JAMMU: At a time when there was mounting evidence that the attack on Mumbai was launched from Pakistani soil, former J&K CM Farooq Abdullah on Saturday sprang in defence of Pakistan, ruling out Islamabad's complicity. Instead, he suggested the two countries come together to fight terrorism .
Srinagar, Nov 29: Following attacks in Mumbai, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) President Mahbooba Mufti Saturday urged New Delhi to ensure security of Kashmiris living in different Indian states.
Addressing public gatherings at Budgam and Beerwah, Mufti said: “Kashmiris living outside should not be targeted.”
However she was quick on to add that “terror should be condemned strongly.”
Mufti said a particular community should not be targeted at a place where terror attacks occur.
She said concrete steps should be taken to ensure security arrangements for Kashmiris staying there.
Mufti said Kashmiri businessmen and students outside the State are engaged in the profession and added that nobody should harass them.
Informing that investigations into the Malegon blasts and Samjauta Express had changed the situation, Mufti said Hindu extremists group have been exposed as they have been directly found to be the mastermind of many terrorist incidents in India.
She said it would endanger the country’s security.
Mufti said instead of blaming each other, India and Pakistan should unite and together uproot the menace of terrorism from South Asia. She said this would help create peaceful environment in the subcontinent.
She stressed that peace would not return to the subcontinent until the leadership of India and Pakistan would take bold decisions.
New Delhi (IANS): Zero tolerance is the only answer to terrorism, the Congress party said on Saturday in the aftermath of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, calling upon Pakistan to honour its promise not to let its territory be used for such strikes against India.
Zero tolerance is the only answer to terrorism, the Congress Working Committee, the party's highest decision-making group, said in a resolution at its Saturday night meeting here, hours after the terror strike in Mumbai was put an end to.
http://www.rediff.com///news/2008/nov/28mumterror-shivraj-patil-is-incompetent.htm
US intelligence expert says Patil is incompetent
Walter Andersen, a former senior Administration official, who headed up the State Department's South Asia Division of the Intelligence and Research Bureau has said the Mumbai terrorist attacks showed clearly a failure of India's intelligence and security apparatus and also the utter incompetence of Home Minister Shivraj Patil.
... deleted India, Jihad's Permanent BattlegroundChronicles Magazine November 28 2008 By Srdja Trifkovic Teams of heavily armed terrorists carried out seven coordinated attacks in India's financial capital "Mumbai" (Bombay) on Wednesday evening and early Thursday morning. Over 120 people were reported killed by Friday morning and over 300 wounded, with the final toll likely to rise once the ongoing hostage crisis is ended. Similar attacks by Islamic terrorists occur with grim regularity in India (see Timetable at the end). The disputed province of Kashmir notwithstanding, militant Islam sees the second most populous country in the world as a piece of "unfinished business": having been ruled by Muslims once, it cannot legitimately revert to Dar al-Harb. The attacks represent a massive intelligence failure on part of the government in New Delhi. Even India's business capital is now seen as a soft target for Jihadist terror, yet the ruling Congress Party continues its old habit of minority appeasement and automatic insistence that the problem is confined to an unrepresentative extremist fringe aided from abroad (i.e. Pakistan). This attitude indicates common ideological roots of India's political and media elite and its Western role model. Both are supine, secularist and leftist to boot. Now that the jihadists have targeted two luxury hotels and a top-tier restaurant frequented by visiting foreigners, now that they have brought their holy war to India's upper crust and their Western business partners, the country's elite class should wake up to the fact that India has a Muslim problem. That problem is fundamentally the same in each and every country in the world with a substantial Muslim minority. It would be there even if the government in Islamabad and its semi-rogue agencies like the ISI were to terminate all support for Islamic terrorist groups active across the Subcontinent (which will never happen, of course). The attacks remind us that global Jihad has India in its sights, no less firmly today than in the early centuries of the expansion of Islam's bloody borders. Prior to the Muslim invasions which started in the 8th century India was one of the world's great civilizations. It matched its contemporaries in the realms of philosophy, mathematics, and natural science. It was a richly imaginative culture, one of the half-dozen most advanced civilizations of all time. Its sculptures were vigorous and sensual, its architecture ornate and spellbinding. Muslim invaders began entering India in the early eighth century, on the orders of Hajjaj, the governor of Iraq. Starting in 712 the raiders, commanded by Muhammad Qasim, demolished temples, shattered sculptures, plundered palaces, killed vast numbers of men—it took them three days to slaughter the inhabitants of the port city of Debal—and carried off their women and children to slavery. After the initial wave of violence, however, Qasim tried to establish law and order in the newly conquered lands, and to that end he even allowed a degree of religious tolerance. Upon hearing of such practices, his superior, Hajjaj, wrote back:
