Better to hand us all a grand than hurl billions at banks

 

Call it unsophisticated and crude, but the best way to stop a slump is to shower people with cash and make them use it

 Simon Jenkins

The Guardian, Wednesday December 10 2008

One prediction about the recession is for sure. It will end. Every recession in the past century (roughly 20 of them in all) did exactly that. It ended. It ended when demand stopped falling and began rising.

 
Those of us with old economics degrees lurking in the mental attic recall that credit bubbles turn into recessions when they lead to a collapse in demand. People stop buying goods and services. Businesses lose profits, lay off staff and are refused bank credit. Unemployment rises, and the vicious circle proceeds. That is what is happening now.
 
There is an obvious plan to counter it. It was put forward by John Maynard Keynes ostensibly to make a point - shower people with money or pay them for doing nothing - and has ever since been treated by policymakers as unsophisticated and rather silly. Proper macroeconomists do not dabble in such simplicities. The plan is excellent. If recessions are caused by collapsing demand, increase demand. Do not wait on tax cuts or lower interest rates. They all take time. Do not plead with people to spend, as the Japanese did while suppressing interest rates to zero, or as Iceland is doing with its patriotic slogan: "Spend for your country."
 
Get people to spend by giving them money, and just stop them saving it. Give them non-cashable vouchers for domestic goods and services that expire in three months. Drive them to the high streets, supermarkets, restaurants, entertainments, garages, anything that is not saving and has an employment multiplier effect. Only firms should be able to bank the vouchers. Demand must feed straight into business revenue, because revenue is collateral for credit. Without revenue, boosting credit is pointless.
 
There is no shortage of the requisite money in the Treasury. We know because anyone can get it if a banker. The government is obsessed with bankers. The whole thrust of policy is aimed at trying to get banks to offer credit. But this was last August's problem, and it conspicuously failed to stem recession.
Credit is still the obsession of public policy. The government is underpinning bank deposits and shares to the tune of a staggering £500bn in guarantees and £50bn in real money. The giveaway to banks must have reached its limit. Cuts to bank rate have little effect on the real economy.
 
The government has nationalised bankers, lunched them, told them how much to pay themselves. Now it has started bullying them, hectoring them and telling the public how awful they are. Christmas pantomimes are casting bankers as villains. Card games depict them as knaves. Mothers tell children that "a banker" will come to eat them up if they fail to finish their sprouts.
 
Some £1,000 for every man, woman and child in the land has gone into saving banks, the most extravagant policy of all time. Yet all this is aimed at forcing banks to do precisely what caused the credit collapse in the first place. It is aimed at making them lend to people and businesses which, with each passing week, are ever less able to pay them back. As the Guardian's economics editor wrote despairingly on Monday, "nothing seems to be working".
 
Having failed to halt the run on credit in September, the authorities are now trying to halt it when the disease has gone elsewhere, into the cash economy. Two points off the bank rate or an inter-bank guarantee are no good to a sacked shop worker. Give that £50bn, or even half of it, to every person in the land, and it does not matter what people do with the vouchers, provided they generate economic activity. They may be traded at a discount, but that does not matter since they can only be banked by firms by the end of the period. Vouchers are better than hurling money at banks.
 
The subsidies donated to stave off recession so far appear to have gone on restoring bank balance sheets, rewarding staff and lending overseas. Money being poured into projects such as Crossrail and the Olympics is going on fees to the rich, which also tend to be saved rather than spent. America is no wiser, in bailing out its least efficient car firms. It would make more sense to give people vouchers to buy cars of their choice, rather than have government choose which they may buy instead.
 
Just giving people money clearly sticks in the gullet of those who run the economy. The whole point in collecting taxes is to control their disbursement. The idea of Gordon Brown going into the street and giving the public their own cash seems undignified and somehow wrong. Yet Brown, Darling, Cameron and the rest seem comfortable giving vast sums to bankers - with no condition that the money be channelled into spending. The banks say thank you but understandably decline to lend to borrowers who are going bankrupt because the government (and Bank of England) has been careless of recession.
The reason for this indulgence of banks is that bankers are "the authorities". They are like chateau generals in the first world war. They talk the same talk as politicians. They head grand institutions that can supposedly handle billions of pounds. They "launder the giveaway" and make it seem respectable. Also ministers can blame them if, as has happened, nothing seems to work.
 
Such counter-recession policy, like last summer's credit policy, is always too little, too late. America earlier this year introduced a mild version of my plan, a $300 tax rebate. While the intention was sound, it suffered from being a rebate, not a restricted cash handout. The money could vanish into savings. It was too small and did not work.
 
A closer parallel is the gift voucher proposed by German Social Democrats. This is a €500 uncashable voucher with a two-month expiry, for every German over 18. Objections have been intriguing: "people might buy imports"; it "would not solve long-term problems"; it "might recall wartime rationing". In other words, none was substantive.
 
The authorities are too hidebound to tolerate eccentricity or simplicity. Giving people money (or borrowing to give it) suggests a loss of competence and
control. It is crude and unsophisticated, without the jargoned nuances that have given macro-economic policy its specious intellectual beauty.
Even the Tories, who should welcome the vouchers as an in-the-hand tax rebate, cannot stomach the idea. The whole lot will go nobly into recession arm-in-arm with their friendly banks, rather than trust people to spend their own money rescuing the economy.

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The Mumbai Terror Attacks:

 

Need For A Thorough Investigation

By R.H.

08 December, 2008
Countercurrents.org

In all the confusion and horror generated by the ghastly terrorist attacks in Bombay, a dimension which has not received the attention it deserves is the circumstances surrounding the death of Anti-Terrorist Squad (ATS) chief Hemant Karkare and two of his colleagues, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and Additional Commissioner of Police Ashok Kamte. The major pattern of operations involved well-organised attacks on a few high-profile sites in Colaba – the Taj, Oberoi and Trident Hotels, and the less-known Nariman House – while a parallel set of operations was centred on Victoria Terminus or VT (now known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or CST) station, Cama Hospital and the Metro cinema, in the middle of which is the police headquarters where Karkare worked. The latter is an area where foreigners are much less likely to be found.

 

Why is a Proper Investigation Crucial?

 

Hemant Karkare was engaged in unearthing a terror network with characteristics which had not been seen so far. The investigation started by tracing the motorcycle used to plant bombs in Malegaon in September 2008 to a Hindu Sadhvi, Pragyasingh Thakur; it later uncovered a cellphone conversation between her and Ramji, the man who planted the bombs, in which she asked why more people had not been killed. For the first time, the Indian state was conducting a thorough professional probe into a terror network centred on Hindu extremist organisations, this one with huge ramifications, some leading into military and bomb-making training camps and policised elements in the army, others into organisations and political leaders affiliated to the BJP. One of the most potentially explosive discoveries was that a serving army officer, Lt.Col. Srikant Purohit, had procured 60 kg of RDX from government supplies for use in the terrorist attack on the Samjhauta Express (the India-Pakistan 'Understanding' train) in February 2007, in which 68 people were killed, the majority of them Pakistanis. Initially, militants of Lashkar-e-Taiba and other Islamist terror groups had been accused of carrying out the attack, but no evidence against them had been found.

