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| How political parties have pushed UP into a communal abyss | | |
Ashutosh
Am I wrong in presuming that UP is being seen as a new laboratory of communal politics like one has seen in Gujarat,' For me, born and brought up in Uttar Pradesh, communal clashes are nothing new. I have seen communal tension spreading, threatening the social fabric of society and engulfing everything in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This was the time when even in my family it was difficult to hold a discussion without it getting ugly. There was a clear demarcation. I had many Muslim friends who were an integral part of my family but whose eyes held fear; not that they were happy with what their community leaders were doing but the atmosphere around was so vicious and scary that one felt pressurised not to speak up. Today I am again reminded of the same viciousness and can feel the same threatening silence.
I have just finished reading a report in the Indian Express about the recent communal clashes in western UP. I have also read how for the first time the Prime Minister's Office has not wished Muslim on Eid. It has also happened for the first time that the PMO did not organise an Iftar party.
Sometimes I wonder if it is deliberate or a mere slip of attention. I don't know the answer but yes I do ask myself certain questions. Is it really important to say Eid Mubarak? The answer is both a yes and a no. There have been times when I have forgotten and not wished my Muslim friends on Eid and to my surprise they have never complained. But at a time when the Centre is ruled by a political party which does not have a single Muslim MP among its 282 members, then it does give rise to doubts and it is these doubts that give birth to a Frankenstein's monster.
It is not for the first time that western UP is simmering with communal clashes. Last year also it burst into flames and more than 50 people died. Muzaffarnagar has become history as the worst case since the Gujarat riots. The riots in Muzzafarnagar were serious for two reasons:
Muzaffarnagar was peaceful even when communalism was at its peak earlier. This district had not seen any clash between its two prominent communities -- Jats and Muslims. Both co-existed peacefully.
Riots have always been considered an urban phenomenon, but this time it spread to rural areas and could not be controlled for weeks.
It is also true that these were not the first riots in UP since Akhilesh Yadav became chief minister of the state. More than 100 clashes, communal in nature, were recorded earlier. But what was surprising was the UP administration's callous attitude. There are serious allegations that the administration deliberately did not act in the beginning and once the situation got out of hand it could not control the riots and the damage was beyond repair.
If Hindutva forces are to be blamed for escalating the crisis then the Samajwadi Party is also to be blamed for playing with fire and allowing communal polarisation so that it could consolidate Muslim votes. And in this dangerous game the Samajwadi party lost badly; a party that wanted to improve its Lok Sabha tally recorded its worst-ever performance and the BJP emerged as the real winner.
Now the game is being repeated again in western UP. Assembly by-elections for 12 seats are about to happen. And as per the Indian Express more than 70 percent of the communal clashes happened around these assembly segments.
Like Muzaffarnagar, here also rural areas were the centre of the carnage. If in Muzaffarnagar clashes broke the unity between Jats and Muslims, the strong social base of Ajit Singh, then recent clashes disintegrated the coalition between Dalits and Muslims, strong supporters of the Bahujan Samaj Party.
Is there an emerging pattern here? Will the BJP again be the beneficiary in the by-elections like it was in the parliamentary elections? If it is so, then, am I wrong in presuming that UP is being seen as a new laboratory of communal politics like one has seen in Gujarat? But why blame the new dispensation in the BJP?
UP had been susceptible to communal politics for a long time and if the BJP benefited from the Ayodhya agitation then Mulayam Singh Yadav too consolidated his social base and loved to be called Maulana Mulayam. There was communal polarisation on both sides and both did it for the votes.
But the situation has changed now. The balance has broken down. In the 1990s, the BJP was nowhere near the majority and the Congress was not in such shambles. Despite the demise of Communism at the global level, it was still thriving in India and was ably led by two of its brightest leaders, Jyoti Basu and Harkishen Singh Surjeet. Now the Left is dead and it has no will to lead the liberal forces. There is a serious crisis.
In an atmosphere where secularism is no longer politically expedient and to be right is the new political currency, I wouldn't be surprised if UP slips into another communal abyss. But more dangerous is the silence of liberal voices. Mayawati, Mulayam and the Congress are incapable of giving a counter narrative to communal politics and the intellectual class is too timid to build a counter argument. But I am not pessimistic. I am reminded of British journalist Don Taylor's words: 'There is resilience about India which seems an assurance of survival. There is something which can only be described as an Indian spirit.'
