Indian Interests_2

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ramana
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Indian Interests_2

Post by ramana »

The enormous perfidy of 'great" britan and of the US beggars belief as does the criminal naivety of BK Nehru.

Another nehru who was promoted way beyond his very modest capabilities and consequently had failed to protect India's interests at a most crucial time.



How India Paid to Create the London of Today
How India Paid to Create the London of Today

BY KANNAN SRINIVASAN ON 20/04/2017 •

A sudden change in the currency with which old debts to the colonies had to be paid helped Britain consolidate its status as a financial centre.

Image

The UK is a tax haven closely connected to other tax havens it has set up. Its trade deficit is therefore offset by the money pouring in from its own tax havens. Almost 90% of net capital inflows to the UK come from just Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. So far, there has been no decline in such funds with the news of Brexit. Britain enjoys a significant measure of protection from the consequences of leaving the EU by virtue of this rush of cash.

How did London achieve this status of being a major financial centre? Knowing this history might be useful, especially for Indians, as the country played a role in it, thanks to the steps taken by Prime Minister Clement Attlee’s Labour government in 1947, employing the resources of newly independent India.

As war broke out in 1939, the trade surpluses run up by India, Egypt, Brazil and others trading primarily in sterling, were withheld by Britain. Total debt to all such creditors (excluding the US, which obtained British businesses and naval and aircraft bases in return for cash) amounted to £3.48 billion. In addition, two and an half million Indian soldiers fighting in Italy, North Africa, the Middle East and the Far East were paid salaries; when any died, their widows were to be paid pensions by the government of India, which remained uncompensated even as the war ended. All this made India (which included the future state of Pakistan) the largest Allied creditor after the US. Britain owed her £1.335 billion ($5.23 billion, which is about $59 billion today). Britain owed the next largest creditor, Egypt, £450 million. At a conservative estimate, the debt to India amounted to about a fifth of the UK gross national product, or seventeen times the annual government of India revenue at highly depressed prices.

India, and other such creditor countries, expected that their future economic development could be significantly financed by the money owed by Britain. But with a run-down industrial economy in 1945, the UK had little that such countries needed.

What the creditors wanted was dollars. They expected, with the money to be released by Britain, to import the plant and machinery they needed from the new leading industrial power, the US.

White plan

There seemed, at first, to be a way to get such convertible currency. Harry Dexter White, the chief adviser to US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau, framed a scheme for the purchase of these balances, in stages, by the new fund to be set up after the war, the subsequent injection of liquidity, and re-purchase.

But, as White was aware, if Britain honoured her enormous debts in this way, that might have meant a more rapid disbanding of the British occupation of Aden, Greece, Malaya and many African countries. The Royal Navy would not have had the resources to play a role of any significance, nor would Britain become a nuclear weapons state. India, Egypt, Brazil and others might have fared far better than Britain did. And, as will be become clear, London would not have become the new hub of international finance.

The celebrated economist John Maynard Keynes had been appointed by the UK government to negotiate post-war arrangements with the United States and other countries. He fiercely resisted this White Plan. He set out to make sure that the sterling balances could somehow be conjured away.

Over the next year, he lobbied effectively in Washington DC — his hard work seemed to pay off. So when the great conference took place at Bretton Woods in 1944 to lay out the post-war reconstruction of the global economy, and the sterling issue was raised by Egypt and by India, the US treasury team abandoned its own commitment to “liberate blocked balances”.

Another ray of hope

Yet after these creditor countries lost out at Bretton Woods, they drew hope from a key provision of the Anglo-American Loan Agreement. Under that treaty, the US provided a credit of $3.75 billion repayable over 50 years at 2% on the specific condition that Britain made the pound sterling convertible into any other currency for current transactions. Accordingly, the pound sterling was made convertible the July 17, 1947.

So as India negotiated the terms of these sterling balances in London over the course of August 1947, her team expected to convert their assets into dollars.

Hope betrayed

But the Indians were unaware how much had changed in Washington DC. The new president, Harry Truman, had changed virtually the entire cabinet he had inherited from Franklin Roosevelt. The people India had thought it could count on to keep Indian interests in mind had been replaced by determined Cold Warriors entirely unsympathetic to India, such as Dean Acheson. At the same time, these new hawkish Truman aides saw Britain – with her enormous network of bases all around the world and large armed forces everywhere – as the key ally.

Emboldened by her new status, Britain is said to have secretly sounded out the US, and received a discreet assurance that she could avoid repaying India, Pakistan, Egypt and others their wartime debt in convertible currency.

Braj_Kumar_Nehru

Image
President John F. Kennedy meets with then ambassador to the US from India, Braj Kumar Nehru, in the Oval Office, 1961. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

So, as India’s representative, B.K. Nehru wound up India’s negotiations in London for the transfer of the balances he was mystified by what his British counterpart murmured to him.

“Wilfred Eady ..said to me (August 15, 1947), ‘Watch your dollars’,” Nehru has written. Nehru did not understand.

“Why should he talk about dollars when the pound had become convertible? All the sterling would become available for purchases in the dollar area, so why did he want me to watch my dollars?”

He was to find out when Britain renounced the convertibility of the pound sterling on the current account within five days of signing the agreement with India.

As Nehru ruefully acknowledged, this “immediately changed the character of the agreement which we had entered into. The pounds released were no longer usable for what we wanted to buy.”

Britain then devalued the pound in 1949, diminishing the value of the claims of the creditor countries by thirty per cent.


What if?

Had Britain not defaulted on convertibility, many countries would have switched to the US dollar in order to finance their imports. Thereafter the central banks of the world would have cut back on their holdings, effectively exiting from the pound sterling.

It was not in Britain’s interest to allow that to happen. Given that the US dollar was the premier international currency, the pound sterling now had to survive at least as the secondary currency for the purpose of international settlement. So default on convertibility was the absolute precondition in order to ensure a gradual drawdown on sterling.

This gave London the time to re-invent itself. Since so many central banks around the world were compelled to hold sterling and therefore trade as much as they could with the UK, Britain survived as an important financial centre. As the stock of US dollars held outside the US grew, it was bound to attract the interest of innovative financiers, and the most innovative were in London. Merchant bankers in the city first saw the potential of trade and investment in this Eurodollar market. The enormous volume of transactions in the Eurodollar market enabled London to return to its role before the First World War, as the most important centre of international finance. Post-war Britain was on its way.

In the meantime, creditor countries such as India and Egypt had to settle for occasional drawings of pounds sterling that they could convert into no other currency. They therefore had to buy goods from nowhere else but the UK. But British industry however had in many areas ceased to be internationally competitive in terms of its prices or technology. So this arrangement suited not the holders of sterling, but the UK, in that she could sell them obsolete plant and machinery at higher prices than would been possible in any free market. The UK had found a captive export market for goods that could be exported nowhere else. India’s imports of the Ford Prefect, the Standard Vanguard, the Morris Oxford, the Indian Naval Ships Delhi and Mysore, all date from the golden age of sterling balances.

But as independent India faced acute food shortages, her stock of sterling could buy her none. She had to turn to the World Bank and IMF to make up the convertible currency she needed, and pay for imports of food courtesy the Aid India Consortium, composed of the World Bank and a group of countries that included, ironically, the UK.

Britain gained the opportunity to employ her former colonies, and possessions of the Crown, to organise capital flight from all around the world. The Cayman Islands, Cyprus, Dubai, Guernsey, Hong Kong, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Mauritius, Singapore and many other such tax havens enable wealthy individuals to conceal their liquid assets. Yet their close connection with London, that most efficient financial centre, enables the best possible returns for the super-rich. All this is possible because Britain avoided honouring her war time debts to India and other countries promptly, and in convertible currency. The enforced Indian loan acted as developmental finance to the UK economy. India’s sacrifices during the war and after may have benefited it but little. But they certainly made possible the London of today.

Kannan Srinivasan, who is working on a book on money laundering, wrote this article at the Wertheim Study, New York Public Library. kannansrinivasan.org
Last edited by ramana on 04 Jan 2018 23:20, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: Edited title to reflect date. ramana
ramana
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

X-posting.

Recent notification on Cow slaughter has a deep history of cruelty to animals in India. The entire thing started with an animal sacrifice festival in Nepal which does not have animals yet ran a festival where 500,000 cattle were sacrificed. Needless to say the cattle were smuggled from India. This triggered a petition to the SC to review the Prevention Of Cruelty to Animals Act of 1960 which was passed during Nehruji's time.

Lilo wrote:Is Madras HC now against the humane treatment of Cows and cattle especially when they are being transported?
Is the counter logical stand of Madras HC suspending the notification because of the fact that Cow is revered in Hinduism and an important symbol which unites Hindus/indics?

Direct reason for the notification as passed by central govt environmental ministry , is described in detail below.
How India's sacred cows are beaten, abused and poisoned

One result of this is secret, hole-in-the-wall cow abattoirs dotted around the country, especially in Muslim quarters of towns and cities. But the main result is an appalling traffic of cattle.

"There is a huge amount of trafficking of cattle to both West Bengal and Kerala," said Mrs Gandhi, Minister of Social Justice and Empowerment in the present government and a veteran campaigner against animal abuse of all sorts. "The ones going to West Bengal go by truck and train and they go by the millions. The law says you cannot transport more than 4 per truck but they are putting in up to 70. When they go by train, each wagon is supposed to hold 80 to 100, but they cram in up to 900. I've seen 900 cows coming out of the wagon of a train, and 400 to 500 of them came out dead."

The trade exists because of gross corruption, Mrs Gandhi says. "An illegal organisation called the Howrah Cattle Association fakes permits saying the cattle are meant for agricultural purposes, for ploughing fields or for milk. The stationmaster at the point of embarkation gets 8,000 rupees per train-load for certifying that the cows are healthy and are going for milk.

