Ford Foundation Had Infiltrated Nehru Government to the Core
By Yatish Yadav
Published: 06th July 2015 05:06 AM
Last Updated: 06th July 2015 05:06 AM
NEW DELHI:On April 23, 2015, the Narendra Modi-led NDA government took an unprecedented step by putting the Ford Foundation under the watch list of the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA).
On April 15, the Gujarat government wrote to the MHA that financial records of activist Teesta Setalvad show that the Ford Foundation had been “sponsoring anti-national activities and should be scrutinised”.
In 2006, the foundation approved a grant of $200,000 to Setalvad’s Sabrang Communications to “address communalism and caste-based discrimination in India through active research, web-based information dissemination, development of civil society network and media strategies”. At that time, the US visa ban on Modi was still in effect. Express investigation into the foundations’ activities in India that goes back to the 1950s throw up some startling facts.
The Ford and Rockefeller foundations had penetrated the Indian establishment without any government oversight.
It gave junkets and scholarships to senior government officials in the Nehru administration without clearance from the Indian government.
These officials were directly selected by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations without the knowledge of the government.
B K Nehru, Indira Gandhi’s cousin and the Commissioner General for Economic Affairs of Indian Embassy in Washington, advised against insistence on clearance of the funds by the Rockefeller Foundation to government employees after a meeting with its President Dean Rusk.
Rusk told the government that only consultations (and not approval) with the Department of Economic Affairs would be necessary before it funded bureaucrats and others.
Appalled at the storm brewing in his Govt against the foundations’ blatant efforts to woo government officials, Nehru denied he had given the necessarily approval. He had to backtrack after a note was shown to him, which made it obvious that the opposite was true.
As expected, the Modi government’s move against the Ford Foundation to bring its donations under the RBI’s and the MHA’s domain created ripples in the US establishment with the Obama administration seeking a clarification on the government’s decision to keep a hawk’s eye on all the bodies and activities funded by the Ford Foundation. Alarmed at its activities to influence government policy and public opinion, all its activities were put under watch.
Hectic negotiations are on between the Ford Foundation and the government, as the former believes that its absolute free run in promoting the US agenda and policy in the Indian establishment through grants to think-tanks, NGOs and junkets to various seminars to the US for the last 63 years may soon be over. How could the foundation operate so freely despite allegations of its CIA links? Express investigation which covers the period from 1952 to 2014 on foreign donors—especially the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation—raises serious questions over the Jawaharlal Nehru government’s decision to let foreign agencies establish deep roots in the country without government oversight.
The most shocking fact that emerges in Express investigation is that officers in Nehru’s government were directly selected by officials of both Ford and Rockefeller foundations to participate in research projects abroad. Their travel and boarding and lodging expenses were taken care of by the sponsors. Some officials in Nehru’s regime who protested the penetration of foreign donors, including the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation into the highest echelons of the Indian government, suggested strong measures to rein in these agencies but were not allowed due to some mysterious “political implications”, according to a note to the Finance Ministry from S Dutt, the Foreign Secretary at that time.
Much before the Narendra Modi government, D P Karmarkar—the Health Minister in Nehru’s Cabinet—blew the whistle on the spreading influence of foreign funding agencies in India during the 1950s. He asked the Ministry of External Affairs about what the procedures adopted by the government to allow foreign donors to operate in India were? Karmarkar was concerned that the Rockefeller Foundation directly lured officials from his ministry with hefty stipends and free junkets. Dutt noted in his file on June 23, 1958, that when the health minister tried to suggest that the government intervene in the matter of unbridled foreign funding, the terse reply from funding agencies was “take it or leave it”.
Foreigners availing Research Visa to undergo strict scrutiny
05 July 2015
Foreigners intending to work in NGOs, carry out research work on human rights and environment issues will have to face stricter scrutiny of their visa applications after detection of several incidents of alleged misuse of these provisions.
Mirror: http://tinyurl.com/olmcl9k In my view, Sarasvati script has virtually no influence on orthography of symbols used on Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts. The possible reasons are: 1. Sarasvati (Indus) script is logographic and provides hieroglyph multiplex texts read (in mlecchita vikalpa or meluhha cipher) as catalogues related to metalwork. The thesis is that Indus Script Corpora is catalogus catalogorum of metalwork of Bronze Age. 2. There are no orthographic comparators to suggest link of the first syllables of metalwork words with the syllabic symbols of Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts. 3. Though the ligaturing principle followed on Sarasvati (Indus) Script is followed in Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī syllabic symbols (i.e. by modifying basic consonants with vowel a endings by diacritical ligatures to connote other vowel endings: A, i, I, u, U, e, ai), the basic orthography of the symbols used in the two scripts of Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī bear only hazy resemblance to any of the hieroglyphs deployed on Sarasvati (Indus) script. 4. Unfortunately, the Vikramkhol inscription which seems to contain Sarasvati (Indus) script hieroglyphs of both a pictorial motif (animal) and sign (bellows) the letterings are not legible, because of eroded stone engravings, though the animal + bellows hieroglyphs identified by KP Jayaswal are indicative of record of metalwork. The available evidence thus seems to indicate that the prototypes for Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts are likely to be alphabetic scripts such as Aramaic, Phoenician -- adapted with ligatures to signify Meluhha (mleccha) syllables. http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2015/07/indus-script-hieroglyphs-have-virtually.htmlMirror: http://tinyurl.com/nefomgf Contra arguments are gleaned from Subhash Kak and BV Subbarayappa which are presented on this note. Further reviewing their arguments, I see no reason to revise my earlier hypothesis that Sarasvati (Indus) script has virtually no influence on Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī scripts including representation of numerals in these two syllabic scripts. In Subhash Kak's view, "primary Brāhmī signs look closes to the Sarasvati signs. many of the Brahmi signs are the first syllables of familiar objects: thus, g, ch, m, s', h appear to have been derived from the representations of giri (hill), chatra (umbrella), matsya (fish), s'ara (arrow), and hasta (hand)...Unfortunately, the phonetic values for the most frequent Sarasvati signs do not help us in reading most of the seals and other texts. The reason for this is that the short lengths of these texts disallows unambiguous readings." (p.379, 382) Subhash Kak compares Sarasvati sign (hieroglyph 'fish') to syllable m in Brāhmī:
He further argues: "The Brāhmī 10 before the advent of zero was written as a fish sign, or the sign for m, lying sideways. In later forms it was also written with a single curving stroke, or with vertical stroke attached to a circle. It appears thatthe shape of zero was determined by the oval related to the fish sign of the Brāhmī 10. In such a representation, the zero sign clearly had the null (s'Unya) value which explains its name." (P.384) Contrasted with this are the sets of numeral symbols of Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī, none of which bear any resemblance to 'fish' symbol variants recorded in Brāhmī:
Brahmi numerals
There is, however, a possibility that numerals were acrophonic and based on the Kharosthi alphabet. "For instance, chatur 4 early on took a Y shape much like the Kharoṣṭhī letter ch, panca 5 looks remarkably like Kharoṣṭhī p; and so on through shat 6, sapta 7, and nav 9 (Kharoṣṭhī sh, s, n). However, there are problems of timing and lack of records. The full set of numerals is not attested until the 1st-2nd century CE...Both suggestions, that the numerals derive from tallies or that they're alphabetic, are purely speculative at this point, with little evidence to decide between them." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_numerals See: http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2013/04/indus-writing-and-numeration-dr-bv.html.
Presented herein are three extraordinarily insightful articles which should lead to further evaluation of the evidence provided by the Indus writing corpora. Dr. Subbarayappa presents fresh perspectives on the continuity in the use of numerals in early inscriptions of Brāhmī and Kharoṣṭī with parallels in Indus writing. He also discusses the parallels between proto-Elamite and Rigvedic cultures. Dr. Subhash Kak presents fresh perspectives on the continuity of glyphs used in Brāhmī script as an evolution from Indus writing. He also discusses the development of the zero sign from ancient India. (Kak, Subhash, 1994, Evolutio of writing in India,Indian Journal of History of Science, 29(3), 1994, pp.375-388.) My comment is that these insights are hypotheses which should be validated by reading the inscriptions in Indus writing; the corpora now exceed over 5000 inscriptions not only in sites such as Mohenjodaro and Harappa but in newly excavated sites such as Bhirrana and Kanmer and also in ancient Near East including Persian Gulf settlements. The number of inscriptions will increase to over 10,000 if continued use of Sarasvati (Indus) symbols (frequently, together with Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī script) on punchmarked and cast coins are taken into reckoning. A good example is the following silver coin with writings in Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī AND ALSO Sarasvati (Indus) script: Silver coin of the Kuninda Kingdom, c. 1st century BCE. Obv: Deer standing right, crowned by two cobras, attended by Lakshmi holding a lotusflower. Legend in Prakrit (Brāhmī script, from left to right): Rajnah Kunindasya Amoghabhutisya maharajasya ("Great KingAmoghabhuti, of the Kunindas"). Rev:Stupa surmounted by the Buddhistsymbol triratna, and surrounded by aswastika, a "Y" symbol, and a tree in railing. Legend in Kharoṣṭhī script, from righ to left:Rana Kunidasa Amoghabhutisa Maharajasa, ("Great King Amoghabhuti, of the Kunindas"). In this example from a Kuninda mint, the coin shows metalwork catalog in Sarasvati (Indus) script -- hieroglyph multiplex text -- while recording the name and title of Amoghabhuti of Kuninda in Kharoṣṭhī and Brāhmī syllabic scripts. S. Kalyanaraman Sarasvati Research Center July 8, 2015
Kharosthi alphabet
Origin
The Kharosthi alphabet was invented sometime during the 3rd century BC and was possibly derived from the Aramaic alphabet. It was widely used in northwest India and central Asia until the 4th century AD.
Unlike the Brahmi script, which was invented at around the same time and spawned many of the modern scripts of India and South East Asia, Kharosthi had no descendants.
Kharoshti was deciphered by James Prinsep and others around the middle of the 19th century. Since then further material has been found and the script is now better understood.
Notable features
Kharosthi is a syllabic alphabet - each letter has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are indicated using diacritics.
It was written from right to left in horizontal lines.
Kharosthi Unicode proposal submitted by Andrew Glass, Stefan Baums, and Richard Salomon - the above script chart and text sample is based on this http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2524.pdf
ALPHABETUM - a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient scripts, including classical & medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Messapic, Picene, Iberian, Celtiberian, Gothic, Runic, Old & Middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old Nordic, Ogham, Kharosthi, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, Phoenician, Avestan, Ugaritic, Linear B, Anatolian scripts, Coptic, Cypriot, Brahmi, Old Persian cuneiform:http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html
The Brāhmī alphabet is the ancestor of most of the 40 or so modern Indian alphabets, and of a number of other alphabets, such as Khmer and Tibetan. It is thought to have been modelled on the Aramaic or Phoenician alphabets, and appeared in India sometime before 500 BC. Another theory is that Brāhmī developed from the Indus or Harappa script, which was used in the Indus valley until about 2,000 BC.
The earliest known inscriptions in the Brāhmī alphabet are those of King Asoka (c.270-232 BC), third monarch of the Mauryan dynasty.
Brāhmī was used to write a variety of languages, including Sanskrit and Prakrit.
Notable features
Type of writing system: abugida - each letter represents a consonant with an inherent vowel. Other vowels were indicated using a variety of diacritics and separate letters.
Letters are grouped according to the way they are pronounced.
Many letters have more than one form.
Direction of writing: left to right in horizontal lines
Vowels and vowel diacritics
Consonants
Sample text
Asokan Edict - Delhi Inscription
Transliteration
devānaṁpiye piyadasi lājā hevaṁ āhā ye atikaṁtaṁ aṁtalaṁ lājāne husa hevaṁ ichisu kathaṁ jane dhaṁmavaḍhiyā vāḍheya nocujane anulupāyā dhaṁmavaḍhiyā vaḍhithā etaṁ devānaṁpiye piyadasi lājā hevaṁ āhā esame huthā atākaṁtaṁ ca aṁtalaṁ hevaṁ ichisu lājāne katha jane
Translation
Thus spoke king Devanampiya Piyadasi: "Kings of the olden time have gone to heaven under these very desires. How then among mankind may religion (or growth in grace) be increased? Yea, through the conversion of the humbly-born shall religion increase"
ALPHABETUM - a Unicode font specifically designed for ancient scripts, including classical & medieval Latin, ancient Greek, Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, Faliscan, Messapic, Picene, Iberian, Celtiberian, Gothic, Runic, Old & Middle English, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Old Nordic, Ogham, Kharosthi, Glagolitic, Old Cyrillic, Phoenician, Avestan, Ugaritic, Linear B, Anatolian scripts, Coptic, Cypriot, Brahmi, Old Persian cuneiform:http://guindo.pntic.mec.es/~jmag0042/alphabet.html
Lecture given during the Inaugural Session of the International Conference on“Sanskrit in Asia” to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn at Silpakorn University,Bangkok, June 23, 2005.
Subsequently published in Sanskrit Studies Central Journal. Journal of the Sanskrit Studies Centre, Silpakorn University, 2 (2006) 193-200.
******************************* Your Royal Highness, Your Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen 1. A Vedic Discovery
It is a great privilege for me to be present here and discuss Sanskrit in Asia on this special occasion. I am sure I speak for all of us who participate in this conference and other visitors, when I say that we are grateful to Your Royal Highness who is not only taking time from more pressing duties, but who is also concerned with many languages other than Sanskrit. I believe they include in alphabetic order Chinese, English, French, German, Khmer, Latin and Pali, not to mention Thai, which comes modestly at the end of this list because I have followed the order of letters of the English ABC. I shall begin my own inquiry with late Vedic, which is close to Classical Sanskrit and comes even later than Sanskrit and Thai because “V” comes after “S” and “T” in all the Near Eastern and European alphabets that I shall oppose to the sound pattern of Sanskrit. For I believe with Plato that if we look at two opposites, side by side, and rub them against each other, “we may cause justice to blaze out as from the two kindling sticks” (Republic IV 435 a 1-2) – the Greek equivalent of agnimanthana in the Vedic fire ritual.
Classical Indian linguists adopted a synchronistic perspective because they did not regard language as subject to change. We now know that language evolves in a manner that is not altogether different from the evolution of the species. Roughly speaking, Old-Khmer evolved into Cambodian, Latin into Italian and French and Sanskrit into Hindi and Marathi. The Vedic language went through three stages which are known as Early, Middle and Late Vedic. Throughout the long period of their evolution, from about 1700 to 500 BCE, Vedic Indians spoke Vedic by definition, composed Vedic verse and prose, and transmitted these compositions to future generations through recitation. It was an exclusively oral tradition.
Toward the end of the Vedic period and at the western extremity of Vedic India, in Kośala or Videha, – not far in time and place from the Buddha’s birth – reciters of the Veda made a major discovery (Figure 1). They found that the consonants of a language are produced by constricting the vocal tract at a particular point along its stationary portion -- the palate or upper lip. If we move from the larynx or throat to the lips, we pronounce ka, ca, ṭa, ta, pa. Each of these syllables may be unvoiced or voiced, provided with more or less breath, which may be made to pass through the nasal cavity as well. Thus we produce, in the case of ka, the sequence ka, kha, ga, gha, ṅa; and similarly for the other four consonantal stops. The two directions are combined in the two-dimensional square or varga that is depicted here. In order to complete the picture, a few other syllables have to be added along with semi-vowels and vowels.
The Vedic system of the sounds of language exhibits and embodies what is nowadays called phonetics, but is close to phonology which studies features of those same sounds as parts of a system. The system exhibits what I refer to as the sound pattern of Vedic, Sanskrit or language. I do not imply that it is the same for all languages, but most of the sounds of human speech may be accommodated in some such scheme. During the Late Vedic period, the Vedic scheme was expounded in the śikṣâ, the Prātiśākhya and other compositions.
Figure 1. The Vedic System of the Sounds of Language
As far as I know, the Vedic discovery of the sound pattern of language was made only once. Modern linguistics uses distinctive features, but they would not exist if the sound pattern of language had not been discovered earlier; by two-and-a-half millennia, as it happens. One intermediary was Pāṇini who composed his grammar one or two centuries after the Vedic discovery. His grammar incorporated it, but his system was different. The reason is not that the Vedic pattern is different from that of Sanskrit. There are differences between the two and Pāṇini referred to some of them by rules that are marked chandasi, “in the Veda.” But Pāṇini composed an entirely new type of grammar for the spoken language of his day, thereby laying the foundation for Classical Sanskrit. It inspired not only many other grammars for Sanskrit, Prakrit and other languages, including Jaina and Buddhist works, but the great tradition of Sanskrit grammarians from Patañjali to Nâgojîbhaṭṭa as well as modern linguistics. It is Nâgojîbhaṭṭa who ended his Paribhâṣenduśekhara with what became a famous saying: “grammarians rejoice over the saving of half a syllable as over the birth of a son” (ardhamâtrâlâghavena putrotsavaṃ manyante vaiyâkaraṇâḥ).
