Everyone’s blaming everyone for Scam Satyam.
What were the auditors (the hallowed PwC) doing?
What was SEBI doing?
What was India Inc doing?
What were Satyam’s ‘independent’ directors doing?
Not surprisingly, politicians are also being blamed.
Even the ‘greedy investors‘ are being blamed.
But is it only me or are there others asking: what was the Continue reading One small question about Scam Satyam
India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the Occupied Territories, Indonesia, Egypt, Jordan, USA, UK, Spain, the Russian Federation, to name a few, are a testimony to the cruel attacks on civilians and other human rights abuses in the recent past by non-state armed groups, including terrorist groups. They are showing utter disdain for the lives of civilians and others, continuing a pattern of serious crimes and crimes against humanity. They fail to abide by even the most basic standards of humanitarian law. The attacks and other abuses by armed groups are so frequent and the security situation so grave, that it is impossible to calculate with any confidence the true toll upon the civilian population, let alone the long term consequences that so many people inevitably suffer.
Guest post by ANUJ BHUWANIA
Recently the clamour for a draconian terror bill came to fruition with rare alacrity. The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment (UAPA) Bill was introduced and passed within two days by both houses of Parliament – quite a contrast to, say, the Women’s Reservation Bill, gathering dust now for more than a decade. Coming from a government that repealed POTA soon after it assumed power, the Bill unimaginatively mimics POTA almost entirely, revealing that little has been learnt from the recent history of TADA and POTA and the problems leading to their removal. While such statutes giving extraordinary powers to the police are introduced to cater to ‘exceptional’ situations, they can easily be deployed in ‘ordinary cases’ and indeed routinely are. The bleeding of one category into the other is inevitable, when the police alone decide which is which.
Oxford Book Store in Mumbai was visited by a cop about ten days ago, and offered a friendly caution to be “careful” about stocking books and CDs related to Pakistan, as the shop might be “targeted” after the recent terror strikes in Mumbai.
Trick question: The reason the cop dropped in was
a) to reassure the store that they would receive police protection in case such threats materialize
b) to pass on a message from Raj Thackeray
(Hint. Looks like there are two options, but there is only one)
On another first day, with its inevitable attempts to divide things into new and old at the end of all the “rapid change” that the world apparently is going through at every second of every news channel’s life, a [to me, lovely] reminder that times have not changed all that much:
Google reports that urban Indians top “how to” search in 2008 was “how to lose weight.” But, at number two, shyly sneaking in was: “how to kiss.”
now there is something worth learning in 2009.
Ashish Sinha in Mail Today:
Any political decision on Kashmir — especially when the ball is in the Congress’s court — cannot afford to ignore the sentiments of lakhs of troops stationed here because, at least for now, they appear to be a more permanent fixture than any party, even the National Conference (NC). [Full text]
And Siddharth Varadarajan asks the right question:
But if these motives propelled the ISI to either mount or at best turn a blind eye to the Mumbai plot, why did the same agency — which essentially manages Rawalpindi’s links with militant groups active in Jammu and Kashmir — not seek to disrupt the assembly elections? [Here]
We are all aware of the terrible toll of unarmed civilian casualties caused by the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces) air strike on Gaza a few days ago. It demonstrates yet again the willingness of those who currently hold power in Israeli to sabotage the chances of a lasting and durable peace with the Palestinian people. There is no other way to describe these air strikes other than as acts of gross state terrorism. Bombing unarmed civilians from the skies, including children is not a solution or an answer to terrorism. It is terrorism.
Of course, Hamas, (which controls the West Bank, and whose origins lie in the cultivation by Israel of an ‘Islamist Opposition’ within the Palestinian ranks in the eighties and earlier ) with its own obduracy has contributed to the ‘blowback’ that holds the peace process in Israel-Palestine hostage to a never ending cycle of competitive retribution.
Shock, Awe and Lies: The Truth Behind the Israeli Attack on Gaza by Chris Floyd
DEMONSTRATION IN TEL AVIV AGAINST THE ISRAELI ATTACK
Award winning American journalist, Chris Floyd, author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Regime, writes:
Here is a simple, stone cold fact. You cannot read or hear the truth about what is happening in Gaza from any corporate media in the United States. The only thing you will find there are regurgitations of Israeli spin, which are themselves only regurgitations of the kind of spin that American militarists have put on their own depredations — for centuries now….”
