External threat and internal subversion

Kargil aggression unfolded Pakistan’s nefarious designs against our country. It envisages disintegration of India through subversion and territorial incursions.

The success of Taliban in capturing nine-tenth of Afghan land including the capital city of Kabul through the instrumentality of Pakistan army and ISI combine brought Pakistan military and political depth westward.

In Kashmir, she has been able to achieve the ethnic cleansing of the religious minority of Pandits, and radicalizing of Kashmiri Muslim polity. Yet one more significant achievement of ISI in Kashmir is of making deep inroads in a segment of the State bureaucracy, political groupings and administrative structure. Today in Kashmir, the land is with India but the people are not.

It is not correct to say that the core issue between India and Pakistan is Kashmir. That is too simplistic an interpretation. Pakistan’s basis is her religion meaning Islamic identity. For two reasons, Islamists have brought about turmoil in many parts of the Muslim world as well as in many countries where Muslims are in sizeable numbers.

Two factors have contributed to the rise of Islamic fundamentalism towards the last three decades of the previous century. One is the cumulative impression that the West politically and economically exploited the Muslims after the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in West Asia and the Mughal Empire in the subcontinent.

The second is the belief that Muslim scriptures promise the worldwide dominance of the religion of the holy Prophet. It also guarantees the superiority of the Islamic civilization because the holy book prescribes Muslim society as the most perfect and an ideal society.

Yet more important than these two factors is the third one, viz. the contradiction within the Islamic society, which has pitted the progressive, reformist and liberal segments against the conservative, orthodox and retrograde segments. In this inter-group dichotomy, the non-Muslims, wherever in a minority in a given Islamic state, become the sitting ducks for the Islamic musclemen. No doubt, the moderates also become the victims of their fury. Thus we have the examples in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco etc. At the same time, we have also the examples where religion is exploited for political ends and regimes are sustained through support to fundamentalist ideology.

Pakistan has, per necessity, to be a Theo-fascist state. In order to justify her existence, Pakistan must reject democracy, secularism and pluralism. Accepting secular dispensation would negate the basic plea of carving the Islamic state on the subcontinent, and accepting of democracy or in other words devolution of power to the masses, means sealing the fate of the big landed aristocracy in Pakistan. Both of these dispensations are unacceptable to her.

This is why we say that Kashmir is only a small nut in the big anti-India machine. Islamabad is not as much afraid of India’s military or economic might as of the political philosophy she has accepted to follow.This explains the imperative with Pakistan of destabilizing or disintegrating India, the arch enemy. We hope Indian ruling circles understand it very well.

After the Kargil aggression, Pakistan stepped up her sponsored terrorist activites in Kashmir. The army and paramilitary camps in the valley have been made the target of their attacks. Suicide squads have been launched to carry out the deadly assignments. This is to rejuvenate confidence among the local militant whose energy had begun to sag.

The ISI has spread its tentacles throughout our country particularly in places where there is a concentration of Muslim population (like 21 districts of Western U.P.) or where logistical support is easily available. She has also thrown a ring of her operational basis around India wherefrom subversive activities of her agents inside India are coordinated. Thus we find Dhaka, Katmandu and Rangoon among such centres in the East and Afghanistan, Dubai, Sharja, Emirates and Qatar in the West.

Pakistan’s overt and covert support to the religious extremist organizations on her soil has added a news dimension to Theo-fascism through which these fanatics want to establish the Islamic Caliphate of their dreams. These organizations based in Pakistan openly raise war cries of jihad against the Indian kafirs (infidels). The type of slogans raised during the Dawa wal Ershad congregation in Muridke near Lahore on November 3 – 4, 1999, explain the mega agenda set forth for themselves by the radical Islamists not only in Pakistan but all over the Muslim world. After all we cannot ignore the fact that delegates of more than two dozen foreign theocratic organizations participated in the Muridke conclave. India, Russia and the US are the declared countries against whom they are to wage a relentless jihad.

Their activities are linked to Osama Ben Laden and his organization Al Qaida. Funding for these fanatical religious organizations does not come only from Osama Ben Laden’s source. The Saudi monarchy and its intelligence agencies have never let these organizations starve. In fact any organization publicly announcing its affiliation to the Sunni–Wahhabi source in Saudi Arabia, becomes the choice beneficiary of their largesse.

New Delhi is bogged down with desk-book formulae of running the government by a democratic dispensation. Meeting this serious threat should not preclude some extraordinary measures aimed at protecting territorial integrity and sovereignty of the Indian State. Evidently, the administrative machinery in the State of Jammu and Kashmir has failed to deliver the goods notwithstanding the mandate it got in 1996. The question is not only of meeting the external threat: internal subversion is proving more disastrous and damaging. The ruling parties in New Delhi should come out of the debilitating spell of vote bank politics and respond to the call of the nation. A radical and far-reaching structural change of J&K State, in which proven anti-national elements are sidelined while proven nationalist elements are empowered, is as urgent a requirement as that of upgrading the counter insurgency tactics.