The secret diary of Hamid Mir

Or why news telly in India is so insensitive!

If Saturday morning’s crash of an Air India plane in Mangalore that resulted in the loss of 159 lives was shockingly tragic, the coverage of the horrific incident by television news channels was appallingly callous. Chasing TRPs, some channels tripped over each other to be the first to get ‘exclusive’ tid-bits of the accident, and took ghoulish delight in presenting macabre details. What was most insensitive was television reporters thrusting their mikes into the faces of survivors and asking stunningly bovine questions. Actually, they were not asking, but demanding replies to questions that were uncalled for. So we had these shaken and injured survivors, too traumatised to think straight and possibly still in a daze, unable to comprehend what had gone wrong in the last few minutes before the plane they were travelling in from Dubai was to have come to a halt on the runway and then slowly made its way to the parking bay, recounting their horror for the benefit of television news channels. What they (or grieving families) said made little sense, which is understandable. Our smart alec anchors would have been far more incoherent and incomprehensible had they been through something far less traumatic and life-threatening.

Make no mistake. The survivors, who were in need of immediate medical assistance and could do without television cameras at their moment of ordeal, were not being brought to the screens of your television sets to inform you about what happened, why it happened, how it happened. In any event, none of the few who survived the crash could possibly throw any light on what went wrong with a landing that was supposed to be smooth — the commander and his co-pilot had landed the same aircraft on the same runway innumerable times in the past and are believed to have known the terrain like the backs of their hands — but proved to be fatal. The survivors were pounced upon by camera crews because it gave them a great high (they were able to get ‘exclusive’ grabs for their channels) and their bosses an opportunity to claim that they had it before anybody else did. That in the process all norms of decency, dignity and discretion were rudely trampled upon, and editorial caution that should have been exercised was thrown to the wind, matters little to our television channels.

Which, of course, is nothing new. Why else would our television channels have sought out Hamid Mir, the now disgraced ‘star’ of Pakistani television and chief of Geo TV, for his comments whenever issues related to that country or India-Pakistan relations cropped up? That Hamid Mir has a dubious past is known to everybody on either side of the Radcliffe Line. Nor is it a well-kept secret that Hamid Mir’s sympathies have all along been with the Islamists and not the modernists of Pakistani society and politics. By extension, his association with the ISI and the Pakistani Army has often been a subject of animated discussion. Yet, what is known as ‘mainstream media’ in India had no compunctions about showcasing Hamid Mir and presenting his views as those representing ‘mainstream opinion’ in Pakistan!

Well, mainstream opinion in Pakistan, at least that which reflects what the educated, thinking classes of that country think, is at the moment heavily loaded against Hamid Mir. Recently, a tape surfaced on Facebook which had him talking to a member of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or what is popularly referred to as the ‘Punjabi Taliban’ by Pakistanis. The conversation had nothing to do with news-gathering: It amounted to Hamid Mir instigating the TTP to kill Khalid Khwaja, a former ISI agent known to be close to the Americans who had been kidnapped by the Punjabi Taliban. The tape reveals Hamid Mir accusing Khalid Khwaja of having links with the minority Ahmedis and the Americans, both sufficiently sinful in the books of the Pakistani Taliban to merit the death sentence. Subsequently, Khalid Khwaja was killed. Hamid Mir tried to disown the tape, saying it was not his voice. Strangely, the ISI has confirmed that it was indeed Hamid Mir’s voice on the tape; senior journalists who have known Hamid Mir for years have also confirmed the tape’s authenticity.

A debate is now raging in Pakistani media circles about who taped the conversation between Hamid Mir and the TTP, and why was the tape leaked. According to some journalists, the outing of Hamid Mir also exposes the deep rifts within Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, namely the ISI, the Military Intelligence and the Intelligence Bureau. Any one of them could be trying to embarrass the other as Hamid Mir is said to have had livewire links with all of them. Another theory has it that the whole purpose was to expose the Islamists within Pakistan’s intelligence agencies by those sections in the ISI, MI and IB aligned with the either the US or China — sort of an ‘ideological’ war which has now come into the open. This is discounted by knowledgeable members of Pakistan’s commentariat who believe, and perhaps rightly so, that there is little that divides Pakistani intelligence agencies and their operatives ‘ideologically’; any alliance with either the Americans or the Chinese is purely tactical and does not automatically denote rejection or repudiation of Islamism.

