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"Nagalim has never been a part of India"
Subir Ghosh: There is a perceptible difference between the talks of the Sixties and that of the Nineties. What lessons did you learn from the previous discussions so that the current negotiations are not abortive once again?
Thuingaleng Muivah: I would rather say that to quite an extent our approach last time had not been genuine. It was not, objectively speaking, to the point.
SG: Except the NSCN chairman Isak Chishi Swu - the factor common to the two rounds of talks - everything else is different.
TM: The general feeling of the people too is different this time. On has to, many a time, follow the wishes of the times. This time the feeling was that we should also try to understand the difficulties of the Indian government. So we are also trying to understand their problems when it comes to our relations with them.
SG: You outright rejected the idea of a Bhutan-type protectorate arrangement. Why?
The poverty of myths
When the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) launched its India Shining campaign, it had a fertile ground on which to sow the seeds of its electoral sloganeering. Newspaper editorials were going dizzy with India’s forever rising gross domestic product (GDP). Pundits were engaged in animated discussions over India being the economic superpower of the new century, nay millennium. Headlines every day would hysterically tell us that the Sensex had scaled a new high. Everyone was happy. Everyone was richer today than the day before. If what you saw or read in the media was anything to go by, India was indeed shining. Quite brightly at that. What the BJP-NDA only did was prop up an effort to capitalise on the apocryphal myth of resplendence that was already being perpetuated by the news media.
Underwear ads pulled down by I&B ministry
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The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (I&B) has banned the transmission and retransmission of the advertisements of Lux Cozy Underwear and Amul Macho Underwear because they are "indecent, vulgar and suggestive." It is a different thing altogether that the two ads had been cleared by the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI), the self-regulatory body of the advertising industry.
The venerable I&B ministry has directed all television channels to be more "careful" in future in selection of ad content, and to strictly adhere to the advertisement code prescribed under the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and Rules framed thereunder. The two ads were seen to be violative of Rule 7(8) of the Advertising Code prescribed under the Cable Television Act.