The Vedic system of sounds that preceded Pāṇini is nothing new to you. Every literate Indian knows it, and I would venture to guess that, among literate people, more than 50% understand it in Southeast Asia, less than 50% in East Asia, and perhaps a handful of linguists if you look west of South Asia. You may be surprised by my guess, but please note that I have in the mean time shifted my language and refer now to literate people which is something the Vedic Indians were not.
Looking back we detect a paradox. The discovery of the sound pattern of Sanskrit was not made despite the absence of writing, but because of it. The reason is simple: the discoverers were not hampered by any written alphabet. Writing was invented or introduced later. The resulting syllabaries were naturally arranged in accordance with the earlier and superior, but orally-based system. That system was rational, because it reflected the places of articulation in their natural order; and practical, especially for languages in which syllables consist of a consonant followed by a vowel. Japanese is such a language and Sanskrit to some extent. So are many of the languages of the Near East and of Europe but their alphabets are neither rational, nor practical. They blocked insight into the nature of language and served as obstacles to the development of linguistics.
Literacy takes us to another instructive contrast that is socio-economic. We have, on the one hand, the difficult grammar of Pāṇini, a work of genius that rightly became famous but was studied by a small elite of specialists, in India, other Asian countries, Europe and the Americas. There is, on the other hand, the Vedic system, a discovery that had a much wider appeal which is due to its rationality and practicality both. It was beneficial to priests of the court and the temple, Buddhist monks, astrologers-cum-astronomers and many others whose writing skills were used in turn by royalty and other rulers, land owners, bookkeepers, artisans, etc., thus affecting larger segments of society. It appealed moreover to practical people who liked to work with a writing system that was not just prestigious but natural and effective – at least in principle and initially, before some of the writing systems began to exhibit labyrinthine qualities.
The languages and inscriptions of South East Asia support these socio-economic generalities. The Sanskrit inscriptions from Cambodia contain words that are not found in Sanskrit dictionaries. One of them is lekhin which refers to a scribe or secretary. We also findabhyantaralekhin, “personal secretary” or, as Kamaleswar Bhattacharya translates it, “secrétaire intime.” The Sanskrit root is likh, “scratch” or “write,” and in Indic Sanskrit we come across derivatives such as lekha- “document,” lekhaka- “writer,” lekhana “writing,” etc.; but not lekhin. In Old-Javanese, similar derivatives are at least apparent. Thus we havelekita which means “written evidence” and is used in a court of law. It also refers to “by-laws of the village.” It may come from Sanskrit lekhita “written” or “caused to be written,” but may be connected with Javanese lukita which means “thought expressed in words” or “literary composition” and may in turn be related to another term that is certainly native: lukis “drawn with a pen.” All this evidence suggests that the introduction of Sanskrit had something to do with writing.
Why are such simple facts not mentioned by specialists in writing systems? Because students of scripts generally confine themselves to the shapes of letters and characters. It is well known that Indic shapes were adapted in Central and Southeast Asia. But that is only the least interesting part of the story as is demonstrated by the fact, that the Indian system spread much further than the Indic shapes. The sound pattern of Sanskrit was adopted and adapted in a large part of Asia - including Central Asia, Korea, Japan and, momentarily, in a grammar of Arabic composed in Iran. I refer to adoption and adaptation because, in most cases, the Indic system was not imitated slavishly but adapted creatively to new languages and language structures.
Since our present enquiry is not concerned with shapes but with order, epigraphy - another topic to which our guest of honor has devoted years of study – is of limited assistance. The same holds for palaeography in the narrower sense. A typical example, de Casparis’Indonesian Palaeography, subtitled A History of Writing in Indonesia, is still the basic manual on the shapes of the characters but does not refer to their order even once. I hope that epigraphists in Thailand, where that rare and valuable discipline still flourishes, will look for order and take it into account when they find it.
Figure 2 provides a geographical overview of the Indic Scripts of Asia. It shows at a glance that the Indian system together with the shapes of its syllables is confined to South and Southeast Asia. The Indian system without the shapes was adopted and adapted in Central Asia, Korea and Japan. Occasional uses of the system are found in China and in Southwest Asia or the Near East
I start this brief overview with a mystery: the script of Kharoshthi, probably the earliest Indic script, which was used in northwest India and spread to Central Asia from about the fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The order of syllables starts with a ra pa ca na la da ba èa ṣa . . . That order is unexplained and the script is called Arapacana after the first five syllables. It possesses clearly Indic features: each syllable ends in a short –a and diacritic signs are added when that short –a is replaced by another vowel. The order of vowels, however, is not Indic but Aramaic: a e i o u and not a i u e o. That order is also adopted by diacritics attached to consonants from top to bottom when changing a into e, i, o and u.
The other early Indic script is Brahmi. It is the paradigm of the Vedic system. It influenced, directly or indirectly, via Pallava or other medieval Indian scripts, all the scripts of South and Southeast Asia that include (again in alphabetic order) Balinese, Bengali, Burmese, Devanagari, Grantha, Gujrati, Gupta, Gurmukhi, Kannada, Khmer, Lao, Malayalam, Nepali, Oriya, Pallava, Sinhala, Tamil, Telugu and Thai.
The evidence for these influences is constituted by the scripts themselves. Textual evidence for how the transmission occurred is less common. The same applies to the evidence for Indian numerals. But there is circumstantial evidence, in both cases. It is probable, for example, that one of the Indian brahmans who transmitted the Vedic paradigm to Cambodia, was the South Indian who belonged, according to a seventh century Cambodian inscription, to the Yajurvedic school of Taittirîya. The reason is that among the Prâtiśâkhya compositions that explain the Vedic system, only the Taittirîya Prâtiśâkhya depicts the Vedic square (varga) of Figure 1 in full.
I have excluded Javanese from the above enumeration because the order of its syllables illustrates a different kind of principle from the Vedic and alphabetic both: hana caraka, data sawala, padha jayanya, maga bathanga. This list is Indic in form, and Old Javanese (Kawi) retains the Indic device of writing consonant clusters by putting one consonant symbol below another. But the creators do not seem to have liked or understood the rationale behind the Indic order. What they construed instead is a mnemonic jingle that includes one occurrence of each of twenty of the twenty-two consonantal syllables of the Javanese script. It has a meaning: “There were two emissaries, they began to fight, their valor was equal, they both fell dead.”
The chief Central Asian varieties are Khotanese, Tibetan and ‘Phags-pa. The latter script was created from the Tibetan by the lama of that name for the Mongol Emperor Qubilai or “Kubla Khan” as an international script for his Asian Empire. Other Central Asian scripts, such as Bactrian or Sogdian, do not concern us here because they were not Indic but Aramaic in shape and order both.
The numbers of South, Southeast and Central Asian scripts that adopted the Indic order is large. An attractive estimate occurs in the tenth chapter of the Lalitavistara, calledLipiśâlâsaṃdarśanaparivarta, “the revolution of displays of the mansions of writing.” It lists 64 different scripts that were mastered by the Bodhisattva. The title of the chapter is reminiscent of the Buddha’s own dharmacakrapravartana. It emphasizes instructively that the carriers of the sound pattern of Sanskrit to other Asian regions were not only Indian Brahmans but also, and in increasing numbers, Buddhist monks. It is explained at least in part by the geographical facts with which I started: the discovery of the sound pattern of language by Vedic reciters occurred close in place and time to the areas where early Buddhism flourished. It was a feature of civilization that Buddhists carried across Asia.
The Chinese system of writing is so different from Vedic orality and all that it entailed, that Indians had nothing to contribute. It caused confusion since Chinese Buddhists believed that each Indic shape was independent and had its own meaning, like many Chinese characters. There were a few exceptions. Hsieh Ling-yün (384-433 CE), poet and calligrapher, assisted by Hui-ju, a Buddhist monk, composed a Sanskrit glossary in Chinese transliteration in the Indian order. After the ninth century, rhyme tables were composed for each tone in that same order.
The Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries of Japan adopted strokes from Chinese characters, but reflect the Indic system which was gradually adapted to the sounds of Japanese. An example from the Heian period is pa pi pu pe po, which became subsequently fa fi fu fe fo, and has now reached the form ha hi fu he ho. It is a classic illustration of the difference between creative adaptation and slavish imitation. But it did not please everyone and a poem was composed in which all but one of the syllables were used once. Their order is not phonetic but semantic. It is called Iroha after the first syllables: iro ha nioedo chirinuru wo waga …and has been attributed to the famous philosopher and calligrapher Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi to whom we will return. In English translation, it says: “Colorful flowers are fragrant but they must fall. Who in this world will live forever? Today cross over the deep mountains of life’s illusions; and there will be no more shallow dreaming, no more drunkenness.” It sounds better than the mnemonic device used for Javanese but belongs to the same category.
The Korean Han-gul is the world’s most perfect script. Even the shapes of its syllables reflect the shapes of the mouth when producing sounds – as does, in English and other European languages, only the shape of the letter “o,” which may be seen as a picture of the rounding of the mouth. The perfection of the Korean order is due to the Indic but is fully adapted to the sound pattern of Korean. Han-gul was developed in 1444 CE by a committee of scholars, including Buddhist monks, appointed by the Emperor of Korea. The committee report starts with the basic insight: “The sounds of our country’s language are different from those of China.”
The case of Arabic deserves a separate lecture by an expert but I shall try to summarize its most salient features. The order of letters in the standard alphabet is based on their shapes (Figure 3). But al-Khalīl bin Aḥmad, teacher of śibawayhi, author of the most famous grammar of Arabic, introduced in the eighth century a new list in which he had re-arranged the letters, starting in the back of the mouth with the ‘Ain followed by ḥâ, Hâ, Khâ, Ghain, Qâf, Kâf, etc. (same Figure 3). It is referred to as the Kitâb al-‘Ayn. Al-Khalīl was probably born in Basra, but he wrote his grammar in Khorasan, the easternmost part of Iran which is the gateway to India.
Al-Khalīl’s Arabic grammar was not adopted by the Arab world. There has been much controversy about the question whether it was inspired by the Indic paradigm. Scholars have argued that Arabic is very different from Sanskrit (it is), that there is no evidence
Figure 3. The Standard Arabic Alphabet and the Indian “Alphabet” of the Kitâb al-‘Ayn
that al-Khalīl studied the Prâtiśâkhya literature or other Sanskrit treatises (true because he didn’t), that borrowing of an alien system without any of the details on which it rests is almost unknown (?), that there were no contacts between Arab and Indian scholars at the time of al-Khalīl (not true because there were such contacts in mathematics), and so on. The argument, in brief, is based upon the assumption that borrowing must be what I have called slavish imitation.
Having listened to me so far, you may already be inclined to conclude, that al-Khalīl’s grammar was inspired by the Indian paradigm. But we need a reason or, at least, a more accurate account. Morris Halle (personal communication) provides precise evidence of the influence of the Vedic discovery on al-Khalīl’s grammar. Al-Khalīl’s order of consonants is basically a linearization of the two-dimensional array of Figure 1. Unless he knew the Vedic order, he would have no reason to deviate from the traditional order of Arabic consonants as depicted on the top of Figure 3. He furthermore extended the system by adding the rear wall of the pharynx as a point of constriction. Put in more general terms, it means this. In linguistics, as in mathematics, ideas that are part of an oral tradition may be picked up by a brilliant scientist, who does not study a text, let alone slavishly, but understands the subject. Al-Khalīl was such a man. He went as far as performing experiments, for instance, by putting his fingers in his mouth. The ancient Indians may have done it too. But superior qualities of the subject and the student are not enough. The Indic system did not enter the Near East or Europe because of prejudice, narrow-mindedness and plain ignorance.
It would not be good to end my lecture on a negative note and so I have kept the auspicious syllabary of Siddham for last. It will show that I have omitted from our discussion a large area of patterned sound, that of mantras and dharaṇîs. The Siddham syllabary was construed, in the Indic order, for the expression of these sacred syllables and their export to East Asia. The number that was exported from India, sometimes in exchange for other goods, probably exceeds that of any other commodity, although no attention seems to have been paid to it by economic historians. Seekers, however, sought solace in these treasures that were of easier access than the Sanskrit language itself, which famous Chinese pilgrims had gone to India to learn, but which was never studied seriously in China proper.
To illustrate the export of the Siddham, we return once more to the Japanese Buddhist monk Kûkai or Kôbôdaishi, who was born in the eighth century. Kûkai went to China and studied the Siddham script with Prajña, a monk from Kashmir who was translating Tantric texts. After his return to Japan, Kûkai built a monastery at Koyasan which became the center of the Shingon sect. He taught his pupils mantras and dharaṇîs and how to write them in the Siddham script.Figure 4 depicts a scroll from Koyasan with the Siddham character A.
I derive five conclusions from our brief discussion. The first is that the sound pattern of Sanskrit was adopted and adapted by many writing systems of Asia. The exporters were Indian brahmans and Buddhist monks. The second is that the pattern that underlies the system was not always understood. The third is that those Asian writing systems are applications of a theory of language, just as airplanes are applications of the laws of aerodynamics. The fourth, closely connected, is that a writing system is only as good as the theory upon which it is based. (Since the accuracy of theories is measured in degrees, absence of any theory points to probability zero.) My fifth and final conclusion is hypothetical in character. If the sound pattern of Sanskrit had also reached the Near East and Europe, there would not be so many clumsy alphabets around and the modern world would have the benefit of rational and practical Indic syllabaries in addition to rational and practical Indic numerals.
I am deeply grateful to Dr. Samniang Leurmsai of the Sanskrit Studies Centre, Silpakorn University, Bangkok, for inviting me to speak in the inaugural session on June 23, 2005, of the International Conference on “Sanskrit in Asia” to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Birth of Her Royal Highness Princess Mahachakri Sirindhorn.
When preparing this paper, I saw that Richard Salomon was about to address the 215th meeting of the American Oriental Society at Philadelphia of March 20, 2005, on “On Alphabetical Order in India, and Elsewhere.” I was unable to attend that meeting but I wrote to Richard and he very kindly sent me a draft of his paper. It became obvious that both of us shared an interest in the order of characters, and not only in their shapes like many other students of scripts. It turned out also that both of us made use of the 1996 manual on The World’s Writing Systems (WWS) by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (see Select Bibliography below), to which Richard had already contributed the section on Brahmi and Kharosthi. I have learned much from Richard Salomon’s contributions and our subsequent correspondence. Our contributions are in some respects complementary but the reader will note that there are differences between our approaches. My own approach reflects the wider context of Staal 2005.
WWS itself calls for additional comment. It is learned and informative. It has been widely praised, especially from the point of view of Semitic Linguistics (Kaye 2003). However, its adherence to the International Phonetic Alphabet is baffling to the intended wide audience and obscured further by the idiosyncratic terminologies of both editors and the careless use of many other technical and semi-technical terms that are nowhere explained. Even the concept of “syllabary” is regarded as a kind of alphabet; as in the Oxford Dictionary, which declares that a syllabary serves “the purpose of an alphabet”. It is not and does not and these verdicts are simply cultural constructs.
Truly fatal to the subject of WWS is its atomistic approach which, in many of its sections, obliterates the intimate relationships that exist between the scripts they deal with. The contributions by Christopher Court, Leonard van der Kuijp and Richard Salomon’s own are free from this defect, and William Bright recognizes that “the traditional order of symbols in the Indian scripts is based primarily on articulatory phonetics, as originally developed for Sanskrit by the ancient pandits” (page 384). But the 113 pages on South and Southeast Asia in this tome of 922 pages, the only ones that study a writing system that is rational and practical, are seriously misleading, not on the whole but as a whole. That has, furthermore, a curious implication. If we omit some pages from the South and South East Asian section that do not reflect the Indic system, and add a few on Korean and Japanese that do, we are left with some 800 pages that are expressly devoted to the description of irrationalities and impracticalities that are a disgrace to homo sapiens though not the only one.
I can summarize my comments best by quoting from my own paper its fourth conclusion. The editors seem to ignore the fact that their phonetic approach, which mirrors the Indic system, lacks its fundamental insight: “a writing system is only as good as the theory upon which it is based.”
Linguists will have noted that the expression “sound pattern” evokes Morris Halle’s “Sound Pattern of Russian” of 1959 and Chomsky and Halle’s “Sound Pattern of English” of 1968. What was meant there is clearly explained in the Preface to the second book: “we are not, in this work, concerned exclusively or even primarily with the facts of English as such. We are interested in these facts for the light they shed on linguistic theory (on what, in an earlier period, would have been called universal grammar) and for what they suggest about the nature of mental processes in general.” That Chomsky and Halle’s book is inspired by the Indic tradition is clear from its final rule, which is identical with the final rule of Pāṇini's grammar: “a a.”
In later publications, Noam Chomsky did not shy away from the expression “universal grammar.” My present contribution is different from all these important works. It is only a brief discussion, but it is concerned with applications, history and practicalities as well as theory. I have tried to show how the Vedic discovery is based on a theory of language that may be used in discussing the contributions of Sanskrit to Asian societies and to civilization. These are ambitious efforts and some of the few steps I have taken may have been unsteady. I hope that readers will render assistance in discussing, confirming, refuting or amending what I have written.
