None of the above

The “Right to Reject” proposals are again gaining ground in discussion. But there is something extravagant about the claims being made. While the proposal may not do too much harm, it is not at all clear it does much good. It is another instance of reform debates taking recourse to wishful thinking.

There are at least three versions of the right to reject on offer. The mildest version, proposed in the Election Commission’s letter to the PM, is an updated version for Rule 49 of the Conduct of Election Rules. Under this, voters can choose to have their abstention registered. Under current procedures, this abstention is not secret. The idea is simply to give voters a “none of the above” option. This has expressive value and is least disruptive. But it will not have any bearing on the outcome of an election. The other two proposals are more consequential. In one version, if more than 50 per cent of the electors choose a “none of the above” option, the election will have to be held again with a new roster of candidates. In another version, the election will be re-held if the number choosing “none of the above” option exceeds the number of votes garnered by the leading candidate. Then there are minor variations on the prohibitions the rejected candidates have to suffer.

It is not entirely clear what problem this is meant to solve. In discussions, one argument put forward is that it will lead to fewer criminals in politics. The logic for this supposition is not entirely clear. But a fair response to the worry about criminals in politics is this: if we are serious about removing criminals in politics, we need to get serious about the criminal justice system. Final convictions have to be secured in a reasonable amount of time. But to be a little more provocative, we need to ask why it is that in some cases people vote for so-called criminals? It is often because they provide services that often the state cannot - ranging from protection, to a visible ability to get things done. Condemning the choices without grappling with the circumstances that lead voters to make the choices they do is a species of easy moralising.

The second argument, expressed in Law Commission reports, is the concern that with plurality of candidates contesting, the winning candidate usually has a very low percentage of votes in their favour. If we could somehow require candidates to poll at least 50 per cent plus one vote, the system would be more representative. It would, so the argument goes, also diminish the role of caste etc., since every candidate would have to have broad-based appeal. But this argument is also too quick. First, if we really want a 50 per cent plus one rule, we need to openly discuss either runoffs, or Alternative Vote proposals, which the British just rejected. The Right to Reject has nothing to do with it. But we should also be cautious about the numerical fixation on 50 per cent plus. The claim that someone is our representative will always be endogenous to the rules of getting elected. Just because the rules require 50 per cent plus one, it does not necessarily mean that individual is more representative. It could mean other things as well. It could mean voters have had to compromise even more in making their choices. It could raise entry barriers into politics and cut down choices. This may not be sufficient to reject 50 plus one requirement. But we must get away from the idea that there is a set of election rules that does not generate its own externalities. Voting rules also have unintended and unforeseen consequences. Many well-intentioned reforms in places ranging from California to Israel have often produced worse outcomes. Tread cautiously.

But it is not clear negative voting has helped anywhere. In the US, some states have experimented; Russia had it, and abolished it. One simple reason is that under the 50 per cent rule, casting a negative vote makes sense only if you are confident that half of all voters agree with you. The middle class may have more contempt for politicians, but this is an extravagant assumption to make.

There is also the curious paradox of expressing contempt for electoral choices, through the rhetoric of more choice. Ostensibly giving the right to reject gives voters greater choice: they have the choice to reject and express exasperation. But in reality the choice argument is more complicated. One rather subtle point about elections is the moral importance of the simultaneity and independence of voting. My expression of preferences should not depend upon knowledge about how others have voted; and it should be based on broadly the same possible information. Only then have votes got equal value. Administering a right to reject in a way mimicking the simultaneity requirement is not going to be easy. Second, the issue of preferences is also not that straight-forward. Just because voters reject a set of candidates does not automatically mean that a second set has enhanced their choice or produced something closer to the illusory idea of their real preferences. Since you cannot test the transitivity of preferences along two different choice sets, it is a bit too quick to claim that the choices exercised on the second set are somehow more authentic than the first.

