Mumbai: Islamist Terror's New Modus Operandi

From the Middle East Times, an excellent article about the change in MO of Islamic terrorists.

One item stands out in particular:
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One of the main reasons for the terrorists switching tactics was to grab the world's attention. In fact as of last week before Mumbai, how many people knew that after Iraq India was the second country in the world most afflicted by terrorism? I would suspect not many. Nonetheless from January 2004 to today, over 4,100 people have died as a result of terrorist attacks in India.
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Indeed, I was angry at the media's indifference to bomb blasts in India. Bomb blasts had become commonplace. Even people in India had become indifferent. I had fallen down on the job. I had tracked the bomb blasts on Tagzania, but so many bomb blasts had happened, that I didn't keep up.

India with a backbone

Piracy off the coast of Somalia is only beginning to emerge as a news story in the mainstream media (MSM). Somali piracy in the Gulf of Aden cripples international trade: one tenth of world’s seaborne petroleum and 16,000 vessels pass through the Gulf of Aden. Insurance premiums for commercial shipping have increased tenfold this year. Some shipping companies have already decided to go around the Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) instead of going through the Gulf of Aden, thereby adding weeks to the voyage and increasing the costs of raw materials and manufactured goods.



A recurring theme of Mera Bharat Mahan has been the need for India to project assertiveness on the world stage. In the last two weeks, the Indian navy has flexed its muscle and successfully defeated Somali pirates.

According to this Associated Press report dated Wednesday, November 19, 2008:
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The ship… was crewed by heavily armed men, some carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Behind it were a pair of speedboats — the sort pirates often use when they launch attacks on merchant ships in these violent seas.

What followed, officials said Wednesday, was a rare victory in a sea war against Somalia-based piracy that has become increasingly more violent, and where the pirates are ever more bold.

A patrolling Indian navy frigate [INS Tabar] quickly identified the vessel as a "mother ship" — a mobile attack base used to take gangs of pirates and smaller speedboats into deep water — and ordered it to stop and be searched.


In this Nov. 11, 2008 file photo made available by Indian Navy, Indian warship INS Tabar, right, escorts the MV Jag Arnav ship to safety after rescuing it from a hijack attempt by Somali pirates. The Indian navy says the INS Tabar dedicated to fighting pirates has successfully fought off an attempted pirate attack in the Gulf of Aden, sparking explosions and a fire on the suspected pirate ship late Tuesday, Nov. 18. (AP Photo/Indian Navy, HO, File)

"They responded on the offensive and said that they would blow up the Indian naval ship," Commander Nirad Sinha, a navy press officer, told reporters in New Delhi. Then the pirates opened fire.

… By the time the battle was over, the mother ship had sunk — the Indian gunfire sparked fires and a series of onboard blasts, possibly due to exploding ammunition — and the speedboats were racing into the darkness.

One was later found abandoned. The other escaped. An unknown number of people died on the mother ship, a navy statement said.

It's not the first success. Last week, Indian navy commandos operating from a warship foiled a pirate attempt to hijack a ship in the Gulf of Aden. The navy said an armed helicopter with marine commandos prevented the pirates from boarding and hijacking the Indian merchant vessel.
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Mera Bharat Mahan congratulates the Indian navy for taking on the Somali pirates - and winning!

The last Jews of Calcutta

Beth-el synagogue in Kolkata

From the Associated Press via the International Herald Tribune, a poignant story about the dwindling Jewish population of Calcutta, as many Jews die or move away for better opportunities.

What the article doesn't mention, however, is India's acceptance of religious refugees. The story of the Parsis, Zoroastrians from Iran, is well-known. Calcutta (or Kolkata, as it's currently known) itself has absorbed Armenians as well as Jews - to say nothing about the Hindu refugees from Partition and the Bangladeshi war of 1971.

Case not closed

In his indignant letter to The Indian American, Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran wrote that the Banerjee commission concluded that the Godhra atrocity was an accident. "Case closed" was the last sentence in his letter.

