Friday, February 13, 2009

Manmohan & Dubya

Here is an interesting take by poster Rudradev at Bharat Rakshak Forum. Posting in full as the thread might be yanked off due to the politically correct admins at BRF. Rudradev btw has posted some gems before too. I have saved one particular post of his which succinctly sums up the Democrats worldview, especially as it relates to India & Indians. Will post it at an appropriate time.

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http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4740&sid=b45baf44f0b07d125c08cb3a9d153c80

On the 20th of January, we were subjected to the spectacle of Manmohan Singh behaving like a heartbroken grade-school groupie, when with tears in his eyes, he publicly told George W. Bush that he "loved" him. We might have been embarrassed, if Manmohan Singh hadn't already jaded our capacity for embarrassment in so many far more damaging ways.

On the face of it there don't seem to be many shared characteristics between the ideologies of the INC and the Bush Republicans. Manmohan Singh has earned a reputation for pusillanimity in matters of national security, even in the face of the gravest terrorist provocation, that is in stark contrast to the hawkishness of an American President who started two wars during his tenure.

And yet, if one looks beyond the immediate personas of these two leaders and compares their styles of disastrous governance... one discovers that they do, in fact, have much in common.

1) "ACT LIKE YOU KNOW BEST, AND SILENCE ALL QUESTIONERS. IT FOOLS ALL OF THE PEOPLE FOR LONG ENOUGH".

Firstly, both the Bush and the MMS regimes have made it a matter of doctrine to govern in the most obdurately autocratic manner possible. During the Bush regime's run-up to the Iraq war, all strategies (or lack thereof) were formulated in the utmost secrecy; what little information was shared with political leaders outside the Neocon fold turned out to be mostly false, and what was fed to the American people was sheer drivel.

During Manmohan Singh's pursuit of the "Indo-US Nuclear Deal", Congress stooges hurried to clinch a bad bargain with Washington so that the Nehru-Maino Dynasty could claim the credit for what Jaswant Singh had prudently begun to explore with Strobe Talbott. At that time, we saw much the same behaviour from the GOI as the Bush regime had demonstrated during the Iraq run-up. Despotic arrogance, an undemocratic refusal to consult the full spectrum of public constituencies as reflected in the sizeable number of opposition party seats in parliament, and a contemptuous dismissal of the Indian people's right to know how much of our hard-won strategic deterrent was being frittered away in exchange for a possible lemon.

Ultimately, Bush's Iraq war turned out to cost the American national interest dearly, even if it did benefit interested parties close to the ruling oligarchy. We still don't know what damage the Manmohan Nuclear Deal has done, but the GOI's reluctance to make public a cost/benefit analysis speaks volumes. I'm sure somebody has benefited, and I'm sure it isn't the Indian people... or Manmohan Singh wouldn't be hiding the details from them.


2) "WHEN MAKING APPOINTMENTS, PICK CANDIDATES FOR SERVILITY. WHO NEEDS COMPETENCE?"

Second, the extent of obvious cronyism in political appointments, and further, the extent to which sheer incompetents received key posts as a result of such cronyism, is a hallmark of both the Bush and the MMS administrations.

Everyone in the USA remembers FEMA head Mike Brown being congratulated by Bush in the aftermath of the non-response to Hurricane Katrina... "heck of a job, Brownie". Not quite as dramatic, but equally harmful, was Bush's stubborn backing of any of his picks... be they Donald Rumsfeld in Iraq and Afghanistan, or Harriet Myers as a candidate for Supreme Court Justice... even as their hopeless ineptitude became unbearably obvious.

It is the same with the Manmohan Singh regime. We've all seen the worth of Home Minister Shivraj Patil and National Security Adviser M K Narayanan in the wake of the Mumbai attacks. Yet, the GOI persists shamelessly with extra-constitutional attempts to get the extremely shady Mr. Chawla appointed Chief Election Commissioner, even as the present CEC recommends he be sacked for incompetence and corruption. And of course there's the outright shielding of criminals wanted by the Indian courts, such as Octavio Quattrochi.

