SABHA - 4M Report Arvind Kumar, 19 Oct, 2004
Your regular dose of pseudosecularism
  1. Ten year old "Asian" pupil threatens to behead seven year old schoolboy

    We learn from the British press that a 10-year-old pupil threatened to behead a 7-year-old schoolboy and pretended to be an Iraqi assassin.
    A 10-year-old Asian pupil threatened to behead a seven year-old schoolboy with a Stanley knife after watching gruesome TV images from Iraq.

    Asian! We're not giving away details as that would be against journalistic ethics. All we can say is that he is a South Asian who is a member of a particular community. Meanwhile PTI reported that children belonging to a particular community refused to eat food cooked by a Dalit woman.

  2. Flip-flopping Professor is Hindu fundamentalist on Tuesdays?

    The issue of Frontline dated May 11-24, 2002 has David Ludden of University of Pennsylvania calling Islam a menace.
    "As immigration boomed again, the Iranian Revolution produced a new alien menace, Islam."
    May 11 2002 was a Saturday. However, in a piece dated 18 Oct 2004 (Monday) in Outlook, he rants against the possibility that people in USA might actually think that Muslims are intolerant!
    David Ludden, a South Asia expert who heard Madhav at U Penn, wrote: "The RSS is moving to spin into the media mainstream and they might get people in the US to believe, little by little, that Hindutva is democratic and secular. (That) Muslims are intolerant."
    In a letter that tells you what he thinks of free speech, just one line before he changed his view and talked of the Nazis' "genocidal violence against Jews," the professor insisted that fascist organizations that led national governments in twentieth-century Europe were no different from RSS! If he really meant this, it would make him a holocaust-denier!

    It isn't just the Jews. In the preface to his book which is full of conspiracy theories, he asserts that the massacre against Sikhs was limited in comparison to the Gujarat riots (that would put the total number of Sikhs killed by pseudosecularists at just a few hundred.)

    Gujarat killings represent a distinctively new cultural moment in the long history of Indian communal violence. (S.Freitag, P.van der Veer.) Sikh massacres in 1984 were targeted politically, but quite limited by comparison.
    Here is another conspiracy theory that really takes the cake. To paraphrase the petition that he has signed, it says,
    We, the experts, fantasize that Israel may or may not indulge in ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. We wish to make it absolutely clear that we will not tolerate such crimes against humanity which exist in our dreams.
    In a beautifully written letter to The Daily Pennsylvanian, an alumnus of University of Pennsylvania has not only exposed the professors' idea of free speech, but also exposed their substandard scholarship when he pointed out that it was chronologically impossible for RSS to have modeled themselves on Nazi practices.

    We investigated the scholarship of this 'expert on South Asia.' Apparently, he thinks that Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar are in northeastern India contiguous with Assam!

    Looking at Assam in the Indian context, we find it adjoining Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to form a northeastern collection of contiguous, very densely populated, lowland states, all with below national average state figures for human development and per capita income, holding about 42 percent of India’s population.
    In his paper on 'Agrarian History of South Asia' where he focuses on the present and not the past despite introducing the word 'History' in the title, he writes,
    From July onward, the days begin to shorten and monsoon rains scatter, as a second season of rain begins, called the winter monsoon, which pours unpredictably on the south-east and north-east and often brings cyclones off the Bay of Bengal to attack Andhra and Bangladesh.
    We assume he is talking of the retreating monsoon. If so, it isn't in July, but in October!

    Last Tuesday, we sent him an email asking him to correct us if we were wrong in our understanding that he was against Hindus being treated on par with Muslims, on the side of Islamic theocracies, in favor of using terrorism to convert people to Christianity and in favor of barring Hindus from running schools and colleges while allowing others to do so. He assured us that we were wrong on every count, making his views synchronous with those of Hindu fundamentalists. What does this make him? A Hindu fundamentalist on Tuesdays?

  3. Member of Saudi Shura Council has serious doubts

    Bewildered by the American accusations of lack of religious freedom in Saudi Arabia, a member of Saudi Shura Council which advices the King on various policies, Abdulaziz Al Fayez expressed his doubt,
    "It [Saudi Arabia] is the cradle of Islam. Are they proposing to have churches or synagogues or Buddhist temples here?" said Abdulaziz Al Fayez, a member of Saudi Shura Council.

    "All Saudis are Muslims and this is a Muslim state."
    Yes! That is exactly what we are proposing!

  4. I am here to SELL India:Manmohan Singh

    Thanks to J Sreedhar who called attention to this news item. "Prime Minister" Manmohan Singh in a moment of candor admitted that he was planning to sell India!
    Addressing a press conference here on Friday, he said he would use every opportunity to 'sell' India and explain to the world what the country was doing.
    He added that he would "promote" India at every opportunity. We take it then, that the idea of "adjusting" the Line of Control in Kashmir was a promotional offer while selling away India.

  5. Manmohanomics: Reinvention of the wheel and Risk calculation methods

    The policy of the Manmohan Singh government of Sonia Gandhi seems to be to reinvent the wheel. The Railways Minister in his government has banned the import of wheels despite the local factories not meeting the demand.
    Some 40,000 wheel-sets need to be imported by the Railways every year. The Rail Wheel Factory at Bangalore and Durgapur Steel Plant, manufacturing to full capacity, are unable to meet the demand.

    Sources said that the minister has not given any reason for refusing to import wheels.

    The government is also taking a calculated risk with human lives.
    As of now, Railways have been running at least 5,000 wagons with wheels which should have been replaced. ‘‘We are going beyond the prescribed condemnation size of the wheels and prolonging their life by one year to run the wagons. It is a calculated risk that we are taking,’’ disclosed an official.