 

The hostility generated by this investigation was enormous, with allegations (refuted by medical examinations) that the suspects had been tortured and that Karkare was being used as a political tool, and demands that the ATS team should be changed. Chief Minister of Gujarat Narendra Modi and BJP Prime Ministerial candidate L.K.Advani accused him of being a 'desh drohi' or traitor, a charge that in India carries a death penalty, and the Shiv Sena offered legal aid to those accused of the terrorist attack, complaining that 'The government does not save Hindus from terrorists, and if Hindus defend themselves, they are maligned'. In an interview shortly before he died, Karkare admitted he was hurt by the campaign against him. On November 26, just before the terrorist attack, the police in Pune received a call from an anonymous caller saying in Marathi that Karkare would be killed in a bomb blast within two or three days.

 

Just as attitudes to Karkare in society at large were polarised, with some admiring him as a hero – one Maulana went so far as to call him a 'massiha (messiah) of Muslims', an amazing tribute from a Muslim to a Hindu – while others hated him as a traitor worthy of death, attitudes within the police force too were polarised. For example, dismissed encounter specialist Sachin Vaze (who with three colleagues was charged with murder, criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and concealment of the dead body in the case of Khwaja Yunus shortly before the terrorist attack) was a member of the Shiv Sena who was actively engaged in the campaign against Karkare and in support of the Malegaon blast accused. Vaze and several other encounter specialists who had been dismissed for corruption, extortion and links with the underworld also had a grudge against Salaskar, whom they suspected of informing on them.

 

Hard Evidence or Pulp Fiction?

 

Given this background, and reports that are riddled with inconsistencies, it is not surprising that many residents of Bombay are asking questions about the exact manner of the death of Hemant Karkare and his colleagues. The earliest reports, presumably relayed from the police via the media, said that Karkare had been killed at the Taj, and Salaskar and Kamte at Metro. If this was not true, why were we told this? And why was the story later changed? Was it because it conflicted with eye-witness accounts? Indeed, under the heading 'ATS Chief Hemant Karkare Killed: His Last Pics', IBNlive showed footage first of Karkare putting on a helmet and bullet-proof vest, and then a shootout at Metro, where an unconscious man who looks like Karkare and wearing the same light blue shirt and dark trousers (but without any blood on his shirt or the terrible wounds we saw on his face at his funeral) is being pulled into a car by two youths in saffron shirts. The commentary says that Karkare 'could well have fallen prey to just indiscriminate, random firing by the cops', and also reports that there were two vehicles, a Toyota Qualis and Honda City, from which the occupants were firing indiscriminately.

Later we were given two accounts of the killings where the venue is shifted to a deserted lane without cameras or eye-witnesses. The first account is by the lone terrorist captured alive, claiming to be A.A.Kasab from Faridkot in Pakistan and a member of the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. According to him, just two gumen, he and Ismail (also from Pakistan), first attacked VT station, where they sprayed bullets indiscriminately. (Around 58 people were killed there, over one-third of them Muslims, and many more might have been killed if the announcer, Mr Zende, had not risked his life to direct passengers to safety.) They then went to Cama, a government hospital for women and children used mainly by the poor.

According to the police, Kasab claimed he and Ismail had killed Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte.

 

 

The other account is by police constable Arun Jadhav. According to him, Karkare, Salaskar, Kamte, a driver and four police constables including himself were driving down the alley from VT to the back entrance of Cama (barely a ten-minute drive) in their Toyota Qualis to check on injured police officer Sadanand Date when two gunmen emerged from behind trees by the left side of the road and sprayed the vehicle with bullets, killing all its inmates except Jadhav. They then dragged out the three officers, hijacked the vehicle, drove to Metro junction and then Mantralaya in South Bombay, abandoned it when a tyre burst, and grabbed another car. According to police accounts, they then drove to Girgaum, where Kasab was injured and arrested and his companion killed.

 

These accounts raise more questions than they answer. Kasab claimed that a band of ten terrorists landed and split up into twos, going to various destinations, he and his companion going to VT. He said they wanted to blow up the Taj, as in the attack on the Marriott in Islamabad; yet we are told that only 8kg of RDX were found at the Taj, and even that was not used; contrast this with 600kg of RDX and TNT used to blow up the Marriott: could they really have expected to blow up the Taj? He said that the terrorists planned to use their hostages as a means of escape, yet there was no attempt at any such negotiations; at other times, he also said they had been instructed to fight to the death. He says he is a labourer from Faridkot near Multan and only studied up to Class IV, but it is reported that he speaks fluent English and that people in Faridkot village say they have never seen him. (Moreover, how did the invaders from the sea get one bomb to go off in Dockyard Road and another in Vile Parle, 25 kilometres away, at around 11.30 p.m?)

 

During his interrogation, Kasab said that he and eight of the operatives had done a reconaissance trip to Bombay a few months back, pretending to be students and renting a room at Colaba market, which is close to Nariman House. It is extremely hard for Pakistani nationals to get Indian visas, and they are kept under close surveillance by the police; it is also most unlikely that the Indian immigration authorities would be fooled by forged passports of another country. In that case, the Indian immigration authorities would have visa applications of nine of the terrorists including Kasab, and could match the photographs in them to those of the terrorists: has this been done? Later, Kasab changed his mind and said that the team who carried out reconnaisance was different from the team who had carried out the attacks, but they still would be traceable.

 

The events in VT and Cama and the back lane also put a question mark over his story. According to witnesses, two gunmen started firing at the mainline terminus in VT at 21.55 on Wednesday night, but at precisely the same time, according to CCTV footage, two gunmen began an assault on the suburban terminus. If the first account is true, there were four gunmen at the station: where did the other two come from, and where did they go? We are shown video footage, claiming to be CCTV but without the timeline of normal CCTV footage, of Kasab and Ismail wandering around the parking lot near the mainline terminus. This surely cannot be before the shootout, since the station is completely deserted; and after the shootout, Kasab and Ismail are supposed to have escaped via the footbridge from Platform 1 of the suburban station on the other side of VT: this, again, suggests there were four gunmen. Several people have pointed out that one of the terrorists in VT was wearing a saffron wrist-band, a Hindu custom. And even if Kasab and Ismail had been shown photographs of Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte before they embarked on their trip, how could they possibly have identified the police officers in a dark alley in the dead of night?

 

Witnesses in Cama hospital say the terrorists spoke fluent Marathi (presumably without a Punjabi accent). The gunmen killed two guards in uniform, spared a third who was in civilian dress and begged for his life saying he was the husband of a patient, demanded water from an employee in the staff quarters and then killed him. They then appear to have made a beeline for the 6th floor (which was empty) and the terrace, taking with them the liftman, Tikhe. 15-30 minutes later, six to eight policemen arrived, and another employee took them up to the 6th floor. The policemen threw a piece of steel up to the terrace, whereupon Tikhe came running down and told them there were two terrorists on the terrace. A fierce gun-battle ensued for 30 to 45 minutes, in which ACP Sadanand Date was injured. Panic-stricken patients and staff in the maternity ward on the 5th floor barricaded the door; nurses instructed the women to breast-feed their babies to keep them quiet, and one woman, who was in the middle of labour, was told to hold back the birth; but they were not invaded. Eventually the gunmen appear to have escaped, it is not clear how. If they were Kasab and Ismail, then these two must have been fluent Marathi speakers. And why would they have taken up positions on the terrace? Was it because they would have a direct view of the lane in which Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte were later supposedly killed?

