CPI Maoist declares Bharat Bandh to protest Obama's visit

Maoists today called for a 24-hour nationwide shutdown on November 8 to protest against the visit of U.S. President Barack Obama.

“The Maoist Central Committee will observe a 24-hour Bharat bandh on November 8,” Maoist Central Committee member Kishenji told PTI over the phone from an undisclosed location.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi were out to sell the country to American imperialism and Mr Obama’s visit to the country was just another step in the process, Kishenji alleged.

Student arrested by Police on cooked up charges

Student-rebel lands in net


After arresting Maoist zonal commander Kundan Pahan’s girlfriend earlier this week, the police achieved another breakthrough when they nabbed a first year student of a Bundu college last evening who had also been working for Pahan.

Twenty-year-old Sushila Kumari, a first-year science student of Panch Pargana Kisan College in Bundu, was arrested on the basis of information provided by Pahan’s girlfriend Cecelia Guriya, who was arrested on October 26 with 30 rounds of ammunition and a letter from CPI (Maoist) politburo member Amitabh Bagchi.

The Lady Naxals - Open Magazine

Slightly built they may be, but you’d be a fool to take them lightly. Battle-hardened, fiercely committed to their cause and proud of the identity the movement gives them, the woman Maoists here are every bit as fierce as their male comrades.

DANDAKARANYA: In a largish clearing of forest along a flooded river, somewhere on the Maharashtra-Chhattisgarh border, Maoist commander Tarakka sits on a large boulder, wearing a shirt and bottle-green pyjamas. She is cleaning her AK-47 assault rifle with a toothbrush dipped in kerosene oil. The roar of the river is deafening, with the incessant nocturnal buzz of insects giving the air an eerie edge. The Maoist camp is also home to poisonous snakes, deadly looking spiders, wild pigs, even bears. An hour ago, they killed a huge snake with another snake in its mouth. “The police doesn’t come here,” Tarakka says with a smile, “They know they will be slaughtered.”

“By the way, did you try that karela [bitter gourd] chutney? I made it,” she adds, as she fits the magazine to her gun. It goes in with a distinct click.

Around her, a platoon of Maoist guerillas—mostly young men and women—goes about the daily grind with surgical precision. Men help cook while women go around with axes to chop firewood. Water is boiled to make it safe for drinking. In one corner, a few guerillas have returned after sentry duty at night and are fast asleep on a jhilli (thin plastic sheet). Some girls are reading to each other, while two comb their hair, listening to Gondi songs on a small tape recorder. In another tent, a class is being held on military strategy. In a corner, a bunch of guerillas from the Maoists’ cultural troupe are rehearsing for a performance. No matter what you are doing, the gun always stays next to you, always less than an arm away.

In the monsoons, life becomes quite tough here. We have arrived at the camp after walking for days through dense forests, wading through rivers and nallahs overflowing with rainwater. It is lush green no matter where you look, and with continuous rains, it feels like Vietnam. For the night, we stay in tents or in small isolated huts of Adivasis on the outskirts of some village. We just sigh in the darkness; somebody lets out a cough, and somebody else takes out a tube of mosquito repellent and rubs yet another coat all over his body.

A night before arriving at the camp, we have halted at an Adivasi hut along with the Maoist squad. Under the influence of mahua, or maybe in spite of the intoxicant, the Adivasi begins to cry after some time as he forces a few morsels of rice down his throat.

“Why are you crying?” Maoist squad leader Samayya asks him in Gondi.

“I feel like crying,” he replies.

The Trickledown Revolution - By Arundathi Roy

The Trickledown Revolution

Article by Arundathi roy on Greenhunt and communist movement in India.

Read it on Outlook at the link below
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?267040

Raghuram Rajan Interview Part II

Raghuram Rajan's POV on Inequalities and Free Enterprise.

This blog does not endorse his views, but he is an intelligent man and I hope readers of this blog could gain some insight from his views, even though they may entirely disagree with his view point.

The first part is here . The second part follows below

Now that we are at the high table, it's time to ask...

In the second part of his interview, economist Raghuram Rajan tells TOI-Crest that India needs to become proactive on the global stage

In India, there's been a lot of talk about how the G-20 is a sign of India having arrived at the high table. Does the G-20 have little more than symbolic value?

You saw what happened. When it was time to spend, the G-20 told them all to spend. They all spent. A year later, some of them got into trouble spending, so the G-20 said 'ok, some of you spend, some don't spend'...

So it basically told them to do what they were already doing?

Exactly. You didn't need encouragement to spend, as politicians, in a downturn. They all went out and spent. They just got political cover in some sense — you were doing what the G-20 said. But now it comes to hard policy change that each country has to do and now you're seeing the differences. So I don't really think the G-20 has that much capacity to do the change. The second thing I would say is that even whatever little the G-20 can achieve has to be through the power of ideas. This is where we also need to say, now that we've arrived at the high table, what is it that we want the high table to do. It's not clear to me that we have a strong sense of where we want the high table to go.

