It does not stop at 49.5 percent

The "deep state" is here and now ...

2011-12-09T17:42:00.001-05:00

The secular party has created an Orwellian regime of censorship, vendetta and propaganda by taking the worst elements from China and Islamic states.

Kapil Sibal flew off the handle when he saw some unsavory content related to the Queen on the internet. Well, at least that's what he claims, but within days, from being disturbed by morphed images of the royalty he went straight to being the valiant crusader who wants to preserve communal harmony by shielding innocent citizens from offensive religious content. To understand what this is all about, a little bit of context is necessary.

Public intellectuals of the "liberal" kind had a big problem on their hands when the secular party was back in power in 2004. The problem got exacerbated even more in 2009. Obviously, the old templates could not be used any longer, they would sound nutty even to the dimple enamored segment. Thus, the "deep state" was invented. This omnipotent and omnipresent (but invisible) creature was remotely controlled by Hindus and "corporates" (the latter seldom named though) and was causing all sorts of problems - killing tribals and minorities, enriching Hindus wrongfully, waging nuclear war against Pakistan, melting Himalayan glaciers by over consumption etc. Despite being in power, the secular party was helpless against the tide of evil that the "deep state" unleashed. Invisible Godzilla was wrecking dreams and cramping the style of secular intellectuals.

The secular party was quick to insert itself into this game of political fantasy football and soon we would see the beginning of the biggest con game in the history of democracy. While the liberal intellectual was battling the "deep state" (and barely able to contain it, mind you), their political counterparts were valiantly struggling with a mysterious entity called the - "Government". Government messed things up. Sonia Gandhi fixed it. Government did not allot grains for minorities. The Prince rode in with his cavalry and slayed the Government monster. Granaries were opened up and milk and honey flowed. Rahul Gandhi has started to outdo the likes of Evo Morales of Bolivia (who is known to fast against his own Government). The party had mastered the art of dissociation.

In a normal world, this is where editors and opinion makers stand up and call out in unison: BULLSHIT.

But India's public faces have been enthusiastically participating in and perpetuating the fraud.

Only problem is, skills in the art of dissociation and propaganda does not necessarily translate into Governance. So, we have the "dream team" suddenly deliver us the nightmarish prospect of another balance of payments crisis. Yet, India Inc. is largely oblivious to the train wreck that lies ahead. This was not achieved by accident, careful planning and execution went into this.

Consider this:

Assam Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi has remembered that he had once ordered allotment of a plot of land to the yoga guru for his institution in Guwahati. Gogoi has warned Ramdev that the same plot may be taken back if not used for proper purpose or left unused.

"He (Ramdev) had once approached me. I remember allotting him a plot of land. However, I do not know whether it was actually allotted or not. If the land was allotted and is not being used for the purpose it was given, it might be taken back as per the recent decision taken by my government on such land," Gogoi said. [Rediff.com]

There are at least a half dozen things that are wrong with the above passage, but one thing stands out - vendetta. Tarun Gogoi does not even know if any land was issued, but he was ready to confiscate such land, assuming such land had been issued and was being adversely used. This guy might have been a Subedar of Aurangzeb.

The Congress party and its minions have taken intimidation of dissenters to the level of fine arts. They have covered the entire breadth of political discourse. Corporate executives issue a statement, next day they are forced to issue a clarification. Government bureaucrats issue statements, they get transferred. Media for the most part has been pliable and willing. For instance, consider this: Tehelka's Shoma Chaudhury, appeared on an NDTV show to defend the Home Minister P. Chidambaram on the 2G scam issue. This is not her area of expertise or even demonstrated interest. Among other things, she seemed to suggest ministers can not be liable for policy decisions. Even when they are malafide? This coming from someone who rues exploitation of mineral resources? This is bizarre. A man like PC needs defending?

How do the odd dissenting voice in the media treated? Simple, by cutting off their life line. Consider this rare and brave editorial By DNA Editor Aditya Sinha:

This was not surprising because DNA recently has faced suspicion and hostility from the government which has apparently adopted an attitude of “you’re either with us or against us”. The prime minister’s media advisor has privately accused DNA of an agenda against the government, and its Editor-in-Chief of being close to a political party in the opposition. [Ambika Soni’s adventures in arm-twisting, DNA India]

If the stick is wielded against the wayward, the compliant majority is duly given their crunchy carrot treat. The chief editor of an investigating journal is suddenly bestowed with properties in exotic locations at Nainital and Goa. The latter acquisition having raised the hackles of the locals too! A leading TV channel is nearly insolvent and miraculously kept afloat by fund inflows from mysterious unknown institutional investors. The Govt of Maharashtra allots affordable housing to hundreds of journalists. Junkets and awards flow continuously in the right direction. Various advert campaigns glorifying the dynasty add up to several hundreds of crores and go to the obedient papers. The list continues.

Coming back to Kapil Sibal, in this environment of more or less controlled dissemination of info, what explains his sudden hissy fit? One could attribute it to one of three factors, and all of them likely played a role in this specific instance.

The first being peer pressure. It is a well known fact that career media persons (described above) have been at the receiving end of social media fact checking. It is becoming increasingly difficult to spin stories and external players (eg. Justice Katju) are sensing an opportunity. Clearly, it is an uncomfortable situation if it continues until 2014, when extra dozes of propaganda and misinformation will require to be served. So, while social media content by itself does not constitute a big electoral threat, coupled to a ground level agitation like the Lok Pal movement or a few strident newspapers and magazines, they can deal a fatal blow to the machine.

The second factor is internal palace intrigue of the Congress party. The online content is more likely to alarm the "young turks". Most likely, a certain young turk recently saw some content and flipped out. Sibal took that opportunity to play one over Chidu and Pranab. Pride could have played a role here too, if Sibal can armtwist every segment of the opinion industry, why can't the internet be tamed? Feasibility and priorities be damned. So, pre-screening internet content is just another Tughlaqian experiment logically extended to the virtual world from the $35 tablet.

The third and most important factor is of course UP elections. Congress has been going all out on sops and dropping $$$ like confetti. In fact it has ventured into a hitherto uncharted territory of Muslim quotas. Intriguingly, Mullahs and clerics have opposed quotas because they fear a fragmentation. Congress needs something drastic to neutralize this resistance.

For quite sometime now, Arab states have been demanding formalizing anti-blasphemy laws as part of UN charter. It will be a devastating blow to freedom of speech across the world. So far, it was been resisted. Having been turned away by Western nations (although plenty sympathetic voices within Left-Liberal polity there), the Arabs believe the key to achieve this is through China and India. China already favors censorship. stridently and violently muzzling its citizens' voices online and offline. If India can be brought around, it will give a fillip to their cause. Arab states are often able to inject their agenda into Indian politics, the most recent being the endorsement of "East Jerusalem" as a Palestine state capital by the Prime Minister.

Therefore, it is obvious that the secular party plans to dangle the carrot of a Sharia law for the internet in front of the UP Mullahs right in time for the elections.

If you think all this is new or recent, you would be terribly wrong. The secular party has been going about it for quite sometime now, albeit a bit more discreetly. Actually, not all of it has been all that discreet, but thanks to a pliant media, not that widely disseminated. For instance, how many do know that Abhishek Manu Singhvi actually participated in burning an unauthorized biography of Sonia Gandhi by a Spanish author? How many know senior Congress leaders showered blows (yes, actual physical blows) to protesters? But we digress.

While the party has always indulged in widespread espionage and unauthorized eavesdropping, it just went up to mind blowing levels in recent years. There has been pervasive phone tapping, bugging and even old styled straight up espionage against political opponents. Less than a third of IB staffers are actually used for national security, rest are engaged in spying for the secular party. Adverse information about political opponents tend to show up on media - for instance Kiran Bedi's TA bills.

As far as internet content goes, the party has been steadfastly pulling content off the net. For instance, as the Google transparency report shows, politically adverse content has been routinely removed. Likewise, content has been removed from other social networking sites like the Facebook.

All this might just have been the tip of the iceberg. While Sibal might have achieved limited success with Global players like Google or Facebook, local content providers have been far more pliable.

The Orwellian concept of pre-screening internet content predictably kicked up a firestorm of protests, but did this deter Sibal? Hardly. With the help of unofficial propaganda machine, Sibal has started spreading the canard that all this is to preserve communal harmony. India's allegedly toughest host did not venture to ask Sibal a simple question: why not do a private screening of the content that has already been removed to select few journalists? Instead Sibal could get away with showing a few cherry picked offensive material.

Now, truly Congress style, an Income Tax notice has been sent to Google. Sibal plans to continue his overtures with the internet companies.

To Summarize: The UPA dispensation has actually managed to implement 1984 and most people don't even know it. Political dissenters have been brought in line and the Government plans more. Forget about removing a few critical pieces from the internet, they actually plan Chinese style complete command and control over the entire information economy. In their sordid design, most of the country's intellectuals are willing and active participants - a few critical voices have been muzzled. UPA's censorship and propaganda has far transcended polemics and entered the hitherto uncharted territory of massaging sacrosanct national accounts figures like the GDP. As the country heads into fiscal armageddon because of unbridled spending, UPA's (dis)information minister Kapil Sibal locks horns with global internet giants - with the uneasy prospect of turning them away, deepening the crisis.

27% was the bait, here comes the switch ...

2011-12-04T18:40:00.001-05:00

Other Backward 'Classes', say hello to secularism:

8.6% OBC quota for minorities

NORA CHOPRA 4th Dec


	The UPA Government is all set to announce 8.6% reservation for minorities under the 27% OBC quota. The quota has been worked out on the lines of Kerala and Karnataka. Muslims will get 5% reservation, and the other minorities 3.6%. The matter will go to the Cabinet for final approval within two weeks of the final decision. [source]

It's only talk

2011-11-27T17:03:00.001-05:00

We have always said and sometimes it can be easily demonstrated that behind every human right / secularist or other type of bleeding heart lies a political motive. They consistently maintain that they condemn all human rights violations with the same fervor. Alas, their actions do not stand up to their claims. How do they get away with it? For one thing, they monopolize the opinion industry. For another, and there is a complex set of reasons behind this, they have usurped the international representation of Indian human rights. Ergo, when the US state dept. or various missionary fronts prepare their "religious freedom reports", who are their go to guys in India? A certain set of people.

The result is quite obvious. The groups that fall out of favor fall through the cracks. Human rights violations against Hindus that live as localized minority (WB, Assam, Kerala, pockets of TN/AP etc.), Kashmiri Pandits, Sikhs are some examples that come to mind.

The brutally violent pogroms of 1984 against Sikhs was one such chapter that was closed and shoved under the carpet by our Human Rights wallahs, ironically to be opened about a couple of decades later. We know how the essays read, or the TV shows factor it in. We also condemn ... Their heart is not in it and it shows.

If they were true to their words, and if they really wanted to make it up for the victims, for the last two days you should have read, heard and seen only this everywhere:

Sikhs targeted

As soon as the news of attack on Pawar reached NCP stronghold of Kolhapur and Satara, party workers staged demonstrations and called for a bandh. A Sikh youth, who was selling household utensils near the Kolhapur Municipal Corporation, was beaten up badly by NCP activists. However, he managed to save his life. In Satara, four trucks belonging to Sikhs were stoned.In Sangli, a bandh has been called on Friday. The activists stoned showrooms and vehicles. In Sangli, the activists burn the effigy of the attacker.

In Nashik, hundreds of NCP activists came out on the streets in protest against the attack on Pawar. Rasta roko, tyre burning and stoning of vehicles were reported. [DNA India]

But you did not, unless you really tried. Excuses were issues, covering communal violence reports apparently fuel "anger". Isn't that nice? Coming from lead journalists whose channels have kept certain items on loop, for nearly a decade, 365/24/7? Or consider this anguished editorial by a leading journalist - how she completely glosses over the episode.

The fact of the matter is, there are no rules. There is a war out there, and they want to prevail. "Human Rights" is merely a propaganda tool, never really there when it is most needed.

The King's speech

2011-09-25T13:00:00.001-04:00

A meta joke that has been making rounds recently is in the form of a picture with the caption "The most politically correct cartoon" or something to that effect. The picture is actually non-existent, clean white space gleams from within the borders where it should have been.

The Prime Minister's speech at the 66th UN General Assembly evoked that joke vividly. The contrast with the Israeli PM Netanyahu's rousing, passionate speech could not have been starker.

No one can claim that the ability to make excellent speeches is a necessary condition for being a successful leader. It is also most definitely not a sufficient condition, we have seen a supposedly grand speaker fall from grace within a couple of years and what a great fall it was. The fact that Manmohan Singh is rather deficient in the speech department is well known. As a matter of fact, it has been noticed and written about by the international commentariat rather widely, for instance:

When India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appeared on Indian national television a full 18 hours after terror attacks started ripping apart Mumbai, he achieved quite an amazing feat. He turned a national emergency, crisis and tragedy into a Grade A snooze fest.

The speech - which can be viewed here for anyone suffering from chronic insomnia - had all the urgency of a road safety public service announcement. Even the static graphic headlines "40 Held Hostage at Trident!" and "101 Killed in Attack!" plastered across his face on the TV screens had more life than Dr Singh, who read the autocue as if he was struggling through an on the spot translation of Pig Latin. [India's Prime Minister Hosts Pajama Party, Virginia M. Moncrieff / HuffingtonPost]

What is lacking in delivery, can be made up in content. But PM Manmohan Singh certainly wasn't trying, neither were his speech writers. Deeply scared of offending sensibilities, the speech was dumbed down until it resembled an incoherent rambling of platitudinous BS taken out of boilerplate speeches of various socialist leaders - with some bits from occasional psychotic rants of various middle-eastern despots. Add deep layers of masking tape to take out anything too edgy.

Dr. Singh the economist put the blame for economic and political crisis squarely on the "traditional growth engines" of US, Europe and Japan. India is willing to contribute, only if UN shows the way. The root of all problems is inflation. This is caused by bad effects of globalization. But please let's not erect barriers to trade. Terrorism is a problem. But the villains shall not be named. We support Palestine. By the way, with East Jerusalem as capital and hope Palestine and Israel become friends. Hail Rajiv Gandhi! All this is his vision. Ok, I am done. [Hey, where's all the people gone?]

At a time of deep political and economic crisis, Dr. Singh and a large part of his cabinet (up to 9 key ministers) are currently in New York. That is to say, like Bollywood movie song and dance numbers that suddenly teletransport protagonists to Switzerland, Singh and his men have taken the palace intrigue to the New York city. Perhaps this is just as well, since the true ruler is back in India.

One presumes that various foreign policy experts will be able to pick out nuggets of deep strategic thinking from this gibberish. But they are the experts, the kind that has been calling the shots for over six decades.

Policy wonks and think tanks and experts will likely congratulate themselves while picking up this award or that junket assignment - but the truth is, the clever by half approach is not working. The world is looking for results and action, all Dr Singh delivered was a speech. And a desperately bad one at that.

Our Hope for Peace Never Wanes ...

2011-09-24T12:28:00.001-04:00

Violence in Bharatpur

2011-09-18T23:47:00.000-04:00

"There could not have been a more communal rifle"
- Kavita Srivastava (PUCL)

The recent communal violence in the Gopalgarh village in Bharatpur district, Rajasthan, could be an interesting case study of how communal violence starts, how various stakeholders (including NGOs, human rights etc.) jump in and muck up the scene, the challenges involved for an administration to control such situations and last but not the least, how media goes about covering (or not covering) those incidences.

Rajasthan, like other parts of the country, has seen a steady stream of communal clashes in recent years. They have involved both internecine clashes within Muslim groups as well as clashes of Muslims with other groups. In this case, the clashes involved Meo Muslims and Gujjars.

Background:

Gopalgarh appears to be the only Muslim majority (60%) village in the Kaman assembly constituency which is held by MLA Zahida Khan of Congress. The rest of the six seats in the district are held by BJP. It is a neighboring district to Haryana's Mewat district, which is dominated by Meo Muslims. The Haryana Meo community holds massive clout over the Kaman constituency. Note: A Sunday Guardian report calls Gopalgarh a "Gujjar majority village" of 5000 with only 100 Muslim families.

Despite the curious demographic mix in this village which is influenced also by neighboring districts in surrounding states, the area has been largely free of communal trouble even during historical periods of communal strife.

Reason behind the dispute:

The reason behind the dispute was a plot of land which Gujjars claimed was a pond, while the Meo Muslims wanted as a graveyard. The dispute has existed for 42 years. In the 1950s, the land, which is part of a pond dug by kings in ancient times was by mistake clubbed with the graveyard near the mosque by a patwari (revenue official). There has also been court cases.

Graveyard related land issues create communal tension all over India, they have occurred in Delhi, West Bengal, all over. This is a contentious issue for which there is no easy solution. Naturally land requirement for burial grounds will keep going up. Where will this land come from? Land is a scarce resource everywhere, isn't it the root of all problems?

How the violence started:

Tension flared up in the few days preceding the violence, it is unclear what increased the tension - whether a legal move or an attempt by district admin to solve the dispute. There were meetings held with local Congress MLA Zahida Khan and a neighboring BJP MLA with community leaders but they failed to pacify the mobs that had gathered.

The exact trigger for the violence is unclear, with both communities blaming one another. What is clear is that the political leadership, including Congress MLA and district administration was already in the area. The Meo Muslims claim that Gujjars had barged into a Mosque, beat up the Imam and some others. Gujjars claim Meo Muslims set Gujjar houses on fire and looted their money. Then there was some issue about idol immersion in the pond and a cow slaughter.

It appears that in light of increased tension, there was already heavy deployment of cops in the area. The administration (at least the saner part of it) got wind of Meo Muslims from Haryana gathering in strength at the Mosque. Violence broke out either at the meeting or just after it. Both parties started firing at each other. Fearing an escalation, police opened fire to disperse the crowds. Since Meo Muslims were present in much larger strength in the area, they got the most of it.

Administration puts the death toll at 9, with dozens injured. Most (all?) of the dead are Muslims, the identified ones appear to be from outside the village, which would prove that there was indeed a large Muslim deployment from neighboring states.

Aftermath, NGO and Government Reaction:

Congress MLA Zahida Khan initially claimed that: "... considering the seriousness of the situation a heavy police force was rushed to the spot but when the situation went out of control, police opened fire". She also claimed to have witnessed the police firing herself: "I saw the police firing at the people. It was horrifying to see what was happening. I demand from the administration that the senior police officers in Bharatpur district be removed. There should be an inquiry by an independent agency into the incident".

However, later she made the curious claim that: "Denying reports of communal violence and exchange of fire between Meos and Gujjars, Zahida said it was a "sponsored programme" by police and RSS". - It is hard to see a violence not communal in nature, yet somehow instigated by a nexus of Police and RSS.

MLA Zahida Khan also made a statement that: "The district collector and SP were fair. But Additional SP O P Meghwal, Inspector Brijesh Meena and lower rank policemen were blatantly partisan. They misled the collector and the SP." Strangely enough though, both the District Collector and SP has been axed over the incident.

NGOs and Human Rights Groups poured into the village otherwise under curfew and heavy police protection and a virtual no go zone except for carefully selected people. Among the groups present were The People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) and Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind and the NGO Anhad. Kavita Srivastava of PUCL and noted secularist Shabnam Hashmi were also there and variously made allegations at RSS and district administration.

Other groups involved were Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan and Suchna and Rozgar Adhikar Abhiyan. Basically it was pouring NGOs. While the village was off limits to mainstream media, the Muslim news website TwoCircles and Sunday Guardian reporters made it there by being part of NGOs.

Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot has announced a compensation of Rs. 5 Lakhs for each of the victims families. It appears that aside from throwing a few mud balls randomly just to check if it will stick, Hindu organizations are no longer being blamed, at least with any amount of conviction. Congress is trying to find an escape route by putting the blame on police and district admin. Reportedly Sonia Gandhi has got involved into cleaning up the mess and the Congress is in "damage control" mode. Whatever that means.

Media Coverage:

Open any national (and many regional) TV news channel and you are likely to catch something about "riots" and "justice" etc. within 5 minutes, any day of the year, any time of day. Same thing if you open any national (and many regional) newspaper. Why is it then major riots such as the one we just discussed are being given a complete miss? Why don't the news broadcasters associations insist that Government allow them some access to communal violence affected areas?

Despite claiming the importance of "justice" over all other issues, media seems to be curiously shy in covering riots when they actually happen, like when it happened in Delhi or Adoni, AP or in Gopalgarh, Rajasthan.

Final Thoughts:

The Gopalgarh violence yet again demonstrated the challenges in preserving communal harmony in a socialist country - with vague notions of property rights and scars of a long tumultuous history, coupled with vested interests. It also raises serious questions about the role of certain NGOs. It is natural for groups involved in medial care or post trauma care to be sent to riot affected area. What were these ultra political outfits doing out there? Also, what's with that statement by PUCL General Secretary Srivastava (see picture) - even before all the inquiries are completed? She wasn't there when the firing happened, MLA Zahida Khan was. Even the autopsies aren't completed.

So, here we are, with a Secular Government at the center, a Secular Government at the State of Rajasthan, local MLA a Muslim belonging to the Secular party - yet, all the kings horses and all the kings men could not put communal humpty dumpty together in a tiny hamlet of Rajasthan.

Caught in the vice grip of secularism and socialism

2011-09-18T20:29:00.001-04:00

The recent New Delhi High Court blast and the even more recent Agra Hospital blasts were stark reminders of the fact that in terms of vulnerability we have not progressed one bit beyond the lofty promises made after 26/11, neither have we progressed beyond the usual meaningless rhetoric by secular intelligentsia.

The National Investigation Agency, set up with much fanfare, has not been able to solve any case in 3 years. It has been deployed as a political PR arm of the Congress party's core political machine. Meant to be an independent agency which would stitch disparate agencies across the country, cut down on rumors and be a force to reckon with, the agency has bickered with state polices, kept leaking vital information and generally been a nuisance. It directly reports to the vaunted Home Minister of UPA, P. Chidambaram. Media can't get enough of either the agency or its supreme head. After the Mumbai blasts, media tried level best to try and find "things that had improved since 26/11". Unfortunately, the stark images of blast injured being carried like cattle in India's maximum city in a dirty truck and headless chicken like contradictory statements issued by NIA officials put a spanner in media's let's make PC look bright project. Public saw through it.

The country is at the time of the post a victim of natural calamity as well, floods in Orissa, Earthquake in North East area. The army is involved at both places, thankfully as it is relatively independent of political interference.

It is clear that we are caught in between two false ideologies neither of which is able to serve their intended purpose. If socialism is slowly starving us, secularism is merely hastening the job for some of the more unfortunate among us, like those at Mumbai, Delhi or Agra.

Suzie's shenanigans

2011-08-31T00:40:00.004-04:00

It wasn't much of a surprise to see Arundhati Roy come out all guns blazing against the Anna Hazare movement. In an insinuation and innuendo laden interview with CNN-IBN, she "alleged" that the key members of the movement had received $ 400,000 from the Ford Foundation.

Arundhati Roy: [...] Just in order to point to the fact, a short article can just indicate the fact that it is in some way an NGO driven movement by Kiran Bedi, Arvind Kejriwal, Sisodia, all these people run NGOs. Three of the core members are Magsaysay award winners which are endowed by Ford foundation and Feller. I wanted to point to the fact that what is it about these NGOs funded by World Bank and Bank of Ford, why are they participating in sort of mediating what public policy should be? I actually went to the World Bank site recently and found that the World Bank runs 600 anti-corruption programmes just in places like Africa. Why is the World Bank interested in anti-corruption? [...]

[Link: Jan Lokpal Bill is very regressive: Arundhati Roy / CNN-IBN Interview transcript]

On this blog, we have always taken the position that fund inflow to NGOs, especially the undisclosed / underhanded variety is highly dangerous. So, we decided to investigate. The Ford Foundation keeps a detailed list of grants and provides a search page.

