Protecting our Protectors: Protecting Our Protectors - Why Sachin Suryavanshi...

THURSDAY, 28 MARCH 2013

Protecting Our Protectors - Why Sachin Suryavanshi cannot be left to fend for himself

You can choose to be indifferent, but not forever. Your misplaced hope that someone else, somewhere, some how will fix this society for you while you keep trying to make the most of your life may well be driving you down a path of future regret and failure - In the eyes of yourself, your family and your society.

What is to come of you should tomorrow your daughter be molested, son murdered, parents heckled or worse? What if these acts were to be committed by someone who cannot be investigated and cannot fall within the realms of law? What if the perpetrators are one of the MLAs or their family member who just got a little more emboldened as ASI Sachin Suryavanshi lies at a hospital, suspended from police service, thrashed by MLAs in the Vidhan Sabha - all for ensuring that an MLA was duly challaned for over-speeding.

Go on, hope that the worse never happens to you or your family. Shirk your responsibility to the nation, your society and to yourself and fatally hope and pray instead. Donate to temples, give to charity and hope that because you pay a "moral hypocrisy" tax, bad will not befall you. Its not the first time for most of us. Lets shirk once again. Lets believe our life is more important and worthy of other things. Lets hope that someone else will fix the mess for us.

Well here is Mr. Sachin Suryavanshi. He is trying to fix a big mess for you! He is trying to uphold his sacred oath of duty to maintain the rule of law and to hold all people equal in the eyes of law. He knew what he was getting into, but he stayed course. He says that he will rather leave the force and return to his village than to take this humiliation that now awaits him - something for which you are giving your politicians a free hand. A fine foot soldier who wanted to make a life built on the foundations of courage and integrity will go back to his village, disgraced.

And what will you do? WHAT will you do?

Do you think virtues of courage and integrity should be protected in testing settings like the police force which is hopelessly under the political thumb? Do you believe it is the right thing to do to let these virtues of courage and integrity be subverted by power hungry misappropriations? 

If you know what is the right thing to do, if you believe that Suryavanshi was doing the right thing, then how can you console yourself into inaction? As you act, so shall be the society you will build for yourself and your family. 

No society is built by random accidents. Its people take decisions on what they will stand for and against. Little drops of convictions converge and build a stream that whips up an ocean one day.

You can look at yourself as one little helpless drop again today. Or you could believe that this little drop too can merge with other little drops and make a sum larger than their individual parts.

It is no longer about Mr. Suryavanshi. It is about what must not be allowed. A policeman tried to protect all of us by trying to uphold the law and treating all people equal within it.

The price of inaction is severe and more of us need to shake out of the delusion that the sins of our collective inaction will never boomerang back on us. As Mr. Suryavanshi pays the price of political retribution for complying with his duty, it is time for more of us to resolve to protect our protectors. 

Gouging the Rich never helps the poor...

 

I have always been concerned that too many of our people are simple, too willing to accept all the propaganda that is showered upon them daily by the politicians and the government’s propaganda machine. That is why I provoke people into thinking for themselves, and not blindly accepting all that they are spoon-fed by the media.

And this brings us to an issue close to our hearts, or rather to our wallets. Taxation! It is time to get serious and tough about the tax policies in our country. Look at the size of our deficit. It grows every year. We could cut spending and we need to do that, but there is clearly a need for more revenue. We cannot and should not reduce defense spending and we cannot cut all of the middle class entitlements. We cannot cut expenses on any major fronts. And, we cannot continue to try and rob the rich. Tax evasion has been a major activity in our lives specifically because the government has been punitive against the rich in India. Because of this entrepreneurs are not motivated to invest into modernization of technology or Research and Development and instead try to either invest into tax-free environments or into farmland schemes. And who are the people who are hurt the most by this? The white collared middle class suffers the most.

