HPI, March 31, 2004

[Guest guest]

Hindu Press International <hpi.list wrote:Today's Stories:

1. Sri Ganapati Sachchidanada Swami Visits Trinidad

2. Shri Shivarudra Balayogi Maharaj Going on Tour

3. The Quirky Karma Army

4. Dr. N. S. Rajaram Speaks on Genetics and Migration in History in

Bangalore

5. Wall Street Journal Upbeat on India

 

1. Sri Ganapati Sachchidanada Swami Visits Trinidad

http://www.guardian.co.tt/news3.html

 

TRINIDAD, March 31, 2004: Thousands are expected to attend a three-day

Ramayan Yagna this weekend at which renowned swami, Parama Puja Sri Sri

Ganapati Sachchidanda Swamiji, will deliver discourses on the first 100

stanzas of Sage Valmiki's Ramayan. The event and is being hosted by

quarry magnate Sieunarine Persad Coosal, at his Acono Road, St Joseph,

residence. The Swami, who heads the Dattatreya Yoga Centre in Mysore,

India, will remain in T&T until April 10. He will also participate in a

series of events at the Dattatreya Yoga Centre in Carapichiama. Sri

Ganapati Sachchidananda, who is known for his musical skills and his

outstanding ability to sing for hours on end, has a long association

with the people of T&T. The swami was instrumental in the establishment

of the local Dattatrya Yoga Centre, which has attracted thousands of

visitors since the consecration of a 60-foot Murti of Lord Hanuman on

June 9, 2003.

 

2. Shri Shivarudra Balayogi Maharaj Going on Tour

cah

 

NEW DELHI, INDIA, March 28, 2004: Charlie and Carol Hopkins write, "As

devotees around the world remember and honor the Divine Guru, Shri

Shivabalayogi Maharaj, on the tenth anniversary of His Mahasamadhi, it

is our joy to announce the first visit to North America of Swamiji's

spiritual son, Shri Shivarudra Balayogi. Baba will be coming to the US

as part of a world wide tour which will include Singapore, Australia,

and the UK. Public programs in the US have been set up in Oregon,

Colorado, and Washington, DC, beginning May 22, 2004." For more details

about Baba's visit to the US and to offer your assistance in this

effort, please contact Charlie and Carol Hopkins at "source" above.

 

3. The Quirky Karma Army

http://www.join-me.co.uk

 

UNITED KINGDOM, March 26, 2004: There are no dues or initiation

rituals. Your age, citizenship, political affiliation, gender, religion

(or lack of it) don't matter. The invitation comes from Danny Wallace

of London. He is the director of a new comedy development for the BBC,

and has written a book about how two words, ingenuity, a sense of humor

and faith in the goodness of people can, have and will make a

difference globally. "Join Me!" is Wallace's tale about the trust and

skepticism inherent to human nature, the desire to do good works and

the need to be part of something bigger than yourself. It is a mission

that also is slightly irreverent and full of dry wit and quirkiness.

"I'm not really a religious or political person, and there are many

people like me," the 27-year-old said on a recent book tour in the U.S.

"We've never had a community." Now he has created one, and it does good

works--for strangers, at random and particularly on Fridays. The number

of joinees (the author's term) has surpassed 6,000 worldwide since

Wallace placed a simple ad in a London newspaper a couple of years ago.

"Join Me!" is the story of where and how he amassed the first 1,000

members. He eventually placed ads on the Internet and as enthusiasm

spread, Join Me got its own Web site. Wallace realized that the

pressure was on to explain why the group existed. So he thought about

it and advised his cohorts to do at least one good deed every Friday,

then report back to him. Good Friday tales, elaborate to simple, are

online. It all has fueled this machine, nicknamed the Karma Army, to do

more of the same. "The story never ends," Wallace said. He has added

another initiative: Happy Mondays, in which joinees do something good

for themselves. None of it is mandatory, and no one keeps track,

Wallace said. "Whatever their leanings, it seems to attract people with

a sense of humor and a kind heart," he observed.

 

4. Dr. N. S. Rajaram Speaks on Genetics and Migration in History in

Bangalore

Press Release

 

BANGALORE, INDIA, March 31, 2004: Dr. N. S. Rajaram sends this summary

of his coming talk on "Genetics on Migrations in History" at the Mythic

Society, Nripatunga Road, Bangalore, 560 001, on Friday, April 2 at

6:00 pm.

 

As George Santayana said: "History is always written wrong, it needs

always to be rewritten. But first we need to identify the people who

gave rise to the history.

