Crap-sandwich of fat-cats in bankrupt economics.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26907542/displaymode/1107/s/2/framenumber/11/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26907542/displaymode/1107/s/2/framenumber/15/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26907542/displaymode/1107/s/2/framenumber/5/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26907542/displaymode/1107/s/2/framenumber/14/

Politicos, columnists, blogs are screaming offering no clue. Quants and nerds including prospective nobel prize winners in economics presenting their econometric models and differential equations are silent.

The guy who called it a crap-sandwich is prepared to eat it because he voted for the bailout crap.

The problem with the bailout authorisation of $700 billion to be administered by King Henry (Paulson) is that it is too little, too late. The bailout should be more like $700 trillion in tune with the rate at which fetishism of money has grown inventing new money instruments such as swaps, index-based funds, participatory notes. All these derivative money vikalpa (alternative forms) have multiplied the underlying assets of say, $60 economic (say, GDP) trillion to a $600 trillion financial marketplace. The same asset is used again and again to create new forms of money (derivatives) and the certified financial advisers receiving fat salaries act as administrators of these new forms of money, that is, simply buy and sell in the markets.

King Henry cannot control this process of buying and selling. Nor can the Fed.

In a state of bankrupt economics of the Keynesian variety, what is the solution?

Go back to basics. Go back to Kautilya. You know what? The entire great book called Arthas'astra (Treatise on wealth) is not about artha (though a definition of wealth is given as related to work) but about governance.

So intertwined are the issues of governance and fetishism of money.

Just look at the chapters in Kautilya’s Arthas’astra:
Book I, "Concerning Discipline"
Book II,"The Duties of Government Superintendents"
Book III, "Concerning Law"
Book IV, "The Removal of Thorns"
Book V, "The Conduct of Courtiers"
Book VI, "The Source of Sovereign States"
Book VII, "The End of the Six-Fold Policy"
Book VIII, "Concerning Vices and Calamities"
Book IX, "The Work of an Invader"
Book X, "Relating to War"
Book XI, "The Conduct of Corporations"
Book XII, "Concerning a Powerful Enemy"
Book XIII, "Strategic Means to Capture a Fortress"
Book XIV, "Secret Means"
Book XV, "The Plan of a Treatise"

The solution offered by Kautilya is simple and dramatic. The artisan guilds, jaatis, the guild corporations are the bedrock of the creation of wealth. Such a creation of wealth involves two desiderata: work and dharma. This dharma is a tough word for the quants and nerds to understand. This dharma means that there should be a level of sacrifice required in the ruling class, sacrificing personal interest for public good.

This is a tall order. The fat cats care a damn about public good. This is the crux of the financial crisis which Uncle Sam has landed the world in. Make no mistake, we are all in this mess. Every Central Bank will be asked to bail out Uncle Sam who may be left with only option, to bomb his way through the mess, eating crap-sandwich as the army marches on its belly.

This is not a far-fetched prognosis. The economy of Uncle Sam is totally dependent uon the military industrial estate. Hence, the need to bail out General Electric with Indian nuke deal contracts.

kalyanaraman

US economy: Wall Street bailout analysis - revolt on Main Street
Hours after President George W. Bush put his dwindling prestige on the line to plead for his Wall Street bailout bill, his Republican colleagues in Congress cast it aside amid a revolt from Main Street.

By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 9:07PM BST 29 Sep 2008

As the House of Representatives rejected the £380 billion bill and went back to the drawing board, political farce turned into political crisis. Congress – one of the few national institutions to be even more unpopular than Mr Bush – was in a state of paralysis.
The proximity of the November 4th election – when all 435 seats in the House are up for grabs – as well as the interlocking problems of Mr Bush’s lack of political capital and the anger against Wall Street and the Washington class doomed the bill.
No Republican wanted to vote for a bill that their own leader Representative, John Boehner, had just described as a “crap sandwich” and that outraged constituents from coast to coast saw as an immoral formula that left taxpayers footing the bill for the fat cats.
Despite his histrionic return to Washington to broker a deal last week, John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, gave only lukewarm support to the bill. The bill’s defeat is another blow to his faltering presidential campaign.
Mr McCain’s Democratic opponent Barack Obama chose a more distant but more positive approach but in truth the main problem was always conservative Republicans to whom the nationalisation of large chunks of the US economy was anathema.
Mr Boehner invited his members to vote with "your conscience”. Some did just that while others saw the prospect of political oblivion staring at them if they were up against a Democrat – 95 of whom voted against the bill along with 133 Republicans – who had rejected the bill Mr Boehner had helped negotiate.
The failure of the bill showed how pervasive the "throw the bums out” mentality has spread amongst American voters – who the House, by its nature of serving two-year terms, is intensely reflective of.
Shortly before the vote, one Republican congressman remarked that being asked to back the bill reminded him of being told six years ago: "Don't worry, we'll find the weapons of mass destruction." Mr Bush is now more of a dead duck than a lame one.
The House Republicans' leaders bear much of the blame after delivering just 65 of their votes. As some of their members headed for their constituencies, all they could do was to blame Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Speaker of the House, for the mess.
She had injected a "partisan voice that poisoned our conference" and caused them to "go south", Mr Boehner griped, citing a speech in which she had laid into Mr Bush and trumpeted the superior economic wisdom of Democrats achievements of Bill Clinton's presidency.
Mr Boehner had voted for the bill, though you'd hardly have known it from his words after the fact. "Americans are angry and so are my colleagues," he said. "They don't want to vote for a bill like this. And I understand that."
Representative Barney Frank, House Financial Services chairman, his voice dripping with sarcasm, said it was ludicrous to blame Mrs Pelosi and noted that if just a dozen Republicans had changed their vote then the bill would have passed.
He summed up their stance as, "Somebody hurt my feelings so I hurt my country", adding: "Give me those 12 people's names and I will go and talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are."
A shell-shocked Mr Bush could only reiterate that the bill was "big because we've got a big problem". He promised that the White House would "continue to address the economic situation head on" and "continue to move forward".
As he spoke, his White House staff were going back to the drawing board.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/3105001/US-economy-Wall-Street-bailout-analysis---revolt-on-Main-Street.html

Bankrupt Economics
A Crisis Resists The Usual Remedies
By Robert J. Samuelson
Monday, September 29, 2008; A19
What we are witnessing, in the broadest sense, is the bankruptcy of modern economics. Its conceit has been that we had solved the problem of stability. Oh, there would be periodic recessions, but the prospects of a major economic collapse were negligible because we knew how the system worked and could take steps to prevent it. What's been so unsettling about the present crisis is that it has not conformed to the standard model of business cycles and has not submitted to familiar textbook solutions.
A hallmark of the crisis has been the stark contrast between the "real economy" of production and jobs and the tumultuous financial markets of stocks, bonds, banks, money funds and the like. Even with the 60 percent drop in housing construction since early 2006, the real economy has so far suffered only modest setbacks. Yes, there are 605,000 fewer payroll jobs than there were in December; still, 137.5 million jobs remain. Meanwhile, financial markets verge on hysteria. The question is whether this hysteria will drive the real economy into a deep recession or worse -- and what we can do to prevent that.
The word that best epitomizes mainstream "macroeconomics" (the study of the entire economy, not individual markets) is demand. If weak demand left the economy in a slump, government could rectify the situation by stimulating more demand through tax cuts, higher spending or lower interest rates. If excess demand created inflation, government could suppress it by cutting demand through more taxes, less spending or higher interest rates.
Economists of this tradition watch consumer and business behavior. Are car sales soft? How much are companies raising prices? What about profits? The $152 billion "stimulus" program earlier this year was a classic exercise in "demand management." It didn't work well mainly because this crisis originated in frightened financial markets. Massive losses on mortgage-related securities caused some financial institutions to fail. As fear spread, financial institutions grew wary of dealing with each other because no one knew who was solvent and who wasn't.
To Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, this financial breakdown now threatens the real economy. Companies depend on bank borrowings and sales of commercial paper (in effect, short-term bonds) to conduct everyday business -- to buy inventories, to pay suppliers and workers before cash arrives from sales. Credit markets were freezing, Paulson and Bernanke decided. Panicky investors were shifting from commercial paper to Treasury bills; banks weren't lending to each other. If it continued, consumers and firms wouldn't get essential credit.
If you reject that conclusion, then the whole crisis has been a contrived farce. Some economists do; they note that downturns always involve losses and disruptions. This one isn't so different. But many economists agree with Paulson and Bernanke. "If we can't calm down short-term credit markets, we're looking at a pretty severe recession," says Michael Mussa of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "If businesses can't roll over their short-term debt, [they] ask where can we cut back" -- firing workers, reducing spending -- "to avoid bankruptcy."
Unfortunately, we lack experience with stabilizing financial markets, and the issue has been at the fringes of economics. Mostly, markets should operate freely. When is intervention justified? How?
Of course, economists recognized that the Federal Reserve should act as a "lender of last resort" and that permitting two-fifths of banks to fail in the 1930s aggravated the Depression. But the creation in 1933 of deposit insurance (now up to $100,000) was thought to prevent most bank runs, and the "lender of last resort" role never anticipated a worldwide financial system that mediated credit not just through banks but also through hedge funds, private equity funds, investment banks and many other channels. In congressional testimony last week, Bernanke admitted the Fed has been "shocked" at how elastic the "lender of last resort" role has become.
The resulting intellectual vacuum has spawned political chaos. Unpleasant and untested ideas invite opposition. Paulson's plan to buy up to $700 billion of impaired securities is wildly unpopular. It may not work and raises many problems. If the government pays too little for the securities, financial failures may mount; if it pays too much, it may create windfall profits for some investors and losses for taxpayers. But Paulson's plan has better prospects for restoring confidence by removing suspect securities from balance sheets than suggested alternatives would. Selective injections of capital into banks, for instance, might involve favoritism and operate too slowly to improve confidence. Psychology matters.
The economy will get worse. Mussa thinks unemployment (now 6.1 percent) could peak near 7 percent; other projections are higher. The harder question is whether financial turmoil heralds an era of instability. Our leaders are making up their responses from day to day because old ideas of how the economy works have failed them. These ideas were not necessarily wrong, but they're grievously inadequate at the moment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/28/AR2008092802230.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Congress -- disband or ban.