“This is of course a damnable and deliberate lie. Papers in Israel — in Israel, but not the United States — are reporting the truth: the murderous assault on Gaza was planned not only before the six-month ceasefire ended — it was planned before the cease-fire even took effect.
Guest post by K
In the summer of 2008, something impossible happened. To a number of Indians, Kashmir was no longer an atoot ung, an inseparable part of the Indian body politic. That image of Kashmir treacherously manufactured by the Indian state through lies, deceit and the media, was wearing down.
The atoot ung no longer seemed atoot to many voices in India and against all odds the people of Kashmir were changing many hearts and minds in India. The loss of soldiers does not worry India as much as the change in its public opinion on Kashmir. This had to be undone, and undone fast before it spread its tentacles. The evil image of Kashmiris had to emphasized and the non-violent protests discredited. What better than an election to do the task?
So the results will be out tomorrow, but do they matter? Continue reading Oranges in Kashmir
This guest post has been sent by IMRANA QADEER and MARY E. JOHN
Surrogacy is suddenly front-page news. First there was the uncertain future of baby Manji, following the divorce of her Japanese commissioning parents; then the happy pictures of an Israeli gay couple with their son born to a Bombay-based surrogate mother. India is becoming a cheap location for foreigners wanting to use ‘assisted reproductive technologies’ (ART) and local clinics are promoting surrogacy arrangements because they are seen as lucrative ventures. While there is hardly any public debate on the ethical, social, epidemiological and medical questions around infertility and surrogacy, the extremely problematic ART Regulatory Bill (2008) is being hurried through. It barely addresses important concerns and ignores national health and population norms. It permits, for instance, three surrogate pregnancies to a woman.
Continue reading Surrogacy Politics: Imrana Qadeer & Mary E. John
Guest Post by MONOBINA GUPTA
It is jarring, to put it mildly, that Times of India, a leading daily, engaged in a high-profile ‘Teach India’ campaign should publish a front page story mocking the unlettered. This story exhibits a strange callousness in its reporting about the very constituency of people the campaign is hoping to address…or ‘uplift’…
The story published in the TOI on December 20, smacks of arrogance as it speaks disdainfully of an unlettered woman legislator recently elected in Rajasthan’s assembly elections. Golma Devi, elected from the Mahuwa constituency is the butt of ridicule and lament in this article authored by P J Joychen. The author, it seems, cannot get over the fact that an unlettered person like Golma Devi has been elevated to the rank of a minister in the Ashok Gehlot government.
No, she is not a history sheeter; nor does she have a scam hot on her heels. She is nevertheless an offender – in the sense of ‘offending’ your ‘sensibilities’ – in the supercilious eye of the media; an object of ridicule. Her offense: her of lack of reading and writing skills.
Continue reading Families and Dynasties, Lettered and Unlettered – Monobina Gupta
Alas, the video has been removed fromYouTube.
I have asked two colleagues who have been working on civil liberties in the war against terror to do an analysis of the Amendment to the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the National Investigation Agency Act, and its implications. But in the meanwhile, here is a useful analysis by Rajeev Dhavan where he describes the amendment as a return of POTA and TADA. As if to fulfill Shuddha’s prophecies, the government according to Dhavan has created a law where everyone is suspect
After months in pre-trial detention under brutal investigation, the police will extract even untruths. The Bill casts a shadow on all of us. It is founded on the principle that everyone is suspicious or a suspect, with no fine distinction between the two. We are creating a suspicious state to empower suspicious officials and citizenry to act suspiciously against any supposed suspect. This Bill goes further than TADA or POTA in its creation of a suspicious state. India must fight terrorism, but the last thing India wants to be is a terrorist anti-terrorist state. – Rajeev Dhavan Continue reading Rajeev Dhavan on The Unlawful Activities Prevention Act
This is a guest post by PRASANTA CHAKRAVARTY
[Dissidence comes along with responsibility. If that sounds an utter sell out, one has to look back no further than the career and oeuvre of John Milton, whose 400th Anniversary is being celebrated around the world.]
Students of English literature usually do not prefer meddling too much with politics, especially if that comes in the way of appreciating the hermeneutics of the text, the lyricism set aside for the work of art. Sophisticated scholars have learnt to deftly negotiate and work with Marxism, new historicism and cultural criticism, without compromising on the finer points of close reading. They have also welcomed areas like textual studies and performance and newer genres like memoirs, broadsheets, travelogues, petitions, graphic fiction and so forth within the critical ambit with a careful eye that such forays do not destabilize the Great Book tradition. Students of politics and the political, on the other hand, have a certain distrust for soft aesthetic options. In one interesting recent interview, James Scott, who routinely uses Zola and Tolstoy in his classes and works, lamented in jest on his status at the Yale Political Science Department as an outlier, blaming it onto the ascendancy and monopoly of formal and rational choice models in the discipline.
