Afghanistan
United States of Elite versus Donald Trump : Sunni-Saudi-Anglo-Euro-Jihadi axis towards war.
Postulate One: European consumption levels could historically be only maintained by exploiting resources and productivity outside the self-defined territory of Europe (as in Roman expansion dependent on Egyptian grain and “barbarian” slave labour and fecundity).
Postulate Two: USA is an extension of western Europe as shaped in British state form revised under imagined and reconstructed Roman Republic with perceptions and constructions of both what is “European” and what is not – based on cumulative claims of history, both regional and global.
Postulate Three: Europe prioritizes consumption of its elite over ideology.
Most of what is happening now in the USA, in its politics, its legislative bodies, its government and state institutions – all the way to its attitudes towards and handling of or engagement with Islam, Middle East, and Asia can be deduced from the three postulates.
The Roman Republic generated several interesting phenomena that is rarely put in perspective when analyzing modern-day politics of the “western” world. The contest between the Plebs and the Patricians was a contest for power and say in state affairs between the increasingly self-aware Plebs (stemming from their co-option into the armies under people like Marius the uncle of Caesar in turn driven by elite hunger for land and slaves in the ever-expanding “periphery”) and the “Patri-cians” claiming descent from leading founding fathers of the historical Roman colony in Italy and who thereby had hogged the material and monetary benefits of the state formation exercise over the centuries. The Romans went through a phase of submission to non-Roman “rule” as well as “kingship” to finally overthrow “dynastic royalty” but evolving or recasting a new form of authoritarianism legitimized by representative bodies of people – closely followed in essence in the process of formation of USA.
All these are pretty well-known in standard history lessons: what is less discussed is how Roman institutions also institutionalized politico-financial corruption together with formation of well-organized coteries that infiltrated, and manipulated the Roman state institutions for combined business, political and power benefits – running almost as “organized crime”. In fact the model of “mafia” now popularized by Hollywood, typically labeled as originating in remnants of old Roman empire in the medieval such as “Sicily” or “Naples”, had their roots in the system of Roman knights/captains put in charge of various zones/districts of historical Rome. The blurred lines between ambitions of impoverished Patricians like that of the Caesars or the still wealthy Patrician Sulla, the stinking rich Crassus, or the yuppie military genius of a country bumpkin-from-peasant-north maternal uncle of Julius – Marius : they all formed a politically-financially-incestuous vicious competition of various groups of “mafia”.
Thus it is crucial to drop the Hollywood imagery of the “Godfather” and expand it in the reality of US politics on the more historical Roman “mafia” of the Republic and transition-to-empire phase of Rome. Such an “extended” mafia can be both “criminally organized” and “patriotic” or more “transnationally minded” just like the ancient Roman “mafia”.
The current phase can be thus understood as a phase of competition between two domestic groups of “mafia” (in the extended “Roman” sense I am using) where one side has grown close to the Sunni-Saudi interests over a cold-war, and inheritance of Indian Ocean geostrategic burdens of defunct British “political” empire (as in every mature and jaded “empire”, the formal fall of empire-state leaves behind a network of transnational finance and elite of ex-colonies connected firmly to an integrated shared “interests” with the ex-empires successor). This means this side shares the political and hence even religious biases of the Saudi Sunni axis which grew up under British imperial patronage as a supposed barrier to restrict the Ottoman grasp over the “passage” to India. This in turn led to panic scramble by then Russia and Europeans powers wary of the British to try and gain access to Indian Ocean aligning a veritable rivalry between “western” (France/UK) and “eastern” (Germany/Russia) Europe to push to the Persian Gulf. However the ancient contest for supremacy between the west and east of Euphrates that had once ended the Greeks and Cyrus’s house allowing Rome to grow, and similarly exhausted Byzantines and Parthians to allow Islamic jihad to flourish in the “frontier” no-mans land between the two sides – continued in the Arab versus Iran contest, and was used by the completely emasculated remnants of Arab tribes to reassert claims against the “east” and try to repeat their 7th century success using the British and French need to secure the Gulf.
