Madhav's Political Views

The Great India-China Game

2009-10-14T12:45:00.016+05:30

The roots of our problem with China go back a couple of hundred years when Emperor Napoleon and Tsar Alexander met in July 1807 on a great raft moored on the river Niemen at Tilsit in east Prussia to conclude a treaty of partnership against the British, thereby beginning 'The Great Game.' This expression was first found in the papers of Arthur Connolly, a British artillery officer and adventurer whose Narrative Of An Overland Journey To The North of India chronicled his travels in the region in the service of the British empire.

As the Russian empire began its eastward expansion, which many felt was to culminate in the conquest of India, there was a shadow contest for political ascendancy between the British and Russian empires -- The Great Game.

Napoleon's waterloo at Waterloo did not see a let-up in the fervour with which the game was played. The Russian longing for a colonial empire and a warm water port did not diminish any and so the game continued. The British response to meet the Russian threat was to establish a forward defensive line in the northern region so that a Russian thrust could be halted well before the plains of Hindustan.

This called for making Afghanistan and Tibet into buffer states and for fixing suitable and convenient borders with these states. At various times, several such lines were proposed.

The most notable of these was the 1865 Ladakh-Tibet/Sinkiang alignment proposed by W H Johnson, a junior civilian sub-assistant with the Survey of India. This line was to link Demchok in the south with the 18,000 feet high Karakorum pass in the north, but it took a circuitous route beyond the Kuen Lun mountains and thus included the barren and cold Aksai Chin desert.

It is believed that Johnson may have had some personal reasons for doing this. He was an Indian born 'Englishman' and in the subtle social graduations that guided an individual's destiny under the Raj, there were limits to where he could go. Johnson could not aspire to either a commissioned rank or a high civilian status with the Survey of India and what better way to improve his prospects than by entering the Kashmir maharaja's service? By greatly enlarging the size of the maharaja's domain by incorporating Aksai Chin, Johnson caught the maharaja's eye.

That the British were undecided about Johnson's line is evident by the recommendation in 1889 by Ney Elias, joint commissioner of Leh. Elias, who was an authority on trans-Karakoram territories, advised against any implicit endorsement of the Johnson line by a claim on Shahidulla in the far off Karakash valley about 400 kilometres from Leh, as it could not be defended.

On the other hand, responding to Captain Younghusband's report on his meeting with the Russian explorer, Colonel Grombchevsky near Yarkand, Major General Sir John Ardagh, director of military intelligence at the war office in London , recommended claiming the areas 'up to the crests of the Kuen Lun range.' Before Whitehall could make up its mind, the Chinese occupied Shahidulla in 1890.

To this, the opinion of the secretary of state for India in Whitehall was: 'We are inclined to think that the wisest course would be to leave them in possession as its is evidently to our advantage that the tract of territory between the Karakorum and Kuen Lun mountains be held by a friendly power like China.'

The Indian case for ownership of the Aksai Chin or the white desert rests essentially on the cartographic exertions of a man such as Johnson and we must begin to think about its validity. It's also not without some irony that another Kashmir maharaja's grandiose dreams of an independent state resulted in India's other major problem with another neighbour.

Though Jammu and Kashmir was an independent kingdom, the 1846 Treaty of Amritsar gave the British the responsibility of its security. This made the British responsible for Kashmir's northern and eastern borders with Sinkiang and Tibet. The British, however, never really got around to fixing the border along this line. In 1899, another line was suggested. This was the MacCartney-Macdonald line that excluded most of the Aksai Chin. The British tried to get the Chinese to sign an agreement to this effect. The Chinese did not respond to these moves and Lord Curzon concluded their silence could be taken as acquiescence and decided that, henceforth, this should be considered the border, and so it was. Interestingly this line, by and large, corresponds with the Chinese claim line, which in turn, by and large, coincides with the Line of Actual Control.

But in 1940-1941, things began to change again. British intelligence learnt that Russian experts were conducting a survey of the Aksai Chin for the pro-Soviet Sinkiang government of the warlord Sheng Shih-tsai. It was obviously time for the Great Game again. Once again, the British went back to the Johnson claim line. But nothing else was done to clearly demarcate the border. No posts were established in Aksai Chin and neither were any expeditions sent there to show the flag, as is normal in such situations. For all practical purposes the Raj ceased at the Karakoram range, but by the rules of the Great Game it went further beyond just in case.

On the eastern sector the Game was also being played, but a little differently. In 1826, the British annexed Assam, which then mainly meant the Brahmaputra valley. The hills were first penetrated in 1886 when an expedition went up the Lohit valley at the far end of what is now Arunachal Pradesh. But in the western end of this sector, immediately east of Bhutan, a Tibetan-administered wedge known as the Tawang tract, located alongside the east of Bhutan up to its southern alignment and running eastwards till just west of Bomdila, was considered by the British to be open country.

In 1903, Lord Curzon concluded that Tibet too had now become a possible launching pad for a Russian thrust and by the rules of the Great Game the Russians were to be pre-empted. Thus came about the celebrated Younghusband mission to Lhasa the following year. But in 1907, the British and the Russians came to an agreement that it suited both their interests to leave Tibet 'in that state of isolation from which, till recently, she has shown no intention to depart.' Thus Tibet, like Afghanistan, was to be a buffer state between the two European imperial powers. But by mid 1910, the Chinese were back in Tibet exercising full control. This reassertion of Chinese power caused concern to the British once again. A consequence of this was a renewed urgency to the perceived need to have a buffer between the Chinese and the precious British investments in Assam.

Another forward line was now mooted. This line called the Outer Line included the entire tribal belt except the Tawang tract. Though the then viceroy, Lord Hardinge, initially saw this as incurring too many risks and expenses, he ordered the establishment of 'a sound strategic boundary' in 1911, citing the Chinese policy of expansion as a cause. Thus, by September 1911, the British had decided that the Outer Line, but now including the Tawang tract, should be the boundary with Tibet-cum-China.

With the collapse of the British and Soviet empires, the only inheritors of this squalid and sometimes bloody game are the Chinese and Indians. The other significant difference is that it is no longer a game played by armchair empire builders in Europe with their assortment of secret agents, cartographers, commercial travellers and explorers, but a deadly serious game between the world's two largest nations with the fastest growing economies, and two of the world's major military powers made even more formidable by their openly deployed nuclear forces. The prize now is no longer an entire subcontinent, but merely a barren and desolate desert high amidst cold wind-swept mountains where, in Jawaharlal Nehru's words, 'not even a blade of grass grows.'

The battle for the border

The next major development with China and Tibet was when the British called for a conference at Simla in October 1913. The Chinese attended reluctantly, but the Tibetan authorities came quite eagerly as they were now engaged in conflict with their Chinese suzerains. Henry McMahon, then foreign secretary to the 'government of India,' led the British delegation. McMahon was some sort of an expert at drawing boundary lines, having spent two years demarcating the Durand Line at the northwest frontier.

The boundary that followed was the now famous McMahon Line. This boundary now extended British India up to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. It was not really a cartographers delight as it violated several rules of boundary demarcation. But it was an ethnic boundary in the sense that the area, except for the Tawang tract, was non-Tibetan in character.

The Chinese soon repudiated the Simla Convention and thus the McMahon Line. All through this period, the British never challenged Chinese suzerainty over Tibet. The new boundary was not made effective till Olaf Caroe, an ICS officer, urged the British authorities to do so in 1935. Thus, in 1937, the Survey of India for the first time showed the McMahon Line as the official boundary. But confusion still abounded.

In 1938, the Survey of India published a map of Tibet, which showed the Tawang tract as part of that country. Even the first edition of Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery Of India showed the Indo-Tibetan boundary as running at the foot of the hills. The Tibetans did not accept this 'annexation' of the Tawang tract and challenged the British attempts to expand their government into this area. But they tacitly accepted the rest of the McMahon demarcation. It is clear that, but for the Tawang tract, there is little basis for the Chinese claim on the whole of Arunachal Pradesh. Even the claim they might have on the Tawang tract is rendered invalid in the sense that it becomes a geographical anachronism and incompatible with India's security interests.

The Japanese thrust towards India in World War II gave urgency to the British need to fix this boundary firmly and securely. Thus, in 1944, J P Mills, the then government's advisor on tribal affairs, established a British administration in the entire belt from Walong in the east to Dirang Dzong in the west. Several posts of the Assam Rifles were established and soon Tibetan government officials were packed off from the Tawang tract also.

The purpose of this laborious recitation of the events of nearly a century-and-a-half of the Great Game is to only show that borders were either never clearly demarcated or established. Lines kept shifting on maps as political contingencies arose. The Indian people were, for this entire period, passive spectators to these cartographic games.

In 1947, the British finally left India. Our choice then was to either call an end to the Great Game or continue playing it with all the intensity and commitment it called for. We did neither. When the Chinese Communists occupied Tibet, we acquiesced. Neither did we firmly move into the areas claimed by the British as Indian territory, particularly in the western sector. How well we looked after territory we claimed as our own is seen by the fact that, in the early 1950s, the Chinese had built a road connecting Tibet to Sinkiang across the Aksai Chin and we did not have a clue about it for several years.

The Indian government did move into the Tawang tract in force in 1951, overriding Chinese/Tibetan protests. In this sector, at least, it was clear that the Indian government was firm about its control of all the territory claimed by the British. There are several signs that indicate the Chinese too seem to have accepted the McMahon Line as the boundary in this sector.

The situation in the western sector was entirely different. Here no definite British Indian boundary line existed. The only two points accepted by both sides were that the Karakoram Pass and Demchok, the western and eastern ends of this sector, were in Indian territory. Opinions on how the line traversed between the two points differed.

India's boundary was inclined towards the Johnson claim line whereas as the Chinese, having built their road through the Aksai Chin, naturally preferred an alignment closer to the McCartney/MacDonald line of 1899. The Chinese claim line however went further west and included the Chip Chap valley, Samzungling, Kongka La, Khurnak Fort and Jara La. More importantly, as far as the Great Game was concerned, the Chinese had occupied all this territory by the early 1950s.

This is how matters were by the end of 1952 and by and large how things are today. The Chinese hold all territory, give or take some, within their claim line in Ladakh. In the east, India holds most of the territory below the McMahon line give or take some. These de facto boundaries could have been a basis for a permanent settlement of our boundaries. But we did not pursue it, though there are indications from time to time that the Chinese might want to settle on this basis.

Now the question that arises is: Why did the Government of India not extend its control to the boundaries it claimed in the western sector as it did in the east? This was mostly due to the terrain. The boundary claimed lies beyond two high mountain ranges and is logistically and militarily indefensible. Besides, the Chinese were already in control of much of the area by 1951. The question then is: Why did the government of India not make serious diplomatic or military efforts to assert control over territories it believed was ours?

The answer obviously lies in the fact that, legally, there was not a very good case. Besides, the military price this barren uninhabited windswept desolation would demand did not make it a worthwhile cause. Despite all this, there abounded the zealous spirit with which recently freed nations regarded their inherited boundaries that were often without regard to geography, ethnicity and history. Even in 1954, the most advanced Indian post was at Chushul. Barring a couple of patrols to Lanak La, no attempt was made to show the new flag. Even Lanak La was well south of Aksai Chin and short of the Sinkiang-Tibet highway, which passed east of it at that point.

The main rule of the Game for the previous 150 years was that it be played as quietly and surreptitiously as possible. In the 1950s, these rules still seemed to prevail. The two contesting governments decided to keep the lid on the problems while jockeying around for local advantages. On the surface it was all 'Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai' and the practice of the Panchsheel philosophy. Underneath was the realisation the titles to large tracts of territory under the control of both parties were under dispute. The lid on this roiling cauldron blew away when in March 1959 the Dalai Lama fled to India and was given political asylum.

Peace with China

The Dalai Lama's flight to India was followed by two ominous incidents. On August 25, 1959, Indian and Chinese forces clashed over the possession of Longju, a small village in the eastern sector. We said it was on the McMahon line and, therefore, ours, the Chinese said it was two miles north of it and, therefore, theirs. There were a few casualties on both sides. On October 20 the same year, the Chinese ambushed an Indian patrol sent to probe the Aksai Chin at Kongka La, in which nine Indian frontier policemen were killed and seven were taken prisoner. With this, public opinion in India was inflamed. A democracy is nothing but a government sensitive to public opinion and governments that ignore this do so at theirs own peril. But public opinion, even when not inflamed, is quite often ill informed. Even among the leadership, many never really understood the historical background of the dispute.

We claimed what the Chinese were claiming and occupying was our 'sacred land' and this was accepted by almost all, except the doctrinaire Marxist Communists who may have done this for reasons not related to history. The Indian government knew better, but allowed itself to be swept by the tide of public opinion and, true to the manner the great game of democracy is played here, the opposition did nothing to bail it out.

The influence of the domestic imperative in the international politics of democratic countries must never be underestimated. It is also an inherent characteristic of democratic societies that very little flexibility is given to the decision-makers in choosing a policy from a wide spectrum of options. If for instance, Nehru accepted Chou En Lai's offers of a settlement on a give and take basis, he would have been accused of giving up our 'sacred' territory. As it is, the opposition was exploiting Nehru's discomfiture over his failed China policy and his naïve reliance on Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai and the Panchsheel policy with the world's foremost practitioners of realpolitik.

In the highly partisan atmosphere that characterised our politics then, as it is even now, any stick is good enough for the opposition to beat the government with and vice versa. The opposition, though small in number then, made up for lack of quantity with quality. Eminent leaders like Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya Kripalani, Asoka Mehta, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya, Minoo Masani and C Rajagopalachari, known for their incisive intellect and oratorical abilities and smarting at their electoral inconsequence, tore into the government in Parliament and outside. Others like Atal Bihari Vajpayee , who is now the prime minister of India, were well known for their fiery demagoguery.

Many of Nehru's colleagues, upset by his 'loftiness' and his fondness for Krishna Menon, often preferred to be bemused observers enjoying these blistering attacks. China was treated as Nehru's problem. To be fair to them, Nehru had for long kept the problems with China to himself as he did with most matters pertaining to external relations. To get over this uncomfortable 'debating' situation in Parliament, Nehru often had to sound tough and uncompromising. This would have been fine, if he had the military strength to back him up. Unfortunately for the country, this was not so.
The Indian Army then was poorly equipped, short-staffed and generally in a bad way. Krishna Menon as defence minister squabbled with the generals in public and wrought havoc with the morale of the military's top brass. Aiding him in good measure was a Nehru kinsman, Lieutenant General B M Kaul, a soldier with no combat experience. In his bid to be one up over his peers, he would agree to do things the politicians wanted done, but the general staff baulked at.

