True Fabrications Picnic Stix Set
|
Sitting distanced from Bengal and going through the sui generis coverage of the Cyclone Aila after effects in the Bengali TV channels is a arousing and attention holding experience. The tragic incidence has emerged as the prime media story of the moment, promptly filling the void devised by the just concluded Lok Sabha polls. The cyclone had hit the Bengal coast on Monday, 25th of May 2009 and has left a massive trail of destruction in dissimilar constituents of the state. The scale of destruction and the suffering of the effected persons were unprecedented. As per official reports, at least 137 people have lost their lives in the catastrophe. Nearly two lakh others were left homeless. While the worst hit districts were South and North 24-Paraganas in South Bengal, Cyclone Aila has also left it is disastrous affect in the North Bengal districts exceptionally in Darjeeling Hills where at least 28 people have lost their lives. In Kolkata, six people were killed when huge trees fell on buses, cars and auto-rickshaws, roads were blocked, galore electric poles were keeled over snapping overhead wires. In various constituents of the city, power and water supply were seriously disrupted. The days after In the Sunderbans delta zone, gigantic waves caused by the cyclone have destroyed around 400 kilometers of embankments in Sagar, Pathapratima, Basanti, Gosaba, Sandeshkhali and Hingalgunj, flooding hundreds of the villages. 54 major and littler islands and the lives of over 40 lakh of it is inhabitants were severely affected in these areas. The floods has razed or damaged innumerable houses, washed away seeds and killed the livestock. Brackish water entering farmlands has ruined crops and wiped out all stocks of freshwater fish and shrimp. Village after village lay submerged. Affected people are living with acute shortage of drinking water, feed and shelter. Fears of an outbreak of waterborne enteric sicknesses loomed big as rotten carcasses of farm animals were drifting in the surrounding rivers and creeks. According to experts, Sunderbans has never been hit by such a damaging storm in the last three decades. The world’s biggest independent conservation establishment World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was working in Mousuni Island of the Sunderbans for rather a good deal of time, in cooperative relationship with WWF (Netherlands), Hewlett Packard and GTZ to increase the adaptive capacities of the inhabitants from cyclones and tidal surges. By taking up climate adaptation systems and infrastructural facilities to protect the island’s inhabitants, WWF (India) had set up a Climate Adaptation Centre here, with an electronic Early Warning System to warn villagers of oncoming disasters. Cyclone Aila’s wrath has washed away the entire work done by WWF (India) in Mousuni. Apart from the humane tragedy, the cyclone and subsequent floods has severely affected the mangrove forests of Sunderbans and presumably caused a sizable harm to it is animal life by sweeping away a big number of highly endangered Bengal tigers, crocodiles, wild boars and spotted deer. It will take various weeks to valuate the actual extent of the harm only after the water level recedes from the area. Alarm bells are ringed by environmental activist groups. A Greenpeace spokesperson has conveyed caution that “the destruction caused by Aila was in consonance with the foretellings made by scientists, who had cautioned that storms would become more usual and more detrimental due to climate change.” The spokesperson has also said that, “…domestically, India will have to take ambitious action to curtail emissions of carbon dioxide (the main greenhouse gas which is causing climate change), by adopting mandatory, ambitious energy efficacy and renewable energy targets, and creating fiscal incentives for the same”. The response The Bengal government’s response to the cyclone devastation was gradual. To gear up the relief and rehabilitation work, chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharjee without delay deployed five ministers in the affected areas. Relief operations delayed to get started as local communication schemes were found to be paralyzed and a great deal of areas inaccessible by the affect of the cyclone. The army and Border Security Force personals were called in for carrying out rescue operations and air dropping of feed packets in the inaccessible terrains. The government set up over 100 relief camps to temporarily shelter 50,000 effected people. While at the ground level rescue and relief attempts gradually assembled it is momentum, it was almost inevitable that there will be administrative shortcomings in reaching adequate relief to sure remote areas as the scale of the disaster was massive and the numbers of victims were countless. The administrative loopholes in relief distribution remained a matter of grave concern to the government and have swelled harsh criticism from dissimilar quarters. Even as the state finance ministry sanctioned 61 crore rupees for relief operations, the funds available with the state government were grossly inadequate to cope up with the situation. Stressing the need for a centre-state joint crusade to tackle the damage, the state government spurred and encouraged for 