 

The other account is equally dubious. In his first account, Jadhav said Karkare was in the second row of the Qualis, while in the second he was supposed to be in the front row with Kamte. In the second account, Salaskar was initially sitting behind the driver, but then asked the driver to slow down and got behind the wheel himself: is it plausible that an experienced encounter specialist would deliberately make himself into a sitting duck like this when they were in hot pursuit of terrorists? In the first account they were supposed to be going to check up on their injured colleague Sadanand Date, but in the second were supposed to be looking for a red car in which they had been told the gunmen were travelling. If the report about the red car was a decoy to lure them into an ambush, it is important to know who told them that the terrorists were in a red car. If the gunmen were firing from the left side, as Jadhav claimed, how was Karkare hit three times in the chest while Jadhav himself got two bullets in his right arm? Also, the only vegetation in that part of the lane has wire netting around it, and it would be hard for anyone to hide behind it. How did two terrorists manage to kill six police personnel, including Karkare and Kamte who he said were armed with AK47s and Salaskar, an encounter specialist who had confronted and killed dozens of dangerous criminals, without getting seriously injured themselves?

 

There was also an intriguing report in DNA on 28 November saying that Anand Raorane, a resident of a building opposite Nariman House, heard sounds of celebration from the terrorists there when the news of Karkare getting killed was flashed on TV: isn't that strange? The same report quoted a resident of Nariman House and a local shopkeeper who said that the terrorists had purchased large quantities of food and liquor before the attack, suggesting, at the very least, that they were not pious Muslims, and that more than two of them were planning to occupy the place for a long time. Another DNA report, on 2 December, said that sub-inspector Durgude, who had been posted in front of St Xavier's College, between Cama Hospital and the exit point of the back lane onto Mahapalika Road, saw two young men whom he took to be students and called out to warn them that there was firing at Cama. When they ignored him, he approached them, upon which one of them turned an AK47 on him and killed him. If Kasab and Ismail were there, who was firing inside Cama? Eye-witnesses in St Xavier's saw a man shot and lying on the pavement in front of the college around 12.30 a.m., while about three gunmen stood over him: who was that? Various reports said that two to eight terrorists were captured alive. Now there is only one in police custody: what happened to the other(s)?

 

A careful scrutiny of all the reports available so far suggests, to this writer anyway, that the killing of Karkare and his colleagues was a premeditated act, executed by a group that had stationed snipers at various points along the general route between VT and the Metro cinema with a view to maximising their chances of a successful murderous assault.

 

The Objective: Shutting Down Terrorist Networks

 

These are just a few of the numerous questions being asked by vigilant Bombayites who find themselves thoroughly dissatisfied with the information that has been doled out. These are citizens who understand the importance of identifying terrorist networks and shutting them down, but doubt that this will be done by the authorities. Why are they so cynical about the possibility of a genuine professional investigation? The answer is that we have too much bitter experience of investigations in which innocent people (usually Muslim youth) are rounded up, tortured and even killed, while the real culprits are allowed to go free. Karkare broke with this dismal record, but now he is dead. When a person who has been vilified, slandered and threatened with death is killed in suspicious circumstances, it is imperative that a proper investigation should be carried out soon, before too much evidence can be manufactured and/or destroyed. If Kasab aka Iman disappears or is assassinated like Lee Harvey Oswald, or is executed, that would be further evidence of a conspiracy.

 

The government and people of Pakistan have as much interest as the government and people of India in eliminating the terror networks that have killed President Asif Ali Zardari's wife Benazir Bhutto and thousands of others in both Pakistan and India. The terrorists, on the other hand, be they Islamist or Hindutva, have a common interest in destroying secularism, democracy and peace within and between the two countries. That is their precise agenda. Pakistani politicians have offered a joint investigation into the terrorist attacks, a far more sensible suggestion than the belligerent statements by some Indians accusing Pakistan of harbouring terrorists who are killing Indians. It should be obvious that a military conflict between India and Pakistan would be disastrous for both countries economically, while a nuclear war, which might ensue if extremist forces captured power in both countries, would have unthinkable consequences. If the Indo-Pakistan peace process is halted, as L.K.Advani advocates, the terrorists would have won.

 

Indeed, without a joint investigation, the terrorist networks behind this outrage can never be uncovered: how else could the names and addresses in Pakistan revealed by Kasab be followed up to the satisfaction of all parties? A team of Pakistani investigators should be invited to come to Bombay and interview Kasab. If he is indeed a Lashkar-e-Taiba militant, he will be able to provide invaluable information, and a team of investigators from India should be invited to Pakistan to pursue the investigation there. If, as some reports have indicated, he is not what he claims to be, that too would become clear. The Indian government owes it to the memory of Karkare, Salaskar and Kamte, who died fighting terrorism of all hues, to establish exactly where, when and how they were killed, identify their killers, and make sure that their work is continued. They also owe it to us, the public, who are the prime targets of all terrorist attacks, to carry out a credible investigation which identifies and puts behind bars all the mass murderers involved in this and other attacks.

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Last one on Mumbai attacks and refute it if you will!

As The Fires Die: The Terror Of The Aftermath
 

 

By Biju Mathew

06 December, 2008
Samar Mag

 

As the smoke lifts from Mumbai, skepticism must prevail over those conjectures which support the official state narrative. It is crucial to increase the pressure for transparency and accountability at this moment to ensure that India doesn't slide into the same state as post-9/11 USA.

 

The deaths continue even as I write this. The death toll stands at 195. And of the several hundred injured some may not survive. It is now official. The siege is over. The last of the gunmen inside the Taj Hotel has been shot dead. The other targets - the Leopold Cafe (a popular tourist hangout), the CST railway terminus (also called the Victoria Terminus), the Metro Cinema, the Cama Hospital, all seem to be targets the gunmen attacked as they zoned in on the hotels and Nariman House. In the end this has become a story of two sets of men with guns.

 

The human story of the innocents who died, the hotel staff who kept their cool and moved guests around the hotel through the service entryways and exits, those who helped each other escape, will not really make it to the headlines. The maintenance worker at the Oberoi who shielded guests and took the bullets in his stomach will remain unsung. The hospital orderlies who ran in and out with stretchers carrying the wounded - each time not knowing if they will make it back themselves to the ambulance, will not be noted. The several trainee chefs at the Taj who fell to bullets even as other kitchen workers escorted guests away from the firing and hid them inside a private clubroom will not be written up in the book of heroes. The young waiter at Leopold who was to leave to work in a Cape Town restaurant will soon be forgotten. The two young men who dragged an Australian tourist shot in the leg away from the Leopold entrance and carried her to a taxi will not even identify themselves so that she can thank them. These stories, in as much as they are told, will remain on the lips of only the workers, the guests and the tourists who helped each other. The officials will try and produce a clean story to tell the world. And we know the clean story is untrue.

 

The official story that has already begun to emerge is one that may have some facts embedded in it. But we must remember that between every two facts is a lot of conjecture. The conjectures that unite the few facts (16 gunmen, AK47s, grenades, passports of multiple nationalities, boats on which at least some of them arrived, a dead Anti-Terror Squad (ATS) chief, Hemant Karkare, who was heading the investigation against the Hindu Right wings' terror campaign, the gunmen trying to identify British and American citizens) makes the story. The story then is as much a product of the conjecture as it is of the facts. And there are certain stories that we are already oriented towards. The conjectures that create that story - the story we are already prepared for - is the one the State will dole out for our consumption. Already the conjectures that will serve the State, are out there in great profusion.

