Indo-UK: News & Discussion

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Lalmohan
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Lalmohan »

Hislop is not an historian, but a satirist. he is the editor of private eye, an intellectual satirical magazine that thrives on attacking politicians and is consequently always in the libel courts. he is very intelligent though. nice to see him present this programme. however, over the past few years, a number of similar programmes have come out, including a dramatisation starring Sanjeev Bhaskar (well known on British TV at least) as a wounded Indian soldier recovering in the IA hospital in Brighton. those interested should look up "Brighton Pavillion". also outside buckingham palace a newly erected memorial commemorates all the men and women from the commonwealth who have fought for the empire - which is recognition long overdue.

i am however more interested to know from any historians how the WW2 policy was formulated to keep BIA out of France but active in Italy and Mediterranean? this affected the white officers as well as indians.
Jarita
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Jarita »

State to 'spy' on every phone call, email and web search
Every phone call, text message, email and website visit made by private citizens is to be stored for a year and will be available for monitoring by government bodies.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... earch.html
Haresh
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Race hate murderer celebrated killing

Post by Haresh »

Same story but from the Times

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 911763.ece

Note the comments, especially one which refers to India helping Britain in the World Wars.
Johann
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Johann »

Lalmohan wrote:i am however more interested to know from any historians how the WW2 policy was formulated to keep BIA out of France but active in Italy and Mediterranean? this affected the white officers as well as indians.
Egypt was the British hinge and logistical hub, even more so than Gibraltar or Malta.

The first thing the IA units were engaged in was securing the lines of communication from Egypt all the way to India, with quick campaigns in East Africa, Iraq, Iran and Vichy Syria.

Then there were near simultaneous campaigns in the Balkans, North Africa and Italy. North Africa and in particular Italy were dragged out affairs because of two very different kinds of terrain challenges.

The invasion of southern France was a much smaller affair than Normandy and within than British/Commonwealth participation in Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France was on top of that proportionately much smaller than Normandy.

The overall operation was relatively short - landings in mid-August 1944, and link-up with Normandy forces by September.

Italy was a much slower campaign. The mountains were a major challenge, and very conducive to static defences. Rome was liberated about the same time as Paris, but the terrain keeps getting tougher, and the Germans held northern Italy until the end of the war. In fact although the French resistance gets a lot of the press, the Italian resistance in the last two years of the war was very active behind German lines, and like the French resistance you had the same ideological split between communists and nationalists.
harbans
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by harbans »

One of the less talked about and known things was the Indian Army broke through Japanese defences and got supply lines secured to Chinese troops fighting Japs within China too. China was fighting the Japs on it's own soil. While Indian troops fought in 3 continents in some of the most critical and bloody battles against the most elite and well entrenched Axis powers of WW2.
surinder
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by surinder »

Indian, or BIA army was battle hardened, professional & competent army. Those who knew this army could scarcely beleive that IA was trounced in 1962.
KLNMurthy
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by KLNMurthy »

surinder wrote:Indian, or BIA army was battle hardened, professional & competent army. Those who knew this army could scarcely beleive that IA was trounced in 1962.
A broken leadership will do that to you.
Haresh
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Pakistani Army ran Muslim extremist training camps

Post by Haresh »

Pakistani Army ran Muslim extremist training camps, says anti-terrorist expert

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 916408.ece

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/11/pakis ... l#comments
nithish
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by nithish »

x-post

MoD may sell aircraft carrier to India to limit cuts
One of Britain's new £2bn aircraft carriers could be sold off under cost-cutting plans being considered by the Ministry of Defence. India has lodged a firm expression of interest, the Observer has learned.

The sale of one of the two 65,000-tonne vessels would leave the Royal Navy with a single carrier and could force Britain to borrow from the French fleet, which itself has only one carrier and is reluctant to build more. Last summer the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, proposed to Gordon Brown that the two navies co-ordinate maintenance and refitting so that one was at sea at all times.

According to senior defence sources, Whitehall officials are examining the feasibility of a sale as part of the strategic defence review that will start early next year and is expected to result in savage cuts.

The carrier programme has already been delayed by two years to push back spending commitments, which itself will end up costing the taxpayer more in the long run. BAE Systems began work in July on HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is due to come into service in 2016. Preparatory work on the Prince of Wales, due for launch in 2018, has also started. The two carriers will replace the ageing Invincible class and are three times the size.

There were fears that the government could scrap one altogether. But it is understood that the financial penalties would be prohibitive. About 10,000 jobs in Portsmouth, Barrow-in-Furness, Fife and Glasgow depend on the orders.
----------
Vikramaditya will be in service in 2012, Vikrant in 2014 and the Viraat, according to Wiki, will serve till 2019
if we were going to buy the Prince of Wales, it might be replacing the Viraat but Wiki also says that the second Vikrant class carrier might be inducted at about the same time (if it's ordered nxt year)
will the Navy go for the super-carrier and forego another Vikrant? or is this all a just a load of cr@p :-o

btw, there was someone earlier on who wanted India to buy one of these carriers when the MoD were pissing themselves about their budget :P
Karan Dixit
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Karan Dixit »

Insaallah! With this rate, we will surpass Cacha's navy. AoA!
Neshant
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Neshant »

i'm disappointed that we are buying tons of foreign junk.

well at least unlike the russians the UK is unlikely to play games like low balling the cost, breaking contracts, overshooting timelines for delivery by years on end and other short changing scams.

Is this the case when making purchases from UK or am I deluding myself.
Prasad
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Prasad »

well atleast its a brand new carrier unlike the vikad.
Haresh
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Haresh »

It is interesting to see how the tone of conversation regarding India changes when the Brits see the $$$$
Look at this army site:
http://www.arrse.co.uk/Forums/viewtopic/t=138016.html

These buggers are always having these ridiculous conversations to the effect that Britain pays for everything in India.
Nuclear power plants, poverty etc.
It will be interesting to see how this particular thread develops.
svinayak
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by svinayak »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M652COEqNg
Veda Chanting at Buckingham Palace

receiving ceremony: Sanskrit in London

The parapets of Buckingham Palace from where, once messages of arrogance were sent in the World, "Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the World!!", are reverberating now with the Celestial sounds, for the first time, of Immortal message 'Om! Shantih, Shantih, Shantih!- 'OM! Peace, Peace, Peace!'
Start at .54
Karan Dixit
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Karan Dixit »

UK has been making all the right noises lately, from Veda chanting to this one:

http://www.ptinews.com/news/374478_UK-s ... -UNSC-seat


UK supports India's claim for a permanent UNSC seat
Hari Seldon
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Hari Seldon »

UK has been making all the right noises lately, from Veda chanting to this one
I wouldn't read too much into it. It is but a cynical attempt at empty flattery in order to gain substantive returns in terms of market access and the like. Its a targeted attack on a character flaw some desi netas are known to have - Sri JLN down. Sri PVNR was immune to its charms, though.

You should have seen the way the French and the Brits fawned when Hu Jintao visited recently. Too bad, flattery there was met with the contempt it deserved.

Anyway, if the UK-stanis are serious and have mended their ways, how about shutting down some of the anti-India insurgency nerve centers running openly out of Londonistan? Or sign up an extradition treaty for criminals like musician Nadeem? Now that would be substantive and would demonstrate clear commitment to relations repair and reboot, no? Just wondering only.
Jarita
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Jarita »

Hari Seldon wrote:Its a targeted attack on a character flaw some desi netas are known to have - Sri JLN down. Sri PVNR was immune to its charms, though.
There was prime minister of Travancore that the British were terrified off. Seems like he understood the big game pat and was as immune as PVNR. Does anyone know his name?
Karan Dixit
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Karan Dixit »

Hari Seldon wrote:
UK has been making all the right noises lately, from Veda chanting to this one
I wouldn't read too much into it. It is but a cynical attempt at empty flattery in order to gain substantive returns in terms of market access and the like. Its a targeted attack on a character flaw some desi netas are known to have - Sri JLN down. Sri PVNR was immune to its charms, though.

You should have seen the way the French and the Brits fawned when Hu Jintao visited recently. Too bad, flattery there was met with the contempt it deserved.

Anyway, if the UK-stanis are serious and have mended their ways, how about shutting down some of the anti-India insurgency nerve centers running openly out of Londonistan? Or sign up an extradition treaty for criminals like musician Nadeem? Now that would be substantive and would demonstrate clear commitment to relations repair and reboot, no? Just wondering only.
I guess I prematurely promoted UQ to UK. I am guilty as charged. I am very prone to flattery. It is a blessing that I am not a Neta. :)
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by SureshP »

Posting in full as its a worthy read
Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again


A generation of British Islamists have been trained in Afghanistan to fight a global jihad. But now some of those would-be extremists have had a change of heart. Johann Hari finds out what made them give up the fight

Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".


