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The Hindu, the unofficial communist mouthpiece in India cannot hide its glee at what it calls a “meticulously planned attack” by the Naxals on a police armoury, station and a training school in Nayagarh, Orissa last night which killed more than 14 people and injured many more including many civilians.

Maoists kill 14 in meticulosly planned attack in Orissa 

Nayagarh (Orissa) (PTI): Maoists killed 14 people, including 13 policemen, and took away a huge quantity of arms and ammunition in a meticulously planned attack on a police station, police training school and armoury here in Nayagarh district late Friday night.

A group of nearly 100 maoists, including women cadre armed with guns and bombs launched the attack at 11:00 pm last night, the first attack in coastal Orissa a mere 90 km from the state capital, and a rerun of the March 2006 attack on a sub-jail in Udaygiri in Gajapati district and looting of an armoury in Koraput town earlier in February 2004.

Nayagarh Superintendent of Police Rajesh Kumar said while 10 policemen were were shot dead by the maoists at the police training school, a civilian died after being caught in the crossfire at the Daspalla police station, 30 km away.

The two other police casualties occurred when the maoists, retreating after attacking the Mahipur police outpost shot them dead, the SP said.

The maoists took away all the arms in the district armoury and the police training school in a truck and a hijacked bus.

Landmines laid by the maoists while retreating at Majuriapali near here injured one person.

Very difficult to miss the triumphant language used while recounting the body count of this gruesome incident and the spoils taken away by the marauders. there is absolutely no sympathy for the innocent people killed in the barbaric attacks anywhere in this article by this newspaper. It makes one wonder where the sympathy of this paper really lies? what kind of an India do they envision if they condone violence and lawnessness in this manner? Is this how a “respectable” newspaper should behave in this hour of tragedy?

Once again the Judicial system in India has proved that when it comes to punishing the Rich and the powerful their famed blindfold does come off for a little while.

While the sessions court sentenced the owners of the Cinema hall and some civic officials to a mere two years and even readily set them free on bail they sentenced a mere gatekeeper, the lowest person in the chain and hence not in a position to hire the best lawyers to defend him to seven years rigorous imprisonment and promptly sent him to prison.

Now in what way is a mere Gatekeeper more culpable than the owner of the building who built the hall flouting all norms, bribed civic officials to look the other way, maintained the building in a poor shape and finally hired him, a thoroughly incompetent gatekeeper, and others, the managers and supervisors to run the whole place?

The buck in this case clearly stops at the very top. And the Association of Victims of Uphaar Tragedy are clearly right in expressing their dismay at the verdict and seeking to approach the High court.

The poor quality of the infrastructure and public facilities and the woeful safety record in the country is a direct result of the people in charge the builders, the civic officials etc… not being held to accountable for their actions and unless the justice system starts taking stringent action against the powers that be such tragedies will continue to happen on a regular basis.

The riots that followed a Radio Jockey’s comment about recently crowned Indian Idol Prashant Tamang has lessons for everyone involved.

First it is time(it is 60 years since independence for heavens sake) that we Indians from all over the country start addressing each other by their own respective names and stop using slang to describe each other. that means no more talk of madrasis, bhayyas, chinkies, banias etc… full stop to that.period.

Second, learn to take it easy. going on a rampage because someone said something that you do not like is so futile in this day and age. It is a globalised world with 6 billion people around and not everyone is your fan.

Third, The Indian state should seriously start pursuing and convicting Rioters/vandals/lynch mobs etc… At this point the impression has become widespread that the long arm of the law will not catch up if the crime is committed during public disturbances such as Riots, strikes and hartals etc…That impression should be changed forthwith and the authorities should start by throwing as many rioters as one can identify by means of eyewitness accounts, camera recordings etc… behind the bars for good. That should put the fear of the Gods in the sub-continental mobs for all time to come.

