Indian Interests

[brihaspati]

Bji, RajeshA or any one who knows German:

Have you read the works of Olaf Ihlau a German expert on India and what does he say about India?
Eg. Weltmacht Indien

and a talk by him:
http://www.redneragentur.de/index.asp?s ... A8&lang=en

Ihlau plays its safe in the book. He pretends to find both positive and negative. But inevitably the yardstick of where the innermost anchor of a critic lies as regards India - shows up in his/her attitude towards the "Hindu/Hinduism". Ihlau poses the cliche supposed multi-facetedness of "Hinduism" as a "spiritual supermarket".

He blames "Hindu nationalism" as provoking pogroms on Muslims, and a future potential problem. Half satirically calls India "republic of the Ganges" - which at least to me is a Freudian slip. Shows that he feels the underlying holding power and potential political militancy that lies dormant in the "Hindu" identity - and does not like it at all.

[JE Menon]

We must internalize that the above is the general western view, either because they truly believe it or because they find it to be generally in their interest...

One way or the other that's the perspective and actions are derived therefrom

[ramana]

Strange logic from Supreme Court

SC commutes death sentence for Rajiv Gandhi's killers

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday commuted death sentences for three killers of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi to life imprisonment, citing delays in the case 23 years after he was assassinated by a Tamil suicide bomber.

The top court headed by Chief Justice P. Sathasivam handed the three life in prison on the grounds that successive Indian presidents had taken 11 years to decide their pleas for mercy against execution.

“We implore the government to render advice in a reasonable amount of time for taking a decision on mercy pleas,” Sathasivam told the court in announcing the judgement.

A lawyer for the three men—Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan, all known by single names—hailed the judgement as “humane,” adding that they were now living in hope of one day being released from prison.
“There is hope that the convicts will walk out of jail. The remission will be decided by the state government of Tamil Nadu,” Yug Chaudhary told NDTV outside the court.
“It is time that the death penalty is abolished in this country,” he added.

The decision comes after the Supreme Court issued a landmark judgement last month that places new restrictions on executing prisoners in the world’s biggest democracy.

The top court then commuted the death sentences of 15 convicts, ruling that “inordinate and inexplicable” delays in carrying out a death sentence were grounds for commuting a sentence.The three at the centre of Tuesday’s ruling were members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a Sri Lankan-based separatist movement, which was wiped out by Sri Lankan forces in 2009.
The men were convicted of plotting the 21 May 1991 murder of Gandhi by a female suicide bomber, but their appeal to the president in 2000 to spare them the hangman’s noose was only finally rejected in 2011.

The lengthy delay contrasts sharply with the execution of Kashmiri Muslim separatist Mohammed Afzal Guru last year over a deadly raid on the Indian parliament in 2001 that left 10 people dead.
Successive governments in the world’s largest democracy have long been wary of upsetting the large Tamil population in the south where the trio’s case has become a cause celebre.India had an eight-year unofficial moratorium on carrying out the death penalty from 2004 to 2012, with only three people executed in the last decade. The delays have led to a build up of more than 400 prisoners on death row.

Murder seen as retaliation

Gandhi had become India’s youngest ever prime minister after his mother, former premier Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in October 1984. He ruled until losing an election five years later.
His widow Sonia Gandhi is the president of the ruling Congress party and his son Rahul Gandhi is the frontman for the party’s campaign in elections due by May.
The shredded clothes and the shoes that Rajiv was wearing when he was killed while on an election tour in the south of the country remain on display in a museum in the Indian capital.
Gandhi’s killing was seen as retaliation for a 1987 Indian government pact with the Sri Lankan government to disarm the guerrillas, who had been trained and armed by New Delhi in the early 1980s.
After that pact, the LTTE fought Indian troops deployed to Sri Lanka by Rajiv Gandhi’s government to supervise the accord. India withdrew its troops after 32 months in which it lost 1,200 soldiers at the hands of the rebels.
Amnesty International said Tuesday’s decision piles pressure on the government to abolish the death penalty altogether.
“India must now do away with the death penalty—a cruel, inconsistent and irreversible form of punishment that has no proven deterrent effect on crime,” senior researcher Divya Iyer said in a statement. AFP

if that were so Afzal Guru and other terrorists will still be alive in India.
What a great liberal idea.

[Prem]

Allergic to sex? On book pulping and pursed lips
Religion does a disservice by trying to leave sex out of the human/divine equation

http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2014 ... lips/30969
( The Khajuraho Gym"o"nastic Mural in The Link)

Allergic to sex? A number of major organized religions seem to be. This week the severe separation of sex and religion came dramatically to light once again, and from a somewhat unlikely direction.Penguin India, it was widely reported, agreed to recall and destroy all copies in India of the 2009 book “The Hindus: An Alternative History” by highly respected American scholar Wendy Doniger. (Full disclosure: Penguin India published one of my own novels.)Alarm at this action has strongly focused on the limiting of free expression, which is indeed a hugely important aspect of the case. Less noted is the fact that this decision further widens the sex/faith divide. The two subjects were already segregated and not just in India. Beyond tersely declaring sex as just-for-marriage or just-for-babies, “the church,” in virtually all of its many forms, seems to have a serious aversion, in practice, to discussing the subject.

While the offended Hindu group has many objections to Doniger’s book, one of the main ones, according to Time magazine, is “the juxtaposition of sex and Hinduism.” The leader of the organization that successfully campaigned for destroying the book says that Doniger’s particular portrayal of sex and Hinduism insults the gods and goddesses and the whole of the book “hurt(s) the feelings” of Hindus.In contrast, The Times of India says the book “appears to make the case that sex was treated by Hinduism as a natural, beautiful part of life.” Hinduism is a religion that — once upon a time — produced a substantial amount of erotic art (and didn’t pronounce it heresy); the sculptures at Khajuraho, for example, and the famed Kama Sutra, the ancient Sanskrit guide to living a loving, pleasurable, and virtuous life.The Judeo-Christian religions have never been so open-minded on the subject.If Hindu protesters are able to quash a book of the intellectual heft of Doniger’s, what’s the hope for a conservative church’s Sunday school class having a useful discussion, something that goes beyond finger-wagging and labels of “naughty-naughty?” What’s needed from churches is attention to the ethics of sexual activity, the emotional realities, the ramifications, frustrations, fears, drives, day-to-day decisions. Spirituality includes bodies as well as souls.

If our chief promoters and guardians of virtue can’t handle a subject so large and pervasive, who can?The subject is, of course, innately private and can be embarrassing to talk about. I get that. Our churches have a moral obligation to toughen up and open the subject anyway.I’ve recently had emails from Christian ministers making the same comment. (Full disclosure: I write novels that intertwine explicit sexuality and religious faith, two of them involving Hinduism.)As is so often the case with novelists, I write on my particular subjects not out of conscious choice but because they rise to the surface and won’t be ignored. Sex does rise to the surface in churches as well; the minister running off with the soprano is a cliche. And as one minister recently wrote to me: “I had no clue as an idealistic young pastor how dangerous our vocation is. … Spiritual intimacy and sexual intimacy cannot be separated.”We’d do well to more widely acknowledge that. Religion does a disservice by trying to leave sex out of the human/divine equation.

(Peggy Payne is the author of the novels “Cobalt Blue,” “Sister India,” and “Revelation.”)