In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.
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The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.


But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.


But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.


Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12 months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.


I. The Imam


My journey began when, sitting in one of the grotty greasy spoon cafés that fill the East End, I heard a young woman in hijab mention that the imam of one of the local mosques was a jihadi who had fought in Afghanistan, but is now facing death threats from the very men he once fought alongside. His "crime"? To renounce his past and call for "a secular Islam".


After a series of phone calls, Usama Hassan cautiously agrees to talk. I meet him outside his little mosque in Leyton. It sits in the middle of a run-down sprawl of pound stores ("Everything only £1!!!"), halal kebab shops, and boarded-up windows at the edge of the East End.


Usama is a big, broad bear of a man in a black blazer and wire-rimmed glasses. He greets me with a hefty handshake; he has a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. He takes me upstairs to a pale-green prayer room. This building was once a factory, then a cinema; now, with Saudi money, it is a Wahabi mosque. Men are kneeling silently towards Mecca, rising and bending in reverential waves. "On Fridays, there are Islamists who stand outside and warn worshippers that their prayers won't count if they are led by me," he says as we squat in the corner, "because I'm supposedly an apostate. A fake imam." He looks away. "I get phone calls late at night. Threats. It's painful. You see, I was like them once."


And so Usama begins to tell me his story. He arrived in Tottenham in North London in the mid- 1970s, when he was five years old. His Pakistani father was sent here by the Saudi Ministry of Religious Affairs, which aims to spread its puritan desert strain of Islam to every nation. His family led a locked-down life, trying to adhere to Saudi principles in a semi-detached house in the English suburbs. "We weren't allowed music or TV or any contact with the opposite sex," he says. "We were very sheltered. I didn't go out a great deal." By the age of 10, he had memorised every word of the Koran in its original Arabic.


He had a strong sense of the Britain beyond his walls – the Britain where I was growing up – as a hostile, violent place. "You have to understand – it was the time of the Tottenham riots. It felt violent in the streets," he says. "I got used to expecting white people to use the Paki word. We used to have a fear of skinheads the whole time."


But Usama was offered a scholarship to the heart of the English elite – the City of London Boys' School, where he could practice cricket at Lord's. He bonded with the Jews at the school as outsiders and supporters of Tottenham Hotspur football team. He still speaks like the public schoolboy he was – in long, confident sentences.


Some berobed men are staring at us, so he takes me down to the mosque's office. "At that time, being a Muslim meant being an Islamist. It was taken for granted," he says. So when he was 13, he joined an Islamic fundamentalist organisation called Jimas. At big sociable conferences every weekend, they were told: you don't feel at home in Britain, but you can't go "home" to a country you have never visited. So we have a third identity for you – a pan-national Islamism that knows no boundaries and can envelop you entirely.


It sounds familiar. This is the identity I hear shouted by young Islamists throughout the East End: I might sound like you, but I am nothing like you. I am Other. I belong elsewhere – in a place that does not yet exist, but that I will create, with my fists and my fury.


Jimas told their members they were part of a persecuted billion, being blown up and locked down across the world. "It was a bit like a gang," he says. "And we had a strong sense of being under siege. It was all a conspiracy against Islam, and we were the guardians of Islam. That's how we saw ourselves ... A lot of my friends would wear the army boots, and carry knives." I realise now that for a nebbish intellectual boy, it must have felt intoxicating to be told he was part of a military movement that would inevitably conquer history.


For his summer vacation in 1990 – as a break from studying physics at Cambridge University – he went to wage jihad on the battlefields of Afghanistan. He arrived with two friends from Jimas at an Arab-run training camp in the mountains of Kunar in Eastern Afghanistan. It was a sparse collection of tents and weapons left behind by the CIA in the snow and blood. They spent the days running up and down mountains learning how to fire Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers. "When you fire a Kalashnikov, it echoes all around the mountain," he says. "After this boring life, you feel the adrenaline pumping."


The Arab fighters wore four layers of clothes and still shivered. They had never seen snow before, so every now and then, they would lay down their weapons to have a long, gleeful snow-fight. Once they had all learned how to kill, they were taken to the front line to shell the communist hold-outs. "One of the shells landed very close to us, about 100ft away." He fired in retaliation. "I hope we never killed anybody," he says quickly.


Usama tells his story fluently and fast, and rides over these difficult moments – a killing – like a speed-bump. He thought an earthly paradise would rise from the rubble he was creating – and remake the world in its image. "The expectation was that Afghanistan would become this dream Islamic state," he adds, "which would then spread all over the world." He returned to Cambridge University determined to convert as many of his fellow Muslim students as possible to Wahabism. "It was relatively easy to persuade them," he says. "People were looking for group identity. They were very confused: what does it mean to live as a Muslim in society like this? We had easy answers. Go back to the original sources, and [follow it] literally."


At the centre of this vision was the need to rebuild the caliphate – the Islamic state under sharia law persisted from the time of Mohamed until 1924. "It was a very dreamy, romantic idea," he says. "If anybody asked questions about how it would work, we would just say – the people that will make it happen will be so saintly, they will make the right decisions." It was the old promise of the revolutionary down the ages: there would be a single revolutionary heave in which all political conflict would dissolve forever, and a conflict-free paradise would be born.


Usama's job was to persuade people to go to fight in Afghanistan and, from the mid-1990s, Bosnia. He was one of the best – and he says, again very fast, that one of his successes was to radicalise Omar Sheikh, the man now on death row in Pakistan for beheading Daniel Pearl. "I set him off on his path to Jihad," he says. He looks a little excited, and a little appalled. The first thing he remembers about Sheikh – who he met at a Jimas study circle – is the fresh lemonade he made in his university rooms. "It was delicious. And we drank and drank. My first impression of him was that he was a clean-shaven, well-educated British public schoolboy. A lovely bloke."


Sheikh was furious about the massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, and demanded the study group lay down their Koranic debates and act. Usama told him: "If you're really serious, you can go and fight. I know people who have gone and fought. I can introduce you to them." And so his journey to torturing and murdering a Jewish journalist – simply because he was a Jew – began.


Usama doesn't want to talk about him any more: he changes the subject, and I have to bring him back to it. "Nothing is proved against him. He's fighting extradition," he says, after a long pause. "But ... " He has an awkward smile. An embarrassed smile. He quickly carries on speaking, ushering us away from Daniel Pearl.


People come in and out of the mosque office, and Usama lowers his voice a little. He says that as he was persuading young men to go and kill, he noticed something disconcerting: the Afghan mujahedin he had fought for were not building a paradise on earth after all. Instead, they were merrily slaying each other. "This great, glorious Islamic revolution – it didn't happen, at all ... they just killed each other."


As he watched the news of the Luxor massacre in Egypt or Hamas suicide-bombings of pizzerias in Tel Aviv, "It just became more and more difficult to justify that." He found himself thinking about the Jewish friends he had made at school. "They were just like me – human beings. And we had a lot in common. The dietary laws, and the identity issues, and the fear of racism." As he heard the growing Islamist chants at demonstrations – "The Jews are the enemy of God," they yelled – something, he says, began to sag inside him.


The stifled language Usama is using to describe his past reminds me of a recovering alcoholic trying to piece together his fragmented memories and understand who he was. When he talks about anti-Semitism, he is clearly ashamed; he giggles almost randomly, looks away, and looks back at me with a puckered, disgusted look.


We have talked enough; we arrange to meet again. The second time I see him, in a café, he seems more guarded, as if he revealed too much. He shifts the conversation onto theology – the area where, I discover, every ex-jihadi feels happiest. He says the 7/7 bombings detonated a theological bomb in his mind: "How could this be justified? I began to wonder if parts of the Koran are actually metaphor, and parts of the Koran were actually just revealed for their time: seventh-century Arabia."


Once the foundation stone of literalism was broken, he had to remake the concepts that had led him to Islamism one-by-one. "Jihad has many levels in Islam – you have the internal struggle to be the best person you can be. But all we had been taught is military jihad. Today I regard any kind of campaigning for truth, for justice, as a type of Jihad." He signed up to the pacifist Movement for the Abolition of War. He redefined martyrdom as anybody who died in an honourable cause. "There were martyrs on 9/11," he says. "They were the firefighters – not the hijackers."


He says he found himself making arguments he once thought unthinkable – like arguing that women should be allowed to show their hair in public. Jihadi websites run by his old friends started to declare him an apostate, a crime that under their interpretation of sharia is punishable by death.