One possibility with negative voting, particularly the third variant, is that it could penalise good candidates. At least now in campaigns, we discuss sops and promises, however illusory. But under negative voting there may be huge incentives on part of weaker candidates and parties to ensure good candidates get disqualified. Finally, since party structures remain important, the significance of getting rid of one set of candidates is not as clear as people suppose; the individual characteristics of MPs now matter less. We need better institutionalised parties more than negative voting.

We need to discuss serious issues: party systems, election finance, decentralisation. We have created huge anomalies by aspiring for proportional outcomes out of a first past the post system. But the clamour for negative voting is distraction. I may not happen to agree with much of what goes on. But at some level I have to acknowledge that my arguments have lost. Having lost, I ought not to blame the rules, or construct the voters as helpless victims of bad rules. Politics is the slow boring of hard boards, as Max Weber said. But India’s privileged, having failed to do the requisite manual labour of politics, and elicit trust, now place excessive faith in new rules.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, Delhi

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:01:00 ET

Diebold voting machines can be hacked by remote control

Exclusive: A laboratory shows how an e-voting machine used by a third of all voters can be easily manipulated

By Brad Friedman

iStockphoto/dcdp

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It could be one of the most disturbing e-voting machine hacks to date.

Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

"We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines," said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team "We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine."

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab's scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor

Previous lab demonstrations of e-voting system hacks, such as Princeton's demonstration of a viral cyber attack on a Diebold touch-screen system -- as I wrote for Salon back in 2006 -- relied on cyber attacks to change the results of elections. Such attacks, according to the team at Argonne, require more coding skills and knowledge of the voting system software than is needed for the attack on the Diebold system.

Indeed, the Argonne team's attack required no modification, reprogramming, or even knowledge, of the voting machine's proprietary source code. It was carried out by inserting a piece of inexpensive "alien electronics" into the machine.

The Argonne team's demonstration of the attack on a Diebold Accuvote machine is seen in a short new video shared exclusively with the Brad Blog [posted below]. The team successfully demonstrated a similar attack on a touch-screen system made by Sequoia Voting Systems in 2009.

The new findings of the Vulnerability Assessment Team echo long-ignored concerns about e-voting vulnerabilities issued by other computer scientists and security experts, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (an arm of the Department of Homeland Security), and even a long-ignored presentation by a CIA official given to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

"This is a national security issue," says Johnston. "It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security."

The use of touch-screen Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) voting systems of the type Argonne demonstrated to be vulnerable to manipulation has declined in recent years due to security concerns, and the high cost of programming and maintenance. Nonetheless, the same type of DRE systems, or ones very similar, will once again be used by a significant part of the electorate on Election Day in 2012. According to Sean Flaherty, a policy analyst for VerifiedVoting.org, a nonpartisan e-voting watchdog group, "About one-third of registered voters live where the only way to vote on Election Day is to use a DRE."

Almost all voters in states like Georgia, Maryland, Utah and Nevada, and the majority of voters in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Texas, will vote on DREs on Election Day in 2012, says Flaherty. Voters in major municipalities such as Houston, Atlanta, Chicago and Pittsburgh will also line up in next year's election to use DREs of the type hacked by the Argonne National Lab.

Voting machine companies and election officials have long sought to protect source code and the memory cards that store ballot programming and election results for each machine as a way to guard against potential outside manipulation of election results. But critics like California Secretary of State Debra Bowen have pointed out that attempts at "security by obscurity" largely ignore the most immediate threat, which comes from election insiders who have regular access to the e-voting systems, as well as those who may gain physical access to machines that were not designed with security safeguards in mind.

"This is a fundamentally very powerful attack and we believe that voting officials should become aware of this and stop focusing strictly on cyber [attacks]," says Vulnerability Assessment Team member John Warner. "There's a very large physical protection component of the voting machine that needs to be addressed."

The team's video demonstrates how inserting the inexpensive electronic device into the voting machine can offer a "bad guy" virtually complete control over the machine. A cheap remote control unit can enable access to the voting machine from up to half a mile away.

