Super-terror Network

A Union Home Ministry report on terrorism says that terror groups backed by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) may use chemical, biological, nuclear or radiological weapons against India, initiating some sort of super-terrorism — reckless use of weapons of mass destruction against the humanity or, in the language of present-day jehad, against the ‘infidels’. The report takes into account the spread of ISI activities right from Jammu and Kashmir to the south of the country, and from the western side to the Northeast. The report speaks of active terror modules mushrooming in Bihar, Asom and West Bengal, adding that sleeper cells have been assigned with specific targets. It also says that the Indo-Nepal border is being used for smuggling of arms, explosives and fake currency into the country, while the ISI focuses on Uttar Pradesh to fund madrassas and recruit youngsters for subversive activities.

The future face of terrorism — that is, criminal terrorism — has been reckoned by experts ever since radical Islamic groups began to veer away from their professed ideology and went about the arbitrary elimination of their perceived rivals. The rise of Al-Qaeda and the Talibanic variety of Islam, whose open declaration is for an absolutist Islamic system where people of other faiths shall have to convert to Islam or get their throats slit, was the precursor to what has now come to be defined as ‘‘super-terrorism’’. Indeed, it does not take India’s Home Ministry’s report to know of the most cherished objective of groups like Al-Qaeda, which is to acquire weapons of mass destruction and be a state in their own right. This is the reason why the US is so concerned about the fate of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal; so much so that Washington has long wanted to be part of Pakistan’s nuclear command structure, resisted strongly by the ISI that has its own nuclear design to further — a highly commercial enterprise that it is, with interests ranging from terrorism to drug trafficking. Given the reality, and of course Pakistan’s own endemic instability, the greatest super-terror threat comes from the vulnerability of Pakistan’s nuclear assets not only to Al-Qaeda machinations but also to primarily India-focused, Pakistan-based outfits such as Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad. Therefore, the menace is not a myth concocted by any paranoid, communal Hindu; it is real, given the avowed objective of jehad to bleed ‘Hindustan by a million cuts’.

Since the Home Ministry report mentions Asom as part of the super-terror network in the making, it is imperative that we relate it all to the oft-reported rise in jehadi groups in the State due mainly to their confidence as to the feasibility of a greater Islamic state to be brought about by annexation of Asom to Bangladesh. This surely would not be possible had the illegal Bangladeshi hordes been prevented from entering Asom and had every single polygamous family from the illegally settled Bangladeshi crowd (is the Tarun Gogoi government still saying there are no illegal Bangladeshis in the State?) been deported to their homeland. It is this illegal immigrant population that holds the greatest — and perhaps the only — potential in Asom to act as active modules as well as sleeper cells for the jehadis in their super-terrorist mode of butchery of the ‘infidel’ humanity. Does the UPA government have anything in it to counter the peril?


A Wrong Message
Christian educational institutions all over the country remained closed last Friday as a mark of protest against violence inflicted on Christians in Orissa. While selective targeting of a religious faith and murderous violence against it — as has happened in Orissa following the assassination of a Hindu leader — is outright cowardly and savage, keeping educational institutions closed in the name of the same religion is both amateurish and unsecular. In fact, when we say ‘‘Christian educational institutions’’, we run counter to the essence of secularism. A truly secular state — which India is not — has nothing to do with religion, where it is a strictly private affair. In that noble scheme, no institution of learning can be classified as Hindu, Islamic, Christian or otherwise. It is a tragedy that India is yet to evolve into a truly secular state, thanks to the politics in vogue. Most importantly, when an educational institution — regardless of the faith of the management — remains closed in solidarity with the cause of the faith it swears by intrinsically, what kind of message goes across to the tender learners? That a day’s lesson could well be compromised, because religion is all-important? Yes, think of the little children. What have they to do with communal violence? Why should they be forced into a religious sense? It is time we all progressed.

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Books Too Make a Nation
ON THE SPOT
Tavleen Singh
It saddened me that one of the Indian subcontinent’s greatest poets died last week and hardly anyone noticed. Of the fifteen newspapers I read every day, only The Times of India reported on an obscure inside page that Faraz Ahmed Faraz ‘‘died battling kidney failure at a hospital in Islamabad on Monday’’.

This is the same poet whose beautiful poem about love and loss — ranjish hi sahi, dil hi dukhaaney key liye aa — continues to be sung by ghazal singers in India and Pakistan.
I met Faraz only once while waiting at Delhi airport for a flight to Lahore. So I cannot say I knew him personally but I know his poetry well and admired his political resistance to his country’s military dictators. He was the last of a generation of poets who in the fifties and sixties not only wrote beautiful poetry but gave to Hindi cinema some of its most unforgettable songs. Sahir Ludhianvi, Shakeel Badayuni, Kaifi Azmi, Majrooh Sultanpuri... the list is long.
Having grown up in Delhi in a time when

evenings of poetry and music were the norm,
the death of poetry troubles me as does our disdain for writers writing in Indian languages. This has created a generation of Indians who watch television and find it hard to read the simplest books. This is disturbing if you remember that half our population is under the age of 25. We have the sad distinction of having the largest number of illiterate people in the world. This will only change when we learn to respect our poets and writers and when the average Indian starts to read books for pleasure. If you keep your eyes open when you travel, you will notice that the average Indian traveller whether on a train or aeroplane almost never has a book in his hand. Travel in developed Western countries and you see the opposite.