There have been demands that he should be ousted from the mosque, but his father is its founder and chief imam, so he is protected for now. He says – leaning forward, his voice losing its public school composure – that the threats have only made him more sure of the need for reform. He has started to call for Muslims to abandon the "medieval interpretation of the sharia" that calls for the killing of apostates and homosexuals. He has said there should be a two-state solution in the Middle East. He has reached the conclusion that evolution is "a scientific fact".


And for the first time in his life, Usama has begun to allow himself to listen to music. "I was taught to believe it shouldn't be allowed. But now, I listen on the car radio." I ask him what music he likes, and he lets out a high-pitched giggle. "You'll get me killed!" he says. "Everything in the charts." He gives me some names, but then calls later and asks me not to print them: "That would be a step too far."


As the threats against him rattle across the internet, I like to think of this as my last image of Usama – a 39-year-old man slowly slipping off the Puritan chains in which he has been bound and finally, in his fourth decade, beginning to dance, as he is circled by the angry ghosts of his younger self.


II. The Prisoner


The most famous former Islamist fanatic in Britain is Maajid Nawaz – a high-cheekboned 31-year-old who walks with a self-confident strut. I make an appointment with him through his personal assistant, and he strides into the hotel lobby where we have arranged to meet in an immaculate and expensive suit. He seems to blend perfectly into the multi-ethnic overclass who use expensive hotels like this as their base; I have to remind myself with a jolt that, not so long ago, he was caught up in a murder in London, helped to plot a coup in nuclear-tipped Pakistan, and served three years in the most notorious prison in Egypt.


Maajid begins to tell me his story as if he is delivering a PowerPoint presentation. He has offered it before, and he will offer it again; it is his job now. He has distilled it into a script. When I try to poke beneath it with questions, he seems irritated, and returns to the comfortable form of words he has established as soon as he can.


His journey towards Islamism began, he says, at the sandy edge of Essex, in the dilapidated coastal town of Southend-on-Sea. It is an old, elegant Victorian resort town drooping under a century of disrepair, reduced to a smattering of tatty arcades and a long, neglected pier that reaches into a filthy sea. Maajid's parents were mildly prosperous first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. "My upbringing was completely liberal from the start," he says. "In fact, I didn't even have a Muslim identity." He went to mosque only once, when he was 11, and an imam hit him with a stick for speaking too loudly.


Asian families were a rarity there in the 1980s, but he had a large group of white friends and felt no different to them. Yet when Maajid turned 14, a strange political shift was taking place in Southend. It began – for him, at least – one evening when Maajid, his brother and his friends were at the funfair, leaping on and off the rides and eating candy floss. A group of young skinheads spotted them and started making Nazi salutes and shouting "Seig Heil".


Maajid and his mates "ran the hell out of there", but a white van pulled up and seven skinheads piled out, wielding machetes. They cornered Maajid and one of his white friends. To his astonishment, they turned to the friend and stabbed him repeatedly with a carving knife, shrieking: "Traitor! Traitor! Race traitor!" They drove off, leaving Maajid covered in his friend's blood.


The story of what happened next is buried in yellowing cuts from the local newspapers. A pack of unemployed young men who had been kicking around on Southend's beaches had joined the Neo-Nazi group Combat 18, named after Adolf Hitler's initials: A is "1" in the alphabet, H is "8". They targeted Maajid's friends one by one for befriending a "Paki". Over the next two years, three of his friends were stabbed, and one was smashed up with a hammer. Maajid began to distance himself from his white friends, out of guilt. He drifted instead towards a group of young black people who were also being terrorised by Combat 18. They would meet at house parties and marinate themselves in hip-hop, Public Enemy, and cannabis fumes. He says: "Feeling totally rejected by mainstream society, we were looking for an alternative identity, and we found the perfect, cool, fashionable identity through listening to hip-hop and speeches by Malcolm X."


One day, his brother came home bearing a sheath of leaflets saying Muslims were being massacred all over the world, from India to Bosnia to Southend. He had stumbled on a stall in the High Street manned by a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). They said he would never be accepted in irreparably corrupt, decadent and racist Britain: Combat 18 were the snarl hidden behind every net curtain. Western society was merely a purgatory for Muslims, and the only escape could be to migrate to a renewed and perfect caliphate somewhere in Arabia. He joined up that day.


Maajid climbed the ranks of HT fast, because – with his easy eloquence – he was especially good at recruiting new members. After a year, they sent him to live in London and conquer a sixth form college. Newham College is a sprawling glass-and-concrete school for 16- to 19-year-olds in the most depressed slab of London. There, Maajid found himself in a majority-Muslim environment for the first time. "I was like somebody who has been craving chocolate for a long time who ends up in Belgium. I thought: these are my people. I knew exactly how to manipulate their grievances. And I did it. We took over that college."


We are served tea by the kind of effusive waitress who works in high-end London hotels. Maajid does not acknowledge her. He says it was "unbelievably easy" to recruit young Muslims to Islamism at that time. He would start with lectures that "broke down the concepts they had been told they should hold dear – like freedom and democracy", he says. It was only in the second or third talk, once humanism lay in rhetorical rubble, that he would announce: "God is in a better position to set those limits than you are, because you'd always contradict yourself, being an imperfect human." So then he would announce: "Let me tell you what God says."


When Maajid enrolled, there were hardly any girls wearing headscarves; by the time he was thrown out a year later, most of them were. The stand-alones were jeered at and harassed.


Maajid was elected President of the college's student union and he was prickling with a Messianic sense of mission. He saw Newham College as a microcosm of the changes that were swelling in the world. "It literally felt revolutionary. We had taken over the campus, and that we were soon to take over the world ... We really believed the caliphate would be established any day soon." On the school's open day for prospective pupils and parents, they staged a massive prayer demonstration. Dozens of them stood in the main hall, yelling to Allah for vengeance. "We wanted to show the parents that if you're sending your kids here, these are the people in charge," he says.


I ask if anybody was arguing for a more liberal form of Islam. Maajid laughs. "Absolutely not. No way. In fact, the only people who were young that were articulating any form of Islam were the Islamists."


The only substantial push-back came from rival religious groups – especially students with a Nigerian Christian background, known universally as "the blacks". There was a racist hysteria that they were muggers and rapists and "somebody had to stand up to them", Maajid says. "Along came us, these crusading Islamists, who didn't give a shit. We'd stand in front of them and say – we don't fear death, we don't fear you, we only fear God." Allah was in their gang, and they were invincible. Young jihadis from outside the college started to hang around there, to defend the Muslims from "the Christian niggers". A tall, aggressive recruit from Brixton called Saeed Nur was appointed as their "bodyguard". He intimidated everyone into silence.


The news reports from the time confirm what happened next. One afternoon, a row broke over the use of the college pool table, as Maajid stood watching. A Nigerian student wanted to push the Muslims off it, and began making derogatory remarks about Islam. Somebody called Saeed to "sort him out". As soon as he arrived, the Nigerian student pulled out a knife – and Saeed produced a Samurai blade and thrust it straight into the boy's chest. As he fell, the other Muslim students set on him with hammers and knives and pool cues. They beat him to death.


How did he feel about the victim? Did he think about his family? He prods the questions away with a grunt. Maajid says he felt "indifferent" to the victim, but was pleased "the Muslims prevailed in the end". He adds: "We were heroes in HT ranks." And he is back to his story. He doesn't want to retrieve his emotions.


He was expelled, and spent the next few years ascending the ranks of HT, while pretending to study at various colleges. But he wanted to be at the heart of the jihad – and in 1999 he found a way. Abdel Kalim Zaloom, the global leader of HT, issued a command from his hidden base somewhere in the Middle East. Pakistan had just unveiled its nuclear weapons to the world. Zaloom wanted them to seize Pakistan, so when the caliphate came it would be nuclear-tipped. Maajid enrolled at Punjab University as a cover – and jetted off to the country his parents had left a lifetime ago.


In the sprawling slum-strewn chaos of Karachi, Maajid found "the first crack in my ideological armour ... I thought – oh, my God. I had idealised Muslim societies, but the people here know less about Islam than we do. And look at how disorganised it is."


He met with a slew of junior Pakistani army officers who had been training at Sandhurst, Britain's elite officer training academy. "They seemed like quite decent, amiable chaps, who believed in our ideology," he says. They had been recruited by other members to HT, "and I told them to rise up the ranks of the army, and when we had an opportunity, to mount a coup and declare the caliphate in Pakistan."


And then, in the strangely bland CEO-speak these ex-Islamists often lapse into, he adds enthusiastically: "It was a very exciting project. We thought it would happen in the medium-term."


