The British Colonial Legacy - Myths and Popular Beliefs

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While few educated South Asians would deny that British Colonial rule was detrimental to the interests of the common people of the sub-continent - several harbor an illusion that the British weren't all bad. Didn't they, perhaps, educate us - build us modern cities, build us irrigation canals - protect our ancient monuments - etc. etc. And then, there are some who might even say that their record was actually superior to that of independent India's! Perhaps, it is time that the colonial record be retrieved from the archives and re-examined - so that those of us who weren't alive during the freedom movement can learn to distinguish between the myths and the reality.

Literacy and Education

Several Indians are deeply concerned about why literacy rates in India are still so low. So in the last year, I have been making a point of asking English-speaking Indians to guess what India's literacy rate in the colonial period might have been. These were Indians who went to school in the sixties and seventies (only two decades after independence) - and I was amazed to hear their fairly confident guesses. Most guessed the number to be between 30% and 40%. When I suggested that their guess was on the high side - they offered 25% to 35%. No one was prepared to believe that literacy in British India in 1911 was only 6%, in 1931 it was 8%, and by 1947 it had crawled to 11%! That fifty years of freedom had allowed the nation to quintuple it's literacy rate was something that almost seemed unfathomable to them. Perhaps - the British had concentrated on higher education ....? But in 1935, only 4 in 10,000 were enrolled in universities or higher educational institutes. In a nation of then over 350 million people only 16,000 books (no circulation figures) were published in that year (i.e. 1 per 20,000).

Urban Development

It is undoubtedly true that the British built modern cities with modern conveniences for their administrative officers. But it should be noted that these were exclusive zones not intended for the "natives" to enjoy. Consider that in 1911, 69 per cent of Bombay's population lived in one-room tenements (as against 6 per cent in London in the same year). The 1931 census revealed that the figure had increased to 74 per cent - with one-third living more than 5 to a room. The same was true of Karachi and Ahmedabad. After the Second World War, 13 per cent of Bombay's population slept on the streets. As for sanitation, 10-15 tenements typically shared one water tap!
Yet, in 1757 (the year of the Plassey defeat), Clive of the East India Company had observed of Murshidabad in Bengal: "This city is as extensive, populous and rich as the city of London..." (so quoted in the Indian Industrial Commission Report of 1916-18). Dacca was even more famous as a manufacturing town, it's muslin a source of many legends and it's weavers had an international reputation that was unmatched in the medieval world. But in 1840 it was reported by Sir Charles Trevelyan to a parliamentary enquiry that Dacca's population had fallen from 150,000 to 20,000. Montgomery Martin - an early historian of the British Empire observed that Surat and Murshidabad had suffered a similiar fate. (This phenomenon was to be replicated all over India - particularly in Awadh (modern U.P) and other areas that had offered the most heroic resistance to the British during the revolt of 1857.)

The percentage of population dependant on agriculture and pastoral pursuits actually rose to 73% in 1921 from 61% in 1891. (Reliable figures for earlier periods are not available.)

In 1854, Sir Arthur Cotton writing in "Public Works in India" noted: "Public works have been almost entirely neglected throughout India... The motto hitherto has been: 'Do nothing, have nothing done, let nobody do anything....." Adding that the Company was unconcerned if people died of famine, or if they lacked roads and water.

Nothing can be more revealing than the remark by John Bright in the House of Commons on June 24, 1858, "The single city of Manchester, in the supply of its inhabitants with the single article of water, has spent a larger sum of money than the East India Company has spent in the fourteen years from 1834 to 1848 in public works of every kind throughout the whole of its vast dominions."

Irrigation and Agricultural Development

There is another popular belief about British rule: 'The British modernized Indian agriculture by building canals'. But the actual record reveals a somewhat different story. " The roads and tanks and canals," noted an observer in 1838 (G. Thompson, "India and the Colonies," 1838), ''which Hindu or Mussulman Governments constructed for the service of the nations and the good of the country have been suffered to fall into dilapidation; and now the want of the means of irrigation causes famines." Montgomery Martin, in his standard work "The Indian Empire", in 1858, noted that the old East India Company "omitted not only to initiate improvements, but even to keep in repair the old works upon which the revenue depended."

The Report of the Bengal Irrigation Department Committee in 1930 reads: "In every district the Khals (canals) which carry the internal boat traffic become from time to time blocked up with silt. Its Khals and rivers are the roads end highways of Eastern Bengal, and it is impossible to overestimate the importance to the economic life of this part of the province of maintaining these in proper navigable order... " "As regards the revival or maintenance of minor routes, ... practically nothing has been done, with the result that, in some parts of the Province at least, channels have been silted up, navigation has become limited to a few months in the year, and crops can only be marketed when the Khals rise high enough in the monsoon to make transport possible."

Sir William Willcock, a distinguished hydraulic engineer, whose name was associated with irrigation enterprises in Egypt and Mesopotamia had made an investigation of conditions in Bengal. He had discovered that innumerable small destructive rivers of the delta region, constantly changing their course, were originally canals which under the English regime were allowed to escape from their channels and run wild. Formerly these canals distributed the flood waters of the Ganges and provided for proper drainage of the land, undoubtedly accounting for that prosperity of Bengal which lured the rapacious East India merchants there in the early days of the eighteenth century.. He wrote" Not only was nothing done to utilize and improve the original canal system, but railway embankments were subsequently thrown up, entirely destroying it. Some areas, cut off from the supply of loam-bearing Ganges water, have gradually become sterile and unproductive, others improperly drained, show an advanced degree of water-logging, with the inevitable accompaniment of malaria. Nor has any attempt been made to construct proper embankments for the Gauges in its low course, to prevent the enormous erosion by which villages and groves and cultivated fields are swallowed up each year."
"Sir William Willcock severely criticizes the modern administrators and officials, who, with every opportunity to call in expert technical assistance, have hitherto done nothing to remedy this disastrous situation, from decade to decade." Thus wrote G. Emerson in "Voiceless Millions," in 1931 quoting the views of Sir William Willcock in his "Lectures on the Ancient System of Irrigation in Bengal and its Application to Modern Problems" (Calcutta University Readership Lectures, University of Calcutta, 1930)

Modern Medicine and Life Expectancy

Even some serious critics of colonial rule grudgingly grant that the British brought modern medicine to India. Yet - all the statistical indicators show that access to modern medicine was severely restricted. A 1938 report by the ILO (International Labor Office) on "Industrial Labor in India" revealed that life expectancy in India was barely 25 years in 1921 (compared to 55 for England) and had actually fallen to 23 in 1931! In his recently published "Late Victorian Holocausts" Mike Davis reports that life expectancy fell by 20% between 1872 and 1921.

In 1934, there was one hospital bed for 3800 people in British India and this figure included hospital beds reserved for the British rulers. (In that same year, in the Soviet Union, there were ten times as many.) Infant mortality in Bombay was 255 per thousand in 1928. (In the same year, it was less than half that in Moscow.)

Poverty and Population Growth

Several Indians when confronted with such data from the colonial period argue that the British should not be specially targeted because India's problems of poverty pre-date colonial rule, and in any case, were exacerbated by rapid population growth. Of course, no one who makes the first point is able to offer any substantive proof that such conditions prevailed long before the British arrived, and to counter such an argument would be difficult in the absence of reliable and comparable statistical data from earlier centuries. But some readers may find the anecdotal evidence intriguing. In any case, the population growth data is available and is quite remarkable in what it reveals.
Between 1870 and 1910, India's population grew at an average rate of 19%. England and Wales' population grew three times as fast - by 58%! Average population growth in Europe was 45%. Between 1921-40, the population in India grew faster at 21% but was still less than the 24% growth of population in the US!

In 1941, the density of population in India was roughly 250 per square mile almost a third of England's 700 per square mile. Although Bengal was much more densely inhabited at almost 780 per square mile - that was only about 10% more than England. Yet, there was much more poverty in British India than in England and an unprecedented number of famines were recorded during the period of British rule.

In the first half of the 19th century, there were seven famines leading to a million and a half deaths. In the second half, there were 24 famines (18 between 1876 and 1900) causing over 20 million deaths (as per official records). W. Digby, noted in "Prosperous British India" in 1901 that "stated roughly, famines and scarcities have been four times as numerous, during the last thirty years of the 19th century as they were one hundred years ago, and four times as widespread." In Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis points out that here were 31(thirty one) serious famines in 120 years of British rule compared to 17(seventeen) in the 2000 years before British rule.

Not surprising, since the export of food grains had increased by a factor of four just prior to that period. And export of other agricultural raw materials had also increased in similar proportions. Land that once produced grain for local consumption was now taken over by by former slave-owners from N. America who were permitted to set up plantations for the cultivation of lucrative cash crops exclusively for export. Particularly galling is how the British colonial rulers continued to export foodgrains from India to Britain even during famine years.

Annual British Government reports repeatedly published data that showed 70-80% of Indians were living on the margin of subsistence. That two-thirds were undernourished, and in Bengal, nearly four-fifths were undernourished.

