels of inequity are lower (i.e., more favourable) than India. However, when one looks at it at the aggregate level, the picture is different.

The levels of inequity in China have been rising through the last three decades, whether between rural and urban, within them, or on an aggregate basis.

According to Zhu Ling, between 1978 and 1995, the Gini coefficient of rural income increased from 0.21 to 0.34 and that of the urban from 0.16 to 0.28.

With the economy opening up rapidly post-1995 and also due the massive concessions that China was forced to make in order to join the WTO, the trend continues and the aggregate Gini coefficient in 2006 was around 0.5.


• SEZs: Invitation to chaos
• High cost of easy forex
It is in this backdrop that India's SEZ thrust must be seen. Following China, India is replicating a similar model where vast tracts of agricultural land are being acquired for creating SEZs and other industries. The September 2005 notification on Environment Impact Assessment is lax for industrial estates, including SEZs, and apprehensions of dirty industries coming up in these zones are quite real. Further, with drastic changes in labour laws favouring industry being considered, the plight of workers in these SEZs will be similar to those in China. Such a mode of development is environmentally unsustainable and socially undesirable.

Further, it is now widely acknowledged that Chinese exports have also been boosted by its undervalued currency, something which Ben Bernanke, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, terms as an "effective subsidy". This is a luxury that Indian exporters do not enjoy. The argument for setting up SEZs to emulate China's export-led growth is therefore questionable.

Is export-driven growth through SEZs desirable for India?

There is no doubt that exports play a significant role in boosting GDP. However in the case of a country with a sizeable domestic market, the choice lies with the producer to either export or supply to the domestic market. Ila Patnaik of the National Institute for Public Finance and Policy wrote in the The Indian Express in December 2006 that household consumption in India at 68 percent of the GDP is much higher that that of China at 38 percent, Europe at 58 percent and Japan at 55 percent. This is an important source of strength for the domestic manufacturing industry of India.

Given the high level of consumption of Indian households, it is quite possible that this rush is fuelled not by the desire to export out of the country but by the possibility of exporting from SEZs into the Domestic Tariff Area (DTA). The SEZ Act is also designed to facilitate this. Any unit within the SEZ can export to the DTA, after paying the prevailing duty, as long as it is a net foreign exchange earner for three years. It is therefore a win-win situation for these units.

The sops in a SEZ will reduce the cost of capital while labour reforms will ensure trouble-free operations. Further, given the considerable international pressure to reduce industrial tariffs, SEZs will be able to export to the DTA at highly competitive prices. This does not augur well for units outside the SEZs who will now face unfair competition. As cheaper imports have already played havoc with the livelihoods of artisan sector of the economy, cheaper imports into DTA from SEZs will also adversely affect the domestic industry. No wonder many of them now want to migrate into SEZs.

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In a country with 65 percent of the population depending on agriculture as a means of livelihood, industry ought to be complementary to agriculture. Through SEZs however, industry is being promoted at the cost of agriculture. Valuable resources spent to create SEZs will be at the cost of building better infrastructure for the rest of the country, something that will affect both the domestic industry as well as agriculture.

Other lessons India could learn from China: Welfare

While the Chinese experience with export-driven economic growth definitely offers many sobering lessons, there are many other areas where India can learn from China. China has initiated a series of measures to arrest social tensions and rising inequality in rural areas. In April 2004, the State Council, China's cabinet, halted the ratification of farmland for other uses and started to rectify the national land market. The Minister of Agriculture, Du Quinglin, promised "not to reduce acreage of basic farmland, change its purpose or downgrade its quality".

China also abolished agricultural tax in 2006 and increased subsidy for food grain production by 10 percent. To boost rural income, the selling price of grain was increased by 60 percent in 2005. In 2004, out of a total 900 million farmers in China, 600 million received US$ 1.5 billion (Rs.6,630 crores approximately) as direct subsidies. 52 million of the Chinese farmers have joined in the rural old-age insurance system and 2.2 million received pensions in 2005. More than 80 million farmers had participated in the rural cooperative medical service system by the end of 2004, and 12.57 million rural needy people had drawn allowances guaranteeing the minimum living standard by the end of 2005.

