Towards Splendid Isolation

With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pursuing a two-point foreign policy agenda of sucking up to America and appeasing Pakistan on American terms, the ‘strategic depth’ that India had once enjoyed in its neighbourhood has been lost even as China strategically encircles India

In the past, any discussion on India-Nepal relations with friends in the political establishment and the bureaucracy and professional colleagues in Kathmandu would elicit animated reaction. There were those who would gush over India and emphatically argue in support of enhanced bilateral cooperation, and there were others who would be equally vehement in criticising India for what they called its “bullying tactics”. There were moments when these differences would disappear and there would be unanimous support for India: For instance, when India conducted its nuclear tests in 1998 — the mood in Nepal was no less celebratory than in India. The journalists from Nepal who were in Colombo for that year’s SAARC summit were furious that there should be criticism of Pokhran II. One of them went to the extent of getting into a scrap with a Pakistani journalist, insisting that it was his right to defend India’s nuclear tests.

That was in the past. The present poses an entirely different picture whose colours are extremely bleak. During a recent visit to Kathmandu, there was no animated discussion, no vehement denunciation nor measured criticism of India. Instead, there was sullen indifference. India’s attempt to influence the voting in the Constituent Assembly to elect a Prime Minister has, for all practical purposes, come a cropper. New Delhi’s hold is now weakened to the extent that it cannot even ensure that the Madhesi factions remain united. The move to isolate the Maoists and ensure that Pushpa Kamal Dahal, better known as Prachanda, does not come to occupy the Prime Minister’s office once again has not yielded any results. Four rounds of inconclusive voting point to the dismal failure of any initiatives that New Delhi may have made to break the political deadlock that has paralysed both governance and the main task of the Constituent Assembly — framing a Constitution for a democratic Nepal.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy and former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran was in Nepal a fortnight ago to try and cobble together a consensus against Prachanda and in support of the Nepali Congress candidate for the Prime Minister’s job, Ram Chandra Poudel. Although his various meetings in Kathmandu have been described as “fruitful”, the reality is far removed from this official claim. The Madhesis may have temporarily set aside their differences, but they remain a deeply divided lot and not too sure of sustained support from New Delhi. The CPN(UML) is disdainful of what its leaders derisively refer to as “Indian interventionism” in Nepal’s internal affairs. The Maoists, of course, nurse a deep grudge and, with 40 per cent seats in the Constituent Assembly, are loath to be goaded by India in any direction.

In brief, the ‘strategic depth’ that India had in Nepal has been lost. Or so it would seem from the prevailing mood in Kathmandu.

But it is not Nepal alone where Indian diplomacy has begun to fetch diminishing returns. The huge advantage India had to regain space in Bangladesh, from where it had been squeezed out during the BNP-Jamaat years when Begum Khaleda Zia was in power, has been virtually squandered. The interim Government that followed was well-disposed towards India but New Delhi did precious little to reach out to Dhaka. Subsequently, after she was swept to power, Sheikh Hasina enthusiastically sought to turn the clock back to the days when the proximity between India and Bangladesh was the envy of both neighbours and distant superpowers. Her visit to New Delhi in January this year generated a tide of goodwill and a host of agreements. Half-a-year later, the goodwill has begun to rapidly evaporate in Dhaka; the agreements remain unfulfilled, shelved along with files pending political and bureaucratic attention in South Block in New Delhi.

Nobody talks of the joint communiqué that was issued after Sheikh Hasina’s visit and which was described as the beginning of a “paradigm shift” in India-Bangladesh relations. That ‘paradigm shift’ is still awaited. Bangladesh is miffed, and rightly so, that the promised removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers to bilateral trade is yet to happen. India had promised to give Bangladesh 250 MW of power. But nothing has moved on the ground, not even technical work on connecting the national grids of the two countries with a 100 km transmission line which will take two years to build after the technical and tendering processes are over. By then Sheikh Hasina’s Government would be nearing the end of its tenure and there would be little to show by way of her securing effective assistance from India. Similarly, not a scrap of paper has moved on the agreement to share Teesta waters or resolve the Tipaimukh dam dispute. Bangladeshi media, which was effusive over the outcome of Sheikh Hasina’s visit, has now begun to voice doubts about India’s intentions.

Deep south, in Sri Lanka, there is increasing wariness about India. New Delhi’s engagement with Colombo has become a bit of a farce, episodic rather than sustained. South Block periodically raises the issue of resettlement and rehabilitation of Tamils displaced during Sri Lanka’s war against the LTTE. The assistance offered by India for this purpose by way of constructing houses is really inconsequential. Security-related dialogue has come to a grinding halt, although neither side will admit this: New Delhi for reasons that are embarrassing; Colombo because this is to its strategic advantage.

In Afghanistan, the future of any meaningful role to be played by India is extremely doubtful. The humanitarian missions New Delhi had launched are at best limping along. Once the Americans up and leave the country, India’s presence will be determined by the successor regime that may not include President Hamid Karzai and is more than likely to be aligned with Pakistan. The West has made it abundantly clear, notwithstanding polite statements to the contrary, that India can at best play a peripheral role in Afghanistan; the future belongs to Pakistan. A crafty politician and a seasoned survivor, Karzai has wasted no time in electing to go with “my brother Pakistan”.

Frankly, what India is left with by way of ‘strategic depth’ is Bhutan. There too a question mark looms large as democratic Bhutan has begun to cast its net wider, seeking cooperation with countries other than India. It does not see happiness as confined to relations with India.

Yet, during the six years when the NDA was in power and Atal Bihari Vajpayee was determining the thrust of India’s foreign policy, India’s bilateral relations with its neighbours were on an upswing. The advantages that then accrued to India have now been all but lost. If these countries were partnering with India then, they are partnering with China now. With Prime Minister Manmohan Singh opting for a unifocal foreign policy solely directed at improving relations with Pakistan and choosing to ignore other countries in the neighbourhood, this deterioration was bound to happen. A charitable explanation would be that this is by default and not design. A realistic assessment would be that with all attention, political and bureaucratic, focussed on Pakistan, albeit without any movement forward, we have lost the initiative in the rest of the neighbourhood.

While it is true that we have a Foreign Minister heading the Ministry of External Affairs, it is equally true that neither the Minister nor his Ministry feels sufficiently enthused to carry forward policy decisions, leave alone re-craft policy to suit the constantly changing dynamics of the region’s geopolitics and geostrategy. The Prime Minister’s Office is obsessed with pursuing a two-fold policy: Cosying up to the US on America’s terms and engaging Pakistan in dialogue — also on American terms. Everything else can wait, and if it can’t wait, tough luck. This has resulted in a strange lassitude taking over South Block, with some of the best minds in the Foreign Service just idling away, marking time. As for Foreign Minister SM Krishna, he is blissfully unaware of what’s happening in the neighbourhood; even if he is notionally aware, he is happy to be left out of the loop and do nothing to correct the situation. His competence, or the lack of it, was on display during his recent visit to Islamabad and reconfirmed by his astonishing utterances after what was a hugely disastrous tour of duty.

Meanwhile, taking advantage of India’s wilful, some would say stunningly callous, disengagement with its neighbours, China has been stealthily stepping into the breach with spectacular results. In Kathmandu, there is a palpable shift in public opinion towards Beijing, and this is not necessarily on account of the Maoists. Even those who are opposed to Prachanda are favourably disposed towards China. With work on to connect the landlocked country with China by rail and road, there is an increasing realisation that Nepal does not need to depend on India for its essential supplies, including oil. China has effectively posited itself as an alternative, and one which can fetch far more benefits to the country and its people. Trade with Tibet is a lucrative option and the fact that China has allowed Nepal to open a Consulate in Lhasa has not gone unnoticed: It’s seen as a rare privilege, which it is. The children of Nepal’s opinion-makers are being offered scholarships to study in Beijing University. The media is being supported in more ways than one. China is now seen as a ‘benign’ neighbour, which suits Beijing fine, providing it with crucial ‘strategic depth’ at India’s expense. It’s a telling comment that in sharp contrast to the strident criticism that follows any perceived “pro-India” move by the Government of Nepal — Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal has had to retreat and withdraw his decisions on several occasions — there is popular praise for any deal that is agreed upon with China.

In Sri Lanka, too, China’s presence and influence continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Hambantota Port is now a ‘pearl’ in the Chinese ‘necklace’ encircling India. But that is only one of the many achievements scored by China. Its continued military assistance to Sri Lanka, which would have been India’s prerogative had the UPA Government not discontinued the supply of defence hardware under pressure from the DMK, has helped forge a strong relationship that will not be easily shaken. What remains unquantified and unknown is the extent of influence Pakistan has come to wield over Sri Lanka by riding on the coat-tails of China. President Mahinda Rajapaksa is too astute a politician to rub India on the wrong side and takes extraordinary care to say the right things in the right place, but he has silently, quietly forged a special relationship with Beijing which, in turn, has helped him strengthen ties with China’s ‘friends’, most notably Iran.

It is only a matter of time before China makes decisive inroads into Bangladesh. Beijing has not been idle and there are reports of increased interactions and enhanced talks with Dhaka. For all we know, China could be negotiating the purchase of Bangladeshi gas and securing port facilities in that country. With Burma in its pocket, Bangladesh is the natural next stop for China. Beijing is determined to increase its sphere of influence beyond the South China Sea and into the Indian Ocean via the Bay of Bengal.

As for Pakistan, China is already deeply entrenched in that country, in many ways much more than the US is. From ballistic missiles to JF-17 fighter aircraft, from nuclear power plants to infrastructure, China continues to shower its ‘all-weather’ friend with every conceivable military and civilian assistance. The Gwadar Port will service China’s oil and gas transhipment requirements, apart from providing Beijing with a strategic outpost in Arabian Sea off the Persian Gulf. Once the proposed Karakoram rail link between Kashgar in Xinjiang province and Havelian near Rawalpindi becomes operational, there will be a tectonic shift in the region's geopolitics.

The strategy is obvious – to contain India to its territorial borders — and the tactics to achieve that objective are ruthlessly selfish, as they should be. India’s hocus-pocus policy of ‘enlightened self-interest’ cannot but founder on the rock of China’s aggressive expansionism.

Ironically, it is only now that there seems to be creeping realisation in South Block of what’s happening in the neighbourhood. A meeting of India’s Ambassadors to SAARC countries, chaired by Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, was held in Rangoon last week to take stock of the situation and try and refix India’s priorities. Interestingly, the meeting was attended by India’s Ambassador to China, which makes eminent sense. But this is at best a bureaucratic exercise which cannot be carried forward unless there is matching political backing. Mere tinkering with policy won’t do anymore; India needs a whole new set of initiatives to reclaim the space it has ceded — or at least as much of it as is possible in the given circumstances.

