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Two Phases of Indian Secularism
As a young backpacker Luke Harding found India charming and eccentric. Fifteen years later he returned as the Guardian`s correspondent. Now, after finishing his time there, he recalls how one terrible incident of sectarian violence in Gujarat brought his love affair with the country to an end
Monday September 15, 2003
The Guardian
I can identify the moment I fell out of love with India quite precisely. It happened at the end of last February. Riots had just broken out in the western state of Gujarat, after a group of Muslims attacked a train full of Hindu pilgrims, killing 59 of them. In Gujarat`s main city, Ahmedabad, trouble was brewing. Hindu mobs had begun taking revenge on their Muslim neighbours - there were stories of murder, looting and arson. Arriving in Ahmedabad from Delhi, I found it impossible to hire a car or driver: nobody wanted to drive into the riots.
But the trouble was not difficult to find: smoke billowed from above Ahmedabad`s old city; and I set off towards it on foot. There were rumours that a mob had hacked to death Ahsan Jafri - a distinguished Indian former MP, and a Muslim - whose Muslim housing estate was surrounded by a sea of Hindu houses. A team from Reuters gave me a lift. Driving through streets full of burned-out shops and broken glass we arrived half an hour later outside his compound, surrounded by thousands of people. Jafri had been dead for several hours, it emerged. A Hindu mob had tipped kerosene through his front door; a few hours later they had dragged him out into the street, chopped off his fingers, and set him on fire. They also set light to several other members of his family, including two small boys. There wasn`t much left of Jafri`s Gulbarg Housing Society by the time we got there: at the bottom of his stairs I discovered a pyre of human remains - hair and the tiny blackened arm of a child, its fist clenched.
Two police officers in khaki told us the situation was dangerous, and that we should leave; they seemed resigned or indifferent to the horror around them, an emotion I had encountered before during what would turn out to be more than three years of reporting on India for the Guardian. Later that afternoon, in the suburb of Naroda Patiya, we watched as a Hindu crowd armed with machetes and iron bars attacked their Muslim neighbours on the other side of the street. All of the shops on the Muslim side of the road were ablaze; smoke blotted out the sky; gas cylinders exploded and boomed; we were, it seemed, in some part of hell. ``We are being killed. Please get us out,`` one Muslim resident, Dishu Banashek, told me. ``They are firing at us. Several of our women have been raped. You must help.``
When we asked a senior policeman to intervene he merely smirked. ``Don`t worry, madam. Everything will be done,`` he told a colleague from the Times mendaciously. We left. It was too dangerous to stay.
The causes of the rioting - India`s worst communal violence for a decade - became clearer the next morning, when I returned to Naroda Patiya - now a ruin of abandoned homes and smouldering rickshaws. Virtually all of the Muslims had fled: I found only a solitary survivor, Narinder Bhai, standing by the charred interior of his home. ``Everything is finished,`` he said, showing off his ruined fridge. ``Many people have been killed here. My wife and children have disappeared.``
Just round the corner, down an alley, I spotted a neat bungalow that had apparently escaped the chaos. It was only on closer inspection that I saw its owner: the charred and mutilated remains of a Muslim woman had been laid out in the front garden and framed by a charpoy. Round the back I found an address book - which identified the woman as Mrs Rochomal; next to it, the Nokia phone she had used in a doomed attempt to summon help. Her son`s washing was hanging on the line, in the morning sunshine; inside there was a neat kitchen and black-and-white family photos. Mrs Rochomal`s flip-flops were still by the front door, next to a swing-seat.
Five minutes later, her mobile phone rang. I didn`t answer it. Her body was less than 60 metres away from the local police station. The police had not, it was obvious, bothered to rescue her: they had, I was forced to conclude, been complicit in her death.
Fifteen years earlier I had visited India for the first time as a backpacker, only dimly aware of the country`s inflammable religious politics. I knew that India was a Hindu-dominated, though officially secular country. I also knew it had a large Muslim minority, which had failed to migrate to Pakistan at the time of partition. But the charming aid workers I spent four months with in the cool hills of Tamil Nadu, Madam Preetha and Babu Isaac Daniel, were eccentric and devout Christians; while the family friends I visited in Bombay were wealthy Parsis. It seemed also that India`s Congress party - led by the secular Rajiv Gandhi - was destined to stay in power for a long time; the party had, after all, governed India for most of the period since Britain left the subcontinent.
Two years later, however, an arms corruption scandal forced Gandhi out of office and a new ideological movement began to dominate the political landscape - the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or India People`s Party. The BJP rejected the idea that India should be secular; its more extreme supporters wanted to turn the country into a Hindu state, a sort of Indian version of Pakistan, an India-stan. By the time I arrived in New Delhi for the Guardian, the BJP was firmly established in power; and the multi-faith India of Mahatma Gandhi and Jarwarharlal Nehru, India`s first prime minister, was, it seemed, in big trouble.
Mahatma Gandhi still appeared on India`s banknotes, of course. But nobody seemed to talk about him any more, and his vision of an inclusive India was under threat from something darker and arguably fascist. Driving last year around Ahmedabad, in Gandhi`s home state, I found a group of Hindu men standing jubilantly around the ruins of a small brick tomb. They had just demolished it. The tomb had belonged to Vali Gujarati - Muslim India`s answer to Geoffrey Chaucer, and the grandfather of Urdu poetry. In its place, the Hindu youths had erected a tiny petal-strewn shrine to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. ``We have broken the mosque and made a temple,`` one of them, Mahesh Patel, told me. What should be done with India`s Muslims, I wondered? ``They should not live in India. They should go and live in Pakistan,`` he told me. This is clearly a tricky proposition: India has 140 million Muslims, out of a population of more than a billion. It is, paradoxically, the world`s second-largest Muslim country after Indonesia. The Muslims I talked to during the Gujarat riots pointed out that they were Indian. They said that they didn`t want to go anywhere.
Returning to Delhi after a harrowing week in dry Gujarat, where it is almost impossible to get a drink, I found dozens of emails from incensed BJP supporters in Britain and elsewhere. Like most commentators I had heaped blame for the riots on Gujarat`s BJP government, and its chief minister, Narendra Modi. I wrote that Modi had condoned and encouraged what was in effect an anti-Muslim pogrom by instructing his Hindu police force to do nothing. The hate mail came flooding in. One email accused me of ``anti-Hindu sentiment``, and announced that dozens of demonstrators would gather outside my flat in the leafy Delhi colony of Nizamuddin the following day.
They didn`t show up. Another pointed out, correctly, that Britain had chopped the subcontinent in half and looted ``trillions of dollars in goodies from India`` - including the Kohinoor diamond. He signed off: ``I piss on your dead whore Queen Mother.`` More ominously, though, I was summoned to meet Mr Kulkarni, a special adviser to India`s ostensibly moderate BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As dusk fell, we sat on wicker chairs in the garden of Kulkarni`s government flat, just opposite the prime minister`s bungalow in Race Course Road. I had failed to understand the nature of Hindu society, he politely suggested over a cup of tea.
It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that the worsening Hindu-Muslim divide in India threatens to tear the country apart, but certainly relations between the country`s two major communities are as bad as they have ever been. Indian Muslims are now in the unenviable position of being cast as fifth columnists for Pakistan, India`s Muslim neighbour and - for most of the time - its enemy. Nehru`s India appears to be dead. Islamic extremists inside India, meanwhile, are taking their own form of bloody revenge - killing more than 50 people, for example, last month in two gruesome car bombings in Bombay.
The origins of the violence ultimately go back to Ayodhya, a small, sleepy temple town in north India, where cannabis grows in the ditches, and sadhus, or Hindu holy men, mingle with large gangs of monkeys. It was here in 1992 that Hindu zealots tore down a mosque on a site they claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram, Hinduism`s most important deity. The episode propelled the BJP to power, provoked widespread communal riots and severely damaged India`s secular credentials.
The issue of whether a temple should be built on the disputed site - and India`s hostile relationship with Pakistan - continue to dominate Indian public life. In the meantime, little attention is paid to the plight of the country`s 400 million poor. Late last year I travelled to Baran, an impoverished district in Rajasthan, where dozens of low-caste tribal people had reportedly starved to death. I found plenty of villagers who were still eating grass; the rumours of starvation were true. There was, it transpired, plenty of food in government warehouses - it was merely that corrupt local officials had taken it for themselves.