1,000 crore rupees central assistance from the Natural Calamity Contingency Fund and demanded for state emphatically and authoritatively the calamity as a national disaster. The chief minister has likewise appealed to all political parties to rise above narrow politics and work hand in hand to provide relief to the distressed people. But where the main opposition party is Trinamool Congress and the main opposition leader is no other but the ‘famous lady’, the country’s newly appointed Railway minister, the lofty call was expected to fall on deaf ears. How may her party work along with the Communist Party of India-Marxist CPI(M), the obnoxious ‘Stalinist’ party she had not long ago thrashed in the polls and won 19 parliament seats from the state? And who’s Buddhadev Bhattacharjee anyway? Didn’t the poll verdict assert that the humans have wholeheartedly supported her adamant approach of going up versus everything the present government does? Eyeing the 2011 assemblage polls, she has without delay tapped the general grievances to blast off the state government for ‘nonexistence’ of any disaster management scheme all around the 32 years of ‘misrule’. As if elsewhere in India, disaster management schemes are working splendidly. She seemed, or pretended, to be incognizant that the term Disaster Management System was introduced into the country’s administrative terminology scarcely seventeen years ago; fifteen years after Left Front came to power in Bengal. Alleging the state government for careless utilization of central funds, she has demanded that the centre ought to not support the Bengal government in relief and rehabilitation. On the pretext that no relief was reaching the affected people, she floated her substitute ‘PM to DM’ proposal: central relief must be directly handed over to the Panchayats bypassing the state government. As the Panchayats in most of the affected areas of South Bengal are advantageously under Trinamool’s control, the raison d’être behind her substitute proposal was purposed to reap greatest or most complete or best possible political vantage through relief distribution. Quite naturally she was disturb when central finance minister Pranab Mukherjee met Buddhadev Bhattacharjee to talk about on the cyclone relief issue. As her substitute proposal was annulled by the central ministry, her party leaders and workers remained by and huge aloof from any relief work. Instead, local Trinamool leaders were more fascinated and active to manufacture obstacles in the ongoing relief and rehabilitation work and together with the friendly journalists were busy plotting effective plans to disrepute the government. Only after relief materials reached the affected areas from the Railway ministry, Trinamool leaders have jumped into their business. The ugly media circus Cyclone Aila has once again uncovered the remorseless anti-CPI(M) face of the mainstream media establishment in general, and the Anandabazar Patrika group (ABP) in particular. Setting a new low in journalistic sensationalism, the ABP group reporters are full of action to disseminate disinformation based on half-truth evidences, mainly purposed versus Buddhadev Bhattacharjee and his party. The cautiously fictitious news items were selective in nature but disregarding of validity, were supported by facts that cannot be effortlessly separated from the fabrications and were staged in a ‘hit and run’ way – by making a brief attack and then dashing off from it without answering the subsequent response. To associate disinformation with authority and point up it is trustworthiness, the news channels continuously ‘inventing’ stimulating news and presenting them through the lingo of their own ‘experts’. Star Ananda, the ABP group’s ‘unbiased’ 24 hour news channel is an unquestioned leader in this aspect. Brushing isolated all journalistic ethics (if such a thing actually exists), the channel has even started name calling and ridiculing rival news channel 24 Ghanta which do not follow their prescribed line of telecasting. After all, 24 Ghanta is the ‘CPM’s channel’ stupid! During Buddhadev Bhattacharjee’s visit in Aila hit Basanti, ABP group journalists had fictitious the sensational ‘imprisonment’ story. A group of local relief distribution workers were shown as ‘forcibly caged’ into a shed ‘against their wish’ for almost two hours by overactive police and administration who had considered them as a ‘threat to Mr. Bhattacharjee’s safety’. An editorial in ABP group’s English daily The Telegraph had further articulated that the actual reason behind the imprisonment was to prevent them from “…confronting Mr. Bhattacharjee with their version of the truth of how relief operations were being mishandled in the area.” Star Ananda made it a major piece, uninterruptedly telecasted the ‘cage’ effigy for hours and promptly arranged a lengthy discussion on the topic. Surprisingly, the alleged ‘cage’ was so tightly locked and guarded that the channel’s cameramen were permitted to enter inside and shoot this sensational footage of captivity for the viewers! When the chief minister visited the cyclone effected Hingalgunj of North 24 Paraganas, he had to face ‘the wrath of the victims’ who had also ‘heckled and jeered’ him for highly inadequate supply of relief. The ‘hungry and angry cyclone