Maajid won't be drawn – not now, and not in our later conversations – on the details of this coup plot. Perhaps this is because he is worried about compromising his ability to visit Pakistan. The Pakistani military spokesmen say it's a lie. The officers were, Maajid says, quietly arrested by Pervez Musharraf's government in 2003, and are currently in prison. Maajid decided to move on to Egypt, and arrived to study in Alexandria on 10 September 2001. When he saw the news from New York City, he felt – that word again – "indifferent". HT technically opposed the attacks, on the grounds they were carried out by private individuals rather than by the army of a renewed caliphate. But Maajid says "There was a huge wave of internal sympathy for [Bin Laden], because he's an ideological comrade, isn't he?"


He started to recruit other students, as he had done so many times before. But it was harder. "Everyone hated the [unelected] government [of Hosni Mubarak], and the US for backing it," he says. But there was an inhibiting sympathy for the victims of 9/11 – until the Bush administration began to respond with Guantanamo Bay and bombs. "That made it much easier. After that, I could persuade people a lot faster."


Then, at 3am one morning, a cadre of soldiers smashed into Maajid's bedroom bearing machine guns and grenades. He was taken, blindfolded and bound, to an underground bunker below the state security offices in Cairo. There were around 50 other men penned in. For three days, he kneeled, and heard the men around him being tortured with electric cattle prods.


"I thought, 'This is something I have been mentally preparing for, for a long time. I knew this day would come,'" he says. On the third day, the guards dragged him into an interrogation room with another British HT member. They punched him in the face and whacked him with batons. They produced the cattle prod. Maajid told them they wouldn't dare to torture a British citizen. "So they took the cattle prod and began electrocuting my friend in front of my eyes."


The British Embassy called looking for its citizens. The interrogation stopped suddenly, and transferred them to prison. Maajid felt no gratitude. "All I thought was – why did it take them three days to find us? They obviously didn't care about the rights of Muslims." He laughs now – a cold laugh, at his former self.


In Mazratora Prison, Maajid was held in solitary confinement for thee months. It was a bare cell with no bed, no light, and no toilet: just a concrete box. Then he was taken out suddenly and told his trial for "propagation by speech and writing for any banned organisation" was beginning in the Supreme State Emergency Court. But Maajid's Islamist convictions were about to be challenged from two unexpected directions – the men who murdered Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and Amnesty International.


HT abandoned Maajid as a "fallen soldier" and barely spoke of him or his case. But when his family were finally allowed to see him, they told him he had a new defender. Although they abhorred his political views, Amnesty International said he had a right to free speech and to peacefully express his views, and publicised his case.


"I was just amazed," Maajid says. "We'd always seen Amnesty as the soft power tools of colonialism. So, when Amnesty, despite knowing that we hated them, adopted us, I felt – maybe these democratic values aren't always hypocritical. Maybe some people take them seriously ... it was the beginning of my serious doubts."


For the duration of the trial, he was placed in a cramped cell with 40 of Egypt's most famous political prisoners. There were row after row of beds with only a thin crack between them to inch through. Maajid was thrilled to discover two of the men who had conspired to murder Anwar Sadat – Omar Bayoumi and Dr Tauriq al Sawah – had recently been moved to this dank cell. "This is like meeting Che Guevara – these great forerunners and ideologues who I can now get the benefit of learning from," he says. But "they were very fatherly, and they had been spending all these years studying and learning. And they told me I had got my theology wrong".


After more than 20 years in prison, they had reconsidered their views. They told him he was false to believe there was one definitive, literal way to read the Koran. As they told it, in traditional Islam there were many differing interpretations of sharia, from conservative to liberal – yet there had been consensus around once principle: it was never to be enforced by a central authority. Sharia was a voluntary code, not a state law. "It was always left for people to decide for themselves which interpretation they wanted to follow," he says.


These one-time assassins taught Maajid that the idea of using state power to force your interpretation of sharia on everyone was a new and un-Islamic idea, smelted by the Wahabis only a century ago. They had made the mistake of muddling up the enduringly relevant decisions Mohamed made as a spiritual leader with those he made as a political ruler, which he intended to be specific to their time and place.


Maajid's ideology crumbled. "I realised that the idea of enforcing sharia is not consistent with Islam as it's been practised from the beginning. In other words, Islam has always been secular, and I had been totally ignorant of the fact." But he says he found this epiphany excruciating. "I knew if I followed these thoughts wherever they would lead," he says, "I would go from being HT's poster boy to being their fallen angel."


His trial was finally ending with the inevitable verdict: guilty. When he emerged from Mazratora Prison into the damp half-light of Britain, he was dazed. HT hailed him as a hero. "After four years of ignoring me, they wanted me to be their rock star ... I was asked if I wanted to be the leader." But in March 2007, he sent out a mass email saying he was resigning from HT, threw away his mobile, and went home to Southend.


He spent a long summer eating his mother's cooking, watching television, and seeing the school friends he had shunned more than a decade before. "It amazed me. These were ordinary British guys and they knew what I had become – that I had hated Britain. And yet when they saw me, they showed me such warmth," he says. "They remembered me as I was. They didn't care what I had done. They had time for me."


In September 2007, Maajid appeared on Newsnight – the BBC's flagship current affairs show – to announce that he recanted not just HT, but Islamism itself. "What I taught has not only damaged British society, it has damaged the world," he said.


With a small band of other ex-Islamists, Maajid decided to set up an organisation dedicated to promoting liberal Islam and rebutting Islamism. They named in the Quilliam Foundation after William Abdullah Quilliam, an English businessman who converted to Islam in the late 19th century and set up the first British mosque. They are taking the organisational skills and evangelical fervour of HT, and turning it against them. They are also taking nearly £1m from the British government – the only way, Maajid says, to do their work effectively.


The last time I speak to Maajid he is on the refugee-strewn North-West frontier of Pakistan, touring the country's universities. He is lecturing to huge audiences about his own experiences, and arguing against literalism in Islam. The massed ranks of the neo-Taliban are not far away. "People here and in Britain keep saying – we've been waiting for something like this for such a long time," he says over the telephone. "They're so happy people are starting to speak out. They're terrified to do it themselves, but this emboldens them."


A large audience of young Muslims is waiting for him. Maajid says assertively: "You know, back when I was an Islamist, I thought our ideology was like communism – and I still do. That makes me optimistic. Because what happened to communism? It was discredited as an idea. It lost. Who joins the Communist Party today?" I can hear the audience applaud him as he walks onto the stage, and with that, Maajid hangs up.


III. Lost in liberalism


As the summer arrives and London begins to swelter, I sit with most of the "out" ex-jihadis in a slew of Starbucks across the city. We sip iced lattes and discuss how, not long ago, they tried to destroy Western civilisation.


They have different backgrounds: one is a Yorkshire girl with Hindu parents, another is a Northern boy whose father was a Conservative ultra-Thatcherite. Yet they are startlingly similar: they have all retained the humourless intensity of their pasts. And when they describe their Islamist former selves, they are distant and cold, as if describing a rather unpleasant acquaintance they did not entirely understand.


They wreath their stories in clouds of pointless detail: they talk for hours about the intricacies of seventh-century Meccan society, or the fine distinctions in the hierarchy of HT, willing you to understand it. It's a way of avoiding answering the hardest question – why? But from their scattered stories, I can trace something that seems genuinely new: an ex-jihadi way of looking at the world, that carries lessons about how to stop Western Muslims sinking into jihadism.


As children and teenagers, the ex-jihadis felt Britain was a valueless vacuum, where they were floating free of any identity.


Ed Husain, a former leader of HT, says: "On a basic level, we didn't know who we were. People need a sense of feeling part of a group – but who was our group?" They were lost in liberalism, beached between two unreachable identities – their parents', and their country's. They knew nothing of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia or the other places they were constantly told to "go home" to by racists.


Yet they felt equally shut out of British or democratic identity. From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation.


"Nobody ever said – you're equal to us, you're one of us, and we'll hold you to the same standards," says Husain. "Nobody had the courage to stand up for liberal democracy without qualms. When people like us at [Newham] College were holding events against women and against gay people, where were our college principals and teachers, challenging us?"


Without an identity, they created their own. It was fierce and pure and violent, and it admitted no doubt.


To my surprise, the ex-jihadis said their rage about Western foreign policy – which was real, and burning – emerged only after their identity crises, and as a result of it. They identified with the story of oppressed Muslims abroad because it seemed to mirror the oppressive disorientation they felt in their own minds. Usman Raja, a bluff, buff boxer who begged to become a suicide bomber in the mid-1990s, tells me: "Your inner life is chaotic and you feel under threat the whole time. And then you're told by Islamists that life for Muslims everywhere is chaotic and under threat. It becomes bigger than you. It's about the world – and that's an amazing relief. The answer isn't inside your confused self. It's out there in the world."


