Wednesday, December 30, 2015
Tuesday, December 29, 2015
RBI committee recommends Interest Free Windows in existing conventional banks
RBI committee recommends Interest Free Windows in existing conventional banks
Comments:
It is very welcome step in India. However, the funds originating from interest free window, should be strictly separated from Banks' interest bearing operations. Unless a strict law is passed on the subject, trust in the operation will not be forthcoming from those who are supposed to be offered this inclusive financial opening to come into India's financial mainstream.
Comments:
It is very welcome step in India. However, the funds originating from interest free window, should be strictly separated from Banks' interest bearing operations. Unless a strict law is passed on the subject, trust in the operation will not be forthcoming from those who are supposed to be offered this inclusive financial opening to come into India's financial mainstream.
Saturday, December 26, 2015
RSS believes India, Pakistan, B’desh will reunite: BJP’s Ram Madhav - Hindustan Times
My comments on HT article: RSS believes India-Pakistan-Bangladesh will reunite
.
Ghulam Muhammed • 12 minutes ago
Nothing could gladden the hearts of common people of the subcontinent, if what Ram Madhav wishes could come true. However, the most insurmountable hurdle is to accommodate 3 different and opposing ideologies, Hindutva, Islam and Marxism in a vast country, where all these ideologies have found deep roots and no ruling democratic majority can be generous enough to accommodate the other left-outs. With goodwill spreading out with sincere gestures and a push from the overlord the US, an attempt should be welcomed, if it does not involve bloodshed and is centered on academic and consultative process, lasting may be decades with clear understanding that we all are ONE PEOPLE and would have full individual and community freedom to follow our own ideologies within agreed parameters.
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=3441003027486211979#editor/target=post;postID=3422205971405472053
RSS believes India, Pakistan, B’desh will reunite: BJP’s Ram Madhav
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HT Correspondent, New Delhi
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· Updated: Dec 26, 2015 18:57 IST
Madhav is a BJP general secretary as well as a national executive member of the RSS. (PTI file photo)
BJP general secretary Ram Madhav has said that he believes India, Pakistan and Bangladesh will reunite one day to form an “undivided India” through “popular goodwill”.
“The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) still believes that one day these parts, which have for historical reasons separated only 60 years ago, will again, through popular goodwill, come together and Akhand Bharat (undivided India) will be created,” Madhav told Doha-based Al Jazeera news network in an interview.
“As an RSS member, I also hold on to that view,” he said, clarifying he did not mean to “wage a war” against any of the neighbours.
“That does not mean we wage war on any country, [or that] we annex any country. Without war, through popular consent, it can happen,” he said.
“If two Germanys can come together, what makes you believe that India and Pakistan can’t come together?”
On Saturday, Madhav told HT that he presented the RSS view in response to a question that asked whether the RSS still held on to that belief.
Madhav is a national executive member of the RSS, a right-wing outfit considered to be the ideological parent of the ruling BJP. Madhav said the RSS ideology is for the supremacy of India and the organisation is neither “fascist” nor “aggressive”.
The programme containing Madhav’s comments was apparently recorded in London before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s surprise visit to Pakistan on Christmas when he met his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, and discussed ways of improving ties between the two countries. The programme was aired late on Friday night.
Speaking on writers and intellectuals returning their awards to protest against “growing intolerance”, Madhav said in the Al Jazeera interview that they were doing it “to defame the government and in turn to defame the image of India”. The BJP leader said the mode of their protest was “wrong”.
Madhav said India is “a land where a particular way of life, a particular culture or civilisation, is practised”.
“We call it Hindu - do you have any objection? India has one culture. We are one culture, one people, one nation,” he told the channel.
On the Jammu and Kashmir issue, he said: “The only outstanding issue with regard to the Kashmir problem is the Kashmir under Pakistan occupation.”
“The Kashmir that is an integral part of India, it has been proved time and again that it’s an integral part of India,” he said.
(With agency inputs)
Friday, December 25, 2015
Narendra Modi of India Meets Pakistani Premier in Surprise Visit - By ELLEN BARRY and SALMAN MASOOD - DEC. 25, 2015 - The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/
Mr. Sharif, left, greeting Mr. Modi at the airport in Lahore.Press Information Bureau, via European Pressphoto Agency
Activists burned posters of Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India on Friday in New Delhi to protest the leader's visit to Pakistan. Chandan Khanna/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
ASIA PACIFIC
Narendra Modi of India Meets Pakistani Premier in Surprise Visit
By ELLEN BARRY and SALMAN MASOODDEC. 25, 2015
Indian Prime Minister Visits Pakistan
Narendra Modi became the first Indian prime minister in more than a decade to visit Pakistan when he made a surprise stop in Lahore on Friday to meet his Pakistani counterpart, Nawaz Sharif, on his birthday.