Now it may be argued that Congress governments, especially those under Dynasty rule, have always made nepotism and cronyism the guiding principles behind their political appointments. Perhaps so. However, here's the difference: those earlier regimes, under JL Nehru, Indira Gandhi and even Rajiv had individuals at the helm who (at some level) cared about India and her interests. They appointed cronies, but at least they picked cronies capable of doing the jobs they were assigned. The Italian {Heroine} of 10 Janpath feels not the slightest obligation to consider the Indian national interest in the political appointments she dictates. Like the House of Bush in its Saudi dealings, she is unburdened by conscience or patriotism, and her sole concern is sustaining a national culture of misgovernance that ensures the continuing domination of the Dynasty for the foreseeable future.

3) "WHEN USEFUL, SUBVERT NATIONAL INSTITUTIONS. WHEN NEEDED, SUBVERT THE CONSTITUTION. ULTIMATELY THE REPUBLIC WILL PICK UP THE TAB".

The passage of the Patriot Act, and various ancillary pieces of legislation like the wiretapping bill, are subversions of the United States constitution that the Bush regime became notorious for. The extent of illegal spying, intimidation of political opponents and intrusion into the lives of private citizens that these tools were used to accomplish has yet to become clear. If indeed the Obama administration has granted immunity to its predecessors as rumored, it may never become clear at all.

The INC's subversion of India's national security apparatus to its own political agenda, however, has been equally blatant. From September 2008 onwards, we saw the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad pressed into extra-constitutional service as a Congress Gestapo; systematically persecuting Hindu spiritual figures such as Sadhvi Pragya Thakur on trumped-up terrorism charges; imprisoning and slandering a highly decorated serving military officer, Lt. Colonel Purohit, with similarly baseless allegations; and victimizing Hindu social workers like Swami Dayanand Pandey for their grassroots opposition to the predatory conversion activities of Christian missionaries (a cause dear to the heart of the Italian Sonia Maino).

We heard the deeply aggrieved head of the ATS, Hemant Karkare, reveal that these politically motivated anti-Hindu witch-hunts on which his Squad were being sent had consumed more than 90% of their time, effort and resources. This, even as worthwhile anti-terrorist investigations, such as those into the Delhi and Ahmedabad blasts, were deliberately snuffed out by Congress functionaries for reasons of political expediency and minority vote-banking.

We saw the hijacking of India's anti-terrorist apparatus continue until, despite ample forewarning, the Congress regime failed to prevent the terrorist attacks against Mumbai on the 26th of November 2008. A day when the exhausted Mr. Karkare went before the Congress Home Minister of Maharashtra to plead that his squad be relieved of the witch-hunt so that they may get back to doing their jobs... just hours before falling to a Pakistani terrorist's assault rifle not ten miles away.

Yet, what is a little hijacking of state machinery when the Congress government has successfully managed to hijack the Indian Constitution itself? Just as the Bush administration strove to accumulate unprecedented powers to the Executive, by browbeating the Legislative and undermining the Judiciary organs of the United States government; just as Dick Cheney became a creature with far more independent authority and far less accountability than any US Vice President in History... we have our own Sultana presiding over the Indian Republic with absolute power and complete impunity. Sonia Gandhi is not Prime Minister; she is not answerable to the elected representatives of the Indian people in the same way as even the most autocratic of Indian Prime Ministers, like Indira Gandhi, have ultimately been. In fact, she is not answerable at all... but she commands the blind obedience of Manmohan Singh, the titular Prime Minister, and his entire government. Indian democracy has been subject to this perversion of the constitution for five years now, and with each passing month the perversion becomes more acute.

4) "STAB THE ARMED FORCES IN THE BACK WHILE PRAISING THEM TO THEIR FACES"

At one point, it emerged that the Bush administration had sent American soldiers to war in two countries while simultaneously cutting down on Veterans' benefits. The backstabbing was covered up by a great deal of jingoistic rhetoric, and didn't come to light until much later.