Instead of trying to bring down the achievers in our country, who make a lot of money; instead of trying to punish these people for working hard and succeeding; what we should do is teach others how to succeed. We have to keep trying to motivate others to put in their hard work rather than be pacified by indictments of the rich and promises that they will be made to pay more than their fair share because they are rich. Of course, the government’s answer to increase revenue is simple; just raise taxes on the middle class. One of the reasons that India has a constant recession is because the middle class does not have any more money to give to the government. The middle class has been taxed at a confiscators rate for 65 years and is now broke.

Taxes go up every year. And they go up the most on the middle class & the rich, because that is where the bulk of the money is, that cannot be hidden from the government. Consider the taxes we pay on cooking gas, petrol, food, clothing, and entertainment. When you add it all up, is it any wonder that we are perennially broke? The average middle class family cannot afford to give their children good schooling or health because, instead of using their money to support their children; they are supporting a giant, bloated cow in New Delhi called the Government of India.

The middle class coupled with the rich should make this country work well. Should, but never does. What is slowing this country down? I will say out loud what it is. The Poor. And the Farmers. I can almost hear the howls of protest from many people, but the reality is that the poor, the farmers and the so-called backward classes of our country have been having a free ride since independence. It has become noble to remain poor or backward. Look at how we treat those who shun money and wealth. We celebrate them, make romantic figures of them. We make movies about them and teach people that it is wonderful to be destitute. The poor of our country, combined with the farmers are the largest herd of calves feeding off the mother cow in New Delhi. They feed off the largess of our government and give nothing in return. Nothing! They get all the benefits and they are the ones always pandered to by the politicians. 

The government has been encouraging poverty by subsidizing the increasing number of poor. And politicians love giving money away to the poor because it makes the poor dependent on the politicians and helps to ensure re-elections. And do the poor pay anything back to the nation? No. Do they pay any taxes? No; because they are poor and cannot afford to pay taxes. They do nothing, but take from the nation. On one hand there is the middle class who are infusing everything into the nation’s economy. These are the people who work hard every day, throughout their life; always obeying the rules and contributing their fair share and more. These are the givers. And who are the takers? The poor, of course!

Insp Sujata Patil v/s Cowards

This entire blog below is from Media Crooks www.mediacrooks.com 

I am reproducing it as my support to Inspector Sujata Patil; the only police officer in Mumbai to have the guts to take on the Muslim fanatics that are destroying my Maharashtra.

 "Sujata Patil wrote her poem in anger against those rioters at Azad Maidan who molested female cops and destroyed the AmarJawan memorial. The very activists who cried “death” to rapists couldn’t stand a poem against molesters of women. Sujata only wrote a poem with metaphors suggesting hands molesting women or destroying monuments be chopped off. She was actually lamenting the helplessness of the Police and public in general rather than calling for any violent action. Her poem was written in Marathi and published in an internal Newsletter (November 2012) of Mumbai police. Many translations of this poem in English are floating around. But I had this translated by a very reliable media person. This person is a Marathi and works in a prominent English-media house and I received this note and the translation:

“Here's my version... I think the attack she talks about is more about the attack on us as a people, who remained spectators to the crime of the Amar Jawan being vandalised. And all we needed to do was teach them a lesson then and there - and we knew how - with a lathi and pistol - but we just failed to understand this - we just failed to act.   Ironically the poem is titled Azad Maidan - Free Ground - and how their hands were tied”.

And below is the "reaction" of the IPS officers to this poem:

"Police journal carries apology for cop's controversial poem"

Source :

Last Updated: Wed, Jan 23, 2013 02:48 hrs

Mumbai: The latest edition of Mumbai police's in house journal 'Samwad' which came out today, carried an unconditional apology by female police inspector Sujata Patil, whose poem had sparked off a controversy.

Traffic police inspector (Matunga division) Sujata Patil's controversial poem in an earlier issue of the in-house police journal, had described last year's Azad Maidan protesters as "snakes" and "traitors", whose hands should have been "chopped off".

