India Poll Results: Anybody interested in seeing Indians' reactions to the Terrorist Attacks?

[liberalpragmatist]

A little background to those who are unfamiliar with Indian politics. The country is roughly 80% Hindu, about 15% Muslim, with the rest made up of Christians, Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, Zoroastrians (Parsis) and others.

The country is a Westminster-style Parliamentary Democracy, with a figurehead President in place of the Queen, and a cabinet government headed by the Prime Minister, currently Manmohan Singh, who, as a Sikh, is India's first non-Hindu Prime Minister. The country has a bicameral legislature, with the lower House, the Lok Sabha (House of the People), consisting of several single-member constituencies elected by first-past-the-post. The Upper House, the Rajya Sabha, has representatives elected by the State Legislatures.

The country has a multiparty system. However, this is not due to any wide ideological differences between political parties. Rather, Indian parties are largely non-ideological and, instead, factional. Identity politics tends to play a big role. Indian political parties tend to lack internal democracy or primary systems. Instead, political parties seek to represent the interests of lots of different interest groups -- castes, class, ethic groups, regions.

Most Indian parties these days are regional, and two-party systems largely exist at the state level. At the national level, there are often fractious coalitions of regional parties. The only parties with a national following are:

(1) The Indian National Congress, informally called "The Congress," which is generally considered left-of-center. This was the party that lead the fight for independence and it tends to draw support from Indian liberals, from the poor, from religious minorities, and from secularists. It has Socialist roots, although these days its largely neoliberal.

(2) The BJP or Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party) is the main right-wing party in India. It is largely nationalistic in its orientation, with links to Hindu fundamentalist groups. It draws its support primarily from India's "cow belt" -- a swathe of Western and Northern Indian states that are India's "red states," where religious polarization is stronger. It draws support from upwardly-mobile middle-class voters and tends to play on nationalism and on middle-class resentments.

Ideologically, the Congress and the BJP actually have very little separating them other than their foreign policy orientation and their attitude to secularism; the BJP wants India to adopt a more Hindu character, whereas the Congress calls for a more secular state.

The only other parties with a national following are the Communists (there are two Communist Parties, their division stemming from the Sino-Soviet Split), and they typically get somewhere in the 5% range, with their strongest support coming from the states of Kerala and West Bengal, which have had communist governments for decades. There's also the BSP or Bahujan Samaj Party, lead by Mayawati, the Chief Minister (i.e. Prime Minister) of the Northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which is a Northern regional party of Dalits and low-caste Hindus that's making a big play at becoming a national party.

The next election is due in May 2009.

The current government is an unwieldy center-left coalition lead by the Indian National Congress. PM Singh is a member of the Congress.

With that, here are the major poll results of the Indian electorate following the Mumbai/Bombay bombings:

NOTE: Indian polls are notoriously unreliable.

If the general elections were held tomorrow, which political party would you vote for?
Bharatiya Janata Party: 36%
Indian National Congress: 28%
Other Parties: 34%

If you were to vote for a government on an issue, what would it be?
Controlling Inflation: 15%
Combatting Terrorism: 47%
Economic Slowdown and Job Loss: 26%
Reducing Communal Tension: 12%

...

Do you feel terrorism is related to religion?
No: 55%
Yes: 45%

...

How should the Indian government deal with Pak on the issue of terrorism?
Engage with Pakistan diplomatically: 17%
Go to war with Pakistan: 23%
Keep the peace process going: 25%
Seek the support of the international community: 35%

...

Has the Congress-lead government been soft on terror?
No: 36%
Yes: 59%

...

Is it fair to equate terrorism with Muslims?
No: 49%
Yes: 51%

[stillcool]

1. Jeez...I really don't want to have..

to learn about yet another country. Can't we just keep the same players in the terror game?