It is a depressing state of affairs but I have some good news to report. In the past year or so, the most fashionable event in Delhi has become the book launch. Unlike in other Indian cities where books and book launches remain confined to bookshops, in Delhi the launch of a new book is celebrated in fancy hotels and attended by the city’s most glamorous people. A country that learns to respect its writers and poets is a country that is beginning to learn that there is more to reading than your daily rag. Some of the best writers and poets I have read have written in Indian languages. Ghalib, Mir, Iqbal, Faiz, Saadat Hasan Manto, Munshi Premchand to mention only the most famous. It is sad that these wonderful writers are not translated into other Indian languages and that their works are not taught in Indian schools.

It comes out of our disdain for our own heritage and may have something to do with the colonial system of mass education we adopted. But books becoming fashionable could mark the beginning of a change.

Last week I attended the launch of Kapil Sibal’s first book at a most glamorous party at the Maurya Hotel. Among the guests were cabinet ministers, high officials, important journalists, famous authors, big businessmen and glittering socialites. The Minister’s book i witness is a collection of poems in limerick style composed most unusually on his cell phone. The invitation offered a sample of the Minister’s poetic efforts: ‘‘Please join us for an evening to stretch your legs and mind, in the midst of all our travails share some thoughts in rhyme. Reflect on issues of concern, relax with a glass of wine away from the din and chatter, without constraint of time.’ I recommend the book for its entertaining and irreverent look at current events and current creatures on the political landscape. One of the poems I enjoyed most was dedicated to the sycophant.

At Kapil Sibal’s book launch, I ran into Bibek Debroy who has just published a charming and learned book called Sarama and her Children: The Dog in Indian Myth. It is an unexpected book from the man I remember most for telling me fifteen years ago that it would take 325 years to clear the backlog of cases in Indian courts. He discovered this while writing a paper on the Indian justice system and has since written serious books on matters of grave current importance. So why a book on dogs? Well, because he has loved dogs and because a book on Sarama, ‘‘the mother of all dogs’’ according to Indian mythology, was waiting to be written. Bibek tells the story of Indian dogs from Sarama, who was dog to the gods, to the Indian stray dog who is such an ubiquitous presence in our cities and villages. The book is worth reading for anyone who cares about dogs.

Another book I recommend while we are talking about books is one sent to me by Chiki Sarkar, who heads Random House India, called AIDS Sutra. It is a collection of writings on AIDS by some of our best known writers and worth reading to at least acknowledge that India has a huge AIDS problem that we refuse to acknowledge.

With all the gloomy news on the political front, especially that which comes from Jammu & Kashmir, it is a nice change to talk about books.

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Aazadi has a Hollow Ring in Kashmir
Cecil Victor
There appears to be a correlation between the heightened calls for aazadi in the Kashmir valley and the cross-border firing by Pakistani troops. It has long been known that gunfire, be it of rifles or artillery, has been used by the Pakistan Army’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to assist infiltration of terrorists across the Line of Control, but this time the message is of a local uprising which can be made an excuse for a frontal attack by the 3,000 terrorists-in-waiting for a ‘‘war of liberation’’.

The cat leapt out of the bag when hardliner and pro-merger with Pakistan Syed Ali Shah Geelani in a fit of over-exuberance made his now-famous faux pas of laying claim to being an aazadi protagonist. He was quick to retract his statement, but its resonance remains and security forces must realize the implications and take appropriate counter-measures. His is an invitation to annexation which, notwithstanding the camaraderie brought on by the Amarnath transfer of forest land among the many factions of the Hurriyat, is not the people’s demand for a takeover by the Pakistani Taliban.

Till the transfer of forest land became cause celebre between ‘‘Hindu Jammu’’ and ‘‘Muslim Kashmir’’, the people of State were watching with trepidation the creeping spread of the Taliban into the Swat Valley towards Peshawar which is the gateway to Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and hence towards the Line of Control. Amalgamation with Pakistan in its current state of disrepair and fundamentalist mindlessness in blowing up girls’ schools and other vestiges of a tolerant, forward-looking society has never been the Kashmiri aspiration. It is ironic, therefore, that the marchers made a beeline for the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan (UNMOGIP) whose mandate is to ensure that Pakistan-occupied Kashmir is emptied of Pakistani troops and their proxies. Aazadi is not an option with it.

