Middle East Affairs

UN's favourite terrorist

Kanchan Gupta

This weekend marked the third death anniversary of Yasser Arafat, lionised in life and in death as a ‘revolutionary’ who fought for Palestinian rights. But Arafat was not half the man he was made out to be by his Arab admirers and supporters across the world, notably in India where the lib-left intelligentsia hero-worshipped this false god. Here’s what I wrote after Arafat died – it’s as valid today as it was three years ago.

New York, United Nations: Supreme leader of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, this morning strode into the hallowed United Nations General Assembly Hall, waving at the assembled gathering of representatives of 191 member states with one hand and holding aloft his trademark AK-56 rifle with the other.
As he took the podium, there was thunderous applause: The entire General Assembly was on its feet, giving a justly deserved standing ovation to the man fittingly described by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as “the courageous symbol of pan-Islamic nationalism”.
An impossible scenario?
Not if you consider a similar despatch filed by news agencies (this was before the days and nights of 24x7 live television) that made waves around the world on November 13, 1974. On that day, the United Nations shamelessly opened its doors to a certain Muhammad Abdel Rahman Abdel Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini, alias Abu Ammar, aka Yasser Arafat. Sporting his pistol-in-holster trademark, he was allowed to enter the UN's premises armed, and address the General Assembly which was only to happy to anoint the progenitor of modern day Islamic terrorism as its ‘favourite and favoured terrorist’.
It took Arafat a decade-and-a-half spent masterminding the hijacking and blowing up of civilian aircraft, the massacre of pilgrims at Lod Airport, targeted assassination of diplomats (including one American ambassador), shooting down school children at Ma’alot (an event that played no insignificant role in inspiring the killers of Beslan) and killing Jewish athletes at the Munich Olympics, apart from gifting the world with a unique weapon of civilian destruction, the human bomb, and unleashing terror in a myriad forms, to secure legitimacy for his evil deeds from that high institution of low scruples, the United Nations.
A decade from now, that honour could be Osama bin Laden's. If Arafat, who spent his entire life leading a campaign of terror, sowing dragon’s teeth of hatred and fanning religious bigotry in the guise of ‘national resistance’ can be described as 'the courageous symbol of Palestinian nationalism' by Kofi Annan, there is no reason why similar accolades cannot be showered on an unrepentant Osama bin Laden.
After all, the inspirational force behind the ritual beheadings of ‘non-believers’ that are conducted with sickening glee by masked Islamists for Al Jazeera's prime time evening news bulletins is as much Osama bin Laden as Yasser Arafat. It was the undisputed leader of al Fateh, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation and the president of the Palestinian Authority who made ruthless violence fashionable, even romantic, during the decades of the Cold War; it was he who made terrorism chic among those manning the barricades and in the vanguard of proletarian revolution around the world.
Ironically, notwithstanding his status as the UN’s favourite terrorist and the EU’s favourite despot on whom the latter showered billions of dollars in aid, at the fag end of his life, Yasser Arafat had become irrelevant – in Palestine, in Arabia and in Israel, the country he was determined to obliterate but which reduced him to a pathetic shadow of his past, holding him prisoner in his decrepit and bombed out headquarters in Ramallah.
In the Arab street he was the object of contemptuous ridicule, and not without reason: He was seen as a charlatan who stole from the very people whose interests he claimed to protect. In 2003, when Forbes published its list of the world's richest people in a new category reserved for kings, queens, and despots, President Yasser Arafat ranked sixth, bracketed with Saudi Arabia's King Fahd, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. According to Forbes, Arafat “feasted on all sorts of funds flowing into the Palestinian Authority”. Even as Palestinians were pushed into increasing impoverishment, desperate to eke out a living, Arafat lavished $100,000 a month on his wife, Suha, safely ensconced in luxury in Paris.
Few remember today that Arafat was not a product of the original Palestinian struggle for nationhood. Licking their wounds after their disastrous campaign against Israel following the birth of the Jewish state, Egypt, Syria and Trans-Jordan hit upon the idea of floating a Palestinian body that would be the Arabs' proverbial cat's paw. Thus was born the Palestine Liberation Organisation, headed by Syria’s nominee, Ahmed Shuqueri, in 1964. Following Israel's triumph in the Six-Day War of 1967, the Palestinian National Conference met in Cairo and the radicals, led by Arafat, whose al Fateh had by then emerged as the dominant group, took charge.
Similarly, few remember that Arafat was not a Palestinian by birth. He was born in Egypt and moved to Jerusalem to live with an uncle after his mother's death. He returned to Cairo for studies, spent his early adult years in Egypt and then moved on to Kuwait. A popular Arab street story has it that he changed his formal name from Muhammad Abdel Rahman Abdel Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini to Yasser Arafat not as part of his effort to radicalise his image (that was done with army fatigues, a chequered kafiyeh, dark glasses and a loaded pistol in a hip holster, immortalised by Time) but to erase his kinship with the infamous mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Muhammed Amin al-Husseini whose claim to fame was his collaboration with the Nazis during World War II.
After becoming chairman of the PLO in February 1969, Arafat never looked back. Like his fellow despots who rule over their fiefdoms, kingdoms and sheikhdoms in Arabia with an iron fist, he ruthlessly established himself as the sole spokesman, the sole leader and the sole public face of Palestinian nationalism, mastering the art of media spectacle and political timing that contributed in no small measure to his gaining an iconic status among liberals and leftists.
In a post-colonial world looking for symbols of national resistance, Arafat emerged trumps: unlike Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh, he was the romantic face of revolution. So much so, he is perhaps the only resistance leader in modern times who was able to convincingly justify recourse to violence against civilians, even make it acceptable as a legitimate instrument of struggle against occupation.
But that does not minimise the fact that it was Arafat who fashioned political terrorism and never in his life apologised for the bloodletting that his Al Fatah is responsible for; on the contrary, even in his dying days, holed up in Ramallah, he continued to sanction repeated assaults by al Fateh’s al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade on Israeli civilian targets. After being feted with the Nobel for peace, he unabashedly justified suicide bombings – after a young suicide bomber had blown up Jewish civilians, Arafat consoled the boy’s parents by telling them the “young man who turned his body into a bomb is the model of statehood and sacrifice for the sake of Allah and the homeland”.
After becoming chairman of the PLO in February 1969, Arafat never looked back. Like his fellow despots who rule over their fiefdoms, kingdoms and sheikhdoms in Arabia with an iron fist, he ruthlessly established himself as the sole spokesman, the sole leader and the sole public face of Palestinian nationalism, mastering the art of media spectacle and political timing that contributed in no small measure to his gaining an iconic status among liberals and leftists.
In his lifetime, Arafat proved to be obdurate and intransigent in the face of the most reasoned logic of peace-making. If the Israelis and the Americans learned it the hard way – from Camp David to Oslo to Taba to Aqaba, Arafat moved one step forward only to take a giant leap backward – the Saudis had to rue coming up with their famous proposal that offered Israel full recognition in return of Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state. Arafat merely laughed up his sleeve.
In a sense, Arafat managed to maintain his stranglehold over Palestinian affairs by taking a maximalist position on peace-making. He rejected each and every offer on the specious plea that it did not offer the Palestinians the maximum he desired. By unswervingly insisting on Palestine of pre-1948 vintage, he was able to convince Palestinians that history could be rolled back and Israel wiped out from the map of Middle-East. That, or nothing else, was his consistent stand. Now that he is dead, Palestine is a possible reality.
Arafat saw himself as a modern day Saladin; he preached the language of hate and militated against reconciliation and accommodation. Through a skilful mix of Arab nationalism and radical Islamism, which he had picked up during his association with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, he inspired generations to march to death and disaster. His was a life spent on fighting for Palestinian land, not for Palestinian lives.
In the end, he failed to drive the Jews out of Jerusalem, but has left behind a legacy of hatred that continues to drive Arabs against Jews, Palestinians against Israelis. It is a pity that India, and a large number of Indians, should honour such a wasted, and wasteful, life.

