sushil kumar wins Rs. 5 crore jackpot on Kaun Banega Crorepati 5
KBC 5 has got its first contestant to win ‘Kaun Banega Crorepati 5′. Sushil kumar from Bihar who is a computer operator and a tutor has won the jackpot amount of Rs 5 crore. Sushil Kumar earns Rs 6000 per month .the episode will be telecated on 2 November.Five months back, he got married.
Sushil made wise moves while answering the questions. His deftness and presence of mind saw him cross all the hurdles until he got stuck at the thirteenth question, which was about the colonial power that withdrew its involvement from the Nicobar Island in 1968.
Sushil was doubtful about the answer so he made use of two of his lifelines – Phone a Friend and Double Dip – and came up with the answer that won him the dream amount. As a youngster, Sushil wanted to take the civil services exams. He wanted to come to Delhi and prepare for the exams. However, he could not do so as he was unable to afford the expensive coaching classes in the Capital. Now, after having won the bounty, Sushil plans to enroll himself at a prominent coaching institute in Delhi and start preparing for his dream job.
Durban climate negotiations meet won't be easy for India
India could find itself in a tough spot at the UN-sponsored climate negotiations in Durban, especially on the question of the legal nature of the global effort to deal with the climate change.
At the pre-conference meeting this week, host South Africa made it clear that the Durban meet would find a "resolution" to the contentious issue of continuing with the Kyoto protocol beyond December 2012 and "agreeing" on the legal nature of a future climate change system.
With South Africa, which is a BASIC constituent, coming out in the open and declaring its willingness to link the Kyoto Protocol with a legal pact that covers all countries, India will be forced to deal with pressure not only from developed countries but also constituents of the developing country, G-77 and China.
India's unequivocal objection to address the possibility and the legal nature of a global climate change agreement may find New Delhi isolated from the OPEC countries.
Experts say that a resolution of the legal form question may not be possible at Durban, especially with the US unwilling to make any big moves. With India continuing to take a hard position on the issue, it could mean that New Delhi would among those blamed for a less than successful outcome.
The tag of a "deal breaker" is a situation that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has sought to avoid. Many view India's recent amended proposal to include unilateral trade measures, intellectual property rights and equitable access to sustainable development, in the provisional agenda of the meet is being seen as "obstructionist" and "hard line".
This is because unlike the Chinese, who are willing to move forward provided that Washington reciprocates, India has made no provisional offers. Thereby closing the avenue for a mutually acceptable deal. Sources indicated that there is a general sense of disappointment with the "absence of flexibility in the Indian position".
At Durban, the big political question will be to find a way forward to ensure that global effort to reduce emission is undertaken in a manner that is "balanced, fair and credible" which will "preserve and strengthen the multilateral rules-based response to climate change".
India confronts US, EU at WTO over national solar power generation programme
India has stoutly defended its national solar power generation programme at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), where the US and the EU raised objections to its requirement of mandatory use of locally-made equipment.
India refuted allegations at a recent meeting of the WTO's committee on trade related investment measures, or Trims, that the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission violated global trade rules.
"The mandatory use of solar modules manufactured in India, in the project, and the 30% local sourcing requirement is to give a boost to the nascent domestic industry and make non-renewable energy more affordable in the long run," the official said.
Along with the EU, the US, which has also taken up the issue bilaterally with India, raised the issue at the WTO meeting on Trims saying the mission requirements prevent them from exporting their technology and equipment.
India has, however, maintained that it is within its rights to lay down such guidelines for its energy security, especially since other countries like Canada and Italy also encourage local procurement for solar projects.
Yet, India is firming up its defence in case the US or the EU decides to lodge a formal complaint against the solar mission.
Japan has recently lodged a formal complaint against Ontario, Canada, at the WTO for establishing a feed-in tariff program, in which electricity generated by using renewable energy is subsidised. The programme favours equipment made in Ontario. "Although, in Canada's case local purchase is linked to tariff concessions, the basic regulatory requirement is similar in both countries," a Delhi-based trade lawyer who did not wish to be named said.