Some of the interesting grants:

Centre for Study of Society and Secularism

2007: $110,000

2009: $191,000

Interesting members: Ram Puniyani

Center for Study of Developing Societies (CSDS)

2008: $350,000

2008: $200,000

Interesting members: Ashis Nandy, Madhu Kishwar, Yogendra Yadav

Sabrang Trust

2009: $250,000

Interesting members: Teesta Setalvad

Ford Foundation also donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Jawaharlal Nehru University, Jamia Milia Islamia, Center for Policy Research, Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Christian Dalit Liberation movement and many other NGOs. Their funds appear to reach practically the breadth of India's Left-Liberal-Secular establishment.

In other words, in terms of taking monies from the "evil" Ford Foundation, Suzie's friends aren't doing too badly.

How the "civil" society got its groove back

2011-08-27T15:49:00.011-04:00

Most of us have heard this fable in one form or another:

A patient came from afar to see a doctor. After a thorough examination, the doctor asked him to come back the next day for his prescription. The patient was a bit peeved - "Doctor, couldn't you give me my prescription today? I come from far away". "Nope", said the adamant doctor. The next day, when the patient arrived, the doctor prescribed him some ordinary vitamins - and oh, by the way, he must go on a strict sugar free diet. The patient was visibly rueful that just for this he had to make a second trip, but he thanked the doctor anyway, and left. The doctor's assistant felt curious about this, he had known the doctor to be a very reasonable man. "Doctor, I am curious, why did you make him come back again? Couldn't you have prescribed this yesterday? Poor fella had to make the long trip twice". The doctor smiled enigmatically. "You see, yesterday I had several boxes of sweets sent by my classmate right here in the chamber. It would be a bit odd to ask the patient to go on a sugar free diet, wouldn't it?"

After successfully subverting the democratic process of elections and converting the entire policy debate into a "civil" society led agit-prop movement for over a decade, the Congress party now expects the people to suddenly become fond of democracy and constitutionalism and start hating "civil" society. Right. That is working really well.

Let's take a brief look at the dangerous road to anarchy the Congress party has led us down:

A "civil" society body called the NAC - completely illegal and extra-constitutional, now runs major policy decisions. The members of this NAC are hand picked from a group of Sonia Gandhi loyalists and dangerous subversionists, with manifest links with both the Maoists and now as it has come to light recently, even Pakistan's ISPR. Just check out news reports - NAC is everywhere. Sonia Gandhi is the self-styled permanent chairman of this body, with no term limits and no provision for her removal.

=> The constitutional experts who sprouted after Anna Hazare's fast started ostensibly had no reason to worry about this dangerous subversive institution.

After 2004, the Congress party led state Governments and not to mention the Central Govt has indulged in a massive orgy of loot. While #2G, CWG and the Adarsh remain the iconic scams against which public ire is directed, a brief look at the situation at Andhra Pradesh provides a worrying picture of hidden scams from which Congress has successfully dissociated itself. Former star CM of AP and the late YSR's son's house is being raided by CBI, this sordid chapter has revealed just how much the Congress party looted from Andhra Pradesh. The whole state now resembles a Jesus camp.

=> Media and public intellectuals simply did not find it worthwhile to dig into the AP story and nail the lies while camping out in non-Congress states for sniffing out even minor transgressions. Try convincing the Anna Team why we don't need a Lok Pal?

Despite their self-proclaimed and oft repeated claims of love for Dalits, the contempt they have shown for Mayawati simply boggles the mind, including planted stories of rape. The Congress party and its media contingent descended in full force (accompanied by a small battalion of "civil" society activists) in a quaint UP hamlet and tried to scuttle a land deal. The Gandhi dynasty scion did his second best impression of Naavi Prince after Odisha and needless to say got completely friendly coverage in the media and hailed by activists. Meanwhile, the Congress run state Govt in Maharashtra was shooting at agitating farmers. The latter news was mostly blacked out.

=> We would like to hear from the suddenly democratic Congress intellectuals exactly why is politics of agit-prop bad? What would they like to tell Team Anna about why Rahul Gandhi defying 144 is constitutional and a-okay while Team Anna wanting permission to hold a rally dangerous?

A famous Diva journalist of a top news channel enthusiastically covered the "Arab Spring" earlier this year. She was nowhere to be seen at the Ramlila grounds. Overnight she had become a champion of stability, democracy etc. Too bad for her, because her credibility had been shot to pieces in the Radia tapes controversy. The entire MSM seemed to be completely depressed over the whole affair. Unfortunately for them, they had already been exposed for hunting with the foxes and running with the hare. Too late.

=> It would be interesting to see these morally compromised and corrupt individuals of media do a debate with Team Anna about why media should or should not be under the Lok Pal.

Let us take a look at the Bills the Congress party itself has in the pipeline. These include the Right to Education (RTE), Right to food, Communal Violence Prevention (CVB) and Land acquisition bill. Each of these bills were written unilaterally by the NAC. Each of these bills suffer from the same problems - amorphous and skewed selection process, massively anti-reform, creates gargantuan bureaucracies, hands out enormous powers into the hands of a select few individuals, destroys federal structure, has the potential to create major communal rift. All these bills also contain a spawn clause - i.e. the commissar can create new rules as he deems fit. The CVB does not even entertain the possibility that Hindus can be victims of communal violence. It also does not specify the conditions under which the extra-judicial powers can be exercised. If boys playing street cricket breaks a Church window, Harsh Mander can walk in and take over that district. Worse, if the minority community feels peeved at some movie or book (which they often do), even then Harsh Mander can walk in. Prevention, see? Does not matter who initiates or starts burning trains. The gist of the Right to Food bill is to divvy up foodgrains into communal quotas and don't you dare touch the minority pot!

=> Now, what were the points again about the Lok Pal being too powerful, can undermine democracy etc.?

The Congress party has led us down the garden path and converted the country into a giant NGO, a carnival of continuous discontent, intrigue and subversion. They have been completely aided and abetted by country's top intellectuals who have not spoken up even on a single instance of countless transgressions of their favorite political outfit - worse, they actively cheered them on. Now that the shyte has hit the fan, Congress intellectuals should just hold their Padmashris in their hands and spare us the sanctimony.

What causes corruption?

2011-08-23T19:41:00.003-04:00

Man is as corrupt as his options.

UPA II came to power amid accusations of grave misconduct, known as the cash for votes scam. Soon they were hit by a tsunami of scam accusations. By early 2010, the 2G scam had been busted wide open, with more to follow, such as the CWG scam and the Adarsh society scam.

Finding their favorite political outfit in this quagmire, the nation's leading TV news channels embarked upon a psyop to convince us that corruption is a cultural issue rather than a systemic one. Both the IBN Face the nation (eg. Does the subcontinent's culture breed corruption? Sept 2010) and NDTV We the people (eg. India: Game for corruption? Oct 2010) flagship talk shows attempted to draw ethno-cultural roots to corruption. Public intellectuals and Left-Liberal intellectuals pretty much drew the same conclusion - only some of them went even a step further. Corruption, according to them, was related to a certain religion.

Is that so?

Let's take a few examples. Among the prime accused in the current scams are Hasan Ali, Shahid Balwa, Father Jagath Gasper Raj. The party that is embroiled in the gargantuan scandals is headed by - not even an ethnic Indian. Leave aside the fact that many scam riddled politicians of the party and its allies are just about nominal Hindus (or HINOs, if you prefer).

Even across the world, evidence simply does not bear out the assertion that Indians (or Hindus for that matter) are culturally more corrupt. The less said about our neighboring Pakistan, the better. Even China, a completely different political system and distinct ethnic people - loads of scandals, including the high profile recent scam involving the architect of their high speed train system. To take a random example from the West, US First Lady Michelle Obama was accused of a patient dumping scam. Similar accusations were made in the past about former First Lady and current US secy of state Hillary Clinton. Following 9/11, there were numerous scandals of people usurping monies meant for actual victims of the terrorist incident.

We will leave aside this rather unproductive investigation (you can't really dump about 800 million people into the Arabian sea) and look at some actual data.

Research by India's emerging think tank clearly shows corruption is highly correlated (negatively) to economic freedom. This is also confirmed by our own findings. Countries with higher economic freedom (or more capitalistic) are less corrupt and vice versa.

This is no surprise. Fundamentally, corruption is merely what is known in economics as the agency problem. Politicians are the agents we select through the election process to look after our interests. They seldom do. Instead, they look after their own interests. How do we make them look after our own interests? Simple, by setting up a reward-punishment system. Unfortunately for us, our country's leading intellectuals and opinion makers have concluded that there is no alternative.

QUIZ:

Your agent (i.e. politician you elected) is behaving badly. But there is no alternative (TINA).

(a) Your agent will continue to look after his own interests

(b) Your agent will suffer a sudden attack of conscience and become all goofy?

The answer is rather obvious.

Socialism, especially the carte blanche variety with loads of accepted and unchallenged holy cows provides a grand excuse for politicians to act with impunity against their principal's (voter) interests and get away with it time after time. The holiest of our holy cows unsurprisingly is secularism. To paraphrase a Hindi film song, they will practically chant the secularism mantra while simultaneously picking your pocket in broad daylight.

This is exactly what is happening in our country.

Dark clouds over our freedom ...

2011-08-15T00:20:00.001-04:00

There is a thin red line.

The line that divides between freedom and slavery.

If you let the others make all the rules, you have crossed over. Actually, you have been kicked across and you don't even know it.

Consider this:

- Those who play with the ISI are today's top architects of social justice

- Dreadful Naxals occupy top health policy positions

- They take all your money and make monuments of leaders you despise, or at least do not respect

- In the end, they blame you for it!

The choice is clear and it must be made. Do not get kicked around by those leeches who live off your blood and sweat. Don't let them tell you what makes you nice.

Happy Independence Day.

Fee-fai-fo-fum

2011-07-21T23:15:00.004-04:00

Are Indian intellectuals on the take from Pakistan's spy agency?

The indictment of Ghulam Nabi Fai, Executive Director of Kashmiri American Council (KAC) by US authorities, has blown the lid off what must have been an open secret in the secu-liberal crowd and what we had long suspected.

Fai ran one of the many Pakistan affiliated NGOs in America that purport to fight for human rights and Azadi aspirations of Kashmir folks. Well, it turns out he was actually being funded by ISI, Pakistan's well known spy agency. In order to subvert US policy, Fai would funnel millions of dollars into the US, even donating to political campaigns of American politicians, including President Barack Obama. Fai's organization paid $250 to the presidents campaign kitty.

Unfortunately, the source of funds and their use ran afoul of the US laws.

Fai also cultivated Indian 'intellectuals' to further his cause. Dozens would attend his seminars in the US as guest speakers. Indian intellectuals speaking against India and for the Kashmir cause in front of an audience of American lawmakers and academicians gave KAC's agenda a certain type of legitimacy. Did they know?

As far back as 2003 (update: maybe even 1994), Indian Embassy circles knew that "it wasn't a real conference but an anti-India shop". There is no reason to believe various Indian intellectuals who attended those seminars did not know the true nature of Fai's organization. Did they willfully ignore the danger signs?

Was there any quid pro quo? Did all it take to turn Human Rights wallah into the public relations equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon against India just a round trip ticket to the US of A?

The list of Indian 'intellectuals' who attended Fai's seminars runs about a mile long, virtually all the biggest blowhards of secularism can be found on this list. Some of the names that are making the rounds are: Kuldip Nayar, Justice Rajinder Sachar, Gautam Navlakha, Siddharth Varadarajan (editor, The Hindu), Harinder Baweja (Tehelka), Praveen Swamy, Subramanian Swami, Bharat Bhushan (Mail Today editor), Dilip Padgaonkar, Harish Khare, Rita Manchanda, Kamal Chenoy, Praful Bidwai, Ved Bhasin.

Justice Rajinder Sachar authored the controversial Sachar report.

Dilip Padgaonkar is one of the Government appointed Kashmir 'interlocutors'.

Harish Khare is the media adviser to the Prime Minister.

This is serious. Some of them owned up to attending Fai's seminars and/or provided reasonable explanations, among them are Sid Varadarajan and Subramanian Swamy. The rest seems to have clammed up.

* * *

So, what we have here is a club of self-anointed high priests of virtue which turns out to be no better than a cottage industry of cheap hustlers. Between fake affidavits and anti-national rants for bits from a very hostile entity, there isn't much left of one's conscience to be compromised.

The Government is likely to question the intellectuals involved. It remains to be seen how they go about this. This investigation might provide vital clues as to whether the Congress establishment has remained merely corrupt and exploitative or has transitioned into the dark zone of open subversion.

Truck

2011-07-13T23:42:00.003-04:00

There is something disturbing about blast injured being ferried in what looks like a filthy truck - not just anywhere, but in the country's largest and most financially important metro. Also known as the maximum city, where artists, writers, rich people, liberals, Bollywood etc. reside.

There is also something disturbing about that large and very important city's hospitals not being able to cope with perhaps 200 odd injured. Hospitals of a city of 12 million can't deal with 200 trauma victims?

Our condolences to the victims and their families. Stay safe.

Perfect metaphors

2011-07-04T09:59:00.002-04:00

Rs 75,000 cr and counting: More treasure tumbles out of shrine in Thiruvananthapuram

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Treasure continued to tumble out of the Sree Padmanabha Swamy temple in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday with a Supreme Court-appointed committee finding more gold idols, coins and other assets on the sixth day of inspection in the shrine's hidden vaults. [TOI]

Here we go again. Ancient temple wealth keep tumbling out of secret hidden chambers faster than Marxist historians can sanitize our history to secular tastes. Official versions would like us to believe loot of temple wealth by various alien invaders never happened, it is all a product of communal imagination. Apparently various rulers such as Tipu Sultan were totally beneficent and it is a communal conspiracy to suggest otherwise. But this cache flies in the face of such theories. This will also force a reprint of various religious propaganda literature for sure. But we digress.

The big problem now is what to do with this massive ancient Hindu wealth. Of course, the answer to this question is when. Already various indignant socialists are demanding this wealth be distributed among the poor through schemes such as the NREGS. One only hopes the wealth doesn't make it to Congress party's 2014 election coffers. Already ultra rich from 2G, CWG and various real estate scams covering practically every inch of the country - this would really skew the race.

In the larger scheme of things, this is what has been going on, Hindu wealth for secular causes. Typically some land or productive asset is appropriated in the name of social justice, a scheme created under the name of a member of Gandhi family, and the wealth is then distributed to the people who need it most. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. See, how easy it is?

* * *

Boy drowns in Congress leader's chemical tank

GHAZIABAD: A 10-year-old boy was killed after he fell in a tank used for cleaning bottles containing chemicals for a local Congress leader's plant.

According to the police, Bilal fell in the pool in Nasib Vihar Colony in Loni on Friday evening while playing and became unconscious. He later passed away at a hospital yesterday, they added. [TOI]

Barkha Dutt, group editor, NDTV, writes a weekly column for the Hindustan Times. If you look at the topics about two years ago - they are all about big global problems, international big ticket items etc. This is a confident Barkha, firm on her feet, the preferred party solidly back in power. Things are as they should be. Fast forward two years - what do we see? Despair, sadness, depression - everything is falling apart, coffee and cigarettes in the cutting room, late nights in the studio ...

So, what happened? Things haven't changed much in concrete terms. Aside from food price inflation, not much has changed for the masses. No changes in political scenario or outlook. Going by the recent assembly polls, the party has grown stronger in the expected areas, received a shellacking where it used to.

Why then does Barkha marinate in the soup of her discontent?

The answer is in the dramatic divergence between the narrative and ground realities. Electronic media is hard to control, the beast has broken free and rampaging around, demolishing plot lines, damaging credibility of characters, rendering editorials and op/eds obsolete even before they hit the press.

Fortunately for her, this is also the precise reason things might just continue in the desired direction. Politics does not follow the studio scripted plot. It mostly follows demographics and flow of benefits to the right kind of people.

Unfortunately for us, we will have to continue to live around Congress party's social justice factory, carefully lest we fall into the toxic juices of secularism. All the major institutions are already in the tank, corroding away what is left of our democracy.

The shrinking Hindu space

2011-06-07T23:36:00.004-04:00

Perhaps nothing illustrates the extreme prejudice and visceral hatred this administration harbors towards Hindus quite like this video. A senior Congress leader and designated mentor to the crown Prince, no less, mercilessly kicking an would be shoe attacker. That video basically sums up what Congress would do to us, given a chance.

As we have been saying for quite sometime, what we have here is not mere hardball politics, we have long transitioned into a different ballgame. From mere socio-economic re-engineering, we have transitioned into genocidal territory.

The completely needless and strategically foolish police action of last Saturday when a battalion of handpicked Delhi Police converged in on the Ramlila grounds, where tens of thousands of devotees, as many as half of them women and children, had already retired for the night, was designed to inflict casualties - which it did. Up to a 100 people were injured, many of them critically. A woman still remains comatose. The fact that it did not result in a stampede is a miracle in itself and perhaps speaks for the discipline and self-restraint of the devotees. The police had fired so many teargas shells that beat journos had irritation and tears in their eyes until late next morning.

This operation had to be authorized at the highest levels. No one at a lower level who would have the gumption to order a lathi charge and teargas shelling in a tent containing so many women and children.

This operation was also a live demonstration of what is going to happen when the proposed Communal Violence Prevention Act (aka Right to Riot with impunities act for minorities) comes into effect. That act will give enormous and unprecedented powers into the hands of a group of hostile and prejudiced people. Under any flimsy pretext, they can take over any district administration. They can then run off any people deemed undesirable, like they did with the tens of thousands of devotees. Within a stretch of 4 hours, the ground was completely deserted, people scattered all over Delhi without shelter and belongings. Some dropped off at potentially unsafe places. Post-op, the administration declared random and arbitrary section 144 and ordered externments without court orders.

Then we have the RTE act, which essentially shrinks education space for Hindus. We also have the Food Security Act, again, designed by the same contingent, which divides the food doles recipients into "general" and "priority" categories, the latter being euphemism for ... you know who.

A day after the operation, Sonia Gandhi offered a chaadar at Ajmer Sharif. A day later, Manmohan Singh followed suit.

Still think you are safe under this administration?

Do we need a Lok Pal bill?

2011-04-18T23:18:00.003-04:00

Scene of protest: Tahrir Square, Cairo. Many have likened the Jantar Mantar gathering

surrounding a fasting septuagenarian Gandhian with the Egyptian uprising

Did we just have a revolution? Well, if we did, it certainly didn't quite have the effect it brought about elsewhere. The ruling dispensation that is engaged in massive scale Economic Terrorism (scam is too mild a term for what we have here) continues to rule the country.

Sandwiched conveniently between the World Cup and the IPL, the "revolution" brought all sorts of people out from the woodwork. Pretty soon, Anna Hazare was seen sharing the dais with a motley crowd of career activists, human rights types, various political entities, wheeler dealers, curious media personnel trying to get a slice of the action and even some Maoists.

Now, let's consider for a moment what we are really asking for. Frankly, the Lok Pal concept is fairly overrated. The wikipedia entry clearly suggests an ombudsman system is neither essential nor sufficient for a corruption free society. One can't just jump at every novelty item every other country has. For a good analysis of what this Lok Pal bill controversy is about, look no further than two stellar post by Reality Check: (1) Jan Lok Pal, (2) Lok Pal - report generator or jail sender?

As a matter of fact, the group that is pushing this Lok Pal bill simply does not have a good track record at drafting good legislations. Good intentions do not result in good laws. The RTI Act is a case in point. The act has led to disappearance of all info from public domain ("need to know") and given rise to a new breed of activists. Having passed the law, the Govt abrogates itself of all responsibilities of making info publicly available. So, keep filing RTI petitions hombres, and keep in mind, such laws actually prevent the weak (such as a person with no access to a powerful RTI lobby) from getting access.

Some clauses in the original proposed draft such as having the two most recent Magsaysay awardees in the selection committee came across as awfully self-serving. This clause has been subsequently removed. On the other hand, the Govt draft mandates jail time for false complaints - a definite red flag.

Any chance of a good bill is further dimmed by the fact that Kapil "Zero Loss" Sibal is on the drafting committee. So is former Enron lawyer Harvard Chidu, whose name is mysteriously missing from the CBI 2G charge sheet. Noted wheeler dealers Moily and Pranab Mukherjee are also on the drafting committee.

The need of the hour is justice for the deprived sections, whose money has been stolen by a ruthless mafia type ruling faction. The drama about this bogus bill shifts focus away from the central issue.

A central omnipotent Lok Pal has some significant shortcomings. First of all, it will lead to legitimization of our central planning tendencies. India is a very large and complex economy now, it is absurd to expect an 11 member body to be able to handle all its scams. This is where most of the bill's designers are being terribly short-sighted. The bill simply does not address prioritization.

Finally, the bill is probably dead on arrival anyway for the same reason the women's reservation bill died. There are already clamors for representation for special classes. Pushed to its logical limit, this will eventually morph into a collective desire for the Lok Pal to yield the same outcome as the political process - why not just have an election then?

Thank you, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi

2011-04-03T21:52:00.004-04:00

We must confess that often we find it hard to understand socialists, sometimes it is due to their better education from institutes like St. Stephens or Jamia Milia Islamia or JNU etc. or sometimes it is simply due to their superior religion. Therefore, we often find ourselves at a loss as to what would be an appropriate and correct response to an event.

All of us has the experience of being confronted by socialists at some point or another. For instance, say you just heard a joke or something and have a wide grin on your face. Suddenly, you meet your socialist friend. Chances are he will read you several statistics such as how 50% of India's kids are malnourished etc. He will prove that you should not grin like that. Of course, your socialist friends have likely lost a bit of their enthusiasm since 2004, but you get the general idea.

Now, cricket is just a sport, nothing more, nothing less. So, should we celebrate India's victory in a cricket match? Sounds simple, isn't it? If you are a fan of the sport, you will probably feel elated, for a few hours anyway, then go back to your daily life in the socialist state. If you do not follow the sport, no problem. Go watch a movie or take your dog out for a walk or something.

Unfortunately, it is not so simple. It could easily go like this:

Cricket fan: Yayyy giggity omg LOL ROFL! We won the world cup, how cool!
Socialist: 50% of India's kids are malnourished.
Cricket fan: Agreed, but can I just burst this last firecracker?
Socialist: NO! You jingoistic nationalistic chauvinistic a-hole from the bad religion!
Cricket fan: :(

Therefore, we were mighty concerned when India did pretty well this world cup and actually went on to win the cup. We were concerned for our cricket loving friends, we had no way to guide them and no help was forthcoming from the socialist circles.

Fortunately, the Queen came to our help. Not only did she attend the important matches with the Prince, but she came out after the win and broke out into an impromptu dance. Was that cha cha cha? Or was that the bhangra? Let's call it the Spectrum Twist, but that's not really important.

The important thing is, now it is totally appropriate for you to celebrate India's cricket victory, at least until 2014 and your socialist friends ain't gonna bug you, not one bit. We guarantee it.

Secret things ....

2011-03-22T21:38:00.005-04:00

We all know that secular media and intellectuals are nuts about the Prince. According to a devastating cable from wikileaks, published by The Hindu, the Prince may have a few - um, nutty issues of his own:

Naqvi claimed that it is increasingly common knowledge that Rahul suffers from "personality problems" of an emotional or psychological nature that are severe enough to prevent him from functioning as PM.

Who would have known! Actually, that's not quite true. We have always believed there was something odd about the Prince. For instance, during the 2009 election cycle, we blogged about it. The cable mentions Congress leaders' growing disenchantment with the Prince and that they thought he "is causing more harm than good" and has "made no impression on the people of the state."

In the same blog post, we unambiguously stated that the Princess came across as a much smarter and polished political leader. The last part of the cable echoes the same sentiments, about how everyone wanted the Princess to join politics and how Sonia Gandhi had chosen the Prince against her own better judgment etc.