Our position in the past has been largely reactive — we don't like this, we don't like that, you've got to change this, you've got to change that. But it has rarely been proactive in the sense of 'here's what we think is for the global good'. I think we need more of that. We did play a little bit of that role in the Non-Aligned Movement, but we need to play that role again. China has tried to take up some of that role, acting as the voice of the developing countries. Brazil has. We need to do that in a way that enhances the debate.

Joseph Stiglitz in his book on the crisis argues that economics as a discipline needs to be reformed too because it has become "the biggest cheerleader" for freemarket capitalism. Your comments...

The cause of this crisis was not free enterprise, it was the interaction between the government and the private sector. If it had been just free enterprise, we'd have seen the problems in the corporate sector. The corporate sector was untouched. We saw the probem in low-income housing. Why? The banks in this country have to be prodded to lend to the poor because there is no money to be made there, right? The same is true of the US. Why are the banks going and lending to people who are less well off? The hand of the government is obvious. Now, who is to blame? The government was well-intentioned , the private sector tried to take advantage of the government.

You can't blame the private sector either, it's their job to try and make money and if the government is willing to step in and provide cheap money, they will take advantage of that. The key is to make each play its role in an appropriate way and that is where economies failed. There are weaknesses in free enterprise capitalism. The question is: what do we replace it with? so what's the alternative? Winston Churchill's comment that democracy is the worst system except all the other ones that have been tried applies here too. It's a pretty bad system, but given human incentives it is something that works much better than anything else, so we just have to make this work much better.

As you point out in your book, the government's urge to boost low income housing was because it was seen as the simplest way of addressing resentment about widening inequalities. Isn't that inherent in free market capitalism?

Well, there are different kinds of inequality. There's inequality that comes because somebody is much more talented and therefore capable of producing something much better. I don't grudge Steve Jobs his billions, because he's a really smart guy who manages to produce products that the world wants to buy. In a system where everybody thinks they have the opportunity to become Steve Jobs, people don't grudge Steve Jobs. That's the way the US used to be. Where people believe that they are shut out from ever becoming a Steve Jobs, inequality breeds resentment, especially when you think, 'Steve Jobs didn't get there because he was Steve Jobs, he got there because he knew the minister for computers'.

So, inequality that comes from privilege is very different from inequality that comes from talent and I think increasingly the US is becoming a society where inequality comes from privilege. The biggest difference in the US is between kids who go back to a home in the summers where they read books and work on summer projects — typically white kids –— and kids who go back home and watch TV. Those three months make an enormous difference in their educational attainments. There have been studies showing that the gap increases over time between white kids and minority kids simply because of the way they use their summer.

This indicates you are a product of your family. As more of these differences make their effect felt, you get a growing gap between the haves and have-nots with the have-nots knowing they can never become the haves. This wasn't the case in the US in the past.

Read the original article at

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/6270009.cms?prtpage=1#ixzz0w2FfSJh9

Another Maoist Leader arrested

Top Maoist leader arrested in Jharkhand

Bokaro(Jharkhand),Aug 8 (PTI) A top Maoist leader hailing from Andhra Pradesh who carries a reward of Rs 10 lakh on his head was today arrested from here. Narasimha Reddy, the 'secretary' of CPI(Maoist) in Andhra Pradesh, was apprehended when a joint team of CRPF and state police raided his hideout at Relibera village following a tip-off, Superintendent of Police (SP) Saket Kumar Singh said.

Reddy alias 'Langada' was held from a house in Upper Ghat of Gomia area and is wanted in many cases in Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, the CRPF officer said. The forces also recovered arms, ammunition, a laptop, certain documents and cash from him.

Wrong Side of the Law

There was consternation over the encounter killing of Hemchandra Pande along with Maoist spokesperson Azad in the jungles of Adilabad in north Andhra Pradesh in the first week of July. While the police contend that Pande was a Left ultra himself, Pande's wife Babita insists her husband was a freelance journalist who wrote for many papers. Obfuscated in this debate is that Pande possibly a Maoist sympathiser and not a hardcore ultra was gunned down in an encounter after allegedly being picked up from Nagpur, roughly three hours drive on the National Highway 8 from Adilabad.

As Maoists run amok in large parts of the country and extremists from across the border try to disrupt peace, sections of the Indian middle class paranoid at this increasing threat to the republic have begun justifying extrajudicial killings. They argue that since the judicial system is not quick and effective, summary encounters are the only way to curb militancy. Though encounter killings are not part of official state policy, police and other agencies armed with this civil society sanction have been increasingly resorting to encounters and abrogating to themselves the role of judge and executioner. It will not be an exaggeration to say many encounters are cold-blooded killings. This has terrible consequences for democracy and rule of law. It also perniciously affects the police's performance, a development that does not augur well for the country. The following example will demonstrate this point effectively.

