India claims that it would surpass China in economic growth in the next decade. Good. Will India’s over 260 million people living below the poverty line also benefit from India’s emergence as the Asian Super Power? When India becomes a Super Power, will news, such as, Man sells daughter to a dance bar (Times of India, September15, 2005), ‘Son sold for 25 paisa in Malda’, Calcutta-West Bengal, (Telegraph, Indian Express and Times of India, May 17, 2005), ‘kidneys sold to pay off debt’ and ‘hunger suicides continue in Andhra Pradesh’, stop appearing in Indian press.
Will growth improve condition of the Indian poor? According to India’s census of household amenities and assets, majority of the Indians have a miserable life style. The survey indicated that the Indian government’s priorities for ameliorating lot of the common man were wrong. For instance, the government keeps fuming and fretting about the Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG) subsidy. But, only about 18 percent fortunate families use the LPG as fuel in their everyday life. Majority of the surveyed families used dung cakes, or firewood to cook. Only six per cent of the families have a car, with or without the LPG facility.
The survey further indicated: (a) Majority of the people is shelter-less and without any public-health cover. About six people live in one house. There are 179 million `residential houses’. Interestingly, `house’ means one room for about 40 per cent of the Indian families. As such, about 40 per cent of the married people (86 million out of total 220 million couples) do not enjoy luxury of an independent sleeping room. (b) Most `houses’, so called, are without toilettes. (c) Only half the population (52%) lives in `houses’ with walls and roofs. The rest live shelter-less in open air. (d) Only 56 per cent of the `houses’ are blessed with electricity. Even in the prosperous Punjab, four lakh households are without electricity.
The survey negated the common impression that 100% households in Punjab had electricity. Not a single state provides electricity to 100 per cent of its households. The situation in Bihar is the most miserable. Only 10 per cent of Bihar state’s 14 million households get electricity, and the 90 per cent remain without it.
The survey found that only 38% families have water. The tapped water supply, besides being erratic, is generally unhygienic. Water is supplied for only a few hours, four hours at the most. About 62 per cent of the families, that is 118 million households; do not have access to drinking water at home. In rural areas, about five million families still fetch drinking water from nearby ponds, tanks, rivers and springs.
One starling finding of the Survey was that the development expenditures were oriented towards the rich (urban areas). This trend has perpetuated the rural urban divide. The urban-rural divide is most pronounced when it comes to electricity supply. About 88 per cent families in urban areas vis-à-vis 44 per cent in rural areas have access to electricity. Almost half of the rural `houses’ are still lit with kerosene.
Urban areas are better in fuel consumption also. Over 22 million Indian families (12 per cent households) still cook under the sky. But, 76 percent of urban households have separate kitchens in their homes. Whether or not there is a kitchen, firewood is still the most widely used fuel with over 52.5 per cent Indians depending on it.
Surprisingly even 23 per cent urban families use firewood for cooking. About 10 per cent rural households use crop residue as fuel. Besides, cow- dung cake as fuel is used by 9.8 per cent (The meagre use of biogas, even in villages, reflects failure of India government to promote biogas in villages).
About 23% urban families have phones as compared to only 4% rural families. Cars are, practically, an anathema for the rural population. As for urban families, only six per cent of the overall households surveyed have a car. But, 13% of the Delhi-resident families have cars (highest average among the cities).
Majority of the Indians live in a Sahara of subhuman conditions. There are oases of affluence, unnoticed and un-taxed by the government’s policy makers. For instance, 11 per cent of Delhi’s 3.3 million houses are vacant. Gujarat has 14 per cent houses vacant.
These are hard facts to swallow for the 86 million married couples who don’t even have an independent room to live in, or to 35 per cent urban Indian families who live in one-room houses. For about a third of even urban Indian families, a house does not include a kitchen, a bathroom, and a toilet. And, in many cases, no power and water supply.
Impact of India’s macro-economic policies has been negative. There is no pro-poor sectoral growth. Industrial growth continues to be jobless growth. Time-Asia magazine points out ‘Economic reforms have produced a new breed of billionaires amid millions of the world’s poorest people’. The magazine questions, ‘Is this an acceptable price of modernization? (http://www.time.com/time/asia/covers/501041206/story.html, A Tale of Two Indias).
A particularly sore problem is the condition of children in India. During seminars, held in New Delhi on ‘Child Relief and You’ in New Delhi, the speakers pointed out: (a) India has 17 million abused children. (b) Delhi alone has five lakh children of whom 19 percent are being used as domestic servants.
The speakers drew attention of the Indian government to miserable plight of the ‘kids wiping windscreens at traffic stops, polishing shoes, begging or picking rags on capital streets.
The condition of the bonded children is worse than those performing menial jobs. The bonded children have no choice. The other children could at least choose between rag-picking or begging.
