03-18-2005, 09:30 PM
Guys! Look at the blog! AROy wants US to invade India. This is what we have guys! A lunatic b1tch who wants India to be invaded by barbaric west and she is darling of news papers, COMMIES and secualrists ....
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http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000422.html
May 13, 2004
India really shines
"Will investors be able to continue to look forward to privatisation, deregulation and economic reform?" CNN's Richard Quest yelled at some poor reporter in New Delhi about an hour ago. The reporter didn't really answer the question, and so Richard started yelling more questions at him, but it was clear enough that the voting season is starting to ripen nicely. The 'world's biggest democracy', as we always say, has confounded all the pundits by voting out the ruling BJP and its combination of economic and religious fundamentalism (how can you have Hindu fundamentalism? there isn't even a fundamental text? I guess you're not on the block these days if you're a religion without a fundamentalism!). The centre-left Congress party has over 200 seats (272 needed), and is likely to form a government, with alliances that may include left parties. The new PM is almost certainly going to be the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, who campaigned on including workers and the poor within India's prosperity. Hooray! Listen very closely and you just might hear the sound of mortality wafting through certain corridors in Canberra and Washington!
Posted on May 13, 2004 07:21 PM
Comments
I think Hindu fundamentalism essentially means bigotry. There is a good article on it by Rhada D'Souza, who is currently a lecturer at Waikato University. It's titled 'The Return of Hitler As Hero: The World Through Cracked Lenses' and appeared on ZNet. Not sure if it is generally available. If so it should be here.
It's main aim is to convert India into a religious Hindu state. Remembering that India has 12% Muslim population, it's pretty scary, especially as Hitler seems to be something of a hero.
There has been quite a bit of stuff floating into my consciousness about India's poverty being untouched by "India shining". Along with that the corruptibility of government by multi-national corporations.
I wish Sonja well!
Posted by: Brian Bahnisch at May 13, 2004 10:34 PM
Yeah, the stuff about fundamentalism reminds me of all that crazy stuff over the temple at Gujarat (if I recall correctly) a few years back... I also remember reading some Hindu fundie site getting their cranky pants on because the City of Campbelltown (NSW) had refused a building permit to some bod who wanted to establish some Hindu centre in Leumeah or thereabouts.
Posted by: Graham at May 14, 2004 12:44 AM
From memory, there was a mosque on a site which the Hindus claimed was the site of an ancient Hindu temple, thought by others to be probably spurios. The mosque was torched, I think.
The worst incident was in Feb 2002 where there was an organised attack and destruction of Muslim businesses and homes. About 2000 were killed. Police were said to be involved, or at the very least stood by.
There was a prequel to that attack when a train carrying Hindu faithful returning from a pilgramage was attacked by moslems. 69 I think died.
All in Gujerat, which was the original power base of the extremist BJP.
Posted by: Brian Bahnisch at May 14, 2004 06:49 AM
I dunno, I have very mixed feelings about this election result. Although the rise of the BJP did have a lot to do with hindu chauvinism, in the past couple of years, the national leadership had been pretty steadily attempting to disassociate itself from the extremist elements such as the RSS ... Vajpayee himself was a committed moderate.
The most recent campaign, as far as I can tell, contained a far more muted appeal to sectarian sentiment than previous campaigns. I wonder if the lesson of this for the BJP will not be that to succeed, they need to be more rather than less sectarian in its appeal.
The other aspect that worries me is that Vajpayee's government was unquestionably the most competent in India's history. It has taken India a long, long time to get on to the path of growth, and there is no guarantee that it will stay there. I am a huge admirer of Vajpayee personally, as much as I disdain some of the extremists with whom he rose to power.
Congress itself these days is a party whose raison d'etre is power and patronage ... it doesn't really stand for anything other than piecing together whatever coalition can hand it office, and rewarding its enablers when it does. And there is very little to indicate that Sonia Gandhi is qualified or competent to be Prime Minister.
Posted by: Mork at May 14, 2004 10:01 AM
the midle class electorates swung to Congress as much as the 'working class' ones.
you also need to take into account over thwe 100 odd seats won by 'other' parties.
Posted by: Homer Paxton at May 14, 2004 01:59 PM
Vajpayee was certainly not a fundamentalist. When I was going around India over summer, people I talked to regarded him as little different from his Congress opponents.
Others like Advani were the ones to watch. Vajpayee was a good Prime Minister by Indian standards, but he ran a very arrogant election campaign. The "India Shining" stuff started sometime late last year, and it was visibly a bad move. Like the Tories used to campaign on "You've never had it so good", and Keating claimed "This is as good as it gets".
Terrible strategy. Sonia will probably symbolically shift away from India's recent cooperation with Western security interests, but I'm sorry to inform you all that privatisation et al should continue (as Congress started it all).
