Tipu Sultan’s world’s first missile rocket

 

Tipu Sultan’s world’s first missile rocket gets due recognition :

Bangluru: Tipu Sultan’s warfare technology achievements are finally getting recognition. A visiting delegation of Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), under its chief controller on Friday has decided to convert the ruins of Srirangapatna Fort of Tipu Sultan into a Missile museum, from where world’s first iron-cased rocket missile was fired.

Tipu Sultan, the king of Mysore, is also referred as father of modern missile technology when he first used the 2 k.m. missiles against the British troops in the Third Anglo-Mysore war at the end of 18th century.

Tipu's rockets.

But today Srirangapatna Fort of Tipu Sultan, a historic monument is lying in ruins with some walls getting collapsed with illegal encroachments all around.This has also shocked the visiting delegation of DRDO scientists.

Amazingly neither Karnataka state archeology department nor Archeological Survey of India has took the responsibility of conservation of the historic fort with has an international significance.

DRDO Chief Controller (R&D), Dr. W. Selvamurthy, who led the delegation was saddened on the appalling condition of the historic fort and the world’s first rocket court. Speaking to the press after his visit Dr. Selvamurthy expressed his disappointment, “Itis really sad and appalling and this matter is of a great concern. The place which gave birth to the basics of rocket technology cannot be treated this way. I am shocked to see that monument is completely clogged with encroachments on main entry and exit levels. A portion of the front wall is also lies collapsed with illegal constructions bonces on all sides of the court walls.”

Selvamurthy also assured that he will raise the matter to the highest level, “I will write to the state Chief Secretary, the Archaeological Survey of India and the state Department of Archaeology and Museums to restore and convert the monument into an archaeological center of great importance.”

Finally lifting the curtains from the plans of DRDO Mr.Selvamurthy said DRDO wants to use the fort to showcase the technological advancement of India which according to the DRDO scientisteven in 18th century was most advanced then rest of the world.

DRDO proposes to convert crumbling Srirangapatna fort and rocket court into a Missile museum to make it a tourist spot and to showcase India's technological advancements in Defense field.

Selvamurthy said the museum could comprise of “life-size prototype of BrahMos, wide range of missiles India developed like Prithvi, Agni and all ballistic missiles, besides having an original piece of Tipu's rocket at the proposed archeological rocket center.”

A Message to Germans

A Message to Germans, Broadcast from Tokyo

 SCB

Ladies and Gentlemen!

I last addressed you in your own language on January 26, when the Indian Independence Day was celebrated in Berlin. Today, I am speaking to you from another corner of the world, namely, Tokyo. First of all, I should like to express my deep gratitude to the Reich Government for the hospitality extended to me during my stay in Germany. True I was not a stranger to Germany, but it was a new experience for me to visit that great country during the war. When in 1919, one year after the conclusion of the last World War, I was staying in Britain, I had to content myself with saccharine instead of sugar and margarine for butter. On the basis of this experience, I expected that foodstuffs for the civilian population would now be severely rationed in Germany. It was a pleasant surprise to me, however, that contrary to my expectations, the German people had sufficient quantities of all essential articles. As I travelled through Europe, I began to realise how utterly untrue was enemy propaganda which asserted that Germany had robbed other European countries of their food. On the contrary, I found that in the restaurants of Paris, Brussels, The Hague, or Prague, much better dishes could be obtained than in those of Berlin. I was, therefore, convinced that the European economic situation in general, and the food situation in particular, was as satisfactory as is possible anywhere during war time. I saw the great change which Europe had undergone since the last World War. In that war, the Allies succeeded in blockading Germany, now, however, it is the Axis Powers who are blockading Britain. This has been possible mostly because of the incessant blows dealt to the enemy's supply lines, particularly those directed against merchant shipping.

When I was in Germany last time, I was able to note that the interest which Germans took in Indian affairs, particularly in the cultural, economic and political spheres, had increased tremendously. The formation of the German-Indian Society is an example of this development.

