American Buddhist Net

Robbie Corey-Boulet

All but one of the six Tibetans participating in a hunger strike for Tibetan freedom lay nearly motionless in their tent near Jantar Mantar on Tuesday, their ninth day without food or water. The one who managed to sit up, a 31-year-old monk named Sodhak, strained to describe his physical ailments, which included dehydration and stomach pains.

“I’m feeling very weak now,” said Sodhak, who fled Tibet in 1997 to study Buddhism in Karnataka, according to a profile distributed by the Tibetan Youth Congress (TYC), the organiser of the strike. “The Tibetans in exile are representing the Tibetans inside Tibet. We have to express their grievances.”

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Consider this in light of the shifting focus of the US "war on terror" to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, and the importance of public opinion in India to that effort. Is this not a clear sign that we are still vigorously playing a "grand chessboard" strategy to control Eurasia? "...it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America." --Zbigniew Brzezinksi in The Grand Chessboard. ABN
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Mon Aug 4, 2008 11:00pm AEST

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced plans to launch six new regional television channels in India, where the media is expanding at a frenetic pace.

Murdoch has a strong television presence in Asia's third-largest economy through leading broadcaster Star, a wholly owned subsidiary of the tycoon's News Corp.

"The investments will be in the region of $100 million and we will launch in the next 12 months," Murdoch told reporters in India's business capital, declining to give further financial details.

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Tuesday, August 5, 2008
By ASHWINI BHATIA

SANTOKHGARH, India — Mukesh Chabba lit the funeral pyre on which seven of his relatives — including his wife and daughter — were cremated Monday, the day after a stampede at a remote mountaintop Hindu temple killed 145 people.

Chabba and 11 other family members had been visiting the temple to celebrate the recent birth of his son. Only five of them survived.

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The Tibetan Youth Congress, known for spearheading high-profile rallies such as last year’s storming of the Chinese Embassy in New Delhi, has unleashed its latest salvo at Beijing: a slow and very public death.

“All our campaigns have been non-violent so far,” said Tsewang Rigzin, the president of the Tibetan Youth Congress. “That’s what we’re doing now.”

But this is the first time Tibetan demonstrators are declining water as well as food. Without medical intervention, they are unlikely to live beyond this week.

The Tibetan Youth Congress vows that for every striker that dies, another will take his place. The six demonstrators, said Konchok Yagphel, who speaks for the group, represent the six million Tibetans in the world still struggling for an independent homeland.

And they do not intend to let any police officer come between them and that goal.

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...Kashmiris thus find themselves not simply sandwiched between India and Pakistan, but they are caught in what I would call a web of the interplay of complex and dubious historical forces. Such being our historical experience, J&K’s deepening crisis cannot be resolved overnight. Nor can it be merely explained in terms of one factor, as for example, Hindu-Muslim divide on the basis of religion, the problematic nature of ethnic diversities or a territorial conflict between India and Pakistan. We need to understand dispassionately the nature of our crisis which, in my opinion, is essentially related to our historical and civilisational identity as a nation.

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By Geetinder Garewal

CHANDIGARH, India (Reuters) - At least 145 people, mostly women and children, were crushed to death under the feet of thousands of pilgrims in a stampede at a temple in Himachal Pradesh on Sunday, police said.

Hindu worshippers, chanting and singing hymns, were snaking up a 4-km trail leading to a hill-top temple in Bilaspur district when the stampede occurred.

Police said the pilgrims might have panicked after heavy rains caused some loose stones from a retaining wall along the hilly trail to fall.

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Sunday August 3 2008

At least 68 people, many of them women and children, were killed and 47 injured in a stampede at a temple in northern India today, police said.

Iron railings leading to the Hindu temple of Naina Devi in the state of Himachal Pradesh broke, causing panic, a senior police officer, K K Indoria told Reuters, adding: "We think around 68 people have died."

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Hundreds of Kashmiri Hindus backed by political parties clashed with police in the Capital on Saturday while holding a rally to pledge support to activists in Jammu protesting the killings of two people and revocation of the land transfer to the Amarnath Shrine Board.

Around 3,000 people of all age groups gathered at Jantar Mantar in the heart of the Capital and proceeded towards Parliament House, but were stopped by police officials near the Parliament Street police station.

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Army called out in Kashmir religious protests

India-Pakistan clashes bring fear to Kashmir villages

New Delhi, July 31 : Tibetan Youth Congress activists continued their hunger strike in New Delhi on the fourth day today to protest against Chinese occupation of their homeland.

The activists had on July 28 started their strike to garner international attention for their freedom struggle.

