India Votes for Stability

Actually Riaz is completely jealous of Sharukhs and Kalams ......

he probably sends chanda to Jehadi producing madarassas in Pakistan in order to continue his jehad against hindus!!

Re: # 483

Riaz - Below is what I wanted to higlight. Indian secularism is much more deeper than you think it is.

Take a note above - On occasion of Eid, Indian country men (not only Muslms but all Indians) were greeted by Manmohan Singh (PM and Sikh), Sonia Gandhi (Catholic), Kalam (ex President and Muslim), Hamid Ansari (Vice President and muslim), Prathiba patil (President and Hindu), Gulam Nabi Azad (now ex CM of J&K and muslim). This can't be just a token representation for minorities in India - its much more deeper.

As for Kalam calling himself Iyer - you really have to understand the way Indian secularism works (or rather the way it should work but in actuality doesn't work 100% this way). Its parimarily based upon a simple sanskrit phrase - "sarva dharma sambhav". Meaning all religions are equal. If Kalam, being a muslim calls himself an Iyer - I don't see him much different from me. I was born in a hindu family but my grandma (she was a born hindu in Lahore) used to go to gurudwara. She had posters of both Guru Nanak and Ram in her prayer room. I have never been to Pakistan but I have been to a gurudwara more times than a Ram temple. I may be an atheist now - but I still beleive in a supernatural power - soemtimes I call it Ram, sometimes Nanak. It really does not matter. My Mom goes to both Gurudwara and Ram temple and considers them equal. That does not matter either.

Re: # 482

Riaz - Your quote about Kalam is from http://www.karuthu.com/forum/forum_posts.aspTID=3783&PID=88289

I looked at Karathu.com and the quote is the opinion of a chatter. Its not a news report.

Look at the following news report talking about Kalam participating in offering prayers at Eid:

http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1140720

And here's the quote from the above news report:

Clerics led Eid prayers at mosques in the national capital, including at the prominent Jama Masjid and Fatehpuri Masjid, where the faithful turned up in hundreds.

Vice President Hamid Ansari offered namaz at the New Delhi Jama Masjid near Parliament House while former President APJ Abdul Kalam offered prayers at Fathepuri Masjid in Old Delhi.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who was in the capital to attend official functions, offered prayers at Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. In his address at the mosque, Azad emphasised the importance of education in meeting the challenges of the modern world.

Muslims visited the houses of their relatives and friends and presented gifts.

President Pratibha Patil, Vice President Hamid Ansari, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi greeted the countrymen on the occasion of the festival, requesting them to serve the cause of humanity.



Take a note above - On occasion of Eid, Indian country men (not only Muslms but all Indians) were greeted by Manmohan Singh (PM and Sikh), Sonia Gandhi (Catholic), Kalam (ex President and Muslim), Hamid Ansari (Vice President and muslim), Prathiba patil (President and Hindu), Gulam Nabi Azad (now ex CM of J&K and muslim). This can't be just a token representation for minorities in India - its much more deeper.

As for Kalam calling himself Iyer - you really have to understand the way Indian secularism works (or rather the way it should work but in actuality doesn't work 100% this way). Its parimarily based upon a simple sanskrit phrase - "sarva dharma sambhav". Meaning all religions are equal. If Kalam, being a muslim calls himself an Iyer - I don't see him much different from me. I was born in a hindu family but my grandma (she was a born hindu in Lahore) used to go to gurudwara. She had posters of both Guru Nanak and Ram in her prayer room. I have never been to Pakistan but I have been to a gurudwara more times than a Ram temple. I may be an atheist now - but I still beleive in a supernatural power - soemtimes I call it Ram, sometimes Nanak. It really does not matter. My Mom goes to both Gurudwara and Ram temple and considers them equal. That does not matter either.