[Prem]

Hindu fundamentalists vs. Hinduism:
Stephen Prothero
Pulping of a U.S. scholar's book in India stirs debate over the "moral majority."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2 ... n/5760611/

After the egging, the pulping. In London in 2003, a protester threw an egg at University of Chicago Sanskrit scholar Wendy Doniger, who was lecturing on the popular Hindu epic the Ramayana. The egg missed its mark, but during the Q&A other protesters continued the assault, insisting that non-Hindus like Doniger had no right to tell them what Hinduism is all about.This month, Penguin Books India agreed to withdraw Doniger's The Hindus: An Alternative History from Indian bookstores and pulp any remaining copies. The settlement came in response to a complaint filed by Dinanath Batra, head of Shiksha Bachao Andolan, a Hindu fundamentalist group that opposes sex education in Indian schools and textbooks that deviate from its Hinduvta ("Hinduness") interpretation of Indian history.If you see a culture war here, you are not far wrong. Like the American culture wars, this contest features a "moral majority" that claims to speak for all true believers, even as it laments its victimhood at the hands of a secular state.Hurt religious feelingsIn his complaint, Batra played the Jerry Falwell figure, blasting Doniger as a Jezebel — "a woman hungry of sex" — peddling "perverse" interpretations of Hindu scriptures. The Hindus is "riddled with heresies and factual inaccuracies," he said, but his core complaint is that the book "hurt the religious feelings of millions of Hindus."
As Doniger books go, this one has very little sex in it. But it is offensive. As Doniger told BBC World Service, she knew "that people like Mr. Batra would hate it."According to Hindu nationalists, there is one unchanging and eternal Hinduism, which just so happens to be their own. Doniger's alternative history, which heeds the voices of women and Dalits ("untouchables"), and observes changes in the tradition over time, shows that there are nearly as many Hinduisms as there are Hindus. To her, Hinduism is a polyphonic symphony. To Batra, it is one note, played over and over again.Books have been challenged in the USA, but First Amendment rights typically triumph. In India, free speech is increasingly muzzled. India banned Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses a quarter-century ago. Two decades ago, Hindu nationalists went after Kali's Child, a psychoanalytic study of the Indian holy man Ramakrishna by American Indologist Jeffrey Kripal, and discovered in the process how to spin hatred of foreign authors into political gold. In recent years, they have targeted films and art exhibitions as well as books on Gandhi, cowsand the Hindu deity Ganesha.
"Pulping of liberal India"
Indian intellectuals responded to the Doniger imbroglio by lamenting "the pulping of liberal India" and the "Talibanization" of the world's largest democracy. "The argumentative Indian is being replaced by the offended Indian," wrote political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta, "the tolerant Indian by the intolerant mob."Penguin responded by invoking its "moral responsibility to protect our employees against threats and harassment," and the need to "respect the laws of the land in which it operates, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be."Other Indian intellectuals — including thousands of signers of a petition published last week in The Hindu — called for legal reform, focusing on the Indian Penal Code's Section 295A, which, by criminalizing "malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings," has invited an epidemic of the piously aggrieved.The Hindus' banishment from India is emboldening the culture warriors who claim to speak on behalf of all Hindus (and are now vowing to go after other Doniger books). But this is not a victory for "Hinduism" over its American despisers. It is a victory of one group of Hindus over another.In The Hindus, which exudes love of scholarship and love of the Hindu tradition, I hear a voice, reminiscent of that famous question of the African-American abolitionist Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a woman?" "Ain't I a Hindu?" it says, in the voices of the millions of believers whom Hindu fundamentalists are determined to silence.

Stephen Prothero is a Boston University religion professor and the author of God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions that Run the World.

[Prem]

Asia’s New Security Trifecta
JASWANT SINGH
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commen ... -and-japan

NEW DELHI – Winter is India’s diplomatic high season, with the cool, sunny weather forming an ideal backdrop for pageantry, photo ops at the Taj Mahal or Delhi’s Red Fort, and bilateral deal-making. But this winter has been particularly impressive, with leaders from Japan and South Korea visiting to advance the cause of security cooperation in Asia.CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphThe first to arrive was South Korean President Park Geun-hye. Despite a strong economic foundation, the bilateral relationship has long lacked a meaningful security dimension. But China’s recent assertiveness – including its unilateral declaration last November of a new Air Defense Identification Zone, which overlaps about 3,000 square kilometers of South Korea’s own ADIZ, in the Sea of Japan – has encouraged Park to shore up her country’s security ties with India.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphNorth Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s unpredictable and often provocative policies represent an additional impetus for improved ties – as do China’s increasingly visible plans to weaken South Korea’s alliance with the United States. Not surprisingly, the discussions during Park’s four-day visit focused on grand strategy, and included detailed talks on maritime security and naval shipbuilding.
Nuclear energy also featured prominently on the agenda, owing to both countries’ dependence on energy imported through dangerous sea-lanes. In 2008, South Korea, as a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group, supported the waiver granting India access to civilian nuclear technology and fuel from other countries – both of which it had been denied since becoming a nuclear-weapons power in 1974. Indeed, India’s nuclear tests are what initially spurred the NSG’s formation. South Korea’s support of India’s civilian nuclear ambitions earned it high praise in India and helped to advance bilateral civilian nuclear cooperation.This budding strategic partnership is undoubtedly important. But when it comes to the regional balance of power, India’s deepening ties with Japan are even more consequential. India’s relationship with the United States has been faltering of late, following the arrest and mistreatment of an Indian consular official in New York, its ties with Japan are flourishing. The visit last December of Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko was the clearest sign yet of a de facto alliance between the two democracies.The imperial couple last visited India more than a half-century ago, as Crown Prince and Princess, when India was part of the non-aligned movement and Japan was happy with a security guarantee from the US. But, with China’s rise having shifted Asia’s balance of power, Indian and Japanese leaders have been seeking new security assurances, and the visit by the Emperor and Empress was the clearest signal Japan could send concerning the value it places on this emerging alliance.
The search for greater security was even more explicit in January, when Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera spent four days in India discussing the specifics of enhanced defense cooperation. During the meeting, Onodera and his Indian counterpart affirmed their countries’ intention to “strengthen the Strategic and Global Partnership between Japan and India,” including “measures ranging from regular joint-combat exercises and military exchanges to cooperation in anti-piracy, maritime security, and counter-terrorism.” In fact, later this year, bilateral naval exercises will be held in Japanese waters for the first time – sending a powerful signal to China.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphBut Indo-Japanese relations must extend beyond the realm of security – something that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has pursued enhanced bilateral ties more vigorously than any other Japanese leader, seems to grasp. Convinced that a strong India is in Japan’s best interests, and vice versa, Abe hopes to create a new “arc of freedom and prosperity” connecting Asia’s two major democratic economies.While Abe could have done more during his recent visit to India to advance this vision –for example, by meeting with Indian opposition leader Narendra Modi, who may become the country’s next prime minister – it seems certain that such a relationship will be achieved in the coming years. Japan has already surpassed the US as one of India’s largest sources of foreign direct investment, accounting for inflows totaling $2.2 billion last year. And the two countries recently tripled their US dollar currency-swap arrangement, bringing it to $50 billion.
CommentsView/Create comment on this paragraphAbe, India’s chief guest at this year’s Republic Day celebrations, also rightly views enhanced trade as a key element in deepening the bilateral relationship, thereby contributing to substantially increased security. But bilateral trade amounted to only $18.4 billion in 2011-2012 – far smaller than India-China trade and a pittance compared to Japan-China trade.
Even with a significant deepening of ties, however, bilateral relationships alone will be inadequate to counterbalance China. Achieving an internal Asian balance of power will require India, Japan, and South Korea to build a tripartite security arrangement, which can be achieved only if Japanese and South Korean leaders overcome their historical animosities.As Winston Churchill declared in his famous 1946 speech in Zurich, “We cannot afford to drag forward across the years that are to come the hatreds and revenges which have sprung from the injuries of the past.” Just as France and Germany pursued reconciliation in order to build a better future in the years following Churchill’s declaration, Japan and South Korea must learn to tame the hatreds and injuries of the past in order to build, with India, a structure of peace and a more prosperous future for Asia.

[Rony]

India witnessing NGO boom, there is 1 for every 600 people

For a country which till recently had a weak civil society movement, India is now witnessing a boom in the NGO sector. With a population of 1.2 billion, the country could well be the land of opportunities for non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with the Central Bureau of Investigation conservatively estimating 20 lakh of them already operating in states and union territories.

The mind-boggling figures boil down to one NGO per every 600 people. Compare this to the latest government data on police. According to the latest figures from the Union home ministry, India has just one policeman for every 943 people.

But there is an accountability deficit among the NGOs. And that's how CBI got into the picture as the Supreme Court responded to a PIL. Many don't submit details of receipt of grant and spending to income tax authorities, the CBI told the apex court.

On the SC's order, the CBI sought information from the states and UTs about operation of NGOs and status of audit of their funds. Major states — Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Delhi, Haryana, Karnataka, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Chhattisgarh and Himachal Pradesh — have provided no data about the number of NGOs operating in their territory.

Without the statistics from these major states, the CBI was informed by other states about the existence of 13 lakh NGOs making the agency conservatively estimate that their number could go well be over 20 lakh. In Uttar Pradesh alone 5,48,194 NGOs are operating.

