Indian Mujahid

[Keysersoze]

they can sell their lands, take the money and leave, jus because they bought the lant it does not separate the land from being India. very good point you have said.. maybe if i buy a house in US and if I want to separate, I take the land along with me is it??

In that case the wealthiest people will be owning their own countries!!

Actually you can do that however the amount of hassle for you to do that would be astronomical. In fact
Fantasy Island, A Convicted Con Man Creates A Country - CBS News

Or there are a few others out here as well.
Sorry but someone should explain how it works.....You wanna disenfranchise someone because they don't want to be in the same country as you...Sorry but no one should have to do that just to keep you with your "idea" of India. Lots of countries are born out of larger entities. If you think that India is gonna stay whole then you will be sadly disappointed.

 

[blain2]

The blunt facts are that Pakistan has failed miserably at its intended purpose. Indian muslims have fared far better than their Pakistani counterparts. They have had far better opportunities to improve in India than Pakistan.

I tend to disagree as your claim is debatable. Having seen Muslims of India up and close, I can tell you that folks in Pakistan have never been held back as much as their co-religionists in India. Indeed Pakistan has problems however India has other types of issues (you can't say qualitatively one problem is better than the other) that afflict Muslims.

 

[Vinod2070]

If you think that India is gonna stay whole then you will be sadly disappointed.

And the basis of this enlightened thought?

Oh, isn't it the 37 separatism movements in India?

The one that every child learns in 1st standard as also the number of people in India without toilet facilities and the bad Hindu caste system.

 

[Keysersoze]

And the basis of this enlightened thought?

Oh, isn't it the 37 separatism movements in India?

The one that every child learns in 1st standard as also the number of people in India without toilet facilities and the bad Hindu caste system.

The basis of the enlighten thought is from being a student of history. Take a look at Ireland /Yugoslavia/Iraq and numerous other historical precedents. If it is a large enough number of people are annoyed enough it is what will happen. And when the country votes in Hindu nationalist groups to lead then sooner or later the minorities will be become separatist.

 

[Vinod2070]

India has faced many critical dangers to her unity in the past and has successfully survived. The future looks better than the past. India is now much stronger to successfully face any outside and inside challenges to her unity.

Though you are right to the extent that the minorities need to be carried along. I am sure that is happening.

You people mostly have a one sided picture of the communal situation in India. And mostly it is tinted by the Gujarat lenses, which was a real blot on India.

The reality though is different. The minorities are better integrated than in most countries. The problems that you see are very much manageable. The situation is not really too bad though it can always improve.

 

[Keysersoze]

India has faced many critical dangers to her unity in the past and has successfully survived. The future looks better than the past. India is now much stronger to successfully face any outside and inside challenges to her unity.

Though you are right to the extent that the minorities need to be carried along. I am sure that is happening.

You people mostly have a one sided picture of the communal situation in India. And mostly it is tinted by the Gujarat lenses, which was a real blot on India.

The reality though is different. The minorities are better integrated than in most countries. The problems that you see are very much manageable. The situation is not really too bad though it can always improve.

India in its current state is pretty much the same age as Pakistan. So it is not that old. Yugoslavia was older when it fell apart. So as the saying goes don't count your chickens till they have hatched.

And forgive if I don't take the "everythings fine" line to heart. look back at the last ten years and tell me what you see.
I remember talking to a Serbian who told me there were no massacres in her country. How would I know what was happening in the country I wasn't from there. its amazing what can happen under your nose.

 

[Vinod2070]

OK. Let's wait.

Time will only tell. Nothing can be taken for granted.

 

[Flintlock]

India in its current state is pretty much the same age as Pakistan. So it is not that old. Yugoslavia was older when it fell apart. So as the saying goes don't count your chickens till they have hatched.

And forgive if I don't take the "everythings fine" line to heart. look back at the last ten years and tell me what you see.
I remember talking to a Serbian who told me there were no massacres in her country. How would I know what was happening in the country I wasn't from there. its amazing what can happen under your nose.

Keys, the rise of Hindu Nationalist parties, esp. the BJP signals that Hindus across India are voting alike. The BJP government in Karnataka is one such indication. This is quite different from the fragmentation seen in yugoslavla.

However, the biggest task for the BJP is to win the confidence of muslims.

 

[Neo]

^^ How many Indian Muslims have left for Pakistan in the last 5 decades?

Is the number even in 2 digits? Single digits?

I will tell you. Exactly ZERO.

Facts don't lie. Motivated people do.

I beg to differ, I come from a huge...and I mean huge family. Many came to Pakistan after the eighties, and I'm sure my family is not an exception.
Thousands of Indians muslims marry Pakistan men and women and leave India every year.
Some chose to live in Pakistan, others go abroad.

