Radical thinking and India.

The following column on Radical thinking is circulating, please read it with calmness, we are in it together. We need to speak out against any one who goes against discriminating any INDIAN. We need to drop all finger pointing... if we don't end it today and now, it will never end.

If we care about India, it's growth that benefits every one, then our attitudes should be - As an individual how can I make the society better? If I am incapable of adding goodness, I shouldn't add ill-will either.

The words of curmudgeonly Paisley who settled the Irish and English conflict that went on for decades: "We must not allow our justified loathing of the horrors and tragedies of the past become a barrier to create a better and more stable future for our children."**

The good news is that the radicals are less than 1/10ths of 1% in both Hindu and Muslim Communities. Figure it out.

1. Radical Thinking
2. Solutions - India is a Bus
3. A pledge of Allegiance.

Mike Ghouse
http://www.mikeghouse.net/

Radical thinking in India.
By Jo Johnson
Financial Times
(c) Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2007

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/24b366ca-dcc9-11db-a21d-000b5df10621.html

Shortly before 8am on February 27 2002, a fire broke out on the SabarmatiExpress as it pulled out of Godhra, a town prone to religious violence in the Indian state of Gujarat. Many of the passengers were Hindu pilgrimsreturning from a ceremony called Chetavani Yatra. Rescuers pulled 58 bodiesout of carriage S-6, all of them charred beyond recognition. An official report, published four years later, in 2006, concluded that the blaze hadbeen an accident, but at the time it was blamed on Muslim youths, who wereaccused of throwing petrol-bombs at the saffron-clad pilgrims.

The blood-letting started the next morning and continued until early May,leaving about 2,500 Muslims murdered. Armed with knives, firebombs andsharpened ceremonial tridents, and guided by electoral rolls that revealed the location of Muslim homes, mobs began to move across the state. "Whatensued was a ghastly sight the like of which, since bleeding partition days,no Indian eye had seen," wrote Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, in a report by the Tribunal of Concerned Citizens, an independent body composed mostly ofretired judges.

"Hindutva barbarians came out on the streets ... and, in all flaming fury,targeted innocent and helpless Muslims. They were brutalised by miscreants uninhibited by the police; their women were unblushingly molested; andMuslim men, women and children, in a travesty of justice, were burnt alive.The chief minister, oath-bound to defend law and order, vicariously connived at the inhuman violence and some of his ministers even commanded the macabreacts of horror."

The first to suffer were the largely middle-class inhabitants of a housingcomplex called the Gulberg Society in the Chamanpura district of central Ahmedabad, the largest city in Gujarat. The centre of an Indian commercialcity saw a medieval and macabre dance of death, humiliation and revenge,reported the Tribunal in its account of the pogrom, Crime Against Humanity, which was based on 2,094 statements taken from survivors.

By 10am, a mob of between 20,000 and 25,000 people had surrounded theGulberg Society, where many had fled to shelter in the home of Ahsan Jafri,an influential trade unionist and former MP from the Congress party. In hisdesperation, Jafri made over 200 calls for help that day. During earlierbouts of violence in Ahmedabad, he had been able to protect his community, but not this time. At 2.30pm, the politician was dragged out of his house,slashed with swords until his limbs were severed, and then set alight.Around 70 others from the Gulberg Society died with him that day.

A series of investigations by the Tribunal of Concerned Citizens, by India'sNational Human Rights Commission and by Human Rights Watch in New York lateraccused two Hindu extremist groups, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, of masterminding the massacres. Numerous human rightsgroups, including HRW, argued that the state government, led by NarendraModi, a senior figure in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), had been wilfully deficient in its response.

For the millions of Muslims whose families opted to stay behind in India atthe time of partition, preferring life within the secular federal republicpromised by Jawaharlal Nehru to the safety of the newly created Muslim homeland in Pakistan, it was a betrayal of trust. "It was the firstfull-blooded pogrom in India's independent history," says Ashutosh Varshney,a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. "It was driven by hatred and ideologically charged."

Modi's approach to the riots may have helped him solidify his electoral baseahead of that year's state elections. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction," he said. The machinery of justice, to the extent itwas used at all, was stacked against Muslims, who accounted, perversely, forthe vast majority of those arrested. Human Rights Watch alleged that the government of Gujarat had systematically obstructed efforts to bring theperpetrators to justice.