Congress – disband or ban.

It is time to introspect on the state of the polity after 60 years of Swarajyam. The focus is on the Congress Party which had, dominated the political scene and has been the prime instrument in creating an environment of criminalized polity in the country.

Mahatma Gandhi once said that Congress Party should disband itself. He had wisely recognized that the party needed to have its sunset after achieving its goal and new political fronts needed to be opened with new political parties as the issues before the country had changed drastically after the British were expelled. Sixty years have passed by since his assassination and the Congress Party has not disbanded itself voluntarily.

Now it is time to disband or ban the Party in the supreme interests of the nation.

Our forefathers gave us the treasure of dharma and our elders won for us Swarajyam from a colonial regime after a saga of sacrifices rendered in the supreme interest of Bharata Rashtram, the Bharatiya Nation. Today, the nation stands threatened by the most shameful institution called the Congress Party with a record of acts of treason, acts against the interests of the nation. The National Congress Party as it was called at its inception is anything but national and has demonstrated a track-record of anti-national spirit and acts for six decades. A call for disbanding or banning the Congress is demonstrably justified .

Congress Party stands accused of its post-independence leaders committing indelible treason on the body politic of the nation and hence has justified its disbandment or ban.

We are your children, Bharata Maata and our generation should not fail the future generations. This means that we should hand over to our children, the burning deepam of dharma which our elders have given us as a legacy.

It is our duty to speak and speak satyam. Our duty is to speak and not be an accomplice in the crime of politicking ignoring national interests, for which the only atonement is the banning of the Congress Party.

A fair investigation into the votes-for-cash scandal often referred to as money tantra leads to the conclusion that it is a most shameful blot on patriotic spirit enshrined in this nation, Bharatavarsha, for many generations starting with the days of the janapada-s of circa the sixth century before common era. The most appropriate consequence for the murderers of democracy and their disloyalty to the country and its national interests should be the banning of the Congress Party which has orchestrated this money tantra and indulged in a series of cover-ups.

A fair investigation will establish that the motive was clearly to stay in power to get the Indo-US nuclear deal executed in utter contempt of the Parliament, despite repeated assurances given to the Parliament by the “Hon’ble Substitute PM” that Parliament approval would be obtained before any deal is struck. There is overwhelming evidence of currencies flaunted and exchanged, Members of Parliament black-mailed and every form of intrigue making a mockery of the constitutional anti-defection provisions and laws. This violation of constitution of India by debasing every known tenet of Parliamentary procedure and decorum cannot be pardoned. Congress Party stands accused the Congress Party of engaging in this murder of parliamentary democracy in the State and hence demand that the Congress party be banned.

Sovereignty of the nation has been undermined without due deliberation within the portals of Parliament and through public debates across the nation. On what authority can a Prime Minister sign a deal with another sovereign nation without honouring his own promises and without taking the Parliament into confidence and getting due approval from the Parliament? It is apposite to mention here that there is indeed a constitutional provision that Jawaharlal Nehru implemented in late 40's by assigning the Ministry of Foreign affairs a subordinate status under the Prime Minister's control and taking it out of the Parliamentary oversight. Under these provisions Prime Minister of India will not be required to consult the Indian Parliament for any treaties with any foreign government. This loophole has been present for sixty years. We must recognize that Indian democracy is immature and people have not taken an active role in curbing the power of the Prime Minister's office because of their adulation and adoration of the Nehru dynasty. Despite legal loopholes, morality and raja dharma dictate that the Prime Minsiter of Bharat should be governed by ethical principles of taking the nation into confidence through the parliamentary/democratic institutions in place, however defective the evolving norms of parliamentary decorum and behavior may be.

What a shame it is that a blot has been left on the sacred feet of Bharata Maata by the abominable deeds of the Congress Party which constitute a moral crime committed against the nation.

The Congress Party stands accused, having committed acts against the supreme interests of the nation and in utter disregard of the primordial need for probity and propriety in public life, fiduciary responsibility of the highest standards and living by the global ethic of the land under dharma.

The Congress Party which stands accused of engineering riots in the country during 1984 'pogrom' against Sikhs and which participated in the terrible miscarriage of justice should be banned.

Congress leader Mohammed Hussein Kolata stands accused for planning the attack on Sabarmati Express.

Indian newspapers had reported that Congress party was involved in instigating riots in the post-Godhra riots and prevented students from attending exams.

Although hundreds of Hindus were killed in the post-Godhra riots, Congress has white-washed this fact and so it needs to be investigated and charged for its role in not rendering justice to the Hindu victims, politicking with truth.
The Congress Party led UPA government has achieved the dubious distinction of getting snubbed by the Courts of Law a maximum number of times for its misuse of power and abuse of Constitutional provisions in its ugly political games against the states ruled by opposition parties and for the relief of its political and family friends.
It has allowed the Christian Churches and Missonaries to abuse the Constitutional provisions to indulge in illegal evangelisation and forced and coercive conversions to an alarming extent in the last four and a half years leading to communal unrest at the cost of peace & harmony.
When the subject of modernization of the army was raised with Nehru, it is believed that he responded by saying that, if need be, the army should be prepared to fight with 'lathies.' There was a pathological dislike of the Indian military in the Congress Party which came to power at the centre on attaining independence. Herein rests the answer to the military's down-gradation in so systematic and persistent a manner soon after independence! The Bureaucracy exploited this bias of the congress to the hilt and added to it the fear of the possibility of a military take over as had occurred in some of the neighbhouring countries. It also managed to restructure the higher defence set-up to the nation's overall strategic disadvantage. Congress resolution of 1942 stated "The present Indian Army is an off-shoot of the British Army and has been maintained to mainly hold India in subjugation. It has been completely segregated from the general population." These were the very years in which the British used police and not the army to ruthlessly crush the 'Quit India movement' and that Lala Lajpat Rai fell to police 'lathies' and not an army bullet. Yet the Congress heaped this ignominy on the Indian military. It is the mutinies in the patriotic Army and Navy which threw a clear signal to the British that it was time to leave. So it is highly malicious for anyone to term the loyal Indian Armed forces, our own protectors as an “army as army of occupation.”

Indian army has been in, 'no war no peace,' state since independence. Wars apart, army has lost 569 officers and over 9000 Junior Commissioned Officers and other ranks in counter insurgency operation during the last ten years. While there is little value for human life in India, the value of soldier's life count for nothing in this country. Therefore, one wonders whose army it is anyway and who will soldier for India! The Indian government, in the first 50 years of Independence, has deployed the Indian army to quell riots, maintain order, etc., 10 times more than the British did in their last 50 years of their rule in India. So much for the poor governance we have had all these years. The 6th Central Pay Commission was the last straw that broke the back of the Forces , and the normally stoic and stiff upper lip has given way to the unprecedented sight of the 'Veterans' taking to the streets. All credit to the Congress.

Repeated occurrences of terror attacks have been ignored or brushed away by statements of political make-believe with little sign of windbag resolve to fight to the finish a war on Islamist Jihadi terror. Visiting the victims of terrorist attacks in the hospital by barricading relatives from seeing their loved ones to give access to the politicians for their publicity in the media is the modus operandi of the UPA leaders. Beyond that there has been no firm action against the terrorists except for the lip service. Congress Party stands accused of not enacting a Patriots Act, of soft-pedaling on terror suspects and even failing to punish terrorists found guilty of terrorist acts by the highest court of the land.

A Prime Minister of the Indian State, the late Hon’ble Rajiv Gandhi, was murdered by terrorists. The Congress Party chief recommended a remission in the sentence of death penalty disrespecting judicial process and Hon’ble Sonia Gandhi continues to keep contacts through her daughter with a convict in Vellore prison. Congress Party stands accused of treating the assassination of a Prime Minister Hon’ble Rajiv Gandhi, as a family affair and by interfering with the judiciary and law enforcement by weakening all their efforts to bring all the culprits to book by seeking extradition of the conspirators involved in the foulest murder of the century against the head of state.

It is a nightmare that all semblance of Constitutional proprieties have been thrown to the wind by affording extraordinary state protection to some selected privileged individuals and rendering the Office of the Prime Minister who is the head of the state to a mere apolitical bureaucratic status.

The sovereignty and integrity of the nation has been imperiled by the misdeeds of the Congress Party which stands accused and in its degraded status has removed itself from the hearts of every Bharatiya. Banning such a Party by the political will of all Bharatiyas will be an endorsement of their heart-felt desire to rid the state of a political evil.
The duty of a Prime Minister of a nation is to govern. When repeated failures occur in governance resulting in the loss of thousands of innocent lives across the nation, the Party to which such a PM belongs does not deserve to be recognized as a political institution worthy of respect and should be banned. Remember Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned when there was a preventable train accident that killed several citizens when he was the Railway Minister. No such remorse has been expressed by the Home Minister of the UPA administration (Hon’ble Mr. Shivraj Patil) when so many Indians have died at the hands of the Jihadi terrorists. We have surely descended to lower levels of morality and public accountability than shown by leaders like Lal Bahadur Shastri.

Hon’ble Manmohan Singh who publicly claimed that he was only a substitute for Ms. Sonia Gandhi and hence is rightly called the "Hon'ble Substitute PM", is a threat to the security of the nation; lamenting for the mother of a Jihadi terrorist and not shedding tears for the Kashmiri Brahmins or the victims of terrorist attacks on the Parliament. Such wrongheaded unpatriotic acts of the head of the nation do not inspire confidence that he will safeguard the security of the nation. His tenure has resulted in unprecedented levels of demoralization in the armed forces who have defended the nation with their lives and should have been honoured with a Martyr's Memorial true to the dharma of heralding Jai Jawan.

