The Doniger Controversy and the Need for Hindu Theologians -- Anantanand Rambachan

March 11, 2014, 2:54 am

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Professor of Religion, Saint Olaf College

The Doniger Controversy and the Need for Hindu Theologians

Posted: 03/10/2014 7:11 pm EDT Updated: 03/10/2014 7:59 pm EDT

The decision by Penguin (India) to withdraw Wendy Doniger's controversial book,The Hindus: An Alternative History, has, not unsurprisingly, elicited a huge volume and range of responses. On one side are those who see the issue solely as one of freedom of expression and worry that Penguin's capitulation undermines free speech. On the other side are supporters of Shiksha Bachao Andolan, the group that filed the lawsuit against Doniger's book. They welcome Penguin's decision on the grounds that her writing offends and hurts Hindu religious feelings. They question Doniger's reading of Hindu texts and narratives and the assumptions of her methodology. In the middle are many, scholars and lay-persons, who are not in favor of book-banning and pulping, but who raise legitimate issues for discussion that include power inequality, the history and nature of scholarship on Hinduism and the relationship between scholar and religious community.

Shiksha Bachao Andolan resorted to Article 295A of the Indian Penal Code (1860), which punishes deliberate acts of religious insult, to deal with Doniger's book. Other religious communities in India, including Muslims and Christians, have used the law also to ban books that they consider offensive. Although Doniger identified the law as the real villain, the recourse to book-banning by some Hindus to deal with the matter of contentious scholarship highlights a critical need in the community for Hindu theologians.

"Theology" and "theologian" are terms that have a long history of meaning within the Christian tradition, but are now more widely employed by persons of other traditions, after critical reflection and clarification, to describe their own work. The same critical appropriation is possible for a certain kind of Hindu scholar and scholarship. The functions of the contemporary Hindu theologian will not be entirely novel ones, but connected deeply and creatively with historical roles and resources within the tradition.

Traditionally, the theologian worked from a place of commitment to a tradition. There are several parallel terms in Sanskrit that identifies such commitment, and sraddha is prominent among these. Commitment implies a responsibility to clarify, explain and, when necessary, to defend the core teachings of the tradition. The theologian clarified the meaning of the tradition in the face of critiques and sought to explain its coherence and consistency. Such commitment and the work that flows from it distinguish the Hindu theologian from the scholar of Hindu theologies. The scholar of Hindu theologies is not motivated by the desire to affirm the truths of the tradition. It is even possible that a scholar of Hindu theologies may have a commitment to the Hindu tradition. The distinguishing mark of the Hindu theologian today must be a willingness, when necessary, to explain its claims in respectful dialogical engagement from a place of deep learning, reason, and a willingness to be self-critical.

In current Hindu scholarship, both in the West and in institutions in India influenced by Western approaches, theological commitment is a rarity and the reasons are many. First, most of the instructors about the Hindu tradition in higher education in the Western world do not personally identify with its world views. South-Asian ancestry, it must be noted, does not equate with commitment. Second, in the study of the Hindu tradition, the religious studies approach, especially as exemplified in the historical and social scientific methods, prevails. These methodologies have deepened and enriched our understanding of the history, character and workings of the Hindu tradition, but give much less attention to the claims of the tradition to transmit important truths about the nature of reality that contribute human wellbeing and to the evaluation and normative implications of such claims. Some in the Hindu community seem to expect from such instructors a rational exposition and defense of the tradition that is associated with the historical role of the theologian and not the teacher of history, anthropology or sociology. Of course, one expects the teacher of religion, whatever his or her methodology, to be fair, balanced and self-critical, but there are constructive theological tasks that only the committed Hindu theologian is invested in undertaking. Third, many Hindu scholars, for complex reasons, choose to describe their work as philosophical in nature and not theological.

As far as the training of the contemporary Hindu theologian is concerned, we may employ and expand a powerful traditional model. The Mundaka Upanishad (1.2.12) describes the qualified teacher as one who is both strotriyam and brahmanistham.Srotriyam (knower of the sruti) is the requirement of deep training in the authoritative canons of the tradition, as well as in traditional principles of reading and exegesis. Such training is undertaken under the guidance of a competent guru and there is much to commend in this mode of embodied learning. This classical training must be expanded today to include familiarity with modern academic modes of inquiry and approaches that include historical-critical and social scientific methods. There are many traditional Hindu teachers with vast and impressive learning in the canons of their respective traditions, but who have not had opportunities for training in contemporary academic methods. Many are unwilling, uninterested or unable to participate in current debates.

The quality of brahmanistham (rooted in the limitless) emphasizes, among other things, the dimension of commitment in the theologian and the expression of this in a particular way of being. It is the bridge between theology and practice, the transformative dimension of theology. For the Hindu theologian, theology is a mode of understanding that expresses itself in a way of being. The Hindu tradition has had a long and distinguished heritage of the integration of learning and commitment. Some of its most creative and influential teachers, past and present, embody this unity and we see in their lives the abundant fruits of this synthesis of mind and heart, learning and spirituality.

In controversies, like the one that rages in the Hindu community over the writings of Wendy Doniger, the Hindu theologian will be located ideally to participate and even lead. The commitment to the tradition connects the theologian intimately to the life of community and offers the opportunity to understand its concerns and to represent these in the religion academy. The theologian's immersion in the world of scholarship enables her to represent this perspective to her community and to convey the concerns of her peers. This bridge-building role is admittedly fraught with tensions and risks and there are times when the theologian will need to challenge one or the other constituency and even both. Freedom and the trust of both are necessary for the proper fulfillment of the Hindu theologian's role. Lawsuits address the matter of whether a community feels insulted or offended by a scholar's writings; the court does not pronounce on matters of truth. When a religious community feels that a certain kind of scholarship undermines its truth claims, the proper response is critical inquiry and, when justified, a vigorous contesting of this scholarship with reasoned argument and alternative readings. A tradition learns, not only from those who are committed to its worldview, but also from those who question it. There is a long history of such responses within the tradition. The evaluation of interpretations and truth claims is one of the traditional roles of the theologian.

The need for Hindu theologians is indispensable. In their absence, the gap will be filled by many who lack training -- classically or academically -- who are limited to the rhetoric of personal denigration and who do a disservice to the theological universality, profundity and diversity of the tradition. Even the Doniger controversy, in the finitude of time, will pass but not the necessity for Hindu theologians who are vital to the rejuvenation, renewal and elucidation of tradition in the context of change and challenge. The Hindu community, interested in the flourishing of a dynamic tradition has an obligation to foster and support the scholarship and commitment of the theologian. Whatever one thinks of Doniger's scholarship, it is obvious that the trust of the community is a casualty, and this growing erosion of trust and the alienation of the community must be a concern of all scholars, with or without personal commitment to the tradition.

(I am grateful to all my friends who helped me to clarify the thoughts expressed here and to refine my language).

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anantanand-rambachan/hindu-theology-the-doniger-controversy_b_4931302.html

Benin Oakland (BeninOakland)

975 Fans·Don't tell me you love me. Let me guess.

Theologians or mythologists?

There is no more a need for Hindu theologians than there is for Christian theologians or Muslim theologians or Jewish theologians. The purpose of a theologian is to explain God/gods and his/her/their message to the world. They are all telling us of different gods and different messages, and each contradicts the others. Every one of us is a theologian, and that is all of the theology that shy one of us needs.

It isn't knowledge, it's mythology. And every theologian is in it for one or all of the same motivations: power, money, dominion, or self assigned but always wholly imaginary specialness. Provide some actual proof that your speculations about the nature of the divine and your/our relationship to it have the slightest thing to do with reality, and then maybe we can have a conversation.

11 MAR 6:36 PM

Chitra R. (kalpavriksha)

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PART ONE OF THREE
I commend Prof. Rambachan’s efforts to be a “bridge over troubled waters.” I do however question one of the central premises of his essay. He bemoans the lack of “Hindu theologians” well versed in “contemporary academic methods” familiar with “contemporary modes of inquiry.” According to this view, it is not the obtuseness of the culturally blinkered academic that is the problem. It is the fault of the object of their study, for not grooming mediators and spokespersons with the right credentials.

Just imagine for a moment that one is not studying Hinduism, but German. Imagine that I, as a native English speaker, refuse to learn German grammar and the nuances of its idiom, and then blame the flaws in my understanding on the deviousness of native German speakers trying to cover up the real meaning of the text. Would it make sense for me to stand stubbornly by my interpretation saying “tough luck Germans, you may not like my translation but I didn’t make it up -- that’s exactly what your text says.” Can you imagine my having such an attitude and trying to pass myself off as a “scholar” of German? Yet, when the subject of scholarship is Hinduism, it is considered perfectly reasonable, even admirable to view Hindu Gods through the lens of an Austrian who came by his insights by “analyzing” the neuroses of middle aged European women! Should it require a Hindu theologian to explain why this is stupid?

26 MINUTES AGO

Chitra R. (kalpavriksha)

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PART TWO OF THREE
Prof. Rambachan reminds us of the verse from the Mundakopanishad describing the qualities of a teacher, the second line of which states: “Tad vigyAnArtham sa gurum evAbhigachchet sait-pANih srOtriyam brahma-niStham.” Translation: Let the one seeking that (ultimate) knowledge approach, with “samit” -- the fuel for the sacrificial offering – in hand, a teacher both well versed in scripture and established in “brahma-niStham” or the full equanimity of self-realization.

I would just point out that this verse describes not only the ideal qualities of the teacher but equally important, *the attitude of the pupil seeking that knowledge.* The seeker must approach with “samit” in hand, signifying his willingness to sacrifice his ego at the altar of knowledge. Having chosen his course of study and the ideal teacher, he must approach the process of learning with open-mindedness and humility.

If one is honest, one would have to agree that it would be easier to teach most western scholars of Hinduism to skydive than to get them to approach their subject matter with humility.

23 MINUTES AGO

Chitra R. (kalpavriksha)

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PART THREE OF THREE
Professor Doniger misses the point, perhaps deliberately, when she states in her NYT Oped “In my defense, I can tell you there is a lot of sex in Hinduism, and therefore a lot of puritanism in Hindutva …”

The first part reminds me of the old joke about the man who responded to every visual stimulus provided by his psychologist as reminding him of sex. When the doctor asked how a straight line could remind this man of sex, his patient replied “I dunno, Doc, you’re the one showing the dirty pictures.”

As for the dig about puritanical Hindutva, Doniger’s critics are by no means all loony fundamentalists as she would have you believe. My political and philosophical views mark me as a liberal. Yet I take just as dim a view of Doniger’s Antics in Alternatives. Freedom to me does not mean freedom from standards.

In her final flourish, Doniger states: “[The Hindus] isn’t about sex at all. It’s about religion, which is much hotter than sex.” Let's see: the book is not about *sex* though she told you a few sentences ago that she found a lot of sex in Hinduism; it’s about *religion*, though the title of the book indicates it has something to do with *history*. Hardly surprising that her book fails abjectly at conveying the religion, the history, as well as the deeper metaphysical significance of aspects perceived by her as “sex.”

14 MINUTES AGO

The Doniger controversy needs to be resolved at various levels. I appreciate Anantanand Rambachan's call to theologians to get involved. It will be most helpful to flag off the involvement by providing a preliminary outline of issues posed by Doniger's alternative and her collection of essays all focused on Hindu theology and practice. Will Doniger's concern about what happens in India's elections be a theological issue? In summary, what are the theological issues to be debated because of Doniger yarns laced with libido?

S. Kalyanaraman, Sarasvati Research Center

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Doniger’s second book not to be re-issued for now; publisher to consult 4 experts

March 11, 2014, 3:29 am

≫ Next: Krantikari Kejriwal, made in TV studio

≪ Previous: The Doniger Controversy and the Need for Hindu Theologians -- Anantanand Rambachan

Should Wendy do a second OPED in NYTimes: Ducked in Delhi? The egg missed the target.

S. Kalyanaraman

New Delhi, March 11, 2014

First Published: 00:11 IST(11/3/2014)
Last Updated: 00:13 IST(11/3/2014)

Doniger’s book not to be re-issued for now; publisher to consult 4 experts

Following demands for the withdrawal of scholar Wendy Doniger’s second book, On Hinduism, Aleph Book Company has said it will not re-print the book “until the concerns are addressed for an acceptable resolution of the whole matter”. For the moment, the publisher has decided to consult independent experts on the book, which is currently out of stock.

Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, whose legal challenge to Penguin Books led to the publisher withdrawing Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History, had sent a legal letter to Aleph. Claiming On Hinduism “offended the sensitivities of Hindus”, it threatened legal action if the book was not withdrawn.

In a written reply, Aleph’s chairman RK Mehra told Samiti convener Dinanath Batra the company “respects” his “concerns and objections”. The book was published last year and has been “out of stock”, he added. The stocks sold out “before your objections reached us”, Mehra wrote, noting it could be because of the coverage to Batra’s objections to the Penguin book.

Batra was told Aleph has now sent the “objections” to four independent scholars “for review, as this is the common practice in such cases”. A response is expected next week. The book “shall not be re-issued” until concerns are addressed.

In a statement, Aleph said they would discuss the experts’ reports with both the author and the complainant “in order to find a solution that satisfies all parties concerned”. The author “concurs” with the proposed course of action, the statement added.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/Print/1193394.aspx?s=p

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Krantikari Kejriwal, made in TV studio

March 11, 2014, 4:16 am

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Krantikari Kejriwal, made in TV studio

OUR BUREAU

Arvind Kejriwal

New Delhi, March 10: A video clip uploaded on YouTube has shown Arvind Kejriwal requesting a television interviewer not to ask him about the corporate sector and turn “all the middle class support against us”.

The Aam Aadmi Party leader is also seen telling the interviewer to play up a part that will portray him as revolutionary, possibly a reference to Bhagat Singh whose photograph is shown behind Kejriwal.

“Bahut krantikari, bahut hi krantikari (Very revolutionary. Indeed very revolutionary),” the interviewer replies when Kejriwal asks him how the interview went.

The clip has not only raised questions about the Aam Aadmi Party leader’s efforts at projecting a particular image of himself but also the role of media in conducting what critics have referred to as “collusive” interviews.

Kejriwal was interviewed soon after his resignation as Delhi chief minister for the Aaj Tak channel by Punya Prasoon Bajpai.

The India Today Group, which owns Aaj Tak, said in a statement the video clip was “part of a motivated campaign to malign Aaj Tak’s reputation as an independent channel, which fearlessly broadcasts the truth”. The statement added that the “entire” interview was telecast live and no part was edited out.

But the statement said: “In the conversation, Arvind Kejriwal is asking the anchor to highlight parts of the interview.”

Neither the media group nor Kejriwal has questioned the authenticity of the clip. The conversation appeared to have been recorded during a break. But it is not clear whether the break was in the middle of the interview or at the end of it.

The future tense used by Kejriwal in some parts of the conversation (see chart) — such as “I will speak on this” — suggests the interview may have continued.

If that is the case, questions can be raised whether the interviewer asked all the questions he originally wanted to ask even if the channel had broadcast the full interview as the media group has pointed out in the statement.

Indian media rarely subjects itself to the scrutiny that it reserves for politicians. One reason has been the reluctance to be seen as fishing in the troubled waters of competing media organisations. For instance, The Telegraph is owned by the ABP Group that also runs ABP News, a Hindi channel which competes directly with Aaj Tak.

However, the media did not fight shy of reporting on two cans of internal worms — one was linked to “paid news” and the other revolved around the rape allegation against Tarun Tejpal.

The current controversy assumes added significance because it has broken in the middle of the election season. This does not mean that someone deliberately recorded the conversation to embarrass Kejriwal — recording usually begins and ends a little before and after each session. But a key — and unanswered question — is how the clip — the unedited tape is the property of the media organisation — got leaked.

AAP spokesperson Sanjay Singh said: “There is nothing wrong in the video. We are just trying to stress our point.” Bajpai, the interviewer, could not be contacted despite repeated attempts by this newspaper.

AAP sources said the party was dismayed by the undue focus on the video, which had clocked 5.68 lakh views by 10pm today.

Politicians and celebrities, including some in Hollywood, are known to lay down terms for interviews and some media organisations have been accused of indulging them to gain “access”. Critics also accuse a section of the media of creating a halo around Narendra Modi and his so-called “Gujarat model”.

But when a subject of news asks a journalist to play up a particular portion or a politician running for public office seeks help in preserving the support of the middle class, the journalist is expected to remind the person that what to highlight is the prerogative of the editorial team and it should not be the concern of the media outlet to protect the support base of a politician.

Arun Jaitley, the leader of the BJP whose associate parivar arms have been accused of threatening “hostile” journalists, seized upon the “curious” video featuring Kejriwal.

Jaitley issued a statement titled When ‘Punya’ meets ‘Paap’ (when virtue meets sin), playing on the names of the interviewer and the AAP.

“We have never been fortunate to be extended such a privilege by any anchor or media organisation. Friendly and collusive interviews intended to cultivate a particular image is a strategy of the AAP. This clearly shows the party and its leader are pretending to be what they are not…. Between reality and projection there is a complete mismatch,” Jaitley said.

THE VIDEO

What the footage on YouTube shows. It appears that the conversation took place during a break

Arvind Kejriwal: (leaning forward towards interviewer Punya Prasoon Bajpai): Woh wala thoda theoretical hai, corporate wala jo aap bol rahe the na. (That section about corporates, that you were talking about; that’s a little theoretical).

Bajpai: (leaning forward towards Kejriwal): Achchha (Okay).

Kejriwal: Kaafi theoretical hai. Isiliye main usme nahin ja raha tha. Usse jitna middle class hain woh anti ho jayega. (It’s quite theoretical. That’s why I was not getting into that. That will turn all the middle class support against us.)

Bajpai: Achchha (Okay).

Kejriwal: Ki hum privatisation ke khilaf hain, companiyon ke khilaf hain. Isliye main uspe nahin aa raha tha. Us debate par nahin pad raha tha jaan boojh kar. Baaki poochhiye (That we are against privatisation, against companies. That’s why I was not getting into that. I was not getting into that debate deliberately. Ask me anything else).

Bajpai: Aur jo hashiye pe 80 phisadi samaj hain? (And the 80 per cent of society on the margins)?

Kejriwal: Isme bolenge (I’ll speak on this).

Bajpai: Isme ab aa jaye na? Vote bank to vahi hai na desh bhar mein asal me. (So let’s get onto this subject now, right? After all, this is the real vote bank across the country).

Kejriwal: Bilkul (Absolutely). Ab yeh bolna hain. Bhool gaya tha main yeh bolna (This is what I want to say now. I had forgotten to say this).

Bajpai: Agar hum unke liye kar rahe hain to... (If we’re doing things for them, then)...

Kejriwal: Main yeh nahin kehna chahta ki yeh saare private wale kar rahe hain... aur koi bhi sarkaar aa jaye private se commission leti hain. To hum saare private sector to nakar denge. (I don’t want to say that the private sector is doing all this. That any other government that comes takes a commission from the private sector. That would be dismissing the entire private sector). Which is not right. Aur middle class haar jayenge (And we’ll lose the middle class).

Bajpai: (nods his head): Hmm.

Kejriwal: (pulling his microphone off): Theek tha? (Was it okay?)

Bajpai: Bahut krantikari. Bahut hi krantikari (Very revolutionary. Indeed very revolutionary).

Kejriwal: Usi ko jyada chala deejiyega. (Play that part up more).

Bajpai: (standing up): Woh to chalega... Hum to maane... Woh Bhagat Singh waala hissa... bada reaction aayega ispe (That will run... I think... That Bhagat Singh section... that will get massive reactions).

Kejriwal: (coughs)...

(They both walk away from the camera.)

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140311/jsp/frontpage/story_18068036.jsp#.Ux7wWj-SySo

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Teesta Setalvad cheated Godhra riots victims: Gujarat police tells HC

March 11, 2014, 6:08 am

≫ Next: Hidden truths: going beyond common sense reality (3 Parts) -- Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

≪ Previous: Krantikari Kejriwal, made in TV studio

Teesta Setalvad cheated Godhra riots victims: Gujarat police tells HC

PTI | Mar 11, 2014, 05.55 PM IST

MUMBAI: (PTI) Opposing the petition filed by social activist Teesta Setalvad and her husband seeking quashing of an FIR against them for alleged misappropriation of funds, Gujarat police on Tuesday told Bombay high court that the duo had cheated victims of 2002 Godhra riots and "embezzled funds" collected in their name.

This was stated in an affidavit filed by the Cyber Crime Cell, Ahmedabad Crime Branch in response to Teesta and her husband Javed Anand's petition seeking quashing of the FIR lodged in Gujarat and challenging the police's move of freezing their and their trusts' bank accounts operated from Mumbai.

Teesta and Javed had said that they were implicated in the case and were victims of political vendetta. They claimed that they were being targeted by the "perpetrators of the riots."

The affidavit was submitted today before a division bench headed by Justice N H Patil which posted the matter for hearing on March 20.

One of the riot victims from Gulbarg housing society, which was burnt during the 2002 Godhra riots, had lodged a complaint with the Ahmedabad police against Teesta, Anand and the NGOs run by them - Citizens for Justice and Peace and Sabrang Trust.

According to the complaint, the accused persons had allegedly collected funds in the name of converting part of the Gulbarg society into a museum and had allegedly misappropriated funds worth Rs 1.51 crores. The Gujarat police in its affidavit said the accused persons (Teesta and Javed) in the name of promoting communal harmony collected huge amount of foreign funds and cheated the complainant and several others.

The Gujarat police in its affidavit said the accused persons (Teesta and Javed) in the name of promoting communal harmony collected huge amount of foreign funds and cheated the complainant and several others.

"The Citizens for Justice and Peace trust received Rs 4.97 crores as foreign funds from February 2004, when it was registered, till January 2014. The Sabrang Trust, which was registered in April 2007, has received Rs 2.63 crores as funds from foreign till February 2014," the affidavit filed by K N Patel, Assistant Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad Crime Branch said.

"Substantial sums have been paid from these accounts towards meeting personal expenses of Javed Anand and also for investing in fixed deposits. Money withdrawn from the trust accounts were diverted to the personal accounts of the accused persons and also invested in shares and mutual funds," the affidavit said.