"The cost of the attack that you're going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities," explains Warner in the video. "If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that's another $15. So the total cost would be $26."

The video shows three different types of attack, each demonstrating how the intrusion developed by the team allows them to take complete control of the Diebold touch-screen voting machine. They were able to demonstrate a similar attack on a DRE system made by Sequoia Voting Systems as well.

In what Warner describes as "probably the most relevant attack for vote tampering," the intruder would allow the voter to make his or her selections. But when the voter actually attempts to push the Vote Now button, which records the voter's final selections to the system's memory card, he says, "we will simply intercept that attempt ... change a few of the votes," and the changed votes would then be registered in the machine.

"In order to do this," Warner explains, "we blank the screen temporarily so that the voter doesn't see that there's some revoting going on prior to the final registration of the votes."

This type of attack is particularly troubling because the manipulation would occur after the voter has approved as "correct" the on-screen summaries of his or her intended selections. Team leader Johnson says that while such an attack could be mounted on Election Day, there would be "a high probability of being detected." But he explained that the machines could also be tampered with during so-called voting machine "sleepovers" when e-voting systems are kept by poll workers at their houses, often days and weeks prior to the election or at other times when the systems are unguarded.

"The more realistic way to insert these alien electronics is to do it while the voting machines are waiting in the polling place a week or two prior to the election," Johnston said. "Often the polling places are in elementary schools or a church basement or some place that doesn't really have a great deal of security. Or the voting machines can be tampered while they're in transit to the polling place. Or while they're in storage in the warehouse between elections," says Johnston. He notes that the Argonne team had no owner's manual or circuit diagrams for either the Diebold or Sequoia voting systems they were able to access in these attacks.

The team members are critical of election security procedures, which rarely, if ever, include physical inspection of the machines, especially their internal electronics. Even if such inspections were carried out, however, the Argonne scientists say the type of attack they've developed leaves behind no physical or programming evidence, if properly executed.

"The really nice thing about this attack, the man-in-the-middle, is that there's no soldering or destruction of the circuit board of any kind," Warner says. "You can remove this attack and leave no forensic evidence that we've been there."

Gaining access to the inside of the Diebold touch-screen is as simple as picking the rudimentary lock, or using a standard hotel minibar key, as all of the machines use the same easily copied key, available at most office supply stores.

"I think our main message is, let's not get overly transfixed on the cyber," team leader Johnston says. Since he believes they "can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine," he recommends a number of improvements for future e-voting systems.

"The machines themselves need to be designed better, with the idea that people may be trying to get into them," he says. " If you're just thinking about the fact that someone can try to get in, you can design the seals better, for example."

"Don't do things like use a standard blank key for every machine," he warns. "Spend an extra four bucks and get a better lock. You don't have to have state of the art security, but you can do some things where it takes at least a little bit of skill to get in."

------------

The video demonstration and explanation of the Diebold "Man-in-the-Middle" attack, as developed by Argonne National Lab's Vulnerability Assessment Team, follows below. Their related attack on a Sequoia voting system can be viewed here.

* * *

No scam, no loss in 2G spectrum sale: Kapil Sibal - Hindustan Times

Telecom minister Kapil Sibal on Friday took both the Opposition and the comptroller and auditor general (CAG) head on in the battle over alleged corruption in 2G telephony, saying there was no policy flaw and CAG’s estimates of revenue losses from underpricing of spectrum were grossly overvalued.

The UPA only followed NDA policies in awarding 2G licences in 2008, Sibal told reporters, describing as “utterly erroneous” CAG Vinod Rai’s estimation of a R1.76 lakh crore loss in government revenues. He said the CAG had done “grave injustice” to the issue.

Turning the tables on the NDA, Sibal said in fact, a policy shift from auction of licences to revenue-sharing took place under the NDA, which led to a loss of R150,000 crore.

“Why is the BJP not talking about that loss? We are following the National Telecom Policy (NTP) of 1999,” Sibal said.