Contrast this data with the following accounts of Indian life prior to colonization:-
" ...even in the smallest villages rice, flour, butter, milk, beans and other vegetables, sugar and sweetmeats can be procured in abundance... Tavernier writing in the 17th century in his "Travels in India".

Manouchi - the Venetian who became chief physician to Aurangzeb (also in the 17th century) wrote: "Bengal is of all the kingdoms of the Moghul, best known in France..... We may venture to say it is not inferior in anything to Egypt - and that it even exceeds that kingdom in its products of silks, cottons, sugar, and indigo. All things are in great plenty here, fruits, pulse, grain, muslins, cloths of gold and silk..."

The French traveller, Bernier also described 17th century Bengal in a similiar vein: "The knowledge I have acquired of Bengal in two visits inclines me to believe that it is richer than Egypt. It exports in abundance cottons and silks, rice, sugar and butter. It produces amply for it's own consumption of wheat, vegetables, grains, fowls, ducks and geese. It has immense herds of pigs and flocks of sheep and goats. Fish of every kind it has in profusion. From Rajmahal to the sea is an endless number of canals, cut in bygone ages from the Ganges by immense labour for navigation and irrigation."
The poverty of British India stood in stark contrast to these eye witness reports and has to be ascribed to the pitiful wages that working people in India received in that period. A 1927-28 report noted that "all but the most highly skilled workmen in India receive wages which are barely sufficient to feed and clothe them. Everywhere will be seen overcrowding, dirt and squalid misery..."

This in spite of the fact that in 1922 - an 11 hour day was the norm (as opposed to an 8 hour day in the Soviet Union.) In 1934, it had been reduced to 10 hours (whereas in the Soviet Union, the 7 hour day had been legislated as early as in 1927) What was worse, there were no enforced restrictions on the use of child labour and the Whitley Report found children as young as five - working a 12 hour day.

Ancient Monuments

Perhaps the least known aspect of the colonial legacy is the early British attitude towards India's historic monuments and the extend of vandalism that took place. Instead, there is this pervasive myth of the Britisher as an unbiased "protector of the nation's historic legacy".

R.Nath in his 'History of Decorative Art in Mughal Architecture' records that scores of gardens, tombs and palaces that once adorned the suburbs of Sikandra at Agra were sold out or auctioned. "Relics of the glorious age of the Mughals were either destroyed or converted beyond recognition.." "Out of 270 beautiful monuments which existed at Agra alone, before its capture by Lake in 1803, hardly 40 have survived."

In the same vein, David Carroll (in 'Taj Mahal') observes: " The forts in Agra and Delhi were commandeered at the beginning of the nineteenth century and turned into military garrisons. Marble reliefs were torn down, gardens were trampled, and lines of ugly barracks, still standing today, were installed in their stead. In the Delhi fort, the Hall of Public Audience was made into an arsenal and the arches of the outer colonnades were bricked over or replaced with rectangular wooden windows."

The Mughal fort at Allahabad (one of Akbar's favorite) experienced a fate far worse. Virtually nothing of architectural significance is to be seen in the barracks that now make up the fort. The Deccan fort at Ahmednagar was also converted into barracks. Now, only its outer walls can hint at its former magnificence.

Shockingly, even the Taj Mahal was not spared. David Carroll reports: "..By the nineteenth century, its grounds were a favorite trysting place for young Englishmen and their ladies. Open-air balls were held on the marble terrace in front of the main door, and there, beneath Shah Jahan"s lotus dome, brass bands um-pah-pahed and lords and ladies danced the quadrille. The minarets became a popular site for suicide leaps, and the mosques on either side of the Taj were rented out as bungalows to honeymooners. The gardens of the Taj were especially popular for open-air frolics..."
"At an earlier date, when picnic parties were held in the garden of the Taj, related Lord Curzon, a governor general in the early twentieth century, "it was not an uncommon thing for the revellers to arm themselves with hammer and chisel, with which they wiled away the afternoon by chipping out fragments of agate and carnelian from the cenotaphs of the Emperor and his lamented Queen." The Taj became a place where one could drink in private, and its parks were often strewn with the figures of inebriated British soldiers..."

Lord William Bentinck, (governor general of Bengal 1828-33, and later first governor general of all India), went so far as to announce plans to demolish the best Mogul monuments in Agra and Delhi and remove their marble facades. These were to be shipped to London, where they would be broken up and sold to members of the British aristocracy. Several of Shahjahan's pavilions in the Red Fort at Delhi were indeed stripped to the brick, and the marble was shipped off to England (part of this shipment included pieces for King George IV himself). Plans to dismantle the Taj Mahal were in place, and wrecking machinery was moved into the garden grounds. Just as the demolition work was to begin, news from London indicated that the first auction had not been a success, and that all further sales were cancelled -- it would not be worth the money to tear down the Taj Mahal.
Thus the Taj Mahal was spared, and so too, was the reputation of the British as "Protectors of India's Historic Legacy" ! That innumerable other monuments were destroyed, or left to rack and ruin is a story that has yet to get beyond the specialists in the field.

India and the Industrial Revolution

Perhaps the most important aspect of colonial rule was the transfer of wealth from India to Britain. In his pioneering book, India Today, Rajni Palme Dutt conclusively demonstrates how vital this was to the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Several patents that had remained unfunded suddenly found industrial sponsors once the taxes from India started rolling in. Without capital from India, British banks would have found it impossible to fund the modernization of Britain that took place in the 18th and 19th centuries.

In addition, the scientific basis of the industrial revolution was not a uniquely European contribution. Several civilizations had been adding to the world's scientific database - especially the civilizations of Asia, (including those of the Indian sub-continent). Without that aggregate of scientific knowledge the scientists of Britain and Europe would have found it impossible to make the rapid strides they made during the period of the Industrial revolution. Moreover, several of these patents, particularly those concerned with the textile industry relied on pre-industrial techniques perfected in the sub-continent. (In fact, many of the earliest textile machines in Britain were unable to match the complexity and finesse of the spinning and weaving machines of Dacca.)

Some euro-centric authors have attempted to deny any such linkage. They have tried to assert that not only was the Industrial Revolution a uniquely British/European event - that colonization and the the phenomenal transfer of wealth that took place was merely incidental to it's fruition. But the words of Lord Curzon still ring loud and clear. The Viceroy of British India in 1894 was quite unequivocal, "India is the pivot of our Empire .... If the Empire loses any other part of its Dominion we can survive, but if we lose India the sun of our Empire will have set."

Lord Curzon knew fully well, the value and importance of the Indian colony. It was the transfer of wealth through unprecedented levels of taxation on Indians of virtually all classes that funded the great "Industrial Revolution" and laid the ground for "modernization" in Britain. As early as 1812, an East India Company Report had stated "The importance of that immense empire to this country is rather to be estimated by the great annual addition it makes to the wealth and capital of the Kingdom..."

Unfair Trade

Few would doubt that Indo-British trade may have been unfair - but it may be noteworthy to see how unfair. In the early 1800s imports of Indian cotton and silk goods faced duties of 70-80%. British imports faced duties of 2-4%! As a result, British imports of cotton manufactures into India increased by a factor of 50, and Indian exports dropped to one-fourth! A similiar trend was noted in silk goods, woollens, iron, pottery, glassware and paper. As a result, millions of ruined artisans and craftsmen, spinners, weavers, potters, smelters and smiths were rendered jobless and had to become landless agricultural workers.

Colonial Beneficiaries

Another aspect of colonial rule that has remained hidden from popular perception is that Britain was not the only beneficiary of colonial rule. British trade regulations even as they discriminated against Indian business interests created a favorable trading environment for other imperial powers. By 1939, only 25% of Indian imports came from Britain. 25% came from Japan, the US and Germany. In 1942-3, Canada and Australia contributed another 8%. In the period immediately before independence, Britain ruled as much on behalf of it's imperial allies as it did in it's own interest. The process of "globalization" was already taking shape. But none of this growth trickled down to India. In the last half of 19th century, India's income fell by 50%. In the 190 years prior to independence, the Indian economy was literally stagnant - it experienced zero growth. (Mike Davis: Late Victorian Holocausts)

Those who wish India well might do well to re-read this history so the nation isn't brought to the abyss once again, (and so soon after being liberated from the yoke of colonial rule). While some Indians may wax nostalgic for the return of their former overlords, and some may be ambivalent about colonial rule, most of us relish our freedom and wish to perfect it - not gift it away again.
References: Statistics and data for the colonial period taken from Rajni-Palme Dutt's India Today (Indian Edition published in 1947); also see N.K. Sinha's Economic History of Bengal (Published in Calcutta, 1956); and "Late Victorian Holocausts" by Mike Davis

Bibliography: (For further research into this area)
* M. M. Ahluwalia, Freedom Struggle in India,
* Shah, Khambata: The Wealth and Taxable Capacity of India
* G. Emerson, Voiceless India
* W. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce in Modern Times
* Brooks Adams, The Law of Civilization and Decline
* J. R. Seeley, Expansion of England
* H. H. Wilson, History of British India
* D. H Buchanan, Development of Capitalist Enterprise in India
* L. C. A Knowles: Economic Development of the Overseas Empire
* L. H. Jenks: The Migration of British Capital

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.

