396.The Man in Blue – The Sang Parivar

my decorations on my orange wall 

This is not an anti-Hindu article. I met many Hindus who believed in the One, who believed in One Humanity and who did not look down on people of low caste, who made an honest living and shared with others. Some were better Sikhs than many of us.

But I strongly dislike members of the BJP, the VHP, the Bajrang Dal, the Shiv Sena and whatever other ‘Sang Parivar’ organisations there are inside Bharat Mata and outside it.

I dislike these people, as I dislike Panjabis who look down on people from Bihar and UP, as I dislike caste Hindus looking down on ‘outcastes’, as I dislike anybody anywhere who divides humanity in higher and lower.  

The Sang Parivar has given up on the idea of Dharm as a way of righteousness. They class all people who follow a dharm that originated on the sub-continent as Hindus. Not in a friendly open way but in a way that wants to narrow down all to their own narrow vision.

The Sang Parivar loves the Sikhs when they fight against Mughals or other Muslims. But if you tell them that a good Sikh should stand up against all dictatorships and all oppressors, including their own intolerant lot, they start foaming at the mouth.

They think that all Indian Christians and Muslims should leave their alien creeds and rejoin the Hindu Dharm. And they do not go about this in a friendly manner either. I agree with them that western Christians or Central Asian or Middle Eastern Muslims have no business to come to India to bring their ‘true religions’ to the poor ‘heathens’.

But killing missionaries, persecuting Christians and Muslims, infiltrating Buddhist, Jain and Sikh organisations, puts them on the same level as the most intolerant members of the Ibrahimic religions. This kind of Hindu supremacist ideas are not unique to the so called ‘Sang Parivar’ but can also be found amongst members of Congress and other smaller parties.

The Dal Khalsa which bravely keeps the idea of Khalistan alive in the East Panjab, makes a big mistake in their attitude towards poor, low caste Hindus from UP and Bihar. These people very often follow the Bhagats whose sabads have an important place in the Guru Granth Sahib.

The people that follow the Sang Parivar ideology are mostly Caste Hindus, not the poor low caste people. There is no Hindu majority in India. If you add the faith and ethnic minorities in India together and include the Dalits, they will form a majority. A real rainbow coalition could rule India, and might even make the biggest democracy a real democracy.

The Tribune – Kaiga staff shaken by radioactive water

Chennai, November 29. Workers at the Kaiga atomic power plant in Karnataka are a shaken lot after the drinking water of a laboratory cooler was found contaminated with radioactive Tritium, suspected to be an act of sabotage.

Fifty-five employees drank the contaminated water on November 24 and were hospitalised. Many of them were discharged later.

The incident that took place at the Unit 1 reactor building of the Kaiga generating station has left the employees completely shaken and has introduced an element of suspicion among them, said an official on condition of anonymity.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL), which owns the nuclear power plants including Kaiga, has launched a probe into the radiation leak. Tritium can cause cancer if ingested.

“Everybody has implicit faith in their colleagues at the work place and more so in the case of critical operations. This has got shaken now at Kaiga,” maintained a NPCIL official.

JP Gupta, station director at Kaiga, told IANS over phone: “We have a list of the people who had entered the reactor building that day. The investigating agencies are analysing the data.”

Denying any problem at the plant, Gupta said: “It is true that employees will be more vigilant now about their colleagues till the culprit is nabbed.”According to a statement issued by SK Jain, CMD of NPCIL, preliminary enquiries have not revealed any violation of operating procedures or radioactivity releases or security breach.

“It is possibly an act of mischief. The related agencies are investigating,” Jain’s statement said.

