Karunanidhis Fasting - Starts after Breakfast and Ends before Lunch!

First time in the world history fasting only 4 hours and that too with an AC .

Fasting starts after breakfast and ending before lunch. Interesting one!!

Should Pakistan Exist?

Dr. Jack Wheeler is a leading conservative pro-western civilization intellectual. He runs the bog www.tothepointnews.com, and writes intelligent and to the point articles. The following is a brilliant solution to the Gordian Knot of Pakistan.

http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/3618/2/

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Let’s cut to the chase. The answer is no. Pakistan should never have existed in the first place. There is no reason for it to continue to exist now.

The place to start here is with The Lunacy of a British Legacy from July 2006, which gives you the background on Pakistan’s creation, and that of the Taliban.

You could follow that up with Moslem Terrorist Drug Lords With Nukes from November 2007, which explains the Afghan heroin production as a joint operation between the Taliban and the ISI - the Pakistan military’s InterServices Intelligence Agency - and how Afghan president Hamid Karzai and his family are in on the heroin take.

Mr. Karzai met with Mr. Zero in the White House yesterday (5/06), along with the leader of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari. All three men privately despise each other, and publicly professed mutual admiration and support.

Ostensibly, they were meeting because the Taliban are now destabilizing Pakistan as well as Afghanistan. You can be sure Zero did not insist on solving the heart of the Taliban problem, any more than did his predecessor. Mr. Bush refused to order Afghanistan’s poppy fields be wiped out via high-altitude spraying of a micro-herbicide developed by DARPA. And so has Zero.

The poppy-killing fungus will cause the entire Afghan poppy crop (which supplies 90% of the world’s heroin) to disappear for decades - with no other crop being affected. Doing so would wipe out the Taliban and the ISI financially. But as it would also wipe out lots of powerful folks on the take in the Afghan and Pak governments, it will not be used, and the Taliban will expand its power until it takes over both governments.

So let’s talk about India instead. There are indications India is about to take matters into its own hands, with or without Washington’s approval. This is particularly true since, as noted by former US ambassador to India Robert Blackwill in a speech in New Delhi this week (5/05), Zero is abandoning the efforts of George Bush to build a strong US-India relationship in favor of currying favor with China.

Pakistan is a make-believe country. Take a look at this official map which the Pak government delineates its borders:

First look at the area in the upper right labeled “Jammu & Kashmir.” See that faint dotted line starting at the China border, goes across the area underneath Skardu and wraps around Srinigar? That’s the real border: below it (Srinigar) is India, above it (Skardu) is Pak. The Skardu-Gilgit area is composed of ancient tribal peoples such as Baltits and Hunzukuts who just want to be left alone by the rest of the world, including Islamabad.

The NWFP, or North West Frontier Province is Pushtun, the same tribe that populates 42% of Afghanistan, forming that country’s largest ethnic group. That nice dark line between Afghanistan and the NWFP, which Islamabad pretends is its border, is an illusion. There is no border, the entire region on both sides of it are Pushtun, and Islamabad has never exercised any control over it.

The pretend line continues, claiming to divide Afghanistan and Iran from the Pak province of Baluchistan, a huge region that takes up almost 45% of Pakistan yet contains only 10% of the country’s population, mostly split between Pushtuns in the north and wild Baluchi nomads in the southern desert wastelands.

The Pak government has never controlled the Baluchis any more than the Pushtuns. It’s all Apache country over which it has little real sovereignty.

So we come to the core of the country, Punjab and Sindh, and the unending hatred between Punjabis and Sindhis.

First a famous story that I can’t resist relating. India, including what is now Pakistan, was created by the imperial British, and when the region of Sindh was conquered by British General Sir Charles Napier in 1842, he sent a one-word message back to Delhi headquarters announcing his victory: peccavi.

In those days, all British officers were classically educated, so they knew instantly what Napier was saying. Peccavi is Latin for “we sinned.” Napier had Sindh.

