"In this respect [caste], Ambedkar and Gandhi were on the same footing--if anything Ambedkar’s argumentation as seen in The Annihilation of Caste is far more sophisticated. However, the crucial difference between them was their treatment of the idea of equality. Both figures held that human beings were essentially unequal. Ambedkar, however, insisted that this ontological inequity was not a sufficient justification for the construction of an unequal social system. Gandhi, on the other hand, felt that this ontological inequality warranted social divisions for the sake of social stability. Thus, Gandhi sought to protect caste and Ambedkar set out to annihilate it."
The Guardian 19.9.1999 av Andrew Smith. In the final analysis, I wonder if he feels British or Indian. Or is that to miss the point? Sawhney looks pensive. 'No, it's salient. That question guided the whole album. What I've had to realise is that I am who I am. I'm not defined by concepts of nationality or religion, or anything else that anyone wants to apply to me. The BJP would probably want to define me through religion, and the BNP would probably want to define me by the colour of my skin.'
Nosy parker Press Trust Of India, New Delhi, 5 January "The Home Ministry is giving finishing touches to 'Netra', which will be deployed by all security agencies to capture any dubious voice traffic passing through software like Skype or Google Talk, besides write-ups in tweets, status updates, emails, instant messaging transcripts, internet calls, blogs and forums."
AAP changes political chemistry in an election year (AAP has now declared that it will contest the national elections due to take place in April-May) Opinion by Saba Naqvi, aljazeera 15.1.14: ...one may have expected more enthusiasm from the left: Since the liberalisation of the economy, AAP has been the first influential force to actually unsettle the politician-business nexus and demand scrutiny. What is happening instead, is that commentators are demanding to know AAP's stance on issues like Kashmir and national security, both areas on which mainstream parties have to tread carefully. Because AAP is the creation of an activist like Kejriwal, there is an expectation that he will take a position on every issue. But within AAP there is an argument that realpolitik demands ambiguity on some issues. The party says it wants to occupy the middle and appeal to a cross section of opinion.
Shuddabrata Sengupta 20.1.14 in Kafila on Delhi Law Minister and Aam Aadmi Party leader Somnath Bharti’s midnight raid in Khirki village... "perhaps this is what Rabindranath Tagore had in mind when he invoked ‘the savage greed of the civilized’ in his poem ‘Africa’. Now that Africa has been called out in the streets of Delhi, we need to recognize the heart of darkness that lurks within this city. This is the darkness of racial prejudice, that every ‘North Eastern’, Burmese and African inhabitant of Delhi knows well, it is the stain of bigotry that every Afghan or Kashmiri Muslim young man or woman faces when looking for a house to rent, it is the slur, the snide remark, that shadows every trans or queer person. This is the real face of the so called ‘moral code’ that Somnath Bharti and his vigilantes are trying to force down our throats. This is why, unless something is done to prevent it now, AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) will rapidly turn into KHAP (Khas Aadmi Party)."
The first thing you should know about Rakhi Birla, 26, is that she is not a Birla. The last name of the upstart Aam Aadmi Party’s youngest minister in Delhi is a misspelling from school records.
Ajachi Chakrabarti 2013-12-07 on immigrants in Khirki and Nigerians in Goa. Obodo Uzoma Simon found murdered in Goa 30.10.13 "The next day, after the police managed to collect the body, the hearse was stopped by a group of around 50 West Africans, mostly Nigerians. They placed Simon’s body on the road and blocked NH 17, the arterial north-south road in the state." "Speaking to a television channel on the incident, activist Oscar Rebello was more blunt. “... Here, the biggest problem is that the drug trade of the coastal belt runs the political economy of the coastal belt. Period.”
The Edtor, Millennium Post 21.1.14: " Despite the ordinary racism now expressed in state law minister Somnath Bharti’s zealous midnight raid in the Capital’s Khirki Extension and forcing, unlawfully, the cops to arrest a bunch of African women ostensibly for participating in sex and drug trade, it is wrong to dismiss the AAP-driven political experimentation as a fad, a passing indulgence on the part of Delhi’s young and old. To say that will be to disregard and misread how Kejriwal and his band of intrepid men and women have changed the grammar of Indian politics, perhaps forever."
