Energy Theft In India

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From an excellent report by Peter Foster in The Daily Telegraph:

“Energy theft in India is endemic

As regular visitors to India will know, every other street corner in every other housing colony has a clothes-pressing wallah who uses gigantic irons filled with hot coals to press the laundry of India’s well-to-do.

Usually the pressing man and his family all seem to live together in the back of the pressing man’s tent. However a new racket in east Delhi, where my Hindi teacher lives, threatens to put the old hot-coals men out of business in some areas.

She tells me that in the compound of eight blocks of flats where she lives, the basements of each of them are filled with pressing-wallahs using electric irons plugged into the sockets in the basement car-parks.

My teacher, who says she suffers power-cuts of four to six hours every day, often takes her laundry down the ironing men to be pressed.

However she is always perplexed to discover that the ironing-wallahs seem to have power when the rest of the block does not.

And when she asks the ironing man who’s electricity meter is being billed for the power he’s using he suddenly goes all coy, but promises that “it’s nobody from ‘upstairs'”.

True to the spirit of India’s nosy-neighbourhoods, my teacher is now conducting a survey of the area, convinced that the local electrician has siphoned off a mains power cable which supplies a major new park which lies behind her flats and, for reasons of public safety, has a guaranteed power supply.

I wait with some interest to see what her investigations will reveal. The local electrician, who takes a 50 rupee cess from the ironing wallahs is, apparently, fearless – which means he has almost certainly cut a deal with someone at the power corporation for hassle-free access to free power.

On a serious note, India’s chronic power shortages are partly created by this endemic electricity theft which leaves too many people like my Hindi teacher leading difficult lives, sweating all summer, freezing all winter and reading by candle-light half the time.

In some places more than 50 per cent of power in Delhi is stolen or ‘lost’ to the grid thanks to poor infrastructure – however when I discover these rackets, there is a tiny corner of my heart which admires their entrepreneurial spirit.

As the electrician says with a shrug of his shoulders when confronted by my teacher’s complaints – ‘Hamne ghar chalana hai.’ – literally, “We have to run our house…” but translated in English as “We have to make a living” or “We all have to get by.”

It’s a saying which excuses a lot of the not-strictly-legal – or downright illegal – things that most people do to get by in this country.

I make no judgment on that given that in my privileged position I don’t have to chose between breaking the law and feeding my family.”

Comment:

I remember the power cuts when I was growing up in India.  Sometimes they were predictable, sometimes out of the blue.

You wake up pouring sweat in the middle of the night as the ceiling fan clunks to a stop. It’s too hot to sleep, so you spend a couple of hours fanning yourself with a magazine or one of the palm-leaf fans that are ubiquitous.

If  the cut starts in the evening, you’re in more trouble. Because if you have homework, then you have to get out the hurricane lantern and study in its flickering light.   I remember everyone in the family feeling their way around the dark for the lantern, which was always kept ready in the corner, with matches and candles as a supplement.  This happened often during the monsoon season.

It was a race between shutting all the windows to keep the rain from getting through the mosquito netting and getting the lamp and candles out before the current went off.

No time for boredom, ennui, existential angst and the other afflictions of modern man.

Everyone knew that workers (manual laborers, dhobis, coolies etc.) stole electricity, whichever way they could.  But there were many others who did too.

There was not too much anyone could do about it, since the policeman took his cut and wasn’t likely to stop them.

Around 25-30% (I wrote 40-50% before, which I’m told is an exaggeration) of electricity in India is stolen in this way. That is gigantic and far more than any other country suffers from theft(China’s transmission losses are 3%).

Most obviously, slum-dwellers steal by running wires from external transmission lines. But there are also middle-class people who tamper with meters and there is widespread theft by businesses, extensive, but hard to gauge.

Total losses to the state (most of the power supply is in the hands of the government) come to around $10 billion a year.

Two private companies, Tata and Reliance (headed by Mukesh Ambani) have begun to supply electricity to Delhi in conjunction with the government and they claim to have cut “transmission losses” (theft) from 50-30%, but there is still a long way to go.

Both Tata (Rothschild affiliated) and Reliance have ties with the state and the global elites, and it’s hard to see this as more than crony capitalism.

The farmers and the politicians always seemed to have enough electricity though.

We’d be studying and cooking in the dark, with candles, while in the town, in the maidan,  the pandals would be lit up 24/7 with colored bulbs.  Radios blared film music at a level that would puncture your ear-drums and cars jammed up the streets already overcrowded with thousands of pedestrians, bullock-carts, cycles, and rickshaws.

If anyone tried to take away the subsidies, the beneficiaries would make common cause with rivals to stir up trouble.  There would be bandhs, strikes, road-blocks, threats of arson or self-immolation. The would-be reformer would back down. The political process in all its gangsterism (“do what we want or else”) shows its face…

The masses of people are illiterate  and half-starved but shrewd and tough. They have little to lose and everything to gain through the process. The politicians have every reason to foster poverty, since they benefit from the vote-bank it provides.

The middle-class is too busy trying to survive in a world that demands international standards to enter the market.

War On India: Air Vice-Admiral Asks If Power Outage Was Cyber-Attack

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Two days after my post suggesting that the massive electricity outage in India might be sabotage of some kind, I find that the Indian Defense Review has taken up the theme.

I’m not sure whether to feel flattered or worried.  In a post entitled “Is Electricity Outage a Cyber Attack on India by China?” Air Vice -Marshal A. K. Tiwari evades addressing the issue, but he does provide a lengthy description of the concept of cyberwarfare and the issues involved.

Why am I worried? Because I rather think someone is setting up China for a confrontation with India that can do neither country any good.

It’s not that the Chinese are incapable of stealth attacks. But I wonder about attacks that come with Chinese IP addresses attached to them.

That was the case with the Vizag attack on the Indian Navy’s HQ recently.

I’m more inclined to think that the Anglo-Zionist establishment might be stirring up things, especially in light of the Gupta case, the attack on the fishing boat near Dubai, the Time cover story of Manmohan Singh, the Anna Hazare Trojan-horse, and dozens of other incidents I’ve listed several times on this blog.

Malefactors use bloggers to unwittingly amplify suspicions, rumors, or possibilities and lend the very credence those rumors need to succeed in having an effect. I wouldn’t like to play the role of dupe in any kind of psywar.

On the other hand, I get a kick out of seeing my narrative echoed by at least one listener in a position of influence.

“When one’s computer system does not work, it is not easy to distinguish whether the failure is a genuine malfunction or a result of malicious attack. More often than not one tends to believe that his computer system itself is malfunctioning. So it is difficult to determine if one is under cyber attack. The nature of attacks are such, for example hidden Trojans activated on command or at pre-determined time, that one does not know when the actual attack was launched.

The origins of attack also remain uncertain. The attacking nation or non-state actor can route his attack via a computers located in a third country or even through benign computers based in the country being attacked. These could be the personal computers of citizens of the country under attack. Such an approach poses major dilemma for defender and for the right to computer privacy in democratic societies.

The malware can be inbuilt in to the computer system at manufacturing stage itself. It can be pre-designed in micro chips for various items like sensors, routers, switches etc. It can be injected later on into system as a sleeper cell. Its algorithm can be programmed in variety of ways to defeat most defenses.

