POLICE BRUTALITY ON USA; BARACK OBAMA HAS MADE LIFE DIFFICULT FOR THE BLACKS IN USA

Horror stories emanating from USA do not shock us anymore. We have come to expect drive by shootings, mall massacres, school yard killings and the like. In India we have our own share of horrors so there is no comparison. However, the Police in India in spite of the occasional instance of violence is much better behaved than in USA. The cases of "fake encounters"that spring up from time to time are due to the inherent flaws in the judicial system with its dependence on procedure and witnesses, that sometime the Law and Order Machinery takes recourse to eliminating the violent criminals. It stands to reason that no one would like to give evidence in a court of law about the violent acts committed by a dreaded gangster. The police in India are now armed only with a fiberglass truncheons and are issued weapons only on the direct order of the Superintendent of Police and he too can issue weapons only on the instructions of the District Collector. I am not saying that the police are totally under the control of the civil district administration, but I can state with some authority that it would be impossible for the Police to getaway with the kind of violence which was visited upon the town of Ferguson, Missouri, USA. Darren Wilson, a white policeman shot and killed Michael Brown a young black man who was apparently walking with his friend Johnson. The attack seems to have been unprovoked as Michael Brown raised his hand the moment Darren Wilson asked him to surrender. The police officer kept firing at the young unarmed youth and he died after being hit by 3 bullets on his chest. It is surprising that the policeman shot the youth on his chest when in most parts of the world the police are asked to shoot at the lege to prevent the fugitive from escaping. In this particular instance, the young man was not a fugitive and was unarmed. The pictures that I have placed on the side of this blog may appear to be a picture from a war zone. Men in body armour,. armed with 5.56 mm short barreled rifles which are both automatic and semi automatic depending on the configuration used, and with a few pouched of ammunition around their waist. We can also see a sniper armed with a telescope keeping an eye from a building. All these men have the authority to kill and the American establishment does not order judicial probes as do our government. I remember that a great scholar of South east Asian Archaeology, Dr Roxanne Brown was killed in prison solely on the unfounded suspicion of being involved in a art case. I am giving these examples only to show that in spite of the situation in India with its crude theatrics and corrupt officialdom, something like what happened in Ferguson, USA is well near impossible. Arming the police with military equipment is against any principle of civilian governance. The police can carry weapons but its use must be strictly controlled. In USA the police carry arms and can open fire in self defence. And if self defence is claimed, there is no argument because it is assumed that everyone is armed and dangerous. The police are expected to open fire first and then engage. This kind of training has led to the unavoidable tragedy in Missouri. Like their counterparts in India, the US police are not above inventing a "narrative" to justify the deed. In the case of the killing of Michael Brown, the Ferguson Police Department has released video footage to suggest that Brown was involved in a hold up in a convenience store. What did he allegedly steal, : a few cigars. In any even, the Officer Wilson was unaware of the hold up when he shot the young man dead. A few months back the Trayvom Martin killing took place and Barack Obama made a grand statement that he could have been Trayon and the hooded jacket became for a brief moment in time the preferred attire of protest. I have a larger issue at hand. The election of Barack Obama in which blacks voted overwhelmningly for Obama is the real reason for the violence against Blacks/. Now White Liberals feel that they have moved to a "post racial" society and no longer feel embarassed by the fact that USA os deeply dividded on racial grounds. The recession has seen the household income of Balcks decline and added to that is the structural discrimination faced by balck men in particular. Obama has done nothing to help his own folks.

