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JC Diwakar Reddy demands Sonia Gandhi to Resign. What does it take for a chamcha to rebel?
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2G scam: ED officer shunted out, PC defies SC in contempt of court
FINANCE MINISTRY SHUNTS OUT ED OFFICER, DEFIES SC
Wednesday, 11 December 2013 | J Gopikrishnan | New Delhi
In a brazen violation of the Supreme Court’s order that seeks continuation of officials connected with the probe into the 2G scam and the Aircel-Maxis deal, the Finance Ministry has not given extension to Rajeshwar Singh, Chief Investigating Officer of Enforcement Directorate (ED).
Both Chief Investigating Officers of the CBI and the ED have been directly reporting to the apex court’s 2G Bench for the past three years. Before Singh’s tenure ended in October, 2013, the ED Director sent a proposal to the Finance Ministry to extend his (Singh’s) tenure in ED by one more year, but the Finance Ministry rejected it.
According to highly placed sources, the Finance Ministry also did not approve the UPSC order to accommodate Singh permanently in ED. Rajeshwar Singh belongs to the Uttar Pradesh Police Service and joined Enforcement Directorate six years ago. Last year, the UPSC approved his permanent posting in the ED and sent the related recommendation to the Finance Ministry for approval. Singh is a Deputy Director in-charge of Delhi Unit and on leave currently.
Singh had ruffled the feathers of several Corproate barons during the probe into money trail in the 2G scam. He had also been involved in the questioning of controversial lobbyist Nira Radia. After he summoned Radia for questioning, more than 100 frivolous complaints were registered against Singh and his family members in various forums and courts across the country. In July 2012, the Supreme Court Bench headed by Justice GS Singhvi and Justice KS Radhakrishnan quashed all vexatious and frivolous procedures against Singh, sensing a “witch-hunt against the honest officer.”
“Is this officer alive?” asked Judges, when senior advocate KK Venugopal told the SC about the hardships faced by Singh from big corporate houses. Sources said that Singh may approach the apex court against his inability to perform his duty as per directive of the court. Justice Singhvi is retiring on Wednesday and a new Bench, comprising Justice HL Dattu and Justice KS Radhakrishnan, is expected to start hearing in the 2G scam related matters from January.
1 comment
Ajith Kumar Verma • 3 hours ago
This is a clear contempt of court. This corrupt and arrogant government should be taught a lesson. All these dubious actions must have concurrence Finance Minister P Chidambaram. Without his knowledge these things won't happen. Without a political boss' support (in this case Mr.P Chidambaram) no bureaucrat have courage to hold UPSC recommendation. It is sure that Congress Govt wanted to block the money trail on 2G.
http://www.dailypioneer.com/todays-newspaper/finance-ministry-shunts-out-ed-officer-defies-sc.html
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JD(U) alleges electoral fraud, calls for banning EVMs. EC, revert to paper ballot in case printouts ordered by SC not introduced.
Published: December 10, 2013 23:52 IST | Updated: December 10, 2013 23:52 IST
JD(U) alleges electoral fraud, calls for banning EVMs
JD(U)’s Bargi candidate, 16 members of whose family voted, got just 2 votes
The Madhya Pradesh unit of the Janata Dal (United) has called for a ban on electronic voting machines (EVMs). The party’s State president, Govind Yadav, alleged that EVMs, for which parts are sourced from foreign vendors, were jeopardising Indian democracy.
JD(U)’s Bargi candidate Suraj Jaiswal claimed, on Tuesday, that in Shahpura polling station where 16 members of his family voted, the break-up of votes under Form 20 showed that he received only two votes. Similarly, Samajwadi Party’s Pushpa Ben in Jabalpur (West) received a single vote in the polling booth where she voted along with nine members of her immediate family.
These are similar to the objections raised by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy after the 2004 Lok Sabha polls in Madurai.
Mr. Swamy’s petition had led the Supreme Court to order introduction of a paper trail before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
Mr. Jaiswal is collecting affidavits and videographing testimonies of voters to approach the High Court seeking a probe.
In the M.P. Vidhan Sabha elections, for which results were announced on December 8, several voting machines and their control units malfunctioned and re-polling had to be ordered in nine polling stations across the State. Candidates of many Opposition parties including the Congress, JD(U) and Samajwadi Party complained of the light emitting diodes blinking for the BJP when the button of some other party was pressed.
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/jdu-alleges-electoral-fraud-calls-for-banning-evms/article5444869.ece?homepage=true
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Au revoir to Justice Singhvi's court? -- Rahul Singh. Is it time for SC to sit en banc to cope with the rot in the state?
http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/X/WeberScienceVocation.pdf Max
Weber,
“Science
as
a
Vocation”
'Wissenschaft
als
Beruf,'
from
Gesammlte
Aufsaetze
zur
Wissenschaftslehre
(Tubingen,
1922), pp. 524‐55. Originally delivered as a speech at Munich University, 1918. Published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich.
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Weber-vocation.pdf Max Weber Politics as vocation
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Photo: Mint
http://www.livemint.com/Politics/ZnOKkTXqIICaPQVMZw4gtM/Au-revoir-to-justice-Singhvis-court.html
1922), pp. 524‐55. Originally delivered as a speech at Munich University, 1918. Published in 1919 by Duncker & Humblodt, Munich.
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ethos/Weber-vocation.pdf Max Weber Politics as vocation
Wed, Dec 11 2013. 12 10 AM IST
Au revoir to justice Singhvi’s court?
Perhaps there hasn’t been another judge in SC’s history whose day of retirement has so closely been watched by certain business houses
Photo: Mint
Max Weber (who was trained as a lawyer but mostly worked as a sociologist) said in his essay Science as a Vocation: “If a young scholar asks for my advice with regard to habilitation, the responsibility of encouraging him can hardly be borne...one must ask... Do you in all conscience believe that you can stand seeing mediocrity after mediocrity, year after year, climb beyond you, without being embittered and without coming to grief?”
Much of the above is certainly applicable to the law schools. One wonders whether it also holds true for the Supreme Court of India.
Justice Ganpat Singh Singhvi will retire from the Supreme Court on 11 December after six eventful years at the apex court. Thanks to India’s system of following seniority for chief justiceship, he must have been aware, at the time of his appointment, that he wouldn’t possibly make it to the position of chief justice, but he couldn’t have anticipated the remarkably eventful nature of his judgeship.
Perhaps there hasn’t been another judge in the Supreme Court’s history whose day of retirement has so closely been watched by certain business houses and their advocates. A raft of petitions requesting “review” of justice Singhvi’s decision in the 2G case, in which he had ordered cancellation of 122 telecom licences, await to be filed. There haven’t been too many judges whose court the so-called “grand advocates” (as Marc Galanter and Nick Robinson’s recent paper calls the elite set of lawyers who command the Supreme Court’s attention) approach with trepidation usually reserved for strict, no-nonsense teachers by their students.
The legal history of the Supreme Court is replete with paradoxes. While its self-image is that of India’s most respected institution, there is little empirical evidence to support the claim. Although the news media consumed by the middle-class certainly reserves much reverence for the court, there is no empirical survey (not even of the opinion poll variety) that places the Supreme Court on any high pedestal. To be sure, there is no authentic survey (or opinion poll) to the contrary either.
This inward-looking, closed institution consists of lawyers and judges (with no academic until now in spite of a constitutional provision) and mostly eulogizes the hyper-active judges, who take refuge under “judicial activism”, and are usually known for “creating” laws rather than “interpreting” them.
Interestingly, while the insiders of this system are prone to having a self-image of protectors of individual liberty, at the most critical litmus test of this idea, the institution crumbled. Indeed, the excesses of Emergency haven’t been tried again only because of the popular, democratic backlash and not because the Supreme Court as an institution stood its ground on the rule of law.
Nevertheless, a notable exception at the Supreme Court during the Emergency was justice H.R. Khanna, who exhibited phenomenal courage and stood by his fidelity to the rule of law. He was the lone dissenting voice and paid a heavy price in the form of being overlooked for the position of the chief justice of India.
While it is difficult to foretell whether justice Singhvi stares at the possibility of being overlooked for post-retirement appointments at the statutory tribunals (where government usually exercises tremendous influence) and arbitration tribunals (where business houses rule the roost), his legacy, like that of justice Khanna, will remain one of harbinger of fidelity to the rule of law, albeit in an inchoate sense.
This legacy stems from one of the most significant judicial decisions delivered in the post-1991 (economic reforms) era— the 2G case mentioned earlier. Justice Singhvi’s belief in adherence to the rule of law was undoubtedly bolstered when he took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the 2G matter more than a month before his retirement.
Critics could point to Devinder Pal Singh Bhullar’s case where justice Singhvi had upheld the death penalty. However, in Bhullar’s context, it is at least, technically speaking, arguable that he was merely following the black letter law and wasn’t really deviating from the norm. If human rights advocates abhor the death penalty, they ought to take their battle to the legislature. Further, at the time of writing, justice Singhvi hasn’t ruled on the Naz Foundation’s appeal involving the legality of homosexuality. Will he follow the Bhullar philosophy in the Naz Foundation case? By the time you read this column, we may have the answer. Nevertheless, in the Naz Foundation appeal, justice Singhvi also has the option of referring the matter to a larger, constitution bench to decide.
It is interesting to note that the strands of fidelity to the rule of law have emerged amidst multifarious allegations of crony capitalism. If similar fidelity to the basic notion of the rule of law emerges as an overarching norm, the essential character of the Supreme Court as an institution is all set to transform from being “hyper-active in creating laws” to the upholder of the Constitution of India.
Unfortunately, India’s Supreme Court, unlike the Supreme Court of the US, does not, as a matter of course, sit en banc, but functions through a bench system, making it extremely difficult to ensure consistency and predictability in decision-making. If the Supreme Court manages to shed its hyper-activism and continues to adhere to the rule of law, while the outcome in several other cases, such as the pending coal allocation matter will become predictable, it will not only prove Max Weber wrong but also emerge as one of the most respected institutions in India and, indeed, in the entire world.
Rahul Singh teaches at the National Law School, Bangalore, and is currently pursuing research at Balliol College, University of Oxford.
http://www.livemint.com/Politics/ZnOKkTXqIICaPQVMZw4gtM/Au-revoir-to-justice-Singhvis-court.html
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Syria: Whose Sarin? -- Seymour M. Hersh
Syria: Whose Sarin?
December 08, 2013
Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts.
Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack.
In the months before the attack, the American intelligence agencies produced a series of highly classified reports, culminating in a formal Operations Order – a planning document that precedes a ground invasion – citing evidence that the al-Nusra Front, a jihadi group affiliated with al-Qaida, had mastered the mechanics of creating sarin and was capable of manufacturing it in quantity. When the attack occurred al-Nusra should have been a suspect, but the administration cherry-picked intelligence to justify a strike against Assad.
In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said.
‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’
Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability:
‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.
But in recent interviews with intelligence and military officers and consultants past and present, I found intense concern, and on occasion anger, over what was repeatedly seen as the deliberate manipulation of intelligence.
One high-level intelligence officer, in an email to a colleague, called the administration’s assurances of Assad’s responsibility a ‘ruse’. The attack ‘was not the result of the current regime’, he wrote.
A former senior intelligence official told me that the Obama administration had altered the available information – in terms of its timing and sequence – to enable the president and his advisers to make intelligence retrieved days after the attack look as if it had been picked up and analysed in real time, as the attack was happening.
The distortion, he said, reminded him of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, when the Johnson administration reversed the sequence of National Security Agency intercepts to justify one of the early bombings of North Vietnam.
The same official said there was immense frustration inside the military and intelligence bureaucracy: ‘The guys are throwing their hands in the air and saying, “How can we help this guy” – Obama – “when he and his cronies in the White House make up the intelligence as they go along?”’
The complaints focus on what Washington did not have: any advance warning from the assumed source of the attack. The military intelligence community has for years produced a highly classified early morning intelligence summary, known as the Morning Report, for the secretary of defence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; a copy also goes to the national security adviser and the director of national intelligence. The Morning Report includes no political or economic information, but provides a summary of important military events around the world, with all available intelligence about them.
A senior intelligence consultant told me that some time after the attack he reviewed the reports for 20 August through 23 August. For two days – 20 and 21 August – there was no mention of Syria.
On 22 August the lead item in the Morning Report dealt with Egypt; a subsequent item discussed an internal change in the command structure of one of the rebel groups in Syria. Nothing was noted about the use of nerve gas in Damascus that day.
It was not until 23 August that the use of sarin became a dominant issue, although hundreds of photographs and videos of the massacre had gone viral within hours on YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites. At this point, the administration knew no more than the public.
Obama left Washington early on 21 August for a hectic two-day speaking tour in New York and Pennsylvania; according to the White House press office, he was briefed later that day on the attack, and the growing public and media furore. The lack of any immediate inside intelligence was made clear on 22 August, when Jen Psaki, a spokesperson for the State Department, told reporters: ‘We are unable to conclusively determine [chemical weapons] use. But we are focused every minute of every day since these events happened … on doing everything possible within our power to nail down the facts.’
The administration’s tone had hardened by 27 August, when Jay Carney, Obama’s press secretary, told reporters – without providing any specific information – that any suggestions that the Syrian government was not responsible ‘are as preposterous as suggestions that the attack itself didn’t occur’.
The absence of immediate alarm inside the American intelligence community demonstrates that there was no intelligence about Syrian intentions in the days before the attack. And there are at least two ways the US could have known about it in advance: both were touched on in one of the top secret American intelligence documents that have been made public in recent months by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor.
On 29 August, the Washington Post published excerpts from the annual budget for all national intelligence programmes, agency by agency, provided by Snowden.
In consultation with the Obama administration, the newspaper chose to publish only a slim portion of the 178-page document, which has a classification higher than top secret, but it summarised and published a section dealing with problem areas. One problem area was the gap in coverage targeting Assad’s office.
The document said that the NSA’s worldwide electronic eavesdropping facilities had been ‘able to monitor unencrypted communications among senior military officials at the outset of the civil war there’. But it was ‘a vulnerability that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces apparently later recognised’. In other words, the NSA no longer had access to the conversations of the top military leadership in Syria, which would have included crucial communications from Assad, such as orders for a nerve gas attack. (In its public statements since 21 August, the Obama administration has never claimed to have specific information connecting Assad himself to the attack.)
The Post report also provided the first indication of a secret sensor system inside Syria, designed to provide early warning of any change in status of the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. The sensors are monitored by the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that controls all US intelligence satellites in orbit. According to the Post summary, the NRO is also assigned ‘to extract data from sensors placed on the ground’ inside Syria. The former senior intelligence official, who had direct knowledge of the programme, told me that NRO sensors have been implanted near all known chemical warfare sites in Syria. They are designed to provide constant monitoring of the movement of chemical warheads stored by the military.
