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CMs’ boycott of PM Iron Lady's release |
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Perils of wielding the lathi
Tamasha at Wagah border
Middle East crisis: Questions we need to ask British fighters make up a quarter of foreign
jihadists
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CMs’ boycott of PM First, Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was heckled, reportedly by BJP workers, in the presence of Prime Minister Modi on Tuesday. Then on Thursday it was the turn of Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren getting the same treatment even though before attending the function at Ranchi he had asked the PMO to ensure that he was not put to any embarrassment while sharing the stage with Modi. The same day Maharashtra Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan decided to skip the Modi function at Nagpur to lay the foundation of a Metro. Chavan had a reason to be cautious as he had faced an unpleasant situation at Solapur earlier. The Hooda incident firmed up his resolve. It is possible, as the BJP claims, people may be unhappy with their governance, but the way the non-BJP chief ministers are jeered at Modi functions and the Prime Minister’s silence and refusal to intervene suggests a pattern and a larger purpose. Maharashtra, Haryana and Jharkhand are going to the polls later this year along with Jammu and Kashmir. Given the tight security for the PM, trouble-makers can’t go anywhere near his function. Ordinary people, even if they have genuine grievances against a government, dare not shout at a CM in the presence of a large security force. Obviously, it is a manufactured BJP anger directed only at the rival party CMs set to face the electorate. The BJP is well aware that any protest in the presence of the PM would get wide publicity and thus serve the party’s political strategy of creating an anti-Congress wave. But the short-sighted goal of winning elections will have serious long-term consequences. The chief minister of an opposition-ruled state may stop extending basic courtesies to the visiting PM. Important Bills and reforms like the GST may not get through in the absence of cooperation from the Congress, already piqued at the denial of the post of Leader of the Opposition and sack of some UPA-appointed Governors. The PM, who talks of strengthening federalism, may end up weakening it further. He should rein in his over-enthusiastic party
leaders.
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Iron Lady's release IT took Irom Chanu Sharmila 14 long years to be set free from the custody of the state that kept force-feeding her. The order has come from a sessions court in
Imphal, dismissing the argument that Irom was attempting to commit suicide by way of hunger strike. Her demands are still not met. On November 2, 2000, Irom witnessed ten civilians being shot by Assam Rifles soldiers while waiting at a bus stop in Malom town,
Manipur. The victims included a 62-year-old woman and an 18-year-old 1988 National Child Bravery Award
winner. Irom began to fast in protest against the killings, demanding the repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act
(AFSPA), which gives complete impunity to the armed forces personnel, who can search, arrest and even execute any individual in the areas where it is in force. Mahatma Gandhi, who was arrested several times by the British, was never booked for attempting suicide through hunger strike. Irom was booked under Section 306 of the IPC for showing solidarity with those whose basic rights were violated under the
AFSPA. A poet who cannot be equated with terrorists for her peaceful protest, she has been released every 364th day, to be re-arrested the next day, as required under the Section 306 provisions. One more case has been slapped against her in the Delhi High Court for attempted suicide; therefore, it is to be seen if the “world's longest hunger striker” is finally able to regain her right to freedom. It is ironical that while there is a move to repeal Section 309
(criminalising suicide) on the recommendation of the Law Commission which was taken up by the Home Ministry, the same law is used to violate basic human rights of a peace-loving human rights activist. The law should be repealed to maintain the democratic rights and dignity of protesters.
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Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less. — C. S. Lewis
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The war and swadeshi DOES the European war in any way promote or stimulate Swadeshi industries in India? This question has been asked because of the difficulties, if not, the impossibility, of importing European goods into India as before the war. A new condition has been created now by which each country will have to provide its own wants to a great extent. The British are already taking advantage of capturing German and Austrian trade, and it is stated that the Indian cotton mills will derive the advantage of increased output. The export of cotton has been stopped and its price will fall. Will the mills be able to utilize all the cotton available? That depends on the demand for mill products, now that Manchester and Lancashire goods are not likely to be sent as largely as before. Excepting cotton industry there seem to be few other industries that can be promoted in India at the present day.