Staal 2005 is concerned with the theory and development of language, natural as well as artificial. It lists the publications on Arabic and Japanese that I have used for the present paper also. Here I like again to express my indebtedness for guidance and references to Professors Oscar von Hinüber, Richard C. Martin, Kees Versteegh, W.J. Boot and Michio Yano. Special thanks go to Professor Morris Halle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a significant correction and important observation mentioned in the body of the text. My final acknowledgments go to Edward M. Stadum and Peter Vandemoortele for their help with the illustrations and powerpoints that were part of the presentation. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1966), “Supplément aux recherches sur le vocabulaire des inscriptions sanskrites du Cambodge,” Bulletin de l’école française d’extreme-orient 103/1:273-77.
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Halle, M. (1959), The Sound Pattern of Russian. The Hague: Mouton.
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Salomon, Richard G. (1996), “Brahmi and Kharoshthi,” in: Daniels and Bright, eds., 373-383.
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CBI books Teesta, hubby for ‘illegal’ foreign aid Neeraj Chauhan 08 July 2015 New Delhi The CBI on Tuesday registered a case against civil rights activist Teesta Setalvad, her husband Javed Anand and businessman Gulam Mohammed Peshimam and Sabrang Communications and Publishing Pvt Ltd (SCPPL) for receiving funds from foreign entities without registration or prior permission from the government. The agency's FIR comes 10 days after the home ministry asked it to probe irregularities and violation of the Foreign Contributions (Regulation) Act (FCRA). Sources said Teesta and others are likely to be questioned soon. READ ALSO: Centre asks CBI to probe activist Teesta Setalvad's firm CBI sources told TOI that Teesta, Anand (both directors of Sabrang) and Peshimam, founder member of Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP) -- also run by Teesta -- have been booked under provisions of FCRA after examining the home ministry's complaint which points to prima facie "illegal diversion of funds". Sources said the guilty in such cases could face imprisonment of up to five years. It is alleged that Sabrang Trust and CJP both received foreign contribution and this was diverted to SCPPL. Sources said Sabrang Trust received around Rs 1 crore in violation of provisions of the FCRA, 1976 as well as those of FCRA, 2010. The agency is examining documents related to the company and bank account details besides the home ministry inspection reports of SCPPL's accounts and records for 2006-07 to 2014-15. Teesta has had a running battle with the Gujarat government since the 2002 riots. Gujarat Police had earlier accused Teesta and her husband of diverting and misusing funds received for the state's riot victims, a charge which she described as 'victimization' by the Modi government. The home ministry's inspection of Teesta's NGOs revealed several violations, primarily relating to receipt of foreign contribution without FCRA registration or prior permission, failure to maintain an exclusive book of accounts for foreign contributions received and utilized, using foreign funds to lobby with political parties, mixing foreign contributions with domestic contributions, publication of a monthly periodical 'Communalism Combat' and writing of columns by its two directors in leading newspapers despite FCRA debarring use of foreign funds for publishing and media ventures, and diverting funds from the stated purpose of charitable, scientific literacy or education. READ ALSO: Govt serves notices on two NGOs run by Teesta Setalvad Ordering a CBI probe, home minister Rajnath Singh's communication to the agency said, "Considering the gravity and complexity of the case and that since the amount involved is more than Rs 1 crore, it has been decided, with the approval of the competent authority, to get this matter investigated more thoroughly ... The CBI is, therefore, requested to conduct an investigation into this case in terms of Section 43 to 46 of FCRA, 2010." The home ministry had served notice to Teesta's two NGOs last month seeking their response to the alleged violations. CJP, which has been fighting cases for 2002 riot victims, had received a total foreign contribution of around Rs 1.18 crore from 2008-09 to 2013-14. While the entity was registered for 'educational and economic' purposes, it received foreign contribution for activities such as 'legal aid' in violation of FCRA rules. The home ministry's inspection also found that an amount of Rs 50 lakh was allegedly transferred by Sabrang Trust to SCPPL which is not registered under FCRA. It also found Sabrang Trust spending more than 50% of its foreign contributions for administrative purposes which is not permitted under FCRA. The notice says the Trust received foreign contributions to the tune of Rs 48 lakh in 2010-11 and Rs 49 lakh in 2011-12. Of this, it spent more than 64% and 55% as administrative expenses. The inspection at the premises of the two NGOs was undertaken days after the receipt of a letter from the Gujarat government in April, alleging several FCRA violations by the NGOs run by Teesta and her husband Javed Anand.
Sparing India’s strategic space for China’s entry in the East
China’s latest strategy paper provides insights to Xi’s thinking on power projection. India should keep its options open while sparing its strategic space to China by participating in the BCIM corridor project.
Col R Hariharan
At last India also seems to have made up its mind on joining the China-promoted Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar (BCIM) corridor project toopen up a land access route between South Asia to China’s South Western region.[i]General VK Singh, Minister of State for External Affairs, recent statement that the recent stand of with Burmese Naga insurgents in Manipur would not affect the Project amply clarifies New Delhi is clear in its decision.[ii]
Perhaps, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the decision to join the Project after clarifying his mind on some of India’s strategic concerns about China after his May 2015 visit to Kunming capital of Yunnan Province where he inaugurated a Yoga Institute supported by India. Chinese also “acknowledge that unlike in the past, when it was perceived to be dragging its feet, India is now showing enthusiasm over the project” according a news report inThe Hindufrom Kunming.[iii] With its changed stance Chinese have high expectations of India speedily completing the last bit of 200 km of road on Indian side of the border to provide four-lane highway connectivity between Kunming to Kolkata.
Ever since President Xi Jinping came to power two years back China has been vigorously promoting the BCIM corridor as part of its strategic outreach to South Asia, mainly India.[iv]
Yunnan has become the focal point of this effort. For the last three years China had been convening the China South Asia Think Tank Forum at Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province, to improve its people to people links with South Asia in a bid to overcome apprehensions about China’s strategic intentions and objectives in the region.
The project is expected to trigger start greater investment inflow because it links India and China which are topping the global economic growth charts first time in two and a half centuries and have the money and inclination to invest in green field areas in the region serviced by the BCIM.
Tenuous land links from the landlocked regions of Southwestern China with Northeastern Indian states. The whole region is rich in natural resources including minerals, forestry, petroleum, forestry and energy. Lack of development in the BCIM region is one of the causes for age old tribal and territorial animosities coming up frequently to result in insurgency movements. However, there are signs of most of the insurgency movements in India’s Northeastern states are talking peace for some time to end decades of conflict. Development and economic growth expected in the wake of BCIM project can speed up this process to improve the quality of life denied to the people of the region. It could also contribute to peace and prosperity to the whole region contributing to the economic viability of the BCIM project.[v]
Perhaps this is what made Prime Minister Modi to decide upon joining hands with China to complete the BCIM project, keeping aside the historical baggage of unresolved territorial disputes between the two countries relevant to the security of the Northeast. Ideally, on completion the BCIM could provide a win-win situation for all the four member states and promote greater understanding and harmony among them, lessening the chances of confrontation.
But India has to recognize a few home truths. The bottom line is India will be sparing its strategic space for China’s entry into India’s East through the BCIM project which fits in with President Xi’s belt and road strategy and supplements the 20thCentury Maritime Road initiatives. These pave way for greater assertion of China’s economic, strategic and political clout. And this could be at the cost of India, which had been the cock of the walk in the region for hundreds of years till it failed to build upon its strengths due to its own national and regional preoccupations and pulls and pressures and seemingly endless ethnic conflicts sometime stoked by China. This had resulted in a cycle of conflict, poor governance and lack of development. In the 90s India embarked upon the Look East policy to the Northeast by improving the connectivity of landlocked region to ASEAN and Southeast Asia. But it made tardy till Prime Minister Modi preferred to Act East rather than merely Look East.
In this context, the China’s military strategy paper released by the State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing on May 26, 2015, provides interesting insights into the dynamics of Xi’s strategy.[vi]
The strategy paper is different in both form and content from the last White Paper “The Diversified Employment of China’s Armed Force” published on April 16, 2013.[vii] Unlike the earlier one, this is more focused on concepts of strategy and doctrine than details. So it is less obtuse than the earlier document and provides a clear correlation between President Xi Jinping’s world view on key strategic issues affecting national development and security as well as employment of Chinese armed forces. However, core concepts of the doctrine appear to remain the same as enjoined by the Communist Party of China (CPC).
A few things stand out in the whole paper. These include getting the armed forces ready for a global role, to protect strategic interests outside China (including protection of maritime rights), and ensuring the CPC’s continued doctrinaire control over the armed forces. On the modernization of armed forces which has been progressing for nearly two decades the focus is now on modernizing the logistics in tandem with the development of road, rail and air communication networks. This was perhaps the weakest link in China’s strategic Westward move. Similarly the emphasis on nuclear deterrence and second strike capability, cyber warfare and space warfare provide Chinese leadership’s employment of forces on emerging threats to the realisation of the Chinese Dream.
President Xi would like the world to see his Chinese Dream as the Chinese peoples’ aspiration “to join hands with the rest of the world to maintain peace, pursue development and share prosperity.” In essence this is what the earlier military white paper also said.
President Xi and other leaders have been repeatedly proclaiming China’s peaceful intentions even as China is making strategic inroads into South and Central Asia and the world beyond. Chinese war ships are increasingly asserting China’s claim to the South China Sea; Chinese navy has become a regular part of the Indian Ocean landscape to protect its national interests.
The Paper probably hopes to set at ease the doubts about China’s strategic intentions in the minds of its neighbours like India and ASEAN over the “Belt and Road” strategy and the 20thCentury Maritime Silk Road projects. There is also latent fear among them about China’s promotion of the communication links in tandem with the Asian Infra-structure Investment Bank and broad banding the BRICS network to build a strong Chinese-led economic and strategic counterpoise to the West. When successful it could make China’s economic and strategic domination of Asia complete and holistic making the RMB the transactional currency among the networked countries.
Even if China’s proclaimed intentions are peaceful, can India be lulled by these words? The answer to this question is closely related to India joining hands with China on opening the BCIM corridor. National Security Advisor Ajit Doval delivering the annual KF Rustamji Lecture on May 22, 2015 on“Challenges of Securing India’s Borders: Strategising the Response”cautioned that while India’s relations with China ‘were looking up’, India’s border issue remained critical for bilateral relations with China.[viii] And India needed to remain on a ‘very very high alert.’ In particular, he spoke of India’s concerns about the Eastern Sector where the Chinese have claimed Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh. He was only articulating what Narendra Modi asked China “to reconsider its approach on some issues that hold us back” during his recent visit to Beijing.
It is a moot question whether the publication of the White Paper was timed to coincide with the worsening situation in the South China Sea? The U.S. and its allies notably Philippines are locked on near-confrontation over China’s development of an air strip on the disputed Spratly islands after artificially expanding the reef. The issue has caused concern to all stakeholders using the sea links including India because it strikes at the root of China’s much professed recurrent theme of “peace and harmony” with all the neighbours. But Beijing seems to be confident of India understanding the Chinese point of view.[ix]
Prime Minister Modi has the difficult task of deciding how far and how much India can trust China and cooperate with it. He seems to have taken a calculated risk in promoting the BCIM project perhaps in the interest of bringing peace, harmony and good governance in the region and to wean away people from insurgencies. It would also reinforce his Act East policy, and provide for greater Indian investment and trade to flow eastwards. It also augments his overall strategy of building bridges with India’s neighbourhood to reinforce our soft power to achieve strategic objectives for the common good of the people living in the entire region.
However, participation in multilateral economic and development initiatives comes with some cost to the country’s freedom in decision making and sovereignty. India has joined major Chinese strategic initiatives i.e. BRICS grouping and its economic initiatives, Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB). India also appears to be interested in signing a Free Trade pact with the Eurasian Economic Union.[x]So India will be coming under greater pressure than ever before in the coming years from diverse countries and multi lateral associations while taking strategic decisions in its national interest.
So India will have to closely monitor the progress and operation of the BCIM project lest the outstanding sovereignty issues with China affect the Northeast region in the course of the laudable development initiative.
[Col R Hariharan, a retired Military Intelligence officer, is associated with the Chennai Centre for China Studies and the South Asia Analysis Group. Their websites carry many of his analytical articles. E-mail: haridirect@gmail.com Website:www.col.hariharan.info]
Courtesy: Chennai Centre for China Studies C3S Paper No. 0139/2015 dated 8 July 2015
Thursday, 09 July 2015 | Kumar Chellappan | CHENNAI July 10, 2015
Though the Election Commission of India has not announced any plans for holding the Assembly elections in Tamil Nadu which in normal course goes to the polls early next year, the principal Opposition party DMK in association with the Congress has unleashed an “undeclared war” on J Jayalalithaa, the Chief Minister and supremo of the AIADMK.
As reported earlier by The Pioneer, Jayalalithaa’s resounding victory in the RK Nagar Assembly bypoll held on June 27 has made the DMK nervous. This forced M Karunanidhi, the 92-year-old president of the DMK and who has been confined to a wheelchair for the last five years, to question the health of Jayalalithaa (67) to lead the State. Political observers in Tamil Nadu attribute the new found aggressiveness in Karunanidhi to a fear psychosis — the fear of losing the next election.
On Monday, the DMK leadership surprised all by filing a special leave petition in the Supreme Court challenging the Karnataka High Court verdict acquitting Jayalalithaa of all charges in the Disproportionate Assets case. The SLP was filed in spite of the fact that the Government of Karnataka has approached the apex court challenging the High Court verdict. Karunanidhi also issued a statement on Tuesday questioning the status of Jayalalithaa’s health to be the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. The DMK chief alleged that Jayalalithaa was not attending any public functions.
Interestingly, since her return as Chief Minister in 2011, Jayalalithaa has cut down her public appearances to the minimum level. She herself had announced that she would be curtailing her movements in order to minimise inconvenience to the public.
The DMK’s aggressive posture follows Jayalalithaa walking away with the honours for commissioning the Chennai Metro Rail, a project which is her own brainchild. The idea of Chennai Metro was first mooted by Jayalalithaa during her tenure as the Chief Minister during 2001 to 2005. But following a change of Government at the Centre, in which the DMK had crucial influence, the works of the Metro Rail project were launched only in 2009 during the DMK regime.
With the Assembly elections round the corner, the DMK is apprehensive of the AIADMK appropriating the entire credit of the project which has altered the landscape and skylines of Chennai. “The DMK, which has lost power both at the Centre and the State is finding itself in a No Man’s land for the first time in its history,” said N Kalyanasundaram, Tamil Nadu’s leading political chronicler. He said Karunanidhi is out to form a rainbow coalition against Jayalalithaa.
Taking note of Karunanidhi’s statement, Jayalalithaa has asked the AIADMK cadre to get ready for the Assembly elections. “Go to each household in the State and explain about the good works done by the AIADMK Government during the last four years,” Jayalalithaa told the party leaders and cadre.
According to S Kalyanaraman, Indologist and former senior consultant to Asian Development Bank, the Dravidian ideology has been confined to dustbin of Tamil Nadu history because of Amma. “For the Tamil Nadu people, Amma is the ultimate identity who can do no wrong. There is no way Karunanidhi or any other Dravidian parties can challenge Brand Amma . They are reduced to non-entities. Even Narendra Modi can chew his own khakhra. He has no impact in Tamil Nadu. It is Amma’s own land,” he said.
In the context of the strikes made against terror camps on the border of Manipur/Nagaland by the Indian Army; there has been number of discussions about national sovereignty and the role of individual States. Actually in the last few decades the activities of transnational corporations aided by tax havens on one side and terrorists on the other side have destroyed the concept of nation state and its sovereignty evolved after the 30 years’ war in 1648 in Westphalia. Westphalian sovereignty is the principle of international law that each nation state has sovereignty over its territory and domestic affairs, to the exclusion of all external powers. The principle of non-interference in another country’s domestic affairs, and that each state (no matter how large or small) is equal in international law is recognized. This doctrine named after the Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years’ War .Afterthat war major continental European states – the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, France, Sweden and the Dutch Republic – agreed to respect one another’s territorial integrity. As European influence spread across the globe, the Westphalian principles, especially the concept of sovereign states, became central to international law and to the prevailing world order.
Scholars of international relations have identified the modern, Western-originated, international system of states, multinational corporations, and organizations, as having begun at the Peace of Westphalia. Henry Kissinger in his important book on “world Order” says:
“No truly global “world order’ has ever existed. What passes for order in our time was devised in Western Europe nearly four centuries ago, at a peace conference in the German region of Westphalia, conducted without the involvement or even the awareness of most other continents or civilizations. A century of sectarian conflict and political upheaval across Central Europe had culminated in the Thirty Years’ war of 1618-48- a conflagration in which political and religious disputes commingled, combatants resorted to “total war” against population centers, and nearly a quarter of the population of Central Europe died from combat, disease, or starvation. The exhausted participants met to define a set of arrangements that world stanch the bloodletting. Religious unity had fractured with the survival and spread of Protestantism; Political diversity was inherent in the number of autonomous political units that had fought to a draw. So it was that in Europe the conditions of the contemporary world were approximated: a multiplicity of political units, none powerful enough to defeat all others, many adhering to contradictory philosophies and internal practices, in search of neutral rules to regulate their conduct and mitigate conflict.
