Thank God,I'm not in a socialist country.

I have great trust in the words of Cho,Swapan Das gupta,Tavleen singh
and Kanchan Gupta,though I differ them in some views..When Tavleen
singh says Black money can't be brought back to India,or When Swapan
says Nitish Kumar is the viable option for NDA's PM candidate than
Narendra Modi,I just stare the article for some time..If there is one
view that they agree with each other and myself is 'Socialism is
evil'..I read many views of these authors describing the way how India
was 20 years before and how liberalisation is not responsible for
rampant corruption (Corruption flourishes where there too much of
State control),how Narashimma Rao and our MMS is responsible for
bringing our country in right track..All I feel,Thank God,now we are
not socialist country..and our capital is not Mascow.I know economics
is a very boring subject,I don't have much knowledge about it,yet I
do understand 'WE ARE NOT IN STATE'S CONTROL and can express our
thoughts freely unlike China' Great know!!! I wish to write these
things after I read the article of Swapan Das gupta in his blog to
which I give a link below.

Blog: Usual Suspects
Post: Twenty years on, a forgotten anniversary
Link:
http://www.swapan55.com/2011/07/twenty-years-on-forgotten-anniversary.html
Let me know what you think of it!!!

NAC's Bill will kill harmony

SURYA PRAKASH

From:

http://www.dailypioneer.com/355943/NACs-Bill-will-kill-harmony.html

The proposed Communal Violence Bill, which paints Hindus as criminals and minorities as their victims, is downright dangerous.
Determined to promote its minority-appeasement agenda, the United Progressive Alliance regime is readying itself to introduce an obnoxious Bill that could disturb communal harmony, wreck the federal features of the Constitution and give the Union Government a fresh set of excuses to interfere in the governance of States.

The aim of this Bill — called the Prevention of Communal and Targetted Violence (Access to Justice and Reparations) Bill — is ostensibly to curb communal violence and hatred, but it rests on the flawed premise that in all situations the religious majority perpetrates violence and members of the religious minority are the victims. Therefore, ab initio it treats the Hindus, who constitute the majority in 28 of the 35 States and Union Territories, as the offenders and Muslims, Christians and other religious minorities as the victims of communal hatred and violence. The draft of this abominable law has come from the National Advisory Council, which has among its members some pseudo-secularists, Hindu-bashers and Nehru-Gandhi camp followers, all of whom have been hand-picked by its chairperson, Ms Sonia Gandhi.

The Bill describes “Communal and Targetted Violence” in Section 3 ( c ) as “any act or series of acts … knowingly directed against any person by virtue of his or her membership of any group”. The biggest mischief is in the definition of the word “group” that occurs in Section 3(e). It says a “group” means “a religious or linguistic minority, in any State in the Union of India, or Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes…”. This means that Hindus, who today constitute the majority in most States and Union Territories, will not constitute a “group” under this law and, therefore, will not be able to invoke its provisions, even if they are victims of Muslim or Christian communalism, hatred or violence.

In other words, if this law had been in force in 2002, the relatives of the 59 Hindus who were burnt to death by a Muslim mob at Godhra Station in Gujarat would not have had the right to lodge an FIR under this law because Hindus constitute a majority in that State, but the Muslims would have used its provisions to prosecute the perpetrators of the post-Godhra violence. If enacted, this Bill will amount to treating Hindu victims of communal violence as second class citizens and would approximate to the kind of anti-Hindu laws that prevail in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

The Bill describes a “victim” as a member of a religious minority who has suffered “physical, mental, psychological or monetary harm or harm to his or her property as a result of the commission of any offence under this Act, and includes his or her relatives, legal guardian and legal heirs, wherever appropriate”. Going by this description, a Muslim or Christian in most parts of India who is aggrieved with a Hindu neighbour over some issue can turn around and accuse him or her of causing “psychological harm”. Further, if the “victim” is not inclined to deploy this mischievous provision, the Bill allows his or her relatives to do so.

Hindu-bashing appears to be the primary aim of this exercise. The Bill says once enacted the law will extend to the whole of India. However, when it comes to the only Muslim-majority State in the Indian Union — Jammu & Kashmir — it says that “the Central Government may, with the consent of the State of Jammu & Kashmir, extend the Act to that State”. One must see what other caveats will be put in place in respect of the only Muslim-majority Union Territory — Lakshadweep — where Hindus constitute just 3.7 per cent of the population.

However, though Hindus will bear the brunt of this Bill’s obnoxious provisions, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs could also find themselves in trouble because the State is the unit to determine the issue of majority-minority. As per the religion data in the 2001 Census, Sikhs constitute 59.9 per cent of the population in Punjab, whereas the Hindu population in that State is 36.9 per cent. If this law comes into force, the Sikhs (constituting the majority) will face the music if Hindus begin accusing them of promoting communal hatred and anti-secular policies. Similarly, Christians, who have an overwhelming majority in three States — Nagaland ( 90 per cent ), Mizoram ( 87 per cent) and Meghalaya (70.3 per cent ) — will find themselves in deep trouble if the Hindu minority in these States begins to leverage this law and lodge complaints against the religious majority.

Therefore, citizens who are Muslims, Christians or Sikhs should not be taken in by the claims of the Congress that this Bill will strengthen secularism. Because this law does not treat all perpetrators of communal violence and hatred equally, these citizens will face the heat in all States where they are in a majority. Also, the demographic reality in some States will place the Hindus at a disadvantage. For example, there are States like Manipur (46 per cent Hindu) and Arunachal Pradesh (34.6 per cent Hindu) where no religious group has a clear majority. So, who is the “culprit” and who is the “victim” in these States?