(Courtesy: @ rediff.com)
A call to India
Bharat Bhushan
By talking of poverty removal in the same breath as building toilets for girls in every school and for women in village homes, the PM reminded us of the importance of dignity in the lives of the poor
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his first Independence Day speech, showed himself a master orator, raising issues that had an instant audience connect. He also coined succinct phrases which will find their way to headlines, photo-captions and tweets - referring to himself as the "first servant" of India, to "zero defect, zero effect" manufacturing, to e-governance as "easy, effective and economic governance", and exhorting foreign capital to "make in India" and export as "made in India".
Not that he left his Hindutva cheerleaders disappointed. He invoked the image of Mother India (Maa Bharati), Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Lord Buddha, and to India's destiny (Desh ki niyati) as the moral and spiritual leader of the world (Jagat-guru). An army of Internet Hindus created during his election campaign will be busy propagating these one-liners for days to come.
However, his proposal for "a 10-year moratorium on casteism and communalism", is difficult to believe as anything more than a virtuous profession. One will have to see the Bharatiya Janata Party and its sister organisations walk the talk - indeed, some of them are still threateningly invoking incidents which Mr Modi referred to as "past sins" which should be forgotten.
But if we leave aside the communal divide - as Mr Modi tried to do at the Red Fort - the better part of his speech was practical and about achievable national objectives.
Mr Modi pointed to the distance between the modernist goals of India and the ground reality. He referred to a non-functional, inefficient and corrupt bureaucracy, high levels of violence against women, lack of toilets in villages and schools, the Maoist insurgency, abysmal poverty, and lack of skills in India's burgeoning youthful population. By talking of poverty removal in the same breath as building toilets for girls in every school and for women in village homes, the Prime Minister reminded us of the importance of dignity in the lives of the poor.
He was perceptive in pointing out that the state cannot be the sole civilising influence, whether in checking open defecation or disciplining male attitudes to women. Society, he said, would have to be mobilised - especially the family - which had a responsibility in checking errant "boys" and securing the lives of women. It is important to hold a mirror to a chauvinist and casteist society which recommends gangrape or even lynching for inter-caste marriages by choice.
No one can take exception to Mr Modi's dream of "Digital India", with long-distance Internet-based education for remote village schools, telemedicine, mobile governance and e-governance. His call to all legislators to set up model villages in their constituencies as well as the scheme for bank accounts for all are welcome moves.
Mr Modi's economic thrust was broadly neo-liberal - inviting the world to an investor-friendly India - and this was underlined by the abolition of the Planning Commission, no longer relevant when the economic role of the private sector had primacy over that of the state.
However, there were two troubling aspects of his speech. One, he projected an inclusive persona which is at variance with his known public image. And two, the economic path he wants India to follow may neither have the answers nor the instruments to address the inequalities inherent in our social and economic structure.
Even though he did not name the first Prime Minister of India, his reference to "India's destiny" (Desh ki niyati) was a nod in the direction of Jawaharlal Nehru's first speech at the birth of independent India. The public image Mr Modi sought to project in his speech was reminiscent of Nehru - grateful to leaders past, liberal, tolerant, inclusive, reformist and with a plan for imbuing the nation with these very qualities. He should be encouraged to surpass Nehru in this noble task.
However, his ideological upbringing sees Nehru's ideas of liberalism and secularism as essentially Western ideas that are responsible for India's woes. Mr Modi was not known for secular politics as Gujarat's chief minister, or as a tolerant person. No one who came in his way escaped humiliation - whether within the party, like L.K. Advani and Murali Manohar Joshi, or outside it, like dissenting policemen and bureaucrats or even those occupying constitutional positions like Kamala Beniwal, the former governor of Gujarat and Mizoram. He would not even wait two months for governor Beniwal to retire gracefully.
There is also no evidence that some of the programmes he proposed so passionately were pursued in his 13-year stint as Gujarat chief minister. Nearly 40 per cent of Gujarat's population is still forced to defecate in the open, and its sex ratio is only 916 females to 1,000 males while the national average, as he pointed out from the Red Fort, is 940. One could even ask, how many model villages have BJP legislators set up in the state.