Another proof of Germany's interest in India is the creation of a Special Bureau at the Foreign Office, which devotes all its attention to Indian problems. There is a growing demand among the people of Germany for lectures and books on India. During my talks with the Fuehrer and other important personalities of new Germany, like Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop, Reich Minister Dr Goebbels, Reichleiter SS Himmler, Reichleiter Baldur von Schirach and other gentlemen, I noted with great satisfaction how real their interest in India is and how deep is their sympathy with India's struggle for independence. This interest of the German nation in India is based on Indo-European traditions and, therefore, it has been existent for centuries. Goethe and Schopenhauer, Rueckert and Schlegel are only a few of the many scholars who brought Indians and Germans closer to each other in the cultural sphere. However, these scholars were attracted by India's ancient culture. But now, it is modern India, with her new problems — political, economic and cultural — in which the German people and their leaders are interested; it is India's struggle for freedom that comes in for so much sympathy and support from the Germans.

Ever since the last World War, the Indian people have always had a great liking for Germany. It is not surprising seeing that Germany fought against our eternal enemy the British. The present war against our hereditary enemy has only deepened this feeling of sympathy a hundred-fold. Every blow struck at Britain by the Axis Powers aids our struggle for freedom materially. We are grateful for this help. Moreover, sympathetic understanding of our movement and the active support given to us have completely won our hearts.

As one who has studied conditions in Europe personally, I can only smile when listening to Anglo-American bragging about a 'second front' in Europe. To those who knew the real situation in France, Dieppe came as no surprise. Should the Anglo-Americans attempt another landing, they will only meet with a second Dieppe, but this time on a much more formidable scale. I cannot understand why the Anglo-Americans should make such pompous announcements of their plans and programmes. After all, words alone, however cleverly formulated, have never won wars. I can only think that the Anglo-Americans are trying to bolster up the sinking morale of their people by Press and radio propaganda. General Wavell should have learnt from his own experience that even the most gigantic bluff cannot in any way contribute to the success of military operations. The famous British General started his offensive against Burma after weeks and months of propaganda, and when the Japanese Army began its counter-offensive with cool deliberation, the General, in spite of all his bragging, had to withdraw to India most ignominiously.

Hardly had the Anglo-Americans completed the occupation of a few islands in the Mediterranean, than they started talking of the conquest of Europe. If the island fortress of Malta had not so far enabled the Anglo-Saxons to make a landing on the continent, how then is Pantelleria going to be of use in starting the second front? When the German troops occupied the Channel Islands in 1940, people in Germany never spoke of an invasion of Britain. The smallest success is enough for the Anglo-Americans to launch a grand propaganda campaign. It is not denied that the enemy has scored a success in North Africa. But, even when the battle was going on in Cyrenaica, I repeatedly emphasized that the African campaign would not affect the final outcome of the war, and I still maintain that. The fate of the war will be decided in Europe, in Asia and on the high seas. The Anglo-Americans want to terrorise the German people, and for this purpose have for sometime past been carrying on air attacks on civilians and non-military targets. I have myself experienced some of these air raids when I was with you in Germany. I know very well how ridiculous it is to try to break the morale of the German nation by these terror-raids on women and children. Thanks to the splendid organisation and to the enthusiasm which His Excellency the Fuehrer has instilled into the German nation, the civilians are so firmly united in one single, solid front that these raids can never have any effect. This 'Home Front’ is in no way less strong than the battle-front. Every German, man, woman or child knows that this war must be won, whatever the cost. No terror-raid of the enemy will ever succeed in shaking the iron determination of the German nation, its unlimited confidence in the Fuehrer and its optimism.

Two years ago, I left my country and travelled through the world, studying the situation everywhere on the spot. After this objective study of the world situation, it became my conviction — a 100 per cent conviction — that this war, however long it may last, can have only one result: the decisive victory of the Tripartite Powers and their Allies. I know what Anglo-American propaganda tries to tell the world. If words could win wars, the Anglo-Americans would have conquered the world long ago.