Re: # 481
Thanks for the correction. I'm glad to see that Kalam did speak up. How about the other allegations like "he drew a lakshman rekha around him and NEVER allowed any Muslim to cross that" and "he is proud to be called as Kalam Iyer, participate in Deepawali festival but will stay away from Muslim festivals."?
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

Re: # 480

Riaz - Your post is factually incorrect. Kalam condemned the Gujarat riots in front of the joint session of Indian parliament.

Here's a link from the Tribune and the excerpt:

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040608/main1.htm

Dr Kalam said: "It is a matter of serious concern that forces of communalism have been able to vitiate the atmosphere in the country, leading to outbreak of riots, the most gruesome face of which was witnessed recently in Gujarat. My Government is determined to combat such forces."

Re: # 478
Shoaib,
You being an Indian Muslim, I do understand the dilemma you face. You have to live with them every day. So, I think it's ok for you to bend yourself backward to vigorously defend your country's record on human rights.

But please don't close your eyes to the reality of how Indian Muslims live. I just recently quoted Shabana Azmi. But don;t go by that, if you wish. Go visit twocircles.net or read Yoginder Sikand or Pankaj Mishra or Asra Nomani or Arundhati Roy.

Here's what I have read about how Indian Muslims feel in general:

The Hindu ruling class arrived at a consensus that Indian Muslims are a threat for the national integrity and pushed us out of the mainstream and we were economically crippled. No one can deny that more than 80% of India's Muslim population lives in ghettos and slums.

In the past 60 years, the so called Muslim leaders have colluded with Congress and have screwedup the entire Muslim population with tags like “appeasement, vote bank, minority commission, Sachar committee, Haj subsidy, Shariah, triple talaq, polygamy, madrassa, mullah, Babri masjid, alienation, descrimination, suppression, Pakistani agent and TERRORIST�.

We get titles like: Thulukkan, Musla, kattus, Babur ke aulad, Hum paanch hamaare pachchees, thulukkane vettu thulukkachiye kattu, Desh drohi etc.

They will keep on repeating the names of a handful of Muslim poster boys, emerged in the past 60 years. Dr.Abdul Kalam, is considered as the best President because he drew a lakshman rekha around him and NEVER allowed any Muslim to cross that. He NEVER uttered a single word till date on Gujarat massacre and will never. He is proud to be called as Kalam Iyer, participate in Deepawali festival but will stay away from Muslim festivals.

Source: http://www.karuthu.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=3783&PID=88289
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

And btw, Re #471 the word Punjab in my post ...

Should read, "And btw, Re #477 the word Punjab in my post.."

Cheers,

Riaz,

East Pakistan in 1971 was a civil war in which India recruited, trained and armed Mukti Bahini to attack Pakistani troops, Punjabis and Biharis and all those who opposed the separation movement

I'm sorry, Riaz mian, for getting involved in this discussion.

When people are massacred in a "civil war" it's ok, but a pogrom is bad. And, of course, it’s all India’s fault. I get it. No wonder no one was held responsible from the Pak Army/Government. They didn't do anything only.

Thank you for your patient replies explaining to me why illiterate countries like Pakistan and India should not have representative governments. Let’s hope you are successful in convincing your fellow countrymen in that regard, not that it should take much effort.

And btw, Re #471 the word Punjab in my post is followed a clarifier, namely ‘India’, which most people would take to NOT mean Pakistani Punjab. However, that should not deter you on lecturing me on the demographics of W Punjab and Sindh. You go right ahead.

I'll take your leave now.

Re: # 471

It again shows your ignorance about Pakistan. Sind is where millions of Pakistani Hindus live, not Punjab. I know some of them because they were my fellow students, colleagues or teachers. Many of them lived in the same neighborhoods as Muslims, there was no housing discrimination against them which is common in India against Muslims.

Your report on minorities notwithstanding, Hindu Sindhis in Pakistan have never been subjected to anything like Gujarat or Orissa.

Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

Here's an article by Sharmila Bose on Bangladesh that Majumdar referred to:

The truth about the Jessore massacre
The massacre may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists, reports Sarmila Bose.