In his latest book, India in Slow Motion, Mark Tully blames India`s problems on the ``neta-babu raj`` - the alliance between politicians and bureaucrats to hang on to power. Tully is probably right. But it is not just in rural India that the pace of change has been slow. Faced with bankruptcy in the early 90s, India embarked on a programme of economic liberalisation. Delhi now boasts Marks & Spencer and Pizza Express. The biggest change in Delhi during my tenure in India has been the arrival of the coffee bar, and the admirable coffee chain Barista. It is now possible to buy a latte or espresso in India`s big metros - in a country famous for its tea. But in general, India`s infrastructure is as creaking and run-down as ever. During the monsoon, the phone lines crack up; and in the infernal summer months, the power fails. Maintaining electrical appliances - fax machine, water purifier, back-up power supply - is a full-time job. In the quiet periods after last year`s Gujarat riots I thought often of Mrs Rochomal, lying burned and mutilated in her neat front garden, and of the horror of her last few minutes. Did her children stumble on her body? Did the people who killed her feel any remorse? I shall return to India, but not for a while.
Email
luke.harding@guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,12559,1042180,00.html
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 15, 2003 11:32 am
Heart of darkness As a young backpacker Luke Harding found India charming and eccentric. Fifteen years later he returned as the Guardian`s correspondent. Now, after finishing his time there, he recalls how one terrible incident of sectarian violence in Gujarat brought his love affair with the country to an end
Monday September 15, 2003
The Guardian
I can identify the moment I fell out of love with India quite precisely. It happened at the end of last February. Riots had just broken out in the western state of Gujarat, after a group of Muslims attacked a train full of Hindu pilgrims, killing 59 of them. In Gujarat`s main city, Ahmedabad, trouble was brewing. Hindu mobs had begun taking revenge on their Muslim neighbours - there were stories of murder, looting and arson. Arriving in Ahmedabad from Delhi, I found it impossible to hire a car or driver: nobody wanted to drive into the riots.
But the trouble was not difficult to find: smoke billowed from above Ahmedabad`s old city; and I set off towards it on foot. There were rumours that a mob had hacked to death Ahsan Jafri - a distinguished Indian former MP, and a Muslim - whose Muslim housing estate was surrounded by a sea of Hindu houses. A team from Reuters gave me a lift. Driving through streets full of burned-out shops and broken glass we arrived half an hour later outside his compound, surrounded by thousands of people. Jafri had been dead for several hours, it emerged. A Hindu mob had tipped kerosene through his front door; a few hours later they had dragged him out into the street, chopped off his fingers, and set him on fire. They also set light to several other members of his family, including two small boys. There wasn`t much left of Jafri`s Gulbarg Housing Society by the time we got there: at the bottom of his stairs I discovered a pyre of human remains - hair and the tiny blackened arm of a child, its fist clenched.
Two police officers in khaki told us the situation was dangerous, and that we should leave; they seemed resigned or indifferent to the horror around them, an emotion I had encountered before during what would turn out to be more than three years of reporting on India for the Guardian. Later that afternoon, in the suburb of Naroda Patiya, we watched as a Hindu crowd armed with machetes and iron bars attacked their Muslim neighbours on the other side of the street. All of the shops on the Muslim side of the road were ablaze; smoke blotted out the sky; gas cylinders exploded and boomed; we were, it seemed, in some part of hell. ``We are being killed. Please get us out,`` one Muslim resident, Dishu Banashek, told me. ``They are firing at us. Several of our women have been raped. You must help.``
When we asked a senior policeman to intervene he merely smirked. ``Don`t worry, madam. Everything will be done,`` he told a colleague from the Times mendaciously. We left. It was too dangerous to stay.
The causes of the rioting - India`s worst communal violence for a decade - became clearer the next morning, when I returned to Naroda Patiya - now a ruin of abandoned homes and smouldering rickshaws. Virtually all of the Muslims had fled: I found only a solitary survivor, Narinder Bhai, standing by the charred interior of his home. ``Everything is finished,`` he said, showing off his ruined fridge. ``Many people have been killed here. My wife and children have disappeared.``
Just round the corner, down an alley, I spotted a neat bungalow that had apparently escaped the chaos. It was only on closer inspection that I saw its owner: the charred and mutilated remains of a Muslim woman had been laid out in the front garden and framed by a charpoy. Round the back I found an address book - which identified the woman as Mrs Rochomal; next to it, the Nokia phone she had used in a doomed attempt to summon help. Her son`s washing was hanging on the line, in the morning sunshine; inside there was a neat kitchen and black-and-white family photos. Mrs Rochomal`s flip-flops were still by the front door, next to a swing-seat.
Five minutes later, her mobile phone rang. I didn`t answer it. Her body was less than 60 metres away from the local police station. The police had not, it was obvious, bothered to rescue her: they had, I was forced to conclude, been complicit in her death.
Fifteen years earlier I had visited India for the first time as a backpacker, only dimly aware of the country`s inflammable religious politics. I knew that India was a Hindu-dominated, though officially secular country. I also knew it had a large Muslim minority, which had failed to migrate to Pakistan at the time of partition. But the charming aid workers I spent four months with in the cool hills of Tamil Nadu, Madam Preetha and Babu Isaac Daniel, were eccentric and devout Christians; while the family friends I visited in Bombay were wealthy Parsis. It seemed also that India`s Congress party - led by the secular Rajiv Gandhi - was destined to stay in power for a long time; the party had, after all, governed India for most of the period since Britain left the subcontinent.
Two years later, however, an arms corruption scandal forced Gandhi out of office and a new ideological movement began to dominate the political landscape - the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), or India People`s Party. The BJP rejected the idea that India should be secular; its more extreme supporters wanted to turn the country into a Hindu state, a sort of Indian version of Pakistan, an India-stan. By the time I arrived in New Delhi for the Guardian, the BJP was firmly established in power; and the multi-faith India of Mahatma Gandhi and Jarwarharlal Nehru, India`s first prime minister, was, it seemed, in big trouble.
Mahatma Gandhi still appeared on India`s banknotes, of course. But nobody seemed to talk about him any more, and his vision of an inclusive India was under threat from something darker and arguably fascist. Driving last year around Ahmedabad, in Gandhi`s home state, I found a group of Hindu men standing jubilantly around the ruins of a small brick tomb. They had just demolished it. The tomb had belonged to Vali Gujarati - Muslim India`s answer to Geoffrey Chaucer, and the grandfather of Urdu poetry. In its place, the Hindu youths had erected a tiny petal-strewn shrine to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman. ``We have broken the mosque and made a temple,`` one of them, Mahesh Patel, told me. What should be done with India`s Muslims, I wondered? ``They should not live in India. They should go and live in Pakistan,`` he told me. This is clearly a tricky proposition: India has 140 million Muslims, out of a population of more than a billion. It is, paradoxically, the world`s second-largest Muslim country after Indonesia. The Muslims I talked to during the Gujarat riots pointed out that they were Indian. They said that they didn`t want to go anywhere.
Returning to Delhi after a harrowing week in dry Gujarat, where it is almost impossible to get a drink, I found dozens of emails from incensed BJP supporters in Britain and elsewhere. Like most commentators I had heaped blame for the riots on Gujarat`s BJP government, and its chief minister, Narendra Modi. I wrote that Modi had condoned and encouraged what was in effect an anti-Muslim pogrom by instructing his Hindu police force to do nothing. The hate mail came flooding in. One email accused me of ``anti-Hindu sentiment``, and announced that dozens of demonstrators would gather outside my flat in the leafy Delhi colony of Nizamuddin the following day.
They didn`t show up. Another pointed out, correctly, that Britain had chopped the subcontinent in half and looted ``trillions of dollars in goodies from India`` - including the Kohinoor diamond. He signed off: ``I piss on your dead whore Queen Mother.`` More ominously, though, I was summoned to meet Mr Kulkarni, a special adviser to India`s ostensibly moderate BJP prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. As dusk fell, we sat on wicker chairs in the garden of Kulkarni`s government flat, just opposite the prime minister`s bungalow in Race Course Road. I had failed to understand the nature of Hindu society, he politely suggested over a cup of tea.