“The Westphalian peace reflected a practical accommodation to reality, not a unique moral insight. It relied on a system of independent states refraining from interference in each other’s domestic affairs and checking each other’s ambitions through a general equilibrium of power. No single claim to truth or universal rule had prevailed in Europe’s contests. Instead, each state was assigned the attribute of sovereign power over its territory. Each would acknowledge the domestic structures and religious vocations of its fellow states as realities and refrain from challenging their existence. With a balance of power now perceived as natural and desirable, the ambitions of rules would be set in counterpoise against each other, at least in theory curtailing the scope of conflicts. Division and multiplicity, an accident of Europe’s history, became the hallmarks of a new system of international order with its own distinct philosophical outlook. In this sense the European effort to end its conflagration shaped and prefigured the modern sensibility: it reserved judgment on the absolute in favor of the practical and ecumenical; it sought to distill order from multiplicity and restraint.
“The seventeenth-century negotiators who crafted the peace of Westphalia did not think they were laying the foundation for a globally applicable system. They made no attempt to include neighboring Russia, which was then reconsolidating its own order after the nightmarish “Time of Troubles” by enshrining principles distinctly at odds with Westphalian balance; a single absolute ruler, a unified religious orthodoxy, and a program of territorial expansion in all directions. Nor did the other major power centers regard the Westphalian settlement (to the extent they learned of it at all) as relevant to their own regions.1
The three core principles on which the consensus rested are:
The principle of the sovereignty of states and the fundamental right of political self determination
The principle of legal equality between states
The principle of non-intervention of one state in the internal affairs of another state
Interesting all three are questioned by contemporary leaders of West and radical Islam.
Tony Blair the then Prime Minister of UK in his famous Chicago Address -1999-suggests
“The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts. Non -interference has long been considered an important principle of international order….
“But the principle of non-interference must be qualified in important respects. Acts of genocide can never be a purely internal matter. When oppression produces massive flows of refugees which unsettle neighbouring countries then they can properly be described as “threats to international peace and security”.2
The NATO intervention in Kosovo and Afghanistan as well as US intervention in Iraq provide recent examples of breakdown of idea of Westphalia. Similar is the humanitarian crisis faced by India regarding refugees from East Pakistan.
Interestingly Radical Islam also considered that the world order based on Westphalian consensus will collapse. “In the aftermath of the 11 March 2004 Madrid attacks, Lewis ‘Atiyyatullah, who claims to represent the terrorist networkal-Qaeda, declared that “the international system built up by the West since the Treaty of Westphalia will collapse; and a new international system will rise under the leadership of a mighty Islamic state.”3
The spread of ISIS across countries and activities of Boko Haram based in Nigeria in Kenya and Chad re-emphasis this point. Radical Islam do not accept territorial boundaries since it works for a global regime for global Ummah.
The recruitment by these terror organizations is also across continents and countries which does not respect territorial sovereignty. The talk about Caliphate indicates that they are trans-border organizations.
On the other side we find global corporations transcending sovereignty in search of global profits. For this they use tax havens as a tool.
Tax havens–numbering more than 70 jurisdictions–facilitate bank facilities with zero taxes and no-disclosure of the names and in many cases anonymous trusts holding accounts on behalf of beneficiary. Basically lawyers and Chartered accountants will deal with mattes. Sometimes a post box alone will be operative system. In the case of Bahamas one building seems to have had tens of thousands of companies registered there.
Luxemburg (population half a million!) registered companies of various countries have evaded taxes significantly from their legal jurisdiction. The key findings of the activities of transnational companies cutting across territorial jurisdiction is given below.
Pepsi, IKEA, AIG, Coach, Deutsche Bank, Abbott Laboratories and nearly 340 other companies have secured secret deals from Luxembourg that allowed many of them to slash their global tax bills.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has helped multinational companies obtain at least 548 tax rulings in Luxembourg from 2002 to 2010. These legal secret deals feature complex financial structures designed to create drastic tax reductions. The rulings provide written assurance that companies’ tax-saving plans will be viewed favorably by Luxembourg authorities.
Companies have channeled hundreds of billions of dollars through Luxembourg and saved billions of dollars in taxes. Some firms have enjoyed effective tax rates of less than 1 percent on the profits they’ve shuffled into Luxembourg.
Many of the tax deals exploited international tax mismatches that allowed companies to avoid taxes both in Luxembourg and elsewhere through the use of so-called hybrid loans.
In many cases Luxembourg subsidiaries handling hundreds of millions of dollars in business maintain little presence and conduct little economic activity in Luxembourg. One popular address – 5, rue Guillaume Kroll – is home to more than 1,600 companies.
A separate set of documents reported on by ICIJ on Dec. 9 expanded the list of companies seeking tax rulings from Luxembourg to include American entertainment icon The Walt Disney Co., politically controversial Koch industries and 33 other firms. The new files revealed that alongside PwC tax rulings were also brokered by Ernst & Young, Deloitte and KPMG, among other accounting firms.4
The big four accounting firms namely KPMG/E&Y/Deloitte and PwC have facilitated the movement of funds of clients across borders and territories to make tax “planning” easier for these companies. USA is literally waging war with major Giants like Amazon/Google/Microsoft etc. for not paying adequate taxes in USA in spite of being US based companies. Most of these companies have moved their profits to other Tax Havens.
Global firms such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon have come under fire for avoiding paying tax on their British sales. There seems to be a growing culture of naming and shaming companies. But what impact does it have?5
Royal Commission into tax loopholes a must—says a report in Australia.6
There is an increasing clamor in USA aboutCongress Should Pass the Stop Tax Haven Abuse Act to Combat International Tax Avoidance. This has been highlighted by both TAX justice network7 as well as Global Financial Integrity.8
A simple method of trade mis-invoicing by global companies using tax-havens have impacted developing countries nearly 730Billion USD in 2012 says Global Financial integrity. Another interesting finding by GFI is about terror financing using Tax haven route.
Because of the increasing wariness of MNCs using Tax havens for avoidance of taxes and the opaque ways of functioning of these off-shore structures, demands are growing about their activities and even closing down of these tax havens by European parliament etc.
Due to relentless pressure from OECD as well as G20 many of these secretive jurisdictions are becoming more transparent.
But the fact of the matter is these Trans National Companies and Tax Havens together have significantly undermined the concept of sovereignty and territorial jurisdictions.
It is ironical that Terror organisations on one side and Tax havens on the other have completely undermined Westphalia consensus. In that context countries like India have every right to exercise its freedom to pursue terrorists who are undermining its existence whether sponsored by foreign countries or home grown. The concept of territorial jurisdictions and sovereignty are no more valid in the context of terror organisations since they damage both India and its own host countries over period of time. India must protect its national interests and institutions by challenging inimical forces wherever they are located without worrying about Westphalia consensus.
(Author is Professor of Finance at IIM-Bangalore, views are Personal)
Endnotes
Henry Kissinger: World order: pp. 2-3: Penguin Press –New York 2014
The site was named Lothal, the first Harappan site with a dock that remained operational till 1600 BC.
AHMEDABAD: Harappan site Lothal, which is believed to be the world's first naval dockyard located 80-km from Ahmedabad, has fallen into disrepair around six decades after archaeologist S R Rao had excavated it.
The archaeologist's daughter, Nalini, said she was heartbroken to see "monumental apathy and neglect" of her father's find when she visited Lothal this week ahead of the SR Rao Memorial Lecture at IIM-Ahmedabad on Sunday.
"I was pained to see crumbling bricks and no attempts to preserve the site," said Nalini, a world art professor at Soka University in the US.
"In countries like Egypt and China that are home to ancient civilizations one witnesses extreme regard for conservation, including restricted entry, hands-off directives and weather proofing.''
Nalini said Lothal has none of this. "There are no guides or leaflets to educate visitors about Lothal's importance in India's history,'' she said.
"The site maybe on every tourist map, but one cannot find a bottle of water for several kilometers.''
Nalini, who would release a booklet on Lothal remains at IIM-A, said she is planning a documentary on the ancient port town to highlight her father's legacy.
S R Rao, an Archaeological Survey of India archeologist, had ordered the excavation when he found a mound near Saragwala village in Ahmedabad district in 1954.
The excavation lasted till 1962 and led to the unearthing of an acropolis that had earliest artifacts dating back to 2450 BCE.
The site was named Lothal, the first Harappan site with a dock that remained operational till 1600 BCE.
Mirror: http://tinyurl.com/pz24oqu I suggest --based on the rebus-metonymy-layered (mlecchita vikalpa) Indus cipher readings of hieroglyphs--, that the sandakada pahana'entrance stepstones' of Anuradhapura (from ca. 3rd cent. BCE) are offerings made by guilds of metalcaster artisans to temples. This is evidence of metalcaster guilds at work in the Anuradhapura region on the banks of Mahaweli river ca. 3rd cent. BCE. It is a challenge in archaeometallurgy to trace the Maritime Tin Road links from Hanoi, Vietnam to Haifa, Israel --across the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf, Ancient Near East and Eurasia, the Levant -- making available copper and tin to foster the Bronze Age revolution which started ca. 5th millennium BCE and flourished on over 2600 sites of Sarasvati-Sindhu civilization. Lankarama, dhatugabha (dagoba), Photo: 1905. http://lankapura.com/2009/05/lankarama-dagoba-ruined-temple-in-anuradhapura-ceylon-1908-1909/ Quarts moonstone. Thanthirimale Archaeology reserve, Sri Lanka Discovered in 1870. Anuradhapura Pavilion (No. 179). Janitor at head of steps 1 foot 2 in. wide and 2 feet 5 in. high; moonstone at foot of steps of a pavilion. http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O146539/anuradhapura-newly-discovered-pavilion-no-photograph-lawton-joseph/ sandakada pahana at the entrance of the Seema Malaka temple, a structure on Beira Lake, Sri Lanka. sandakada pahana. Anuradhapura. sandakada pahana. Samangala, Ampara, Sri Lanka A sandakada pahana of the ancient Anuradhapura kingdom of Sri Lanka. "A half lotus was carved in the centre, which was enclosed by several concentric bands. The first band from the half lotus is decorated with a procession of swans, followed by a band with an intricate foliage design known as liyavel. The third band has carvings of four animals; elephants, lions, horses, and bulls. These four animals follow each other in a procession..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandakada_pahana [Note: liya ʻcreeperʼ(Sinhala); latā1 f. ʻ creeper ʼ Mn.Pali (CDIAL 10928).] According to Senarath Paranavitana, the sandakada pahana symbolises the cycle of Saṃsāra. The liyavel symbolise worldly desires (Taṇhā) and the lotus depicts the final achievement of Nirvana. (Diganwela, T. (1998). කලා ඉතිහාසය (History of Art)(in Sinhala). Wasana Publishers, p.12). The ancient chronicle Mahavamsa and Pali literature such as the Samantapasadika refer to the sandakada pahana as patika. The outermost band is interpreted as signifying flames of a fire-altar. sandakada pahana literally means 'union stone', i.e. a stone offering put together by the guild of artisans. It is often interpreted in popular etyma as a moonstone because of the circular shape. Who are the members of the guild who made this stone offering? The artisans are gaṇa,'guild'.gaṇá m. ʻ troop, flock ʼ RV. [Poss. (despite doubts in EWA i 316) < *gr̥ṇa -- ʻ telling ʼ (cf. *gr̥nti -- and esp. gaṇáyati ʻ tells one's number (of troop of flock) ʼ Kāś. -- √g&rcirclemacr;3] Pa. Pk. gaṇa -- m. ʻ troop, flock ʼ; Tor. (Biddulph) gan m. ʻ herd ʼ; K. gan m. ʻ beehive ʼ = mã̄cha -- gan m.; WPah. bhal. gaṇ m. pl. ʻ bees ʼ; Si. gaṇaya ʻ company ʼ (CDIAL 3988) Normally depicted as dwarfs who are the retinue of Kubera and also Siva and Ganapati. They are hieroglyph: kharvá(RV. ákharva -- ) ʻ mutilated, imperfect ʼ TS., ʻ dwarfish ʼ lex., khárvaka -- AV., khalvāṭa -- ʻ bald ʼ Bhartr̥. [ʻ Defective ʼ word, cf. *karva -- beside Av. kaurva -- ʻ bald ʼ (ʻshortʼ H. W. Bailey BSOS vi 598 ff.), Pers. karve ʻ decayed teeth ʼ ← Sogd. krw -- W. B. Henning BSOS x 96. EWA i 304 rejects non -- IE. origin, but if they are connected with kárvati, khárvati, gárvati ʻ is haughty ʼ Dhātup., there is the characteristic interchange of initial in such words.] Pk. khavva -- ʻ hunchbacked, dwarfish ʼ, m. ʻ left hand ʼ, khava -- m.; Kt. kawə ʻ left -- hand ʼ, Kal. urt. khāvi, Kho. koh, Sh. gil. khăbŭ, gur. khā, f. khaī, koh. khăbīnṷ (X dákṣiṇa -- ); S. khaḇo, L. khabbā, (Ju.) khaḇḇā, P. khabbā → H. -- Ext. with -- la -- : Ash. kawál ʻ left -- hand ʼ, Kal. khāˊulī; -- with -- ṭa -- : Wg. kawṛīˊ, Bashg. kō̃war, Paš. xōṛi f., Shum. xauṛi f., Kal. rumb. khäˊuŕi, K. khōworu; S. khāḇaṛu ʻ left -- handed ʼ (< *khārvaṭa -- ?); <-> with -- āṭa -- (cf. khalvāṭa -- ): Or. khabāḍibā ʻ to do a thing clumsily ʼ; -- with -- ra -- : Or. khabirā ʻ limping ʼ. -- Kaf. forms with k -- listed above perh. < *karva -- . -- Si. kurā ʻ dwarf ʼ Geiger ES 26, poss. < *kharuva -- .A. khābṭā ʻ dwarfish ʼ (CDIAL 3832) Rebus: karuvā ʻ artist ʼ(Sinhala): kharva'one of the nine nidhis or navanidhi of Kubera'. kārú -- ,°uka -- m. ʻ artisan ʼ Mn. [√kr̥1] Pa. kāru -- , °uka -- m., Pk. kāru -- m.; A. B. kāru ʻ artist ʼ; Or. kāru ʻ artisan, servant ʼ, kāruā ʻ expert, deft ʼ; G. kāru m. ʻ artisan ʼ; Si. karuvā ʻ artist ʼ (CDIAL 3066) The hieroglyphs in the Indus Script tradition engraved on such stones provide the clue. Metalworker artisan guilds made this stone offering as a stepping stone at the entrance of the temple, sacred place of worship. The artisan union or guild is composed of: Anser indicus or bar-headed goose is one of the world's highest-flying birds, flies across Himalayas at over 27,000 ft.and migrates across Tibet, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Russia before crossing the Himalaya to enter India and Sri Lanka. 1.Hieroglyph: anser indicus: कारंडव [ kāraṇḍava ] m S A drake or sort of duck. कारंडवीf S The female. (Marathi) kāraṇḍava m. ʻ a kind of duck ʼ MBh. [Cf. kāraṇḍa- m. ʻ id. ʼ R., karēṭu -- m. ʻ Numidian crane ʼ lex.: see karaṭa -- 1] Pa. kāraṇḍava -- m. ʻ a kind of duck ʼ; Pk. kāraṁḍa -- , °ḍaga -- , °ḍava -- m. ʻ a partic. kind of bird ʼ; S. kānero m. ʻ a partic. kind of water bird ʼ < *kāreno.(CDIAL 3059) S. karaṛa -- ḍhī˜gu m. ʻ a very large aquatic bird ʼ; L. karṛā m., °ṛī f. ʻ the common teal ʼ.(CDIAL 2787) Rebus: करडा(p. 137) [ karaḍā ] Hard from alloy--iron, silver &c (Marathi) Rebus 2: karaṇḍi'fire-god' (Remo) 2. Hieroglyph: elephant: kara'trunk of elephant'; ibha'elephant' (karabha 'elephant'(CDIAL 2797) Rebus: karba 'iron'; ajirda karba'very hard iron' (Tulu) [ajirda cognate ayas'metal'; ayiri 'iron'] 3. Hieroglyph 1: humped bull, zebu: poLa'bull dedicated to the gods'; Hieroglyph 2: bull, ox: barad, barat'bull'
Rebus 1: poL 'magnetite iron ore' Rebus 2: भरत(p. 603) [ bharata ] n A factitious metal compounded of copper, pewter, tin &c (Marathi) 4. Hieroglyph: lion: arya 'lion' Rebus: arya 'noble person' ara 'brass' [It is possible that the artist was signifying a tiger: kola'tiger' Rebus: kol'working in iron'; kolle 'blacksmith'; kolimi 'smithy, forge'; kole.l 'smithy, temple' -- glosses of Indian sprachbund (speech union)] 5. Hieroglyph: wild ass: khara 'wild ass' Rebus: khAr 'blacksmith' Thus, all hieroglyphs point to metalworkers, metalcasters, blacksmith in particular: working in iron, alloys such as bharata, brass. sandakada is derived fromPali saṁdhāya'on account of'; sandhāna 'union';sandahati 'puts together': saṁdhāya (absol. ʻ having fixed on ʼ) ʻ with reference to ʼ BHSk. [√dhā] Pa. sandhāya ʻ with reference to ʼ; -- Si. san̆dahā, san̆dā postp. ʻ on account of ʼ (EGS 173) prob. ← Pa.(CDIAL 12911)saṁdhāˊna n. ʻ joint, union ʼ TS., ʻ mixing (a drink) ʼ ŚārṅgS., ʻ sour rice gruel ʼ lex., ʻ bell -- metal ʼ MW., °nī -- f. ʻ foundry ʼ lex. [√dhā]*; Pa. sandhāna -- n. ʻ union, fetter ʼ (CDIAL 12909) sáṁdadhāti ʻ places on, combines ʼ RV., inf. saṁdhitum Ep. [Semant. cf. saṁdhāˊ -- f. ʻ union ʼ AV. ~ ʻ mixture of a beverage ʼ lex. -- √dhā] Pa. sandahati ʻ puts together ʼ, sandahana -- n. ʻ applying (arrow to bowstring) ʼ; Pk. saṁdhāi, saṁdhēi, saṁdhaï ʻ joins ʼ, pp. saṁdhia -- , saṁdhaṇa -- n.; K. sanun ʻ to mingle, penetrate ʼ; S. sandhaṇu ʻ to pickle ʼ, L. sãdhaṇ; WPah.bhal. sannṇū ʻ to knead flour ʼ, rudh. sannnā; Ku. sānṇo ʻ to mix with ingredients, immerse in spices, make a sauce of, pickle ʼ; N. sã̄dhnu, sã̄dnu ʻ to pickle ʼ; A. xāniba ʻ to mix, knead, plaster ʼ; Or. sāndhibā, sāndibā, (Sambhalpur) sānibā ʻ to mix up, knead ʼ; Bhoj. sānal ʻ to mix ʼ; OAw. sāṁdhaï ʻ aims, fixes, prepares pickles ʼ, lakh. sānab ʻ to mix ʼ; H. sānnā ʻ to mix, knead ʼ; OMarw. sāṁdhaï ʻ aims ʼ; G. sã̄dhvũ ʻ to unite, attach ʼ; M. sã̄dhṇẽ, sã̄dṇẽ ʻ to join (tr.), be joined, come together ʼ. -- Si. hananavā, an° ʻ to mix, knead (dough or clay) ʼ prob. (and other forms with -- an(n) -- or -- ān -- poss.) < sáṁnayati which appears to have collided with sáṁdadhāti. (CDIAL 12898) pahana is derived from Pali pāsāṇa,'stone':pāṣāṇá ʻ stone ʼ ṢaḍvBr. 2. pāṣāṇī -- f. ʻ small stone used as a weight ʼ lex. [Cf. pāṣī -- . Early occurrence of -- h -- in Pk. and thence in NIA. (though in S. P. Si. -- ṣ<-> regularly > -- h -- ) is unexplained. Poss. connexion with *pāhāḍa -- ]1. Pa. pāsāṇa -- , °aka -- m. ʻ stone, rock ʼ, Pk. pāsāṇa -- , pāhā̆ṇa -- m.; S. pahaṇu m. ʻ stone ʼ, °ṇī f. ʻ pebble ʼ; P. pāhaṇ m. ʻ stone ʼ, Mth. pāhan, OAw.pāhana m., H. pāhā̆n m., OG. pāhaṇiiṁ inst. sg. m., G. pāṇ, pahāṇɔ, pāṇɔ m., Si. pahaṇa, pāṇa. -- X śāna -- .2. B. pāṣāṇ ʻ the excess of weight in one scale which disturbs the equipoise ʼ.S.kcch. pāyaṇ, pāyṇo, pāṇo m. ʻ stone ʼ.(CDIAL 8138) S. Kalyanaraman Sarasvati Research Center July 12, 2015
Published: July 13, 2015 17:07 IST | Updated: July 13, 2015 17:22 IST New Delhi, July 13, 2015
TN urges Centre to start work on interlinking rivers
IANS
The Hindu
Tamil Nadu Finance and Public Works Minister O. Panneerselvam: “It is our earnest request that work at the ground level be started immediately to interlink the peninsular rivers.” File photo: B. Jothi Ramalingam
The State made this demand during the fifth meeting of the Special Committee for Interlinking of Rivers in New Delhi on Monday.
