Quote:For the past few days and in a desperate attempt to counter the middle-class euphoria over Anna Hazare, a beleaguered Congress has been cashing many of the IOUs it has accumulated over the past seven years.



NAC member Harsh Mander, the unchallenged King of sanctimoniousness and the great proponent of communal budgeting of state resources, has denounced Anna’s crusade as “a Right-leaning, fascist campaign to push for an extremely regressive legislation”. Aruna Roy, another NAC member and the Queen Bee of the NGO movement, has proffered her own version of outsourced legislation — one that apparently travels the middle path between the official Lokpal Bill and Anna’s Jan Lokpal Bill. To cap it all, former Infosys chief and the present head of the UID scheme (with the status of a Cabinet Minister) has made TV appearances expressing his unhappiness with the “uni-dimensional” approach of Team Anna and the need for a “much more strategic, holistic” approach.



Nilekani’s critique of the Anna movement can’t be dismissed lightly. He issued a testimonial to Indian parliamentary democracy and particularly the functioning of parliamentary committees. At the same time, he mocked the simplistic bantering that has characterised Team Anna: “Which Kool-Aid are they drinking?” Kool-Aid, I was informed by Wikipedia, is a “brand of flavoured drinks owned by Kraft Foods.” Nilekani could, perhaps, have been less global with his choice of metaphors to state his astonishment with Team Anna’s certitudes. Yet, if Twitter is any indication, he was berated for allowing himself to become a “mouthpiece” for the Government. A few months ago, India’s middle-class twitterati would have treated every word and sentence he uttered as Gospel truth. Today, he is being viewed as part of the rotten elite that is beholden to the Government. It wasn’t what he said that was questioned but why he chose to go public now.



In the coming days, and irrespective of whether the Anna campaign turns more strident or begins wilting, the Government bid to create a less excitable public mood will intensify. From August 16 to the installation of Anna in Ram Lila Maidan three days later, the entire focus was on the Government’s ill-conceived preventive detention, the assault on the Government in Parliament and its unconditional surrender to Team Anna. The Government stood discredited, with a large omelette on its face and its authority in shreds. Most important, for three days the Government successfully turned a populist, anti-corruption movement into an anti-Congress movement. In just three days, the Congress frittered away the goodwill of Middle India.



Yet, no Government capitulates so easily. Manish Tewari’s assault on the integrity of Anna Hazare didn’t click and neither did Rashid Alvi’s comic attempt to locate an American hand behind the movement. At the same time, the abrupt elevation of Anna into a “hero” and “hero of heroes” by Sanjay Nirupam and Harish Rawat has looked patently disingenuous, coming as it did with the news that the Government actually wanted to ‘deport’ Anna back to his village in Maharashtra on August 16. The Congress (and, in fact, most political parties) often forget that people aren’t fools and will believe whatever drivel is served to them. It is easier to persuade courtiers to forgive past sins and come to the aid of the party than to regain lost public goodwill instantly.



I can say with near certainty that the next few weeks will see reports of weariness with street protests, exasperation with unreasonable politics, the unresponsiveness of minorities and Dalits to middle-class protests and, finally, the silent majority’s wish that the Government gets on with the job of governing. Apart from the difficulties of maintaining sustained interest in one story, the media too is susceptible to official cajoling and arm-twisting. This matters in times of economic difficulties.



On August 20, for example, Government departments issued 69 advertisements spread over 41 pages in 12 daily English newspapers to commemorate Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary. It is said that the total expenditure for this occasion last year was between Rs 60 crore and 70 crore. And this was a commemoration that excluded the electronic media. When that is brought into the purview of campaigns like Bharat Nirman and advertisements made by agencies with close ties to daughters-in-law and nephews of Ministers, the sums involved can be mind boggling. In short, it doesn’t make business sense for the media to persist with the shrill anti-Government campaign of the past week. This isn’t a matter of politics; it’s prudent business.



In the coming days, the stage will be set for Team Anna to undertake suicide missions and become increasingly reckless. Actually, that is not asking for too much. The sight of doting crowds spontaneously assembled, 24x7 news coverage and a belief in their own manifest destiny can turn many heads. Kiran Bedi’s “India is Anna” remark, Prashant Bhushan’s sneering espousal of plebiscitary democracy that is calculated to generate anarchy, Swami Agnivesh’s slipperiness and Anna’s own innocent understanding of public life will come under sustained gaze. The hyenas are waiting for them to slip up, and slip up they will. The Anna movement may well falter, but will it restore the Government’s credibility? That, unfortunately, is history. Unless a political miracle takes place, India seems set for a long innings of lame-duck governance. Anna may not get to taste success, but he has begun the halal killing of this Government.

