India Votes for Stability

Re: # 386

Romair:

I would love to read your essay whenever you finish and post it, that you must do.

"...Indian pot has variety that no one, ... (including)right wing hinduvta, can change..."

This statement is almost like a law, much like no one could win Russia by attacking it. Napolean to Germans all fell victim. Islam drowned in it and chose to reconcile, as a result a wonderful amalgam evolved in India, something that ended with the partition. I have talked to ardent hindutva wadi even they acknowledged the creation of such an amalgam, which, even according to them, has brought good not bad. Gandhi had often said "let the winds of change blow in through India's window".

You are correct that India can neither be analyzed nor encapsulated by simple slogans. Whether they are BJPs "India Shining", or Riaz's morning delights for comfort and pleasure from Mumbai's rail road track.

It has a critical mass that is gathering momentum in a direction which by no means is wrong (hindutva wadis take over threat). India's neighbors at their own peril can bury their head in the sand and enjoy morning delights.

Shriman Masadi ji:

You and your rant, as long as you continue with it, you will never learn. You are bankrupt of points to bring forward, and resort to this.

"...Indian pot has variety that no one, from your type to right winge hinduvta, can change..."

Learn the above as a mantra or aayat whatever you are comfortable with. You, Riaz & Co can pick at its however defective democracy, but that is no going to change it. Just as right wing hidutva wadis cannot. Even if Pakistan nukes it, there will some of it left to get even not just mad. You have to spend time in India to understand it. Try to find a fellowship in some university there. JNU could be a good place for you to start.

Read what Romair has written. He is one Pakistani who has risked his career to go into India's IT center, bring engineers out to work with him in Pakistan. Ask him to write an essay so that you, Riaz & Co can learn. What he accomplished, I have not heard of anyone else accomplish.

As regards to the rest of your rant, please try yoga and meditation to get over it.

Anil wrote "With faster changes, new dynamics get created at faster space to not let your 7th century to Mills ranting. Indian pot has variety that no one, from your type to right winge hinduvta, can change."

These are the contradictory statements that Hasho was talking about. You write that 60 years is nothing in a 1000 year history, when I say that more changes have been produced in those 60 years which makes your 'shortness' BS invalid you respond with something that supports my point and not yours. Your miserable 4th century BC to Adam Smith nonsense is long passed and no 'entrepreneurship' ranting (rhetoric) that does not represent the reality of capitalism in today's world can prove that you are anything but a goddamned fool.

TNITC masadi

dost-mittar/anil #:"You make several points which should probably be addressed in an article by itself (hint! hint!")"

....all said and done, indian democracy is something, all indians can be legitimately proud of (that and indian rise in IT; and of course malika sharawa and rakhi sawant; not mention arjunm)....at least the election side of it.....it has yet to translate into widespread uplift of humanity....but that may well happen also........

.....it may, actually, be unique in history......no where, in history, has there ever been a democracy of such size.....most importantly, and this is what most pakistanis do not understand - india is so gigantically complex, varied, and with so many potential trouble spots, that it is almost impossible to manage and run......the potential social problems of pakistan pale in comparison.....since pakistani is much less diverse and complex (even though pakistan, itself, is one of the most diverse countries in the world)........india is on a scale of its own.......

........hence, i am not sure if anyone can analyze india correctly......it is like flying a plane, which is based on ten different designs and models, with multiple pilots....yet it remains airborne.......

having said that, i have indulged in trying to figure out the bjp....actually, i tend to look at the philosophical center of movements, and not on the end result......so an attemept to understand hindutva.....

.......i, like many other people, used to think hindutva was a fascist idea, like talibanism, which any reasonable person - indian or otherwise - would hate.......until i started meeting people in bangalore......close friends of mine, whom i expected to be very anti-bjp etc.......it turns out that bjp won in karnataka.......that got me thinking that so many of my friends, must have voted for the bjp.......otherwise normal people.....

hence i concluded that there must be more to hindutva than modi and advani, and the various pogroms.....

.....since then, i have, actually, spent a lot of time researching hindutva.....from its foundations......philosophically, the closest comparison i can make is to pakistani's version of tnt.......one could call it the hindu tnt......hindutva supporters (setting aside the extreme violent ones), simply want a hindu identity for india, of which it should be proud......they don't want to kill minorities etc.....i have never had any problems with any of my hindutva friends.....

but they don't want minorities messing around with india's hindu identity........however, the more extreme amongst them, are ok to kill minorities, if they feel the minorities are harming a hindu identity....

kind of like pakistanis are fine with christians and hindus......there are hardly any pogroms in pakistan's history.....but if tomorrow, a hindu pakistani said he wanted krishna's statue in the national assembly.......or wanted pakistan to be just a republic and not an islamic republic, he would be in big trouble.......

........as for an article, i wrote one, but was unable to complete it.......

Alumni WW writes to tahmed "tahmed sahib,
With all due respect to you, I think your belief in democracy is dogmatic, not pragmatic. "

Alumni WW, you are wasting your time reasoning with this sellout. He is in the habit of using 'democracy' as slogan much like his masters do in the U.S.as they dictate terms not only to their own public in the policies that predominate US national affairs but to the world at large. Democracy is not possible when a tiny one percent of the U.S. population controls the major chunk of its wealth, predominates information and determines the national and indeed international agenda. In such a scenario there is a master-slave relationship, just because those slaves inside the borders of the US happen to be 'house slaves' as against the field slaves of the 'Third World', does not mean democracy either exists or works under advanced capitalism. First we need to cultivate a public that can think and reason, and that cannot happen in the current US social structure- that structure cannot be changed through democratic means because of reasons mentioned above, it requires dictatorial changing at a fast pace, a dismantling of this concentration. Once a public evolves, only then can democracy be practiced.