 

Several reporters have noted that the gunmen were clean-shaven, dressed in jeans and T-shirts. The silent conjecture is that they were expecting and were surprised by the fact that these men did not have beards and did not sport the Muslim prayer cap. Every newspaper worth its salt - the Times of India, the Jerusalem Post, the Independent from the UK, among scores of others - have already run commentary on the unsecured coastline of India. The conjectural subtext is that securing the coastline is possible and if India had done so, this attack would have been prevented.

 

There is also a quick labeling going on -- India's 9/11. The subtext is that India could and should act as the US did after 9/11 - decisively and with great aggression. There is also the subtext that the Indian State is soft on terror that adds to the US-tough-on-terror contrast. Sadanand Dhume, writing in the Wall Street Journal, has castigated the Indian government for withdrawing the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) and for preventing states like Gujarat from passing their own version of the draconian worse-than-Patriot Act legislations. Neither Mr. Dhume, nor the several reporters who will now write stories about how the POTA repeal represents the Indian State's soft attitude towards terror will ever feel the need to explain how POTA could have prevented this attack.

 

The dead are on the floor. The vultures are moving in. The conjecture will try to unite the country into a series of unexamined positions. That POTA must be recalled. That States must be allowed to pass even more draconian laws. That Hindu terror is not a big issue and must be forgotten for now - especially now that we may not find an honest policeman or woman to head the ATS. That the defense budget must go up. That the coastline must be secured.

 

None of the well educated masters of the media will write that the 7000 odd kilometer coastline cannot be protected - that all it will translate to is billions in contracts for all and sundry including Israeli and American consultants. Nobody will write that a hundred POTAs will not prevent a terror attack like this one; that Guantanamo Bay has not yielded a single break through. Nobody will write that higher defense budgets have been more often correlated with insecure and militarized lives for ordinary citizens. Nobody will write that almost without exception all of US post-9/11 policies have been disasters. Bin Laden is still around, I am told and so is the Al Qaeda. The number of fundamentalist Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Jews have probably gone up over the last decade. So much for good policy. But the conjecture will go on.

 

The foreign hand and its internal partner will be floated without ever naming anything precise. But the country will read it just as it is meant to be read - Pakistan and the Indian Muslim. Everything will rest on the supposed confession of the one gunman who has been captured. A Pakistani from Faridkot, I am told. Why should we believe it? Didn't the same Indian State frame all the supposed accomplices in the Parliament attack case? Didn't the same Indian State claim that the assassins of Chattisinghpura were from across the border until that story fell apart? And more recently, didn't the same Indian State finally agree that all the accused in the Mecca Masjid bombings were actually innocent? And even if Mr. Assassin supposedly from Faridkot did say what he did say - why should we believe him? Why is it so difficult to believe that he has his lines ready and scripted? If he was willing to die for whatever cause he murdered for, then can he not lie? Oh the lie detector test - that completely discredited science that every militarized State trots out. And the media love the lie detector test because it is the best scientific garb you can give to conjecture.

 

I certainly don't know the truth. But I do know that there is more than enough reason for skepticism. The problem is that we need a new theory of the State. We need to re-understand the State.

 

There is such unanimity when it comes to analyzing the Pakistani State - that the ISI, and if not all of the ISI, at least a segment of it, is a rogue element Furthermore, that its bosses may not be sitting in Islamabad, but perhaps elsewhere in the country or even abroad. If we can accept that about the Pakistani State, why is it so difficult to accept it about the Indian State? We all know that Colin Powell was a kind of a patsy - a fall guy, who trotted out some lies on behalf of a segment of the neo-conservative movement firmly entrenched within the American State (which Obama will not touch). We also know that if the ISI has a rogue element in it, it was in good part created by the CIA. Then why do we think that the same guys couldn't render another State - such as the US - itself hollow from the inside.

 

The contemporary State is a different being. For every story of money-corruption you hear, there could just as well be one of political-corruption. Every vested interest who locates himself inside the State apparatus is not just a vested interest going after money but could just as well be securing the space for creating a certain politics. The RSS has a long history of trying to take over the bureaucracy, doesn't it? So do the neo-cons and so do the jamaatis. Then why do we believe in a theory of the State that is unified and with liberal goals?

 

The history of the liberal State and its relationship with capitalism of all types is a simple one. The longer that relationship persists the more corrupt and hollow the liberal State gets, leaving the space open for political ideologies to occupy its very insides. The logic for this is inherent in the very system. If profit is above all, then given the power the State has, it must be bought. Cheney is no different from Shivraj Patil, and Ambani is no different from Halliburton. They are both part of the story of hollowing the State out. And once the hollowing process begins, every ideological force can find its way in, as long as it has resources. The archetypal bourgeois liberal State is over. It never really existed, but what we have at the end of four decades of neo-liberalism bears no resemblance to the ideal formulation whatsoever. What we have instead is a series of hollowed out States with their nooks and crannies, their departments and offices populated with specific neo-conservative ideological interests. The US has its variant. India has its. And Israel its very own. It is incapable of delivering the truth, and not just the truth, it is only capable of producing lies.

 

If this story of skepticism makes sense then we have only one choice. To understand that it is crucial to increase the pressure for transparency at this moment, to be relentless in our demand for openness and detail, in our call to ensure that no investigation or inquiry that was in place be halted and that every one of these be subjected to public scrutiny. It is our responsibility to reject the discourse of secrecy based on security and demand specific standards of transparency. What we should demand is that every senior minister and every senior intelligence officer be examined and the records be made available to the public. What we must demand is that an officer of impeccable record be found to replace Hemant Karkare. What we must demand is that we get explanations of how a POTA clone would have stopped this crime. What we must ask is how POTA or the Patriot Act could have ever helped prevent terror? What we must do is support the Karkare family in their demand for a full investigation of his death in the company of the encounter specialist- Salaskar. What we must have is an open debate on every single case of terror over the last decade in India.

 

When I am in Bombay, I always stay at a friend's on Third Pasta Lane. Each afternoon I would walk out and see the Nariman House. I have wondered what the decrepit building was. I have always contrasted the drabness of the building with the colorful sign on the next building that announces Colaba Sweet House. The next time I won't wonder. I will know that it was one of the places where the drama that inaugurated India's renewed march towards fascism unfolded. Unless we act. Unless we act with speed and determination demanding transparency and accountability and a careful rewriting of the story of terror in India. Only a renewed movement can ensure that India doesn't slide into the same state as post 9/11 USA.

 

Biju Mathew is a member of the Campaign to Stop Funding Hate and the Coalition Against Genocide.

This piece originally appeared in Samar 31, published online December 1st, 2008.

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"More Fishy Clues"

 

Mumbai Terror Attack: Further Evidence Of The Anglo-American-Mossad-RSS Nexus

By Amaresh Misra

03 December, 2008
Countercurrents.org

Now who has the last laugh? That is the question; I only have pity for those who cannot see reality and who were so glib to buy into what the media and political troubleshooters were saying about the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

Consider this:

As a BBC report notes, at least some of the Mumbai attackers were not Indian and certainly not Muslim.Pappu Mishra, a cafe proprietor at the gothic Victorian Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus railway station, described "two sprightly young men dressed in black" with AK47s who were "foreign looking, fair skinned."Gaffar Abdul Amir, an Iraqi tourist from Baghdad, saw at least two men who started the firing outside the Leopold Cafe. "They did not look Indian, they looked foreign. One of them, I thought, had blonde hair. The other had a punkish hairstyle. They were neatly dressed," Amir told the BBC.