The press in those troubled days was not very helpful either. The major English language papers shrilly, and almost in unison, demanded the Chinese be expelled and often accused the government of not doing its duty. The influential English language media, with few notable exceptions, were still conditioned by their pro-British past. They were generally pro-West and found this a good opportunity to needle the government on its policy of non-alignment, seen by them in Dullesian terms as being pro-Soviet. The editors and pundits, never comfortable with Nehru's non-alignment, went hammer and tongs at him. Given this atmosphere, partisan political interests took precedence over national interests. This is not unfamiliar even today. The need to develop a non-partisan national consensus based on a rational survey of facts and events never was greater, yet was as far as it often seems even now.

Against this surcharged backdrop, Nehru had to come up with something. This something was the Forward Policy. This policy called for establishing posts in the disputed areas often behind the Chinese line of forward posts. Thus a number of small forward posts were set up with meagre resources, poor communications and extremely vulnerable supply lines. Most of these posts had to be supplied by air drops and quite a bit of the supply would end up in Chinese hands. The Chinese People's Liberation Army would then hand them over to our men to derive a psychological advantage.

Nothing describes the Forward Policy better than the words of an Indian Army officer: 'We thought it was a sort of game. They would stick up a post and we would stick up a post and we did not think it would come to much more.' It came to be much more, as it had to, and the consequences were felt in 1962 when a full-scale border war broke out. The Forward Policy was against all sound military advice.

Lieutenant General Daulat Singh, GOC, Northern Command, bitterly criticised this policy in his memo to the government on August 17, 1962. He wrote: 'It is imperative that political direction is based on military means.' Singh's warning, like those of many other senior officers, was ignored. Then defence minister Krishna Menon, Intelligence Bureau director B N Mullick and Lieutenant General B M Kaul, who had conjured up this policy, had Nehru's ear and that was what mattered. If Nehru had learnt a little from the much-publicised Bay of Pigs fiasco the new American administration of then President John Kennedy had landed itself into in 1961, he would have been very wary of this threesome.

In Kennedy's case, he allowed the legendary Richard Bissell, the Central Intelligence Agency's then director of operations, to awe him, his cabinet and his military chiefs into approving an operation that was based on little hard intelligence and a lot of wishful thinking. Also, in Kennedy's case, the pressures of the domestic imperative were overwhelming. The planning of the operation had begun in Eisenhower's time with Richard Nixon playing a leading part in it. If Kennedy aborted the plan, he would have been accused of being 'soft on communists' and what greater crime can there be in that bastion of 'freedom and liberty' than this? He succumbed to the fear of an inflammable public opinion just as Nehru was to do later. In both cases, the policies ended up as unmitigated disasters that almost irretrievably hardened positions and thus shaped the future course of national direction and domestic politics.

Incidentally, the order to 'throw the Chinese out,' was given on September 22, 1962 by K Raghuramiah, then minister of state in the defence ministry. Raghuramiah was in the chair, Krishna Menon being in New York to deliver yet one more of those long harangues he was so fond of, when then army chief General K N Thapar gave his appreciation of the situation in the Dhola area. The then foreign secretary then gave his appreciation that the Chinese were unlikely to react strongly and, for good measure, repeated the prime minister's 'instructions' on the subject. We went to war!

In the 41 years that have followed the debacle of 1962, little has changed. We in India have not yet been able to get together a non-partisan consensus on crucial issues such as this. We do not seem to have as yet grasped the real and futile nature of the border dispute. In an overpopulated, overcrowded and primarily agricultural country with a relatively small landmass to share, the concern and obsession with land is understandable. Land is our primary economic resource and hence it is an ingrained national characteristic to be possessive about it. Our leaders, notorious for their land grabbing ways, have not surprisingly acquired an estate agent's mentality as far as territory goes. It seems that, to us, our country no longer means people but land. Why would we care so little about our people and their interests and honour and care so much for an inhabitable desert?

While it is possible for us to settle our eastern border disputes with China on the basis of a clearly demarcated McMahon line, there seems little or no chance that the Chinese could be persuaded to hand over Aksai Chin to us, thereby de-linking Tibet from Sinkiang. There also seems an equally remote chance that we might be able to retrieve it from the Chinese by military means. Even if we summon the political will to stake a fortune, the sheer lack of any tangible benefits, material or spiritual, will only make this even more foolhardy.

There are many indications that the Chinese would settle along these lines. We in India still seem prisoners of our past and continue to take an excessively legalistic view of past events and present inheritances. We have even bound ourselves in knots with a jingoistic and unrealistic parliamentary resolution that binds us to an undefined boundary bequeathed to us and to the 'liberation' of occupied territory, so desolate and inhospitable that let alone animal life, even plant life is hard pressed to exist upon it! By freeing ourselves from this mindset, we could meaningfully negotiate a settlement with the Chinese, whose only aim in this sector seems to secure the Sinkiang-Tibet highway through the Aksai Chin. While this will not entirely dissipate the rivalry between the two countries, it will remove a cause of frequent tension that only serves to underline our unfavourable strategic position.

The challenge now for our national leadership is to harmonise reality with sentiment, pragmatism with unhistorical belief and national aspirations with imperialistic legacies. To be able to do this we first need to extricate such sensitive and critical issues from the ambit of partisan politics. The responsibility for this lies with the government of the day, which alone can orchestrate such an exercise. By doing this, we can once again bring into alignment our political objectives, with military means and reality. We can then negotiate from a position of strength and give ourselves secure, defensible and natural boundaries in the north at least. And who knows this may even lead to lasting good relations between the two great countries.

SOURCES: Mohan Guruswamy (Rediff.com)

Barack Obama wins 2009 Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-09T15:13:00.005+05:30

Barack Obama wins 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. This is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in this year. You cannot give Peace Prize to someone who is waging wars in a different country.

America had re-started the Crusades that stopped during the middle ages and for this the credit goes to former President, George Bush and Obama is continuing the crusade in Afghanistan and to some extent in Iraq.

He is pretty new into the Office and what is that he had done so much that he deserves a Nobel Prize ?? Let him solve the Middle East crisis and then we can give a thought of giving a Prize.

Looks like some organizations donot want to waste time bending over to America's hegemony.

This is a shameful act on part of the Nobel Foundation.

Go to jail or join jihad against India: ISI tells surrendered Taliban

2009-10-07T17:36:00.000+05:30

In a new shift in tactics, Pakistan is planning to push as many as 60 "surrendered" Taliban into Jammu and Kashmir to become part of the "jihad" against India. The ISI is said to have offered the extremists the option of either going to jail or crossing the Line of Control.

The "jail or jihad" option offered to the Taliban seems a useful diversion for ISI. The Pakistan military establishment has had to fight the Taliban, once its close allies in Afghanistan, but is looking to turn the situation to its advantage.

Apprehensions in Indian security circles that the crackdown by the Pakistan army on Taliban — seen as a last resort after the jihadis turned their guns on the Pakistani state — could mean trouble in Kashmir are being proved correct. Not only have infiltration attempts by regular jihadi outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba gone up, the presence of Taliban poses a new threat.

Highly placed sources said BSF and the Army had been alerted about the developments after intelligence intercepted talk about infiltration bids in the next 15 to 20 days.

"Although the Taliban is yet to successfully infiltrate into India, the coming days will pose a challenge as their attempts to sneak in are expected before the onset of winter," said a senior official. The infiltration is closely controlled and monitored by the ISI and Pakistan army which is often involved in the crossings.

The issue cropped up as a major security concern during the two-day visit to Srinagar by a high-powered central team led by cabinet secretary K M Chandrashekhar and comprising home secretary G K Pillai, defence secretary Pradeep Kumar and other senior officials.

Top security and intelligence officials deliberated over the move by state actors in Pakistan to utilize the Taliban for their objectives in Kashmir. Taking note of the assessment, officials are learnt to have unequivocally noted during the reviews in Srinagar that there was no change in Pakistan's support to terror groups post 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks.

The Taliban, who recently fought against Pakistan army in Swat Valley and other areas along the Pak-Afghan border, were well trained and battle-hardened. They could put their experience of fighting US troops to use in Kashmir.

Apart from the group of 60, there are nearly 250 to 300 jihadis — armed with sophisticated weapons, Thuraya satellite phones and Indian mobile SIM cards — poised at launch pads along LoC. This feeds into the view that violence could escalate in J&K in the winter months.

The meeting in Srinagar, attended by senior Army and paramilitary personnel, also took note of repeated use of Pakistani Air Force helicopters to evacuate injured infiltrators along the LoC and as many as 42 terror camps in PoK and Pakistan.

"Such incidents (like use of choppers) clearly show the involvement of Pakistani authorities in facilitating infiltration. Though our forces are fully alert to thwart Pakistani designs, the next 15-20 days are quite crucial as this is the period when they will do everything to infiltrate as many terrorists as possible," said a senior official. That is when winter will begin to set in.

Sources: Times of India

Sinhalese don't object to Tamils leaving Lanka

2009-10-07T11:37:00.001+05:30

A Ganesh Nadar visits a camp for Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in southern Tamil Nadu to find out what the people there think of recent events on the island nation.

Last fortnight in Kanyakumari and Tirunelveli in south Tamil Nadu, Christians came out on the streets to express solidarity with the Tamils suffering in Sri Lanka.

While they staged a rally in Nagercoil, the district headquarters of Kanyakumari, in Tirunelveli they sat on a day-long fast.

The Palayamcottai bus stand is opposite the venue where the fasting Christians sat. Both Protestants and Catholics were present though the organising was done by the former. Most local political parties sent their speakers to express support.

And what do the Lankan Tamils, in whose support this was being held, think about the solidarity? They were not present at the rally or at the fasting venue. Inquiries at camps for Sri Lankan refugees revealed that there was a blanket ban on leaving the camp for three days.

"We cannot go anywhere without informing the 'Q' branch (A special branch of the Tamil Nadu police that deals with extremist activities). How can we tell them that we are going for a political rally? We are happily working here, enjoying freedom that even our brethren in our own county don't have. We are not going to jeopardise that by attending any rally or fast. We know it is for us and appreciate it. But we won't participate," a middle-aged man, who has been in India for 21 years, tells rediff.com

Sherry, a young girl, adds, "You know what filthy language the Sinhalese soldiers use when they see young Tamil girls. That is why refugees are still coming here. The sea route is not safe anymore and so they come by air."

For those who have a passport and the money getting to India is not a problem at all. In the villages, they inform the army that they are going to Colombo to see their relatives. Once they reach Colombo they just leave for India. The Sinhalese do not object to any Tamil leaving for India. In fact they don't object to any Tamil leaving for any country, Tamils, who have come over from Sri Lanka, told rediff.com

Once they land in India (Chennai or Thiruvanathapuram) they are told to go to the Mandpam camp to register themselves. After registration the 'Q' branch questions them for at least three days till what they say corroborates with what refugees who are already here are telling them.

They can live in the camps or outside if they have the money to do so. About life in Sri Lanka, Sherry says, "The Sri Lankan government says it gives free rations in the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps. It is true that they are giving food grains, but it is enough for only one meal a day."

Outside the camps, life is controlled by the Lankan army. "There is no civil administration anywhere where the Tamils live. If the army says 'Sit!' we have to sit and if they say 'Stand!' we have to stand. We were better off under the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). At least they allowed us to work and move around freely. We did not have to take any pass from them to go anywhere. Now the army insists on a pass to go from one village to another and we have to inform them on when we will come back."

Young Tamil boys are always under threat from the white vans that still operate in spite of the LTTE being defunct. These vans were famous during the fight against the LTTE. They used to appear without number plates, pick up young men and women who vanished after that.

The LTTE is gone, but not the white vans.

"The vans do not enter the camps as there are three lakh (300,000) Tamils there," says an elderly man. "They cannot kidnap anyone without a revolt. So young people should stay here. They are not safe outside."

The Mannar area, which has always been under army control, has seen no violence recently. "I have relatives there. Their lives are safe, but not their freedom," he adds. "They are very scared of the army and move around in fear all the time."

Sources: Rediff.com

Prabhakaran was a good weapon to use

2009-09-14T14:21:00.006+05:30

Ever since the war in Sri Lanka ended, one question that has persisted is India's role in the battle against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

NDTV Defence and Strategic Affairs Editor Nitin Anant Gokhale's book Sri Lanka: From War to Peace answers that question. India gave Sri Lanka helicopters, supported it with intelligence and the Indian Navy effectively pinpointed LTTE ships and shut the door on the rebels.

While China and Pakistan merely gave Sri Lanka the muscle, says Gokhale, India helped the island nation land the knockout punch.

In this interview with Gokhale discusses India's role, the death of LTTE chief V Prabhakaran, the lessons for India and how Sri Lanka still looks at its big neighbour with respect.

How exactly did Prabhakaran meet his end?

In the last two days, the Sri Lankan army had intelligence that all the top LTTE leaders were in a narrow lagoon. They knew this from people who were coming out, and also one of his bodyguards who was captured.

The LTTE had tried to break through that lagoon. They launched waves of attacks, like they are known to do. The idea was to come out of the lagoon and get into the jungles of Mullaitheevu.

Prabhakaran's son Charles Anthony died in the first wave of attacks.

If the rest of the top leaders had managed to escape, the war would have been extended. But the army had deployed two defence lines and one of the reserve forces.

When they spotted some movement in the mangroves, they engaged in a gun battle and the top leaders were killed. When President Mahinda Rajapakse addressed the nation, he didn't mention anything about Prabhakaran.

Then Colonel Karuna was flown in to identify the body. It took three hours for a positive identification, as they call it.

You have been following this war, Eelam war 4, since it began...

The day after the failed assassination attempt on Lankan army chief General Sarath Fonseka, I went to Colombo and went to the east where the fighting was happening...

Did you get a sense then that this would be the biggest and bloodiest phase?

I could sense that this army was taking losses. Earlier leaderships did not want to take losses. But that this leadership was different was very evident. But it did not seem very apparent till January 2007.

What were the key aspects of Eelam 4?

As General Fonseka told me: "This time we were playing for a win, not a draw." Earlier, governments would go a distance and pull back. But this time the politico-military objective was to finish the LTTE militarily. Human rights be damned. The Tamil issue, the devolution of power would all come later, it was decided.

The second key thing was the total synergy between the three forces, which was never seen before.

Earlier, the navy used to be their weakest link. It had large boats that used to come under LTTE suicide boat attacks. When such a boat went down, it was a loss of about 40 lives and $15 million.

The (then) naval chief (Admiral Vasantha ) Karannagoda said 'Let me take them on at their own game.' He started building smaller boats. They were called arrow boats.

The navy started adopting the LTTE's swarming tactics. The air force too.

Leadership makes a difference. The air force was earlier basically an air transport wing of the army. This time, helicopter gunships were used, casualty evacuation used to happen. So the army knew it would be backed fully.

What was the single biggest turning point?

When they took the east, they realised the LTTE could be taken on. That was the biggest morale booster. Another thing was that the international atmosphere had changed after the 9/11 attacks in the US.

How will you quantify India's role?

When Rajapakse took over, he came to India within a month of taking oath. Initially, he was also saying that he would negotiate. He added that he didn't think the LTTE will be interested.

