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To all Indians supporting or opposing NPR, it is time to reveal this for the long term welfare of the nation.
Dear India,
My name is Nilotpal Kanti Sinha and I am a mathematician. In 2015, I worked on a project with the Government of India, Ministry of Minority Affairs and I used to report to Dr. Najma Heptulla who was then the cabinet Minister for Minority Affairs and the current Governor of Manipur.
I was assigned the task of estimating the number of minorities in every village, tehsil, town, city and district in India using national census data of 2011. The legal definition of minority in India is any person who is not a Hindu.
The purpose of this project was so that govt. can use the actual data to identify districts where the total non-Hindu population was higher than that of Hindus so that the central govt. can allocate funds to these districts for the development of non-Hindus. The total budget was in several hundreds crores. So yes, there is a central government fund for developing the down tridden of every community except Hindus.
I did the task and calculated which district had what proportions of Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Jains, Buddhists, Parsis, Other minor religions. At the end of this exercise, I knew the statistical details of more than 700 districts in India and identified those districts which had a higher % of non-Hindus.
In West Bengal, I found that out of the 23 districts in West Bengal, about 10 of them did not qualify for the central funds because in these districts Hindus were inp majority. I submitted all the findings in my report to the Secretary of the Ministry of Minority Affairs.
A few days later, the Secretary called me and told me about a letter from the office of Chief Minister West Bengal where she was complaining that all the 23 districts should receive the funds since Muslims are in majority in all the districts and demanding explanation why we had exclude 10 districts. The Secretary asked me for my advice. This gentleman was one of the very few top level IAS officers who believed taking decisions based on the evidence and merit of data . A few days later, I gave him a very scientific answer that I am really proud of and want to share with all of India today.
I looked at all available historical data on West Bengal population starting from the 1991 census and calculated the growth rate of the populations of minorities. I factored in birth rate, mortality rate and even the likelihood of twins born. I found that in order for actual minority population to be higher that of Hindus as claimed in the letter, the population growth rate of minorities must be fast enough to beat Hindu population as recorded in the census. There are only three possible scenarios under which this could be true:
1. Assuming a nine month gestation period and one month recovery period post delivery, every adult minority female will have to give birth more than 1 child every year from 2011 to 2015
2. Or somehow the minority population in these districts disproportionately increased in a non-biological way
3. Or West Bengal fudged the previous census data
Option 1 is biologically ruled out unless most of the minority mothers in Bengal gave birth to twins during this period. This left only option 2 and 3. But both these two remaining options directly points to illegal immigrants! There is no way there 10 districts can be Muslim majority unless they have been imported from somewhere else. The Secretary of the Ministry of Minority affairs got the reply he wanted.
And this is why India needs detailed data of population though NPR right now.
Note: If you do not agree with me, please download the West Bengal census data from the govt website https://bit.ly/2QE4ltc, do the math and convince yourself.
VHS - Maharashtra had organised Study tour cum picnic ideally can be called holy pilgrimage . Under the guidance of Jagdish Shetty & Dr Ajay Sankhe .
It was wonderful best study excursion ever taken.
Highly motivational , you Rediscover your glorious History ...
This has potential to awaken the Nation from its long slumber and take it by storm !!!
Sandip Kaimal along with Ajay G , Rajiv H , Umesh G and team are doing great research and ground work to gather crucial data to trace the roots of Vasai Nala Sopora Virar in Palghar District of coastal Maharashtra. Reference in our Puranas from Treta Yuga Ramayan Mahabharat period can be linked. Parashuram Bhagwan Ram Bhagwan Krishna Balarama Pandavas Chaitanya mahaprabhu gracing thier feet on this pious place making it holy land. The Historical Monuments Temple Kunds around the place carry significant importance . There are lot of unattended sites with material lying unexplored. We are looking at a great civilisation which existed 10,000 years back within 50 KM of present Mumbai City.
The invaders looters destroyers - Portuguese Arabs English definately saw pre existing flourishing settlement in the area to spread there footprint . Force terror conversion was imposed to change the narrative of the vicinity.