That, however, remains uncertain. As of now, there is nothing to suggest that Manmohan Singh is willing to give up his obsession with Pakistan (and the US) and refocus attention on the greater neighbourhood. It is suggested by his admirers that Manmohan Singh is driven by the desire to go down in history as the Indian Prime Minister who brokered peace with Pakistan. That’s a noble desire. But shouldn’t he rather want to go down in history as the Prime Minister who expanded India’s sphere of influence in its immediate neighbourhood? Or must national interest suffer on account of an individual’s myopic vision?

Taliban's barbarism in name of Islam

What awaits Afghanistan

The August 9 issue of Time featured a cover story on the plight of women in those parts of Afghanistan where the Taliban enforce their barbaric interpretation of sharia’h. The magazine had a shocking picture on the cover: That of 18-year-old Aisha whose nose and ears were sliced off on the instructions of the local Taliban commander. Aisha was punished for running away from an abusive husband and parents-in-law.

UPDATE
The Taliban publicly flogged and then executed a pregnant Afghan widow by emptying three shots into her head for alleged adultery. Bibi Sanubar, 35, was kept in captivity for three days before she was shot dead in a public trial on Sunday by a local Taliban commander in the Qadis district of the rural western province Badghis. The Taliban accused Sanubar of having an "illicit affair" that left her pregnant.

Aisha’s story is symbolic of persecution of girls and women by the Taliban in the name of Islam. There are innumerable examples of young girls, some just past their puberty, being forced into marriage with members of the Taliban militia to serve as no more than sex slaves for the adherents of Deobandi Islam. Woe betide those girls who try to escape from their life of forced misery.

Jihad Watch provides a glimpse of what it calls “Unspeakable barbarism among the Taliban, the students of Islam.”
Time has raised a fundamental question: What happens if we leave Afghanistan?
That question has been posed from the American perspective, reflecting American concerns over US President Barack Hussein Obama’s plan to pull out troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2011. But it’s a question that should really bother democracies across the world. The issue raised by Time has several aspects involving the liberty, rights and dignity of Afghans, especially women.

If the Taliban were to regain power in Aghanistan, as it seems likely with the US preparing to hand over control over Kabul to the Generals of Pakistan, then all those who claim to stand for freedom, liberty and dignity would stand indicted of complicity in this crime.

The years when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan will be remembered for the contempt with which Mullah Omar and his men trampled upon women’s rights. Not only were young and old women made to disappear under burqas, they were virtually banished to the darkest corners of their homes. Girls were prohibited from attending school. In the joyless world of ‘pure Islam’, along with music and art, women’s rights disappeared to as they were deemed to be ‘un-Islamic’.

That period of terror came to be symbolised by the public execution of two women in Kabul’s football stadium.

That was in the past. As for the future, a glimpse of what awaits Afghanistan has been provided by AP in this news despatch from Kabul on August 16:

Taliban stone couple for adultery in Afghanistan

By AMIR SHAH

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Taliban militants stoned a young couple to death for adultery after they ran away from their families in northern Afghanistan, officials said Monday. It was the first confirmed stoning in Afghanistan since the fall of Taliban rule in the 2001 US-led invasion.

When the Islamist extremists ruled Afghanistan, women were not allowed to leave their houses without a male guardian, and public killings for violations of their harsh interpretation of the Quran were common.

This weekend's stoning appeared to arise from an affair between a married man and a single woman in Kunduz province's Dasht-e-Archi district. The woman, Sadiqa, was 20 years old and engaged to another man, said the Kunduz provincial police chief, Gen. Abdul Raza Yaqoubi. Her lover, 28-year-old Qayum, left his wife to run away with her, and the two had holed up in a friend's house five days ago, said district Government head, Mohammad Ayub Aqyar.

They were discovered by Taliban operatives on Sunday and stoned to death in front a crowd of about 150 men, Aqyar said. First the woman was brought out and stoned, then the man a half an hour later, Aqyar said. He decried the punishment, which he said was ordered by two local Taliban commanders.

The ancient practice of death by stoning has been abandoned in all but a handful of countries. It is still a legal punishment in some countries, like Iran, which justify it under Sharia’h, or Islamic law.

Last month, Iran's religious authorities called off the planned stoning of a woman convicted of cheating on her husband. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani's sentence -- which would have been Iran's first stoning since 2008 -- was lifted following a campaign around the world.

Two witnesses to the horrific double murder in the name of Islam told the BBC that the Taliban asked the villagers to attend the stoning through an announcement on loudspeakers in the mosque. "There was a big crowd of people... We were also asked to throw stones. After a while, the Taliban left. The woman was dead but the man was still alive... Some Taliban then came and shot him three times. The Taliban warned villagers if anyone does anything un-Islamic, this will be their fate.''

Anybody for ‘good’ Taliban?

Independence Day musings

For poor and rich,just another day!

There are fond memories that we cherish and nurse, often recalling them to relive memorable moments of our past. And there are bad memories that remind us of events we wish had never occurred, memories that we want to erase from our minds but more often than not are unable to do so. Then there are haunting memories, graphic audio-visual images that keep on surfacing every now and then, often at the most unexpected moments, disorienting us and leaving us feeling melancholic. No matter how hard we try to erase those images, those voices, from the past, they just don’t fade away. They recede, only to surface time and again.

There are many fond memories of summer holidays spent at my grandmother’s house in the suburbs of Kolkata that I cherish and have lovingly nursed for nearly two score and ten years. But there’s one memory I would rather not carry in the crevices of my mind; yet, no matter how hard I try to erase it, the black-and-white image of a young woman in a tattered sari, carrying a rickety child, and a little girl with large eyes in a torn frock clutching to her mother’s rags with one hand and holding a battered and bruised aluminium bowl in another, remains indelible. It keeps on popping up just when I think I have been able to wipe it out forever, often when I am settling down for a meal at a table laden with food.

There was a dining table at my grandmother’s house which was kept in a sort of half open room next to the kitchen that led to the garden and the narrow, black-painted iron gate, which was closed and locked only after nightfall, and the lane into which it opened. If memory serves me right it was the summer of 1972 and my cousins and I had just sat down for lunch — a sumptuous meal of bhaat, daal, begun bhaaja and maachher jhol — with my grandmother hovering over us and my aunts piling our plates high with food. Children were supposed to eat till they couldn’t swallow another morsel without throwing up.

Suddenly there was this woman at the gate, with the starving child and the little girl with large eyes. “Ma, fan daao ma!” It was a pitiful cry, not for food but for the starchy water that is poured out after boiling rice and thrown away. Those were hard days of PL480 when food was rationed and there was never anything extra in the pot to be given away. The poor and the starving knew it was no use begging for food, so they asked for fan. All this I gathered much later, but on that afternoon I was stunned by the sight of such stark poverty. Back home in Jamshedpur, which was a small, very small, town those days, life was lived out in an orderly fashion; nobody was rich, but everybody lived well and hunger was unheard of, leave alone seen in such a stark manner.

My grandmother, a kind soul, I learned that afternoon, would keep the fan aside in a large brass bowl, to be given away to anybody who came asking for it. One of my aunts poured the fan into the aluminium bowl which the girl held out, clutching it with both hands so that it would not slip and fall. Another aunt asked the woman to come in and sit in the shade of the guava tree. I watched, strangely fascinated, unable to take my eyes away, as the woman fed the girl and the child, by turn, and then with great care wiped the bowl with her fingers and licked them hungrily. The remnants were her meal.

I couldn’t eat a morsel that day. Not at lunch, nor at dinner. At night, as I tossed and turned in the sweltering summer heat — power cuts in West Bengal of the 1970s stretched for hours together — my grandmother tried to calm me with one of her stories about the life she had left behind in East Bengal. It didn’t work.

You could well ask why am I recounting this apparently irrelevant incident that dates back to when I was 11 years old. There is no real reason to do so, but it’s an image from the past that I have seen again and again, and continue to do so as this wondrous land of ours celebrates its 64th Independence Day. Freedom is something we the privileged take for granted. But for many it means nothing: August 15 is just another day in their pathetic lives lived out in gut-wrenching poverty.

We who flaunt near double-digit GDP growth as evidence of India’s ‘progress’ and get excited by the findings of the National Council of Applied Economic Research that show the number of high-income households has exceeded the number of low-income households, can never quite imagine how the other half lives — and dies — because we have willed ourselves into disowning the poor and the wretched of the land. To talk of poverty is considered unfashionable in an India aglitter with chrome-and-glass shopping malls, a country which sees no shame in the continuous loot of public funds as is happening in Delhi at the moment where thousands of crores are being skimmed off in the guise of hosting this year’s Commonwealth Games, which, we are told, are a matter of ‘national pride’. Nor does our conscience bother us that thousands of tonnes of foodgrains are allowed to rot in Government godowns so that they can be sold at a pittance to liquor manufacturers while millions go to bed hungry.

Statistics culled by the Suresh Tendulkar Committee suggest 37.2 per cent (the Planning Commission insists it is 27.3 per cent) of India’s citizens, who are supposed to feel blessed and proud for being born in a free country, a democracy at that, live below the poverty line, which, incidentally, is variously defined and not without a purpose: The hazier the definition, the easier it is to disown discomfiting facts in ‘rising’ India. According to the Experts’ Group headed by Mr NC Saxena, which based its estimates on calorie intake, 50 per cent of rural households live below the poverty line. The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, headed by Mr Arjun Sengupta, came to the conclusion that 77 per cent of Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day. It is now believed that the poor in eight of India’s States outnumber the poor in sub-Saharan Africa.

The bold and the beautiful of the new India, the rising India, the shining India will no doubt turn up their pretty noses and snigger at the poor and the underprivileged, the hungry and the deprived, the dying and the diseased, and blame them for being a huge drain on public funds. Life is an un-ending party for the privileged, the haves cannot be expected to bother about the have-nots. That’s the way it has been throughout history. That’s the way it shall forever be.

That, however, should not stop us from sparing a thought for those who wistfully gaze at the fluttering Tricolour and wonder what life on the other side of the divide is like. The middle-classes could do without being selfish for a day and take a look around them, if only to convince themselves that they are far better off than they believe they deserve to be. As for the rich, the top eight per cent which stands to gain the most with eight per cent and more GDP growth, we really need not bother about them. Funnily enough, Independence Day means nothing for them either: It’s just another holiday.