Great Britain and the war THE English mail papers that left London on the 31st July contain interesting discussions on whether or not Great Britain should stand aloof from the impending war. There were two different opinions represented by the Times and the Standard, the one urging British participation and the other British neutrality. If the war should break out said the Times, “we must make instant preparations to back our friends, if they are made the subject of unjust attack. That is not merely a duty of friendship. The days of 'splendid isolation,' if they ever existed, are no more.” As opposed to this view, the Standard wrote: “We are under no compulsion to follow her (France) in the adventure.” However, now that the war is declared it is the duty of all patriotic citizens to support the authorities.
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Perils of wielding the lathi There is no grace in some of the actions undertaken by the Narendra Modi government. The replacement of Governors by a new government coming to power has been done before by the Congress party. But never before has a Governor been sacked two months before her retirement after she was sent on a punitive transfer a month earlier as the treatment meted out to Ms Kamla Beniwal. Everyone knows the background to the new government's animosity to Ms Beiniwal. She tangled with Mr Modi during his stints as chief minister of Gujarat, most notably over the appointment and powers of the Lokpal. Ultimately, Mr Modi had his way by first delaying the appointment for years and then diluting his powers. More generally, Congress-appointed Governors who did not take the hint were threatened with implied punitive measures. The main point the Modi government was trying to get across was not only one of decisiveness and resolve but of using strong-arm methods to have its way. The Speaker of the Lok Sabha, reflecting the consensus in the BJP, chose not to grant the Congress the official position of the Leader of the Opposition because it did not have the required strength in the House. It would have been an act of grace to give the largest opposition party the formal rank, instead of citing old precedents. There is little room for niceties or grace in the RSS and Parivar philosophy. The compulsory morning lathi drills at every shakha are symbols of how problems should be resolved. And over the decades we have seen how the Parivar intervenes in settling political disputes, the most spectacular action being the demolition of the Babri mosque. More frequently, the objects of the Parivar ire are directed at painters — M.F. Husain being a favourite target ultimately hounded out of the country to die abroad — or women forced out of bars or enforcing dress codes on them. Obviously, the return of a BJP government at the Centre has given encouragement to the party’s supporters to indulge in their concept of social and political decorum. It is an open question whether once it settles down to governing the country, instead of individual states, the BJP will change its methods of conducting business. For the present, the party is confusing decisiveness with boorishness and the instinctive Parivar habit of employing the lathi, figuratively and otherwise, that is part of its gene. The new BJP president and Mr Modi’s confidant, Mr Amit Shah, has declared from the housetops that his mission is to change the Congress narrative, which has been that of independent India and of the long independence struggle before it. Although the plan seems to be to inculcate it at an early school level by mass indoctrination, the attempt is to change the outlook of future generations. In a similar vein, school textbooks are being rewritten to suit the mélange of RSS myths and religiosity. In more immediate terms, the attempt is to place RSS ideologues and sympathisers in key positions, beginning with the Indian Council of Historical Research. And as has been widely broadcast, the main ministry dealing with higher institutes of excellence and education has been placed in charge of a school leaver. This is Mr Modi's way of thumbing his nose at conventional wisdom. Every age and era has its own messiah. We cannot turn back the clock and bring back the Jawaharlal Nehru days. But the functioning of a democracy presupposes certain norms not merely in justifying actions legally but also in following basic rules of civilized conduct. If such conduct is thrown to the winds, a needless antagonism is brought to turning the wheels of a democracy. There seems to be little appreciation in the higher echelons of the Modi government that while a determined chief minister can ride roughshod in a state, translating the same methods to the national level is immensely more arduous. Even if the long-term objective of the BJP and the Sangh Parivar is to convert the country’s