I don’t know the author of this email and I have no copyright. But I’m sure whoever she is, she will not mind me sharing her views which I wholeheartedly endorse. I have taken the liberty of editing the mail:
``By the time you read this news, the body of Major Manish Pitambare, who was shot dead at Anantnag, would have been cremated with full military honors.
The day he died, the news channels were swept off their feet by the critical newsbreak about a cinestar being acquitted of TADA. `'Sanjay Dutt relieved by court'. 'Sirf Munna not a bhai' '13 saal ka vanvaas khatam' screamed the channels.
Then came forth the eulogies: Salman Khan said, 'He is a good person. We knew he will come out clean'. Mr Big B said, `Dutt's family and our family have relations for years. He's a good kid. He is like elder brother to Abhishek.'
Etc. etc.
Among other news, Parliament was mad at the Indian crciket team; Greg Chappell said something; Shah Rukh Khan to replace Amitabh in KBC and blah blah. But most of the emphasis was on Sanjay Dutt's `phoenix-like’ comeback from the terrorist charges.
In the Dutt medley, there was one bit of news on BBC that startled me. It read `Hijbul Mujahideen's most wanted terrorist 'Sohel Faisal' killed in Anantnag, India . Indian Major leading the operation lost his life in the process. Four others are injured.'
It was past midnight, I started checking all Indian channels, but Sanjay Dutt continued to rule supreme. His arguments: `'I'm the sole bread earner for my family', 'I have a daughter who is studying in US' and so on.
Then the channels beamed trivia about how Sanjay was not wearing his lucky blue shirt while he was hearing the verdict and also how he went to every temple and prayed for the last few months. A suspect in Mumbai bomb blasts, convicted under the Arms Act, was being transformed into a hero.
Sure, Sanjay Dutt has a daughter. Sure, he did not commit any terrorist activity. Sure Sanjay Dutt went to all the temples. Sure he did a lot of Gandhigiri but then......
Major Manish H Pitambare got the information from his sources about the terrorists' whereabouts. Wasting no time, he attacked the camp, killed Hijbul Mujahideen's supremo and in the process lost his life to the bullets fired from an AK47. He is survived by a wife and daughter (just like Sanjay Dutt) who's only 18 months old.
Major Pitambare never said 'I have a daughter' before he took the decision to attack the terrorists in the darkest of nights. He never thought about his family and about him being the bread-earner.
But that mattered little to the channels which were too busy hyping up a former drug addict, a suspect who's linked to bomb blasts which killed hundreds. Their aim was to show how he defied the TADA charges and they were so successful that his conviction for possession of arms had no meaning. They also concluded that his parents in heaven must be happy and proud of him.
Major Manish’s parents have to live the rest of their lives without their beloved son. His daughter won't ever see her beloved father again.
To my generation, Major Manish Pitambare is a big hero, someone who laid down his life without our asking him, just so that Sohel Faisal did not claim any more victims in his motherland.
Let’s hang our heads in shame that the news about the army major's death was given by a foreign TV channel!!!''
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
Hi People!
Just one request. Please put your names to your comments. Many of the good comments i receive are without a name. That makes it somehow incomplete. Thanks.
This piece is courtesy sulekha. had written it for them in 2003....resurrecting it at a time when farmers suicides are becoming de rigeur...
It seems a little odd to cite an old non-violence hero in the times of international stress, especially when Gandhism has been summarily dismissed as unviable and simplistic.
What is not understood is the fact that though simple, it is too profound to be ignored.
His philosophy is not a tangled maze of absolutes and probables. To me, it is the most pragmatic way of living for the body, mind and soul, for social, economic and spiritual salvation without creating a conflict of interests and by weaving each other's welfare into an all-facilitating formula of community living.
As a nation, it should concern us, especially post-WTO, that we have managed to ignore even his most practical of teachings, while showing an inexplicable eagerness to bear with the pitfalls of embracing a path nobody is clear about.
It is now more than ever that we need that one visionary who demonstrated a non-confrontationist charter of development that helped the individual, the family and the society grow separately and together. Gandhism is a ready reckoner on existence. But look at what we have done. We are disarrayed on all fronts.
Gandhiji told us to ostracize untouchability. We paid lip service, carved out seats for the backward classes, nows Dalits, in disputed sectors like education and sated our souls. Caste today works as the single largest pull factor in elections, from Parliament down to the zilla parishads. He told us to ensure equal status for women. We gave free education to the girl child but still managed to throttle her at birth.