Political instability haunts Nepal

Maoist menace takes its toll!

Kathmandu: The rain-drenched silver-green leaves of the birch outside my room shimmer in the late afternoon light which is rapidly fading as the slate grey sky turns inky black. The birch would have been in splendid isolation, squeezed between a ghastly apartment block and the refreshingly old world Shangri-La, but for the solitary weeping willow, its branches, lush with newly-sprung monsoon leaves, hanging low. Not much remains of the garden Desmond Doig, artist, story-teller and an editor much ahead of his times, had landscaped for the Shangri-La. That was some three decades ago after Junior Statesman was shut down and a heart-broken Desmond Doig moved to his beloved Kathmandu from Kolkata, the other love of his life.

Much of the open space in front of the Shangri-La has now been paved, a virtual parking lot for cars and SUVs. Maintaining a garden, that too one landscaped by Desmond Doig, is not cheap in these hard days as Nepal struggles to come to terms with political instability gnawing at the innards of an economy that was not healthy in the best of times which came to an end with the night of the long knives at Narayanhity Palace a decade ago. Desmond Doig did not live to see the decline and fall of the only Hindu kingdom of modern times, but his presence is felt at the Shangri-La in more ways than one. The coasters are imprinted with his pen-and-ink sketches of a Kathmandu that now exists in the nooks and corners of an over-crowded city; the stationery folder contains two picture postcards with his breath-taking watercolour painting of Shekha Narayan temple; and the lobby has huge framed drawings, possibly working sketches that he left behind in his studio at the hotel.

“No PM, no surprise, no shame!” runs the headline in The Himalayan, Kathmandu’s popular English language daily. The story is about the Constituent Assembly failing, for the fourth time, to elect a Prime Minister to head a coalition Government and steer the long-pending task of framing and adopting a Constitution for the Secular Democratic Republic of Nepal. After the storming of the Singha Darbar in 2006, the Maobadis, the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) and the Nepali Congress were quick to dethrone the King and declare the birth of a ‘new’ Nepal. But the ‘new’ Nepal still awaits a constitutional structure to set it apart from the ‘old’ Nepal and put the country firmly on the path of multi-party democracy.

The Maobadis, who have been operating under the banner of the UCPN (Maoist) after giving up their armed insurgency and joining mainstream politics, have never quite allowed themselves to be reconciled with their till-now unsuccessful revolution. Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal and his comrades, backed by their People’s Liberation Army, had hoped to capture power and convert the Himalayan kingdom into a Communist state modelled along the lines of China; critics say they had dreamt of establishing a Pol Pot-like regime. Instead, they have had to contest elections and conform to the norms of parliamentary politics. Maobadis, like conservative Communists, may make a show of ‘internal debate’ but have neither the time nor the inclination for decisions arrived at through discussion and deliberation with the other main players in Nepal’s politics, namely the Nepali Congress and the CPN (UML). Nor do they concede the fact that someone not from their ranks could head the Government.

Therefore, it is not surprising that the Maobadis have done everything possible to hobble the Government of Nepal, such as it is, after Mr Dahal had to resign as Prime Minister following his unseemly spat with the President, Mr Ram Baran Yadav, over the Army chief refusing to allow the wholesale transformation of what used to be the Royal Nepal Army into the People’s Liberation Army by admitting to its ranks demobbed insurgents. Despite his best efforts, Mr Madhav Kumar Nepal, who succeeded Mr Dahal, found himself managing street agitations by the Maobadis instead of governing his country. The only decisive action he could take was to get the term of the Constituent Assembly, which was to expire this summer, extended for a year. A recalcitrant Prachanda has forced Mr Nepal to resign from office; for more than a month now he has been Nepal’s caretaker Prime Minister, waiting to hand over charge to a Prime Minister elected by the Constituent Assembly.

That wait has just got longer, with neither Mr Dahal, who wants to become Prime Minister again, nor Mr Ramchandra Paudel of the Nepali Congress, who believes that with the Maobadis and the CPN (UML) having failed to provide political stability, his party should now get a chance to lead the Government. On the face of it, Mr Paudel has a point: After all the Nepali Congress is far more experienced in dealing with political crisis and adept at the game of co-opting dissenters. It could succeed where both the Maobadis and the CPN (UML) have abysmally failed.

There’s a problem, though. The polls to elect a Constituent Assembly gave nobody a majority; the smaller parties, especially those representing Madhesi interests, are not easy to deal with; and, among the top three parties there’s virtually very little, if at all any, consensus on any issue of consequence, leave alone who should lead the Government. As much was evident last Friday when Mr Dahal polled 213 votes (of which 204 came from his party legislators) and Mr Paudel got 121 votes.

In the 601-member Constituent Assembly, this is way behind the halfway mark. From the votes cast against Mr Paudel it would seem the CNP (UML) is not on the same page with him. As the rule says the Constituent Assembly shall keep on voting till one of the contenders is able to secure a majority, the Speaker has called for a fresh election, the fifth, on August 18. A week is a long time in politics and much could change between my arrival in and exit from Kathmandu later this week. But those who should know are reluctant to hazard a guess.

Tail piece: The priests at Pashupatinath temple are not to be trifled with, as Kishen Thapa learned to his shock, pain and agony. Infuriated at Mr Thapa’s callous disregard of rites and rituals — he broke a coconut at the western gate of the hallowed shrine, which apparently is strictly not allowed — Harihar Bhandari, a temple priest, banged the puja thaali he was carrying on the pilgrim’s head. Mr Thapa is presently nursing a split scalp which required to be stitched up by doctors.

Kerala’s slide into radical Islamism

Junking Indian identity for Arab garb!

There’s nothing surprising about the rash-like emergence of violent Islamism in Kerala. God’s Own Country, as Kerala was known for its natural splendour and cultural heritage, is rapidly turning into the springboard of jihad in India. This hasn’t happened overnight, nor has Islamism spread its tentacles over the past few months to make its presence felt in the most shocking manner: The attack on a professor for allegedly denigrating Islam has served to highlight the seeping terror unleashed by homegrown jihadis.

The rain-gorged verdant plains and hills along the lush Malabar coast are fast turning into the billious green of radical Islam. Roadside brick-and-mortar glass-fronted shrines dedicated to Virgin Mary with flickering candles lit by the devout and ancient temples with amazing hand-crafted brassware and bell metal utensils that once celebrated the Hinduness of Kerala are overshadowed by spanking new mosques that seem to be mushrooming all over the place. Not only are they built with Arab money — donations by Muslim Malayalees working in Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia, add up to only a fraction of the cost — but they also symbolise the increasing influence of Arab ‘culture’, which is largely about visible manifestations of Islam and Islamism, that threatens to stamp out Kerala’s rich indigenous culture rooted in India’s civilisational past.

Huge billboards, advertising ‘Arab Pardha’ in English and Arabic, now jostle for space along with those advertising jewellery, new apartment blocks and investment schemes. The ‘Arab Pardha’ billboards are illustrated with larger than life images of women clad in head-to-toe burqas: They look shapeless and formless, their identity smothered by black fabric and their eyes barely visible through slits. “Arab Pardha”, declares one billboard, “All pious women should wear it.” The copywriter has it all wrong; it should have read, “All pious women should disappear behind it.” For, that’s what the burqa is meant for — to make women disappear, make them invisible, deny them the right to exist as individuals. Any argument to the contrary is spurious and any religious edict cited in support of this grotesque suppression of individual liberty is specious.

But there is a larger purpose behind propagating the ‘Arab Pardha', or purdah, which is insidious and frightening for those who value freedom. This is one of the many instruments adopted by Islamists to push their agenda of radicalising Muslims and imposing their worldview on others without so much as even a token resistance by either civil society or the state. The darkness of the world in which they live is now being forced on us. Decades ago Nirad C Chaudhuri was to record in his celebrated essay, The Continent of Circe, “Whenever in the streets of Delhi I see a Muslim woman in a burqa, the Islamic veil, I apostrophise her mentally: ‘Sister! you are the symbol of your community in India.’ The entire body of Muslims are under a black veil.” The Continent of Circe was first published in 1966; forty-one years later, the community wants the black veil, the ‘Arab Pardha’, to envelope ‘secular’ India.

Kerala’s ‘Arab Pardha’ billboards are a taunting reminder that in ‘secular’ India we must remain mute witness to the communalisation of culture, politics and society by peddlers of Islamism and its offensive agenda that is rooted in the most obnoxious interpretation of what Mohammed preached millennia ago. Even the economy has not been spared: Islamic banking, Islamic investments and Islamic financial instruments have surreptitiously entered this country under the benign gaze of an indulgent UPA Government whose Prime Minister spends sleepless nights agonising over the plight of Islamic terrorists and demands that all Government initiatives must be anchored in his perverse ‘Muslims first’ policy. The Prime Minister’s admirers claim he is a “sensitive person” who is easily moved by the “plight of the helpless”. Had he been moved by the pathetic sight of a Muslim woman, as much an Indian as all of us, forced to wear an ‘Arab Pardha’, his claimed sensitivities would have carried conviction. But such expression of sympathy, if not resolve to combat the insidious gameplan of Islamists inspired by hate-mongers and preachers of intolerance who draw their sustenance from the fruit of the poison tree of Wahaabism that flourishes in the sterile sands of Arabia, would demand a great degree of intellectual integrity and moral courage. The Prime Minister may be an “accidental politician”, but he is a practitioner of politics of cynicism. For that, you neither need intellectual integrity nor moral courage.

Every time there is criticism of the Islamic veil, which comes in various forms of indignity — the hijab, the niqab, the burqa, the chador — whether from within or outside the Muslim community, we hear the frayed argument: It’s a matter of personal choice; it’s an expression of religiosity; it’s culture-specific; it’s a minority community’s right, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. All that and more is balderdash, not least because there is no Quranic injunction that mandates a Muslim woman to wear an ‘Arab Pardha’. Given the nature of the community’s social hierarchy and the grip of the mullahs, rarely does a woman protest, leave alone rebel. Those who do, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somalian activist whose book The Caged Virgin provides a revealing insight into Islamism’s warped religio-political ideology, are hounded and live in perpetual fear of losing their lives. Blasphemy is not tolerated by those who live in a world darker than the darkest burqa, a world in which even Barbie wears the Islamic veil lest her plastic modesty be compromised.

