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@Mariyam I was talking about priorities, not percentages. It’s obvious healthcare and education need a big boost, I already wrote about that.

 

India defense budget as a share of gdp is not even in top 20 in the world, so not sure why you think india spends too much on defense 

 

If you think defense is the least priority for a country invaded for more than 1000 years and surrounded by 2 hostile nuclear armed neighbours, I’m just thankful there are people in the govt who don’t think like you. Your kind of thinking would accelerate the plan of India —> Endia

 

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1 hour ago, someone said:

You are writing about why heath is important, and obviously I agree with that. But the discussion and disagreement is on your inability to undertake SWOT analysis of India and like foolishly calling weapons system as fancy and redundant.

We have threats (T), and thus need a strong defense. We have opportunities (O), like our space exploitation. We have weakness (W), and so we spend on healthcare. We cannot neglect or replace them. All has to worked upon simultaneously.

In the past, there were also many armchair experts, and celebs lamenting on why India become nuclear power since it has many bhooka nanga people. Today, it's obvious it was a great decision and so your critical thinking is weak.

Apart from mentioning "foolish, SWOT, hard power and top 5" like a chor bazaar quality vinyl , you've not really made any points. Repeating the same statement over and over again, doesn't make it true. Not really a display of strong critical thinking either.

I have never said India doesn't need nuclear weapons. How did you reach this strange conclusion?

You seem to avoid what you mean by Top 5 nations.

 

The weapons system, that I am talking about was an Aircraft carrier India purchased it from Russia at an exorbitant price. Many defence analysts were against this purchase for this very reason. Indian defence industry generally tends to buy expensive weapon systems from 'allies' at a huge mark up. All of this is public domain information. It is not that we have developed any of these advanced system over the last 70 years.

 

The most important resource of a nation is its people. Providing them an adequately healthy life and a decent shot at justice is what the state owes them. In a nation where substandard sanitation causes diseases and permanent damage to a fair chunk of the population that is growing up, spending anything beyond the bare minimum of what is needed to defend the territories of the country seems wrong. 

 

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18 minutes ago, bhakum20 said:

@Mariyam I was talking about priorities, not percentages. It’s obvious healthcare and education need a big boost, I already wrote about that.

India defense budget as a share of gdp is not even in top 20 in the world, so not sure why you think india spends too much on defense 

If you think defense is the least priority for a country invaded for more than 1000 years and surrounded by 2 hostile nuclear armed neighbours, I’m just thankful there are people in the govt who don’t think like you. Your kind of thinking would accelerate the plan of India —> Endia

 

Of the four that you've mentioned: Law and Order, Health, Education and Defence, I think that Defence should have the lowest priority. I was setting a pecking order among the four parameters that you mentioned and now suddenly I am a proponent of India->Endia?

When you mention it being obvious that health care and education need a big boost, you do realize that these budgets can be shored up by reallocating funds from some other sectors. 

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33 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

Apart from mentioning "foolish, SWOT, hard power and top 5" like a chor bazaar quality vinyl , you've not really made any points. Repeating the same statement over and over again, doesn't make it true. Not really a display of strong critical thinking either.

I have never said India doesn't need nuclear weapons. How did you reach this strange conclusion?

You seem to avoid what you mean by Top 5 nations.

 

The weapons system, that I am talking about was an Aircraft carrier India purchased it from Russia at an exorbitant price. Many defence analysts were against this purchase for this very reason. Indian defence industry generally tends to buy expensive weapon systems from 'allies' at a huge mark up. All of this is public domain information. It is not that we have developed any of these advanced system over the last 70 years.

 

The most important resource of a nation is its people. Providing them an adequately healthy life and a decent shot at justice is what the state owes them. In a nation where substandard sanitation causes diseases and permanent damage to a fair chunk of the population that is growing up, spending anything beyond the bare minimum of what is needed to defend the territories of the country seems to be criminal. 

 

You are all over the place. Don't have a stable mind and you bring about random different things. You have now talking about defense acquisitions. There are variants, payloads and many factors, and you ought to use other forums for such discussions.

 

The issue is health vs defense, which I see as wrong. Both are not an opposition to each other. Both has it's own priorities in a big country like us. A nation grows through a good SWOT analysis. If bhooka/nanga is all you think about for our country, then it's trap. And this debate already happened in the past, when we became a nuclear power. You are using the same old reasons to lament our defense power again.