Economically, we are a country with our distinctive needs and definitions of growth. But strangely, we have always tried to co-opt a growth charter not intended for us -- the socialist, the hesitatingly capitalist and now the rabidly opportunistic WTO. Though WTO bears the whip for many of our economic ills, the real picture is probably buried in something as sublime and yet as basic as our fundamentals as a nation.
Grounded in a rock-like conviction that agriculture feeds villages, the Gandhian model holds up the villages as the centrifugal kernel of our prosperity, and social and moral evolution. Not for nothing did British economist E. F. Schumacher call Gandhiji “the most important economic teacher today.”
The economy today is in a shambles, not so much because of the global economic meltdown but because we have failed to insulate ourselves from the self-destructing philosophy that preaches more power to the cities and let villages be damned.
While he said, “India lives in its villages,” we superimposed an economic monstrosity that preys on the villages and feeds cities to grow into outrageously obese, smoke-spouting, crime-festering dragons that kill as much as they survive -- with the result that our villages continue to starve, suffer droughts, are deprived of what urban life takes as a given: electricity, water, education and health care. Cities prosper while villages decay. A skewed paradigm of growth, entirely at variance with Gandhian thought and any serviceable model of socialism -- which Nehruvian socialism clearly was not -- has evolved over the years even as a neatly demarcated policy of growth, much like the line of control, remains elusive.
Sure, villages get subsidies but there is no clear understanding of their needs and concerns -- providing water and power, conserving both, ensuring crop rotation not to the detriment of soil but to enrich it. All the while, we have gone ahead with expanding our industrial base, eating up agricultural land wherever available on the periphery of cities. There is no concept of equitable or justiciable development.
Even today, three-fourths of India lives in its villages. Yet, agriculture has no place in the national sweepstakes. Any Finance Minister's budget is first dissected on the basis of its acceptability to the neatly profiled industrial interests.
Experts say profitability in Indian agriculture went down by 15 per cent in the nineties because of proliferating exploitation. But bumper crops seem to cloud academic judgment. The annual growth in agriculture and allied activities is about one per cent while that of industry is 4.5 per cent. The share of agriculture has shrunk in the GDP reckoning, and the WTO may finish the job of throttling the farmer.
The WTO promised farmers access to markets and support from government. This has not happened. Prof M. S. Swaminathan, the pioneer of the Green Revolution, has said as much. No additional markets have been thrown our way. “In fact, the market has even reduced in the OECD countries in the past six years,” he says.
Sure, the Green Revolution has done wonders for our ego by producing an enviable marketable surplus. But what about food rotting in the godowns of the almost defunct Food Corporation of India and the starving millions being bred on mango kernels. What about farmers committing suicides across the national map in Andhra, in Maharashtra, in Nagaland? Are we happy?
Some inevitable processes are already under way -- soil erosion, depletion of nutrient manure; even as cities expand, fertile lands get sold at throwaway prices to non-performing industrial units. Approximately, 57 per cent of our geographical area is under various degrees of soil degradation.
What's more, after 50 years, we don't have much to show in favor of our urban bias. Over 400 million live below the poverty line. About 300 million do not have access to safe drinking water. Around 700 million live without proper sanitation.
In the Gandhian scheme of things, a greater sensitivity to environment, forests and villages is inalienable in our growth plan. Especially because we are one-sixth of the world living on 2-4 per cent of the total land mass and contributing eight per cent of the world's bio-diversity. Because we are still a rural people. Even when our rural masses have shrunk from 80 per cent during Independence to about 60 per cent today, our growth should necessarily be propelled from within our fields.
By following the western script blindly, we have fostered unhealthy competitiveness, excessive consumerism and wanton living -- the symptomatic outgrowth of a grievously shortsighted development model that the west is now grappling with.
Gandhiji said Britain's prosperity and industrialization were due to the exploitative utilization of half of the planet's resources. India cannot afford this decadent growth, particularly when we don't even have their wherewithal in the first place. Our main resources are our people and the natural bounty in the form of forests, soil, water, air, minerals and trees.
Journalist Mark Shepard observed, “India's leaders have done their best to imitate the western countries by building an economy based on large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture. Gandhi fought this kind of development. He warned it would ruin India's villages.” Gandhiji was one of the greatest advocates of decentralism. But when we did disband the licence raj, it was in deference to the WTO juggernaut and not as a farseeing policy.
The Amul model of growth where participants are their own future-tellers is the only one that practices what the old man envisaged. And the results are stark. An economy of peace and permanence. If we depend for our food on the farmer, wealth should first flow to the farmer, Gandhiji postured. Riches cannot flow from cities to the villages. What flows are only second-hand TVs, audio systems and automobiles, all of which generates more stress than they hope to offer comfort.