India, on the other hand, either does not have any of these safety nets or is in the process of dismantling the few that exist. There is much to learn as well as unlearn from the Chinese experience. Until that is done, millions of poor across the country will be made to pay an even higher price than the Chinese did for following this flawed approach. ⊕

Bhaskar Goswami
9 Feb 2007

The writer is with the New Delhi based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.

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Comments (4)

* Posted by Samir Suneja,

Well Bahskar ..well said ..but the catch is that ...you save the country or yourself...you would like to live a 30 year good life or would you like to conrtibute to the countries definitely say a 2000 year life ... the whole value system is degrading and this is only a fallout, that India as a country seems to be on this way ..
Samir

* Posted by Sridhar R,

Very timely article - Bhaskar. The hype of the SEZ's in China we knew was more an argument of convenience. The proponents of this model, have always been taking such examples, and then refuse to tell what is the other side of the story. And in this other side there will always be the poor, the marginalised, the farmers, workers - who form the losing class. Then the State will run a "shining" campaign that eventually gets demolished at the end of five years of elected government. Lets hope that "politicians" like Sonia Gandhi, Veerappa Moily, Pranab Mukherjee et al take back the reins of the government from "bureaucrats" like Manmohan Singh, Chidambaram, Kamalnath and Ahluwalia's. Not that Politicians were better off (like Budhadeb) but atleast they eventually have to come back to the people. Yes ! I do sound like I still have some hope in people's democracy !!

* Posted by Yeshwanth Pai,

The article is an eyeopener for the policy makers in Delhi and perhaps elsewhere in the world, who are keen on following SEZ models. Policy makers should consider whether their own children in 30 years' time will have to face and be victimsed for the social evils their policies would have caused.

* Posted by Prakash M Apte,

There is no doubt that the concept of SEZ whether the Chinese or any other model is totally unnecessary in India. Yet it has found favour with the national and state governments. Why? Because it is the best way to camoflauge land grab for the developers in the garb of economic development.

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Tehelka - The People's Paper

Tehelka - The People's Paper
COVER STORY

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

'It’s outright war and both sides are choosing their weapons'

Chhattisgarh. Jharkhand. Bihar. Andhra Pradesh. Signposts of fractures gone too far with too little remedy. Arundhati Roy in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury on the violence rending our heartland


Singur and Nandigram make you wonder — is the last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism?
There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How do you read the signs? In what context should it be read?

You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive greed. Unlike industrialising Western countries, which had colonies from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed this process, we have to colonise ourselves, our own nether parts. We’ve begun to eat our own limbs. The greed that is being generated (and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable. What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere. They’ve managed to commandeer the resources, the coal, the minerals, the bauxite, the water and electricity. Now they want the land to make more cars, more bombs, more mines — supertoys for the new supercitizens of the new superpower. So it’s outright war, and people on both sides are choosing their weapons. The government and the corporations reach for structural adjustment, the World Bank, the ADB, FDI, friendly court orders, friendly policy makers, help from the ‘friendly’ corporate media and a police force that will ram all this down people’s throats. Those who want to resist this process have, until now, reached for dharnas, hunger strikes, satyagraha, the courts and what they thought was friendly media. But now more and more are reaching for guns. Will the violence grow? If the ‘growth rate’ and the Sensex are going to be the only barometers the government uses to measure progress and the well-being of people, then of course it will. How do I read the signs? It isn’t hard to read sky-writing. What it says up there, in big letters, is this: the shit has hit the fan, folks.

You once remarked that though you may not resort to violence yourself, you think it has become immoral to condemn it, given the circumstances in the country. Can you elaborate on this view?