The bodies lie strewn on the ground. All are adult men, in civilian clothes. A uniformed man with a rifle slung on his back is seen on the right. A smattering of onlookers stand around, a few appear to be working, perhaps to remove the bodies.

The caption of the photo is just as grim as its content: ‘April 2, 1971: Genocide by the Pakistan Occupation Force at Jessore.’ It is in a book printed by Bangladeshis trying to commemorate the victims of their liberation war.

It is a familiar scene. There are many grisly photographs of dead bodies from 1971, published in books, newspapers and websites.

Reading another book on the 1971 war, there was that photograph again ? taken from a slightly different angle, but the bodies and the scene of the massacre were the same. But wait a minute! The caption here reads: ‘The bodies of businessmen murdered by rebels in Jessore city.’

The alternative caption is in The East Pakistan Tragedy, by L.F. Rushbrook Williams, written in 1971 before the independence of Bangladesh. Rushbrook Williams is strongly in favour of the Pakistan government and highly critical of the Awami League. However, he was a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, had served in academia and government in India, and with the BBC and The Times. There was no reason to think he would willfully mislabel a photo of a massacre.

And so, in a bitter war where so many bodies had remained unclaimed, here is a set of murdered men whose bodies are claimed by both sides of the conflict! Who were these men? And who killed them?

It turns out that the massacre in Jessore may have been genocide, but it wasn’t committed by the Pakistan army. The dead men were non-Bengali residents of Jessore, butchered in broad daylight by Bengali nationalists.

It is but one incident, but illustrative of the emerging reality that the conflict in 1971 in East Pakistan was a lot messier than most have been led to believe. Pakistan’s military regime did try to crush the Bengali rebellion by force, and many Bengalis did die for the cause of Bangladesh’s independence. Yet, not every allegation hurled against the Pakistan army was true, while many crimes committed in the name of Bengali nationalism remain concealed.

Once one took a second look, some of the Jessore bodies are dressed in salwar kameez ? an indication that they were either West Pakistanis or ‘Biharis’, the non-Bengali East Pakistanis who had migrated from northern India.

As accounts from the involved parties ? Pakistan, Bangladesh and India ? tend to be highly partisan, it was best to search for foreign eye witnesses, if any. My search took me to newspaper archives from 35 years ago. The New York Times carried the photo on April 3, 1971, captioned: ‘East Pakistani civilians, said to have been slain by government soldiers, lie in Jessore square before burial.’ The Washington Post carried it too, right under its masthead: ‘The bodies of civilians who East Pakistani sources said were massacred by the Pakistani army lie in the streets of Jessore.’ “East Pakistani sources said�, and without further investigation, these august newspapers printed the photo.

In fact, if the Americans had read The Times of London of April 2 and Sunday Times of April 4 or talked to their British colleagues, they would have had a better idea of what was happening in Jessore. In a front-page lead article on April 2 entitled ‘Mass Slaughter of Punjabis in East Bengal,’ The Times war correspondent Nicholas Tomalin wrote an eye-witness account of how he and a team from the BBC programme Panorama saw Bengali troops and civilians march 11 Punjabi civilians to the market place in Jessore where they were then massacred. “Before we were forced to leave by threatening supporters of Shaikh Mujib,� wrote Tomalin, “we saw another 40 Punjabi “spies� being taken towards the killing ground?�

Tomalin followed up on April 4 in Sunday Times with a detailed description of the “mid-day murder� of Punjabis by Bengalis, along with two photos ? one of the Punjabi civilians with their hands bound at the Jessore headquarters of the East Pakistan Rifles (a Bengal formation which had mutinied and was fighting on the side of the rebels), and another of their dead bodies lying in the square. He wrote how the Bengali perpetrators tried to deceive them and threatened them, forcing them to leave. As other accounts also testify, the Bengali “irregulars� were the only ones in central Jessore that day, as the Pakistan government forces had retired to their cantonment.

