It is India, Stupid!!

August 15, 2007

If you agree with the views of this Indian Express Story, take affirmative action by writing to BJP/Communist M.P.s and parties to not be stooges of Pakistan and China. URL for parlimentarians is http://goidirectory.nic.in/

Rajinder Sandhir

Print Story

It’s India, stupid

Posted online: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST

After his negotiators had delivered a very credible nuclear agreement with the US last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had an easy case to defend. The impressive part of the PM’s statement to Parliament on Monday was its complete political self-assurance. He declared the readiness to let history judge his huge accomplishment in the nuclear liberation of India. The PM is aware that the debate on the nuclear deal has long ceased to be a technical one. For quite some time, the BJP and the CPM have made it plain they will attack the 123 Agreement, irrespective of its contents. The PM confronted this challenge head on when he declared over the weekend that there will be no renegotiation of the nuclear agreement and told his opponents to either accept the deal or pull down his government. The PM’s new robustness should rub off on the Congress when parliamentary debate begins in a few days.

To be sure, as the main opposition party, it was BJP’s responsibility to question the government’s negotiating positions. But from the very moment the PM and George Bush unveiled the nuclear initiative two years ago, the BJP painted itself into a corner with its unremitting opposition to the deal. Has BJP begun to see itself as a party in permanent opposition? Worse still, the BJP seemed ready to abandon its own rightful claim of making India a real nuclear weapon power and transforming India’s relationship with the US. It is also understandable that the CPM finds it hard to get over its ideological opposition to engaging the US and wants to retain the option of challenging the government’s conduct of foreign policy.

What is tragic, however, is the failure of the BJP and the CPM to see the line that separates the natural calculus of self-interest among contending parties and the broader commitment to national interest. Beyond all the technical abracadabra of the nuclear agreement, the world fully understands that the deal is about ending the atomic symmetry between New Delhi and Islamabad and putting India on par with nuclear China. If India chooses to forgo the nuclear deal at hand, under pressure from the BJP and the CPM, no two nations will be happier than China and Pakistan at seeing India poke itself in the eye.

August 15, 2007

The media will have us believe that the civilian nuclear deal exists in a vacuum. It is in fact embedded in a matrix of over a dozen "concessions" wrung out of the Indians. I am pasting an extract from my book on Paradoxical Healing. In this I have attempted to show that systematic destruction of the environment is both the outcome of losing touch with the Relational Self, and the way of further distancing ourselves from it. This is why we ail. Realigning ourselves with the Sacred Self, which is nothing but the Web of Creation itself, is the way to heal. Thus there is in essence nothing paradoxical about this healing. The quest for nuclear power is destructive enough -- what we have to give the Americans in exchange is a lot worse -- we have been asked to mortage India;s future for generations to come. Sorry for this long post -- it is because I am not "stupid" but cautious. Extract. This trend is set to be intensified soon. The US-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative agreement on agriculture was signed in March 2006, and generated deep misgivings in many sections of the society. It is now known that companies like Monsanto, Wall-Mart etc. will be on the board of US-India Agricultural

Knowledge Initiative Agreement to monitor agricultural research, education and dissemination and exchange of knowledge between US and India. Though this Initiative is being touted as the so-called "Second Green Revolution" it has no connection with the First Green Revolution in which the seeds were with the farmers. The agricultural pact is a

part of the larger picture of emerging trend of globalization which aims towards corporatisation of agriculture. Dr. Krishan Bir Chaudhary, Executive Chairman, Bharat Krishak Samaj is one among many who have voiced their apprehensions regarding this deal. In a note sent to the Prime Minister he has made these key points. It is highly regrettable that the major stakeholders in agriculture in India, like farmer's organizations, State governments, Standing Committees of Parliament, civil society organizations and eminent academics, have not been consulted in preparing the framework of the agriculture deal nor in determining the focus areas. All features of the agriculture deal must be in consonance with existing Indian policy and legislation, the National Biodiversity Act and the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act. It is alarming that there is no mention in the deal of key issues of genetic engineering, like respecting crops in their centers of origin, of protecting socio-economic interests of rural and tribal communities and implementing a regime for liability and redress in case something goes wrong with a genetically engineered crop or fish or animal. Key policy issues with respect to Intellectual Property Rights must be implemented, for instance If a database of Indian genetic material is compiled through the collaborative research, the ownership should remain with India. The technology and knowledge gained through the collaborative research should be freely accessible to

the Indian scientific community and remain in the public domain. The agriculture pact should enable India to have free access to the public sector technology and research in US universities and research institutions. The new varieties should be made available to farmers through public research institutions as done during the Green Revolution and should not be given to the