According to Gupta, the heavy water (Tritium) could have been taken from the reactor building (Unit 1), or from samples of the heavy water kept for analysis, or from outside where it is stored in sealed drums. — IANS

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20091130/nation.htm#21

The Tribune – Kaiga Atomic Power Plant Leak

 

Mischief suspected; staffers being grilled
No security breach by outsiders: NPCIL chief

Shiv Kumar & Shubhadeep Choudhury

Tribune News Service, Mumbai/Bangalore, November 29. The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd, under which the Kaiga atomic power plant falls, has identified some employees who could have contaminated the drinking water in a section of the plant with radioactive material, resulting which around 50 employees have taken ill.According to sources, around a dozen employees are being grilled. Chairman and Managing Director of NPCIL SK Jain said in a statement here that contamination at the nuclear plant could have been a deliberate act of mischief and not the result of any mishap.

Jain confirmed that no security systems were breached by outsiders and there were no release of radioactive material into the environment. Forty-five to fifty employees working in the first maintenance unit of the Kaiga plant were treated at the plant hospital in Mallapur for increased level of tritium after they drank water from a cooler in the operating area on November 24.

NPC officials said investigators probing the matter have identified the employees ,who had access to the first unit of the plant between 3 am and 6 am on November 24.

Access permits are routinely issued to all personnel entering operating island and the computerised access control system has record of all the personnel who have entered the operating island”, the statement said indicating that the culprit involved in the mischief would not be able to get away.

The employees are being questioned by various agencies, NPCIL officials said. The water cooler from where employees of the plant drank water was found contaminated with tritium (a radioactive isotope of hydrogen). The cooler has been was isolated and put out of use.

According to Jain, none of the employees have been hospitalised. “Preliminary inquiry does not reveal any violation of operating procedures or radioactivity releases or security breach. It is possibly an act of mischief. The related agencies are investigating,” he said.

As a precaution bioassay samples of all the persons working in that particular area were analysed. “Based on the analyses results, a few personnel were advised to visit for routine medical consultation as per laid down procedures. They are attending to their normal duties. This incidence has no way affected public, safety, health and environment”, the NPCIL said.

The first plant where the incident occurred has been shut for routine maintenance.

Jain said the tritium contamination was discovered when routine testing of urine samples of the workers was conducted. He added that medication can be used to remove contamination caused by Heavy Water inside the human body by perspiration and urination. “The contamination detected in this incident has been brought down quickly and currently one worker is close to the limit specified by Atomic Energy Regulatory Board (AERB),” Jain said.

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2009/20091130/main3.htm

St Truiden & Ieper (Belgium) 10 – 13 November IV

Fourth post about my trip to Belgium in November
All the pictures taken will be uploaded to a new set called Benelux 4 of my flicker photo account
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12445197@N05/sets/72157622685920411/

Brass band at the Menen Gate with beautiful trees in the background

Menen Poort and sangat

My two ‘potia’

Father & Daughter

More to follow
Harjinder Singh
Man in Blue

Gurbani Kanth Competition – Southall and maybe also at Hounslow

The last possible date to register has been brought back from November 29 to Friday 4 December

The Southal event will be on 
20 December 10 am
at 
Singh Sabha Gurdwara Havelock Road 

If there is enough interest we might have an extra session in the Singh Sabha Hounslow on the 25th of December

Tirath Yatra to Coventry IV

This is the fourth posting on the 07/11 ‘Tirath Yatra’ of Coventry by Balwant Singh and me
All pictures taken will be uploaded to the Gurdwara set of my flickr account
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12445197@N05/sets/72157622872811516/

Nanaksar ‘Gurdwara’
224 Foleshill Road
Coventry CV1 4HW
Is this really a Gursikh Temple ?
Is this a Gursikh temple run according to the teachings of the Guru Granth Sahib and the rules of the Rehat Maryada ?
To quote Maggie Thatcher, the answer is :
NO, NO, NO  

The ‘Gursikh Temple’ is not much to look at from the outside, but is beautiful inside

In almost all deras the area around the Guru Granth Sahib is not accessible to us ordinary mortals, and I have seen similar stairs leading up to the Guru Granth Sahib in the Baba Ke dera on the furniture market between Mohali and Chandigarh. Note the three pictures trying to depict Baba Nand as Guru Nanak !