But far more important, in terms of early warning, is the sensors’ ability to alert US and Israeli intelligence when warheads are being loaded with sarin. (As a neighbouring country, Israel has always been on the alert for changes in the Syrian chemical arsenal, and works closely with American intelligence on early warnings.)
A chemical warhead, once loaded with sarin, has a shelf life of a few days or less – the nerve agent begins eroding the rocket almost immediately: it’s a use-it-or-lose-it mass killer. ‘The Syrian army doesn’t have three days to prepare for a chemical attack,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘We created the sensor system for immediate reaction, like an air raid warning or a fire alarm. You can’t have a warning over three days because everyone involved would be dead. It is either right now or you’re history. You do not spend three days getting ready to fire nerve gas.’ The sensors detected no movement in the months and days before 21 August, the former official said. It is of course possible that sarin had been supplied to the Syrian army by other means, but the lack of warning meant that Washington was unable to monitor the events in Eastern Ghouta as they unfolded.
The sensors had worked in the past, as the Syrian leadership knew all too well. Last December the sensor system picked up signs of what seemed to be sarin production at a chemical weapons depot. It was not immediately clear whether the Syrian army was simulating sarin production as part of an exercise (all militaries constantly carry out such exercises) or actually preparing an attack.
At the time, Obama publicly warned Syria that using sarin was ‘totally unacceptable’; a similar message was also passed by diplomatic means. The event was later determined to be part of a series of exercises, according to the former senior intelligence official: ‘If what the sensors saw last December was so important that the president had to call and say, “Knock it off,” why didn’t the president issue the same warning three days before the gas attack in August?’
The NSA would of course monitor Assad’s office around the clock if it could, the former official said. Other communications – from various army units in combat throughout Syria – would be far less important, and not analysed in real time. ‘There are literally thousands of tactical radio frequencies used by field units in Syria for mundane routine communications,’ he said, ‘and it would take a huge number of NSA cryptological technicians to listen in – and the useful return would be zilch.’ But the ‘chatter’ is routinely stored on computers.
Once the scale of events on 21 August was understood, the NSA mounted a comprehensive effort to search for any links to the attack, sorting through the full archive of stored communications. A keyword or two would be selected and a filter would be employed to find relevant conversations. ‘What happened here is that the NSA intelligence weenies started with an event – the use of sarin – and reached to find chatter that might relate,’ the former official said. ‘This does not lead to a high confidence assessment, unless you start with high confidence that Bashar Assad ordered it, and began looking for anything that supports that belief.’ The cherry-picking was similar to the process used to justify the Iraq war.
The White House needed nine days to assemble its case against the Syrian government.
On 30 August it invited a select group of Washington journalists (at least one often critical reporter, Jonathan Landay, the national security correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers, was not invited), and handed them a document carefully labelled as a ‘government assessment’, rather than as an assessment by the intelligence community.
The document laid out what was essentially a political argument to bolster the administration’s case against the Assad government. It was, however, more specific than Obama would be later, in his speech on 10 September: American intelligence, it stated, knew that Syria had begun ‘preparing chemical munitions’ three days before the attack. In an aggressive speech later that day, John Kerry provided more details. He said that Syria’s ‘chemical weapons personnel were on the ground, in the area, making preparations’ by 18 August. ‘We know that the Syrian regime elements were told to prepare for the attack by putting on gas masks and taking precautions associated with chemical weapons.’ The government assessment and Kerry’s comments made it seem as if the administration had been tracking the sarin attack as it happened. It is this version of events, untrue but unchallenged, that was widely reported at the time.
An unforseen reaction came in the form of complaints from the Free Syrian Army’s leadership and others about the lack of warning. ‘It’s unbelievable they did nothing to warn people or try to stop the regime before the crime,’ Razan Zaitouneh, an opposition member who lived in one of the towns struck by sarin, told Foreign Policy. The Daily Mail was more blunt: ‘Intelligence report says US officials knew about nerve-gas attack in Syria three days before it killed over 1400 people – including more than 400 children.’
(The number of deaths attributable to the attack varied widely, from at least 1429, as initially claimed by the Obama administration, to many fewer. A Syrian human rights group reported 502 deaths; Médicins sans Frontières put it at 355; and a French report listed 281 known fatalities.
The strikingly precise US total was later reported by the Wall Street Journal to have been based not on an actual body count, but on an extrapolation by CIA analysts, who scanned more than a hundred YouTube videos from Eastern Ghouta into a computer system and looked for images of the dead. In other words, it was little more than a guess.)
Five days later, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence responded to the complaints. A statement to the Associated Press said that the intelligence behind the earlier administration assertions was not known at the time of the attack, but recovered only subsequently: ‘Let’s be clear, the United States did not watch, in real time, as this horrible attack took place. The intelligence community was able to gather and analyse information after the fact and determine that elements of the Assad regime had in fact taken steps to prepare prior to using chemical weapons.’ But since the American press corps had their story, the retraction received scant attention.
On 31 August the Washington Post, relying on the government assessment, had vividly reported on its front page that American intelligence was able to record ‘each step’ of the Syrian army attack in real time, ‘from the extensive preparations to the launching of rockets to the after-action assessments by Syrian officials’. It did not publish the AP corrective, and the White House maintained control of the narrative.
So when Obama said on 10 September that his administration knew Assad’s chemical weapons personnel had prepared the attack in advance, he was basing the statement not on an intercept caught as it happened, but on communications analysed days after 21 August.
The former senior intelligence official explained that the hunt for relevant chatter went back to the exercise detected the previous December, in which, as Obama later said to the public, the Syrian army mobilised chemical weapons personnel and distributed gas masks to its troops.
The White House’s government assessment and Obama’s speech were not descriptions of the specific events leading up to the 21 August attack, but an account of the sequence the Syrian military would have followed for any chemical attack. ‘They put together a back story,’ the former official said, ‘and there are lots of different pieces and parts. The template they used was the template that goes back to December.’ It is possible, of course, that Obama was unaware that this account was obtained from an analysis of Syrian army protocol for conducting a gas attack, rather than from direct evidence. Either way he had come to a hasty judgment.
The press would follow suit.
The UN report on 16 September confirming the use of sarin was careful to note that its investigators’ access to the attack sites, which came five days after the gassing, had been controlled by rebel forces. ‘As with other sites,’ the report warned, ‘the locations have been well travelled by other individuals prior to the arrival of the mission … During the time spent at these locations, individuals arrived carrying other suspected munitions indicating that such potential evidence is being moved and possibly manipulated.’
Still, the New York Times seized on the report, as did American and British officials, and claimed that it provided crucial evidence backing up the administration’s assertions. An annex to the UN report reproduced YouTube photographs of some recovered munitions, including a rocket that ‘indicatively matches’ the specifics of a 330mm calibre artillery rocket.
The New York Times wrote that the existence of the rockets essentially proved that the Syrian government was responsible for the attack ‘because the weapons in question had not been previously documented or reported to be in possession of the insurgency’.
Theodore Postol, a professor of technology and national security at MIT, reviewed the UN photos with a group of his colleagues and concluded that the large calibre rocket was an improvised munition that was very likely manufactured locally. He told me that it was ‘something you could produce in a modestly capable machine shop’. The rocket in the photos, he added, fails to match the specifications of a similar but smaller rocket known to be in the Syrian arsenal.
The New York Times, again relying on data in the UN report, also analysed the flight path of two of the spent rockets that were believed to have carried sarin, and concluded that the angle of descent ‘pointed directly’ to their being fired from a Syrian army base more than nine kilometres from the landing zone.
Postol, who has served as the scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations in the Pentagon, said that the assertions in the Times and elsewhere ‘were not based on actual observations’. He concluded that the flight path analyses in particular were, as he put it in an email, ‘totally nuts’ because a thorough study demonstrated that the range of the improvised rockets was ‘unlikely’ to be more than two kilometres.
Postol and a colleague, Richard M. Lloyd, published an analysis two weeks after 21 August in which they correctly assessed that the rockets involved carried a far greater payload of sarin than previously estimated.
The Times reported on that analysis at length, describing Postol and Lloyd as ‘leading weapons experts’. The pair’s later study about the rockets’ flight paths and range, which contradicted previous Times reporting, was emailed to the newspaper last week; it has so far gone unreported.*
The White House’s misrepresentation of what it knew about the attack, and when, was matched by its readiness to ignore intelligence that could undermine the narrative.
That information concerned al-Nusra, the Islamist rebel group designated by the US and the UN as a terrorist organisation.
Al-Nusra is known to have carried out scores of suicide bombings against Christians and other non-Sunni Muslim sects inside Syria, and to have attacked its nominal ally in the civil war, the secular Free Syrian Army (FSA). Its stated goal is to overthrow the Assad regime and establish sharia law.
(On 25 September al-Nusra joined several other Islamist rebel groups in repudiating the FSA and another secular faction, the Syrian National Coalition.)
The flurry of American interest in al-Nusra and sarin stemmed from a series of small-scale chemical weapons attacks in March and April; at the time, the Syrian government and the rebels each insisted the other was responsible. The UN eventually concluded that four chemical attacks had been carried out, but did not assign responsibility.
A White House official told the press in late April that the intelligence community had assessed ‘with varying degrees of confidence’ that the Syrian government was responsible for the attacks. Assad had crossed Obama’s ‘red line’. The April assessment made headlines, but some significant caveats were lost in translation.
The unnamed official conducting the briefing acknowledged that intelligence community assessments ‘are not alone sufficient’. ‘We want,’ he said, ‘to investigate above and beyond those intelligence assessments to gather facts so that we can establish a credible and corroborated set of information that can then inform our decision-making.’ In other words, the White House had no direct evidence of Syrian army or government involvement, a fact that was only occasionally noted in the press coverage. Obama’s tough talk played well with the public and Congress, who view Assad as a ruthless murderer.
Two months later, a White House statement announced a change in the assessment of Syrian culpability and declared that the intelligence community now had ‘high confidence’ that the Assad government was responsible for as many as 150 deaths from attacks with sarin. More headlines were generated and the press was told that Obama, in response to the new intelligence, had ordered an increase in non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition. But once again there were significant caveats.
The new intelligence included a report that Syrian officials had planned and executed the attacks. No specifics were provided, nor were those who provided the reports identified. The White House statement said that laboratory analysis had confirmed the use of sarin, but also that a positive finding of the nerve agent ‘does not tell us how or where the individuals were exposed or who was responsible for the dissemination’.
The White House further declared: ‘We have no reliable corroborated reporting to indicate that the opposition in Syria has acquired or used chemical weapons.’ The statement contradicted evidence that at the time was streaming into US intelligence agencies.
Already by late May, the senior intelligence consultant told me, the CIA had briefed the Obama administration on al-Nusra and its work with sarin, and had sent alarming reports that another Sunni fundamentalist group active in Syria, al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI), also understood the science of producing sarin.
At the time, al-Nusra was operating in areas close to Damascus, including Eastern Ghouta. An intelligence document issued in mid-summer dealt extensively with Ziyaad Tariq Ahmed, a chemical weapons expert formerly of the Iraqi military, who was said to have moved into Syria and to be operating in Eastern Ghouta.
The consultant told me that Tariq had been identified ‘as an al-Nusra guy with a track record of making mustard gas in Iraq and someone who is implicated in making and using sarin’. He is regarded as a high-profile target by the American military.
On 20 June a four-page top secret cable summarising what had been learned about al-Nusra’s nerve gas capabilities was forwarded to David R. Shedd, deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. ‘What Shedd was briefed on was extensive and comprehensive,’ the consultant said. ‘It was not a bunch of “we believes”.’
He told me that the cable made no assessment as to whether the rebels or the Syrian army had initiated the attacks in March and April, but it did confirm previous reports that al-Nusra had the ability to acquire and use sarin. A sample of the sarin that had been used was also recovered – with the help of an Israeli agent – but, according to the consultant, no further reporting about the sample showed up in cable traffic.
Independently of these assessments, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assuming that US troops might be ordered into Syria to seize the government’s stockpile of chemical agents, called for an all-source analysis of the potential threat.
‘The Op Order provides the basis of execution of a military mission, if so ordered,’ the former senior intelligence official explained.
‘This includes the possible need to send American soldiers to a Syrian chemical site to defend it against rebel seizure. If the jihadist rebels were going to overrun the site, the assumption is that Assad would not fight us because we were protecting the chemical from the rebels.
All Op Orders contain an intelligence threat component. We had technical analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, weapons people, and I & W [indications and warnings] people working on the problem … They concluded that the rebel forces were capable of attacking an American force with sarin because they were able to produce the lethal gas. The examination relied on signals and human intelligence, as well as the expressed intention and technical capability of the rebels.’
There is evidence that during the summer some members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff were troubled by the prospect of a ground invasion of Syria as well as by Obama’s professed desire to give rebel factions non-lethal support.
In July, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, provided a gloomy assessment, telling the Senate Armed Services Committee in public testimony that ‘thousands of special operations forces and other ground forces’ would be needed to seize Syria’s widely dispersed chemical warfare arsenal, along with ‘hundreds of aircraft, ships, submarines and other enablers’.
Pentagon estimates put the number of troops at seventy thousand, in part because US forces would also have to guard the Syrian rocket fleet: accessing large volumes of the chemicals that create sarin without the means to deliver it would be of little value to a rebel force.
In a letter to Senator Carl Levin, Dempsey cautioned that a decision to grab the Syrian arsenal could have unintended consequences: ‘We have learned from the past ten years, however, that it is not enough to simply alter the balance of military power without careful consideration of what is necessary in order to preserve a functioning state … Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.’
The CIA declined to comment for this article.
Spokesmen for the DIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence said they were not aware of the report to Shedd and, when provided with specific cable markings for the document, said they were unable to find it. Shawn Turner, head of public affairs for the ODNI, said that no American intelligence agency, including the DIA, ‘assesses that the al-Nusra Front has succeeded in developing a capacity to manufacture sarin’.
The administration’s public affairs officials are not as concerned about al-Nusra’s military potential as Shedd has been in his public statements.
In late July, he gave an alarming account of al-Nusra’s strength at the annual Aspen Security Forum in Colorado. ‘I count no less than 1200 disparate groups in the opposition,’ Shedd said, according to a recording of his presentation. ‘And within the opposition, the al-Nusra Front is … most effective and is gaining in strength.’
This, he said, ‘is of serious concern to us. If left unchecked, I am very concerned that the most radical elements’ – he also cited al-Qaida in Iraq – ‘will take over.’ The civil war, he went on, ‘will only grow worse over time … Unfathomable violence is yet to come.’ Shedd made no mention of chemical weapons in his talk, but he was not allowed to: the reports his office received were highly classified.
A series of secret dispatches from Syria over the summer reported that members of the FSA were complaining to American intelligence operatives about repeated attacks on their forces by al-Nusra and al-Qaida fighters.
The reports, according to the senior intelligence consultant who read them, provided evidence that the FSA is ‘more worried about the crazies than it is about Assad’. The FSA is largely composed of defectors from the Syrian army.
