The spectre of jihadi terror continues to cast a baleful shadow across continents. Barely had decent men and women everywhere recovered from the shock of the Westminster Bridge suicide assault on the innocent, than the traumatic bombing of the St Petersburg metro by a blast suspect, one Akbarzhon Jalilov, from Kyrgyzstan made media headlines. Fourteen passengers died and around 50 were injured. While world leaders condemned the attack, a British Conservative MP was indecently quick off the mark on the BBC called it a ‘blowback’ from the Russian presence in Syria, which he said had place Moscow above Washington as the primary target of Jihadi vengeance. A prominent neo-con US columnist suggested the the blast was the work of Russian security services as a diversion to save the Putin regime from imminent collapse.
Another jihadi attack occurred in Stockholm, when an Uzbek immigrant drove his truck/van into a crow of shoppers in the Swedish capital, leading to deaths and injuries.
On Syria itself, President Trump has reversed his earlier avowed goal of improved US-Russia ties. This volte face promises few lasting dividends in America and elsewhere. With the American nation, deeply divided already, its political and social fissures are poised to deepen further, and swelling antiwar demonstrations, as in Vietnam war, decades ago, are certain to take a heavy toll in public trust. President Trump’s statement that he had ordered the bombing of Syria because American security was at stake is too absurd for serious comment. His Administration is doomed, henceforth, to lurch from crisis to crisis until its last rites in office.
The Trump Administration launching a military assault on Syria for reasons as valid as ‘the weapons of mass destruction’ that were allegedly in Saddam Hussein’s possession and readied for use against his own people, could have unforeseen consequences transcending the borders of the Middle East, leading to an adumbration of the situation preceding the First World War of 1914.
The United States is the only nation to have used atom bombs, when they dropped one each on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The official narrative would have us believe that this was done to save American lives - an obscene falsehood on every count.
Admiral William D. Leahy, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff declared: ‘It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. My feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted the an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Age.’
An exultant President Truman, on receiving the report of the atomic bombings, said: ‘This is the greatest thing in history…We have won the gamble.’ Truman’s hubris, stemming from an ingrained belief common to all US presidents to this day, that America is the divine instrument of God’s purpose, blinded to the consequences of his barbaric act.
It led instead to an arms race in weapons of mass destruction and the spectre of a nuclear Armageddon. President Trump and his philistine cabal would do well to ponder these iconic lines of the poet Shelley: I met a traveller from an antique land,/Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone/ Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, /Half sunk, a visage lies, whose frown,/And wrinkled sneer and lips of cold command./ Tell that its sculptor well those passions read…And on the pedestal these words appear:/ M y name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:/ Look on my works ye Mighty and despair!”/… Round the decay/ Of that colossal rock, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Facing US perversity, Chinese obduracy
President Trump has decided to turn the clock back on the Indian subcontinent by re-hyphenating India, Pakistan over Kashmir. US Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikky Haley, declared recently that the Trump Administration was determined to mediate in the search for a permanent solution to the Kashmir dispute. This has caused considerable displeasure in New Delhi, with the Indian government issuing a firm rebuttal to any such move. Kashmir was a bilateral matter to be resolved by India and Pakistan without the interference from any quarter, said the Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi.
The Trump Administration’s demarche has been a wake-up call to sections of the Indian media and the political class, much given to salivating at the mere mention of the United States and its gifts, always rhapsodizing on the soaring Indo-US relationship of their dreams. Former Indian foreign secretary, Kanwal Sibal, writing on The Telegraph’s edit-page deplored the practice of the country’s principal English language broadsheets’ reliance on Western news agencies and newspapers their syndicated columnists for wisdom on Russia – a point emphasized on this page of Asian Voice. People who rarely read history, let alone ponder its lessons, prefer instead to cull their reports of press handouts and sumptuous post-prandial diplomatic lunches, trot out rancid clichés on shared values of democracy and much else scripted in heaven. Earthy truths tell a different tale. Amnesia hobbles memory, hence the Nixon Administration’s close alignment with Maoist China and the military regime in Pakistan, led Henry Kissinger, with his president’s full approval a demarche to B eijing to open a second front against India along the Himalayan border, to save Pakistan – the common client – from military defeat in December 1971.
The Kolkata-based Telegraph’s Diplomatic Correspondent, K.P. Nayar, in a sensational front-page report (April 7) relates how US Secretaries of State, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry made direct approaches to Pranab Mukherjee, then Indian Finance Minister, with the aim of bring about a ‘colour revolution’ in Bangladesh- the ‘kind of regime change successfully attempted in Georgia, Ukraine and Egypt’. The US aim was to replace the government of Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka with one to be led by Mohammed Younis, Director of the micro-credit lender Grameen Bank.
Pranab Mukherjee (now Indian President) rejected these appeals and assured Sheikh Hasina (who had got wind) of the US design, the India would stand by her, and that she had nothing to fear. These revelations were likely to appear in the third volume of President Mukherjee’s memoirs.
China continues to berate India over the Dalai Lama’s visit to Arunachal Pradesh, to which it has laid claim. The language emanating from Beijing, minatory and insulting, has stiffened Indian resolve. Chief Minister Khandu stated that Arunachal Pradesh had no legal border with China, but it had one with Tibet – a truly magnificent response in face of China’s brutal invasion and occupation of the country. The Dalai Lama likened the attitude of the Chinese government to that of the genocidal Cambodia regime of Pol Pot in the 1970s.
Jagadish Bose: Father of radio science
In 1895, a remarkable experiment was conducted at the Town Hall in Calcutta, before, among others, the assembled Bengal Governor and some his senior officials were privy to the world’s first successful demonstration of radio communication. Bose refused to patent his invention on principle – which cost him the Nobel Prize, and enabled the Italian Guglielmo Marconi to win it. That is a story of its own.
Today, scientists and engineers, looking to construct 5G mobile communication, are basing their efforts on the millimetre wavelength frequency that Bose used in his experiment 122 years ago.
Ramjee Prasad, Professor of Future Technologies for Business Eco-system Innovation at Aarhus University, Denmark, during an address at the 5G Summit in Kolkata, said: ‘I take a lot of inspiration from Bengal and Kolkata because it is here that radio communication was born. The millimetre wave that J.C. Bose worked on is the backbone of developing 5G.’
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world’s leading technical organization in the field recognized the 1895 experiment as a milestone. ‘In the scientific community Bose is now gaining recognition as the father of radio science and semiconductor technology. While advancement in semiconductor technology had led to smartphones, millimeter wave technology may bring about a more wirelessly connected world tomorrow,’ said Suvra Sekhar Das, Associate Professor at the GS Sanyal School of Telecommunication at IIT-Kharagpur.
