Wednesday, February 7, 2018

PARTITION: Tattooed ‘Blue-Skinned’ Hindu Pushtuns look back at their Roots

SOURCE:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tattooed-blue-skinned-hindu-pushtuns-look-back-at-their-roots/article22645932.ece



PARTITION: Tattooed ‘Blue-Skinned’ Hindu Pushtuns 

                      look back  at their Roots

                                      BY

                          Suhasini Haidar








Tora shpa da tora khun, sheenkhalai na da Maloom/ 

Tora Shpa ba khudai runya ki, sheenkhalai ba khudai paida ki 

(It's a dark night and in a dark room,/ 

Your Sheen Khalai has disappeared./ 

But the dawn will break and light will start to enter the room./ 

Sheen Khalai will start to glow again.)












Moving experience: The former Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, meeting the community members

Former President Hamid Karzai meets the small, forgotten Afghan ‘Sheen Khalai’ community in India on whom a film is being made

As they walk through the corridors of the exhibition, looking at photographs of themselves in traditional clothes, the women begin to sing first. At first, the tune is tentative. Then, as more and more join in, it becomes a roaring chorus, and they clap to words of the song, ‘Sheen Khalai’, and dance the ‘Attan’ folk dance in the way they were taught seven decades ago. ‘Sheen Khalai’ (blue skin) is not just a name for these women and men, many of them well over 90 years old, it is the story of their identity, one that brings forth tears even today. They fled with their families from the tribal areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan during the Partition in 1947.
The women are part of a community of Pushtun Hindus that lived in the Baloch areas of Quetta, Loralai, Bori and Maikhter, and belong to the Kakari tribes still living there. 1947 was a second partition for their villages, as the British-imposed Durand Line in 1893 had already given their villages to Pakistan, despite the people’s Pushtun lineage.
In 1947, they were forced out of their homes overnight. “The government told us to leave quickly and go to India. We didn’t even look back at our homes, just ran,” says Lakshmi Devi, who can’t remember her age now, but says she was a teenager then. Like many other Hindu families from Sindh and Balochistan, Lakshmi Devi, her father and siblings were sent to resettle in the village of Unniara in Rajasthan, about 130 km south of Jaipur. But once they reached, they realised that while being Hindu brought them shelter, it didn’t bring them acceptance, given their ‘Sheen Khalai’.
“It was their blue skin, the colour of the face tattoos that women in tribal areas have, that set them apart from their neighbours, and even from the Hindu women of Pakistan,” explains Shilpi Batra Advani, a documentary filmmaker from a Pushtun Hindu family. Ms. Advani is completing a film on the Sheen Khalai. “My own grandmother started to cover her face, and was shy around outsiders, because she feared being shunned for the tribal tattoos that were looked down upon,” she adds.
Some had trouble renting a home, others were viewed with suspicion by neighbours. “We tried to scrub and scrub, but the tattoos wouldn’t fade away,” says 103- year old Pyari Devi in Ms. Advani’s film. As a result, most found it easier to assimilate as Pakistani-Hindu women not as Pushtuns, dressed in saris and salwar suits, and spoke the local language publicly while teaching their children Pashto.

Mining memories

In her quest for information about their past, Shilpi Advani, with her mother Yashoda’s help, began work on the film about the roughly 500-600 Hindu Pushtun community members in India. She interviewed elders for their memories, and coaxed women into pulling out old traditional tribal clothes from the bottom of their suitcases, like the ‘kakari kameez’ they would have worn in their villages. Most were frayed at the edges, but still rich with embroidery, mirror work and colourful tassels, which Ms. Advani restored.
During the course of her research, Ms. Advani spent a year and a half in Kabul and spoke to journalists about her family’s villages in Balochistan across the line. One day, she received a video over a social media site: it was an interview with an old villager in Balochistan’s Maikhter who remembered his neighbour Prakash and his two daughters had left for India one hurried night. The name rang a bell and Ms. Advani traced back the family in Rajasthan for her film. The audience watching the interviews claps with joy at a glimpse of the village.
But the biggest joy comes from a special visitor who inaugurates the exhibition and speaks to them: former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai. Ms. Advani reached out to him in Kabul five years ago. “Hearing women singing these old songs is a very special experience. This was them asserting their identity, asserting that no force, or separation or partition can destroy this,” Mr. Karzai told The Hindu.




The women are part of a community of Pushtun Hindus that lived in the Baloch areas of Quetta, Loralai, Bori and Maikhter, and belong to the Kakari tribes still living there.  