It added that the Sabrang Trust had only three trustees - Teesta, Javed and Amili Setalvad (Teesta's sister). "Hence it may be called a family trust created specially for receiving foreign funds," it said.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Teesta-Setalvad-cheated-Godhra-riots-victims-Gujarat-police-tells-HC/articleshow/31848873.cms

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Hidden truths: going beyond common sense reality (3 Parts) -- Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

March 11, 2014, 6:36 am

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Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1)

Monday, March 3, 2014

By Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

Despite their many divergences, science and philosophy are both led forward by reality. This is inevitable if facts, concepts, axioms, and other mental models are to be reliable. There are two ongoing projects, thousands of years old by now, that sprang from a different response to reality and where it leads. Roughly speaking, they are materialism and idealism. Materialism is fact-based, data driven, and wedded to the notion that “reality as given” is essentially trustworthy. Idealism cannot accept “reality as given” but looks to a hidden intelligence or level of Nature (if not God or the gods) that invisibly originates the physical universe.

To anyone who isn’t a professional scientist or philosopher, this divergence is mystifying, as if reality was a Chinese menu offering Platonism, Christianity, and Buddhism in column A and Aristotelianism, Einstein, and the Higgs boson in column B. As a practical matter, however, the ordinary person, including ordinary scientists, lead common-sense lives that depend implicitly on trusting the five senses and accepting “reality as given.” A quantum physicist drives his Honda Civic to work, not the ambiguous cloud of subatomic particles that he knows, professionally speaking, to be the substrate of every physical object, including automobiles.

Yet reality cannot be approached as Solomon’s choice. It isn’t tenable to divide it between materialism and idealism, each getting half. (For the moment, we’ll set aside the obvious disparity by which materialism got the whole baby while idealism was left with a teething ring and hints of a soul.) Understanding the nature of reality is too important to be left to specialists; the ordinary person deserves to know that certain first principles are true, applicable to reality itself, not a model of reality that exists to satisfy one stream of intellectual curiosity or the other.

The problem for the “matter first” position is that no one has credibly described the point at which unconscious particles acquire consciousness. That they somehow did is simply an unproven assumption. The problem for the “mind first” position is exactly the reverse: how to describe the mechanism by which consciousness morphs into physicality. These matching dilemmas would be of purely academic interest to ordinary people except for their practical implications, if any. If reality is leading us to see it in a different, more comprehensive way, there can’t help but be practical outcomes. But that’s a secondary issue, which we will address in our conclusion.

In the early quantum era, a number of seminal thinkers suspected that the link between materialism and idealism could only be found by exploring the role of consciousness. A handful of notable quotes summarizes their suspicions:

Erwin Schrödinger: “To divide or multiply consciousness is something meaningless.”

“There is obviously only one alternative, namely the unification of minds or consciousness…. [I]n truth there is only one mind.”

Max Planck: "I regard consciousness as fundamental. We cannot get behind consciousness. "

Werner Heisenberg: “The atoms or elementary particles themselves are not real; they form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facts.”

It has taken a long time for these intimations to be recognized as profound insights. The lag time was due to various things – consciousness wasn’t considered a valid scientific subject; quantum theory had other fish to fry (for example, reconciling quantum mechanics with relativity); and in general the excitement of the quantum era was being generated by a complex set of new facts. Consciousness could be conveniently relegated to metaphysics and ignored. The triumph of one monism, the “matter first” worldview, seemed inevitable.

Yet at bottom the common-sense world of solid tangible objects fixed in space and time had been fatally undermined by quantum theory. This changed the status of facts per se. A fact could be accepted as a certainty in the classical Newtonian model, deriving from Aristotelian mechanics. Quantum facts were entirely different, taking into account the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s equation. It was valid to describe quantum behavior as a field of possibilities governed by mathematical probabilities. Thus a fact became a mental calculation first and foremost, with experimentalists struggling at great expenditure of time and money to gather fleeting evidence that a set of mathematical predictions was supported by data.

With startling speed, skipping over myriad complexities, we arrive at the present situation, where despite the astonishing accuracy of quantum mechanics (touted as the most accurate scientific theory ever developed), there is more doubt than ever about the nature of reality. By definition reality is more complex than any model can portray, and once a model runs into phenomena it cannot explain, we are compelled to follow wherever reality leads next.

It’s been well said that theories are right about what they include and wrong about what they exclude. We take that as axiomatic. To follow reality’s next hints, it is necessary for materialism and idealism to both abandon their prejudices, the chief of which is to protect the ground they’ve already won. Science has no reason to abandon its demand for data. The upholders of idealism (found in a loose aggregation of religion and spirituality, with a sprinkling of outlying philosophers, perhaps) have no reason for abandoning the inner world of subjective experience, with its remarkable capacity for insight, intuition, art, etc.

Since science dominates the current view of reality, we are more or less forced, as a provisional measure, to accept its demand for data, even though facts as such have been seriously undermined. There are some new hypotheses that bridge the gap between the quantum and classical worlds, making it possible to glimpse an underlying connection. Such a connection would justify seeing reality as a unity, after which we can decide which unity, the materialistic or the idealistic, is more credible. If reality’s hidden dimension is actually open to us, everyday life will be radically transformed, as we’ll discuss in the next post.

To make a long story short: By just looking at my reality I can change it. This is what Schrödinger`s cat example is all about. The newest way of looking at things in the business world is called: process mining. This is something quite different from data mining. Mining a process will enable a person to change the process on the go........ Am doing exactly this by designing objects for a 3D printer. Soon now such a printer can print all kinds of objects that really matter because whatever one fancies can be printed out. New exciting times are awaiting us.......idealism and materialism united indeed! ~:D~
heartphone // 8 days ago //
Long before science and materialism blended into scientism and became the predominate world view embraced by both skeptics and religious folks, Lord Buddha had to contend with attachment to intellect as the most highly "evolved" medium for understanding "reality."“Lord Buddha’s general attitude to barren Metaphysical problems may be illustrated by his attitude to the problems of (i) the existence of God and (ii) the existence of the individual soul. He is said to have refused to answer the question, ‘Does God exist or not?’ Even when he was repeatedly asked that question, he scrupulously maintained inviolable silence on that point, because for the Pandits of his age God was merely an idea to play with. They had encountered upon some descriptions of God in their extensive study and they had turned these descriptions into tools for carrying on their unending controversies. God was for them not a living reality, but merely a possible hypothesis. And although they played with the idea they did not have any genuine desire for knowing him. It is true that the Upanishads had declared that God was unapproachable through the intellect alone. In spite of these declarations these Pandits wanted to prove or disprove the existence of God merely through intellectual debates. Whenever, therefore, Lord Buddha was invited to give his opinion about God he emphatically said that the belief or disbelief in the existence of God is of very little importance so long as the everyday life of man remains unchanged.” --from Meher Baba Journal, Vol I, No.11, p. 64-65 by Dr. C.D. Deshmukh
Ron Greenstein // 7 days ago //

http://www.sfgate.com/default/article/Hidden-Truths-Going-Beyond-Common-Sense-Reality-5283560.php

March 10 2014

Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 2)

Although everyone as a practical matter accepts "reality as given" - the world presented by the five senses - that common-sense version of the world was radically undermined over a century ago with the advent of relativity and quantum theory. Equally dramatically, results from neuroscience show that mind creates representations of reality as in the phantom limb phenomenon. The trail from this ongoing revolution leads to current theories about a conscious universe, one that displays all the attributes of mind. In other words, mind precedes matter. The first post in this series introduced this concept, which if true would revolutionize everyday life. Reality itself, as explored by cutting-edge theories in physics, cosmology, and neuroscience, is giving us hints that we should look at the world through fresh eyes.

Some of the most intriguing thinking about the universe can be gathered under two rubrics: veiled non-locality and cosmic censorship. Veiled non-locality describes how the universe -- and the human brain -- disguises its wholeness in order to produce specific (i.e., local) events. This filtering process allows for specific observations and thoughts in a classical world of everyday experience, while keeping quantum and general relativistic processes out of sight. Cosmic censorship, on the other hand, describes the inability of distant observers to directly observe the center of a black hole, or "naked singularity." The center of the black hole is presumed to be the same as the quantum vacuum, which exhibits no behavior of matter or energy. This gives us a zero point – invisible, intangible, unlocatable in spacetime – that is the origin of the visible cosmos.

Between them, these two hypotheses remove a substantial amount of prejudice and unsupported belief. There is no longer a need to defend crude materialism in terms of subatomic “building blocks” as the basis for reality. Reductionism is the foundation of any “bottom up” model, and the base of the pyramid, like it or not, isn’t solid things or even stuff. At bottom the universe is emergent from the quantum vacuum, a “nothing” that contains the potential not just for our universe but for multiple, perhaps even infinite universes. Decades ago the noted physicist John Archibald wheeler of Princeton declared that all of physics is based on the quantum vacuum, and time has borne him out.

At the same time, an opening has been made for a “top down” interpretation of the universe based on a single holistic foundation, from which individual events spring. But what should the foundational principle be? If the materialistic monism is to survive, everything must be derived from the quantum vacuum. Cosmic censorship and veiled non-locality provide a prop for materialism, because it can be taken as axiomatic that some aspects of reality will never be observable; this removes the onus for finding data that support the emergence of consciousness. In brief, the materialistic position becomes “We have found all the data that can be found, and from our findings the conjecture that mind arose from matter is as reliable as it can be. The rest is hidden, not from any flaw in our position but due to the nature of things.”

The idealist monism can claim stronger support, however. Its great obstacle, as we mentioned, is to describe how mind creates matter. At its basis, any creative agency must be overarching and separate from its creation (otherwise, one is left with the self-contradiction of asking who made the creator). Cosmic censorship can be interpreted as an invisible creative agency that organizes reality but permits human observers only a glimpse of it, just enough to fit the limited mechanics of the human brain. With veiled non-locality, one can point to something beyond spacetime, and this something gives rise to everything local in the cosmos – from the Bing Bang to neutrinos, from a single hydrogen atom to DNA - without revealing itself. The theological dictum that God’s ways are not justified to man now has its scientific correlate. The whole doesn’t have to justify itself to the parts.

If both styles of monism are supported by these new hypotheses, we are obliged to settle on which is right. This age-old contest is no longer the same. The balance has discernibly shifted in favor of idealism, but since that’s an outmoded term, let’s call it consciousness-based reality. More than a century after Planck, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger had their insights, physicists have begun to take consciousness seriously again. If a demand for parsimony matters, it is simpler and more elegant to derive matter form mind than vice versa.

In the next post we'll build a bridge from scientific thinking to everyday life. If, as we believe, reality has been hinting at a conscious universe, the same hints should be detectable at the human level. The cosmic mind should have impacts on the brain, as indeed it does.

Deepak Chopra, MD is the author of more than 75 books with twenty-two New York Times bestsellers includingSuper Brain. Join the weightlessproject.org to eradicate obesity and malnutrition. For more interesting articles visitThe Universe Within

Menas C. Kafatos is the Fletcher Jones Endowed Professor of Computational Physics at Chapman University. He is a quantum physicist, cosmologist, climate change researcher and works extensively on consciousness and the above fields. His doctoral thesis advisor was noted M.I.T. professor Philip Morrison who studied under J. Robert Oppenheimer. Kafatos' studies involved quantum physicists Hans Bethe, Victor Weisskopf and cosmologist Thomas Gold. He is co-author with Deepak Chopra of the forthcoming book, Who Made God and Other Cosmic Riddles. (Harmony)

Subhash Kak, Ph.D., Regents Professor of Computer Science, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater

Comment

The first reply to the above that comes up in me is: why not just experience this as ones own truth instead of trying to prove something that cannot be proven. I watch my reality and can change my perception of it, which means I am the only one who can find suitable creative solutions to my own reality. This means that consciousness as such can be manipulated to suit anybody`s needs. That`s why dictators still have so much power in this world! But maybe that`s your only intention: to make people become aware of their own power. Well, chaos will be the result as there is no true reality left anymore. Before that happens am luckily not among the living anymore.....

heartphone // about one day ago

http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/chopra/article/Hidden-Truths-Going-Beyond-Common-Sense-Reality-5303734.php

https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1512/hidden_truths:_going_beyond_commonsense_reality_(part_2)

https://www.deepakchopra.com/blog/view/1505/hidden_truths:_going_beyond_commonsense_reality_(part_1)

Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 3)

↧

Rahul Gandhi, Stop using Gandhi's name -- Shrikrishna Kulkarni, Gandhi's great grandson

March 11, 2014, 7:34 am

≫ Next: UPA hurts India as it exits -- Arvind Panagariya

≪ Previous: Hidden truths: going beyond common sense reality (3 Parts) -- Deepak Chopra, MD, Menas Kafatos, Ph.D., and Subhash Kak, Ph.D.

Dear Madam Bharkhaji,

We should be ever indebted to the internet to help us read the minds of millions around, else would have been what it was in the 60s, ignorance is bliss.

With Regards.

Wg.Cdr. ( Retd ) V P Sachar

http://deshgujarat.com/2014/03/10/dont-use-gandhis-name-for-selfish-benefits-mahatma-gandhis-great-grandson-to-rahul-gandhi/

Don’t use Gandhi’s name for selfish benefits: MahatmaGandhi’s great grandson to Rahul Gandhi
March 10, 2014 DeshGujarat

Ahmedabad, 10 March 2014
Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi these days in his speeches speaks against the RSS for the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
Rahul had literally a slap on his face when Mahatma Gandhi’s great grandson, Shrikrishna Kulkarni wrote an open letter to him in this regard on his Facebook page. Srikrishna’s letter is now viral on social media.
“To keep harping that the RSS killed Gandhi is akin to saying the Tamils killed your father,” he writes to Rahul. “…which would be such a petty falsehood, isn’t it? A couple of guys don’t make for a community…” Charging the Congress with milking the name of Gandhi for their “selfish benefits”, he says the party should just accept the verdicts of various commissions. “So please stop this charade, stop this opportunistic usage of the Gandhi name. You are not from the Gandhi family. You have fooled too many people for too long in India. Stop it now.” Somebody from the Gandhi family has to call their bluff, he ends.
Later, speaking to CNN-IBN, Kulkarni said, there was no need to bring up the issue of Gandhi’s assassination. “Couple of points. Gandhi was killed in 1948. Many enquiry commissions were done. Nobody indicted any particular organization. There are a couple of people involved in his killing, yes. But the fact of life is he is dead and is not going to come back. To bring up the Gandhi name is not needed. We must stop fanning these flames. Stop this politics of hate for selfish reasons,” Kulkarni said.
Shrikrishna Kulkarni’s mother is Mahatma Gandhi’s third son Ramdas Gandhi’s daughter. She married GR Kulkarni.
Read full text of Kulkarni’s letter here:
I had posted this on my Facebook, but was requested to post it on Linkedin also, so here it
March 8th, 2014
Dear Rahul Gandhi,
Gandhiji was my great grandfather.
He was assassinated by Mr. Nathuram Godse. Many inquiry commissions have researched the case and none has implicated the RSS. My grandfather Ramdas Gandhi wrote to the then Home Minister, Sardar Patel to spare Mr. Godse the capital punishment … our family had moved on even then … but … just for your information .. when Ramdas Gandhi lay dying in Mumbai (1969), Mr. Gopal Godse, the younger brother of Mr. Nathuram Godse did pay him a visit. So as it stands, this issue is squarely in the past and my family has moved on…
…my humble suggestion… you folks who own Congress (I) and your good self…should move on AND QUIT milking the name Gandhi and this issue for your selfish benefits. Have the magnanimity to accept the verdicts of the various commissions.
To keep harping that the RSS killed Gandhi is akin to saying the Tamils killed your father…which would be such a patty falsehood isn’t it? A couple of guys don’t make for a community….
So please stop this charade, stop this opportunistic usage of the Gandhi name. You are not from the Gandhi family. You have fooled too many for too long in India. Stop it now.
I am putting this in the public domain as someone from the Gandhi family has to call your bluff.

Your sincerely,
Shrikrishna Kulkarni

↧

UPA hurts India as it exits -- Arvind Panagariya

March 11, 2014, 7:43 am

≫ Next: China's water grid: 4500 kms.links, borrowing water from south. India should implement a Water Grid.

≪ Previous: Rahul Gandhi, Stop using Gandhi's name -- Shrikrishna Kulkarni, Gandhi's great grandson

UPA hurts India as it exits

By Arvind Panagariya, | 11 Mar, 2014, 11.32AM IST

China's water grid: 4500 kms.links, borrowing water from south. India should implement a Water Grid.

March 11, 2014, 4:53 pm

≫ Next: Kejriwal: India's biggest foreign-funded scam -- RSN Singh

≪ Previous: UPA hurts India as it exits -- Arvind Panagariya

India's water grid follows the natural contours of the alluvial land stretching from the Kashmir to the Indian Ocean. Transfer of flood waters from Brahmaputra and Sahyadri south-/east-wards will be by gravity flows creating 9 crore acres of additional wet land with assured 24x7 irrigation doubling agri production to 400 m.t/per annum.

Do it, NaMo.

SC has already said ok; the national water grid can be done in 5 years' time reaching tap water to every home in 6.5 lakh villages, increasing forest cover. This will take India to the level of its just share in world GDP which she had in 0 CE.

S. Kalyanaraman

China Has Launched the Largest Water-Pipeline Project in History

By Lily Kuo

BEIJING—On a Saturday morning in late August, about a dozen university students, professors, and middle-aged Beijing locals stand by a row of apartments in northwestern Beijing. Once an outskirt of the city known for its natural springs and reed-filled ponds, the area now looks just like another part of the sprawling capital: wide roads lined with set-back buildings, crowded with pedestrians. It’s home to some of China’s best schools, Peking and Tsinghua universities. One member of the group—an environmental society called the Green Earth Volunteers, led by one of China’s most well-known environmentalists, Wang Yongchen—asks a local if he knows how to get to the Wanquan River.

“That’s a river?” the man asks, and offers directions to what he says is a nearby ditch that sometimes puddles. After a few minutes, the Green Earth Volunteers arrive at a narrow canal holding a few centimeters of water. The bed of the Wanquan, which means “ten thousand springs,” is now paved over with concrete, the result of attempts to keep water from soaking into the ground when the canal was full. A pipe, once used to carry water into the small river, lies exposed to the sun, as do patches of dry ground. Ivy creeps along the sides of the canal, as if trying to reach what’s left of the water.

The Wanquan "river" in Beijing. (Lily Kuo/Quartz)

The Wanquan is one of thousands of rivers in China that have dried and disappeared after decades of declining rainfall, prolonged droughts, exploding population growth, industrial expansion, and a series of disastrous reservoirs built during the early days of the Communist Republic. The problem is most obvious in Beijing, which was chosen to be China’s capital in part because of its abundance of streams and freshwater springs. Beijing consumed 3.6 billion cubic meters (127 billion cubic feet or 950 billion gallons) of water in 2012, far more than the 2.1 billion cubic meters per year the city has at its disposal in nearby rivers and in the ground. The city’s water resources, about 120 cubic meters per person a year, are well below the 500 cubic meters the UN deems a situation of “absolute water scarcity.” Beijing has been supplementing the shortfall by diverting water from the nearby province of Hebei and trying to lower water usage in the city.

China has a severe water problem overall. Its resources of freshwater, around 2,000 cubic meters per capita, are one-third of the global average. Coal production, which supplies about three-quarters of China’s energy, already accounts for one-sixth of total water withdrawals. Between now and 2040, China’s total energy demand is expected to more than double, and be twice that of the U.S. The World Bank has put the annual cost of China’s water problems—specifically, water scarcity and the direct impacts of water pollution—at 2.3 percent of GDP but says it is likely much higher. About 45 percent of the country’s GDP comes from water-scarce provinces, according to a 2012 report by HSBC and China Water Risk, a consultancy. About 300 million people in China, almost a quarter of its population, drink contaminated water every day. Former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao wasn’t being dramatic in 1999 when he called the country’s water problems a threat to the “survival of the Chinese nation.”

But these shortages are unevenly spread. The North Plain, a region home to a quarter of the population, and which includes Beijing, is especially dry. Here, water tables are falling by two to three meters a year, according to the UN, and posing serious risks to agriculture and food security. Of China’s 22 provinces, 11 were considered “water-stressed,” meaning they have less than 1,000 cubic meters of water per person a year, as of 2012. One of the north’s main water sources, the Yellow River, has been shrinking for the past three decades, drying up almost every year before reaching the sea. Hebei province, which neighbors Beijing, has seen 969 of its 1,052 lakes dry up; some of its farmers water their crops with sewage water. Wang Shucheng, a former minister of water resources, predicted that if groundwater extraction in the north continues at current rates, in 15 years there will be none left.

The solution, as Mao Zedong first said in 1952, is to “borrow a little water from the south.” Southern China is home to four-fifths of the country’s water sources, mostly around the Yangtze River Basin. It took another 50 years after Mao’s suggestion for China to start work on it. Finally, on December 10, the first phase of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (SNWDP), or Nanshuibeidiao, began operating.

The project’s eventual goal is to move 44.8 billion cubic meters of water across the country every year, more than there is in the River Thames. The infrastructure includes some of the longest canals in the world; pipelines that weave underneath riverbeds; a giant aqueduct; and pumping stations powerful enough to fill Olympic-sized pools in minutes. It is the world’s largest water-transfer project, unprecedented both in the volume of water to be transferred and the distance to be traveled—a total of 4,350 kilometers (2,700 miles), about the distance between the two coasts of America. The U.S., Israel, and South Africa are home to long-distance water transfer systems, but none on this scale.

Part of a canal for the central route of the SNWDP, near Beijing in Hebei province. (David Gray/Reuters)

It’s the kind of operation, observers of China say, that would never have a chance somewhere like America. The project requires the coordination of at least 15 provinces—several of them water-rich areas that will have to give up some of their own water. It involves building over hundreds of archeological sites and eventually through religious ones as well. Almost half a million people will have to be relocated. The cost is budgeted at some $60 billion and is likely to exceed that considerably. In the U.S., proposals for large-scale water transfers from the Great Lakes to the west or south of the country have been repeatedly put down. It would seem to be an example of the power of an autocratic central government to enact the kinds of far-reaching national transformations that, in a democracy, get bogged down.

But a closer look reveals that it’s far from certain whether the benefits will outweigh costs: Some describe the project as a “high-risk gamble.” And rather than showing off the power of China’s central government, in many ways the project merely highlights the limitations of the central government’s ability to manage China’s water needs.

The project creates a grid of water highways that criss-cross the country and can be adjusted to send water almost anywhere. That grid—the siheng sanzong, literally the “four horizontals, three verticals”—consists of the Yangtze, Yellow, Huai, and Hai Rivers running west to east, and three routes that run from south to north, each longer than 1,500 kilometers (600 miles) through both natural and man-made canals.

The first branch, the eastern route, has just started transferring water from the Yangtze River in Jiangsu province to the dry cities in Shandong province. A second route will start carrying water from central China to Beijing and other northern cities at some point in 2014. The third, western route may link the Yangtze River to the Yellow River by crossing through the mountainous terrain of Sichuan and Qinghai, at elevation of between 3,000 and 5,000 meters.