Until a short time ago, it was the main argument in enemy propaganda that the enormous productive potential of America, and time, which was working in favour of the anti-Axis Powers would, in the end, result in an Allied victory. But even this argument the Biitish Premier had to drop during his last visit to Washington. The Tripartite Powers have one formidable advantage over their enemies: they stick together like a wall of granite. There is neither jealousy, suspicion nor doubt to divide them. There is no conflict or difference of opinion in their programme. On the other hand, what is the situation in the enemy camp? The American imperialists mistrust the British imperialists, and Giraud is jealous of de Gaulle. In this total war, a motley crew like that of the Allies, however large it may be, can never win.

Here, in Japan, there is as much optimism and confidence as in the other Axis countries. Every Japanese citizen is ready to do his duty even like Grand Admiral Yamamoto. Japan has at her disposal enormous manpower and material which has not yet been fully utilised. The economic situation, particularly the food situation, is very satisfactory, and if anything, will only improve in the future. These very vast resources, which were at one time at the disposal of the Anglo-Saxons, are being used for their defeat. The firm determination of the Tripartite Powers, their unparalleled heroism and their superior technique of war are the guarantees of a final Axis victory.

My German friends, from the land of the Rising Sun, I send you my most sincere greetings. I congratulate you on the unique successes which you will have scored in order to establish the New Order — an order based on justice and equal rights.

My faith in the final victory of the Tripartite Powers and their allies is just as firm as my faith in the early emancipation of my own people.

I send greetings to my compatriots in Germany and other European countries. I have no doubt that they, too, will do their best in this gigantic struggle. We are still facing great difficulties which we will have to overcome. But the final victory and with it our freedom is bound to come as surely as the bright day comes even after the darkest of nights.

Long Live the Tripartite Powers and their Allies! Long Live Free India!

Mr. American Pie

BYE, BYE, MR. AMERICAN PIE VAJPAYEE

By Niranjan Ramakrishnan

 Indogram.com

For political aficionados, the Indian parliamentary election is the superbowl of superbowls. The largest electorate in the world moves, and in that movement, scoffs at elites and cynics all around the world who say democracy is not for the poor, the illiterate or the backward. As its hand hovers over the ballot box (or in this election, the touchscreen), it makes and breaks the rich and the powerful in distant Delhi. 

Twice in the last thirty years, a profoundly anti-democratic dispensation in India has been overthrown by the ballot. On both occasions, the coup de grace came not from the urban literates mouthing the shibboleth of the day ('law and order' in 1977, 'economic reforms' in 2004), but by the masses who saw things for what they were. As the results gushed in on May 13, 2004 (electronic voting making the counting of 400,000,000 votes a mere matter of hours, plus the advantage of India not having a state called Florida), it became clear that the people had defied TV-anchor and editorial page wisdom and showed the ruling coalition the door. 

This election was also the first to be conducted entirely in electronic format. That it went flawlessly is a tribute to the world's largest democracy, and testimony to the country's increasing facility with the computer.

The new government :

I wish one could say that the inheritors were clean knights in shining armor. The Congress Party,which will form the next government, imposed a fascist rule on the country between 1975-77. It was responsible for the mass murder of sikhs following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984. It was also the originator of economic liberalization (though it was never so axiomatic about it as the current government) when it reassumed power in 1991. And as soon as it seemed to have acquired enough support to form a government, its first statement was the obligatory one -- "economic reforms will continue". Through the five years of the ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA)'s cultural assault, the Congress often did little to resist. But there will be time enough to deride the Congress during the rest of its term. Today is a day for cheering. 

Reasons for the upset :

The opinion and exit polls -- almost uniformly -- predicted either a majority for the ruling alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or at the very least an assured position as the largest bloc in Parliament. The Congress Party, led by Italian-born but India-settled Sonia Gandhi (whose foreignness is strangely troubling to expatriate Indians settled in far corners of the world), was at first billed to do worse than the last time, and though slowly upgraded, never expected to emerge as the largest single party (its position for the first 30 years of independent India). 

