Modi, Gujarat, India and a long distance of Muslim……………

Robert D. Kaplan writes in The Atlantic: 

• “……….a leader like Modi demonstrates how the century can also go very wrong when charismatic politicians use modern electoral tactics and technology to create and exploit social divisions, and then pursue their political and economic goals with cold bureaucratic efficiency. And here is why Modi is so important: although he is not his party’s standard-bearer going into this spring’s national elections, his popularity and influence in the BJP mean that he could one day be governing the world’s largest democracy. 
  
• Gujarat’s post on a frontier zone of the subcontinent exposed the state to repeated Muslim invasions. Some of the worst depredations came at the hands of the Turco-Persian ruler Mahmud of Ghazni, who swept down from eastern Afghanistan and in 1025 destroyed the seaside Hindu temple of Somnath. During a trip to India last fall, whenever I mentioned the events of 2002 to Hindu nationalists, they would lecture me about the crimes of Mahmud of Ghazni. For these Hindus, the past is alive, as if it happened yesterday. 
  
• …….the spread of education made people aware of their own histories, supplying them with grievances that they never had before. “The Hindu poor are blissfully ignorant of Mahmud of Ghazni. It is the middle class that now knows this history,” explained one local human-rights worker. That is why Hindu nationalism is strongest not among the poor and uneducated, but among the professional classes: scientists, software engineers, lawyers, and so on. In the eyes of this new, right-wing cadre of middle- and upper-middle-class Hindus, India was a civilization before it was a state, and while the state has had to compromise with minorities, the civilization originally was unpolluted (purely Hindu, that is)—even if the truth is far more complex. 
  
• At 5 p.m. sharp, I was ushered in. Modi sat behind a desk that looked over a long committee table. He wore traditional paijama pants and a long, elegant brown kurta—ironically, the traditional dress of India imported by the Mughals. A row of pens lined his pocket. Rimless glasses rested on his face. He had a clipped and distinguished salt-and-pepper beard. His was a handsome, welcoming visage. A small stack of documents lay in front of him. He thrust them at me before I even asked my first question. “I heard you were interested in development here, so here are your answers.” What he gave me was not the usual promotional brochures, but long lists of sourced statistics put together by an aide. Gujarat had experienced 10.2 percent annual GDP growth since 2002. It had eight new universities. In recent years, almost half the new jobs created in India were in Gujarat. The state ranked first in poverty alleviation, first in electricity generation. 
  
• I have met Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and both Bushes. At close range, Modi beats them all in charisma. Whenever he opened his mouth, he suddenly had real, mesmerizing presence. 
  
• I wondered if Modi felt differently behind closed doors. By all accounts, after the riots, he manically dedicated himself to development, sleeping less than four hours every night, up at 5 a.m. to check his e-mail and read the local papers, visiting about 3,000 of the 7,000 villages in the state, and empowering the lowest reaches of its bureaucracy through his slogan, “Less government, more governance.” 
  
• His words echoed through the empty room. “I have a toll-free number where callers hear my recorded voice and can make complaints against the government, and the relevant department must respond within a week.” 
  
• These forces appear sufficiently grounded either to reject Modi at the national level or to contain his worst impulses as he moves—as many expect he will—from Gandhinagar to New Delhi. After all, the churches and bastions in Diu are ruins not because they represent an idea that failed but because they represent no idea at all, whereas India has been an idea since Gandhi’s Salt March in 1930. Either Modi will fit his managerial genius to the service of that idea, or he will stay where he is. Hindus elsewhere in India are less communal-minded than those in Gujarat, and that will be his dilemma”. 
  

A article by Ashok V. Desai who writes:

• “He has reduced the leakage of government revenue that goes all over India into enrichment of politicians and bureaucrats, and diverted it to building up Gujarat’s infrastructure. And out of his own necessity, he has publicized Gujarat’s good administration. Modi’s success is more due to Gujarat than the other way round. But he is an autocrat, and has used his autocratic powers to give Gujarat a considerable competitive advantage over other states. His intellectual equipment is limited, but he has concentrated it in a remarkable manner to rebrand Gujarat, to his own collateral benefit.”
  

Oprah talks to herself, did Mr M K Gandhi also talk now?

In The American Spectator Jeffrey Lord re-opens the idea of Mr M K Gandhi. 

• “There's something to be learned from Mr. Gandhi, something capitalists everywhere in America should seriously ponder. They are being targeted today just as surely as were the citizens of India all those years ago. Gandhi taught his fellow citizens to think outside the box, to simply refuse to cooperate with their persecutors. 
  
• From urban street corners to suburban malls to lonely outposts in the rural plains, eventually it dawns on a startled populace. There are no trucks out there hauling American products or, for that matter, products from anywhere. The truckers too have kissed off the Obama bureaucrats who want to raise their gas tax and tax them by the mile. And so, they simply stayed home or, caught on the highway, pulled to join the lengthening train of motionless trucks forming a peculiar guardrail for passing cars. 
  
