The political and semi-political parties (NGOs/NPOs/etc) with religious affiliations (fondly called secular in Bharat and consists of CommiePakis), and leanings - left and center, Red, Green & White, continue back tracking and betraying their promises.

These spawned movements can get no direct representation in any of the party structure, and their own leaders have failed them through and through. This constant and continous exploitation of these people - resulting only in a vote bank - has left them ill equipped to guide their own actions/destiny as well as in forming an alternative political front.

The so called reprensetatives have come with ingenious slogans and theories, spread by the activists of the new movements; yet no new alternative, no differently articulated version of social justice has as yet emerged as a political force. If anything the only issue that ever comes to the forefront is - pet agendas, petty grudges of the reformists and activists. Society as such as become hostage to their experimentation with discarded political and social theories of the west and elsewhere.

These instigated movements have constantly used dalits and other weaker sections of the society, to further divide the society. In doing so, these movements are eroding their victims' identity, culture, religion and distancing them from the very people they should be dealing with to solve their very real problems they face - socially, politically and on other fronts. In short the activists have tried everything under the sun, including instigating the said unfortunate Indians to violence and anti-national activities.

Now, Can we provide an alternative framework, where reformation, reconciliation and mutual understanding that will result in a strong, vibrant India - India that is for everyone.

We have one thread for "Caste/Religious Persecution" to highlight how propagandists and politicians use dalit issues and dalits as cannonfodder to further perpetuate a persecution complex.

We have another thread for "Caste/Religion based Reservation" to discuss the merits or lack there of such policies and impact.

This thread will raise the altitude to take stock of the situation - Big Picture - and discuss realistic solutions for reformation and reconciliation within a framework whose parameters are acceptable to everyone, and not just a single party in the mix and throw out the instigators and self-appointed reformers and revisionists.

With apologies to Sun Tzu for twisting the name of his ageless work on statecraft, I wish to start a topic thats familiar territor for most IFites and BRites. In I-F we have touched upon some aspects of this through our Ithihasa-Purana, Indian History and Pre Modern Warfare threads but we must look deeper into the texts to reveal the very subtle and hidden wisdom of our ancient thought.
By the very title Arth (Meaning) of War, I wish to find out if we have a well thought out and comprehensive approach to War.....War and the whole baggage of war.
Things like why war, how and when to start a war, what justifies the war, whats the moral foundation of the conflict, how to *continue* the war till some sort of "decision" is reached......and the obvious post mortem of the conflict. A very good (maybe the only) Indian pointer to the whole process of conlict is the Mahabharata.

The question will become more clear after the reader carefully studies some insights from a BRF thread...I shall freely quote them in order in the following posts so as to create some sort of a synopsis on the idea. I will post the relevant stuff here with permission.......

Thanks.

Thread archive available at http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...arat-riots.html


In the list of all those ex-Presidents, ex-Babus, ex-Judges etc who find their consicience after they've left the office, add one more name: ex-President K R Narayanan who made it to the top solely by his virtue of birth.
Here he's dissing ABV with his 'Vajpayee didn’t do anything effective’ tirade in a Malayalam magazine edited by Congress MLA P.T. Thomas.

Could it be he's getting back to ABV for not extending his tenure in Rashtrapati Bhavan? Does this dork know that the division of army was sent to Gujarat smack in the middle of the largest mobilization in the sub-continent i.e., Operation Parakram. That too within 16 hours of the start of the riots! Rajiv Gandhi (PM), PVNR (Home Minister) didn't call the army for whole 5 days in Delhi, nation's capital!! <!--emo&:angry:--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/mad.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='mad.gif' /><!--endemo-->

State News and Discussion -II is renamed as Jharkhand and Goa Governor role.

