As for as Democracy is concerned,though it has its share of warts, it is , at present, the best working/workable system, where human values are recognised and it does not treat people as Statistics.
Tag: Democracy
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BJP-A confused House?
Image via Wikipedia Exquiiste logic by Venkiah Naidu.
There is no crisis in BJP;only divergent views between Advani,Rajnath Singh,Arun Shourie;one man proposes ,many disagree, the decision is called unanimous;Advani did not say any thing about Jaswant’s expulsion, but did say he need not be sacked;Advani has his views but he agreed to others views;there is no crisis in BJP;we discuss many issues;Advani is not depressed;he is very much acitve;ho does not talk,because he has nothing to say;he may quit;may not; BJP shall have no problem in finding a successor,we will decide in party meet;Vasundara has been asked to resign;not resigned;she may or may not;party may ask her again,again may not;Arun Shourie should not have spoken/written;but no issues.;Advani’s image is in tact;it suffered because of some news.
Can anybody tie himself in knots better than this?
Venky,Keep it up,Delhi is yours.
You are in competition with Karunanidhi in expressing your views, which even God can not unravel!Story:
Is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or its leadership in crisis? That’s the key issue Karan Thapar explored with the former president of the party and a man that many believe could be the future president as well – Venkaiah Naidu.Karan Thapar: Mr Naidu, let’s start with LK Advani. He has been unaccustomedly quiet and withdrawn since the elections, he is hardly seen or heard these days, is he depressed?
M Venkaiah Naidu: Who said it? He is very much active. He will be there in Maharashtra for the election campaign. He is guiding us on every matter. Should he go on speaking without any need unless there is a reason?
Karan Thapar: Is LK Advani going through a personal political crisis?
M Venkaiah Naidu: Not at all. Where is the crisis? He is the man who is responsible for building the party and guiding the party upto this level. Winning and losing happens in elections. Do you mean to say that once you lose elections, there is a crisis?
Karan Thapar: Many believe that LK Advani is constantly caught up in controversies one after another. For instance, do you believe as he now claims that at the parliamentary board meeting on August 19 in Shimla, he was against the decision to expel Jaswant Singh?
M Venkaiah Naidu: My point is do we need these issues to be discussed time and again? People have other important works also. That has been clarified by himself.
Karan Thapar: When you say he ‘clarified it,’ I am quoting what he said, “These reports are correct that I was not in an agreement with the decision to expel Jaswant Singh.”
M Venkaiah Naidu: My point is why are you trying to rake up another controversy. It’s a known fact that in a democratic party everybody has the right to express their views. Views were expressed and a unanimous decision was taken. We heard his view, which he has said.
Karan Thapar: Then it wasn’t a unanimous decision?
M Venkaiah Naidu: Why?
Karan Thapar:Because he was opposed to the decision to expel Jaswant Singh.
M Venkaiah Naidu: You mean to say that one man purposes and everybody agrees is a unanimous decision? In the BJP, we discuss issues, we listen to various views and finally we come to a conclusion, we call it the unanimous decision. There was no dissenting voice in the Shimla meeting.
Karan Thapar: Do you confirm that LK Advani expressed an opinion stating that expelling Jaswant Singh was not the right thing to do?
M Venkaiah Naidu: Yes.
Karan Thapar:Because the reason I ask you is this. Rajnath Singh went on record after the expulsion to say that it was unanimous decision and there was no dissent. Rajnath had gone further and said that no one had spoken against it. You are now clarifying that Mr Advani had expressed an opinion against it?
M Venkaiah Naidu: Expelling a colleague who had been in the party for over 25-35 years is a painful thing but there is no other way and the party colleagues have discussed it and then Advaniji heard everybody and finally it was a unanimous decision.
Karan Thapar: But Advaniji’s first position was against the expulsion?
M Venkaiah Naidu: My point is let us not go back to each and every issue which are not relevant today. Yes, I say that initially his views were different. He had said whether there was a need for expulsion and were there no other alternatives. This sort of discussion took place. Members felt that Jaswant Singhji’s book contained many objectionable references. The view in the meeting was that in no way we could keep quiet on this book and we had to take action. And everybody agreed, Advaniji also agreed.
Karan Thapar: Was Mr Advani persuaded to change his mind or did he simply agree to go ahead with the consensus of everyone else?
M Venkaiah Naidu: Advaniji is a democratic person. He may have his own views but once the colleagues discuss and he understands the mood of the people and the general consensus, he goes by it. That day also the same thing happened.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/devils-advocate-naidu-on-advani-bjp-crisis/103069-37-single.html -
Freedom to Disagree.
People should be allowed to express their views, unless proscribed by the State on grounds of National security.Fight ideas with ideas ,do not gag and make him a hero.
Freedom iof speech is about allowing peopleto air their views and rebutting them.“>Story:
Protesters are expected to picket BBC Television Centre in London later ahead of the appearance of BNP leader Nick Griffin on Question Time.Cabinet minister Peter Hain’s appeal to the BBC Trust to stop Mr Griffin appearing was rejected on Wednesday.
The trust said it was a “question of editorial judgement” whether it was appropriate for the BNP to appear.
But BBC head Mark Thompson said the case against having the BNP on Question Time is “a case for censorship”.
Writing in Thursday’s Guardian newspaper, Mr Thompson added only governments could decide which organisations should be banned from the airwaves.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8319596.stm
<a href="http://http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8319596.stm -
Communism-Needed,a more Humane one.