Police refused to file reports for the missing, let alone arrest suspects.Witnesses who came forward to identify attackers were harassed, threatened or bribed into turning hostile on the witness stand, or simply into notshowing up when the case went to trial. Only Muslims who withdrew theirtestimony were allowed to return to their neighbourhoods. For four years, impunity prevailed. Only in early 2006, following the exasperatedintervention of the Supreme Court in New Delhi, was there some tokenprogress, with the conviction, by a Mumbai court, of nine people for themurder of 14 Muslims who had taken refuge in a bakery.

"Gujarat was a turning point," says Sayeed Khan, a social worker withpolitical ambitions who runs Muslim Youth of India, a Mumbai-based groupthat is battling against the radicalisation of the country's young Muslims."After Gujarat, young Muslims started asking themselves: 'Why are theykilling us just for being Muslims?'... All over India , there are youths who think there should be revenge. And they're ready to do whatever it takes.

"In the past 18 months, India has been lashed by a wave of terror attacksoutside the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir, the main battleground for Islamic militants waging a jihad against Indian "occupation". Some see apattern emerging. It started in October 2005, on the eve of the Hinduholiday of Diwali and the Muslim festival of Eid, when bombs exploded in markets across Delhi, killing 62 and injuring 210. It continued in March2006, when blasts in Varanasi, a city holy to Hindus, killed 15 and injured60.

The following month, explosions at Delhi's main mosque, the Jama Masjid, injured 13. Thirty-five Kashmiri Hindu villagers were shot dead in May.Then, on July 11, a date that has become known as India's 9/11, terrorstruck Mumbai, with seven bombs hitting the commuter train network, the backbone of the city's transport system, killing 209 and injuring more than700. In September, blasts in Malegaon, a town in Maharashtra prone tocommunal violence, killed 37 Muslims as they left a mosque after Friday prayers.

And then on February 18 this year, as the five-year anniversary of theGodhra train attack approached, terrorists placed kerosene bombs linked tosophisticated timers on an overnight train from Delhi to the Pakistani city of Lahore. Six minutes before midnight, as the Samjhauta Express travelledthrough late-winter wheat fields north-west of Delhi, two firebombs explodedinside denim-clad briefcases, causing an inferno in carriages packed with slumbering passengers that left 69 dead.

The catalogue of atrocities demands explanation. Why is India, a countrythat prides itself on its democratic safety valves and vibrant politicalsystem, proving so vulnerable to terrorism? Indian authorities have in almost every instance laid the blame on Pakistan-based militant groups,citing their opposition to a peace process that would end the jihad. AjaiShukla, a leading security affairs analyst in New Delhi, says India is looking for scapegoats beyond its borders.

"While external support certainly fans the flames of disaffection, terrorismincreasingly springs from radicalised elements within India that have notbeen able to address issues by other means," says Shukla. "Besides the disaffection in India's north-eastern states and in Kashmir, Gujarat is nowbecoming a fertile recruiting ground for terrorist cells. Setting upterrorist cells has been made wonderfully simple by poor law-and-order enforcement and lax financial regulation that allows criminal groups toflourish and terrorist groups to ride piggyback on them."

This tendency to blame the "foreign hand" also ignores the assessment that even sophisticated Pakistan-based militant groups are likely to be dependenton local terror cells to carry out their attacks. "After the Mumbai blasts,there is now no doubt that there are terror cells in India," says Varshney. "That kind of attack cannot be undertaken without a deep local knowledge ofMumbai and without serious local co-operation, whether paid for orideologically motivated.

"Academics believe the roots of India's worsening terrorism problem can be found in a complex fusion of greed and grievance. While an unscrupulouscriminal underworld plays an important part in facilitating and carrying out terror attacks, that is just part of the story. Despite three years of turbo-charged growth, there are still hundreds of millions living in abjectpoverty, with next to no stake in this newly wealthy and self-confident society. Some, inevitably, succumb to the blandishments of recruiters from the country's myriad insurgencies and extremist movements.

Unless these underlying causes of India's susceptibility to terrorism are addressed, India's path to superpowerdom will be bumpier than almost everyone now predicts. In that context, the successful integration ofIndia's Muslim population has strategic significance for the subcontinent and for the political west. The Muslim community, although far from monolithic, forms the second largest religious group in the country andrepresents just under 14 per cent of the 1.1 billion population.