Posted by: Steve Edwards at May 14, 2004 07:16 PM
India seems to be a wonderfully diverse place, with the super rich and sophisticated on one hand and "tribals" and "forest people" on the other. It throws up many anomalies. For example, the number of poor are said to number about 26% of the population (1.05b) or 273 million whereas the number of hungry is typically given as about 300 million. The existential reality for many seems pretty desparate as a couple of articles by Indian food policy analyst Devinder Sharma show.
For example you could take a look at his We are the cause of hunger, where he speaks of babies being sold for less than the price of a bottle of mineral water and grains being exported while Indians starve.
Of course poverty and hunger are conceptual constructs as well as existential realities. In The Algebra of Poverty: Only the Rich Should Become Richer he describes how 110 million poor were magically lifted from poverty by cutting the figures a different way.
From what I've heard in commentary (mostly on News Radio) "India Shining" left at least 80% of the population untouched. Expenditure on rural infrastructure, they say, has actually decreased in recent years. Even in industry, progress has been patchy beyond the glamour industries.
The most plausible reason I have heard in the last two days as to why BJP dipped out has been that there is a new pragmatism in India's voters. If their lives have not been improved on a local level, then they are inclined to tip the present lot out and take their chances with the other crowd.
I've heard no Indian expert criticize Sonia. They all reckoned she was up to the job. Given the new pragmatism, the focus on the local, and the apparent magnitude of the task, she may not be there long.
They reckon that she constitutes a move to the left. But I daresay Steve is right. The program of privatisation will continue. This may depend, however, on which parties she needs to join in order to form a coalition. The major left party is apparently so left it is communist. With 50 seats she may need them.
The leader of the communists said they will meet today to decide whether they were interested. He said they were looking for three things:
1. A reversal of recent "de-communalisation" policies.
2. An emphasis on public welfare as well as on corporate profit (he does not see these elements as either/or)
3. The reintroduction of a bit of morality in government.
Well, in the face of that the stock market has already taken fright. Maybe the US will seek to veto such an alliance. If Sonia goes ahead nevertheless they could always invade.
<b>
As Arundhati Roy said in her address to the 4th World Social Forum in Mumbai earlier this year (see Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?) the US can find reasons to invade any-one. But "as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism."
Roy gave plenty of reasons why the US should invade India. There is so much bad stuff that goes on in India that is missed by the mainstream press. So how can we possibly know why the voters opted for change?
</b>
Posted by: Brian Bahnisch at May 15, 2004 03:34 PM
-------------------------------------------------------
http://backpagesblog.com/weblog/archives/000422.html
May 13, 2004
India really shines
"Will investors be able to continue to look forward to privatisation, deregulation and economic reform?" CNN's Richard Quest yelled at some poor reporter in New Delhi about an hour ago. The reporter didn't really answer the question, and so Richard started yelling more questions at him, but it was clear enough that the voting season is starting to ripen nicely. The 'world's biggest democracy', as we always say, has confounded all the pundits by voting out the ruling BJP and its combination of economic and religious fundamentalism (how can you have Hindu fundamentalism? there isn't even a fundamental text? I guess you're not on the block these days if you're a religion without a fundamentalism!). The centre-left Congress party has over 200 seats (272 needed), and is likely to form a government, with alliances that may include left parties. The new PM is almost certainly going to be the Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, who campaigned on including workers and the poor within India's prosperity. Hooray! Listen very closely and you just might hear the sound of mortality wafting through certain corridors in Canberra and Washington!
Posted on May 13, 2004 07:21 PM
Comments
I think Hindu fundamentalism essentially means bigotry. There is a good article on it by Rhada D'Souza, who is currently a lecturer at Waikato University. It's titled 'The Return of Hitler As Hero: The World Through Cracked Lenses' and appeared on ZNet. Not sure if it is generally available. If so it should be here.
It's main aim is to convert India into a religious Hindu state. Remembering that India has 12% Muslim population, it's pretty scary, especially as Hitler seems to be something of a hero.
There has been quite a bit of stuff floating into my consciousness about India's poverty being untouched by "India shining". Along with that the corruptibility of government by multi-national corporations.
I wish Sonja well!
Posted by: Brian Bahnisch at May 13, 2004 10:34 PM
Yeah, the stuff about fundamentalism reminds me of all that crazy stuff over the temple at Gujarat (if I recall correctly) a few years back... I also remember reading some Hindu fundie site getting their cranky pants on because the City of Campbelltown (NSW) had refused a building permit to some bod who wanted to establish some Hindu centre in Leumeah or thereabouts.
Posted by: Graham at May 14, 2004 12:44 AM
From memory, there was a mosque on a site which the Hindus claimed was the site of an ancient Hindu temple, thought by others to be probably spurios. The mosque was torched, I think.
The worst incident was in Feb 2002 where there was an organised attack and destruction of Muslim businesses and homes. About 2000 were killed. Police were said to be involved, or at the very least stood by.