Tamil Nadu Finance and Public Works Minister O. Panneerselvam on Monday urged the central government to start the work of interlinking the peninsular rivers immediately.
“It is our earnest request that work at the ground level be started immediately to interlink the peninsular rivers,” he said at the fifth meeting of the Special Committee for Interlinking of Rivers held here.
He said action may be taken to commence forthwith the ground work for the speedy implementation of the interlinking of rivers project, particularly the peninsular component of the Mahanadi-Godavari-Krishna-Pennar-Palar-Cauvery-Vaigai-Gundar link system and the Pamba-Achankovil-Vaippar link so that the people of Tamil Nadu are benefited.
Mr. Panneerselvam said Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Ms. Jayalalithaa is of the firm view that in the interlinking projects, the rights of use of water flowing from the existing Inter State Agreements should not be disturbed and that the aim should be to increase the availability of water to the deficit states like Tamil Nadu.
The Minister said Tamil Nadu’s long standing demand for diversion of about 22 tmcft of water of the west flowing rivers of Pamba and Achankovil (both in Kerala) to Vaippar Basin in Tamil Nadu, to benefit the southern districts, should be implemented expeditiously, since the feasibility has already been established.
What was the robbed tele exchange used for? What data was transferred using 700+ high capacity wi-fi lines? Who received the data? Did the data transfers include data involving national security?
CBI should investigate and provide the answers. Avoiding payment of telephone line charges is only a thin end of the wedge.
Gurumurthy's expose is shocking beyond belief. It is shocking that the principal law officer of NaMo Government compromises national security.
NaMo, restitute kaalaadhan, the nation trusts you.
S. Kalyanaraman
Sarasvati Research Center
Mr Attorney, You Got Facts, Law Right on Marans?
By S Gurumurthy
Published: 13th July 2015 04:25 AM
Former communications minister Dayanidhi Maran | PTI
CHENNAI: Provide “clinching evidence” that can prove allowing Sun TV network’s operation would impinge upon national security, reported the media on July 11. This is not Marans demanding from the Home Ministry. But this is the Information and Broadcasting Ministry asking the Home Ministry. The issue has ceased to be Maran versus the Home Ministry anymore. It is now I&B Ministry versus the Home Ministry. Marans no more need to argue their case. The I&B Ministry seems to have taken their Vakalat.
This interesting duel became public last month with a report in a Maran-friendly media, on June 20, 2015 that, in a shot in the arm for the Kalanithi Maran-promoted Sun TV network, Attorney-General Mukul Rohatgi has said the refusal by the Ministry of Home Affairs to grant security licence to the media group is “not legal”. The I&B Ministry sought and got the AG’s opinion, which it seemed to be looking for. The AG had signed the opinion on June 18. It means the media got it within 24 hours, on 19th, for it to print on 20th. Maybe the opinion had reached the media before the Home Ministry got it. A week later, on June 28, media reported that the Home Ministry, unfazed, rejected the AG’s opinion and stood its ground that Sun TV network did not deserve security clearance.
HC exposes fraud Sun TV network’s security issue came to light in August last year.
On August 20, 2014, the NDA’s I&B ministry cancelled the permit granted by the UPA government in 2012 to the Maran family-owned Kal Cables to run its cable network. Reason: it had not obtained security clearance from the Home Ministry. Kal Cables, which distributes Sun TV network channels, had been operating since April 2003. How come then it was faulted for not obtaining security clearance after nine years, in August 2014? In the answer to the question lay buried Marans’ fraud when Dayanidhi Maran was the self-proclaimed ‘Prime Minister’ of Telecom from 2004 to 2007 and textile minister from 2009 to 2011.
The wrongdoing of Marans was exposed by the judgment of Madras High Court (Sept 5, 2014) on the Kal Cables’ writ against the cancellation of its permit. The headline of the judgment “that the court had set aside cancellation on the ground that no opportunity was given to Kal Cables by the Home Ministry” was deceptively in Marans’ favour. The heart of the judgment was deadly against them.
From the text of his opinion it is clear that the AG had read, or was shown, only the headline of the judgment. That perhaps led him to believe that the High Court had gone totally against the Home Ministry. The judgment, one of the finest pieces of prose on facts and law, was delivered by Justice V Ramasubramaniam. Read on for how devastating is the indictment of Marans by the learned judge - not a word of which figures in the AG’s opinion. Actually, the court was so hard on Dayanidhi Maran that he had to join the appeal against the judgment asking that the court’s indictment of him be expunged. Are you aware of this? Mr AG. You may not be because you had said in your opinion that you were just “informed” of the appeal proceedings.
File Disappears for 7 Years
First, the Justice faulted the original permit given to Kal Cables. He had said that government could take action against Kal Cables - read Marans - about the manner in which ‘provisional’ permission for 10 years was granted to it on September 30, 2006, when its promoter Dayanidhi Maran was a Union Minister too. The court noticed two startling facts, which you failed to, Mr AG. First, the “provisional” permission given was “subject to security clearance”, which Kal Cables never got and yet it had been operating its cable network from 2006. Next, more shocking, the Kal Cables file containing the provisional permit subject to security clearance just disappeared and did not move to the Home Ministry at all. It was detained in the I&B Ministry for 7 years from 2006 till 2013! That meant that even the UPA government, in which Maran was minister for 5 out of 10 years and his party the DMK was alliance partner for 10 years, could not give security clearance to Marans. Why? Why was the file kept back from the Home Ministry? These questions need answers first. The AG, who obviously believed that the court had decided in Marans’ favour, seems to be unaware that it had almost suggested that the government could act against Marans on how permission was given in 2006 and how the file was kept away from the Home Ministry for 7 years. Mr AG, had you been aware of this, would you not support the court order for action against the Marans?
Marans Ducked Security Clearance
Next, the law relating to TV network and cables was amended in the year 2011 making ‘security clearance’ condition precedent for registering operators of both businesses. But existing operators were allowed the facility of deemed registration for the remaining period of their permission. Kal Cables, which had got provisional permission till Sept 29, 2016, requested for deemed registration under the new law, on December 18, 2012, representing “we have obtained due permission from the Ministry.” Simultaneously it also gave undertaking to comply with the Act, rules, regulations, order, directions or guidelines. This representation of Kal Cables that it had “due” permission was fraudulent as the stipulation of “security” clearance was not complied with.
Consequently, the undertaking that it had complied with the law, rules and directions was equally fraudulent. And yet, on June 19, 2012, Kal Cables got deemed registration for 10 years from Sept 30, 2006 - without complying with the stipulation of security clearance.
The High Court has ruled that the requirement of security clearance was always part of the rules. Kal Cables had ducked this vital requirement as the file that disappeared did not go to the Home Ministry. Intriguing, isn’t it? Mr AG, will you say that the government need not act against Marans despite the court saying it can?
Threat, Said Maran’s Ministry
The AG has noted in his opinion that, “the CBI is investigating Dayanidhi Maran for setting up 300 illegal telephone lines at Kalanidhi Maran’s home to facilitate SUN TV Service thereby gaining pecuniary advantage of Rs 443 cr.”
But the AG dismisses it as just an economic offence. Is it just that, Mr AG? Or, is it just the Home Ministry’s view that illegal telephone lines are security threat? No.
Are you aware, Mr AG, that it has been the long-held view of the Telecom Ministry itself that illegal telephone exchanges are a grave threat to national security? A full year before Dayanidhi Maran became Telecom Minister, how illegal telephones were security threat was discussed at the meeting on April 26, 2003, chaired by the Telecom Secretary himself and attended by intelligence agencies and cellular operators. Taking note of this meeting, in its order of May 24, 2010, the Telecom Appellate Tribunal [TDSAT] ruled: “Operation of clandestine/illegal telecommunications facilities has serious implications from national security point of view.” This is a matter of serious concern and all possible steps need to be taken by all concerned to curb such activities. Mr AG, was this brought to your notice?
Mr AG, is not the illegal and secret telephone exchange operated by the Telecom Minister himself even more serious - an undetectable subversion? Even more grave because, being the minister’s secret lines, the exchange was kept out of the eye of the system deliberately. Mr AG, does not the operation of 764 illegal high speed lines, which could carry unmonitored and undetected millions of pages of documents and voice and video, by the very man entrusted to protect national security as per the decision of his own ministry in 2003, make the offence graver? Mr AG, are you not aware that the Indian Telegraph Rules, 1951 prohibit interconnection of ISDN lines to the public telecommunications network?
Why, do you know? Because carrying traffic from Private Network to Public Network and vice versa will result in flow of unmonitored traffic from a private network to the public network bypassing the authorised “monitor-able” gateways and result in security threat to the nation. This is precisely what Marans’ illegal exchange of 764 ISDN lines did.
Kept connected the 764 fraudulent lines to public network for three years. Can you deny Mr AG, that it was potential danger to national security? On top of all this, Maran, superseding a senior official of BSNL chose a person close to a TADA detainee to use the 764 smuggled high speed telephone lines? [NIE dated July 3, 2015] Mr AG, would you not advise a probe into whether there could be actual national security breach?
Post Script: Mr AG, do you remember the Blackberry Case? The order of the government to ban Blackberry unless it stopped providing encrypted content was based on the perception of potential threat to national security. If encrypted communication of just a couple of sentences is potential threat to national security, is not secret and unlicensed telephone exchange of 764 high speed lines, which could carry a reservoir of data - video and voice - without being detected, not potential threat to national security? Think about it Mr AG.
Mr AG, Isn't Maran Money Laundering Threat to National Security?
By S Gurumurthy
Published: 14th July 2015 03:26 AM
CHENNAI: The Attorney General’s firm opinion is that economic offences, which include charges of money laundering, do not constitute a threat to national security.
The AG says that to hold Marans’ offences as constituting prejudice to the security of the state, they must have done something “threatening national security”, in the sense of actual or imminent threat, to deny them security clearance. The test of actual and imminent threat adopted by the AG to exonerate Marans seems totally misconceived. The threat to national security need not be actual or imminent. Even potential threat prejudices national security. The Cable Television Network (Regulation) Act 2000 uses the words “in the interest of the security of India” or the words “in the interest of the security of the State”. They comprehend potential threat, which is markedly different from “threatening the security of India” in the sense of actual threat. According to the Home Ministry, Marans have caused prejudice to the security of the State in two ways.
One, they had set up an unlicenced, clandestine and unmonitored telephone exchange of 764 high-speed telephone lines, which undeniably constitute potential threat to national security [Mr Attorney, you got facts and law right on Marans? NIE June 13, 2015]. Two, they also stand charged for money laundering, which according to the Home Ministry constitutes potential threat to economic security of India. A critique of the AG’s view to the contrary not only confirms the Home Ministry’s view, but leads to the position that his view that money laundering is no threat to national security is itself a national security risk. Read on.
Security of State
The AG says that Marans’ television and cable businesses are protected under the right to freedom of expression guaranteed under Art 19(1) (a) of the Constitution. The freedom is only subject to the restrictions imposed by Art 19(2).
One such restriction, security of the state, is discussed by the AG in his opinion. The AG refers to the decided cases on Art 19 to contend that “Security of State” in Art 19(2) means crime or violence intended to overthrow the government, levying war and rebellion against the government, external aggression and crimes and the like.
On the decided cases, the AG says that, from the stand of the Home Ministry itself, it is clear that none of the cases instituted against the Marans — meaning including the charge of money laundering — would fall under threat to “national security”.
By that logic, the AG then boldly says that the Home Ministry “seem to suggest that economic security of the state should be covered under the Article 19(2) of the Constitution. I do not warrant for the same”.
Mr AG, do you really mean that economic security is not comprehended within the meaning of security of the State in Art 19(2)?
Mukul RahtogiIt is obvious that the AG has not been updated on the law, including on the Madras High Court judgment on Kal Cables, by those who had briefed him. In the Kal Cables judgment, which the AG is relying on to give his opinion, the Madras High Court has discussed extensively whether economic security is integral to security of the State. The court had referred to a recent judgment of the Supreme Court of India (in the case of Ex-Armymen’s Protection Services Private Limited Vs. Union of India, 2014). In that case, saying that while it is difficult to define in exact terms as to what national security is, the SC indicated that national security would include economic solidarity and strength. The court also added that what constitutes “security” is a matter of policy for the government to decide and not for the court to define. Mr AG, your opinion does not refer to this judgment or that of the Madras High Court at all. Both say that what is security is a matter of government policy and economic security is integral to it. Yet, you say, Mr AG, in your opinion that economic security is not integral to national security according to courts — thus contradicting both the Supreme Court and the High Court. Referring to the Supreme Court view and also the abuse of power by the Marans noticed by it, the Madras High Court has gone further and ruled, “May be a time has come to hold that the abuse of official position by a person and amassing of wealth of unimaginable proportions, is an assault on the security of the State. Economic aggression may soon become more dangerous than military aggression.”