India straightaway told him that it won't give Sri Lanka offensive weapons.

Within a while of liberating the east, two teams comprising three members each were set up on both sides. They were constantly in touch. Thus, India was always in the loop.

We gave them MI-17 helicopters, but told them to fly those in their colours. The Indian Navy also played an active part in the LTTE's defeat. And we gave them intelligence.

We also denied the LTTE space to come out. We shut the door on them.

India was very clear that the LTTE was a terrorist organsiation. India said 'Go ahead with your operations', but was very clear in telling Sri Lanka not to harm civilians.

In percentage terms, how much did India help Sri Lanka in the war against the LTTE?

About 25 per cent.

In terms of importance?

Very important. Lanka knows despite the hue and cry, India cannot be ignored. And Sri Lanka holds India in respect.

India was quietly supportive of the military and also helped with humanitarian assistance.

Although there is a school of thought that India is no longer important, there is not enough evidence. The port that China was given, remember that they came to India first.

Only when India refused to give them arms, did they go elsewhere. But they have given another port, the northernmost, to India. Trincomalle is with India.

India's importance in the public eye may have diminished. But the Sri Lankan State knows it is a big power.

What role did China and Pakistan play?

China's role is mostly commercial. They gave out weapons at a discounted rate and also gave them a line of credit.

Pakistan mostly gave them training because India expressed its inability to do that. Although, I must say that about 800 officers come and train in India every year. Most senior officers I met in Sri Lanka had done at least three courses in India.

Pakistan's and China's help was mostly commercial in nature and they were able to be open about it.

As I say in the book, Sri Lanka won this war with China and Pakistan's open backing and with India's covert support.

So, the most hands-on help was given by India?

Absolutely. There is this lobby in India that is anti-China. They are obsessed with China. Even in Myanmar, only after India declined did they go to China.

What are the lessons that we can learn?

This is the only second instance in the world in the last 50 years where an insurgency has been put down militarily. Here, we don't do it. Especially in the last 30 years or so it has never happened.

But I don't think we can repeat what happened there. There are some lessons, but we can't take the full template because India is a much more open society and vibrant democracy and has a stronger press.

Can the North-east problem or the Naxal problem be solved militarily?

No. It can't be done. Unlike the North-east and the Naxals, the LTTE created a state within a state, a territory within a territory. It became important to clear the area. You have to clear the area.

In the North-east or Naxal-controlled areas or Kashmir , you can't do that.

The lesson is that you can take a military solution up to a point. But you also have to give the military a free hand. In India we always interfere. Be it with ULFA (the United Liberation Front of Asom), the Naga rebels or in Kashmir, as they were going to deal a final blow, you pull them back.

Once you have decided on it, you can't succumb to the liberal view.

Any non-military aspects of this war that stood out for you?

Nobody was ready for the kind of people who came out of LTTE controlled areas. At one point, 80,000 people came out in one day. If not anything you have to at least feed them.

Lanka failed to gauge the humanitarian issue. They could have done better. They never have dealt with this kind of thing. This is where the expertise of an army like India comes in. A force like the Indian Army would have handled it far better.

Politically, why do you think the ruling party fared badly in two local bodies election recently?

That will happen. The Tamil National Alliance has a hold in certain areas. That shows that like the Rajapakse brothers keep saying, they did not rig it. So they will see it as a victory.

What next?

Rajapakse has shown in the final analysis that a small nation can eliminate terror and still stand up firm against the West.

There are a lot of games going on in the Indian Ocean. The US wants a lever with Sri Lanka. Prabhakaran was a good weapon to use. Likewise the Scandinavian countries were the arms suppliers to the LTTE.

In fact, Fonseka told me on record that 10 minutes before they were killed, ambassadors were calling up the defence secretary (Gotabaya Rajapakse, the persident's brother) to save them (Prabhakaran and top LTTE leaders).

Fonseka said any fool would have known that a ceasefire appeal at that time was to save Prabhakaran and not the people, because there were no people there.

The issue had two aspects: Military and political.

Tamils will very frankly never get the kind of autonomy they have been demanding. But Sri Lanka now has to treat them with dignity. The death of one Prabhakaran should not give rise to another.

This is the chance for Rajapakse. He cannot afford to go wrong. There is too much international scrutiny. India has told them, 'We supported you in the international fora but that doesn't mean you can act with impunity...' So, the real test is to win the peace.

Sources: Rediff.com

Fearing Taliban, Pak Hindus take Thar Express to India

2009-09-10T17:38:00.002+05:30

In the past four years, some 5,000 Hindus may have crossed over from Pakistan, never to return. It has not been easy abandoning their homes, sometimes even their families, but they say they had no choice: they had to flee the Taliban.

It started as a trickle in 2006, the year the Thar Express was flagged off. The weekly train starts from Karachi, enters India at Munabao, a border town in Barmer, and runs up to Jodhpur. In the first year, 392 Hindus crossed over.

This grew to 880 in 2007. The next year, the number was 1,240, and this year, till August, over 1,000 have crossed over. They just keep extending their visas and hope to become Indian citizens.

Incidentally, these are official figures. Sources say there are many more who cross over and melt in the local milieu. And officials have a soft corner for these people, most of whom have harrowing stories to tell.

Ranaram, who used to live in the Rahimyar district of Pakistan’s Punjab, says he fell prey to the Taliban. His wife was kidnapped, raped and forcibly converted to Islam. His two daughters were also forcibly converted. Ranaram, too, had to accept Islam for fear of his life. He thought it best to flee with his two daughters; his wife was untraceable.

Dungaram, another migrant, says atrocities against Hindus in Pakistan have increased in the past two years after the ouster of Musharraf. "We won't get permanent jobs unless we convert to Islam."

Hindu Singh Sodha, president of Seemant Lok Sangathan, a group working for the refugees in Barmer and Jaisalmer, says there's unfortunately no proper refugee policy in India even though people from Pakistan reach here in large numbers.

He said in 2004-05, over 135 families were given Indian citizenship but the rest are still living illegally in the country and are often tortured by police because they don't have proper citizenship certificates. "In December 2008, over 200 Hindus were converted to Islam in Mirpur Khas town of Pakistan. But there are several others who want to stick to their religion but there’s no safety for them in Pakistan."

Immigration officer at Munabao railway station, Hetudan Charan, says the arrival of Hindu migrants had suddenly increased as over 15 to 16 families were reaching India every week. “None of them admit they are to settle here but seeing their baggage, we easily understand,’’ he said.

Ravi Kumar, who was Barmer collector till his transfer two days back, said the government in 2007 had given permanent citizenship to a few Pakistani immigrants.

Sources: Times of India

Behind Hamas' Own War on Terror

2009-09-10T16:15:00.004+05:30

Eyebrows were raised around the world Aug. 14 when Hamas security forces in Rafah swiftly, and brutally, destroyed an al-Qaeda-inspired group that had proclaimed the southern Gaza town an "Islamic emirate." After all, Hamas is listed by the U.S. and the European Union as a terrorist organization, and many in the West don't expect an avowedly Islamist political organization to forcefully suppress jihadist groups.

Yet, that's exactly what happened when pro-al-Qaeda cleric Abdel Latif Moussa gathered about 100 of his heavily armed supporters in a mosque to denounce Hamas rule and declared himself the "Islamic prince" of the new "emirate." Hamas security men moved in to disarm the group, and 24 people, including Moussa and about 20 of his followers, were killed in the ensuing firefight. Their group, Jund Ansar Allah, claimed inspiration from al-Qaeda, and condemned Hamas both for maintaining a cease-fire with Israel and for its failure to impose Islamic Shari'a law after taking full control of Gaza in 2007. It had mounted small-scale attacks on rivals inside Gaza, and two months ago failed in a bizarre cavalry charge by mounted fighters against Israeli border guards. Following the Rafah showdown, the fringe group has vowed to wage war on Hamas, turning Gaza's rulers into an unlikely ally against Osama bin Laden.

Still, there was little surprise about the Rafah confrontation for longtime observers of Palestinian politics. Hamas, in fact, has always been at odds with al-Qaeda. Despite its Islamist ideology, Hamas is first and foremost a nationalist movement, taking its cue from Palestinian public opinion and framing its goals and strategies on the basis of national objectives, rather than the "global" jihadist ideology of al-Qaeda. For example, Hamas has periodically debated the question of whether to attack American targets in its midst, and each time has reiterated the insistence of the movement's founders that it confine its resistance activities to Israeli targets.

"What distinguishes Hamas - as well as organizations like Hizbullah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood - from groups like al-Qaeda is that they recognize, whether out of principle or practical necessity, that the will of the people they claim to represent is paramount," says Mouin Rabbani, an Amman-based analyst with the Center for Palestine Studies. "In deciding their actions, they're ultimately more responsive to their environment than to their principles."

And it's precisely that more pragmatic strain in Hamas that has often infuriated al-Qaeda leaders. Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has savagely and repeatedly condemned Hamas for participating in elections, for accepting Saudi and Egyptian mediation of its conflict with Fatah, and for observing a cease-fire with Israel. Hamas officials routinely dismiss al-Qaeda's criticisms. Hamas' Beirut representative Osama Hamdan two years ago suggested that "a fugitive in the Afghan mountains" offered the Palestinian cause no advice worth heeding. Also in 2007, when a self-styled "Army of Islam" claiming inspiration from al-Qaeda kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston in Gaza, Hamas forced the group to release him.

The harsh crackdown on Jund Ansar Allah sends two emphatic messages from Hamas: one to potential rivals, the other to potential interlocutors. The speed and violence with which it suppressed the jihadist group is a warning to all potential rivals that Hamas will tolerate no challenge to its authority in Gaza. But it also signals that as long as Hamas maintains a cease-fire, it is willing and able to forcibly restrain others in the Strip from launching attacks on Israel.

That display of force will likely reinforce the emerging consensus in the West that no credible Israeli-Palestinian peace process is possible without the consent of Hamas. Indeed, one European diplomat in the region told TIME that U.S. officials were pleased by the Hamas action in Rafah. The action "benefited Hamas because it allowed them to show that they're capable of enforcing their authority and order, in Gaza, and also to distinguish themselves from the radical jihadists," says Rabbani. "This shows not only that Hamas is different from al-Qaeda, but that the two are actually violently at odds."

While Hamas may have gained diplomatically from taking down Moussa's outfit, the emergence of an al-Qaeda-inspired group ready to openly challenge Hamas authority is a reminder of the downside. Some of the leading elements in Jund Ansar Allah were former Hamas members who broke with the movement over its decision to join in the political process of the Palestinian Authority by running for election in 2006. They were bolstered, according to Palestinian observers, by jihadist elements from other Arab countries, taking advantage of the widespread despair and frustration in Gaza brought on by the ongoing economic siege. While Hamas is currently enforcing the cease-fire it adopted seven months ago at the close of Israel's Gaza invasion, the economic siege remains largely in place - although if Egyptian-mediated negotiations over the fate of captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit are successfully resolved, that might prompt Israel to ease the pressure.

Although basic food and fuel supplies are entering Gaza, the Israelis have kept out the construction material essential for rebuilding the thousands of homes damaged and destroyed in January's fighting. If the onset of winter sees no progress in rebuilding the homes of those currently living in tents and other temporary shelters - and especially if the U.S. pushes a plan that is viewed as an attempt to isolate Hamas - the pressure on the group to end the cease-fire will be coming not just from more radical challengers, but from Hamas' own commanders and fighters.

Courtesy: Time.com

Did Lord Krishna Exist ?

2009-08-31T11:23:00.011+05:30

Did Krishna exist?

Most certainly, says Dr Manish Pandit, a nuclear medicine physician who teaches in the United Kingdom, proffering astronomical, archaeological, linguistic and oral evidences to make his case.

"I used to think of Krishna is a part of Hindu myth and mythology. Imagine my surprise when I came across Dr Narhari Achar (a professor of physics at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, in the US) and his research in 2004 and 2005. He had done the dating of the Mahabharata war using astronomy. I immediately tried to corroborate all his research using the regular Planetarium software and I came to the same conclusions [as him]," Pandit says.

Which meant, he says, that what is taught in schools about Indian history is not correct?

The Great War between the Pandavas and the Kauravas took place in 3067 BC, the Pune-born Pandit, who did his MBBS from BJ Medical College there, says in his first documentary, Krishna: History or Myth?.

Pandit's calculations say Krishna was born in 3112 BC, so must have been 54-55 years old at the time of the battle of Kurukshetra.

Pandit is also a distinguished astrologer, having written several books on the subject, and claims to have predicted that Sonia Gandhi would reject prime ministership, the exact time at which Shankaracharya Jayendra Saraswati would be released on bail and also the Kargil war.

Pandit, as the sutradhar of the documentary Krishna: History or Myth?, uses four pillars -- archaeology, linguistics, what he calls the living tradition of India and astronomy to arrive at the circumstantial verdict that Krishna was indeed a living being, because Mahabharata and the battle of Kurukshetra indeed happened, and since Krishna was the pivot of the Armageddon, it is all true.

You are a specialist in nuclear medicine. What persuaded you to do a film on the history/myth of Krishna? You think there are too many who doubt? Is this a politico-religious message or a purely religious one?
We are always taught that Krishna is a part of Hindu myth and mythology. And this is exactly what I thought as well. But imagine my surprise when I came across Dr Narhari Achar (of the Department of Physics at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, in the US) and his research somewhere in 2004 and 2005. He had done the dating of the Mahabharata war using astronomy.

I immediately tried to corroborate all his research using the regular Planetarium software and I came to the same conclusions. This meant that what we are taught in schools about Indian history is not correct.

I also started wondering about why this should be so. I think that a mixture of the post-colonial need to conform to western ideas of Indian civilisation and an inability to stand up firmly to bizarre western ideas are to blame. Also, any attempt at a more impartial look at Indian history is given a saffron hue.

I decided that I could take this nonsense no more, and decided to make films to show educated Indians what their true heritage was. The pen is mightier than the sword is an old phrase but I thought of new one: Film is the new pen.

Any ideas I have will receive wide dissemination through this medium.

I wanted to present a true idea of Indian history unfettered by perception, which was truly scientific, not just somebody's hypothesis coloured by their perceptions and prejudices.

Why not a documentary on Rama, who is more controversial in India today? Proof of his existence would certainly be more than welcome today...
A documentary on Rama is forthcoming in the future. But the immediate reason I deferred that project is the immense cost it would entail. Whereas research on Krishna and Mahabharata was present and ready to go.

Further more, Rama according to Indian thought, existed in the long hoary ancient past of Treta Yuga, where science finds it difficult to go.

There is a controversial point in your documentary where someone Isckon monk alludes to Krishna as being the father of Jesus. How can you say that since there is an age gap of roughly 3000 years between the two spiritual giants?
Is Krishna the spiritual father of Jesus? That is what the person who was training to be a Roman Catholic priest, and who now worships Krishna, asks. The answer comes within the field of comparative religion and theology.
The Biblical scriptures qualify Jesus as the son of God. Most Indians have no problems accepting this as Hindus are a naturally secular people. However, then the question that arises is, if Jesus is the son, then who is the Father or God Himself?