In making policy, the Congress regime has done its best to "cut the armed forces down to size". They have systematically deprived those who defend our nation of the funds desperately needed to modernize by purchasing foreign equipment; and simultaneously crippled our indigenous military R&D efforts with a paralyzing quantity of red tape. In doing so, they have undone all the NDA administration's efforts to bring our armed forces to fighting form in the aftermath of Kargil. Adding insult to injury, and compounding the severely degraded morale of our troops, Manmohan Singh's government has further slashed the already meagre salaries paid those who are ready to lay down their lives for our country.

Today, lacking the spine to address Pakistani terrorism and intransigence, the Congress regime blames our armed forces for a "lack of preparedness to fight a war". One must wonder if that lack of preparedness is thanks in large part to their own neglect and sabotage.

It is notable that both of these regimes have not hesitated to shove the serving members of their countries' armed forces into harms way as necessary, ill-prepared as they might be, out of sheer political expediency.This was seen in the US invasion of Iraq, where US armed forces went in woefully unprepared for the kind of war they were required to fight; as also in the haphazard response to the Mumbai terrorist attacks, when the panicked Congress government's pathetic excuse for a National Security administration sent detachments of NSG to storm terrorist-controlled buildings without even the benefit of floor plans.

We may think of Bush as a courageous leader... and indeed, it must be said for him that next to Manmohan Singh he looks like one. However, both regimes have shown their readiness, at the drop of a hat, to blame people in uniform for their own shortcomings and political failures.

And finally, of course, there is the big question mark as to what Manmohan Singh has done with the strategic deterrent bequeathed him by his predecessors, in his mad hurry to steal the BJP's thunder and clinch the Indo-US Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. That is one of those things we'd probably never want to find out; but may end up finding out, despite ourselves, after it's too late to do anything about it.

5) "CULTIVATE A KENNEL OF SMALL, TOOTHY, CONSTANTLY-BARKING MEDIA CORPORATIONS TO SCARE, DISTRACT AND LIE TO THE PUBLIC"

The story of how FOX news contributed to George W Bush's ascension to the Presidency is well known. At CEO Roger Ailes' command, they called the 2000 election for Bush even before the votes in Florida had been entirely counted. Since then, they were the faithful cheerleaders of every ill-advised Bush policy initiative. More importantly, they were used to mount character-assassinations and slander campaigns against political opponents... to distract the people's attention with irrelevant sensationalism at convenient times...and to maintain a constant pall of fear, rendering the public vulnerable to manipulation.

These tactics are identical to those being used, every day, by the vast majority of English language media in India today on behalf of the Congress government. The Indo-US Nuclear Deal was cheered on deafeningly, and its opponents demonized as paranoid or regressive, by Congress plants in any number of previously respectable newspapers.

The constant anti-Hindu diatribes of every media outlet were never more obvious, or more pronounced, than during the Malegaon witch hunts, when the carefully coined term "Hindu Terrorism" crawled across the front of every television screen in every Indian home hundreds of times every day. The anti-Hindu hysteria whipped up by that slander campaign against the alleged protagonists of the Malegaon blasts served its purpose of distraction while Islamist groups sympathizing with SIMI were pandered to in the Congress' unending quest for Minority Votes. So distracted were the Indian people by this spectre of "Hindu Terrorism" that the Pakistani terrorist attack on Mumbai took them utterly by surprise... just as it did the anti-terrorism squad.

The Congress continues to peddle fear at every turn. It elevates dangerous, anti-national organizations as far-side threats to its regional rivals; Raj Thackeray's MNS against the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra, the soft-Islamist PDP against the National Conference in Kashmir, the lunatic-fringe Sri Rama Sene against the BJP in Mangalore.

It then uses the consequences of its own elevation of such groups, to sow yet more fear among the people via sensationalist media coverage.