But this is not only about the denial of an individual’s liberty, nor is it about the suppression of human rights in the name of faith. It is about the in-your-face declaration of Islamists that they can have their way without so much as lifting their little finger. It is a laughable sight to watch Malayalees trying to navigate crowded streets in Kochi wearing white Arab gelabayas, the loose kaftan like dress that along with the kafeyah — or ‘Arab rumal’ — has become a symbol of trans-national radical Islam, their ‘Arab Pardha’ clad wives and daughters in tow. But it is not a laughable matter.

Increasingly, we are witnessing a shifting of loyalties from Malabar to Manipur. Faith in India is being transplanted by belief in Arabia. This should alarm those who believe in the Indian nation as a secular entity.

CWG loot is a national shame!

What pride in robbing India of its wealth?

On May 14, 2010, the Times of India, quoting an NGO audit, reported that the cost of this year’s Commonwealth Games in New Delhi had escalated by a whopping 1,575%. The report said:

In the case of Delhi's Commonwealth Games, official cost estimates have gone up by a whopping 525% since the city won the bid. Unofficial assessments put the escalation at a mindboggling 1575% -- that is more than 15 times the original estimate -- according to an independent report.
India's bid document for the Commonwealth Games in 2003 estimated the cost of hosting the event at Rs 1,899 crore. After several revisions the estimates now range from an official figure of Rs 10,000 crore to independent experts at an astounding Rs 30,000 crore.

By end-July officials associated with the Games were admitting that total costs would be upward of Rs 35,000 crore. If the cost of various infrastructure projects (including extension of Metro services, power plants, etc) meant to showcase Delhi as a ‘worldclass city’ were to be taken into account, the grand total would shoot up to nearly Rs 1,00,000 crore.

The construction and renovation work was undertaken by agencies of the Delhi Government, run by the Congress. The ‘preparations’ include relaying of perfectly good roads which are now sinking under cars and buses, paving pavements that were spanking new, digging up vast stretches of the city and then leaving things that way, giving Delhi a bombed-out look.

The various stadia where the Games are to be held are still in a shambles after extensive ‘renovation’. Roofs are leaking, walls are damp, toilets are non-functional and premises are littered with debris and uncovered power cables that are a death trap. Many of the venues have not been checked for fire safety.

A CVC report lists the lapses in detail. The Delhi Government has no credible response.

What began as the rape of Yamuna when the Delhi Government colluded with real estate firms to violate all environment norms to build the Sports Village on the river’s floodbanks (the apartments will be later sold at astronomical sums to those who can also grease palms) has turned into an open loot.

The Organising Committee is now found to have its snout in the trough too. Its budget alone is more than Rs 1,000 crore. Where’s this money going?

.A treadmill is being hired for 45 days for Rs 9.75 lakh. A cross trainer for Rs 8.8 lakh.
.Diesel power will be generated at Rs 80 per unit at some Commonwealth Games venues. .The market rate is less than a tenth of this.
.Umbrellas are being ‘hired’ at Rs 6,308 each.
.Chairs are being rented at Rs 8,378 for a month-and-a-half each.
.Tissue rolls are being purchased at Rs 4,138 each.

This is not all. An unknown London-based firm was hired, without any contract being signed and on the basis of what now transpires to be a forged e-mail, allegedly sent by a junior staff at the Indian High Commission in London, for services like the Queen’s Baton Relay for an astronomical sum. Curiously, the firm continues to be paid every month.
An IANS report informs us that the scandal surfaced with:

... British tax authorities wanting to know if there were any discrepancies in the payments made to AK Films by the Organising Committee for the services rendered.
Their attention was drawn to the payments when the OC approached them this March for a VAT refund of 14,000 pounds for the payments.
It is claimed that the firm and its sister concern, AM Car and Van Hire, were paid nearly 450,000 pounds by the OC. The British authorities apparently claimed that 25,000 pounds was continuing to be paid into the firm's account.
On his part, the firm's owner Ashish Patel denied receiving the monthly amounts and said the OC had paid him only 247,000 pounds and still owed him 147,000 pounds towards transport rental costs.

Similarly, the Organising Committee has signed a strange deal with a Singapore-based ‘marketing firm’ to secure sponsorships and revenue for the Delhi Games. A clause in the contract entitles the firm to a percentage of all sponsorship revenues. The firm till date has not secured any sponsorship for the Games, but it has made a huge amount by way of its commission from money given by PSUs, under instructions from parent Ministries in the UPA Government, as ‘sponsorship’.

There’s more to the shame and the scandal. The Delhi Government is now found to have diverted Rs 744 crore from Budget funds meant for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe welfare to the Commonwealth Games. Diversion of these funds are not allowed.

For further details, read It’s Common V/S Wealth, an excellent, well-documented report of an independent inquiry into the loot in the name of organising the Commonwealth Games.

All this amounts to no more than the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Easily this is the biggest ever scandal in independent India. People are being told not to talk about the loot of public money under the watch of the Congress Government of Delhi and the Congress-led UPA Government as the Commonwealth Games are a matter of “national pride”.

I see no ‘national pride’ in hosting a 12-day bogus sports event (even Asiad takes precedence over Commonwealth Games) which is a cover for looting India of thousands of crores of rupees. A country where 37 per cent of the people live in appalling poverty and millions barely keep body and soul together such criminal loot of taxpayer money is a matter of national shame.

For CBI, slander is evidence!

Real target of Congress' Goebbelsian propaganda is Narendra Modi!

There have been more than 5,000 ‘encounter deaths’ in this country. Over 1,700 ‘encounter death’-related complaints are pending in various courts and before the Human Rights Commission. More than 800 ‘encounter deaths’ took place in the last few decades in Uttar Pradesh alone. More than 400 police ‘encounters’ took place in Maharashtra. None of these (incidents) has come to trial as has the Sohrabuddin case. We have never heard that anyone has been convicted for these thousands of ‘encounter deaths’. No policemen have been found guilty or even arrested as it has happened in Gujarat,” says Mr Devang Nanavati, an Ahmedabad-based lawyer who is associated with the BJP, while highlighting the strange obsession with which the death of a notorious criminal who had a mile-long record of serious crimes and whose links with Dawood Ibrahim qualified him as a terror accomplice, is being pursued by the Congress, the Central Bureau of Investigation, congenital liars who pose as human rights activists and a corrosive media which has lost all sense of balance and fair play.

The Supreme Court, which asked the CBI to inquire into the ‘larger conspiracy’ behind the killing of Sohrabuddin Shaikh and his wife, Kauser Bi, nearly five years after the incident had occurred, was no doubt motivated by the noble intention of getting to the truth. However, such lofty intentions need not necessarily be attributed to the sustained pressure from the slain criminal’s apparently inconsolable brother and jholawallahs who would be rendered jobless (and thus find themselves starved of generous funding by a variety of sources and agencies) if society were to be cleansed of malcontent, to punish those responsible for what they allege to be extrajudicial killings carried out by the police on the instructions of BJP leaders. Their pre-determination of guilt, both by implication and association, which finds more than an echo in what the CBI now alleges through stories which are touted as ‘investigative journalism’ by newspapers and news channels whose bias renders them incapable of distinguishing between fact and fiction, cannot be allowed to supplant the judicial process.

Events over the past fortnight have removed all doubts, if there were any, about the CBI’s motives that are anything but lofty. The agency has been most brazen while pursuing a political agenda set by the Congress to defame Chief Minister Narendra Modi through slander and worse with the sole purpose of tarring his reputation and hobbling his Government to a point where it begins to lose credibility among Gujarat’s voters. For, the real target of the Goebbelsian propaganda orchestrated by the Congress with the help of the CBI and a craven media is not Mr Amit Shah, who has resigned as Minister of State for Home after being charged with murder, extortion and obstruction of justice in the Sohrabuddin ‘false’ encounter case and is currently in jail. It is Mr Modi — his invincibility is being sought to be weakened. At the national level, the purpose is to force the BJP on the back foot and tie it down to answering allegations instead of leading a robust campaign to oust the Congress from power.

The use of manufactured taint to stun and paralyse political foes is nothing new for the Congress; it’s a past master at the game of misusing agencies of the state, most notably the Intelligence Bureau and the CBI, to further its political interests. When the Congress needed to put down the Raja of Amethi Sanjay Singh after he fell out with Rajiv Gandhi, it used the CBI, which was inquiring into the murder of badminton champion Syed Modi in 1988, to plant salacious stories in newspapers — there were no 24x7 news channels those days — eager to oblige the party. ‘Excerpts’ from what was alleged to be the personal diary of Syed Modi’s widow, Amita, found their way into the front page of these newspapers day after day, suitably embellished with insinuations and slanderous concoctions attributed to ‘sources’ in the CBI. Public memory being proverbially short, few people would remember today that the charges against Mr Sanjay Singh and Ms Amita Modi did not stick — the courts contemptuously threw them out. Twenty-one years later, the CBI quietly closed the case, having failed to establish the ‘larger conspiracy’ behind Syed Modi’s murder which, not surprisingly, it had claimed to have established in 1988-89.

Nor would too many people remember the so-called ‘St Kitts scandal’ that was manufactured by the Congress with the help of an obliging CBI to embarrass VP Singh and divert attention from the Bofors bribery scandal in 1989. An elaborate exercise was undertaken to forge documents to allege that VP Singh was a beneficiary of his son Ajeya’s ‘offshore account’ in First Trust Corp, a little-known bank in St Kitts of which nobody had heard till then. The forged documents showed that the account contained $ 21 million. Once again, eager-to-oblige newspapers published the bogus story and the Congress’s dirty tricks department had a field day painting VP Singh in the most lurid of colours, pronouncing him as a villain who was not quite the knight in shining armour that people thought he was. In the end, of course, the forgery was exposed, the conspiracy to defame VP Singh unravelled and the Congress lost the general election. Similarly, the Congress had tried to frame Mr LK Advani in the so-called ‘hawala case’ on the eve of the general election in 1996. Not only did the Congress lose that election but Mr Advani — and the BJP — emerged stronger from that attempt to sully his and the party’s image.

Examples of the Congress misusing the CBI abound. It is no secret that after the UPA came to power in the summer of 2004, the agency not only ensured Ottavio Quattrocchi remained at a safe distance from India where he was wanted to stand trial in the Bofors bribery case in which he was the prime accused, but also facilitated the emptying of the London bank accounts where the bribe money had been parked by the Italian middleman. Subsequently, the case was ‘closed’, much to the relief of a Prime Minister who actually believed prosecuting those behind the Bofors scandal was “a shame”. We also know how the CBI’s investigations into the disproportionate assets cases against Ms Mayawati and Mr Mulayam Singh Yadav are used to secure their support for the Government at moments of crisis.