"One could also argue that since NTPC, which is a public sector body, will purchase solar power generated by the projects, it could amount to government procurement which is not bound by WTO rules," the lawyer said. He added that the Trims rules prohibiting local sourcing can be interpreted variously.
The national solar mission was launched last year to promote use of solar energy as part of the government's initiative under the national action plan on climate change. While investors in the solar projects will get incentives, such as relief on import duty for capital goods and exemption from excise on inputs, the government has put in place clauses of compulsory domestic sourcing of inputs, which will differ in the three phases of the mission.
World Bank may fund Mumbai'sTrans Harbour Link project
The Mumbai Trans Harbour Link (MTHL) project that connects Sewri and Nhava port here is likely to get a boost as the World Bank has shown keen interest in funding the said project.
The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA), which is implementing the project, said that it was in talks with the World Bank for funding the project. “The World Bank has been funding our few projects.
Six-lane road bridge
“They have now shown interest in funding our ambitious MTHL project,” the MMRDA Commissioner, Mr Rahul Asthana, said here. The 22-km, around Rs 8,300 crore MTHL will be a six-lane road bridge with provisions for two lanes for a Metro line.
The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) was handling the project initially, but it was later handed over to the MMRDA.
The World Bank had earlier tied up with the MMRDA to fund the Mumbai Urban Transport Project (MUTP). “MMRDA is also in talks with the World Bank for its metro rail projects,” another official said.
The Authority is also in talks with Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) for providing soft loans for its other projects, including the metro rail project, the official said.
In August, the MMRDA had appointed a consortium of Arup Consulting Engineers and KPMG to conduct a techno-economic feasibility study of the MTHL. The consortium is expected to submit the report by October next year.
World Polio Day to be observed on October 24 2011
Only one polio case has been detected so far this year in the country making it the longest polio-free period ever since eradication efforts were launched. The only case of polio reported this year has been from Howrah district in West Bengal on 13th January 2011 as compared to 39 cases in the country in the same period of 2010. For the first time no case of polio has been reported from UP (since April 2010) and also from Bihar (since September 2010). No case of type 3 polio has come up for over a year. Closest ever to eradicating polio, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India has decided to treat any fresh case of polio as a “public health emergency” in order to achieve polio eradication from India at the earliest. An Emergency Preparedness and Response Plan has been drawn up to intensify measures to build the immunity of children in all high risk areas and also to conduct intensive immunization campaigns rapidly in response to any polio cases if they occurred.
In context of World Polio Day, the Union Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Shri Ghulam Nabi Azad noted that while the progress this year is remarkable, the risk still persists. “We are close to our goal but are not taking any chances. Efforts will be further intensified in the country to stop any residual poliovirus circulation and also to prevent any polio cases following an international importation,” he observed. Shri Azad also noted that the remarkable progress follows introduction of bivalent Oral Polio vaccine besides persistent efforts over the last few years in the highest risk areas and in reaching the most vulnerable populations such as the newborns, the migrants and the mobile populations.
To mitigate the risk of polio importation from Pakistan which is experiencing a spurt in cases and has re-infected China, polio immunization has begun at the Wagah border and Attari train station in Punjab since September and Munabo in Barmer district of Rajasthan since this month. All children crossing over into India by road and train are being administered polio vaccine. An alert has been sounded in the states bordering China to step up polio surveillance. Continuous polio vaccination is also being carried out at 81 transit points along the Indo-Nepal border in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar since April this year, the Minister said.
A series of new initiatives have been taken this year.
Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has put in place an Emergency Preparedness and Response Plan (EPRP). All states in India are preparing their EPRP. As a part of this plan, Rapid Response Team have already been constituted and (i) high-risk districts (ii) blocks (iii) villages are being identified to roll out measures to scale up routine immunization; address polio associated risk factors such as hygiene, hand washing and diarrohea management with the use of zinc and ORS. The plans are also identifying and putting resources in place to roll out of rapid and intense emergency response to any polio case.