The defender in cyber world has to cope with many problems. The existing defenses are against only known viruses/worms. Defense networks, therefore, require constant upgradation. Even secure nets can be injected with virus even though attacker is not physically connected into the net. But then excessive security on the net decrease the system speed.”

DHS: Threat To US Critical Sytems Very Real

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Now, just a day after power is restored in India, following the largest power outage in history,  the government in the US is hyping up the threat of a cyber attack on critical systems here:

CNN:

“The Senate debated a bill on Wednesday to improve America’s cyber security. The Department of Homeland Security said we’ve seen a 20-fold increase in computer attacks recently. So how vulnerable are we?

After 24 years with the FBI — many spent as the bureau’s top cyber cop — Shawn Henry has come face to face with the Internet threat. And he’s worried.

“I think that it is very, very likely,” said Henry when asked if a serious cyber attack against critical system in the U.S is inevitable. “I’m quite frankly surprised it hasn’t happened yet.”

Every day, U.S. government and private computer systems are being probed by cyber thieves and state-sponsored hackers from China and Russia.

“There are estimates that there are attempted breaches in the millions of times per day. They’ll just continuously knock until they find an edge to get in,” Henry said. Asked whether they have gotten in, Henry replied: “They get in regularly.”

In 2011, Henry led the FBI in breaking up an international hacker ring that had infiltrated 4 millio”n computers, including some at the U.S. space agency NASA.

The head of the U.S. Cyber Command estimates corporate and government losses may already total $1 trillion. Many companies don’t even know they have been hacked.”

Comment:

Is this all coincidental? The Indian government talks about the possibility of a large cyber attack in June. In July rioting breaks out, with no apparent cause, in a very strategic area in NE India, displacing vast numbers of people. PM Manmohan Singh goes there. Immediately after, the NE grid collapses, triggering a multi-state power outage, affecting some 300 plus million people.  This is repaired. Then the next day, a large outage shuts down power for double the number of people, mostly in north India, far from where Western corporations are located. This follows on cyber-attacks on Indian’s naval HQ that seem to come from Chinese IP addresses.

[The Chinese, although apparently having IQs higher than even the Ashkenazi, seem to leave their signature behind when they commit attacks. Somewhat like that Arabs leaving their passports behind after 9-11. But then Arabs and other darkies don’t have high IQs, so that must be it.]

Notice that Rajat Gupta, who was convicted in June, in lieu of the major perps at Goldman Sachs, is the poster boy for Manmohan Singh and the liberalization of the economy.

He headed McKinsey, the consulting firm most associated with the outsourcing and the loss of American jobs, which is a primary focus of the anger on main street and in the OccupyWallStreet movement, although outsourcing was not the cause of the financial crisis.

Social media references to the Gupta trial played on the word ‘untouchable,” which means the very lowest-caste in India, but also, in the neo-liberal regime, refers to someone whose job is beyond outsourcing. The double-entendre gives the game away.

The take-down of Gupta was co-ordinated by the elites to play to the anarchist, anti-globalization crowd and distract them from the sleight-of-hand surrounding the prosecution of Wall Street crime, which had begun to knock on the doors of the real perps.

Similarly, the Indian power outage, noticeably hyped in the Western media, was described in the social media with many references to “dark ages,” a phrase which contrasts with the slogan of the Indian liberalization regime of the 1990s, which was “India Shining.”

The Dark Ages also refers to the pre-Enlightenment, medieval, and religious world-view, which is, more generally, the target of the Illuminist/Zionist power elite.

Hence the contrast between so-called “shining India” plunged in the dark, because of her “Dark Ages,” (that is, because of her medieval, or religious backwardness) and the illumination of the “New Jerusalem,” “the city on the shining hill,”  which is the self-image of  London, both as the seat of the City (the banking establishment), as well as the head of the restored British empire, now a world empire, declaring itself  to the assembled royalty of Europe.

Gore Vidal Dead: Clever Satirist, Deluded Moralist

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Gore Vidal died.

He said some accurate things about American foreign policy [which I admired], wrote some famous books I’ve never read [well, actually I did read “Myra Breckinridge” and disliked it] and was a clever fellow altogether, at least, all the clever people say so. 

But, hmm…I don’t really have anything to say except, let’s see…

I really don’t give a fuck. Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young

hooker decrepit old pansy man dies?  feels as though she’s been taken advantage of ?

[That was Gore Vidal defending his good friend Roman Polansky, guilty of forced sodomizing and rape of a 13 year-old girl, after feeding her drugs.]

[Further note. The derogatory term (pansy) is intended to be satirical.  I have no animus against gays or gay rights, in fact, I fully support them.]

But, since the entire blogosphere is singing Vidal’s praises, without any reference whatsoever to his many negative traits, including venomous attacks on people ranging from Truman Capote to Charlton Heston,  I decided to break my usual rule of not saying anything negative on someone’s death and point out how mean a man he was in some ways, personally.

There was, for instance, his trick of embarrassing heterosexual males by implying homosexuality, the most famous instance of which was his encounter with Charlton Heston, who was not amused.]

And more here about the venom behind the urbanity:

About Truman Capote:

“Vidal made no secret that he detested the author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood, saying once: “Capote I truly loathed. The way you might loathe an animal. A filthy animal that has found its way into the house.”

When asked ‘What was Capote doing that you didn’t like?” Vidal shouted: “Lying! The one thing I hate most on this earth. Which is why I do not have a friendly time with journalists.” He called Capote’s death “a good career move” and added “Every generation gets the Tiny Tim it deserves.”

Stephen Moss in The Guardian has a good piece about a man who wrote brilliant essays and over-rated novels, and  carried his perceptive and prescient anti-imperial criticism into pointless America-bashing that finally undercut his own criticism.

“Does age bring wisdom?” a questioner from the floor asked Gore Vidal? There was a short pause. “No, it brings senility.” Cue a wave of applause from the vast audience that had come to touch the hem of the man Adam Boulton, who had the tricky task of interviewing Vidal, called “the greatest essayist since Montaigne”.

That’s a big claim, but not necessarily wide of the mark: Vidal’s essays on politics and literature are magnificent and will live long after the weighty novels he is keener for us to read and remember are gathering dust.

The wind-lashed encounter with Boulton was a ramble – an old man (Vidal, not Boulton) peering into the nooks and crannies of a fascinating life – but, happily, it was punctuated by some memorable one-liners. Asked who his successor as the great contrarian would be, he said: “I’m not holding the door open.” Lifting his walking stick and brandishing it like a mitre, he intoned: “I’m still the bishop of Rome.”

His advice to young people – “Grow up.” Questioned about his famous line that “when a friend succeeds, a little part of me dies”, he insisted it had been a joke – the books of quotations may have to be rewritten. The Republicans he called “a mindset rather than a party – a group of like-minded people compelled by greed and with a capacity for character assassination.” Asked by Boulton if Bobby Kennedy (who Vidal heartily disliked) would have made a better president than George W Bush, he replied: “You would make a better president than Bush!” Could an intellectual ever be elected president? “Well,” said Vidal, “accidents happen.”