Of course Mr Modi might yet transform into an entirely different person by having to live up to the Constitution as elected Prime Minister of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural India.
The other disturbing aspect of Prime Minister Modi's Independence Day speech is the excessive faith he seems to place on private investment as opposed to the role of the state. He can demolish the Planning Commission by all means, but he must also note that the free market will not solve the diversity of India's social and economic problems.
A pro-corporate policy that the Congress supported hesitatingly, and with some amount of guilt, Mr Modi wants to push to the hilt. However, corporate interests have no effective instruments to deal with conflict over commons and natural resources nor any interest in protecting the most vulnerable, impoverished and insecure sections of the population which leave alone participating in that economy have become its worst victims. The state then cannot and must not put all its weight behind a corporate agenda. It should not run businesses, but it has a larger role to perform in an iniquitous society such as ours and, therefore, a wider accountability.
(Courtesy: @ asianage.com)
INDIA'S RELIGION OF HUMANITY
Ajith Kumar
This country developed the perfect manual for mankind, as Sri Aurobindo, whose birth anniversary coincides with India's Independence Day, had opined. India's dharma transcends narrow-minded nationalism, writes AJITH KUMAR
Among the many ancient knowledge systems that guided humanity down the millennia, the manual for man that India developed proved outstanding and singularly perfect. Out of the many, India developed the most coherent system - a harmony of values resulting in a perfectly balanced worldview. All inclusive was its outlook, versatility its hallmark and concordance its culture. "India is an epitome of the world" - this comment by one of world's most noted philosopher and historian explains well India's all comprehending culture that took to the inner most recess of its heart all the noble aspects of the world's cultures, living as well as dead.
British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee believed India is a living civilisation whose vitality would enlighten the future humanity, contribute to human unity and strike a balance between the extremities of all kinds. True, many centuries have elapsed, invaders carrying fire and sword pounded India one after the other. Torn to fragments geographically and psychically, India of the present even bleeds in terrorist violence whose profile has occupied volumes of literature. It is as if India's glory has become almost irretrievably stooping with bandicoots of all types eating into the vitals of her national life. Denunciation of the motherland, derogatory writings and statements that blackmail its culture and declining it for mere kickbacks and pay-offs are common place. Indeed the problems confronting our nation are legion. Yet, in the turbulent ocean with its currents flowing against and furious tides lashing out, India sails safe, looking at its distant destination, reminding one of the lonely traveller, left untouched by the surroundings, venting its way to a fixed goal.
What made India stand the vicissitudes of time and tension that had completely done away many coeval cultures? Definitely it was India's all comprehending nature, its readiness to imbibe the noble aspects and bring about coherence to give the final touch to the culture of humanity. Greece was an aesthetic culture with its tendency to glorify and enjoy everything beautiful notwithstanding whatever defect what it deemed beautiful had. Discipline, shape, size and what not, the Greeks would ignore. Only beauty they were particular about.
Hence the aesthetic nature of the Greek culture, opined Indian seer Sri Aurobindo. Ancient Rome, Aurobindo says, ran in contrast. Beauty they discarded, and zeroed in more on the ethical aspects of life than anything. Enjoyment of beauty gave way to ethics and disciplines of life. A strong and muzzled body was preferred to the beautiful. They never thought of any beauty attainable through the discipline like the Greeks who didn't have any idea about the discipline leading to a higher beauty. Beauty and discipline thus had run parallel, never to make their rendezvous in a creative unity. But India harmonised both discipline and beauty, making the former a means to realise the latter. It, down the millennia, was disciplining life to realise the ultimate beauty which if to quote a poet "is a joy for ever". India's eternal discipline leads it to the ultimate beauty or saundarya which is another synonym for god. It is both ethics and aesthetics perfectly mixed with superb finish.
India's religion - dharma -was thus motivated by the principle of making human life perfect. Man making was its mission and turning the life divine was its end. In fact, in all the faculties of thought India developed man was of prime importance. On the incubator of its thought was always a religion or dharma of humanity. The entire nature was the ground for man's sadhana or preparation for the higher life. India's religion of man helped it attain the supra-rational beauty or the god within itself. The religion of humanity India developed down the millennia has it that man must be worshiped as god is. It aims at discovering and acknowledging the inherent divine potency and intrinsic superiority of man. Summing up India's religion of man Sri Aurobindo wrote: "Man must be sacred to man regardless of all distinction of race, creed, colour, nationality, status, political or social advancement. The body of man is to be respected, made immune from violence of outrage, fortified by science against disease or preventable death. The life of man is to be held sacred also, given scope, protected from violations, from suppression, from mechanisation, from belittling influences. The mind of man is to be released from all bonds, allowed freedom and range and opportunity, given all its means of self-training and self-development and organised in the play, of its powers for the service of humanity. And all this too is not to be held as an abstract or pious sentiment but be given full and practical recognition in the presence of men and nations and mankind".