Mr AG, you seem to be unaware of this observation of the High Court in Marans’ case itself, which directly conflicts with your opinion.
AG Needs to Update Himself
Again, the AG’s contention that economic security is not comprehended within national security is clearly based on an outdated view of law. The AG needs to be updated on this branch of law fast in the interest of national security, as he will be advising and arguing for the government time and again on this vital issue. The world has changed dramatically in the last couple of decades. The Center for Strategic Conferencing Institute for National Strategic Studies 2011 [National Defense University Press Washington, DC] says: “Economic security is a major element of national security, even as borders are less important than ever.” The Congressional Research Service Report to US Congress titled Economics and National Security: Issues and Implications for US Policy [Jan 4, 2011] says that the US national security consists, among others, first, physical security and second, economic security. How then can any one doubt that economic security is integral to national security? Then, Mr AG, is not your view that in Art 19(2) of the Constitution of India “there is no concept of economic security which the Home Ministry seeks to rely on” clearly outdated? The Home Ministry seems to be far more updated on the issue than you, Mr AG.
Money Laundering: Threat to Security
Mr AG, you say that, in your considered view the “charge of economic offences for denying security clearance in the instant case cannot amount to threatening national security.” It means that economic offences are no threat to national security. Now see how outdated are the AG’s view here too. A report on Economic Crimes by the Indian Audit and Accounts Service [2007] says: There is a growing recognition in the world that the economic offences are, many times, part of other serious crimes posing serious threat to the security of the nation.” And, of all economic offences that endanger national security, money laundering is the most serious.
A report titled “Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing: A Global Threat” published by the US Department of State [2004] says that money laundering poses international and national security threats through corruption of officials and legal systems and threatens the financial stability of countries and the international free flow of capital. Mr AG, none of the cases relied on by you had had occasion to consider whether money laundering is a threat to national security. They are, therefore, no authority to say that money laundering is not a national security threat. Mr AG, can you deny this? And yet you say that according to decided cases economic security or economic offences are not integral to national security.
Mr AG, bribery and money laundering are considered the world over as a deadly combination against national security. You seem to have ignored this totally. You have even failed to notice the Preamble to UN Convention On Corruption to which India is a signatory. The UN Convention has noted that all member states are concerned about the seriousness of problems and threats posed by corruption “to the stability and security of societies” and points to links between corruption and other forms of crime, “in particular, organised crime and economic crime, including money laundering” and that cases involving vast quantity of assets can threaten political stability and security of the country”. The Marans have been charged with both bribery and money laundering, Mr AG. They allegedly got paid `740 crore for Dayanidhi Maran, as Minister, pressuring a businessman who owned the Aircel cellular company to sell his company to Maxis Group of Malaysia. They are believed to have laundered the bribe back as genuine investment in Sun Group. The Enforcement Directorate has seized the asset representing the bribe under the money laundering law. This is precisely what money laundering means. An article in the US Federal Bureau of Investigation Law Enforcement Bulletin [May 2001] titled “Money Laundering: A Global Threat and the International Community’s Response” defines money laundering as “the process by which one conceals the existence, illegal source, or illegal application of income to make it appear legitimate”. This is precisely the charge against the Marans. They are alleged to have concealed the bribe taken by them in the Maxis deal and recycled it to make it appear as legitimate capital.
Mr AG, will you still assert that the allegation of money laundering against the Marans is no threat to national security? No, you cannot. And how ridiculous then it is for the I&B Ministry to ask the Home Ministry for “clinching evidence” that can prove allowing Sun TV network operate would impinge upon national security?
Finally Mr AG, will you withdraw your opinion and give another one consistent with the latest law and correct facts?
Computing the financial loss due to the telexchange robbery:
Rs. 1.78 cr. installation charges
Rs. Several hundred crores call (metre-less) charges
Rs. Several lakh crores for cost of data transferred on 364 + 353 high-end lines (since 2004, 2006)
Who knows? The nation's valuable data archives might have been sold to foreign bidders. Who knows? CBI and NSA have to find out.
Surely, the Hon'ble HC should support the law-enforcement agency seeking prosecution of the looters of nation's wealth.
NaMo, restitute kaalaadhan. The nation trusts you.
Kalyanaraman
CBI Urges Madras HC to Cancel Maran's Bail in Illegal BSNL Lines Case
By Express News Service
Published:17th July 2015 03:33 AM
Former communications minister Dayanidhi Maran | PTI
CHENNAI: Accusing former Union Telecom Minister Dayanidhi Maran of deliberately suppressing information in the multi-crore illegal BSNL Telephone Exchange scandal to save himself and others, the CBI on Thursday moved the Madras High Court to cancel his anticipatory bail so that he can be taken into custody for interrogation.
“The accused (Maran), despite sustained examination during his presence before the Investigation Officer, did not intentionally furnish any relevant information, which are in his exclusive knowledge, was evasive, giving contradictory replies and was deliberately hiding the facts to save himself and others,” CBI Deputy Superintendent of Police Rajesh Kumar said in his petition. Justice R Subbiah had on June 30 granted six weeks anticipatory bail to Maran after the CBI summoned him to New Delhi for questioning in connection with the setting up of an illegal telephone exchange at his houses in Chennai when he was Telecom Minister in UPA-I Government.
The CBI officer said that though Maran was examined thoroughly from July 1 to 3, he retracted from his earlier version and gave many evasive answers to the questions put before him. “He was also asked to provide some information, which was also not complete and did not match with the statement given by him during his examination and is not cooperating with the investigation. I submit that in the nature of the case, the CBI is of the opinion that custodial interrogation of Maran is required,” the officer said.
Explaining the seriousness of the crime that Maran was accused of committing, Kumar in his affidavit said, as a Member of Parliament, the former was entitled to only three telephone connections (one for his constituency, one for Delhi residence and one broadband connection) and two mobile connections, subject to an annual cumulative consumption of 1,50,000 calls.
Whereas, Maran in collusion with the then BSNL Chennai Telephones Chief General Manager K Brahmadathan, illegally obtained 364 actual telephone numbers/lines consisting therein high end connections at his Gopalapuram residence in Chennai under service category. No bills were raised and no payments were made to BSNL towards these connections. “To bring these connections under Service Category, the hirer/billing address was provided as the office of the CGM, BSNL Chennai Telephones. Maran also illegally obtained 19 pre-paid mobile SIM cards (including 10 vanity number SIM cards) under Service Category. These SIM cards were used by the Sun TV staff without payments to BSNL,” the officer said.
Besides, in December 2006 when Maran shifted his residence to Boat Club Road, a proposal to shift the existing facilities to the new bungalow was mooted in collusion with the new BSNL CGM M P Velusamy. During this shifting process, the accused illegally obtained another 363 high end connections under service category. “It is pertinent to mention here that the previous connections were not disconnected,” he pointed out.
“Maran had also obtained 13 connections at his New Delhi residence from MTNL, New Delhi including ISDN connections under service category. Besides, one 8+8 MBPS leased line was also obtained illegally under service category. It is pertinent to note that MTNL never took the approval of the Department of Telecommunications for the ISDN and leased line circuits, which clearly established that the ISDN connections and lease line circuits cannot be provided to anybody including the Minister under the service category,” the affidavit said. While the CBI said that an estimated loss amounting to Rs 1,78,71,391 was arrived at as the wrongful loss caused to the exchequer, this figure was only towards installation charges as no meters were fixed. “The total loss incurred could not be immediately quantified and is being investigated,” the affidavit said, thereby indirectly endorsing Express reports which put the probable loss at several hundred crores.
[quote]I was recently “bombed” by an online petition with a sensational charge that I had “plagiarised” in my earlier book, Indra’s Net. The demand was that publishers must withdraw my books. The accusation is that in nine different instances in Indra’s Net, I should have cited a certain book by Andrew Nicholson, which I failed to do.
However, the facts are different: I do cite Nicholson’s book about 10 times in the main text with an additional 20 references in the endnotes. Clearly, I am informing the reader that I utilise Nicholson’s ideas with a combination of his words and mine. I do not cite him after every single sentence where I use him, but it is unambiguously clear when reading entire passages of my book that I am discussing his works. Unfortunately, none of those attacking me have bothered to acknowledge this simple fact. Those passing judgment need to figure out why someone wanting to plagiarise a source would bother referencing it about 30 times.
Highly experienced writers say this is a common grey area in scholarship, with no absolute standard or norm. In the worst case they see this as a simple copyediting human error – but not critical because Nicholson does get ample references and hence the purpose of citing gets satisfied in spirit if not in every literal instance.
The routine method for someone who finds errors in a book is to write to the publisher asking for corrections. Publishers routinely process this. We are not in the era when commandments were carved in stone. In the digital age, content does change routinely, due to various factors including inadvertent copy editing errors.
There is a general understanding among publishers and authors that any errors/addendums get routinely fixed in the next print run. My earlier book, Being Different, has had over 100 small changes made over several print runs – ranging from cosmetic to more significant. These were brought to our attention by readers in a constructive manner as well as those we detected ourselves. None were intentional and none caused any controversy. Each of my books has 300 to 600 citations of various sources, and my editors and I do the best we can to cite accurately. But we are not perfect. Neither me, nor my publisher have a problem in adding quotation marks or citing the source each and every time in the next print. I am happy to do that.
But I suspect the intention is not to help the discourse (and me) become more accurate, but rather to shut me and others out of the debate altogether. The demand to withdraw books (as opposed to correcting the issues) is unprecedented in such a situation. It is a tactic to make a mountain out of a molehill or fake a molehill to make a mountain. Those very voices who hated Dinanath Batra for asking for a book to be withdrawn, are now asking for my books to be withdrawn.
An independent analysis done by serious readers was posted online and out of the nine alleged omissions, they found that six were properly acknowledged, albeit not using the precise format required by certain Western conventions. In the other three cases, there could be a misunderstanding if someone wants to nit-pick, although a reader of the entire chapter would get a clear sense of the source being acknowledged.
However, there is much more going on in the background. The complaint comes from some people whose anger is really targeted at my forthcoming book that exposes some problems in Western scholarship on Indian culture. The petition was started within days after I presented an overview of my next book at an international conference. The chief complainants are individuals I have had tense arguments with in the past, due to the controversial positions I take. I am open to engage in a debate with them on issues of substance without personal acrimony, and with neutral moderation. I have made numerous offers of debate but the other side has not responded. They have chosen to try and silence me instead.
The real issue is even broader. A common criticism they level against me is that I am not in an academic job, hence I am an “outside”’ who is not entitled to “meddle” in the discourse. Despite having researched full time for two decades, produced four major books and countless blogs and lectures, these “high priest” of academics still remain unimpressed.
Or is it that they are worried? Is their monopoly being threatened over the public discourse on matters of general importance, such as how our civilisation is to be interpreted? Why is there a presumption that the adhikara to think creatively is reserved only for the academicians? From Jesus Christ to Sri Krishna, from Vivekananda to Gandhi, from Shashi Tharoor to Narendra Modi to Arvind Kejriwal – public intellectuals all across the ideological spectrum have included influential persons who were not academicians. In this Internet age and with its dis-intermediation (eliminating the middlemen), the world of knowledge producers has expanded and the high priests of the past feel threatened.
This brings us to the further question of the norms and standards of English usage that we are supposed to obey literally. My attackers wish to judge me by certain specific norms of citation that most Indian writers do not follow – including many trained in Western systems. In fact, one academician suggested that someone should examine the published works of the persons accusing me, as that is sure to reveal that they are guilty of the very same thing they accuse me of. In other words, in actual practice most scholars like to give “enough” references to indicate their sources clearly, but without over-populating the text with “scare quotes”. The extent of literal citation should also depend on the type of genre and audience.
Unfortunately, our colonised minds are programmed to obey the rules of idiom, quotation, style, etc. set by the West. It is time to discuss whether we should decolonise ourselves in this regard. I believe we should be free to innovate in the way we use language. I am not writing academic books, but writing for the commoner. I am taking subject matter that has remained hidden in the academic closet, and I am making it accessible to the mainstream reader. This is frightening to the gatekeepers of the academic world who see me as a trespasser on their turf. I am not bound to obey the rules they have made. It is for my readers to judge whether my works are useful or not, and academics do not have the license to authorise or deny my free speech.
Ironically, these very same academicians are claiming to champion the downtrodden voices, the subalterns, on the basis that elitist Brahmins have controlled the Sanskrit rules, idiom, etc. and non-Brahmins have been treated as unqualified and lacking the adhikara to write in Sanskrit. I feel they are guilty of the same elitism by treating me as unqualified to write in English. My forthcoming book, in fact, examines these very topics of Sanskrit versus English elitism and issues of who controls the intellectual production.
An allegation of plagiarism must look at the issue at two distinct levels: substance and form. Plagiarism as a matter of substance is when the author hides a source because he wants to claim originality for something he has borrowed. Nobody who has read my book has said that that is even remotely the case, because it would run counter to the fact that I have very frequently referenced Nicholson’s work.
The second level is whether there is omission of references in a merely technical sense. This is where customs for acknowledgment differ, depending on whether it is an academic book (which mine are not), which readership is viewing it, and so forth. I wish to point out that in ancient Indian traditions, references were required (as in ancient Sanskrit texts) but the Western conventions did not apply. Sanskrit does not even have quotation marks in its character set. Yet traditional scholars made clear when they referred to someone else’s thoughts. So in the worst case, I might be accused of violating a specific technical convention of the style and form of acknowledging sources. But certainly no plagiarism can be said at the level of the intention and spirit of my work.
Suppose we gave the dog a bone by increasing the number of citations for Nicholson from 30 to 35, would that really bring them to the discussion table to sort out the matters of substance and avoid playing such games? I hope so.[/quote]
Requesting publishers of Rajiv Malhotra not to yield to mafia pressure tactics that seek to threaten intellectual freedom.
Requesting publishers of Rajiv Malhotra not to yield to mafia pressure tactics that seek to threaten intellectual freedom.
Madhu Kishwar New Delhi, India
Intellectual disagreements must be resolved through debate with all parties present and Mr. Malhotra has publicly invited his opponents to debate. We should stop this practice of censorship using power plays. It is against the best interest of the publishing industry and all lovers of truth.
------------------------
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
–George Orwell
When it comes to scholarship on India’s ancient traditions, there is a coterie of scholars who, in a one-sided display of power, cry foul at any attempt to de-colonize the discourse. They use underhanded tactics to muzzle intellectual pioneers like Rajiv Malhotra whose work is based on indigenous and not Western perspectives. They have been engaged in a smear campaign against him for quite some time, dishing out a series of flimsy allegations in an attempt to intimidate him and others into abandoning their work.
The most recent move is a well-orchestrated campaign by a team of Indian leftists aligned with Western polemicists to slander the credibility of Rajiv Malhotra’s path-breaking scholarship. Rather than engaging the substantive merits of his arguments head on, these scholars attempt to divert and deflect attention through silly and unsubstantiated allegations. They would rather silence him than engage him in an honest and open debate.
This latest move is being timed to coincide with Mr. Malhotra’s latest book on the defense of Hinduism and Sanskrit from an indigenous perspective. They have petitioned his publisher HarperCollins to drop his books by generating a spurious scandal which they can use to divert attention away from the important issues he has raised.
Their petition rests on a false and baseless allegation of plagiarism in his earlier book, “Indra’s Net”. Their case is built on exaggerating a few minor copyediting oversights in order to undermine the enormous credibility and following Malhotra has garnered over the years on the strength of his well-researched critiques of the partisan agendas of leftist scholars and their patrons. A presentation of the ideas contained in his new book at the recently concluded 16th World Sanskrit Conference in Thailand received enthusiastic reception from Sanskritists around the world. However, a number of Western scholars were disturbed as they thought this new book would threaten their life’s work, because the book challenges the very epistemic foundations of Sanskrit and Indological studies in the West.
How convenient that these same scholars (and their disciples) suddenly claim to have discovered alleged “plagiarism” in Indra’s Net (which has been out for 1.5 years with no complaints) and have now petitioned the publisher. Their complaint is of a pedantic, nitpicking nature, made with malicious intent, hoping to mislead and prejudice people based on the presumed “authority” of the petitioners. This is nothing but a naked power play to quash down the voice of an independent scholar whose views make a small coterie of scholars uncomfortable.
These accusations are completely false and unsubstantiated.
The Western hijacking of traditional knowledge has been an old enterprise and is best epitomized by the cover of Malhotra’s new book: a wall carving in Oxford depicting the 18th century Sanskrit scholar, Sir William Jones, seated high on a table with Indian pundits on the floor as though they are students trying to grasp the high wisdom he claims to give them. The quote below the picture says it all: “He gave the Hindus and Mohammedans their Laws.”
Scholars like Rajiv Malhotra are effectively challenging well-entrenched and all-pervasive intellectual power structures through painstaking high-quality research. This has required rare intellectual courage, academic rigour and emotional resilience because he has faced enormous hostility, ridicule and political abuse from those ensconced in the high citadels of academia. His work is a sincere attempt to present an indigenous view of Indian history and identity formation in the subcontinent. All he seeks is a level playing field for voices that speak from the Indian intellectual traditions to represent their heritage. Since this tight-knit cartel of academics feels threatened by the challenge he poses, they are indulging in outright calumny to frighten leading publishers from touching his books. This can only be described as intellectual terrorism and imposition of censorship on a dissenting voice through mafia-like tactics.