private sector for commercialization. When studying the Freedom Movement in school, we learnt that during British rule, raw cotton was sent to Manchester, and finished textiles were sold back to the “natives”. Gandhi’s response was a country wide khadi spinning programme. Under the latest avatar of colonization, that is the Knowledge Initiative, Indian farmers and scientists will work like indentured labour on their own farms and laboratories, produce

new varieties only to see them patented by the Americans and sold back to the Indians. We can expect as Vandana Shiva does, the extermination of that species which exists largely in India – the small farmer. In negotiating the US-India Civilian Nuclear Deal, the Americans wrung out of India many crucial concessions. The Agricultural Knowledge Initiative is one of many such. Ambassador David Mulford, in a speech on April 24, 2006 "The Promise of India", at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC., listed more than a dozen areas where India had to compromise long held positions.[ii] Dr. Krishan Bir Singh in his note to the Prime Minister also made this interesting point –“Our planners are playing an extremely dubious role which is absolutely not in the national interest” But this is nothing new. John P. Lewis in commenting on the origin of the Green Revolution notes that the outcome of the US intervention in Indian agriculture is “… all the

healthier because our (the US Administration) role in the exercise has been closely held: indeed most of the Indian cabinet are not fully aware of it”. Lewis adds ”In some ways the most auspicious development of all has been the Indian Government’s reaction to our “performance conditioning” of our $50 million fertilizer loan… Nevertheless, our list of conditions was a yard long, and of the kind that would have made the Indians bridle a few months ago”. Lewis adds, that ‘Indian observation of the way good self-help pays off should speed the acceptance of similarly conditioned assistance in the

future”.[iii] We have since then been ever ready for this form of self help and we would never “bridle” at any conditions dictated to us. www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7996 [ii] http://www.thesouthasian.org/archives/2006/usindia_nuclear_deal_the_carro.html [iii] “The Green Revolution: whose baby was it?” The Organic Farming Sourcebook. 1996, Mapusa, The Other India Press:82. Mr. C. Subramanium, who was then the Agriculture Minister was in 1998 awarded the Bharat Ratna,

India’s highest civilian honour. Sandhirs <nimmiraj61 wrote: If you agree with the views of this Indian Express Story, take affirmative action by writing to BJP/Communist M.P.s and parties to not be stooges of Pakistan and China. URL for parlimentarians is http://goidirectory.nic.in/ Rajinder Sandhir Print Story It’s India, stupid Posted online: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST After his negotiators had delivered a very credible nuclear agreement with the US last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had an easy case to defend.

The impressive part of the PM’s statement to Parliament on Monday was its complete political self-assurance. He declared the readiness to let history judge his huge accomplishment in the nuclear liberation of India. The PM is aware that the debate on the nuclear deal has long ceased to be a technical one. For quite some time, the BJP and the CPM have made it plain they will attack the 123 Agreement, irrespective of its contents. The PM confronted this challenge head on when he declared over the weekend that there will be no renegotiation of the nuclear agreement and told his opponents to either accept the deal or pull down his government. The PM’s new robustness should rub off on the Congress when parliamentary debate begins in a few days. To be sure, as the main opposition party, it was BJP’s responsibility to question the government’s negotiating positions. But from the very moment the PM and George Bush unveiled the nuclear initiative two years ago, the BJP

painted itself into a corner with its unremitting opposition to the deal. Has BJP begun to see itself as a party in permanent opposition? Worse still, the BJP seemed ready to abandon its own rightful claim of making India a real nuclear weapon power and transforming India’s relationship with the US. It is also understandable that the CPM finds it hard to get over its ideological opposition to engaging the US and wants to retain the option of challenging the government’s conduct of foreign policy. What is tragic, however, is the failure of the BJP and the CPM to see the line that separates the natural calculus of self-interest among contending parties and the broader commitment to national interest. Beyond all the technical abracadabra of the nuclear agreement, the world fully understands that the deal is about ending the atomic symmetry between New Delhi and Islamabad and putting India on par with nuclear China. If India chooses to

forgo the nuclear deal at hand, under pressure from the BJP and the CPM, no two nations will be happier than China and Pakistan at seeing India poke itself in the eye.

DELETE button is history. Unlimited mail storage is just a click away.