The fine print, really, is inconsequential. The fact remains that Hamid Mir is more than just chief of Geo TV; he is also in cahoots with Pakistani intelligence agencies and has strong links with organisations like the TTP which are considered ‘strategic assets’ by sections of the Islamabad-Rawalpindi political-military-jihad complex. What is also of some importance for us is that Geo TV belongs to Independent Media Corporation, which owns the Jang group of newspapers. And as we all know, the Jang group is the Pakistani partner of a well-known Indian group of newspapers in a joint venture called ‘Aman ki Asha’ which aims to promote cross-border harmony and peace. It would be perfectly in order to ask how can a media group that has die-hard Islamists with links to terrorist organisations vehemently opposed to peace with India in senior positions be a trans-border peace partner. It would also serve some purpose if we were to be told as to why the Jang group was selected over other newspaper groups or independent dailies like the Daily Times, which has played a leading role in exposing and outing Hamid Mir. Chinese whispers are not exactly reliable. But there could be some truth to the story doing the rounds that it was neither aman nor asha that prompted the partnership between the two media groups.

[This appeared as my weekly column Coffee Break in Sunday Pioneer, May 23, 2010.]

How legitimate are targeted killings?

What is a legitimate killing? And what makes a killing illegitimate? On the face of it, these are not difficult questions to answer. Those who take an absolutist position on right to life would argue that any killing is illegitimate. On the other end of the absolutist spectrum are those who would insist that when the state kills, no matter what the reason, it is legitimate; when individuals kill, unless they do so in self-defence, it is illegitimate. Then there are those who would cite the law to justify certain killings — for instance, killing enemy soldiers on the battlefield; executing those found guilty of committing capital offences; and, killing criminals who resist arrest or attack the police — but insist that extrajudicial killings by the state or agencies of the state are illegitimate. Human rights activists would strangely argue that while it is legitimate for ‘armed opposition groups’ to resort to violence and even indulge in senseless killings, the state, as the protector of human life and liberty, does not have the right to kill.

Macabre and distasteful as it might be, the debate over what is and is not legitimate killing came up, although fleetingly, during a recent television discussion on Maoist violence. The human rights activists who were present in the studio were most emphatic in asserting that the state, in this case represented by security forces, has no right to kill even if those who are targeted are known to have indulged in killing innocent people and policemen or, unless put down, can be expected to shed human blood in the future. Of course, this is an absurd proposition. If it is the state’s responsibility to ensure the security of its citizens, then it is equally its responsibility to take any measure that it may deem fit to protect them from marauders.

The argument proffered by human rights activists is fallacious for a second reason. Implicit in what they say is the suggestion that men and women in uniform (whether of the police or the military) are fair targets for ‘armed opposition groups’ — or ‘gunmen’, as terrorists are referred to by politically correct sections of ‘civil society’ — since they represent the state and hence the ‘enemy’. As if that robs them of the right to life which, for everybody else, is considered inviolable. This is not only chillingly callous, but also downright sinister. Thankfully, in real life it doesn’t quite work that way.

The reason why I have raised this issue is not to discuss whether it is right or wrong to adopt tough measures against Maoists; that’s a settled point and little or no purpose is served by endlessly debating it. Maoists must be crushed with minimum, if at all any, collateral damage. But we need to look beyond what has come to be accepted as the normal, textbook response to terrorism, never mind the shade of terror, which could range from shimmering green to dazzling red. Must the state entirely depend on ‘massive deployment’ of security forces? Should action be always visible to the people? Or has the time come to consider the adoption of strategic responses, for instance targeted killings, which could be more effective and virtually rule out the possibility of collateral damage?

