"In this season of people offering money to behead others over depictions of history, Aisi Taisi Democracy drops the new song about the forever-in-conflict phenomenon. Share it with ten people and Lord Macaulay will appear in your dreams to deliver his fake-speech."
Aisi Taisi Democracy - a comedy-political-satire group that features National award winner Varun Grover alongside Indian Ocean's Rahul Ram, and stand-up comic Sanjay Rajoura - have yet again hit all the right notes with their latest song, titled,
"The History Song".
The song emphasizes on how the history is being re-told and distorted at convenience in our country. With its catchy tune and cheeky lyrics, the song sums up the political discourse right now.
From Rajasthan government’s rewriting the outcome of the Battle of Haldighati to the on-going debate over Padmavati, to RSS and BJP, Aisi Taisi Democracy covers it all.
Performed by Rahul Ram and written by Sanjay Rajoura and Varun Grover, the song is currently being shared by many on social media.
At sea: Costs involved to sustain ‘heightened’ maritime activity are immense.
MARITIME : Playing the Great Game
BY Sandeep Dikshit
THE three years of the Narendra Modi government have seen a shifting of the goal posts of the Great Game in South Asia. The British navy’s muscle at one time brooked no contest; hence the maritime domain posed no challenges. The British instead played the Great Game on terra firma, for it was here that it suspected a challenge, especially from Russia and, for a brief time, when Napolean planned march to India till he ran aground in Egypt.
For most of the time, Independent India conducted the Great Game on land: keen interest in Afghanistan and Nepal, the Bangladesh war, the annexation of Sikkim and even its military intervention in Sri Lanka was a short sea-hop away. But for the intervention in the Maldives in 1987, India kept away from dipping its toes in the maritime domain though 90 per cent of its trade, including all oil supplies, came from the sea.
There was a good reason for the aversion. India had no axe to grind beyond the Malacca Straits. Neither did it need to foray much into the western Indian Ocean: there never has been any disruption of oil supplies from Arabia to warrant a preemptive naval presence. It, however, kept its ethnicity-based diaspora links alive with Mauritius and the Maldives by occasionally handing over used military hardware and kept ships deployed in the Gulf of Aden to tackle piracy.
The Modi government promises to revolutionise this somnolescent state of affairs. It has made much of a berthing arrangement for its ships with Singapore. On his visit to Seychelles, Mr Modi had come away with a solemn assurance of being given an island on lease for “developmental purposes”. There is little doubt it would evolve into a military foothold for India.
More than his other third world Asian colleagues, Mr Modi has taken to heart frequent US exhortations for India to pull its weight in the region. There was enough on India’s plate anyway: its humanitarian mission in Afghanistan, the constant prodding by Pakistan and China, its foray into Africa and, of course, the usual bread and butter of international relations that a middle power like India was fully stretched to cope with due to its abysmally small diplomatic corps and an asset-starved Navy.
The Manmohan Singh government wisely kept most of US homilies on a slow flame: it backed out from a quasi-naval alliance with Japan, Australia and the US; maintained a calibrated intensity of ties with Vietnam; and the file on the three military pacts with the US kept shuffling between the ministries and the PMO.
Now, as the Navy Chief put it, warships and aircraft are deployed from the Gulf of Aden to the Western Pacific on an almost 24x7 basis. He justified this philosophy because it ensures a high degree of presence, visibility and situational awareness in important maritime regions across the globe.
But what are the costs involved to sustain this heightened maritime activity? Apart from the usual expenditure on personnel and fuel, besides the increased wear and tear of assets, massive capital expenditure upwards of Rs 1 lakh crore may be required to match words with deeds.
However, the Modi government is missing a trick by not interweaving naval muscle with exploitation of economic opportunities. It may be treading the same path as the British when they made financially ruinous military forays into the badlands of Afghanistan as part of the Great Game in the 19th century with no commensurate financial returns.
