India v Pakistan

[pandarilla]

#prayforfuckingdavierobertson

[Bully Wee Villa]

Don't like India because they keep refusing to play tests against Pakistan. Plus Kashmir seems like it would make more sense to be Pakistani than Indian. Pakistan does seem a bit terrorist-curious, though. I'm supporting the draw. 

Edited February 28, 2019 by Bully Wee Villa

[Dindeleux]

You finding it hard to believe that anyone has lived a life less boring than your own?

Aye no bother Dr Dre.

[Miguel Sanchez]

14 hours ago, Antiochas III said:

India's greed meant the ICC reduced the teams that qualify for the Cricket World Cup meaning Scotland missed out because of weather.  This means supporting Pakistan is the correct thing to do surely

I don't know, anyone who limits the amount of cricket Scotland plays must have something about them.

[JamieThomas]

4 hours ago, Miguel Sanchez said:

I don't know, anyone who limits the amount of cricket Scotland plays must have something about them.

Reminder that Scotland boabied England at the cricket last time we played, instantly making it our national sport.

[dirty dingus]

I'm backing India. The female regiments look as though they have a bit more at the front.

[Granny Danger]

Interesting article from Robert Fisk.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-india-pakistan-conflict-balakot-arms-trade-jaish-e-mohammed-a8800076.html

India was Israel’s largest arms client in 2017, paying £530m for Israeli air defence, radar systems and ammunition, including air-to-ground missiles – most of them tested during Israel’s military offensives against Palestinians and targets in Syria.

Israel itself is trying to explain away its continued sales of tanks, weapons and boats to the Myanmar military dictatorship – while western nations impose sanctions on the government which has attempted to destroy its minority and largely Muslim Rohingya people. But Israel’s arms trade with India is legal, above-board and much advertised by both sides.

[welshbairn]

2 hours ago, Granny Danger said:

Interesting article from Robert Fisk.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/israel-india-pakistan-conflict-balakot-arms-trade-jaish-e-mohammed-a8800076.html

India was Israel’s largest arms client in 2017, paying £530m for Israeli air defence, radar systems and ammunition, including air-to-ground missiles – most of them tested during Israel’s military offensives against Palestinians and targets in Syria.

Israel itself is trying to explain away its continued sales of tanks, weapons and boats to the Myanmar military dictatorship – while western nations impose sanctions on the government which has attempted to destroy its minority and largely Muslim Rohingya people. But Israel’s arms trade with India is legal, above-board and much advertised by both sides.

I read that earlier. Think it's a bit of a step from Israel selling arms to anyone who will buy them to Israel conspiring with India to start a war with Pakistan. I admire Fisk for his work in the past but I fear he's losing the plot a bit, or just getting a bit lazy. Fair enough given he's getting on a bit and has been through some awful stuff.

Edited February 28, 2019 by welshbairn

[Jarballs]

I'm backing India. The female regiments look as though they have a bit more at the front.

Double wid

[vikingTON]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/05/india-revoke-disputed-kashmir-special-status

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49231619

This can only end well. 

[dorlomin]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/49306816/article-370-gunfire-at-kashmir-rally-india-denies-happened

 

Possibly turning (more) violent in Kashmir. 

[SandyCromarty]

In 1970 India absolutely pulverised what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, this resulted in starvation on a massive scale through the seventies, in 1973 I was on the Ben Line ship the Ben Kitlan and we took a cargo of rice into Chittagong, the rice had been funded by a Ravi Shankar and George Harrison fund raising concert, the scenes when we arrived were appalling and demonstrated the ruthlessness of an Indian nation against a defenseless country.

The Russians were already there but their main intent was to clear the river of the bombed out ships not to feed the starving as far as we could ascertain. 

[welshbairn]

19 minutes ago, SandyCromarty said:

In 1970 India absolutely pulverised what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, this resulted in starvation on a massive scale through the seventies, in 1973 I was on the Ben Line ship the Ben Kitlan and we took a cargo of rice into Chittagong, the rice had been funded by a Ravi Shankar and George Harrison fund raising concert, the scenes when we arrived were appalling and demonstrated the ruthlessness of an Indian nation against a defenseless country.