He cited the 10th Five-Year Plan aim of taking telecom to the masses as the basis for cheap or free spectrum allocated to operators, echoing his ousted predecessor A Raja, but distanced himself from the administrative lapses the DMK minister has been accused of. He said procedural mistakes in implementation of policy were being investigated by his ministry, including in the CBI’s anti-corruption probe into the matter (which in turn is being monitored by Supreme Court) but the policy itself was neither a UPA brainchild nor was it flawed. “It is a fact that as a consequence of this telecom policy, India is today the world’s largest telecom market,” said Sibal.

“The issue of criminal culpability in implementation is being investigated. All we are saying is that facts on policy must be placed before the people,” he added. Sibal said Prime Minister Manmohan Singh too had agreed on continuing with the old policy on 2G pricing while going in for auction of 3G spectrum. He said the telecom regulator had also repeatedly recommended that 2G spectrum not be auctioned. Read Govt's reportsHowever, the BJP lambasted Sibal "If the entire argument is that there was no loss to the exchequer, then why did Raja resign,” asked party leader Arun Jaitley, adding: “Sibal's entire argument is fallacious. He is just playing with statistics. When spectrum was allotted in 2008, why was it done at 2001 prices?”

Rakesh S Krishnan

Freedom didn’t come at midnight

Rakesh Krishnan Simha

Thursday, August 12, 2010

A persistent Indian myth gleefully accepted as truth by the country’s liberals and Macaulayites – a class of people western in outlook but Indian in looks – is that freedom came too easy. The British, the myth goes, after ruling India for 190 years, became so tired of the responsibilities of running an empire that they simply wound up their empire and left.

Yeah, right! This myth would be laughable if it weren’t so sinister. Though it was clearly invented by the British to cover their ignominious and hasty retreat from India, millions of Indians have been brainwashed into swallowing the myth wholesale. Many Indians believe M.K. Gandhi used the weapon of non-violence and shamed the British colonialists into leaving India, and since then both countries have been best friends.

Freedom didn’t come overnight. It was obtained at a great cost – the sacrifice of millions of Indian lives.

Contrary to the belief that the British period was a time of great stability, India was in fact roiled by uprisings and rebellions everywhere, virtually throughout colonial rule.

The First War of Independence of 1857 was the biggest uprising against the British. The sweep of the war covered nearly the entire country and for months India was turned into one massive battlefield. Britain came perilously close to losing its most prized possession: India.

In War of Civilisations: India AD 1857, Amaresh Misra, a writer and historian based in Mumbai, argues that there was an “untold holocaust” which caused the deaths of almost 10 million people over 10 years beginning in 1857. Speaking to The Guardian newspaper, Misra said, “It was a holocaust, one where millions disappeared. It was a necessary holocaust in the British view because they thought the only way to win was to destroy entire populations in towns and villages. It was simple and brutal. Indians who stood in their way were killed. But its scale has been kept a secret.”

After the British re-conquered India, The Guardian itself wrote about the savage retribution that followed: “We sincerely hope that the terrible lesson thus taught will never be forgotten.”

Here’s what the writer Charles Dickens remarked: “I wish I were commander-in-chief in India … I should proclaim to them that I considered my holding that appointment by the leave of God, to mean that I should do my utmost to exterminate the race.”

The Vellore Mutiny of 1806 predates even the war of 1857 by half a century. The revolt, which took place in the south Indian town of Vellore, was rather brief, lasting only one full day but brutal, as mutineers broke into the Vellore fort and killed or injured 200 British troops, before they were subdued by reinforcements from nearby Arcot.

Again, in 1824, Rani Chennamma, the queen of the kingdom of Kittur in Karnataka, led an armed rebellion against the British. The queen, born 56 years before 1857 leader Rani Laxmi Bai, was the first woman to fight against the British.

From 1858 to the beginning of 1900s the British enjoyed some semblance of stability. This can well be described as the time when they undertook the task of the destruction of thriving Indian industries, including spinning, weaving and metallurgy, as well as agriculture and trade.

