Indian Diplomacy : Time To Recheck

I cant stop wondering that why these leftists stay in pakistan and bangladesh withtheir tail carefully tugged b/w their legs.Only in India they have the guts to come out and roar.Thes e commies forefathers were hunted like a dog in bangladesh and were killed ,converted or thrown to india.and whatt these commies do again lick the feet of those very killers.

Raibahadur NC Sur Noakhali no1 lawyer was killed like a dog by muslim extremists in 1947 and his son Prasanta Sur was a refugee to India.he joined CPM and became mayor of Calcutta and during his tenure maximum bangladeshi immigrants became legal indians.god only knows what sort of blood these commies bengali have .just imagine their plight in bangladesh wud hv been.Bangla Bhai wud hv butchered them.today 30-40% muslims hv become pucca vote bank of cpm.

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Studebaker,

Yes, you are right about that. It is a very complex place - a place of tremendous difficulties and tremendous opportunities. That is why, outsiders often fail to understand it, since the more complex an object is, the more important becomes the role of glasses one is wearing when looking at it.

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Another sad development -

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4332402,00.html

Jan. 8, 2002, 6:15PM

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/1203042

In age of terror, what of the lone actor?

By WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY JR.

JOHN Burns of The New York Times cracks the story of an anonymous aide, of the plight of Gen. Pervez Musharraf. The Pakistani leader is said to have telephoned the U.S. ambassador to Islamabad to ask a serious and entirely understandable question. That question is relayed as follows: ``What if some outraged Kashmiri takes a Kalashnikov and shoots an Indian politician or puts a bomb in a parking lot? Is Pakistan going to be held accountable every time anybody picks up a weapon? Is Washington saying that all freedom struggles, everywhere, can be suppressed under the guise of the war on terrorism?``

The second point made here strikes at the heart of a definitional problem that, beginning years ago, beset the United Nations. In 1973, the United States introduced a resolution condemning terrorist activity. It never carried through the appropriate committee because it was burdened with so many equivocations as to make it useless. Most prominently critical of it, back then, were African leaders who insisted that any apparently terrorist acts committed against the governments of Rhodesia and South Africa were not really terrorist acts, but initiatives in national liberation.

That construction of the right of protesters gives them a kind of juridical authority. In conventional understanding, someone who fires at a foreign official can claim the protections of war only if he is deputized to do as he did by his government. He is, otherwise, a pirate, prowling about until he is caught and hanged. Musharraf is asking out loud for some kind of provision to be made for incontinent liberators who do not want to wait for diplomacy to settle their problems, taking their own initiatives -- as terrorists, we call them. On this matter, the correct response from President Bush is: The people you are talking about are terrorists, period.

The first question is more difficult. Is India supposed to assume that there was tacit backing by the government of Pakistan of the five militants who attacked the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13? Musharraf is denying any condonation of the act; India is saying, Prove your dissociation from it by rounding up the people who supported it and putting them in jail. Musharraf wavers. Question: Because he is secretly in sympathy with the Kashmiri militants? Or because he reasons that to go after them at the very same time that, on his western flank, he is pursuing the Taliban, would take him over the line, risking the very survival of his government, yielding then to an uprising or even a coup?

The day before this concern was relayed to our ambassador, a 15-year-old Florida boy got into a Cessna, in which he had been taking flying lessons, flew up in the air of Tampa and dove into a building, killing (only) himself. The suicidal act was without political implication but for the message he left behind, a suicide note that identified the boy as in sympathy with Osama bin Laden.

It would require a McCarthyite reading of the event to suppose that al-Qaida had enlisted the boy to plunge into that building, without so much as a .22 rifle to fire at somebody. But the episode highlights the nature of Musharraf`s concern. The Israeli government tends automatically to suppose, with plenty of precedent, that terrorist attacks on Israelis are expressions of Yasser Arafat`s determination to undermine Israel. Arafat has in most cases dissociated the PLO from the terrorist acts, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is usually saying: Prove your dissociation by going after centers of militant anti-Israeli activity.

Whatever one concludes personally about the likelihood of Arafat`s responsibility, we do need to focus on procedural matters. Gov. Jeb Bush doesn`t need to reassure President George Bush that the Tampa flier wasn`t an agent of revolutionary sentiment in Florida. Arafat, on the other hand, has a bloody record, altering the presumptions to his disadvantage. Musharraf is somewhere in between; so what are we asking of him?

The United States wants him to do two things to fortify plausibility: (1) Stop the Muslim polemical organs that preach an irreconcilable irredentism on Kashmir; and (2) outlaw the money-gathering devices by which the militants are empowered. Those are pretty concrete means of satisfying critical suspicion that Musharraf isn`t endorsing terrorist activity against India. But he now needs to weigh action on these lines against the risk of provoking the militarist right.

But he, and the world, are entitled to thoughtful attention given to the question he raised: Is the lone actor, in an age in which lone actors can do so much, all that`s needed to precipitate great wars?



Buckley is a nationally syndicated columnist based in New York

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/090102/detLET03.asp

One man’s anti-national...



When the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba threatens to blow up the Taj Mahal, we call them ‘anti-national’. Not long ago, when hundreds of Bajrang Dal activists entered the Taj complex with an aggressive and destructive objective, the Supreme Court had to intervene to avert a disaster. The Bajrang Dal is not seen as an anti-national organisation. What a paradox!

M. Shahid Kamal, Aligarh

http://www.hindustantimes.com/nonfram/090102/detLET03.asp

One man’s anti-national...



When the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba threatens to blow up the Taj Mahal, we call them ‘anti-national’. Not long ago, when hundreds of Bajrang Dal activists entered the Taj complex with an aggressive and destructive objective, the Supreme Court had to intervene to avert a disaster. The Bajrang Dal is not seen as an anti-national organisation. What a paradox!

