Right And Wrong Indian Style

Right and Wrong Indian Style

Here we go again. It is hard to tell on whose side certain members of the Indian Coast guard are on. You can never get a Pakistani official or even a member of Civil Society there, to espouse anything but the official line. Here in India, it’s democracy at work, interpreted more often than not as rank indiscipline. The once apolitical Armed Forces may also no longer be so.

Congress meanwhile, reduced to 44 seats in the  Lok Sabha, still sees things differently.  It heckled the Defence Ministry when the Pakistani fishing boat, laden with explosives, blew itself up 350 km. from Porbandar . That it should do so, when challenged by the Indian Coast Guard, was not accepted as an intended terrorist attack. That it was off the Gujarat coast on the eve of the Vibrant Gujarat Summit wasn’t convincing. Not even when the Summit was expecting John Kerry, Ban Ki Moon, the Prime Minister, several other notables, and hundreds of business leaders.

Congress said it could have been a vessel engaged in mere smuggling, flying in the face of reports of satellite phone intercepts between the boat’s crew and its handlers in Pakistan.  Other parties also kept quiet. To the Congress Party and fellow travellers, any criticism of Islamic terrorism, even if it clearly emanates from Pakistan, is deemed to be ‘communal’ and ‘anti-secular’. And now a senior member of the Coast Guard alleges that it blew up the Pakistani boat! 

The ISI and the Pakistani military establishment have long known our internal weakness, and exploits it. It counts on little or no retaliation.

This has changed under NDA II to an extent, with a robust will to roll back such aggression. Determined efforts are also on to install a high tech border fence along the LoC, another bordering Bangladesh, roads along the Chinese border and the LaC, intensive patrolling of the desert border with Pakistan in Rajasthan and so on.

But over the last decade, Pakistan has also managed to foster the Indian Mujahideen (IM) and similar organisations, aided from Pakistan and its cells in Bangladesh, Nepal, the UAE, Thailand, etc., so that it can claim all domestic Islamic terrorism is home-grown disaffection.

We may know this to be clear misinformation in truth, but the parties wooing Muslim vote banks don’t care to counter it. Pakistani propaganda has long said that Indian Muslims are unhappy, more so wherever the Muslims are in large numbers : Lucknow, Allahabad, Hyderabad, Meerut, Mumbai, Kolkata, New Delhi, and, of course, in J&K.  It depicts India as no more than a Hindu majority state, at some variance from its ‘secular’ pretensions.

India’s nearly 190 million Muslims are second-class citizens, according to this narrative. Pakistan maintains India, ruled by the Left or the Right, Congress or BJP, irrespective, only pays lip- service to Muslim welfare.

It is ironic therefore that the grand old party tries to portray itself as secular, along with its sisters under the skin, and the BJP/NDA as communal! 

The half-truth in the Pakistani slur, comes from the lack of Narendra Modi’s far more muscular level playing field pitch, implemented over the last 13 years by him for Gujarat’s Muslims in an environment of security. But one is not going to get AAP, Congress, the CPM, TMC, and others of their persuasion, to admit it. 

Similarly, the another popular canard, beloved of the Left-Leaning Liberal in India, is that we have brought the terrorism and anti-statism upon ourselves. They think the insurgents in the North East, the Maoists in the jungles of Central India and the East, are justified and a consequence of years of blatant neglect and exploitation/discrimination against the disadvantaged.

To their liberal followers, equally hypocritical themselves, all the murder and mayhem, the hundreds of soldiers and policemen being killed in peace-time, including those in J&K, is not particularly condemnable. Cross-border terrorism isn’t cross border in origin to their view, but a consequence of Army oppression!

But spies have always had it dead to rights- that perfectly cynical take on human nature. They need to understand the mechanics of deception as a stock-in-trade. Their lives, let alone their missions, depend on it.  Spies need to surf popular currents of emotion, to infiltrate, fit in, be trusted, be alert to undercurrents. Spies need to belong in the very communities they routinely betray.

In the acclaimed TV Serial The Americans, about a seemingly married couple of embedded KGB agents in the US  during the Cold Warring eighties; one of the protagonists tells her  teenage daughter, born in America, part offspring, part cover: ‘We see what we need to see in people, things that are not really there’.

This kind of selective view of reality amongst some of the political drivers of this country could cost us very much more than it already has.  The San Andreas style tectonic fault in India’s body politic is the willingness to distort the truth. 

We are under threat, not just in the realms of formal security on the borders, but via a guerilla war of attrition in our homes and streets. This could, if unchecked, bring to naught all of India’s much vaunted economic promise.

 Let us recall that James Headley, the half-American half-Pakistani double-agent (CIA/ISI), scoped out several Indian targets, including the nuclear facilities at Trombay, essentially using the goodwill of his Indian friends.

He was able to advance plan the micro-route map for 26/11, nine months in advance. It is providential that the subsequent operations did not simultaneously involve all of his recommended targets.

There have been scores of small and big terrorist atrocities over the years. And the fact is, we are ever vulnerable, partially because this country is far from being united in how to fight it.

To be ruthlessly effective in dedicated intelligence gathering, and action taken on its findings, let alone aggressive counter espionage, the political will must be unwavering. 

The UPA Government, when 26/11 happened, was beholden to, and dependent on, its minority vote bank as usual, and felt it was impolitic, though they will   never admit it, to vigorously pursue Islamic terrorism in this country. It has  always refused to distinguish between the terrorist and our millions of patriotic citizens who happen to be Muslim.

And now, something of its political inheritor, the AAP, is already vanguarding the revival of the great socialist come back. It is eliciting support from the CPM, the TMC, Nitish Kumar’s JD(U) , the minorities, the dalits, the migrant labourers, and other disadvantaged sections. The AAP, with its come- one- come-all attitude, its newbieness, is easy to fund and infiltrate.

For: The Pioneer

(1,098 words)

February 18^th, 2015

Gautam Mukherjee