The cable also mentions "he continues to be the subject of press reports that rave about his participation in the early January Congress Youth training camp" - which is like, hardly a secret. Read another blog post where we described this in some detail.

The lunatic is on the grass

Remembering games and daisy chains and laughs ....

- Brain Damage, Pink Floyd

Whither revolution?

2011-03-13T14:44:00.005-04:00

Continuing our thoughts from a previous post, the question that stares us squarely in the face is simply this - if Egypt, Libya, Tunisia etc. have opted to oust their autocratic leaders through violent revolutions, why not us? Democracy is obviously not a good answer. The said countries had democracies of sort, elections too.

Now, consider these two snippets, from India's largest circulation daily, The Times of India:

SNIPPET 1: I still remember Nehru stepping into our living room and inviting Sir Alladi, my father-in-law, to join the drafting committee," says Lalitha Krishnaswami. "We were caught by surprise when someone informed us that Nehru who had come to attend a function at the nearby Andhra Mahila Sabha had decided to drop by. But to Sir Alladi's horror, no picture of the prime minister framed our walls. My husband was immediately asked to get one. He rushed to Luz Corner, got the first picture of Nehru he saw, framed it and rushed back home just minutes before Nehru himself walked in. Over the discussions that followed, Sir Alladi accepted his invitation to join the Constitution drafting committee," she says. [link]

SNIPPET 2: As she took her seat in the front row next to NCP chief Sharad Pawar, finance minister Pranab Mukherjee handed her the one-paragraph statement the PM had just read out.Going through it carefully, Sonia nodded briefly to herself, signalling her approval and put the paper down. Looking up, she saw MPs thanking her for ensuring that the government accepted including caste as a point of enumeration in the national headcount. As is her wont, Sonia was quick to gesture towards Congress's chief troubleshooter while Mukherjee sat unmoved. [link]

Remarkably, these are from the news section of the newspaper. Qualitatively, we are not really different from those regimes, the same state run or controlled media and its intellectuals singing glory be.

We have gargantuan scams going on, not only do these scams deprive the very same social justice classes the rulers and their PR agents claim to benefit, but they have grave national security implications. What are some of the beneficiaries of these scams? Aside from the obvious holy cows and calves, these names are Hasan Ali, Shahid Balwa, Jagath Gasper Raj etc.

Minister after minister have been allowed to brazenly perjure themselves on national TV without so much as a murmur of protests from TV show hosts.

Secular intellectuals, whose raison d'etre seems to be to constantly decry deprivation of certain sections, have remained mum. Worse, some have actually blamed 'neo-liberal economic framework' etc. for the scams. Diabolic plans have been put in place to somehow retroactively blame folks who have not been in power for two terms. Attempts to put the right sort of people in charge of the vigilance department has backfired for the time being. The state machinery has made significant progress in blocking out any signs of dissent.

Yet, there are no signs of revolution. We remain hopeful though.

The crosses we bear ...

2011-03-11T00:44:00.004-05:00

More pictures at Flickr

MUMBAI: Fresh demolition notices pasted by the BMC on several crosses across the city on Saturday drew a sharp reaction from the Christian community. Around 400 Bandra residents from the community gathered on Chapel Road in Bandra (W) in the evening to protest against the notices, prompting cops to rush there. [link]

Funny thing is, this thing has been going on since 2003 - when people started noticing illegal structures of all types sprouting all around the city.

Feb 18, 2011: Demolition stayed for 4 days - Priya Dutt (CONGRESS MP) et al do what secular politicians are supposed to do. Religious groups incensed.
Mar 1, 2011: 7 day stay on notices to crosses
Mar 2, 2011: 30 day to prove legality of crosses
Mar 5, 2011: Chief Minister says sorry
Mar 8, 2011: Locals did not seek BMC permission to re-erect cross

What we have here is a vivid illustration of competitive secularism. If Waqf board can do this (albeit a lot more violently and with a lot less media coverage), why can't Minority Team B? There is obviously no good answers to these questions. Hence, the shrines will not get demolished or alternately they will be demolished but community leaders will get sops elsewhere.

Rinse. Repeat.

The troubling thing is, due to the British legacy, the community owns disproportionately high amount of real estate, in prime locations all over. They are obviously out of bounds. But of course, they have nothing to fear, forget about those large swathes of tax free land - the municipal body of India's largest city can't even touch tiny recently built structures for almost a decade.

Just wondering ...

2011-03-01T19:13:00.003-05:00

A 19-year-old boy stabbed to death a Std X student whom he suspected of having an affair with his sister. Yasin Sayyed stabbed Nawaz Hanif Kalifa at least five times and left the 17-year-old to die on the tracks last Thursday. Nawaz was a student of Nice English school in Mumbra. Cops identified him on the basis of his school identity card and his bag, both of which were recovered from the murder spot.

[...]

During investigation, sleuths learnt that Nawaz was romantically linked to a girl from the same school. Preliminary inquiries pointed to the involvement of the girl's family in the crime. [link]

Just wondering if this fits secular/liberal definition of 'Honor' crimes. Article does not mention it though.

Tunisia, Egypt ... etc.

2011-02-19T21:00:00.018-05:00

Perhaps counter-cyclical political events provides for the largest servings of irony and the Middle-Eastern 'revolution' falls firmly in this category - so far as the Indian political scene is concerned.

Just imagine how the secular journos, intellectuals, human rights and other assorted Left-Lib types would cover this thing had it happened during the NDA regime. But we have what we have and ironically (a double dose, if you like), the regime, with its ~$100B scams looks every bit like the despotic regimes the Middle-Eastern folks are trying to depose.

In any case, Indian journalists went to Cairo in hordes. Short of a story and short on analysis and certainly deprived of a suitable political narrative to spin, they decided to make it about personal valor. The social media scene was abuzz with (mostly) brave journos patting each other etc. Funny thing is, they did not actually come in harms way to the extent some Western/Middle-Eastern journalists did. Some spent a few nights in the cooler. Most spent the time holed up in the Indian embassy, only to come out during times of relative calm and that too avoiding the rough areas.

The Barkha Dutt docu-drama called The Women of Egypt is a perfect example of this. It was at least in part an attempt to redeem herself from #barkhagate using the Kargil flashback. Already being hailed as a masterpiece, award-worthy etc. the documentary shows Barkha walking around about town, microphone in hand. She also interviews a few what appeared to be a few elite Egyptian women at their homes.

* * *

This is not to suggest the Egyptian scene was not dangerous, quite the contrary. Unfortunately, the attack came from unexpected quarters. An American journalist was brutally assaulted at the Tahrir Sqaure in Cairo. She suffered a sustained attack and beatings by a mob of about 200, who yelled "Jew ... Jew ... Jew ..." while setting upon her. This wasn't the only such incident.

It took several days for the Mecca Cola drinking Left-Lib media to deliberate and finally release the information (after censoring the chants). Why? Because it largely cut through the narrative of 'revolution', or rather the Western conception of it. Secondly, the revolution is being worked into a storyboard of achievements for Dear Leader, in prep for 2012. Baaaaad Boooosh attacked Saddam, but The Great One liberated Egypt by delivering just one speech in Cairo!

Shortly afterwards, instead of a proper root cause analysis, they were able to steer the conversation towards a few fringe comments. Business as usual. But that did not prevent a particularly loony Left-Lib to actually connect this attack to 'Hindu Nationalists'!

This and various other factors, history etc. does not make us feel particularly warm and fuzzy about the whole deal. We just have to wait and watch.

* * *

We were particularly anxious to see the effects of this revolution upon our domestic faithful. Historically, the heart of the faithful has always throbbed for the global movement, for instance Khilafat. But so far there is not much evidence of any ripple effect.

Actually, we are not too sure - is it possible the disturbance is manifesting itself in different ways? As we discussed earlier, there was a dangerous riot in New Delhi, involving the demolition of an illegal Mosque. This was largely censored by the media. Well, there was another one, also censored by media, this time involving the expansion of a burial ground, in New Delhi. Then there was major rioting in a village in Rajasthan.

Would they actually rise up and depose a secular Government? It would be rather interesting.

Sachar Envy ...

2011-02-19T15:52:00.007-05:00

In a previous post, we discussed how the community was finding it problematic to push its victim status:

The biggest obstacle to pushing through special privileges for the community proved to be raw data. There was no way to massage this to manufacture a "deprived" victim status for the community. Call it Sachar envy. Soon this was largely mitigated - large number of poor people, like cattle was head counted and factored into stats. Even this proved inadequate. This is why the Kandhamal incident was engineered. Now we have a new victim category with refugees and dead people to show for! Take that, Kashmiri Pandits!

Well, lo and behold, we already have a demand for a Sachar Report for the community!

A meeting of Church representatives, scholars and activists on January 25, which was presided over by Delhi Archbishop Vincent Concessao, decided to petition the UPA government for a Sachar Committee type report on the status of Christians. The report would serve as a reference point for decisions concerning the community, it was felt.

"Our own spot studies have shown how poor groups like tribal and Dalit Christians are but we dont have authenticated empirical data," said All Indian Christian Council general secretary John Dayal. "We want the government to quantify their marginalization in terms of poverty levels, land holdings, literacy and so on like the Sachar Committee did for Muslims. We also want the government to establish burning issues in troubled areas like the Dangs in Gujarat so that they can be addressed." [The Times of India]

Now, everyone knows the community is far from deprived, as a matter of fact they enjoy massive advantages in almost every field, and more so in 'liberal arts' type fields. They dominate journalism, human rights, book publishing, advertising and most other soft sectors. They lead in awards too.

However, we have an interesting problem here. Of course there are those in the community that are not doing well, after all not everyone is John Abraham. So, unless everyone in the community gets up to that level, we will always have grievances, right? This is the unique problem with this type of identity politics. There is never enough. Poor Hindu? Stand in line, we are now uplifting Community 1, Community 2 ....

Then of course we have the numbers game. Suddenly tribals become part of the narrative. This explains why this increased level of missionary activities in Maoist areas, why we suddenly have a Hindu seer killed in a remote district in Orissa, why we have another rotting in jail (the latter's 'confession' being all over media with nary a regard for rights of the under trial, no peep from Human Rights), why we have indignation over (mostly) self-inflicted attacks on religious places in Karnataka, why we have EU delegations interfering with our domestic matters, why the Supreme Court is forced to change certain remarks in its verdicts in an unprecedented manner, why after years we suddenly begin to accept UK aid, which invariably flows through certain organizations.

When the Sachar Report II finally comes through, rest assured to find apples to oranges comparison just like in Sachar Report I. Recently acquired members (who is gonna check?) will drag down the average and it is all the way to the bank for community leaders.

Funny thing is, we already have a parallel Government running with Sonia Gandhi (anyone knows her faith?) as its tenured President, it is called the NAC. This organization is planning to control every drop of milk squirted from the mammaries of our welfare state and no one could claim they are being misdirected. But we still have grievances.

Call it the burden of secularism.

Free, Fearless Journalism ...

2011-02-09T00:20:00.007-05:00

So, after furious backpedaling for over two years by the Government (which according to rumors may be headed by the Congress party), finally some moves are being made to bring back black money home. Lo and behold, now everybody and their chachaji wants to bring back black money home! Funny thing is, when the black money issue came up just before last elections, everybody and their auntyji said - well, various things.

Anyway, we digress.

As a trailer for supposedly bigger things to come, a number of individuals with accounts in the LGT bank of Liechtenstein, Germany, are being pursued. Tehelka claims it has "accessed" the list. Now, the original list had 18 names on it, Tehelka published only 15 with much fanfare and over the top triumphalism:

TEHELKA has accessed 16 of the 18 names, of which we are putting out 15 right now. These names include individuals as well as trusts. At this point, we are putting out 15 names without disclosing details like their addresses, the businesses they are involved in and the total money they have stored away in Liechtenstein. Abiding by the basic journalistic principle of proving the accused an opportunity to present their side of story, TEHELKA has approached each of these individuals involved and is awaiting their response. [link]

Now the intriguing question is, why 16? Why not all the 18? As such none of these individuals have been found guilty of any crime yet. So, like the Spectrum scam losses, their guilt is presumptuous. There are three possibilities as to why 16 and not 18:

(a) A metered leak from the Govt (allegedly headed by the Congress party)
(b) Leaked by a whistle-blower with only 16 names
(c) Leaked by a whistle blower, last two names too hot

These are situations which stretch your imagination and push their credibility or perhaps the other way around.

Anyway. Having gotten over that bit about 16/18, we are suddenly faced with a strange situation. If all 16 names had been accessed, why publish only 15? The question perhaps intrigued other individuals as well, Tehelka faced a barrage of queries.

16th name on 'The List' to be out in a few hours...
More developments happening on the 16th name... Sorry to make you wait a little longer. Will keep you posted.
Sincere apologies. Between developing stories and technological hiccups-- the two big stories planned for the day will have to wait :|
No. 16 on the Swindlers List... Out in a few minutes... (This time for real)
The 16th name on the Swindlers' List...

This is far more suspenseful than the Oscars and arguably about as entertaining.

These messages indicate the tremendous amount of emotional turmoil Tehelka folks must have been going through. In any case, Tehelka did indeed publish the 16th name on the list, more than 2 days after publishing the first 15.

The 16th name rated a full story of its own for some inexplicable reason, with loads of explanations. The 16th name happens to be a member of a large family run industrial house.

Now, Tehelka can not claim they were waiting for the individual to offer his side of the story, since the other 15 had not been given this opportunity. So, why was this name held up? The guy was too big? The fearless folks of Tehelka, supposedly crusaders for the small guys holds back the one big name on the list? Or is it perhaps religion? Or secularism? Or some other reason? Perhaps we will never know.

Religious Banking is here!

2011-02-05T11:56:00.010-05:00

In a previous post, we had pointed out how India has progressively moved towards compliance of religious laws. As it stands now, India is nearly as compliant as Pakistan, certainly more compliant than Malaysia or Qatar.

By its ruling to allow religious banking/finance institutions, the Kerala High Court has opened up a whole new paradigm. But are we ready?

Sure enough, the current entity expects to operate wholly within the framework of Indian laws. But what does Indian law exactly mean? Who creates laws? The track record of our lawmakers starting from institutionalizing medieval religious practices through constitutional sanction to Shah Bano to more recent cases does not inspire any amount of confidence.

The most alarming aspect of the case is that this is not a private company trying to offer just another product with a largely superficial label, with not much consequence to anyone else. The entity in question is Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC), a state owned entity. The rationale being provided is absolutely bunkum - this is a real estate investment Public-private-partnership deal with a mutual fund type arrangement. Religious issues most certainly are not in the way of getting Gulf based Kerala diaspora into infrastructure - and this appears to be the primary pitch!

Secular blowhards have been trying to legalize religious banking for several years now, with The RBI steadfastly opposing such moves. For instance this report shows what a minefield this can quickly become in terms of regulations and bureaucratic overload. Even under the current arrangement, there will be regulatory costs. Someone has to pay for it. What if investments come a cropper? It would be too tempting to do a social justice bailout.

The reasons for this enthusiasm is quite clear. This type of moves are cheap popularity stunts performed for the M-Street. Additionally, the religious label will make sure law enforcement and financial regulatory bodies keep their hands off. Like most other religion tinged concepts, it will likely morph into a money laundering operation with other attendant ill effects.

We have let the camel's nose in the tent, the beast will come in.

The unbearable heaviness of secularism

2011-01-26T19:42:00.003-05:00

Wednesday, January 12, 2011. In a couple of weeks time, the nation would celebrate its 62nd republic day with much fanfare. But here, the situation was grim, very different. In fact, the place looked like a mini battlefield. Large contingents of Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), Rapid Action Force (RAF) and city Police personnel had been deployed. The police used teargas shells and had to resort to lathi charges; the mob armed itself with brickbats and set fire to random things. Stone pelting, vandalism. Dozens of people were injured. The main arterial road, a National Highway no less, was blocked for over a 3-km stretch, causing major gridlocks in the area. The entire neighborhood was locked inside their homes, too scared to come out. The protests continued for two days ...

We wouldn't blame anyone for saying this sounds like a bad day in Srinagar. Only, it wasn't. It was right in the heart of our capital city, not far from where the rulers of the country, leaders of the designated secular/liberal party would participate in the Republic day celebrations. Only two weeks later.

So, with a secular/liberal party ruling the country and the city-state itself being ruled by the same preferred political dispensation, why the unease, why the aggravation? Also, why are so many folks from the chatterati class yet to wise up about the incident?

We will attempt to answer the second question first. Surely, the sheer scale of the incident rated a headline and a breaking story on the various TV news channels? But there was simply no mention of the incident on any of the news channels. Not a peep. This got us curious - we reached out to Barkha Dutt, senior editor of NDTV. She confirmed that all the TV channels decided to black out the incident and it was an NBA (News Broadcasters Association, a cartel of TV news channels) decision.

Needless to say, this is highly disturbing. TV news dominates the world view of most literate Indians and drives much of the opinion business. Ms. Dutt herself hosts several shows on her channel. Now, if important items like this are completely blacked out, what does it do to the reference point in any debate on national policy? After all, information is the key driver in many debates. Aren't we essentially killing any effective "debate" if we do away with about half the information? This is hardly an isolated case - dangerous riots in Miraj, Bareilly, Deganga and many other places are unceremoniously dumped on the floors of the editing rooms.

* * *

The genesis of this trouble dates back to a quasi constitutional and extremely odd institution called the Waqf Board. Saba Naqvi's article [Edited for sensitivity]'s Left the Building is as good a resource as any for a quick intro. At 4 lakh acres, the Waqf board is the third largest landholder in the country, behind only railways and defense. The logic behind this institution is peculiar - Mughal era monarchs donated huge tracts of land for charitable purposes, following an established religious custom. After independence, all this land was put under the trust of Waqf board, and get this, for the EXCLUSIVE use of the community! Well, just whose land is it anyway?

Needless to say, the board leadership takes full advantage of this. Instead for putting the land to use for the benefit of the poor in the community, they do all sort of sordid deals. Every once in a while our secular nation then replenishes the land, from the common pool.

Needless to say, any time an illegal religious structure comes up for demolition, it is an opportunity for the Waqf board to acquire more land. The easily excitable faithful create enough trouble for the local administration to back off. This is exactly what happened in New Delhi.

* * *

As you can see, all this makes the BJP's so called flag yatra to Lal Chowk rather redundant, no matter which side of the issue you are. By historical accident Kashmir just happens to be demographically skewed across one state. In every city, every hamlet, every corner of the country, we have thousands of mini Kashmirs. All these Kashmirs are really off limit for the state. The controlling elements of the community makes sure the larger population is held hostage to them. Progressive elements are hounded out, like they forced the newly elected leader of Deoband seminary to resign for going against the grain. Popular imagination is captured not by the likes of M. J. Akbar or Azim Premji, but by perpetual grievance mongers like Shabnam Hashmi. Human rights mafia led by the likes of Teesta Setalvad etc. ensure that the community remains in a state of constant paranoia. Secular politicians form the final link in this ecosystem - a community that prays together votes together. The cycle continues. We continue to have faux debates, armed with partial info.

* * *

So, what was the final outcome of the drama? We leave it as an exercise for the readers to figure out. It is there in the references.

References:

Facing contempt DDA demolishes Mosque
Mosque demolition causes protests, jams
Waqf attempt to grab land
Local Residents get threatening calls
Jama Masjid - secular leaders rush to woo community leaders
Demolished Mosque will be rebuilt - Sheila

21 years of exodus

2011-01-19T00:31:00.003-05:00

Week-o-leaks

2010-12-19T16:43:00.004-05:00

Secularism as a concept died in India the day Rajiv married Sonia ....

Admittedly history could have taken many different paths. Rahul's grandmother and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not have to get killed in the hands of militants. Rahul's father "jeetenge ya loosenge" Rajivji would not have to leave his flying career and subsequently get killed by who we now know to be terrorists of another hue. But history took the course it had to and now we have Rahul snitching about "Hindu terrorists" to the US ambassador - according to leaked cables.

So, massaging and lazy explanations aside, the leaked cable confirms what we knew to be true for a while now - the Prince does not consider himself as one of us or more accurately, he does not consider us to be one of his. His vision for a future India solidly excludes us or at best reduces us to a body of cheap labor and clerical work. We have already seen from the Radia tapes how much collusion has taken place at the top. The exclusive officers' club has been built and its gate is being shut on our faces. If you want to pass through the strict face control, make sure you carry your Youth Congress card.

Remember Sonal Shah?

It is important to understand where the Prince derives his world view from. Obviously the biggest influence had to be the Queen, who after decades in India still remains ill at ease with Hindi. According to another leaked cable, the usually reticent and aloof Queen poured her heart out to California first lady Maria Shriver to such an extent that they titled the cable - "A garrulous Sonia Gandhi opens up to Maria Shriver". So here we have Italian Mama gabbing to her Germanic cousin. History may not repeat itself but it sure does flirt with memory.

In her conversation Sonia clearly comes off as a person on a civilizing mission. But we digress.

Sonal Shah was the Indian American woman who made news for becoming one of the first persons of South Asian extract to be made part of President Obama's transition team. Soon she was to find out blood is thicker than water. We all know who was behind the ghastly, nefarious and apocryphal campaign against Sonal Shah, as also against The Times of India reporter Balakrishna.

The idea is very simple and alluring. The vast millions of soft office jobs that so many of us covet (and upon landing such a job think the world of ourselves) - you can easily take out a large part of competition in one fell sweep. All you need to do is create a demand for an absurd and nearly impossible to prove moral requirement. Then either you are the right color (figuratively speaking), or you must show the Youth Congress card.

The worldly contact of the Prince largely comprise of the people behind that campaign. What might they be telling the Prince?

Squeezing the Free Agent voters:

Like most political parties in the World, the Congress party realizes the mortal danger "free agent" voters present to them. The first most visible of these were rather absurdly the so called NRIs. Congress and its minions went hammer and tongs at them. Old issues of The Outlook magazine still carries those articles - they provide good comic relief. The second source of free agent voters are produced by the Education system. Having received a drubbing once from the NDA dispensation, UPA realized the dire need to squeeze these obstinate types. They launched a multi-pronged approach.

- The first consists of completely destroying the primary education sector so that - (a) Missionary schools flourish (b) Changing the curriculum so that the "right" values are inculcated from an early age. The RTE act was designed to bring about this change.

- The second consists of destroying the Entrance test based system and gradually replacing it with a strong secular filter such as an interview. Efforts are on in this area but currently suspended due to the unfortunate portfolio reallocation due to the 2G scam.

- The third is to formally introduce religious quotas in education. Already we have minority institutions. Conversion, where possible, is underway - for instance a century old Agricultural institute suddenly got renamed and its students even took out a religious procession!

Already top posts in Government and bureaucracy are being strictly face controlled (eg CVC). In the Indian Administrative Services interviews for instance, the only right answer to "who was the all time great ruler of India" - is Akbar the great.

Free agent voter reduction program, aside from achieving the demographic rengineering goals has the extra advantage - 2G, CWG etc are much easier to pull. Everything stays in one happy extended family.

On ground tactical aspects and International intrigue:

The biggest obstacle to pushing through special privileges for the community proved to be raw data. There was no way to massage this to manufacture a "deprived" victim status for the community. Call it Sachar envy. Soon this was largely mitigated - large number of poor people, like cattle was head counted and factored into stats. Even this proved inadequate. This is why the Kandhamal incident was engineered. Now we have a new victim category with refugees and dead people to show for! Take that, Kashmiri Pandits!

Then of course we always have the UN route - if you do not let us rule, we will complain to the UN. Already the High Court in Gujarat has taken strong exception to certain Human Rights groups making unwarranted complains to the UN. The leaked cable proves this strategy can be and will be extended if UPA loses a national poll in the future.