Chairman of the Indian National Congress and UPA is an Italian and from what was recently revealed was a dual citizen and has allegiance to the Belgian government by joining the Order of Leopold.

The present pathetic state of the Party and impoverishment of the nation is evidenced by the Party's incompetence in governance with an standard operating procedure on the part of the Prime Minister of taking decisions only in consultation with the politicos in 10 Janpath (residence of UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi in Delhi). This is gross devaluation of the august office of the Prime Minister of Bharat.

A party which has by its shameful policies and inaction allowed thousands of farmers to commit suicide does not deserve the trust of the people of the state. At least for the sake of these dharmaatma-s, UPA and the Indian National Congress need to be banned.
A polity of UPA and the Indian National Congress has left behind criminalized politics, using money power as the only instrument of state policy, making corrupt deals with local and national communal (cast based or religion based leadership) with divide and rule politics cutting out deals with fragments of society to create vote banks just to continue in office. As the wheels of justice grind slowly, even the institutions which are expected to use intelligence in the interests of the nation have been subordinated to party interests. It is a shame indeed that a party which was in the forefront of the swarajyam movement has been reduced to such a scoundrel status, misleading public opinion and even attempting to manipulate the fourth estate.

In the light of justice and dharma, it is a crime to have exploited patriotism of bharatiya-s who have shown exemplary patience and intolerance for over sixty years after swarajyam. The patience has worn thin. Enough! The time has come to ban the Congress Party which is a pale imitation, a far cry from those who fought for swarajyam.
Heading a band calling themselves 'secular', the vote-bank motivated Party has debased our primordial duty and responsibility to protect dharma. Secular cabinet ministers have asked for lifting of a ban on a terrorist organization, encouraged grant of Indian citizenship to millions of illegal Bangladeshi infiltrator. A communal head count was ordered in the army to start divide and rule politics even within the armed forces, muted were the celebrations of Bharat Vijay Diwas, 16th December, and Kargil Vijay Diwas , and Pokharan test anniversary. All these are not mere straws in the wind but indicative of a mind-set denigrating nationalist sentiments.

Dharma which we passionately cherish shall triumph. Dharma protects those who protect dharma.

In the name of dharma, it is time for Congress to “go”. Congress Party stands accused of practicing a-dharma and call for a ban, total and unequivocal.

The crimes committed by the Congress Party have raised the consciousness of all bharatiyas who care only for the well-being under dharma of the present and future generations.

We bear no grudge against those whom we accuse here. We only seek the supremacy of truth, justice and dharma.

This is a cry of our aatman. Let the broad daylight of the effulgent sun restore the nation to its rightful place in the comity of nations.

We wait with profound respect, offer prayers at the sacred feet of Bharata maata with tears in our eyes for the future glory of every child of our nation, to uphold dharma that which upholds everything in the cosmos and in our collective consciousness.

Outrageous DU textbook: SC directive

October 05, 2008

Supreme Court takes cognisance of outrageous DU textbook
Directs experts to examine objections

By Pramod Kumar

The article in the textbook, Three Hundred Ramayanas, depicts the epic’s heroes in a bad light. The article formed part of a collection Many Ramayanas, a book edited by Smt Paul Richman and published by Oxford University Press. Delhi University adopted Ramanujam’s text in 2005 as curriculum text for second-year BA (Hons.) history course. This saw even violent protests by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and some other organisations in the university.

A three-member bench of the Supreme Court directed the five-member expert committee of Delhi University to consider the objections raised by Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti on blasphemous remarks made against Ramayana heroes in Delhi University textbook being taught to BA (Hons.) history students.

The bench comprising of Chief Justice KG Balakrishnan, Justice JM Panchal and Justice P Sadashivam also told the petitioner Shri Dina Nath Batra to come to the court again if he is not satisfied with the response of the committee. The directive from the apex court came on September 19, 2008. The expert committee includes Prof BD Chattopadhyaya, Prof. RN Mishra, Prof MGS Narayanan, Smt Kapila Vatsayayan and Prof MK Dhawalkar.

After the Supreme Court directives Shri Dina Nath Batra has written to the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University requesting him to provide details of the findings by the expert committee so that he can go through them. He also sought an appointment with the VC.

Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti had approached the Supreme Court after a bench of Delhi High Court dismissed its plea demanding withdrawal of the offensive article written by AK Ramanujan being taught in BA (Hons.) second-year history course of Delhi University. A bench of the High Court headed by Justice Manmohan Sarin had postponed the hearing till the report of the expert committee is received, but the new bench of Chief Justice AP Shah and Justice S Murlidhar rejected its plea even without holding any debate in the case. This bench said the syllabus was based on “well researched” materials and rejected the contention that Hindu gods and goddesses were referred to in a “defamatory” and “derogatory” manner saying “these are folklore that are interpreted in various ways”.

The article in the textbook, Three Hundred Ramayanas, depicts the epic’s heroes in a bad light. The article formed part of a collection Many Ramayanas, a book edited by Smt Paul Richman and published by Oxford University Press. Delhi University adopted Ramanujam’s text in 2005 as curriculum text for second-year BA (Hons.) history course. This saw even violent protests by Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad and some other organisations in the university. The text recorded in the book is blasphemous. A five-member expert committee was formed in March 2008 by the Vice Chancellor following the protests and agitations across the country against the insulting text. The committee is still to submit its report.

Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti had prayed in the Supreme Court to pass an interim order directing the University of Delhi and Academic Council to remove the offending article from the course curriculum and restrain Dr Upinder Singh of History Department and Arun Thesis Typing Centre, to further compile or make copies and distribute the copies of the article. Dr Upinder Singh is also daughter of Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh.

Meanwhile, Shri Dina Nath Batra wrote to Delhi University to know about the details of the expert committee. But what the university replied to Shri Batra through its letter dated September 15 (No. Info/OA/945/2008/25202) wondered everyone. The university denied giving any information about the committee members claiming that “the disclosure of identities of the members can endanger their physical safety.”

The university also tried to misguide Shri Batra over the number of the members of the committee. The university said the number of the members is “four”. Though, the Union HRD Minister Shri Arjun Singh through his letter dated April 12, 2008 (No. F.4-14/2008-Desk (U)) to Dr Subramanian Swamy informed that the number of the members of the expert committee is “five”.

Expressing concern over the so-called threat to physical safety of the committee members Shri Batra again wrote to the university authorities saying, “It is a matter of concern not only for me but also for the whole teaching fraternity. I am sure that you must have informed the state concerned to provide them security cover.”

Since this blasphemous text has first been published by Oxford University Press, Shri Batra served a legal notice to the Press on September 3 citing the objectionable contents of the published work and demanded immediate withdrawal of the blasphemous article from the book. He also demanded withdrawal of the permission granted to the University of Delhi to publish, use, and reproduce the blasphemous article and to use the same in the course curriculum. Replying to this notice, the Oxford University Press informed Shri Batra on September 12 that they have withdrawn the book with immediate effect and have also demanded from the University of Delhi to know how the portion from the book was reproduced in the University text without obtaining requisite permission from the publisher. It means the Delhi University circulated the text without seeking requisite permission from the original publisher.

The controversy over the Ramayana characters had not stopped the Delhi University from introducing another similar insulting book Human Rights Gender and Environment in the BA Programme of Foundation Course, Sociology. This book also contains impugned outrageous remarks about the Hindu religion, religious texts and particularly the Rigveda and Atharva Veda. Shri Batra has served another legal notice to Vice Chancellor of Delhi University demanding unconditional apology from the Hindu community for writing, publishing, prescribing and circulating the book in the university on September 11. Apart from demanding apology he also demanded withdrawal of the impugned paragraph from the book within 15 days.

This book under chapter 15 at page no. 209 with the title Women and Laws in India, section 1, Relationship between laws and women, says: “In India, religious texts and political treatises also did not accord the same legal status to women. The Rigveda regards the birth of daughter as a curse. It also equates a woman to a dog, cow, and a ‘shudra’. A woman is considered bereft of intelligence. The Atharva Veda regards marriage as necessary for producing offspring, i.e. sons only and women are considered as property.”

http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=257&page=38

UPA creates a Taliban corridor -- MD Nalapat

October 05, 2008
UPA creates a Taliban corridor
By MD Nalapat

Thanks mainly to the superb job done by Palaniappan Chidambaram and Suresh Pachauri of keeping her detractors quiet, almost all the media ire against the destruction of the security screen of the Indian state has been directed at the hapless Union Home Minister, whose main job is to ferry the Big Boss around in a state aircraft, while he trots along by her side with an obedient, adoring expression on his face. His is one of several departments—others being Finance, the PMO, Energy, Defence and MEA—that are clandestinely micromanaged by Sonia men.

Had vigorous action been taken against such elements since 2004, and had the security agencies been allowed to do their task of safeguarding the country, several of the terrorist strikes that have taken place during the UPA’s watch could have been avoided. Hundreds of lives have been lost as a result of the dilution of counter-terror activity caused by the signals emanating from 10 Janpath.
Should “Chief Information Commissioner” Wajahat Habibullah so ordain, a request via RTI to unearth the numerous “advisories” sent out directly and otherwise by UPA Chairperson Sonia Maino on crucial segments of the counter-terror operations of the police, military and intelligence agencies would be illuminating. They would show that there has been ceaseless pressure by those linked to Manmohan Singh’s boss to place brakes on investigations and follow-up. Because of these informal directives, localities where pools of suspected terrorists took refuge were declared off limits to law enforcement agencies. Small wonder that these based themselves either in Congress-ruled states such as Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, or in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar during the time of Rabri Devi.

Had vigorous action been taken against such elements since 2004, and had the security agencies been allowed to do their task of safeguarding the country, several of the terrorist strikes that have taken place during the UPA’s watch could have been avoided. Hundreds of lives have been lost as a result of the dilution of counter-terror activity caused by the signals emanating from 10 Janpath.

