There are two major reasons why the buffalo herd fails to adapt a winning strategy. First they do not have the ability for foresight and planning and are unable to co-operate for mutual defense and run to save themselves.

Benjamin Franklin is said to have put it very nicely during the American war of independence in the words, 'Let us all hang together otherwise we will be surely hanged separately'. This is a pertinent historical lesson that India and Indians have still not learnt. Churchill and the British were partially right in saying that the idea of an Indian nationhood had not developed in India until after British rule. This is why Muslim conquerors dominated India for a millennium and the Europeans for two centuries.

The second reason why the buffalo herd does not adopt a winning strategy is its diet of grass requires nearly constant feeding during waking hours, because of its poor nutritive value and large requirements. A stalemate with lions who can do with one or two meals per week would starve the buffalo herd by time constraints while the lions persisted in their siege for hours. This is also the second weakness of India and Indians. A long history of colonial exploitation and plunder has left the country and its citizens poor and insecure. No loud chants of the Gita, Hindutva, Koran or Bible can disperse the pervasive stink of corruption in the entire nation. 

Thus the poor Indians are more interested in a square meal than the future of their country or children (sending them to school to improve future prospects) and the educated are willing to sell naval secrets for money and a green card, while the rich in their greed only want to out-compete their peers in conspicuous consumption and are ever willing to bribe the politicians and bureaucrats with even greater lust for power, fame and wealth. The triumph of Mayawati and her BSP with her fortune growing from twelve to fifty-two crores is not a triumph of democracy or defeat of caste politics, but an equal opportunity effort by all castes of greedy pigs to unite to feed at the public trough. The transfer of government servants is a ploy used by ministers and bureaucrats to extract bribes, punish dissidents or reward sycophants.

Even today in India some older poor people express their nostalgic desire for the British Raj for its law, order and lack of corruption, just as many Afghans now yearn for the Taliban era and Iraqis for Saddam, despite their cruelty, nepotism, discriminatory justice, intimidating practices and national impoverishment. We know from the Mitrokhin archives, CIA crown jewels, jeep, Bofors, coffin and other scandals, that our elected leaders, secretary level bureaucrats and highest defense personnel have sold the nation for monetary rewards and industrialists have procured monopolies in chemicals, textiles and communications by covertly funding political parties. 

Left leaning and religious zealotry imbued historians have abdicated personal integrity and decency by whitewashing even our national history to the same or greater degree than the imperial colonizers. Who knows what hidden motives or bribes are responsible for the shameful arm twisting of our nuclear scientists to force them to promote a humiliating civilian nuclear deal meant to emasculate the country and make it an impotent client state without an independent foreign policy or nuclear deterrent? The ridiculous statements of Condoleeza Rice saying that non-alignment is passe when the US is engaged in illegal and immoral wars and occupation, accusing China and Russia of re-arming while NATO extends its tentacles to Afghanistan reveals her lying and hubris. Our press and television media are supine promoters and amplifying megaphones of the agenda of our crooked politicians as they are owned by our corrupt money hungry industrialists.

It is this selfish greed and power of our former kings and the passive indifference of our people that allowed Mohammed Ghazni to carry out repeated and frequent raids from Ghazni to Somnath into a thousand miles of Indian territory without successful opposition in an era when he had no planes, cannons or nukes and had to depend on local plunder for logistics and food. The same linguistic and ethnic fissiparous tendencies have led to more recent insurgencies in Kashmir, Punjab, Assam, the northeastern states, Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Orissa and Andhra Pradesh. In 1568 the protestant Netherlands were ruled by catholic Spain and the Spanish empire in Europe was divided like the old East and West Pakistan. The Dutch successfully rebelled and gained their independence. Around the same era the Indian Rajputs collaborated with Akbar and gave Jodhabai as his bride to consolidate shaky Mughal rule in India.

There was a minimal awakening of political consciousness a hundred years later when Shivaji challenged the Mughal empire but the Marathas could not sustain themselves more than a hundred years and after the other battle of Panipat fractured them into competing smaller kingdoms some of which co-operated with the British and the rest like Holkar of Indore and Scindia of Gwalior were figuratively hanged separately. Contrast that with the constant insurgency that plagued Napoleon's conquest and occupation of Spain in the same era. The mutiny of 1857 failed because the Sikhs and some Hindus and Muslims remained loyal to the British. The former were having their revenge for the Hindu and Muslim troops under the British who had helped to defeat the independent Sikh kingdom after Ranjit Singh and the latter followed the spineless Indian instinct of being servants of the Sahibs. 

The credit for a united and awakened political consciousness in India goes to Gandhi inspired by Gokhale and the revolutionaries of Bengal. Even today there is a Gurkha regiment in the British army in which Nepalis enlist for money even though they get less pay than the British whites, are not allowed to settle in Britain when they retire from their contract of indentured servitude and are not entitled to the same pension and health benefits as the British soldiers. 'Bubhukshitam kim na karoti papam' (What sin will a hungry person not commit? One should remember that hunger is not always for food or of the stomach, it can be of the heart and mind too).

