Failure of global intelligence says Pak PM, Gilani .

Pak PM Gilani who is on a tour of France, yesterday made this very surprising statement that Osama Bin Laden's capture and kiling in Pakistan was a failure of global intelligence agencies..

Osama is hiding in Pakistan with the connivance of the authorities there. How can Gilani make such an absurd claim ? Can we Indians go to Pakistan and find where these terrorists are being hidden by ISI and Pak military ? Americans are giving aid to Pakistan and they do not mind their sovereignty being compromised occasionally for mutual benefit.

The Osama killing incident has made some issues clear to the world regarding Pakistan. There are three centres of power in Pakistan, the first is the political establishment, the second, the military and third, the intelligence network, ISI. Everyone is calling the shots and working at cross purposes, with the result that the Pakistan public is becoming a fool in the eyes of the world public.

The world leaders will have to look at how these three power centres can be made to work coherently for the welfare of Pakistan and to eradicate terrorism and poverty from that country.

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The plight of India's tribals ..

The Indian tribals, a neglected lot .. The Indian establishment is not acting as cruel as the champions of Democracy US have treated their tribals, the Red Indians, two hundred years back, killed, maimed and demoralised them in such a manner that they would not rise for another thousand years.

Indian tribals are feeling disoriented and before they completely fall into the clutches of the Maoists and cause irreparable harm and damage the tender fabric the community is woven of, the Indian govt needs to act to reassure them. One of the suggestions which has come up in the article by Ramachandra Guha is to make them stakeholders, at the max, shareholders of the natural wealth which is being plundered from under their noses, to fuel the massive engine of globalisation.

Hope the Indian govt takes serious note of this development, lest many more , intellectuals, activists and sympathiosers like Binayak Sen surface in their support to force rational changes.

http://www.newsweek.com/2011/05/01/the-war-in-the-heart-of-india.html

Class Warfare In the Heart of India – Newsweek

Posted at May 3, 2011 // articles

Ramachandra Guha

New Delhi is India's political capital; Bangalore the center of its showpiece software industry. If you travel from New Delhi to Bangalore and back, you fly over the poorest districts of the country, where, for the past decade, a bloody war has raged between Maoist revolutionaries and the Indian state. The conflict is invisible to the business traveler, and to the rising Indian middle class. Beneficiaries of an economic boom that is concentrated in the south and the west of India, this middle class has no reason to take notice of a conflict in districts they never visit and to which they have no necessary connection.

Every so often, though, the war in the heart of India forces itself on the national consciousness. In April 2010 the Maoists ambushed a platoon of the Central Reserve police, killing 75. The jihadis in Kashmir occasionally shot dead one or two policemen, but never before, in the history of independent India, had so many men in uniform died simultaneously at the hands of insurgents. TV anchors in Delhi called upon the government to order airstrikes in retaliation.

A year later, the civil war is in the news again, owing to the journeys in and out of jail of a doctor named Binayak Sen. A gold medalist from the prestigious Christian Medical College in Vellore, Sen has been working for the past two decades among tribals in the state of Chhattisgarh. In May 2007 Sen was arrested on the charge of aiding the Maoists. The evidence against him was scandalously flimsy. It consisted of some pamphlets the police found in his house and of visits he had made, in his twin capacity as a doctor and human-rights activist, to Maoists in jail. Sen's incarceration provoked widespread protests in India and abroad. Amnesty International adopted him as a "prisoner of conscience"; 22 Nobel laureates signed a letter demanding his release.

Two years later, when Sen's case had not yet come to trial, the Supreme Court finally granted him bail. In December 2010 a court in Raipur, the capital of Chhattisgarh, found Sen guilty of "sedition" and sentenced him to life imprisonment. The severity of the judgment—and the scantiness of the evidence presented by the prosecutor—prompted a fresh wave of protests by intellectuals and human-rights organizations. On April 15 this year, the Supreme Court granted Sen bail again, noting that the mere possession of Maoist literature did not make one a Maoist. The judges added that possession of a copy of The Story of My Experiments With Truth did not necessarily make one a follower or admirer of Mahatma Gandhi.

The case of Sen provides a window into India's most ferocious fault lines. These run across various axes: economic, social, political, and institutional. In 1991 the Indian economy, previously under strict state control, was opened up to market competition. The dismantling of what was called the "license-permit-quota raj" was overdue. It unleashed the shackled spirits of the Indian entrepreneur; generated wealth, employment, foreign exchange; and spawned a new wave of philanthropy.

