Author: Premen Addy
Publications: The Hindu
Dated: August 28, 2001
"Gangsters, not freedom fighters"
was the excoriating title of the Sunday Telegraph report on the arrest,
recently, of three suspected members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA)
in Colombia. The paper's investigative team of reporters probed the deception
of "international drug dealers and gun-runners posturing as political guerillas".
Irish terrorism is a sore point with the British public and media, especially
for those, like The Telegraph, which belong to the hard Right.
This general anger is understandable
given the tragic loss of life and damage to property from IRA bombings
and sabotage. The routes of terrorists everywhere often traverse the underworld
of drugs and crime and are, thus, part of the seamless robe of contemporary
life.
Gangsters and freedom fighters have
become interchangeable terms determined by the lowest common political
denominator rather than the highest common ethical factor. The same Sunday
Telegraph and its stable mate, the Daily Telegraph, so apoplectic at the
mention of the IRA, are remarkably indulgent towards Islamist terrorism
in Kashmir or Chechnya or the Philippines.
The politically correct, liberal
Guardian and Independent are caught in a similar cleft stick of inconsistency.
Nor is the vaunted BBC a model of rectitude, much as it and its legion
of admirers would have us think otherwise. The beheadings of Russian and
Filipino hostages by Chechen rebels and the Abu Sayaff are reported with
chilling calm, just as the Mumbai bombings of March 1993 were. A comparable
outrage in, say, an American city which resulted in 300 civilian deaths
would have been regarded in Washington as a declaration of war and the
perceived perpetrators, even if innocent, would have paid dearly for their
crime.
When an Air-India aircraft was bombed
by Khalistani terrorists in June 1985 with the loss of 329 lives of passengers
and crew, a British tabloid came out with a front-page report suggesting
that it was the debris of a Soviet satellite that had destroyed the plane.
The perpetrators of the deed have still to be brought to trial. Contrast
this with the Pan Am jet airliner Lockerbie disaster in Scotland. The Libyan
bombers were caught, tried and put behind bars even as the Khalistanis
are still being sought.
Selig Harrison, the American writer
on South and Central Asia, admitted ruefully at a conference in London
earlier this year on terrorism and security in Asia-Pacific region, that
the defining principle of terrorism in Washington was the loss of US lives
and no other. He said he had urged the State Department to at least brand
the Lashkar-e-Toiba, which operates from Pakistan, a terrorist organisation
but his plea had fallen on deaf ears.
The Lashkar uses Kashmir as its
principal killing field, so it was interesting to see how the BBC World
Service programme, Reporting Religion, went about its proclaimed goal of
examining the "roots" of the Kashmir problem and its possible "solution".
The standard: BBC and British and American media practice has been to manicure
some facts, omit others, and tell the rest, the amputated and mutilated
corpse usually labelled a "reliable report". It was no different this time.
The panel of discussants was a guarantee
that no deviation from the accepted scriptural text would occur. Ayub Thukar,
Pankaj Mishra and Victoria Schofield put India in the dock. As it was a
Star Chamber performance, no voice was heard in defence of the Indian view.
However, to Mr. Mishra's considerable credit, he did draw attention to
the plight of Kashmir's Hindu Pandit refugees now languishing in camps
for the internally displaced in India.
The torrent of politically correct
rhetoric on human rights and the copious tears on which many an adventurous
sail has been launched to catch the public eye, appear to have obscured
the pain and suffering visited upon a community whose cause it is not respectable
to air. The Government of India -- keen, no doubt, to acquire a seat on
the UN Security Council -- is silent. So also are the keepers of the world's
conscience. An occasional protest is made by people such as US Congressman
Sherrod Brown, who is perceived as a maverick.
When Mr. Mishra spoke about the
Hindu Pandits there was perceptible embarrassment in the momentary pause
that followed. Like a clever and alert actor coping with the unexpected,
Mr. Thukar remarked brightly that once India had withdrawn from Kashmir
brotherly sweetness and the light of religious tolerance would illuminate
the vale of darkness. Consider his credentials.