After all, if the top leaders of an insurgency, Islamist or Maoist, were to be neutralised through surgical strikes, there would be disarray and demoralisation in the ranks and the cadre, no matter how motivated, would feel deterred from persisting with the ‘cause’. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eeelam did not become extinct because fighters were killed in scores if not hundreds. The LTTE became history only after its top leadership was annihilated. Till the moment the Sri Lankan Government released photographs of V Prabhakaran’s lifeless body, the Tigers fought back fiercely. Similarly, in Punjab the guns fell silent after the top leaders of the Khalistani insurgency were methodically neutralised. Perhaps far fewer lives would have been lost had this approach been adopted in the early days of separatist violence in Punjab — and in Jammu & Kashmir.

These thoughts come to mind while reading about the targeted killing of Hamas’s top military commander Mahmoud Al Mabhouh in Dubai on January 20 and subsequent investigations by the emirate’s police. The Government of Israel has refused to comment on what is widely perceived to have been a Mossad operation. No other organisation could have carried out such a daring and flawless execution, that too on hostile territory. If details pieced together from closed-circuit television camera footage collated from various spots and released by the authorities of Dubai are to be believed, a group of men and women travelled from foreign destinations on forged passports a day before Mabhouh arrived in the emirate. Apparently, he had come to Dubai to meet someone who had offered to sell arms to Hamas. It may have been a trap set up by his assassins who tracked their quarry to his hotel room and killed him before he could raise an alarm. Their mission accomplished, the assassins flew out of Dubai the same afternoon.

It could be argued that Mabhouh’s assassination will not lead to the collapse of Hamas or end its rule of terror in Gaza, just as ‘Operation Wrath of God’ and ‘Operation Spring of Youth’ did not result in the destruction of the PLO, although they did serve to revive and reinforce the fear of Gideon in rage. Mabhouh is not the first Hamas leader to be killed. Salah Shahade was assassinated in 2002; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic who would remorselessly direct suicide bombers to murder Israeli civilians, was killed in March 2004; within a month, Sheikh Yassin’s successor, Abdel Aziz Al Rantissi, was assassinated; and, in October that year, another senior Hamas leader, Adnan Al Ghoul, was put down. Hamas was no doubt shaken, but not necessarily deterred, or else there would have been no need for ‘Operation Cast Lead’. Although, the killing of Nizar Rayyan on January 1, 2009, during the Gaza raid did result in a hudna which is still holding.

Was Mabhouh despatched before he could acquire sufficient weapons for Hamas to break the truce and launch a fresh attack on Israel? Will his killing revive the fear of Gideon the righteous destroyer and reinforce the idea of Israel as a mighty warrior? Whatever the answer, the utility of targeted killing of terrorists — we need not go into the morality or legality of such counter-insurgency measures since terrorism is neither morally right nor a legal expression of dissent — is demonstrated by the fact that Israel has survived six decades of relentless and fierce hostility without ever feeling the need to capitulate before its enemies.

PS: Ever since Mabhouh’s assassination, there has been a phenomenal increase in the demand for custom-made T-shirts emblazoned with Mossad’s logo sold by an Israeli firm. Orders have been pouring in from countries across the world, including, hold your breath, India.

[This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break in The Pioneer on February 28, 2010]

