Alleged Hindu terrorism: “truth by repeated assertion”

A version of this appeared in Daily News & Analysis on 27th July at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_hindu-terrorism-doesn-t-exist-but-do-we-want-one_1415107 and the pdf for the same is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf%5C27072010%5C26main%20edition-pg14-0.pdf

Truth by repeated assertion

Rajeev Srinivasan on the motivated campaign about alleged ‘Hindu terrorism’

Joseph Goebbels pithily described propaganda thus:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

By this measure, there appears to be a conspiracy in India to propagate a certain set of views, and in Noam Chomsky’s words, to “manufacture consent”. Like the military-industrial complex in the US which allegedly controls what its citizens think, there is a media-State nexus in India, whereby the mass media unquestioningly regurgitates the State’s perspective.

A recent example is the fuss about a new Indian ‘laptop’ for $35. It is virtually impossible to get a large portable display for less than $50, and with the electronics and packaging, even if the software is free, there is no way the bill of materials can be less than $100. Yet the media swallows this story whole.

This is far from the most egregious example. Bafflingly, the media repeats the government’s anodyne, statements that inflation will subside “in the next six months”. This is ludicrous and has no rationale, yet mandarins mouth it regularly. But it is never challenged by the media; meanwhile, food inflation is galloping at over 20%.

But the cravenness of the media is most evident when it comes to that pet project of the State, known as ‘secularism’. The actual meaning of the term, which emerged in the context of the continuous interference of the Catholic Church in the affairs of the State in medieval Europe, is that the State is fully indifferent to religion.

However, in India, so-called ‘secularism’ means precisely the opposite – the State looks upon every individual primarily based on his religion. For instance, the Prime Minister made the statement in December 2006 that Muslims should have first rights to the resources of the country. This violates the Constitution, but it has become part of the accepted ethos through repeated assertion.

The most blatant example of this propaganda is the current feeding frenzy about ‘Hindu terror’. The fact is that there is practically no history of Hindu terror. Religious terrorism has traditionally been the monopoly of the Abrahamic traditions, including Communism. Monotheists by definition divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’, and demonize the Other, probably a necessary condition for terror.

Communist terrorists regularly massacre people in Central India, West Bengal and Kerala. There was Jewish terrorism – the Stern gang in Palestine, which had as a member Yitzhak Shamir, later Prime Minister of Israel, comes to mind. There are many historical examples of Christian religious terrorism, going back to the liquidation of the Albigensians and other heretics around 345 CE, the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition (and especially the version in Goa), all the way to assassinations by radical anti-abortionists in the US.

The National Liberation Movement of Tripura is an explicitly Christian terrorist group, forcibly converting people. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland has unleashed terrorism in its pursuit of “Nagalim for Christ”. The assassination of Swami Lakshmananda in Orissa, when his major ‘sin’ was that he was defending Hindu tribals against the depradations of Christian missionaries, is another example.

But clearly Islamic terrorism is the biggest example of religion-based terrorism today. Suicide bombings, the fatwas on Salman Rushdie and others, 9/11 and 26/11, the periodic bombings in many parts of India, college professor T J Joseph’s hand getting sliced off as retaliation for alleged blasphemy, all these are instances of Islamic religious terrorism. The terrorists themselves take pains to point out that their acts have religious sanction.

Compared to all this, there is no evidence whatsoever that there is Hindu terrorism. The so-called Malegaon blast case and other alleged instances of Hindu terrorism languish because of lack of evidence, although, those accused such as Sadhvi Prajna are also rotting away in jail. If there are incidents of Hindu violence, these are almost inevitably reactions to terrorism imposed on them.

The moral equivalence drawn between the Abrahmics’ inherent tendency to violent terrorism and the non-existent Hindu or Indic terrorism is abhorrent.

There is the Panchatantra story about the man with the goat and the three rogues. The rogues convince the gullible man, via the ruse of repeatedly telling him that he is carrying a dog, to abandon the goat, which of course was their original intent. The rogues in the media and the State are, through repeated assertion, convincing people of the ‘fact’ of Hindu terrorism. Do we want to make it a self-fulfilling prophesy?

820 words, 25^th Jul 2010

Moving beyond the Indo-Pak ‘peace talks’, as the Afghan end game nears

A version of the following appeared on rediff.com on July 21st at http://news.rediff.com/slide-show/2010/jul/21/slide-show-1-rajeev-srinivasan-on-moving-beyond-the-indo-pak-peace-talks.htm

Moving beyond the Indo-Pak ‘peace talks’, as the Afghan end game nears

Rajeev Srinivasan on how apportioning blame for the failure of the talks misses the big picture on the ground – the Great Game is afoot

I am always amused at the great expectations that some Indians harbor about India-Pakistan palavers, contrary to sense and prior experience. I suspect nothing will ever come of any Indo-Pak talks, because the dominant Pakistani ethos, indeed the very raison d’etre of that State’s existence, is based on being not-India and anti-India.

In particular, Pakistan is a State owned by an Army, and the Army would have no reason to exist if peace were, by some miracle, to break out with India. Survival instinct alone, therefore, suggests that the Pakistani Army could not possibly afford peace. After all, the continuous state of covert war sustains a very comfortable living for the generals – a story in the New York Times on July 19^th talked about how parts of Islamabad look like a tidy, affluent Los Angeles suburb.

However, I am overwhelmed by déjà vu, because I could repeat verbatim what I wrote in June 2001, in a column titled “Because it’s their nature, their custom: Why the Indo-Pak summit is doomed”, [http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/jun/18rajeev.htm] about the much-ballyhooed 2001 talks with General Musharraf. I offered several analogies, including one with two sets of Polynesian islanders with widely differing visions of what ‘peace’ might be – absolutely appropriate in the India-Pakistan context.

I concluded with the following, and in hindsight I was wrong in assuming that India could drive Pakistan to bankruptcy with an arms race, much as the Americans had done to the Soviets:

“It is clear that Pakistan — or, to be precise, their ruling military establishment — wants, or needs, war. We can oblige: India can continue to bear the cost of war better than a much smaller, economically stagnant Pakistan which is liable to collapse under its own internal contradictions and runaway religious terrorism.”

Of course, this was before 9/11, and I did not anticipate then that the Pakistanis would get the Americans (and the Chinese) to underwrite their war against India, and that the Indian government would be so unwilling to or incapable of deterring Pakistan by imposing costs on misadventures. Instead, Pakistan is convinced that India does not have the guts to stand up to them.

Pakistanis are justified in believing this: for all practical purposes, the Mumbai attack in 2008, 11/26,  has been forgotten, and this so-called ‘peace process’ is proceeding from the Indian side as though the humiliation of that frontal attack on India’s financial nerve-center never happened. The small matter of 180 Indians being massacred, and India’s inept response to the crisis, both broadcast live around the globe, are forgotten.

Indeed, the name of the game today in India is finger-pointing: mandarins are running around trying to find a scapegoat to blame for the ‘failure’ of the talks. They have found a good candidate in Home Secretary G K Pillai, who is now the fall guy for having dared to mention some unmentionables.

A news item suggests that the Prime Minister is unhappy with Pillai for having aired David Coleman Headley’s confessions about the involvement of the ISI and the LeT in the Mumbai invasion. It seems the Prime Minister would have preferred it if this minor detail were swept under the carpet! What were the talks about, if they were to ignore the Pakistani establishment’s culpability in cross-border terrorism?

Where do the ‘concessions’ end? Wasn’t it enough that the Government of India quietly handed over 25 Pakistani terrorists – with no reciprocity – as  a ‘goodwill gesture’ to apparently smooth the way for the talks? And why didn’t the ever-vigilant English Language Media utter a word about this rather strange, and servile, way of engaging a foe?

There is also a basic flaw about the coverage of the talks – the issue is not whether the talks were successful. The issue is whether there is any progress made in the larger issue of protecting India’s national interests. Once again, we are losing the forest for the trees – the talks are tactical, the pursuit of national interests is strategic.

Several distinct but related events have shown that India’s alleged Pakistan policy is either non-existent or self-defeating. First, there is the all-but-complete transfer of two 635-megawatt Chinese nuclear reactors to Pakistan, which will allow the latter to build 24 more nuclear bombs every year in addition to their existing stockpile of 70-90, already bigger than India’s.

Second, recent violence in Jammu and Kashmir is a direct result of the decision by the GoI to withdraw 30,000 troops a few months ago. Third, the apparent willingness by Afghan President Karzai to cooperate with the intensely anti-India Haqqani network implies the total failure of India’s efforts to be a stakeholder in that nation.

China has simply ignored the pro-forma noises that the US made at the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group regarding likely weapons proliferation because of the new reactors being transferred to Pakistan. Selig Harrison, writing in the Boston Globe, pointed out how proliferation is part of Pakistani national policy. Despite this, and despite all the GoI’s exertions to ram the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ down India’s throat, America has no qualms about the Pakistani stockpile.

Thus the dubious nuclear deal has had the effect of strengthening Pakistan’s hand, while constraining India’s own puny efforts at building a deterrent against China, almost exactly as opponents of the deal said, while the GoI proceeded with it in a haze of lies and subterfuge.

It appears the sudden upsurge of violence in Jammu and Kashmir is almost certainly a calibrated and calculated ratcheting up of tension by the ISI. Intercepted phone calls suggest that the ISI and pals like the LeT are paying ‘rage-boys’ to indulge in stone-throwing and other violence, expecting to induce over-reaction by the stressed-out paramilitary troops and police. This, then, can lead to manufactured ‘martyrs’.

The ISI has reason to believe it is on a winning track. Successive statements by the Prime Minister in Havana, Sharm-al-Sheikh and Thimphu have all implied that, succumbing to American pressure, India is willing to cede Kashmir to Pakistan, the only issue being how to market such a climb-down to the Indian public.

The coded talk of ‘creative solutions’ and ‘trust deficit’ have been interpreted by them as a ‘deficit of will’, and the likelihood that they can make J&K simply too expensive for India to hang on to. The proximate cause is the withdrawal of 30,000 troops. To the ISI, this spells “we have the Indians on the run”. So why, they ask reasonably, should they negotiate, when they are winning?

Intriguingly, this is almost exactly the same feeling that the ISI has about the Obama administration after its disastrous declaration of a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. They, and their proxy the Taliban, feel that all they have to do is to wait things out – the Americans have no will to fight, or stay on. Apparently President Karzai implicitly believes this – witness his alleged overtures to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network.