 

When we examine the accounts of ancient India as given in history books

still in use against the background of empirical data and the primary

(literary) sources, we find fundamental mismatches between data and

historical theories. These mismatches are both qualitative and

quantitative.

 

Qualitative mismatches

1. There is no archaeological record of any invasion and/or massive

migration from Eurasia in the Vedic period. If anything we find traces

of movement in the opposite direction-- to West Asia and even Europe.

2. The geography described in the Rigveda corresponds to North India in

the fourth millennium BC and earlier and not Europe or Eurasia.

3. The flora and fauna described in the Vedic literature, especially

those found in the sacred symbols, are tropical and subtropical

varieties and not temperate or from the steppes.

4. The climate corresponds to that found in North India.

 

Quantitative mismatches:

 

There is huge time gap--exceeding a thousand years--between the dates

assigned to significant features and what we actually find. These

include:

1. Indian writing is supposed to be based on borrowings from the

Phoenicians, but the Indus (Harappan) writing is more than a thousand

years older than the oldest Phoenician examples known.

2. Naturalistic art with realistic depictions is supposed to have been

brought to India by the Greeks, but we find superb realistic depictions

in Harappan remains. As John Marshall said: "The Indus artist

anticipated the Greek artist by more than 2000 years."

3. Indian astronomy is claimed to be a borrowing from the Greeks, but

the Vedanga Jyotisha cannot be dated later than the 14th century BC.

The name Vedanga indicates it is later than the Vedas, so the

astronomical references in the Vedas must be older.

4. Migrations: The major migration or invasion is supposed to have

taken place after 2000 BC, but the genetic evidence shows that the

people of India have lived where they are for tens of thousands of

years.

 

It is clear that we need a serious re-examination of history-- both of

the chronology and the descriptive accounts. Two fundamental tasks

suggest themselves: (1) establishing independent chronological markers

that connect literary accounts and physical features; (2) determining

the identity of the people of India on scientific grounds, independent

historical and/or linguistic theories. The present talk will address

the second question-- on what recent findings in population genetics

have to say about the origin and identity of Indians.

 

5. Wall Street Journal Upbeat on India

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB105510492687064200,00.html

 

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, June 9, 2003: This article appeared in the Wall

Street Journal last year, but was only brought to HPI's attention

recently. It is by Bruce Gilley and called "Asia's Quiet Miracle. It is

given here in its entirety.

 

As it nears the end of its fifth year in office as the head of a

coalition government, India's Bharatiya Janata Party is preparing to

put its mandate on the line in national elections due by October 2004.

Little surprise that the party has recently shown signs of backing down

on some planned economic reforms in areas like taxation, foreign

investment and privatization. Cabinet rifts and a series of antireform

strikes have chastened the government against moving too fast at the

risk of considerable political loss.

 

Yet those in the chambers of commerce and business press engaged in a

reactive bout of hand-wringing need to check themselves. Almost

unnoticed by the outside world, India over the past two decades has

witnessed an economic transformation of staggering proportions. It is a

transformation that has cut poverty to 20% of the population today from

something like 40% a few decades earlier (estimates vary), while adding

nine years to the life of the average Indian. Most important, it is a

transformation that has been achieved through open processes of

reaching a fair and consensual policy, which in the lexicon of the

dissatisfied is now being disparaged as "politics."

 

The democratic nature of India's economic miracle, as frustrating as it

is to those who like the stroke-of-a-pen changes of authoritarian

countries like China, has ensured that reforms are more just and

therefore more enduring. Inequality has remained moderate while

opportunities have expanded for all. By bemoaning the incremental

nature of India's economic reforms, critics are liable to undermine the

very foundations of the country's stirring success.

 

As the columnist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta wrote in Business Today

magazine in late May: "While it may be very fine to wax eloquent about

the need for so-called economic reforms, unless a political consensus

can be arrived at, all such attempts are bound to falter if not fail."

That would be a tragedy indeed.

 

Of course, the BJP is far from being above recrimination in its

handling of recent economic reforms. Its reform of the power-generation

sector and its attempts to reduce the dangerously high annual

public-sector deficit (now 11% of gross domestic product) have been

plagued by ineptness and corruption.

 

But most of the criticism has focused instead on issues where reform

has been delayed precisely because the losers are not reconciled to

change. Reforms in agricultural support, small-scale industry

restrictions, labor laws and privatization have been delayed because of

the interests affected.

 

India's reforms have moved forward by minimizing opposition, not

bulldozing it. That may have meant a pace that many find frustrating.

But the important result, notes a recent paper by Harvard's Center for

International Development, is that "India's political system is more

than ever in consensus about the basic direction of reforms."