Earlier version of this thread archived at.. http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...discussion.html

Earlier version of this thread can be found at http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...ere-psyops.html

read the caption
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->A dog sleeps next to a vegetable stall in Bombay. Two small boys and two girls were married off to four puppies by tribal villagers in the small northern Indian state of Jharkhand to ward off evil.(AFP/File/Rob Elliott)<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<i>What is the link between this picture and Jharkhand story? </i>

In this thread I shall use the principle of association
to create a list of anti-hindu charities
These are run by commies, south asians, xtian missionaries etc
Often these charities have hindu sounding names

If an organisation condemns the Gujurat riots without a much stronger condemnation of the Godhra fire, if an organisation calls itself south asian, if an organisation has not condemned the ethnic cleansing of kashmiri pandits pre-1995
and bangladeshi hindus pre 1995, these fall under anti-hindu organisations

A further sanity check, if an organisation bleats about secularism without condeming xtian missionaries and madrasas, it again qualifies as anti-hindu

Next I use guilt by association, any organisation supported by a known anti-hindu organisation is considered suspect unless verified further

G.S

From Telegraph, 17 Feb., 2005

<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->Not in the accepted sense of the word 
Even three decades after the Emergency, India continues to miss its political relevance, just as it did during the crisis, writes N.J. Nanporia


In evil hour
<b>Thirty years after the event, reactions to the Emergency continue to be shaped by political bias, platitudes like “murder of democracy” and an overwhelming sense of political correctness. </b>Not long ago, Rahul Gandhi “admitted” that “excesses” had occurred, an admission that hardly made sense because no one has denied that people were arrested, that censorship was imposed or that a wide variety of oppressive acts were perpetrated, some under the directions of Sanjay Gandhi. <b>Sonia Gandhi herself is on record saying that she regretted the Emergency, all of which reinforced the view that the 1975 crisis is not something to be understood but to be condemned. </b>The Prasar Bharati’s decision to drop the film on Jayaprakash Narayan hasn’t helped matters either.

<b>But neither apologies nor admissions can ever provide a key to what the Emergency was about.</b> It can only be found by focussing on the one individual who matters — Indira Gandhi herself. <b>And also by asking the only question that matters — what were her motives and what moved her to do what she did?</b>

<b>Shortly after the Allahabad judgment in 1975, Indira Gandhi said that she was “not a politician in the accepted sense of the word”. </b>Though she had her share of egotism, this was not a display of defensive arrogance. Nor was she implying here that she occupied a position of exceptional privilege and that the normal rules of public conduct did not apply to her. <b>It was an unintended and indirect disclosure of a subject that governed her turbulent career since the 1969 split — her disgust for and absolute rejection of politicking.</b>

As a member of the Congress working committee in 1955 and later of the central parliamentary board; as president of the Congress in 1959 (when she played a persuasive role in the bifurcation of bilingual Bombay and the dismissal of the communist government in Kerala); as her father’s political hostess; and in 1964, as Lal Bahadur Shastri’s minister of information and broadcasting, Indira Gandhi was exposed to the full blast of politicking. <b>At this point, we have another of her revealing comments, “The nation is in a hurry and we cannot afford to lose time.” Combine her strong aversion to politicking with her sense of time draining away, and arguably we have the first intimation of the approaching tragedy.</b>

<b>During this time, the Congress was also running out of the energy that had sustained it as a movement. There was a mismatch, unseen by the party, between the old guard that was firmly in the saddle and the new challenges that confronted it. </b>There was, additionally, a sense of a mission having been accomplished and lost moorings. <b>War with Pakistan and the party’s internal dissent induced organizational paralysis and an inability to redefine itself.</b> These could not have been acceptable to someone of Indira Gandhi’s temperament, though she was, undoubtedly, aware that her own elevation to prime ministership under the auspices of K. Kamaraj was itself a prime example of politicking. Of course the atrophied old guard hadn’t the remotest clue to what Indira Gandhi was about to do. Confined within the stagnating limits of syndicate culture, it was unable to realize that she could read its motivations and calculations like an open book.

<b>Her conclusions are not difficult to guess. The syndicate culture was incompatible with her idea of national achievement and the urgency of the task. All those associated with the syndicate were victims of a mindset that couldn’t conceive of a politician having any concern other than those held by it. </b>There was a complete lack of comprehension about a prime minister who refused to be a run-of-the-mill politician. The old guard came to regard her as a pliable instrument in its hands.

