Guest dada_rocks Posted December 7, 2008 Posted December 7, 2008 http://dailypioneer.com/141607/Time-to-show-extreme-prejudice.html Time to show extreme prejudice Swapan Dasgupta In his breathtaking account of The Last Battle for Berlin in 1945, published some four decades ago, Cornelius Ryan narrated the story of how one Berliner tried to anticipate the final collapse. Walking to work each morning, he would look into the drawing room of a prominent Nazi and focus on the lavish portrait of Adolf Hitler. The removal of the portrait, he had decided in his mind, would be the signal that the fall of the city was imminent. For the past week, diplomats, spooks and assorted international busybodies have been working overtime to gauge the imminence or otherwise of a retaliatory Indian attack on terror camps in Pakistan. Logically speaking, their sense of anticipation was not unfounded. A beleaguered Government, caught with its pants down and confronted by possible electoral reverses, was under tremendous pressure to “do something†to avenge the attack on Mumbai. With nerves firmly on edge, it was feared that a knee-jerk bid to placate angry public opinion would trigger something catastrophic. Those with a sense of history recalled that it was literally a wrong turn in Sarajevo and a fluke shot by a fringe sect that triggered World War I. International crisis managers need not have preoccupied themselves with looking for tell-tale signs. A casual perusal of “open sources†would have alerted them to the startling fact that it was business as usual for the rulers. Last Saturday, even as the full horror of the Mumbai carnage was sinking in, the heir apparent was busy partying till 5 am. Three days later, his entire family was celebrating the wedding of the son of a loyal courtier (who is also a Congress MP) in the full gaze of the paparazzi. There was no sign of restraint. It was as if Mumbai was another land. The Delhi edition of Times of India did a seminal service by publishing two pages of photographs of the ruling family’s post-Mumbai celebrations. Those photographs did what thousands of candles, lakhs of text messages and a trillion words of indignation failed to achieve: Expose the callousness of India’s rulers. The international busybodies feared war. The photographs recalled the immortal words of John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious!†Maybe left to himself President Asif Zardari and a minusculity of the Clifton elite and Aitchison College alumni would have readily agreed to send all jihadis in Pakistan to a UN-run Guantanamo Bay. After the devastation of the Marriott in Islamabad, there is a greater awareness of the jihadi blowback within Pakistan than ever before. Beautiful Pakistanis hate visa denials, that extra scrutiny at international airports and being dubbed a global migraine. It ruins their composure and commerce. Unfortunately when it comes to India there is a blind spot. Islamabad has despatched innumerable of its wild Islamists to US custody in unknown destinations without any concern for the due process of law. However, any attempt to emulate the process to India’s satisfaction will lead to a national uprising that could end up with Zardari making London his permanent residence. But Pakistan has no reason to fear the Indian bully. Egged on by the global fraternity of deranged liberalism, Pakistan has expediently concluded that the discrimination and persecution of the Muslim minority lie at the heart of India’s terrorist problem. The thread that binds the conspiracy theorists, the Hindu-Zionist haters and the India-watchers who have been prolific in shedding tears for the Indian Muslim in the op-ed pages of western publications, is the belief that India had it coming. For the jihadis, the Mumbai operation is fast becoming an unqualified victory. Using the cover of a fledgling democracy and its nuclear assets, the jihadis have taunted a supine India and mocked an America that is dithering on its global entanglements. In the aftermath of Mumbai, the LeT has made itself synonymous with Pakistan’s honour and negated the possibility of any effective international punitive action against those who organised the butchery. It has invoked the fear of unilateral Indian action to underline the West’s over-dependence on Pakistan in the pacification of Afghanistan. There is an eerie similarity between how Pakistan moved after 9/11 and how it has reacted to Mumbai. There is, however, one monumental difference. In 2001, the world was still dealing with a single entity called Pakistan, governed by a military dictator who attempted to balance its ugly imperatives in Afghanistan with a modernising agenda at home; in 2008, India is confronted with a fractured Pakistan where a weak civilian authority has to dance to the tune of a subversive army and a menacing explosion of perverse religiosity. In seven years, the balance has tilted more decisively in favour of the Islamists in Pakistan, a shift hastened by weariness and existential crisis of the US. The Mumbai attack has exposed the crisis within India. On the security front, India was callously unprepared; on the diplomatic plane, it found itself with little room for manoeuvre. The Government was guilty of a lack of foresight and paralysed by a leadership that couldn’t distinguish between a “soft power†and an emasculated power. If Pakistan is in wilful denial of its complicity in spreading terrorism, the Indian Government is in denial of its vulnerability and helplessness. Yet, there are small signs of hope. For the first time since the country encountered jihadi terrorism, there is an outburst of visceral anger directed at those who secured themselves but left ordinary people unprotected. Media organisations may try to channel this anger for commercial advantage but the rage won’t be dissipated by the mere burning of candles. It is time to demonstrate extreme prejudice towards those who kill and those who don’t even have the hhumanity to stop partying while India burns. It’s time to change the portraits on the wall.
