The first multinational: Little has changed

From infochange

The East India Company was the first major shareholder-owned multinational company (MNC). It found India rich and left it poor. When the company was established in 1600, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, and for 150 years thereafter, there were no products England could export that the East wanted to buy. Spices, textiles and luxury goods sailed west. Only money sailed east. It was the ability to acquire land and control government services that raised the fortunes of the Company -- and broke India.

As the mighty and opulent Mughal Empire declined, the Company acquired land beyond its vulnerable trading ports, extorted taxes, manipulated terms of trade in its favour, and built up a private army. In 1757 Robert Clive fought and defeated the Nawab of Bengal. Later, Lord Cornwallis defeated Tipu Sultan in the south. In both cases, and in many lesser incidents, the Company's executive officers extorted huge ransoms and accumulated unimaginable wealth. This wealth was obtained, not so much from its fashionable society customers back in England, as from suppliers in India, from defeated rulers and from taxes imposed on the populace. India financed its own impoverishment.

Under the Mughals, taxes had been collected through a complex pattern of mutual obligation. This was too complex for the Company. At a stroke the zamindars, tax farmers under the Mughals, were transformed into landlords, and Bengal's 20 million smallholders were deprived of all hereditary rights. Just five years after the Company secured control of Bengal in 1765, revenues from the land tax had tripled, beggaring the people. The devastating effects last to this day. These conditions turned one of Bengal's periodic droughts, in 1769, into a full-blown famine. An estimated 10 million people, one third of the population of Bengal, died. But, rather than organise relief efforts to meet the needs of the starving, the Company actually increased tax collection during the famine. Granaries were locked, and grain was seized by force from the peasants and sold at inflated prices in the cities.

The Company became feared for the brutal enforcements of its monopoly interests. For example, it was infamous for cutting off the thumbs of weavers found selling cloth to other traders, to prevent them ever working again. In rural areas two-thirds of a peasant's income was taken in tax, nearly double that under the Mughals. Consumption of salt was forced well below the minimum prescribed in English jails: the effect was to treat the people of India as sub-human, a class below the criminal. This disgraceful control of an essential commodity was only withdrawn after Gandhi's famous Salt March in 1930. The Company's performance, through pursuing profit for its shareholders and its chiefs, contrasted starkly with its claim, in the mid-19th century, that it ruled for the moral and material betterment of India.

In Britain, so powerful was the Company's grip on politics, that attempts to control its affairs could bring down a government. An attempt, led by Edmund Burke, to place the Company's Indian possessions under Parliamentary rule led to the dismissal of the government. The general election that followed was so generously funded by the Company that it secured a compliant Parliament in which a tenth of the seats were held by `nabobs'.

Booty from India created this new class of `nabobs', the chief executive officers (CEOs) of Georgian England. The nabobs themselves had no conscience about their wealth. Robert Clive, having extorted a fortune after the battle of Plassey, defended himself at a House of Commons enquiry into suspected corruption, saying that he was "astounded" at his own moderation at not taking more. Only a few dissenting voices, like the Quaker, William Tuke, pointed to the humanitarian disaster that the Company had wrought in India. But the case for reform was overwhelming and in 1784 the India Act transferred executive management to a Board of Control, answerable to Parliament -- a kind of public-private partnership.

Although there were expressions of intent that the Company should promote a mission to make Indians "useful and happy subjects," the underlying ethics of the public-private partnership remained the same. By the 1850s, just 15,000 pounds sterling was being spent on non-English schools compared with a military budget of 5 million pounds sterling. Railways were built to accelerate access of British goods to Indian markets. Mill-made cloth brought from Britain shattered the local village economies, which were based on the integration of agriculture and spinning. The great textile cities of Bengal collapsed. The governor-general reported that "the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India".

Indians were worn down by the hegemony of the British presence, by the unfair trading rules, the crippling taxes, the draining of India's wealth, and the contempt in which they were held. Retaliation was inevitable. The final insult to Indian sentiments came when sepoys were forced to use a rifle cartridge greased with cow and/or pig fat -- an outrage to both Hindus and Muslims. Catastrophe struck in 1857. Mutiny. The massacre of Europeans generated a ferocious bloodlust in English society. Reprisals were brutal. Long- standing plans for increased dominance in all spectrums of Indian life and economy had now received their 'justification'. In 1858, the East India Company was abolished and direct rule by queen and Parliament was introduced.

Corporate exploitation, followed by catastrophe, led to Empire. Is history repeating itself?

Excerpted from The Little Earth Book by James Bruges, published by Alastair Sawday.

This is a bleeding process, with a vengeance!

In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, is in store for the British government. What the English take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindus; pensions for military and civil service men, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc. – what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, speaking only of the value of the commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of income of the sixty millions of agricultural and industrial labourers of India! This is a bleeding process, with a vengeance!

