The Cold War Between The Indian Left & Right

The Cold-War Between The Indian Left &Right

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 and subvert progress, for political gain.  

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.

What happened at VT Station, the hospital near it, the Taj Mahal Hotel, Leopold Café and the Jewish Chabad House in Mumbai, was savage enough. Hundreds of innocents and some heroic combatants were slaughtered.  Horrendous as this was, it was intended to be a lot worse.

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. Israel is able to do it better than most, because the Jewish nation, works together.

The UPA Government, when 26/11 happened, was beholden to, and dependent on, its minority vote bank as usual, and felt it was impolitic to vigorously pursue Islamic terrorism in this country. It refused to distinguish between the terrorist and our millions of patriotic citizens who happen to be Muslim. It may be out of power now, but this attitude has not changed at all. 

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 more easy to fund and infiltrate.

Congress meanwhile, reduced to 44 seats in the Opposition, still sees things differently.  It heckled the Defence Ministry when the Pakistani fishing boat, laden with explosives, recently 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, catering to large Muslim constituencies 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’.  

The ISI and the Pakistani military establishment have long known this, and exploit it. Pakistan infiltrates its agents across our borders; tortures, mutilates and beheads our soldiers. 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. Much more has been done in NDA II over just a few months to press the international community to condemn  global terrorism, than in the UPA’s decade past in power.

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.

Socialists, the ones these people back, plead lack of resources whenever cornered.  But they never care to reflect on why their politics never generates a decent income.

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 at all to their view, but a consequence of Army oppression!

Some charismatic ultra- Leftists, like acclaimed writer Arundhati Roy, would like us to let go of Indian held Kashmir altogether, and surrender to every demand of the Maoist  ‘Gandhians with guns’, to boot.

And in the epic war between the seductive Leftist dream of legislated and politically engineered ‘equality’, and the prosaic ‘elitistism’ of the Right’s emphasis on earning one’s place in the sun, there is surely much room for negotiation.

Even though India has clearly failed to deliver growth and equality through a lengthy pursuit of socialist policies, the Left, broadly speaking, is unrepentant. They portray the BJP/NDA as its opposite, and see its pursuit GDP growth as a form of ‘crony capitalism’, an immoral credo, designed to only further enrich the rich.  

On their part, the Leftists prefer extensive welfare, vast populism, paid for via deficit financing. They  are  blithely unconcerned about the possibility of such policies bankrupting the country, while still failing to lift people out of their misery.

But, when this then pauperised country,  was forced to undertake the first stage of economic reform, at World Bank dictation, it tasted high growth for the first time. This inadvertently created a sizeable middle class, today almost as numerically populous as the poor.

The hope of the Right leaning ‘Vikas’ brigade now hangs on the aspirations of this resurgent middle class, over 300 million strong.  It is a constituency that was almost non-existent in 1947, and smallish, even in 1991.

The present backlash comes from sections of the political leadership not yet convinced that Modi’s soft capitalism will ever give them their electoral space in the sun. To the socialist, poverty is good politics and prosperity may mean political suicide.

These worthies do not want to go forward to a prosperous post Deng-like era like China.  Instead, they want to go back to the future of their glory days, and never mind the consequences. Only the voter can set them right, but for that to happen, they have to see things for what they really are.

For: Swarajyamag.com

(1,502 words)

February 5, 2015

Gautam Mukherjee