Guest dada_rocks Posted December 7, 2008 Posted December 7, 2008 http://dailypioneer.com/141450/Pitfalls-of-citizen-power.html Pitfalls of citizen power Chandan Mitra I am more amused than agitated by the sudden burst of activity among Page 3 people over the terror outrage in two of Mumbai's best hotels. During and after the carnage, celebrities have been holding forth, crying "Enough is enough" and demanding banishment of politicians from public life. They have argued that civil society is the only entity that should determine the response to Mumbai's angst. Candlelight processions have been held and last Wednesday several thousand people gathered at the Gateway of India to mark the passage of a week since India's commercial capital was brought to its knees. Now, similar exhibitions of citizen power are slated to be held in other metros, starting with Delhi this week. Probably for the first time since India became a victim of organised terrorism nearly 20 years ago, the affluent classes have been stirred. This is a welcome trend because their articulation and the celebrity status of some of the protagonists undoubtedly helps focus public anger, which has been diffused so far. Arguably, many would say their hearts should have bled earlier when city after city was ravaged by the jihadis. Such is the socio-economic stratification of Indian society that anger remained muted in the past because most terror victims belonged to the underclass or lower middle classes. For instance, this time too attention is focused on Taj and Oberoi hotels while the carnage at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (VT), where a whopping 62 ordinary people were mowed down did not elicit remotely comparable consternation. Similarly, the July 2007 serial blasts in commuter trains that killed 190, was largely ignored by the city's chatterati. Then we were subjected to standard homilies like how the "spirit of Mumbai" would never allow pitiful wallowing in grief; that it would be "business as usual" from the very next day. Such comments were approvingly highlighted by the electronic media, and even its print counterpart was not immune to chanting the same mantra. This time, however, nobody is talking about the "unbeatable spirit" of Mumbai. Now that Taj ("Which is like my second home," as a celebrity told a news channel) has been pulverised by the satanic bloodlust of Pakistan-trained terrorists, upper middle class rage is boiling over. Politically biased English language TV news channels have, however, skillfully directed this anger to indulge in wanton politician bashing. The channels, newspaper columns and blogs are full of venom spewed at the entire political class. "Withdraw their security" is the common refrain. Accusing politicians as a class for messing up things, people have gone so far as to demand takeover by the Army! One banner at the Gateway of India proclaimed: "There are many more terrorists prowling. They are called politicians". It is no longer possible to dismiss these voices as totally unrepresentative or emanating only from fossils of the Raj era who love to recall the mythical "good old days" when life was orderly. Nowadays, young, educated, well-groomed executives are expressing these sentiments with feverish gusto. A series of gaffes by politicians unnerved by the highly publicised outrage of this section has added more fuel to the fire. By targeting the entire political class, the angry young (and not so young) men and women have happily overlooked that it is only the legitimately elected Government, its political leaders and bureaucrats, who can be held accountable for the lapses that led to the tragedy -- be it the failure to act with alacrity on intelligence inputs, ineptitude of marine security personnel, delay in dispatching NSG commandos and so on. In other words, both the Union and State Government of Maharashtra must be held responsible for the disastrous denouement. And both Governments happen to be controlled by the Congress Party and its allies. So, you can't bracket, say, Mayawati, with Vilasrao Deshmukh, Naveen Patnaik with Shivraj Patil or LK Advani with Manmohan Singh or Sonia Gandhi. When public anger should rightly be directed at the gross incompetence of the Congress-led UPA and its five-year-old record of mollycoddling terrorists, the media manipulated redirection of the fury towards the entire political class is a potentially dangerous gambit. It is dangerous because it sanctifies the ongoing systematic tirade against democracy itself. If we lose faith in the entire political class as some people would like us to do, we erode the very basis of India's democratic polity; we thus lose our faith in the Constitution itself. I know this won't happen. There is too much at stake. Affluent people, usually cocooned in their plush, multi-crore apartments, often do not participate in the electoral process. They have far lesser stake in who becomes the local MLA or MP or which party forms the Government, compared to the impoverished villager