Marx, Letter to Nikolai Danielson
London, February 19, 1881

The God Project: Hinduism as Open-Source Faith

by Josh Schrei
Posted: 03/ 4/10
Huffington Post


Trying to explain the core beliefs of "Hinduism" to an interested observer can be challenging to say the least. Its often stated that the word "Hinduism" itself is a total misnomer, as it basically refers to the sum total of spiritual and religious thought and practice that has taken place on the Indian subcontinent over the past 5,000 years. And lets just say it's been a busy 5,000 years.

The sheer volume of spiritual literature and doctrine, the number of distinct gods worshiped (over 30 million, according to some sources), the breadth of distinct philosophies and practices that have emerged, and the total transformation over time of many of the core Indic teachings and beliefs can be disconcerting to those raised in monotheistic cultures, as we are used to each faith bringing with it a defined set of beliefs that -- with the exception of some denominational rifts over the centuries -- stay pretty much consistent over time.

However, the key point of differentiation between Hinduism and these other faiths is not polytheism vs. monotheism. The key differentiation is that "Hinduism" is Open Source and most other faiths are Closed Source.

"Open source is an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software, offering practical accessibility to a software's source code."

If we consider god, the concept of god, the practices that lead one to god, and the ideas, thoughts and philosophies around the nature of the human mind the source code, then India has been the place where the doors have been thrown wide open and the coders have been given free reign to craft, invent, reinvent, refine, imagine, and re-imagine to the point that literally every variety of the spiritual and cognitive experience has been explored, celebrated, and documented.

Atheists and goddess worshipers, heretics who've sought god through booze, sex, and meat, ash covered hermits, dualists and non-dualists, nihilists and hedonists, poets and singers, students and saints, children and outcasts ... all have contributed their lines of code to the Hindu string.

The results of India's God Project -- as I like to refer to Hinduism -- have been absolutely staggering. The body of knowledge -- scientific, faith-based, and experience-based -- that has been accrued on the nature of mind, consciousness, and human behavior, and the number of practical methods that have been specifically identified to work with ones own mind are without compare. The Sanskrit language itself contains a massive lexicon of words -- far more than any other historic or modern language -- that deal specifically with states of mental cognition, perception, awareness, and behavioral psychology.

At the heart of the Indic source code are the Vedas, which immediately establish the primacy of inquiry in Indic thought. In the Rig Veda, the oldest of all Hindu texts (and possibly the oldest of all spiritual texts on the planet), God, or Prajapati, is summarized as one big mysterious question and we the people are basically invited to answer it.

"Who really knows?
Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced?
Whence is this creation?
The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?"
While the god of the Old Testament was shouting command(ment)s, Prajapati was asking: "Who am I?"

Since opening the floodgates on the divine question, Indic thought has followed a glorious evolutionary arc from shamanism, nature worship and sacrifice through sublime and complex theories on mental cognition, the nature of consciousness, and quantum physics.

Through tracing the subcontinents relationship with the deities of the Vedas, we can trace the course of Indic thought over the centuries. One of the first things we notice is that not only does the people's relationship to god change over the centuries, the gods themselves change. Shiva, for example, appears in the vedas as Rudra, the howler, god of storms, still something of a lesser deity. Reappearing over the centuries as Bhairava -- he who inspires fear -- Pashupati, lord of beasts, the god of yogis, and the destroyer, Shiva finally, by the 9th century, achieves status in Kashmir as the fundamental energetic building block of the entire universe. Neat trick.

But as much as the gods change and the evolution of Indic thought leads us to increasingly modern and post-modern views of the nature of reality, the old Vedic codes still remain front and center. One of Hinduism's defining factors is that the historic view of god, the nature worship and shamanism, never went away, so that god as currently worshiped exists simultaneously as symbol and archetype as well as literal embodiment. That Shiva, for instance, could simultaneously be the light of ultimate consciousness and an ash-smeared madman who frequents cremation grounds is a delight to us spiritual anarchists, while mind numbing to most western Theologists.

Western and Middle Eastern monotheistic faiths have simply not allowed such liberal interpretation of their God. They continue to exist as closed source systems.

"Generally, [closed source] means only the binaries of a computer program are distributed and the license provides no access to the program's source code. The source code of such programs might be regarded as a trade secret of the company."

One of the defining facts of Christian history is that access to God has been viewed -- as in most closed source systems -- as a trade secret. The ability to reinterpret the bible, or the teachings of Christ, or the Old Testament, or to challenge the basic fundamental authority of the church has been nonexistent for most of the church's history. Those who dared to do so were quite often killed.

In Indic thought, there is no trade secret. The foundation of yoga is that the key to god, or the macrocosm, or the absolute ... lies within the individual and can be accessed through a certain set of practices. It's a beautifully simple but ultimately profound concept that has been allowed to flourish unchecked for millennia. The process of discovering and re-imagining the divine is in your hands. The God Project.

