Korea's Indian Connection

In the first centuries AD, there was both trade and missionary activity by Indians to South-East Asia which resulted in the spread of Indian culture to the Malay Peninsula, Thailand, Vietnam etc. The spread of Indians to Cambodia resulted in the Khemer kingdom, who built the magnificient Hindu temples of Angkor Wat. Now here is a story which connects Korean history to India, more specifically to Ayodhya.

The origin of the historical ties can be traced back to the middle of the first century AD. According to Sam Kuk Yusa, the ancient history of Korea, Queen Huh, wife of legendary King Suro, who founded the Karak Kingdom, was born in Ayodhya.
Queen Huh was a princess of the kingdom. Her father, the king of Ayodhya, on receiving a divine revelation, sent her on a long sea voyage to the Karak kingdom in southern Korea to marry King Suro, states the lines inscribed on the plaque at the monument in Ayodhya. The clan that descended from the Ayodhya princess Huh and South Korean King Suros, today known as Kim-Hae-Kim clan, has a little over six million Huh descendants in the Republic of South Korea.[South Korea’s Ayodhya connection]

Pipeline on a slow burner

The proposal for building a gas pipeline from Iran to Indian through Pakistan has been going on for sometime. There has also been another proposal to build a pipeline from Western India to Pakistan to carry diesel. The rationale behind these pipelines is that nations who do business with each other will refrain from going to war.

Finally, history shows that nations that do serious business with each other seldom go to war, even when they’re ideologically far apart. The best example of this is the US and China, which share huge investment and trade ties, but have vastly different political ideologies. While India and Pakistan work on the energy pipes, they should also negotiate free trade between themselves, build expressways across the border and open up each other’s sky and sea lanes to people and freight. Economic engagement pays a double dividend: We get lasting peace across our borders, and everybody gets richer.[Peace Pipes]

But this is a very risky proposition at this point as the Pakistani rhetoric is increasing day by day as if they will suffocate if they do not separate Kashmir valley from India. The Pakistani Prime Minister has even stated that the fate of the pipeline is linked to Kashmir. So long as Pakistan sticks to its Olive Trees, it is better for India to put the proposal on a slow burner.

The Israeli Connection

The largest number of tourists to Jammu and Kashmir are from Israel and Muslims in the Kashmir Valley even started writing boards in Hebrew to attract them. One of the reasons Israelis visit Jammu and Kashmir is to visit the graves to Jesus amd Moses (yes as in Jesus Christ and Moses from Egypt).

The main attractions in the Valley for the Israelis are two graves, believed by some to be those of Jesus Christ and Moses. A section of the local population believes Kashmiris are one of the lost tribes of Israel. Aziz Kashmiri, the author of the book Christ in Kashmir, insists that the Kashmiri people’s ancestors were one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel and that Jesus died during a visit to the Valley.[Jesus’ tomb in Kashmir?]

While there has been no proof for these graves, as well as the assertion that the ancestors of Kashmiris were from the lost tribes of Israel, there is now evidence that people of Mizoram are descendents of Menashe, one of the lost tribes of Israel.

This is a clear indication that there was a Jewish female founder effect in the Kuki community. “It is scientifically impossible to have the same genetic sequence in two populations living so far apart if they did not originate from a common stock who historically inhabited a common space,” says Maity. He also found a specific mutation in some Lusei and Kuki samples that is also present in Indian Jews.

There are also historical pointers to this claim. Zaithanchhungi, a scholar who has been studying the Mizo claim to Israeli ancestry for over 20 years, is convinced that all Mizos are descendants of the Menashe. “The Menashe were enslaved by the Assyrians and taken there [Assyria] when Jerusalem fell,” she says. “From there they migrated to the Afghanistan region. During Alexander?s invasion they were driven further on to Mongolia through the Kashmir region and Tibet plateau, and they settled in the Chhinlung region of China. They entered Mizoram about 300 years ago from Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Burma.”[The new Jerusalem via Indian Archaeology]

Where is Osama

On Sept 10, in 2002 and 2003, Osama bin Laden came up with his lecture to the world and surprisingly this year there was no message. This has led B. Raman to wonder

The absence of an anniversary homage to the terrorists of the 9/11 operation by Osama is interpreted by some as an indicator that either he is already in the custody of the US or Pakistan and will be produced before the world just before the polling day in the US or that he is dead or that his health has deteriorated aggravating the speech disability reportedly suffered by him due to the sharpnel injury. There is, however, no evidence to corroborate any of these interpretations. He must be presumed to be alive and free till there is evidence to the contrary.[Osama

Book Review: Bush in Babylon

coverThe invasion of Iraq by the coalition forces has upset many people all over the world for various reasons. But for Tariq Ali, the Pakistani writer and playright, it is not just the invasion of Iraq that is wrong, but almost everything on this planet Earth. His book Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq is an expression of his anger.
He writes that this event is a turning point in World History and is a part of the two-hundred year old war waged by the North against the South. After that he fails to explain what is this North and South he is talking about. Also first of all he declares that he is not one of those guys who believe that every disaster that has fallen in the Arab world is the result of Western intervention. This is like Fox News saying it is Fair and Balanced because the cover of the book is a picture of a child urinating on an American solider.
But even if your forgive that image as the work of an over enthusiastic publisher, the contents of the book do not change your impression. He claims to be impartial and says that he gets regular mails from both Israel and Palestine, but they just turn out to be letters about acts of violence committed by Israelis. Apparently the innocent Israeli civilians killed by the Palestinian suicide bombers never wrote him a letter.
Then for some reason he gets obsessed with jackals. Everyone in the world is a jackal. He quotes some poets who wrote against the occupation. People who criticised the poets were cursed jackals. The Iraqi Governing Council is a bunch of jackals. The jackal obsession is carried throughout the book till the end and he makes predictions like “the jackals and their masters will fail”.
No book on Iraq is complete without its history. So Tariq Ali writes a few chapters on which the world is composed of Communists, Communist Poets, British imperialists and Ba’athists. There were no Shias, Sunnis or Kurds in any major activities. He goes on touting the virtues of the Communist Party and how they were ruthlessly destroyed by Saddam Hussein. There are also many pictures of these martyred communists and Mr. Ali laments that this was not covered by a single American newspaper.
Continue reading “Book Review: Bush in Babylon” →

Terrorists in Pakistan !!