Angered by the havoc being wreaked by the British, the revolutionary forces now gathered for a new phase of struggle. They derived inspiration from the cult of nationalism preached by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Swami Vivekananda and others during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Chatterjee’s soul-stirring cry of Vande Mataram or Hail to the Mother, which he penned in 1882, became the hymn of nationalism.

The spark for a full-fledged struggle came in 1905 with the launch of Swadeshi – the refusal to buy foreign goods and the promotion of indigenous industry. This massive pan-Indian movement aroused the spirit of nationalism. It was Veer Savarkar who first lit the bonfire of foreign clothes in Pune on 7th October 1905. (Ironically, MK Gandhi, who much later became the leader of the freedom struggle, criticised that action from far away South Africa although he himself did precisely that 16 years later.)

While the educated classes were fighting the British through Swadeshi, violent outbreaks were happening all over India. In Jharkhand, Birsa Munda led a long struggle directed against the British. In 1914 Jatra Oraon started what is called the Tana Movement, which drew the participation of over 25,000 tribes people. In 1920, the Tana Movement stopped the payment of land taxes to the colonial government. The fire of revolution spread even to the Indian rulers – the Raja of Darbhanga at great risk fully supported the resisting farmers. In the tribal tracts of Andhra Pradesh a revolt broke out in August 1922. Led by Alluri Ramachandra Raju, the tribes people of the Andhra hills succeeded in drawing the British into a full-scale guerrilla war.

A hugely popular force was the Khaksar Movement founded by Allama Mashriqi in Lahore. Mashriqi wanted no compromise with the British. Comprising Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, the Khaksar had four million members and thousands of offices all over India. Its activities for mobilising the nation included holding parades in public places, staging mock wars, organising training camps and striving to create a strong brotherhood of Muslims and non-Muslims in order to jointly overthrow foreign rule. Mashriqi and his young sons were arrested and tortured.

Both Hindus and Muslims were more than willing to unite against the British, as they demonstrated by joining the Indian National Army of Subhas Chandra Bose. It demonstrated to the British that there was no safety for them in India. The British were feeling the heat at home too. Bhagat Singh exploded a bomb in the British Parliament. The revolutionary Uddham Singh went to the UK and assassinated Michael O’ Dwyer, the British Lt Governor of Punjab, for the murder of over 2000 unarmed men, women and children in Jallianwallah Bagh.

While General Reginald Dyer, who personally supervised the massacre of the peaceful gathering, had boasted in court he would do it again, O’ Dwyer had called his action “the right thing”.

Meanwhile, the British, addicted to the easy loot from India, even as millions of Indians were dying in manmade famines, were not prepared to leave. As Neville Chamberlain put it clearly: "The astonishing gold mine that we have discovered in India’s hordes has put us in clover.” Churchill was adamant. “I have not become prime minister to preside over the demise of her majesty’s empire,” he said.

But after the Second World War, the momentum of the freedom movement led to growing militant actions that weakened British authority in an irreparable way. According to M.G. Agrawal in his four-volume Freedom Fighters of India, “In February 1946 the Indian Navy declared an unprecedented strike. It quickly drew support from the Indian crews of all the 20 vessels anchored in Bombay port; 20,000 naval ratings revolted.” The British panicked because the single biggest factor that facilitated colonialism was the military.

Clement Atlee, the British Prime Minster, who decided to finally quit India, told chief Justice P.B. Chakrabarty of the Calcutta High Court that the principal reasons why Britain decided to quit India was the erosion of loyalty to the British Crown among the Indian army and navy personnel.

According to Fenner Brockway, political secretary of the Independent Labour Party of England, the two major causes of Britain’s hasty exit from India were: “One, the Indian people were determined to gain independence. Two, was the revolt by the Indian Navy.”