Patil had already apologised in writing, but today it was published in the latest edition of 'Samwad', police sources said. She did not intend to hurt anybody's religious sentiments or any religion through her poem, she wrote in the journal.

Joint Police Commissioner (Administration) Hemant Nagrale who is also Samwad's editor and publisher, has stated in writing that Patil had already apologised and she did not intend to hurt anybody's sentiments.

"I too agree with her. Samwad is a platform to encourage the creativity of policemen and it is circulated among them," he wrote in the journal's latest issue.

Patil's poem which was published in an earlier issue of Samwad read, "Hausla buland tha, izzat lut rahi thi, himmat ki gaddaron ne Amar Jyoti ko haath lagane ki, kaat dete haath unke toh faryad kisi ki bhi na hoti. Saanp ko doodh pila kar, baat kare hain hum bhaichare ki. (Their morale was high, women were being dishonoured. The traitors had the audacity to touch Amar Jawan Jyoti. Had we cut off their hands, nobody would have complained. We feed milk to the snakes and then talk of harmony".

Her poem, which also suggested that the police ought to have played "goliyon ki holi" (Holi with bullets), triggered off a huge controversy and prompted Mumbai Police Commissioner Satyapal Singh to order an inquiry. 

(NOTE: Satyapal Singh is from Uttar Pradesh).

Why "Reservations" are fatal to our society and our Country...

 

What is India's “reservation” system? It’s a war against a small number of performing and talented people by un-performing and unqualified majority.

The concept called 'Reservation' (which literally means, specific sections of society should be entitled to a minimum number of positions in an institution regardless of how poorly qualified for that position) in India's various institutions and departments; is the biggest problem restricting India’s growth in any sector. There should nothing called reservation - be it based on caste, sex, economics or any other differentiation.

Admissions to institutions should be based on performance standards & merit, just as success in real life is based on pure performance. Life requires competition, inspiration and motivation.

Just as there are no ‘reservations’ for Olympic medals (I have not yet heard that 33% of Gold medals will be reserved for those who belong to certain caste / tribe/ religion/ poverty level) or that Silver & Bronze medals will be reserved for “sub-castes” within these categories; then why should we need ‘reservations’ in our educational institutes or Government departments?  

‘Reservation’ in it’s very concept, is illogical and unsustainable, but it is also a crime against talented & hard working people. By giving the undeserved a place in any field, this policy denies opportunity to the success of a deserving candidate. Whenever the Government reserves specific portions in an institution or department, it kills the hopes & aspirations of those deserving people who can get access to better education or do a better job, and whose life is destroyed by denying him/her a place even though they deserve it.

Reservation based on any criteria - caste, creed, background, economy, sex... denies a good performer the opportunity that they have worked hard to attain. The ‘Reservation’ policy unjustly punishes a deserving candidate for the act of good performance.

Whatever may have been the genesis of the “Reservation” policy; it is no longer required for a strong country. The ‘Reservations” policy is today meant solely for the survival of the political parties that use & abuse this concept for the creation of ‘vote banks’ and to consolidate power.

The real effect of “reservation” is the polarization of Society on the basis of Caste & creed; leading to segregation in social life, increased strife due to frustrations in various segments of society and the lack of growth of our Nation (as one single entity).

Five Habits that make Political parties to fail spectacularly:

 

Habit # 1: They see themselves and their party as dominating their environment Shouldn’t a party try to dominate the political environment, shape the future and set the pace for growth? Yes, but there’s a catch. Failed leaders who never question their dominance fail to realize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success.

Habit #2: They identify so completely with the party that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their political interests People want leaders to be completely committed to their ideology, with their interests tightly aligned with those of the party. But digging deeper, you will find that failed politicians weren’t identifying too little with the party, but rather too much. Instead of treating party as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves. And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold.


Habit #3: They think they have all the answers Leaders who are invariably crisp and decisive tend to settle issues so quickly they have no opportunity to grasp the ramifications. Worse, because these leaders need to feel they have all the answers, they aren’t open to learning new ones.

