Saturday, February 20, 2010

The Thackerays' primitive charisma By Aakar Patel - LIVEMINT, Mumbai

AAKAR PATEL, A GUJARATI, HAS COME OUT WITH A VERY INFORMATIVE AND INCISIVE ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICS OF SHIV SENA AND ITS REAL IMPACT ON THE CITY OF MUMBAI AND THE STATE OF MAHARASHTRA. IT BRINGS OUT THE ROLE DIFFERENT COMMUNITIES HAVE CHALKED OUT IN THIS MOST COSMOPOLITAN OF ALL INDIAN CITIES. IT FURTHER POINTS TOWARDS THE NEW AREAS OF DEVELOPMENTS THAT HAS BEEN NEGLECTED BY SOME COMMUNITIES AT THEIR OWN LOSSES.




  • Posted: Fri, Feb 19 2010. 9:37 PM IST
  • Culture


The Thackerays’ primitive charisma


The Senas have nothing constructive to offer Marathis. So what’s their appeal? The Mumbai Marathi, better at renaming things than building something himself, is disinherited from his city, and the Thackerays give him an illusory sense of power


By AAKAR PATEL

Politicians respond to constituencies. Their positions are deliberate.
What is the Thackerays’ constituency? Mumbai’s Marathis, whom the Thackerays speak for.
The cast: (clockwise from top left) Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray (AFP) and his estranged nephew Raj (Rajnish Kakade / Hindustan Times), founder of MNS, together control 42% of Mumbai’s votes (Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint); and north Indian taxi drivers have had to bear the brunt of their hate campaigns. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.
The cast: (clockwise from top left) Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray (AFP) and his estranged nephew Raj (Rajnish Kakade / Hindustan Times), founder of MNS, together control 42% of Mumbai’s votes (Abhijit Bhatlekar / Mint); and north Indian taxi drivers have had to bear the brunt of their hate campaigns. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.







Congress does not represent Marathis in Mumbai, and they have surrendered this space politically to the Thackerays. This can be seen in their organizational structure (www.mumbairegionalcongress.org).
Neither the Mumbai regional Congress committee’s president Kripashankar Singh nor its treasurer Amarjit Singh is Marathi.


Of Mumbai Congress’ 18 vice-presidents, 12 are not Marathi. Of its 19 general secretaries, 13 are not Marathi. Of its 13 secretaries, eight are not Marathi. Of its seven executive members, none is Marathi.
Of Congress’s seven members of Parliament from Mumbai, six are not Marathi.


Of its 17 MLAs, 12 are not Marathi. Of its two housing board chairmen, neither is Marathi.
This surrender hasn’t come because Congress does not want Marathi votes, but because it cannot get them. Congress is inclusive by nature and cannot offer Mumbai’s Marathi what the Thackerays can, which is anger and resentment.


When Raj Thackeray left his uncle and launched his party it was inclusive, because he initially read the Mumbai Marathi wrongly. His flag makes space for the green of Muslims and the blue of Dalits. Marathis didn’t find that inclusiveness appealing and his party struggled. But after his calibrated violence against migrants from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, in which people were killed by his boys, Raj demonstrated his nastiness and Marathis gave him their approval and their vote. Between Raj (24%) and Uddhav (18%), the Thackerays control 42% of Mumbai’s vote, which corresponds to the city’s Marathi population. In the last election, not one opposition seat in the island city of South Mumbai went to Shiv Sena. They all went to Raj after his violence, and that is the reason why Uddhav is currently acting the way he is. The more unhinged the message, the more appealing it is to the Marathi.


Elected to power in 1995, Shiv Sena renamed Bombay. This began the series which has gifted us Chennai, Kolkata and Bengaluru. The Indian’s renaming of his cities is thought to be a positive assertion of identity, but it is actually negritude. Shiv Sena’s renaming did not stop there. It renamed Victoria Terminus (Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus) and Prince of Wales Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangharalaya). Why is the Marathi angry with the British, who gave him his fine city?
The answer is that he isn’t. Those things were renamed because the British are gone and cannot defend themselves. Their property was available for the Marathi to stamp his ownership upon.

So the question is: Why does Mumbai’s Marathi want to assert himself? The answer is that he is disinherited from his city.