[LR: Being anti-Bush or anti-Republican, is, after all very popular in intellectual circles, so it is hardly evidence of great courage to attack either of them from the safety of Europe.]

The one-liners, if you could catch them above the howling wind, kept coming: Vidal’s mind, which has a deeply ironic and subversive bent, is sharp, even if at 82 the body is frail. But are one-liners enough? There is substance in Vidal’s worldview – the Jeffersonian belief in the autonomy of the states, the fear of centralised power, the opposition to US entanglements abroad (he even said US involvement in the second world war was undertaken for selfish reasons) – but these days it gets hopelessly lost. He has become a turn.

His ceaseless negativity is also wearing. Perhaps that is the prerogative of the old, but the attack on the US is so unremitting that he undermines his own assault. “America is a country where no one can be phoney enough” – it sounds good, but is it true? It seems phoney to me. This is the country, after all, he has chosen to return to after his long sojourn in Italy.

Vidal has things of value to tell us – that the US administration has used 9/11 to tear up supposedly inviolable personal freedoms, that America cannot be both republic and empire, that all US politics is based on money, property, business. It was a telling moment when Boulton mentioned the picture in Vanity Fair that linked Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer, three octogenarians pitching against America’s misguided, self-interested interventions in the Middle East. That got a large and deserved burst of applause.

Where were the voices of the younger generation was the implication? Is the art of engagement dying? Ironically, Christopher Hitchens, seen by some as a possible heir to the waspish Vidal, has engaged – but on the side of so-called liberal interventionism. Hitchens was in the audience and asked a loaded question – was it true Vidal had said the Bush administration knew 9/11 was coming? Vidal shot back that he’d never said such a thing, and that in any case Bush – his questioner’s hero – was too incompetent to have carried out so strategically devastating an attack.

[LR: Notice that Hitchens and Vidal reinforce the propaganda frame-work, by denying any validity whatsoever to the view that the government itself might have been complicit. How is this different from the Michael Moore brand of Democrat anti-establishmentarian critique?]

Vidal avoided that trap, but the uncommitted observer was still left wanting a more coherent picture of what should replace Bush. Even old guys – and it is poignant that Vidal is now the last of that Vanity Fair trio alive – have to do more than mock the vanities of the world. And beyond welcoming an Obama presidency as a sign that the US might be growing up,

[LR: Again, how deep really is criticism of this kind? ]

Vidal has little positive to say. Bush is an idiot, McCain a dimwit – not even a war hero, because “all he ever did was crash his plane; he didn’t even try to escape”; even Roosevelt wanted only to become “emperor of the west”. Sorry, but I don’t buy that latter point: there is a point where glib contrarianism becomes hollow and self-defeating; the enemy of thought.

Did he have any words of wisdom to offer at the dusk of a long life, asked a youthful member of the audience? Vidal had none, which seemed rather sad. It doesn’t suggest senility – the mind is strong, the wit undiminished – but it does suggest that irony can only take you so far.”

Lynn and Vanahan National IQ Results Found Unreliable

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From Racial Reality a good criticism of the patently biased Lynn assessment of race and IQ

“Richard Lynn has long been criticized for his controversial studies on intelligence, but this latest series of criticism might just be the final nail in his coffin. Focusing on his much-condemned African IQ studies, it reveals serious flaws in his methodology and calls him out on manipulating and falsifying data, which has wider implications that make his entire body of work (and that of his associates) untrustworthy. It begins with Wicherts et al. 2010:
Although these estimates of national IQ are claimed to be “highly valid” (Rushton, 2003, p. 368) or “credible” (McDaniel, 2008, p. 732) by some authors, the work by Lynn (and Vanhanen) has also drawn criticism (Barnett & Williams, 2004; Ervik, 2003; Hunt & Carlson, 2007; Hunt & Sternberg, 2006; Lane, 1994). One point of critique is that Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s estimate of average IQ among Africans is primarily based on convenience samples, and not on samples carefully selected to be representative of a given, targeted, population (Barnett & Williams, 2004; Hunt & Sternberg, 2006). Unfortunately, in many developing countries, such representative samples are lacking (McDaniel, 2008).

A literature review is necessarily selective. Despite Lynn’s objective of providing a “fully comprehensive review of the evidence” (Lynn, 2006, p. 2), a sizeable portion of the relevant literature was not considered in both his own review, and in reviews with Vanhanen. Nowhere in their reviews did Lynn (and Vanhanen) specify the details of their literature search. Our own searches in library databases resulted in additional relevant studies that may be used to estimate national IQ. For instance, Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) accorded a national IQ of 69 to Nigeria on the basis of three samples (Fahrmeier, 1975; Ferron, 1965; Wober, 1969), but they did not consider other relevant published studies that indicated that average IQ in Nigeria is considerably higher than 70 (Maqsud, 1980a,b; Nenty & Dinero, 1981; Okunrotifa, 1976). As Lynn rightly remarked during the 2006 conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), performing a literature review involves making a lot of choices. Nonetheless, an important drawback of Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s reviews of the literature is that they are unsystematic. Unsystematic literature reviews do not adhere to systematic methodology to control for potential biases in the many choices made by the reviewer (Cooper, 1998; Light & Pillemer, 1984). Lynn (and Vanhanen) failed to explicate the inclusion and exclusion criteria they employed in their choice of studies. Such criteria act as a filter, and may thus affect the estimate of national IQ. Lynn (and Vanhanen) excluded data from several sources without providing a rationale. For instance, they used IQ data from Ferron (1965), who provided averages in seven samples of children from Sierra Leone and Nigeria on a little-known IQ test called the Leone. For reasons not given, Lynn (2006) and Lynn and Vanhanen (2006) only used data from the two lowest scoring samples from Nigeria. Most of the remaining samples show higher scores, but those samples were not included in the estimation of the national IQ of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Likewise, Lynn (and Vanhanen) did not consider several relatively high-scoring African samples from South Africa (Crawford Nutt, 1976; Pons, 1974). It is unfortunate that Lynn (and Vanhanen) did not discuss their exclusion criteria. In some cases (Crawford Nutt, 1976; Pons, 1974), the Raven’s Progressive Matrices was administered with additional instruction. Although this instruction is quite similar to an instruction as described in the test manual (Raven, Court, & Raven, 1996), some have argued that this instruction artificially enhances test performance (cf. Rushton & Skuy, 2000). Given the likely differences in opinion on which samples to include or exclude in a review, inclusion and exclusion criteria should be explicated clearly and employed consistently. It is well known that unsystematic literature reviews may lead to biased results (Cooper, 1998; Light & Pillemer, 1984). Another problem is that the computation of statistics in literature reviews is quite error-prone. Indeed Lynn’s work contains several errors (Loehlin, 2007).
Lynn responded, attempting to defend his work, and Wicherts et al. fired back immediately with an even stronger rejoinder, repeating their previous criticism of his methodology and flat out accusing him of cherry-picking data that supports his position while ignoring the rest:
In this rejoinder, we criticize Lynn and Meisenberg’s (this issue) methods to estimate the average IQ (in terms of British norms after correction of the Flynn Effect) of the Black population of sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that their review of the literature is unsystematic, as it involves the inconsistent use of rules to determine the representativeness and hence selection of samples. Employing independent raters, we determined of each sample whether it was (1) considered representative by the original authors, (2) drawn randomly, (3) based on an explicated stratification scheme, (4) composed of healthy test-takers, and (5) considered by the original authors as normal in terms of Socio-Economic Status (SES). We show that the use of these alternative inclusion criteria would not have affected our results. We found that Lynn and Meisenberg’s assessment of the samples’ representativeness is not associated with any of the objective sampling characteristics, but rather with the average IQ in the sample. This suggests that Lynn and Meisenberg excluded samples of Africans who average IQs above 75 because they deemed these samples unrepresentative on the basis of the samples’ relatively high IQs. We conclude that Lynn and Meisenberg’s unsystematic methods are questionable and their results untrustworthy.
Then in a later paper, Wicherts et al. dug even deeper, finding that in addition to picking and choosing, Lynn actively seeks out and uses data that’s not reliable or representative:
The samples, considered by Lynn (and Vanhanen), but discarded here, are given in the Appendix. Besides the two samples described above (Klingelhofer, 1967; Zindi, 1994), these are Wober’s (1969) sample of factory workers, and Verhaegen’s (1956) sample of uneducated adults from a primitive tribe in the then Belgian Congo in the 1950s. Verhaegen indicated that the SPM test format was rather confusing to the test-takers, and that the test did not meet the standards of valid measurement. In Wober’s study, the reliability and validity were too low (Wober, 1975). In three of the samples in Table 1, the average IQ is below 70. These are Owen’s large sample of Black South African school children tested in the 1980s, the 17 Black South Africans carefully selected for their illiteracy by Sonke (2001), and a group of uneducated Ethiopian Jewish children, who lived isolated from the western world in Ethiopia and immigrated to Israel in the 1980s (Kaniel & Fisherman, 1991). The last two samples cannot be considered to be representative.