Kerala had 3,69,137 NGOs, Maharashtra 1,07,797, Madhya Pradesh 1,40,000 and Gujarat has 75,729 NGOs. While Kerala and Maharashtra have given details of finances of the NGOs operating in their area, Madhya Pradesh gave partial information about their funding. Gujarat was completely silent.

According to information received through RTI queries by Asian Centre for Human Rights, the Union and state governments between 2002-09 released Rs 6654 crore to various NGOs, averaging almost Rs 950 crore per year.

For the financial year 2010-11, available data show that about 22,000 NGOs received a total of more than $2 billion from abroad, of which $650 million came from the US.

On a PIL filed by advocate M L Sharma alleging misuse of funds by Anna Hazare's NGO Hind Swaraj Trust (HST), a bench headed by Justice H L Dattu had last year asked additional solicitor general Sidharth Luthra to engage the CBI to find out details of the funding of NGOs across the country and whether these were filing their income tax returns.

From the information made available by the state governments and presented in tabular form by the CBI to the Supreme Court, it was apparent that most NGOs had not filed income tax returns regularly.

Responding to Sharma's PIL alleging that large amounts of government funds were being doled out without taking proper account of utilization of grants by NGOs, Council for Advancement of People's Action and Rural Technology (Capart) in an affidavit denied any wrongdoing by HST and annexed an audited account for the utilization of Rs 1 lakh.

Capart had given a grant of Rs 1 lakh to Hazare-led HST for watershed development in three villages in 1999-2001,but more than 90% of the money was spent on honorarium, travelling, printing and stationery, the Supreme Court was told.

In two years, the trust spent Rs 63,243 on paying honorarium, Rs 20,347.50 was accounted towards travel expenses and Rs 6,487.50 was spent on printing and stationery. This means, of the Rs 1 lakh granted for watershed development in three villages, the trust spent Rs 90,078 on honorarium, travelling and printing and stationery.

Capart functions under the ministry of rural development and assists over 12,000 voluntary organizations across the country in implementing a wide range of development initiatives.

[svinayak]

Talbott few years ago even mention that they will use NGOs to bring revolution inside India

[Prem]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26379739
Subrata Roy: India detains Sahara group chief

One of India's most flamboyant tycoons, Subrata Roy, has been taken into police custody after surrendering himself for arrest in a fraud case.The Supreme Court ordered the arrest of the Sahara group chief when he failed to appear before judges on Wednesday.Two Sahara firms are accused of raising 240bn rupees ($3.9bn; £2.3bn) through illegal bonds.Market regulators say Mr Roy failed to refund money to millions of investors despite a court order.He was remanded to police custody until 4 March when it is expected the Supreme Court will hear the case.Indian media reports say he has requested to be kept under house arrest.

[JE Menon]

Talbott few years ago even mention that they will use NGOs to bring revolution inside India

Any source for this? By "they" did he mean the US?

[Lilo]

Amnesty International said Tuesday’s decision piles pressure on the government to abolish the death penalty altogether.
“India must now do away with the death penalty—a cruel, inconsistent and irreversible form of punishment that has no proven deterrent effect on crime,” senior researcher Divya Iyer said in a statement. AFP

This focus on abolishing of death penalty by busybodies apparently oblivious to the conditions in their own jails and capital punishments back home (as in massa for example) is quite a curious thing.
So why so much khujli for something as rare a punishment (in Indian context) ?
For example till kasab was hanged, it was a grand total of 1 execution for 17 years !!

Indian courts awarded death penalty to 1,455 convicts from 2001-11, an average of around 132 convicts per year. But an overwhelming number of death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment during this period.

The only convict to be executed during this period was Dhananjoy Chatterjee who was hanged(in 2004) for the murder and rape of a 14-year old girl in Kolkata. This was the country’s first execution since April 27, 1995, when Auto Shankar, a serial killer, was executed in Salem, Tamil Nadu..

http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-new ... 21884.aspx

Methinks the only plausible explanation in light of above is that these Western agents want to reassure their networks of assorted spies and traitors in desh that their life and limb will be ultimately guaranteed with full foreign force once their case gets involved with Indian Justice system.

Above intent clearly shows in the stands peddled in Western media especially by Briturd based Al-Guardian ,PeePeeCee (through the regular opeds by sahibs and brown sahibs repoduced in their local influence peddlers like Al-Chindu etal).
Briturds afterall have one of the largest and most complex networks of spies and subverters operating in Indian Society continuing since preindependence Raj.

The long due fitting response would be to change Indian Law to make it mandatory that the mercy petition(if any) be processed and sentence executed -say within 2 years in all cases where conviction and death sentensing was based upon section 121(Waging, or attempting to wage war, or abetting waging of war, against Govt of India) with additional rider for enforcing the expedited process being that the crime was deemed to have been committed with help and encouragement from foreign powers.

If above type law comes into force , believe me - all this feigned outrage about the death penalty in India pushed by Western powers will die a natural death at least in our local newsprint.

[JE Menon]

Cross-posted from Indo-US Thread

______________________________________________
American University Prepares for Riots in India

The University of California at Berkeley has set up a project to “create a policy and protocol framework for protecting people’s rights in situations of internal armed conflict and mass violence” in India.

Their website is http://nonprofit.haas.berkeley.edu/rese ... objectives
It is claimed that “The project will avoid taking positions on political questions, focusing instead on human rights and humanitarian concerns”. However, the composition and well-known records of their staff raise some concerns.

The stated aim of the “Armed Conflict Resolution And People's Rights Project”, is “creating a policy and protocol framework for protecting people’s rights”. It is set up by the Center for Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, near San Francisco. The Center is one of two under the Institute for Business and Social Impact under the Haas School. The Center lists 15 faculty. The Center Director is Dr. Nora Silver, listed as an Adjunct Professor at the Haas School. Her own project under the Center deals with Multi-Sector Leadership and Non-Profit Networks.

The Co-Chairs of the Armed Conflict Resolution project are Dr. Shashi Buluswar and Dr. Angana Chatterji. Dr. Buluswar is a Senior Fellow in International Development at the Haas School. He is prominent in the ASHANGO which raises funds for projects in India. He also holds a position as Executive Director of the Lawrence Berkeley Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is operated under a Department of Energy contract by the University of California. Dr. Buluswar’s research area at the Haas School of Business is listed as “Armed Conflict in India”. Dr. Chatterji is not on the School’s list of 278 “faculty and executive leadership”.

The project lists a Working Group including Rajvinder Singh Bains, Lawyer, Punjab High Court and Haryana High Court, Mihir Desai, Lawyer, Mumbai High Court and Supreme Court of India, Meenakshi Ganguly, Human Rights Policy Expert and South Asia Director, Human Rights Watch, Parvez Imroz, Lawyer, Jammu & Kashmir High Court and President, Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, Srinagar, Harsh Mander, Director, Center for Equity Studies, Delhi, Jaykumar Menon, Legal Expert and Professor of Practice, McGill University, Binalakshmi Nepram, Founder, Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, Delhi and Manipur, Sudhir Pattnaik, Human Rights Expert and Editor of Samadrusti, a human rights news magazine, Bhubaneswar, Teesta Setalvad, Secretary, Citizens for Justice and Peace, Mumbai.

Partner institutions include the Institute for the Study of Human Rights; Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability, Columbia University, Asian Legal Resource Center, Hong Kong (holding general consultative status with the Economic and Social Council, United Nations), Asian Human Rights Commission, Hong Kong, Center for Equity Studies, Delhi, Manipur Women Gun Survivors Network, Prashant Center for Human Rights, Justice, and Peace, Gujarat, Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, Jammu & Kashmir, Khalra Mission Organization, Punjab, Indian American Muslim Council, Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances, Philippines.

Scholar-Affiliates are Paramjit Kaur Khalra, Khalra Mission Organization, Punjab, and Robert Nickelsberg, Photojournalist, New York.

The Project’s Advisory Group includes Amitava Kumar, Vassar College, Homi K. Bhabha, Harvard University, Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College, Khurram Parvez, Program Coordinator, Jammu & Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, Srinagar, Vinay Lal, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Los Angeles.Quoting the project website: The Working Group plans to “engage with affected communities, and periodically engage with members of the Government of India and the Parliament of India”….Opportunities for Students: The project is engaging exceptional graduate students and select undergraduate students from UC Berkeley, Stanford University, other institutions, and from impacted communities in India and the Indian Diaspora in the U.S. The project will engage age-appropriate youth from affected communities in the work of creating archives, experimenting with photography and videography, and documenting remembrance.”