Two standing Baba Nands to the left and right

From what I heard when in Panjab Baba Nand was a humble and friendly person. He did live for a while in a grotto in Himachal Pradesh which is not according to Guru’s teachings.

The ’sants’ who claim to be his followers are empire builders and many of them are fully immersed in Maya. The sevadars of such persons are often very friendly and humble persons. But that does not make it right to follow a ’sant’, or to have a divan full of pictures. 

Please do not be aggressive towards such a place, just go to Gurdwaras like Guru Nanak Prakash and the Singh Sabha Gurdwara, and work together on staying on Guru’s Path.

A Sikh believes in One God, One Humanity
A Sikh follows Guru Granth, Guru Panth 

The Guardian UK – Prey for the BNP

Priyamvada Gopal, 23 November 2009

The Sikhs who join in the hatred of Muslims are deluded if they expect to avoid racial exclusion

Rajinder Singh, a British Sikh with an extreme dislike of Muslims, is, according to the BNP, “the kind of immigrant you want if you’re going to have them”. And if, as expected, the party members vote to allow ethnic minorities to join, Singh wil be the first to be conferred this “honour”.

Sikh organisations have dismissed him – and fellow BNP wannabe “Ammo Singh” (a pseudonym) – as unrepresentative, and it is easy to write them off as self-hating lunatics or pranksters. But to do so is to obscure the larger realities of how race, religion and hate operate.

What has been lost in the storm over Nick Griffin’s BBC appearance and the debate over the freedom to voice hatred in the guise of “white rights” is that modern racism survives through a parasitical alliance of vicious groups and ideologies, each of which thinks it is superior to and more entitled to preservation and growth than the others. What they share is a commitment to delusions of absolute racial or religious grandeur and purity even as they compete for victim status.

The two Sikhs’ hostility to Islam is strong enough for them to overlook the contempt in which the BNP ultimately holds all racial minorities. Communities in Britain with links to the Indian subcontinent have, over time, seceded from their rich shared heritage and the assertive under which they fought successfully for their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. Dispersed into the sectarian religious identities of Sikhs, Hindu and Muslim, they have all but forgotten how to mobilise together against the threat of an opportunistic ethnic majoritarianism that does not, ultimately, make fine distinctions among thos it perceives as outsiders, focus instead solely on Muslims”.

A 2006 Runnymede Trust survey claims that as many as 80% of Hindus and Sikhs in Britain wished to be seen as specifically distinct from Muslims. “Don’t Freak, I’m a Sikh”, urged T-shirts printed after the 7 July bombings.

Generalising labels like “Asian” may have their drawbacks but, as Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations notes of Sunrise Radio’s bizarre decision to drop “Asian” from its banner under sustained pressure from extremist groups like the World Hindu Council, the hope underlying such disaffiliation is that “racist whites could be persuaded to exclude Hindus and Sikhs from their hatred, and

Griffin’s assertion that “many” Hindus and Sikhs support the BNP is a wild exaggeration. But we need to face up to the messy reality of a society where ethno-religious fragmentation and tensions between minority groups work to the advantage of majority chauvinism. Kundnani points out that as early as 2002 the BNP was able to persuade a tiny Sikh faction called the Shere-e-Punjab to participate in its anti-Muslim campaign. Even if such collaborators are a tiny fringe, minority communities need to be aware of the ways in which their participation in divisive categories and separatist communal warfare only strengthens the positions of the racists who seek to subordinate them entirely.

Anti-immigrant views among migrants are not new, but what extremisms also share is an exaggerated fear that other groups are numerically overwhelming theirs. When Sikh-Muslim gang fights broke out in Slough, the language used mimicked the defensive territorial language of the BNP. “Muslims run Slough,” one gang member insisted at the time. “Why are Sikhs coming from outside?”

Ammo Singh told the BBC, which has made a habit of using fringe groups as representatives of entire communities, that Islam was planning to take over Britain through “a combination of immigration, high birth rate and conversion”.