Borrowing water from the south isn’t as simple as Mao suggested. The government has so far relocated at least 345,000 people to make way for construction, the largest resettlement for an infrastructure project since at least 1.4 million people were moved for the Three Gorges Dam. Officials say their relocation is a sacrifice for the good of the country, but others argue that the government is overlooking the extent and impact of the forced relocations that are taking place. The diversion project also risks long-term damage to two of China’s most important rivers, along with the communities that depend on them.

About 1,400 kilometers south of Beijing and its dried-up Wanquan River is the ancient town of Xiangyang, best known as the setting for epic battles over control of southern China over 700 years ago. Today, stretches of newly paved highways dotted with half-built high-rise apartment buildings lead to the city of 5 million. Locals brag that their strip of the Han River has some of the best water in the country. Of China’s six levels of water quality, theirs is of the second highest level, crisp and clean enough for drinking—a rarity in a country where as many as 20 percent of rivers are so polluted they’re unsafe to even touch. Over the summer, traffic near the river shore jams around 6 p.m. as people stream to the water for a quick bathe before dinner.

That may change once the central route of the water transfer system opens next year. About 30 percent of the Danjiangkou Reservoir will then go north instead of flowing south toward Xiangyang and into the Yangtze River—the river that supplies water to the diversion project’s eastern route, and eventually the western one as well. Officials say any impact will be minimal, but local environmentalists and researchers dispute that. Worse, some say, is that diverting this much water may permanently hurt two of China’s most important rivers: the Han, the main source of water for about 30 million people, and the Yangtze, which runs through 11 provinces and supports up to 400 million people.

“We’ve resolved a lot of issues and done a lot of research. The negative impacts are so small they almost don’t exist,” says Shen Fengsheng, head engineer of the water project, sitting at a broad wooden table at the SNWDP’s project office in Beijing. When all three routes are completed, he says, the Yangtze will lose only about 5 percent of the 29,400 cubic meters of water it dumps into the ocean every second.

Local governments are building passageways for fish whose routes are disrupted by the canals, supplementary dams to ensure consistent water flow, and wastewater-treatment plants to reduce pollution in water transferred or affected by the central or eastern routes. Officials in charge of managing the diversion from Danjiangkou say they’re making sure a minimum amount of water still flows downstream to cities like Xiangyang. “The water volume overall will be lower, but it will be enough to meet the daily needs of the people,” Zhou Jinhua, general office director at Danjiangkou SNWDP Water Resources Company, which is in charge of the dam for the Danjiangkou Reservoir, toldQuartz.

Locals in Xiangyang, however, say their water will become not only more sparse but also more polluted. Water quality there will fall at least one level when the route begins, according to Yun Jianli, head of Green Hanjiang, a nonprofit environmental group based in Xiangyang. That’s because decreasing water volume weakens a river’s “environmental capacity”—its ability to clear out pollution. Provincial researchers say the quality will go down another level, to the fourth of six, once the central route is at full capacity.

A worker along the Danjiangkou Reservoir. (Stringer/Reuters)

A slower-flowing river is also slower at depositing the sediments along the riverbed needed to form wetlands, which help mitigate pollution and nurture the river’s ecosystem. According to estimates by the Xiangyang municipal government, average water levels in the city’s section of the Han River will fall between 0.51 meters and 0.82 meters once diversion begins. “That water quality level will be worse is a foregone conclusion. The situation for the water environment is grim,” says a provincial report on the impact of the project on the Han River near Xiangyang, which was seen by Quartz.

In part to prepare for the diversion, Xiangyang is transforming itself. Plots of land covered in brick and concrete rubble litter the city as officials tear down paper and chemical factories. These have long been a large part of Xiangyang’s economy; now local officials want to move the economy away from manufacturing to minimize pollution in the Han River, and build up a services sector based on things like tourism. But as part of doing so, they plan to expand the city to three or four times its current size. Given that city dwellers consume about three times as much water as rural residents, according to International Rivers, a U.S.-based environmental group, a bigger Xiangyang will probably guzzle much more water.

To make things worse, both the Han and the Yangtze will end up with less water than even the diversion plan allowed for. The amount of water to be diverted for the central route, for instance, is based on calculations of the Han River’s water flow between the 1950s and the early 1990s. But since then the Han has become less consistent as rising temperatures have made droughts in the south more common. The amount to be diverted, however, hasn’t been adjusted. “It begs the question of why the Chinese government is going to spend all this money to alleviate drinking water shortages in Beijing. Are they more important?” says Kristen McDonald, China program director for Pacific Environment, a California-based nonprofit.

A woman washes cleaning supplies in the Yangtze river in Jiangdu, the beginning of the eastern route of the SNWDP. (Lily Kuo/Quartz)

Water levels in the Yangtze have been falling too. In 2012, Chinese researchers found that the amount of water entering the Yangtze from glaciers on the Tibetan plateau had fallen 15 percent over the last four decades. And in 2009, total freshwater reserves in the Yangtze River Basin had fallen 17 percentfrom 2005 levels, according to the China Statistical Yearbook. So cutting 5 percent from the river’s annual runoff is not trivial. Parts of the Yangtze will see much lower flow during the dry months of the year, affecting navigation and the health of the river. Officials say shipping along the Yangtze, which has become something of a “second coastline” for China, won’t be affected—but even now, local governments dig at least once a year to make the riverbed deeper to give ships more room.

A lower water volume could also mean more saltwater from the sea filters into the Yangtze’s estuary. That will impose higher costs on factories along the shore to treat and use salt water. Polluted water in the Yangtze—which officials have called “cancerous”—may also be transferred northward, bringing with it diseases like schistosomiasis (bilharzia), which can damage internal organs and harm children’s brain development. The solutions include installing costly wastewater management systems and, according to officials in Shandong, simply cutting off the flow of dozens of streams that carry factory wastewater into two lakes that function as transfer points for the diverted water. “The project will be useless if these problems aren’t solved,” Chinese environmentalist Yang Yong told Quartz. "You haven’t even solved the old problem and you’ve already created new problems."

Perhaps the most alarming example of how the SNWDP creates new problems is that it has triggered a cascade of unforeseen extra engineering projects. This is because provincial officials, worried that their towns will lose water, are pushing for supplementary dams and water-transfer systems to protect them.

The rivers can ill afford this extra engineering burden. There are already almost 1,000 dams on the Han and its tributaries and hundreds of dams and other hydro-projects on the Yangtze. With China’s goal of tripling hydropower generation, says Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, many Chinese rivers simply won’t be flowing in 10 years.

But the real problem is that this creates a circular web of hydro-projects that take water from one river to replenish another—robbing Peter to pay Paul.

For instance, about 17 kilometers south of Xiangyang on the Han River is the Cuijiaying Dam. A metal security fence guards it, with a sign that warns trespassers of intruding on “an area important for the work of national development.” The dam will maintain water levels for the city but slow the river’s flow downstream. “Usually NGOs are against dams, but this one is good for the local community,” Yun says.

Another diversion route, separate from the SNWDP, is being built to transfer water from the Yangtze to the Han, to help cities downstream of the Danjiangkou Reservoir. In turn, Shaanxi province—a parched region from which the central route will also take water—is building a project to take water out of the Han, to supplement its Wei River and the 13 cities along it that have serious water shortages. Officials are considering another proposal to bring water from the Three Gorges Reservoir, on the Yangtze River, to the Danjiangkou Reservoir. The Yangtze already has 353 dams, making it the world’s second-most engineered water basin, according to data from International Rivers. There are already 14 dams on the Han River, and another 18 on a main tributary, according to the group.

Officials say they can resolve any unforeseen environmental impacts after the system begins operating, in much the same way that problems caused by the Three Gorges Dam project are being addressed now. That’s not very comforting, given that the Three Gorges project has caused, in the words of China’s State Council, “urgent problems” including thousands of earthquakes and landslides, and tens of thousands of extra people needing relocation. Earlier this month, China’s anti-graft body accused officials who helped run the dam project of corruption, including taking bribes and influencing the bidding process for projects.

Dong Wenhu, former head of the water-resource department in Taizhou in Jiangsu province, near the beginning of the eastern route, tells Quartz, “Yes there are risks. But no, I’m not worried. Why? Because we can just build more.”

Ships sail on the Yangtze River near Badong, 100 kilometers (62 miles) from the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province. (Carlos Barria/Reuters)

For all the social and environmental costs, not even the project’s leaders pretend that it solves China’s water problem. “For now, the transfer project is just compensating an amount. It can’t completely fix the problem,” says Shen, the head engineer of the project. There is dissent even among officials. In February, China’s vice minister of housing and urban rural development, Qiu Baoxing, in a rare public criticism, called the project “difficult to sustain” and unnecessary if cities would only conserve more.

The central route will supply 1.24 billion cubic meters of water a year to Beijing. That won’t cover the city’s annual shortfall of 1.5 billion cubic meters. As the city’s population expands, its water needs will also expand faster than the diversion project can keep up. Water demands in northern China overall—the river basins around the Hai, Yellow, and Huai rivers—will be beyond what the SNWDP can cover at full capacity. The Institute of Water and Hydroelectric Research estimates that total demand in northern China will reach 203 billion cubic meters by 2050, of which the SNWDP will only supply a little over a fourth.

This does bring an economic benefit. By alleviating water shortages, the SNWDP is supposed to add between 0.12 percent to 0.3 percent to annual GDP growth and create up to 600,000 jobs, according to government brochures and a state research center. “If you look at other countries in comparable stages of development and water scarcity, virtually all of them have employed some form or another of water transfer. At one level, I can’t blame China’s economic planners for thinking this is an essential thing to do,” says Scott Moore, a research fellow at the Harvard Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

Still, the SNWDP’s project’s costs are rising quickly. Construction material, labor, and added expenses like installing dozens of wastewater-treatment plants are pushing the total bill past the previously earmarked amount of 500 billion yuan (about $60 billion, according to exchange rates in 2002 when construction began).

That figure, for all three routes, was already almost twice as expensive as the Three Gorges Dam. And, Shen tells Quartz, “that number is meaningless now.… In the future, it will be far more than 500 billion.” Costs for the now-completed first phase have almost doubled to 300 billion yuan from the earlier budget of 124 billion yuan, according to Zhang Jiyao, in an interview with Southern Weekend in October.

These spiraling costs mean there’s a risk that the SNWDP could turn into China’s largest white elephant—an unused network of canals and structures across the country. Beijing residents currently pay 4 yuan ($0.66) per cubic meter of water. The diverted water could cost around 10 yuan a cubic meter for residents in Beijing, according to estimates. So far, water from the eastern route costs up to 2.24 yuan per cubic meter for cities, but the final price that residents pay will be higher, government academics say. Residents, factories, and some cities may be unwilling to pay this price, says Jia Shaofeng, a government researcher in water-resource management at the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS).

If the SNWDP doesn’t pay back its own costs, that could be a catastrophe for government finances. About 45 percent of the project is financed by loans from banks. “There could be a great default,” says James Nickum, vice president of the International Water Resources Association, who visited areas slated to be the grounds for the eastern and central route in the 1980s, when officials were still debating the project. “I’m not convinced the project is a good deal economically.”

A canal along the central route of the SNWDP in Henan province. (Lily Kuo/Quartz)

So why do it? The SNWDP seems to be another example of China’s penchant for massive projects that show off the power of the party. Large water projects are an especial favorite of China’s engineer-dominated leadership. (Eight of the nine members of the previous Politburo’s standing committee were engineers, including former President, Hu Jintao, who was a water engineer.) “It’s an approach that comes from both a Maoist impulse to subjugate nature in the pursuit of economic development, as well as what you’d expect from a government made up of engineers,” says Peter Martin, an analyst of Chinese politics at APCO Worldwide.

But this massive display of power—some might say hubris—is also a sign of weakness. One reason why China’s water crisis is so dire is that the central government hasn’t been able to coordinate national efforts to conserve water. Local environmental bureaus are often weak. Companies fined for breaking pollution rules often ignore the fines or renegotiate them with local officials. Local officials have been loath to raise water prices, despite Beijing’s requests, because of the backlash they might face from residents, or their relationships with local businesses. “Beijing can only get localities to do a certain number of things,” says Kenneth Pomeranz, an environmental historian at the University of Chicago. Water conservation hasn’t traditionally been one of them. “It shows both the strength of the center and its limitations.”

So, while China is pushing other forms of water conservation, from new provincial water usage quotas to initiatives to raise water prices as well as recycle rainwater, the SNWDP is China’s most ambitious effort perhaps because it is the most feasible. Formalized and promoted as a national initiative, the project requires officials to fall in line, at least to some extent. “We had other choices, but construction is easier. You pay. Companies build it,” says Jia, the researcher from CAS. By contrast, when it comes to things like conservation, “The upper leaders have their policy and the local officials have their countermeasures.”

You can see some of those countermeasures on display in Jining, a city in the coastal province of Shandong, where the eastern diversion route passes through. Pharmaceutical company Cathay Biotech is one of dozens of polluting factories that officials promised to move out of the city to clean up a local lake through which the diverted water will flow. A People’s Daily article on the factory in April said that it had closed and moved to a nearby development area in Jin Xiang.

Quartz visited Cathay’s original location in Jining in late August. The complex of buildings was along a row of car manufacturers and other factories. Plumes were wafting upwards from a smokestack. In a half-full parking lot, workers were unloading a truck and one of the workers said the factory was still operating. (The company declined to respond to emailed questions.)

Meanwhile, in Jin Xiang, the plot of land belonging to Cathay Biotech’s new factory was little more than a mound of dirt. Nearby plots of land were similarly empty. Near Cathay’s Jining factory is a small village where the residents say local industry has long polluted their water supply. They don’t expect the SNWDP to change that. One man says, “You can build, but it won’t solve the core problem.”

Additional reporting by Ning Hui. Graphics by David Yanofsky. This project was funded through a fellowship with the International Center for Journalists.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/china-has-launched-the-largest-water-pipeline-project-in-history/284300/

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Kejriwal: India's biggest foreign-funded scam -- RSN Singh

March 11, 2014, 5:05 pm

≫ Next: Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others; Truth behind ’2nd Independence Movement’.

≪ Previous: China's water grid: 4500 kms.links, borrowing water from south. India should implement a Water Grid.

Kejriwal: India’s biggest scam

on MARCH 11, 2014 · in POLITICS

BY RSN SINGH

This article is going to be based on facts and facts alone. It purports to clearly decipher the process of subversion and use of Kejriwal and his associates by powers and countries inimical to India. Sadly, as invariably the case, there are vested interests at the highest political levels in India, who are part of the design.

The flowchart below gives out the link of foreign funding and subversion of Kejriwal and associates. Each of the links given in the flowchart are backed by documents.

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 1

LINK-1, 2 & 3: CIA, Rockfeller Foundation and Ford Foundation, Magsaysay Award

A US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secret document (declassified) given below, duly signed by the then Director Allen W. Dulles clearly shows the link between CIA and Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation and Magsaysay Award. It may be mentioned that Dulles was the longest serving Director of CIA from 1953 to 1961. Even in the citation of Kejriwal for Magsaysay Award, the first reference was made to CIA.

Link-1: CIA and Ford Foundation

The link between CIA and Ford Foundation and Magsaysay Award is yet again reinforced by a secret (declassified) document. The document clearly shows that how so called intellectuals, professors and students of target countries are financially enticed by the Ford Foundation on behalf of CIA to avail education facilities in the US clearly with the purpose of subversion.

Link-5 : Ford Foundation and Kejriwal

The grants given by Ford Foundation in 2002 to various Indian entities are given below in the accessed document. Arvind Kejriwal’s NGO ‘Sampoorna Parivartan’ and CSDS (Center for the Study of Developing Societies) have been granted $80,000 and the $250,000 respectively. Key associates of Arvind Kejriwal like Yogendra Yadav have been functionaries of the CSDS. What makes this funding to Kejriwal a criminal activity is the fact that he in 2002 was still a government servant and therefore not entitled to receive it. Government servants are not permitted to float NGOs without due permission.

Kejriwal, while on study leave and availing full government salary started Parivartan along with Manish Sisodia in 2000-2001. On its website, Parivartan on 10-March-2009 declared that it is not an NGO or a registered organization, and for Income Tax purposes it was an Association of Persons. However, in 2002 the website declared the organization was registered under Societies Registration Act, 1860 and was exempt from Income Tax in Section 80G of 12A of IT Act. This is a clear fraud on India and Indians (Click here to see more).

Further, under the banner of Parivartan, Kejriwal received funds from World Bank for a Jan Sunvai campaign even as the organization was not registered. It is again a criminal act. This funding nearly coincides with the period of Kejriwal resigning from service (not accepted) in 2006, and Ford Foundation funding and grant of Magsaysay Award. In fact, Kejriwal got the Magsaysay Award shortly after he featured in the World Bank report of 2005 (page: 29-33).

Kejriwal branched off from Parivartan to establish yet another NGO, Kabir. As per the documents, Kabir was established on 15 August 2005. This was again illegal, as Kejriwal continued to be in government service. The subversive agenda of the Ford Foundation is quite clear in the contradictions in dates between financial documents declared by Kabir and Ford Foundation. While Kabir claims that the NGO began its operations on 15 August 2005 in which the contribution from Ford Foundation was Rs.43,48,036/-, whereas the annual report of Ford Foundation claims to have made a contribution to Kabir to the tune of $172,000 on 15 July 2005. It is not only intriguing that the Ford Foundation funding to Kabir began from the very first year of its operation, but the money was given one month before its birth. The fraud is evident from the two sets of documents of Kabir and Ford Foundation, given below.

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 5

Link-1: Ford Foundation funding to Kabir and Fraud. Source: Ford Foundation Annual report of 2005 (http://www.fordfoundation.org/pdfs/library/ar2005.pdf)

As per Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) submission made by the Kabir in its annual return indicates that between 2005 and 2011, only Rs.75,54,006 were received from Ford Foundation in two tranches; i.e. 2005-06: Rs. 43,48,036 on 15-July-2005, 2006-07: Rs. 32,05,970 on 12-Dec-2006. It also shows a sum of $1,97,000 was not accepted as Kabir had become a political movement by then. It may be reminded that it was at this time that lot of questions were being raised about illegal foreign funding to Kejriwal’s political activities. Kabir tried to mislead by removing or omitting all details from website regarding its funding from Ford Foundation in the year 2007-2008, 2009-2010.

However, the fraud can be nailed by visiting the Ford Foundation website http://www.fordfoundation.org/grants/grantdetails?grantid=107117(again suppressed), which clearly indicates that in the year 2007-2008, Kabir received $1,97,000 and the very next year Rs.60,75,149 (Kabir website, details suppressed again).

The hide and seek being played on the net by Kabir and Ford Foundation is testimony to the fraud. In fact, Parivartan and Kabir, suddenly shutdown their websites after coming under scrutiny in 2012.

Kejriwal and dubious American funding

Kejriwal received the Ashoka fellowship in 2004. He conveyed an impression that the outreach to him was by an Indian organization. In reality Ashoka is an US registered organization, whose strategic partners include McKinsey & Company, Corporate Executive Board and Latham and Watkins (Ref: https://www.ashoka.org/sites/ashoka/files/form990-2004.pdf). Since the Cold War, this organization has been engaged in creating human assets for expanding American influence.

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 6

It emerges that after liberal funding from various Western sources, Kejriwal decided to send his resignation from government service in 2006. This story began in 2002, when his ‘Sampooran Parivartan’ was given $80,000 (Ref: http://www.fordfoundation.org/pdfs/library/ar2002.pdf, Page: 104)

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 7

$80,000 in 2002 was equivalent to Kejriwal’s 15 years’ salary. Moreover, the biggest fraud is that the donors, i.e. organizations that funded Kejriwal’s so-called NGOs were the decision makers in the award of his Magsaysay Award. This includes the CIA. Further, the representative of Ford Foundation on India Steven Solnick admitted on 31st August 2012 that the Magsaysay Award for Kejriwal was funded by them.

Subsequently, foreign money began to flow into Kejriwal’s NGO. As per the response to an RTI filed by a website Beyond Headlines, the other foreign contributors to Kejriwal’s NGO ‘Kabir’ were Ford Foundation (Rs 86,61,742), PRIA (Rs 2,37,035), Manjunath Shanmugam Trust (Rs 3,70,000), Dutch Embassy (Rs 19,61,968), Association for India’s Development (Rs 15,00,000), India’s Friends Association (Rs 7,86,500), United Nations Development Programme (Rs12,52,742) while Rs 11,35,857 were collected from individual donations between 2007 to 2010.

The link 6 in the Chart at the start indicates recipients of the funds by the Dutch entity Humanistic Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries (HIVOS). It provided € 1.3 million between 2008 and 2012. Of these more than half, i.e. DISHA, GKVP, SAFAR, MAHITI, SWATI, and UTHAN are active in Gujarat. The others like CJP run by Teesta Setalvad and ANHAD run by Shabnam Hashmi are known for their virulent anti-Modi campaign.

HIVOS in turn is the highest recipient of funds from Ford Foundation. It has an office in India receiving $1.2 million (Ref.:http://www.fordfoundation.org/Grants/Search?searchphrase=kabeer). HIVOS also funded Kejriwal’s Parivartan (http://www.hivos.nl/eng/content/view/full/96/(sector)/10000025/(country)/10000011).

There are various other organizations funded by the Dutch government i.e. PSO Association and PRIA. These organizations ostensibly are engaged in ‘development and social work’, however their main purpose is to promote American agenda. The US adopts the Dutch route in various target countries so that suspicions are not aroused. HIVOS receives €27 million from the Dutch government and funds the PRIA, which is also a Ford Foundation partner. Another PSO partner Soliaridad also funds PRIA. PRIA funded Kejriwal as well. Many countries have compelled the PSO to windup its activities as they have been found to be intrusive.

Another Dutch funded organization is PANOS, which has seven offices in South Asia. This too is recipient of funds from Ford Foundation and its main purpose is to manipulate the media ‘in South Asia’. So is it surprising that a segment of Indian electronic media has gone to vulgar extent in amplifying Kejriwal? The funding of the Dutch entities as mentioned by the Ford Foundation is evidenced by the document placed below:

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 8

Collusion between CIA and Kejriwal

All the documents above suggest the alleged systematic subversion and creation of Kejriwal by the CIA through the Ford Foundation and the Dutch entities. A CIA document clearly establishes as to how CIA loans officers to Ford Foundation.

