Is there anything more exasperating and undeserved than Obama's tweaking of the same old US Powerspeak?
Brand Obama is new improved Brand Bush. Nobody in India should expect any better.
Fortunately our own leaders in India know better than to buy Brand Obama.
Here are the reasons why in India we don't buy Brand Obama:
1. The US has exploited Pakistan for 60 years ever since the John Foster Dulles State Department of the early 50's, right after Partition.
2. Pakistan, weakened at Partition, was manipulated by the US to further its own invented Cold War strategy against the former USSR. The US turned Pakistan into a dependent, occasionally defiant, but always subordinate client-state.
3. Any pragmatic initiative by India, to develop Amity and Concord with Pakistan is rendered nearly impossible by continued US manipulation of Pakistan and physical military presence in the South Asia region.
No matter how slick his dance moves, India does not buy Brand Obama
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
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NYtimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08prexy.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
MUMBAI — When Michelle Obama, the first lady, introduced her husband to a group of college students here Sunday, she urged them to ask him “tough questions.”
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They did.
“What is your take or opinion about jihad?” came the first question for President Obama at a town hall-style meeting at St. Xavier’s College. Next up: queries about spirituality, Gandhi, the American midterm elections and his government’s negotiations with the Taliban.
Finally, there was the question Mr. Obama confessed he had been waiting for: Why hasn’t the United States labeled Pakistan “a terrorist state?”
“Pakistan is an enormous country; it is a strategically important country,” Mr. Obama began carefully, before meandering around to a defense of his administration, in which he said its policy is to “work with the Pakistani government in order to eradicate this extremism that we consider a cancer within the country that can potentially engulf the country.”
The diplomatic response was indicative of the fine line Mr. Obama has walked on the topic of terrorism while in India. On Saturday, his first day here, he faced criticism in the local press when he paid homage to the victims and survivors of the 2008 terrorist siege in Mumbai without mentioning that the gunmen were Pakistani or suggesting, more broadly, that some groups in Pakistan pose a terrorist threat.
While the students at St. Xavier’s, a 140-year-old Jesuit institution in this pretty seaside city, were exceedingly polite to Mr. Obama — in interviews many said they admired him — they seemed unafraid to get straight to the point, even if Mr. Obama did not always get straight to his.
“Well,” the president said, tackling the opening question about jihad, “the phrase jihad has a lot of meanings within Islam and is subject to a lot of different interpretations.”
He carefully avoided saying he is opposed to jihad — commonly interpreted to mean “holy war” — and instead said, “I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted to justify violence towards innocent people that is never justified. And so, I think, one of the challenges that we face is how do we isolate those who have these distorted notions of religious war.”
Sunday’s session, in a sunny outdoor courtyard surrounded by Gothic buildings, came on the second day of a 10-day, four-nation swing that will also take Mr. Obama to Indonesia, his boyhood home for four years, South Korea and Japan. He is spending the longest stretch, three days, in India. He left Mumbai later Sunday for the capital, New Delhi, where he was expected to address Parliament on Monday.
While Mr. Obama was dancing around questions — figuratively speaking — on Sunday, he also participated in some literal dancing, showing off some moves that, to the delight of photographers traveling with him, are likely to provide iconic images of his trip. Mr. Obama’s short performance came after student dancers doing a show for him implored him to join in.
The White House has cast the Asia trip as an economic mission that will also strengthen American diplomatic ties with emerging democracies and established ones; on Sunday, Mr. Obama also toured a small technology expo here with the aim of showcasing American partnerships with India in expanding agriculture.
Officials billed the college town hall as a chance for Mr. Obama to connect with ordinary Indians. But for a president still bruised from the trouncing his party took in last week’s elections, the appearance was also a chance to come before the kind of sympathetic crowd he now has trouble attracting at home.
“We call him the world king, king of the world,” said Chetman Rawal, 20, who studies commerce at the college. “I think he will change the world.”
It seemed a common sentiment. In interviews, students and faculty here uniformly spoke kindly of Mr. Obama, praising everything from ‘’his cuteness,” as one female student said, to his basketball skills, to his respect for “Gandhian principles.” On the question of how he applies those principles, Mr. Obama sounded a note of humility.
“I’m often frustrated by how far I fall short of their example,” he said, referring to Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, all of whom he said he is studying. “But I do think that at my best what I’m trying to do is to apply principles that fundamentally come down to something shared in all the world’s religions, which is to see yourself in other people.”
Indians followed the American elections closely, said Father Lawrie Ferrao, director of the institute of communications at the college. But he said people here are more interested in another election — the one Mr. Obama himself ran in 2008.
“The admiration for him with regard to his campaign, his optimism, his charismatic movement and charismatic leadership, that I think has not faded off yet,” Fr. Ferrao said. As to the outcome of the midterms, he gave an explanation Mr. Obama himself might have offered: “He was given an economy which was unsustainable.”
The president himself, when questioned on the races, pledged some “mid-course corrections and adjustments,” , though he was not specific about his plans. But in his commentary on Gandhi, he offered a lesson he had learned, one that perhaps provides some insight into how he might be feeling these days.
“On this journey,” Mr. Obama said, “you’re going to experience setbacks and you have to be persistent and stubborn, and you just have to keep on going at it. And you’ll never roll the boulder all the way up the hill, but you may get it part of the way up.”
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TOI copyright
Obama pushes India to talk to Pakistan
REUTERS, Nov 7, 2010, 05.56pm IST
Tags:Obama|Michelle|Manmohan Singh|Barack Obama|Abdul Basit
NEW DELHI: US President Barack Obama called on India on Sunday to bolster peace efforts with Pakistan that have floundered since the 2008 Mumbai attacks, relations seen as crucial to his troubled efforts to win the war in Afghanistan.
On the second day of his official visit to India, Obama faces a diplomatic tightrope in fostering ties with the growing global power, while at the same time helping Pakistan with billions of dollars in aid and promoting wider peace in Afghanistan.
Obama's first leg of a 10-day Asian tour has been hailed as moving the United States closer to India as Washington tries to revive a weak economy and gather support to pressure China on its currency. But on Sunday, India's worries about Pakistan dominated.
Peppered by questions from students at a college in India's financial hub, Obama toed a cautious line between the two nuclear-armed foes, saying both were needed to help stabilise Afghanistan where thousands of US troops battle militants.
"My hope is that over time, trust develops between the two countries, that dialogue begins, perhaps on less controversial issues, building up to more controversial issues," Obama told students under a hot midday sun.
Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit was quoted by news agency Press Trust of India as saying the United States ought to play an "effective role for an amicable solution of the longstanding issue of Kashmir" given close India-US ties.
Kashmir is at the heart of the dispute between the nuclear-armed rivals, who have fought two wars over the restive Himalayan region which they both claim.
The Mumbai attacks inflamed tensions between the foes, which have been to war three times since 1947 independence. India says elements within the Pakistan state were behind the rampage, when Pakistan-based gunmen killed 166 people in a 60-hour strike on hotels, a train station and a Jewish centre.
India immediately broke off peace talks with Pakistan, although there have been some largely fruitless top level meetings in the last year.
"India's investment in development in Afghanistan is appreciated," Obama added. "Pakistan has to be a partner in this process, in fact all countries in the region are going to need to be partners in this process.
"The United States welcomes that, we don't think we can do this alone."
India has given $1.3 billion in aid to Afghanistan, a policy that unnerves Pakistan which sees its northern neighbour as its own backyard of influence. India wants stability there to stop the country being used to harbour anti-Indian Islamist militants.
Obama said Pakistan was not acting quickly enough to deal with militancy within its borders, a view long expressed by many Indian officials who say Islamabad is hoodwinking Washington by taking aid while also backing militants in Afghanistan.
"There are more Pakistanis who've been killed by terrorists inside Pakistan than probably anywhere else," Obama said.
Obama will visit Indonesia, South Korea and Japan on the tour that will see Washington push to prevent countries unilaterally devaluing currencies to protect their exports, a top theme at the Group of 20 heads of state meet in Seoul next week.
Mauled in mid-term elections, Obama is trying to bolster exports and jobs by boosting business in countries like India, trying to show that US voters have more to benefit from India than fear from its cheap outsourcing industries.
To that end, Obama announced $10 billion in business deals that he said would support 54,000 jobs in the United States.
But on Sunday he called on Asian countries like India to open their economies more up to US firms. India restricts foreign investment in key areas like retail and financial services.
"It's not unfair for the United States to say, look, if our economy is open to everybody, countries that trade with us have to change their practices to open up their markets to us. There has to be reciprocity in our trading relationships," Obama said.
He said the United States was not making progress on unemployment quickly enough and he would take "some mid-course correction" after the mid-term elections.
"Unemployment in the US is very high now, relative to what it is typically. Although we are making progress, we are not making progress quickly enough," Obama said.
Earlier on Sunday Obama and is wife Michelle watched children in saris perform traditional dances. Michelle led an initially hesitant president to join in, mimicking their dancing moves as White House aides laughed at their commander-in-chief.
Later in the afternoon, Obama landed in New Delhi and greeted the waiting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with a hug. The Obamas and the Singhs chatted with each other for a few minutes, before the president went for a scheduled tour of a Mughal-era tomb. The leaders were to meet for dinner at Singh's residence later.
Read more: Obama pushes India to talk to Pakistan - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Obama-pushes-India-to-talk-to-Pakistan/articleshow/6884180.cms#ixzz14cchAWW3
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TOI copyright 11/08/10
text of Joint India-US statement Obama Manmohan
NEW DELHI: Following is the text of the Joint Statement of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama.
Reaffirming their nations' shared values and increasing convergence of interests, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama resolved today in New Delhi to expand and strengthen the India-U.S. global strategic partnership.
The two leaders welcomed the deepening relationship between the world's two largest democracies. They commended the growing cooperation between their governments, citizens, businesses, universities and scientific institutions, which have thrived on a shared culture of pluralism, education, enterprise, and innovation, and have benefited the people of both countries.
Building on the transformation in India-U.S. relations over the past decade, the two leaders resolved to intensify cooperation between their nations to promote a secure and stable world; advance technology and innovation; expand mutual prosperity and global economic growth; support sustainable development; and exercise global leadership in support of economic development, open government and democratic values.
The two leaders reaffirmed that India-U.S. strategic partnership is indispensable not only for their two countries but also for global stability and prosperity in the 21st century. To that end, President Obama welcomed India's emergence as a major regional and global power and affirmed his country's interest in India's rise, its economic prosperity, and its security.
A global strategic partnership for the 21st century
Prime Minister Singh and President Obama called for an efficient, effective, credible and legitimate United Nations to ensure a just and sustainable international order. Prime Minister Singh welcomed President Obama's affirmation that, in the years ahead, the United States looks forward to a reformed UN Security Council that includes India as a permanent member. The two leaders reaffirmed that all nations, especially those that seek to lead in the 21st century, bear responsibility to ensure that the United Nations fulfills its founding ideals of preserving peace and security, promoting global cooperation, and advancing human rights.
Prime Minister Singh and President Obama reiterated that India and the United States, as global leaders, will partner for global security, especially as India serves on the Security Council over the next two years. The leaders agreed that their delegations in New York will intensify their engagement and work together to ensure that the Council continues to effectively play the role envisioned for it in the United Nations Charter. Both leaders underscored that all states have an obligation to comply with and implement UN Security Council Resolutions, including UN sanctions regimes. They also agreed to hold regular consultations on UN matters, including on the long-term sustainability of UN peacekeeping operations. As the two largest democracies, both countries also reaffirmed their strong commitment to the UN Democracy Fund.
The two leaders have a shared vision for peace, stability and prosperity in Asia, the Indian Ocean region and the Pacific region and committed to work together, and with others in the region, for the evolution of an open, balanced and inclusive architecture in the region. In this context, the leaders reaffirmed their support for the East Asia Summit and committed to regular consultations in this regard. The United States welcomes, in particular, India's leadership in expanding prosperity and security across the region. The two leaders agreed to deepen existing regular strategic consultations on developments in East Asia, and decided to expand and intensify their strategic consultations to cover regional and global issues of mutual interest, including Central and West Asia.
The two sides committed to intensify consultation, cooperation and coordination to promote a stable, democratic, prosperous, and independent Afghanistan. President Obama appreciated India's enormous contribution to Afghanistan's development and welcomed enhanced Indian assistance that will help Afghanistan achieve self-sufficiency. In addition to their own independent assistance programs in Afghanistan, the two sides resolved to pursue joint development projects with the Afghan Government in capacity building, agriculture and women's empowerment.
They reiterated that success in Afghanistan and regional and global security require elimination of safe havens and infrastructure for terrorism and violent extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Condemning terrorism in all its forms, the two sides agreed that all terrorist networks, including Lashkar e-Taiba, must be defeated and called for Pakistan to bring to justice the perpetrators of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Building upon the Counter Terrorism Initiative signed in July 2010, the two leaders announced a new Homeland Security Dialogue between the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Department of Homeland Security and agreed to further deepen operational cooperation, counter-terrorism technology transfers and capacity building. The two leaders also emphasized the importance of close cooperation in combating terrorist financing and in protecting the international financial system.
In an increasingly inter-dependent world, the stability of, and access to, the air, sea, space, and cyberspace domains is vital for the security and economic prosperity of nations. Acknowledging their commitment to openness and responsible international conduct, and on the basis of their shared values, India and the United States have launched a dialogue to explore ways to work together, as well as with other countries, to develop a shared vision for these critical domains to promote peace, security and development. The leaders reaffirmed the importance of maritime security, unimpeded commerce, and freedom of navigation, in accordance with relevant universally agreed principles of international law, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and peaceful settlement of maritime disputes.
The transformation in India-U.S. defense cooperation in recent years has strengthened mutual understanding on regional peace and stability, enhanced both countries' respective capacities to meet humanitarian and other challenges such as terrorism and piracy, and contributed to the development of the strategic partnership between India and the United States. The two Governments resolved to further strengthen defense cooperation, including through security dialogue, exercises, and promoting trade and collaboration in defense equipment and technology. President Obama welcomed India's decision to purchase U.S. high-technology defense items, which reflects our strengthening bilateral defence relations and will contribute to creating jobs in the United States.
The two leaders affirmed that their countries' common ideals, complementary strengths and a shared commitment to a world without nuclear weapons give them a responsibility to forge a strong partnership to lead global efforts for non-proliferation and universal and non-discriminatory global nuclear disarmament in the 21st century. They affirmed the need for a meaningful dialogue among all states possessing nuclear weapons to build trust and confidence and for reducing the salience of nuclear weapons in international affairs and security doctrines. They support strengthening the six decade-old international norm of non-use of nuclear weapons. They expressed a commitment to strengthen international cooperative activities that will reduce the risk of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons or material without reducing the rights of nations that play by the rules to harness the power of nuclear energy to advance their energy security. The leaders reaffirmed their shared dedication to work together to realize the commitments outlined at the April 2010 Nuclear Security Summit to achieve the goal of securing vulnerable nuclear materials in the next four years. Both sides expressed deep concern regarding illicit nuclear trafficking and smuggling and resolved to strengthen international cooperative efforts to address these threats through the IAEA, Interpol and in the context of the Nuclear Security Summit Communiqué and Action Plan. The two sides welcomed the Memorandum of Understanding for cooperation in the Global Centre for Nuclear Energy Partnership being established by India.
Both sides expressed deep concern about the threat of biological terrorism and pledged to promote international efforts to ensure the safety and security of biological agents and toxins. They stressed the need to achieve full implementation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and expressed the hope for a successful BWC Review Conference in 2011. The United States welcomed India's destruction of its chemical weapons stockpile in accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Both countries affirmed their shared commitment to promoting the full and effective implementation of the CWC.
The two leaders expressed regret at the delay in starting negotiations in the Conference on Disarmament for a multilateral, non-discriminatory and internationally and effectively verifiable treaty banning the future production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.
India reaffirmed its unilateral and voluntary moratorium on nuclear explosive testing. The United States reaffirmed its testing moratorium and its commitment to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and bring it into force at an early date.
The leaders reaffirmed their commitment to diplomacy to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue, and discussed the need for Iran to take constructive and immediate steps to meet its obligations to the IAEA and the UN Security Council.
Technology, innovation, and energy
Recognizing that India and the United States should play a leadership role in promoting global nonproliferation objectives and their desire to expand high technology cooperation and trade, Prime Minister Singh and President Obama committed to work together to strengthen the global export control framework and further transform bilateral export control regulations and policies to realize the full potential of the strategic partnership between the two countries.
Accordingly, the two leaders decided to take mutual steps to expand U.S.-India cooperation in civil space, defense, and other high-technology sectors. Commensurate with India's nonproliferation record and commitment to abide by multilateral export control standards, these steps include the United States removing Indian entities from the U.S. Department of Commerce's "Entity List" and realignment of India in U.S. export control regulations.
In addition, the United States intends to support India's full membership in the four multilateral export control regimes (Nuclear Suppliers Group, Missile Technology Control Regime, Australia Group, and Wassenaar Arrangement) in a phased manner, and to consult with regime members to encourage the evolution of regime membership criteria, consistent with maintaining the core principles of these regimes, as the Government of India takes steps towards the full adoption of the regimes' export control requirements to reflect its prospective membership, with both processes moving forward together. In the view of the United States, India should qualify for membership in the Australia Group and the Wassenaar Arrangement according to existing requirements once it imposes export controls over all items on these regimes' control lists.
Both leaders reaffirmed the assurances provided in the letters exchanged in September 2004 and the End-Use Visit Arrangement, and determined that the two governments had reached an understanding to implement these initiatives consistent with their respective national export control laws and policies. The Prime Minister and President committed to a strengthened and expanded dialogue on export control issues, through fora such as the U.S.-India High Technology Cooperation Group, on aspects of capacity building, sharing of best practices, and outreach with industry.