In December 1999, three central committee members of the Maoist party were liquidated in an encounter by the Andhra Pradesh police in Karimnagar district. Three IPS officers were awarded the police medal for gallantry for their role in this encounter. This medal entitles an awardee to get a free land site and free lifetime 1st class travel by train, among other goodies. But an anonymous complaint led to an inquiry which revealed that the gallant trio were nowhere near the scene of encounter that day. In 2008, nine years after the encounter, the officers were served a "charge memo" asking why they should not be punished. But internal police pressure in the home ministry ensured the file lost its way in the meandering bylanes of North Block.

This is not the end of the story. One of the 'gallant' officers, an SP then and now a DIG, was posted as the CRPF's boss in Dantewada earlier this year, presumably because he was a gallant man eminently qualified to take on the extremists in this Maoist-infested area. What happened next is history: 76 men of the CRPF were ambushed and gunned down by the Maoists on April 6 in an event that shook the nation. An official inquiry by a former BSF director general revealed that there was "command failure" and "standard operating procedures" were not followed. This was responsible for the CRPF men falling to the hail of bullets from the ultras. The DIG in question was sent packing from the area, but only after the damage had been done. The point is that he would never have had an exalted status if not for the gallantry award for a false encounter.

The unfortunate thing is that not only are officers rewarded for false encounters, but officers resisting such encounters end up in the doghouse. Ask Harvinder Singh Kohli, an artillery colonel whose regiment was deployed in south Assam in 2003 to track down militants. At the end of an operation in August 2003, Kohli's men captured five militants from the Assam Commando Force.

On hearing about the operation, his senior, the brigadier, ordered him to bump off these militants since all that mattered in the eyes of the bosses were "kills". The brigadier also indicated that his boss, the major-general, was in the know of things. The colonel resisted and quickly handed these militants to the police to ward off further pressure. But the brigadier would not relent, he told the colonel to photograph a staged encounter. The colonel chose the lesser evil. So five men were made to lie on the ground with ketchup sprayed on their bodies and their pictures taken to show that there were 'kills'. But the lid soon came off with a complaint and the colonel was court-martialled and sacked.

Later the brigadier was also discharged from the army, but the major-general was allowed to retire. On appeal, the brigadier, who commissioned the activity, was reinstated with loss of seniority and a reprimand. But Kohli now an ex-colonel wearing the media-given label of 'ketchup colonel' is waging a Herculean battle to clear his name. There is, however, nobody to bell the cat and reinstate an officer who actually had the moral courage to refuse orders to execute a false encounter. Interestingly, defence ministry officials noted on the file reviewing Kohli's case that an unofficial policy existed to assess the peformance of units involved in counter-insurgency operations in terms of number of kills.

A dispensation where officers resorting to false encounters get encomiums and those resisting are jettisoned can only lead to the brutalisation of security agencies, with individual policemen using the gun to also eliminate petty criminals and other suspects. This process has actually begun in many places. The consequences can be well imagined since, in a civilised nation, lawlessness cannot be countered by lawlessness.

Times of India

Cyberwar - War in the fifth domain

An article from the Economist -

http://www.economist.com/node/16478792

Are the mouse and keyboard the new weapons of conflict?

At the height of the cold war, in June 1982, an American early-warning satellite detected a large blast in Siberia. A missile being fired? A nuclear test? It was, it seems, an explosion on a Soviet gas pipeline. The cause was a malfunction in the computer-control system that Soviet spies had stolen from a firm in Canada. They did not know that the CIA had tampered with the software so that it would “go haywire, after a decent interval, to reset pump speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds,” according to the memoirs of Thomas Reed, a former air force secretary. The result, he said, “was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.”

This was one of the earliest demonstrations of the power of a “logic bomb”. Three decades later, with more and more vital computer systems linked up to the internet, could enemies use logic bombs to, say, turn off the electricity from the other side of the world? Could terrorists or hackers cause financial chaos by tampering with Wall Street’s computerised trading systems? And given that computer chips and software are produced globally, could a foreign power infect high-tech military equipment with computer bugs? “It scares me to death,” says one senior military source. “The destructive potential is so great.”

After land, sea, air and space, warfare has entered the fifth domain: cyberspace. President Barack Obama has declared America’s digital infrastructure to be a “strategic national asset” and appointed Howard Schmidt, the former head of security at Microsoft, as his cyber-security tsar. In May the Pentagon set up its new Cyber Command (Cybercom) headed by General Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency (NSA). His mandate is to conduct “full-spectrum” operations—to defend American military networks and attack other countries’ systems. Precisely how, and by what rules, is secret.

Britain, too, has set up a cyber-security policy outfit, and an “operations centre” based in GCHQ, the British equivalent of the NSA. China talks of “winning informationised wars by the mid-21st century”. Many other countries are organising for cyberwar, among them Russia, Israel and North Korea. Iran boasts of having the world’s second-largest cyber-army.

