An Alternative Post-2015 Agenda

As noted in my last post, the draft of the post 2015 agenda that governments have agreed upon is the disastrous product of a dysfunctional UN. To show what a meaningful agenda could be, I’ve drafted the text below. If governments go ahead with their agreed text I invite civil society organizations to consider adapting and adopting the following.

PREAMBLE

We live at a time when the growth of global connectivity has ushered in a range of new political, economic and social realities and opened up unprecedented potentials for sustainable human development.

Within the next 15 years we can realistically look forward to ending poverty and war, the most formidable obstacles to sustainable development.

In the process we can eliminate also the interrelated scourges of drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime which at present exact a huge cost in lives and treasure from the poorest countries of the world.

To realize these objectives there are two fundamental requirements.

One is the full partnership of men and women and nations large and small in repairing a world devastated by the poisonous processes of the industrial age.

The other is the fundamental reform of the United Nations system of agencies.

Progress towards these ends will be framed by the values set forth in the United Nations Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Within that framework we recognize that nations have a sovereign right to determine their own course of development.

GOALS

We endorse the Goals set out below and will take action to achieve them within our nations and in sub-regional, regional and global frameworks. We urge international agencies to prioritize South-South and Triangular modalities of cooperation wherever possible. In listing the Goals below, we set out the rationale that will guide policies and programmes and note (in italics) the action that we will take.

1. Eliminate Poverty: The extreme poverty afflicting nearly a billion people who live on less than $1:25 a day is caused by systemic factors rooted in the colonial era and sustained by current socioeconomic arrangements, especially those noted below under other Goals. We expect that as those are addressed, the problem of extreme poverty will be greatly ameliorated. To accelerate the process, we will frame specific policies and field well-funded programs to end hunger, extend good quality education to all children and ensure that the poor have access to health care.

2. Promote Social Inclusion: Poverty is not just economic; everywhere, it is associated with forms of social exclusion and discrimination. Many who are not poor also suffer exclusion and discrimination on the basis of their gender, age and sexual preference. To counter this, we will formulate appropriate laws and policies, initiate media campaigns targeting discrimination and make social inclusion a high priority in housing, education and access to the Internet and the worldwide web.

3. Combat Organized Crime: Most of the violence visited on societies around the world is the work of criminals organized around a nexus of economic interests, especially drug trafficking. They are empowered by existing financial and legal arrangements at the global level that must be changed if we are to root out all forms of organized crime ranging from sexual exploitation of children and women to trade in counterfeit goods and environmental crimes. To that end, we pledge to:

• Revoke the existing prohibitionist conventions on the manufacture, trade and use of so called “illicit drugs,” and replace them with one that will promote a medical and social approach to addiction and abuse. This will be done at the Special Session of the General Assembly that will convene in 2016 to deal comprehensively with the issue of “illicit drugs.” 

• Declare illegal all “shell companies” that allow criminals to hide behind corporate identities, and subsequently, seize the assets of all entities whose beneficial ownership is not verified. To this end, the Sixth Committee of the current session of the General Assembly will inscribe a new item on its agenda and come to an agreement within a year.

• Decree that banks caught laundering money will automatically lose their license to do business and that the individuals involved will be subject to mandatory prison sentences. 

4. Build Peace and Security: The action under 3 a, b and c above will eliminate organized crime as a major threat to international peace and security but state-sponsored terrorism and proxy wars for control of resources or strategic space will continue. To address those sources of violence a twin-pronged approach will be necessary. On the one hand, we must make a concerted effort to end the proliferation of small arms and light weapons and stop the illicit trafficking in arms. On the other hand, the defensive responses of victimized societies must change. Instead of relying on heavily militarized police and secretive agencies that conduct massively intrusive surveillance of their own citizens, the first line of defense should be community-level organizations working with lightly armed local police organizations. To these ends, we resolve to:

• Work with corporations manufacturing weapons to create a clear, transparent and global registry of small arms and light weapons

• End the illicit trade in weapons by putting brokers out of business and into prison. 

• Explore and promote community-level networks supporting local police to ensure security.

5. Change Production/Consumption Patterns: Existing patterns of production and consumption are rooted in the realities of the industrial era that are now fading under the influence of the technologies of the Information Age. The Internet and the Worldwide Web now allow small and medium corporations to identify and sell to niche markets, in effect destroying the mass markets essential for the survival of giant corporations. The rapid evolution of 3-D printing is making it possible for the highest quality of industrial production on a very small scale, in effect, setting at naught the single greatest advantage of mega corporations. As networks of small producers emerge to maximize their efficiencies, the mega corporations with their top-down decision-making structures and concentrated production/service centers will become increasingly inefficient dinosaurs. This will inevitably affect patterns of trade and urbanization, especially as cheap off-grid renewable sources of energy become plentiful. In sum, these trends will change all the wasteful production and consumption patterns of the last few centuries. To accelerate the process, we will:

• Review all policies based on industrial era assumptions of production and consumption, especially of fossil fuels.

• Promote the evolution of 3-D printing to meet the requirements of small and remote communities.

• Set in place educational systems capable of providing the highest quality of instruction in the remotest rural locations.

• Encourage entrepreneurs to meet the cultural needs of remote or widely dispersed rural populations

• Consider how best to adapt our nations to the reversal of long standing trends towards urbanization.

6. Reduce Social Inequalities: Growing inequalities within societies has been one of the most unsustainable of trends over the last decade, accentuating injustices that have been a characteristic of all civilizations. The most obvious difference between the haves and the have-nots, and historically the most irreducible, has been access to high quality housing. However, as the connectivity of the Information Age has made crowd-funding a new economic reality, that great divide can now be closed. A crowd-funded housing sector can not only eliminate the issue of homeless populations, it can, in the process, rapidly expand employment, build infrastructure and drive economic growth. To make this possible a range of monetary and environmental issues will have to be ironed out. We will initiate a global research effort to illuminate and address those issues with an eye to providing housing for all by 2030.

