Recently the former Indian foreign minister, in the BJP Vajpayee government, Yashwant Sinha, wrote a rejoinder to an editorial in the Hindustan Times newspaper, which had condemned him (Sinha) for searching the text of the ancient Hindu epic Mahaabharata to bestow the derogatory title of 'Shikandi' on poster-boy Indian Prime minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, a Sikh. We will explain the implication of the use of the 'Shikandi' word and what it means later. In his rejoinder Op-ED Mr. Yashwant Sinha asked some relevant questions, which question India's parliamentary democracy credentials. A 'democracy' which is supposed to be a clone of the British parliamentary democracy's customs, procedures and traditions something about which most 'educated' Indians take false pride.

Yashwant Sinha in his Hindustan Times Op-ed, headlined, "So sorry we're the opposition," asked a few pertinant questions, which ridicule the democratic credentials of India. Wrote he:- "Does it matter at all that Dr. Manmohan Singh (who has been nominated as Prime minister by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi) is not the leader of his party - the Congress party? Does it matter that Manmohan Singh is not even the leader of the Congress parliamentary party? Does it matter if Dr. Manmohan Singh was not elected but selected by the President of his party (Mrs. Sonia Gandhi) for the post of Prime minister? Does it matter that as Prime minister of India Manmohan Singh only looks after the affairs of the government while political matters are looked after by the Congress party president, Mrs. Sonia Gandhi?

Interestingly Pakistan, which can hardly be called a democracy, and is run by Army Chief General Pervaiz Musharraf, also nominated a new Prime minister recently, a banker/ technocrat Shaukat Aziz who, like Rajya Sabha (India's upper house) member Dr. Manmohan Singh, was a member of Pakistan's Upper house, the Pakistani Senate. But, unlike the Sonia Gandhi 'nominated' Indian prime minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, (who has, to India's eternal shame, indicated no intention of resigning from the Rajya Sabha and standing up for election for a seat in the Indian parliament, Lok Sabha, as he obviously thinks that the lady-who-could-have-been-PM Mrs. Sonia Gandhi's likes and dislikes are above the law in present-day India) Pakistani prime minster Shaukat Aziz, after resigning from the Senate, has successfully sought and won an election for a seat in his country's parliament from not one, but two, constituencies, before being sworn in as head of government. Even Pakistan's shaky 'democracy' seems to have leapt ahead of the Indian democracy, nay Castocracy, which has been misruled by the heriditary Pandit Nehru dynasty for more than forty years, since independence in 1947, when Imperial Britain withdrew in haste from the subcontinent.

Shikhandi, the derogatory name bestowed, on Dr. Manmohan Singh, by Mr. Yashwant Sinha, (for the benefit of readers who may not know, is a character from the Hindu epic, Mahaabharata) was a eunuch and was the brother of Daropadi, who was the common wife of the five Pandva brothers, Yudhishtra, Bhim, Arjun, Nakul and Sahdev. Shikhandi is also known by the female/male name of Ambha/Shikhandi. One of the Pandva brothers, Arjun the crafty warrior is supposed to have used Shikhandi as a shield to fire his fatal arrow at his enemy Bhisham Pitama who as a warrior had announced earlier that he would not attack a eunuch or a woman.

This ancient belief system, that created India's lower castes, Untouchables and their never-ending misery, has overpowered most modern Laws, drafted and promulgated, by the Indian parliament like the Indian Constitution which forbids caste discrimination and is supposed to have abolished Untouchability. Some supposition! The Rig Vedas and the Instruction Manual of the Hindu Caste System - the racist Laws of Manu, drafted about 2,500 years ago - prescribe for each caste whom to marry, what to eat, how to earn money, whom to fight, how to keep clean, and whom to avoid etc., etc. Castes are the building blocks of Hindu society. Membership of a caste is by birth: one may lose one's caste identity by being thrown out of one's caste for severe misconduct but one does not become a member of another caste. Castes reproduce themselves through endogamy ie., marriage within a defined group. Caste occupations are usually hereditary particularly among artisan and 'service' castes. Each caste and subcaste (there may be over 3, 000) stands below, above or on a par with others in a system of strict social ranking.

India's socalled democracy reminds one of the profound statement made by the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), in a June 1938 letter to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that, "No democracy can long survive which does not accept as fundamental to its very existence the recognition of the rights of minorities." In polytheistic India the unhappy beleaguered monotheistic Christian, Sikh and Muslim minorities (over one hundred and sixty million souls) 'have no rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' They all live in fear of losing their very existance - their life and property. The chance of misruled fascist India surviving in its present farcical democractic form as a united nation, (which geographical hallucination Sir Winston Churchill used to describe as, 'a geographical term'. India is no more a united nation than the Equator,' he would often say) is next to nil. Is it any wonder that the Sikhs (22 million captive in India and three million free and prosperous in the diaspora) having experienced, for over half a century, the misrule and tyranny of the Dynastic Brahmin-caste-dominated Indian 'democracy', want an egalitarian, democratic buffer state of Khalistan? The Sikh-majority state of Khalistan, will stretch from the Jumna River on the East to the Pakistan border on the West, Kashmir on the North and China on the North East and will act as a bridge of peace and commerce between South Asia and the oil/gas of the seven Stans of Central Asia.

India is NOT a democracy, it is a fascist DemoNcracy!

Khalistan Zindabad :: Long Live Khalistan