Pakistan faces 26/11 everyday: Mani Shankar Aiyar

[karan.1970]

The discussion at hand was not who started the war but of ' internal matters' of India & Pak.

For some Pakistanis, the name of the game is

" If you cant prove your point, obfuscate the point of the debate "

 

[nair]

Getting your Apples and Oranges mixed here...... the Indian forces initiated the war in Eastern sector, thus Pakistan retaliated in the West.

Sir you got the facts wrong here..... India was trying to deal with the refugees coming from eastern sector.....The first act of war.... the first bullet/bomb was fired from pakistan to india .. so pakistan started the war.... period!!!!

Now lets get back to the discussion on topic!!!!

 

[Windjammer]

You Reap what you Sow................................................

"Chhattisgarh jungles". !!

 

[vsdoc]

Is Mani Shankar Iyer a closet Hindutvawadi? I think he is.

I quite agree with most of his views. My dad is an unabashed fan.

 

[Windjammer]

The discussion at hand was not who started the war but of ' internal matters' of India & Pak.

Indeed, and also what people are lead to believe. !! No. ??

 

[third eye]

For some Pakistanis, the name of the game is

" If you cant prove your point, obfuscate the point of the debate "

Its the old ABC principle.

A Avoid
B Bypass
C Confuse

Indeed, and also what people are lead to believe. !! No. ??

See, we'll keep on arguing and we always do with no end .

The fact as seen by Indians is that India has always torn a page from the Pak book.

Luckily for us we have been more successful than the Pakistanis.

 

[Rig Vedic]

India suffered terrorism for so many decades including 26/11.was that also result of india's karma?

In a sense, yes. Civilizations go through ups and downs. If the Indic civilization had been healthy, Islam would never have managed to establish a presence in South Asia.

 

[arbit]

Guess every Indian has to act like a smart *** over my comment now

Even a simple sane reply will appear smart in front of you. You were that dumb.

 

[arbit]

One point I would like to disagree here, time is on their side too, they are able to maintain a low cost, low intensity proxy war against India for decades with complete infrastructure, with Jihadii financing and plenty of terrorist recruits and we have to post a big security force costing us both money plus development, time is more on their side than ours. We would like a peaceful border for a decade or two to help us economically and this decades old terrorism has been bleeding us non stop.

Wrong.

We have paid the cost. Yes. Lives earlier and money now. But the cost paid by Pakistan is much much more in terms of radicalization, and an intolerant society. You can't put a monetary cost to it. Time is definitely on our side, we keep playing this game, we will only go up and them down.

 

[Joe Shearer]

No dude. This is good that you guys are fighting and discussing things. It actually helps you to solidify your stances by subjecting them to tests that the other guys throw at you.

Btw it is not true that the people decide. Decisions are taken by leaders and leaders only. People just express their trust in leaders or their gratitude for the notes. Leaders are the ones that counter each other and compromise.
I would rather have you guys argue more and more. I would like to hear more from KS about what to do with Indian muslims who refuse contraception, about those Indians who don't want to be Indians(some of them muslim) and about what he thinks should be a solution to Kashmir.

I returned from a day trying to get so rich that I would never have to work again to find this collection of posts and their comet's tail of attendant comments. Some of the naivete and irresponsibility on display is saddening.

@rubyjackass, decisions are taken by leaders as they sense their constituencies want those decisions to be taken. Karunanidhi does not decide to take a stand against Indian training of Sri Lankans on his own; he does so because he senses that he will lose numbers to Vaiko and such-like, and the nascent pro-Tamil Eelam groups which are slowly trying to return to effectiveness. Jayalalitha does not pre-empt him and make louder noises in the matter because she has any negative views about the military arrangement, but simply in order to ensure that her own constituency remains convinced that her heart is in the right place.