President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said that Pakistan has no external threat and its borders are 400 percent secured..[Religious extremism is a threat to Pakistan: Musharraf]

It is really a bad time to be Pakistan’s President/CEO/Army Chief. Earlier the phone calls used to come from Washington only, but now the instructions come from the Kremlin also. As a result the Pakistanis had to bomb some “freedom fighters” in their own land.

The Inter-Services Public Relations also put the figure at 50. “There were confirmed reports of training activity being conducted by foreign elements, including Uzbeks, Chechens and a few Arabs,” an ISPR statement said. He said among the 50 dead, at least 35 to 40 could be foreign militants, the rest could be their local comrades. The ISPR statement said the trained terrorists were indulging in sabotage and terrorist acts in the country. [Air raid on camp kills 50 foreign, local militants]

What is this ? Terrorists in Pakistan ? Civilian Casualties ? Can this be called state sponsored terrorism ?

Gypsies came from India

It seems there were four waves of migration of Indians to rest of the world. The first was after the earthquakes which caused the drying up the river Saraswati. The second wave 1500 years later when Indian soldiers battled in Persian armies. The third wave was when the Roma or Gypsies left India.

The third wave is remembered with greater clarity. This was the Roma, or Gypsies, who left India a thousand years ago as a result of the Arab and Turkish wars. According to the Chachnama, a contemporary account of Muhammad al-Qasim’s campaigns in Sindh in 712-3, several thousand Jat warriors were captured as prisoners of war and deported to Iraq and elsewhere as slaves. A few hundred thousand women were likewise enslaved. The process of enslavement was accelerated during the campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni. Abu Nasr Muhammad Utbi, the secretary and chronicler of Mahmud, informs us that 500,000 men and women were captured in Waihind alone in 1001-2. During his seventeen invasions, Mahmud Ghaznavi is estimated to have enslaved more than a million people. According to Utbi, “they were taken to Ghazna, and merchants came from different cities to purchase them, so that the countries of Mawarau-un-Nahr, Iraq and Khurasan were filled with them.”[The Roma and the Persistence of Memory]

Now a new genetic study shows that the Gypsies came from India and not Egypt as it was believed.

As well as looking at over 1100 samples of Romany from Europe, they studied six samples from India and found that the similarity in genetic markers supported the theory that the founder group, of perhaps under 1000 people, came from India. The idea that Romany people came from India was first proposed 200 years ago based on similarities between their language and the Indian language Sanskrit, said Kalaydjieva. But such studies were inconclusive.

“There are quite a few examples where a population adopts a language but this does not necessarily mean its biological roots belong to the same place as the larger population that speaks this language,” she said. “So from the biological point of view we have provided we have provided the best evidence so far that this is indeed a population that derives from the Indian subcontinent.” Kalaydjieva and team’s analysis of disease genetic markers supported the scientists’ previous research on male and female genetic markers. “It all points in the same direction,” she said.[Romany Gypsies came out of India]

Buddhism and Brahminism

Sudharshan Seneviratne a leading Sri Lankan expert says that the rise and fall of Buddhism in India was linked to trade and fortunes of the mercantile community. According to him, Buddhism was an urban phenomena and it owes its spread to the movement of the merchants all over the India. So for example Buddhist sites came up in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu due to the expansion of trade to the Mediterranean.

“The Buddhist temple was not merely a place of worship. It brought into contact foreign merchants and local groups. It funnelled resources and endowed wealth for investment by acting as a bank where merchants and guilds deposited money. The temples used to lend money for interest and the interest was used to maintain the temples,” he said.[Buddhism linked with traders in South India: Lankan scholar]

He also mentions that Buddhism was a movement against brahminical hegemony but later, around 4 AD, there was a revival of Brahminism and he claims that it was because kings started seeking the Kshatriya status and that could only be conferred by Brahmins.
But many scholars do not agree with this black and white distinction between Buddhism and Brahminism as enemies.

The notion of continious rebirths and the challenge of escaping from their endless cycle were common to both orthodox teachings derived from the Upanishads and to the Buddha’s teaching. Buddhism was not a belief system, not a rival faith to the post-Vedic cults and practices which prevailed under brahminical direction, but more a complementary discipline[John Keay, India, a History]

Abraham Eraly in his book The Gem in the Lotus writes that the early disciples of the Buddha were people from the upper crust of the urban society such as Brahmins, Kshatriyas and wealthy merchants. Even though Buddhism did not recognize any status claimed by birth, he never challenged the caste system. Eraly says that Buddhism was not a movement against the established order, but instead its concerns were of a different plane altogether.
Buddha was against Brahminism in certain ways. For one the Buddha never could accept the fact that people could claim sanctity because of birth and because they could recite the Vedas. He also could not accept their blind belief in the Vedas while he advocated on experiencing the truth individually. Buddhisms insistence on non-ritualistic sect, definitely affected the livelihood of Brahmins, but it never resulted in any serious confrontation between them. Buddhism never considered Brahmins as their real opponents, but their rivalry was more with other sectarians like Jains and Ajivikas.