What will cyberwar look like? In a new book Richard Clarke, a former White House staffer in charge of counter-terrorism and cyber-security, envisages a catastrophic breakdown within 15 minutes. Computer bugs bring down military e-mail systems; oil refineries and pipelines explode; air-traffic-control systems collapse; freight and metro trains derail; financial data are scrambled; the electrical grid goes down in the eastern United States; orbiting satellites spin out of control. Society soon breaks down as food becomes scarce and money runs out. Worst of all, the identity of the attacker may remain a mystery.

In the view of Mike McConnell, a former spy chief, the effects of full-blown cyberwar are much like nuclear attack. Cyberwar has already started, he says, “and we are losing it.” Not so, retorts Mr Schmidt. There is no cyberwar. Bruce Schneier, an IT industry security guru, accuses securocrats like Mr Clarke of scaremongering. Cyberspace will certainly be part of any future war, he says, but an apocalyptic attack on America is both difficult to achieve technically (“movie-script stuff”) and implausible except in the context of a real war, in which case the perpetrator is likely to be obvious.

For the top brass, computer technology is both a blessing and a curse. Bombs are guided by GPS satellites; drones are piloted remotely from across the world; fighter planes and warships are now huge data-processing centres; even the ordinary foot-soldier is being wired up. Yet growing connectivity over an insecure internet multiplies the avenues for e-attack; and growing dependence on computers increases the harm they can cause.

Enlarge

By breaking up data and sending it over multiple routes, the internet can survive the loss of large parts of the network. Yet some of the global digital infrastructure is more fragile. More than nine-tenths of internet traffic travels through undersea fibre-optic cables, and these are dangerously bunched up in a few choke-points, for instance around New York, the Red Sea or the Luzon Strait in the Philippines (see map). Internet traffic is directed by just 13 clusters of potentially vulnerable domain-name servers. Other dangers are coming: weakly governed swathes of Africa are being connected up to fibre-optic cables, potentially creating new havens for cyber-criminals. And the spread of mobile internet will bring new means of attack.

The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security. Yet in wiring together the globe, it has merged the garden and the wilderness. No passport is required in cyberspace. And although police are constrained by national borders, criminals roam freely. Enemy states are no longer on the other side of the ocean, but just behind the firewall. The ill-intentioned can mask their identity and location, impersonate others and con their way into the buildings that hold the digitised wealth of the electronic age: money, personal data and intellectual property.

Mr Obama has quoted a figure of $1 trillion lost last year to cybercrime—a bigger underworld than the drugs trade, though such figures are disputed. Banks and other companies do not like to admit how much data they lose. In 2008 alone Verizon, a telecoms company, recorded the loss of 285m personal-data records, including credit-card and bank-account details, in investigations conducted for clients.

About nine-tenths of the 140 billion e-mails sent daily are spam; of these about 16% contain moneymaking scams (see chart 1), including “phishing” attacks that seek to dupe recipients into giving out passwords or bank details, according to Symantec, a security-software vendor. The amount of information now available online about individuals makes it ever easier to attack a computer by crafting a personalised e-mail that is more likely to be trusted and opened. This is known as “spear-phishing”.

The ostentatious hackers and virus-writers who once wrecked computers for fun are all but gone, replaced by criminal gangs seeking to harvest data. “Hacking used to be about making noise. Now it’s about staying silent,” says Greg Day of McAfee, a vendor of IT security products. Hackers have become wholesale providers of malware—viruses, worms and Trojans that infect computers—for others to use. Websites are now the favoured means of spreading malware, partly because the unwary are directed to them through spam or links posted on social-networking sites. And poorly designed websites often provide a window into valuable databases.

Malware is exploding (see chart 2). It is typically used to steal passwords and other data, or to open a “back door” to a computer so that it can be taken over by outsiders. Such “zombie” machines can be linked up to thousands, if not millions, of others around the world to create a “botnet”. Estimates for the number of infected machines range up to 100m (see map for global distribution of infections). Botnets are used to send spam, spread malware or launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which seek to bring down a targeted computer by overloading it with countless bogus requests.

The spy who spammed me

Criminals usually look for easy prey. But states can combine the criminal hacker’s tricks, such as spear-phishing, with the intelligence apparatus to reconnoitre a target, the computing power to break codes and passwords, and the patience to probe a system until it finds a weakness—usually a fallible human being. Steven Chabinsky, a senior FBI official responsible for cyber- security, recently said that “given enough time, motivation and funding, a determined adversary will always—always—be able to penetrate a targeted system.”

Traditional human spies risk arrest or execution by trying to smuggle out copies of documents. But those in the cyberworld face no such risks. “A spy might once have been able to take out a few books’ worth of material,” says one senior American military source, “Now they take the whole library. And if you restock the shelves, they will steal it again.”