In other words, in one sense, Rahul Gandhi might have simply been preparing a hedge against future election defeat when a quasi-legal internationally supported maneuver could still help retain power.

In Conclusion

If the above sounds too conspiratorial to you, we have two points to make. First, just because you can not see a glacier move does not mean it is not moving. The signs are too ominous to ignore. Second, when Digvijay Singh with his wild conspiracy theories becomes the leading mentor of India's future PM and consequently his conspiracy theories are all but tacitly approved by the High Command, it is no longer a conspiracy theory. The fact that they sanction such views is reason enough for alarm and caution.

Secular Hindus must make a hard call at this juncture. If they do not want to end up like Buddhists in South Korea or Hong Kong, the time to act has arrived. A few generations later it might be too late. Remember that "I am not very religious" "I am an atheist" etc. cuts mustard only with Hindus.

We refuse to succumb to fashionable concepts. We refuse to accept ANY absurd moral requirement dictated to us by people with vested interests or otherwise hostile to us. We reserve the right to act as we please within the Indian legal and constitutional framework and ... TO HELL WITH YOUR SECULARISM!

BARKHAGATE: What's up with Barkha Dutt

2010-11-29T23:55:00.013-05:00

* * * EXCLUSIVE: Barkha Dutt's response to hitherto undiscussed tape * * *

The 110 odd tapes that have been released from the cache of about 5000 contain conversations with or references to dozens of journalists. But none have taken the issue to heart as much as Barkha Dutt has. She has taken the battle to the front lines - engaging directly with her social networking fandom, responding with a sense of righteous indignation. This is however at great variance with her TV channel - which continues the blackout till date.

Unfortunately for Barkha Dutt, her online responses combined with continued blackout on TV has raised more eyebrows than the tapes actually did. For instance, RCR being the OB van etc. We have no way to confirm this but people speculate RCR is Race Course Road (PM's residence). Someone suggested journalists sometimes refer to OB vans by their location.

Since the issue has been discussed endlessly, both on and off TV - we will focus on certain aspects that we feel were not adequately covered. We will use Barkha Dutt's response on NDTV website as a reference.

1. Like Vir Sanghvi, Barkha has also taken great issue that she is being selectively picked for reasons she attributes to personal vendetta. Both have hinted at conspiracies.

2. Unlike Vir Sanghi however, she flat out denies that she was actually asked to pass on any message:

Barkha: AT NO STAGE WAS I EVER ASKED TO PASS ON ANY MESSAGE TO INTERCEDE ON BEHALF OF A PARTICULAR MINISTER OR PORTFOLIO. NOT ONCE, WAS I ASKED TO "LOBBY" FOR A. RAJA. NOT ONCE WAS I ASKED TO CARRY ANY MESSAGE REGARDING HIM OR ANY OTHER APPOINTMENT.

Contrast with Vir Sanghvi: One conversation relates to a call Radia made to me [..] but the problem was that nobody was speaking to Karunanidhi directly. Could I pass this on to Congress leaders? I had no intention of passing along the information but I strung her along and said I would ...

3. Both Barkha and Vir Sanghvi allude to tape doctoring or editing in a manner suggestive of manipulation or outright fraud, Vir more strongly than Barkha:

Barkha: "The edited conversations" - "Oh God, What should I tell them", is in fact two separate sentences ...

Vir: They seemed to me to have been doctored (I said so last week in a statement on my website). I then listened to the actual tapes. There were gaps, words had been deleted, whole chunks of conversation had been removed and there was an obvious malafide attempt to cause mischief.

4. Here we come to the most interesting part - so far all discussions related to Barkha Dutt were based on the tapes released by The Outlook on a single page. These are the tapes that Barkha Dutt bases her response on.

But one more tape contains a discussion with Barkha Dutt. Unlike the other tapes, which are dated 22 May, 2009, this tape was recorded on 9 July, 2009:

Conversation between Barkha Dutt, Managing Editor, NDTV and Manoj Modi, the right hand man of Mukesh Ambani, July 9, 2009, 4.14.11 p.m [AUDIO]: (Transcript mostly via Indiasreport)

Radia: Barkha, one second, Manoj (Modi) wants to speak to you.

Manoj: Hi Barkha, sorry couldn’t say bye to you yesterday night. Parimal (Nathwani, Rajya Sabha member from Jhakhand) was remembering you yesterday night.

Barkha: Oh, he , he once saved my life on the plane you know. It was nice to meet you, Manoj, kabhi aap ko fursat hoga toh we should meet araam se (whenever you are free we should meet freely), without the crowd.

Manoj: yeah, yeah, we will meet, but Parimal is my cousin brother, I have brought Parimal to Reliance.

Barkha: Reallyyyy!!! I didn’t know that, ohh, I didn’t know that, ohhh.

Manoj: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Barkha: You please give him my regards, aur aap kabhi dilli aaye toh fursat mein, not that you have any thing like fursat, but if ever you—

Manoj: No, no,no, you know I never come to Delhi, but I came only for this ... last night, only for this purpose I have come.

Barkha: It was very helpful Manoj, it was really very helpful. But then maybe main aapke saath ... ( gets disconnected).

This tape throws a new light of sorts on the whole issue. From her response, Barkha appears to suggest her conversations with Niira Radia took place only during the cabinet formation, in May 2009. However, this particular conversation takes place more than a month later. Reading this transcript along with Barkha's response throws the latter somewhat out of gear.

We were very curious about how did the person Nirmal once saved her life on a plane. So, we reached out to her and this is the response we received:

Ma'am, could you expand on "he once saved my life on the plane you know" ...

Barkha: ?? is this a scandal, that someone helped me on a plane when i fell sick. for gods sake. This discourse is now absurd

That's about as far as we got and needless to say we have to take her word for it.

5. Barkha Dutt's claim related to NDTV coverage of 2G scam:

It is simply scandalous that we first came to know about the spectrum scam from a blog. Check out the date of the first post on RealityCheck on the subject - December 12, 2008.

In her response, Barkha Dutt cites her "consistently hard-hitting and scathingly critical of the ongoing 2G scam and the former Telecom Minister" as proof that she could not possibly have lobbied for the man. We are not saying she did, one way or another - but the issue that we have is with her claim. She provides a list of shows in her response. We provide three graphics below and let you decide whether this is a fair coverage of the largest scam ever (~$40 B) in the country or whether her claim of "hard-hitting and scathingly critical" coverage stands up to scrutiny:

(please click on the images for a larger version)

BARKHAGATE: When news manufacturers become news

2010-11-27T18:16:00.009-05:00

Run, rabbit run
Dig that hole, forget the sun
And when at last the work is done
Don't sit down
It's time to dig another one

- Breathe, Pink Floyd

It is telling that much of the shock and awe surrounding the so called "Radia Tapes" aka "barkhagate" involves the news industry and some of its most revered icons. This should really have been a sideshow, the real story is the massive scams and systematic loot of the country and the wholesale destruction of institutions by the ruling UPA dispensation. However, cutting Indian mainstream media down to size was also necessary and somewhat inevitable.

Consider the following:

This year alone, NSUI and "Youth" Congress activists indulged in dozens of acts of vandalism. How many did you see on the TV ticker?
In the past couple of years, dangerous riots occurred in Miraj, Bareilly, Farakka, Deganga and many more places. How many do you recall?
Based on the coverage of politics, why does it feel that BJP and not the Congress party is running the Government?
It has been revealed that the Karnataka CM (BJP) used his "discretionary" quota to grant lands to his kids. Subsequently we learn the practice has been around for decades. Why do we learn about this now?
Should media give equal emphasis to scams worth tens of billions of dollar and those worth a few million?

Rasheeda Bhagat writes:

Readers of the print media and television viewers are strange creatures. Most of them are generous in heaping encomiums on their favourite reporters, columnists or anchors. Despite growing cynicism and scepticism about the media, unfortunately, most people in India tend to take the written or broadcast word as gospel truth. So, any journalist with good articulation skills, flamboyance and a dash of glamour — oh yes, glamour is important in the electronic media, ask the plain Janes and they'll tell you horror stories on this aspect — can catch the fancy or admiration of thousands of followers. (emphasis added)

In our view, that is the real scandal of Indian media and journalism.

Much of it comes from the explosive growth and extreme visibility of news anchors. They keep getting industry and national awards. They also become part of international junkets and foreign think tanks which wield great influence on policy. They also seem to be raking in crores. As a result, in our aspirational society, where chances of escaping "darkness" without resorting to "white tiger" type tactics is rather thin, they start to seem like demigods. The way the urban white collar middle class teens fawn over these media icons is astonishing, you could strike some of these awestruck specimens down with a rose petal.

Indian journalists exploited this factor to the hilt by building loose fan networks by pretending to be accessible. In a society where connections and plugs go their distance, they also managed to coopt so called independent media - a plug for profuse praises for a show or an article. Thus their influence far exceeded the reach of television both in terms of coverage and influence.

The gory details in the tapes reveal they might have also exploited their proximity to businesses and politicians to their full advantage, bartering favorable coverage for favors ranging from the trivial to the substantial to the much more serious - possible insider trading tips.

Possible effect on Indian Media

The "barkhagate" tapes initially had a deer in the headlights type of effect on MSM - when the young and still idealistic Open Magazine broke ranks and went ahead with the story. The OutLook magazine soon followed suit. The impact on the Indian netizens was instantaneous and devastating. Various related topics started trending on social networking sites and continues to trend till this day. After an initial period of blackout, various news channels have started covering the incident - but metering it carefully. Some channels like NDTV, whose star journo Barkha Dutt was among those "stung", continues the blackout.

Let's take a step back and look at the media situation in other countries: in the US for instance, journalism commands very poor respect from the public. A recent Rasmussen poll reveals that Americans regard journalism as one of the least respected professions, after their lawmakers and CEOs. In this regard, American public has been pretty consistent over the years. This merely shows the maturity and pragmatism of the electorate, which, needless to say has been a crucial factor in the country's destiny.

The second important factor about the US news industry is the dramatic shift of power from organized media towards crowd sourced media. Today, at least half of all Americans consume news from what they consider more trustworthy sources of news - news aggregates, blogs, alt websites and social networks. High traffic websites on both sides of the political aisle not only thrive but increasingly referred to by the MSM itself. Alternate news sites have come up in many countries including Japan, South Korea etc. and act as governors which keeps the MSM honest.

The self-evident fact that BarkhaGate must have been powered by not just political detractors but a large portion of Indian netizens, including former fans of Ms Barkha Dutt, gives us hope that at least in the the credibility department, we are seeing a course correction in the right direction. Now every time you read a story or see a TV report, you can not but wonder about the phone calls that might have preceded it. As a matter of fact, this has been an ongoing process - Indian MSM has been slowly losing credibility over the years as this blog post shows - India's trust in media down by 7%.

As far as alternate sources of news is concerned, it will have to be seen - we fear that various Congress party affiliated outfits or NGOs might hijack this most opportune moment. This is a battle that must be fought till the bitter end. Beware of lifelong Congress supporters or connected people suddenly claiming to be "disgusted" by the "system" and launching a website - inviting you to be a part of the change etc. Remember, even Tehelka started out as a "free and fearless" website. Look what happened - sample this (if pressed for time, search for "Tarun") and ponder.

Next Up: What's up with Barkha Dutt?

Remembering 26/11 - Missiles, not Mombattis

2010-11-25T14:33:00.005-05:00

Two years ago, a belligerent neighboring country launched a pre-planned, deliberate and deadly terror attack on Indian soil. The attack resulted in hundreds of casualties in our largest metro, at the heart of our financial capital.

The Indian response to it was to organize rallies by Left-Liberal secular crowds. With candles in their hands, they insulated the political fallout and prevented the true state of the disgusting rot within our security apparatus from reaching the aam aadmi. Some of those journalists who now find themselves in an uncomfortable situation (aka #barkhagate), carefully metered and steered public opinion.

Ever since the attacks, we indulged in a series of comical "diplomatic" moves. The Secular hard left lobby became even more chummy with their "civil society" counterparts from the belligerent country. The offending country received even greater foreign aid and now actually possesses the capability to harm our nation even more. Complicity of certain Indian citizens in the attacks were never seriously pursued.

We summarily reject these bogus gestures of the corrupt Indian Government.
We reject the crocodile tears and overtures of their "civil society", for we find them merely an extension of their corrupt, morally decrepit Military-Industrial-Jihadi complex.
We reject any notion of friendship, Track II, goodwill, Aman-ki-Asha and any such bullshit.
We strongly protest ridiculous attempts to connect this with Kashmir or social justice issues by a section of Indian "liberals".

Above all, we reject any calls for candle light vigil - as far as we are concerned, candles are items with the flame at the wrong end.

A few thoughts on Micro Finance

2010-11-06T12:52:00.002-04:00

This post is about the general concept of Micro Finance as opposed to Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs), although we will also discuss the latter.

At the heart of every credit business lies the same and incredibly simple fundamental principle. The lender needs to make a certain amount of money on his loans. In a world with no defaults and no fraud, all loans would bear the same interest rate, adjusting for term of course. But people often default on their loans and there is also considerable fraud. So, when you are paying that high "EMI", you are paying for the next person's incompetence or criminal intent. You are the default sucker.

This is the first of the two ironies of the credit business. The second is also obvious - credit is not easily available to people who need it the most, i.e. poor people.

Micro Finance was sprung upon us by the UN, NGOs, various do gooders and even some nasty rich turned "philanthropic" type people as the panacea for the latter evil. It came with lofty promises and was duly awarded the Nobel prize too.

The story went something like this: Kalavati needed to raise her kids. She did not have sustainable income from the patch of land she owned and lived on. Enter the Micro Finance (the concept). Soon Kalavati is raising chickens, selling eggs, even omelets to day laborers returning from the field at dusk. In short she went from being the poor widow waiting for salvation to a veritable entrepreneur, a bourgeois! How did this magic happen? Simple, someone gave her a loan of Rs. 1000/- and a booklet Chicken Farming for dummies. This story ends nicely, Kalavati even pays back her loan.

There are two obvious problems with this story. The first is, how do we know this woman is truly the poor downtrodden widow she claims to be? The second is, if there is a demand for eggs in that village, how likely is it that someone is already not selling them? In short, for MF to be successful, we still need to fix the original problems.

MF proponents want to conquer these problems with the help of an army of volunteers or SHGs. With person to person contact, they want to achieve better weeding and also to find unexploited opportunities (chicken farm). The first is easier to achieve with physical verification, but the cost is high and unaccounted for since it is ultimately passed on to the tax payers. The second is extremely doubtful, except under extenuating circumstances. If there are unrealized returns, it will soon be exploited by someone until none is left at all.

The fact that Micro Finance Institutions are charging the same high rates as moneylenders proves that accounting for overheads, defaults and after adding the purported benefits of unexploited opportunities, as a concept, Micro Finance is not generating value over what normal economic factors would predict. In addition, much of the nastiness surrounding the rural credit business continues to exist even with organized Micro Finance institutions.

We should have opened up the rural credit sector to organized private sector in the first place, but we wanted to protect the rural poor from exploitation. After decades of exploitation, lost productivity and stagnation we finally did open up the rural credit sector but put a pretty weird spin and highly questionable moral tone to it. Isn't socialism just wonderful?

Swaminathan Aiyar argues that we should still allow the MFIs to operate even after the "shocking" discovery they can be as heartless as the rural moneylender and the resultant indignation of the social justice wallahs. We agree, there is simply no reason to not let organized and better monitored operators make rural credit when we know that moneylenders can not be stopped anyway.

Of course, Mr. Aiyar has nothing to fear. MFIs will emerge as the next big thing in our crony socialistic portfolio. Since much of the action happens away from the chatterati, this business will thrive with politicians staking a big claim to it. The overheads will be passed on to NGOs and ultimately the tax payers. Occasional loan waivers etc. will soon follow, also paid for by tax payers. Village vote marshals will double up as loan collection agents and a win win scenario will emerge for the right people.

Who let the dogs out?

2010-09-21T20:01:00.004-04:00

A dog walks past Mike Fennell, president of Commonwealth Games Federation

People are ostensibly upset over the tragic-comic events of the CWG unfold before our eyes. It is a combination of law of averages catching up (foot bridge collapse), the stark reality that socialism simply does not work (dog poo on the beds in the athletic village) and massive levels of denial (the non-terror attack).

It actually took international criticism for our media to actually realize that the village was a dud. Conversely, the message could not be controlled this time since it went beyond the scope of state controlled media. Thus, oh what a a shocker!

Of course the socialists will tell you that none of these matters - a Government that can not build a decent athletic village for a smallish international games meet in its capital city (and Governed by its star CM) can administer a gargantuan scheme like NREGA successfully across the nation.

As country after country, athlete after athlete pull out of the game, watch our media honchos (many of whom actually have a real financial stake in the loot - more on it later, watch this space) scramble for the proper verbiage to tell us that it really is our collective shame.

Exactly how? Aren't we the communal greedy unneeded people relegated to the sidelines while The Crown Prince traipses around the countryside as his Momma the Queen watches over an able bodied administration like a Guardian Angel that sends poor children to school, feeds the hungry and (most importantly) keeps us at bay?

CWG pierces the narrative, it is a peripheral event that will soon be lost to memory and obscured by TV overload. It is the dog that escaped the catcher.

The Judiciary strikes back ....

2010-09-11T06:08:00.003-04:00

As usual, the recent Supreme Court order on food grain distribution triggered a deluge of editorials, TV shows and commentary.

What we find interesting is not the order per se, but the curious evolution of the dynamics between the Judiciary and the Executive/Legislative branches of the Government.

The key issue in Indian politics is the regime of ad hoc and unmonitored benefits, as blogger RealityCheck has chronicled on his blog. Ad hoc benefits directed to minorities or "caste" groups, even when thinly disguised by catch phrases like "classes" is de jure unconstitutional. As a matter of fact, a modern Constitutional Democratic Republic (CDR) can not have any incentives tied to social groups. The Liberal Democratic Republic (LDR) works around this problem by secondary activism, whereby pressure tactics and intense propaganda causes public opinion to steer so much as to threaten the functioning of the state.

Compromises are struck and the public is served a full load of BS, by a group of bureaucrats whose key qualification is that they can keep a straight face amid the stench.

Invariably, when CDR trends towards becoming an LDR, the Judiciary conflicts with the other two branches. In well functioning countries, Legislative eventually sides with Judiciary since opposition parties do not want to be railroaded. In other words it balances out. Executive proposes, Judiciary opposes. If executive goes too far out, political opponents exert pressure via Legislature. In other words, in order to work around the constitution, the Executive branch needs to overcome both political as well as legal challenges.

In Banana (or Pasta, if you like) republics, ALL political parties want to create their own social justice groups. Contrary to secular propaganda, even the BJP holds regular Iftaar parties, promises loads of stuff to minorities - thus, in this ruinous journey all parties are but Humsaafars.

In this way, in India, the judiciary comes into direct conflict with the executive.

We saw this come to a head in the apex court during the "OBC reservations in central institutions" issue. After several months of duking it out, the court finally gave in. The verdict had a resigned tone about it which was not surprising, coincidentally during this time the issue of asset declaration of Judges came to the fore. It was clear that the executive was willing to go to extreme lengths.

The current Supreme Court order on grain distribution is interesting because here the court has deliberately trespassed into executive territory by using the biggest trump card in an LDR poker game - social justice for the poor. This has caused much public hand wringing by the Manmohan Singh Govt. It will be interesting to see the moves of the court in the days to come.

Freedom ...

2010-08-15T12:39:00.004-04:00

Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose ... (Janis Joplin/Me & Bobby McGee)

Hockey Schticks

2010-08-11T19:37:00.003-04:00

The general feeling among India's liberalatti (usually also socialists, seculars and staunch defenders of the dynasty) is that goofy editorials can really fix the country. The big disconnect is between what they believe or at any rate want us to believe and what really goes on.

Nothing illustrates this better than the elevation of Vidya Stokes (Age: 83) as the President of Hockey India. This is the ultimate bait and switch for a political outfit that keeps harping about its "youthful" image, albeit one reinforced mainly by dynastic leaders who do not seem to want to grow up at least in terms of responsibility. After a Bollywoodized campaign based on the youthful hockey movie "Chak De", we get a Granny with Indira Gandhi hairdo who likely never held a hockey stick in her hands.

It is easy to see where this is coming from, after all the same house gave us Pratibha Patil, Navin Chawla, M.S. Gill and of course Kalmadi - the latter being a constant on the headlines these days for the comical ineptitude and jaw dropping corruption at the Commonwealth Games.

If Stokes' election wasn't funny enough, the aftermath is downright hilarious. Mainly due to the torrent of secondary criticism after Stokes' election, the machine is now seeking to de-legitimize its own Hockey body! The machine will likely get away with the layer of plausible deniability supplied by a pliant media but we will know forever this wasn't by design - the election was. Why? Because editorials and glowing profiles had already been written and in the momentary loss of coordination between the body and its PR agents, some of them had actually made it to the press too!

Frankly, we do not understand a lot of this, why for instance are there two Hockey organizations, why did the Govt wait until Stoke's election to de-legitimize IH? Why, within hours of his election, the Joint Secretary of IH resigned his post? If it was due to ordinance scams, why was he allowed to stand in the first place? Also, who else are charge-sheeted in the same scam?

The secular party can not have it both ways - either they are fully complicit in this intriguing and distasteful business of empowering loyal members of the extended family or they are so utterly inept that a private body can masquerade as India's official Hockey organization under its very nose.

Maybe we will read some more goofy editorials to find out.

The Socialism Train Wreck

2010-07-20T08:50:00.002-04:00

Headley's singing

2010-07-06T00:55:00.003-04:00

NEW DELHI: Pakistani American terrorist David Headley has said that Ishrat Jahan, the Mumbai girl who was killed along with three alleged terrorists in 2004 in a police encounter, was indeed a Lashkar-e-Taiba fidayeen.

Sources said Headley told interrogators from the National Investigation Agency that Ishrat, a resident of Mumbra in Thane, was recruited by top Lashkar commander Muzammil who was in charge of LeT's operations in India till 2007. [link]

This one stayed as the third lead story on the TOI site for a few hours, below the wedding story of a cricketer. Now a different story is back as the lead story: Ishrat Jahan's mother seeks Chidambaram's help - and the revelations by Headley is a footnote to it. The latter story has already stayed on the top spot longer than the main story did, on the third spot.

All of us knows just how much attention the Ishrat Jahan "fake" encounter story received in the media. For months, even years, the seculars would not stop talking about it. Given this backdrop, Headley's revelations should have been treated as the most explosive story to break within at least this past week. Yet, the editorial desk decided to run with the most vague and redundant aspect of it all.

Ishrat Jahan's Mom seeking HM's help is hardly news, the family has been all over media, treated as top priority by various national and international human rights groups. They are really the elite "victims", the picture perfect election campaign poster of the Secular Party. In fact, we would not be surprised if they have a hotline to the Home Ministry or something.

Was Ishrat Jahan's demise a result of a "fake" encounter? We are not so sure. The jury is still out on that. Based on TOI's headline football, we are not going to take media's word for it for sure, let alone the word of the so called "Human Rights Activists".

Do we feel sad for Ishrat Jahan? The answer is yes. In this case though, the Secular media and intellectual narrative and high def Bollywoodized victimhood stories are as much responsible as the virulent religious ideology that drives that sort of thing. From what we read, she was likely a smart girl albeit from a family of modest means. She fell victim to the "liberal" spins, those passive aggressive and garbage blogs and webzines. She trusted the only ones she could, and she did not know any better.

Perhaps if she had read this blog, she would have trusted those award seeking vultures a little less. She might have chosen a different path.

So yes, we feel sorry for her, she didn't have to die so some rat continues his sorry fucking race for a Pulitzer prize based on prevarications and wholesale canards.

Terror: Admitted

2010-06-21T19:54:00.002-04:00

MUMBAI: An 11-year-old girl, the youngest witness to depose before the court in the 2008 Mumbai terror attack case, was denied admission in a private school which fears that it would become a terror target if she was admitted.