The Re-Colonization of Africa. Berlin, 1884 and Paris, 2011

Written by Stef Terblanche 

     
Last week the world was treated to the spectacle of the Paris Conference where one Western leader after the other – together with a few token Arab dictators – patted themselves on the back for "liberating" Libya from the rule of Muammar Gaddafi. It quickly brought to mind the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884 at which Africa was sliced up among its European colonisers.

Quite rightly so, South Africa's President Jacob Zuma let it be known - as any self-respecting African should have done - that he would have nothing to do with this cynical circus initiated by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron, ostensibly to decide Libya's future...as if Libyans and Africans themselves should not be doing that.

In the end there was a conspicuous absence of influential African leaders, with a number of African countries and the African Union (AU) having refused to recognise the Nato-installed National Transitional Council (NTC) as the new government of Libya. Libya's neighbour, Algeria, was there, but only as an observer and perhaps only because its shared border with Libya gave it a pressing reason.

Russia and China – both of which opposed the Nato-led military campaign to oust Gaddafi - attended as observers, with Russia having recognised the NTC only days earlier. However, both these countries have major vested interests in Libya, with China having enormous interests further afield in Africa, such as Angola now being its biggest supplier of oil.

For many Sarkozy and Cameron's 2011-style "scramble for Africa" conference also brought to mind erstwhile ANC leader Chief Albert Luthuli's acceptance speech in Norway in 1960 when he received the Nobel Peace Prize and said: "Our continent has been carved up by the great powers. Alien governments have been forced upon the African people by military conquest and by economic domination".

As Vusi Gumede of the University of Johannesburg so eloquently reminded us in an opinion piece in the Sunday Independent this weekend: "A case in point 50 years later is the painful issue of Libyan Arab Jamahiriya. There are other cases such as Côte d'Ivoire, which is a ticking time-bomb."

To these Gumede could have added the growing "economic domination" of many African countries by China, or the mess the United States left behind after its attempted "military conquest" of Somalia.

The latter country first became a geopolitical pawn in the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union in their quest to control the Horn of Africa. The US maintained good relations with the murderous regime of Siad Barre until he was ousted, the country disintegrated into lawless anarchy and the US fled tail-between-its-legs after its "Black Hawk down" tragedy at the hands of marauding war lords.

Today the US has indirectly returned to Somalia, supporting one faction in the conflict there against the Islamist movement al-Shabaab, which is blamed for the deepening crisis. But this time the US military is not openly involved.

Instead, according to a number of respected media sources, Washington has sent Richard Rouget, a French-born mercenary to Magadishu to head a 40-man team of "mentors" who are training a "peace-keeping" force in Somalia. Rouget works for a private Washington-based security company and has a criminal record and suspected ties to several African coups and a murder. He also once was the right-hand man of erstwhile mercenary supremo Bob Denard.

Former British, French and, sadly yes, South African soldiers are among those working with him. The US State Department is funding Rouget's company, yet everybody knows to what destructive levels these types of clandestine US operations usually develop.

African countries also refused to allow the US to base its military Africa Command – one of 10 US Armed Forces regional commands around the world – on African soil. Instead, it was forced to base the command in Germany "until 2012" when it will review the situation.

General William E. Ward, [former] commander of US Africa Command (AFRICOM) , has recently paid several visits to Botswana as part of sharply increased military cooperation between the two countries. It was that and the rumour that the US was to set up a base in Botswana which led South Africa's ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema to make his infamous statement regarding his organisation's support for regime change in Botswana, a statement that now has him in trouble with South Africa's ruling party.

Meanwhile, a group calling itself Concerned Africans, of which Vusi Gumede is a member, has authored an open letter to all the peoples of Africa and the world, drafting it within the context of the United Nations having failed the world, and particularly Africa, through taking inappropriate decisions.

"As concerned Africans we have no choice but to stand up and reassert our right and duty to determine our destiny in Libya and everywhere else on our continent," writes Gumede. He points out the ingenuous manner in which Nato interpreted and implemented the UN Security Council resolution to impose a "no-fly zone" over Libya, a decision into which South Africa had also naively been suckered into supporting.

Along with South Africa, many African countries and the other BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] countries all condemned France and Britain's arrogant move to use only military means instead of the proclaimed "use of all means" to protect Libyan civilians, and their further move to shift the campaign from protecting civilians to implementing regime change at all costs in Libya. In the end many, many civilians were killed – not protected – by Nato's relentless bombing campaign, with Libya's vast oil resources of course being the ultimate prize.

Ironically it started at the United Nations in which South Africa's greatest living leader, Nelson Mandela, had such faith when international deliberations were under way as to whether or not the US and Britain should invade Iraq to rid it of its alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction...weapons it never had.

At the time Mandela said: "There is one compromise and one only, and that is the United Nations. If the United States and Britain go to the United Nations and the United Nations says we have concrete evidence of the existence of these weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and we feel that we must do something about it, we would all support it."

Britain and the US eventually did as they pleased anyhow – they invaded on the basis of their lie and the pretext that they would save millions of lives by doing so. On a similar pretext of humanitarian aid and saving lives, Britain and France abused the UN Security Council resolution to invade Libya and effect regime change.

Several commendable initiatives by the African Union in which South Africa played a leading role and which sought a negotiated settlement in Libya that would avoid a bloodbath, were simply ignored by Britain, France and their Nato allies. Africa was not allowed the space to bring about an African solution to an African problem.

"Therefore Africa and the developing world are right to be appalled, as Libyans are Africans and are part of the developing world that has suffered a lot under imperialism and colonialism. Libyans have paid, and will continue to pay, with their lives for the Western agenda of regime change," writes Gumede.

Indeed.

http://www.leadershiponline.co.za/articles/sports/1529-out-of-africa

Outside the Box: Libya to be made safe for plutocracy

By Harry Goslin
Columnist

It is doubtful Western elites shared the optimism of President Obama when he recently announced that the end of Moammar Gadhafi means control of Libya's destiny will devolve to its "people."

Nothing causes so much fear among the elite as the prospect of a nation controlled by its people.

The fear becomes more acute when that nation is sitting on top of a valuable resource and located in the most volatile region in the world. Libya might be on the fringe of the Middle East, but people-controlled government there could reignite demand for change in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

Change in Libya has been under the protective power of NATO and the United States.

Recently, the U. S. fired more than a dozen unmanned drones in the final push to oust Gadhafi.

The cost to the U. S. taxpayer for the Libyan operation now exceeds $1 billion.

That's okay. More drones and bombs means a better GDP at the end of the year.

NATO and U. S. military assistance was never intended to ensure that the people of Libya succeeded in gaining control of their government. "Rebel" forces would have never gotten the help they did if it wasn't clear from the start that they were willing to swear fealty to Western plutocrats.

The Libyan story is the same tale that's been told since Western governments and their well-connected benefactors started pushing their weight around the last 500 years. It's just the latest chapter in this tale.

Whenever there's a valuable resource or strategic location to be exploited, the standard plan has been to make sure the guy in power is on your payroll and willing to take orders. It doesn't matter what he does to his people or his neighbors, so long as he's giving you access to whatever is valuable.

If he refuses to play the game or goes rogue after being a loyal employee for many years, like Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega or Ngo Dinh Diem, you get rid of him. Count on state-controlled media to send past associations down the Memory Hole.

It really works the same in this country, except that the transition of real power and control to the elites was gradual and far less violent. The American people reaffirm and support this silent coup every election day.

Predictability is what matters. Look at Wall Street. They don't care who sits in the White House or Congress so long as they know that whenever they take a serious hit the taxpayers will be shaken down to make good their losses. They already got the Federal Reserve on their side. The federal government is extra insurance. Heads they win; tails we lose. It’s the same idea projected into every corner of the Earth.

Libya will be purged of Gadhafi. Its government will be reformed by Libyan people. They just won't really represent the "people." They can't. The guys in the West who write the checks won't allow it.

A chilling report about US interference into the affairs of Sovereign Sri Lanka

Posted on January 30th, 2010

Insight By Sunil Kumar

The sudden concerns By the US Authorities for Fmr. Gen. Sarath Fonseka’s personal safety does not appear to be a mere aftermath of the recently concluded Presidential Election.There appears to have been a very complex and intricate plan by the US in lending support towards the Fonseka cause to unseat President Rajapaksha which is attested to by the contents of this item the authenticity of which hardly needs establishing as every detail belongs to the John Kerry report it has been extracted from. There are however some debatable issues which get bypassed towards rationalities despite the report having been filed by Senator John Kerry. For instance the US’s concerns about the weakening of their hold on the region consequential to the demise of the LTTE which does not really make sense and adds to a somewhat speculative nature of the item as the LTTE are outlawed by the USA, duplicity towards the case in point namely a US loss of regional strength notwithstanding regardless of whether it was the LTTE who cemented it. There are some analysts who have concluded however that this also typical of how the USA chooses to meddle into the internal affairs of a foreign sovereign nation with gall and impunity as the infamous days of the CIA activities globally which caused mayhem in many countries it was involved in come to mind! aka “Divide and Rule Regardless Of The Principles Involved As Long As It Benefits the USA!”