The possibility of cooperation between the two nations in space, to advance scientific knowledge and human welfare, are without boundaries and limits. They commended their space scientists for launching new initiatives in climate and weather forecasting for agriculture, navigation, resource mapping, research and development, and capacity building. They agreed to continuing discussions on and seek ways to collaborate on future lunar missions, international space station, human space flight and data sharing, and to reconvene the Civil Space Joint Working Group in early 2011. They highlighted the just concluded Implementing Arrangement for enhanced monsoon forecasting that will begin to transmit detailed forecasts to farmers beginning with the 2011 monsoon rainy season as an important example of bilateral scientific cooperation advancing economic development, agriculture and food security.
The two leaders welcomed the completion of steps by the two governments for implementation of the India-U.S. civil nuclear agreement. They reiterated their commitment to build strong India-U.S. civil nuclear energy cooperation through the participation of the U.S. nuclear energy firms in India on the basis of mutually acceptable technical and commercial terms and conditions that enable a viable tariff regime for electricity generated. They noted that both countries had enacted domestic legislations and were also signatories to the Convention on Supplementary Compensation. They further noted that India intends to ratify the Convention on Supplementary Compensation within the coming year and is committed to ensuring a level playing field for U.S. companies seeking to enter the Indian nuclear energy sector, consistent with India's national and international legal obligations.
India will continue to work with the companies. In this context, they welcomed the commencement of negotiations and dialogue between the Indian operator and U.S. nuclear energy companies, and expressed hope for early commencement of commercial cooperation in the civil nuclear energy sector in India, which will stimulate economic growth and sustainable development and generate employment in both countries.
Just as they have helped develop the knowledge economy, India and the United States resolved to strengthen their partnership in creating the green economy of the future. To this end, both countries have undertaken joint research and deployment of clean energy resources, such as solar, advanced biofuels, shale gas, and smart grids. The two leaders also welcomed the promotion of clean and energy efficient technologies through the bilateral Partnership to Advance Clean Energy (PACE) and expanded cooperation with the private sector. They welcomed the conclusion of a new MoU on assessment and exploration of shale gas and an agreement to establish a Joint Clean Energy Research Center in India as important milestones in their rapidly growing clean energy cooperation.
The leaders discussed the importance of working bilaterally, through the Major Economies Forum (MEF), and in the context of the international climate change negotiations within the framework of the UNFCCC to meet the challenge of climate change. Prime Minister Singh and President Obama reiterated the importance of a positive result for the current climate change negotiations at the forthcoming conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Mexico and affirmed their support for the Copenhagen Accord, which should contribute positively to a successful outcome in Cancun. To that end, the leaders welcomed enhanced cooperation in the area of climate adaptation and sustainable land use, and welcomed the new partnership between the United States and India on forestry programs and in weather forecasting.
Inclusive growth, mutual prosperity, and economic cooperation
The two leaders stressed that India and the United States, anchored in democracy and diversity, blessed with enormous enterprise and skill, and endowed with synergies drawn from India's rapid growth and U.S. global economic leadership, have a natural partnership for enhancing mutual prosperity and stimulating global economic recovery and growth. They emphasize innovation not only as a tool for economic growth and global competitiveness, but also for social transformation and empowerment of people.
Prime Minister Singh and President Obama celebrated the recent growth in bilateral trade and investment, characterized by balanced and rapidly growing trade in goods and services. They noted positively that the United States is India's largest trading partner in goods and services, and India is now among the fastest growing sources of foreign direct investment entering the United States. The two leaders agreed on steps to reduce trade barriers and protectionist measures and encourage research and innovation to create jobs and improve livelihoods in their countries.
They also welcomed expanding investment flow in both directions. They noted growing ties between U.S. and Indian firms and called for enhanced investment flows, including in India's infrastructure sector, clean energy, energy efficiency, aviation and transportation, healthcare, food processing sector and education. They welcomed the work of the U.S.-India CEO Forum to expand cooperation between the two countries, including in the areas of clean energy and infrastructure development. They also encouraged enhanced engagement by Indian and American small and medium-sized enterprises as a critical driver of our economic relationship. They looked forward to building on these developments to realize fully the enormous potential for trade and investment between the two countries.
Recognizing the people-to-people dynamic behind trade and investment growth, they called for intensified consultations on social security issues at an appropriate time. The two leaders agreed to facilitate greater movement of professionals, investors and business travelers, students, and exchange visitors between their countries to enhance their economic and technological partnership.
To enhance growth globally, the Prime Minster and President highlighted both nations' interests in an ambitious and balanced conclusion to the WTO's Doha Development Agenda negotiations, and in having their negotiators accelerate and expand the scope of their substantive negotiations bilaterally and with other WTO members to accomplish this as soon as possible. They agreed to work together in the G-20 to make progress on the broad range of issues on its agenda, including by encouraging actions consistent with achieving strong, balanced, and sustainable growth, strengthening financial system regulation, reforming the international financial institutions, enhancing energy security, resisting protectionism in all its forms, reducing barriers to trade and investment, and implementing the development action plans.
Building on the historic legacy of cooperation between the India and the United States during the Green Revolution, the leaders also decided to work together to develop, test, and replicate transformative technologies to extend food security as part of an Evergreen Revolution. Efforts will focus on providing farmers the means to improve agricultural productivity. Collaboration also will enhance agricultural value chain and strengthen market institutions to reduce post-harvest crop losses.
Affirming the importance of India-U.S. health cooperation, Prime Minister and the President celebrated the signing of an MOU creating a new Global Disease Detection Regional Center in New Delhi, which will facilitate preparedness against threats to health such as pandemic influenza and other dangerous diseases.
Embracing the principles of democracy and opportunity, the leaders recognized that the full future potential of the partnership lies in the hands of the next generation in both countries. To help ensure that all members of that generation enjoy the benefits of higher education, the Prime Minister and the President agreed to convene an India-U.S. Higher Education Summit, chaired by senior officials from both countries in 2011, as part of a continued effort to strengthen educational opportunities. They welcomed the progress made in implementing the Singh-Obama 21st Century Knowledge Initiative that is expanding links between faculties and institutions of the two countries and the expansion in the Nehru-Fulbright Programme for Scholars.
Noting that the ties of kinship and culture are an increasingly important dimension of India-U.S. relations, President Obama welcomed India's decision to hold a Festival of India in Washington DC in 2011. Recognizing the importance of preserving cultural heritage, both governments resolved to initiate discussions on how India and the United States could partner to prevent the illicit trafficking of both countries' rich and unique cultural heritage.
A shared international partnership for democracy and development
Consistent with their commitments to open and responsive government, and harnessing the expertise and experience that the two countries have developed, the leaders launched a U.S.-India Open Government Dialogue that will, through public-private partnerships and use of new technologies and innovations, promote their shared goal of democratizing access to information and energizing civic engagement, support global initiatives in this area and share their expertise with other interested countries. This will build on India's impressive achievements in this area in recent years and the commitments that the President made to advance an open government agenda at the United Nations General Assembly. The President and Prime Minister also pledged to explore cooperation in support of efforts to strengthen elections organization and management in other interested countries, including through sharing their expertise in this area.
Taking advantage of the global nature of their relationship, and recognizing India's vast development experience and historical research strengths, the two leaders pledged to work together, in addition to their independent programmes, to adapt shared innovations and technologies and use their expertise in capacity building to extend food security to interested countries, including in Africa, in consultation with host governments.
Prime Minister Singh and President Obama concluded that their meeting is a historic milestone as they seek to elevate the India-U.S. strategic partnership to a new level for the benefit of their nations and the entire mankind. President Obama thanked President Patil, Prime Minister Singh, and the people of India for their extraordinary warmth and hospitality during his visit. The two leaders looked forward to the next session of the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue in 2011.
Read more: Text of joint statement of PM Manmohan Singh and President Barack Obama - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Text-of-joint-statement-of-PM-Manmohan-Singh-and-President-Barack-Obama/articleshow/6890825.cms#ixzz14iW9Yonw
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President
President
Obama Calls for India to Be Permanent Member of U.N. Security Council
Published November 08, 2010
| Associated Press
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Monday: A barefoot Indian worker sweeps the red carpet before the arrival of U.S. President Obama to a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, India.
AP
Monday: A barefoot Indian worker sweeps the red carpet before the arrival of U.S. President Obama to a ceremonial reception at Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Presidential Palace in New Delhi, India.
NEW DELHI -- President Barack Obama backed India for a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council Monday, a dramatic diplomatic gesture to his hosts as he wrapped up his first visit to this burgeoning nation.
Obama made the announcement in a speech to India's parliament on the third and final day of his visit. In doing so, he fulfilled what was perhaps India's dearest wish for Obama's trip here. India has been pushing for permanent Security Council membership for years.
"The just and sustainable international order that America seeks includes a United Nations that is efficient, effective, credible and legitimate," Obama said. "That is why I can say today -- in the years ahead, I look forward to a reformed U.N. Security Council that includes India as a permanent member."
The announcement brought the loudest applause of Obama's speech. But it does not mean that India will join the five permanent Security Council members anytime soon. The U.S. is backing India's membership only in the context of unspecified reforms to the council that could take years to bring about.
That makes Obama's announcement more of a diplomatic gesture than a concrete step. Nonetheless, it underscores the importance the U.S. places on fostering ties with this nation of 1.2 billion people, something Obama has been seeking to accomplish throughout his time here.
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Obama said repeatedly throughout his three days in India -- first in the financial center of Mumbai and then in the capital of New Delhi -- that he views the relationship between the two countries as one of the "defining partnerships" of the 21st century. He set out to prove it by making India the first stop on a four-country tour of Asia, and then through economic announcements, cultural outreach and finally the announcement about the U.N. Security Council.
India has sought permanent council membership as recognition of its surging economic clout and its increased stature in world affairs. The U.S. endorsement is certain to deepen the ties between them and could also send Obama's popularity in India skyrocketing to a level comparable to that enjoyed by George W. Bush. The former president is seen as a hero here for helping end India's nuclear isolation.
The five permanent members of the Security Council are the U.S., China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia.
Debate has raged for years over how to change a structure that is widely seen as outdated and it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. So it's unclear when India's drive for permanent membership will ever be realized. But backing it at all is a critically important move from India's perspective.
In another important gesture to India, Obama went farther than he had previously during his stay in addressing the terror threat inside Pakistan, India's neighbor and archrival. Obama angered some here when he visited a memorial to victims of the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks but didn't mention Pakistan, which was home to the attackers.
"We will continue to insist to Pakistan's leaders that terrorist safe-havens within their borders are unacceptable, and that the terrorists behind the Mumbai attacks be brought to justice," the president said in the address, to loud applause. "We must also recognize that all of us have an interest in both an Afghanistan and a Pakistan that is stable, prosperous and democratic -- and none more so than India."
Muslim-dominated Pakistan and Hindu-majority India have gone to war and remain deeply suspicious of each other. Indian officials accuse Pakistan's intelligence service of helping orchestrate the 2008 Mumbai attacks that killed 166 people and say the country has not done enough to crack down on the Pakistan-based extremists held responsible.
Pakistan views India's ties with the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan as an effort by its old rival to encircle it.
Throughout his time here, Obama has taken pains to cast his visit as a search for U.S. jobs and benefits to people back home, sensitive to the priorities of U.S. voters who punished the Democratic Party in last week's midterm elections, in part over high unemployment. He touched on the theme again Monday.
"As global partners we can promote prosperity in both our countries," Obama said. "Together, we can create the high-tech, high-wage jobs of the future."
Obama departs early Tuesday for Indonesia, the country where he spent four years as a boy. From there, he heads to South Korea for a meeting of the Group of 20 developed and developing nations, and then to Japan for a gathering of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. He returns to Washington on Nov. 14.
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Sunday, November 7, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
WikiLeaks' Assange Candidate for 2011 Nobel Peace Prize ? YES
I would like to propose the name of Julian Assange, Founder of WikiLeaks, for Nobel Peace Prize 2011, Oslo are you listening? More important, are you reading those leaks that expose US war crimes? Expose Iran war Crimes? Expose Iraq war crimes?
This is not just worthy of a Pulitzer. It's worthy of a Nobel. You heard the recommendation here first folks. Bigger than The Pentagon papers, which the NYTimes also published. I scooped it, in all humility, because Assange is enormously ethical.
================================================
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: October 23, 2010
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: October 23, 2010
LONDON — Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.
He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.
In his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832 secret documents on the Iraq war. He held a news conference in London on Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”
Twelve weeks earlier, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.
Much has changed since 2006, when Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, used years of computer hacking and what friends call a near genius I.Q. to establish WikiLeaks, redefining whistle-blowing by gathering secrets in bulk, storing them beyond the reach of governments and others determined to retrieve them, then releasing them instantly, and globally.
Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.
Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. “If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.”
He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he characterizes the claims as “a smear campaign,” the scandal has compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.
“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like,” he said over the London lunch.
Exposing Secrets
Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995. History is punctuated by spies, defectors and others who revealed the most inflammatory secrets of their age. Mr. Assange has become that figure for the Internet era, with as yet unreckoned consequences for himself and for the keepers of the world’s secrets.
“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.
“They were willing to go to prison for life, or be executed, to put out this information,” Mr. Ellsberg said.
Underlying Mr. Assange’s anxieties is deep uncertainty about what the United States and its allies may do next. Pentagon and Justice department officials have said they are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act. They have demanded that Mr. Assange “return” all government documents in his possession, undertake not to publish any new ones and not “solicit” further American materials.
Mr. Assange has responded by going on the run, but has found no refuge. Amid the Afghan documents controversy, he flew to Sweden, seeking a residence permit and protection under that country’s broad press freedoms. His initial welcome was euphoric.
“They called me the James Bond of journalism,” he recalled wryly. “It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”
In late September, he left Stockholm for Berlin. A bag he checked on the almost empty flight disappeared, with three encrypted laptops. It has not resurfaced; Mr. Assange suspects it was intercepted. From Germany, he traveled to London, wary at being detained on arrival. Iceland, a country with generous press freedoms , has also lost its appeal, with Mr. Assange concluding that its government is too easily influenced by Washington.
He faces attack from within, too.
After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.
Internal Turmoil
Effectively, as Mr. Assange pursues his fugitive’s life, his leadership is enforced over the Internet. Even remotely, his style is imperious. When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”
Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.
In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.
“About a dozen” disillusioned volunteers have left recently, said Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer who has distanced himself in the recent turmoil. In late summer, Mr. Assange suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who had been the WikiLeaks spokesman under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, accusing him of unspecified “bad behavior.” Many more activists, Mr. McCarthy said, are likely to follow.
Mr. Assange denied that any important volunteers had quit, apart from Mr. Domscheit-Berg. But further defections could paralyze an organization that Mr. Assange says has 40 core volunteers and about 800 mostly unpaid followers to maintain a diffuse web of computer servers and to secure the system against attack — to guard against the kind of infiltration that WikiLeaks itself has used to generate its revelations.
Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy. Moreover, he said, “we have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”
Even among those challenging Mr. Assange’s leadership style, there is recognition that the intricate computer and financial architecture WikiLeaks uses to shield it against its enemies has depended on its founder. “He’s very unique and extremely capable,” said Ms. Jonsdottir, the Icelandic lawmaker.
A Rash of Scoops
Before posting the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq, WikiLeaks enjoyed a string of coups.
Supporters were thrilled when the organization posted documents on the Guantánamo Bay detention operation, Sarah Palin’s e-mail, reports of extrajudicial killings in Kenya and East Timor, the membership rolls of the neo-Nazi British National Party and a combat video showing American Apache helicopters in Baghdad in 2007 gunning down at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists.
But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.
A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member “commission” after the Afghan documents were posted “to find about people who are spying.” He said the Taliban had a “wanted” list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.
“After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,” he said.
Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision “with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,” he said.
But if Mr. Assange is sustained by his sense of mission, faith is fading among his fellow conspirators. His mood was caught vividly in an exchange on Sept. 20 with another senior WikiLeaks figure. In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”
In London, Mr. Assange was angered when asked about the rifts. He responded testily to questions about WikiLeaks’s opaque finances, Private Manning’s fate and WikiLeaks’s apparent lack of accountability to anybody but himself, calling the questions “cretinous,” “facile” and reminiscent of “kindergarten.”
Mr. Assange has been equivocal about Private Manning, talking in late summer as though the soldier was unavoidable collateral damage, much like the Afghans named as informers in the secret Pentagon documents.
But in London, he took a more sympathetic view, describing Private Manning as a “political prisoner” facing a jail term of up to 52 years, without confirming that he was the source of the disclosed war logs. “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences,” Mr. Assange said.
Mr. Assange’s own fate seems as imperiled as Private Manning’s. His British visa will expire early next year. When he left the London restaurant at twilight, heading into the shadows, he declined to say where he was going. The man who has put some of the world’s most powerful institutions on his watch list was on the move again.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
This is not just worthy of a Pulitzer. It's worthy of a Nobel. You heard the recommendation here first folks. Bigger than The Pentagon papers, which the NYTimes also published. I scooped it, in all humility, because Assange is enormously ethical.
================================================
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: October 23, 2010
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/world/24assange.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
WikiLeaks Founder on the Run, Chased by Turmoil
By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA
Published: October 23, 2010
LONDON — Julian Assange moves like a hunted man. In a noisy Ethiopian restaurant in London’s rundown Paddington district, he pitches his voice barely above a whisper to foil the Western intelligence agencies he fears.
He demands that his dwindling number of loyalists use expensive encrypted cellphones and swaps his own as other men change shirts. He checks into hotels under false names, dyes his hair, sleeps on sofas and floors, and uses cash instead of credit cards, often borrowed from friends.
“By being determined to be on this path, and not to compromise, I’ve wound up in an extraordinary situation,” Mr. Assange said over lunch last Sunday, when he arrived sporting a woolen beanie and a wispy stubble and trailing a youthful entourage that included a filmmaker assigned to document any unpleasant surprises.
In his remarkable journey to notoriety, Mr. Assange, founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowers’ Web site, sees the next few weeks as his most hazardous. Now he is making his most brazen disclosure yet: 391,832 secret documents on the Iraq war. He held a news conference in London on Saturday, saying that the release “constituted the most comprehensive and detailed account of any war ever to have entered the public record.”
Twelve weeks earlier, he posted on his organization’s Web site some 77,000 classified Pentagon documents on the Afghan conflict.