7. Reform the United Nations System: The system of international agencies set in place at the end of World War II 70 years ago continues to function with little change in its modalities. It adopts hundreds of resolutions every year phrased in arcane diplomatic jargon addressed mainly to governments. No one knows what actually happens to the resolutions, for there is no systematic feedback on their implementation To rectify this state of affairs, we will move to hook the operations of the UN System into the networked world of the 21st century. That will entail crisply action-oriented resolutions circulated on all public, expert and organizational networks worldwide, eliciting feedback and responses in a fluid interactive process.

In sum, the achievement of these goals will lead towards the long-standing UN goal of general and complete disarmament, anchoring sustainable development to deepening peace and security. It will result in a world transformed by 2030.

UN's Faux Development Agenda

The United Nations seems to be headed for a summit session of the General Assembly in September that will agree on a meaningless global development agenda.

The draft of the document now being discussed in New York makes high minded declarations about "principles" and "commitment" but ignores such key issues as money laundering and drug trafficking that bedevil economic growth in poor countries.

Produced  after lengthy "consultations" by the Ambassadors of Ireland and Kenya, it does not mention drug trafficking at all. Governments only promise to "strengthen the prevention and treatment of substance abuse, including narcotic drug abuse and harmful use of alcohol."

Money laundering is noted obliquely in the pledge by governments that by 2030 they will "significantly reduce illicit financial and arms flows ... and combat all forms of organized crime."

There are four anodyne references to terrorism:

1. Governments say they will "take further effective measures and actions, in conformity with international law, to remove obstacles and constraints, strengthen support and meet the special needs of people living in areas affected by complex humanitarian emergencies and in areas affected by terrorism."

2. They will "Strengthen relevant national institutions, including through international cooperation, for building capacity at all levels, in particular in developing countries, to prevent violence and combat terrorism and crime.

The third and fourth mention of terrorism repeat those formulations word for word in other sections of the draft.

If any of this makes a difference to the lives of the billion people living on less than $1.25 a day it will be convincing proof that miracles do happen.

Dawn of a New Terrorism?

Investigators of the Germanwings crash and the derailment of the Amtrak train in the United States should not discount terrorism.

They should look for evidence of a sinister new technology straight out of science fiction: mind control.

Brainwashed killers have long been a staple of Hollywood movies like the Manchurian Candidate with the hapless victims turned into the zombie tools of villainous foreign controllers.

But scientific reality has outdistanced the fiction of Pavlovian conditioning turning unsuspecting innocents into ticking time bombs.

 The discovery that thought is just a form of electronic activity has opened the door to invasive mind reading and manipulating technologies.

At the most mundane level those technologies allow thought control of things like wheel chairs and computers.

More extraordinarily, they allow such manipulations at transcontinental distances.

It should be theoretically possible to communicate telepathically at the same distances and control not a just a computer but another brain, a la Obi-won Kenobie in Star Wars.

The person thus manipulated might be like one hypnotized, without volition or even memory.

The driver of the Amtrak train, by all reports an extremely responsible individual, says he has no recollection of accelerating into a bend at twice the permitted speed.

Who is to say the co-pilot of the German aircraft was conscious of what he was doing, or that it was he who rehearsed flying into the mountain?

Is this too fiendish to imagine?

Hardly so in a world that has seen the cold blooded use of nuclear, chemical and bacteriological weapons.

If my speculation is correct, we could be far along on the evolutionary path H.G Wells foresaw when he wrote of a future in which a vicious minority of telepathic controllers exploited a large majority incapable of self defense.

The only dim consolation is that before such a future can come to be, ordinary folk will probably butcher scientists in the streets and send us all back to the family farm.

Misleading Mid-East Punditry

The edit page of The Hindu is a far cry from the shouters of Times Now but there too punditry can be misleading noise.

The latest case in point is Suhasini Haidar’s analysis of “The West and its flawed anti-IS strategy” published appropriately enough on 1 April.

Here are some of its errors:

1. Throughout the piece there are references to “the West,” as if it is still a global political entity. The “West” of the Cold War has been gone for over a quarter century and in those years the United States and the countries of Western Europe have gone their separate ways.

2. It is true, the British and their military-industrial friends in Washington tried to extend the shelf-life of “the West” with the rigged election of Bush Jr. followed immediately by the Saudi-managed 9/11 attacks. But despite enormously profitable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the “special relationship” has become increasingly irritable and now is little more than a joint enterprise to wiretap everything that moves.

3. Meanwhile, the Americans have retreated to their historical default position of being leery of most things European except their wine, cheese and women. Britain, France and Germany awakened to that reality when a fit of post-Cold War hubris led them to implode Yugoslavia; they created an unmanageable mess and had to call for Yankee help.

4. The British have been especially hard hit in recent years by the end of transatlantic bonhomie. United States regulators have gone after the largest British banks with a hatchet for such things as money laundering, manipulating global gold prices and fixing interest rates. Under American pressure the Bank of England even had to accept a Canadian Governor. All this has made it difficult for the British elite to continue as usual with their profitable business managing the proceeds of global organized crime. In fact, they have been forced to pay off their multi-ethnic mafia/terrorist clientele with high-end British real estate. To prevent London becoming home to the world’s worst hoodlums the British parliament made it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to enter the country. And to ensure that the long-suffering people of Britain will not turn on their betters for selling off the country to criminals another law has completely delegitimized public protest: a 12-year old can now be arrested for standing on a street corner and cursing the government loudly.(The punishment will probably include non-stop viewing of Downton Abbey.)