victims’ shouted at the chief minister, “You are an inefficient chief minister. You is worthy of a garland of shoes. What have you done for the development of the Sunderbans in the last five years?” The angry ‘villagers’ asked the chief minister for the duration of an interactional session why a poor country like Bangladesh may build concrete embankments and the state government had failed to do so in spite of enjoying continuous power for more than three decades. What the ‘angry villagers’ didn’t know was that ‘concrete embankments’ had feebly failed to protect Bangladesh from the excessive damage and destruction wrath of Aila. In fact, the condition of the Bangladesh Aila victims was so bad that Heather Blackwell, the NGO group Oxfam’s Bangladesh representative called it a ‘humanitarian crisis’. The ‘furious cyclone victims’ then heckled and maltreated the 75 years old local CPI(M) legislator Gopal Gayen at the Madanmohan Vidyapith relief camp and smeared his face with mud. The next day, the mud spattered face of the legislator was published in newsprints all over the country beautified by an unbelievable caption: ‘How does it feel?’ Not a single line were published anyplace by the worshippers of democracy condemning the attack on a senior legislator whose own house, located in one of the worst affected areas was lying submerged for days. Inspired by their homemade propaganda, a columnist of The Telegraph wrote, “The humans were angry with not just the administration’s rather casual response to the humane suffering, but also with the long years of official indifference to their plight.” (Emphasis added) The columnist continued, “Such anger erupting in the Sunderbans and in the chief minister’s presence may only mean how it is extending beyond ideological or partisan confines.” (Emphasis added) The columnist at long last delivers his real message, “But the modify in Bengal is noticeable…Bhattacharjee and the CPM are now less standard with the rural masses…” (Emphasis added) Buddhadev Bhattacharjee’s visit was termed by Star Ananda as a ‘VIP Picnic’. The media brotherhood roared in accordance: if the security of a chief minister becomes more important than relief distribution, if distribution workers are held caged, then there is no need for the chief minister to visit the affected areas. Let him sit home. His visits are hindering the relief process. Amazingly, enlightenment struck the ABP group to raise the ‘VIP Picnic’ issue only after the ‘famous lady’ and three Trinamool central ministers had finished their respective visits to the cyclone hit areas. When the ‘conscience keeper’ Bengal Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi later visited the modest victims of Sandeshkhali, the same media reported regarding an ‘altogether dissimilar public mood’. Cyclone victims who has lost all that they possessed gave the Bengal Governor a ‘warm welcome’, little girls strewed flower petals before him. A shaken Governor was seen to amiably ask a woman in tears ‘if the child in her lap had eaten’. The reporting has turned Sandeshkhali into an almost surreal land, populated by surreal persons who in the midst of intense feelings of suffering may magnanimously strew flowers on their illustrious guest! There is an substitute version of this rousing incident that came from Ganashakti, the CPI(M) mouthpiece. (Ganashakti, June 4, 2009 Issue) According to Ganashakti, the basic plan to heckle the chief minister was hatched by the ABP reporters. Blessed by their management, the reporters joined with local Trinamool leaders in a neighborhood club ‘Tarun Sangha’ in the early hours of that eventful day and fine-tuned their plan. Hingalgunj became their perfective executing ground as the area is considered to be a Trinamool Congress stronghold. The Trinamool leaders were taught how to stage a ‘media friendly’ demonstration in front of the chief minister, in the crudest way possible, involving women armed with brooms and shoes. The news and images will then be publicized as ‘public fury versus the chief minister’. The Trinamool leaders utterly acted according to the ABP authored script and helped to formulate the breaking news: ‘Struck by Aila, survivors jeer Buddha, call him inefficient CM’. The CPI(M) mouthpiece’s version could have been effortlessly dismissed as a cliché CPM style defense under severe media criticism. But this time the every day has struck directly to give rise to an authorized proof to help their claim. Ganashakti published an effigy of the chief minister’s interactional session in the Madanmohan Vidyapith relief camp and convincingly identified five ‘cyclone victim villagers’ – all of them were local Trinamool leaders. Throughout the incident, this gang of five was the most invective protesters who had flung ‘hard questions’ before the chief minister. None of them were cyclone victims; none of them were living in relief camp, none of them were hungry. The attack on CPI(M) legislator Gopal Gayen was likewise perpetrated by the same group. But no matter what proof or logical arguments are offered, it is CPM fabricated news after all. A piece of news is considered ‘credible’ only when it appears in the ‘unbiased’ media. Why the ABP group has gone berserk to implicate itself into such a depraved act? In their own words, the