Much has changed since 2006, when Mr. Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, used years of computer hacking and what friends call a near genius I.Q. to establish WikiLeaks, redefining whistle-blowing by gathering secrets in bulk, storing them beyond the reach of governments and others determined to retrieve them, then releasing them instantly, and globally.
Now it is not just governments that denounce him: some of his own comrades are abandoning him for what they see as erratic and imperious behavior, and a nearly delusional grandeur unmatched by an awareness that the digital secrets he reveals can have a price in flesh and blood.
Several WikiLeaks colleagues say he alone decided to release the Afghan documents without removing the names of Afghan intelligence sources for NATO troops. “We were very, very upset with that, and with the way he spoke about it afterwards,” said Birgitta Jonsdottir, a core WikiLeaks volunteer and a member of Iceland’s Parliament. “If he could just focus on the important things he does, it would be better.”
He is also being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation involving two Swedish women. Mr. Assange denied the allegations, saying the relations were consensual. But prosecutors in Sweden have yet to formally approve charges or dismiss the case eight weeks after the complaints against Mr. Assange were filed, damaging his quest for a secure base for himself and WikiLeaks. Though he characterizes the claims as “a smear campaign,” the scandal has compounded the pressures of his cloaked life.
“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like,” he said over the London lunch.
Exposing Secrets
Mr. Assange has come a long way from an unsettled childhood in Australia as a self-acknowledged social misfit who narrowly avoided prison after being convicted on 25 charges of computer hacking in 1995. History is punctuated by spies, defectors and others who revealed the most inflammatory secrets of their age. Mr. Assange has become that figure for the Internet era, with as yet unreckoned consequences for himself and for the keepers of the world’s secrets.
“I’ve been waiting 40 years for someone to disclose information on a scale that might really make a difference,” said Daniel Ellsberg, who exposed a 1,000-page secret study of the Vietnam War in 1971 that became known as the Pentagon Papers.
Mr. Ellsberg said he saw kindred spirits in Mr. Assange and Pfc. Bradley Manning, the 22-year-old former Army intelligence operative under detention in Quantico, Va., suspected of leaking the Iraq and Afghan documents.
“They were willing to go to prison for life, or be executed, to put out this information,” Mr. Ellsberg said.
Underlying Mr. Assange’s anxieties is deep uncertainty about what the United States and its allies may do next. Pentagon and Justice department officials have said they are weighing his actions under the 1917 Espionage Act. They have demanded that Mr. Assange “return” all government documents in his possession, undertake not to publish any new ones and not “solicit” further American materials.
Mr. Assange has responded by going on the run, but has found no refuge. Amid the Afghan documents controversy, he flew to Sweden, seeking a residence permit and protection under that country’s broad press freedoms. His initial welcome was euphoric.
“They called me the James Bond of journalism,” he recalled wryly. “It got me a lot of fans, and some of them ended up causing me a bit of trouble.”
In late September, he left Stockholm for Berlin. A bag he checked on the almost empty flight disappeared, with three encrypted laptops. It has not resurfaced; Mr. Assange suspects it was intercepted. From Germany, he traveled to London, wary at being detained on arrival. Iceland, a country with generous press freedoms , has also lost its appeal, with Mr. Assange concluding that its government is too easily influenced by Washington.
He faces attack from within, too.
After the Sweden scandal, strains within WikiLeaks reached a breaking point, with some of Mr. Assange’s closest collaborators publicly defecting. The New York Times spoke with dozens of people who have worked with and supported him in Iceland, Sweden, Germany, Britain and the United States. What emerged was a picture of the founder of WikiLeaks as its prime innovator and charismatic force but as someone whose growing celebrity has been matched by an increasingly dictatorial, eccentric and capricious style.
Internal Turmoil
Effectively, as Mr. Assange pursues his fugitive’s life, his leadership is enforced over the Internet. Even remotely, his style is imperious. When Herbert Snorrason, a 25-year-old political activist in Iceland, questioned Mr. Assange’s judgment over a number of issues in an online exchange last month, Mr. Assange was uncompromising. “I don’t like your tone,” he said, according to a transcript. “If it continues, you’re out.”
Mr. Assange cast himself as indispensable. “I am the heart and soul of this organization, its founder, philosopher, spokesperson, original coder, organizer, financier, and all the rest,” he said. “If you have a problem with me,” he told Mr. Snorrason, using an expletive, he should quit.
In an interview about the exchange, Mr. Snorrason’s conclusion was stark. “He is not in his right mind,” he said. In London, Mr. Assange was dismissive of all those who have criticized him. “These are not consequential people,” he said.
“About a dozen” disillusioned volunteers have left recently, said Smari McCarthy, an Icelandic volunteer who has distanced himself in the recent turmoil. In late summer, Mr. Assange suspended Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a German who had been the WikiLeaks spokesman under the pseudonym Daniel Schmitt, accusing him of unspecified “bad behavior.” Many more activists, Mr. McCarthy said, are likely to follow.
Mr. Assange denied that any important volunteers had quit, apart from Mr. Domscheit-Berg. But further defections could paralyze an organization that Mr. Assange says has 40 core volunteers and about 800 mostly unpaid followers to maintain a diffuse web of computer servers and to secure the system against attack — to guard against the kind of infiltration that WikiLeaks itself has used to generate its revelations.
Mr. Assange’s detractors also accuse him of pursuing a vendetta against the United States. In London, Mr. Assange said America was an increasingly militarized society and a threat to democracy. Moreover, he said, “we have been attacked by the United States, so we are forced into a position where we must defend ourselves.”
Even among those challenging Mr. Assange’s leadership style, there is recognition that the intricate computer and financial architecture WikiLeaks uses to shield it against its enemies has depended on its founder. “He’s very unique and extremely capable,” said Ms. Jonsdottir, the Icelandic lawmaker.
A Rash of Scoops
Before posting the documents on Afghanistan and Iraq, WikiLeaks enjoyed a string of coups.
Supporters were thrilled when the organization posted documents on the Guantánamo Bay detention operation, Sarah Palin’s e-mail, reports of extrajudicial killings in Kenya and East Timor, the membership rolls of the neo-Nazi British National Party and a combat video showing American Apache helicopters in Baghdad in 2007 gunning down at least 12 people, including two Reuters journalists.
But now, WikiLeaks has been met with new doubts. Amnesty International and Reporters Without Borders have joined the Pentagon in criticizing the organization for risking people’s lives by publishing war logs identifying Afghans working for the Americans or acting as informers.
A Taliban spokesman in Afghanistan using the pseudonym Zabiullah Mujahid said in a telephone interview that the Taliban had formed a nine-member “commission” after the Afghan documents were posted “to find about people who are spying.” He said the Taliban had a “wanted” list of 1,800 Afghans and was comparing that with names WikiLeaks provided.
“After the process is completed, our Taliban court will decide about such people,” he said.
Mr. Assange defended posting unredacted documents, saying he balanced his decision “with the knowledge of the tremendous good and prevention of harm that is caused” by putting the information into the public domain. “There are no easy choices on the table for this organization,” he said.
But if Mr. Assange is sustained by his sense of mission, faith is fading among his fellow conspirators. His mood was caught vividly in an exchange on Sept. 20 with another senior WikiLeaks figure. In an encrypted online chat, a transcript of which was passed to The Times, Mr. Assange was dismissive of his colleagues. He described them as “a confederacy of fools,” and asked his interlocutor, “Am I dealing with a complete retard?”
In London, Mr. Assange was angered when asked about the rifts. He responded testily to questions about WikiLeaks’s opaque finances, Private Manning’s fate and WikiLeaks’s apparent lack of accountability to anybody but himself, calling the questions “cretinous,” “facile” and reminiscent of “kindergarten.”
Mr. Assange has been equivocal about Private Manning, talking in late summer as though the soldier was unavoidable collateral damage, much like the Afghans named as informers in the secret Pentagon documents.
But in London, he took a more sympathetic view, describing Private Manning as a “political prisoner” facing a jail term of up to 52 years, without confirming that he was the source of the disclosed war logs. “We have a duty to assist Mr. Manning and other people who are facing legal and other consequences,” Mr. Assange said.
Mr. Assange’s own fate seems as imperiled as Private Manning’s. His British visa will expire early next year. When he left the London restaurant at twilight, heading into the shadows, he declined to say where he was going. The man who has put some of the world’s most powerful institutions on his watch list was on the move again.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Dexter Filkins from Kabul, Afghanistan.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 24, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Friday, October 22, 2010
US/CIA Impedes South Asia's Efforts To Find Place In The Global Social Justice Order
US/CIA Impedes South Asia's Efforts to Find a Place in the Global Social Justice Order
The US Govt's foreign policy imperatives, which are, as always, driven and directed by the CIA, are seriously impeding efforts by neighbor states' attempts to find its rightful place in the Global Social Justice Order.
The out-of the-box thinking needed is really just common sense. India-Pak AMITY/UNITY is the need of the hour. But the US will not allow this to happen.
Out-of-the-Box Thinking -- Is it Out of Reach?
The "out-of-the-box" thinking we need in the South Asia context, pragmatically speaking, is out of reach for the foreseeable future. Why?
1. The US has gained "strategic depth" in South Asia. The US is now firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and Pakistan and has a brand-name, AkPak, to underscore its entrenchment.
Q. Who can get the US out of South Asia? Not India, certainly not Pakistan, and certainly not Afghanistan.
2. The US has therefore secured a geopolitical advantage in South Asia, on the Pak-Afghan border, from where it can a) monitor and threaten Iran, b) stand within striking distance of Russia, 3) monitor the underbelly of several republics that once formed the USSR. ALL these sovereign nation-states are resource-rich in oil and natural gas. Afghanistan is bursting at the seams with minerals estimated in the trillions, according to a recent New York Times report quoting the US. Geological Survey.
3. The US "strategic depth" achievement, at the cost of the entire South Asia region, is a direct consequence of activities by the US since the early 1950's to turn Pakistan into a DEPENDENT client-state. The US State Department had carefully fostered Pakistan as a dependent client-state (Israel in contrast is a DOMINANT client-state of the US), during its own invented Cold War against the Soviets.
Pakistan, weakened by Partition, especially forced separation of Muslims from their Muslim brother and sisters, fell prey to US manipulation and inducements and Paks's own knee-jerk anti-India policy from the 1950's, stumbled and fell right into the open claw of the American Eagle. Pakistan is a hapless VICTIM of US Cold War strategy, Pakistan's ISI is financed and controlled by the CIA.
Who governs Pakistan does not much matter, the USCIA is in charge, with the ISI in PAID subordination to US strategic goals.
4. The US is on Pakistani soil and and there is nothing Pakistan can do about it. The US is on Afghan soil and Afghanistan can do nothing about it.
The US has NEVER been able to place even ONE US soldier on Indian soil but still India cannot do anything about the US occupation and dominance of the South Asia region.
5. The main and for now, intractable problem is that Pakistan has ACCEPTED the US as its MASTER, instead of CHOOSING India as its ALLY.
6. The out-of-the-box solution, actually the common sense solution that has been there all along, is for India and Pakistan to have a joint political and economic strategy, to make South Asia strong and independent in the global economic and geopolitical order.
Q. Can that happen in our lifetime? Some of us hope so. Some of us dream of that possibility and act everyday to bring that possibility closer to reality.
Until then, the out-of-the-box solution, to build India-Pak AMITY/UNITY, to counter US power in the South Asia region, is out of reach.
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
The US Govt's foreign policy imperatives, which are, as always, driven and directed by the CIA, are seriously impeding efforts by neighbor states' attempts to find its rightful place in the Global Social Justice Order.
The out-of the-box thinking needed is really just common sense. India-Pak AMITY/UNITY is the need of the hour. But the US will not allow this to happen.
Out-of-the-Box Thinking -- Is it Out of Reach?
The "out-of-the-box" thinking we need in the South Asia context, pragmatically speaking, is out of reach for the foreseeable future. Why?
1. The US has gained "strategic depth" in South Asia. The US is now firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and Pakistan and has a brand-name, AkPak, to underscore its entrenchment.
Q. Who can get the US out of South Asia? Not India, certainly not Pakistan, and certainly not Afghanistan.
2. The US has therefore secured a geopolitical advantage in South Asia, on the Pak-Afghan border, from where it can a) monitor and threaten Iran, b) stand within striking distance of Russia, 3) monitor the underbelly of several republics that once formed the USSR. ALL these sovereign nation-states are resource-rich in oil and natural gas. Afghanistan is bursting at the seams with minerals estimated in the trillions, according to a recent New York Times report quoting the US. Geological Survey.
3. The US "strategic depth" achievement, at the cost of the entire South Asia region, is a direct consequence of activities by the US since the early 1950's to turn Pakistan into a DEPENDENT client-state. The US State Department had carefully fostered Pakistan as a dependent client-state (Israel in contrast is a DOMINANT client-state of the US), during its own invented Cold War against the Soviets.
Pakistan, weakened by Partition, especially forced separation of Muslims from their Muslim brother and sisters, fell prey to US manipulation and inducements and Paks's own knee-jerk anti-India policy from the 1950's, stumbled and fell right into the open claw of the American Eagle. Pakistan is a hapless VICTIM of US Cold War strategy, Pakistan's ISI is financed and controlled by the CIA.
Who governs Pakistan does not much matter, the USCIA is in charge, with the ISI in PAID subordination to US strategic goals.
4. The US is on Pakistani soil and and there is nothing Pakistan can do about it. The US is on Afghan soil and Afghanistan can do nothing about it.
The US has NEVER been able to place even ONE US soldier on Indian soil but still India cannot do anything about the US occupation and dominance of the South Asia region.
5. The main and for now, intractable problem is that Pakistan has ACCEPTED the US as its MASTER, instead of CHOOSING India as its ALLY.
6. The out-of-the-box solution, actually the common sense solution that has been there all along, is for India and Pakistan to have a joint political and economic strategy, to make South Asia strong and independent in the global economic and geopolitical order.
Q. Can that happen in our lifetime? Some of us hope so. Some of us dream of that possibility and act everyday to bring that possibility closer to reality.
Until then, the out-of-the-box solution, to build India-Pak AMITY/UNITY, to counter US power in the South Asia region, is out of reach.
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
Monday, October 18, 2010
"Culture" of Poverty? POWER is Missing from this Equation
NYTimes Comment #155.
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 18th, 2010
11:22 am
\"Culture\" of Poverty? Corrupt POWER is Missing from this Equation
Ever since Oscar Lewis used the now (in)famous phrase, anthropology students, social justice activists, economists and of course politicians have been debating how culture and poverty have became conflated.
I think the missing part of this critical social equation is POWER and its obverse, Disempowerment.
It is directly harmful to POOR PEOPLE (yes, Poverty is all about PEOPLE, haves and havenots)to construe these POOR PEOPLE as sharing a Culture of Poverty. To merely say, like Harvard's Sampson, quoted above in your article, that culture is merely shared understandings is to conceal the role of POWER in the construction of the concept of Poverty.
Let me cite a personal example:
This summer, while I was volunteering in the Kashmir Valley, I spoke at a large meeting of career bureaucrats, clerics, politicians, on the topic of feminization of poverty in the Valley. I was in the process of trying to get govt. agencies to release goats to psychiatrically ill women, because these women has ASKED for GOATS, so they could earn their livelihood. These women understood perfectly they were sick BECAUSE they were POOR.
A henna-bearded Hajj-returned, indubitably devout and very sincere academician turned to me and then stated to the gathering \"Madam is right. Poverty is a curse.\"
I said \"Sir, I did not say that. I said Poverty is a CRIME committed by the government against its people.\"
You could have heard a pin drop. All the power-holders in the room kept silent.
I was never invited to speak again!
Poverty and Power are inextricably conflated. \"Culture\" is a misleading term, when applied to human rights and the right NOT to be poor is a human right.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==========================================
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?scp=1&sq=culture%20of%20poverty&st=cse
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?sort=newest
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback
William C. Eckenberg/The New York Times
[Picture]A vacant lot on East 110th Street in New York in 1952: the study of urban blight has long been influenced by political fashions.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 17, 2010
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
Enlarge This Image
George Tames/The New York Times
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his office at Harvard in 1971.
The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.
The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.
The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.
This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.
With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.
To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”
“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?
As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.
The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.
William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”
For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”
Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.
Enlarge This Image
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
A Chicago mother and child in 1997 at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, since demolished.
In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.
Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.
Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”
Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.
The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”
He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”
He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school.
Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace. At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”
Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.
Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses, Michèle Lamont, another editor of the special issue of The Annals, said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?”
So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”
“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will.”
Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 18th, 2010
11:22 am
\"Culture\" of Poverty? Corrupt POWER is Missing from this Equation
Ever since Oscar Lewis used the now (in)famous phrase, anthropology students, social justice activists, economists and of course politicians have been debating how culture and poverty have became conflated.
I think the missing part of this critical social equation is POWER and its obverse, Disempowerment.
It is directly harmful to POOR PEOPLE (yes, Poverty is all about PEOPLE, haves and havenots)to construe these POOR PEOPLE as sharing a Culture of Poverty. To merely say, like Harvard's Sampson, quoted above in your article, that culture is merely shared understandings is to conceal the role of POWER in the construction of the concept of Poverty.
Let me cite a personal example:
This summer, while I was volunteering in the Kashmir Valley, I spoke at a large meeting of career bureaucrats, clerics, politicians, on the topic of feminization of poverty in the Valley. I was in the process of trying to get govt. agencies to release goats to psychiatrically ill women, because these women has ASKED for GOATS, so they could earn their livelihood. These women understood perfectly they were sick BECAUSE they were POOR.
A henna-bearded Hajj-returned, indubitably devout and very sincere academician turned to me and then stated to the gathering \"Madam is right. Poverty is a curse.\"
I said \"Sir, I did not say that. I said Poverty is a CRIME committed by the government against its people.\"
You could have heard a pin drop. All the power-holders in the room kept silent.
I was never invited to speak again!