With Beijing Olympics approaching, Tibetans are trying to reinvigorate their freedom movement and protest against what they see as China's illegal occupation of their homeland.

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Nobel Laureate His Holiness Dalai Lama today consecrated the ancient Thungyur Lakhang Buddhist Gompa amidst enchanting of holy ‘Mantras’, prayers and traditional musical instruments in the presence of Shri Virbhadra Singh, Chief Minister, Smt. Pratibha Singh, MP and senior monks assembled from a number of prominent monasteries to mark the ceremony at Rampur Bushehar coinciding with 2550th year of Enlightenment when Prince Sidhartha attained Budhisatva and become Lord Budha.

Delivering the sermon to the devotees assembled from different parts of the State, His Holiness Dalai Lama dedicated the centuries old restored Thungyur Lakhung Monastery to the devotees of the Buddhism and congratulated them on the 2550th year of enlightenment of Lord Buddha which was being celebrated in a big way in the State. He said that the restored monastery would attract more devotees to undertake their devotional duties in a more holy manner.

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Tuesday July 29th 2008

Acid attacks are on the rise in Bangalore, leaving a trail of disfigured and often disabled women who, until recently, could find little sympathy among the public and next to no support from the state. Not much is done to combat the problem, with acid still cheap and readily available in shops and police unwilling to interfere in ‘domestic’ disputes. But since Sushma, Verma, Sanjana and Mallige started campaigning for better rights for the victims of acid attacks in 2003, things in the state of Karnataka are changing for the better

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Reuters
Published: Friday, July 25, 2008

MUMBAI - About 100 people worried about industrial pollution set fire to a construction site of a local unit of Dow Chemical Co. in western India on Friday, police and a Dow official said.

The company is setting up a research and development centre with an initial investment of 4 billion rupees ($90 million) near Shinde village, about 200 kilometres from Mumbai.

Dow Chemical Co is the largest U.S. chemical maker.

For many Indians, Dow is synonymous with the catastrophic industrial accident in Bhopal in central India in 1984, when tons of toxic gas leaked from a pesticide plant owned at the time by Union Carbide.

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July 28th, 2008
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

NEW DELHI — Over the past several years, terrorist attacks in India have become an everyday presence in everyday places. The targets seem to have nothing in common except that they are ordinary and brazenly easy to strike.

In eastern Varanasi, a deadly explosion interrupted Hindu devotees as they lighted oil lamps to Hanuman, the monkey god, one Tuesday at dusk. In southern Hyderabad, a homemade bomb planted inside a historic mosque killed worshipers on a Friday afternoon. In Mumbai, India’s largest city, nearly 200 commuters on packed city trains died in a series of blasts.

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Sat, Jul 26 09:44 AM

Shimla, July 26 (IANS) Bad roads and poor air connectivity are hampering tourism in the tribal districts of Himachal Pradesh, popularly known as the Buddhist circuit.

The trans-Himalayan Buddhist area comprising Kinnaur, Spiti and Lahaul has a treasure trove of monasteries. These include Tabo, which is over 1,000 years old and is also called as the Ajanta of the Himalayas, Dhankar, Gungri, Lidang, Hikim, Sagnam and Nako.

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A little-known Islamist group is attempting to provoke sectarian violence

July 28, 2008

After the series of bomb blasts that killed more than 45 people in two of India's main cities, the worry preoccupying all Indian politicians is whether Islamist extremism has finally taken root in India (see page 29).

Until now, India has been spared much of the extremist terrorism that has racked much of the Muslim world. Although it has one of the world's largest Muslim populations and has seen regular outbreaks of communal violence, India's Muslim minority has not been radicalised so far by the global jihadist movement. Despite three wars with Pakistan, terrorist infiltration and more than 60 years of tension, India's Muslims have not, on the whole, been seen as a fifth column under the sway of outside agitators. Al-Qaeda has no indigenous presence. India's secular constitution has been sufficiently robust to withstand assaults by religious extremists on all sides.

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By Alistair Scrutton and Bappa Majumdar

NEW DELHI, India, July 27 (Reuters) - India's major cities were put on high alert on Sunday, with fears of more attacks after at least 46 people were killed in two days of bombings that hit a communally sensitive western city and a southern IT hub

At least 16 bombs exploded in the Indian city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat state on Saturday, killing at least 45 people and wounding 161, a day after another set of blasts in Bangalore killed a woman.

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AHMEDABAD, India (AFP) — At least 29 people were killed and over 100 wounded Saturday in a string of more than a dozen coordinated bomb attacks in the tinderbox western Indian city of Ahmedabad, officials said.

India television channels said as many as 30 people were killed, and reported that a little-known Islamist group calling itself the "Indian Mujahedeen" had claimed responsibility.