A Few Issues

1. The project list reads like a “Who’s Who” of the Forum of Indian/Inquilabi Leftists (FOIL), and the “Coalition Against Genocide” (CAG), a loose coalition of groups including the FOIL and IAMC. Members of this Coalition have been associated with the Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence Agency, and other suspected connections to international organizations as well as political parties, particularly the Indian National Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist/Leninist/Maoist) and to Evangelist Christian organizations and their activist arms such as the Christian Aid group. There are some suspected links to foreign terrorist organizations such as the Khalistan groups, the SIMI, through the Indian Muslim Council, the Maoists in India, to secessionist groups active in Jammu-Kashmir, and to interests in Odisha and Chattisgarh. The FOIL and CAG have been studied in articles in the early 2000s, in the book titled “NGOs and Foreign Funding: Anti-National Industry” edited by Kishan Kak and Radha Rajanand a recent report by the Hindu American Foundation. In 1997-2002, Ms. Teesta Setalwad’s “Sabrang” organization channeled funds to the FOIL to develop a “5-year comprehensive research report” that attacked the India Development and Relief Fund. Dr. Angana Chatterji was a primary author of that report. Dr. Vinay Lal was the spokesman for the FOIL. The attack was proven to be baseless. The thorough debunking of that report was published in the book “IDRF: Let the Facts Speak”. Since then, the FOIL has reorganized on several occasions to launch campaigns, generally against India and particularly against the government of Gujarat.

2. It may be useful to remember the past.In October 2001, while the world was in upheaval after the 9/11 attacks in the USA, and Pakistani terrorism was spiking in Kashmir, the Oberlin College Trust in Ohio announced a conference to be held in April 2002, titled: “Siting Secularism in India”. The Oberlin Foundation, a Christian missionary organization, has excellent relations with the Shanxi University in China, with specific approval from the government of the PRC. (see http://shansi.org/about-shansi/history/ for a recently sanitized version). Around that time, the FOIL seemed to have received a sudden influx of funding, and started an active campaign. They hurriedly revived their dormant publication, “Ghadar” citing the urgent need to get organized and conduct a media campaign, since they expected “a loud noise that will be heard around the world” or words to that effect. In January they held a meeting in Maryland, USA. The Siting Secularism in India conference occurred just a few weeks after the events of late February 2002, with many visitors from the US, India, UK and France, most of them with Communist/Islamist leanings. The only business at that conference for which any record can be found, is an Oberlin Resolution condemning the government of India for alleged genocide against minorities. Those who remember this, find the parallels with the present Project to be chilling. We wonder what “loud noise” is anticipated this time. Note that we have no evidence to link any of these entities directly to any violence, and are not claiming any. However, their apparent foresight and timing seem remarkable.

3. Dr. Angana Chatterji’s activities and visits in India have perhaps coincidentally, preceded violence in the parts where she focused her activities. Examples are Gujarat, Chattisgarh, Odisha, and Jammu-Kashmir.

4. Circa 2010, Dr. Chatterji and her US citizen husband Dr. Richard Shapiro, were asked to terminate their visit to Jammu-Kashmir. Shapiro was asked to leave India, and later denied a visa to enter India.

5. On July 19, 2011, Ghulam Nabi Fai, Kashmir activist in the USA, was indicted in US Federal Court for being an agent of the Pakistani ISI. The indictment listed his contacts with/ funding of a woman code-named “Mary” for making a presentation before a UN panel, presenting the Pakistani point of view on Jammu-Kashmir. In May 2011, Dr. Chatterji made a presentation to a UN Panel to raise Kashmir issues. On July 19, 2011, the California Institute for Integral Studies suspended Drs. Chatterji and Shapiro, tenured full professors (he was Department Head), citing financial and other irregularities. Both were later dismissed after faculty hearings. CIIS denied any link to their outside activities.

6. Although the project claims to develop policies and protocols for nations around the world, there is no indication of any activities directed at any nation other than India.

7. The project claims interest in various troubled parts of India, including Jammu-Kashmir, Odisha, Chattisgarh, the Northeast, and Punjab. The inclusion of Teesta Setalwad and Harsh Mander suggest that the main interest is in Gujarat. Ms. Setalwad has several allegations filed against her in India and has sought anticipatory bail again. Mr. Mander, during and after his tenure as IAS officer, has a history of association with the British NGO Action Aid, which shares origins and close synergy with Christian Aid, which is active in conversions in the tribal regions of Gujarat and elsewhere in India.

8. The Lok Sabha elections in India are only two and a half months away.


Some Questions
1. Who is sponsoring this project?

2. Who are the Members of the Indian Parliament and other lawmakers in India that this project intends to “engage” or co-opt? Have they already been approached and have they agreed? Are they also sponsoring it?

3. Given the background of Ms. Teesta Setalwad’s fundraising and past activities, is the Congress Party funding this enterprise as well?

4. Why are such Protocols and Policies for India, the largest sovereign democracy in the world, being developed in America, and by a group that has a clearly one-sided political bias and record?

5. Why is a person whose primary employment is with a US Federal Laboratory focused on bringing science to public welfare, engaged in such a project which has clear overtones and undertones of interfering in the politics/public policy dealing with internal armed conflict of a friendly foreign nation?

6. Why is this project within Dr. Buluswar’s or the LBNL’s mandate?

7. Why is this project dealing with making protocols for armed conflict, sited within a Business School?

8. Why is the staffing of such a project done exclusively with people who have such a colored record, with no effort to strike a balance between law enforcement interests and secessionist/subversive interests?

9. Is the University of California, Berkeley, aware of Dr. Angana Chatterji’s prior activities involving Kashmir and the United Nations, among others?



APPENDIX: Quotes from the website
http://nonprofit.haas.berkeley.edu/rese ... ml#Network

“This project seeks to create a policy and protocol framework for protecting people’s rights in situations of internal armed conflict and mass violence. Interdisciplinary in practice and rooted in local knowledge, this project seeks to define steps in conflict resolution through capacity building for psychosocial healing and the amelioration of abuses. In so doing, we contend with the condition of violence and the contested terrain of human rights and transitional justice.

India serves as a case in point, given that several diverse parts of the country are beset by armed conflict. Civilian populations—especially children, youth, women and minorities—suffer in the absence of adequate governance, access to responsible development, and the preservation of human rights.

The National Human Rights Commission of India, in its submission to the UN Human Rights Council for India’s Second Universal Periodic Review (2008), stated: “There are inordinate delays in the provision of justice... There is still no national action plan for human rights.”

Drawing on international, regional, and local expertise, the project aims to develop two inter-related but separate outputs: a Policy document and several Protocols.

Contemporary conflicts and transitional contexts will inform the development of this policy and the protocols.

The regions of Jammu & Kashmir, Manipur, and Chhattisgarh are differently but persistently affected by conflict, with conflict-related issues intermittently occurring in Punjab. Additionally, areas such as Gujarat and Odisha have been impacted by far-reaching violence on minority communities in recent history.

These conflicts are spurred by a myriad of issues, including cultural and communal identity, religionization, self-determination, and economic empowerment. Such conflicts can have far-reaching human impact and lead to intense psychosocial and economic suffering of civilian populations in the affected areas, collapse of responsible governance, development, and social protection mechanisms, and can also have a broader disruptive effect impacting national, regional, and global security.

The importance of this project lies in the fact that nothing close to a policy framework with attendant protocols currently exists in India that protects civilians and their rights in areas of armed conflict and mass violence, in a way that is consistent with India’s legal, ethical, and constitutional obligations, even as brutal conflicts and suffering continue.

If such a policy framework is adopted in India, and appropriate technical protocols are implemented with the aid and participation of civil society and affected populations, it would serve as a model for other countries.”



Objectives

In the development of the Policy and Protocols, this project will focus on questions of transitional and transformative justice.

These questions pertain to issues of access to justice and conflict resolution; accountability and human rights; governance and the rule of law; gendered violence; minority rights; religious freedom; memory and healing; commitment to nonviolence; mechanisms for restitution and redressal; and people’s rights and humanitarian considerations during and after conflict; as well as multi-sectoral approaches, including involving education technology and social enterprise, toward inclusive development.