(This article originally appeared on http://www.rediff.com/ on November 19, 2004. See my Rediff homepage at http://www.rediff.com/news/gupta.htm )

Hunger in Communist Bengal

The distant thunder

Kanchan Gupta

In Ashani Sanket (Distant Thunder) Satyajit Ray brought alive, with great sensitivity, the misery inflicted by the Bengal famine of 1943. The film was made three decades after that harrowing experience which returned to haunt Bengalis during the mid-1960s and became the leitmotif of the Communist movement in West Bengal. Based on Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's novel, Ray's award-winning film suggested, without recourse to crudity, how hunger stalked people amidst plentiful food stocks. Neither Bandyopadhyay nor Ray was treading new ground in making this point. After all, the famine of 1943 was a man-made disaster that claimed four million lives as the colonial Government chose to ignore its horrendous consequences.
The Bengal famine of 1943 - there were famines earlier, too, but none so devastating - has been evocatively described as the 'forgotten holocaust', a crime not recognised by history and now no more than a fading memory in the Bengali conscience. Hence the need to recall the sequence of events that led to hunger, disease and death on an unimaginable scale in rural Bengal where people pleaded for a fistful of rice but were spurned by a callous administration and corrupt hoarders; both joined hands to zealously guard overflowing godowns.
The distant thunder in Ashani Sanket referred to Japanese bombers. In real life, it was the killer cyclone of October 1942 which destroyed paddy fields along the east coast stretching from Bengal to Orissa. With no autumnal harvest, farmers, most of them landless or marginal, had no other option but to dip into emergency stocks at home which ran out by the summer of 1943. Meanwhile, sensing a scarcity, traders began to hoard whatever they could lay their hands on.
But the cyclone was only one of the contributing factors and its impact could have been mitigated if the colonial administration had not acted in the most selfish manner. Huge quantities of rice were stockpiled for British soldiers by seizing stocks meant for civilian consumption. Worse, even as the stark contours of the famine were emerging, rice was being exported to Sri Lanka for British soldiers garrisoned there.
Later, much after vultures had feasted on the dead and the dying, Britain tried to explain the crippling shortage by citing the suspension of rice imports from Burma, then occupied by Japanese forces. But Burmese rice, at best, accounted for not more than 15 per cent of Bengal's requirement. In any event, every effort was made to mop up all available rice from rural Bengal and either store it for soldiers or ship it out to what was then Ceylon. The little that escaped British appropriation was picked up by traders, nearly all of them collaborators of the civil administration, and sold at exorbitant prices. Wartime Kolkata, flush with money, did not experience the hunger of rural Bengal; tragically, Bengalis who could afford to buy rice at black market rates were deaf to the pitiful cries of starving fellow Bengalis. Latter day economists would say that market forces decided the price of rice. It would, therefore, be incorrect to blame the colonial Government alone for the colossal loss of lives.
Winston Churchill, who refused to acknowledge the famine till it became an embarrassment for the Empire, was to later slyly pretend it never happened by glossing over this dark chapter of British rule in India in his six-volume History of the Second World War. On the contrary, disdainful of natives and remorselessly untouched by their suffering, he claimed, "No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the people of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small island." The four million people who died in the made-in-Britain famine of 1943 were inconsequential for the Empire's last standard-bearer.
It is unthinkable that so many lives would be lost today even in the worst possible circumstances. In food surplus India, Government often claims, there are enough provisions to ensure that nobody dies of starvation. No matter how scary the distant thunder may be, rest assured you shall not go hungry. Yet, in rural Bengal we are witnessing food riots: People are demanding their rightful share of supplies through the public distribution system but dealers are reluctant to meet their demand.
It is not that there are no supplies, but these are being diverted to the 'open market' to reap windfall profits. For instance, wheat which is sold at Rs 6.75 a kg through the public distribution system, fetches as much as Rs 13 in the 'open market'. Modern day economists will insist that there is nothing wrong with market forces deciding the price of foodgrains in rural Bengal. But that is as facetious as Churchill's claim of protecting Hindustan "from the horrors and perils of the World War".
If traders hoarded rice during the famine of 1943, accentuating the shortage and fuelling the famine, under the benign gaze of an uncaring civil administration controlled by Britain's equally unfeeling wartime Government, public distribution system dealers in districts across West Bengal - Bankura, Burdwan, Nadia, Murshidabad and Birbhum are witnessing food riots every day - have either hoarded rice and wheat or diverted supplies to the 'open market' with more than a little help from CPI(M) leaders and the hugely corrupt administration they run.
There is a difference, though: In 1943, famished men, women and children meekly surrendered to their fate, as the accompanying photograph of a peasant and his two sons shows. There was no struggle for survival: Godowns were not raided by hungry masses, traders were not attacked, administration offices were not set on fire. Today, there is no such meek surrender. Ration shop dealers, who are also card-carrying members of the CPI(M), are being beaten up and their shops and godowns are being ransacked. Local Marxist chieftains who dare intervene on behalf of the dealers-turned-hoarders are being chased, in some cases out of villages.
The Left Front Government of West Bengal claims the agitation is being stage-managed by Maoists and Jamaatis. To prove that there is no shortage of food, it points to well-fed, well-nourished Kolkata, forgetting to mention that the city was untouched by the famine of 1943 too. Such pathetic efforts to discredit the impoverished, hungry masses would convince only those who sit in the airconditioned confines of AK Gopalan Bhawan, agonising over the India-US nuclear deal even as the distant thunder rolls nearer from West Bengal.

Coffee Break

Blame America, not Musharraf

Kanchan Gupta

Ever since last Saturday, when Gen Pervez Musharraf declared a state of Emergency in Pakistan, the world appears to have woken up to the absence of democracy in that benighted country. The European Union, which ardently believes that its primary responsibility is to promote the European way of life, such as it is, has been in the forefront of expressing distress and demanding that democracy be restored in the ‘Land of the Pure’. Reluctant to be seen as not pushing its totally discredited — and thoroughly impractical — democracy agenda, the Bush Administration has also been growling at Gen Musharraf. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took time off from hectic negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah to issue a stern message: The General must discard his uniform and get back to the task of holding elections to the National Assembly and the Provincial Assemblies. President George W Bush, not given to eloquence, has issued a similar statement. Other lesser Presidents, Prime Ministers and self-appointed guardians of freedom have added their tuppence worth views on how to save Pakistan from dictatorship and ensure constitutional rule.
But the flood of reactions has apparently had little effect on the man in the eye of the storm. Gen Musharraf remains undeterred, or at least appears to be unruffled. Pakistan’s image has never ever been worse than what it is today; Newsweek may have suddenly discovered that it is the “most dangerous country” in the world, but we need not be influenced by such realisation, not least because American media is as fickle as those who manage American affairs. If it suits Washington, American media will see nothing but virtue in the devil and mock at those who dare question its ‘wisdom’. When an individual is no longer seen as serving American interest, he or she is denounced in an inquisitorial manner. Hence, The Washington Post and The New York Times, which would routinely trash India’s evidence of Pakistani perfidy in promoting cross-border terrorism much after 9/11 had happened simply because Gen Musharraf was America’s blue-eyed boy, have now begun to berate him for not keeping the many promises he had made to his masters in the White House, the State Department and to the Pentagon. In its usual sly manner, American media has chosen to gloss over the fact that the situation which prevails in Pakistan today is really a reflection of the abysmal failure of US policy which has favoured the Army over the political class in that country ever since its wretched birth 60 years ago.
If elected representatives of the people have ruled Pakistan for less than two decades of its existence, it is primarily because the US, looking for a strategic perch in South Asia, has actively promoted military rulers who would be loyal and not question American intentions. Gen Ayub Khan would not have come to power in October 1958 if the US had not decided to deny Pakistan an elected Government simply because it believed — perhaps with good reason — politicians would not meekly agree to do Washington’s bidding. Gen Ayub Khan, trained at Sandhurst and with a pronounced preference for the good things of life that are frowned upon by Islam, was a perfect ally for Governments on both sides of the Atlantic. The American media feted him, even when he pompously declared, “Democracy cannot work in a hot climate. To have democracy, we must have a cold climate like Britain.” The New York Times thought he was talking about placing Pakistan on the road to democracy! Strangely, American media, like the American Government, did not bother about Gen Ayub Khan’s dictatorial regime — the Pakistani Press was muzzled, dissidents were thrown into jail and tortured (Abu Ghraib came much later) and bogus elections were held to create the illusion of civilian rule.
When Gen Yahya Khan seized power, he had the full backing of the US which by then had decided that Gen Ayub Khan was a charlatan who could not deliver on his promises. Eager to please his masters, Gen Yahya Khan held elections in January 1970 and then decided not to hand over power to the Awami League which had won a clear majority. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman called for a liberation struggle and Bangladesh was born, but not before Gen Yahya Khan’s troops had indulged in every possible atrocity, including massacre and mass rape. Legend has it that during those terrible days when the world wept over the plight of East Pakistanis, Gen Yahya Khan was closeted with his favourite harlot, known in Pakistani garrisons as ‘General Rani’; one evening, he was seen dancing on the streets of Peshawar, minus his uniform and innerwear, with that woman in his arms.
And what was Washington’s response to Gen Yahya Khan’s outrageous campaign to bludgeon East Pakistan into submission? The US refused to acknowledge the atrocities, snubbed India for seeking to influence world opinion and, in a grand show of solidarity with their favourite Pakistani dictator, sent the Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal. Funnily enough, the man who was then crafting American policy, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, would now want us to believe that his heart beats for India!
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto provided an interlude but his corrupt Government was so hated by the masses that there were celebrations when Gen Zia-ul Haq hanged him in 1979, with the Supreme Court acting as an accomplice, after seizing power in 1977. Gen Zia, like the other two Generals who had ruled Pakistan before him, was also blessed by the US which looked on admiringly as he went about demolishing the little that was left of democratic institutions and politics in Pakistan with the zeal of a bigot. He handed over the Ministries of Information and Education to the Jamat-e-Islami, introduced Islamic rule and made public flogging into popular entertainment. The Americans, including the American media, loved him because he was a “valuable ally” in the US-financed and armed jihad against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Gen Zia was to later die when the plane in which he was flying blew up. The death of US Ambassador Arnold Raphael in that ‘accident’ was collateral damage.
Gen Musharraf too is America’s protege. He is in power because the US wants him to rule Pakistan. He has the added task of cleaning up the mess which is largely America’s doing. If the US is hated in Pakistan today, the reasons are not unknown to those who are now chanting the democracy mantra in Washington.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/

November 11, 2007.