Discovery of oil has gradually shifted the balance of power within the front of Sunni-Saudi-“western” axis, and WWII drew up an extended “frontier” of two hostile “fronts” running roughly North-East – South-West from Balkans through Syria-Iraq into Persian gulf.
The “western” Anglo fear of Russian breakthroughs in this sector combined with Arab jealousy of the more pre-Islamic nationhood retaining Iran with all consequent better human capital not destroyed as much as in Saudis under mullahcracy – drove the US attempt at wooing Communist China away from USSR, in return China extracting economic entry into global capitalist flow, and an attempt to ring-fence Iran and central-Asian routes from Russia down south by encouraging Islamism in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
However even if this strategy largely succeeded in weakening USSR and led to its overthrow, two problems had been created for US “mafia”: the immensely financially networked with US Saudi lobby’s growing influence among the “mafia” and China’s capture of the US consumer market using its totalitarian state economy and control over Chinese labour. After US had to necessarily engage in the mop-up operations consequent to fall of USSR and Sunni-Saudi lobby’s grasping the opportunity to expand its long-held jihadi ambitions to revive Caliphate style re-conquest of the Middle East, and beyond, parts of US mafia must have realized the growing threat of China’s economy.
However during the long cold-war era, Sunni-Saudi axis had been allowed to become politically entrenched in influencing US foreign policy and thus in the US state institutions and its political class as well as in the instruments of ideological hegemony of modern states – like the media, academics of “humanities”. The faction of US mafia that realizes the supreme importance of China as a threat to their interests (by disrupting the mafia’s finger in the global – “outside of territory” economic exploitation) was the force that allowed someone like Donal Trump to come through. Looking from this perspective, it becomes clear why he had to be “promoted” – they needed an “outsider” or “outcast” or deemed “dilettante” political actor, therefore less likely to have been compromised by the existing pro-Sunni-Saudi pro-China cliques.
That the majority of US state institutions are waging a virtual but desperate war to remove “Trump” from power is simply a manifestation of the failure of the “cold-war” legacy portion of the administration and ideological establishment to grasp the drive and perhaps even realpolitik “sense/pragmatism” of the anti-China “patriotic mafia” as the need of the hour for “US” interests just as overthrow of USSR was in then US interests.
So Trump is being driven to make superficial “compromises” while he is trying to protect the underlying agenda of cutting China down to size. However the pro-Sunni-Saudi US mafia does not want China to be cut down to size as both the Saudis and the Chinese favour each other as hedges for their respective geostrategic ambitions. Saudis do not really want Pakistan to be cut down to size as Pakistan is most helpful in delegating tasks of wahabization and radicalization that serves Saudi geo-strategic ambitions while China does not want Pakistan to be harmed as Pakistan provides a corridor to Indian ocean as well as a useful jihadi counter-balance to India whose territory and population the Chinese see as an obstacle to their own imperial ambitions.
So even if Trump announces a troop increase in Afghanistan, the reality of the situation will simply help Saudi strategy for the zone. The Sunni jihadi assets were first tested on Syria – seen as a rival Shiite state, and on Iraq – but it quickly spiraled out of control revealing the extent of jihadism that Saudis have unleashed which even they can no longer fully control. Russian backing stalled overthrow of the Syrian regime, so that means the “western/European” and Saudi-Sunni jihadi assets need to be “saved” and protected by the pro-Saudi-mafia/European elite from total destruction so they can be unleashed against the real intended targets – Iran and Russia. This means there will be an attempt to carve out a “sovereign” protectorate style enclave for those dubbed “free Syrian army” on the eastern parts of Syria, thereby giving them breathing space and regrouping recouping as well as a Sunni buffer which in turn faces a Kurdi enclave on the east – thereby balancing each other and buffering each other. However the jihadis will be most effective in the greater anonymity of northern Afghanistan and even frontiers of Pakistan to be effective against Iran and Russia. Hence the bulk of the ISIS jihadis will be “helped” by “west” and Saudi-Sunni lobby to “escape” to northern Afghanistan.