initiative was undertaken to ‘provoke a widespread eruption of general rage’ versus the ‘impotent’ state government administration. The key intention behind this media circus was to act as proxy to the ‘famous lady’ who was away from the epicenter to attend her ministerial indebtednesses in New Delhi. While the Trinamool chieftain and her henchmen were too busy celebrating their portfolios, their media friends has taken up the task to counteract the positive affect of the chief minister’s visit by any means. It was consequently their moral obligation to establish that the chief minister was sternly discarded by the cyclone affected people. They have realized that this out of the blue circumstance has provided them a wondrous prospect to intensely exploit public resentment versus the ruling Left Front and the CPI(M). Systematically they are attempting to build-up an atmosphere of discontent and sustain it till 2011, for the final assault. Beating the Stalinists in Bengal is no more a pipedream. In any case, the Stalinists are in the verge of losing their power and the glory! A concealed truth The all out media surge versus the Left, exceptionally versus the CPI(M) evidently lead to the suspicion that the media might be working hand in glove for a much dandier plan designed by their imperialist bosses. Remember the former US Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s testimony regarding how the Central Intelligence Agency had carried out a clandestine operation to topple the democratically elected Communist government in Kerala? Howard B Schaffer, the author of Bunker’s biography Ellsworth Bunker: Global Troubleshooter, Vietnam Hawk, has disclosed in the book that, “…the election results rang alarm bells in Washington. This apparently involved agency funding for political demonstrations coordinated by the Congress party and other opposition groups that were designed to construct a law and order situation.” Sounds familiar? Former US ambassador to India Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s autobiography A Dangerous Place has further revealed how agency funds were poured in to support the Congress Party in Kerala and Bengal to cut off the communists who were clear favorites in the elections. Successive US governments have a long history of broad using the CIA to interfere in the internal political matters of respective countries if considered damaging to the US interests. Do we have to believe that the uninterrupted eruptions of mayhem, lawlessness and violence in Bengal are spontaneous events? In the current global state of affairs, it is inconceivable for the US to stay impassive in regards to a strategically important country like India. Only a stupid will believe that the US has signed the Indo-US nuclear deal to solve India’s power crisis! In their illfamed intelligence game, one of the most effective widgets is the journalists who may serve the US interests underneath an institutional cover – the Fourth Estate. Former Washington Post reporter, the legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein had exposed in his Rolling Stone cover story ‘The CIA and the Media’ how journalists had secretly carried out assignings for the Central Intelligence Agency. Bernstein wrote, “Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services – from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, discerned reporters … who found that their association with the Agency helped their work… and, the smallest category, full time CIA workers masquerading as journalists abroad. In a lot of instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to carry out tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.” Do the journalists go on working for the CIA on their own? According to Bernstein, “…contrary to the notion that the CIA insidiously infiltrated the journalistic community, there is ample proof that America’s leading publishers and news executives permitted themselves and their organizations to become handmaidens to the intelligence services.” What with regards to the ‘opinion maker’ columnists? Bernstein writes, “…a dozen well known columnists and broadcast commentators whose relationships with the CIA go far beyond those commonly maintained amongst reporters and their sources. They are referred to at the Agency as ‘known assets’ and may be counted on to carry out a assortment of undercover tasks.” Bernstein continues, “In the field, journalists were applied to aid recruit and handle foreigners as agents; to acquire and evaluate information, and to plant untrue selective information with officials of alien governments.” Bernstein further elaborates, “…During the past twenty-five years, the Agency has secretly bankrolled numerous alien press services, periodicals and newspapers-both English and alien language – which provided magnificent cover for CIA operatives.” (Emphasis added) The CIA is believed to have directly owned of subsidized “…more than fifty newspapers, news services, radio stations, periodicals and other communications facilities, most of them overseas. These were employed for propaganda efforts, or even as cover for operations. Another dozen alien news organizations were infiltrated by remunerated CIA agents.” However, in response to public disclosure of CIA’s use of journalists