A new communication campaign personalizing the message for polio immunization from ‘Har bachcha har bar’ (every child every time) to ‘mera bachcha har bar’ (my child every time) has been rolled out. The new campaign encourages all parents to take action to protect their children against polio. These measures are in addition to the intense efforts already being made in the polio endemic states of UP and Bihar to ensure that the children living the highest risk areas and specially the youngest children, the newborns, are rapidly protected. A 107 Block Plan that addresses actions to improve actions to improve polio coverage and routine immunization in 107 high risk blocks of UP and Bihar in addition to tackling risk factors such as reducing incidence of diarrhea, improving sanitation and water quality is being implemented.
Special strategies are being implemented to protect children on the move – those of migrants, nomads, construction sites and brick kiln workers and the families returning to their homes in the endemic states on important festivals such as Holi, Diwali and Chatt. Mobile and transit vaccination teams immunize children at railway stations, inside running trains, at bus stands, market areas, brick kilns, construction sites etc. Around 5 million children are immunized by transit and mobile teams during every round in UP, Bihar and Mumbai alone. Polio immunization is also carried out at religious congregations such as the ongoing ArdhKumbh in Bihar, the annual ShravaniMela, Urs in Ajmer and elsewhere in UP and Bihar.
India’s progress and efforts have been lauded by both national and international experts and bodies. The India Expert Advisory Group on Polio Eradication, which reviewed the programme in July mentioned that India is on track to eradicate polio. The International Monitoring Board (IMB) of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in its October report has said that India is on track to interrupt transmission in 2011. Lauding India’s efforts, the IMB said India had pushed barriers after barriers to reach a very favorable position. India stands alone as the country that has demonstrably made consistent progress over a prolonged period of time.
It is pertinent to note that in 1985, there were estimated 2 lakh polio cases in the country in the wake of which polio vaccine was universalized and integrated in the Universal Immunization Programme for administration across the country. In 1995, when Pulse Polio Programme was launched, there were still an estimated 50,000 polio cases in the country. However 2010 was the turning point when only 42 polio cases were reported. Every year two National Immunisation Days (NIDs) are carried out in January and February. During each NID nearly 17.2 crore children are immunized. Nearly 23 lakh vaccinators under the direction of 155,000 supervisors visit 20 crore houses to administer oral polio vaccine to children under the age of 5 years. The polio campaigns during the rest of the year cover polio endemic states and other areas at risk of importation of poliovirus.
The Human Development Index (HDI) in the country rose by 21% says a report while cautioning that health, nutrition and sanitation remained key challenges for India. India Human Development Report, 2011, prepared by Institute of Applied Manpower Research, placed Kerala on top of the index for achieving highest literacy rate, quality health services and consumption expenditure of people. Delhi, Himachal Pradesh and Goa were placed at second, third and fourth position respectively.
The report was released on October 21 by Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia in the presence of Rural Development Minister Jairam Ramesh. It said, as on today, two-thirds of the households in the country reside in pucca (cemented) houses and three-fourth of families have access to electricity for domestic use. According to the report, India's HDI has registered an impressive gains in the last decade as the index increased by 21 per cent to 0.467 in 2007-08, from 0.387 in 1999-2000.
However, it noted that Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Rajasthan and Assam are those states which continue to lag behind in HDI and remain below the national average of 0.467. At the same time, the quantum of improvement in HDI in some of the poor states was higher than the national average, the report said, citing the cases of Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Assam. The overall improvement in the index was largely attributed to the 28.5 per cent increase in education index across the country.
It ranges from 0.92 for Kerala to 0.41 in the case of Bihar. The improvement in the education index was the "greatest" in states like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh to name a few, the report said. The analysis also indicates that improvement in the health index, as compared to education, has been lower. It ranges from 0.82 in Kerala to 0.41 in Assam. It observed that despite the Right to Education Act, school education faces challenges of quality and employability. The report also said that despite improvements, health, nutrition and sanitation challenges are most serious.
Stating that open defecation was posing a serious threat to health and nutritional status, the report said even though half of the population had access to sanitation in 2008-09, there was still wide inter-state variation. It said 75% households in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and Uttarakhand do not have toilet facilities. The report revealed even in Nirmal Gram Puraskar winning villages, toilets are often being used for storing, bathing and washing purposes. On the issue of right to food and nutrition, the Human Index Report revealed that calorie consumption has been declining and the intake of calories by poor are way below the recommended norm.