In a subsequent communication, Hajjaj reiterated that all able-bodied men were to be killed, and that their underage sons and daughters were to be enslaved. Qasim obeyed, and, on his arrival at the town of Brahminabad, massacred thousands of men. Qasim's early exploits were continued in the early eleventh century, when Mahmud of Ghazni "passed through India like a whirlwind, destroying, pillaging, and massacring," zealously following the Kuranic injunctions to kill idolaters, whom he had vowed to chastise every year of his life. In the course of seventeen invasions, in the words of Alberuni, the scholar brought by Mahmud to India, Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country and performed there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people. Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion toward all Muslims. In the aftermath of the invasion, in the ancient cities of Varanasi, Mathura, Ujjain, Maheshwar, Jwalamukhi, and Dwarka, not one temple survived whole and intact. In his The Story of Civilization, Will Durant lamented the results of what he termed "probably the bloodiest story in history." He called it a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within…. [E]ternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry. Islamic invaders broke and burned everything beautiful they came across in Hindustan, displaying, as an Indian commentator put it, the resentment of the less developed warriors who felt intimidated in the encounter with a more refined culture. The Muslim sultans built mosques at the sites of torn down temples, and countless Hindus were sold into slavery. As far as the invaders were concerned, Hindus were kafirs par excellence. They, and to a lesser extent the peaceful Buddhists, were not "of the book" — "protected," like Jews and Christians, provided they submit to dhimmitude – but at the receiving end of Muhammad's implacable injunction against pagans: "Kill those who join other gods with God wherever you may find them." (Kuran, 9:5-6) The mountainous northwestern approaches to India are called Hindu Kush, "the Slaughter of the Hindu," a reminder of the days when Hindu slaves from Indian Subcontinent died in the harsh Afghan mountains while being transported to Muslim courts of Central Asia. The slaughter in Somnath, the site of a celebrated Hindu temple, where 50,000 Hindus were slain on Mahmud's orders, set the tone for centuries. The Buddhists were the next to be subjected to mass slaughter in 1193, when Muhammad Khilji also burned their famous library. By the end of the twelfth century, following the Muslim conquest of their stronghold in Bihar, they were no longer a significant presence in India. The survivors retreated into Nepal and Tibet, or escaped to the south of the Subcontinent. The remnants of their culture lingered on even as far west as Turkestan. Left to the tender mercies of Muslim conquerors and their heirs, they were systematically destroyed, sometimes—as was the case with the four giant statues of Buddha destroyed by the Taliban in Afghanistan in March 2001—as late as the first year of the third millennium. That cultivated disposition and developed sensibility can go hand in hand with bigotry and cruelty is evidenced by the example of Firuz Shah, who became the ruler of northern India in 1351. This educated yet tyrannical Muslim ruler once surprised a village where a Hindu religious festival was celebrated and ordered all present to be slain. He proudly related that, upon completing the slaughter, he destroyed the temples and in their place built mosques. The Moghul emperor Akbar is remembered as tolerant, and only one major massacre was recorded during his long reign (1542–1605), when he ordered that about 30,000 captured Rajput Hindus be slain on February 24, 1568, after the battle for Chitod. But Akbar's acceptance of other religions and toleration of their public worship, his abolition of poll-tax on non-Muslims, and his interest in other faiths were not a reflection of his Islamic spirit of tolerance. Quite the contrary, they indicated his propensity for free-thinking experimentation in the realm of religion that finally led him to complete apostasy. Its high points were the formal declaration of his own infallibility in all matters of religious doctrine, his promulgation of a new creed, and his adoption of Hindu and Zoroastrian festivals and practices. Things were back to normal under Shah Jahan (1593–1666), the fifth Mogul Emperor and a grandson of Akbar the Great. Most Westerners remember him as the builder of Taj Mahal and do not know that he was a cruel warmonger who initiated 48 military campaigns against non-Muslims in less than 30 years. Taking his cue from his Ottoman co-religionists, on coming to the throne in 1628 he killed all his male relations except one who escaped to Persia. During his reign, in Benares alone 76 Hindu temples were destroyed, and Christian churches at Agra and Lahore were demolished. At the end of the three-month siege of Hugh, a Portuguese enclave near Calcutta, he had 10,000 inhabitants "blown up with powder, drowned in water, or burnt by fire." More than 4,000 were taken captive to Agra where they were offered Islam or death. Most refused and were killed, except for the younger women who went to harems. The massacres perpetrated by Muslims in India are unparalleled in history. They are bigger in sheer numbers than the Holocaust, or the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks; more extensive even than the slaughter of the South American native populations by the invading Spanish and Portuguese. Major recent attacks by Islamic terrorists in India:
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"If we do something wrong, those human rights [people] will come and have our necks so we have to be careful about all these things," said one of the commandos, a stocky, mustachioed man. He gave a boyish smile and shrug before returning to his high-powered scope.I think that says it all.