By ASSOCIATED PRESS and REUTERS on December 25, 2015. Photo by Press Information Department, via Associated Press.Watch in Times Video »
NEW DELHI — It started with a private phone call by the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan on Friday morning to wish him a happy birthday.
About four hours later, Mr. Modi landed in the Pakistani city of Lahore for an impromptu visit with Mr. Sharif, giving such little notice that Mr. Sharif’s national security adviser could not make the journey from Islamabad in time.
It was the first visit to Pakistan by an Indian premier in almost 12 years. The tense relations between India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed nations, have long worried American policy makers, who fear that proxy wars between the two countries could flare into a real one. Mr. Modi is also highlighting India’s role in Afghanistan, including providing military assistance, which risks angering Pakistani leaders.
RELATED COVERAGE
But with his flash of spontaneous personal diplomacy on Friday, Mr. Modi appeared to send a strong public message that the ambiguous course he has taken toward Pakistan has shifted to embrace engagement, not confrontation. It is a message that his administration has hinted at in recent weeks, seeking to sketch out a road map for talks with Pakistan on terrorism and trade.
A DIPLOMATIC DANCE
Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s election in 2014, relations between India and Pakistan have remained frosty despite efforts to improve them.
- May 2014: Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan attends Mr. Modi’s swearing-in ceremony and the two men hold a summit meeting in New Delhi. In a gesture of good will, Mr. Sharif releases 151 Indian fishermen from Pakistani prisons.
- August 2014: A summit meeting in Islamabad between the countries’ foreign ministers is canceled after a senior Pakistani official meets with Kashmiri separatists.
- November 2014: Mr. Modi and Mr. Sharif meet in Kathmandu, Nepal, for a regional conference but do not hold bilateral talks.
- May 2015: More than 500 violations of the cease-fire are recorded in the first year of Mr. Modi’s term.
- June 2015: Mr. Modi rankles some in Pakistan during a visit to Bangladesh.
- July 2015: Mr. Modi and Mr. Sharif meet for more than an hour at a conference in Ufa, Russia, where they discuss border security and intelligence sharing.
- December 2015: After a brief meeting between the two leaders in Paris on the sidelines of a climate summit, Mr. Modi visits Mr. Sharif in Lahore, the first trip to Pakistan by an Indian head of government in a decade.
Mr. Modi had sent mixed signals about Pakistan. He surprised many by inviting Mr. Sharif to his swearing-in ceremony last year, but three months later abruptly halted that tentative engagement by canceling high-level talks over Pakistani diplomats’ meeting with separatist leaders from Kashmir.
“In a way, he is sending a signal to everyone that there will be no more U-turns,” said Siddharth Varadarajan, a founding editor at The Wire, an Indian news site. “He is putting his personal political brand on this process. He can’t walk away that easily now.”
Mr. Modi’s day began in Afghanistan, where he helped inaugurate the new Afghan Parliament building, built over eight years with the help of about $90 million from India. He also delivered three Mi-25 attack helicopters and 500 new scholarships for “the children of the martyrs of Afghan security forces,” making a point of acknowledging Pakistan’s concerns about the Indian presence in Afghanistan.
“There are some who did not want us to be here. There were those who saw sinister designs in our presence here,” Mr. Modi said. “But, we are here because you have faith in us. You know that India is here to contribute, not to compete; to lay the foundations of future, not light the flame of conflict; to rebuild lives, not destroy a nation.”
The first that outsiders — including his own Indian constituency — heard of his plans to visit Mr. Sharif in Pakistan was when Mr. Modi made a show of casually mentioning it on his Twitter account: “Looking forward to meeting PM Nawaz Sharif in Lahore today afternoon, where I will drop by on my way back to Delhi.”
Mr. Modi soon arrived at Mr. Sharif’s private residence outside Lahore, meeting the Pakistani leader’s family at an estate decked out with decorations for the wedding of Mr. Sharif’s granddaughter. The two leaders met for almost an hour, aides said, speaking pleasantly and pledging to restart talks between the two nations.
Among the factors that may have prompted Mr. Modi to reach out is that Pakistan has a new national security adviser, said Ashok Malik, a New Delhi-based political analyst. The Indian leader, Mr. Malik said, may also have seen an opportunity for “a positive headline.”