US boots on the ground , in the hands of local networks of politics remaining from British imperial days – will effectively be a force that facilitates – willingly or unwillingly – the fall of the “north” to jihadis, while a “progressive” regime will gradually shrink to the south and east of the country around the big cities in the south even while under US “protection”.
The Saudi-Sunni penetration of the US state implies that Trumps “threat” to Pakistan will in effect have little impact. The Sunni-Saudi lobby has slightly different geo-political ambitions compared to what even the pro-Saudi lobby thinks it has. The Sunnis want a repeat of their seventh century jihadi performance – they want one sweep of continuous jihadi territory from Arabia through India into Indonesia in the east, and all the way to Gibraltar in North and Sub-Saharan Africa.
For myself, I see benefit in the expansion of Sunni jihad across Afghanistan and Pakistan and towards India. Jihad destroys pre-existing nationalisms – even the artificial and opportunistically foisted ones like that of Pakistan. It will also weaken the part of the modern Indian state that is ideologically and for other reasons, similar to the pro-Saudi lobby within US “mafia” and which can use state coercive resources to protect the Islamist interests against the non-Muslim majority of the country. Any genuine resistance to jihad can only come from the vast non-Muslim populations of India but only when their state power actively is no longer able to protect the Islamic infrastructure and allows new state forces to come up that can resist and roll back jihadis back to where it started – in the deserts of Saudis. Jihadis expanding in north Pakistan and Afghanistan will also finally roll-back Chinese presence and effectiveness in this zone.
So the future is bleak and bright.
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Looking back on “Assadfall” and the future of Middle East
About six years ago, when the Syrian “civil war” started off, I had already been used to frequently writing and debating on an online forum. There was a poster apparently from India, but claiming intimate knowledge of the Gulf states and having access to “higher levels” of policy-making and decision makers in both Gulf Saudi allied regimes and in India. He often gave out timelines for fall of Assad, overthrow of the Syrian regime, or even sometimes how Saudi forces were preparing for the final assault that will annihilate Syrian government, and occasionally the imminent victorious or successful battle plans of Israel, USA and others against Assad. Sometimes it was about how in the following weeks the Russians were going to abandon Assad to his fate.
I had already clashed with him on his whitewashing of the history of Palestine in favour of Islamic occupation of the Levant following Byzantine withdrawal, or the legitimacy of the claims of the Jews on their current lands (leading to the series I wrote on this blog on Palestine and Islamo-Judaic relations). So when he declared that Assad was going to “fall” in the “next two weeks”, I thought I would have some fun by contradicting him on his “sure” predictions on Syria, (this led me to coin the term “Assadfall” – something that is promised to happen the next day or next week but never happens even in years) and proposed,
(1) If Assad could hold onto the narrow ridge highland that separated coasts from the eastern trough before the vast eastern plateau he was not going to fall. Not in two weeks. Not in two years.
(2) Syria was going to be partitioned one way or the other and the Kurds were going to get their independent homeland.
(3) Russia was not going to abandon Assad, and Israel was not going to move against Syria.
I was of course laughed at just like the time when I had predicted that the US forces will be withdrawing from Afghanistan, that the British forces would make no headway against the Taleban, and that the Taleban were going to re-emerge as the main power in Afghanistan. My reasons for predicting the resurgence of the Taleban is perhaps material for another post, so skipping it now.
Returning to this six-year old issue, I can see that my reasons for predicting the outcome of the Syrian adventure by Sunni-Saudi-West have not really changed. But the fallout needs to be fleshed out in further predictions. So what will be the major trends for the future for the region?
