nanosecond

How come then I am able to open the page? What about others? plz give ur feedback

If u r born Sikh, u r someone special. U r born Sikh bcoz u r special for Guru jee. Don't break ur promise with Guru Gobind Singh jee. I feel a Sikh isn't a complete Sikh unless he has uncut hair. U will slowly go away from ur relegion( which is karam and dharam both) if u stay mona.

The page does work. Just Click the link. Do not copy-paste the code.

See this page http://www.conservatives.com/news/article....2056&speeches=1

239 of 240 booked under POTA in Gujarat are Muslims: Report AFP NEW DELHI: All but one of those charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) in Gujarat are Muslims, a report said on Monday. Of the 240 people booked under the act, which carries the death penalty, 239 are Muslims while one is a Sikh, a newspaper reported. Muslims have been booked for three different attacks on Hindus, including the burning of Sabaramati Express at Godhra last year, the attack on Ahmedabad's Akshardham temple and the murder of former minister Haren Pandya, the report said. That attack sparked communal riots in the state in which more than 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were killed. The report comes after Supreme Court slammed the Gujarat government, saying it had no faith that the administration would bring to justice Hindu fanatics responsible for the killing of Muslims. A three-judge bench led by India's Chief Justice VN Khare said Chief Minister Narendra Modi should quit if he could not prosecute the guilty. The court was hearing appeals from the National Human Rights Commission and 17-year-old Zaheera Sheikh to reopen the trial of 21 people acquitted of murder for the deaths of 12 people killed when they torched a bakery in Gujarat during the riots. All 21 accused were acquitted in July by a local court after Zahira and 72 other witnesses retracted their testimony. Zahira later she said she lied in court because of threats to her life. The Supreme Court told the Gujarat government to extend protection to her. She fled the state and is still seeking justice for her father and his 11 Muslim workers who were burned to death in the bakery. Send this Story to your friend

Letwin wants renewed status for Sikhs Sep 14 2003 Shadow Home Secretary Oliver Letwin is to visit the National Sikh Convention, and is due to praise the religion's ideals of service to the community and neighbourly society. Mr Letwin, who was attending the event at the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Blakenhall, Wolverhampton, was also expected to call for the Commission for Racial Equality to monitor Sikhs as a separate ethnic group. The three-day conference, which started on Friday, is on course to attract more than 10,000 of the UK's 600,000-strong Sikh community. The creation of a new Sikh Federation and a National Council of Gurdwaras was announced on the opening day of the conference. The Federation is billed as the first Sikh political party in the UK, but will not field candidates in local, national or European elections, instead lobbying existing parties to promote the interests of it members. Mr Letwin was due to tell delegates: "Sikhs now constitute one of the most numerous and most economically active ethnic groups in the countrytheir contribution to business and to many professions is enormous. "It is very surprising that the Commission for Racial Equality, and the present Government, continue to refuse to acknowledge Sikhs as a grouping worthy of recognition along with other ethnic minorities. "The Conservative Party will continue to campaign, as it has done over the past two years, for such recognition. "And we will also continue in our struggle to ensure that the British National Party, which has made Sikhs the target of outrageous vilification, does not make any fu rther political progress in Britain."

Amardeep u seem to have problem at ur mathematics :umm: 50+25+25+5 makes 105% ..........lol.......jus jokin Hey hey, u r really 105% person.

Check these pumping shabads by Bhai Tejinderpal Singh Ji Doola Veerji on http://sikhbytes.guroocities.com/Kirtan.htm http://sikhbytes.guroocities.com/gursikh.ram at around 10 mins location AND http://sikhbytes.guroocities.com/peeoo.ram These are really refreshing

What's in the name? We need our own country, name doesn't matter. But khalistan is derived from Khalsa+Sthan i.e. the place of the pure bcoz khalsa means pure. Hence Khalistan=Land of pure Also we have had much struggle by the name of khalistan and the word is more known to people around the globe. Hence Khalistan is apt name for our own country

What about Harbhajan Singh, Reetinder Singh Sodhi, and Sarandeep Singh of Indian Cricket Team. I know Harbhajan trims his beard. What about the rest two?