 

And if we want to be in the top 5 most powerful leaders, we need to be strong internally and externally. You make it sound like if India has no healthcare and puts everything on defense. So stop being melodramatic.

 

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35 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

Apart from mentioning "foolish, SWOT, hard power and top 5" like a chor bazaar quality vinyl , you've not really made any points. Repeating the same statement over and over again, doesn't make it true. Not really a display of strong critical thinking either.

I have never said India doesn't need nuclear weapons. How did you reach this strange conclusion?

You seem to avoid what you mean by Top 5 nations.

 

The weapons system, that I am talking about was an Aircraft carrier India purchased it from Russia at an exorbitant price. Many defence analysts were against this purchase for this very reason. Indian defence industry generally tends to buy expensive weapon systems from 'allies' at a huge mark up. All of this is public domain information. It is not that we have developed any of these advanced system over the last 70 years.

 

The most important resource of a nation is its people. Providing them an adequately healthy life and a decent shot at justice is what the state owes them. In a nation where substandard sanitation causes diseases and permanent damage to a fair chunk of the population that is growing up, spending anything beyond the bare minimum of what is needed to defend the territories of the country seems to be criminal. 

 

You know how many war we have gone through since independence. You as well know what happened when we sent and old mig 20 to fight against F16.  You need to have an aircraft career to counter any future invesion especially by keeping China's intrest in t indian ocean in mind other than Pakistani persistent threat. if you forgot in 1971 war US has already deployed their Navy thanks to Russia they had to pull back but we dint had an answer to that. In an ideal world what you said is right to spend taxpayers money on people welfare. But remember if you have a looming threat surrounding all the time no matter how healthy you are you ll always live in morbid fear. More than health care we need better education , population control and uniform civil code other than infrastructure building and economic reforms . Coz no matter how much you spend on health care system you will unable to cater to the needs of 1.3 billion people. Having said that for countries like India we have  to strike a balance and don't forget inspite of having so much of challange we still uplift millions of people from poverty and just between 2005 to 2016 we have reduced poverty from 54.7 to 37.5 percent and at present it is 12.5 percent. So for progressive country like us education and  economic reforms are needed more than health care but we can't compromise on defence.

Edited by raki05
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@someone

In the top 5 most power leaders? What?

 

I've never mentioned bhooka/nanga? You seem to have some creepy fetish, and keep bringing it up in this discussion. 

You simply have no understanding budgets. How they are planned out.  Or how resources (especially for health) are allocated to states.

 

But for the sake of the forum, its better we don't drag this on any further. You've clearly understood nothing of what I said.

 

Top 5, SWOT not bhooka/nanga (there I said it) trap, Nuclear hard power.

There you go, I agree with you.

 

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42 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

Of the four that you've mentioned: Law and Order, Health, Education and Defence, I think that Defence should have the lowest priority. I was setting a pecking order among the four parameters that you mentioned and now suddenly I am a proponent of India->Endia?

When you mention it being obvious that health care and education need a big boost, you do realize that these budgets can be shored up by reallocating funds from some other sectors. 

How do you really differentiate between Law & Order and Defense? Both are linked, and so if Law & order is priority, then it includes Defense as well.

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1 minute ago, someone said:

How do you really differentiate between Law & Order and Defense? Both are linked, and so if Law & order is priority, then it includes Defense.

Its not my differentiation. I go with the norms that the GoI has laid out.

For instance, the CRPF which is under the ambit of the Ministry of Home affairs, gets its allocated funds from that specific ministry. The state police, regular police and the BSF (not sure) also derive their yearly budgets from this same corpus. This is distinct from the defence budget which is allocated to the Ministry of Defence.

 

These forces are a part of the Law and Order machinery. As are judges, various auditors, state prosecutors and such like.

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13 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

Its not my differentiation. I go with the norms that the GoI has laid out.

For instance, the CRPF which is under the ambit of the Ministry of Home affairs, gets its allocated funds from that specific ministry. The state police, regular police and the BSF (not sure) also derive their yearly budgets from this same corpus. This is distinct from the defence budget which is allocated to the Ministry of Defence.

 

These forces are a part of the Law and Order machinery. As are judges, various auditors, state prosecutors and such like.