Karzai, Taliban and Haqqanis are all Pashtuns. Pashtuns account for only about 40% of the Afghan population, along with large groups of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras. India has traditionally had good relationships with the Pashtuns but even better ties to the Tajiks, who, under the charismatic military genius Ahmed Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, held off the Soviets and then the Taliban.

Now all the blood and treasure – hundreds of millions of dollars – that India has poured into reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan seem to be in jeopardy because Pakistanis have convinced Americans and others that India has no business whatsoever in Afghanistan. India was excluded from previous talks about that nation, and now seems to be grudgingly included.

The irony is that the Pashtun issue is one of Pakistan’s key weaknesses – the Durand Line arbitrarily divides Pashtun territory into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pashtuns themselves have never recognized it, and given a chance, would create an independent Pashtunistan on both sides of the line. Pashtun parts of Afghanistan, and the erstwhile North-West Frontier Province and parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan would be its component parts.

This, of course, would be a disaster for Pakistan, as it would induce restive and oppressed Baluchis and Sindhis to secede as well, leaving just a rump Pakistani Punjab, which would be too small to cause much damage to anybody but itself.

In fact, some analysts suggest just such a Balkanization to solve the Pakistan problem. (There are clearly potential problems for India, too – perhaps there will be pressure to create a separate Kashmiri State; similarly Iran may end up losing its Baluch province of Sistan/Baluchistan to an independent Baloch State).

Somehow, the enterprising ISI has turned this weakness into a strength, by hijacking the Pashtun elements into their proxy Taliban. Similarly, the ISI, which faced the wrath of America after 9/11 with its peremptory warning to President Musharraf to behave, or else, has turned it into a $25 billion bonanza. Ironically, the Americans are in effect subsidizing the Pakistani purchase of Chinese reactors!

Instead of containing Pakistan with a pincer movement with one front in Afghanistan, India is now in the unenviable position of confronting the ISI’s ‘strategic depth’, which it has always craved. Uncertain about its goals and ever-eager to appease, India has allowed a failing State one-seventh its size to checkmate it. Lack of strategic intent has led to dismal failure yet again.

There is only one small silver lining in this cloud, and it is based purely on geography and demography. That silver lining is that the ISI may have been too clever for its own good, and that its ‘victory’ in Afghanistan may well be Pyrrhic, if it results in the unraveling of the country. There are those in India who say that a ‘stable, prosperous’ Pakistan is in India’s best interests. Hardly. On the contrary, a weak, balkanized Pakistan is.

Pakistan has made a career out of running with the hares and hunting with the hounds. It was obvious as long ago as the siege of Kunduz in 2001 and the ensuing ‘Airlift of Evil’ that the so-called Taliban officers are serving or retired Pakistani Army and ISI brigadiers and colonels wearing baggy pants and beards and turbans. The ISI has had a great run with the fiction that the Taliban is distinct from itself.

With luck, this may be coming to an end. Former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill endorsed a formulation of a de-facto partition of Afghanistan, with the northern portion (including Kabul) to be under an American-NATO umbrella, and the southern, Pashtun, portion, to be left to the tender mercies of the Taliban/ISI. This is surely a trial balloon from the US Administration.

In effect, this would mean the old Northern Alliance would be re-constituted, with the US/NATO supporting it and keeping the Taliban at bay, as it was before 9/11, the only difference being that ten years have passed and $300 billion has been spent, a fair bit of which has spirited away by the ISI and friends. And Massoud has been assassinated.

If this is the final end game in Afghanistan, India had better be prepared to play an active role. Otherwise, in the new Great Game being played on the fringes of Indian territory, it will end up just a spectator. India should be looking to parlay its long tradition of relations with Afghanistan to establish strong commercial linkages, especially now that it turns out the country is chock-full of minerals.

The Indo-Pakistan ‘peace process’ is merely a ritualistic sideshow, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The real strategic imperative is a plan for India in a post-Pakistan scenario, especially to prevent China and America from dividing up the Af-Pak region into their spheres of influence. With some luck, Pakistan may yet implode without any help from India. India should look beyond its obsession with Pakistanis strutting about, and pursue its national interests.

2000 words, 20^th July 2010

India’s strategic blunders help Pakistan

A version of the following appeared in Daily News & Analysis on Jul 13th, 2010 at http://www.dnaindia.com/opinion/main-article_india-s-strategic-blunders_1408958, and a PDF version of the page is at http://epaper.dnaindia.com/epaperpdf/13072010/12main%20edition-pg12-0.pdf

Strategic blunders hurt India

Rajeev Srinivasan on how Pakistan has outsmarted India through clever foreign policy

Several distinct but related events have shown that India’s alleged Pakistan policy is either non-existent or self-defeating. First, there is the all-but-complete transfer of two 635-megawatt Chinese nuclear reactors to Pakistan, which will allow the latter to build 24 more nuclear bombs every year in addition to their existing stockpile of 70-90, already bigger than India’s.

Second, the violence in Jammu and Kashmir is a direct result of the decision by the GoI to withdraw 30,000 troops a few months ago. Third, the apparent willingness by Afghan President Karzai to cooperate with the intensely anti-India Haqqani network implies the total failure of India’s efforts to be a stakeholder in that nation.

China has simply ignored the pro-forma noises that the US made at the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group regarding likely weapons proliferation because of the new reactors being transferred to Pakistan. Selig Harrison, writing in the Boston Globe, pointed out how proliferation is part of Pakistani national policy. Despite this, and despite all the GoI’s exertions to ram the so-called ‘nuclear deal’ down India’s throat, America has no qualms about the Pakistani stockpile.

Thus the dubious nuclear deal has had the effect of strengthening Pakistan’s hand, while constraining India’s own puny efforts at building a deterrent against China, almost exactly as opponents of the deal said, while the GoI proceeded with it in a haze of lies and dissimulations.

It appears the sudden upsurge of violence in Jammu and Kashmir is almost certainly a calibrated and calculated ratcheting up of tension by the ISI. Intercepted phone calls suggest that the ISI and pals like the LeT are paying ‘rage-boys’ to indulge in stone-throwing and other violence, expecting to induce over-reaction by the stressed-out paramilitary troops and police. This, then, can lead to manufactured ‘martyrs’.

The ISI has reason to believe it is on a winning track. Successive statements by the Prime Minister in Havana, Sharm-al-Sheikh and Thimphu have all implied that, succumbing to American pressure, India is willing to cede Kashmir to Pakistan, the only issue being how to market such a climb-down to the Indian public.

The coded talk of ‘creative solutions’ and ‘trust deficit’ have been interpreted by them as a ‘deficit of will’, and the likelihood that they can make J&K simply too expensive for India to hang on to. The proximate cause is the withdrawal of 30,000 troops. To the ISI, this spells “we have the UPA on the run”. They perceive a ‘backbone deficit’ and lack of will.

Intriguingly, this is almost exactly the same feeling that the ISI has about the Obama administration after its disastrous declaration of a timetable for withdrawal from Afghanistan. They, and their proxy the Taliban, feel that all they have to do is to wait things out – the Americans have no will to fight, or stay on. Apparently President Karzai implicitly believes this – witness his alleged overtures to the Taliban and the Haqqani Network. Karzai, Taliban and Haqqanis are all Pashtuns.

Pashtuns account for about 40% of the Afghan population, with large groups of Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras among others. India has traditionally had good relationships with the Pashtuns but even better ties to the Tajiks, who, under the charismatic military genius Ahmed Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, held off the Soviets and then the Taliban.

Now all the blood and treasure – hundreds of millions of dollars – that India has poured into reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan seem to be in jeopardy because Pakistanis have convinced Americans and others that India has no business whatsoever in Afghanistan. India was not even invited to talks about that nation.

The irony is that the Pashtun issue is one of Pakistan’s key weaknesses – the Durand Line arbitrarily divides Pashtun territory into Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pashtuns themselves have never recognized it, and if given a chance, would create an independent Pashtunistan on both sides of the Durand Line. This, of course, would be disaster for Pakistan, as it might induce restive Baluchis and Sindhis to secede as well. In fact, some analysts suggest just such a Balkanization to solve the Pakistan problem.

Somehow, the enterprising ISI has turned this weakness into a strength, by hijacking the Pashtun elements into their proxy Taliban. Similarly, the ISI, which faced the wrath of America after 9/11 with its peremptory warning to President Musharraf to behave, or else, has turned it into a $25 billion bonanza. Ironically, the Americans are in effect subsidizing the Pakistani purchase of Chinese reactors!

Instead of containing Pakistan with a pincer movement with one front in Afghanistan, India is now in the unenviable situation that the ISI has achieved the ‘strategic depth’ it has always craved. Uncertain about its goals and ever-eager to appease, India has allowed a failing State one-seventh its size to smother it. Lack of strategic intent has led to dismal failure yet again.

825 words, 10 Jul 2010

A U-turn in Afghanistan? US to stay on?

A version of this appeared on rediff.com on Jun 21st at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/jun/21/rajeev-srinivasan-on-americas-afghan-plans.htm

A U-turn on Afghanistan?

Rajeev Srinivasan wonders whether the US is making a mid-course correction on Afghanistan

These are not good times for US president Obama. Hailed as a savior if not a messiah just eighteen months ago, he is now reeling from several crises. The BP oil spell has left him looking incompetent and uncaring. The $1 trillion stimulus package may have avoided a Great Depression, but unemployment hovers near 10%. His big achievement, healthcare reform, has left a sour taste with almost all sections of society.

But most of all, the Afghanistan quagmire is getting worse. Just this week, seven US soldiers were killed in a single day; the public is getting tired of body bags and elusive promises of success. Maybe there’s a re-think. A series of unexpected events took place recently that, if put together, may signal a mid-course correction by the US:

1. A report from the London School of Economics and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University that emphasized the very high level of co-operation between Pakistan’s government, ISI and the Taliban
2. A major story in the New York Times about the discovery of large mineral deposits in Afghanistan
3. Severe ethnic riots, resulting in a breakdown of normal activity, in the republic of Kyrgyzstan, where an important US air force supply base in Manas is used to support the war effort
4. The resignations of Afghanistan’s interior minister and security chief, among other things, taking responsibility for an attack on a loya jirga, but also suggesting a hardening of ethnic differences
5. Reports that the Afghan President Karzai has lost faith in the ability of the NATO forces to actually win the war
6. Reports that the much-anticipated counter-insurgency surge in Marjah, which was hailed at the time as momentous, has bogged down and that the rebels are gaining strength

All these have to be seen in the context of Obama’s policy of increasing the number of soldiers on the ground first, and then beginning to wind down the US war effort and withdrawing troops in 2011, just in time to declare victory and use the halo effect to effortlessly win the 2012 presidential elections.