What is happening in the Valley is a mirror-image of what is happening in Jammu and it is for the Government of India to move quickly to control the law-and-order situation in the latter for the simple reason of preventing interference or disruption to the lines of communication for military operations in case Pakistan makes another miscalculation of Kargil proportions. The cross-border shooting is a sign that the ISI is moving in that direction for two reasons: one is to prevent a takeover of its political wing by the new civil dispensation in Pakistan. The other is to ease the pressure on General (retd) Pervez Musharraf who is under siege by the same political elements who want to defang the ISI.

It was made out to be a show of complete confidence that former President Pervez Musharraf visited Beijing to watch the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games at the very height of the crisis at home. He went there to garner support from China for what he perceived to be a golden opportunity in the turmoil in Jammu and Kashmir to try and delink it from the rest of India. September is an appropriate moment for clandestine military operations in Jammu and Kashmir because the passes in the Himalayas are clear and offer a window of opportunity before the snowfall of late October makes military operations of any kind difficult.

It is not as if the Pakistan Army itself will make the first move into Jammu and Kashmir when the opportunity arises. It will use the terrorists it has trained to make the first assault across the Line of Control because that will be the fig-leaf of a ‘‘war of liberation’’ by Kashmiri ‘‘freedom fighters’’.

The Pakistan Army sees a penetration into the Kishtwar-Doda salient of Jammu as an appropriate manoeuvre to cut the Indian Army’s lines of communications into the Valley with some assurances that the people of this endemically disaffected area will , unlike in 1965 when the Kashmiris handed over the infiltrators to the Indian Army, welcome and support the jehadis. Hence the testing of the waters by firing across the international border in the Jammu sector as well as across the Line of Control.

For the Hurriyat Conference and Mufti’s PDP , the semblance of unity of the many factions is a product of the emotional appeals given to their different agendas by the Amarnath land transfer and the fruit harvest which touches every family to bring crowds onto the streets to attack security forces to make out cases of human rights violations. With the fruit rotting there will soon be no leverage left with these groups to threaten to walk into Muzzarafabad in POK where the economics is doubly worse under the shadow of a 30 per cent inflation that has made everything edible extremely expensive.

The economics and politics of aazadi will soon come up against the hard facts of life, and everyone across the spectrum from the Hurriyat to Omar Abdullah know which side their bread is buttered. (ADNI)

Violent Saffron
Amulya Ganguli
Just as the deaths of kar sevaks (Hindu pilgrims) in an arson attack on their train led to retaliatory violence by the Hindutva brigade against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, similarly the murder of five Hindus, including the head of an ashram in Orissa, has sparked off attacks against Christians by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal activists.

Why the Christians should have been targeted is not clear because the murders were reportedly committed by Maoists. However, since it is not easy to track down the Maoists in their jungle hideouts, the saffron warriors seem to have vented their wrath on the Christians with whom they have long had a tense relationship. Only last winter, the longstanding feuds between them erupted in violence.

The most gruesome incident was in 1999 when a Christian missionary, Graham Staines, was burnt alive with his two young sons by saffron activists. Since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was in power at the centre then, apart from being an ally of the ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) in Orissa, there was even an initial attempt by George Fernandes, the convener of the National Democratic Front, to pass off the tragedy as an ‘‘international conspiracy’’, with Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik sitting quietly besides him. This time also, a woman was burnt alive when an orphanage was set on fire while houses, shops and churches have been attacked over a large area.

The latest incidents have provoked several BJP legislators to threaten to withdraw their support to the government of Naveen Patnaik since, first, he failed to prevent the attack on the ashram and, secondly, he has apparently been less tolerant of the rampaging Hindutva mobs than Narendra Modi was in Gujarat during the communal riots. One of the grouses of the BJP, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal against the Christians is their missionary activity among the tribals. Churches, therefore, are a prime target of the saffron mobs, as they were in Gujarat’s Dangs area where, too, the saffron brotherhood had targeted the Christians before their attention turned to Muslims.

The VHP had set up their bases in Orissa with the specific purpose of wooing the Christian converts back to Hinduism. The murdered head of the ashram, Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, was one of the leading figures engaged in the reconversions. Given the competitive nature of such missionary activity, with its focus on religion and education among simple-minded villagers in poverty-stricken areas, there is little chance of an improvement in the tension-ridden atmosphere in the near future if only because of the BJP’s political and official clout as a part of the government.

What is more, the VHP and the Bajrang Dal seem to have begun to act on their own not only in Orissa but also in Jammu where it is involved in the agitation on the Amarnath land transfer issue. If its objective in Gujarat was to ghettoize the Muslims by terrorizing them, in Orissa the VHP’s plan apparently is to compel the isolated Christians communities to change their faith by attacking people and places of worship.
(The writer is a political analyst) (IANS)
source: sentinel assam 01.09.08