Indian soldiers, whose brilliant performance on the battlefields of Europe had won them grudging praise from the British as well as the Germans, had seen firsthand the collapse of the British in the face of the German challenge, which exploded the myth of the invincibility of British arms. Indeed, US Army generals like Bradley and Eisenhower had expressed contempt for the British Army's fighting skills.

Britain was also in steep decline. London had been nearly destroyed by the German Luftwaffe and V-2 rockets. The Russians and Americans were the new superpowers, and both wanted an end to colonialism.

The British had no stomach for a fight with Indians and were looking for a face-saving exit from India.
Independence came through the indefatigable spirit of our revolutionaries rather than the mere transfer of power at midnight.

(Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a features writer at Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.)

HarE Krsna

How science discovered the historical Krishna

Rakesh Krishnan Simha

Thursday, August 26, 2010

"The sea, which had been beating against the shores, suddenly broke the boundary that was imposed on it by nature. The sea rushed into the city. It coursed through the streets of the beautiful city. The sea covered up everything in the city. Arjuna saw the beautiful buildings becoming submerged one by one. He took a last look at the mansion of Krishna. In a matter of a few moments it was all over. The sea had now become as placid as a lake. There was no trace of the beautiful city, which had been the favourite haunt of all the Pandavas. Dwarka was just a name; just a memory." – Mausala Parva, Mahabharata.

Does this account from the ancient Indian epic have a true historical core? Did Lord Krishna, indeed the favourite Indian deity, walk the streets of ancient Dwarka? Did Krishna, considered the Lord of the universe by a billion Hindus, rule the Yaduvanshi clan thousands of years ago?

Using archaeological, scriptural, literary and astronomical data, scholars and scientists are coming round to the view that Krishna was definitely a historical character.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

The Rosetta stone, or the key, to the Krishna story is Dwarka. The strongest archaeological support comes from the structures discovered in the late 1980s under the seabed off the coast of modern Dwarka in Gujarat by a team of archaeologists and divers led by Dr S.R. Rao, one of India's most respected archaeologists. An emeritus scientist at the marine archaeology unit of the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, Rao has excavated a large number of Harappan sites, including the port city of Lothal in Gujarat.

In his book The Lost City of Dwarka, published in 1999, he writes about his undersea finds: “The discovery is an important landmark in the history of India. It has set to rest the doubts expressed by historians about the historicity of Mahabharata and the very existence of Dwarka city.”

Conducting 12 expeditions during 1983-1990, Rao identified two underwater settlements, one near the present-day Dwarka and the other in the nearby island of Bet Dwarka. This tallies with the two Dwarkas mentioned in the epic. The underwater expeditions won Rao the first World Ship Trust Award for Individual Achievement.

Another important find by our divers was a seal that establishes the submerged township's connection with the Dwarka of the Mahabharata. The seal corroborates the reference made in the ancient text, the Harivamsa, that every citizen of Dwarka should carry such a seal for identification purposes. Krishna had ruled that none without the seal should enter it. A similar seal has been found onshore as well.

LITERARY EVIDENCE

The west coast of Gujarat was the traditional land of the Yadavs, or Yadus. According to the Bhagavad Puran, Krishna led the Yadavs thousands of kilometres west to establish Dwarka, so they could start a new life, safe from their many enemies in the Gangetic Valley.

The Mahabharata says, Dwarka was reclaimed from the sea. Rao’s divers discovered that the submerged city's walls were erected on a foundation of boulders, suggesting that land indeed was reclaimed from the sea.

One cannot separate Dwarka from Krishna. If the city existed, then it is true that Krishna ruled over it.

ASTRONOMICAL EVIDENCE

Dr Narhari Achar, professor of physics at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, has dated the Mahabharata war using astronomy and regular planetarium software. According to his research conducted in 2004-05, the titanic clash between the Pandavas and the Kauravas took place in 3067 BC. Using the same software, Dr Achar places the year of Krishna’s birth at 3112 BC.