Think about history, Indian or other, and look at the leaders who come to your mind. Think about what they decided. Gandhi took a confrontational approach and distracted the natural trajectory of devolution of government that had started with the Morley-Minto reforms; according to some opinions, this may actually have retarded the Indian cause by decades. Jinnah took to representing the inchoate feelings of resentment and insecurity of the minority Muslims (as opposed to the majority Muslims of the later-designated homelands). The result was confrontation and communal strife magnified many millions of times beyond what there had been before.

Was it Winston Churchill or his counterpart, Hitler, that you had in mind? Look at their records, and tell me that their decisions were not what the people they led themselves wanted, and if they were in any way very much more than symbolic of those popular urges and wants.

This craving for a father-figure that will tell us all what to do, after which we can happily follow orders flies in the face of 2,600 years of recorded history. But then, there are those, like Carlyle, who have derived from this record their considered view that heroes form the turning points of history, rather than representing much deeper urges and wishes of the collective. It is just disillusioning to see this point of view persist into the 21st century. Along with religion, jingoism, and exaggerated attention to symbolical social structures.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Understandable. But the problem with our scores is probably not that. Put in questions based on the pet peeves of Indian right wingers. They can even be very blunt. We are too emotional to not pick our choice.
Do you want a dictatorship in India? I have many friends who will answer yes.

Some fine-tuning of the F-Test will bring in sharper results for Indians who take the test, but the test itself is structurally sound. We fine-tuned it in IIMC in 1973, and found a difference in the figures of the second decimal. Putting in equivalent positions of Indian right wingers, we found, did not work very well, because in English, they were inclined to make far more centre of the road decisions than when the test was administered to them in Bengali. Perhaps when people speak and write English, they feel it incumbent to comply with an unseen set of social norms; the invisible hand of Macaulay. Perhaps. I am more than 35 years away from that area of work.

About saying yes to dictatorship, there will always be a handful of weak people who seek, crave direction. That is an element in every democracy. So what?

When Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, she effectively created a dictatorial regime, a regime not answerable to the law, for a very brief period. Are you unaware of the reaction to that brief experiment? Or what might have resulted if any politician got the impression that he or she could get away with such measures?

 

[Joe Shearer]

Please do not draw the conclusion on my behalf. Reading through some of your responses above, you have again come up with paragraphs of pompous meaningless drivel and ended with a soft blasphemy BS in your own typical fashion on folks who have clear thoughts and understanding on what is needed for India(and it does not matter whether it is right or wrong). Fortunately your ilk are becoming less in numbers and more seen among the past generations while the younger ones perform their,in your words, "intellectual Onanism", which I feel is a good thing as they refine their thoughts and ideas and will be leading to the new awakening and strengthening of the democracy in India as they can pick someone to lead the country/state who reflect their thoughts. You have reinforced my thoughts again that you are the kind who is clueless on what is needed for India and would rather sit at home(and not vote as is the case with numerous middle class citizens) allowing the manipulated electorates vote for the corrupt politicians owing to a false loyalty bought by the money and liquor.

P.S - Pardon me if I do not respond to your posts as I feel it is worthless though you are a good "historian" explaining past events and good for reading. And pardon me for being so blunt as I felt any sweetcoating of the words will not convey the message in the way I wanted it conveyed.

That is fine by me. I welcome support, not sycophancy. Your responding or not responding to my posts is a matter of your sovereign desire, why are you even bothering to explain it? None was sought, nor did I, earlier or now, seek any sweet-coating. Those are actions you have taken on your own. Live with it, or without it, as you wish. It makes no difference.

Coming to what you have to say, all that you have said is that you cannot find meaning in my post, and at best it is inimical to people who have clear thoughts and understanding on what is needed for India - and the crowning phrase, that it does not matter whether it is right or wrong. What else is this but a surrender of independent analysis and decision to a chosen elite, typically a leader, which is the principle at the core of fascism?

The long rigmarole about those who sit at home rather than those who articulate their views conceals the fact that those who poignantly outline their positions here, on PDF, are quintessentially keyboard warriors, not people who descend into electoral politics to save it from electoral manipulation, from false loyalties bought by money and liquor. As if this faffing will result in a clear-sighted leadership emerging. As if it has not been demonstrated by an electorate far above your disdainful condescension that regardless of what they are offered, they vote for what they find in their interest.