This post is taken from Tapoban.org written by Kulbir Singh I received the following email from a Singh in India: >>>>> Hope you all in Chardi Kala.Today itself, there was a news in a section of the press. SGPC is going to honour Jugraj Singh, a hockey player,who got injured in a car accident and is under treatment.Probablly, he was drunk when met with accident. He does not keep hair. Does SGPC furthers the cause of propagation of Sikh cause by honouring a Patit Sikh player. Kindly do highlight it and write to SGPC and your friends to drop the idea. >>>>>> Singh jee has made a very valid point. What is the point in honouring Jugraj Singh the hockey star of India? He is a monna and SGPC should not honour him and portray him as a Sikh hero. He may be a national hero but not a Sikh hero. We don't need heroes like him. He is an excellent hockey player and in the last world cup he out-performed everyone but still let hockey fans honour him. He has done nothing for Sikhi and there is no need for SGPC to honour him. I appeal SGPC to rethink it's decision to honour a patit Sikh. Daas, Kulbir Singh

And btw vicky veerji, is that ur pic in ur avtaar?

Yes,my maternal grandfather was in Police during the British Era and mother says that he was highly respected by the Britishers

Why not in USA and Canada???

British Sikhs form their own party Thursday, 11 September , 2003, 16:51 London: The over 700,000 Sikh community in Britain has launched its own political party, the Sikh Federation (UK) for British Sikhs, and has warned the government to take their wishes more seriously. The federation plans to set up branches in major towns and cities with a sizeable Sikh population, including Slough, Glasgow and London. However, it does not initially plan to put up its own candidates for local, national or European elections and will support any party that represents the community's interest best. According to federation spokesman Dabinderjit Singh, one of the main issues the federation plans to take up was the matter of identity. He said the Sikhs were very angry that despite promises from the Government, they were let down over issues of identity. Though Singh did not mention it, some in the community have been reportedly voicing the demand for a specific identity, objecting to being called by the generic term 'Indians'. Singh said, "I can name a dozen Labour ministers who have a large number of Sikhs in their constituencies...the Sikh Federation wants to tell them that unless you start helping us and taking our issues seriously we will not vote for you." He said the Conservatives had been very helpful and "very willing to listen, more so than the Government."

I have never listened to Bhai Sahib Bhai Randhir Singh Ji's Kirtan. I really want to. Is it available on the AKJ.Org site???

Also Check http://sikhbytes.guroocities.com/Kirtan.htm but only real audio (& 2 video files too) is available

