http://desicritics.org/ Superior South Asian bloggers on Culture, Media, Politics, Sport, Business, and Technology. en Copyright 2006 by the authors Wed, 6 Feb 2008 10:35:05 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss BC custom software http://desicritics.org/2008/02/05/131540.php#comment-319718 Didn't Nixon say "Those who believe that India is not governed well should wonder that it is governed at all". Looking at the happenings today, even this statement seems pretty generous towards India. 319718@desicritics.org Wed, 6 Feb 2008 10:35:05 EST http://desicritics.org/2008/02/05/131540.php#comment-319658 This is just another case of scapegoating (another trick stolen from the pages of Hitler) so as to try to cover up one's own fault. shiv sena doesn't want to be blamed for mumbaikers' hardships, and it becomes so much easier to deflect attention away from one's own issues if you point the attention at others and make a big hullabaloo. and AGAIN the poor get blamed when all they are trying to do is make a living. for the most part the average maharashtran is simply a pawn in this ugly thing... I don't think the majority of the people interviewed know any better. they just want jobs, they see people from bihar or orissa in what they perceive as "their" city with jobs, and that Thackeray just lights the fire... it's despicable one would think that the people who went on the rampage should know better, but unfortunately when people perceive that they are under threat, they behave badly. it is a pretty predictable response, although a sad one and not one I am trying to defend here. In the meantime, while Thackeray has deployed his "divide and conquer" methods I am sure he's up to something else more sinister in the meantime. it's pretty damned sad. 319658@desicritics.org Wed, 6 Feb 2008 05:51:04 EST http://desicritics.org/2008/02/05/131540.php#comment-319496 This is a nation within a nation, crisis. India has this peculiar case. It is neither a nation-state in the classical sense like say China or UK or Germany, nor is it a amorphous union like the EU or ASEAN. We have some characteristics of both, and having 1.1 billion people with over 10 langauges having suffient critical mass to be independent interntaional languages on their own right poses some serious problems. And the main issue being, while we had some common culture India was never a single nation except for the glorious struggle led by Gandhiji and had very little common history. Even our freedom movement before world war-I was highly state-centric. As the memories of freedom struggle wade out, and as the freedom winning party sent to dogs, we need to do some soul searching on what binds us a nation. Do we have something other than Cricket where we work together as a nation? As the nation gets more wealthy we will see these state-centric tendencies to grow stronger, rather weaker. Days might not be far when people and their politicans might forget the various interdepencies and would start questioning why should the prosperous Maharashtra, Gujrat, Punjab and Tamilnadu need to subsidize BIMARU states. We have such massive internal migration because we have only a very few centers of growth. India's center and east hardly has any such center, while the south has Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad, and the north has Delhi and Gurgoun. So, it becomes imperative for the government to start new centers of economic growth. They should try to start building up massive cities in the Bihar-Orissa Region, that could tap the regions's energy, mineral reserves and coastline with plenty of cheap, surplus labor. The central government has to realize that we have a real national crisis at hand, and waste no time in spreading economic development. Modis and Thackareys are not alone in their quest for this ethnic-cleansing. 319496@desicritics.org Tue, 5 Feb 2008 18:40:45 EST