In global terms, India has the largest Muslim population after Indonesia and Pakistan. By the time its population stabilises, sometime in the middle ofthis century, demographers expect it to number between 320 and 340 million, and its share of the total population, by then 1.7 billion, to be almost 19 per cent. India's success as a society will, to a considerable extent,depend on it reversing a worrying trend towards radicalisation in certain sections of that population.

Many take this for granted. Announcing a strategic partnership between the US and India last year, George W. Bush, for example, repeatedly hailed Indiaas a model for the successful integration of a large Muslim population in a secular political framework. In recent weeks, however, such complacency should have been punctured following the government's release of a shockingstudy of how the country's Muslims as a whole have fared since independence.

Commissioned by the prime minister and produced by a committee chaired by Rajinder Sachar, a former justice of the Delhi High Court, the reportpresents a sharp counterpoint to perceptions of India as a stable, inclusive and multicultural society. Of all the groups yet to benefit from India's spectacular recent growth - set to hit 9.2 per cent this year - none, apartfrom so-called dalits (once known as "untouchables") and tribals, have fared as poorly as Muslims.

"Muslims in India have this sense of being degraded," says Sarfaraz Arzu, editor and publisher of The Hindustan Daily, Mumbai's oldest Urdu-languagenewspaper during an interview in his office on the first floor of a crumbling building near Mohammed Ali Road. "They're not getting their share of the national pie. They see things whizzing past them at high speed. Theysee growth in all sectors, but are untouched by this growth. They are not the only section of society untouched by this growth, but they are excluded because of their identification as a distinct religious group, which means,in simple terms, that they're targeted for what they are."

Moreover, in a world ever more connected by cable television and internet chatrooms, the community's feeling of vicarious victimhood is also growing.Arzu has devoted the day's front page to violent protests around the world against Israeli excavations near the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest site. Later that day, there will be anti-Israelidemonstrations in the Azad maidan, a triangular field in south Mumbai used for cricket matches and political rallies.

India's 140 million Muslims are divided along class, caste and sectarian lines, with sociologists describing their relationship to the rest of Indiansociety as one of "upper class inclusion and mass exclusion". A small elite - typified by the Khans that rule Bollywood, the aristocratic Nawabs and businessmen such as Azim Premji, chairman of Wipro, a leading software group- thrives in the new India, while the masses, mostly low-caste converts from Hinduism, face marginalisation.

The Sachar committee found that India's Muslims, constantly battling perceptions that they are "anti-national", "unpatriotic" and "belong inPakistan ", are reluctantly withdrawing or being pushed into ghettos. Markersof their identity, such as the burkah, the purdah, the beard and the topi, a Muslim cap, invite ridicule and harassment. Bearded men find that they are routinely picked up for interrogation, hijab-wearing women that theystruggle to find jobs.

Sachar notes that many Muslims are unable to buy or rent property in the area of their choice and find their children rejected from good schools. This has contributed to the sharp growth in the number of madrassas. Thephenomenon should not be exaggerated: just 4 per cent of Muslim school-age children now attend full-time madrassas, according to Sachar. But in some states, including the populous northern state of UP, where more than 7 percent of Muslim schoolchildren are being educated in religious seminaries, madrassas are spreading rapidly.

Behind the green gates of 41 Mohammed Ali Road is the Minara Masjid complex,where 450 young Muslim men aged between 12 and 25 live and study at themadrassa attached to the mosque. "There has been a 100 per cent increase in the number of madrassas in India over the last five years," says Syed AtherAli, principal of the madrassa, which provides students with lodging, board,books and medical care. Students pass their days translating and memorising the Koran and their nights sleeping on mats in a number of concrete-floored dormitories.
The educational system is failing India's Muslims, whose average literacylevel was 59.1 per cent in the 2001 census, compared with a national average of 65 per cent. While the average child in India goes to school for fouryears, Muslim boys will spend around 36 months and Muslim girls just overtwo and a half years. Just 4 per cent of Muslims above the age of 20 are graduates or diploma holders, compared to 7.4 per cent for the country as awhole. Muslims, tellingly, account for 1.3 per cent of students at the eliteIndian Institutes of Management.