Now, Biblical scriptures do not really give the answer except to say that the Father is all-powerful and omnipresent. Now, of course, we know that Jesus does not say that he is omnipresent or omnipotent.

Now, no scripture can live as an island, all by itself, and the Srimad Bhagavatam and other scriptures such as the Bramha Samhita all call Krishna as an all powerful, omnipresent being.

So, if we use these words of Bhagavatam, there can be no other truth, which means that Krishna is the father of all living creation.

But it does not mean that Jesus is not divine. Jesus is indeed divine. What I liked about the monks in my documentary is that they do not denigrate Jesus although they worship Krishna as God. They keep Jesus in their hearts, while worshipping Krishna. What could be more secular or more Christian?

3067 BC is when the Mahabharata war took place, says Dr Achar. How did he arrive at this?
There are more than 140 astronomy references in the Mahabharata. Dr Achar used simulations of the night sky to arrive at November 22, 3067 BC, as the day the Mahabharata war began.

He used the references common to Udyoga and Bhisma Parvan initially, and so Saturn at Rohini, Mars at Jyestha with initially only the two eclipses, Lunar at Kartika and Solar at Jyestha.

Let me tell you how rare this set of astronomical conjunctions is.

The Saros cycle of eclipses is periodic at 19 years and so is the Metonic cycle of lunar phases.

So if I say that Amavasya has occured at Jyestha, then this will occur again in 19 years, but if I say that a solar eclipse has occured at Jyestha, then this occurs again at Jyestha only after 340 years. Add Saturn at Rohini and we take this to 1 in 7,000 years. This set of conjunctions takes all of these into consideration, but also takes all the other data into consideration.

So now, we know about Balarama's pilgrimage tithis and nakshatras, and believe it or not, all that fits the 3067 BC date perfectly.

And to top it all, so does the repetition of the three eclipses described at the destruction of Dwarka 36 years later.

This would explain why so many other researchers tried and failed to find the date of the Mahabharata war as it is based on such a unique set of astronomy that it occured only once in the last 10,000 years.

So essentially, your thesis is that since the Mahabharata war actually happened, as confirmed by astronomical deduction, Krishna was also a living entity since he's the fulcrum of the Great War?
Not just that, but the fact that archaeology, oral and living traditions point to the same. And yes, we cannot separate the Mahabharata war from Krishna. If one is shown to have happened, then the other must be true as well.

What's your next project?
The next project is called Indian Jesus. It is already 80% complete. It is very controversial but needed to be done. Living in India convinced me that there are definitely many paths to God. Anybody who lives in India and does not subscribe to that concept should be termed intolerant, but instead the opposite is happening. There are some people today who call their God as God and mine as the devil, this is unacceptable, and I will see to it that those intolerant concepts are demolished. I long to see a one borderless world where we live in mutual respect. I cannot say much on the project but to say that I will prove that the underlying basis of religions is the same.

There is talk of a banyan tree which the documentary says was a witness to the Battle of Kurukshetra, where 4 million people are said to have died in 14 days. Where exactly does this exist? Has the tree been carbon-dated to confirm its age?
There is indeed a banyan tree at Jyotisaar in Kurukshetra which is worshipped as such. This concept is similar to the tree in Jerusalem, which is thought to have witnessed Jesus's arrival. Carbon-dating of this banyan tree is unlikely to give any concrete answers. I have included it in the documentary to show the living tradition of India --- like worship of the Ganges cannot be carbon-dated to give any answers.

There is a gentleman named Ram Prasad Birbal, who said he has found many bones which are said to belong to the Kurukshetra battle. Has this been scientifically proved?
Ram Prasad Birbal is a resident of Kurukshetra. I am not aware of carbon dating of those bones. But I am informed that thermo-luminescent dating of other relics as well as carbon-dating at other sites in Kurukshetra have given dates far older than the Indus valley civilisation. Further, Euan Mackie, an eminent archaeologist, had found a clay tablet of Krishna's Yamalaarjuna episode at Mohenjedaro, a site of the Indus Valley civilisation proving that even in 2200 BC, there was a culture of worshipping Krishna.

You said Hinduism spread across South East Asia in those times ... how big was this religious empire?
The Hindu religious empire extended across the whole of the Asian sub-continent to South East Asia, from Afghanistan to Thailand (where Ramayana and Krishna are still shown through dances), Burma, Cambodia (Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bayon, etc), Vietnam, Laos (little Kurukshetra and temples), Malaysia (which was Hindu until recent) up to Java (more temples), Bali (where Hinduism is still the religion) and Indonesia, where Bhima's grandson is said to have performed a thousand fire rituals at Yogyakarta. Afghanistan was of course home to both the Yadu race and Shakuni (Kandahar or Gandhar).

Dr Achar said the Kurukshetra war must not have happened on a full moon day...
The Mahabharata war did not start on an Amavasya. That is straight forward.

Krishna tells Karna "Saptama chappi divasat Amavasya Bhivasyati" and says that Karna should tell Drona and Bhisma to do the ayudha (weapons) pooja on that date. But not start fighting the war on that date.

The documentary is quiet crisp. I am told this is the first time you held a camera, and learnt how to shoot. How many days did this take and what was your budget?
I learnt film editing first using a variety of software such as Final Cut 6 as I realised that a film director must be able to do decent basic editing to realise what to shoot, from what angles and for what duration.

I bought a professional grade HD movie camcorder initially and then learnt to shoot before we went filming in 8 major Indian cities, the US, UK and Cambodia.

However, nothing prepares you as thoroughly as filming on your own. Most of this was done with a skeleton crew, mostly handling audio.

I later was funded to buy the latest Cinealta tru HD movie cameras, which are not available in India, and which I am now proficient in using. I also taught a few crew members how to shoot.

Then came the task of assembling a team of professionals to do editing, graphics, voice over and all else, so that I had a team of people for my next set of documentaries.

It was a steep learning curve, as I never went to film school, but it has worked out well, with people within the industry who are veterans complimenting my work. I personally think that it was all God's grace.

The budget was 15,000 pounds or approximately Rs 12 lakh. It took me 18 months to complete.

Your documentary says India did not have a tradition of putting down everything in writing till 325 BC, when Alexander the Great arrived. How did you come to this conclusion?
This is what the current scientific belief is. Although people have talked about deciphering the Indus Valley "script", there is no straightforward conclusion about the same, so we stuck to the "official line" there. We will deal with these issues in a future documentary.

S R Rao, the marine archaeologist from the National Institute of Oceanography, found a 9th century building, and an entire city. Where was this and when did he find it?.

S R Rao found the sunken city of Dwarka a few years ago at Beyt Dwarka in the early 1990s.

Apparently, this city near Dwarka was set up 36 years after the Mahabharata war. Is this the summation of Rao?
It is believed that due to damage and destruction by the sea, Dwaraka has submerged six times and the modern-day Dwarka is the 7th such city to be built in the area. Scientifically speaking, we see that 36 years after the war there were the same repetitions of an eclipse triad as we have shown in the documentary.

From Dwarka to Kurukshetra is more than 1,000 km. How do you think Krishna travelled to help the Pandavas?
As a scientist, I believe that they travelled on horses which would enable them to reach pretty quickly. If you consider 1,000 km, that should take him 7 days if he had a string of horses. Of course if you take faith into account, then it could happen in a twinkling of an eye.

What's the link between the two comets that Sage Vyasa talked about, the retrograde motion of Mars (Mangal or Kuja) at Antares (Jyestha) to all this
The idea that comets are harbingers of doom is well-documented. The thing is that there is a set of statements describing comets and their positions. Only Dr Achar has arrived at the correct deduction, that those sentences in Bhisma Parvan relate to comets, not planets --- which is where previous researchers found it difficult.

We know that Halley's comet was seen in that year as well.

Dr Achar interpreted verses from the Bhism Parvan and Udyog Parvan to arrive at various conclusions. One of them is that when Saturn in at Aldebaran (Rohini) it brings great bad tidings. The last time this happened was in September 2001, when 9/11 happened. When does this happen next?
Actually Saturn at Rohini is long known to be a bad omen by astrologers. Rohinim Pidyannesha Stitho Rajan Shanischarah. This transit happened in 1971 where a million or so were killed, and again in 2001 September, when 9/11 happened. The next time is in 2030/2031 AD approximately.

When is the next time Mars will be in Antares?
Mars at Jyestha has to be taken in conjunction with the other things mentioned by Karna when he talks to Krishna, as it occurs every year. In any case, those people were great astronomers and not just warriors, so we don't know what the extent of their knowledge was regarding these events, In my personal humble opinion it was perhaps even better than that which we have today.

Sources: Rediff.com & Saraswati Films

Extra-Judicial Killings in Sri Lanka

2009-08-27T12:30:00.002+05:30

A video clip received from Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) evidences the way extra-judicial killings are executed in the island. The video captured in January show the behaviour of Sri Lanka’s soldiers during the war that is claimed ‘humanitarian operation’ to rescue the Tamils, JDS reported Tuesday.

The conversations of the killers are in Sinhala. “From the casual nature of the conversations and from the fact that it is taking place in an open area in broad daylight – it can be surmised that these are not ordinary acts by rogue elements carried out without the permission from the top leadership. The soldiers egging each other on, the insulting jokes and the laughter show that there is a consensus that these cold blooded killings should take place,” JDS further reported.

As there is no reason to believe there is a change in the behaviour of the armed forces, the treatment of the 280,000 people in the internment camps kept for ‘screening’ and another more than 10,000 alleged to be LTTE cadres, kept in undisclosed locations, is widely feared.

The way the men are treated even in execution, shown in the video clip, is a repeatedly demonstrated feature of the chauvinism in the island. One can imagine the treatment of women, was the observation of Tamil circles.

BBC Sinhala Service Monday reported the trauma of the internment camp inmates about 'Dolphin vans' whisking away people, who then disappear.

While some governments are sitting on indicting Colombo’s war crimes and while some other governments don’t want to recognise the genocidal perspectives or the need to call for the closure of internment camps, Colombo enjoys absolute impunity, Tamil circles said.

Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS) was founded on 18th of July in Berlin, with the participation of Tamil and Sinhala journalists coming from six European countries, who were forced into exile. JDS aims to raise the concerns about the deteriorating conditions of democratic rights in Sri Lanka, with a special emphasis on issues related to media freedom.

Sources: Tamilnet

Swine Flu - Dont Panic, Take Precautions

2009-08-14T14:18:00.005+05:30

The spread of swine flu has brought the Union health ministry under the scanner. Dinesh Trivedi, minister of state for health, who belongs to the Trinamool Congress, has remained in the shadows even as his senior Health Minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad faces the fire over government inaction on the issue.

Trivedi gives his take on the issue and a lot of advice as well. Even though he doesn't say it in enough words, Trivedi wants people to take the H1N1 pandemic in their stride and not go by the coverage in electronic media.

Q: What is the real picture of spread of swine flu in India?

A: Since the outbreak of swine flu in the western countries, the health ministry's team -- under the guidance of Ghulam Nabi Azad -- is working round the clock. Honestly speaking, it is due to the hard work of doctors, scientists and officers of the health ministry in the last two months that we have been able to contain the disease to this extent.

To answer your question I would say so far, so good. But, do we have infrastructure to tackle the disease if it spreads? The answer is yes and no; because, every day things are changing and every day the ministry changes its strategy. So far, we have done very well, but now the common flu season is on. We will have to increase collection centres; we will have to increase the number of beds for isolated cases. And, if the patients go beyond certain numbers, then we will have to do something dramatic.

Q: What is the biggest challenge before the ministry?

A: The major challenge is educating people. Without running down any particular section of the media, I would say that a section of electronic media is trying to create a sensation without knowing what this disease is all about, how does one counter it and the right treatment is. I somehow think a section of the television media has not covered the disease maturely. They have mishandled it. I am not saying all, just few of them.

Some of the channels were asking me angrily why are you not increasing testing centres or why are you restricting it to the government. The answer is very simple. These laboratories are very sophisticated. It requires investment and one has to have what is called BSL level 3. It will require four to five months to set up such a lab.

These labs require trained technicians, doctors and staff. It is like handling a nuclear power plant where waste management is an equally big job. These labs have to manage the waste of the virus. These labs don't have many people inside. If somebody goes in, they are covered from top to toe. If any lab does the test and is not well equipped to manage the waste management, then you can create more problems than solutions.

The maintenance of such a lab even without testing could be more than one lakh rupees a day. The private sector is not into social service; they want to make money. The government has 12 functional labs in the country; on paper there are 16 labs!

In Kolkata, I have visited one such lab, which has state-of-the-art technology. We as countrymen should be proud of it. Doctors told me that they can test 92 cases per day. Another machine is coming, so they will be able to conduct 180 tests.

If you read any European or American medical journal, most of them have praised the way India has controlled swine flu. We are screening 100 per cent of passengers at international airports. If an infected passenger is found, we go through the list of passengers, track down and contact each and every passenger sitting around that patient in the aircraft.

Since the government contacts them, they are bound to respond and tell us if they have caught swine flu or not. We have visited so many air-passengers' houses. You have to understand that in India more than lakh patients die due to viral flu, malaria and TB. But, nobody gives it in headline news. I am also, not trying to distinguish between rich and poor. Swine flu has suddenly become disease of high society because it has come through people flying abroad. Rich patients are scared to do anything with the government. They may have justification. They are scared to be in isolated beds in government hospitals. Many of them have never seen government hospitals.

When blasts occur in a middle class locality there is not as much coverage as it was in case of the November 26 attack on the Taj hotel. We already have serious diseases and that too requires attention of the people and the media.

Q: So, do you mean there is no reason to panic?

A: There is no reason to panic for one simple reason that there is a cure for swine flu. One has to see that when there are symptoms, go to the government laboratory and get the test done. Now, we don't even insist that they should be quarantined in hospital. We give a choice to patients if they have the infrastructure at home to live in isolation. We give the medicine (Tamiflu).

The unfortunate incident in Pune involving that little girl was sad. She had no reason to die this way. Her parents went to a place, which was not equipped to test H1N1. Her test result came out negative. So, obviously she was not treated for swine flu. She didn't get the right medicine at the right time. Then the family panicked and rushed her to a government hospital with the sample. She tested positive. But by then it was too late.

I am again saying that do not panic. Have faith in the system. Go to registered laboratories. If you test positive, then take medicines as per the doctor's advice and you will be cured. The masks are not important for ordinary citizens; handkerchiefs will do.

Masks are a must for medical people or people who are vulnerable. Take personal caution. Greet people with a 'namaste' instead of shaking hands. Take care of hygiene. Avoid kissing and hugging for some time. Cover yourself with a handkerchief. Don't be shy of it.