And pardon me for bluntly rejecting a frothy, nebulous middle-class attitude which thinks that some kind of candle-parade or electronic mass contact will substitute for electoral politics.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Maybe because I have no illwill towards homosexuals and accept them as natural which you might have failed.


And this is the precise reason why I said the western definitions of fascism etc dont apply to the Indian context.

Fascism is a political philosophy which is universal and not exclusively western. Just as democracy too started in several places in several ways, and today represents an amalgam of these practices, an amalgam which requires detailed analysis to comprehend. Just as autocratic systems fit into one or the other of these political categories and do not require 'nationalisation'. Theocracy being an example, not to labour a point.

Instead of seeking to evolve 'flavours' of a political paradigm, it is better to concentrate on understanding it in the first place. Shallow analysis is of no use, the only analysis that is of any consequence comes from a deep and rich understanding in the first place, one which precludes glib formulae like the need to adapt 'western' definitions of fascism in the Indian context.

 

[Joe Shearer]

Those who refuse contraception (whether Hindus, Muslims or Christians) - There should be a law which mandates that ration card would have only the first two children along with the parents and not the subsequent ones. The individual families are free to beget as many as they want according to their social,religious or economic conditions but only two would be entered in the ration card. So reservation, passport and all the legal documents which require ration card as proof would be out of reach for the others..i.e., the nation would not decide how many children each couple can get but at the same time the nation would not pay for the over time activities of the parents. This will strongly dissuade families from getting more active in bed than required. But Sikhs, Parsis, Jains would be exempted from this law because their TFR and population is already very low and they as a community are rich enough to care of the children.

Indians who do not want to be Indians - Please have a sense of dignity and shame and leave India. Stop utilizing the reservations and all the sops that is being handed out to you by the very country you dont want to be a part of. The country should hand them over a one way train ticket or a flight ticket to which ever country they want to go.

Solution to Kashmir - LoC into IB. India gets to keep its Kashmir while Pakistan gets to keep its. The Kashmiris who chant Jeeve jeeve Pakistan can be asked to migrate to Pakistan just like millions others who did the same in '47. The Hindus and Sikhs who are being persecuted in Pakistan can be got in return so that Pakistan does not complain of additional population and those Hindus can be re-settled in Kashmir.

It is good enough to leave this post on public display to serve as an example of how a fascist urge to rush in to fill every vacuum can lead to taking strident and apparently clear-edged positions on diffuse, complex situations requiring tact and sensitive handling.

Remember Kashmiri Gate, Jag Mohan and Sanjay Gandhi? Or was that before you were born?

 

[Joe Shearer]

I will ask you a simple question which requires a simple answer - elections are coming in 2014 or possibly sooner. What would you as an Indian citizen do on that day keeping in mind the various problems facing the nation ?

a) UPA
b) NDA
c) Third Front if it emerges/regional parties
d) AAP
e) I will stand in elections on behalf of some party
f) I will log onto PDF and keep lecturing fellow Indians without going out to do my constitutional duty.

A very simple question that requires an equally simple answer cutting out all the un-necesssary essays.

I all probability I guess it would be (f)

I have voted in every election for which I have been eligible as a voter since 1968, so how does the question of not participating arise? Have you been a voter in your turn?

In 2014, I might vote in west Bengal, in UP, or in Karnataka. Obviously I will vote according to the choice of candidates available on the ballot at that time at the place of voting.

Don't you think it slightly bone-headed to assume that these are the choices available in three locations in future, one and a half years later?

Incidentally, I was offered a ticket (in jest) for 2014. Presumably it was in jest, as it is difficult to fathom anything in common between the mass organisation that did the offering and my own liberal democratic views,, except for our shared antipathy to majoritarianism..

How about maoist ruling the delhi ?that can be an option too much better than any other political parties looting the country.

Not unless they reject violence, accept the rule of law and agree on constitutional rule. Maybe not the present constitution, but an amended one.