I’d be a liability as a guerrilla! I doubt I used the word ‘immoral’ — morality is an elusive business, as changeable as the weather. What I feel is this: non-violent movements have knocked at the door of every democratic institution in this country for decades, and have been spurned and humiliated. Look at the Bhopal gas victims, the Narmada Bachao Andolan. The nba had a lot going for it — high-profile leadership, media coverage, more resources than any other mass movement. What went wrong? People are bound to want to rethink strategy. When Sonia Gandhi begins to promote satyagraha at the World Economic Forum in Davos, it’s time for us to sit up and think. For example, is mass civil disobedience possible within the structure of a democratic nation state? Is it possible in the age of disinformation and corporate-controlled mass media? Are hunger strikes umbilically linked to celebrity politics? Would anybody care if the people of Nangla Machhi or Bhatti mines went on a hunger strike? Irom Sharmila has been on a hunger strike for six years. That should be a lesson to many of us. I’ve always felt that it’s ironic that hunger strikes are used as a political weapon in a land where most people go hungry anyway. We are in a different time and place now. Up against a different, more complex adversary. We’ve entered the era of NGOs — or should I say the era of paltu shers — in which mass action can be a treacherous business. We have demonstrations which are funded, we have sponsored dharnas and social forums which make militant postures but never follow up on what they preach. We have all kinds of ‘virtual’ resistance. Meetings against SEZs sponsored by the biggest promoters of SEZs. Awards and grants for environmental activism and community action given by corporations responsible for devastating whole ecosystems. Vedanta, a company mining bauxite in the forests of Orissa, wants to start a university. The Tatas have two charitable trusts that directly and indirectly fund activists and mass movements across the country. Could that be why Singur has drawn so much less flak than Nandigram? Of course the Tatas and Birlas funded Gandhi too — maybe he was our first NGO. But now we have NGOs who make a lot of noise, write a lot of reports, but whom the sarkar is more than comfortable with. How do we make sense of all this? The place is crawling with professional diffusers of real political action. ‘Virtual’ resistance has become something of a liability.

Anyone listening? nobody
Abhinandita D. Mathur

We are in the era of sponsored dharnas and NGOs the sarkar is comfortable with. The place is crawling with professional diffusers of real political action
There was a time when mass movements looked to the courts for justice. The courts have rained down a series of judgements that are so unjust, so insulting to the poor in the language they use, they take your breath away. A recent Supreme Court judgement, allowing the Vasant Kunj Mall to resume construction though it didn’t have the requisite clearances, said in so many words that the questions of corporations indulging in malpractice does not arise! In the ERA of corporate globalisation, corporate land-grab, in the ERA of Enron and Monsanto, Halliburton and Bechtel, that’s a loaded thing to say. It exposes the ideological heart of the most powerful institution in this country. The judiciary, along with the corporate press, is now seen as the lynchpin of the neo-liberal project.

In a climate like this, when people feel that they are being worn down, exhausted by these interminable ‘democratic’ processes, only to be eventually humiliated, what are they supposed to do? Of course it isn’t as though the only options are binary — violence versus non-violence. There are political parties that believe in armed struggle but only as one part of their overall political strategy. Political workers in these struggles have been dealt with brutally, killed, beaten, imprisoned under false charges. People are fully aware that to take to arms is to call down upon yourself the myriad forms of the violence of the Indian State. The minute armed struggle becomes a strategy, your whole world shrinks and the colours fade to black and white. But when people decide to take that step because every other option has ended in despair, should we condemn them? Does anyone believe that if the people of Nandigram had held a dharna and sung songs, the West Bengal government would have backed down? We are living in times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo (which no doubt suits some of us). And being effective comes at a terrible price. I find it hard to condemn people who are prepared to pay that price.

You have been travelling a lot on the ground — can you give us a sense of the trouble spots you have been to? Can you outline a few of the combat lines in these places?

Huge question — what can I say? The military occupation of Kashmir, neo-fascism in Gujarat, civil war in Chhattisgarh, mncs raping Orissa, the submergence of hundreds of villages in the Narmada Valley, people living on the edge of absolute starvation, the devastation of forest land, the Bhopal victims living to see the West Bengal government re-wooing Union Carbide — now calling itself Dow Chemicals — in Nandigram. I haven’t been recently to Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, but we know about the almost hundred thousand farmers who have killed themselves. We know about the fake encounters and the terrible repression in Andhra Pradesh. Each of these places has its own particular history, economy, ecology. None is amenable to easy analysis. And yet there is connecting tissue, there are huge international cultural and economic pressures being brought to bear on them. How can I not mention the Hindutva project, spreading its poison sub-cutaneously, waiting to erupt once again? I’d say the biggest indictment of all is that we are still a country, a culture, a society which continues to nurture and practice the notion of untouchability. While our economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some f***ing superpower this.