But once they had made that leap to identify with the Umma – the global Muslim community – they got angrier the more abusive our foreign policy came. Every one of them said the Bush administration's response to 9/11 – from Guantanamo to Iraq – made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world. Hadiya Masieh, a tiny female former HT organiser, tells me: "You'd see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think – anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?"


But the converse was – they stressed – also true. When they saw ordinary Westerners trying to uphold human rights, their jihadism began to stutter. Almost all of them said that they doubted their Islamism when they saw a million non-Muslims march in London to oppose the Iraq War: "How could we demonise people who obviously opposed aggression against Muslims?" asks Hadiya.


Britain's foreign policy also helped tug them towards Islamism in another way. Once these teenagers decided to go looking for a harder, tougher Islamist identity, they found a well-oiled state machine waiting to feed it. Usman Raja says: "Saudi literature is everywhere in Britain, and it's free. When I started exploring my Muslim identity, when I was looking for something more, all the books were Saudi. In the bookshops, in the libraries. All of them. Back when I was fighting, I could go and get a car, open the boot up, and get it filled up with free literature from the Saudis, saying exactly what I believed. Who can compete with that?"


He says the Saudi message is particularly comforting to disorientated young Muslims in the West. "It tells you – you're in this state of sin. But the sin doesn't belong to you, it's not your fault – it's Western society's fault. It isn't your fault that you're sinning, because the girl had the miniskirt on. It wasn't you. It's not your fault that you're drug dealing. The music, your peers, the people around you – it's their fault."


Just as their journeys into the jihad were strikingly similar, so were their journeys out. All of them said doubt began to seep in because they couldn't shake certain basic realities from their minds. The first and plainest was that ordinary Westerners were not the evil, Muslim-hating cardboard kaffir presented by the Wahabis. Usman, for one, finally stopped wanting to be a suicide bomber because of the kindness of an old white man.


Usman's mother had moved in next door to an elderly man called Tony, who was known in the neighbourhood as a spiteful, nasty grump. One day, Usman was teaching his little brother to box in the garden when he noticed the old man watching him from across the fence. "I used to box when I was in the Navy," he said. He started to give them tips and before long, he was building a boxing ring in their shed.


Tony died not long before 9/11, and Usman was sent to help clear out his belongings. In Tony's closet, he found a present wrapped and ready for his little brother's birthday: a pair of boxing gloves. "And I thought – that is humanity right there. That's an aspect of the divine that's in every human being. How can I want to kill people like him? How can I call him kaffir?"


Many of the ex-Islamists discovered they couldn't ignore the fact that whenever Islamists won a military victory, they didn't build a paradise, but hell.


At the same time, they began to balk at the mechanistic nature of Wahabism. Usman says he had become a "papier-mâché Muslim", defining his faith entirely by his actions, while being empty inside. "Wahabis are great at painting themselves [an Islamic] green on the outside, but when it comes to that internal aspect, it's not there. You pray five times a day, but why? Because God's told you to pray five times a day. You pay your charity – why? Because God's told you to pay your charity. This God of yours is telling you a lot. And why does he tell you to do that? Because if you don't do it, you'll end up in a fire. It's all based on being frightened. There's nothing to nourish you."


They had to go looking for other Islams – and often they found it in the more mystical school of the Sufis. "Wahabi Islam is totally sensory: eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," Usman says. "It lays out a strict set of rules to be followed here on earth, every moment of the day. Sufi Islam teaches instead that the realm of Allah is wholly separate and spiritual and nothing to do with the shadow-play of mere mortals. It is accessible only through a sense of mystery and transcendence." In this new Sufi Islam, Usman found something he had never known before: a sense of calm.


Ed Husain insists: "There are a lot of Muslims who agree with us. A lot. But they're frightened. They see what's happened to us – the hassle, the slander, the death threats – and they think: it's not worth it. But you know what? When I first spoke out, I was alone. I had no idea that, a year on, there would be this number of people speaking out, and many more who are just offering resources and support. Once a truth is spoken, it takes on its own life."


IV. Not Strawberry Season


Anjem Choudhary waves his hand angrily through the air, and says that in the world he wants to create, the people I have been interviewing will be put to death. "They are apostates. I don't consider [them] to be Muslim in any sense of the word," he says. "Everybody knows the punishment for apostasy." My facial muscles must involuntarily react, because he leans forward and asks suspiciously: "Are you Jewish?"


Anjem is one of the last of the famous Islamists from the 1990s still walking London's streets, free and furious. A decade ago, this city hosted a stream of fanatical Muslims who kept cropping up in the tabloid press as semi-comic pantomime villains. But gradually, one by one, they have been deported or arrested, leaving Anjem as their final public face. He has said the Pope and the Mohamed cartoonists should be executed, and has lauded the 7/7 bombers as "the Fantastic Four".


I wanted to see what the people the ex-jihadis have left behind make of them – and to sense if they are seen as a real threat. Anjem suggests meeting me in the Desert Rose Café in Leyton, not far from Usama's mosque. The 41-year-old lives here on social security benefits, paid for by a populace he believes should – in large measure – be lashed, stoned or burned in the hellfires. A long beard covers his chubby face, and long white robes cover his swollen form. I was surprised he agreed to meet me. He rarely speaks to print journalists. The last time he did, he stormed out, accusing the reporter of being a paedophile.


He immediately launches into a lecture about how the ex-Islamists are all liars and charlatans. They are "government bandits, set up by them and funded by them to do their dirty work within the [Muslim] community ... They were never actually practising! They were ignorant of Islam."


When I read him statements by ex-Islamists, he spits: "This is heresy ... The Muslim must submit to the sharia in all of his life. If I start to say things like, 'I don't believe the sharia needs to be implemented,' then that's tantamount to denying the message of Mohamed ... To say that any part of the Koran is not relevant nowadays is a clear statement of apostasy."


Taking any part of the Koran as metaphor will, he warns, cause the text to turn to dust in their hands. "I can't pick and choose what I like from the scripture. This is not strawberry season, where you can pick your own strawberries. You abide by whatever Allah brought in the final revelation with the example of the Prophet. And if there's something that you don't like, then you need to correct your own emotions and desires to make sure they're in line with the sharia."


He describes what is going to happen to them with a grin: "After they've been burnt, their skin will be recreated, and they will suffer the same punishment again and again and again."


I wondered if Anjem's biography fitted with that of the ex-jihadis' – or was there something different about them all along? Anjem says he was born in Welling in South-East London in 1967, where his father was a Pakistani immigrant who ran a market stall. He first realised the One and Eternal Truth when, one day in the early 1990s, he happened to hear a lecture at a local mosque by the Syrian-born Islamist Omar Bakri. Until then, Anjem had been living a life of sin as a young trainee lawyer, known to his friends as Andy. The British tabloids have exposed that he had sex with white women and dropped LSD.


But as he tells it, in the flames of Bakri's rhetoric, Andy was burned away, and Anjem was born. "Yeah, obviously, I had a period where I was not practising ... I have no shame at all in saying that I didn't always use to be like this. And I have great thanks to Allah that he guided me."


Yes, I say – but you would whip and lash and execute the person you were 20 years ago. His eyes flare. He pushes back his chair, half-rising to leave. "What I used to be like and what I used to say before isn't under discussion. If you're going to continue to ask about that, then I'll just stop the interview."


He then launches into half an hour of theological gobbledegook, where any question I try to interject is waved aside with a sneer. He has no interest in persuasion: with dull Torquemada eyes, he advocates the execution of anyone who disagrees. Is he scared of the ex-jihadis and their arguments? He is certainly angry with them – but he is so angry at everyone that it is hard to tell what this means.


He begins to ask – jabbing his finger – what my alternative is. "In the United States, bestiality is legal in the privacy of your own home," he says. Paedophiles are rampant, with the Man-Boy Love Association on the brink of success. Compare that with the 1,300-year long caliphate. In all those years, he says, "there were only 60 rapes".


Do you really believe that if people are not suppressed by a tyrant-God, they will become paedophiles and start ****** animals? Are you so rotten inside? Does Anjum fear Andy that much?


He stares at me, flat and emotionless now. "That is your last question," he says. And as I leave and look back at him through the glass, jabbering on his phone and daydreaming of annihilation, I realise how far all my interviewees – and new friends – have travelled.


They have burned in this fire of certainty. They have felt it consume all doubt and incinerate all self-analysis. And they dared, at last, to let it go. Are they freakish exceptions – or the beginning of a great unclenching of the jihadi fist?