Thats the contradiction in your own argument. The enforcers of Law & Order are police, army in extreme areas. And we have many such areas namely Kashmir, Maoist corridor, certain NE parts and occasional skirmishes in various part of countries. Thus, you don't know ground reality when you say defense should be our least priority. That's also called being in lalaland.

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2 minutes ago, someone said:

Thats the contradiction in your own argument. The enforcers of Law & Order are police, army in extreme areas. And we have many such areas namely Kashmir, Maoist corridor, certain NE parts and occasional skirmishes in various part of countries. Thus, you don't know ground reality when you say defense should be our least priority. That's also called being in lalaland.

Ugh.

Maybe you should revisit what I said in my initial response to @bhakum20.

I said Law and Order should take precedence over Defence in terms of priority. 

Till 10 minutes ago, you weren't even aware about which force falls under the ambit of which ministry, and I am the one in lalaland?

When the CRPF is deployed in Kashmir for example, they are ultimately answerable to Amit Shah. They are seen as an extended police/paramilitary force. I am all for increasing the budget of the police/paramilitary. I have been from my first post in this thread. Where is the contradiction?

 

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25 minutes ago, Mariyam said:

Ugh.

Maybe you should revisit what I said in my initial response to @bhakum20.

I said Law and Order should take precedence over Defence in terms of priority. 

Till 10 minutes ago, you weren't even aware about which force falls under the ambit of which ministry, and I am the one in lalaland?

When the CRPF is deployed in Kashmir for example, they are ultimately answerable to Amit Shah. They are seen as an extended police/paramilitary force. I am all for increasing the budget of the police/paramilitary. I have been from my first post in this thread. Where is the contradiction?

 

Alright, you keep living in lalaland. Law & Order, and Defense are interlinked, and so they all are essential for the country's growth. You are saying like eating should take precedence over immune system.  So really, your posts makes little sense.

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11 hours ago, coffee_rules said:

Tarek Fatah and Javed Akhtar fighting 

 

 

 

In my opinion, Javed Akhtar is a true liberal and he has my respects. 

 

While I don't have good opinion about Tarek Fatah. He prefers himself upon the true Secular values.

 

That is why when he came to the Pakistani Liberal Secular facebook groups, he got no appreciation for his non-balanced views. While Javed Akhtar never visited our facebook groups or twitter accounts, but still I see that many Pakistani liberals are sharing his posts and videos and he is very well respected.

 

On the contrary, non-balanced (enmity based) views of Tarek Fatah got a lot of appreciation on the Hindutva platforms. 

 

In long run, views of Tarek Fatah are very harmful for Pakistani society, while Muslim Extremists and Pakistani Establishment supporters use Tarek's hatred filled views against whole of the Secular Community of Pakistan, and successfully make propaganda against us, and successfully paint all of us a traitor to Pakistan and foreign agents like Tarek Fatah. 

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56 minutes ago, Alam_dar said:

 

In my opinion, Javed Akhtar is a true liberal and he has my respects

Javed Akthar is an Islamist who wears the mask of secularism/atheism. He does a decent job of hiding his true face but the mask does slip from time to time.

 

Quote

While I don't have good opinion about Tarek Fatah. He prefers himself upon the true Secular values.

Tarek Fatah is a true secular, who doesn't shy away from calling out Islam on it's bigotry. Of course, an Islamist like you won't have a good opinion on him.

 

Quote

That is why when he came to the Pakistani Liberal Secular facebook groups, he got no appreciation for his non-balanced views. While Javed Akhtar never visited our facebook groups or twitter accounts, but still I see that many Pakistani liberals are sharing his posts and videos and he is very well respected.

Pakistani Liberal Secular facebook groups are barely Liberal in the true meaning of the word. In my opinion, the bar is set way too low for a Muslim liberal. Any Muslim that doesn't want Sharia law or doesn't want to kill kafirs, is considered to be a liberal by Islamic standards. Pathetic!

 

Quote

On the contrary, non-balanced (enmity based) views of Tarek Fatah got a lot of appreciation on the Hindutva platforms. 

Tarek gets very angry that Urdu is artificially imposed in Pakistan and Punjabis like him are made to feel shame about their mother tongues. Pakistan needs to shove the urdu language up their asses and stop brainwashing people to hate their mother tongue. One of the triggers for the formation of Bangladesh is urdu imposition and you still haven't learnt a lesson.