in undercover operations, the agency has scaled down the program but continued “to ‘welcome’ the voluntary, unpaid joint operation of journalists”. Daniel Brandt, founder of NameBase, the web-based cross-indexed database of names that focuses on persons involved in the international intelligence community once asked, “How may one distinguish among news and propaganda when the overlaps and interlocks are so pervasive?” According to Brandt, “…the collapse of socialism and the centralization of domestic and transnational media, suggest that the CIA now has everything well in hand”. We conclude this division with a wise comment of Brandt, “…the larger problem is that the media is owned by the ruling class. With the increased media centralization of the last twenty years, their lock on the masses is now so finish that when they maintain an aspect of objectivity, it’s only out of habit.” Disaster Management: the Indian way Any policy is best judged by how well it is enforced on ground. The Government of India had incepted the Natural Disaster Management Program (NDMP) in 1992-93 following the excessive damage and destruction Latur earthquake to suggest a long-term scheme for managing natural disasters in the country. As a road map the NDMP had likewise provided a long list of necessary institutional and legislative measures for the national, state and district levels to follow. In 1999, soon after the ravaging cyclone in Orissa, another high powered committee on disaster management plans was constituted to prepare a comprehensive model for management of disasters. But the 2001 Gujarat earthquake has brought out in open assorted inadequacies in the country’s disaster management system. The 2004 tsunami catastrophe has proved again that the scheme in fact does not subsist beyond the government files. As a consequence of the tsunami, on 11 January 2005, another high power committee was constituted by the central government to draft the Disaster Management Bill to begin a multi dimensional endeavor involving respective scientific, technology and social processes. The draft bill became the National Disaster Management Act after being passed by Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and signed by the President of India on 23 December 2005. The Cabinet Committee on Management of Natural calamities and The National Disaster Response strength was constituted on the same year. The 2008 Kosi floods in Bihar once more exposed the severe weaknesses in the government machinery and confirmed that disaster management scheme in India has turned into a disaster by itself. Neither the central nor the state governments have any clue on how the system is supposed to work. Disaster Management Programs require multi-disciplinary and pro-active approach involving a number of departments and agencies spanning throughout all sectors. After each disaster strikes, limitations of the government machinery, it is top-down approach and lack of determination to mitigate the affect of natural calamities comes into open. Our governments have learned little from experiences of the past disasters. Neither have they realized that costs of disaster mitigation are far more economical than spending crores on relief and rehabilitation. Conclusion It is beyond any doubt that after a natural disaster of uttermost magnitude, where properties and lives of innumerable humans are devastated, anger versus the government administration is not one thing unusual. If the Aila affected humans in Bengal are demonstrating their anger versus the authorities, they have sufficient reasons to do so. But it is also unfeigned that in a country like India, timely and evenly providing relief material to each and each effected area or person is nearly impossible. Even a utopian administration cannot succeed in this task. There will be sure places where supply of relief will fall short to satisfy the real need. Therefore it is rather easy to find out stories of anger, feeling of annoyance at being hindered or criticized and deprivation in a circumstance like this. We are not saying this to cover up a lot of of the authenti administrative lapses of the Bengal government’s but attempting to view the circumstance from a realistic point of view. The point is – what are then the alternatives? Running a parallel administration while ignoring a democratically elected government? Purposefully defaming a sincere and concerned chief minister by questioning his motivations and blowing the opposition leader out of proportion? Bringing out cliché allegations based on minor matter or element of the facts, focusing on side issues and devising them to an ludicrous level? Claiming each crusade of the Bengal government as not relevant and demanding for the impossible? Insisting on prompt disaster management solutions in a country where political cynicism, bureaucratic lassitude and corruption formidably rule the roost? None of the above number of things from which only one can be chosen have any capacity to fetch smile on the face of the Cyclone Aila victims. It may only reinforce the farce of Indian democracy once more. Judicious preventive measures with community initiatives are the real answer to the problem, not the post-disaster relief and rehabilitation. Resources: |
Great for pinics
Great Product! 