 

According to Andrew G. Marshall, the ISI "has long been referred to as Pakistan's 'secret government' or 'shadow state.' It's long-standing ties and reliance upon American and British intelligence have not let up, therefore actions taken by the ISI should be viewed in the context of being a Central Asian outpost of Anglo-American covert intelligence operations."The presence of "foreign looking, fair skinned" commandos who calmly gunned down dozens of people after drinking a few beers indicates that the Mumbai attacks were likely the work of the Anglo-American covert intelligence operatives, not indigenous Indian Muslims or for that matter Arab al-Qaeda terrorists. The attacks prepare the ground for the break-up of Pakistan and the furtherance of destabilizing terrorism in the Middle East and Asia. The Mumbai attacks had little to do with India or the relationship between Muslim Pakistanis and Hindu Indians."Pakistan's position as a strategic focal point cannot be underestimated. It borders India, Afghanistan, China and Iran," concludes Marshall. "Destabilizing and ultimately breaking Pakistan up into several countries or regions will naturally spread chaos and destabilization into neighboring countries. This is also true of Iraq on the other side of Iran, as the Anglo-American have undertaken, primarily through Iraq, a strategy of balkanizing the entire Middle East in a new imperial project." (See Marshall's Divide and Conquer: The Anglo-American Imperial Project.)

Now I ask specifically: WHO HAS EGG ON THE FACE? MY DETRACTORS OR ME?

Andrew Marshall is a respected author; he is clearly saying here that terrorists looked like Anglo-American covert operatives and that the entire Mumbai operation was an attempt by Anglo-American forces to destabilize India and push it further into the Israel-US orbit. Marshall also says that Americans are keen to dismember Pakistan--it is clear that in this project, America needs India as a firm ally--it cannot afford Indo-Pak friendship at least on a long-term basis. The Mumbai attack thus was multi-layered--and one of the reasons could be to warn India that the Anglo-American elite has the power to penetrate India, with the help of its own people. Clearly, the attackers would not have come from the sea route without some kind of a connivance of Gujarat and Maharashtra Governments with the terrorists, and the connivance of RSS type Hindutva elements as I will prove later in the piece.

This afore-mentioned report appeared on the BBC, a news agency which pro-west, Muslim-haters and all NRIs love to see. NOW I ASK THESE PEOPLE: why are you adopting double standards? Now a BBC report is incovenient because it militates against your idea of what happened in Mumbai?

Even the Indian Government is aware of this reality. That is why it is not issuing statements in a hurry and that is why the kind of Islamo-phobia seen earlier after Bomb Blasts is not being seen now.

 

A second report is more shocking--some news channels captured it but then it went off air:

One Police officer who encountered the gunmen as they entered the Jewish Center (Nariman House) said the attackers were white. "I went into the building late last night" he said. "I got a shock because they were white. I was expecting them to look like us. They fired three shots. I fired 10 back".

The Nariman House affair brings the Mossad angle to the fore. Two of the `hostages' killed in the Narimam House were identified as Rabbi Gabreil Holtzberg and his wife Rivka. They ran the center as spokespersons of the Chabad Lubavitch movement.

Now the Chabad movement is one of the many sects within Israel and Judaism. But of late it has come under the Zionist influence. Now what is Zionism? A brief digression would suffice: Zionism is the political ideology of racist Jews, just like Hindutva is the political ideology of a section of `race conscious' Hindus. Just as a majority of Sanatani Hindus have opposed Hindutva, a majority of Jews oppose Zionism and its fascist-anti-religious tone.

In opposition to the teachings of Judaism, the orthodox Jew religion, Zionists want to dominate the world; they see the `Jewish race' as the most important, almost divine, race in the world. Zionists are opposed to democracy and even the concept of naitonhood. Zionists believe in creating murder and mayhem as a matter of policy.

In America, Zionists have entered into an alliance with the American elites--the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) forces--which rule America. The reasons for this alliance lie in the way the Zionist agenda matches with that of the American corporate and WASP elite and is beyind the scope of this article.

People who do not understand Zionism will never be able to understand what happened in Mumbai.

Back to members of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement killed at Nariman House--people have asked how come the Rabbi and his wife were killed if Mossad is involved in the Mumbai terror attack?

The answer to this is being forwarded by Jewish anti-Zionist websites. They also detail the sectarian history of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement:


The attack on Mumbai spotlights the ultra-orthodox (haredi) Chabad-Lubavitch community and its international outreach network. When Chabad outreach (keruv) started in the 1950s, it seemed rather intellectually dishonest because the organization used nostalgia for a never-existent Jewish past as a hook to enmesh secular or secularized Jews in ultra-orthodox (haredi) practice as hozrim bitshuvah (returnees, sometimes improperly called baalei tshuvah), but on the whole the activity was mostly harmless in contrast with current Chabad activities, which long ago crossed the border into dangerous territory.

As the Lubavitcher organization has become larger and wealthier -- partially because mobilization for keruv has brought large contributions, members have shown a propensity for corruption.

 

Yet, the Lubavitchers have worked closely with Jewish racists like Lawrence Summers and Alan Dershowitz in the ongoing attempt to control discourse on American campuses. The wealthy Russian Lubavitcher hozer bitshuvah Lev Leviev openly supports Zionist terrorism and settlement building in the Palestinan occupied territories. Possibly because of Leviev Chabad-Lubavitch has openly become involved in Putin's struggles with Russian Jewish oligarchs.

Still, there is an even more sinister aspect to the Lubavitcher organization.

 

Because Lubavitcher outreach offices are located in some of the most important political, corporate and university centers throughout the world, the Lubavitchers have put together a network that is incomparable for corporate and international espionage as well as for the secret exchange of information. Because Chabad Houses could potentially act as safe houses, where there would be no record of a person's stay.

 

Most people do not take the Lubavitchers seriously, but I have visited Chabad houses and encountered senior Israeli government or military officials (and probably intelligence agents). One can easily imagine that Neocon intelligentsia trying to develop a relationship with Hindutva (?????????) intelligentsia or politicians might have used the Chabad Nariman House as a meeting place.

Here a Jew is saying that he has visited Chabad houses and that he has seen covert operations going on and the involvement of senior Government and military officials of Israel. This Jew writer is also talking openly about a Neo-Con-Chabad-Hindutva tie-up!

The Jew writer mentions the Mossad involvement in Chabad Houses:


Because the Lubavitchers provide an unconditional welcome to all Jews in the hope of bringing them closer to the Lubavitcher way of life, the Lubavitchers have been open to potential subversion by Israeli intelligence organizations. Mossad and Shin Bet found it quite easy to penetrate the haredi community during the Yossele Affair. Jewish politics has often involved infiltration and subversion of one political group by another. The David Project Israel Advocacy organization has used its educational programs as a means to infiltrate more mainstream Jewish communal organizations with radical Islamophobes and Jabotinskian Zionists.