Poverty and Power are inextricably conflated. \"Culture\" is a misleading term, when applied to human rights and the right NOT to be poor is a human right.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
==========================================
NYTimes copyright
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?scp=1&sq=culture%20of%20poverty&st=cse
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/us/18poverty.html?sort=newest
‘Culture of Poverty’ Makes a Comeback
William C. Eckenberg/The New York Times
[Picture]A vacant lot on East 110th Street in New York in 1952: the study of urban blight has long been influenced by political fashions.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 17, 2010
For more than 40 years, social scientists investigating the causes of poverty have tended to treat cultural explanations like Lord Voldemort: That Which Must Not Be Named.
Enlarge This Image
George Tames/The New York Times
Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his office at Harvard in 1971.
The reticence was a legacy of the ugly battles that erupted after Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an assistant labor secretary in the Johnson administration, introduced the idea of a “culture of poverty” to the public in a startling 1965 report. Although Moynihan didn’t coin the phrase (that distinction belongs to the anthropologist Oscar Lewis), his description of the urban black family as caught in an inescapable “tangle of pathology” of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency was seen as attributing self-perpetuating moral deficiencies to black people, as if blaming them for their own misfortune.
Moynihan’s analysis never lost its appeal to conservative thinkers, whose arguments ultimately succeeded when President Bill Clinton signed a bill in 1996 “ending welfare as we know it.” But in the overwhelmingly liberal ranks of academic sociology and anthropology the word “culture” became a live grenade, and the idea that attitudes and behavior patterns kept people poor was shunned.
Now, after decades of silence, these scholars are speaking openly about you-know-what, conceding that culture and persistent poverty are enmeshed.
“We’ve finally reached the stage where people aren’t afraid of being politically incorrect,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at Princeton who has argued that Moynihan was unfairly maligned.
The old debate has shaped the new. Last month Princeton and the Brookings Institution released a collection of papers on unmarried parents, a subject, it noted, that became off-limits after the Moynihan report. At the recent annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, attendees discussed the resurgence of scholarship on culture. And in Washington last spring, social scientists participated in a Congressional briefing on culture and poverty linked to a special issue of The Annals, the journal of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
“Culture is back on the poverty research agenda,” the introduction declares, acknowledging that it should never have been removed.
The topic has generated interest on Capitol Hill because so much of the research intersects with policy debates. Views of the cultural roots of poverty “play important roles in shaping how lawmakers choose to address poverty issues,” Representative Lynn Woolsey, Democrat of California, noted at the briefing.
This surge of academic research also comes as the percentage of Americans living in poverty hit a 15-year high: one in seven, or 44 million.
With these studies come many new and varied definitions of culture, but they all differ from the ’60s-era model in these crucial respects: Today, social scientists are rejecting the notion of a monolithic and unchanging culture of poverty. And they attribute destructive attitudes and behavior not to inherent moral character but to sustained racism and isolation.
To Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, culture is best understood as “shared understandings.”
“I study inequality, and the dominant focus is on structures of poverty,” he said. But he added that the reason a neighborhood turns into a “poverty trap” is also related to a common perception of the way people in a community act and think. When people see graffiti and garbage, do they find it acceptable or see serious disorder? Do they respect the legal system or have a high level of “moral cynicism,” believing that “laws were made to be broken”?
As part of a large research project in Chicago, Professor Sampson walked through different neighborhoods this summer, dropping stamped, addressed envelopes to see how many people would pick up an apparently lost letter and mail it, a sign that looking out for others is part of the community’s culture.
In some neighborhoods, like Grand Boulevard, where the notorious Robert Taylor public housing projects once stood, almost no envelopes were mailed; in others researchers received more than half of the letters back. Income levels did not necessarily explain the difference, Professor Sampson said, but rather the community’s cultural norms, the levels of moral cynicism and disorder.
The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty, he said.
William Julius Wilson, whose pioneering work boldly confronted ghetto life while focusing on economic explanations for persistent poverty, defines culture as the way “individuals in a community develop an understanding of how the world works and make decisions based on that understanding.”
For some young black men, Professor Wilson, a Harvard sociologist, said, the world works like this: “If you don’t develop a tough demeanor, you won’t survive. If you have access to weapons, you get them, and if you get into a fight, you have to use them.”
Seeking to recapture the topic from economists, sociologists have ventured into poor neighborhoods to delve deeper into the attitudes of residents. Their results have challenged some common assumptions, like the belief that poor mothers remain single because they don’t value marriage.
Enlarge This Image
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
A Chicago mother and child in 1997 at the notorious Robert Taylor Homes, since demolished.
In Philadelphia, for example, low-income mothers told the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas that they thought marriage was profoundly important, even sacred, but doubted that their partners were “marriage material.” Their results have prompted some lawmakers and poverty experts to conclude that programs that promote marriage without changing economic and social conditions are unlikely to work.
Mario Luis Small, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and an editor of The Annals’ special issue, tried to figure out why some New York City mothers with children in day care developed networks of support while others did not. As he explained in his 2009 book, “Unanticipated Gains,” the answer did not depend on income or ethnicity, but rather the rules of the day-care institution. Centers that held frequent field trips, organized parents’ associations and had pick-up and drop-off procedures created more opportunities for parents to connect.
Younger academics like Professor Small, 35, attributed the upswing in cultural explanations to a “new generation of scholars without the baggage of that debate.”
Scholars like Professor Wilson, 74, who have tilled the field much longer, mentioned the development of more sophisticated data and analytical tools. He said he felt compelled to look more closely at culture after the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s controversial 1994 book, “The Bell Curve,” which attributed African-Americans’ lower I.Q. scores to genetics.
The authors claimed to have taken family background into account, Professor Wilson said, but “they had not captured the cumulative effects of living in poor, racially segregated neighborhoods.”
He added, “I realized we needed a comprehensive measure of the environment, that we must consider structural and cultural forces.”
He mentioned a study by Professor Sampson, 54, that found that growing up in areas where violence limits socializing outside the family and where parents haven’t attended college stunts verbal ability, lowering I.Q. scores by as much as six points, the equivalent of missing more than a year in school.
Changes outside campuses have made conversation about the cultural roots of poverty easier than it was in the ’60s. Divorce, living together without marrying, and single motherhood are now commonplace. At the same time prominent African-Americans have begun to speak out on the subject. In 2004 the comedian Bill Cosby made headlines when he criticized poor blacks for “not parenting” and dropping out of school. President Obama, who was abandoned by his father, has repeatedly talked about “responsible fatherhood.”
Conservatives also deserve credit, said Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, for their sustained focus on family values and marriage even when cultural explanations were disparaged.
Still, worries about blaming the victim persist. Policy makers and the public still tend to view poverty through one of two competing lenses, Michèle Lamont, another editor of the special issue of The Annals, said: “Are the poor poor because they are lazy, or are the poor poor because they are a victim of the markets?”
So even now some sociologists avoid words like “values” and “morals” or reject the idea that, as The Annals put it, “a group’s culture is more or less coherent.” Watered-down definitions of culture, Ms. Hymowitz complained, reduce some of the new work to “sociological pablum.”
“If anthropologists had come away from doing field work in New Guinea concluding ‘everyone’s different,’ but sometimes people help each other out,” she wrote in an e-mail, “there would be no field of anthropology — and no word culture for cultural sociologists to bend to their will.”
Fuzzy definitions or not, culture is back. This prompted mock surprise from Rep. Woolsey at last spring’s Congressional briefing: “What a concept. Values, norms, beliefs play very important roles in the way people meet the challenges of poverty.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Why Neither India nor Pak can Trust the US: The Headley Instance
Q. Why was the India Gov so wretchedly uninformed?
Q. Why has India, the world's largest democracy not positioned itself to take cognizance of US-Pak intelligence-gathering and collusion in cross-border terrorism?
See my additional comments [ ] within the text of this NYTimes article, still working on it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008.
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.
Enlarge This Image
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.[What did the US do?]
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.[What did the US do?]
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and counter surveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”[Example of continuing turf war between FBI and CIA. Who benefits? ISI]
Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.[ ] More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.[the US neo-imperial project wqwhether in Iraq or Palestine or South Asia, is impervious to ethical geopolitical considerations]
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.[ ]
State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.
But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.[ ]
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.[ ]
Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.[Yet another example of the US agencies' turf war, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing]
Q. Why has India, the world's largest democracy not positioned itself to take cognizance of US-Pak intelligence-gathering and collusion in cross-border terrorism?
See my additional comments [ ] within the text of this NYTimes article, still working on it.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------
NYTimes copyright
U.S. Had Warnings on Plotter of Mumbai Attack
David Guttenfelder/Associated Press
Indian soldiers fought terrorists at the Taj Mahal Hotel in 2008.
By JANE PERLEZ, ERIC SCHMITT and GINGER THOMPSON
Published: October 16, 2010
This article is by Jane Perlez, Eric Schmitt and Ginger Thompson.
Enlarge This Image
Verna Sadock/Associated Press
David Headley in federal court in Chicago in 2009. In March, he pleaded guilty to helping plan the 2008 attacks on Mumbai.
Less than a year before terrorists killed at least 163 people in Mumbai, India, a young Moroccan woman went to American authorities in Pakistan to warn them that she believed her husband, David Headley, was plotting just such an attack.[What did the US do?]
It was not the first time American law enforcement authorities were warned about Mr. Headley, a longtime informer in Pakistan for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration whose roots in Pakistan and the United States allowed him to move easily in both worlds.
Two years earlier, in 2005, an American woman who was also married to the 50-year-old Mr. Headley told federal investigators in New York that she believed that he was a member of the militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, created and sponsored by Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency.[What did the US do?]
Despite those warnings by two of his three wives Mr. Headley roamed far and wide on Lashkar’s behalf between 2002 and 2009, receiving small arms and counter surveillance training, scouting targets for attack, and building a network of connections that extended from Chicago to Pakistan’s lawless frontier.
Then in 2008, it was his handiwork as chief reconnaissance scout that set the stage for Lashkar’s strike against Mumbai, an assault intended to provoke a conflict between nuclear-armed adversaries, Pakistan and India.
It is unclear what United States officials did with the warnings they had gotten about Mr. Headley — who has pleaded guilty to the crimes and is cooperating with authorities — or whether they saw them as complaints from wives whose motives might be colored by their strained relations with their husband.
A senior administration official said Saturday, “We took the information, passed it around to the relevant agencies, and what came back was that the F.B.I. had a file on Headley, but it didn’t link him to terrorism.”[Example of continuing turf war between FBI and CIA. Who benefits? ISI]
Mr. Headley’s ability to hide for years in plain sight has rekindled concerns that the Mumbai bombings are another instance of a communications breakdown among the agencies involved in combating terrorism, much like the enormous intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
It also raises the question of whether United States officials were reluctant to dig deeper into Mr. Headley’s movements because he had been an informant for the D.E.A.[ ] More significantly, it may provide another instance of American reluctance to pursue evidence that some officials in Pakistan, its major ally in the war against Al Qaeda, were involved in planning an attack that killed six Americans.[the US neo-imperial project wqwhether in Iraq or Palestine or South Asia, is impervious to ethical geopolitical considerations]
The Pakistani government has insisted that its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, a close partner of the C.I.A., did not know of the attack. The United States says it has no evidence to counter this, though officials acknowledge that some current or retired ISI officers probably played some role.[ ]
State Department officials and the F.B.I. said that they investigated the warnings they received about Mr. Headley, but that they could not confirm any connections between him and Lashkar-e-Taiba. And D.E.A. officials said they ended their association with him at the end of 2001, at least two months before Mr. Headley reportedly attended his first terrorist training.
The investigative news organization ProPublica reported the 2005 warning from Mr. Headley’s American ex-wife on its Web site and in the Saturday issue of The Washington Post. By ProPublica’s account, she told authorities that Mr. Headley boasted about working as an American informant while he trained with Lashkar. According to that report, she gave authorities audio cassettes and ideological material, and described e-mails she believed he exchanged with extremists.
But she was not the only one to come forward. An examination of Mr. Headley’s movements shows that United States authorities also heard from his Moroccan wife that he was involved in a terrorist group that was actively plotting against targets in India. Beyond these warnings, interviews illustrate his longstanding connections to American law enforcement and the ISI.
Among the findings:
¶ An officer of the Pakistani spy agency handed Mr. Headley $25,000 in early 2006 to open an office and set up a house in Mumbai to be used as a front during his scouting trips, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to Indian investigators in Chicago in June.[ ]
¶ The ISI officer who gave Mr. Headley the cash, known as Maj. Iqbal, served as the supervisor of Lashkar’s planning, helping to arrange a communications system for the attack, and overseeing a model of the Taj Mahal Hotel, so that gunmen could find their way around, according to Mr. Headley’s testimony to the Indians.
¶ While working for Lashkar, which has close ties to the ISI, Mr. Headley was also enlisted by the Pakistani spy agency to recruit Indian agents to monitor Indian troop levels and movements, an American official said.[ ]
Mr. Headley was well known both to Pakistani and American security officials long before his arrest as a terrorist. He went to an elite military high school in Pakistan, whose graduates went on to become high-ranking military officers and intelligence operatives. After arrests in 1988 and 1997 on drug-trafficking charges, Mr. Headley became such a valued D.E.A. informant that the drug agency sent him back and forth between Pakistan and the United States.[Yet another example of the US agencies' turf war, the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing]
Saturday, October 9, 2010
1586 NOT 1947
1586 not 1947
In 1586 NOT 1947 Kashmir Became part of Mughal India. A Date we can ALL be Proud of
Critical Readers of Subcontinental and Global South history know that the British colonial Divide and Rule strategy grievously harmed aam janta interests everywhere in Africa and Asia.
On our own subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, Sikhs and Jains, adivasis and other indigenous peoples, had lived with a reasonable measure of peaceful co-existence and prosperity for several millennia.
The British imperial project changed all that. The British played Divide and Rule in EVERY region of the subcontinent,. The Instrument of Accession is just one more British divisive invention (like Lord Curzon's disastrous Partition of Bengal in 1905) to fabricate an artificial disconnect between Kashmir and the rest of India.
Jinnah fell for Britain's Divide and Rule strategy. Jinnah managed to do what even the British failed to do -- Jinnah separated Muslims from Muslims -- just as Geelani is trying to do now.
Pakistan is the tragic product of such painful and unnecessary division -- and the results can be read every day in the newspapers, seen online and on TV. Pakistan for 60+ years has fallen victim to US neo-imperial strategy, after the geopolitical power vacuum created by the departure of the Brits. As contemporary events have shown, Pakistan has jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
If Kashmiris follow the Valley Warlord and his criminal calendar of enforced unrest, loss of education and employment, Kashmir will predictably see the same conclusion as Pakistan.
In 1586, the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost secularist Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, the pioneer of open-court philosophical and strategic discourse, sent Hindu generals to overthrow an upstart Turki ruler of Kashmir. Akbar annexed Kashmir and made Kashmir part of Mughal India.
Q. Do Kashmiris want to fall victim to the Divide and Rule legacy of the British?
Q. Do Kashmiris want to embrace our shared history under Akbar the Great?
1586 not 1947.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
===============================================
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
JK India’s integral part: Congress
Agencies
New Delhi: Congress Friday said Kashmir is an integral part of India and that the question of merger of the state with India was decided on October 26, 1947.
''The question of the merger of Jammu and Kashmir with India was decided on October 26, 1947 when late Maharaja Hari Singh
had announced accession of the entire state with the country, including parts of the state under the illegal occupation by Pakistan,'' Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari told reporters here, apparently in reference to the speech by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.
He, however, did not make any comment on Omar.
''From the time of the first Prime Minister late Jawaharlal Nehru to the present Manmohan Singh, the Congress has believed that Kashmir is an integral part of India,'' Tiwari said.
In reply to a question, he said the situation in Jammu and Kashmir had improved.
''It is the duty of all national parties and parties in the state to make responsible statements about Jammu and Kashmir to help improve the situation,'' he added.
In 1586 NOT 1947 Kashmir Became part of Mughal India. A Date we can ALL be Proud of
Critical Readers of Subcontinental and Global South history know that the British colonial Divide and Rule strategy grievously harmed aam janta interests everywhere in Africa and Asia.
On our own subcontinent, Muslims and Hindus, Buddhists and Christians, Sikhs and Jains, adivasis and other indigenous peoples, had lived with a reasonable measure of peaceful co-existence and prosperity for several millennia.
The British imperial project changed all that. The British played Divide and Rule in EVERY region of the subcontinent,. The Instrument of Accession is just one more British divisive invention (like Lord Curzon's disastrous Partition of Bengal in 1905) to fabricate an artificial disconnect between Kashmir and the rest of India.
Jinnah fell for Britain's Divide and Rule strategy. Jinnah managed to do what even the British failed to do -- Jinnah separated Muslims from Muslims -- just as Geelani is trying to do now.
Pakistan is the tragic product of such painful and unnecessary division -- and the results can be read every day in the newspapers, seen online and on TV. Pakistan for 60+ years has fallen victim to US neo-imperial strategy, after the geopolitical power vacuum created by the departure of the Brits. As contemporary events have shown, Pakistan has jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.
If Kashmiris follow the Valley Warlord and his criminal calendar of enforced unrest, loss of education and employment, Kashmir will predictably see the same conclusion as Pakistan.
In 1586, the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost secularist Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, the pioneer of open-court philosophical and strategic discourse, sent Hindu generals to overthrow an upstart Turki ruler of Kashmir. Akbar annexed Kashmir and made Kashmir part of Mughal India.
Q. Do Kashmiris want to fall victim to the Divide and Rule legacy of the British?
Q. Do Kashmiris want to embrace our shared history under Akbar the Great?
1586 not 1947.
Dr. Chithra Karunakaran
City University of New York (CUNY)
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
===============================================
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
JK India’s integral part: Congress
Agencies
New Delhi: Congress Friday said Kashmir is an integral part of India and that the question of merger of the state with India was decided on October 26, 1947.
''The question of the merger of Jammu and Kashmir with India was decided on October 26, 1947 when late Maharaja Hari Singh
had announced accession of the entire state with the country, including parts of the state under the illegal occupation by Pakistan,'' Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari told reporters here, apparently in reference to the speech by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly.