Habit #4: They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isnt completely supporting them Leaders who think their job is to instill belief in their vision also think that it is their job to get everyone to accept it. Anyone who doesn’t rally to the cause is undermining the vision. By eliminating all dissenting and contrasting viewpoints, destructive politicians cut themselves off from their best chance of understanding and correcting grassroot problems as they arise. Sometimes politicians who seek to stifle dissent only drive it underground. Once this happens, the entire organization falters.

Habit #5: They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past Many politicians on their way to becoming spectacularly unsuccessful, accelerate their party’s decline by reverting to what they regard as "tried-and-true" methods. In their desire to make the most of what they regard as their core strengths, they cling to a static (non-changing) model.They insist on providing a solution to a voter group that no longer exists, or they fail to consider changes in areas other than those that made the party successful in the past. Instead of considering a range of options that fit new circumstances, they use their own careers as the only point of reference and keep on doing the things that made them successful in the past; leading down to the path of spectacular failure.

Death does not stop this leader from inspiring his people.

 Today we remember the man who built the foundations of the strong Maharashtra. Yashwantrao Balwantrao Chavan, popularly called "YB" (12 March 1913 - 25 November 1984) was the first Chief Minister of Independent Maharashtra after the division of Bombay State. A man with a strong personality, he established the Cooperatives, and further enhanced his stature as a social activist and writer.

  Widely known as "Leader of Common People", he advocated socialist democracy in his speeches and articles. His concept of establishing the co-operatives in Maharashtra for the betterment of the farmers led to the rise of agricultural production in the State.

  YB obtained his B.A. in history and political science from Bombay University in 1938. During this time, he was closely associated with the Congress party and its leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel and Keshavrao Jedhe. In 1940, Yashwantrao became President of Satara District Congress. In 1941 he passed his LLB. In 1932, he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for hoisting the Indian flag on 26 January 1932 in Satara. He was a delegate to the historic Bombay session of the A.I.C.C. in 1942 that gave the call for Quit India and was subsequently arrested for his participation in the movement.

  This first Chief Minister of Maharashtra, also served as a cabinet minister in the Central Government of India heading the portfolios of Home, Defence, Finance and External Affairs and went on to become the Deputy Prime Minister of India. One of the most outstanding features of his career was that he never lost an election.

YB contested from varied constituencies like Karad, Satara & Nasik, mostly from the Congress Party and once from the Congress (S) party. But he never lost the trust of the people that he represented. A personal aspect of his nature, not widely known outside his close circle of friends was his deep love for his wife, Venutai; whom he married in 1942. He always called Venutai his best friend, soul-mate and source of his strength to overcome all obstacles. The death of his wife broke the spirit of this strong man and he was not able to survive this loss beyond a few months.

Yashwantrao Chavan died of a heart attack on 25 November 1984 in Delhi. He was 71. We salute this stalwart on his birthday today, 12th March.

 मन मनास उमगत नाही, आधार कसा शोधावा?

India's nuclear program - brief history

The Indian nuclear program was started in the mid-forties, around the time it gained independence from over two centuries of British rule, and soon after the United States bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Both these factors had a powerful impact on Indian leaders, who saw India's technological backwardness and military inferiority as the main causes of colonization over two centuries ago. It was therefore natural that India would also follow the dominant power at the end of the Second World War, the United States, which relied on nuclear technology for energy as well as defense.

  From the very beginning, the Indian nuclear program was ambitious and envisaged having indigenous capability for covering the entire nuclear fuel cycle. Over the years, apart from nuclear reactors, India also developed facilities for mining Uranium, fabricating fuel, manufacturing heavy water, reprocessing spent fuel to extract Plutonium and, more recently, enriching Uranium. During the early years, though only a part of the infrastructure needed to manufacture nuclear weapons was in place, the program never lost sight of the possibility that the facilities constructed and expertise gained could be used for military purposes. The strategy used, perhaps not intentionally, were remarkably close to something that Robert Oppenheimer said in 1946 while responding to a proposal for the international control of nuclear weapons.