Poorly educated Muslims generally end up working as self-employed, economically vulnerable casual labourers. Relatively few pick up covetedsalaried jobs, which tend to be monopolised by high-caste Hindus. And thoseMuslims who do receive regular salaries tend to occupy the lowest rungs within organisations, with more than 70 per cent having no written contractor social security benefits. Poor work conditions are also reflected inlower earnings. The proportion of Muslims living below the poverty line, at 31 per cent, is higher than the 22.7 per cent for the country as a whole.

Sachar found that Muslims had an "abysmally low" share of prized governmentjobs, accounting for just 3 per cent of posts in the Indian Administrative Service, the elite corps of the civil bureaucracy, 1.8 per cent of theIndian Foreign Service and 4 per cent of the police. They had such a lowprofile in the military that the Ministry of Defence denied Sachar the data. The community is only consistently over-represented in the prisonpopulation. In Maharashtra, for example, Muslims account for more than 40per cent of those jailed for less than a year.

"This government was brought into power by two forces: the anger of the poor and the anger of the Muslims," says Mobashar Javed Akbar in an interview inthe New Delhi offices of The Asian Age, a newspaper he edits. And althoughprime minister Manmohan Singh provoked an outcry among Hindu nationalists when he promised in December to make sure that Muslims and other minoritieshad "first claim on resources", analysts say the government's lack offollow-through may cost the Congress party dearly in the imminent elections in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 31 million Muslims.

"The root problem is economic," says M.J. Akbar. "If you look at IndianMuslims, their traditional businesses, such as crafts and weaving, have been wiped off the economic map, and there has been no effort to create jobs inthe space stolen from them. And now the malls that are coming up across thecountry are about to eliminate their traditional role as suppliers of meat, wiping out another large source of employment. The impact of all of thiswill be 10 years of serious violence.

"Of the 700,000 towns and villages in India, the vast majority are free fromcommunal conflict from one year to the next. But the potential for such violence is a terrifying underlying reality. Communal violence left 40,000dead and injured between 1950 and 1995, according to research by academicsSteven Wilkinson and Ashutosh Varshney. The costs of riots have been overwhelmingly borne by Muslims, forced to leave their homes, businesses andland for sanctuary in safe Muslim areas.

"Fearing for their security, Muslims are increasingly resorting to living inghettos," the Sachar report notes. But access to water, toilets, electricity, schools, clinics, banks and ration shops is often limited ornon-existent in Muslim areas. The absence of these services affects women inparticular because they are reluctant to venture beyond the confines of "safe" neighbourhoods to access these facilities from elsewhere, withknock-on effects on literacy and child health.

Sofia Khan, a 42-year-old human rights activist, moved to Juhapura, a Muslimghetto in Ahmedabad, in the aftermath of the July 2006 Mumbai commuter trainattacks. She says she was hounded out of her home after local televisionstations advised viewers to check out their neighbours. "If you talk to the minority community today, they're just pushed into a corner. For us, there'sno 'Vibrant Gujarat' [Modi's slogan for the state], it's just violentGujarat."

"It's five years now and there's no sense of remorse in society at large, no sense of justice. Overwhelming feelings of insecurity and fear, these areour biggest problems. Fear that you will be targeted, fear that you will bevictimised, fear that there will be another backlash. You cannot open your mouth. You cannot engage in human rights activities. Many people who wereengaged in relief work are now in prison."

Juhapura is the biggest ghetto in Gujarat, with a population at 400,000,that increases with every communal riot in the state. Disparagingly nicknamed "Little Pakistan" by some Hindus, it is on all sides carefullyseparated from adjacent neighbourhoods by empty wastelands that serve asno-man's-lands separating the two largest religious communities. "It's just as if it was a border between India and Pakistan," Khan says.

From her fourth-floor office, the trained lawyer overlooks a relief camp forvictims of the 2002 riots. NGOs say as many as 35,000 remain camped in 81 semi-permanent colonies set up by Islamic relief organisations. Access topublic services is poor. India is in the throes of a telecoms revolution,but Khan's building in Juhapura cannot get the state-controlled service provider to install a landline: "There is not a single bank or broadbandinternet connection in the area and you can forget about having a publicpark or a library, those are luxuries.

"When religious organisations such as the Islamic Relief Committee, Jamaat Ulema-e-Hind and Imarat-e-Shariya opened madrassas, they filled a vacuumleft by the state. One conservative religious organisation, GujaratSarvajanik Welfare Trust, has set up a relief camp at Siddikabad, which has become a semi-permanent home for about 130 families displaced by the carnageof 2002, some of whom came from the Gulberg Society.

