ei: Speaking out on Kashmir and Palestine in the US - 0 views
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After my presentation at the main public library in San Jose, California last month, I was told by one member of the audience that "You are the very reason why we Hindus hate Muslims," and that comment was followed by many that were worse. I was called an extremist and told "Your presentation is a lie; this is India-bashing." The abuse I received will be familiar to those who have been on the receiving end of the backlash when speaking about the Palestinian cause.
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Kashmir is the most militarized zone in the world with close to 700,000 Indian troops. According to Professor Angana Chatterji of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), between the years of 1989 and 2000, "In Kashmir, 70,000 are dead, over 8,000 have been disappeared and 250,000 have been displaced ... India's military governance penetrates every facet of life. ... The hyper-presence of militarization forms a graphic shroud over Kashmir: detention and interrogation centers, army cantonments, abandoned buildings, bullet holes, bunkers and watchtowers, detour signs, deserted public squares, armed personnel, counter-insurgents and vehicular and electronic espionage" ("Kashmir: A Time For Freedom," Greater Kashmir, 25 September 2010).
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Chatterji told me: "I was threatened with rape by Hindutva groups in 2005. Since announcing the Kashmir Tribunal in April 2008, each time I have entered or left India since, I have been stopped or detained at immigration." Richard Shapiro, her partner and chair and associate professor at CIIS, was banned from entering India on 1 November 2010.
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The Hindu : News / National : Shun violence, come for talks: Manmohan to Kashmiri youth - 0 views
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In a firm message, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today asked agitating Kashmiri youth to end violence saying it would not benefit anyone even as he offered to carry forward the dialogue process within the framework of the state being an integral part of India.
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Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today asked agitating Kashmiri youth to end violence
The Hindu : News / National : Indian warships on goodwill visit to Africa - 0 views
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Four Indian warships - INS Mysore, INS Tabar, INS Ganga and INS Aditya - have been deployed on a goodwill visit to several maritime nations of Africa and the Indian Ocean.
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Four Indian warships - INS Mysore, INS Tabar, INS Ganga and INS Aditya - have been deployed on a goodwill visit to several maritime nations of Africa and the Indian Ocean. The warships will hold naval exercises with the navies and coast guards of Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, Seychelles and Mauritius besides making port calls at Reunion Island and Mozambique, a defence spokesperson said.
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The visit will also include the biennial naval exercise ‘IBSAMAR’ among the navies of India, Brazil and South Africa.
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The Second Green Revolution: A Blue-Print to Control India's Agriculture - Indo-US Trea... - 0 views
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As prescribed by the US based IMF and World Bank, India also undertook ‘structural adjustment’ programme. This had a two-fold effect: on the one hand it resulted in diminishing governmental spending, reduction of subsidies in different social welfare projects, divestment and privatization, while on the other hand it eliminated all hurdles to monopolistic capital to take over the production in the country.
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In effect, the entire country is being sold in pieces to private capital, resulting in widespread social inequity, hunger, poverty and starvation.
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According to Forbes magazine, the number of trillionaires in India jumped from 27 to 52 just in the year 2006-07. In a recent article Forbes also informs that 56 Indian firms figure in its elite list of 2000 multinationals
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BBC News - Sri Lanka's historic Jaffna library 'vandalised' - 0 views
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Information does not flow freely from northern Sri Lanka, but sources in Jaffna say a large group of tourists from the ethnic majority Sinhalese community arrived in buses from the south and asked permission to enter the facility on 23 October. Guards tried to turn them away as the library was hosting a medical seminar. The tourists reacted by running amok, breaking some of the shelves and throwing books on the ground.
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The Sri Lankan president's office said there was no "attack" on the library but did not deny reports of an "altercation" there.
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Some local Tamils resent the overcrowding and what they see as a triumphalist attitude in some of the visitors. But Sinhalese people say they need not apologise for visiting all parts of the reunified island.
Obama Is Not Likely to Push India Hard on Pakistan - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Senior American military commanders have sought to press India to formally disavow an obscure military doctrine that they contend is fueling tensions between India and Pakistan and hindering the American war effort in Afghanistan. But with President Obama arriving in India on Saturday for a closely watched three-day visit, administration officials said they did not expect him to broach the subject of the doctrine, known informally as Cold Start. At the most, these officials predicted, Mr. Obama will quietly encourage India’s leaders to do what they can to cool tensions between these nuclear-armed neighbors. That would be a victory for India, which denies the very existence of Cold Start, a plan to deploy new ground forces that could strike inside Pakistan quickly in the event of a conflict.
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It is also a victory for those in the administration who agree that the United States and India should focus on broader concerns, including commercial ties, military sales, climate change and regional security. However vital the Afghan war effort, officials said, it has lost out in the internal debate to priorities like American jobs and the rising role of China.
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The two countries are expected to sign a $5.8 billion deal to supply Boeing C-17 transport planes to the Indian military, one of several lucrative multiyear agreements to supply India with military hardware. The United States is eager to strengthen military ties with India, partly to make it a counterweight to China, which is flexing its muscles militarily and economically
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India and America Improve Relations From the Bottom Up | Anand Giridharadas - Columnist... - 0 views
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The man appeared closer in age to his first shave than to fatherhood. My memory has him slouching in the chair. I succumbed to the temptation of a current-events joke: The A380 was in the news those days for falling behind on the production schedule. Smiling, I asked the man whether he was to blame for the delay. “Actually, sir,” he replied, “if they had outsourced the whole plane to us, it would have been finished early.” There was something distinctly un-Indian about a response like this. An unmistakable whiff of America had gotten into him. The young man’s parents probably wouldn’t have spoken in that way; they might have found such talk disrespectful and tempting of fate. But what was Indian and un-Indian was changing, and such verve, confidence, self-belief were contagious among the globalized, upwardly mobile young.