(a) I find that there is a remarkable lack of awareness of the historical reality of the Kurds among western audiences and perhaps even so-called think-tanks. The Kurds, after Islamization, were at the vanguard of Islamic expansionism, with the most famous example perhaps being the forces around Salahuddin the expeller of crusaders. Kurdis were also implicated as the main forces used by the Ottomans to “manage” the Armenians which later came to be seen by non-Turkish scholarship as the Armenian genocide. Ironically, it was this cooperation with Ottoman regimes that helped coalesce military strength around family, clan and regional lines among the Kurds. The Kurds were not free of Islamist theological-political admixture with leadership held within pseudo-dynastic frameworks.
(b) With the break up of the Ottoman empire, this Kurdi nucleus of state formation around charismatic and pseudo-dynastic clan leadership in one particular remote terrain among all the regions inhabited by the Kurdis, began to pursue political independence more vigorously. Like with Saudis, western powers toyed with but dashed their hopes of political sovereignty. But Ottoman failure also led to soul-searching by new generation of Middle East’s muslims, and one section of Kurdis, like all over both Arabs and non-Arab population in the zone, began to explore “Left” approach. This tendency eventually led to the modern PKK.
(c) The current Kurdi assertion is split between the “Leftists” in PKK and its armed wings, which have fought alongside the more “mainstream” Peshmarga, the forces around the “clan”. The Peshmarga will compromise on independent state-formation as its leadership will be more interested in keeping their personal control over Kurds, which might be less assured at current stages if the dissenting factions come into a sovereign state where other national governments cannot be tasked with reducing this opposition.
(d) Given that Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and even Iran would not like an independent Kurdi nation being carved out as it would bite into each of their current territories, at this stage, its Turkey which stands to lose most and the other countries involved may concede a little just so that the major portion of the new Kurdi territory is taken out of Turkey.
(e) Since the forces around Peshmarga are likely to be softer on independent state formation, and the balance of forces would like to see Turkey being cut down a bit, it’s the PKK led faction and its forces which are likely to gain increasing political support from within Kurdi populations, and they will gradually replace the political predominance of the current clan based framework that Kurdis have.
(f) Turkey, Saudis and Qataris or Kuwaitis, who most likely supplied and deemed the ISIS as deniable assets of an army of expansion, will seek to carve out a territory for the ISIS assets. This Turkey, European powers, are going to try to do by overtly representing it as an autonomous or independent region of “Sunni” “moderate rebels” just south of Turkish borders. In fact this could also be a part of a deal in which both Kurdis and ISIS re-packaged as “moderate rebels” have each their adjacent “independent states”. Turkey may accept this as a check against Kurdis and as temporary compromise to protect its jihadi assets. Saudi money might also work behind the scenes in western corridors of power to create pressure to accept this model.
However in the long run, this will just be an interim redrawing of Middle Easts borders. The main objective of Europe, and Saudis will be to transfer the jihadi assets developed in the plains of Iraq and Syria into two directions – east and north against Russia and Iran, and further east towards Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. We may already see the beginnings of this policy in increased activities of claimed ISIS operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, even within that, its India’s north that is the target.
Enticing them into India is the thing to do. As I have been projecting for years, any such jihadi incursion will create the conditions for eventual erasure of Islam and jihadism.
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Counter Thoughts -2: Pakistan should be dissolved as a nation and absorbed into India.
[First written almost 4 years ago: updated!]
How many nations of our times are based purely on a religion and recognized by other nations as independent nations? Only two – the Vatican City and Pakistan. Ironically they share in common some traits. Both have helped in the unravelling of the USSR but not of Communism – for it still survives behind the People’s Republic of China and is still working towards global dominance. In spite of the UK and West’s blatant support for Pakistani sadism on both Afghans and Indians, for its supposed role in overthrow of USSR – Pakistan is desperately grabbing the Chinese communist hands in gratitude for having benefited from Chinese nuclear proliferation. Pakistan showed that gratitude by dealing in stolen or robbed property – so typical of Islamism, by gifting China territory Pakistan received from its British facilitated deceptive raid mounted on Indian territories in 1948.
Both the Vatican and Pakistan have been courted by the USA in its Cold War struggles. Neither has disappointed. Both exert influence on the global politics disproportionate to their actual size, economy, military capabilities, and the capacity to contribute in any meaningful way towards a modern, knowledge based, technological and information society. Both manage to do so by manipulating their historical images as projections into the future.