In the Sohrabuddin ‘false’ encounter case, the CBI is back to using its old trick of planting stories about ‘evidence’ that has been clearly concocted to suit the Congress’s insidious gameplan. The fact is, it has filed a chargesheet but has no evidence to substantiate its allegations. And so the CBI has sought more time from the Supreme Court for ‘investigation’. Doesn’t prosecution follow investigation? Or is it the other way round for the Congress Bureau of Intimidation? And is that why it wants the case transferred out of Gujarat?

[This appeared as my Sunday column, Coffee Break, in The Pioneer on August 1, 2010.]

Criminal history of Sohrabbuddin

Teesta's "secular petty criminal" was no innocent lad!

Sohrabbuddin was not an ordinary criminal as projected by the petitioner in the alleged encounter case. Sohrabuddin had spread his tentacles in four states viz. Gujarat, Rajasthan, MP and Maharashtra. He was working in tandem with mafia dons like late Abdul Latif and Daud Ibrahim. With the active support of Dawood Ibrahim, Rasul Parti, and Mammumiya Panjumia, he was continuously smuggling in dangerous weapons and other contraband from Pakistan. In one case alone, detected by the DCB crime branch of Ahmedabad, 24 AK-56 rifles, 27 Hand grenades, 5250 cartridges and 81 magazines were recovered from one of his family owned property in Madhya Pradesh.

The details of Sohrabbuddin’s offences registered in different states are as under.

GUJARAT :
(1) DCB PS Ahmedabad CR No.11/94:
In this case, after the demolition of Babri Masjid, Sohrabbuddin and other accused had indulged in criminal conspiracy with a view to wage war against the Government of India by collecting and distributing arms and ammunition illegally and distributing them to attack during annual Lord Jagannath Rath Yatra in the year 1993 with a view to spread terror among the citizens of Ahmedabad City. After investigation, charge sheet was filed against 60 accused including Sohrabbuddin. During investigation 24 AK-56 rifles, 27 hand grenades, 5250 cartridges, 81 Magazines were recovered from the well located in the agricultural field of Sohrabbuddin. Sohrabbuddin was arrested on 9.11.1995 and was taken in police custody remand up to 9.12.1995.

(i) In this case, Sohrabbuddin along with 60 notorious accused was involved. All accused were arrested except (1) Dawood Abrahim, (2) Mammu Maiya Punju Miya (3) Farooq, (4) Ahmed (6) Sharif Khan, (7) Rasul Patti, (8) Syed Ali and seven others.
(ii) All 60 accused were tried in the Court of Designated Judge at Ahmedabad. The accused in this case were anti-national and anti-social persons having criminal antecedents and were associated with Dawood and Latif’s gang.
(iii) Number of accused who had absconded, are yet to be arrested. Amongst them are anti national criminals such as Dawood Ibrahim, Rasulkhan Party, Sharifkhan @ Dawood Shamsher. Red corner notices have been issued by Interpol for arrest of Rasul Party, Sharifkhan, Dawood Ibrahim. Dawood Ibrahim has been declared international terrorist.
(iv) It is evident that Sohrabbuddin was one of India based leader of these notorious criminals and their gangs. During investigation, Sohrabbuddin confessed to his involvement in this serious offence.
(v) The brief facts of his confession is mentioned in the judgment of this case which is as under:-
(Accused No.26: Sohrabbuddin @ Salimbhai Anvaruddin Shaikh: In his confessional statement he had stated that
he knew Sharifkhan since 1980. He came in contact with Shamim and Babukhan when he was driving a truck in Mahijpur. In March 1994 during the EID he went to meet Mahijpur to meet Shamimkhan and Sharrifkhan and met him at the residence of Shamimkhan. Sharifkhan told him that he was going to purchase one or two trucks and offered him to serve with him. Thereafter he purchased one truck. The driver Pappukhan was the younger brother of Shamimkhan and the conductor of the truck was Afzalkhan and the number of the truck was MOU-686. In may and June 1994 two trips carrying brown sugar in the truck were done by him at the instance of Sharifkhan to Bombay. In April 1994 he was told by Sharifkhan to go to Ahmedabad. He came to Ahmedabad, stayed in Ajanta Hotel in the name of Shohrab and as per the instruction of Sharifkhan, one Sattar Chacha handed over a box to him in the hotel. He brought the said box and handed over the same to Sharifkhan. The box contained 9mm pistols and cartridges. Again he came to Ahmedabad at the instance of Sharifkhan and stayed in Ajanta Hotel where one person handed over Rs. 1 lac as per the instruction issued by Sharifkhan who in turn handed over the same to Sharifkhan at Mahijpur. In June 1994 he came to Ahmedabad along with the cleaner of the truck and he stayed in Ajanta Hotel at Mirzapur. One person came to the hotel and handed over to him one box. The box contained 30 carbine guns and 100 cartridges. He in turn handed over the said box to Ajjukhan who was an accomplice of Sharifkhan and who went to Mahijpur with the box in the truck. He himself went to Mahijpur by train. In July 1994 he again came to Ahmedabad at the instance of Sharifkhan. Sharifkhan had told him that silver belonging to him was lying in Ahmedabad and therefore he was instructed to come to Ahmedabad along with Shamim Pappukhan the driver and Afzal the conductor. He went to Ahmedabad in Truck No.MOU-686. Pappu and Afzal had gone to one factory for the purpose of unloading the goods while he himself and Shamim dropped down at Kathwada and then they came to Astodia. He stayed in Hotel Ajanta. Sharifkhan had given him three currency notes of Rs. 100/- denomination and told them that if the notes were shown to the persons approaching them then he would talk with them. Thereafter he had a talk with Sharifkhan on telephone at Mahijpur. He gave the instruction to change the Hotel. Shamim was asked to stay in Hotel Ajanta while he went to stay in A-1 Guest House near Railway Station and stayed there. Thereafter he contacted Sharifkhan on telephone from A-1 Guest House and on next day at 4.00 p.m., two persons came to the guest house. He had shown the currency notes which were given by Sharifkhan. Thereafter as per their previously hatched plan, he followed the two persons in the auto rickshaw and the persons who came to the guest house followed them on Yamaha. Thereafter they went to the Amardeep Transport where Pappu, the driver of the truck, met him and informed him that the truck was loaded. Thereafter he, Shamim, Afzal and one unknown person followed the Yamaha motor cycle in a truck. The truck was taken near one mosque at Vatva. Thereafter, the persons who came on Yamaha motor cycle requested them to wait. At about 10.00 p.m., three pardanashin ladies came in the Maruti van with three persons including two persons who came on Yamaha. The name of one of the lady was Zarina. The Maruti Van was parked near the truck and the box lying in the Maruti van was loaded on to the truck. Thus, nine long boxes were loaded in the truck. Thereafter, he sat near the driver’s seat with Pappu and went to Mahijipur. Sharifkhan in the mean while managed one truck bearing No. MP-14-B-9177 Tata 1210 LP. The weapons were subsequently shifted in the said truck with help of Afzal and Shamim. It contained 32 AK-56 rifles, cartridges and magazines. The transfer of weapons was made near the pond situated at some distance from Mahijpur. Sharifkhan thereafter told him to keep the weapons at his residence for some days. During the night hours the weapons were kept in the back portion of his house. On the next day he purchased four containers and the weapons were put in the containers and few of them were buried. Sharifkhan, in the month of October-November, came in Maruti Van bearing No. DL-2-8224 and they met at the house of Shamim and at that time Afzal informed that some persons have come from Gujarat and they were interrogating Pappukhan at Malva Transport. In December, January and as well as in February he stayed in Ahmedabad. Salim and Rafiq RD came in Maruti Car bearing No. CTK-4605. He came along with them to Zarania and thereafter they went to the well situated in his field. He had brought 4 AK-56 Rifles, 8 to 10 magazines and one box of cartridges. Then he went with them to Indore and from there he had returned to Ujjain. Subsequently he came to Ahmedabad at the instance of Sharifkhan and stayed in the house of his sister Ramzani Gandhi. Thereafter again in the month of June 1995 he went to M.P. where police came to have a search at his place. He apprehended danger and therefore to conceal weapons, he threw all the weapons in the well and bombs and cartridges were buried near the well."


The order of conviction in judgement read:-

“ The accused no.1 YUSUFKHAN ALIAS LAPLAP KHUDDADKHAN PATHAN, accused no.2 SHIRAZMIYA AKBARMIYA THAKORE, accused no.5 SAJIDALI ALIAS DENI MOHEMADALI SAIYED, accused no.13 IQBAL ALIAS BAPU SAIYEDHUSSEIN SAIYED, accused no.15 GAJNAFARKHAN ALIAS BABU MINNAKHAN PATHAN, accused no.26 SOHRABBUDDIN ALIAS SALIM ANVARUDDIN SHAIKH, accused no.32 ABDUL SATTAR ALIAS SATTAR BATTERY ABDULGANI SHAIKH accused no.33 ABDULRAOOF ALIAS RAOOF ABDULKADAR SHAIKH accused no.47 HUSSEINBHAI ALIAS BHAJIYA MOHHAMMEDBHAI PATANI and accused no.58 HUJAFARKHAN ALIAS NASHIR LUHAR UMARDARAJKHAN PATHAN are convicted for the offence punishable under sections 3 and 5 of the TADA ACT and sentenced to undergo FIVE YEARS RI under both the sections and to pay a fine of Rs.250/- each and total amount of fine to the tune of Rs.5oo/- in default to pay fine to undergo further RI of ONE MONTH EACH. They are further convicted for the offence punishable under sections 4,5, and 6 of the EXPLOSIVE SUBSTANCES ACT and sentenced to undergo FIVE YEARS RI and to pay a fine of Rs.500/- indefault topay fine to undergo further RI of ONE MONTH. They are further convicted for the offence punishable under section 7 and 25(1)(a) of the ARMS ACT and sentenced to undergo imprisonment.".

For enhancing the punishment awarded to the accused, the state government has gone in appeal which is pending before the Supreme Court.

(2) Offence registered at Vejalpur Police Station of Ahmedabad City CR-II-238/2007 under section 123 B, IPC, 25 (i), B, A of Arms Act, 135 (i) of Bombay Police Station. In this case, Sohrabbuddin @ Salim @ Samir Agrawal was arrested along with other accused. In this case, the accused indulged in criminal conspiracy to commit murder by arming themselves with weapons to extract money from a person who had failed to pay a loan taken by him. In this case, associate of Sohrabbuddin, Sharifkhan @ SK,(known as Chhota Dawood) is absconding and has taken shelter in Pakistan. Red corner notice has been issued by Interpol for arrest of Sharif Khan.

