The bombing in Mumbai is part of the continuing Jihad waged against India since 980 AD.



see the below article. An Excerpt.



Why My Father Hated India

Aatish Taseer, the son of an assassinated Pakistani leader, explains the history and hysteria behind a deadly relationship






My father was the governor of Punjab, Pakistan's largest province, and his tweet, with its taunt at India's misfortune, would have delighted his many thousands of followers. It fed straight into Pakistan's unhealthy obsession with India, the country from which it was carved in 1947.


Though my father's attitude went down well in Pakistan, it had caused considerable tension between us. I am half-Indian, raised in Delhi by my Indian mother: India is a country that I consider my own. When my father was killed by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy, we had not spoken for three years.

To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan. This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan's animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.

The idea of Pakistan was first seriously formulated by neither a cleric nor a politician but by a poet. In 1930, Muhammad Iqbal, addressing the All-India Muslim league, made the case for a state in which India's Muslims would realize their "political and ethical essence." Though he was always vague about what the new state would be, he was quite clear about what it would not be: the old pluralistic society of India, with its composite culture.

Iqbal's vision took concrete shape in August 1947. Despite the partition of British India, it had seemed at first that there would be no transfer of populations. But violence erupted, and it quickly became clear that in the new homeland for India's Muslims, there would be no place for its non-Muslim communities. Pakistan and India came into being at the cost of a million lives and the largest migration in history.

This shared experience of carnage and loss is the foundation of the modern relationship between the two countries. In human terms, it meant that each of my parents, my father in Pakistan and my mother in India, grew up around symmetrically violent stories of uprooting and homelessness.


But in Pakistan, the partition had another, deeper meaning. It raised big questions, in cultural and civilizational terms, about what its separation from India would mean.

In the absence of a true national identity, Pakistan defined itself by its opposition to India. It turned its back on all that had been common between Muslims and non-Muslims in the era before partition. Everything came under suspicion, from dress to customs to festivals, marriage rituals and literature. The new country set itself the task of erasing its association with the subcontinent, an association that many came to view as a contamination.

Had this assertion of national identity meant the casting out of something alien or foreign in favor of an organic or homegrown identity, it might have had an empowering effect. What made it self-wounding, even nihilistic, was that Pakistan, by asserting a new Arabized Islamic identity, rejected its own local and regional culture. In trying to turn its back on its shared past with India, Pakistan turned its back on itself.

But there was one problem: India was just across the border, and it was still its composite, pluralistic self, a place where nearly as many Muslims lived as in Pakistan. It was a daily reminder of the past that Pakistan had tried to erase.

Pakistan's existential confusion made itself apparent in the political turmoil of the decades after partition. The state failed to perform a single legal transfer of power; coups were commonplace. And yet, in 1980, my father would still have felt that the partition had not been a mistake, for one critical reason: India, for all its democracy and pluralism, was an economic disaster.

Pakistan had better roads, better cars; Pakistani businesses were thriving; its citizens could take foreign currency abroad. Compared with starving, socialist India, they were on much surer ground. So what if India had democracy? It had brought nothing but drought and famine.

But in the early 1990s, a reversal began to occur in the fortunes of the two countries. The advantage that Pakistan had seemed to enjoy in the years after independence evaporated, as it became clear that the quest to rid itself of its Indian identity had come at a price: the emergence of a new and dangerous brand of Islam.

As India rose, thanks to economic liberalization, Pakistan withered. The country that had begun as a poet's utopia was reduced to ruin and insolvency.

The primary agent of this decline has been the Pakistani army. The beneficiary of vast amounts of American assistance and money—$11 billion since 9/11—the military has diverted a significant amount of these resources to arming itself against India. In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" against India.

In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba's 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.

The army's duplicity was exposed decisively this May, with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets.

This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country's wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.

The reversal in the fortunes of the two countries—India's sudden prosperity and cultural power, seen next to the calamity of Muhammad Iqbal's unrealized utopia—is what explains the bitterness of my father's tweet just days before he died. It captures the rage of being forced to reject a culture of which you feel effortlessly a part—a culture that Pakistanis, via Bollywood, experience daily in their homes.

I do not agree to his contentions in the article.

His father was a womanizer and his mom was then a typical modern progressive (read moron) who got knocked down by this guy and then abandoned.