It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to say that the worsening Hindu-Muslim divide in India threatens to tear the country apart, but certainly relations between the country`s two major communities are as bad as they have ever been. Indian Muslims are now in the unenviable position of being cast as fifth columnists for Pakistan, India`s Muslim neighbour and - for most of the time - its enemy. Nehru`s India appears to be dead. Islamic extremists inside India, meanwhile, are taking their own form of bloody revenge - killing more than 50 people, for example, last month in two gruesome car bombings in Bombay.
The origins of the violence ultimately go back to Ayodhya, a small, sleepy temple town in north India, where cannabis grows in the ditches, and sadhus, or Hindu holy men, mingle with large gangs of monkeys. It was here in 1992 that Hindu zealots tore down a mosque on a site they claimed was the birthplace of Lord Ram, Hinduism`s most important deity. The episode propelled the BJP to power, provoked widespread communal riots and severely damaged India`s secular credentials.
The issue of whether a temple should be built on the disputed site - and India`s hostile relationship with Pakistan - continue to dominate Indian public life. In the meantime, little attention is paid to the plight of the country`s 400 million poor. Late last year I travelled to Baran, an impoverished district in Rajasthan, where dozens of low-caste tribal people had reportedly starved to death. I found plenty of villagers who were still eating grass; the rumours of starvation were true. There was, it transpired, plenty of food in government warehouses - it was merely that corrupt local officials had taken it for themselves.
In his latest book, India in Slow Motion, Mark Tully blames India`s problems on the ``neta-babu raj`` - the alliance between politicians and bureaucrats to hang on to power. Tully is probably right. But it is not just in rural India that the pace of change has been slow. Faced with bankruptcy in the early 90s, India embarked on a programme of economic liberalisation. Delhi now boasts Marks & Spencer and Pizza Express. The biggest change in Delhi during my tenure in India has been the arrival of the coffee bar, and the admirable coffee chain Barista. It is now possible to buy a latte or espresso in India`s big metros - in a country famous for its tea. But in general, India`s infrastructure is as creaking and run-down as ever. During the monsoon, the phone lines crack up; and in the infernal summer months, the power fails. Maintaining electrical appliances - fax machine, water purifier, back-up power supply - is a full-time job. In the quiet periods after last year`s Gujarat riots I thought often of Mrs Rochomal, lying burned and mutilated in her neat front garden, and of the horror of her last few minutes. Did her children stumble on her body? Did the people who killed her feel any remorse? I shall return to India, but not for a while.
luke.harding@guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/india/story/0,12559,1042180,00.html
Two Phases of Indian Secularism
India`s Muslim Time Bomb
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 15, 2003 08:08 am
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/15/opinion/15MISH.html?ex=1064203200&en=1b4d910e6ca8509d&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLEIndia`s Muslim Time Bomb
By PANKAJ MISHRA
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 15, 2003 06:44 am
Pakistan the odd one outBy Syed Saleem Shahzad
KARACHI - With Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Indian counterpart Atal Bihari Vajpayee agreeing in their condemnation of terrorism, elements within the Pakistani intelligence and security apparatus see the two as part of an unholy alliance, and a threat to Pakistani interests, especially in Indian-held Kashmir.
This comes at a time when Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf is under US pressure to improve relations with India, as well as to establish diplomatic ties with Israel.
Sources in Pakistan`s strategic quarters told Asia Times Online that initially the foreign office was encouraged to react cautiously to the new Indian-Israeli warmth following Sharon`s visit to India last week, even though it could be detrimental to Pakistan`s interests.
However, the Strategic and Planning Department, which comprises army officers and which was established to safeguard national interests and keep a vigilant eye on departments like the foreign office, then stepped forward and instructed foreign affairs on how to respond. Consequently, the foreign office issued a strongly-worded protest, terming the India-Israel alliance as Yahood-o-Honoud (Judia-Hindu) and against Pakistan`s interests.
The India-Israel nexus, however, is not a new development. Israeli intelligence has consulted with India ever since Hamas and Islamic Jihad recruits trained in Afghanistan during the Taliban days, when Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) had complete influence in that country, as well as orchestrating the Kashmiri struggle.
However, the situation has changed completely in Afghanistan following Musharraf`s reversal of support, under US pressure, of the Taliban, and even in Kashmir, overtly at least, the ISI has had to back away from supporting militants in the Kashmir struggle.
Nowadays, after US and French intelligence agencies, Israeli and Indian intelligence have the biggest presence in Afghanistan. Israel, reportedly through Mossad, has established indirect contact with Kabul, and both countries are secretly making trade deals and cooperating in various fields.
According to Pakistani security sources, Israel and India aim to further their aims on Pakistan`s western border with Afghanistan. Under the guise of non-governmental organizations, they are coordinating with Pakistani Pashtun nationalists and providing them with resources to promote the idea of a ``Pashtun land`` and revive the contentious issue of the Durand Line.
This revolves around the so-called Durand Line, named after a British colonial official, that marks the present day border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The present-day Afghan government says that the agreement reached between their King Abdur Rahman Khan and British colonial official Sir Henry Mortimer Durand in 1893 was for 100 years only, and expired in 1993. The Afghans are now asking the US to renegotiate the border, and some Afghan officials have already issued a new map that shows such major Pakistani cities as Peshawar and Quetta in Afghanistan.
The issue has already caused several skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan and has forced the US to form a tripartite commission to resolve border disputes between its two allies. The commission, which also includes the US, has already held three meetings and officials in Washington say that they expect the Durand Line issue also to dominate the fourth meeting, scheduled this month in Rawalpindi.
In the previous meetings the US administration made it clear to both sides that it has no desire to get involved in re-negotiating a deal made more than a 100 years ago between Afghanistan and Britain. In its last meeting, the tripartite commission asked its sub-committee to continue with deliberations on proposals to sort out disputes over some border posts. The commission also established a hotline between Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent further armed clashes between the two countries. The hotline also allows the two US allies to stay in touch with US military officials based in the region.
But apparently Afghanistan wants more. The sources say that Kabul has officially asked the US to use its influence on Pakistan to force it to re-demarcate the Durand Line. Islamabad, however, has already rejected this demand, saying that the Durand Line is a settled issue and it has no desire to reopen it. Informally, Pakistani officials are believed to have complained to the US that they believe India is using its influence on the Northern Alliance, which dominates the present government in Kabul and has close ties to New Delhi, to revive an old and settled issue.
The heart of the problem is that the Durand Line runs through the middle of the lands of the most important eastern Afghan Pashtun tribes, and since the line was drawn, these eastern Pashtun have resolutely refused to recognize it. The Pashtun are divided into more than 60 clans, all speaking the common Pashto language. They number some 12.5 million in Afghanistan, where the major clans are the Durrani and Ghilzai, and 14 million in Pakistan. In Pakistan, Pashto speakers are only 8 percent of the population of 145 million, which is otherwise dominated by Punjabis and four lesser ethnic groups. In Afghanistan, however, with a population of barely 26 million, the Pashtun constitute nearly half and naturally dominate Afghan affairs.
No Afghan regime after 1893, even the Taliban, has accepted the validity of the Durand Line. But Pakistan - formed out of old British India in 1947 - has always sought to make it permanent while trying to keep the problem at arm`s length. The fact that 14 million Pashtun inhabit western Pakistan is why Pakistan has tolerated the ``Free`` Tribal area west of Peshawar. This fact also explains why Islamabad always enjoyed better relations with the southeastern Kandahari Pashtuns, who are fewer and had not suffered at all from the 1893 map-making.
Pakistan continued its ``arm`s length`` policy by putting the Federally Administered Tribal Agency (FATA), as the Pashtun-inhabited border area with Afghanistan is identified in Pakistan, under the direct control of the central government. Frontier regulations stipulated that the clans could retain their own legal order, with elders` councils and local jirgas (courts), as well as the practice of going to war to resolve tribal feuds over land and livestock. There remain to this day places in FATA where general tribal law is in force.