(3) Shahpur Police Station of Ahmedabad City CR No.-II-169/95 under Section 467, 468, 469, 471 of IPC under Section 25 (i), A (i), AA of Arms Act and Section 29, 1 (B3) of Explosive Act. In this case, 32 accused persons entered into a criminal conspiracy by forgery of documents to use them for obtaining No Objection Certificate with a view to obtain a license for transportation as well as purchase of prohibited pistols, revolvers and cartridges and other weapons with a view to indulge in criminal activities in the city of Ahmedabad. Sohrabbuddin was one of the accused along with other anti-national criminals like Rasul Party, Sharifkhan etc. He was charge-sheeted. Rasul khan, Ezazkhan, Sharifkhan are absconding. In this case, the Sessions court acquitted the accused. Against this acquittal, the State Government has filed appeals No. Crl. Revision Appeal. No. 285/2002 and No. 286/2002 which are pending in the High Court of Gujarat. Red corner notices has been issued for arrest of Rasul Party and Sharif Khan.

(4) Navrangpura Police Station of Ahmedabad City CR No.II-1124/04 under Section 307, 427 of IPC, Section 25(i) A. In this case, Sohrabbuddin along with 9 other accused persons had opened fire in the office of Popular Construction Ltd., and had attempted to murder with a view to intervene himself in a property dispute. In this case, all the 10 accused were arrested and chargesheeted. In this case, Shorabbuddin was also arrested. The brother of Sohrabbuddin, Niabuddin is also co-accused.

MAHARASHTRA:

(1) Chandgad Police Station of Kolhapur District CR No.52/2000 under Section 307, 120(b), 147, 148, 149 of IPC and under Section 25(i) (3), 27 of Arms Act. At that time, Sohrabbuddin was known as Sohrabbudin @ Salman @ Salim Anvaruddin Kureshi. In this case, Sohrabbuddin was involved along with 5 other accused. In this case, Sohrabbuddin was absconding and declared as such. The case has been charge sheeted in Jurisdictional Court and is pending for trial. On 8.11.2000, the accused, who were riding motor cycles, opened fire on 2 persons at Old ST Stand and injured them greviously. In this case, Sohrabbuddin along with Praful @ Tulsi @ Samir, Jalil, and Ramzan Shah were involved. In this case, accused Jalil was arrested whereas Praful and Sohrabbuddin have absconded.

(2) Chandgad Police Station of Kolhapur District Crime Registration No.4/2005 under Section 302, 120(b), 34 of IPC and under Section 25(1) (3) and 27 of Arms Act. In this case, Sohrabbuddin along with 5 other accused involved in criminal conspiracy by arming themselves with illegal weapons and killed Gopal Tukaram Badivadekar. In this case, Sohrabbuddin was arrested whereas other 5 accused had absconded. In this case, charge sheet was filed and the case is pending for trial.

MADHYA PRADESH:

1. Nagda Police Station of Ujjain District of MP Crime Registration No.237/95 under Section 122, 123 IPC and sections 25, 27 of Arms Act. In this incident Sohrabbuddin was caught while selling arms. The case was investigated by local police and C.B.I.
2. Mahidpur Police Station of Ujjain District of MP Crime Registration No.166/95 under Section 122,123 of IPC and 25 and 27 of Arms. Act. In this incident fire arms were recovered from Sohrabbuddin. The case was initially investigated by the local police and later on by C.B.I.
3. Lasudia Police Station C.R No.346/2003 under section 419 IPC in this case on 23.07.2003 Sohrabbuddin along with one Juberbhai were caught riding a motor cycle with driving licence with bogus name. They were arrested and charge sheeted along with two more persons who facilitated bogus licence.
4. On 06-07-1999 Sohrabbuddin was detained under National Security Act (N.S.A) In this case, accused were arrested and later on released on bail and since then they are absconding. Sohrabbuddin was detained under National Security Act on 5.7.1999 by Madhya Pradesh Police.

RAJASTHAN:

(1) Hathipol Police Station of Udaipur District of Rajasthan State Crime Registration No.214/04 dated 31.12.2004 under Section 147, 148, 149, 302 IPC and Section 3/25 of Arms Act. In this case, Sohrabbuddin along with other 6 accused persons formed an unlawful assembly and opened fire with fire arms and killed one Hamid Lata at a busy thoroughfare of Suraj pole in the heart of Udaipur City. These accused had come on motor cycles. In this case, 2 accused were arrested whereas other 5 accused are absconding.
The deceased was killed after he was pointed out by Sohrabbuddin. In this case, charge sheet was filed in the jurisdictional court. A reward of Rs. 2,000/- was declared on 11.1.2005 for arrest or help in arrest of Sohrabbuddin. The letter was circulated to all concerned police units of Rajasthan. As more record of criminal antecedents of Sohrabbuddin came on record, Director General of Police of Rajasthan on 27.10.2005 declared a reward of Rs. 25,000/- for the arrest or help in arrest or for assistance in use of lawful force during arrest if he resisted arrest.


Role of Sohrabuddin’s family members:

The Petitioner namely Rubabuddin and his brothers were also aware of the movement and activity of Sohrabbuddin. These facts have come on record during inquiry and investigation conducted. The details are as under:-

[1] Conduct of Rubabbudin(petitioner in Supreme Court) - The Petitioner in his writ petitions and additional writ petitions, had concealed criminal antecedents and activities of Sohrabbuddin. In no petition he has stated that his brother was terrorist and involved in serious offences deliberately to project picture of Sohrabbuddin as an innocent person, nor such details he has given to media, to whom he has given many interviews.
Sohrabbuddin was absconding after committing an offence of murder, for which an offence was registered at SurajPole police station of Udaipur District of Rajasthan in day light at a major thoroughfare. A reward of Rs. 25,000/- was also declared for his arrest or information. However, Petitioner who has constantly maintained relations with Sohrabbuddin, never informed local police station or other jurisdiction police about Sohrabbuddin during period of his absconding to save him from arrest. In fact, all acts of omission and commission of trial by media by the Petitioner are to hide his own culpable misconduct. From the signed statement of Rubabbuddin given to inquiry officer and statement given to the Investigating Officer on 3-2-2007 on 1.4.2007 and on 25.7.2007 following facts have come on record.
1. Rubabuddin provided photographs of Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi to the Inquiry officer which is borne out by statement given by Rubbabuddin. These photographs show visit to Agra by Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi, as in the background “Taj Mahal” is visible.
2. Rubabuddin was also aware of the movement Sohrabbuddin while on run and was actually harbouring him alongwith his brother at Jharania house. It is evident from the subsequent paras in the signed statement given to inquiry officer on 25/07/06. From his statement, following additional information and facts are revealed.
(a) Brother Niamuddin informed Rubabuddin on 23/11/05 at 05.20 hrs about Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi going to Sangli from Hyderabad by his mobile phone.
(b) Rubabuddin was aware of mobile telephone No. of Sohrabbuddin
(c) Brother Naibuddin was aware of Seat number of bus occupied by Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi when they went out from Hyderabad.

In the signed statement of Petitioner recorded by Inquiry Officer of this encounter case on 03/02/07, petitioner Rubabuddin has confessed and gave facts that on 16/17-11-05 in the morning Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi had gone out of house at Jharania to go to Indore and at that time Sohrabbuddin informed him that he and Kauser will go to Hyderabad and stay with one Kalimuddin (b) Rubabuddin was informed that Sohrabbuddin would travel in maruti car owned by Kalimuddin from Indore to Hyderabad bought from previous owner Dr.Prakash Bandel. (c) Sohrabbuddin and Kauser had stayed in their joint family house at Jharania for a week.(d) Sohrabbuddin was living in Indore at Hizrabad Colony in the house of Ibrahim. (e) Sohrabbuddin was living in the house of a relative of Azam Dadhi. (f) Medical treatment records of Kauserbi of Bombay and at Indore were with him. (g) He was not aware of goods lying in the houses occupied by Sohrabbuddin. (h) Sohrabbuddin informed him on 22/11/05 on telephone that he was going out to Hyderabad for treatment of Kauser and after that he would return to Jharania. (i) List of goods of Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi in house at Jharania was given to Inquiry Officer. (j) Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi used to attend all religious functions and social functions of relatives by coming at Jharania. Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi used to come frequently to the house of Rubabuddin.

[2] Conduct of Sababuddin Anwaruddin Shaikh aged 42, Advocate (Brother of Sohrabbuddin.)
Sababuddin was arrested in Nagda Police Station (M.P) C.R No. 237/95 u/s 122,123 IPC and 25-A,27 of Arms Act. The case was initially investigated by local police and later on by C.B.I which charge sheeted the case against him and other ten accused. In this case his brother Sohrabbuddin was also co-accused. Sohrabbuddin was absconding after committing day light murder in major –cross ways at Suraj Pole area of Udaipur City on 31.12.2004 and was hiding. As per statement recorded during inquiry of Sohrabbuddin encounter, on 16/17 November, 2005, Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi were present in their house and then from his house Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi had gone to board a bus of Nagda private travels to go to Indore. Sababuddin was also enjoying confidence of Sohrabbuddin as he has also stated in his statement that Sohrabbuddin was to stay at the house of Kalamuddin.

[3] Conduct of Niabuddin s/o Anvaruddin, aged 31 brother of Sohrabbuddin.
On 3.2.2007, Niabuddin admitted in his signed statement before Inquiry Officer of State CID Crime (Inquiring into death of Sohrabbuddin) following facts.