To give credit to Sonia Maino, she has never hidden her desire to make matters easier for terrorists. Since 2004, several convicted murderers have been hanged, and more are scheduled to swing soon. This columnist opposes the death penalty and would like to see the provision repealed, as the taking of even a single innocent life by the state is a travesty of justice. However, it is remarkable that the sole beneficiary of the “humanism” of Sonia Maino is an individual who was part of the assassination team that took away her husband’s life. In like manner, it is on Sonia’s initiative that POTA was abandoned. It is true that both POTA as well as the earlier TADA have been shamelessly misused, mainly by Congress chief ministers in Maharashtra and Gujarat, who used to arrest individuals and release them after extorting large sums of money for the purpose. The conviction rate under POTA was less than five per cent, a symptom of the disuse and misuse of the law. However, to say that maladministration is a ground for repeal would be to argue that the laws against rape and murder need to be repealed, as both crimes still flourish in abundance. What is needed is to create a monitoring and review mechanism for a strong anti-terror law that would include non-official members as well as hold public hearings, to prevent abuse. Although hundreds have died because of her reluctance to allow the agencies to act with despatch and depth against those responsible for acts of terror, it is unlikely that Sonia Maino will allow Manmohan Singh and Shivraj Patil to enact a law that takes note of the reality that terrorism is a crime very different from others, one that calls for different standards of proof and preventive action. If innocent lives have to be saved, this is the only way forward.

Thanks mainly to the superb job done by Palaniappan Chidambaram and Suresh Pachauri of keeping her detractors quiet, almost all the media ire against the destruction of the security screen of the Indian state has been directed at the hapless Union Home Minister, whose main job is to ferry the Big Boss around in a state aircraft, while he trots along by her side with an obedient, adoring expression on his face. His is one of several departments—others being Finance, the PMO, Energy, Defence and MEA—that are clandestinely micromanaged by Sonia men. Any RTI request into the cellphone and official/home telephone records of senior functionaries of these departments would expose the truth of this. Of course, Habibullah is likely to rule that these are “state secrets, even though they relate to telephone calls being made by a non-official and her designated underlings to those ostensibly in charge of these departments. Under Sonia Maino, over the past four years the agencies have concentrated not on enemies of the state but foes of Sonia, and as a result, the country has begun to host the same Taliban that has devastated Afghanistan and which is now in the process of laying waste to its creator, Pakistan. A “Taliban Corridor” has been created that links the whole of India with Pakistan, Bangla Desh, Afghanistan and Nepal, the other states where the Taliban nests. Since 2005, because of the somnolence of the UPA, the ISI has succeeded in recruiting hundreds of Indian citizens as foot soldiers in their covert war on India, a battle that is being waged even while Manmohan Singh— following the signal given from the top—seeks to free the leadership in Pakistan from blame for their activities in India

What does the ISI seek? Very briefly, it is to ensure that India by 2018 goes the way of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. That the country disintegrates into a medley of squabbling states and identities, that will tear apart everyday life and make the entire territory a hell for each citizen. They have succeeded in ensuring that today, four hundred million indians living in the urban areas are no longer safe. At any time,any of them can be blown to pieces by explosives that have been allowed to have been brought into the country and processed. Till 2005, the international jihad in India was confined to Kashmir, a state where consistent pandering to (well-funded) Wahabbi fanatics in the Valley has made a breeding ground for terror. Now, at least five states are in almost as much risk of attack as Kashmir, and in more than twelve states, modules of the Taliban nest, awaiting the nod from their controllers in the Pakistan Army.

Both Pakistan and China are alarmed at the prospect of India becoming a major economy, and Beijing is happy to let Islamabad—or more accurately, Lahore and Rawalpindi—do the dirty work of pushing the country back to below the Nehru Rate of Growth of two per cent. According to concerned citizens across the border, the explosives used in the recent Marriott Hotel blasts in Pakistan’s capital were supplied to the army by an allied country in Asia, which was fully aware that the target of such deadly materials was India. Unfortunately for both,the terrorists to whom the material was supplied subsequently decided to use them in Pakistan instead, in order to accelerate their offensive to convert the tribal areas of the country into a safe haven for the Taliban. This allied country has also supplied the Pakistan army with sophisticated communications and encryption equipment, which too has migrated to those active in mayhem in Kashmir. Interestingly, since 2004, the UPA has allowed the steady expansion of the foreign company that has been the primary supplier of sensitive communications technology to the Pakistan army, even though the Government of India (and indeed the company) are aware that the actual beneficiary of such largesse are terrorists. However, now that the Marriott blasts have shown that Pakistan and not India has become the primary target of the jihadis who are being supplied logistical, communications and explosive material by the Pakistan army, perhaps saner voices will prevail on the jihad-loving Chief of Army Staff, Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, to halt this flow. Perhaps, although the chances of such a change in policy are slight, so deep is Kiyani’s corrosive hatred for India and desire for its collapse, a feeling that he has never concealed from colleagues and foreign allies, including representatives of the country that has emerged as the primary supplier of deadly equipment to the Pakistan Army, including sophisticated explosives, communications and encryption gear, as well as missile and nuclear capability. Incidentally, this is a country where Sonia Maino was treated as Head of State during a recent visit, feted by the President and the Prime Minister in a style denied to poor Manmohan Singh, who is only the Prime Minister.

All those interested in victory against the ruthless struggle-to-the-death launched by the Taliban against India since 2005 will need to avoid activities that play into the hands of the ISI. In particular, care needs to be taken to ensure that places of worship belonging to all communities is protected, and that each citizen is made to feel safe and equal. Under the UPA, there has been a conscious effort to separate the majority community from the rest of the population. Although there has been active discrimination against the majority community, yet a crescendo of misinformation has gone out in India and other countries that religious minorities are not safe in India, a country where affirmative action in support of the minorities has been institutionalised since 1949. The most vicious untruths about this country and its peoples are being carried on by a small band of Indian citizens who travel to international capitals each month for the purpose. Such falsehoods get traction at reports of attacks on religious places of worship, such as those that occured in Mangalapuram and Bengalooru two weeks ago. Rather than take to violence, what is needed is for individual citizens to register FIRs against those guilty of publishing tracts that denigrate any of the religions flourishing in India. For instance, an individual in Andhra Pradesh who has access to the highest officials in that state has brought out more than two dozen tracts that are deeply offensive to the religious sentiments of the majority community. Unlike some learned jurists, who believe for example that salacious representations of the Goddess Sita are simply “pure art”, this columnist believes that while each individual has the right to extol the virtues of her or his faith, such a right does not extend to abuse of other faiths. There is evidence—unfortunately not yet revealed to the media—of substantial financial involvement of a major national party in the attacks on the churches, the same way as this columnist personally witnessed members of that same party funding some of the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat in 2002, a week that has emerged as a potent weapon in the hands of detractors of India. Interestingly, few in the media care to report that since that awful period, not a single life has been lost in communal clashes in Gujarat, and this despite severe jihadi provocations such as the Akshardam attack. Indeed, even in the recent Gujarat polls, several individuals who ought to have known better accepted financial help from elements belonging to a major political party to traduce the BJP government in Gujarat. The reality of such subversion underscores the need for all patriotic elements to avoid actions that can help those intent on defaming the country and dividing it

Each citizen of India, whatever be her or his creed, is an equal citizen of this ancient land. Even so fanatic an individual as Mahmoud Ahmedinejad of Iran speaks of the “7000 years of Persian civilisation” while defining himself. Each of us are the inheritors of a vibrant culture that is more than 5000 years old. We come neither from England nor from Turkey, but from the sacred soil of our common motherland. The Taliban seeks to do the bidding of the ISI and convert India into the next Yugoslavia. We must unite to ensure that they fail, we must unite to ensure that the malign grip of the Maino family over this country is removed in the coming elections. Under Sonia Maino, the country has witnessed a steady collapse of its security, its economy, its social cohesion and its democratic polity. Five more years would push India beyond the brink, into disaster. Hopefully, all patriots will accept the challenge and succeed in making the next five years the springboard for Superpower India’s emergence.
http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=257&page=8

Homegrown, yes, but ISI inspired -- KPS Gill

Homegrown, yes, but ISI inspired -- KPS Gill

(Pioneer, 29 Sept. 2008)

Much is now being made of the 'indigenisation' of Islamist extremism and terrorism in India as purportedly opposed to the earlier Pakistan-backed terrorist activities. It is crucial, at this juncture, to scotch emerging misconceptions on this count. Islamist terrorism in India has always had an Indian face -- but has overwhelmingly been engineered and directed from Pakistan, and nothing has changed in this scenario. Going back to the March 1993 serial explosions in Mumbai, which killed 257 people and left 713 injured, and were executed by the Dawood Ibrahim gang, for instance, it is useful to recall that nearly 1,800 kg of RDX and a large number of detonators and small arms had been smuggled from Pakistan through India's west coast prior to the bombings. The operation was coordinated by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, and Ibrahim and a number of his gang members have since lived under state protection in Karachi.

Similarly, Al Ummah, which was responsible for a series of 19 explosions in February 1998, which left 50 people dead in the Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu, and which had established a wide network of extremist organisations across south India, was also aided by Pakistan, with a considerable flow of funds from Pakistan-based terror groups, often through the Gulf. The Deendar Anjuman, headed by Zia-ul-Hassan, which orchestrated a series of 13 explosions in churches in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Goa between May and July 2000, was, again, bankrolled by the ISI.

The then Union Minister for Home Affairs had stated in Parliament that investigators had established linkages between the Deendar Anjuman and Pakistan's covert intelligence agency. Hassan himself was based at Peshawar in Pakistan, where the sect was established under the name of Anjuman Hizbullah, and he is said to have floated a militant group, the Jamaat-e-Hizb-ul-Mujahiddeen in Pakistan, in order to 'capture India and spread Islam'.