Ahmedabad is the communally-sensitive capital of the opposition Hindu nationalist-ruled state of Gujarat, where thousands were killed in Hindu attacks against Muslims in 2002.

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Beijing is pushing India to cede ‘southern Tibet’, the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. The demand is falling however on deaf ears in New Delhi which is instead reopening an airfield at 4,960 metres above sea level that overlooks the region, especially the Karakoram Highway to Pakistan.

26 July, 2008

Beijing (AsiaNews/Agencies) – Chinese incursions along the 4,057-km-long Sino-Indian border have increased in 2008. New Delhi has responded by re-building an airfield at 4,960 metres (16,200 feet) close to the border. The control of that part of Tibet under Indian rule but claimed by mainland China is at stake.

Borders between the two nations have not been demarcated on maps or delineated on the ground after the border war of 1962 which India lost. New Delhi claims some 38,000 sq km of territory in Chinese-held Aksai Chin in the north-eastern corner of Jammu and Kashmir as well as 5,180 sq km of land in Kashmir ceded to China by Pakistan in 1963. For its part, China lays claim to around 90,000 sq km of territory in India's northeast, roughly approximating the India state of Arunachal Pradesh. China refers to it as "southern Tibet".

In mid-June both sides said that their territorial dispute was resolved but in the first six months of the year China has carried out over 65 incursions into the Indian state of Sikkim.

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By Salman Ravi
BBC News, Sahebganj, Jharkhand

A treasure trove of history preserved by nature for millions of years in eastern India is threatened with extinction.

Plant fossils, scattered all over the Rajmahal Hills in Sahebganj district of Jharkhand state, are fast finding their way into the hundreds of crusher machines that are reducing them into stone chips to be used in road construction.

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July 24th, 2008 - 1:43 pm ICT by IANS

Dharamsala, July 24 (IANS) The Indian government has refused to allow Tibetan spiritual leader the Karmapa Lama, the only major monk reincarnate recognised by both the Dalai Lama and China, to visit areas close to the China border ahead of the Beijing Olympics, his aides said here Thursday. The 17th Karmapa, Ugyen Trinley Dorjee, had sought permission to visit various monasteries in Lahaul and Spiti districts of Himachal Pradesh as well as Ladakh district of Jammu and Kashmir.

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By Dan Isaacs
BBC News, Orissa

Hundreds of families in a remote region of the eastern Indian state of Orissa remain homeless and without support after a wave of violence swept the region last month.

The minority Christian community in Kandhamal district, many of whom are forest tribal people and low-caste Dalit converts from Hinduism to to Christianity, say they've been targeted by radical Hindu nationalist organisations seeking to put an end to the church and its activities in the region.

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Shantideva, who delivered the famous teaching we call "The Way of the Bodhisattva", lived in the 8th century near Bodhgaya, India.

Lama Chuck Stamford

...Even if he was a great scholar he didn’t show this outwardly. Most saw [Shantideva] as lazy and in fact gave him a nickname similar to “lazybones.” His nickname translated as “Eats, Sleeps, Shits” because this all they ever saw him do. The other monks mocked him because they saw him as lazy and completely useless. Some students wanted him expelled because the University was full of scholars and Shantideva was no scholar. They said all he knows about is eating, sleeping and going to the bathroom. So they asked Shantideva to give a teaching, with the hopes that he would be so embarrassed that he would leave the monastery.

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KURUNEGALA: Seven treasure hunters were arrested along with a gold Buddha statue and stolen weapons yesterday morning in Kurunegala.

The seven treasure hunters including an Army deserter were arrested early yesterday with the help of SSP Kurunegala Division OIC Crime CI Tissa Withanage, Police spokesman SSP Ranjith Gunasekara said.

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16/07/2008

New Delhi - An Indian man cut off his tongue to appease a deity at a temple in India's eastern state of Orissa, a news report said on Wednesday.

Aswini Patel, 25, went to a temple in Rourkela city on Tuesday, sliced off his tongue with a razor blade and offered it at the idol of Hindu god Shiva, police told the IANS news agency.

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July 16, 2008

Udupi, Karnataka: An elected representative of this rain-fed district in Karnataka has turned to frogs to soothe the parched throats here in the wake of monsoon failure.

Taking the initiative to appease the Rain God in a novel way, independent Udupi Municipal Councillor and Udupi Nagarika Vedike President Nityananda Volakad, known for his ''innovative'' ideas, arranged a marriage of the croaky amphibians in the city, last night. The wedding ceremony commenced with the 'baraat' starting from the Udupi Taluk Office to reach the wedding venue of clock tower near the bus stand here, covering a distance of about one km.

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