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 9

It has also been established that CIA operatives operate through the academic route. One such academic researcher Ms Shimrit Lee was associated with Kejriwal’s Kabir NGO in the garb of doing research on ‘Public Power: India and Other Democracies’. Ms Lee specializes in Tahrir Square type demonstrations that we are now witnessing in Ukraine. She has been active in Cairo, Haifa, Chad and Israel, India and US. It is she who introduced the ideas of Mohalla Committees and brought the Arab Spring technology to India to launch Kejriwal. Ms Lee’s photograph is given below:

Kejriwal - India's biggest Scam Images - 10

That the US has been using the Dutch for pushing its agenda in India, which includes destabilization of India’s Northeast is known. It is evident by the bonhomie between Netherlands and various Naga outfits, particularly the NSCN (IM). It was the NSCN (IM) which took umbrage when on 17-July-2002 in a written reply to a question in parliament, the late Digvijay Singh then Minister of External Affairs said that Netherlands was one of the countries where terrorists have safe heavens besides Pakistan. It may also be reiterated that the NSCN (IM) always insists on holding talks with the Indian government in Amsterdam. It is also well known as to how the CIA and the Dutch Intelligence Agency (BVD – Binenlandise Veiligheidsdienst) connived in allowing AQ Khan to steal nuclear secrets from URENCO, site at Almeto in Netherlands, only with the purpose of balancing Pakistan with India in nuclear capability during the Cold War. It is through this kind of geopolitical balancing in various regions that the US maintains its lead role.

Just as in the case of lead role by geopolitical balancing the Western countries maintain their supremacy in global economy through the ‘offshore financial centers’. These centers thrive on black money of the developing world. Was it for this reason that Kejriwal was created to kill Ramdev’s movement for recovery of black money stashed abroad? During the entire Anna agitation, not even once, the issue of black money in foreign soil was raised.

In pursuit of the CIA agenda there are Indians who have been partnering Kejriwal. Is it a coincidence that a former Admiral also a recipient of Magsaysay Award accompanied Kejriwal when he filed his nomination from New Delhi constituency? This Admiral, whose daughter married to a Pakistani, has been in the forefront against India’s ‘nuclear development’. Is it a mere coincidence that the closest aides of Kejriwal are recipients of funding from Ford Foundation. Is it also a mere coincidence that Kejriwal never served out of Delhi during his government service, and helping him in this bid was none other than Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, who wrote a letter to ensure the same? Is it also a mere coincidence that Arvind Kejriwal is a protégé of Aruna Roy, another recipient of Magsaysay Award, and a member of Sonia’s National Advisory Council?

Arvind Kejriwal is therefore not a political threat but a security threat to this country, his main objective being to destabilize India to perpetuate US agenda.

Arvind Kejriwal is India’s biggest scam.

(RSN Singh is a former military intelligence officer who later served in the Research & Analysis Wing. The author of two books: Asian Strategic and Military Perspective and Military Factor in Pakistan, he is also a Guest Blogger with Canary Trap. The opinions expressed by the author and those providing comments are theirs alone, and do not reflect the opinions of Canary Trap or any employee thereof)
http://www.canarytrap.in/2014/03/11/kejriwal-indias-biggest-scam/

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Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others; Truth behind ’2nd Independence Movement’.

March 11, 2014, 5:32 pm

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Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others (Shocking Revelations)

Posted on March 11, 2014by rajuparulekar

14 Votes

Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others
(Shocking revelations of Truth
behind
’2nd Independence Movement’)

Strenuously researched and written by Birbal ; my colleague and friend…..

Hi Friends,

The story mentioned below depicts almost complete picture of anti-national Gang Kejriwal’s conspiracy, their sympathisers, media partners, crony capitalists and aides.

We don’t want to reveal his identity at this point because he (Birbal) and many others are involved in another mission of this kind.

I will come back to you with more very soon.

Adieu.

Raju Parulekarraju.parulekar@gmail.com(M) 9820124419

** Related Links & Evidences are given below this article.
Please click the links accordingly for details.**

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others
(Shocking revelations of truth behind ’2nd Independence Movement’)

Strenuously researched and written by Birbal ; my colleague and friend…..

The case of False Affidavit:

Why is the Government of India trying to protect the NGO Kabir and its media initiative enabled through foreign funding?

On Wednesday, January 16, 2013 the Government of India misled its own judiciary. In an attempt to dupe its own institution, the centre had conceded before the Delhi High Court that it found nothing to warrant a criminal investigation in its inquiry into utilization of foreign funds by a few NGOs affiliated to anti-graft activist Anna Hazare’s civil society organization.’ (Network, 2013) This case was subsequently quashed by the high court believing the centre’s testimony. But the documents which are in possession of this reporter will show how justice was manipulated and then internalized by country’s own government.

In the matter of Advocate Manohar Lal Sharma versus the Union Of India, Central Bureau Of Investigation, Ford Foundation and Kisan Baburao Hazare, the counsels of GOI wrongly informed the court that the Ministry of Home Affairs has given a clean chit to NGO KABIR for its involvement in any political activity. The actual report ‘Inspection of Foreign Contribution Records pertaining to an NGO KABIR (2005-06 to 2011-2012)’by the Controller of Accounts, MHA, New Delhi mentions in bold that “Involvement in Political Activities: As per the minutes of the meeting dated 24 Nov. 2006 of the association, KABIR has played an active role in the Jantar Mantar agitation held under the leadership of Mr.Anna Hazare in the year 2006.” (pls. see point no. 25,page 10 of the report attached with this post) This is in violation to the constitution of India which does not allow any foreign sponsored agitation for any kind of object. It is an amount of wage war only which is liable to be further investigated for further prosecution in accordance of law.

KABIR or ‘Karmyogi Association for Bringing Indian Regeneration’ is an NGO run by Arvind Kejriwal and managed by his key aide Manish Sisodia. According to the president of this organization, this NGO has both national as well as international members. It was registered in the year 1999 under the ‘SOCIETIES REGISTRATION ACT, 1860’ with the registrar of societies Govt. of N.C.T of Delhi. Less is known about its operations untill 15th August 2005 when it officially started furthering the cause of Right to Information Act of India, 2005. In an answer to a RTI petition filed by the website Beyond Headlines in 2009 , KABIR revealed that they had received funds from the Ford Foundation (Rs 86,61,742), PRIA (Rs 2,37,035), Manjunath Shanmugam Trust (Rs 3,70,000), Dutch Embassy (Rs 19,61,968), Association for India’s Development (Rs 15,00,000), India’s Friends Association (Rs 7,86,500), United Nationals Development Programme (Rs12,52,742) while Rs 11,35,857 were collected from individual donations between 2007 to 2010.

Among the many allegations made on KABIR is the funding made by Ford Foundation to the organization in the year 2011 when the Janlokpal movement started. According to various news paper reports and KABIR’s own testimony, it participated actively in the Janlokpal movement. The Foreign Control Regulation Act of India, 2010 prohibits any foreign funding to Indian political organization or the organizations with political nature. The law states that the following persons are prohibited from accepting any kind of foreign contribution:

(a) Candidate for election;

(b) Correspondent, columnist, cartoonist, editor, owner, printer or publisher of a registered newspaper;

(d) Member of any Legislature;

(e) Political party or its office bearers;

(f) Organisations of a political nature as may be specified;

(g) Associations or company engaged in the production or broadcast of audio news or audiovisual news or current affairs programmes through any electronic mode or form or any other mode of mass communication;

(h) Correspondent or columnist, cartoonist, editor, owner of the association or company referred to in (g) above.

When Kavitha N Ramdas, the present Indian representative of Ford Foundation was reached for an official comment she replied, “In 2010, the foundation reviewed a new grant proposal from KABIR for similar activities. We approved this second grant in February, 2011. However, KABIR notified the foundation in September 2011 that it was not capable of carrying out the planned activities due to an emerging campaign to mobilize the public around anti-corruption efforts. Based on this information from KABIR and the foundation’s own fiscal year schedule, the foundation amicably rescinded its second grant in February 2012, against which no funds had ever been distributed. The rescinded and unpaid grant was then removed from our web site.” She also thanked the writer for bringing this correction to foundation’s notice. When a more detailed answer was sought, the director of Communications, Ford Foundation, Newyork, took on the matter further. He is yet to reply with the details.

On foundation’s association with KABIR, she said, “The foundation’s first grant to KABIR was made in 2007 and was for $197,000 over three years. The grant supported the organization’s efforts to produce training materials on India’s Right-to-Information law, to disseminate information about the effective use of the law, and to help promote transparent and accountable governance. These efforts were carried out satisfactorily and the grant was closed on schedule.”

In her reply Mrs. Ramdas forgot to add the grant made to KABIR in the year 2005, for enabling a ‘media initiative’ to popularize the right to information act, 2005.

But it is very well documented in the foundation’s annual report of the year 2005-06attached with this post. The president of KABIR has candidly or rather unknowingly confirmed the use of this grant in tying up with various media houses of the country. It is very surprising to see that the Home Ministry provided this NGO with a FCRA license even when the foreign funding to the Indian media is strictly banned under FCRA, 2010.

KABIR’s Annual Report of 2006-07 reveals that it started two media campaigns called Drive against Bribe (Ghoons ko Ghoonsa) and ‘Save the RTI campaign’ from the money given to it by the Ford Foundation:

The Drive Against Bribe Campaign (1st July to 15th July 2006)

Kabir in partnership with one of the highest TRP rated news channels NDTV, newspapers like Hindustan Times, Hindustan (Hindi) and The Hindu started planning for a campaign to promote the use of the RTI Act, 2005 amongst the masses. At the same time the print media at the regional level also joined the campaign. Consequently, 8 media houses publicized right to information in their news dailies and news channels. They are The Successes received from the use of Right to Information were being telecast in the form of advertisements and news stories on various news channels from the first week of June itself. Kabir not only collected such success stories but also coordinated their reporting on various print and electronic media. (From Kabir’s Annual Report 2006-07)

Save the RTI campaign

“The Drive Against Bribe Campaign was still in its follow up stage and the success stories were still being recorded when the Cabinet gave a green signal to the amendments in the RTI Act, 2005. Kabir and Parivartan sensitized and mobilized both the conventional and the unconventional media across the country and called for a press conference in which Annaji announced that many more protest meetings and briefings will be organized on the issue. In the

mean time protest demonstrations against the amendments began at Jantar Matar in Delhi. Kabir actively participated in the protest activities along with organizations like NCPRI, Parivartan and MKSS. (political agitation mentioned in the Home Ministry Report) Kabir zealously collected successful examples of RTI Act implementations and disseminated them to the masses through various media to explain that such achievements would not be possible if these amendments were implemented.” (from Kabir’s Annual Report 2006-07)

The nature of these media partnerships remains unclear because Kabir has lost its cashbook for the same period 2006-08. The MHA has reported in its investigation reports that ‘Cash Books w.e.f 2006-08 is not available with the association. As per statement of Mr. Manish Sisodia, the cashbook has been lost somewhere due to shifting of office. It is again questionable that vital documents like the cashbook have been lost. From the perusal of details in the years when the cashbook was maintained i.e 2008-09 to till date, it has been observed that most of the expenditure has been incurred in cash. In the absence of cashbook, the genuineness of the expenditure can’t be ascertained.’ (Home Ministry report, point no. 11, page 8 of 14) When some of the associated media organizations were reached for a comment, they chose not to respond.

RTI and ‘The Foreign Hand’ (From The Right to Information Act in India: The Turbid World of Transparency Reforms, A thesis submitted to the Department of International Development of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, by Prashant Sharma)

“An issue that arose consistently in the critiques of the mainstream narrative of the RTI movement is the resources needed to finance such campaigns. The Ministry of Home Affairs also constituted an Inter-Ministerial Task Force to develop a draft bill on the right to information, which was also tasked inter alia to conduct a survey of the ‘foreign experience’. “It was a Joint Secretary level committee, only officials and non political figures. That committee went to a few countries and thereafter it gave its report in two volumes. Somehow that report came into my hands, one volume only, and I requested the Home Ministry to give me the other volume, and give me the files on which this committee was constituted, the recommendations they made, and what was the decision of the Home Ministry on those recommendations. They said they have no papers on the subject. I didn’t get anything except one volume, in which they only had copies of the legislations which they had collected from other countries.” Whether the ‘disappearance’ of the second volume was by design or simply a result of poor record management, the familiar trope of the political executive being stymied by the bureaucracy reappears here. “In conversations many years later, V.P.Singh revealed that though he had tried to get a suitable act drafted and introduced in Parliament, the bureaucracy had frustrated him at every step”. Eventually, V.P. Singh’s abilities to outmaneuver the bureaucracy on this issue remained untested, as his government did not last long enough.”

“In sum, the existing explanatory narrative around the RTI Act in India proposes that the Indian experience is particularly noteworthy as not only can its roots be traced to the dusty weather-beaten paths of rural India, but also because the process was divorced from any perceptible international influences or trends. It is this defining characteristic of the Indian ‘struggle’ for an RTI Act that accords it an almost mythical status within FoI-related advocacy, academic and activist spheres. Top-down, elite-led, externally influenced democratic ‘deepening’ after all, presents a far less attractive image compared to a bottom-up local struggle that succeeds in wresting power from above.”

This particular version of the ‘truth’ calls out for deeper examination, not least because of the timing of the enactment of the RTI Act in India. In 1990, only fourteen countries had some sort of a law that provided citizens with a formal and legal procedure to access government information. In 2010, this number stood at eighty four.441 In addition, another fifty countries seem to be on their way to enacting such legislation.442 Some international organisations, including the World Bank, have of late begun to draft disclosure policies somewhat on thelines of national FoI laws. Clearly, there seems to be a well-established global trend of adopting national (and international) FoI legislation and policies across the world, particularly over the last two decades.

An early clue in this direction can be discerned in the enactment of state level FoI laws in India that preceded the national FoI Act of 2002 and the RTI Act of 2005. The specific case relates to the southern state of Karnataka. “[The CHRI] had a major role to play in Karnataka, where there was no people’s movement for RTI, but ADB [Asian Development Bank] was giving a loan, and they said, ‘conditionality’ – have an RTI law. So B.K. Chandrashekhar who was the Information Minister, he knew CHRI was working [on this issue], and he called [them] over, and they sat and drafted the law, not a terribly good law, but definitely not as bad as the Tamil Nadu one.” As a result, the Karnataka Right to Information Act was enacted in 2000. Soon after, in 2001, the President of the Asian Development Bank recommended the grant of a loan of USD 200 million for “infrastructure projects in specified infrastructure sectors in four selected Indian states: Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, and Madhya Pradesh”

A similar logic also played out at the national level, albeit in less obvious ways. An important element that informs the allocation of World Bank funds (lent at preferential rates for low- income countries) under its International Development Association (IDA) programme is based on its Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) framework. The CPIA rating for India in 2003 included a section on “Transparency, Accountability and Corruption in the Public Sector” where it stated that “Corruption remains a significant problem. India ranked 71 out of 102 in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions index… With the passage of the Freedom of Information legislation in March 2003 [sic], the GoI has followed in the path of some leading states and taken a significant step forward in improving the legal framework for transparency and this increase in rating reflects that… The effective implementation of this act will remain a major challenge in the next several years…”501 With rewards such as ‘increased ratings’ in the CPIA framework on offer, it comes as no surprise that the Ministry of Finance sent several missives to the DoPT seeking its input on the status of the implementation of the FoI Act to be able to respond to the assessment exercise of the World Bank.

“I think perhaps around 30%-40% of the contribution for bringing the Act was the World Bank and the international community’s pressure on the government, which most of us normally don’t like to acknowledge. My own perception is that the Prime Minister of India unfortunately is fairly influenced by these factors. The World Bank and various international organisations were pressing to get in more transparency, less corruption. This is part of a worldwide agenda they have – they want to do business, they want these as essentials.” (for more read the thesis attached with this post)

In such a scenario Kabir’s activities related to the right to information act of India is heavily objectionable. Its Save the RTI campaign challenged the advice of the then president Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Incidentally, while giving his approval to the RTI Act in June 2005, President APJ Abdul Kalam, had emphasised that notings by bureaucrats on files should be privileged, otherwise it could affect the decision-making process. The logic being that the senior bureaucrats would be more interested in covering their backs rather than being forthright. In a communication to the Prime Minister, he had also suggested that the Act should not have a purview over communications between the Head of State and the Head of Government and that the documents emanating from the President’s secretariat were not not brought within the ambit of the Act. Accordingly, in December 2005 (only a month after the RTI Act came into force), Prime Minister Manmohan Singh instructed the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT) that ‘file notings’ relating to identifiable individuals, group of individuals, organizations, appointments, matters relating to inquiries and departmental proceedings, should not be disclosed.

Similar objection were raised by the then Parliamentary Affairs Minister Priyaranjan Dasmunsi , “The Union Cabinet has decided to amend the RTI Act to correct “certain ambiguities” and it is based of the objections raised by some government organisations such as UPSC who had objected that while decisions taken could be conveyed, the details and the process as to how the decisions were arrived at could not be: “Decisions can be conveyed, not in terms of details about what the Under Secretary or Joint Secretary wrote or what the Secretary disapproved.” The minister had also claimed that such exemptions also exist in the systems followed by the US, UK and Australia as well.”

Effectively, KABIR’s campaign voiced against the proposed amendments in the RTI campaign which is a democratic right in this country. But it also enabled a media campaign in the country where it severely criticized its own government and democratic institutions using the foreign funding from an organization who is suspected to have links with the CIA. (Please refer to The Ford Foundation and the CIA: A documented case of philanthropic collaboration with the Secret Police by James Petras 15 December 2001) When this reporter sought a comment from the Ford Foundation for its suspected links with CIA, it’s Director of Communication, Newyork never responded back.

During the ‘Save the RTI’ media campaign a series of editorials were written across the newspapers in the country supporting Kabir’s stand on file notings in the RTI act. Kabir’s president says these editorials were written by its in house media team which was passed on the media houses. For a full list of editorials written on the RTI campaign please visit http://rti.aidindia.org/content/blogcategory/25/100/. While nothing can be proved in absence of cashbook for the same period, a detailed inquiry is a must sought to justify the intentions of these articles.

NDTV’s partnership with Kabir deserves a special mention. Starting with KABIR in 2006, they were involved in all its media campaigns. They also announced National RTI Awards in association with Public Cause Research Foundation (PCRF), an organization set up by Magsaysay awardee Arvind Kejriwal to acknowledge those who have displayed exemplary commitment to RTI Act. In 2011, NDTV went on to give Arvind Kejriwal and Anna Hazare the Indian of the year award.

Similarly a host of newspapers also borrowed news from Kabir, remembers an old time associate of Kejriwal. “He [Arvind Kejriwal] was directly involved with editors and proprietors of these newspapers. After the media campaign, members from Kabir became regular at newspaper offices. Specific RTI beats were created within newspapers which are now filing 30 RTI applications in a single day, less is known about the petitions which don’t make it to the newspapers.” This member was once part of Arvind Kejriwal’s movement Parivartan but he left the group in 2004 on the issue of foreign funding from the Ford Foundation. Parivartan then had a rule that no outside institutional funding will be accepted by the organization.

The Home Ministry report also notes that amount of Rs. 17,68,261/- has been paid to different RTI activists throughout the country between the years 2008 to 2011-12. However, no agreements between the individuals and association were made available to the inspection party. (Home Ministry Report, Point no. 8, page 8 of 14)

Less is known about centre’s motivation to rid KABIR of serious charges reported by the home ministry investigation. But the report itself falls short of mentioning anything about the organizations working during the Janlokpal movement, for which the inquiry was sought by the petitioner. There are also no references about Ford Foundation in the report. With just a month before the election, who is it that the Indian government trying to save?

What is it trying to save? – KABIR, Ford Foundation, its own media or the false sense of democracy in the country.

Please click the links mentioned below accordingly for details….

1 ) Inspection of Foreign Contribution Records pertaining to an NGO KABIR (2005-06 to 2011-2012)’
2) Kabir – Annual Report 2006-07
3) kabir – registration certificate
4) The Right to Information Act in India and The Turbid World of Transparency Reforms By Prashant Sharma

Thanx,

BIRBAL….

http://rajuparulekar.wordpress.com/2014/03/11/conspiracy-unfolds-kejriwal-others-shocking-revelations/

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End of Free and Fair elections

March 12, 2014, 1:42 am

≫ Next: Kabul Museum birch-bark manuscript epigraph segments read rebus as Meluhha hieroglyphs of Bronze Age

≪ Previous: Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others; Truth behind ’2nd Independence Movement’.

http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/canvassing-the-base-114030900556_1.html

Canvassing the base
Business Standard | New Delhi
March 9, 2014 Last Updated at 21:06 IST
Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and the Congress' candidate from the Bangalore South constituency, seems to be leveraging his expertise as head of the Unique Identification Authority of India or Aadhaar project to prepare for the next general elections. To this end, he has been sending out personalised letters to the heads of every household within the constituency. What is unusual is that the cover containing the letter looks nearly the same as those that were used to send out the Aadhaar numbers and bears the name of the addressee and his/her father on it.

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Kabul Museum birch-bark manuscript epigraph segments read rebus as Meluhha hieroglyphs of Bronze Age

March 12, 2014, 2:44 am

≫ Next: Kabul Meluhha hieroglyphs; segments read rebus as stone-ware, metalware consignments

≪ Previous: End of Free and Fair elections

Kabul Museum birch-bark manuscript epigraph segments read rebus as Meluhha hieroglyphs of Bronze Age

Gandhara was the link between the Silk Road, the Tin Road and Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization sites. Buddhism and trade networks had a symbiotic relationship.Buddhism provided support to the merchant networks and merchants supported Buddhism by donations.

Thus manuscripts in Kharoshti and Meluhha epigraphs are a means of spreading both Bauddham and trade. The possibility of continued use of Meluhha epigraphs -- together with kharoṣṭī manuscripts -- during the spread of Buddhism from 1st century BCE cannot be ruled out.

"The Early Buddhist Manuscripts Project was founded at the University of Washington in September 1996 to promote the study, edition and publication of twenty‐seven birch‐bark scrolls, written in the Kharoṣṭhī script and the Gāndhārī language, that had been acquired by the British Library in 1994." If these birch-bark scrolls are not forgery, why should this Kabul Museum mss. be presumed to be a forgery -- merely because there is no consensus, yet, on the cipher used for Meluhha hieroglyphs?

One instance is the Kabul Museum birch-bark manuscript which has to be authenticated and dated.

Artifact with wooden box and label. ID 1000, 7085 in: Western Himalaya Archive Vienna 2009.

ID: SN05 1000, 7086

Photo focused on the lower portion of the artifact.

Partial enlargement of the bottom left-hand corner of the artifact.