To get an idea of the current state of affairs in Pakistan, read Tariq Ali's scintillating article, 'Pakistan at Sixty' in the London Review of Books.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n19/ali_01_.html

Communalism in India -I

Half-truths don't help Muslims
Kanchan Gupta

A Kashmiri Hindu grieves over his children slaughtered by Islamic terrorists

Recently Tehelka released what it claimed to be sensational, never-before details of the post-Godhra violence in Gujarat. These were based on sting operations aimed at trapping those accused of participating in the riots. Little purpose is served by the 'startling revelations' because they do not add to the bulk of what has been alleged for long; the individuals are already facing trial. Three points come to mind after watching television's theatrical presentation of Tehelka's latest 'expose' and reading Friday morning's newspapers.
First, the timing of the 'revelation', which has curiously come within days of the Prime Minister describing the violence as Gujarat's "Holocaust", raises an uncomfortable question: Why did Tehelka wait till a month before Assembly election in Gujarat since it has had the 'information' for some months? Second, the wisdom of resuscitating the ghosts of a communal violence people would rather forget and move on with their lives, more so in Gujarat, defies logic. Third, the ease with which our 'secularists' gloss over other more horrendous killings -- I am not referring to the slaughter of Pandits and the subsequent ethnic cleansing of Kashmir Valley -- while insisting that the 2002 violence in Gujarat is the worst India has seen in its 'modern history' is truly astonishing.
Once again we hear the cacophony of 'secularist' clamour insisting that "thousands of Muslims" were killed in Gujarat. Specific details inevitably fall victim to such sweeping statements. So, let me recall for you what Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Sri Prakash Jaiswal, whose credentials as a Congress loyalist are impeccable, told Parliament while replying to a Rajya Sabha MP's question on the 2002 violence in Gujarat. The details provided by Mr Jaiswal in his reply are in total variance to the outrageous claims of the 'secularists' to which we continue to be subjected ever so often, courtesy news channels and newspapers that can no longer distinguish between information and disinformation. Since the Minister's reply provides some interesting facts that deserve to be placed in the public domain, it would be in order to reproduce the salient portions. Lest I be accused of tampering with the Minister's reply, I have decided to quote the excerpts verbatim from a PTI report. You can't get more kosher than that.
The Central Government informed the Rajya Sabha that 254 Hindus and 790 Muslims were killed in the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat.
Minister of State for Home Affairs Sri Prakash Jaiswal said a total of 223 people were reported missing and 2,548 sustained injuries during the riots in 2002.
He said the Government paid Rs 1.5 lakh to the next of kin of each person killed and Rs 5,000, Rs 15,000, Rs 25,000 and Rs 50,000 for the injured. The amount for the injured was based on the extent of injury, the Minister added.
According to this reply in Parliament, the Minister of State for Home Affairs in the Congress-led UPA Government has pegged the death toll of the 2002 riots at 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus. Yet, these figures are not reflected in the propagandist pronouncements of those who claim to champion the cause of India's Muslims. More often than not we come across claims of 'thousands of Muslims butchered by Hindu fanatics in Narendra Modi's Gujarat.' This is a lie that has been repeated ad nauseam since that terrible day when Hindus travelling by Sabarmati Express were roasted alive after their coach was set ablaze by Muslim fanatics.
It has been repeated the most by India's Marxists who subscribe to the Goebbelsian tactic of repeating a lie till in the popular perception it comes to be identified as the truth. And, it is on the strength of such contrived truth that the Marxists make preposterous claims. For instance, the claim that the communal violence in Gujarat was 'the worst in modern Indian history.' In one grand sweep, our 'secularists' brush aside the far more horrendous riots that have resulted in far more gruesome blood-letting. We do not have to go too far back in 'modern Indian history' to locate some of these riots.
The massacre in Malliana has been conveniently forgotten; brutal memories of the riots in Meerut have been obliterated. The nightlong massacre of Muslims at Nellie in Assam, which witnessed suckling infants being snatched from their mothers' arms and being speared to death, has been erased from the secularists' record of 'modern Indian history.' Stomach-churning details of the Bhagalpur riots -- Muslims were killed, buried in fields and cauliflower and other winter vegetables planted over the rotting cadavers -- no longer feature in the secularists' collective conscience. The anti-Sikh pogrom that followed Mrs Indira Gandhi's assassination is not even talked about any more: More than 4,000 Sikhs were murdered, many of them by placing burning tyres around their necks. Each of these massacres of innocent men, women and children took place when the Congress was in power and did nothing more than twiddle its thumbs as marauders went about their pillaging secure in the belief that they would not be punished.
Yet, the Congress and its 'secular' allies, more so the Marxists, have the gumption to claim that the riots in Gujarat were 'the worst in modern Indian history.' Perhaps they are referring to history after it has been purged of uncomfortable facts by the detox army led by Union Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh. Crass minorityism comes easily to the Congress and its cheer leaders. That is the reason why propaganda disguised as campaign to promote 'secularism' is deployed with such ease, regardless of the truth. And appeasement of the worst variety is projected as 'secular' policy.
Whose interest is served by such Goebbelsian propaganda? Clearly, neither that of India 's Muslims nor that of our nation. It serves the purpose of vote-bank politics, which has become the bane of our democracy. Worse, it perpetuates hate, polarises communities and divides society. There is more: It provides fodder to those who gain the most from gaping, festering wounds -- bigots, zealots and extremists for whom religion is a convenient cover and imagined grievances justification enough to wreak vengeance by killing innocent men, women and children.
It's a pity and a shame that media has now become an instrument of political manipulation. Instead of empowering people, it has elected to disempower them by peddling half-truths and outright lies.

Israel Diary - IV

Security fence for peace

Kanchan Gupta

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbours'.