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JK22Df03.html

South Asia
Nov 22, 2008

Faith in India's army shaken by blasts
By Sudha Ramachandran

BANGALORE - Investigations into recent bomb blasts in India have led to the arrest of several Hindus and for the first time ever, a serving officer of the Indian army

The arrests have triggered heated debate on whether the arrests indicate the existence of "Hindu terrorism". More worryingly, the probes point to the possibility of the hitherto secular and apolitical Indian army being infected by the communal virus.
-------------------------------------
These were not members of fringe, underground outfits but people with links to the BJP and its fraternal organizations. Thakur, for instance, is known to be close to BJP president Rajnath Singh and Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan. There are photographs of her with these BJP bigwigs. Investigations are revealing that their activities might have been funded by business houses as well.

That has now changed with the investigations into the Malegaon blasts. The hand of Hindu right-wing organizations in terrorist attacks in India has now been laid bare.

But even as Indians are heatedly debating whether "Hindu terrorism" exists, another worrying issue has been thrown up by the investigations. Three men arrested in connection with the Malegaon blasts are from the armed forces. They include one serving officer, Lieutenant Colonel Prasad Shrikant Purohit, and two retired officers, Major Ramesh Upadhyay and Colonel Shailesh Raikar.

------------
The arrest of serving and retired army officers in connection with terrorist attacks has triggered a spate of worrying questions. Have Hindu supremacist and extremist ideologies penetrated the hitherto secular Indian army? Are Purohit and others an aberration or do they point to a growing trend in the Indian armed forces?
Sudha Ramachandran is an independent journalist/researcher based in Bangalore.

The tip of India's terror iceberg
By Sudha Ramachandran
Sep 30, 2008
BANGALORE - A wave of bomb blasts in four Indian cities over the past few months has drawn attention to a new, shadowy terror outfit which calls itself the Indian Mujahideen (IM).

In less than a year of existence, the group has a high rate of terror strikes - 43 bomb blasts over a four-month period in four cities leaving over 140 dead. The frequency and potency of the attacks have left India significantly rattled.

But it is not just the IM's capacity for terror that is troubling India. Just as worrying is the fact that the IM is, as its name suggests, Indian. Unlike terror outfits the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed or the Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), which are based across the border in Pakistan or Bangladesh, the IM - like the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) - is a homegrown outfit.

Although some of its funding might come from abroad - on Sunday, a Saudi national was detained at Delhi airport on suspicion of funding the IM - its members are Indian Muslims.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JI30Df01.html

Nov 13, 2008
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JK13Df01.html
India faces terror from another front
By Siddharth Srivastava

NEW DELHI - Deadly bombings in the remote northeastern state of Assam have confounded authorities with their unprecedented scope and complexity - opening what's been described as a "sinister" front for jihadi terror in India.

The Assam strikes - most recently a string of blasts on October 30 that took 85 lives and left nearly 500 injured - have added a disturbing new angle to terrorism in India, a former high-ranking police official told Asia Times Online. Citing sophisticated weaponry and mysterious smuggling networks, he compared Assam's embattled capital, Guwahati, to the war-torn Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

Unlike the relatively crude, locally assembled explosives used elsewhere in India - including strikes in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Varanasi - the bombs used in Assam have raised concerns
about the region's porous borders as well as jihadi groups' links with local militants, especially from Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Security experts say that the car and motorcycle bombs - often laden with over 80 kilograms of RDX (rapid detonating explosive) - are beyond the capability of homegrown separatist outfits such as the United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) or the National Democratic Front of Bodoland (NDFB).

[Veritas_et_Aequitas]

2. Now, now, war's just God's way of teaching us geography.

[stillcool]

4. Ah..and all this time I thought it was..

George Bush

[rainbow4321]

3. Their state level elections (results) are going on right now

I check the live stream of their news once in a while to get an update on post-Mumbai news and I see tonight (time zone diff means their Monday morning news show is on) that they are awaiting results from their state elections.
http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/video_streaming.php

Their news anchors are calling these elections the "semi-finals" before their general election.