"The government vets get X amount for certifying them as healthy. The cattle are unloaded just before Calcutta, at Howrah, then beaten and taken across to Bangladesh by road. Bangladesh, which has no cows of its own, is the biggest beef exporter in the region. Between 10,000 and 15,000 cows go across that border every day. You can make out the route taken by the trucks by the trail of blood they leave behind."

Even more horrifying is the transport of cows to the abattoirs on the border of Kerala in the extreme south of the peninsula. Mrs Gandhi says, "On the route to Kerala they don't bother with trucks or trains: they tie them and beat them and take them on foot, 20,000 to 30,000 per day." All Kerala's slaughter houses are on the border. "Because they have walked and walked and walked the cattle have lost a lot of weight, so to increase the weight and the amount of money they will receive, the traffickers make them drink water laced with copper sulphate, which destroys their kidneys and makes it impossible for them to pass the water - so when they are weighed they have 15kg of water inside them and are in extreme agony."

To keep them moving, drivers beat the animal across their hip bones, where there is no fat to cushion the blows. The cows are not allowed to rest or drink. Many cows sink to their knees. Drivers beat them and twist their battered tails to force them to rise. If that doesn't work they torment the cows into moving by rubbing hot chilli peppers and tobacco into their eyes."


When they finally make it to the slaughterhouses that stand on the Kerala border, the end they confront is unspeakable, Mrs Gandhi says. "In Kerala they also have a unique way of killing them - they beat their heads to a pulp with a dozen hammer blows. A well-intentioned visitor from the West, trying to improve slaughterhouse practice in Kerala, exhorted them to use stun guns, saying that the meat of an animal killed in this fashion (rather than having its throat slit) tasted sweeter. The stun guns that she left behind quickly broke and fell into disuse, but the belief that the meat was sweeter took hold - which explains this horrible method of slaughtering."
From a foreign source i.e Independent.co.uk. but lot of relevant info.
Please to paste into fb/whatsapp groups populated by liberals.
ramana
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

ramana wrote:Very interesting article on how British Intelligence had all the information but hardly any insight on India.

http://www.satp.org/satporgtp/publicati ... ticle1.htm
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Prem »

Bhagat Singh's gun he used to get rid of Sanders

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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Philip »

Western "appeasement" of Islam in this twisted report on the historic verdict by the SC in this "Love Jihad" case. This is not the first,neither is it to be the last,"poaching: of Hindu girls by Islamic elements esp. from Kerala."Love Jihad" operations, have been known for sev. years now.Coimbatore,in TNadu just on the border with Kerala has been a deliberate target as it is a cosmopolitan city ,where free interaction between peoples of all faiths has been the custom.LJ has reared its ugly head in recent times say political entities,after the flooding of Kerala with Saudi/Wahaabi money with a deliberate agenda. The historic SC verdict will bring much relief to parents across the country whose daughters are threatened with this diabolic plot by jihadists.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... afin-jahan
India upholds controversial marriage annulment amid ‘love jihad’ inquiry
Widespread shock as supreme court endorses dissolution of union between woman from Hindu family and Muslim man and orders forced marriage
India’s supreme court ruled that the annulment of the marriage between Akhila Ashokan and Shafin Jahan should stand. Photograph: Sonu Mehta/Hindustan Times/Getty Images

Amrit Dhillon in New Delhi
Monday 21 August 2017 00.01 BST Last modified on Monday 21 August 2017 01.04 BST
The Indian supreme court has upheld a decision to annul the marriage of a 24-year-old woman in Kerala and force her to live back at her parents’ house because she married a Muslim man.

‘Love jihad’ in India and one man’s quest to prevent it

The woman, Akhila Ashokan, who prefers to be known as Hadiya, converted to Islam from Hinduism while studying medicine in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu. Last year, she met Shafin Jahan, a Muslim, and they married in December. Her livid father went to the Kerala high court demanding that Hadiya be returned to his custody.

In May, the court nullified the wedding and forcibly sent Hadiya back to her parental home in Kottayam despite her express wish not to return. The controversial judgment said Hadiya was “weak and vulnerable, capable of being exploited in many ways” and that “her marriage being the most important decision in her life, can also be taken only with the active involvement of her parents”.

On Wednesday, the supreme court ruled that India’s National Investigation Agency, which investigates terrorism, must assess whether Hadiya converted freely to Islam or was part of a “love jihad” – a phrase used by some Hindu fringe groups to allege that Muslim men are forcing Hindu women into marriage.

Hadiya has had virtually no contact with anyone outside her parents’ home since May. Local reporters say she has no phone or internet access and the house is guarded by police officers. A police officer quoted in the local media said social isolation had made Hadiya depressed.

Akhila Ashokan and Shafin Jahan. Ashokan said the annulment of their marriage was ‘an insult to the independence of the women of India’.
Jahan approached the supreme court to rule on the validity of the ruling that annulled his marriage. In his petition, he said the high court order was an “insult to the independence of the women of India as it completely takes away their right to think for themselves”.

But instead of overturning the lower court’s ruling, the supreme court ordered a federal investigation into the union.
In a video clip of Hadiya in her parent’s house, shot recently by a social activist, she is heard asking her mother: “Is this how I should live? Is this my life?”

The supreme court judgment has shocked women’s rights activists. The court has established a reputation for supporting Indian women by ruling against honour killings and other customs that deny women the right to exercise their choice.

Rebecca Mammen, a senior lawyer in India, said she was “simply stunned” by the supreme court ruling.

“It [the marriage] is clearly a consensual relationship between two adults, totally voluntary – the woman has not complained of any coercion – I don’t know of any law that allows a court to act in this way,” said Mammen. “So all I can say that I am really taken aback.”

Vrinda Grover, a lawyer withn a track record of defending women’s rights, called Hadiya’s confinement “illegal house arrest”. Grover said it was typical, when an Indian woman transgressed social norms by exercising her own choice, that society should react by curbing her freedom.

“Her right, as an adult, to choose her husband irrespective of his caste or creed or ethnicity and her right to freedom of religion have been violated,” she said. “The courts are behaving as though she doesn’t know what’s good for her. The fact of being kept confined by her parents has deprived her of her personal liberty.”
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Aditya_V »

Clearly these reports are not covering the facts of the case, as there are many Hindu Woman Muslim men marriages against parents wishes, it could be a ) parents are very rich and influential and b) there is a lot of information int his case which is not public.
ramana
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21 and 22 August 2017 will be landmark days in Indian interests:
- SC gave Col. Purohit bail and buried the lie of Saffron terror
- Trump resents Af-Pak policy that marks the end of TSP
- 3T banned by SC by consequence the repugnant Halala practice.

And we had the new Sun emerge from the total eclipse!!!!!
ramana
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X-Posting from Nukkad -81
Brad Goodman wrote:Not sure where to post. Mods please move to appropriate thread

Why don’t more Indians know U N Sinha?
Posting in full to preserve the article. URL of original author is posted and all credit to that person

Back in 1985, computing power was abysmal. Solving even a modest 2D flow problem was hard. It wasn’t, therefore, a surprise when scientists at Bangalore’s NationaI Aeronautical Laboratory (NAL) met their new director, Professor Roddam Narasimha, to ask for a faster computer.

Narasimha, arguably India’s greatest scientist in fluid mechanics, of course appreciated their predicament. But there wasn’t much he could do. Computers were horrendously expensive, and even if money could be found to buy a Cray supercomputer, there was no way the Americans were going to sell it.



BuildAParallelComputer“We can’t buy a faster computer”, Narasimha told his colleagues, “but we could, like they recently did at a lab in Caltech, try to build a parallel computer to speed things up at an affordable cost”.

It was a mad and romantic idea, and it required someone equally mad to take it on. That mad scientist would be Dr Uday Narayan Sinha, then aged 39.

Sinha – henceforth “Sinhaji” in his narrative – fitted the bill. He had a shock of unkempt hair, a beard that needed urgent attention, a jhola sagging under the weight of books and journals, worn out Hawaii chappals, and a Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur for solving some absurdly difficult mathematical problem.

The fairy tale begins at this point. By the end of 1986, Sinhaji and his team actually built that parallel computer – which was named ‘Flosolver’.



PresentationToPMIt would be India’s first parallel computer even though many of us today think that C-DAC got there first. In fact, now confident after the Flosolver success, Narasimha made a presentation to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi explaining why we need parallel computing. I have no doubt that this heralded the birth of C-DAC.

But we mustn’t digress! This is Sinhaji story. Starting with the Flosolver success, Sinhaji blazed a trail of incredible achievement over his next two decades at NAL. He worked with tireless energy and passion: he was writing thousands of lines of code, he was building innovative hardware devices, he was parallelizing very difficult sequential code to enhance performance (there is no magical black box that accepts sequential code and spits out its optimized parallel counterpart), and he was mentoring hundreds of engineering students! It would be impossible to count how many lives he touched, and how much knowledge he imparted … but Sinhaji influenced a whole generation of computer science students now spread all over the world.

Flosolver itself became bigger, stronger and more versatile. Flow problems that appeared to be beyond the realm of the possible were easily and accurately solved.

It was my privilege to watch this remarkable karmayogi in action till 2006 (when I left NAL). He worked with the ferocious passion of a possessed spirit. He wanted absolutely to make the difference; to transcend from just clever computer science and fluid mechanics to something that could change the course of his country and the life of his countrymen.

What could be this game-changing endeavor? A horrific cyclone in Odisha during the late 1990s provided him the answer. His life’s goal henceforth would be to improve India’s capability in numerical weather prediction. In his idyllic world, no cyclone, avalanche or cloud-burst would be allowed to kill innocent Indians!