It is 4AM in India right now. I am in Mumbai reporting from the ground. I have not slept a wink. Mumbai is under attack. People and forces who killed Mahatama Gandhi, who demolished the Babari Mosque have triumphed. More than 16 groups of terrorists have taken over Taj, Oberai and several hotels. Hundreds of people are dead. For the first time no one is blaming Muslim organizations.
The Mumbai ATS chief Hemant Karkare and other officers of the ATS have been killed. These were the same people who were investigating the Malegaon Blasts--in which Praggya Singh, an army officer and several other noted personalities of the BJP-RSS-Bajrang Dal-VHP were arrested. Karkare was the man to arrest them. Karkare was receiving threats from several quarters. LK Advani, the BJP chief and several other prominent leaders of the so-called Hindu terrorism squad were gunning for his head. And the first casualty in the terrorist attack was Karkare! He is dead--gone--the firing by terrorists began from Nariman House--which is the only building in Mumbai inhabited by Jews. Some Hindu Gujaratis of the Nariman area spoke live on several TV channels--they openly said that the firing by terrorists began from Nariman house. And that for two years suspicious activities were going on in this house. But no one took notice.
Our worst fears have come true. It is clear that Mossad is involved in the whole affair. An entire city has been attacked by Mossad and probably units of mercenaries. It is not possible for one single organization to plan and execute such a sophisticated operation. It is clear that this operation was backed by communal forces from within the Indian State. The Home Minister Shivraj Patil should resign. The RSS-BJP-VHP-Bajrang Dal should be banned. Advani and others ought to be arrested. Today is a day of shame for all Indians and all Hindus. Muslims and secular Hindus have been proven right. RSS type forces and Israel are all involved in not only destabilizing but finishing India. India should immediately snap all relations with Israel. We owe this much to Karkare and the brave ATS men who had shown the courage to arrest Praggya Singh, Raj Kumar Purohit, the army officer and several others.
A photograph published in Urdu Times, Mumbai, clearly shows that Mossad and ex-Mossad men came to India and met Sadhus and other pro-Hindutva elements recently. A conspiracy was clearly hatched.
This is a moment of reckoning especially for Hindus of India. The killers of Gandhi have struck again. If we are true Sanatanis and true Hindus and true nationalists and true patriots we have to see this act as a clear attack by anti-national deshdrohi forces. Praggya Singh, Advani and the entire brand is anti-national. They ought to be shot. Any Hindu siding with them is hereafter warned of serious consequences.
This is a question of nationalism. If no one else, the Indian army will not take this lying down. Communal, anti-national forces have attacked the very foundation of the Indian constitution and the nation. We will fight a civil war if need be against the pro-Hindutva, communal forces and their Israeli backers.
Amaresh Misra
misra.amaresh@gmail.com
91-9250305699
The terrorists are calling themselves "Deccan Mujahedin" -- sounds suspiciously like the same ploy of the previous terrorists calling themselves "Indian Mujahedin". Someone is deliberately trying to market their newest round of terrorist attacks as being homegrown efforts. It couldn't be more obvious.
Greenland, the world's largest island, has voted overwhelmingly for independence. They are finally taking the bold steps necessary to achieve independence from European rule. While their population numbers in the mere tens of thousands, the natural resource wealth of their budding nation will open up tremendous opportunities for them in the future. Hopefully India will reach out to this fellow developing nation and facilitate its entry into the international community.
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| Book: | Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: the British in BengalRobert TraversCambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007ISBN-13: 978-0-5218-6145-8; 292 pp.; £50.00 |
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| Reviewer: | Jon WilsonKing's College, London |
| Citation: | Jon Wilson review of Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: the British in Bengal (review no. 697) URL: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/wilsonj.html Date accessed: Thursday, 20-Nov-2008 16:31:37 GMT |
In the course of a single generation, the British empire was transformed from being a network of self-governing Atlantic communities into a cluster of largely Asian territories acquired, for the most part, through conquest. As countless historians note, the second half of the eighteenth century saw an 'epochal shift in world power'. For many scholars it was this period which saw the 'foundations of modern colonial empires' (p. 2). For some, it marks the beginning of forms of imperial domination which continue into our present.