Q: Even as we talk, television channels are showing that Mumbai has been shut down. Why?

A: I have just come from Mumbai. I had gone to Bali, Indonesia on an official visit. It's quite amusing to see Mumbai. Mumbai panics very fast and normalises very fast as well. I think it's strange on part of the government to ask parents to SMS their opinion. How do you expect them to react one way or the other on diseases they have no knowledge about? The authorities should have taken their own decision.

However, Mumbai is alright and functioning. The intensity of panic is more on television than in real life. Do you have any idea when you hype more than what is real how much the country loses in terms of business? Do we know what the spread of swine flu in America is? In the western world, there are over one million cases. They are not panicking; they are taking care to cure.

I am sorry to say that some channels are adding to the panic. People watch it and panic more. I have gone to many studios and I have seen that the interviewer has no idea about the disease. We have enough stock of medicines. Companies have given us manufacturing schedules to ensure supply. Somebody in the world will quickly crack the solution and make vaccines soon. Few companies are doing clinical trials.

We have enough centres for testing; enough isolated beds. Why panic? I see that the print media is much more responsible. They are analysing it and telling people without spreading panic. See, few days back a friend of mine called from Kolkata. His nephew Rishabh tested positive. They didn't want to enter a government hospital but were worried about how to tackle the 11-year-old boy's flu. I strongly advised them to go to a government hospital. These are all psychological fears. I went to see the boy. He was in an isolated area with all sides covered with glass. I could not enter that place, but he wrote on a piece of paper in bold handwriting 'Uncle, You saved my life'. I was so touched.

Q: Still, what are your fears?

A: My fear is that we are entering the flu season. We have no control over the atmosphere. While we are talking, it is quite possible that the virus is somewhere around in the air around us. I won't say fear but my concern is that if the virus really spreads, I am afraid we may not have capacity to treat everybody. In that case, we will have to change our strategy.

In US, the issue has gone beyond testing time. There, in many cases, they are skipping the testing and going by symptoms.

We have relaxed the system where in we are doing away with keeping patients in quarantine area of government hospitals. It is quite possible that a situation may arise when we may have to allow certain things and may have to further liberalise. We are updating our website. The government is bearing the cost of Rs 5,000 for a negative test and Rs 10,000 for a positive one. The government is not concerned about money. We give free test and medicines. But I wish the private sector will chip in. There is no bar on private investment in laboratories that can test swine flu and on curing patients.

Q: What will happen if swine flu spreads to the villages?

A: I am not ruling that out, but I would not panic. There are more serious medical issues and diseases that we already face. Nobody is talking about it, but it doesn't mean they are not there. The same way, we will fight against flu. People don't necessarily die of flu but in some cases when patients also have lung disease, diabetes or obesity, those issues get aggravated if not treated on time.

I am hopeful that as it happened in Mexico, the virus would become weak as it passes on from one person to another person to another and so on. Swine flu started in Mexico but the deaths are decreasing there. We will have a graph of infected patients that will go up but it would come down soon. Sorry to repeat myself, but there is nothing to worry. If you get it, you get it. All cases are not terminal. It can become terminal if you run away from it. If you get any symptoms, go to the government doctor. Get the test done if he advises. Take medicines and let life go on.
The Indian government tried to stop the flu from coming to India. We requested western countries to try screening passengers. But, you know this is a unipolar world. The western countries would have stopped flights from India, Pakistan or Bangladesh in a similar case. This flu is imported. It's difficult to guess how the disease will mutate. But the silver lining in the current situation is that in a couple of months we are definitely going to have the vaccine. Importantly, the virus weakens as it is passes on from person to person. So, we will have to withstand this storm for a while.

Sources: Rediff.com

The Reason Why India Agreed To Discuss Baluchistan

2009-07-28T16:26:00.006+05:30

Why is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh under fire in India, becoming the first Indian prime minister to be blamed by the Opposition and the media for surrendering to Pakistan in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt , a fortnight ago?

Many Indians are not happy over the reference to Baluchistan in the joint statement released in Sharm El Sheikh after the meeting between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers. Some Indians think Dr Singh stabbed the nation in the back by accepting India's interference in Baluchistan. There are reports that the Pakistani prime minister pressurised Dr Singh in Sharm El Sheikh by handing over a dossier containing proof of alleged Indian cross-border terrorism in Baluchistan, and that was how the latter was forced to accept the mention of Baluchistan in the joint statement.

I was present in Sharm El Sheikh. I remember that many Indian journalists were shocked after reading the joint statement. They started asking me why Baluchistan was mentioned in the statement at all. In fact, many of them were not aware, like many ordinary Indians, of what is going on in Baluchistan. Within a few hours I started receiving phone calls from many Indian television channels asking me what was the evidence shown by Pakistan to Dr Singh. The fact is, while the Pakistani prime minister did mention Baluchistan to Dr Singh, he never handed over any dossier.

But the situation in Baluchistan came under detailed discussion during the first meeting of the foreign secretaries in the evening of July 14 in Sharm El Sheikh, which took place two days before the meeting between Dr Singh and Yousaf Raza Gilani. Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir told Shiv Shankar Menon that India must delink the talks from terrorism, otherwise Pakistan will be forced to produce at least "three Indian Ajmal Kasabs" before the international media, who were directly or indirectly part of the terrorist activities in Baluchistan, and Pakistan will easily establish that the Indian consulate in the Afghan city of Kandahar was actually a control room for the terrorist activities organised by the separatist Baluchistan Liberation Army.

These three Indian nationals were arrested In Pakistan over the last few weeks and, according to Pakistani officials, they have undeniable evidence of Indians links with Baluch militants.

Bashir told Menon that both Pakistan and India cannot afford a blame game right now. If Pakistan comes out with evidence that Indians are responsible for attacking Chinese engineers in the port city of Gwadar in 2004 it may damage India's credibility, but it will surely fan greater anti-India feelings in Pakistan which will ultimately be to the benefit of extremist forces. This is why Pakistani authorities are very careful in exposing the alleged Indian involvement in Baluchistan.

After all, this sort of blame game will only help those extremist forces who successfully organised attacks in Mumbai on November 26, 2008, just to derail the India-Pakistan peace process.

Secondly, it will also harm relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United States does not want any tension between Islamabad and Kabul at this stage because NATO forces are trying their best to conduct a presidential election in Afghanistan in the coming weeks.

Thirdly, the Pakistani Peoples Party-led coalition government is aware that Baluchistan is not a serious dispute like Jammu and Kashmir , it's a problem of provincial rights, and instead of internationalising the problem Islamabad should address the problem realistically. Islamabad cannot get away by simply blaming India for the unrest in Baluchistan. Behind the scene talks with many Baluch militants are going on, and some good news may come out soon in this regard.

Pakistan is making noises against the alleged Indian involvement in Baluch insurgency in a very careful, well-calculated and "limited manner". Recently a prominent US magazine, Foreign Affairs, in its March 2009 edition, published the report of a roundtable discussion on the causes of instability in Pakistan. Christine Fair of Rand Corporation is reported to have said in that discussion that 'having visited the Indian mission in Zahedan, Iran, I can assure you they are not issuing visas as the main activity. Indian officials have told me privately that they are pumping money into Baluchistan'.

This allegation came from a very credible American scholar who recently visited the Indian consulate in Zahedan. Now, where is Zahedan? It is the capital of the Irani province of Sistan-o-Baluchistan bordering Pakistan. More than two million Baluchis live on the Iranian side of Baluchistan. Iran is building a big port, Chabahar, in the same area with active help from India. Top Iranian leaders have alleged many times that the Central Intelligence Agency is supporting Iranian Baluchis to destabilise the Islamic Republic. The famous American journalist Seymour Hersh admitted in July 2008 that the George Bush administration gave millions of dollars to a separatist Iranian group, Jandallah, which is responsible for the violence on the Iranian side of Baluchistan.

China's presence in Pakistani Baluchistan is also a problem for the US administration. The Chinese are accused of using Gwadar as a listening post for monitoring US military activities in the Persian Gulf. If Pakistan plays the India card in Baluchistan, many anti-US forces in Pakistan will ask why it is silent over the CIA's role in Baluchistan whereby it is using Jandallah against Iran.

Keeping in view the sensitivity of the problem, it is difficult for India to openly support the Baluch insurgency because it may harm her relations with Iran. If the Indians will come out openly in support of the BLA, anti-Indian elements in Pakistan will quickly bracket New Delhi with the alleged Great Game of the US against Iran.

We must know that Baluchis are Kurds of South Asia. Kurds are divided in Iran, Turkey and Iraq while the Baluchis are divided in Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Separatist groups in Pakistan and Iran want the unification of Baluch areas which is not acceptable to both the countries. Baluchistan has huge quantities of natural gas and unexplored oil reserves. It is the largest province in Pakistan in terms of area, covering almost 48 pc of the country while its population is only 5 pc of Pakistan's. It is a tribal society, and is the most underdeveloped province in Pakistan.

The first military operation in Baluchistan was launched by General Ayub Khan in the late '50s. The second one was launched in 1974 when Iraq tried to destabilise Iranian Baluchistan with the help of pro-Soviet Afghan ruler Sardar Daoud in collaboration with some Pakistani Baluch leaders. Daoud tried to exploit the slogan of Independent Baluchistan on one side and Pashtunistan on the other. Afghanistan's interference in Pakistan forced the then prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to use Ahmad Shah Masood and Gulbadin Hekmatyar against Kabul, and these two Afghan rebels became the guest of Pakistani security forces for the first time in 1975. Later on they were used by General Zia against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Musharraf gave the Gwadar port city to the Chinese for development in 2003, which was the beginning of a new problem. Three Chinese engineers were killed and nine were injured on May 3, 2004, in a remote-controlled car bomb attack. Two months after that incident, Pakistan claimed on July 2 for the first time that India was involved in the blast. Local Baluchis were not happy over the employment of many non-Baluchis in the main development projects of their province. They also wanted a fairer share of royalties generated by the production of natural gas in their province. Instead of addressing their grievances, the Musharraf regime launched a third military operation against them in 2005, which further aggravated the situation.

Why must Indians discuss Baluchistan with Pakistan? Because Baluchistan will be the route of at least two multinational gas pipeline projects. One will come from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan; the other will come from Iran to Pakistan. India could be a beneficiary of both the pipelines. These two pipelines could be extended from Multan to New Delhi. I think there is no harm in India discussing Baluchistan with Pakistan because stability in Baluchistan will ultimately benefit India.

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, China and India should join hands with each other, stop proxy wars in Kashmir and Baluchistan as soon as possible, and thus they can change the fate of the whole region.

Article Written By: Hamid Mir, Executive Editor of Geo TV in Islamabad
Sources: Rediff.com

Sikhs, Hindus dread Taliban tax in northwest Pakistan

2009-07-27T14:40:00.002+05:30

Sitting on a broken chair outside a Sikh temple in a crowded part of Peshawar, Aman Deep Singh is frantic about his future after losing his business in the tribal district of Khyber.

When the Taliban gave Sikhs and Hindus an ultimatum — leave the land of your forefathers or pay an Islamic tax in protection money — Singh packed up and left his native Tirah valley for Peshawar.

‘We were living under fear. Fear of militants, fear of Lashkar-e-Islam and fear of other armed groups,’ said Singh, his hair swept up in a turban, a long beard touching his abdomen and thick moustache covering his upper lip.

He swapped a general store in the mountains for unemployment in the northwest capital, where he struggles to feed the nine members of his family.

Aman Deep is a fake name. He wants his real name hidden for his security.

As light fades to dusk, Sikhs gather for evening prayers at the Joga Singh gurdwara (temple) in a narrow street of Peshawar’s Dabgari bazaar. Each man removes his shoes, washes his feet in a small pool of water and covers his head.

‘I am not the only one. About 400 Sikh and 57 Hindu families migrated from the town of Bara and Tirah,’ said Singh.

Sikhs and Hindus are tiny communities in Pakistan. In the last year, hundreds have fled their homes after receiving death threats from the Taliban and other militant groups in an increasingly unstable northwest.

After US troops invaded Afghanistan in 2001, Taliban and Al-Qaeda ideologues fled to Pakistan, where they have increasingly focused their campaign and where 2,000 people have perished in bomb attacks over the past two years.

Pakistan launched a major offensive in the northwest this summer, under pressure from the United States, after Taliban fighters made deep territorial inroads.

Militants need an endless supply of funds for their weapons, communications and training.

Kidnapping, drugs and extortion are typical sources of income. Taxation and protection scams are others, and vulnerable non-Muslims are easy prey.

Local Sikhs mostly trade in cloth, and also run grocer, garment and herbal medicine shops. They are people who can afford the 1,000 rupees per man, per year ‘jizya’ tax.

In the region of Orakzai, the Taliban demanded the tax of adult male Sikhs, forcibly occupying Sikh-owned shops and houses. After two months, the tax spread to Khyber, the legendary tribal region on the main supply line to Afghanistan.

It was there that Lashkar-e-Islam, a group headed by Mangal Bagh, announced Sikhs and Hindus would be free to live anywhere — as long as they paid jizya.

But threats made the situation increasing tense. Hundreds of Sikh and Hindu families fled to nearby areas, especially Peshawar.

‘Minorities in Orakzai and Khyber were warned by some militant groups to become Muslims or leave the area. This was a real threat,’ Singh said.

‘They’re running a parallel government. Hindu and Sikh families did not feel safe, in Orakzai, in Bara and in Tirah. We preferred to migrate, at least here we can breathe in peace and feel safe,’ he said.

The same sentiment was echoed by other shopkeepers from Bara.

‘No female Muslim or non-Muslim is allowed out without a male relative. All women, even the elderly, have to wear a burka,’ said Gulab Khan Afridi, a 38-year-old Muslim.

Gulab Khan said growing a beard and wearing a cap had become compulsory, otherwise Lashkar extremists would dole out beatings or a 200 to 500-rupee fine.
‘Can you believe it? A man cannot wear a ring in Bara,’ he added.

Much like the Taliban, Lashkar-e-Islam acts like police, enforces prayers five times a day and punishes people accused of prostitution and other vices.

Sardar Sahib Singh, a Sikh leader in the district assembly in Peshawar, said his community paid 150,000 rupees a year to Lashkar-e-Islam in protection money.

‘Our community is better off. We only pay tax, while Muslims have to work, like being guards in Lashkar trenches,’ he said. But families are dwindling. ‘At first there were 500 Sikh families in Bara, now only 150,’ he said.

Scholars say only a true Islamic government, no one else, can collect jizya and on condition that those who pay feel safe, but Lashkar-e-Islam insisted the tax was proper payment for services rendered.

‘Women, children and the handicapped have been exempted,’ Misri Gul, a spokesman for the group, told AFP.

‘Jizya is according to sharia. We will provide them protection in exchange for this,’ he said.

What is the End-Use Monitoring Agreement?