Two views of the Kabul Museum manuscript with Meluhha hieroglyphs. Closeup photo of the artifact. Media identity number SN05 1000:7087 in Western Himalaya Archive Vienna 2009.

See: http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2011/11/indus-signs-on-birch-bark-folio-in.html

Segmentation of texts After Fig. 5 by Lucy Zuberbuehler (2009, A comparison of a manuscript with the Indus Script, Univ. of Bern, Fac. of Lettres, Bachelor thesis prepared under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Roland Bielmeier). http://www.docstoc.com/docs/103016650/A-comparison-of-a-manuscript-with-indus-script---Lucy-Zuber-Buehler-(2009) (Embedded)

Comparative charts presented by Lucy Zuberbuehler showing concordance of hieroglyphs between Kabul mss and Indus Script corpora:

After Fig. 8 Near identical graphemes in the Kabul manuscript and the Indus Script (Indu script hieroglyphs are based on Corpus compiled by Parpola, Asko, 2000, Deciphering the Indus Script, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 7-78)

Fig. 9 Near identical correspondenes in mirror image

Fig. 10 Strong resemblances with fewer strokes

Fig. 11 Uncertain resemblances due to obstructions

Fig. 12 Fair resemblances

Fig. 13 Modifications of other Kabul signs

Fig. 14 No obious resemblances

Fig. 15 Comparison of alternative segmentation

Fig. 16 Comparison of alternative allograph divisions

Notes:

The artifact is a rectangular birch-bark with seven lines of Meluhha hieroglyphs. It is kept in the Sultan Museum in Kabul, founded by Ahmad Shah Sultani, a trader.

No provenience information is available, though the artifact has been archived in Western Himalaya Archive, Vienna 2009.

The birch-bark mss is kept in a wooden box depicting a narrative of three riders on horseback, brandishing clubs.

Lucy's documentation is entirely based on three photographs kept in the West Himalaya Archive of Vienna.

Considering that the University of Washington Buddhist Manuscript project has been substantially based on such birch-bark and other manuscripts, this particular birch-bark mss. should be ab initio be accepted as authentic and further researches carried out on the message contents which are mostly an assemblage of Meluhha hieroglyphs commonly deployed on Indus Writing Corpora.

One notable feature of the hieroglyph assemblage is that the Kabul Museum mss. does not exhibit comparable pictorial motifs taken from Indus Writing Corpora.

One conjecture is that the birch-bark fragment may be a documented summary of consignments of stone- and metal-ware sent on caravans from Gandhara guarded by the horse-riders.

Another conjecture is that the scribe who prepared the birth-bark mss. demonstrates the continued use of Meluhha hieroglyphs, as evidenced by the Sohgaura copper plate with a line of Meluhha hieroglyphs followed by an inscription in Brahmi.

Given the symbiotic relationship between traders and Bauddham practitioners who also produced kharoṣṭī manuscripts of sacred texts of Bauddham, it is possible that the Kabul mss. with Meluhha hieroglyphs may also use some kharoṣṭī syllabic signs to denote the names of parties involved and other bill-of-lading information of the trade transaction/consignments of the trade network.

See:

http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2012/10/a-comparison-of-manuscript-with-indus.html

http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2011/11/indus-signs-on-birch-bark-folio-in.html

http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2011/11/manuscript-has-been-discovered-with.html

Comment by Wim Borsboom (Nov. 19, 20, 2011):

If the birch bark IVC 'Kabul Manuscript' and the 5th century Buddhist Gandharan 'Los Angeles Manuscript' are comparable, and if we can go by the average length of the typical birch tree stripes (lenticels) then the dimension of one 'IVC Kabul Manuscript' folio is only approximately 2 by 3.6 inches or about the size of a business card.

If the small dimensions of the "Kabul IVC Manuscript", as I am suggesting, are correct, then it is surprising that Lucy Zuberbühler who wrote her "undergraduate thesis (!)" (Farmer*) on the Kabul IVC Manuscript, did not catch the following (OR WAS NOT questioned on her assumption of the dimensions.):
L. Z.'s bells should have been ringing, when she read in the 2001 birch-bark conservation report by S. Sayre Batton "...When Buddhist sutras are found *inside* sculptures..." In 'ancient birch-bark manuscript conservation' circles, it is known that certain MSS are often kept inside statues, sometimes even small ones.

Birch-bark mss. Separation Anxiety: The Conservation of a 5th century Buddhist Gandharan Manuscript - Susan Sayre Batton

Daniel Salas has noted a remarkable occurrence of Indus glyphics sequence on the Kabul mss. and compares with an almost identical sequence of glyphics appearing on a Zebu seal with Indus script inscription:

One segment of the Kabul museum birch-bark manuscript is deciphere as follows:

Hieoglyphs r. to l.: notch, spoke of wheel, liquid measure, dual seedling, wide-mouthed pot with infixed notch, structure (Building?)

Readings: खांडा [ khāṇḍā ] m A jag, notch Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’; eraka 'nave of wheel' Rebus: eraka 'copper molten cast'. arā 'Spokes (of wheel)' Rebus: āra 'brass'; ranku 'liquid measure' Rebus: ranku 'tin';. kolmo 'seedling' Rebus: kolimi 'smithy, forge' dula 'pair' Rebus: dul 'cast metal'; baṭi 'broad-mouthed, rimless metal vessel'; rebus: baṭi 'smelting furnace'; khāṇḍā Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’;sangaḍa’frame of a building’ Rebus: jangaḍ ‘entrustment articles'.

Sustantive message can thus be read as: (This is) a native metal consignment. Consignment is on entrustment basis. The bill-of-lading details are: moltencast copper, brass, tin (artifacts, cast metal) worked on smithy/forge; tools, pots and pans, metalware.

Hieroglyph: The zebul: adar ḍangra. Rebus:

aduru ḍhangar‘native metalsmith’. Rebus: aduru ‘native metal’ (Ka.) aduru = gan.iyinda tegadu karagade iruva aduru = ore taken from the mine and not subjected to melting in a furnace (Kannada) (Siddhānti Subrahmaṇya’ śāstri’s new interpretation of the Amarakośa, Bangalore, Vicaradarpana Press, 1872, p. 330) Alternative reading: khũṭ ‘zebu’. Rebus: khũṭ ‘guild, community’ (Semantic determinant of the ‘jointed animals’ glyphic composition). kūṭa joining, connexion, assembly, crowd, fellowship (DEDR 1882) Pa. gotta ‘clan’; Pk. gotta, gōya id. (CDIAL 4279)

khũṭ Brahmani bull (Kathiawar G.); khũṭro entire bull used for agriculture, not for breeding (G.)(CDIAL 3899). khũṭro = entire bull; khũṭ = brāhmaṇi bull (G.) khuṇṭiyo = an uncastrated bull (Kathiawad. Gujarat) khū̃ṭaḍum a bullock (used in Jhālwāḍ)(G.) kuṇṭai = bull (Tamil) cf. khū̃dhi hump on the back; khuī˜dhũ hump-backed (G.)(CDIAL 3902). Rebus: kūṭa a house, dwelling (Sanskrit) khũṭ = a community, sect, society, division, clique, schism, stock; khũṭren peṛa kanako = they belong to the same stock (Santali) khūṭ Nag. khũṭ, kūṭ Has. (Or. khūṭ) either of the two branches of the village family. Rebus: kuṭi, ‘smelting furnace’ (Mundari).kuṭhi, kuṭi (Or.; Sad. koṭhi) (1) the smelting furnace of the blacksmith; kuṭire bica duljaḍko talkena, they were feeding the furnace with ore; (2) the name of ēkuṭi has been given to the fire which, in lac factories, warms the water bath for softening the lac so that it can be spread into sheets; to make a smelting furnace; kut.hi-o of a smelting furnace, to be made; the smelting furnace of the blacksmith is made of mud, cone-shaped, 2’ 6” dia. At the base and 1’ 6” at the top. The hole in the center, into which the mixture of charcoal and iron ore is poured, is about 6” to 7” in dia. At the base it has two holes, a smaller one into which the nozzle of the bellow is inserted, as seen in fig. 1, and a larger one on the opposite side through which the molten iron flows out into a cavity (Mundari)

Parpola had noted an occurrence of similar sequencing of Indus glyphics on inscribed metallic tools/weapons.

Indus script inscriptions on some metal tools/weapons.

Some glyphics on Dholavira signboard are also comparable to sequence in the Kabul mss.

Dholavira signboard glyphic sequence.

Kabul mss with the hieroglyph sequence is read rebus as follows:

खांडा [ khāṇḍā ] m A jag, notch Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’;

Kōḍi corner; kōṇṭu angle, corner, crook. Nk. kōnṭa corner Rebus: kõdā ‘to turn in a lathe’ (Bengali)

aḍaren, ḍaren lid, cover (Santali) Rebus: aduru ‘native metal’ (Kannada) (Note: native metal denotes unsmelted metal, such as meteoric iron).

This is the middle segment of Dholavira signboard which has 3 segment messaging. This sequence of hieroglyphs has been read rebus. The cipher text and plain text are reproduced below.

Four hieroglyphs in sequence (from r. to l.): Native metal tools, pots and pans, metalware, engraving (molten cast copper)

खांडा [ khāṇḍā ] m A jag, notch, or indentation (as upon the edge of a tool or weapon). (Marathi) Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’.

aḍaren, ḍaren lid, cover (Santali) Rebus: aduru ‘native metal’ (Ka.) aduru = gan.iyinda tegadu karagade iruva aduru = ore taken from the mine and not subjected to melting in a furnace (Kannada) (Siddhānti Subrahmaṇya’ śāstri’s new interpretation of the Amarakośa, Bangalore, Vicaradarpana Press, 1872, p. 330)

koṇḍa bend (Ko.); Tu. Kōḍi corner; kōṇṭu angle, corner, crook. Nk. kōnṭa corner (DEDR 2054b) G. khū̃ṭṛī f. ʻangleʼ Rebus: kõdā‘to turn in a lathe’(B.) कोंद kōnda ‘engraver, lapidary setting or infixing gems’ (Marathi) koḍ ‘artisan’s workshop’ (Kuwi) koḍ = place where artisans work (G.) ācāri koṭṭya ‘smithy’ (Tu.) कोंडण [kōṇḍaṇa] f A fold or pen. (Marathi) B. kõdā ‘to turn in a lathe’; Or.kū̆nda ‘lathe’, kũdibā, kū̃d ‘to turn’ (→ Drav. Kur. Kū̃d ’ lathe’) (CDIAL 3295) A. kundār, B. kũdār, ri, Or.Kundāru; H. kũderā m. ‘one who works a lathe, one who scrapes’, rī f., kũdernā ‘to scrape, plane, round on a lathe’; kundakara—m. ‘turner’ (Skt.)(CDIAL 3297). कोंदण [ kōndaṇa ] n (कोंदणें) Setting or infixing of gems.(Marathi) খোদকার [ khōdakāra ] n an engraver; a carver. খোদকারি n. engraving; carving; interference in other’s work. খোদাই [ khōdāi ] n engraving; carving. খোদাই করা v. to engrave; to carve. খোদানো v. & n. en graving; carving. খোদিত [ khōdita ] a engraved. (Bengali) खोदकाम [ khōdakāma ] n Sculpture; carved work or work for the carver. खोदगिरी [ khōdagirī ] f Sculpture, carving, engraving: also sculptured or carved work. खोदणावळ [ khōdaṇāvaḷa ] f (खोदणें) The price or cost of sculpture or carving. खोदणी [ khōdaṇī ] f (Verbal of खोदणें) Digging, engraving &c. 2 fig. An exacting of money by importunity. V लाव, मांड. 3 An instrument to scoop out and cut flowers and figures from paper. 4 A goldsmith’s die. खोदणें [ khōdaṇēṃ ] v c & i ( H) To dig. 2 To engrave. खोद खोदून विचारणें or –पुसणें To question minutely and searchingly, to probe. खोदाई [ khōdāī ] f (H.) Price or cost of digging or of sculpture or carving. खोदींव [ khōdīṃva ] p of खोदणें Dug. 2 Engraved, carved, sculptured. (Marathi)

eraka ‘knave of wheel’ Rebus: eraka ‘copper’ (Kannada) eraka ‘molten cast (metal)(Tulu).

S. Kalyanaraman

March 12, 2014

Annex on bhaga 'divine' in bhagavato okkanti inscription on Bharhut pillar

BAGA, an Old Iranian term for “god,” sometimes designating a specific god.

i. General.

ii. In Old and Middle Iranian.

iii. The use of baga in names.

i. General

Baga- is attested in early and late Iranian with two meanings (1) agent noun “distributor,” glossed by Parsi Sanskrit vibhaktar- and (2) noun of action and result “portion.” Beside the noun, the verb bag- “give or receive portions” is in frequent use: bag-, present baj- and baxš-, participle baxta-, and nominal derivative bāga-. The cognate words are cited in full in Dictionary of Khotan Saka, p. 300: Avestanbaž-, baxta-, bāga-; Sogdian βaxš-, βxt-, βγn-; Zoroastrian Pahlavi baxš-, baxt; Khotan Saka būṣṣ-, būta-; Old Indian (Sanskrit) bhájatiṃbhaktá-, bhága-, bhāgá, traced in Indo-European in J. Pokorny, Indogermanisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bern and Munich, 1959, p. 107 s.v. bhag-.

The agent noun baga- “distributor” was adopted as a name for “god” and “gods.” In Old Persian baga- occurs beside maθišta bagānām “greatest of gods” for Ahuramazdā. It renders the Akkadian Semitic ilu “god.”

In the Avesta the word yazata- “worshipful” was preferred, the later Zor. Pahl. yazdand Ossetic izäd, in Greek script isdi- in the name Isdigerdēs, Yazdkirt, Armenian Yazkert. The other word of divinity, dai- “shine,” is retained once in the Avestan word dyaoš “from the sky” (genitive from dyau-) and in daiva- of the Avestan phrase daēvāiš-ca mašyāiš-ca “with gods and men.” Normally this word for the ancient gods was developed to “devils” in the Zoroastrian tradition. The North Iranian Khotan Saka also had developed dyūva- “devil” from daiva. A trace of the older “god” can be seen in the name Dēv-dād “created by god.” Xerxes in a Persepolis inscription reported daivadānam viyakanam “I destroyed the house of devils” (XPh 37).

In the later Zoroastrian books Pahlavi and Pazand baga- became baγ (bkˈ, bγˈ, Pāzand baγ) and occurs associated with yazata- in the phrase yazdān baγān “gods” (bkʾn, bγʾn). A lost nask “book” of the Avesta (a word preserved in its earlier non-technical sense in Caucasian Georgian naskʾ-v-i “knot,” verbal naskʾ-va) was calledBaγ (bkˈ) and Baγān. The Avestan baγō.baxta- can be rendered either “bestowed as a portion” or “distributed by the gods,” the second meaning can be supported by the compound (Dēnkard, ed. Madan, p. 603.6) baγ-tāšīt “created by gods.” The Aramaic ALḤA “god” was interpreted by baγ; it is used in the Ḥājjīābād inscription and in the inscription of Šāpūr I, Parthian line 1 mzdyzn ALḤA, *mazdēẓn baγ, Greek masdaasnēs theos. The king Ḵosrow I is called im baγ “his present Majesty” (Dēnkard, p. 413.9). Šāpūr son of Ohrmazd is quoted in Škand-gumānīk Vičār (ed. P. J. de Menasce, Fribourg, 1945, pp. 118-19, 10.70) ōi baγ šāhpūr ī šāhą šāh i hōrməzdq “the god Šāpūr king of kings son of Ohrmazd.” The baγ yazdkart is cited in Dēnkard, p. 949, 21. The word baγa- gave Sogdian βγ (in Arabic script this β- was expressed by the letter f with three dots on it, which in normal Arabic could be replaced by f). The Buddhist Sogdian employed βγ- of the Buddha P 2.1137-45 βγʾn βγtm pwty “the most godlike of gods Buddha.” The Khotan Saka had preferredgyastānu gyastä “god of gods” from yazata-. Sogdian had the plural βγʾyšt, *βaγišt, gen. plural βγʾn, *βaγān, and βγʾstʾn, *βaγastān for “paradise.”

The Kušan bagapouro (from baga-puθra-) is represented in Turfan Parthianbγpwhr and New Persian faγfūr, and found in Armenian čen-bakour, the Chinese imperial title ṭʿien-tsï “son of heaven,” to which the Old Indian word was deva-putra-. Manichean and Christian texts use this same word for “son of god.”

Turfan Parthian had bg, *baγ with plural baγān and adjective baγānīγ. Turfan Persian had developed -y- from -γ- in by, *bay, plural baʾān (bʾʾn) and adjectivebayānīγ. This bai is found in New Persian bē-doxt, bē-loft from *baga-duxtā“daughter of god” for the planet Venus. About A.D. 800 Iranian baγ is present in Kirkut (Qiṛγiz) bai, written by the Chinese sign buâi (Mathews, Chinese-English Dictionary, no. 4991, modern pei) cited in JA, 1950, p. 298. The Kirkut adopted the Turkish language only in the 7th-8th centuries.

Khotan Saka has beʾga-, baʾga-, and be- in the title beʾgarakä, baʾgarakä, andberakä for Turkish bägräk. From Turkish, in proper names Ossetic has bī “prince,” as in Baras-bī “tiger, prince.”

Turkish took the title bäg, beg, and later bey; in early Turkish in Brāhmī script it was bhek, and in Byzantine Greek the Khazar title was written mékh. The formbägräk occurs in a Turfan Manichean source. In Arabic script the Turkish title wasbag, baḵ, and bāk.

The sacred fire called farn-baγ “the distributor (god) of farn” (farn was equated with Aramaic GDHǰ “fortune”) was located at Kārīān in Fārs. The Pāzand read the name as farō-bag and in Armenian it probably gave hour-bak.

In Kushan inscriptions this baga- is vaka- and vvaga-in the name Vaka-mihira and Vvaga-mihira “the god Miθra.” The v- and vv- are an attempt to express the fricative β. The Kushan bakana-pati- “temple official” is βγn-pt in Sogdian. Armenian has bagin (q.v.) “shrine, altar” from Parthian.

Choresmian from Toprak-kala has βγy for the sixteenth day of the month corresponding to mtr “Miθra,” as Bīrūnī gave fyγ, *βaγ, from βaγi for the same day.

The word baga- occurs in many proper names in ancient Persia. In Greek these names are written with Baga- and Mega-. The name bg-srw, *baga-srava- occurs in an Aramaic papyrus from Egypt.

Two toponyms contain the word baga- in Persia, others are in Armenia. The rock of Behistūn, Bīsotūn is on tò Bagístanon óros. The Bundahišn cites Baγ-dāt ī baγān-dāt “Baghdad which is created by the god(s)” (TD₂, p. 205.12).

In the sense of “portion” Gathic Avestan has baga-, beside later baγa- and baγā-, which is glossed by Zor. Pahl. baγ, bažišn, and baxtārīh.

The derivative baxta- “distributed, allotted” also is frequent later. The Avestan phrase in Vištāsp yašt 38, baxta-ca nivaxta-ca, is explained to mean pat nēvakīh ut frazandān “possessed of good things and children” where “possessed” is Pahlavibaxtadār (baxtiyār). The baxt “fortune” takes the form of a varrak ī vazurg “great ram” mounted behind Artaxšaθr (Ardašīr) in his flight from Artapān (Ardavān).

The noun derivative bāga- is also important in connection with baga-. A later form is attested in Khotan Saka haṃbāya- (sing. haṃbā, plural haṃbāya) “portion” corresponding to Turfan Parthian ʾmbʾg, *ambāγ, Turfan Persian hmbʾw, *hambāv, “rival,” Zor. Pahl. hambāγ, Pāzand hambāi, hambāe “companion.” Through connection with “possessions” the Iranian bāy gave Turkish bai “rich,” whence Mongol bayan “rich.” In Ossetic the Turkish bai- occurs in the personal family name Bai-tuγantä “rich” and “bird of prey.” As a “portion of land” New Persian has bāγ “garden” and Pāzand has bāγastą i vahəšt “garden of Paradise,” that is Garō’amān, and vahišt is in Zor. Pahlavi bō’astān “garden as place of perfumes.” From Alanian (that is older Ossetic) Caucasian Čečen has (with many other words of Alanian origin) the word bai “meadow, lawn,” plural beš, with Ingušbai, plural bäš (the plural suffix is -aš and -s-).

This bāy “rich” is also found in the Finno-Ugrian Ostyak way.

(H. W. Bailey)

ii. In Old and Middle Iranian

The old IE. term for the heavenly gods, the cognate of OInd. devá-, Lat. deus, etc., was generally devalued in Iranian to “false or evil god” and ultimately “demon” (Av.daēva-, Old Pers. daiva-, Mid. Pers. dēw, etc.). In the sense “god,” this word was replaced either by yazata- “(a being) worthy of worship” (Av. yazata-, Mid. Pers.yaz(a)d, NPers. īzad, etc.) or by baga-.

It is not likely that OIr. baga- derives from a word meaning “god” in IE., despite the occurrence of bogŭ “god” in the Slavonic languages (probably as a result of Iranian influence). Etymologically, baga- “god” belongs to the verbal root bag “to distribute, allot” and may be equated with OInd. bhága-, a divine epithet probably meaning “dispenser; generous one,” beside which there exists also a second nounbhága- “distribution, allotted portion” equivalent to Av. baγa- “portion, lot,” Slavonic *bogŭ in derivatives such as ubogŭ “poor” (from “*portionless”). It is this latter word which is personified in the Rigveda as the minor deity Bhaga (one of the Ādityas, a group headed by Varuṇa and Mitra). (See P. Thieme in B. Schlerath, ed.,Zarathustra, Darmstadt, 1970, p. 401.)

Av. baga- occurs only once in the Gāθās, in a much-debated passage (Y. 32.8) where it possibly means “portion” or “distribution.” In the later Avestan texts baγa- occurs occasionally as a title of divinities (Ahura Mazdā, Māh, Mithra), but it is debatable whether it should still be understood in the earlier sense of “dispenser” (cf. OInd. bhága-) or already as “god.” The development of the latter meaning is securely attested in Old Persian, where baga-, translated by words meaning “god” in Babylonian and Elamite, is the only generic term for the divinities worshipped by the Achaemenids.