[…]

Our review of the literature on the performance of Africans on the Raven’s tests showed that the average IQ of Africans on the Raven’s tests is lower than the average IQ in western countries. However, the average IQ of Africans is not as low as Lynn (and Vanhanen) and Malloy (2008) maintained. The majority of studies on IQ test performance of Africans not taken into account by Lynn (and Vanhanen) and Malloy showed considerably higher average IQs than the studies that they did review. We judge the reviews of Lynn (and Vanhanen) and Malloy to be unsystematic. These authors missed a large part of the literature on IQ testing in Africa, failed to explicate their inclusion and exclusion criteria, and made downward errors in the conversion of raw scores to IQs (Wicherts, 2007). Lynn (and Vanhanen)’s estimate of average IQ of Africans of around 67 is untenable. Our review indicates that it is about 78 (UK norms) or 80 (US norms). These means are somewhat lower than the means of Africans on other IQ tests, which lie around 82 (Wicherts et al., 2010). These results undermine evolutionary theories of race differences in intelligence of Lynn (2006), Rushton (2000), and Kanazawa (2004) (Wicherts, Borsboom, & Dolan, 2010a; Wicherts et al., 2010b).
Lynn responded to that too, accusing Wicherts et al. of deriving their higher estimate of average African IQ from elite samples, but they once again showed that his lower estimate results from the unsystematic use of samples that are not random or representative.

Bahrain Govt. Blackmails Activist With Video Of Sex With Wife

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David Swanson at Dissident Voice:

“Bahraini authorities are targeting human rights activist and lawyer Mr. Mohamed Isa Al-Tajer due to his human rights activities and years of work on behalf of political detainees and prisoners of conscience.

Mohamed Isa Al-Tajer is an attorney, human rights activist, Co-founder and Executive Director of the Bahrain Rehabilitation and Anti-violence Organisation (BRAVO) and works with many international human rights organizations. Al-Tajer has defended many prisoners and participated in several defense firms formed to defend activists, political figures, and prominent human rights defenders in Bahrain since 2007.

In June 2012, Al-Tajer participated at the Bahrain UPR meeting in Geneva. Pro-Bahrain-government newspapers and state television led a smear campaign against Al-Tajer. Later video and private photos of him and his wife were published via pro-government forums and accounts on the social media.

Al-Tajer has previously provided testimony to the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry BICI that “he was videotaped sleeping with his wife and that he was threatened that this tape would be made public.” (BICI 1261.b)

According to Al-Tajer’s testimony, after spending a night at his beach house with his wife, more than a year ago, he started receiving threats in January 2011 from people he believes are intelligence agents of the Bahrain government. Al-Tajer was told that they had installed cameras in his beach house, and now had a tape of him being intimate with his wife. The threats targeted his work, and he was told that if he did not stop his human rights work they would release the tape. In January 2011 Al-Tajer was defending a group of opposition activists and led a protest movement inside the court when he withdrew from the trial for lack of any fair hearing; he was followed by 45 other lawyers, a move that attracted attention to the problems of the judicial system in Bahrain.

Al-Tajer refused to be blackmailed and continued with his work as a human rights lawyer. During the popular protest last year, Al-Tajer reportedly made a speech in which he addressed the public in the Pearl Roundabout in March 2011 to denounce Bahrain’s human rights record.

In April 2011 after the crackdown on the protesters Al-Tajer received more threats, but he continued to express his opinions through the media, and he was eventually arrested on 15 April 2011 by a group of more than 20 masked and armed plain-clothes men, belonging to security forces who raided his house after midnight. He was held incommunicado until he appeared before the National Safety Court (Military) on June 12, 2011 facing charges of incitement of hatred against the regime, releasing of false news and taking part in a demonstration.

During his detention, Al-Tajer was subjected to torture and ill-treatment. He was kept in solitary confinement during seven weeks, beaten and kicked, forced to stand for long hours with his hands against the wall, prevented from going to the bathroom, sleeping, talking with other detainees and having contact with his family during two consecutive months. On August 6, 2011, after 114 days of detentions, he was released on bail.

The trial against Al-Tajer has still not been concluded and the next hearing session is scheduled on 26 June 2012. Confiscated items during the arrest which include confidential lawyer client information, as well as family pictures and videos have not been returned to him. Additionally, Al Tajer’s telephone communications and movement allegedly remain under close monitoring by the National Security Intelligence.

After participating at the UPR process in Geneva last month, Al-Tajer received text messages on his mobile phone threatening him not to take part in a conference held to discuss the UPR meetings by the Bahrain National Democratic Action Society on Wed 30 May 2012, and when he did, the video was released the next day. The video was released on a pro government website, Bahrain Forums, which has played a huge role in spreading sectarianism and conducting attacks and defamation campaigns on people who are part of the opposition and/or activists.

The Bahrain government and dictator are not denounced in the U.S. media because of their alliance with the U.S. military. But if anything gives the lie to the pretense that U.S. motivations in Libya or Syria or Iran are related to human rights it is the absolute indifference to the rights of humans in Bahrain.”

Power Restored Across India: Losses Run To Hundreds Of Millions

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The Huffington Post:

“Factories and workshops across India were up and running Wednesday after major electrical grid collapses caused the world’s two worst power blackouts.

