thecatapult.in is a new blog focusing on the matters concerning the Indian national interests, strategy and the affairs of the State.
The First Post today is about the Chinese side war gaming a scenario on the Tibetan plateau and the border with India in case of a (planned?!) steady deterioriation of relations leading to war with India after the conclusion of the Beijing Olympics.
Shri N.Ram, the toast of China’s communist clique
Shri N.Ram, the well-known Editor-in-Chief of “The Hindu” of Chennai, has been the toast of China for an article purported to have beenwritten by him refuting the allegations levelled by the Dalai Lama and his supporters regarding the events of March in Lhasa . The Chineseauthorities have been gratified by what they see as his vigorous articulation of the version of the events as put out by them.
2. A report on Shri Ram’s article disseminated by the State-owned Hsinhua news agency of China is annexed. It is learnt that this has beentranslated into the Tibetan and Uighur languages and copies distributed in all the monasteries and educational institutions in theTibetan-inhabited areas of China. It has also been made required reading in the patriotic re-education classess for Tibetans being organisedby the Chinese authorities.In the meanwhile, the Chinese authorities have reduced the duration of the stay of the Olympic Torch in Tibetfrom three to one day. The torch will be in Lhasa on June 21 instead of June 19.
3. The dissemination of Shri Ram’s article is unlikely to have any impact on the Tibetans and Uighurs. Nor will it have much of an impact oninternational opinion on the recent events in Tibet because Shri Ram’s policy of “see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil” with regard toChina is well known right across the world.His popularity in China is confined to the Chinese ruling circles.
4.After writing this article, I showed this to a number of Indian friends. While a majority agreed that this deserved to be written anddisseminated, some asked why do this since it could reflect on the credibility of a great institution of Chennai.
5. After carefully considering their advice, I concluded that this needed to be written in the interest of the Indian people and the lovablepeople of Tibet. It will be moral cowardice to remain silent when the Editor of a highly respected paper of Chennai uses his access to itscolumns to demonise the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans just as Beijing is in the habit of doing.
6. As you move around Chennai, you see thousands of advertisements inviting you to buy “The Hindu”. When you see those advertisements,think of Shri Ram and his writings in support of the Chinese and in demonisation of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans and ask yourself thequestion:” Does such a newspaper deserve my continued support?”. The choice is yours.[link]
Besides Tibet, two other important stories to watch while gauging Beijing’s newly discovered bent for openness and transparency are closely tied to the disaster in Sichuan. The Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development has launched a probe into the disproportionately large number of schoolchildren who were killed when their schools collapsed on them while other nearby buildings withstood the shock of the quake. If shoddy construction was involved, officials have vowed to punish those responsible.
Angry, grieving parents who have lost children are screaming for justice, but an honest and full investigation could lead to high places in Communist Party officialdom in the province. Its seems likely that so-called “tofu” construction was commonplace in the building of schools and that private contractors colluded with government officials to skimp on essential materials such as steel and concrete and pocket the savings. If these corrupt officials are truly brought to book for their malfeasance, that would be a major breakthrough in the country’s battle against graft. But beware the scapegoat: this investigation could turn out like a lot of others – punishing a few for the widespread practice of many.
The same is true of the central government’s pledge that all local and foreign donations to quake victims, which have surpassed 40 billion yuan (US$5.8 billion), will be strictly accounted for. This promise comes after numerous reports on the Internet of donated goods intended for quake victims winding up on sale in shops or in the possession of people not affected by the quake. Venal officials are allegedly selling items such as tents and rice by the truckload. If this is true, how many of these culprits, the latest symbols of China’s endemic corruption, will pay for their crimes?
Finally, of course, there are the Olympic Games and the 30,000 foreign reporters who will descend on the country to cover not just the athletes but also anything else of interest they can find. They will want to interview ordinary citizens and ask Chinese leaders tough questions about corruption and democratic reform. They have been promised great freedom. Let’s see if Beijing can deliver on that promise.
In the end, however, it will not be until the grand Olympic stage is packed away and the eyes of the world have turned elsewhere that any clear sense of China’s future as a budding civil society will become clear. [link]
Filed under Freedom of Speech & Information, International Communism, PRC
He actually called the CPI(M) as ‘thugs and murderers’ for the massacre of innocents in Nandigram and infact he goes on to draw parallels with Mao and Stalin and the finest traditions of ‘global communism’.
One wonders how long it is before Vir Sanghvi is denounced as a “counter-revolutionary” and a “closet communalist” by his leftist media colleagues and “intellectuals”.
It is now over a decade since I moved out of Calcutta. But watching the news last week, I felt I was back. As I saw those terrible shots of policemen beating up women in Nandigram, as I read about the massacre of innocent villagers, and as I noted the cold, commissar-like response of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee to the killings, I remembered what it was like to live in West Bengal.
Like the rest of us, the people of West Bengal get the politicians they deserve. They get the thugs and murderers of the CPM and they get the hysterical, self-destructive opposition of Mamata Banerjee. Small wonder then that while Bengalis prosper all over the world (and in the rest of India), Bengal remains a backwater, always at least a decade behind the rest of the country.
