With no regional party commanding the required numbers in the State Assembly, Governor N.N. Vohra dissolved the Legislative Assembly and imposed Governor’s Rule, that is direct rule from the Centre in New Delhi. Biting the bullet, the Centre vested the Army with full authority to return the State to normalcy from jihadi terror groups and jihadi stone throwers. They shall not pass. The barbarians may be at the gates, but that is hopefully as far they will get. Calling for fresh elections in the State at this juncture would have been an exercise in karmic futility. Democracy is not the issue in Kashmir. The essence of the jihadi-Hurryiat agitation is the formation of an Islamist state, with religious and ethnic minorities either expelled or living under the new dispensation as hewers of wood and drawers of water. The ethnic cleansing the Hindu Pandit community was the prologue to the present narrative.
Past regimes in New Delhi have played fast and loose with democratic norms in misbegotten charade of perks and perquisites and a revolving door of specious backroom electoral deals. An acceptable distribution of the loaves and fishes of office, plus the bribery of recalcitrant politicians with piles of bank notes was the only show in town. The Hurriyat leadership were honest: nothing less than Kashmir’s secession from India, as a first step to the State’s accession to Pakistan. Surrender or die was the coda.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, the Kashmir valley was witness to sustained ethnic cleansing of its Hindu Pandit population from their ancestral homeland, resulting in internal displacement in local refugee camps or the safety of Indian cities farther afield.
The tragedy was underplayed in New Delhi for the fiction of a little local difficulty. The brutal truth was concealed in the comfortable foliage of make believe. India’s financial hub Mumbai was subjected to a commando-style jihadi assault in 1993 during which around 300 of its inhabitants were killed; in November 2008, a similar assault left around 167 of its citizens and foreign visitors dead and significant properties seriously damaged or destroyed. Both these assaults were choreographed by Pakistan’s military-intelligence nexus and executed by their field operatives. The scale of the assaults and the casualties dwarf all the jihadi terrorist outrages in Europe, and bear some likeness to the devastation of 9/11 in the United States.
The crisis in Kashmir must be viewed in context to the larger picture, including the messianic Pakistan dream of a subcontinent Khilafat, with Islamabad as its hub. The party-political ground reality gets murkier by the day. Even as Kashmir boiled and bubbled, with senior Kashmiri Congress leader Saifuddin Soz issuing a call for an independent, Kashmir causing embarrassment to his party leadership. Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, once Kashmir chief minister himself, accused the Army of killing more civilians in the State than jihadi terrorists, a provocative statement by any yardstick. The BJP faithful were outraged, but there was broader public wonderment at the cynical games being played by men long perceived as Congress party loyalists. Perhaps it was a case of wolves in sheep’s clothing, and hence undetected by the partially sighted Congress President Rahul Gandhi, more adept in high voltage street theatre.
Mr Gandhi deplored the ‘opportunistic BJP-PDF alliance (as) it set fire to Jammu and Kashmir killing many innocent people including our brave soldiers. It cost India strategically and destroyed years of UPA’s hard work.’ UPA was the Congress-led coalition at the Centre from 2004-2014. The convoluted drafting could have done with better penmanship.
Mufti Mehbooba, the departing Chief Minister warned: ‘Muscular policy cannot be successful here.’ But it was surely the murderously ‘muscular policy’ of the jihadis that eventually led to her undoing. When people refuse to turn swords into ploughshares, they must be prepared to perish by the sword. In a sign of things to come, Dawood Sofi, a notorious jihadi believed to be behind the recent attacks on the police was killed along with three accomplices in a gunfight with security forces in the valley’s Anantnag district.
Finally, Mufti Mehmooba’s predecessor, Omar Abdullah, of the National Conference, exclaimed: ‘What’s this about “new muscular policy” discourse that’s sought to be created? She was unapologetic for all (the) pain and suffering.’ Abdullah could with help in his parsing. Confusion worse confounded, with the contestants struggling for the elusive clarity. So the game goes on regardless, a travesty of democracy and the rule of law that offered little security of life and limb to the citizenry. Wailing, handwringing, and ritual breast- beating the only solace in view. The people of Jammu and Kashmir deserve better.