How did this upset take place? Who knows? As the Urdu couplet goes, "Ya subah ka ehsaan ho, ya meri kashish ho, Dooba hua khursheed sarebaam to aaya..." (Whether it was the kindness of the morning, or my irresistible attraction, the sunken sun did come up after all). 

But we can recount some possible reasons. 

Mom, can I be the 51st State? 

The NDA, and its leading constituent, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's BJP, became the standard bearers of globalization, zealous in their pursuit of 'economic reforms', ardent water carriers for America. To its shame, official India remained mute when Iraq was attacked. Mr. Vajpayee's administration threw its weight behind the Strategic Defense Initiative, and was mightily proud of a projected US-Israel-India alignment in a new world order. 

The globalization policy, while delighting a rudderless urban middle class drooling over the prospect of luxury at any price, devastated much of the urban poor and village India. The aftermath of joining the WTO has wreaked havoc among the farmers, of whom it is reported that more than 25000 have committed suicide in recent years -- a development not deemed worthy of serious front page coverage in Indian newspapers, many of whom have far more important stories to carry, such as Oscar Night and Emmy Nominations. 

The identification with America came at a time when America's stock was on the downswing the world over. Even the BJP's Hindu vote base, though possessed of no great love for Muslims, could see that Indian silence in the face of the invasion of Iraq, and the frenetic energy with which Mr. Vajpayee's government tried to preempt Pakistan and get in bed with the Bush Administration in the latter's post-9-11 muscle-flexing, were hardly in keeping with India's tradition of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism. And if America could launch a pre-emptive attack on a country merely suspected to be developing nuclear weapons, it did not take much imagination to see that a country with actual nuclear weapons could be considered just as much of a target. 

India on Sale, POTA :

On the domestic front, the government proceeded to systematically carry out a controversial privatization initiative involving the selling off of billions of dollars of public assets. India's Supreme Court ruled in favor of the government, declaring that workers had no inherent right to strike. State high-handedness was rampant, and to seal the deal, Mr. Vajpayee's government pushed through a law called POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), which basically did away with large sections of India's constitutional protections regarding arbitrary arrest, detention and due process. 

Gujarat Burns :

To compound this general attitude of callousness, the BJP, as its allies looked on mutely, oversaw the worst communal pogrom in post-partition India. Thousands of muslims were killed throughout Gujarat state, in response to the killing of Hindus in Godhra, a town in the same state. The response of the central government was the rough equivalent of 'Stuff happens'. The Gujarat state government, also led by a BJP chief minister, saw in all this nothing more than the manifestation of the universal law of action and reaction. Even now, many BJP supporters view this as just a tit for tat. They would also tell you (quite factually) that thousands of Hindus have had to leave the state of Jammu and Kashmir owing to fear of militants. They miss a vital difference: in Gujarat, the killings, rapes and lootings took place with the deliberate inaction (and in some places, the active connivance) of the state government (see, Riding the Tiger in India). 

The Cultural Taliban :

Another aspect of BJP rule (again as its allies, including the anti-fascist stalwart of 1975, George Fernandes, stood shamelessly by) was the attempted cultural transformation of the country in the name of 'Hindutva'. This term, originally coined by VD Savarkar, the spiritual father of the BJP -- and incidentally an accused in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi -- means 'Hinduness'. In the dispensation of the last five years, the BJP and its cohorts got to decide who was Hindu enough. Led by a bumbling Hindutva enthusiast called Murli Manohar Joshi (who lost his seat in the elections), the BJP pushed through the rewriting of Indian history according to the Hindutava interpretation, and created revised textbooks now used by millions of schoolchildren throughout India. A friend of mine, who worked at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) -- one of the most prestigious technical institutions in the world -- told me how Joshi was forcing IIT meetings to begin with a Hindu prayer (the Muttawain would be proud), something spineless officials, swayed by the atmosphere, readily acceded to. My friend died of cancer earlier this year -- how I wish he had been alive to see this clown trounced!