If you are a true patriotic Sri Lankan, This item should chill your spine!! It is all the more reason for all patriotic Sri Lankans to rally round their astute President in supporting the mandate of his new term and showering contempt on all the contentious activities of the Sarath Fonseka camp.

It also brings to focus the bravado which Sarath Fonseka seems to continue to display in his attacks against the President and consequently the legitimate

Sovereign State of Sri Lanka but who can blame him if he has the backing of a superpower such as the USA although the transparencies of the superpower seem to overshadow the rights of a sovereign nation it is trying to belittle if this be the case which the blinkered Sarath Fonseka vision seems to be be blind to!There is no justification for the Sarath Fonseka entourage to continue denigrating President Rajapaksha with his barrage of lies and innuendo about corrupt practises at the Polls, violation of the rights of displaced people etc. etc. in a confrontational manner where the President in all probabilities has a right to execute his jurisdiction towards confronting Sarath Fonseka and his cronies on this issue in turn and meting out punitive action against them within the legal statutes of Sri Lanka if found liable for their actions which some find tantamount to treason!!

In the case of the USA they should be better advised that the stand taken against President Rajapaksha as portrayed in the Kerry Report is something they have absolutely no entitlement to unless the gist of the Kerry report has been misrepresented which conclusion is obviously ludicrous as the objectives seem etched in stone as well as in Black and White!!

An extract from a recent John Kerry Senate Foreign Relations Committee report on Sri Lanka .

John Kerry is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (US)

Stunned by the unexpected annihilation of the terrorists in Sri Lanka and fearing consequently a grave threat to US security interests in the region, the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations (SCFR) hastily scrambled two of its staff members to visit the island nation in the first week of November 2009 with a mandate to evaluate the fall out of the terrorist debacle on US policy in the island and geopolitical, in the region; the two member team were required to made recommendations immediately to stem the alarming deterioration of US leverage on the island.

Arriving in the island at a time when security sensitivity remained high, the evaluating team travelled the country during their weeklong stay with the approval and support of the Sri Lanka Government.

In reciprocation of this courtesy it is to be expected that the report would be couched in veiled parlance. On reading the report one cannot but be taken aback that, coincidentally, LTTE fortunes have a direct correlation to US policy on the island and to US geo-strategic interests in the region.

Foreign policy objectives

On December 7, 2009 John Kerry, the Chairman of the SCFR, circulating the two member report among the rest of the committee members, makes comment by stressing the strategic importance of Sri Lanka to the US particularly, as the report emphasizes, the geopolitical location of the island; he goes on to add the need to maintain a strategic alliance with the island and the need to re-evaluate US foreign policy in the wake of the military defeat of the LTTE.

It would appear that the US , placing reliance on a fundamentally flawed assumption of the military invincibility of the terrorists, laid all their strategic chips on the LTTE, sadly ignoring other foreign policy tools that were at their disposal. As the report states, Rajapaksa did the unthinkable and the unexpected; his achievement was one of the few instances in modern history in which a terrorist group had been militarily defeated.

When finally Washington realized the vulnerability of the terrorists, in the face of the rolling Government juggernaut, and the fragility and folly of their chosen ‘single agenda’ policy option, desperate attempts were made, finally at the level of the White House, to rescue and salvage US interests by endeavours that included attempts at coercing Sri Lanka to negotiate a truce with the terrorists.

Much of the chagrin with Rajapaksa flows from his recalcitrance to comply. US foreign policy collapsed in the waters of the Nanthikadal lagoon.

Washington admittedly cannot be too happy with Blake who is seen as the chief proponent of the failed policy which has created a temporary power void for the US in the immediate region.

The report is extremely critical of his single agenda policy which has resulted in shortchanging US strategic interests in the region. Wearing his new hat, Blake, it is to be anticipated, would have his time cutout, repairing the damage to US interests in the region, perceived as his responsibility, and further, initiating action to vindicate his previous miscalculations.

Team mission

It was in this backdrop that the special team from Washington was dispatched to Colombo . Their mission: To make recommendations to prevent further erosion of US security interests in the island and increase US leverage in Sri Lanka for securing longer term US strategic interests, expanding the number of tools available at Washington ’s disposal.

Serious dichotomy of views

The urgency of the mission also suggests a serious dichotomy of views in Washington . On one side of the coin Blake, described in certain circles, in oxymoronic terms as the smiling ‘Ugly American’, pursuing the failed hard-line policy of all stick while on the flip side, a breath of fresh air from the new Obama administration, wishing to engage in more-carrot-and-less-stick policy.

The visiting team did a quick situational analysis, weighing the ground situation, the strategic importance of the island, the weaknesses and consequences of US policy hitherto pursued, the strengths and vulnerabilities of Sri Lanka State , the US strengths in the island and the tactical options at the disposal of Washington .

The report describes Sri Lanka as being located geographically at the nexus of the maritime trading routes connecting Europe and the Middle East to China and the rest of Asia .

All of China’s and Japan’s energy resources from the Persian Gulf, as the report identifies, transits Sri Lanka and the island has the potential to control or impede the free flow these resources to China, an emerging global power, or to Japan, a strategic partner of the US .

Free flow of trade

Furthermore, half of the world’s container traffic passes through Sri Lanka and the island has again, as indicated before, the potential to control or impede the free flow of trade in the Indian Ocean .

The island lends itself naturally to be an effective choke point, the control of which provides a strong bargaining platform in global rivalries; shades of Somalia where sea terrorists, often referred to as pirates, directed by some unidentified power, impede shipping in the Arabian Sea of the Indian Ocean .

In fact the report makes reference to some acts of piracy off one of the myriads of islands that lie to the West of Sri Lanka.

New great game

The US , as the report explains, has a competing interest with India and China in securing this maritime route; Sri Lanka says the report, is a key piece in a larger geopolitical dynamic, commonly described as the new Great Game.

Potential to destabilize India

The Washington report also identifies the potential of Sri Lanka to destabilize India ; it states that the communal tensions in Sri Lanka Sinhala-Tamil or Hindu-Muslim, have the ability to undermine stability in India , particularly Tamil Nadu, home to sixty million Hindu Tamils.

Two thirds of coastline

Unfortunately for the US , the structure of their foreign policy in this region, based on the invincibility of the terrorists, crumbled dramatically when Rajapaksa annihilated the terrorists.

If the LTTE had succeeded, the US would have gained control of two thirds of Sri Lanka coastline, enabling them to secure Persian Gulf energy resources to Japan, interfere if and when the need arose, with the flow of these same resources to China, selectively interfere with free trade in the Indian Ocean and undermine stability in India by provoking Tamil and Hindu sentiments in Tamil Nadu.

The Sea Tigers, the naval arm of the defeated terrorists, which had alarmingly become a very potent force, had the hallmarks of a nascent ‘pirate’ organisation.

To make matters worse not only did Rajapaksa destroy the cornerstone of US policy in the region but he was, as the report identified, responsible for the country’s drift towards China (and the non Western world), considered one of the biggest challengers to US hegemony of the world.

All this threatens US National Security interests and Rajapaksa is considered a threat to US National Security.

US policy, the report states, has to be re-charted. A regime change is considered imperative; Rajapaksa must go.

The problem however is that Rajapaksa is popular across the length and breadth of the country and his Government’s annihilation of the terrorists has made his popularity soar. As the report identifies, there is no political leader in the country to match his popularity. Wickremesinghe, in the report, has been identified as a very close ally of the US who has consistently urged the US to take Sri Lanka to the war crimes tribunal.

As the report admits, Wickremesinghe lacks the charisma to battle Rajapaksa nation-wide. Fonseka is identified as the only individual who perhaps could challenge Rajapaksa’s popularity nationally, having been the Commander of the troops that defeated the terrorists.

Engagement of Fonseka by the US

Blake engaged Fonseka at the height of the war. He persuaded Fonseka to apply for Permanent Residency in the US which would lighten Fonseka’s financial burden of educating his children. Fortune smiled on Fonseka when out of a 6.4 million applicants, Fonseka was one of the chosen few of a mere 50,000 to be accorded permanent residency in the US .

It is not clear what prompted Fonseka, just prior to setting off to the US in September 2008, tell Bryson Hull of Reuters “The Tigers will go underground rather than fight to the last man.” This was contrary to the thinking of the troops on ground, battling the terrorists and the Rajapaksas who were determined and confident of defeating the terrorists totally.

Was Fonseka coerced to say this or was Fonseka out of step with what was happening on the battlefield? In November 2008, when the Army was bogged down in a do or die battle for Killinochchi and Muhamalai, and the future of the war in Fonseka’s mind, was not clear, the Commander of the battling troops left his Motherland and his troops, dying in their hundreds at the time, to tour Washington on his being accorded permanent residency of another country.

This created adverse morale repercussions within the Army; fortunately for Sri Lanka , Fonseka was far removed from the battlefield. Was the timing of the visit sheer ignorance or was he already being influenced by Washington ? Fonseka is perhaps the only permanent resident of the US , with perhaps the exception of Pakistan ’s Musharaff, to be accorded such a reception in Washington .