Since Mr Modi is benchmarking the Indian Navy’s forays with those of the Chinese navy, it would be worthwhile to examine how both compare in extracting money from the military investment. On its Pacific coast, China stepped up deployment when India was investing all its vigour in facing off with its army on the Doklam plateau. Beijing’s testing of its military prowess on the Pacific coast was not meant only as a signal to Japan, but also to avert the possibility of a possible US-Japan interdiction of its supply routes of oil from a massive, newly-minted terminal at Vladivostok in case Sino-West ties nose-dived.
While India imports or has substantial foreign inputs in its high-end naval assets, China’s complete mastery over submarines has allowed it to innovate in underwater robotics that is useful for the offshore petroleum industry and the mining of undersea metals. China is well on its way to extracting much sought-after minerals from a UN-allotted 75,000 sq km of seabed for poly-metallic nodules. It is not the only player. Canada will mine sulphide resources while Korea, Japan and the US have also invested in deep-sea prospecting.
In sum, like the Europeans who used the navy as a battering ram to open unwilling economic doors, the Chinese are also marrying security deployment with economic returns: the oil-rich South China Sea is a prime example. Its more ambitious Maritime Silk Road too has an economic approach.
India, in contrast, may soon find itself in an overstretched defensive position, struggling to retain its earlier salience.The Maldives — where the Indian Navy once fended off a mercenary take-over attempt — has signed a Free Trade Agreement with China while keeping India in the dark. And this island-nation receives subsidised ration and water from India! New Delhi’s repeated requests to Sri Lanka for taking over the Trincomalee oil tanks and the airport at Hambantota is getting a feeble response. The latest news is that China may even have turned around Seychelles.
No Great Game can be played only by military tools and with no economic returns to boot. India has no economic doors to knock down. Its Navy is good enough to thwart all challenges and has traditionally evacuated Indians in distress on foreign shores or assisted neighbours suffering from a natural calamity. Even in the 16-country ASEAN Plus it is considered the most reluctant on a free trade agreement. Had India been a big power, Mr Modi’s military vision in the high seas would have been called imperial overstretch. Currently, he seems to be locking the country into permanent antagonisms with no commensurate returns.
“In my view, shared by all my Muslim friends, burqa is the single most reprehensible cause for keeping Muslims backward (it is synonymous to jehalat — ignorance and backwardness). The sooner it is abolished, the better.”
At the recent Book Fair in Delhi there was a stall selling Islamic literature. Friends who went round the stalls told me that among the hottest sellers was Answer to Non-Muslim Common Questions About Islam by Dr Zakir Naik (Madhur Sandesh Sangam).
The learned doctor, who has a phenomenal memory when it comes to quoting chapters, verses and lines of the scriptures, has chosen 20 questions, most often asked by non-believers: they include polygamy, burqa, drinking, eating pigmeat, afterlife, and kafirs.
I have heard Zakir Naik hold forth on these and other subjects several times on television before large receptive audiences, who hear him spellbound. I disagree with almost everything he has to say about misconceptions about Islam. Though by definition (a kafir), I don’t believe in God, satan, angels, devils, heaven or hell, I feel hurt and angry because I am emotionally and rationally bothered by the sorry plight of Muslims today.
I find Naik’s pronouncements somewhat juvenile.
They seldom rise above the level of undergraduate college debates, where contestants vie with each other to score brownie points.
I will deal with only four of the twenty topics he deals with — two of minor and two of major importance.
Muslims and Pork
Why is eating pigmeat forbidden in Islam? Dr Naik tells us that the “pig is one of the filthiest animals on earth.”
Agreed, it eats garbage, including human and animal excreta. He further adds,“The pig is the most shameless animal on the face of the earth. It is the only animal that invites its friends to have sex with its mate”I admit I was not aware of this swinish aberration. He goes on to list 70 different types of diseases caused by eating pig meat.
He does not tell us why the vast majority of non-Muslims, non-vegetarians of the world relish pig meat in different forms: ham, bacon, pork, sausages, salami etc.
Many Pacific island economies depend on breeding pigs. I for one have not heard of great epidemics caused by consumption of pig meat.