-- (Mending Wall by Robert Frost)
There are pines and sycamores and olive orchards, but no apple trees along what Israelis refer to as geder ha'hafrada and those unwilling to concede that Israel has the right to protect its citizens from Palestinian terrorists call the 'wall'. Geder ha'hafrada means the 'separation fence' or, given the purpose behind erecting it, the 'security fence'. The 'wall' could mean any one or all of these things: A racial barrier, an illegal separation, forced quarantine and, according to the more radical and therefore absurd voices, apartheid in practice. In reality, it is mostly a chain-link fence that escapes attention unless you look for it.
Driving from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, you first encounter the security fence in its other avatar: Flat slabs of grey concrete strung together, providing a canvas for artists who are adventurous enough to brave the security cameras, the electronic sensors and the patrolling soldiers. The stretch of concrete wall, which has been built to prevent Palestinians from shooting at Israeli motorists on the highway that snakes along but has come to capture popular imagination beyond Israel as a symbol of "suppression" of Arab rights and "occupation" of Palestinian territory, comprises only three per cent of the planned 720-km security barrier; 97 per cent of it is a three-metre high chain-link fence that crawls along the pre-1967 line which separated Israel from West Bank. Gaza Strip was fenced off in 1994 along the 1949 armistice line, two years after Yitzhak Rabin, mourning the slaying of a teenaged Israeli girl by Hamas, promised that he would "take Gaza out of Tel Aviv".
The entire fence has not been erected -- there are yawning gaps and these are causing concern among both the security establishment and the people who live in fear of bombings by Hamas and Islamic Jihad that were commonplace till the barrier began to take shape. "Construction on many of the fence's stretches has been halted and new building contracts aren't being signed. Work is proceeding only where old contracts are still in force, like around Gush Etzion, as distinct from some unfenced areas of western Samaria, Modi'in and the Arava," says a report in The Jerusalem Post. It goes on to add, "Considering the enormous financial and political investment -- from almost all across Israel's political spectrum -- in promoting the fence and the concomitant separation from Palestinians which it embodies, it is bizarre in the extreme that a Government which includes the most outspoken of fence advocates (like Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Vice-Premier Haim Ramon) cannot come up with the funds to efficiently complete the project."
There are valid reasons for this disquiet and simmering anger, an Israeli official tells me over dinner at Restobar, a happening place in Jerusalem's upmarket Rechavia neighbourhood, a stone's throw from the Prime Minister's official residence. More than 900 Israelis have died in terror attacks, including suicide bombings, carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. With Gaza Strip effectively cut-off by a security fence, terrorists would slip in from West Bank and effortlessly carry out their murderous mission.
Five years ago, Restobar was known as Moment Cafe. A suicide bomber walked in on March 9, 2002, and pulled the trigger, killing 11 people. A marble plaque at the entrance recalls that terrible night. All around Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and, indeed, across Israel, similar memorials bear mute witness to the slaying of innocent Israelis, often school children, in the name of Palestine. At a bus stop, the twisted stubs of steel poles have been set in concrete as reminder of a suicide bombing; at Mahane Yehuda market, where two bombs killed 16 people and injured 178 others, memories are still fresh of that horrific bloodletting. Everybody has a grim story to tell. Eric Silver, veteran journalist and old Israel hand, shows me the spot outside his 19th century house on the Street of the Prophets where a suicide bomber's belt went off accidentally. The man's head landed in the adjacent convent.
There has been a dramatic reduction in such attacks -- barring the firing of Qassem rockets at Sderot, which is a different story by itself -- and for the past year there have been no bombings. This is largely attributed to three factors: Better intelligence-gathering, robust patrolling by soldiers and the security fence. There is considerable apprehension that with peace talks coming up next month and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas making the right noises, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert may go easy on the fence. "That could be disastrous. Hamas and Islamic Jihad are waiting for us to lower our guard. Moreover, they will do anything to scuttle the Annapolis conference," a strategic affairs specialist with the Israeli Government tells me. Everybody is expecting a big bang that would force Mr Olmert to leave the negotiating table.
Israelis, therefore, believe that the only way to prevent the recurrence of terror bombings is to complete the construction of the fence which, apart from being a security barrier, is also a "key component in planned West Bank disengagement". Officials who highlight this point also take care to stress that the fence is neither aimed at annexing Palestinian land nor at establishing a border. There are a large number of crossings to allow Palestinians' free movement. Contrary to stories about long delays at these crossings, I drove into Ramallah without being asked for any documents. It is equally erroneous to claim that the fence is being built entirely on private Palestinian land; the portions that intrude on private land comprise a minuscule fraction of the fence. Full compensation is paid for private land over which Palestinian owners retain their right and if they do not wish to part with it, they can approach the courts, which are known to have ruled against requisitioning, as opposed to acquisition, of private land for erecting the fence.
All this apart, it is difficult to argue against the security fence because the Palestinian Authority has not been mindful of its obligations under the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements. Not only has it abjectly failed in preventing Hamas and Islamic Jihad from killing Israeli civilians but also done nothing to punish the perpetrators. Israel cannot be expected to abdicate its responsibility towards its citizens, nor does it make sense to demand that it should give up its right to self-defence. The fence can be dismantled; the dead cannot be brought back to life.
David Ben-Gurion had famously declared that "they (Arabs) will be there and we will be here". The security fence, which separates Israel from Palestinian territories in both Gaza Strip and West Bank, ensures this separation. It also proves Frost's neighbour right.

Israel Diary - III

Israel moves towards durable peace

Kanchan Gupta

Forty years after the 1967 war which gave Israel absolute control over West Bank and Gaza Strip, uniting Jerusalem but dividing the world between contesting groups aligned with or against Arabs, peace may descend in the land of prophets before 2007 draws to a close.
Across Israel, political differences have been set aside, at least for the moment, and there is a sense of quiet confidence in the Left and the Right that the moment to strike a deal with the Palestinian leadership has arrived. A similar upbeat mood prevails in the West Bank, more so in Ramallah.
With Hamas rapidly losing support -- Palestinians shocked by its reign of terror in Gaza are rallying behind President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fateh -- it finds itself squeezed out of the latest attempt to forge a durable peace in the theatre of the world's longest conflict. Mr Abbas is not complaining, neither are his interlocutors in Jerusalem.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in Jerusalem last week, discussing the finer details of the Annapolis conference scheduled for November 26. Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is believed to have shown her his cards, as has Mr Abbas. The sets don't clash violently, and that's a huge movement forward.
The key issues have been narrowed down to final demarcation of Palestinian territories, the status of East Jerusalem and the right of return of refugees. Senior officials in the Israeli Government, including those involved with the latest peace initiative, feel a deal can be struck on all three points of contention.
For instance, Israel has 'more or less' agreed to the 1967 border as the territorial demarcation for a future state of Palestine. There are some areas which it is reluctant to give up, including those of strategic importance. But it is willing to do a land-for-land swap to retain these areas, some of which have big settler communities.
A senior Palestinian official in Ramallah told The Pioneer that Mr Abbas and Fateh are not averse to the idea. This is a big leap forward from the time when Yasser Arafat walked out of the Camp David, Oslo and Tabah talks, refusing to settle for anything less than 100 per cent - he was being offered 97 per cent. For the first time, both sides agree there are no absolutes, that compromises have to be made if a deal is to be signed.
On East Jerusalem, there is an emerging consensus of sorts. Israel is willing to give up its control over this part of the city, which is dominated by Arabs, so that Palestine can have its desired capital. The sticking point is the walled city with its Jewish, Arab and Christian quarters and symbols of all three Judaic faiths.
For Palestinians, East Jerusalem makes sense only if it includes Al Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock. But this is something that no Israeli Government will ever agree to, not least because the Temple Mount and the Western Wall have been non-negotiable ever since Jordanian troops were forced to retreat in 1967 and Jerusalem was 'unified'.
The right of return of Palestinian refugees was non-negotiable, too. But there has been a subtle shift in the Israeli position, as also in that of the Palestinians. Today, Israelis are willing to discuss the possibilities of arriving at a 'settlement', which includes compensation for those Palestinians claiming refugee status.
On their part, Mr Abbas and his aides accept that it is absurd to expect Israel to pave the way for a demographic shift that would rob the Jewish state of its raison d'être by granting the right of return to four-and-a-half million Palestinians who claim 'refugee status'; not all of them are in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Two ideas are being bandied about: First, Israel will agree to a certain number of 'refugees', possibly 10,000, exercising the right of return; and, second, it will offer monetary compensation to any 'refugee' who wishes to exercise this right. In Ramallah, both options are being considered with an open mind.
Does this mean Annapolis will see Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas signing on the dotted line? More important, will it be a deal or just a joint declaration of principles? Even the most optimist officials and politicians on both sides of the divide are not looking forward to a final settlement. But everybody is hopeful of a joint declaration of principles around which a final settlement could be crafted.
This would be a big breakthrough, provided Annapolis happens. Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, with a stake in Israel and Palestine arriving at some sort of an accord, are working behind the scenes, pushing both Mr Olmert and Mr Abbas.
With Shia Iran steadily grabbing space in the region and making its ambition of gaining control clear to all, Sunni Arabia has been quick to align with Israel. The Riyadh declaration of the Arab Leagur, calling for an end to hostilities between Arabs and Israel, is beginning to take tangible shape and form.
Which doesn't mean Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is worried. For him, the Annapolis conference is a "Zionist conspiracy" and a move by the "enemy to deceive Muslims". But his shrill cry does not resonate in the olive groves of Mount Scopus and Mount of Olives which overlook this city that has rarely known peace since the days of the First Temple, yet looks bewitchingly at peace with itself and the world.