The Russians were already there but their main intent was to clear the river of the bombed out ships not to feed the starving as far as we could ascertain. 

Are you not meaning West Pakistan rather than India? India came to the aid of East Pakistan/Bangladesh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide

 

 

[Detournement]

Quote

 

Reporters Without Borders say that India is the fifth most dangerous place for journalists in the world, ranked just above Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Mexico. Here I must pause to thank PEN for the work it does to protect writers and journalists who are have been imprisoned, prosecuted, censored and worse. From one day to the next, it could be any one of us that is in the line of fire. To know that there is an organization looking out for us is a consolation.

In India, those who’ve been jailed are the lucky ones. The less fortunate are dead. Gauri Lankesh, Narendra Dabholkar, MM Kalburgi, and Govind Pansare, all critics of the Hindu far right, have been assassinated. Theirs were the high-profile killings. Scores of other activists working with the Right to Information Act to uncover massive corruption scandals have been killed or found dead in suspicious circumstances. Over the last five years, India has distinguished itself as a lynching nation. Muslims and Dalits have been publicly flogged and beaten to death by vigilante Hindu mobs in broad daylight, and the “lynch videos” then gleefully uploaded to YouTube. The violence is flagrant, open and certainly not spontaneous. Although the violence against Muslims is not new and the violence against Dalits is ancient – these lynchings have a clear ideological underpinning.

The lynchers know that they have protection in the highest places. Protection not just from the government and the prime minister, but from the organization that controls them both—the far-right, proto-fascist Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), the most secretive and most powerful organization in India. It was founded in 1925, its founding ideologues were greatly influenced by European fascism. They openly praised Hitler and Mussolini, and compared Indian Muslims to the “Jews of Germany”. It has worked ceaselessly for 95 years toward having India formally declared a Hindu Nation. Its declared enemies are Muslims, Christians, and Communists.

The RSS runs a shadow government that functions through tens of thousands of shakhas (branches) and other ideologically affiliated organizations with different names – some of them astonishingly violent – spread across the country. Traditionally controlled by a sect of west coast Brahmins. known as Chitpavan Brahmins, the RSS today has white supremacists and racists from the United States and Europe circling around it, writing in praise of Hinduism’s age-old practice of caste. It’s what is more accurately known as Brahminism – a brutal system of social hierarchy they envy for its elaborate, institutionalized cruelty, which has survived more or less intact from ancient times. Brahminism also has admirers in the most unexpected places. One of them, you will be saddened to know, was Mohandas Gandhi – who considered caste to be the “genius” of Hindu society. I have written at length about Gandhi’s attitude toward caste and race in a book called The Doctor and The Saint, so I will not dwell on it now.

Let me just leave you with this: at a speech at a missionary conference in Madras in 1916, he said: “The vast organisation of caste answered not only the religious wants of the community, but it answered too its political needs. The villagers managed their internal affairs through the caste system, and through it they dealt with any oppression from the ruling power or powers. It is not possible to deny the organising capability of a nation that was capable of producing the caste system its wonderful power of organisation.”

Today the RSS boasts of having a trained militia of six hundred thousand members who proudly call themselves swayam-sevaks (volunteers), whose numbers include the prime minister and most of his cabinet. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) functions as the parliamentary political department of the RSS. Ram Madhav, its secretary is a member of the RSS. By insisting on viewing the BJP as an independent entity, as an ordinary, right wing, conservative political party, by inadvertently or deliberately minimizing its organic connection to the RSS, many in the Indian and the international media, as well as many who claim to be secular and liberal, have eased its path to political power.