The economic chain of supply and demand begins and ends with the villages, the cities being merely supplementary instruments of facilitation. The farmer grows crops, sells it to buy his child a good education, better health and fuels ancillary growth in entertainment, services etc.
When his land is taken away, or when repetitive use depletes his soil and his yield drops, or his crop value shrinks or when the omnipotent landlord flexes his muscles, his purchasing power weakens and that sets the ball rolling back.
Gandhiji said the path to Sarvodaya is antyodaya -- attention to the poorest person. Until this person is brought up on an equitable scale, rational growth is not possible. Until he is neglected, we shall continue pulling the cities up growth paths indexed by material prosperity and suborning the villages to our residual benefits.
Apart from being non-justiciable, this pattern is non-serviceable. It cannot last. The cities cannot spout Harvard English and wean on palmtops while the villages drag on walking miles for water and fighting exploitation. We have to take them along. For their sake and ours. Each year, around one million migrate to the cities in search of employment and better life. What if we had empowered them in the first place?
Gandhism is not a dispensable dogma or a one-day wear. After all, the man who brought the sun to set on the British Empire without fingering a pistol could not have been a moron.
Just one request. Please put your names to your comments. Many of the good comments i receive are without a name. That makes it somehow incomplete. Thanks.
This piece is courtesy sulekha. had written it for them in 2003....resurrecting it at a time when farmers suicides are becoming de rigeur...
It seems a little odd to cite an old non-violence hero in the times of international stress, especially when Gandhism has been summarily dismissed as unviable and simplistic.
What is not understood is the fact that though simple, it is too profound to be ignored.
His philosophy is not a tangled maze of absolutes and probables. To me, it is the most pragmatic way of living for the body, mind and soul, for social, economic and spiritual salvation without creating a conflict of interests and by weaving each other's welfare into an all-facilitating formula of community living.
As a nation, it should concern us, especially post-WTO, that we have managed to ignore even his most practical of teachings, while showing an inexplicable eagerness to bear with the pitfalls of embracing a path nobody is clear about.
It is now more than ever that we need that one visionary who demonstrated a non-confrontationist charter of development that helped the individual, the family and the society grow separately and together. Gandhism is a ready reckoner on existence. But look at what we have done. We are disarrayed on all fronts.
Gandhiji told us to ostracize untouchability. We paid lip service, carved out seats for the backward classes, nows Dalits, in disputed sectors like education and sated our souls. Caste today works as the single largest pull factor in elections, from Parliament down to the zilla parishads. He told us to ensure equal status for women. We gave free education to the girl child but still managed to throttle her at birth.
Economically, we are a country with our distinctive needs and definitions of growth. But strangely, we have always tried to co-opt a growth charter not intended for us -- the socialist, the hesitatingly capitalist and now the rabidly opportunistic WTO. Though WTO bears the whip for many of our economic ills, the real picture is probably buried in something as sublime and yet as basic as our fundamentals as a nation.
Grounded in a rock-like conviction that agriculture feeds villages, the Gandhian model holds up the villages as the centrifugal kernel of our prosperity, and social and moral evolution. Not for nothing did British economist E. F. Schumacher call Gandhiji “the most important economic teacher today.”
The economy today is in a shambles, not so much because of the global economic meltdown but because we have failed to insulate ourselves from the self-destructing philosophy that preaches more power to the cities and let villages be damned.
While he said, “India lives in its villages,” we superimposed an economic monstrosity that preys on the villages and feeds cities to grow into outrageously obese, smoke-spouting, crime-festering dragons that kill as much as they survive -- with the result that our villages continue to starve, suffer droughts, are deprived of what urban life takes as a given: electricity, water, education and health care. Cities prosper while villages decay. A skewed paradigm of growth, entirely at variance with Gandhian thought and any serviceable model of socialism -- which Nehruvian socialism clearly was not -- has evolved over the years even as a neatly demarcated policy of growth, much like the line of control, remains elusive.
Sure, villages get subsidies but there is no clear understanding of their needs and concerns -- providing water and power, conserving both, ensuring crop rotation not to the detriment of soil but to enrich it. All the while, we have gone ahead with expanding our industrial base, eating up agricultural land wherever available on the periphery of cities. There is no concept of equitable or justiciable development.
Even today, three-fourths of India lives in its villages. Yet, agriculture has no place in the national sweepstakes. Any Finance Minister's budget is first dissected on the basis of its acceptability to the neatly profiled industrial interests.