Human Rights at U.N. Obscured by the Shadow of Politics by Barbara Crossette .... It is never hard to find critics of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. The question is whether the criticisms are too often directed at passing outrages like Libya being elected to the commission's chair only months before accepting responsibility for the 270 deaths in the terrorist bombing of Pan Am 103. Often deeper, more persistent faults are missed, or deliberately overlooked. There is, for example, the perennial failure to recognize, not to mention condemn, abuses of such a magnitude that they should be impossible to miss. Like so much about the United Nations, the commission is nothing but a hollow shell filled by countries, by governments. Politics quickly becomes the determining factor when agenda items are proposed—or not. Thus the decision every year about whether to put China in the spotlight—it escaped this year—is decided not on the merits of the Chinese government's human rights record but on whether or not Europe and the United States can agree to bring abuses to the commission's public attention. In years when China was on the agenda, Beijing was almost always successful at rounding up enough countries to vote for a "no action" motion—an inventive piece of diplomatic skullduggery that kills debate before it can begin. The issue of missing agenda items is relevant now because of the quiet appearance in the United States of a new book-length report, Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab. That's Indian Punjab, not the Pakistani counterpart, from which we hear frequently about &q uot;honor" killings of women, the abuse of child laborers or sectarian killings. In India, the state of Punjab was the scene of a rebellion in the 1980s by Sikhs, a religion whose followers produced both exemplary military leaders and the green revolution. The story of how the Sikhs became disaffected with India's central government is long and complex. It is told succinctly in Reduced to Ashes, published by the South Asian Forum for Human Rights in Kathmandu, Nepal. Suffice it to say that by 1984, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sent the Indian army into Sikhdom's holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, to root out armed Sikh militants. It was a fatal move. Four months later, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Those of us who were in New Delhi in the days that followed her death can never forget the terror that reigned as Sikhs were massacred in marked neighborhoods across the city. I saw charred bodies in ditches, a Sikh scalped and left to die on a train at Old Delhi station, where other bodies were lined up on platforms, and Sikh families everywhere sick with fear, cowering in their homes or Sikh-owned businesses. This was not primarily a religious pogrom. Most people then and now saw it as politically motivated, with henchmen from the assassinated prime minister's Congress Party leading the charge. No politician of real importance was ever called to account, however. One of them, P.V. Narasimha Rao, who was the home minister in charge of the ineffectual police, went on to become prime minister in 1991. In more than 17 years of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, 2,095 killings and deaths under torture were recorded, with another 1,100 "disappeared" people who are also thought to have died, according to the Chilean truth and reconciliation commission. In India, human rights activists and journalists estimate (and have largely documented) that in the three days after Gandhi's assassination on Oct. 31, 1984, about 3,000 Sikhs were slaughtered in the Indian capital and other cities. In the decade that followed, according to India's own Central Bureau of Investigation, another 2,097 bodies were "illegally" (that is, without proper documentation) cremated in and around Amritsar by the police or other officials. Sikhs see them as more victims of the Indian state, murdered outright or killed in shady circumstances or faked "encounters" with the police or military and then hurriedly burned. Thus the title of the new report, Reduced to Ashes. India is a democracy, and so Indian human rights activists, among them the chief author of this book of documentation, Ram Narayan Kumar, could get access to public records, and were able to press the case for accountability all the way to the Indian Supreme Court, though no high-level charges have been filed against those in charge in Punjab. Governments at several levels are still stonewalling. It is hard to imagine this happening in any other functioning democracy.Never in the course of almost two decades has the Indian government's attempt to annihilate troublesome Sikhs been the subject of debate at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. No nation wants to take on India, particularly countries with economic stakes in its vast market. Now the United States wants Indian troops to play a major role in security in Iraq as it struggles to create a fragile democracy. Jaskaran Kaur, an American graduate of Harvard Law School who, through the Harvard human rights program, assisted Kumar and his team in their research and is working on a book of her own, said that Sikhs, now armed with this published report, will try again to get world attention. Kaur predicted that they would skirt the commission and work instead through the U.N. system of independent human rights investigators, whose credibility is high. "We want to bring the report to the relevant special rapporteurs, such as the rapporteur for extrajudicial executions, the independent expert on disappearances and t he rapporteur on human rights defenders," she said. Human Rights Watch has publicized the report, and in India the Association of Families of the Disappeared in Punjab has formed to put pressure on authorities. Around the world, there are, sadly, other cases of neglect like this. Only recently have powerful nations, especially the United States, been interested in condemning the 1988 gassing of thousands of Kurds in Iraq by Saddam Hussein's regime. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, has long argued that repeated calls for attention by human rights groups were ignored or brushed aside by governments at the time. Hill people—the Montagnards—in Vietnam's Central Highlands, who say that their lands are being seized and they have been imprisoned, have begged for years for international attention. The murderous record of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a rebel army in Sri Lanka that introduced large-scale suicide bombing to South Asia, has only recently been rigorously condemned, but mostly outside the U.N. system. Peter G. Danchin, director of the human rights program at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, wrote a summary of what the Commission on Human Rights accomplished in 2003 for a new book, Global Agenda: Issues before the 58th General Assembly of the United Nations, 2003-2004, a useful guide published every year by the United Nations Association of the United States. Danchin wrote that this year, Russia, Zimbabwe and Sudan escaped even toned-down censure as the United States held back from leadership on these and other issues. Iran got no attention because a monitor designated to report on the country had been barred for so long that the investigation was dropped. Meanwhile, nations that Human Rights Watch labels an "abusers' club" are gaining in numbers and power as a see-no-evil voting bloc in the 53-member commission. Human Rights Watch lists only a handful of countries (among them Canada and Mexico, leaving a big hole in between) that act out of principle and not political expediency. The moment is rapidly approaching when the commission, one of the oldest bodies in the U.N. system, will have no credibility at all. It seems that the only serious, honest jobs are being done by the rapporteurs concentrating on certain nations or specific abuses and the U.N. Human Rights Committee, an independent body of experts created to track compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights since 1977. The committee can hear individual complaints. That makes these monitors the last and only hope of people like those families in Indian Punjab still waiting for their story to be told, said Jaskaran Kaur. "We are slowly learning who to approach and how," she says. There is a tragic footnote to this story. The U.N. high commissioner for human rights does not control the Commission on Human Rights. But his or her moral influence might make a difference. Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was on temporary leave as high commissioner when he was killed so senselessly in Baghdad, had begun to show signs of trying to invigorate the system. It will be very hard to find someone with his personal authority and persuasive power to carry on that task. http://www.theatlantic.com/foreign/unwire/...e2003-09-08.htm

I think my signature works now. Is it visible now??????

and btw is my signature in gurmukhi visible to others? i used some other font

Hey khalsa_007 how did u change ur screen name? can i do so? i also wanna do so but don't want to sign up for new account allover again.