Of the 30 companies in Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex, the number of those owned by Marathis is zero. Of the 50 on the National Stock Exchange’s Nifty, the number owned by Marathis is zero. The Marathi is quite good at renaming things others built, but at building them himself he’s less able.
Three-fourths of India’s capital transactions happen in Mumbai but the participation of Marathis in this activity is irrelevant. There is a reason for this. If we observe Marathi society we notice the total absence of mercantile castes. Into this space the British imported the multi-religious trading community of Surat—Vohra, Khoja, Luhana, Memon, Jain, Parsi and Vaniya. They control the economy of Mumbai and its capital markets, and occupy the city’s best real estate.


Lower down, space opened up for others with enterprise, like the Bhaiyya, Bihari and Sikh taxi drivers of Mumbai. They are actually very good at their trade, hard-working and honest. Against them, the Marathi displays his valour and, like all Indians, he can be quite brave in a mob.


Face value: (clockwise from top left) Members of a fan club gather outside a multiplex screening of My Name is Khan (Shirish Shete / PTI); the film’s lead actor Shah Rukh Khan returns to the city after the world premiere of the movie (Punit Paranjpe / Reuters); Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray at an exhibition of cartoons by his father (Santosh Hirlekar / PTI); and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi rides a suburban train on 5 February. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.
Face value: (clockwise from top left) Members of a fan club gather outside a multiplex screening of My Name is Khan (Shirish Shete / PTI); the film’s lead actor Shah Rukh Khan returns to the city after the world premiere of the movie (Punit Paranjpe / Reuters); Shiv Sena executive president Uddhav Thackeray at an exhibition of cartoons by his father (Santosh Hirlekar / PTI); and Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi rides a suburban train on 5 February. Hemant Padalkar / Hindustan Times.



The second big industry in Mumbai is media, especially Bollywood. Bollywood is dominated on the trade side by Punjabis and Sindhis, on the talent side by Punjabis and Urdu-speakers. The participation of Marathis is not of consequence. In some ways it is negative.


If we think about it, popular entertainment can only be produced on the cusp of immorality. Bollywood liberalizes India through its content which slowly pushes that cusp outward. Bollywood is based in Mumbai because it is India’s most liberal city. But the Marathi peasants who now control the state respond to their constituency in the village, which is illiterate and moral. As home minister, R.R. Patil banned this city’s unique dance bars where young women entertained men. Such acts pull the cusp inward.
The Marathi isn’t bothered about My Name is Khan being released, and by itself the matter is irrelevant, but he’s impressed by Thackeray’s ability to make Shah Rukh Khan grovel and to disrupt Bollywood’s business. It reassures him that Marathis control Mumbai.


Shiv Sena’s issues are always those where they can demonstrate to Marathis their ability to block events—we won’t allow Australian players, we won’t allow Valentine’s Day, we won’t let Pakistanis come in and so on. Shiv Sena has nothing constructive to offer Marathis, nor is it expected: Someone else will do all that.



All these events blocked eventually come to pass anyway, because the control is cosmetic, and it wilts when the state decides to apply rule of law. But that moment of theatre—when the media exhibits anguish—produces the spotlight that nourishes the Thackerays. This is the pattern to Shiv Sena’s actions.


It might appear that these actions are irrational, but the Thackerays’ method is cold and reasoned to squeeze out advantage. Witness the discipline of Raj. He works his strategy with great care. On national television he speaks Marathi no matter what language he is questioned in. The Marathi loves this because it reflects his defiance.


There is a second reason why the Thackerays are compelled to make a nuisance of themselves every so often. Unlike other parties, Shiv Sena has a physical presence in neighbourhoods. These offices, run by local toughs, are self-funded, meaning that they approach businesses and residents for “donations”. This activity can be smooth only so long as Shiv Sena radiates menace. The party is not effective if it isn’t feared, and the grass roots reminds the leadership of this.


The Marathi pattern of resentment we have observed is visible elsewhere in time.


India’s nationalist debate a century ago was dominated by the Marathis: Tilak, Gokhale, Agarkar and Ranade. All four were Chitpavan Brahmins, whose members are fair-skinned and unique for their light eyes (like cricketer Ajit Agarkar and model Aditi Govitrikar).