The creation of Pakistan has nothing to do with idea of Iqbal. Muslims have always demanded either separate state or complete control of the state to the exclusion of non muslim minorities for them all over the world. Yugoslavia, Checheniya Malaysia Indonesia etc are the example. Nor the animosity is because of the carnage at the time of partition- They killed many times more Hindu and shikh. Hindu retaliation was to stop the carnage which commenced much later only after Sardar Patel realized that it was the only way to stop that. The moron author is trying to justify or legitimize muslim anger/prejudice/ Jehad against India by stating that it was the consequence of partition. This is typical argument by “progressive socialist” people and media for the consumption of people who read TOI kind of newspaper and stop using their brain. If partition is the result of Jehad , then why the opposite is not true? How come Hindu , who suffered most in terms of lives and property lost, have not taken up Jehad against the muslims or against Pakistan? I think the author, though sporting a Hindu sounding name, is a pseudo Hindu and a real sympathizer of Muslim- his father’s religion and by writing such a garbage trying to obfuscate the true reason , nature and purpose of Jehad , which is a mandate in Koran. It should be as simple and clear and nobody should be misled by such a piece of garbage article.

TOI and Barkha Dutt???


see this Excerpt:




Rupert Murdoch, it seems, may be able to defuse at least some of his troubles at News Corp. (NWSA) by selling his three remaining British newspapers.

But new questions immediately arise: Who will be their foolhardy buyer, given that two of the papers lose money? And what will Murdoch do with the nest egg of $12 billion he had planned to offer for an increased stake in British Sky Broadcasting?

Certainly, Murdoch could do much worse than look east, especially to India, where he revolutionized the stale news and entertainment media in the early 1990s with his satellite television channels and where he has been steadily expanding his empire.

In India, where more than 500 satellite television channels have opened in the last two decades, daily newspapers are also multiplying at an astonishing rate -- increasing by 40 percent to 2,700 between 2005 and 2009. Newspaper executives in the West can only gaze enviously at India’s 32 percent year-over-year rise in advertising spending.

There is much more growth to come. “India’s newspaper publishing market, which has 356 million readers, may expand 6.8 percent annually to $4.1 billion by 2014,” Bloomberg News reported in February. Last year, India’s largest media company, Bennett Coleman & Co., which owns the Times of India, the world’s highest-circulation English broadsheet daily, declared its global ambitions by buying Virgin Radio from the British tycoon Richard Branson; it is now planning an IPO within two years.

But India’s news media boom, like the U.K. phone-hacking scandal, is also a cautionary example, showing that when it comes to the press’s responsibility and freedom, more can amount to less, and that the supposed watchdog of democracy can quickly turn into its most insidious enemy within.

More than a decade ago, in what now seems an innocent era, I wrote in the Financial Times of the creeping “Murdochization” of the Indian news media. I meant primarily the growing dominance of advertiser-friendly infotainment in major newspapers such as the Times of India and the Hindustan Times.

Every day, and often on the front page, these once-stodgy newspapers were carrying reports of parties at five-star hotels and fawning profiles of film stars, musicians, cricketers and fashion designers, consisting of such useful information as their eating and dieting habits, romantic preferences, favorite holiday destinations, champagnes, colors and dogs.

Meanwhile, advertiser-unfriendly news such as the suicides of tens of thousands of farmers often went unreported or were relegated to the inside pages. “A good newspaper,” Arthur Miller wrote, “is a nation talking to itself.” And most English-language newspapers in India presented, within a few years of Murdoch’s arrival, an alarming picture of the nation’s public life.

Things have gotten much worse since then. Many more newspapers and television channels have sprouted in the past decade of rapid economic growth. But their emphasis continues to be, as the Economist put it last week, on “sensationalist, ‘Bollywoodised’ coverage of celebrities.” Also, “most news outlets are openly partisan,” featuring what seem to be many an over-eager understudy for Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann.

More disturbingly, the editorial departments in many of India’s major newspapers and television channels are now open to the highest bidder: political parties, corporations, celebrities, indeed anyone who can afford to can secure favorable coverage for themselves with a simple cash transaction. What Indians call “paid news” is not confined to a few small-town rags.