China, in particular, is accused of wholesale espionage, attacking the computers of major Western defence contractors and reputedly taking classified details of the F-35 fighter, the mainstay of future American air power. At the end of 2009 it appears to have targeted Google and more than a score of other IT companies. Experts at a cyber-test-range built in Maryland by Lockheed Martin, a defence contractor (which denies losing the F-35 data), say “advanced persistent threats” are hard to fend off amid the countless minor probing of its networks. Sometimes attackers try to slip information out slowly, hidden in ordinary internet traffic. At other times they have tried to break in by leaving infected memory-sticks in the car park, hoping somebody would plug them into the network. Even unclassified e-mails can contain a wealth of useful information about projects under development.

“Cyber-espionage is the biggest intelligence disaster since the loss of the nuclear secrets [in the late 1940s],” says Jim Lewis of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington, DC. Spying probably presents the most immediate danger to the West: the loss of high-tech know-how that could erode its economic lead or, if it ever came to a shooting war, blunt its military edge.

Western spooks think China deploys the most assiduous, and most shameless, cyberspies, but Russian ones are probably more skilled and subtle. Top of the league, say the spooks, are still America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ, which may explain why Western countries have until recently been reluctant to complain too loudly about computer snooping.

The next step after penetrating networks to steal data is to disrupt or manipulate them. If military targeting information could be attacked, for example, ballistic missiles would be useless. Those who play war games speak of being able to “change the red and blue dots”: make friendly (blue) forces appear to be the enemy (red), and vice versa.

General Alexander says the Pentagon and NSA started co-operating on cyberwarfare in late 2008 after “a serious intrusion into our classified networks”. Mr Lewis says this refers to the penetration of Central Command, which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, through an infected thumb-drive. It took a week to winkle out the intruder. Nobody knows what, if any, damage was caused. But the thought of an enemy lurking in battle-fighting systems alarms the top brass.

That said, an attacker might prefer to go after unclassified military logistics supply systems, or even the civilian infrastructure. A loss of confidence in financial data and electronic transfers could cause economic upheaval. An even bigger worry is an attack on the power grid. Power companies tend not to keep many spares of expensive generator parts, which can take months to replace. Emergency diesel generators cannot make up for the loss of the grid, and cannot operate indefinitely. Without electricity and other critical services, communications systems and cash-dispensers cease to work. A loss of power lasting just a few days, reckon some, starts to cause a cascade of economic damage.

Experts disagree about the vulnerability of systems that run industrial plants, known as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA). But more and more of these are being connected to the internet, raising the risk of remote attack. “Smart” grids”, which relay information about energy use to the utilities, are promoted as ways of reducing energy waste. But they also increase security worries about both crime (eg, allowing bills to be falsified) and exposing SCADA networks to attack.

General Alexander has spoken of “hints that some penetrations are targeting systems for remote sabotage”. But precisely what is happening is unclear: are outsiders probing SCADA systems only for reconnaissance, or to open “back doors” for future use? One senior American military source said that if any country were found to be planting logic bombs on the grid, it would provoke the equivalent of the Cuban missile crisis.

Estonia, Georgia and WWI

Important thinking about the tactical and legal concepts of cyber-warfare is taking place in a former Soviet barracks in Estonia, now home to NATO’s “centre of excellence” for cyber-defence. It was established in response to what has become known as “Web War 1”, a concerted denial-of-service attack on Estonian government, media and bank web servers that was precipitated by the decision to move a Soviet-era war memorial in central Tallinn in 2007. This was more a cyber-riot than a war, but it forced Estonia more or less to cut itself off from the internet.

Similar attacks during Russia’s war with Georgia the next year looked more ominous, because they seemed to be co-ordinated with the advance of Russian military columns. Government and media websites went down and telephone lines were jammed, crippling Georgia’s ability to present its case abroad. President Mikheil Saakashvili’s website had to be moved to an American server better able to fight off the attack. Estonian experts were dispatched to Georgia to help out.

Many assume that both these attacks were instigated by the Kremlin. But investigations traced them only to Russian “hacktivists” and criminal botnets; many of the attacking computers were in Western countries. There are wider issues: did the cyber-attack on Estonia, a member of NATO, count as an armed attack, and should the alliance have defended it? And did Estonia’s assistance to Georgia, which is not in NATO, risk drawing Estonia into the war, and NATO along with it?

Such questions permeate discussions of NATO’s new “strategic concept”, to be adopted later this year. A panel of experts headed by Madeleine Albright, a former American secretary of state, reported in May that cyber-attacks are among the three most likely threats to the alliance. The next significant attack, it said, “may well come down a fibre-optic cable” and may be serious enough to merit a response under the mutual-defence provisions of Article 5.