An estimated 620 million people lost state-provided electricity when India’s northern, eastern and northeastern grids failed Tuesday afternoon. It followed Monday’s failure of the northern grid, which left 370 million people powerless.

Electricity workers struggled throughout the day Tuesday to return power to the 20 affected states, restoring most of the system within hours of the failure. India’s new Power Minister Veerappa Moily told reporters that by Wednesday morning power had been fully restored across the country.

“Factories and workshops across India were up and running Wednesday after major electrical grid collapses caused the world’s two worst power blackouts.

An estimated 620 million people lost state-provided electricity when India’s northern, eastern and northeastern grids failed Tuesday afternoon. It followed Monday’s failure of the northern grid, which left 370 million people powerless.

Electricity workers struggled throughout the day Tuesday to return power to the 20 affected states, restoring most of the system within hours of the failure. India’s new Power Minister Veerappa Moily told reporters that by Wednesday morning power had been fully restored across the country.

Moily, who took over the top power ministry position Tuesday, said an investigation had begun and he did not want to point fingers or speculate about the cause.”

And this:

“The Confederation of Indian Industry said the two outages cost business hundreds of millions of dollars, though they did not affect the financial center of Mumbai and the global outsourcing powerhouses of Bangalore and Hyderabad in the south.”

Comment:

The whole things is so bizarre, not the least, because everyone seems to be taking it so coolly. The relative calmness of the population was really quite admirable.  Half of India doesn’t have access to electricity and those that do are used to black-outs of smaller dimensions.

What I get from everything I’ve read so far:

1. No one really knows what happened.

2. It was the power-grid in the NE Northern grid that went down first.  The NE area is where there were violent riots and communal clashes involving the Bodo tribes. Thousands were displaced. No one really knows why the rioting began. The area is very strategically positioned close to Burma and China and also near the drug trade. [Correction, August 3: I read that it was around Delhi that the grid first went down. It must have been misreported. I’ll research this a bit more.]

3.  Just last month the government talked about the importance of defending against a major cyber-attack against public utilities and also tasked one agency to engage in surveillance preparatory to preemptive attack, if needed.

4.  Recently, there was also a cyberattack on the Vishakhapatnam naval HQ on the east coast.

5.  Power seems to have been restored very fast, all in all.  This argues against the failure being simply a bigger version of “business as usual.” While rolling brown-outs and even black-outs are common throughout India, this is the biggest electricity outage in history, and the biggest India has suffered since 2001.

6. I am not sure whether those grids are modern “smart grids.” Until one knows more about the grid, it would be misleading to suggest a cyberattack, unless there were other computerized systems that could trigger such a big collapse.

Several groups stand to profit from an outage of this kind:

1. Groups wanting to sell the government and public on smart grids (very vulnerable to attack unless properly encrypted).

2. Groups pushing for alternative sources of energy, such as nuclear power.  Nuclear plants under construction in India have been met by fierce opposition from anti-nuclear activists.

3. Groups that see a need for other sources of energy, such as natural gas (the NE has large natural gas deposits).

4. Groups that want to hype a terror threat would make increased surveillance easier to sell to the public.

5. Groups that want to set back the economy or highlight its weaknesses for whatever purpose, whether to encourage reforms, push them through at a higher rate, or destroy them.

6. A government “dry-run” or preparedness exercise of some kind is also a possibility. Perhaps others governments are involved. Who knows? These days, nothing seems to be outlandish any more.

War On India: Is Massive Electricity Outage Sabotage By Elites?

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Power Grid failure hit India States Affected What is causing power grid failure in India? What is an electrical grid?.

Update

Soutik Biswas at the BBC has some interesting facts about India’s power consumption:

  • Despite its soaring energy needs, India has one of the lowest per capita rates of consumption of power in the world,734 units, as compared to a world average of 2,429 units. This is nothing compared with say, Canada, (18,347 units) and the US (13,647 units). China’s per capita consumption (2,456 units) is more than three times that of India.
  • The low per capita consumption is despite the fact that the power sector has been growing at more than 7% every year.
  • Other interesting points Biswas makes: India’s electricity is mostly derived from coal, with about a fifth from hydro-elecric power; the main problems are massive subsidies to rich farmers, pervasive theft, and failures in transmissions and distribution; there is no shortage of money (this contradicts the usual mythology).
  • The most telling statistic: At the time of Independence, about 60% of India’s power sector was privately owned. Today, about 80% of the installed capacity is in the hands of the government

Update: I should point out how calm most of India looks in the pictures of the outage. There seems to be more panic in the Western media.

I can only imagine what would happen here if the entire population of the US (double that, actually) was plunged into darkness.

Part of the reason is that Indians are used to this sort of thing.

Rolling electricity cuts are common. In Tamil Nadu where a huge number of multinationals have relocated and heavily tax the system, there are current cuts practically every day, from anywhere between 4 hours and 12.

Usually, customers get notice and have time to arrange their day around the cut. But still, in temperatures of 45 degrees Celsius, it can be dangerous to have go without a fan, let alone an air conditioner, especially for older people, like my parents.

But, there hasn’t been a major power failure like this since 2001.

Causes of the current shortages include massive subsidies to farmers, pervasive current theft, and price controls. However,  for private industry to come in and suddenly take over would also have terrible immediate effects. The smart thing would be to improve the existing infrastructure, remove the subsidies, and crack down on theft.

Update: The AtlanticCities.com explains why it took longer to restore power in DC than in India.

“That’s 10 days for less than half a million people [in DC] compared to about 6 hours for most of the power to be restored to the roughly 350 million affected by the outage Monday, or compared to the 6 hours it’s taken Tuesday to restore power to 75 percent of the more than 670 million people affected by this latest outage. The Times of India notes that the last major outage – in 2001, affecting a region home to 230 million people – was resolved in 16 hours.”

“http://m.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/07/why-indias-massive-power-outages-get-fixed-more-quickly-dcs/2775/

Update:: A piece in Zdnet in June 2012 describes a new Indian security initiative that involved allowing some government agencies to carry out cyber attacks, apparently as a preemptive move. So, the Indian government had been anticipating a cyber attack and even planning one, if necessary. Curious.

India is taking steps to protect its cyberinfrastructure by designating relevant government agencies to carry out offensive cyberattacks on other countries when necessary.

The country’s National Security Council (NSC) will soon approve the “comprehensive” plan and designate the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Technical Research Organization (NTRO) to carry out offensive cyber-operations if needed, sources told The Times of India in a report Monday. All other intelligence agencies will be authorized to carry out intelligence gathering abroad, but not offensive operations.

Update: A piece in the Telegraph of July 30 (the first day when the NE grid was down) quotes a businessman saying it felt like a cyberattack:

There is no way India can become an economic world power with such outages that leave a third of the country paralysed” businessman Virender Kapoor said. Its almost as if somebody had launched a crippling cyber attack on its power grid, he declared.

Update: An article in Economic Times, (India) July 19, 2012, reported a warning by McAfee (a computer security firm) that electric grids are easy to attack and can have a major impact. So, two weeks before a historic power outage occurs, a mainstream outlet runs a warning about a massive outage occurring, helpfully spelling out the details and warning that air defense systems could also be at risk?