That dream is, to put it mildly, in some jeopardy now. The Obama plan was to surge, bribe, declare victory and run like hell. They have done the surge part, and are in the process of bribing (usually the ISI and its pals), but it’s not going well. The bribees are not acting as expected – Afghans seem to be taking the bribes and merrily continuing what they were doing anyway.

The US’s intent to declare victory and leave requires someone to be the ‘keeper’, as it were, of Afghanistan. The ISI has volunteered itself for this role. This is why it is intriguing that the LSE/Kennedy School report has come out at this time. The Kennedy School is close to the US government, and so it is a fair conjecture that the US administration wants to put the screws on someone.

At first glance, if you read the litany of things in this report, “The Sun in the Sky: The relationship between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan insurgents”, it sounds like a damning indictment of the ISI which is quite transparently the prime motivator, financier, and provider of cover to the Taliban and related groups.

The ISI, says the report, “orchestrates, supports and strongly influences” them. It “provides huge support in training, funding, munitions and supplies”, which is “official ISI policy”, not the work of some rogue elements. Furthermore, it is not just the ISI, it claims that Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari promised to release jailed Taliban leaders if they kept quiet about it. This amounts to “collusion with the Taliban by an enemy state [Pakistan]”, the bracket in the original. Interesting that an American is calling Pakistan an enemy state, not the trademarked “major ally in the war on terror”.

Unfortunately, the author, Matt Waldman, has the standard simplistic solution to all this: the way to end the ISI’s cooperation with the Taliban “is to address the fundamental causes of Pakistan’s insecurity, especially its latent and enduring conflict with India”. Of course, if only India were to give Kashmir to Pakistan, the ISI would stop arming the Taliban, and Americans can go home. Simple! QED.

The answer, therefore, is for India to give more: which might explain the Indian PM’s offer to ‘walk the extra mile’ and the latest euphemism, ‘creative solutions’ to the Kashmir problem. India must give up territory so that Americans can exit Afghanistan, in return for… exactly what? Eternal love and fellowship? Just like India sacrificed Tibet and got eternal love and friendship?

Well, be that as it may, it is also possible that finally the US is recognizing the obvious: the ISI has been running with the hares and hunting with the hounds from day one. Maybe the judicious leak is a way of putting the ISI on notice that it had better ratchet things down to some extent. Maybe the Obamistas are actually planning to stay for a while.

Such an eventuality would explain why the NY Times, also known to the close to the US government, made such breathless noises about newly-discovered minerals in Afghanistan (“1 trillion worth!” “Might fundamentally change the war!”). Perhaps Obama has decided that it is not such a good idea to exit in 2011, possibly handing the terrorists a morale-boosting victory.

This story about minerals is not new – months ago, I heard about this from the intrepid foreign policy analyst who goes by the name Pundita. She suggested this meant Americans would stay on: there was no way they would leave all this loot to the Chinese, who have already snapped up a giant copper mine. Perhaps the NYT minerals story is a red herring to divert attention away from the real issue of American failure in Afghanistan.

That failure is evident in the subdued talk about Marjah now; instead of the cocky self-assurance then, there is grim talk now of the difficulty in clearing the area and keeping in clear. No wonder it appears Karzai has lost faith in American staying power – and even in their military tactics; and he is also probably tired of being painted as the villain and blamed for the failure of American plans.

In this context, the resignations of the interior minister Hanif Atmar and the security chief Amrullah Saleh sent ominous signals. In particular, Saleh, an ex-aide of the assassinated military genius and commander of the Northern Alliance, Ahmed Shah Massoud, appears to have been one of the most competent ministers. And as an ethnic Tajik, his departure may signal increasing ethnic fractures in the Afghan government.

It is easy to underestimate the impact of ethnic divisions in Central Asia. There are differences of opinion between the Pashtuns (Karzai is one and so are the Taliban) and the smaller Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara minorities. Sometimes these break into open warfare – the Taliban, for instance, massacred Hazaras, and that was partly because the latter were Shia, so the Shia-Sunni religious divide can also be potent.

A case in point about ethnic divisions is the sudden outburst of rioting and killing in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, where the Kyrgyz are apparently killing Uzbeks (which may be normal in Central Asia where majorities severely oppress minorities). This has an impact on the US – if Manas air support base becomes less available for operations, it increases the US’s dependence on Karachi and the ISI that much more.

Thus, nothing seems to be going according to plan, and a gloomy headline in the NY Times suggesting that “Setbacks cloud US plans to get out of Afghanistan”. No kidding. The Americans may have to accept they are in it for the long term: Afghanistan may not be another Vietnam, but a tar baby. They simply cannot cut and run. They have to clean up this unholy mess of their own making.

It is time that America recognized that the problem is not Afghanistan, but the chimera Pakistan, an imaginary homeland. The very existence of Pakistan – a state with no raison d’etre, is the root cause. The random Durand Line, that slices the Pashtun nation into Afghan and Pakistani areas, was never taken seriously by Pashtuns, and the British-brokered treaty that created it expired in 1993. Until a united Pashtun nation is created including the appropriate areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, this problem is going to fester: tribal loyalties run supreme in those mountains.

The Americans may be thinking of contracting the running of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth to the ISI, much as the latter have been exploiting the mineral wealth of Baluchistan while severely oppressing, and occasionally massacring, native Baluch. It is not clear that this tactic will work with the Afghans.

Instead of giving the ISI the ‘strategic depth’ they crave by allowing them run rampant in Afghanistan, the answer would be to create a Pashtun nation, a Baluch nation (part of it is in Iran), a Sindhi nation, leaving the rump of Pakistani Punjab too small to do too much damage to anybody but themselves.

If this has finally dawned on the Americans, the $300 billion that they have already poured down the endless money-pit of this war can be chalked up to experience. Otherwise, they would, in Talleyrand’s memorable indictment of the French monarchy, have “learned nothing and forgotten nothing”. Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is that they will press India to give in to the ISI, or, equally disastrously, ask for Indian troops to join them in Afghanistan.

1550 words, June 15, 2010

The fine art of punching below one’s weight

A version of this appeared on rediff.com on Jun 2nd at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/jun/02/rajeev-srinivasan-on-why-india-is-not-taken-seriously.htm

The fine art of punching below one’s weight

Rajeev Srinivasan on how India has managed to make itself much smaller and less important in the world’s eyes than it really is

Several events in the recent past have been emblematic of the problems that India faces: on the one hand, India gets no respect from anybody. On the other hand, it may well not deserve any – any Rodney Dangerfield fans out there?

Pakistan’s Supreme Court found Hafiz Saeed, founder of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and suspected chief instigator of the 11/26 attacks on Mumbai, innocent of all charges. Startlingly, a few days later, India released 25 jailed terrorists (members of the LeT, Jaish-e-Mohamed and Hizbul Mujahideen) and returned them to Pakistan.

Second, some low-level official in Canada’s embassy in India has been, it turns out, telling Indian armed forces members that they are violent terrorists and therefore ineligible for a visa – this has been going on for two years.

Pakistan’s behavior in exonerating Hafiz Saeed – the Supreme Court must be influenced by their government’s, and army’s wishes – suggests that they do not take India seriously. All the fine warlike words uttered by the GoI after 11/26 (and after the every blast in the past six or seven years), that there would be a stiff price to pay for any further mischief and so on, turn out to be total bluster. India has metaphorically thrown in the garbage-bin the 200 or so victims of 11/26. It is safe to kill Indians, and there are no consequences whatsoever. (Communist terrorists and their sponsors are taking note, which explains the 150 ordinary, apolitical, normal Indians massacred due to rail sabotage in Bengal).

Pakistan has called India’s bluff. They have observed that the Indian establishment is laboring under the illusion that there are only two things that can happen between the two countries – “peace talks” [sic] or war. Pakistanis like the so-called peace talks because that means India will continuously make unilateral concessions to keep the alleged dialog going – after all, this is exactly what India has done for 28 years with China, with China escalating its demands on Indian territory all the time and never giving an inch in the discussions.

Pakistanis also believe that Indians are too cowardly to actually go to war, and that anyway sugar daddy American can always be called upon to put pressure on India. Astonishingly, Indian planners do not comprehend that there are shades of gray – it is not a binary affair between war and talks. There are other ways of imposing costs on a recalcitrant foe – it is not for nothing that the aphorism goes “diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means”.

There are other means India has at its disposal, for instance monkeying with water supplies to the lower riparian Pakistan (once again, the clever Chinese have shown how to do with downstream states for rivers originating in occupied Tibet by building dams and even using river-bombs such as those in the Sutlej when they suddenly release massive floods). Trade sanctions are also possible – instead of which India gives generous Most Favored Nation status to Pakistan with no reciprocity. Covert operations, including judicious interference, are also used by all nations as part of their strategy.

But the bottom line is that the original end — peace and cooperation in exchange for stopping terrorism – has fallen by the wayside. The means – the so-called peace talks – have become the end, and the UPA cannot see beyond them. Pakistan has realized that the UPA will appease them and give peace, cooperation and all the trade they want, and there is no penalty to them for continuing their terrorist attacks on India.

In Afghanistan as well, Pakistan has got its way. The world at large sees India as superfluous in Afghanistan, despite the highly-lauded humanitarian and infrastructure-building activity that Indians have pursued there at significant cost in blood and treasure. India was conspicuously excluded from talks on Afghanistan. Pakistan has convinced the world that India is a liability and a hindrance to Obama’s plans to declare victory and run like mad from Afghanistan.

The release of the 25 captured terrorists, in the very wake of Hafiz Saeed’s exoneration, sends a startling message. Orders came from the Home Ministry (See the Daily Excelsior, May 27^th: “Let, HM ultras among 25 Pakistanis freed from 8 jails”) apparently as a peace offering prior to the Home Minister’s and External Affairs Ministers’ visits to Pakistan. How come no Indians in Pakistani prisons are being released in return? What about Sarabjit Singh, falsely accused, on death row, and continually harassed in Pakistan?