To watch Johann Hari taking on Hizb ut Tahrir in a debate on the Islam Channel, click here

You can follow Johann on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/johannhari101
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 21215.html
Jarita
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Jarita »

Sab taqiyaa hain sab taqiya hain.
This new found liberal religion is a way to neutralize the backlash they are facing. They will use this to grow in de religionized Europe and then show their true colors.
Hari Seldon
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Hari Seldon »

Jarita wrote:Sab taqiyaa hain sab taqiya hain.
This new found liberal religion is a way to neutralize the backlash they are facing. They will use this to grow in de religionized Europe and then show their true colors.
That EU-stan might well be heading for a civil war with different zones/territories carved out by the rising islamists and the waning natives. Sounds far-fetched, I know. A ageneration ago, when De Gaulle opened French doors to Algerian immigration, nobody thought they'd cross 10% of total french pop this fast. And the rate grows relentlessly. In the next 20 yrs, more French natives will die than will be born, looking at age profiles. The graphic demographic imbalance will change ever faster seems like....

/OK, enough demographic D&G now. There are signs the EU establishment is showing signs of waking up to the danger. Lets wait and see how this plays out.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Sachin »

Jarita wrote:There was prime minister of Travancore that the British were terrified off. Seems like he understood the big game pat and was as immune as PVNR. Does anyone know his name?
This would be Sir C.P Ramaswamy Iyer the last Diwan of Travancore. How ever in Kerala he is also considered as an autocrat, who even wanted to implement a kind of US-model government (President being the top chap) in Kerala. He also ordered the police and army to give the commies a bloody-nose in Punnapra Vayalar uprising. He was also ambushed by one KCS Mani and injured in the attack. Commies and commie historians are not too pleased with the last Diwan.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Sanku »

There was a photo of Nehru with Rajpramukh of Travancore -- would he be also known as the Diwan? I.e. Diwan and Rajpramukh the same position?
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Sachin »

Sanku wrote:I.e. Diwan and Rajpramukh the same position?
I dont think so. Rajpramukh would be the king.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Rahul M »

carrying over from Indo-china thread
ashish raval wrote:J.C.Bose did not learned how to make wireless by reading Veda's. Neither did he communicated with Einstein in Sanskrit.
that was SN Bose, not JC Bose ! :rotfl:
Could you explain to me what they taught in Village education centres in 1800's in India !!
primary education taught grammar, arithmetic and calculations using prevalent unit systems.
higher education taught primarily logic and philosophy along with sanskrit literature. there wasn't a reason why more modern subjects couldn't be introduced without completely destroying the existent primary education system which catered to a huge portion of rural India, irrespective of caste and in some cases, even gender, I might add .
this system was destroyed by the british without bothering to place an alternative, plunging majority of India into the depths of illiteracy.
Give the due where it is necessary.
due ? :evil:
do lambs give 'dues' to the butcher for fattening them ?
whatever negligible good came out of brit rule was by accident and not by design and even that pales in comparison to the sheer carnage that was brought upon the Indian people.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Avinash R »

^ Rahul just a request, the history thread is an better place to discuss this.
http://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/viewto ... &start=680
Delete after reading, thanks
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Rahul M »

relevant enough for Indo-UK relation, even if historical. I will cross post all the same, thank you.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by harbans »

Hi Rahul, it was Jagdish Bose that invented wireless. SN Bose worked with Einstein in 20's, 30's particle physics and other fields.

primary education taught grammar, arithmetic and calculations using prevalent unit systems.
higher education taught primarily logic and philosophy along with sanskrit literature. there wasn't a reason why more modern subjects couldn't be introduced without completely destroying the existent primary education system which catered to a huge portion of rural India, irrespective of caste and in some cases, even gender, I might add .
this system was destroyed by the british without bothering to place an alternative, plunging majority of India into the depths of illiteracy.


Indians had primary education always, the gurukul system. It was the British who implemented primary education after seeing it prevalent in India. This is little talked about, on my other computer i had saved links regarding this. Will post them once i have access.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Rahul M »

Hi Rahul, it was Jagdish Bose that invented wireless. SN Bose worked with Einstein in 20's, 30's particle physics and other fields.
yes sir, I know that. I happen to know a little bit about those subjects too.
SN Bose's work is more accurately classified as statistical mechanics than particle physics.

added later : moved last three posts to distorted history thread.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by KaranR »

Bangalore designs Intel's first quad-core processor
16 Sep 2008, 1247 hrs IST,ECONOMICTIMES.COM

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Interesting notes:




Intel engineers in Bangalore have added a feather to their caps by designing from scratch, Intel’s first ‘true’ quad-core processors.

The company has rolled out its Xeon 7400 series of server chips, code named Dunnington, a chip lineup that includes the company's first quad-core and six-core chips produced on a single piece of silicon.

The Bangalore design centre is the first Intel team outside the US to complete the design of a 45-nanometer processor.

Post its inception in 2001, the Xeon 7400 series is the first chip to come out of Intel's Bangalore design centre. The centre had previously worked on another Xeon server chip called Whitefield.

But that chip never made it to market. It was cancelled in 2005, when Intel revised its product road maps to better compete with Advanced Micro Devices, and the Indian design team soon put its focus on Dunnington.

The Dunnington chip design marks a technical milestone for Intel, as it uses a monolithic die, the term engineers use to describe putting all of the cores on a single piece of silicon.

Intel's existing quad-core processor lines use two pieces of silicon, each with two cores, packaged together. That approach made the older quad-core chips easier to produce and avoided the manufacturing difficulties that hampered the release of AMD's Barcelona chip, an x86 server chip with four cores on a single piece of silicon. Those difficulties were compounded by AMD's transition to a new 65-nanometer manufacturing process.

With the introduction of Dunnington, and the upcoming Nehalem line of quad-core processors that also uses a monolithic design, Intel waited until its 45-nanometer process was in mass production, with any technical difficulties presumably ironed out, before making this transition.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by KaranR »

All these achievement without English .