5. Haidar’s assumption that the United States and Britain are on the same Mid-East page has never been true. Transatlantic differences have been a major factor in regional politics ever since FDR’s famous deal with Ibn Saud stuck a large American thumb in Churchill’s strategic eye. Things have got much worse of late. The Arab Spring” began when Washington withdrew support from long-established clients in the Middle East, and its failure is not the result of any “misreading” as much as it is of European support for favoured (read profitable) tyrants. That explains the seesaw process of democracy one day and mob/military rule the next. The Benghazi mob attack that killed the American Ambassador was clearly an MI 6 operation in revenge for the loss of Britain’s lucrative interests in Libya and the revelation of its long support for Gaddafi.

6. The Islamic State is essentially a British attempt to squelch the democratic potential of the Arab Spring and not, as Haidar seems to think, an ideological vehicle attractive to young Muslims. The streams of teenagers going to join IS from Western countries and the Russian Federation are drawn more by talk of parties, booze and sex than any desire for jihad. “Jihadi John,” the British face of televised IS murder, is reported to be an MI 6 operative ensconced in 5 star luxury. It is a mystery who the non-foreign IS fighters are; they could all be mercenaries.

7. To conclude, Haidar seems unaware that the whole fight against international terrorism is sham. There is incontrovertible evidence that Britain is the birth mother of modern international terrorism and that major NATO members are its godparents.

On the "Hindu Perspective"

My post about Neeraj Pandey's obnoxiously anti-Muslim movie “Baby” brought an accusation from a reader that I did not have a suitably Hindu “perspective.”

That raises the question, “What is the Hindu perspective?”

One answer lies in the attitudes that Hinduism has promoted throughout its millennial course.

Hinduism began with our ancient rishis compiling the lore of India’s diverse tribes into the Vedas, thus creating a work all could venerate.

That allowed the tribes to stop their endemic conflicts and settle into interdependent castes.

Intense discussions (Upanishads) then drew from the Vedas the concepts that lie at the heart of Hindu belief.

Primarily, the rishis conceived of a universal spirit, Brahman (one who strengthens).

Brahman is manifest as the Sanatana Dharma (Eternal Law) holding all Creation in control.

The philosophic implication of that belief is expressed in Vasudeva kutumbhakam (God’s family). It is the basis of India’s unity in diversity and constitutes the fundamental Hindu perspective.

Another important contributor to the Hindu perspective is the confidence that comes from an acute age-old capacity to understand and meet the challenges facing our society.

The Vedas settled warring tribes into castes.

The Upanishads anchored the resulting peace in a profound philosophy of family relationships.

The Ramayana and the Mahabharata made that wisdom available to everyman/woman.

When superstition and ignorance blocked understanding of the Dharma the Buddha cleansed it.

When Buddhism lost its reforming zeal, Adi Sankara energized and brought back the old faith,

When caste and invasive Islam caused deep fissures in society, Kabir and Guru Nanak initiated the healing that developed into the modern Indian renaissance of Chatrapati Shivaji, Rammohun Roy, Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Mahatma Gandhi.

That progression makes one thing very clear: Hinduism has never been a blind faith. We have always studied problems, debated issues and come up with insightful and creative solutions.

Our failure to do that in the depths of the Kali Yuga is the primary reason why India fell victim to foreign invaders over the last two millennia.

Now, as we recover from that period, it is critically important that Hindus retrieve their traditional capacity to understand and meet the numerous challenges facing Indian society.

This blog has warned at great length about the greatest danger we face at present, the British campaign, with much help from Indian mass media proxies, to cloud our understanding of issues.

An important part of that campaign has been aimed at poisoning Hindu-Muslim relations.

The creation of Pakistan with its permanent siren call to jihad has, of course, done a great deal of work in that direction already, and if Hindu understanding is to defeat British intentions we must re-examine what actually happened.

To that end, the following section looks at the origin and development of “Islamic terrorism.”

“Islamic Terrorism”

There is no denying that Islam has an enormously violent history, but no more so than Christianity. Since their founding nearly seven centuries apart both religions have been almost ceaselessly at war within their own realms, and, since the 7th Century, with each other.

However, when Christian colonial expansion began in the 15th Century Islam was a generally quiescent faith with an Ottoman Caliph in Istanbul ruling most of what is now called the Middle East, and Persia (encompassing modern Iran, Iraq and a number of adjoining areas), presiding over most of the world's Shia.

The transformation of Islam from that torpor to its current jihadist frenzy is almost entirely due to British policy.

It involved the creation of three States (Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel), and the promotion of the violent Muslim Brotherhood as the fount of “Islamic terrorism.”

The Brotherhood had its first mosque paid for by the British in the colonized “Suez Canal Zone” of Egypt, and its initial use was against anyone threatening British assets or allies anywhere in the Middle East.

The Cold War made it a tool against Communists and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan made it the source of a “Mujaheddin” army that became Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

In that progression, the three British-created States had a key role.

Saudi Arabia came into existence before World War I when the British found in Kuwait the 16-year old scion of the former ruling family of Riyadh and sponsored him to take it back from Ottoman rule. The Saudis brought with them to power the violently extremist Wahhabi sect, long considered “Haram” by mainstream Islam.

What the British did to create Pakistan is fairly well known, so I will not dwell on the details; suffice it to say, they used murderous violence to support the Hindu and Muslim proxies who actually ripped India apart.

Pakistan emerged as a failed State and has remained one with the support of enormous amounts of aid from Saudi Arabia and the West; in return it has become their handy drug dealing rent-a-terrorist supplier, hitting not just India but Afghanistan, Russia, all of Central Asia, Uighur China and South East Asia.

Britain’s record in Palestine – later Israel – is unequaled in treachery.