The funny thing is that the dynamical equations that help us predict weather are well-known … have been well-known for a long, long time. But they require immense computing power (hence parallel processing) and exceptional mathematical and modeling acumen. All this is very, very hard.



VarshaForecastThis would be Sinhaji’s challenge. Starting with the GCM T-80 code from NCEP, Sinhaji re-engineered, re-worked, parallelized, added more variables, understood the internal computing and modeling mechanisms, and eventually unveiled the Varsha software for numerical weather prediction over India.

Varsha has been around for over a decade now. For many years NAL’s Flosolver Lab published a daily India rainfall forecast during the monsoon months (it couldn’t be disseminated online those days because NAL couldn’t be India’s official forecaster). Varsha performed reasonably well; it could, for example, spot the horrendous Mumbai rainfall one day in July 2005.

But, in 2013, Varsha‘s prediction of the July rainfall was significantly off the mark. Sinhaji could’ve dismissed it as a rare blip, but he knew that something was wrong. So he agonized for many months to unravel the glitch – and, while doing so, stumbled on an idea that could eventually be of great consequence.

Today, Varsha is better than ever before, but it can obviously get even better. Improving it will continue to be Sinhaji’s life goal.

I often wondered what drove Sinhaji to tirelessly strive and stretch his arms towards that elusive perfection. One day I even asked him why he was doing all this although he was a grand retired gentleman over 65. “Oh, I’m merely doing my dharma”, he replied very matter-of-factly.

What are the tenets of Sinhaji’s dharma anyway? First, as we said before, that he should do something useful for his country. His big dream is that all his work will one day save at least one Indian life. He is shocked and enraged at the country’s inability to combat natural disasters. “When a cyclone need not kill anyone, why should hundreds die?”, he asks.

Second, Sinhaji’s dharma requires that he pursue excellence without wavering, and at every step. This pursuit took him to difficult problems in mathematics and fluid mechanics, and indeed even to the beautiful world of Indian verse and music. He still finds Indian poetry deeply thoughtful and enchanting, and his favorite pastime is still to play a mellifluous tune on his violin.

Third, Sinhaji’s dharma is to be truthful, unflinchingly and at all times. As someone who occasionally chronicled Flosolver’s achievement, I often asked him if I should report an unfavorable result, or just keep quiet about it. He always advised me to be completely truthful. In fact, his experiments with truth reveal the overwhelming influence of Mahatma Gandhi.

Finally, Sinhaji’s dharma requires him to be extremely aggressive in the pursuit of his goals. At most times he is extremely amiable, even childlike. But if you become an infringement in one of his many moral or scientific experiments, you will be badly hurt. “My hero is Parshuram. Like him, I won’t hesitate to harm anyone who strays from the righteous path”, he often tells you.

Now that I’m an independent freelancer, I’ve made a conscious attempt to reach out to Sinhaji in 2017. Even after all these years he hasn’t changed much. The flesh is a little weaker, but the spirit seems even stronger. It is still that same Sinhaji offering you a cup of lemon tea, or inviting you to join him as he potters around his beloved books. He still lovingly browses through the “Complete Works of Euler”. If he is pressed for time, he moves away after bestowing the book with such a loving gaze that the book might well blush.

At other times, when he is seized by the mathematical bug while driving for some meeting, he will pull out his pen from his pocket, grab his car driver’s newspaper, and scribble a completely new proof to show that the square root of three is irrational. Or explain how, when everything else fails, randomness could prove to be the key. Or even ruminate on artificial intelligence and worry that India remains unprepared for the new revolution.

Sinhaji’s complete and unequivocal faith in the power of science, that allows him to boldly venture into unknown technological terrain, never wavers. “Science never lets you down, only we let science down”, he likes telling you.



CrayAwardAs an long-time admirer of Sinhaji (and there are hundreds like me!), I’m bothered that we may be letting Sinhaji down. Sinhaji hasn’t been recognized enough (although he did recently get Cray’s A P J Abdul Kalam Award) for his phenomenal achievement and body of work. But you know how it tends to be: awards only come to those who want them, or ask for him, or make sure they ‘belong’ to those enabling cliques. Instead, Sinhaji would be happier if he got more opportunities to serve his people – it was the same admirable resolve, half a century ago, that saw a young Sinhaji travel from village to village in Bihar during a virulent outbreak of cholera hydrating young children and possibly saving their lives.

Today Sinhaji turned 70, but he soldiers on. The tapasya continues. And he asks for nothing in return. After all, he’s only doing his dharma.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

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https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ind ... paign=show
ASI approves excavation at site of Mahabharata’s ‘house of lac'
MEERUT: After years of requests by archaeologists and local historians, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has finally approved the excavation of what locals believe is the site of the 'Lakshagriha', the house of lac which features in an important incident in the Mahabharata.
The site is located in Barnawa area of Baghpat district.Retired ASI superintending archaeologist, (excavation) KK Sharma said, "Lakshagriha plays a significant part in the Mahabharata. The Kauravas had built the palace out of lac and planned to burn the Pandavas alive, but the brothers escaped through a tunnel.The structure was located in what is now Baghpat, at the site called Barnawa. In fact, Barnawa is the twisted name of Varnavrat, one of the five villages that the Pandavas had demanded from the Kauravas to settle in after their exile."
Speaking to TOI, director (excavation) of ASI Jitender Nath said, "After a thorough study of the proposal we have given licence to two ASI authorities, Institute of Archaeology in Red Fort, Delhi, and our excavation branch, to jointly conduct the excavation."Asked about the religious significance of the site, Dr SK Manjul, director, Institute of Archaeology, said, "It will not be appropriate to say anything on the religious aspect of this site as of now. We chose this site primarily because of its proximity to other important sites like Chandayan and Sinauli. In Sinauli, excavations had revealed an important Harappan-period burial site. We had recovered skeletons and pottery in large quantities in 2005. Similarly, a copper crown along with carnelian beads was found in Chandayan village in 2014."The crown was found by local archaeologist Amit Rai Jain and the find had been reported by TOI. Though not much remains at the site, its most significant part is the tunnel inside the mound, which the Pandavas may have used to make their escape.Krishan Kant Sharma, associate professor, department of history, Multani Mal PG College Modinagar and secretary of Culture & History Association, "No one has ever ventured too deep into the tunnel as it has several turns. But maybe now this excavation will map its length."
JE Menon
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by JE Menon »

I don't know where else to post this, although it does have something to do with our larger strategic interests:

This is about the "Pidification of Congress"
https://swarajyamag.com/politics/when-r ... s-good-boy

Please read and share...
ramana
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

Its in right location..
The dhimmification of Congress is a national interest.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

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ramana
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On this Nehru's birthday, Please read about the' House of Government' a critique of Soviet Union.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/11 ... believers/

Rudradev, Spot Lootyens, Secularism the five year plans. The Stalinst cult....

Just as Communism died in Russia, Secularism another evangelizing cult must die in India.

Bolshevism’s New Believers


Benjamin Nathans

November 23, 2017 Issue

The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

by Yuri Slezkine

Princeton University Press,
1,104 pp., $39.95



A poster for Sergei Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov’s 1928 film October, about the Russian Revolution of 1917, designed by Georgii and Vladimir Stenberg with Yakov Ruklevsky; from Susan Pack’s Film Posters of the Russian Avant-Garde, just published by Taschen


Over the past one hundred years, some 20,000 books on the Russian Revolution have been published, roughly six thousand of them in English. It’s as if, starting on October 25, 1917—or November 7, according to the Western calendar the Bolsheviks adopted soon after seizing power—a new book on that topic appeared without fail every weekday (with summers off). It could be worse: there are now over 70,000 books on the French Revolution. Which one are you going to read?

The Russian Revolution reshaped global time and space. The replacement of the House of Romanov by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics inaugurated what came to be known as the “short twentieth century”; the USSR’s disintegration in 1991 signaled its finale, in all likelihood the last time events in Europe will serve as a century’s bookends. The Soviet project precipitated the partition of the planet into first (capitalist), second (socialist), and third (developing) worlds. For much of its existence, the USSR haunted the West and beckoned developing societies to replicate Russia’s leap into industrial and fully sovereign socialism.


The Russian Revolution, to borrow a phrase from Gershom Scholem, the historian of Jewish messianism, was one of history’s “plastic hours,” when inherited institutions melt away, clearing a path for possibility. Having embarked on that path, the Bolsheviks set about turning capitalism into the world’s ancien régime. Instead, at the centenary of its birth, the Soviet Union is an increasingly distant memory, a bizarre country that once had the audacity to try to abolish private property, markets, and, for a brief time, money itself.

Where did the USSR come from? Was it the offspring of Russia’s peculiar development under the tsars, or did it arise from the inner contradictions of capitalism? Were its ambitions scripted by Marx and Engels, or did they emerge from broader currents of the Enlightenment—the same currents that, under different conditions, propelled the United States, France, and other countries to take their leave of monarchy? Throughout the many studies devoted to these questions runs an abiding tension between those that cast the USSR as an outlier in modern history and those that place it within a family of European or even universal phenomena. One of the first attempts at the latter approach focused on the fact that, notwithstanding their radically different political habits, in the end the Soviets and their capitalist rivals produced roughly the same kind of society: urban, industrial, educated, secular, consumerist, and science-friendly. A more recent version of the modernization-as-convergence argument, shaped by thinkers as diverse as Michel Foucault and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, puts the family resemblance in a decidedly darker light, stressing shared attributes of technocracy, state surveillance, mass mobilization, and urban anomie.

