brahma chellaney: Defining moment

dec 31st

kapidhwaja, that was a good article by brahma. he forwarded me the same article, and i am posting it because it is very well articulated.

the kandahar episode was comparable to the rubaiya sayeed kidnapping episode. the terrorists realized they could get far more from india than they had ever dreamt of, and that our politicians were utter fools. in the rubaiya sayeed kidnapping, the terrorists captured the woman on a whim, and were on the point of releasing her unconditionally when vp singh, i k gujral, arif mohammed khan and arun nehru said, basically, "oh, you want us to release a few jailed friends of yours? please kick us on the backside as well and take your friends." so they released these guys, and that was the first taste of success for the terrorists. this led directly to the ethnic cleansing of the kashmiri hindus, because the pakistanis rightly decided that india was too wimpy to do anything. the 'secularists' could be counted on to cave in.

with kandahar, the pakistanis realized that the 'nationalists' were no better. this is what i mean when i say that the bjp and the rss are nice guys, who want to show everybody what nice people they are. they hate all the terrible press they get even though they are nice guys, and so they are eager to impress upon the media and the mohammedans what great guys they are. when brinda karat of the cpi-m was caught on video chivvying on the relatives of the IC814 hostages to force the govt to capitulate -- note that as usual the marxists were doing what they believed the mohammedans would want -- they should have arrested her on the spot for treason and threatened to hang her as an example.

similarly when the bangladeshis returned a murdered indian jawan trussed like a pig on a pole, india should have invaded the miserable country, or turned the farakka barrage off. let's see what they would do if they had no water. instead, the govt bleated nonsense: yes, the bjp was as good as the congress at mealy-mouthed cowardice.

now that the iisc has been attacked, the proper response would be to have a couple of serious acts of violence in pakistan, where it hurts the personal interests of the army generals. but india does nothing.

incidentally, san has mentioned a couple of times the violence on baluchistan. how many of you know that a few months ago in dera bugti in baluchistan -- where the fighting is going on now, i think -- a hindu temple was shelled and levelled and a few dozen hindus killed by the pakistani army. but nobody made any noise about it. but when a disused mohammedan mosque was torn down in ayodhya, it was the end of the world as far as a lot of indians were concerned. translation: mohammedan sentiments and lives are worth something, hindu sentiments and lives are not. the very definition of dhimmitude.

and as san mentioned, after the iisc episode no mohammedan came forth and said he was ashamed of mohammedanism for this violence. they will always blame all terrorism on some mohammedan who is not following the true mohammedanism. actually that is al taqiyah, because these guys are following true mohammedanism, an imperial faith, to the letter: they are the absolutely most faithful mohammedans.

similarly, i have noticed on this very blog how christists never say they are ashamed of christism whenever a christist does something terrible, like pulling out a hindu priest from his temple and shooting him in cold blood. they always blame some 'other christists' as the bad guys, whereas they themselves are the good christists. wrong. the real christists, just like the real mohammedans, are the most violent imperial ones, because that is what is written in their book.

so then why do some idiot hindus always talk about how they are ashamed of hinduism whenever any hindu anywhere in the world does something bad? my responses to these shame-wallahs is that nobody elected them to be the ambassadors of hinduism, and they are welcome to join the imperial semitic cult of their choosing. i dont know if i am imagining this, but southerners and especially women are prone to this bullshit. case in point: one woman in the san francisco bay area who is living with a pakistani. (this must be a case of becoming pakistani by "injection" if you know what i mean :-)) another case is another woman married to a pakistani, and not only has she become pakistani by injection, but her father and mother, and her father was some admiral, have become pakistani by osmosis as well. i guess that means pakistaniness is like a virus.

i do hope RAW is helping the balochi separatists to the hilt. if they manage to create a real problem that would mean the end of chinese imperial ambitions in gwadar as well.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Brahma C

The Hindustan Times, December 31, 2005

 

As a defining moment, the Kandahar cave-in set in motion India's relentless softening

 

A bleeding shame

 

By BRAHMA CHELLANEY

 

 

Exactly six years ago, hours before the onset of the new millennium, India capitulated to the demands of hijackers of an Indian jetliner so disgracefully that it advertised itself globally as an attractive target for further terrorist attacks. In a surrender unparalleled in modern world history, then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh personally chaperoned three jailed terrorists to freedom in a special aircraft. The bitter fruit of the Kandahar deal has been a sharp surge in terror that has seen India emerge as the world's worst victim of terrorism.

 

By breaching the fragile global consensus against surrender to terrorist demands, India lost not just international respectability. Once a nation lowers its esteem in its own eyes, it opens the path to continuing compromises on national interests. That is what Kandahar did.

 

It was such a defining moment for the new millennium that India has continued to slip and sink. As the already-forgotten New Delhi bombings of two months ago show, India is increasingly unwilling to go after transnational terrorists and their sponsors. Contrast that with the unforgiving British response to the bombings in London that killed fewer people. Is it any surprise that terrorists are now emboldened to strike in India's Silicon Valley?