Policy and Protocols:

The Policy will be a document proposing a general course of action with the long-term goal of justice and stability across the country.

The Protocols --blueprints of standards and steps for accountability and reparation pertaining to healing through reparatory, transitional, and transformative justice in areas of current conflict and post-conflict--will be specific to the issues presented by various conflicts in India. Topics of the protocols will include:

• Gendered violence and human rights during armed conflict and massified violence.
• Casualties and missing persons.
• Supporting survivors through holding all parties to the conflict accountable (army, paramilitary, police, and non-state armed groups).
• Impunity laws and failures of legal justice.
• Historical dialogue and alliance-building.
• Social trauma, memory, and psychosocial restitution.
• Humanitarian and socioeconomic development, such as women’s health, and access to education.

In the course of producing these outputs, the project will involve those affected by conflict in conceiving redress. It will initiate cross-cultural dialogue. The project will facilitate remembrance and documentation, and undertake to create an archive and web-based memorialization installations. It will involve progressive civil society and the next generation in India, the Diaspora, and the global community in dialogue on peace, nonviolence, and justice. The project will initiate pilot processes through which to identify mechanisms for psychosocial restitution and humanitarian efforts.

The project will draw on diverse and plural imaginations of rights and justice in local, customary, and global traditions, in creating a framework for acknowledgement and remorse, accountability and justice, and healing and restitution.

The project will avoid taking positions on political questions, focusing instead on human rights and humanitarian concerns.”

[Prem]

Which Countries Spend the Most Time Reading?
Ever wonder which countries around the world spend the most time reading?
Index Here : Hoshiar, Khabardar, More Internet Hindus Coming

India leads the list with citizens of the country spending an average of 10.42 hours a week reading per person, according to the NOP World Culture Score Index. Thailand was a close second with 9.24 hours spent reading each week. China came in third with 8 hours a week spent reading.The U.S. came in No. 22 on the list with the average time spent reading per week per person clocking in at 5 hours and 42 minutes.We’ve embedded World Culture Score Index’s infographic after the jump for you to explore further.

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/wh ... ing_b83221

[Prem]

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commen ... -of-living
From Poverty to Empowerment

MUMBAI – As India gears up for its general election next month, it has some cause to celebrate: extreme poverty is finally in retreat. In 2012 – two decades after the government launched a series of economic reforms aimed at opening up the economy – the official poverty rate had reached 22%, less than half the rate in 1994. But it is time for India to raise its aspirations. Escaping abject destitution, though an important milestone, is not the same as achieving a decent standard of living and sense of economic security. To that end, there is still much to be done.Indeed, the extent of the task is reflected in a new McKinsey Global Institute report, “From Poverty to Empowerment,” which uses an innovative analytical framework, the “empowerment line,” to estimate the cost to the average citizen of fulfilling eight basic needs: food, energy, housing, potable water, sanitation, health care, education, and social security. According to this metric, 56% of Indians in 2012 “lacked the means to meet essential needs.”Remarkably, this number is more than 2.5 times larger than the number of people still living below the poverty line in India. Even more striking is that the “empowerment gap” – that is, the additional consumption required to bring these 680 million people to the empowerment line – is seven times larger than the cost of eliminating extreme poverty.
Furthermore, while the empowerment line is a measure of individual consumption, a household’s ability or willingness to spend is not sufficient to guarantee a decent life. People also need access to community-level infrastructure like health clinics, schools, power grids, and sanitation systems. But the average Indian household lacks access to 46% of basic services, with the severity of the gaps varying widely across districts.What can India’s government do to provide its citizens with the dignity, comfort, and security that they deserve? Given that roughly half of current public spending on social programs fails to deliver better outcomes for the poor, simply directing more funds through existing channels is unlikely to have much of an impact.Instead, policymakers should focus on supporting employment and productivity gains – historically the most potent weapons against poverty. Of course, this will not be easy. India’s economy has slowed in recent years. If economic growth remains on its current trajectory, with no major reforms, more than one-third of the population will remain below the empowerment line in 2022, with 12% still trapped in extreme poverty.
To avoid such an outcome, India’s government should pursue a set of bold reforms that boost growth by encouraging businesses to invest, scale up, and hire. The reform agenda should be based on four key priorities:The addition of 115 million non-agricultural jobs over the next decade to absorb the growing pool of workers and accelerate the shift toward more modern industries.A doubling of agricultural productivity growth, in order to raise India’s farm yields to the levels achieved in other emerging Asian countries. A doubling of real (inflation-adjusted) public spending on social services over ten years, with much of the increase allocated to fill gaps in health care, the provision of clean drinking water, and sanitation.
An overhaul of social-service delivery.
With the right set of measures, more than half a billion people could cross the threshold of consumption required for an economically empowered life, and Indians could gain access to more than 80% of the basic services they need by 2022. Jobs and productivity growth could contribute 75% of the potential gains, while increased public spending alone, without measures to improve its effectiveness, would contribute less than 10%.To realize this potential, policymakers should eliminate arcane regulations that handcuff businesses; accelerate infrastructure projects; make the labor market more flexible; remove market distortions; and expand vocational training for the poor and uneducated. At the same time, they should work to place the efficiency of all public spending on par with that in India’s best-performing states.All of this demands a strong commitment to better governance and a relentless focus on outcomes. Common-sense strategies – such as improving coordination among the plethora of ministries and departments that comprise the bureaucracy, and establishing accountable and empowered agencies to deliver results in high-priority areas – could go a long way toward meeting this demand. Moreover, technology could be used to streamline government services and render them more transparent. Finally, closer engagement with private- and social-sector actors and local communities could help to increase efficiency, while reducing the burden on the public sector.India’s young and dynamic population is demanding a better quality of life. With strong and sustained political will and results-oriented policies, India’s government can deliver it.

[ramana]

SHQ complains its more than 10.5 hours a week that.

[Prem]

Is the sari staging a comeback in urban India?

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26373993

nside almost every Indian woman's wardrobe, you will find a sari - the long, and usually colourful piece of cotton or silk used to drape around the body.In urban India, the garment has lost its prominence in recent years - with more and more women opting to wear western outfits.I only wore a sari twice last year - but that was still more than most of my friends: the sari has become less of a staple, and more an elaborate piece of clothing worn only at weddings or other traditional ceremonies.It is not that the sari is a difficult piece of clothing to work in: My mother wears a sari every day. She has trekked in the Himalayas, ridden camels in Rajasthan and gone boating in Kerala wearing one.She has more than 500 saris and often dares me to wear one.So why is that younger women - especially in urban India - find the sari so difficult to wear?Ms Malhotra says there are signs the sari is coming back into style.

"We know everything there is to know about saris," she tells the BBC. "We have been doing this for four generations. But what's happening now has taken us by surprise."Suddenly there is this whole new crowd of young women, much younger than me, coming in to the store to buy saris. They wear it to parties and outings! This never happened earlier."Surprisingly, few women I know can actually wear a sari which, as five-and-half metres (18ft) of unstitched fabric, can be difficult to arrange.Many neighbourhood beauty salons offer a sari draping service for 150 rupees ($2.40; £1.45).But Ms Malhotra insists that I try on a sari in the store.First I put on a waist belt, before an assistant helps me fold the pleats of a beautiful green sari and drapes it around me in minutes.Giving tradition a twistWhile it was exquisite, the fabric was too rich and traditional for my taste.My mum came up with a solution, suggesting I make my own sari.I went to fashion designers Shivan Bhatiya and Narresh Kukreja, who have designed a rather unique product - a bikini sari, which can be worn on the beach or in the water.It is what the Delhi-based swimwear designers came up with when women started asking them for something that was modest but still appropriate for the beach.
Starting at a price of $600, it is not cheap. But Narresh Kukreja says the sari remains the backbone of the Indian fashion industry because it is always open for evolution."The sari is being reinvented for... the changing mind-set of the Indian travel customer or the holiday-goer," he says. "It's yet another way of making the sari even more viable in today's wardrobe and not losing such a fantastic garment from our roots."But while changing sari fashions are unavoidable, the traditional style has survived generations of fashion cycles.

[ramana]

Tell that to Bollywood!

MD on Comedy Circus with Kapil was looking ridiculous and had to change channels.

