• Kailash Who ? - Indian Punchline
    http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2014/10/11/kailash-who

    Kailash Who?

    The Nobel Prize Committee has partly made up for its colossal failure not to have honored Mahatma Gandhi by honoring a disciple with this year’s peace prize. Kailash Satyarthi is not a famous name among India’s elites — like Nandan Nilekani or Shashi Tharoor. He’s a mere ‘Gandhian’, a vanishing breed.
    We have our own native yardstick to judge what merits national attention and what doesn’t. But the Western world took careful note of Satyarthi and is compelling us to be attentive to Satyarthi.
    What does this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for Satyarthi mean? Of course, it is an apt recognition of the great work Satyarthi has been doing for three decades running against the mainstream trend of governance that gives low importance to the social sectors of development.
    Present-day India attaches far greater importance to the ‘modernization’ of its military than to addressing the humiliating stigma that one child dies every 8 seconds in our country due to malnutrition — or, that 2.1 million Indian children die before reaching the age of 5 every year — four children every minute — mostly from preventable illnesses.
    I can go on and on. Therefore, Nobel has done a great thing by making the Indian political class hang its head in shame — although that might not have been its intention.
    But then, what has been its intention? To my mind, a compelling message is also being communicated to our subcontinent by bracketing two activists from India and Pakistan to share this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
    The message to our two countries in the subcontinent where Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai live and work is as follows: ‘You guys have got your national priorities all screwed up.’ It’s a stirring message for a rude awakening — and a cause to celebrate at a time when the beating of war drums was beginning to be heard in our region, again.

  • NATO slouches toward Syria, Iran draws red line - Indian Punchline
    By M K Bhadrakumar – October 9, 2014
    http://blogs.rediff.com/mkbhadrakumar/2014/10/09/nato-slouches-toward-syria-iran-draws-red-line

    ehran has come out openly today warning Turkey against making “any move which will further exacerbate and complicate the conditions in the region and have irreparable consequences.” The foreign ministry spokesperson disclosed that Tehran has made a demarche with Ankara to act with great circumspection. This is the first Iranian reaction to the resolution passed by the Turkish parliament last Thursday authorising the government to despatch troops to Syria.
    The Iranian reaction is sharp and amounts to a warning that if Turkish troops cross the border into Turkey, there will be “irreparable consequences.” Hmm. Things are getting to be rather explosive. Why such a sharp Iranian reaction?
    Evidently, Tehran has seen through Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s game plan, which is playing out on three templates. Erdogan visualizes that the US-led air campaign against the Islamic State won’t suffice to curb the extremist challenge and there is going to be need for “boots on the ground”. He knows Turkey is the only country which is in a position to deploy ground troops to strengthen the US’ strategy against IS.
    So, Erdogan has put forward a pre-condition — he will play ball provided the US reworks its anti-IS strategy in Syria to include ‘regime change’. But Washington prevaricated. Thereupon, Erdogan played his second card — reviving the ancient Turkish proposal to create a “buffer zone” inside Syria. And, then, he made the buffer zone a precondition for Ankara’s intervention to defend the northern Syrian town of Kobane on the Turkish border which had come under IS attack.
    Again, Washington dithered. Kobane has now fallen to the IS. Meanwhile, Erdogan has anyway scored a goal — Kobane is a Kurdish town and its capture by the IS weakens the effectiveness of the Kurdish separatist organization PKK fighting the Turkish army.
    Simply put, Erdogan is allowing the IS (which Turkey supports secretly) to crush the Kurds in northern Syria, while at the same time offering help to President Barack Obama to fight the IS — provided, of course, the US went along with the Turkish territorial ambitions (under the garb of buffer and ‘no-fly-zone’) in Syria, which will be the first shot in a ‘Balkanization’ of that Country.
    Clearly, Erdogan’s agenda focuses on the “regime change” in Syria and, secondly, on the weakening and eventual decimation of the Kurdish separatist groups, while his attitude to the IS as such has always remained ambivalent.
    (...)
    But Tehran seems to have understood what is afoot. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson announced today that Iran is willing to (militarily) intervene to liberate Kobane from the IS, if the Syrian government of President Bashar Al-Assad makes such a request to Tehran. In real terms, Tehran has pre-empted the pretext for a NATO intervention in Syria.
    Erdogan may have overreached. Within Turkey, too, opposition is building up against the despatch of Turkish troops to Syria, including even within the Islamist camp.
    Indeed, if the Kurds get Kobane liberated with Iranian help, that will expose Erdogan completely. The repercussions can be very serious for Turkey, because Kurds won’t accept Erdogan’s perceived betrayal. Anti-government violence has erupted on a big scale in the Kurdish regions in eastern Turkey.