Going against the current noise about Marathi in schools, Chitpavans actually demanded to be educated in English. By 1911—100 years ago—Chitpavans were 63% literate and 19% literate in English. This gave them the edge over other Indians.
All four were on the most influential body in western India of the time, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha. But English education had not exorcized the native instinct. There they unleashed their pettiness on each other. Agarkar and Tilak fought over leadership. Tilak was forced out in 1890 after quarrels over social status and money. Gokhale took his place but was opposed by Tilak who said the job required 2 hours of work daily and so it couldn’t be done by a college principal. Ranade was attacked in Tilak’s newspapers and Gokhale quit in 1895 because he couldn’t work with Tilak’s friends. A jealous Tilak sabotaged the Congress session held in Pune the same year.


When the Gujaratis—Jinnah and Gandhi—entered Congress, they immediately eclipsed the Marathis, because they had the trader’s instinct towards compromise. The Marathi Brahmin’s energy was then channelled into resentment, this time against Muslims.
RSS, founded in 1925, is actually a deeply Marathi organization. Hindutva author Savarkar, RSS founder Hedgewar, the great Golwalkar, his successor Deoras and current sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat are all Marathi Brahmins.


Marathi resentment cuts down its own heroes. The first was Shivaji. Marathi Brahmins refused to crown him though he controlled dozens of forts in the Konkan. This was because he was a peasant from the cultivator caste and not a Kshatriya. He had to invent an ancestry, perform penance and bring in a Brahmin from Kashi before he could crown himself in 1674, with the title Chhatrapati, meaning leader of Kshatriyas.



The second was Ambedkar. A first-rate mind, he is seen by Marathis for his caste. The term “Ambedkarite” refers purely to the Dalit movement. Educated in America unlike Jinnah and Gandhi, he absorbed the pragmatism of John Dewey at Columbia. Ambedkar was methodical, unemotional and persuasive in all that he wrote. Europeans would classify him as an Aristotelian, against the Platonism of Gandhi. When the merchants of Mumbai voted for the city to join Gujarat during the reorganization of states, Ambedkar wrote a response that skewered their claims with finality. He did this without being parochial. He was above his caste, above his community.


Mumbai’s Marathis should be proud to own Ambedkar’s message of a universal civilization, but they cleave to the primitive charisma of the Thackerays instead.


Aakar Patel’s book on the changing world of Indian servants will be published by Random House India in 2011.


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Mossad's licence to kill By Gordon Thomas - The Telegraph, UK



"The issue projected by world media and EU member states is not the morality or immorality of political assassination, but the gory details of whodunit. It exposes the conspiracy of the Western countries to collectively support violence at all levels when dealing with the Muslim world."


Ghulam Muhammed @ Facebook

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/israel/7254807/Mossads-licence-to-kill.html


Mossad's licence to kill

The killing of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh bears the hallmarks of the ruthless Israeli intelligence service. One of the leading chroniclers of the agency gives a unique insight into its methods.

 
A scene from Steven Spielberg's film 'Munich' - Mossad's license to kill
Hit squad: Mossad assassins escape after killing one of the terrorists involved in the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in a scene from Steven Spielberg's film 'Munich' Photo: KAREN BALLARD