"My daughter (Devika Rotwan) has been denied admission in New English High School at suburban Bandra. School authorities say they may face a terror threat as my daughter had deposed as a witness in the 26/11 case," her father Natwarlal Rotwan, a businessman, told PTI tonight. [Source: TOI Lead Story]

Like it or not, terror has won. People are not confident that the current ruling dispensation can save them from terror attacks. Of course, your local secular honcho will give a different spin to the story. like, for instance how you are responsible for all this. But then again, by now you should get used to it.

Lessons from the Bhopal Tragedy

2010-06-12T23:07:00.004-04:00

We belong to a generation that grew up knowing that the man was important, not quite understanding why. Even today whatever little we know about the man is from hagiographic accounts sanctioned and approved by the dynasty. Funny thing is, even the current generation will grow up with exactly the same feeling.

You can run and you can hide, but from there is no escaping the myth making machine. Everything good about India or rather everything that the feudal masters think that the public think are good for them, are stamped with the man's name. So far, this has worked beautifully, India's ignorant masses believe in the mythology.

The Bhopal disaster happened right after the man took over the helms of the country. He would continue to rule over it for several years. After him, his party would continue this rule for several more years. Actually, all this is rather redundant really - suffice it to say the country has been ruled and any dissidents roughshod and silenced by the family to which the man belonged except for a few brief periods of times.

Yet, column after column, editorial after editorial, TV show after TV show discussed anything but this singularly important fact in the context of the Bhopal tragedy. This is no surprise. This is what this group is tasked with. Lying with a straight face and deflecting blame from the dynasty is their primary responsibility.

Every now and then, the nation will be gripped with some grave concern or the other, like hay fever. A few frenzied editorializing days later we will move on to the next topic. In this case perhaps Bihar elections where presumably the myth loses much of its power in transit.

In the end, we are left with an empty feeling. We still do not have any clarity whatsoever on industrial regulations, land acquisitions, accident redressal. A few days ago an airplane belonging to the national carrier nose dived on a substandard runway, killing all but a few on board. Yet nothing since the incident suggests a change in policies that could improve the situation. Bhopal happened over a generation ago.

The only lesson we ultimately learned from the Bhopal tragedy is that we do not learn from past tragedies. The only thing changes is the number of human rights activists, their relative wealth and power and the poisonous fumes coming out of their mouths. Needless to say, we are pretty darn near suffocating as a nation.

Azizul Hawk Molla, vegetable vendor

2010-05-27T08:27:00.002-04:00

"The UPA government has been a complete failure in this respect. It has not only been unsuccessful in curbing price rise but also has cut a sorry figure in bringing about useful economic reforms.

"Things were not this bad under the National Democratic Alliance. Poor people's misery never reached this level during Bharatiya Janata Party-led government. Prices of essential commodities, as it stands now, are totally out of our reach.

"I have a feeling that the government wants to eradicate the poor from India. It wants them to die of starvation."

Read the whole series, it is enlightening.

We are guessing the water carriers of social justice and the poverty pornographers are not gonna be amused.

I saw poor people

I felt sad

I wrote about poor people

Now gimme a prize

gimme gimme

gimme

gimme gimme

Hang the man, spare the boy

2010-05-09T12:55:00.005-04:00

So, the Indian courts have handed down the death sentence to captured militant Ajmal Amir Kasab. Predictably, the socialists want him pardoned and given the life sentence instead. This is what socialists do, in these matters they are more predictable than Bollywood melodramas. Actually they do these things more for the shock value and future award potential rather than any kind of ideological conviction. They think they are pissing off Hindoos.

Actually, they would be wrong, as a matter of fact they would also be pretty late to the party. We said the same thing more than a year ago.

Among the more idiotic concepts posited by socialists is that since suicide attackers want death, pardoning them would deter future attacks. Let's see how this might play out: not awarding the death penalty to suicide attackers would prevent future attacks because suicide attackers will be afraid that they might live! As you can see, this is not really a symmetric situation.

If you have not figured out the illogic in this, let's spell this out further: the objective of a suicide attacker is not just his own death. That is to say, the definition of a suicide attacker is not a person who simply covets death. If that were the case, they would all just commit mass suicides like the Jonestown cult or something and we would all be happy. A suicide attacker is one who wants to inflict death and injury upon those he considers his enemies (us, in this case) - and in the process he does not care whether he lives or dies.

To summarize, one could argue awarding death to Kasab might not act as a strong deterrent to future foot soldiers of G-Had, and we would agree. But to say that not awarding him a death sentence will act as some sort of a deterrent is juvenile.

As we laid it out in the previous post, the socialists should have thought this through before demanding a civilian trial in the first place. At the time they were basking in the reflected glory of the newly anointed Messiah and started a chorus of how Kasab should get a just trial and not merely thrown to the hounds by a blood thirsty crowd (of Hindoos).

Since the concept of equality so completely eludes socialists, we have to spell this one out too. Once a case reaches the civilian courts, it is out of their hands. Then it will just work its way through the legal machinery. Then the only question to ask is whether another person, say Ram Sharma, would also get the death penalty for spraying bullets on innocent commuters at a train station. If the answer is yes, then Kasab should get the death penalty too and he did. The socialists don't usually get this, since they live in a world of politburos and so on. They think they can change the rules on a case by case basis, merely upon whim. That's why they like China. It does not work that way in a constitutional democracy. They can't demand a sentence dilution just because they like Kasab.

At this point, the best option for socialists is to make Kasab a Muslim folk hero like they did with Afzal. Once that happens he will join the mercy petition queue behind Afzal and live happily ever after. Heck, he might even score a date with a Bollywood starlet.

Coming to what we think is going to happen, we believe Kasab will not become a folk hero, Congress will make sure he does not. They will hang him just before the next general elections trying to score cheap points. They will try to prevent Kasab from submitting a mercy petition at the legal level and in any case obscure the issue. Because if he does, he will have to jump the queue to pass Afzal and in the process make Chidu a bald faced liar. But then again, we already know he is one.

Here we go again

2010-04-27T18:53:00.003-04:00

'South Park' and the Informal Fatwa

Our "Liberal" Values - Part I

2010-03-10T23:08:00.003-05:00

The torture was so brutal that there were blood stains on the wall of Anu's room ....

The news that dominated the headlines and TV spots for the past few days was predictably the Swamy Nithyananda happy ending case. Since it involved a religion which is every secular person's mission to fix and a movie actress, the case had great tabloid appeal. Prima facie it does not appear any laws were broken. Plenty can be said about the moral aspect of the case but should the secular state get involved? There is an obvious catch-22 in such private sting operations, especially when it involves gross violation of privacy, you can not just barge into someone's bedroom. Yet, the courts admitted a case of "rape and intimidation" against the Swamy. This is a very clever ruse, something tells us the dude called K. Lenin did not think it up all by himself. Maybe it had something to do with land disputes between the Swamy's organization and a powerful regional satrap, who knows?

The point is, we expected our liberals to take a contrarian stand with their fiercely individualistic fearless selves. Alas, as "liberal" journalist after "liberal" journalist wrote about and one rating hungry secular TV anchor to the next discussed the salacious aspects of the case, no one gave the poor Swamy a break. Forget the Swamy for a moment, what about the poor woman's privacy? The sting video kept on running until it was dislodged off the prime slot by the Queen's triumphant appearance post passage of the Women's reservation bill in the Rajya Sabha. What good is empowerment if ladies can't have a bit of private fun on the side?

In any case, titillating as the case might have been, no small animals or little children were hurt in the process.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said about another case that flew past in the minor headlines. No one took any notice:

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A Kerala Christian priest has been arrested for alleged sexual abuse of a minor girl inmate of a hostel run by Orthodox Church at Pothukal in Malappuram district in September last year. The victim is a student of Catholicate Higher Secondary School run by the church. [source: The Times of India]

This is a very serious, big ticket crime, the holy grail of any public prosecutor, and yet:

Father K G Joseph alias Father Habib Joseph was arrested and produced in a local court on Thursday. He, however, was granted bail. Joseph later denied charges. Crime Branch sources said the priest was charged under Section 354 IPC (assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty), a bailable offence.

It is astonishing that a monster who abuses a 14-year old kid gets booked under IPC 354 as opposed to IPC 375. Given the situation, letting the dude out on bail basically means letting him walk free.

Wait, there is more:

Police are also probing the "unnatural" death of the girl's elder sister, who "succumbed" to suspected food poisoning at hostel in October last year. A few days after her death, the 14-year-old class IX student had alleged that she and her elder sister Anu were made to wash feet and massage Joseph and another priest who was a regular visitor to the hostel and that it often ended up with them being sexually harassed.

If you are still shaking your head in disbelief, you are not alone. Yet the priest was booked under a bailable offense. This is what we call outstanding success of sensitivity training of public prosecutors in a secular country.

Further along, we find that the abuse was almost institutionalized and happened with full knowledge of other personnel of the institution:

Though they took up the matter with a nun, she instead of helping, threatened them with dire consequences, the girl had alleged. The two sisters belonging to a poor family of Kelakam in Kannur district thought it better to resign to their fate as otherwise they would have had to discontinue studies. Sixteen-year-old Anu, a class XI student, died on October 24, 2009. Soon after her death her younger sister had told reporters in the presence of her father that Anju was taken out in a car by the second priest on October 21 and they returned late in the night. Anu looked very tired and was crying and didn't eat anything the next day. This infuriated the nun who beat her up, she had alleged.

The systematic, pervasive and almost institutionalized abuse in such institutes happens right under the noses of our "liberal" people, the type whose every other spoken word is "justice". Just a few months ago, the Sister Abhaya case was finally wrapped up after years of legal intrigue. Another sister came out with a tell all book and received little attention. Every now and then one reads these horror stories and shivers, most of them involve a clique of religious leaders, politicians and powerful people. Little girls suffer silently, occasionally the walls carry the stains of their muffled cries .....

Minority Report

2010-03-09T22:50:00.003-05:00

Outrage: People enforcing bandh in Khammam town protesting

against a book authored by Macha Laxmaiah on Thursday. [Link]

Move over the anguished, impoverished minority stereotyped by the Sachar report, here comes the newly assertive variety. In Khamman, AP (pictured above), minority youth protested against a supposedly inflammatory book and brought life to a standstill. Special forces had to be deployed to keep matters from going out of control. The Government did not take any chances, copies of the offending book were seized and the author promptly arrested.

In Shimoga and Hassan, Karnataka, things did not end so well. Protests against an article written by controversial author Taslima Nasreen turned violent and two people died in the ensuing police firing.

Alert netizens point out that cars with bumper stickers "KHANS" were noticed in and around Bangalore, it is not clear if it is the effect of the movie "My Name is Khan".

40 year old nabbed for raping minor
Youth gets bail in elopement caseKolkata
Kidnapped girl rescued after chase in Choolaimedu
Moharrum passes off peacefully
Four held with firearms in Uttar Pradesh
Indian workers sold like cattle in Saudi Arabia Stowaway
20 unruly fliers hijack AI flight for 15 hrs
Dawood man held with fake currency
Miracle doc took two govts for a ride
SIMs being misused by Pak callers
Victim gives two versions court acquits rape accused
Man who murdered vagabond held
Four held with 50 kg date rape drug from city airport
Bombay HC upholds ban on Islamic book
Sultan ul Uloom lands in trouble
Vedic case MLA brother surrenders granted bail
Man accused of molesting Jet airhostess lands in custody
Furnish whereabouts of Gulshan Kumars killer
Truck looting Gang of robbers busted
Minor girl rescued from Delhi brothel
HuJI south India chief arrested in Hyderabad
14 year old raped killed in up
Men killed by wife paramour
D company got fake passports issued from Lucknow office
Girl spills beans on killer father
6 with fake currency held
Man behind 1993 train blasts held near articleshow
Ex MLA could face minimum 3 yrs in jail for giving shelter to IM terrorist
Ban on SIMI extended by two years
Cops crack Rs 42 lakh heist
3 town planning men suspended
Wanted accused in 1993 bomb blasts held after 17 years
Indian Mujahideen terrorist sent to police custody
youth arrested for kidnapping raping 15 yr old in mumbai
HuJI man in city for fake notes probe
IM man posed as BTech student to buy ball bearings
Suspected terrorist arrested in
Two suspected Bangla nationals held in Muzaffarnagar
200 kgs of ammonium nitrate 600 detonators seized in Gujarat
Cameras of mediamen snatched by cops
mumbai boy rescued from employer s custody
rapist in ties the knot victim bails him out in mumbai
Ketamine powder seized from Ahmedabad airport three held
Judge to face probe over links with woman officer
First time offenders
jammu and kashmir sex maniac in police net
suspect rider leads cops to robbers
railway cops put lives on the line to catch a con man
Gang of highway robbers busted
Two arrested on rape charges
Rape accuseds bail rejected yet again
Five arrested in molestation saga
Left hoodlums in khaki attack N Bengal village
hubby in laws get 7 year ri for raping woman
haj house imam accused of harbouring terrorists acquitted
al qaeda terrorist arrested in bihar
HC nod for CB plea on Naseer Khan
16 yr old girl set on fire
Delhi serial blasts accused arrested in Azamgarh
Vedic case Court extends Khude bail
hamza handled dawood s ops
shahbaz khan plans to sue airline authorities for maligning his name
sons of deplaned businessman quizzed police do not get any clue
how many female cops do you have Woman Trafficked
fake notes flood wholesale market in and around mumbai
youth arrested for kidnapping raping 15 yr old in mumbai
centre to pardon j and k youth training in pok
boys face 55 cases in four states
indian mujahideen had plans to attack iit bjp cong hqs
2 held with 20 stolen bikes
Three gunrunners held in Palamau
Four get life for kidnapping killing boy
Counterfeiters arrested in Bangalore
MLA aspirant 2 others held for killing tailor
Five held for cheating woman
senior citizen held for rape in mumbai
jealous of ex wife s success lawyer turns into an outlaw
dawood paying crores to ensure own protection
double murder convict gets bail after 8 years
convicted murderer may walk free if dna test is valid
three persons arrested poppy straw recovered in kashmir
11 get bail in Shopian case
dalit woman set on fire for objecting to molestation
Cargo plane lands with AK 47 rifles from Dubai
Constables son arrested for chain snatching
Taslimas article sparks violence in Karnataka 2 killed
2 AI employees suspended for molesting 2 minor passengers
Two more arrested in drug seizure case
10 yr old girl molested in tony south mumbai club
eve teasing leads to mumbai youth s murder
Plucky 7 yr boy survives uncles bid to kill him
Four teenagers arrested for robberies
54 yr old aide of state cong leader detained in german bakery probe
Kerala priest held for sexual abuse of minor
Lover murders pregnant girlfriend in public loo
delhi cop killer arrested in mumbai
molester in south mumbai thought victim was a foreigner
Aftab case judge gets death threat
Man held for fraud

Previous:

Minority Report - December 27, 2009

Minority Report - September 20, 2009

Minority Report - August 2, 2009
Minority Report - May 10, 2009

India's bestest Home Minister evah!

2010-02-22T22:52:00.004-05:00

India Inc. appears to be completely enamored by Shri P Chidambaram, who has already been anointed the best Home Minister ever by the secularatti. How quickly we forget that he has been at it for just a little over a year, having taken over the reigns very reluctantly in a politically expedient transition post 26/11. Till date Chidambaram has little to show for other than the creation of ever bigger bureaucracies.

There appears to be little evidence that any serious domestic investigation was even undertaken, if FBI hadn't caught Headley, India's "breakthroughs" post 26/11 would be exactly zero. Despite strong evidence of domestic terror cells in many cities, there seems to have been no attempt to bust these cells. Perhaps one such cell, alleged to be linked to Indian Mujahideen, which in turn is a polymorph of SIMI, may have been behind the recent Pune blast.

Yet, media persons covering the Pune terror attack proclaimed in reverent adulation how Chidambaram had "rushed" from Chennai to Pune and how well he handled the aftermath. This handling mainly consisted of a press conference, held in his preferred style, which is essentially a royal sermon. He does not like to be asked questions, setting the boundaries at the get go. The few he chooses to answer, he makes no attempt to hide his contempt towards the questioner, making hand gestures of impatience, his body language reeking of elitism. He drops recycled cliches ("they have to get lucky just once..") and his fanboys in the media lap it all up.

After Pune, Chidambaram claimed that there had been no intelligence lapses, which is probably true. There had been ample information related to flourishing terror cells in Pune. What was lacking was the political will to act on this information. It is obviously hard to prevent terror attacks, but "you are a sitting duck, too bad" isn't exactly confidence inspiring.

Perhaps what is most astonishing is that even after establishing the much touted NIA, the Pune terror attacks are still being investigated by Maharashtra ATS. Meanwhile there is something brewing with the whole NSA thing.

In any case, minor structural adjustments within the bureaucracy isn't really the job of the Home Minister. A seasoned bureaucrat can pull this through, there is no direct political consequence involved. A Home Minister is supposed to provide vision and handle politically difficult situations. This is where P Chidambaram has so far proved to be a complete failure, sending wrong signals to both fundamentalists and Naxalites.

The Naxalite situation has gotten progressively worse, now we are down to blaming local state governments. One wonders if the said state Governments will be given credit if the situation improves. P Chidambaram himself has denied there is such a thing called Operation Green Hunt.

On the other hand, for someone who insists on taking the secular version of the ministerial oath, P Chidambaram allowed himself to be summoned by an Islamic seminary who then read him the riot act. Chidambaram went with his tail tucked between his legs and then surrendered. A good dog knows his masters. Under P Chidambaram's watch, Kashmir type tendencies has spread throughout India. It started with the student agitations post Batla-house encounter. Conspiracy theories abound yet the Home Ministry remains silent.

If P Chidambaram doesn't wipe off the smirk on his face soon and start showing some leadership, his legacy might as well turn out to be the Kashmirization of rest of India.

15 ...

2010-02-22T21:55:00.003-05:00

On February 13, 2010, a powerful blast occurred inside a popular eating joint at Koregaon, Pune. The death toll from the blast has now reached 15. Most of the victims were in their early twenties. There were also scores of people injured, some with visible wounds, some with a scar deep inside ....

Excuse us for this anachronistic post, India has bounced back. We haven't ...

Justice gets a Secular angle

2010-02-09T00:21:00.003-05:00

In an earlier post (Justice gets a Social Justice angle), we had discussed how the Secular Govt of India is slowly but surely changing the legal framework to incorporate ideas of social justice into it. A recent Supreme Court judgment not only confirms this, but starts an extremely alarming trend:

Poverty could mitigate crime, even murder: SC

In an order that is sure to spark a debate, the court said poor background of the accused should -- along with old age and years spent behind bars while awaiting death sentence -- be considered as mitigating factors when courts ponder whether life sentence should be used in an otherwise fit case for death penalty. The order was passed by a Bench comprising Justices P Sathasivam and H L Dattu while hearing an appeal against death penalty awarded by the trial court as well as Allahabad high court to two members of a gang of bandits convicted for killing four people in December 1995.

The Bench noted that apart from being old, the convicts had been in custody since 1996 and death penalty had hung over their heads since 2005, when the trial court gave its verdict.

The Bench further said, "The convicts (Mulla and Guddu) belong to an extremely poor background. One thing which is clear to us is that they have committed these crimes for want of money. Though we are shocked by their deeds, we find no reason why they cannot be reformed over a period of time." [source: The Times of India]

Were these men particularly destitute? How about the victims? They were farm laborers who had been kidnapped for ransom by the two men. Just because the ransom amount was small (Rs. 10,000) does not make the perps poor, it just reflects the fact that the victims' capacity to pay might not have been very high. To brutally hack to death five farm laborers upon non-payment of ransom does not reflect desperation, it reflects cold blooded sadism of seasoned criminals.

What if the names of the two condemned men had been Munna and Guddu instead of Mulla and Guddu? Your guess is as good as ours, but something tells us no minority is ever going to be hanged in this country, no matter how gruesome the crime. This isn't a stretch, if you take the Sachar generalization across the whole spectrum and apply the observation of the Hon'ble Justices Dattu and Sathasivam, this is but a natural conclusion. Indeed, the secular zeal of UPA is going in this direction for quite sometime now. Recent examples include clemency to J&K youth who had attended terror school in Pakistan and continued attempts by secular politicians to get the UP terrorists off the hook.

A quick search on Justices HL Dattu and P Sathasivam reveals interesting facts. Justice Dattu has Karnataka / Kerala HC background while Justice Sathasivam is a former CJ of the TN High Court. In other words, both hail from citadels of a certain model of social justice. Both are interesting 2008 appointees to the supreme court with a long tenure ahead of them.

It also appears that Justice Dattu had earlier recused himself from the well publicized and infamous Nun Avaya murder case.

Justice Sathasivam appears to be one of those who do not believe in practicing what they preach:

The Supreme Court’s pivotal role in making up for the lethargy of the Legislature and the inefficiency of the executive is commendable. But the law can be dehumanized and the final forensic floor–the Supreme Court–may turn into a dictator. He concluded by saying that the weapon of judicial activism should be used carefully. [source]

That rhetoric would nominally mean a judge who makes the strictest interpretation of the constitution and the laws, and these currently most decidedly do not have any provision for factoring in the "poverty" of perpetrators of heinous crimes in doling out sentences.

These two judges seem to be getting a disproportionate number of Police encounter cases and have presided over the bail plea of Gujarat encounter cops.

This is why we need think tanks to analyze and collate the judgments of supreme court benches, just to make sure nothing funny is going on. Watching this page would be a start.

Trial lawyers all over the country will make a keen note of this case, suddenly we will start seeing a lot of perps on trial suddenly turn poor and destitute, especially if they happen to belong to the minority community.

Asif Zardari featured on Indian National Congress Ad

2010-01-24T18:58:00.002-05:00

Well, not quite, but if that happened, it would be in the same league as this one.

This GOI advertisement came out on the National Girl Child day, released by the Ministry of Child and Women Development under Krishna Tirath of Congress. The first thing that strikes you is how amateurish the composition is. A high school student could compose a better ad and write better copy too. Most of the real estate is taken up by post-modernist blocks of color, an advertisement against female foeticide features mostly successful male icons (including the Pakistan Air Force general, of course). The ad is clearly off message. It is also way off target, people who can read that ad usually do not kill their girl children.

It is admirable that the Government takes up such a strident stand against this social malaise but haven't we done just about enough on this particular issue? We have legislated the heck out of it, there is no dearth of jhollawalla funds or enforcement. Yet, clearly Government action is unable to make a reasonable dent on the problem. On the other hand, is the problem as big as it is made out to be? Reports indicate female foeticide is fairly common in the Southern parts. Reports also indicate in male-female ratio, China does far worse than India.

Obviously, this is a secondary problem that can not be easily fixed by running bogus color ads on English language newspapers. On the other hand, it does provide two essential services - provide employment to extended members of the family (ad design, publishing, copy writing, printing etc.) and a moral cudgel to a group of people whose sole purpose in life appears to be to pick faults within other religions.

We recommend the Ministry of Child and Women Development to expend at least some resources to other areas. We do not see Hindu priests or religious leaders advocate female foeticide, in fact many of them are vocally against it. What we do see are advertisements for Arab Pardha adorning billboards in major cities in Kerala.

Forgotten Genocides

2010-01-19T20:55:00.003-05:00

Find a Kashmir Hindu around you, he will tell you the significance of January 19. It was exactly 20 years ago to the day when all hell broke loose in the valley of Kashmir on the peaceful, patriotic community of Kashmiri Hindus.

Twenty summers and winters have passed since then but the memories, scars and hopes are still fresh and alive. It was a night from hell when the gruesome threats emanated from loudspeakers mounted atop mosques all over the Kashmir valley. That night, Islamic terrorists gave our parents three choices -- convert to Islam, get killed, or flee.