He, however, did not make any comment on Omar.
''From the time of the first Prime Minister late Jawaharlal Nehru to the present Manmohan Singh, the Congress has believed that Kashmir is an integral part of India,'' Tiwari said.
In reply to a question, he said the situation in Jammu and Kashmir had improved.
''It is the duty of all national parties and parties in the state to make responsible statements about Jammu and Kashmir to help improve the situation,'' he added.
Monday, October 4, 2010
US Midterm Elections Impact Kashmir?
According to a news report from Srinagar, Kashmir, India, Obama has sent two Indian-origin US envoys to Kashmir, from the US Embassy in New Delhi.
The envoys met the JKLF leader and are slated to meet others. Pushpinder Dhillon and Kailash Jha, met the leader, preceding Obama's scheduled visit to India in November.
Wait a minute. Isn't that just around the time that the Democrats (I voted Democrat, I voted Obama/Biden), under Obama's leadership are predicted to get a swift kick in the gut during the U.S. midterm elections, Tuesday November 2? Read on.....
Any US interference in the internal affairs of Kashmir, India will be a grave mistake for the US. But the US has made catastrophic mistakes in foreign policy -- and profited by them. In this case, I don't think Obama will initiate any such direct interference. Sending his career diplomats (read bureaucrats) from the State Department to Kashmir is just a game to counter Republicans before the US midterm elections in November.
I am a US citizen. I voted for Obama in order to end the Bush administration policy in Iraq. But Obama has proven to be even worse than Bush, Obama is Bush with a more likeable, smiley face and a smooth tongue. He is still strongly preferable to Bush-style Republicans, particularly on US DOMESTIC policy which I endorse and support, but OBAMA is a flag carrier for the CIA on US FOREIGN policy.
Every US President is controlled by the CIA, just like every Pakistani leader is controlled by the ISI!
Ironical but factually correct, perhaps that is why the US has been able to exploit Pakistan so successfully for 60+ years.
Obama has initiated this action to meet Kashmiri "leaders" (he has not made any attempt to meet authentic aam Kashmiris' leaders like the J&K RTI), because this is the period of midterm elections in the US and the Democrats are going to lose seats. Obama wants to look tough to show the American people that he is as violently militaristic and as business-for-profit-driven as most of the Republican leadership in the House and in the Senate. Obama's overture to Kashmir's inexperienced, unsophisticated and factional 'leaders' is a midterm election maneuver to thwart people like Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, who is facing 5 challengers in his re-election bid in November. Burton, this week, urged Obama to intervene on Kashmir.
Does anyone really believe that a midwestern US politician cares about Kashmir? Burton and his constituents probably cannot even find Kashmir on a map!
India of course will politely say NO to Obama, about interfering in India's internal affairs. And Obama will have no option except to agree with India, because India is a sovereign state, of which Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part.
However, Obama will continue to play the US midterm election game on Kashmir, until approximately November 2, when Americans, including me, will vote.
For 60 years the US has pursued a superpower policy of INVASION, OCCUPATION, and EXPLOITATION in Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador,, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Does anyone in the Valley think the US should be flying unmanned spy drones against so-called "militants" INSIDE the territory of Pakistan and Afghanistan? How many innocent Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghan civilians has the US killed in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan? Are they not our sisters and brothers, our friends and neighbors?
INDIA, in sharp contrast to Pakistan, has NEVER EVER allowed even ONE US/CIA soldier/spy to ever be stationed anywhere on INDIA's territory.
Poor Pakistan has been a paid political prostitute (the real PPP!) of the US since the early 1950's of the John Foster Dulles State Department. Today, Pakistan has been so exploited by the US, Pakistan has become an international source of terror. Pak is most unfortunately a client-state (read slave) of the US/CIA, its land is overrun by US/NATO troops, who are far more powerful than the J&K police and Indian army,
The US is the #1 source of international terror in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Having lived in the US for 45 years, I can credibly say that the US, in its foreign policy, is completely focused on predatory market-driven and geopolitical imperatives to secure resources, markets and geopolitical influence.
Saudi Arabia is the main supporter of the US, supplying cheap oil to the US consumer, so that medieval Saudi princes with a sharp eye on their personal wealth, can prevent democracy and human rights for the ordinary people of Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile US consumers are happy driving their Hummers and SUVs (I use only public transportation in India, the US, everywhere, including of course the J&KSRTC, my favorite!),
With the subservience of Pakistan and connivance of Saudi Arabia, The US has now gained a foothold in South Asia so that it can control Iran and Russia for their oil and natural gas reserves.
Look at the FACTS.
Examine the EVIDENCE.
Wake up and smell the fumes of US/CIA invasion and occupation going on right now, right this minute, in South Asia.
Is that what aam janta Kashmiris need? Kashmiris deserve better than the opportunistic leaders they currently have.
They need to look more towards leaders like the J&K, RTI, we need to allow aam Kashmiris to lead themselves
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------------------
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/us-envoys-call-on-malik-2064.aspx
US envoys call on Malik
‘Obama should help resolve Kashmir dispute’
Ishfaq Ahmad Shah
Srinagar, Oct 03: Amid speculations of Kashmir being on the agenda of US President Barak Obama during his visit to India in November, two top US diplomats called upon Chairman Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Muhammad Yasin Malik here on Sunday.
The two diplomats of US Embassy in New Delhi, Pushpinder Dhillion and Kailash Jha met the JKLF chief at the party headquarters. The meeting, which lasted for more than an hour, discussed several issues including the prevailing situation in the valley.
Briefing mediapersons after the meeting, Malik said he urged the diplomats to persuade Obama to use his influence over India and Pakistan to resolve Kashmir issue as per the aspirations of its people.
“I appealed the delegation that they should aware America and the world community that three Kashmiri generations have been consumed by the 63-year-old conflict and it is the duty of Obama and other world leaders to impress upon India and Pakistan to resolve the issue amicably,” he said.
Malik said he urged the delegation to recognize the transition of Kashmiri movement from violent to non-violent means.
“It was America which suggested change in our movement from violent to a non-violent mode. Now that we have changed the mode of our movement, the world community has still maintained a criminal silence,” he told the diplomats.
The JKLF chief said that if Obama and the world leaders fail to impress a resolution over Kashmir, the youth who are leading a peaceful agitation from the past four months will be forced to take up guns again.
“It is the moral and diplomatic responsibility of US to help resolve the Kashmir issue,” he added.
Meanwhile, the delegation which is on a three-day visit to the valley, is likely to hold meetings with Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwiaz Umar Farooq besides the civil society members.
As per sources, the delegation will also be meeting Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, Governor NN Vohra and other mainstream politicians.
The envoys met the JKLF leader and are slated to meet others. Pushpinder Dhillon and Kailash Jha, met the leader, preceding Obama's scheduled visit to India in November.
Wait a minute. Isn't that just around the time that the Democrats (I voted Democrat, I voted Obama/Biden), under Obama's leadership are predicted to get a swift kick in the gut during the U.S. midterm elections, Tuesday November 2? Read on.....
Any US interference in the internal affairs of Kashmir, India will be a grave mistake for the US. But the US has made catastrophic mistakes in foreign policy -- and profited by them. In this case, I don't think Obama will initiate any such direct interference. Sending his career diplomats (read bureaucrats) from the State Department to Kashmir is just a game to counter Republicans before the US midterm elections in November.
I am a US citizen. I voted for Obama in order to end the Bush administration policy in Iraq. But Obama has proven to be even worse than Bush, Obama is Bush with a more likeable, smiley face and a smooth tongue. He is still strongly preferable to Bush-style Republicans, particularly on US DOMESTIC policy which I endorse and support, but OBAMA is a flag carrier for the CIA on US FOREIGN policy.
Every US President is controlled by the CIA, just like every Pakistani leader is controlled by the ISI!
Ironical but factually correct, perhaps that is why the US has been able to exploit Pakistan so successfully for 60+ years.
Obama has initiated this action to meet Kashmiri "leaders" (he has not made any attempt to meet authentic aam Kashmiris' leaders like the J&K RTI), because this is the period of midterm elections in the US and the Democrats are going to lose seats. Obama wants to look tough to show the American people that he is as violently militaristic and as business-for-profit-driven as most of the Republican leadership in the House and in the Senate. Obama's overture to Kashmir's inexperienced, unsophisticated and factional 'leaders' is a midterm election maneuver to thwart people like Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, who is facing 5 challengers in his re-election bid in November. Burton, this week, urged Obama to intervene on Kashmir.
Does anyone really believe that a midwestern US politician cares about Kashmir? Burton and his constituents probably cannot even find Kashmir on a map!
India of course will politely say NO to Obama, about interfering in India's internal affairs. And Obama will have no option except to agree with India, because India is a sovereign state, of which Kashmir is an integral and inalienable part.
However, Obama will continue to play the US midterm election game on Kashmir, until approximately November 2, when Americans, including me, will vote.
For 60 years the US has pursued a superpower policy of INVASION, OCCUPATION, and EXPLOITATION in Brazil, Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador,, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Does anyone in the Valley think the US should be flying unmanned spy drones against so-called "militants" INSIDE the territory of Pakistan and Afghanistan? How many innocent Iraqi, Pakistani and Afghan civilians has the US killed in Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan? Are they not our sisters and brothers, our friends and neighbors?
INDIA, in sharp contrast to Pakistan, has NEVER EVER allowed even ONE US/CIA soldier/spy to ever be stationed anywhere on INDIA's territory.
Poor Pakistan has been a paid political prostitute (the real PPP!) of the US since the early 1950's of the John Foster Dulles State Department. Today, Pakistan has been so exploited by the US, Pakistan has become an international source of terror. Pak is most unfortunately a client-state (read slave) of the US/CIA, its land is overrun by US/NATO troops, who are far more powerful than the J&K police and Indian army,
The US is the #1 source of international terror in Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Having lived in the US for 45 years, I can credibly say that the US, in its foreign policy, is completely focused on predatory market-driven and geopolitical imperatives to secure resources, markets and geopolitical influence.
Saudi Arabia is the main supporter of the US, supplying cheap oil to the US consumer, so that medieval Saudi princes with a sharp eye on their personal wealth, can prevent democracy and human rights for the ordinary people of Saudi Arabia.
Meanwhile US consumers are happy driving their Hummers and SUVs (I use only public transportation in India, the US, everywhere, including of course the J&KSRTC, my favorite!),
With the subservience of Pakistan and connivance of Saudi Arabia, The US has now gained a foothold in South Asia so that it can control Iran and Russia for their oil and natural gas reserves.
Look at the FACTS.
Examine the EVIDENCE.
Wake up and smell the fumes of US/CIA invasion and occupation going on right now, right this minute, in South Asia.
Is that what aam janta Kashmiris need? Kashmiris deserve better than the opportunistic leaders they currently have.
They need to look more towards leaders like the J&K, RTI, we need to allow aam Kashmiris to lead themselves
Dr. Chithra KarunaKaran
City University of New York
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------------------------------
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Rising Kashmir copyrighted article
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/us-envoys-call-on-malik-2064.aspx
US envoys call on Malik
‘Obama should help resolve Kashmir dispute’
Ishfaq Ahmad Shah
Srinagar, Oct 03: Amid speculations of Kashmir being on the agenda of US President Barak Obama during his visit to India in November, two top US diplomats called upon Chairman Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, Muhammad Yasin Malik here on Sunday.
The two diplomats of US Embassy in New Delhi, Pushpinder Dhillion and Kailash Jha met the JKLF chief at the party headquarters. The meeting, which lasted for more than an hour, discussed several issues including the prevailing situation in the valley.
Briefing mediapersons after the meeting, Malik said he urged the diplomats to persuade Obama to use his influence over India and Pakistan to resolve Kashmir issue as per the aspirations of its people.
“I appealed the delegation that they should aware America and the world community that three Kashmiri generations have been consumed by the 63-year-old conflict and it is the duty of Obama and other world leaders to impress upon India and Pakistan to resolve the issue amicably,” he said.
Malik said he urged the delegation to recognize the transition of Kashmiri movement from violent to non-violent means.
“It was America which suggested change in our movement from violent to a non-violent mode. Now that we have changed the mode of our movement, the world community has still maintained a criminal silence,” he told the diplomats.
The JKLF chief said that if Obama and the world leaders fail to impress a resolution over Kashmir, the youth who are leading a peaceful agitation from the past four months will be forced to take up guns again.
“It is the moral and diplomatic responsibility of US to help resolve the Kashmir issue,” he added.
Meanwhile, the delegation which is on a three-day visit to the valley, is likely to hold meetings with Syed Ali Geelani and Mirwiaz Umar Farooq besides the civil society members.
As per sources, the delegation will also be meeting Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, Governor NN Vohra and other mainstream politicians.
Saturday, October 2, 2010
Let the Games Begin: Collective Sigh of Embarrassed Relief CWG 2010!
NYTimes Comment #40.
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 2nd, 2010
11:18 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
Let the Games Begin (collective sigh of embarrassed relief)
The fact is, India is finally, finally, finally ready to open the CWG Games, right on deadline.
Read the relentless, expose-bent, hard-hitting Indian media online.
India is ready. Just Barely. Finally.
So Jim Yardley's reporting is a trifle belated, understandably so.
Jim Yardley hits the nail on the head when he notes:
\"The answer, to many of those involved with the games, is that India’s political culture, if prized for its commitment to democracy, often seems unable to transcend its own dysfunction.\"
He adds:There were at least 21 governmental or quasi-governmental agencies involved in preparing for the Games, yet none were ultimately in charge, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to try to personally take command as things went awry in August. Analysts say the absence of a clear line of authority translated into an absence of urgency and accountability.
Moreover, crucial figures in organizing the games had almost no experience in staging international events and were products of an insular Indian political culture where cronyism and nepotism often trump competence. End of quote.
Yardley's right.
As an Indian, I can say from lived experience (and I am in India volunteering five months every year), that almost every task/ venture/enterprise, is fraught with needless and wasteful uncertainty, delays, obstructionism, red tapism, ineptness, corruption, lack of basic hygiene in public spaces, overcrowding, etc etc, whether it's a train trip from point A to Point B, 35 km apart, or a rocket launch by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), or in this case the organizing of the CWG.
India Exasperates, India Endures, India Improves, Incredible India!
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------
New York Times copyrighted article by Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
October 2nd, 2010
11:18 pm
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
Let the Games Begin (collective sigh of embarrassed relief)
The fact is, India is finally, finally, finally ready to open the CWG Games, right on deadline.
Read the relentless, expose-bent, hard-hitting Indian media online.
India is ready. Just Barely. Finally.
So Jim Yardley's reporting is a trifle belated, understandably so.
Jim Yardley hits the nail on the head when he notes:
\"The answer, to many of those involved with the games, is that India’s political culture, if prized for its commitment to democracy, often seems unable to transcend its own dysfunction.\"
He adds:There were at least 21 governmental or quasi-governmental agencies involved in preparing for the Games, yet none were ultimately in charge, forcing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to try to personally take command as things went awry in August. Analysts say the absence of a clear line of authority translated into an absence of urgency and accountability.
Moreover, crucial figures in organizing the games had almost no experience in staging international events and were products of an insular Indian political culture where cronyism and nepotism often trump competence. End of quote.
Yardley's right.
As an Indian, I can say from lived experience (and I am in India volunteering five months every year), that almost every task/ venture/enterprise, is fraught with needless and wasteful uncertainty, delays, obstructionism, red tapism, ineptness, corruption, lack of basic hygiene in public spaces, overcrowding, etc etc, whether it's a train trip from point A to Point B, 35 km apart, or a rocket launch by ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization), or in this case the organizing of the CWG.
India Exasperates, India Endures, India Improves, Incredible India!
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
--------------------------------------
New York Times copyrighted article by Jim Yardley and Hari Kumar
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/world/asia/03india.html
The Art of the Deal: Ayodhya, Babri & the Secular Beyond
It's Gandhiji's Birthday today. Gandhi Jayanti. Mohandas was born today. Cheers and salutations.
I started this blog on Gandhiji's birthday five years ago, beginning with a street protest against Hindu right wing religionists attempting to politicize an observance of Gandhi's birthday in New York City. In all humility try to make my life my message, as Gandhiji did for the inspiration of the entire world. On this celebratory day, I quote Einstein, when he noted upon hearing of Gandhi's death -- " “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”
It's a great day to discuss the debate the Ayodhya/Babri verdict.
---------------
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/babri-verdict-2008.aspx
I posted substantially this same comment (see below) on the website of the New York Times in response to an article by Jim Yardley, on the Ayodhya/Babri Allahabad High Court Verdict
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/asia/01india.html?scp=1&sq=babri&st=cse
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
September 30th, 2010
5:38 pm
Everybody gets something -- that's the Art of the Deal.
The Allahabad High Court has wisely, if laggardly, decided to apportion the Ayodhya/Babri site among the three contesting parties, the three direct stakeholders, so that each can have, at least part of what they sought to obtain.
The court has also shrewdly ordered a 3-month status quo, to allow the judgment to be discussed and debated locally and nationally without precipitous action by anyone.
The right to appeal the Allahabad High Court judgment to the Supreme Court is guaranteed to all three litigants in the suit.
Compromise, accommodation, equity and fairness are necessary to resolve a 600 year old blood and emotion-soaked contestation that is steeped in antiquity, myth, narrative, faith, conquest.
Is politics central to this judgment? Of course.
India now can continue, sometimes resolutely, usually stumbling, on its secular path, two steps forward -- one half-step back.
To be secular is to include, to become inclusive. To include is to become human, since we become human only through lifelong experiences as social beings.
A threatened Quran burning in the US did not make America less secular. The falling twin towers that crushed lives, dreams and exposed US neo-imperialism (non-inclusion of Palestinians as humans with full human rights, for example) in the so-called Middle East, did not make Americans, We the People, as a whole, less secular.