It is entirely within this paradigm that the evolution of Students Islamic Movement of India as a terrorist group is located. Absent the support and involvement of Pakistan's covert agencies and an enduring partnership with a range of Pakistan-based or backed terrorist groups, SIMI may have had an amateur flirtation with terrorism, an impulse that would quickly have been exhausted with a handful of low-grade and at least occasionally accidental bomb blasts. Instead, its leadership and cadre have had a long apprenticeship alongside Pakistani terrorist groups operating in Jammu & Kashmir, and several of the more promising candidates have crossed the border to secure 'advanced training' on Pakistani soil or in Bangladesh.

The control centre of SIMI has, for some time now, been based in Pakistan. Operational command in a number of major attacks, including the Samjhauta Express bombing of February 18, 2007, and the two serial attacks in Hyderabad in May and August 2007, was known to have been exercised by Mohammed Shahid aka Bilal. Bilal was reported to have been shot in Karachi in September 2007, and, while Indian intelligence sources remain sceptical, no confirmed sighting has subsequently been reported. Operational control thereafter has shifted to the Lahore-based second-in-command, Mohammad Amjad.

I have repeatedly emphasised the fact that Pakistan's ISI -- as an organ of the country's military and political establishment -- has been, and remains, the principal source of the impetus, the infrastructure and the organisational networks of what is inaccurately called 'Islamist' terrorism across the world. An overwhelming proportion of so-called 'Islamist' terrorism is, in fact, simply 'ISI terrorism'.

While the Indian establishment remains unusually coy about this reality -- with fitful and often quickly qualified exception -- some measure of satisfaction may now be derived from a growing American recognition of Pakistan's pernicious role as an abiding source of Islamist terrorism. Had this recognition come in the first weeks after 9/11, that could have saved thousands of lives, most significantly in Afghanistan and India, but also in Europe and across Asia.

Nevertheless, Western commentators and Governments are now increasingly acknowledging Pakistan's duplicity in the 'global war on terror', the proclivity to act as an 'on-and-off ally of Washington'. While providing fitful cooperation in US anti-terrorism efforts, The Washington Times notes, "in other ways, Pakistan aids and abets terror. US officials say that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence... was behind the recent bombing of India's Embassy in Kabul. And the Pakistani Government's refusal to confront Al Qaeda has helped create a de factosafe haven for the group and its allies in locations like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas region of Pakistan".

US Intelligence officials, The Washington Times notes further, compare "Al Qaeda's operational and organisational advantages in the FATA to those it enjoyed in Afghanistan prior to September 11", and warn that "Al Qaeda was training and positioning its operatives to carry out attacks in the West, probably including the United States".

These disclosures coincide with reports that President George W Bush had secretly approved orders in July 2008, allowing American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani Government. US Forces have executed numerous missile attacks from unmanned Predator drones on Pakistani soil in the past, but the September 3, 2008, attack by NATO and US ground troops at a Taliban-Al Qaeda stronghold in South Waziristan was the first instance in which troops had participated. The incident has already been followed by drone attacks on September 9 on a seminary run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, in which 20 people, including some senior Al Qaeda operatives, were killed; and on September 12 at Tul Khel in North Waziristan, in which an Al Badr Mujahideen commander was targeted. Haqqani, it is significant, was known to have engineered the attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul, using a LeT suicide cadre Hamza Shakoor, a Pakistani from Gujranwala district, on behalf of the ISI.

The increasing frequency of US-NATO attacks -- manned or unmanned -- into Pakistani territory, and the Bush Administration's approval of Special Operations into Pakistan without prior sanction from Islamabad, has reconfirmed the country's status as a safe haven for Islamist terrorists and an area of growing anxiety for the world. There is, however, still very little understanding of how heavy and sustained the Pakistani footprint has been in Islamist terrorist activities across the globe. The enormity of this 'footprint' is, for instance, reflected in the long succession of terrorist incidents, arrests and seizures, separately, in India, the US and Europe, in which a Pakistani link has been suspected or confirmed.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=kpsgill%2Fkpsgill47.txt&writer=kpsgill

Quants, Smith and Artha. Premature announcement of death of capitalism

Quants, Smith and Artha. Premature announcement of death of capitalism

Pramit Pal Chaudhuri should be complimented for a scintillating piece. But he is wrong on many counts. First, he has not counted. He has not explained how a 60-trillion dollar economy can be transformed into a 6000-trillion dollar financial marketplace. Second, he has not thought through the alternatives to capitalism, assuming as he does that capitalism is the greatest thing that has happened to organization of humanity.

Pramit is wrong on both counts.

There is an alternative to both capitalism and communism. That is dharma, integral support systems in a samajam built upon family values.

Greed has to yield place to love and compassion. Fetishism of money has to yield place to primacy of work as worship, of seva to fellow humans as the highest form of worship. This alternative can broadly be called family trust.

Hundreds of examples can be cited for the history of civilization. To cite the most recent ones, just witness the way the Tiruppur hosiery makers are organised and how their jaati became an economic powerhouse.

Pramit will do well to study Kautilya's Arthas'astra. So will the quants -- chamcha-s of the capitalist regimes. Wealth creation is not capitalism's success story. Destruction of wealth has been capitalism's record.

Only wealth formation that is abiding is that resulting from work, from the realization of the fullest potential of every citizen of the world. Quants may give a mathematical kick and win some nobel prizes in economics but are of little value as wealth creators.

The farmers' family who committed suicide as rina mochan (liberation from debt) are the true wealth-creators who were true rebels. They took their lives in defence of dharma, for it is a-dharma to default on debt repayments. They simply became victims of the oppressive financial system built as a house of cards by quants.

Quants of the world, you have nothing to lose but your differential calculus and bogus economic-financial functions far removed from the mother earth's bounties.

Kautilya’s Arthas’astra can be called the science of worldly gains. In the last chapter, Kautilya defines artha: “Artha is the source of livelihood of human beings, in other words, the earth inhabited by men. The science which is the means of attainement and protection of that earth is the Arthas’astra.”

Simply, wealth is the protection of the earth and its bounties. The goals of life, of human existence, in Hindu civilization tradition are: cosmic order (dharma), worldly gain (artha) and enjoyment (kaama). Thus, artha is only one of the three goals of life and cannot be separated from the three goals taken as an integral unit of accomplishment.

Let us look at some specific excerpts which are relevant in the context of the notes on collapsing capitalism-communism duo:

Thus with his organs of sense under his control, he shall keep away from hurting the women and property of others; avoid not only lustfulness, even in dream, but also falsehood, haughtiness, and evil proclivities; and keep away from unrighteous and uneconomical transactions. Not violating righteousness and economy, he shall enjoy his desires. He shall never be devoid of happiness. He may enjoy in an equal degree the three pursuits of life, charity, wealth, and desire, which are inter-dependent upon each other. Any one of these three, when enjoyed to an excess, hurts not only the other two, but also itself. Kautilya holds that wealth and wealth alone is important, inasmuch as charity and desire depend upon wealth for their realisation. Those teachers and ministers who keep him from falling a prey to dangers, and who, by striking the hours of the day as determined by measuring shadows warn him of his careless proceedings even in secret shall invariably be respected. Sovereignty (raajatva) is possible only with assistance. A single wheel can never move. Hence he shall employ ministers and hear their opinion.(Excerpt from Chapter 7. Restraint of the organs of sense; R. Shamasastry’s translation of Kautilya’s Arthas’astra.)

In the happiness of his subjects lies his happiness; in their welfare his welfare; whatever pleases himself he shall not consider as good, but whatever pleases his subjects he shall consider as good. Hence the king shall ever be active and discharge his duties; the root of wealth is activity, and of evil its reverse. In the absence of activity acquisitions present and to come will perish; by activity he can achieve both his desired ends and abundance of wealth.[Thus ends Chapter XIX, The Duties of a King in Book I. Concerning Discipline of the Arthas'astra of Kautilya.]


kalyanaraman

Adam Smith isn’t dead

Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Hindustan Times
September 28, 2008

Capitalism does two things well. Creating wealth and making a bad name for itself. The sub-prime crisis and its fallout have meant a lot of the second, not much of the first. However, Adam Smith isn’t dead. Capitalism is just making a poor job of adjusting to a new financial order. And a large part of why it’s tripping is bad governance. Here’s a market-friendly guide:

Sub-prime is a consequence of greedy politics: Sub-prime’s origins lie with the US government. Sub-prime loans were mortgages doled out to people who couldn’t afford them. One variety was ‘stated loans’ where a person just had to declare his income, without proof, and get a cheque.

The largest players in this were the Federal National Mortgage Association, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and the State-owned federal home loan banks. The first two alone underwrote 44 per cent of the US sub-prime market in 2004. Better known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, they were private in theory but crony capitalist in fact.

Under the aegis of providing ‘affordable housing’ — giving home loans to people normal banks wouldn’t touch — the US Congress exempted Fannie Mae and Co. from the regulatory and accounting norms of private banks. In return, these institutions showered political constituencies with dud loans and donated money to campaign coffers.
Because it was correctly believed these hybrid financial institutions could count on an implicit government bailout, they were dubbed ‘government-sponsored enterprises’.

Three-quarters of the $1.3 billion sub-prime loans were handed out by these enterprises. The US government spent $400 billion bailing them out, as opposed to $113 billion for private sector firms who joined in the feeding frenzy. Sub-prime’s rise was socialism masquerading as capitalism and capitalism falling for the disguise.
Wall Street’s financial bust shows markets work: When Lehman Brothers bought up securities backed by dud loans with borrowed money, it decided to load up on risk. Months before the present meltdown, I was told by a senior Federal Reserve Bank official that the market would be better off if stand-alone investment banks like Lehman died — they were gambling on credit cards.

If Lehman had survived and prospered - that would have been market failure. Instead, capitalism put it to the sword. Economists like Joseph Schumpeter adopted nihilism’s description of capitalism as ‘creative destruction’ but argued this was the system’s strength. When firms get greedy and stupid the market wipes them out, making way for more sensible firms. American International Group, as a boring insurance firm, was doubly stupid to have submerged itself in sub-prime and deserved to die. Politics and panic are why the only price it is paying is 11 per cent interest on its $85 billion US government handout.