 

[Vinod2070]

I was talking about leaving India due to persecution or mal-treatment.

Marriage is a normal thing, I remember reading reports of the flow in the other direction too. Some recent report talked of a Hindu gild marrying a Pakistani and settling there.

And millions of Indians and Pakistanis (including your good self) are setlled outside the country. Doesn't mean they didn't love their country.

BTW, what was the reason for your family to emigrate. Some problems in India or the desire to be one with the larger family? That is if you don't mind sharing that.

 

[QuickSilver]

Actually you can do that however the amount of hassle for you to do that would be astronomical. In fact
Fantasy Island, A Convicted Con Man Creates A Country - CBS News

Or there are a few others out here as well.
Sorry but someone should explain how it works.....You wanna disenfranchise someone because they don't want to be in the same country as you...Sorry but no one should have to do that just to keep you with your "idea" of India. Lots of countries are born out of larger entities. If you think that India is gonna stay whole then you will be sadly disappointed.

With so much turmoil in FATA and NWFP I think the situation is worser in Pak!! Look, I dont know much about pak so me making such a statement is easily condemnable.. its exactly what u said 'if u think India is gonna stay that ways, u will be disappointed'.

We want to disenfranchise someone who does not want to be here as a citizen of the whole of india. A person is a citizen by birth because the country chose it that ways, because it expects everyone to have the same kind of nationalism and patriotic fervor. if a person feels he does not belong to this place, he is very well allowed to leave. But if he tries to disturb the others' peace by dastardly acts, he is in bigg danger!!

 

[muse]

It's beyond sad that some indian interlocutors refuse to acknowledge problems and react with such absurd defensiveness.

Instead of positioning the blame on those hindu religio/political bigots for staining the vision of a unified, dignified India, it is the victim that is to blame.

And when these victims of what is now evident is state tolerated, if not directed, discrimination, seek to create solutions such as the settling of these Muslims, over time, in the provinces or states that border Pakistan, eye brows are raised, paniciky reactions masked in nationalistic definitions of history, sadly, it is obvious that many Indian want to acknowledge little but triumphal, soothing visions; and can anyone really say they do not understand that.

As Muslims of Hindustan slowly begin to make lives for themselves in these border states, the prospects for long term peace increase within India and also for those countries that neighbor it.

 

[vish]

It's beyond sad that some indian interlocutors refuse to acknowledge problems and react with such absurd defensiveness.

Instead of positioning the blame on those hindu religio/political bigots for staining the vision of a unified, dignified India, it is the victim that is to blame.

And when these victims of what is now evident is state tolerated, if not directed, discrimination, seek to create solutions such as the settling of these Muslims, over time, in the provinces or states that border Pakistan, eye brows are raised, paniciky reactions masked in nationalistic definitions of history, sadly, it is obvious that many Indian want to acknowledge little but triumphal, soothing visions; and can anyone really say they do not understand that.

As Muslims of Hindustan slowly begin to make lives for themselves in these border states, the prospects for long term peace increase within India and also for those countries that neighbor it.

Dude, stop your subtle propaganda.

 

[Vinod2070]

Muse, who do you think has treated its minorities better: India or Pakistan?

Let's take it from there.

 

[muse]

Hum Hindustani: Blasts and the BJP
J Sri Raman


It is no mystery what the blasts of July 26 in Ahmedabad (immediately in the wake of explosions in Bangalore) meant for the common people of India. Television images of the outrage, which claimed a toll of 49 lives, illustrated a terrorism that was at once absurd and inhuman in its choice of targets. We need not speculate over the popular response to the sight of scattered bodies, sobbing women and the broken and plastered limbs of children in hospital beds.

What the blasts mean for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), however, has indeed become a matter of some serious speculation. The party and its parivar (the Far Right “family”) cannot blame this on bilious enemy propaganda for it is the contradictory voices emanating from within the BJP that have roused curiosity and raised questions.

The first reaction linking the blasts in both the cities to the BJP came from outside the party. B Raman, a former official of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the Indian counterpart of Pakistan’s in-the-news Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), found it “striking” that both the blasts had taken place in BJP-ruled States. The party is proud of having made a breakthrough in south India, until recently considered out of bounds for it, by capturing power in Bangalore, the software-strong capital of Karnataka. And Ahmedabad, of course, is the seat of Narendra Modi’s power, and the capital of Gujarat, the laboratory of “cultural nationalism” that witnessed the grisly pogrom of 2002.

Raman found the circumstance so striking that he even talked of the BJP-ruled state of Madhya Pradesh as the next likely target of terrorists. No blasts have yet shaken Bhopal, the capital of MP. But that is not the only reason why the ex-RAW expert seemed to be more than somewhat selective in the matter.

