Give Kashmir to Pakistan: Don’t insult Indian nation again & again

In 1930, Jawaharlal Nehru attacked Mahatma Gandhi and lamented: “This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but a whimper”. His grouse was that Gandhi had gone beyond the confines of the December 1929 Lahore Purna Swaraj resolution and accepted Lord Irwin’s “insistence on three ‘lynch-pins’ … Federation; Indian responsibility; reservations and safeguards.”

Gandhi, it bears recalling, took this U-turn at a time when the agitating people of the country had virtually brought the British Government to its knees because of the supreme sacrifices they were making for the national cause. Had Gandhi waited for a few more months, India would have attained complete political emancipation in 1930 itself.

But Gandhi had done the same in February 1922, when he unilaterally withdrew the pan-India and very largely participated in Non-cooperation Movement in the wake of the Chauri-Chaura (Gorakhpur) incident that led to the killing of 22 policemen within the police station. These policemen were responsible for opening fire on the unarmed crowd agitating before the police station.

Though Gandhi admitted that there had been “ample provocation” (caused by the uncalled for police barbarity), he withdrew the movement much to the chagrin of “almost all the prominent Congress leaders’, including Jawaharlal Nehru. He withdrew the movement on the ground that people had indulged in violence at Chauri-Chaura, at a time when independence was round the corner.

Remember, those involved in the Chauri-Chaura incident had nothing to do with the Non-cooperation Movement. They were, in the words of Leftist historian Sumit Sarkar, simply “picketing the local bazaar in a campaign directed both against liquor and high food prices” (Modern India, p. 224).

What this means is that there were leaders in pre-1947 days whose bungling instincts caused immense damage to the national cause from time to time, and who overtly and covertly helped the canny Britons play with utmost ease their nefarious games, protect and further promote their geo-political interests, and enrich the British economy at the cost of the suffering Indians.

History is repeating itself today, and in a manner which is highly frightening and even more harmful for India. The manner in which history is repeating itself indicates that India is in for another communal partition.

There are potent reasons to believe that the custodians of the Indian State are all out to hit the Indian nation below the belt in their desperate bid to appease the Americans and their other European friends, all working against India; Pakistan which has its evil eyes fixed on Jammu & Kashmir; and Kashmir-based rank communalists and separatists.

Keeping in mind the role played by the Indian political leadership which ruled the roost and harmed our paramount national interests by political and diplomatic blunders between 1947 and June 2009, it would be worthwhile to scrutinize the role being played by the present leadership since July 16, 2009. The past 18-odd months have revealed the utter political bankruptcy of the Indian political leadership which has bungled again and again on the political and diplomatic fronts, insulted the Indian nation again and again, and exhibited its chicken-heartedness in such a shameful manner that independent India has never before witnessed. The present ruling elite in New Delhi has been bringing a bad name to the country, thus sending signals across the world that India is a banana republic, that the Indian State is on sale, and that it can go to any extent to jeopardize the country’s sovereign interests.

One can refer to any number of instances to show that the present political leadership in the country has insulted and disgraced the Indian nation and pampered the anti-India and communal and separatist forces at regular intervals. A reference to just six such instances which have brought shame to Indians and undermined the status of India as an independent and sovereign state would be in order.

One: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Reza Gilani at Sharm-el-Sheikh in July 2009 and took a complete U-turn. He dumbfounded the Indian nation by accepting the Pakistani Prime Minister’s insistence on including a reference to “Indian involvement in the subversive activities in Baluchistan”. Not content with this, he took the Indian nation for a ride and overlooked the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks and resultant 195 deaths of innocent persons.  

Our Prime Minister happily joined hands with Yousuf Reza Gilani to equate terrorized, convulsed and bloodied India with Pakistan, epicenter of global terrorism, which has been consistently bleeding the Indian nation. He endorsed the Pakistani line and issued with his counterpart a joint-statement that de-linked the issue of terrorism from the issue of composite dialogue with Pakistan, thus suggesting that terrorism and dialogue could go on simultaneously. What he did and said at Sharm-el-Sheikh, which only disgraced the Indian nation and lowered its dignity in the eyes of the international community, was the negation of his earlier stated stand that India will engage in the composite dialogue process only if Pakistan satisfies India by bringing the perpetrators of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks to book and reining in all terrorist organizations based in Pakistan.

As expected, the Prime Minister’s Sharm-el-Sheikh fiasco, nay bungling, provoked a commotion in the country, with the bulk of the Congress leaders not finding any place to hide their faces. That the Prime Minister acted against Indian interests to please terrorist and fundamentalist Pakistan became more than evident when the then Foreign Secretary and current National Security Advisor Shiv Shankar Menon told Members of Parliament within the Parliament premises, immediately after his return from Sharm-el-Sheikh, that the Sharm-el-Sheikh statement was a badly drafted statement.

Such was the nature of public anger at the time that the Prime Minister was left with no other option but to tell Parliament that he stood by his earlier stand – talks with Pakistan only if it took definite action against the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks; only after Islamabad dismantled the terrorist-related infrastructure on Pakistani soil, including terrorist-producing factories, and stopped cross-border terrorism.

However, it needs to be noted that whatever Prime Minister said in Parliament was said under compulsion. He was not truly committed to what he said in the nation’s supreme law-making body. That he was uncommitted to what he said became clear from the developments that have since been unfolding on a daily-basis...

(To be continued …)