Israel Diary-II

India can learn from Israel

Kanchan Gupta

Hidden in the mountains, the stark, grey concrete structure of Yad Vashem looms before you as you approach the Avenue of the Nations dedicated to brave individuals who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. Sycamore trees line the avenue, and crowd the rugged space around Yad Vashem, each planted in the memory of men and women who defied Adolph Hitler's 'Final Solution' programme. A gnarled tree recalls memories of Oscar Schindler's valiant efforts to save Jewish men, women and children, using every possible skill, including bribery and lies, often escaping detection by the skin of his teeth. Those who have seen or read Schindler's List would connect easily to the bravery of the few who stood up to the murderous majority in Hitler's Germany and the Third Reich.
It is only fitting that Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, should look like the innards of a soulless concrete jail. Life in ghettoes and concentration camps could not be captured in a different setting. It is equally fitting that a visit to the memorial, which can be at once intensely personal and educative, should begin with an encounter with the first two dark deeds of the Nazis that paved the way for their subsequent brutality. The first was the burning of books which were perceived to be contrary to Hitler's supremacist theory that denied space to intellectual dissent and discounted the non-Aryan's right to flourish (later it would be the right to exist). The burning of books was to result in the burning of bodies -- the pathetic, decrepit remains of millions of Jews gassed to death. The second was the organised attack on Jewish property, business and synagogues on the night of November 9, 1938. The mass vandalism by Hitler's hoodlums was to be later known as Kristal Nacht: By dawn the next day, the streets were littered with shattered glass, charred shops and the burnt remains of any hopes that may have survived Hitler's coming to power.
The story of the Holocaust, in which six million Jews perished, the 'Final Solution' which nearly wiped out Europe's Jewry, is brought alive in the most telling, touching manner in the stone cold chambers of Yad Vashem. The evidence, painstakingly put together, largely stems from the Nazi obsession with documentation. The Nazis would photograph the horrific medical experiments, the wretched degradation, the mass executions, the cattle train rides to concentration camps, the stripping of Jews, the final journey to the gas chambers and the burning of bodies. Each detail would be documented and logged. Children's rag dolls, their shoes and the little things that symbolise life only serve to heighten the scale of the brutality that was perpetrated as the rest of the world slept. Till now, Yad Vashem has documented details, on the basis of testimonies that are bound and filed in alphabetical order, of three million Jews who perished during the Holocaust. These are stored in the last chamber where the only other display is a well which symbolises the dark void of life after the mass murder conducted by Hitler.
The numbing horror is further magnified in the memorial hall dedicated to children who perished in the Holocaust. Inside, in the pitch black darkness, a candle flickers, its image reflected and refracted a million times while a voice chants the names of those whose lives were snuffed out by a mad man and his criminal regime. Shades of that madness are visible in the rant of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his ilk who deny that the Holocaust ever occurred. I am told that a very senior member of the CPI(M), a comrade we often see on prime time television, refused to visit Yad Vashem when he was in Jerusalem this summer to attend a conference of the Israeli Communist Party. He is believed to have told his local guide that he had no intentions of "legitimising Israeli propaganda about the Holocaust" by visiting Yad Vashem. Such concerns did not bother him when, accompanied by his wife, he visited Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock.
The most amazing thing about Israel is the country's sense of history. Apart from investing huge amounts of resources to restore and preserve antiquities that connect the modern state of Israel with its Biblical past, the Government also ensures that people do not forget their cultural and civilisational identity. At every historical site you can find soldiers and school children: They are taught about their past and encouraged to treasure it. The slogan 'Never Again', which is as much to do with the massacre at Massada as with the mass extermination at Auschwitz, gains significance with the inculcation of a sense of history. Children grow up proud of their heritage; soldiers defend not just Israel's territory but the very idea of a Jewish state. Across the political spectrum, people are resolute about doing whatever it takes to ensure the Jewish nation is not endangered again. No sacrifice is big enough, no contribution too small.
On Thursday night I visited the magnificent home of Frida and Arek Steinberger at a moshev. Frida is a ceramic artist, Arek a gentleman farmer. Their 21-year-old son Itay was killed in last year's war with Lebanon: He was hit by a missile on the battlefield while trying to rescue a fallen fellow soldier. He was among the 119 Israelis who did not return home from a battle that has caused tremendous political upheaval in Israel. What was his first reaction on hearing the news of his son's death, I asked Arek in the sprawling patio of their ranch. "I was stunned, I could not think. Later, I was consumed by anger. Now I have reconciled myself to this fact," he told me. There's a huge poster of Itay in uniform, the last photograph of him with his comrades-in-arms. But tragedy has not deterred either Frida or Arek, nor lessened their passion for Israel. Their daughter has just finished her stint with the Israeli Defence Forces. Their second son is in the Army. Their youngest son, a 16-year-old boy, will follow in the footsteps of his elder siblings.
A nation can be forged by tapping emotion. But for the nation to survive, you need determination and commitment to the national cause. There is more than a lesson here for us Indians.

Israel Diary - I

Israel Diary - I

Belligerent Iran changes West Asia alliances

Kanchan Gupta

If there is one topic of conversation that overshadows everything else in Israel today it is next month's US-sponsored peace talks at Annapolis. There is some amount of cynicism among intellectuals and right-of-centre politicians who believe that this will be another wasted effort because the Palestinians will not settle for anything less than what Yasser Arafat demanded and was refused. But the overwhelming mood is one of optimism. Friday's meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the former's residence in Jerusalem, during which they are believed to have discussed ways and means of ensuring Annapolis does not become just another marker along the tortuous road to a negotiated settlement, is an indication of how seriously both the Israelis and the Palestinians are taking the conference.
But for all his efforts to focus on a possible joint declaration of principles if not an agreement of sorts, Olmert is a distracted man -- not so much by the cases of alleged corruption piling up against him as by Iran's accelerated nuclear programme and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's relentless assault on Jews and his threats to exterminate Israel. Indeed, in Israel's security establishment, Hamas and Hizbullah have taken a back seat as strategists race against time to put together a plan to stymie Iran's soaring ambitions. There are apprehensions that the over-emphasis on Annapolis among the political class could deflect attention from Iran which would work to Tehran's advantage.
"The greatest danger is that Annapolis might be considered a substitute for, or become a distraction from, the overarching requirement for any peace process to have a chance: Forcing Iran to back down," the Jerusalem Post comments in its weekend edition, "without that, nothing achieved at Annapolis -- or in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon, for that matter -- has a hope of sticking over the long term. By the same token, a turning back of the Iranian challenge could significantly increase the prospects for success on all of these fronts."
Shia Iran is being increasingly perceived as trying to dislodge the traditional Sunni Arab power base in West Asia, stretching from the Gulf states to the Suez Canal. This is bad news for Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt; on the other hand, Shias in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq are delighted. A nuclear armed Iran, therefore, is as much a threat to Israel as its hitherto Arab foes. Strangely, together they now form a putative alliance: Israeli officials refer to Saudi Arabia as a "moderate Arab state" while Riyadh, Amman and Cairo put pressure on Abbas and his Fateh to cut a deal with the Jewish state so that there are no distractions while dealing with "Islamofascist" Iran.
Just how far opinion has shifted in Arab palaces, if not on Arab streets, can be gauged from the non-response to the Israeli air strike on a Syrian target on September 6. It is believed, though there has been no official statement, leave alone a confirmation, that Israeli bombers crossed into Syrian air space and flattened a nuclear "facility". There are various versions floating around in Jerusalem about the nature of this "facility" -- it may have been an upcoming nuclear reactor or a storage facility for Iranian nuclear material. There is some speculation that Iran had shifted some of its men and material to Syria to ensure a foreign military intervention does not entirely neutralise Tehran's nuclear capability. Israel decided not to take a chance and bombed the facility into oblivion.
"The Government of Israel has neither said anything, nor has it denied news reports about the September 6 strike. But we do know something happened on that day, as do the Arabs. What is surprising is the deafening silence of the Arab world," says Eran Lerman, director of the Israel office of American Jewish Committee (AJC). This is seen as an endorsement of the Israeli air strike by Sunni Arab states that have never quite been at ease with Syria since the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser's disastrous experiment with a "United Arab Republic".
Those in the security establishment who advocate a tough line with Iran interpret the Arab silence over September 6 as indicative of Iran's isolation in the region. Ahmadinejad is seen as dreaming of "regional hegemony"; others have ganged up against him, displaying rare unity, more so against an Islamic nation. "The only protests we heard came from Syria's only friends ... which is less than half of Lebanon," Lerman adds, referring to the Shias of Lebanon.
Lerman brushes aside all suggestions of approaching Iran's claim -- that its nuclear programme has nothing to do with acquisition of nuclear warheads -- with a snort. "Iran's claim is a fantasy. Believing in Iran is like believing in the tooth fairy," he says. Apart from its ambition to emerge as the predominant regional power, Iran, Lerman adds, is driven by its "ideological commitment". In terms of technological abilities, defence posture and intelligence capability, Israel is far better placed than Iran. "But we have very little time," he says.
So, will Israel take the first step towards neutralising Iran's nuclear programme as it did in Osirak, destroying Iraq's nascent nuclear facility on June 7, 1981, a week before it was to go "live"? Was the bombing mission in Syria a dry run? Lerman avoids a direct answer. He only points out that Iran poses a threat to everybody and everybody should react. He has a point: A nuclear armed Iran is as alarming for India as for Israel, or, for that matter, the US and Europe.
Just how advanced is Iran's nuclear programme? A senior official at Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs says, "We are not sure whether we know enough... it could be more advanced than we think." His assessment is alarming: Iran should be able to achieve complete enrichment and produce a device by the second half of 2009. This has made "pragmatic, moderate Arab regimes sit up and take notice of Tehran's ulterior motives". With Hizbullah on the ascendant in Lebanon, Syria fortifying itself with new weapons (of "Russian origin") and Hamas having established a line of communication with Tehran, not to mention Shias becoming more aggressive by the day in Iraq, "pragmatic", if not "moderate", Sunni Arab states have reason to feel as concerned as Israel, if not more.
It is this shared concern that has led to what Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, recently voted the most influential woman in her country, describes as "new camps and new alliances". Sitting in her office in downtown Tel Aviv, listening to her outline Israel's threat perception of Iran, I am mesmerised by her body language. It's not for nothing that she has been nominated the chief Israeli interlocutor for the latest peace dialogue. "We need to stop Iran. It is a threat to the region ... It can destabilise the region more than the Israel-Palestine conflict," she says in a matter-of-fact manner.
It's not a proposition, but a statement of intent. "Sanctions are effective but they take time to have an impact. And right now time is of essence," she says, and, after a pause, adds disdainfully, "the world lacks determination. It is unaware of the consequences, the domino effect (of Iran going nuclear)."
So, what are the options? The full import of Thursday's sanctions, imposed by the US on Iran, is yet to be known, but they have been welcomed by Israel. Once again, there is a deafening silence in the Arab world. But what if Russia and China refuse to play ball? Then who shall bell the cat? "At this point of time it's tempting to say we'll take care (of the problem)," says an ebullient Lerman. Which means a repeat of Operation Opera that put paid to Saddam Hussein's dreams of acquiring nuclear power.
But will the Israelis be audacious enough to bomb Natanz? Maybe yes if Annapolis goes well and the Arabs have something to show for their exertions. And if that doesn't happen, we can look forward to a dangerous West Asia destabilising global power equations and throwing the world economy into a tizzy. A breakthrough, no matter how small, at Annapolis could prevent this from happening. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice realises this, as does Livni.

