"Asaf Ali had described his old India House comrade Savarkar as someone who lived in the spirit of Mazzini and Shivaji, which was apt considering the fact that the Italian revolutionary and the great Maratha king were his political heroes."
"After Savarkar died, Hiren Mukherjee of the Communist Party of India stood up in the Lok Sabha to demand that parliament pay homage to [him].
Dange described him as a great anti-imperialist revolutionary while Indira Gandhi said Savarkar was a byword in daring and patriotism."
"His final release was widely welcomed. There was a lot of interest about his next move.
Two young socialist leaders, SM Joshi and Achyut Patwardhan, who would later become heroes of the 1942 movement, went to Ratnagiri to persuade Savarkar to join the Congress Socialist Party."
"There was Comrade M. N. Roy, who had once worked with Lenin in Moscow ... Khurshed F. Nariman, the lawyer who was recently the Congress mayor of Bombay, and a steadfast admirer of Savarkar [and] Lalji Pendse, the Marxist intellectual and independent trade union leader."
"Savarkar was famously galvanised by the example set by Joseph Mazzini, the revolutionary who helped integrate Italy into a united nation state.
He was also an admirer of Kemal Ataturk, calling on Indian Muslims to learn from the Turkish example, and join the modern world ..."
"Another improbable person he had a high regard for was Lenin.
Narayan Sadashiv Bapat, a member of Savarkar’s inner circle at Ratnagiri,who later became a Royist,wrote how Savarkar would urge colleagues to read Lenin.
Some lectures on Lenin were given by a young Nathuram Godse"
"[He] argued in the opening pages of 'Hindu Pad Padshahi' that it is the task of modern societies to overcome the strife of the past.
... added that people should read history not to perpetuate the old strife but to seek a way out of it by identifying the causes of such strife."
"A Hindu Nation is in no way inconsistent with the development of a common Indian Nation...in which all races and religions, castes and creeds, Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Anglo-Indians, could be harmoniously welded together into a political State on terms of perfect equality.”
"Such a warm reception for Savarkar from across the political spectrum seems almost unbelievable today.
The man who even his political rivals once respected has thus been lost in a fog of either hagiography or demonisation."
An essential component of any revolutionary anti-colonial or anti-imperial movement is that national liberation and integration come first.
It is only upon that foundation that the institutions of monarchy or socialism or liberal democracy can be built.
Any country that experiences foreign tyranny, be it medieval Turkocracy or modern Western colonialism, experiences a historical trauma - their culture degraded, knowledge destroyed, people enslaved.
The cure is a unifying ideology of national liberation.
The left-right, libertarian-authoritarian model is dead, because it never really existed outside the Anglosphere.
Welcome to the real world.
Instead of labelling historical figures based on juvenile American political culture, understand their ideas and take them forward today.
It is reductionist to simplify complex historical personalities to fit contemporary political debates and labels. It only prevents us from understanding the past.
That holds true across cultures, continents, and centuries, be it Saladin, Garibaldi, Bismarck, or Haile Selassie.
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Biomass firm poised to clear Bornean rainforest for dubious ‘green’ energy:
3 villages have signed over at least 5,000 hectares of their land to a biomass company. Much of this area, locals say, is covered in rainforest to be cleared for the project.
Despite its billing as sustainable, research has shown that burning woody biomass emits more climate change-causing CO2 than coal per unit of electricity produced. The company in Borneo, moreover, has said it plans to export the wood pellets to be produced on its plantation.
As the nation strives to make good on its pledges to cut fossil fuels, President Joko Widodo has promoted biomass energy, derived from burning plant and animal products, as a sustainable alternative. His administration, whose term came to an end on Oct. 20, has set ambitious targets to increase the burning of biomass alongside coal in power plants, a method known as cofiring, which is used extensively in Japan and South Korea.
Wikileaks - US Consulate General Kolkata*, 13 February 2007:
"On February 12, [the US] Consul General spoke with Nobel Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus about his plans to enter Bangladesh politics.
Yunus, on a two-day visit to Kolkata, expressed a strong interest to enter the political fray and said that he was reviewing his options. He expressed support of the present Caretaker Government and its decision to declare a "State of Emergency," saying it had averted a possible civil war."
"Yunus felt that Muslim fundamentalists represented a fringe and that while the dominant parties had developed ties with fundamentalists for political gain, most Bangladeshis did not favor the extremism."
"During a lunch hosted by the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce (CCC) for its 175 th anniversary, ConGen spoke with Dr. Yunus about the present political situation in Bangladesh.
On February 11, Yunus had issued an open letter saying that he was seeking support from Bangladeshis to launch a political party to reform the violence and corruption in Bangladesh."
Few Americans lament the lack of high-speed rail. How can you miss what you never possessed?
If you’ve never experienced 300 Mbps download speeds,you won’t question AT&T marketing 100 Mbps as 5G.
If every student goes $40,000 into debt,it’s not considered a burden on the young.
The US successfully twisted Japan’s arm in the 1990s, forcing them to build local factories. China forced all multinationals to manufacture domestically through local JVs. The US, however, might not be able to pull off something similar this time around.
Just weeks after the import policy was introduced, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai, during an August 26 meeting, told Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal privately that Washington wants New Delhi to "rescind the requirement", as per a USTR briefing paper.
Travis Coberly, a US diplomat for trade in New Delhi, reportedly told his US colleagues that India's IT ministry "understands they (India) screwed up. They admitted as much. American companies here have been hammering them about this," he wrote, according to the news agency.
However, Indian officials, who preferred to remain anonymous, told Reuters that the Centre did not reverse its policy because of US pressure but rather made the decision after realising that local manufacturing of laptops and other devices was not significant currently.
Friedman has accidentally answered the question 'why do Indians support 🇷🇺 or 🇮🇱 online?'
It is a form of bitter self-critique.
Living in a soft state that has, in exchange for 'good boy points', consistently refused to stand up for them, people live vicariously through others.
“I myself pressed at that time for immediate visible retaliation” Shivshankar Menon wrote.
“But on sober reflection and in hindsight, I now believe that the decision not to retaliate militarily and to concentrate on diplomatic, covert and other means was the right one for that time and place.”
Chief among the reasons, Menon said, was that any military response would have quickly obscured just how outrageous and terrible the raid on Indian civilians and tourists was; “the fact of a terrorist attack from Pakistan on India with official involvement on the Pakistan side” would have been lost.
Germany: Leipzig forbids fresh far-left demonstration after 2 nights of unrest:
Police arrested nearly 30 people during the weekend protests, which followed the conviction of a left-wing activist for physically attacking neo-Nazis.
The underpinning legal rationale for the decision, they said, was a broader restriction for any protests in the city this weekend connected to the conviction earlier in the week of left-wing activist Lina E. for her part in violent physical assaults on neo-Nazis.
On Saturday, around 1,500 people turned up to the demonstration, even though several courts had refused to authorize it. Police first tried to accommodate the protest, but broke it up when officers came under attack.