Yuri Slezkine’s monumental new study, The House of Government, also situates the Russian Revolution within a much larger drama, but one that resists the modernization narrative and instead places the Bolsheviks among ancient Zoroastrians and Israelites, early Christians and Muslims, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Puritans, Old Believers, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Rastafarians, and other millenarian sects. As sworn enemies of religion, the Bolsheviks would have hated this casting decision and demanded to be put in a different play, preferably with Jacobins, Saint-Simonians, Marxists, and Communards in supporting roles. Slezkine, however, has claimed these groups for his story as well, insisting that underneath their secular costumes they too dreamed of hastening the apocalypse and building the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The Bolsheviks, it seems, were condemned to repeat history—a history driven not by class struggle, as they thought, but by theology.

{In other words Communism is a form of Abrahamism. And is a cult.}


Slezkine was born in 1956 and raised in Moscow. The son of a historian and grandson of a fiction writer also named Yuri Slezkine, he graduated from Moscow State University before making his way to the United States, where he attended graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin and is now a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. He first achieved international notice in 1994 with an article entitled “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism.”* The Soviet Union had just broken up into fifteen ethnically defined states, confirming for many its status as a “prison house of nations” (one of Lenin’s many epithets for tsarist Russia) from which the inmates had finally staged their jailbreak.

Slezkine came to a very different conclusion: despite their insistence that class, not nationality, was the deepest source of human solidarity, the Bolsheviks had turned out to be nation-builders of the first order. Their “chronic ethnophilia” inspired “the most extravagant celebration of ethnic diversity that any state had ever financed,” and was largely responsible for the formation of the very national-territorial units that burst forth as newly independent states in the 1990s. To capture the process of socialist nation-building, Slezkine deployed a perfectly Soviet metaphor: the communal apartment, the sprawling pre-revolutionary living space partitioned after 1917 into separate rooms, each housing an entire family, with a single shared kitchen and bathroom per apartment. “Remarkably enough,” he wrote, “the communist landlords went on to reinforce many of the partitions and never stopped celebrating separateness along with communalism.”

{Shades of Nehruvian Secular India; The creation of linguistic states in India by 1956, constant dividing the states as recently as 2014, and the segregation of ruling class in Lootyens Delhi....}

Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century (2004) performed a similar volte-face, turning the story of Jewish assimilation on its head and moving Soviet Jewry from the margins to the center of the short twentieth century. Wide-ranging, witty, and provocative, it became the subject of academic symposia in the United States, France, Germany, Russia, and Israel. Modernization, Slezkine argued, is about “everyone becoming urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible,” and thus “about everyone becoming Jewish.” Different groups accomplished this metamorphosis at different rates, “but no one,” he noted, “is better at being Jewish than the Jews.”

For centuries, diaspora Jews (or at least some of them—Slezkine was not overly interested in such distinctions) belonged to a human type he dubbed “Mercurians,” familiar strangers wherever they lived, “service nomads” whose professional profile, food rituals, cosmologies, and, not least, endogamy kept them distinct from the rooted, agrarian, martial, and much more numerous “Apollonians” around them. Diaspora Armenians and Chinese were Mercurians too. Ukrainians, Russians, and other peasant-dominated populations, by contrast, were Apollonians. Slezkine’s most important point, however, was that Mercurianism and Apollonianism, rather than being innate qualities of this or that group, were strictly functional categories. Individuals and ethnic groups could move in and out of them over time, and since the modern world increasingly rewarded Mercurian qualities, modernization was the story of what happened when more and more Apollonians began to switch sides—as did a few quixotic Mercurians, aka Zionists.

{In Nehruvian Secular India, the less numerous Mercurians were: Kolkatans, MAdrasis, Bombayites, and Lootyens Delhiites. The more numerous Appolonians were everybody else. The current urban disconnect in India is due to the failed Secular experiment to transform the groups.}

The Jewish Century, it turns out, was a kind of prequel to an even grander project, The House of Government. A striking proportion of the latter’s characters (and residents) were of Jewish background, reflecting the extraordinary presence of Jews in the early Soviet political, cultural, and administrative elite. By attending to the rise and fall of that presence in The Jewish Century, Slezkine in effect cleared space for exploring the Soviet experiment in its largest, world-historical dimensions. Readers will note cameo appearances by this or that figure in both books, but above all they will recognize the hallmarks of Slezkine’s highly distinctive way of thinking and writing about history. Serious novels, the literary critic Robert Alter once wrote, are a way of knowing, and much the same can be said of Slezkine’s work.

Constructed on what feels like a lifetime of research and reflection, The House of Government offers a virtuosic weaving of novelistic storytelling, social anthropology, intellectual history, and literary criticism. It moves effortlessly (though the copious sources cited in the endnotes suggest otherwise) across different historical scales, joining a millennia-spanning, pattern-seeking master narrative to acute readings of diaries, letters, novels, and other such documents, often quoted at luxurious length. More than most historians, Slezkine conveys a sense of knowing his Bolshevik subjects (and occasionally their spouses and children) from the inside out, inhabiting not just their thoughts but their emotions and their most intimate relationships as well. He himself is capable of many moods: ironic, elegiac, deadpan, tragic, analytical. His goal is to make readers feel at home in the House of Government, and he accomplishes this not least via a preternatural prose style in a language not his native tongue, calling to mind Nabokov and Conrad.

The House of Government was a fortress-like edifice constructed in the late 1920s on a swamp across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, its 507 fully furnished apartments were designed to house leading Soviet officials and their families, the pinnacle of what would come to be known as the nomenklatura. It may have been a bad idea to build such a structure on a swamp, but Russia had a history of pulling off such ventures. Peter the Great had founded a spectacular new capital, St. Petersburg, on the swamps off the Gulf of Finland. The Bolsheviks had launched the world’s first Marxist revolution in a figurative swamp, an overwhelmingly agrarian, thinly industrialized country whose tiny proletariat had only begun to emerge from the sea of peasants spread across Russia’s vast hinterland. Building socialism in backward Russia meant transforming the entire country into “a gigantic construction site.” Unlike some other political figures, when the Bolsheviks promised to drain the swamp, they meant it.

{Lootyens Delhi was also in a wasteland. And see the parallels to India after Independence...}

If the communal apartment served as a metaphor for the USSR’s multiethnic society, the House of Government, in Slezkine’s telling, was the “place where revolutionaries came home and the revolution came to die.” By the mid-1930s it was the dwelling place of some seven hundred top officials and more than twice that number of spouses, children, assorted relatives, and nannies—the last group mostly refugees from the famine caused by the disastrous collectivization of Soviet agriculture. The up-and-coming Nikita Khrushchev lived in Apt. 199 with his wife and three children. Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s foreign minister, lived in Apt. 14, just a few doors away from his son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, the future dissident Pavel Litvinov. Matvei Berman, chief architect of the Gulag system, was in Apt. 141, while Boris Iofan, chief architect of the House of Government itself, settled into Apt. 426. The civil war hero Valentin Trifonov shared Apt. 137 with his second wife, Evgenia Lurye (sixteen years his junior), as well as his ex-wife, Tatiana Slovatinskaia (nine years his senior). Evgenia was Tatiana’s daughter by a previous marriage. Evgenia and Valentin’s children Yuri (the future Soviet writer) and Tatiana lived there too. Trifonov, Slezkine archly notes, was a man “free of prejudices.” He wasn’t the only one. Nikolai Bukharin secured Apt. 470 for his aging father; his second wife, Anna Larina (twenty-six years his junior); their infant son; and his first wife, Nadezhda Lukina (who was also his cousin). Bukharin himself retained an apartment inside the Kremlin.


{ I see so many parallels to Lootyens Delhi, its incestuous nature, its complicated interconnections chronicled in Tavleen Singh's 'Darbar' its eerie how closely Secular India matches the Communist Russia. In other words 2014 elcetions was India's Perestroika that upended the Secular India}



This being the Soviet Union, the apartments belonged to the state, as did the furniture and, in some sense, the inhabitants. Most of the fathers and some of the mothers were “Old Bolsheviks,” professional revolutionaries under the tsarist regime who had joined the party as young men and women, serving time in prison, Siberian exile, or abroad, where they had “courted each other, married each other (unofficially), and lectured each other.” All of them had pledged their lives to the party.

{Shades of Nehruvian Secular India. The comparison are too numerous...}


As Slezkine makes clear, however, the Bolsheviks were not a political party in the conventional sense of a group seeking, by vote gathering or other means, to elevate themselves into existing institutions of power. Nor, despite their fervent denunciation of religion and metaphysics in the name of science and materialism, were they immune to eschatological impulses. Writing of the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties of the early twentieth century, Slezkine observes:


Their purpose was to…bring about [Russian] society’s replacement by a “kingdom of freedom” understood as life without politics. They were faith-based groups radically opposed to a corrupt world, dedicated to “the abandoned and the persecuted,” and composed of voluntary members who had undergone a personal conversion and shared a strong sense of chosenness, exclusiveness, ethical austerity, and social egalitarianism.

In a word, the Bolsheviks were a sect.


{Nehruvian Seculars too were converts to a new cult called Secularism....See the Awards Wapasi gang and all other Artistes and their strong cult adherence.}



Slezkine is by no means the first to argue that Bolshevism is best understood as a form of religious faith. In July 1917, two months before they overthrew the Provisional Government, the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev wrote that “Bolsheviks, as often happens, do not know the ultimate truth about themselves, do not grasp what spirit governs them.” By laying claim to “the entire person” and seeking to provide answers to “all of a person’s needs, all of humanity’s sufferings,” Bolshevism drew on “religious energies—if by religious energy we understand not just what is directed to God.” The German political theorist Carl Schmitt’s landmark study Political Theology, published in 1922, revealed modern European notions of law, sovereignty, and the state as thinly disguised transpositions of theological concepts, smuggling the sacred into what purported to be secular institutions.