people to its way of thinking, the limits of political tolerance of the public will dethrone the BJP before it reaches that point, if ever. One problem, of course, is that the RSS is an organisation with a missionary zeal and has been steadfast in pursuing its objectives, despite its troubling history. At one stage, it was enmeshed in the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, was proscribed and resuscitated. It prospered during the six years of the first BJP government, but has had to endure a decade of the return of Congress rule. There was the glow of the demolition of the Babri mosque for a time, but the RSS has been seeking to build its fences in the meantime. It gambled on offering full support to Mr Modi's leadership of the BJP in the correct belief that he would be a winner. Now that he has delivered, the intense phase of RSS indoctrination must start. Here begins a conflict of interests between the BJP and its convincing win on the one hand and the RSS’s own agenda. For the RSS, the propagation and implementation of its core beliefs often embodied in the concept of Hindutva is life’s ambition. Mr Modi, on the other hand, must govern and bring about a measure of modernisation and prosperity to the country. Thus far, Mr Modi has given the RSS low-hanging fruit by indulging the whims and superstitions of the Sangh Parivar. If scholarship is to be sacrificed in educational institutions to propitiate the RSS gods, so be it. Larger questions of national well-being, progress and prosperity remain unanswered. Inevitably, running an efficient and modern government will necessitate the demarcation of the RSS sphere of influence from the rigours of administering. Mr Modi succeeded in relegating the more difficult elements of the Parivar in Gujarat. His problem is that the RSS leaders will remain dissatisfied with symbolic gestures and will demand their pound of flesh. However, the nation must reconcile itself to the government's penchant for adopting coarse methods for implementing decisions. There is no civility in the RSS rule book in preaching and conducting business, schooled as the organisation is in the motto “jiski lathi, uski bhains” (one who wields the lathi owns the buffalo}.
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Tamasha at Wagah border The Wagah border is the 'Berlin Wall of Asia.' While the two Germanys demolished the wall and reunited, the one between India and Pakistan appears insurmountable. The ground for summit-level talks is laid with an exchange of fire and lobbing shells at each other. The result is doomed even before the talks begin. The uniform of the Border Security Force and the Sutlej Rangers is colorful. When the drill is in full flow, it appears akin to the 'dancing of peacocks. Six feet tall soldiers on both sides are chosen based on their fitness levels and the length of the moustache. It is a choreographed show of contempt and ‘rabble rousing’ by two nations perpetually finding ways to normalise relations and live like brothers. On August 15 this year I switched to a TV channel showing the ceremony. The familiar stomping of feet, aggressive gesturing and contemptuous shaking of hands in the background of cries of ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’ and ‘Jeeve Jeeve Pakistan’, there were two additions this year. A commando each from India and Pakistan in dark glasses marched up to hand-shaking distance and kept staring at each other for 40 minutes. Who blinked first no one knows due to the dark glasses. The other addition: a tit-for-tat gesture to counter the smart drill of the two women constables from the ‘mahila’ wing of the BSF. A matronly looking ‘mohtarma’ stood ‘savdhaan’ on the Pakistan side of the divide and did not move her butt at all. I am convinced that at the last minute the services of the ‘Principal Matron’ of ‘Military Hospital’, Lahore, were requisitioned for the ceremony to counter the presence of the Indian women constables. In 2008, the high point of our visit to London was the ‘Changing the Guard’ ceremony at Buckingham Palace. This is a process involving a new guard exchanging duty with the old guard. It was a beautiful morning and I and my wife walked from Oxford Street to Buckingham Palace through the Hyde Park. The Guard which mounts at Buckingham Palace in their full uniform of red tunics and bearskins is divided into two detachments: the Buckingham Palace Detachment and the St James Palace Detachment. Each detachment is commanded by a Lieutenant. The handover is accompanied by a guards' band. The colour of the battalion providing the guard is carried by a Second Lieutenant. A well-rehearsed solemn ceremony of precision drill is witnessed by thousands of people every day. No unnecessary sound. No jibes, no taunts. Somebody tapped me from behind. ‘Myself Jeet Singh from Patiala’.