Fonseka returned to the country after over month. Immediately on his return, in December 2008, he made that now infamous speech, quite inappropriate, unexpected and uncalled for, about corrupt politicians, political jokers and LTTE links in Tamil Nadu, which embarrassed the Rajapaksa Government no end and nearly provoked Delhi, who had resisted US pressure to intervene in the Sri Lanka offensive, to reconsider their decision.

Was Fonseka naive or did he make that calculated statement at the behest of his adopted country? Is he a captive of his own doing or is he a loose cannon? This statement provoked a sharp retort from Neduraman who warned the Government of Sri Lanka that the actions of Fonseka suggest that the nation may witness Army rule in the near future which would be disastrous for Sri Lanka-India relations.

Creation of the rift

Rumour Street had it, from about early 2009, that Blake had urged Fonseka, notorious for an inflated ego, to increase the strength of the Army. Fonseka complied by pressing the Government, in the aftermath of the war, to increase the strength of the Army to 300,000 (It is presumed that this is his opinion even at present).

Rumour Street also had it that the same sources leaked it to the Government that they had intelligence that Fonseka was planning a military coup.

The rift was created and the first step for a regime change had begun. In the meantime whispers to both sides, from the different mouths of the same source, continued and the rift widened.

Reportedly, it was conveyed to the Government that Fonseka, still in uniform, was harbouring Presidential ambitions and to Fonseka that he could easily be the top honcho, barring his safety; it was suggested to him that if he made an implicative confession, to his country of adoption, regarding the conduct of the war, that would serve as his life insurance; this, he was apparently assured, would be released only if some harm were to befall him.

A highly controversial trip to the US was arranged in November 2009 with Blake choreographing the moves.

The much publicized statement of Fonseka to a newspaper recently, is reportedly a transcript of a recording that was made in the US which found its way into the island in the pouch of a roving envoy, this, reportedly again, was played to a journalist who had the privilege of listening to it but not permitted to take a copy.

Through a grapevine it was leaked that the journalist does not have a copy of the recording.

One conceivable danger is that if a stone is thrown by the adopted country at Fonseka at any time, it would be construed that Rajapaksa was responsible for the stone giving justification for the incriminating statement to be publicized and Rajapaksa running against a wave of public emotion; a classic case of three birds with one stone.

US moves in the Sri Lankan election

US manoeuvres in the Sri Lankan election is to effect a change in Sri Lanka ’s geopolitical position. This calls for a regime change and the ouster of Rajapaksa.

To this end they have instructed the non charismatic politicians to keep out of the fray; they have successfully divided a country which eight months ago was united; they have been able to weaken the Rajapaksa team by corrupting one of the team with a permanent residency; they have been successful in fielding against Rajapaksa, Fonseka, a candidate who has a trifle more appeal than the old political war horses of the Opposition.

The battle is how to present a coarse, humourless General as an erudite individual of some refinement and polish and to dent Rajapaksa’s unbelievable popularity in the country.

To this end, as carried by the Asian Tribune, a massive USD 140 Million has been pumped into the country through conduits that include NGOs which the Kerry report has identified as being friendly to US interests.

US expectations from Fonseka

Mavil Aru in Sampur was the beginning of the end for the terrorists. There has been much bafflement at reports that the previous status quo in Sampur, located on the Southern rim of the Trincomalee harbour and considered ground vital for the control of the harbour, is being restored.

There are indications that the essence of the Wickremesinghe CFA agreement of 2002, which concede control of the North and the East and nearly two thirds of the coastline of the island to the terrorists, is being reintroduced; the CFA enabled the terrorists to build up their illegal state infrastructure which resulted in thousands of soldiers having to lay down their lives simply to dismantle it.

Also there are indications that Kumaratunge’s infamous and ill fated Post Tsunami Operations Management (PTOM) of 2005 which gave equal status to the terrorists and the government of Sri Lanka in the management of Tsunami related funds, and created that insidious mechanism-referred to as ‘Co-Chairs’ (EU, Norway, US, and Japan) which eroded our sovereignty and legalized these countries to interfere at will with the internal affairs of Sri Lanka, is being surreptitiously brought back.

On the last occasion the JVP with Rajapaksa fought against it and had it thrown out at the Supreme Court.

This time however the JVP, heavily dependent on Japan for their funds, appear to be consenting partners.

Rumour Street has it that the US has instructed Fonseka to deny the Indians the Uranium rich soil stretching along the coastline of Mullaitivu and to give access to the US to mine this monazite for a pittance.

The news on the grapevine is also that Fonseka on the dictates of the US has agreed to allow the Norwegians access to the recently staked area, abounding with mineral resources, on the sloping continental shelf off the coast of Sri Lanka .

Considering the strong link between Blake and the Diaspora, it is not surprising that the political arm of the terrorists is supporting Fonseka who time and time again has insisted that Sri Lanka belongs to the Sinhalese and who insisted that the Tamil persons in the IDP Welfare Centres should be detained indefinitely as there were 20,000 terrorists hiding among 280,000 civilians.

Executive Presidency

The Kerry report has identified the Executive Presidency as one of Sri Lanka ’s strengths which enabled it to overcome the terrorists and which Rajapaksa refuses to dismantle. At the moment the three eggs of Executive, Legislature and Judiciary are in three baskets. The dropping of one basket will not crack the other two eggs. To weaken the Sri Lanka State that it may never in the future do the unthinkable of defeating an invincible terrorist group, the US through the NGOs are attempting to put the two eggs of Executive and Legislature in one basket so that when the legislative egg breaks, the executive egg will automatically break..

The battle lines are drawn for January 26 the battle is not between Rajapaksa and Fonseka but between Sri Lanka and the US . On May 18, 2009 Sri Lanka won an historic proxy war on the banks of the Nanthikadal lagoon defeating the scourge of terrorism and the threat of neo colonialism. On the 26th, the battle is even more crucial; Sri Lankans have to defeat the neo colonialist if they are to protect their victory at Nanthikadal.

The sovereignty of Sri Lanka is being challenged and is at stake; the battle is even more difficult than on May 18, with the US throwing in 140 Million US dollars, buying up one of the key players of May 18 and having the historical comprador class doing, as usual, their dirty work.

Lanka House UK

Vamps, victims and videotapes

By: Paromita Vohra
2010-10-03
MidDay Mumbai


Last week a YouTube video called VAMP Protests 'Prostitutes of God' went viral. Produced by Vaishya Anyaya Mukti Parishad (VAMP), a sex worker rights organisation in Sangli, it features some very pi**ed off folk calmly addressing a British filmmaker, Sarah Harris, director of a documentary Prostitutes of God, featuring them and
playing on the VBS network's website.



The film is about sex work around the cult of Goddess Yellamma--linked to the Devdasi tradition.
VAMP's video is nothing fancy but it is power-packed. One after another, the interviewees ask the filmmaker why she betrayed their trust by insulting their gods, misinterpreting their culture and portraying them as craven victims.

It's not the first time people have felt this way about a documentary made by a first world filmmaker/network about an 'Indian problem'. The producers usually have two responses: we are people who care, and some things have to be 'simplified' so that our audiences can understand the unfamiliar.

The VAMP video, as a direct testimony of the people the film is about, is hard to ignore as carping. In the flabby verbiage about the power of digital media, this stands out as a politically creative moment. It also throws a light on how documentaries work, and so, how not to make them.

Watching the film, you see that Harris, like others before her, is not a bad person. But niceness does not prevent mediocre analysis or filmmaking. The hard work of questioning your assumptions might. There's little space for that in this format of filmmaking.Beginning with the never-before 'insight' that 'India is a land of extremes, ancient tradition and modern capitalism', the filmmaker 'bonds' with sex workers--giggly chapati-making and sari shopping--overlain with a commentary about how 'these people' have terrible lives, exist in a superstitious society, suffering the iniquities of tradition.

While there's truth in this, is this the only way to understand the truth?
Documentaries can explain something simply and clearly. Or they can provide a textured experience of the unknown, and by making you see people as complex individuals, not examples or types, provide a compassionate understanding and awareness about the issues, subjects and our prejudices.

Neither happens in this style of filmmaking. Despite many bonding gestures on camera--we never understand the humour, sensuality or choice of subjects as individuals--evidence of the filmmaker's connection to the people. Nor do we understand sex work differently from the common perception as a terrible fate to be rescued from, or the difference between an empowered sex worker and one who isn't.

There's a declared incomprehension about the Yellamma myth--as some bizarre story featuring 'fat gods in gold bikinis'. If the Indian informants were inarticulate (as the film makes clear by using translators who can't speak English well, and using that for feeble humour), there's Wikipedia.

Reading the entry, I found it comprehensible as a myth that's a way of legitimising courtesans/prostitutes to ensure respect and livelihood unlike the moralising which renders sex workers illegal, unorganised, improverished and vulnerable.

Responses on the film's website indicate what this kind of storytelling achieves: most comments are in the unthinkingly racist "what's wrong with these barbaric people" category. The simplification excuse-- turning people's lives into baby food to feed babies--doesn't hold, and a different filmmaking style is needed.