How does one view the recent State and police violence in Bengal?

No different from police and State violence anywhere else — including the issue of hypocrisy and doublespeak so perfected by all political parties including the mainstream Left. Are Communist bullets different from capitalist ones? Odd things are happening. It snowed in Saudi Arabia. Owls are out in broad daylight. The Chinese government tabled a bill sanctioning the right to private property. I don’t know if all of this has to do with climate change. The Chinese Communists are turning out to be the biggest capitalists of the 21st century. Why should we expect our own parliamentary Left to be any different? Nandigram and Singur are clear signals. It makes you wonder — is the last stop of every revolution advanced capitalism? Think about it — the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, the Vietnam War, the anti-apartheid struggle, the supposedly Gandhian freedom struggle in India… what’s the last station they all pull in at? Is this the end of imagination?

The might of the gun: The Maoists march during their Ninth Convention in Chhattisgarh
AP Photo

These are times when to be ineffective is to support the status quo. And being effective comes at a terrible price
The Maoist attack in Bijapur — the death of 55 policemen. Are the rebels only the flip side of the State?

How can the rebels be the flip side of the State? Would anybody say that those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their methods — were the flip side of the State? What about those who fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State? This facile new report-driven ‘human rights’ discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything. However pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices. There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the Chhattisgarh government, which is publicly pursing the Bush doctrine: if you’re not with us, you are with the terrorists. The lynchpin of this war, apart from the formal security forces, is the Salva Judum — a government-backed militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become spos (special police officers). The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared. Any banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants to import these failed strategies into the heartland. Thousands of adivasis have been forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated. Those lands, rich in iron-ore, are being eyed by corporations like the Tatas and Essar. mous have been signed, but no one knows what they say. Land acquisition has begun. This kind of thing happened in countries like Colombia — one of the most devastated countries in the world. While everybody’s eyes are fixed on the spiralling violence between government-backed militias and guerrilla squads, multinational corporations quietly make off with the mineral wealth. That’s the little piece of theatre being scripted for us in Chhattisgarh.

Of course it’s horrible that 55 policemen were killed. But they’re as much the victims of government policy as anybody else. For the government and the corporations they’re just cannon fodder — there’s plenty more where they came from. Crocodile tears will be shed, prim TV anchors will hector us for a while and then more supplies of fodder will be arranged. For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and spos they killed were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the main, hands-on perpetrators of repression, torture, custodial killings, false encounters. They’re not innocent civilians — if such a thing exists — by any stretch of imagination.

We were here: After the Jehanabad jailbreak
AP Photo
I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable atrocities. I have no doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local people — but who can? Still, no guerrilla army can survive without local support. That’s a logistical impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not diminshing. That says something. People have no choice but to align themselves on the side of whoever they think is less worse.

But to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms, there is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous situations it creates.

‘Naxals’, ‘Maoists’, ‘outsiders’: these are terms being very loosely used these days.

‘Outsiders’ is a generic accusation used in the early stages of repression by governments who have begun to believe their own publicity and can’t imagine that their own people have risen up against them. That’s the stage the CPM is at now in Bengal, though some would say repression in Bengal is not new, it has only moved into higher gear. In any case, what’s an outsider? Who decides the borders? Are they village boundaries? Tehsil? Block? District? State? Is narrow regional and ethnic politics the new Communist mantra? About Naxals and Maoists — well… India is about to become a police state in which everybody who disagrees with what’s going on risks being called a terrorist. Islamic terrorists have to be Islamic — so that’s not good enough to cover most of us. They need a bigger catchment area. So leaving the definition loose, undefined, is effective strategy, because the time is not far off when we’ll all be called Maoists or Naxalites, terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, and shut down by people who don’t really know or care who Maoists or Naxalites are. In villages, of course, that has begun — thousands of people are being held in jails across the country, loosely charged with being terrorists trying to overthrow the state. Who are the real Naxalites and Maoists? I’m not an authority on the subject, but here’s a very rudimentary potted history.