... long, fascinating review deleted| Secular anti-Nationalism vs. Cultural Nationalism V. Sundaram, ivarta Nov. 19, 2008 I have just finished reading masterpiece of a book titled "INDIA A Cultural Decline or Revival"? by Bharat Gupt. The so-called educated people in India-usually pseudo-secular Indians with Western Education-take it for granted that Independence from the British Rule also ushered an era of cultural and social freedom in India. Bharat Gupt in this beautifully conceived and written book has carefully examined as to whether this is true or whether a dark age of cultural decline and barbarism descended on India after Independence. To quote the brilliant words of Bharat Gupt from his preface: "It is further imagined that in spite of its poverty, India is admired by the richer nations of the West as a culturally evolved nation. This self-congratulation, lingering from the euphoric days of our freedom struggle, sounds now like the thunder on distant mountains shedding not a glimmer of hope on our present lives. For most of us our memory is enough to be a lived-through account of the cultural decline that set in barely within a decade after freedom. Any analysis is sufficient to counter the smug belief, still fostered in schools and political speeches about the superiority of our culture, once voiced in Iqbal"s song, "Saare Jahaan se acchaa Hindustan hamaaraa". Very insidiously this rhyme nurses a misplaced conviction that while many other ancient civilizations were wiped out in time, India alone is indestructible.... The song takes special pride in stating that while the Greek and Roman civilizations, the so-called predecessors of the West, lost to ravages of time, Indian civilization alone remains immortal". According to Bharat Gupt such headiness was excusable during the struggle for freedom but is hardly justified after half a century of self-misrule. Our name and significance (naam-o-nishaan) are now "under gradual but marked erosion, fading faster than anything witnessed in the last millennium". The ravages of technology are greater than even those perpetrated by Islamic misrule for more than thousand years. Bharat Gupt argues and proves with force that in every sphere of life it is now obvious that India has not been able "to internalise European technology to march its own civilization concepts, the foreign techno-kaayaa into its traditional dharma-kaayaa". Bharat Gupt, Reader (Associate Professor) in English, at the College of Vocational Studies, University of Delhi, holds two Master"s degrees, one from St. Stephen"s College, Delhi and another from Toronto. He did his doctoral research at the M.S. University of Baroda. His Doctoral Dissertation was on "A Comparison of Greek and Indian Dramatic Theories as given in the Poetics and the Natyasastra". Bharat Gupt was taught Sitar and Surbahar by Pandit Uma Shankar Mishra and musicology and classics by Acarya Brhaspati. Trained both in modern and traditional educational systems, he is also on the Visiting Faculty of National School of Drama, Delhi. For his interest in media studies he was awarded a fellowship to work at the McLuhan Program, University of Toronto. Author of several research articles, he has presented many papers at various international seminars. He has also published critical editions and translations of ancient Indian books on music and drama (Natyasastra, Chapter 28: Ancient Scales of Indian Music, Natyasastra, Chapter 17: A Critique of Theatrical Polyglossia., Natyasastra, Chapters 29 - 36, and Dibbuk). In a breezy manner, in his preface, Bharat Gupt has traced the process of cultural and spiritual decline of India after Independence from decade to decade. He argues that after Independence, each passing decade, excepting perhaps the first (1947-1957), ushered in an uncomfortable, dislocating and deranging change. Only the decade of the 1950s was characterised by hope and optimism, within India, and as well in the minds of her well wishers in India and abroad. She was expected to perform by leaps as a developing nation by the international community. The optimism of this decade was symbolised by our first Prime Minister, called "Chaachaa Nehru" by his sycophants who spent his every Birthday, November 14, with school children as a State ritual. He projected the expectation that the nation was going to grow big and strong like its children. To quote the caustic words of Bharat Gupt "Every year in the capital of the reborn nation, international exhibitions connected its people to the big and small nations of the world. Perhaps in the fifties only the country like its kids and their Chaachaa could smile hopefully". In the sixties, things continued to take some shape as schools and colleges expanded. "Temples of modern India" - a term coined by Nehru to describe the New Factories and Dams-gave employment to many. Yet the less lucky but more enterprising started moving away to far off lands in large numbers. The present prosperous lot of the Indian diaspora in North America and Europe left the country at this time. By now the stagnation in the economic growth of Socialist Order imposed upon the country in a dictatorial manner began to extract its price. Nevertheless, on account of strong nationalism, in spite of strong bullying by China in 1962 and a grievous injury by Pakistan in 1965, India was able to defend most of its territory and