• Accessing a mostly frozen Internet is done by the pulse of dying, un-rechargeable batteries. There is no Fox, which makes liberals chortle, until they realize there is none of anything else on the nation's suddenly blank screens”. 
  

It is worth to read but at least it is not fully clear to my mind that what could be the way or method to bring those hard or core change to masses when classes determine the fate of those masses. 

It freedom sense, it is crime, to do so, but our rulers did every year after the independence. 

We are still patient waiting for a good doctor to cure the ills created by our own home grown political pundits (including some foreign origin). 

If at all I agree with Mr Nandan Nilekani‘s argument of “the demographic 'dividend' could well turn out to be a demographic 'disaster”, it is this sense that the young age population which goes with criminal politicians during election rally, unwanted strikes, party mobs, etc without mindfulness of their business which obviously become “a demographic 'disaster” for the country which is often said ‘young’. 

Thanks to politicians for making folly of this young population otherwise mind their business in life even if they don’t bother to listen, their parents or elders advice, or teachers etc.

Mahatma was a cruel man

Partly Shoba Narayan is right saying “the Mahatma had flaws—he was a cruel husband and a mostly absent, if intensely anxious, father—but his moral compass was as unwavering as it was right. How else could a frail man sway a nation and chase out a powerful empire through ahimsa (non-violence) and satyagraha? Gandhi conducted peculiar experiments with young women—sleeping and bathing nude together to strengthen his chastity—but he didn’t suffer from the moral ambivalence that plagues much of Indian industry today. Ever the champion of human rights, he even put it ahead of nation-building. When Patel, Nehru, Azad and Jinnah were pondering the semantics and logistics of independence, Gandhi was in the largely Muslim areas of East Bengal (now Bangladesh) and Bihar, trying to stop communal violence”. 

Also see my other post here

Every individual life is a message to someone –Gandhi, Hayek and Osho!

There is a wider belief among the first generation of independent India that the Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi “life was his message” it may true for his some of simple ideas, like “simple living, high thinking”, fighting for freedom by non violence, disobedience, etc. 

What was happened or still happening is that some his ideas become dangerous to present society including the “self sufficient”, the “disobedience”, the “self rule”, etc. 

It may be worth to ask our self that is there any country in the world which is “self sufficient” of all goods and services? Clearly the answer is no. And what people misunderstood is not only the Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ideas but the whole process of freedom fighting. 

People now wolf cry that the present generation have terribly “misunderstood” and the “great injustice has been done to Gandhi, by Gandhians, who deified him and made him into some kind of a cult figure; by his opponents who simply dismissed him as obscurantist, outdated and irrelevant; and by those who have used him as a stamp to justify and legitimised their own agenda. Gandhi needs to be rescued from all three. That would do justice to him”. 

What is more terrible is the saying of “he never tried to impose it on the Congress organisation. In fact the famous Congress resolution passed at Karachi in 1931, advocating centralised planning and large-scale industrialisation, was predictably drafted by Jawaharlal Nehru. But it was Gandhi who moved that resolution, primarily in order to create consensus around it. Gandhi never insisted on his economic ideas to be at the centre of Congress programme”. 

What is the meaning of stressing to “create consensus” when his life is message to the people of this country or the world where he think that the “centralised planning” will kill the people instead of saving from it. 

Let’s not forget that the true Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ideas will be perished by time alone, including the everyone else’s who think that they wanted to replace his ideas. 

Who does not understand whose language? It is the another barely a year old (or close) newspaper Mint which says “Much before the first five-year Plan was launched, economist Freidrich Hayek had highlighted the pitfalls of centralized planning. More than Hayek, it was Gandhi’s influence that curbed the worst excesses of that process. Nehru did not make mistakes of the kind that caused Soviet-type political disasters. He did not shake the foundations of private property in India that might have led to serious political problems”. 

It is important to say at least two points. First it has been now understood that “it was Gandhi who moved that resolution” of “centralised planning” and the Mint no, no “more than Hayek, it was Gandhi’s influence that curbed the worst excesses of that process”. It does not give when and where he “curbed” it that process? 

Another naturalist Osho says “I wrote Gandhi another letter: "On the one hand you say you are non-violent, and on the other hand you worship the Gita, which teaches simply violence and nothing else." The whole book is a teaching for violence. Krishna, to his disciple Arjuna, is teaching, "You go to the war, fight, because that's what is the will of God, because without his will nothing happens. So if this big war is happening, it cannot happen without his will." Krishna tries in every way to persuade Arjuna. Arjuna argues but he is not a great logician, otherwise it was so simple.” 

No doubt it is now questionable as I posted here yesterday. 

And there is no doubt that we all like or don’t like we respect the man who fought for us but if his ideas become impracticable or more harmful let’s reject it honestly. 

Don't forget to read full article by Osho here