Child labor ranges from four-year-olds, tied to rug looms, to keep them from running away, to seventeen-year-olds helping out on the family farm. Children working at rug looms have been disabled ‘with eye damage, lung disease, stunted growth, and a susceptibility to arthritis as they grow older.
Children making silk thread in India dip their hands into boiling water that burns and blisters them, breath smoke and fumes from machinery, handle dead worms that cause infections, and guide twisting threads that cut their fingers’.
Bonded labor takes place when a family receives an advance payment (sometimes as little as U.S. $15) to hand a child-boy or girl-over to an employer. In most cases the child cannot work off the debt, nor can the family raise enough money to buy the child back. The workplace is often structured so that “expenses” and/or “interest” are deducted from a child’s earnings in such amounts that it is almost impossible for a child to repay the debt.
In some cases, the labor is generational-that is, a child’s grandfather or great-grandfather was promised to an employer many years earlier, with the understanding that each generation would provide the employer with a new worker-often with no pay at all.
Theoretically, bonded labor is outlawed by the 1956 U.N. Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade, and Institutions and Practices. The very first article of Convention 182 calls on member states to ‘take immediate and effective measures to secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour as a matter of urgency.’ In India, the efforts are yet to meet this standard. Most of the children in India who were suffering in the worst forms of child labour when ILO Convention 182 was adopted have not enjoyed any relief or rehabilitation since then.

Unity of human race
Col (R) M. Zaman Malik

...And We have revealed unto thee (O Muhammad) the Book as an exposition of all things, and as a guide, a Mercy and Glad tidings for those who have surrendered (to Allah). (16:89)” The unity of human race as envisaged by the Holy Quran implies the establishment of world commonwealth in which all nations, races, creeds and classes are closely and permanently united, and in which the autonomy of its state members and the personal freedom and initiative of the individuals that compose them are definitely and completely safeguarded. This commonwealth consists of a world legislature, whose members will with justice abhorring materialism and hedonism.
The Holy Quran has laid down great emphasis on the concept of unity (Tawheed). It governs all the fundamental domains of human faith and action. It is vitally important in all its dimensions for the sake of understanding the basic Quranic approach to the vital human problems:
1) Unity of God; 2) Unity of the Universe; 3) Unity of life; 4) Unity of the “natural” and the ‘Super-Natural’; 5) Unity of knowledge: 6) Unity of faith and reason; 7) Unity of truth; 8) Unity of religion; 9) Unity of ‘love’ and “law”: ‘Love’ and ‘Law’ function in organic unity in the life of a person; 10) Unity of mankind; 11) Principle of Unity in respect of the sexes; 12) Unity of Human personality; 13) Unity in terms of ‘Freedom’ and ‘Determinism’; 14) Unity in Basic social life; 15) Unity in terms of politics; 16) Unity of ‘Church and State’; 17) Unity in terms of economics; 18) Unity of classes; 19) Principle of Unity as the basis of Culture; 20) Unity in terms of the ‘Ideal of Single Goal’.
The only goal is, infect, the comprehensive goal to which the pursuit of all the partial goals should bear reference; and for that purpose all the immediate goals of human activity (- and every healthy activity must be included in the Empire of human Action) should be pursued and integrated in balanced manner, harmonizing everyone of them with the rest, and all together with the comprehensive goal, or, the ultimate goal.
The emphasis on ‘other- worldliness’ creates ideational culture. The emphasis on ‘this-worldliness’ leads to sensate culture. The Quran stands for human fulfilment in ‘this’ world as well as in the ‘hereafter’, unifying the good of this world with the next world and gives full due to both physical and spiritual. It synthesizes them with its unitary ideal of human fulfilment. Thus it projects the unified intergalactic Culture.
“We like those, who, if we establish them in the land, set up regular prayer and give regular charity, enjoin what is right and forbid what is wrong”. (22:41). If they deny thee (Muhammad), even so the folk of Noah, and the (the tribes of) Aad and Thamud, before thee, denied (our messengers).