 

To Zionize haredi groups that practice outreach, the Israeli government need only give encouragement to Zionistically indoctrinated Hebrew-speaking young people to participate in outreach programs, and in a few years the targeted haredi community is thoroughly enmeshed in Zionist thinking while Israeli intelligence organizations have a new crop of saya`nim in place ready to serve in Zionist covert operations.

What is a sayanim? Go to the link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayanim and it states that "Sayanim (Hebrew: "helpers") is a term used to describe Jews living outside Israel who volunteer to provide assistance to the Mossad.[1] This assistance includes facilitating medical care, money, logistics, and even overt intelligence gathering, yet sayanim are only paid for their expenses. No official number is known, but estimates put the number of sayanim in the thousands. The existence of this large body of volunteers is one reason why the Mossad operates with fewer case officers than fellow intelligence agencies"

Now back to the link

http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/12/
chabad-lubavitch-dangerous-game.html

from which I was quoting the Jewish writer originally. He says that the Lubavitcher shluchim (outreach emissaries) Gavriel Noach and Rivka Holtzberg fit the `sayanim' profile to a "T" -- especially Rivkah.

So the two people killed in Nariman House fit the Sayanim, that is Jews outside Israel who volunteer to provide assistance to Mossad, profile!

NOW WHAT OTHER PROOF DO YOU WANT?

The Jewish writer of the afore-mentioned link himself asks the question: WOULD MOSSAD HAVE KILLED THE RABBI AND HIS WIFE IN NARIMAN HOUSE?
AND HE PROVIDES THE ANSWER:

Zionists have always used dead Jews to build sympathy for Zionist goals and as cover for Zionist crimes against humanity.

Ben-Gurion explicitly stated that he would sacrifice German Jewish children for the sake of Zionism while the Zionist leadership probably learned the benefit of sacrificing Zionist operatives from the 1946 Kielce Pogrom. In this incident (Jewish) Soviet and Zionist agents probably worked together to make sure that surviving Polish Jews chose emigration to Palestine over a return to Poland.

Because the Kielce Zionist recruiters were killed during the pogrom, the events leading up to the pogrom was rendered forever unobtainable.

Some reports of the Mumbai attack indicate that the Holtzbergs rented space to the attack planners over the past few months and thereby helped make the operation far more effective.

 

An opportunity to interrogate the Holtzbergs would have helped investigators immensely.

AGAIN WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?


Another piece of massive evidence: In a telephone interview with CBC News from outside the Center (Nariman House), freelance journalists Arun Asthana said that there are reports that some of the militants had stayed at a guest house there (Nariman House) for upto 15 days before the attack. "They had a huge mass of ammunition, arms and food there", Asthana said.

Now other reports have also confirmed that a huge mass of food was ordered by the residents of the Nariman House. This food was enough for 30-40 people for several days. Why was this amount of food ordered? Also why was Nariman House not assaulted till the very last? A Gujarati Hindu resident of Mumbai came onto TV on CNN-IBN to say at around 3.30 AM or so, that for two months suspicious activities wree going in Nariman House. A lot of foreigners were seen coming in and going out. This matter was reported to the Police. But no one took action.

 

The CNN-IBN did not repeat the news; then it was only when the common people of Mumbai threatened to storm the Nariman House the NSG commandos were moved in--why this delay in assaulting Nariman House when only two terrorists were holed in there?

 

This is sheer official complicity and nothing else--AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE WHOLE NARIMAN HOUSE AFFAIR IS A MUST.



Then it was reported that " somehow surprising to learn that the terrorists in Cama hospital in Mumbai were fluently speaking Marathi. The terrorists who are said to have fired in Cama hospital talked to an employee clad in civil dress in Marathi, reports a Marathi daily 'Maharashtra Times'.

The newspaper said the terrorists who targeted ATS chief Hemant Karkare, police commissioner Ashok Kamte and encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar were speaking Marathi fluently.

 

The newspaper claims the terrorists having fired at two watchmen in uniform asked the other beside them on gunpoint in Marathi, 'You are here an employee?' The employee caught the legs of the terrorist and said, 'I am not working here. My wife has suffered from heart attack and I have come here to admit her.' The terrorist asked him again in Marathi, 'You are speaking true or false?' The employee answered, 'No, by God I am speaking true.'

On this the terrorist let him go.

NOW WHAT DO WE MAKE OF THAT? Another report says that traditional Jews of Mumbai who have migrated to Israel speak fluent Marathi and are known to have been recruited by Mossad!

The death of Hemant Karkare remains a mystery. All official versions are contradictory: some say he was killed near CST, some that he died near Cama hospital, some near Metro cinema, and some that he was killed while in a Police jeep. Also, where did the bullet hit him? Some say on the neck and some near the heart. Karkare was shown on TV wearing a bullet proof vest--he could not have been shot in neck in that case, unless there was a sniper waiting for him.

Also if he was shot near heart, then when did he take out his vest? No one has even bothered to answer this question. Also, another facet is coming to light: that Karkare was killed near Cama--but Kaamte and Salaskar in the Metro shootout!

Intelligent people--what do you have to say now? It is becoming obvious that...


1. Several terrorists might have been white

 

2. Were they International mercanaries? If yes, then from which country? Who collected them? It is well known that Mossad and CIA have several mercenary organizations, including so-called Jihadi ones on their list. They create Jihad and manipulate Muslims disaffected by the Islamophobia in the world. Some of them might have been used in the Mumbai attack. But why were they carrying American, British, Mauritian and Malaysian passports?

 

3. Who were the Marathi speaking Karkare killers? The lane next to the Cama Hospital is a deserted one--it goes straight to the backyard of the Mumbai CID Headquarters. Anonymous sources in the Police have revealed that Karkare was taken there, by a joint team of anti-Karkare, pro-Hindutva Mumbai Police officers, and Chota Rajan men. Now Karkare was opposed to Chota Rajan. Salaskar was anti-Pradeep Sharma, another Mumbai senior Police officer now in jail, for working as Rajan's shooter. So the Marathi speaking terrorists could either have been Jews with some connection to Mumbai--or hired killers of the Hindutva brigade or men of Chota Rajan.

 

4. It seems that several things went on simultaneously--the Mahrashtra Chief Minister Vilas Rao Deshmukh was in Kerala when the Mumbai attack began at 9.30 PM on 26th November. Then by 11PM Deshmukh had informed the Home Minister Shivraj Patil--the latter has started proceedings to send the NSG Commandos. So Deshmukh knew about what was happening by 11PM--then why was there no Mumbai Police on various locations between 9.30 and 1am, the time when Karkare arrived? The Mumbai ATS is a separate organization. it does not lead the Mumbai Police. So the 40,000 strong Mumbai Police was absent from the scene of action between 11pm to 1am and then Karkare arrived and he was killed along with his men!

 

Isn't there something fishy here? Obviously the Mumbai Police was kept deliberately away between 11pm and 1am, the time period when terrorists were killing people merrily. Then Karkare must have been told--and he went there expecting Mumbai police personals to be there--but there were none or only a few! And he was killed!