2009-07-23T12:07:00.001+05:30

The US had been pressing India to sign three agreements related to defense cooperation:

1. End Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA).

2. Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CIS MoA).

3. Mutual Logistic Support Agreement (MLSA).

All these agreements contain a series of restrictive clauses.

On the eve of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's July 2009 New Delhi visit, the newly appointed US assistant secretary of state for public affairs, Philip J Crowley, had linked EUMA to the nuclear deal. He told the media in Washington on July 17 that EUMA was 'part of the fulfillment of an important initiative that India and the U.S. have signed in the area of nuclear cooperation.'

'We are working with India on an end-use agreement,' said Crowley, the State Department spokesperson. 'But clearly, this is part of the fulfillment of an important initiative that India and the United States have signed in the area of nuclear cooperation.' Crowley went on to say that he was 'sure' there will be 'substantial discussion' during Clinton's visit on 'fulfilling the initiative and its various components.'

Contrast this with what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh told the Lok Sabha on July 22, 2008: 'Some people are spreading the rumours that there are some secret or hidden agreements over and above the documents made public. I wish to state categorically that there are no secret or hidden documents other than the 123 Agreement, the Separation Plan and the draft of the safeguards agreement with the IAEA.'

Earlier, on August 4, 2005, he told the Rajya Sabha: 'Sir, what are the commitments that I have taken? I am very clear in my mind and I can assure the House that there is no secret appendage or secret agreement. Everything that I discussed with the President (Bush) is faithfully stated. There is nothing more to our agreement than what is stated in this Joint Statement.'

EUMA CLAUSES

All these three agreements were designed by the US Congress for ensuring American oversight, right-of-access and on-site inspection in client States -- States that are under the US security and nuclear umbrella. For example, there are 32 countries under the US nuclear and security umbrella today.

In addition, there are States like Pakistan that are officially classified by Washington as Major Non-NATO Ally (MNNA) -- a conferred status that gives the US virtually the same rights over them as it has vis-a-vis States formally under the American military umbrella.

The special rights the US has with client States are understandable because America is responsible for their security and it thus seeks to underpin its own obligations and those of its allies through such agreements.

But India is not a client State, but a strategic partner of the United States. Unlike an ally who has to follow the alliance leader, a strategic partnership is built on the principle of equality. Thus, a strategic partner is an equal, at least in theory.

Yet, the US has succeeded in imposing the End Use Monitoring Agreement (EUMA) on India. The EUMA is highly controversial.

Some of its clauses may not be a subject of concern, such as prohibitions on second-hand sales without approval of the United States. Its contentious clauses impose restrictions on what India may do with the equipment it buys from the USA.

* EUMA will allow the US to periodically carry out an inspection and inventory of all articles transferred to India. In the negotiations, India strenuously objected to physical inspection and instead sought an inspection of the records and other measures in place. In the end, the Americans had their way, but it was agreed that the physical inspection would be done at a time and place granted by India. Supplying-State officials, in any case, would need visas and other assistance from the recipient State, including about the location of the equipment, to carry out an inspection.
* The US will have the right to check that India is using any purchased weapon for the purpose for which it was intended.
* EUMA restricts what the purchasing country, India, can do with the US-origin defense equipment, even within its own borders.
* Under the terms of EUMA, India cannot modify the purchased defence article or system in any form.
* Also, to prevent the buyer country from freeing itself from dependency on the United States for maintenance, EUMA restricts India from getting US-origin defence equipment serviced by any another country without prior American permission. Even spare parts need to be sourced only from the United States.

These 'cradle-to-grave' restrictions arm Washington with continuing leverage over the recipient country. After all, any equipment or system needs maintenance. Such leverage, in turn, can help ensure that the recipient country cooperates with Washington on larger political matters.

THE AGREED TEXT

A key element of Clinton's India trip was the announcement that the two sides had reached an accord on the EUMA. The Joint Statement issued at the end of her visit recorded: 'External Affairs Minister Krishna announced that both sides had reached agreement on End-Use Monitoring for US defence articles.'

The agreed text of the EUMA was exchanged by External Affairs Minister Krishna and Clinton on July 20, 2009. It, however, was not formally signed because it takes the form of agreed language to be included in contracts for all future US defence sales to India.

Although the agreed language deviates in some aspects from the standard EUMA text applicable to client States, the United States managed to get India to accept the core conditions. The United States already has been including end-use monitoring rights for itself in the sale of all defenve equipment to India. Such end-use monitoring rights have been incorporated in the Letter of Offer and Acceptance (LOA) relating to every defence contract with India in recent years, including the contracts for:

i. The USS Trenton -- a 1971-vintage amphibious transport ship, bought by India in 2007 for $50 million and renamed INS Jalashwa.

ii. The $2.2 billion deal with Boeing for eight P-8I maritime patrol aircraft.

iii. Six C130-J Hercules military transport aircraft worth more than $1 billion.

iv. Three VVIP jets.

The US right to end-use monitoring is also incorporated in the export contracts of US high-term items to India, starting with the Cray X-MP-14 supercomputer in the late 1980s. But EUMA relates to defense-equipment transfers and contains detailed and elaborate restrictions.

Now the EUMA language agreed to between India and the US will become the standard in all future Indo-US defence contracts. 'We have agreed on the end-use monitoring arrangements that will henceforth be referred to in letters of acceptance for Indian procurement of US defence technology and equipment,' External Affairs Minister S M Krishna told Parliament on July 21, 2009. 'This systematises ad hoc arrangements for individual defense procurements from the USA entered into by previous governments.'

EUMA comes as a major boost to American arms companies like Lockheed Martin Corp, Boeing Co and Northrop Grumman Corp eying megadeals in India, one of the world's largest importers of conventional weapons.

Indeed, EUMA opens the path for the US and India to agree to the terms of the Communications Interoperability and Security Memorandum of Agreement (CIS MoA), which is still under negotiation.

OFFICIAL CONCERN IN INDIA

The Indian government has embraced EUMA despite concerns expressed within the official establishment over its restrictive and invasive clauses.

For example, Navy chief Admiral Suresh Mehta had publicly described EUMA as 'intrusive.' Speaking at an April 2008 conference organised by the London-based International Strategic Studies Institute in New Delhi, Admiral Mehta said: 'There are certain things we can't agree to. As a sovereign nation, we can't accept intrusiveness into our system, so there is some fundamental difficulty.'

He added: 'The US may have this kind of (end user) agreements with everyone. I don't believe in that. We pay for something and we get some technology. What I do with it, is my thing.'

In fact, India's Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) in a March 2008 report criticized the end-use monitoring clauses in the contract for the USS Trenton/INS Jalashwa. (No sooner the US had transferred that transport ship to India than a gas leak killed an Indian officer and five sailors on board.)

The CAG report stated: 'Restrictive clauses raise doubts about the real advantages from this deal... For example, (there are) restrictions on the offensive deployment of the ship and permission to the (US) government to conduct an inspection and inventory of all articles transferred under the end-use monitoring clause of the LOA (Letter of Offer and Acceptance issued by the US government).'

Note that the contract contains even 'restrictions on the offensive deployment of the ship.'

Against this background, the Indian government ought to have taken Parliament into confidence on the EUMA rather than place on record just the two sentences on the agreement found in Krishna's statement on Clinton's visit.

The MLSA envisages exchange of services and logistics. If it gets signed, the Indian and American militaries will provide logistic support, berthing and refueling facilities to each other's warships and aircraft on a barter or equal-value exchange basis. But given that the Indian military, including the navy, has no deployments or operations outside the region, the MSLA, in effect, would be a one-sided arrangement.

The purchase of the USS Trenton was severely criticized by the Comptroller and Auditor General, which in its report raised several questions, including why the ship was bought when the US Navy itself had concluded in 2003 that the ship was not suitable for modernization ought to be decommissioned in 2006. The report pointed out gas leaks on board other Trenton-type ships in which three American sailors lost their lives.

Sources: Rediff.com

Meeting Shows U.S.-India Split on Emissions

2009-07-20T10:35:00.002+05:30

It was supposed to be a showcase for how the United States and India can find common cause in fighting climate change: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton toured an innovative, energy-efficient office building on Sunday in this city on the outskirts of New Delhi.

But simmering grievances about how countries should share the burden of cutting greenhouse gases abruptly changed the mood. No sooner had Mrs. Clinton marveled at the building’s environmentally friendly features — like windows that flood rooms with light but keep out heat — than her hosts vented frustration at American pressure on India to cut its emissions.

In a meeting with Mrs. Clinton, India’s environment and forests minister, Jairam Ramesh, said there was “no case” for the West to push India to reduce carbon dioxide emissions when it already had among the lowest levels of emissions on a per capita basis. “If this pressure is not enough,” he said, “we also face the threat of carbon tariffs on our exports to countries such as yours.”

Rather than projecting solidarity, the visit ended up laying bare the deep divide between developed and developing countries on climate policy — a gulf the Obama administration will have to bridge as it tries to forge a new global agreement on climate change later this year.

Mrs. Clinton, in the first visit to India by a top Obama administration official, offered reassurances that the United States had no intention of forcing India into an economically crippling deal.

“No one wants to, in any way, stall or undermine economic growth that is necessary to lift millions more people out of poverty,” Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference. “The United States does not, and will not, do anything that would limit India’s economic progress.”

American officials said they did not expect these differences to be aired during what was supposed to be an upbeat event, focusing on technology. But they said they did not feel betrayed.

To some extent, India’s tough tone is a negotiating tactic as it and other countries prepare to advance their positions in talks leading up to a critical United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen in December.

“We are simply not in a position to take over legally binding emission reduction targets,” Mr. Ramesh declared at the news conference. “That does not mean that we are oblivious of our responsibilities.”

India’s refusal to accept mandatory national cuts in emissions is neither new nor unique. China also opposes a deal with compulsory targets. Both countries say their economic growth should not be constrained when the West never faced such restrictions during its industrialization.

India’s stance may reflect its pique at a bill passed in Washington by the House of Representatives, which would impose sanctions on countries that did not accept binding emissions cuts.

It may also reflect domestic political pressure because India acceded this month to an “aspirational” goal by the Group of 8 industrialized countries to cap the rise in temperatures because of global warming to two degrees Celsius. The group had sought a pledge of far-reaching reductions in global emissions.

Even the presence here of Todd Stern, Mrs. Clinton’s special envoy for climate change, has raised eyebrows: On Saturday, The Times of India published an article with the headline “Climate man’s visit shocks India.” American officials insist Mrs. Clinton had long planned to bring Mr. Stern, who said climate change presented an opportunity for India to invest in windmills and solar panels. “India, with its knowledge base and entrepreneurial talent and élan, is well positioned to be a winner,” he said.

Mr. Ramesh leavened his tough words with a promise of cooperation in “green technology.” He proposed teaming up with the United States on solar energy and biomass, and setting up Indian-American centers to study the long-term effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite India’s opposition to binding reductions, he said the Indian government was committed to reaching an agreement in Copenhagen. “It is possible for us to narrow our positions,” he said.

Mrs. Clinton also sought to put a good face on the differences. “We have many more areas of agreement than has perhaps been appreciated,” she said, “and what we’re looking for is a way to have a framework that includes everyone and which demands certain steps.”

She still seemed fascinated by her tour of the office building, a squat structure built around a circular atrium and known as the ITC Green Center, which has been certified by an American green building council with its highest classification.

Its owner, ITC Ltd., is a conglomerate that operates hotels and owns India’s second-largest cigarette maker, a line of business that Indian officials say has made it eager to be regarded as a good corporate citizen. Mrs. Clinton compared the building to great Indian monuments like the Taj Mahal, though she conceded, “No one will confuse it with the Taj Mahal.”

Sources: Newyork Times

Seeking Business Allies, Clinton Connects With India’s Billionaires

2009-07-20T10:28:00.001+05:30

India’s booming economy has turned some business executives into rock stars. So it was perhaps not surprising that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — a celebrity in her own right — would stop first in India’s commercial capital for a power breakfast with bankers and billionaires.

Mrs. Clinton was to go to New Delhi on Sunday for meetings and ceremonies the next day with government leaders. But she began her visit to India, the first by a top official from the Obama administration, by discussing climate change, education and health care with private-sector potentates.

Flanked by Mukesh Ambani (estimated net worth: $19.5 billion) and Ratan Tata (estimated net worth: $1 billion), Mrs. Clinton heard ideas from seven other guests about how Indian companies could provide health care, education and banking services to India’s desperately poor.

“You’re so right, Ratan,” Mrs. Clinton said to Mr. Tata when he explained how his Tata Group was delivering nutrients to children and young mothers through daily staples like milk. “If we could get the nutritional status of children to improve, it would solve so many problems.”

The purpose of her visit, Mrs. Clinton said at a news conference on Saturday, was to “broaden and deepen” dialogue between the United States and India. Given the potential for friction in the issues that face the two countries — climate change, trade and the insurgency in Pakistan — Mrs. Clinton’s visit with business leaders was more than a sidelight.

The United States is clearly hoping that Indian business will help bridge potential gaps between the two countries.

Mr. Ambani, for example, proposed that Indians and Americans work together to develop “clean technologies” that would reduce carbon emissions. The Indian government is resisting the Obama administration’s push for a global treaty that would mandate cuts in carbon emissions, arguing that developing economies deserve to grow without compulsory constraints.

“Rather than argue about who has a right to pollute,” Mr. Ambani said, “we will move forward to create institutions.”

As the richest man in India, Mr. Ambani is influential. But he may soon face his own problems with the United States. His conglomerate, Reliance Industries, operates refineries that sell fuel to Iran. That could make him vulnerable to sanctions against Iran being proposed in Congress.

The choice of Mumbai as Mrs. Clinton’s first port of call was steeped in symbolism for another reason: It offered her a platform to speak out against the coordinated terrorist attacks here last November that killed 173 people and wounded more than 300.

Mrs. Clinton told an Indian broadcaster, Times Now, that she stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, one of two hotels that had been attacked, partly as a “rebuke” of the terrorists.

Last week, she encouraged India to support Pakistan’s effort to stem a radical insurgency in Pakistan, a request that may unsettle some Indians. India and the United States blamed a Pakistan-based militant group for the Mumbai attacks, and India has long complained that Pakistan is not serious enough in cracking down on militants.

Mrs. Clinton met with the hotel’s general manager, who lost his wife and child in the attack, as well as other employees, before signing a condolence book.

“Just as India supported America on 9/11, these events are seared in our memory,” she said at the news conference, adding that terrorism is “global, it is ruthless, it is nihilistic, and it must be stopped.”

Mrs. Clinton delivered her message on an outdoor terrace at the hotel that had been littered with bloodied bodies during the siege. Just before the news conference, the Indian police urged her not to speak there for security reasons, but she resisted.

The rest of her day was devoted to two longtime interests: women’s issues and education.

She visited a shop run by the Self Employed Women’s Association, a cooperative of 1 million women who make and sell embroidery and other products using microfinance methods. In 1995, Mrs. Clinton visited the group as the first lady; she has stayed in touch since then.