of eastern Uttar Pradesh, the small artisan of Tamil Nadu or even the average commuter on Mumbai's suburban trains. The indigent urban labourer or the marginal farmer has a stake in democracy because they need their elected representative as a cushion against wanton exploitation and to get their legitimate rights from an insensitive junior bureaucracy or corrupt policemen. The rich, on the other hand, can easily afford to lubricate their way through India's Byzantine bureaucratic maze while funding political parties across the board to ensure their work gets done irrespective of a regime's ideological complexion. In turn, they need the comfort of a secure environment, a dependable law and order mechanism and appropriate conditions for conducting business and leisure activities. I know I may be sounding like an old fashioned Leftist, but there is nothing ideological about this stark reality. Admittedly by reacting intolerantly, politicians have invited further ignominy upon themselves. Martyred Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan's father may have said in a fit of rage that he wouldn't let into his house "any old dog" that came visiting, but that did not justify veteran VS Achuthanandan responding in a most undignified manner. Outgoing Maharashtra Home Minister RR Patil's comment that such "small things" happen in big cities was reminiscent of a similarly insensitive remark by former UP Minister Shivpal Yadav in connection with the Nithari killings of children by two perverted sex maniacs. Had BJP Vice-President Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi not prefaced his critique of near-anarchic activism by celebrity women in Mumbai with a reference to "powder, lipstick and Western ideas", the substance of his assertion might not have been misconstrued. Our politicians may have much to answer for. But that does not mean democracy can do without politicians. And those who champion the idea that citizen power can be a substitute for elected Government should realise that the logical extension of that argument is abolition of democracy itself. "Citizen-power" to replace political power -- a fashionable cause extolled by sections of the media -- amounts to advocacy of dictatorship of the elite. Are we ready to have as Home Minister an ageing ad guru who goes on every channel claiming his 21-year-old daughter has discovered the perfect solution to hostage-taking by terrorists: Use sleeping bombs instead of grenades, he passionately demands! Are our security forces so daft as not to have explored all options? Does the monopoly of reason rest with India's elite, effete at the best of times and subversive at the worst? By the way, why is Arundhati Roy in hiding this time?
Guest dada_rocks Posted December 7, 2008 Posted December 7, 2008 http://dailypioneer.com/141416/Must-we-pay-for-‘VIP’-security.html Must we pay for ‘VIP’ security? Kanchan Gupta The diatribe against politicians following the fidayeen attacks is extremely disconcerting, but not entirely unjustified. Till now, we did not get to hear of or read about what people in this country think of their politicians, although we had a fairly good idea about it, because the views of the unwashed masses rarely find mention on prime time television or the front pages of our so-called national newspapers. Now that we have the bold and the beautiful who can be spotted at the ‘happening places’ in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and wherever else it’s ‘happening’ denouncing politicians and blaming them for holding India up to ridicule, 24x7 news channels and newspapers competing with instant television to grab eyeballs are tripping over each other to publicise the views of the la-di-da crowd as profound observations on the pitiable state of our country, a nuclear weapon state which aspires to emerge as a great power. Ask Binapani Adok of Baltitola Lane in Howrah, and she will tell you what she has always thought of politicians every time she has had to stand in a mile-long queue at the local ration shop. There’s nothing profound about her profanity, but at least it’s far more honest than the balderdash dished out by television channels and newspapers this past week. It would, however, be wrong to brush aside the angry voices we have been hearing on the streets ever since the hideous bloodletting in Mumbai as inconsequential. Indeed, it could prove to be disastrous for the political class to pretend that the popular mood will calm down before long and life in this wondrous land of ours will be back to ‘normal’. For, there are some genuine concerns that are being voiced and the solutions that are being proposed should cause alarm among politicians and set alarm bells ringing. After suffering the callous indifference of those in power, whether at the Centre or in the States, and fed up with the cynicism of politicians who are solely obsessed with themselves and feathering their nests, people have begun asking why they should pay taxes to keep their rulers in comfort