India's Lajja: Taslima leaving for freedom

India's Lajja: Taslima leaving for freedom

Dissident Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen has decided that rather than suffer solitary confinement in a ‘safe house’ where she is kept under virtual house arrest by intelligence agencies, she will “leave India in the next few days to live in freedom” in another country. Nasreen says she has conveyed her decision to officials of the Ministry of External Affairs.
“I wanted to, I still want to, live in India, make it my home. But look at my terrible existence. I can’t meet friends; people can’t meet me. E kemon bechey thaaka? Is this any way to stay alive?” the author of Lajja (Shame), told The Pioneer on Monday evening.
She describes her stay in the ‘safe house’ as “incarceration”, adding, “My hands have been shackled… I can’t accept these chains any more. I am not doing this (leaving India) of my own volition. I am being forced to leave. It gives me no great pleasure to do so.”
Nasreen, whose resident permit was extended on February 14 after keeping her on tenterhooks for weeks, says she is not even allowed access to doctors. “I need to urgently consult a cardiologist. I am suffering from high blood pressure. But I am told that I cannot be taken to any hospital, as it will ‘create problems’. So I requested them to bring a doctor (to the ‘safe house’). But even this they refused to do,” she adds.
Unlike previous occasions when she would be feisty and insist that she would not succumb to pressure and leave India, on Monday she sounded tired and despondent. “Aami morey jaabo… ei bhabey thaakley aami baachbo na. (I will die… if I continue to remain in this solitary confinement, I will not survive),” she says, adding, “I want to escape to freedom.”
So is she giving up her fight? “If I don’t live to fight another day, how can I continue with my struggle? I tried my best to stay in India. All I wanted was to be in Kolkata. If I can’t do that, if I cannot be among my friends and the people I love, what’s the use of my staying here?” she shoots back.
And then she becomes despondent again. “Because of high blood pressure caused by stress, I have developed heart disease (hypertrophy) and hypertensive retinopathy, which will eventually cause me to go blind. My blood pressure, if uncontrolled, will destroy my heart and kidneys. Tell me, what should I do?” Nasreen, a qualified doctor who gave up her profession to become a writer, asks.
She claims that her request to visit her apartment in Kolkata to collect her bank cards and some documents before she leaves India has been rejected. “Officials of the Ministry of External Affairs have finally had their way,” she says.
Nasreen, exiled from Bangladesh since 1994 when Islamic fanatics demanded she be sentenced to death for Lajja, was forced to leave Kolkata, where she had been living for two years, after Muslims rioted on November 21 last year, accusing her of being anti-Islam and demanding she be thrown out of the city and the country. She was brought to Delhi via Jaipur and has been in the custody of Central intelligence agencies since November 23 in a 'safe house' in the National Capital Region, from where she is not allowed to step out.
Nasreen's offer to delete ‘controversial’ passages from her autobiographical book, Dwikhondito, has been ignored.

March 18, 2008.

Marxists and Mullahs in West Bengal

For freedom, stand by Taslima Nasreen
Kanchan Gupta

Dissident Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen arriving in Delhi on Friday night