Yes, it took a long time for supposedly efficient markets to bring down these faulty towers. There was regulatory failure by the US central bank under the once-sainted Alan Greenspan. Gree-nspan, a laissez faire advocate who headed a government regulator, also believed central banks shouldn’t pre-empt asset bubbles, that they should just clean up after they popped.

He should have been warier. Over the past decade or so, the world has become submerged in an enormous tidal wave of dollars, with credit growing nearly a fifth more each year than the real world economy. Capital was abundant, so it became cheap and eventually abused.

Forget sub-prime, this cheap capital has led to speculative bubbles in everything from petrol to platinum. Two years ago, at an Aspen world economy conference, I heard analysts fret that $400 billion worth of the homes being bought in the US were being bought as investments. When, they asked, would someone stop this? The market did. It just took a while because the money flood obscured the reality.

Government regulation is no answer to modern finance: The experience of quasi-government enterprises like Fannie Mae and the US central bank over the past decade shows bureaucrats are as clueless about the financial world as their private sector counterparts.

A simple example are the new-fangled mathematical models being used by both regulators and bankers to calculate the risk in buying and selling things like sub-prime mortgages. The nerds who did quantitative analysis, ‘quants’ in New York parlance, underestimated the sub-prime risk. What they accomplished was to take bad debts, run them through a computer, and then stamp them with ‘AA’ credit ratings. Everyone fell for it, regulators and investors alike, because the stochastic calculus-based financial superstructure was indecipherable. Lehman and the others do not seem to have strayed from the rules, the world of finance had moved beyond the rules.

Not everyone in Wall Street believed in these models. Goldman Sachs didn’t, which is why it survived the panic. Last year, while being quizzed by a Manhattan fund manager on India’s financial sector, I was asked, “Have the MIT quant guys got to India yet?” No He smiled, “Thank god.” I presume he bought Indian bank stock after that.
The other reason the world will have to find ways to let markets be regulated by economics is that bailouts are getting too big for governments. Washington has deep pockets. But Deutsche Bank has liabilities equal to 80 per cent of Germany’s GDP. In case of a meltdown, what would Berlin do?

History won’t declare this the day capitalism died, Perhaps the Day that Lehman Died. Capitalism will go on, not because it is perfect but because no alternative comes close in terms of creating wealth. My guess is historians will look back on what has happened — and the crisis has a few more phases to go — and call it the Day 21st Century Capitalism was Born. Much of what has happened is a consequence of the intersection of two or three developments in the international economic system.
One, already mentioned, was the sheer expansion of capital in the economy. In 1945, only the US generated surplus funds for the world economy. Today, everyone from China to India, Brazil to Bahrain, adds to the global pool. When its capital that’s on tap, no one has the necessary plumbing. This capital flow then joined with an information technology revolution whose intangible impact on finance, one, reduced regulation to guesswork for people like Greenspan and, two, paved the way for quant-based risk assessment. Most quants used a measure known as Value at Risk that drew on historical data. But what if you live in ahistorical times?

Finally, because even regulators are groping with the new financial order, the man on the street is less willing to trust governments to do the right thing. This is crucial because much State intervention in the market is not based on financial logic; it’s just a gut judgement of what is needed to restore public confidence. If Joe Investor believes central bankers don’t know what they’re doing, he will join a vicious cycle of financial panic. If he does so, he will join a virtuous cycle of financial recovery.

Welcome to 21st century capitalism. The ride has just begun.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print.aspx?Id=40d6f914-cfc8-4c3e-8180-666b361a7c02

Fetishism of money and defusing the world financial mess: re-define money as a unit of account

Fetishism of money and defusing the world financial mess: re-define money as a unit of account

One definition says that money is anything accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts. [Frederic S., (2007). The Economics of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets (Alternate Edition). Boston: Addison Wesley, 8.]
The synonym is ‘currency’ which is a standard, a unit of account, a store of value and a medium of exchange.

Modern financial transactions have indulged in fetishism of money, treating money as a commodity.

The commodity called money has undergone may processes not unlike an agricultural product, say, tomato, which by processing through agro-processing industry gets packaged as ketchup. All such processed ‘money’ products are bought and sold in financial markets such as stock exchanges, central banks, IMF.

One such process of transformation of money is called ‘derivative.

‘Derivative’ is actually a technical term in differential calculus, a branch of mathematics. Derivative in calculus – is the reverse of integration and, -- is a measurement of change in a function as the value of inputs change. A crude example is how a graph which is curved is made into a linear approximation; so, a horizontal S-shaped curve -- ~ -- can be shown as a downward-sloping line drawn as a tanget to that function.

A financial derivative is an instrument which changes in response to changes in the underlying variables. Examples of derivatives in financial markets are: participatory notes, mutual funds, futures, forwards, puts, options, swaps. Financial derivatives have taken many shapes and forms and are based on a variety of assets not excluding inflation derivatives: commodities, equities, stock market indexes, consumer price index, bonds, interest rates, exchange rates.

The financial derivatives are the root cause for a 60 trillion economy resulting in a 6,000 trillion dollar financial marketplace. The players in the marketplace (including the recently collapsed or rescued entities such as Lehmann Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Washington Mutual, American International Group) transact in these derivatives.
Instead of reducing risk for the players, these market players have placed themselves at risk of bankruptcy or simply going out of business when faced with the prospect of defaulting on promised payment schedules.

Now what Uncle Sam is attempting is a quick-fix to rescue these market players who have placed themselves at risk by their own market follies, dealing with fetishism of money, that is, money as a commodity which has changed beyond its original form and function – simply as a unit of exchange to facilitate barter transactions.

The basic problem which Uncle Sam is NOT addressing is the fact that 60 trillion dollar economy has been transformed into a ballooned 6000 trillion dollar financial derivatives marketplace.

This is the structural reform needed: money has to be put back to its original function, as a unit of account to facilitate barter transactions. If I have cotton to sell and want to buy a Nano, I should simply use money to settle the deal and not be put through the fancy financial instruments set up as mortgage loans or as personal debts to be repaid using complex interest rate computations and equated monthly repayment schedules.

The justification for designing a processed money product called a ‘financial derivative’ is to manage risk, to reduce the risk for one party.

In Hindu tradition, the word artha has two meanings: ‘wealth’ and ‘meaning’. This is a profound semantic equivalence. Artha is meaningful only when it is related to the creation of wealth. Today’s financial derivatives do NOT create wealth but indulge only in playing games with money and its allotropic modifications called financial derivatives.

An old-fashioned 18th century book of Economics, is called Adam Smith’s ‘An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.’ Smith was talking of money as a measure of creating wealth. An example cited is that a butcher, a baker, and a brewer provide goods and services to each other out of self-interest; these economic activities result -- because of an ‘invisible hand’ -- in a surprise: creation of wealth for all three. Simply put, artha is the result of peoples’ actions, work as it is called in old-fashioned economics.

There is no substitute for work to produce employment and to create wealth. The financial marketplace players are creating an illusion of wealth thinking that they have transformed the world into a 6000 trillion dollar marketplace. It is actually worth only 60 trillion dollars, that is, on the basis of the value of the underlying goods and services available.

The G20 nations (including India) may be called upon to set up a new brand of IMF, something like a super-SEBI to regulate the world’s financial marketplace. But they are doomed to failure so long as they fail to understand that the butcher, baker and brewer are the real producers of wealth, not the Goldman Sachs, not the Mauritius-based participatory note issuers.

I agree with Prof. Vaidyanathan. http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1192432 India has to teach artha to Uncle Sam and the other G19 of the G20.

Kalyanaraman

Mujahid manifesto. IM and p-sec nexus

Mujahid manifesto. IM and p-sec nexus

A penetrating, lucid analysis by Ashok. Congratulations, Ashok.

Many security analysts have drawn some technological clues from the Indian Mujahideen (IM) emails. Some have also highlighted the roots of islamist jihadi terror in the religious texts cited in the emails. This is the first analytical piece I have come across placing the IM's viewpoint in a clear-cut present-day political context. Calling it a 'manifesto' may be a hyperbole, but the message is clear.

Politico-s will be at peril if they draw wrong conclusions from the IM emails and if they fail to identify the IM email scribes.

Ashok is on the dot; there is an ideological nexus between 'thehoot' -- see the URL cited below -- and the IM scribe who cites 'thehoot' approvingly.For info. on promoters of 'thehoot' see

http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/aboutUs.php?cid=26&bg=1

When IM cites pseudo-seculars, the mixture is potent and explosive (not unlike ammonium nitrate + RDX), denying the very fabric of nationalist Hindusthana and the fact that the ancestors of all these folks were Hindu.


kalyanaraman


Mujahid Manifesto (Ashok Malik, Pioneer, 28 Sept. 2008)


[Before the Ahmedabad and Delhi bombings, Indian Mujahideen sent out long e-mails outlining its historical inspirations and its contemporary politics. Ashok Malik compares the two letters to understand the new jihad --]

In Ahmedabad on July 26 and in Delhi on September 13, the Indian Mujahideen terrorist group carried out bombings and killed about 80 people. On both occasions, the perpetrators sent out elaborate, 13-page e-mails just before the bombs went off (in the case of Delhi, the first bombs had already exploded).

Just what do these letters say about the terrorists, their inspirations and motivations? Do the letters differ or is the second a corollary to the first? Can we, on the basis of these letters, detect a strategy to the politics of Indian Mujahideen -- or is there a numbing and mindless randomness to its bombings?

To be fair, nobody knows the precise answers. What is clear is that Indian Mujahideen seeks to locate its actions within the pan-Islamic jihad but is equally careful to contextualise its terrorism within contemporary Indian politics. If those aims seem sometimes contradictory -- and give the impression that India's best-known terrorist group is riding two boats at the same time -- consider the evidence from the e-mails.