Now Asia Times Online has learned that in the past few months the Indian-Israel nexus has been operating in Kandahar and Jalalabad in Afghanistan, from where it has activated nationalist elements on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line to question the validity of this border.
On the Kashmiri front, meanwhile, under US pressure, Pakistan`s cooling in support of militants has affected their morale, while the split in the Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella grouping of 25 secessionist Kashmiri groups, is also a political setback and will weaken Pakistan`s grip on events in the disputed area. In this environment, if Israel provides India with technical and intelligence assistance to combat Kashmiri militancy, it would be a further setback for Pakistan.
Thus the wheel has turned against the ISI. Afghanistan is now an open playing field for Indian and Israeli intelligence, but a prohibited area for the ISI. As is Kashmir. The situation is reaching a stage where Pakistan will have to take a decisive step - complete surrender or an open fight.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EI16Df01.html
This Beloved Arab Colony
14-09-2003
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http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/Opinion.asp?ArticleID=97496
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 14, 2003 08:53 pm
Abdullah Al Madani: Indo-Israeli ties: Arabs have none but themselves to blame 14-09-2003
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http://www.gulf-news.com/Articles/Opinion.asp?ArticleID=97496
A Decision to Regret
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s944794.htm
One critic is Mansoor Ijaz. In 1997, the Pakistani-born American negotiated with Sudan to provide crucial information on the Osama bin Laden to the US. He also worked on an attempt to have bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan, through the United Arab Emirates, in 2000. He also has family connections with Pakistan`s intelligence establishment and he`s recently met with key politicians and Mujahideen leaders in the region.
MANSOOR IJAZ: You know, the Pakistanis now have an enormous responsibility to, as I said, put up or shut up and so far, what they`ve done is they`ve milked the American people for their $150 or $200-million a month in aid to keep the profits on the economy propped up, but they have not yet taken that final step of really turning up the heat and going into these tribal areas and trying to, you know, pin bin Laden down.
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Mansoor Ijaz says bin Laden is probably limited to a small area.
MANSOOR IJAZ: The most likely area that he is in is what they call the ``FATA region`` of Pakistan and Afghanistan. These are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that are just north of Quetta, the border town of Quetta, which is in the southern part of Baluchistan, and the northern city of Peshawar.
That leaves us with the question of well, how is he then being protected in those areas? Why is it that they`re willing to do that, these tribal leaders are willing to do that? Something like 70 to 80 per cent of the illegal trade that goes from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean comes through the FATA region in terms of illegal border trade.
Those guys are fairly wealthy, they`re very well entrenched and they love the fact that they are able to snub their nose at the most powerful country in the world. They have arranged a mechanism in which the first layer of protection for bin Laden are the tribal, what I would call, villagers if you will. Just ordinary people who are trained to immediately alert the tribal elders if US Special Forces were to land or if there were to be another incursion by Pakistani Army troops or something like that.
The second layer are the tribal elders and in reality, the second layer is only about a handful of tribal elders that have very detailed knowledge of where bin Laden is. And then the third layer are his own close inside associates. People perhaps like his son or other trusted bodyguards, who will be given a signal that if they got the message that somebody had gotten through the second layer, that they should go ahead and commit the final act of martyrdom.
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: In an interview with the BBC, Pakistan`s President denies a lack of effort.
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: To presume that we have knowledge of every inch of the territory and who is in it is not on, and therefore I say I cannot really be very sure whether he`s in Pakistan or the Afghan side.
BBC REPORTER: Do you think he`ll ever be caught?
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: Well, your guess will be as good or as bad as mine. We are trying our best.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: The President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf.
As with past such tapes, a good deal of effort is being put into trying to glean as much information as possible from this latest bin Laden tape, right down to an assessment of the flowers shown in bloom on the tape and what they say about season and location, critically about when the tape was recorded. Well, it appears that it was recorded some time ago and thus some experts believe that it`s of little use to the agencies trying to find bin Laden.
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 13, 2003 07:19 am
Pakistan gets $150 or $200-million a month in aid from UShttp://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s944794.htm
One critic is Mansoor Ijaz. In 1997, the Pakistani-born American negotiated with Sudan to provide crucial information on the Osama bin Laden to the US. He also worked on an attempt to have bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan, through the United Arab Emirates, in 2000. He also has family connections with Pakistan`s intelligence establishment and he`s recently met with key politicians and Mujahideen leaders in the region.
MANSOOR IJAZ: You know, the Pakistanis now have an enormous responsibility to, as I said, put up or shut up and so far, what they`ve done is they`ve milked the American people for their $150 or $200-million a month in aid to keep the profits on the economy propped up, but they have not yet taken that final step of really turning up the heat and going into these tribal areas and trying to, you know, pin bin Laden down.
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: Mansoor Ijaz says bin Laden is probably limited to a small area.
MANSOOR IJAZ: The most likely area that he is in is what they call the ``FATA region`` of Pakistan and Afghanistan. These are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas that are just north of Quetta, the border town of Quetta, which is in the southern part of Baluchistan, and the northern city of Peshawar.
That leaves us with the question of well, how is he then being protected in those areas? Why is it that they`re willing to do that, these tribal leaders are willing to do that? Something like 70 to 80 per cent of the illegal trade that goes from Central Asia to the Indian Ocean comes through the FATA region in terms of illegal border trade.
Those guys are fairly wealthy, they`re very well entrenched and they love the fact that they are able to snub their nose at the most powerful country in the world. They have arranged a mechanism in which the first layer of protection for bin Laden are the tribal, what I would call, villagers if you will. Just ordinary people who are trained to immediately alert the tribal elders if US Special Forces were to land or if there were to be another incursion by Pakistani Army troops or something like that.
The second layer are the tribal elders and in reality, the second layer is only about a handful of tribal elders that have very detailed knowledge of where bin Laden is. And then the third layer are his own close inside associates. People perhaps like his son or other trusted bodyguards, who will be given a signal that if they got the message that somebody had gotten through the second layer, that they should go ahead and commit the final act of martyrdom.
RAFAEL EPSTEIN: In an interview with the BBC, Pakistan`s President denies a lack of effort.
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: To presume that we have knowledge of every inch of the territory and who is in it is not on, and therefore I say I cannot really be very sure whether he`s in Pakistan or the Afghan side.
BBC REPORTER: Do you think he`ll ever be caught?
PERVEZ MUSHARRAF: Well, your guess will be as good or as bad as mine. We are trying our best.
HAMISH ROBERTSON: The President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf.
As with past such tapes, a good deal of effort is being put into trying to glean as much information as possible from this latest bin Laden tape, right down to an assessment of the flowers shown in bloom on the tape and what they say about season and location, critically about when the tape was recorded. Well, it appears that it was recorded some time ago and thus some experts believe that it`s of little use to the agencies trying to find bin Laden.
Musharraf : Self Styled Saviour Stuck in a Rut
By Bernard-Henri Levy
Friday, September 12, 2003; Page A31
PARIS -- There have been reports recently in the American press concerning the probability that the government of Pakistan has traded nuclear secrets and maybe even technology with Iran. Such disclosures were welcomed by those of us here in France who consider ourselves part of the ``anti-anti-American society`` and who have long wondered why the United States doesn`t seem more concerned with the character of its major ally in the war against terrorism.
As an observer of Pakistan for more than 30 years -- I first went to the region in 1971 as a war correspondent covering the conflict between India and Pakistan over Bangladesh -- I have seen the government become ever more degraded as it fell from the hands of the Bhuttos to military leaders such as Pervez Musharraf and then to the point where now -- as the Daniel Pearl affair showed -- it is doubtful that the executive branch of the country`s government is fully in charge. Is it known in the West that President Musharraf himself had to cancel several trips to Karachi, the economic capital of his own country, for safety reasons?
My last few visits, including one on a diplomatic mission for France following the Afghan war and several more as part of my investigation into the death of journalist Daniel Pearl, brought this point home and gave me a full sense of who really runs things there. What has become obvious is the tremendous power of the ISI, Pakistan`s secret service -- so dreaded by average citizens that they rarely speak its name but refer to it instead as the ``three letters`` -- and the deep infiltration of this powerful organization by militant fundamentalists and jihadists.
