Urdunama: Indian Misadventure

The Daily Ausaf has been fairly regular in the recent past in drawing attention to what it calls an “Indian conspiracy” in Pakistan and the need for Pakistan to counter it.  This theme, though not unusual in Pakistan’s vernacular press, has appeared more frequently recently than hitherto.  One wonders if there is more mischief at hand than meets the eye.

Below is the December 11 editorial from Daily Ausaf:

Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said that proof of India’s involvement in terrorism in Pakistan has been presented to the Foreign Affairs ministry so that the ministry may raise this issue in all international fora.  Malik said, “We have ample proof of India’s involvement in terrorist activities inside Pakistan”.

Weapons confiscated from four trucks in Bara had Indian markings.  He said his ministry was responsible for accumulating evidence, which is then passed on to the concerned institutions and ministries.

After 9/11, India has benefited greatly from America’s opportunistic wars. But what sort of peculiar logic is this, where Pakistan is forced to make the most sacrifices, while India reaps the most benefits.  This situation points to our weakness where our past leaders made policies only to satiate their own power.  Pakistan continued to sink as a result of this, and India fully exploited this situation.

On one end, India tried to sabotage the movement for Kashmiri independence, and on the other, it has created a situation of virtual anarchy in Pakistan by sending in terrorists through Afghanistan, in its quest for “Akhand Bharat.”

Despite this situation, the US not only  forgot Pakistan’s sacrifices in its war, but also tried to use India as an effective counter-weight to our ally, China.  This Indo-US friendship also includes the civil nuclear agreement between the two countries. As a result of the US’s friendship, India’s attitude is getting increasingly bellicose.  And India has been trying to avoid any further dialog with Pakistan on the Kashmir issue.

Even if firecracker bursts in India, their media blames Pakistan’s intellegence agencies, while on the other hand despite India’s support to terrorists in Pakistan, our leaders have been silent, and India has been making full use of our silence.

To promote its impure vision for an “Akhand Bharat”, India, via its agents, is trying to dismember and destroy Pakistan. It is also attempting a cultural invasion of our youth. Unfortunately, India’s cultural invasion of Pakistan is being helped by some of our own people.

Even Afghanistan’s external intelligence agency, RAMA, whose name sounds like “Ram”, was founded by India’s RAW.  India has increased its budget allocation for intelligence to facilitate RAW’s activities inside Pakistan.  India’s intentions are to encircle Pakistan — to that end it has established air bases in foreign countries.

With the ruse of helping reconstruct the airport in Jalalabad, India has deployed about 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, whose job is to support activities against Pakistan.  Therefore, India’s espionage and terrorism in sevaral parts of Pakistan — from Wana and Waziristan to Baluchistan — is irrefutable.

Our media has reported India’s hand in several terrorist activities in Pakistan — from the attack on the Manawa training center to the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team.  The question that needs to be asked is why India’s shameful and alarming acts haven’t been exposed to the world.

India’s politicians and media make it a point to sully Pakistan’s name, without proof, after every terrorist attack, but here, our politicians, despite beomg armed with concrete evidence of India’s terrorism in Pakistan, appear reluctant to present this to the world.

It is time to give India a befitting reply to its misadventures against Pakistan.

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Filed under: 9/11, Af-Pak, India, Pakistan, Terrorism, Urdunama, Afghanistan, akhand bharat, ausaf, baluchistan, bara, China, cricket, India, Kashmir, manawa, Pakistan, raw, RAWA, Rehman Malik, Sri Lanka, Terrorism, Urdunama, US, wana, waziristan

Where do we go from here?

The people of India have spoken.  A clear mandate for the UPA government has been given.  While this blogger doesn’t consider the verdict to be optimal (considering UPA’s unforgivable lapses in security and foreign affairs), the decisiveness of the victory is pleasing because it allows a less fractious Central government to go about its business.  The mandate against the BJP is very clear — the people don’t want any part of their divisive politics.  A campaign that was overshadowed by the venom spewing bigotry of Varun Gandhi was only bound for failure.  Uttar Pradesh has told Mayawati what it thinks of her self glorifying statues in Lucknow.   And Prakash Karat stands amidst the shattered pieces of his non-ideology.

Where does India go from here?  The Filter Coffee has repeatedly drawn attention to the dilapidated state of our local law enforcement forces, and national and border defense mechanisms.  They need addressing immediately.  When Chidambaram took over as Home Minister, he instituted a few changes, come cosmetic, some concrete.

The Congress must stop pretending that it is tied at the hip to the Unlawful Activities Prevention (Amendment) Act and work with the Opposition to construct a meaningful anti-terror law for the nation.  Our local law enforcement agencies need money, equipment and training.  Our national forces face severe shortages in equipment, which can only be addressed by correcting India’s defense procurement mechanism.  The shackles need to be loosened from our intelligence agencies.

India faces two immediate threats with regard to terrorism, from the Maoists and Jihadi groups.  With regard to external Jihadi threats, there are some elements that India can control and some that it can’t.  However, the Maoist menace is well within India’s realm and decisive action is needed to eliminate this plague that has consumed a third of India.

On the foreign affairs side, the Subcontinent is on fire.  Sri Lanka has found itself an effective counterweight to India in China, and its dismissal of India’s pleas was the most telling aspect of this relationship as war against the LTTE drew to a close.  Similarly, India lost the plot in Nepal during the UPA administration and as tensions continue to rise between the army and the Chinese backed Maoist government, India has a great opportunity to play the honest broker and demonstrate to that nation that India wants peace and stability in Nepal.