During his confirmation hearing, senators sent General Alexander several questions. Would he have “significant” offensive cyber-weapons? Might these encourage others to follow suit? How sure would he need to be about the identity of an attacker to “fire back”? Answers to these were restricted to a classified supplement. In public the general said that the president would be the judge of what constituted cyberwar; if America responded with force in cyberspace it would be in keeping with the rules of war and the “principles of military necessity, discrimination, and proportionality”.

General Alexander’s seven-month confirmation process is a sign of the qualms senators felt at the merging of military and espionage functions, the militarisation of cyberspace and the fear that it may undermine Americans’ right to privacy. Cybercommand will protect only the military “.mil” domain. The government domain, “.gov”, and the corporate infrastructure, “.com” will be the responsibility respectively of the Department of Homeland Security and private companies, with support from Cybercom.

One senior military official says General Alexander’s priority will be to improve the defences of military networks. Another bigwig casts some doubt on cyber-offence. “It’s hard to do it at a specific time,” he says. “If a cyber-attack is used as a military weapon, you want a predictable time and effect. If you are using it for espionage it does not matter; you can wait.” He implies that cyber-weapons would be used mainly as an adjunct to conventional operations in a narrow theatre.

The Chinese may be thinking the same way. A report on China’s cyber-warfare doctrine, written for the congressionally mandated US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, envisages China using cyber-weapons not to defeat America, but to disrupt and slow down its forces long enough for China to seize Taiwan without having to fight a shooting war.

Apocalypse or asymmetry?

Deterrence in cyber-warfare is more uncertain than, say, in nuclear strategy: there is no mutually assured destruction, the dividing line between criminality and war is blurred and identifying attacking computers, let alone the fingers on the keyboards, is difficult. Retaliation need not be confined to cyberspace; the one system that is certainly not linked to the public internet is America’s nuclear firing chain. Still, the more likely use of cyber-weapons is probably not to bring about electronic apocalypse, but as tools of limited warfare.

Cyber-weapons are most effective in the hands of big states. But because they are cheap, they may be most useful to the comparatively weak. They may well suit terrorists. Fortunately, perhaps, the likes of al-Qaeda have mostly used the internet for propaganda and communication. It may be that jihadists lack the ability to, say, induce a refinery to blow itself up. Or it may be that they prefer the gory theatre of suicide-bombings to the anonymity of computer sabotage—for now.

Flames of the Snow - Maoist Documentary

An Indian journalist's documentary film on the Maoist uprising in Nepal has finally won its battle with the Indian censors after a panel, headed by veteran Bollywood actress Sharmila Tagore, gave it the green light.

It was a moment of triumph for Anand Swaroop Verma, whose 125-minute documentary, Flames of the Snow, was approved for public screenings by the Revising Committee of India's Central Board of Film Certification without being asked to delete any scenes.

Last month, citing the growing Maoist violence in India, the Board had declined to allow the film, saying "any justification or romanticisation of the ideology of extremism or of violence, coercion, intimidation in achieving its objectives would not be in the public interest, particularly keeping in view the recent Maoist violence in some parts of the country". However, Verma, who is considered close to Nepal's Maoist leadership, challenged the decision and the film was viewed in New Delhi last week by six members of the Board's Revising Committee, including its chairman and veteran actor Sharmila Tagore.

"Finally I won the battle," a jubilant Verma told IANS on the eve of flying to Kathmandu Friday to hold consultations with Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda and other senior leaders of the formerly banned party.

"I got the certificate without a single cut."

The Board however asked Verma to add a disclaimer, saying the views expressed in the film by various persons underlying the Maoist ideology were those of the author and producer and that the documentary was not against any person or country.

In reply, Verma pointed out that the documentary carried interviews with 16 people, including two prominent leaders of the Nepal Maoist party, and a Nepal Police officer.

"They are expressing their own views," Verma told the Board. "The author or producer can't put his words into their mouth. This is not a feature film where author provides them dialogues to read before camera. This is a documentary film."

Finally, a compromise was reached with a new disclaimer that says the substance of the documentary has been compiled from various media publications. The views expressed are those of the individuals interviewed and it is not the intention of this documentary to offend the sensibilities or sentiments of any country or individual.

The film begins with the founding of the Shah dynasty in Nepal in 1770 by the first powerful king of the clan, Prithvi Narayan Shah. It covers nearly 250 years of absolute rule, first by the kings and then by the Rana prime ministers, punctuated with people's rebellions.

It ends with the formal abolition of monarchy after a historic election in 2008 that saw the Maoists emerge victorious to head the new government of Nepal.

Flames of the Snow is directed by Verma and New Delhi-based Ashish Srivastava, formerly associated with Discovery channel, and produced by a Kathmandu-based human rights organisation, Group for International Solidarity.

It includes an interview with Maoist supremo Prachanda, describing the genesis of the armed movement in 1996.

