By Col. Anil Athale (Retd.)

The recent surrender by the Pakistani State to the Taliban  in the Swat valley may well turn out to be a watershed in the history of the Indian subcontinent. In terms of long-term impact, this may even overshadow the recent Mumbai massacres. All signs point to the ‘Talibanisation’ of Pakistan. Here are several pointers:

I A Rehman writing in the Dawn newspaper on February 12 says ‘the Pakistani armed forces were indoctrinated in General Zia-ul Haq’s rule to reserve senior posts for genuine Islamists. The Pakistan army  may have the capacity to kill hordes of people, but it will not — and cannot — do that.’ The army and the State may well disintegrate if it does.

We have the example of Iran — on February 11, 1979, when the mass upsurge to impose ‘Islamic rule’ reached its zenith, the Iranian army declared its ‘neutrality’ in the ongoing conflict. This sealed the fate of the Shah of Iran. A similar happening in Pakistan is very likely.

Slumdog Jihadis

The Dawn on December 18, 2008, quoted the Pakistan Planning Commission’s Deputy Chairman Sardar Asef Ahmad Ali that poverty had skyrocketed to above 40 per cent in the country, leaving millions helpless. It is these poor/unemployed/uneducated people that are cannon fodder for the jihadis. The interrogation of the lone surviving Mumbai terrorist Ajmal Kasab’s story fits the bill. There are such 48 million Ajmals waiting in Pakistan to be primed against India.

As a student of  military  history, I found it extraordinary that Indians were always blissfully unaware of developments in their neighborhood. No ruler of Delhi  ever woke up when the enemy crossed the Khyber Pass. The first stirrings of action were usually when the enemy was at the gates, at Panipat, just a day’s march from Delhi.

Indians have been made to totally forget the holocaust that they faced in past; the name Hindukush itself means ‘Hindu killer’, a reminder of the days when thousands of Indians died on the mountain slopes while being taken to Central Asia as slaves.(the Encyclopaedia Britannica quoting a 12th century traveler Ibn Batuta).

Nearer our times, the 1981 UN declaration of Universal Human Rights writes; ‘Among the genocides of human history, the highest number of people killed in the small span of time is in Bangladesh in 1971. An average of 6,000 to 12 000 people were killed every single day. This is the highest daily average in history.‘ The lower estimate shows that 15 lakh were killed, a majority of them Hindus.

A commission of inquiry appointed by the Pakistan government, the Hamidoor Rehman Commission, has recorded testimonies of Pakistani army officers who have quoted General Amir Abdullah Khan Niazi asking the question ‘How many Hindus have you killed today?‘ as a matter of routine. We have forgotten this recent episode as well.

Demography is destiny

Pakistan has a very high rate of population growth. Although it has declined from three percent at the time of the census in 1981 to the present 1.9 per cent it is still the highest among populous countries of more than 50 million, except Nigeria. The more reliable indicator of population growth is the total fertility rate — the number of children born to a woman in her reproductive span. Pakistan’s TFR is four. A TFR of 2.1 is considered replacement level which leads to a stable population.

In Pakistan, the under-15 population is 37 per cent of the total. Given the poor education, health and skills of this youth, they are fodder for jihad and little else. With the mullahs constantly drumming that all of Pakistan’s ills are due to the evil Hindu India/Zionist Israel/Christian America troika, Pakistan’s biggest export for a long time is likely to be terror.

If by some miracle, Pakistan is to implement population control tomorrow, it will take two to three decades for it to take effect. Even if the re-brainwashing was to begin now, again it is bound to take time. The sad fact is that neither of these things is happening either tomorrow or any time soon.

Impact of the economic meltdown

For decades over 25 percent of the Pakistani labour force was employed in the oil-rich Middle East. With the economic downturn and lower oil prices, the boom is over. The Dubai shopping festival was a flop this year. The returning labour force will only add to the unemployment in the country.

In any case, Pakistan has very little industry and its agriculture is confined to Punjab and parts of Sindh. Most of the country’s landmass is arid and unfit for agriculture. Rural poverty will gallop in the near future.

Ripe for implosion

The politics of extremism as represented by the Taliban, the economic meltdown and demographic pressure all point to a major implosion in Pakistan. Are we ready for the fallout?

Despite this threat staring in our face there is a palpable lack of national unity — another Indian trait. In the last four years, we have let our defence apparatus go to seed, so much so that we have lost the conventional edge over Pakistan.