Experts say profitability in Indian agriculture went down by 15 per cent in the nineties because of proliferating exploitation. But bumper crops seem to cloud academic judgment. The annual growth in agriculture and allied activities is about one per cent while that of industry is 4.5 per cent. The share of agriculture has shrunk in the GDP reckoning, and the WTO may finish the job of throttling the farmer.
The WTO promised farmers access to markets and support from government. This has not happened. Prof M. S. Swaminathan, the pioneer of the Green Revolution, has said as much. No additional markets have been thrown our way. “In fact, the market has even reduced in the OECD countries in the past six years,” he says.
Sure, the Green Revolution has done wonders for our ego by producing an enviable marketable surplus. But what about food rotting in the godowns of the almost defunct Food Corporation of India and the starving millions being bred on mango kernels. What about farmers committing suicides across the national map in Andhra, in Maharashtra, in Nagaland? Are we happy?
Some inevitable processes are already under way -- soil erosion, depletion of nutrient manure; even as cities expand, fertile lands get sold at throwaway prices to non-performing industrial units. Approximately, 57 per cent of our geographical area is under various degrees of soil degradation.
What's more, after 50 years, we don't have much to show in favor of our urban bias. Over 400 million live below the poverty line. About 300 million do not have access to safe drinking water. Around 700 million live without proper sanitation.
In the Gandhian scheme of things, a greater sensitivity to environment, forests and villages is inalienable in our growth plan. Especially because we are one-sixth of the world living on 2-4 per cent of the total land mass and contributing eight per cent of the world's bio-diversity. Because we are still a rural people. Even when our rural masses have shrunk from 80 per cent during Independence to about 60 per cent today, our growth should necessarily be propelled from within our fields.
By following the western script blindly, we have fostered unhealthy competitiveness, excessive consumerism and wanton living -- the symptomatic outgrowth of a grievously shortsighted development model that the west is now grappling with.
Gandhiji said Britain's prosperity and industrialization were due to the exploitative utilization of half of the planet's resources. India cannot afford this decadent growth, particularly when we don't even have their wherewithal in the first place. Our main resources are our people and the natural bounty in the form of forests, soil, water, air, minerals and trees.
Journalist Mark Shepard observed, “India's leaders have done their best to imitate the western countries by building an economy based on large-scale industry and large-scale agriculture. Gandhi fought this kind of development. He warned it would ruin India's villages.” Gandhiji was one of the greatest advocates of decentralism. But when we did disband the licence raj, it was in deference to the WTO juggernaut and not as a farseeing policy.
The Amul model of growth where participants are their own future-tellers is the only one that practices what the old man envisaged. And the results are stark. An economy of peace and permanence. If we depend for our food on the farmer, wealth should first flow to the farmer, Gandhiji postured. Riches cannot flow from cities to the villages. What flows are only second-hand TVs, audio systems and automobiles, all of which generates more stress than they hope to offer comfort.
The economic chain of supply and demand begins and ends with the villages, the cities being merely supplementary instruments of facilitation. The farmer grows crops, sells it to buy his child a good education, better health and fuels ancillary growth in entertainment, services etc.
When his land is taken away, or when repetitive use depletes his soil and his yield drops, or his crop value shrinks or when the omnipotent landlord flexes his muscles, his purchasing power weakens and that sets the ball rolling back.
Gandhiji said the path to Sarvodaya is antyodaya -- attention to the poorest person. Until this person is brought up on an equitable scale, rational growth is not possible. Until he is neglected, we shall continue pulling the cities up growth paths indexed by material prosperity and suborning the villages to our residual benefits.
Apart from being non-justiciable, this pattern is non-serviceable. It cannot last. The cities cannot spout Harvard English and wean on palmtops while the villages drag on walking miles for water and fighting exploitation. We have to take them along. For their sake and ours. Each year, around one million migrate to the cities in search of employment and better life. What if we had empowered them in the first place?
Gandhism is not a dispensable dogma or a one-day wear. After all, the man who brought the sun to set on the British Empire without fingering a pistol could not have been a moron.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Now it can be told.
The two women killed in Khairlanji--the infamous incident that caused delayed riots in the state including Mumbai-- were not raped, according to the two post-mortem reports. I wrote about this in my paper after confirming it from government sources.
One could now dispute the PM report itself but the fact remains that this is an official document, belonging to the government and if this report says it's not rape or even sexual behaviour of any kind, it's the government's duty to point this out in the better interests of society. The murders are gross enough but if there's a supposed untruth, they owe it to the people to out with it.
The media has written about how there was an economic aspect to the Khairlanji murders but thre is no real understanding ot what happened. Government and intelligence reports indicate a farmhand was not paid Rs 500-600 and went to the Dalit boss to demand his money. That was the flashpoint of the flare-up.