Rajinder Singh, like many Hindus and Sikhs, has invoked the 1947 partition of India, in which he lost his father, as the cause of his enmity towards Muslims. This selective emphasis conveniently obscures two facts. The first is that it was the British empire and its policies of divide and rule which culminated in the partition that was its last official act. The second is that all three communities are fully responsible for the horrific butchery, bloodletting and rape that followed. Rather than mourning the tragedy of partition, men like Rajinder Singh seek to re-enact it in Britain, once again under the aegis of British racial supremacism.

The time has come for us to recognise racial and religious hatred in all its manifestations for what it is and take a stand against it – alongside right-thinking whites – not only when it is directed at us, but also when it is undertaken in our name. The colour line hasn’t disappeared yet, but the real struggle is between fascist hatreds and humane solidarity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/23/bnp-racism-deluded-sikhs-muslims

BBC News – Pakistan’s Gilani warns Obama over US Afghan troop plan

BBC News Thursday, 26 November 2009

Pakistan has warned the US that sending more soldiers to Afghanistan could endanger its southwest border region.

President Barack Obama is expected next week to order more than 30,000 extra US soldiers into Helmand province, to battle Taliban insurgents.

But Pakistan prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani fears this would force militants over the border into Balochistan.

“We want a stable Afghanistan. At the same time we don’t want our country to be destabilised,” said Mr Gilani.

Exit strategy

“This is the concern that we already discussed with the US administration – that the influx of militants towards Baluchistan should be taken care of, otherwise that can destabilise Balochistan.”

Security in Pakistan has been deteriorating ever since coalition forces entered Afghanistan eight years ago.

In Balochistan, which borders both Iran and Afghanistan, hundreds of people have died in attacks by both separatist insurgents and Taliban fighters.

In wider Pakistan, suicide attacks and bombings have killed more than 2,550 people in the last 29 months.

President Obama is due to unveil his new Afghanistan policy next week, after weeks of deliberations.

He is expected to lay out an exit strategy for withdrawing forces.

Mr Gilani said Pakistan should be consulted on any shift in America’s Afghan policy, because it would be directly affected by it.

He would not say if Pakistan had been consulted on the expected troop surge.

“We have asked US administration to consult us in case of any paradigm shift in the policy… so that we can formulate our strategy accordingly,” the prime minister said.

Domestic approval

Correspondents say it is unlikely that Mr Gilani seriously believes he can influence US strategy in Afghanistan. He is more likely trying to win domestic favour.

Many Pakistanis are angry with their government’s perceived support for the US military presence in Afghanistan.

Some blame the US for the suicide bombings by insurgents who have been “driven out” of Afghanistan and over the border into Pakistan.

Mr Gilani may simply be seeking to distance himself from the US announcement next week on how many new soldiers it will deploy.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8381183.stm

Sikh News Discussion – Those involved in the November 1984 Sikh Genocide targeted at the Sikh Lobby

Tuesday, 24 November, 2009

Following success with exclusion of Tytler, five others involved in November 1984 Sikh genocide targeted at the Sikh Lobby

On the 25th anniversary of the anti-Sikh pogroms of November 1984 a briefing was provided to MPs with the aim of stopping visas from being issued to known perpetrators.

The briefing provided an outline into the anti Sikh pogroms and a description of those who have been identified as being guilty but have not been brought to justice.

MPs were urged to get the Foreign Office to Inform the European Union that those who are listed in this document should not be entitled to visit, or stay in the EU on any basis due to their part in the 1984 anti Sikh pogroms. A further request was made that the Foreign Secretary asks the Indian Government to remove Tytler from the Volunteers’ Committee of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee due to his role in instigating violent attacks on Sikhs. It is hoped Sikhs in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries belonging to the Commonwealth can take similar steps with their respective governments.

