Comment

Monday 13th October 2014 05:56 EDT
 

Jihadi terrorism in India

The spectre of jihadi terrorism continues to cast its baleful shadow across India, but nowhere more menacingly than in West Bengal. The recent Burdwan bomb blasts [see Media Watch, page 12] has been a wake-up call for the authorities in Delhi to a threat that is now deeply embedded in the State, thanks largely to the deliberate policy of the State government to mollycoddle hydra-headed Islamist elements with tentacles spreading to its farthest corners. The senior-most officers of the State police kowtow at all hours to ruling Trinamool Congress politicians, including government ministers, the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee among them. They appear to be under orders not to infringe the principles of vote bank politics laid down by the State authorities. That the bomb blast was confined to a flat was a stroke of luck. What is truly disturbing is the role of the West Bengal police. Instead of waiting for the anti-terror sleuths of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to arrive from Delhi and examine the unexploded ordinance for clues, the DIG instructed that the unexploded devices be taken to the banks of a nearby river and destroyed through controlled explosions. The Superintendent Police of Burdwan, SMH.Meerza, was grilled for three hours by NIA officers., who wished to know, in particular, why this was done before the arrival of an anti-terror squad from Delhi. The standard practice is to store such ordinance in pits for experts to examine for possible clues on their origin, and the imprint of the source. The Intelligence Branch (IB) in Delhi has laid the following charges against the State police: 1 An attempt at a cover-up to make it appear that the explosion was a cylinder blast; 2. Did not cooperate with the central agencies; 3. Burnt documents linking certain local personages to the Jamaat-e-Islami in Bangladesh; 4. Coached the accused arrested at the site to reveal nothing; Ignored IB alert following the trail linking the Jamaat to the Sarada ponzi scam; 5. Resolutely obstructed the NIA investigation. These charges are of the utmost seriousness. If proved, they would amount to nothing less than treason, a betrayal of national security. Such accusations must surely be investigated at the highest national level, with those having a case to answer brought to trial and sentenced, if found guilty by the courts. The law has to take its course. The country has to be protected from villains within who conspire to destroy it. Naivety is out of place in a combustible world riven by discords fed by the unbridled ambitions of certain great powers and their local minions. There are signs that the Centre in Delhi means business. The first meaningful step has been taken with the application of the Unlawful Activities Act, which paves the way for the NIA to take full charge of the inquiry as an anti-terror operation. Mamata Banerjee and Jayalalitha protested the establishment of the NIA by the previous Congress-led regime of Manmohan Singh, on the ground that its creation violated states’ rights in a federal structure. Their self-righteous opposition has been exposed as a squalid manoeuvre. There is something truly rotten in the state of West Bengal. An accidental bomb blast has revealed its cancerous growth.

Jammu-Kashmir border on fire

The week-long cannonade along the border areas of Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistani forces have led to lost lives and property on the Indian side. This resulted in a vigorous riposte from Indian troops, according to TV reports, and a warning from the Indian Defence Minister, Arun Jaitley that Pakistani adventurism would have consequences that Islamabad would find difficult to bear. There would be no flag meetings between local commanders, no talks between officials as was the standard practice in former times. Tough words are being complemented by tough action. Where this will end is difficult to say at this stage. But the larger picture deserves close critical scrutiny. A few weeks ago al Qaeda announced that India was in its sights, that jihadi activity in the country would be intensified. An ISIL flag was unfurled from a Srinagar mosque. The Pakistani assault started thereafter in a bid to bring international pressure on India through the auspices of the United Nations. Two visiting US senators Timothy Kaine and Angus King issued a statement in New Delhi welcomed the prospect of a UN-sponsored India-Pakistan dialogue on the status of Jammu and Kashmir. Simultaneously came Pakistan’s call for an “international role” by outside parties to expedite a settlement of contentious issues between the two countries. India has resolutely rejected any third party role on the Kashmir dispute. This has been the position of every Indian government, since Indira Gandhi enunciated this poicy in 1972 at the Shimla talks with Pakistan in the aftermath of the Bangladesh war. Fast rewind to 1989-90, when a Jihadi insurgency broke out in the Kashmir valley and the uncertain domestic scene put India under pressure. Then New York Times Correspondent in South Asia, Barbara Crossette, quoting a “senior Western diplomat in Islamabad”, anticipated a “change in the power equation in the subcontinent,” since the Soviet Union no longer existed to help India out as it did in 1971, when the Nixon administration in Washington, and its new de facto ally, Chairman Mao’s regime in Beijing, backed Pakistan’s military dictator, Yahya Khan. India duly withstood the jihadis, thus aborting the Crossette prediction. Echoing the fraught past, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, heir to Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto legacy of a 1000-year war against India, has promised that Pakistan under his rule would liberate and occupy Jammu and Kashmir. His grandfather Zulfiker Ali ended his days dangling at the end of a rope in a Pakistani prison, so one must hope that the young grandson’s exuberance doesn’t lead to a kindred fate, or the assassination, near Islamabad, suffered by his mother Bernazir. The question here – and it is only a question, but it does require cogitation - are there linkages between the current events in Kashmir and those in Burdwan in West Bengal, with foreign powers muddying the waters, as has happened before? Old habits die hard, do they not?

UKIP star in the UK firmament

The Conservative and Labour party establishments can ignore the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at their peril. To have thrashed their rivals in the Clacton by-election, and come second to Labour in its stronghold of Heywood, in north of England, by a mere 600-odd votes is an achievement that brooks no denial, nor sneers about a party of nuts and fruit cakes. UKIP is rabidly anti-EU, advocating an immediate UK withdrawal from Europe; UKIP calls for even more stringent immigration controls than those already in place. UKIP has outbid the Cameron government in the auction of fear of the Other. Following the Scottish referendum, UKIP’s arrival is yet another blow to the closed shop Westminster political culture. UKIP, like many hitherto fringe parties in Europe, is garnering a substantial protest vote, but it would be a grievous error of judgment to believe that the trend can go no further, that things will get back to normal, given time. The European Union is discrediting itself with stagnating economies, high unemployment levels and continuing austerities. Germany, long the European powerhouse, is heading for a recession. Worse: EU leaders were whipped into imposing sanctions against Russia, boasted the US Vice President Joe Biden to a Harvard University audience.. The EU’s cringing impotence before a swaggering bully sullies its image. The sanctions regime against Russia is now backfiring. Russia’s putative diplomatic isolation is an absurdist invention, as it excludes China, India, South East Asia, Latin America and tiny, but hugely productive Israel, which refused to align with America and Europe at the UN against Russia over developments in Ukraine. [Refer Le Monde diplomatique September]. UKIP leader Nigel Farage has trashed David Cameron’s Russia-Ukraine policy. When you bait the bear, he said, expect to be mauled. The UKIP package has to be scrutinized with care if we are to grasp the UKIP phenomenon. The Cameron government’s scaremongering immigration policy set the UKIP ball rolling. Oxford and Cambridge Universities lament the declining student visa applications from China and India, from the latter in particular. A globalized world requires that the UK’s best universities can compete for the best global talent, a point most recently made by Andrew Hamilton, the Vice Chancellor of Oxford University.  


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