Sindh is a feudal region dominated by wealthy land-owning families (of which the Bhutto and Zardari families are among) who control the lives of 40 million poverty-stricken illiterate farmers.

It also contains Pakistan’s largest city (12m) and business center, Karachi, where the Mohajirs are concentrated, the Indian Moslems who fled to Pakistan during 1947 Partition and their descendents. The hatred is mutual between them and native Sindhis.

While Sindhis are farmers ruled by a land-owning aristocracy and Mohajirs are business folk, Punjabis consider themselves warriors. Half the Pak population is Punjabi, some 80m. 90% of the Pak Army officer corps in Punjabi.

Not only is the Punjabi Pak military so politically powerful that , as Alex Alexiev observes this week in The Real Problem in Pakistan, “Pakistan is not a sovereign state with a military, but a sovereign military with a state at its disposal to use as it sees fit.” It is that the Punjabi Pak military is so economically powerful that it controls most business activity like a mafia.

There is no way to untie this Gordian Knot of ethnic hatreds, fanatical stone-age Islamism, a heroin-smuggling mafia military, corruption at every level of society, feudal poverty, and an arsenal of nuclear weapons. The solution is to let India cut the Gordian Knot of Pakistan asunder.

This is tricky. India has no desire to conquer and absorb Pakistan, which would double the number of Moslems within it (there are 160 million Moslems in each). It needs to rather break the place apart into pieces.

The first object should be a quick in-and-out military operation to seize Pakistan’s nukes. They are dispersed so it’s complicated - and more so because there will be no help from the US military under Zero. So India will be smart about it and take advantage of the Pak military’s greatest vulnerability: it’s officers and key personnel are for sale, they can be bought.

The Punjabis have always looked upon Afghanistan as theirs, and the Pushtuns as barbarian inferiors. (The disgust is returned. The greatest insult a Pushtun parent can give a misbehaving child is: “Stop that - you’re behaving as a Punjabi.”) Simultaneously, they are in constant fear of Pushtuns on either side of the border joining together to form an independent “Pushtunistan.”

Yet Pushtuns don’t want their own political entity apart from Afghanistan. The solution is to move the border east, so that Afghanistan encompasses the NWFP and the Pushtun region of northern Baluchistan.

This is not difficult to broker. The Pushtuns would jump at the chance to be unified, and it would deny the Taliban of the fig leaf of a Pak sanctuary. After India seizes the Pak nukes and engenders a period of chaotic destabilization, India has Kabul claim all of Pushtunistan and the Pushtuns declare for it. The US military, commanded by David Petraeus, is then free to nail the Taliban with no concern over violating “Pakistan sovereignty.”

During the same chaotic time, the Baluchis can get the independence from Islamabad they’ve fought decades for. The capital would be Quetta, and the Baluchis could make a go of it, as one of the world’s largest gold and copper deposits is at Reko Diq in the west near Iran (it’s being developed by the Australian mining giant BHP Billiton). Further, the Chinese have spent $2 billion developing the Baluchi port of Gwadar (spelled Gawadar on the map) with state-of-the-art import/export facilities.

What would be left is a rump state of Sindh-Punjab plus the Gilgit-Skardu northern territory. If the Sindhis and Punjabis and Mohajirs can get along sufficiently, they could still have a single country however reduced in size and power - for the chaos should be used to shrink concomitantly the size and power of the Punjabi Pak military.

Such a plan is being worked on right now at the South Block headquarters of the Indian Defense Ministry in New Delhi. The generals all realize now they have to act alone without America. It is the same situation that Israel is in regarding Iran. There is even some talk - for there is a great deal of communication between the Indian and Israeli militaries - of coordinating attacks, Israel upon Iran’s nukes, Indian upon Pakistan’s nukes, simultaneously.

“Your president would be like a deer in the headlights if this occurred,” says one US-educated Defense Ministry fellow I know. “He’d be paralyzed.”

Pakistan has become the world’s most dangerous failed state. It needs to be disarmed and dismantled. Just like Iran. Working together and ignoring Zero, India and Israel may kill two nuclear birds with one cooperative stone.