Not so fast. The Nanavati-Mehta judicial inquiry commission states the Godhra atrocity was a “pre-planned conspiracy,” thereby contradicting the findings of the Banerjee commission, and by extension, Chandrasekharan's conclusion. As Chandrasekharan claimed that he based his report on interviews with witnesses, the Nanavati-Mehta commission based its conclusions on over 100 interviews with witnesses.

The Vedanta of Adi Sankara

Sankaracharya

In the second part of the July 19 lecture, Dr. Hebbar began discussing Vedanta as expounded by Adi Shankara (आदि शङ्कर). He spoke about the rope-snake illusion (rajju-ahi bhrama), in which one mistakenly perceives a rope as a snake in the dark. The way to correct this illusion is by shining a lamp onto the object.

The metaphysical interpretation of the rope-snake illusion is as follows:

The rope represents God
The "snake" represents gods, souls, and matter, that is, mulitiplicity
The illusion itself is Maya (माया)
The lamp represents spiritual discernment, or viveka (विवेका)

Maya and ignorance, that is, avidya conceal the real (the rope), project the false (the snake), and confuse the real and false (the person stumbling around in the dark).

Purva-Mimamsa

I attended Dr. Hebbar's lecture on Indian philosophy last Saturday, July 20.

In the previous lecture on Saturday, July 13, Dr. Hebbar began talking about the (Purva-)Mimamsa system in terms of epistemology, or the study of knowledge. Last Saturday, he talked about Mimamsa ontology (the study of construction of reality), theology (the study of God), psychology (in its original sense as the study of the psyche), and soteriology (the study of salvation or liberation). He compared and contrasted the philosophies of Prabhakara and Kumarila, the two principal exponents of Mimamsa.

Observing the 25th anniversary of anti-Tamil riots in Sri Lanka

This article from the International Herald Tribune discusses two exhibits that prod the Sinhalese majority to confront the civil war ignited when 2000 Tamils were killed in riots provoked by the killing of 13 soldiers.

One exhibit, by photographer Anoma Rajakaruna, features photos of Tamil victims of the riots and the civil war. The other exhibit features paintings by Chandraguptha Thenuwara that remind people of the peaceful doctrines of Buddhism, the dominant religion of Sri Lanka.

Where I've been, what I've been doing

Hard to believe that it's been two months since I last blogged, which does NOT mean that I have been oblivious to hot button issues such as the aborted land transfer to the Amarnath shrine board or the Centre's lining up new support for the US-India nuclear agreement.

For the last month, I've been attending lectures on Indian philosophy presented by Professor B.N. Hebbar at Durga Temple here in Fairfax County. How I found out about the lecture series was something of a fluke. I subscribe to mailing lists from the local temples, even though I am not affiliated with a temple. A month ago, I received an email from Durga Temple announcing this series, and the lecture series was to begin that very day! I called one of the contacts listed, and he told me to just come on down, I could still get the second half of the lecture.

To date, Dr. Hebbar has covered Vedic Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism. Now he is undertaking a discussion of the six darshanas of Classical Hinduism: today, he covered Nyaya-Vaishesika and Sankhya-Yoga and began discussion of (Purva-)Mimamsa (as opposed to Uttara-Mimamsa, or Vedanta).

I'm going to be on vacation beginning tomorrow, but plan to blog on the lecture series when I return.

Jaipur bomb blasts

Several days have passed since May 13, 2008, when a series of bomb blasts hit Jaipur. It would have been remiss of me not to recognize this event on the Mera Bharat Mahan blog, as I have frequently written about Islamic terrorism in India on this blog (I leave documentation of Naxal terrorism to Naxal Terror Watch).

I have read various accounts, which differ in the number of victims and even the number of blasts. However, there were at least six blasts, which left at least 60 dead and 200 injured. The fact that these blasts took place within a short time indicates coordination, thus bearing the hallmarks of an Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorist attack.