Why does Pakistan not feel the need for “goodwill measures”? Because it is India that is desperate to continue the charade of the “peace talks”. That confuses the impartial observer – it is Pakistan which needs that fig-leaf. So whose interests are being protected here? Pertinently, who is pulling the strings?

Second, the Canadian mess is a metaphor for the fact that India has no credibility. After all, Canada (like Australia and Britain) are generally mere appendages for the US. They tend to have little individual clout, but follow the US’s policies. For instance, it is Australia that has been the loudest in threatening India with bloody murder if it didn’t sign the NPT. It is not for nothing that the word ‘poodle’ is sometimes used in this context.

Now comes Canada with a sterling act of friendly diplomacy. The fact that this insulting of serving and retired Indian army and police officers has been going on for two years is simply astonishing. Why wasn’t the low-level flunkey accused of doing this declared persona non grata and given 24 hours to leave, bag and baggage? Why wasn’t the Canadian ambassador summoned and given a demarche? These are the things real countries do – let us remember how the noxious Chinese, in a gratuitous insult, woke up Indian ambassador Nirupama Rao at 2am to deliver a complaint.

It is particularly ironic coming from Canada. I wrote a few years ago in the Pioneer (“Justice denied: the Kanishka bombing of 1985”, May 22^nd, 2007) about how Canada had been criminally negligent in ignoring warnings about the events that led to the bombing of Air India’s Kanishka aircraft, with the loss of 329 lives. Furthermore, their investigation – still incomplete after 25 years – shows racism, incompetence, callousness, dilatory tactics and virtual State compliance in terrorism.

Indians are afraid – of what I do not know – to give uppity foreigners a dressing-down. In fact, this would be highly salutary. If India had immediately expelled the obnoxious Chinese diplomat who said that Arunachal Pradesh was part of China, the Canadians would have been more circumspect.

In that vein, it appears US president Obama is going to make another totally empty gesture, which will give goose-bumps to the usual suspects. It seems he is going to ‘drop in’ on the External Affairs Minister’s discussions with Hillary Clinton. And why, pray, is this significant, unless he is actually bringing David Coleman Headley along (thanks, B, for that insight)? It’s style over substance – let us remember how the Indian PM was not among the world leaders that Obama telephoned when he first took charge, but there was the nonsense of the First State Visit ™ over which the Indian media and officialdom went ga-ga. Nothing whatsoever came of that, other than that a good time, and biriyani, were had by all.

The world has taken its measure of India, and found it to be a second-tier nation. Hence they will continue to insult it subtly and openly. There is no consequence. India does not realize that it is, at least as an economic entity, a desirable partner, and that when the world is in the depths of a financial crisis, the threat of withholding access to the Indian market would immediately encourage snooty Canadas and Australias and Britains to fold. We have seen how the British absolutely groveled a few years ago when Malaysia’s prickly Mahathir Mohammed cancelled orders with British companies when the British said something rude. I have never seen such kowtowing and mea culpas and brown-nosing.

India is a heavyweight acting like a featherweight. There may be a Hanuman Syndrome in effect here: a country not knowing its true worth. On the other hand, I am afraid it’s worse – the rulers do not pursue India’s national interests to the best of their ability, despite their solemn oath to do so.

1400 words, 31^st May, 2010

A Bangkok on the Yamuna? Lessons from the Thai insurgency

A version of this appeared on rediff.com on 27th May at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/may/27/lessons-for-india-from-thai-insurgency.htm

A Bangkok on the Yamuna? Lessons from the Thai insurgency

Rajeev Srinivasan on why the Thai troubles should be an eye-opener for India, which faces similar insurgents with covert agendas

Despite pious promises in the past about “looking East”, it is clear that the Indian establishment, including the media and the foreign ministry, remain obsessed with the West and Pakistan. Events unfolding in Thailand have remained under the radar in India, even though the parallels are ominous, both regarding India and regarding Nepal.

Consider: in Dantewada, Communist terrorists first massacred 76 policemen; they then proceeded to massacre 36 civilians riding in a bus. The first instincts of both the Congress and the media are to justify the terrorism based on the same tired clichés about poverty fomenting violence. Aren’t they embarrassed to trot out this hoary old chestnut?

Also consider Hyderabad in the wake of the Telengana agitation: I am sure investment decisions have been put on hold and real estate prices have dipped along with consumer and investor confidence. Similarly, Thailand’s economy will take a hit, as ASEAN neighbors Malaysia and Indonesia suddenly look more stable.

Finally, look at Nepal: a functioning monarchy has been replaced by an aggressive Communist regime, with the expected results – political turmoil, and anti-national forces including Chinese proxies, missionaries and jihadis having a field day.

The roots of the Thai problem are murky, but the event that triggered off today’s crisis was the coup in 2006 that overthrew the government of the billionaire industrialist Thaksin Shinawatra. I was in Thailand in 2006 during the revered King Bhumibol Adhulyadej’s 80^th birthday celebration – and it was a grand gala affair. My previous visits had been over ten years prior, and I was impressed at how far Thailand had come in the interim: it had the makings of an intermediate economic power.

Thailand has left India in the dust in economic growth: an indicator is the exchange rate between the Thai Baht and the rupee. When I first went to Thailand, there was rough parity between the two; today the Baht is 40% higher. The ramshackle capital with run-down roads and unbelievable traffic jams (people used to carry portable urinals in their cars) was transformed by an elevated expressway. The skyline is impressive, and the city looks clean, orderly and prosperous, in a Singaporean kind of way.

This prosperity is based on small to medium industry, especially textiles, electronics and automobile components. Endemic political instability, including bloodless military coups, did not hurt because there was always a symbol of strength and continuity – the royalty. Thais revere their monarchy, and the King could always resolve any problems.

Until now, that is. The army and police seemed helpless against a few thousand insurgents who barricaded themselves inside the city, urban guerilla warfare, the King hospitalized and silent – this is a nation under siege, not the kind of place where locals or foreigners will risk their money. This will hurt the Thai economy.

Who gains from this? Malaysia and Indonesia, especially the former. There is a festering separatist movement in southern Thailand, which is ethnically Malay and Mohammedan. Given the Malaysians’ increasing religious fervor – they have been tyrannizing religious minorities recently – Malaysia may be offering moral and material support.

The apparent demand of the insurgents is justice for the poor who live far away from the glitzy capital, in the north and northeast. I suspect this is a slight exaggeration, along the lines of what Communists claim in India’s tribal belt. The Red Shirts in Thailand may be acting principally on behalf of Shinawatra, who wants to be prime-minister again, to ensure the survival of his business empire, not to mention avoid a $1.4 billion fine. The Communists in Jharkhand may be agents of China, intent on wrecking India from within. None of them is particularly interested in the poor, except for rhetorical purposes.

What alarms me about the Bangkok situation is that I can easily imagine a similar situation in New Delhi, with the capital held hostage by gangs of Communist insurgents, quite possibly barricaded inside the JNU campus, where they gain succor and support from armchair urban guerillas. Just as in Bangkok, we might watch on TV the hopes of a stable and progressing Indian economy going up in thick, black, acrid smoke – welcome back to the dark ages of ‘roti-kapda-makan’ and the rent-seeking neta-babu-journalist nexus, a preview of which we got with the 2G scam.

There are differences, of course. The Indian Army is not involved in business, whereas the Thai army is a smaller version of the Pakistani Army in that context – it runs many industries, and is not dependent on the national government for all of its budget.

But the eerie parallels to, say, Nepal, are many: the end result may well be a ‘secular’ movement to overthrow the Buddhist monarchy, which will then be portrayed as roundly corrupt, godless, feudal – whatever else the spin-meisters can think of.

The destruction of the Thai State would be a tragedy. It was just about the only Asian nation that, through some fancy footwork, avoided being colonized. This has given the average Thai a certain self-confidence. Secondly, turmoil is likely to be exploited by vulture-like missionaries descending on the country, much as they did in the aftermath of the tsunami elsewhere. In Nepal, it is reported that a million people were converted to Christian sects after the Communists took over. Similarly the number of mosques, and presumably adherents, has soared. We might find the same in Thailand.

Odd, isn’t it, that there are Communist revolutions in Hindu and Buddhist monarchies, but never in Christian or Mohammedan monarchies? Coincidence? Communists have been accused of being ‘useful idiots’ for others. Let us note that, according to reliable sources, the manifesto of the Communist terrorists in India speaks at length about extinguishing ‘imperialism’ and ‘liberalism’, but is silent about ‘poverty’ and ‘tribals’.

The extinction of the State, neo-colonization and neo-conversion – these are the downsides of globalization. India would be well-advised to watch the Thai example with great care.

The ordinariness of evil and how the Pak state manufactures it

An edited version of this appeared on rediff on May 6th at http://news.rediff.com/column/2010/may/06/rajeev-srinivasan-on-the-banality-of-evil.htm

Why good people do bad things: the ordinariness of evil

Rajeev Srinivasan on why normal people do appalling things in the wrong circumstances

In the aftermath of the Ajmal Kasab trial and the failed bomb attack in New York, the impartial observer would find it hard to conclude that Pakistanis were mild, inoffensive people. But in fact there are a number of people – apart from the professional Wagah candle-holders – who cannot believe that this kind of horror could come from the kind of Pakistanis they know – PLUs (people like us), urbane, sophisticated, great hosts and dinner companions.

There is, of course, the fallacy of rapid generalization: every Pakistani is not like the people you know, who are likely to be the world-traveling sort. There are many dirt-poor, uneducated people who have been brainwashed with strange notions of what Indians are like and what India is like. Given high population growth and a fairly stagnant economy, the number of these “Bottom-of-the-Pyramid” people is much larger than those at the top of the pyramid, the 22 ruling feudal families who own the place.

But apart from the logical fallacy, there is also a more subtle issue, that of how easily evil can take over  even perfectly normal, well-adjusted people. It turns out you don’t have to be a sociopath to do the most horrifying things: your random neighbors, such as the kindly old man down the street, the kid who drops off the newspaper, the old lady who is full of religious zeal – any and all of them can turn into monsters under the appropriate circumstances.

This was demonstrated in Cambodia, when under the Khmer Rouge, perfectly ordinary people became mass killers. I have been to Tuol Sleng prison and interrogation center in the middle of Phnom Penh, where thousands of people were tortured, and confessions extracted from them. They were photographed and meticulous dossiers prepared about each of them. They were then taken to the Killing Fields on the outskirts of town and dispatched with a blow to the back of the head with a spade.