There was a prequel to that attack when a train carrying Hindu faithful returning from a pilgramage was attacked by moslems. 69 I think died.
All in Gujerat, which was the original power base of the extremist BJP.
Posted by: Brian Bahnisch at May 14, 2004 06:49 AM
I dunno, I have very mixed feelings about this election result. Although the rise of the BJP did have a lot to do with hindu chauvinism, in the past couple of years, the national leadership had been pretty steadily attempting to disassociate itself from the extremist elements such as the RSS ... Vajpayee himself was a committed moderate.
The most recent campaign, as far as I can tell, contained a far more muted appeal to sectarian sentiment than previous campaigns. I wonder if the lesson of this for the BJP will not be that to succeed, they need to be more rather than less sectarian in its appeal.
The other aspect that worries me is that Vajpayee's government was unquestionably the most competent in India's history. It has taken India a long, long time to get on to the path of growth, and there is no guarantee that it will stay there. I am a huge admirer of Vajpayee personally, as much as I disdain some of the extremists with whom he rose to power.
Congress itself these days is a party whose raison d'etre is power and patronage ... it doesn't really stand for anything other than piecing together whatever coalition can hand it office, and rewarding its enablers when it does. And there is very little to indicate that Sonia Gandhi is qualified or competent to be Prime Minister.
Posted by: Mork at May 14, 2004 10:01 AM
the midle class electorates swung to Congress as much as the 'working class' ones.
you also need to take into account over thwe 100 odd seats won by 'other' parties.
Posted by: Homer Paxton at May 14, 2004 01:59 PM
Vajpayee was certainly not a fundamentalist. When I was going around India over summer, people I talked to regarded him as little different from his Congress opponents.
Others like Advani were the ones to watch. Vajpayee was a good Prime Minister by Indian standards, but he ran a very arrogant election campaign. The "India Shining" stuff started sometime late last year, and it was visibly a bad move. Like the Tories used to campaign on "You've never had it so good", and Keating claimed "This is as good as it gets".
Terrible strategy. Sonia will probably symbolically shift away from India's recent cooperation with Western security interests, but I'm sorry to inform you all that privatisation et al should continue (as Congress started it all).
Posted by: Steve Edwards at May 14, 2004 07:16 PM
India seems to be a wonderfully diverse place, with the super rich and sophisticated on one hand and "tribals" and "forest people" on the other. It throws up many anomalies. For example, the number of poor are said to number about 26% of the population (1.05b) or 273 million whereas the number of hungry is typically given as about 300 million. The existential reality for many seems pretty desparate as a couple of articles by Indian food policy analyst Devinder Sharma show.
For example you could take a look at his We are the cause of hunger, where he speaks of babies being sold for less than the price of a bottle of mineral water and grains being exported while Indians starve.
Of course poverty and hunger are conceptual constructs as well as existential realities. In The Algebra of Poverty: Only the Rich Should Become Richer he describes how 110 million poor were magically lifted from poverty by cutting the figures a different way.
From what I've heard in commentary (mostly on News Radio) "India Shining" left at least 80% of the population untouched. Expenditure on rural infrastructure, they say, has actually decreased in recent years. Even in industry, progress has been patchy beyond the glamour industries.
The most plausible reason I have heard in the last two days as to why BJP dipped out has been that there is a new pragmatism in India's voters. If their lives have not been improved on a local level, then they are inclined to tip the present lot out and take their chances with the other crowd.
I've heard no Indian expert criticize Sonia. They all reckoned she was up to the job. Given the new pragmatism, the focus on the local, and the apparent magnitude of the task, she may not be there long.
They reckon that she constitutes a move to the left. But I daresay Steve is right. The program of privatisation will continue. This may depend, however, on which parties she needs to join in order to form a coalition. The major left party is apparently so left it is communist. With 50 seats she may need them.
The leader of the communists said they will meet today to decide whether they were interested. He said they were looking for three things:
1. A reversal of recent "de-communalisation" policies.
2. An emphasis on public welfare as well as on corporate profit (he does not see these elements as either/or)
3. The reintroduction of a bit of morality in government.
Well, in the face of that the stock market has already taken fright. Maybe the US will seek to veto such an alliance. If Sonia goes ahead nevertheless they could always invade.
<b>
As Arundhati Roy said in her address to the 4th World Social Forum in Mumbai earlier this year (see Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?) the US can find reasons to invade any-one. But "as long as our `markets' are open, as long as corporations like Enron, Bechtel, Halliburton, Arthur Andersen are given a free hand, our `democratically elected' leaders can fearlessly blur the lines between democracy, majoritarianism and fascism."
Roy gave plenty of reasons why the US should invade India. There is so much bad stuff that goes on in India that is missed by the mainstream press. So how can we possibly know why the voters opted for change?
</b>
Posted by: Brian Bahnisch at May 15, 2004 03:34 PM