"The government has not done anything for us," says Mukti P., a middle-aged woman carrying water pots, who is so frightened of retribution that sherequests I do not use her full name. "Whatever has been done for us has beendone by our own people." Abeda P., 36, who says her husband and daughter died as they hid in Jafri's house, says: "When Narendra Modi dies, thenthere will be communal harmony in Gujarat because [alive] he will not allowit in the state.

"Ravi Nair, a human rights activist who runs the South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre, says these relief camps provide "cannon fodder forIslamic fundamentalist groups". His assessment finds an echo with FatherCedric Prakash, a Jesuit priest, who was recently honoured by the French government for his work promoting religious harmony in Ahmedabad. "The wholeghetto is on the boil," he warns.

"Hundreds of thousands of Muslims are living in Juhapura without access topublic banking services, schools, or drinking water. We're pushing an entire community to the brink. One doesn't need a lot of common sense to realisethere's going to be a reaction. Forgiveness and reconciliation can onlyhappen in the context of justice. Suppose my daughter's been raped, my only son's been killed, and I can see the person responsible behaving withimpunity. How then do I bring myself to forgive?"

That day, Modi and I sit down together. The apostle of Hindutva("Hinduness") has just addressed investors at the "Vibrant Gujarat" conference in Gandhinagar. He is an electrifying orator, and the globalbusiness community cannot get enough of a man in charge of a state thatexpanded by more than 11 per cent last year, making it the fastest growing investment hotspot in India.

The idea of "Hinduness" emerged between the two world wars as an alternativeto the Gandhian nationalist rhetoric of inclusiveness. While Hindunationalist parties have had to tone down sectarian rhetoric to win power by building broad coalitions at national level, strident and threateningreligious politics are frequently found at local level. Since the BJP'sdefeat in the 2004 national elections, Modi has sought to cultivate a less ideological image.

For the moment, though, he remains something of a pariah within the Indianpolitical system, a status that has been reinforced by the fact that he hasbeen banned from travelling to the US. In March 2005, the US State Department publicly denied him a visa, pointing in a statement to a sectionof the Immigration and Nationality Act barring entry to any foreigngovernment official who "was responsible for or directly carried out, at any time, particularly severe violations of religious freedom".

In his meeting with the FT, Modi wants to talk business, not religiouspolitics. Amid increasingly fierce competition between Indian states for investment, he has adopted the most can-do attitude of all chief ministers.Across the country, the government's policy of promoting Special EconomicZones, Chinese-style capitalist enclaves, has run into fierce opposition and many chief ministers have gone off the idea. But not Modi: "The whole ofGujarat is a SEZ," he says. "S stands for spirituality, E forentrepreneurialism, and Z for zeal.

"Would he like the US to lift the travel ban? "It is up to them," he says without hint of rancour. Asked why Gujarati Muslims feel marginalised andexcluded from this growth, he shakes his head as if to imply a logicalimpossibility. "This state has constant double-digit growth. Would that be possible if 10 per cent of the population were excluded? That's my questionto the questioners.

"The glib response saddens Rahul Dholakia, the director of Parzania, a newfilm about the Gujarat pogrom that is essential viewing for anyone wanting to understand why the events of 2002 continue to have such a far-reachingimpact on the politics of religious identity in India. Based on the truestory of a father and mother's tragic hunt for their cricket-loving son, Azhar Mody, who was swept up by the sword-wielding mob that ransacked theGulberg Society, it is, at times, just too painful to watch.

The film ends with an appeal: "His parents are still waiting for him" - and offers an e-mail address and mobile telephone numbers to which informationon his whereabouts can be sent. Parzania, which has received criticalacclaim and met with commercial success, is showing in nine Indian cities. But the people who would be best placed to help the family are unlikely everto see it: the Bajrang Dal, the Hindu extremist youth group, has seen to itthat no cinema in Ahmedabad, Gandhi's adoptive town, has yet dared show it.

Manubhai Patel, the head of Gujarat's multiplex operators' association, toldDholakia to seek the permission of a notorious and self-professedly violentBajrang Dal leader by the name of Babu "Bajrangi" Patel. Arrested in 2002 following the pogrom, but released shortly afterwards, Babu Bajrangi nowruns an NGO, Navchetan (New Awakening), which forcibly "rescues" Hindu womenwho have been "lured" into relationships with non-Hindu men, and is widely loathed in the Muslim community.