(1) On 16/17.11.2005, Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi had gone from Jharania village by a private bus to Indore and while going Sohrabbuddin disclosed that he is going to meet Kalimuddin.
(2) Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi were living at Shalimar township, Devas Road in Indore.
(3) Rubabuddin had informed that Dr. Prakash Bandel’s maruti van was used by Sohrabbuddin.
(4) Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi stayed for one week in their house in Jharania.
(5) Earlier Sohrabbuddin was living at 111, Khijrabad Colony on rent in the house of Ibrahim.
(6) Sohrabbuddin was also living in the house of relative of Azam Dodhi in Udaipur. Sohrabbuddin and Kauserbi were living alternatively in Udaipur and Indore in above mentioned houses.
(7) Where ever Sohrabbuddin used to go, Kauserbi used to accompany him.
(8) Sohrabbuddin before going out of Hyderabad had rang him up and told him that he was taking Kauserbi for treatment to Sangli.
(9) Sohrabbuddin got married with Kauserbi in the house of Samabhai Khanjipir, Machla Magra.
The statement shows that Naiumuddin was very much aware about Sohrabbuddin’s activities, places of stay and movement. However, in spite of knowing Sohrabbuddin as an absconder and wanted by police in many cases, he never informed police station and actively harboured Sohrabbuddin. Naimuddin is also wanted in Navrangpura Police station (Ahmedabad) in CR No. 1124/04 u/s 307, 427 of IPC and section 25 of the Arms act. In this case Sohrabbuddin was also a co-accused.
[4] Conduct of Jabbunisa W/o Anvaruddin Quereshi , 60 years R/o Jharnia (Mother of Sohrabbuddin).
From the signed statement given to inquiry officer, following facts have emerged.
(1) Sohrabbuddin’s mother admitted that she had five sons. (1) Sababbuddin, (2) Sohrabbuddin, (3) Shanawajuddin (4) Rubabuddin and (5) Niabuddin.
(2) She had admitted that her son Sohrabbuddin had gone to Hyderabad and from Hyderabad he was going to Sangli by bus for treatment of Kauserbi.

From the signed statement of mother Jabbunisa and three brothers Niabuddin, Sababbuddin, and Rubabbuddin as briefly stated herein above given to the Inquiry Officer, they all have accepetd that they were aware that Sohrabbuddin was absconding and wanted in a case under sec. 302 of IPC and for whose arrest a reward of Rs. 25,000/- was declared by DGP Rajasthan, and yet they along with their family members actively harbored him violating section 216 of IPC.

[This is excerpted from a larger note sourced from official files.]

Media's campaign of calumny

All are equal, media is more equal than all!

Interviewing prospective students for a media school can be a useful experience. It provides you with an insight into how media is perceived among the young who shall inherit the world from us. I usually begin by asking the applicants whether they want to pursue a career in print journalism or in the audio-visual media. During one such interview recently, a young woman told me, “I want to join a news channel.” And do what? “I want to become an anchor.” Why? “I have many things to say and as an anchor I can say anything I want.” What makes you think so? “I watch television regularly. I know.” And why do you think you can actually say whatever you want? That left her slightly flustered. “But we have freedom of expression, right? And media is free in our country, right?” I seemed to have planted doubts in her mind and she wanted me to disabuse her of them. I asked her to tell me about her other interests in life.

I was reminded of that conversation on Friday evening when editors of television news channels, feigning great outrage, queued up to condemn the smashing of glass panes and upturning of potted palms in the lobby of Videocon Tower in Delhi, where the offices of Headlines Today, Aajtak and Mail Today are located, by a crowd of people protesting against the ongoing campaign of calumny against the RSS which is being accused of promoting ‘Hindu terrorism’. The violence was uncalled for, unfortunate and unacceptable. The protest could have been peaceful. Indeed, those leading the protesters should have ensured that no damage was caused on account of the demonstration. Having said that, let us look at what was said in condemnation by editors of other channels.

“This is an attack on freedom of expression. The media is being muzzled. Ideas must be combatted with ideas, not violence. It is despicable and deplorable,” said a news channel editor, virtually frothing at the mouth. Others pitched in with elaborate denunciation of “goons” and “hooligans” — the protesters did not look like either category of social malcontents — and condemned the attack. What was most amusing was to see Ms Ambika Soni, Minister for Information & Broadcasting, waxing eloquent on how the cherished values of our democracy are under assault. Ms Soni heads a Ministry which is a relic of our fake Socialist past when the Government controlled newspapers (there were no news channels then) and information flow by adopting strong-arm tactics — newspapers critical of the Government were denied newsprint quota — and by regulating the release of advertisements — obedience fetched you a greater share. More importantly, her entry into politics was through Sanjay Gandhi’s Youth Congress during the Emergency, when all freedoms and rights, including the right to life, were suspended and journalists who didn’t extol the virtues of the Great Leader were sent to jail. All that and more seems to have been forgotten.

However, we need not be distracted by what certain practitioners of the world’s second oldest profession have to say in defence of their emulating the practices of the world’s oldest profession. It’s a free country and people have the right to say whatever they want. But what is objectionable is the attempt to disguise biased writing and distortion of the truth as “freedom of expression”. The ongoing campaign of calumny to demonise the RSS and denigrate Hindus by painting the first as a sponsor of terrorism and the second as a community of terrorists is by no stretch of the imagination ‘freedom of expression’. Nor does media have the freedom to malign or defame individuals and then seek shelter in its presumed immunity from scrutiny.

Without going into the specifics of the campaign that has been launched to tar the RSS and label Hindus as terrorists, I would like to make three points. First, neither the stories published by some magazines and newspapers nor the reports that have been telecast by some news channels present even a shred of evidence. What we have read, seen and heard so far are aspersions, accusations and alleged admissions, all of it attributed to unnamed sources in the Intelligence Bureau and the Central Bureau of Investigation. These have been neither cross-checked nor corroborated with indisputable facts. Second, it is amazing that in a country which is supposed to be governed by the law of the land, there should be such organised trial by media which is really trial by insinuation. Years later, if nothing is proved in a court of law, media will conveniently choose to forget that they had already declared individuals guilty of horrible crimes. Third, since when has speaking to someone on the phone, irrespective of whether or not that person is guilty of having committed a crime, a crime in itself?

There is, of course, the other aspect about the IB and CBI leaking like sieves with a billion holes. If the alleged offence of planting bombs in Malegaon, Ajmer and Hyderabad is to be treated seriously, shouldn’t the agencies be conducting their investigations in absolute secrecy? If they must go public with titillating tid-bits, then IB and CBI offcials should formally brief the media on record. If they are planting stories, as they are doing, then this is no investigation but a political conspiracy: The RSS is being targeted to weaken the BJP. The conspiracy to defame and demonise Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi has now been enlarged to hobble the BJP at the national level. There are no prizes for guessing who are the conspirators. Sadly, sections of the media have offered to play the role of co-conspirators. During Mrs Indira Gandhi’s Emergency regime, few editors stood up against the criminal abuse of power. Most of them chose to crawl when asked to bend. Tragically, many editors have kept up that tradition, offering space on the front page and time during prime-time news bulletins to the Establishment’s dirty tricks department.

This is not about ideology. Nor is it about political loyalties. To suggest so would be as bogus as those crying themselves hoarse that media’s freedom and freedom of expression are under attack. If anything is under attack, if anything is being questioned, is the peddling of fiction as fact under the garb of ‘investigative reporting’. Had it not been so, our ‘free’ media, a large section of which thrives on ‘paid news’, would have reported that the investigating agencies have failed to come up with any evidence to make their charges against Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur and Colonel Srikant Prasad Purohit stick. That the courts have refused to let them be tried under MACOCA, saying there was nothing on record to justify such a trial. That it’s been two years since they were arrested and have been in jail without being prosecuted or formally charged.

Or shall we just burn them at the stake because ‘free’ media has pronounced them guilty?

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on July 18, 2010.]

Don't defame the armed forces

How many men in khaki die defending India every day?

Major killed, Col injured in encounter with LeT in Poonch
Jammu, July 13: An Army Major was killed and six other personnel including a Colonel injured in Mandhar sector of Poonch in an encounter tonight with Lashkar-e- Tayyeba terrorists. Major Amit Phunge was killed in the operation while Col.Ajay Katoch of 47 Rashtriya Rifles was injured when the terrorists resorted to heavy fire and lobbed grenades, official sources said. The Army team had gone to the spot following information that about 15 Pakistan-based terrorists had sneaked in. The Army cordoned off the area and launched a search operation. The injured included Dinesh Kumar and Satinder Kumar, both Signalmen, Naik Jasbir Singh, Sepoy Samir Kumar and Rifleman Dasharat.

It’s now considered fashionable and politically correct to berate the security forces and accuse them of violating human rights. The Delhi commentariat, whose ill-informed members are often indistinguishable from jholawallahs with a certain fondness for candles, having run out of abuse to heap on Hindus and organisations that speak up for Hindu rights, has now decided to pour its bile on our men in khaki. Real and imagined instances of alleged ‘encounter killings’ are being recalled, professional human rights activists are being interviewed, separatist leaders are being flown down to Delhi and panel discussions are being organised with the sole purpose of painting the security forces in the bleakest of colours. It would seem suddenly the Army has become a four-letter dirty word and there’s no crime that jawans cannot be held guilty of having committed.

Last Sunday I was invited to a popular television show in which participants were supposed to discuss whether the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act of 1958 — subsequently amended in 1972 — requires amendments to make the security forces operating under this law accountable for their actions. We need not go into the specifics of who said what — much of it was predictable: The politician from Jammu & Kashmir described the law as “draconian”; the Kashmiri separatist accused the ‘Indian’ Army of “killing Kashmiri children”; the human rights activist said the colour khaki makes boys (she meant militants) see red and hence should be banned; and, the person representing Delhi’s exalted commentariat pompously demanded that “the law must go”. Two retired Generals of the Army and a Brigadier valiantly fought back. As usual, I was in a minority of one.

The point to note was that none of the critics of the Army and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act had a clue about the specifics of the law, nor did anyone offer to validate sweeping allegations of rights violations. Instead, what we heard were bizarre figures being cited and implausible charges being levelled. To be fair, the host repeatedly made it clear that the purpose of the show was not to attack or belittle the Army, but to debate the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act. But that served little purpose because the critics were either not interested in this particular issue or they were keen to push their own agenda. In the process, nothing of substance could be discussed and debated.

The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, I ventured to suggest, was not meant to place the Army or the security forces above the law of the land but to empower them to function effectively while dealing with situations that have defied resolution through normal means — intervention by civilian authorities, action by the police and call for calm by the political class. The Army cannot be expected to function in a vacuum and requires to be given autonomy of decision and action, I argued, hence the need for the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.

This fetched a volley of furious reactions: The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act gives the Army and security forces the licence to kill; it militates against the spirit of democracy; its provisions fly in the face of rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The Kashmiri separatist thought he was being profound when he said, “The right to life is inalienable, it cannot be violated,” and then went on to allege that “thousands are being killed by the Indian Army”. For a moment I was tempted to point out that having repudiated his allegiance to the Republic of India he had also forfeited the rights guaranteed by the Constitution of India. But I desisted from doing so because it would be meaningless trying to engage him in a debate on the provisions of the very Constitution which separatists like him find sufficiently repelling to want to secede from the Union of India.

