Roadmap to Peace?
Agra 2001 was one of the periodic highpoints of the India-Pakistan relationship, a similar climax of expectations was Vajpayee’s Lahore bus trip in 1999. The Indians had reason to feel aggrieved because of Kargil, when they received President Pervez Musharraf with open arms in New Delhi two years later that became a moot point. Or was their welcome feigned? There was expectation and excitement in the air in Agra that morning when the agreed draft was initialled, the gloom came later when it did not see the light of day, signalling a massive relationship slide. After 9/11 the world’s catchword was “terrorism”, the Indians soon realized that Pakistan’s stupidity in supporting the Taliban regime beyond a fail-safe point was being glossed over because of Pakistan’s primarily role as a US ally in the war against terrorism. The Indians hurriedly re-drew their gameplan to emasculate Pakistan, the raison d’etre the still unexplained attack on India’s Parliament. At the end of Dec 2001 the entire Indian Armed Forces (including the formations withdrawn from facing China and Bangladesh) was stationed en bloc in an offensive posture along Pakistan’s eastern border and along the LOC in Kashmir, subsequently the Indian High Commissioner was recalled permanently and in reciprocation his Pakistani counterpart was asked to leave. There was a further low-point, the Pakistan Deputy High Commissioner was expelled because of concocted and childish allegations, subsequently proven patently false by Indian courts.
Keep Your Powder Dry
At a special ceremony held at Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) on Wednesday January 8, 2002 the indigenously developed 1300 km range Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) GHAURI was formally handed over to the President, Gen Pervez Musharraf accepting the induction into the “Strategic Forces Command” on behalf of the Pakistan Army. With this the teeth-to-tail structure of Pakistan as a nuclear power is now complete, i.e. from development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems to the operational commissioning thereof as an integral part of our defence mechanism under the umbrella of the Nuclear Command Authority (NCA). That our scientists, engineers and workers achieved both uranium enrichment and missile development indigenously should be a matter of great pride and satisfaction to all Pakistanis. This force upgradation in non-conventional weapons will take the pressure off our outnumbered (in comparison numerically to our arch-enemy India) Armed Forces.
The Advani Identity
For once ISI is off the hook! By assuming the appointment of India’s Deputy PM, Advani has discarded the charade of who is the real power in the country. The source of the defamatory article in TIME magazine recently about Indian PM Atal Behari Vajpayee should not have been a mystery, who else stood to benefit other than Lal Krishan Advani? In conducting a pre-mortem of Vajpayee (the whole anatomy was laid bare), TIME reporter Alex Perry had an impeccable source, for good measure his interrogation by Indian immigration authorities shored up his credibility. That Advani’s warped muslim-hunting personality should have his finger (aided and abetted by madcap Defence Minister George Fernandes) as the final authority on the nuclear trigger is scary. Compare the Advani “virility” to the doddering TIME portrayal of “senile” Vajpayee and the thought becomes scarier, this man not only has the penchant but the necessary venom and ruthlessness to initiate a nuclear holocaust in South Asia at the slightest pretext without any inhibitions or qualms whatsoever. His former daughter-in-law, who also served as his confidential secretary for many years, has chronicled his devious, vicious ways in a signed affidavit in a court of law.
India’s democracy prides itself in never have lived under the tutelage of the uniform, as if this is somehow different to being under absolute authoritarian rule under civilian garb, were Hitler and Mussolini army generals? And when Indira Gandhi declared emergency, what happened to India’s democracy? Germany’s Nazis could never be as virulent as India’s Rashtria Sevak Sangh (RSS), incidentally both have Swastikas as their cult’s symbol. Eminent Indian columnist Kuldip Nayar says that Advani, to quote, “is an RSS hardliner and a vociferous exponent of Hindutva Doctrine”, unquote. In layman’s terms, Advani is a charter member of a extreme right wing socio-political religious grouping that not only believes in the Hindu religion’s absolute supremacy over all other religions, it does not permit other religions to even co-exist. And they say fundamentalism exists in Islam! Despite being in numbers many times less than the Hindus they ruled, Islam’s millennium supremacy period is particularly galling for the RSS. When it came to the matter of sacking Gujerat’s muslim-killer Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Vajpayee, supposedly very secular, not only succumbed to RSS pressure within the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) but labelled most muslims in India as “potential terrorists”.
With Enemies like Advani
Believe it or not, it is increasingly becoming a fact that India’s Home Minister L K Advani is Pakistan’s biggest asset in the struggle to counter India’s motivated propaganda to declare Pakistan “a terrorist State”. His place on this pedestal would be a dead heat with George Fernandes but Fernandes is a Christian and despite his best efforts to sound like a Hindu revivalist, he lacks the venom that Advani generates inherently due to the basic character quirk in the conservative Hindu psyche bedevilling Hindu-Muslim relationship in the South Asian sub-continent. It is no coincidence that Sindhi Advani feels that his ancestors let the side down by allowing Muhammad Bin Qasim establish a foothold for Islam in the sub-continent in the first place. He has made eradication of Muslim rule anywhere in the regional hemisphere his personal war to wage, there being no comparable word in the Hindu religion for “Jehad” or “crusade”.
First Blood
In Dec 13, 2001 six terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi, all except one who got away, were shot dead, but not before they started a chain of events that has brought Pakistan and India to the brink of war. Even before the live TV drama was over, the Indian Government had labelled the terrorists, who had no identification on them, as Pakistanis of Kashmiri origin belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish Mohammad, two Kashmiri organizations engaged in guerilla warfare against the Indian occupation forces within Indian Held Kashmir. Coincidentally, within the Indian Parliament on that day, the Indian Government was under internal siege on two issues, viz (1) POTO, the Anti-Terrorist Bill that was being opposed tooth and nail not only by the Opposition but some of the BJP’s coalition partners, enough for the government to declare a parliamentary “whip” for its partners, coincidentally during the same week, and (2) the matter of “over-payment” for 3000 coffins ordered from USA by George Fernandes for the Indian Kargil dead during his previous tenure as Defence Minister from which he was forced out because of another scandal, the “Tehelka” scam.
Whether the attackers were Pakistanis, Kashmiris or even Indian convicts, they were conveniently dead and as such could not be identified immediately as per the Indian claim. Among the possibilities, in a desperate bid to divert the issues bedevilling their governance, India requested the Northern Alliance for Pakistani Taliban prisoners to be brought by air by Qanooni as a “gift” from Kabul to New Delhi, and then contrived to have them to “escape” and carry out the attack. One may well ask why were they brought to India in the first place? That India blamed ISI was no surprise, the only things they have not blamed ISI in the last decade is for the rat plague in New Delhi in 1994 and for Rabri Devi being elected as CM of Bihar. India has a history of being quick on the gun to blame Pakistan for its own “dirty tricks”, “Ganga” being blown up in Lahore by Indian RAW in 1971 is once concrete example. A few weeks ago an Indian Airlines aircraft remained “hijacked” for 4 hours before it was discovered that the flight had no hijackers, they had probably missed the flight but no one told the cockpit or the cabin crew. The cockpit crew thought the “hijackers” were in the cabin, the cabin crew thought likewise they were in the cockpit. In the meantime senior Indian officials, including a junior minister, told the media that the hijackers were Pakistani since they had heard their “Urdu” conversation over radio. Of such stuff are “facts” created to scandalize Pakistan.