It is the passive nature of Hinduism with the sword of Damocles hanging over the heads of the poor and miserable that has allowed exploitation on the basis of caste, money and religion. It was for this reason that education of the masses was actively discouraged. The theodicy of explaining a person's current misery by the sins of past birth and threatening rebirth as a cockroach living in gutters if any rebellion is attempted to redress the present injustice, kept people in line and let them die in famines engineered by the neglect of British rulers. No thinking or educated person will long fall for such baloney when he knows that nobody returns after death. This rebirth theory was so important for preserving social order that even rebellious Buddhism did not reject it and Buddha's followers after his death wrote up a tome of Jatak Kathas to continue the Hindu tradition of sages and divine persons who knew and could recall their past births.. 

With modern times, education and information, it is leading to Naxalite and Maoist insurgencies. An educated and thinking person is unlikely to silently acquiesce to his own demise without a whimper of protest. The poorhouses of medieval Europe were not established as much for charity as for preventing the revolutions by the have-nots. The French, Russian, Chinese and to some extent the Iranian revolution were due to severe deprivation of the masses with cruel and oppressive punishment of them by the powerful oligarchies. There is a significant component of the same drama in the rise to power of the Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine. It is the foolish policy of the West from previous imperialists like Britain and France and the newest hegemon America which have been a fertile medium for the growth of malignant Islamic terrorism like Al Qaeeda. It was America that midwifed its birth and wet nursed it to become a threatening monster pandemic.

The personality of an individual depends on his genes (nature) and environment (nurture). The Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam have always been extremely intolerant and narrow minded because of their false arrogant certitude. The Old Testament is rife with sanctioned unethical behavior by the jealous, vengeful and tyrannical Jewish God. Christianity with its crusades and the pretext of a civilizing and Christianizing mission has been used for colonial exploitation, slavery and genocide for the last half millennium in Africa, Asia, Australia and all of the Americas. Currently the west has turned away from religion and accepted Darwinism with the exception of ignorant America, the land of yahoos. Islam, a mishmash of Judaism, bits of Christianity and a lot of whimsies of its illiterate founder did have a few important good points, mandated charity, equality of all Muslims and the promotion of an Islamic Ummah but retained polygamy, violence for spreading, even more intolerance and apostasy.

This is why the Afghans could not be truly subjugated by the British after three wars and the Iraqis who had tolerated Turkish rule for centuries under Dar-ul-Islam rebelled in 1920 against the Dar-ul-Harb of the British and caused huge casualties of British officers and their slavish Indian troops. The insurgencies in those two countries plague the occupiers even today. The shortsighted idiotic policies of America due to the severe childhood psychological trauma suffered by President Carter's national security adviser Brzezinski during his childhood in Poland under Soviet occupation, led him to entice the Soviets into invading Afghanistan to make it their Vietnam and contribute to the demise of the Soviet Union. In doing this Carter and Reagan promoted the genetic quality of the Islamic Ummah by allowing it to suckle at their large financial bosoms and promoted the growth of the Enfant Terrible. The blowback was when the now grown viper stung the US in Aden, Kenya, Tanzania and on 9-11.

What the prophet and the subsequent Caliphs failed to do (uniting the Ummah), America with its foolish blunders succeeded in doing by activating the transcription and translation of the dormant repressed Ummah gene in Muslims worldwide. Just as the US had suckered the Soviets into invading Afghanistan, Bin Laden suckered the US into invading Afghanistan, Iraq and now Somalia and in future Iran. The gene will be without any control and turn into a malignant metastatic cancer to weaken the entire West. Another foolishness by western intelligence is the undue emphasis on the importance of the brainwashed, ignorant and unsophisticated madrassah students (Taliban). They may constitute the cannon fodder for insurgents and suicide bombers in Afghanistan and Iraq, but are no terror threat in the west, which really needs to worry about the educated and more sophisticated Muslims domestic and worldwide, who were responsible for the attacks in London, Madrid, Glasgow, Delhi and the beheading of Daniel Pearl. It is this coterie of educated and professional Muslims often living in the west, who have been so thoroughly antagonized by the invasions and exploitation of Muslims and their lands, and are a serious cause for worry because of their EU and US passports and sophistication and access to terrorist manuals.

The nineteen hijackers of 9-11 and London bombers were neither poor nor uneducated. Some of them were married and had a child but none of these prevented them from courting death to harm their co-residents in the US or fellow citizens in UK. This reveals the extent of their hatred and alienation and the strength of their affiliation to the Ummah. The same problem should be glaringly obvious to India with the involvement of professional Muslims in domestic terrorism and now Indian engineers and doctors living in western countries, incensed by the oppression of their Muslim Ummah members in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Their grievance has transcended the nation of India and become unified with the Ummah to such an extent that despite no connections to the invaded lands they are willing to commit terror in the western country they live and prosper in. This is a distinctly new and more dangerous battlefront that they have opened and is likely to worsen if the insane, inane and self-destructive policies of Bush, Blair and their coalition is not checked and corrected by wise statesmen in the west. Idiot Bush and the single ruling Republimocrats party who have dreams of empire and lust for power for which they have sold their souls and brains in a Faustian bargain, sacrifice young Americans, bankrupt the country and keep giving money to Pakistan which funds the terrorists. 

Ostentatious flouting of a closer public embrace of America by the Indian leadership with total disregard for the demography of its own population and neighborhood, energy dependency and the possible change in leadership of unstable Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan and the large Indian diaspora in the Gulf countries responsible for huge remittance of foreign exchange, is equally indicative of their ignorance, idiocy, intellectual and strategic bankruptcy or susceptibility to be bought.