A few years ago, as an avowed Islamist,
Mr. Thukar led a pro-Pakistan mob into one of the committee rooms of the
House of Commons where the Tory MP, Mr. Toby Jessel, was chairing a meeting
of the Hindu Pandit diaspora. Mayhem followed and Mr. Jessel was forced
to call in the police to eject the hooligans. During the confusion a journalist
appealed to Mr. Thukar to respect the right to free expression. He replied
brusquely that neither he nor his comrades were concerned with such trivia;
their aim simply was to cleanse Kashmir of kaffirs. On the BBC programme,
he chose to sing from a different hymn sheet. He spoke with the injured
innocence of a much-wronged choir boy.
As for Victoria Schofield, she suggested
that India open the Line-of-Control so that divided families could meet
as a gesture of goodwill and fellowship. Of the Pakistani-funded and armed
jehadis infiltrating the border, neither Ms Schofield nor Mr. Thukar made
even passing mention. Perhaps these were goblins in the night manufactured
by an Indian teller of fairytales. Ms Schofield does indeed prefer simplicity.
In a book on Kashmir, she argued that Pakistan and India need urgently
to reach a peace (on Islamabad's terms naturally), otherwise the sub-continent
would be opened to Chinese Communist subversion. The darling dodo. Nevertheless,
useful to the British Foreign Office she has been given a high public profile
by the BBC and other opinion-making bodies.
The Corporation could have invited
one of the country's most respected jurists, Lord Templemen (a Law Lord,
as it happens) who, in a debate in the House of Lords, said: "In Kashmir,
human rights are threatened but they are threatened by terrorists not by
the Indian Army or the Indian police... The attack on fundamental rights
and freedoms comes not from the Government or the police or the security
forces of India but from terrorists, fundamentalists, secessionists and
criminals who attack democracy and seek to achieve their aims by murder,
intimidation and by propaganda attacks on the conduct of the armed forces
and the police...".
In a letter to the Boston Globe,
Mr. Richard Gordon, of the Harvard Law School, countered a tendentious
article by Mirwaiz Moulvi Omar Farooq, Chairman of the All Parties Hurriyat
Conference, with these words: "As has been the case in most American newspaper
reportage concerning Kashmir, the excesses of the Indian Army, well documented
by Indian human rights groups, are noted and deplored. However, the Indian
Army (and various paramilitary police forces) were not deployed in Kashmir
to restrain `unarmed, peace-loving ..... citizens', as suggested by Farooq.
These forces were, in fact, deployed
when various armed anti-Indian groups began to massacre unarmed Kashmiri
Hindus and other non-Muslims in an apparent attempt to `ethnically cleanse
the State'. These non-Muslims are not carpetbaggers. Hindus, Buddhists,
Sikhs and Christians have lived in the Kashmir Valley for centuries. Of
course, very few live there now. By and large, those who survived the Islamic
pogroms are huddled in refuges camps outside Kashmir".
And if the original sin on Kashmir
is sought the search need go no further than the report of Sir Owen Dixon,
the first UN mediator and Chief Justice of the Australian Supreme Court,
which stated: "Without going into the causes or reasons why it happened
-- which presumably formed part of the history of the subcontinent -- I
was prepared to adopt the view that when the frontier of the State of Jammu
& Kashmir was crossed on, I believe, October 20, 1947, by hostile elements,
it was contrary to International Law, and that when in May 1948, as I believe,
units of the regular Pakistani armed forces moved into the territory of
the state, that too was inconsistent with International Law".
The "causes" to which Sir Owen referred
includes surely the Pakistani mindset which was succinctly described by
Sir Vidia Naipaul recently in an interview published in The Literary Review.
"The Pakistani dream is that one day there'll be a Muslim resurgence and
they will lead the prayers in the mosques in Delhi".
Stanley Wolpert, the American biographer
of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, discovered a document in the Bhutto archive in
which one of his top advisers gloated at the prospect of an Indian defeat
in the war of December 1971, calculating that "once the back of the Indian
forces is broken in the East, Pakistan should occupy the whole of Eastern
India and make it a permanent part of East Pakistan... This will provide
a physical link with China. Kashmir should be taken at any price, even
the Sikh Punjab and turned into Khalistan".
If the BBC plans a programme called
Reporting the truth, which included a discussion of the sub-continent and
Kashmir the information required to make the exchange memorable is easily
available. The truth will set us free, one and all. Make it a mantra.
(The author, a visiting tutor in
Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is a political columnist
of the London-based India Weekly)