{Here is convincing proof that Nehruvian Secualrism is Roman and Protestant Christianity without Church. And an alien to Hindu India and is thus unable to resonate with the people.}


Following Berdyaev and Schmitt, countless observers have linked Bolshevik practices to alleged Christian precedents. Samokritika (self-criticism) sessions have been likened to Christian confession, the project of building socialism to a crusade, communism’s “radiant future” to the Kingdom of Heaven, and the Lenin cult to the veneration of saints. Herbert Marcuse claimed that in the USSR, Marxism stood in for Weber’s Protestant ethic, cultivating forms of self-discipline essential for a modern industrial economy. Most of these analogies are merely associative, suggesting ways of thinking about Bolshevism without claiming (let alone demonstrating) lineal descent from Christianity. All of them face significant challenges. Wouldn’t one have to posit an epidemic of false consciousness to account for so much religiosity on the part of the militantly antireligious Bolsheviks? Why do some analogies refer to quintessentially Catholic practices and others to quintessentially Protestant or Russian Orthodox ones? How can any of them account for the motives of the many Jewish party members? :rotfl:

{ :rotfl: Because without reading this far I called Nehruvian Secularism as rooted in Roman and Protestant Christianity without Church!!!}


Bolsheviks are by no means the only moderns to be subjected to the secularization thesis. While the first Soviet officials were settling into their apartments in the House of Government, the American historian Carl Becker was completing his boldly contrarian Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers, in which he argued that the Enlightenment had dethroned Christianity only to reinstate it “with more up-to-date materials.” A generation later, M.H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism claimed much the same for Romanticism.

Slezkine’s version of the secularization thesis is simultaneously more specific and much broader. In their thinking and their interactions with one another, on the one hand, Bolsheviks displayed the particular form of religious fervor associated with millenarian sects, namely the desire to eradicate “private property and the family as the most powerful and mutually reinforcing sources of inequality,” thereby fashioning, once and for all, a “simple, fraternal society organized around common beliefs, possessions, and sexual partners (or sexual abstinence). Millenarian sects with apocalyptic dreams, on the other hand, have appeared in many different religions and historical eras. Indeed, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism (to name a few) are, according to Slezkine, “institutionalized embodiments of unfulfilled millenarian prophecies,” churches that sought to routinize the teachings, if not all the practices, of the rebellious sects that gave birth to them.

Not only is apocalyptic millenarianism a type of belief and a way of life found in all major religions, Slezkine claims, it is also the template for all modern revolutions. Before the Bolsheviks there was the Russian intelligentsia, to be a member of which meant “being religious about being secular; asking ‘the accursed questions’ over lunch and dinner; falling deeper and deeper into doubt and confusion as a matter of principle; and feeling both chosen and damned.” Before them were the Jacobins (“an Age of Reason revival”) and before them the Puritans (“a Christian revival”):


Both were defeated by the non-arrival of a New Jerusalem (“liberty”) and the return of old regimes (“tyranny”), but both won in the long run by producing liberalism, the routinized version of godliness and virtue. The inquisitorial zeal and millenarian excitement were gone, but mutual surveillance, ostentatious self-control, universal participation, and ceaseless activism remained as virtues in their own right and essential prerequisites for democratic rule (the reduction of individual wills to a manageable uniformity of opinion)…. The expectation of imminent happiness was replaced by its endless pursuit.

{See how this explains the secular India resistance to the convincing election victory in 2014!}

In the nineteenth century, a new breed of prophets—foremost among them Marx—“left Jesus out altogether without feeling compelled to change the plot. Providence had become history, progress, evolution, revolution, transcendence, laws of nature, or positive change, but the outcome remained the same.” Weber was wrong: the modern world is not disenchanted (even if secularists pretend otherwise) but a continuation of Christianity by other means. Whether liberal, communist, fascist, or authoritarian, every polity relies to one degree or another on the persistence of charismatic authority and the (usually disguised) theological legitimation of political power.


In the ongoing debate about secularization, as should be clear by now, Slezkine has staked out a maximalist position: politics is incapable of divorcing itself from the sacred, and history consists of endlessly recurring salvation projects. The Bolsheviks, following Marx’s example, made sense of their unfolding revolutionary drama via French archetypes: they were the new Jacobins, the Mensheviks were the hated Girondins, and everyone anxiously awaited a Russian Vendée and a Russian Thermidor.

Slezkine does them one better. Having concluded that millenarianism is the true interpretive key, he applies his own rebranding: capitalism is “Babylon,” the Bolsheviks are “the preachers,” Marxism-Leninism is “the faith,” agitation and propaganda are called “missionary work,” and the end of tsarist Russia becomes “the end of the world.” The revolution is “the flood,” enlightenment is renamed “conversion.” The New Economic Policy, Lenin’s tactical retreat following the civil war, is “The Great Disappointment,” while Stalin’s revolution from above is christened “the Second Coming” and his Great Terror, “the Last Judgment.”

By rhetorically collapsing the distinction between Bolsheviks and their biblical predecessors, The House of Government signals its ultimate aim: to grasp the meaning of the Russian Revolution sub specie aeternitatis, to suggest an abiding element in human history, something very old of which we have not freed and may never free ourselves, precisely because we are human.

There is something undeniably intoxicating about such world-historical narratives, with their deep structure and eternal recurrences. But they have their frustrations too. “What man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis,” Carl Jung wrote, “can only be expressed by way of myth.” Slezkine’s saga of apocalyptic millenarianism provides a powerful way of knowing the Bolsheviks, placing them in an almost mythic framework of significance. When it comes to actually explaining the October revolution, however, or Stalin’s revolution from above, or the Great Terror (aka the Flood, the Second Coming, and the Last Judgment), the saga seems to offer little beyond the claim that the Bolsheviks were millenarians, and this is what millenarians do.

Nor does it account for the radically different outcomes of various millenarian movements—why some died as sects, others managed to routinize themselves into churches, but the Bolsheviks alone “found themselves firmly in charge of Babylon while still expecting the millennium in their lifetimes.” Not all instances of political fervor, even utopian fervor, qualify as millenarian, and there’s an important difference between believing in the possibility of progress and believing in its inevitability or necessity. Liberalism, communism, and fascism may indeed have certain millenarian instincts in common, but like a haircut and a beheading, the outcome is hardly “the same.”

In Nehruvian Secular Indaa the society became corrupt and enriched itself and lost its mojo leading to the rejections. The 1975 Emergency was the first sign of decay, the 1984 Delhi killings of Sikhs after Indira Gandhi assassination, the unbridled corruption for ten years under Sonia Gandhi all point to this. The beginning was in the Indicate-Syndicate wars of 1968}


One aspect of the Russian Revolution for which The House of Government does offer an explicit explanation is its demise. Most histories of the Soviet Union emphasize the failure of the command economy to keep up with its capitalist rivals. Slezkine, however, is not terribly interested in economics. In his account, the Soviet experiment failed, half a century before the country’s actual collapse, because it neglected to drain the oldest, most persistent swamp of all—the family.


{Same ill in Nehruvian Secular India. Its the Congress that is the swamp. No wonder #CongressMukthBharat resonated with the Mercurians.!!!}

In between their epic labors at the great construction site of socialism, residents of the House of Government “were settling into their new apartments and setting up house in familiar ways,” unable to transcend the “hen-and-rooster problems” of marriage and domestic life. Many of them expressed unease at the prospect of sinking into the traditional bonds of kinship and procreation. “I am afraid I might turn into a bourgeois,” worried the writer Aleksandr Serafimovich (Apt. 82) to a friend. “In order to resist such a transformation, I have been spitting into all the corners and onto the floor, blowing my nose, and lying in bed with my shoes on and hair uncombed. It seems to be helping.”

But it wasn’t. No one really knew what a communist family should be, or how to transform relations between parents and children, or how to harness erotic attachments to the requirements of revolution. Bolsheviks were known to give their children names such as “Vladlen” (Vladimir Lenin), “Mezhenda” (International Women’s Day), and “Vsemir” (worldwide revolution). But naming was easy compared to living. The Soviet state went to great lengths to inculcate revolutionary values in schools and workplaces, but not at home. It never devised resonant communist rituals to mark birth, marriage, and death. The party ideologist Aron Solts (Apt. 393) claimed that “the family of a Communist must be a prototype of a small Communist cell…, a collectivity of comrades in which one lives in the family the same way as outside the family.”

In that case, why bother with families at all? Neither Solts nor anyone else had a convincing answer. Sects, Slezkine notes, “are about brotherhood (and, as an afterthought, sisterhood), not about parents and children. This is why most end-of-the-world scenarios promise ‘all these things’ within one generation…, and all millenarian sects, in their militant phase, attempt to reform marriage or abolish it altogether (by decreeing celibacy or promiscuity).”


{MuFo Nehru who was womanizing with anyone set about reforming Hindu marriage Act!}

Unable or unwilling to abolish the family, Bolsheviks proved incapable of reproducing themselves. For Slezkine, this is cause for celebrating the resilience of family ties under the onslaught of Stalin’s social engineering. It’s worth asking, though, why the same Bolsheviks who willingly deported or exterminated millions of class enemies as remnants of capitalism balked at similarly radical measures against the bourgeois institution of the family. Could it be that they, especially the men among them, realized that by doing so they stood to lose much more than their chains?

Whatever the case, the children they raised in the House of Government became loyal Soviet citizens but not millenarians. Their deepest ties were to their parents (many of whom, as Slezkine shows with novelistic detail, were seized from their apartments and shot during the Great Terror) and to Pushkin and Tolstoy—not to Marx and Lenin. Instead of devouring its children, he concludes, the Russian Revolution was devoured by the children of the revolutionaries. As Tolstoy’s friend Nikolai Strakhov wrote about the character Bazarov, the proto-Bolshevik at the heart of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (another work about family), “The love affair takes place against his iron will; life, which he had thought he would rule, catches him in its huge wave.”