Which one would you have chosen?

A majority of us chose to escape because the honour and dignity of our sisters, daughters and mothers was sacred for us. Most of us seized the very first transportation we could find, hid our womenfolk in the back of the vehicles, prayed and escaped. [source: Rediff]

This is just one example, albeit the most heartbreaking one. Any reasonable person would see this as a pattern that repeats with deadly predictability when certain conditions are met.

There is no escaping this menace, where would you go to? Europe? Africa?

In this world and in this fight we stand alone.

Did Kashmir separatist leader Yasin Malik really commit a rape?

2010-01-11T21:58:00.003-05:00

Yasin Malik with his brand new Pakistani wife (backstory)

That Aman ki Asha thing between The Times Group and the Jang (literally "war") group of Pakistan? Not going well. Had we not known about The Times of India's seemingly endless appetite for self-parody, we would have called the exercise totally redundant. As far as we can tell, the peace process between India and Pakistan isn't stalled for lack of candle light vigils or goofy editorials.

Within days of announcing the citizen-to-citizen over social media and web peace gesture, we had:

(a) Fidayeen attack on Kashmir

(b) Rocket attack on Punjab villages

... or, if you prefer, business as usual with that country. Anyway, we digress.

The peace initiative had a two day conference in New Delhi, with delegates from Pakistan flown in. Guess who was one of the keynote speakers? Yasin Malik.

According to reports, the separatist leader was delivering a key-note speech on the road map towards peace between the two hostile nations, when he was interrupted by some unidentified youths. What started as a normal interaction with the JKLF leader soon turned out to be an altercation where in Malik was accused of supporting anti-India activities, misguiding people and politicising sensational issues just in the name of building peace.

The protestors then raised slogans against Malik. In the full glare of media, Malik was accused of raping a nurse and escaping justice due to his political influence. [source: zeenews]

Now, rolling out the red carpet for the enemies of the country is not a terribly new thing for our secular people, but we were stunned at the serious allegation leveled at Malik.

Sure enough, a google search throws up several hits which make the allegation, including detailed analysis and even the name of the victim. There is no way to corroborate the story, it is not like Indian media will report anything like that.

So, did he or didn't he? Knowing what we know about the man, we certainly won't put it beyond him.

Just how broken is the Mid-Day meal scheme?

2010-01-10T19:56:00.003-05:00

Poor: adjective, -er, -est, noun
1. having little or no money, goods, or other means of support: a poor family living on welfare.

[Applies to: NDA Regime]

Remember poor folks? The kind that used to show up on front pages of newspapers every now and then during the NDA regime? Well, they disappeared again. No more editorials lamenting poverty etc. from the career socialists either. Anyway, we digress.

One of the flagship schemes of the UPA 1.0 Govt much loved by socialists is the mid-day meal scheme. So, we did a quick google news search to see how the scheme is doing:

Oh, by the way, did you know there is actually a Mid-Day Meal Scheme Workers Union?

Meanwhile, MDM Scheme Workers Union led by its district president Babaji Parida organized a dharna in front of the collectorate demanding the government to supply pulses, cooking gas and vegetables along with rice to the implementing agencies and pay salaries regularly.

Obviously, none of the water carriers of social justice will show any interest whatsoever in these stories. This is how the whole thing is supposed to work. It is simply amazing how quickly any socialist scheme assumes a mammoth bureaucratic structure, grows unionized work force and then suddenly starts running out of money.

As discussed before, the only places where the mid-day meal scheme is reasonably working is where a public-private partnership exists. Even in that example, since the organization running the scheme is ostensibly a Hindu charitable trust, it ran into other types of trouble - apparently serving children a full nutritious meal of Daal, Rice and Sabzi is Hindutva indoctrination!

Eyeballing this sad state of affairs, it looks like completely broken doesn't even begin to describe the problem, it is so bad that we are seriously jeopardizing the health of millions of children to not only just malnutrition but also to serious type of food poisoning. The kids are obviously better off bringing whatever food their parents can afford. We just don't believe that parents who can spare their children for school can not spend 44 paise on their meals.

Tribals see through Human Rights Mafia

2010-01-09T01:04:00.002-05:00

Dantewada tribals attack Medha Patkar

BHOPAL: Tribals angry with activists fighting for human rights of Naxals while ignoring poor ‘adivasis’ threw rotten eggs and tomatoes at Magsaysay award winner Medha Patkar and Sandeep Pandey as they reached Dantewada town in Chhattisgarh on Wednesday.

While Medha, being a woman, did not face much humiliation, her companion Pandey was pulled down from the motorcycle and given a hiding. He was pushed around and asked why the activists had done nothing for the tribals but found cause to support Naxals.

Medha, who leads Narmada Bachao Andolan, and Pandey who founded Asha for Education, were on their way to participate in a 'jan sunwai' (people's court) in Naxal-hit areas on Thursday. Patkar and Pandey were on a motorbike when tribals carrying banners of ‘Maa Danteswadi Adivasi Swabhimaan Manch’ surrounded them, asking them to go back.

Shouting slogans like "Wapas jao, wapas jao (go back)", the tribals alleged that NGOs "support Naxals under the pretext of human rights." [source: The Times of India]

It is just incredible that these human rights activists were actually on their way to participate in a "people's court". The Naxals have basically four uses for villages. They hit them for recruiting soldiers (often using coercion and threat), food, shelter and women. The people's courts are used to settle issues like who were the "informers" and so on and so forth.

It is no secret that most of the so called Human Rights Activism is media propaganda aided by astro turfed crowd financed by NGOs (paid by YOU).

The only regret we have out of this incident is that Genocide Suzie was not on the scene. Readers will recall that in recent interviews she can't seem to stop boasting about her visits to Dantewada. Go ahead Suzie, visit Dantewada again, the tribals are waiting for ya.

Resist "Global Governance" - your life may depend on it

2010-01-05T23:32:00.002-05:00

Read this and weep:

The Elephant in the Room
The biggest pain in Asia isn't the country you'd think.
BY BARBARA CROSSETTE | JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2010

Think for a moment about which countries cause the most global consternation. Afghanistan. Iran. Venezuela. North Korea. Pakistan. Perhaps rising China. But India? Surely not. In the popular imagination, the world's largest democracy evokes Gandhi, Bollywood, and chicken tikka. In reality, however, it's India that often gives global governance the biggest headache.

Of course, India gets marvelous press. Feature stories from there typically bring to life Internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers, and gurus keeping spiritual traditions alive while lovingly bridging Eastern and Western cultures

[source: Foreign Policy Magazine via: Varnam]

In the context of the Global Warming scam, we briefly touched upon the subject of "World Government". For those unfamiliar with the concept, basically the initial draft text of Copenhagen had this apparently innocuous reference to "World Government".

A big problem with the Indian media and indeed media in many developing countries is that, they filter out anything other than the Left-Liberal opinion from the developed nations, which means anything right of The Guardian magazine never reaches a large proportion of the global public. The public thus comes to accept an incomplete and highly distorted image as the consensus opinion of the West.

People in India do not know that the Australian senate recently rejected a carbon trading scheme. They are not aware that just a few days ago, the French declared a newly enacted carbon tax law unconstitutional. A cap and trade style legislation has practically no chance of passing in the US senate, of course that may change.

The sinister idea of World Government must be summarily rejected by the people of India, because it will mean becoming colonized all over again. However, a section of people in India will make out like bandits, for a glimpse of this sinister crowd, please peruse this link at leisure.

The people who can come up with this audacious plan are the sort that keep coming back for seconds, as they will when they reconvene for another round of tamasha at Mexico City. The UPA Government wants to jump on to this bandwagon because through it they can rule India indefinitely.

We feel so strongly about this threat to our freedom that we added this to the banner of our blog:

Resist "Global Governance"

India's "insecure" minorities

2010-01-03T23:59:00.005-05:00

Images - from left to right:

(a) Haj Pilgrims at Mumbai hijack airliner for 15 hours [link]

(b) Violent stone pelting protest in Gujarat to get a BRTS stop named after a Pir [link]

Haj pilgrims confine crew in AI plane for 15 hours
Mumbai, Jan 3, PTI:

Haj pilgrims on board an Air India flight from Jeddah refused to leave the plane on arriving here and confined its cabin crew for 15 hours resenting the diversion of the aircraft from fog-hit Delhi.

Due to fog, the flight AI-891A was diverted to Mumbai at 5.30pm on Saturday and the plane could not leave until 9 pm. When the passengers were asked to deplane and make their way to the transit lounge and hotel for overnight stay, a few of them refused and created a ruckus on board the aircraft.

"The unruly passengers blocked the exits and prevented the security and traffic from coming on board and/or deplaning the other passengers into the parked buses," a statement issued by All India Cabin Crew Association said. [source: Deccan Herald]

This piece of news was not meant for public consumption, but it made it to you anyway. What you don't know, couldn't possibly hurt you, at least not in the immediate future, subject to abrupt changes of course.

By the time news reaches you, several filters get applied. Some of it does not reach you at all, or, sometimes when they do reach you, they get sanitized by the "style guides". For instance, once the news factory churns out the above piece of news, it becomes something like this:

20 unruly fliers 'hijack' AI flight for 15 hrs
Manju V, TNN 4 January 2010, 03:31am IST

MUMBAI: It was a 15-hour nightmare on the ground for over 200 air passengers and flight crew at Mumbai airport thanks to the hijack-like

The unprecedented case of unruly passenger behaviour in the country came about when around 20 Air India passengers—who like hundreds of others found their flight diverted to Mumbai because of fog and technical glitches at Delhi airport—stopped their co-passengers and 12 flight attendants from leaving the aircraft that was parked on the Mumbai tarmac from Saturday evening to Sunday morning. [source: The Times of India]

See, how easy it is? "Haj Pilgrims" become "unruly fliers", like they say, news is like sausage, you don't wanna know how it's made. At least you know the broad outline of how this one panned out, including how the security personnel made no attempt whatsoever trying to rescue the crew. What you don't know is just how much never makes it beyond the editorial desks. You didn't hear about Miraj riots, perhaps you didn't hear about violent stone and bottle pelting at oncoming cars at Mahim during Muharram either.

If this is the state of news reporting, when secular blowhards like Harsh Mander and Ram Puniyani etc. add their spin, you really start to feel guilty.

The truth of course is stranger and harsher than their fiction. The docile "minority" cowering under the glare of majorities is mostly a myth. Actually, it is quite the reverse. Most people are constantly afraid when the short fuse is gonna ignite. It can happen anywhere, anytime, for any reason and sometimes no reason at all. Mobile phones have made it better, earlier used to be many anxious moments spent by family members.

It is not just a case of a few rotten apples. The whole basket is so far gone that by the time crooked opportunistic secular politicos realize it, it is going to be too late.

Happy New Year. Stay alert, stay safe.

Climate Concerns: OMG!!! We are all gonna die!!!

2009-12-29T18:05:00.006-05:00

Nikki says:
December 10th, 2009 on 8:21 pm

If climate change is not TOP priority WE ARE FINISHED !!!!!!!

Plzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz save US all, it’s us ,the WORST ANIMALS who will pay a very very heavy price

What development are people taking about which will come in the way ….when we wont have mankind for who this development needs to be done !!!!!!!!

Cheers
Nikki

This exemplifies the nasty effects of the pervasive fear mongering that prevails in the atmosphere. At a time when her outlook on life should be as cheery as her sign off, poor little Nikky is scared of the possibility of extinction of her species.

How exactly do you get an impossible demographic like teenage fans of Shah Rukh Khan to actually get serious enough to truly believe in a cause, however fake and farcical it is? This is really a question for behavioral scientists, psychologists and philosophers. We suspect billions of dollars worth of advertisements and news items (paid by YOU) has something to do with it. Perhaps there is something about climate change fears that appeals to the post-modern lifestyle, to people who like to be in a flash crowd or be a "friend" of a celebrity on social networking sites.

Anyway, we digress.

Many of the "climate" concerns shared by Indians are actually for real. Our cities are overloaded, a walk outside causes a deposit of soot on our clothes. Toxic fumes permeate the air, grime, dirt and squalor everywhere. Factories billow dark plumes of poisonous gases in obvious and flagrant violation of environmental laws, right at the heart of our cities. The water table continues to get depleted, the summers seem severe and dry. Coastal areas and mountain sides undergo land erosion.

Unfortunately, none of these problems have anything to do with what the folks at IPCC have been talking about. As a matter of fact, even if the full recommendation of IPCC is adopted into a binding international treaty, none of these concerns will be addressed.

In fact, most of these problems will be aggravated and some very nasty new problems will likely get introduced.

Although cleverly named InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the central focus of IPCC and the "scientific" research they publish is global warming. Between "global warming" and "climate change" a lot can happen, the gullible public can be duped into believing anything.

The actual IPCC report is not all that scary, none at all. Politicians add another layer of polish on top of the IPCC report which gets further amplified in the media.

Let's take a recent example of media fear mongering:

Warm trend to rob Mumbai of winter in 10 years?

MUMBAI: White Christmas may soon be relegated to a poet's analogy for Mumbaikars. Deputy director-general of meteorology, regional meteorology centre, Colaba, R V Sharma confirms our worst fears.

"We have conducted a survey, studying the variation of maximum temperature in Santa Cruz spanning more than a hundred years. There is a significant rise (1.62 degrees Celsius) in the average maximum temperature in Mumbai. It means that the city is getting warmer and, if this warming trend continues, Mumbai may cease to have any winter in a decade or so. If you see December's temperature over the past 100 years, the average rise is about 2.98 degrees Celsius. The rare cold that we have experienced this month is because of the air flowing in from the north but, on the whole, it has been a warmer month," he said. [source: The Times of India]

Winter in Mumbai? White Christmas in Maharashtra? Funny, the report itself contains evidence to the contrary. We have been set up for the worst type of confirmation bias, we feel scared no matter whether it is hot, cold or temperate; whether it rains or remains dry. This winter, like the previous one has been much colder than averages in large parts of Northern India. Europe and North America reeled under severe snow storms and blizzards over the past week.

As a matter of fact, there is no discernible long term change in climatic pattern observed in India.

What if we believe Anthropogenic Global Warming is a certainty and indeed adopt in full measure all of IPCC's recommendations?

Our emissions account for just 2 ppmv a year, or 20 ppmv over the next decade, of which 7.5% is just 1.5 ppmv. So, how much “global warming” will the Copenhagen Accord forestall? The answer lies in the following sum, still based on the UN’s high-end estimate of the warming effect of CO2:
No cuts in emissions: 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29 C° = 0.51 F°.
Copenhagen cuts: 5.7 ln(406.5/388) = 0.27 C° = 0.48 F°.
Copenhagen cooling: 0.02 C° = 0.035 F°.
That cooling – or, rather, warming forestalled – would be so small that our instruments would not be able to detect it. Yet the cost of achieving it would run into the trillions. [source: SPPI Blog]

If India eventually signs up for a binding global climate treaty, its impact will be felt by the poorest segment. There will be an enormous increase in energy costs, which will of course be subsidized by the Government leading to severe economic imbalances. Subsidies do not work perfectly even when they do work at all - so there will be a steep increase in poverty.

The monies that could potentially go towards cleaning up the real pollutants such as SO2, NOx, soot, asbestos etc. would chase the mirage of CO2, which is a harmless trace gas. The monies that could go to provide good quality electric coverage will be wasted on solar lanterns. The monies that could go to prevent deforestation, sand mining would actually be chasing large wind farms and solar cities, actually causing more deforestation and land erosion.

If we let ourselves be coaxed into a binding global treaty premised on demonstrably false science, we will be basically ruining our future and little Nikky will be none the wiser for it.

Move over NGOs, here comes the GONGOs

2009-12-28T08:57:00.004-05:00

Commenter Ashok Kumar forwarded a few fantastic links on the NGO menace.

The first article focuses on the GONGOs and the obvious problems they pose in the democratic setup:

Democracy's Dangerous Impostors

The Myanmar Women's Affairs Federation is a gongo. So is Nashi, a Russian youth group, and the Sudanese Human Rights Organization. Kyrgyzstan's Association of Non-commercial and Nongovernmental Organizations is also a gongo, as is Chongryon, the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan. Gongos are sprouting everywhere; they're in China, Cuba, France, Tunisia and even the United States.

Gongos are government-organized nongovernmental organizations. Behind this contradictory and almost laughable tongue twister lies an important and growing global trend that deserves more scrutiny: Governments are funding and controlling nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), often stealthily. [source: Washington Post]

The second link is an excerpt from a book by Dr. Sam Vaknin:

NGOs - The Self-Appointed Altruists

Their arrival portends rising local prices and a culture shock. Many of them live in plush apartments, or five star hotels, drive SUV's, sport $3000 laptops and PDA's. They earn a two figure multiple of the local average wage. They are busybodies, preachers, critics, do-gooders, and professional altruists.

Always self-appointed, they answer to no constituency. Though unelected and ignorant of local realities, they confront the democratically chosen and those who voted them into office. A few of them are enmeshed in crime and corruption. They are the non-governmental organizations, or NGO's.

Some NGO's - like Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Amnesty - genuinely contribute to enhancing welfare, to the mitigation of hunger, the furtherance of human and civil rights, or the curbing of disease. Others - usually in the guise of think tanks and lobby groups - are sometimes ideologically biased, or religiously-committed and, often, at the service of special interests.

The encroachment on state sovereignty of international law - enshrined in numerous treaties and conventions - allows NGO's to get involved in hitherto strictly domestic affairs like corruption, civil rights, the composition of the media, the penal and civil codes, environmental policies, or the allocation of economic resources and of natural endowments, such as land and water. No field of government activity is now exempt from the glare of NGO's. They serve as self-appointed witnesses, judges, jury and executioner rolled into one.

The third article is a treatise from The International Journal of Not-for-profit Law:

The Power Shift and the NGO Credibility Crisis
By James McGann and Mary Johnstone1

World politics has undergone a radical and often-overlooked transformation in the last fifteen years, resulting neither from the collapse of the Soviet Union nor the rising tide of fundamentalism, but from the unprecedented growth of non-governmental organizations around the globe. NGOs or Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) have moved from backstage to center stage in world politics, and are exerting their power and influence in every aspect of international relations and policymaking. NGOs have been a positive force in domestic and international affairs, working to alleviate poverty, protect human rights, preserve the environment, and provide relief worldwide. Few, therefore, have felt the need to take a critical look at the effectiveness and accountability of these organizations. [source: ICNL]

* * *

In the Indian context, NGOs are already starting to create massive damage, as we discussed in a recent post: NGO: Government is their middle name.

It should be blindingly obvious to anyone by now that these organizations are involved in wholesale graft and corruption involving amounts that probably exceed the services they provide. If we add on the salaries and perks received by the NGO personnel, we will probably not even get a social surplus. A recent case is the usurping of money received in donation for Tsunami aid from abroad.

One such donor agency, US-based Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD), which gave Rs 7.5 crore to the Church of South India (CSI), demanded the audited accounts for the funds and that led to the church filing a case against a few people with the police. Apart from that, two other cases were filed with the police relating to swindling of tsunami relief funds. [source: ExpressBuzz]

The fact that The Church of South India (CSI) is one of the most powerful and prominent religious organization in the Southern region is a testament to the extent of the rot.

In India, we also have what can be called GANGOs, i.e. Government Aided Non-Governmental Organizations. These GANGOs receive a ton of funds from the Government, i.e. YOU. There is no systematic audit requirements or disclosures in place. These are completely destroying the natural feedback mechanism of our democracy. Newspapers quote NGOs, Government use their statistics. They end up influencing policy in harmful ways.

NGOs have managed to insert themselves even in our foreign policy areas. During the PM's US visit, he made an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Among others, NDTV's Prannoy Roy is on CFR's International Advisory Board. The Clinton Foundation is also involved heavily in India. There were reports that Amar Singh of Samajwadi Party gave millions to the Clinton Foundation.

But people are smart, they know which side of the bread the butter is on. There is a mad rush to open NGOs, if you have connections, or join one.

Minority Report

2009-12-27T13:02:00.002-05:00

Harsh Mander is a perfect case that illustrates many of the problems with our Administrative Services. For a former bureaucrat, Mr. Mander's complete lack of statistical sense of proportion is remarkable. Does he even read the census reports? So, we have another one of those reruns of virtually the same column, which claims minorities live in fear in India. Sure, in a demographic segment of more than 150 millions, at least some of them are liable to have a little bit of everything. If stats not his style, he could simply ask the Hindu teen girl who must go past a Muslim ghetto to her tuition classes or a stewardess on a Haj flight.

What is it with India? The Agriculture Minister wants to do Cricket, IAS officers want to be Human Rights Activists and writers. Maybe our problem is that we got too many people stuck in the wrong career.

In any case, this issue of our report is dedicated to Harsh Mander.

Man who was blackmailing Anoushka Shankar arrested
Woman nabbed with 3 passports
Piracy racket Producers seek Rs 100 cr in damages
Youth who used pals bikes to snatch chains held
Man accused of luring 15 yr old maid
5 Bangladeshis held
BBA student alleges repeated rape by father
Man wanted in fake currency racket arrested
Two held in fake credit cards case
Murder case accused killed
Cops raid CPM mans home in Kaliachak
Wife lover held for mans murder
Gang involved in printing fake postal stamps busted
report_man kills wife for fling with clients
Agnecy dupes job seekers of Rs 1 cr
Passenger held for misbehaving with air hostess
Man beaten with shoes for raping 13 year old
Father daughter gun down 2 over incest taint
Cuffe Parade cops nab 4 for extortion
Youth kills sister over love affair
Youth Congress activists protest at MLN Hospital
Girl kidnapped rescued in Sikar
7 Pak nationals arrested with boat
Charges framed against gangrape accused
Four held with antiques worth Rs 2cr
Top guns of Latif gang to go for Haj
RJD activists protest implication of Shahabu in criminal cases
Burglar gang arrested
report_absconding from bihar jail arrested in city
report_teacher tortures adopted student
report_teen arms supplier arrested
JK cricketer held for RDX in bag
Police attach property of ex SP MLA
Five women stripped paraded naked in Jharkhand.html
Kidnapper held
5 held for assault
Cops and robber chase led to deadly accident
5 SIMI activists arrested in Madhya Pradesh
Jetpur villager abducted 3 arrested
city
3 youths held in Nigerian credit card scam
Kamal Khan off Bigg Boss for violent behaviour
Accused in multi crore recruitment scam arrested
Forgery charge against head of Delhi NGO
Case against NGO man for using fake ministry IDs
Man marries daughter claims divine sanction
Love jihad Karnataka joins probe
Bihar cop killed in Jharkhand mob attack 4 hurt
Two dozen trees on Halim College campus cut down
report_three held with fake notes in haridwar
Pancholi has helped Munir escape Police
Minister gets notice for gun licence
Cops nab real estate agent for visa fraud
Model is nabbed at mall in dowry case
Two more held for Vile Parle guards death
High court orders protection to runaway Hindu Muslim couple
HC asks top cop to decide on MCOCA against 3 BMC men
FIR against Amar for election remark
Three held for attacks on 2 Naga students
Militants object to judges remark comparing them to Kasab
Fresh arrests in MP show banned SIMI active again
Anoushka case Warrant against accused hacker
Driver behind girls abduction caught
Kidnapped girl rescued unharmed
18 year old robs Thane policeman of revolver
Notorious burglar who escaped from Godhra nabbed policemen suspended
Victim nabs robber fleeing with Rs 2 lakh
Cops oppose Wahabs Haj pilgrimage
Pak spys passport was issued from Lucknow
Two aides of Pak spy arrested in Lucknow
3 HuJI LeT linkmen held in Kolkata
report_dawood thought he was the us president
report_now fake notes are almost as authentic as the original
Bangla terror trio nabbed in city
report_cops hunt for bangla girl
Top Shakeel man gunned down in Borivli encounter
Man alleges human traffickers took his wife to the UK
Top Shakeel man gunned down in Borivli encounter
6 more fake passports found
NIA chargesheets Assam babus netas
Cops arrest another city Limouzines director
Hyderabad bound Indigo flight grounded after bomb threat 1 held
Duo admits role in Bangalore blasts
Hoax terror SMS a bid to frame wifes lover
sex racket delhi hotel manager is bangladeshi national say cops
D gang is now dialling rural areas IB
Fake currency unit unearthed in Delhi
report_naxal arrested 20 gelatin rods recovered from up s manchi area
report_demonstration held over conversion of sikh girl in j and k
report_five simi activist further remanded till nov 17
report_teenager held for raping 6 year old girl in vakola
report_bar girl turned drug kingpin held 1240kg marijuana seized
report_30 yearr old kidnaps sells baby in tardeo
report_jilted lover gets life for killing girl s mother in delhi
report_did disappeared simi and im cadres use headley s services
report_gold worth rs2 lakh recovered from robber in ap
Rape convict escapes Kutch police custody
report_up stf arrests two persons involved in visa racket
report_wahab changed cars on way to mumbai to dodge police
report_wanted criminal arrested in meerut
Man gets 3 years for placing iron bar on railway tracks
Women bartenders face the bar again
Who is Syed Wasim
Sherwani of Nizam era seized 2 held
Gangrape case Cops another girl cross examined
Five held on eve teasing charges
Youth attacks rapist dad
NRI techie arrested for rape
Cops in a spot over Habib Hussain case
Six inter state gang members held in Hyderabad

Minority Report - September 20, 2009

Minority Report - August 2, 2009
Minority Report - May 10, 2009

Climate of corruption

2009-12-22T02:10:00.004-05:00

Source: Livemint

In our previous post, we summarized the current state of the AGW debate in the world in the wake of the climategate scandal. In covering these issues, we also took a departure from the big stories of Indian politics for several weeks. It was very hard. Consider the following stories:

A Goa Congress politician rapes a Russian woman and then tries to weasel out using political clout. Comment by other Congress politicians? The woman should not have been out and about! Yeah, who are the Taliban here?
A Karanataka Congress politician caught with a woman and subsequently into immoral trafficking dragnet.
Telengana or not to be? A fine example of leadership. Crown Prince not available for comment even as his Youth Congress erupt in riots in Kerala.
A church pastor in Karnatana vandalizes his own Church and media spins the story. Nothing new here.
In Mumbai, evangelicals use deceit to convert children without the permission of their parents.
PDP Politician Madani's wife caught by police on terrorism charges inevitably leading to secular indignation, signature campaign by concerned citizens etc.
The usual minority related troubles including busting of a gang in Bangalore that used to kidnap bar girls and sexually assault them to force their employers to pony up.