“If a rogue state, terrorist, or malcontent wanted to debilitate a major city or even an entire country, how could it make a widespread, immediate, and lasting impact? Quite simply, by striking at the facilities that produce and distribute the electrical power that everything else depends on!

“Anything from the lights and appliances in your home to heart monitors in hospitals to air defense systems-anything could be compromised by a single, targeted attack on the energy grid. Only today, the weapon of choice is not a rocket launcher, but rather, malicious software code-malware that is skillfully designed to destroy, disrupt, or take control of the complex systems on which the grid runs,” Tom Moore, vice president, Embedded Security at McAfee said.

What’s more, it is modernization that has made the cyberthreat worse. The old systems were not sufficiently interconnected to make them that vulnerable.  The new systems, the Smart Grids, like Smart phones, are actually far more vulnerable to attack because they contain programs and embedded information that trojans or viruses can attack. Often, when modernizing, security and encryption are after thoughts…or might be just too expensive to consider.

“Moving systems from a manual process to one that is internet connected gave energy grid operators real-time info and allowed administrators to telecommute and field workers to re-program systems from remote locations through their smartphones however this also opened all their systems to the outside world.”

From what I can tell, India is trying to upgrade to smart grids.

That could make the system even more vulnerable, although it might help the single biggest problem after the aging infrastructure – the theft of electricity.

Update: Here’s another clue, in Rothschild-owned Reuters:

Stretching from Assam, near China, to the Himalayas and the northwestern deserts of Rajasthan, the outage was the worst to hit India in more than a decade and embarrassed the government, which has failed to build up enough power capacity to meet soaring demand.

If you have been following the Rothschild media for any length of time, a piece like this immediately gives the  game away. Who  thinks about the embarrassment of a government when hundreds of millions of people in the tropics have to go without electricity?

Most normal people are stunned or saddened, because they’re thinking of the people.

If the government actually is behind the failure in some way, it’s not an embarrassment, it’s criminal. And if the government’s not, then it’s an attack of some kind, in which case, it’s either criminal or some kind of state or non-state terrorism.

But embarrassment is the kind of thing only someone conducting a psyops would impute.

Update: Another clue that there is something fishy going on is that this occurred during the monsoon

season, when the demand on electric power-grids is lower than at other times. Correction: I read now that the monsoon was weaker than usual so there was an increase in electric usage to draw on well water:

The problem has been made worse by a weak monsoon in agricultural states such as wheat-belt Punjab and Uttar Pradesh in the Ganges plain, which has a larger population than Brazil.

With less rain to irrigate crops, more farmers resort to electric pumps to draw water from wells.

Also highly relevant to the blackout is the controversy over nuclear energy. While some people want to supplement the overloaded electric grid (overloaded because of economic growth), with nuclear power, others are understandably concerned about the potential for accidents in such a highly populated region of the world. That has led to rioting and protests against nuclear plants, like the one in Kudankulam Tamil Nadu, where usage of electricity is particularly heavy. A collapse of the electricity grid is an excellent way to force the issue and also strike a major blow to the country.

Update: I found some confirmation for my suspicions in comments made by executives responding to the crisis:

The failure happened without warning just after 1 p.m., electric company officials said.
“We seem to have plunged into another power failure, and the reasons why are not at all clear,” said Gopal K. Saxena, the chief executive of BSES, an electric company that services South Delhi, in a telephone interview. It may take a long time to restore power to north India, he said, because the eastern grid has also failed, and alternate power sources in Bhutan and the Indian state of Sikkim flow into the east first.
About two hours after the grid failure, power ministry authorities said some alternate arrangements had been made. “We are taking hydro power from Bhakhra Nangal Dam,” in northern India, said Sushil Kumar Shinde, the power minister, in a televised interview.”

I also found a statement contradicting claims that the outage was caused by an overdraw from state governments::

“No official reason for the Monday’s failure has been given, although some local news reports pointed fingers at state governments which were overdrawing power.

That assessment is too simplistic, Mr. Saxena, of BSES, said. There are controls in place on India’s electricity grids that override an outsized power demand. “We have one of the most robust, smart grids operating” in the world, he said. It would “not be wise” to give an assessment of what happened at this time, he added.”

Update: (July 31, 4:19PM) A couple of Pakistani websites are claiming that this was a Pakistani-Chinese cyberattack and that the Indian media has been told not to report on it.

This sounds pretty flimsy to me.

Even under Emergency in Mrs. Gandhi’s time there was no way to keep the press quiet.  But I’ll be on the look out. The timing of this, following the mysterious rioting in the strategic NE, is suspicious.

Update  : I was finally able to get through to family members, who tell me that the power failure mostly affects the north.  So, again, there is some hype about the situation. I’ll be adding info as I find it.

Update

SF Gate:

The massive failure – a day after a similar, but smaller power failure – has raised serious concerns about India’s outdated infrastructure and the government’s inability to meet its huge appetite for energy as the country aspires to become a regional economic superpower.

LR: The elites have been demanding that the government make it easier to invest in India’s infrastructure (public utilities), which they claim hasn’t been opened up at the speed at which they want:

Rothschild-affiliated Lakshmi Mittal on April 30, 2012

“India still has a tremendous potential to grow, but the slow progress in the infrastructure sector was proving to be an impediment, said Lakshmi Mittal, chairman and CEO of steel giant ArcelorMittal. He was in Bhatinda, Punjab in India recently where his company has set up Hindustan Mittal Energy Ltd (HMEL), a joint venture between state-run Hindustan Petroleum and Mittal Energy.

“Indian condemning millions to stay poor, Lakshmi Narayan Mittal says,” PTI, Times of India, June 20, 2012.

PM Manmohan Singh has responded that some of the problems have arisen because of Eurozone problems (where India has loaned money toward the bailout of European bankers) and also because of vehement press criticism of crony-capitalism that has made government officials extremely wary of doing anything. “Bollygarchs At Bay,” Investor’s Fresh New, July 31, 2012.

“Many foreign businesses have fallen foul of India’s tricky regulatory system but analysts note that it is domestic companies in sectors dependent on regulation that seem to be struggling more than most. Those with weaker links to government, such as consumer goods or pharmaceuticals, are proving more resilient.

A stark example is provided by Ambit Capital, a Mumbai-based broker. Its “politically connected companies” index ranks 75 big Indian businesses with either “strong connectivity to the political establishment” or fortunes that rely on state licences. For most of the past five years, they outperformed the 500 leading shares on the Bombay Stock Exchange. The pattern flipped last year, a trend that seems to be growing.”

ORIGINAL POST:

This is being called the largest black-out ever, affecting over 600 million people. (Hype?)

Power Fails Again in India, Wall Street Journal:

(I will add links to support my argument when I have time, so bear with me….)

“A massive power failure hit India’s north, east and northeast regions Tuesday, forcing offices and factories to shift to emergency generators and raising more questions about the state of infrastructure in Asia’s third-largest economy.

A commuter walked past an information board at a

The blackout was even more wide-reaching and severe than the power failure that plunged several states in northern India into darkness Monday.