I will leave editorializing for another day. In the meantime, I pray for the departed, the injured, and their survivors.

The Hindu : From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu

This article From Indus Valley to coastal Tamil Nadu from the May 3, 2008 edition of The Hindu notes that there are commonalities between arrow-like symbols on megalithic pottery from Nagapattinam district, Tamil Nadu and Indus Valley symbols.


Megalithic pottery from Tamil Nadu

The pottery from Tamil Nadu is said to be dated between 300 BCE and 300 CE, while the Indus script dates is said to be dated between 2600 BCE and 1900 BCE.

I have been meaning to write a review on the book The Aryan Debate, edited by Thomas R. Trautman. Trautman adheres to the traditionalist view of the origins of the Indian people, which posits that the Aryans migrated from outside India and that the Aryans post-date the Indus Valley Civilization; however, he gives respectful attention to scholars with alternative viewpoints. He bases his judgments on what the vaunted "community of scholars" says about what linguistics and archeology (with emphasis on archeological evidence about the presence of the horse in India) indicate about the origins of the Indian people.

Trautman believes that the Indus Valley script might be some version of Dravidian, but doesn't provide any evidence. Indeed, the articles on the Indus Valley script in The Aryan Debate iterate that there has been no successful decipherment of the Indus Valley Script. Trautman would likely take the similarities of symbols on the Tamil Nadu pottery and Indus Valley script as evidence that the Indus Valley script was some sort of Dravidian.

India's Genetic Map

According to this article Genetic map blurs lines from The Telegraph (Kolkata), findings from the Indian Genome Variation (IGV) project indicate that various populations within India have intermingled throughout the centuries.

As noted in the article:

"Dravidian lineages have mixed with Indo-Europeans, Austroasiatics have mingled with Dravidians, and bridge populations in central India are blends of Dravidian, Indo-European and Himalayan groups."

and

"The analysis has also indicated that Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri Muslims are genetically similar and share genetic similarities with Dravidian groups. It has also shown that some Dravidian-speaking population groups in south India have Indo-European lineage."

Samir Brahmachari of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) says that the results of the IGV study recall Tagore's words in Bharat-tirtha:

Aryan and non-Aryan, Dravidian and Chinese... Pathan, Mughal/All have merged into one body.…

Might I also suggest that the findings also recall the words of Subramania Bharati?

She has thirty crores of faces, but her heart is one; she speaks eighteen languages, yet her mind is one.

Bottom line: It's time to put aside divisions among Indo-Europeans, Dravidians, and other groups to build a unified India.

IndianExpress.com :: Why Tibet matters

From IndianExpress.com (via the IndiaPride mailing list) comes an excellent column by Sonia Jabbar on Why Tibet matters.

She cites two reasons why Tibet is important to India.

The first reason is that Tibet has preserved the knowledge that disappeared from India after the Muslim sacking of Nalanda and other centers of Buddhist education. This is an important consideration for this blog, which promotes conservation of India's heritage, be it natural or cultural, tangible or intangible.

The second reason is that India has treaty obligations with Tibet that she inherited from Great Britain when India became independent. As Ms. Jabbar notes, "... when two countries have concluded an agreement between them, China has no locus standi as a third country. A sovereign state is one that negotiates and sign treaties with other states. Once a state exists it cannot simply be wished away simply because another nation has invaded it."


The Brahmaputra Watershed from Watersheds of the World: Asia and Oceania

Ms. Jabbar further notes, "... one should be aware that China controls the headwaters of many Indian rivers that originate in the Tibetan platea." There have been longstanding concerns that China is planning to divert waters from the Brahmaputra to the Yellow River.

India Today's Top 10 Indians poll

Found through the drisyadrisya दृश्यादृश्य (seen/not seen) blog was information about the poll conducted by India Today on the Top 10 Indian leaders.