Dr Manish Pandit, a nuclear medicine physician in the UK, after examining the astronomical, archaeological and linguistic evidence, agrees with Dr Achar’s conclusions. Dr Pandit, who is also a distinguished astrologer and has written several books on the subject, traced the route of Krishna’s journeys to shoot the documentary, “Krishna: History or Myth?”

Dr Pandit says there are more than 140 astronomy references in the Mahabharata. Simulations of the night sky have been combined with geographical descriptions to arrive at various dates. He says the chances of these references repeating are next to nothing.

According to historian S.M. Ali, the author of Geography of Puranas, “The geographical matter contained in the Mahabharata is immense. It is perhaps the only great work which deals with geographic details and not incidentally, as other works.”

WHOSE HISTORY?

Of course, none of the evidence is good enough for the ossified historians that lord over India’s academia, regurgitating the lies written by British colonial scholars, who were in reality Christian missionaries.

For the missionaries, destroying the historicity of Krishna was important if they had any chance of establishing their religion in India. Also, many European scholars were shocked to learn that Indian history pre-dated their world by thousands of years. By labelling as myth the Indian historical sources like the Vedas, Mahabharata, Upanishads, and especially the Puranas, which give exact chronologies of Indian kings including Krishna, the missionaries ensured that Indian history did not clash with their world view.

That tradition continues. Disregarding all new research, academics like Romilla Thapar, R.S. Sharma and Irfan Habib have consigned Krishna to mythology.

In his textbook for Class X, Sharma writes, “Although Lord Krishna plays an important role in the Mahabharata, the earliest inscriptions and sculpture pieces found in Mathura between 200 BC and 300 AD do not attest his presence.” What brilliant deduction. Going by Sharma’s logic, any fool can dig at a random site, and upon failing to discover an artefact, declare Krishna never existed. Sadly, millions of Indian school children are being taught such lies.

Thapar, in fact, says the Mahabharata is a glorified account of a skirmish between two “Aryan” tribes, with Krishna merely playing the role of an agent provocateur.

And what do they do when confronted with the new evidence? They withdraw into their parallel dystopian world and argue it is not clinching evidence. But, of course, they will accept as truth the myths of other religions.

Dr Rao says further digging and diving, in tandem with India’s vast treasure trove of historical facts will further corroborate key dates of our eventful and glorious past.

As the Upanishads say, pratnakirtim apavirnu – know thy past.

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(About the author: Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a features writer at Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.)

Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box - NYTimes.com

Eben Moglen Is Reshaping Internet With a Freedom Box - NYTimes.com

Interview

See My Iron Lady!!! Part 3

Money Talks

by Jeffrey Toobin April 11, 2011

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Ask the Author: Join a live chat with Jeffrey Toobin about the Supreme Court on Monday, April 4th, at 3 P.M. E.T.

Eight of the current Supreme Court Justices are known for their zeal in questioning lawyers. That tendency was on display last week during the oral argument over the constitutionality of an Arizona law known as the Citizens Clean Elections Act, a law that attempts to do a little something about campaigns in which one candidate has a great deal more money than the others. Roughly, the law says that the ones who are outspent should receive a modest subsidy from state funds. By the end of the questioning, however, it had become clear that a majority of the Justices will probably declare the Arizona law unconstitutional. In apparent frustration, Justice Stephen G. Breyer departed from custom and allowed himself a despairing comment about the Court’s treatment of campaign-finance laws, which he has long, and mostly futilely, defended. “It is better to say it’s all illegal than to subject these things to death by a thousand cuts, because we don’t know what will happen when we start tinkering with one provision rather than another,” he said.