Proper investigation Archeology study can reveal more untold truth .
It's a attempt on the part of VHS to adhere to one of its five principles to bring out the correct History in the forefront . This will further motivate others in different part of India to take up similar exercise in rewriting our distorted History !!!
In the words of Historian PN Oak , " Invaders in India can never be Builders ... They came here to Loot destroy and grab local wealth. They did bring in change by introducing new things to suit to there advantage with vested interest " .
Very soon VHS Maharashtra will be revealing the first part of the story to the Nation with a Documentary Film , which will be Lok Arpan to the Nation by VHS National President Dr Swamy on 1st March 2020 at Palghar - Maharashtra .
Brexit has happened. But the United Kingdom still faces two major choices over the coming year. How will it align its domestic economy with Europe? And how will it continue its global role? The new UK government is still deeply conflicted on these choices. Only when they are made will it know how to conduct its future relations with the Asia Pacific.
A little history helps. By the end of World War II, the British Empire was still intact. But the United States demanded that the British Empire be dismembered. This happened over the next 30 years. The General Agreement on Tariffs on Trade, which became the World Trade Organization, gradually removed barriers to international trade until the Uruguay Round concluded in 1993. It wound back the preferential trade which had occurred within the British Empire. Commonwealth countries such as Australia and Canada increasingly traded with their near neighbours. The United Kingdom withdrew from Malaysia and Singapore. UK rule in India came to an end.
The United Kingdom saw its way forward in Europe. It joined the European Economic Community in 1973 and led the establishment of the European Single Market in the 1980s. Many foreign firms located themselves in the United Kingdom in order to serve the European market. The Japanese car industry established its base there for European expansion. UK firms too seized the opportunity provided by a market of 450 million people. BAE Systems and Rolls Royce, for example, have been at the centre of the aerospace industry in Europe. UK universities lead those in Europe.
But the Single Market is not just a free trade area or a customs union. It is built on four freedoms: the freedom of movement of goods, capital, services and labour. Like all freedoms, these need to be administered and protected within a governmental regulatory framework. Product, labour and environmental standards — and the freedoms on which they build — are all enforced by the European Union. The enforcement of these requirements is carried out by the European Court of Justice.
As a result, membership in the European Union required deep political compromises in the United Kingdom. Those engaged in the financial services industry, of course, regarded the free movement of capital and labour within Europe as desirable. But unskilled workers — damaged by the deindustrialisation which occurred under former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s — did not.
Controlling migration was a central Brexit issue. Many in the United Kingdom object to the sovereignty of the European Court of Justice, given their memories of the British Empire. But these compromises were held together by the United Kingdom’s prosperity brought by membership in the European Union. They have been shattered by Brexit.
EU–UK negotiations about future trade are now beginning. The United Kingdom wants to continue the unimpeded access to European markets which it possessed in the Single Market. But the European Union asserts that it will grant this only if the United Kingdom continues to subscribe to the Single Market’s freedoms and standards.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new government regards these conditions as unacceptable. His government wants to diverge from Europe in order to negotiate new openings for trade with other countries. But what will the United Kingdom actually offer other countries in future negotiations? Access to the UK market is a smaller prize than access to the EU market, which it used to offer.
Moreover, the United Kingdom will find it difficult to grant what foreign countries want. India will seek access for its labour to work in the United Kingdom as a price for allowing the United Kingdom to sell goods and services into India. Asian countries will seek better employment opportunities for their students studying in UK universities.
China may seek product standards for what it sells to the United Kingdom that conflict with those in the European Union. Australian farmers will seek access to UK beef, lamb and sugar markets. But UK farmers, which have been protected by the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, will resist this. And, of course, the United States will seek access for its agricultural goods, produced under different standards from those which rule in the European Union.
The United Kingdom will need to resolve these issues in principle by December 2020 when the Brexit transition period is meant to end. Only then will openings emerge for negotiations about the United Kingdom’s future relations with countries in the Asia Pacific.
And only then will its global position become clear.