The software industry represents the best, and most benign, side to globalization. Here, a skilled, English-speaking labor force has taken advantage of the integration with the world economy and of the accident of India's being five hours ahead of Europe and 10 hours ahead of North America. But there is also a darker side to globalization, as manifested in a growing demand for iron, bauxite, and other minerals, to meet which tens of thousands of villagers have been pushed off their land by private companies acting in collusion with the state.

The surge in mining has chiefly taken place in the tribal districts of central and eastern India. The tribals constitute 8 percent of India's population, and are even worse off than the Dalits (as the former Untouchable castes are known), who make up 15 percent. In a recent book, demographer Arun Maharatna compared the quality of life of an average Dalit with that of an average tribal. On all counts the tribals are more disadvantaged. Some 30.1 percent of Dalits are literate, but only 23.8 percent of tribals are. As many as 41.5 percent of Dalits live below the official poverty line; however, the proportion of poor tribal households is even higher, at 49.5 percent. One in six Dalits has no access to doctors or health clinics; as many as one in four tribals suffers from the same disability; and 63.6 percent of Dalits have access to safe drinking water, but only 43.2 percent of tribals do.

Although they are often poor and oppressed, the Dalits do have a visible stake in Indian democracy. The drafting of the Indian Constitution was conducted under the close supervision of the great Dalit lawyer B. R. Ambedkar. Dalits have their own political parties and their own, very influential political leaders: a Dalit woman, Mayawati, is currently chief minister of India's largest state, Uttar Pradesh.

On the other hand, the tribals have been neglected by the state and the political class. Moreover, they have in recent years been dispossessed of their means of livelihood, and have faced a triple resource curse. Living among some of India's finest forests, alongside its fastest-flowing rivers, and atop its richest veins of mineral ore, they have had to make way for commercial logging, hydroelectric projects, and mines. Their discontent has been exploited by the Maoists, who are now deeply entrenched in the tribal districts of central and eastern India. The insurgents are very focused. They have a full-time cadre of 20,000 activists, with a comparable number of AK-47s at their command. They are also adept at the use of land mines.

In the summer of 2006, I traveled through the district of Dantewada, in Chhattisgarh, where a state-supported vigilante group had been set up to combat the Maoists. The conflict had divided families, homes, and clans, and claimed hundreds of lives and rendered 100,000 tribals homeless. The refugees lived in tents along the main road with no hope of going back to their villages and no prospect of jobs elsewhere in India.

Sen had been to Dantewada, too, and published a sharp indictment of the vigilantism, which may be one reason why he has since been persecuted by the government of Chhattisgarh. For criticizing an admittedly totalitarian regime, Liu Xiaobo (winner of last year's Nobel Peace Prize) got 10 years in jail; for more or less the same offense, albeit in a county that claims to be the world's largest democracy, Sen has been sentenced to jail for the rest of his life. The judicial system in India is painfully slow, so, while it is likely the Supreme Court will eventually acquit him of the charges, this may take several years.

Sen has suffered greatly, as have very many others, whose cases have unfortunately not been picked up by Amnesty International or even the Indian media. On that trip to Dantewada we also visited the local jail, where we interviewed several tribals who had been locked up because they refused the invitation to join the vigilantes. These "undertrials" (as people awaiting trial are described in India) had no knowledge of the law, no access to lawyers: for all I know they are in jail still.

The Indian judicial system is tardy in its upper reaches and corrupt in its lower reaches. The police are always inefficient and often malevolent. Their treatment of undertrials is brutal. On our trip, we collected testimonies of villagers who had their homes burned and their women violated by the police. In every case, they were too terrified to file a formal complaint.

The Maoists are lawless in their violence; so too, in these districts, is the state. The trial of Binayak Sen, one hopes, will bring wider attention to these deep deficiencies in Indian democracy. By the same token, the spread of Maoism could perhaps make economic policies more sensitive to tribal rights and needs. Perhaps if they are given a substantial stake in mining and forestry projects, they may yet benefit from the boom.