The report said Gujarat fares the worst in terms of overall hunger and nutrition among the industrial high per capita income states. The report also noted that "India is the worst performer in terms of low birth weight, underweight and wasting among children in BRIC and SAARC countries”. Reacting to the findings, Ramesh said increased focus should be laid on health and nutrition during the 12th Plan period even as he lauded the growth in the education sector. "On nutrition, I am puzzled as to why high rate of malnutrition continue to persist even in pockets of high economic growth," he said referring to findings of Gujarat. The minister said total expenditure on sanitation has been only one-tenth of the resources allocated for the water sector.
Ramesh attributed the positive growth in education to Central "interventions" like Sarva Sikshya Abhiyan and RTE. The report said between 2002-03 and 2008-09, there has been an improvement in condition of people's housing with 66% population residing in pucca housing. In rural areas, share of household in pucca houses has increased from 36% to 55%. It said a greater proportion of Muslims than the SCs and STs live in pucca houses due to their urban concentration. The report revealed that three-fourths of all households had access to electricity, with 75% households having access to electricity for domestic use. Insofar as tele-density was concerned, the report said it increased at an "impressive pace" over time from 22% in 2008 to 66% till December 2010, largely led by growth in urban tele-density.
It said good governance and social mobilisation by state governments was reflected by the fact that SCs and OBCs in Delhi, Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala were better off than even the upper castes in Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh in terms of various health outcome indicators. The report also highlighted the fact that 60% of the poor were concentrated in states like Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. It said though incidence of poverty declined over the years across states, the above said states performed much worse than others in terms of poverty reduction. Further, asset ownership both in urban and rural areas continued to be highly unequal and concentrated among top five per cent of households.
Pakistan narrowly won a hotly-contested seat to the UN Security Council on October 21 joining India as a two-year non-permanent member on the body.
India, which is already serving as a non-permanent member for the 2011-2012 term, is believed to have voted for Pakistan, the two sides having made common cause on many issues at the UN except for Kashmir. Pakistan's term is for two years beginning January 1, 2012 to December 31, 2013, overlapping with India for one year.
Pakistan just about scraped through, securing 129 out of 193 votes in the United Nations General Assembly, exactly the two-third majority required to win the seat. Its principal opponent in the Asia-Pacific region, Kyrgyzstan, won just 55. This would be the seventh time Pakistan would serve on the Security Council, and the fourth time its term would overlap with India. India won its latest two-year term by securing a landslide 187 votes.
Guatemala and Morocco were the other members who joined the 15-member council, five of whom are permanent members with veto powers. The other ten are non-permanent members on two year rotations. There will be a second round of voting for two more seats, one in Africa between Togo and Mauritania and one in Eastern Europe between Azerbaijan, Slovenia and Hungary. Pakistan avoided a second round by just about managing to get the required 2/3rd majority in the first round itself.
The last time India and Pakistan served together on the council was in 1977. With India and Pakistan on the council next year, seven of the 15 members will be nuclear powers.
An unprecedented step in space cooperation
A Soyuz rocket lifted off on October 21 on its maiden flight from Europe's space base here, carrying the first two satellites in the Galileo geo-positioning system.
The launch marked an unprecedented step in space cooperation, being the first by the veteran rocket beyond Russia's historic bases at Plesetsk and Baikonur.
As mission controllers counted off the final seconds, Soyuz's main engines ignited, a cluster of umbilical masts flipped back and at 1030 GMT the rocket clawed its way skywards through a pounding tropical rain.
After a nine-minute flight through Earth's atmosphere, its final stage, the Fregat, fired up to drive the satellites toward their orbital slots, a last leg that should take more than three hours.
“The first part of this mission has gone well,” said Jean-Yves Le Gall, chief executive of Arianespace, which markets launches at Kourou.
October 21st launch came after a 24-hour postponement caused by a faulty valve in a ground system designed to disconnect fuel lines to the rocket's third stage just before flight.
Soyuz is a space legend, for it traces its lineage to 1957 with Sputnik, the first satellite, and to the first manned flight, by Yuri Gagarin, in 1961. October 21st launch was the 1,777th in the Soyuz saga. It has a success rate of 94.4 per cent. A symbol of national pride in Russia, the rocket was deployed at a specially-built pad at Kourou under a 2003 deal intended to complete Arianespace's marketing range.
