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August11, 2005 - [India Thinkers Net] Dalit Human Rights watch >> |
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[1] From: viji <viji123@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Aug 9, 2005 Subject: The dangerous dichotomy between some Muslims and the society around them The dangerous dichotomy between some Muslims and the society around them Saturday, 23rd July 2005, by Robert Fisk (The Independent) http://www.robert-fisk.com/ http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/ That fine French historian of the 1914-18 world conflict, St?©phane Audoin-Rouzeau, suggested not long ago that the West was the inheritor of a type of warfare of very great violence. "Then, after 1945," he wrote, "... the West externalised it, in Korea, in Algeria, in Vietnam, in Iraq... we stopped thinking about the experience of war and we do not understand its return (to us) in different forms like that of terrorism... We do not want to admit that there is now occurring a different type of confrontation..." ----------- [2] From: viji <viji123@yahoo.com> India's cancer wards Sandhya Jain Since West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya is more mature than his Assam counterpart, there has been no unseemly controversy over Governor GK Gandhi's warning that the State is sitting on an "infiltration time bomb" (The Pioneer, July 21). Mr Gandhi has informed President APJ Abdul Kalam that unchecked infiltration is creating a demographic crisis, with the border districts of Murshidabad and Malda witnessing a steep rise in minority population. BSF officials say the magnitude of the threat can be gauged from the fact that over 11 lakh Bangladeshis who entered the State legally since 1971 have simply disappeared. As for the illegal aliens, estimated at 1.5 crores by former Home Secretary Madhav Godbole, the entire north eastern sector is bursting with Bangladeshi migrants, mosques and madarsas. These are festering cancer wards of an amnesiac nation, hurtling towards another potential Partition. Bangladesh census chief Sharifa Begum has detected a 'missing' population of 1.4 crores, closely matching Indian estimates of persons who have intruded with the connivance of Bangladesh and Pakistan's ISI, to destabilise India. Bangladesh is even training infiltrators to speak Assamese before pushing them into Assam. Concerns over Bangladeshi infiltration are not new. Mr Godbole's unpublished Task Force on Border Management and Assam Governor Gen SK Sinha's 42-page report to the President in November 1998 warned of a conspiracy to carve out a Greater Bangladesh. Gen Sinha cautioned against an ISI plot (Operation Pin Code) to cut off the north east by grabbing the narrow "chicken neck" Siliguri corridor. Former Intelligence Bureau chief TV Rajeshwar reported plans to create another Bengali-speaking Islamic country on India's eastern border. These reports have been picturised into an exceedingly powerful documentary, The Bangla Crescent, by dynamic film producer Mayank Jain, who is privately screening it in concerned circles. The film captures the connection between mushrooming madarsas and jihadi fundamentalism; the radicalisation of Kashmir was preceded by the creation of a network of madarsas across the state. Standing on the Indian side of Jessore Road, Mayank Jain interviewed 6-8 year old boys at Madrasa Zulfikar Ali Siddiqiya, where all teaching is in Arabic, not Bengali. Asked to define a kafir, young Mohammad Sheikh Shahin parroted: "Jo Allah ki baat nahin sunta, Nabi ke adesh ke mutabik nahin chalta... shaitan ki baat suntan hai" (One who does not listen to Allah, does not live according to the dictates of the Prophet, listens to Satan). Asked if he knew the meaning of jihad, the young talib (student) said, "it means war"(yudh), it is "Kafir ke saath Nabi ji ke Musalmanon ki ladai." Quite explicit. If there are any doubts about the uniformity of madarsa teaching, one has only to walk into the Madrasa Faizul Ulum Hathishala in Laxmi Nagar, near Delhi Police headquarters. Here Maulana Rehan Ahmad explains: "Khuda himself has determined the punishment (sazaa) of the Kafir. It is to reside forever in hell (jahannum), burn in fire... there are all kinds of horrors there." He explains that jihad is waged on non-Muslims after "he is invited to join the faith (din ki dawat), asked to place his faith on Allah, when he does not do so, then at that moment the hukm for jihad is given." The Bangla Crescent documents the political corruption which helps infiltrators get ration and voter identity cards, an issue Ms Mamata Banerjee was not allowed to expose in Parliament recently. A young woman in the film admits her family came from Bangladesh, but her father managed to get a ration card from Kolkata. They vote for a certain political party. That money changes hands is obvious: Chief Vigilance Commissioner N Vittal recorded that RDX for the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts sailed through customs after an officer received Rs 20 lakhs. Political support has made the aliens quite aggressive. A young man in the capital's Jamia area asserted that even if those who came from Bangladesh are called outsiders (is there a doubt?), the children born in India are not! Conceding this anomaly, Mr Baljit Rai, ex-DGP, Tripura, said there is urgent need for a law to deny citizenship to the offspring of infiltrators. Alex Perry of Time magazine gave the startling information that 150 persons entered Bangladesh from Afghanistan or Pakistan under escort, and simply disappeared, probably in Chittagong where there are well established insurgent bases. The whole point of Bangladesh, Perry said, is that "if you are on the run, it's a safehouse. You go there to disappear". American authorities have listed the Bangladeshi and Bosnian branches of a Saudi charity called Al Harmain as having gone "completely rouge;" they use their money essentially to fund Al Qaeda. The cameo interviews are forceful and neatly woven into the script, maintaining momentum. The Pioneer editor Dr Chandan Mitra points out that as madarsas are not functioning covertly, but openly, we need to know what the Government, the citizenry and the security forces are doing. He said he had personally seen border madarsas being used for ISI activity and Maoists are also using them. Mr RK Ohri, ex-IGP, Arunachal Pradesh, cautioned that an Islamic Caliphate is rising on India's flanks, from Bangladesh to West Asia, and that the shadow of the Mughlistan corridor is now visibly manifesting in various districts along the Indo-Nepal and Indo-Bangladesh border. The demand for a 'Muslim Banghboomi' has already been raised, warns ex-MP BL Sharma (Prem). Travelling in West Bengal to check out certain atrocities against Hindus some years ago, his convoy was attacked by Bangladeshis. When demographer JK Bajaj and his colleagues prepared a mathematical model of the demographic challenge facing India, they found it exactly matched the map prepared by Bangladesh's Mughalstan Research Institute. Experts feel the latter has been