There is no certain trace of baga- in the Mid. Ir. Saka dialects, where forms derived from yazata- (Khot. gyasta-, Tumshuqese jezda-) are used instead, while Islamic Choresmian has adopted Ar. ʾllh for “God” (but cf. Chor. (‘)βγ(y)k “doll” from *baga-ka-). All other attested Mid. Ir. languages retain forms derived from baga- in the sense “god”: Mid. Pers. bay (plur. bayān, baʾān), Parth. baγ, Bactr. bago, Sogd.βγ-. All these forms are used as honorific titles, not only of gods but also of kings and other men of high rank, in which case the translation “lord” is usually appropriate, e.g., Bactr. i bago šao Kanēški “the lord king Kanishka.” In Zoroastrian Pahl. im bay “this lord” and ōy bay “that lord” mean “His (present) Majesty” and “His late Majesty” respectively. A peculiar use of the plur. form to refer to the monarch is found in the Sasanian inscriptions (and perhaps in the Sogd. “Ancient letters,” see W. B. Henning, “Soghdisch βγʾʾn-,” ZDMG 90, 1936, pp. 197-99), e.g., Inscr. Parth. LKM ʾLḤYN (išmāh baγān) “Your Majesty.” A derivation of the Turk. lordly title bäg, later bey, from Iranian is superficially attractive but quite uncertain (see G. Doerfer, Türkische und mongolische Elemente im NeupersischenII, Wiesbaden, 1965, pp. 402-06).

It is probable that baga- “god” sometimes designates a specific deity as “the god”parexcellence. Various attempts have been made to identify “the god” so referred to, as Ahura Mazdā, as Mithra, or as an Iranian equivalent of the Vedic Varuṇa (see M. Boyce, “Varuna the Baga,” further identifying Varuṇa with the Av. Apąm Napāt [q.v.]), but no basis has ever been stated for the assumption that baga- “the god” in a personal name such as *Baga-dāta- “given by (the) god” must refer to the same divinity at all periods and in all parts of the Iranian world. However, strong evidence that Baga was sometimes used as a by-name of Mithra is provided by calendrical data first exploited by J. Marquart (Markwart), Untersuchungen zur Geschichte von Eran I, Göttingen, 1896, pp. 63-65; II, Leipzig, 1905, pp. 129, 132-34 (see also V. A. Livshits, “The Khwarezmian Calendar and the Eras of Ancient Chorasmia,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 16, 1968, pp. 444-46, for Chor. data). Thus, the seventh month of the year is named after Mithra in Mid. Pers. Mihr māh, Arm. Mehekan, early Chor. mtr, but after Baga in Old Pers. *Bāgayādiya (attested in El. transcription) and Bāgayādi(š) (q.v.), Sogd. βγkʾn(c)(cf. the similar formations used to name the ninth month: Mid. Pers. Ādur māh, Arm. Mehekan, early Chor. ʾtrw, Old Pers. Āçiyādiya (q.v.) and *Āçiyādi(š)). Likewise, the sixteenth day of the month is known as Mihr rōz in Mid. Pers., mtr in early Chor., myš in the Sogd. calendar given by Bīrūnī, etc., but as fyγ (for *βyγ) in Bīrūnī’s Chor. calendar, βγy-rwc in a Sogd. document from Mount Mug, bgy in a Chor. inscription.

A different interpretation of these facts was proposed by W. B. Henning, “A Sogdian God,” BSOAS 28, 1965, pp. 242-54. Chiefly on the basis of an etymology of Sogd.βγʾny-pš-ktʾkw “wedding” as “making of a Baga-union” and a reference to βγy, apparently as a god distinct from my’rʾ “Mithra,” in a Sogd. marriage contract, he identifies Baga with the Vedic Bhaga: both in India and in Iran, B(h)aga would be a god with a “special interest in marriage” and closely associated (but not identical) with Mit(h)ra. This theory has been supported with onomastic data by P. Gignoux, “Le dieu Baga en Iran,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 25, 1977 (1980), pp. 119-27, but it has also been strongly challenged, see especially A. Dietz, “Baga and Miθra in Sogdiana,” in Ētudes mithriaques, Acta Iranica 17, Tehran and Liège, 1978, pp. 111-14, and S. Zimmer, “Iran. baga—ein Gottesname?” MSS 43, 1984, pp. 187-215, and cannot be regarded as proven.

Bibliography:

The article by S. Zimmer just cited includes a useful discussion of most problems concerning baga-, while the Old and Mid. Ir. usage is surveyed by M. Boyce, “Varuna the Baga,” in Monumentum Georg Morgenstierne, Acta Iranica 21, Leiden, 1981, pp. 59-73, esp. 61-65.

On the relationship between OIr. baga- and OInd. bhága-, Slavonic bogŭ see M. Mayrhofer, Kurzgefasstes etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen II, Heidelberg, 1963, pp. 457-59.

Regarding H. W. Bailey’s suggested reading and interpretation of Khot. *vvūvayauas a royal title derived from *baga-yauna- (e.g., in The Culture of the Sakas in Ancient Iranian Khotan, Col. Lect. Ser. 1, Delmar, 1982, p. 11) see R. E. Emmerick in Studies in the Vocabulary of Khotanese II, ed. R. E. Emmerick and P.O. Skjærvø, Vienna, 1987, pp. 132-34.

(N. Sims-Williams)

iii. The Use of Baga in Names

Baga- as a name element occurs in names of towns, e.g., Bagadāta-, modern Baghdad “given by baga” or “established by baga,” *Bagadāna- “temple (?) of (the) god(s),” Old Armenian Bagaran, a town and a village (see Hübschmann), with derivative suffix -ka- Bactrian bagolaggo “altar” (or proper name “The Sanctuary”), today Baḡlān, name of the region (see Henning), Bagastāna- in Media “place of the gods,” so named after the nearby Bīsotūn carvings and inscriptions,Bag(e)is in Lydia; rivers, e.g., Bagrades, today Nābendrūd, Bagossala, probably modern Bug, Ukraine; and mountains, e.g., tò Bagístanon óros at Bagastāna, see above, Bagôon óros between Areia and Drangiana (see Pauly-Wissowa, II, 2, cols. 2765-74; S. I, col. 237). Most of the names, however, are personal names and exclusively men’s names. All three Indo-European name types are attested, namely, one-stem-names (“short names”), derivatives (mostly hypocoristica), and compound names. Short names are seldom (e.g., Baga inscription of Priene, 1st cent. A.D.; perhaps Vaga, “Indoscythian” stratega inscription, ca. 20 A.D.). The hypocoristica (e.g., Bagaios, Bagauka-) have been treated in many articles by R. Schmitt (see Schmitt, 1982 and “Indogermanische Chronik”). Of compound names,Bagabigna- and Bagahuxša- are attested in the Old Persian inscriptions (see IPNB), but more than 60 other Old Iranian names are found from the sixth or even eighth century B.C. in Aramaic, Armenian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Elamite, Greek, Hebrew, Indo-Arian, Latin, Lydian, and Lykian tradition, see Schmitt, 1982 with references, also to the studies on the phonetic shape of Old Iranian baga- in these languages respectively. The Middle Iranian names are only partially published, see Gignoux, 1980a, 1980b, and forthcoming parts of Iranisches Personennamenbuch. At present, four baga names are known from epigraphical Middle Persian: ʾtwrbg, bgʾtwr, bgʾwhrm[zd], plnbgy (this itself part of compounds), and one from Sogdian: βγyfrn. On the linguistic classification and interpretation of these compound names, see Schmitt, 1981, and Zimmer, 1984.

Contrary to the opinion of Gignoux, 1980a and b, these names do not provide any evidence for the existence of an Iranian deity “Baga.” See the detailed analysis of the arguments in Zimmer, 1984. Old Iranian baga-, from Indo-Iranian *bhaga-, means “allotment, distribution,” later also “god” [but see also baga i, above], and in Middle Iranian bag/bay “god, lord” as a mode of address of gods and noble men. Nowhere in Iranian is this word a name. Only in India did the concept of “allotment, distribution” become the Āditya Bhaga.

Mayrhofer’s suggestion (Etymological Sanskrit Dictionary II, p. 457) that baga- in Iranian names replaces the old *daiva- whose meaning had been changed to “evil deity” by Zarathustra, is quite attractive, but hard to prove.

The Old Persian month name Bāgayādi- (q.v.) is interpreted by R. Schmitt as “(month of) worship of the god,” against Henning’s suggestion “(month of) fertilizing (?) the fields” (comparing Middle and Modern Persian bāḡ “garden” [q.v.]). This interpretation is supported by the parallel formationAçiyādiya/*Açiyādiš (Elamite) “(month of) fire-worship” (cf. the Middle Persian month Ādur, Armenian Ahekan; see i, above). This could imply a special worship of Miθra (?) in one month, and of Ātar in the other, perhaps because of some major feasts celebrated in these months.

For place and personal names containing Baga-, see, e.g., bagaran; bagawan; bagayarīč; bagazušta; baghdad; bagratids.

Bibliography:

Ph. Gignoux, “Le dieux Baga en Iran,” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 25, 1977 [1980], pp. 119-27 (1980a).

Idem, “Les noms propres en moyen-perse épigraphique,” Pad nām ī yazdān, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Travaux de l’Institut d’Ētudes Iraniennes 9, 1979 [1980], pp. 35-100 (1980b).

W. B. Henning, “Surkh Kotal,” BSOAS 18, 1956, pp. 366-67, Acta Iranica 15, 1977, pp. 503-04.

W. Hinz, Altiranisches Sprachgut der Nebenüberlieferungen, Wiesbaden, 1975.

H. Hübschmann, “Die Altarmenischen Ortsnamen,” Indogermanische Forschungen16, 1904, pp. 410-11.

M. Mayrhofer, A Concise Etymological Sanskrit Dictionary (Kurzgefasstes Etymologisches Wörterbuch des Altindischen), Heidelberg, 1965-80. Idem,Onomastica Persepolitana, Vienna, 1973, esp. 8.184-8.244.

M. Mayrhofer and R. Schmitt, eds., Iranisches Personennamenbuch, Vienna, 1977ff. (IPNB). R. Schmitt, “Altpersisch-Forschung in den Siebzigerjahren,”Kratylos 25, 1980 [1982], pp. 1-66.

Idem, “Indogermanische Chronik, chap. V c 3,” Die Sprache, Vienna, twice yearly.

Idem, review of Gignoux, 1980b, Studia Iranica 10, 1981, pp. 154-59.

St. Zimmer, “Iran. baga- —ein Gottesname?” MSS 43, 1984, pp. 187-215 (with further references).

R. Zwanziger, Studien zur Nebenüberlieferung iranischer Personennamen in den griechischen Inschriften Kleinasiens, Ph.D. dissertation, Vienna, 1973.

(H. W. Bailey, N. Sims-Williams, St. Zimmer)

Originally Published: December 15, 1988

Last Updated: August 22, 2011

This article is available in print.
Vol. III, Fasc. 4, pp. 403-406

http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/baga-an-old-iranian-term-for-god-sometimes-designating-a-specific-god

Sanskrit bhaga is a term for "lord, patron", but also for "wealth, prosperity". The cognate term in Avestan and Old Persian is baga, of uncertain meaning but used in a sense in which "lord, patron" might also apply. A Slavic cognate is bog "god". While the word "bog" denoted nearly all Slavic gods, the word Deva in its cognate Div was used only for the creator god - Rod, the Slavic equivalent ofBrahma.^{[citation needed]} The semantics is similar to English lord (from hlaford "bread warden"), the idea being that it is part of the function of a chieftain or leader to distribute riches or spoils among his followers. The name Baghdad shares its origins with the Middle Persian baga (baga-data: "god given", modern Persian: "Baghdad")

Personified, Bhaga is one of the Adityas, a god of wealth and marriage in Hinduism. Virabhadra, a great powerful hero created byShiva, once blinded him. In the Rigveda Bhaga is the god who supervises the distribution of goods and destiny to each man corresponding to his merits. The word apparently, is cognative to "Bhagavan" and "Bhagya", terms used in several Indian languages to refer to God & destiny respectively.

In some references Bhag, Bhaga or Bhagya is miss-termed as Lord Sun. In fact Bhagya is the son of Lord Sun. Father Sun awarded him with the powers to give away or take away anything from the human race. He is the real and practical benefactor among all the 33 Crore deities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhaga

Bhagavan, also written Bhagwan or Bhagawan, from the Sanskrit nt-stem bhaga-vant-(nominative भगवान् Bhagavān) literally means "possessing fortune, prosperous" (from the nounbhaga, meaning "fortune, wealth", cognate to Slavic bog "god", Russian богатый (boga'ch)"wealthy"), and hence "illustrious, divine, venerable, holy", etc.^[1]

In some traditions of Hinduism it is used to indicate the Supreme Being or Absolute Truth, but with specific reference to that Supreme Being as possessing a personality (a personalGod).^[2]^[3] This personal feature indicated in Bhagavan differentiates its usage from other similar terms^[4] such as Brahman, the "Supreme Spirit" or "spirit", and thus, in this usage,Bhagavan is in many ways analogous to the general Christian conception of God.

Bhagavan used as a title of veneration is often translated as "Lord", as in "Bhagavan Rama","Bhagavan Krishna", "Bhagavan Shiva", etc. In Buddhism and Jainism, Gautama Buddha,Mahavira and other Tirthankaras, Buddhas and bodhisattvas are also venerated with this title. The feminine of Bhagavat is Bhagawatī and is an epithet of Durga and other goddesses.

The title is also used by a number of contemporary spiritual teachers in India who claim to be Bhagavan or have realized impersonal Brahman.

^ Macdonell Sanskrit-English dictionary
Jump up^ Who is Krishna? "God the person, or Bhagavan"
Jump up^ About Bhagwan? "Know about Bhagwan"
Jump up^ Bhag-P 1.2.11 "Learned transcendentalists who know the Absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramatma or Bhagavan"

In [bhagavad gita] it clearly stated that bhagavan is just the avatar of supreme lord in the earth in other words the avatars of supreme lord as being human is termed as Bhagavan.

vadanti tat tattva-vidas

tattvam yaj jnanam advayam

brahmeti paramatmeti

bhagavan iti sabdyate

Srimad Bhagavatam 1.2.11: Learned transcendentalists who know the Absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman, Paramatma or Bhagavan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavan

The Bhagavata Purana (1.2.11) states the definition of Bhagavan to mean the supreme most being:

The Learned Know the Absolute Truth call this nondual substance Brahman,Paramatma or Bhagavan.^[a]

The Sanskrit word bhagavan is explained in the Vishnu Purana (6.5.74, Venkateshvara edition 1910) by the great authority, Parashara Muni, the father of Vyasa Deva, defines Bhagavan as one who possesses six opulences completely, as follows:

The Supreme Personality who possesses all riches, all strength, all fame, all beauty, all knowledge and all renunciation is called Bhagavan. There are many persons who are very rich, very powerful, very beautiful, very famous, very learned, and very much detached, but no one can claim that he possesses all riches, all strength, etc., entirely.^[b]

The Bhāgavat religion of early Hinduism is documented epigraphically from around 100 BCE, such as in the inscriptions of the Heliodorus pillar, in which Heliodorus, an Indo-Greek ambassador from Taxila to the court of a Sunga king, describes himself as a Bhagavata ("Heliodorena bhagavatena"):

This Garuda-standard of Vasudeva (Vishnu), the God of Gods
was erected here by the Bhagavata Heliodoros, the son of Dion, a man of Taxila, sent by the Great Greek (Yona) King Antialcidas, as ambassador to King Kasiputra Bhagabhadra, the Savior
son of the princess from Benares, in the fourteenth year of his reign."^[c]

[Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report (1908-1909)]

^ vadanti tat tattva-vidas/ tattvam yaj jnanam advayam/ brahmeti paramatmeti/ bhagavan iti sabdyate
Jump up^ aiśvaryasya samagrasya vīryasya yaśasaḥ śriyaḥ/ jñāna-vairāgyayoś caiva/ ṣannāḥ bhaga itīraṇā
Jump up^ Devadevasa Va [sude]vasa Garudadhvajo ayam/ karito i[a] Heliodorena bhaga-/ vatena Diyasa putrena Takhasilakena/ Yonadatena agatena maharajasa/ Amtalikitasa upa[m]ta samkasam-rano/ Kasiput[r]asa [Bh]agabhadrasa tratarasa/ vasena [chatu]dasena rajena vadhamanasa

The word "Bhagava" is used many times to refer to the Buddha in the Pali suttas. The term "Bhagava" has been used in Pali Anussati or recollections as one of the terms that describes the "Tathagatha".

In the Buddha anussati, Bhagavan is defined the following way:

Iti pi so Bhagavā

Thus is Buddha,

1) Arahaṃ - deserving homage.

2) Sammā-sambuddho - perfectly awakened.

3) Vijjā-caraṇa sampanno - perfect in true knowledge and conduct.

4) Sugato - well gone (to Nibbana)

5) Lokavidū - knower of the worlds

6) Anuttaro purisa-damma-sārathi - incomparable leader (lit. charioteer) of persons to be tamed.

7) Satthā deva-manusānaṃ - teacher of gods and humans.

8) Buddho - awakened one.

9) Bhagavāti - Blessed One.

Sākamunisa bhagavato

Greek meridarch (civil governorof a province) named Theodorus records how he enshrined relics of the Buddha in kharoṣṭī inscriptions. They are on a vase found inside a stupa, dated to ca. 1st cent. BCE (reign of Menander of his successor)(Tarn, p. 391).

Theudorena meridarkhena pratithavida ime sarira sakamunisa bhagavato bahu-jana-stitiye (Trans. The meridarch Theodorus has enshrined relics of Lord Shakyamuni, for the welfare of the mass of the people).

Theodorus was a "meridarch" (Civil Governor of a province) in the Swat province of the Indo-Greek kingdom in the northern Indian sub-continent, probably sometime between 100 BCE and the end of Greek rule in Gandhara in 55 BCE.

He is only known from a dedication written in kharoshthi on a relic vase inserted in a stupa in the Swat area of Gandhara, dated to the 1st century BCE (line-for-line translation):

:"Theudorena meridarkhena:"pratithavida:"ime sarira:"Sakamunisa bhagavato:"bahu-jana-stitiye"

:"The meridarch Theodorus :has enshrined :these relics:of Lord Shakyamuni,:for the welfare of the mass of the people"

:(Swāt relic vase inscription of the Meridarkh Theodoros [http://depts.washington.edu/ebmp/etext.php?cki=CKI0032] )

This inscription represents one of the first known mention of the Buddha as a deity, using the Indian bhakti word Bhagavat ("Lord", "All-embracing personal deity"), suggesting the emergence ofMahayana doctrines in Buddhism.

It is also one of the examples of direct involvement of the Greeks with the Buddhist religion in India.

Theodorus is considered as contemporary or slightly posterior to another Indo-Greek named Heliodorus, whose c.100 BCE inscriptions have been preserved in the Heliodorus pillar.

References

*"Monnaies Gréco-Bactriennes et Indo-Grecques, Catalogue Raisonné", Osmund Bopearachchi, 1991, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, ISBN 2-7177-1825-7.
* "The Shape of Ancient Thought. Comparative studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies" by Thomas McEvilley (Allworth Press and the School of Visual Arts, 2002) ISBN 1-58115-203-5
* "Buddhism in Central Asia" by B.N. Puri (Motilal Banarsidass Pub, January 1, 2000) ISBN 81-208-0372-8
* "The Greeks in Bactria and India", W.W. Tarn, Cambridge University Press.

http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/1162426

Scroll. Taxila, India Silver, Ca. 1st Century I.E. National Museum, New Delhi

Year 136, on the 15th day of the first month, ashadha, on this day were established relics of the Lord by Urasaka, of the sons of Imtavhria, the Bactrian, the resident of the town of Noacha. By him these relics of the Lord were established in his own bodhisattva chapel, in the Dharmarajika compound of Takshasila for the bestowal of health on the Great King, the King of Kings, the Son of Heaven, th Kushana, in honour of all Buddhas, in honour of all Prtyekabuddhas, in honour of the Arhats, in honour of all beings, in honour of mother and father, in honour of friends, ministers, kinsmen, and blood relations, for the bestowal of health upon himself. May this pioud donation lead to Nirvana. (Text and translation based on Konow. 1929:77).

↧

Kabul Meluhha hieroglyphs; segments read rebus as stone-ware, metalware consignments

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Segments from 7 lines of Kabul Museum mss

The consignments from sãgaṛh m. ʻline of entrenchments, stone walls for defenceʼ (Lahnda) are identifiable from the following segments of Meluhha hieroglyph sequences: (For the identification of sãgaṛh connoting a building structure see Segment 1 rebus readings discussed below.)

Segment 1

The hieroglyph sequence was read rebus:

moltencast copper, brass, tin (artifacts, cast metal) worked on smithy/forge; tools, pots and pans, metalware.

खांडा [ khāṇḍā ] m A jag, notch Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’; eraka 'nave of wheel' Rebus: eraka 'copper molten cast'. arā 'Spokes (of wheel)' Rebus: āra 'brass'; ranku 'liquid measure' Rebus: ranku 'tin';. kolmo 'seedling' Rebus: kolimi 'smithy, forge' dula 'pair' Rebus: dul 'cast metal'; baṭi 'broad-mouthed, rimless metal vessel'; rebus: baṭi 'smelting furnace'; khāṇḍā Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’; sangaḍa’frame of a building’ sãgaṛh m. ʻline of entrenchments, stone walls for defence ʼ (Lahnda) Rebus: jangaḍ ‘entrustment articles'.

Segment 2

Two hieroglyphs from right were read rebus: खांडा [ khḍā ] m A jag, notch Rebus: khāṇḍā ‘tools, pots and pans, metal-ware’;kōḍi corner; kōṇṭu angle, corner, crook. Nk. kōnṭa corner Rebus: kõdā ‘to turn in a lathe’ (Bengali); aḍaren, ḍaren lid, cover (Santali) Rebus: aduru ‘native metal’ (Kannada) (Note: native metal denotes unsmelted metal, such as meteoric iron).

Segment 3

ḍã̄g mountain-ridge Rebus: dhangar‘blacksmith’.

Or. gaṛhibā ʻto mould, buildʼ, gaṛhaṇa ʻbuildingʼ; ghaṭ ‘mould, form’ (CDIAL 4407). Pk. khaḍḍā-- f. ʻhole, mine, caveʼ(CDIAL 3970).

ḍã̄g mountain-ridge Rebus: dhangar ‘blacksmith’.

Ta. kaṇ eye, aperture, orifice, star of a peacock's tail. (DEDR 1159a) Rebus:Ta. kaṉ copper work, copper, workmanship; kaṉṉāṉ brazier. Ma. kannān id. (DEDR 1402).

bhaṭa ‘warrior’ Rebus: bhaṭa‘furnace’. Alternative: meḍ ‘body ' (Mu.) Rebus: meḍ ‘iron’ (Ho.)

kanka ‘rim (of jar, kaṇḍ)’ (Santali) kárṇa— m. ‘ear, handle of a vessel’ RV., Glyph: kaṇḍ kanka, kaṇḍ karṇaka ‘rim of jar’ (Santali. Sanskrit). Rebus: furnace account (scribe). khanaka m. one who digs , digger , excavator Rebus: karṇaka ‘scribe, accountant’.