The Obama administration, committed to the end of the Assad regime and continued support for the rebels, has sought in its public statements since the attack to downplay the influence of Salafist and Wahhabist factions. In early September, John Kerry dumbfounded a Congressional hearing with a sudden claim that al-Nusra and other Islamist groups were minority players in the Syrian opposition. He later withdrew the claim.
In both its public and private briefings after 21 August, the administration disregarded the available intelligence about al-Nusra’s potential access to sarin and continued to claim that the Assad government was in sole possession of chemical weapons. This was the message conveyed in the various secret briefings that members of Congress received in the days after the attack, when Obama was seeking support for his planned missile offensive against Syrian military installations.
One legislator with more than two decades of experience in military affairs told me that he came away from one such briefing persuaded that ‘only the Assad government had sarin and the rebels did not.’
Similarly, following the release of the UN report on 16 September confirming that sarin was used on 21 August, Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, told a press conference: ‘It’s very important to note that only the [Assad] regime possesses sarin, and we have no evidence that the opposition possesses sarin.’
It is not known whether the highly classified reporting on al-Nusra was made available to Power’s office, but her comment was a reflection of the attitude that swept through the administration. ‘The immediate assumption was that Assad had done it,’ the former senior intelligence official told me. ‘The new director of the CIA, [John] Brennan, jumped to that conclusion … drives to the White House and says: “Look at what I’ve got!” It was all verbal; they just waved the bloody shirt.
There was a lot of political pressure to bring Obama to the table to help the rebels, and there was wishful thinking that this [tying Assad to the sarin attack] would force Obama’s hand: “This is the Zimmermann telegram of the Syrian rebellion and now Obama can react.”
Wishful thinking by the Samantha Power wing within the administration. Unfortunately, some members of the Joint Chiefs who were alerted that he was going to attack weren’t so sure it was a good thing.’
The proposed American missile attack on Syria never won public support and Obama turned quickly to the UN and the Russian proposal for dismantling the Syrian chemical warfare complex. Any possibility of military action was definitively averted on 26 September when the administration joined Russia in approving a draft UN resolution calling on the Assad government to get rid of its chemical arsenal. Obama’s retreat brought relief to many senior military officers. (One high-level special operations adviser told me that the ill-conceived American missile attack on Syrian military airfields and missile emplacements, as initially envisaged by the White House, would have been ‘like providing close air support for al-Nusra’.)
The administration’s distortion of the facts surrounding the sarin attack raises an unavoidable question: do we have the whole story of Obama’s willingness to walk away from his ‘red line’ threat to bomb Syria?
He had claimed to have an iron-clad case but suddenly agreed to take the issue to Congress, and later to accept Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical weapons. It appears possible that at some point he was directly confronted with contradictory information: evidence strong enough to persuade him to cancel his attack plan, and take the criticism sure to come from Republicans.
The UN resolution, which was adopted on 27 September by the Security Council, dealt indirectly with the notion that rebel forces such as al-Nusra would also be obliged to disarm: ‘no party in Syria should use, develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain or transfer [chemical] weapons.’
The resolution also calls for the immediate notification of the Security Council in the event that any ‘non-state actors’ acquire chemical weapons. No group was cited by name. While the Syrian regime continues the process of eliminating its chemical arsenal, the irony is that, after Assad’s stockpile of precursor agents is destroyed, al-Nusra and its Islamist allies could end up as the only faction inside Syria with access to the ingredients that can create sarin, a strategic weapon that would be unlike any other in the war zone. There may be more to negotiate.
Seymour M. Hersh is writing an alternative history of the war on terror. He lives in Washington DC.
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Seymour Myron "Sy" Hersh (born April 8, 1937) is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and author based in Washington, D.C. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker magazine on military and security matters.He has also won two National Magazine Awards and is a "five-time Polk winner and recipient of the 2004 George Orwell Award."[5]
He first gained worldwide recognition in 1969 for exposing the My Lai Massacreand its cover-up during the Vietnam War, for which he received the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting.
His 2004 reports on the US military's mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison gained much attention.
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RELATED PLEASE :
WH: Hersh report on Syria 'simply false'
Justin Sink
The Obama administration on Monday flatly denied a report from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, who reported that the Obama administration “cherry-picked intelligence” when building its case for a military strike on Syria.
In the story, published in the London Review of Books, Hersh accuses the administration of assuming that Syrian leader Bashar Assad was responsible for a sarin gas attack outside of Damascus that killed more than 1,400 people.
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Sonia's NAC and AAP: economic holes of statism and dole politics -- R. Jagannathan
Dole-nomics: Why AAP is headed down the same hole as Sonia’s NAC
by by R Jagannathan Dec 10, 2013
This is exactly why the Congress government, advised by a dole-oriented National Advisory
Council under Sonia Gandhi, is sinking in corruption and price-rise. Does Arvind Kejriwal want to repeat a bad experiment? An honestly executed bad idea is still a bad idea.
For this we have to understand the role doles play in increasing corruption. A dole is, by definition, about giving someone a benefit without seeking a price for it, or at least an adequate price for it.
If it costs Rs 14-15 to procure and store a kilo of rice and you sell it at Rs 3, it is an open invitation to corruption: the people who hawk it will see a potential to sell it in the black market, and deny the poor their cheap grain. Even the people who finally get it at Rs 3 might sell it to use the money for buying something else. Put another way, long-term doles make all of us corrupt - even the poor.
If diesel costs far less than petrol, and kerosene even less than diesel, it is an open invitation to adulteration.
Surjit Bhalla of Oxus Investments notes that large parts of AAP's manifesto reflect a Luddite tendency, as it opposes privatisation, wants the common man's necessities (water, power, food) to be subsidised, and tax the rich and middle classes more.
For this we have to understand the role doles play in increasing corruption. A dole is, by definition, about giving someone a benefit without seeking a price for it, or at least an adequate price for it.
If it costs Rs 14-15 to procure and store a kilo of rice and you sell it at Rs 3, it is an open invitation to corruption: the people who hawk it will see a potential to sell it in the black market, and deny the poor their cheap grain. Even the people who finally get it at Rs 3 might sell it to use the money for buying something else. Put another way, long-term doles make all of us corrupt - even the poor.
If diesel costs far less than petrol, and kerosene even less than diesel, it is an open invitation to adulteration.
Surjit Bhalla of Oxus Investments notes that large parts of AAP's manifesto reflect a Luddite tendency, as it opposes privatisation, wants the common man's necessities (water, power, food) to be subsidised, and tax the rich and middle classes more.
]![The top leaders of the AAP with its manifesto. PTI]()
The top leaders of the AAP with its manifesto. PTI
Leaving aside the question of taxing the better off classes aside for a minute, the mere prospect of increasing subsidies if the AAP is voted to power should scare any sensible person. It would mean that AAP has learnt no lesson from UPA-2, where the pursuit of mindless subsidies has not only slowed down growth but increased corruption to mind-boggling levels.
The top leaders of the AAP with its manifesto. PTIThe link between doles and corruption is very direct. Since doles are meant for the poor, they are easy to justify politically. This is why politicians love doles - and Kejriwal surely does not want to be thought of as any other politician. Once you commit yourself to doles, you are essentially committing yourself to a degree of corruption by interfering with market forces in the pricing of goods and services.
It is not an accident that UPA-2 saw the highest levels of corruption and highest levels of dole too.
Consider the big two scams - 2G and Coalgate. They were about helping the poor and keeping prices of power down - exactly what Kejriwal wants.
What was the justification offered by A Raja for selling spectrum in 2008 at 2001 rates? He said he wanted to make mobile services affordable to the common man. This is the argument the UPA bosses ultimately bought, since there was no other way to justify Raja's decision which got the backing of Manmohan Singh and the UPA government.
In short, the poor are always used to justify a policy that can only result in corruption. By selling spectrum far below market prices, UPA ensured gigantic corruption. How can Kejriwal rail about 2G and then want subsidies too?
Next take Coalgate, which came directly under the Prime Minister after the exit of Shibu Soren as Coal Minister. The ministry wanted to sell coal blocks by auction, but ultimately coal blocks were given away virtually free and non-transparently - again creating scope for enormous corruption.
Why give coal blocks free? The objective was, and is, cheaper power. But did we get cheaper power or costlier corruption?
Almost all state governments give electricity at throwaway prices to farmers. The net result is huge theft of cheap power from the grid. Once again, a deed done in the name of the poor farmer ends up benefiting someone else.
So when Kejriwal comes up with his cheap power and free water scheme, he can be sure that every crook will be salivating at the prospect. Kejriwal will be watering the soil of corruption further. A water mafia will develop, and power theft will become endemic.
But, no, AAP sympathisers will say, we will have a powerful Jan Lokpal who will police the administration and ensure that the right people get the cheap power and water. There will be no corruption.
Will an all-powerful anti-corruption force reduce corruption or make it worse? What is the guarantee that the Lokpal's agents will do their work diligently rather than merely accept bribes to look the other way. Don't the police, protectors of the law, do precisely this? Ask the Stalin-Brezhnev era Russians and they will tell you that when Big Brother is watching, corruption goes underground and become endemic. Corruption will become more systemic - precisely the thing Kejriwal is said to be fighting against.
The only way forward is to make doles restricted only to the ultra needy - and self-dissolving. Once it becomes universal and widespread, it becomes self-perpetuating and self-defeating.
Consider NREGA, the rural jobs scheme, which is universal. In 1999-2004, when there was no NREGA, jobs grew by 60 million, thanks to the NDA government's infrastructure investments. In the next five years, jobs growth vanished. Among other things, the entry of NREGA pushed rural wages up and drove women out of the workforce. Is the purpose of a jobs scheme to help people temporarily in distress and without jobs or to destroy the market for real jobs? Atal Behari Vajpayee's infrastructure spending created more jobs than the UPA's make-work schemes. And NREGA is one of the most corruption-ridden schemes in the country after the public distribution system. (Read here, here and here)
Kejriwal is barking up the wrong tree by mixing up old-style corrupt populism with the idea of integrity. He should remember that the post-independence Congress, and the early BJP were honest parties run by fairly clean politicians - of the kind Kejriwal himself is promising. But by embracing statism and dole politics, both Congress and BJP descended into corruption, bit by bit.
Memo to the most honest kid on the block: doles and corruption go hand in hand. Even a Jan Lokpal cannot break that invisible link.
Sonia Gandhi's National Advisory Council has pushed the UPA government into a deeper hole with suggestions for more and more doles, and look where the economy has landed.
Does Kejriwal want to dig his own hole with the dole?
http://www.firstpost.com/politics/dole-nomics-why-aap-is-headed-down-the-same-hole-as-sonias-nac-1278659.html
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Gay sex is illegal, says Supreme Court of India. Next stop: Uniform Civil Code
SC on Homosexuality
I welcome SC judgment holding homosexuality as illegal. Homosexuality is a malfunction of the human body. It is no accident that men and women are born in equal proportion. Moreover survival of the human race requires one man one woman cohabitation. Hence any behaviour which disturbs this natural selection has to be regarded as deviant and treated as illegal. Homosexuality is therefore a malfunction that must treated medically for rectification. Hence the. Government and corporates must fund research to find a cure for homosexuality at the earliest. It is a malady that should not be celebrated but cured with compassion.
Subramanian Swamy December 11, 2013
Gay sex is a criminal offence, rules Supreme Court
| |
 Gay sex is illegal in India A bench of justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya set aside the Delhi High Court's verdict which had in 2009 decriminalised gay sex among consenting adults in private. The bench allowed the appeals filed by various social and religious organisations challenging the high court verdict on the ground that gay sex is against the cultural and religious values of the country. The bench, however, put the ball in Parliament's court to take a decision on the controversial issue, saying it is for the legislature to debate and decide on the matter. With the apex court verdict, the operation of penal provision against gay sex has come into force. As soon as the verdict was pronounced, gay activists in the court looked visibly upset. The bench said Parliament is authorised to delete section 377 of IPC but till the time this penal provision is there, the court cannot legalise this kind of sexual relationship. After pronouncement of the judgement, gay rights activists said they will seek review of the apex court's verdict. The court passed the order on a batch of petitions of anti-gay right activists and social and religious organisations against the high court's verdict decriminalising gay sex. The bench had reserved its order in March last year after granting day-to-day hearing of the case from February 15, 2012. While hearing the appeal, the apex court had pulled up the Centre for its "casual" approach on the issue of decriminalisation of homosexuality and also expressed concern over Parliament not discussing such important matters and blaming judiciary instead for its "over-reach". While pleading for decriminalisation of gay sex, the Centre had subsequently told the court that the anti-gay law in the country had resulted from British colonialism and Indian society was much more tolerant towards homosexuality. The Delhi High Court had on July 2, 2009 decriminalised gay sex as provided in Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and had ruled that sex between two consenting adults in private would not be an offence. Section 377 (unnatural offences) of IPC makes gay sex a criminal offence entailing punishment upto life imprisonment. The petition seeking to decriminalise gay sex was filed in the high court by Naz Foundation. Senior BJP leader B P Singhal, who died in October last year, had challenged the high court verdict in the apex court, saying such acts are illegal, immoral and against the ethos of the Indian culture. Religious organisations like All India Muslim Personal Law Board, Utkal Christian Council and Apostolic Churches Alliance too had challenged the judgement. The Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Right, Tamil Nadu Muslim Munn Kazhgam, SD Pritinidhi Sabha, Joint Action Council, Raza Academy, astrologer Suresh Kumar Kaushal, yoga guru Ramdev's disciple S K Tijarawala, Ram Murti, Bhim Singh, B Krishna Bhat had also opposed the verdict. The Centre had earlier informed the apex court that there are an estimated 25 lakh gay people and about seven per cent (1.75 lakh) of them are HIV-infected. In its affidavit, the Union Health Ministry had said it was planning to bring four lakh high-risk 'men who have sex with men (MSM)' under its AIDS control programme and it has already covered around two lakh of them. |
| http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/supreme-court-verdict-gay-rights-decriminalisation-of-same-sex/1/330538.html |
Live: Gay sex is illegal, says Supreme Court
by 12 mins ago
11:30 am: ASG says SC has lost a historical opportunity
Historical opportunity to expand constitutional values has been lost, Attorney Solicitor General Indira Jaising said.
11:30 am: All India Muslim Law Board welcomes Supreme Court verdict
"The Supreme Court has given this verdict to maintain the culture of this country. I don't know the exact text of the judgement though," Zafaryab Jilani of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board told ANI.
"Some people wanted to live their lives in any manner they deemed fit and the Supreme Court has deemed it wrong," he said.
He said that a small minority wanted the entire system of the country changed which he was strongly opposed to.
"They are just 1 percent of the population and they want all kinds of rights including roaming around naked, which the Supreme Court has struck down," he said.
We had pointed out that homosexuality is not only against all religions but against the moral fibre of the country, he said.