But there the similarities end. The Vatican’s leadership has made amends to its historical victims, and has shown its flexibility and readiness to change with the times. It has steadfastly refused to underwrite radicalism of the theological variety [the severe castigation of the Liberation Theology for example]. This may change in the future. But the leadership of the Vatican have proved themselves consummate statesmen in the concessions and compromises that they have made while never abandoning the fundamental objective of total global ideological domination. This is an objective that would have been a crime if not from the “one and only true message”, for any other “religion” in the times when the Church ruled supreme. But now in the days of “total religious tolerance”, there is nothing wrong in having a declared agenda of “harvesting all souls” and poaching on the following of looked-down-upon religious cultures. In fact, legal and state coercive machinery in liberal states can be used to guarantee protection of any proselytizer – even someone swearing by texts that recommend putting the unrepentant unbeliever to the sword, while raising no questions as to the right of the followers of those very same religions – where they are a majority – to deny exactly those very same rights to non-co-religionsists. How tolerant Christianity can be with regards to cohabiting with Islamists, and vice versa – especially where Christians have sufficient numerical strength – was and is being shown in Sudan. But no great talk is being thrown about in the liberal western media about what is going on in Sudan and why.
Where Pakistan differs is not in its protection of organizations claiming the right to practice “Dawa” or spreading of the Islamist beliefs -in parallel to Christianist demands for the right to badmouth non-Christian religions and beliefs and “spread the light” – by any and all means possible, and where even “charity” as concrete monetary benefits is kosher in a process of buying religious allegiance that in the corporate world would be condemned as criminal bribing – but in its total lack of statesmanship. Unlike the Vatican, the Pakistani leadership never apologizes to the victims of its Islamists, never acknowledges that it has nurtured Jihadis in its madrassahs, never concedes to modernization in education and social practices, never really allows any land reforms or dismantling of feudal exploitation in its backyard.
Pakistan is basically an anachronism, a nation whose only foundational claim for identity is a religion – in a historical period where the world is leaving behind, exclusive and historical claim based religions. Moreover, that religion is not even unique to the country – it is shared by a host of other nations, some of whom have louder and more well established claims of being the centre for that religion. So Pakistan is based on a type of ideology increasingly irrelevant globally as national foundation, and moreover on an ideology based identity shared with other “nations” – and therefore has no real claims of distinction from other nations. It cannot look at history and culture, for in spite of the best sadistic efforts of generations of “mullahs” – elements of pre-Islamic cultures lie firmly interwoven in the national fabric, and those elements are shared by its imagined nemesis – India. In fact the pre-Islamic cultural element proved so strong that a part of it broke away in reaction in 1971 as Bangladesh.
So now Pakistan finds itself in a terrible dilemma. To strengthen and give uniqueness to its national foundation, it has to become more Islamic than “others”. Becoming more Islamic means more and more unquestioning obedience to a strict and literal interpretation of the core texts. That in turns means more Jihad with violent means which accelerates the competition between the ruling feudal elite, the army, the mullahs, the commons, the militants – to become “purer” than the others. That means an almost perpetual state of national Jihad. Purer Islam can only be maintained by preventing modernization – in education, productivity, technology and above all the questing mindset. Which means Pakistan will become more and more dependent on largesse from interested external sources and be a drain on the global economy as the sources would spread the cost around.
So the West and the global community should perhaps start thinking of dissolving the entity called Pakistan. Here are the brief reasons :
(1) Dissolving Pakistan saves the West (and therefore the world economy )a huge amount of money and resources needed to keep the state afloat, and a total drain, because none of that capital goes into productive capacities.