In India secularism is many many centuries older, more textured, more nuanced, more organic. In India, Secularism as a formal geopolitical strategy and governance ideal, begins with the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost SECULARIST and prime architect of open-court religious discourse, Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar. That same Akbar, in 1586, sent two Hindu Rajputs (yes there are Rajput Muslims and they bear testimony to South Asia's secular mosaic)to restive Kashmir (so, what's new!) to overthrow its Turki (Muslim) ruler. Akbar annexed Kashmir into Mughal India. Since then, no matter who has ruled Kashmir -- Dogras, Jats, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Brits -- Kashmir has been a territorially integral part of India. As it turns out, a critical reading yields the chronologically sequential fact that 1586, not 1947 is the date of Kashmir's union within India.
1586, not 1947.. A Mughal, a Muslim secured Kashmir for India! Jai Ho or something to that effect.
Jai Ho, to salute India's most recent as well as ancient tests of secularism in Kashmir and Allahabad. Extremists among Hindus and Muslims, will have a field day however, it does appear education and jobs, not faith and belief, are foremost in the minds of the polity. Secularism advances.
That's the lesson of Democracy as Lived Practice, especially secular democracy, that Democracy is an imperfect, fumbling, stumbling exercise in real time, all the while hewing to a (sometimes) unrealized ideal of freedom equality and fraternity for India's Muslims and Hindus -- and all the other faiths represented there.
Eyes on the Prize -- Secular Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------
Article is the copyrighted property of the New York Times
Indian Court Divides Disputed Ayodhya Holy Site
pic by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Hindu holy men awaiting a ruling Thursday on a site claimed by Hindus and by Muslims. More Photos »
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: September 30, 2010
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NEW DELHI — In a case that spanned centuries of religious history and languished in the legal system for six decades, an Indian court issued a historic ruling Thursday on the ownership of the country’s most disputed religious site by effectively handing down a split decision: granting part of the land to Hindus and another part to Muslims.
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The Lede Blog: Indian Judges Rule on a Matter of Faith (September 30, 2010)
Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press
Indian soldiers in front of a mosque in Mumbai on Thursday after a court ruled that a disputed holy site in Ayodhya that has set off bloody communal riots across the country in the past should be divided between the Hindu and Muslim communities. More Photos »
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Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press
An Indian Muslim walked past security personnel in Ayodhya, India, on Thursday More Photos »
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The unorthodox decision by a three-judge panel in the state of Uttar Pradesh provided a Solomonic resolution — if one likely to be appealed to India’s Supreme Court — to a case the authorities had feared might unleash religious violence across India.
Nearly 200,000 state and federal officers were deployed across Uttar Pradesh as a precaution, as almost every major political figure in the nation, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, appealed for calm and harmony.
The case was considered especially combustible because the contested site, in the city of Ayodhya, was the scene of a searing act of religious violence in 1992 when Hindu extremists tore down an ancient mosque known as the Babri Masjid on the property. The destruction sparked riots that spilled into the following year and have been blamed for about 2,000 deaths.
Yet that violence did not repeat itself on Thursday evening, as the Indian public absorbed the ruling with a calm that leaders framed as evidence of the nation’s maturation and commitment to religious tolerance.
“I have full faith in the people of India,” Mr. Singh said in a statement issued after the decision, even as he cautioned against “mischief makers.” “I also have full confidence in the traditions of secularism, brotherhood and tolerance of our great country.”
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which rose to national prominence in the 1990s partly because of its advocacy of rebuilding a Hindu temple on the contested site, issued a statement Thursday praising the public’s controlled response as “a new chapter for national integration and a new era for intercommunity relations.”
“The B.J.P. is gratified that the nation has received the verdict with maturity,” the statement added.
The unexpected decision to divide the property initially suggested a political solution as much as a legal one. But Harish Salve, a former solicitor general of India, said the court had apparently based its decision on historical accounts suggesting that for centuries Hindus and Muslims had worshiped together at the site before they were segregated during British rule in the 1850s.
With this legacy, the court concluded that the entire property should be considered jointly held by Muslims and Hindus and distributed under relevant Indian property statutes, Mr. Salve said, which divide contested properties on the principle of fairness.
“It looks pretty good,” Mr. Salve said, rating the decision as “9 points out of 10.”
Under the court’s ruling, two-thirds of the land will go to Hindu groups while the remaining third will be awarded to Muslims. Lawyers for Hindus and for Muslims expressed dissatisfaction and promised to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
“There is no reason of any loss of hope,” said Zafaryab Jilana, a lawyer representing one of the Muslim parties to the case, speaking on national television. “We do not agree with the formula of giving one-third of the land to Muslims.”
The case required the judicial panel to wade deeply into India’s contested religious history. Lawyers for Hindu groups had argued that the Ayodhya site was the birthplace of one of Hinduism’s most revered deities, Ram. They contended that a temple to Ram had existed on the site until it was demolished to make way for the Babri Masjid, constructed in the 16th century by India’s first Mughal ruler.
Soon after the judges read the decision in a closed hearing, lawyers rushed to hundreds of reporters waiting outside the courthouse in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. “The judgment is in favor of Hindus,” said H. S. Jain, a lawyer for one of the Hindu groups in the case. “The belief of Hindus that this is the birthplace of Ram is upheld.”
But each of the three judges issued a separate opinion, diverging in interpretation of certain facts, including over whether Ram was born precisely on the contested site. Yet the court did hand a significant victory to Hindus, who had argued that Ram was born beneath the central dome of the destroyed structure. That portion of the contested property was granted to Hindus as part of their two-thirds share, presumably to erect a new temple to Ram.
The original case was filed in 1950 and then expanded over the years as more parties claimed title to the property. The Indian government now controls the property, and the court ordered that the status quo remain intact for the next three months. Assuming both sides follow through with filing appeals to the Supreme Court, the case could continue indefinitely.
The initial quiet public response was a relief to Indian officials. Earlier, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, had predicted that the public would respect the court’s finding.
“I think India has moved on, young people have moved on,” he told the Indian news media.
The oldest plaintiff, Hashim Ansari, 90, a Muslim tailor who had prayed at the Babri Masjid as a boy, said he would not take part in any appeal. He joined the case in 1961 and had looked forward to a ruling as a matter of closure. He called Thursday’s decision a good judgment and hoped that efforts could soon begin to rebuild a mosque on the land granted to Muslims.
Of course, he added, the timing will depend on appeals.
“It took 60 years to get this decision,” he said by telephone. “I do not know how many years the Supreme Court will take. At least I could hear this judgment on my own. Will I hear the Supreme Court judgment from my grave?”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 1, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
---------------
Times of India copyright
Muslim Religious Leaders Respond
LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh's remarks that the Muslim community felt cheated by the Ayodhya title suit verdict has evoked sharp reaction from the community leaders, who dubbed it as "unwise" to make politically motivated statements at this time.
"The atmosphere at the national level has been positive with religious leaders of both the communities, political leadership as well as the media. It would not be wise if politically motivated statements which could vitiate communal harmony are issued now," said Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangimahli, the Naib Imam of Idgah and member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
He told PTI that it was heartening that "no one has so far shown immaturity... not even the Sangh Parivar and there should be restraint from now on to ensure that nothing is done which could give strength to fundamentalist forces."
He said though there is disappointment among the community over the verdict, it is in the larger interest of the country and communal harmony that restraint should be exercised.
Echoing Firangimahli's views, Maulana Mohammad Umer of Islami research institute Darul Musinnfeen termed Yadav's statement "ill-timed".
"Though he is expressing the views held by the community, the timing is not correct," Maulana Umer said.
Maulana Mohammad Mirza Athar of Shia Personal Law Board said that it was unbecoming of a senior leader like Mulayam Singh Yadav to issue such a statement at a time when everyone is trying their best to ensure peace and harmony.
"In a court case, there is bound to be one side on the losing side and after this verdict by the High Court, the option of approaching the Supreme Court or making an effort to resolve the issue through mutual understanding is still open and in this backdrop such statements are unnecessary," he said.
Noted Shia leader and member of the AIMPLB, Hamidul Hasan refused to comment on Yadav's statement, but appeal to everyone to desist from issuing statements which could hurt unity and peace of the country.
Maulana Mohammad Mushtaq of the All India Sunni Board asserted that none of the Muslim leaders have said anything adverse on the verdict.
"It is the time to ensure peace and communal harmony and an appeal in this regard was also made after the Firday prayers to not politicise the issue", Mohammad Mushtaq added.
The SP chief had yesterday said he was disappointed by the Ayodhya title suits verdict as he felt faith was given "priority" over legal procedures.
Read more: Mulayam's remark on Ayodhya verdict evokes sharp response from Muslim leaders - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6671581.cms#ixzz11DQ6kpzf
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I started this blog on Gandhiji's birthday five years ago, beginning with a street protest against Hindu right wing religionists attempting to politicize an observance of Gandhi's birthday in New York City. In all humility try to make my life my message, as Gandhiji did for the inspiration of the entire world. On this celebratory day, I quote Einstein, when he noted upon hearing of Gandhi's death -- " “Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood.”
It's a great day to discuss the debate the Ayodhya/Babri verdict.
---------------
http://www.risingkashmir.com/news/babri-verdict-2008.aspx
I posted substantially this same comment (see below) on the website of the New York Times in response to an article by Jim Yardley, on the Ayodhya/Babri Allahabad High Court Verdict
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/asia/01india.html?scp=1&sq=babri&st=cse
EthicalDemocracy
NYC
September 30th, 2010
5:38 pm
Everybody gets something -- that's the Art of the Deal.
The Allahabad High Court has wisely, if laggardly, decided to apportion the Ayodhya/Babri site among the three contesting parties, the three direct stakeholders, so that each can have, at least part of what they sought to obtain.
The court has also shrewdly ordered a 3-month status quo, to allow the judgment to be discussed and debated locally and nationally without precipitous action by anyone.
The right to appeal the Allahabad High Court judgment to the Supreme Court is guaranteed to all three litigants in the suit.
Compromise, accommodation, equity and fairness are necessary to resolve a 600 year old blood and emotion-soaked contestation that is steeped in antiquity, myth, narrative, faith, conquest.
Is politics central to this judgment? Of course.
India now can continue, sometimes resolutely, usually stumbling, on its secular path, two steps forward -- one half-step back.
To be secular is to include, to become inclusive. To include is to become human, since we become human only through lifelong experiences as social beings.
A threatened Quran burning in the US did not make America less secular. The falling twin towers that crushed lives, dreams and exposed US neo-imperialism (non-inclusion of Palestinians as humans with full human rights, for example) in the so-called Middle East, did not make Americans, We the People, as a whole, less secular.
In India secularism is many many centuries older, more textured, more nuanced, more organic. In India, Secularism as a formal geopolitical strategy and governance ideal, begins with the greatest of the Mughals, India's foremost SECULARIST and prime architect of open-court religious discourse, Jalaluddin Mohammad Akbar. That same Akbar, in 1586, sent two Hindu Rajputs (yes there are Rajput Muslims and they bear testimony to South Asia's secular mosaic)to restive Kashmir (so, what's new!) to overthrow its Turki (Muslim) ruler. Akbar annexed Kashmir into Mughal India. Since then, no matter who has ruled Kashmir -- Dogras, Jats, Sikhs, Hindus, Muslims, Brits -- Kashmir has been a territorially integral part of India. As it turns out, a critical reading yields the chronologically sequential fact that 1586, not 1947 is the date of Kashmir's union within India.
1586, not 1947.. A Mughal, a Muslim secured Kashmir for India! Jai Ho or something to that effect.
Jai Ho, to salute India's most recent as well as ancient tests of secularism in Kashmir and Allahabad. Extremists among Hindus and Muslims, will have a field day however, it does appear education and jobs, not faith and belief, are foremost in the minds of the polity. Secularism advances.
That's the lesson of Democracy as Lived Practice, especially secular democracy, that Democracy is an imperfect, fumbling, stumbling exercise in real time, all the while hewing to a (sometimes) unrealized ideal of freedom equality and fraternity for India's Muslims and Hindus -- and all the other faiths represented there.
Eyes on the Prize -- Secular Democracy.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
---------------
Article is the copyrighted property of the New York Times
Indian Court Divides Disputed Ayodhya Holy Site
pic by Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times
Hindu holy men awaiting a ruling Thursday on a site claimed by Hindus and by Muslims. More Photos »
By JIM YARDLEY
Published: September 30, 2010
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NEW DELHI — In a case that spanned centuries of religious history and languished in the legal system for six decades, an Indian court issued a historic ruling Thursday on the ownership of the country’s most disputed religious site by effectively handing down a split decision: granting part of the land to Hindus and another part to Muslims.
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The Lede Blog: Indian Judges Rule on a Matter of Faith (September 30, 2010)
Rajanish Kakade/Associated Press
Indian soldiers in front of a mosque in Mumbai on Thursday after a court ruled that a disputed holy site in Ayodhya that has set off bloody communal riots across the country in the past should be divided between the Hindu and Muslim communities. More Photos »
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Rajesh Kumar Singh/Associated Press
An Indian Muslim walked past security personnel in Ayodhya, India, on Thursday More Photos »
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The unorthodox decision by a three-judge panel in the state of Uttar Pradesh provided a Solomonic resolution — if one likely to be appealed to India’s Supreme Court — to a case the authorities had feared might unleash religious violence across India.
Nearly 200,000 state and federal officers were deployed across Uttar Pradesh as a precaution, as almost every major political figure in the nation, led by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, appealed for calm and harmony.
The case was considered especially combustible because the contested site, in the city of Ayodhya, was the scene of a searing act of religious violence in 1992 when Hindu extremists tore down an ancient mosque known as the Babri Masjid on the property. The destruction sparked riots that spilled into the following year and have been blamed for about 2,000 deaths.
Yet that violence did not repeat itself on Thursday evening, as the Indian public absorbed the ruling with a calm that leaders framed as evidence of the nation’s maturation and commitment to religious tolerance.
“I have full faith in the people of India,” Mr. Singh said in a statement issued after the decision, even as he cautioned against “mischief makers.” “I also have full confidence in the traditions of secularism, brotherhood and tolerance of our great country.”
The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., which rose to national prominence in the 1990s partly because of its advocacy of rebuilding a Hindu temple on the contested site, issued a statement Thursday praising the public’s controlled response as “a new chapter for national integration and a new era for intercommunity relations.”
“The B.J.P. is gratified that the nation has received the verdict with maturity,” the statement added.
The unexpected decision to divide the property initially suggested a political solution as much as a legal one. But Harish Salve, a former solicitor general of India, said the court had apparently based its decision on historical accounts suggesting that for centuries Hindus and Muslims had worshiped together at the site before they were segregated during British rule in the 1850s.
With this legacy, the court concluded that the entire property should be considered jointly held by Muslims and Hindus and distributed under relevant Indian property statutes, Mr. Salve said, which divide contested properties on the principle of fairness.
“It looks pretty good,” Mr. Salve said, rating the decision as “9 points out of 10.”
Under the court’s ruling, two-thirds of the land will go to Hindu groups while the remaining third will be awarded to Muslims. Lawyers for Hindus and for Muslims expressed dissatisfaction and promised to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
“There is no reason of any loss of hope,” said Zafaryab Jilana, a lawyer representing one of the Muslim parties to the case, speaking on national television. “We do not agree with the formula of giving one-third of the land to Muslims.”
The case required the judicial panel to wade deeply into India’s contested religious history. Lawyers for Hindu groups had argued that the Ayodhya site was the birthplace of one of Hinduism’s most revered deities, Ram. They contended that a temple to Ram had existed on the site until it was demolished to make way for the Babri Masjid, constructed in the 16th century by India’s first Mughal ruler.
Soon after the judges read the decision in a closed hearing, lawyers rushed to hundreds of reporters waiting outside the courthouse in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh. “The judgment is in favor of Hindus,” said H. S. Jain, a lawyer for one of the Hindu groups in the case. “The belief of Hindus that this is the birthplace of Ram is upheld.”
But each of the three judges issued a separate opinion, diverging in interpretation of certain facts, including over whether Ram was born precisely on the contested site. Yet the court did hand a significant victory to Hindus, who had argued that Ram was born beneath the central dome of the destroyed structure. That portion of the contested property was granted to Hindus as part of their two-thirds share, presumably to erect a new temple to Ram.
The original case was filed in 1950 and then expanded over the years as more parties claimed title to the property. The Indian government now controls the property, and the court ordered that the status quo remain intact for the next three months. Assuming both sides follow through with filing appeals to the Supreme Court, the case could continue indefinitely.
The initial quiet public response was a relief to Indian officials. Earlier, Palaniappan Chidambaram, the home minister, had predicted that the public would respect the court’s finding.
“I think India has moved on, young people have moved on,” he told the Indian news media.
The oldest plaintiff, Hashim Ansari, 90, a Muslim tailor who had prayed at the Babri Masjid as a boy, said he would not take part in any appeal. He joined the case in 1961 and had looked forward to a ruling as a matter of closure. He called Thursday’s decision a good judgment and hoped that efforts could soon begin to rebuild a mosque on the land granted to Muslims.
Of course, he added, the timing will depend on appeals.
“It took 60 years to get this decision,” he said by telephone. “I do not know how many years the Supreme Court will take. At least I could hear this judgment on my own. Will I hear the Supreme Court judgment from my grave?”
Hari Kumar contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 1, 2010, on page A4 of the New York edition.
---------------
Times of India copyright
Muslim Religious Leaders Respond
LUCKNOW: Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh's remarks that the Muslim community felt cheated by the Ayodhya title suit verdict has evoked sharp reaction from the community leaders, who dubbed it as "unwise" to make politically motivated statements at this time.
"The atmosphere at the national level has been positive with religious leaders of both the communities, political leadership as well as the media. It would not be wise if politically motivated statements which could vitiate communal harmony are issued now," said Maulana Khalid Rasheed Firangimahli, the Naib Imam of Idgah and member of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
He told PTI that it was heartening that "no one has so far shown immaturity... not even the Sangh Parivar and there should be restraint from now on to ensure that nothing is done which could give strength to fundamentalist forces."
He said though there is disappointment among the community over the verdict, it is in the larger interest of the country and communal harmony that restraint should be exercised.
Echoing Firangimahli's views, Maulana Mohammad Umer of Islami research institute Darul Musinnfeen termed Yadav's statement "ill-timed".