The modern history of American campaign-finance reform began about a century ago, in the Progressive Era, when the Tillman Act of 1907 outlawed direct contributions to political campaigns by corporations. Congress tightened some regulations in response to the Watergate scandal, but, with the Buckley v. Valeo decision, in 1976, the Court began relaxing the rules. In that case, the Court asserted for the first time that an individual’s decision to spend money in support of a political cause was, like giving a speech or carrying a campaign sign, protected by the First Amendment. It is this metaphor—that money is speech—that is driving the current Court’s revolution in campaign-finance law.
In many other respects, this Court’s commitment to free speech is admirable. Earlier this year, Chief Justice John Roberts gave voice to the best American tradition of tolerance when he (along with seven colleagues) overturned a damage award against a fringe religious group. The Westboro Baptist Church, which, as it happens, is more of an extended family than an actual church, had launched one of its odious anti-gay publicity stunts near a funeral at which a mother and father were grieving the loss of a son in Iraq. Understandably, perhaps, a judge had awarded five million dollars in a civil suit brought by the father, but the Court recognized that such a judgment threatened the free-speech rights of all unpopular groups. “Speech is powerful,” Roberts wrote, but it was the Court’s duty “to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”
The problem is that there is more than one way to stifle public debate. The idea behind limiting campaign contributions and expenditures is to insure that the voices of the wealthy don’t drown out the voices of those who are less well off. A surreal moment during the Arizona argument summed up how peculiar the Court’s campaign-finance jurisprudence has become. Springing a well-planned trap, Roberts told the lawyer defending the Arizona law, “I checked the Citizens Clean Elections Commission Web site this morning, and it says that this act was passed to, quote, ‘level the playing field’ when it comes to running for office. Why isn’t that clear evidence that it’s unconstitutional?” To many ears, levelling the playing field hardly sounds like a sinister activity, worthy of the Supreme Court’s ultimate sanction. Indeed, as recently as 1990 the Court upheld a campaign-finance law because of “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth that are accumulated with the help of the corporate form and that have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.” But the Court explicitly overruled that decision last year in the Citizens United case. For better or for worse, Roberts is right: levelling the playing field is now verboten.

The implications of the Court’s approach are now becoming more clear. In the Citizens United case, the majority decreed, in an opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, that corporations and other organizations could bypass the old limits by giving unlimited amounts not to candidates but to nominally independent groups that support them. (Corporations, of course, traditionally give more to Republicans.) But the logic of the decision—and the views expressed by the majority at the argument last week—suggests that in the future the Court will allow corporations to skip the third parties and give money directly to the candidates. It also implies that any limit on the size of contributions, by individuals or corporations, may now be held to be unconstitutional. The Court did suggest that requirements calling for the public disclosure of contributions might pass constitutional muster, but Congress shows no inclination to enact any such rules. President Obama’s DISCLOSE Act, which would have bolstered disclosure requirements, died in Congress last year. (Clarence Thomas, the silent Justice during oral arguments, believes that even disclosure violates First Amendment rights.)
During the 2010 campaign, Karl Rove pioneered the partisan exploitation of Citizens United by directing Republican donors to American Crossroads and American Crossroads GPS, his largely unregulated political operations. As he told Fox News, “What we’ve essentially said is, if you’ve maxed out to the senate committee, the congressional committee, or the R.N.C. and you’d like to do more, under the Citizens United decision you can give money to American Crossroads.” Rove’s organizations, which raised seventy-one million dollars in the 2010 cycle, have vowed to raise a hundred and twenty million for 2012. Crossroads GPS is supposedly limited to grass-roots activities and public-policy analysis—categories for which it is not currently required to disclose how much it raised or from whom. Needless to say, these categories are so broad that they can, in effect, function like campaign spending.
It is customary to point out that Citizens United also frees labor unions to make unlimited expenditures. Because unions generally favor Democrats, this observation is supposed to lend a gloss of bipartisanship to the Court’s reworking of a century of laws. But, these days especially, any notion of an equivalency of means between unions and corporations is, to put it mildly, far-fetched. So the vulgar truth about Citizens United, the doomed Arizona law, and related future cases remains: the five Justices appointed by Republicans are thrashing the four appointed by Democrats—to the enormous advantage of the G.O.P. Coincidence? You be the judge. ♦

ILLUSTRATION: TOM BACHTELL

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