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During the visit, Mr. Obama repeatedly described the Indian-American bond as “the defining partnership of the 21st century.”
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The case of India and the United States reveals what is true of many other cases as well: Beneath the summitry and state dinners and trade deals, there is a gradual human weaving through which two countries sensitize themselves to each other, inspire and learn from each other, laugh at and argue with each other, mimic each other’s fashions and management philosophies, discover each other’s pressure points.
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Of course, the author ignores the fact that this "weaving together" involves, at best, a small fraction of Indian society, the urban elite and middle classes. Who else, after all, is involved in "mimicking each others' fashions and management philosophies"? The notion that the experiences of this segment of the population speaks for the country as a whole is easily recognizable as the rhetorical sleight-of-hand of nationalist discourse.
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Dilemmas of 'Right of Nations to Self Determination': Rohini Hensman « Kafila - 0 views
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Lenin, starting from his experience in imperialist Russia, insisted on the right of nations like the Ukraine to self-determination (in the sense of their right to form separate states), contending that denial of this right would merely strengthen Great Russian nationalism.
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In a colonial situation, Lenin was surely right. When a country is under foreign occupation, all sections other than a very small number of collaborators want to be free of the occupiers, even if there are sharp differences between these sections.
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A striking example is RAWA (the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) which, despite speaking for a section of the population which is sorely oppressed by the Taliban, and continuing to fight against it, nonetheless shares with the latter the goal of ending the occupation by US and NATO forces.
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Pakistan: Rescuing a Drowning State - 2 views
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The floods in Pakistan are a humanitarian disaster of massive proportions, yet international assistance has been slow to come due to the purported lack of credibility of the State. The Pakistani state has been weakened over decades of abuse, in which the west has been complicit. Today this is being used to further discredit and weaken the State, a course which will only strengthen the military establishment and the militants. The international community should understand that aid needs to be given in large amounts and in ways which reinforce the legitimacy of the State.
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A strange argument, which seems to erect an artificial Chinese wall between the Pakistani state and the military.
Floods, Islamophobia, and Apathy « P U L S E - 0 views
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The response of the West has been less than generous causing panic in Islamabad with pro-US journalists in the country pleading that if help is not forthcoming the terrorists might take over the country. This is nonsense. The Pakistani Army is firmly in control of the flood-relief effort. The religious groups and others too are raising money and helping the homeless. It’s normal.
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Since 9/11 a rampant Islamophobia has gripped Europe and parts of North America. A recent opinion-poll in “multicultural Britain” revealed that when asked what their first thought was on hearing the word “Islam” over fifty percent replied “Terrorist”. France and Germany, Holland and Denmark, are no different. This treatment of Islam as the permanent “other” is not unrelated to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the attitude is as wrong as the anti-Semitism that ignited prejudice and genocide during the first half of the 20th century. A million Iraqis dead since the occupation: Who cares? Afghan civilians dying every day: It’s their own fault. Pakistani engulfed in floodwaters. Indifference. That is undoubtedly one reason for the lack of response.
The Hindu : News / National : Govt. rejects environment clearance to Vedanta - 0 views
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Government on Tuesday rejected environment clearance to U.K. based Vedanta’s USD 1.7 billion bauxite mining project proposed in Orissa citing serious violation of forest and environment laws.
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Dismissing reports that rejection was a sort of deal in lieu of clearance to the Korean steel giant Posco’s proposed Rs 54,000-crore project in the State, Mr. Ramesh said that the two cannot be equated as the violations of forest dwellers by the latter at the site were also being investigated.
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The stalling of the project has come at a time when Vedanta Resources is facing legal trouble in its bid for control of Cairn India, a potential deal valued at USD 9.6 billion that will push its stake in the oil market.
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The Future of Kashmir? - 0 views
Books of The Times - 'Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb' - NYTimes... - 0 views
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In part it’s a deft survey of post-9/11 art, from its fiction and nonfiction (Mr. Kumar appears to have read everything) to its foreign films and obscure works of performance art.
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At its heart, however, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb” — the excellent title is a riff on the title of Edmond Jabès’s 1993 book, “A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book” — is about the ordinary men and women, brown-skinned in general and Muslim in particular, who have had their lives upended by America’s enraged security apparatus.
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“Rightly or wrongly, I’m caught by the drama of the displaced provincial, the impoverished youth finding himself in the house of wealth,”
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Protest against Operation Green Hunt « New Red Indian - 1 views
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NEW YORK CITY – Sanhati, and other organizations and individuals, are organizing a protest against the Indian government’s insidious war, named “Operation Green Hunt,” which has been unleashed on the inhabitants of the forested regions of East-Central India. The protest will approximately coincide with Indian Independence Day (August 15) to emphasize that the promises of independence have remain largely unfulfilled for a large section of the population, including the tribal peoples.
BBC News - Pakistan floods 'a catastrophe, that's no overstatement' - 0 views
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A terrible tragedy is unfolding in the very place where the world's largest powers have gathered huge numbers of troops, helicopters, equipment, food, water.... all of which is being expended on bombing Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands face a catastrophe, while the imperial overlords of the world bomb them first, then make a show of "international aid" to grab headlines. This is disgusting.
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