  "We know very well what we would do if we signed such a convention: We would not make atomic weapons, at least not to start with, but we would build enormous plants, and we would design these plants in such a way that they could be converted with the maximum ease and the minimum time delay to the production of atomic weapons saying, this is just in case somebody two-times us; we would stockpile uranium; we would keep as many of our developments secret as possible; we would locate our plants, not where they would do the most good for the production of power, but where they would do the most good for protection against enemy attack."

 Several countries, like the U.K., Canada and the U.S., offered technical help to India's fledgling nuclear program. The framework for U.S. aid was the Atoms for Peace program, initiated by Eisenhower to forestall criticism of the use of atomic energy for military purposes and to wean away third world countries from the Soviet Union. As part of this initiative, the U.S. offered $80 million as a low interest loan towards the cost of the first Indian nuclear reactor at Tarapur, constructed by General Electric. As it became clear that China was developing a nuclear bomb, there was even a proposal that the U.S. help India conduct a nuclear test.

In a 1961 memorandum to Secretary of State Dean Rusk, George McGhee, Director of the Policy Planning Council, suggested that assisting India to test a nuclear device first was one way to reduce the political impact of a Chinese bomb. Rusk did not approve this idea, in part, because India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was likely to reject it. At the same time as the development of its nuclear infrastructure was going on, India under Nehru also tried to change the world so that it was not necessary to develop nuclear weapons.


As a champion of the non-aligned movement, Nehru had made several disarmament proposals. Prominent among them was the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). In a proposal dated April 8, 1954, he requested the nuclear weapon states to negotiate: "Some sort of what may be called `Standstill Agreement’, in respect at least, of these explosions, even if arrangements about the discontinuance of production and stockpiling must await more substantial agreements among those principally concerned." The reactions to this proposal from the two superpowers of the day are worth recalling. The Soviet Union said that the proposal made sense only in the context of general and complete disarmament, a linkage that is even more ambitious than the one that India gave when it rejected the treaty in 1996. The United States first said that the proposal was worth of "respectful attention." But Eisenhower, the president at that time, was soon persuaded by Lewis Strauss that a ban on nuclear explosions was not in the US interest.

 Nevertheless, the proposal, coupled with worldwide concern about the dangers of radioactive fallout, galvanized opposition to testing. It resulted in the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. India was one of the first countries to sign it. Despite the buildup of nuclear infrastructure, Nehru’s avowed opposition to nuclear weapons as well as India’s recent history of non-violent struggle for independence under Mahatma Gandhi, ensured that there was never any support for developing nuclear weapons.

Three events mark the shift in India’s nuclear program during the early sixties.  
           The first was the completion of a reprocessing plant at Trombay and the CIRUS research reactor, which gave India the ability to extract plutonium and thus to make nuclear weapons. 
           The second was the death of Jawaharlal Nehru. While encouraging the development of a militarily capable nuclear infrastructure, Nehru had always opposed explicit weaponization. 
           The third event was the first Chinese nuclear test in 1964, barely two years after India lost the border war with China. 


 In hindsight, the Chinese nuclear test was the most significant since the Chinese nuclear program allowed and has continued to allow the construction of a security rationale for the Indian nuclear program. With Nehru's death the most significant political opposition to an explicit nuclear weapons program had been removed. Following the Chinese test, several influential individuals among the bureaucracy, political parties and intellectuals started arguing for India developing nuclear bombs. The chief arguments for developing nuclear weapons were largely based on the rationales used by the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the cold war. The "bomb lobby" argued that nuclear weapons are required to counter nuclear weapons, they guarantee security, and that they are relatively cheaper than conventional weapons and provide more destructive power. 