Also could be effect of Turdpal and his ilk mindset about women in Western clothes as ready meat for taking.

[abhishek_sharma]

link

“On Hinduism” (Oxford University Press), by Wendy Doniger, out March 3rd. For more than a decade, Doniger’s scholarship has been under attack by conservative Hindu groups who feel that her work misrepresents and insults their religion; last month, her eight-hundred-page book “The Hindus: An Alternative History” was pulled from bookstores in India. (Read Jonathan Shainin on Doniger and censorship.) Her latest book, “On Hinduism,” which is in its second printing in India, is a collection of essays and lectures addressing contemporary and historic debates surrounding the religion, from the ethical implications of Hindu cosmologies to gender inversions in the Kama Sutra. Dinanath Batra, the man who filed the suit against “The Hindus,” has said that he intends to take aim at “On Hinduism” next.—R.A.

[SanjayC]

After Penguin, another publisher recalls Wendy Doniger's book

BANGALORE: Within weeks of Penguin controversially recalling Wendy Doniger's book, 'The Hindus: An Alternative History', another publisher, Aleph, pulled out the American author's previous work, 'On Hinduism', on Tuesday. Bookshops across Bangalore received calls from representatives of Aleph Book Company, promoted by Rupa Publications, seeking return of all copies of the book.

Confirming the move, an Aleph spokesman said, "We don't want to get involved in any controversy. Officials from our Delhi office sent a clear message to us — recall all copies of 'On Hinduism' we had sold to across Karnataka. We got back about 100 copies till Tuesday evening."

'On Hinduism' was published in 2013 while 'The Hindus: An Alternative History' was published in 2009. Mayi Gowda of Blossom Book House told TOI that the publisher sought the return all copies of the book. On Monday, this bookshop had sold all 95 copies of the book following renewed interest in Doniger's work post- Penguin's withdrawal of 'An Alternative History'.

Another city bookshop, Bookworm, said it returned a few copies of the book Tuesday morning. The staff at different book shops said they got emails from the publisher seeking their cooperation.

Advocate Lawrence Liang of the Bangalore-based Alternative Law Forum, who had filed a legal notice on Penguin India over the withdrawal of Doniger's book, described Aleph's step as "terrible".

"It's absolutely shameful and ridiculous. If you want a publisher to withdraw a book, all you have to do is file a police complaint. Reading has no future in this country," Liang said.

'The Hindus' had been recalled by Penguin following protests by a little-known organization' Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, on grounds that its contents were "derogatory and offensive to Hinduism" and misrepresented facts. The Samiti upped the ante last week and demanded 'On Hinduism' be withdrawn as well, as it too was "malicious and offending."

[gandharva]

[ramana]

When Texas in US is producing Texas Basmati!

[ramana]

A_Gupta, While reading the India-Uk thread came across the British 'historian' talking about non-violence/violence duality in Indian freedom struggle at IP Desai Memorial Lecture in Surat.
Here is a link to the Centre for Social Studies, IP Desai memorial Lectures

Looks like JNU has spread its tentacles far and wide:

http://www.css.ac.in/ip_desailecturer.asp

[svinayak]

After Penguin, another publisher recalls Wendy Doniger's book

BANGALORE: Within weeks of Penguin controversially recalling Wendy Doniger's book, 'The Hindus: An Alternative History', another publisher, Aleph, pulled out the American author's previous work, 'On Hinduism', on Tuesday. Bookshops across Bangalore received calls from representatives of Aleph Book Company, promoted by Rupa Publications, seeking return of all copies of the book.

Confirming the move, an Aleph spokesman said, "We don't want to get involved in any controversy. Officials from our Delhi office sent a clear message to us — recall all copies of 'On Hinduism' we had sold to across Karnataka. We got back about 100 copies till Tuesday evening."

'On Hinduism' was published in 2013 while 'The Hindus: An Alternative History' was published in 2009. Mayi Gowda of Blossom Book House told TOI that the publisher sought the return all copies of the book. On Monday, this bookshop had sold all 95 copies of the book following renewed interest in Doniger's work post- Penguin's withdrawal of 'An Alternative History'.

Another city bookshop, Bookworm, said it returned a few copies of the book Tuesday morning. The staff at different book shops said they got emails from the publisher seeking their cooperation.

Advocate Lawrence Liang of the Bangalore-based Alternative Law Forum, who had filed a legal notice on Penguin India over the withdrawal of Doniger's book, described Aleph's step as "terrible".

"It's absolutely shameful and ridiculous. If you want a publisher to withdraw a book, all you have to do is file a police complaint. Reading has no future in this country," Liang said.

'The Hindus' had been recalled by Penguin following protests by a little-known organization' Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, on grounds that its contents were "derogatory and offensive to Hinduism" and misrepresented facts. The Samiti upped the ante last week and demanded 'On Hinduism' be withdrawn as well, as it too was "malicious and offending."

What about the books published by Oxford Universities over many centuries on Hinduism

Also who will call out on University research on Sociology studies done on Hindu society

What about Indian studies programs in the west which have been derogatory on Hindus in perticular

[Karan M]

I am loving this. Good stuff. These racist turds have peddled their hate literature freely all this while assuming hindus are gungadins who will always be deferential. Kudos to Mr Batra.

[ramana]

Wonder if we need a thread to rebut Wendy Doggerel's phantasies?

[Prem]

The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary

True Specimen Of Sanskritic Sansakars

He managed to convince 20 students to try out his pads - but it still didn't quite work out. On the day he came to collect their feedback sheets he caught three of the girls industriously filling them all in. These results obviously could not be relied on. It was then that he decided to test the products on himself. "I became the man who wore a sanitary pad," he says. He created a "uterus" from a football bladder by punching a couple of holes in it, and filling it with goat's blood. A former classmate, a butcher, would ring his bicycle bell outside the house whenever he was going to kill a goat. Muruganantham would collect the blood and mix in an additive he got from another friend at a blood bank to prevent it clotting too quickly - but it didn't stop the smell. He walked, cycled and ran with the football bladder under his traditional clothes, constantly pumping blood out to test his sanitary pad's absorption rates. Everyone thought he'd gone mad. My wife gone, my mum gone, ostracised by my village - I was left all alone in life” He used to wash his bloodied clothes at a public well and the whole village concluded he had a sexual disease. Friends crossed the road to avoid him. "I had become a pervert," he says. At the same time, his wife got fed up - and left. "So you see God's sense of humour," he says in the documentary Menstrual Man by Amit Virmani. "I'd started the research for my wife and after 18 months she left me!"

[Atri]

Shri. Atal Bihari Vajpayee in mid 80s. At his pristine best.

[Prem]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2014/03/04/6565/
Sparking Curiosity And Creativity To Ignite Change In Rural India

One development problem in India that has been largely overlooked is what Ramji Raghavan calls the “chalk and talk” educational mindset, in which students learn based on rote memorization, which has stifled creativity and critical thinking. Many consider this to be a holdover from British colonization, but Raghavan believes the time is now to solve this issue, and he has dedicated his life to this very cause.Raghavan asked the daring questions: How can decades of a deeply entrenched system be unbound, and the potential of the people at its center unleashed? How can a new kind of education be created—one that works within the existing system and utilizes the best community resources—to celebrate teachers and students as change agents? And how can this meet critical development needs while leveraging the power of every day changemakers?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sn2U8FkG ... r_embedded

[Agnimitra]

X-post from Afghanistan thread:

Interesting article to appear in an Afghan news publication:

Pakistan’s mysterious love for Indian anti-corruption crusaders

[Prem]

Another NAC screw Up?
Why India's landmark education law is shutting down schools