Coffee Break

'Arab Pardha' smothers India

Kanchan Gupta

Every time I visit Kerala, which I have been doing quite frequently these past two-and-a-half-years, I am struck by the rapid Islamisation of 'God's Own Country'. 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 memorable 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 'Islamic' veil. Just as there is nothing Quranic about the cruel and mind-numbing practice of female circumcision which is carried out in the name of Islam and to force women to be pious and faithful! 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 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 is not good news for those who believe in the Indian nation.

http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=kanchan%2Fkanchan128%2Etxt&writer=kanchan

November 4, 2007.

Jerusalem: The eternal front line

Caroline Glick
THE JERUSALEM POST
June 2, 2009

The following is the full text of Caroline Glick's speech after accepting the 'Guardian of Zion' award. For nearly as long as I can remember, the image of the watchman on the gates of Jerusalem has been the singular image of Jewish strength for me. It is has always been to the Jewish watchmen, ever vigilant, to whom we have owed our lives, and our survival as a people.
Today these watchmen preserve our freedom in our land. For 50 generations in exile, it was the memory of those Jewish Centurions, manning the barricades, that inspired us to keep faith with our traditions, our God, our law and our land.
It is an honor beyond measure that Bar Ilan University and the Rennert Center would deem it proper to cast me among the ranks of our greatest defenders and champions. I know I do not deserve the distinction. I certainly do not believe that I have earned it. But I do know that since childhood I have strived to emulate the image of the watchman - or watch-woman - on the walls of Zion. And I pledge that I will continue throughout my life to strive to earn the distinction you bestow on me tonight. THE WATCHMAN at the gates is a powerful image. But of course the defense of Jerusalem cannot begin at the gates. And guarding Jerusalem is not simply a matter of physical strength. It requires spiritual commitment and wisdom as well. Indeed, defenders of Zion require a greater mix of physical and spiritual strength than any defenders of any spot on earth.
Both our recent and ancient history as a people is one continuous testament to this truth.
And it is this aspect of Jerusalem - the eternal and temporal front line of the Jewish people - that I wish to discuss with you.
If you drove to Jerusalem this evening from Tel Aviv, as the coastal plain suddenly ended 25 kilometers from the city at Sha'ar Hagai or Bab el Wahd, you reached the starting point of the siege of Jerusalem from 1947. It was from this gauntlet that the British-commanded Jordan Legion sought - with the help of the Arabs of Jerusalem and surrounding villages - to cut the Jews of the city off from the rest of the country and so to conquer the nascent Jewish state.
As you began ascending through the hills to Jerusalem you could see the remnants of some of the most fearsome and bloody battles of the war. They came in the form of the reverentially preserved hulks of armored personnel carriers used by Haganah and Palmach units sent in front of the Jordanian snipers in a continuous attempt to bring reinforcements and food to the besieged Jews of Jerusalem.
As the hills - covered on both sides by JNF forests - rose to meet you, you passed the Latrun fortress on your right. It was the British decision to transfer control over Latrun - with its command over the road below - to the Jordan Legion, that all but guaranteed the fall of Jerusalem by preventing reinforcements from aiding its undermanned defenders.
Wave after wave of Jewish soldiers threw themselves against the guns of the Jordan Legion in a desperate attempt to break its chokehold on Jerusalem.
If you came to this hotel from the center of town, you may have gone by Davidka Square. There you would have passed by one of the primitive mortars used by the Harel Brigade in the battle for Jerusalem.
The Davidka was grossly ineffective as a killing machine. But between its thunderous noise and the rumor mill, it proved an effective tool of psychological warfare against the enemy. Even more than in traditional conflicts, the psychological aspect of the War of Independence played a pivotal role in determining its outcome.
The Jews, who just three years before had been incinerated in European crematoria, were an object of wonder no less than hatred for our enemies. Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, for many Arabs there was a sense that supernatural powers were at work as the new Jewish state rose from the ruins of Jerusalem.
If you came this way from the Old City, you most likely walked through the Jewish Quarter. It was to the 1,700 Jews who lived there in 1948 and their 150 defenders that the eyes of the citizens of nascent Jewish state were turned. The future security of the country was dependent on their ability to withstand the Arab siege. They had to be assisted and they had to hold their ground if the war was to end in a resounding victory for the Jews.
Tragically, the spiritual strength that sustained us 61 years ago was not matched by sufficient physical strength to hold the city.
As Jerusalem commander Dov Yosef instructed the starving and desperate Jews within the walls about the nutritional benefits of various leaves that they could eat in the absence of food, and as wave after wave of Jewish fighters fell to their deaths on the roads ringing the city - at Latrun, the Castel, Har Adar and Gush Etzion - in their bid to relieve the Jerusalemites - the British-commanded Jordanians delighted in our suffering. Arab snipers picked off any Jew within range.
In the end, the Jews of the Old City held out for six months. Last week marked the 61st anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem on May 27, 1948. Of the Jewish Quarter's 150 defenders, only 43 survived until the Hurva synagogue was destroyed by the Jordan Legion. It was the destruction of the venerable old synagogue that finally forced the hands of the rabbis within the walls. After the Hurva was destroyed, the rabbis began negotiating the surrender of the Old City to the Arabs.
If you walked to the King David Hotel today from the Old City, and exited through the Jaffa Gate, you certainly took note of the gentrified neighborhood of Mamilla. Today, as you walk through the new upscale shopping plaza, it is hard to believe that from May 27, 1948 through June 7, 1967 Mamilla was Israel's frontline. It was the Sderot and Kiryat Shmona of its time.
The Jews of the neighborhood lived in constant fear of Jordanian snipers who took pot shots from the walls of the conquered city at the Jews down below. The buildings you passed were once surrounded by sandbags. The Jews who lived inside them would run, not walk across the street. Any hesitation could spell their death.
But then, on the third day of the Six Day War, their long nightmare ended. After 19 years, the IDF succeeded in liberating the capital city. Paratroopers from kibbutzim danced with yeshiva buchers as they stood in awe before the remnant of the Second Temple. In June 1967, the proper balance between our spiritual and physical defenses had finally been struck.
After 2000 years, we were again a free people. EIGHTEEN YEARS AGO, on May 27, 1991, the 43rd anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, and the 24th anniversary of its liberation, tens of thousands of Jews from Ethiopia were airlifted to the Jewish state. As then prime minister Yitzhak Shamir said, the Ethiopian aliyah marked the first time in history where Africans were liberated from slavery by being taken out of Africa.
The entire country celebrated the arrival of these Jews, who had maintained their allegiance to Zion for thousands of years often in complete isolation from the rest of the people of Israel.
The next day, May 28, 1991, I stepped off an El Al plane at Ben Gurion Airport, and before reaching the passport check, I walked up the stairs of the old terminal building to the Ministry of Absorption's offices and officially made aliyah. A friend picked me and my massive immigrant suitcases up and a few hours later, I began my new life in Jerusalem.
The Jerusalem that greeted me 18 years ago was almost entirely free from fear. It was hard for me to imagine that the city had ever been endangered as I rode the buses, walked along the streets, sat in cafes, hiked in the forests, shopped in supermarkets and clothing stores.
As I moved without fear through Arab neighborhoods, and traversed the old and new city, it rarely occurred to me that I was walking on contested ground. The Palestinian uprising, which had begun in 1988 and had instigated a period of self-segregation and renewed hostility towards Israel among the city's Arab residents, had been defeated in the wake of the Gulf War.
But unbeknownst to me and to my fellow Jerusalemites, all of this was set to change just two years later. When, as part of the implementation of the Oslo peace process with the PLO, the government of Israel allowed for an Arab armed force to be deployed on the outskirts of the city, fear returned to Jerusalem.
Within just a few weeks of the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Jerusalem again became the front line of the country as terrorists from Ramallah, Hebron, Beit Lehem and beyond converged on Jerusalem to terrorize its people in shooting attacks and suicide bombings. What the people of Sderot experience today was first suffered by residents of Gilo.
I moved away from Jerusalem at the end of 1991, after I joined the army. I returned to the city in 2002. By that time, the sense of safety I had felt here during my first months in the country had been obliterated. Every day brought a new atrocity or attempted atrocity. My own street became the scene of carnage as a bus was bombed just a half a block from my front door. My neighbors' mangled bodies were strewn before me as I ran out of my home with some vague notion that I could help someone.
It was only after the government finally unleashed the Israel Defense Force in Judea and Samaria that a semblance of normality returned again to the city. It was only after Operation Defensive Shield returned our soldiers to the streets of Ramallah, Beit Lehem, Shehem, Jenin, Kalkilya and Hebron, and vastly curtailed the powers of the Palestinian armed forces, that we could feel safe going out to dinner and riding the bus again. DURING THE YEARS that Jerusalem came under physical threat, it also became politically threatened. Israel's acquiescence to the PLO's military presence on the outskirts of the city began a process of unraveling Israel's own claim to the city. As Yasser Arafat ordered his forces to march on Jerusalem, and denied that the Jewish people have any rights to the city, successive Israeli governments found themselves on the diplomatic defensive.
Just as our leaders allowed Jerusalem's physical wellbeing to be threatened, so they enabled its political unity to come under assault. Rather than insist that the world recognize our sovereign rights to our capital, at best, our leaders spoke of the strategic importance of Jerusalem to our physical security.