India's Scientific and Cultural Heritage
Prof. N. S. Ramaswamy*
THHE long march of Man from nomadic an existence 10,000 years ago to the current level of civilization has been achieved by the contribution of sages, saints, scholars, scientists and philosophers in different parts of the world. We are indebted to all of them, who in their life time struggled and contributed for the welfare of man, animals and nature. In general, India contributed in the spiritual, cultural and philosophical sectors, while westerners contributed in science and technology for -the materialistic progress. Each country has a unique genius. Indians are indebted to the West for the modem technology, like instant communication, computers, rapid modes of travel, innovation in production, etc. India contributed largely to the inner world of Man. In certain cases, Indian sages discovered scientific truths long before westerners did. Mankind should be grateful to both ancient wisdom of India and the modern scientists and technologists of the West.
Many scholars think that it is India's century, whereby India's ancient thought and wisdom would be useful to solve the myriad problems afflicting mankind and to improve quality of life. Therefore, we propose to give a glimpse of India's scientific and cultural heritage so that Indians would get a better appreciation of our contributions, which will enable them to spread India's ancient wisdom not only to Indians but also to rest of the world.
Information given in this article has been taken from a variety of sources - both Indian and foreign. I express my gratitude to them. The number being large, I am not giving their names, for which I apologize. Voluminous books by eminent scholars are now available in Sanskrit, English and some regional languages.
I must express my profound gratitude to Dr. N. Gopalakrishnan, Honorary Director, Indian Institute of Scientific Heritage. The world owes a great deal to this great son of India, who has dedicated his life to spread the messages contained in our ancient thought and wisdom through his writings and lectures in India and abroad. I have taken a lot of material from his publications, for which I thank him.
Swami Vivekananda and Sri Aurobindo as well as many foreign scholars and Indologists believe that this is India's century, when the whole world would come to India to seek solutions to the problems confronted by mankind.
India's ancient thought and wisdom has covered most areas of human endeavor -science, technology, economics, psychology, law, governance, health, education, culture, philosophy, mysticism, cosmology, astronomy, astrology, linguistics, logic, music, dance, Yoga, meditation, environment, ecology, architecture etc: Sages and scholars made hundreds of discoveries in these areas, largely without any equipments or library, and partly through experiments as in the case of medicine, surgery,metallurgy, etc. They led virtuous lives and meditated with a prayerful heart. Many of these discoveries perhaps came to them as revelation, intuition and imagination. There is nothing supernatural about their powers. These saints and sages were selfless souls, who were only interested in the welfare of man, animal and nature. They led a simple life, desiring nothing for themselves. Most of them had family also. They had lofty ideals and worthy goals. Their discoveries prove that man is capable of unraveling the mysteries of the cosmos and nature, using then- inherent powers and following the principles laid down in India's spiritual literature. Such knowledge is known as Para Vidya, or higher knowledge^ as distinct from Apara Vidya or secular and materialistic knowledge obtained through the senses and using .equipments wherever necessary.
In spite of such a head start of 3000 years, India looks to the West in scientific and technological fields. Our Education system ought to be given enough resources and autonomy to carry out research as well as to document and disseminate India's ancient knowledge and wisdom. Our rich temples ought to fund such studies. Tirupati, Sabarimala and Guruvayoor temples should establish study centres. Educational institutions, under the management and control of religious Mutts, can help such pursuits.
We have compiled information on India's Scientific Heritage. Indians discovered profound and marvelous concepts, such as, counting, numbering system, zero, decimals, place value, infinity, Pythagoras theorem, gravitation, spherical shape of earth, planetary movements, diameter of the earth and atmosphere, speed of light, age of the Universe, time, metallurgy, atom and hundreds of such scientific truths, re-discovered later by western scientists using equipments. Sankara postulated the Advaita philosophy.
Indians gave a plausible explanation for the inequality and inequity in creation and suffering,by postulating the Law of Order, Law and Effect and Law of Rebirth. Ayu now being accepted by the West as method, since medicines are organic, was done by Sushrutha. Indians gave s arguments in favor of vegetarianisn western scholars were vegetarians, i Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare, Russell, and thousands of others. Our saints a had discovered the mysteries of nati before western scientists did. Mai discoveries of our sages are now attri Newton, Galileo, Kelvin, Copernicus, Pj etc. A list of discoveries by bur sages corresponding finding by the West will a later issue. A large number of wesl Emerson, Maxrmieller, Isherwood, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Mathew Arnol Frawley, Will Durant, Toynbee, Basham, Lin yu Tang, Walters - were in by Indian philosophers — Vivekana Abhedananda, Prabhupada and Ram Yogananda, Mahesh Yogi and Deepak Osho, Dayananda and Ravi Shankar ai others. These philosophers instilled in Indian thinking among US scholars. Y meditation have become popular there. C are also helping. They have to be hell facilities to learn more on Indian heril to spread Indian wisdom.
What is the advantage of knowing ancients had discovered these truths ear the west? The main objective is to Bharath, Most of us do not know anythii ^ India's past glory. We should blame o that, even after 60 years of independem is no attempt on the part of the Establisl educate the young about our ancient gloi hidden energy would then emerge and them to conduct research so that the contribute to the progress of our nati should adopt whatever is good in the the East as well as our own ancient and concepts, provided they are scientific rational. Superstitions should be abolished. Nothing should be accepted in blind belief. Experience is the key test of any statement. Even the concept of God should be proved by experience. Ramakrishna said that he saw God. Knowledge is of various kinds — Prathyaksha (manifested, visible), Anumana (inference) and Pramana (authority of great people). When we cannot see or infer, we should accept statements of those who are knowledgeable and have had experience. It is in that spirit we accept Einstein and Sankaracharya.
With the same attitude, we should take the postulatidn of our sages as valid. The younger generation of Indians do need to know much about ancient Indian discoveries in the field of Science, Astronomy, Mathematics, Metallurgy, etc. Fortunately, there are still hundreds of scholars, who are struggling, without support and recognition, to keep alive our heritage and prayerfully waiting for support their studies and documentation. Our corporate world should come forward. Though there is no profit in such investigations they will be the beneficiaries of a stable and united India. Understanding ancient thought and culture would help to strengthen our bonds to keep India as a nation state. The Corporate sector should introduce Indian Heritage as part of their HRD programmes. Rich temples in the south, like Tirupati, Guruvayur and Sabarimala ought to start Sanskrit colleges to study Vedas and show their relevance to current situations and problems. •
India's Scientific and Cultural Heritage — II*
Prof. N. S. Ramaswamy

I
N the earlier part of this article we have thanked Dr. N.Gopalakrishnan, Honorary Director of Scientific Heritage for his dedication to ancient India's thought and wisdom.
We give below Dr. N. Gopalakrishnan's writings in the Heritage Publications Series-66.

We have also listed a few discoveries of Indians, said to have been discovered by Westerners much later. We are thankful to him for permitting the reproduction. We are sure our compilation and pleas would awaken India.


No, Subject Discovered by Year
1 Discovery and Use of Zero Pingalacharya 200 B.C.
2 Loans and Interests Vishnusmruthi 100 BC
3 Charging Interest Vishnu Smruthi 100 B.C.
4 Pythagorus Theorem Boudhayana 700 BC
5 Binomial Theorem Pingalacharya 200 BC
6 Geometry in Sulbasutra-II Boudhayana 700 BC
7 Rules of Bodies in Motion Aryabhata - I 499 AD
8 Arc and Chord Aryabhata-I 499 AD
9 Circle - Value of Phy Aryabhata - I 499 AD
9- A Circle - Value of Phy Bhaskaracharya - I 628 AD
10 Triangles Aryabhata - I 499 AD
1 1 Rotation of Earth - II Aryabhata - I 499 AD
1 2 Eclipse-I Aryabhata - I 499 AD
1 3 Four Quadrants of Earth Aryabhata - I 499 AD
14 Nrushiyojanam Aryabhata - I 499 AD
15 Day Diameter Panchasiddhantika 4 505 AD
16 Meridian and Time Varahamihira
17 Knowledge on Infinity Bhaskaracharya - II Brahmaguptha 1148 AD ' 600 AD
18 Use of Ratio and Proportion Bhaskaracharya - I 628 AD
1 9 Use of Fractions Bhaskaracharya - I 628 AD
20 Partnership and Shares Bhaskaracharya I 628 AD

21 Progression of the Type
I sq + 2 sq + 3 sq + 4 sq . Bhaskaracharya I 628 AD
22 Progression of Type 1 cu+2 cu+3 cu+4 cu Bhaskaracharya I 628 AD
23 Triangles - (Quiz) Bhaskara I 628 AD
24 Rotation of Earth-I Brahmagupta 629 AD
25 Place Values-J Vyasa Bhashya to Yoga Sutra 650 AD
26 Parallax-H Lallacharya 700 AD
27 Parallax-HI Lallacharya 700 AD
28 Apogee, Perigee and Orbit of Earth Lallacharya 700 AD
29 Appearance of Circumference of Earth Lallacharya 700 AD
30 Shape of Earth Lallacharya 700 AD
3J Globe Varahamihira 505 AD
32 Meridian and Time Bhaskara I 628 AD
33 Eclipse - II Lallacharya 700 AD
34 Eclipse-II Lallacharya 700 AD
35 Angular Dimensions Vateswara 880 AD
36 Horizon Vateswara 880 AD
37 Astronomical Definitions Vateswara 880 AD
38 Equator Vateswara 880 AD
39 6 o* Clock Circle Vateswara 880 AD
40 Circle of Diurnal Motion Vateswara 880 AD
41 Day Radius Vateswara 880 AD
42 Ecliptic Vateswara 880 AD
43 Setting Point of Ecliptic Vateswara 880 AD
44 Rising — Setting Line Vateswara 880 AD
45 Day Radius and Earthsine Vateswara 880 AD
46 Sun's Prime Vertical Vateswara 880 AD
47 Progression of the Type En+En Sq + En Cu Sreedharacharya 900 AD
48 First Degree Indeterminate Equation Sreedharacharya 900 AD
49 Newton Gauss (1670 AD) Vateswara 904 AD
50 First Order Equation - II Sreedharacharya 990 AD
51 Equations of Higher Order - I Sreedharacharya 990 AD
52 Permutations and Combination - I Sridharacharya 990 AD
53 Interest Calculation Sridharacharya 990 AD
54 Meeting place of the two surfaces Aryabhata I 499 AD
55 Meridian Sankaranarayana I 950 AD