Noble intentions (sometimes called 'human interest stories') can be dangerous, for they absolve us of interrogating ourselves.

We must cast others as fallen victims so we can be seen as their noble saviours. Sometimes being the devil, or his advocate, may give us something to chew on and help us grow up.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company.

THE THING ABOUT THUGS - book review

Book Review -The Telegraph, Calcutta
Sept 10, 2010

THE THING ABOUT THUGS By Tabish Khair, Fourth Estate, Rs 399

A fairly simplistic interpretation of the concept of the ‘heathen thug’ prevalent in mid-19th century England was adequately employed to satisfy the British thirst for romantic notions with a difference. This ‘romance’ lay in embellished descriptions of the cult of the Thuggee, a movement associated with dangerous conmen from the mystical Orient, armed with rumaals, who would lie in wait to befriend unsuspecting travellers, only to loot and murder them at the opportune moment before disappearing into the night. Such, the West believed, was the mystique of the devotees of the goddess, Kali.

The deceptive casualness in the title of Tabish Khair’s book, The Thing About Thugs, is followed through into the opening pages of the narrative by the relaxed yet strangely unfathomable tone of the narrator, who sits in his late grandfather’s whitewashed ancestral house in Phansa, Bihar, and reads. He reads a myriad manuscripts and books, spanning lifetimes and languages; he reads Captain William T. Meadows’s Notes on a Thug: Character and Circumstances, chronicling the life of the thug, Amir Ali, as it was related to the captain; he reads Farsi manuscripts, written in Amir Ali’s own hand, letters addressed to Ali’s jaanam, Jenny, refuting the facts about his brutal past as recorded in the captain’s work, and telling a very different story. The narrator reads, while his reality intersects with theirs, across centuries and lands.

The casting of India and its image into a few particular moulds and then popularizing these often-misleading notions had been practices of the imperial powers in colonial and post-colonial India. Khair appears to be attempting to address and do away with some part of the problematic West European ways of viewing Eastern and African cultural mores in a one-dimensional and stereotypical manner. The character of Amir Ali begins, in the captain’s chronicles, by saying all the right self-deprecating things and behaving in a servile manner befitting a mere colonial subject. But the character of the eminent phrenologist, Lord Batterstone, is made to project an (initial) gravitas that is but natural to the superior ruling power. As the narrative progresses, however, Khair deftly makes incisions into the tough fabric of popular belief and reveals the multi-faceted, composite actuality that the Thuggee movement was. Amir Ali intrigues the reader, while Lord Batterstone remains an unevolved entity — very visible, despite the masks he wears, but nevertheless an unfortunate stock character. Khair’s skill lies in the way he projects these parallel character narratives and records their collisions without making them look like mere games of one-upmanship.

A sense of enormity of the happenings in the novel belies the casual title and the seemingly light tone that the narrator adopts. It is as though the seriousness that lies beneath is straining to break through and take over — and yet, without ever managing to do that, it makes its presence felt among the wide range of realities, recollections and personalities that dot the landscape of the book — sometimes lingering, often disappearing, only to reappear sometime later, or never again. Khair adeptly juxtaposes Meadows’s chronicles of Amir Ali’s life with Ali’s letters to his beloved, Jenny — a strategy that works perfectly to set questioning minds to investigate the contrast between the two. A perceptible rawness, however, does creep into the narrative while one is almost galloping through it, for the author struggles a little to make a number of dissimilar stories and voices converge into an interconnected entity (not a homogeneous one, for such a work cannot be homogeneous). Be it the dreadful tasks carried out by the resurrectionists, John May and Shields, the curiously empty life of Lady Batterstone or the twisted yet tragic life led by the old woman in the opium den, Khair attempts to afford importance to all that he creates, but is unable to do them equal justice.

Lord Batterstone’s ambitious plan to travel down the Congo river into the heart of Africa in search of uniquely shaped, non-white human skulls to add to his phrenological (and sometimes just plain creepy) collection and to prove to the world the infallibility of his research is somewhat reminiscent of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The latter work attempted to explore the concept, image and reality of imperialism in a detailed manner. The deep-rooted belief in the ‘darkness’ that was Africa lies at the heart of Conrad’s novella, dealt with strategically in a way that is sympathetic to West European imperial constructs. It is, however, the darkness of Kurtz’s fear of obliteration and his existential crises that remained with me as the true ‘darkness’ in the book. Like Kurtz, Lord Batterstone too can be situated in the context of a larger imperialistic convention that sought both to marginalize and condescend to ‘inferior’ cultures, the difference being that Batterstone is single-minded in his murderous intent, instead of also patronizingly undertaking the uplift of other races.

Batterstone, Daniel Oates, and to a certain degree Major Grayper, are archetypally imperialistic in their varying degrees of malevolence. Amir Ali, too, does not deviate considerably from the notion of a wronged hero. He demonstrates the traits that one would associate with a man in his misunderstood position — he is resilient, strong, flawed and very human. He learnt to believe that he “had to be like the grass”, for unlike the upright trees that storms can uproot, grass is always “wavy and green, unaffected by the storm”. Khair does not have to create radical misfits or extraordinary characters to illustrate his point. Characters within recognizable conventions work quite well for him.

For example, the tender moments that Ali shares with Jenny, mainly spoken of in his letters to her, are clichéd. Yet they are an ‘unconventional’ pair, given the time and space in which their relationship blossomed. But there is an underlying melancholy and a strange longing in the records of their time together — a sense that, irrespective of how close the two are, an endless distance separates them.

NAYANTARA MAZUMDER


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Possible misinterpretation by the British and skepticism about the existence (Wikipedia)

In her book The Strangled Traveler: Colonial Imaginings and the Thugs of India (2002), Martine van Woerkens suggests that evidence for the existence of a Thuggee cult in the 19th century was in part the product of "colonial imaginings" — British fear of the little-known interior of India and limited understanding of the religious and social practices of its inhabitants. For a comparison, see Juggernaut and the Black Hole of Calcutta.

Krishna Dutta, while reviewing the book Thug: the true story of India's murderous cult by the British historian Dr. Mike Dash in The Independent, argues:^[16]

"In recent years, the revisionist view that thuggee was a British invention, a means to tighten their hold in the country, has been given credence in India, France and the US, but this well-researched book objectively questions that assertion."

In his book, Dash rejects scepticism about the existence of a secret network of groups with a modus operandi that was different from highwaymen, such as dacoits. To prove his point Dash refers to the excavated corpses in graves, of which the hidden locations were revealed to Sleeman's team by Thug informants. In addition, Dash treats the extensive and thorough documentation that Sleeman made. Dash rejects the colonial emphasis on the religious motivation for robbing, but instead asserts that monetary gain was the main motivation for Thuggee and that men sometimes became Thugs due to extreme poverty. He further asserts that the Thugs were highly superstitious and that they worshipped the Hindu goddess Kali, but that their faith was not very different from their contemporary non-Thugs. He admits, though, that the Thugs had certain group-specific superstitions and rituals.

Global Terror: The British Connection

December 1, 2005
JASON JEFFREY
NewDawn


“There are powers at work in this country about which we have no knowledge.”

– Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II speaking to Paul Burrell, former butler to the late Princess DianaOn July 7, 2005 bombings on the London subway system and a bus killed 52 people and injured 700. As the list of unanswered questions and inconsistencies about the attacks continued to grow, blame was quickly laid on ‘al Qaeda’.

The effects of the London bombings were immediate: There was a renewed commitment by Western leaders to the ‘war on terror’. Most other stories and scandals were wiped off newspaper front pages, including UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s plummeting popularity.

The bombings occurred while the G8 Summit was going on in nearby Gleneagles, Scotland. It was here the topic of terrorism was beginning to seem tired amid broadening demands for debt cancellation for impoverished countries. US President George Bush’s priority – the ‘war on terror’ – was moving out of the limelight.

Afterwards, with London smoking and bleeding, Bush and Blair were able to stand up tall and look strong as they declared the ‘war on terror’ would be won: “we will prevail and they will not,” and, “we alone are fighting” to defend “the values of Western civilisation.” Terror returned to front and centre and further debt cancellation was forgotten.The bombings were the green light for Tony Blair to introduce draconian anti-terrorism legislation which had previously been thwarted by judicial rulings designed to protect human rights.

Blair said he plans policies for deportation of people who “foster hatred.” Parliament will also be asked to pass a law against “condoning” or “glorifying terrorism” anywhere in the world, and giving the government the power to close places of worship. Lists are to be drawn up of ‘extremist’ websites, bookshops and centres.

A clampdown on words or actions likely to be seen as ‘glorifying terrorism’ could affect groups and individuals unconnected to ‘Islamic extremism’ – animal rights activists, for example, may have to change much of what they write if they are not to fall foul of the legislation. British MP George Galloway, a vocal supporter of the Iraqi resistance movement, could be charged under the new law because the government has demonised the resistance as ‘terrorists’.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard also announced a similar review to ‘tighten up’ anti-terrorism legislation.

Who was ultimately responsible for the July 7 bombings remains a mystery. But authorities seemed to know who was behind it soon after the attack. London Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair had already made up his mind when he said the investigation into the bombs will uncover a “clear al Qaeda link.”