24-hour television reports of MNS goons assaulting North Indians in Mumbai, of atrocities by PDP-backed terrorists in Srinagar, of Sri Rama Sene idiots assaulting pub-goers in front of conveniently positioned television cameras...these things all serve a purpose. By engendering fear, such reports reinforce the Congress' message that they are the Sole Voice of Reason and Moderation; that any dissension from their centrist position equals dangerous anti-national extremism; and that the BJP and its supporters are as much of a threat to national survival as the Lashkar-e-Taiba.

One thing must be said for the Bush regime. Despite all their media manipulation, they never deliberately created negative media coverage harmful to the United States in order to serve their own political purposes.

Here the Congress has outdone them. One need only consider the myth of "Hindu terrorism against Christians", repeated ad-nauseam by the pro-Congress media, in the aftermath of Swami Laxmanananda's murder by pro-Missionary Maoist terrorists. One need only look at the fictitious numbers of "2,000", "3,000" and even "4,000 Muslims killed in the Gujarat riots" that the pro-Congress media continues to inflate year after year, because demonizing the Hindu parties is of greater importance than preventing the slander of Indian secularism by her enemies. And one need only read the Indian Express to find a completely concocted story about the RSS producing a soft-drink made out of "cow urine", penned by Congress hatchet-man Rajeev Khanna, which has found its way into every Hindu-bashing news outlet the world over not 24 hours since its inception.

To {Our Lady} of Janpath, none of this matters. It isn't her country, or her culture, that is being systematically denigrated by the clamour of her kept-media mouthpieces. It's ours.

So its really no surprise when her son, the Dynastic Heir Apparent, takes British Foreign Secretary David Miliband on a chummy tour of the provinces to observe the untouchable Slumdogs in their own habitat. And this, merely hours after said British Foreign Secretary has instructed us to give up Kashmir to the terrorist state of Pakistan, lest we face any more of the sort of well-deserved terrorist attacks that we saw in Mumbai last November.

No, not even the much reviled George W. Bush ever stooped that low.

6) "DRIVE THE ECONOMY INTO THE GROUND".

This couldn't be stated any more simply.

When George W Bush came to the White House, the American Economy was just coming off the Clinton boom, with multiple years of budget surpluses in its wake. He has now vacated it in the midst of the most disastrous crisis since the Great Depression.

When the BJP ran for re-election on their "India Shining" platform in 2004, the Congress responded to the slogan with derision. However, there's no arguing with the fact that we were enjoying an unprecedented 9+ % GDP Growth Rate at the time. Today, after five years of stewardship by the great architect of Indian liberalization, Manmohan Singh, and his pipsqueak Cambridge protege Chidambaram... that same economy is headed resolutely down the toilet.

Enough said.

4 comments:

Sakthi said...

Rajeev,

H1B restriction for TARP companies in US bill was defeated in senate. so Please update your info.. There is no protectionism visible in America

We are happy to inform you that the discrimination against skilled legal immigrants was yesterday successfully defeated in the conference committee of bill HR1.

This victory over negative labeling is a victory for all those key members of Immigrationvoice who traveled to DC during 2007 rally and re-contacted their lawmakers in the past 2 days to oppose such provisions.

Thank for the great effort. The anti-immigrant forces are conspiring to bring in more similar bills/ provisions. Such legislations would bring hardship to the immigrants and their families who are already supporting the US sluggish economy by working hard and paying taxes.

blogger said...

Its insane how negligent this government and sell-out media is,

India a terribly soft state: US experts

India will be vulnerable to more terrorist attacks along the lines of Mumbai, terrorism analyst Brian Jenkins from RAND and Ashley Tellis have told the US Senate's committee on homeland security.

CVSMurty said...

Kapidhwaja,

Why did Karkare's wife reject the monetary offer made by Narendra Modi? It is a mystery to me. Any guesses?

Satya

KapiDhwaja said...

@Murty,

It is Kaangressi media spin. Narendra Modi offered no money or anything else to Karkare's wife. I think Pioneer had a piece confirming the same.