In July 2013, European Parliament identified the Wahhabi movement as the source of global terrorism and a threat to traditional and diverse Muslim cultures of the whole world. The Wahhabi cult was a creation of the British. It should make Muslims happy that the EU Parliament has identified not all Muslims as terrorists, but Wahhabis. Al Qaeda was a US creati...
“Special efforts will be made to ensure that Kashmiri Pandits return to the land of their ancestors with full dignity, security and assured livelihood”. These are the words of the President of India (para 20 of address) to the joint sitting of Parliament. It is not only a statement of intent but reveals the basic thought process of the Government of India to...
Agriculture in India is ceasing to be a profitable enterprise. The most unfortunate part is the growing distress among the farmers, who are responsible for our food security. Incidences of farmers’ suicides remain high and previous governments did little to redress farmers’ woos. The latest reliable data available on farm suicides shows 13,754 reported...
There is trouble brewing on Tamil shores, with shock waves being felt across Palk Strait too. At the core of the problem are the twin terror trails that are becoming more discernible. Analysis of recent terror activities in Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka lend credence to their presence. One relates to the Indian jehadi network and the other to the LTTE’s overseas ...
Current events in Ukraine are guided by the evil spirit of fascism and Nazism, though it seemed to have dissipated long ago, after World War II. Seventy years after the war, the genie has escaped from the bottle once again, posing a threat not merely in the form of the insignia and rhetoric of Hitler’s henchmen, but also through an obsessive Drang nach Osten...
Events in Iraq over the past week were perhaps best crystallized in a series of photos produced by the jihadist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Sensationally called The Destruction of Sykes-Picot, the pictures confirmed the group’s intent to upend nearly a century of history in the Middle East.
In a series of pictures set to a purring jihadi...
“The events that are taking place in Iraq are an illustration of a complete failure of the venture started by the US and the UK that allowed it to spiral out of control completely” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently told journalists.
Mr. Lavrov, I’m sure, knows better and is merely speaking for the press regarding the stated goals of the Iraq w...
Bodu Bala Sena general secretary Galagodaaththe Gnanasara Thero addressing the rally in Aluthgama yesterday, referred to Muslims in derogatory terms and accused sections of the Government of being in collaboration with the Muslim community. “They keep calling us racist and religious extremists. Yes, we are racists,” he charged as the crowd cheered him on. “T...
All over India, an interesting phenomenon can be observed. On one hand, materialism is on the rise, and on the other hand, spirituality is also on the rise. Even difficult poojas, like the Chat Pooja, and arduous pilgrimages, like the Kanvar Mela, attract huge crowds, most of them young. It shows that in spite of modern life style and western influence, the ...
I traveled between Poland and Azerbaijan during a rare period when the forces that shape Europe appear to be in flux, and most of the countries I visited are re-evaluating their positions. The overwhelming sense was anxiety. Observers from countries such as Poland make little effort to hide it. Those from places such as Turkey, which is larger and not direct...
The weather department has predicted poor rainfall this monsoon season, which has resulted in understandable panic. The worry is not much about food stocks which are comfortable, even surplus, but on account of the trend towards rising of prices of essential commodities, particularly food items that pinch the pocket of...
Edward Snowden: Is Edward Snowden a radical? The dictionary defines a radical as “an advocate of political and social revolution”, the adjective form being “favoring or resulting in extreme or revolutionary changes”. That doesn’t sound like Snowden as far as what has been publicly revealed. In common usage, the term “radical” usually connotes someone or some...
The erotic reliefs of Hindu temples with their gravity-defying and anatomy-challenging positions have found a new modern competitor in the Ukrainian crisis. Each party wants to get the Jews on their side, while claiming that the other side is anti-Jewish and a Jewish puppet at once. This impossible, Kama-Sutraesque position is the result of extremely confusi...
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Hari Om
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18 Jun 2014
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The BJP’s rational, national and democratic suggestion for a holistic debate on the archaic and regressive Article 370 has so rattled and alarmed the communal, despotic and arrogant Kashmiri leadership that it has crossed the fine line and adopted a threatening posture. The completely routed ruling National Conference (NC) and its ally, the Sonia Gandhi Cong...
Between July’s Budget and that of February 2015, the nation will get a fair idea of the direction being taken by the ‘Modi Sarkar’. Some broad parameters can be gauged from President Pranab Mukherjee’s address to the joint sitting of Parliament on June 9, where he admitted the chances of a deficient monsoon and promised to mitigate its impact on the poor...