Inevitably, some of these encounters are more successful than others. In the category of less successful was a panel discussion on education at a Jesuit college, at which Mrs. Clinton appeared with Aamir Khan, a prominent Indian film star who campaigns for better teaching.

While Mrs. Clinton offered an earnest discussion of teaching standards in Arkansas, Mr. Khan appeared to condone dropping out of school to pursue entertainment careers.

Mrs. Clinton appeared unfazed, closing with a quote from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who, she noted, “of course learned so much from Gandhi.”

Sources: Newyork Times

India Fears Pressure From U.S. to Mend Ties With Pakistan

2009-07-20T10:15:00.002+05:30

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton arrived here on Friday, determined to put the United States’ relations with India on a broader footing, even as Indian commentators voiced fears that the Obama administration was preoccupied these days with Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Mrs. Clinton’s three-day visit, the first by a senior American official since President Obama took office, will include meetings with business leaders, educators and prominent women — the kinds of personal encounters that she has made a hallmark of her early days as the nation’s chief diplomat.

With her elbow on the mend from a fracture last month, Mrs. Clinton is hitting the road after a hiatus during which some in Washington remarked on her low profile. She seems eager to step out in India, where her husband, former President Bill Clinton, has long been popular.

But she will also have to answer concerns that Mr.Obama’s intense focus on the insurgency in Pakistan, as well as the war in Afghanistan, will get in the way of the American-Indian relationship. India is sensitive about being put under pressure by the United States to ease tensions with Pakistan.

In a column published Friday in The Times of India, Mrs. Clinton wrote that she looked forward to discussing climate change, economic development and nuclear non-proliferation. And, she added, “We should encourage Pakistan as that nation confronts the challenge of violent extremism.”

Her fleeting reference to Pakistan drew the most attention: the newspaper made it the headline for the column.

Commentators here warned Washington not to try to pressure India into a deal with Pakistan over Kashmir — something the United States favours because it may persuade the Pakistani Army to shift troops from the country’s eastern border with India to the west, where the army could better fight Taliban insurgents.

“India is not in that class of nations, nor is it an age in which Washington can bend nations in that manner,” said an editorial Friday in the financial newspaper Mint. The paper welcomed Mrs. Clinton with a photo and headline, “Cold Wind from Washington.”

India and Pakistan agreed this week to resume negotiations over Kashmir and other issues, though Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India insisted afterward that his government still demanded that Pakistan bring to justice those who planned the Mumbai attacks in November. India had halted those talks after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai killed 166 people.

“I really see events trending in a very positive direction between India and Pakistan, in part because of the shared sacrifice, commitment and understanding that now exists about the threat,” Mrs. Clinton said in an interview with an Indian broadcaster, CNN-IBN.

The bloodshed from the attacks in November will loom large in Mrs. Clinton’s visit: she is staying at the Taj Mahal Palace & Tower, one of the two hotels that were taken over for nearly three days by terrorists. She will take part in a ceremony commemorating the victims of those attacks.

During Mrs. Clinton’s visit, India is expected to announce two sites for American-supplied nuclear reactors, according to American officials. India pledged to award contracts for the reactors to American companies, in return for a landmark civilian nuclear trade agreement between the countries.

The visit may also produce an agreement that would allow the United States to monitor the “end use” of military equipment sold to India, to ensure that it is not diverted to other purposes or sold to other countries. That could open the door to the sale of 126 fighter jets to India.

With Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton traveling to many countries before India, there has been some talk here about why this visit has taken so long.

“There’s a very simple answer to that,” said Robert O. Blake, the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs. The United States wanted to wait until India’s elections were completed, in mid-May. The re-election of Mr. Singh’s Congress Party “really opened the way for a new and invigorated partnership,” Mr. Blake said.

Sources: Newyork Times

Akshardham suspect arrested at Hyderabad airport

2009-07-20T10:06:00.001+05:30

Shoukatullah Ghouri, a suspect in the seven year old Aksharadham temple attack case, was taken to Gujarat by a police team after he was nabbed at the Hyderabad International Airport in a joint operation by the counter intelligence wing and the Hyderabad police.

Shoukat Ghouri, who alleged provided finance for the attack on Akashardham temple soon after the carnage in Gujarat, had arrived in Hyderabad along with his family from Saudi Arabia on Saturday when he was taken in to custody and shifted to an unknown place.

After officials of Hyderabad police, anti terrorist force OCTOPUS and counter intelligence wing questioned him about his role and whereabouts of his other wanted brother Farhatullah Ghouri, he was handed over to the Gujarat police team.

"He was not wanted in any case in Hyderabad but a warrant issued by a Gandhinagar court under Prevention of Terrorism Act was pending against him," the Hyderabad city police commissioner B Prasad Rao said.

After landing in an Amman Air flight from Saudi Arabia, as soon as he came out of the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad, police surrounded him and made his sit in a separate vehicle. His wife Musharraf Shaheen and four children were shifted to a nearby farm house in another vehicle for searching her luggage. Shaheen, a resident of Kurmaguda in Hyderabad, said that the police seized a cheque of Rs 1 lakh and her daughter's educational certificate and a few other things from the luggage and allowed her to go home.

Shoukatullah Ghouri, known as Hafiz Sahab, was an Imam in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and had returned home after two and a half years for the treatment of his wife.

It may be recalled here that the attack by two terrorists on Aksharadham temple had left 30 people dead. The National Security Guards commandos had killed both the attackers. In 2006, the POTA Gujrat in Gandhinagar awarded death sentence to three accused and life imprisonment to ten others. The court issued a non bailable warrant against Shoukatullah in 2004 and he, along with two others, were shown as absconders.

Shoukatullah's brother Farhatullah Ghouri alias Abu Sufian is wanted by Hyderabad police in several terror related cases including the suicide attack on Hyderabad police task office in 2005 and earlier bomb blast outside Sai Baba temple in Hyderabad.

The police said that he was not directly involved in these cases, but was a mastermind and financer of such activities.

Sources: Rediff.com

Sania Mirza Getting Engaged Today

2009-07-10T10:22:00.005+05:30

Indian tennis sensation Sania Mirza is all set to get engagement with family friend Sohrab Mirza here today.

Sohrab is the son of Adil Mirza and Noora Begum, who own Universal Bakers chain in Hyderabad. Sania and Sohrab are long time friends.

She might be used to scoring on the tennis court, but India's tennis sensation Sania Mirza is all set to win the match of her life. This one, of course, involves a love different from the points.

The famous Mirza girl from Hyderabad is reportedly all set to become a pretty bride pretty soon. But she will remain a Hyderabadi and a Mirza as well. That's because Sania is reportedly getting engaged today to Muhammad Sohrab Mirza, a 23-year-old B.com graduate from Hyderabad.

Sohrab and Sania have known each other for a few years. Their families have been friends. Sohrab is planning to go to the UK to pursue an MBA degree.

Sania herself is away in Paris playing in the French Open, and it was her father Imran Mirza who confirmed the reports of her engagement.

"This is to confirm that Sania Mirza is engaged to Mr. Muhammad Sohrab Mirza, whose family hails from the city of Hyderabad. Although not related, the two families have had friendly ties for several decades. However, the wedding is not expected to take place for a while," Imran Mirza said.

But will this mean the end of Sania, the Hyderabadi hurricane?

No, says her family, insisting Sania will continue to score 15-love and 30-love on the tennis court for at least some more time.

Security Tightened:

Meanwhile, security has been tightened at Sania Mirza's bungalow in the posh Banjara Hills area of Hyderabad following the arrest of two admirers of Indian tennis beauty.

Ajay Singh Yadav, an admirer of Sania, was detained after professing his love for Indian tennis star Sania Mirza at her Hyderabad home.

Yadav told the police that he had been in love with Mirzafor five years and wanted to marry her.

Earlier, on Wednesday another man, Mohammad Ashraf, was arrested after threatening to kill himself if 85th rank Sania Mirza did not marry him. Meanwhile, both men are in the police custody.

Bachelors: Better to forget her and give her privacy than acting crazy jeopardising your careers.
All the best to the lucky guy, Sohrab Mirza.

Maoists Banned Throughout India

2009-06-23T11:26:00.002+05:30

The Centre on Monday banned the Communist Party of India-Maoist as a terror organisation to avoid any ambiguity after the merger of the Communist Party of India-(Marxist Leninist) Liberation and Maoist Communist Centre in 2004.

However, West Bengal's Left Front government feels the Centre's move would make the outfit more aggressive.

A large section of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) feels banning the Maoists will hardly make any difference on the ground and it is better to counter them politically.

On Monday, Gour Chakraborty, the CPI (Maoist) spokesman, told rediff.com over the telephone that the Centre's stand would have no effect whatsoever on his party.

This is what he had to say:

The Centre's stand is not a new move. It had made a similar announcement in 2004. This time it just repeated itself in the context of the Lalgarh crisis.

We, the Maoists, believe in class struggle. We make no mistake in identifying our class enemies. The government that we have at the Centre now is a capitalist government run on the maxim: The poor should get poorer and rich the richer.

It is quite, natural, therefore, that the government won't like the existence of a people-friendly outfit like ours in an area like Jangalmahal, rich in foreset reserve, minerals and other natural resources.

Ever since we started our operations, we posed obstructions to the government's ambition of minting money by exploiting the resources of this area. Also, it saw in us a barricade that prevented them from taking undue advantage of the residents of Jangalmahal.

The government knows that unlike the Jangalmahal people, we are armed and that we know how to deal with violence, hence a ban seems to be the best option to put a check on our activities.

However, let me tell you, the central government is thoroughly mistaken. Since inception, the CPI (Maoist) has been an underground party. It has always carried out its operations clandestinely.

Therefore, a prohibition is not going to have any influence on our party's activities. In fact, it will only infuse into us a new sense of grit to counter the government opposition.

Interestingly, the central ban on us has put the Left Front government of West Bengal in a spot. One of the main constituents of the front happens to be the CPI-M . It is common knowledge that one Communist party can never ban another Communist party.

Therefore, the CPI-M as also a few other members of the Front, are against the ban as they have been in the past.

However, the ruling government of West Bengal, I am sure, will continue to arrest our men on the pretext of 'fighting violence', bring fictitious charges against them and will carry on their anti-Maoist activities across the state.

Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee too would not oppose the Left Front's anti-Maoist moves as she wants most of us to be either arrested or killed prior to the 2011 assembly election.

As the spokesperson of the CPI (Maoist), all I want to say is that these ever-changing political equations amuse us greatly; crafty politicians and their shifting loyalties entertain us.

As we stand united to put up a brave fight against our class enemies, we express our deepest hatred for the 'rotten' political system of our country.

Sources: Rediff.com

Israeli Pilots Knew US Spy Ship Was American Before 1967 War Attack

2009-06-17T17:39:00.000+05:30

Israeli air control twice told pilots during the 1967 Six Day War that a U.S. spy ship they were attacking was American, according to a new book on the USS Liberty affair.

Israel has always claimed that the June 8, 1967 attack on the spy ship Liberty, which killed 34 U.S. Navy sailors and wounded another 170, many seriously, was a case of mistaken identity, a "tragic accident."

But according to "The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship," by James Scott, Israeli pilots who radioed the Liberty's hull number to their air controller were told two times that the spy ship was "probably American."

Nevertheless, Israeli fighters jets and torpedo boats continued to attack the spy ship, which was flying an American flag and plying international waters as it monitored Israeli and Egyptian radio traffic during the June 1967 war.

Israel's goal in the brutal air and sea assault on the Liberty was twofold, says Scott, whose father served on the Liberty: to prevent the spy ship from learning about Israeli troop movements, and to kill anyone aboard who could later identify the attacking aircraft as Israeli.

Despite Israel's eventual annihilation of Arab forces in less than a week, in its opening hours and days the outcome of the war was far from certain.

And Israel could not be certain of American support in those days.

Only 11 years earlier, in the Suez Crisis of 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower had forced Israel to call off a planned attack on Egypt with French and British collusion.

Some published accounts have suggested that Israeli wanted to prevent the U.S. from intercepting its radio traffic about an ongoing massacre of Egyptian troops in the Sinai, or from eavesdropping on the Israeli command's instructions to ready its nuclear weapons in case the war went badly.

But Scott says he never found any corroboration for either theory.

Israel never wavered from its stance that the attack on the Liberty was anything but a mistake, although angry U.S. officials had quickly concluded it was deliberate.

Besides repeatedly raking the defenseless ship with cannon fire and bombs, Israeli jets also dropped napalm on American sailors running about the deck trying to save the ship, reports Scott, an award winning former reporter for the Charleston Post and Courier.

"There clearly were individuals inside Israel's chain of command who knew this was an American ship in time to prevent the fatal torpedo boat attack that left more than two dozen of the Liberty's sailors dead," Scott says.

Yet the Israelis informed Johnson administration officials that they were innocent -- and outraged by such suggestions.

That prompted the State Department's number two official, Nicholas B. Katzenbach, to summon Israel's ambassador Abraham Harman, Scott writes.

"The secret memo of the meeting," Scott writes, "declassified 33 years later, records Katzenbach telling the Israeli ambassador" that Tel Aviv's initial protest "contains some statements they might find hard to live with if the text some day became public."

Nevertheless, the American protest remained muted. President Lyndon B. Johnson didn't want to alienate Jewish Americans who were prominent supporters of his civil rights agenda, especially when many were already deserting him over the Vietnam war.

"The beleaguered president, anxious to retain Jewish support and refocus on Vietnam, couldn't afford the domestic political controversy," Scott writes.

Katzenbach told him in an interview, "It was no helping getting a lot of people angry at the Israelis.

"If the Israelis screw up the relations, then the Jewish groups are going to bail out the Israelis. It ends up with a more difficult situation than you would have otherwise," Katzenbach said.

Years later, an Israeli pilot who participated in the Liberty attack, Yifta Spector, told Scott he'd like to apologize personally to his father.

Scott told his father to come to Israel, where he was conducting research for the book. They met the pilot outside of his house on a dusty street corner in a Tel Aviv suburb, Scott said.

"He stuck out his hand and said, 'We came within 300 meters of each other.'"

"I'm sorry," the old pilot told his father.

"That's all my father wanted to hear for all those years," Scott said.

"Just somebody who would say they were sorry."

Sources: Spy Talk Blog

Iran Secretly Helped U.S. Bomb Taliban Units, Find Al Qaeda

2009-06-17T17:37:00.002+05:30

Iran supplied U.S. diplomats with the location of Taliban military units in Afghanistan after the initial bombing campaign in the fall of 2001 failed to rout them, according to former officials in the George W. Bush administration.

The Islamic regime also gave the Bush administration "really substantive cooperation" on al Qaeda after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, at one point providing Washington with a list of 220 suspects and their whereabouts, said one official, former White House National Security Council Iran expert Hillary Mann Leverett.