The two women killed in Khairlanji--the infamous incident that caused delayed riots in the state including Mumbai-- were not raped, according to the two post-mortem reports. I wrote about this in my paper after confirming it from government sources.
One could now dispute the PM report itself but the fact remains that this is an official document, belonging to the government and if this report says it's not rape or even sexual behaviour of any kind, it's the government's duty to point this out in the better interests of society. The murders are gross enough but if there's a supposed untruth, they owe it to the people to out with it.
The media has written about how there was an economic aspect to the Khairlanji murders but thre is no real understanding ot what happened. Government and intelligence reports indicate a farmhand was not paid Rs 500-600 and went to the Dalit boss to demand his money. That was the flashpoint of the flare-up.
Monday, January 01, 2007
Saddam, the supposed harbinger of doom for mankind, is gone. And he leaves behind an unflattering mass of no-gooders. Topping the list is Bush-part II. It was extremely distressing to see Saddam go to the gallows while Bush was peacably holidaying on his good old Texan ranch. His cowboy living becomes him much more than his role as the head of the American state. ranch .
No, Saddam is no God. But surely, he has killed fewer people than his arch-enemy. In Iraq alone, the US troops have OFFICIALLY killed around 3,000 people - mostly innocent civilians or protestors - since their masterful takeover. The total toll including the civil war and the bombings it unleashed touches a million or two.
Saddam, at least, did not pretend to be fair and just nor did he mask his dictatorial brutality under the guise of ``cause of freedom.''
Besides, Saddam was different from many others of his ilk. Like it or hate it, he had an incredible self-belief. What I appreciate about him is not just that he was India's friend and not an Islamic fanatic as he was painted out to be but also the fact that he never minced words, stood his ground and stood by his beliefs -whatever they be- till the end. Here's a man who withstood the scorching fire of the US and allies but never displayed even a momentary weakening of either his will or his emotions -not after his arrest, not after his torture of a trial and not before his death.
Somehow, when I read his profile, I don't get the impression of a man who wronged all his neighbours and ALL his countrymen but as a man who had some extreme and irrational ideas, was extremely ambitious and brooked no dissent. I find that most who stood in his way or betrayed him got ruthlessly crushed but those who did not betray him were appreciated and treated with respect. He was not the cruel tyrant to everybody.
More than a decade ago, I was reporting on a high-profile meeting on Iraq in a five-star hotel. If I recall right, it was on forging trade partnerships with India. Posters of Saddam were hung all over the huge room-- The Ballroom at the Taj, I think-- and the sophisticated Iraqi men and women I met were full of glowing praise for their leader even though they knew I would quote none of it. They called him by an appellation and not by his name though I forget what.
It's ironic that Saddam is dead while his tormentor who has unleashed a reign of terror in his homeland that's certainly no less horrendous than Saddam's is moving around freely, and babbling about free will.
No, Saddam is no God. But surely, he has killed fewer people than his arch-enemy. In Iraq alone, the US troops have OFFICIALLY killed around 3,000 people - mostly innocent civilians or protestors - since their masterful takeover. The total toll including the civil war and the bombings it unleashed touches a million or two.
Saddam, at least, did not pretend to be fair and just nor did he mask his dictatorial brutality under the guise of ``cause of freedom.''
Besides, Saddam was different from many others of his ilk. Like it or hate it, he had an incredible self-belief. What I appreciate about him is not just that he was India's friend and not an Islamic fanatic as he was painted out to be but also the fact that he never minced words, stood his ground and stood by his beliefs -whatever they be- till the end. Here's a man who withstood the scorching fire of the US and allies but never displayed even a momentary weakening of either his will or his emotions -not after his arrest, not after his torture of a trial and not before his death.
Somehow, when I read his profile, I don't get the impression of a man who wronged all his neighbours and ALL his countrymen but as a man who had some extreme and irrational ideas, was extremely ambitious and brooked no dissent. I find that most who stood in his way or betrayed him got ruthlessly crushed but those who did not betray him were appreciated and treated with respect. He was not the cruel tyrant to everybody.
More than a decade ago, I was reporting on a high-profile meeting on Iraq in a five-star hotel. If I recall right, it was on forging trade partnerships with India. Posters of Saddam were hung all over the huge room-- The Ballroom at the Taj, I think-- and the sophisticated Iraqi men and women I met were full of glowing praise for their leader even though they knew I would quote none of it. They called him by an appellation and not by his name though I forget what.
It's ironic that Saddam is dead while his tormentor who has unleashed a reign of terror in his homeland that's certainly no less horrendous than Saddam's is moving around freely, and babbling about free will.
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