Arianespace says it has orders for 14 Soyuz launches from Kourou, including the third and fourth satellites in the Galileo constellation next year. Galileo is intended to give Europe independence in satellite navigation, a vital component of the 21st-century economy, from the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS). When completed in 2020, it will comprise 27 satellites and provide accuracy to within a metre, compared to three to eight metres for the GPS.
The Arab Spring is a misnomer used by the media to describe the uprising that the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazizi unleashed in Tunisia on December 18, 2010 in protest against police corruption and ill-treatment — a spark that ignited into wildfire and spread to Algeria, Jordan, Egypt, Yemen and to other countries. In January, Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, the fountainhead of Islamic fundamentalism.
But it was in Egypt that the computer-literate working class youth and their supporters among middle-class college students, created a veritable revolution, fanned by the whirlwind of many human rights activists, labour, trade unionists, students, professors, lawyers, and especially unemployed youth. A Facebook page set up to promote the demonstrations, attracted tens of thousands of followers. The government mobilised the riot police and resorted to infiltration to break the uprising, but the demonstrations by students and labour activists continued in Tahrir Square, until President Hosni Mubarak was forced to resign on February 11, 2011, after 18 days of massive protests, ending his 30-year presidency.
The euphoria that chants such as “the people and the Army are united” that had reverberated around Egypt’s squares created, was rudely snuffed out within a week by the Egyptian military Generals, who grabbed power from President Hosni Mubarak. They did not identify themselves as partners in the revolution, but claimed to be the sole bearer of its legitimacy. The haste with which they discarded the façade of secularism that Mubarak’s authoritarian regime was using against the Muslim Brotherhood, resulted in the largest demonstration on Friday, July 29, by thousands of Islamists since the uprising, calling for the imposition of strict Shariah law. Many demonstrators carried Saudi Arabian flags and placards that said: ‘Bin Laden is in Tahrir.’ As recently as 2009, the Brotherhood had called for a ban on women or Christians serving as Egypt’s President.
Tahrir Square, once the scene of wild celebrations, turned into a battlefield as the Army moved in to disperse the activists, beating them with clubs and electric rods, and even firing live ammunition. Hundreds have since been thrown in jail and 12,000 civilians have been tried in military tribunals — a number that is far more than was treated thus during Mubarak’s 30-year dictatorship. Widespread torture by beatings, electrocution, and even sexual assault by military personnel, has been reported. The police, in connivance with the authorities, have shot and killed Coptic Christians who protested against Islamists that had set fire to their churches. The Egyptian Coptic Patriarch, Chenouda III, was awarded the 2000 UNESCO Madanjeet Singh Prize for the Promotion of Tolerance and Non-Violence for encouraging interfaith dialogue.
The Islamic retrogression is a far cry from the colourful secular flowers that had blossomed during the Arab Spring with the establishment of the Baath Party in 1946. “Baath,” which means "resurrection" or "renaissance," was a movement that was founded in Damascus by two Syrian intellectuals: Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian (1910-1989), and Salah al-Bitar, a Sunni Muslim (1912-1980). In the early 1930s, Alfaq and Bitar had gone to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris and worked together to formulate a doctrine that combined aspects of Arab nationalism and socialism committed to Arab unity and the freedom of the Arab world from the clutches of Western colonialism.
On their return to Syria in the early 1940s, they became school teachers, and together with a significant number of Christian Arabs as founding members, they promoted Baathist ideology within a nationalist and secular political framework that rejected the faith-based orientation. These ideas of protecting the minority status of non-Muslims, found favour with the progressive leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement such as Nasser in Egypt, Nehru in India, Tito in Yugoslavia and Sukarno in Indonesia, since the secular ideology helped them to stabilise the ethnic and communal conflicts in their newly independent countries. They also supported the Baathist concept of socialism that differed from classical Marxism.