I think we should reply to Mr. P Chidambaram on this article wriiten by him. He can be reached at pc@expressindia.com This article is from http://www.indianexpress.com/full_story.ph...ontent_id=31050 Stem this Alien Nation P Chidambaram I can fill this column — nay, the whole page — with names of Muslim men and women, all Indians, who have achieved distinction in different walks of life. Because, among the 110 million Muslims, there are thousands of distinguished men and women. We can start with President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. At the other end — though it is inappropriate to call it that way — there are millions of ordinary Muslims who live, work, marry, raise families, pray, prosper, suffer and die like millions of ordinary men and women belonging to other faiths. I remember that when I was a child, our tailor was a gentle man by name Zynulabdeen. We knew he was a Muslim but we did not think that made him different from us. The 110 million Muslims are Indians, they belong to India, India belongs to them as well, and they have to live and die in this land. They cannot be banished from this country. From time to time, a whole community may become the target of attack or may be believed to be the aggressors but, at the end of the day, the men, women and children of that community are entitled to a place in Indian society. The Punjab precedent Not many years ago, the Sikh community was in the eye of a storm. The years from 1984 to 1990 were the worst years. Every day br ought bloodshed, death and destruction. There was a strident demand for Khalistan, a separate State for the Sikhs. Some faint-hearted people even said ‘‘Let’s give them Khalistan and put an end, once and for all, to this festering problem.’’ Thankfully, the government of the day did not heed this counsel of desperation. We adopted a two-track approach. To the militants, we showed the iron fist. Militants were fought on their own turf and eliminated. There were, indeed, some excesses. The turning point was Operation Black Thunder II. When the Golden Temple was retrieved and the militants were arrested, the back of Sikh militancy was broken. From then onwards, it was a slow climb to normalcy. Finally, elections were held in 1992 and Punjab returned to the path of peace and prosperity. During this period, the government was careful not to paint the whole Sikh community in black or treat all Sikhs as terrorists or anti-nationals. On the other hand, government reached out to the Sikh community. It was a battle for the hearts and minds of Sikh youth. While the militant outfits were busy recruiting young boys, government offered them jobs in the Punjab police, the CRPF and the Army. Many young men were swept away by the thrill and glamour of the life of a terrorist. Money, guns and women were believed to be available to the terrorists. The fear of death did not deter them. On the other hand, government, especially the Punjab police, befriended the youth. Many institutions, groups and individuals made significant contributions to this effort. Hundreds of names come to my mind. Of them, two stand out — Sardar Beant Singh (later Chief Minister, who was assassinated) and the redoubtable Mr K.P.S. Gill. The point to be noted is that both were Sikhs. The Muslim present The situation today is qualitatively not very different although the problem is more complex. Ever since the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the Muslim community has been deeply hurt and alienated. The P.V. Narasimha Rao government was inept and ineffective in dealing with the sense of alienation. When the BJP came to power, the situation became worse. After the Gujarat pogrom, all over India, Muslims believe that they are under siege. And every day words are spoken or deeds are done that only drive more Muslims into despair and alienation. An example of this pernicious trend is the official ‘‘celebration’’ of Independence day by the Government of Gujarat by converting it into a Hindu festival. Mr Narendra Modi, the Chief Minister of Gujarat, claims that his government did everything to quell the riots and it continues to do every thing necessary to rehabilitate the victims. The bitter fact is despite doing ‘‘everything’’ the riots left 2000-3000 Muslims dead. No one has bee punished so far. And as for ‘‘rehabilitation,’’ the facts speak for themselves. Uday Mahurkar, reporting for India Today, has documented case after case of Muslims whose lives have crumbled after the riots. There is Yusuf K. Malik, a taxi driver in Pavagadh village, who is not allowed to ply taxis in the village and now works as a daily-wage labourer. There is Rafique Pittal, once a wealthy businessman, who was able to re-start his grocery business, but no Hindu buys from his shop. And there is Sirajuddin Kansara, whose house was plundered twice by the mobs; now he works in the village during the day and returns to the relief camp by the evening. According to Mr Mahurkar, the Muslims in Gujarat have been pushed to ‘‘the last frontiers of hope.’’ Out of hopelessness and despair will rise new waves of terror. Otherwise, how does one explain the phenomenon of graduates and engineers and doctors taking to the path of violence? Mohammed Abdul Mateen Abdu Bashid was implicated in the bombing of a bus in Ghatkopar on December 2, 2002. r> He is an MD in forensic science from Aurangabad University. Anwar Ali has been accused for the March 13, 2003 bombing of a local train. He holds MA, M.Com and MCA degrees and was a part-time lecturer at the National Defence Academy, Pune. Such examples abound. The most important challenge faced by civil society today is the growing communal divide between Hindus and Muslims. The divide is taking new and dangerous forms — ghettoization, social boycott, discrimination in employment and the blurring of lines between State and religion. If the BJP and the ruling establishment are sincere in their claim that they desire to bridge the communal divide, they must find Muslims who will take up this challenging task, and give them the power and the responsibility to do so. Alas, the BJP will not find any one in its ranks. The BJP cannot find even Hindus who enjoy the confidence of the Muslim community. The BJP’s man on the spot holding the reins of power is Mr L.K. Advani and, by any measure, Mr Advani, accused in Crime No.198, is the wrong person for the task.