The Pushtun leader, who was himself once an exile during the 1980s in Shimla, tells his listeners that he met Sikhs from the Frontier area of Mardaan. Among them was his mentor Ajaib Singh, who was equally fierce about his heritage, he says. When asked about the status of minorities in Afghanistan today, after they were attacked and driven out by the Taliban regime in the 1990s, Mr. Karzai says the Taliban was under “Pakistani influence” and doesn’t represent Afghan sentiments.
“The Afghan people want them back. Even just after I took over as President [in 2002], one of my oldest teachers told me our Hindus and Sikhs have suffered more than the Muslims of Afghanistan. He wanted me to bring them back. We had an Ambassador to Canada, and my economic advisor, from the minorities,” he says.
Ms. Advani says her project is for the official recognition of her community. “This is about validation, about giving us a name after all these years of hiding our identity,” she explains.
One by one, the women and men of the Pushtun Hindu community step up to tell their stories, of how they preserved their heritage despite all the odds. “We have changed our clothes (pahnava),” nonagenarian Shanti Devi says in fluent Pashto. “But our hearts and tongues remain Pushtun.”
“We have always wondered what we are, since no one owned us,” says Leelaram, who is in his late eighties. “Are we Afghan, or Pakistani or Indian or Hindu or Pushtun?” he asks, and then to answer his own question, he adds, “Today, we have become Pushtuns again.” They all cheer and break into another song, a happy wedding song about ‘beautiful Laila’ that they learnt when they were very young.
Here, just for this moment in the aptly named Frontier Colony in Jaipur, borders have blended, the subcontinent is not so divided and history is not so unkind to this tiny community of ‘Sheen Khalai’, as they sing these words: 

Tora shpa da tora khun, sheenkhalai na da Maloom/ 

Tora Shpa ba khudai runya ki, sheenkhalai 

ba khudai paida ki 


(It's a dark night and in a dark room,/ 

Your Sheen Khalai has disappeared./ 

But the dawn will break and light will start to enter the room./ 

Sheen Khalai will start to glow again.)

                                        OLD IS  GOLD










Tuesday, February 6, 2018

GREAT GAME :Great Game in Indian Ocean

Source:
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/657542/game-indian-ocean.html


              Great Game in Indian Ocean 
                                By
           Admiral Arun Prakash (Retd) 




Feb 4, 2018






It is now clear that a grand-strategic, multi-contestant, maritime ‘Great Game’ is being played out in the Indian Ocean region. Of the two major participants, a ‘resident’ India and an ‘interloper’ China are each playing by different rules. While India imagines that the conventions of traditional Shatranj (Chess) will suffice, the Chinese, shrewd practitioners of realpolitik, are playing by the far more complex rules of their strategic board-game Wei qui, or more commonly Go, about which we know very little. [  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game) ]


A discussion of this unfolding geopolitical drama must start with an acknowledgment of the audacious vision which has charted the transformation of a traditionally land-oriented China into a maritime power. Early Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) doctrine had relegated the navy to coastal defence, using small craft and submarines to wage ‘guerrilla war’ at sea. The past two decades have, however, seen a dramatic change in China’s strategic outlook. Swift growth of the Chinese economy and the consequent expansion of its commercial interests abroad has enhanced its dependence on overseas energy, natural-resources and markets, as well as the sea lanes of communication (SLOC) that carry them. While China’s land borders are relatively tranquil, the unresolved Taiwan issue and complex maritime disputes with six neighbours have led to enhanced focus on sea-power.


Although the die must have been cast at the turn of the century, it was only in 2015 that China’s Military Strategy acknowledged that, “The traditional mentality that land outweighs sea must be abandoned...given the new strategic requirement of ‘offshore waters defence’ as well as ‘open seas protection’, the PLA Navy (PLAN) will shift its focus and build a combined, multi-functional marine combat force.”  

China’s leadership has astutely grasped the reality that ‘maritime power’ is much more than just a ‘fighting navy’. The results are truly striking; China is today the world leader in ship-building and its 5,000-ship strong merchant marine ranks No.1 in the world. It also owns the largest number of coast guard vessels that protect the world’s biggest fishing fleet. It is noteworthy that China’s sea-going fishing fleet is viewed in strategic terms as a guarantor of national food security and the marine economy. Chinese shipyards are rapidly adding to its fleet of modern warships as well as merchantmen. Its force of home-built nuclear submarines is operationally deployed, and its first aircraft carrier is at sea, with more to follow.


By 2020, the PLAN will overtake the US Navy in numbers, and remain at No.2 only in capability.

  
As for India, its ancient sea-faring skills and maritime tradition had lain dormant for a thousand years; till revived by a visionary post-Independence naval leadership. The maritime-awakening of our
‘sea-blind’ politico-bureaucratic decision-makers, however, was triggered not by a sudden ‘epiphany’ but by a series of disruptive developments, that included the globalisation of trade, rampant piracy, the trauma of a sea-borne terror strike on Mumbai and the spectre of a PLA Navy on the rampage in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR).