And see the intolerance of the UNHRC to any criticism of its conduct and the threat to ban the UN Watch representative’s speech. This has become a stalinist organisation through and through dominated by the same third world dictatorial thugs from many parts of Asia, Africa, the Arab world and latin America who are supposed to be held accountable by this body.
Also Watch the Speeches Not Banned at the UNHRC by UN Watch.
Ajai Sahni writing on Rediff warns that left unchecked the Naxalites can become a big security nightmare for the Indian state.
The ‘Red Corridor’, extending from ‘Tirupati to Pashupati’ (Andhra Pradesh to Nepal), has long been pass in the Indian Maoists (Naxalites’) conception. Maoist ambitions in India now extend to the farthest reaches of the country, and this is not just a fantasy or an aspiration, but a strategy, a projection, a plan and a programme under implementation. A multiplicity of Maoist documents testify to the meticulous detail in which the contours of the current and protracted conflict have been envisaged, in order to ‘intensify the peoples’ war throughout the country’.
These documents reflect a comprehensive strategy, coordinating all the instrumentalities of revolution — military, political, economic, cultural and psychological — harnessed through the ‘three magic weapons’ Comrade Mao spoke about: the Party, the People’s Army, and the United Front.
The Maoists have established regional bureaus across a mass of nearly two-thirds of the country’s territory (Map 1) and these regions are further sub-divided into state, special zonal and special area committee jurisdictions (Map 2) where the processes of mobilisation have been defined and allocated to local leaders. As these maps indicate, there are at least five regional bureaus, 13 state committees, two special area committees and three special zonal committees in the country. This structure of organisation substantially reflects current Maoist organisational consolidation, but does not exhaust their perspectives or ambitions. There is further evidence of preliminary activity for the extension of operations to new areas including Gujarat, Rajasthan, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and Meghalaya, beyond what is reflected in the scope of the regional, zonal and state committees. A ‘leading team’ recently visited Jammu & Kashmir to assess the potential of creating a permanent party structure in the form of a state committee to take the Maoist agenda forward in the state.
Within this broad geographical spread, the Maoists include, in their inventory of ‘immediate tasks’, among others, the following:
- ‘Coordinate the people’s war with the ongoing armed struggles of the various oppressed nationalities in Kashmir, Assam, Nagaland, Manipur and other parts of the Northeast.
- ‘Build a broad UF (United Front) of all secular forces and persecuted religious minorities such as Muslims, Christians and Sikhs�
- ‘Build a secret party apparatus which is impregnable to the enemy’s attacks�
- ‘Build open and secret mass organisations amongst the workers, peasants, youth, students, women and other sections of the people�
- ‘Build the people’s militia in all the villages in the guerrilla zones as the base force of the PGA (People’s Guerrilla Army). Also build armed self-defence units in other areas of class struggle as well as in the urban areas.’
The Maoist strategy is clearly to fish in all troubled Indian waters, and to opportunistically exploit every potential issue and grievance to generate a campaign of protests and agitations. The principal vehicles for these ‘partial struggles’ are ‘front’ or ‘cover’ organisations of the Maoists themselves, on the one hand, and a range of individuals and organisations best described, in a phrase often attributed to Lenin, as ‘useful idiots’ — well intentioned and often gullible people who are unaware of the broader strategy and agenda they are unwittingly promoting through their support to specific and unquestionably admirable causes.
The last category can include everyone from the Human Terrorist Rights Mafia, Mainstream Media personalities to so called “intellectuals”, some of them could perhaps be well intentioned and gullible but some others might well be Communist sympathizers and quislings.
Communist thugs massacre poor, innocent, defenseless villagers in Nandigram, West Bengal because they dared to stand up to their tyranny and prevent the commies from stealing their land and livelihoods.
Warning – graphic video
With the fall of the Soviet Union died the Communist ideology. Now the surviving communist regimes in China, Cuba and West Bengal state in India have lost their ideological veneer and have become plain thugocracies who maintain their power only through sheer terror, intimidation and cheating. They always arrogate themselves the right to speak for the common people but have no qualms to kill them if they dare challenge them in anyway and ofcourse with the usual accompanying gaudy red rhetoric that it is all for their own good !!
This is similar to what is happening in China, very much admired by Indian communists and their sympathizers in the media and intellectual circles, where the Communist government there is stealing land from its poor farmers for the sake of “development”, which could mean anything from a factory to a shiny hotel and golf course, through intimidation and violence. The Chinese government is also involved in a massive organ trafficking scam stealing organs from poor people to sell it to rich foreigners.
Update- Nandigram Media Archive at sacredmediacow.com
India’s good for nothing comrades have created another meaningless controversy over nothing.
February 23, 2007– President Kalam’s address to Parliament on Friday stirred up a row with the Left parties asking the Central government to take cognizance of the Hindi translation of the word secularism used in the address, saying ‘dharmanirpeshkta’ (secularism) had been wrongly termed as ‘panthnirpeshkta’ (only Hindu religion).