But what is most amazing about Tuol Sleng is that it was formerly a school in the middle of a residential neighborhood! It still looks like an inoffensive school from outside, although inside it is the Genocide Museum, with the interrogation cells left as they were, harrowing paintings of inhuman torture, and row after row of black and white photographs of those who were about to die, including some Indians and other foreigners. It is a metaphor for the banality and very ordinariness of evil. The Khmer Rouge were the greatest mass-murderers in the recent past, killing some 15% of their compatriots.

Ordinary Cambodians – farmers, artisans, bicycle-repairers, fishermen – were instruments of civilizational suicide. Similarly, perfectly normal Hutus went on the warpath in Rwanda against  embattled Tutsis, attempting genocide. Ordinary Germans did the bidding of the Nazis; ordinary Europeans participated in an orgy of violence on innocent people during the horrifying Inquisition, dispatching thousands, especially women, in the most appalling ways.

And so with the Pakistanis. The young men of the Lashkar-e-Toiba and other terrorist outfits were not monsters to begin with: they were turned into what they are quite deliberately – they have been manufactured by a consciously-created system where they have no choice but to become monsters.

I was reminded of all this when I was listening to an archived podcast from 2007 of an interview with Philip Zimbardo, a retired professor from Stanford, whose celebrated “Stanford Prison Experiment” of 1971 was a startling practical demonstration of how evil is engendered. In 2006, Zimbardo wrote a new book, The Lucifer Effect, because he was struck by similarities between the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq and the Stanford experiment.

The experiment was simple: Zimbardo set up a simulated prison in the basement of one of Stanford’s buildings, and recruited 24 normal male college students for a two-week study of the behavior of prison guards and prisoners. The students were randomly assigned to either role and given uniforms or prison smocks to wear, but no specific instructions on behavior except that there must be no physical contact. Zimbardo himself acted as both ‘jail superindendent’ and research leader.

The results were startling: within 36 hours, the ‘guards’ started misbehaving, exerting their power over the ‘prisoners’. One of the prisoners had a nervous breakdown. Within three days, the guards were exhibiting brutal, sadistic behavior, and the prisoners were increasingly humiliated and oppressed. Several other prisoners also had nervous breakdowns. On the night of day five, sexual torture began: the prisoners were made to expose themselves, and to simulate sodomy with each other.

On the sixth day, a shaken Zimbardo abandoned the experiment, which had been slated to run for two weeks. He was shocked to realize that certain dangerous boundaries were being crossed, and that some of the participants might end up with permanent psychological damage.

The fact that perfectly normal, intelligent college students – they had been screened for any abnormality – could so easily be turned into sadistic monsters is astonishing. Apparently the situation had gotten the better of them:

Perhaps the normal human condition is indeed the Hobbesian “nasty, brutish and short”. Maybe “Lord of the Flies”, the book about a group of boys abandoned on an island evolving into a dictatorial society, is all too true. Perhaps the Law of the Jungle is indeed the right metaphor, much as we like to think of ourselves as civilized beyond fang and claw and might-is-right.

In a related study, the Milgram Experiment at Yale analyzed the willingness of volunteers to administer electric shocks to unseen victims based on orders from authority figures. It turned out that – with no gender differences – people were quite willing to torture people whom they had never met. (The shocks were simulated, and so were the recorded screams of the recipients, but the subjects didn’t know that.)

Zimbardo believes that it is not the individual’s own inherent tendencies, but the social situation around them that drives bad behavior. That can help us understand the pathology of the Pakistani situation. These young men have been told for such a long time that Indians and Hindus are evil and monstrous that they have internalized it. It is the environment that addles them. Therefore, expending a lot of effort on the arrest and prosecution of individual terrorists is not going to have a major impact, because they are expendable – there are many waiting in line, ready to step into their shoes. In that sense, it is immaterial what happens to Ajmal Kasab – he is simply cannon fodder, dispensable.

It is the system that is psychotic, and it is so by intent. That is why Pakistan refuses steadfastedly to move against those who have created the system: for instance, Hafiz Saeed of the Jamaat-ul Dawa (the current nom-de-guerre of the Lashkar-e-Toiba). The Pakistanis have refused again and again to prosecute Saeed, just as they refuse to extradite Dawood Ibrahim. These are strategic assets for the ISI. People like Hamil Gul, ex-ISI eminence-grise, have articulated the grim calculus of this perspective.

The system in Pakistan was put in place by General Zia-ul-Haq, who fundamentalized education, the Army, and the rest of society (it may be remembered that Zia in effect banned the use of the ‘Hindu’ sari, and encouraged the ‘Pakistani’ salwar-kameez). The textbooks were re-written to eulogize Central Asian invaders. History begins with the Arab invasion of Sind in 712 CE. The word ‘Hindu’ is always preceded by ‘cunning baniya’. The idea that a single Mohammedan soldier is worth ten Hindus in valor was put about, notwithstanding considerable evidence to the contrary.

American psychologist Sam Keen suggested in Faces of the Enemy that a major part of warfare lies in dehumanizing the enemy. Every nation has created extraordinary propaganda against its enemies: by internalizing this, young soldiers are able to kill other young men without compunction, because they believe the enemy are sub-human monsters intent on raping ‘our’ women, destroying ‘our’ nation, and so on. The  book includes hundreds of posters, cartoons and other material from 20^th century propaganda, which Keen calls the “archetype of the hostile imagination”.

Surely, there is Indian propaganda against Pakistan; however, it is on a secular plane, and does not target Pakistanis based on religion. In fact, average Mohammedans are better off in India as compared to anywhere else in the world, including, and especially Pakistan, where only the feudal upper classes (castes) live well. In  North India (as seen in Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”, there is a certain admiration – justified or not – for some alleged nawabi high culture, possibly because using Farsi/Arabic is considered cultured by some.

And the leftists in the media are ever-ready to cry themselves hoarse in the service of poor Mohammedans. Not to mention a government with a Prime Minister who says without irony, “Muslims must have first claim on the nation’s resources”, which is, in passing, strange from someone sworn to uphold the religion-blind Constitution.

But that is not what Pakistanis believe. In encounters with middle-class Pakistanis in America and on the Internet, I have heard how glad they are that there is a homeland for subcontinental Mohammedans who would otherwise have been oppressed by Hindus. They are silent, however, when I point out that there are, in fact, two homelands, and how the one homeland couldn’t keep half of its inhabitants happy and started a genocidal war with them.

This incomprehension about India was seen in the transcripts of the conversations by the 11/26 terrorists with their handlers in Pakistan: the terrorists were obviously confused that India was not a whole lot like what they had been brainwashed into believing.

Thus, it is the environment, of radicalization and mind-games, that is creating a cadre of evil-doers. Any amount of ‘talks’ and ‘goodwill gestures’ and ‘walking the extra mile’ is unlikely to change the situation unless the hate-mongering institutions with a monomanical jihadi agenda are dismantled. So long as India cannot get Pakistan to do this, there will be an endless supply of cannon fodder.

There is another issue – terrorism has now become a job, and quite a lucrative one at that. Zimbardo is of the opinion that a lot of the brutality in the Stanford Experiment and at Abu Ghraib happened because of simple boredom, especially at night, when the guards had nothing better to do and wanted some entertainment – perhaps the ultimate in the banality of evil.

In the case of the Pakistanis, and, alas, in the case of a number of home-grown terrorists in India, terrorism has now become an easy and attractive job, with perks like foreign trips (eg. to Pakistan via Dubai to throw people off the scent), cash (including counterfeit Indian rupees shipped in container-loads), women (who will dare say “no” to an AK-47?) and so on. For an ill-educated youth with poor prospects, this must be like manna from heaven. This has been demonstrated in Kerala where a number of young men were trained and shipped off to J&K as mercenaries/jihadis to kill Indian soldiers.

Thus, the cognitive dissonance between the “they are just like us” ordinary citizens of Pakistan and the ruthless killers is a matter of their environment. Unless it is cleaned up, and the godfathers of the system such as Hamid Gul, Hafiz Saeed and Dawood Ibrahim forced to stand down, India – and (note to President Obama) the West — will continue to face evil and bleed. It is not the individuals, but the system of propaganda and inducement of hatred that is to blame. And that suits the Pakistani establishment just fine: it sustains their failing State.

Obama’s Af-Pak Plan 2.0: India loses, again

a version of this was published by rediff at http://news.rediff.com/column/2009/dec/08/column-rajeev-srinivasan-on-obamas-af-pak-plan.htm

Obama’s Af-Pak speech: America will declare victory and leave soon

Rajeev Srinivasan concludes the winners are China and Pakistan; India loses again

There is no doubt the US President Barack Obama had a difficult task to perform in making his long-awaited Afghanistan speech on Tuesday. There has been a clamor of different voices urging him to take every position from digging in for the long term all the way to an immediate withdrawal, and the only option Obama really had was to take a median position that would certainly disappoint large sections of his voters.

In a sense, the speech turned out to be a bit of a damp squib: it must be extremely unsatisfying to officer cadets at West Point to be told that their nation was effectively in a war it could not win. And that the only thing to do was to find a face-saving exit. Besides, it really didn’t say anything new other than the laying out of a time-frame for the exit. It was common knowledge all along that the Obama Af-Pak plan was simple: “surge, bribe, declare victory and run like hell”.

The bribery plan has taken more concrete steps now. Hillary Clinton announced that there were ‘non-violent Taliban’ (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?), and therefore one has to presume the Americans are busy figuring out which are the ‘good Taliban’ (hint: those not attacking the Pakistani Army). These are the ones to bribe before the part about declaring victory loudly and heading for the exit.

One has to sympathize with Obama, who is in a bit of a spot. Two unwinnable wars are draining his treasury. The financial meltdown and related fallout has hit his economy hard. His hard-core supporters are wondering when he will deliver on his campaign rhetoric of change and hope, because so far there has been little change and not much hope. The fence-sitters are beginning to desert him, as the results of mid-term elections and opinion polls suggest. For someone who is in permanent campaign mode, this is altogether disturbing. The timing of the pullout from Afghanistan, naturally, is intended to give Obama sound-bites for the elections in 2012.

Afghanistan is, alas, looking more and more like Vietnam; even the blame game, where suddenly the Americans seem to have discovered that their hand-picked man, Hamid Karzai, is the fount of all corruption, is like Vietnam. The generals in Afghanistan are not filing enthusiastic and breathless forecasts like Westmoreland did in Vietnam, however: they are, perhaps because of  more widespread information, less optimistic and probably more realistic about what can be achieved.