The elite in India also identified having a nuclear bomb as a source of international prestige. The first official policy decision shaped by this constellation of factors was at the negotiation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1967. After initial attempts to seek security assurances from the nuclear weapon states, India decided to vote against the treaty and argued against the its discriminatory aspects and pushed ahead with its nuclear program. A little over a year after the NPT went into force, India and Pakistan fought their third war. During this war the US Seventh Fleet, led by the USS Enterprise, was sent into the Bay of Bengal. Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State at the time, claimed the move was designed not only to 'assist' Pakistan, but also to 'back up the Chinese'.


 For some Indian policy makers, however, the 1971 intrusion was a form of "gunboat diplomacy" – one that was possibly nuclear. This is regarded by some as a factor in the decision to conduct India’s first nuclear test. The first Indian nuclear test was conducted on May 24, 1974. At that time, in order to try and limit negative international reaction, the Indian Prime Minister termed it a "Peaceful Nuclear Explosion." At that time, of course, this term was very much in vogue. The U.S. was still pursuing its own series of PNEs under Project Ploughshares. The Soviet Union also had a similar program. The IAEA conducted several meetings on PNEs. Indian officials and policy makers now admit that the 1974 test was, in part, a bomb and that since then it has always been part of India's security calculus. For a variety of reasons, primarily domestic, India did not proceed with further nuclear tests after this. 


We now know that there were a couple of attempts to carry out a test in the early eighties but they were called off. However, the eighties saw the establishment of a missile program that started delivering its first products around the end of the decade. The decision to induct these missiles into the Indian armed forces was made only in the early nineties. Throughout this period, i.e. ever since the 1974 test, India maintained that it had demonstrated its capacity to build nuclear weapons should the need arise, but had chosen not to manufacture or deploy them. There were calls within the domestic debate, by what can be called the "bomb lobby" to proceed with these activities but they were not particularly popular. It is only in the mid-nineties that we see the first shifts within the debate. This happened on the occasion of the question of what to do with the NPT when it came to the end of its 25 year life in 1995. 


Due to the complete failure of the Nuclear Weapon States to comply with their Article VI commitments under the NPT, the Non Nuclear Weapon-States seemed to be more inclined towards a rolling or definite-period extension. The Nuclear Weapon-States, led by the US, forced through an indefinite extension of the NPT. This provided grounds for a renewed campaign for nuclear weapons by the Indian bomb lobby who argued that the indefinite extension signaled that nuclear weapons were going to be around forever; therefore, India should either develop nuclear weapons or settle for permanent second-class status. To develop militarily use-able nuclear weapons India had to test. Therefore it had to reject the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). 


 In international forums, as well as official circles, two main arguments were used against the CTBT. First, the CTBT was no longer a step towards disarmament as had always been envisioned. Indeed, the Nuclear Weapon-States viewed it as merely a measure that would, in the words of the head of the erstwhile Arms Control and Disarmament Agency of the USA, "freeze countries on the nuclear learning curve." Second, the CTBT did not really constrain the weapons development programs of the Nuclear Weapon-States, especially the U.S. The U. S. had started a multi-billion dollar Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program involving the construction of several facilities that could develop new weapons designs. Further, the rationale for the Stockpile Stewardship Program was to ensure the US nuclear arsenal would remain functional for the foreseeable future, thus making it clear that the U.S. was not interested in nuclear disarmament. 


India demanded that the CTBT be coupled to a time-bound program for nuclear disarmament. The Nuclear Weapon-States were completely opposed to this. Quoting these reasons, India voted against the CTBT. Despite refusing to sign the CTBT, the last two Indian Prime Ministers belonging to the center-left United Front party did not authorize nuclear tests. This was left to the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The large number of tests with differing designs – a thermo-nuclear fusion weapon, a light weight fission weapon and three sub-kiloton tactical nuclear weapons – suggest that, unlike the 1974 explosion, these tests are intended to develop weapons for military purposes. 


The Indian Prime Minister also stated that a Command and Control system was in place, thus making it clear that it is possible to deploy these weapons.