Communism stood for certain principles,namely equality,eradcation of the difference between the Have’s and Have nots;distribution of wealth;work accoding to capacity and be provided for what you need;classlesssociety.
The collapse of Communism is mainly due to the fact that it assumed work and needs can be quantified.They can never be for needs are subjective, and ‘work according to capacity ‘ can not be defined-who defines capacity?-
Secondly it assumes human beings are mere numbers.No doubt man needs material comforts the most;however that is not the Summum Bonum of His existence.He has his feelings,emotions and ambitiuons and a constant desire to to move up.
Thirdly,the premise that ‘That all are born equal’ is a wrong one.Human beings are similar, not identical.No two individuals are equal in that their predispositions,drives, level of competency,and their definitions of needs and happiness.This, communism has failed to make allowance for.
Fourthly,too much of academic discussion on the means to achieve their ends,socialism;democracy,revolution etc;while achieving, the goal should have been accorded priority by sticking to one process, say Socialism and not dithering beacuse of impatience, and switching over to Arms.
Fifthly,Distribution of wealth without creating it.
Sixthly, confusion as to which comes first,their Nation or their ideologies.This led to international friction among the practitioners of the same system
Seventhly, dogmatic adherence , bordering on Religious fervour that anything other than communism is evil.
Eighthly, systematic destruction of the fundamental units of Society, Family,Religion,Philosphy,free thought and criticism.
While creating classless society ,they have created elite in the form of members of the party ,politburo Members and the common man.
Yet the principle of communism is sound and is needed even today-especially to day-as Keynesian Economics is not delivering the goods and the divide between the Rich and the Poor is widening.
What is needed now is the elimination of the mistakes mentioned above and provide Communism with a more Human face ;fight for injustice ,in a democratic way, with out being impatiennt.
Lastly what was the quip about’oriental despotism”-Typical Occidental reaction;if things go right,it is due to them;if wrong,orientals.USSR, oriental?
Story.
‘Few occasions are more propitious for forgetting the past than moments of historical commemoration. Amidst fond recollections of the fall of the Berlin wall, and in a time of, at least temporary, improvement in relations between Russia and the west, few may spare a thought for what it was that ended two decades ago. On two issues history has given its ultimate verdict: the cold war, the third and longest of the three chapters that made up the great global civil war of 1914-91, will not return; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as a multinational state and as a global ideological and strategic challenge to the west, is indeed dead. However, on a third component of this story – the worldwide communist movement – the verdict is, as yet, less clear.Fred Halliday is ICREA research professor at IBEI, the Barcelona Institute for International Studies. He was formerly professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. He is a widely known and authoritative analyst of middle-eastern affairs who appears regularly on the BBC, ABC, al-Jazeera television, CBC and Irish radio. Among his many books are Revolution and World Politics: the Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Palgrave, 1999), The Middle East in International Relations: Power, Politics and Ideology (2005) and 100 Myths about the Middle East (2005)
This article is based on a more extended essay, “The Cold War: Lessons and Legacies”, to be published in Government and Opposition (December 2009-January 2010)Communism, embodying the ideology and the social aspirations underlying the Soviet challenge, and the worldwide echo that challenge evoked remains to be interred. But to bury communism can only be done on the basis of recognising what it represented, why millions of people struggled for, and believed in, this ideal and what it was they were struggling against. It can also only be done when the legacy of this ideology and movement is assessed and not simply forgotten, or conveniently, and in violation of all historical evidence, dismissed as an “illusion”.
Judging from the politics and intellectual debates of today, neither those who celebrate the end of communism, nor those who are now articulating a radical alternative, have carried out such an assessment: between (on one side) the still resilient complacency of market capitalism and an increasingly uncertain world of liberal democracy, and (on the other) the vacuous radicalisms that pose as a global alternative, the lessons of the communist past remain largely ignored. And so, as they say, they will be repeated. ‘
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/what-was-communism -
US- Ideal Brand.
<em>Realistic assessment, not only of Obama , but US as well.US,many of its citizens may not know, is looked upon as a modelof Democracy and Freedom,not with standing the corruption and shenanigans of Politicians.Its ideals are noble.Its execution had a few aberrations, not because the people nor because of lack of ideals or humaneness, but because of self seeking selfish politicians and double guessing the perceived opponents in the world, by seeing them through the prism of US’s ideology.Though well meaning and good at heart the way US goes about helping other Nations,has angered the people world over,even to the extent of hating US, overlooking the help it has rendered to the world.At the same time bull dozing its way with out consensus, treating other Nations as less than equals,though unintentional, has produced anti americanism.
Comes Obama, with his candour,probably after JFK,speaking from the heart and reaching out to people of the world,without preaching,seeking consensus and not confrontation.
A dream called America, can still light the world, that is what we, Non-Americans, hope.Obama seems to be the the one to light .
Story.
‘The millennium goals, for those of you who don’t know, are a persistent nag of a noble, global compact. They’re a set of commitments we all made nine years ago whose goal is to halve extreme poverty by 2015. Barack Obama wasn’t there in 2000, but he’s there now. Indeed he’s gone further — all the way, in fact. Halve it, he says, then end it.Many have spoken about the need for a rebranding of America. Rebrand, restart, reboot. In my view these 36 words, alongside the administration’s approach to fighting nuclear proliferation and climate change, improving relations in the Middle East and, by the way, creating jobs and providing health care at home, are rebranding in action.
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