Given this situation the only option for India is to ‘isolate and contain’ Pakistan. That still leaves the million dollar question about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Here one hopes that all those joint exercise with special forces of the US, UK, Israel, China and Russia were in preparation for this very contingency.

If not, then God save the world!

RELATED ARTICLES:

1) Now, Lashkar trains women for terror  http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/feb/18-now-lashkar-trains-women-for-terror.htm

2) Terror  Against India @ http://indiaview.wordpress.com/2008/12/25/terror-against-india/

3) History of Terror @ http://worldmonitor.wordpress.com/2008/12/10/l-e-thistory-of-terror/

by Tarun Vijay

In Srinagar, a Muslim women’s organization – the Dukhtaran-e-Millat vows to impose the strict Islamic code on women through violence and declares that it is in the interests of women. The leader of this outfit, Asiyah Andrabi, was jailed several times for working against the nation and for being a conduit for money to jihadi groups who used that help to kill Hindus and create disaffection among people against India.

The US State Department Report of 1995 held a Dukhtaran-e-Millat activist responsible for a parcel bomb blast at the BBC office in Srinagar in which one person was killed and two injured.

The DeM has recently been linked to certain money laundering cases. Andrabi was booked under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) for receiving ISI money through hawala channels. Whenever she speaks against India, there is no emotion or any sense of regret.

She was never subjected to a narco test nor did the media feel anything bad about her. Instead, women’s groups interviewed her, called her the “new face of Muslim feminism”, and glossy magazines splashed her interviews with a tinge of revolutionary romanticism.

For Indian seculars, the Srinagar crowd working against India brings added fizz, a thrill and a heroism that has to be “understood” rather than condemned. Serious academic columns are published saying that if they are so passionately and aggressively pursuing separatism, why shouldn’t we give the Kashmir valley to them?

It’s only when a lady monk is killed in Kandhamal or arrested in Nashik and appears to be wearing saffron rather than green that expressions become stern, the law becomes the guiding force, narco tests are immediately ordered and before anything can be even remotely established, the person is pronounced guilty. No women’s organization comes out openly to say she is a woman and hence the police must protect her honour and religious obligations at all cost.

Her father says she is innocent. No one gives any importance to that statement.

She cooperates during the narco test and nothing incriminatory is proved. The police say she practices yoga, hence the narco test didn’t work.

The bike, the RDX, the targets – nothing is proved. Yet, she is tortured in police custody.

The women’s commission that swung into action when an item girl used it to get cheap publicity and hot assignments maintains a studied silence.

The Human Rights Commission remains unfazed and the red sirens of the Marxist class look the other way. They had been demanding a pardon for Afzal although the Supreme Court convicted him. But the issues involved were of secular nature; hence they had to speak.

Nobody still knows what Pragya actually did or didn’t do. She has to be severely dealt with just because the colour she wears is not registered as secular in the government’s registry of protection where rapists, extortionists and scandalous criminals get a cabinet berth and a murder accused jailbird becomes a chief minister for being on the correct side politically.

First they said an army officer used 60 kg of RDX to blow up the Samjhauta Express. Then the denial comes; no RDX was used, it was ammonium nitrate, oh no perhaps IEDs. Then the Mecca Masjid blasts are linked with Malegaon, then the Hyderabad police issue an official statement that nothing has been found to link the two. The motorbike, the disfigured numbers on the chassis, the absconding person, the real mastermind, the saffron terror guru … Remember when the Kanchi Shankaracharya was arrested, what kind of charges were levelled against him? Rape, murder, financial fraud and womanizing. And women came foreword to issue statements about how they were “lured”. What happened afterwards? Even “nothing” won’t convey the nothingness of the entire plot.

But the damage to the great seat of Hindu reverence had been done.After Kanchi and the Kandhamal murders, a new tool in form of Hindu terrorism has been crafted to make the Batla House terror gang happy.

Not a single Hindu will ever condone terrorism. It’s not in our genes. Our blood group in this matter is different. If someone does it he is guilty of doing an un-Hindu act. Anyone caught and proven guilty must be severely dealt with. But why humiliate a majority community that defines the character of the nation for election gains?

Words, cacophony, a celebrative secular media’s new 24-hour preoccupation – lynch the saffron, light the party fire.

Just one incident and look how Batla House terrorism, Jamia’s protective belligerence, Assam blasts, Pakistani flags carried in Bodo areas by Muslim infiltrators, the Ram Setu destruction and affidavits that humiliate Hindus, everything got under cover. Only the newly manufactured “Hindu terrorism” is reigning in the national debate as a new fashion statement.