This, speaking largely, is the idea and spirit of the intellectual religion of humanity. This is the reflection of a nation's aspiration to elevate man into godhood and the whole earth to the kingdom of heaven or to quote Sri Aurobindo once again, "to raise the world to god in deathless light, to bring god to the world on earth we come, to change the earthly life into life divine". This is the religion of India that stands above all fetters, limitations and confinements of creed, group or narrow minded nationalism.
(Courtesy: @ daily Pioneer.com)
A new re-laying of India
Dr Anirban Ganguly
The capital's ever-shifting power class remains unsettled and unnerved seeing the power, favour, nepotistic and quid pro quo pillared superstructure gradually crumble under Narendra Modi's watch -- the only mantra that seems to be taking centre stage is that of performance, implementation and delivery,
When Narendra Modi ascends the Red Fort ramparts on August 15, he will be the first prime minister, born after Independence, to address the nation on its Independence Day.
It is not this alone that will stand out as a first, the fact that Modi is the first prime minister to have grown outside the Nehruvian fold -- political as well as intellectual is another and perhaps more substantial first in the history of post-independent India. It shall in a sense signify -- what had become apparent on May 16 -- the advent or at least the heralding of the second age of India after independence -- the post-Nehruvian era.
It is an era when newer ideas of India shall at last be articulated and given scope, an era that perhaps will truly announce the rise of India -- as a civilisational-state.
It is for the first time, after a long gap, that the aspirations of young India, an India which, while increasingly blending with the waves of globalisation yet prefers to remain culturally and civilisationally rooted has begun to find expressions in the language of public and political discourse.
Narendra Modi speaks an earthy language, a language that perhaps lacks the sophistication of the accented home de lettres, but which nevertheless, leaping across barriers and dimensions, reaches out to young India exuding a conviction rarely heard in the last decade or so. The occasion of Independence Day offers an ideal setting to reiterate that conviction.
In many ways the journey so far, in the last 60 plus days, has been one of aspiration and of hope. The first and most striking aspect that has, in a sense, shaken the shallow foundations of our national politics is the end of the emphasis on a false secularism -- a secularism which jettisoned its essential spirit of religious equality manifested through a true spirit of compassion and brotherhood and instead catered to and nurtured a false culture of religious cronyism through the politics of vote-banks and minorityism. So profound has been the impact of this changed mandate that it has led some of the leading voices among the progenitors of vote-bank politics in India, to rethink, introspect and question the utility of this denominational political culture that has been practised to the detriment of the health and texture of our national fabric.
The lexicon of minoritysm versus majoritarianism is itself gradually getting obsolete and diluted amidst Modi's sustained and unequivocal call of 'development with and for all'.
Those who had thought it to be an election war cry gimmick continue to remain disappointed and confounded by seeing it being implemented in actual practice.
Despite the din and noise created by the 44 odd benchers and their intellectual drum-beaters who had
predicted, from western pulpits, the descent of doomsday for India and the world if Modi came power, the last months have been a period of quiet consolidation, determined performance and one-pointed focus -- a tenacious approach to clearing the Augean stable. Much remains to be done and undone but at least the first firm steps have been taken and the overgrowth has begun to be cleared.
The capital's ever-shifting power class remains unsettled and unnerved seeing the power, favour, nepotistic and quid pro quo pillared superstructure gradually crumble under Modi's watch -- the only mantra that seems to be taking centre stage is that of performance, implementation and delivery. All those manning the system seem to have been bound by that simple yet grinding commandment.
Unlike most other times, elected representatives this time, at least those who have won under Modi's watch, are being reminded and seem to be reminding themselves that they have been voted in to articulate and express the peoples' voice, that they hold their parliamentary seat as a trustee of the peoples' faith and therefore every moment of their parliamentary life counts and must be an effort to reflect the democratic aspirations of the people. Modi himself, by bowing down at the steps of Parliament lived that dictum, again through a first in the annals of India's parliamentary tradition.