11:20 am: Reasoning of vedict still not known
Unfortunately in this case we don't have the judgement and are still unaware of the reasoning that the Supreme Court has used to arrive at this verdict.
"I was quite confident till this morning that it would be upheld. To say I am disappointed is an understatement," Derek O'Brien, TMC's Rajya Sabha MP, told CNN-IBN.
He also said that it would affect gay rights in the country.
11:15 am: There is no question of morality in this case, says rights activist
"For the first time all groups are being driven under the carpet by the Supreme Court," Ashok Row Kavi, from the Humsaafar Trust, said.
He said that for the first time that the Supreme Court had taken away the rights of people and would affect health programmes that aided the queer community.
"There is no question of morality in this case," he said.
Meanwhile Firstpost's Pallavi Polanki who is at the Supreme Court said that gay rights activists said that they are "angry and disappointed with the verdict".
"We will not take this lying down," one of them told her.
11:05 am: Amnesty India says SC verdict marks a black day for freedom in India
The ruling by India's Supreme Court making consensual same-sex conduct between adults a criminal offence marks a black day for freedom in India, Human rights group Amnesty International India said today.
“This decision is a body blow to people's rights to equality, privacy and dignity,” G Ananthapadmanabhan, Chief Executive, Amnesty International India, said in a statement.
"It is hard not to feel let down by this judgement, which has taken India back several years in its commitment to protect basic rights," he said
11:00 am Lawyer for Naz Foundation says they aren't hopeful of Parliament
Anand Grover, who represented the Naz Foundation, said that they weren't hopeful about Parliament passing legislation to ensure that gay sex isn't illegal.
"Parliament is not going to assemble for six months and then they will take another six months to pass legislation so its not a viable option," Grover said.
However, he said that it wasn't the end of the battle for them.
"We have a just cause and will use all the means necessary to get our rights," Grover said.
10:45 am: Filmmaker Onir says its regrettable that the law has been upheld
"It is sad that an over 100 year law has been upheld," the filmmaker told CNN-IBN.
10:45 am: Twitter erupts after Supreme Court verdict
10:35 am: NGO representing gay men says they will appeal
"We are very disappointed, we will take action, this is a huge step back," said Anand Grover, who represented the Naz Foundation, one of the respondents in the case.
"We don't know the precise reasoning...Whether other things have been said is not clear," he said.
If the Delhi High Court is set aside it is indeed a setback and we will take all steps to appeal, the lawyer said.
10:30 am: Supreme Court sets aside Delhi High court's verdict decriminalising homosexuality
The Supreme Court has set aside the Delhi High Court verdict decriminalising homosexuality.
The Supreme Court observed that the it was not for the courts to decide the matter and hoped that Parliament would take up the matter.
"It is for legislature to look into desirability of deleting section 377 of IPC," the Supreme Court said.
10:00 am: SC set to decide on decriminalising Section 377
The Supreme Court will today pronounce its verdict on petitions challenging Delhi High court judgment decriminalise homosexual acts among consenting adults in private.
A bench of justice GS Singhvi and justice SJ Mukhopadhaya will deliver the verdict on a bunch of petitions of anti-gay right activists, social and religious organisations against the high court's 2009 verdict decriminalising homosexual acts.
Incidentally, the judgement will be pronounced by justice Singhvi on the day he retires. The bench had reserved its order in March 2012 after granting day-to-day hearing of the case from 15 February, 2012.
]![AFP]()
AFP
The Delhi high court had on 2 July, 2009, decriminalised homosexual intercourse as provided in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and ruled that such sex between two consenting adults in private would not be an offence.
AFPSection 377 (unnatural offences) of the IPC makes homosexual acts a criminal offence, entailing punishment up to life term.
Decriminalising homosexuality among consenting adults in private the High Court had said,"We declare that Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution. The provisions of Section 377 IPC will continue to govern non-consensual penile non-vaginal sex and penile non-vaginal sex involving minors. By 'adult' we mean everyone who is 18 years of age and above. A person below 18 would be presumed not to be able to consent to a sexual act."
The verdict was challenged by one Suresh Kumar Koushal, an astrologer, followed by other private individuals and several other bodies representing religious groups like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
Among those who have fought for the Delhi High court verdict to be upheld are the Naz Foundation, filmmaker Shyam Benegal and other groups.
http://www.firstpost.com/india/sc-sets-aside-delhi-hcs-vedict-decriminalising-section-377-1280861.html
SC verdict on decriminalising homosexuality today: The case so far
by Dec 11, 2013
#Delhi High Court #gay sex #Homosexuality #India #Indian Penal Code #Naz Foundation #NewsTracker #Section 377 #Supreme Court
The Supreme Court will today pronounce its verdict on petitions challenging Delhi High court judgment decriminalise homosexual acts among consenting adults in private.
A bench of justice GS Singhvi and justice SJ Mukhopadhaya will deliver the verdict on a bunch of petitions of anti-gay right activists, social and religious organisations against the high court's 2009 verdict decriminalising homosexual acts.
Incidentally, the judgement will be pronounced by justice Singhvi on the day he retires.
The bench had reserved its order in March 2012 after granting day-to-day hearing of the case from 15 February, 2012.
A bench of justice GS Singhvi and justice SJ Mukhopadhaya will deliver the verdict on a bunch of petitions of anti-gay right activists, social and religious organisations against the high court's 2009 verdict decriminalising homosexual acts.
Incidentally, the judgement will be pronounced by justice Singhvi on the day he retires.
The bench had reserved its order in March 2012 after granting day-to-day hearing of the case from 15 February, 2012.
]![Representational image. AFP]()
Representational image. AFP
The Delhi high court had on 2 July, 2009, decriminalised homosexual intercourse as provided in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and ruled that such sex between two consenting adults in private would not be an offence.
Representational image. AFPSection 377 (unnatural offences) of the IPC makes homosexual acts a criminal offence, entailing punishment up to life term.
Decriminalising homosexuality among consenting adults in private the High Court had said,"We declare that Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution. The provisions of Section 377 IPC will continue to govern non-consensual penile non-vaginal sex and penile non-vaginal sex involving minors. By 'adult' we mean everyone who is 18 years of age and above. A person below 18 would be presumed not to be able to consent to a sexual act."
The verdict was challenged by one Suresh Kumar Koushal, an astrologer, followed by other private individuals and several other bodies representing religious groups like the All India Muslim Personal Law Board.
Among those who have fought for the Delhi High court verdict to be upheld are the Naz Foundation, filmmaker Shyam Benegal and other groups.
What those challenging the Delhi High Court verdict said:
The legal counsel for astrologer Suresh Koushal argued that the verdict would lead to a rise in gay parlours and prostitution.
The All Indian Muslim Personal Law Board said that gay sex was against the principle of nature and would lead to sexual corruption and could also lead to the spread of ailments like cancer and AIDS.
What the government said
The Centre had courted controversy in the case and had irked the Supreme Court by changing its stance on the issue.
Arguing for the Union government, additional solicitor general PP Malhotra said that gay sex was "highly immoral and against the social order," and also said that it was "against nature and spreads HIV."
He argued that Indian laws reflected the view of society and also said that the Indian laws could not be guided by laws of foreign countries.
However, the Centre went into damage control mode after an outcry with the government saying that Malhotra's statements did not reflect the government's stance.
Additional Solicitor-General Mohan Jain, who represented the the Health Ministry, told the court that the Centre had decided not to challenge the 2009 High Court judgment de-criminalising homosexuality. The argument however, irked the court which questioned how the Centre could change its stance.
The court had also criticised the Centre for what it said was a 'casual' approach to the case for failing to provide adequate information to the court.
However, in his arguments before the court Attorney general Goolam Vahanvati said that the Centre was not opposed to the Delhi High court's verdict in any manner.
"It would appear that the introduction of Section 377 (making homosexual acts an offence) in India was not a reflection of existing Indian values and traditions. Rather, it was imposed upon Indian society due to the moral views of the colonisers," Attorney General ( AG) GE Vahanvati submitted.
What the respondents argued
Counsel for filmmaker Shyam Benegal argued that the effect Section 377 was so wide that it would even include heterosexual sex as well.
The Naz Foundation which works among homosexual men argued that the law was violative of hte right to privacy and sexual expression.
NGO Lawyers Collective has also put together the the final arguments in the case which you can read here.
Huge blow to LGBT rights: SC declares gay sex illegal
by 34 mins ago
#criminalising homosexuality #India #LGBT rights #parliament #Section 377 #Supreme Court #ThatsJustWrong
In a surprising judgement, Justice GS Singhvi of the Supreme Court has set aside a landmark judgement by the Delhi high court, that decriminalised homosexual sex between two consenting adults. This essentially means that gay sex in India stands illegal again.
A bench of justices GS Singhvi and SJ Mukhopadhaya allowed the appeals filed by various social and religious organisations challenging the high court verdict on the ground that gay sex is against the cultural and religious values of the country.
The bench, however, put the ball in Parliament's court to take a decision on the controversial issue, saying it is for the legislature to debate and decide on the matter.
With the apex court verdict, the operation of penal provision against gay sex has come into force.
As soon as the verdict was pronounced, gay activists in the court looked visibly upset.
Section 377 of the penal code (unnatural offences) reads like this:
A bench of justices GS Singhvi and SJ Mukhopadhaya allowed the appeals filed by various social and religious organisations challenging the high court verdict on the ground that gay sex is against the cultural and religious values of the country.
The bench, however, put the ball in Parliament's court to take a decision on the controversial issue, saying it is for the legislature to debate and decide on the matter.
With the apex court verdict, the operation of penal provision against gay sex has come into force.
As soon as the verdict was pronounced, gay activists in the court looked visibly upset.
Section 377 of the penal code (unnatural offences) reads like this:
]Representational image: Reuters
Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with 1[ imprisonment for life], or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine. Explanation.- Penetration is sufficient to constitute the carnal intercourse necessary to the offence described in this section. Unsurprisingly, the verdict has generated shock and outrage.
"Legally we'll explore options, have to discuss with those involved. The movement for equality will not stop... it is massive, it will go on," said one of the petitioners to reporters after the verdict. She had tears in her eyes as she spoke.
Anand Grover, who was the lawyer representing the Naz Foundation (one of the respondents) said, "We don't know the precise reasoning...Whether other things have been said is not clear. But we will keep fighting for justice".
The court passed the order on a batch of petitions of anti-gay right activists and social and religious organisations against the high court's verdict decriminalising gay sex.
Here are some Twitter responses:
It is for the court to decide who should head India's hockey federation, who should use red beacon but not about fundamental rights of gays
- vivek raj (@vivekrajindia) December 11, 2013At least the middle-class valorization of the judiciary won't last much longer.
- Jonathan Shainin (@jonathanshainin) December 11, 2013Supreme Court of cowards. #Section377
- Overrated Outcast (@over_rated) December 11, 2013This judgement of SC will have wide spread impact on many health projects of GOI #S377
- Kunal Majumder (@kunalmajumder) December 11, 2013The 2008 judgement by the Delhi high court read:
Decriminalising homosexuality among consenting adults in private the High Court had said,"We declare that Section 377 IPC, insofar it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private, is violative of Articles 21, 14 and 15 of the Constitution. The provisions of Section 377 IPC will continue to govern non-consensual penile non-vaginal sex and penile non-vaginal sex involving minors. By 'adult' we mean everyone who is 18 years of age and above. A person below 18 would be presumed not to be able to consent to a sexual act."
Published: December 11, 2013 10:53 IST | Updated: December 11, 2013 11:27 IST
Homosexuality illegal: SC
The HinduThe Supreme Court on Wednesday has set aside Delhi High Court judgement, which had decriminalised gay sex.
In a major setback to gay activists, the Supreme Court on Wednesday held that homosexuality or "unnatural" sex between two consenting adults under Section 377 Indian Penal Code would be an offence and this provision did not suffer from any constitutional infirmity.
A Bench of Justices G.S. Singhvi and S.J. Mukhopadaya in its judgment allowed a batch of appeals challenging the Delhi High Court judgment decriminalising Section 377 of IPC between two consenting adults.
The court had reserved verdict on March 27, 2012 after marathon arguments since February 15, 2012 from counsel for the appellants, the Attorney General G. E. Vahanvati and others arguing for and against the judgment.
The Bench while setting aside the High Court judgment, however said it would be open to the government to accept the recommendations of the Attorney General G.E. Vahanvati either to delete Section 377 IPC from the statute book or bring in appropriate amendments.
After the initial flip flop by the Centre in opposing the High Court judgment and changing its stand later, during the arguments the Attorney General maintained that the Centre had decided not to file any appeal against the High Court judgment. He said Section 377 of the IPC “insofar as it criminalises consensual sexual acts of adults in private” (prior to striking down by the Delhi High Court) was imposed upon Indian society due to the moral views of the British rulers.”
Mr. Vahanvati had said “the introduction of Section 377 in the IPC was not a reflection of existing Indian values and traditions, rather it was imposed upon Indian society by the colonisers due to their moral values. The Indian society prevalent before the enactment of the IPC had a much greater tolerance for homosexuality than its British counterpart, which at this time under the influence of Victorian morality and values in regard to family and the procreative nature of sex.”
Parents of gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals and transgenders told the court that the Delhi High Court judgment decriminalising IPC Section 377 between two consenting adults should not be interfered with. It was argued on their behalf that Section 377 created a sense of fear among them which was against their right to life and liberty guaranteed under the Constitution. The Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and Apostolic Churches Alliance (ACA) had strongly opposed the Delhi High Court judgment.
From the archives:
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Sheila Dikshit should have allowed SoniaG, RahulG in rallies to ensure victory of BJP
Sheila Dikshit even prevented PM, Sonia, Rahul from addressing rallies in Delhi
New Delhi: Former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit had such a stranglehold on Congress in Delhi that she refused to allow the Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh to address a single election rally saying the people were not happy with the Centre.
Sheila Dikshit also prevented Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi from addressing eletion rallies on the last three days of campaign, lulling them into an air of self-complacency.
The Prime Minister's Office sought dates from the Delhi chief minister several times about the election meetings Dr Singh was supposed to address, but no dates were given. This charade went on for nearly 10 days.
The Prime Minister personally wanted to address the large number of Sikh and Punjabi voters in the capital, but out of sheer self-confidence, Sheila Dikshit told the central leadership that she would lead the party to victory for a fourth consecutive term, purely on the issue of development.
Not only the Prime Minister, but P Chidambaram, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Manish Tewary and Jairam Ramesh also wanted to address election meetings in Delhi, but were prevented from doing so.
Law Minister Kapil Sibal however campaigned as he is a Lok Sabha MP from Delhi, but his campaign did not cut much ice among the voters.
All these facts fly in the face of Sheila Dikshit's assertion that she did not get full cooperation from the party in Delhi. Congress leaders say that it was Sheila's high-handedness that led to the electoral debacle.
Sheila Dikshit also prevented Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi from addressing eletion rallies on the last three days of campaign, lulling them into an air of self-complacency.