reaffirm its identity. The seventies, in their first half, witnessed another triumph of nationalism when "Indira Gandhi played midwife to the birth of Bangladesh terminating a horrendous genocide of the Bangla Muslims and Hindus by the Punjabi Muslim army of West Pakistan. But giddy from her success, Indira Gandhi unheedingly consolidated the Socialist agenda to prune it of all liberal intellectual and democratic vitality that Nehru would not have liked to disappear". By the mid seventies, darker days set in. Indira Gandhi introduced emergency. External support to terrorism and internal regional factionalism cast their net around the nation. As Bharat Gupt puts it, "Both were promoted under many garbs by a pernicious propaganda masterminded in the bastions of Western subversive agencies and academics as well. To contain the politically centrifugal forces, Indira Gandhi, flushed with her earlier success, made the pendulum of State governance swing from the dictatorial Socialism at the Centre to conspiratorial manipulations in the regions, thus seriously eroding democracy". The period from 1970 to 1980 was marked by a great illusion of all at the Left of Centre. They imagined that Socialism could be poured from the top like flowing river waters and that changes at the grassroots would automatically follow. This kind of make-believe Socialism created a class of corrupt and unscrupulous politicians who acquired total control over national wealth and perpetuated a licence-permit-control-quota Raj that killed personal enterprise and initiative, while very little from the State percolated to the poor. Bharat Gupt rightly concludes that on the cultural front, in the name of Secularism, religious regression was promoted not only among minorities, but more so in the Hindu majority. Under the shadow of nurturing parochial minions for Centrist manipulations, regional outfits were promoted to such an extent that they went out of control. By the end of the decade in 1980, both the Socialist State and Nationalism came to be discredited. The period from 1980 to 1990 was marked by the escalation of terrorist wars, caste polarisation and withering of Socialist State that revealed the himalayan corruption operating beneath. A proxy war against us was started by Pakistan in Punjab and Kashmir. A section of Indian policy-makers from Tamilnadu, started sympathising with the terrorist and separatist outfit of LTTE in Sri Lanka. But the final blunder of sending the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to eliminate LTTE was beyond belief and gave a severe blow to nationalism. The consolidation of the middle castes, which had acquired enough economic muscle to translate their cultural identity into a political clout, was subverted by cheap politicians like V P Singh, "under the impact of Western notions of ethnicity and compensatory discrimination under the garb of affirmative action for the so called OTHER BACKWARD CLASSES". Thus V P Singh gave a deathblow to the process of integration of Hindu society. The slogan of "social justice" has become another name for Social stagnation riding rough on the backs of the lowest castes. Reiteration of the caste identities has subverted Indian Nationalism. Every political party, for a handful of votes or a momentary alliance, pampers the regional, religious, or caste identities. Thus Bharat Gupt rightly concludes that the new millennium has opened with glaring entropy in the Indian political system and social institutions. The ruling elite of legislators and bureaucrats is unable to handle even every day governance let alone crisis situations that are routine as sunrise. National interest seems to have been totally sacrificed at the altar of power struggle and corruption. In such a scenario there is a temptation to throw cultural matters into the background and focus on enforcement of law and defence of national territory. As Bharat Gupt brilliantly puts it: "But this is not an age of territorial invasions. It is the age of cultural invasion and subversion. Political territories are altered after the cultural landscape has been reordered from within. There are three distinct forces that have at present laid a strong siege of India after the Cold War and the fall of her politically supportive though hardly economically beneficial ally, namely the Soviet Union. They are, COMMERCIAL GLOBALISM, JEHADI ISLAM AND EVANLEGICAL CHRISTIANITY. India needs a new leadership to counter these three. This requires strategies born of a cool and analytical mind and least of all an emotional retaliation of the momentary kind that seems to be the fashion of the day". Bharat Gupt is indeed a renaissance man in every sense of the word. He clearly brings out the fact that the levelling down of the first rate, the excellent, and the noble has been a very crucial part of the destruction of our national life after our Independence. Destruction of cultural history has proceeded, step by step, with the destruction of all the traditional, social, cultural and familial institutions in our ancient country. Bharat Gupt"s brilliant book brings to my mind the following words of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): "Culture is nothing but sweetness and light. Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that as been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human sprit". In the Mahabharata there is a shloka, which was perhaps incorporated into later day classical texts. The meaning and message of the shloka can be summarised as follows: "Give up the individual for the family, the family for the habitat, the habitat for land. But for the Aatman, give up the whole earth". According to Bharat Gupt this shloka offers a Neeti or practical ethics for organising a humane social order that provides as much for the single person as for its larger units. In the above shloka, Eka, Kula, Graama, Janapada, Prithvee and Aatman make up the mental and terrestrial shelves for the inner and outer being of an individual in the cultural context in Indian terms. Bharat Gupt brilliantly observes that the changes that have taken place in these areas can and do index the decline or revival in cultural life. The same conceptual framework can also be seen in a verse in the Panchatantra. The Panchatantra, was originally a canonical collection of Sanskrit (Hindu) as well as Pali (Buddhist) animal fables in verse and prose. The original Sanskrit text, now long lost, and which some scholars believe was composed in the 3rd century BC, is attributed to Vishnu Sarma. However, based as it is on older oral traditions, it illustrates, for the benefit of princes who may succeed to a throne, the central Hindu principles of Raja niti (political science) through an inter-woven series of colorful animal tales. Based on the framework of a verse in the Panchatantra, Bharat Gupt"s book has been divided into six parts: Eka (person), Kula (family), Graama (habitat), Janapada (land), Prithvee (earth), and Aatman (self). Eka is the individual, male or female that makes up the unit of cultural consciousness and the fulcrum of creative ability. Bharat Gupt says that if the Eka breaks either due to a hostile social environment or due to lack of inner ethical or moral strength, the social order that depends upon individuals will also collapse. The same disastrous result will follow if the individual is unable to give up one"s selfish interest for the larger unit of kula (family), the kula (family) for Graama (habitat), the Graama (habitat) for Janapaada (regional kingdom/political unit/nation) and the Janapaada (land) for Prithvee (earth) and all material interests of the earth for the Aatman (self). According to Bharat Gupt the mode of this non-selfish action varies with time and place but as a principle of action it is none other than what Socrates called the Supreme Good (ton agathon) and what the Indian philosophers have called DHARMA. Bharat Gupt has divided his book into six sections based on the Panchatantra framework referred to above. He says that he has chosen the six terms in the Panchatantra as they "not only define the Indian cultural experience more accurately than the Western categories like the "individual", "society", "nation" and the "global order". The ancient Janapaada was neither synonymous with the modern nation state or raashtra, nor with the present day provinces of a nation state. It was a local cultural space with community governance that enforced a moral and financial discipline that mattered much more for a person than the distant court of a de jure Emperor or the de facto Emperor. In the age of nationalism and globalisation in India, it has been virtually replaced for the time being by the nation state and will be further replaced by a newer entity". Bharat Gupt states with conviction that beneath the present "regional states" and the nation state of India, the Janapaada is still very much alive as a cultural force that has a pervasive influence on the behaviour of the rural India. With telling effect, Bharat Gupt observes that Janapaada as a cultural force offers eventoday the rural Indian a sustenance through festivals, dress and cuisine, colour and designs that are more rewarding than the "week-end" is to metro-Indian. The six categories - Eka, kula, Graama, Janapaada, Prithvee and Aatma-seem more natural not only to understand the Indian identity of the past, but also to develop a healthier framework for personal, social and cosmic organisation for the future. As Bharat Gupt puts it "More than anything else, as indicated in the verse from the Mahabharata, they provide a well tested way (marga/pantha) to progress from the PERSONAL TO THE UNIVERSAL". In Part I of his book Bharat Gupt deals with Eka: The Uprooted Individual in five chapters. After August 15, 1947, modernity came to be concretised in India as "print culture managed space in which the symbolic and imaginative were replaced by functional reality". A great change of attitude towards the very value of ancient and sacred ritual set in after Independence. In the State manipulated intellectually enervating climate that prevailed during Nehru"s rule, reality and truth came to be defined in Newtonian terms of European Physical Sciences. Rationality was reduced to a sterile scientific positivism which in its turn was hyped as "scientific temperament". Bharat Gupt declares that this state sponsored scientific temperament was privileged as a curative for the earlier "non scientific Hindu vision" of the Universe. Bharat Gupt laments the fact that this fascination for "scientific temperament" did not take into account the post-classical developments in Physics and their profound implications for philosophy and Hindu vedanta. Thus not only were some of the most rigorous