August 15, 2007

How many of us really know all the details of the Indo-US Nuclear Agreement? Are we aware of all the nuances in that agreement? BJP did make India a nuclear power and break the US-phobia of the earlier Governments but BJP also has to recognise the combined opposition of the Indian Atomic Scientists to some clauses of that agreement. However the opinion of these scientists may be questionable. When I joined BARC (Bhabha Atomic Research Centre) as a Scientist in a somewhat senior cadre (SO-SC1) in 1964 I used to hear of an assessment that China was 10 years behind India in nuclear technology. But China had proved us wrong. In the nuclear submarine project BARC did actively participate but there are people who still question the role of BARC in that. In the mid-sixties there was the planning to produce ten thousand megawatts of electricity by the nuclear route within a decade or so. Where are those projections? If we see the vastly poor

past assessments of the people at the helm of affairs it may be right that we are going in for the nuclear agreement. This is not to cast any aspersion on the merit and the capability of the world-class scientists in BARC.Prabha Krishnan <prabha40249 wrote: The media will have us believe that the civilian nuclear deal exists in a vacuum. It is in fact embedded in a matrix of over a dozen "concessions" wrung out of the Indians. I am pasting an extract from my book on

Paradoxical Healing. In this I have attempted to show that systematic destruction of the environment is both the outcome of losing touch with the Relational Self, and the way of further distancing ourselves from it. This is why we ail. Realigning ourselves with the Sacred Self, which is nothing but the Web of Creation itself, is the way to heal. Thus there is in essence nothing paradoxical about this healing. The quest for nuclear power is destructive enough -- what we have to give the Americans in exchange is a lot worse -- we have been asked to mortage India;s future for generations to come. Sorry for this long post -- it is because I am not "stupid" but cautious. Extract. This trend is set to be intensified soon. The US-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative agreement on agriculture was signed

in March 2006, and generated deep misgivings in many sections of the society. It is now known that companies like Monsanto, Wall-Mart etc. will be on the board of US-India Agricultural Knowledge Initiative Agreement to monitor agricultural research, education and dissemination and exchange of knowledge between US and India. Though this Initiative is being touted as the so-called "Second Green Revolution" it has no connection with the First Green Revolution in which the seeds were with the farmers. The agricultural pact is a part of the larger picture of emerging trend of globalization which aims towards corporatisation of agriculture. Dr. Krishan Bir Chaudhary, Executive Chairman, Bharat Krishak Samaj is one among many who have voiced their apprehensions regarding this deal. In a note sent to the Prime Minister he has made these key points. It is highly regrettable that the major stakeholders in agriculture in India, like farmer's organizations, State governments, Standing Committees of Parliament, civil society organizations and eminent academics, have not been consulted in preparing the framework of the agriculture deal nor in determining the focus areas. All

features of the agriculture deal must be in consonance with existing Indian policy and legislation, the National Biodiversity Act and the Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act. It is alarming that there is no mention in the deal of key issues of genetic engineering, like respecting crops in their centers of origin, of protecting socio-economic interests of rural and tribal communities and implementing a regime for liability and redress in case something goes wrong with a genetically engineered crop or fish or animal. Key policy issues with respect to Intellectual Property Rights must be implemented, for instance If a database of Indian genetic material is compiled through the collaborative research, the ownership should remain with India. The technology and knowledge gained through the collaborative research should be freely accessible to the Indian scientific

community and remain in the public domain. The agriculture pact should enable India to have free access to the public sector technology and research in US universities and research institutions. The new varieties should be made available to farmers through public research institutions as done during the Green Revolution and should not be given to the private sector for commercialization. When studying the Freedom Movement in school, we learnt that during British rule, raw cotton was sent to Manchester, and finished textiles were sold back to the “natives”. Gandhi’s response was a country wide khadi spinning programme. Under the latest avatar of colonization, that is the Knowledge Initiative, Indian farmers and scientists will work like indentured labour on their own farms and laboratories, produce new varieties only to see them patented by the Americans and sold back to the Indians. We can expect as Vandana Shiva does, the extermination of that species which exists largely in India – the small

farmer. In negotiating the US-India Civilian Nuclear Deal, the Americans wrung out of India many crucial concessions. The Agricultural Knowledge Initiative is one of many such. Ambassador David Mulford, in a speech on April 24, 2006 "The Promise of India", at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC., listed more than a dozen areas where India had to compromise long held positions.[ii] Dr. Krishan Bir Singh in his note to the Prime Minister also made this interesting point –“Our planners are playing an extremely dubious role which is absolutely not in the national interest” But this is nothing new. John P. Lewis in commenting on the origin of the Green Revolution notes that the outcome of the US intervention in Indian agriculture is “… all the healthier

