Random Thoughts
What should India do and Why?
It was America and Pakistan, which created, nurtured and funded the Islamic fundamentalists including Al Qaida and only reacted after three terrorist acts against it. America was blind to the vicious epidemic of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in spite of the experience of India. Afghans are great fighters but totally unreliable and constantly susceptible to bribes and blood feuds. They are the buffer that gets periodically crushed in the great game of great powers. See the book on the Khyber Pass and Afghan wars by a former CIA agent John Waller, and the famous words of Dost Mohammed, the much deposed and reinstated Afghan king.
The Palestinian Authority is corrupt, venal and incompetent and even though my sympathies are with Israel, an ally of India, one has to read history and Chomsky's writings to realize that the Palestinians are treated horribly and even Jews can become oppressors, when it suits their purpose. Even more importantly States and nations are not moral agents and occasional human beings only intermittently so.
Musharraf was coerced and threatened into betraying his progeny and protZgZs, the Taliban and hoped that this betrayal would buy him a free hand to indulge in terrorism in Kashmir and break up India by Salami tactics and a thousand cuts. When diplomatic efforts and shrewd word games hoisted the US by its own petard in such a way that after the terrible punishment meted out to Afghanistan and the loud condemnation of Palestinian suicide bombers, it was compelled to
publicly chastise and rein in Musharraf. The latter then directly or through Akram and Lodhi in USA screamed in a tantrum that Pakistan would resort to nuking India. This backfired and brought worldwide condemnation and so today Musharraf, back-pedalled and declared that Nuclear War was unthinkable! Who knows whether America has something else in mind? May be they want to destabilize Musharraf and if there is a coup, use it as a pretext to destroy the nuclear arsenal and capability of Pakistan, which is most likely to fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists, the irrational suicidal specter that is the only shadow looming on the otherwise endlessly bright horizon under America's majestic survey.
Bengal and Kerala communists and the CPIs are retarded ineducable ignorami of today and serve the same function as the appendix in the human body. They have no use and periodically get inflamed to cause morbidity and mortality. They have no understanding of human nature in its natural visage, which is an admixture of greed, selfishness and fear under the mask of charity, altruism and hubris. The rotting remnants of the failed experiments of so called communism, which in reality was a tyranny of oligarchs placing themselves above the law, while practicing a corrupt brand of state capitalism are still visible sores on the world landscape and pollute the earth's atmosphere with the odor of the putrefying products of their dead carcasses. The impossibility of the actual mass practice of communism is of the same order as that of a Christian turning the other cheek or a Hindu performing an action devoid of the fruit of desire.
Secular humanism is the only acceptable alternative if all bellies are full and the masses contain no significant fanatic zealots. When there is significant contamination by rabid, violent and obsessed religious groups espousing violence, it is not possible to create a secular society. I strongly recommend Karl Sigmund's book--Games of Life. In a population of forgiving cooperators playing reiterated Prisoners' dilemma, a united group of defecting non-cooperators can cause extinction of the nicer original majority. Those who advocate secularism and tolerance of a gutter religion like Islam are playing checkers on a board where the Islamic terrorists play by the rules of chess and have powerful bishops, knights, rooks and a queen to begin with, to massacre the egalitarian powerless proletariat pawns that constitute the soldiers of the foolish utopians.
Let us not forget that 80000 Indians have died in Kashmir due to an insurgency caused by Indira Gandhi and Nehru family stupid policies and fueled by Pakistani terrorism. There are daily incidents of terrorism in India and Pakistani agents are caught all over India and the Indian public in general and the Hindus are fed up of pseudo-secularists and fifth columnists like the Imams and madressah indoctrinated fanatics and suspicious of the constant silence of the Muslim population and leaders when the initiators and transgressors are Muslims. It is inevitable that India will fragment if Pakistan is not marginalized and thus it is our war. India was smart to ride America's coattails on the bandwagon of antiterrorism and if Pakistan behaves in its usually irrational Islamic fanatic extremist manner, the estimates of catastrophe and casualties are likely to exceed even the dire predictions of America and the DIA. They don't really care about that. Their overwhelming fear is the destabilization of Pakistan and the likelihood of the nukes falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists who infest Pakistan's foundations and structure like termites. America is likely to have factored this contingency and most probably has a plan for that scenario which would involve direct US destruction of Pakistan or use of Israel as the surrogate golem, but the resultant upheaval in the Muslim world would cause disruption of Iranian and Saudi oil supplies. This is the main reason that US wants to add Iraq to the client state of Kuwait by replacing Saddam and control the newest source of energy viz. Central Asian De-Islamicized former Soviet republics like Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. Note the lack of interest in Kirghizstan, which has no oil or gas and is next to China!
What is the rest of the world supposed to do under these circumstances? Europe is strong enough to hew a separate path and China smart enough to do the same. India must stop depending on the goodwill and permission of an unreliable ally like the United States and pursue its own long-term interests, while showing respect and diplomacy towards the lone superpower, and irrespective of the short-term costs. In my biased, warped or well thought out opinion, the reduction of Pakistan to a trivial and marginal status is essential for the long-term well being of India, as long as it has a large minority Moslem population, which it cannot expel by legal or moral means and would make its secular status a ridiculous farcical sham. Not that the latter matters in the long run, but my alternative gives India, a more ethical status or a fig leaf, if circumstances change. In similar situations in the past UK and USA have imposed an arms embargo and America did so unilaterally against Moslem Bosnians, who were being slaughtered by the Serbs. No one imposed an embargo on India this time because India has the cash to pay for it and is a large potential future client. It is about time that India completely abandons its socialist and moralist postures and realizes that the rich and powerful are different and they make the rules and are above them!
09-Jun-2002
More by :
Gaurang Bhatt, MD
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