The Prime Minister's Office sought dates from the Delhi chief minister several times about the election meetings Dr Singh was supposed to address, but no dates were given. This charade went on for nearly 10 days.
The Prime Minister personally wanted to address the large number of Sikh and Punjabi voters in the capital, but out of sheer self-confidence, Sheila Dikshit told the central leadership that she would lead the party to victory for a fourth consecutive term, purely on the issue of development.
Not only the Prime Minister, but P Chidambaram, Sushil Kumar Shinde, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Manish Tewary and Jairam Ramesh also wanted to address election meetings in Delhi, but were prevented from doing so.
Law Minister Kapil Sibal however campaigned as he is a Lok Sabha MP from Delhi, but his campaign did not cut much ice among the voters.
All these facts fly in the face of Sheila Dikshit's assertion that she did not get full cooperation from the party in Delhi. Congress leaders say that it was Sheila's high-handedness that led to the electoral debacle.
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Pranams to Sri Guru Nanak Dev ji. Guru ka langar, a kitchen that feeds 100,000 every day in Harmandir Sahib
This is the only Kitchen in this universe which serves free food 7days a week, 12 months to all present there.
Kitchen that feeds 100,000 daily
Free kitchen in India run at the Sikhs' holiest shrine, Golden Temple at Amritsar, produces 200,000 flat breads and 1.5 tons of lentil soup daily.
Two hundred thousand Rotis - Chapattis (Indian flat bread), 1.5 tons of Daal (lentil soup) and free food served to 100,000 people every single day are what makes the free kitchen run at the Golden Temple in the western Indian city of Amritsar stand apart.
By all measures, the kitchen (called Langar in Punjabi ) is one of the largest free kitchens to be run anywhere in the world. The concept of langar was initiated centuries ago by Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikh religion. Sunday, November 17, 2013 was his 545th birth anniversary.
At the Langar, no one goes hungry - and everybody gets a hot meal regardless of caste, creed and religion. All Sikh Gurudwaras (places of worship) have Langar, but the one at Golden Temple - Sikhs' holiest shrine - has little parallel.
“Anyone can eat for free here and on an average we serve food to100,000 people. On weekends and special occasions double the number of people visit the langar Hall. The langar never stops and on an average 7,000 kg of wheat flour, 1,200 kg of rice, 1,300 kg of lentils, 500 kg of ghee
(clarified butter) is used in preparing the meal every day,” says Harpreet Singh, manager of this huge kitchen.
“The free kitchen uses firewood, LPG gas and electronic bread makers for the cooking and we use around 100 LPG cylinders and 5,000 kilograms of firewood every day,” he adds.
The kitchen is run by 450 staff, helped by hundreds of other volunteers. Sanjay Arora, 46, from New Delhi, comes to volunteer at the langar two days every month. “This is KAR-SEVA (do-service) for me. I feel happy after doing this service. It’s is not just free food, here you forget all the differences that separates humans from each other,” he says.
Volunteers also wash the 300,000 plates, spoons and bowls used in feeding the people. The food is vegetarian and the expenses are managed through donations from all over the world. The yearly budget of the langar runs into hundreds of millions. One has to see it to believe.
Women play an important role in the preparation of meals. Volunteers make stacks of Rotis that will be served at the free kitchen.
The "langar" or free kitchen at Golden Temple in the Indian city of Amritsar is perhaps the world’s largest free eatery.
The Langar or free kitchen was started by the first Sikh Guru, Guru Nanak
Around one hundred thousand (100,000) people visit the langar every day and the number increases on weekends and special days.
People from all over the world who have FAITH in “SIKHISM” aspire to visit Golden temple at least once in their life time.
Everybody is welcome at the langar, no one is turned away.
It works on the principle of equality amongst people of the world regardless of their religion, caste, colour, creed, age, gender or social status.
People sit on the floor together as equals and eat the same simple food at the eating hall of the Golden Temple langar.
Langar teaches the etiquette of sitting and eating in a community situation.
People from any community and faith can serve as volunteers.
The lines of status, caste and class vanish at the langar. Everybody, rich or poor, is treated as equals.
The meal served is hot but simple: comprising roti (flat Indian bread), lentil soup and sweet rice.
The utensils are washed in three rounds to ensure that the plates are perfectly clean to be again used.
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Psecularatti Poirot to participate in investigations for 12 more days
Tehelka rape case: Tarun Tejpal sent to jail for 12 days | |
| |
 Tarun Tejpal Tehelka editor-in-chief Tarun Tejpal was on Wednesday remanded in 12 days in judicial custody by a court in Panaji. Tejpal was presented before the court on Wednesday after his extended four-day police custody period expired. The district and sessions court passed the order after police argued that Tejpal should not be released on bail for fear of intimidating the victim and witnesses who have testified against him in the alleged rape case, or for destroying evidence against him. The editor has spent 10 days in custody since his arrest Nov 30 for alleged sexual assault on a junior colleague in a Goa resort last month. Besides the alleged sexual assault, Tejpal faces charges under sections like 341 (wrongful restraint) and 342 (wrongful confinement) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). These were slapped on him last week. Tejpal has already been booked under sections 354-A (sexual harassment, physical contact, advances involving unwelcome and explicit sexual overtures, or any other unwelcome physical, verbal or non-verbal conduct of sexual nature), 376 (rape) and 376(2)(k) (rape by a person of a woman in his custody taking advantage of his official position) of the IPC. The police have already recorded the statements of the victim, three witnesses and Tehelka's former managing editor Shoma Chaudhury, sworn before a judicial magistrate. Sources said that the investigators had been unable to break Tejpal and extract a confession of crime from him. Tejpal is alleged to have insisted to his investigators during interrogation that the sexual encounter with the victim was consensual. | |
| http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/tehelka-sexual-assault-case-tarun-tejpal-goa-court-shoma-woman-journalist/1/330544.htm |
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4-0: Two crucial factors - Swami Ramdev & social media -- Abhishek Bhattacharya
4-0: Two crucial factors – Swami Ramdev and Social Media
This article was written in the joint authorship of Shantanu Gupta and Abhishek Bhattacharya.
There are many in line to take credit for the stellar performance of BJP- a clean sweep in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh, a close shave in Chhattisgarh, and its emergence as the largest party in Delhi. Thoughtful seat allocation, projecting a good CM candidate, structured polling booth management, and Modi wave are the major factors contesting for the credit for this.
However, two factors which have gone completely unnoticed are- Social Media and Swami Ramdev!
A group of Indian alumni from Harvard and IDS, Sussex studied the Swami Ramdev effect on BJP’s performance in these four Hindi speaking states. As per Vinod Yadav- a Harvard Kennedy School of Government alumnus, Swami Ramdev has done 53 Public Rallies, 23 Yoga Camps, and countless road-shows in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan, and Delhi in the last two months. He himself campaigned in 118 out of the total 589 seats in the fray- more than 20%. And the effect- BJP pulled more than 90% of these 118 constituencies!
Mr. Yadav further adds, “majority of these rallies were in rural and tribal areas, where Swami ji has a huge fan following and a very strong organizational structure through bharat swabhiman movement.” Even in remote areas, he easily attracts a crowd of 50,000. If Modi is a charismatic natural crowd puller in urban India, Swami Ramdev is the same in the rural hinterlands. Though urban areas are expected to vote for the BJP, rural areas are more inclined to vote for the grand old party. However this time, BJP managed to increase its vote share in rural areas and the success is attributed to the Ramdev factor.
Swami Ramdev featured in the Top 500 Most Powerful People, a list compiled by the renowned Foreign Policy Magazine in 2013. It was a great honour for India when he spoke at the Fullerton Hall in the Art of Chicago Institute, the same hall where Swami Vivekananda had spoken in the year 1893.
It is worth mentioning that Swami Ramdev’s extensive connect andsabhas have converted strong Congress bastions such as Pandariya, Raigarh, and Saja in Chhattisgarh to BJP’s favour. Extensive anti-Congress campaigning by Ramdev ji pulled the seats such as Bhind and Morena in Madhya Pradesh where BJP did not even manage a second place in the previous assembly elections. Similarly in Delhi, constituencies like Nagloi Jat and Narela, which were with Congress earlier, are with BJP now, courtesy yog shivirs and jansabhas organised by Swami Ramdev.
Ramdev effect will be crucial in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. It is the strong performance in the rural heartland of India in the crucial states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar that will determine the fate of BJP and Swami Ramdev will be a critical ally in accomplishing this. His strong base and a wide network through the retail outlets will be a key advantage during election campaigning.
Swami Ramdev’s relentless efforts are backed up by his meticulous social media team which has disseminated his messages from rural India to the netizens across the globe. His Facebook page has more than 12 lakh likes and his Twitter following is steadily rising. You can follow all his moves, meetings, and statements on his twitter handle @yogrishiramdev.
Abhishek Bhattacharya
A libertarian by orientation, Abhishek Bhattacharya is a former LAMP Fellow and presently works at Centre for Civil Society- a free market think tank. His ideas and writings reflect the interplay of Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Connect with him at @tathast_manush / abhi.bh.in@gmail.com
http://centreright.in/2013/12/4-0-two-crucial-factors-swami-ramdev-and-social-media/#.UqgaiCembjZ
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Is war with China inevitable? -- Brandon Smith. American culture of war will bring war closer to India's borders, unless India wakes up.
Is War With China Inevitable?
http://personalliberty.com/2013/12/10/is-war-with-china-inevitable/
[quote]Why, then, did the United States persist at war, when so little was accomplished and so much horror inflicted? Its primary response to frustration and defeat in war has been, apart from a post-Vietnam pause, to double down—to try war again, usually invoking World War II, even as previous failures get swept aside. Now President Obama has done so in Afghanistan. This failed instrument of policy has shown remarkable persistence. One reason for it was that no U.S. failure entailed the national humiliation and occupation that Germany and Japan experienced. America has suffered defeat too lightly, just as it wages war too cavalierly, to force a strong reexamination of its culture of war. Still, the persistence is fascinating. Why some nations or groups learn from defeat and others do not is another book. Dower would be the one to write it. “Cultures of Defeat” would be a fitting sequel to Cultures of War, pointing toward “the possibility for shared cultures of peace and reconciliation,” that “distant shore that lies opposite the cultures of war.” [unquote] Read on...http://theamericanscholar.org/our-madness-for-war/#.UqhHOtIW02c
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SoniaG Congi faces a muslim famine -- Rohini Singh
Economic Times, Dec. 11, 2013
Delhi saw big mobilisation by maulanas against Congres. With them planning to take the campaign national, the GOP faces a piquant situation.
AFTER VOTE DROUGHT, CONG FACES A MUSLIM FAMINE
Trouble Ahead for GOP Delhi saw big mobilisation by maulanas against Cong. With them planning to take the campaign national, the GOP faces a piquant situation of Muslim desertion despite Modi
ROHINI SINGH NEW DELHI
Five of Congress’ eight MLAs in Delhi now are Muslims. That tells you something. But what tells an even bigger story is this: compared with 2008 assembly elections, Congress lost more than 70% of Muslim support in Delhi, according to the party’s internal calculations. And that loss of support was a direct result of an aggressive and focused campaign against Congress by Muslim leaders. This, in an election cycle that has Narendra Modi as BJP’s votegetter-in-chief. And it could get worse, Congress leaders privately admit and some Muslim leaders openly predict. Congress’ general election prospects, not excluding the all-important constituencies of Rae Bareli and Amethi, can get significantly affected by Muslim anger. In the key states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, share of Muslim votes in the total electorate is around 19% and a little less than 17%, respectively. Political pundits say around 150 out of 545 Lok Sabha constituencies are significantly affected by en bloc shifts in Muslim votes.
In recent assembly elections, Congress’ heavy losses have come even from areas with heavy Muslim voter concentration. Rajasthan, where the party suffered awipe-out, saw a sharp jump in Muslim votes for Bharatiya Janata Party, despite Modi campaigning intensively in the state.
Mufti Aijaz Arshad Qasmi, an influential Muslim scholar who was a key part of Muslim leaders’ campaign against Congress, says the party can no longer bank on the Modi factor to get Muslims to vote for it.
“This so-called secular government thinks where will Muslims go? We have been saying that we are not scared of Narendra Modi and they cannot use the Modi fear to scare us into voting for them again. What has happened in Delhi is a trailer. We will carry on our campaign till the Lok Sabha,”says Qasmi.
So, why is Congress in this position four months before general elections? It all started with two monuments, one man and one allegedly false police case.
TWO MOSQUES AND A MAN DID CONGRESS IN
In March 2012, Syed Mohammed Ahmed Kazmi, a Press Information Bureau-accredited Delhi journalist, was arrested by Delhi Police’s special cell. Police charged Kazmi with aiding an Iranian intelligence service plot to bomb an Israeli Embassy car belonging to Tel Aviv’s defence attaché in Delhi. Police say Kazmi confessed to assisting some Iranian officials and receiving $5,500 for his services. Kazmi has said in court that the confession was obtained by police making him sign a blank paper under threats that non-cooperation will mean “dire consequences” for his family.
Police say Kazmi hasn’t signed other statements it has submitted as evidence. Only the “disclosure statement” is signed.
Prominent Muslim leaders allege Kazmi is not just a victim of bad policing but that he was targeted for his active role in Muslim protests against alleged land-grab of wakf properties by persons with “connections to prominent Congress politicians”. ET was the first to report (on August 27 and September 9) the Muslim anger against Congress leaders over what they saw as wakf property landgrab. The two plots, in Delhi’s tony Jor Bagh and fast-developing Mehrauli, house Muslim religious structures.
Months-long protests, according to Muslim leaders, led to little action. Plus, Kazmi was picked up by the police. ET had earlier reported Muslim leaders warning Congress of electoral consequences.
PROTESTS AGAINST CONGRESS
Two days before Delhi’s December 4 election, Maulana Syed Kalbe Jawad Naqvi, an influential Muslim cleric, held a press conference in Delhi, asking Muslims not to vote for either Congress or BJP but for a third party. Maulana Naqvi’s appeal was published prominently in Delhi’s Urdu press. The national media ignored all of this. But Congress can’t — anymore. Among Congress’ heavyweight defeats in Delhi are Sheila Dikshit and Yoganand Shastri. The two wakf plots fall in Dikshit’s and Shastri’s constituencies.
Muslim protesters had demonstrated outside the Delhi residences of Ahmed Patel, Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary, and Kamal Nath, Union minister for urban affairs.
“Ahmed Patel had told us that no matter how much we protest there was no way Shastriji (Yoganand Shastri) can be defeated. I want to ask him now, will he still say the same? There were 12,000 Muslim votes in Mehrauli alone and not a single one went to Congress,” says Shazida Begum, who has been leading the protests. Shastri lost to BJP’s Parvesh Singh by more than 12,000 votes and was in the third position.