The documentary made its debut in Kathmandu in April 2008, during the last days of the Maoist government, when it was watched by Prachanda and other Maoist leaders.

Now Verma wants to hold public screenings of the documentary in Nepal as well.

Ironically, while Flames of the Snow passed unscathed at the hands of the Indian censors, the Nepal Censor Board asked Verma for a cut.

A brief scene of unrest that shows Palestinians burning Israeli and American flags will not be shown during the screenings in Nepal as the Nepal government's foreign policy is to maintain good relations with all nations and 2010 marks the 50th year of diplomatic ties between Kathmandu and Tel Aviv.

The Indian censors' decision comes as Indian film director Ananth Mahadevan's Red Alert: the War Within, a film focusing on the impact of the armed movement in rural India, released in India this month.

Read more at: NDTV Movies

Guns and Daughters - Documentary on women maoists by Shikha Trivedy

It is a story of poverty, desperation and girls talking up guns at an early age because violence is the only way out. But what after that ?

Duration : 18 Minutes

Includes profile of Anuradha Gandhy


Link to Video

Chhattisgarh DGP Vishwaranjan issues veiled threat to encounter Journalists

Several Journalists from Tehelka ,The Hindu, Indian express and other news channels who have interviewed Maoist leaders along website owners who post articles about Maoists are on the hit list of Security Agencies. Hem Chandra Pandey who was kidnapped from Nagpur and murdered by the APSIB was deliberately murdered along with Com Azad to send a strong message to the journalist fraternity some of whom had been giving balanced reports on the Maoist movement in India.

Journalists sympathising with Naxals under watch

Intelligence agencies monitoring the Naxal activities have started keeping tabs on journalists sympathising with Naxals on information provided by Andhra Pradesh police after the killing of a mediaperson with Naxal leader Cherukhuri Rajkumar alias Azad in an encounter recently.The surveillance includes electronic snooping,phone tapping and even physical monitoring of the movements of journalists and sympathizers in both the real and virtual worlds.

Confirming the development to UNI, highly-placed official sources here said the details gathered from Azad after the encounter have been forwarded to all the Naxal-affected states besides Chhattisgarh by the Andhra Pradesh police.

The names of mediapersons in the list of Naxal sympathisers are those who frequent the Naxal-dominated areas on the state's border with four other Naxal-affected states while also meeting the Maoist leaders.

''We cannot share everything with the media. Those mediapersons who are working for Naxals are already under watch by the intelligence agencies and action would be initiated when substantial proof is gathered against them,'' Chhattisgarh Director General of Police Vishwaranjan said.

He said one cannot stop the mediapersons from entering the jungles and interviewing the Maoist leaders but it is certainly dangerous to enter the jungle during an anti-naxal operation being carried out by the security forces.

''Nothing can be done about mediapersons who take the risk of entering the jungles during an operation and get stuck inside, they might become victims of draculas who like to feast on their blood '' Mr Vishwaranjan added.

Central Chronicle

Com Azad murdered by Andhra Pradesh Police

Source : ICAWPI

COMMUNIST PARTY OF INDIA (MAOIST)

CENTRAL COMMITTEE

North Regional Bureau

Press statement

3rd July, 2010

It is not an encounter at all!! It is a cold blooded murder by AP Police!!

Red Salutes to Martyrs com. Azad (Cherukuri Rajkumar) and com. Hem Pandey (Jitender)!!

Let us avenge the killings of the beloved comrades by the khaki clad fascist gangs of AP government!!

Azad was arrested at Nagpur on June 1^st along with com. Hem Pandey

On June 1st, the notorious Andhra Pradesh Special Branch Police for its abductions and cold blooded murders, have arrested com. Azad, Polite Bureau member and Spokesperson of CPI (Maoist), and com. Hem Pandey, a zonal committee level comrade in Nagpur city around 11'o clock when they went to meet a comrade who was supposed to receive them from Dandakarnaya zone. Com. Azad reached Nagpur around 10 am on the fateful day along with com. Hem Pandey, after travelling from long distance. With specific information, the lawless goons of AP SIB abducted them, perhaps flown them in a helicopter, to Adilabad jungles near Maharashtra border and killed them point block and in cold blood.

We pay our red homage to our beloved comrades and vow to take vengeance of these killers.

Life of com. Azad

Comrade Azad is one of the senior most party leaders of CPI (Maoist). He was born in Krishna district of AP, in a well to do family. He did his school education in Sainik School, at Korukonda of the present Vizianagaram District. Com. Surapuneni Janardhan, a legendary comrade of the student movement brought com. Raj Kumar into RSU in 1974. A brilliant student at the Regional Engineering College, which became famous as Radical Engineering College in those days, he finished his Mtech in Chemical Engineering and moved to Vishakhapatnam as per the Party direction. He was the second president of AP Radical Students Union till 1984. He was the catalyst behind many all Andhra wide student agitations and peoples movements in that period. He became the district committee member of vizag unit of the CPI (ML) (PW). He moved length and breadth of India, to organize the Seminar on Nationality question held in Madras (now Chennai) in 1981. He was shifted to Karnataka in 1982 and com. Azad was one of the founder members of the Karnataka Party and worked as the secretary of the Karnataka State Committee. He was taken into CC, after the Central Plenum in 1990. He was the elected member of CC in the All India conference in 1995 and since then he served in CC and PB. He continued in those posts after the formation of CPI Maoist too in 2004. He has been the spokes person of the CC since then.