Amaresh Misra is a freelance writer, historian and poet. He is the author of Mangal Pandey: The True Story of an Indian Revolutionary; Lucknow: Fire of Grace: The Story of Its Renaissance, Revolution and the Aftermath, and more recently War of Civilizations: The Road to Delhi and The Long Revolution. He can be contacted on misra.amaresh@gmail.com

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China's economic success may soon bring trouble. It would be ours too

 

The country's reformers seek incremental political changes to complement its gobsmacking growth. If they fail, it could be war

Timothy Garton Ash in Shanghai

• The Guardian, Thursday December 4 2008

 

In Chinese reactions to the troubles of the rest of the world, from the terrorist attacks in Mumbai to the recession in the US and Europe, I hear a hint of complacency and a touch of arrogance. "If that's what you get with democracy, perhaps we're better off without it," is how one official thinker summarises his reaction to the atrocities in India. And if the west wants China to bail it out of this self-inflicted financial mess, it must give Beijing more power in international institutions. The refrain of "China's back" mingles with "that wouldn't happen here". They may be speaking too soon. If they are, it will be our problem as well as theirs.
 
Gobsmacking is the word to describe China's economic development over the 30 years since Deng Xiaoping initiated what has come to be known as the period of reform. In these three decades, growth has averaged more than 9% a year. As I write, I look out at the garishly neon-lit skyscrapers of downtown Shanghai, which make the business districts of all but the largest American cities seem low-rise and sober by comparison.
 
Across the river, the Superbrand Mall is a buzzing hive of conspicuous consumption, with young Chinese stopping off for a coffee at Starbucks, weighed down with shopping bags from the most fashionable western brands. Yes, cities like Shanghai are islands of urban prosperity in a sea of rural backwardness, but this growth has also lifted perhaps 300 million people out of extreme poverty. If it goes on like this, the Chinese economy will, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, be roughly the same size as those of the United States and the European Union by 2020. If.
 
The well-known free marketeer Zhang Weiying, dean of an impressive new management school at Peking University, argues that after 30 years the economic reform is essentially complete. Yes, the commanding heights of the economy are still occupied by giant state-controlled enterprises, but as they come to be quoted on stock exchanges across the world, gain minority private shareholders and face market pressures, so they increasingly behave like value-maximising companies. They have a long way to go, but the direction of travel is clear.
 
What's needed for the next 30 years, he suggests, is a complementary political reform, starting with the rule of law. This is an argument I have heard many times over the past fortnight, and in quite surprising places. For instance, in the austere offices of the Chinese Communist party's Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, an institution whose primary task is to collect and translate official writings and declarations, from Marx through Mao to Hu Jintao. Its deputy director, Yu Keping, a prominent political scientist and party reformer, argues that China is moving from the rule of man towards the rule of law. For the first time in several thousand years of Chinese statehood, he suggests, ordinary people are being offered legal recourse against political authority. Even the top party and state leaders should be subject to the law. The country also needs more transparent, less corrupt government; a civil service answering more efficiently to the needs of its citizens ("one-stop service!" he cries enthusiastically); and more democracy, both in local government and inside the Communist party. Comrade Lenin would be turning in his grave.
 
Practice lags far behind this theory. Any Chinese lawyer can tell you how far away the country is from having an independent judiciary. And its ruling authorities, though no longer communist in anything but name, are in one vital sense still Leninist: that is, uncompromisingly defending their monopoly of political power. Nonetheless, in political reforms too, the direction of travel is encouraging.
 
If we in the rest of the world have any sense, we will encourage it with every means at our disposal - starting from the aims set by Chinese reformers themselves. Rather than saying, "No, this can't work, what you need is western-style multi-party democracy", we should say, "Right, for strengthening the rule of law, here's this detailed body of experience; for a more professional civil service, we have this useful method". We will achieve more by offering a complex toolkit for good governance and the rule of law, including human and civil rights, rather than a single template for democracy.
 
Thirty years ago we would have said that Leninist capitalism was a contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs. Well, here it is, right in front of our eyes. After another 30 years of Chinese-style incremental reform, "crossing the river by feeling the stones" as Deng Xiaoping put it, who knows what new political riverbank they will have reached?
 
But the Chinese system is wrestling with many tensions. Public protests are a regular occurrence, and some turn violent: demonstrators recently stormed Communist party offices in Gansu province. And this is before the economic downturn has begun to bite. The test of any political system is how it withstands hard times. The Chinese system, as it has emerged over the past 30 years, has not yet stood that test.
 
What's the alternative to further open-ended, incremental reform? The most likely scenario is one that we have seen elsewhere in the post-communist world. Faced with growing discontent, as rising expectations clash with lowered economic performance, post-communist rulers turn to nationalism to preserve their own power. There's every reason to believe this could be popular in China. Even among Chinese people critical of the current system, one seldom finds much sympathy for the Tibetans or for the Muslim population in the northern province of Xinjiang. If a few despairing members of those small minorities turned to violence in one of China's big cities, the majority reaction would probably be degrees fiercer than in India.
 
Nationalist netizens in China's hyperactive blogosphere are more luridly anti-western than China's current rulers. If, in the coming years, the existing system were to fail to meet rising expectations - due to a combination of global recession, American and European resistance to Chinese exports, local corruption, mismanagement and lack of democratic controls - the temptation would grow to salvage legitimacy by turning to a more aggressive nationalism.
Even with the wisest leadership in Beijing and Washington, the global rebalancing of power over the next decades will be hard to manage without conflict. Introducing his national security team on Monday, Barack Obama observed that "newly assertive powers have put strains on the international system". A former US commander in the Pacific, Admiral William Fallon, recently revealed that there were people in the Pentagon under George W Bush "who warned me that you'd better get ready for the shoot 'em up here, because sooner or later we're going to be at war with China".
 
Susan Shirk, who was one of the senior US officials responsible for China policy in the Clinton administration, argues in her book, China: Fragile Superpower, that American policy should give priority to China's external behaviour, precisely to avert the long-term danger of war. But China's external behaviour can't be separated from its internal dynamics. We cannot afford not to be interested in the progress of its uncharted, incremental economic and political reforms, and we must want them to succeed. Otherwise we'll all be Shanghaied.

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Who is this Sajan Kapur? Were gunmen paid to create Mumbai terror?

  Who is this Sajan Kapur? Were gunmen paid to create Mumbai terror?

As the debris of the 60 hour long Mumbai nightmare is cleared and the dead are laid to rest and medical fraternity try to save as much of the injured as they can, it is time for questions to be raised. Many have already been raised and more will continue to be raised from all over the world in the coming days, by experts and those on the ground. One is therefore refraining from raising any at this point of time.

But as an informed and interested viewer of the 60 hour drama being played out in front of our eyes, one has been rather hugely intrigued by something one watched in the afternoon of Friday, when the siege was already 41 hours old.  

Switching channels furiously to catch something unusual which can give a new perspective to the happenings in Mumbai, one stopped at Aaj Tak, to find a Virendra Sehwag look-alike, with the shaven head and all, being questioned breathlessly by the unseen anchor.  The caption read--- Sajan Kapur (or Kapoor) --- Taj se chudaye gaye bandhak (hostage released from Taj).

What Kapur, presumably a Punjabi going by the name, but with a rather heavy malayali accent in his Hindi, was revealing was sensational. His story went something like this---

On the night of Nov.26, soon after the gunmen were found firing indiscriminately in several places in Mumbai, and the Taj Hotel siege began, he got a call from the Mumbai Police's ace "encounter specialist", Vijay Salaskar. The cop told Kapur about the firing happening in Taj and instructed him to reach the hotel. His brief was to go in and merge in the crowd and find out what is happening exactly and to report to him (Salaskar). Though this was left unsaid, obviously Kapur was an "informer" of Salaskar who has been used before also for such assignments.