We sign this petition to uphold the integrity of a civilization which has gifted the world with many precious gems, such as Sanskrit and Yoga, and because we support Rajiv Malhotra as a champion of the “open architecture” of Hindu knowledge. We endorse his well-researched books and the many fresh insights he offers through his lectures worldwide. We are confident that his forthcoming book, ‘The Battle for Sanskrit’ will be a major contribution to Indology and provide valuable insights into the forces that have tried to enslave the Indic civilization.
Most of all, we reject the politically motivated false allegations that are being hurled at him by a group with a long track record of blocking voices that challenge their hegemonic discourse. The attached point-by-point rebuttal is by a team of established independent scholars showing the allegations against Mr. Malhotra to be false.
Throughout his writings, Rajiv Malhotra has consistently been an exemplar of rigor, has created a public record that is open, and has invited debate from opponents. Hence, it is vital for his supporters and, in fact, all those who cherish intellectual freedom, to sign this petition.
Call to Action: The undersigned petitioners hereby ask publishers to stand firm against this assault on intellectual freedom. In particular, the publishers must not bow to any demands to issue apologies as any such apologies are unwarranted and must not succumb to pressure to withdraw any of Mr. Malhotra’s books.
LETTER TO
Publishers of Rajiv Malhotra's books
Do not yield to mafia pressure tactics that seek to compromise intellectual freedom. Make the slight modifications in the book (if required) to clarify any doubts in the best interest of fair play.
At last we have Rajiv Malhotra doing what our great leaders should have done long back. I support freedom of expression and want to see his book published.
In this era of "freedom of speech" the publishers have a moral duty to protect the freedom of speech of the victims of lies. They are supportint the propagandists. OK. But they should hold on to their own freedom by making sure that the victims' freedom to defend themselves & to uncover & investigate the truth is not usurped by the academic mafia of the west.
"A cabal is a group of people united in some close design together, usually to promote their private views or interests in a church, state, or other community, often by intrigue, usually unbeknownst to persons outside their group."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabal
An evangelist-leftist cabal has been consistently spreading hatred against Hindus and Hindu traditions.
This note exposes William Jones' hollow eulogy on Samskritam. It is now apparent that Jones heads the evangelist-leftist cabal of anti-Hindu phobia.
Hopefully, this will be a curtain-raiser for Rajiv Malhotra's forthcoming book which exposes the cabal.
I am sorry I quoted Jones' eulogy on Samskritam. Samskritam needs no eulogies from hypocrites.
University College, Oxford asked to remove the offending panel depicting William Jones and three Indian scholars
By Kalyanaraman
William Jones' third discourse published in 1798 with the famed "philologer" passage is often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies. Indo-European is a family of languages that by 1000 BC were hypothesised as spoken throughout Europe and in parts of southwestern and southern Asia.This is his quote, claiming to establish a "tremendous" find in the history of linguistics:
[quote]The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have spring from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.[unquote] (Sir William Jones, Supreme Court Judge of the British East India Company, 1786, Singer 1972, 29)...
On 27 April 1794 Jones died at Calcutta in the forty-eighth year of his age, and was buried there... the directors of the East IndiaCompany showed their sense of his services by the erection of a monument to him in St. Paul's Cathedral. His wife also placed a monument to his memory, executed by Flaxman (1796-1798), in the ante-chapel of University College, Oxford. http://www.eliohs.unifi.it/testi/700/jones/Jones_DNB_article.html
Let us take a look at this Oxford memorial monument. Why is Jones shown in a skull-cap of the type worn by a Pope? Click To justify the depiction of the marble frieze in a chapel?
Arindam Chakrabarti, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaii, brought to Rajiv Malhotra's attention a colonial wall carving in Oxford which blatantly boasts of the intellectual conquest of Sanskrit by the British.
[quote]There is a monument to Sir William Jones, the great eighteenth-century British Orientalist, in the chapel of University College, Oxford. This marble frieze shows Sir William sitting on a chair writing something down on a desk while three Indian traditional scholars squatting in front of him are either interpreting a text or contemplating or reflecting on some problem.
It is well known that for years Jones sat at the feet of learned pandits in India to take lessons in Sanskrit grammar, poetics, logic, jurisprudence, and metaphysics. He wrote letters home about howfascinating and yet how complex and demanding was his new learning of these old materials. But this sculpture shows – quite realistically –the Brahmins sitting down below on the floor, slightly crouching and bare-bodied – with no writing implements in their hands (for they knew by heart most of what they were teaching and did not need notes orprinted texts!) while the overdressed Jones sits imperiously on a chair writing something at a table. The inscription below hails Jones as the "Justinian of India" because he "formed" a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan laws. The truth is that he translated and interpreted into English a tiny tip of the massive iceberg of ancient Indian Dharmashastra literature along with some Islamic law books. Yet the monument says and shows Jones to be the "law-giver," and the "native informer" to be the "receiver of knowledge."
What this amply illustrates is that the semiotics of colonial encounters have – perhaps indelibly – inscribed a profound asymmetry of epistemic prestige upon any future East-West exchange of knowledge. [unquote](Arindam Chakrabarti, "Introduction," Philosophy East & West Volume 51, Number 4 October 2001 449-451.)
See also: Teltscher;and Kate, 1995, India Inscribed : European And British Writing On India 1600 – 1800, Figure 6. Memorial to Sir William Jones by John Flaxman (1796-8), University College, Oxford.203, New Delhi, Oxford University Press.
It took Rajiv Malhotra nearly two years to locate the marble frieze in a chapel at Oxford, which he had to personally visit to see and then to go through a bureaucratic quagmire to get the picture of it. RajivMalhotra notes: [quote] The picture symbolizes how academic Indians today often remain under the glass ceiling as "native informants" of the Westerners. Yet in 19th century Europe, Sanskrit was held in great awe and respect, even while the natives of India were held in contempt or at best in a patronizing manner as children to be raised into their master's advanced "civilization." [unquote]
Is the display in the chapel of the University College, Oxford a true depiction of William Jones in his true colours – as an evangelist?
[quote] The Bible Is a Wonderful Book because of its literary characteristics. It contains the highest literature of the world. It appeals to the aesthetic and intellectual as well as moral and spiritual faculties... Sir William Jones sums it all up in the following beautiful eulogy: "The Scriptures contain, independently of a divine origin, more true sublimity, more exquisite beauty, purer morality, more important history, and finer strains both of poetry and eloquence, than could be collected, within the same compass, from all other books that were ever composed in any age or in any idiom."[unquote] Click
In the face of this monument, Jones' eulogy on Sanskrit sounds hollow.
Maybe, the scholars who participated in conferences held in Calcutta and Pune in April, 1994 to mark the bicentenary of his death did not know that this eulogy was only a camouflage for the depiction of a supreme court judge sitting on a high chair and three indian scholars sitting at his feet. The eulogy of Sanskrit didn't last long in the eurocentric studies called IE linguistics with the invention of a hypothetical PIE with *.
The authorities of University College, Oxford should: 1) apologise to Indians for this gross, humiliating, insulting representation of Indian scholars, on a monument displayed on the walls of the College chapel; and 2) remove the offending marble frieze from display.
Have you ever heard of any government spending almost 40 lakh on a book? Or a book project going on for 43 years, and counting, with crores of rupees spent on it?
All this and more has been happening at the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), an autonomous academic body funded by the Government of India. It spends liberally to produce books in the name of 'Special Research Projects'.
And these special research projects, which should be wrapped up within a few years for only a few lakhs of rupees, drag on for decades and bleed taxpayers of crores. Among the defaulting historians are the late Bipan Chandra, Irfan Habib and KM Shrimali. Prof Chandra, a formidable scholar of modern Indian history, is the sole reason why the 'Towards Freedom' project, which started in 1972, is still continuing.
The ICHR's oldest, costliest and the most controversial project continues to bleed the public exchequer. It provoked Arun Shourie to write Eminent Historians in 1998, and he accused ICHR of spending 1.70 crore on the project.
This project, which is as old as ICHR itself, is yet to be completed, though its apologists often cite AB Vajpayee's six-year reign - when the project was suspended - to justify the delay. If a top HRD ministry official is to be believed, over 2.45 crore have been spent on the nine-volume project. But ICHR has still not got its hands on the last volume.
But people privy to ICHR's functioning said that the actual spend on the project is much more than 2.45 crore. A former ICHR member, requesting anonymity, told MAIL TODAY: "It's a conservative amount. The total cost would easily be above 3 crore." Actually a lot more, if one factors in 43 years of inflation.
As for Habib and Shrimali, they have not submitted a single manuscript for the 'Dictionary of Social, Economic and Administrative Terms in Indian/South Asian Inscriptions' project, which was started in 1989 with the mandate to bring out nine volumes in 15 years. This project has so far soaked up more than 42 lakh.
The ICHR's feeble defence about the expenditure: it has no record of the money spent on the special projects. "It's difficult to give you a definite figure because we don't have any such record," conceded ICHR chairperson Y Sudershan Rao. He explained that if a seminar were held for the 'Towards Freedom' project, the spend would be clubbed to ICHR's overall seminar expenditure rather than to the project's account.
"Similarly, when we provide managerial or editorial assistance to these historians, the salary of the support staff isn't marked with the respective project, which should be the case," he added. The awaited volume of 'Towards Freedom' project covers the year 1942. "We are yet to get this volume, originally assigned to Bipan Chandra," Gopinath Ravindran told MAIL TODAY just before resigning as ICHR's member-secretary last month due to "irreconcilable differences" with the BJP appointed ICHR chairperson.
"The death of Prof Chandra, followed by Prof Visalakshi Menon's, who took up the project after the former's demise, has caused the delay," he added.
The ICHR's annual report of 2006-07, however, punctures Prof Ravindran's claim. It informs how ICHR "has decided to provide secretarial assistance and made special provision for editorial assistance to Prof Bipan Chandra". It also stated that Dr Visalakshi Menon of Delhi University and Prof Salil Mishra of IGNOU had been assigned to assist Prof Chandra in finalising the volume, "which is expected to be ready by early 2008". So what happened from 2008 to date? How can Prof Chandra's death on August 30, 2014, be the reason for the project's delay?
"Look, we don't have any provision to force these historians for submitting their volumes in a definite time frame. We can only request," Prof Rao said. But shouldn't there be a time frame, especially when the taxpayers' money is involved? "Yes, I agree, and we are looking into it, " the ICHR chairperson added.
However, the 'Dictionary' project is slowly turning out to be the ICHR's Achilles' heel. "I don't know how it's shaping up. There's just no update," Prof Rao said. A top HRD official regards this as the "new Towards Freedom project". He said: "It stands where it was in the early 1990s, except for a few thousand cards being computerised and a volume pertaining to south Indian inscriptions getting published. Nothing else has moved, apart from the expenditure of 42 lakh."
Prof Ravindran admitted: "We have published Volume-I from A-D of the dictionary pertaining to south Indian inscriptions. It was submitted by KV Ramesh and released in December 2011."
Prof Rao was clueless about other volumes of the dictionary project, going to the extent of saying he didn't see much coming out of it, at least not in the near future. The ICHR's annual reports since 2004 reveal the mess. In 2005-06, for instance, the ICHR provided software facilities to Prof Shrimali, who along with Ramesh (now replaced by Prof Y Subbarayalu) and Irfan Habib, spearheaded the project. Shrimali looked after north Indian inscriptions, Ramesh exploring south Indian inscriptions, and Habib dealing with Arabic, Persian and Urdu inscriptions.
Shrimali has not produced a single volume to date. All he has to show for all these years is a few thousand computerised cards compiled by hired assistants who get paid by ICHR. "All these cards remain in Prof Shrimali's custody. I don't know what will happen if something occurred to him," says a former ICHR member who practices law in a Delhi court.
Habib's record is worse. If the annual reports are to be believed, he has been promising to submit his manuscript since 2006-07. It went on until, interestingly, the 2011-12 and 2012-13 annual reports certified he was making "satisfactory progress"! The AMU professor is yet to submit a single volume.
When MAIL TODAY enquired about the stage of Prof Habib's work, ICHR informed that "Habib saab has excused himself from this project". Rao said: "Now Prof Shireen Moosvi is looking after it."
An HRD ministry official, who insists he isn't close to the current BJP government, believes the problem is more fundamental in nature. "There was no need to have ICHR when we already had Indian Council of Social Science Research. But more pressing question is: do we really need such bodies, which will only be misused for political reasons."
Indian–American researcher, author, speaker. Current affairs, inter-civilization, science
Dear Andrew Nicholson,
I am glad you have entered the battlefield so we can get into some substantial matters. Since this is an extended article, I want to go about it systematically, starting with the following clarifications: I used your work with explicit references 30 times in Indra’s Net, hence there was no ill-intention. But I am not blindly obeying you, contrary to your experience with servile Indians; hence your angst that I am ‘distorting’ your ideas is unfounded. My writing relating to your work can be seen as twofold:
Where I cite your work.
Where it is my own perspectives.
You are entitled to attribution for ‘A’ but not for ‘B’.
Regarding ‘A’, I am prepared to clarify these attributions further where necessary. But, as we shall see below, I am going to actually remove many of the references to your work simply because you have borrowed Indian sources and called it your own original ideas. I am better off going to my tradition’s sources rather than via a westerner whose ego claims to have become the primary source. This Western hijacking of adhikara is what the elaborate Western defined, and controlled system of peer-reviews and academic gatekeepers is meant to achieve, i.e. turning knowledge into the control of western ‘experts’ and their Indian sepoys.
Regarding ‘B’, let me illustrate by using the very same example you cite as my ‘distortion’ of ‘your’ work. You wrote in your book that Vijnanabhikshu unified multiple paths into harmony. This is correct. That comes under ‘A’. But I add to this my own statement that Vivekananda does the same thing also. This is important to my thesis that Vivekananda built on top a long Indian tradition, and not by copying ideas from the West as claimed by the neo-Hinduism camp. This is ‘B’ – my idea. Your complaint is that by asserting this about Vivekananda, I am distorting you. You fail to distinguish between ‘A’ and ‘B’ because you assume that you are the new adhikari on the subject and anything in addition to or instead of your views amounts to a distortion. I see this as a blatant sign of colonialism.
You are carrying the white man’s burden to educate the Indians even about our own culture. Please note that Vijnanabhikshu is an important person in our heritage and there are numerous commentaries on his work. Yours is not any original account of him. You got this material from secondary sources. But by complying by the mechanical rules of ‘scholarship’ you got it into western peer-reviewed publications, and hence you claim to be the new adhikari. Furthermore, nor was Vijnanabhikshu the first to unify Hinduism. I have sources of the unification of various Hindu systems that go back much further in time and you do not seem to be aware of these. My point is that Vivekananda stands on the shoulders of many prior giants within our own tradition. I cited you to the extent it worked for me but did not stop there; I took it further than you have.
Sir Williams Jones started this claim to be the ‘new pandit’ in the late 1700s when he was a top official for the East India Company. Today that enterprise is dead in one sense, but has revived and reincarnated into new forms. You do not seem conscious that your position is not only arrogant but also puts in the parampara of Sir William Jones.
I re-examined your book lately and find too many ideas taken from Indian texts and experts that are cleverly reworded in fancy English. Let’s take a look at bhedabheda Vedanta. My teacher of this system has been Dr Satya Narayan Das, head of the Jiva Institute in Vrindavan, who spent considerable time with me while I was writing Being Different where I first explained my understanding. He is considered one of the foremost adhikaris today in this system, and adhikar in our tradition is not a matter of producing publications (with lots of quotation marks and obedience to other rules), but mainly requires actual experience of what is being said. Without the inner experience of the states of consciousness being discussed, it is at best secondary knowledge.
This experience is not a simple matter for western Indologists who spend hours going through other western interpretations and Sanskrit dictionaries. By complying with the procedural requirements of citations, etc. they suddenly claim to have become the new original and primary source. This system needs to be questioned, and I have written extensively about the syndrome I call the peer-review cartel. (You can read my debate on this a decade back on Rediff.com)
Therefore, I intend to delete most of the references to your book for bhedabheda, because it is clear that you lack the adhikara as per our system. I do wish to credit you in some respects but nowhere close to what you demand. It amazes me that there is nothing original in your explanation of bhedabheda, as your knowledge is obtained from reading Indian texts, western interpretations and sitting at the feet of Indian pandits to learn. Unfortunately, western Indology does not recognize what the pandit teaches you as his work, because it is oral and not written in a peer-reviewed (hence western supervised) publication. So the whole protocol of claiming something to belong to you as the author is a sort of technology of thievery. Fortunately, Indians have started claiming back their bio-heritage such as Ayurveda from such thievery that is being done by westerners claiming that Indians never filed patents as per western rules. It is time to also claim our intellectual heritage back.