In haste, a Maoist retreat

Tarun Vijay


Prachanda should have read Mao more carefully. He adopted a non-Nepali revolutionary leader of a neighbouring country as his hero and named his
band of terrorists People's Liberation Army (PLA), exactly after the Chinese Communist army. But he forgot to do his homework. Mao had always warned against taking action "in haste" and "impetuously". His famous line: "We should not be impetuous; impetuosity leads only to failure."

This time Mao proved true for his errant follower.

In any case, an ideology based on violence and inspired by an alien school of thought is bound to fail in a deeply religious and nationalist country like Nepal. Prachanda, or Pushpa Kamal Dahal, rode over the crest of an artificial revolution romantically praised by India's failed communists and their secular cohorts and became the prime minister promising democracy and friendship with coalition partners who supported him hoping this may stop Maoists going back to the jungle, as was 'threatened' by the extreme communist leaders. No doubt Indian communists, led by an overwhelmingly influential CPM leader facilitated, and rejoiced at this change-over in Kathmandu, which saw the Hindu nation tag removed as the first show of strength of the first "revolutionary republican government" led by the red flag.

Prachanda, changing Nepalese tradition, took oath in a western three-piece suite and went to China before he shook hands with the Indian leaders in Delhi. His diplomatic skills were in full swing when he tried to impress the Hindu nationalist political leaders with his glib talk of comparing Nepal-India relations with Janakpur-Ayodhya civilizational links. Soon the mask was off with his "assault" on the Pashupatinath temple's sanctity and orders to change the chief priest who happened to be of Indian origin following hundreds of years tradition. It created a public furore and he had retract. He next misstep followed soon, indicating he had not learnt his lessons well and instead of concentrating on governance and the mandated mission of constitution writing, began pressing the army chief to have his rogues of the PLA inducted into the regular army. The army chief refused logically and got instant support from Maoists' coalition partners and the president, who is the constitutional head of the armed forces. There was enough time the president provided a reason to Prachanda to take back his decision, but he made it an ego issue and chose a dramatic exit.

This may prove to be a blessing in disguise for Nepalese people and Maoists both.

Prachanda wanted his PLA rogues, highly indoctrinated and intoxicated on a terror ideology, inducted into the Nepalese army of accomplished and trained soldiers so that in due course he would hold a complete control over the government and the security forces, becoming an unquestioned ruler of Nepal like it had happened in many east Asian countries where communists came to power using the democratic means but once established, completely ruined the democratic norms and decimated the non-communist parties paving the way for a communist totalitarianism.

A presidential intervention and the army chief's flat refusal to yield to an unconstitutional pressure changed the scene and as I write this column, a coalition of Nepalese Congress and Communist party of Nepal United Maoist-Leninist, led by the suave and soft-spoken democrat Madhav Nepal is expected to form a non-Maoist government invited by President Ram Baran Yadav.

Not surprisingly Prachanda's colleagues severely criticized the army chief accusing him of acting under the instructions of a foreign power (read India). But almost the entire Nepal felt a great relief seeing Prachanda resigning and though there were usual demonstrations on Kathmandu's roads by Red Flags, it hardly created a ripple or sympathy.


For the last two months Nepal had been in a state of uneasy silence. Most of the democratic parties were seen sending signals of disquiet over Maoists' bulldozer governance, and efforts to change the profile of police, administration, judiciary and the education department. Heads of departments were sacked or compelled to seek retirement, seniority of officers was ignored and those considered "closer" to the Maoists family were inducted and promoted. Though Prachanda had shown a deftly crafted diplomatic skill when he visited India and even impressed the leaders of the Hindu right, he was rude to his coalition partners, on whose support depended his government's survival and didn't feel obliged to take them into confidence before taking any major decision.