In an unauthorised colony of labourers in Delhi, a class of six-year-olds is reciting English, a language their parents hope will get them jobs in call centres and offices.But later this month the classes will stop. Ramditi JRN Deepalaya is among hundreds of small private schools - which have multiplied in India selling education at 100 rupees ($1.6; 96 pence) a month - that are being forced to sound the final bell because they do not comply with a law which makes education a fundamental right for children.
When the Right To Education (RTE) law was introduced in 2009 it was hailed as a major step to bridging the cavernous gap between the education of rich and poor in India.The law mandated education as a human right that should be free and compulsory for children from six to 14 years of age and ordered schools to have infrastructure like playgrounds and girls' toilets. But now critics say the landmark legislation is hurting those it was made to help - by forcing private schools in slums and poor areas to shut because they lack the space and finances to change.Sangeeta Pillai (left) complains her daughter is 'suffering' in a crowded government school Baladevan Rangaraju, director of think tank India Institute, who has been monitoring media reports, has counted 2,692 schools shut and 17,871 at risk. Critics of the law say that while far from perfect, India's bargain-price schools have been producing better performing students, while government schools have gained a reputation for teachers that don't show up for class and most don't offer the coveted English-medium tuition.A rural survey found that private students performed better in reading and math than government students.The Annual Survey of Education (ASER) also highlighted the shift to private education, with enrolment increasing from 19% in 2006 to 29% in 2013. But state officials said the schools shut were not good enough for students. "It's our duty to close those schools that are not providing the best facilities, some don't have toilets or water," Punjab's additional state project director Parampal Kaur said. Haryana Education Minister Geeta Bhukkal said states had approached the federal government for guidance."[We told them] we are facing a problem because most of the private schools are not in a position to comply with the RTE, so we are facing a problem whether to close them."As per the RTE, we are required to close those schools."Ms Bhukkal said a further 1,379 schools would be closed in Haryana after the end of the school year in March.
Meanwhile, critics say the RTE fails to address the main problems with government education."There is nothing literally in the law that makes it mandatory for a teacher to teach - their salary is not linked to performance and the children are not tested," said Mr RangarajuUniversity of Newcastle professor James Tooley, who has studied India's private schools, said governments should be trying to improve them rather than close them. "You should not be telling parents to be patient and wait for government schools to improve. Meanwhile, all the government officials are sending their children to private schools," he said.Some of Indian states are being more lenient - like Gujarat, which has weighted the measures for evaluating schools, with 70% given to learning outcomes and 15% to infrastructure and teacher qualifications.Delhi eased the minimum land requirements last year. But Delhi State Public Schools Management Association president RC Jain said roughly 300 schools still had to shut and 750 face closure.Ramditi stopped running grades six to eight last year, waving goodbye to around 270 students.One of those students was Sangeeta Pillai's 11-year-old daughter, who now attends a government school.Ms Pillai says her daughter complains that her new teachers don't check her work and she often has to sit on the floor."There's about 100 children in some classes," she said.

[Aditya_V]

That was the exact Idea, the Doon's schools are exempted under Minority unaided Education Institutions and to shutdown Majority schools. Does any one need further proof of INC and Left leadership intentions? Is it a Mystery while Taiwan, Singapore, CHina, South Korea, Japan all were developing virtual INC, Left rule has achived nothing but Internal conflicts?

I hope rather complicated condencation theories on BRF its time to accept the sad fact, some people have put personal benefits above country and have been holding the nation back.

[Prem]

India’s path from poverty to empowerment
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-p ... mpowerment

India has made encouraging progress by halving its official poverty rate, from 45 percent of the population in 1994 to 22 percent in 2012. This is an achievement to be celebrated—yet it also gives the nation an opportunity to set higher aspirations. While the official poverty line counts only those living in the most abject conditions, even a cursory scan of India’s human-development indicators suggests more widespread deprivation. Above and beyond the goal of eradicating extreme poverty, India can address these issues and create a new national vision for helping more than half a billion people attain a more economically empowered life.In applying this metric to India, we found that in 2012, 56 percent of the population lacked the means to meet essential needs. By this measure, some 680 million Indians experienced deprivation, more than 2.5 times the population of 270 million below the official poverty line. Hundreds of millions have exited extreme poverty but continue to struggle for a modicum of dignity, comfort, and security. The Empowerment Gap, or the additional consumption required to bring these 680 million people to the level of the Empowerment Line, is seven times higher than the cost of eliminating poverty as defined by the official poverty line (exhibit).ility or willingness to spend is not wholly sufficient, in itself, to guarantee a decent life. Households also need access to basic services, such as health clinics and schools, at a community level, as well as electricity, drinking water, and improved sanitation within their homes. Our research finds that Indian households, on average, lack access to 46 percent of the basic services they need, and it identifies wide geographic disparities in the availability of social infrastructure.
Job creation and productivity gains have historically been the most powerful forces for improving living standards—and India is in need of deep reforms that can encourage businesses to invest, scale up, and hire. If India’s recent weak economic performance continues and no major reforms are undertaken, we project that in 2022 more than one-third of the population will remain below the Empowerment Line and that 12 percent will remain trapped in extreme poverty.
MGI’s research outlines a more ambitious yet economically sound path of inclusive reforms, which could lift 580 million people above the Empowerment Line by 2022, while virtually eliminating extreme poverty. It involves four key priorities: •Accelerating job creation. India needs to add 115 million new nonfarm jobs over the next decade to accommodate a growing population and reduce agriculture’s overall share in employment. The manufacturing and construction sectors, along with labor-intensive services, can form the backbone of this effort. To support job creation, policy makers can focus on reducing the administrative burden on businesses, accelerating infrastructure projects, making the labor market more flexible, removing market distortions, and expanding vocational training for the poor and uneducated.
•Raising farm productivity. Increasing investment in agricultural infrastructure and implementing reforms to improve market access, rationalize price supports, expand the adoption of new technologies, and streamline agricultural administration and extension services can help to achieve annual yield growth of 5.5 percent. This would bring India’s yields into line with those in other emerging Asian countries by 2022.
•Increasing public spending on basic services. To fill the most critical gaps, public spending on basic services would need to grow in real terms by about 6.7 percent annually through 2022. The fiscal resources will be available if India can achieve faster GDP growth. The share allocated to health care, water, and sanitation, however, needs to double.
•Making basic services more effective. We estimate that half of India’s current public spending on basic services does not translate into improved outcomes for the poor. By 2022, however, that spending can become 50 percent more effective if the nation as a whole matches the standards already set by the best-performing states. Some of the most promising strategies include forming partnerships with the private and social sectors, mobilizing community participation, and using technology to streamline and monitor operations.Put together, these forces would set off a virtuous cycle generating more revenue, thus enabling India to meet its fiscal-deficit targets even as it ploughs additional funding into social infrastructure and achieves nearly universal coverage for the basics of health care, water, sanitation, and energy.The Empowerment Line begins with the premise that every household in India should be able to attain a fundamental sense of economic security, opportunity, and dignity. This new benchmark reveals the dimensions of today’s problem and provides a framework for designing interventions that could deliver a better quality of life for the majority of India’s citizens

[ramana]

TOI reports. No GOI named sources.

India to slash Iran oil imports due to US nuke deal with Iran:Sources

Story says US demanded India to reduce oil imports from Iran to previous year's levels in order to comply with US-Iran nuke deal!

NEW DELHI: India has to cut its Iranian oil imports by nearly two-thirds from the first quarter after the United States asked it to hold the shipments at end-2013 levels, in keeping with the nuclear deal easing sanctions on Tehran, Indian government sources said.

India, with the increases already made in the January-March loading plans from Iran, has to cut its purchases of the crude to about 110,000 barrels per day (bpd) to drop its intake average to 195,000 bpd for the six months to July 20.

Under the November 24 agreement between Iran and six world powers, the OPEC member was to hold oil exports at "current volumes" of about 1 million bpd, and a message delivered by a top US energy policy official to Indian ministries in February was the first clear sign of low tolerance for any increases.

Shouldn't US ask Iran to not ship rather than India not to imjport!

[Virupaksha]

the threat is cut off from US financial markets, iran is not linked to it. India is.

[ramana]

Following the example set by the Minsiter of Disarmament AKL Anthony, Dritharastra MMS has his office give favorable reviews of his tenure to rpeserve his legacy!!!!

After ten years as PM, MMS worries his legacy will go down like Narasimha Rao

Dont mind lekin but MMS cannot be compared to a Chakravarti like PVNR. MMS was clerk when the office needed a Mantri. Strange. He was PM when PVNR died and he did nothing to honour him.



In typical style of his functioning even the PMO official is anonymouse.
So how can he be trusted with all the panegyrics being sung by court poets like in the maharajas time?