At the height of assembly election campaigning, in November, a group of prominent Muslim clerics and leaders held a conference in Delhi. The meeting discussed the Kazmi case and wakf land ‘encroachment’, and passed a resolution proclaiming Congress was not to be supported in coming elections. Then, this was put into action. Under the guidance of newly formed United Muslim Forum, 15 lakh text messages were sent to Muslim voters, urging them not to vote for Congress. Twenty-five teams tasked with campaigning against Congress were sent to Delhi constituencies with significant Muslim presence. The forum also distributed campaign material on ‘Congress misdeeds’ and took out advertisements in Delhi’s Urdu newspapers. ‘Vote for AAP, not Congress’, the ads said.
‘PROMISES NOT KEPT’
Qasmi says besides terror cases and wakf issues, Congress has not even kept the smaller promises made to the community, be it increasing the salaries of Imams or priests, disbursal of loans from minority financial corporation or hiring Urdu teachers.
“Through Right to Information applications, we discovered that nothing had happened to any of those promises. Worse, innocent Muslims are being targeted by the State and fixed if they raise their voice in protest. When a wellknown figure like Kazmi can be arrested, imagine what can happen to other Muslims. Par ab darr aur khauf ki siyasat nahin chalegi (We won’t allow a reign of fear),” says Qasmi. Congress differs with Muslim leaders. Congress general secretary and Delhi in-charge Shakeel Ahmad denies that Muslims are shifting away from the party. “Five of the eight seats won by Congress were in Muslim-dominated areas,” says Ahmed. “Muslims are expecting much more from Congress than can be done by the party,” says Rahman Khan, the minister for minority affairs. Khan says Congress has done more for Muslims than any other political party, and the community cannot turn the encroachment of wakf properties or the arrest of Kazmi into “emotional” issues.
Some of India’s most prominent Muslim leaders don’t have any time for such arguments. Muslim leaders say the Delhi experiment, where the community organised itself and actively campaigned against the party, would be repeated in other states, notably the battleground states of UP and Bihar.
“We will campaign against any party that works against Muslims. Here, even Sonia Gandhi had personally met us and assured us the issues will get resolved. But that has not happened. In the Lok Sabha elections, we will even campaign against the Gandhis in their constituencies,” Maulana Jawad says.
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BJP Lok Sabha prospects. Kumar Vishwas ready to face Jaitley, RahulG in polls
AAP celebrates poll victory at Jantar Mantar | |
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 5.25 pm: Kumar Vishwas dares BJP's Arun Jaitley to contest against an AAP candidate from any seat in Delhi. 5.20 pm: Broom has become AAP's election symbol for the entire country: Kumar Vishwas at Jantar Mantar. 5.10 pm: We have taken two-and-a-half steps of the three needed for a political victory in one go. AAP knows how to do door-to-door campaigning but not political intrigues: Yogendra Yadav. Someone told me that the party which got four seats more than AAP, is scared and asking AAP to form the govt: Yogendra Yadav on BJP. 5.00 pm: Aam Aadmi Party is with Anna and we are supporting his cause: Kumar Vishwas at Jantar Mantar. 4.05 pm: AAP takes out massive rally at Jantar Mantar to celebrate its victory in Delhi Assembly polls. Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal held a public meeting on Wednesday at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi to explain the party's future course of action to the volunteers and the party members. |
| http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/aam-aadmi-party-poll-victory-jantar-mantar-arvind-kejriwal/1/330655.html |
Delhi: BJP leads in 6 Lok Sabha seats, AAP one and Congress zero
December 10, 2013
The seat difference between the BJP and the AAP is just four in the recently held Delhi Assembly elections. The BJP has won 32 and the AAP 28 while the Congress has been reduced to singe digits with juts eight in its bag.
But the BJP is miles ahead of the AAP in terms of Lok Sabha seats.
If we add the votes polled for the BJP, the AAP and the Congress in each Lok Sabha seat, the BJP is leading in 6 of the total 7 Lok Sabha seats in Delhi.
The AAP is leading in just one Lok Sabha seat. The Congress which swept the last Lok Sabha polls by winning all 7 seats is not leading in even a single seat.
Each Lok Sabha seat in Delhi has 10 Assembly seats.
Many BJP candidates have won by a big margin when compared to the AAP, whose candidates except a few have won by a very small margin.
In the prestigious East Delhi Lok Sabha seat currently held by the outgoing chief minister Sheila Dikshit's son Sandeep Dikshit, the BJP is ahead of both the AAP and Congress. The BJP has got 3,62,013 votes, the AAP has got 3,15,262 votes and the Congress has got 3,28,050 votes.
Even though the AAP has won 5 out of 10 seats in East Delhi, it's total vote share is lesser than the votes the BJP and the Congress got.
The reason being AAP's winning margin is lesser than the margin of BJP and Congress. The BJP won three and the Congress two seats respectively.
The AAP is leading only in New Delhi Lok Sabha seat currently held by senior Congress leader Ajay Maken. The AAP has got 3,42,260 votes. The BJP come second with 3,00,181 votes while the Congress is third with just 2,15,097 votes. The AAP has won a record 7 seats in this Lok Sabha constituency. The remaining 3 seats have gone to the BJP.
The BJP is leading in North-West Delhi seat currently held by Union minister Krishna Tirath.
The BJP is also leading in North-East Delhi, South Delhi, West Delhi and Chandni Chowk.
Chandni Chowk is currently held by high profile Union minister Kapil Sibal. Here the BJP polled 2,93,080 votes and the Congress 2,69,397 votes.
The Congress heavy weights of Delhi, who are now holding important positions at the Centre have a reason to worry in the coming Lok Sabha elections.
The AAP, which is close behind, can hope to win by fielding strong candidates in all 7 Lok Sabha seats.
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BJP picks its playing XI: How saffron party is targeting 11 states as it aims to take 293 Lok Sabha seats
9 December 2013
The Bharatiya Janata Party has sharpened its final countdown to the general elections of next year. The party's CEO and President – Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh - have revised the target upward to beyond the magic figure of 272, deciding to focus on 11 states in the north and central zone of the country so as to form the next government.
In the four states where results were declared on Sunday, the BJP got 408 of the 590 seats. The party leadership now wants to ride carry this momentum forward into the general elections.
"Our aim is to first cross the 272 mark and hold public rallies to take across the voters our message for good governance, anti-corruption agenda and enrolling new voters,'' party president Rajnath Singh told Mail Today.
It is learnt that the party's prime ministerial candidate and poster boy Narendra Modi now wants the BJP not only to target the nearly 72 parliamentary seats in these four states, but to extend the momentum over the nation's entire northern and central zones.
Top party sources confirmed the 11 states where the BJP will be entering an aggressive poll mode beginning early January next year are Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Rajasthan Haryana, Punjab, Himachal, Gujarat and Maharashtra.
These 11 states together have 293 LS seats, and the BJP hopes that the pace picked up in the Assembly polls will get it very close to the half-way mark of 272 in Parliament.
Leading from the front is Modi himself, who has set a virtual "mission impossible" for himself – to sweep Gujarat and get 26 out of 26 LS seats for the BJP, a top party insider told Mail Today on Wednesday.
In a similar vein, the Madhya Pradesh Assembly results have encouraged the state party leadership to fix a similar target - 29 out 29 - there as well.
BJP general secretary Ananth Kumar sees the momentum in the BJP as similar to the wave of the 1977 elections.
"A north India poll phenomenon is ready to strike in the Lok Sabha polls next year where we are aiming to repeat what we did then, that is make the Congress under Indira Gandhi sweat in the Hindi heartland of north and central India," he told Mail Today.
"If the latest Assembly results are any indicator, then we are going all out in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and the entire northern region up to Jammu," Kumar said.
The party top brass has decided to go full swing with its three-fold strategy, hints party chief Rajnath Singh.
Big aims
The party is aiming high in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, particularly in the former where Rajnath's own leadership is facing a test to get the state back in the BJP's kitty.
"We are aiming to score over 50 per cent in UP and Bihar, which makes at least 60-70 seats out of 120," said Kumar.
Top party sources said Modi and Singh have already made Bihar a priority, especially after the split with Nitish Kumar.
In Maharashtra, the saffron party is ready to have a soft alliance with either the Raj Thackeray-led MNS or the Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena.
"We can then sweep Maharashtra and with SAD in Punjab, we will try to make the most in northern areas," Kumar added.
Party sources added that the leadership is not leaving out the North-East, especially Assam and Arunachal, in its new poll agenda of a "Strong BJP and Extended NDA" to neutralise the Trinamool Congress effect in Bengal.
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http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/Congress-MPs-Face-Bleak-Future-in-MP/2013/12/11/article1939203.ece?service=print
http://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/Congress-MPs-Face-Bleak-Future-in-MP/2013/12/11/article1939203.ece?service=print
Congress MPs Face Bleak Future in MP
Abhinandan Mishra
Dec 11, 2013
[The BJP wave in Madhya Pradesh has literally put a question mark on the fate of 11 Congress MPs in the state, who failed to make any impact in the Assembly seats in their constituencies.]
The BJP wave in Madhya Pradesh has literally put a question mark on the fate of 11 Congress MPs in the state, who failed to make any impact in the Assembly seats in their constituencies.
A reading of the poll result shows that of 87 such Assembly seats, the Congress could win only 20 of them.
The worst performer was Pradesh Congress Committee chief Kantilal Bhuria, the MP from Ratlam. In the seven Assembly seats there, the party drew a blank. The BJP won in six seats while the remaining one went to an independent.
Similarly, in the Mandsaur parliamentary seat, represented by Rahul Gandhi’s trusted aide Meenakshi Natrajan, the party could win only one of the eight seats.
The rest seven went to the BJP. MP from Ujjain Premchand Guddu, who was also the party’s media incharge during the campaigning, too, fared poorly in his constituency. The Congress lost all the eight Assembly seats in Ujjain. In the 2008 polls, the party had three MLAs from this region.
According to party sources, these leaders would now find it difficult to secure tickets for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.
“They are MPs and hence responsible for the party’s performance in their constituencies. We were expecting close to 50 seats from these 11 MPs. However, they failed to win even half of it. The Assembly election results show that they have become unpopular and it is likely that many of them will not be repeated in 2014,” a party leader said.
Another senior leader Sajjan Verma, who represents the Dewas seat, too could not stop the BJP wave and all the eight seats in his constituency went to the saffron party.
Khandwa MP Arun Yadav also failed to deliver. In his region, the Congress could win only one of the eight Assembly seats. In Chhindwara, represented by Union Minister Kamal Nath, the party won three of the seven seats.
In the Guna constituency, from where Union Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia comes, the Congress did relatively well by winning five of the eight seats.
The party also did well in Mandla where it won four of the eight seats. Mandla is represented by Basori Singh Masram.However in Dhar, the Congress could secure only two of the eight seats. The constituency is represented by Gajendra Singh Rajukhedi. Similar was the party’s fate in Rajgarh. MP
Narayan Singh could manage only two of the eight seats. The story was repeated in MP Nandini Singh’s Shahdol constituency.
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Friend, father & philosopher of black money is Chidambaram -- Ram Jethmalani
WEDNESDAY | DECEMBER 11, 2013
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Order of nature. Family is the cornerstone of the nation of Bharatam. Let not psecularatti destroy the abiding social fabric.
Heterosexual family and extended family of caste is the cornerstone of the nation of Bharatam. Let not psecularatti destroy this abiding, moral social fabric. If family is lost, everything is lost and we revert to the state as it exists in America with high divorce rates, unwed mothers and total social rot of atomized bogus human rights. See what is the 'order of nature' as per Sec. 377: http://newswatch.
Oldest Fossil of Mating Insects Found; Sex Positions Haven’t Changed
A holotype male, on the right, and allotype female, on the left.
Photograph by Li S, Shih C, Wang C, Pang H, Ren D
Photograph by Li S, Shih C, Wang C, Pang H, Ren D
You could call it everlasting love: Scientists have discovered the oldest fossil of mating insects, which lived during the Jurassic period.
A pair of unlucky froghoppers were caught in the act in what’s now northeastern China and preserved in stone over 165 million years ago. Froghoppers are a type of small insect named for their tendency to hop around plants like tiny frogs.
Fossils of mating insects are rare, which creates challenges for scientists studying the evolution of mating position and how genitalia are oriented in insects. (See video: National Geographic’s “Mating Moments.“)
For example, the amorous pair was mating in a belly-to-belly position, much like modern froghoppers mate. This suggests that froghoppers’ mating position and genital symmetry have remain largely unchanged for over 165 million years, according to the study, published November 6 in the journal PLOS ONE.
The remarkably well-preserved fossil also reveals the male’s reproductive organ inserting into the female, and the position of the male’s body segments suggest he was twisting and flexing during sex. (Also see “Mating Turtles Fossilized in the Act.”)
Comments
- Patrick J SmithKCMONovember 14, 10:26 amI Recall N Remember Her… We became Stuck To N On each other… From our Sticky Ectoplasm… Like a Couple of Prehistoric Sized Mating Lightening Bugs and or Fire Flies… Flying around while Stuck together… Landing on a Palm… Blinking Away etc… When the END OF THE WORLD Happened… Trust Me 72 Million Years Ago when Old Scratch The Devil aka SUE/SUMAC The T-Rex DINOSAUR along with all this Other all went Extinct!!!!!!!!
- Chris Hyman
November 13, 12:51 pm
@Christine – Wonderful pun !!! Well done !! (. . . and just for the record, it is believed they died from poisonous gases released by a significant eruption . . . (uumm – volcanic one that is).@zzeus – Well, these were discovered in China, where much of the populace is educated enough to realize that money spent on scientific research, art, music, and other endeavors that don’t show an immediate profit isn’t ‘wasted’.@Mike – The reproductive organs fossilized, like the rest of the bodies. Once fossilized, they don’t decompose (other than by wear n’ tear, like any ‘rock’-like substance).@me&James – I meant to write ‘desperate’ . . . sorry. - gelaciophoenix azNovember 12, 3:59 pmMe gusta national gegrafic, y mas si es espanol ca…laveras
- MikeNairobiNovember 12, 9:16 amReproductive parts of these two insects didnt decompose after 6m yrs?
- ChristineUnited StatesNovember 9, 12:39 pmWhat caused these froghoppers to die so suddenly? Was it the big bang?
- Chris Hyman
November 8, 3:48 pm
@ Michael
I think True Patriot was being facetious (or maybe fecetious), and he might well have meant it was indeed a ‘mute’ point . . . since the point itself said nothing, really . . . (don’t you wish I were a ‘mute’ reader . . . or is that moot at this point?)
@ James
Perhaps you were kidding too . . . so does it become even more ‘deserate’ if I say I’m impressed by the prominently displayed aedeagus in a bursa copulatrix ? - zzeusAntiguaNovember 7, 7:55 pmNo change over millennia: how reassuring…
And how much money is being wasted on this crap?! - Michael HenryUnited StatesNovember 7, 7:32 pmTrue American Patriot – First of all, “mute” point? I think you mean “moot” point. However, since you believe the Earth was made 6000 years ago, we can forgive you for your grammatical errors. If you’re smarter than educated people who properly employ the scientific method and are scrutinized by peer review, please research the concept of “Created Antiquity” which, if true, means that God is deceptive. Since I’m sure that you will agree that God cannot be, by definition, deceptive, then you may realize how frustrating it is to not be as smart as you think you are.