56 Eclipse - I Sarikaranarayana 950 AD

57 Knowledge on Infinity Brahmaguptha Bhaskaracharya II 600 AD 1148 AD

58 Calculations with Zero Sripati 1039 AD

59 Permutations and Combination - II Bhaskaracharya 1114 AD

60 First Order Equation - I Bhaskaracharya II 1114 AD

61 Equations of Higher Order - II Bhaskaracharya II 1114 AD

62 Area of Circle and Sphere Bhaskaracharya 1114 AD

63 Polygonal Bhaskara II 1114 AD

64 Lenth of ARC - Chord Bhaskara II 1114 AD

65 Arc and Arrow Bhaskara II 1114 AD

66 Volumes of4 Cones Bhaskara II 1 1 14 AD

67 Gravity Bhaskara II 1114 AD

68 Use of Average Values Bhaskaracharya II 1 150 AD

69 Gregory's (1632 AD) Madhava 1350 AD

70 De-Molvre's (1650 AD) Approximation Madhavacharya 1350 AD

71 Lhuiler's (1782 AD) Formula Madhavacharya 1360 AD

72 Lebnitz (1673 AD) Power series Puthumana Somayaji 1440 AD

73 Newton's Infinite GP Convergent Series Nilakanta 1444 AD

74 Taylor (1685 AD) Series of Sine and' Cosine Nilakanta 1444 AD

75 Somayaji's Theorems Puthumana Somayaji 1450 AD

76 ARC and Chord Puthumana Somayaji 1450 AD

77 Sine, Cosine Radius and ARC Puthumana Somayaji 1450 AD

78 Newton's (1660 AD) Power Series Puthumana Somayaji 1450 AD

79 Velocity of Planets per day Puthumana Somayaji 1450 AD

80 Place Values - 11 Sankaracharya -

8 1 Tycho Brahe Reduction of Ecliptic Achyuta Pisharoti -

82 Parallax - I Lallacharya -

Many scientific inventions that are attributed to foreigners have actually been discovered by our ancient masters of science. Given below are the discoveries and the names of the ancient Indians and western scientists, as given by Dr. N. Gopalakrishnan in the HPS-66.
1 BHQUDHAYANA - 700 BC
Pythagoras Theorem Pythagorus - 500 BC Proof of Pythagorus Theorem Euclid - 300 BC
2 SUSRUTHA - 700 BC
Cataract Operation Joseph Lister - 1600 AD Lithotomy Marios Santos - 600 AD Plastic Surgery Joseph Constantine -1814 AD Nose Surgery Gasparo Tag cozzi - 1600 AD

1 BHQUDHAYANA - 700 BC
Pythagoras Theorem Pythagorus - 500 BC Proof of Pythagorus Theorem Euclid - 300 BC
2 SUSRUTHA - 700 BC
Cataract Operation Joseph Lister - 1600 AD Lithotomy Marios Santos - 600 AD Plastic Surgery Joseph Constantine -1814 AD Nose Surgery Gasparo Tag cozzi - 1600 AD

3 GOUTHAMA - 300 BC
Evolution Theory Wave Nature of Sound Darvin - 1800 AD Hyghen - 1700 AD
4 KANAADA - 300 BC
Atomic Theory Dalton - 1893 AD'
5 CHARAKA - 300 BC Blood Circulation Micro Organism ' Hrarvey - 1656 AD Lewis Pasture -1822 AD
6 ARYABHATTA - I 476 AD
Spherical Shape of Earth Revolution of Earth Apogee Sine & Cosine Diameter of Earth Value for Pye Square Root Determination Galileo - 1564 AD Kepler- 1571 AD Kepler DeMolvre's i Copernicus-1473 AD Lindemann - 1882 AD Cantanew 1546 AD
7 VARAHAMIHIRA - 505 AD
Comets Haley - 1656 AD
8 BRAHMAGUPTA - 628 AD
Style's Equation +ve Integral Sterling Formula Newton Sterling Interpolation Equation for Area for Cyclic Quadrilateral Equation for Radius of Cyclic Quadrilateral Intermediate Equation of Second Degree Style - 1600 AD DeMolvre's - 1667 AD Sterling - 1642 AD Newton/Sterling
W. Shell - 1619 AD Lhuiler - 1782 AD Langrange - 1560 AD
9 LALLACHARYA - 748 AD
Perigee Kepler
10 GOVINDASWAMIN - 800 AD
Newton Gauss Forward Interpolation Formula Newton/Gauss
11 VATESWARA - 860 AD
Newton Gauss Backward Interpolation Formula Newton / Gauss 1640
12 BHASKARA - II - 1114 AD
Gravity Cyclic Method Newton Galois - 1600 AD

Inverse Cyclic. Method Differential Calculus Toilers Theorem • Theory of Continued Fraction Pellian Equation Euler - 1600 AD Newton Rolle - 1646 AD Sanderson Deoron Pale - 1660 AD
13 MADHAVA - 1350 AD
Taylor Sine Cosine Series Lebnitz Series Gregories Series for Arc Lebnitz Infinite Taylor - 1685 AD Lebnitz - 1642 AD Gregory Lebnitz
14 PARAMESWARA - 1360 AD
Lhuiler formula Lhuiler - 1782 AD
15 NILAKANTA - 1440 AD
Infinite GP Series Lebnitz Power Series Newton Lebnitz
16 SAYANA - 1400 AD
Velocity of Light Newton - 1642 AD
17 PUTHUMANA SOMAYAAJI - 1440 AD
DeMolvre's Infinite Series DeMolvre's
18 ACHYUTHA PISHAROTI - 1530 AD
Tycho-Brahe Reduction Tycho Brahe - 1546 AD

-
Tanaji
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Tanaji »

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8370459.stm

New Indian brides abandoned by British Asian husbands
but the practice still thrives in rural areas, and a British Asian groom can command a dowry of up to £20,000 in Punjab.

After Rani's marriage, her in-laws demanded more cash, but her parents could not pay, and she was dumped.

"After marriage, they physically and mentally tortured me.

"He made me abort my baby, then they threw me out of their house."
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Hidden threat from al-Qaeda sleeper cells

Post by Haresh »

Hidden threat from al-Qaeda sleeper cells

The British governments stupidity comes home to roost, anthing for a vote!!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6672806 ... cells.html :(
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Haresh »

British company to help India harness the power of the sea

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 935567.ece
Stan_Savljevic
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Stan_Savljevic »

The more I read about British perfidy pre-47 and prior to the Integration of States into the Indian Union, the more I am finding it hard to control my Karma-chuckles at watching Londonistan burn in its own perfidy. Cabinet Mission Plan, Stafford Cripps plan, lapse of paramountcy, separation between Indian States and Indian Provinces, you name it, just the tip of the iceberg.

And we had our own set of gunga dins who could do so much to subvert central power for the sake of sovreignty and financial control. Casts a new light on the geopolitical rumblings in the periphery at that time. Sardar Patel was the original chai-biskoot man, Nehru had no patience to take our gunga dins on a roller-coaster ride over a sustained period. For some positive that Sardar or other Congress-ites did, Nehru would utter some arrant nonsense and put insecurity in the gunga dins' minds. Could we have had Sardar live till Nehru died in 64?

And we have this, :roll:
Veil off Indo-UK defence courtship
http://telegraphindia.com/1091130/jsp/f ... 802137.jsp
India is considering a pact assuring the UK that bases of the Indian air force, army and navy will refuel British military aircraft and warships and facilitate the changeover of its troops and war material. Minister of state for defence M.M. Pallam Raju told a visiting UK delegation last week that “an MoU on Host Nation Support (HNS) was under examination of an inter-ministerial committee”. This is the first time such a committee or proposal has been disclosed. India does not have such a pact with any country. Its agreement with Russia is the strongest military relationship that is officially endorsed.
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Sanjay M »

Here are the latest resounding words of Pat Condell, a Brit with true grit:

arun
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by arun »

George Galloway, MP of the British Parliament, indulges in a spot of vote bank politics in Bangladesh and opposes the construction by India of the Tipaimukh dam in Manipur :

UK MP leads march against Tipai dam
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Mahendra »

Barroness Warsi gets eggs -e-pelti in Lutonabad, Pakistan

Now wasn't this the same woman who was batting for the Kasmheeri Phreedom phiters from Mirpur
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Re: Indo-UK: News & Discussion

Post by Johann »

Mahendra wrote:Barroness Warsi gets eggs -e-pelti in Lutonabad, Pakistan

Now wasn't this the same woman who was batting for the Kasmheeri Phreedom phiters from Mirpur
Not sure about that - she's from a newer crop of Muslim politicians who are much more concerned with domestic issues than international ones.

She's pushed the government to forget political correctness and attack Muslim cultural practices like polygamy, bigamy, forced marriage, etc., which is why some of these lads from Luton dont like her.

She represents what they most hate and fear - a powerful Muslim woman talking about women's rights and generally oriented towards assimilation. Why else do you think she's a Tory?

The British educated classes are so tied up in knots over political correctness and historical guilt that they need coloured Muslims to say what must be said. Its not just them either - for the significant numbers of *Muslims* in the UK who want to get the hell out of the stifling environment of family and mosque, or who are afraid of what their more pious brothers might do, they're looking to people like her or Ed Hussein who have embraced modernity while continuing to call themselves Muslim.
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