ISRAEL'S WAR CRIMES IN THE GAZA STRIP; THE WORLD MUST TAKE NOTE AND CONDEMN THE KILLINGS

The State of Israel owes its origin to the crimes of the Europeans, the Germans who massacred around 6 million Jews during the last two years of the Second World War. Of course this horrendous crime had to be expiated and the Americans and the British made the Palestinians pay for the crimes of their fellow white men. Israel is fast losing the sympathy it has rightly won for its several outstanding achievements: its civic programme, its educational institutions, its fairly successful practice of democracy. However, in its treatment of the displaced Palestinians, Israel is showing its true colours. Even John Kerry, the US Secretary of State in an unguarded moment called Israel an Apartheid State. one in which racial discrimination is legally enforced. The Arabs living in the territories are treated as second class citizens with limited access to education, employment or health. And the Right Wing parties like the Likud are further aggravating the situation by opposing the two state solution. The cycles of violence unleashed by Israel as retaliation for the kidnapping and killing of three Jewish teenagers from one of the settlements that has sprung up in the occupied territories is both disproportionate and beyond the limits of civilized state conduct. Without unleashing such fire power against the people of the Gaza Strip, Israel could have dealt with the crisis in a more balanced manner. In any event, the Israelis too extracted their revenge when they killed a young boy, by beating him and burying him alive. The silence from the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, the President of USA, Barack Obama is disquieting. Both Obama and Kerry are not willing to even condemn  the aerial attacks on Palestinian civilians.

The Hamas has been firing rockets into Israel and the Israeli media justifies the full blooded attack on unarmed civilians by saying that Hamas deserves to be punished for firing rockets. It must be stated that Hamas rockets have not caused a single casualty in Israel while in the current round of bloodletting, the Israelis have killed 166 Palestinians and wounded more than 1000 civilians. It appears that the motive behind this state sponsored massacre is to weaken the resolve of the Palestinians in the Gaza strip who are supporters of the Hamas. Therefore the killing of civilians is part of a strategy pursued by Israel and if the Bosnian Serbs can be tried for killing Muslims during the Balkan Crisis of the 1990s. by the same logic the Israeli political leadership is also culpable. The Arab League, the organization of autocratic Oil Rich state which legitimized the invasion of Iraq and Libya are keeping quiet. Saudi Arabia which is usually very eloquent on issues dealing with Muslim affairs is keeping a deathly silence over this entire issue. It appears that the Arab world has decided to allow Israel to solve the Palestinian Question like Hitler solved or attempted to solve the Jewish Question. The UN has lost its legitimacy before the entire world due to its inability to prevent USA from invading Iraq in 2003 and most people now believe that UN is just a facade behind which the white nations hide to carry out their atrocities on non white people. Unfortunately the discourse on Palestine centers around the muslim identity of the people forgetting the fact that a considerable number of them are Christians.

In 2009 when Israel invaded Gaza Strip it killed more than  hundred people and wounded around 1, 500. With this kind of violence unfolding can the World be silent.  

"The Case for Books": Reading in the Digital Age

Reading has become increasingly dependent on technology. The book under review by the celebrated historian Professor Robert Darnton is an interesting analysis of the ways in which the advent of digital technology has changed the reading practices of people. The joy of reading the printed book cannot be experienced by one reading the most thrilling novel on kindle. The sight and smell of a book is a delightful experience and only those who savour the joy of reading can understand what we lose by shifting to the digital mode.


Robert Darnton, the historian who gave us such classics of Cultural History as The Business of the Enlightenment, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, has been a prolificwriter who has published extensively on topics such as Censorship in the Ancien Regime and the attempts made by the Bourbons to police the literary world on the eve of the French Revolution. His approach to the subject essentially derived from the pioneering work of Lucien Febvre who wrote the Coming of the Book, an early attempt at book history. Since then, thanks largely to the efforts of Robert Darnton and Elizabeth Eisenstein, the history of print and the cultural impact of print has emerged as an important area of study, Robert Chartier contributed to the field and he brought "reading practices" to the fore. In a printed book, the codex, the eye is trained to move from left to right and the page is taken in as a unit. In the case of the Old Scrolls which had to be held in the left hand and unscrolled by the right, reading was limited to at best a short paragraph or so. The emergence of Printing made possible a rapid and almost instantaneous dissemination of texts creating the first pre digital Information Revolution. Ann Blair has been writing about how the scholars in the early modern age coped with the explosion of information brought about by print technology. In Too Much to Know Blair has documented the difficult beginning of scholarly apparatus which culminated in the humanists of the sixteenth century inventing the Footnote as a central metaphor of critical historiography as Anthony Grafton has documented in an interesting book.