- Benjamin T.Asahara desertNovember 7, 6:45 pmDo the frog hoppers perform cannibalism like the praying mantis?
- Chris HymanWildwood, MONovember 7, 5:04 pmUmmm . . . er. . .yeh . . . sorry about the less-than-highly- scientific nature of the comments . . . it’s just so rare we get a break in the day of this nature . . . one involving insect-porn no less.
- Christine Dell'Amore
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November 7, 4:36 pmEnjoying these comments everyone! - Chris Hyman
November 7, 3:59 pm
It’s just as well that they died while mating . . . I’ll bet he had no intentions of calling her the next day . . . . - True American PatriotMiddle of AmericaNovember 7, 3:46 pmWe all know the earth was made roughly 6,000 years ago so this is all a mute point.
- Chucks
November 7, 2:50 pm
James- What’s your problem with describing it as sex positions? That’s exactly what the article is about. And why do you put sex in quotes, when it’s clear that insects have sex? - JeremySaint LouisNovember 7, 1:47 pmJames – Stop being so sensitive. That information is valuable to scientists & is the whole point of the article. Why does the sexual position of a 165M year old pair of flies offend you? Would you feel better if they included verbiage that the flies were monogamous, married & Christian?
- James StoutUnited StatesNovember 7, 1:26 pmIt is necessary to mention “sex” positions? Many will read your science report without it. Or are we that desperate?
- Brad LeutwylerUSANovember 7, 1:16 pmIn the timeless words of that wise philosopher M.C. Hammer, “Can’t touch this.”
November 13, 12:51 pm
November 7, 4:36 pm
November 7, 2:50 pm
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2013/11/07/oldest-fossil-of-mating-insects-found-sex-positions-havent-changed/
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What 2013 means to 2014? -- Dr. Praveen Patil
What 2013 means to 2014?
The four states that gave a verdict on Sunday could not have been clearer, but we can continue to obfuscate and try to mold the verdicts as per our own whims and fancies. For the media in Delhi and the intellectual elite it is the arrival of AAP that defines the victory which only goes on to show how shallow Delhi is, for it cannot see an India beyond the national capital. For the BJP supporters it is the ultimate wave in their favor, but they tend to forget that these states were essentially their strongholds and bipolar in nature. For the Congress, well, it continues to live in denial, at least publicly.
The result of this round of assembly polls may mean different things to different people, but what actual impact will it have on 2014? That is the question we will try and answer from a neutral perspective. To answer that question we will dissect these assembly elections with cold neutrality and try to capture the signals.
BJP
It is quite obvious that BJP was the big winner on Sunday, for the party got something to the magnitude of 72 lakh additional votes over and above its nearest rival, the Congress party. This is a significant set of elections for the party because it seems to be finally on the path that it had originally chalked out for itself when the party was born in 1980. Uniting the Hindu vote under one umbrella has been the BJP’s raison d’être despite whatever politically correct statements its many leaders make from time to time. It might yet be impossible to unite the whole spectrum of Hindu vote, but BJP under its new leadership is now positioning itself towards acquiring large sections of Hindu vote.
The BJP experiment of a united Hindu vote, if ever there was one, is best elucidated in Rajasthan. It is here in this western state that BJP has won 81% of the assembly seats with a whopping 37 lakh more votes or roughly a 13% gap margin over Congress! This is a socially unprecedented election result for the BJP, a party that starts every election with a handicap of minus 10 to 20% vote-share due to adverse minority voting. How did this happen? This happened because of the united Hindu vote, for BJP was able to add to its core votes of Rajputs, Brahmins and trading communities with OBC vote like that of Jats, Gujjars, Ahirs etc.This broad social coalition of upper-castes, middle-castes and OBCs is almost insurmountable in a first past the post system of India. In Rajasthan, for instance, all the 15 Muslim Congress candidates lost because non-minority voters refused to vote for the party. In Madhya Pradesh too all Muslim legislators of the Congress party lost barring one. This is the ultimate polarization of votes, wherein the entire Hindu vote rallies behind one party and gives it a solid block of 35 to 40% of votes. It is a combination of governance model of Gujarat and the OBC status of BJP’s prime-ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, which is delivering this impossible Hindu vote to a party that has been historically limited to a Brahmin-Bania demographic. What is significant is that this is a scalable electoral model, especially in North and central India. For instance, the Jat vote that BJP has accrued is not limited to Rajasthan alone, but has happened even in Delhi for almost the first time and is developing into a wave in western UP.
Under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, Congress party had an umbrella social coalition of sorts through what was then famously known as KHAM (Kshatriya, Harijan, Adivasi & Muslim) which did not consider the OBCs as a vote-bank. The first generation of OBC mobilization happened in the post-JP, pre-Mandal era and completely swept out the Congress party from the core heartland states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – an area which has never returned back to the party fold since then. The second generation of OBC mobilization was attempted by BJP by building a broader coalition of a section of OBCs and upper castes through regional satraps like Kalyan Singh, Uma Bharati etc. It is the third generation of OBC mobilization that is now being attempted by Narendra Modi by marrying governance to a complete coalition of the Hindu vote in which OBCs are an important part.
This third generation mobilization of Hindu vote is the deadliest of them all and has the maximum disruption potential, especially in the whole of heartland. We could see the impact of this coalition in Chhattisgarh, where the ruling BJP was facing an impossible task of a loss of large number of seats in the northern and southern tribal belts. The entire game-plan of BJP rested on its performance in Central Chhattisgarh, wherein the party needed to make-good all the losses from north and south. The problem for the party was compounded by the presence of CSM – Chhattisgarh Swabhiman Manch, which was formed exclusively to tap the OBC votes and had many strong Sahu community leaders in its ranks (the largest OBC group of Chhattisgarh), such as Dehru Prasad and Urwashi Sahu et al.
Narendra Modi addressed 5 well attended public rallies in Central Chhattisgarh, especially in the Durg-Raipur belt where CSM was putting up a strong fight and changed the entire political scenario by preventing large-scale leakage of OBC votes. For instance, Dehru Prasad who was widely expected to win his Navgarh seat, ended up being number two behind BJP, despite garnering 42 thousand odd votes. Similarly, Urwashi Sahu (daughter of Tarachand Sahu, a 4 time MP from Durg and the tallest Sahu leader), lost her Durg rural seat to BJP. It is indeed a minor electoral miracle that BJP managed to win a whopping 32 of 49 seats from central Chhattisgarh (BJP had won only 23 in 2008) despite 3% vote-share of the CSM, while BSP’s performance (which always hurts Congress) was much debilitated this time.
Similarly in Madhya Pradesh, BJP not only added 4% of the vote-share that it had lost in the last election of 2008 due to Uma Bharati leaving the party, but also added an additional 4% of vote-share because of the Modi-OBC-vote-mobilization factor. Even in Delhi, the OBCs have voted overwhelmingly in favor of the BJP, which is why its performance is much better in the outer parts of the national capital region than in the central parts dominated by AAP.There are 218 parliamentary constituencies in what is termed as North India or the Hindi-Heartland – UP, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarkhand. BJP’s new found total Hindu vote has the ability to win a lion’s share of LS seats in the heartland and even a tally of 150+ cannot be ruled out if the present set of election results are any indication. BJP will face major electoral resistance only in UP and Bihar due to the presence of regional caste-based parties, but if the experiment of Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh holds true then expect major socio-political churning in UP and Bihar too. The problems in smaller states of Haryana and Jharkhand are related to forming proper alliances. In conclusion, this set of assembly elections have provided a perfect Launchpad for a Narendra Modi led BJP into the battleground of 2014.
Congress
First let us state the obvious problem, Congress has been decimated in the latest round of elections and has an almost insurmountable 10% gap to cover in order to put up a fight against BJP. There are three ways of going about this business, one is what the party is doing in the TV studios, living in denial and just giving up on 2014. The second way is what Rahul Gandhi prescribed on Sunday – the AAP way. The problem with the second path is that you are becoming a victim of your own propaganda. Congress must realize that the Delhi media is a propaganda machine that simply churns out eulogies to the newest challenger to Modi-BJP without any substance (Nitish Kumar, L.K. Advani, Shivraj Singh Chouhan have all had their seasons). So if you believe that AAP is really the big story of 2013 then good luck to you and Nandan Nilekani or whichever technocrat you would want to choose for your 2014 sojourn. Rest assured, a tally of double digits awaits you at the end of the dark tunnel.
If, on the other hand, you are willing to accept your shortcomings and the existence of a NaMo-wave, then there is a third path, the old-fashioned political pathway to take on the bull by its horns in the electoral arena. You may not win 2014, but at least you would have put up a fight and would have ensured that you would live to fight another day. If Congress continues to live in denial, then the defeat in 2014 may actually be a deathblow to the party than just a minor setback.
To some extent, Sonia Gandhi does seem to still have her legendary political instincts intact, for she did address the basic problem of Congress not having a face to oppose Modi and that is a good starting point. There are hundreds of problems with the Congress party, but the two biggest ones are big ticket corruption scandals and economic mismanagement. You can’t do much about the former because it is already too late, but there is a lot that can be done about economy and the biggest problem that has the simplest of solutions is inflation. How on earth did Congress go into elections with prices of onion, tomato and potato sky rocketing? It was such a simple basic mistake. In the next 6 months, the biggest priority for Congress should be to control inflation at any cost (and it is not that difficult, mind you).
There are also two specific signals that have emanated from this round of assembly elections – maybe feeble signals, but signals nonetheless – and the Congress party needs to work on this. First of all let us be very clear, Congress cannot hope to win an election purely on minority vote-mobilization as we have clearly seen in Rajasthan and MP etc., so unnecessary minority appeasement of the Shadi Bhagya variety will only backfire and play into the hands of BJP. Minority vote gets converted into seats only when combined with sections of Hindu vote and Congress is in the danger of being pushed out of the Hindu vote spectrum in North India.
The first signal is an obvious one from Chhattisgarh where the tribals and Dalits seem to have reposed faith in the Congress party once again after many years. This should give the party hope, but is this model scalable beyond Chhattisgarh is the big question. The Dalit vote of North India for instance, gets splintered in multiple directions; the largest chunk goes to the BSP, and other part gets divided between Congress, BJP and others. By and large, we can surmise that the Dalit vote has the least incentive to be a part of the BJP-Modi-Hindu-vote-spectrum. It is this aspect that the Congress needs to tap aggressively in the next few months, either by trying to form an alliance with BSP or by entrusting Congress leadership to Dalits.
The second signal has come from Baghelkhand in Madhya Pradesh, but Congress needs enormous political capital to latch on to this. In an otherwise overall sweep of MP, Baghelkhand is one of those rare sub-regions where BJP has lost seats to the Congress party as compared to last time (which was accurately predicted only by 5Forty3). Just 10 seats out of 30 may not be a great advertisement of Congress revival, but it does give us something to work on. Especially because not only the vote-share gap between BJP and Congress has been reduced to just 3%, but also BJP’s vote-share has decreased drastically.Baghelkhand has been a BJP stronghold for long now due to the fact that it is dominated by upper castes – Thakurs Brahmins and Vaishyas. In this election a section of the upper castes and Vaishyas rebelled against the BJP and voted for other parties (mainly Congress and BSP). The ostensible reason for the minor rebellion has been attested as wrong ticket distribution, but the real reasons are a little more than that. There has been a simmering discontent, especially among the Brahmins and Thakurs, about the growing importance of OBCs in BJP and therefore a section of them actually started to look favorably at Ajay Singh (the son of Arjun Singh and the leader of the opposition in MP), but the singularly non-talented Mr. Singh just couldn’t build on the discontent. This is just a toe-hold for the Congress party, but it provides a template for the rest of North India, wherein Congress should try and break the big Hindu coalition that Modi is attempting to build and Brahmins can turn out to be Congress’s best friends in this venture.
Of the 218 LS seats in North India, Congress is in realistic contention only in about 50 seats as of today. The party must try and at least double that tally if not more by building social coalitions and political alliances. It is absolutely vital for the Congress party to put up a fight against BJP in the heartland and mobilizing Dalit-Brahmin vote as an addendum to the core minority votes is the only way forward as it cannot hope to get any traction in middle castes and OBCs. Bottomline is that the Congress party is in grave danger of being reduced to the level of erstwhile Muslim league in Northern India if it doesn’t take corrective measures soon.
Third Front
Contrary to what the TV studio debates are propagating, the fact is that the third front space has actually shrunk in these assembly elections, in fact, the third political pole has never had it this bad in assembly elections. For instance, BSP’s vote-share has gone down from 8% to as low as 3.5% in Rajasthan, from 9% to 6% in Madhya Pradesh and from 6% to 4% in Chhattisgarh. The overall vote share of “others” has been drastically reduced by anywhere between 40 to 70% in all the three states as we can see in the chart. Delhi is not the rule but the exception where AAP has altered the vote-shares.The one big message that has come from this set of assembly elections is that even in the state assembly elections there is a latent national vote. India is heading for bipolarity and that actually is a good news for the tottering Congress party. The shrunken third space as evidenced in these assembly polls will invariably shrink further in the national elections as we have seen in the past. With Narendra Modi and BJP targeting the whole spectrum of Hindu vote, the position of small regional parties in the LS polls would be extremely vulnerable in North India.
A note on AAP
The problem with frivolous intellectualism is it always hyper-reacts. Before the Delhi election everybody was busy under-estimating AAP and now everybody is busy over-estimating and over analyzing the AAP phenomenon. We get to hear such humungous theories from TV studios as to how AAP would now be a national party and how Arvind Kejriwal would be the PM candidate of the third front! Nobody bothers to tell us how AAP will replicate its limited success of a rootless city like Delhi in other metros; for instance, how will AAP gather votes in Mumbai where fault-lines are between Maharashtrians and outsiders, or say in Hyderabad where there are agitations for and against Telangana or even in say, Lucknow, where the politics of identity is foremost.
Even the success of AAP in Delhi is a one-off phenomenon that has come about through a string of coincidences – a very unpopular government, agitations of the past year on a range of issues from corruption to women’s safety, passionate participation of youth (who have long-term attention deficiency as always) and a moribund opposition which woke up much later in the day and yet managed to be the single largest party. Arvind Kejriwal is making a classic mistake once again. He is taking this one-off support of the people of Delhi for granted and wants to go for polls once again based on some ludicrous suggestions that AAP has the momentum and will gain a 2/3rdmajority in a re-poll.