[Prem]

http://mashable.com/2014/03/17/holi/
15 Joyful Photos of India's Vibrant Holi Festival
(Ck the slide)

As many Western nations struggle to return to the vibrancy of pre-winter life, spring is ushered in across the Hindu world. Holi, the Hindu festival of color and love was celebrated over this weekend and into Monday.Beginning with an evening bonfire on the full moon in March, festival goers sing and dance into the night. The next day is filled with colored paints and waters, thrown freely at strangers and friends alike. Celebrated as the triumph of good over evil, in India Holi is also traditionally a time when strictly separated castes can interact freely.While India and Nepal are the most widely-known for their Holi celebrations, the festival has spread westward into Europe and the U.S. as well. Festivals vary by location, with traditions — mythological and otherwise — influencing how regions and villages celebrate. In Barsana, northern India, women playfully hit men from the nearby village of Nandgaon with wooden sticks as they parade through the town.

[Prem]

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-26478430
How India is building Asia's largest secure forest network

A landmark effort by the Indian state of Karnataka to connect isolated protected forests could lead to the building of Asia's largest unbroken forest, writes Jay Mazoomdaar.It's been all about connecting the green dots. Since 2012, the southern state of Karnataka has declared nearly 2,600 sq km (1,000 sq miles) of forests as protected areas, linking a series of national parks, tiger reserves and sanctuaries.Protected areas cover nearly 5% of India's land mass and come under strict legal protection that makes conversion of land for non-forestry purposes difficult. Tiger reserves and national parks do not allow human settlements.Karnataka has already built three unbroken forest landscapes spread over more than one million hectares along the Western Ghats, a mountain range that runs along the western coast of India. It is also a Unesco World Heritage site and one of the eight hottest biological hotspots of the world.
In southern Karnataka, the missing links in the Bannerghatta-Nagarhole landscape have been bridged to achieve an unbroken stretch of 7,050 sq km that includes adjoining protected areas in the neighbouring states of Tamil Nadu and Kerala.In central Karnataka, the Kudremukh-Aghanashini landscape across 1,716 sq km has been made contiguous. In the north, expanding the Anshi-Bhimghad landscape has linked a forest stretch of 2,242 sq km in Goa and Karnataka.Experts say habitat fragmentation is a major threat to wildlife conservation. Contiguous forest landscapes allow gene flow and increase colonisation probability, thereby reducing the risk of local extinction.
Interconnected forests also offer a better chance of adaptation and survival when wild animals shift habitats to cope with the impact of climate change.None of these concerns has stopped the Indian government from dragging its feet over implementing the recommendations of an expert panel to safeguard the Western Ghats. A series of national parks, tiger reserves and sanctuaries has been linked From the beginning, explains former forest official BK Singh who initiated the expansion process, it was made clear that all existing rights of the people would continue. "The protected area expansion covered only reserve forests where people's rights were already settled. Even in those areas, we did not force our decisions on people," says Vinay Luthra, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests, Karnataka.
"We have not relocated a single village for this expansion," says MH Swaminath, former wildlife official who was part of the team that drew up the plan in 2011, adding that the focus was on protecting biodiversity-rich forests and key wildlife corridors from invasive development such as heavy industries, mining or dams."Since then, nearly 1,700 sq km was added to three national parks and five wildlife sanctuaries. National parks like Nagarhole in Karnataka have been added to protected areas
A spate of small hydel power projects, for example, threatened to block the elephant corridors and spoil the natural water systems in and around Pushpagiri wildlife sanctuary. Yet, an unbroken Bangalore-Goa landscape may remain just a dream. "But it is possible to link the southern and the central Karnataka forest landscapes into a contiguous protected area spread over 15,000 sq km in Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Kerala," says Mr Gubbi. "That in itself will probably be Asia's largest unbroken protected area network."

[Philip]

Khushwant Sihgh kicks the bucket at 99.
The Grand Old Man of Indian journalism and irreverent humour switched off his light bulb yesterday.
He, as one wit has described him," was a blunt man with a sharp pen",who took on India's sacred cows and slaughtered them,from Mrs. G. to less hallowed hypocrites dressed in white wearing khadi caps.His popularity was so immense that he once received a postcard from abroad addressed to "Kushwant Singh,B*st*rd,India"!

We will miss his Sadarji jokes,lampooning our political class and all manner of species Indian,laced with his sex sodden pen,dipped in scotch! RIP (Rite in Paradise) dear Kushwant,God and his angels-whom you never believed in need some cheer. Hic!

Farewell to a free spirit
Friday, 21 March 2014 | Pioneer | in Edit

Khushwant Singh lived a full and varied life

For a man who spent much of his adult life in the power-bubble that is Lutyens' Delhi, hobnobbing with the high and mighty, Khushwant Singh never let his inner-self be cellophane-wrapped in the ostentatious sophistry of our times. Outspoken, irreverent and brutally honest, Khushwant Singh was a free spirit. He refused to be chained by the terms of political correctness or caged within stifling social codes. He had no qualms in acknowledging that he supported the Emergency even when, in his own words, it had “become a synonym for obscenity” much like he had no moral compunction in telling the world, in his last book published when he was at 97, that he had come to the sad conclusion that “since the age of four”, he had “always been a bit of a lecher”. It is no wonder then that this man who trained as a lawyer and had joined the foreign service of a newly independent India (“a briefless barrister, a tactless diplomat”, he said) quickly gave it all up to become a roving journalist and a prolific author whose words knew no bounds. Indeed, they flew thick and fast, and hit one and all equally hard. His memorable column, With Malice towards One and All, in equal parts the product of his razor sharp commentary as it was of his acid wit, remains one of the widely read in the annals of Indian journalism. A typical Malice column was a combination of three or four short essays, covering a wide range of issues from politics to culture to literature and, of course, also included juicy details from the author's own trails and travels. But while Malice (alongside The Illustrated Weekly of India which became one of India’s most popular magazines under his editorship) is one of the most important factors in making Khushwant Singh a household name, it is hardly evidence enough of the author's wide range of talents.

For a fuller understanding of the literary giant that was Khushwant Singh, one must, of course, take into consideration his other, equally iconic, works such as The Train to Pakistan and I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale. While the former remains the one of the most searing accounts of Partition, the latter, situated at the peak of India's freedom movement, is the author’s finest literary contribution. But that is not all. Apart from his classics, Khushwant Singh also wrote a lot on Sikhism, for instance. In fact, his History of the Sikhs, is highly regarded both from a literary viewpoint as well as from a scholarly perspective. Infact, it established him not just as an erudite historian but also put him in that rare group of scholars whose works are equally accessible to the academic and the lay-man alike. Interestingly, Khushwant Singh professed to being an agnostic, even though it was his interest in religion that inspired his fine translations of Sikh literature into English. And if all this wasn’t enough, Khushwant Singh also wrote beautiful poetry in Urdu with as much skill and ease as he dished out jokes in Punjabi, neither of which failed to warm the hearts of his readers.

[Agnimitra]

X-posting from GDF:

Not sure if this was posted before:

Kashmir Watch: AAP to fight against extending Tosamaidan lease to Indian Army

AAP to fight against extending Tosamaidan lease to Indian Army

Srinagar: Aam Admi Party (AAP) Friday vowed to fight against granting of further extension of lease to Artillery unit of Indian Army for using the Tosamaidan pasture as a filed firing range.

In a statement issued to CNS, AAP leader and Lok Sabha candidate for Srinagar parliamentary seat Dr Raja Muzaffar Bhat said that Aam Aadmi Party would resist any move of the Government for granting further extension in the lease agreement post April 2014 as AAP believes that granting extension would directly affect the local population which has suffered tremendous losses from the last more than six decades.

He said that the party hopes that high level committee constituted few months back under the chairmanship of Chief Secretary would look into the human aspect first and ensure that the field firing range is shifted from Tosamaidan to some uninhabited area of the state.

“If lease agreement is extended AAP would hold state wide agitation over this issue,” the statement reads.

[fanne]

Is there method in the Madness of Arvind Kejriwal - Why he is doing a referendum for everything, should he form the government, should he resign, should he fight from Varanasi etc. Is he a prop from outside? Suppose Namo does not win or worse he wins and fails, and then the great hope AK comes to power, will he do a referendum and give JK to Pak or maybe have it independent (so that other great powers can have base there and dominate the whole central Asia including China)? Is he being fed information, (remember there are many surveys in India on what makes us tick, many we do not hear, maybe he is being fed the right info, to what to say and what not) so that he gets maximum band for the buck. Is he willingly doing this or he is himself unaware? Is this the great plot?
rgds,
fanne