He was also under tremendous pressure from his erstwhile terror outfits that he had promised almost everything under the sun. Having joined a democratically elected government he felt it was difficult, if not impossible to implement those promises that required bending laws and twisting procedures. Those included induction of PLA into the regular army, jobs for ill-trained and half-skilled cadres spread out in the remote villages, making Maoist functionaries part of the government by providing various important posts which "yielded" benefits. He was at pains to explain to the cadre that it was "not a Maoist regime but a coalition government just led by them". Maoist cadre won't listen. They saw their leaders at the top wearing expensive watches and living in luxury and felt why shouldn't be they acting the way they had promised. In a way, the resignation of Prachanda has given an opportunity to the Maoist leaders to save their cadre from disintegration and frustration and directing anger publicly against their leaders who were being blamed for enjoying the fruits of the labours of ground-level workers.

It was this pressure from the cadre that made him act to effect changes in the Pashupatinath temple and then sack the army chief. Both the decisions boomeranged.
Nepalese people, his coalition partners and the opposition showed an extraordinary solidarity against the Maoists. Though he silently took back the Pashupatinath temple decision to change the head priest, his hotheaded colleagues prevailed on him to disregard the army chief's reply to his notice and the sagacious advice of the president bringing him to a point of no return. He appointed Kul Bahadur Khadka as the acting army chief because he thought he would help PLA cadre to be inducted through back door. His major failure was to make the people believe he was serious in governance and implementing the mandate's main purpose - writing the new constitution. Everything else would have followed if he had shown some patience and prudence.

He utterly failed to gauge the mood of the people post-Pashupatinath imbroglio and the fact that 18 political parties of Nepal petitioned to the president to stop Maoists removing the army chief shows the extent to which Prachanda and his people had lost confidence of all within the political system.

The best way for the frustrated Maoists now is to play martyr and blame, as usual everything on India. The South Block, which had followed a policy of wait and watch till the elections are over and new government with a clear Nepal policy has been sworn in, is in for a barrage of attacks not only from the leftist press of Kathmandu but also from the "friendly" pals of the Maoists in Delhi. So far Indian political parties, including the BJP and the Congress have reacted cautiously and indicated that it's the Nepalese people whose wishes must reign supreme. That's the right way.

Maoist will try every trick - threaten to go back to the jungles, start violence once again, take to the streets and force decisions through bullying. Kathmandu's political fraternity must stay firm and united against all this and start governing the way Nepal aspires. Maoists have lost the steam and can't go too far now.

India must keep its options open and as always support the real democratic players to take charge of their country. Maoists are a dangerous game for Indian security and strategic policies. We are already facing diplomatic tsunamis on our left, right and on the southern tip. Another flash point on the border with Nepal, having an immature left extremist group playing ping-pong with Beijing would be ill-affordable for us.

Kathmandu needs patience and a cool decision-making procedure. Its democratic institutions must be given time and the right atmosphere to mature and keep the weeds of violence out so that the Shangri La doesn't turn into a hub of communist violence. Though President Ram Baran Yadav has asked Prachanda to continue till the next government takes over, in the present scenario, Madhav Nepal's chances to take the prime ministership in a Nepali Congress-supported coalition seem to be the workable choice left to restore peace and a sense of democratic confidence in Nepal.

(The author is director of Dr Syama Prasad Mookerjee Research Foundation)

Left exposed in waste Bengal

Ashok Malik

One of the noteworthy features of the 2009 election has been the scrutiny of the Left Front’s governance record in West Bengal. In its extent and intensity, this interrogation has been fairly unprecedented.

There have been, broadly, three reasons for this. First, after 2004 the Left has acquired a bigger national profile than ever in its history. For four years, the CPI(M) remote-controlled the UPA Government. Left spokespersons had strong opinions on economic, social and foreign policy.

They are determined to have a decisive say in the next Government as well. As such, it is entirely natural that their precedents and performance be examined carefully.

Second, the past few years have seen the first stirrings of change in West Bengal’s economic decision-making. This has led to social and political turmoil, as the Nano episode and the so-called ‘peasants revolts’ in Singur and Nandigram have shown.