Those acquainted with contemporary Bengali literature could argue that dissident Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasreen is not a talented writer. But there are few who would disagree that she is an extremely courageous woman who has struck out at Islamic fanatics and mullahs whose sole passion in life is to come up with the most perverse interpretations of the Quran so that they can live out their dark fantasies born of obscurantism and twisted notions of patriarchy. Ms Nasreen gave up her profession as a qualified physician to take on radical Islamists who had begun to gather strength under the tutelage of Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Dhaka cantonment queen Begum Khaleda Zia, as well as Awami League, headed by a fork-tongued Sheikh Hasina Wajed. Her newspaper columns were hugely popular, especially among Bangladeshi women, although the Jamaat-e-Islami was none too pleased that someone should dare question the mullahs’ diktats.
Ms Nasreen became a celebrity of sorts in Kolkata after the publication of Nirbachito Column, a collection of her newspaper columns, which won her a prestigious literary award. Back in Dhaka, her success raised the hackles of those discomfited by the fact that rather than disappear behind a burqa and meekly accept the oppressive ways of the clergy, a Bangladeshi woman had begun to inspire others to emulate her defiance. They began to sharpen their knives for the kill; in the meanwhile, they turned on Bangladesh’s minuscule and disinherited, disempowered Hindu community, committing horrendous atrocities. After the demolition of the disputed Babri structure in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992, they let loose a reign of terror, killing Hindu men, raping Hindu women and destroying Hindu temples. Lest all this be denied by Islamic fanatics on both sides of Padma — including those who fly the banners of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, All-India Milli Council and assorted organisations like All-India Minority Forum that make up the Brotherhood in Green — and their ‘secular’ patrons, the most casual scan of newspapers of those days will reveal the extent of the crimes committed against Hindus in Bangladesh in the guise of protesting the demolition of the disputed Babri structure.
It is a tribute to Ms Nasreen’s courage that rather than silently watch the persecution of Bangladeshi Hindus, she recorded those crimes in a slim volume, Lajja. Within days of the publication of the novel — it was ‘fiction’ based on incontrovertible facts — it was slammed by the Government of Bangladesh, which had clearly colluded with the fanatics by allowing them a free run, and the mullahs who, typically, were outraged that a Muslim (although Ms Nasreen says she is a ‘humanist’) should have dared put their misdeeds on record. The book was banned and a mullah issued a fatwa, calling for her execution as she had committed ‘blasphemy’! During Friday prayers in mosques across Bangladesh, believers were urged to murder Ms Nasreen if the Government failed to carry out the death sentence. Another mullah offered a reward of $ 2,000, which was really more a reflection of his cash flow problems than his desire to see her head brought to him on an aluminium platter borrowed from his kitchen.
But all this did not dampen the demand for Lajja. Pirated copies of the book sold in thousands even as fanatics took to the streets, clamouring that Ms Nasreen be executed to uphold shari’ah. Overnight, Ms Nasreen became a household name, here and abroad. In those days The Pioneer had a fiesty correspondent in Dhaka. I recall asking him for a copy of the book. He got hold of a pirated copy and sent it to us by courier. Since everybody was curious about what Ms Nasreen had written that had so angered the mullahs, The Pioneer published the relevant extracts. Later, the book was published in both Bengali and English in India; thankfully, the Government did not ban Lajja. That was the beginning of Ms Nasreen’s woes. Hounded by Islamists baying for her blood (in the hope of pocketing the promised $ 2,000), she fled her beloved country in 1995 and sought shelter in Sweden. Two decades earlier, another Bangladeshi writer, Daud Haider, had to similarly flee Bangladesh after fanatics declared him a heretic. We shall return to Daud’s story later.
Feted by Kolkata’s intellectuals, Ms Nasreen decided to shift to West Bengal and was granted a one-year visa in September 2005. But before that, she had run into trouble with Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee who, despite his pretensions of being a writer and a Marxist, gave in without a fight and banned her autobiographical book, Dwikhondito, in November 2003 because it had references to the perversion of Islam by those who use religion to perpetuate their twisted notions of a Muslim woman’s place in society. Another book, Aamar Meyebela, also ran into trouble and was promptly banned in Bangladesh. The publishers of Dwikhondito went to court and appealed against the ban. The Calcutta High Court declared the ban was “untenable” and “unjustifiable” in September 2005. Dwikhondito reappeared in bookshops and became an instant bestseller, not least because it rips off many a ‘secular’ and ‘progressive’ mask.
On August 10 this year, when Ms Nasreen visited Hyderabad for the launch of her translated works, she was set upon by leaders of Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen who insisted that she should be handed over to them so that they could punish her for her ‘sins’. She escaped the lynching but the incident showed that fanatics had put in motion a plan to hound her out of India. Last Wednesday’s riots in central Kolkata when murderous mobs owing allegiance to All-India Minority Forum, headed by Mr Idris Ali, a Congress leader, demanded that she be thrown out of the country, are part of this devious plan whose ultimate goal is to demonstrate the might of radical Islamism in ‘secular’ India. Mr Biman Bose, chairman of the Left Front and a member of the CPI(M) Polit Bureau who loves to be portrayed in media as a remorseless, cold-blooded commissar, wilted in the face of Muslim fury and ensured Ms Nasreen’s eviction from Kolkata and West Bengal. Since then, she has been on the run, first seeking shelter in Jaipur and then in Rajasthan House in Delhi.
It is anybody’s guess as to whether the UPA Government will be able to summon the courage to stand up to fanatics and insist that Ms Nasreen shall remain in India. On another occasion, Mrs Indira Gandhi had succumbed to Muslim pressure and was on the verge of deporting Daud Haider to face death in Bangladesh when the dissident poet was rescued by German Nobel laureate Gunter Grass. If Ms Nasreen is forced to leave India, make no mistake that a time will come when anybody who doesn’t subscribe to the twisted worldview of Islamic fanatics will be similarly hounded in this wondrous secular democracy of ours.

{This appeared as my Sunday column Coffee Break on November 25, 2007.)