The Case for Books is an excellent study of the importance of books in the cultural landscape of the civilized world.

Narendra Modi: India's New Prime Minister Leadership and Vision

For the first time in India's electoral history, a single individual has been able to overcome the inherent contradictions of a complex electoral system which makes it difficult for any one candidate to emerge victorious as the first past the winning post system imposes its own conditions. And for Narendra Modi to prevail in the face of this hugely complex electoral system and surge toward the 285+ mark makes us stop to think, ponder and reflect. He has clocked 300,000 kilometers of travel by road, rail and air. He has addressed nearly 500 rallies all over the country and had participated in over 4600 gatherings called "chai pe chercha". An Indian version of a Tea Party. The hard work has paid off and the BJP and its Allies in the NDA are poised to form the next Government in India. Narendra Modi was born on 17th September 1950 in a family which belonged to the OBC section of Indian society. Modi himself did not present himself as an OBC leader as his strategy involved the emphasis on development rather than identity. It was only when the Congress party insulted his politics by calling it "low level" politics (neech rajniti) that Modi decided to hit back and turned a barb into an emphatic endorsement of his vision. Priyanka Gandhi made sweeping and rather crude remarks against Modi and that turned the tide in his favor into a flood.Having shot her mouth about Modi's "low politics", Priyanka and the dynastic fascists tried to mend the damage but it was too late. She came across as an arrogant woman insulting a self made man. Narendra Modi spent his formative years in the RSS . The RSS, a nationalist and patriotic organization has always remained the bete noire of the Indian establishment because it was the only politcal force which opposed the Nehruvian Plan of Partition of India. The Congress made ,made what Nehru called the "tryst with destiny" but that tryst was predicated upon the unity of India not division. Because the RSS opposed Partition, Nehru and his cohorts labelled it "communal" and when Gandhi was murdered in January 1948, Jawarlal Nehru tried his best to implicate the RSS in the killing. Three National Commissions of Inquiry have exonerated the RSS and yet the Congress and its allies always rake up the past in order to undermine the organization. Narendra Modi came under the influence of Vakil Sahib and owes his world view and personality to him. It was Inamdar who encouraged Modi to study and he graduated with a B A degree in political science from the University of Delhi and later took his M A again in political science from South Gujarat University. Right form an early age Narendra Modi has remained a voracious reader with a formidable memory. During his long years as Prachark of the RSS, Narendra Modi stunned people by his accurate recall of names and events from times past. An incredible capacity to juggle with the nitty gritty of organizational details and a dedicationto the mission and vision of the RSS ensured Narendra Modi's transition from a Pracharak to the General Secretary of the BJP during the years when L K Advani was the President. As General Secretary of the Party, Narendra Modi realised the importance of the newly emergent technologies, particularly the Computer and has always shown a willing ness to harness technology for political purposes. In the recently concluded Parliamentary Polls, Narendra Modi successfully integrated Information Technology, GIS and the Internet to propel the BJP forward. All his meeting and rallies took place well within the limits of the Code of Conduct of the Election Commission of India.He adhered to the time limit and there were days when he addressed a rally in North East India in the morning, a rally in South India in the afternoon and another in Western India all on the same day,. Few politicians have put themselves through such a grueling task. Even before setting off in the morning his Research Staff would have prepared the dossier for the next days rally. Even Generals planning a campaign or war hardly show such dedication to detail. The new Government will have a completely new policy on almost all the important social and economic issues of the country. Massive funding on projects like the MNREGA, the flag ship scheme of the UPA will not be undertaken and the emphasis will shift to infrastructure. Investment in Roads, Ports and Railways can be expected to increase together with greater emphasis on Primary Education. Social Welfare will be targeted keeping real poverty levels in view and there will be less salience on identity issues. The hyped statements of the Congress that a Modi victory will lead to chaos will prove to be empty rhetoric. Even with the Muslim population, the Modi Governemnt will be fair. Since the narrative has changed from identity to development, social temperature will remain normal. I would not be surprised if new high speed trains are introduced between the different major metros. On the foreign policy front, the strategic embrace of the USA will be reconsidered as it is not in India's interest. Modi has always been an admirer of China and will try to bring about good relations with China. The confrontational policy will not continue and Modi will walk the extra mile to remain on friendly terms with China. With USA the relationship will remain normal, but the special bond between UPA leaders and USA will not be there.India under Modi will not strut about on the international stage as there are great challenges here in India. With Israel there will be excellent ties and normal relations will continue with the Middle Eastern countries. With Iran, the stalled Gas Pipe Line project will be revived. As far as the neighborhood is concerned, India will retain its predominance and will not follow a policy of letting the tail wag the dog. On the economic front, the Current Account Deficit will engage the attention of the Government. Investment climate will certainly improve. Corruption will not be totally eliminated, but Narendra Modi is known for his integrity and his zero tolerance for mis government and corruption. After 10 years of stagnation< India will at last have a Government