{Similarly, Nehruvian Secular India got its comeuppance from Vajpayee who was a prototype Nehruvian child....}


Yuri Slezkine, Mercurian par excellence, has caught an extraordinary set of lives in this book. Few historians, dead or alive, have managed to combine so spectacularly the gifts of storyteller and scholar.

Thanks to this article I better understood the revolution in India in 2014.
periaswamy
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by periaswamy »

interesting article from 1959 -- the original swarajya mag. Nehru's stalinist tendencies were well known by then before the band of sycophants and thieves took over the country.

creeping totaliarinism of Nehru's Congress
Jealousy and hatred never were and never can be wisdom or be the basis of national polity. Yet this has become the philosophy and the bible of the Congress. “Inequalities must go”; therefore, says the ruling party, we confiscate the “surplus” above the proper average as we lay it down.

All this will lead the country to the inescapable end of accepting totalitarian tyranny – unless we resist it now and prevent its destructive march.
and presciently warns:
this is the programme of an institution which has the history of political emancipation on its flag to hide its present rotten interior. How can we be disloyal to Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru? This is the question that puzzles the noble hearts of our youth and blocks their intellect. God bless them for their noble instincts. But loyalty does not and should not mean approval of the ideology which the Government has today chosen to inflict on the nation and on which it has proceeded to build its policies in all matters.
But these warnings were never heeded and so it came to pass to where we are, trying to crawl out of that abyss created by the mofo Bandit Nehru and his acolytes.
ramana
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

Please read rwad above post and see how Nehru modeled Indian Secularism after Soviet Communism
Prem
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Prem »

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ind ... 641276.cms?

Dalveer Bhandari’s re-election: India bid to break UN 'glass ceiling’
The battle+ between the last two candidates left in the field, Dalveer Bhandari of India and Christopher Greenwood of the UK is symptomatic of this global tension.After the last round of balloting, Bhandari logged 121 votes in the UNGA, moving up from 116 in the last round, a tribute to India's sustained multilateral diplomacy. Greenwood reduced his numbers from 76 to 68. However, in the UN Security Council, India lags six votes to Greenwood's nine.This number has been unchanged and is important for a couple of things: first, India has not lost the support it has already gathered, and second, the P5 are unlikely to abandon one of their own.In normal circumstances, the evident momentum in Bhandari's favour should have been able to swing one or two Security Council votes towards him. But the P-5 have not budged from their positions. But the very fact that India, a non-P5 has prevented a sweep by the UK tells of an unfolding inevitability — if not Bhandari, India has shown that the P5 glass ceiling cannot possibly sustain for too long.rime Minister Narendra Modi has kept up a sustained campaign for Bhandari's re-election, having raised it at various summit meetings with key UNSC members. But as India discovered during the NSG admission process, breaking the status quo will remain an uphill task for some time to come.
JE Menon
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by JE Menon »

Sai Deepak, well known indic lawyer. Look at this presentation by him. Absolutely vital to listen to the WHOLE thing. Spend the time people. He articulates so many of the critical points that all Indians must know and ponder upon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QjFUnd ... e=youtu.be

Karthik S
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Karthik S »

I posted same video yesterday in Rohingya thread. Awesome guy and we all need to contribute to his group indic collective.
JE Menon
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by JE Menon »

Karthik S, yes... I copied it from there. Thanks for posting. Apologies I should have acknowledged it there...

Also tweeted. Do the same please, if you haven't already.
JE Menon
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by JE Menon »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdmE2TIUf5U

An excellent presentation by the MD Of Kotak Mahindra, speaks to the national interest, in light of how things have changed and can change

shiv
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by shiv »

New Video: Who is trying to sabotage the Tejas? Do not kill the Tejas
https://youtu.be/4Lzh5LZ5L3M
Philip
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Philip »

Great piece! As I've said elsewhere given the 270+ myriad "critical" flaws plaguing the JSF, which one expert who helped design the F-16 said, a cold war MIG-21 would best the JSF.By that yardstick the Tejas a better bird than legacy MIGs would equally do the biz.The JSF too is no better at close combat than the F-16.Various tests and simulations have proved the same.Yet this flawed turkey is being touted as the follow to the F-16 as " the next best thing " for India. This pernicious , traitorous conspiracy has to be nipped in the bud and given as much exposure as possible.It is now only the media and patriots within the establishment that can save Tejas.The wheeler- dealers and firang vultures are circling the capital.
ShauryaT
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ShauryaT »

PS: It will be good to have a thread titled "Colonial Perfidies". There is much information that comes out every day on the topic and people who are interested in strategic thinking, cannot afford to not learn from the experiences of the past. Can some kind moderator start one, I am sure it will attract enough posts and reading to make it worthwhile. In the meanwhile, it goes here.

How a School Teacher Exposed the British ‘Coolie’ Trade in 19th Century Assam
Dwarkanath was shocked to see British managers enjoying the luxuries provided by huge profits while leaving little for the natives as wages and virtually nothing for the development of Assam. What aggrieved him, even more, was the deplorable conditions in which the “coolies” were forced to live.

The outraged writer returned to publish a succession of articles in nationalist newspapers, such as KK Mitra’s Sanjibani and Surendranath Banerjee’s Bengalee, to expose the near-slave like conditions of bonded “coolies” in Assam. Soon after, he even took the matter to the forums of the Indian National Congress, with the help of freedom fighter Bipin Chandra Pal.

Effectively contesting British claims of worker emancipation, Dwarkanath’s reports told the stories of thousands of Indians who had been lured into Assam’s plantations with the false belief that they would get a living wage in salubrious conditions.

They also grimly described the brutal punishments meted out and how one of every four “coolies” died, their deaths casually dismissed by the planters as being caused by disease or failure to adjust to climatic conditions.

While Britain’s influential planter lobby did all they could to prevent Dwarkanath’s reports from having much impact on public opinion, they were unable to prevent it from receiving wide publicity in nationalist circles. In fact, the impact was so great that the Indian National Congress sent its own fact-finding missions to Assam to amass evidence.

By the early twentieth century, Dwarkanath’s reports on Assam “coolies” had become an important plank for nationalist agitation against colonial rule. And finally, the pressure proved too much for the British, forcing them to abolish the imperial indenture system in 1920.

Today, Dwarkanath’s story has faded away from history textbooks and public memory. A school teacher who took a strong stand against injustice in every form, its time Indian gave this unacknowledged hero the respect and recognition he deserves.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Karthik S »

Gurus, anyone participating in Swadeshi Indology conference in Chennai this month?
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Prem »

ramana
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

Now that State elections in Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh are over and BJP has won both states the results throw up some very troubling lessons.

Gujarat was a touch and go and it was NaMo personal charisma that turned the tide along with some mis-steps by Congress.

BJP had 115 seats in 2012. Since then NaMo left for Center, Anandiben his successor had corruption issues, the Patel agitation, the Opposition consolidation to give a straight fight all contributed to the reduced majority. Yet the total BJP vote share increased by 1% to just about 50% or 49% going by which site you read. And there is an urban-rural divide in the support for BJP.

Yet over all getting re-elected after 22 years of incumbency for another 5 year term means Gujarat has a generation that has not live under Congress rule. Familiarity breed contempt.

All this has lessons to the big race in 2019...
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Rudradev »

There is an overarching lesson to be learned from Gujarat.

Vikas is something that, when delivered consistently over the medium-to-long term, the public begins to take for granted.

This does not mean that vikas is not a critical result to deliver, or that good governance is not vitally important to implement... they are. Even in strictly political terms, these things will go a long way towards cementing a supportive electorate, particularly in states that start the process from a low base level of development and prosperity.

However, they alone cannot guarantee success, and are in fact likely to yield diminishing results in the medium-to-long term. It is nearly unbelievable that so much of the GJ electorate voted for a proven failure like Rahul Gandhi simply out of a need for "change". Change from what? A clean, well-administered, prosperous, secure, and stable government?

Gibbon lists "five good emperors" of Rome: Nerva (96–98 CE), Trajan (98–117), Hadrian (117–138), Antoninus Pius (138–161), and Marcus Aurelius (161–180) who presided over the Empire's highest apex of power and prosperity. Marcus Aurelius, particularly, is revered as being not just a consummate administrator but an enlightened ruler of unimpeachable integrity. Yet, from as early as the reign of Trajan, the Empire had adopted a policy of increasing "tolerance" towards the single-mindedly fanatical Abrahamic zealots who were quietly eating into the corridors of power.

By 208, the imperial throne had passed to Alexander Severus, who was indoctrinated into Christianity at the insistence of his mother, Julia Avita Mamaea. By 235, barely 5 decades after Marcus Aurelius' death, the assassination of Alexander Severus had led to the crisis of the third century: 50 years of civil war culminating in the irrevocable split into Eastern and Western Roman Empires. Rome never recovered from this terminal decline, and the adoption of Christianity as state religion by Constantine I in 326 was the final nail in its coffin.

The undercurrents of ultimate destruction are always present, even at times when the might of the state and the prosperity of its people are soaring to previously unmatched heights by all apparent indications.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Kashi »

I think the local issues must not be overlooked. In the assembly elections, it's often these local issues that play an important role. As per many reports there were dissatisfaction at the ground level against many sitting legislators.

It's not just familiarity that is a problem, it's also complacency.