The root cause of the problem in Afghanistan, unlike in Iraq, is simple: the Americans are laboring mightily to ignore the elephant in the living room, Pakistan’s agenda. It is as clear as daylight to the casual observer that Pakistan has no interest whatsoever in bringing stability to Afghanistan, in preventing the Taliban from coming back to power there, or in capturing Osama bin Laden and other Al-Qaeda operatives: and these are the alleged reasons why the Americans are in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has clearly articulated its pursuit of strategic depth which, for instance, involves having a Plan B even if its major cities such as Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, close to the Indian border, are obliterated in a possible Indian nuclear second strike (after Pakistan has wiped out Delhi and Mumbai in a first strike). They want to regroup from Afghanistan and continue their jihad against India from there.

The Taliban, of course, are Pakistani Army and ISI soldiers dressed in baggy pants and beards for the occasion. The fact that alleged seminary students (who the Taliban are supposed to be) suddenly started driving tanks and flying planes is indirect evidence that they were trained soldiers. Therefore, Taliban rule in Kabul means Pakistan has achieved it strategic depth. Clearly, they have no desire to fight or eliminate the Taliban, despite the fact that some factions (such as the one from the Mehsud tribe) have begun to inconvenience Pakistan through a campaign of suicide bombings. Dead Pakistani civilians are considered acceptable collateral damage by the ISI, but their attacks on the military apparatus is a big no-no. They are clearly ‘bad Taliban’, and will not get any share of the spoils.

The fact that the Americans condone Pakistani support for the Taliban was made most evident during the siege of Kunduz some years ago: see my old column: “What happened in Kunduz?” at http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/nov/30rajeev.htm It was evident to observers then that the massive airlift of besieged Taliban – allegedly hundreds of senior officers were rescued from the advancing Northern Alliance with the full knowledge of the CIA – was an effort to hide the evidence about ISI involvement with the Taliban. They allowed the alleged Taliban to escape to Islamabad and resume their day jobs as brigadiers and colonels in the Pakistani Army and the ISI. If the Northern Alliance, then in full cry, had been able to capture or liquidate these officers, it would have broken the backbone of the Taliban war effort.

A recent report from the US Senate accused the then-leaders of the war effort, Donald Rumsfeld and General Petraeus, of a signal failure in late 2001: apparently the Senate has found that it would have been entirely possible to capture Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora mountains then, if only a large force of American troops had been deployed in search operations, instead of the few hundreds.

All this brings into sharp focus the nexus between the CIA and the ISI. (The more recent story of Daood Gilani alias David Chapman Headley, who may have done the reconnaissance in Mumbai for 11/26, also suggestions unholy connections between the two). There are some seriously opaque things going on between the Americans and the Pakistanis, and the billions paid by the Bush and Obama administration have vanished without a trace. (With their friend Robin Raphel now in charge of disbursing funds, the ISI must be breaking out the champagne – such incredible good luck!)

So long as the Americans are willing to subscribe to the fiction that Pakistanis are serious about fighting terrorism, there is no way that Pakistan can lose. As a result, the planned departure of the Americans in 2011 should be welcome news for Indians. Presumably, once they leave, as they did after the Soviet debacle in the 1980s, Americans will lose interest in Pakistan and cease to write them blank checks (which usually end up killing Indians).

However, as General McChrystal suggested recently, chances are that the US is going to lean on India to ‘make concessions on Kashmir’, to stop its humanitarian operations in Afghanistan and to close its consulates there. Pakistan has alleged that Indians are interfering in Baluchistan – which I hope they are, but it is unlikely: a former Prime Minister, in a burst of misplaced enthusiasm, gutted the RAW counter-intelligence operations there. The first sign of this pressure is already evident in the UPA government’s announcement of large troop withdrawals from J&K, leaving it to the local police, whose sympathies are not necessarily with the Indian nation.

The reality of American sentiment was demonstrated by Richard Holbrooke who held a cringing press conference to assure Pakistanis that there was no tilt towards India. Clearly in Afghan War 2.0, America is going to be ever more dependent on the tender mercies of the ISI. Obama concluded his speech with the mantra – regarding Pakistan – of “mutual interests, mutual respect, and mutual trust.” The cynic in me thinks Obama better lock up the family silver, as he is deluding himself regarding Pakistan’s fundamentalist kleptocrats.

Besides, the exit timeline – even though it does not mean all troops leave then, and there has been a lot of ‘clarifications’ that even the date is not cast in stone – implies that the Americans have no stomach to fight on any longer in Afghanistan beyond 2011. This, in effect, means they have been defeated. The essence of military strategy is to demoralize the enemy by all means possible, and from that perspective Taliban psy-ops have won. This will be a significant morale-booster to the jihadis: they can legitimately claim to have defeated both the Soviets and the Americans. This will embolden their triumphalist attacks on US targets, and on India.

The Americans have a difficult choice, caught as they are with no really attractive options. Add to this Obama’s personal preferences, wherein his tendency is to be an internationalist, and to jaw-jaw where Bush may have gone for war-war. It is not clear that these are bad things per se, but it remains to be seen whether they are the right things for this war, or for the colder war against China. There is an element of ‘paralysis by analysis’, and some have begun to call Obama the ‘Great Ditherer’.

There is a worst case scenario: the possibility that, given the deadline of 18 months that Obama has outlined for the beginning of the exit, there will be a headlong and ignominious retreat from Kabul. I remember the photographs from Saigon in 1975 with the last helicopters taking off from the American embassy with people desperately hanging on. Vietnam scarred America’s soul, but Communism did not win, and the Domino Theory turned out to be wrong: communists are susceptible to the charms of the market.

The Afghan game is altogether different: it may crush America’s soul. If the jihadis gain sustenance from the American defeat there, there will be no respite: they will keep on attacking, as they are not easily distracted from their goal of global dominance, which they believe is within their grasp. Indeed they may be right, because there is a short window of opportunity when vast petro-dollars are at their disposal. The near-default of sovereign debt in Dubai shows that the petro-dollars may well be ephemeral, and that they had better strike when the iron is hot.

America is clearly suffering from imperial overreach. Not that America is a ruined country, but compared to the can-do and supremely confident nation it was a few years ago – the sole hyperpower proclaiming the end of history – it is suffering from serious self-doubt, and it is beginning to see the shadows of decline everywhere, even in its crowning glory, the civil engineering marvels that span the nation.

American’s involvement in Afghanistan, if it had been a whole-hearted war against the forces of terrorism, would have been positive for India. But given that it merely enriched the Pakistanis while retaining intact the entire infrastructure – both the ISI and the radicalized Army – the Afghan war has not really helped India. Indeed, the Northern Alliance – assuming that its tactical genius Ahmed Shah Massoud had not been assassinated – may well have driven the Taliban out or at least fought them to a standstill. In hindsight, the American intercession in Afghanistan has been a net negative for India.

As things stand, it now appears that it is better from India’s perspective for the Americans to leave. As usual, India is left to fight its own battles. Unfortunately, the two parties that will benefit the most from the American debacle in Afghanistan are India’s sworn enemies: China and Pakistan. China, because the loss is likely to turn America inward, and in any case they have now been convinced by Chinese bluster that there has to be a G-2. Pakistan, of course, is richer by some $25 billion some of which is in numbered accounts somewhere, and the rest in nuclear and other weapons pointed at India.

For China, the Vietnam analogy is apt again. There, a Chinese proxy defeated the Americans; in Afghanistan, another Chinese proxy, Pakistan, may defeat America. In Korea, China fought America to a standstill. Score: China – 2.5, America – 0.5. No doubt this, along with Obama’s kowtowing in Beijing, will embolden further Chinese adventurism. India is already seeing the beginning of this, as Chinese are building 27 airstrips in occupied Tibet, and just ordered Indians to stop building a road in J&K, explaining that it was their territory.

Obama should learn from India’s experience: a vacillating, dithering and appeasing nation gets no respect from those who have a a clear long-term intent.

1720 words, Dec 2, 2009, updated Dec 4, 2009, 2050 words

Endgame and tragedy in Sri Lanka

Published by the Pioneer on May 4:

http://www.dailypioneer.com/173668/Triumph-and-tragedy-in-Sri-Lanka.html

The news and the images coming out of Sri Lanka are horrendous: 100,000 Tamil civilians trapped on a tiny beach, where cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are making their last stand . The LTTE are using the civilians as shields (according to the Sri Lankan government); and government troops have shelled hospitals and killed thousands of non-combatants this year (according to The Economist quoting human-rights groups and the UNHCR).

The photographs of long-suffering Tamil refugees fleeing the war with nothing more than the clothes on their backs remind us of the curse of the Indian subcontinent: religion- and ethnicity-based conflict, generally leading to the genocide of Hindus. We saw this in 1947 and 1971. Millions of Hindus were ethnically cleansed from Pakistan and Bangladesh then, and the handful remaining are now fleeing newly-Talibanized territories; now they are being driven out of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna and the Eastern Provinces at the fag-end of a brutal civil war.

The LTTE certainly did not expect to fade into oblivion, their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran a fugitive. Only a couple of years ago, the Tigers were rampant, scoring victories on land and sea, and terrorizing Colombo with their makeshift air force. What turned things around? Probably much covert aid from governments, including India’s, wary of the Tigers’ penchant for redrawing boundaries by force (and China’s, fishing in troubled waters).

That, and internal dissension. The turning point was the defection in 2004 of ‘Colonel’ Karuna Amman, formerly LTTE commander in the Eastern Province. The LTTE ran a tight ship, and defectors generally were liquidated, but Karuna – as reported by the Wall Street Journal last year — thrived, and has become a minister, although he is at loggerheads with his erstwhile protégé and now-Chief Minister of the Eastern Province, Pillaiyan.

After sama (negotiations) and dana (give-aways) failed, bheda (creating dissent) worked, and now the Sri Lankans are applying the last of the four tactics of classical Indian stagecraft, danda (punishment). This is an object lesson for India’s pusillanimous politicians who advocate sweet-talk and appeasement of terrorists; and for Obamistas, advocating land-for-peace (India’s land, that is, to be given to Pakistan, so that the ISI would leave the Americans in peace). Pandering does not work, the iron fist does. Crush the terrorists first, then talk to real people.