As the Financial Times reported last year, “private treaties,” the business of selling news coverage in exchange for corporate stock, was “pioneered by the Times of India a few years ago, and is now widespread in India’s national and regional press.”

In addition, a damning report last year by the Press Council of India, the industry’s watchdog group, concluded that in many cases the news media has forced politicians to pay upfront for “positive” coverage, especially during elections. (This has its amusing aspects: In the run-up to local elections last year in the Indian state of Maharashtra, three major newspapers published, under different bylines, an identical front-page article ecstatically praising the incumbent chief minister.

Yet the powerful lobby of corporate publishers who are members of the Press Council ensured that only a drastically edited version of its report on paid news was made available to the general public. (The leaked full version is now available on the Internet.) But Indians had to wait only a few months for a clearer insight into the workings of their wealthy “new” media.

Monitoring telephone calls for its own purposes, India’s income tax department inadvertently exposed a web of corrupt interconnections among Indian press, politicians and businesses. India’s mainstream newspapers and TV news channels initially tried to ignore the mountain of evidence against India’s best- known journalists, but the recordings were finally made available by Open Magazine and Outlook, two of India’s very few independent periodicals.

In one, India’s answer to Charlie Rose, Vir Sanghvi, can be heard speaking to a lobbyist for two of India’s biggest corporations, Tata Group and Reliance Industries. “What kind of story do you want?” Sanghvi asks, and then goes on to offer a “fully scripted” and “rehearsed” television interview with Reliance’s chairman, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man.

In another recording, Barkha Dutt, a sort of cross between Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric, can be heard offering to help the lobbyist place a politician in a high ministerial post. (The politician, subsequently appointed telecommunications minister, has been arrested and stands accused of cheating the nation out of billions of dollars by selling the mobile phone spectrum cheaply to his preferred corporate groups).

As in Britain, incestuous ties between businessmen, politicians and journalists in India have long been an open secret. Almost everyone in these circles knows who is beholden to whom, and for what. Yet little of this information gets out to the Indian public. Any news organization that thinks about violating the Indian press’s “dog will not eat dog” principle will be deterred by the severe punishment meted out by the government to the newsmagazine Tehelka. In 2001 it caught on video senior army officers, bureaucrats in the defense ministry and the political head of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party taking bribes to approve defense contracts. The government retaliated with an investigation into the magazine and harassment of its financial backers.

Small magazines such as Tehelka and the Caravan continue to break important stories about individual acts of corruption. But accounts of systemic malpractice throughout the media and the country’s political, commercial and legal institutions are rare. And self-examination is rarer still. According to the leaked version of the Council of India report from last year, the rot in the Indian media “goes beyond the corruption of individual journalists and media companies and has become pervasive, structured and highly organized.”

Sound familiar? Rupert Murdoch, abandoned by politicians in Britain, and facing uncomfortable questions in Australia and the U.S., may find no more hospitable place for his investments and his modus operandi than India.

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Originally posted by Nightmare

I do not agree to his contentions in the article.

His father was a womanizer and his mom was then a typical modern progressive (read moron) who got knocked down by this guy and then abandoned.

The creation of Pakistan has nothing to do with idea of Iqbal. Muslims have always demanded either separate state or complete control of the state to the exclusion of non muslim minorities for them all over the world. Yugoslavia, Checheniya Malaysia Indonesia etc are the example. Nor the animosity is because of the carnage at the time of partition- They killed many times more Hindu and shikh. Hindu retaliation was to stop the carnage which commenced much later only after Sardar Patel realized that it was the only way to stop that. The moron author is trying to justify or legitimize muslim anger/prejudice/ Jehad against India by stating that it was the consequence of partition. This is typical argument by “progressive socialist” people and media for the consumption of people who read TOI kind of newspaper and stop using their brain. If partition is the result of Jehad , then why the opposite is not true? How come Hindu , who suffered most in terms of lives and property lost, have not taken up Jehad against the muslims or against Pakistan? I think the author, though sporting a Hindu sounding name, is a pseudo Hindu and a real sympathizer of Muslim- his father’s religion and by writing such a garbage trying to obfuscate the true reason , nature and purpose of Jehad , which is a mandate in Koran. It should be as simple and clear and nobody should be misled by such a piece of garbage article.

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