"India to review anticorruption bill; Pressure builds to accept fasting activist’s draft" by Muneeza Naqvi, Associated Press / August 25, 2011
NEW DELHI - Indian lawmakers agreed after frantic talks yesterday to discuss a stringent anticorruption law proposed by an activist whose eight-day fast demanding the legislation has drawn burgeoning support and tested the scandal-tainted government.
The beleaguered prime minister, Manmohan Singh, met with all parties in Parliament, which called on Anna Hazare to end his hunger strike and recommended that lawmakers debate his draft of an anticorruption bill.
Singh told the meeting that the protesters were demanding the government withdraw its version of the bill, table their version within four days, and pass it this session with only minor amendments.
Critics have accused the protesters of blackmailing the government and subverting Parliament....
Government hates having what it does done to them.
Critics of Hazare’s bill say its provision granting such power to the watchdog would be unconstitutional and note that top leaders in most democracies worldwide have immunity from such investigations....
Then why doesn't India set an example like Gandhi did?
Hazare’s fast has drawn tens of thousands of supporters to a round-the-clock protest rally in the heart of the capital and tested a government reeling from scandals said to have cost the nation billions of dollars.
That's the example, yup.
In another blow to the government yesterday, police charged four lawmakers with buying and selling votes to keep the Congress-led government in power in 2008.
Hazare, 74, has refused to let doctors feed him intravenously. He asked his supporters to block the exits if police tried to take him away to a hospital to force feed him. The police must step in if they think his life is under threat because suicide is illegal in India.
His aides appealed to supporters to pray for his health. Yet he appeared hearty and defiant yesterday morning as he addressed his supporters for nearly 20 minutes....
Styling himself after liberation icon Mohandas Gandhi, Hazare calls his campaign a second fight for freedom in a country where top officials are regularly embroiled in corruption scandals even as hundreds of millions of people are trapped in abject poverty....
That's not the India Gandhi foresaw or dreamed about. Had they not scattered his ashes in the Ganges he would be rolling in a grave.
--more--"
Can we get a channel going?
"Gandhi scion criticizes Indian’s fast" August 27, 2011|Associated Press
NEW DELHI - The scion of India’s most powerful political family praised a reform activist for galvanizing anger against corruption but said yesterday that using a hunger strike to force lawmakers to adopt an anticorruption bill set “a dangerous precedent for a democracy.’’
The comments by top ruling-party lawmaker Rahul Gandhi were his first foray into the government’s standoff with Anna Hazare since the 74-year-old activist began a fast 10 days ago. The protest has attracted tens of thousands of supporters fed up with endemic corruption into the streets.
Gandhi’s speech, coming a day after an emotional appeal by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for Hazare to end his hunger strike, signaled a government attempt to take control of the corruption debate after nearly a week of flailing on the issue....
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And he listened:
Indian activist agrees to end hunger strike
Related: A Feast of Fasting Stories From India
I'm kinda full up on 'em, thanks.
Also see:
"Roy told me that Gandhi was not at all as he is made out to be and that he actually wanted the British to stay and worked to that end and that it was Chandra Ghosh who drove them out, even though they didn’t actually leave, they just went underground and behind the scenes. I haven’t researched this and have no idea of how true it is. I mention this because it is possible that all of our assumptions concerning everyone are wrong....
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Now I have two things to think about.
Make that three:
"Gandhi on ending injustice: Speak the truth because Truth is God" by Carl Herman, Nonpartisan Examiner | August 2, 2011
“It is more correct to say that Truth is God than to say God is truth. ...we must speak the Truth.” - Gandhi on Truth (and here, pg. 20)US injustice in major policies will end when enough Americans speak the truth. The injustice is literal: US government policies with war and economics are in Orwellian violation of basic laws. The annual costs are millions of human lives, billions damned to suffer, and trillions of dollars looted.
Anyone with intellectual integrity and moral courage can see and say these “emperor has no clothes” facts.
Assessing US “leadership” as psychopathic is the perfect academic and professional word because it neither understates nor overstates the facts. I also suggest Princeton professor Frankfurt’s academic term for the type of lies that “leadership” uses: bullshit.
“As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.” - unsourced and attributed to Andrew CarnegieGandhi was clear to state and repeat the facts until critical mass of public understanding and action ended the injustice:
"One thing we have endeavoured to observe most scrupulously, namely, never to depart from the strictest facts and, in dealing with the difficult questions that have arisen during the year, we hope that we have used the utmost moderation possible under the circumstances. Our duty is very simple and plain. We want to serve the community, and in our own humble way to serve the Empire. We believe in the righteousness of the cause, which it is our privilege to espouse. We have an abiding faith in the mercy of the Almighty God, and we have firm faith in the British Constitution. That being so, we should fail in our duty if we wrote anything with a view to hurt. Facts we would always place before our readers, whether they are palatable or not, and it is by placing them constantly before the public in their nakedness that the misunderstanding… can be removed." - Mohandas K. Gandhi, Indian Opinion (1 October 1903)Dr. Martin Luther King learned from Gandhi:
“‘A time comes when silence is betrayal.’ That time has come for us... The truth of these words is beyond doubt but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world.
... A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. ... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. ... A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. ...We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate.
... These are revolutionary times.” - Dr. Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”Again, the basic explanation, documentation, and proof of US “leadership” crimes is here.
I do not place myself in Gandhi and Dr. King’s company, and I assume that neither do you. But I do suggest that We the People are like in spirit and will stand for Truth in the face of War Criminals and destruction of trillions of families’ and children’s dollars.
You should also know this area of Truth: the King family's civil trial found the US government guilty of Dr. King's assassination. US Corporate media refused to cover the trial or interview Dr. King's wife. His family's opinion is that the US government murdered Dr. King to end his protests against unlawful US wars and his call to end poverty.
Following are further resources to explain and document US "emperor has no clothes" obvious injustice:
- Congressional reports disclose that all “reasons” for war with Afghanistan and Iraq were known to be lies as they were told.
- Orwellian unlawful wars, including using depleted uranium weapons to damn victims with continuous misery and death.
- obfuscating from the obvious answer of ending an Orwellian "debt supply" and replacing it with money.
- allowing a million children a month to die of preventable poverty, even though historically ending poverty reduces population growth rate and the investment is less than 1% of the developed nations' gross national incomes (GNI).
- torture, extrajudicial assassinations (including against American citizens) and indefinite detentions.
- destruction of the US Constitution into a form of government closest to fascism and nowhere near a constitutional republic.
- literally throwing Americans onto the streets rather than take any of a dozen acts to allow them to stay in their homes.
- intentional unemployment, crime, infrastructure decay, fear, anger, depression (both economic and psychological) rather than create money for full employment.
- allowing 45,000 Americans to die every year from lack of health care, even though universal single-payer saves the nation $100-$300 billion every year.
- US corporate media complicity to lie by omission and commission to keep the above facts unrecognized by the American public.
We will win with critical mass of public recognition of what’s right in front of everyone to objectively verify.
You, citizen, have unique opportunity to contribute your unique, beautiful, and powerful self-expression to building a brighter future if you choose the intellectual integrity and moral courage to do so.
Please do.
Millions will live or die, billions will have a life worth living or misery, and trillions of dollars of power are directed at our collective choice.
An artistic expression of Gandhi is the 4-minute video at the left by MC Yogi.