Some 20 of India’s 28 states were affected Tuesday, and as many as 600 million people – half of India’s population – reportedly impacted. Monday’s blackout, which was caused by a failure of the northern grid, affected eight states with a total population of around 370 million.

Tuesday’s power outage was caused by the failure of the power supply networks in the north, east and northeast regions at 0730 GMT, according to the National Load Dispatch Center, a unit of Power Grid Corpof India Ltd. It added that work is on to restore the grid.

A commuter walked past an information board at a train station in New Delhi, Monday.

Power Minister Sushilkumar Shinde also said that efforts are being taken to resume supply as soon as possible, especially to essential services.

The electricity failure resulted in a widespread breakdown of transport and other services. A spokesman for the Northern Railways and Eastern Railways said about 200 trains were stopped in their tracks.

Metro rail services in New Delhi and its suburbs were halted as well, a spokesman for the Delhi Metro Rail Corp. said.

At Delhi’s international airport, diesel generators were switched on quickly to ensure services were not interrupted.

Arup Roy Choudhury, chairman of NTPC Ltd., India’s largest power generator by capacity, said the company’s coal-based power plants have stopped operating.

“We are expediting [the process of restarting the plants and will supply] first to the railways within the next one hour,” Mr. Choudhury said.

The government has already announced the appointment of a three-member panel to study the causes of Monday’s power failure. The committee will submit its report in 15 days’ time.

Comment:

There is a strong suspicion in my mind that this is sabotage at some level.

First.

I have been compiling growing evidence of  low-grade psychological warfare directed against India in the Western media: – The Time cover of Manmohan Singh as an underachiever, the barrage of misleading information about the Rajat Gupta trial, the publication of highly tendentious biographies of canonical Indian figures and Hindu leaders, accompanied by inflammatory and mendacious press articles, coupled with attacks in India by secular authorities (in bed with Western elites) against Hinduism and on Hindu temples, where vast amounts of gold still exist.

Second. In “Breaking India,” Rajiv Malhotra has described in detail how western-funded NGOs are encouraging secessionist activity.

The US state dept has made a U-turn and gone from condemning the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist movement to now supporting them as victims of Sri Lankan genocide.

(Bruce Fein’s career shows this about turn). Western elites are behind the foundation-funded Afro-Dalit movement, which aims to control the south of India, by westernizing it and breaking it off from the north.

The south includes the highly industrialized Tamil Nadu state, Andhra, the relatively wealthy Kerala region, as well as the Poona-Mumbai region, and it has not been affected.

The majority of Western corporations are located here.

Third.

Earlier this year, there were reports that a part of RAW (Indian intel) had fallen out with the Mossad. This followed on the Indian government’s commencement of barter and non-dollar trade with Iran, a move sure to discomfit the US government.

According to reporter Wayne Madsen, Indian intelligence has been cracking down on Mossad. (There is a division in RAW between those who want to stand firm against the globalist cabal, and those who want to be on the winning team).

Fourth.

There was a recent attack on an Indian fishing boat by a US naval vessel, leading to fatalities; in early July this year, there was a cyberattack on India’s naval HQ in Vizag, from which sensitive information was stolen apparently by hackers with Chinese IP addresses.

In the last few days before the outages, there were accounts of serious rioting/attacks against Muslims by Christian and Hindu tribes in the NE (near China and Burma).  Around a hundred were killed and thousands were displaced.

Fifth.

There is extensive Mossad/CIA activity in the NE area (near Burma) and in India as a whole, relating to the drug-trade that is now finding an HQ in Kochi in Kerala (where there is an ancient Jewish community, supposedly dating to the time of King Solomon) and in Mumbai, where there are numbers of Chabad houses through which the drug-money is laundered and where spies and saboteurs find refuge.

Sixth

Mossad and CIA have admitted being behind the creation of the Stuxnet virus and were behind David Headley, the alleged mastermind of the Mumbai bombing. Some allege that parts of Indian intelligence colluded with CIA and Mossad.

India was a minor victim of that virus when it first raised its head a couple of years ago.

[Check out my blog posts on Stuxnet.  I was one of the earliest bloggers to even follow the story and to allege it was an Israeli operation, not due to any so-called anti-Semitism on my part, but because I am aware that Israel leads the world in this area of technology.

Ditto with the Headley story, which was blogged here as well. ]

Seventh

The NE region is the area in which the electricity grid collapse began. Burma has recently been opened up and there has been some talk about Jewish republics being created there.

One such group is the Bnai Menashe in the NE part of India:

“Hillel Halkin, a well-known writer and translator who has lived in Israel for three decades, has written a fascinating new book out about his growing interest and belief in the Bnai Menashe, a group of some 5,000 people in a remote corner of northeastern India who live as observant Jews, claiming a link to the biblical tribe of Menashe. The book, Across The Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel, describes how Halkin’s skepticism was reversed after visiting the community, which began in the 1970s and has been guided for the last two decades by Eliahu Avichail, an Orthodox rabbi in Jerusalem. Over the years he has helped some 600 of the Bnai Menashe settle in Israel, where they underwent formal conversion. Another 100 arrived last month and more of their brethren would like to join them.

Michael Freund is a former New Yorker living in Jerusalem who has come to espouse the cause of the Bnai Menashe. A Modern Orthodox Jew who served as deputy director of communications and policy planning in the Prime Minister’s office under Benjamin Netanyahu, Freund, after visiting the community, has agreed to succeed Rabbi Avichail as head of Amishav, the organization championing the Bnai Menashe.

He believes that groups like the Bnai Menashe and the descendants of the Marranos “constitute a large, untapped demographic and spiritual reservoir for Israel and the Jewish people.” And while Freund opposes outright proselytization, citing traditional Judaism’s hesitancy about such an approach, he says that since groups like the Bnai Menashe have taken “the first step in our direction, it is time that we reach out and help them as they undergo the process of returning to the Jewish people.

The NE area is strategically-positioned between China and India, and has been the site of considerable secessionist activity over the last decade.

In 2009, two researchers claimed that a second Israeli state was emerging in India: “Second Israeli state emerging in India: “New Jersualem” movement eyes take over of three eastern states, near center of opium production,” John Kaminski and Arun Shrivastava, August 19, 2009

:A second “nation” of Israel today is nearing completion smack dab in the middle of the world’s premier drug producing region, the Golden Triangle of Burma — located right on the border between India and the military dictatorship now known as Myanmar, which is the real model of the human future.

Activities presaging the creation of a second Israeli state are well-known in India, but not elsewhere. Most everyone remembers how the first Israel popped onto the world scene in 1948 and has continued mass murdering its neighbors and hapless nations that fall under its sway ever since.

Precisely, political stealth moves over the last three decades and an aggressive outreach effort by “rabbis from Israel” to convert inhabitants of the three easternmost provinces of India to Judaism have been reported for years by Indian patriots in the Himalayan foothills who seek to return their country to its much longed for pre-British liberty.

The Deccan Chronicle, a newspaper in Hyderabad, reported that by means of “a ritual bath,” rabbis promise penniless Christian, Muslim and pagan converts a trip to Israel and preferred employment status, then buy votes of peasants, take over local boards and pass laws to legalize their manipulations, the same way they do everywhere else.