It has also provoked a closer study of rural conditions and village prosperity in West Bengal by national analysts. After all, only those from outside the circle can make a cold, rational assessment.

Again, there is a context to this. With honourable exceptions, the media in Kolkata is completely compromised and largely unable to take a disinterested view. Having lived a lifetime in the intellectual autarky of Left-ruled West Bengal, the provincial intelligentsia is out of sync with the rest of India and its currents. It has no reference points by which to judge whether the State is racing ahead or falling behind.

Siberians cannot tell if they are better or worse off than Moscow. They know no world outside Siberia.

Third, following the bitter parting of 2008, the Congress has made an onslaught on the Left and on West Bengal essential to its election plan. A post-May 16 reconciliation may still happen but the party is bent upon wearing down the CPI(M) and reducing its Lok Sabha strength.

The alliance with the Trinamool Congress reflects this. That aside, the Congress has unleashed its propaganda machine and opinion-making auxiliaries. This past week, Mr Rahul Gandhi was biting in his criticism, comparing West Bengal’s poverty to the darkest zones of Orissa and virtually calling the State a basket case.

Unused to being asked tough questions by its largely captive gaggle of intellectuals and journalists, the Left Front Government is rattled. Mr Sitaram Yechury of the CPI(M) has hit back by comparing the junior Gandhi to his father, Rajiv Gandhi, who had accurately classified Kolkata as a “dying city” in the mid-1980s. The State Finance Minister has come up with trademark obfuscation to somehow prove West Bengal is actually a world leader in development.

What has hurt the Communists most is the interrogation of their failure to combat rural poverty. On April 5, the Congress released a booklet titled 30 Years of Left Front Rule in West Bengal: A Development Report Card. It quoted a survey by Jean Dreze, a Left-leaning social scientist, to point out that, “West Bengal has the highest rate of hunger in rural households among major Indian States.”

The figure for all of India is 2.5 per cent, for Bihar it is 3.2 per cent and for Orissa it is 5.9 per cent. In West Bengal, however, 11.7 per cent of rural households go hungry every night.

The Congress document also says “14 of West Bengal's 18 districts … are among the 100 poorest districts in India”. The single “poorest district in India” is Murshidabad — the former capital the riches of which dazzled Robert Clive 250 years ago — “where 56 per cent of the people live in abject poverty”.

“An astonishing 1.47 per cent of India's rural poor live in this one district alone,” the Development Report Card says of Murshidabad. It has sourced these figures from a study earlier this year by the Indian Statistical Institute, based on National Sample Survey data.

A few weeks ago, economists Bibek Debroy and Laveesh Bhandari published a critique of West Bengal called A Story of Falling Behind. It had a particularly trenchant section on income inequality and rural poverty. These issues are at the heart of the CPI(M)'s political credibility.

“West Bengal’s per capita GSDP was Rs 29,457 in 2007-08. This gives West Bengal 18th rank in the country,” write Debroy and Bhandari, “… And one shouldn’t forget that there is a considerable amount of variation across West Bengal's 18 districts. Kolkata isn’t representative of West Bengal. West Bengal’s Human Development Report, published in 2004 and endorsed by the Left Front Government, acknowledges this too. The HDR identified six northern districts (Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri, Cooch Behar, Malda, Uttar Dinajpur, Dakshin Dinajpur), three western districts (Purulia, Bankura, Birbhum) and the Sunderbans area of the two 24 Parganas districts as particularly backward.”

Kolkata is West Bengal’s richest district. “Uttar Dinajpur, which is West Bengal's poorest district,” Debroy and Bhandari write, “has a per capita SDP that is only 33.6 per cent of that of Kolkata. For all its talk about equity and removal of inequalities, the West Bengal Government hasn’t been able to improve the lot of the people in the worst-off and backward districts.”


A Story of Falling Behind cites other numbers. “In 2004-05,” it says, “from the Planning Commission's estimates, the percentage of population below the poverty line in West Bengal was 24.7 per cent”. Only Bihar, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and Dadra and Nagar Haveli did worse.

