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Strategic Security
Strategic Security
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Few days ago, I was in a restaurant in New York. The newspaper I had been reading reported the death of thirty five Hindus by Jihadi terrorists in Kashmir. A Pakistani Muslim sitting nearby screamed right into my face "for Hindus we need more bombs". On the same day, four American marines were killed in Iraq by an explosive device planted by an Islamic terrorist. The next day 50 people including children and women were killed in a bomb explosion in Karachi. Last month a Taliban terrorist beheaded several infidel engineers working in Kabul. Muslim terrorists in Kashmir murdered 45 Kashmiri Hindus. Bombs planted by Jihadi terrorists exploded in the temple town of Varanasi, India killing twenty-five people. Attacking religious centers of infidels, schools, crowded shopping centers, torching people alive in passenger trains, bombing of hotels and rioting and disrupting public life by Jihadi terrorists is a daily occurrence in Israel, India, and all over the world. Last week, forty-five people were killed in a bomb exploded by Jihadi terrorists in Egypt. Several hundred people were killed or maimed by Muslim terrorists in Algeria. Few weeks ago Islamic Thinkers Society of America demonstrated in front of the Israeli Consulate in New York.
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AMONG THE institutions that contribute to the make-up of a public sphere in society, the media perhaps perform the most critical function. In the transactions in the public sphere, the media are not a neutral participant or an impassioned chronicler. Instead they either legitimize the status quo or innovator of the existing social equilibrium. The conflict or collaboration of the media with forces that attempt to colonize the public sphere materializes in this context. The mutual relationship between the state and the media, either as oppositional or as complementary, is influenced, among others, by the nature of intervention of the state in the public sphere. The former goes back to the 18th century when the Bengal Gazette trained its guns on the British administration and was mauled in the process. Since then, the endeavor of the press to imbue the public space with a critical culture has been consistently curtailed by the state, both by legislative interventions and by administrative interference....
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A clash of civilisations was predicted by V. S. Naipaul and later given some sort of quasi academic respectability by Harvard?s Samuel Huntingdon. Some Indians were exercised by this new intellectual oeuvre, either hating it or self-satisfyingly sensing confirmation of their supposed superior understanding of Islam. But Naipaul was clearly on to something. Even hard-nosed Western bankers pronounced him a prophet when his casual observations about an impending crisis in Southeast Asia came to pass suddenly in 1997, halting its ostensibly irresistible economic advance....
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I saw the naked, deadly Jihadi bombing on commuter trains in Mumbai and I feel an odd combination of anger, bewilderment and embarrassment (for being from a country in which such insanity is tolerated). ...
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All civilized nations make laws, rules and regulations and attempt to enforce them for safety and security of its citizens. Some rules and cultural norms define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate for citizens, specifying some actions as ?right? and forbidding others as ?wrong?. When a rule is broken, the violator is regarded as a criminal, or an outsider who cannot be trusted to live by the rules. It is the responsibility of the government to enforce laws, rules and regulations, arrest the criminal, prosecute and punish the criminal as just desert and deterrence. Most of the lawbreakers do not think they have been unjustly judged. Civilized nations enforce the law, punish the guilty, and protect law-abiding citizens. This is not practiced in India. Corrupt politicians, swindlers, Islamic terrorists, Naxalite anarchists, and subversive missionaries, develop their own full-blown criminal ideologies explaining why they are right and why those who disapprove of and punish them are wrong. ...
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Gautam Sen
Dr. Gautam Sen
(Taught political economy at the London School of Economics & Political Science for more than two decades).
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