I had taken with me some notes, which proved to be of no use when the discussion drifted into irrelevant issues and bogus allegations. But some of the details, culled from data sheets hosted on the South Asia Terrorism Portal, need to be placed on record, if only to nail the lies of those who seek to defame the Army and other security forces drafted for counter-insurgency operations. These essentially deal with fatalities suffered by our men in uniform.

For instance, 5,962 security forces personnel have been killed by terrorists in Jammu & Kashmir between 1988 and July 5, 2010. This year alone 45 security forces personnel have died in the State fighting militants. There are other insurgencies being fought by the security forces. Since 1992, as many as 939 officers and jawans have lost their lives in Manipur; 783 in Assam; 81 in Meghalaya and 22 in Mizoram. There’s more: 1,226 security forces personnel have died fighting Maoists between 2005 and 2010; this year, till July 5, we have lost 204 men in uniform to Maoist bullets.

Don't these lives count for anything? Do men who don khaki automatically surrender their right to life guaranteed by the Constitution? Are young men and women who join paramilitary forces and the Army no more than cannon fodder? And, more importantly, what about their human rights? Their right to dignity? Are these meant to be scoffed at? To be spat upon? To be violated with impunity?

The parents of a young Army Captain who went down fighting terrorists in Kashmir Valley earlier this year recounted during the show how their son was not felled by the militants’ bullets, but by a bullet fired from a nearby house. His mother, wiping her tears, said in a firm voice: “I have no more sons. If I had any, I would have sent them to join the Army. Since I have none, I am willing to offer my services.” The Kashmiri separatist slyly retorted, “We have heard thousands of such stories.”

There are two points that merit mention. First, contrary to propaganda, despite the so-called ‘sweeping provisions’ of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, the security forces virtually operate in terrorist and insurgent-infested areas with both arms tied behind their backs. Or else the fatalities would not have been so high. That’s commonsense. Second, nobody, least of all the Army, condones wilful violation of human rights. But allegations cannot be deemed to be actionable unless proven to be true. Since 1990, the security forces have faced 1,511 cases of human rights abuse. These were investigated by various agencies, including the National Human Rights Commission, and 1,473 were found to be false. In the remaining cases where culpability was established, 104 men have been punished.

A last point. There’s nothing called a pretty war fought with roses and daisies. Collateral damage is inevitable in counter-insurgency and anti-terrorist operations. It’s an asymmetrical war being fought out there by men who have dedicated their lives to the service of the nation; we must get real and learn to live with the consequences. Stuff happens.

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on July 11, 2010]

The spies who came in from the cold

Back to the Cold War era!

As spies were swapped in Vienna between the US and Russia on Friday in a replay of the Cold War years when men who came in from the cold would be exchanged after secret negotiations, officials in both White House and the Kremlin would have heaved a sigh of relief.

Curtains were drawn on the fortnight-long drama which began with the FBI busting a Russian spy ring in America in end-June and arresting 10 Russians, some of them couples, who had been living staid suburban lives since the 1990s, when they were exchanged for four Russians spending time in Russian prisons on espionage charges. The fate of an 11th Russian spy, said to be on the run, who was arrested in Cyprus and brought to the US, remains unclear.

Soon after the Russians were arrested, the FBI claimed that they had been “serving for years” as secret agents of the SVR, the intelligence organisation which has replaced the KGB. Their main aim was to infiltrate official American policy-making circles. In its submission to the court after the arrests, the FBI said that it had intercepted a message from SVR headquarters, Moscow Centre — popularly known as the ‘Centre’ — to two of the Russians, describing their main mission as “to search and develop ties in policy-making circles in the US”.

[The London Conspiracy]

Other messages intercepted by the FBI showed, or so the American agency claimed, that the Russian spies had been “asked to learn about a broad swath of topics, including nuclear weapons, US arms control positions, Iran, White House rumours, CIA leadership turnover, the last presidential election, the Congress and political parties”. Which pretty much covers everything that a spy could be tasked with. American media went into a tizzy, as did the Western Press.

Given the scale of the alleged operation, and the involvement of a high profile woman ‘entrepreneur’ with an extraordinary lifestyle — Anna Chapman was virtually into everything that can titillate the imagination — spy watchers on either side of the Atlantic came to the conclusion that this was the biggest bust since the arrest of Soviet Colonel Rudolf Abel in 1957 in New York.

The only difference: Abel was picked up as the Cold War was beginning to slide into sub-zero zone and the world was beginning to feel the chill a decade after the Iron Curtain descended, dividing the world into what then seemed frozen forever Eastern and Western Blocs. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire, which also marked the end of the Cold War, nobody could have imagined spies surfacing as spikes in US-Russia relations which have been on the ‘reset’ mode for a while now, with both Washington DC and Moscow trying their best to put the past behind them and work as friends if not allies.

[Spies not bound by law]

But Friday showed how the past can never be erased entirely. Journalists crowding Vienna airport reported how a maroon-and-white Boeing 767-200 charter flight, carrying the 10 deported Russian agents, flew in overnight from New York’s La Guardia Airport. Within minutes of its arrival, the plane came to a halt behind a Russian Emergencies Ministry plane carrying the four Russian double agents to be exchanged for the Russian spies picked up in America. For a while, it seemed the world had gone back in time.

We will never really get to know what the Russian spies, and we must presume they were spies as they pleaded guilty in court before being ‘deported’, were actually up to behind their carefully cultivated cover as part of America’s laidback suburbia. What we do know, however, is that the four Russians who were exchanged to secure their freedom were spying for America.

Anna Chapman may or may not have been a modern day Mata Hari, seducing American men into parting with professional secrets, but the four Russian double agents operating in Moscow both for their country and for America bring to mind the Cambridge Five.

Interestingly, the memoirs of Anthony Blunt, the fourth man in the Cambridge Five spy ring, were made public during the latest tran-continental espionage drama. The Cambridge 5 were behind what has been described as the “biggest security scandal of the 20th century”.

What is obvious is that the US has more to gain by securing access to the four Russian double agents than by prosecuting and jailing the Russian Ten. Nothing else explains why the US Administration should have moved so swiftly and agreed to a swap. Similarly, it could be argued that Moscow, while officially (and strenuously) denying that the Russians arrested in the US were on the payroll of the SVR, was desperate to get them out of America without being subjected to further interrogation. What secrets could they have spilled? Would they have squealed on other Russian spies operating in the US and in certain European countries, for instance in Britain? While this cannot be entirely ruled out, it's unlikely. For, undercover agents are never ever informed about others working in the same country; rarely, if ever, do spies know of their colleagues in the field. That’s basic standard operating procedure: If a spy gets caught, he or she should be in no position to squeal.

[Who killed General Zia?]

Are we then to assume that standards have drastically fallen ever since the KGB was wound up and replaced by the SVR? Is the migration of the best brains in the KGB (among them Vladimir Putin) from Intelligence-gathering to politics beginning to tell on the espionage skills of new age Russian spies?

If the FBI is telling the truth, and we need not entirely believe the Americans, the Russian spies were not only technologically-challenged (even schoolchildren would do a better job of erasing their browsing history and safeguarding their computer passwords) but wrote secret notes with ‘invisible’ ink.

If the 10 Russians, including Anna Chapman with her taste for the outrageous behind closed doors and between silken sheets, arrested in the US were dumb, the four Russians arrested in Russia were amazingly skilled in their job, excellent double agents and belonged to the old school of espionage which flourished during the Cold War. Two of them are former Russian Intelligence colonels who were found to have cheated on their bosses and ‘compromised’ — that is, helped expose — “dozens of valuable Soviet-era and Russian agents operating in the West”.

Alexander Zaporozhsky, one of the former Russian colonels, is believed to have provided crucial information to the Americans that led to the capture of Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, “two of the most damaging spies ever caught in the US”. He was sentenced to 18 years of hard labour in 2003. The other former Colonel, Alexander Sypachev, was found guilty of “passing Russian State secrets to the CIA and planning to betray Russian colleagues working abroad for money” and sentenced to eight years of hard labour in 2002.

Of the other two Russian spies doing time in Russia, Igor Sutyagin, a nuclear scientist, was found guilty of passing on secret information to a British firm, believed to be a CIA front. He was sentenced to 15 years’ labour in northern Russia near the Arctic Circle in 2004. The fourth man freed by the Russians on Friday is Sergei Skripal, a retired GRU colonel, who was sentenced to 13 years in jail in 2006 for working for Britain’s MI6 in the ’90s.

If the charges levelled by the FBI against the Russian spies appear incredible — even a rooky spy would think twice before taking his or her laptop to an unknown person to solve a technical glitch, leave alone someone allegedly as accomplished as Anna Chapman — then it is equally arguable that the charges ‘proved’ against the Russian double agents held in Russia are untenable; after all, none of the four men admitted to their guilt, which the Russians held in America did, if only to escape prison and secure freedom. What, then, makes the whole affair so significant?

There are two theories doing the rounds. Both emanate from Moscow. According to the first theory, there are powerful sections in the FBI and the CIA which are appalled by the pace at which relations between the US and Russia have been stabilising, if not improving, in recent times. The ‘reset’ button was supposed to be just there, to be seen and not to be pressed. But US President Barack Obama has been itching to press the button (his predecessor, George W Bush, kept his finger firmly away). That would have meant fast-tracking improvement in bilateral relations and an equally fast cutback in the role played by American Intelligence agencies in determining the course of the US policy vis-a-vis Russia. It is significant that the Russian spies were arrested a day after President Dmitry Medvedev concluded his visit to the US, which was described as “successful” by both the White House and Kremlin.

The second theory has it that the Americans were desperate to secure the release of the four Russian double agents — the humanitarian reasons cited by Washington have been brushed aside by Moscow. Why does the US want these men out of Russia and in its safe custody? Is it because given their long and difficult prison terms, sooner or later they would have sung like the proverbial canary and told all to the SVR?

A former KGP spymaster says the end of the Cold War has no doubt de-escalated tension between Moscow and Washington and removed all chances of direct or proxy military conflict. But espionage and counter-espionage has, instead of decreasing, actually increased. According to his estimate, there are at least 400 Russian spies operating in the US. If there is any truth in that claim, there would be at least that many, if not more, American spies lurking in the shadows across Russia. While it is easy for Russian 'immigrants' to mingle with Americans, the opposite is not that easy. So the US continues to seek out and secure the services of Russian agents in Russia, lures them into double-crossing their bosses, and gets hold of information of strategic value.

In the end, as the Cold War showed us, espionage is a zero sum game. And, that game still continues.

[This appeared as the cover story of The Pioneer's Sunday magazine section 'Foray' on July 11, 2010.]