Books: Dirk A. H. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the military labour market in Hindustan, 1450-1850.

December 30, 2008
 by caindevera

At Google Books


As the title suggests, Dirk A. H. Kolff`s minor classic of a book is quite heavy at times, and not for the faint of heart or for those who don`t want to read about military recruitment and Rajput poetry. It`s a rather unique book as well, as its focus is really on the cultural and labour history of certain military service groups in northern India, ones with close connections to the peasantry and made up at first of nebulous `castes` whose identity only became solid by the middle of the seventeenth century.

It isn`t an easy book to summarise, because Kolff really has collected here a series of related articles to draw a picture of the history of the Indian sepoy and the labour market that supplied them to ruler after ruler. The thread that runs between these articles is tenuous, and some of the chapters are better than others (or rather, some are more interesting to me), as is usual for a scholarly book of this sort. Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy does surprise the reader with a sense of the flexibility and mobility of pre-modern British society.



The peasantry of India were heavily armed. Kolff cites Peter Mundy`s reminiscences of travelling through India in 1632, in the present-day Kanpur district, where Mundy saw: “labourers with their guns, swords and bucklers leying by them while they ploughed the ground”. Another example from 1650 describes the Rajputs of the Agra area:

“They are a numerous, industrious and brave race. Every village has a small fort. They never pay revenue to the hakim (tax-collector) without a fight. The peasants (riàya) who drive the plough keep a musket (bandug) slung over their neck and a powder-pouch at the waist. The relief-loan (taqavi) they get from the hakim is in the form of lead and gunpowder.” 

As Kolff notes, the monopoly of arms we assume to be a feature of the modern state was impossible in pre-Mughal and Mughal India. The peasantry was so well armed and numerous that it could be considered less the subjects then the rivals of the state. Tax collectors and recruiters could be assaulted and killed, and were likely to enter an area well protected, as were caravans that hired hundreds of guards (many of them mobile peasants as well); troops were driven out or robbed on the march. The problem of rules, Kolff writes, “was how to deal with the peasantry at large, how to subject to some manner of control and collect revenue from these almost ungovernable tens of millions of people protected by mud forts, ravines, jungles… and the weapons they were so familiar with” (9). This difficulty of rule meant that the Mughals were never as absolute or despotic as we imagine, and that on the local, provincial or regional level rule meant negotiation, loan relief, tax exemption, the waving of debts and the toleration of continued armament. 

 This `freedom’ of the peasantry was dearly bought: villages too recalcitrant, or too well organized, or supporting the forces of bandits and rulers hostile to the Mughals, would be razed. Whole towns would be sold into slavery as the ultimate punitive measure, if the inhabitants simply weren`t massacred. Mundy, again in 1632, travelling between Agra and Patna in Bihar, “saw, during four days of passage…200 minars or pillars on which a total of 70,000 heads were fixed with mortar.” According to Mundy, this was the work of Abdullah Khan, a powerful Mughal general, whose force of 30,000 “destroyed all their [the peasants] townes, tooke all their goods, their wives and children for slaves, and the chieftest of their men, causing their heads to be cut off and to be immotered” The result was constant low level warfare, that might not be unfamiliar from early seventeenth century France or nineteenth century Russia. Only by about 1818 was the British East India Company able to disarm and pacify much of the countryside in its grasp, but only then as part of a general trend to fix peasants to their home, deprive them of many forms of redress and confiscating their means of resistance, the ubiquitous matchlock musket.



The ‘unsettled’ centuries of pre-British India were ones of opportunity for soldiers, some of whom came to be known as `rajputs`. The term is generally ethnic now, but was much less specific in early modern India. As the title of the book suggests, rajput was just another appellation like naukar or sepoy, generic and vague enough to encompass a wide variety of peoples and groups, and even organizations, even if the `proper` Rajput clans did exist at that time. Kolff describes this process:

“Rajput soldiers of the seventeenth century must have been of the most diverse origins. True, with a large number of them, memories of their precise social backgrounds were gradually obscured by vague territorial identities or claims of ksatriya status. But in ancient times, recruitment…had not taken social origins into account. Instead, it overlaid old identities with a new…’rajput’ veneer.” (155). 

Certain castes considered themselves `pure` Rajput, and monopolized certain ‘regal’ names and territories, but the evidence that Kolff musters suggests that many otherwise unremarkable peasant groups were able to assume the mantle of glorious (and lucrative) rajput even if they were not considered of the ‘right’ caste.