Aside from such backdoor efforts to leave its imprint on Indian history and culture, the NDA also countenanced with little demur the burning of libraries, art exhibits, the threatening of artists and others because they were deemed not to conform to the Hindutva view of things. For all its cravenness towards things American, the BJP had no time for the spirit of the First Amendment. When the world-famous Bhandarkar Library in Pune, India, (a repository of ancient Hindu manuscripts, among other things), was ransacked and trashed in January because an American author of a book critical of an Indian folk hero had thanked it for its help, no political leader said a word, and both the state and central governments stood by watching. No wonder the looting of the Baghdad Museum did not strike the NDA Government as calling for an outcry. 

India Shining :

All this may yet not have been enough to ensure the NDA's ouster. But in the last few months, it spent public money like water to blanket the airwaves and roadsides with ads and billboards of "India Shining", showing off the great progress India had made (neither the message nor its context was lost on anyone during the election season). I was in Chennai (Madras) early this year, and the city (run by a recent NDA ally) was without drinking water, with the worst dry season still to come. People were buying and storing water by the truckfull, and even scheduling that was getting difficult. In the neighboring state of Andhra Pradesh, the chief minister, another NDA ally, who prided himself as the chief globalist of India and habitually went about with a laptop computer, forgot that his state was in the throes of a drought and that rural indebtedness had driven many to despair. Three days before the parliamentary election results, his party was thrashed in the state assembly polls, presaging the rout of his partners on the national scene. "India Shining", was a slap in the face of the average Indian, something only a tone-deaf administration with its ear cocked solely toward praise from the west would have missed. Instead of pulling the plug, they continued the campaign for months before being ordered to stop by the Election Commission for being violative of election campaign laws. Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani made much of what he called, "the Feel Good Factor" under the BJP. It turned out to be Feel Good Riddance Factor. 

Bye, bye, Mr. Vajpayee 

All in all, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, veteran of Indian politics and regarded (wrongly, in my view, for what politicians do matters more than what they say) as a moderate, came across as out of touch, and some of his colleagues as epitomes of downright chest-thumping zealots. Like the myth of George W. Bush being strong on terrorism, there is one about Vajpayee being the master of foreign policy. If India is regarded with greater respect in the world today, it has little to do with Vajpayee, and a lot to do with the purchasing power of its economy, a product of liberal education and technological strength for which one must thank Jawaharlal Nehru. 

One is tempted to make an analogy of Mr. Vajpayee's defeat with that of Winston Churchill in 1945. Would that it were true... Churchill left behind the legacy of a nation united in wartime and prepared to sacrifice. Mr. Vajpayee leaves behind a culture of callous divisiveness and selfish consumerism. If Churchill challenged the British people asking for blood, sweat and tears, Mr. Vajpayee scarcely said anything inspiring, projecting only a smug, don't worry, be happy attitude. Churchill's words can ring with power even today. The only place where Vajpayee's clever wordplay evokes appreciation any more is amidst inebriated Indian audiences in foreign countries. I speak as one who has attended many of his public meetings and enjoyed his oratory

Conventional wisdom in India is that Mr Vajpayee brought about, after several attempts, a kind of a rapprochement between India and Pakistan. One may say his heart was in the right place, of his surefootedness one is less certain . His visit to China was considered a success in building bridges between the two Asian giants. This too is an imperative of the times, and Vajpayee's abandonment of India's traditional sympathy for the Tibetans has came in for criticism. The one achievement for which he deserves credit is the holding of free elections in Jammu and Kashmir. 

In the end, Atal Behari Vajpayee's tenure as prime minister of India will be remembered, like that of friend Bill Clinton's, as a squandered opportunity, mistaking galloping consumption for real upliftment, spiritual or material, leaving little lasting positive imprint on the country's ethos.