While the core issue in this geopolitical expansion of Rothschild-Rockefeller money empire that controls the world is proximity to the centuries old center of opium production run by the generals in Myanmar, the creation of a new Israeli state in the exact center of China, India and Southeast Asia augurs badly for the peoples of the region, as the current level of destabilization among Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East clearly illustrates.

And not to be forgotten is that the world’s oldest still functioning oil field is located in this area and Tripura state is reported to be floating on a sea of natural gas.”

The left and many non-governmental human rights group claim that the trouble in the NE is simply indigenous rebellion against multinational land-grabbing and government abuse of those who protest .

(The area is rich in minerals).

The right and the government claim that this is Naxalite-Maoist provocation, using the cover of trade-unions.

“There is enough documented information which reveals that trade unions are the new hunting grounds of Maoists. If we get good evidence that there was indeed a Maoist link to the Maruti violence, then we would invoke the anti-terror law,” a senior IB official told ET on condition of anonymity. The official says intelligence agencies suspect the attack on the Maruti plant was “premeditated” and believe that the union leaders could have links to top Maoist leaders. He cautioned it was early to reach any conclusion.

Former home secretary GK Pillai told ET: “The government has had information that Naxals have been trying to infiltrate labour organisations in urban areas for a while now. That information was passed on to states, and in some places action was taken.”

In recent days, there have been reports of violent rioting in the NE and the displacement of thousands of people.

Here is a report from France24

“”This time, it seems the violence was set off after a Muslim youth group in the district of Kokrajhar called for a strike to protest the removal of a signboard at a local mosque. This was followed by a series of drive-by killings, before large-scale rioting broke out on July 19. Roving bands of armed men – reportedly from both sides of the conflict – torched hundreds of houses, leaving both Bodos and Muslims homeless.

The indigenous Bodos represent just 10 percent of the population of Assam state. Since the early 1970s, the state has seen a steady influx of immigrants from Bangladesh. The rising number of Muslim immigrants has been cause for worry among Bodos, who are afraid that this could thwart their hopes of establishing an independent state.
[Hindu nationalists see this immigration as a kind of infiltration and subversion of the country.]
India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who visited both a Bodo and a Muslim refugee camp in Assam state on Saturday, promised “a proper inquiry into the tragic incidents”, as well as a three billion rupee (44 million euro) relief package for the region.”
And most significantly, no one seems to be able to say what set off the rioting.
“No one can explain how the violence started. They tell me they usually have good relations with the Bodo people. Muslims have lived in Bodo areas for a very long time – some even speak Bodo. Though this is not the first time Muslims and Bodos have clashed, the violence still seems to have taken them by surprise.”

Now comes the report of the grid being hit in the north (Monday) and spreading to most of the rest of the country (Tuesday)

There is not doubt in my mind that this is sabotage.

Eighth

Naturally, the Trojan horse Anna Hazare group (blessed by Wikileaks and heavily supported by Western NGOs of the “color revolution” variety) claims that the outage is an Indian government conspiracy.

That conspiracy theory covers the first few pages of Google already, very conveniently.

Just now, I noticed several sites referring to “Bhagat Singh” and praising revolution in India.  Here is one identifying itself as Naxalite and asking Indians to join the revolution. It looks like some kind of intelligence-created OPTOR! style site to me.

If the grid got hit only yesterday, how is it that Anna Hazare has so quickly come up with this theory and Google has already taken it up so fast? This means that any other interpretation of events  – for eg. that it is  likely orchestrated by the Western elites – is unable to get a hearing.

I know that when I posted my Goldman articles on LRC in 2008, they were rarely linked or passed around. A couple of them in fact landed up on sites like “Assassinated Press.” But any rumor passed on by NGO-backed journalists gets read over international radio, passed around in a flash, and rises to the top of Google searches. [As soon as I said this, of course, this post rises in Google!]

In fact, whenever I post a controversial piece like this one, I notice my home page on Google searches doesn’t change. I also notice an increase in spam and evidence of browser hijacking.

This is a pattern I’ve seen over and over.

I think there is a fair possibility that some parts of the Indian government (those colluding with outside interests, whether left-communist or right-corporatist) might be involved in the sabotage, but there is no doubt in my mind that the puppet-masters are Western elites.

The attack might be part of the show of strength necessary to collapse the government or force its hand.

[Added: I also wonder if it could be a kind of “war-gaming” by parts of the government for its own ends? ]

Anna Hazare’s grandstanding over the grid failure is also getting the headlines. This is the same way in which the Anna  movement got off the ground in the first place, at lightning speed, overtaking the indigenous resistance movement. Anna Hazare, like OccupyWallStreet, has the blessings of the western elites.

The elites need to break up India so as to have its constituent parts under control.

The idea is to stir up the Indian masses and to show the Indian government that it is the elites who are really in charge. Thus, Lakshmi Mittal (who is hand-in-glove with the Rothschilds) delivered an ultimatum to the Indian government recently, to “grow” or else.

Ninth (and the most controversial and speculative).

There were two massive earthquakes in Indonesia earlier this year (once was 8.9), of a magnitude that should have set off tsunamis that would have been in the direction of India.

In fact, there were tsunami warnings, but nothing came of it. The earthquakes took place off the Aceh province, which is just where the 2004 Asian tsunami had its origin. Had there been a similar tsunami from the earthquakes this year, it would have hit the Kudankulam nuclear plant which is at the tip of the peninsula, right on the Indian ocean. It would have been Fukushiima all over.

“More than 1 million people live within the 30 km radius of the KKNPP which far exceeds the AERB (Atomic Energy Regulatory Board) stipulations. It is quite impossible to evacuate this many people quickly and efficiently in case of a nuclear disaster at Koodankulam.”

The 2004 tsunami, which killed over 250,000 people hit, India and Sri Lanka.  I speculated then that it might have been caused by underwater nuclear testing in the Indian ocean.  Coincidentally,  the southern half of Iran has been struck by a massive drought (as have the grain-belt (heartland region) of the US and three quarters of Mexico) this past year.

Note:

I was unable to get through on the phone to India when I tried.

Notes:

“”Wikileaks takes credit for Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption campaign,”  MSN, April 20, 2011

http://news.in.msn.com/national/article.aspx?cp-documentid=5111803

Desi Divas: Anoushka Shankar & Norah Jones

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Half-sisters and full celebrity musicians, Anoushka Shankar and Norah Jones.

Anoushka , the daughter of classical sitar maestro Ravi Shankar, is  a renowned sitarist and composer herself. She’s also a columnist and actor. Her paternal half-sister, Norah Jones, is equally gifted and a familiar voice and face in American popular music. She is a country/blues singer, pianist, and composer.

Besides her widely praised solo work, Anoushka has collaborated with Joshua Bell, the classical violinist, Herbie Hancock, the jazz pianist, and legendary classical cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich.

Norah (born Geethali Norah Jones) sold over 26 million copies of her sensational debut album, “Come Away With Me,” which won 5 out of the 9 Grammy awards she’s won altogether. Billboard rates her the best-selling Jazz and popular singer of the last decade.