M. Shahid Kamal, Aligarh

The constipated toad of a Foreign Minister of India needs to be replaced by a more modern person willing to accomodate neigbours and stop dreaming about Akhand Bharat...

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Ref 12-head-Shah #: 10

[Do they want the Muslims to create a replica of Kaba in India & perform Haj there?]

No, neither the Hindus nor the BJP nor the Vishwa Hindu Parishad nor the Bajrang Dal want Indian Muslims to create a replica of Kaaba in India and perform Haj there.

However, the people who want to do it and who have been doing it for close to a century are Indian Muslims.

Please go to the following website:

http://kamrup.nic.in/

and read about:

``Poa Macca: At Hajo itself, a place of pilgrimage for the Muslim. It is believed that by offering prayer here a faithful gains one fourth spiritual enlightenment of what could be gained at Macca. Hence the name.``

Elsewhere I have read that Pao Mecca was built on holy sand brought from Mecca itself by earlier pilgrims. This was a time when the Haj pilgrimage would take two years to complete because of lack of road and transportation facilities. The Muslims of Assam who made the pilgrimage resolved to do something for their fellow Muslims who could not afford to perform the Haj; they brought back bags of Meccan sand and built a mosque on grounds where the Meccan sand was spread. They associated this mosque with the holiness of Mecca itself and named it Pao Mecca.

As a Hindu, I can understand why Indian Muslims would consider this mosque holy and would want to make a pilgrimage to this site. After all, as Aryan migrants into India, we have deliberately practiced collective amnesia so that our holiest places are associated today only with India and not any place outside of it. Our holiest river today is the Ganges, not the Indus; our holiest confluence is Prayag. In that sense, we can understand the motivation of those earlier Haj pilgrims who, against great odds, brought back Meccan soil to form the foundation of Pao Mecca.

You, on the other hand, will disagree and consider these simple humble Muslims to be nothing but kaffirs.

Therein lies the difference between the pious and the bigoted.

Shah # 10

Bhaijan, it seems many Pakistanis born in the Muslim faith are not thrilled with ``puritanical`` deobandi Islam, either. We Hindus are, afterall, the detested kafirs. You don`t expect us to respect/support that kind of thing, do you? :)

Regards.

India: Guilty conscience?

In a CNN newscast a few days back, Shekhar Kapur, director of the 1994 movie Bandit Queen, was asked why there had been such widespread angry reaction in India to his portrayal of bandit-turned-politician and member of parliament Phoolan Devi. Anger, Kapur responded, (we paraphrase) is often caused by a guilty conscience; this was the first high-profile movie to put the spotlight on India`s caste system.

Anger was also among the most notable reactions of the Indian political and bureaucratic establishment to the ``performance`` of Pakistani leader General Pervez ``Kargil`` Musharraf during and after his recent India visit. How dare he, ran the complaint, hijack a press conference with Indian editors, take his case directly to the public and conduct open (and nationally televised to boot) diplomacy on behalf of his cause - and without a script?

Following his return to Islamabad, the ``villain`` general-turned-president held a press conference there and was bemused, explaining that he didn`t need a script to speak his mind, that in private with Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee much as in public he had been frank and to the point, that reality dictated that Kashmir was the critical issue between India and Pakistan, and that he couldn`t understand why a free press and democratic polity should take him to task for his directness. He also promised that he would offer Vajpayee the same opportunity at a free-wheeling exchange with Pakistani editors upon the latter`s agreed upon return visit.

Actually, much of the Indian press didn`t mind Musharraf`s openness and apparent disdain for diplomatic protocol one bit and found the general - as one editor put it - ``logical, transparent, focused, candid, articulate, belligerent, media-savvy and fearfully self-confident``. It was the politicians and bureaucrats that minded, and we suspect that their discomfort and anger stems from the same cause identified by Kapur. Much as the Indian establishment has a guilty conscience regarding its neglect of the problems arising from the debilitating caste system, it feels guilty (and in part probably also stupid) about not having a cogent or persuasive solution to the Kashmir problem other than maintaining the status quo.

Of course, that status quo is not exactly something to write home about or effectively make hay with in domestic and international politics. Several hundred thousand security forces deployed in Kashmir for over a decade have brought the valley no closer to pacification. The ``major irritant`` in India-Pakistan relations, as General Musharraf calls it, has become an international concern as both India and Pakistan are now declared nuclear powers. For New Delhi to say that confidence-building measures across the board must be enacted in order to establish a context in which the Kashmir conflict can be profitably addressed doesn`t wash in Washington or London any more than in Islamabad.

And there are other elements to India`s guilty conscience and anger at being found out about having no policy beyond the status quo. As the international spotlight more clearly illuminates the situation on the ground in Kashmir, claims that only a small minority of Kashmiris are in favor of self-determination and support separatist forces become untenable.

But while General Musharraf for the time being has seized the initiative (and some may say the high ground), that same international spotlight will also expose more clearly the extent to which the Pakistani military and intelligence services aid the Kashmiri ``freedom fighters``, a hardcore of whom undoubtedly are Islamic terrorists whose agenda goes well beyond Kashmiri self-determination. Their agenda is radical Islamization, Taliban-style, and their target is not just Kashmir, but the rule of moderates (such as Musharraf) in Pakistan. Hence, much as India must confront its own political conscience, Pakistan must be prepared to address what India calls ``cross-border terrorism``. Without such reciprocity and with continuing unwillingness of both sides` moderates to reach a viable compromise solution for Kashmir, the only winners will be both sides` fanatics.

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