After getting command of the territory through a League of Nations Mandate, it allowed unrestricted Jewish immigration from Europe, ostensibly to create a "Jewish Homeland." It then sponsored Arab terrorism against Jews. During WW II a “Jewish Brigade” in the British Army shaped the core of the Israeli Self Defence Force that beat back invading Arab armies in 1948.

One thing important to note about this whole scene is that the Arabs, who had not ruled themselves for over 800 years, were manipulated at every turn by Britain and France.

After WW I, when London and Paris created a number of new countries in the former Ottoman territories, they consistently arranged for political instability.

In Sunni majority Syria they gave power to the Shia; in Shia majority Iraq they empowered the Sunni. France created Lebanon to give power to Christians. With British prompting, Saudi Arabia took the territory containing Mecca and Medina, vaulting Wahhabi Islam to unprecedented global influence.

In surveying this history it is important to note that the Muslim populations of the Middle East and Pakistan have been the worst victims of “Islamic terrorism.” They have shed the most blood, lost the most resources and suffered the worst political manipulations.

An Indian Perspective

There can be no “Hindu perspective” in dealing with this situation for several reasons.

First and most important, our entire tradition depends upon each person being free to accept God in any form and worship in any way; those are matters decided by individual karma in which no one else can interfere. Sri Krishna says explicitly in the Bhagavad Gita: “do not disturb the faith of another. No matter to whom a person bows, he bows to me.”

Beyond the question of religion is that of politics, and there too is a strong argument not to strive for a “Hindu perspective.” Indian Muslim perceptions of their co-religionists elsewhere are likely to be far more acute, and it would be silly for Indian policy not to benefit from that.

If we want to help steer the world out of its current vortex of “Islamic terrorism,” it is essential that Muslims be part of the Indian team. They already are in the Ministry of External Affairs, but we need greater cultural heft in what is now purely policy.

It is only when Muslims in Pakistan see Indian Islam as a viable political alternative that we can wash back the blood-dimmed tide that Britain drowned us in; only in such circumstances can Arabs and Jews exchange Salaams and Shaloms in the Middle East and mean it.

The Weight of History

To foresee Hindu-Muslim unity as the foundation of India is hardly visionary. Guru Nanak set off the modern Indian renaissance five centuries ago by declaring “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim;” his first disciples (Sikhs), were drawn from both religions and all castes.

He was, in fact, making a formal statement of what had become part of life. In the centuries since Islam's entry into India Hindu and Muslim kings never stopped fighting each other; but they made liberal use of soldiers of both faiths.

One of the greatest of Indian national heroes, Chatrapati Shivaji, now celebrated as an icon of Hindu resistance to Mughal rule, endowed and prayed at Sufi shrines and employed Muslims at every level in his armies.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies the easy interfaith coexistence of those times as Netaji Palkar, one of his commanders who joined the Mughal army, converted to Islam and spent ten years fighting the Afghan tribes under the name of Quli Mohammed Khan; after that he returned without fuss to Hinduism and Shivaji's service.

The Mughals meanwhile were equally tolerant. Akbar’s main general was his former enemy, Man Singh. After Akbar the Mughals were by blood as Indian as alien, and culturally they were entirely indigenous. Aurangzeb, the most intolerant of them, endowed Hindu temples even as he destroyed others.

As British colonial rule spread over India, the resistance was nowhere divided along communal lines.

Tipu Sultan exemplified that unity: all his top commanders were Hindus and his capital took its name from the Vishnu temple of Sri Ranga Patnam which he endowed and prayed at. Tipu was finally defeated and his stronghold taken after a Persian Islamic scholar he had favored opened a door in the outer wall to British forces. Tipu's body was found under several others, all Hindus who had died to prevent the British from taking and desecrating it. The great Sultan remains a living memory: last November a mass rally at Haveri in Karnataka celebrated the 264th Tipu Jayanthi.

The British poisoned that long and liberal tradition. It is up to modern Indians of all faiths to reclaim our national heritage.

Baby, How Not to Fight Terrorism

If there is a sudden surge in Indian youth heading for Syria to join the Islamic State, the credit must go not only to Pakistan’s ISI but to those in "Bollywood" who will do anything for money.

The richest of Indian actors, Shahrukh Khan, planted the idea of the victimhood of an entire community with his mantra “I am a Muslim and not a terrorist.”

Now “Baby,” an abomination of a movie directed by Neeraj Pandey and starring Akshay Kumar, has provided a great deal of fodder for terrorist recruiters.

The movie is a fascist wet dream that glorifies brutal “anti-terrorist” activity, all of it directed at Muslims. 

Torture and violence are shown as the only effective way to get results.

Our muscular hero tortures a rogue Indian agent – a Muslim of course – to get the location of a bomb about to go off; he gets the information after arranging for the man’s parents, wife and child to be taken to the targeted mall.

He slips a plastic bag over the head of a Muslim leader – labelled as an ISI agent – and brings him near death to get the location of a terrorist.

He even administers a roundhouse slap when a minister’s PA (religion unknown) says Indian agents are bound to die in the fight against terrorism.

The movie-makers lay on with a trowel the association of terrorism with Islam.

No hint here of the brainless Hindus who have taken the jihadist route, or of the strong possibility that a rogue element of our intelligence apparatus enabled the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

A former Mumbai Police chief has made a strong case for that in the book “Who Killed Karkare?”

And a recently published New York Times investigation turned up considerable evidence that British and Indian intelligence agencies took no action after collecting credible information on the impending attack. Indian intelligence ignored a specific warning from the Americans about an attack on the Taj.

This is hardly surprising.

As I have noted in many earlier posts (see here, here and here), Britain is behind the whole “Islamic terrorism” phenomenon, using it for political manipulation and to promote its drug trafficking interests.

It is only reasonable to expect that in addition to creating the ISI in Pakistan as its proxy Britain has also corrupted parts of Indian intelligence to do its work.