Leverett said that in December 2002, after the U.S. gave Tehran the names of five al Qaeda suspects it believed were in Iran, the regime found two, which they delivered to the U.S. air base at Baghram, in Afghanistan.

But the budding relationship died on the vine.

Hardliners in the Bush administration prohibited Mann and Ryan Crocker, two of the principal diplomats dealing with the Iranians, from building on the contacts to pursue al Qaeda.

And then a month later, President Bush labeled Iran part of an "axis of evil," lumping it with North Korea and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

But even then, Leverett said, Tehran continued to provide Washington with intelligence on al Qaeda and expel them from Iran.

"They deported hundreds of [al Qaeda] people," she said.

At the same time, Bush officials were accusing Iran of harboring al Qaeda terrorists - a claim they and their allies continued to make until the end of the administration.

But Leverett, backed up by other officials, tells an entirely different story.

"The foreign ministry took the evidence - passports, vital information - and gave us pages and even a chart showing the disposition or what they'd done with each person," broken down by "those who had been turned away at the border, or been detained or deported," she said.

At one point the Iranian foreign ministry asked the Americans to help it set up "a mechanism" to help it deport Egyptian suspects to Cairo, with which it had no diplomatic relations, Leverett said Thursday by telephone.

But White House hardliners rejected the idea of helping Iran in any way, she said.

"We said, 'Too bad, you're evil. You'll be a target yourself if you don't just get rid of them.'"

Richard N. Haass, the State Department's chief of planning at the time, was also frustrated that Bush officials were scuttling Iranian attempts at rapprochement, which he and others believed might have led to a "grand bargain" on other thorny issues.

"We couldn't get support from the NSC, the Pentagon, from the Vice president's office. And in every case we ran up against this belief in regime change," Haass said in a BBC documentary that aired in the U.K. in February.

"Iran and the West" has yet to be televised here, and a spokesperson for PBS, the usual venue for such fare, said the public broadcasting network has no plans to pick it up.

In the third segment of the three-part documentary, Leverett described the Iranians' secret offer to help the American bombers destroy Taliban units in the fall of 2001.

"The Iranians were willing to do whatever was necessary to help ensure that the U.S. military campaign [against the Taliban] could succeed," Leverett told the BBC.

She had previously described some of the back channel meetings with Iran in an October 2007 story by John H. Richardson in Esquire magazine.

But neither that nor the BBC's "Iran and the West" documentary has elicited detectable news media interest here, despite its incessant descriptions of Iran as an uncompromising, implacable foe.

Iran's hardliners, led by "Holocaust-denying, Israel-hating, America-bashing" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, appear to hold the upper hand now, but things could change in elections two weeks from now.

Iran's president in 2001, Mohammad Khatami, sought to get around the hardliners and establish better relations with Washington.

"He had sought reconciliation with America (before), but his political opponents stopped him," the BBC reported. "With America poised to attack the Taliban, he had a chance to win the argument in the parliament."

"The Taliban was our enemy," Khatami explains on the program. "America thought the Taliban was their enemy too. If they toppled the Taliban, it would serve the interests of Iran."

Iran had discreetly offered help to Washington right after the 9/11 attacks, Leverett and other officials say.

But nothing happened until November.

American heavy bombers had been pounding Taliban units for weeks, but the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance rebels were still bottled up.

One of the Iranians Leverett was meeting with lost his temper over the stalemate, she says. He began pounding the table.

"And then he took out a map, and he unfurled the map on the table, and started to point at targets that the U.S. needed to focus on, particularly in the north," Mann said. "We took the map to CENTCOM, the US Central Command, and certainly that became the US military strategy."

Said Colin Powell, Secretary of State at the time: "We took a fourth-world force, the Northern Alliance, riding horses, walking, living off the land, and married them up with a first world air force. And it worked."

Leverett told Esquire that Khatami's representatives believed that helping the U.S. defeat the Taliban - and al Qaeda - would help bridge a quarter-century long estrangement marked by hostage taking, terrorism, name calling and outrage over Iran's clandestine nuclear program.

"They specifically told me time and again that they were doing this because they understood the impact of this attack on the U.S., and they thought that if they helped us unconditionally, that would be the way to change the dynamic for the first time in twenty-five years," Leverett said.

Obviously, any chance was lost.

Bush officials have refused to discuss the issue. When Leverett submitted a piece she had written for the New York Times about her U.S.-Iran contacts to administration censors, swaths were blacked out.

"They said it was classified," she said by telephone Thursday. "But nothing had ever been written down."

Sources: Spy Talk Blog

US Allowed Pakistan To Go Nuclear

2009-06-16T15:43:00.003+05:30

The United States allowed Pakistan to manufacture and acquire nuclear weapons without informing the Congress, a non-profit corruption watchdog has said, quoting a whistle blower who was fired for objecting to the policy.

Here is a very resourceful link:

Government Oversight - Richard Barlow Resource Page.

Richard Barlow at Wikipedia.

They Sold out the World for an F-16 Sale

A Central Intelligence Agency and Pentagon official, who tried to object to this policy of the then US administration of keeping the Congress in dark on this issue, was fired.

"As a CIA intelligence officer and later in the Pentagon, Rich Barlow learned that top US officials were allowing Pakistan to manufacture and possess nuclear weapons," Danielle Brian, executive director, Project on Government Oversight (POGO), told a Congressional hearing last week.

Washington-based, POGO is a non-profit non-partisan watchdog that works with whistleblowers and government insiders to expose corruption, fraud, and abuse of power.

"Barlow also discovered that US officials were hiding these activities from Congress," Brian told US lawmakers in her testimony during a hearing.

"Barlow objected and suggested to his supervisors that Congress should be made aware of the situation... he was fired," said Brian in her testimony.

"Barlow is now destitute and living in a trailer," she said as she went on to give other examples of the fate of the whistleblowers in the US government.

An investigative story published by UK's The Guardian newspaper in 2007 had said: 'In the late 80s, in the course of tracking down smugglers of WMD components, Barlow uncovered reams of material that related to Pakistan.'

According to the newspaper, Barley soon discovered that senior officials in government 'were breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to shelter Pakistan's ambitions and even sell it banned WMD technology'.

This was done because in the closing years of the cold war, Pakistan was considered to have great strategic importance, it said.

'We had to buddy-up to regimes we didn't see eye-to-eye with, but I could not believe we would actually give Pakistan the bomb,' Barlow was quoted as saying.

He next discovered that Pentagon was preparing to sell Pakistan jet fighters that could be used to drop a nuclear bomb and came to the conclusion that a small group of senior officials was physically aiding Pakistan's programme, it said.

'They were issuing scores of approvals for the Pakistan embassy in Washington to export hi-tech equipment that was critical for their nuclear bomb programme and that the US Commerce Department had refused to license,' he said.

'He (Barlow) prepared briefs for Dick Cheney, when Cheney was at Pentagon, for the upper echelons of the CIA and even for the Oval Office. But when he uncovered a political scandal -- a conspiracy to enable a rogue nation to get the nuclear bomb -- he found himself a marked man,' the paper said.

Sources: Rediff, POGO.org

US drops 'India, AQ Khan' riders from Pak aid bill

2009-06-15T12:07:00.002+05:30

Guys, India needs to fight it's own battle against Pakistan and NO ONE is going to help us in this. We have been trying to put pressure on Pakistan through the US and looks like it is not working out. We need to find our "own ways" of taking action if not Pakistanis will feel that we are incapable of defending our country.

Following Article illustrates that:

In what may be seen as a major concession to Pakistan, the US House of Representatives has dropped demands of access to the disgraced nuclear scientist Dr A.Q. Khan and preventing terrorist attacks against India as conditions from the aid bill offering Islamabad 1.5 billion dollars for the next five years.

When the Pakistan Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Enhancement Act' (PEACE) was first tabled in the Congress in April, it required Pakistan to fulfil some major requirements in order to qualify for the aid.

The act asked Pakistan to improve relations with India, and stop supporting the cross border terrorism.

It also asked Islamabad to provide 'access to Pakistani nationals' and especially to Dr. A.Q. Khan who is connected to proliferation networks.

However, the House Foreign Affairs Committee has now omitted the part that named Dr Khan, The Dawn reports.

Even though, the language of the US aid bill has been reworked, it still has certain benchmarks in place for Pakistan.

According to the restrictions included in the PEACE act, an evaluation of efforts would be undertaken by the Pakistan government to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other extremist and terrorist groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and other regions.

The act also asks for a crackdown on all terrorist camps operating inside Pakistan, including those of Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM).

One of the major conditions put forth in the PEACE act is to cease all support for extremist and terrorist groups, and increase oversight over curriculum in madrasas.

It also asks for the closing down of all the madrasas which are directly linked to the Taliban and other militant organizations.

The assistance could also stop if the US president fails to certify that Pakistan is cooperating with nuclear non-proliferation efforts.

Sources: ANI & Yahoo

ISI HQ Hit in Lahore

2009-05-28T11:27:00.003+05:30

Suspected Taliban militants on Wednesday brazenly targeted the provincial headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence in Lahore , detonating an explosive-laden car, leaving at least 35 people dead and over 250 wounded.

Though heavily armed militants, believed to be two to four in number, failed to reach the main premises housing the ISI office, they detonated the explosives, which damaged the building and totally flattened the nearby city police rescue office.

The terrorist hit squad headed their vehicle towards the two buildings located just off the Mall Road, but as heavily armed guards stopped them, they came out and exchanged fire with the guards, before setting off a massive blast.

District Coordination Officer Lahore Sajjad Ahmed Bhutta said a car loaded with explosives rammed into the barriers on the road leading to the buildings housing ISI and the Lahore police office.

Though the Punjab government officials confirmed that only 18 people were dead, the privately-run Ehdi Ambulance Service has put the death toll at 35. The hospital officials said 13 of the dead were policemen and seven were ISI officials.

Commissioner Lahore Khusro Pervaiz said that 18 persons, mostly policeme, had been confirmed dead so far and 187 people had suffered injuries. Police chief Pervaiz Rathore estimated that over 100 kg of explosives had been used in the blast. He said the death toll could rise as a number of people were still trapped under the rubble.

"A white car approached the ISI headquarters and opened fire on the police guards and also threw grenades before heading towards it," Abid Ali, an eyewitness, told PTI.

Lahore is the second largest Pakistani city and today's attack was the third major terrorist assault on the metropolis this year, heightening fears that militancy may be creeping into the Pakistani heartland.

No organisation immediately took responsibility for the blast in the city. The blast comes less than two months after the attack on the police academy at Manawan, close to Lahore, on March 30 this year, when armed gunmen laid a siege resulting in the deaths of 10 people, including eight policemen.

Lahore was also the scene of an attack on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team on March 3, in which eight people, including six police officials, were killed and six cricketers were injured.

"Apparently the target was ISI," a witness said, adding that the terrorists first opened fire on police guards and then rammed the vehicle into the barrier in a bid to hit the buildings.

TV channels reported three suspects have been arrested. The attack came a day after Taliban spokesperson Maulvi Mohammad Omar threatened attacks across Pakistan if the military operation in Swat was not stopped immediately.

A police source informed PTI that some suspects involved in the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team were being interrogated in the ISI building.

In March 2008, some suspects involved in the Naval War College attack were being interrogated at the Federal Investigation Agency building, when a mini-truck loaded with huge explosives ran into it, killing 30 people, mostly FIA officials.

TV channels reported that approximately 40 vehicles were destroyed in the blast, which also caused considerable damage to nearby buildings. Soon after the incident, the army personnel cordoned off the area. The Special Investigation Group of FIA also reached the spot and collected forensic evidence.

The impact of the blast was so powerful that windowpanes of government buildings, private offices, schools and a cinema hall within one kilometre radius were broken.

Two schoolchildren were reportedly also killed in the attack. The injured were shifted to the major hospitals in Lahore.

Resources: Rediff.com and Dawn.com

History of Tamil Persecution

2009-05-28T10:59:00.007+05:30

Tamils, belonging to the Dravidian Race are the original inhabitants of India. They have been persecuted since ages. The first attack on Dravidians are done by the nomadic Aryans who were looking for an ideal country to settle in. This happened couple of thousands of years back.

There is a language called Brahui, which is spoken in parts of Balochistan Province in Pakistan. This language belongs to the Dravidian Family of languages. Some historians consider that Brahui might be a remnant of the language spoken in the Indus Valley Civilisation. This itself proves that Tamils are persecuted since hundreds of years.

As Aryans advanced, Tamils were pushed into what is called as the present day Tamilnadu in Southern part of India. The Britishers took Tamils to Srilanka and Malaysia to work in the Tea Gardens. Even for this day, Tamils in Malaysia are persecuted by the Muslim majority country through its "Bhumiputra" policy.

British policy of Divide and Rule placed the minority Tamils capturing most of the Government jobs in British Srilanka and once Independence was granted to Srilanka in 1948, the majority Sinhalese saw this domination of Tamils in Government jobs as a strategy to keep the majority sinhalese in Control and in 1956, they came out with a "Sinhala Only Language" (Official Language Act) making Sinhala as the only official language of Srilanka.

This enraged the Tamils and they protested through Satyagraha (Non Violence). Sinhalese mobs reacted through violence and killed more than 300 Tamils in what is called as the "58 Riots". Sinhalese gangs attacked Tamil labourers in Polonnaruwa farms. Tamils who tried to hide in sugar-cane fields were surrounded there and the fields set ablaze by the mobs. Those who fled were clubbed down or hit by machetes. In Hinguarkgoda, rioters ripped open the belly of an eight-month-pregnant woman, and left her to bleed to death.

Here is a list of Anti Tamil Riots in Srilanka:

* Gal Oya (1956)
* 1958 riots (1958)
* 1977 riots (1977)
* Jaffna library (1981)
* Black July (1983)
* Welikada (1983)
* Kalutara (1997)
* Bindunuwewa (2000)

All these riots let to the formation of Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Background for Black July Riots:

The events dubbed Black July began after members of the terrorist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (the Tamil Tigers or the LTTE) organization ambushed a military convoy in the North of Sri Lanka on the evening of July 23, 1983 outside the town of Jaffna in the North of Sri Lanka.

In the July 23 massacre of 13 soldiers, initially, a road-side bomb was detonated beneath the jeep that was leading the convoy, injuring at least two soldiers on board. As soldiers traveling in a truck which was following the jeep dismounted to help their colleagues, they were ambushed by a group of Tamil Tiger fighters, who fired at them with automatic weapons and hurled grenades at them. In the ensuing clashes, one officer and 12 soldiers died immediately, while two more were fatally wounded, bringing the total death toll to 15 along with number of terrorists.Kittu, a regional commander of the LTTE later admitted to planning and carrying out the ambush.

This enraged the Sinhalese and in the following days, massacred 3000 Tamils.

Now, with LTTE wiped out of Srilanka, India should ensure that Tamils were given equal powers along with Sinhalese in the Government.