There is a startling silence in India about the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils. This has to do with two factors: one is that most of the shrieking banshees in the human-misery cottage-industry do not care about the human rights of Hindus, and Sri Lankan Tamils are about 85% Hindu. Second is that the killing of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE, and the incessant noise by the DMK in their favor has genuinely turned off many people. The LTTE’s idea of its Tamil Eelam (they have taken down the maps on their website showing this) consists of north and eastern Lanka, all of Tamil Nadu and Kerala and parts of Karnataka and Andhra: in other words, most of South India. This is comparable to the jihadi wet-dream of a ‘Mughalistan’ consisting of most of North India.

It further appears that this ‘Eelam’ was meant to be a Christian-stan, in fearsome symmetry with ‘Mughalistan’. Let us note in passing that at Partition, missionaries had demanded a Christian-stan consisting of the Northeast, tribal areas of the Central Provinces (Chota Nagpur), and Travancore. Clearly, they have not given up the idea of territorial gains through any means.

The church has a well-known modus operandi. In Rwanda, the church fomented genocide by dividing Hutus and Tutsis – who, to the casual observer, and to the geneticist, appear identical – through claiming that the former were short and dark, and the latter were tall and fair, and that Tutsis were oppressing Hutus. Several Christian godmen and godwomen have been convicted of crimes against humanity for their direct role in massacres of Tutsis.

In India too, the church has fabricated a divide between the alleged ‘Aryans’ and ‘Dravidians’ – tall and fair vs. short and dark, oppressor, oppressed, sound familiar? – which was initially the handiwork of a white padre named Caldwell. It remains an interesting but little-known fact that churchman Max Mueller who invented the entire ‘Aryan’ fiction recanted in later years, admitting he was wrong.

The church has had a dubious role in Sri Lanka too. It is surely curious that most of the famous cadres of the LTTE are Christians (examples include Prabhakaran himself who is a Methodist, Anton Balasingham, the suicide-bomber Dhanu who killed Gandhi). Senior non-Christians in the LTTE, remarkably, have been captured, have died in battle, or been liquidated.

And the LTTE has wiped out all other groups representing the Tamil cause. The very ruthlessness of the LTTE is an indicator of its Semitic thought-process. Buddhists and Hindus have always co-existed peacefully all over Asia – in India, Indonesia, Afghanistan, etc. – until West Asian ideologies appeared. The church, and the LTTE, had no use for moderates or for negotiation.

There is another party with ill-intent in all this: China. As part of their ‘string of pearls’ strategy, they previously supported violent Communist insurgents, but these were wiped out by the Sri Lankan government. Now the Chinese are supplying heavy equipment, including planes and artillery to the army. Their likely objective: the prized deep-water port of Trincomalee, which would help them control shipping in the Indian Ocean, not to mention be a serious problem for India in its own backyard.

But with the apparent demise of the LTTE, the Sri Lankan government should be able to negotiate from a position of strength. Tamils can see that militancy and terrorism has achieved nothing but catastrophe for them. The Sinhalese, if they are wise, will deal magnanimously with their Tamil fellow-countrymen and reconcile with them. They must recognize that Tamils have genuine grievances arising from bumiputra-style discrimination against them for decades. They need to appreciate that the LTTE are not synonymous with Tamils. Then Sri Lanka can become the success story of the subcontinent with its superior health and education record.

Towards a failed State – Ghori, Jaichand and friends redux

rediff published this with some fairly significant edits at http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/dec/08mumterror-are-we-heading-to-being-a-failed-state.htm — to some extent the piece was rendered toothless — and so here is the original copy I sent them.

Towards a failed State – Ghori, Jaichand and friends redux

Rajeev Srinivasan on the attack on Mumbai

The invasion of Mumbai by Pakistani terrorists – and undoubtedly local collaborators – is but a replay of times past: the periodic and predictable arrival of barbarians over the Khyber Pass, laying waste to the countryside, and wreaking untold damage on a long-suffering populace. The only crime that the average Indian committed was to focus on the creation of wealth; of course, the barbarians came because of the wealth. Today, once again, India is generating capital, and the intention is to thwart its economic rise.

Then, as now, the rulers failed the populace. There is an implicit contract between the rulers and the ruled: you pay the taxes, obey the rules, and we ensure that your life, liberty and pursuit of happiness are unhindered. India’s ruling class failed signally to honor this contract – they never did figure out that the simple expedient of defending the Khyber and Bolan passes would be enough to save the plains, because Nature had been kind enough to build the impregnable Himalayas all around India.

I have never got a satisfactory answer to the question as to why we didn’t build the Great Wall of India. The Chinese built a 1,500-mile wall; Indians could surely have built a 15-mile wall and kept the marauders out. But there was clearly a failure in leadership and in strategic thinking. Time after time, the barbarians would pour in through the passes, march to Panipat or Tarain, and there, in a desperate last-ditch battle, the Indians would lose, again and again. The result: disaster.

Furthermore, there were traitors in-house, too. They would collude with the invaders to the detriment of their fellow-Indians. Jaichand, during the Second Battle of Tarain in 1192 CE, turned the tide of the battle by allying with Mahmud of Ghori against Prithviraj Chauhan, with the result that Northern India suffered 700 years of Mohammedan tyranny – it was a clear tipping point. Or take the battle of Talikota that ended the magnificient Vijayanagar empire: it was their own troops that betrayed them.

Fast forward to today. India is under withering attack on all fronts. To the east, there is the demographic invasion by Bangladeshis, including unhindered infiltration by terrorist elements. The entire Northeast is in danger of secession, given both the narrow and hard-to-defend Chicken’s Neck that connects the area to the Gangetic plain, as well as the Christian fundamentalism and terrorism that is on the verge of turning into a move to secede on religious and ethnic grounds, a la East Timor.

The northern frontier is restive, with Nepal, a former ally and buffer state transformed into hostile territory, with its porous borders turned into a way of infiltrating Mohammedan terrorists and Communist terrorists into India, with the declared intent of capturing the “Pasupati-to-Tirupati corridor”, in other words, most of the eastern half of the country.

China is making increasingly belligerent noises about Tawang and all of Arunachal Pradesh. They are gambling that, despite the summit that just took place in Dharmasala, the steam has gone out of the Tibetan resistance movement. They have been emboldened by the fact that Tibetans were not able to disrupt the Olympics, and the more immediate betrayal by the British (International Herald Tribune, “Did Britain Just Sell Tibet?” http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/25/opinion/edbarnet.php) , who declared, contrary to all the historical evidence, that Tibet was always a part of China. Besides, the Chinese fully intend to move forward with the diversion of the Brahmaputra, which is in effect a declaration of war against the lower riparian State, India.

It is likely that the Chinese will march into Tawang – there is a lot of chatter in Chinese circles (see, an analysis by D S Rajan at the Chennai Center for China Studies http://www.c3sindia.org/strategicissues/419) about a “limited India-China war”, a replay of 1962. The Chinese have, in addition to pure geopolitics, another reason to do this, as was pointed out by strategy expert Brahma Chellaney – as in the years preceding 1962, the world is now once again hyphenating India and China. By handing India a sharp conventional military defeat, China would like that hyphenation to be removed decisively, as it surely would be. India will once again be seen as the loser it has been during the entire 1947-2000 period.

In the Northwest, Kashmir burns. The population clearly views India as a colony – they want Indian money, but they are not willing to make the slightest concessions to Hindu sentiments. It is very convenient for them to have the cake and eat it too – there is the little-known fact that J&K has practically nobody under the poverty line (2% and falling), as compared to the average of some 20% in the country as a whole. Kashmiris have prospered mightily despite – or is it because of? – the brutal ethnic cleansing of 400,000 Pundits now languishing in refugee camps.

In the traditionally quiet Peninsula, there is evidence of tremendous terrorist activity. In Kerala, it has been reported widely in the Malayalam media that 300 youths have been hired, trained and dispatched to Kashmir with explicit instructions – kill Indian soldiers and support Pakistani intrusions. Terrorism is just another job. Sleeper cells exist in every town, sometimes in the guise of “Kashmiri emporia”. The Konkan and Malabar coasts are dotted with safe harbors, where weapons, counterfeit currency and contraband are cached. The preferred mechanism – bomb blasts to inflict maximum damage. Logistics, safe houses, surveillance, forged documents, etc. are provided by a wide network.

In the tribal lands of central India, the Northeast and in Orissa, Christian terrorists are joining hands with Communist terrorists. In fact they often are one and the same, as confessed by an alleged Communist leader on TV. Their preferred weapon – liquidation of inconvenient people, as they did in the case of Swami Lakshmananda, the 84-year-old monk that they attacked with AK-47s.

The fact is that all these threats are overwhelming the security apparatus in the country, such as it is. It is quite likely that the Intelligence Bureau and the Research and Analysis Wing and the Anti-Terrorism Squad had some inkling of something big being planned, including the movement of small arms on the Ratnagiri coastline, and the logistics-related activities of known suspects. It is unclear why they didn’t take preventive action.

There is a terrifying possibility – that they in fact had no idea this was going on. There is an aphorism that you cannot stop all terrorist activity, but in India the situation is such that no terrorist activity is stopped – they strike at will, and the populace is left to pick up the pieces of broken lives. This is no way to run a country.

The frightening possibility is that the Jaichands have in fact taken over the State. In which case, we can anticipate the total dismemberment of India – possibly preceded by an interregnum where it is failed State – in the near future.

There is one other possibility – that the Army will have to take over. It is a remote possibility, for two reasons – the Indian Army has been determinedly apolitical; and the State has continually striven to weaken it. Someone once made the ridiculous statement that India really didn’t need an army, only a police force, and it appears the entire political class and bureaucracy have internalized this slogan.

See also http://in.rediff.com/news/2002/nov/19rajeev.htm

From 1962 – as always, on November 18^th I silently saluted the martyrs of the Battle of Rezang-La, where C Company, 13^th Kumaon died heroically to the last man – when the ill-equipped troops froze to death on the Himalayan heights, to the refusal to increase military salaries when the bureaucrats awarded themselves 300% increases recently, the State has told the military that it doesn’t value them. All the Services are starved of funds. The recent open attack on Lt. Col. Purohit is another signal that the State despises the military . As Ashok Malik pointed out in the Pioneer (“A Hindu Dreyfus Affair?” http://www.dailypioneer.com/135567/A-Hindu-Dreyfus-Affair.html ), this is a near-repeat of the celebrated Dreyfus case in France, and alas, we have no Emile Zola to cry “J’accuse!” .