As Vajpayee very eloquently put it

हम पड़ाव को समझे मंज़िल
लक्ष्य हुआ आंखों से ओझल
वतर्मान के मोहजाल में-
आने वाला कल न भुलाएँ।
आओ फिर से दिया जलाएँ।

We mistook the halt for the destination
and we lost sight of our objective
Caught in the intricacies of the present
Let us not stop thinking about the future
Let us light that lamp once again!
ramana
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

Vikas is a band aid over the civilizational hurt in India.

The wounds can be ripped open repeatedly by Congress and future BIF.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by krishna_krishna »

This election in Gujarat has following dimensions to it :

1) First time since 1985 congress bought up cast, this was never issue till my memory serves me right. Issues before namo came where three mainly :

a) WATER (Biggest issue, there used to be murders for water), b) Electricity to support farmers and industries, c) Road

BJP (NaMo specially) delivered all three via Narmada, I still remember step motherly attitude/contempt towards state via centers meddling into narmdada dam. He united people on Narmada and it galvanized people for Gujarat.

2) There has been big issues of unemployment primarily arising out of vacuum of good colleges(and schools) being filled by rich guys owning private institutions (primarily owned by congress/patels) just to pocket profits without any meaningful granting of good knowledge/ gainful employability of the students that are graduating from these institutes. Here is where students (young generation) feels that this is not true vikas or future they see for themselves.

3) Patels, this is wealthy caste in Gujarat with big ownership in education ,real estate and industry. They definitely have talented individuals among them however a big chunk of newer generation have lot of entitlement issues just being born in these last name families. It has vitiated atmosphere to such a level in Saurasthtra that there has been ghettoizing of areas of Patels and non Patels ( A Patel would not sell a house to a non Patel in areas where they are in majority) . They feel (especially Saurashtra) that they will be able to force govt. to submission to their demands and without their support BJP support cannot continue, this has been proved false and for good of State and India.

4) For Rural Gujarat lot of hardship is suffered by farmers especially doing cotton farming where govt. is not giving them proper return (amount) that they are not able to make any good living out of it.


=======================================================================

The biggest lesson I see is Congi's trying old tricks of splitting India on communal lines (Especially hindu's) this is our Achilles heel of Bharat where still people are not thinking as hindus but see themselves from false identities of caste.

The perception build that Gujarat elections was a moral victory, even though with everything that they threw. I thought at a point they would win however NAMo's popularity and faith in BJP for hindus especially what was going in Ayodhya by K.Sibal , Abuse by M A Aiyar had put the votes intact. They lost badly I would say , even though vote share for BJP increased this was no way a victory for "can-grass". But building a perception that BJP lost morally, all the crap of luteyons sic-liar shit that this is not my PM etc.

Minority vote does not matter for 2019, can-grass will try to look more Indic( wearing tilak, saffron bands and more temple visits, i.e healing)

Can-grass will look into involving outside players (porkis) to create trouble during 19 elections

=========================================================================
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Y I Patel »

I posted a thinly disguised analysis of the Gujarat elections in the Terroristan thread, but since there are some posts here, let me add to what I said:

(1) BJP in Gujarat was in extremely bad shape after Modi and his right hand Amit Shah departed to the national stage. Gujarat has always been a well governed state, and Modi's departure really left the local BJP with no credible and non-corrupt leader who could step up to public expectations. If Congress had retained Shankarsinh Vaghela, the combination of his leadership credentials and the Pradesh Congress's institutional heft would have easily carried Congress back to power

(2) There is a lot of talk about the splintering of BJP base due to the Patidar civil war. Why is no one talking about the serious backlash that has been building up against the Patidars among the other communities? This was as much a threat for BJP as the splintering of its own base

(3) The series of Congress missteps I described in my previous post in the Terroristan thread helped BJP cauterize the Patidar boil

(4) Do not confuse Pradesh Gujarat Congress with the National Congress Party. Gujarat Congress is the party of Morarji Desai, and has never been as servile to the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty as in other parts of the country. State elections were always won on the strength of local leadership - the biggest win came under Madhavsinh Solanki (father of current Pradesh Congress President Bharatsinh Solanki) when the got 149 or so seats in early 1980s, with minimal need for a formidable Indira Gandhi to get involved. Pappu and Sonia are blood sucking parasites that undermined local leaders and robbed them of victory

(5) Likewise, do not hold Gujarat BJP minus Modi in that high esteem. The fact that Modi is such a transformative leader becomes even more apparent by the shambles in Gujarat BJP after his departure. Corruption, infighting, arrogance were all there. Gujarat BJP minus Modi is far less than Gujarat Congress plus leaders of stature like Shankarsinh Vaghela. People had ample reason to vote against the misrule post Modi, and probably Pappu's biggest mistake was baiting the lion back into his den. Modi turned this around, make no mistake. Hopefully the results of this elections will force a shake-up of the state chapter of the party to its very core. The big blessing is that the state BJP is no longer beholden to one power group (Patidars) and so a thousand lotuses can bloom

Only the uninformed or incurably biased would see competence in the Congress "resurgence" in Gujarat. In Gujarat, Congress is far more powerful and BJP a lot weaker than the results show. Only someone with Pappu's world class incompetence can manufacture defeat from such a favorable situation
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

Yogi Where are those posts? Do x-post them here.

x-post from Habal
habal wrote:
SBajwa wrote:
Bhai Mani singh was head Granthi of Golden Temple he was granted permission to have a diwali fair at golden trmple (Sikhs always had two fairs Diwali and Visakhi) . So 1 day before festival Mughals arrested him and took him to Lahore., where he was asked to convert he refused so his body was cut piece by piece and he refusing each time until he achieved martyrdom.

Bhai Kapoor Singh and his band of Khalsa in an attempt to revenge disguised into Sufis and went to main Mosque of lahore that Mir Mannu use to attend but he did not that day., just when namaz was to start all Khalsa Sikhs started with Sat Sri Akal and attacked all government officials. Few days later mir mannu fell off the horse and broke his back and then passed away after suffering months.
for many months I was searching if there is a link between the hyderabadi nizams and mughals in dehli and their subordinate rulers of lahore, when I stumbled upon this link. mir mannu aka Muin ul mulk is none other than the son of nizam ul mulk asaf jah 1 aka wazir qamruddin khan aka chin qilich khan the first nizam of deccan.
:shock:

this wazir qamruddin aka chin qilich khan who is mir mannu's father was as his name suggests the chief wazir in then dehli mughal emperors court and the chief counter revolutionary to the syed brothers attempt to Indianize mughal court and free it of foreign (read turk-iranian) influence.

It took the efforts of maratha and sikh generals combined to chase away this group away from punjab back into their deccan holdouts. Ideally they should have been chased out of the country.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Y I Patel »

This is a modified version of my original post in the Terroristan thread. I have edited parts relating to Pakistan. Since this was before the elections were announced, and as a supporter from far of BJP, I was somewhat circumspect in describing the unfavorable perception of post-Modi BJP rule in Gujarat.

Gujarat, right now, is going through a classic example of an interregnum. The governing political dynamic in Gujarat, in the last three decades, has been the anti-KHAM backlash. It began with the anti-reservation movement that coalesced a Bhramin-Vania-Patel coalition under the leadership of a Patidar (Patel) core. It was a popular backlash, and championed into a political cause by Keshubhai Patel of BJP. But this was not enough in itself to totally undermine the KHAM coalition - Keshukaka, as he is fondly known, wobbled in and out of power, and in late 2001/2002, just before Godhra, a caretaker CM named Modi was named to help organize a precariously perched BJP political coalition for the next election. If Godhra had not happened, Modi might still be a regional leader shuttling in and out of power. Instead, the anti-Muslim backlash that followed Godhra splintered KHAM, and gave Modi a governing agenda that not only dovetailed seamlessly with the interests Patel core, but also permitted him to expand to other Hindu constituencies. So powerful was this that it helped him fend off a powerful internal challenge from uncontested Patidar leader Keshubhai. Notably, the Patidars stayed with Modi even when Keshukaka and Modi had a political falling out. For this support, Patels garnered the political rewards in the decade to come when Modi leveraged the economic development plank to grow his own political base beyond the High-Caste coalition with the Patidar core that he inherited.

When Modi moved to become PM, the interregnum started. The Gujarat BJP then faced an existential crisis - what was the new agenda for governance, and who would lead BJP through it? They had about 3 years to come up with a solution, and were not able to do so. A big part of this was the civil war within BJP - the Patidar core had reaped unprecedented benefits in the Modi years for supporting him, and a faction within this Patidar community wanted more. Hardik Patel became the standard bearer for this faction by seizing the politically emotive issue of reservations. But all this time, a backlash has been building among the old KHAM constituencies against the growing power of Patels. The two other leaders that have come to prominence lately - Alpesh Thakore and Jignesh Mawani - are OBC and Dalit leaders, and in a sense the HAJ group (Hardik-Alpesh-Jignesh) make for uneasy and unnatural bedfellows. Adding to BJP troubles is that Modi took the development/good governance plank with him to the center. If a successor continues with good governance, how much credit will s(he) get? If new Gujarat-specific development initiatives are championed and executed under BJP leadership, who gets the credit? Gujarat's favorite son in Delhi, or some faceless local nominee/figurehead of the political machine back home?