I agree with drisyadrisya that this was not a scientific poll. India Today states, "The poll began on March 14 and ran for three weeks through the India Today website and SMS." If there were no means to disallow votes from those who had already voted (and I suspect there weren't), then this poll was subject to vote-stuffing.


Bhagat Singh

In descending order of percent voting:

1. Bhagat Singh - 37%


2. Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose - 27%


3. Mahatma Gandhi - 13%


4. Sardar Patel - 7%


5. J.R.D. Tata - 4%


6. Indira Gandhi - 3%


7. Rabindranath Tagore - 3%


8. Homi Bhabha - 2%


9. Jawaharlal Nehru - 2%


10. Jayaprakash Narayan - 1%

As drisyadrisya noted, April 13, 2008 marks the 89th anniversary of Jallianwallabagh Massacre, which galvanized Bhagat Singh. So maybe the timing of the poll is why Bhagat Singh took top spot.

I don't mean to disparage the results of the India Today poll; indeed, I take heart in the fact that those who voted in the polls sought to promote assertive leaders.

Rethinking Gandhi

Gandhi

I have made reference to Gandhi in scattered posts on this blog. Now comes another article from the redoubtable Sanjeev Nayyar on Gandhi, Christianity, and Ahimsa. In this article, Sanjeev cites Sri Aurobindo, who was critical of Gandhi throughout his life:
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“Some prominent national workers in India seem to me to be incarnations of some European force here. They may not be incarnations, but they may be strongly influenced by European thought. For instance Gandhi is a European-truly, a Russian Christian in an Indian body. And there are some Indians in European bodies!

Yes. When the Europeans say that he is more Christian than many Christians (some even say that he is “Christ of the modern times”) they are perfectly right. All his preaching is derived from Christianity, and though the garb is Indian the essential spirit is Christian. He may not be Christ, but at any rate he comes in continuation of the same impulsion. He is largely influenced by Tolstoy, the Bible, and has a strong Jain tinge in his teachings; at any rate more than by the Indian scriptures-the Upanishads or the Gita, which he interprets in the light of his own ideas.”
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Indeed, Gandhi's interpretation of the Gita is fanciful: he does not accept the need to take up arms against the forces of adharma.

Neo-Neocon is a blogger whose worldview changed after 9/11: she formerly was a liberal; after 9/11, she became, well, a "neo-neocon." In her article The varieties of pacifism: (Part I)–Gandhi’s absolutism, Neo-Neocon looks at Gandhi's extreme form of pacifism, in which he advocated collective suicide on the part of Jews in Nazi Germany and on the part of Sikhs and Hindus about to face massacres in Pakistan.

After hearing yet another hagiographic portrayal of Gandhi by a minister in a New Thought church, I told the minister that I disagreed with the portrayal as she greeted me in the receiving line following the service. She was nonplussed. I then forwarded Neo-Neocon's essay, with an apology for using that time and place to state my disagreement, to her by email. I never received a reply.

But then I'm a bit of a sh**-stirrer: certainly, I PO'ed Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekharan with my criticism about his reporting about Godhra.

Jodhaa Akbar

I admit it: I have not seen Jodhaa Akbar. Still, I believe that banning or boycotting a movie is ultimately counterproductive, as people will become curious and want to see the movie, rather than let it die a natural death. Besides, the movie will be made available through YouTube or Google Videos: for example, the Bachchans successfully got the kissing scene between Aishwarya Rai and Hrthik Roshan in Dhoom 2 removed, after a PIL was filed and Rai was engaged to Abhishek Bachchan. However, the scene became freely available through YouTube.

From what I've read, the mainstream Indian media believes that the issue is the dubious historicity of the woman Jodhaa Bai. Anything beyond that is simply anti-Muslim sentiment, given that the story is a romance between the Muslim Akbar and the Hindu Jodhaa Bai: follow the line of questioning that interviewer Anuradha Sengupta puts before Jodhaa Akbar director Ashutosh Gowariker.