Segment 4

बलुतें [ balutēṃ ] n A share of the corn and garden-produce assigned for the subsistence of the twelve public servants of a village, for whom see below. 2 In some districts. A share of the dues of the hereditary officers of a village, such as पाटील, कुळकरणी &c. बलुतेदार or बलुता [ balutēdāra or balutā ] or त्या m (बलुतें &c.) A public servant of a village entitled to बलुतें.

ayo ‘fish’ Rebus: ayo‘metal, alloy’;kōlān, kōli needle-fish (Ma.)(DEDR 2241). kole.l ‘smithy, temple’ (Ko.) kol ‘working in iron, blacksmith (Ta.)(DEDR 2133)

Two linear (curved?) strokes may be phonetic determinant: dula ‘pair’ Rebus: dul ‘cast metal’.

Rebus: Ta. kol working in iron, blacksmith; kollaṉ blacksmith. Ma. kollan blacksmith, artificer. Ka. kolime, kolume, kulame, kulime, kulume, kulme fire-pit, furnace; (Bell.; U.P.U.) konimi blacksmith (Gowda) kolla id. Koḍ. kollë blacksmith. Te. kolimi furnace. Go. (SR.) kollusānā to mend implements; (Ph.) kolstānā, kulsānā to forge; (Tr.) kōlstānā to repair (of ploughshares); (SR.) kolmi smithy (Voc. 948). Kuwi (F.) kolhali to forge. (DEDR 2133).

Rebus: kol metal (Ta.) kol = pañcalōkam (five metals) (Tamil) kol = pañcalōkam (five metals); kol metal (Tamil) pañcalōha= a metallic alloy containing five metals: copper, brass, tin, lead and iron (Skt.); an alternative list of five metals: gold, silver, copper, tin (lead), and iron (dha_tu; Nānārtharatnākara. 82; Man:garāja’s Nighaṇṭu. 498)(Ka.) kol, kolhe, ‘the koles, an aboriginal tribe if iron smelters speaking a language akin to that of Santals’ (Santali)

Segment 5

Comparable hieroglyph duplication on a circular Ur seal18 9902 BM 123059.

Twins, two men stand side-by-side. dula‘pair’ Rebus: dul‘cast (metal) meḍ‘body’ Rebus: meḍ‘iron’. Thus, the twin hieroglyph denotes cast iron.

ranku ‘liquid measure’ Rebus: ranku‘tin’.

Segment 6

ḍã̄g mountain-ridge Rebus: dhangar ‘blacksmith’.

aḍaren, ḍaren lid, cover (Santali) Rebus: aduru ‘native metal’ (Kannada) (Note: native metal denotes unsmelted metal, such as meteoric iron).

Segment 7 (Hieroglyph third from right is illegible)

khareḍo = a currycomb (G.)खरारा [ kharārā ] m ( H) A currycomb. 2 Currying a horse. (Marathi) Rebus: करडा [karaḍā] Hard from alloy--iron, silver &c. (Marathi) kharādī‘ turner’ (Gujarati)

eraka 'nave of wheel' Rebus: eraka 'copper molten cast'. arā 'Spokes (of wheel)' Rebus: āra 'brass'.

Segment 8

Readings r. to l.:ayo sāṇḍa aDara ayo

Meluhha translation: metal (ayo) alloy collection (sāṇṭhaṇēṃ) native (aduru) metal alloys (ayo)

Hieroglyphs from r. to l. The first hieroglyph is illegible, may be ayo 'fish' rebus: ayo 'metal (alloy)'.

The second hieriglyph is comparable to this Meluhha hieroglyph. The picture is a sluice gate.

Alternative: koḍa ‘sluice’; Rebus: koḍ ‘artisan’s workshop (Kuwi)

सांड [ sāṇḍa ] f (षद S) An outlet for superfluous water (as through a dam or mound); a sluice, a floodvent. सांडावा [ sāṇḍāvā ] m (Or सांडवा) A vent (as through a dam or mound); a watergate or sluice.सांडवा [ sāṇḍavā ] m (सांडणें) A sluice, watergate, floodgate; a vent (as through a dam or mound): also a built-up channel or passage of masonry for flowing water generally. साटा or ट्या [ sāṭā or ṭyā ] m A frame &c. See साठा or ठ्या. सांठवणी [ sāṇṭhavaṇī ] n (सांठ & पाणी) Water collected (in a cistern, tank, pond, or other reservoir); also accumulated in a pool, puddle, or any hollow. Allographs: सांड [ sāṇḍa ] m (षंड S) A bull set at liberty. Hence (such bulls soon becoming fat and lusty) सांडणी [ sāṇḍaṇī ] f ( H) An instrument of goldsmiths. It is hooked or curved at the extremity; and is used to draw things out of the fire. This allograph may be denoted by this hieroglyph of Kabul Museum mss.

(Note: I am unable to identify and read the related hieroglyphs in context).

सांठा [ sāṇṭhā ] m (संचय S) A collection, heap, hoard, store, stock.साटें [ sāṭēṃ ] n (संचय S) A whole investment; the total quantity of merchandise (brought to market by one merchant): also buying up the whole of an investment &c. सांठणें [ sāṇṭhaṇēṃ ] v i (संचय, or स Together, अट To go.) To accumulate or collect; to get together in mass or in quantity. 2 To be contained in; to enter into the capacity or hold of.

<aDara>(L) {N} ``^scales of a fish, sharp bark of a tree’’.#10171. So<aDara>(L) {N} ``^scales of a fish, sharp bark of a tree’’. Rebus: Aduru = gaṇiyinda tegadu karagade iruva, that is = ore taken from the mine and not subjected to melting in a furnace (Kannada. Siddhānti Subrahmaṇya’ Śastri’s new interpretation of the Amarakośa, Bangalore, Vicaradarpana Press, 1872, p.330); adar = fine sand (Ta.); ayir – iron dust, any ore (Ma.) Kur. Adar broken grains, etc. Malt. adru broken grain (DEDR 134).

<ayu?>(A) {N} ``^fish’’. #1370. <yO>\\<AyO>(L) {N} ``^fish’’. #3612. <kukkulEyO>,,<kukkuli-yO>(LMD) {N} ``prawn’’. !Serango dialect. #32612. <sArjAjyO>,,<sArjAj>(D) {N} ``prawn’’. #32622. <magur-yO>(ZL) {N} ``a kind of ^fish’’. *Or.<>. #32632. <ur+Gol-Da-yO>(LL) {N} ``a kind of ^fish’’. #32642.<bal.bal-yO>(DL) {N} ``smoked fish’’. #15163 (Munda etyma). Rebus: ayo 'metal (alloy)' (Gujarati)

Segment 9 in three subsets: dul aḍaren| aDara ayo| potR kāṇḍā|

dula'pair' rebus: dul'cast metal'

aḍaren, ḍaren lid, cover (Santali) Rebus: aduru ‘native metal’ (Kannada) (Note: native metal denotes unsmelted metal, such as meteoric iron).

aDara 'scale of fish' ayo 'fish' Rebus: aduru 'native metal' ayo 'metal (alloy)

potR'trefoil' Rebus: pot 'polishing stone'; kanḍo stool, seat Rebus: kāṇḍā ‘metalware, tools, pots and pans’(Marathi).

[[

The third hieroglyph from r. in this segment may be compared with the 'trefoil' hieroglyph superfixed with a table hieroglyph.

The substantive plain text may be a combinatin of words: pot + tri

The shawl is potti. potti, pottika n. Same as. Doll's clothes, a gaudy dress for an idol or for a little girl. (Telugu) S.potīf. ʻ shawl ʼ Pk.potta-- ,°taga-- ,°tia-- n. ʻ cotton cloth ʼ,pottī-- ,°tiā-- ,°tullayā-- ,puttī-- f. ʻ piece of cloth, man's dhotī, woman's sāṛī ʼ,pottia-- ʻ wearing clothes ʼ (CDIAL 8400) pōtramu ‘ a cloth’ (Telugu) போத்து² pōttu , n. < பொத்து. 1. Hole, hollow (Tamil)

trika, a group of three (Skt.)

The occurrence of a three-fold depiction on a trefoil may thus be a phonetic determinant, a suffix to potṛ as in potṛka. potti ‘temple-priest’ (Ma.) போத்தி pōtti போற்றி pōṟṟi , < id. n. 1. Praise, applause, commendation; புகழ்மொழி. (W.) 2. Brahman temple-priest of Malabar; கோயிற் பூசைசெய்யும் மலையாளநாட்டுப் பிராமணன். (W.) 3. See போத்தி, 1.--int. Exclamation of praise; துதிச்சொல்வகை. பொய்தீர் காட்சிப் புரையோய் போற்றி (சிலப். 13, 92) (Tamil) potR `" Purifier "'N. of one of the 16 officiating priests at a sacrifice (the assistant of the Brahman (RV. Br. ŚrS. Hariv.)

Rebus: Bi. pot ʻ jeweller's polishing stone ʼ (CDIAL 8403). [The ‘dotted circle’ may denote a polished bead; hence, Pk. pottī -- f. ʻglass ʼ (CDIAL 8403).]

The superfix of a 'table' to the hireoglyph may be read as: Kur. kaṇḍō a stool. Malt. kanḍo stool, seat. (DEDR 1179) Rebus: kaṇḍ = a furnace, altar (Santali) Alternative: kāṇḍā ‘metalware, tools, pots and pans’(Marathi).

Segment 10 Plain text in three subsets: eraka arā| kharārā | potR kanḍo|

Translation: copper molten cast brass hard alloy, polishing stone, metalware tools pot and pans

eraka'nave of wheel' Rebus: eraka'copper molten cast'. arā 'Spokes (of wheel)' Rebus: āra 'brass'.

khareḍo = a currycomb (G.) खरारा [ kharārā ] m ( H) A currycomb. 2 Currying a horse. (Marathi) Rebus: करडा [karaḍā] Hard from alloy--iron, silver &c. (Marathi) kharādī ‘ turner’ (Gujarati)

potR'trefoil' Rebus: pot'polishing stone'; kanḍo stool, seat. Rebus:kāṇḍā ‘metalware, tools, pots and pans’(Marathi).

S. Kalyanaraman

Sarasvati Research Center

March 13, 2014

↧

Devyani Khobragade: US court dismisses charges. Preet Bharara warns of new indictment.

March 12, 2014, 8:44 pm

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Devyani, jeevema s'aradah s'atam,may you live a hundred autumns.

Kalyanaraman
March 14, 2014

Delhi scores, Devyani still in grey zone

K.P. NAYAR

Devyani Khobragade

Washington, March 13: When S. Jaishankar, India’s new ambassador in Washington, arrives in New Delhifor consultations on Tuesday on his maiden visit after presenting credentials to President Barack Obama, he will have an opportunity to rework Indo-US relations on a clean slate.

US district judge Shira Scheindlin’s order yesterday dismissing the case of visa fraud and felony against Devyani Khobragade, India’s former deputy consul-general in New York, has cleared the way for a fresh start in bilateral relations with America, ending the biggest rift between the two countries since Atal Bihari Vajpayee proclaimed his country and America “natural allies” in 2000.

The stage for ending a virtual freeze in Indo-US official contacts since Khobragade’s arrest and strip-search in December was set by Nisha Desai Biswal, the state department’s assistant secretary of state for south and central Asia, during a visit to New Delhi last week.

Quickly on the heels of Biswal’s talks in New Delhi which were postponed once, Ernest Moniz, the US energy secretary, visited India on the eve of the court decision and held an energy dialogue with Montek Singh Ahluwalia, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.

The visit by Moniz, a member of Obama’s cabinet, had been called off at the height of the crisis caused by Khobragade’s arrest, highlighting the bilateral freeze.

The judge relied on a technicality rather than the merits of the case against the diplomat to grant her motion for dismissal.

“Khobragade’s motion to dismiss the indictment on the ground of diplomatic immunity is granted. Khobragade’s conditions of bail are terminated and her bond is exonerated. It is ordered that any open arrest warrants based on this indictment must be vacated,” the judge said in a 14-page order.

Therefore, yesterday’s developments in court do not in any way vindicate Khobragade. At the same time, it is a signal triumph for Indian diplomacy, especially the team at the Indian embassy in Washington which, in effect, made the dismissal of her case possible.

According to the timeline of events in the episode, the embassy team in Washington extracted a letter from the state department on the night of January 8 permitting her change of visa from A-4, which is consular, to G-4, which is accreditation to international organisations, and granting her transfer from deputy consul-general to an equivalent post at the Indian mission to the UN.

The embassy team was aware that time was of the essence and that her transfer to the UN mission — which unambiguously gave her full diplomatic immunity — had to be facilitated before her indictment was unsealed in court.

The prosecutor, Preet Bharara, was also aware that time was of the essence and he advanced her indictment from January 13 by four days.

Accordingly, the grand jury met at noon on January 9 and indicted Khobragade, still unaware that she had acquired full immunity only the previous night.

It is this technicality that the judge has relied on now to let her off the hook by pointing out to Bharara and his team of prosecutors that they were wrong to indict her on January 9 when she was immune from arrest or prosecution in the US.

What it means is that if the grand jury had indicted Khobragade even one day before, the judge could not have found any ground to dismiss the case against her.

Ravi Batra, a New York lawyer who has represented the Government of India in several cases here, said last night that “judge Scheindlin’s order vindicates both judicial independence and judicial excellence. She rightly acknowledged diplomatic immunity and its consequential effect on the indictment unsealed on January 9. What is also clear is that on December 12, when Khobragade was arrested, she did not enjoy immunity from the arrest.”

For Khobragade personally, the tricky part of yesterday’s ruling is that the judge has left open the possibility of a fresh case against her on the same charges.

The judge observed that Khobragade’s immunity ended when she ceased to be a diplomat at the Indian mission to the UN and left for New Delhi on transfer. Since she no longer enjoys immunity from prosecution or arrest, Bharara is free to file a fresh case against her as an individual who no longer has any official status under US laws or international treaties.

“One can only hope that US attorney Preet Bharara’s exercise of prosecutorial discretion results in not re-indicting Khobragade,” said Batra. “There has been enough pain and suffering already both personally and bilaterally and we need these two countries to rejoin the call of destiny to help form a more perfect world.”

James Margolin, an official speaking for Bharara, was not so generous, however. “As the court indicated in its decision, and as Devyani Khobragade has conceded, there is currently no bar to a new indictment against her for her alleged criminal conduct, and we intend to proceed accordingly.”

Margolin’s assertion is based on a portion of the 14-page order which read: “Khobragade concedes that prosecution is clearly legally able to seek a new indictment at this time or at some point in the future now that (she) no longer possesses diplomatic status and immunity.”

If that happens, it will be her case and the Indian government will probably have no role in it. That may explain the external affairs ministry spokesman’s guarded and diplomatically correct reaction to yesterday’s ruling.

“We welcome this ruling, which dismisses the January 9 indictment against Khobragade and vacates any arrest warrant in the existing case. We note that the judgment does not consider the merits of the case.… Given the importance both sides attach to their bilateral strategic partnership, the government hopes to see further progress in this matter in a manner consistent with international norms and conventions.”

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140314/jsp/frontpage/story_18080028.jsp#.UyJF1j-SySo

US court dismisses charges against Devyani Khobragade

by 28 mins ago March 13, 2014 9: 15 AM IST

New York: Devyani Khobragade, charged in New York with visa fraud and making false statements about a domestic worker she employed has won dismissal of a federal indictment, ending a chapter in a dispute that frayed US-Indian diplomatic relations.

Khobragade, who was India's deputy consul-general in New York, had diplomatic immunitywhen she sought on 9 January to dismiss the indictment, and thus could not be prosecuted, US District Judge Shira Scheindlinin Manhattan ruled on Wednesday.

Prosecutors accused Khobragade of making Sangeeta Richard, her housekeeper and nanny, work 100-hour weeks at a salary of just over $1 an hour, far below the legal minimum US wage of $7.25 an hour.

They argued that the indictment should stand because Khobragade did not have diplomatic immunity either when she was arrested, or now given that she has left the country.

Scheindlin said, however, Khobragade had that immunity on 9 January when the indictment was issued, having the day before been named a counselor to India's mission to the United Nations.

"Even if Khobragade had no immunity at the time of her arrest and has none now, her acquisition of immunity during the pendency of proceedings mandates dismissal." she wrote. "The government may not proceed on an indictment obtained when Khobragade was immune from the jurisdiction of the court," Scheindlin wrote.

She also lifted Khobragade's bail and said open arrest warrants based on the indictment must be thrown out.

Khobragade, 39 at the time of her arrest on December 12, is now working for foreign affairsministry in Delhi, having left the United States in January, said her US lawyer, Daniel Arshack.

Federal prosecutors have not said whether they will seek a new indictment.

"As the court indicated in its decision, and as Devyani Khobragade has conceded, there is currently no bar to a new indictment against her for her alleged criminal conduct, and we intend to proceed accordingly," said James Margolin, a spokesman for US Attorney Preet Bharara in Manhattan.

The US Department of State was not immediately available for comment.

Khobragade's arrest and a subsequent strip-search provoked an outcry in India, setting off reprisals against U.S. diplomats and the removal of some security barriers near the U.S. embassy there.

It also led to the postponement of trips by US officials and business executives to India, with which the United States was working to strengthen ties.

Some Indians thought the case reflected US arrogance and that its relations with India could be taken for granted.

Arshack welcomed the judge's decision.

"The law requires that any prosecution brought against an individual with diplomatic immunity must be dismissed," he said. "We're pleased and heartened that the rule of law has prevailed."

The case is US v. Khobragade, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 14-cr-00008.
Reuters

http://www.firstpost.com/world/diplomatic-row-us-court-dismisses-charges-against-devyani-khobragade-1431841.html

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Abhi bhi waqt hai -- Nachiketa song. Songs keep company in Mamata's flop show in Delhi.

March 12, 2014, 10:08 pm

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| Thursday , March 13 , 2014 |

Didi becomes collateral damage
Crushed between Anna-Arvind clash

J.P. YADAV

The scene at Ramlila Maidan in New Delhi an hour before the meeting started on Wednesday. Several chairs remained unoccupied even after the meeting started. Picture by Prem Singh

New Delhi, March 12: Anna Hazare lost the battle against Arvind Kejriwal today but Mamata Banerjee was left standing alone on the burning deck in Delhi.

Anna cited a last-minute “chest congestion” to avoid the ignominy of facing a thin crowd on the Ramlila Maidan, the very same theatre he had lorded over in 2012 when Kejriwal was just a disciple.

Which meant the sole “national” factor that kept Mamata company on the national platform was a medley of Hindi songs.

“Aaja aaja main hoon pyar tera… (Come, come, I’m your beloved…),” a band played on the saxophone in the afternoon before the meeting began — a theme that was in tune with the yearning to fill the chairs, many of which were vacant.

When Mamata reached the venue, she waited for some time in the car and then backstage. Once Mukul Roy informed her that Anna had decided not to attend on the advice of doctors, she climbed on to the stage and listened to some songs.

She then took the microphone and pointed out: “This was not our rally. I had come here on the invitation of Annaji…. I have struggled all my life and will continue to struggle even if no one gives company.”

Mamata Banerjee after the rally in New Delhi. Picture by Prem Singh
Didi becomes collateral damage

This is the second time in the recent past that Mamata has found herself abandoned while trying to emerge a player in the national capital. She was led up the garden path but dumped by Samajwadi Party chief Mulayam Singh over opposing the candidature of Pranab Mukherjee for President. Mamata eventually supported Mukherjee.

At Ramlila today, Mamata — who never had a politicalbase in Delhi — was feeling the ripples of the battle between Anna and Kejriwal.

The thin crowd proved that Anna may remain a father figure but the children of the anti-corruption movement have followed the course charted by Kejriwal. Much like what happened when the Communist Party split 50 years ago and several of the stalwarts stayed with the CPI while the ranks went to the CPM.

Anna, according to sources, was all dressed up to leave for the ground from Maharashtra Sadan but backed out after reports of “a very poor crowd”. Police reportssaid the crowd was around 2,000 inside a ground that has a capacity of around 1 lakh.

“How could Anna face an empty Ramlila where thousands had gathered for days together when he had fasted for the Jan Lokpal bill?” asked a Team Anna member, pointing out it would be a big loss of face in front of Kejriwal, the estranged protégé whom Anna wants to teach a lesson.

The thin crowd suggested that Kejriwal has cornered the capital’s pro-change segment— the same space that Anna and, by association, Mamata were trying to occupy.

For the record, Anna aide Sunita Godara cited both health and the poor crowd. “Annaji is not well. He has chest congestion. I don’t know whether he will attend the rally,” Godara said.

Later, she talked of the poor turnout because it was a weekday. “When does public gather? It should be a Sunday and evening time,” she reacted over the poor crowd.

Trinamul refused to take the blame, pointing out that the date and venue were decided by Anna.

The second reason, according to insiders, was Mamata’s insistence to follow in the footsteps of Kejriwal and campaign against Narendra Modi in Gujarat.

Sources close to Anna said the anti-corruption crusader was not keen to campaign with Mamata against Modi.

Anna’s close aides, former army chief V.K. Singh, who has joined the BJP, and Kiran Bedi, who openly roots for Modi, were learnt to have prevailed upon the social activist not to campaign in Gujarat. In the past, Anna had praised the “development work” done by Modi and had never attacked the Gujarat chief minister over the 2002 communal riots.

V.K. Singh called on Anna today at Maharashtra Sadan, soon after the activist decided not to share the dais with Mamata at Ramlila. The former army chief, expected to be fielded by the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, denied his meeting had any political meaning.

“Can’t I meet Annaji without a cause? He isn’t well. I always meet him when he is Delhi,” Singh said after meeting Anna.

Mamata wanted to canvass against Modi in his state with the intention of sending a message to the Muslims in Bengal that she was committed to opposing the man blamed for one of the worst communal riots in the country.

Asked whether there was a political reason behind Anna skipping the meeting, Mamata chose to side-step the question with a soft smile and a telling comment: “I don’t know. I will not doubt that Annaji is unwell.”

She pointed out that Congress and BJP leaders have been meeting Anna.

At Ramlila, Mamata did not pull punches on Modi. She termed the Gujarat model of development as faulty and, without taking Modi’s name, said: “The Gujarat leader was communal”, was spreading lies and using “paid news” to build his image.