The most dominant factions in the ISI, in fact, have come to constitute a virtual jihadist group itself. And this is why Pakistan has become the subject of numerous other urgent questions: Did it shelter Osama bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks? Has it provided bin Laden with medical attention since the Afghan war, in the Binori Town Mosque in Karachi, which I happened to visit? Was it involved, and to what extent, in the murder of Pearl?
It is in this context that it`s advisable to consider the problem of the Pakistani nuclear program and the dangers of proliferation that it presents -- with Iran certainly, but also with al Qaeda and the still-at-large elements of the Taliban. In my book I bring up the case of the so-called ``father of the Islamist bomb,`` the man after whom Pakistan`s leading nuclear laboratory is named, Abdul Qader Khan. He is a revered figure in his country. He is cheered in the streets. His birthday is sanctified in the mosques. I witnessed an Islamist demonstration in which gigantic portraits of him led the march. But this man has long been not only a government official but a fanatical Islamist. This public figure, this great scientist, this man who knows better than anyone (since it is he who developed them) the most sensitive secrets of Pakistan`s nuclear program, is both close to the ISI and a member of Lashkar e-Toiba, a group closely allied with al Qaeda. My story concerned Khan`s ``vacations`` to North Korea and his links with bin Laden`s men; one of my hypotheses is that Pearl may have been killed to prevent him from reporting on such trafficking of nuclear know-how.
It is clear that the United States accepted the moral imperative when it came to the Afghan war. It is also obvious that, after Sept. 11, the war against terrorism had to be declared, and that it has to be carried on, with all the necessary alliances. But what is the real necessity, in this framework, of the U.S.-Pakistan alliance? Was it necessary, after the most recent visit of Musharraf to Washington, to continue the massive funding of his regime? Is it not possible at least to tie this aid to certain simple political conditions -- for example, that the Pakistanis must give proof of a genuine effort to reform the ISI; or that they impose the most severe sanctions on their high-ranking nuclear scientists and officials who take ``vacations`` in Iran, North Korea or Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan?
This story, unfortunately, I`m unable to cover further, because I have become part of a growing club of reporters who cannot return to Pakistan, simply because they don`t want to end up like one of the best journalists to have covered the nuclear trading story, Daniel Pearl. But I am convinced that a harsher tone, a reformulation of the terms of alliance, is called for, so that our relationship with Musharraf will be more than a gullible, naive embrace -- and will conform to moral as well as political imperatives. And I would add that waiting for us is the other Pakistan -- that which is liberal, democratic, secular, which fights, back against the wall, against mounting Islamism, and which does not understand why, in this combat, we are not at its side.
Bernard-Henri Levy is the author of ``Who Killed Daniel Pearl?``
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63098-2003Sep11.html
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 12, 2003 12:32 pm
Doubts About an Ally By Bernard-Henri Levy
Friday, September 12, 2003; Page A31
PARIS -- There have been reports recently in the American press concerning the probability that the government of Pakistan has traded nuclear secrets and maybe even technology with Iran. Such disclosures were welcomed by those of us here in France who consider ourselves part of the ``anti-anti-American society`` and who have long wondered why the United States doesn`t seem more concerned with the character of its major ally in the war against terrorism.
As an observer of Pakistan for more than 30 years -- I first went to the region in 1971 as a war correspondent covering the conflict between India and Pakistan over Bangladesh -- I have seen the government become ever more degraded as it fell from the hands of the Bhuttos to military leaders such as Pervez Musharraf and then to the point where now -- as the Daniel Pearl affair showed -- it is doubtful that the executive branch of the country`s government is fully in charge. Is it known in the West that President Musharraf himself had to cancel several trips to Karachi, the economic capital of his own country, for safety reasons?
My last few visits, including one on a diplomatic mission for France following the Afghan war and several more as part of my investigation into the death of journalist Daniel Pearl, brought this point home and gave me a full sense of who really runs things there. What has become obvious is the tremendous power of the ISI, Pakistan`s secret service -- so dreaded by average citizens that they rarely speak its name but refer to it instead as the ``three letters`` -- and the deep infiltration of this powerful organization by militant fundamentalists and jihadists.
The most dominant factions in the ISI, in fact, have come to constitute a virtual jihadist group itself. And this is why Pakistan has become the subject of numerous other urgent questions: Did it shelter Osama bin Laden and other members of al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks? Has it provided bin Laden with medical attention since the Afghan war, in the Binori Town Mosque in Karachi, which I happened to visit? Was it involved, and to what extent, in the murder of Pearl?
It is in this context that it`s advisable to consider the problem of the Pakistani nuclear program and the dangers of proliferation that it presents -- with Iran certainly, but also with al Qaeda and the still-at-large elements of the Taliban. In my book I bring up the case of the so-called ``father of the Islamist bomb,`` the man after whom Pakistan`s leading nuclear laboratory is named, Abdul Qader Khan. He is a revered figure in his country. He is cheered in the streets. His birthday is sanctified in the mosques. I witnessed an Islamist demonstration in which gigantic portraits of him led the march. But this man has long been not only a government official but a fanatical Islamist. This public figure, this great scientist, this man who knows better than anyone (since it is he who developed them) the most sensitive secrets of Pakistan`s nuclear program, is both close to the ISI and a member of Lashkar e-Toiba, a group closely allied with al Qaeda. My story concerned Khan`s ``vacations`` to North Korea and his links with bin Laden`s men; one of my hypotheses is that Pearl may have been killed to prevent him from reporting on such trafficking of nuclear know-how.
It is clear that the United States accepted the moral imperative when it came to the Afghan war. It is also obvious that, after Sept. 11, the war against terrorism had to be declared, and that it has to be carried on, with all the necessary alliances. But what is the real necessity, in this framework, of the U.S.-Pakistan alliance? Was it necessary, after the most recent visit of Musharraf to Washington, to continue the massive funding of his regime? Is it not possible at least to tie this aid to certain simple political conditions -- for example, that the Pakistanis must give proof of a genuine effort to reform the ISI; or that they impose the most severe sanctions on their high-ranking nuclear scientists and officials who take ``vacations`` in Iran, North Korea or Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan?
This story, unfortunately, I`m unable to cover further, because I have become part of a growing club of reporters who cannot return to Pakistan, simply because they don`t want to end up like one of the best journalists to have covered the nuclear trading story, Daniel Pearl. But I am convinced that a harsher tone, a reformulation of the terms of alliance, is called for, so that our relationship with Musharraf will be more than a gullible, naive embrace -- and will conform to moral as well as political imperatives. And I would add that waiting for us is the other Pakistan -- that which is liberal, democratic, secular, which fights, back against the wall, against mounting Islamism, and which does not understand why, in this combat, we are not at its side.
Bernard-Henri Levy is the author of ``Who Killed Daniel Pearl?``
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A63098-2003Sep11.html
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 12, 2003 12:32 pm
NLINE DISPATCHBoom Town
by John Elliott
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Srinagar, Kashmir
During a visit by India`s president, A.P.J.Abdul Kalam, to the disputed Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir in June, terrorists staged a suicide attack on an army camp in the region, killing twelve Indian soldiers. A year earlier, 34 soldiers and their families were killed in a similar attack. Battles between terrorists and security forces are a daily occurrence in the state, and the government says at least 40,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since an anti-India insurgency, backed in part by Pakistan, began in 1989. As militancy grew through the 1990s, schools, universities, and hospitals closed and India`s often-brutal security forces roamed the streets, frequently generating more fear than safety because of their scarce concern for human rights. Previously one of India`s main tourist areas, the attractions of Kashmir`s mountains and valleys faded rapidly, especially after five foreign tourists were kidnapped in 1995 and never seen again. Traditional handicraft artisans lost sales for rugs, shawls, and painted boxes and other businesses declined.