About the lack of reference to Akbar's harem, Gowariker says:

... the story in my hands had reached a length of three hours and 20 minutes. There are many more things in Akbar and Jodhaa's life that I would have loved to bring to the screen but I cannot because it goes beyond the scope of the film.

On the other hand, he says:

When I looked at the scope of the film, I realised I cannot bring it in because I think this kind of film needs the tehzeeb, the salaams, the duas, the announcements of an emperor coming into court. Because it is due to these that the right ambiance, the right atmosphere is created.

The main problem, as I see it, is that the film denies Akbar's persecution of Hindus, the abduction of Hindu women into his harem, and the Jauhar of women when defeat of the Rajputs at Akbar's hands was inevitable.

Samarth : Why are Indians divided ?

From hindujagruti.org:

Dar-ul-Aloom's phony fatwa

The Dar-ul-Aloom seminary in Deoband, Uttar Pradesh is the most influential school of Islamic learning after Al-Azhar University in Egypt. Moreover, Dar-ul-Aloom provides the ideological underpinning for the Taliban and Islamic terrorist movements in South Asia. Small wonder that Moorthy Muthuswamy said that its influence should be "neutralized."

Dar-ul-Aloom recently issued a fatwa (link found through MEMRI) ostensibly condemning terrorism. This article Deoband plays peace card; a few call it bluff from the Times of India reviews feedback from readers about the fatwa. While the article provides considerable space to opinions of those who are rightly critical about the fatwa and the motives of the Islamic scholars, it concludes with this statement:

For the majority though, the Deoband's initiative was an important step in the war against terror.

What I read in the Dar-ul-Aloom fatwa was a cursory denunciation of terrorism. As with a fatwa issued by American Muslim groups, no Islamic terrorist individual or group is called out by name and denounced. The principal concern of the Dar-ul-Aloom fatwa is the treatment of Muslims in India and around the world, not opposition to Islamic terrorism.

Hijackers free, helpers get life - Kandahar cuffs on trio after 7-year trial

From The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) , February 6, 2008, comes this article Hijackers free, helpers get life - Kandahar cuffs on trio after 7-year trial, in reference to the December 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines flight 814.

The article notes:

The masterminds, Masood Azhar, Ahmed Zargar and Sheikh Ahmed Omar Sayeed, are still out. The three were freed in exchange for the 189 passengers held hostage in Afghanistan’s Kandahar for a week.

For many Indians, it was a matter of shame that there was no Entebbe-type of raid when the plane landed in Amritsar. That shame was compounded when then External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh personally handed over Masood Azhar, Ahmed Zargar and Sheikh Ahmed Omar Sayeed to end the standoff.

The Blame Game

Sadanand Dhume wrote that "An increasingly radicalized neighborhood, fragmented domestic politics and a curiously timid mainstream discourse on Islam add up to hobble India's response to radical Islamic intimidation."

Here are two examples how fragmented domestic politics hobbles India's effectiveness in fighting terrorism:

From Naxal Terror Watch, which in turn found this article through Offstumped, comes this commentary Make Terror Victims the face of Anti-Terrorism Campaign, which criticizes the efforts of Congress and the BJP to prove that the other party has the worse record on fighting terrorism. The article argues:

By making the voice of the Terror Victims and the voice of those brave women and men in uniform who shed their lives fighting terrorism the Anti-Terrorism Campaign will not just have tremendous credibility but it would frame the public debate in the right terms.

This article Maya’s Intelligence Quotient from Hard News indicates that while there was advance knowledge of the terrorist attack on the CRPF camp in Rampur, the Uttar Pradesh government headed by Chief Minister Mayawati claimed that it had not received intelligence from the Centre. It also reveals other gaps in the state intelligence network. The article closes with this question:

If [terrorists] can attack a CRPF camp and get away, what is the fate of ordinary people?