 

Kandahar set in motion a process from which India has found hard to recover due to its leadership deficit — the further softening of this country, mirrored in its growing forbearance towards terrorism. As it has repeatedly in recent years, India will invite another major terror attack before long, but one already knows how it will respond — with bold, empty words that will do little to hide its lack of both a coherent counter-terrorism strategy and the political will to go beyond mere reprobation. The ruling and opposition leadership, ensconced in a commando ring, cares little about ordinary citizens falling to terrorists.

 

The Kandahar ignominy has hung from the nation's neck like the proverbial albatross, exacting continuing costs. Indeed, after Kandahar, terrorism rapidly morphed from hit-and-run strikes to daring assaults on military camps, major religious sites and national emblems of power, like the Red Fort and Parliament.

 

Gen. Pervez Musharraf accomplished through this ISI-scripted hijacking much more than what he had set out to achieve with force in Kargil just months earlier. The Flight IC-814 hijacking, as Strobe Talbott wrote in his book, came as "as a personal victory for Musharraf, who was widely believed to have masterminded the incident…" Within five months, Musharraf won an invitation to a summit in Agra, an event that lifted his semi-pariah status internationally. Since then, he has progressively upped the ante to the extent that today he is able to hold the weapon of terror to India's head and still show off an "irreversible" Indian-initiated peace process.

 

The ISI, for its part, used the hijacking to bring home its two main assets from Indian jails — Harkat-ul Ansar chief Masood Azhar and the abductor of Western tourists, Ahmed Omar Sheikh — and then reemploy them for more vicious terrorism.

 

Azhar, through his new terror outfit, Jaish-e-Muhammad, has killed many more Indians in attacks than the number of hostages for whose freedom he was freed along with Omar Sheikh and another terrorist, Al-Umar's Mushtaq Ahmad Zargar. Omar Sheikh went on to help finance the 9/11 attacks and murder reporter Daniel Pearl, who was investigating the ISI's role in fomenting global jehad.

 

Yet there has been no mea culpa from the architects of the Kandahar capitulation, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and company. Not even a casual acknowledgement of guilt.

 

While they were in office, they frustrated any enquiry effort to get to the bottom of how they ended up negotiating with the terrorists on bended knees. Lest the CBI enquiry uncovered the culpability of Brajesh Mishra, who bungled in the takeoff of the commandeered plane from Amritsar, the Crisis Management Group claimed to have maintained no records. Its members even feigned loss of memory on key details. Equally unsavoury was how security agencies were used to orchestrate demonstrations by hostages' relatives to help build a public case for succumbing to the hijackers' demands.

 

Even in opposition ranks, Vajpayee and company have maintained a conspiracy of silence. No explanation has been offered as to why the foreign minister had to hand-deliver three monsters. In fact, the publicity-hungry Jaswant Singh even wanted to take a media team with him. Singh had whipped himself into such a hallucinatory loop of delusion that when the flight landed in the terrorist retreat of Kandahar, he actually rejoiced, telling newspaper editors that it presented a golden opportunity to drive a wedge between the Taliban and its sponsor, Pakistan!

 

Lord Acton's maxim that "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" may explain why Vajpayee and company had begun to lose touch with reality. The intoxication with heady power was manifest from Jaswant Singh's Alice-in-Wonderland briefing to newspaper editors and Vajpayee's consent to his foreign minister to escort hardcore terrorists, as if they were kids and needed a guardian.

 

More than the shame it brought on India, the capitulation's significance lay in the manner it helped raise the threshold of shame for Vajpayee and company. After Kandahar, they increasingly become anesthetized to disgrace, as they took the nation on a wacky roller-coaster ride with an ever-shifting policy on Pakistan and terror. Today, they and their party are unable to stand up for any principle because they showed in office that they have no convictions. Scandal and sleaze have become the nemesis of a party incapable to play the role of an effective opposition.

 

Every time Azhar's Jaish-e-Muhammad claims responsibility for a terror strike that murders or maims innocent Indians, the same question must haunt Vajpayee and company that did Lady Macbeth: "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood clean from my hand?" In fact, close to the first anniversary of his release, Azhar sought to pay his debt to those who freed him by sending a terrorist squad to kill them. But for the valiant security personnel, six of whom laid down their lives, the attackers would have stormed into Parliament.

 

Kandahar remains a bleeding shame. No lesson has been learned. No plan is in place to prevent another Kandahar-type ignominy.

 

What India needs is a concerted, sustained campaign against terror. But what it gets is more political rhetoric and dubious declarations. A new anti-hijacking declaratory policy threatens to shoot down an aircraft that deviates from the assigned course in such a way as to take its flight track close to sensitive sites, such as the presidential or prime ministerial house.

 

If a rogue plane over Delhi aims to crash into such a site, the government will have less than a minute to take a decision and execute it. When India failed to keep Flight IC-814 grounded at Amritsar after it landed there, despite advance information that it was headed to that city, how can anyone expect the country's doddering, dithering leadership to take a decision within seconds to shoot down a plane?

 

As an open, untreated sore on the Indian body politic threatening to become gangrenous, Kandahar has brought India under increasing attack from terrorism. Turning this abysmal situation around demands a new mindset that will not allow India to be continually gored and treats terrorism as an existential battle. That in turn means a readiness to do whatever it takes to end the terrorist siege of India.