Is INDIA heading towards another EMERGENCY ???

This blog comes from nowhere, I had not planned to write this……………...

I am reading about ‘Operation Blue Star’ since past few months; to dig out the truth of that time, I am reading about the political environment which prevailed during that period of time. To that, what got my attention is - State of Emergency in India (1975 – 76).  I never heard about it before, so this is the time to know about it, and I turned on my Google driver. The outcome of ‘the know how’ of this event is very strange and you must also think about it.….

The Congress Party of India has been historically associated with the Indian politics from the budding independence movement so are the charges of corruption and miss-trust on the congress party. In 1966 after the death of Lal Bahdur Shastri, Indira Gandhi (daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru), was selected as the President of the Indian National Congress Party. In 1966 Mrs. Gandhi defeated Moraji Desai to become the fifth Prime Minister of India and the first woman to hold that position.

From the early 1970s onwards, pervasive discontent shook India: large sections of the population came out in demonstrations against rising prices, fall in the supply of essential commodities, unemployment, and more importantly, corruption in government administration. These protests reached a crescendo in 1974, with students leading the agitations and giving them an organized shape. The Gujarat state government ruled by Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party was forced to resign that year. Mrs. Gandhi realized that she was losing her hold, and was threatened by a political crisis. The threat became imminent when the Allahabad high court (from where Indira Gandhi won in the parliamentary election in 1971), declared her election invalid on corruption charges. The high court judgment barred her from holding the office of prime minister, but granted a stay for 20 days – to allow her party to choose another leader (since the Congress party still enjoyed a majority in the Indian parliament).

Unable to find a competent successor, Mrs. Gandhi, appealed for “complete and absolute” stay and she was granted a “conditional stay”.  This decision gave rise to outcries of opposition from the opposition that she should resign.  Strikes by labour and trade unions, student unions and government unions swept across the country. In response, the authority of the maintenance of Internal Security Act was used to arrest more than a hundred people on June 26th who opposed Mrs. Gandhi and her party.  A proclamation of Emergency was issued by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on the advice of Prime Minister Gandhi.

The powers given to the Central Government under this form of emergency virtually have no limits. Civil Liberties were suspended and the government introduced a mandatory birth control program. The government of India banned four major religious, political and revolutionary parties and 22 associated parties with them. An amendment to the Representation of the People Act was drafted to clear Indira Gandhi from the Allahabad high court ruling. At least 50,000 or more people had been jailed in India in first 3 months of Emergency. At last Emergency was withdrawn on March 21^st 1977 after a period of 21 months.

Now what I am thinking is – High corruption, Rising Prices, Black Money, Rupees downslide, Squeezing Economy, government’s dictatorship & wrong policies and the Public Unrest are the terms which are presently clouding India. Same reasons coupled with many wrong decisions by Indira Gandhi led to that phase of emergency in 1975. Presently the only difference is that Mrs. Sonia Gandhi is driving India from the back seat instead of Prime Minister's position rest everything is ditto same and I don’t think there is any such gutsy judiciary left in India who can charge the corrupt politicians. So, the mango people are just left to wait and watch, let’s see where it is heading? Moreover, Anna Hazare movement and his arrest, Lathi Charge during Baba Ramdev Protests, other happenings with all the socialists & RTI activists and other public protests…………

Is INDIA heading towards another EMERGENCY ?

I am not sure, but my intuition says – something big is going to happen before 2014 elections….. Keep your fingers crossed

In the land of the NAZI'S

BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Porsche………

As a Mechanical Engineer and a lover of the Mean Machines these must be the words which should come to my mind on the name of The Federal Republic of Germany or it should be Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Karl Diesel………But there is some fancy about the name or I don’t know what; NAZI’S is the word which comes to my mind at first.

I was super excited about my three months official trip to Germany, but my enthu. was bitten hard first by the official delays to the trip and then after reaching Germany the sleepy town Offenbach (A small town near Frankfurt, where my company’s head office is situated) punched out all my remaining excitement. Cherry on the top; it rained throughout the weekend and drained down my plans of roaming around the bustling streets of Frankfurt.

Nothing much to do rather than watching TV (which majorly runs German channels) or reading something….. I choose the later, OK now, no rewards for guessing what I am reading; yes about German history, particularly about Hitler and Nazi’s movement. Earlier also when I was in Seoul I started reading about Adolf Hitler, but now I can’t recall why I stopped in-between and went on to reading about M.K. Gandhi (I don’t use Mahatma or Bapu for him as most Indians used to prefix it with; anyways that’s another topic I will tslk about some other day).  So, I was talking about Nazi’s.

First thing I read on the internet about Germany is that it is world's fourth largest economy by nominal GDP and the fifth largest by purchasing power parity and the second largest exporter and third largest importer of goods. I know it’s a developed country but still….. Amazing figures….. Anyways lets move on to the history…….

The strangest and funniest part of the NAZI history is its formation itself, you must read about it – In 1919 Anton Drexler founded DAP – German Workers Party; his party had strong nationalistic views and was anti-Semitic. The party had been looked as a potential socialist threat by the armed forces so they sent a police spy to investigate the impending danger, and the spy is none other then – ADOLF HITLER. In few months he became so fascinated by the party’s politics that he became an active participant in every event of the party and soon he rose to the top and named his party as Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party). The term Nazi was an acronym formed from the first syllable of National and the second syllable of SoZialist. And the other strange thing about Hitler which I got to know few years back is that he is not even a German, he was an Austrian.

The earlier manifesto of 25 points by NAZI Party, which I read on the internet, seems to be all right except 1 or 2 demands. But somehow at some point of time it went all wrong. The Nazi’s advocated the supremacy of the claimed Aryan master race over all other races. They claimed that the development of humanity depends on the Aryans and the Jews are the greatest threat to the Aryan race and led to the human holocaust specially Jews.

Hitler's foreign and domestic policies had the goal of seizing space for his people. He directed the invasion of Poland in September 1939, leading to the outbreak of World War II. Under Hitler's rule, in 1941 German forces occupied most of Europe and North Africa. By 1943, Hitler's erratic military decisions led to escalating defeats. In 1945 the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany. By then Hitler's supremacist and racially motivated policies had resulted in the systematic murder of eleven million people, including an estimated six million Jews (one million Jewish children, two million Jewish women and three million Jewish men).

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. On 30 April 1945, two days later, the two committed suicide to avoid capture by the Red Army.

The basis for Hitler’s extreme hatred for Jews are still not clear, historians had given different reasons for it from ordinary prejudices to some relate it to the Germany’s defeat in World War-1* caused by Jews.

Presently I am reading Mein Kampf (My Struggle) a book by Adolf Hitler. He wrote the book while imprisoned after his failed putsch in Munich in November 1923. It’s a lengthy book (450 Pages), hope I will finish it soon and then will definitely let you guys know what are my findings about Hitler and his fundamentals.

* I don’t know anything about World War-1; will read about it some day.