We are coming: A demonstration against the acquisition of land in Singur
AP Photo

The government has slammed the door in the face of every attempt at non-violent resistance. The government is responsible for the situations it creates
The Communist Party of India, the CPI, was formed in 1925. The CPI (M), or what we now call the CPM — the Communist Party Marxist — split from the CPI in 1964 and formed a separate party. Both, of course, were parliamentary political parties. In 1967, the CPM, along with a splinter group of the Congress, came to power in West Bengal. At the time there was massive unrest among the peasantry starving in the countryside. Local CPM leaders — Kanu Sanyal and Charu Mazumdar — led a peasant uprising in the district of Naxalbari which is where the term Naxalites comes from. In 1969, the government fell and the Congress came back to power under Siddhartha Shankar Ray. The Naxalite uprising was mercilessly crushed — Mahasweta Devi has written powerfully about this time. In 1969, the CPI (ML) — Marxist Leninist — split from the CPM. A few years later, around 1971, the CPI (ML) devolved into several parties: the CPM-ML (Liberation), largely centred in Bihar; the CPM-ML (New Democracy), functioning for the most part out of Andhra Pradesh and Bihar; the CPM-ML (Class Struggle) mainly in Bengal. These parties have been generically baptised ‘Naxalites’. They see themselves as Marxist Leninist, not strictly speaking Maoist. They believe in elections, mass action and — when absolutely pushed to the wall or attacked — armed struggle. The MCC — the Maoist Communist Centre, at the time mostly operating in Bihar — was formed in 1968. The PW, People’s War, operational for the most part in Andhra Pradesh, was formed in 1980. Recently, in 2004, the MCC and the pw merged to form the CPI (Maoist) They believe in outright armed struggle and the overthrowing of the State. They don’t participate in elections. This is the party that is fighting the guerrilla war in Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand.

The Indian State and media largely view the Maoists as an “internal security” threat. Is this the way to look at them?

I’m sure the Maoists would be flattered to be viewed in this way.

The Maoists want to bring down the State. Given the autocratic ideology they take their inspiration from, what alternative would they set up? Wouldn’t their regime be an exploitative, autocratic, violent one as well? Isn’t their action already exploitative of ordinary people? Do they really have the support of ordinary people?

I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that both Mao and Stalin are dubious heroes with murderous pasts. Tens of millions of people were killed under their regimes. Apart from what happened in China and the Soviet Union, Pol Pot, with the support of the Chinese Communist Party (while the West looked discreetly away), wiped out two million people in Cambodia and brought millions of people to the brink of extinction from disease and starvation. Can we pretend that China’s cultural revolution didn’t happen? Or that millions of people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were not victims of labour camps, torture chambers, the network of spies and informers, the secret police. The history of these regimes is just as dark as the history of Western imperialism, except for the fact that they had a shorter life-span. We cannot condemn the occupation of Iraq, Palestine and Kashmir while we remain silent about Tibet and Chechnya. I would imagine that for the Maoists, the Naxalites, as well as the mainstream Left, being honest about the past is important to strengthen people’s faith in the future. One hopes the past will not be repeated, but denying that it ever happened doesn’t help inspire confidence… Nevertheless, the Maoists in Nepal have waged a brave and successful struggle against the monarchy. Right now, in India, the Maoists and the various Marxist-Leninist groups are leading the fight against immense injustice here. They are fighting not just the State, but feudal landlords and their armed militias. They are the only people who are making a dent. And I admire that. It may well be that when they come to power, they will, as you say, be brutal, unjust and autocratic, or even worse than the present government. Maybe, but I’m not prepared to assume that in advance. If they are, we’ll have to fight them too. And most likely someone like myself will be the first person they’ll string up from the nearest tree — but right now, it is important to acknowledge that they are bearing the brunt of being at the forefront of resistance. Many of us are in a position where we are beginning to align ourselves on the side of those who we know have no place for us in their religious or ideological imagination. It’s true that everybody changes radically when they come to power — look at Mandela’s anc. Corrupt, capitalist, bowing to the imf, driving the poor out of their homes — honouring Suharto, the killer of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian Communists, with South Africa’s highest civilian award. Who would have thought it could happen? But does this mean South Africans should have backed away from the struggle against apartheid? Or that they should regret it now? Does it mean Algeria should have remained a French colony, that Kashmiris, Iraqis and Palestinians should accept military occupation? That people whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because they can’t find saints to lead them into battle?