Muslims and Alcohol
Why is alcohol forbidden to Muslims? Actually, what is forbidden by the Quran is drunkenness, not drinking. However, Dr Naik construes it to be a sin.
He says, “Alcohol has been the scourge of human society, since time immemorial. It costs enormous human lives and terrible misery to millions throughout the world.”
He lists 19 diseases, including eczema, caused by intake of liquor. One does not have to quote the scriptures to prove that excessive drinking ruins one’s health, impoverishes families, leads to bad behaviour and crime. It is plain common sense.
People all over the world overdo it and suffer. Those who drink within limits enjoy it. I have been drinking for 70 years. I have not been drunk even once in my life, never fallen ill nor offended anyone.
I am 94 and still drink everyday.
My role model is Asadullah Khan Ghalib. He drank every evening and alone. I look forward to my sun downers. For me and for millions of others, drinking has nothing to do with religion.
Let us see what Dr Naik has to say about two more serious subjects: polygamy and hijab (veil).
Muslims and Polygamy
“The Quran is the only religious book on the face of this earth that contains the phrase “marry only one,”he asserts. And explains the verse on the subject
“marry women of your choice, two, three or four; but only fear that ye shall not be able to do justice (with them), then only one”.
And since “ye are never able to be fair and just as between women. Therefore, the verdict is in favour of one wife at a time. “Hindus are more polygamous than Muslims,” writes Dr Naik.
There are more women than men in the world; so what are women who can’t find unmarried men do except become co-wives of married men? Or become “public property?” So goes the learned doctor’s argument.
He does not deign to deal with the situation as it exists today. Every other religion other than Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism now forbids men from having more than one wife at a time.
Muslims are the sole exception though only a miniscule minority, mainly Arabs, have multiple wives.
Apply for a visa to some country like Indonesia and Malaysia and you will have to fill a column naming up to four wives accompanying you. The answer to the problem of women out-numbering men is not polygamy, it is freedom to engage in extra-marital relation or have them staying single. It is better than having a harem.
Muslims and Burka
Dr Naik is in favour of women wearing burqas from head to foot, girls not going to mixed schools or colleges, nor going into professional institutions in which they have to expose their faces etc. This amounts to denying them, equal rights with men.
In my view, shared by all my Muslim friends, burqa is the single most reprehensible cause for keeping Muslims backward (it is synonymous to jehalat — ignorance and backwardness). The sooner it is abolished, the better.
He castigates the western society in no uncertain terms: “Western talk of women’s liberalisation is nothing but a disguised form of exploitation of her body, degradation of her soul and deprivation of her honour.
“Western society claims to have uplifted women. On the contrary, it has actually degraded them to the status of concubines, mistresses, and society butterflies who are mere tools in the hands of pleasure seekers and sex marketers….”
All I can say in reply is “Dr. Naik, you know next to nothing about the Western society and are talking through your skull cap. People like you are making the Muslims lag behind other communities.”