So there were powerful undercurrents in the upcoming Gujarat elections, and Congress needed to take some very basic steps to capitalize on them: firstly, and most importantly, recognize that the undercurrents were powerful because of Gujarat-specific dynamics, and secondly, exploit the struggle for succession within BJP to splinter the Patidar core at the heart of the BJP coalition. The ideal strategy for Congress, to my mind, would have been to (a) nominate a local leader who could revitalize KHAM and present a credible alternative to wrest the pro-development, good governance plank away from BJP, (b) recognize that Hardik Patel is political kryptonite and support him from afar while he and BJP destroy each other. They had two strong candidates for (a): Shankersinh Vaghela and Bharatsinh Solanki both fit the bill. While neither is in Modi's league, Vaghela has RSS/ex-CM cred and Solanki is the Akhilesh Yadav equivalent of Gujarat Pradesh Cong-I. Vaghela, to my mind, would have been deadly for BJP. But he is not a family loyalist, and the first big eff up that Congress did was to make the Rajya Sabha elections a choice between him and Ahmad Patel. That was sheer stupidity to let Shankarsinh contest an RS seat in the first place - he still has a real base and is far more useful to Congress in Gujarat than out of it. But Cong decided to go with family loyalist Ahmad Patel instead, and Vaghela was cast out in the cold.

And now we come to political kryptonite - Hardik Patel. The truth of the matter is that Hardikbhai is a very polarizing figure, with a single issue political plank - to get reservations for Patidars. He is symptomatic of the political struggle for power, and his plank represents dangerous political overreach which will only lead to diminution of political power of the Patidar community. Handled carefully, Hardik is a powerful force who can serve Congress's purpose of splintering the Patidar community and breaking the current governing coalition. He was on his way to doing that anyway, but Congress went for more in coopting him as closely as it has. Congress has come to the cynical conclusion that Muslims do not matter as a political block anymore, in Gujarat and nationally. In the Gujarat context, Patels represent the most unequivocally Hindutva friendly political block. If Congress wants to signal that it too wants to play the soft Hindutva card, who better than the Patidar block to replace KHAM with KHAP? Now that would be a winning combination, except for one problem. The KHA part goes with the M part nicely - this should be no surprise to anyone with passing familiarity to politics in other KHAM areas like UP and Bihar (what, you thought only Gujjus had this figured out? Shame on you!) However, KHA mixes with P like oil and water - remember the anti-reservation riots of the 80s and 90s that were spearheaded by Patels, anyone? And oh, by the way. Every time there was an anti-reservation riot, it somehow mutated into a Hindu-Muslim riot. Every frickin time. Coincidence? or M coming to the aid of KHA?

So the Congress is taking a huge political gamble by embracing Hardik Patel so closely. But I am inclined to think that they have not factored in the trade-offs - if Hardik is supported to the hilt, it undermines the other two rather natural allies of Congress (Jignesh Mawani and Alpesh Thankore). And of course, totally alienates the Muslims. In fact, it does more than that. Do you know why BJP has not been able to get traction with Muslim and Dalit voters in Gujarat? Not because of Maut-Ka-Saudagar Modi! It is because Muslims know that at its core Gujarat BJP is dominated by Patels. Same applies to Dalits. Now, through its awkward attempt to embrace one Patidar cause, Congress risks effacing the perception that the BJP agenda is controlled by Patels who are unequivocally anti-Muslim and have misalignment of interests with Dalits. This will significantly lower the unacceptability barrier for BJP among these communities, in Gujarat today and India tomorrow. And this dynamic perfectly illustrates the limitations of caste based politics in India going forward - if there is balance of power among different communities, if no one group can dominate unilaterally, then issues other that caste suddenly become determinative of political success. Economic development can only be used as a plank if all other competing interests can balance each other out. Ultimately, that is why Gujarat/India is such dynamic and vibrant society - because in balancing each other out, different interest groups have to learn to find common ground, and economic development is a universal aspiration. Modi became one of a kind leader because he recognized this, but he could become what he is only in India.

Since I have talked so much about Gujarat, let me wrap up. Congress made another huge error beyond what I have already talked about - it failed to recognize that the headwinds BJP is experiencing in Gujarat are due to Gujarat-specific issues. This was too good an opportunity to pass up to further glorify half-wit Pappu, so the election suddenly became (a) a testament to glorious leader Pappu's astute vision, and (b) a referendum against Modi's developmental agenda! The first thing this did is drag Modi back to Gujarat, and that is not a good idea. Honestly, they would have been better off letting him distance himself from Gujarat's current political situation. Instead, they laid out a welcome mat for the lion to combe back to his favorite hunting ground. Related to this, morons with an overinflated sense of self-importance like Arundhatti Roy and AAP, and fundamentalist muslim organizations like PFF jumped on the bandwagon to support local leaders like Jignesh Mawni. This is like a kiss of death in Gujarat, for heaven's sake! If Congress had played it's cards right, it would have kept this limited to Gujarat, run by local Congress leaders, and sticking to the trusty KHAM playbook. Beyond that, they would not need to do a thing - Gujarat is undoubtedly experiencing economic doldrums related to the larger Indian economy but that is fleeting and economic development and good governance are now the agenda du jour for the entire country. So that plank was ready and waiting for appropriation from a local BJP that is still in the throes of transition and currently held accountable for the passing economic slowdown. But instead, Congress made costly unforced errors because the interests of Pradesh Congress are different from those of the Gandhis, and consequently might actually snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. My prediction - BJP retains Gujarat, 100+ seats. If the backlash against these missteps is strong enough, and enough Patidar base remains with BJP, exceeding 120 is a distinct possibility. If Muslims and Dalits develop a backlash against Congress, 150+ can happen.
In retrospect, I was close but overestimated the negative impact of Congress missteps - Muslims, certain OBCs, and Dalits did not leave the Congress alliance as much as I projected (or hoped!) it would. Also of note is that BJP vote got destroyed mainly in rural Gujarat, mainly Saurashtra, where the distress was real. However, that is a temporary phenomenon, and the absolute dominance of BJP in urban areas is the new political phenomenon to watch nationwide. This brings the final insight of these elections - caste considerations are there, but they can be overridden by universal considerations like economic development. That's why Vikas is so powerful as an electoral plank.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Vips »

BJP lost the support of farmers. Half the seats lost in Saurashtra is due to this reason. The Minimum support price for Cotton was promised at Rs 1400 and the actual pay out was Rs 800. The phenomenon of numerous farmers committing suicide which is otherwise very common in Maharashtra and Karnataka happened this year for the first time in Gujarat. BJP can easily address this discontent against it by increasing the procurement prices for Cotton and Groundnut and writing off loans in the rural belt.
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by ramana »

Folks please subscribe to ths Youtube channel run by some members from

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChP7mn ... A9C3TLUEhg

thanks
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by Raja Ram »

Thanks ramana,

Swatantra TV is an initiative of Swatantra Forum a Think Tank in the making started by a few of us in Chennai, India. We will be hosting a series of Talks on a wide range of important subjects from experts in that field under the brand "Swatantra Talks". This channel will be streaming these events live.

Please see the link for the last talk by Dr Raj Vedam, Director Indian History Awarness & Research (IHAR) Houston, Texas on the topic "Scientific Heritage of Ancient India"

Please popularise the channel. Thank you Gentle Rakshaks
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Re: Indian Interests_2017

Post by VKumar »

BJP should closely educate the rural folk about how it's policies are beneficial to their interests to avoid a repeat of 2004, when India Shining was understood only by urban population.
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Re: Indian Interests_2

Post by Prem »

ramana
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Post by ramana »

x-post from China thread....
Pulikeshi wrote:
SSridhar wrote: OBOR has two components, one a 'land route' and another, a 'maritime route'.
Those are the "what" of it not the "why" of it - What if OBOR/MSR is not based on traditional (read Western) understanding of strategy?
Its important to understand the Wei Qi of using scarce (perhaps not with Chinese surplus :P) treasury on these non-performing investments.
If a bank owns your house for a 100 years, who does it really own - you or your progeny?
SSridhar wrote:
In fact, India is targetted by China under MSR, not much under the 'land route'.

Under the pretext of expanding maritime activity and MSR, China plans to massively increase its naval power to unchallenged levels. While India backs the BCIM, it is opposed to CPEC and has largely remained silent on the Maritime Silk Road due to security concerns in the IOR.
What does China expect to gain if it succeeds in dominating the IOR (while US is still in Diego Garcia, Taiwan, SKorea and Japan)?
Just securing the SLOC and dominating the IOR for the sake of doing so seems like a tragic case of hyper-realism gone to Shangai ! :mrgreen:
What if again the Wei Qi has not been understood merely applying Western strategy models?
SSridhar wrote: Indo-China is not civilizational term either. It was a term, Indo-Chine, coined by the French colonialists not more than a hundred and fifty years or so back.
Call what - Indo-China or Indo-Chine? Can the underacinated come up with terms that are more meaningful? The Indian Ocean is a connector!
If there is Indo-Pacific then is there also an Indo-Atlantic?

One has to read up the history of Manigramam, Ayyavole and Ainnurruva, etc. - these are not merely Chola merchant guilds that guided the destiny of The Indo-Pacific, but may have earlier origins in Pallava, Chalukya and other dynasties in South India. The sad part is no such articulation has occurred from Indian scholars on merchant guilds such as the Anjuvannam for example that had Jews, Christians, Muslims, South Indians all working together to keep the trade routes with China open and operating to South India's advantage. The security of the Indo-Pacific was historically and hopefully in the future the responsibility of the Jana-padas (today the States of the Indian Union) of India.

Merely considering hyper-realistic power games defined by Western frameworks will miss out not only on the Indian historic experience in the region, but also in what the Chinese are trying to avoid and prevent with the rise of India. Focusing on the Quad means a stronger empashsis on security and not enough has been done on the economic renascence in that part of the world. Just my two paisa as always.

and
panduranghari wrote:
Pulikeshi wrote: Focusing on the Quad means a stronger empashsis on security and not enough has been done on the economic renascence in that part of the world. Just my two paisa as always.
At the moment, India-China-Indonesia alone constitute 40% of global population. India-China alone over 32%. By 2050, India alone will be 25%.

Demographics is destiny.
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