India’s naval leadership has steadfastly striven for the creation of a strong and balanced three-dimensional navy with indigenous roots. The Indian Navy (IN) has also created its own roadmap via a succession of ‘Doctrine’ and ‘Strategy’ documents whose contours are shaped by the need to protect India’s national interests, resources and diaspora; to support India’s foreign policy; and to assure safety of SLOCs by upholding freedom of the seas.  

China’s acquisition of economic heft and coercive military power has led to a display of increasing belligerence through a campaign of ‘cartographic expansion’, as manifest in the ‘9-dash line’ in the South China Sea and repudiation of the 1914 McMahon line on the India-China border. Having already established a chain of maritime footholds in the Indian Ocean, China inaugurated its first overseas military base in Djibouti last year, and PLAN warships and submarines have now become frequent visitors to the Indian Ocean.



Since China’s grandiose Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) relies on Indian Ocean ports and sea lanes, India’s refusal to participate in this project has caused concern in Beijing. In the emerging maritime equation, former Chinese president Hu Jintao’s ‘Malacca dilemma’ may come to haunt the PLA Navy, given the Indian Navy’s ability to dominate IOR sea lanes.  In a related context, the recent conclusion of an Indo-Seychelles agreement regarding creation of air and naval facilities on Assumption Island is a welcome development.  Similar accords could be in the offing with Mauritius and the Maldives. Similarly, membership of the inchoate US-Japan-Australia-India ‘Quadrilateral’ is being recommended as a hedge against Chinese hegemony in the Indian Ocean Region. None of these measures would, however, render expected benefits unless they are components of a carefully thought-out, overarching maritime masterplan.  [  Chinese answer to ‘Malacca dilemma’  will very soon get converted to the construction of KRA CANAL in South  Thaiand - VASUNDHRA ]

It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Indian Ocean ‘Great Game’ and India’s role in it will be keenly watched by the larger Indo-Pacific region. So, India’s decision-makers need to be mindful of a few important factors. 

Firstly, India’s modern and professionally competent navy is said to be largely home-grown, but until Indian warships and submarines are equipped with indigenously designed and manufactured weapons, sensors and machinery, the navy will remain import-dependent and vulnerable in war. Far from being a regional ‘net security provider’, the IN may find it a challenge to sustain its own units in distant waters.

Secondly, unlike their Chinese counterparts, Indian decision-makers have failed to comprehend that the navy, by itself, constitutes just one component of the country’s maritime capability. Without the remaining elements, India’s maritime power will remain hollow. Despite exaggerated claims, India’s ports and infrastructure remain backward, our shipbuilding industry is stagnating, the merchant fleet is static, we lack a viable fishing-industry, and sea-bed exploitation is yet to commence.  

Finally, the Indian Navy’s maritime doctrines and strategies, as well as initiatives like ‘Sagar’ abroad, and ‘Sagarmala’ at home, will lack logic and coherence unless backed by a comprehensive national strategy for maritime security. The faithful implementation of this strategy will create urgently-needed capacities that will not only benefit our economy but also reinforce maritime security. 

(The writer is a former chief of the Indian Navy)











AN ARMS DEALER SAYS LIFE UNDER TRUMP IS A 'WIN-WIN'

SOURCE
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/asked-international-arms-dealer-life-trump/E:






AN ARMS DEALER SAYS LIFE UNDER                TRUMP 

              IS A

        'WIN-WIN'








David Marks—not his real name—is an international arms dealer. He acquires military technology, including weapons, aircraft, tanks, missiles, and computers, on behalf of governmental clients around the globe. He operates legally, working only works with countries that are allied with the West. He has modest homes in two locations around the globe–his primary residence is in Europe–as well as offices that anchor his presence in the countries within which he does business.

Marks closes hundreds of millions of dollars in arms deals every year, taking a single-digit percentage for each as his company’s compensation. He travels monthly around the world to meet clients and governments, brokering deals and conducting due diligence on both the buyers and sellers. He works with large prime contractors, civilian corporations, and small weapons manufacturers. He describes his role as an outsourcing specialist," someone who can step in to manage transactions and acquisitions that might be sensitive or politically unpopular.
By virtue of his network of clients and sources, he can offer unique insight into international geopolitics. (He describes his personal politics as centrist, though slightly more right-leaning as he gets older.) I spoke with Marks via a secure communications app to find out what impact the Trump administration might have on global security.

WIRED: First, some background. How do you gather your information when conducting business?

Marks: You establish a network over a long period of time. I have contacts in intelligence, government, commerce, and banking. It behooves you to have a diverse range of sources. They all have their own vantage points, so you use your experience and knowledge about how the world really works, and then balance all of that input so you can gauge things for yourself. You have to judge whether to go ahead with a given deal or deem it too risky. A lot of it has to do with experience and common sense, but also understanding geopolitics and global business. We walk the line in the middle.