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Senthil
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14 Jun 2014
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The ban on Jallikattu by the Supreme Court seems more in the nature an inquisition rather than a judgment. The religious, social, and cultural festival of Jallikattu, followed for thousands of years throughout Tamil Nadu, has been banned for allegedly violating provisions of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (PCA) Act, written in the 1960s. This is compar...
Three previous essays on a “yatha raja, tatha prashasan” theme argued that a British legacy of administration is being perpetuated through an institution called the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) that selects administrators through an annual Civil Services Examination (CSE).[1] It was argued that the CSE, as a system, affirms that government service,...
The numbers game is all that matters in the Indian Parliament today. The BJP won a majority of 282 seats on its own in the 543-Member Lok Sabha; the pre-poll NDA alliance jigged up the numbers to 336, which places the ruling coalition in a comfortable position in the Lok Sabha.
The 129 year-old Congress party has been shattered to its lowest ever score at 4...
Energy infrastructure requires huge investments and takes time to build. Mistakes made today show up five, seven, or even ten years later. The sector is also mired in geo-politics. Powerful financial interests influence decisions as we saw in the previous two UPA governments. Therefore, those in Modi’s strategy group should analyse the geo-political constrai...
The Presidential Commission to investigate cases of Missing Persons was appointed on August 14, 2013 with a mandate to cover alleged abductions or disappearances during the period June 10, 1990 to May 19, 2009. This was thereafter extended to cover the period from 1983 to 2009. The three member commission including Maxwell Paranagama (Chairman), Mrs Dimingu ...
Barely a week after the Congress party suffered its most humiliating electoral defeat ever, the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) unanimously re-elected Sonia Gandhi as its Chairperson for the fifth time since 1998. The Congress Working Committee promptly ‘rejected’ the resignations ‘offered’ by the ‘Maa-Beta’ duo and even went on to place on record their g...
In the late evening of Monday, August 25, 2013, India’s Parliament passed The Food Security Act (FSA) and the UPA government claimed it to be a “game changer”; others had less charitable words to describe it. Initiating the debate, senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi reminded the UPA Government of the announcement made by former President Pratibha Patil, o...
Two weeks after the attack on the Indian consulate at Herat in Afghanistan, an Indian national, Fr. Alexis Prem Kumar, director of Jesuit Refugee Service, Afghanistan, was abducted by armed militants allegedly belonging to the Taliban. He was kidnapped while visiting a school for refugee children in Sohadat township, 34 kms from Herat city. Before moving to ...
Manmohan Singh began his tenure as Prime Minister honeymooning with the 7-nation BIMSTEC group and by a strange coincidence, the third BIMSTEC Summit in Nay Pyi Taw in Myanmar in March 2014 was his last foreign tour. He attended the first BIMESTEC Summit in Bangkok in Thailand in July 2004, soon after taking over as Prime Minister in May, and presided over t...
I arrived in Bucharest, Romania, the day after US Vice President Joe Biden [May 20, 2014]. US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel will be here in a few weeks. The talk in Bucharest, not only among the leadership but also among the public, is about Ukraine. Concerns are palpable, and they are not only about the Russians. They are also about NATO, the European Un...
In 2011, Forbes magazine released a list of 400 richest Americans. Some of the billionaires on the list were self-made entrepreneurs who were college dropouts or, worse, did not go to college at all, which revived the long debated question as to whether formal education is necessary to be a successful entrepreneur.
The Indian scene is no different. As soon ...
A recurrent theme during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s marathon election campaign was the Pink Revolution and the depletion of the cattle wealth of villages due to subsidised meat exports. Cattle are intrinsic to agriculture and provide a secondary lifeline to marginal farmers, especially in times of distress. Yet the meat industry has created such a...
Honourable Minister,
You have taken charge of a portfolio which is most vital to the development of India because it is a sector that affects the livelihood, in one way or another, of close to 65 per cent of the population. The country experimented with a factory-type agriculture, modelled along the lines of American agriculture, and it was branded as “gree...
“The Russians are coming … again … and they’re still ten feet tall!”
So, what do we have here? In Libya, in Syria, and elsewhere the United States has been on the same side as the al-Qaeda types. But not in Ukraine. That’s the good news. The bad news is that in Ukraine the United States is on the same side as the neo-Nazi types, who – taking time off from p...