and original Hindu traditions of native reasoning disregarded, even the latest views of modern science were blatantly ignored. Nehru was the leader of this anti-Hindu movement. Thus Bharat Gupt gives a very just estimate of the petrified adolescence of Nehru in these words: "As a result, modernity in India, to this day remains a 19th century construct weighed down by notions that Nehru imbibed in his days in Eaton and Cambridge ossified in his adulthood into a Fabian atheism that he foisted upon the Indian educational system being the First Prime Minister". In the name of development of a "scientific temperament" and "scientific temper", that the whole of India was de-Hinduised in a systematic manner by government after Independence. Bharat Gupt highlights the following facts to illustrate this point of view: a. Replacement of the Vedic Model of Purusha as Angin with Angas by the Guttenberg-Newtonian Model of objectivity. All Hindu ritual was conceived as a sacred way of asserting a complete unity of the individual with the Universe. There is a great difference between this age-old Vedic method of performing an act before the Universe which is witnessed by the community, the Gods and the demi-Gods alike and the modern method of doing an act as a private action not witnessed by anybody. The first is ritual (Savana/Anushtaaanalsatra) while the second is personal consumption or "eating" alone (bhukthi). The first was the prescribed (Vaidha)way of life in traditional India and the second a forbidden (Nishidda) way. With the rise of Western individualism, the second has become esteemed and normal while the first is viewed as backward, abnormal and even suspect. b. Replacement of Orality with Writing Philosophies and beliefs of a society depend on its educational system and the technology of their transmission and dissemination. Right from the dawn of history India used the aural as the main mode of knowledge preservation, although plastic, graphic and symbolic methods were not lacking. Right from the days of Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization, writing was kept subsidiary to oral composition. Now-a-days, there is an irrational and wrong presumption that Indian elevation of orality was caused by ignorance of writing. As Bharat Gupt puts it "This is again based on the prejudice that graphicity once achieved can never allow orality to dominate. Hence the presumption that the Sarasvati-Sindhu script once lost, the very concept of a script was forgotten till reintroduced into India by the Greek and the Phoenician influences. The truth seems otherwise. ORALITY, which was comprehensive enough to be a combination of speech (vaacika), gesture (angika), mental concentration (saattvika) and symbolic dress (ahaarya) was preferred to other technologies of preservation as a cultural choice. This kind of orality keeps thought, speech and action in a unity for performance in education, arts, rituals and life in general. Whatever is to be done may thus be done by mind, speech and body (manasaa, vaacaa, karmanaa) together". This paradigm has operated on all aspects of Indian life. Hence the role of writing was made supportive not performative in our culture. This paradigm also patterned India"s educational systems. These systems have been destroyed in a systematic manner by Government and Nehru acting together in post-Independent India. In my view, after Indian Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru promoted his concept of false nationhood under the label of "secularism". According to this concept, all the people who happen to reside on the soil of India form a nation, whether he follows the culture of this country or not, whether he is loyal to this country or not. It does not matter if the state-aided minorities dismiss the time-honoured culture of this country "Sanatana Dharma" as abominable and as a path of the Devil. Thus in a mischievous way Nehru turned the concept of nationhood into a soulless geographic entity and bade good-bye to the established principles of nationhood founded on emotional unity and all that it implies. According to this Nehru"s notion (a dead substitute for a live Hindu nation), Hindus of India in absolute majority have to lose the inheritance of their traditional homeland. Nehru used his political might to propagate this soulless philosophy and this became the corner stone of all his policies that proved to be disastrous for the Hindus of India. (To be continued...) India's Secularism @ http://indiasecular.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/india-and-secularism/ "Muslims say they are proud to be Muslim, Christians say they are proud to be Christian, Sikhs say they are proud to be Sikh, and Hindus say they are proud to be … "secular." |
1.08%? why do they use these unusual numbers, like .27% before? must
be because, like manmohan singh, they are so keen on the ancient hindu
significance of 108, and its fractions :-)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=aJd1Td6ZKAao&refer=home
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Naresh
That explains why Sheila Dikshit calls Bangladeshi illegals - honoured guests
http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/nov/23delhipolls-bjp-says-it-will-form-next-government-in-delhi.htm
congress-CM-sheelaJEE:
100`s of scams you created and brilliantly executed.
i`ll list only five, ok?