The Mossad assassins could have felt only satisfaction when the news broke that they had succeeded in killing Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a top Hamas military commander, in Dubai last month.
The Israeli government's refusal to comment on the death has once more gained worldwide publicity for Mossad, its feared intelligence service. Its ruthless assassinations were made famous by the film Munich, which detailed Mossad's attacks on the terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Long ago, the agency had established that silence is the most effective way to spread terror among its Arab enemies.
In the past year, al-Mabhouh had moved to the top of Mossad's list of targets, each of which must be legally approved under guidelines laid down over half a century ago by Meir Amit, the most innovative and ruthless director-general of the service. Born in Tiberius, King Herod's favourite city, Amit had established the rules for assassination.
"There will be no killing of political leaders, however extreme they are. They must be dealt with politically. There will be no killing of a terrorist's family unless they are also directly implicated in terrorism. Each execution must be sanctioned by the incumbent prime minister. Any execution is therefore state-sponsored, the ultimate judicial sanction of the law. The executioner is no different from the state-appointed hangman or any other lawfully-appointed executioner."
I first met Amit in 2001 and through him, I talked to the spies of Mossad, thekatsas, and finally, to the assassins, the kidon, who take their name from the Hebrew word for bayonet. They helped me write the only book approved by Mossad, Gideon's Spies. Amit said the book "tells like it was – and like it is".
Amit showed me a copy of those rules at our first meeting. After two years of training in the Mossad academy at Herzlia near Tel Aviv, each recruit to thekidon is given a copy.
The killing in Dubai is a classic example of how Mossad goes about its work. Al-Mabhouh's 11 assassins had been chosen from the 48 current kidon, six of whom are women.
It has yet to be established how al-Mabhouh was killed, but kidon's preference is strangling with wire, a well-placed car bomb, an electric shock or one of the poisons created by Mossad scientists at their headquarters in a Tel Aviv suburb.
The plan to assassinate Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had been finalised in a small conference room next to the office of Meir Dagan, who has run Mossad for the past eight years. The 10th director-general, Dagan has a reputation as a man who would not hesitate to walk into a nameless Arab alley with no more than a handgun in his pocket.
Only he knows how many times he has asked a prime minister for legal permission to kill a terrorist who could not be brought to trial in an Israeli court, along with the kidon to whom he shows the legally stamped document, the licence to kill.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh's name had been on such a document, which would have been signed by Benyamin Netanyahu. That, like every aspect of a kidon operation, would be firmly denied by a government spokesman, were he to be asked. This has not stopped Dubai's police chief, Lt-General Tamin, from fulminating against the Israeli prime minister.
Two years ago this week, Dagan sent a team of kidon to Damascus to assassinate Imad Mughniyeh. His Mossad file included details of organising the kidnapping of Terry Waite and the bombing of the US Marine base near Beirut airport, killing 241 people. The United States had placed a £12.5 million bounty on his head. Dagan just wanted him dead.
Mossad psychiatrists, psychologists, behavioural scientists, psychoanalysts and profilers – collectively known as the "specialists" – were told to decide the best way to kill Mughniyeh.
They concluded that he would be among the guests of honour at the Iranian Cultural Centre celebrations in 2008 for the celebration of the Khomeini Revolution. The team rigged a car-bomb in the headrest of the Mitsubishi Pajero they discovered Mughniyeh had rented, to be detonated by a mobile phone. As Mughniyeh arrived outside the Culture Centre at precisely 7pm on February 12, the blast blew his head off.
At Mughniyeh's funeral in Beirut, his mother, Um-Imad, sat among a sea of black chadors, a sombre old woman, who wailed that her son had planned to visit her on the day after he died. She cried out she had no photograph to remember him by. Two days later she received a packet. Inside was his photograph. It had been posted in Haifa.
The list of kidon assassinations is long and stretches far beyond the Arab world. In their base deep in the Negev Desert – the sand broken only by a distant view of Israel's nuclear facility at Dimona – the kidon practise with a variety of handguns, learn how to conceal bombs, administer a lethal injection in a crowd and make a killing look accidental.
They review famous assassinations – the shooting of John F Kennedy, for example – and study the faces and habits of potential targets whose details are stored on their highly restricted computers. There, too, are thousands of constantly updated street plans downloaded from Google Earth.
Mossad is one of the world's smallest intelligence services. But it has a back-up system no other outfit can match. The system is known as sayanim, a derivative of the Hebrew word lesayeah, meaning to help.
There are tens of thousands of these "helpers". Each has been carefully recruited, sometimes by katsas, Mossad's field agents. Others have been asked to become helpers by other members of the secret group.
Created by Meir Amit, the role of the sayanim is a striking example of the cohesiveness of the world Jewish community. In practical terms, a sayan who runs a car rental agency will provide a kidon with a vehicle on a no-questions basis. An estate agent sayan will provide a building for surveillance. A bank manager sayan will provide funds at any time of day or night, and a sayandoctor provides medical assistance.
Any of these helpers could have been involved in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Mossad has recently expanded its network of sayanim into Arab countries.
sayan doctor in the West Bank provided details of the homoeopathic concoction Yasser Arafat used to drink. When he died in 2004, his personal physician, Dr al-Kurdi, said "poisoning is a strong possibility in this case".There have been reports that more than a dozen terrorists have died from poisoning in the past five years,.
Within the global intelligence community, respect for Mossad grew following thekidon assassination of Dr Gerald Bull, the Canadian scientist who was probably the world's greatest expert on gun-barrel ballistics. Israel had made several attempts to buy his expertise. Each time, Bull had made clear his dislike for the Jewish state.
Instead he had offered his services to Saddam Hussein, to build a super-gun capable of launching shells containing nuclear, chemical or biological warheads directly from Iraq into Israel. Saddam had ordered three of the weapons at a cost of $20 million. Bull was retained as a consultant for a fee of $1 million.
On the afternoon of March 20, 1990, the sanction to kill Bull was given by the then prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Nahum Admoni, the head of Mossad, sent a three-man team to Brussels, where Bull lived in a luxury apartment block. Each kidon carried a handgun in a holster under his jacket.
When the 61-year-old Bull answered the doorbell of his home, he was shot five times in the head and the neck, each kidon firing their 7.65 pistol in turn, leaving Bull dead on his doorstep. An hour later they were out of the country on a flight to Tel Aviv.
Within hours, Mossad's own department of psychological warfare had arranged with sayanim in the European media to leak stories that Bull had been shot by Saddam's hit squad because he had planned to renege on their deal.
The same tactics had been placed on stand-by on October 24, 1995, for the assassination of Fathi Shkaki who, like Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, had reached the top of Mossad's target list as a result of his terrorist attacks.
Two kidon – code-named Gil and Ran – had left Tel Aviv on separate flights. Ran flew to Athens, Gil to Rome. At each airport they collected new British passports from a local sayan. The two men arrived in Malta on a late-afternoon flight and checked into the Diplomat Hotel overlooking Valetta harbour.
That evening, a sayan delivered a motorcycle to Ran. He told hotel staff that he planned to use it to tour the island. At the same time, a freighter that had sailed the previous day from Haifa bound for Italy radioed to the Maltese harbour authorities that it had developed engine trouble. While it was fixed, it would drop anchor off the island. On board the boat was a small team of Mossad communications technicians. They established a link with a radio in Gil's suitcase.
Shkaki had arrived by ferry from Tripoli, Libya, where he had been discussing with Colonel Gadaffi what Mossad was convinced was a terrorist attack. The two kidon waited for him to stroll along the waterfront. Ran and Gil drove up on the motorcycle and Gil shot Fathi Shkaki six times in the head. It had become a kidon signature.
When the police came to search Shkaki's bedroom they found a "Do not disturb" sign on his door – a signature that was repeated in last month's Dubai killing.
Gordon Thomas is the author of 'Gideon's Spies'.