The invention of “Hindu terrorism” helped the government get out of a defensive shell and be extraordinarily active to crack a whip against “bad elements”.

It had never displayed this action-oriented thrill when the Delhi blasts occurred or the Jaipur blasts claimed more than 60 lives. No Maulana was arrested or caricatured in the media as the bloody green terror guru or ghastly Islamic terrorism.

No, they said, terror has no religion hence these blasts, though done with a holy book surrounded by AK47s, and long quotes from it to justify the blasts and the killings of Hindus shouldn’t be sourced to religion. These must not be explained away as Islamic terror, but just the work of some misguided people who are giving a bad name to a peaceful, brotherly way of worship.

Fine.

But when they see saffron, everyone loves to tie them with the speeding bus of law enforcement and constitutional propriety and beat them black and blue to prove a secular manliness of dhimmitude variety.

Pragya says she was tortured in police custody but no one took any notice of that. Why?

Even the most dreaded women criminals have been accorded human rights protection. Pragya is no criminal, she doesn’t advocate violence against the state, she is not a traitor, she doesn’t impose any kind of obscurantist code on women nor does she use acid, like Andarabi, to make other women fear her dictates. She has not said she is out to kill others to bring about any kind of religious order. But she is tortured and no one says it a gross violation of human rights. Is she not to be given the protection that every woman is entitled to?

Those who write against the nation, insult our heritage and support secession, get applauds and awards. But those who die for the nation and protect the civilisational flow are tortured in police custody.

That’s the brevity and power of a state that’s in reality headed by a woman and is being actually run by another.

More than 60,000 Hindus have been killed by Islamic jihadis, in the name of their religion and not a single Hindu stood up to say: Enough is enough, I will now see the wicked are punished and innocents are protected.There is a list of more than 200 Hindu temples razed or desecrated in the Kashmir valley. No Hindu Kashmiri vowed to establish a Hindu terror group to
take revenge because the state apparatus has failed to provide them safety.

Seema, a six-year-old girl, was found lying unconscious in a pool of blood in Doda when Islamic terrorists came to her house in the thick of night at 2.30 am, woke up her father, mother and her 11-year-old brother, killing them after brutal torture. They used big knives to cut them into pieces.

Still no Hindu terror group was formed to teach them a lesson.

A two-and-a-half-year old boy who was crying for milk as his mother was shot dead by Islamic terrorists in Wandhama attracted the attention of the jihadis and the bullets silenced him too.

Even then, Hindus didn’t become terrorists.

The great socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia use to say – India has three dreams – Ram, Krishna and Shiva. The abodes, the principal temples of the global Hindus dedicated to these three dreams of India were destroyed and desecrated by Islamic invaders. Go to Google and see how the Shiva temple in Kashi has been turned into a mosque in such a style that the pillars of the old Hindu temple remain clearly visible to show Hindus that here was once the temple they used to worship, which has been converted into a mosque.

Yet for the last four centuries no Hindu has turned a terrorist to take revenge in Kashi.

Now when elections are underway, the government is in shambles showing utter unworthiness to govern and protect patriotic people. Suddenly every single person arrested for terrorism is a saffron, a Hindu and nothing is appearing on the channels or in Sunday magazine features except the “grave danger of Hindu terrorism” and the army getting the saffron “tilak” of terror.

Even the Ghaznis, Ghauris and Abdalis haven’t done so much of character assassination of a majority community as this government has done just to garner a few Muslim votes.

Is it fair?

Will it not create a reaction among those who have been chanting mantras of global peace and fraternity and praying for the welfare of all, irrespective of faith or colour? Pushed to a corner, restricted from crying and blackholed like the Jews during the Nazi regime, will it not be a bit too naive to expect that Hindus will remain silent and offer their necks for the
secular sacrificial ritual of election gains? Their temples are bombed, their children are killed, their property is looted, their orchards are burnt, their motherland is disfigured and assaulted, yet the state declares a war on their sensitivities, the media muffles their voice and bans all for a for them to express their views. On the contrary, it shows the victims as
aggressors, humiliating them in the eyes of the real attackers.

Nature abhors such Siberian gags. Peace is strengthened by justice alone.

The way Pragya has suddenly become a hero must make sane people sit up and take note of the wave passing through the Hindu heartland. Tsunamis don’t send advance emails before they strike.

The author is the Director, Dr Syamaprasad Mookerjee Research Foundation.