The element of metaphysical power embodied by the tactically worthless Davidka was absent from discussions of how Israel needed Tzur Bahar and Jabel Mukaber to defend Armon HaNatziv or how our control over Shuafat and Beit Hanina is necessary to defend Ramot, Neve Yaakov and Pisgat Zeev.
Happily today Prime Minister ISRAEL TRANSFORMED. In 1967, the convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable. Binyamin Netanyahu and Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat have abandoned this defensive posture and are waging strident campaigns against all who demand that we again surrender our eternal capital.
But for much of the past 15 years, the full expanse of Jewish history and identity was narrowed to a discussion of isolated neighborhoods, as if they were what this is all about.
Jerusalem's importance is far greater than the sum total of its neighborhoods. In ignoring this basic truth, our leaders did more to imperil the city's neighborhoods than legions of our enemies could hope to accomplish.
Even more devastating than what we said to the world is what we said to ourselves. For much of the past 15 years, our national leaders scornfully and contemptuously worked to limit our expectations and accused us of being greedy for assuming we had a right to our capital.
When did King David live in Abu Dis?, they sneered. Why were we needlessly upsetting the Arabs by moving back to Ir David?, they hissed. The underlying message was clear. We were provoking our enemies by asserting our rights, which we were told, were unimportant.
In general, since 1994, to greater and lesser degrees, our leaders abandoned Jerusalem as our metaphysical frontline and reduced the rationale of our control over our eternal capital to a security argument.
This argument is fine for as far is it goes. We explained - correctly - that without Israeli control over Jerusalem, the entire country would be under threat. And this is true. Indeed it has always been true.
Among other reasons, King David chose Jerusalem as his capital city because of its strategic importance. Were foreign forces to take control over Jerusalem and surrounding areas today, everything from Ben Gurion Airport to Tel Aviv to Beersheva to Tiberias would be placed under threat.
As Shaar Hagai in 1948 and Beit Jalla in 2000 showed, with foreign forces on the outskirts of the city, Jerusalem is cut off from the rest of the country. To secure the city is to secure the country. And to abandon the city - whether by surrendering control of the road to Tel Aviv or by relinquishing Judea and Samaria - is to imperil the country.
Specifically, placing foreign forces in Jerusalem or on its doorstep would mean importing Gaza into the heart of the country.
Jerusalemites would find ourselves living in bomb shelters like our brothers and sisters in Sderot. Tel Aviv would find itself, like Ofakim, within range of enemy rockets. Terrorists with simple portable weapons could sit on the hills of Jerusalem and shoot down civilian jetliners landing at Ben Gurion airport. In wartime, terrorists with primitive artillery could shut down the country's vital traffic arteries, preventing reservists from reaching the fronts to defend the state.
Although inarguably accurate, Israel's security arguments for its sovereignty over Jerusalem have fallen on deaf ears. Neither the Americans - who demand that we cease asserting our sovereignty over eastern, northern and southern Jerusalem, not to mention Judea and Samaria - nor the Arabs consider Jerusalem primarily a military issue.
The Americans prefer to ignore the metaphysical and spiritual aspects of the city's frontline status as they push for an Israeli retreat to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. For them, the issue of Jerusalem is no more than a petty real estate squabble.
But our enemies know better. For them the question of who controls Jerusalem is rightly recognized as the core issue - as the issue upon which Israel rises or falls as a state and as a people. Earlier this month, this point was made clearly by one of Israelís sworn enemies.
In a television interview on May 7, the PLO's Ambassador to Lebanon Abbas Zaki explained that from the PLO to the Iranian mullahs, Jerusalem is seen as the metaphysical key to Israel's wellbeing. As he put it, "With the [implementation of the] two-state solution, [involving an Israeli relinquishment of Jerusalem], in my opinion, Israel will collapse, because if they get out of Jerusalem, what will become of all the talk about the Promised Land and the Chosen People? What will become of all the sacrifices they made - just to be told to leave? They consider Jerusalem to have a spiritual status. The Jews consider Judea and Samaria to be their historic dream. If the Jews leave those places, the Zionist idea will begin to collapse. It will regress of its own accord. Then we will move forward."
As a wayward Jew once said, "The truth will set you free."
We owe the likes of Zaki - and the Iranians who call their most prestigious terrorist unit the Jerusalem Brigade - a big thank you for reminding us of who we are and what we need to survive. For even as our leaders tried to forget what we as a people have always known, our history - both ancient and modern - is testament to the truth of Zaki's statement. WE MARK the end of Jewish control over the Land of Israel as having occurred not with the Roman invasion in 63 BCE, nor from the defeat of Bar Kochba's rebellion 182 years later in 135. We mark the hurban, the destruction of our sovereignty, as having occurred with the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE.
And why is this the case? It is because people do not fight for strategically significant hilltops. They fight for ideas like freedom. They fight for symbols, for abstractions like flags. They fight for their beliefs. They fight for their way of life.
They do not fight for strategic advantage.
We Jews know this better than any other people. We were the first people to self-consciously define ourselves at Mt. Sinai as a nation committed to an abstract principle of an invisible God, an abstract code of law, and an abstract, yet-to-be-seen promised land.
Josef Trumpeldor is not remembered as a great hero for having said, "It is good to die for strategically significant hilltops" - although that is what he died defending. Trumpeldor is remembered as a great hero for declaring, "It is good to die for our country."
Just as Zaki, Arafat, Nasrallah, and Ahmadinejad remind us every day, from the outset of our nationhood here in Israel 4,000 years ago, throughout the centuries of our dispersion and to this day, our fate as a nation - both physically and spiritually - has always been tied directly to our control, or lack of control over Jerusalem. Jerusalem has always been our front line both physically and spiritually.
Rabbi Akiva knew, as he gazed at the destroyed Temple from Mt. Scopus, that one day our control over the city would be restored and so our national wellbeing would be renewed. This is why he laughed as he watched foxes entering and exiting the Holiest of Holies.
Perhaps if he had known then that it would take nearly 2,000 years for that to happen, he would have joined his colleagues in their tears instead of shocking them with his laughter and gaiety. But still, today we know that Rabbi Akiva was right. Our return to Jerusalem did presage our national rebirth with the renewal of our sovereignty in 1948 and 1967.
The modern Zionist movement, which officially began with Hovevei Tzion in 1882, came after the Jewish repopulation of Jerusalem. By 1850, Jews again comprised the majority of the city's population. And it was our strong presence here that emboldened the early Zionists to believe that a mass return to Zion was finally possible. It was because we had returned again to Jerusalem that our hope and so our strength were finally renewed after 2000 years of stateless wandering and persecution. LET US RETURN for a moment to 1967.
In June 1967, Israel was transformed from a threatened, vulnerable Jewish statelet into a mighty state to be reckoned with. But who celebrated - then or since - the conquest of Gaza and Kalkilya? Who remembers the great battles in the Sinai or even the Golan Heights?
The images of that war that have entered our collective consciousness - never to leave - are the images of our paratroopers on the Temple Mount, of Mota Gur crying "Har Habayit b'Yadeinu!" "the Temple Mount is in our hands!," of our young soldiers praying at the Western Wall.
The convergence of Jerusalem as our frontline of physical security and spiritual security was palpable in those days.
In honor of Yom Yerushalayim this month, a documentary was aired on Israel Television about the signals battalion in the Paratroopers Brigade. The battalion played a major role in the fighting - first taking over the Rockefeller Museum, then the Temple Mount, then the Kotel, then the walls of the city.
In the documentary, the heroes who liberated Jerusalem were brought together 40 years later to celebrate its renewal and to recall their fight. They told a stunning story.
After the city was liberated, they situated themselves in the abandoned Jordanian police station just inside the Jaffa Gate. The same station now houses the Israel police. In one of the rooms, they found a large quantity of musical instruments. Apparently, the Jordanian police band was stationed at the site and stored its instruments there.
The men took one of the drums and climbed up the walls of the Old City overlooking Mamilla. There the Jews had been huddled beneath the streets in their bomb shelters for several weeks.
As they ascended the walls, the paratroopers began pounding the drum. It must have been a terrifically strange noise since they all claimed to have had no idea how to play the drums.
As the men told it, and as a woman who had been hiding in the shelters with her family recalled, the civilians became perplexed at the new sound that replaced the familiar staccato pop of gun bursts and cannon fire. Slowly, they began emerging from the shelters to find out what was happening.
There above them, they saw the flag of Israel flying. They saw Jewish watchmen on the walls, beating the drums of victory in a half-mad boom, boom, boom.
And at the site of the Guardians of Jerusalem above them, the Jews of Mamilla began to dance as in times of old. They danced and danced, and walked to the walls, first tentatively, and then with a massive convulsion of joy and relief, of hope and ecstasy as for the first time in 2,000 years the city was secured. The Jews were free of fear as we returned to the Temple Mount, to Mt. Zion, to Jerusalem from whence our strength was renewed. OUR ENEMIES are right in choosing their targets. They are right because they know who we are. We are the children of Jerusalem, of Zion. Our physical and spiritual survival is dependent on our willingness to dedicate our lives in every generation to guarding both the physical and spiritual walls of this city. It is only by guarding Zion, that we guard its people.
I am humbled and honored beyond words to have been chosen from among so many of my fellow Jews for this singular honor of being named a "Guardian of Zion." For me, more than anything, what this means, is that people I respect for their defense of our people accept me as a loyal daughter of this eternal city. It is all I have ever wished to be. It is all I wish for my children to become.
And with God's help, it is something I will be blessed to remain all the days of my life.
Thank you. God bless the people of Israel and our eternal capital city.