First Malaysian women to be caned make statements - AFP

First Malaysian women to be caned make statements

KUALA LUMPUR — The first Malaysian women to be caned under Islamic law for having illicit sex have reportedly said they regretted their actions and welcomed the punishment.

The three women, whose identities were not revealed, gave the first account of the caning which took place earlier this month, drawing condemnation from human rights activists and applause from some Muslim groups.

"On the day I was caned, I was scared but, at the same time, I knew I deserved it and was willing to take the punishment," said one of the women, a 25-year-old who went by the name of "Ayu".

She told the New Straits Times that the punishment -- administered while they were fully clothed and by a female prison officer wielding a thin rattan cane -- did not hurt.

"Those out there who are having sex before marriage should really consider the consequences and not only think about momentary pleasure," she told the daily.

The three women said they turned themselves in to religious authorities after being wracked by guilt over having pre-marital sex.

"Ayu" has a one-year-old daughter with her boyfriend, who she plans to marry, and the other two women also gave birth out of wedlock.

Human rights campaigners, who were stunned by the caning of the three women which had not been foreshadowed by authorities, were sceptical over the comments published in several Malaysian newspapers.
"These three women are just normal people who have been surrounded by all kinds of legal mumbo jumbo and pressured into agreeing to be caned," one activist told AFP, declining to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Islamic authorities triggered uproar last year when they sentenced mother-of-two Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno to six strokes of the cane after she was caught drinking beer in a hotel nightclub.

Her case, which was to have been the first time a woman was caned under Islamic law in Malaysia, is still under review after she was given a last-minute reprieve amid intense media coverage.

Malaysia's Bar Council has said it was "shocking" that the caning of the three women went ahead while the Kartika case was unresolved.

Legal commentators have said that the Islamic courts -- which operate in parallel to the civil system in Malaysia -- are becoming increasingly confident, threatening Malaysia's status as a secular nation.

The Sharia courts have been clamping down on rarely enforced religious laws that apply to Muslim Malays who dominate the population -- including a ban alcohol and sex between unmarried couples.

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