Previously, the United Kingdom had been important in determining the EU’s response to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. But it will be harder for the United Kingdom to exert this influence now that it is engaged in difficult trade negotiations with the European Union. Similarly, while the United Kingdom was an EU member, it acted as a bridge between Europe and the United States. But the decision to allow Huawei into the United Kingdom’s 5G network shows how difficult this will now be. Responses coordinated with France and Germany seem essential on both of these issues.
Progress will be slow. Countries in the Asia Pacific will not be able to make trade agreements with the United Kingdom until its relations with the European Union are clarified. Asia Pacific countries and the United Kingdom will need to work together towards greater global coherence in the face of global competition between the United States and China, rather than allowing further global disintegration to continue. That will also require cooperation with the European Union.
David Vines is Emeritus Professor of Economics and Emeritus Fellow of Balliol College at Oxford University. He is also a regular Visiting Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University, and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, London.
From Beijing's perspective, political influence operations are at least as important as military operations, if not more so. Although the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) military modernisation programs have been at the centre of attention for decades, China's influence operations have only recently begun to be scrutinised. It is easy enough to understand why. Policymakers can easily point to an adversary’s growing military capabilities in order to raise public awareness, highlight the potential danger posed to the nation’s security, and rally their constituents around the need to provide adequate means to address the challenge. By contrast, the potentially devastating effects of influence operations – and even their very existence – cannot be easily visualised. In the case of China, influence operations are also wrapped in mystifying terminology such as “magic weapons” and “united front”, which can be dismissed either as witchcraft or as the exclusive preoccupation of a coterie of obsessive Sinologists.
To help grasp the nature of the challenge at hand, it may be useful to think of China's influence strategy as very similar to its so-called “anti-access, area denial” strategy – in other words, what the Chinese Communist Party is trying to achieve with influence operations in the realm of ideas is similar to what it aims to accomplish in the military domain.
What has come to be referred to in the West as China’s “A2/AD strategy” first appeared two decades ago under the name “active strategic counterattack on exterior lines”. It aims to prevent or constrict the deployment of an opponent’s forces into a given theatre of operations and to limit their freedom to manoeuvre once they are present. Against an adversary that approaches China’s territory, the PLA intends to “strike first, strike deep, hit hard” at the furthest possible distance from the mainland, targeting not only the enemy’s forces in the theatre, but also its supporting command, control, and logistical infrastructure. It is essentially part of a “vision for how to overcome weakness” against a numerically or technologically superior enemy.
Words are not merely instruments of communication used to facilitate exchanges and discussions; they convey concepts, ideals, and values that are the foundation for the norms on which the international architecture is constructed and thus determine how the world order is run. In sum: Whoever rules the words rules the world.
The same strategic framework explains how Chinese elites think about the global struggle for influence. Here, the hostile forces are not heavily armed soldiers threatening to attack China’s territory, but liberal democratic ideals and their corollaries – constitutional democracy, universal values, individual rights, economic liberalism, free media – which have been identified by the CCP as deadly “perils.” For the one party-state, the West’s promotion of liberal democracy is part of an ideological struggle led by an adversary that is still vastly superior, a situation that Chinese strategists describe as xiqiang woruo (“the West is strong, while China is weak”).
In the battle for influence, the power discrepancy is not so much technological as it is about an imbalance in “discourse power”. In China’s evolving strategic lexicon, this term refers to the ability not only to articulate attractive ideas, but also to be listened to, to influence others’ perceptions, and eventually to shape the international conversation. Beijing believes the West has used its power in this domain to dominate the international system and the world order. Words are not merely instruments of communication used to facilitate exchanges and discussions; they convey concepts, ideals, and values that are the foundation for the norms on which the international architecture is constructed and thus determine how the world order is run. In sum: Whoever rules the words rules the world. In the eyes of the CCP, the West’s superior discourse power is an existential threat more imminent than the remote possibility of a foreign military invasion.
Against the West’s post–Cold War “discourse offensive,” the Chinese leadership has established a layered defence, starting with the protection of its domestic perimeter, incrementally extending outwards. It first tried to prevent or constrict the inward flow of liberal democratic values and ideals within its territory: by building a Great Firewall around China’s cyberspace and strengthening party control over domestic media and information circulation. The CCP has also intensified domestic propaganda and “patriotic education” to inoculate its people against dangerous ideas that might slip through the first line of defence.