See also http://indiaabroad.com/news/1998/jul/23rajeev.htm

One possible outcome is that the Indian military forces will gradually wither away and die, thus making the statement about India not needing an army a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is another possibility – that of a military coup d’etat. Normally, the prospect of a military takeover – given that they all end up badly – from a democracy is not something one would welcome. But then India is not a democracy – it is a kakistocracy, rule by the very worst possible people – which has the trappings of a democracy but not the substance, so I wonder if military rule could possibly be any worse.

But the chances are getting increasingly good that the Indian State will collapse, just like Pakistan already has. A recent risk assessment by the World Economic Forum and CII (“India@Risk 2008”) considers the economic, energy, food/agriculture and national security that face India. The report is more concerned about the first three items, assuming that India is secure enough as a nation.

I hope they are right, but this invasion of Mumbai – so daring and audacious – makes me wonder. I have considered a nightmare scenario of Chinese battleships arriving in triumph at the Gateway of India, to be welcomed with marigold garlands by the Jaichands, but I have to admit I never thought a motley crew of Pakistani terrorists would invade. The very future of the Indian State, suddenly, is in question. And it is mostly from self-inflicted, avoidable wounds. The failure of leadership is causing India to cease to exist.

Nomenclature terrorism

Nomenclature terrorism

Rajeev Srinivasan on the fuss about “Hindu terrorists”

The recent fuss about alleged “Hindu terrorists” has entertained me hugely because all the usual suspects played their expected roles to perfection. The pseudo-secular media had a field day insinuating that Hindu terrorism is as major a problem in India as is Mohammedan and Christist terrorism. The UPA forgot its axiom that “terrorism has no religion”, and joyously crowed about “Hindu terrorists”. The BJP was apoplectic in its attempts to distance itself from the alleged “Hindu terrorists”.

Meanwhile, some actual – not imagined — terrorism activity has been going on in Kerala, where at least 300 people have been recruited by Mohammedan fundamentalists to wage war on the Indian State. Newspaper reports suggest that at least 96 young men from Kerala, who were given military training by SIMI, are at large. 16 of them are in Kashmir, the others in Bangalore or Kerala, according to Intelligence Bureau reports. Apparently there are special instructions in Malayalam in SIMI jungle camps held all over the country, for the poor dears are not so proficient in Urdu/Arabic.

These young men were dispatched to Kashmir with simple instructions: kill Indian soldiers and facilitate infiltration by the Pakistanis. Terrorism has now become just a job. So much so that so-called “spiritual advisers” (“paymaster” may be a more accurate designation) are out there recruiting known gangsters, converting them and sending them off to Kashmir. A particular gang of Christist criminals in Cochin has apparently supplied several converts who made the trek to Kashmir: including one Verghese aka Yasin who took a bullet in his head from the Indian Army and had to be identified from his fingerprints.

All this is ironic: Kerala has long been a supplier of manpower and womanpower – first it was the clerks and petty shopkeepers all over India, as well as a lot of soldiers; then it has been nurses, next construction labor and professionals for the Persian Gulf and America, and most recently, Christist padres and nuns for the conversion industry and as gastarbeiter for the shrinking seminaries of Europe.

I guess it is but a small step to terrorism as a profession. As Adi Sankara said in a slightly different context some centuries ago, “udara nimittam bahu krta vesham” (one wears various roles to satisfy that despotic stomach). It is said that in parts of Malabar, the UAE dirham, the Saudi riyal, and the US dollar are almost as much legal tender as the Indian rupee: there is so much of that stuff floating around. Not to speak of absolutely authentic-looking Pakistani-made Indian rupee notes. A while ago, an entire ocean-going container full of Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 counterfeit notes – from Pakistan with love via Dubai – was intercepted in Kerala. That is a boatload of money, indeed.

And then there’s the news about serial blasts in Manipur and – as I write this – in Assam, that have killed large numbers of innocent people. There are all the other blasts – there have been so many we begin to lose count – in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Delhi, etc. etc. etc. – where the perpetrators unambiguously let it be known that they were Mohammedans inflamed by religious fundamentalism and jihad.

Christist terrorists have been running rampant in the Northeast for some time: their modus operandi is a little different – they prefer the AK-47 and they generally target specific individuals. They have ethnically-cleansed 45,000 Reang tribals from Mizoram for refusing to convert; they shot respected litterateur and patriot, Bineshwar Brahma in Guwahati; they shot Hindu priest Shanti Tripura in his own temple; and most recently, they shot Swami Lakshmananda in Orissa (let’s not kid around about this: even the alleged Communist terrorist who was trotted out, suitably incognito, on TV to exonerate Christists admitted that most of his flock were Christists).

Not to mention that almost the entire top echelon of the dreaded Tamil Tigers are Christists, and the non-Christists mysteriously suffer “accidents” or are captured by the Sri Lankan Army or “commit suicide”. Velupillai Prabhakaran, Anton Balasingham, et al are all Christists. So was Dhanu, the suicide bomber who blew up Rajiv Nehru Gandhi. There is reason to believe that the so-called Maoists in Nepal are also crypto-Christists, especially some of their top brass.

Of course, none of this qualifies for the “religious terrorism” moniker as far as the lovely English-Language Media and the UPA are concerned. Their sound and fury is reserved for some poor Hindu nun who is, by the power of “truth by repeated assertion”, subjected to an electronic lynch, deemed a terrorist and subjected to tejovadham. This is to be expected, as the ELM and the pseudo-seculars in India have a sworn duty: that of cultural extinction of the native civilization of this country. Once you understand this axiom, their baffling acts are self-consistent in a certain bizarre frame of reference.

Whether the pseudo-seculars do this for money, or they have been brainwashed by the predatory State, is not entirely clear. But then it doesn’t matter, does it, since the end result is the same?

And this deliberate use of nomenclature terrorism – the use of insinuation to demonize and to create defensiveness – is a purely Goebbelsian propaganda tactic. I tried a little experiment on the pseudo-seculars some years ago by returning the favor. I started referring to their ideology as Nehruvian Stalinism. Their immediate knee-jerk reaction was to label me a Hindu fundamentalist, Hindu fascist etc. Which I was prepared for: I told them, fine, maybe I am all that, but you, you are Nehruvian Stalinists.

I got the reaction I expected: when the tables were turned, the pseudo-seculars did exactly what they expect others to do under their attacks. They got defensive, they labored to explain why they were not Stalinists, and how different Nehru was from Stalin. They grew increasingly exasperated as I kept insisting that Nehru was a lot like Stalin: the personality cult, the imperiousness, the purges, the heavy-industry fetish, etc., and how Jawaharlal was merely a little less effective in his ruthlessness.

Happily, I got a few pseudo-seculars into an absolute tizzy denying these allegations; they practically foamed at the mouth. I had succeeded – I had got them to play on my terms, on the playing field I defined; instead of protesting that I was not a fascist, I had changed the terms of reference and forced them to defend their cherished shibboleths. It was good to watch them squirm.

That, I submit, is the way to play this game. Hindus should not bother to try and prove that they are not terrorists. We should say “Yes, there must be Hindu terrorists, just like you guys are Communist terrorists, or Christist terrorists, or Mohammedan terrorists. Any questions?” If they continue to blather, one might hint darkly of caches of AK-47s and RDX.

It is evident that the pseudo-seculars are cowards and bullies, and this will shut them up. Only, gentle reader, I suggest you be careful in your choice of words, just in case somebody has a hidden camera – make veiled threats, where you cannot be pinned down to anything specific. And occasionally mutter knowingly about some atrocity perpetrated by the Christist or Communist or Mohammedan terrorists, and insinuate that you have certain “friends” and you know where the pseudo-seculars live. You know, the kind of thing the Mafioso say in those gangster movies.

Nomenclature terrorism is a game two can play, and the sinister Nehruvian Stalinists can be – as in the quaint phrase they use – hoist on their own petard.

Musharraf’s Theater of the Absurd

Posted at rediff today. I wrote it before the Lal Masjid was attacked by troops.

http://www.rediff.com/news/2007/jul/10rajeev.htm

Actually, the copy editor messed up the structure and introduced a few errors. Here’s the original as I sent it to rediff:

Musharraf’s Theater of the Absurd: In which he sings for supper and lives to fight another day

 

Rajeev Srinivasan on the make-believe that is Pakistani politics

 

After years of observing the deft General Musharraf, I must admit a sneaking feeling of admiration for the way he has navigated the minefields of, to mix metaphors wildly, dancing with three elephants: Saudi Arabia, the United States, and China. He is simply peerless in his ability to put on diplomatic theater, and he has an unerring instinct for how to induce the willing suspension of disbelief that is the centerpiece of all theater.

 

Kanishka: Justice delayed or denied?

Appeared in the Pioneer on May 22nd. http://www.dailypioneer.com/displayit1.asp?pathit=/archives2/may2207/edits/edit3.txt

Justice denied: the Kanishka bombing of 1985

 

Rajeev Srinivasan on skeletons tumbling out of closets

 

Here are the bare facts. In 1985, Air India’s flight 182, a Boeing 747 named Kanishka, blew up over the Atlantic off Ireland en route to India, killing all 329 aboard. A time-delayed bomb in the checked luggage was the culprit. In a related incident, two Japanese baggage handlers died at Tokyo’s Narita airport when luggage on another Canada-India flight exploded.

 

Separatist Khalistanis were suspected of having set the bombs. But no one was convicted for murder after the longest and costliest trial in Canadian history. Only one person was convicted: Inderjeet Singh Reyat pleaded guilty to manslaughter in 2003 and received a five-year sentence. The suspected ringleader, Talwinder Singh Parmar, died in India in 1992 and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s two main surviving suspects were both acquitted in March 2005.

 

Encounter killings

This is what I actually wrote. Rediff has replaced many of the external links with other links that I am not thrilled with. Also, I specifically said that “political workers posing as relatives of victims” forced a trial by media, and there are particular political workers whom I have named before who were caught on camera doing this. But Rediff chose to drop the “political workers posing as”. Oh well.

The consequences of inaction vs. the human rights of the terrorist

 

Rajeev Srinivasan on how human rights apply to the victim rather than the perpetrator

 

Consider the following moral dilemma: If you knew that a friend was planning to commit random mass murder, what would you do? Would you turn him in to the police, or would you let him murder, in cold blood? Most people would in fact alert the authorities, because the massacre of innocents violates our sense of ethics.