Debroy and Bhandari find “42.4 per cent of West Bengal’s rural Scheduled Tribes population is below the poverty line”. They cite NSS 1999-2000 data to compute that 78.7 per cent of rural Purulia’s population lives below the poverty line, as does 61.5 per cent of urban Jalpaiguri’s population.

“The (poverty) situation is especially bad in backward and deprived districts,” they conclude, “and this isn't thrown up in aggregate State-level figures.”

The districts Debroy and Bhandari mention as extremely poor and deprived merit closer attention. Darjeeling wants out, and is voting for Gorkhaland. In Cooch Behar and Jalpaiguri, the autochthonous Rajbangshis too are demanding a separate State — Kamtapur.

In Purulia, there are pockets of armed rebellion against feudalism and tribal oppression by CPI(M) party bosses. Some of this is being exploited by Maoists; on April 30, voting day, a landmine attack in Purulia killed two people.

The Maoists cannot be defended, but neither can the Left Front’s neglect of poverty in the interiors of West Bengal. This election, they have nowhere to hide.

Seeking Spiritual Anchor

Tarun Vijay

There was a time when India’s polity was marked by decency and had a focus on ideology. Not any more. The biggest casualties of this election have been civility in public debate and ideological issues. The campaign is run on cacophony and strength is measured in decibels.

Modern ideological assertion is an import from the West. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology referred to the word ideology: “Ideology consists of reflexes and echoes, it is bound to material processes, has no semblance of independence, no history, no development”. Marx died in 1883. In 1890, Engels expressed a different view to Joseph Bloch. Ideology was no longer confined to reflexes and echoes; it was linked to history and development and became a part of real life, exercising a decisive influence. For us, the word that would define a way of belief and practice is dharma.

Marxist ideology failed in less than 100 years of its exposition and what remains is a market economy with Stalin’s posters or a few incoherent, violent groups in India and Nepal. By contrast, the Hindutva school of thought in India, despite hurdles and the resistance of an influential Anglicised class, grew to affect and rewrite the political agenda.

Deendayal Upadhyaya, while presenting his theses on ‘integral humanism’, stressed the spiritual urge of society, where the individual is part of the whole and the whole is reflected in individual actions as dharma. This relegates materialism, which predominates in capitalism and communism, to a secondary position. The hope is to put the brakes on inhuman competitive instincts acting upon an insatiable ‘have more’ mantra, killing society’s nobler virtues. Upadhyaya said this mantra goes against the historical ethos of the Hindu civilisation, whose dominant trait is giving while earning,a virtuous gift. Self-aggrandisement being considered a dehumanised value, the mantra is: earn to give. Even the BJP has been accused of ideological dilution for the sake of electoral winnability.

Post-independence, it became difficult for all ideological assertions to be reflected in a system that basically rested on the Graeco-Roman world view and was a product of an alien historical process. Initially, Gandhian values of simplicity and humility in public life were respected. Those were the times we still had leaders of depth and vision like B R Ambedkar, J B Kripalani, Purushottam Das Tandon, Syama Prasad Mookerjee, Sardar Patel, Sampoornanand, K M Munshi, Ram Manohar Lohia, Acharya Narendra Dev and Hiren Mukherji. And then we had Jawaharlal Nehru, who drew strong criticism as well as praise for his deep-rooted belief in socialism. They differed strongly but their concern for the nation was unquestionable.

With the advent of the politics of expediency, a Gandhian ashram of ideas was turned into a mandi trading in votes, relegating ideological diversity to irrelevance and irreverence. Since political parties were no more than a conglomeration of certain interest groups, even ideology was defined in terms of material activity such as construction of roads and supply of energy. Political power became a goal in itself, not a vehicle to achieve greater purposes and execute visionary plans.