Thankfully, our anti-terrorist modus operandi seems to be taking those realities into account: according to The Hindu, the Intelligence Bureau was kept completely out of the loop on the operation last December to intercept a Pakistani “fishing boat” that blew up before it could be boarded.

Since then, there has been talk of setting up a completely new domestic intelligence service.

If that happens, I hope decision makers in Delhi will do it within a constitutional framework, establish adequate safeguards against abuse of Indian citizens, and make the agency accountable to parliament.

With venal brain-dead “Bollywood” figures promoting fascism, we need strong institutional protections in place.

Flight 370 a Grim Omen for India

The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 on 9 March should be seen as a grim omen for India.

It portends a 9/11 type attack using the missing Boeing 777 that could precipitate war with Pakistan.

A single chilling fact precludes any possibility that the aircraft was lost innocuously at sea: as it veered off its set course and headed towards India, the aircraft reportedly climbed to 45,000 feet – 2000 feet beyond the maximum for a Boeing 777 – then dropped rapidly to 12,000 feet.

Such a descent occurs when there has been a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure.

The climb to 45,000 feet is also significant if we consider that at that altitude, sudden depressurization will render passengers brain dead in 15 seconds.

At that hour of night – past 01:30 – most of the passengers were probably asleep and of those who were awake few could have grabbed an emergency oxygen mask in time.

We know from the series of satellite "handshakes" by the Boeing's Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), that it continued flying west for five to six hours. 

That is enough time to reach as far north as Kazakhstan in Central Asia, overflying areas infested with drug dealing terrorists who certainly had the wherewithal to make a one-mile landing strip.

Given the brutality of the hijacking, it is highly likely that the aircraft is now in the possession of terrorists in that general area, being readied for use.

So why is the search for the missing plane focused on the remote southern Indian Ocean?

Because American and Chinese satellites reported debris in the area, and the British company that runs the surveillance system INMARSAT, said that it had registered a number of pings from an unidentified aircraft in that area.

There is no other evidence. Even if some floating seat cushions turn up in the area, it is most likely to have been planted on 24 May, when a fierce storm supposedly stopped all search operations for 24 hours.

The fact that the search was refocused on the basis of such skimpy evidence indicates a willingness of major Powers to turn a blind eye on reality; it should put Indian air defence authorities on high alert for misinformation from usually reliable sources. 

This is not being paranoid.

The world is in the midst of a complex power struggle in which treacheries abound. 

At a time when all the major developed countries are still reeling from the “Great Recession,” and China is on the verge of economic collapse, India is the only national market that can generate the rapid increase in demand necessary to avoid a prolonged global downturn. Control of it is a rich prize.

However, getting a government in New Delhi entirely devoted to foreign interests will require extraordinary circumstances, such as would result from a massive airborne terrorist attack that precipitated war with Pakistan.

(The bizarre essay prophesying an India-Pakistan war published by the Brookings Institution suddenly makes sense! So does Ashutosh Varshney’s book on India’s “improbable democracy:” it establishes his credential as an expert on the planned chaos.)

Another factor that makes me think a major terror attack is in the works is the increasing difficulty Britain faces in laundering the $60 billion proceeds of the illicit drug trade out of Afghanistan. International pressure to close down its “tax haven” money laundering system has made it imperative that the money be invested in the region, which means India.

Such large-scale investment will be possible only if Britain has the kind of political control in India that it asserts in Pakistan through the ISI.

A beginning has been made in that direction by promoting in India the same kind of endemic sectarian violence that bedevils Pakistan: communal incidents this year are up 30 per cent over 2012.

However, that is not enough. Even with the largest electoral war chest localized communal incidents cannot be used to manipulate Indian voters on the scale necessary to bring in a proxy government. Ergo, a terrorist attack that could provoke war, give new life to all kinds of moribund insurrections, and allow a bully-boy proxy to emerge as a national saviour.

There is little doubt who that will be.

The relentless reporting in the country’s British proxy mass media of a “Modi wave,” the personality cult now in the works, and the jettisoning of senior BJP leaders of integrity and stature, all point to a scenario in which the “khoon ke saudagar” can spout on about Hindu power and a 54-inch chest while bringing back foreign rule to India.

Do I think this will happen?

No. There are too many honest sensible Indians to allow it.

Also, I do not think it is in the cards at the end of the Kali Yuga.

Britain & Hinduism 8: Breaking Bad

In 1972, a British national of Pakistani origin, Agha Hasan Abedi, founded what he called a “Third World bank” in London. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) became a runaway success, expanding from 19 to 108 branches in three years and its assets jumping from $200 million to $1.6 billion. In less than two decades, it had $23 billion in assets and was operating in 73 countries, with offshoots in Luxembourg and Grand Cayman. It became the first foreign bank to open an office in China.

Through its Third World Foundation BCCI handed out awards to luminaries like Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang of China, Nelson and Winnie Mandela, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania (with Indira Gandhi making the presentation). As the bank’s senior staff hobnobbed with presidents and prime ministers and the governments of many developing countries gave it their official business, tens of thousands of small depositors in developing countries trusted it with their life savings.

What only a few people knew was that BCCI also held the accounts of Abu Nidal the terrorist, members of the Medellin drug cartel in Colombia, and Lieutenant-General Fazle Haq, the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province, who had set up hundreds of heroin processing plants close to the Afghan border and trucked their output to Karachi in military vehicles.

Reality Check for David Cameron's India Quest

Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain began his three-day visit to India by invoking the "huge ties" between the two countries of "history, language, culture and business."

One wonders which particular aspect of the shared history of the two nations he found supportive of his current quest for broadened economic linkages.

Could it be what the East India Company did  after bribing its way to control of Bengal, the richest province of Mughal India? Within a decade of the so-called "Battle of Plassey" (Pilashi) in 1757, Bengal lay in ruins. The destruction of its economy was so severe a third of the population, some five million people, died of starvation in the first of the great "man-made famines" British rule spread across India. A conservative estimate of the overall toll of such famines is 100 million.

Or perhaps Mr. Cameron found inspiring the theft of the fabled Kohinoor diamond after the British defeated the Sikhs almost a century later. Maharaja Ranjit Singh's 11-year old son went with the diamond to Britain where it became part of the "Crown Jewels" and he was comprehensively debauched with drugs and sex to disable his potential as a leader.

Or maybe the Prime Minister is enthralled by the post-1857 "pacification" that involved the indiscriminate slaughter of some 10 million civilians, men, women and children. 

Mr. Cameron's historic admission that the 1919 Jallianwalla Bagh massacre was a "deep shame" does not begin to address the long line of British atrocities in India, most of which remain officially unacknowledged. They are systematically ignored or downplayed even in works of history by British scholars supposedly engaged in the pursuit of truth.

That is true not just of the colonial era. There is no honest British account of the cold-blooded manipulation of communal violence that led to Partition, the killing of well over a million people and the biggest migration in history as 14 million people were forced from their ancestral lands.

Nor is there admission that Britain created Pakistan as its proxy in South Asia and that it is the real sponsor of the terrorist "war of a thousand cuts" against India.

Such denial is not to safeguard national pride and honor. It is to hide the fact that Britain has maintained its imperial interests in the region, and indeed, globally, without benefit of the apparatus of colonialism. This has been achieved primarily by keeping control of the illicit trade in drugs, which Britain pioneered in the 18th Century by exporting Indian opium to China. It is now far and away the most lucrative sector of the world economy, with revenues of over $500 billion annually.

In South Asia the control of the drug trade has involved the use of the ISI, Pakistan's notorious spy agency established in 1948 by a serving British Army officer, to godfather Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Together, they have kept Afghanistan as the lawless badlands necessary to produce opium; it now supplies over 90 percent of the world's illicit supply.   

Where Britain does not maintain operational control of drug trafficking, as in Latin America, it provides money laundering facilities. Last year American authorities slapped a $1.98 billion fine on HSBC, Britain's largest bank, after investigators discovered that it had been laundering billions of dollars of Mexican drug money into the United States. The fine made not a blip in the stock market value of HSBC shares because investors have known of its primary source of profit since traffickers established the company during Britain's 19th Century "Opium Wars" to force the drug into China.

An interesting sidelight to the increased American pressure on British money laundering is that the terrorist "Left" insurgency in Colombia that has for decades provided the cover for drug running, has sued for peace and is now engaged in talks with the government.

The global money laundering system Britain put in place as its colonies dwindled is the core element of its new Empire. It consists of a string of tax havens around the world operating with London as a global hub. The system now caters to all sorts of criminals, ranging from super-rich tax evaders and corporate bigwigs hiding the proceeds of mispricing of trade to mafiosi engaged in garden variety organized crime. 

The tax haven system washes an estimated $2 trillion annually into the "legitimate" world economy. According to a recent report from Washington-based Global Financial Integrity, an NGO headed by a former World Bank economist, it also drained about $6 trillion out of poor countries over the last decade . Adding up the estimates made by a number of experts indicates that the total of illicit assets in tax havens is some $30 trillion, double the GDP of the United States.

That massive pool of money generates the multi-billion dollar "hedge funds" that have made a travesty of free market mechanisms, especially commodity markets. Indians struggling with the ever increasing cost of petrol and diesel can blame it on hedge fund manipulations that have kept oil prices over $100 per barrel amidst the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. They can also blame the system for India's pandemic of mega scams: without a convenient way to stash black money the corrupt would be far less prone to steal on such a scale.

All this is becoming generally known because Germany and the United States, increasingly irate at the loss of billions of dollars in revenues to tax havens, have begun to push for change. Mr. Cameron's recent threats of a referendum that might take Britain out of the European Union is a response to pressure from Germany for uniform application of EU banking standards on all its members. The announcement last week that the next head of the Bank of England will be a Canadian is probably the result of pressure from the United States to clean up the City (financial center) of London.  

Against this background, Mr. Cameron's push for India to open up its financial sector to British investment should be seen as an invitation to national suicide. His vision of a string of "business centres" around the country to facilitate British-Indian trade should be seen in the same light.

So what is the future of the British-Indian "partnership"?

It is difficult to see how we can build one when Britain is using its proxies to subvert and destabilize India. Perhaps the only way to make a new beginning is to be utterly blunt about Indian perceptions of and expectations from Britain.

Britain should stop whitewashing its colonial record and consider the grim reality that its Empire was the bloodiest construct of power the world has ever seen. In Africa, Asia and the Americas no nation has been as oppressive of other races. Britain was by far the leading slave trader out of Africa and transporter of indentured labor out of Asia. It has killed with famine, sword and fire more people than Genghis Khan, Atilla the Hun, Hitler or Stalin. In the defense of its imperial interests it has precipitated two World Wars and is now presiding over an empire of crime that drains the poorest countries of their hard earned wealth. During the days of Empire and now, treachery has been a staple in Britain's international relations.

How can Britain respond to such criticism? 

At the minimum it can review its history books and initiate soul-searching among academic propagandists of the imperial record like Niall Ferguson, touted by The Times of London as the “most brilliant British historian of his generation.” A "Truth Commission" such as the one that eased South Africa out of the apartheid era might help. So could a national discourse on the value and meaning of life. In that journey of mind and spirit the British might find useful guides in the Sermon on the Mount, the Eightfold Path and the Bhagavad Gita.

In terms of state policy, a renewed British-Indian relationship will require Britain to withdraw support from terrorist groups and insurgencies, wind up its involvement in the drug trade, and stop running the global black market.

If all this seems a very tall order, it indicates how far Mr. Cameron's proposals stand from Indian perceptions of reality.

Getting a Grip on Terrorism

I've just watched New Delhi chief honcho Sheila Dixit in an infuriating television interview about the bombing of the High Court in her city yesterday, less than four months after it was last hit.

She maintained throughout a cold distance from what had happened, making the right noises but seemingly not in the least perturbed. It was as if she had no personal responsibility for the death of 12 people and the physical mangling of many others.

Why were the CCTV cameras ordered after the May bombing not in place? An enquiry was under way. She really had nothing to say. The interviewer, Rahul Kanwal of Headlines Today said the delay was being blamed by the CPWD on the Delhi Police revising their original request for 32 cameras, asking for 49 instead. The CPWD had cancelled the tender issued for the purchase of 32, putting back the acquisition process by months. "That is criminal!" he declared.

She was unfazed.   

Asked if heads would roll, she said they would -- if an investigation showed that anyone was at fault!

With 12 dead and nearly 80 injured because of a basic failure of security, what does she need to prove  that indeed, people were at fault? Including, of course, herself.

Home Minister Chidambaram made his usual anodyne statement, as did Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Neither made any real sense. We've all been around this track once too many times. Their failures can no longer be explained away, or even explained.

That goes for the television channels too. They are so enamoured of "Big Fight" discussions and promoting their own political agendas (including 24/7 coverage of Anna Hazare) that they have forgotten that their basic job is to be our society's nervous system. It's up to them to keep track of action on the anti-terrorism front. The CCTV camera story should have been top news as it happened -- not after the bombing.

So what can we do to turn things around?

Here are my proposals:

1. A CCTV Czar: The Prime Minister should appoint a cabinet-level Minister whose only job will be to ensure that all our cities and important facilities (sea and air ports, hospitals, factories, bridges, dams etc) are under adequate surveillance. To avoid delay because of procurement red tape he should be authorized to work with private businesses to get the cameras installed, submitting the bills to government for reimbursement. His office should maintain a web site showing progress and allowing feedback from the public on what is happening or not happening on the ground.
2. Every newspaper and television channel should establish beat coverage on the installation of CCTV cameras in its own area. It should be as regular as the weather report, and include the functional status of the installed equipment. The people responsible for the system should be regularly interviewed, and any problems aired without delay.
3. Chambers of Commerce & Industry at the central, state and city level should appoint a coordinator on CCTV installation and functionality. They should fund training programmes to ensure enough trained staff for local and nearby systems.
4. The programme should aim to cover all major cities and facilities within six months, and have a comprehensive national system in place within a year.

If another terrorist attack should occur either in Mumbai or Delhi, there should be a pre-designated list of officials to be immediately suspended, to be fired after the requisite investigation.

     

Hammarskjold's Ghost

Newly discovered eyewitnesses to the plane crash that killed UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold in 1961 say it was not an accident. They remember the aircraft being shot down.

The eyewitnesses, men in their 80s who still live in and around Ndola in Zambia where the crash occurred, spoke to Göran Björkdahl, a Swedish aid worker based in Africa. Björkdahl became interested in Hammarskjold's death because his father had a piece of metal from the wreck; when his work took him to Africa a few years ago he began probing the rumours surrounding the end of the most effective of UN leaders. A British investigation had declared the crash of Hammarskjold's chartered DC-6 an accident due to pilot error.

Björkdahl says the witnesses also remember the authorities (of what was then the British colony of Rhodesia) sealing off the site of the wreckage hours before they announced its discovery. Some charcoal-makers who came upon the wreckage before the official announcement were told to go away; British investigators did not interview those witnesses, and Björkdahl's findings implicate them, at the very least, in a cover-up of a political assassination.

Hammarskjold was on a mission to negotiate an end to the secession of Katanga province from the Congo, a former Belgian colony enormously rich in natural resources. The Congo had become independent in June 1960 and, with considerable help from Belgium, plunged immediately into political crisis, armed conflict and chaos. The secession of Katanga was engineered by white mercenaries in the pay of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, a politically well connected Belgian company with major investments in the province; fronting the operation was Moise Tshombe, with whom Hammarskjold was scheduled to meet in Ndola.

Local UN officials had informed Hammarskjold that the British Consul in Katanga was sympathetic to the secessionists and might even be sheltering Tshombe from UN peacekeeping forces. However, that did not stop the Secretary-General from asking the man to arrange the meeting with the secessionist leader. It was set for 18 September, in Ndola, in Rhodesia, a country then in the control of a rabidly anti-UN white-supremacist leader, Roy Welensky.

There was much speculation after Hammarskjold’s death about a conspiracy involving Tshombe, the British and Rhodesian authorities, but nothing could be proved. The official United Nations inquiry found “no evidence to support any of the particular theories that have been advanced,” but was also unable to exclude any of the possible causes it had considered, including “sabotage and attack from the ground or air.”

The Commission raised a number of unanswered questions which Björkdahl’s new evidence clarifies. One of the unanswered questions about the crash was why it took Rhodesian authorities 15 hours to find the wreckage; the DC-6 had passed over Ndola airport with its landing lights on, and local police reported hearing it crash in the jungle nine miles away.

The new evidence makes clear the delay in reporting the crash site was deliberate. Hammarskjold had survived the impact but with massive injuries, including a broken spine; the delay prevented any medical help to the stricken man. It also reduced the chances of survival of the only other victim to be found alive, a badly burned UN Security Guard; he could have been saved with proper medical care, but he was left in a poorly equipped local hospital and died five days later.