Rajnath Singh in Mongolia
Home Minister Rajnath Singh paid a three-day visit to Mongolia to strengthen ties with one of the most strategically significant states in Central Asia. Mongolia is Buddhist, belonging to the same school of Buddhism as Tibet, and hence also reveres the Dalai Lama as its pontiff. Mongolia and Tibet were both constituents of the Manchu Empire in China. With its collapse in 1911, China became a republic. Thereupon Mongolia and Tibet made a declaration of independence and signed a defence treaty. This failed to get the recognition of the United States, which committed to the territorial integrity of the Manchu Empire for reasons of commerce, opposed the move. Britain opted for a casuistic policy of de facto support to Tibetan autonomy – it minted its own currency, appointed diplomatic missions and possessed a Nation Assembly and Cabinet - and to China’s de jure sovereignty over Tibet.
The invasion of Tibet by Mao’s legions in 1950 was a repeat performance of the Manchu general Chao Erh feng’s march into Lhasa and to the flight of the Dalai Lama to India, whereupon The Morning Post in London on February 28, 1910 issued this prescient warning: ‘A great Empire, the future military strength which no man can foresee has suddenly appeared on the North East Frontier of India…The Strategic Line has been lost, and a heavy price may be exacted for the mistake. China, in a word, has come to the gates of India, and the fact has to be reckoned with.’
Thanks to Tsarist, and subsequently, to Soviet intervention, the outcome for Mongolia was sovereignty guaranteed by Stalin’s insistence, against US opposition, of a United Nations-supervised plebiscite in 1945, resulting in an overwhelming vote for Mongolian independence.
The Chinese military presence in Tibet and the Dalai Lamama’s refuge in India cast a dark shadow over Sino-Indian relations. When, in 2016, the Mongolian government of Mongolia invited the Dalai Lama to visit the country as religious figurehead, Beijing responded with a vicious economic blockade accompanied by a minatory warning of intent. The full significance of Rajnath Singh’s visit to Mongolia can only be appreciated in its historical context. It is the new Great Game in the Eurasian heartland.
Red card for anti-Russian tantrums
Russia-baiting is the flavor of the silly season for sections of the British media and the country’s political class. Whitehall has relied on its Russian ally to see off such world conquerors as Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler. Frederick the Great of Prussia put it well: ‘The more I see of men, the more I love my dog.’
This latest fit of the vapours from the National Socialist cabal of the Labour Party arises possibly from the striking success of the FIFA World Cup across Russia. The dire predictions of British tabloids of hooligans and race riots have been refuted by the carnival atmosphere soccer fans from across the world in full enjoyment of their surroundings. An enraged Stephen Kinnock MP has called for the boycott of Russia. This is at one with other rabid Blairite voices, who forget the damning Chilcot Report on their sainted leader, whose mendacity and crawling servility to the George W. Bush Administration, which included jointly crafted falsehoods on Saddam Hussain’s ‘weapons of mass destruction.’
The sight of vast masses of humanity mulling over the splendid sights and sounds of Russian cities is difficult to swallow. Contrast these images with pictures of black footballers assaulted by Polish hooligans in Poland or English thugs in Chelsea colours roughing up a black passenger on the Paris Metro. Sir Alan Sugar’s racist innuendos directed at the soccer stars of Senegal, would appear to suggest that the once famous British sportsmanship and good manners now float in the gutter.
On the eve of the Iceland-Nigeria tie at Volvograd – once Stalingrad - players and officials from both sides went to the city’s iconic War Memorial and laid wreaths in tribute to the million and more Soviet dead, whose epic resistance over six months against Hitler’s hordes brought the victory that saved Russia, Europe and, dare one say it, the civilized world from a new Dark Age.
Winston Churchill, a larger than life figure, addressing the Parliament in London, said the ‘guts of the German army had been largely torn out by Russian valour and generalship. The people of all the Russias have been fortunate in finding in their ordeal of agony a warrior leader, Marshal Stalin, whose authority enabled him to combine and control the movements of armies numbered by many millions upon a front of nearly 2,000 miles.’
A Nigerian supporter told a reporter that Stalingrad and all that it represented brought him to the site. Earlier, on the morning of England’s clash with Tunisia at the same venue, a senior British diplomat, Lindsay Skoll, and Greg Clarke, Chairman of the (English) Football Association laid wreaths to commemorate the 75th anniversary of this historic battle.
Mr Skoll said: ‘I think what this demonstrates more than anything is that the enduring nature of the relationship between the UK and Volvograd outweighs any political ups and downs.’ Give politics a well deserved rest.