Tarun Vijay’s recent alarming report on the problems in the North-East of the country is nothing new. There have been many, many such columns on a regular basis and even a high quality documentary by a TV channel about the problem. And they go along the same line- “The North-East is burning but the nabobs in Delhi couldn’t care less, All the money that is earmarked to go to the north-east for developmental purposes is diverted into the pockets of the corrupt netas, babus, contractors and assorted middlemen etc…”

And the Big one- “Bangladeshi illegal immigration is going on unchecked but the politicians are standing in the way of tackling this problem because of their perverted vote bank politics etc…”

But is it enough to just stop at blaming the government of the day? Or is it a much more deep rooted problem? Even the supposedly patriotic NDA govt which was in power for six years didn’t do anything much better than the current corrupt and anti-national dispensation.

Infact during the NDA rule the BDR even got away with the brutal murders of the BSF jawans in cold blood!

So what is it that keeps India from responding appropriately to the Bangladeshi problem? A peep into the thinking of the Indian establishment with regard to Bangladesh can be had in B.Raman’s recent book “The Kaoboys of R&AW” where the author laments about the Bangladesh issue thus.

“Bangladesh which brought glory to the R&AW in 1971, became an embarrassing millstone around its neck. It watched helplessly as there was one surprise after another and as Bangladesh once again became the hub of anti-Indian activities directed against India’s North-East.The spread of insurgency to Tripura and Assam in the 1980s from sanctuaries in Bangladesh and the seeming Indian helplessness in dealing with it strengthened India’s image as a soft state”.

“In India one doesn’t often realize the constraints imposed on Indian policy making in Bangladesh, the like of which one does not face in Pakistan. Bangladesh still has a large number of Hindus and has substantial pockets of friendly feelings for India. Any unwise and hasty use of the big stick against Bangladesh could have negative consequences for the Hindus and the pro-India sections of its population.The resulting Indian reluctance to use the big stick is exploited by the anti-Indian elements in the local administration and political class to further step up their anti-India activities. We have not yet found a way of breaking out of this vicious circle.”

It is said that for the Americans Iranian history doesn’t go before 1979. A similar mental block seems to afflict Indians in the case of Bangladesh who cannot see that country without the prism of 1971 not one year before not one year after.

We Indians seem to have collectively forgotten what pre-1971 Bangladesh was. We seem to have forgotten that before the events of 1971 today’s Bangladesh was East Pakistan and it chose to secede from its mother country and join Pakistan willingly with even a referendum to boot and also it did more than its share to make the Pakistani dream come true. Have we forgotten that some of the worst riots, massacres and cases of mass ethnic cleansing designed to make Pakistan a reality happened in the East? What about the Calcutta direct action day? Noakhali? etc… The slaughter in the East was just as worse as that in the West which gets much of the attention in the chronicles of the partition.

1971 therefore was just an internal problem between the two wings of Pakistan where we merely intervened to safeguard our own interests. As simple as that. But instead of seeing that reality in the right perspective the Indian side naively expected that East Pakistan will be replaced by a grateful and friendly Bangladesh. The disappointment and bewilderment that it did not happen is palpable in the above quoted paragraph written by one of the long time insiders of the Indian establishment.

Even the remote possibility that Bangladesh will somehow buck its own chosen destiny and evolve into a friendly state went bust in 1975 with the overthrow and execution of its founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Since then Bangladesh has steadily reverted to the path that it had chosen for itself when it became East Pakistan in 1947 but had been temporarily forced to pause by the events of 1971.

The Bangladesh of today is therefore the heir of the East Pakistan of 1947 and not the Bangladesh we helped found in 1971. Hope we start admitting that to ourselves before we can begin to deal with the challenges posed by this rogue state in sheep’s clothing.

That is what this sobering analysis by that much maligned page 3 rag paper, ToI says in the aftermath of the latest outrage in Hyderabad last saturday. It says that after Iraq, India is the only country with the highest casualty rates due to terrorism and Iraq is officially a war zone!

Which means of all the countries that are “technically” at peace India is the one that has suffered the most in the past decade and infact has suffered more casualties than even most other regions of the world put together.

In fact, India has since 2004(when the UPA came to power -ed) lost more lives to terrorist incidents than all of North America, South America, Central America, Europe and Eurasia put together.