As you can see, it tested the very limits of our self-control to pass up stories like this, yet we did. Why? Because the issue at hand is that important.

In India, we have a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. We obsess over silly little political games they play and that have no real consequence. We debate over the Swiss minaret ban which has practically no consequence in India, thankfully, aside from the comic relief provided by presumably Hindu secular journalists feigning more indignation than Muslims themselves. Yet, scams worth tens of thousands of crores get virtually no attention.

Funny thing is, we can at least recognize those scams. Take for instance the Madhu Koda scam or the Ambulance scam. These were low tech 19th century scams. Then the spectrum scam - tricky, but nothing you couldn't explain to the Mufassil types over a cup of tea.

Just how exactly do you even begin to explain the AGW scam? While you remain fixated over Copenhagen, your aam aadmi friendly Government has already bartered away your interest and you don't even know it.

In our next post, we will expose how our Government has already committed to a certain energy regime at a potential cost of literally hundreds of billions of dollars. Meanwhile, please take a few moments to ponder over the chart at the top of the post as well as the following:

Delhiites wrapped themselves up in more woollens today as the national capital woke up to a chilly and foggy morning with the mercury plummeting to the season's lowest of 7.4 degree Celsius. The capital is likely to get chillier ahead of Christmas with the Weatherman predicting minimum and maximum temperatures falling below average levels. (Source: Yahoo India)

Cold conditions intensified in most parts of the northern region on Monday as mercury dipped by several notches with Leh in Jammu and Kashmir freezing at minus 16 degrees. The minimum temperature in Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh hovered between two to four degree Celsius below normal at several places. (Source: IBNLive)

CLIMATEGATE: Some random thoughts, Links and Resources

2009-12-19T18:36:00.005-05:00

In continuation to the previous two posts on Climategate (CLIMATEGATE: The biggest "scientific" scandal ever, CLIMATEGATE: The market is the best peer reviewer), here are some final thoughts and resources on the AGW issue in general, before we move on to Copenhagen and its implications for India.

After initially ignoring the climategate leakage for nearly two weeks, MSM in the developed countries finally caved in, partly because the leaks went viral and attracted massive amounts of attention. Steve McIntyre, a leading skeptic and a maverick climate scientist was even interviewed on US prime time TV. Several newspapers in the UK have already gone over to the other side or at least moved towards a more of an agnostic position. Andy Revkin, the leading climate journalist of the New York Times is reportedly leaving. George Monbiot, The Guardian's leading climate journalist, seems to have regained composure after his initial shock and disbelief, he remains a believer.

Unfortunately, Indian media and intellectuals have given the climategate scandal a complete miss. Indian media did not cover the issue with much enthusiasm earlier, since few people really care about it one way or the other. Copenhagen was covered with much enthusiasm in articles full of baseless speculation and gross factual errors.

Links and Resources:

Two highly recommended websites are Watts Up With That? maintained by Anthony Watts and ClimateAudit.org by Steve McIntyre, the latter being the more science oriented.

Another very good website is The Science and Policy Institute with which the most vocal opponent of IPCC, Lord Christopher Monckton is associated. Lord Monckton, a former policy adviser to Margaret Thatcher, famously challenged the UK Department of Education when they made the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth compulsory viewing in UK schools. Lord Monckton won that court case after pointing out some 35 errors in the movie.

A very good and recent video of a presentation given by Lord Monckton on October 14, 2009 is available on [YouTube]. The slides for the presentation are available here [pdf].

Another must read is an open letter by Lord Monckton to IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pacharuri. This letter, apart from being a scathing critique of some of the scientific and statistical techniques used by the IPCC throws light on massive conflicts of interest that helps us understand the money game behind it.

For a better understanding of the problems of the solutions being proposed, in particular the economic viability of the various "green" energy sources, US based think tanks The Cato Institute and The Heritage Foundation are particularly helpful. A quick fun post by Professor Mark Perry shows how Ethanol, the 90s magic bullet of the greenies has already turned out to be a "dangerous and delusional bullshit".

We urge the readers to research the web on their own before drawing any conclusion based purely on MSM propaganda.

The status of the AGW debate post climategate:

The climategate leak was by no means the first time the whole IPCC thing was seriously challenged. However, it helped shatter the mythology to a great extent. Already public support for AGW is tottering below the 50% mark.

A common talking point of the believers is that, the whole thing could not possibly have been all a scam. It is difficult to imagine thousands of scientists, the MSM all over the world, all green and environment groups and major politicians from virtually every country working lockstep in a grand conspiracy.

Actually, this is the nature of all major socially engineered movements - they gain their own momentum. Think of socialism itself - an ideology that has miraculously survived despite its proven track record of creating misery.

For something like this to stick, it needs several conditions: First, it must be perceived to help the left-liberal political parties. This in itself will ensure that the MSM in every country will deliver the right message to the intended target. Second: it must have an underlying moral or social concern so that the feel good crowd can, well, feel good about supporting it. What can beat saving the planet? Third: it must be aligned with the money game. This essentially means big corporations must be able to make money out of it, the financial world must love the scheme and it should generate loads of jholawalla type opportunities.

The AGW concept met all these conditions and more. There is a reason it has come to be called "climate change" and not just "global warming" - a convenient ploy to get all sorts of anxiety to sharply focus at achieving a singular goal, in this case a politically binding UN led treaty for all nations to sign up for eternity.

The money trail:

Contrary to the popular belief, there is huge money to be made from a green world. The finance world loves it because the trading desks stand to gain massive amounts of commission from carbon trading. Many big corporations will make windfall profits by selling their carbon credits. As an example, Lakshmi Mittal can make up to £1bn on profits under the European scheme. The same story holds true for the Tatas for their Corus acquisition. A WSJ article details some of the money trail involving policy research institutes and academia. A potential conflict of interest scenario involving IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri and the Tatas can be found here and also in the open letter by Lord Moncton linked earlier.

Green energy being heavily government subsidized, an army of NGOs around the world will make out like bandits, mostly for doing unproductive work. Of course, the companies involved in green energy production themselves stand to make Government guaranteed profits, with much of the downside protected by Government. In turn, the financial world will make commissions out the green IPOs, bonds etc.

A global energy regime will create a massive global scale bureaucracy with an estimated 700 organizations under the UN umbrella.

Many conventional energy and utility companies actually welcome "green" energy. These companies are always the primary target of socialist wrath on account of their windfall profits. Most have diversified into green energy and for a good reason - green energy earns an overall better operating margin. By contrast, coal based energy for instance, runs at very low margins.

Global Governance:

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh gave a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), an independent think tank, during his US visit. Clueless Indian media reported this as though this is some sort of official US Government body. Among others, NDTV's Prannoy Roy is on CFR's International Advisory Board.

CFR is an example of an organization that believes in the concept of a "World Government". A full discussion of this concept is beyond the scope of this blog.

Needless to say, these things increase the chances of international wheeling-dealing. The global governance concept looks particularly attractive to the Left-Liberal parties of Western Democracies. Many of them can not get their own legislative bodies to accept the recommendations of IPCC, for instance a carbon trading scheme was rejected in the Australian Senate just a while ago.

The problem is, under the Geneva convention, an international treaty such as the one being proposed for climate change is binding on a nation and supersedes the nation's legislature.

For India, the implications are less severe since for all practical purposes we do not have a constitution. The ruling party has a blank check for a trillion dollars and they can do as they please. Unfortunately, if an arbitrary global governance regime gets accepted and signed into international law, its consequences can be very problematic. Financial and economic consequences aside, it can open up a whole new front for diplomatic assault under the pretext of saving the world.

CLIMATEGATE: The market is the best peer reviewer

2009-12-07T22:41:00.004-05:00

Recently activist P. Sainath ran an expose on three local dailies in Maharashtra showing that they had simultaneously run the same story on Maharashtra CM Ashok Chavan, just prior to the elections. Today, 56 newspapers across the globe ran an identical editorial, that included The Hindu from India. This editorial claims exactly what the entire left-liberal world has been claiming for the last couple of decades, that if unprecedented regulatory powers are not vested upon the UN and a select coterie of global "intellectuals", humanity will be faced with catastrophic consequences of Anthropogenic Global Warming. As we all know, there is no limit, no outer bound for the bad things that can happen to us - children will die by the millions, oceans will rise and flood many countries, tsunamis and hurricanes will increase, there will be wide spread disease and epidemics, low rainfall, low crop yield, many species will go extinct, your penis will shrink - ok, made that one up.

These newspapers are pretending that climategate never happened. Well, climategate already gets more google hits than Global Warming.

As it stands now, the global warming story stands thoroughly debunked. Up until now, most people accepted the general idea of global warming, although few believed in the doomsday scenarios and even fewer accepted the so called solutions.

Climategate shows the whole thing was a scam on a scale beyond our wildest imagination. It corrupted institutions, sacred principles of science and above all, it pushed a set of people generally considered above suspicion on the brink of and possibly well into criminal behavior. Perhaps the latter is the most tragic chapter in the book of climategate.

Consider the following:

- the scandal involves the very core of the global warming industry, the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, UK. The entire edifice of global warming and the IPCC reports are based on this organization's data and research.

- over the last two decades, the research grants for CRU and other pro scientists have increased dramatically, to the tune of many tens of millions, if not hundreds.

- the global warming scientists have always claimed a massive scientific consensus. It turns out there was no such consensus. The 2,500 scientists named in the IPCC report? Well, perhaps a few of them are actually scientists, the rest are bureaucrats. Rajedra Pachauri, IPCC head honcho, is a former railway engineer.

- the scientists vigorously denied any grain of truth in the so called "skeptics" claim, yet they actually entertained Stephen McIntyre's rebuttal and corrected the part involving Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age.

- the scientists persistently refused to share data with the "skeptics". If they at all released data, it was the heavily massaged and processed data.

- CRU now claims that the raw data was deleted for "space reasons".

- The Chief of CRU has stepped down following an externally constituted investigation.

- The famous hockey stick graph was found to have been based on a single tree! This tree was actually a huge outlier.

- NASA is yet to share raw data

- New Zealand NIWA produced a graph showing global warming that can not rationally be reproduced from the underlying data

The list goes on and go on. If what they are willing to admit and what their massaged data and research reveals is shocking enough, what they did to achieve the so called consensus is absolutely repulsive. They ganged up on anyone in the academia who challenged their thesis, they influenced journals to pull out contrarian articles and universities to drop competing research. Some of the emails exposed in the scandal indicate they might have completely compromised the scientific peer review process. They took care of the academia while their overground supporters - politicians, governments and government agencies made sure that if you did not support global warming, your funds ran dry.

In due course, everyone wised up and played ball. To understand the implication of this, consider this: reliable temperature records exist only for a century or so. In order to get a handle on temperature variability, one needs data for at least a couple of thousands of years. This is achieved in a rather esoteric field of paleoclimatology. This science produces what is known as proxy data - for instance, by studying width of tree rings of ancient trees, one can get a handle of temperatures far into the past. In this manner the "global warming" science touches upon a very broad range of sciences.

It is entirely possible that in order to keep contradictory evidence out of sunlight, many of these science areas have been either been heavily compromised or parched in terms of funding.

As is very evident, the entire process of Government funding research creates such sinister scenarios of moral hazard. Economics as we all know is a heavily compromised area, with the climategate expose, it appears that any political meddling in supposedly cut and dry areas of sciences can get corrupted in no time.

The only way to restore sanity is to let the market work its magic on the scientific process. Once the dignity of the science is restored, there is little by way of climatic danger that humanity can't handle.

The Grand Asymmetry: The Swiss Minaret Ban

2009-12-06T14:01:00.003-05:00

Left: The minaret that triggered the ban overwhelms the local landscape

Right: Terrified bleeding passenger after attack on bus at Agra after Saddam execution

Neither the picture on the left nor on the right are big surprises really. For those of us unfortunate enough to live in a country that capitulates to every irrational whims of the minorities to the point of masochism, it is a matter of how you accept it and move on. Our landscapes are dotted with structures, our cities are named after personalities who have inflicted terrible carnage on our ancestors, calls to prayer to the faithful shatters our eardrums, our history rewritten, religious customs and places of worship defiled, denuded by the Government, constitution perverted - in short order our life is held hostage. So we end up with the occasional nosebleed like the man shown above. To take a more recent example, peruse the YouTube videos of Miraj riots (video 1, video 2).

What is absolutely stunning is the sheer magnitude of the asymmetry. The fantastic denial of dozens and dozens of theocratic states of that religion with horrendous record of human rights and treatment of minorities.

Let's try to put this in context, as Suzanna Genocide Roy always exhorts us to do. Now Switzerland is a neutral country, always was. It stayed neutral in WW I, WW II and characteristically it remained neutral in the Iraq war. In other words, if there is one country the "occupation" theory does not apply to, it is the region of Europe we proudly claim Kashmir is similar to. The Swiss minority population doubled in the recent decade to about 450,000, at 5% of the total population. Most of them are refugees, i.e. they went there to be safe. Many of them are on welfare. They enjoyed full religious, economic and political freedom sans prayer calls which were afoul of sound pollution laws from much before anyway.

So, we should expect a "they lived happily ever after" Bollywood ending, right? Wrong!

Swiss minorities started radicalizing and started creating the same sort of issues that we see everywhere. The recent imports from more radical countries started becoming more assertive. The minaret that triggered the ban (pictured above) was in fact constructed atop a Turkish cultural center, amid protests by local residents. It was clearly more political than anything religious. It was clearly a "mine is bigger than yours" type of statement. In 2006, terror plots got exposed in Switzerland, leading to the arrest of a dozen people.

Clearly the Gandhian angle wasn't working as it has not worked anywhere else or has the remotest chance of working anywhere else ever. Now, the left-liberal howlers would like to divide the world into two tranches of "liberals" and "illeberal" (with the people of that faith presumably filed under a special category) . Under this fake reconstruction, the Swiss people would have to bend over and see their way of life, constitution, freedom and happiness trampled all over by a set of primitive people.

By banning construction of future minarets legally and under the provision of referendum in the Swiss constitution, the Swiss people have restored the true meaning of "liberal", which is also giving it back to the evil.

Our heartiest congratulations to the great Swiss people, more power to them!

NOTE: Do not forget to read about the Acorn treatment of a bleeding heart secular journo here and analysis by RealityCheck here. The Swiss minaret ban is none of our business and does not concern us. But we were forced to comment on it because people like Vishnu Som make it our business. We are also concerned of potential for violence by India's minorities who tend to make every issue real or imaginary anywhere in the world their business.

CLIMATEGATE: The biggest "scientific" scandal ever

2009-11-28T11:56:00.003-05:00

This news is so big that it should have been featured prominently on the front pages of every newspaper and splashed on every TV channel. Assuming of course it is their business to really inform the public and not to push agenda. So, just how big is the climategate? To use an analogy closer to home, suppose the secular brigade had known all along and had incontrovertible proof that the Gujarat riots were a spontaneous orgy of violence and that the Government had nothing to do with it and didn't make the facts public? Yes, it is that big.

Scientists working on the phenomenon known as anthropogenic global warming had known all along that there was no global warming. And they cooked up data and facts, suppressed evidence to the contrary, engineered fake experiments, destroyed data to keep the bogey of an impending global warming led catastrophe alive. It all changed when a few days ago a hacker broke into a climate laboratory and stole emails and data files. Those emails and data files revealed a sordid tale of how politics compromised scientific integrity.

For a quick intro to what really transpired, please peruse this or use the friendly google search.

Coming in days before the Copenhagen meet where world leaders will negotiate a binding treaty to control greenhouse gas emissions, this assumes enormous importance, especially since India is trying its best to avoid signing any such treaty. Yet Indian newspapers have blacked out this explosive news.

A binding climate treaty will be catastrophic for India, especially when we are stuck with the Nuclear Deal. It is now clear that the Nuclear Deal did not come with all the bells and whistles that were promised, it comes in with a laundry list of new compliance requirements instead. Even then, signing the deal with the US is politically important for the secular party. The secular party has willfully put us into this unenviable situation, we are stuck with a lemon and they know it.

The attitude of Indian media and opinion makers on the climategate is worrying because it raises uncomfortable questions about their loyalty to the country. Globalization of politics has ensured that they will throw a crumb to anyone who supports the big ticket global "liberal" agendas and there are signs people in the Indian Government and bureaucracy are working to get some of those crumbs.

The biggest tragedy of the global warming scandal is that no field of human knowledge or endeavor is sacrosanct anymore. It also shows any dogmatic ideology, be it religious or secular, is ultimately detrimental for scientific advances.

Mushroom Clouds

2009-11-25T22:57:00.002-05:00

Bullets at the station

Grenades at the Taj

Burning burning

symbols of Raj

Panic at the cafe

mayhem on the streets

talking heads

and their relatives

Mushroom clouds

Mushroom clouds in the sky

Ballots at the poll booth

people of hate

they get reelected

such is our fate

patience wears thin

the rising din

the sad look in her eyes

Mushroom clouds

Mushroom clouds in the westward sky

The Overground - Part I

2009-11-22T18:17:00.006-05:00

Since the 26/11 siege of Bombay by ten punks from Pakistan, Bollywood has churned out several movies on the subject. The biggest blockbuster predictably was Sandeep ka Sangharsh - with the martyr major as the protagonist, the movie was a chilling depiction of the attack from inception to execution, ending with a rousing finale, which, albeit somewhat fictionalized, depicted the commandos finally ending the siege in a crescendo of violent firefight.

In most theaters, audience members stood up and burst into spontaneous applause, some singing Vande Mataram, during the scene of the major's supreme sacrifice. The Government declared the movie tax free.

Just kidding.

There was no such movie coming out of Bollywood, as a matter of fact, there was not a single movie that presented a heroic picture. There were dozens of low budget "we bounced back", "we wallow in self-pity" type of movies. The biggest movies so far in fact glorified not the hero cops and commandos but the type of people who perpetrate these crimes. The biggest movies so far romanticized not a legitimate state's struggle against nefarious elements but the fictitious victimhood of those nefarious elements themselves.

These movies showed the attackers as matinee idols, replete with all the regalia that are coveted by youth - money, power, popularity in college campuses and oh yes - a pretty Hindu wife (Maya in New York, and Avantika in Kurbaan). Let's not even go into the specific plot points that tended to validate some of the loonier conspiracy theories, e.g. post 9/11 (yeah, Genocide Suzie, the original one of which 26/11 is just a fake made up copy) the Americans randomly detained and tortured America born and brought up Muslims for no apparent reasons.

This is no accident, this tells us volumes about what we have become. As a matter of fact, this puts a serious question mark in front of the notion of who "we" are.

As far as Vande Mataram goes, instead of encouraging us to sing the song, the good secular people of India have already decided to practically banish it. They made several TV shows on it too.

(.... to be continued)

Ifs and Bhatts

2009-11-19T00:29:00.003-05:00

Sometimes you go to a fancy restaurant. The aroma from the other tables drives you crazy as you wait patiently. The food never seems to arrive. By the time it does - you have lost your appetite.

Considering all the faux indignation, cries for justice, goofy editorials, human interest stories we had to endure for almost a year, the biggest story ever to break is getting a noticeably lukewarm response.

Since the previous post on the topic, the David Coleman Headley case has gotten bigger. The man now seems to be a veritable harbinger of doom - wherever he went, disaster struck. Let us quickly recap what the Bhatts had to say then and how things have changed.

In his initial interview with CNN-IBN, Mahesh Bhatt claimed that his son Rahul Bhatt took the initiative to go to the Police "the moment he got a whiff from the media". He had run into Headley "a few years ago" and when the media started "flashing", he presumably went to his parents seeking advise who then directed him to supercop Rakesh Maria. The senior Bhatt said that he did not know Headley personally and that he does not keep track of "every acquaintance" of his son. He also claimed that there was no reason to suspect a "white skinned American" who was "very decent in behavior".

In another version of the story it was Mahesh Bhatt's ex-wife (Rahul's mom) who recognized Headley on TV and asked his son to go to the cops.

Then the father daughter duo Mahesh and Pooja Bhatt (pictured above) appeared on the CNN-IBN Fake the Nation show and launched a massive tirade against - well, everyone. According to Pooja Bhatt, everyone is a lying, conniving, conspiring member of a totally broken system that is out to get their precious little snowflake.

Since then, more details have emerged and it does not look pretty for the Bhatts or the Bollywood community at large. Instead of being a chance acquaintance he met at a gym "a few years ago" (or variously at another place through a friend), Headley hung out with Rahul Bhatt as recently as March 2008. They must have known each other for a period of at least several months. Rahul took Headley out to meet his Bollywood pals, including his cousin. An assorted variety of Bolly stars and starlets then socialized with Headley at various levels of intimacy.

The police claim Rahul and Headley's other friends from the film world knew he was Asian. "He spoke in an American accent, but looked Asian," an officer said. "We've come to know some of the film stars knew Headley was Muslim and was regularly travelling to Pakistan. If that didn't arouse suspicion, what could?"