"Though he is expressing the views held by the community, the timing is not correct," Maulana Umer said.
Maulana Mohammad Mirza Athar of Shia Personal Law Board said that it was unbecoming of a senior leader like Mulayam Singh Yadav to issue such a statement at a time when everyone is trying their best to ensure peace and harmony.
"In a court case, there is bound to be one side on the losing side and after this verdict by the High Court, the option of approaching the Supreme Court or making an effort to resolve the issue through mutual understanding is still open and in this backdrop such statements are unnecessary," he said.
Noted Shia leader and member of the AIMPLB, Hamidul Hasan refused to comment on Yadav's statement, but appeal to everyone to desist from issuing statements which could hurt unity and peace of the country.
Maulana Mohammad Mushtaq of the All India Sunni Board asserted that none of the Muslim leaders have said anything adverse on the verdict.
"It is the time to ensure peace and communal harmony and an appeal in this regard was also made after the Firday prayers to not politicise the issue", Mohammad Mushtaq added.
The SP chief had yesterday said he was disappointed by the Ayodhya title suits verdict as he felt faith was given "priority" over legal procedures.
Read more: Mulayam's remark on Ayodhya verdict evokes sharp response from Muslim leaders - The Times of India http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6671581.cms#ixzz11DQ6kpzf
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Democracy, Diversity & The Public Sphere: Practising Citizenship in New York City
I am fortunate today, on my birthday no less, to actively participate in a lesson in Democracy, Diversity and how to participate in the Public Sphere, upon which the 2 D's mentioned here, are dependent.
I am taking a birthday run up to Fort Tryon in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan where I live. As I approach Fort Tryon Park I notice, aided by the dazzling spring sunlight, the thinnest line of clear picture or fishing wire strung up way, way above my head. I could easily have missed seeing it.
Flashback: Years ago I had happened to read about the practice by members of a certain Jews who "define" themselves as a community, by putting up such -- I am going to call them (note, this is my word, not theirs) -- 'encirclements'.
In any event, I approach a mini-truck carrying the NYC Parks Department decal on its door and I draw the driver's attention to the wire above. There are other persons in the Parks mini-truck.
I say "Can you see this wire?" At first they could not. So I say "Well if you step out you can see it really clearly." The driver steps out of the truck, while the other Parks employee accompanying him, leans out of her window and said "Oh yeah, now I see it."
I continue "I am not going to name the group that carries out this practice on a public road in a public area. I have nothing against this group and I have no reason to have anything against this or any other group. But I am pretty sure it is illegal for any person or group to string a wire above a public space to advance their own private beliefs."
The driver thinks a minute then says, "This is a diverse community. I am going to go right now to my supervisor and report it."
I say "NOW you get it." We hi-5.
[I'll add more to this blog entry when I find out more what happened as a result of this moment of ethical reckoning in the context of the diverse secular public sphere in a democracy].
Whether it is a woman in niqab driving on a public tax-paid road, or a group that strings wire on a public tax-paid road to indicate they are exclusive, the consequence is the same -- such acts are an unwarranted intrusion into the Public Sphere of participatory civil society in a diverse democracy.
We have no empirical evidence of any contemporary society, democratic or otherwise, from Rio to Riyadh that is not DIVERSE. Therefore it seems to me, public spaces cannot be constrained by exclusionary acts of persons and groups.
Happy Birthday to me. Today, I feel even more energized than I usually am.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
copyright owned by:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ritual/Shabbat_The_Sabbath/In_the_Community/Eruv.shtml
Sharonne Cohen is an Israeli-Canadian writer, editor, translator, and teacher. She currently lives in Montreal.
---
Shabbat is a day set apart from all others, differentiating between the sacred (kodesh) and the mundane (hol), between the work week and the day designated for rest, family, and spirituality. On Shabbat all activities associated with work are prohibited, and according to traditional Jewish law include formal employment as well as traveling, spending money, and carrying items outside the home, in the public domain.
shabbat eruvThe prohibition against carrying includes house keys, prayer books, canes or walkers, and even children who cannot walk on their own. Recognizing the difficulties this rule imposes, the sages of the Talmud devised a way to allow for carrying in public without breaking the rule. Through this means, called an eruv, communities are able to turn a large area into one that is considered, for Jewish law purposes, a large private domain, in which items may be carried.
What It Is
The term eruv refers to the act of mixing or combining, and is shorthand for eruv hazerot--the mixing of domains, in this case, the private (rashut hayahid) and the public (rashut harabim). An eruv does not allow for carrying items otherwise prohibited by Jewish law on Shabbat, such as money or cell phones.
Having an eruv does not mean that a city or neighborhood is enclosed entirely by a wall. Rather, the eruv can be comprised of a series of pre-existing structures (walls, fences, electrical poles and wires) and/or structures created expressly for the eruv, often a wire mounted on poles. In practice, then, the eruv is a symbolic demarcation of the private sphere, one that communities come together to create.
To many people, the eruv sounds like a legal fiction, a way to circumvent the spirit and possibly letter of the law against carrying. To them, the eruv risks making the entire Jewish legal process seem absurd to non-Jews and non-observant Jews.
The talmudic Rabbis, however, were concerned with maintaining the integrity of the halakhic (Jewish legal) system while ensuring that the law is livable. Though the eruv makes use of a legal technicality, the fact that it is used--rather than allowing people to just carry anything, anywhere--is itself considered a form of respect for and submission to a legal system that is central and indispensable to traditionalist Jewish life.
The eruv helps enhance an aspect of Shabbat that the Rabbis considered vital-- "oneg Shabbat," the injunction to enjoy the Sabbath. With an eruv, Shabbat events are available to all families--young and old, mobile and less mobile--and individuals are able to carry house keys, reading glasses, or books outside their homes.
How It Works
Public domains are defined by Jewish law as non-residential areas, including streets, thoroughfares, plazas (open areas), and highways. Private domains are residential areas, and were originally referred to as homes surrounded by a wall, considered closed off from the surrounding public domains.
A designated space may be considered a private domain only when several conditions are met: It must cover an area of at least 12 square feet and must be somehow demarcated from its surroundings--either by a wall of some kind or by its actual topography (it must be all lower or all higher than its surroundings). If a space is frequented by more than 600,000 people each day it is considered too big to turn "private" with an eruv (which is why a large city like New York cannot have a single eruv constructed around it, though individual neighborhoods do). And an eruv cannot encompass two separate public spaces, so for instance, it may not cross over a river that cuts through town.
When eruvim (the plural of eruv) or parts of eruvim are constructed (as opposed to using pre-existing structures), they generally consist of a wire surrounding the designated area. The eruv, therefore, is unlikely to be noticed except by those looking for it, which fulfills a talmudic guideline that the eruvbe an integral part of the city, as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible.
Despite its symbolic nature, the eruv is intended to mimic in some way the form of walls, which need doorways--defined as two posts with a crossbeam over them, strong enough to withstand an ordinary wind. The eruv likewise needs openings, consisting of crossbeams resting or passing directly over the top of the doorpost (lehi). This is how modern rabbis arrived at the solution of having the eruv be made of a wire: The poles holding up the wire represent the "doorposts," and the wire itself represents the "crossbeam."
Many communities construct their eruvim by using lighting (or utility) poles to fulfill the requirement of doorposts and a continuous cable, string, or wire to represent the crossbeam. In order for this arrangement to be acceptable, the "beam" must rest directly above the top of the doorposts. Since this is not typically the case with utility poles--where the cable is attached either to the side or to an element that is held away from the pole--communities often attach a thin rod to the pole to serve as a substitute for the doorpost.
In areas where poles and lines do not exist, new arrangements must be made. The design of an eruv can make use of existing fences, overhead wires, hillsides, buildings, bridges, and other means that may serve as indicators of the eruv boundaries. This often requires communities to obtain permission from the appropriate authorities and property owners, and to work with local governments, power, telephone, and cable companies--a lengthy and often difficult process.
Those who use an eruv are obliged to ensure that it is intact before carrying on Shabbat. In most cases there is a group that is responsible for maintaining the eruv, providing information regarding its status, conducting weekly inspections to ensure that it hasn't been damaged, and dispensing repair crews when necessary. Many communities provide current information regarding their eruv by phone (eruv hotlines) and the web. They also provide maps delineating the exact boundaries of the eruv. (While Orthodox and Conservative understandings of Jewish law recognizes the restrictions that make an eruv necessary, other denominations generally do not.)
There are hundreds of eruvim in communities throughout the Jewish Diaspora (the U.S, Europe, South Africa, Australia), and many more in Israel. The challenge for these communities is incorporating the eruv into the streets of their cities. They must conduct traffic density studies in order to ensure that the number of people frequenting the area does not exceed 600,000 on a given day, while attempting to make use of existing urban structures to avoid wherever possible the need to construct the entire eruv themselves.
Controversies
Unlike other religious Jewish practices, which usually take place within private spaces, the eruv places signs in the public sphere; several communities have, therefore, encountered difficulty, controversy, and even major public battles in their attempt to receive the necessary authorization from authorities to establish their eruv.
The proposal submitted in 1992 for the North London eruv, for example, was met with public uproar, and was refused by the Town Planning Committee on the grounds that it would constitute a disturbance of visual amenity. Following an appeal made to the Secretary of State for the Environment, who found that the construction of the poles in chosen sites did not present any legal complication, the initial refusal was reversed.
Another controversy surrounding an eruv occurred in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1999. Residents of the city debated the eruv in a religious context, arguing over the distinction between temporary and permanent accommodations, and raising the concept of neighborliness as the underlying nature of a community. Some argued that the eruv created a walled city, and compromised property rights and the separation of Church and State, while others asserted that the eruv is not only harmless, but is a positive contribution to the larger community.
In addition, there are other controversies regarding eruvim among Jews as well. Rabbis debate the nature and specifications of the eruv amongst themselves, attempting to ensure standards that fulfill all halakhic (Jewish law) requirements. Many secular Jews are concerned about increased interaction with Orthodox Jews if many new families move to a neighborhood because of the eruv; they fear they may face pressure to change their lifestyle and become more observant. A public discussion over a religious issue such as an eruv tends to bring up many fissures within Jewish communities, often leading to harsh battles between secular and observant Jews over Jewish practice in a modern, secular society.
The eruv has been referred to as "an invisible wall of freedom." It brings about social liberation and an increase in the potential for interaction within the public sphere. It has also been nicknamed--using the Yiddish word for carrying--"the magic schlepping circle." Since the social aspect of Shabbat is one of the most significant elements fostering community bonding, the eruv proves to be instrumental in enhancing the Shabbat experience, though disagreements and disputes surrounding its very nature and essence are likely to continue.
======================================================================================
I am taking a birthday run up to Fort Tryon in Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan where I live. As I approach Fort Tryon Park I notice, aided by the dazzling spring sunlight, the thinnest line of clear picture or fishing wire strung up way, way above my head. I could easily have missed seeing it.
Flashback: Years ago I had happened to read about the practice by members of a certain Jews who "define" themselves as a community, by putting up such -- I am going to call them (note, this is my word, not theirs) -- 'encirclements'.
In any event, I approach a mini-truck carrying the NYC Parks Department decal on its door and I draw the driver's attention to the wire above. There are other persons in the Parks mini-truck.
I say "Can you see this wire?" At first they could not. So I say "Well if you step out you can see it really clearly." The driver steps out of the truck, while the other Parks employee accompanying him, leans out of her window and said "Oh yeah, now I see it."
I continue "I am not going to name the group that carries out this practice on a public road in a public area. I have nothing against this group and I have no reason to have anything against this or any other group. But I am pretty sure it is illegal for any person or group to string a wire above a public space to advance their own private beliefs."
The driver thinks a minute then says, "This is a diverse community. I am going to go right now to my supervisor and report it."
I say "NOW you get it." We hi-5.
[I'll add more to this blog entry when I find out more what happened as a result of this moment of ethical reckoning in the context of the diverse secular public sphere in a democracy].
Whether it is a woman in niqab driving on a public tax-paid road, or a group that strings wire on a public tax-paid road to indicate they are exclusive, the consequence is the same -- such acts are an unwarranted intrusion into the Public Sphere of participatory civil society in a diverse democracy.
We have no empirical evidence of any contemporary society, democratic or otherwise, from Rio to Riyadh that is not DIVERSE. Therefore it seems to me, public spaces cannot be constrained by exclusionary acts of persons and groups.
Happy Birthday to me. Today, I feel even more energized than I usually am.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
copyright owned by:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com/practices/Ritual/Shabbat_The_Sabbath/In_the_Community/Eruv.shtml
Sharonne Cohen is an Israeli-Canadian writer, editor, translator, and teacher. She currently lives in Montreal.
---
Shabbat is a day set apart from all others, differentiating between the sacred (kodesh) and the mundane (hol), between the work week and the day designated for rest, family, and spirituality. On Shabbat all activities associated with work are prohibited, and according to traditional Jewish law include formal employment as well as traveling, spending money, and carrying items outside the home, in the public domain.
shabbat eruvThe prohibition against carrying includes house keys, prayer books, canes or walkers, and even children who cannot walk on their own. Recognizing the difficulties this rule imposes, the sages of the Talmud devised a way to allow for carrying in public without breaking the rule. Through this means, called an eruv, communities are able to turn a large area into one that is considered, for Jewish law purposes, a large private domain, in which items may be carried.
What It Is
The term eruv refers to the act of mixing or combining, and is shorthand for eruv hazerot--the mixing of domains, in this case, the private (rashut hayahid) and the public (rashut harabim). An eruv does not allow for carrying items otherwise prohibited by Jewish law on Shabbat, such as money or cell phones.
Having an eruv does not mean that a city or neighborhood is enclosed entirely by a wall. Rather, the eruv can be comprised of a series of pre-existing structures (walls, fences, electrical poles and wires) and/or structures created expressly for the eruv, often a wire mounted on poles. In practice, then, the eruv is a symbolic demarcation of the private sphere, one that communities come together to create.
To many people, the eruv sounds like a legal fiction, a way to circumvent the spirit and possibly letter of the law against carrying. To them, the eruv risks making the entire Jewish legal process seem absurd to non-Jews and non-observant Jews.
The talmudic Rabbis, however, were concerned with maintaining the integrity of the halakhic (Jewish legal) system while ensuring that the law is livable. Though the eruv makes use of a legal technicality, the fact that it is used--rather than allowing people to just carry anything, anywhere--is itself considered a form of respect for and submission to a legal system that is central and indispensable to traditionalist Jewish life.
The eruv helps enhance an aspect of Shabbat that the Rabbis considered vital-- "oneg Shabbat," the injunction to enjoy the Sabbath. With an eruv, Shabbat events are available to all families--young and old, mobile and less mobile--and individuals are able to carry house keys, reading glasses, or books outside their homes.
How It Works
Public domains are defined by Jewish law as non-residential areas, including streets, thoroughfares, plazas (open areas), and highways. Private domains are residential areas, and were originally referred to as homes surrounded by a wall, considered closed off from the surrounding public domains.
A designated space may be considered a private domain only when several conditions are met: It must cover an area of at least 12 square feet and must be somehow demarcated from its surroundings--either by a wall of some kind or by its actual topography (it must be all lower or all higher than its surroundings). If a space is frequented by more than 600,000 people each day it is considered too big to turn "private" with an eruv (which is why a large city like New York cannot have a single eruv constructed around it, though individual neighborhoods do). And an eruv cannot encompass two separate public spaces, so for instance, it may not cross over a river that cuts through town.
When eruvim (the plural of eruv) or parts of eruvim are constructed (as opposed to using pre-existing structures), they generally consist of a wire surrounding the designated area. The eruv, therefore, is unlikely to be noticed except by those looking for it, which fulfills a talmudic guideline that the eruvbe an integral part of the city, as unobtrusive and unnoticeable as possible.
Despite its symbolic nature, the eruv is intended to mimic in some way the form of walls, which need doorways--defined as two posts with a crossbeam over them, strong enough to withstand an ordinary wind. The eruv likewise needs openings, consisting of crossbeams resting or passing directly over the top of the doorpost (lehi). This is how modern rabbis arrived at the solution of having the eruv be made of a wire: The poles holding up the wire represent the "doorposts," and the wire itself represents the "crossbeam."
Many communities construct their eruvim by using lighting (or utility) poles to fulfill the requirement of doorposts and a continuous cable, string, or wire to represent the crossbeam. In order for this arrangement to be acceptable, the "beam" must rest directly above the top of the doorposts. Since this is not typically the case with utility poles--where the cable is attached either to the side or to an element that is held away from the pole--communities often attach a thin rod to the pole to serve as a substitute for the doorpost.
In areas where poles and lines do not exist, new arrangements must be made. The design of an eruv can make use of existing fences, overhead wires, hillsides, buildings, bridges, and other means that may serve as indicators of the eruv boundaries. This often requires communities to obtain permission from the appropriate authorities and property owners, and to work with local governments, power, telephone, and cable companies--a lengthy and often difficult process.
Those who use an eruv are obliged to ensure that it is intact before carrying on Shabbat. In most cases there is a group that is responsible for maintaining the eruv, providing information regarding its status, conducting weekly inspections to ensure that it hasn't been damaged, and dispensing repair crews when necessary. Many communities provide current information regarding their eruv by phone (eruv hotlines) and the web. They also provide maps delineating the exact boundaries of the eruv. (While Orthodox and Conservative understandings of Jewish law recognizes the restrictions that make an eruv necessary, other denominations generally do not.)
There are hundreds of eruvim in communities throughout the Jewish Diaspora (the U.S, Europe, South Africa, Australia), and many more in Israel. The challenge for these communities is incorporating the eruv into the streets of their cities. They must conduct traffic density studies in order to ensure that the number of people frequenting the area does not exceed 600,000 on a given day, while attempting to make use of existing urban structures to avoid wherever possible the need to construct the entire eruv themselves.
Controversies
Unlike other religious Jewish practices, which usually take place within private spaces, the eruv places signs in the public sphere; several communities have, therefore, encountered difficulty, controversy, and even major public battles in their attempt to receive the necessary authorization from authorities to establish their eruv.