while they are left to fend for themselves. There’s a groundswell of anger over the elaborate security arrangements that politicians ensure for themselves and their families while leaving the citizens at the mercy of jihadis and assorted criminals, to be killed, maimed, raped and denied the security of life and property which is their inalienable right and the Government’s primary responsibility. If politicians believe that it is the state’s job to protect them, here’s what the people believe: We would like to see them suffer for a change. The ‘VIP’ sees himself as a ‘Very Important Person’; the people now pity him as a ‘Very Impotent Person’. Politicians have only themselves to blame for being seen as objects of ridicule, scorned and loathed by the masses. They claim to be servants of the people, but actually believe that they are more privileged than the rest, that their lives are more precious than those that are lost in terrorist attacks. They see themselves as indispensable to India; the nation has begun to see them as eminently dispensable. It is this inflated sense of importance, of being able to manipulate the system, that has resulted in the creation of the ‘VIP’ who must be provided with round-the-clock security in the form of bullet-proof vehicles and gun-toting commandos. It is immaterial whether the ‘VIP’ actually faces a threat to his or her life, what is important is that their security cover should shock and awe the masses. This is not about protecting their ‘precious’ lives, but projecting their ‘status’ and ‘prestige’. So we have the likes of Mr Ram Vilas Paswan and Mr Amar Singh (just two of the many such politicians) who coerce the Government to deploy commandos to guard them and their families — to be upgraded from ‘X’ to ‘Y’, from ‘Y’ to ‘Z’, and from ‘Z’ to ‘Z+’ security cover is a measure of the political clout, social status and prestige of the self-annointed ‘VIP’. After becoming Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Ms Mayawati demanded that she be provided with SPG cover, meant for ‘Very Very Important Persons’ like the Prime Minister, former Prime Ministers and, of course, the presiding dynasty of the Congress. Upset over being denied similar privilege, she has commandeered 350 policemen to provide her with security cover night and day, and travels in a 25-vehicle cavalcade. Each time she decides to take a ride in her bullet-proof SUV, traffic is stopped, shopkeepers are asked to down their shutters, pedestrians are made to stand facing away from the street. The Prime Minister and his leader make do with only traffic being stopped and the roads being cleared of potential assassins among exasperated commuters. The cost to the tax-payer? According to one estimate, Rs 250 crore is spent every year on providing security cover to our ‘Very Important Persons’. An additional Rs 184 crore is spent on securing the lives of the ‘Very Very Important Persons’. In Lutyens’ Delhi, 10,000 policemen of various ranks are deployed every day to protect 391 people. Had there been 1,000 policemen on duty at Gateway of India on November 26, the massacre at Mumbai may have been averted. But if you were to point out to a ‘VIP’ that the discrimination is obnoxious, that his fixation with security cover has resulted in the people being rendered vulnerable, he would take great offence and insist that it is important to protect the ‘leader’ so that the ‘led’ can be governed. What good is a democracy unless its politicians are safe and sound? Who’s to tell them that along with democracy the political class is threatened when citizens start looking up to the Army for deliverance? So, like our national assets, for example oil installations and airports, the politicians must also be protected at the tax-payers’ expense. The most frustrating part of it all is that there’s nothing we can do about it. The Delhi High Court, which has been hearing a PIL on ‘VIP’ security, had acidly commented last year that “politicians are not national assets that need to be protected” and that the “security cover given to political leaders is often a nuisance for the common man”. The court had also observed, “If there is a threat to the lives of the politicians, they should remain in the confines of their homes and offices… You should not let these men (politicians) come out.” The courts may not be able to force the VIPs and VVIPs to stay at home, but the people can. All we need to do is honk every time we see a ‘VIP’ on the road, honk louder when traffic is stopped, and raise such a din that the ‘VIP’ is left fuming at his impotence. And if we have the guts, we could, collectively, refuse to pay taxes to a Government of the few, by the few and for the few. Any takers?
Guest dada_rocks Posted December 7, 2008 Posted December 7, 2008 Where can I see these TOI photos? It was in print edition.. any volunteers please.. Let us expose Rahulbaba we all knew he was an idiot of first order time to expose his callousness too..
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