The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) cancerous corruption in Orissa
Waging war on bureaucratic terrorism
The country has elaborate institutions to fulfil the development agenda of a newly independent nation. Lack of accountability has held those institutions back from delivering on that mission. Courts, up to a point, have tried to plug that accountability gap. So has the media on occasions. However, they are not substitutes for systemic accountability.
Citizens Right to information is a demonstration of the willingness of the system to change itself and to hold itself accountable to its mandate of social and economic development. The Prime Minister, who belongs to the generation that won independence for the country, should restore honesty and accountability to the system. The nation deserves nothing less from him.
V Anantha Nageswaran
The author was the regional head of International Banking of Credit Suisse, Asia-Pacific. The views expressed are personal.
Waging war on bureaucratic terrorism
Clerical Terror
If we needed reminding, the carnage in Mumbai proved yet again that South Asia is home to some of the world's deadliest Islamist terrorists. Usually missing from press coverage, though, is any sense of the origin of these movements, which are often assumed to be tied to the grievances of the Arab Middle East and the fate of Jerusalem.
That is a misconception. Historically, the roots of radical Islam belong at least as much in South Asia as in the Middle East. And one individual, wholly unfamiliar to most Westerners, played an indispensable role in founding and shaping that movement. When modern radicals call for sharia law, when they demand an Islamic state active in every sphere of life, when they urge a revolutionary jihad against the infidel world, they are drawing on the ideas of a India-born cleric called Maulana Mawdudi.
Modern Islamism traces its origins to three men born in the opening years of the twentieth century. Two of them are well known in the West: Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini and Egypt's Sayyid Qutb. Both, however, owed an immense intellectual debt to the third man, Syed Abul Ala Mawdudi, known by the honorific "Maulana," which means master. Until his death in 1979, Mawdudi was the critical link between the various theaters of transnational activism, between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian Revolution, between Kashmir and Western Europe. Mawdudi's thinking was South Asian in origin and character, as was the international Islamist movement he inspired--a movement whose flowering we are still watching today.
Mawdudi was born in what is now the state of Maharashtra, in a British-ruled India littered with monuments of a collapsed Muslim power. It was a world marked by the humiliating political failure of the Islamic regimes, the same failure that so influenced Qutb and Khomeini as well. In India, restive under what they saw as infidel domination, Muslims struggled to find a role in a nationalist movement in which Hindus massively outnumbered them. Making matters more difficult for religious Muslims, even the available forms of modernization and anti-imperialism were Western and radically secular as well. As a young journalist in the 1920s, Mawdudi plunged into Western literature and political thought, but he borrowed heavily from these traditions in order to modernize Islamic ideology.
by Philip Jenkins
The roots of jihad in India: CLERICAL TERROR: THE ROOTS OF JIHAD IN INDIA
Bureaucrats must share blame for terror mayhem: experts
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