On the face of it, all this sounds like other long-running insurgencies in the world, places where guns and terror take over people`s daily lives. But there is a difference. Instead of being in ruins, the economy in urban Kashmir and in some Jammu cities is booming, thriving on the unrest. The hard-core poor are still poor, but many others have become rich. There is a property boom in Kashmir`s summer capital of Srinagar, famous in more peaceful times for colonial-style houseboats on its picturesque Dal Lake. Property values in Srinagar have risen by as much as 600 percent in 14 years; prices elsewhere in India have, at best, been flat. Large houses are being built in many parts of the city, replacing traditional plaster and wooden styles with expensive marble. Jewelry shops have proliferated in Kashmir, along with shopping complexes, large cars, and domestic electrical goods like fridges and coolers.
Ironically, however, this boom is financed mostly by an inflow of money connected to the continual unrest in Kashmir. Pakistan`s secret service, other Islamic countries, and Kashmiris living abroad send money to keep Pakistan-supported terrorists operating in Kashmir. There are no precise figures for the funds coming from Pakistan and other Islamic sources, but a local police chief estimates it at about $20 million per year. Three years ago an activist arrested in India carrying $100,000 told police that it was part of $400,000 collected by Yasin Malik, a Kashmiri leader, from a prominent Kashmiri businessman in America for ``the cause.`` The other $300,000, he said, had been routed via Pakistan and Nepal.
India`s intelligence agency, meanwhile, finances under-cover militants in Kashmir, some of whom are paid to defect from terrorist organizations and other covert activities. Consumer spending is also boosted by the income of the 300,000-plus Indian security forces stationed in the state, who pad their wallets with bribes paid by militants for help evading police and military personnel, and monetary rewards they receive from the government when they kill militants or capture guns. Finally, there is the general economic aid from India`s central government, which outstrips the amounts given to any other Indian state, because Delhi wants to keep Kashmiris in the government`s good graces. Some of the legitimate funds are used for their designated purposes. But militants, politicians, bureaucrats, and security personnel siphon off a large portion. ``Everyone seems to be on the take,`` says an activist in the Pakistan-backed All-Party Hurriyat Conference, a group of 23 Kashmir-based parties with separatist roots whose leaders are themselves reputed to have siphoned off insurgency funds.
Even some businesses that have altogether avoided the state`s graft trade are profiting. The Jammu & Kashmir Bank, majority-owned by the state government, is India`s fastest growing bank. When central government-owned banks reduced their Kashmiri presence in the 1990s due to the region`s violence, Jammu & Kashmir Bank obtained a near-monopoly on local business, including the state`s hefty development funds and private savings. In fact, the bank did so well that it built up enough capital to expand. It has since marketed itself aggressively--and successfully--across India. Roughly half its deposits and advances are now with customers outside Kashmir, and it has become a major lender to India`s biggest companies. The bank`s share price has gone up from 90 cents to nearly $5.00 in the past two years, and its profits role rose last year by a record 30 percent.
All of which might be somewhat reassuring, except that the widespread benefits of the boom diminish pressure to stop the fighting. Many people ``have a vested interest in keeping things as they are,`` says Mehbooba Sayeed Mufti, the outspoken 43-year old president of the Peoples` Democratic Party, which has led Kashmir`s coalition government since last October. ``The current situation suits many people.`` Mufti explains that bureaucrats and politicians are able to take advantage of the militancy, extorting bribes and siphoning off development funds, ``because no one has asked for accountability.`` Even low-level public servants benefit from the violence. Mufti says several hundred teachers refuse to go to their schools because, they say, of the security threat. But they still collect their salaries.
This is especially worrying at a time when the prospects for a reduction of violence, though not high, seem better than they have been for quite some time. People in Kashmir are growing tired of bloodshed, and moderates in the state are calling for talks rather than guns. Atal Bihari Vajpayee, India`s prime minister, made a historic visit to Srinagar in April to promote moderation. He offered a ``hand of friendship`` to Pakistan and pledged to help rebuild life in Kashmir. And President Kalam`s visit brought Kashmiris a further sense that a return to peace and normality was possible. Indeed, Mufti argues that even after 14 years of bloodshed and fighting aimed at breaking away from India, most Kashmiris would probably choose to remain part of India if only politicians in New Delhi would make them feel wanted and restore most of the high degree of autonomy the state enjoyed for six years after India became independent.
But a settlement is unlikely anytime soon. The United States and Britain are pushing Pakistan and India to get together, and reconciliation might help push events forward in Kashmir. But there is little sign of much progress, in large part because most vested interests do not want the general situation to change. In the meantime, the only people who benefit from this stalemate are the power brokers and magnates getting rich on Kashmir`s booming shady economy.
John Elliott covers India for Fortune and other publications.
Balkan Tragedy: A Re-enactment of the 1971 Genocide in Bangladesh
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 12, 2003 07:54 am
http://www.globalwebpost.com/genocide1971/chaps/kiss_71.htm
Afghanistan Reflections
Is the Durand Line storm brewing again?
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: Afghanistan is asking the US to renegotiate its border with Pakistan, while some Afghan officials have issued a new map that shows Peshawar and Quetta as part of Afghanistan, says a United Press International (UPI) report.
However, the US neither has the expertise nor the desire to resolve what the report calls a “standoff.” The Durand Line was drawn in 1893 with a life of 100 years which means it “expired” 10 years ago, a position that the present Kabul regime maintains.
According to the report, it is this issue that has led to several skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan since April and has forced the US to form a tripartite commission, which has already held three meetings. The US officials in Kabul say they expect the Durand Line issue also to dominate the fourth meeting, scheduled in the second week of September in Rawalpindi. Officials in Kabul say in the previous meetings, the US administration made it clear it has no desire to get involved in renegotiating a deal made more than a 100 years ago between Afghanistan and Britain. “The best we can do is to help the two countries reposition small border posts but we are not here to rewrite the history,” a US official told UPI.
The report says: “Kabul has officially asked the US to use its influence on Pakistan to force it to redraw the Durand Line. Islamabad, however, has already rejected this demand saying the line is a settled issue. Informally, Pakistani officials are believed to have complained to the US that India is using its influence on the Northern Alliance to revive an old and settled issue. In the last meeting of the tripartite commission, Kabul repeatedly brought up the issue, which prevented the commission from making unanimous recommendations.
Diplomatic sources said that during the meeting, Afghans also presented a copy of the original 1893 agreement, which they acquired from Britain. The Afghan government has also demanded that the tripartite commission be empowered to redraw the line.
Officials in Islamabad say they always feared that a government dominated by the Northern Alliance would revive the Durand Land issue.
Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbours, which include the newly independent Muslim states of the former Soviet Union, also established close ties with the Northern Alliance when the anti-Taliban force was fighting to oust the militia. They too hold Pakistan responsible for the rise of the Taliban. “Diplomatic observers say only the US has been urging Afghanistan to maintain friendly ties with Pakistan but they may not succeed in doing so, adding to the region’s imbroglio,” concludes the report.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/defaul...12-9-2003_pg1_4
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 07:52 pm
Afghanistan was the only country which refused to recognise Pakistan as an independent country in 1947 as it did not accept the Durand line which divides NWFP and Baluchistan. Looks like Afghanistan is putting pressure on US !!Is the Durand Line storm brewing again?
By Khalid Hasan
WASHINGTON: Afghanistan is asking the US to renegotiate its border with Pakistan, while some Afghan officials have issued a new map that shows Peshawar and Quetta as part of Afghanistan, says a United Press International (UPI) report.
However, the US neither has the expertise nor the desire to resolve what the report calls a “standoff.” The Durand Line was drawn in 1893 with a life of 100 years which means it “expired” 10 years ago, a position that the present Kabul regime maintains.
According to the report, it is this issue that has led to several skirmishes between Pakistan and Afghanistan since April and has forced the US to form a tripartite commission, which has already held three meetings. The US officials in Kabul say they expect the Durand Line issue also to dominate the fourth meeting, scheduled in the second week of September in Rawalpindi. Officials in Kabul say in the previous meetings, the US administration made it clear it has no desire to get involved in renegotiating a deal made more than a 100 years ago between Afghanistan and Britain. “The best we can do is to help the two countries reposition small border posts but we are not here to rewrite the history,” a US official told UPI.