Congress Chief Ministers were at the helm in Maharashtra, both during the series of 13 bombings that shocked Mumbai in March 1993 and the train blasts in the same metropolis in July 2006. No expert ever perceived any party-political significance in the fact. Mayawati Kumkari Naina of the Bahujan Samaj Party was the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh in November 2007, when blasts shook Varanasi, Lucknow and Faizabad in the politically crucial state.

Moving south, Karnataka had no BJP Chief Minister when the Indian Institute of Science was attacked in Bangalore in December 2005. Nor had Andhra Pradesh one, when Hyderabad shook with blasts in August 2007. And the BJP had never more than a negligible political presence in Tamilnadu, which witnessed its worst blasts in Coimbatore way back in 1998.

The Bangalore-Ahmedabad bombings, however, seemed, at least to a section in the BJP, to promise a bonanza of sympathy for the party, as it prepares for assembly polls in some states and, more importantly, the general election in 2009. Predictably and particularly, Modi is out to make the most of the situation.

“It is a war on India”, he declared, humility stopping him from describing it as a war on himself. The message, however, has not been lost on the media. Modi, as the no-nonsense answer of the nation to terrorism, encounters one in every newspaper and channel. Particularly endearing and potentially enduring is the image of the leader patting the police on the back in the diamond city of Surat for suddenly discovering all of twenty unexploded bombs in public places, including one precariously perched in the cleft of a tree.

The first voice of dissent within the party and the “family” came from no less a leader than Lal Krishna Advani. The Shadow Prime Minister was shrewd enough to see the dangers of the claim that the BJP-ruled states were the targets of successful strikes by a diabolical terrorism.

Here he was, protecting himself as the Iron Man of India and his party as the scourge of terrorists. He has been at his oratorical best, assailing Congress and its coalition government for cravenly surrendering to terrorism. The controversy over his own role as No 2 in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime during a high-profile hijack case, with even his party colleagues questioning his version, may have mellowed someone made of less stern stuff.

He, however, has persisted in making a promise of better anti-terrorist action a major part the BJP’s poll platform. He has no reason to share the others’ excitement over the opportunity of a sympathy vote they espy in the serial blasts. He had good reason, thus, to reject the suggestion from Raman, supported by other party leaders and media luminaries.

Some observers also see no reason for him to rejoice over such sympathy strengthening Modi further. Advani, elected to the Lok Sabha (the lower house of India’s parliament), has always championed the larger-than-life Chief Minister’s cause in the party and outside. But, Advani has left no doubt that he is the Prime Minister-in-waiting, while Modi and his admirers have never concealed his prime-ministerial ambitions.

Advani has, instead, opted to use the blast as yet another argument for a tougher law against terrorism — or for revival of the rights-denying Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), rejected by the people in the general election of 2004 and therefore removed from the statute book. The people, who lived through the blasts the POTA could not prevent, may not exactly be looking forward to its re-enactment. But Advani knows they will look forward even less to rule buy the BJP, if it spells more blasts.

Meanwhile, a woman BJP leader, well known for a warped political campaign that perhaps made Manmohan Singh the Prime Minister, has come out with the most curious theory on the blasts.

Sushma Swaraj came into limelight in 1999 when she contested a by-election against Congress president Sonia Gandhi and lost. The former Information and Broadcasting Minister, however, got even greater media attention in 2004, when she put up a very BJP-like opposition to “foreigner” Sonia becoming the Prime Minister. Sushma threatened to cut her tresses, wear a white sari and start living on peanuts (like a traditional widow), if the “national humiliation” was not averted. It was and, mercifully, we were all spared the visual and other consequences of the vow.

Barging into the debate over the blasts with characteristic belligerence, she has called them a “conspiracy” by Congress and the government in New Delhi. The motive, according to her, was to divert public attention away from the “cash-for-votes” controversy raised during the confidence vote sought and won by the Manmohan Singh government.

Many, in fact, suspect another conspiracy, by which the BJP let the government win the vote (sought mainly on the US-India nuclear deal, to which the party never had a serious objection) but also allowed some of its members of parliament to flaunt on the floor of the House wads of currency allegedly given as bribes in a show of opposition.

Swaraj’s theory was, clearly, at variance with the take of either Modi or Advani. Yet, she has reiterated that she sticks to the stand, without receiving any party reprimand so far. Veteran BJP-watchers see this as another instance of the party and the parivar deciding to speak with different voices on difficult issues.

Pity the BJP. The blasts, which spell only terrible suffering for the ordinary citizen, pose so many tricky, tactical questions for the poor party.

The writer is a journalist based in Chennai, India. A peace activist, he is also the author of a sheaf of poems titled ‘At Gunpoint’