Zee news January 31, 2012 Tharoor, who is on a visit to Israel to attend the annual Herzliya conference which attracts leading Israeli politicians and experts from world over, "I am not hiding anything in saying that India is not a fan of NPTa deeply misguided treaty which essentially enshrined apartheid in international law, which basically said that only five countries had the right to have something that nobody else did, and for us it was fundamentally unacceptable,"
SA Aiyar "Swaminomics" The Times of India , 09 February 2014 "Gandhi wanted the central government to have very limited powers. He wanted villages to rule themselves the traditional way, through sarpanches and panchas (village chiefs and councillors). But Ambedkar declared that villages were cesspools of cruelty, caste prejudice and communalism. No human rights would be safe if left to dominant groups that had oppressed minorities for centuries in the most inhuman fashion. "
With the Lok Sabha elections just weeks away, a Leftist Opinion: "Who are the AAP voters who would otherwise vote for the BJP? By definition, they are people who wouldn’t mind having a prime minister who presided over a massacre of Muslims in Gujarat (whether or not they know what role he played in it). This is where the AAP and BJP constituencies overlap. But these voters are fickle. AAP issued just one statement during its election campaign about the violence in Muzaffarnagar, and apparently that was enough to make the overwhelming majority of Jats, who constitute a strong voting bloc in outer Delhi constituencies, decide to support the BJP. In other words, the more AAP makes anti-communal statements or takes left-wing positions, the less it is a threat to the BJP."
India broke with the international community in acknowledging that Russia has legitimate interests in Ukraine. zachary-keck_q By Zachary Keck March 08, 2014 "When asked for India's official assessment of the events in Ukraine, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon responded: "We hope that whatever internal issues there are within Ukraine are settled peacefully, and the broader issues of reconciling various interests involved, and there are legitimate Russian and other interests involved…. We hope those are discussed, negotiated and that there is a satisfactory resolution to them."
"The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) is a national political party in India. It was formed mainly to represent Bahujans (literally meaning "People in majority"), referring to people from the Scheduled Castes Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Castes (OBC) as well as minorities. The party claims to be inspired by the philosophy of B. R. Ambedkar. The BSP was founded by a Dalit charismatic leader Manyawar Kanshi Ram in 1984, who was succeeded by Mayawati in 2003. The party's political symbol is an Elephant. In the 15th Lok Sabha the party has 21 members, making it the 4th-largest party. "
As voting begins in India in the largest elections the world has ever seen, we spend the hour with Indian novelist and essayist Arundhati Roy. Nearly 815 million Indians are eligible to vote, and results will be issued in May. One of India’s most famous authors — and one of its fiercest critics — Roy is out with a new book, "Capitalism: A Ghost Story,"
By Pankaj Mishra 16 May: "Bhagwati, once a fervent supporter of outgoing prime minister Manmohan Singh, has even publicly applied for an advisory position with Modi's government. It may be because the nearly double-digit economic growth of recent years that Ivy League economists like him – India's own version of Chile's Chicago Boys and Russia's Harvard Boys – instigated and championed turns out to have been based primarily on extraction of natural resources, cheap labour and foreign capital inflows rather than high productivity and innovation, or indeed the brick-and-mortar ventures that fuelled China's rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. "The bulk of India's aggregate growth," the World Bank's chief economist Kaushik Basu warns, "is occurring through a disproportionate rise in the incomes at the upper end of the income ladder." Thus, it has left largely undisturbed the country's shameful ratios – 43% of all Indian children below the age of five are undernourished, and 48% stunted; nearly half of Indian women of childbearing age are anaemic, and more than half of all Indians still defecate in the open." jfr sosiologia 1970:1, s 68-69
"For over a decade, Modi has not lacked for comparators. He's been likened to Nero, Hitler, Putin. To me, he has all the makings of a Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: a hi-tech populist holding together a fragile coalition of big business, impatient urban youth and religious fundamentalists. Those disparate groups can be kept together as long as growth comes. But if it doesn't, Modi and his generals will go hunting for an enemy: Pakistan, India's own minorities, and the pseudo-seculars."