The report says: “Kabul has officially asked the US to use its influence on Pakistan to force it to redraw the Durand Line. Islamabad, however, has already rejected this demand saying the line is a settled issue. Informally, Pakistani officials are believed to have complained to the US that India is using its influence on the Northern Alliance to revive an old and settled issue. In the last meeting of the tripartite commission, Kabul repeatedly brought up the issue, which prevented the commission from making unanimous recommendations.
Diplomatic sources said that during the meeting, Afghans also presented a copy of the original 1893 agreement, which they acquired from Britain. The Afghan government has also demanded that the tripartite commission be empowered to redraw the line.
Officials in Islamabad say they always feared that a government dominated by the Northern Alliance would revive the Durand Land issue.
Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbours, which include the newly independent Muslim states of the former Soviet Union, also established close ties with the Northern Alliance when the anti-Taliban force was fighting to oust the militia. They too hold Pakistan responsible for the rise of the Taliban. “Diplomatic observers say only the US has been urging Afghanistan to maintain friendly ties with Pakistan but they may not succeed in doing so, adding to the region’s imbroglio,” concludes the report.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/defaul...12-9-2003_pg1_4
India-Pakistan Reconciliation School
Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 11:24 am
Terrorism is a product of mindset Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Where did Pakistan go wrong?
Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 11:17 am
Terrorism is a product of mindset Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Let us Not be Foolish
Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 11:17 am
Terrorism is a product of mindset Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
A Visit to Pakistan
Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 11:17 am
Terrorism is a product of mindset Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
A Line Runs Through It
Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 11:17 am
Terrorism is a product of mindset Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Can’t we too break the wall?
Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 11:17 am
Terrorism is a product of mindset Pak drive to destroy India’s secular ethos
by G. Parthasarathy
DURING their recent visit to Pakistan, Indian Members of Parliament warmly embraced and shook hands with the President of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League (Q), Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain, who was the Interior (Home) Minister in Mr Nawaz Sharif’s government. Chaudhuri Shujaat broke ranks with Mr Sharif and spearheaded the movement to establish the PML (Q), with due encouragement and support from General Musharraf and the ISI. He was a leading aspirant for the post of Prime Minister in the Musharraf dispensation, but had to settle for his cousin Chaudhuri Parvez Elahi being appointed the Chief Minister of Punjab while he became the leader of the PML (Q). He is now one of General Musharraf’s closest political cronies. Even as our parliamentarians were bending backwards to meet Chaudhuri Shujaat, he had some interesting things to say about relations with India.
He proclaimed: “Running buses, trains and exchange of cultural delegations between the two countries cannot buy peace without a resolution of the core issue of Kashmir. Peace in this region can be achieved only when the core issue (of Kashmir) is resolved to the satisfaction of the wishes of the Kashmiri people.” Put bluntly, Chaudhuri Shujaat was disowning the Simla Agreement that requires all issues, including Kashmir, to be resolved peacefully and bilaterally. He was also threatening recourse to war if Pakistan’s ambitions on Kashmir were not fulfilled. All this was happening when our parliamentarians led by Mr Laloo Prasad Yadav were talking about the need to “demolish the wall of hatred”.
There is little doubt that hardly any of our parliamentarians knew about the backgrounds of their interlocutors. If they had done their homework properly, they would have known that Chaudhuri Shujaat Hussain and his family have been part of a network in Pakistan, backed by the ISI, that has been at the very epicentre of efforts to fan separatism and terrorism in Punjab. Both Shujaat and his late father Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi were part of this network set up by Gen Zia-ul-Haq. Incidentally, Pakistani moves to fan Sikh separatism in Punjab picked up momentum shortly after the visit of the then Foreign Minister of India, Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, to Pakistan in 1978. Virtually all important separatist Sikh leaders from abroad like Jagjit Singh Chauhan and Ganga Singh Dhillon enjoyed the personal hospitality of the family of Chaudhuri Zahoor Elahi during their visits to Pakistan. Even today this Pakistani infrastructure of terrorism plays host to wanted terrorists from Punjab linked to organisations like the Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation that were involved in the assassination of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh. This infrastructure extends to ISI cells in Pakistani missions abroad that incite persons running gurdwaras to keep alive the call for “Khalistan”.
At a recent meeting that I had with a group of prominent Pakistanis in a South Asian capital, a close associate of General Musharraf bluntly remarked that if India believed that it could ignore differences with Pakistan and move ahead economically, his country would have no difficulty in taking steps to retard Indian economic progress. A few years ago a former Director-General of the ISI remarked to me that Pakistan would see to it that jihad in Kashmir would draw support from Muslims all across India. This was in response to an assertion by me that Muslims in India were proud of the secular ethos of their country. It is important to bear these factors in mind while assessing the challenge that Pakistani policies pose to India. Pakistani ideologues, especially in their Punjabi dominated armed forces establishment, believe that they are the true inheritors of the Mughal throne in Delhi. Like the Mughals, their concept of “Hindustan” ends with the Vindhya mountains. A former ISI chief actually told me that he did not regard me to be “Hindustani” because my hometown Chennai was south of the Vindhya mountains!!
Terrorist acts like bomb blasts in Mumbai, the attack on the Red Fort and Parliament in Delhi and on the Akshardham Temple in Gujarat have to be seen and understood in the context of this Pakistani mindset. Assertions by General Musharraf and his sidekick, Gen Aziz Khan, that low intensity conflict and tensions with India will continue even if the Kashmir issue is resolved merely reflect this mindset. They strongly believe that India must be weakened and divided and its secular and pluralistic ethos undermined at all costs. The 1993 Bombay bomb blasts were personally approved by then Prime Minister, Mr Nawaz Sharif and executed by his fundamentalist ISI chief Gen Javed Nasir, who now heads the so-called Pakistan Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (PGPC). The main function of the PGPC is to incite Sikh pilgrims from India visiting their holy shrines in Nankana Sahib and elsewhere in Pakistan. Less than a week after the Lahore summit, General Javed Nasir was spreading a message of poison and hatred against India and Hindus to a group of Sikh pilgrims visiting the holy shrine of Nankana Sahib. General Nasir belongs to a fundamentalist group called the Tablighi Jamaat that is patronised by the Sharif family. Sectarian groups like the Tablighi Jamaat and the Ahle Hadis are used to spread fundamentalism and separatism in Muslim minorities abroad, including in India. Fundamentalist outfits like SIMI, founded in 1977, have close links with these Pakistani sectarian organisations. Saudi Arabia serves as a convenient and hospitable venue for such activities.
What the military establishment in Pakistan is today engaged in is nothing short of an attempt to undermine the very basis of a united, secular and pluralistic India. This is not an effort that can be diluted by candlelight vigils at the Wagah border, or sentimental reminiscing about our common culture and values. Sadly, very little effort is made to educate public opinion in India about these realities. We are instead fed with daily diets of how one or another “peace initiative” is going to bring about instant success merely because of sentimental outpourings over the surgery of Baby Noor, or the witticisms and profound wisdom of some of our parliamentarians and journalists visiting Pakistan and interacting with the likes of Chaudhuri Shujaat. The relationship with Pakistan will normalise only when its people are made to realise that their military establishment is leading the country to ruin and disaster. That effort will require consistency and sense of national will and purpose even while keeping the doors to contacts and dialogue open.
Pakistan will spare no effort to undermine India in every possible manner. But we would do well to remember that it was able to exploit the situation in Punjab only after political parties in the state espoused and adopted policies that sought to promote separatism and exclusionism. The Pakistani effort to undermine communal harmony in Punjab failed because of the bonds of Hindu-Sikh unity and brotherhood. Pakistan exploited disaffection in Kashmir following what many young Kashmiri politicians believed were the flawed elections in 1987 and the abject surrender of the V.P. Singh government to extortionist demands by Kashmiri terrorists in December 1989. Pakistan exploited communal tensions in India in 1993 and after the Gujarat communal carnage last year to incite and assist disaffected Indians to resort to terrorism. It is true that there is no justification for a resort to terrorism. But is it not time for our political parties to vow not to repeat their past mistakes and follies?
The writer is a former Ambassador of India to Pakistan
Muslim League’s Politics (1937-1947)
TIME Magazine, September 20, 1948, p. 36:
PAKISTAN: That Man
Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent have come two symbols-- a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of non-violence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of an assassin. Last week, the man of hate, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of the state he had founded. His devoted and equally fanatic sister, Fatima, was at his side; so was his daughter, Mrs. Dinah Wadia, whom he had disowned because she married a Parsee (as he had done before her).
