Yogi's Corner

With the Egyptian-mediated ceasefire, the latest round of the Israel-Palestinian conflict ended on May 21, 2021. The eleven-day firefight, bloodiest since 2014, left a trail of death and destruction. Recurrent conflicts between the two are essentially manifestations of two self-determination movements — the Jewish Zionist and Palestinian Nationalist projects—both claiming the same piece of real estate.   Jewish Build-Up in Palestine.             After his unsuccessful siege of Acre in 1799, Napoleon Bonaparte proposed a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a European stronghold in the region. Four decades later, the British carried this proposal forward to urge the Ottoman Sultan to open up Palestine to Jewish immigrants. Around 3000 then, wealthy benefactors began to sponsor Jews from Europe to establish settlements in Palestine to augment their numbers.                ...

                       Last month, US President Joe Biden announced a complete and unconditional pullout from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, thus proclaiming an end to the longest US war. The withdrawal deadline coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the horrific 9/11 al-Qaeda aerial assaults in New York and the Pentagon that prompted President George W Bush to seek retribution by attacking terrorist bases in Afghanistan.               Biden has throughout remained a critic of the American presence in Afghanistan.  No sooner than he had the authority did he order an end to a war that was 'not worth the costs in blood and money' - 2,400 troops and $ 2 trillion. Biden claimed that the original objectives, ousting al-Qaeda and ensuring Afghanistan is never again used as a pad for launching attacks on the US,  are already achieved. He underscored a ...

       Recently, a providential coincidence upset the applecart of Kashmir's thriving land mafia-revenue officials' nexus to fraudulently sell a residential plot belonging to a Kashmiri Pandit (KP) family in Srinagar's upscale outskirts. While the JK Grievance Cell remains a ping-pong of bureaucratese, simple communication to the PMO did the trick this time. That the deal was almost 'done' by swapping revenue papers of a nearby plot, whether by artifice or in connivance, reveals how brazen and deep-rooted this nexus remains. Even after retrieving the land from their clutches, the revenue-cum- police sponsored mafia remains unrelenting to let go of the opportunity to grab KP property. The overarching separatist ideology of Muslim exclusivism continues to rule the social order in the Valley.   Since the early 1990s, commerce in abandoned KP property worth lakhs of crores is a thriving activity. This trade has benefitted the entire Kashmiri society- separati...

                 One can safely infer that uprooted Kashmiri Pandit (KP) diaspora has already made a truce with its gunpoint exodus from the Valley and whatever appears to cause an upset to its exiled life meets with an instant obstruction. Faint cries for 'Homeland' or resettlement in the Valley don't carry any conviction with the ruling political class in Delhi. Such a scenario is a fertile ground for the luxuriant growth of vested interests, and that is what we witness today.   Personal ambitions of the 'self-styled' leaders of the Community have pushed the travails of tenement dwellers into oblivion. They ignored the left-over lot in the Valley as if they did not exist. No one, except US-based Dr Vijay Sazawal, ever spoke up for them. While migrants lapped up all the   Government doles, concessions and relief, none cared for the non-migrants- as if they sinned by refusing to be cleansed by the Islam...

               On August 5 last year, BJP fulfilled its long-pending promise of removing barriers to full integration of Jammu & Kashmir with India’s mainland. India de-operationalised Article 370 of its constitution with consummate finesse. It was indeed a masterstroke that left Kashmiri politicians dumbfounded. For them, it was a double whammy, rendering   Article 370 redundant and splitting the state into two Union Territories (UT), J&K and Ladakh. People in Ladakh were thrilled on having been ‘rescued’ from the domination of Kashmiri political masters.                Ever since the revocation of Article 370, the Valley remains locked-down, initially due to an unprecedented security clampdown and now to protect it from the deadly pandemic. It is time we analyse the post-abrogation scenario.   Internal Security Situation. Empirical evidence shows that the insurgency-related incident...