Bhaaji pade likhe lagde ho. Tussi inhan nu suggestion deyo ke janta nu bewakoof na banana, te parade Wagah ton sikh ke
aan.
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Middle East crisis: Questions we need to ask For centuries, governments told their soldiers and their people to “Know Your Enemy”. The problem with the Isis “Caliphate” — and it is a big problem for President Obama after journalist James Foley's murder — is that we don't know who it is. We are told of its butchery, cruelty, its kidnapping of women, its burying alive, its viciousness towards Christians and Yazidis and its public beheadings, but that is all. Even the Isis leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, comes across as a mad combination of the Mahdi who murdered Gordon of Khartoum, the assassinated Osama bin Laden and Oliver Cromwell, who did to the civilians of Drogheda what the Muslim Lord Protector al-Baghdadi has done to his enemies.
Unspeakable enemy Foley's ritual slaughter is enough to dissuade even the most foolhardy of journalists from seeking an interview with al-Baghdadi. Never before in the Middle East has so much land been out of bounds to the Western media. So ignorant are we of this Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant — a dark land in which the reports we see of it are their own phone videos — that the Obamas, Camerons and Hammonds can only gnash their teeth at this unspeakable enemy. Easy reaction — but not much to go on. Yet Isis knows how to do one thing: Confront Obama with his very own hostage problem, the same conundrum Tony Blair faced when Ken Bigley appeared before the video lens. Do you ignore the warnings, thus proving that you don't care about your individual citizens when undertaking military operations — which is the truth — or do you turn into Jimmy Carter, curtsy to every whim of your enemies, go down on one knee and tell the Pentagon to “Hold it right there”? Now Obama has seen the next American reporter threatened with beheading. Will he blink? He can't, can he?
Fearful day So I suspect the answer will be what presidents and prime ministers have always done best in the Middle East, and announce that Foley's murder shows not only just how awful Isis is — but how important it is to go on bombing it in order to destroy the wretched institution. In other words, turn the sadistic Isis reaction to the air strikes into the reason why America is carrying out the air strikes. After all, we were bombarding Isis because it was killing Yazidis and dispossessing Christians and threatening Kurds. And Iraq. Now we have another reason to bomb al-Baghdadi's “Caliphate”. For journalists, day before yesterday was a fearful day. Thirty years ago, Arabs would acknowledge our special role as neutral observers. As the years have gone by — and as journalists have been killed by American military forces and Israeli soldiers and Iraqi rebels (and Arab militias), so our vulnerability has grown infinitely greater.
Callous governments When our chum, the Egyptian Field Marshal Abdol Fottah al-Sissi, locks up journalists for months, precious little do Western governments care about them. When our own masters show so little concern for our fate, is it any surprise that Isis -or Isil or whatever - are prepared to kill them. Sure, we don't execute them. But that's not a significance Isis is going to take much interest in. There are two truths that the West is going to have to face about al-Baghdadi's savage and dotty "Caliphate": These executioners began their careers — or their predecessors did — in the video-murderers of the anti-American resistance in Iraq; and however disgusting their activities, there are hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslims who live in the area of the Caliphate and who have NOT fled for their lives. This, of course, makes unhappy reading. If the "Caliphate" is so revolting, disgusting, gruesome in its purity-driven brutality, how come all these people —Iraqis and Syrians — did not flee along with their Christian brothers? Are a few thousand armed fighters really able to coerce so many people over such a vast tract of the Middle East? Let's go back to the months and years that followed the 2003 Anglo-American invasion. The rebels or insurgents felt able to demonstrate extraordinary cruelty against their captives. I was once offered a videotape in Fallujah of a man having his throat cut by hooded men. It took me some time to realise that the victim was almost certainly a Russian soldier and his murderers were Chechens. Someone had brought this video to Fallujah so that the future butchers of the resistance could learn from it. This is the epic violence which our invasion unleashed. And most Sunni Muslims stayed in their towns and cities and went on living there while their brothers — the Isis citizens of the future — went about their grisly work. In other words, the “Caliphate” obviously does not appear to be so terrifying to them as it does to us. Is there a problem here? Or is it just a matter, as the Americans seem to think, that the Sunni tribes — those all-purpose mini-societies which we depend on when things go wrong — have only to be bought over or their national government made more “inclusive” after the departure of al-Maliki to bump off al-Baghdadi? These are the questions we should ask. In his last weeks, Osama bin Laden was expressing his revulsion at the sectarian nature of “Islamist” attacks — he even received a translation from Yemen of an article I wrote in The Independent in which I described Al-Qa'ida as “the most sectarian organisation in the world”. Things have moved on. At least when I met bin Laden, I didn't fear for my life.