Much of Naukar, Rajput & Sepoy is taken up by histories of this sort, of warbands and mercenary captains of indeterminate origin raising themselves through service, bribery and conquest to be the equals of princes or at least to be recognized as important by emperors. Many of the men that came to serve these warlords were from far away, with the chief recruiting grounds centred in areas of dense population but poor state control, like Bihar or Malwa. It would not be unusual for a man or groups of men to travel far, from Malwa to serve in Gawlior or the Deccan, and these lines of recruitment to certain villages were very venerable indeed, lasting until long past the British conquest. Likewise, rajput could often be synonymous with bandit or outlaw, as petty Rajput rulers were frequently chased into the jungles and became gangs of freebooters and robbers, only to emerge decades later and reestablish a claim to their traditional parganas. These bandit-kings, likewise, had little trouble adjusting to the service of the Mughal emperors, but their service always carried the risk of a return to outlawry if not satiated by treasure and title. Banditry and soldiering were off-season occupations for many peasants, a chance during the dry season, especially if crops failed, to loot, steal or be rewarded for their service; consequently, campaigns often began after the harvest was in, to ensure a ready supply of idle hands, willing to soldier for the potential of rich rewards.


A multiplicity of identities was common to early modern India. We are used to the cliché that “one man`s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” but such contradictions of subjectivity were common place in north India. A professional rajput soldier could easily be a bandit and a peasant, indeed were all three, and their identity had more to do with those occupations than with an ethnic or religious solidarity and consciousness (though these did play a role, indisputably). Employment by an Iranian or Afghan also implied a certain initiation into that ethnic group. Many peasants, before the Mughals, could, through service and success, become a rajput, and their hiring by a powerful notable cemented such status.

Likewise with the Afghans and Turks that served the armies of the Lodi dynasty and the warlord Sher Shah. We do not know if the warriors that served them were actually ethnically Afghan or Turk as we understand it; some certainly were, but these terms became synonymous with warrior as readily as rajput or sepoy, and thus nearly as meaningless in more specific senses. Kolff relates that as late as 1918 Hindu men were changing their name to Singh and enlisting in Sikh brigades; undoubtedly such processes, such ease at changing name and identity, were at work much earlier, and involved the same pragmatism: war and manpower. Treasure decided loyalties, manpower determined military success, and tapping into the labour market, into these self-made communities of obscure warriors, was necessary for success, no questions asked, as the French Foreign Legion was so fond of.

So long as the rajputs remained mercenaries on the outskirts, they were still open to recruits of any caste and ethnicity, melting old identities and making new ones. Kolff documents British attempts to trace the genealogies of groups claiming to be Rajput, and discovering both the lowness of their original station, ferrymen, farmers, artisans and wanderers, and the spuriousness of their claimsto the Rajput names. Indeed, it does not seem that Rajput as a clear term of ethnicity and culture was solidified until the seventeenth century, as part of a process by which the Mughals adopted Rajputs (who may have started their careers as lowly rajputs) into their imperial house and made them powerful members of the state. The incentive to formalize, specific and make exclusive what it meant to be Rajput, and especially to ensure that only high castes could become Rajput, came from this ascension to power.


By the nineteenth century, sepoys in service of the East India Company, once a name for a profession united by military service and little else, was monopolized, or colonized, by high caste Rajput as well, as native recruiting sergeants chose men of their own, apparently exalted caste. Conclusions derived by Kolff, or from the book: caste is not nearly as fixed or timeless a determinant of social position as it was previously thought (of course this had long been under attack sociologically and politically, but Kolff adds some additional historical derived material) against the assumption that caste (as described in Homo Hierarchicus by Louis Dumont for instance) has been sharply defined and delineated since at least the Vegas. The reality is that caste could be and was negotiated and flexible, requiring consent and active collaboration, and during the early modern period of Indian history still open to manipulation, not just by high castes but by low, and that the lowly anonymous farmer-bandit-soldier was an active agent both in improving his lot and his station, in resisting or joing the dominant hierarchies, and thus combating another (as I pointed out in Bayly’s work) another still strong cliché about India: that the village and rural life was of crushing, monotonous, changeless despair, forever beholden to the demands and horrors of the rulers (until the British arrived, so goes the story used in part to bolster colonial regimes) was not inevitably bond to a cruel, unchanging system. India was never as stable, oppressive or absolutist as the assumptions frequently made by earlier scholars; quite the opposite, there was actually less order than in much of Europe at the same time, and an equally longstanding tradition of peasant resistance against, but also participation and self-fashioning in, the states and ruling classes of India, a situation that puts the jacqueries of Europe to shame.

Blugaria's muslims and Saudi Money

Here Bulgarians demostrate at the Main mosque in Sophia:

In Kashmir Christians get to taste the ethnic cleansing Hindus once faced

Pioneer
January 23, 2012

The manner in which Muslim zealots in Jammu & Kashmir have been harassing the State’s Christian minority community over a religious conversion row that erupted last week demonstrates yet again the unbridled and absolutely illegal manner in which mullahs are enforcing their writ. 