The Ahmedabad e-mail begins with a long theological preamble. It targets "kaafirs" and "disbelievers", and announces: "We are back -- the Mujahideen of India -- the terrorists on the disbelievers -- the radicals of Islam -- after our triumphant and successful assault at Jaipur, once again calling you all, who disbelieve in Allah and His Messenger Muhammad ... Accept Islam and save yourselves."

It reserves filth and abuse for those of another faith: "O Hindus! O disbelieving faithless Indians! Haven't you still realised that the falsehood of your 33 crore dirty mud idols and the blasphemy of your deaf, dumb, mute and naked idols of Ram, Krishna and Hanuman are not at all going to save your necks, Insha-Allah, from being slaughtered by our hands?"

It promises to renew the jihad of Muhammad bin Qasim, the first Muslim general to attack India, in AD 712, and of the medieval invaders, Mahmud of Ghazni and Muhammad Ghori. Finally, the preamble urges the "Muslims of Gujarat" to "show these weak-willed Hindu cowards the onslaught of Khalid bin Waleed, the determination of Ali bin Abi Talib, the bravery of Saad bin Abi Waqqas, the heroism of Abu Bakr and Umar, the guts of Talhah and Zubair. Let these spineless Hindus know that you inherit fearless courage of Salahuddin Ayyubi, Tariq bin Ziyad and Muhammad bin Qasim."

That is an interesting list of warriors from early Islam. Khalid was a general of the Prophet's army who annexed Byzantine and Persian territories. Ali was the son-in-law of the Prophet and the father of the Shia faith. Most of the others were Arab companions of Muhammad. Tariq bin Ziyad was a conqueror of Spain and the man who gave his name to Gibraltar (Jabal-ar-Tariq or Mountain of Tariq). Salahuddin was a Kurd from Tikrit (Iraq) who fought the Third Crusade and whom western historians remember as Saladin.

It is fairly apparent that this invocation of Middle Eastern Islamic heroes is a cut-and-paste job. It probably borrows from a similar pamphlet meant for circulation in, say, Iraq, and asking the faithful (Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd) to unite against the infidels. It has little resonance among Indian Muslims, who have a very different history and, even if radicalised, a very different set of prejudices.

The e-mail sent on September 13 seems to recognise this failing. It is a less theological, less Middle Eastern Islamist document, and is more secular -- as in non-religious -- in its arguments and postulates. This would also indicate that somewhere between July 26 and September 13, the theologian in the upper echelons of Indian Mujahideen became unavailable. The arrest of Mufti Abu Bashir by the Gujarat police could explain this.

The police action after the Ahmedabad blasts must have hurt Indian Mujahideen. After all, the Delhi e-mail goes out of its way to insist all is well: "By this attack we intend to prove to you the ability and potential of Indian Mujahideen to assault any city of India at any time ... This attack has now confirmed that all your attempts to stop our advance have failed and ... false claims made about the crackdown of the terror modules ... shows how shameless the Gujarat police and Gujarat ATS have become."

The mail targets specific officers of the Gujarat and Rajasthan police forces, aiming to shake the confidence of those individuals who are at the forefront of the battle against Indian Mujahideen.

It indicts BJP and Congress State Governments in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, as well as the BSP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, for "post-July 26 harassments imposed by your ATS and police on the innocent Muslims with complete, but hidden, backing of Central Congress Government". It specifically warns that the Chief Minister and Deputy Chief Minister of Maharashtra "are already on our hit-list".

However, something like six pages of 13 make threatening references to Sangh Parivar organisations and leaders. It is noticeable that the Sangh Parivar, the RSS, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal and the AVBP find specific and repeated mention, but not the BJP, which is named only once. Obviously, a full-fledged assault on the BJP will be the subject of a future letter.

The Delhi e-mail makes just one clearly identifiable political demand: "Vacate the land of Babri as soon as you can". It pays "tribute to all our brethren martyrs in Kashmir" and warns from "now on ... the Muslims won't cry alone, our women won't be widowed alone, our children won't be orphaned alone and scores will be settled evenly".

Making a departure -- or, more correctly, an evolution -- from the Ahmedabad e-mail, the Delhi message seeks to present the Indian Mujahideen cause not as Islamist terrorism but as a legitimate protest movement against oppression by the Indian mainstream. It reaches out to other groups: "We ask you as to why the 'Sangh terror' on all the minorities, including the Muslims, Dalits and Christians, is a rarely noticed idea?"

The Delhi letter is a mix of styles. The beginning and the conclusion are crude, cutting and pugnacious. In the middle, there is a whole analysis of the media, particularly of leading English-language newspapers and of which ones are allegedly even-handed in reporting Hindu violence and Islamic terrorism and which ones are not. This is written in a more reasoned manner, almost like an editorial article.

As it happens, this media analysis is not original. It is another cut-and-paste job, simply reproducing an article titled "Bombs defused in newsrooms" published on a popular media website on September 5. The author of that piece, a leftwing critic, accuses the media of using "different scales to measure terrorism".

(Note: Article "Bombs defused in newsrooms", is at the following URL:

http://www.thehoot.org/web/home/story.php?storyid=3302&mod=1&pg=1§ionId=19&valid=true )

Somewhere between the Ahmedabad and Delhi e-mails, Indian Mujahideen decided on a tactical shift -- not taking on all of India but courting allies within the intelligentsia and the polity.

The Ahmedabad e-mail had a broad sweep, questioning Indian/ Gujarati Muslims: "I ask you, who has healed your wounds so far? Congress, or BJP? Do you still want the media and agencies like Tehelka to expose your torture and make money in return of your burnt dead bodies and present all this in front of the judiciary so that they can watch this 'drama' of your killing and laugh at you, seeing you cry and beg for justice?"

The Delhi e-mail is comparatively narrow-focused. It identifies friends and foes in the media and in Indian society. It hints at an alliance with left-liberal factions. Again, this has a precedent. The New Left-Islamist alliance is a reality in, for instance, Britain and has sought to underplay the existence of homegrown jihad among migrant communities there.

It is not as if the apparent dilution of the Islamic content of the second letter completely removes Indian Mujahideen's appeal to religion. While the Middle Eastern warriors and marauders from a millennium ago don't find mention, more recent jihadis do.

"We carried out this attack in the memory of two most eminent Mujahids of India: Sayyed Ahmed Shaheed and Shah Ismail Shaheed ... who had raised the glorious banner of jihad against the disbelievers in this very city of Delhi." Sayyed Ahmed and Shah Ismail were from today's Uttar Pradesh but believed that "pure" Islam existed among the Pashtun tribals of what is now Afghanistan and the North West Frontier Province.

The two comrades mobilised troops for a jihad against the Sikh Empire and the "liberation" of Peshawar and neighbouring regions into a dream Islamic emirate. In 1831 this jihad was defeated by the army of Ranjit Singh and the two extremist leaders killed in Balakot, now in Pakistan and close to the Karakoram Highway.

Shah Ismail was, as it happened, the grandson of Shah Walliulah. In the late 1750s, Walliulah had urged Ahmed Shah Abdali to invade India and wage a jihad against the emerging Maratha Empire. This led, eventually, to the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761.

Walliulah was a contemporary of Abdul Wahhab (after whom Wahabbism is named). Both men were born in 1703, and are believed to have shared two theological teachers in Mecca and Medina. There is apocryphal evidence that they met in their youth.

Walliulah was distraught at the "deviations" and "distortions" that came into the Indian practice of Islam after Aurangzeb and at the rising power of the Marathas and the Jats. His grandson felt similarly about the Sikhs. Indian Mujahideen, their ideological descendant, perceives itself as fighting a jihad against a "Hindu empire" in modern India.

Whatever its tactical semantics and immediate signals to short-term political allies, that larger, terrifying and messianic vision of Indian Mujahideen should not be forgotten.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/AGENDA1.asp?main_variable=SUNDAYPIONEER%2FAGENDA&file_name=agen1%2Etxt&counter_img=1

Protesting BBC's fake photograph created digitally

http://www.petitiononline.com/kiran5c/petition.html
To: Sir Michael Lyons, Chairman of the BBC Trust
trust.enquiries@bbc.co.uk BBC, PO Box 1922, Glasgow, G2 3WT
Telephone: 03700 100 222 or textphone on 03700 100 212 Information line on 0370 010 3100 Lines will be open from Monday to Friday, between 9.30am and 5.30pm.

Protesting BBC's fake photograph created digitally

We the undersigned protest the fraud perpetrated by BBC by digitally
creating an image to show Hindus in bad light. BBC has faked the photo
of a Hindu man rioting in Gujarat.

http://www.sabha.info/bbc/bbc-fake.html clearly shows that the image
of the man was imposed on a scene containing some burning material.
The fire is probably a garbage dump on fire because the people in the
background do not seem to be alarmed as they would be if it was a
scene of rioting.

This is completely contrary to all known journalistic ethics and we
demand an apology from BBC for faking a photograph in order to justify
the actions of Islamist extremists. BBC must also identify the
employee responsible for faking this photograph and terminate his or
her employment.