Responding to news of the July 7 bombings, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, who heads Iran’s top legislative watchdog the Guardian Council, said the British had themselves to blame.

“One possible set of culprits is al Qaeda. But al Qaeda is Bush and Blair. Who launched al Qaeda? You must be tried, you who are the mothers of al Qaeda,” he told worshippers at Friday prayers in Tehran.

“The other likelihood is that the British regime may have carried out the attack itself… because it benefits most… They want to justify their presence in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he added.

July 7 Anomalies

Independent researchers across the world have uncovered information which contradicts the official version of events and points to the involvement of intelligence agencies in the bombings.

Hardly any mainstream media picked up the news that ‘bombing exercises’ were being conducted in the London Underground at the same time as the actual attack.

Only hours after the July 7 bombings, in an interview on BBC radio, Peter Power, Managing Director of Visor Consultants, made the extraordinary admission that at precisely the time the London bombings took place, his company was running an exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life on July 7. Visor Consultants is a “crisis management advice company” or PR firm.

Power said the drill focused around “simultaneous bombings.” Originally the London bombings were thought to have been spread over an hour, but later it was revealed they were in fact simultaneous. Also, they were easier to execute as Britain’s terror alert level had just been lowered.

“We had to suddenly switch an exercise from fictional to real,” said Power who is a former Scotland Yard official, working at one time with the Anti Terrorist Branch.

Responding to a deluge of emails after his admission, Power strenuously denies any truth to “conspiracy theories” tying his company to the attacks, but he does confirm the exercise involved a “short number of ‘walk through’ scenarios for a private company in London as part of a wider project that remains confidential.”

Some investigators suspicious of Visor Consultants suggest the company might have released information to the media that the bombings were a power surge. For the first hour this was the explanation given, and one that would give authorities time to manage the release of information about the explosions. Power has been hired by the British government before and has on previous occasions released information after terrorist incidents in London. This is all too close to dismiss as simply coincidence.

A news report which almost went unnoticed hints intelligence agencies had prior knowledge of the attacks.

Arutz Sheva, pegged as Israel’s national news Internet site, stated on the day of the July 7 bombing: “Army Radio quoting unconfirmed reliable sources reported a short time ago that Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred. The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address an economic summit.”

This report was subsequently refuted and changed to say Netanyahu was warned after the first blast.

The importance of Visor Consultant’s training exercise cannot be understated because the exact same scenario played out in the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001.

The Pentagon and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted drills involving multiple hijacked planes on the morning of September 11, 2001. And in what the US government called “a bizarre coincidence,” the US National Reconnaissance Office had planned an exercise for September 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into an office tower. American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, took off from Dulles at 8:10 AM on September 11 – 50 minutes before the exercise was said to begin.

On the morning of 9-11, NORAD radar screens showed as many as 22 hijacked airliners at the same time, but they had been briefed this was part of the exercise drill and therefore normal reactive procedure was forestalled and delayed. The two scenarios are comparable in that it is a tried and tested method of navigating around everyday security services, and, more importantly, if the perpetrators get caught during the attack or after with any incriminating evidence, they can just claim they were taking part in an exercise.

What are the odds of coincidental ‘drills’ going on at the exact same time real life events were taking so many human lives in two terrorist attacks?

We are also faced with the scenario of four men, one of whom had a new family, and another whose wife was pregnant, carrying bombs set on timers and calmly waiting for them to explode.

A statement issued by the family of the so-called “fourth suicide bomber”, Jamaican-born British resident Germaine Lindsay, said he “had a kind, caring and calming presence about him.”

“He was a good and loving husband and a brilliant father, who showed absolutely no sign of doing this atrocious crime. We as a family had no idea of his plans and are as horrified as the rest of the world.”

The incongruities of the case have already prompted even some official investigators to suggest the men were not ‘suicide bombers’ but may have been duped by their “al Qaeda handler” into believing they would only place the explosive devices and not be killed in the blast. But it also makes sense if the men thought they were carrying fake bombs as part of a terror drill.

Lending weight to this theory is the fact all four men had paid up their parking tickets before boarding a train at Luton for King’s Cross and they all bought return tickets to the capital.

The lack of video taped evidence revealing the alleged bombers’ movements is also suspicious. Every London bus and Underground train carriage is said to have multiple video cameras, but the one on the bombed bus apparently “malfunctioned.” Videos of the other men have not been made available, only a few grainy images of the men at the start of their journey boarding the train at Luton.

Another piece of the jigsaw being pieced together by independent investigators is the testimony of 32 year-old dance instructor Bruce Lait, who was just metres away when a bomb ripped through his train carriage. He miraculously escaped with only minor injuries.

Speaking from his hospital bed in an interview with the British newspaper Cambridge Evening News of July 25, Lait recounts what happened after the bomb went off and how a policeman helped him out of the carriage, adding that, “The policeman said ‘mind that hole, that’s where the bomb was’. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don’t remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag.”

Then on July 21, two weeks after the July 7 bombings, four attempted bomb attacks disrupted part of London’s public transport system. By July 29, police had arrested all four of the main bombing suspects and numerous other people.

The July 21 attacks were immediately linked to the previous bombings, however it is has now been established there was no connection between the men involved in both attacks.

The police operation that quickly rounded up all the suspects of the copycat July 21 attack succeeded in monopolising media coverage and taking attention away from growing doubts about the official version of the July 7 bombings.

Hamdi Issac, one of the July 21 bomb suspects held in custody in Rome, says his backpack contained only flour and was designed merely to frighten. This explains why the so-called bombs let off a small bang followed by some smoke smouldering from their backpacks. According to Italian daily La Repubblica, he claims not to have planned to kill anybody in the attack, “let alone myself.” He added that the July 7 bombings in London, “happens every day in Iraq.”

The difference between the two bomb attacks could not be starker. The bombers of July 7 are all dead and police have made no arrests of significance in connection with it. The attacks of July 21 led to the arrest of all those directly involved including dozens of people who supposedly are ‘connected’.

Perhaps one of the biggest indicators of an intelligence agency link to the July 7 bombings is the revelation that Haroon Rashid Aswat – allegedly the “mastermind” of the attacks – is controlled by MI6, Britain’s external security service.

Speaking on July 29 to Fox News channel, former US Justice Department prosecutor and terrorism expert John Loftus discussed Aswat’s relationship to British and US intelligence, through a British based organisation Al Muhajiroun.

Loftus added that, “the entire British police are out chasing him [Aswat], and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him…” Loftus adds that Aswat’s role as an informer or a ‘double agent’ had protected him from being arrested by the CIA because he “was working for British intelligence.”

Arresting and putting Aswat on trial in a secret tribunal for organising the July 7 attacks could be turned into a two fold victory for the intelligence agencies: al Qaeda is proved to be responsible, and a blowback remnant and potential whistleblower from their past operations is taken out of circulation.

Londonistan

Space does not permit a full accounting of Britain’s creation and manipulation of certain so-called ‘Islamic’ organisations in the late 19th and early 20th century. Close to a century ago the British began cultivating Islamic groups to counter the rising tide of Arab nationalism which demanded independence from colonialism. Suffice to say, as masters of political manoeuvring and intrigue, British geostrategists have for many years struggled to control events in the oil rich Middle East.

Up until recently, this strategy allowed a flood of ‘Islamists’ from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Palestine, to live in Britain, a safe haven where they could further promote their various causes.

By the 1980s and 90s, foreign intelligence services were complaining about the policy. The French were particularly incensed, tracing the origin of the 1995 bombings of the Paris Metro to cells operating, with apparent impunity, from London.

The Russians repeatedly expressed displeasure over Britain providing asylum for Chechen separatists, which they say is a double standard in the fight against terrorism. Two of the terrorists behind the massacre of 300 people, half of them children, in Beslan, Russia in 2004, were British citizens.

It is well known that for more than two centuries, the West has been engaged in breaking up – or thwarting – the presence and extension of Russian influence southward to the Black Sea and beyond. Destabilising the Russian republic of Chechnya is a key aspect of this strategy, part of the ‘New Great Game’.

The New Statesman revealed in December 2002 that, even a year after September 11, Britain was still seen as excessively tolerant. In a cover piece entitled ‘Londonistan’, the Statesman quoted European and American officials as suggesting the UK “had come to a non-aggression pact with Islamist oppositionists dating back to the mujahedin rebellion against the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan”: a deal that might explain British immunity from ‘Islamic’ attacks.

Years before September 11 there were calls for Britain to give up harbouring certain groups, but these pleas fell on deaf ears.

Malaysian Prime Minister Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, at the 1997 summit of the Organisation of Islamic Conference decried “Western democracies,” meaning in this case, Britain, which “give refuge to those of our people who promote disruptive activities in our countries,” even while accusing Islamic nations of promoting “terrorism.”

The ‘Islamic Group’ that claimed credit for the November 1997 shootings in Luxor, Egypt which killed over 60 people, mostly foreign tourists, had its international headquarters in London.

