Editorial for BP
Chandrayan!
The nation must salute them and wish them more successes like landing a Bharatiya on the moon and bringing him back to Bharat. We are the fifth country after the USA, Russia, European Union and Japan, to place a satellite in orbit around the moon for exploration purposes. We may recall that it was the former USSR’s feat of sending Sputnik as an artificial satellite of earth that jolted the mighty USA out of its smugness and spurred that country to numerous space exploration projects including the historic landing of Neil Armstrong in 1969 on the moon and bringing him back safely to mother earth and later landing exploration laboratory equipments on Mars and so on. These projects create a tremendous wealth of know-how in the country; they involve the bringing forth into being of a number of new enterprises to design and develop various sub-systems involving advanced technologies which have spin-off benefits in other sectors of economy. In fact, the scientific and industrial might of a nation can be built by such challenging projects like landing men on the moon and later on Mars and explorations even farther into space. Some people are asking why did we not do this before and some others are asking how a poor country can afford to do such things. These are the proverbial unmitigated Shalya-like “friends” of Bharat. Some of these hailed and congratulated China when it first exploited the nuclear device but denounced India for doing the same thing. They congratulated China for the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and for sending a man into the lunar orbit and brining him back. But they denounce India for such a project. It is because of these resident non-Indians (RNIs) on whom some governments have been having to depend for getting and staying in power that there is delay in India undertaking this project and their under-funding. These very forces are opposed to India’s accelerated nuclear power generation programs. India should ignore these foreign ideology and foreign interest inspired criticisms and pour further larger and ever larger amounts of finances and human resources into the development of space science technologies which are essential for the defence of India too.
Barak Obama as President of the US:
A little out into the harbour of New York is the Ellis Island. On that is situated the Statue of Liberty, whose remarkable feature is an -outstretched hand holding a torch. Onthat is inscribed a poem by an young Jewish immigrant girl, Emma Lazarus:
The New Colossus
“………
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your huddled masses yearning to breathe free
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless tempest-tost to me
I lift my lamp beside the golden door”
America is viewed by the world’s people as a land of opportunity. Americans themselves are proud to say that they are a nation of immigrants. A famous statesman even said that if there was no America, it would have to be invented. The fierce yearning for freedom and liberty and great opportunities that that country provides for the meritorious and hard-working and enterprising are what have been making the US as a magnet for the distressed people, called by Emma Lazarus in the words that are engraved on the Statue of Liberty. Obama’s election gives truthful content to those words.
Barak Obama is the son of a Kenyan Muslim, Barak Hussain Obama (Sr.) who emigrated to the US and married a white American Christian lady. Obama was baptized to Christianity. Because of indigent family conditions he grew in poverty but was determined to be a self-made, successful man against heavy odds like racial inequality! He persevered to attain talents that have enabled him to be the first non-WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) and black i.e., Afro-American man to become the President of the US. The seemingly endless expensive American war in Iraq, and the unbridled markets have landed the US in a stupendous economic crisis. The US power and its share of the world’s gross product are declining. Its military power is being threatened by resurgent China and Russia and not inconsiderably, by India also. It appears that in great disgust and a fond longing for a change, the American voters seem to have punished the traditional- hegemons and voted for Obama. They might have taken a great gamble but it appears to be expression no confidence in the traditional leaders for, Obama was least known to Americans to just five years ago in contrast to glorious public figures like Hillary Clinton and McCain.
As far as India is concerned, it would matter little whether McCain or Obama is the US President. US as a nation has been seeking the friendship of India because we are becoming economically and intellectually strong. America’s friendship with Pakistan under severe strain because Pakistan is degenerating as a failed state with terrorists running amock and its embrace of China, a potential rival to the US.
Although Obama spoke about containing the outsourcing of work for US businesses and industries to India, it maybe taken just as election rhetoric. For an America getting caught in an economic crisis, there is a compulsion to cut costs and therefore to persist in outsourcing. The adverse effect of Obama pre-election pronouncement may be for a short time; it is unsustainable for long. The Indo-US Civil 123 Agreement was supported by the Democratic Party and Obama in particular. Its operation will not be jeopardized. In fact, may be with better relations and understanding developing, some revisions would, as a national Party has in view, may also be accomplished with understanding.
Even the Worm Turns!
Just consider whether Hindus have not enough reasons to be provoked into violence and terror. In the last few years increasing number of Islamist jihadi terrorist outfits have been able to place and explore bombs and kill and main hundreds may scores of people in city after city at will. The Indian state and its various arms have not been able to get any person to conviction. On the other hand, if the suspected terrorists and their accomplices are apprehended, there are violent denunciation’s and demonstrations as in the case of the death of an Islamist in am encounter with the police in the Zamia Millia University in Delhi. Even when the person who master-minded in the terrorist attack on Parliament of India to all the MPs has been convicted and the conviction had been upheld by the Supreme Court, the Indian government is afraid the carry out the sentence on Mohammed Afzal because even ‘secular’ present and past Muslim CMs and their secular allies have threatened a blood bath and hell fire if Afzal is hanged.
In Andhra Pradesh the Christian Chief Minister has proudly and publicly declared that his is a government of minorities and despite the High Court’s adverse ruling has been providing 4% reservation to Muslims in government and educational institutions; paying the fees of all Muslim students in professional colleges, is spending government money to subsidize the pilgrimage of Christians to Jerusalem and for the performance of marriages of Muslims and Christians. Almost every one of the 26,000 villages in Andhra Pradesh has been planted with more than one church, the cremation grounds of Hindus are being occupied by aggressive militant, new-converts to Christianity; Christians are claiming that their populations is 10% to 12% having reached this figure from 1.44% according to the Census 2001; thousands of pastors and tens of thousands of full-time propagandists are going from house, to house in village after village inveigling the poor and ill-informed to convert to Christianity.
One third of India has been lost for ever and from that third, almost all Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists had been expelled while within India the 10% Muslim population in 1951 had grown to 20% and is fast increasing with the addition of infiltrators from Bangladesh. While Christians and Muslims can freely encroach on government lands and blare out from loud speakers at all times, Hindus are put on the defensive to have permission from the Muslims they cannot observe their festival rituals like the Ganesh immersion procession. The Hinduism and India-threatening facts are too many to narrate. Finding the media and secularists and communists and Islamic and Christian groups ranged against them, Hindus are being driven to defend themselves. No wonder, some Hindus are driven to desperation in reaction to the aggressiveness of the evangelizing, converting and intolerant faiths and ideologies of foreign origin. Unless the humiliations and assaults on Hindus in their only shrinking land are put an end to, this country will be heading to violence and disaster. Even the worm turns!