Future of secularism in India Asghar Ali Engineer THE question of future of secularism in India is very important particularly at this juncture. The fundamentalist forces are raising their heads in India as in other countries of the world. No religion is exception to this. There are many reasons for this. In India Hindu fundamentalism has become much more aggressive than say Muslim fundamentalism. Secularism today is in much greater danger than ever before due to Hindutva militancy. Secularism is highly necessary if India has to survive as a nation. But apart from survival of Indian nationalism and Indian unity, secularism is necessary for modern democratic polity. And this need for secular polity becomes much greater if the country happens to be as diverse and plural as India. Secularism is a great need for democratic pluralism. Our leaders and freedom fighters were well aware of need for secular and modern democratic polity for India. They also knew that India is highly religious country and that secularism in the sense of hostility or indifference to religion will never be acceptable to people of India. Secularism was never meant to be indifference to religion by India leaders. It is for this reason that even most orthodox among Hindus and Muslims accepted it as a viable ideology for Indian unity and integrity. The most Orthodox Muslim 'Ulama of Deobandi school preferred secular India to Muslim homeland or theocratic Pakistan. They outright rejected the idea of Pakistan when mooted by Jinnah. They denounced two nation theory on the basis of religion. Nehru, though personally agnostic, but never imposed agnostic or atheistic secularism. He was too much of a democrat to attempt that. He said in his answer to a query by an Indian student at Oxford University in fifties that in U.K. state has a religion (Anglican Christianity) but people of England are quite indifferent to religion but in India state has no religion but people are very religious. Therefore, in Indian situation secularism means equal protection to all religions. Nehru was greatly committed, more than anyone else in post-independence India, to the concept of secularism. He never compromised on this question. He was well aware of the fact that secularism is a great cementing force for the diverse people of India. He, as an idealist, thought that with spread of modern scientific and technological education secularism would spread and find greater and greater acceptability. However, not only it that did not happen that way but communalism and obscurantism spread with more intensity than secularism. There are several reasons for this all of which we cannot analyse here. Some of them of course must be mentioned. Like Nehru very few people were genuinely committed to secularism in the Congress. Many eminent Congress leaders were opposed to it in their heart of heart. They tried to sabotage Nehruvian vision in his own lifetime and they became much more active after his death. Nehru could not pay much attention to educational system in his lifetime. It could not be reformed. The old textbooks with communal approach introduced during the British period were never changed. The Congress leaders themselves approved of them. Those who did not, could not show enough courage to demand essential changes in history textbooks. Thus most of the Indians grew with subtle or pronounced communal mindset. In fact the educated were thus more affected with communal virus than the illiterate masses who never studied in schools and colleges. Similarly urban areas were more affected with communal virus than rural areas. Formation of Pakistan also greatly affected thinking of educ ated middle class Hindus and they looked upon Muslims as responsible for creation of Pakistan. They were never explained the complex political factors which brought about existence of Pakistan. Thus the education system did not cultivate secular outlook and conservative political outlook continued to strengthen communal mindset among the educated middle classes. The Muslim leaders in independent India, after the death of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad and Zakir Husain, could not provide moderate and wise leadership to Muslim masses. They also remained not only extremely cautious in their approach but never prepared Muslim masses for modern secular polity in India. They were more insistent on minority rights than on necessity for change. This attitude was further strengthened among these leaders due to frequent occurrences of communal riots. The Jabalpur riot of 1961 shook Nehru as much as Indian Muslims to the core. For the first time they became greatly apprehensive of their security and began to withdraw in their shell. This further reinforced conservatism and became a hurdle in developing secular outlook among Muslims. The Jabalpur riots were followed by more intense communal violence in Ahmedabad in 1969 and Bhivandi-Jalgaon in 1970. The end of seventies and early eighties witnessed number of; major communal riots in which hundreds were killed brutally. The RSS propaganda, on the other hand, was