Quote:We were at Checkpoint Charlie. There it was, in real life no more than an unimpressive white prefabricated cabin with a grey slanting roof straddling the famous crossing in the Berlin Wall that had come to symbolise the Cold War. This is where spies were swapped on smoky, rain-washed evenings; a gap in the Iron Curtain immortalised by writers of brooding yet brilliant fiction like John le Carre. Just in case those crossing Checkpoint Charlie from West Berlin into East Berlin were unaware of their passage from ‘freedom’ into ‘servitude’, a large board had been put up for their benefit: “You are leaving the American sector.” These six words were repeated in Russian and French. In brief, you had been warned.



It was a bright summer day when the bus in which I was travelling crossed into East Berlin after a brief halt at Checkpoint Charlie. A rather well-built East German woman with a stern, unsmiling face, muscles straining at the fabric of her severely cut dark brown Army jacket, had boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, and sold each one of us a ticket, a rectangular piece of cardboard printed with undecipherable details. Her job done, the bus began to inch its way through the narrow opening; within seconds we had made our passage from West into East. A short distance later, the bus stopped again. An official boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, made elaborate notes in a leather-bound logbook, and disembarked, without so much as saying guten morgen or danke — he was clearly not paid for that. A kilometre or so away, the bus was flagged down at a barricade. A third official, jowly and scowling, boarded the bus, flipped through our passports, checked our tickets, and made further elaborate notes in his logbook, also leather-bound.



That, however, was not the end of the passport-ticket story. When we disembarked from the bus, we were made to pass through a turnstile which would turn only after we handed over our passports and tickets to a woman who bore remarkable similarity to Herta Bothe of Bergen-Belsen fame and she pressed a switch behind the counter where she stood, her face passive and her gaze steely. The passport was returned, the ticket was retained as it was ‘state property’. I later learned that the multiple checks were to ensure that the previous official had done his or her job and meticulously followed all rules. Each one of them would file a report to his or her boss, who would then file a report to higher officials, who would then compare and match the reports and file yet another report recording their satisfaction or pointing out lapses. Those reports would then be put in a file and the file would be filed in a high-security Stasi building somewhere for future reference. As for the tickets, they would be recycled till the cardboard crumbled; the remains would then be sent to a recycling plant to produce fresh tickets. A very elaborate system, and foolproof too, just that it did not prevent the edifice from collapsing after the first brick in the Berlin Wall was dislodged in the winter of 1989, leading to the fall of the sprawling Soviet Empire.



Memories of that summer day’s experience at Checkpoint Charlie and beyond came flooding back last Friday as I heard Ms Kiran Bedi addressing the crowd at Ramlila Maidan, or Midan-e-Ramlila if we must borrow metaphors since Anna Hazare’s do-or-die crusade against corruption which has captured the popular imagination is being compared with Egypt’s Midan-e-Tahrir, or Tahrir Square, ‘revolution’ by easily excitable though appallingly ill-informed ‘revolutionaries’ waving the National Tricolour and chanting “Azadi”, demanding that the Jan Lok Pal Bill, which they of course haven’t even read, be adopted and implemented without a comma or full stop being changed.



There was Ms Bedi on the dais, waving at the crowds and swaying to their sloganeering. “You don’t need to know what is there in the Jan Lok Pal Bill we have drafted,” she assured the cheering masses, “All you need to know is that we (and she emphasised the ‘we’ with a great degree of emphasis) will get you 101. Do you know what is 101? Let me tell you what is 101. If someone asks you for a bribe, no matter where you are, whether in a city or in a village, you will have to just dial 101 and immediately Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to the place with cameras and recorders.” Here she took a pause as the masses went into a frenzy of cheering, assured that a solution to the gargantuan problem of corruption was just three digits away. “And… listen to me… and, if 101 doesn’t do its job, you can dial 102. Other Jan Lok Pal inspectors will rush to your help and take the first lot of inspectors to task,” Ms Bedi was in full flow now, “You will ask me, what if 102 doesn’t work? Don’t worry, you can then dial 103…”



I didn’t bother to listen any further, but possibly she went on to explain how 104 would monitor 103, and 105 would keep a watch on 104, and so on. In other words, what we are being promised is a Soviet-style parallel bureaucracy with Soviet-style inspectors to enforce a Soviet-style law in a Gestapo state which will rule not on the strength of respect for the law but fear of an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Big Brother. What is being demanded are not measures to remove the primary reason for corruption, a bloated Government with a humongous bureaucracy, but a law that will make Government even bigger — a return to the days of Inspector Raj which we had to cope with for the privilege of living in a joyless socialist India wrapped with endless red tape.



Everybody knows that the route to a corruption-free India lies through radical reforms that will ensure minimum government, maximum governance. But that’s a tedious process which will also mark the end of entitlements. So, what we are being asked to adopt instead is a second version of the hugely wasteful NREGA which has bred further corruption and thievery at all levels of our administration. The new job-generating scheme shall be called JLPEGA — it will create sufficient employment to keep retired babus, busybodies and self-appointed monitors of rectitude in clover at the taxpayers’ expense. Sadly, our political class, denuded of credibility, has so compromised itself that it lacks the guts to take on those who claim to represent all of India but have nothing to show, apart from a well-choreographed made-for-television protest, to substantiate that claim.