Indian pandits know their materials by heart and it is orally transmitted, and they do not have the ego to claim authorship. They are very humble and hence get taken for a ride. They are duped by any ‘good cop’ from the west who comes in Indian dress to talk to them nicely and bamboozle them into believing that he is a friend of the tradition. Westerners can pick their brains freely, without which you would not be able to learn; but then you go back to the West and have the arrogance to call it yours. As per your Western protocol, you thank the pandit in some preface once, and feel that it suffices. But if you want that my 30 references to your work fall short then by the same token, please note that you, too, ought to be acknowledging your pandits and Indian textual sources in every single paragraph, if not every sentence.
Only that portion of your work which you feel gives truly original thoughts can become yours and make you its adhikari. If you would be kind enough to send us a list of what you consider original thoughts in your book, and that I have used these because they are not found anywhere else except in your work, then I would gladly bow to you and thank you profusely. But whatever portions (which is almost the entire book) are merely your rehashing the Indian materials in fancy English, over those I do not grant you the status of ‘ownership’.
Poetry and art are different than this. There, the originality is not in the substance but in the presentation. However, you are writing analytical works and there the originality would have to be established in the content and substance of the work, and not based on the ‘form’ of language gymnastics. Much of Western Indology is a factory to copy-paste and distort Indian materials, and process it through an industrial machinery called ‘academic knowledge production’ controlled by the Western institutions, journals, funding agencies, archives, gatekeepers, standards and rules, and so forth. Its requirements of idiom, the toolkit of theories to be used, language standards, etc., are such that 99% of the Indian traditional pandits (the true keepers of adhikara) are unable to participate.
My forthcoming book examines these mechanisms of exclusion in detail, which is why the war against it has started already. (This attack by you out of the blue comes 1.5 years after Indra’s Net, not as some remarkable coincidence, but because your peers are rattled at the thought that they are about to be exposed as the continuation of Sir William Jones.)
I challenge you to disclose all your Indian teachers – these are not ‘native informants’ as your system calls them but the true adhikaris of our heritage, and whose services you purchase to be able to do your work. What frightens your colleagues is that my book will educate our traditional pandits about your methods of exploitation. Let me frighten you even further: All my books are in the process of being translated into Sanskrit, specifically for the purpose of education of young pandits about the issues I raise. So my target reader is not folks like you, but our own pandits and others who claim this as their heritage and practice. I am especially interested in those who did not sell out to western sponsorship, foreign tours, etc. These will comprise my home team. I am only doing a humble service to inform them about the issues and remedies.
This is why more and more Indologists will be asked to come out of the woodwork and defend the old fortress. In the process they will also expose themselves. But that fortress is crumbling and my work merely accelerates the process of India once again becoming the center of Indology and not a subservient satellite of it.
Indian authorities should demand the return back to India of the 500,000 Sanskrit manuscripts that are lying outside India in various Western universities, archives, museums and private collections. These are our heritage just like old statues and should be returned since they were mostly taken by theft during colonial rule. I consider these more precious than the Kohinoor diamond. Right now, it is western Indologists like you get to define ‘critical editions’ of our texts and become the primary source and adhikari. This must end and I have been fighting this for 25 years. Now we finally some serious traction, thanks in part to people like you who attack and give me a chance to make my case more openly. Please note that what happens to me personally is irrelevant, and I am glad if attacks like this awaken more people.
My response to you is nothing personal, but serves to educate my own people. You are a glaring example of what I have called a ‘good cop’, i.e., one who goes about showing love/romance for the tradition. But at some time his true colors come out when he does what I have called a U-Turn. You would make an interesting case study of the U-Turn syndrome, for which we ought to examine where you got your materials from, and to what extent you failed to acknowledge Indian sources, both written and oral, with the same weight with which you expect me to do so.
To suit their agendas, westerners have pronounced theories like ‘nobody owns culture’ and ‘the author is dead’. Our naïve pandits are too innocent to know any of this, but I wish to inform them. The claim that nobody owns a culture makes it freely available to whosoever wants to do whatever they choose to do with it. Hence, Indian cultural capital is being digested right and left. The contradiction is that the west is ultra-protective about its ‘intellectual property’ and your obsession to squeeze more references/citations out of me illustrates this.
By declaring that the ‘author is dead’, the West says the contexts and intentions of the rishis are irrelevant. They are dead and nobody knows what they meant. So ‘we’ (the Western Indologists) must interpret Indian texts by bringing our own theories and lenses. This has been the basis for the Freudian psychoanalysis of Hinduism, and all other Western theories being applied. If the original author is dead, the material does not belong to anyone. It is public domain. So whoever has more funding and powerful machinery will determine how it is interpreted. However, the same ‘nobody owns culture’ principle does not apply to what you consider as your ‘property’. Indians need to wake up to this game.
They need to stop funding Western Indology and develop Indian Indology. The ‘make in India’ ideal should also be applied here. Expecting Indologists to change because you dole out money is like feeding a crocodile expecting him to become your friend. For the first 10 years of my work in this area, I gave away a substantial portion of my life savings in an unsuccessful attempt to fund and change the Indologists’ hearts. But they play the good/bad cop game with skill. I learned a great deal because I was acknowledged as the largest funder of western Indology at one time. Then I stopped and became their harshest critic. I have on file a lot of grant correspondence with Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, to name just a few. Naturally, they worry that I am exposing their secrets. One day I will get someone to organize all that material into a publication.
Before I close, I wish to address one of your points – that I lack the competence in Sanskrit to be able to do my work. I will address in a separate article my background and experience and how it fits the specific type of work I have focused on. But meanwhile let me inform you that, just as Western Indologists work in teams of collaborators consisting of specialists in different domains, so also I have been building my team of collaborators whose combined strength on Indology far exceeds anything you can possibly match. I bring a specialty they lack, and vice versa. But I am unable to get into further details at this time.
Welcome to the battlefield! I hope we can avoid personal acrimony and deal with the multiple issues I have raised above in a professional and mutually respectful manner. I give back as hard as I get. (Dr. Swamy’s slogan, being acknowledged without need for quotation marks…)
[File Photo of Book Launch of Breaking India - Samvada.org]
An old legal aphorism advises young lawyers that “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.” When you see someone furiously pounding the table, you’d be justified in thinking that he has taken that advice too seriously, and conclude that neither the facts nor the law are on his side.
The fact is that in any battle — of wits or muscle, figurative or real, defensive or offensive — one leads with the best device at one’s disposal. In desperate situations, clutching at straws may be the best one can do when one is in over one’s head and lifeboats are missing. That cliched image comes to mind seeing the recent charges of plagiarism against Shri Rajiv Malhotra.
For those who are not familiar with Malhotra, he’s the author of “Breaking India,” “Being Different”, and other books. The wiki notes that he’s an “Indian-American author and Hindu activist who, after a career in the computer and telecom industries, took early retirement in 1995 to found The Infinity Foundation. Through this organization Malhotra has promoted philanthropic and educational activities in the area of Hinduism studies. Malhotra has written prolifically in opposition to the academic study of Indian history and society, especially the study of Hinduism as it is conducted by scholars and university faculty, which he maintains denigrates the tradition and undermines the interests of India.”
I know Rajiv Malhotra and have deep respect for him. I am convinced that he is a serious seeker of knowledge and understanding. I know him sufficiently well to be absolutely certain of his integrity, his commitment to scholarship, his dedication to the cause of engaging “the other” in serious discussion, his principled challenge to all to engage in purva-paksha: “a tradition in dharma discourse [which involves] building a deep familiarity with the opponent’s point of view before criticizing it.”
Even to me, a lay reader and an outsider to his area of investigation, his competence is clear. But domain experts too attest to his diligence and expertise. I urge you to read some of thereviews of his book“Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism.” Quote:
In this substantial work Malhotra explores a variety of topics inherent to Indic culture and worldviews. He reflects on many aspects of the Hindu world. His goal is not only to dismantle misconceptions, but also to formulate a new paradigm for intercultural discourse. . . . Malhotra begins by referring to a number of his own personal encounters with Western scholars and individuals in conferences and elsewhere to let the reader know how, through means subtle and overt, Christianity and the West have been intruding into the sacredness and integrity of Indic culture. Not that many Indians are not aware of this, but this book gives it all raw and ruthless exposure. It unveils aspects of what it sees as Western hegemonic intercultural ruses that may not be as obvious to superficial observers. These revelations are sure to jolt both unwitting Indians who may have held Western civilization in high regard, as well as scheming Westerners who may feel awkward being caught.
So one may wonder, what accounts for the spurious charges of plagiarism leveled against him by his detractors? Paradoxically, the attempt to discredit Malhotra by silly accusations of plagiarism in essence gives indirect support to the fundamental solidity of his incisive arguments. His opponents have failed to counter his theses and in their desperation have had to resort to serious harassments. Having neither the facts nor the analytical skills to counter the theses, they are reduced to idiotically pounding the metaphorical table in their frustration. If charges of plagiarism is the best offensive weapon they have, they deserve pity and maybe even a little bit of sympathy.
To be quite frank, I have little time to waste on the trivialities that Malhotra’s opponents have published, such as the one by Sandip Roy at FirstPost on July 15th. “Not my monkey, not my circus” is my motto. Granted that the antics of the circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys (to borrow a phrase much favored by Prof Brad deLong) is an entertaining distraction but really, we do have real problems that need addressing. I will not waste time showing how vacuous their charge of plagiarism is. Others have done it. Malhotra has addressed charges, such as this one, “Rajiv Malhotra has a rejoinder to Andrew Nicholson” (July 18th) in NitiCentral. Besides there is no need to elevate their inane nonsense by actually quoting them.
So am I wasting time writing this? Not at all. My primary motivation is to express solidarity with the cause that Rajiv Malhotra has been tirelessly engaged in for decades. He is one among that rare breed of intellectuals who are willing to challenge the orthodoxy where it is substantially wrong; an orthodoxy that is slavishly and uncritically accepted by those whose minds are still colonized by a narrowly conceived Western narrative designed to denigrate and devalue Indian contribution to human knowledge and understanding. Malhotra provides the serious, intellectually sound, necessary corrective pushback to that worldview. Which naturally gores their precious goat. That partly explains their fury and their animosity towards Malhotra.
My secondary motive for writing this is my belief that public discussions should be accurate, honest, decent and intelligent. To oppose those with an agenda to poison the well of public discourse is a sacred duty to me. If we don’t speak out against what we perceive to be false and malicious, how will we discover what is true and valuable? I stand with Edmund Burke, the Irish statesman and philosopher, when he wrote in 1770, “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
The circular firing squad of flying attack monkeys has chosen Rajiv Malhotra as its target. We must note that the target is the man, not his theses, because the FAMs, having failed to counter his theses, have been reduced to firing specious charges of plagiarism at Malhotra. But indirectly, we are also targets of their random acts of senseless shootings. By not opposing them, we tacitly acquiesce to their implicit demand that we bow and obey their paymasters. (By using the word “paymasters” I grant them this much dignity that I don’t believe that they would so abjectly debase themselves without being paid for it.)
These charges against Malhotra is a distraction, a tiny scuffle in a minor battle that doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the larger context of the civilizational war that we are forced to be in. I think I speak for a majority when I say that I’d like to be left alone, to live and to let live. But opposition to us and our civilizational ethos has been a historical reality. It is also historically true that those who oppressed India had the help of Indians. Indians are also involved in this petty attack against India, represented here by Malhotra. This batch of Indian flying attack monkeys will disband but there can be no doubt that new batches will form and new targets identified. That is as certain as the fact that ultimately we will prevail.
May Shri Rajiv Malhotra’s tribe increase. Or more accurately I should say may our tribe increase, since I too belong to it.
Building the SRI RAMA TEMPLE in Ayodhya (English) (Hardcover) No. of pages 116 Har Anand Publications 2015
ISBN: 978-81-241-1905-1 INR 200
Building the SRI RAMA TEMPLE in Ayodhya (English) (Hardcover)
Hindus believe that Bhagvan Sri Rama was born in Ayodhya. At his birth spot in Ayodhya, there stood a temple, but on the same spot Islamic came to be known as "Babri Masjid." This book, explores how, through legal measures the Rama Temple can be rebuilt on the original spot where it had stood nearly half a millennium ago.
About The Author
Subramanian Swamy
SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY is the President of the Janata Party since 1990, which was founded by Jayapraksh Narayan in 1977 in the aftermath of the Emergency. He is also one of the founding members of the party. He is also Chairman, school of Communication & Management Studies, Kalamaserry, Ernakulam District, Kerala (www.scms.org) and Managing Life Trustee, Naveen Hindustan Foundation (www.indiaright.org).
Vijñānabhikṣu (1550-1600) provided commentaries on Vedānta, Sāṃkhya, and Yoga. The commentaries claimed the three schools to be unity and included exposition ofBhedābhedaVedānta -- difference and nondifference of Brahman and Atman. This 16th century view is but a small blip in the millennial radar of Hindu philosophy, the world view of Bharatam Janam which can be summarized in one word: dharma (aka dhamma in Pali) To look upon this Bhedābhedaas an alternative to Advaita is to build a cock-and-bull story around Vijñānabhikṣu. Commentaries on Vijñānabhikṣu include: Ganganatha Jha's Yogasarasamgraha of Vijnanabhikshu (1995) and TS Rukmani's Yogavarttika of Vijnanabhikshu (1981). The essential unity of Hindu thought and philosophy is most effectively summarized in Gautama's famous affirmation --esa dhammo sanantano, 'this dharma eternal': The roots of resolution of Hindu ideas of the Atman get summarised in Gautams, the Buddha's famous exhortation: esha dhammo sanantano, this dhamma eternal. This dharma-dhamma continuum can unite all strands of world views within the Indian Ocean Community as one parivaar, one family.
Dhammapada Verse 5 Kalayakkhini Vatthu
Na hi verena verani sammantidha kudacanam averena ca sammanti esa dhammo sanantano.
Verse 5: Hatred is, indeed, never appeased by hatred in this world. It is appeased only by loving-kindness. This is an ancient law. It is deeply disturbing that a cabal governed by anti-hindu phobia is targetting personal attacks on Shri Rajiv Malhotra. What could the motive be? One obvious answer is: evangelism. Another possible answer is: vivisection of the nation of Bharatam Janam in a bizarre vision of perpetuating colonial loot. Shri Rajiv Malhotra should be complimented for putting up an effective counter to the rascality of the cabal which is prima facie axis of evangelists and leftists (also called psecs, pseudo-seculars). http://bharatkalyan97.blogspot.in/2015/07/dear-andrew-nicholson-rajiv-malhotra.html The attempts to defame Shri Rajiv Malhotra are a distraction from the principal message: esa dhammo sanantano, this Dharma Sanatana which can lead to the constitution of an United Indian Ocean Economic Union as a counterpoise to the European Union -- to take the 3 billion people of the region to their fair share of world GDP, a fair situation that existed 0 CE (pace Angus Maddison). This fair share can be achieved. unity is the key. NaMo should lead the mission to create the United Indian Ocean Economic Union as Dharma-Dhamma vanguard.
Vishal Agarwal: Did Andrew Nicholson Borrow Ideas from Indian Writers Without Acknowledgement?
Decades before Nicholson, the Indian philosopher Surendranath Dasgupta has said exactly the same thing in his History of Indian Philosophy vol III.
In the 17th century, the 'Prasthanabheda' of Madhusudana Saraswati clearly dilineates the boundaries of Hindu thought and one can see a unifying tendency. I can send a soft copy.
Then, the Prapanchahridaya (which does not mention Ramanuja or later scholars) gives a detailed description of Hindu scriptures sequentially, including of works that are now lost.
We also have of course the Sarvadarshanasamgraha, and the anaonymous (attributed sometimes to Shankaracharya) Sarvasiddhantasamgraha.
One only needs to look at standard editions of Bhikshu's commentaries on Samkhyasutras (Sacred Books of the Hindus Series gives a translation too) or Brahmasutras (with prefaces) to conclude that there is really nothing unique in Nicholson's book.
Or even take a look at the 'Suchipatra' of Kavindracharya's library that was set up during Shah Jehan's reign in Varanasi. The list clearly shows attempts made by Kavindracharya to collect the entire gamut of Hindu scriptures at one place, which he would not have done if the Hindu traditions were not linked or unrelated.
There is large scale plagiarism in the works of western Indologists who copy from lesser known Indian authors and these allegations have been made in the past too. An example is that Renou as well as Batakrishna Ghosh (he did his PhD from Germany) had copied from the works of Pandit Bhagavad Datta without acknowledging properly (or giving merely lip service in the reference sections - which is a far cry to the profuse attributions in 'Indra's Net').
I have a soft copy of Nicholson's PhD thesis (different from the book). I also have softcopies of most of the titles listed above. Please write to me offline.
Frankly, when I first read Nicholson's book a little after it was awarded at the Oberoi Foundation (how come he accepted the award from a 'Hindutva' outfit) in 2010, it reminded me of S Dasgupta and I merely thought that Nicholson had presented in more detail what Dasgupta had said decades earlier.
Brahmi numerals
Lankarama, dhatugabha (dagoba), Photo: 1905. 
Quarts moonstone. Thanthirimale Archaeology reserve, Sri Lanka
sandakada pahana. Samangala, Ampara, Sri Lanka
Anser indicus or 