The society of ancient Greece was the earliest in history to divorce its institutions, customs, arts, sciences from religion. Can we, based purely on this logic, call them the first truly secular society? Could its philosophy the premise that a perfect, harmonious society filled with beauty and justice could be achieved by an intelligent, rational application of human reason unaided by any supernatural power? If not everybody will not have his own ideal, thus spreading the discord and acrimony, instead? Where is the acid test? Who will think of it among men? God provided it to every nation. But Muslims believe, having believed in all the previous Holy Scriptures; that the Holy Quran is the last of these books and Muhammad (PBUH) is the last prophet. The claim of the Holy Quran is forcefully substantiated by the modern science which began to unfold the mysteries sent to Muhammad (PBUH). On his objective study ‘The Bible, The Quran And Science’ by Maurice Bucaille, he clears away many pre-conceived ideas about Old Testament, the Gospels and the Quran. As a surgeon, Maurice Bucaille has often been in a situation where he was able to examine not only people’s bodies, but their souls too. This is how he was struck by existence of Muslim piety and by aspect of Islam which continue to remain unknown to the vast majority of non-Muslims. After arising just that much of curiosity to the would be reader, I leave it here for him, to have the full benefit of himself. Since Pharaoh’s period Ptolmaic’s astronomy was being followed. In the 7th century only the Holy Quran revealed every thing science has accepted as ‘Nothing but the Truth’, and is still searching into the ever expanding universe. Surah Yasin (36) and Surah Al- Rehman (55) present everything on the platter. So, to have it as a ‘Global World’ sincerely and earnestly, one must look for the book which modern science too has been able to prove per-se, so far, Mankind may continue more and more efforts for more, endlessly.
So, up and till the time our morals, norms, what we consider is good/bad are equally and in every respect, considered the same way, throughout the world, we can’t hope to be the so-called one world. All terminologies, at the cost of well- meaning existing ones, are the result of the handiwork of evil/satan. The Crucifiers of Jesus Christ have not changed their religion, like most Muslims. Why is then President Bush having given away America’s horse to those who ensured fructification of Jesus Christ, is after the blood of Muslims? US and EU will rather be drowned in their own sea of Desert, by the Jews, rather than accept yet another hard time at their hands; country to country, living in ghettoes with yellow patch at the pack of each Jew; termed as aliens. US and NATO’s horse must not forget that the Jews never forget their past. All their present machinations stem from their treatment meted out to them at the hands of West, in the West, in the recent past. We can safely tell the Jews about the Muslim’s 800 years long rule in Spain, leaving the answer to Jews themselves. Romans expelled them in 71 AD. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) appeared five centuries after that? Now, if, having put your hand at your heart, you think honestly, the cause remains there as it was, for Christiandom and Judiasm. Muslims came centuries later, after the exodus of the scattered tribes. But no, this is not the case; the case is materialism and hedonism. The seeds of irreligion, which began to sprout during Renaissance burst into full bloom, during the ‘Age of Reason’ or ‘Enlightenment’. I cry full throated at the Muslims who got a clear and indisputable lead of nearly one thousand years and yet having last Spain in 1492, they were seen as mere pawns in the game! Where is your Qyas and Ijtihad? Why did you reduce this ever growing and all encompassing religion to a mere stagnant pond of water? Okay! Fight; you have a Muslim next door who must be made proper Muslim first! They have become accustomed to everyone who is there, bears the stamp of Jewish horse. They were likewise selected after Ottomans and Mughal Empires were subdued.
“Either you are with us or against us”. This is in sync with India’s new policy. Gone with the wind is Indo-Pak composite dialogue. How far further behind do we have space enough to escape the precipice behind? Jews and Indians are creating all the conceivable troubles through their numerous consulates, in our North and North East? Would we wait for the way out until Muslims are swallowed in detail? US will meet the same fate, after Jews have ensured the killings of more birds with one stone, as were the Soviets with their block. This is part of the ‘Protocols’. Don’t we see how systematically the horse is being moved to monopolise the riches of the Muslim World? Nihilism among us is our worst enemy. We must acquire knowledge if we call ourselves Muslims.
Has India gone berserk at the mere glance of state of the art weaponry? Will this shine and glitter of weaponry not allow other’s weapons to harm India? How can India remain immune while causing other’s devastation, at the behest of the one who prevailed upon it to cost its vote against Iran’s peaceful Nuclear Programme. Indo-US naval exercises, termed as Malabar-05 exercises in Northern Arabian Sea started on 25 Sep and will continue for another four days. These are the biggest ever and most comprehensive exercises between the two strategic partners. Still, all said and done, if J&K problem is not resolved soon enough, India and Pakistan can both be told to forget about it. Enough is enough and therefore we shall manage everything ourselves from now on.
This world, global or regional still, can never have peace, if now, right away, General Assembly does not perform the task of world parliament. UNO is dead, Security Council has announced its failure loud and clear and Germany is not being accepted by France and Britain like themselves as a veto power of the dead UNO. Will India continue to go forward for this canriot indefinitely? America should mind its own business and forget about Pacific. Its own rider will bury it under the deep snow or Tsunami’s, Katrina’s or Rita’s rage. No power bigger than the Jews is tolerable to Jews. Be that as it may, why do the Arab states not withdraw their 6 trillion dollars from US Banks? Are rulers happy with what US is doing or they just don’t have the courage for it? Muslims devastation and not welfare ever factored to Jewish horse.