Memories of Bangladesh Liberation War

35 years ago, this day

Kanchan Gupta
The Pioneer, December 16, 2006

Memory can play tricks on you, as it did with me when I was trying hard to recall how and when I came to know of George Harrison's The Concert for Bangladesh at New York's Madison Square Garden on August 1, 1971. Growing up in small town Jamshedpur in an era when the only source of information was The Statesman unless you also tuned into BBC World Service every night, it was not easy to keep pace with events beyond India's shores.

It was possibly during the summer vacation of 1975 that I came across the album, The Concert for Bangladesh, a three-LP boxed set with its memorable cover of a Bangladeshi refugee child - a stark image of innocence betrayed, reproduced along with this article, that has since remained indelibly stamped on my mind. This was in a second hand record shop in Kolkata's Free School Street. The shop-owner refused to part with the album even when offered the princely sum of Rs 100. It was not for sale, but he would make a copy on a 90-minute cassette which would cost Rs 25. That cassette, its tape worn thin, remained a prized possession till it was borrowed and never returned by a friend in Cairo.

Meanwhile, the album had become a collector's item, both for the fact that it was the first such venture to raise funds to help victims of a human catastrophe - Live Aid came many years later - and its stirring music, especially Bangla Dhun performed by Pandit Ravi Shankar, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan and Ustad Alla Rakha, apart from George Harrison's Bangladesh. A couple of years ago, The Concert for Bangladesh was re-released as a two-CD set, but it did not surface in Indian music stores. During a recent visit to London, I checked at the Virgin store and was lucky to get the last remaining copy.

The live recording of a concert - eloquently described by Pandit Ravi Shankar as "the most moving and intense musical experience of the century" - organised 35 years ago by a musician who has been dead for five years should really not be of any consequence to merit elaborate mention. But the relevance lies in both the events that prompted the concert and the fine print of the booklet that now accompanies the re-mastered album, a far more lavish production than the three-LP boxed set with its half-tone pictures and scratchy music.

First, though, the events. A year after half-a-million people were killed and millions more left homeless and destitute, battling cholera and death, by a cyclone that hit East Pakistan, the other half of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's "moth-eaten" country was in turmoil. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman's Awami League had swept the national election, winning 167 of the 169 seats in East Pakistan and a clear majority in the 300-member National Assembly. Backed with this mandate, he demanded the Prime Minister's job. Backed by the Army and Gen Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, military ruler since 1969, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto of Pakistan People's Party insisted he should get precedence over Sheikh Mujibur Rahman.

The stand-off ended on March 7, 1971, with Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declaring, at the historic Race Course Ground rally in Dhaka, "The struggle this time is for our freedom. The struggle this time is for our independence... Joy Bangla." The slogan was soon to reverberate across both sides of Padma, rekindling emotional and cultural linkages that Jinnah had tried to stamp out with his "Urdu and only Urdu" policy. The ghosts of Ekushe February had returned to haunt the inheritors of Jinnah's legacy.

Alarmed by the rapid unravelling of Rawalpindi's control over Dhaka, Gen Yahya Khan despatched his trusted man, Gen Tikka Khan, known for his ruthlessness, to take charge as East Pakistan's Governor. Between March 10 and 13, Pakistan International Airlines cancelled all its flights and deployed its fleet to ferry "Government passengers" to Dhaka. Undeterred by the impending crackdown, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, hours before his arrest in the early hours of March 26, issued a statement, "Today Bangladesh is a sovereign and independent country... The Bengalis are fighting the enemy with great courage for an independent Bangladesh. May god aid us in our fight for freedom. Joy Bangla."

Gen Yahya Khan thought he had an easy solution to the problem posed by a recalcitrant Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. "Kill three million of them, and the rest will eat out of our hands," he told a foreign correspondent. Gen Tikka Khan took his cue from his master, and launched 'Operation Searchlight' on March 25. His soldiers hunted down intellectuals and political activists; students of Dhaka University were targeted with ferocious brutality. Hundreds were slaughtered in cold blood and dumped into mass graves. As the Pakistani Army's terror spread - it was to ultimately claim three million lives - refugees began to stream into India: Within days, the trickle of men, women and children fleeing the Pakistani marauders turned into a tidal wave.

Millions of refugees took shelter in shanties and open fields, bringing with them tales of limitless horror: Men being killed in front of their families, women being raped and then bayoneted, children being bludgeoned and kicked to death. Tragically, there was little respite from death in the crowded refugee camps where children died like flies, falling prey to diarrhoea. There were no emergency response systems those days and the international community remained untouched by the plight of Bangladeshi refugees, waking up to the grim reality only after Mrs Indira Gandhi decided to join battle on December 3, 1971, a battle that ended with the fall of Dhaka and Gen Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi's abject surrender along with his 93,000-strong force on December 16. Thus was Bangladesh born 35 years ago today.

Far away from the killing fields, two men tried to make a difference for the hapless refugees - Pandit Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. The sitar maestro suggested that musicians come together to raise funds and through the concert tell the world about the horrific plight of the refugees. George Harrison called up his friends, and they all came together on August 1 at Madison Square Garden for The Concert for Bangladesh.

The money raised at the event would appear insignificant today. But for Unicef, $ 250,000 came as manna from heaven and saved many lives in the refugee camps. A little known fact is that money collected through the concert helped aid workers discover a life-saver now called oral rehydration therapy, or ORT - a small sachet of salt, sugar and potassium - which keeps death away from innocent victims of war and famine, too enfeebled to fight hunger, death and disease.

Memories tend to fade and few today would recall that tumultuous day 35 years ago when Dhaka fell. For me, what survives is the music of The Concert for Bangladesh. And the image of a famished child who probably did not live to see his country liberated.