Al Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, in a feature entitled ‘How Can We Surround and Extradite London’s Lords of Terror?’ published on December 7, 1997, documents how London became an “Islamic” terrorist haven following the war in Afghanistan, when “legions” of unemployed mujahideen, who had been drawn to Afghanistan from all over the Muslim world, flocked to London for protection, and for new assignments.

Al Ahram quotes an unnamed security source, in its analysis of British motives in making London the “world’s terror capital,” which partially describes the thinking of British intelligence. “The British expect to reap a great advantage through controlling the most dangerous terrorists on its soil,” it quotes the source as saying.

“Through this logic,” the source continues, “British intelligence works contrary to all its counterparts in the world. The information British intelligence has acquired about these groups and its members, is an invaluable card, which it can use to either negotiate, or put pressure on, Middle East states.”

Al Ahram adds that part of the purpose is to manipulate these groups and take them over, on behalf of British geopolitical aims.

Al Ahram’s source concludes: “London’s ‘permanent interests’ have always converged with the lords of terrorism who live in Britain, and who never underestimate what their existence represents for British interests.’’

After September 11, French intelligence officials again angrily accused Britain’s internal security agency MI5 of failing to cooperate in stifling ‘Islamic’ terrorist groups. The level of assistance received from British intelligence in tracking down terror cells was described as being worse than before September 11.

The mid-1990s witnessed a series of vicious wars that led to the break up of Yugoslavia. The Pakistan-based militant group Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUA) was one of the many organisations to send a contingent to help Bosnian Muslims in their fight against the Serbs. They were sent by the Pakistan government of Benazir Bhutto at the request of the US administration under Bill Clinton.

The contingent, which was raised and trained by Lieutenant General (retired) Hamid Gul, former director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), included a large number of British Muslims of Pakistani origin.

According to estimates, about 200 Muslims of Pakistani origin living in the UK went to Pakistan, received training in the camps of the HUA, and joined the HUA in Bosnia with the blessings of London and Washington. Among them was Omar Sheikh, who went on to mastermind the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002.

In the late 1990s, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) also attracted many foreign fighters, encouraged by an outpouring of Western support to help defeat an alleged Serbian genocide. One of those fighters was David Hicks, who is now locked up in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

In Crossing The Rubicon, investigative journalist Mike Ruppert notes: “Great Britain – one of the major players supporting the KLA in Kosovo – also maintained secret relationships with bin Laden… In 1996, Britain’s exterior intelligence, MI6, actually funded and worked with al Qaeda in a plot to assassinate and overthrow Libya’s Muammar Qadhafi. Details of the relationship emerged after a British domestic intelligence (MI5) officer, David Shayler, went public with documents detailing the relationship between Britain and bin Laden.”

A decade before Bosnia and Kosovo, the West had raised and funded a large corps of fighters – including Osama bin Laden – to help the mujahideen in their jihad against Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Most of these ‘Freedom Fighters’ returned home, but many remained under Western intelligence agency control. Some were soon redeployed to North Africa and the Middle East, to carry out terrorist actions ascribed to ‘Islamic terrorist groups’, on behalf of Western geopolitical aims.

Question is: Are some of these fighters participating in the ‘war on terrorism’, and who do they work for?

Who Benefits?

After September 11, terrorism suddenly became enemy number one. The threat was conflated into the proportions of an alien invasion. However, whether it was real or not, the powers-that-be promptly took advantage of the terrorist bogeyman.

Armies could be mobilised against any country alleged to be ‘harbouring’ the new terrorist enemy (ie. Afghanistan and Iraq). An elusive enemy could strike anywhere at anytime, which meant sacrifices at home (anti-terrorism laws).

Such an enemy of vague and ambiguous proportions could be easily stage-managed. It is now irrelevant whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead, or that he controls an actual organisation with certain objectives. The myth is born. And now those with real power – military force and ‘informational dominance’ – easily direct the outcome of the new game.

With ‘jihadists’ on the loose worldwide, we would expect to see many attacks. Instead, despite the mainstream media’s duplicity, since September 11 the Western world has witnessed only a few spectacular attacks supposedly carried out by small groups ‘connected’ to ‘al Qaeda’.

With great fanfare in the corporate controlled press, large numbers of Muslims have been rounded up in raids across Britain, Europe, the US, and Australia. But most were later released and no one has been proven to be an ‘al Qaeda’ operative. For example, following the well publicised ‘ricin affair’ in the UK in January 2003, it was later established there was no ‘ricin’, no ‘cell’, and no ‘al Qaeda’ connection.

The independent British journalist William Bowles notes that, “with hundreds arrested under anti-terror laws but not a single conviction of anyone actually proved as being a member of al Qaeda or even being caught red-handed with a bomb, it’s safe to assume that it’s unlikely al Qaeda actually exists as an effective organisation, let alone operates an ‘international terror network’.”

Statements of responsibility made in the name of ‘al Qaeda’ or the fact an individual claims to be acting on behalf of it (after being ‘softened up’ at a secret prison camp), does not prove such an organisation exists.

Official briefings about terrorism, often unverified or unverifiable by journalists, have become dramatic press stories. Few of these ominous announcements are retracted if they turn out to be baseless. Almost no one questions the myth of ‘al Qaeda’ because so many people have got an interest in keeping it alive.

It is not too difficult to understand the relative ease in which intelligence agencies, with all their financial and information resources, can manipulate data (as we saw in the recent WMD justification for war on Iraq) and people to achieve objectives.

Is the ‘war on terror’ running a little flat? Let’s raid the homes of some Muslims and then leak to the press that ‘Muslim extremists’ were planning ‘terrorist attacks’ on Australia’s Sydney’s Opera House and Harbour Bridge (such raids actually occurred in Melbourne on June 22). What’s even better, the families whose homes were raided are prevented from speaking out by new anti-terrorism laws.

Thus, we never know if the raids prevented a terrorist plot or they were a publicity stunt for the ‘war on terror’. But headlines have the desired effect, the not so subtle reminder there’s a ‘war’ going on and it might one day come to your home, your office, or your child’s school – just as it did to commuters in London on July 7.

Can we say the cause of Islam benefits from terrorist attacks that kill civilians? No, of course not. The beneficiaries are governments who can ‘justifiably’ continue to support Bush’s ‘war on terror’ (which enriches the military-industrial complex) and introduce long sought laws that curtail civil liberties and limit dissent.

In London today they are now implementing intrusive surveillance and policing of Muslims and the Muslim community. The attacks have justified the introduction of ID cards, which will hold substantial personal information.

New ‘anti-terror’ laws being rushed through the UK Parliament include rules allowing the government to impose curfews and the electronic tagging of people suspected of terrorism.

A Phoney ‘War on Terror’

It goes without saying that the overwhelmingly majority of Muslim organisations are entirely legitimate and also it cannot be assumed that all groups cited in this article are simply the products of Western intelligence. What the evidence reveals is that intelligence agencies have tirelessly worked to infiltrate groups of all political and religious persuasions in an effort to achieve their objectives.

The use of agent provocateurs is a well established method that many states still use against their perceived enemies. It would be child’s play for well established spy agencies such as Britain’s MI6, America’s CIA, and Israel’s Mossad to control ‘al Qaeda’, which barely exists at all, except as an idea or a myth about cleansing a corrupt world through religious violence.

Much of the currently perceived threat from international terrorism, argues the recent TV documentary ‘The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear’, “is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services, and the international media.”

“In an age when all the grand ideas have lost credibility, fear of a phantom enemy is all the politicians have left to maintain their power,” it says. A perpetual war against an invisible and entirely fictitious enemy.

Five continuous years of a ‘war on terrorism’ past the point of no return have left the line between fabricated (intelligence agency-orchestrated) terrorism and any ‘real’ terrorism (a response to the provocations and policies) irrevocably blurred.

As a willing partner in this enterprise, the mainstream media has distorted the truth by ‘pre-packaging’ language in a way that paints the world into black (‘terrorist’) and white (‘us’). Shades of grey (where truth and reality normally reside) are difficult to describe in just a few words. Terms such as ‘terrorist’, ‘act of terror’, ‘fundamentalism’ or ‘threat’ act as familiar signposts for the public, to be regurgitated in social discourse without any knowledge of the semantic meaning of the language being employed.

George Orwell warned that an individual’s thought processes were undermined by what he disparaging termed ‘journalese’ or ‘officialese’. When an individual becomes a slave to official jargon they are, in a sense, gagged. Individuals are prone to use ‘officialese’ and follow the ‘mindless thought grooves’ which, in Orwell’s opinion, could easily be replaced with more accurate and thoughtful terms.

In George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, the totalitarian state of Oceania is perpetually at war with either Eurasia or Eastasia. Although the enemy changes periodically, the war is permanent; its true purpose is to control dissent and sustain dictatorship by nurturing popular fear and hatred.

Newspeak, the “official language” of Oceania, reduced the number and variety of words in use to render dissenting thought obsolete. Closely related to Newspeak is Doublethink, in which someone is conditioned to either say the opposite of what he thinks or think the opposite of what is true.

By the devious abuse of language and spreading the fear of more terrorist attacks, the government and the corporate media are numbing us into blindly accepting the emerging totalitarian state.