“Child mortality rate in Gujarat is 41 per cent. What have you achieved when your children are not safe?” she asked.

But when she arrived around 2pm, Mamata had appeared a bit perplexed.

Nachiketa had then taken over the stage. “Abhi bhi waqt hai… Is yug mein sabse aage Mamata hai (there is still time… In this age, Mamata is ahead of all),” Nachiketa sang as Mukul, along with an Anna aide, rushed to Maharashtra Sadan.

Mamata climbed the elevated concrete stage around 2.15pm when it was clear that Anna had dumped her at the altar. She sat on the stage in the backdrop of a black-and-white Gandhi bust. Party MP Saugata Roy was by her side.

Biswajit, the matinee idol of the sixties who was later in the evening declared the Trinamul candidate in south Delhi, crooned: “Pukarta chala hoon main.”

Trinamul had also hired a band, which sang “Aaja, aaja”, to entertain the crowd.

Later, as she left the Ramlila ground, Mamata said: “It’s OK.” She also wished “Annaji good health and a long life”.

In the evening, Mamata announced 30 party candidates in the Northeast, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Madhya Pradesh.

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1140313/jsp/frontpage/story_18075971.jsp#.UyE8Pj-SySo

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Newly discovered Brahmi inscription deciphered

March 12, 2014, 10:40 pm

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Published: March 12, 2014 22:34 IST | Updated: March 12, 2014 22:34 IST

Newly discovered Brahmi inscription deciphered

E. M. Manoj

The mechanical estampage of the Dravida Brahmi inscriptionfound on a laterite bed inside a forest at Karadukka in Kasaragod district.

It was found engraved on a laterite bed near a water channel in Kasaragod

An inscription in Dravida Brahmi characters, reported from the government forest division, Karadukka, in the Kasaragod district of Kerala, has been deciphered.

The inscription in bold and legible letters was discovered recently. There are 14 letters, and the use of pulli (dot), peculiar to Southern Brahmi for denoting half-sound, is conspicuous by its presence in the record. Such label recordsare not uncommon in Kerala, but this is the first time an inscription engraved on laterite has been found.

The record is in good state of preservation even though the place is infested with wild animals such as elephants and bison, M.R. Raghava Varier, a notable epigraphist, who visited the site and deciphered the inscription, told The Hindu.

According to Dr. Varier, the record reads, kazhokora pattan makan charuma. The writing, in all probability, records the name of the person who was responsible for constructing the channel. Until recently, this facility was utilised by people of the locality to water the low-lying fields.

Dr. Varier says the letters in the inscription are comparable to those of the Ammankoyilpatti and Arachallur of Tamil Nadu dated 3rd Century CE. The record may be tentatively dated to that period, he says. But it cannot be compared with the Brahmi inscriptions on the walls of the Edakkal rock shelter in Wayanad, he adds.

Mechanical estampage of the inscription was prepared by K. Krishnaraj, field assistant, Department of Archaeology, Kerala, and E. Kunhikrishnan, former professor, Department of Botany, Government University College, Thiruvananthapuram, along with E. Ratnakaran Nair, a local resident.

“Good discovery”

Chennai Special Correspondent adds:

V. Vedachalam, one of the four authors of Tamil-Brahmi Inscriptions, an authoritative book on Brahmi script brought out by the Tamil Nadu Archaeology Department, has described the find at Karadukka as “a good discovery.”

Dr. Vedachalam is of the view that the language of the Karadukka script is Tamil and should be called Tamil-Brahmi or at least Southern Brahmi.

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/kerala/newly-discovered-brahmi-inscription-deciphered/article5777862.ece

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The Kejri files: anarchist or anti-national? -- Ram Ohri, IPS (R)

March 12, 2014, 11:09 pm

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THE KERJI FILES: ANARCHIST OR ANTI-NATIONAL?

Posted by Ram Ohri / March 13, 2014 /

Introduction

There is no denying the fact that Arvind Kejriwal, a newly commissioned secular anarchist romping across India’s political theatre has confounded many analysts and political pundits. His emergence as a motor-mouth political know-all requires an in-depth analysis.

By now most Indians know that Kejriwal and his political gorilla, Aam Aadmi Party, have been funded and sired by the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA through its powerful financial arm, the Ford Foundation. Even so, the truth about the funding of AAP by some foreign-based anti-India forces has not fully reached the crores of marginalized hoi polloi, trapped in hunger and penury, across rural India. There has been media spotlight on an NGO Kabir, run by Kejriwal and his closest confidante Manish Sisodia and other camp followers.

It is alleged that Kejri’s Kabir had received a financial largesse totaling $ 3,97,000 as grants from the Ford Foundation. Another prominent member of AAP Yogendra Yadav,a former Fellow of the Centre for Developing Societies, New Delhi, has allegedly received substantial funds from Ford Foundation through the ICSSR. Similarly some other members of AAP have allegedly received funds from some dubious sources.

Admittedly Kejriwal is a sharp-shooter strategist who knows his onions well. But the successful debut of AAP on the political horizon during Delhi Assembly elections did expose another secret relationship of Team Kejri with our hostile neighbour which needs to be made public and debated. In addition to the Ford Foundation, Kejriwal has perhaps some more powerful foreign connections, too–maybe in West Asia and possibly even in Pakistan!

Kejriwal pampers fundamentalist Muslim clerics

The unusual success of the Aam Aadmi Party in the Delhi elections had caused tectonic tremors across the country. especially in the ranks of the BJP brass who were caught napping. No wonder the party paid a high price for not being able to read the tea leaves of AAP narrative and its crafty founder, Kejriwal, who stonewalled the formation of a BJP government in the national capital.

The rise and rise of Kejriwal began with his well planned and timely association with the anti-corruption movement of Anna Hazare launched in April 2011, for enacting the Lok Pal Bill. Interestingly neither Anna nor most of his associates, except perhaps to some extent Kiran Bedi, could decipher Kejriwal’s ultra-clever game plan.

The clue to the shape of things to come was reflected in Kejri’s meetings with the Imam of Jama Masjid and other Muslim leaders at whose instance in the third week of August, 2011, Bharat Mata’s portrait was suddenly removed from Anna’s stage and replaced with the likeness of Gandhiji. The shrewd implications of this “meaningful” change was neither analysed nor understood either by our unpaid or ‘paid’ media or by the BJP. In this context, the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid disclosed that Hazare’s team members had also asked him to share the stage with them at Ramlila Maidan but he was not inclined to go there. He claimed to have told Kejri that “if you want to include Muslims in your movement, you will also have to understand their pain and problems, and you would do well to also highlight issues of concern to Muslims,” He further added that the greater evil in the country was communalism which should be addressed first. Additionally, Imam Bukhari told Kejri and his teammates that communal powers were also participating in their campaign due to which it was difficult for Muslims to join them.

Equally surprising was the ignorance of our political analysts on the import of Kejri’s sudden but meaningful two hours long meeting with the fundamentalist fatwa-issuing cleric, Maulana Tauqeer Raza Khan of Bareilly, who had issued a ‘fatwa’ in 2007 promising a reward for forcing Taslima Nasreen to burn her books and leave India. Earlier in the March 2006, the same cleric had issued a ‘fatwa’ for beheading the American President George Bush when he visited India. Though clever Kejri tried to dismiss his meeting with the notorious Maulana as a courtesy call, the latter was more frank. He admitted that Kejriwal had come to his house for a 2 hours long meeting with him. In fact, he showered praise on Arvind Kejriwal in the following words:

“Kejriwal came to meet me at my residence. I liked his simplicity. He is against the Congress and BJP. This is a common factor between us and I assured him of my support”1 -

According to a reliable source, Maulana Tauqeer had reportedly agreed to address some meetings in Delhi for AAP. The plan was, however, changed at the instance of Kejriwal who decided to use his favourite SMS route to reach and win the Muslim voters.

Now, Maulana Tauqeer is the head of a fundamentalist outfit called the Ittehad-e-Millat Council which is closely associated with several fundamentalist organizations in India and abroad. No wonder, at the height of the campaign for the Delhi assembly, a group of prominent Muslim clerics and leaders held a conference in Delhi in November 2013. Thereafter Kejriwal’s time-tested SMS plan was put into operation for winning Muslim voters. Under the guidance of a newly formed outfit, United Muslim Forum, approximately 15 lakh text messages were sent to Muslim voters, urging them to vote for AAP and not to vote for Congress. Twenty-five teams tasked with campaigning for AAP and against the Congress were sent to various constituencies of the Delhi Assembly. These teams had a significant Muslim presence. The forum, which had the blessings of Maulana Tauqeer and many other Muslim leaders, also distributed campaign material on ‘Congress misdeeds’ and gave advertisements in Delhi’s Urdu newspapers which are the staple reading material of the Muslim community. ‘Vote for AAP, not Congress’, the ads proclaimed loudly. Any reference to the BJP was avoided because the campaigners knew that no Muslim will vote for the politically pariahed saffron party.

Kejriwal’s seamy side exposed

The most seamy side of the Kejriwal’s narrative was, however, laid bare in an article posted by a Baloch journalist, Aamna Shahwani in The Afghanistan Times, Kabul, on 4 March, 2014.2 Briefly, the well-researched article highlighted the following facts to which the eternal Quiz Master Kejriwal must respond:

1. After Kejri’s AAP won 28 seats out of the 70, the Pakistani media was full of praise for AAP. Although the BJP had won a few more seats than the AAP, the well known Pakistani newspaper Dawn, totally ignored it but emphasized the AAP victory by frontpaging the news. The Pakistani media also started praising Kejriwal for his spectacular success. No one knows why Kejri became a darling of of Pakistani chatterati.

2. There were celebrations in different cities of Pakistan, especially in the Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Can Kejri explain what led the jihadi tribe to laud and celebrate AAP’s political debut in Delhi Assembly elections?

3. There was a big spurt in the online donations from Pakistanis to AAP. According to Aamna, more support was likely come to AAP from Pakistan because the ISI wants to have a puppet regime in New Delhi. Surely, why there was a sudden spurt in online donations for AAP from Pakistan needs to be explained to the Indian masses?

4. In February 2014, the ga-ga-singing Pakistani journalists and media groups interviewed Kejri. Even the Prime Minister of Pakistan Nawaz Sharif, proclaimed that the victory of Kejri will help in resolving the Kashmir dispute. What made Kejriwal a darling of the Pakistani politicians?

5. The prime reason for Pakistan’s love for Kejri and AAP is their anti-India stand on the Kashmir dispute. The Baloch columnist Aamna pointed out that at least three members of AAP had delivered anti-India and pro-secessionist statements on Kashmir, including the option of referendum or plebiscite voiced by Prashant Bhushan. Why do the AAP activists have a pro-secessionist approach on Kashmir?

6. It needs to be observed that AAP has many members who had pleaded for sparing the life of Ajmal Kasab who was convicted for waging war against India on 26/11 in Mumbai. Kejri must explain why AAP leaders had a soft corner for Ajmal Kasab.

7. Aamna Shahwani has also alleged that no attempt was made by Kejriwal during his regime to recover the long pending electricity bills running into several lakh rupees from the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid. Was the soft corner of the AAP leadership towards the Shahi Imam of Jama Masjid for not making any attempt to recover the long pending electricity bills occasioned by his proximity to the radical Islamists’ vote bank?

8. After the post-poll alliance with the Congress Party, Kejriwal forgot his earlier charge sheet against the former Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit. Further, AAP also removed earlier posts charging Sheila Dikshit with mammoth bribery from their website. Why?

9. While addressing a gathering of Muslims at the Islamic Centre in New Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal publicly pronounced that communalism was a bigger threat than even corruption. He suddenly changed his focus like the shifting sands of Arabia and started parroting the same communal rhetoric which had been voiced by the Imam of Jama Masjid in August 2011. What caused this sudden somersault from his focus on his favourite issue of corruption to the so-called communalism?

10. It was further pointed out that a new entrant to AAP, Rajmohan Gandhi–a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi–had launched a campaign in the USA for releasing the notorious ISI spy, Ghulam Nabi Fai. Equally, why did some members of the AAP openly campaign in favour of mercy for Afzal Guru who was sentenced to death for the December, 2001, attack on the Indian Parliament ?

The ISI’s honeybee

Although it is difficult to identify the hand(s) responsible for nurturing and financing the self-confessed anarchist Kejriwal and his AAP, it will be pertinent to recall that Adrian Levy and Cathy Scott had highlighted in their extensively researched tome, The Seige, that Major Iqbal of the ISI had boasted about planting in India of a super spy agent codenamed “Honeybee.” The Pakistani Major had further revealed that there was a retinue of chuhes (i.e., rats) working for the ISI across India.

Prima facie, till now the Intelligence Bureau does not appear to have made any worthwhile attempt to trace and arrest the so-called Honeybee and his or her rats. An alert was, however, sounded by the Bureau in January 2014, warning that the ISI and LeT were trying to infiltrate into Indian political parties.4 In the circumstances, the startling revelations made by Aamna Shahwani in The Afghanistan Times on March 4, 2014, certainly point to the urgent requirement of identifying the hidden hand of Pakistan’s Honeybee.

Indeed, the facts-rich article of Aamna Shahwani published in The Afghanistan Times on March 4, 2014, has cited more than one proof of the AAP being funded and supported by the ISI of Pakistan.

Finally the ‘communal cat’ jumped out of Kejriwal’s ‘secular topi’’ when recently the Washington-based Association of Indian Muslims of America issued an “appeal to Indian Muslim citizens and voters to raise funds for and support Aam Aadmi Party” in the upcoming parliamentary elections of 2014. Showering encomiums on the Aam Aadmi Party the press release of American Indian Muslims Association displayed Kejriwal’s photograph and his famous ‘broom’ to enthuse the Muslim voters. The press release claimed that AAP will help the deprived Muslim community escape the police brutality, denial of justice, etc.

Add to this the vigorous efforts for online fund collection made by Kejriwal’s trusted lieutenant, Shazia Ilmi, during her visit to the Middle East in February, 2014. While Kejriwal and his cabinet sat on a dharna at Rail Bhawan, Shazia Ilmi went touring abroad to collect funds to enable her party to fight the 2014 general elections.

Kejriwal needs to answer his Pak connection

The time has come for the anarchist Kejriwal and his team mates to respond truthfully to the questions raised by Aamna Shahwani. They must come clean now to dispel the doubts troubling the minds of millions of patriotic Indians, especially when there are hush-hush rumours in the Lutyens garden city about Kejriwal’s proximity to the Political Adviser of the UPA Chairperson and some prominent members of the National Advisory Council !

The ISI and many other spy agencies have been using the methodology of bogus online funding to destabilise nations hostile to them. According to knowledgeable foreign sources, several members of the American Indian Muslims Association were in close touch with the ISI of Pakistan through Dr.Ghulam Fai of Kashmiri American Council, who was arrested by the United States police in July 2011 on charges of illegal activities and espionage. Interestingly the shadowy Pak agent Dr. Fai was also responsible for getting bogus online funds rolled over by the ISI through online donations for promoting the cause of Kashmiri secessionists. The Federal Bureau of Investigation discovered that he was in regular touch with Abdul Majeed Tramboo and Nazir Ahmad Shawl who ran the Kashmir Centres in Brussels and London respectively. Bogus online funding is a well known trick used for espionage.

Surprisingly, during the last one year, Indian intelligence agencies have made no worthwhile attempt to unravel the mysterious rise of AAP nor questioned the sources of the outfit’s remarkable success in fund-raising across West Asia and Pakistan. They have also miserably failed to identify and capture the ISI’s ‘Honeybee’ and Major Iqbal’s chuhe operating in India. The politicization of the Intelligence Bureau and other security agencies cannot be ruled out.

*********

References :

www. ndtv.com/article/assembly polls/cleric-who-issued fatwa-against taslima-nasreen -441919

Aamna Shahwani, Afghanistan Times, Kabul, March 4, 2004.

Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-clark, The Seige. Pp.44, 56, 115, 293.

‘Intel Warning: ISI- LeT to infiltrate parties, The Asian Age, New Delhi, 27 January, 2014.

[The author is a retired senior IPS officer]

- See more at: http://www.indiafacts.co.in/kerji-files-anarchist-anti-national/#sthash.fNe61wP5.79n2bmhU.dpuf
http://www.indiafacts.co.in/kerji-files-anarchist-anti-national/#sthash.fNe61wP5

↧

Seminar: Developing Hindu historiography and Hindu history, April 26-27, 2014 San Jose, CA

March 12, 2014, 11:18 pm

≫ Next: Protest renaming of Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar, Kashmir 11AM Sunday March 16, 2014

≪ Previous: The Kejri files: anarchist or anti-national? -- Ram Ohri, IPS (R)

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: GHF Web <webmgr@ghfinc.net>
Date: Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 10:42 AM
Subject: SEMINAR: Developing Hindu Historiography and Hindu History, April 26th-27th, San Jose, CA

Please find attached Call for Papers for a seminar titled “Writing History from a Hindu Point of View”, to be held at Global Hindu Conference, San Jose, CA, April 26th-27th, 2014.

Please pass it on to anyone who may be interested in Hindu History and would like to see the development of a Hindu School of History.

Writers, authors, thinkers, activists as well as bloggers and Hindu community at large are cordially invited to be a part of the development of Hindu Historiography and Hindu History.

Your participation and patronage will be truly appreciated.

Further Information on the Seminar:

Dr. Sumeet Saxena
Session Coordinator
sumeet.saxena@ghi.org.in

Tel. (609) 200-5785

[ Conference details are at http://globalhinduconference.org ]

http://www.scribd.com/doc/212213701

GHC 2014 - Call for Papers - Hindu Historiography v2 by kalyanaraman7

↧

Protest renaming of Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar, Kashmir 11AM Sunday March 16, 2014

March 13, 2014, 4:20 am

≫ Next: Aadhaar a 'fraud'. From Infosys to politics, what a record to end free&fair elections, Nilekani

≪ Previous: Seminar: Developing Hindu historiography and Hindu history, April 26-27, 2014 San Jose, CA

Join displaced Kashmiri Hindus to protest the renaming of Shankaracharya Hill in Srinagar,Kashmir to Takht-e-Suleiman Hill. 11AM on Sunday, March 16, 2014 at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.

↧

Aadhaar a 'fraud'. From Infosys to politics, what a record to end free&fair elections, Nilekani

March 13, 2014, 4:30 am

≫ Next: A Million Dollar Indian Wedding that will Blow Your Mind -- Adii Dande

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http://www.assamtimes.org/node/10074

Aadhar a big fraud: Naidu

Submitted by AT News on Wed, 12/03/2014 - 14:57

Former BJP president M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday said that the much-hyped Aadhar is a big fraud.

Addressing a press conference in Guwahati, he said that the UPA government has smartly used it to legalise the illegal migrants in the states like Assam.

He said that the multi crore project was implemented without any parliamentary approval.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/aadhaar-a-fraud-will-review-it-if-voted-to-power-bjp/articleshow/31871489.cms

Aadhaar a 'fraud', will review it if voted to power: BJP
By Amit Kumar, TNN | 12 Mar, 2014, 08.16AM IST

Questioning Nandan Nilekani's claims on Aadhaar's achievements, Meenakshi Lekhi termed the programme as a "fraud" perpetrated on the people.

BANGALORE: The BJP on Tuesday said it would review the Aadhaar programme if it comes to power at the Centre and demanded a CBI probe into the scheme, alleging it regularized illegal stay of migrants in India.

Questioning the UIDAI chairman Nandan Nilekani's claims on Aadhaar's achievements, BJP national spokeswoman Meenakshi Lekhi termed the programme as a "fraud" perpetrated on the people of the country while seeking the probe.

"This is a dangerous programme to regularize the illegal stay of migrants in the country. Is Bharat Mata so open to illegal migrants? The Aadhaar is also in contravention of Supreme Court directives.

The entire biometric data of people enrolled has been stored outside the country," she said during an interaction with students here.

Fielding questions from students hailing from West Bengal and Bihar on Bangladeshi migrants, BJP general secretary HN Ananth Kumar, who is facing Nilekani in Bangalore South parliamentary constituency, said: "If you illegally enter other countries, you are shot at or put in jail. But if anyone illegally enters India, he is given citizenship. This is the contribution of Aadhaar. Half of Assam is occupied by Bangladeshis. Aadhaar is the biggest fraud in the country."

Meenakshi claimed there are over three crore illegal Bangladeshi immigrants spread across the country and allotting Aadhaar numbers to them posed a huge security risk to the nation. "Of 33 members in a parliamentary standing committee, 31 had voted against implementing Aadhaar programme. The apex court too had questioned its credibility. Yet the government went ahead with it," she said.

Short of naming Nilekani, Meenakshi also questioned the expenditure incurred on Aadhaar. "A thorough CBI probe is needed on the money spent and why Aadhaar was made mandatory," she said.

http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2014/03/end-of-free-and-fair-elections.html

End of Free and Fair elections

http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/canvassing-the-base-114030900556_1.html
Canvassing the base
Business Standard | New Delhi
March 9, 2014 Last Updated at 21:06 IST
Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys and the Congress' candidate from the Bangalore South constituency, seems to be leveraging his expertise as head of the Unique Identification Authority of India or Aadhaar project to prepare for the next general elections. To this end, he has been sending out personalised letters to the heads of every household within the constituency. What is unusual is that the cover containing the letter looks nearly the same as those that were used to send out the Aadhaar numbers and bears the name of the addressee and his/her father on it.

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Krantikari Kejriwal, made in TV studio

Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 1)

Monday, March 3, 2014

Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 2)

Hidden Truths: Going Beyond Common-Sense Reality (Part 3)

UPA hurts India as it exits

China Has Launched the Largest Water-Pipeline Project in History

By Lily Kuo

Kejriwal: India’s biggest scam

Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others (Shocking revelations of Truthbehind’2nd Independence Movement’)

Strenuously researched and written by Birbal ; my colleague and friend…..

Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others (Shocking revelations of truth behind ’2nd Independence Movement’)

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Devyani, jeevema s'aradah s'atam,may you live a hundred autumns.

Delhi scores, Devyani still in grey zone

US court dismisses charges against Devyani Khobragade

Didi becomes collateral damageCrushed between Anna-Arvind clash

Newly discovered Brahmi inscription deciphered

It was found engraved on a laterite bed near a water channel in Kasaragod

Aadhaar a 'fraud', will review it if voted to power: BJP

Canvassing the base

Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others
(Shocking revelations of Truth
behind
’2nd Independence Movement’)

Conspiracy Unfolds ; Kejriwal & others
(Shocking revelations of truth behind ’2nd Independence Movement’)

Didi becomes collateral damage
Crushed between Anna-Arvind clash