prepared by the ISI because the 'Mughalstan' spelling indicates a Punjabi mind! Bangladesh's reputed human rights activist Salam Azad laments that Bangladesh is the best place in the world for the return of the Taliban. Madarsas, he said, are teaching that "Muslims are the best in the world; non-Muslims will be converted, beaten, killed, married, raped, because non-Muslim women are regarded as maal-i-ganimat (free war booty)... Minorities will be oppressed, indigenous people will be attacked, in my country there is oppression everywhere... and this is being done by the so-called educated people of the madarsas." West Bengal BJP leader Tathagatha Roy said the extent of atrocities against Hindus in Bangladesh can be seen from the fact that in several districts there was not a single woman between the ages of seven to seventy years who had not been raped in that country. He apologised for the indifference of the BJP Government which did not grant refugee status to Hindus fleeing oppression in Bangladesh. North Eastern Students Organisation chairman Samujjal Bhattacharya said all 49 tribal belts and blocks in Assam have been occupied by Bangladeshis. The shadows have spread to Arunachal, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya... Today, Hindus residing within a 50-km radius of the border are feeling the heat. They are being harassed on Indian soil and forced to move as the infiltrators establish themselves along this corridor, thus de facto extending the Bangladesh border into India - another PoK in the making. Yet the political attitude was best summed up by CPI leader AB Bardhan: "Why are you raising the issue of Bangladesh? Because it borders Tripura and West Bengal and Left gets elected from there?" http://www.dailypioneer.com/indexn12.asp?main_variable=EDITS&file_name=edit3%2Etxt&counter_img=3 ----------------------------------------- [3] From: Parvez Jamasji <parvez1942@yahoo.com> Date: Tue Aug 9, 2005 5:48am Subject: Re: [indiathinkersnet] Re: [Mahajanapada] Cultural Relativism - This era's fascism There are no links Regards "C.K. Vishwanath" <ck_vishwanath2000@...> wrote: The question of cultural relativism is an important one.in india,SATI was justified in the name of india's peculiar social context.what we want is clearly a critical attitude towrds universal and relative values. --------------------------------------- [4] From: viji <viji123@yahoo.com> http://www.newkerala.com/news.php?action=fullnews&id=12297 India and China will alter the world: Naipaul New York : Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul says that India and China "will completely alter the world" although he bemoans there "are no thinkers in India". "It's a rather calamity of India today that there are no thinkers. A big country, a powerful country of a billion people. There are no thinkers in India. What is important today is the economic development of India and China that will completely alter the world," Naipaul told The New York Times in an interview. In contrast "nothing that is happening in the Arab world has that capacity", Naipaul said, adding, "It has capacity for mischief. They are spreading their little wars to Indonesia, the Philippines and all these other places. But that's just mischief. What's happening in India and China will bend the world and will change it forever." Naipaul, whose writings about the world of Islam and its troubles have been considered prophetic, had a sobering view of the Sep 11 terror attack on America. "What happened on Sep 11 was too astonishing. It is one of a kind, can't happen again. But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually but they'd raid a few banks," he said. On the Arab world he said "intellectually it is a great tyranny. Because it is a tyranny people's can't grow intellectually and be on the level of the world they envy. But it has always been like that. Religion has always been a tyranny and it becomes an expression of state power." He spoke of his controversial views on Islam with undiminished vehemence. "I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery," he said. He wondered to what extent "people who lock themselves away in belief...shut themselves away from the active busy world?" He said he was also interested in "to what extent without knowing it" they were "parasitic on that world"? He said there were "no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them"? He reiterated his famous observation that as a form of writing the novel is dead. "What I felt was, if you spend your life just writing fiction, you are going to falsify your material," he said. "And the fictional form was going to force you to do things with the material, to dramatise it in a certain way. I thought nonfiction gave one a chance to explore the world, the other world, the world that one didn't know fully." "I thought if I didn't have this resource of nonfiction I would have dried up perhaps. I'd have come to the end of my material, and would have done what a writer like Graham Greene did. You know, he took the Graham Greene figure to the Congo, took him to Argentina, took him to Haiti, for no rhyme or reason." -------------------------------------------------- [5] From: Sukla Sen <suklasen@yahoo.com Date: Tue Aug 9, 2005 Subject: Remembering Nagasaki Nagasaki Peace Declaration Mayor Iccho Itoh August 9, 2005 Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/asia-pacific/4133572.stm ------------------------------ [6] From: "I. K. Shukla" Date: Wed Aug 10, 2005 Subject: FW: [uttorshuri] We must act now to prevent another Hiroshima Published on Saturday, August 6, 2005 by the lndependent/UK <http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article303965.ece We Must Act Now to Prevent Another Hiroshima - or Worse by Noam Chomsky The explosions in London are a reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated. In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction. A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 September 2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist groups. The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited. US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for more than 60 per cent of the world total (which has risen 25 per cent since 2002). There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May. The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that "reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others". President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including Anti-Ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states". The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history", as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana. The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster", recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon". McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably high", and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade". <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0805074007/commondreams-20/ref=nosim/ |
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