— The Independent
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British fighters make up a quarter of foreign
jihadists THE brutal beheading of US journalist James Foley by a Briton fighting in the ranks of Isis, which calls itself Islamic State, is the latest — and most shocking — example of British jihadists committing atrocities in Syria and Iraq. Britain accounts for around one in four of all European fighters who have pledged their allegiance to Isis, with an estimated 500 Britons among 2,000 foreign fighters from across Europe. One reason is the sheer ease with which people can get to Istanbul in Turkey, and then catch a bus to get into neighbouring Syria, according to Charlie Cooper, a researcher at the Quilliam Foundation. Isis wants to “show off” its foreign fighters as part of its propaganda, he added. And the unnamed man who beheaded Mr Foley “will have committed himself entirely to furthering the aims of the Islamic state” and “completely rejected his British nationality”. The killing of the American journalist was evidence that British jihadis were “some of the most vicious and vociferous fighters” in Syria and Iraq, said Shiraz Maher, a senior researcher at the International Center for the Study of Radicalisation at King's College London. They are “very much at the forefront of this conflict,” with roles ranging from suicide bombers to executioners, he added. Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond called the killing an “appalling example of the brutality of this organisation” and admitted that “significant numbers” of Britons are involved in “terrible crimes, probably in the commission of atrocities”. Professor Anthony Glees, of the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham, told The Independent: “Why are there Brits there? In my view, this is because Islamist extremist ideologies have been able to be spread with relative ease in our country under the cover of ‘religion’, ‘free speech’ and ‘multiculturalism’. He added: “A small number of British Muslims have been brainwashed by so-called preachers, from western values and convinced that they must kill to create a global caliphate.” And they are willing to die for their beliefs. Abdul Waheed Majeed, a 41-year-old father of three from Crawley, Sussex, died in a suicide bomb attack on a jail in Aleppo in February. Many other Britons have been killed in the fighting. Earlier this month, 25-year-old Muhammad Hamidur Rahman, a former Primark supervisor from Portsmouth, became the latest to die, bringing the total number of Britons killed to 19. Meanwhile, British fighters continue to make their presence felt online. Last week, images emerged of 23-year-old Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, from London, holding the severed head of a soldier with the caption: “Chilling' with my homie or what's left of him.” Radicalised Britons, who call themselves the “Baadiya Boys,” after their original base in Syria, are among the fighters who have raped and killed thousands of Yazidi refugees in northern Iraq. Another British fighter, Reyaad Khan, 20, from Cardiff, has boasted of preparing for “martyrdom ops” and planning “fireworks” in a series of tweets over recent weeks in which he has also claimed to have “executed many prisoners”. And recently it emerged that Nasser Muthana, 20, from Cardiff, had posted images on Twitter of a destroyed military building in northern Syria, claiming: “I'm getting good with these bombs.” Muthana, who is in Syria with his 17-year-old brother Aseel, describes himself on Twitter as a “soldier of the
Islamic State”. — The Independent
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