China has emerged as the alternative power-bloc to the US, and questions on the efficacy, impact and real intent behind the Chinese model of global investments, have ensued. Chinese ‘colonialism’ in Africa To allay the fears of a ‘new form of colonialism’ (read, Chinese investments in Africa), global consultancy firm McKinsey had presented a paper called the ‘Dance of the Lions and Dragons’ to suggest that the Chinese investment were indeed, beneficial to the recipient countries. However, credible concerns abound in Africa about the lack of financial transparency involving the ‘Chinese private firms’, the extraction and plunder of Africa’s natural resources, on-site employment opportunities to hordes of Chinese nationals, debilitating paybacks of oil concessions and mining rights in return for Chinese investments and strategic ‘land-securing’ by the Chinese. Unverified figures of about 15 million acres of African land secured by Chinese conglomerates and the opening of the overseas Chinese Naval base in the ultra-strategic Horn of Africa, Djibouti, costing nearly $600 million have fueled further concerns about the Dragon’s ulterior motives. This posits the other infrastructural initiatives of the Chinese juggernaut with potential concerns, eg the brazen Eurasian corridor with the One-Belt-One-Road (OBOR) and the $62 billion China-Pakistan-Economic-Corridor (CPEC), connecting the Gwadar port in the restive Baluchistan with Kashgar, in the Chinese mainland. Pak sees real motives of China in CPEC Like the wary whispers in Africa, the real Chinese motives in CPEC are slowly raising eyebrows in Pakistan amongst the puzzled policymakers, beyond such flowery expressions as “Pakistan-China friendship is higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, sweeter than honey, and stronger than steel”, coined by the Chinese. Recently, the Seventh Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) was deliberating to finalise the nuts and bolts of the CPEC Long-Term-Plan (LTP), and an oddly disconcerting request by the Chinese to make their currency (Yuan) as the legal tender in the Gwadar port was raised, and expectedly refused by Pakistan. No ‘soft loans’ or jobs for Baluch: Already, the veneer of the Chinese ‘concessions’ and ‘soft loans’ are riling against the debt-burden of $90 billion that Pakistan will end up paying China over the 30 years’ term period. The abundance of Chinese workforce in Gwadar is in stark contrast to the promised employment and prosperity for the local Baluch (even as 19 out of the 39 ‘early harvest’ projects are either completed or in advanced stages). The local Baluch, in any case, nurse a historical animosity against Islamabad for exploiting their natural resources in return for negligible gratification and are saddled with more Pakistani military boots-on-ground to quell their legitimate grouses. Other areas like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and ‘Azad Kashmir’ are also alluding to deprivation emanating
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In india various types of languages are spoken but our national language id Hindi but here are lots of people in south india. north east who can't speak or under stand hindi but they can understand english language so finally we decided to make video in both language so that each and every person can understand and can be informed about defence news on youtube .our videos are related to global defence news . we try to update defence news as soon as possible without any editing but we never say its 100% true but try to get it from verified sources . Jai Hind
Historically, the Dragon is driven by self-interests, even against fair-play norms, as is evident in its dealing with neighbours India, Vietnam etc. But, its ensnaring abilities will come to forefront for Pakistan as more details of CPEC tumble out
THE Chinese have an ‘expansionist’ agenda that manifests itself in the realm of trade and commerce, infrastructural initiatives, diplomacy and military footprint. Having overtaken the US as the world’s largest economy (also the world’s largest polluter), the dragon is now securing the neologism of the ‘Chinese Century’ with aggressive realpolitik, geostrategic investments and crucially, by remaining uninvolved in the global war-on-terror that saps the resources of the West. To fructify the portents of the ‘Chinese Century’, Beijing does not shy away from patronising illiberal regimes (eg Sudan, North Korea or having ‘all-weather friendship’ with Pakistan, with which it has no civilisational, cultural or ideological commonality). The ready generosity of the Dragon’s coffers are ostensibly ‘without strings attached’, as it comes without preachy concerns on issues like human rights, democracy or any other ‘niceties’. China has emerged as the alternative power-bloc to the US, and questions on the efficacy, impact and real intent behind the Chinese model of global investments, have ensued.
Chinese ‘Colonialism’ in Africa
To allay the fears of a ‘new form of colonialism’ (read, Chinese investments in Africa), global consultancy firm McKinsey had presented a paper called the‘Dance of the Lions and Dragons’ to suggest that the Chinese investment were indeed, beneficial to the recipient countries. However, credible concerns abound in Africa about the lack of financial transparency involving the ‘Chinese private firms’, the extraction and plunder of Africa’s natural resources, on-site employment opportunities to hordes of Chinese nationals, debilitating paybacks of oil concessions and mining rights in return for Chinese investments and strategic ‘land-securing’ by the Chinese. Unverified figures of about 15 million acres of African land secured by Chinese conglomerates and the opening of the overseas Chinese Naval base in the ultra-strategic Horn of Africa, Djibouti, costing nearly $600 million have fueled further concerns about the Dragon’s ulterior motives. This posits the other infrastructural initiatives of the Chinese juggernaut with potential concerns, eg the brazen Eurasian corridor with the One-Belt-One-Road (OBOR) and the $62 billion China-Pakistan-Economic-Corridor (CPEC), connecting the Gwadar port in the restive Baluchistan with Kashgar, in the Chinese mainland.