Further, if you exclude the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes from the Hindu population, what will be the percentage of Hindus in these States? Kerala, with 56.2 per cent Hindus, is also a case in point. If you exclude Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (22 per cent approximately), what is the percentage of the Hindu “majority” in that State? Can this so-called “majority” be seen as the oppressor of the Muslim “minority” (24.7 per cent) or the Christian “minority” (19 per cent)? The Bill also tends to intimidate the bureaucracy and the police in the States. These provisions, which are repugnant to the federal features of our Constitution, will have to be discussed separately.

Finally, far from being a “Prevention of Communal and Targetted Violence Bill”, this is a “communal” and “targetted” Bill because it empowers only religious minorities and targets not all communalists but only the religious majority. Should Ms Gandhi and her cohorts have their way, the country’s unity and integrity will be in peril. Instead of promoting communal harmony, this law will promote communal strife. Such a Bill could only have come out of the Devil’s workshop! It could not have been drafted by persons who care for India’s unity and integrity. Where has the original draft come from? We must investigate.

Fai's Indians not my Indians - Swapan Das Gupta

From

http://dailypioneer.com/355537/Fais-Indians-not-my-Indians.html 

As the London correspondent of an Indian newspaper in the mid-1990s, I went for a meeting on Jammu & Kashmir in one of the committee rooms of the Palace of Westminster. There was nothing spectacularly important about the meeting and my only reason for going was that an Indian diplomat pressed me to attend. Those were the days when Jammu & Kashmir was on the boil and Western Governments were inclined to be quietly sympathetic to the separatists.

The meeting would have been unmemorable had it not been for a group of about 10 so-called Kashmiri activists who started shouting slogans and forced the security staff to intervene and clear the whole room. The Indian diplomat was understandably dejected and angry but helpless. It had taken just 10 determined and rowdy activists to win a minor victory for Pakistan.

I was reminded of the incident last year when, on a visit to London, I observed a group of some 50 noisy demonstrators picketing the Indian High Commission in Aldwych. Later that day I asked an Indian diplomat who was knowledgeable about such things what all the fuss was about. Surely India-Pakistan diplomacy had gone beyond these silly bouts of slogan-shouting in London?

The diplomat’s answer was cynically revealing. “It’s a mug’s game,” he replied. The Pakistan mission, he indicated, was under a compulsion to keep its local supporters happy. As a matter of routine, a busload or so of protesters were brought in to shout slogans for a few hours. When the show was over, these guys retired to a side street a few blocks away where a Pakistani handler would dole out a small fee and a carton of cigarettes to each protester. “It’s completely purposeless but a part of the Pakistani drill,” my diplomat friend assured me.

I guess Ghulam Nabi Fai, the director of the Kashmiri American Council, who finds himself in trouble with the FBI for violating the provisions of the US Foreign Agents Registration Act, was also part of the ‘drill’ in Washington, DC. The US Justice Department has claimed that Fai’s organisation, which also has branches in London and Brussels, received nearly $4 million from the Pakistan Government since the mid-1990s. It is also alleged that Fai operated on the instructions of Islamabad for the past 20 years and interacted with his intelligence ‘handlers’ more than 4,000 times since June 2008. The allegations would suggest that Fai was a field operative for the notorious ISI.

Fai’s activities were a little more subtle than the hired rabble in London that mouthed anti-India profanities for the sake of a carton of cigarettes. He organised seminars and conferences and lobbied law-makers to influence US policy on Kashmir — a legitimate activity if you consider that his primary allegiance was to Pakistan.

As part of his promotion of Pakistani interests, Fai assiduously courted those Indians in India who would help serve his interests. He made it a point to invite select Indians to his annual conferences in Washington — the business class tickets and generous hospitality being sweeteners. Naturally, his interest was focussed on those Indians whose views converged with the interests of Pakistan. He wasn’t bothered with Indians who felt that Jammu & Kashmir was an integral part of the Indian Union, even if some of them were unhappy with New Delhi’s handling of the civil unrest in the State. He was interested in a particular type of Indians — those who were critical of the Indian state but, at the same time, were also well-connected figures in the larger Indian Establishment. The so-called ‘human rights activists’ and ‘independent’ journalists were high on Fai’s list of priorities.

This is not to suggest that every Indian who disagreed with the official position on Jammu & Kashmir did so with a view to making Islamabad happy. That is clearly not the case. However, the contrarian would have to be a prize ass or wilfully obtuse to not realise that Pakistan would gleefully lap up their dissent for its own narrow advantage.

The issue, therefore, is not whether a Justice Rajinder Sachar or an editor of a mainstream publication held certain contrarian views that democratic India allows them the right to do. The issue is whether or not they were aware of Fai’s ability to use those views to promote the interests of Pakistan in a third country. All the evidence suggests that those Indians who travelled to the US to participate in Fai-organised programmes did so with the full awareness of the larger agenda of the Kashmiri American Council. The greed of a junket proved so overwhelming that they were willing to aid the interests of an enemy nation — and let’s have no doubt that Pakistan is an enemy nation with which India has been in a state of undeclared war.

There is a difference between a junket and an ISI-sponsored junket. Those who can’t appreciate the difference don’t deserve to grace public life in India.

The legitimacy Fai’s Indians gave to Pakistan’s war of a thousand cuts resulted in more than diplomatic embarrassment to India. It helped prolong a conflict and has resulted in the spilling of innocent blood.

To condone the transgressions of Fai’s Indians as simple naiveté or a colossal misjudgement is to be excessively indulgent. To not bat for India isn’t an offence; to play for Pakistan is an act of betrayal.

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