Is there a communication breakdown in our society?

Yes.
Mar 31 , 2007

APJ Kalam's article - classic - Developed India..

DEVELOPED INDIA

Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam.
The President of India
“I have three visions for India.
In 3000 years of our history, people from all over the world have come and
invaded us, captured our lands, conquered our minds. From Alexander onwards.
The Greeks, the Turks, the Moguls, the Portuguese, the British, the French, the Dutch, all of them came and looted us, took over what was ours. Yet we have not done this to any other nation. We have not conquered anyone. We have not grabbed their land, their culture, their history and tried to enforce our way of life on them.
Why? Because we respect the freedom of others. That is why my first vision is that of FREEDOM. I believe that India got its first vision of this in 1857, when we started the war of independence. It is this freedom that we must protect and nurture and build on. If we are not free, no one will respect us.
My second vision for India is DEVELOPMENT. For fifty years we have been a
developing nation. It is time we see ourselves as a developed nation. We are
among top 5 nations of the world in terms of GDP. We have 10 percent growth
rate in most areas. Our poverty levels are falling. Our achievements are being
globally recognized today. Yet we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a
developed nation, self- reliant and self-assured. Isn’t this incorrect?
I have a THIRD vision.
India must stand up to the world. Because I believe that, unless India stands up to the world, no one will respect us. Only strength respects strength. We must be strong not only as a military power but also as an economic power. Both must go hand-in-hand. My good fortune was to have worked with three great minds. Dr. Vikram Sarabhai of the Dept. of space, Professor Satish Dhawan, who succeeded him and Dr.Brahm Prakash, father of nuclear material. I was lucky to have worked with all three of them closelyand consider this the great opportunity of my life.
I see four milestones in my career:
Twenty years I spent in ISRO. I was given the opportunity to be the project director for India’s first satellite launch vehicle, SLV3. The one that launched Rohini. These years played a very important role in my life of Scientist.
After my ISRO years, I joined DRDO and got a chance to be the part of India’s guided missile program. It was my second bliss when Agni met its mission requirements in 1994.
The Dept. of Atomic Energy and DRDO had this tremendous partnership in the recent nuclear tests, on May 11 and 13. This was the third bliss. The joy of participating with my team in these nuclear tests and proving to the world that India can make it, that we are no longer a developing nation but one of them. It made me feel very proud as an Indian. The fact that we have now developed for Agni a re-entry structure, for which we have developed this new material. A Very light material called carbon-carbon. One day an orthopedic surgeon from Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences visited my laboratory. He lifted the material and found it so light that he took me to his hospital and showed me his patients. There were these little girls and boys with heavy metallic calipers weighing over three Kg. each, dragging their feet around. He said to me: Please remove the pain of my patients. In three weeks, we made these Floor reaction Orthosis 300-gram Calipers and took them to the orthopedic center. The children didn’t believe their eyes. From dragging around a three kg. Load on their legs, they could now move around! Their parents had tears in their eyes. That was my fourth bliss!
Why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognize our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them.
Why?
We are the first in milk production.
We are number one in Remote sensing satellites.
We are the second largest producer of wheat.
We are the second largest producer of rice.
Look at Dr. Sudarshan, he has transferred the tribal village into a self-sustaining,
self driving unit. There are millions of such achievements but our media is only
obsessed in the bad news and failures and disasters.
I was in Tel Aviv once and I was reading the Israeli newspaper. It was the day after a lot of attacks and bombardments and deaths had taken place. The Hamas had struck. But the front page of the newspaper had the picture Of a Jewish gentleman who in five years had transformed his desert land into an orchid and a granary. It was this inspiring picture that everyone woke up to. The gory details of killings, bombardments, deaths, were inside in the newspaper, buried among other news.
In India we only read about death, sickness, terrorism, crime. Why are we so
NEGATIVE ? Another question: Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? We want foreign TVs, we want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported. Do we not realize that self-respect comes with self-reliance?
I was in Hyderabad giving this lecture, when a 14 year old girl asked me for my