Kapur promptly landed up in Taj and walked in and found himself taken hostage by the gunmen. He along with two others, foreigners, were taken to Room No.630 on the sixth floor and held hostage for several hours. It was not clear for how many hours. But during these hours, what Sajan Kapur saw and heard is nothing short of sensational.

According to Kapur, this room was the operation base of the gunmen/terrorists. He saw so much arms and ammunition there, he was left wonderstruck how they managed to gather all that in a five star hotel room. Now it becomes more interesting. Unlike what we were being regularly fed by the numerous reporters of various TV channels who in turn were feeding from NSG and other security sources, there were not just four or five terrorists in the Taj Hotel. Kapur said with a straight face without any hint of confusion or doubt, that he had seen 17 terrorists! And according to him, they were coming in and going out of room no.630, conducting operations and very interestingly communicating with someone from Karachi. Kapur insists he was a witness to some of these gunmen, who had mobile phones and satellite phones too, were getting calls from Karachi, and were being told what to do, and also about what the security forces were planning and doing outside the hotel. Obviously they were monitoring the Indian news channels.

But what is most interesting about Kapur's story as he narrated on Aaj Tak, was about the conversation he heard among some of the young gunmen. It went something like this---

"Yaar in India ke neta ke pass kitna paisa hain"( hey, how much money these Indian politicians have?), asked one of the young gunmen to the other. The other replied (all in front of Kapur) --- "tere ko kya lene ka—tumhe mil gaya na paisa"( hey, why are you bothered about it, you got your money no).

In fact the excited anchor asks repeatedly if the terrorists were talking of money, and if he felt they were paid for the job. Kapur reiterates and even goes on to say, that there was even a scuffle or verbal fight between the terrorists on the question of money. He also talks about the leader of the gang having been killed in the second or third floor, which also lead to some "fight" between the other gunmen.

Now coming to the intriguing part. Normally an eye witness like this would have been grabbed by all the TV channels. But somehow only Aaj Tak managed to get him and even kept him in their Mumbai studios for a couple of hours almost, during which they kept coming back to him, and he went on giving more and more interesting details. One however missed his take on how he escaped from the clutches of his captors.

However, what is most intriguing is that Sajan Kapur has disappeared after that appearance on Aaj Tak. Not a single newspaper one has seen so far( more than half a dozen) has a word about this most interesting "hostage" who had escaped, leave alone what he claimed on TV channel, that he had seen and heard.

ON the Aaj Tak web site, the clipping of his interview is still available, but not all that he said. Though his claim of the gunmen talking of money and Indian politicians is very much available. Those interested can even watch it by clicking on this link http://aajtak.itgo.in/index.php?option=com_registration&exist=yes&type=1&task=videopage&assignedvideoid=4116&sectionid=21&secid=0 .

Now some questions which invariably crops up and begs for an answer. Who is this Sajan Kapur? Why has no newspaper or other news channels not been able to get him or if they have, not published or telecast what he claims? Are there more to this entire dastardly terror acts than what is generally believed to be at this point of time---- the Lashkar connection and all that?
 
http://indiainteracts.com/columnist/2008/11/29/Who-is-this-Sajan-Kapur-Were-gunmen-paid-to-create-Mumbai-terror/ 

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Muslims must confront the truth about Mumbai

By Yasmin Alibhai Brown
 
In the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, wild speculations swirled, furious cyclones that threw up windy and wild theories, charged conspiracies and noisy condemnation. Inevitable perhaps, just human nature responding fearfully to sudden and unspeakable violence. The terrorists cleaved the body, heart and soul of this cosmopolitan, enterprising hub which draws to its bosom the richest and most wretched of the earth. What they did coldly in hotels, cafés and the Jewish centre was as atrocious as the killings in Beslan. But as the panic subsides, it is the duty of all world citizens to confront truths, however inconvenient.
 

Instead we see a scandalous passing of the buck. "Can't be, won't be, not our native sons," say India, Pakistan and Britain as they set about impugning each other explicitly and implicitly. It is a form of post-trauma nationalism that can grip wounded nations and was most vividly manifested in the US after 9/11. Meanwhile, millions of Muslims, also traumatised, habitually revisit sites of conflict – Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan and Iraq – or list other legitimate grievances to explain away each successive act of Islamist violence.
 
Denial and obfuscation once again stop us from examining who the killers were, why they did what they did, the places and times they pick. It is not to exonerate them or forgive them, but to acquire vital data and a deeper understanding of the international networks and the mental states of the perpetrators – their religious and political ideologies. This essential information cannot be extracted through torture or the outlandish "evidence" of anti-Muslim, neo-con think tanks whose agenda we know all too well.
 
Years on from the al-Qa'ida assault on the US, with two wars still going on, Guantanamo Bay and other rendition centres doing their filthy work, Islamist assassins can still strike in Mumbai. We have no psychological profiling, no dependable evidence to stop the next time. Is that not chilling? As big a problem is the pathological reluctance of nations to examine how their politics and policies bear some responsibility for the support given to men of terror.
Take India. Its people, economy, history, culture and democratic credentials make it a remarkable country. It is also a nation which tolerates shocking poverty, inequality, caste and religious injustice and gender oppression. Some Indian Muslims have done brilliantly well in the last decade or so, too many though are trapped in poverty and have fallen below the lowest of the Hindu castes.
 
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh appears sanguine about this Muslim underclass and has done little to bring to trial those responsible for the massacres of Muslims in Gujarat. Nothing is done to quell the physical abuse and oppression of Kashmiris by the Indian security services. Even if the terrorists came from Pakistan – there must be Muslims in India who feel unsafe in their land and so support the unsupportable. Ashok Mehta, a security analyst, says: "Without help, the terrorists would not have known how to enter the hotels or where the exits are. This operation would have been well-rehearsed and there certainly would have been local guides." That kind of talk is taboo in complacent India.
 
Then there are the deniers, who are outraged if you suggest that Pakistan breeds Islamists who terrorise their own country. Ahmed Rashid is one of the world's most authoritative Pakistani authors. His latest book, Decent Into Chaos: The US And The Failure Of Nation-Building In Pakistan, Afghanistan And Central Asia, tells how his country is now increasingly lawless, churning out young people filled with homicidal aspirations. Many in the political and military establishment back the jihadis. I said so on the BBC this weekend and was then forced to shelter from the torrent of abuse from "patriotic" Pakistanis. Sara writes: "Just because these men were Muslims doesn't mean they were the financiers." The men were probably Indian double agents, says another Pakistani. A man from Burnley calls me "a fucking Zionist". Don't ask me why.
 
Here, after some early, irresponsible coverage claimed some of the killers were British, there is now an assumption that there is no connection at all. I think we need to wait and see. The Government still refuses to accept the implicit contribution that our foreign policies have made, and as yet has commissioned no credible, long-term research on radicalisation.
 
After Obama's victory, the world felt optimistic. That India and Pakistan (a democracy again) were at last trying to rebuild trust gave pause for cautious
hope. The Mumbai terrorists shattered all that and once more, we are lost in misinformation and misapprehension.

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