Pak Sees Real Motives of China in CPEC
Like the wary whispers in Africa, the real Chinese motives in CPEC are slowly raising eyebrows in Pakistan amongst the puzzled policymakers, beyond such flowery expressions as “Pakistan-China friendship is higher than the mountains, deeper than the oceans, sweeter than honey, and stronger than steel”, coined by the Chinese.
Recently, the Seventh Joint Cooperation Committee (JCC) was deliberating to finalise the nuts and bolts of the CPEC Long-Term-Plan (LTP), and an oddly disconcerting request by the Chinese to make their currency (Yuan) as the legal tender in the Gwadar port was raised, and expectedly refused by Pakistan.
No ‘soft loans’ or jobs for Baluch: Already, the veneer of the Chinese ‘concessions’ and ‘soft loans’ are riling against the debt-burden of $90 billion that Pakistan will end up paying China over the 30 years’ term period.The abundance of Chinese workforce in Gwadar is in stark contrast to the promised employment and prosperity for the local Baluch (even as 19 out of the 39 ‘early harvest’ projects are either completed or in advanced stages). The local Baluch, in any case, nurse a historical animosity against Islamabad for exploiting their natural resources in return for negligible gratification and are saddled with more Pakistani military boots-on-ground to quell their legitimate grouses. Other areas like the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and ‘Azad Kashmir’ are also alluding to deprivation emanating from CPEC.
Only 9% revenue for Pak: The initial claims of the supposed windfall for Pakistan from the revenue generation from Gwadar port got blunted by the reluctant clarification from the Pakistani authorities that China would get 91 per cent of the Port revenues, and Pakistan only a measly nine per cent for the next 40 years! Expectedly, the unofficial ‘voice’of the Chinese officialdom came through the Chinese publication Global Times that quoted an official clarifying, “common international rules regarding build-operate-transfer (BOT) projects do not require the operator to share any revenue generated from the projects during the investment and operation period with the eventual owner.” Earlier, the Chairman of Pakistan Senate Standing Committee on Planning and Development had warned,
“Another East India Company is in the offing; national interests are not being protected.”
Recently, lawmakers in the Pakistani Senate expressed concerns in the apparent bias in favour of the Chinese as details about CPEC became public.
For China, its strategic interest primary: The CPEC for China is primarily about finding a life-sustaining corridor alternative to the compulsive vulnerability felt for its shipping lanes (through the ultra-narrow Malacca Straits) that could get potentially ‘choked’ by vested powers in the region. That the CPEC also offers the additional opportunity to create new export markets, utilise Chinese spare capacity, develop Western China or facilitate goodwill and economic transformation for its tactical ally, Pakistan, is secondary to its primary strategic interest that seeks to uninterruptedly fuel the wherewithal for the ‘Chinese Century’. So, if the Chinese focus limitedly on the dual objective of self-maintaining the Gwadar port and on maintaining the singular axis of the narrow Gwadar-Kashgar corridor (for which the Pakistanis have already committed a Division of 15,000 soldiers), ignoring the other inter-linkages in the periphery, arterial projects and other economic ‘zones’ as envisaged as part of the CPEC Master Plan, the economic transformation for the Pakistani economy could get severely limited. As the initial veil surrounding the finer details of the CPEC unfurl, facts seem disturbing for the Pakistanis, who were assured that CPEC would alleviate most of their economic concerns. Historically, the Dragon is driven by blatant and tactical self-interests, even if they militate against the norms of fair-play and respect, as evident in its dealing with India, Bhutan, Taiwan, Vietnam etc. The ensnaring abilities of the hidden Dragon will come to fore for Pakistan, as more details pertaining to the CPEC tumble out.