These were among the reasons for Baathism having grown rapidly, establishing a number of branches in different Arab countries. Baathism went on to form governments in Syria and Iraq, as well as in Egypt briefly when Syria merged with Egypt in 1958, to become the United Arab Republic. There could not have been better interlocutors than Aflaq, representing the Greek civilisation, and Bitar, personifying the Phoenician culture. They conceived their respective religions as a mere appendix attached to the Greek and Phoenician classical antiquity that spread across the Mediterranean region from 1550 BC to 300 BC.
This region, known as the ‘Fertile Crescent,’ comprising ancient Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Mesopotamia, was home to the earliest urban communities in the world, spanning some 5000 years of history. It was in ancient Iraq that the first literate societies developed in the late 4th millennium BC. They developed the first cities and complex state bureaucracies, using a highly sophisticated writing system. Their scholars compiled historical, juridical, economical, mathematical, astronomical, lexical, grammatical and epistolary treatises. They invented the first two-wheeled wooden carts and built roads, earlier than 3000 BC. It was this cradle of civilisation that the illegal Anglo-American invasion destroyed. The invaders installed bin Laden’s jihadists to promote their Islamic agenda.
Taha Hussein (1889-1973) was the senior mentor of Aflaq and Bitar. He was one of the most influential 20th century Egyptian writers and intellectuals, known as the pioneer of the Arab Renaissance and the modernist movement in the Arab world. An admirer of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he was a nationalist, and his vision of Egyptian secular culture was embedded in what he called “Pharaonism.” He believed that “Egypt could only progress without reclaiming its ancient pre-Islamic roots.” He opposed Saudi Arabia’s Stone-Age Islamic culture of the desert that was alien to the rich Arab cultures of the Fertile Crescent.
Taha Hussein was prosecuted for his views and lived in exile for several years. It was not until the 1950s that he was rehabilitated, on the eve of Egypt becoming a republic, and appointed Minister of Knowledge (now the Ministry of Education). This gave him the opportunity to initiate a number of educational reforms, such as free education for children. Like Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first Education Minister of independent India, Taha Hussein left no stone unturned to make education secular. He transformed many of the Koranic schools into secular primary schools and secularised not only the Al-Azhar but also a number of scientific universities that he established. He upgraded several high schools to colleges, such as the Graduate School of Medicine, Agriculture and others.
Since the United States’ alliance with bin Laden’s Mujahideen destroyed the secular Democratic Republic of Afghanistan in 1989, and dismantled the secular Baath administrations in Iraq for the benefit of al-Qaeda jihadists, the abortion of the 2011 Arab Spring has given the Anglo-Americans another wonderful opportunity to install Islamists in the Arab world. These ferocious vultures are now hovering over Syria, the last bastion of Baathism, under the pretext of democracy, to tear apart the amity between its Muslim and Christian communities. But so far they have found no ruse to directly attack Syria, as President Bashar al-Assad could not be accused of “possessing weapons of mass destruction capable of destroying Western civilisations within 45 minutes.” So the Arab Spring has become the Trojan horse to supply arms and ammunition to the dissidents and escalate the conflict into an emergency to isolate Syria by imposing United Nations sanctions.
The computer-literate students and working class youths and their supporters among the middle class who had initiated the protests, are naturally baffled, as I was when India was partitioned by the British colonialists. The impact of the divide-and-rule policy was even more devastating on the subcontinent’s Sufi Islam as Pakistan’s military dictators uprooted it to cut the Gordian knot with Mother India’s secular and pluralist culture. The political scenario in the Arab countries seems to be heading towards one similar to the struggle now being waged in Pakistan between Muslim fanatics and the more moderate sections of society,
As with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the Ennahda Party of the Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi is expected to win the elections in Tunisia next month and choose an Assembly to draft a new Constitution. His biographer Azzam Tamimi wrote: “The real struggle of the future will be about who is capable of fulfilling the desires of a devout Muslim. It’s going to be about who is Islamist and who is more Islamist, rather than about the secularists and the Islamists.” During a re¬cent debate with a secular critic, Ghannouchi asked: “If the Islamic spectrum goes from bin Laden to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which of them is Islam?” And he argued: “Why are we put in the same place as a model that is far from our thought, like the Taliban or the Saudi model, while there are other successful Islamic models that are close to us, like the Turkish, the Malaysian and the Indonesian models — models that combine Islam and mo¬dernity?”