Now the condition with the Third World is different, they already have a public with a consciousness due to circumstance, the field slaves know their oppressors, so dictatorial bs there is for control purposes only, over their the roots of democracy are much more well developed than anything in the West, so the institutions of democracy that dictatorship destroyed need to be cultivated and the military dismantled.

TNITC masadi

Re: # 382

Please take a look at an OECD graphs showing economic growth in Pakistan over several decades, both under military and civilian rule.

Here's the link: http://www.riazhaq.com/2009/05/foreign-aid-trade-investments-and.html
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

RiazHaq: And no doubt India has not achieved a perfect democracy. But it is on the right path, and that is what matters. One can point flaws in any society - just pointing to flows does not make you an objective observer. Merely a polemicist.

Riaz Haq: you seem totally confused. If dictatorship brought prosperity, then Pakistan would have alleviated poverty long ago today. Along with North Korea. No one claims that democracy means instant transformation. Pakistanis have rejected your anti-democratic viewpoint when they got rid of Musharraf the scoundrel.

A Deeply Unfair Cast of Mind

A phenomenal diary at Dailykos.
This site supports President Obama and is probably funded by the Democratic Party. Hopefully, the honest and the upstanding citizens of this country would not let the Abu Gharib pass in to the history w/o appropriate punishment to the culprits at the highest level.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/5/21/734169/-A-Deeply-Unfair-Cast-o f-Mind

A Deeply Unfair Cast of Mind
by Garrett
Thu May 21, 2009 at 08:22:20 PM PDT
May 21, 2009
“At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulation, and simple decency. For the harm they did to Iraqi prisoners and to America's cause, they deserved and received Army justice.
And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men. “
Dick Cheney

“She was escorted downstairs to another cell where she was shown a naked male detainee and told the same would happen to her if she did not cooperate. She was then taken back to her cell, forced to kneel and raise her arms while one of the Soldiers (SOLDIER31, A/519 MI BN) removed her shirt. She began to cry, and her shirt was given back as the Soldier cursed at her and said they would be back each night. “
Fay Report http://news.findlaw.com/hdocs/docs/dod/fay82504rpt.pdf#page=105

He [General Sanchez] said they are like dogs and if you allow them to believe at any point that they are more than a dog then you've lost control of them.
General Janis Karpinski (June 2004)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3806713.stm

The Abu Gharib Pictures. http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/chapter_2/1.html

Pentagon is still hiding thousands of them along with the videos.

Re: # 379

tahmed sahib,
With all due respect to you, I think your belief in democracy is dogmatic, not pragmatic.

Democracy is not the be-all and end-all; it's supposed to serve the people to uplift them and serve their basic needs, not line the pockets of the politicians as the data shows it does in India. It requires inspirational leadership to improve society as a whole, not just once-in-five-years exercise of voting rights in a dubious process where polling booths are taken over by gangster politicians and opponents physically intimidated. It requires a spirit of democracy within parties. It requires accountability of the elected reps. Democracy is much more than elections, it's active day-to-day participation of the people in running the affairs of a country; it's rule-of-law; it require some basic level of literacy, integrity and education, not caste-based or ethnicity based voting of scoundrels into positions of power. Indian democracy fails by most of these measures.
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

RiazHaq sahib: You are obviously not being reasonable when you ignore what is indeed a wonderful achievement of India - the conduct of peaceful elections in a vast nation comprising one-sixth of humanity and facing fundamental issues of poverty. This is just another example of the "state of denial" that Khyber talks about below that Pakistanis can ill-afford the luxury of floating on.

From the results on the ground as far as the state pf average Indian citizen is concerned, the Indian democracy appears to be a farce. Indian democracy's main value is propaganda value in the West where they (e,g. Zakaria and co) breathlessly talk about as a "stable, peaceful and prosperous" with middle class Indians presented as mouthpieces and tokens of Indian democracy.

In almost every category of human deprivation, ranging from poverty, hunger, illiteracy, poor sanitation, absent heathcare, to law and order and justice system, state of minorities, India figures among the worst, in many instances worse than Sub-saharan Africa.
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

#376 while there are many Pakistanis living in denial, those like Jamaat-e-Islami (who are conducting a demonstration right now against US presence in the area and against Pakistan action against the taliban dogs) are more than mere "deniars" - they are the "enemy within" Pakistan, the one that is clearly trying to pave the way for a mullah takeover of Pakistan and a destruction of its democracy.

While the real punishment for these traitors is a bullet in their heads, there is every indication that these demonstrations achieve nothing but expose their true goals before the Pakistani people. Who will no doubt kick their behinds in the next elections even harder than they did in the last.

tahmed32..Unfortunately there are many living in denial and There are many political parties today that are shedding tears over the military operation against the Taliban, despite a realisation across Pakistan that the Taliban are our enemies and must be destroyed, given that all other options have failed. But then it should not be so surprising given the history of some of these parties, which were propped up by the regime of General Zia-ul Haq, and were at the forefront of sowing the seeds of the extremism and terrorism we see today. Their hypocrisy and lies should be challenged by civil society and the media so that they may not mislead the nation.
http://pukhtunkhwatimes.blogspot.com/

Pakistani troops retake 'bloody intersection'
ISLAMABAD — Pakistani troops battling the Taliban have captured several points in the Swat Valley's main town, the army said Sunday, including a spot nicknamed "bloody intersection" because militants routinely dumped the mutilated bodies of their victims there.Click following link for more details.
http://pukhtunkhwatimes.blogspot.com/

Re: # 373..Yes thats right,zia and mushy boy stole miillions of dollars,now mushy boy wana stay there,that should be SWAT HOUSE and let IDP'S families stay there.Hypocrites like masadi and others living in state of denial on this forum.
http://pukhtunkhwatimes.blogspot.com/