bringing more and more Hindus in the fold of Hindutva. All these developments were sure prescription for increasingly weakening secular forces in the country. The decade of eighties saw rise of religious militancy among Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. This decade also witnessed horrendous communal violence in North India. It was again during this decade that Khalistan movement came to the fore on one hand, and the Shah Banu and Ramjanambhoomi movement; on the other. Mandal commission was implemented by V.P.Singh towards the end of eighties, which further gave boost to Hindutva forces. The caste stratification became much more pronounced and led to Hindu militancy apprehensive of division of Hindu votes. And in the beginning of nineties Babri Masjid was demolished which pushed Indian secularism to the brink. It was the greatest disaster and was followed by Bombay riots, which shocked whole world. Thus we see Indian secularism has followed a tortuous course all through in the post-independence period. It is not surprising in a underdeveloped country like India with its immense poverty, insurmountable levels of unemployment and widespread illiteracy. The BJP, which came to power using its Hindutva card is not likely to give it up in near future. With every election it intensifies its Hindutva agenda. The other members of the Sangh Parivar, specially the Vishva Hindu Parishad, tend to be more irresponsible as it does not have to govern. It assumes extremist postures and threatens minorities. It is this irresponsible extremism which resulted in the Gujarat carnage which again shook the world. The BJP Government tends to be buffeted between the VHP extremism and National Democratic Coalition compulsions. It thus fails to adopt consistent policies. In the given political circumstances the future of secularism does not seem to be bright. However, one should not take short- term view based only on given context. Human beings have always struggled to transcend their given situation. A purely contextual view tends to be realistic but also restricted one. A vision, on the other hand, may not always be realistic but has a much broader sweep. And it is this broader sweep which shapes new realities and these new realities enables us to shape our future. Though religion will never cease to be a force in human life secularism will not loose its relevance either. The modern democratic polity cannot be sustained without the state being neutral to all religions or equally protective for all religions as Nehru put it. And it is in this sense that secularism in India will becom e more and more relevant. It should also be noted that we should not pose secularism and religious orthodoxy as binary opposites, as some rationalists tend to do. Faith will always remain an important component of human behaviour and there will always remain an element of orthodoxy in faith behaviour. Rational faith is certainly not an impossibility but it tends to be an elitist phenomenon. On the level of masses orthodoxy reigns rather than rationality, even in advanced societies. Also, economic advancement and reduction in levels of poverty and illiteracy will ultimately sideline communal bigotry and enhance forces of secularism. Religious orthodoxy, if not challenged by the other's threats, would not yield to communalism. There is a Laxman Rekha between religious orthodoxy and communal discourse. India has stupendous challenges to meet due to its economic backwardness and unemployment, which sharpen communal struggle. Unemployed and frustrated youth can easily be induces to think and act communally as he thinks his unemployment is due more to his caste or community than economic backwardness. Thus chances of secularism will certainly brighten with more economic progress and reduced levels of unemployment, particularly educated unemployment. Indian democracy, which is here to stay, is in itself a guaranty for future of secularism. A pluralist country like India needs secularism like life-blood. India has been pluralist not since post-modernism but for centuries and no one can wish away its bewildering pluralism and this pluralism can be sustained only with religiously neutral polity. India has been passing through very critical phase now but there is nothing to despair. The present communal turmoil is not here to stay. It would certainly yield to more stable secular polity. Asghar Ali Engineer is executive director of Centre for Study of Society and Secularism, Mumbai http://w ww.thedailystar.net/2003/09/04/d30...30904150176.htm://http://w ww.thedailystar.net/2003/...30904150176.htm

Sikh devotees carry the holy book Granth Sahib in a palanquin during a religious procession at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, Monday, Sept. 1, 2003. The Sikh community is celebrating the 399th anniversary of the compilation of the holy book. In the background is the Golden Temple. (AP Photo/Sandeep Sharma)

Picture on left is Jassika version 1.0 and on right is Jassika version 2.0 Obviously 2.0 is a better,updated,improved and more beautiful version than 1.0 :umm: