Several Bombs Explode in Jaipur

In a span of 12 minutes, a series of bombs exploded in crowded market areas and near a Hanuman Temple in Jaipur on Tuesday night, killing 60 and injuring 150. Reports vary as to whether six or seven bombs exploded; one was defused prior to detonation.

NDTV:

A senior police officer said that the blasts were of high intensity. The bombs were reported to have been planted on cycles. Four of the blasts took place within a radius of one kilometer.

Bloomberg:

The medium-intensity bombs may have been placed on bicycles about 500 meters (1,640 feet) from each other, police officials said. The bombings are India’s worst since 65 people died when a train to Pakistan was attacked in February 2007.

While no one has claimed responsibility for the attacks, sources at the Indian Home Ministry said that Bangladesh-based Harkut-ul-Jehadi Islami is suspected to be behind the explosions.

My thoughts are with those who are in Jaipur.

Cultural Regression, Political Warfare, and an Assault on St. Valentine

Since February 3rd, when Raj Thakeray, leader of the right wing party Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), started making inflammatory statements faulting migrants from North India for not learning the local language or adopting local customs, youth in Mumbai have gone on a rampage. Perceiving migrant workers as stealing their jobs, depressing wages, and corrupting their culture, these party activists threatened migrant workers and attacked taxi drivers, street vendors, and other properties and businesses. As a result of the national outcry, Mumbai police eventually arrested Thackeray and his co-discriminationist Abu Asim Azmi, but not before one bystander — most embarrassingly to the politicians, a Maharashtrian — died in the rioting. Behind the scenes of the violence, as usual, lies a political power grab between Thackeray and his cousin over who is the true heir of Bal Thackeray’s political legacy.

Detailing the clash of politics, culture and religion, the International Herald Tribune points out the increasing incidence of communal tension, social censorship, and narrow-minded sectarianism around India. Citing examples such as the self-imposed exile of renowned Indian painter M. F. Husain (who offended many by painting nude depictions of Hindu goddesses), death threats to Salman Rushdie, the banning of the Da Vinci code, and effective religious zoning (whereby entire neighborhoods have been declared vegetarian, rendering them essentially off-limits to Muslims), the IHT highlights a disturbing regressive trend in social and religious thought in India. Case in point: Delhi protesters yesterday blocked roads, chanting “Down with Valentine.”

Oddly, the underlying out-with-the-migrant-workers theme based on the accusation that some “other,” whether domestic or from abroad, is to blame for the lack of jobs, as well as the perceived corruption of culture is eerily familiar. Does Samuel Huntington consult on the side for the Hindu right-wingers? Maybe his books aren’t bringing in enough cash.

(IHT link courtesy of GM — thanks!)

Indian Media, Its Lack of Faith in the Intellect of Its Readership, and the Fate of Some Cold and Unfortunate Indian Soldiers

The first two sentences of this article by one Manu Pubby on the front page of today’s Indian Express speaks volumes:

If fighting heavily armed insurgents and battling the extreme cold were not enough, army troops posted in Jammu and Kashmir are facing another challenge that is making life even tougher.

Thousands of soldiers posted along the Line of Control (LoC) and in the Kashmir Valley have been issued faulty, ill-fitting winter jackets that are hampering free movement of the arms—essential for quick reaction to threats.

Thank you so much, Manu. Because if you hadn’t pointed it out to me, I would never have realized that free movement of the arms is essential to a soldier’s duties.

Even more shocking news comes later in the report:

Sources say that the Directorate [General of Quality Assurance] is still to institute an inquiry. “It is the DGQA’s job to ensure that equipment delivered for troops is fault-free but it seems that this time it has passed on the blame to the Ordnance Factory Board (OFB),” an official said.

Unbelievable. Who has ever heard of a government body, and an Indian government body at that, passing the blame for a failure on to someone else?

Manu also points out that “Lt Gen G Sridharan, Director General Quality Assurance, could not be reached on the phone and a detailed questionnaire sent to him was not answered.” He failed to explain that this was due to hampered movement of Lt Gen G Sridharan’s arms, since he had swiped a few of the un-quality-assured jackets for himself. It’s damn cold in Delhi these days, too.

India on the Brink of Genocide?

Outlook published an abridged version of a lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy in Istanbul on January 18, 2008 to commemorate the first anniversary of the assassination of Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian paper, Agos. As Roy mentions, Dink advocated Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human and minority rights in Turkey, and tried to fill the nationwide silence on the topic of the systematic murder of one and a half million Armenians in a genocide by the Ottoman Empire in 1915.

The day I arrived in Istanbul, I walked the streets for many hours, and as I looked around, envying the people of Istanbul their beautiful, mysterious, thrilling city, a friend pointed out to me young boys in white caps who seemed to have suddenly appeared like a rash in the city. He explained that they were expressing their solidarity with the child-assassin who was wearing a white cap when he killed Hrant.

Roy’s (abridged) lecture continues as an exposé on genocide, its denial, and its celebration. She highlights incidents of genocide in India and throughout the world, and details the quest for Lebensraum underlying genocide throughout history. Lebensraum, literally defined as “living space,” was the term coined by German geographer and zoologist Freidrich Ratzel “to describe what he thought of as the dominant human species’ natural impulse to expand its territory in its search for not just space, but sustenance. This impulse to expansion would naturally be at the cost of a less dominant species…that Nazi ideologues believed should give way, or be made to give way, to the stronger one.” Connecting dots between the concepts of living space (or economic determinism), “union,” and “progress” employed by perpetrators of genocide, Roy speculates that a country that is standing at the threshold of “progress” might also stand at the threshold of genocide.

Could the India being celebrated all over the world as a miracle of progress and democracy, possibly be poised on the verge of committing genocide? The mere suggestion might sound outlandish and, at this point of time, the use of the word genocide surely unwarranted. However, if we look to the future, and if the Tsars of Development believe in their own publicity, if they believe that There Is No Alternative to their chosen model for Progress, then they will inevitably have to kill, and kill in large numbers, in order to get their way.

The forward march towards “Union and Progress,” or in contemporary Indian terms “Nationalism and Development,” which has been undertaken by the two major national political parties since 1989, and the destruction meted upon communities and minorities in its wake have been documented elsewhere (and are discussed in Roy’s lecture).

Roy presents a question based on that concept of Lebensraum and India’s future: where will the New India go? The nation’s wealth of natural resources and prime industrial real estate are also home to its under-represented poor, and the New India long ago began to lay territorial claim to those resources in several regions, including Chhattisgarh and Nandigram. These states’ internally displaced peoples now live in police camps, tenements, and resettlement colonies, and have been sucked into the spiral of poverty. Yet these are not the news headlines we read in the international or even the domestic media. This is not the New India, the one the world is chattering about.

In this ‘counterfeit’ version of India, in the realm of culture, in the new Bollywood cinema, in the boom in Indo-Anglian literature, the poor, for the most part, are simply absent. They have been erased in advance. (They only put in an appearance as the smiling beneficiaries of Micro-Credit Loans, Development Schemes and charity meted out by NGOs.)

There are Two Indias — one pushing “forward,” and the other supposedly holding back. And the “pulsating, dynamic, new India” is bursting at many seams, and may even be looking for more living space.