Author: Sandhya Jain
Publication: Vijayvaani.com
Date: August 2, 2011
URL: http://www.vijayvaani.com/FrmPublicDisplayArticle.aspx?id=1900
America's startling political decision to
arrest US citizen cum ISI lobbyist Ghulam Nabi Fai last month, while Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton was in India, follows a string of continuing face-offs
between the two countries and suggests that Washington may have decided to
dismount the Pakistani tiger. Tensions peaked with Islamabad closing NATO
supply routes to Afghanistan; the arrest of CIA agent Raymond Davis and subsequent
expulsion of many CIA agents from Pakistan; the May Day midnight murder of
Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad; and the continuing Drone attacks
on the western frontier, which ISI chief Shuja Pasha's fence-mending visit
to Washington could not fix.
New Delhi's muted reaction is understandable.
Fai's arrest exposes UPA appointees, Justice (retd.) Rajinder Sachar and journalist
Dileep Padgaonkar, for hobnobbing with ISI and other anti-India agents abroad
and later accepting positions to empower the Muslim minority and Kashmiri
separatists respectively, at the cost of the Hindu community and the nation.
This raises larger questions regarding the reasons why the Union Government
found jobs for persons with anti-India and anti-Hindu proclivities, and why
the nation should accept their so-called reports which stand tainted by association.
Going by Washington's revelations, Islamabad
covertly funnelled over $4 million to Fai's Kashmiri American Council over
two decades, to influence American and international opinion against India's
claim to Kashmir. The FBI's main charge is that Fai and his associate Zaheer
Ahmed failed to register with the Justice Department as Pakistan lobbyists.
Of course, Washington knew this and was monitoring the duo for many years;
it refrained from acting against them while Pakistan was perceived as useful
in the war against terrorism. Now, the knives are out; hence the naming of
Fai's handlers, viz., Maj. Gen. Mumtaz Ahmad Bajwa; Brig. Javed Aziz Khan,
Brig. Sohail Mehmood, Lt. Col. Tauqeer Butt and a man codenamed 'Abdullah'.
Fai's job included getting Pakistani and Indian
eminences to attend conferences on India's human rights violations in Kashmir,
and escorting men like Mirwaiz to meet White House staff. Recently, Mirwaiz
Farooq and Hurriyat leader S.A.S. Geelani met Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina
Rabbani Khar at the embassy in New Delhi, on the eve of talks with her Indian
counterpart Mr S.M. Krishna, a move which reduced the official talks to a
formality.
Fai's Indian friend, Justice Rajinder Sachar,
was in 2005 appointed by the UPA to head a high powered committee with a mandate
to 'prove' the backwardness of the Indian Muslim community, and attribute
this alleged backwardness to 'institutional discrimination' at social, political
and economic levels. Though completely lacking empirical data, Mr Sachar strove
to entrench a Muslim communal identity in India by pressing for an 'Equal
Opportunity Commission' and paving the way for unmanageable communal discord.
The Union Ministry of Minority Affairs, egged
on by the National Minorities Commission, is working overtime to secure for
Muslims an undeclared religion-based reservation in the public and private
sectors. Mr Salman Khurshid, as Minority Affairs Minister, strove through
2009 to get reservations for all Muslims under the Backward Communities category,
and to persuade the corporate sector to give minorities reservation in lieu
of tax rebates. Mr Sachar stressed proportional reservation for Muslims in
the police, administrative services, armed forces and public sector. For a
nation divided by the impetus created by separate electorates under the British
Raj, this is truly macabre.
A discriminated religious community must
suffer in terms of parameters like health (IMR, lifespan, growth rate), education
(literacy, mean years of schooling, female literacy), general living conditions
(absence of overcrowding, access to potable water, toilet facilities) and
economic status (participation in work force, per capita income). But most
of these human development indicators are favourable for Muslims as compared
to Hindus, and in certain instances they are even better than the Hindu General
community (e.g., the Infant Mortality Rate for Muslims is 59, as compared
to 77 for Hindus). No variation can be attributed to State or institutional
discrimination.
Mr Sachar's most dangerous move, however,
was to rectify the low participation of Muslims in politics by proposing de-reservation
of Scheduled Caste constituencies where Muslim population is greater through
'rational delimitation.' The idea is that Muslim voters will polarize themselves
into voting for a Muslim candidate or one compelled to exclusively pander
to Muslim interests. This crude cynicism is matched only by his attempt to
force the armed forces to submit to a Muslim head count, which was robustly
resisted by General J.J. Singh.
Fai's other friend and Union Home Ministry-appointed
chief interlocutor on Jammu & Kashmir is currently under fire from his
own colleague Mr M.M. Ansari, as the untimely exposé has blighted their
report which was only awaiting the end of the Amarnath Yatra before being
submitted to the government, so as not to incite Hindu sentiments. Mr P. Chidambaram
fears the Padgaonkar report may now meet the same fate as the Justice Saghir
Ahmed working group report, and has tried to minimize Padgaonkar's enjoying
Fai-ISI hospitality and legitimizing the Pakistan-sponsored hate and break-India
campaign.
But as Mr Ansari has pointed out, one cannot
join a conference without knowing the credibility of the individuals and the
institution. Indeed, if the UPA regime wishes to have even an ounce of public
credibility, it must crackdown on the Kashmiri separatists who attended the
Fai and other seminars and defamed the nation abroad. The Home Minister must
explain if he was aware of Mr Padgaonkar's seminar circuits and biases before
appointing him as chief interlocutor on Kashmir. If not, what kind of vetting
does the Ministry do before making sensitive appointments?
Mr Chidambaram must urgently bring out a paper
listing all Indian nationals who travelled abroad at the invitation of known
India-baiters like Fai, Farooq Kathwari and their ilk, with details of the
presentations they made there on Kashmir and other alleged human rights violations
by Indian security and armed forces. These fifth columnists must be named
and shamed, and asked to tender an unconditional apology to the nation for
eating its salt, enjoying all the prestige and privileges it bestows upon
its unworthy sons, and then playing footsie with its enemies.
Above all, we must be told how Pakistan-ISI,
the pro-Pakistan western nations, the ruling UPA, and the anti-national elites,
have been found to be on the same page! Shame.