autograph. I asked her what her goal in life is. She replied:
I want to live in a developed India. For her, you and I will have to build this
developed India. You must proclaim. India is not an under-developed nation; it is
a highly developed nation.
Do you have 10 minutes? Allow me to come back with a vengeance. Got 10 minutes for your country? If yes, then read; otherwise, choice is yours.
YOU say that our government is inefficient.
YOU say that our laws are too old.
YOU say that the municipality does not pick up the garbage. YOU say that the phones don’t work, the railways are a joke, The airline is the worst in the world, mails never reach their destination.
YOU say that our country has been fed to the dogs and is the absolute pits.
YOU say, say and say.
What do YOU do about it?
Take a person on his way to Singapore. Give him a name - YOURS. Give him a
face - OURS. YOU walk out of the airport and you are at your International best.
In Singapore you don’t throw cigarette butts on the roads or eat in the stores.
YOU are as proud of their Underground Links as they are.
You pay $5 (approx. Rs.60) to drive through Orchard Road (equivalent of Mahim
Causeway or Pedder Road) between 5 PM and 8 PM. YOU comeback to the Parking lot to punch your parking ticket if you have over stayed in a restaurant or a shopping mall irrespective of your status identity.
In Singapore you don’t say anything, DO YOU? YOU wouldn’t dare to eat in public during Ramadan, in Dubai. YOU would not dare to go out without your head covered in Jeddah. YOU would not dare to buy an employee of the telephone exchange in London at 10 pounds (Rs.650) a month to, “see to it that my STD and ISD calls are billed to someone else.” YOU would not dare to speed beyond 55 mph (88 km/h) in Washington and then tell the traffic cop, “Jaanta hai sala main kaun hoon (Do you know who I am?). I am so and so’s son. Take your two bucks and get lost.”
YOU wouldn’t chuck an empty coconut shell anywhere other than the garbage pail on the beaches in Australia and New Zealand. Why don’t YOU spit Paan on the streets of Tokyo?
Why don’t YOU use examination jockeys or buy fake certificates in Boston? We are still talking of the same YOU. YOU who can respect and conform to a foreign system in other countries but cannot in your own. You who will throw papers and cigarettes on the road the moment you touch Indian ground. If you can be an involved and appreciative citizen in an alien country, why cannot you be the same here in India?
Once in an interview, the famous Ex-municipal commissioner of Bombay, Mr.Tinaikar, had a point to make. “Rich people’s dogs are walked on the streets to leave their affluent droppings all over the place,” he said. “And then the same people turn around to criticize and blame the authorities for inefficiency and dirty pavements. What do they expect the officers to do? Go down with a broom every time their dog feels the pressure in his bowels?
In America every dog owner has to clean up after his pet has done the job. Same in Japan. Will the Indian citizen do that here?” He’s right. We go to the polls to choose a government and after that forfeit all responsibility. We sit back wanting to be pampered and expect the government to do everything for us whilst our contribution is totally negative. We expect the government to clean up but we are not going to stop chucking garbage all over the place nor are we going to stop to pick a up a stray piece of paper and throw it in the bin. We expect the railways to provide clean bathrooms but we are not going to learn the proper use of bathrooms.
We want Indian Airlines and Air India to provide the best of food and toiletries but
we are not going to stop pilfering at the least opportunity.
This applies even to the staff who is known not to pass on the service to the public. When it comes to burning social issues like those related to women, dowry, girl child and others, we make loud drawing room Protestations and continue to do the reverse at home. Our excuse? “It’s the whole system which has to change, how will it matter if I alone forego my sons’ rights to a dowry.” So who’s going to change the system?
What does a system consist of? Very conveniently for us it consists of our neighbors, other households, other cities, other communities and the government. But definitely not me and YOU. When it comes to us actually making a positive contribution to the system we lock ourselves along with our families into a safe cocoon and look into the distance at countries far away and wait for a Mr. Clean to come along & work miracles for us with a majestic sweep of his hand or we leave the country and run away.
Like lazy cowards hounded by our fears we run to America to bask in their glory
and praise their system. When New York becomes insecure we run to England. When England experiences unemployment, we take the next flight out to the Gulf. When the Gulf is war struck, we demand to be rescued and brought home by the Indian government. Everybody is out to abuse and rape the country.
Nobody thinks of feeding the system. Our conscience is mortgaged to money.