Though the military action had started in Dhaka on March 25 night, most of East Pakistan was still out of the government’s control. Like many other places, “local followers of Sheikh Mujib were in control� in Jessore at that time. Many foreign media reported the killings and counter-killings unleashed by the bloody civil war, in which the army tried to crush the Bengali rebels and Bengali nationalists murdered non-Bengali civilians.

Tomalin records the local Bengalis’ claim that the government soldiers had been shooting earlier and he was shown other bodies of people allegedly killed by army firing. But the massacre of the Punjabi civilians by Bengalis was an event he witnessed himself. Tomalin was killed while covering the Yom Kippur war of 1973, but his eye-witness accounts solve the mystery of the bodies of Jessore.

There were, of course, genuine Bengali civilian victims of the Pakistan army during 1971. Chandhan Sur and his infant son were killed on March 26 along with a dozen other men in Shankharipara, a Hindu area in Dhaka. The surviving members of the Sur family and other residents of Shankharipara recounted to me the dreadful events of that day. Amar, the elder son of the dead man, gave me a photo of his father and brother’s bodies, which he said he had come upon at a Calcutta studio while a refugee in India. The photo shows a man’s body lying on his back, clad in a lungi, with the infant near his feet.

Amar Sur’s anguish about the death of his father and brother (he lost a sister in another shooting incident) at the hands of the Pakistan army is matched by his bitterness about their plight in independent Bangladesh. They may be the children of a ‘shaheed,’ but their home was declared ‘vested property’ by the Bangladesh government, he said, in spite of documents showing that it belonged to his father. Even the Awami League ? support for whom had cost this Hindu locality so many lives in 1971 ? did nothing to redress this when they formed the government.

In the book 1971: documents on crimes against humanity committed by Pakistan army and their agents in Bangladesh during 1971, published by the Liberation War Museum, Dhaka, I came across the same photo of the Sur father and son’s dead bodies. It is printed twice, one a close-up of the child only, with the caption: ‘Innocent women were raped and then killed along with their children by the barbarous Pakistan Army’. Foreigners might just have mistaken the ‘lungi’ worn by Sur for a ‘saree’, but surely Bangladeshis can tell a man in a ‘lungi’ when they see one! And why present the same ‘body’ twice?

The contradictory claims on the photos of the dead of 1971 reveal in part the difficulty of recording a messy war, but also illustrate vividly what happens when political motives corrupt the cause of justice and humanity. The political need to spin a neat story of Pakistani attackers and Bengali victims made the Bengali perpetrators of the massacre of Punjabi civilians in Jessore conceal their crime and blame the army. The New York Times and The Washington Post “bought� that story too. The media’s reputation is salvaged in this case by the even-handed eye-witness reports of Tomalin in The Times and Sunday Times.

As for the hapless Chandhan Sur and his infant son, the political temptation to smear the enemy to the maximum by accusing him of raping and killing women led to Bangladeshi nationalists denying their own martyrs their rightful recognition. In both cases, the true victims ?Punjabis and Bengalis, Hindus and Muslims ? were cast aside, their suffering hijacked, by political motivations of others that victimised them a second time around.

Source: http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060319/asp/look/story_5969733.asp
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

Re: # 470

While I have acknowledged repeatedly on this forum that East Pakistan in 1971 was a shameful chapter in Pakistan's history and Pakistanis paid for it dearly, I find it ridiculous to compare it with Gujarat. East Pakistan in 1971 was a civil war in which India recruited, trained and armed Mukti Bahini to attack Pakistani troops, Punjabis and Biharis and all those who opposed the separation movement. And then India invaded a sovereign country against all international laws in an attempt to assert its hegemony in the region.

Gujarat, on the other hand, was an organized massacre of Muslim minority and more recently Orissa was an organized rape-murder of nuns, priests and other Christians by the same well-known Sangh Parivar murderers. India's history is filled with day-to-day discrimination against Muslims and anti-Muslim riots which continue to destroy large numbers of lives and cause a continuing humanitarian disaster.