Perhaps if they can assemble ten people who can spell either of those two words let alone know what the difference between them really is.
At a joint press conference convened to brief the media about the issues the Left proposed to raise during the Budget Session of Parliament, Communist Party of India parliamentary group leader Sitaram Yechury said whether it was a ‘bureaucratic’ or the translator’s mistake, it had to be corrected as Indian Republic was based on separation of religion from the state.
Maybe Mr Sitaram Yechury should better spend his time finding out why his parents gave him such a communal first name- It has both Sita and Ram in it.Perhaps he will blame it on the “imperialist conspiracy” and in true Maoist style denounce his own parents as “reactionaries”.
It is noteworthy to remember that the left had opposed Dr Abdul Kalam’s nomination for President back in 2004. Since according to them he was not pseudo-secular enough.
They are creating all this unnecessary nonsense while even after 60 years of Socialist rule India is at the bottom of every development index and hundreds of millions of our countrymen are living in inhumane conditions and the left parties on the other hand are blocking every meaningful reform that would raise all those people out of poverty and instead are protecting the labour aristocracy in the PSUs and ofcourse creating useless controversies to distract the people from the real issues needing urgent attention.
Filed under Comrade Circus, Indian Politics, International Communism
In the socialist worker’s paradise of China, the rich and the priviliged have the de-facto right to bear more than one children inspite of the official One-Child policy.Whereas women from the poorer sections of society have to endure forced and most often botched abortions even at later stages of their pregnancies so that the local “officials” can meet the ‘annual targets’ for population growth set for that particular county by the central government in Beijing.
In recent years, more and more affluent people and social celebrities have born a second or third child. Based on a report by China’s Xinhuanet, Mou Weiyong, vice director of Liaoning Provincial Commission of Population and Family Planning, said that out of those who have more than one child, the number of people with high incomes is on a dramatic increase; most of them are private enterprise owners or self-employed.
According to Zhong Liyan, director of the Bureau of Population and Family Planning in Heping District, Shenyang City, the privileged and celebrities bear more than one child for two main reasons. First, they want a boy to inherit the estate; second, they want to keep the only child from feeling lonely.
China’s government agents at all levels will be punished according to party discipline or be discharge from public employment once they fail to adhere to the one-child policy. But no effective measures have been taken to stop the rich and celebrities from bearing more than one child.
Filed under International Communism, Liberal Extremists, PRC
Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN has been named Impact magazine’s Person of the Year 2006. Impact who? Well, no one had supposedly heard of them till they decided to make this guy their Person of the Year. Maybe they hope that by this act some of his “fame” will rub off on them too and help push up their sales. As of now they don’t seem to have even a proper website.And i don’t remember seeing their copies on any newsstand.
So get this strategy right. If you are a struggling magazine desperately wanting to come out of the pits make sure to institute an award to “reward” well recognised people with recognitions.
The list of nominees drawn up by Impact – a weekly magazine that focuses on the media – included some of the biggest names in the media industry, all icons in their own fields.
This way whoever wins you get recognised for sure.
So what are the so called “achievements” of Rajdeep Sardesai that got him this “recognition” from a not so well recognised magazine.
His channel’s coverage of the reservation stir in May 2006 where he desperately tried to give a good spin to the pro-reservation crowd.He conducted a sham survey along with his pal Yogendra Yadav and tried to twist the results in a show debate held in his channel to suit his own point of view.
Subsequently the Acorn also published this letter to Rajdeep Sardesai from Sameer wagle. where he pointed out CNN-IBN’s bias in the coverage.
The anti-reservation stir has been led by idealistic students with no political axe to grind. They are fighting on principles without any resources to back them and facing the might of the government.
The pro-reservation agitation on the other hand is led by jobless professional politicians (Dalit Panthers etc) who are doing so mainly for vote-bank politics. The number of anti-reservation students far exceeds whatever few people the pro-reservation politicians can gather.
Yet you equate the two in a bid to be seen as fair. This is not objective journalism. Every news coverage that you give to the anti-reservation guys you will show some 10-15 pro-reservation guys just to look balanced. You don’t look at the numbers of people, their backgrounds or their motivation levels
He displayed a very pathetic attitude during the 7/11 Mumbai tragedy. He was jumping up and down all the time reminding his viewers that his channel was the first to report the “breaking news” and that his newsfeed is being carried by CNN all over the world.
And a month later he participated in the UPA government’s efforts to play down the incident and by the time of the Havana appeasement he was in the forefront of those wanting the Indian government to hug the dictator and let bygones be bygones.
He later supported the clemency petition for Parliament attack convict Mohammed Afzal for which the terrorist himself thanked him profusely.
Afzal said he was moved by the ‘solidarity’ he has received from people, cutting across ideological divides(An eupheism for the Indian Media which pretends to represent everyone), apart from the support he got from Jammu and Kashmir.
So ladies and gentlemen applause please!
May his tribe go extinct.
The State Of the Oldest Nation 