Those who had seen the rise of a fascist India in his victory, kept silent and sullen at that profoundly symbolic act they had not anticipated, refusing to even feebly applaud thus displaying that they lacked a spirit of true balance and fair play.
By systematically and widely reaching out to India's neighbours and to other countries which aspire to create an alternate world order, the Modi government has infused new life into the vision of the rise of India as a civilisational state concerned for the growth and prosperity of that region which was once counted as being part of her civilisational contours and world-view. A genuine spirit of concern has imbued Modi's travels to India's neighbourhood; a spirit which sees all members of the region as equal partners in the area's growth and development that India, under him, wishes to initiate and push.
His transatlantic travel, undertaken in this short span, seems to be inspired by the vision of seeing India emerge as a major pole in an increasingly multi-polar world. The achievements at BRICS, the holding of ground on WTO, the successful rescue of beleaguered Indians from the clutches of the ISIS are early indications of the gradual fruition of that hope nursed by voiceless millions -- of seeing India assume a new role in shaping the twenty first century world order. Cynics may see this as a bloated reading of Modi's initial days but then cynics have never been known to understand or usher in civilisational shifts.
All in all these are times of great and lasting change, when the foundations of a new India are being re-laid anew, it is as Tagore described in his immortal anthem for India, a new dawn and awakening, the night is turning into day and the sun in all its resplendent glory is rising, while a gentle breeze steeped in auspiciousness blows pouring in the energies of a new life and an India that was asleep is awakening. Perhaps that true dawn, long ago foreseen by the poet laureate, is about to break at last -- the past months have generated that long held hope.
(Courtesy: @ rediff.com)
Is the Internet 'full' and going to shut down?
Samuel Gibbs
Reports state that the Internet is running out of space - but is this really a problem? Do we have to worry about it?
Reports this week have claimed that the Internet is in danger of becoming "full" because the number of Internet connections rose above a crucial limit. A small number of sites could have been taken momentarily offline by the issue with the infrastructure supporting parts of the Internet.
The issue revolved around a limit on the number of concurrent connections made to routers that underpin the Internet. These operate in a similar manner to home routers spreading data about the global Internet, rather than simply within a single address.
"Old hardware that is at least five years past its end-of-life sulked, because it ran out of memory," explained James Blessing, chair of the Internet Service Providers Association, which has close to 300 members across the U.K.
"The problem revolved around TCAM memory - which is like an address book - getting full," Mr. Blessing told The Guardian. "The default settings have 5,12,000 entry spaces. It reached 5,12,000 entries last week when an Internet service provider (ISP) had a problem and leaked some address space, which caused some older boxes at other ISPs to fail." ISPs have known about this issue for a while. Cisco, which manufactures a large chunk of the hardware used by ISPs, put out a notice about the issue in May, but some ISPs have been slow to fix the problem.
"There is a fix for the issue - you can simply change some values on the boxes and then restart the entire machine," said Mr. Blessing. "Unfortunately these boxes have hundreds of customers attached to them so getting permission from them all to do that is a pain."
That has caused some ISPs to put off the reboot, which would momentarily take websites connected to the box offline, until it caused a brief issue last week.
Because some of the properties that suffered issues are interlinked it created larger domino-like problem for other sites.
Mr. Blessing explained that if an ad-server was hit, then ads wouldn't show up on websites making them look broken, or if an authentication service that lets users log into other sites with a single username and password - like Facebook, for instance - then those sites would be disrupted.
Safe for now The issue could be described in a similar manner to the Y2K bug - something that could have caused major issues for the Internet if it hadn't been fixed, but the fix was simple and in most cases completed within plenty of time. "In the grand scheme of things, it's tiny," said Mr. Blessing. "It's a glitch, glitches happen." "If someone at an ISP hasn't noticed it by now, it's too late as the default table is over 512,000, so nothing that had this problem is now connected to the Internet and working," he said. "We've had the glitch and nothing further will happen now concerning the 512,000 bug." The advice from experts is that if Internet users haven't noticed any issues by now they won't see anything happening from now on. The Internet is safe for now. |
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