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Strategic Security
Strategic Security
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It is widely recognized that the almost 600 years of domination by Islamic Sultans and Padshahs followed by two hundred years of colonial rule had a profound impact on the Indian population and has altered the political map of the Indian subcontinent. What is less well appreciated is the equally profound impact this had on the mind of the people of Indian Subcontinent. The colonial overlord changed the way the Indic looked at himself. He rewrote the history of India, refashioned the legal system, reinvented the social hierarchy, institutionalized a vastly expanded Caste system, and divorced the Indic from the language of its ancestors, all this in the space of less than 200 years. This presentation is a narrative of some of these efforts both during the colonial period as well as the years after independence. It is a singularly fascinating story, albeit not as well publicized, of how the shaping of the Indic mind and the Indic society has gone on for the last two centuries to the point where it touches the lives of most Indic today.
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Gregory F. Treverton1, Heather S. Gregg, Daniel Gibran, Charles W. Yost have authored a RAND Corporation report titled "Exploring Religious Conflict". The "new" finding of this report, is an acronym "NRM" denoting "New Religious Movement", which, according to the authors, threaten to develop like tumors into violent organizations (think "Al Qaida"), threatening the USA and the rest of the world. Apparently this was the product of a 3-day Worskhop of 'intelligence analysts and religious experts' on religious conflict, hosted by RAND corporation (estimated cost to the US taxpayer: $100,000). This report is interesting primarily because it either plumbs depths of incompetence hitherto unreached by the American "Strategic Affairs" community, or caters to a strange combination of Marxist Communist and extreme right-wing Christian fundamentalist propaganda. It appears that RAND has "found" religion and joined another "NRM": New Religious Media.
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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 fearful and persistent chorus of hostility is widespread on numerous Internet sites. They purvey rancid hatreds that amount to a call for the ?destruction? of Brahmins. Virtually all of it is ultimately orchestrated intellectually and financially by the American Christian Right. However, the demand for the elimination of Brahmins cannot end with their ethnic cleansing and legal restrictions on their human rights, which are already enshrined in the Indian Constitution and successive amendments to it. These policies and attitudes have become so deeply entrenched that very few, including Brahmins themselves, question their wider connotations and intrinsic legitimacy. Eventually, pogroms and mass murder are the most effective way of expelling large numbers of people because only the better off flee in response to mere legal discrimination and threats alone. ...
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A quiet revolution has been sweeping the Western world. It is the integration into mainstream society of the two radical movements that emerged during the political upheaval of the 1960s. Many Leftist radicals who once protested the Vietnam War and argued in favour of the dispossessed have now lined up behind President George Bush Jr., cheering on the utter destruction of Iraq. The women?s movement in the West has also come full circle and re-discovered their real enemy of long-established colonial folklore, non-white men. Their own are doing some sporadic labour in front of the kitchen sink and occasionally delivering the children to school and are now comrades-in-arms. They stand shoulder to shoulder together to confront a much greater threat out there against Western civilisation itself. ...
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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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