Though post-1947, there were stray cases of corruption in high places, like the jeep scandal and the Mundhra case, these were small yet created a furore. The guilty were not honoured in political circles and people would rise in revolt and revulsion against them. Not any more. With the breaking of the Congress and the games played with institutions like the judiciary and bureaucracy, Indira Gandhi institutionalised political corruption. It became accepted, normal behaviour for a politician to treat the issue as a non-issue. Self-interest and winning elections became goals in themselves; even a semblance of virtuous public behaviour became a matter for jokes and mockery.

Hence those who people Parliament, with charges of murder, extortion and corruption against them, become page-one politicians and secular symbols that define ‘grassroots’ politics. Except the Left and the Hindu right, there is hardly any political group that can claim to run on the basis of some ideological assertion and functional democratic inner-party norms. If it is father-and-son in the National Conference, the PDP is run by the Muftis, the BSP by Mayawati, the Samajwadi Party by Mulayam Singh, the DMK by M Karunanidhi and Stalin, the AIADMK by Jayalalithaa, the Congress by Sonia Gandhi and the Biju Janata Dal by Naveen Patnaik. The danger of such a fragmented polity becomes starker in times of crisis.

We are a nation surrounded by a failed state like Talibanised Pakistan (Hillary Clinton’s statement about Pakistan abdicating to the Taliban is unprecedented and also an alarm bell for New Delhi), Bangladesh where jihad churns, Nepal where the Maoists are messing around with the system, Sri Lanka which is mishandling the Tamil issue and, above all, China which looks over our shoulders. Add these factors to internal terror wars. If, despite these problems, we have not only survived but a small section has marched ahead, the credit must solely go to the resilience of the Indian people.

Compare India with its neighbours to appreciate the intrinsic civilisational strength of this country which is under assault from a de-culturised polity that concocts stories to malign a people and their land. India needs more than coalitions without ideological contours, as well as a pan-Indian attitude.

No solution to Ayodhya issue possible through talks: VHP

Insisting that a solution to Ayodhya issue is not possible through negotiations, VHP on Friday said it would have to undertake a
"mass" agitation on the pattern of Amarnath land yatra movement last year to achieve its goal of building Ram Temple.

"I believe that construction of Ram temple at Ram Janambhoomi is not possible by any negotiation. I believe that Hindu Saint fraternity and Hindu organisations will have to launch a mass movement in days to come," VHP president Ashok Singhal told reporters here.

"I believe that the kind of movement undertaken in Jammu for reclaiming Amarnath land, our saints will have to create the same situation in days to come and a Ram temple will be constructed," he added.

Singhal noted that BJP has talked about construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya in its election manifesto. He described BJP as the "only party" which could safeguard "interests of Hindu polity" and expressed his organisation's support to it.

He charged Congress with being bent upon "dividing and weakening" the Hindu society.

BJP worker hacked in Kannur

Even before three days were out since the murder of an RSS worker near Mattannur, Kannur, another BJP activist was hacked by a group of assailants in Koothuparamba, the capital of political violence in Kannur distict.

BJP activist Rajeesh (29), of Choyon Kannoth, KT Junction, Vattipram, Koothuparamba, was admitted to the Medical College Hospital, Kozhikode with serious the stab and hack injuries he suffered in attack on him early Wednesday morning at Vattipram. Rajeesh, a truck driver, was returning home after his assignment around 0200 hours when was attacked by suspected CPI(M) activists.

The police said that he had sufferd serious injuries in both his legs. BJP leaders, who lodged a complaint with the Kuthuparamba police station, alleged that the CPI(M) workers behind the attack. Additional police forces had been deployed in the area to monitor law and order situation.

The police said that Rajeesh was a witness in the case of attempt on the life of Santhosh of Vattipram, another BJP worker. They said he had received several threats for this reason. Meanwhile, several bomb blasts on Tuesday night were reported from Paduvilayi area in Koothuparamba.


Koothuparamba, said to be he epicenter of the murderous political violence in Kannur, is represented in the State Assembly by CPI(M) State committee member P Jayarajan, who had suffered serious hack and stab injuries in an attack on the Thiruvonam day of 1999.