They have now begun to ‘ban’ priests, ‘banish’ foreign NGOs and demand that missionary-run schools should include Islamic prayers. Given this kind of bullying, it is little wonder that the Valley’s Christians are living in fear. They have become the victims of a vicious slander campaign that includes the kind of story that one of the State’s English dailies ran last Thursday.

A full-page spread titled, ‘Apostasy Unveiled’, the report is a first person account of a love-lorn young Muslim boy who has been lured with money, alcohol and drugs and ultimately beguiled into converting to Christianity — just the kind of thing that the Muslim-majority State’s religious guardians can be trusted to raise a ruckus about.

Ever since the conversion dispute surfaced, the situation has progressively worsened for the Christians, as the Valley’s mullahs have stepped up their efforts to make the entire community in Jammu & Kashmir — which has only a few hundred members — and even foreigners who practice Christianity, their target of hate and violence.

The most telling example of this mindless harassment is perhaps the story of Juan Marcos Troia — an Argentine football coach who had been promoting his sport in the Valley but is now being hounded by the fanatics. His house has been vandalised, funding for his clubs are under the scanner and he has received calls in the middle of the night asking how many copies of the Bible he keeps at home.

At the centre of this controversy is a certain Protestant Pastor, CM Khanna. The mullahs have released a video of his baptising Muslim boys and a shari’ah ‘court’ has expelled him from the State in blatant violation of the law of the land that does not recognise such illegitimate directives.
While the fundamentalists have behaved in the way they would be expected to — and as they have always done — it is for the State Government to end the persecution of the Christian minority which follows the cleansing of the Kashmir Valley of its Hindu minority. Unfortunately, no protection has been given to Pastor Khanna (instead, he has been arrested for disturbing communal peace) nor to the likes of Mr Troia — all of whom have been left to fend for themselves.

Similarly, the country’s Left-liberals, who are quick to denounce Hindus, have, once again, remained stunningly silent in the face of Islamist bullying. Just like they once glossed over the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, today there is barely a murmur of protest in support of the Christians living in the Valley.

Racial violence grips British society

Racist violence migrates to the country

The Independent (UK) 
Saturday 26 June 2010

Racism and xenophobic violence is flourishing in towns and villages across Britain – while inner city areas that were once hotbeds of racial violence are now more "at ease" with diversity, according to a new report.

Researchers at the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) analysed 660 racist attacks across Britain last year and found growing evidence to suggest that violence against minorities has shifted to rural areas and towns.

The IRR said hatred and bigotry had spread in less than a generation thanks to a broad spread of asylum seekers, migrant workers, overseas students and the movement of settled ethnic minority families. Prejudice was also being fanned, they concluded, by mainstream political parties competing with one another over which could cut immigration the fastest.

"What has emerged is that the map of violence has changed quite dramatically since studies were first done of such violence in the 1970s," the authors wrote.

"It is no longer poor, deprived areas of London such as Southall, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Newham, which witnessed many of the racial attacks and racist murders a generation or two ago, that are now so prone to serious attacks. Not only are black and ethnic minority communities now more established there but also a whole history of struggle against racism has strengthened these communities." They added: "But what was significant was that ethnic minorities in a whole host of cities, towns and areas, not traditionally associated with such violence, now appear to be experiencing it.

These are areas which have traditionally been very white and are not affluent. In some cases, core industries have gone and a whole generation of young people are without a future." The authors said minority ethnic groups, asylum seekers and migrant communities are bearing the brunt of these tensions. They found asylum seekers, newly-arrived migrant workers and people who look Muslim are most at risk of attack, while trades that isolate individuals, such as cab driving, serving in takeaways and staffing small shops were found to be the most dangerous.

IRR researchers say at least 89 identifiably racist murders have taken place in Britain since Stephen Lawrence was killed while waiting for a bus in Eltham, south London, in 1993 – an average of five a year.

Of the victims, 39 were Asian, 25 were black, four were white British and three were white eastern Europeans. Lee Bridges, who analysed official crime statistics for the report, found that while racist attacks had decreased in London over the past decade, they have dramatically risen in proportion elsewhere.

In 1999/2000, London recorded 23,401 racist incidents, 49 per cent of the national total. By 2007/8 that number had dropped to 9,866, a 58 per cent reduction. Last year, Greater Manchester, West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Thames Valley and Lancashire accounted for 28 per cent of the national total, a 103 per cent increase on 10 years ago.  

Case Study: Indian sailor died after attack by gang of 20 youths 

Gregory Fernandes, a 32-year-old sailor from Goa in India, was walking back to the cargo ship he worked on in Fawley, Hampshire when he and a friend were set upon by a 20-strong gang of youths. It was October 2007. Mr Fernandes was his family's breadwinner. A passerby broke up the fight and drove Mr Fernandes to his cargo ship, but he dropped dead from a heart attack. Police concluded that the attack, which took place in a normally quiet backwater of Hampshire, had clear racist overtones. 