 

If someone tried to make me feel ashamed of my mother tongue, i'd be pretty hateful as well.

 

Quote

In long run, views of Tarek Fatah are very harmful for Pakistani society, while Muslim Extremists and Pakistani Establishment supporters use Tarek's hatred filled views against whole of the Secular Community of Pakistan, and successfully make propaganda against us, and successfully paint all of us a traitor to Pakistan and foreign agents like Tarek Fatah. 

If someone speaking the truth about a society is causing problems and helping extremists, then the problem lies with the society, not with the one who's calling it out.

 

Frankly, i don't think Pakistan can ever be secular. For god's sake, you start brainwashing kids with hate for Hindus in your textbooks. How nuts does a nation have to be to have state sanctioned bigotry towards another religion?

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On 4/22/2020 at 10:51 AM, Mariyam said:

India's defence spend is more than 2.5 times the health spends.

Indias defence spend is direct reflection of the threat perception that India has and the real recurrent attacks that India faces with a nuclear armed hostile super power and a rogue radical islamist country which uses terrorism and nuke proliferation as a state policy, both of which control some Indian territory and covet further more of Indian territory. 

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2 hours ago, Vilander said:

Indias defence spend is direct reflection of the threat perception that India has and the real recurrent attacks that India faces with a nuclear armed hostile super power and a rogue radical islamist country which uses terrorism and nuke proliferation as a state policy, both of which control some Indian territory and covet further more of Indian territory. 

It is still lesser than most countries like US, Russia, China or even Pakistan spends based on their GDP

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7 hours ago, Vilander said:

Indias defence spend is direct reflection of the threat perception that India has and the real recurrent attacks that India faces with a nuclear armed hostile super power and a rogue radical islamist country which uses terrorism and nuke proliferation as a state policy, both of which control some Indian territory and covet further more of Indian territory. 

I believe that we should we working towards having the ability to increase spending on healthcare and public infra along with defence. The issues if the Gov needs the tax to be able to do this effectively. When the mentality is to pay as little or no tax as possible, you cant then also complain that the country doesnt have the right priorities As you have mentioned we also have to maintain a certain level of defence spending due to our unpredictable neighbours.

 

To get to an ideal position we need to do the following:

 

- Digitise the economy as much as possible so that the all the population that needs to pay tax is paying tax.

- Do away with reservations and promote meritocracy and innovation. Right now the mindset in India is to churn out salaried staff members and not global innovators and inventors. If you do not have an innovative mindset/economy you cannot become an economic superpower. That in turn can lead to more investments in india which will raise more tax which can be used to keep lifting people out of abject poverty.

 

Thats just my take on this.

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5 hours ago, LordPrabhzy said:

increase spending on healthcare and public infra along with defence.

Sure they can try to increase spending i. Healthcare and infrastructure by containing corruption. But my point was simply to point out that a defence spend of 2 to 2.5 pc for indias neighborhood is alright if not quite deficient.

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6 hours ago, LordPrabhzy said:

I believe that we should we working towards having the ability to increase spending on healthcare and public infra along with defence. The issues if the Gov needs the tax to be able to do this effectively. When the mentality is to pay as little or no tax as possible, you cant then also complain that the country doesnt have the right priorities As you have mentioned we also have to maintain a certain level of defence spending due to our unpredictable neighbours.

 

To get to an ideal position we need to do the following:

 

- Digitise the economy as much as possible so that the all the population that needs to pay tax is paying tax.

- Do away with reservations and promote meritocracy and innovation. Right now the mindset in India is to churn out salaried staff members and not global innovators and inventors. If you do not have an innovative mindset/economy you cannot become an economic superpower. That in turn can lead to more investments in india which will raise more tax which can be used to keep lifting people out of abject poverty.

 

Thats just my take on this.

The gov is already doing. One major focus has been to increase our organized sector. We cannot sustain a country with 80% unorganized sector. Thus, Jan Dhan Yojana, Demo, GST, and can even put NRC, CAA as government targets to be a more organized country. We need even more greater actions.

 

Yet, the burden of the country is seemingly on taxpayers.  We keep losing with exports of our best talents. The bigger target is we need a hardworking culture. We have many strikes, many day-offs, and really ineffective system. No wonder big manufacturing companies are reluctant to work with Indian workers.

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