Comrades look to the 19th century, not the 21st (Organiser)

M.D. Nalapat

WITHIN the constellation of cultures that comprise the glory that is India, the people of Bengal have a special place. For centuries, they have been the trendsetters in societal reforms and in educational progress. From Vivekananda to Ramakrishna, RC Dutt to Rabindranath Tagore, from Aurobindo to Raja Ram Mohan Roy, this noble culture has been responsible for much of India's finest minds.

Even in the present century-which began less than a dozen years ago-it is historians from Bengal who have recently exposed the ugly underbelly of British rule, such as the famine in Bengal and Bihar caused by the genocidal reluctance of Winston Churchill to ensure that grain reached these provinces during World War II. Others from Bengal have written about the chicanery of the Mountbatten staff that resulted in the loss of more than a third of Kashmir to Pakistan. Together with recent gems, such as the diary of a survivor of the 1857 War of Liberation that has been translated into English from Marathi by an eminent journalist, the truth about the colonial era is getting known. Of course, because of the near-total control of Nehruvian ideology on school and college curricula, little of this knowledge is as yet taught to our young.

More Troops not the Answer in Afghanistan (UPIASIA)

M.D. Nalapat

Manipal, India — During the 1960s, the United States had a president who did more for the underclass than most of his predecessors put together. Lyndon Johnson introduced healthcare, civil rights and other measures designed to provide a level playing field for people of different classes and colors among the citizenry.

Instead of acclaim, what he got was unpopularity, forcing him to surrender office after just one term. The reason was an unpopular war, fought the wrong way – through the insertion of greater and greater numbers of troops.

U.S. soldiers marauding through their land converted several hundred thousand South Vietnamese into Viet Cong. As a recent editorial on Afghanistan in the New York Times put it, Americans too would be tempted to violence were a strange-looking bunch of aliens to invade and occupy Oregon.

Those who seek conventional military solutions to problems within other countries forget that the world is very different from what it was during the peak years of European colonialism. Then, mass killings were acceptable. But now, were NATO to repeat in Afghanistan the tactics of European colonial powers in South America, Africa and Asia, their own populations would halt such slaughter.

In the age of worldwide cable television, significant "collateral damage" is unacceptable. This is not a situation that would have endeared itself to Winston Churchill, the wartime British prime minister who once favored the bombing of undefended villages in the Middle East, and looked the other way when more than 6 million Indians died in 1944 of starvation in the single British-ruled province of Bengal.