The United States is blowing a sigh of relief that the month long elections in India are at an end.  Obama’s immediate concern is to get India to focus on the Af-Pak issue.  The repeated calls for India to reduce troop levels along the western border are as absurd as they are misplaced and the UPA would do well not to wilt under American pressure as they have so often done in the past.

With Pakistan, India must continue to use every tool at its disposal to pressure that country to dismantle not just “terror” infrastructure, but specifically the Punjabi-terror outfits that target India.  The Pakistanis must be pressed to ensure that those responsible for 26/11 are brought to justice.  Pakistan’s “investigation”, as farcical as it was, is now a casualty of all the attention to the existential threat that country faces today.  Above all, the UPA must impress upon Islamabad that for India to show any interest in rekindling the “peace process”, there needs to be very credible action from Pakistan on both dismantling terror infrastructure armed at India, and bringing to justice those that were responsible for 26/11.

The mandate for the Congress is conclusive.  Manmohan Singh can either show the country that he can act convincingly to address the challenges that face us, as he did in 1991, or he can falter and stumble from one embarrassing embroilment to another as he has done over the past five years.  The ball is in his court.  What’s it going to be, Mr. Prime Minister?

Filed under: 2009 Indian General Elections, Af-Pak, Barack Obama, Foreign Policy, India, Politics in India, Sri Lanka, Terrorism, arun jetley, bahujan samaj party, bharatiya janata party, bjp, congress, Congress I, CPI(M), India, indian elections, lk advani, Manmohan Singh, Mayawati, nda, nepal, Pakistan, Prakash Karat, priyanka gandhi, rahul gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Sri Lanka, Terrorism, united progressive alliance, United States, UPA, uttar pradesh, varun gandhi

“People give the Indian army a lot of leeway…”

More pearls of wisdom from the Writer Formerly Known As Sane, Arundhati Roy.  She recently hopped across the border to Pakistan to really sink her fangs into the country she calls home.  Speaking at the Karachi Press Club, she talks about the Taliban, the ongoing operation in Swat, Siachen, Indian elections, and the RSS, among other things.  True to her form, Arundhati talks at a tangent, jumping from one unrelated topic to the next.

What makes people like her and Praful Bidwai particularly dangerous isn’t the fact that they speak out against the institution.  It’s that they speak out by distorting facts and drawing parallels between issues that have no logical correlation to support their agendas.  Don’t let them tell you they don’t have an agenda. They do. Everyone does.  Here’s Arundhati at her prattling best:

Each day (Siachen glacier)  is being filled with ice axes, old boots, tents and so on. Meanwhile, that battlefield is melting. Siachen glacier is about half its size now. It’s not melting because the Indian and Pakistani soldiers are on it. But it’s because people somewhere on the other side of the world are leading a good life….in countries that call themselves democracies that believe in human rights and free speech. Their economies depend on selling weapons to both of us.

Each day, apparently, the glacier is being filled with “old boots”; I’m not even sure what she’s talking about here. Her concern clearly couldn’t be environmental, since the “substance” behind the drivel appears to be to apportion blame to the US (aka “democracies that believe in human rights and free speech”) for selling weapons to “both of us” with which the two above-fault former colonial nations fight wars they are conned into waging by the conniving West.  Only problem here is that India didn’t really receive any weapons from the US that it used to fight Pakistan in Siachen.  A convenient falsehood to support her anti-US agenda, certainly, and no different from the mindset of the Pakistani establishment that affixes blame on everyone but itself for the situation it finds itself in.  But wait, there’s more:

The RSS has infiltrated everything to a great extent..The RSS has infiltrated the (Indian) army as much as various kinds of Wahhabism or other kinds of religious ideology have infiltrated the ISI or the armed forces in Pakistan.

Clearly, she’s taking issue with Lt. Col. Purohit and his ilk in re the Malegaon attacks.  But the act of one man, as deplorable as it was, can hardly be equated to the fundamentalist indoctrination of an entire army over the course of 62 years that led it to slaughter 3 million civilians because they belonged to different ethnic and religious persuasions.  Apart from Purohit, what other examples does Arundhati Roy have of an RSS “infiltration” into the army? To be clear, the Indian army is battling infiltration.  But it isn’t from the RSS.  An inconvenient truth that Roy chooses to ignore.

Arundhati continues:

The Indian army is quite a sacred cow especially on TV and Bollywood.I think it is a sacred cow. People are willing to give them a lot of leeway.

Forgive me, but the armed forces of a developing nation that chooses to mind its own business and not stick its nose into political affairs deserves all the credit it gets.  The Indian army isn’t perfect. No army is.  Sure, the media chooses to turn a blind eye to the army’s conduct in Kashmir and Sri Lanka.  But the fact that India has had a virtually unblemished record in democracy since independence (a singular rarity in the developing world) is enough proof that this is an army unlike any other, and if it does get any leeway, it is well deserved.

Arundhati Roy is successful in the sense that her utter ignorance compels people like me to respond and set right the things that this malingering cretin masks with her eloquence.  The fact that she can string a couple of sentences together in English is often mistaken by India’s elite and the Western media as indicative of her mastery over subjects she has no experience in.  I’ve taken issue with Roy before as I take issue with her today.  Abinav Kumar, in his response to Roy’s much published diatribe right after the 26/11 terrorist attacks, said that Arundhati Roy suffered from a failure of the imagination.  I beg to differ.  Arundhati Roy suffers from a failure of the mind.

Filed under: 26/11, Defense Forces of India, India, Indian Army, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Terrorism, 1971, arundhati roy, India, Indian Army, karachi, Kashmir, outlook india, Pakistan, praful bidwai, purohit, RSS, siachen, Sri Lanka