which will work.

Thse pictures show the different facets of Narendra Modi.

The French Medievalist,Jacques Le Goff: A Tribute

When the twentieth century looks back on its past and tries to locate the intellectuals who strove to make sense of the past in a meaningful way, then the names of Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel, E J Hobsbawm, Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff will crop up. With the exception of Hobsbawm all the others belonged to a school of historical thought, reflection and method which is generally referred to as the Annales School. While there is considerable disagreement between different historians on the themes, approaches and methods of writing history, all the leading members of the Annales School shared an ecumenical view of History one that skirted the primacy of the Nation State as the main motor or engine of History. Right from the days of Ranke the emergence of the Nation State was seen as the teleos of history, the end result of the long drawn struggle between Church and State and the religious conflicts which split Christendom in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hegel even made the Nation State the informing ideal of History and the historical process. The wonton and savage destruction of a whole civilization in the battlefields of Somme, Ypres and Flanders during World War I raised questions in the minds of Historians about the validity of the nation state as the container of the historical process. From the ruins of World War I emerged a new way of looking at the past. Marc Bloch and his friend and collaborator Lucien Febvre founded a journal in 1929 in which they espoused a Historiography unhinged from the political and ideological demands of the Nation State. The Annales remained a journal devoted to the study of History not as a mere narrative of events, the dance of kings, queens and their courtiers on the stage of History, but as problems posed as questions--histoire problematique. The death of Jacques Le Goff on April 1, 2014 brings an end to one of the most creative epochs of European medieval historiography. Born on January 1st 1924, Jacques Le Goff succeeded Fernand Braudel as the directeur of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales in 1972 and devoted most of his research energy to the uncovering of the deep structures of culture and ideology, the carapace within which society functions. The early Annales historians stresses the role of agrarian organizations and March Bloch famously demonstrated that the Open Field system emerged in southern France with the gradual end of serfdom. Using the maps of the Revolutionary period, Bloch was able to uncover the earlier patterns of farming and field organization. Under Jacques Le Goff, the Annales turned its attention to what the French called mentalites, the structures of thought and behavior informing social life. In books such as Time Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, The Birth of Purgatory, The Medieval Imagination and several such contributions Le Goff vastl;y extended the domain of medieval history. Understanding the medieval world in its totality remained the inspiring ideal of Le Goff. A great historian is no more. This blogger lives works and teaches in India, far away from the land of Le Goff. I have read his work with passion and I write these words as a tribute to a Historian who will forever remain an inspiration.