The proposal submitted in 1992 for the North London eruv, for example, was met with public uproar, and was refused by the Town Planning Committee on the grounds that it would constitute a disturbance of visual amenity. Following an appeal made to the Secretary of State for the Environment, who found that the construction of the poles in chosen sites did not present any legal complication, the initial refusal was reversed.
Another controversy surrounding an eruv occurred in Palo Alto, California, in the summer of 1999. Residents of the city debated the eruv in a religious context, arguing over the distinction between temporary and permanent accommodations, and raising the concept of neighborliness as the underlying nature of a community. Some argued that the eruv created a walled city, and compromised property rights and the separation of Church and State, while others asserted that the eruv is not only harmless, but is a positive contribution to the larger community.
In addition, there are other controversies regarding eruvim among Jews as well. Rabbis debate the nature and specifications of the eruv amongst themselves, attempting to ensure standards that fulfill all halakhic (Jewish law) requirements. Many secular Jews are concerned about increased interaction with Orthodox Jews if many new families move to a neighborhood because of the eruv; they fear they may face pressure to change their lifestyle and become more observant. A public discussion over a religious issue such as an eruv tends to bring up many fissures within Jewish communities, often leading to harsh battles between secular and observant Jews over Jewish practice in a modern, secular society.
The eruv has been referred to as "an invisible wall of freedom." It brings about social liberation and an increase in the potential for interaction within the public sphere. It has also been nicknamed--using the Yiddish word for carrying--"the magic schlepping circle." Since the social aspect of Shabbat is one of the most significant elements fostering community bonding, the eruv proves to be instrumental in enhancing the Shabbat experience, though disagreements and disputes surrounding its very nature and essence are likely to continue.
======================================================================================
Sunday, May 9, 2010
A Tale of 2 Faisals -- and the Nation-States that Shaped them
Two Faisals -- one became a topper, the other a terrorist. How did this happen?
Thousands of Indians from all over the world sent messages of congratulation through newspapers, phone calls and sms, to a 28 year old doctor, Faesal Rasool Shah from Kashmir. Faesal topped the IAS exam conducted by the Union Public Service Commission.
Indians everywhere exulted at young Faisal's success.
Indians get to celebrate doctors -- not terrorists.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from an ETHICAL path chosen 65 years ago?
The scene shifts earlier in the very same week, to another Faisal, to an image of a smiling young man in designer sunglasses, Fisal Shahzad. But this time the young man, a Pakistani-American from an upper middle class, privileged, influential air force family has clumsily detonated a bomb in Times Square in the US, country of his adoption.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from a less- than-ethical path chosen by a colonized nation-state 65 years ago? A path that was forged against its own people? A path of destruction, bloodshed and an embittering border where none before had existed? Is young Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American the direct descendant in a six-decade history of Brit colonialism, Brit-driven Partition, Pakistan's puppet-state collusion with US neo-imperialism?
And that other more enduring and ever inspiring Faisal from India's Kashmir, how did he survive against tragic adversity? How did he accomplish excellence?
Which Nation-state withstood neo-imperialism of the US military-Corporate-Complex and produced a topper instead of a terrorist?
-----------
more....that's what a blog is for...reflection....
Thousands of Indians from all over the world sent messages of congratulation through newspapers, phone calls and sms, to a 28 year old doctor, Faesal Rasool Shah from Kashmir. Faesal topped the IAS exam conducted by the Union Public Service Commission.
Indians everywhere exulted at young Faisal's success.
Indians get to celebrate doctors -- not terrorists.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from an ETHICAL path chosen 65 years ago?
The scene shifts earlier in the very same week, to another Faisal, to an image of a smiling young man in designer sunglasses, Fisal Shahzad. But this time the young man, a Pakistani-American from an upper middle class, privileged, influential air force family has clumsily detonated a bomb in Times Square in the US, country of his adoption.
Q.How that did that chain of events materialize? Out of thin air? Or from a less- than-ethical path chosen by a colonized nation-state 65 years ago? A path that was forged against its own people? A path of destruction, bloodshed and an embittering border where none before had existed? Is young Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-American the direct descendant in a six-decade history of Brit colonialism, Brit-driven Partition, Pakistan's puppet-state collusion with US neo-imperialism?
And that other more enduring and ever inspiring Faisal from India's Kashmir, how did he survive against tragic adversity? How did he accomplish excellence?
Which Nation-state withstood neo-imperialism of the US military-Corporate-Complex and produced a topper instead of a terrorist?
-----------
more....that's what a blog is for...reflection....
Thursday, April 22, 2010
37.2%. A Number to Remember. A Number to Lower to ZERO.
37.2%. THIRTY-SEVEN point TWO PER CENT.
A Number to Remember. A Number to be Ashamed of.
A Number to be Repelled by.
A Number to Recoil from.
A Number to Lower to ZERO.
The India Government has finally admitted that more than ONE-THIRD of our entire population lives Below the Poverty Line. 400 Million children, women and men.
Millions more have died in previous decades from hunger, malnutrition, starvation and the diseases and disorders resulting from such horrific deprivation.
Now finally the heartlessly cynical netas, babus and armchair economists of the India Govt. at least on paper, have faced up to the grim facts.
37.2%. 400 million plus children, women and men.
But a number on paper is not enough.
We the People cannot rest until that figure reaches ZERO.
We the People cannot rest until 37.2 PLUMMETS to zero.
It must not take India another 63 years to make it zero.
37.2%
THIRTY-SEVEN point TWO PER CENT.
Now make it 0. NOW.
ZERO
Each One Feed One.
Each one Feed More. TODAY. NOW. ASAP.
Then India has a chance of becoming a DEMOCRACY worth the name.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------
http://www.righttofoodindia.org/
------------
infochangeindia.org copyright
India raises official poverty estimate
India’s Planning Commission has adopted the Suresh Tendulkar Committee’s methodology for poverty estimation, which includes spending on education and health, besides calorie intake, taking the number of the country’s poor to a whopping 37.2% from the 27.5% earlier estimated
After a lot of deliberation, the Indian government has concluded that it has around 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004. This was after the country’s top policy planning body raised its estimate of the nation’s official poverty rate to 37.2% of the population, from 27.5%, a key development as the government drafts legislation to give the poorest Indians a right to state-subsidised foodgrain.
The move by the Planning Commission, which wasn’t announced formally but was confirmed by a senior government official, pegs the number of Indians in poverty at around 410 million -- more than 100 million above the previous estimate.
The change comes after critics said the earlier poverty estimate left too many destitute households out of the government’s food entitlement programmes. But the new poverty figure is unlikely to please food activists and politicians who feel it still vastly underestimates the number of people in need of assistance.
The 37.2% poverty line is based on a new methodology recommended by a panel headed by former economic advisor Suresh Tendulkar, in a report submitted to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in December 2009. Although the report still has to be officially accepted, for the limited purposes of food security the Planning Commission agreed to Tendulkar’s recommendations at a recent meeting of its members.
The earlier definition of poverty was based on calorie intake, according to which only 27.5% of people were living below the poverty line and the number of BPL families was around 65 million. With the Plan panel accepting the Tendulkar methodology, 37.2% of the total population, or 81 million families, will be placed below the poverty line.
The new poverty estimate, which will reflect the impact of high growth recorded during the decade, will be available in 2011. Computation of the number of BPL families at this stage assumes significance in view of the government’s decision to enact a food security law under which 25 kg of foodgrain will be provided every month, at Rs 3 per kg, to every BPL family.
The Planning Commission, mandated by the empowered group of ministers, chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, to finalise the BPL numbers, will now meet the secretaries of food and expenditure to calculate the cost of providing food security to so many poor.
The burden on the central exchequer for implementing the food security law will depend on the number of BPL households and the quantity of subsidised foodgrain available with the government. Food subsidy stood at around Rs 72,000 crore in the last financial year.
“Two different poverty lines -- one for food security and the other for all other purposes -- for one country sounds odd. But this has been the most expedient solution for the time being,” said an official who did not wish to be named.
This will raise the number of those eligible for free food significantly -- but nobody’s sure how much. The widely quoted number is close to 10 crore families; some states put it at over 11 crore; the Planning Commission puts it somewhere between 7.5 and 8 crore. The worry is that it demonstrates, again, a dangerously halfhearted commitment to food security: dangerous because it will neither be abandoned nor effectively implemented, and the country could end up with a system that feeds too few and costs too much.
“This is a very low, suppressed poverty line. We reject it,” Kavita Srivastava, an activist who led a ‘right to food’ rally in the capital recently, said. “As far as we’re concerned, it still doesn’t tell us the real number of poor.”
Among the protesters at the rally was 50-year-old Kesar Sahu who lives in a slum in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, and supports herself and two daughters by sweeping floors and cutting vegetables at schools. The Rs 1,000 she earns in a good month isn’t enough to make do, even with existing government subsidies, she said. “We’re only getting 35 kg (of foodgrain) now. We really need 50 kg to get by. Everyone should get that much.”
Though India’s economy emerged from the global downturn with a solid gross domestic product growth of 7.2% in the year ended March 31, the country’s poor are struggling to deal with year-on-year food inflation that is hovering around 17%. Even before rising food prices, India was struggling with high malnutrition rates.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has pushed for legislation that will provide 25 kg of wheat and rice per month to households deemed officially below the poverty line. India already has a programme in place to distribute about 35 kg of subsidised foodgrain to poor households, but the rate is about 50% more expensive than what’s now being proposed.
Moreover, there is no law that guarantees food subsidies -- they are given at the central government’s discretion. And the current programme is plagued by corruption, with one-third of grain pilfered or rotting before it reaches needy households.
Experts say a third of the world’s poor are in India, living on less than $ 2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: The Indian Express, April 19, 2010
Press Trust of India, April 19, 2010
The Economic Times, April 18, 2010
Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2010
--------------------------------------
Economic Times copyright
NEW DELHI: India
now has 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004, according to official estimates released on Sunday.
The poverty rate has risen to 37.2 percent of the population from 27.5 percent in 2004, a change that will require the Congress-ruled government to spend more money on the poor.
The new estimate comes weeks after Sonia Gandhi, head of the Congress party, asked the government to revise a Food Security Bill to include more women, children and destitutes. [my emphasis added]
"The Planning Commission has accepted the report on poverty figures," Abhijit Sen, a member of the Planning Commission told Reuters, referring to the new poverty estimate report submitted by a government panel last December.
India now has 410 million people living below the U.N. estimated poverty line of $1.25 a day, 100 million more than was estimated earlier, officials said.
India calculates how much of its population is living below the poverty line by checking whether families can afford one square meal a day that meets minimum nutrition needs.
It was not immediately clear how much more the federal government would have to spend on the poor, as that would depend on the Food Security Bill when it is presented to the government after the necessary changes, officials say.
India's Planning Commission will meet the food and expenditure secretaries next week to estimate the cost aspects of the bill, government officials said.
A third of the world's poor are believed to be in India, living on less than $2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa
, experts say.
The government spends only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare facilities, forcing millions to struggle to get medicines, Oxfam and 62 other agencies said in a report called: "Your Money
or Your Life" last year.
While India's economy is slowly recovering from a global recession with a GDP growth of 7.2 percent, millions of poor in rural India are finding it difficult to cope with around 17 percent food price inflation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A Number to Remember. A Number to be Ashamed of.
A Number to be Repelled by.
A Number to Recoil from.
A Number to Lower to ZERO.
The India Government has finally admitted that more than ONE-THIRD of our entire population lives Below the Poverty Line. 400 Million children, women and men.
Millions more have died in previous decades from hunger, malnutrition, starvation and the diseases and disorders resulting from such horrific deprivation.
Now finally the heartlessly cynical netas, babus and armchair economists of the India Govt. at least on paper, have faced up to the grim facts.
37.2%. 400 million plus children, women and men.
But a number on paper is not enough.
We the People cannot rest until that figure reaches ZERO.
We the People cannot rest until 37.2 PLUMMETS to zero.
It must not take India another 63 years to make it zero.
37.2%
THIRTY-SEVEN point TWO PER CENT.
Now make it 0. NOW.
ZERO
Each One Feed One.
Each one Feed More. TODAY. NOW. ASAP.
Then India has a chance of becoming a DEMOCRACY worth the name.
Chithra KarunaKaran
Ethical Democracy As Lived Practice
http://EthicalDemocracy.blogspot.com
----------------
http://www.righttofoodindia.org/
------------
infochangeindia.org copyright
India raises official poverty estimate
India’s Planning Commission has adopted the Suresh Tendulkar Committee’s methodology for poverty estimation, which includes spending on education and health, besides calorie intake, taking the number of the country’s poor to a whopping 37.2% from the 27.5% earlier estimated
After a lot of deliberation, the Indian government has concluded that it has around 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004. This was after the country’s top policy planning body raised its estimate of the nation’s official poverty rate to 37.2% of the population, from 27.5%, a key development as the government drafts legislation to give the poorest Indians a right to state-subsidised foodgrain.
The move by the Planning Commission, which wasn’t announced formally but was confirmed by a senior government official, pegs the number of Indians in poverty at around 410 million -- more than 100 million above the previous estimate.
The change comes after critics said the earlier poverty estimate left too many destitute households out of the government’s food entitlement programmes. But the new poverty figure is unlikely to please food activists and politicians who feel it still vastly underestimates the number of people in need of assistance.
The 37.2% poverty line is based on a new methodology recommended by a panel headed by former economic advisor Suresh Tendulkar, in a report submitted to Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in December 2009. Although the report still has to be officially accepted, for the limited purposes of food security the Planning Commission agreed to Tendulkar’s recommendations at a recent meeting of its members.
The earlier definition of poverty was based on calorie intake, according to which only 27.5% of people were living below the poverty line and the number of BPL families was around 65 million. With the Plan panel accepting the Tendulkar methodology, 37.2% of the total population, or 81 million families, will be placed below the poverty line.
The new poverty estimate, which will reflect the impact of high growth recorded during the decade, will be available in 2011. Computation of the number of BPL families at this stage assumes significance in view of the government’s decision to enact a food security law under which 25 kg of foodgrain will be provided every month, at Rs 3 per kg, to every BPL family.
The Planning Commission, mandated by the empowered group of ministers, chaired by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, to finalise the BPL numbers, will now meet the secretaries of food and expenditure to calculate the cost of providing food security to so many poor.
The burden on the central exchequer for implementing the food security law will depend on the number of BPL households and the quantity of subsidised foodgrain available with the government. Food subsidy stood at around Rs 72,000 crore in the last financial year.
“Two different poverty lines -- one for food security and the other for all other purposes -- for one country sounds odd. But this has been the most expedient solution for the time being,” said an official who did not wish to be named.
This will raise the number of those eligible for free food significantly -- but nobody’s sure how much. The widely quoted number is close to 10 crore families; some states put it at over 11 crore; the Planning Commission puts it somewhere between 7.5 and 8 crore. The worry is that it demonstrates, again, a dangerously halfhearted commitment to food security: dangerous because it will neither be abandoned nor effectively implemented, and the country could end up with a system that feeds too few and costs too much.
“This is a very low, suppressed poverty line. We reject it,” Kavita Srivastava, an activist who led a ‘right to food’ rally in the capital recently, said. “As far as we’re concerned, it still doesn’t tell us the real number of poor.”
Among the protesters at the rally was 50-year-old Kesar Sahu who lives in a slum in Rajasthan’s capital, Jaipur, and supports herself and two daughters by sweeping floors and cutting vegetables at schools. The Rs 1,000 she earns in a good month isn’t enough to make do, even with existing government subsidies, she said. “We’re only getting 35 kg (of foodgrain) now. We really need 50 kg to get by. Everyone should get that much.”
Though India’s economy emerged from the global downturn with a solid gross domestic product growth of 7.2% in the year ended March 31, the country’s poor are struggling to deal with year-on-year food inflation that is hovering around 17%. Even before rising food prices, India was struggling with high malnutrition rates.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government has pushed for legislation that will provide 25 kg of wheat and rice per month to households deemed officially below the poverty line. India already has a programme in place to distribute about 35 kg of subsidised foodgrain to poor households, but the rate is about 50% more expensive than what’s now being proposed.
Moreover, there is no law that guarantees food subsidies -- they are given at the central government’s discretion. And the current programme is plagued by corruption, with one-third of grain pilfered or rotting before it reaches needy households.
Experts say a third of the world’s poor are in India, living on less than $ 2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Source: The Indian Express, April 19, 2010
Press Trust of India, April 19, 2010
The Economic Times, April 18, 2010
Wall Street Journal, April 18, 2010
--------------------------------------
Economic Times copyright
NEW DELHI: India
now has 100 million more people living below the poverty line than in 2004, according to official estimates released on Sunday.
The poverty rate has risen to 37.2 percent of the population from 27.5 percent in 2004, a change that will require the Congress-ruled government to spend more money on the poor.
The new estimate comes weeks after Sonia Gandhi, head of the Congress party, asked the government to revise a Food Security Bill to include more women, children and destitutes. [my emphasis added]
"The Planning Commission has accepted the report on poverty figures," Abhijit Sen, a member of the Planning Commission told Reuters, referring to the new poverty estimate report submitted by a government panel last December.
India now has 410 million people living below the U.N. estimated poverty line of $1.25 a day, 100 million more than was estimated earlier, officials said.
India calculates how much of its population is living below the poverty line by checking whether families can afford one square meal a day that meets minimum nutrition needs.
It was not immediately clear how much more the federal government would have to spend on the poor, as that would depend on the Food Security Bill when it is presented to the government after the necessary changes, officials say.
India's Planning Commission will meet the food and expenditure secretaries next week to estimate the cost aspects of the bill, government officials said.
A third of the world's poor are believed to be in India, living on less than $2 per day, worse than in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa
, experts say.
The government spends only 1 percent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on healthcare facilities, forcing millions to struggle to get medicines, Oxfam and 62 other agencies said in a report called: "Your Money
or Your Life" last year.
While India's economy is slowly recovering from a global recession with a GDP growth of 7.2 percent, millions of poor in rural India are finding it difficult to cope with around 17 percent food price inflation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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