Anuranan

Rahul Bose as Rahul and Raima Sen as Preeti in Anuranan

It's not often that one finds Bengali language films playing in movie theaters in the U.S. (unless it's a retrospective of the films of Satyajit Ray), so on a lark, I persuaded my husband to take me to see Anuranan.

Anuranan is about two couples: the dreamy/poetic Rahul (Rahul Bose) and his wife Nandita (Rituparna Sengupta) and driven businessman/domineering husband Amit (Rajat Kapoor) and his repressed wife Preeti (played by Raima Sen, granddaughter of Bengali cinema legend Souchitra Sen). Gradually, Preeti finds that she can find expression for her interests in literature and nature with Rahul. The relationship has tragic consequences.

As with many Bengali offerings, Anuranan is replete with quotations of songs and poems of Tagore. In the way that Anuranan deals with a woman who finds (non-sexual) self-expression through a man other than her husband, it recalls Satyajit Ray's films Charulata and Ghare-Baire, both based on stories by Tagore.

Birth of the Maitreya

Book cover for Birth of the Maitreya

Birth of the Maitreya by Bani Basu, with translation from Bengali to English by Sipra Bhattacharya, is a novel that reminds one of the Mahabharata in its scope and range of characters. Part I sets the stage and introduces characters from all walks of life; Part II, which is much shorter than Part I, provides the denouement.

The novel is set around 500 BCE, during the lifetime of Gautama Buddha. Essentially, it is about the efforts of Chanak and Tishyakumar to encourage alliances among kings and establish righteous rule. Notable in this book are the debates about the dharma promoted by Gautama Buddha and that of what we now refer to as Hinduism, in terms of caste, Vedic ritual, asceticism, and self-defence and ahimsa.

Without betraying too much of the story (notably about what happens to Chanak and Tishyakumar), the ending is tragic, characterized by fighting among kings, palace intrigues and coups, and failed aspirations. At the same time, the Persian army is advancing toward India. (I can't help drawing parallels with India today: the infighting that characterizes politics prevents a unified response to external threats.)

Still, the novel ends on a note of hope for new life: in this way, it recalls Peter Brook's film adaptation of the Mahabharata, in which Lord Krishna saves the life of one woman so that the human race can continue.

You may find a preview of Birth of the Maitreya through Google Books.

Lost Temples of India

Here's another reason for my wish to travel to southern India: this video The Lost Temples of India, which was presented on The Discovery Channel:



The above video is Part 1 of 6. Parts 2 through 6 are also available.

My criticism about this documentary is the dramatic ominous music background for the temples, which contrast with the reposeful music on the segments showing the Taj Mahal. What statement is that making? Still, there are awe-inspiring views of the temples at Thanjavur (Tanjore) and Madurai, both in Tamil Nadu.

The Beautiful South

Jog falls in coastal Karnataka

I've had a longstanding wish to go outside of Bangalore and explore southern India. This collection of photo essays on coastal Karnataka and Coorg by Vimla Patil (from eSamskriti, which is a treasure trove of photos and essays about India) make me want to travel all the more:

Coastal karnatakas two heritage districts Udipi Gokarna and Jog Falls

Coastal Karnataka: Shringeri and Karkal

Travel to Coorg

To find the photos, you will have to scroll down the frame.

8 killed as terrorists attack CRPF centre in Rampur

Mera Bharat Mahan's dreary task of documenting terrorist attacks in India:

From The Hindu, 8 killed as terrorists attack CRPF centre in Rampur: Uttar Pradesh police suspect the involvement of Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"Eight persons including seven jawans were killed in a pre-dawn terrorist attack on the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) Group Centre in Rampur in Uttar Pradesh on Tuesday."

The article goes on to say that central intelligence agencies had alerted the UP government about terrorist attacks on the camp, only 5 days after the UP courthouse blasts.