Obama and His Crimean Misadventure: Russia has legitimate interests in the region

The Western powers have once more started behaving like cold warriors, provoking Russia and hiding their aggression in a cloak of Democracy and Human Rights, a sanctimonious combination of realpolitik and ideological assertion. Nothing typifies this new conduct of the European Union and USA than the crisis over Russian involvement in the Ukraine and the subsequent merger of Crimea with the Russian Federation. People who rail against Russia seem to have forgotten recent history. It was in the Siege of Sebastipol that Florence Nightingale earned her name and it was the same Crimean war that provided the occasion for bad poetry as well: we are all familiar with the Charge of the Light Brigade by England's poet laureate, Lord Tennyson. I am only recalling these facts to underscore the historical context of the recent events. Russia has had a presence in the Crimean Peninsula right from the waning years of the Ottoman Empire and the West always tried to thwart the legitimate interests of Russia. Now Vladmir Putin has succeeded and revered the long imposed isolation of Crimea from Russia. In fact during the Soviet Era, Crimea was handed over to Ukraine for only administrative convenience. Barack Obama, of course, has stated that the West will not recognize the "annexation" of Crimea. Russia held a Referendum in which 96% of the people of the region voted for merger with Russia. Further, where was International Law that Obama and his allies talk now, when they bomber Serbia, imposed the UDI on Kossovo, and shat about the armed invasion of Iraq in defiance of the international community as represented by the UN. Russia has now followed the example of USA and her allies. There is yet another serious problem. When the Soviet leader Gorbochev allowed the unification of East and West Germany,he was given a solemn assurance by the US President that NATO will not be expanded to cover Eastern Europe. The collapse of USSR and the rise of USA as an imperial, post-Soviet power meant that the temptation to ring the erstwhile territories of USSR with military bases was too strong to be ignored and the expansion of the NATO into the territories of the Warsaw Pact nations is really at the heart of the problem. The President of Ukariane, Viktor Yanukovitch who was duly elected and a legitimate ruler was overthrown by street mobs of rampaging neo-nazis armed and encouraged by the European Union. The overthrow of a legitimate government by rioters is always a cause of concern but not for Obama and his Merry men. Snipers who killed nearly 100 people during the course of the anti Yanukovich protests are now hailed as great freedom fighters. Russia should have intervened militarily and stopped the mayhem on the street of Kiev, but Putin held his horses.In all fairness, Russia cannot allow its security to be permanently jeopardised by Ukaraine and the EU. Yet, Vladmir Putin showed remarkable statesmanship and restraint. The fear of Ukraine joining NATO is all to real to be ignored and the European Union is following the the Nazi policy of expansion by invoking the rhetoric of Democracy and Human Rights, rhetoric that hides the war crimes of USA in Iraq and Afghanistan. Ukraine during world war II set a horrible example of collaboration with the Nazis and the same forces are being harnessed now to legitimize Western intervention. More than one million jews were killed in Ukraine during the War and men like Stepan Bandera were really Nazis not nationalists. The Russian leadership is aware of the potential for Ukraine to divide on its east-west axis with the Russian majority eastern part joining the Russian federation and the western part becoming a rump member of the NATO. Given this volotile scenario, Vladmir Putin took steps to protect the vital national interests of Russia. The merger of Crimea with Russia and the eventualbreakup of the independent state of Ukaraine can be blamed on the misguded policy of the EU of encouraing the neo-nazi natioanlists.