Other than Jagdish Tyler the other five named were:

Sajjan Kumar – The police filed the first case in 1984, accusing Kumar and 10 accomplices of instigating riots in the Sultanpuri area of Delhi, killing 49 people. In 1987, the Jain Bannerjee Commission recommended filing a case against Sajjan Kumar in 1987, however, it was not registered. The CBI filed the second case in 1990, acting on a complaint by a Sikh widow called Anwar Kaur. She accused Kumar of leading the mob that killed her husband in Sultanpuri on November 1, 1984. In August 1990, Potti-Rosha Committee issued recommendations for filing cases based on affidavits submitted but victims of the violence. There was one against Sajjan Kumar. A CBI team went to Kumar’s home to file the charges. His supporters locked them up and threatened them harm if they persisted in their designs on their leader.

The Nanavati Commission claimed evidence against congressmen Kumar for instigating the mobs to violence. In April 2009 Kumar sought to re-enter politics by opting to stand for the Lok Sabha elections on behalf of the Congress Party. Due to wide spread condemnation on behalf of Sikhs and human rights activists the Congress Party withdrew their selection.

Babu Ram Sharma – Member of Municipal Corporation and reported to be the right-hand man of H. K. L. Bhagat, a leading perpetrator of the massacre (now deceased). The Nanavati Commission made a number of references to Sharma’s involvement in looting, arson and murder in the following areas of Delhi: Yamuna areas- Babarpur, Chajupur Colony, Maujpur, Gonda. Sharma is said to have led people on motorcycles with a megaphone.

Mangat Ram Singal – Member of Municipal Corporation was reportedly with Dharam Das Shastri (now deceased but named in the Nanavati Commission as a key instigator of the pogroms). Currently the Minister of Social Welfare, Labour, Employment, Law Justice & Legislative Affairs and Election, Government of NCT of Delhi. The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) and People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) also named him among the alleged instigators of the 1984 pogroms.

R. D. Malhotra – Police Officer in the East District of Delhi at Shakarpur. Reported to have invited mobs, heard to say “You should have blown up the Gurdwaras in addition to killing Bhatia” (Congress worker, Trilochan Singh Bhatia). A mob was accompanied by Malhotra, who moved with one jeep, station-wagon, two men with sten-guns and revolvers, petrol-cans and stones. He supplied weapons to the mob, according to eye-witness accounts. He also reportedly incited mobs at Laxmi Nagar, Gurunangal Nagar.

Malhotra was the Supervisory Officer in charge at Police Station Krishna Nagar located in the centre of the District. The total number of persons killed in this Police Station, as per Police records, was sixteen whereas according to the Relief Commissioner, the figure was 86. The incidents of violence in the Police Station started in the morning of November 1, 1984. A number of shops at Lal Quarters were set on fire during the day between 1200 hours to 1500 hours. The most serious incident the burning of the house of the owner of Swaran Cinema.

As it appeared that many police officers and the policemen had either failed to perform their duty by remaining indifferent or had helped the mobs in their violent activities, notices were given to all of them, including ACP Shri R.D. Malhotra.

Hari Ram Bhatti – Police Officer at Sultanpuri, reported to have helped the mob by disarming the Sikhs. On November 1 and 2 it is alleged that he himself killed Sikhs. On 3 and 4 reported to have had the Sikhs shaven at gun point. The police involvement may be summed up in words of one survivor ”they themselves killed: they were in complicity”. Bhatti was issued with a Section 8B Notice further to allegations against him by witnesses.

In the briefing it was pointed out that the evidence outlined is supported by independent human rights organisations and hundreds of Sikhs. Reference was also given in the briefing to a list of more than 200 named perpetrators.

London Overground – Camden to Brick Lane IV

Fourth post about going from Camden to Brick Lane
All pictures will gradually be uploaded on my flickr account
http://www.flickr.com/photos/12445197@N05/sets/72157614139538921/

The Overground Bridge across the Shoreditch High Street

From Shoreditch High Street till Brick Lane the trains run in these concrete boxes

View of Shoreditch High Street Station

Looking from Bethnal Green underneath Shoreditch High Street Station towards Wheler Street

More to follow
Harjinder Singh
Man in Blue