The gang had been shouting "Paki" during the assault. In January 2008, the Fernandes family expressed concern at the police investigation and the failure to charge anyone in connection with his death. Three young boys were later charged with his murder. At their trial in February 2009, the three admitted lesser charges of manslaughter. In March 2009, Stephen Pritchard, 18, Daniel Rogers, 18, and Chay Fields, 16, were sentenced to six-and-a-half years. A 15-year-old boy admitted GBH on Mr Fernandes' friend and was given a 12-month detention and training order. Another 15-year-old who admitted assault was given an 18-month supervision order.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
 See also:
Fri Jan 6, 2012

PressTV (Iran)

Britain's racism problems have once again come under spotlight after two white men were eventually convicted of a racist murder that took place 19 years ago. The trial of Stephen Lawrence's murderers and the racial murder of the Indian student Anuj Bidve on Boxing Day have disclosed the depth of racism problems in Britain. According to Britain's Home Office, 51,187 racist cases were reported to the police just in England and Wales in 2010-11. Moreover, the Institute for Race Relations (IRR) has revealed that since the racial murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993, at least ninety-six people have been killed, being victims to racial violence. The IRR also revealed that in 2009 there were at least 660 cases of racial violence eighty-nine percent of which were committed by white people. The IRR severely criticises British politicians for the widespread racism problem in the UK. On the one hand, they refrain from dealing with such problems unless they are after electoral victory. On the other hand, “it is the policies and pronouncements of mainstream politicians, on a range of issues from terrorism and foreign wars to cohesion, criminality and immigration, which create the insidious popular racism in which such violence foments.” British officials complacently believe the 1999 MacPherson report, which recommended measures subjecting the police to greater public control and extended the classification of racist offences, has been able to tackle problems of racism in Britain. Nevertheless, according to the IRR, at least 81 cases of murder due to racial violence have been reported since 1999. Moreover, a study conducted by the London School of Economics and the Open Society Justice Initiative has revealed that black people are 26 times more susceptible to stop and search practices by the police than white people are. The IRR asserts that British “politicians remain in denial about the extent and severity of racial violence and popular racism” while their actions and remarks fuel the racial violence gripping the British society.

Racist English woman rant

and more... and men too..

CONVERSIONS AS MUSLIM MALAISE

From ML Kaul's excellent book: 
Kashmir: Wail of a Valley 


 There is hardly any conceivable excess and atrocity which the Kashmiri Pandits as a characteristic religious group have not been subjected to by the Muslim marauders. Apart from the pogrom having no semblance of a human face that was perpetrated on them the devastating catastrophe that could befall them was the forcible conversion to an alien religion of Islam.

History is a pulsating witness to the brutal conversions that were realised by Muslim monarchs whether of Sunni or Shia brand through spilling of blood, hacking of flesh and splintering of body limbs for transforming religious complexion of Kashmir. Sikander, Ali Shah, Malik Saif-ud-din, Kaji Chak, Aurangzeb and Afghan surrogates as medieval despots were at pains to devise all instruments of coercion and repression with the ominous motive of proliferating the support-base of Islam which in Kashmir at the initial stages was near negligible. With the loss of political power to the Sikhs the raging fury of proselytisation campaigns came to a sudden halt but the deep and crippling scar of conversion was already inflicted on the religious personality of Kashmir. Some of the neo-converts who were traumatised by the forcible conversion to Islam harked back to their birth religion. Had the process found support from the power structures it would have turned into a roaring tide.

With the decay of Sikh state the reins of power in Kashmir were handed over to the Dogras by the British masters and with the speed of lightning a consistent campaign of calumny virulent hatred was unleashed by the Punjab based violent and fanatic Muslim groups urging the Kashmir Muslims to dismantle the Dogra rule spoke by spoke. Demands were yelled that the rulers who were dubbed as staunch Hindus should cease to create hurdles in the holy task of conversions from other faiths and should desist from interference in the launch of straightforward hate campaigns against the religious enemies.

In the murderous loot of 1931 the seven Kashmiri Pandits belonging to a single family of the village of Kanikoot near yusmarg were offered conversion as an alternate choice to escape slaughter. In 1932 when riots were triggered off in Mirpur the Hindus were massacred, arsoned and coerced to accept Islamic faith. Forty-one Hindus were forcibly converted to Islam in the Kotli Police Station area. In the Seri Police Station area four hundred and thirty-five Hindus from ten villages were coerced to join the Islamic ranks. In Kotli Tehsil five Hindus were slaughtered- who reportedly rejected the offer of conversion to Islam. A Maulvi, combative and violent, from Kashmir was responsible for the riots in Rajouri with their quick impact in all the adjoining areas.