Björkdahl also found telegrams sent in the days before Hammarskjöld's death that reflect British anger at UN efforts to end the secession of Katanga.To understand that anger it is necessary to recall that the imperial Powers of Europe were engaged in a broad and violent effort to subvert decolonization. The United Nations, with strong support from the United States, stood in the way, most openly during the 1956 British-French effort to take the Suez Canal from Egypt.

In Africa, the British were under mounting stress. After the March 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, the Security Council, for the first time, asked the Secretary-General to get involved in the campaign against apartheid. Hammarskjold had visited Pretoria in January 1961, and hopes were high that he would emerge as a strong voice against the country's criminally racist system. (Posthumously, he shared the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize with Albert Luthuli of South Africa.)

Hammarskjold knew that he was in a no-win situation in the Congo; he told a colleague in New York before leaving on his last trip that if he failed in that effort to resolve the Katanga problem, he would resign. That probably added to the urgency to kill him, for a resignation would have been hugely embarrassing for Britain.

The British government has not responded to Björkdahl's findings, which have been reported in some English newspapers. Even if it acknowledges the story it is unlikely to make any admissions. It seems to me the only way to get at the truth is to have an International Commission look into its works. Among the topics that need investigation are the British roles in:

1. The WW-I era genocide of Armenians in Turkey.
2. The communal riots preceding the Partition of India and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.
3. The creation of the civil war in Cyprus.
4. The Sri Lankan civil war and support of the Tamil Tigers.
5. The sponsorship of a number of terrorist movements in Asia and Africa.
6. International drug trafficking and management of the global black market.

Ideally, the primary support for such an examination should come from the people of Britain who have also been victims of a ruling elite as vile in its greed and lust for power as it has been brutal in the pursuit of its "interests."

Ilyas Kashmiri: The Trend

Now that another key al Qaeda henchman, Ilyas Kashmiri, is reported to have followed Osama bin Laden into the realms of the Djin, it is clear that something more structural than luck has changed in Pakistan. It seems as if the ISI has, at long last, decided that it can no longer afford to run with the hinds and hunt with the hounds.

That is an almost unbelievable paradigm shift, for the factors keeping the ISI invested in its double game were weighty with reasons of history, strategy and profit.

Historically, Pakistan's military spy agency was created expressly to serve as Britain's handle to manipulate Pakistan, the proxy it created in South Asia when quitting India in 1947. The man who created it was an Australian-born British Army officer, Major-General Walter Joseph Cawthorn, who stayed behind as the Deputy -Chief of Staff of the new Pakistani Army (1947-1951). He created the ISI to fight a guerrilla war against India in Kashmir, an aim the agency has maintained as one of its highest strategic priorities ever since. Because of the support from Britain, Pakistan has felt entirely comfortable in pursuing what would otherwise be a suicidally foolish policy against a much more powerful neighbour. Since Afghanistan became the main source of the world heroin trade in the 1980s, the top brass of the Pakistani military has also had the huge additional incentive of profits from trafficking narcotics.

To break the ISI loose from that strong foundation it took a threat to the integrity of Pakistan that could not be ignored, and it came in the unlikely form of a short Media Note on 15 April from the United States State Department in Washington. Issued by the Office of the Spokesman, it said:

"On April 13, 2011, the United States and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Police signed a Memorandum of Understanding on the provision of over $17 million in vehicles, communications, and other equipment. These vehicles and equipment funded by the US will support the KP Police – including the Elite Force – in their mission to protect the local population.

"State Department Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Ambassador William R. Brownfield and the Inspector General of KP Police Fiaz Toru presided over the ceremony. Also in attendance were U.S. Acting Consul General Constance C. Arvis and Embassy Islamabad Narcotics Affairs Section Director Garace Reynard.

"The US supports civilian law enforcement in Pakistan through equipment, training, refurbishment, and construction of new police facilities. Last year, the United States committed $102.6 million for civilian law enforcement assistance. This year, the United States will continue to supply the KP Police with approximately 440 additional vehicles, including trucks, armoured vehicles and personnel carriers, ambulances, and motorcycles, as well as other equipment vital to the execution of its critical mission.

"The signing of this agreement is another example of ongoing American support and is a symbol of the continuing close cooperation between our two countries."

Although the Press release mentioned the "two countries" it made no mention of any role that Islamabad had in the event. In fact, it was clearly a transaction between Washington and the Khyber Pakhtunwala police, and that political development must have sounded like a thunderclap in the Pakistani capital.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa police are in charge of territory where the Pathan tribes of Afghanistan have traditionally staked their claim to independence on a large chunk of Pakistan's border region. It is the area where the old North-West Frontier Province once was a stronghold  of the Indian National Congress under the redoubtable Khan Brothers. In the most intensely Islamic area of Jinnah's "Muslim nation" (minority communities were less than 2 per cent), that was a "bastard situation," as Mountbatten's Chief of Staff Lionel Ismay put it. The violence and chaos of Partition helped stampede the tribesmen of the NWFP into Pakistan, but once things cooled off, the realities set in. The older of the Khan brothers was allowed to share power for a while, but then he was tossed into the wilderness and did not survive. His younger sibling, the great Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan spent 15 years in Pakistani prisons. (The British had kept him behind bars for only 12.) Popular resentment in the region against Pakistan's ruling Punjabi coterie has grown steadily ever since.

What Washington's mild Media Note did was heat up that old flame. It signalled clearly to Islamabad that unless the ISI played ball, Pakistan would have to redefine its Western borders radically. It was no idle threat. The Afghan and Punjab elements of Pakistan have had a rancorous relationship from the very beginning, and given the insurrection already blossoming in Baloochistan, a Pakhtoon uprising would spell disaster for the country. Quite suddenly, the weight of the British in keeping Pakistan on the old narco-terrorist tracks was neutralized, and it was, as they say in America, a whole new ball game.

Expect the terrorists in Pakistan to continue suffering major setbacks.