 

Economic reforms in India began haltingly in the mid-1980s and then

accelerated sharply in the early 1990s. Easy reforms in areas like

licensing, exchange rates and banking came first. In the period from

1985 to 2001, real per-capita GDP in local currency terms grew 3.9% a

year, four times the rate of the previous three decades, marking an

unprecedented gain for the average Indian. India's Human Development

Index, as measured by the United Nations Development Program, rose by

23% between 1985 and 2000, the same as in much ballyhooed China.

 

The BJP, true to its nationalist roots, began life espousing Gandhian

policies of self-sufficiency and small industry, known as swadeshi. It

first won office in 1998 because of growing disaffection with reforms

and with elitist secularism. The coalition led by the BJP represents a

poor people's movement that threatened reforms.

 

Yet when it came into office, the BJP sensibly embraced reforms as the

best hope for the poor. It was, and is, the only party with the

legitimacy to push the reforms forward, since it has a foot in both the

elite and populist segments of India's fractured society. The fact that

it is criticized not only by right-wing ideologues in India, but also

by influential left-wing intellectuals and unionists for selling out to

"liberalism," shows just how successfully it has walked the middle way

in its efforts to move forward through consensus.

 

Low inflation, strong foreign-exchange reserves and healthy agriculture

and services sectors underlie the changes. The information technology

sector continues to boom despite the global IT bust, now accounting for

3% of GDP and 15% of exports. There is no vast underclass of

disaffected farmers and workers threatening to overturn the reforms, or

even the political system, as there is in China. Indeed, the BJP-led

coalition includes many of the parties that represent those groups.

 

If India's voluntary and female-empowering population-control policies

continue to surprise with their success, per-capita GDP gains could

outstrip those of the first decade and a half of reforms. As University

of Michigan scholar Ashutosh Varshney told a conference in the U.S. in

April: "Progress has been, and will remain, gradual and steady."

 

For those inclined to discount the gains under the BJP because of the

communal violence that has erupted on its watch, a little perspective

is key. The rise of the BJP was supported by India's poor, who could be

organized using the symbolism of Hindu revivalism. It was a response to

the failures of the elitist Congress Party to address the country's

developmental problems in more than four decades of rule. Communalism

was already on the rise when the Congress began reforms in the

mid-1980s (highlighted by the 2,700 killed in anti-Sikh riots in 1984).

Yet the economic reforms that the BJP continues to push forward may be

the best solvent for these passions. Moreover, on their own, the

reforms have life and death implications in a country like India.

Infant mortality began to fall in the late 1970s as a result of the

country's agricultural boom, but the decline accelerated once economic

reforms began. Taken on its own, the fall in infant mortality between

1985 and 2001 saves about 800,000 lives a year today. If the decline

continues as targeted by the state through 2007, another 600,000

children a year will be saved.

 

The BJP has emerged as India's strongest party (along with its allies,

it won 40% of the popular vote in the 1999 elections) precisely because

it more closely reflects Indian society than any other party. It is

more national, and cuts across the various identity-based (region,

caste, religion, ethnic group, etc.) parties. And it is more nativist

and populist than the highbrow Congress. Much of the "instability" of

post-1998 Indian politics is because of the growing inclusion of more

people in democracy, a natural result of a process that leads to a more

healthy polity. Five years out, India is still in this initial process

of democratic deepening.

 

Post-1947 India has been a whipping boy for impatient reformers of all

colors, from the left and right. In his 1966 book, "Social Origins of

Dictatorship and Democracy," the Harvard scholar Barrington Moore, Jr.

berated India's "peaceful change" and called for "coercion on a massive

scale" to solve the country's development challenges. Fortunately, the

post-1985 economic reformers ignored such advice and stuck to the

country's great democratic tradition. This is not just for idealistic

reasons. The country's more enlightened industrialists are also quick

to point out that they prefer reforms that will not face another poor

people's movement. As Narayanan Vaghul, former chairman of the

Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India told a conference

in New York in 1999, just after the BJP announced its bold economic

reform plans, "Unless the common man in the street is able to identify

himself with the reform process, we will find that the reform is going

to be very difficult."

 

India's reforms are not just an economic issue. The country is forging

a proudly democratic model of economic reforms. It is the kind of model

that many developing countries, despairing that they do not have the

dictatorship of China to force through difficult reforms, can hope to

emulate.

 

The BJP government should be kept honest and chided when it falls down.

But the politics that it plays are mostly the politics of balancing

interests and views that, if not addressed, might threaten the entire

movement. Those who criticize the consensual nature of India's economic

reforms risk undermining Asia's quiet miracle.

 

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