"Islam is in danger" (and ironically it is always deemed in danger) is the standard Muslim tactics of generating Muslim paranoia against Hindus and mobilising the Muslim hordes for unleashing wild frenzy for Jehad. In the ensuing tidal wave of chaos and mayhem the Hindu minority for one reason or the other is charged with betrayal and sacrilege to Islam and struck with fear psychosis generated in ample measure by the yelling and howling Muslim crowds many succumb to the sword of Islam. Pt. Hargopal, a poet and historian, known as the Lion of Kashmir, along with Janki Nath and Sham Narain was accused of having used abusive language against Islam over a trifling issue of trespass which, his neighbour, a Moulvi, refused to remove despite numerous requests and entreaties. Hargopal was put under detention to quell the mob fiery. His licence as a practicing lawyer was cancelled. Despite court acquittal the Muslims as a combination of brute force and harsh coercion never felt satisfied with the quantum of punishment awarded to him. Ultimately all the three were exiled from their native homes.

The tribal raid of 1947 had all the contours of Muslim Jehad and primeval savagery. Thousands of Hindus, men, women and children whose staggering numbers were never divulged were mercilessly butchered and conversions as a Muslim malaise resorted to on a large scale. Till the adjoining areas of Baramulla and the town itself were under the deluge of tribals Kahmiri Pandits who were unable to move to the safer zones in the city of Srinagar were not only looted and killed but also converted to the Islamic religion by the secular progeny of humanists drummed about as Islamic sufis. After the territories under the avalanche of the barbarous raiders were cleared by the valiant soldiers of India, prominent Kashmiri Pandits like Pt. Kashyap Bandhu, Pt. Shamboo Nath Ogra, Pt. Sham Lal Shalla alongwith Rameshwari Nehru toured the villages and hamlets where Muslim marauders having planted banners of crescent had effected forcible conversions. The neo-converts despite threats and verbal invectives from the Muslim bigots were re-christened and restored to their birth religion.

The Muslim fundamentalist movement of 1989-variety targeting the Kashmiri Pandits as enemies of Islam and agents of Brahmanical imperialism realised their massive exodus to the Siberia of Indian plains. History has been repeating for them. They were slaughtered and their hefty properties looted, grabbed or destroyed as per the religious ordinances and fatwas that have been relentlessly and immutably in vogue. Buzzing off to safer zones despite heavy losses in terms of life and limb, what satisfied them the most was that they preserved their ideological and religious personality which they had acquired through civilisational processes of growth and flowering and had not renounced even in the worst.times of Muslim holocaust. Yet there are a few thousand of their co-religionists who chose to stay back for their own reasons despite polarisation on communal lines and religious cleansing. Their presence in the valley though confined to the high security zone has been blown out to authenticate and propagate the dubious theory of Muslim secular sense, tolerant ethos and intellectual acceptance of composite culture. As is buttressed by the authentic reports their numbers are believed not to exceed a bare two thousand. But the vested interests in cohorts with unscrupulous elements in the corridors of central government inflated their figures to a whopping twenty thousand only to secularist the troubled times and to establish that the Pandits' perception of deadly threat from the Muslim majority was only a ploy to be in self-exile.

The Kashmiri Pandits who have chosen to stay back as subservient to Muslim identity and majoritatianism are to all intents and purposes hostages to the Muslim majority and have been victims to Muslim fundamentalist terror attacks and Qrgies of carnage. The fate of Sohan Lal Braroo, his wife and his innocent daughter has blackened the countenance of Muslim rationality and exposed the Muslim pretensions of allegiance to Sufi Islam and caused shivers in the corridors of Geneva, the seat of Human Rights Commission. T.N. Bhat who had stayed back and was a poor guy eking out existence from the scarce earnings from a few temples. The inhuman terrorists earning tremendous favours and sympathies from the Muslim masses robbed him of his earnings at the Shrine of Zeshta Devi, tied him to a three wheeler, wounding him brutally and fatally and hurled him in an unconscious state into the Dal Lake for final burial. But the humiliating disability and torture that they have been subjected to is the forcible conversion to Islam and adoption of Muslim dress codes, language nuances and other outer appearances that stand out a Muslim.

The Report of a team of the Gandhi Peace Foundation which visited Kashmir very recently reveals, "Those Kashmiri Pandits who have stayed back with their families have made adjustments with the overwhelming majority of Muslims. Their women do not wear sari, do not put on a bindi or wear 'dejohur'. They have no outward sign of being married."

Since the volcanic eruption of fundamentalist insurgency till June, 1994 a good number of Kashmiri Pandits and their daughters under duress have been forcibly converted to Islam at the hands of rabid Muslims owing allegiance to multiple armed outfits.82 The Pandit girls who were abducted from their house-holds and work - places were forcibly converted and married to Muslims after meting out to them the treatment prescribed for the looted women of Kafirs. In the hateful conversion campaigns the Jammaati-Islami has been in the active vanguard and has drawn unstinted and unqualified support from a Muslim fanatic, Qazi Nissar, and some Janata Dal turn-coat politicals with a dubious track-record in politics. The pages of "Kashmiriayat" as the official organ of umat-e-Islami have showered a litany of plaudits and praises on Qazi Nissar impelled by the Islamic concept of Kufra for the initiation and direction of the conversion campaign. The hapless victims to the brutality of conversion generally belong to the villages of Anantnag, Pulwama and Tangmarg.