These hopes are probably illusory. Judicial reform may be beyond the present institutional capacities of the Indian state. To make tribals stakeholders may be beyond the moral compass of politicians and mining companies. It is striking that despite the persistence of the Maoist insurgency, no major leader has yet thought it fit to visit these troubled parts of India. Not the prime minister, Manmohan Singh; not the head of the ruling alliance, Sonia Gandhi; not her son and heir apparent, Rahul Gandhi. Like the traveler between Bangalore and Delhi, but with far less excuse, they act as if the conflict did not exist.

Guha's most recent book is Makers of Modern India (Harvard).

Finally US learns a hard lesson ..

Finally the dumb US administration has learnt, though the hard way, after 10 years and spending ( Chinese and Japanese funds loaned to US) $ 1.3 trillion, that their sleeping partner for the past 40 years, has actually been stabbing in its back !!! They have closed US consulates in two cities which will be followed by cutting off aid funds to Pakistan. The irony is that the US billions which flowed to Pakistan to fight terrorists and help find Osama Bin Laden was used to feed and protect him. These dumb leaders should try to introspect and realise that it cannot fool its people any longer by feeding  them stories of partners in terrorism claims ..

The whole world knows for sure that Osama is safe in American custody and will be tried to unravel the terrorist havens in Pakistan and it's assistance and inks to terror groups in Pakistan and around the world .. Slowly we will see in the coming days all the remaining Islamic terror leaders being gunned down one by one, with inputs from the hale and hearty Osama.

After realising their goals US will dispose of their source of this classified information the way they like. Cries from around the world have come to brand Pakistan as a terrorist state .. It is already a terrorist haven, the only question remains when the final branding and baptism will happen ..

For the failed rogue state of Pakistan, it's last days are numbered !! But what about its partner in crime all these forty years ?? Caught between the devil and the deep sea, lot of questions will be answered in the coming days .. Containing the backlash in its collaborator and partner rogue countries against the killing will be the immediate threat US will face ..

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Any relations with Ladens of Kerala ..?

I was told by somebody in Kerala that Bin Laden's family migrated from Kerala many generations back and they were from the central part of Kerala, the laden family which is found moving all around Kerala (gypsies..), concentrated mainly around muvattupuzha and kolenchery ..

Surprising news !!

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Pakistan lives to its promise .. another one bites the dust..

Pakistan has once again demonstrated its comittment to eradicating terrorism from the face of planet earth by helping smoke out yet another dreaded terrorist from its own land.

All the while  Pakistan leaders and its dreaded secret service organisation ISI has been maintaining that Osama Bin Laden is not in Pakistan. If this revelation by US is accurate Pakistan has once again demonstrated its commitment with US to get rid the world of terror.

Pakistan's pre-eminence as the epi-centre of world terror stands unchallenged in the modern world. The US Secretary of State has been very quick to reassert its committment with Pakistan to fight terror jointly.

God only knows when they will realise with whom they have been sleeping with all these years. By being the first state in the world to quickly align with the failed, rogue state of Pakistan , US is showing the world that a similar fate will befall itself very soon ..

some habits die hard !!

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Indian Democracy shows its mettle yet again ..

The Parliamentary Accounts Committee (PAC) of the Indian Parliament set to probe into the 2G scam to look into the flawed award of 2G spectrum licenses, under the leadership of Dr Murli Manohar Joshi failed to get its report accepted by the committee.

Dr Joshi who violated all forms of Parliamentary procedures and rule book, tried to take the law into his hands and ram the unilaterally drafted report down the throat of parliamentarians which was not accepted by them. He even went further to call off the meeting, walking off and tried to submit his partial report to the Speaker.

The richness of Parliamentary democracy is witnessed in that even after showing his fascist style of functioning, the Indian Parliament speaker went by the rule book to accommodate Dr Joshi again as the head of the PAC for one more year.

The Indian democracy is ever forgiving and accommodative, but it can be strict and non-forgiving on the 2G scamsters ....
Coruption will beeradicated from the Indian public life for ever under the leadership of Anna Hazare..

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Osama Bin Laden, dead ..

Now that confirmed reports are coming of the death of Osama Bin Laden, can the world look forward to a period of peace or retribution ?

The winds of the Jasmine revolution blowing across the Arab nations in full force, and even in India to rid itself of the scourge of corruption, is hoped will lead to people's aspirations getting full voice and representation across the world. Dictators and autocrats who have been taking their people for a ride will find the going tough and will be answerable to all of their sins of omission or commission.

Let Democracy prevail in all nations of the world ..

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