A cople of years ago stand up comedian Albert Brooks made a film he called ‘Looking for humor in the Muslim world.’ It was almost entirely shot in India. In the film Albert Brooks, playing himself - a Jewish stand up comedian - is sent on a fact-finding mission, based on the premise that even though George Bush has a great sense of humour, his administration had difficulty understanding very many groups of people: Chinese, Africans, but mainly the Muslims. The American president wanted to develop a secret weapon that would work on the sense of humour in the Muslim world. But what made them laugh? It was a mystery to Bush. It is for Brooks to find out what makes Muslims laugh and he has to produce a 500-page report based on the findings. Brooks wonders: Why India, a Hindu country? The man heading the committee that sends him on the mission responds: ‘‘There are 150 million Muslims there. Is that enough for you? Anyway we’ll consider the job half done if you can tell us what makes the Hindus laugh.’’
Funnily enough, the truth manages to elude the comedian. But Albert Brooks would have got much closer to the truth had he stopped over in Mumbai and met the Shiv Sena chieftain Bal Thackeray, who started out life as a cartoonist but has got to that stage in life where others draw cartoons of him and caricature him in novels where Thackeray is transformed into characters with nicknames like Mainduck, which means frog in Hindi. Salman Rushdie did it in Moor’s Last Sigh, and his book got banned, which is not a bad thing for sales. But sometimes it doesn’t even take a book to stir his followers. The weekly magazine Outlook was targeted by Sainiks last Tuesday for featuring the Sena chieftain under the categorisation of ‘villains’ in an issue that took stock of India at sixty. It was the third time that copies of the magazine were being burnt by Shiv Sainiks.
About ten men burst into the weekly’s Mumbai office broke, among other things, a fax machine, a photocopier and burnt copies of the magazine. It is a Shiv Sena ritual and a way of getting their point of view through as well as an accomplishment, like climbing Everest and sticking a flag there. Outlook got a taste of it in its very first issue in October 1995 when the cover story suggested the majority of the people of the Srinagar valley wanted independence.
Shiv Sena found the article, based on a survey, offensive and anti-national. ...
Given the widely divergent strategic goals and policies followed by India and the US in the past, particularly on nuclear non-proliferation, the Indo-US Civil Nuclear Cooperation Agreement was never going to be as simple as one, two, three! The US, since the mid-sixties, has actively sought to deny proliferation of nuclear weapons/technology outside the P5 countries.
It was the principal promoter of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). President Clinton revised the US nuclear strategy and doctrine for a more active role when new threshold states including India started emerging. The Defense Counter-proliferation Initiative of 1993 included eight functional areas: intelligence, counterforce capabilities, surveillance, inspections, passive defence, active defence, export control and counter terrorism.
President George Bush upgraded it to a ‘forward policy’ in 2002 by including pre-emptive or preventive use of force in handling proliferation and ‘taking anticipatory actions to defend’.For much of the Cold War period, India’s bilateral relations with the US had remained rancorous partly due to different perceptions of the world order but mostly due to US support to Pakistan. Some of those doubts continue to persist. When India blasted its way out of nuclear ambiguity on May 11,1998, causing a major setback to non-proliferation, the US reaction was immediate and severe.
Given this, the tight-rope walking involved in negotiating this deal can well be imagined, especially after Dr Manmohan Singh committed in Parliament that India’s strategic autonomy shall not be compromised in any way, and the US Congress passed the Hyde Act in December 2006. It is evident that the 22-page ‘The 123 Agreement’, named after Section 123 of the US Atomic Energy Act, 1954, worked out after two years of tough negotiations cannot and will not meet every aspiration of the two parties in perpetuity. But I believe that, despite some doubts in a toothcomb analysis, India’s strategic autonomy has not been compromised. One, the Agreement does not impinge on India’s military strategic programmes. Two, it does not deny us the right to carry out nuclear tests.
The tests will no doubt cost us a lot, but that ought to be weighed against (a) our ability to build strategic reserves, (b) the strategic circumstance requiring further tests, and (c) our determination in worldwide sanctions imposed after the Shakti nuclear ...
Half of Mumbai’s more than 15 million people live in slums. Most Mumbaikars consider the slums worthless but to others they are priceless real estate. Dharavi, Asia’s biggest slum, is next to the emerging corporate hub, the Bandra-Kurla complex. Land in the complex costs as much Rs 30,000 per sq m, and 535-acre Dharavi is worth Rs 6,500 crore. Dharavi is every property developer’s dream and they are achieving it in the name of slum rehabilitation.
S S Tinaikara, a retired IAS officer, was asked by the state to investigate slum rehabilitation schemes and his verdict was this: “all slum rehabilitation plans are meant to encourage corruption.” HNN team went undercover in Dharavi and rented a room. The objective was to meet the slum mafia and prove that the slum rehabilitation scheme is a scam and slum dwellers rarely get flats built for them.
The most prized piece of paper in a slum is a ration card, for owning it makes a person eligible for one of the 100,000 free flats to be built in Dharavi. And the mafia can get you a card for you. “The ration officers have piles of old, clear ration cards. They have touts who get customers for these ration cards. It doesn't matter if you are a Pakistani, Nepali, Bangladeshi, anybody can buy a ration card proving residence from any date.
You just have to pay the right amount of money,” says social worker N R Paul. People who can prove that they are residents of a slum on or before 1995 are eligible for flats under the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme. The slum mafia, for Rs 15,000, got HNN a ration card dated before 1995. Mafia rehabilitation scheme: When they couldn’t block the slum rehabilitation scheme, the mafia, corrupt builders, politicians and bureaucrats converted it converted into a massive scam.
The scam is simple: build and allot flats to people who are dead or are fictitious. Builders then sell the flats at market rates, instead of handing them over free of cost to slum dwellers. Of the 65,000 flats for slum rehabilitation, it is estimated that builders have earned Rs 5,000 crore through the scam. The scheme rewards builders for building slum rehabilitation flats by allotting them to develop a portion of the original slum. Dharavi’s slums for instance, would earn a builder as much Rs 40,000 per square foot.
Tinaikar’s report ripped apart the scheme. It alleged that crores were spent on building Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) Office, but the ...
In India today there are many Maoist parties and organizations that either predate the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) or emerged from factions when the CPI-ML split after the death of Charu Majumdar. Three of them, the CPI-ML (People's War), CPI-ML (Party Unity), and the Maoist Communist Center (MCC), are currently engaged in armed struggle. An inter-connected "Naxalite belt" stretches across central India, comprising Bihar, MP, Orissa, AP, Maharashtra and parts of Tamil Nadu. Those parts which were connected to the neighbouring states came under the influence of Naxalism. Click here to read more on this story......
Is India on the verge of a major social and political change? Two contradictory events - one raising the spectre of caste wars and the other of caste reconciliation - have introduced dramatic new possibilities to the Indian scene. There is little doubt that the recent confrontation in Rajasthan between the Gujjars and Meenas - the first a backward caste community and the other a scheduled tribe - has induced second thoughts about the policy of reservations based on castes, which the political class has been pursuing merrily for a decade and a half. Click here to read more.....