“He realizes he needs to be seen as engaging, and he is under pressure from the West and the Saudis to engage,” Mr. Malik said. “What came across in the past year was this very combative guy, snarling at his opponents. This has allowed him to appear serious and statesmanlike.”
In an interview last week, T.C.A. Raghavan, the departing Indian high commissioner in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, said that relations between the two countries were at “a tipping point.”
For his part, Mr. Sharif has been an advocate of better ties with India, and he has been eager to enhance trade ties with it. But his desires have been viewed with suspicion and disapproval by the powerful Pakistani military establishment, which remains focused on the resolution of the longtime dispute over Kashmir and accuses India of fostering separatists in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.
Most of the Pakistani political opposition welcomed Mr. Modi’s visit, expressing hope that it would bring momentum for better relations. “Today is a good day for Pakistan and India,” said Aitzaz Ahsan, a leader of the opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, while talking with Geo, a private television news network.
Other analysts urged a more cautious view.
Adil Najam, the dean of the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said in an interview that there was a danger of overanalyzing the visit.
“I think it’s actually a good step. But that is what it is: a step, a very small step. There is a danger of reading too much into that,” Mr. Najam said, adding that false expectations eventually “become a recipe for future heartbreak.”
The last time an Indian prime minister visited Pakistan was when Atal Bihari Vajpayee went for an international conference in January 2004 and met with President Pervez Musharraf. In 1999, Mr. Vajpayee made a historic bilateral visit, riding from New Delhi to Lahore on the inaugural run of a new bus route between the countries.
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In India, a leader of the opposition Indian National Congress, criticized the visit as “unannounced, unprecedented,” and unstatesmanlike.
“In the last 67-odd years, no prime minister has landed in another country in this manner,” said Anand Sharma, a senior Congress leader, asking whether Mr. Modi could claim any progress on dismantling Pakistan-based terrorist groups or punishing the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
“What are the assurances the prime minister is bringing back?” he added. “Has this process been unequivocally endorsed by the real establishment and force in Pakistan, the I.S.I. and the Pakistani Army?” The I.S.I., or Inter-Services Intelligence, is Pakistan’s powerful military spy agency, which is accused of sponsoring militant groups against India in Kashmir.
Although there appeared to be widespread support and enthusiasm in Pakistan for Mr. Modi’s visit, some observers also expressed skepticism, saying the Indian leader has a knack for playing to the news media.
“Modi was being seen as unreasonable and unnecessarily hard-line by the international community and Indian liberals due to the recent actions of his allies in supporting sectarian tensions within India,” said Moeed Pirzada, a talk show host and political analyst based in Islamabad.
“After doing a $7 billion arms deal with Putin and engaging the Afghan leadership, promising support for the Afghan spy agency, this dash to Pakistan provides a softening of his hard image,” Mr. Pirzada said, referring to a recent weapons agreement between India and Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, and to remarks Mr. Modi made in Afghanistan.
Correction: December 25, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the last time an Indian prime minister visited Pakistan. It was in 2004, not 1999.
Ellen Barry reported from New Delhi, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan. Mujib Mashal contributed reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan.
A version of this article appears in print on December 26, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Indian Premier Goes to Pakistan In Diplomatic Act. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Wednesday, December 23, 2015
Sunday, December 13, 2015
NSA and CIA Contractor Says U.S. Mercenary Group Carried Out San Bernardino Attack - (Article by M. David and Jackson Marciana; image by #Op309 Media)
http://countercurrentnews.com/
NSA and CIA Contractor Says U.S. Mercenary Group Carried Out San Bernardino Attack
December 9, 2015 10:04 pm·
A former NSA and CIA contractor says he has to come clean about the San Bernardino shooting, which he says did not happen the way the media and law enforcement are claiming.
The official narrative is that last Wednesday, Syed Rizwan Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 29, stormed a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, shooting and killing 14 people and injuring 21 others. This marks the deadliest mass shooting in the US in three years.
We are told that Malik pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Daesh (ISIS) terrorist organization and pseudo-Caliphate. This pledge or “bayat” supposedly came via Facebook – during the attacks in question.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said on Monday that the couple had been radicalized “for some time,” even though they claimed to have known absolutely nothing about them.
But according to Steven D Kelley, a former NSA and CIA contractor, Mercenaries from the Craft International, a tactical training company for the US military, are the ones who carried out a “false flag operation” in San Bernardino, California.
Kelley said in an interview with Iran’s Press TV on Tuesday that the San Bernardino shooting “is just one in a long string of false flag events that I am afraid to say are not over.”