Rahul told investigators he found Headley's behaviour odd at times. "It is only now that Rahul has realised that Headley spoke on the phone in some code language." The code words used in Rahul's presence included "Mickey Mouse", "Allah", "Jannat", "North", "Maal" and "baraf" (Hindi for ice). Another word the officers haven't deciphered yet may have referred to the three top cities in the country. [India Today]

These facts are distinctly at variance with what Mahesh Bhatt had been selling to the media. No one forced him to come to the TV station - why then would he gloss over certain details?

Even the claim that Rahul took the initiative to go to the cops seems to be a bit untenable:

"The Bhatts claim we are hounding Rahul and that he came to us voluntarily. This is far from reality. It was only after we reached Headley's rented Breach Candy house that he came to us. We would have come to know of his friendship with Headley. The Bhatts possibly saw the trouble that lay ahead." [link]

There is still no reason to believe Rahul Bhatt had any inkling of Headley's devious plans. However, Mahesh Bhatt's claim that he was a hero who is being run aground by the media is ludicrous.

While the middle is intriguing enough, we know how the story ends and that's a bummer:

Police sources claim a lawyer-turned-politician has been calling up senior officers every day and asking them to not pressure Rahul.

A lawyer turned politician asking the cops not to pressurize Rahul? Who could that be? Well, there are two who fit the description - P. Chidambaram and Abhishek Manu Singhvi. But we know they are better than this, don't we?

NEXT: We will discuss shocking lapses in UPA's handling of the security apparatus and minority pandering that led to Pakistanis having a virtually free run in the country.

Mourning Norman

2009-11-16T18:02:00.004-05:00

Father and daughter on discovery of Coca Cola trip, Disneyland, USA

September 12, 2009: A 95 years old man from Texas, USA passed away. His name was Norman Borlaug.

On October 31, India observed the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's death. It triggered major coverage in the media.

On Novermber 14, India celebrated Children's day - this time it was the 120th birth anniversary of Jawaharlal Nehru. Little children were ritually paraded to the Prime Minister's residence. A prominent female journalist from a major news channel accompanied the children to cover the event "exclusively". She cutely posed with the children.

Norman Borlaug's death should have triggered massive mourning in India and indeed we should have known much more about this man. His name barely finds a mention in the textbooks, that too only recently. Ramachandra Guha does not mention his name in his India after Gandhi, although there were a few pages on Green Revolution.

It took India until 2006 to finally confer the Padma Vibhushan on him, he was awarded the title abroad.

So, who was this Norman Borlaug and why didn't we hear much about him before?

One of the defining characteristics of socialism is that information is disseminated on a strictly need to know basis. The leader of the nation is to be respected like a father figure. Many of us feel the Green Revolution as Indira Gandhi's gift to the nation.

To put it simply, Norman Borlaug's infinite genius caused so much increase in crop yield that Nehru's socialism simply could not kill us fast enough. We are alive today because of Norman Borlaug. But for him, the famines during the Nehru era would be far more persistent and far more wide even today. India could not produce enough food for the population levels at Nehru's time. Readers of this blog can certainly find out more about this amazing man, but we are tempted to offer this quote from the Wiki page:

The Indian and Pakistani bureaucracies and the region's cultural opposition to new agricultural techniques initially prevented Borlaug from fulfilling his desire to immediately plant the new wheat strains there. By the summer of 1965, the famine became so acute that the governments stepped in and allowed his projects to go forward.

Unfortunately, we have not learned anything. Norman Borlaug continues to be maligned posthumously and Nehru's hagiographers continue to pine for the Nehruvian golden era. In the second article, the author pretends that we are some sort of a "free market economy" as opposed to the "mixed economy" of Nehru's time. With these type of people calling the shots, is it any wonder that millions of people live in abject misery?

"We're eating what even pigs won't"

Tur dal? We haven't eaten it for several months," says Ganesh Jahangir Pawar, 50, a two-acre farmer in Wardha's Amgaon-Khadi village. The only time in the last one year that he bought tur was during Diwali. "Only a quarter kg."

But of late, he has not been able to buy food grain at all. He will need a thousand rupees a month, he says, to feed his family of six, including four children, to meet their minimum nutritional requirements.

Already heavily in debt, Pawar is broke and has no work to fall back upon. His family, he says, is eating much less. "Rice and dal are out of question," says his wife Alka. "So are sugar and milk." His helpful neighbour, Sudam Pawar, 35, lends him sorghum flour to keep the family afloat. Other villagers give them various vegetables. (DNA India)

Clean chits before charges

2009-11-15T00:34:00.005-05:00

Passport image of David Coleman Headley (source: Tribune India)

India Government has shown extraordinary reluctance in investigating local links to the 26/11 attacks. In fact, even when the attack was going on with prime real estate in Bombay under siege, many in the media and Government said there were only foreign hands behind the attacks. While the motivated bunch were burning up, brutalizing, sexually torturing inmates at two hotels and a Jewish center, secular blowhards were naturally more worried about retaliation against minorities which never happened.

Various freelance and amateur commentators have pointed out many fallacies in the convenient theories of the Government. There was no particular interest in fact finding. That such an attack is inconceivable without detailed recon, never seemed to have occurred to them.

But then again we know the compulsions of a secular political system. General elections were due in a few months and if they stirred up too much dust in Bombay, it might have cost them Delhi.

The capture of David Coleman Headley aka Daood Gilani, an American of Pakistani ancestry has clearly put the Government into an uncomfortable situation. Given that this is the FBI, it is not easy to dismiss the charges or create a bogey of Hindu/Jewish conspiracy. Moreover, the man seems to be intimately connected to the big boys in that business and seems to have left a huge trail across two continents. In other words, this is a major catch.

The news would have lingered on secondary headlines and off hours TV spots for a few days before disappearing - had it not been for the media's need to create titillation around a certain mysterious "Rahul" the aforementioned man frequently referred to in his email transcripts. The mysterious Rahul eventually turned out to be filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt's son. Mahesh Bhatt as we all know is a die hard secular with an almost physical need to assert the point on a regular basis.

Since then Bhatt senior has been playing the indignant father on prime time TV. The media for its part has already issued a clean chit to junior.

Now, strictly to maintain a semblance of parity in both religious and social justice terms (Rahul is only a quarter Muslim) - it would really be prudent to throw him into the cooler for a few days. Under the same circumstances a man from a Muslim ghetto would probably be given a slightly rougher treatment.

All these things again raise serious questions such as the nature of Bollywood as an industry and its nefarious linkages to jihad-mafia networks. They seem to run into terror related issues very frequently. Even when Bhatt junior was socializing with Headley, he was supposed to appear in a film tentatively titled "Suicide Bomber". This is perhaps a coincidence, but surely he would have researched the role a little? Being a resident of Bombay and coming from a background where people wear their politics on their T-Shirts, he should have chosen his company a tad more carefully.

Just another state

2009-11-09T22:41:00.005-05:00

Arunachal Students hand over a memo to Uttarakhand CM

Recently Rahul Gandhi said Arunachal Pradesh is "like any other Indian state". Well, it does appear that Arunachal Pradesh is just like any other Indian state in a way Kashmir isn't.

As a matter of fact, the two states present a startling contrast. One receives state patronage, massive funding (to be pocketed by vested interests and separatists, of course). The other remains neglected. A large section of the population of one state wants to get away and openly call for destruction of India - "Bharat Ragda" is their slogan. Ask your Kashmiri friend what that means and he will rub it in for you.

Perhaps more surprising is the coverage in the media. The newspapers and TV channels can not get enough of the Kashmir separatists state their point of view - usually a barrage of grievances. Human Rights Activists can not condemn the Indian state enough for holding the Kashmiris back without their consent.

Recently, a group of students from Arunachal Pradesh handed over a memo to the Uttarakhand CM, affirming their loyalty and pledging to shed the last drop of their blood for defending the nation against Chinese aggression. In a nation where patriotism is a bad word, it still manages to pull at a few heartstrings. This was not an isolated incident - over 100 students from the state courted arrests by demonstrating in front of the Chinese embassy in New Delhi. The recent Dalai Lama visit had the state enthralled, they went out on the street in massive numbers. It was as much out of reverence for the spiritual leader as it was in defiance against our belligerent neighbor.

Why then, does the state receive such step-motherly treatment in the media? If Kashmir separatism is such a hot topic, logically speaking the converse should get at least equal attention. We are not even asking the media to run PR stories to help the country in international forums, we know that would be too much.

This in a way is really the sign of the times. Bad behavior is encouraged at all times. Those who cause mayhem, explosions and gunfire at public places are the heroes while those who protect and defend are annoying distractions. It is as though the whole world is running on a film noir script, actually make that a Bollywood gangster flick. At least in the classic film noir, the anti-hero dies at the end.

* * *

Given that this is the faithful Indian media, expect them to turn a story thus far favorable to India completely on its face. There is a story in the Outlook magazine provocatively titled On the wrong side of Geography? with a tagline With India having given them nothing but neglect, the Arunachalis wonder if they'd have been better off with China. As described earlier, there really is no sign of Arunachalis "wondering" or "looking" across the border.

If they really do look across the border, China does not present the unambiguous picture of milk and honey the media would have you believe. Just a couple of recent examples: China recently executed 9 Uighurs. India has been struggling to hang just one. China is also trying a Tibetan filmmaker for subversion.

If lack of development in Arunachal Pradesh is a cause for concern, the media does not leave much wiggle room for that either. In the Outlook story linked above, the "flashpoint 5" says influx of migrants for projects will wreck havoc, presumably hassle the locals etc. In other words, India can't win.

Recently, N. Ram, Editor-in-chief of The Hindu was in China on a propaganda trip hosted by the Chinese Communist Government.

Ram quoted a commentator on Sen's work as saying, "Measuring real freedom in terms of indicators such as life expectancy, literacy and educational attainments, levels of nutrition, access to health care, employment, social respect and political participation are central to assessing how individuals and societies are faring."

We wonder if N. Ram will have the same point of view for Palestine or Kashmir. Funny thing is, India recently beat China on such a composite indicator. Don't expect the editorials to highlight that though.

Uighurs! Welcome!

2009-11-09T18:32:00.003-05:00

Afghan students queue up at the Indian Embassy for visas

It is funny that Muslims the world over hold a far more favorable opinion about India than do the domestics. Is it Bollywood? Is it the grass on the other side effect? Maybe the wrinkles get smoothed in the view from a distance. Perhaps it is just a case of familiarity breeds contempt.

In any case, M's flock to India from all parts of the world. From Arab sex tourists to Afghan students to Pakistanis in need of medical treatment to wheeler dealers from the middle east to drug traffickers and email scam artists from Nigeria. Of course we have B'desh folks too. They are practically a state in the Indian nation.

The latest are the Uighurs:

Uighurs seek a passage to India

With Han Chinese flooding Xinjiang - a region struggling with ethnic strife - the demoralized natives seek refuge across the border to escape the
oppression...

[...]

"We want dignity, what is normalcy?" he asks as his friends lapse into Uighur, talking excitedly about reports of Tibetans living in India, free from the fear of persecution, free to speak against the oppression of their people "back home."

"We can do more from India. We thought of Pakistan, but they have returned Uighur refugees to China. India has welcomed Tibetans and we are similar," he reasons before turning back to the heap of coffeestained notes and maps with highlighted routes into India strewn over his keyboard and table. [link]

We say, let's throw the doors wide open, let's embrace one and all. Everyone will be accommodated and provided a suitable position in our caste system according to their aptitude and abilities. So, here is a Barbarian's guide to national integration, a quick and easy overview of some of the most popular castes and what they have to offer:

Politician: Indisputably the Brahmins of modern India, this class presents formidable entry barriers.
Human Rights Activist: This caste offers easy admissions but the field has become cluttered lately. Blame it on the laws of economics - any area that offers abnormal returns will attract investors.
Goon: No experience required, perhaps the only easy entry point (aside from having been born from a pedigreed vagina) to the politician class but runs the risk of encounter killing. If you so prefer, you can also pick from several subcastes like NSUI, YC, SFI, ABVP etc.
Minority: An increasingly popular caste, good Government benefits. Side effect: you may become perpetually constipated with all those grievances bottled up inside you. Plus occasional riots.
Naxal: If you like wildlife, Naxal may be the way to go. You will be required to worship a reportedly horny Chinese dude who mistreated his parents.
Jholawalla: Once upon a time everyone wanted to be lawyers. Then the preference shifted to engineers, doctors etc. The current rage seems to be "computers". We predict that in a few decades, every kid will have nightly wet dreams of donning that Khadi kurta over those dirty pair of jeans and slinging that trademark bag across his shoulders.

"Green war" update

2009-11-07T23:24:00.003-05:00

In a previous post, we expressed our skepticism about the Government's willingness to carry out a war against the Naxals. However, we never imagined such an about face in such a short time:

After heavily publicizing the government's intention to launch an attack on Maoist headquarters in the jungles of Chhattisgarh for weeks, Union home minister P Chidambaram took a U-turn on Friday by saying that the proposed "Operation Green Hunt" was an invention of the media. All that the centre as was doing was to help the states by deploying paramilitary forces in the fight against left-wing extremism, the home minister said at the passing out parade of IPS probationers in Hyderabad. [link]

Coming from our smartypants Home Minister, this should hardly be a surprise. Earlier, he had made an even stranger statement:

"We never said lay down the arms...We said halt the violence and talk...If they halt violence, the Centre will persuade the state governments to talk to them on issues like land reforms, land acquisitions," he told reporters here. [link]

Lay down arms vs. halt the violence - what's the difference? This is virtually conceding a parallel Government to the Naxals.

There is simply no reason for the Naxals to come to talks with the Government unless they find their movement under serious threat of attrition. The ringleaders are all underground, having propped up "tribal" faces to create a convenient image for the hard left to run with. Meanwhile Kobad Gandhy and overt and covert support from mainstream people clearly proves the movement is anything but "tribal".

There are ways to create pressures on the Naxals by sanitizing zone by zone but it is beyond the capabilities of our current political and economic framework. The secular party honchos are too busy looting the spoils of a virtually guaranteed single party rule for the foreseeable future.

When the other shoe dropped ...

2009-11-05T21:45:00.007-05:00

PRIEST'S VOICE: Michael Francis Rizzi, do you renounce Satan?
MICHAEL CORLEONE: I do renounce him.

Given a choice and with no trade offs involved, all of us will readily vote for a peaceful society - like in the Government newsreels that accompanied 70s Bollywood pictures. Yet such a society has remained elusive so far, and how so!

Naturally we turn to our intellectuals for an answer, an honest answer. What we get instead is names. We are told that society is made up of Satan and Saints, or if you prefer, Devas and Asuras. It takes just a casual review of the the political discourse of the last decade to find out how the public sorts itself out into the two categories. We are also told that the necessary conditions for peaceful society comes from the heart. Apparently renouncing violence and giving up conspicuous consumption will lead us down the path to socialist Nirvana in no time at all.

Some intellectuals do not answer at all, instead they hit us back with a barrage of what they call "uncomfortable" questions and inundate us with anecdotes they find "disturbing".

Jarnail Singh, the journalist who achieved instant fame (or notoriety, depending on which side of the aisle you are) by throwing a shoe at Union Home Minister P. Chidambaram has just published a book called: I Accuse: The anti-Sikh violence of 1984.

The journalist made some shocking revelations in an interview with Rediff. For instance, we find this rather shocking statement from the journalist's Rediff interview transcript:

I had always been following the issue and developments. When my publishers contacted me after the incident, I started conducting interviews with the victims and after researching the various committee reports, I have put together this book, which will clearly expose that what happened in 1984 was a state-sponsored massacre of the Sikhs, and not 'riots', when the issue got highlighted on April 7, I realized that there was nothing in media about this. I went back to the reports of that year, and again found that barring the Indian Express, there was no reporting of the incident. DD was interested only in Indira Gandhi's funeral when the capital was burning.

If you take the Gujarat riots, everyone now knows about all the individual incidents, like the Best Bakery massacre and so on. But when you think of the Delhi riots, it is just a vague, 'it happened somewhere in Delhi' is the idea one gets ...

This distinction between the Gujarat riots and the 1984 carnage may seem like splitting hairs, but then again this hair splitting has been going on in our political discourse for the last decade or so.

Much has also been made of various statements issued by politicians. Yet, we found the following quite disturbing:

On April 2, there was a PTI report quoted the home minister as saying: 'I am happy that my friend Tytler has been exonerated by the CBI.' What kind of home minister says that? If he gives such a statement, what kind of message is he sending down to the investigators in the CBI, which is an investigating agency under the home ministry? If your agency has failed to prove a case against a mass murderer how can you be happy? The clean chit is a sign of your negligence and you express happiness at that?

Mind you, this is our current, superstar Home Minister, uber intellectual Harvard graduate.

Jarnail Singh also expresses his sadness about the lack of concrete steps being taken to curb communal violence. This is a rarity, most writers and journalists are usually happy just to have made their point:

There is something wrong with the political system. The anti-communal law is still not in place. This in a place where the Pandits have been subjected to severe communal violence. Sikhs in Delhi, Muslims in Gujarat, Christians in Kandhamal. How long will this continue?

It took years and much prodding for our intellectuals to finally start adding a couple of obligatory statements about 1984 to their Gujarat riot stories (which is about all some of them write about).

Jarnail Singh's book may finally help our intellectuals find some answers to their questions so that in turn they can educate us better. Assuming of course they are sincere and really trying to solve the problem.

Madhu Koda scam eclipses Spectrum scam

2009-11-05T05:26:00.003-05:00

Everything happens for a reason. Gullible people in India, conditioned by the chaotic reality of daily grind believe that events arrive randomly, like Indian trains.

Now the coverage of the Madhu Koda scam completely eclipses the Spectrum scam. A headline analysis of The Times of India shows the spectrum scam received just about a few hours headline space in the last few months, that too in the context of "BJP raising questions" etc. The Madhu Koda scam features prominently on the site.

So, the Spectrum scam, easily India's biggest scam and most definitely planned and executed at the highest level that stole money from poor Indians is getting a casual go by. Meanwhile a tribal leader is being made a scapegoat even as various social justice water carriers are overcome with indignation about injustice done to tribal people.

Inflation revisited

2009-11-03T19:53:00.003-05:00

The inflation issue, after making headlines and TV shows for months prior to the general elections, seems to have fallen off the radar. People differ on the effect of inflation on elections - bloggers such as RealityCheck argue that group directed benefits trump inflation. This would make sense if the recipients of group directed benefits (quotas, minority/underprivileged schemes, NREGA etc.) outnumber the rest. This certainly seems to be the case.

The Wholesale Price Index, the figure that the Indian Government uses (and consequently the most quoted in the media) does not truly capture the stress on consumers. For some reason, the Government stopped publishing CPI numbers from last April. They still publish a monthly CPI figure for urban consumers. These figures were used to make the chart above (click the image for a larger version).

During the election season, the secular politicians went blue pointing out the grave injustice meted to them by the almighty in terms of energy and commodity prices. Well, that is no longer true, and consequently the WPI figures are running pretty tame.

The CPI numbers, which represent the true effect of prices on end consumers tell us another story. As we see from the chart above, the CPI is running very hot - almost 13 percent for all items and 15% for food. This is a direct consequence of NREGA and other inflationary policies.

The NREGA policy will hurt the economy grievously. If you take out 20% of labor force from the economy, you will get 20% less output. Short term gains for politicians, a true long term disaster in the making. Low end industries and labor intensive jobs get priced out causing a death spiral.

Right now it is hurting the poorest because food prices are going high. As an example, mid-day meal schemes in Hyderabad serve "plain rice and watery dal" because that's all they can afford. Of course, the public mid-day meal schemes suffer from other more serious problems.

Radical Suzie

2009-10-26T22:22:00.005-04:00

Is Suzanna Roy becoming too radical for the mainstream media to handle? After giving her celebrity status, why are the views of mainstream intellectuals and opinion makers beginning to diverge from those of Roy?

Arundhati Roy's famous spat with historian Ram Guha is well known. Now even anti-Hindutva champion Harsh Mander has spoken out against Roy's openly batting for Naxals. One could easily see the discomfiture of TV personalities when they recently interviewed Roy. In an interview segment, CNN-IBN's Suhasini Haider called Roy out on her bald faced lie that Naxals never kill civilians - however it appeared Rajdeep Sardesai restrained Haider before it got too heated.

The same TV channels that happily endorsed and echoed Roy's views on Kashmir seem to be chickening out as far as the Naxals are concerned.

The answer can be found in the genesis of India's intellectual class and a key point where Roy differs from them.

The TV personalities, intellectuals who adorn the pages of The Outlook India and hog most of the editorial space mostly have domestic aspirations. Even if they do have international aspiration, it is strictly in the context of reporting for the country - maybe a Pulitzer or a Magsaysay etc. Roy on the other hand wants to break out into the international arena - she wants to play with the big dogs.

Thus, while Roy still favors the secular party, she is not under the inertial and territorial compulsion of the rest of the intellectual class. A Harsh Mander, for instance, will still bat for NREGA at the end of the day, although the program has done nothing for the most dispossessed of the tribals - the kind usually within the firing range of Naxals.

The second problem with India's opinion makers is accidental - you see, being concerned about poverty and misery was never part of the program. It is by sheer accident that BJP came to power and all the fake obsession with Human Development Index etc. started then. Otherwise, India would be a fully feudal single party society and according to TV channels, a land of milk and honey. The poverty part would be swept under the rugs like it was under Nehru. CNN-IBN and NDTV would be extensions of Door Darshan - running fancy ads on NREGA.

Anyone wishing to contest this view should check out the textbooks of the 70s and the 80s. They all but lamented that India is destined to be poor for lack of natural resources. As a matter of fact, even now the consensus view is that people actually want to be farmers. A quick recent example: Shekhar Gupta wrote a scorching article about Maharashtra (The Maha Crater) - a massive indictment of the ruling coalition - after the Maharashtra assembly elections.

So the line the media was almost forced to adopt is that India still remains poor but Government is doing "something". Now, doing "something" is simply not cool enough for the type of international anti-establishment street-cred Roy covets.

There is a reason the extended family feels nervous about the war on Naxals - after the first war, West Bengal completely switched over to the communists. This is also the reason they feel nervous about Roy. So, don't they care about the violence? Let's just say the set we have been talking about do not bring work to the cocktail parties.

Maharashtra's maladies

2009-10-25T18:10:00.003-04:00

Image courtesy: ZIM/Offstumped.

The recent elections in Maharashtra which the secular parties won, brought out in full view the malignant tumor that is growing across the country. The poster above was used in election campaign by one Sayyad Abdul Qadir Aamir (Qadir Maulana) - who stood on a Cong/NCP ticket from Aurangabad. His message promises to bring back the era of Amanulla, erase the signs of Shiv Sena from the city (with "Hindus" in parenthesis to avoid any confusion). He also claims to have been sent by Allah to hoist the Islamic flag over the land of Aurang(abad) - perhaps the last point refers to the Mughal emperor after whom the city was named.

At this point the clueless types will ask: what was the Election Commission doing? The answer is elsewhere in the blog.

While Qadir Maulana did not win the election, another Imam did:

MUMBAI: The terror-struck Malegaon has rebuffed the overtures of the Congress. Mufti Ismail, the Deoband-trained chief imam of the Muslim-dominated textile town's Jama mosque won the seat by a handsome 17,000 votes, getting the better of Congress's Shaikh Rasheed and five-time MLA and Janata Dal (secular) leader Nihal Ahmed.

This is the first time an imam has won in Maharashtra. [link]

The electorate at Malegaon, terror struck or otherwise, certainly was not lovestruck with the secular party despite the party's constant overtures to them. Despite being Muslims, the candidates from two secular parties lost out.

Another way of looking at it is that the electorate chose a candidate who is fundamentally closer to religion, being an Imam and all that.

While the TV pundits etc. continue to peddle English press friendly analysis, the sad reality is that we may not really have the right conditions for the sort of secular society they have in mind. The secular party is just an interim arrangement of convenience - when they have the numbers, they will create a future they envision - not the one the TV Pundits want them to.