Known for his simple life and hard work; voracious reading and brilliant analyses of situations, crystal clear articulation and sharp logic, and fine organizational skills, he contributed widely to the revolutionary movement in many spheres. He wrote profusely to the People's March, Peoples war (theoretical organ of the CPI (Maoist), and to the Maoist Information Bulletin. He wrote a fine critique of the intellectuals of AP, who got disillusioned and lost faith in revolutionary movement after the 1990 events of collapse of soviet imperialism and its satellite regimes.

In his death, the Indian revolutionary movement lost an exemplary comrade and a shining star, who served the movement more than three and half decades.

Just before his last journey, he received questions for interview from a well known magazine. He replied that he was in the journey and would send the answers as early as possible.

It is not Sukhdev, but com. Hem Pandey of Uttarakhand who was killed by APSIB

Com. Hem Pandey, 30, hailed from a nearby village of Pithoragarh town of Uttarakhand State. He did his MA history in Nainital University and got himself registered in PhD. While he was in college, he was active member of AISA, and slowly realizing he pseudo revolutionary character of AISA politics, he moved to the radical groups, later in 2001 he joined the then CPI (ML) (PW). He organized peasantry in the mountainous villages in Almora district, taking up umpteen numbers of issues of peasantry, including the problems arose out of Binsar Sanctuary. Soft-spoken, bespectacled, lean and energetic Com. Hem won the love of people of that region. He was moved into more important works in 2005. He had done his new assignments with patience and endurance. His appetite for learning new things, reading more and more, and zeal for penning his ideas are things for the emulation for all the revolutionaries. He has written various articles to newsmagazines under various pen names. We request the civil rights organisations to demand the A P police to send the body of com. Hem Pandey to his bereaved mother who is in Haldwani, Uttarakhand state, who is his sole surviving parent.

APSIB- the Indian avatar of Mossad

The Andhra Pradesh Special Intelligence Bureau, which has been partially trained partially by the Mossad, has acquired the notoriety of its master trainer-Mossad, in India. It has been moving across the state borders, and conducting abductions and cold blooded murders with impunity. This is all happening with clear blessings of Manmohan- Sonia and Chidambaram. This fascist gang has established its tentacles all over India, resorting the killings of revolutionaries, scoffing at the recent AP high court judgement that all encounters are to be first booked as murders under IPC 302, Ultimaely these killers will be taken to task by the revolutionary masses.

Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with his blood on his hands of com. Azad and com. Hem Pandey?

CPI (Maoist) never contested or raised any hue and cry in the case of real encounters. The AP Police is resorting to globbeian lies, not believed even by gullible. CPI (Maoist) stood for truth and accountability to the people, and always stated facts. There is no such programme of Azad going to Sarkepally forest of Adilabad. Azad was going to discuss with our comrades, inter alia, the concrete proposals of well meaning people like Swamy Agnivesh about particular dates for the mutual cease fire. He was a carrying the confidential letter of Swamy Agnivesh written to Azad dated- 26^th June 2010. Will Chidambaram expect CPI (Maoist) to sit for talks with his blood on his hands of com. Azad and com. Hem Pandey? He calls repeatedly to us to abjure violence? Killing the unarmed comrades by AP Police with your blessings - is it not like devils chanting scriptures?

White lies by AP Police

When there is no movement and organization in Adilabad, what is the necessity of Azad going to Azad? That the police found AK47 is again white lie. He alighted from a train around 10 am along with com. Hem Pandey in Nagpur Station, and was caught by the APSIB unarmed. Is the government following its own constitution of article 21? Is the government following kernel of the Geneva Convention that "defenceless persons" should not be harmed? Is it not utter hypocrisy and hoax that on one hand the government is placing the prevention of torture bill and the police every minute resorting to the torture of the detained? It is a concocted story of encounter repeated ad nauseum, by the AP Police, churned out to the media umpteen times. The right life, guaranteed under the constitution is mocked and the right to be produced within 24 hours of the arrest is metamorphasized into killing within 24hours of arrest, so that there is no scope for any redressal by their near and dear.

We appeal to the civil rights organizations, democrats, patriots to raise to raise to the occasion thoroughly investigate this fake encounter as an example of extra judicial killing that are happening in scores in this country and bring out the truth before the people.

Ajay,

Spokes Person,

CPI (Maoist)