“We’ll probably be seeing several more before the end of the year, because of the events that are going on in the world, specifically with the NATO being implicated in the buying of oil from Daesh and other events,” he continued.
“So when these things happen they need to have a rapid response which requires a false flag attack. This was very obvious that this was going to happen,” Kelley added.
“The people that were on the scene and saw this happen also reported that three tall white men wearing black shirts, khaki pants and tanned combat boots were actually the shooters. The description is almost exactly what the gentlemen from Craft International, the mercenary organization that was involved in so many other false flags, actually look like. This seems to be their standard uniform,” he concluded.
In spite of claimed from law enforcement and President Obama, Kelley says that he is absolutely certain that the couple accused did not carry out the attacks.
“The people that are being implicated – the couple – first of all if they were planning something, if they were radicalized as this is being said, and clearly the NSA, the FBI will be right on the top of these people all the time, but rather than stopping them from doing something, they were nurtured to be used for this exact purpose,” he argued.
“I do not suspect that these people have anything to do with the actual shooting. I suspect that these were patsies, no different than Timothy McVeigh or any of these other people who have historically been used to implement these terrorist acts,” he continued.
“If you look at the people that were wounded you can see clearly that bullet wounds are not real. The .223 caliber weapon or bullets fired from AR15 – an extremely powerful weapon – would blow someone’s arm off, it is not going to make a small hole,” Kelley concluded, noting his professional background and vast knowledge of tactical weapons and ballistic wounds.
“So clearly this is a very very dirty false flag. Obviously, the United States is getting very very desperate; the government here is very desperate, they need to do something immediately to disarm the United States prior to a revolution, because the people here are waking up very fast, and they are ready to shut down this evil empire. And this needs to happen very soon,” Kelley concluded.
Watch the video of the interview below and let us know what you think about Kelley’s controversial claims…
(Article by M. David and Jackson Marciana; image by #Op309 Media)
Non-state actors have upstaged the superpowers - By SA Aiyar - The Sunday Times of India
My comments on Sunday TOI article by Swaminathan A. Aiyar: Non-state actors have upstaged the Superpowers :
Ghulam Muhammed
The Origin of ISIS:
In December 2004, The National Intelligence Council of the CIA predicted that in the year 2020 a new Caliphate would emerge on the world stage. The findings were published in a 123-page report titled “Mapping the Global Future”.
The aim of the report is to prepare the next Bush administration for challenges that lie ahead by projecting current trends that may pose a threat to US interest. The report is presented to the US president, members of Congress, cabinet members and key officials involved in policymaking.
“They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the Seventh Century Caliphate. This was the world as it was organized 1,200, 1,300 years, in effect, when Islam or Islamic people controlled everything from Portugal and Spain in the West; all through the Mediterranean to North Africa; all of North Africa; the Middle East; up into the Balkans; the Central Asian republics; the southern tip of Russia; a good swath of India; and on around to modern day Indonesia. In one sense from Bali and Jakarta on one end, to Madrid on the other.” — Former US Vice President Cheney In December 2004,
The National Intelligence Council of the CIA predicted that in the year 2020 a new Caliphate would emerge on the world stage. The findings were published in a 123-page report titled “Mapping the Global Future”. The aim of the report is to prepare the next Bush administration for challenges that lie ahead by projecting current trends that may pose a threat to US interest. The report is presented to the US president, members of Congress, cabinet members and key officials involved in policymaking. What is striking about the report is that it is full of references about political Islam and the various challenges it poses to US interests in the foreseeable future. There is even a fictional scenario depicting the emergence of Caliphate state in 2020 and its impact on the international situation.
Much that ISIS has captured the imagination of a scattered minority of Muslims around the globe, the fact must be exposed in good time, before much damage is done, that the entire Caliphate project was conceived, promoted and put in action by CIA ( including Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the old gang of Neo-cons, to trap the Muslims in a new mirage. The vision documents is available on Google search. Before writing of ISIS, writers must familiarize with the idea of Caliphate that is being promoted by US Neo-cons. To Quote Global Research: "Logic would dictate the following conclusion: An off-shoot of Al Qaeda/CIA and western intelligence operatives would automatically be a chip off that old block. Therefore, it is safe to presume that ISIS also belongs to the western intelligence apparatus. However, the Caliphate concept was created and perpetuated by the intelligence agencies and by Donald Rumsfeld who on many occasions discussed the objectives of Al Qaeda and OBL as a re-establishment of the caliphate throughout the greater Middle East. It appears that ISIS or ISIL is less ambitious than its mother-ship Al-Qaeda and will be willing to settle for a Caliphate in the Iraq and Syria for now."