The BJP's neoliberalism may have pushed the left to the sidelines, but the inequality perpetuated by this agenda will ensure its return Vijay Prashad Vijay Prashad theguardian.com, Friday 23 May 2014
NEW DELHI (AP) September 4, 2014 "Al-Qaida has been increasingly overshadowed by the Islamic State group, a renegade al-Qaida offshoot that was expelled amid internal divisions and which has gone on to capture vast territory in Syria and Iraq, including oil wells and other income-generating resources, and has inspired thousands of fighters to join its jihadist mission. Al-Zawahri, in turn, has found his own influence pale beside that of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi."
In February 2012, the procurement director, Mr. Sergei Shutov of Zio-Podolsk was arrested for buying low quality and cheap raw material, passing it off as more expensive grade and pocketing the difference. Another Russian court has convicted one Mr. Alexander Murach, Director of another notorious Russian company, Informtekh, for fraud and sentenced him to three years in prison for selling counterfeit measuring equipment for the Russian nuclear power plants' turbines.
Saba Naqvi, Outlook India Magazine 27.5.2013 (Opinion): On April 30, 2013, the Union ministry of home froze the bank account of a coalition known as INSAF (Indian Social Action Forum) and suspended its registration under the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act or FCRA. INSAF is a network of 700 NGOs, people’s movements against acquisition of lands and forests and other resistances from Koodankulam to Kashmir. It has been a sort of facilitator, a clearing house for donations and support to various struggles. The home ministry believes its actions to “be prejudicial to public interest”.
The first phase of Posco’s $12-billion Orissa project — India’s single-largest foreign direct investment — could start churning out steel by 2018 Posco, which signed an agreement with Orissa to set up a 12 MT steel special economic zone at Jagatsinghpur at $12 billion way back in 2005, scaled down the size of the project to 8 MT last year due to the state government’s inability to acquire the required 4,004 acres. It now wants to set up two 4 MT steel units
by Fatemeh Aman IPS May 22 2013 Following on Nawaz Sharif's victory in the May 11 national elections in Pakistan, many analysts are indicating cautious optimism on the prospect that the new prime minister can strengthen bilateral relations with the country's neighbours, particularly India.
by G Pramod Kumar Nov 16, 2012 Indian media has been full of Aung San Suu Kyi for the last two days with the headlines playing up the regret element - that she was saddened by India’s support to the junta, but never felt betrayed.
by Niharika Mandhana WSJ 2 Jan, 2014 In Delhi's Dec. 4 state polls: -AAP 28 seats -Bharatiya Janata Party 31 seats -congress p 8 seats (of 70 allinall) “The common man dared to enter politics because politics in this country failed,” Arvind Kejriwal, AAP’s founder and Delhi’s new chief minister, said in the assembly on Thursday. “Very basic demands of the people were not met in the 65 years since independence.” In national polls, AAP, popular among urban middle-class voters, is likely to chip away at the support base of the opposition BJP, AAP’s leaders then had to prove that they could form a legitimate government. The party, which was created in 2012 out of India’s anti-corruption movement, sailed through its first legislative test with support from the Congress party, which has eight seats.
"The contradictions and confusions in U.S. policy in South Asia were on full display during Secretary of State Hilary Clinton's recent visit to India. U.S. support for India, which centers on making money, selling weapons, and turning a blind eye to the c
Dawn.com 4 July '09. "Perhaps the story of the Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, is the most appropriate metaphor for the insanity of our times... "
Analysis of India's foreign policy, and its nuclear weapons policy. Critique of Kenneth Walt's theorythat more NW in more states may be better. Prospects.
The Canadian High Commissioner to India acknowledged that while Canadian investment into India over the last ten years was USD 239m according to official statistics, the actual figure, including money routed through the tax havens, was more like USD 10bn,
The six-member Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has invited India to attend an international conference on Afghanistan to be held in Moscow on March 27, according to a report by local daily the Asian Age on Saturday. SCO secretary-general Bolat Nur
"11th May 1998 was the day the Government of India, constituted of a motley crowd of about two dozen political parties led by the “Hindu” nationalist BJP, carried out, as per its official declaration, three nuclear explosions as a deliberate act of milita