What is more likely to happen is quite the opposite;
- Voters passion would have come down a couple of notches in about 3-4 months and AAP would never be able to get the same kind of volunteer participation as they got this time, no matter what kind of funds they manage (this is exactly what happened with the Anna movement which eventually fizzled out despite huge initial success)
- With the passage of time, basic every day governance delivery issues will become important and the greenhorn MLAs of AAP would be answerless to voters queries especially in a situation where there is no government
- The Voter anger against Sheila Dixit would also be much reduced in a few months’ time and all Congress needs to do is regain some 3-5% of the vote share to overtake AAP
- If Delhi elections are held along with LS polls, which is the only practical possibility as far as the EC policy on repolling is concerned, then AAP would come a cropper as it is a well-established fact that almost 65% of AAP voters want to vote for Modi in the LS polls
- Even if Delhi elections are held separately, all that BJP/Congress have to do is manage better ticket distribution by giving more tickets to young professionals rather than tired old faces and AAP would lose its only USP
- At least half a dozen seats are such where AAP has won by a very narrow margin and as such it won’t be sustainable in another election
At the end of the day, far from going national, AAP stands vulnerable in the only state that it has performed, as we move closer towards 2014 elections.
http://5forty3.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/what-2013-means-to-2014/
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Why the BJP loves AAP -- Surjit S Bhalla. AAP is a SoniaG Congi chamcha, that is why.
Column: Why the BJP loves AAP
Surjit S Bhalla Posted online: Tuesday, Dec 10, 2013 at 0000 hrs
For a long time, or at least since Ms Sonia Gandhi started on her experiments with populist socialism, many of us had suspected that the 2014 Lok Sabha election would herald a new and different world order. And the December 8 state poll results have transformed that forecast into a welcome and impending reality. A brand new 1-year-old baby called AAP (Aam Aadmi Party), too young to be called David, has felled an ageing and fading Congress in Delhi. And with a little help from their Prime Minister nominee, Mr Narendra Modi, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has dispatched the same ageing, fading and toothless Congress into the record books in two additional states.
Unlike just a few days ago, the glitterati speculation is that all dreams (and nightmares) will become reality. That the 2014 election will be a two person Presidential contest between Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal. That the Aam Aadmi Party will soon spread to the far corners of India and make the Indian spring happen. By obtaining 28 out of 70 seats in Delhi, and the BJP short of a majority by 4 seats in a 70-member parliament, the AAP is riding on hope for the future.
So are a lot of AAP supporters and the concerned middle class. But before we all get carried away, time to assess AAP as a mature adult rather than a new born baby, albeit a cute one. They have earned the respect and admiration of all. So time now to ask the basic question: if the AAP were an important player in governance, what else will they do besides supporting motherhood and being against corruption? Their views on economic policies provide a clue.
Economic policy according to AAP/Kejriwal should be as follows (obtained from interviews, manifestos, etc). “GDP growth should be directly related to the lives of the people, but such growth affects very few people … AAP opposes privatisation, wants government into oil extraction (and much else), recommends an increase in effective taxes on the middle class and supports increases in fuel and electricity subsidies. AAP would take measures to ensure basic facilities; e.g. electricity expense reduction of 50% and 700 litres of free water. Further, AAP believes in government provision of high quality education and health, regulation of fees of private schools, implementation of minimum wages etc.”
The AAP may signal the birth of honest politics (I believe it does) but it most likely signals the birth of Luddite and extremely dishonest economics. Until I read the AAP manifesto, I believed that it was a close race between Ms Sonia Gandhi and Mr Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for the title of Populist of the Century. In her spurt over the last five years, the close race is no more—Ms Gandhi is the champion. But I believe the title should go to Mr Kejriwal as revealed by his economic views as quoted above.
The other big story of Election 2013 is the absence or presence of a Modi wave. The Congress people say no, and they provide proof by pointing to the two states Delhi and Chhattisgarh—these states show virtually no vote gain for the BJP, indeed witnessed a marginal average 1 percentage point loss. The AAP supporters point to their giant killing activity in Delhi and make unveiled inferences about the lack of a third alternative (i.e. absence of AAP) in the two BJP victorious states of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh.
It is fun to speculate on the counterfactual, but also difficult. The only recourse one has is to look at history and when history does not have an occurrence like AAP (it does not in India) then one is left with a “take it or leave it analysis”. So here goes. Voting data for all four states is strongly indicative of an anti-Congress (not anti-incumbent) wave. And data for Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh is indicative of the presence of a Modi wave. Note the following. First, even in Delhi where the AAP was the big alternative, the CNN-IBN-CSDS opinion poll results revealed that at least half of those people voting for the AAP in Delhi would vote for Modi in the Lok Sabha election. And the AAP’s own survey indicated that a third of the people would do so!
In a three-cornered contest, the Delhi poll resulted in the lowest-ever Congress seats—8 compared to 10 they obtained in the Emergency election of 1977. The two-cornered Rajasthan election results are even more shocking and out of the ballpark. The average number of seats that the Congress has obtained in 13 past Rajasthan elections was 92. But in the 2013 election, the BJP humbled the Congress to beat this record by a wide margin. The Congress obtained almost half of their lowest ever, and half the Emergency 1977 election—21 seats. (The lowest seats ever obtained by the BJP in Rajasthan was 32 in 1980.)
Did the people vote in such overwhelming numbers for the BJP in Rajasthan in 2013 because they did not have an AAP alternative? I doubt it. Proceeding to Madhya Pradesh where the BJP chief minister overcame a double anti-incumbency to record a third consecutive win of 165 seats, 22 more than in 2008. In the outlier Digvijay Singh lost election of 2003, the BJP obtained 173 seats to the Congress’s 38. That record may never be breached, but in his third term, Mr Chouhan has come close by “granting” the Congress only 58 seats.
Still no Modi wave? Then let us look at Chhattisgarh. In the 1977 Emergency election when Chhattisgarh was part of Madhya Pradesh (data for Chhattisgarh prior to 2004 from the India Today-Oxus election dataset), the Congress obtained 36 seats; in 2013, despite a battle for a third term and the horrific elimination of Congress leaders by the Maoists in Bastar, the Congress obtained only 39 seats, only 1 more than in 2008. Still no Modi wave?
What implications for the 2014 election? Each party’s interests are different. The Congress has to attempt to become relevant; a course change is difficult, but not impossible. The AAP needs to mature into a responsible establishment outfit. And the BJP needs to pray that the AAP gets financing to make Election 2014 into a three cornered contest. It knows that only 6 out of every 100 BJP voters voted for the AAP, but 6 times as many (36 out of 100) Congress voters did so. The math of the first-past-the-post system is well known to the BJP. If the AAP is almost the new Congress, as seems likely, then the BJP can be realistically ambitious about winning 2014 by a near absolute majority.
Surjit S Bhalla is chairman of Oxus Investments, an emerging market advisory firm, and a senior advisor to Zyfin, a leading financial information company. He can be followed on Twitter, @surjitbhalla
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Australian court rejects law allowing gay marriage
Published: December 12, 2013 10:12 IST | Updated: December 12, 2013 10:12 IST![]()
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Australian court rejects law allowing gay marriage
Australia’s highest court struck down a landmark law on Thursday that had begun allowing the country’s first gay marriages, shattering the dreams of more than two dozen same-sex newlyweds whose marriages will now be annulled less than a week after their weddings.
The federal government had challenged the validity of the Australian Capital Territory’s law that had allowed gay marriages in the nation’s capital and its surrounding area starting last Saturday.
The federal government’s lawyer had argued that having different marriage laws in various Australian states and territories would create confusion. The ACT, which passed the law in October, said it should stand because it governs couples outside the federal definition of marriage as being between members of the opposite sex.
The High Court unanimously ruled that the ACT’s law could not operate concurrently with the federal Marriage Act, which was amended in 2004 to define marriage as between a man and a woman.
“The Marriage Act does not now provide for the formation or recognition of marriage between same sex couples. The Marriage Act provides that a marriage can be solemnised in Australia only between a man and a woman,” the court said in a statement issued alongside its ruling. “That Act is a comprehensive and exhaustive statement of the law of marriage.”
Rodney Croome, national director of the advocacy group Australian Marriage Equality, said his group knows of about 30 same-sex couples who have married since Saturday, though the actual number may be slightly higher. The court decision essentially nullifies their marriages, as it means the ACT law under which they were wed was invalid.
Outside the court in Canberra, a tearful Mr. Croome, flanked by several same-sex couples who were married in the past week, said the ruling was a defeat for marriage equality but there had been a greater victory this week.
“And that victory was the nation saw for the first time, I believe, what is really at the core of this issue they’ve seen that marriage equality is not about protest or politics or even about laws in the constitution, ultimately. Marriage equality is about love, commitment, family and fairness,” Mr. Croome said.
In its decision, the court wrote that the federal government is responsible for deciding whether same-sex marriage should be legalized. The ruling means that no Australian state or territory can make that decision, said Sydney University constitutional lawyer Anne Twomey.
Lyle Shelton, managing director of Australian Christian Lobby, which opposes same-sex marriage, praised the court ruling and said common sense had prevailed.
As for the ruling’s impact on the newly-wedded couples, Shelton said it was “really sad that they were put in a position” in which they were allowed to marry before the court handed down its judgment.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott opposes gay marriage and his coalition blocked two federal bills last year that would have allowed legal recognition of same-sex partnerships.
The ruling comes a day after India’s Supreme Court struck down a 2009 lower court decision to decriminalize homosexuality.
Gay marriage has legal recognition in 18 countries as well as 16 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia.
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Regressive SoniaG divides Indian society on communal lines, disowns Nehru and Indira Gandhi -- Hari Om
PAST SHOWS WAY TO THE FUTURE
The Congress leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi is playing with fire by showing complacency towards the separatist tendencies in Kashmir valley and pampering the so-called mainstream politicians whose track record is dubious
Notwithstanding the fact that the Nehru-Gandhi family complicated matters for the nation in Jammu & Kashmir by according it a special status on purely religious grounds in October 1947, and handing over the State power to the votaries of plebiscite in February 1975, it did take a few corrective measures also to rectify some of the mistakes and salvage the situation. Jawaharlal Nehru, who had conspired against Jammu and got political power transferred to the Kashmir-based pro-autonomy National Conference leader, Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, had the latter dethroned and arrested on August 9, 1953, on charge of sedition. Sheikh Abdullah remained behind bars for 11 years and became irrelevant for all practical purposes.
Similarly, Indira Gandhi, who had brought back to power the deflated Sheikh Abdullah in 1975 after bringing down her own party’s Government, withdrew support to his regime in 1977 on similar grounds. She said since Sheikh Abdullah had become a threat to national security, it had become imperative to remove him from the sensitive office of Chief Minister. In 1975, Sheikh Abdullah disbanded his Plebiscite Front and revived the National Conference. Indira Gandhi got dismissed the Government of Sheikh Abdullah’s son, Farooq Abdullah, in 1984. She defended her action saying Farooq Abdullah too had become a threat to national security.
Between August 1953 and 1984, a number of definite and progressive steps were taken by the Nehru-Gandhi family and others like Lal Bahadur Shastri to integrate Jammu & Kashmir with India, politically and constitutionally. The process was smooth. There was no coercion. As many as 260 out of 395 Articles of the Indian Constitution were extended to the State with the concurrence of the State Government. Ninety four out of 97 Entries in the Union List were applied to the State. Twenty six out of 47 Entries in the Concurrent List were also applied to the State. Not just this, seven out of 12 Schedules of the Constitution of India were made applicable to the State in letter and spirit.
In between, the State witnessed three very significant developments in 1965. That year, the National Conference merged its identity with the Congress and the first ever Congress Government came into being in the State with Ghulam Mohammad Sadiq as Chief Minister. Besides, the same year, the offices of Sadr-e-Riyasat (Head of State) and Wazir-e-Azam (Head of Government) were abolished and the offices of Governor and Chief Minister introduced to bring Jammu & Kashmir at par with other States of the Union. Other developments that integrated the State into India included the extension of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, the Comptroller and Auditor-General and the Election Commission, abolition of the obnoxious permit (read visa) system, repeal of Section 75 of the Jammu & Kashmir Constitutional Act of 1939 under which the Council of Ministers, and not the Jammu & Kashmir High Court of Judicature, was the final interpreter of the Constitution, and repeal of the highly draconian Jammu & Kashmir State Press and Publication Act, 1932, under which the Council of Ministers could seize any Press on the ground that it had published or carried a seditious (read anti-Government) article.
All these political and constitutional reforms helped the people of the State and democratised the polity to an extent. It was hoped that the process of integration, which was started with the arrest of Sheikh Abdullah, would go on unabated and the remaining Articles, Entries in the Union List and Concurrent List and Schedules would be introduced in the State. But it was not to be. Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded Indira Gandhi after her assassination, instead of maintaining a distance from Farooq Abdullah, befriended him and concluded a power-sharing truce with him — a development that culminated in the deadly secessionist movement in 1987 in the wake of wholesale rigging in the Assembly election held the same year, and which continues to bloody and convulse the State’s political scene at regular intervals. Ever since then, the Congress has been hobnobbing with anti-Indian Constitution forces and overtly and covertly promoting fissiparous tendencies.
However, it is Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi who have crossed all lines in their desperate bid to further divide Indian society on communal lines for Muslim votes, and tell the remaining 85 per cent Indian electorate that it has no place whatsoever in their scheme of things. It is Ms Gandhi, and not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has been ruling the roost and, hence, all the latter’s actions are her actions and all the statements made by her men and women in the Government and the party on Jammu & Kashmir and against BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and the party as whole, are her statements. The fact of the matter is that Ms Gandhi has turned completely regressive.
She has let loose Union Minister for External Affairs Salman Khurshid, Water Resources Minister Harish Rawat, Information and Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari, AICC general secretary Digvijaya Singh, former Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee president Rita Bahuguna Joshi, spokesperson Sanjay Jha, JKPCC chief Saifuddin Soz, to mention only a few, to make outrageous statements to reassure the reactionary elements in the minority community that the Congress would not allow anyone to talk about Article 370 under which Jammu & Kashmir enjoys a special status in the Union, and tell the National Conference and other political and separatist groups in the Valley that the party shares their perverted views.
Each one of these Congress leaders has condemned Mr Modi and dubbed him as a communalist. Each one of them, like the Kashmiri leaders, including Chief Minister Omar Abdullah, has described Article 370 as a bridge between the State and New Delhi, and sought to create an impression that an abrogation of this Article would provoke communal explosions across the country, facilitate the State’s separation from India and result in the country’s balkanisation.
It must remain a matter of grave concern that the Congress has taken a stand that doesn’t augur well for the national unity and inter-communal relations. It negates the basic tenets of the Constitution. Indeed, the Congress has disowned Nehru and Indira Gandhi for Muslim votes.
Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley is absolutely right when he says that “an ill-informed debate had earlier linked the issue of Article 370 to a secular versus non-secular debate” and that “my own study on the subject has revealed a very interesting dimension as to how Article 370 can turn into an instrument of oppression and discrimination against Indian citizens”.
(The writer is former Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Jammu)
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