Recently, the party has also stepped up its long-standing control of Chinese communities abroad, which the CCP considers as the “sons and daughters” of the Chinese nation, no matter where they live. Several tools of control have been employed, including physical surveillance and regular compulsory checks with Chinese embassy officials, the creation by the party-state of overseas Chinese friendship, reunification, and students associations (and incremental subversion of older associative groupings), the purchase of overseas Chinese-language media outlets, and the surveillance, censorship, and control of information disseminated on social media platforms such as WeChat. The purpose of all these activities is to limit the expansion and possible propagation of what the party considers to be subversive ideas.
A billboard at the 2nd China International Import Expo, Shanghai, October 2019 (Wu Jun/VCG via Getty Images)
As the CCP continues to defend against, in its view, nefarious foreign attempts to infiltrate its domestic space, it has also begun to shift into counterattack mode, targeting audiences outside of the Chinese diaspora, striking deeper into the adversary’s territory, and hitting hard.
This has taken the shape of attempts to “properly disseminate China’s voice” and to influence foreign perceptions of China’s rise as non-threatening, usually by claiming that “peace has been in the blood of us Chinese and a part of our DNA” and that China “will never seek hegemony”. In addition to efforts to dispel criticism of the CCP’s model of political and economic governance and of its human rights abuses, the party-state is actively targeting foreign media, academia and business communities through the deployment of front organisations whose main purpose is the co-option of foreigners in support of Beijing’s strategic objectives.
The counter response also takes the form of retaliation against those who might threaten the party-state’s core interests. The suspension of NBA games in China after the Houston Rockets manager showed support for anti-government protests in Hong Kong on Twitter and a lawsuit filed against a French researcher who commented on Huawei are recent examples of “hit hard” counterattacks on exterior lines.
As it implements anti-access strategies to prevent foreign ideas from penetrating its domestic perimeter, the CCP is also trying to deny the West’s ability to spread its discourse globally. Most recently, the party-state has initiated the next phase in its ideational counteroffensive, specifically aiming at the command and control centre of Western discourse power – i.e., the institutions and norms that support the existing international order. The CCP’s rejection of universal values as enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is not a mere principled stance. The Chinese government’s efforts to ensconce its concepts in UN resolutions, as well as its promotion of the “right to development” as transcending all other rights and of the Belt and Road Initiative as synergistic with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals agenda, target the foundations of the existing international order. Denying the absolute precedence of individual rights weakens the case for spreading and defending freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and freedom to trade, to peacefully assemble, to access information, or to choose one’s government.
When, a decade ago, China started to behave more assertively in its surrounding maritime domain, some commentators pointed to the supposed lack of coordination among the “nine dragons stirring up the sea” (the Chinese government agencies dealing with the South China Sea). Scholars dissected at length what they described as the “assertiveness meme”, alerting Western policymakers to the potential for intensified security dilemmas and strategic rivalries if this “meme” were taken seriously. Other observers cautioned that “the United States should not exaggerate the significance of a rivalry over claims to a few hundred mostly uninhabited small islands, rocks and atolls.”
Ten years after Beijing gave the first hints of its ambitions, it has now become clear that “China, not the United States, would control the sea and airspace of the South China Sea at the outbreak of hostilities thanks to its artificial island bases”. China’s anti-access strategy in the maritime domain has significantly, and perhaps irreversibly, constricted the US military’s freedom to manoeuvre and to act in the East Asian theatre. Underestimating China’s global influence strategy similarly risks permitting a drastic limitation in the future ability of the United States to project its discourse power, promote liberal democratic ideals on the global stage, and perpetuate the existing international order.
Monitoring events in Balochistan, CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor), China's Belt and Road Initiative and it's economic and strategic implications, Pakistan Military operations and ongoing Baloch struggle.News and Reports are collected from open sources to raise awareness among scholars, researchers and public in general.
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