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Non-state actors have upstaged the superpowers
SA Aiyar
Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar is consulting editor of The Economic Times. He has frequently been a consultant to the World Bank and Asian Development Bank..
The era of superpower hegemony is over, and that of non-state actors has arrived. Fourteen years after 9/11, the US has — let’s be blunt — been repeatedly defeated by radical Islam. Look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, or even Yemen. The US can drop a thousand bombs from a thousand drones, yet cannot dictate outcomes to a hydra-headed monster. The California school shooting showed that the US is unsafe even at home. Paris is the latest European scene of devastation. Radical Islamic thought has effortlessly penetrated national borders and created terrorists within the US and Europe.
At the recent TimesLitfest in New Delhi and Mumbai, many speakers addressed these issues. Many lambasted US military interventions that had created not democracy but anarchy and mass deaths.
Yet, historically, imperial powers alone could end local wars, and thus bring stability in place of anarchy. Superpowers could overthrow regimes they disliked, and install stable, controllable rulers across the world. Pax Britannica, Pax Americana or Pax Sovietica (in Eastern Europe) provided stability, and set rules for property, trade and commerce. This facilitated economic progress, providing handsome dividends for imperial controllers and also lifting living standards for the entire region.
That now looks so 20th century. Earlier, the state was allpowerful and individuals and groups were mostly powerless. But in the 21st century, the internet and social media have empowered non-state actors so much that superpowers can no longer install stable regimes at will. So, intervention now brings anarchy, not stability. This is a totally new development.
The internet and social media can now create and mobilize radical ideologues across the world, and create homegrown fanatics in every country. There is no military defence against these new developments. The ability to spread subversive ideas, once the hallmark of liberation movements, is now the hallmark of radical Islam.
The US easily ousted the Taliban from Afghan cities after 9/11, but could not dislodge it from rural areas. High technology could pulverise conventional armed forces but could not control low-tech rural areas, or stop the Taliban’s spread of ideas and arms, or even stop the Taliban raising funds through local taxes, smuggling and the opium trade. Obama’s military surge in Afghanistan gained ground only temporarily. He ultimately exited tail between legs, leaving the Taliban smiling.
Tech and terror: Islamic radicals use the internet as much as those fighing them, which makes the war more unpredictable.
ISIS is more fanatical than al-Qaida, and has enjoyed tremendous success in Iraq and Syria. Unlike most non-state actors, ISIS has grabbed considerable territory, but this may be unsustainable. However, even if ISIS gives up most of its territory, it will retain the power to persuade and mobilize through social media and the internet, inspiring an unending succession of alienated Muslims in many countries to become suicide killers.
New forms of communication have enabled non-state actors to spread their tentacles, and to mobilize money and arms, on a scale that even strong states cannot foil. Somali pirates have shown that even commercial hoodlums, seeking millions without a shred of ideology, can defy the greatest naval superpowers. Capturing hostages for ransom has proved an easy way to raise enormous sums that terrorists in earlier times could not dream of.
Hacking and other 21st century tools enable radicals to undercut the most powerful states. One day hackers may steal nuclear secrets, or direct government missiles at targets chosen by terrorists. Leftist anti-imperialists might rejoice at western discomfiture but a wide array of international jihadi literature classifies India too as an enemy, as an imperial tyrant in Kashmir that also kills Muslims in Gujarat and elsewhere. Those celebrating the end of superpower hegemony must understand the consequences. India is at risk, no less than the US or France.
Yet most Indian intellectuals are in denial. They would rather focus on the threat from communal Hinduism at home — which is very real — and dismiss Islamic communalism as a distant threat that mostly affects the West. This is sheer myopia.
How does one meet this threat? Ideally, by creating a sense of universal brotherhood. But radical Islamists are uninterested. They need gain only a few adherents a day to create danger for everybody else. In the absence of 20th century solutions, western states may retreat into fortresses. India may have to follow.
At the Mumbai Litfest, Dileep Padgaokar declared that a tough state had to replace the era of ever-expanding civil liberties. The greatest threat to civil liberty now came from nonstate actors, not the state. This could not be tackled by motherhood, brotherhood and other 20th century virtuous solutions.
Today, diabolical viruses, placed by both state and non-state actors, sit on every smartphone and computer, monitoring everyone. Radical ideas are buzzing in the airwaves all around us. We face new dangers, and an unprecedented loss of security and privacy. There are no easy answers.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.
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