In Tral (District Pulwama) a Pandit family with a teenage daughter clinging to its habitat like a limpet was coerced to accept Islam by the rabid Jammaat activists.84 Since its conversion the brutalised family has been shifted from its ancestral house to the house of a Muslim in the same locality. Attempts galore have been made to abduct the teenage girl by the lecherous elements held in high esteem as the saviours of Islam. The Pandit family is under close watch lest it should slip off to the safer zones for retrieval from the atrocity and as is reliably reported has been under lessons of initiation in Islamic precepts and practices by some rabid Mullahs who have been howling along with dogs since 19/20th January 1990 as generalismos of Islamic army of marauders.

Another Kashmiri pandit girl from Safapora was made off as a prize catch by a Muslim in broad daylight. She was converted under the shadow of a gun and married to her Muslim abductor. The parents of the girl living in absolutely hostile environs meekly protested against the atrocity but were threatened with dire consequences if they did not shut up their traps and maintain stoic silence. The mother of the girl under a terrific shock developed serious ailments and her spouse floated a humiliating application in the dailies for permission from the brutal terrorists to shift his wife to Srinagar for proper medical;aid. The family somehow managed to flee to Jammu and thus was able to save another teenage daughter from the similar fate awaiting her.

In Tangmarg a Kashmiri Pandit lady married with children was said to have been lifted and forcibly married to a Muslim who is said to be a driver. Her husband tried to report the abduction to the nearby police station but was threatened with dire consequences by the hostile Muslims in the area. In the same area another girl with Hindu origins was said to have been converted and married to a Muslim under duress.

Again in Tral (District Pulwama) a Kashmiri Pandit girl living with her parents was abducted by the Islamic terrorists who rule the roost despite government claims of normalcy. She was converted to Islam under gun-point and married by a terrorist affiliated to a particular brand of terrorist formation. Another terrorist of a different brand did not take kindly to the marriage and after an incessant chase were able to spot the terrorist and his bride and without mincing words commanded him to hand over the girl to him for marriage. Losing his cool and in utter rage the terrorist pounced on his rival and in the ensuing bloody duel he fell to a bullet. The rival made off with his catch to the privacy of a den leaving behind no clues for tracing him out.

In the health resort of Pahalgam a Kashmiri Pandit boy possessed of Dutch courage reportedly married a Muslim girl from the same area. The Muslim terrorists alongwith their Muslim supporters were shell-shocked by such a marriage as it was deemed to score off the history that they were writing in Kashmir. They were dead set after the two lovers for their annihilation. Ultimately after a hunt the couple was traced, abducted and mercilessly beheaded with a blunt axe. Their bodies with severed heads were recovered from a field. How could a space be allowed to those who are deviants from the grammar of Islam?

Scores of Sikh girls have been abducted and brutally converted to the Islamic religion. The abduction and subsequent conversion of Satinder Kour D/o Bhupender Singh R/o Khawaja Bagh, Barmulla and Surinder Kour D/o Dalip Singh R/o Alucha Bagh, Srinagar have been splashed in the media. Appeals to the Sikh separatist leader Simranjit Singh Mann who had informed the valley Sikhs that he had ensured their safety through a pact with the Kashmiri terrorists failed to secure their release from the clutches of the Islamic crusaders. The Sikh organizations of varied hues from the Punjab have also issued numerous appeals for the redemption of the Sikh girls but to no avail. The chief of the Dukhtaran-i-Milat, Aisha Indrabi, has been assiduously working to the nefarious end of realising the conversion of many a Sikh and Pandit girl.

In the villages of Sopore, Tral, Mattan, Anantnag et al the Pandit families that have been atrociously converted to Islam are allowed to retain the pictures of Hindu gods and goddesses only to mislead the anti-terrorist operators and maintain the effectiveness of the den.

Som Deva reports, "Since the eruption of the fundamentalist insurgency till June, 1994 nearly a hundred Pandit and many Sikh girls have suffered this fate at the hands of Jamaat-i-Islami and Its armed outfit Hizbul Mujahideen. Later on they were married to Muslim boys."

He continues, " In July, 1993 two Pandit girls at the historic village Omanagri (Anantnag) and another one at Safapore were forcibly converted to Islam by Jammaat activists. The attempts by their families which subsequently migrated to Jammu to seek the help of official agencies for retrieving their daughters evoked no response."

Jai Ho

On 15 August India became free and Pakistan became enslaved