Continue reading John Milton Takes a Stand? Prasanta Chakravarty
The bloody terror attack in Bombay, which was supposedly directed by the dreaded Lashkar-e-Toiba, has had an interesting fallout as far as Mossad – the notorious intelligence agency of Israel – is concerned. One finds its growing mention in the Indian media as well as polity as a role model supposedly for ‘being successful’ in ‘curbing the terrorist menace’ inside Israel.
Little did all such ignoramuses ranging from the Barkhas to the Arnabs bother to know the fifty plus year old trajectory of the organisation which is formally responsible for intelligence collection but basically engaged in counter-terrorism, covert operations and paramilitary activities and political assassinations.One could say that it is part of amnesia that none from the chatterati brigade wants to take a critical as well as dispassionate look at its ‘myth of success’ vis-a-vis the Palestinian militants nor do they want know the terrorist acts engaged in by the agency to stigmatise its opponents.
The Indian media has been expressing surprise about the high voter turnouts in the Kashmir elections. The expression of surprise sounds genuine. I am not sure how genuine it is. Is patriotism coming in the way of truth? How can we not see what a Wall Street Journal reporter can?
In the village of Samboora, residents said that Indian Army troops went from house to house on Saturday morning, rounding up families and taking them to a polling station. As a reporter drove into the village Saturday afternoon, an army vehicle with several soldiers stopped by the walled compound of Ghulam Mohammad, pulling the 59-year-old retiree onto the road. Seeing a foreign reporter, the soldiers jumped into their vehicle and quickly drove off. “They asked me why I’m not voting, and I said that’s because I don’t like any of the candidates,” Mr. Mohammad said moments later. “They said, if I don’t vote, I’ll be sorry later.” [Must Read]
A phone in poll today on CNN-IBN’s Face the Nation:
Should human rights take a back-seat in favour of tougher terror laws?
65% say Yes!
Thus speaketh the great Indian middle-class- Enough is enough!
Statement by the South Asia Solidarity Initiative (SASI) at ‘After Mumbai, Which Way Forward? A Public Dialogue’, City University of New York Graduate Center, New York, December 15th, 2008. Co-sponsored by The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, The Brecht Forum and SALAAM Theatre.
Let Us Not Forget
Like many in South Asia, we watched with anguish as nearly 180 people of different castes, classes, religions and nationalities lost their lives in the events in Mumbai that unfolded over several days. We mourn their loss in this large tragedy and condemn the perpetration of such terrible violence. We also express solidarity with those intrepid groups and individuals who have tirelessly sought to build deep-roots of social, political, economic and cultural understanding for peace and justice in South Asia. At this moment, we call for reflection on recent histories of South Asia and the world. Hence lessons may be drawn, collective action contemplated and spaces of hope created from the debris of despondency. Continue reading Let Us Not Forget – South Asia Solidarity Initiative
With utmost seriousness, the news clip replays the incident twelve times for our viewing pleasure, while the ‘LIVE’ on the top right-hand of the screen glints promisingly. Ah yes gentle reader, if wishes were horses… The Guardian helpfully accompanies the clip with cultural commentary for its readers, just in case we were in any doubt as to the symbolic significance of the action:
In the Arab world, throwing shoes at somebody is considered a serious insult, as is even showing them the soles of one’s footwear, as demonstrated by jubilant Iraqis towards the statue of Saddam Hussein as it was toppled in Baghdad during the 2003 invasion.
Always good to be up on native customs in the global village.
Strategically speaking, that is. It is important to think this question through.
For one, there’s hardly anybody disputing that the Lashkar-e-Tayebba was behind the attack. Pakistan wants evidence, but doesn’t deny the LeT could be it.
Parvez Hoodbhoy says in an interview:
LeT, one of the largest militant groups in Pakistan, was established over 15 years ago. It was supported by the Pakistani military and the ISI because it focussed upon fighting Indian rule in Muslim Kashmir. Today it is one of the very few extremist groups left that do not attack the military and the ISI; Continue reading Looking Kabul, talking Rawalpindi?
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