What’s an example of a deal that’s too risky for you?
There was an incident a few years ago in the Ukraine—which, I’m sorry to say, is a tough place to do business. We were invited to participate in the procurement of non-military vehicles that were going to be used by a government agency. I had access to extremely good products, and have sold hundreds of these vehicles in the past, so I thought it would be a piece of cake. It’s close to Europe, the Ukraine is our friend, etc. But then I got a phone call from a friend at three-letter US agency: ‘We have actionable intelligence that you might get kidnapped.’ This is a person with 30 years of experience. I don’t take comments lightly from someone like this, so I backed out.

What do you think of the Trump administration so far?
What I see is what I expected to see. The first year is going to be a reality show—and yes the early stuff out of DC is mind-boggling. From a geopolitical perspective, countries know they at least can’t bullshit him the way they could past administrations. If they do try to bullshit him he’ll come at them full-power, so they’re going to have to sit down and negotiate. This scares the crap out of both allies and adversaries.
How will that manifest itself?
There are a lot of niceties and protocols involved in foreign policy and structuring international deals. Trump can’t stay ignorant of those details, and you must respect international laws and protocols, but he’s going to run this like he runs a business. In the last 25 years, international relations deviated from focusing on statecraft to all the politics and niceties. Now there will be more dialogue, lots of back and forth, and this administration will try to find a medium between statecraft and business. We’re going to get a dose of realism, and frankly we need that. Sure, it’s all going to be filtered through the Trump lens, and we don’t really know what that means yet, but we’ll get clarity. I truly believe that.
What are others in the global military community saying about the new administration?
They’re confused. A lot of them don’t know what to expect. Take the fact that he hung up on the Australian prime minister. Contrary to what people might think, I really, really don’t believe he’d act like that if he didn’t feel the need, given his desire to change the tenor of conversations even with our allies. He knows what it means to be President of the United States. But that doesn’t change the fact that people are confused.
How will the arms business in general change?


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Trump has been all over the likes of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, telling them to get their act together in terms of pricing and accountability. They used to shoot from the hip when pricing their defense systems, and that’s going to end. The Joint Strike Fighter program—just as a top-level example—has been mind-boggling in this respect. We’ve been lied to, as have our allies, and now those nations are looking elsewhere for their military systems. That makes the US look bad. You just can’t say an airplane is going to cost x and then say oh never mind, it’ll be y. They need to be more fair and even-handed, and they need to not act like we’re the only show in town. Things need to be more rational and business-minded in the defense industry. You cannot keep inflating prices and expect your buyers to pay any price you deem correct.
How do you think your business specifically will be impacted by Trump?
Business will be better in part because of Trump going after a lot of bloat at the higher echelons of the military-industrial complex. This frees up money for broader spending. In terms of political tension, if things stay the same, it’s a win-win proposition—assuming you are fair and deliver your goods and services with a reasonable margin, and don't gouge prices. If tensions escalate, the US and NATO allies will all need more equipment. If tensions thaw, we will get access to new markets, including the CIS states like Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine.
Of course, a potential global recession would be a game-changer for everyone, including our business. NATO states will certainly cut spending on military technology, and the business environment would get more difficult and complicated with the general reduction of trade volume.
Have the types of weapons and hardware people have been buying changed, in anticipation of evolving types of conflict? In short, what’s hot these days?
The guns-and-ammo side will always be there. Frankly, Trump and his administration won’t really change anything for our business in that respect. Remember, we only deal with states that are allied with the US, and even there we have clear lines regarding exactly what can and cannot be sold or supplied to friendly states.
'In terms of political tension... it's a win-win.'
INTERNATIONAL ARMS
 DEALER

Having said that, what is always hot is what we refer to as disruptive technology—smart weapons, missiles, guided weapons, for instance, and any kind of game-changing technology specifically related to any particular conflict. This can be as simple as long-range artillery, advanced anti-tank missiles, or civilian aircraft modified to carry weapons. This is why we need to seriously and strictly control their proliferation, and not let them just "appear" on any battlefield or conflict zone. In the wrong hands, they can have catastrophic effects on society at large, world-wide.
What’s the short-term prognosis?
Everyone is in a holding pattern. People are giving him the benefit of the doubt, and I know myself that everything I’m saying here is nice and in a perfect world. But the truth is that we don’t know what’s going to happen. In US and foreign policy at this point in time, that’s a good thing. It’s not predictable, and our adversaries count on the predictability of US administrations. That predictability has worked to our detriment, and we paid price for that. But now there’s no predictability, and that’s given us kind of a reset button. Everyone is hoping for the best, but we still don’t know what to expect from him. The ball is absolutely in his court.
So should the world be worried?
No, I don’t think so. It’s going to be fine.