Strait is the gate and narrow the path to redemption. If legislation and the creation of bureaucratic institutions could alone redeem us as a nation, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a sorry mess. Populism has brought us to where we are today; populism of the kind being witnessed at Midan-e-Ramlila (and before that at Tihar Square) will only leave us stuck deeper in the mire of hopelessness. Anna Hazare is right up to a point. India does need a second freedom movement, but not to recreate the Inspector Raj of our socialist past. We need a second freedom movement to secure economic freedom and freedom from a system that intrudes into every aspect of our lives. That’s how democracies have dealt with the menace of corruption elsewhere in the world.

Quote:Me dearies, the Vigil book on NGOs published in 2006, five years before Anna Hazare is pushing the country to the brink of anarchy detailed those on the streets of delhi today - anna hazare and sonia gandhi's NAC - was right on target. The central theme of the book was the foreign funding to NGOs, international (read American) peace prizes, peace and conflict resolution fellowships with special focius on the Magsaysay award and the Nobel peace prize.



The Magsaysay was given to those whom the US had picked as potential to serve the American cause while the Nobel Peace prize was given to those who were already serving or had effectively serrved the American and/or the Christian cause. Oftentimes both converged. I have not been proved wrong so far it gives me great pleasure to declare.



Anarchists with the capacity to bring people to the streets for america-decided regime change, Christian charity workers, De-Hinduised Hindu intellectuals - have all been given the Magsaysay - Anna Hazare, Kiran Bedi, James Michael Lyngdoh (former chief election commissioner), TN Seshan (former chief election commissioner), Jayapraksah Narayan, LC Jain (Devaki Jain, her daughter in law Kathy Sridhar is behind Martin Mcwan), Arun Shourie (for his anti-Indira Gandhi writings), MS Swaminathan, Ela Bhatt of SEWA (Gujarat anti-Modi socila charity worker), Aruna Roy, Mahaswata Devi, Mother Teresa, Jockin Arputham, Admiral Ramdas, Sandeep Pandey, Arvind Kejriwal, Rajanikant and Mabelle Arole.



For every twenty such political causes, they will give one MS Subbalakshmi, one Pandit Ravi shankar, one Mahesh Chander Mehta.



Take a look at Korea, Burma, Ind0nesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the story is the same.



American bottomline - anrchy, left extremism, jihad, multiculturalsim - all this is not ok on american soil but if someone is nurturing them on Hindu soil, give them magsaysay and nobel. And no anti-american nationalist leader please. And first on the list is those will help create american puppet regimes and new christian states.

Quote:ETV UP/UK News: Biggest happening in Rahul Gandhi's Amethi: Anna supporters burn his PUTLA at inside congress office

Quote:He believed, as he has often believed in the past, that he would succeed in pulling off a trick without being called out and that he would be cheered for ‘thinking out of the box’ and saving the nation from a political crisis. Alas, as in the past, this time too he has been called out, his Government has been exposed as a gathering of tricksters, and his reputation, or whatever remained of it following the unrestrained loot under his watch, lies in tatters. Now that he finds himself facing a huge problem and his Government is clueless as to how to handle it, he has turned towards the Opposition, making out as if it is the collective responsibility of Parliament to bail him out. It is not. Mr Singh should realise that after treating Parliament with utter contempt and denying the Opposition its legitimate space in the political process there is no reason why those who are not in Government should step forward to rescue him or prop up his decrepit, tottering regime.

Quote:Kolhapur, August 27, 2011



Woman commits suicide in bid to support Hazare

A Correspondent



A woman at Miraj in Sangli district has committed suicide by hanging in her house in a bid to support Anna Hazare’s fast, with an appeal to the government to respond to Mr. Hazare’s demands in the interest and welfare of the poor in the country.



Shubhangi Karande, 33, was found dead after she hung herself with a sari on Friday evening. Her children returned from school, and relatives and neighbours later opened the front door to find her dead.



[color="#0000FF"]In her suicide note, Shubhangi has stated, “I am committing suicide for the demand of redeeming the country from corruption. The poor are starving, which I cannot see. They do not get adequate wages. Even in private companies, wages are low and dearness is increasing. I can eat and survive on jawar from the farm. But those who have no farmland are suffering pangs of starvation. The poor have dreams that they will meet their requirements after they get employment. But even for getting employment, money is demanded. From where will they get money?[/color]



Anna Hazare is on fast but the Government is not responding. What then should be done? I am doing this for the society and my family members should not feel sorry for this. Let the government realize that such a deed of a woman will reduce inflation and my brothers and sisters will have a happy life. My husband should marry again and keep my children happy with love and care.”



Her husband Vinayak Karande is working as a fabricator in Miraj industrial estate. The family stays in a two room house with 13-year-old daughter Monika and 10-year-old son Ganesh. The current cost of living indicates that the family is also under financial hardship.