As is often said, you judge a democracy by well it takes care of its weak and most vulnerable. India's record on taking care of its people, particularly children, is just as bad. 43% of India's children suffer from chronic hunger and 2.1m die each year from poor sanitation, half a million suffer from violent crime. It's a shameful record of terrible governance and an indictment of India's democracy...a democracy that denies the basic freedom from hunger and disease to vast majority of its own people.

As far as India's literacy is concerned, I am not sure what you are so proud of. It's near the bottom of the pile, not very different from Pakistan's. The organizations you talk about are tools for America's attempt to remake the world in its own image so it can perpetuate its own role as a world hegemon, with India as its favorite example of "world's largest democracy" and a faithful follower to promote US agenda as it faces a serious decline of its power.

I am not a pro-democracy bigot. I do not believe in democracy as an article of faith, as promoted by many here and by Uncle Sam as a panacea to all of the world's ill. I do not believe that countries with large numbers of illiterate people trapped in poverty can afford the luxury of democracy that puts the criminals, thugs and gangsters in parliament and power to perpetuate their crime spree.

Neither Pakistan nor India can grow out of the morass they are in with democracy as it's practiced there. This is the kind of situation for which America's founding father Alexander Hamilton said "Masses are asses". What South Asia needs is a Suharto or a Mahathir or a Lee Kuan Yu to step up on industrialization and human development decisively and forcefully and to save the people from themselves and their daily humiliations of continuing hunger, poverty and illiteracy.
Riaz Haq, PakAlumni Worldwide

Re: # 469 Riaz: "Pakistan and Bangladesh have a better record than India".

Your statement is absolutely contradictory when applied to Pak, in view of the recent report from the Pak Newspaper Dawn that states as follows:

"Minority Rights Group International, a watchdog organization, ranked Pakistan last year as the world’s top country for major increases in threats to minorities from 2007 — along with Sri Lanka, which is embroiled in civil war. The group lists Pakistan as seventh on the list of 10 most dangerous countries for minorities, after Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar and Congo."

The talibans are extorting money in broad day-light from the Sikhs an amount of $150000.00, and the Pak govt is doing nothing to prevent this.

Source:
http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/ news/pakistan/15-Pakistans-religious-minorities-report-violence-nf-01

Re: # 469
riaz katue..
You need have some non-muslas left in Pakiland to engage in violence...so, jihadis are now crossing border and sneaking into India to carry out islamic task...

Shoaib bhai,

aprox 3 lakh Bengalis or more were killed in the span of a few months. And BHs were meted out 'special treatment'.

I am afraid you are wrong. According to Sharmila Bose, a respected Bengali lady sociologist (well actually I need not have added respected becuase all Bong lady sociologists are respected) only 6 Bongs were killed by Pak Army in 1970-71. Much of the massacre in 1970-71 were pogroms in BD were actually pogroms of Bihari and Punjabi Muslims carried out by Muktis and Indian Army.

Regards

Riaz,

Neither BD nor Pak have such a (riot) system.

And you will also never hear of Hindu-Muslim riots in the Indian Punjab. Why is that, mian?

Riaz,

You can not point to any organized pogroms like Guhjarat 2002...

This will go down a predictable path but have you heard of 1971? It's largely a well accepted fact that aprox 3 lakh Bengalis or more were killed in the span of a few months. And BHs were meted out 'special treatment'.

I'm sure many others on this board can give you many more stats on this.

Riaz mian, I admire your crusade against the ills of India, especially against the people who jerk of to India Shining on the Internet everyday. But with you glossing over the faults of the country of which you are an ‘alumni’ nobody will take you seriously.

Anyways, I'll repeat my question:

So with a literacy rate significantly lower than India's and with the economy growing "much faster" under army dictators, in your opinion, I assume, democracy is a strict no-no for Pakistan too, right?