On her part, Indira Gandhi realized that she could survive only by mastering the techniques of politicking. She did this with the panache and determination. She beat the syndicate at its own game. Her expulsion from the syndicate marked her out as someone with a bold, uncompromising and dynamic approach to national affairs.

Psychologically and symbolically, for her, this was one way of disinheriting the politicking politicians. Yet, tragically, this was the only kind of politicians available, given the system that had bred them. Indira Gandhi also realized that her convictions could not be translated into an understandable public ideology or into terms the Constitution would find acceptable. An appreciation of this persuaded her to repeatedly try and reach out to what she called the “masses”. With them, she felt a rapport that was impossible to replicate with anyone else in the political jungle. Jayaprakash Narayan spoke of “total revolution”, signalling a break with the past. For Indira Gandhi, the revolution was primarily in her mind, while for Narayan, it was out there physically, which unfortunately was also a recipe for chaos and indiscipline. In the event, neither could make a headway against factionalism, violence, corruption, the pursuit of power, regionalism and so on. Collectively, these represented “parliamentary democracy”, but actually, it was the “greatest demagoguery in the world.”

Indira Gandhi helped popularize the legend of a ruthless person, frequently hiring people and firing them, thus lending credibility to the Janata campaign against the “personality cult”. Yet, even in her increasing isolation, she kept hoping to find some empathy that would elude her forever. <b>JP too was frustrated and, confronted by the crisis, pushed himself to the limits — as the romantic idealist is apt to do — calling out to students to agitate, to the armed forces to revolt, and to civil servants to disobey orders that were not to their liking. The infamous railway strike and 92 derailments followed. </b>Under total revolution, all the ills of the system, all that Indira Gandhi wanted to uproot, came to be magnified.

Prakash Tandon struck a note of sanity and balance when he said: “For years we wished an end to chaos and willingly promised to forgo some rights for some order and an end to how a whole town of ten million could be held to ransom by whoever chose to call a strike for whatever cause. A question we should ask is whether Mrs Gandhi was carrying, somehow, unknown to her, the cumulative will of a democratic people looking for a catharsis, long tired of incompetent governments.” Indira Gandhi did what her father could never have done — critically question a system imposed on India for the sole reason that it was favoured by the departing colonialists.

<b>As for the Shah commission and the legal trivialities into which it sunk, it should be said that the commission was more keen to pursue Indira Gandhi than on ensuring an inquiry into the origins of the Emergency.</b> So much so that it is pointless to ask whether it was competent to investigate the circumstances or the way in which the Emergency was declared. In the end, Indira Gandhi realized that she had all the right reasons for doing the wrong thing in conditions in which she could never succeed. All she could do was administer what she called “shock treatment”, which, nevertheless, left the system largely unchanged.

On the sidelines were those who expediently applauded Indira Gandhi without the slightest understanding of her motives, but became her harshest critics post-Emergency. There were others sincerely associated with her but who remained entirely innocent about what was going on. And then there were the would-be Emergency heroes, so remote from reality and so full of their egotistic concerns that they waited eagerly to be arrested, only to be ignored by an unimpressed Emergency authority. We are indebted to them for injecting some comedy into an otherwise tragic affair.

As for Indira Gandhi, she remained the way she had started, a person whose image was writ large on the national and international scene, but whose core remained private and intense. The statement that “only a political illiterate could disapprove of the Emergency” is well worth pondering over.
<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->

<img src='http://ftp.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/china_india_e_border_88.jpg' border='0' alt='user posted image' />

( Earlier version of this thread available at..

http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/2...ons-i.html
http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/2...ns-i1.html


<b>Hinduism and the Contest of Religions</b>
Subhash Kak

Junior Sankaracharya granted bail!!

Previous versions of this thread are available at ..

http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...karacharya.html
http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...racharya-2.html
http://indiaforumarchives.blogspot.com/200...racharya-3.html

- Admin