because our (the US Administration) role in the exercise has been closely held: indeed most of the Indian cabinet are not fully aware of it”. Lewis adds ”In some ways the most auspicious development of all has been the Indian Government’s reaction to our “performance conditioning” of our $50 million fertilizer loan… Nevertheless, our list of conditions was a yard long, and of the kind that would have made the Indians bridle a few months ago”. Lewis adds, that ‘Indian observation of the way good self-help pays off should speed the acceptance of similarly conditioned assistance in the future”.[iii] We have since then been ever ready for this form of self help and we would never “bridle” at any conditions dictated to us. www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=7996 [ii] http://www.thesouthasian.org/archives/2006/usindia_nuclear_deal_the_carro.html [iii] “The Green Revolution: whose baby was it?” The Organic Farming Sourcebook. 1996, Mapusa, The Other India Press:82. Mr. C. Subramanium, who was then the Agriculture Minister was in 1998 awarded the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour. Sandhirs <nimmiraj61 (AT) (DOT) co.uk> wrote: If you agree with the views of this Indian Express Story, take affirmative action by writing to BJP/Communist M.P.s and parties to not be stooges of Pakistan and China. URL for parlimentarians is http://goidirectory.nic.in/ Rajinder Sandhir Print

Story It’s India, stupid Posted online: Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 0000 hrs IST After his negotiators had delivered a very credible nuclear agreement with the US last month, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had an easy case to defend. The impressive part of the PM’s statement to Parliament on Monday was its complete political self-assurance. He declared the readiness to let history judge his huge accomplishment in the nuclear liberation of India. The PM is aware that the debate on the nuclear deal has long ceased to be a technical one. For quite some time, the BJP and the CPM have made it plain they will attack the 123 Agreement, irrespective of its contents. The PM confronted this challenge head on when he declared over the weekend that there will be no renegotiation of the nuclear agreement and told his

opponents to either accept the deal or pull down his government. The PM’s new robustness should rub off on the Congress when parliamentary debate begins in a few days. To be sure, as the main opposition party, it was BJP’s responsibility to question the government’s negotiating positions. But from the very moment the PM and George Bush unveiled the nuclear initiative two years ago, the BJP painted itself into a corner with its unremitting opposition to the deal. Has BJP begun to see itself as a party in permanent opposition? Worse still, the BJP seemed ready to abandon its own rightful claim of making India a real nuclear weapon power and transforming India’s relationship with the US. It is also understandable that the CPM finds it hard to get over its ideological opposition to engaging the US and wants to retain the option of challenging the government’s conduct of foreign policy. What is tragic, however, is the failure of the BJP and the CPM to

see the line that separates the natural calculus of self-interest among contending parties and the broader commitment to national interest. Beyond all the technical abracadabra of the nuclear agreement, the world fully understands that the deal is about ending the atomic symmetry between New Delhi and Islamabad and putting India on par with nuclear China. If India chooses to forgo the nuclear deal at hand, under pressure from the BJP and the CPM, no two nations will be happier than China and Pakistan at seeing India poke itself in the eye.

DELETE button is history. Unlimited mail storage is just a click away.

Pinpoint customers who are looking for what you sell.

August 15, 2007

Thank you Dr Prabha Krishna for giving an educated response to this. Thank you too to Guru K for posting Jessica Long’s article.

Its good to look at this issue from all angles. Actually its not just the farmers and the consumers who are ready to eat non organic produce who are at risk. Its even those who are willing to make the healthy choice and go through pains to find and buy organic. Monsanto’s seeds are designed with inbuilt pesticides, and these crops contaminate even non Monsanto fields. So even if you are buying organic it could be contaminated and many good farmers stand to lose their organic status thanks to contamination.

Anything that allows Monsanto and other GM companies to sell in India should be rejected.

Nandita

August 16, 2007

It is true that there is a big question mark on the effect on health due to the consumption of the GM (Genetically Modified) food but I am still not aware of incorporation of any harmful chemical pesticide in the GM seeds. I was thinking that a genuine genetic modification makes the crops (grown out of the GM seeds) pest-resistant. Nandita Shah <shahnandi wrote: Thank you Dr Prabha Krishna for giving an educated response to this. Thank you too to

Guru K for posting Jessica Long’s article. Its good to look at this issue from all angles. Actually its not just the farmers and the consumers who are ready to eat non organic produce who are at risk. Its even those who are willing to make the healthy choice and go through pains to find and buy organic. Monsanto’s seeds are designed with inbuilt pesticides, and these crops contaminate even non Monsanto fields. So even if you are buying organic it could be contaminated and many good farmers stand to lose their organic status thanks to contamination. Anything that allows Monsanto and other GM companies to sell in India should be rejected. Nandita

Moody friends. Drama queens. Your life? Nope! - their life, your story. Play Sims Stories at Games.