Godhra incident, pre-meditated conspiracy -- Nanavati Comission (Sept. 2008)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6245523/godharaincident (See full text of the Nanavati Commission Report of 18 Sept. 2008 on Godhra incident of 27 Feb. 2002)

Excerpts from the Nanavati Commission Report (Sept. 18, 2008) on Godhra Incident

223. Ajay Bariya in his statements recorded by the police on 4.7.2002 and J.M.F.C. Godhra on 9.7.2002 has stated that on 27-2-2002, he had gone to Godhra railway station at about 7.00 a.m. After referring to the incident of Mohmad Latika, he has stated that after the chain was pulled and the train had stopped, he had gone out of the station. Shaukat Lalu had met him there and told him to run alongwith them. So he had gone with them to the back side of Aman Guest House. Shaukat and others had then gone inside the room of Razak Kurkur and come out with Kerbas. He was asked to put one Kerba in the rickshaw which was standing nearby. Petrol like smell was coming from it. Thereafter others had also come there with Kerbas and they were all kept in the tempy. All of them had then got into that vehicle which after passing through Bhamaiya nala and Ali Masjid had stood near the railway track near ‘A’ cabin. Each one of them was asked by Shaukat Lalu to carry one Kerba with him. At that time he had come to know that the train was to be set on fire. They had run towards the train through the foot track. He himself was reluctant go with those persons but Shaukat Lalu had compelled him to go along with them. He has then described in his statement how the coaches were attacked and coach S/6 was set on fire. According to him, Shaukat Lalu and Mohmad Latika had forcibly opened the sliding door of S/6 leading to coach S/7 and entered coach S/6 through that door. Hasan Lalu had thrown a burning rag which had led to the fire in S/6.
224. It is rightly pointed out by the Jan Sangharsh Manch that there was no prior information with the polie and the authorities at Gandhinagar regarding the return journey of the Karsevaks from Ayodhya as can be gathered from the evidence of Mahobatsinh Zala (W-17), Raju Bhargav (W-31), DGP K.A. Chakravarti, Addl. DGP R.B. Shreekumar (W-995) and Ashok Narayanan, Chief Secretary, Home Department (W-994). Under the circumstances prevailing then, movements of Karsevaks was not a matter of concern. That appears to be the reason, why the police had not thought it necessary to keep itself informed about 171
their movements. Merely because the police was not aware about the return journey of Karsevaks from Ayodhya, it would not follow therefrom that no one had known about their return journey from Ayodhya. Anyone who wanted to know about it could have obtained that information easily. Therefore, it would not be correct to say that there was no scope for any conspiracy, as the alleged conspirators did not know that Karsevaks were going to return from Ayodhya by that train. VHP had already announced earlier its plan of taking Ramsevaks to Ayodhya for the ‘Purnahuti Maha Yagna’.
225. It is also true that some other train carrying Karsevaks going to Ayodhya had passed through Godhra railway station and the conspirators could have attacked them in pursuance of the object of the conspiracy to burn a coach carrying Ramsevaks and it was not necessary for them to wait till the morning of 27th February, 2002. Other possibilities cannot make doubtful what really has happened. Why the conspirators chose the Sabarmati Express train coming from Ayodhya and why coach S/6 thereof was made the target, was obviously the result of many factors, including what was desired by and suitable to the conspirators. Unless the conspirators who took that decision dislose the real reason, it would be a matter of drawing an inference from the surrounding facts and circumstances. It appears that the decision to put the plan into action was taken on the previous evening. On 26.2.2002 at about 9.30 p.m. the first step for procuring petrol was taken. It is likely that the conspirators had decided to burn a coach of this train as it used to pass Godhra during the night. That would have enabled them to carry out their object without being noticed and identified. It appears that because the train was running late, they had to make some changes in their plan and circulate a false rumour regarding abduction of a Ghanchi Muslim girl. That was done in order to collect large number of persons near the train and induce them to attack it, so that they get sufficient time to go near the train with petrol. It was also an 172
attempt to show that what happened was done by an angry mob because of the earlier incidents which had taken place at the station. The mob consisting of the genral public would not have set coach S/6 on fire on the basis of the false rumour as their attempt in that case would have been to stop the train, search for the abducted girl and rescue her.
226. Ranjitsinh Jodhabhai Patel and Prabhatsnh Gulabsinh Patel serving at Kalabhai’s petrol pump were present at the petrol pump on 26.2.2002 at about 10.00 p.m. Both of them have stated that at about that time Rajak Kurkur and Salim Panwala had come there and told Prabhatsinh to give them about 140 litres of petrol. Petrol was filled in the carboys which were brought in a tempy rickshaw. Prabhatsinh has further stated that Jabir Binyamin, Shaukat Lalu and Salim Jarda had come in the tempy. Both these witnesses have explained in their statements why they had earlier told the police that they had not given loose petrol to any one in a carboy on 26.2.2002.
227. On the basis of the facts and cirumsances proved by the evidence the Commission comes to the conclusion that burning of coach S/6 was a pre-planned act. In other words there was a conspiracy to burn coach S/6 of the Sabarmati Express train coming from Ayodhya and to cause harm to the Karsevaks travelling in that coach.
228. The confessions of Jabir Binyamin Behra, Shaukat alias Bhano son of Faruk Abdul Sattar and Salim alias Salman son of Yusuf Sattar Jarda have also been placed before the Commission for its consideration. Jabir Behra had made a confession before the Chief Judicial Magistrate, Panchmahal District under section 164 of Cr.P.C. The confessions of Shaukat and Salim were recorded under the provisions of Prevention of Terrorism Act, 2002. It was contended by the Jan 173
Sanghars Manch that the Commission should not consider the confessions of the accused as the findings that may be recorded by this Commission are likely to cause prejudice to the accused in the trial which is pending before the Sessions Court. This objection was raised at an earlier stage of inquiry and it was rejected by passing an order. A Commission of Inquiry appointed under the Commission of Inquiry Act is only for the purpose of making an inquiry into a definite matter of public importance. It is neither a judicial inquiry nor a quasi judicial inquiry. The Commission has to make an inquiry and submit its report to the appropriate Government for taking further action. Though the Commission is given certain powers of the civil Court for certain purposes, the proceeding before it does not become a judicial proceeding. Even though under sub section (5) of section 5 of the Commission of Inquiry Act, the proceedings before the Commission are deemed to be judicial proceedings for certain purposes, they are not to be treated as judicial proceedings for other purposes. Under the Act the Commission can obtain information from any person and can cause an investigation to be made by any officer or investigating agency of the appropriate Government and can utilize such information for recording its conclusion. The only requirement in that behalf is that the Commission should satisfy itself about the correctness of the facts regarding the information obtained and correctness of the facts and the conclusion arrived at in the investigation report. The Commission can record statements of the persons by way of evidence but those statements cannot be used in any civil or criminal proceeding except for prosecuting a person making the statement if it is found to be false. The nature of the inquiry being thus quite different from a judicial proceeding we see no reason why the Commission should not take into consideration such confessions. The inquiry before by the Commission is a fact finding inquiry and therefore, the Commission can look into and consider any piece of evidence for finding out the correct facts provided it is satisfied about its correctness. 174
229. Jabir Behra in his confession dated 5.2.2003 has stated that he had gone with Salim Panwala to the petrol pump of Kalabhai for bringing petrol. Though the carboys filled with petrol were kept in the guest house of Rajak Kurkur. Salim Panwala had then gone to the Station to inquire whether the train was on time or was running late. Returning there from he had informed them that the train was running late by about 4 hours. Therefore, he had gone to home. He had again gone back to Aman Guest House at about 6.00 o’clock in the morning of 27th Along with Salim Panwala, Shaukat Lalu and others he had gone in the tempy along with carboys to a place near ‘A’ cabin. He has further stated that Mohmed Latika had cut the vestibule between coach S/6 and S/7 and entered the coach through that opening and he had also followed him. Both of them had then together by force opened the door of coach S/6. They had gone inside with two carboys. Shaukat Lalu had followed them and opened the door of coach on A cabin side. Through that door Imran Sheri, Rafik Batuk and Shaukat Lalu had come inside the coach with more carboys. Those carboys were thrown in the coach and immediately thereafter there was a fire in the coach. Shaukat Lalu has also in his confession dated 19.8.2003 given these details. Salim Jarda in his confession dated 20.06.2004 has also stated that he had accompanied Salim Panwala, Siraj Bala, Jabir and Shaukat Lalu while going to the petrol pump of Kalabhai at about 9.30 p.m. for procuring petrol. He has also referred to the message sent by the Maulvi Saheb. Since he was relunctant to take any further part in such a bad act Rajak Kurkur had not allowed him to go. He was forced to staye in one room of the Guest House. He has then stated that next day morning he, along with Jabir Behra, Irfan, Shaukat Lalu and others had put the petrol filled carboys in the tempy and gone near A cabin. Rajak Kurkur and Salim Panwala had also followed them. He had thereafter not taken any part in the attack on the train and had remained standing at some distance. All these three persons have retracted their 175
confessions but that by itself is not a good ground for throwing them out of consideration. When considered along with other facts proved by the evidence details given by this accused regarding the manner in which coach S/6 was burnt appear to be true. These confessions disclose that Rajak Kurkur and Salim Panwala were the two main persons who had organized execution of the plan and that what was being done was according to what was planned earlier and the directions of Maulvi Umarji. All the acts like procuring petrol, circulating false rumour, stopping the train and entering in coach S/6 were in pursuance of the object of the conspiracy. The conspiracy hatched by these persons further appears to be a part of a larger conspiracy to create terror and disstabiblise the Administration.
229. The Commission is required to consider the role and conduct of the then Chief Minister and/or any other Minister(s) in his Council of Ministers, Police Officers other individuals and organizations in the Godhra incident. The Commission is also required to consider the role and conduct of the then Chief Minister and/or any other Minister(s) in his Council of Ministers, Police Officers (i) in dealing with any political or non-political organization which may be found to have been involved in the Godhra incident and also (ii) in the matter of providing protection, relief and rehabilitation to the victims of communal riots and (iii) in the matter of recommendations and directions given by National Human Rights Commission from time to time. There is absolutely no evidence to show that either the Chief Minister and/or any other Minister(s) in his Council of Ministers or Police offices had played any role in the Godhra incident or that there was any lapse on their part in the matter of providing protection, relief and rehabilitation to the victims of communal riots or in the matter of not complying with the recommendations and directions given by National Human Rights Commission. There is no evidence regarding involvement of any definite religious 176
or political organization in the conspiracy. Some individuals who had participated in the conspiracy appear to be involved in the heinous act of setting coach S/6 on fire.
230. The policemen who were assigned the duty of travelling in the Sabarmati Express train from Dahod to Ahmedabad had not done so and for this negligent act of their an inquiry was held by the Government and they have been dismissed from service.

Ahmedabad. (G.T. Nanavati) (Akshay H. Mehta)
September 18, 2008 Chairman Member

http://www.home.gujarat.gov.in/homedepartment/downloads/godharaincident.pdf