Ghannouchi seems unaware of Prime Minister Erdogan’s antecedents. As Mayor of Istanbul in 1995, he declared that “the New Year’s Day is a Christian holiday and not a legitimate cause for celebration by Muslims,” and that “shaking hands with the opposite sex is prohibited by Islam.” In 1997, he identified Turkish society as having “two fundamentally different camps — the secularists who follow Kemal Atatürk’s reforms, and the Muslims who unite Islam with Shariah laws.” The secular lullaby he is singing to put his people to sleep and join the European Union, is symbolised by the Islamic hijab with which President Gul’s wife wraps her head.
Regarding Indonesia and Malaysia, Ghannouchi would have known better had he married an Indonesian Muslim — as I did in 1963 — and witnessed how the indigenous syncretistic cultures derived from the secular Buddhism and multicultural Hinduism are being systematically destroyed by the innumerable Wahabi mosques and fundamentalist madrasas that the Saudi petrodollars have built in these countries.
The omens are ominous as thousands of Islamists in Tunis have protested against the screening of a film they condemn as “un-Islamic and blasphemous.” And in Cairo, a student attending a Salafist protest meeting asked: “If democracy means majority, then why do they want to impose on us the views of the minorities — the liber¬als and the secularists — when we Islamists are the major¬ity? Salafis are the extremists that espouse violent jihad against civilians as a legitimate expression of Islam.”
The Arab Springers seem well on their way towards subscribing to the Sunni majoritarian culture and becoming another “epicentre of terrorism” like Pakistan, where even the moderate civilians are throwing rose petals on the assassin of Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, who was assassinated for defending a Christian woman condemned to die for insulting Islam. The judge of the Anti-Terrorism Court who sentenced Mumtaz Qadri to death has gone into hiding after lawyers attacked his courtroom, and a spate of protests and death threats. Banner-carrying mobs in Lahore, Rawalpindi and other cities are “saluting Qadiri’s glory,” and some fundamentalist organisations have announced huge rewards for anyone who would kill the judge.
“Pakistan once had a violent, rabidly religious lunatic fringe. This fringe has morphed into a majority. The liberals are now the fringe. We are now a nation of butchers and primitive savages. Europe’s Dark Ages have descended upon us,” said Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy, at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
Obama honours Indian-American activist Vijaya Emani
U.S. President Barack Obama has honoured Indian-American activist Vijaya Lakshmi Emani posthumously with the Presidential Citizens Medal for her courage in overcoming and speaking out against domestic abuse in the Indian-American community, according to an IANS report from Washington.
“Breaking long-held taboos, Vijaya Emani lent her voice to protect Indian-American women from domestic violence,” Mr. Obama said while presenting the nation's second-highest civilian honour to Emani's daughters -- Sujata and Nirmala -- in the East Room of the White House.
“She was a trailblazer who shared her personal story to help other battered women overcome abusive relationships,” Mr. Obama said of Emani, who was killed on January 15, 2009 at the age of 51 when she was hit by a truck in Ohio.
Vijaya Emani was born at Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh to Indu Rani and G. Venkataramana Reddy and she was a meritorious student at every level of her education. She made her way to the United States in 1986 after graduating in engineering from Osmania University in 1980 and later received her M.S. degree in Computer Science from Cleveland State University.
With her marriage ending in divorce, she overcame personal struggles to bring up her daughters with the help of her mother. Vijaya came to the forefront of the Indian community, first working with the Northeast Ohio Telugu Association, then with the Federation of Indian Community Associations and with Greater Cleveland Asian Community later.
She initiated single-parent support groups and opened discussion about immigrant domestic violence. An advocate of women's empowerment and community involvement, Vijaya rose to be a civic leader to one of the largest minorities in the city of Cleveland. She worked to help set up the India Cultural Garden in 2002 and installation of Gandhiji's statue in 2006.
The news of Vijaya Emani receiving the award from Mr. Obama aroused keen interest in the elite sections of Kurnool town, Several citizen activists launched a search to trace her roots. The former Mayor S. Raghurami Reddy, social activist K. C. Kalkura and collector of antique objects Venkateshwar Reddy were in the forefront among them.