Gandhi`s death shamed Hindus and Moslems into halting the communal massacres which he had been unable to stop during his life. Jinnah`s passing might release a new wave of fanaticism which even he might have opposed. As he died, a crisis which might bathe all India in blood was boiling up. When the news of his death reached New Delhi, a Hindu said, ``A man can be more dangerous in death than in life.`` He meant that the inflammatory preachings of Jinnah the agitator would live on, but the occasionally restraining hand of Jinnah the politician had been removed.
``The Best Showman.``
Jinnah was born in Karachi in 1876 of a wealthy trading family; at 16 he went to England to study law. As an advocate of the Bombay High Court he was, according to a colleague, ``the best showman of them all... his greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee.``
He joined the Congress Party and for a while worked for Hindu-Moslem unity. In 1921, he abandoned the Congress to build the Moslem League and to work for a separate government for Indian Moslems.
The walls of his meeting halls blazed with such slogans as: ``Make the blood of slaves boil with the force of faith!`` and ``Make the small sparrow fight the big hawk!`` He would stalk into meetings wearing his ``political uniform``-- native dress with a black astrakhan cap-- and whip the Moslems into a frenzy. Sometimes, in his fury, his monocle would pop out of its socket. After meetings, he would go home, change to Western clothes and be again the suave Western lawyer.
Enemies among the Moslems whispered against him: ``Jinnah does not wear a beard; Jinnah does not go to the mosque; Jinnah drinks whiskey.`` Yet his power increased to the point where he was able to force the Hindus and the British so split India into two dominions. He became governor general of Pakistan. With the split came the riots. His part in them will not soon be forgotten by Hindus. Last week, when news of his death reached New Delhi`s bazaars, there was bitter exultation. A Hindu refugee said:
``I had six people working under me in the West Punjab. Because of that man, I now work as a watchman for one rupee, eight annas [45¢] a day. Now that man is dead, but what about me?``
``A Man of Destiny.``
The Hindustani Times devoted a page to an uncompromising attack on Jinnah`s motives and methods. However, it concluded: ``A man of destiny, he was perhaps the greatest man of Islam since Mohamed.``
Jinnah did not underestimate his own importance. Recently, a delegation from the Moslem League called on him to urge a policy with which he disagreed. Gently, the League spokesman reminded Jinnah of a debt. ``Sir,`` he said, ``because of this league you got Pakistan.`` Jinnah snapped, ``No. Because of my iron will I got Pakistan. I can see ahead 50 years-- which you and even my Pakistan ministers cannot.``
Last June he retired to a cool, quiet mountain resort in Baluchistan Province. Against the advice of his doctors, he flew back to Karachi last week to confer with Premier Liaquat Ali Khan on the war between India and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The strain of the flight was too much for his old heart. Two hours after his arrival he was dead.
Behind him, Jinnah left no outstanding favorite, no one man who could command the unquestioning respect of other contenders. The cabinet hastily appointed as governor general Khwaha Nazimuddin, British-educated premier of East Bengal. The real struggle for influence would be between Liaquat Ali Khan and Foreign Minister Sir Mohamed Zafrullah Khan.
Liaquat, 53, is a plump, bald, practical politician, whom Hindus regard as moderate. Zafrullah Khan, 55, Pakistan`s spokesman in the U.N., is handicapped politically because he is a member of the Ahmadiyya community, an offshoot from Mohammedanism. Mizza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the sect, who died in 1908, taught that Christ had escaped alive from the cross, fled to Kashmir, where he died, and was buried at Srinigar. Hindus regard Zafrullah Khan as a brillian fanatic.
Jinnah`s death raised the possibility that his political heirs might seek the final solution for insolvent, disorganized governments: WAR.
Posted by
sarwar
Sep 11, 2003 09:53 am
Here is an excerpt from TIME magazine on Jinnah`s death anniversary. Jinnah died September 11, 1948.TIME Magazine, September 20, 1948, p. 36:
PAKISTAN: That Man
Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent have come two symbols-- a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of non-violence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of an assassin. Last week, the man of hate, Mohamed Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of the state he had founded. His devoted and equally fanatic sister, Fatima, was at his side; so was his daughter, Mrs. Dinah Wadia, whom he had disowned because she married a Parsee (as he had done before her).
Gandhi`s death shamed Hindus and Moslems into halting the communal massacres which he had been unable to stop during his life. Jinnah`s passing might release a new wave of fanaticism which even he might have opposed. As he died, a crisis which might bathe all India in blood was boiling up. When the news of his death reached New Delhi, a Hindu said, ``A man can be more dangerous in death than in life.`` He meant that the inflammatory preachings of Jinnah the agitator would live on, but the occasionally restraining hand of Jinnah the politician had been removed.
``The Best Showman.``
Jinnah was born in Karachi in 1876 of a wealthy trading family; at 16 he went to England to study law. As an advocate of the Bombay High Court he was, according to a colleague, ``the best showman of them all... his greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee.``
He joined the Congress Party and for a while worked for Hindu-Moslem unity. In 1921, he abandoned the Congress to build the Moslem League and to work for a separate government for Indian Moslems.
The walls of his meeting halls blazed with such slogans as: ``Make the blood of slaves boil with the force of faith!`` and ``Make the small sparrow fight the big hawk!`` He would stalk into meetings wearing his ``political uniform``-- native dress with a black astrakhan cap-- and whip the Moslems into a frenzy. Sometimes, in his fury, his monocle would pop out of its socket. After meetings, he would go home, change to Western clothes and be again the suave Western lawyer.
Enemies among the Moslems whispered against him: ``Jinnah does not wear a beard; Jinnah does not go to the mosque; Jinnah drinks whiskey.`` Yet his power increased to the point where he was able to force the Hindus and the British so split India into two dominions. He became governor general of Pakistan. With the split came the riots. His part in them will not soon be forgotten by Hindus. Last week, when news of his death reached New Delhi`s bazaars, there was bitter exultation. A Hindu refugee said:
``I had six people working under me in the West Punjab. Because of that man, I now work as a watchman for one rupee, eight annas [45¢] a day. Now that man is dead, but what about me?``
``A Man of Destiny.``
The Hindustani Times devoted a page to an uncompromising attack on Jinnah`s motives and methods. However, it concluded: ``A man of destiny, he was perhaps the greatest man of Islam since Mohamed.``
Jinnah did not underestimate his own importance. Recently, a delegation from the Moslem League called on him to urge a policy with which he disagreed. Gently, the League spokesman reminded Jinnah of a debt. ``Sir,`` he said, ``because of this league you got Pakistan.`` Jinnah snapped, ``No. Because of my iron will I got Pakistan. I can see ahead 50 years-- which you and even my Pakistan ministers cannot.``
Last June he retired to a cool, quiet mountain resort in Baluchistan Province. Against the advice of his doctors, he flew back to Karachi last week to confer with Premier Liaquat Ali Khan on the war between India and the Nizam of Hyderabad. The strain of the flight was too much for his old heart. Two hours after his arrival he was dead.
Behind him, Jinnah left no outstanding favorite, no one man who could command the unquestioning respect of other contenders. The cabinet hastily appointed as governor general Khwaha Nazimuddin, British-educated premier of East Bengal. The real struggle for influence would be between Liaquat Ali Khan and Foreign Minister Sir Mohamed Zafrullah Khan.
Liaquat, 53, is a plump, bald, practical politician, whom Hindus regard as moderate. Zafrullah Khan, 55, Pakistan`s spokesman in the U.N., is handicapped politically because he is a member of the Ahmadiyya community, an offshoot from Mohammedanism. Mizza Ghulam Ahmad, founder of the sect, who died in 1908, taught that Christ had escaped alive from the cross, fled to Kashmir, where he died, and was buried at Srinigar. Hindus regard Zafrullah Khan as a brillian fanatic.
Jinnah`s death raised the possibility that his political heirs might seek the final solution for insolvent, disorganized governments: WAR.
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