All of these vast swathes of the globe lost a total of 3,280 lives in terrorist incidents between January 2004 and March this year. India alone lost 3,674 lives over the same period of three years and three months.

If that page 3 rag paper was so outraged as to interrupt its regular programming of half-naked ladies on the one hand( that too during a weekend!) and pimping for the Wagah candle kissers lobby on the other hand then one can only imagine what would it be like among the public. Perhaps Mr Sardesai and his trusted minion Mr Yogendra Yadav can come up with another make believe poll to gauge the public sentiment.

One year ago more than 200 innocent people doing nothing more than returning home from a hard day’s work were brutally murdered and hundreds more were injured in the name of an insidious and perverted ideology.

But the perpetrators of this dastardly crime are still at large and even basic security measures to make sure such tragedies never occur are yet to be taken. Our politicians aided by the heavily politicised media are more than happy to brush this and other such incidents under the carpet by invoking the so called “Mumbai spirit” and thus escape their own responsibilities to ensure safety and security in the vulnerable public places across the country.

A week after July 11, 2006, Western Railways installed close circuit television (CCTV) cameras at seven of the 28 suburban railway stations in Mumbai. It was decided that a total of 530 CCTV cameras would be installed throughout the suburban rail network. This has not happened yet, as mandarins continue to dither over whether it would be cheaper to hire these cameras rather than buy them.

This is just the tip of the iceberg that no one seems to be worried about crashing into time and again. As we did in the days following July 11, 2006, we’ll hear more about the indomitable spirit of Mumbaikars this week. By extension that’s the tragic tale of India and its general approach to terrorism: we can handle every tragedy; all we have to do is to keep calling it ‘moral victory’.[HT]

This week saw three events in quick succession involving India’s accursed communists, the first was the beastly act in Nandigram in West Bengal where the communists are in power and using the machinery of the state butchered the common man in the dozens with all the accompanying claptrap, gaudy red rhetoric that it was for their own good in true classical Soviet-Chinese-Khmer Rouge style, the next in Chhattisgarh where another more “purer” and virulent strain of the same gutter virus, this one known to toxicologists as the ‘Naxalite(Maoist)’ strain murdered more than 50 policemen in cold blood because they were agents of the state, and ofcourse the one involving the more domesticated, scotch and soda sipping, suave, but always obstructive and a no do-gooder “mainstream” political outfit which this time contented itself by “merely trying” to assault and manhandle a minister of the Union government in the very heart of Indian democracy- the hall of the parliament itself!

As repulsive and disgusting as the above incidents are the response of the so called watchdog of democracy, the mainstream media and the self appointed “secular” conscience keepers of the country, the “intellectuals”, assorted NGO’s and the human terrorist rights mafia is even more disgusting. Their one line excuse on behalf of their comrades for each one of the above incidents -It is the other guy’s fault.

Read the rest…

Five years after the horrific Godhra incident and its aftermath, there has been created according to Mr K.P.S. Gill, a virtual ‘Gujarat Riots industry’ consisting of left leaning politicians, NGO’s, the Media and assorted “intellectuals” who indulge in whipping up flagging passions at every opportunity, and manufacturing a range of ‘products’ that are marketed principally to foreign ‘buyers’. He says that

During and after the Gujarat riots, the role of political actors, non-governmental organisations and ‘activists’, was nothing short of shameful. There was a lot of posturing, a great deal of tamasha, but little was done to bring relief to the victims. Group after group flew into Ahmedabad, went through the motions of ‘investigation’, held press conferences and brought out ill-informed reports, but nobody stayed long enough to deliver concrete services and succour to those whose lives had been shattered and dislocated. In certain political quarters, there was almost an implicit hope that the violence would continue, so that it could be exploited electorally.

All this while the incident that started it all, i.e., Godhra train burning which killed nearly 58 Hindu pilgrims, including 35 women and children is sought to be played down or denied by this very same actors. But why is one set of victims given all the attention and sympathy while the suffering of the other set is sought to be played down, denied, glossed over or even vilified? One such politically motivated report by the Banerjee commission was ruled illegal by the Gujarat High court.

Read the rest…