Dear Indians, The article is highly thought inductive, calls for a great deal of introspection and pricks one’s conscience too....I am echoing J.F.Kennedy’s words to his fellow Americans to relate to Indians.....
“ASK WHAT WE CAN DO FOR INDIA AND DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE TO MAKE INDIA WHAT AMERICA AND OTHER WESTERN COUNTRIES ARE TODAY”
Lets do what India needs from us. Forward this mail to each Indian for a change instead of sending Jokes or junk mails.
Thank you
Abdul Kalam

MANY SHADES OF UNREASON by Khushwant Singh

The Tribune
March 3, 2007

JN. Srivastava of Ghaziabad has collected data on predictions made by our leading astrologers which turned out to be false. Some of it makes amusing reading. In its annual forecast published by The Times of India in its January issue of 2004, it predicted that Aishwarya Rai would marry Vivek Oberoi by the end of the year. She is still unmarried and is engaged to marry not Oberoi but Abhishek Bachchan some time this year. When Karisma Kapoor married, Bejan Daruwala predicted she would make an ideal wife: "She got Raja Hindustani and he got Biwi Number One," he pronounced. A month later Karisma hauled up her newly wedded husband to court and gave him a tongue-lashing before the Judge. Both are back in happy matrimony. But you have to give it to Daruwala, he lends religious sanction to his predictions by chanting 'Sri Ganeshaya Namah'. He is a Parsi.

Not to be forgotten are prophecies made about the end of the BJP-led government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. It was predicted it would be back in power before the end of 2004. There are as yet no signs of it doing so. Such false prophecies are on the menus of star-gazers' restaurants every day, but have failed to fill the bellies of our multitudes which continue to hunger for them. Their champion, Murli Manohar Joshi, remains unfazed. When asked after losing his election, if he still believed in astrology, he replied emphatically 'certainly' (pronounced in Almora accent 'suttonly'). The same is true of T.N. Seshan, former head of the Election Commission who failed in his bid to become Rashtrapati, but remains unshaken in his belief in the divine messages sent down by the stars. So all kinds of irrationality thrives: changes of spellings of names (Jayalalitha to Jayalalithaa, Shobha De to Shobhaa De) altering ingresses to homes and offices and turning around furniture etc, according to Vastu. Unreason manifests itself in numerous ways. Even reminding people that most of our great leaders like Dayanand Saraswati, Vivekananda, Mahatma Gandhi, Pandit Nehru disdained astrology as superstition, makes no difference. There are other examples of enlightenment which we should keep in mind. When A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was to be sworn in as President and asked to suggest an auspicious day, he replied in his gentle manner: "Days and nights are formed by rotation of earth on its axis. So long as the earth rotates, each day and every moment is auspicious for filing nominations for Supreme Commander of the Indian Army."

Dr J.V. Narliker, equally eminent Indian scientist in the realm of astronomy, blasted astrological forecasts based on eclipses of the sun. He said, "Eclipses are mere shadows and don't effect human life in any way. The grounds on which the original beliefs were based have long been debunked." It might be worth remembering that on August 15, 2001, while M.M. Joshi was still lauding Vedic astrology and mathematics, 128 scientists signed a declaration in Delhi to the effect that "Vedic maths is neither Vedic or Maths. As such it would be a fraud on children to introduce it in their syllabus."

Has the kind of debunking made any difference to astrologers and people who have horoscopes cast on birth to guide them in choosing careers, life-partners or gauging their spans of life. Reason and logic cannot pierce the skulls of the thick-headed; they remain thick-headed to the last even though they manage to live longer than predicted in their horoscopes.

'Indian languages carry the legacy of caste'

'Indian languages carry the legacy of caste'