The Metaphysics of the Political Imagination: Why Shiv Vishwanathan is wrong about Modi

A noted Indian "sociologist" in a center page article in the Hindu (April 5, 2014) has made some bold and superficially interesting speculations abort the brand of politics Narendra Modi represents. I wonder why such eminent sociologists do not subject the Congress Party and its mascot, Sonia Gandhi to the same kind of rigorous scrutiny as many of his conclusions can with equal justification be extended to the Congress. In politics style matters as much as substance and when Indian intellectuals train their guns on one individual and suddenly find his ideological soul mates like Atal Bihari Vajpayee and l K Advani more authentic than Narendra Modi from a "civilization" point of view, then we know that something is seriously wrong about the logic behind such ideologically constructed posturing. Until not that long ago, Indian middle class intellectuals, particularly the tele intellectuals of the JNU breed were articulating their wisdom in terms of sound bytes aired on NDTV which drove home just one point: the BJP and its politics is a threat to the "secular" values of the country and by default must support the Congress party. The intellectuals found it both prudent and professionally rewarding to mouth the empty slogans of "secularism" and "inclusion", the stock in trade of high political discourse in India/. As a sociologists, the writer must be aware that in terms of social inclusion as empirically measured by voting percentages and seats won, the BJP scores much higher than it rival the Congress. At least in North India, most of the SC reserved seats and ST seats have been won by the BJP and there is no use in taking recourse to the Marxist line that such figures only represents false consciousness on the part of the "subaltern" classes. At the end of the day the tele intellectual is always right and facts be damnned. Why let facts and empirically verifiable date come in the way of a politically correct and rewarding statement. The intellectual goes on to gratuitously advive the BJP to be more "discursive" more "conversational". The discursive space in Indian politics is hogged by the Congress and its academic bandwagon who have monopolized public space in the name of secularism and nationalism. If they want to suggest that the hysterical style of ranting against electoral adversaries like the way Sonia, Rahul and other members of the First Family, the Royal Dynasty represents discursive expanse and a conversational style of politics, I am afraid that people will not accept. The electorate sees the shrill hysterical ranting of the Congress as hate mongering and it is time that the soft intellectuals like the author of the center page article recognize the political style of the dynastic fascists as divisive and fraudulent To harp on Jaswant Singh has become fashionable. Suddenly the opponents of Narendra Modi have rediscovered the virtues of Jaswant Singh after his rebellion. But the same class of tele intellectuals were berating him until the other day for the views on Partition and his analysis that Congress too was responsible for the Partition and do In need to remind my readers of what they said about Jaswant Singh when the then NDA Government released the Taliban prisoners in exchange for the passengers of the Indian Airlines flight which was hijacked to Kabul. I agree Indians do not have a sense of History, but if "sociologists" who write about the civilizational strengths of the BJP should choose tom ignore recent events then it is not oversight but deliberate distortion for political purposes. Is there anything "civilizational" about Sonia Gandhi or Rahul Gandhi. If Narendra Modi is faulted for not being "civilizational" them I wonder if the hate filled rhetoric of the First Family is civilizational. It is obvious that the writer has not followed the Campaign of Narendra Modi and therefore is unaware of the reasons why he resonates all around the country. He is not an "ersatz"version of the BJP as the writer inelegantly puts it, but rather one who has crafted his political message keeping the complex realities of an ever changing India. The fact is that Narendra Modi has jettisoned the old style identity politics and has changed the terms within which India debates its future. And "sociologists" of course are livid as he has out did them in their own game. He has crafted a message of social and economic development based on the principle that the State has to ensure that the basic structure within which resource transfers and nation building takes place is in tune by and large with the aspirations of the people. And he has successfully sold the argument that the economic downturn in India is linked to the massive and egregious corruption under the congress. What is offensive or objectionable about this fundamental message. Governemnts will be voted in and voted out not on the basis of real and invented identities but on the grounds of performance as seen by the common man. I do not see anything alarming in all this and wish the author had used the resources of his mind to reflect on the conditions prevailing all over the country. The sense of gloom and doom are there in the eyes of eveyone except the starry eyed wonder struck sociologists of JNU. The upcoming elections will mark a decisive turning point in the history of India. Under Narendra Modi, India will be able to stand and take strides towards improving its economy, living standards and social harmony all of which were ruthlessly compromised during the past 10 years.