1. BRT corridor:
u gave 80 crores project to ur son-in-law
(a muslim, and ur daughter is, er...was hindu)
son-in-law has no qualifications except a rabid islamic preacher.
u gave 80 crores to him,
to write a research report:
on how BRT corridor is doing!
80 CRORES FOR A PAPER PRINTOUT!
2. u bought low floor buses:
You paid 1 crore per bus.
Tamil-nadu pays 20 lakhs for same identical bus!
DID U NOT POCKET 80 LAKHS PER BUS? (for 10,600 buses right?)
3. that 1,500 private bus operation,
run by ur son-in-law.
Did u not move our Banks money, to purchase these 1500 buses?
ZERO COST TO SON-IN-LAW !
4. Lucrative bus contracts:
buses to pickup and dropoff govt employees:
you son-in-laws bus company, does it, right?
Delhi Govt pays for it right?
Each ride within delhi, costs Delhi treasury, Rs. 206 per day !
Rs 206 for a bus ticket!
5. Metro contracts:
u signed contracts with BIG builders to build METRO RAIL.
what is in those contracts?
- if company does work,
delhi govt pays say Rs 100/day.
- if company does NOT DO ANY WORK,
delhi govt pays Rs 1,200/day!
THE COMPANIES STOPPED WORKING!
NOW FIGHTING CASES IN COURT!
COMMONWEALTH_GAMES UNDER THREAT!
Govt treasury vanishing!
6. electricity_board sold to reliance:
U sold it and its PRIME_VALUABLE_GOVERNMENT_land.
all valued at RS. 27,000 crore.
BUT U SOLD FOR 3,000 CRORE.
DID U NOT POCKET @24,000 CRORE YOURSELF?
no, he's not mad. he's just a good christist.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Naresh Khanna
Hate scan on school texts
- Arjun push for panel to question publishers, schools CHARU SUDAN KASTURI
Arjun Singh
New Delhi, Nov. 20: Human resource development minister Arjun Singh
has asked his officials to speed up plans to introduce a central panel
armed with legal powers to question publishers and schools on
textbooks alleged to be spreading communal hatred.
The National Textbook Council will specifically target books used at
schools run by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its affiliates, top
government officials said. The RSS runs a network of schools called
Saraswati Shishu Mandirs across the country.
But the powers of the council, the officials conceded, would be
extremely limited, effectively making it only a political tool in an
election season rather than an agent to curb books that spread hatred.
Six states are in the middle of conducting elections. The Lok Sabha
polls are scheduled for 2009.
While it can call publishers and schools to question contents of a
textbook, the council cannot order any action against them if it finds
the textbooks are indeed spreading disharmony. "The council can only
counsel, not act against the publisher or school," a source said.
Arjun's prod follows a letter to him and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
from chemicals and fertilisers minister Ram Vilas Paswan last week,
urgently seeking their intervention in preventing textbooks used in
RSS schools from "fabricating history".
The HRD minister's hurry to form the council, articulated to his
officials earlier this week, also indicates a possible return to the
"desaffronisation" agenda that he followed four years ago, sources
said.
The textbook council was first proposed by a sub-committee of the
Central Advisory Board on Education in 2006, and the HRD ministry
started working on a draft law to create it.
But the government appeared to lose its initial interest in pushing
through the council bill quickly, a source said, adding: "That
interest has now been reactivated."
The HRD ministry has received comments from all ministries on the
proposed bill. It may move a note before the cabinet "now that the
political signal has come", the source said.
The bill makes it clear that the council is aimed at textbooks that
promote religious intolerance or hatred for certain religions.
According to its mandate under the bill, the council cannot, however,
address any other form of intolerance — for instance, along the lines
of caste, race or gender — that may allegedly be spread through
textbooks.
It also cannot intervene in cases of factual inaccuracy, or instances
where the content of a textbook is unsubstantiated and challenges
traditional culture and practice, sources said.
They cited the example of a primary school textbook that said a family
of four would always be happier than a family of eight as it would
have more to eat and better clothes to wear.
An MP had complained to the HRD ministry that the lesson would breed a
generation of people who would dump their parents once they started
their own families, the sources said.
http://www.telegraphindia.com//1081121/jsp/nation/story_10141314.jsp#
But the real punch is in the tail of the document. The final paragraph says: “Advanced economies, the IMF, and other international organisations should provide capacity-building programmes for emerging market economies and developing countries on the formulation and the implementation of new major regulations, consistent with international standards.”This is something we should be vigilant against. These guys don't want to fight fair, and always want to keep the playing field and the game rigged in their favour.