The idea of recognising Bajrangi as a legitimate authority was repulsive toDholakia, a friend of the missing boy's parents, whose names were changedfor the film. When he refused, the theatre owners said they could not show his film. "I can see the anger in the Muslim community," Dholakia says."They will retaliate unless they're given a non-violent platform to expresstheir anger at being denied justice. They will react in the way they find easiest, which is through violence.

"Sixty years ago, on the eve of independence, Nehru, called on his countrymento help him "build the noble mansion of free India where all her childrenmay dwell". He declared: "We are citizens of a great country on the verge of bold advance, and we have to live up to that high standard. All of us, towhatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India withequal rights, privileges and obligations. We cannot encourage communalism or narrow-mindedness, for no nation can be great whose people are narrow inthought or in action."

His words are as true today as they were then.

Jo Johnson is the FT's bureau chief in Delhi.

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India is a Bus

Each community, each nation and each faith is like a beautiful bus; when you plan to go somewhere, you make sure all its tires have the same amount of air pressure for it to run effectively, to give better mileage, lasting tire wear..... all the mechanical parts must be greased, all the parts must be checked for a safe, stable and sure journey .

We need to work together to ensure that every one is on par to ride the road of progress, we need to fill the tire if the pressure is inadequate, instead of asking the tire to fill itself. Whose loss is it if the tire does not fill itself? We have to help the communities that are at a disadvantage. We need to bring them to a well balanced, smoothly functioning society. Ignoring one tire or a community is an irresponsible thing for the bus journey.

It is the responsibility of each person in the world to make a better world. Each day we need to ask ourselves, what have we done today to make the world a better place?

Peace and prosperity of our World hinges on justice and plurality, absence or deficiency of it will cause the BUS to slow down. It is in the interests of Community of the Nations to bring up the people in ditches on to a level playing field , and let them compete from that point forward. Imagine each community to be a tire of the bus, if all the tires have adequate air pressure, the smoothness of the journey is certain, assured and safe.

Each one of us needs to be the 'source' of goodwill to bring that equilibrium. You and I are not safe if the world around us isn't. All change begins with you and me. And I pledge that whatever I do, I will do it to bind people together, and will be a source of goodwill.

Try filling your heart with goodwill and fight with yourselves to remove any prejudice you may have..... some day, you would have changed the lives of at least a few people around you, but more than any one else, it will be you who will find boundless joy in yourselves. Be contagious with your freedom.
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INDIAN PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE

Mike Ghouse

With the belief that every Indian wants justice to every human being; rich or poor, connected or not, and demands fair treatment of every one of the 1.1 Billion Indians, we must come to grips with the social and community life to create an exemplary India, that will become a model nation in the world.

We have to give room to the extremists in every section of our communities be it Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jain, Muslim, Sikh, Zoroastrian or other, hoping they would recognize the God given space to each one of us and eventually see the benefits of co-existence.

I propose that the parliament of India introduce a bill for every political, cultural and religious organization in India to register with the Home Ministry, state their purpose, list their assets for public scrutiny, list the membership roster to be updated annually. Include a modified version of the 7 items into Indian Penal Code, and make it in to the law to punish the violators of the law.

Patriotism should be defined in terms of what you do to uplift the hopes of people, in terms of education to all, jobs to as many as we can in each successive year, home for every human, and a better life style to every Indian.

Every public office holder from the Peon to the President of India, and every one in between must take this pledge and live by it. Violation should disqualify him or her from holding the public office. Let it be monitored publicly.

1. I pledge allegiance to India, the nation that stands for liberty and justice for all.

2. I pledge that I honor and treat every Indian with "full" dignity.

3. I pledge that all individuals would be treated on par.

4. I pledge that I will treat all religions with equal respect, equal access and equal treatment.

5. I pledge that I will oppose any act that treats any Indian less than myself.

6. I Pledge that I will work for a India, where every individual can live with security and aspire for prosperity.

7. I pledge that I will protect, preserve and value every inch of India and every human soul in India

This would be the first step towards ensuring a Just, peaceful and prosperous India, that can sustain its progress and peace.

Jai Hind


Mike M Ghouse
SPEAKER THINKER WRITER
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