Modi’s mainstream political career was launched, coincidentally, (or maybe not) just weeks after 9/11, when, he was appointed as the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, although he was not an elected member of the Legislative Assembly. Within months of that appointment, under Modi’s watch, a pogrom against Muslims took place in Gujarat, in which two thousand people were killed in broad daylight. Within months he called elections and won. At a grand convention of businessmen and industrialists in Gujarat, CEOs of several of India’s major corporations openly endorsed him as their future candidate for prime minister. Fascism and capitalism exchanged marriage vows in a not-so-quiet ceremony and moved in together. After three terms as Gujarat’s chief minister, Modi was elected prime minister of India in 2014. He was given a hero’s welcome by the liberal commentariat and he has traveled the world embracing and being embraced by world leaders, including Barack Obama and Emmanuel Macron. And Donald Trump of course, but that is no surprise. None of them is ignorant about who Modi really is, but all of them have something to sell to this “market” of more than a billion people. Now after five years in office and a vicious communal campaign, he and his cohorts, are seeking re-election. The candidates include a saffron robed Sadhvi Pragya, who is standing trial for being part of a terrorist strike that killed six people and is currently out on bail.

In what marks a dangerous turn of events, newspapers reported a public speech by Maneka Gandhi, a union minister in Modi’s cabinet in which she said that villages would be graded according to which ones voted for the BJP in the greatest numbers and they would be rewarded or punished by the award or withholding of ‘development’ proportionate to their loyalty. She is by no means the only one speaking this language, by no means the only one who has openly suggested that the Party knows who has voted for it and who has not. And that retribution will follow. And by no means the first to hint that political parties have access to data from what is supposed to be a secret ballot—data they can use to their advantage in dangerous ways that completely undermine elections and democracy itself.

In the era of surveillance capitalism, a few people will know everything about us, and will use this information to control us.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/13/arundhati-roy-literature-shelter-pen-america

This an excerpt from Arundhati Roy's speech to PEN America a few months ago.

It was the first I had ever heard of the RSS. India gets a very easy time in the western press.

 

[Sergeant Wilson]

4 hours ago, SandyCromarty said:

In 1970 India absolutely pulverised what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh, this resulted in starvation on a massive scale through the seventies, in 1973 I was on the Ben Line ship the Ben Kitlan and we took a cargo of rice into Chittagong, the rice had been funded by a Ravi Shankar and George Harrison fund raising concert, the scenes when we arrived were appalling and demonstrated the ruthlessness of an Indian nation against a defenseless country.

The Russians were already there but their main intent was to clear the river of the bombed out ships not to feed the starving as far as we could ascertain. 

 

[SandyCromarty]

19 hours ago, welshbairn said:

Are you not meaning West Pakistan rather than India? India came to the aid of East Pakistan/Bangladesh.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Bangladesh_genocide

 

 

Yes my mistake, apologies, blinded by the title of the thread.

But it really was a terrible time for the Bangladeshi's

More recently I did a couple of jobs in Pakistan's interior and my travels entailed me being escorted everywhere with heavily armed guards due to earlier fatal attacks on Westerners. 

[Sir Tarmo Kink]

Pakistan is really corrupt and supports terrorism. Could never support their government in anything.
Bin Laden staying across the road from the police station. They probably protected him ffs.

This is one of the main reasons I am against Pakistan. Osama literally rocked up at a purpose-built mansion for a few years and did his gardening outdoors but they apparently didn’t know about it. In the terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team about a decade back, the Pakistan team bus was suspiciously held back when it usually followed the Sri Lankan bus. Dodgy as f**k, corrupt, terrorist-sympathising country.

But then again, Virat Kohli is Indian, so I’m torn.

[Kuro]

10 minutes ago, Tarmo Kink said:

 

This is one of the main reasons I am against Pakistan. Osama literally rocked up at a purpose-built mansion for a few years and did his gardening outdoors but they apparently didn’t know about it. In the terrorist attack on the Sri Lanka cricket team about a decade back, the Pakistan team bus was suspiciously held back when it usually followed the Sri Lankan bus. Dodgy as f**k, corrupt, terrorist-sympathising country.

But then again, Virat Kohli is Indian, so I’m torn.

 

Two points here - firstly, Osama Bin Laden was not killed in Abbotabad in 2011 or whatever, he had been dead for years by that point.  You'd have to be awfy naive to believe that.

Two, we are a terrorist sympathising, arming and enabling country when it suits us, its just they're our type of terrorists.