(2) Even though the Chinese are now playing second fiddle to the West, it is uncannily similar to the Ribbentrop-Molotov handshake where both sides appear to be buying time. Eventually, Russia and China could come together with Iran (or whatever is left of it even if a so-called revolutionary liberalization and democratization takes place there under non-theologians) to which the CAR will lean. As long as Pakistan remains an independent entity, it can play the prostitute and threaten to kiss the higher bidder or the one more willing to pay. That is both a security risk and a potential disaster, if everything given to Pakistan lands up in Russian, Iranian or Chinese hands and the West’s presence is virtually terminated in the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Dissolving Pakistan takes away this worry.
(3) Dissolving Pakistan and putting up new independent states in its place actually creates new multiple centres where Jihad can be protected and nurtured. One Pakistan becomes many and the western problem multiplies. One of the best bets is to allow India to absorb the populations and the territories. India is a growing economy which can absorb the costs. It has the capability and the will to manage multicultural groups and religious animosities. Culturally Indians of the western part of the country will be closer to the Pakistanis across the border [Punjab for example shares the language across the border in spite of the state sponsorship of Urdu] compared to any other external ethnicity or country. Moreover the costs of developing infrastructure and the economy or carrying out necessary social reforms will be borne on Indian shoulders and not on the west.
(4) As the price for non-intervention in the absorption, the West could extract concessions from India that it will have assured access and facilities to reach the CAR through channels and routes maintained and developed through Pakistani territories connecting the Karakorum Highway and other CAR approach routes.
(5) The Taliban lose their foster home, and are buffered off from the crucial supply routes of Karakorums and the Arabian Sea. The so-called Kashmir problem vanishes as the Pakistani military and ISI mechanism to foment terrorists inside India vanishes. So one of the greatest excuses for maintaining Jihad from the Pakistani side, vanishes. With dissolution of Pakistan, one of the persistent Pakistani revivalist jihad trends that periodically and insistently reappears in Bangladesh, gets cut from its roots – leaving only Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and elements from Malaysia as remnant patrons.
(6) India can and should promise land reforms, and redistribution of concentrated big-landholding from Pakistan’s obnoxious feudal lords and the military upper echelons who are either created landlords as rewards or come from the feudal network itself – to landless and marginal farmers of Pakistan. These are the same people who are exploited ruthlessly, often sexually and through slavery, by the Pakistani elite in an obvious extension of the worst aspects of casteism, but on which no Christian or western liberal intelligentsia will comment upon as it shows Islam in a bad-light compared to eminently much more bashable “Hindu”.
If it is any consolation, MacArthur broke the Japanese feudal class’s back to an extent through land-reforms, in post war Japan. Moreover all the off-shore money laundering units that UK maintains for complete deniability from its colonial days can still harness and will definitely attract Pakistani Islamist and feudal military elite’s looted capital for parking on the prospect of imminent fall before Indian troops, and to play with for financial speculative profits and bonuses by the “city” bosses. That in itself should convince the UK and its ally across the pond, to allow the “fall” to happen.
India, because of linguistic and unique cultural history, will remain firmly in western and specifically the Anglo-Saxon or Atlanticist orbit for generations to come. There are sufficient fissures in the Indian ruling class for the west to exploit and protect western interests.
It is worth a try – at least the largest source for generating terror of the Jihadi and allied kind (through international crime and other non-religious or ethnic militancy) will be effectively liquidated. At one stroke West no longer has to face Islamist terror, pay for upkeep of Jihad, and instead can profit from a growing economy which bears all the costs, together with an alternate route to get closer to tantalizing natural resources to be looted in Central Asia and keep a nervous eye to the age-old threat – Russia! After all, the greatest threats come from those shared common ideological roots, and who are well-versed as brothers from the same family school in the tactics of robber imperialism that originated in “greater” Europe!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )CounterThoughts-1 : India’s failure in Bangladesh is a failure to understand Islam.
It is almost six years since I started writing on this blog. As with most of my intellectual forays, it was to search for root causes to phenomena on which people seem to be talking from belief, bias, preconception and conscious or subconscious agenda, and on which I seemed to find no answers of my own yet.
Six years later, and a myriad interactions with ideological friends and foes or the merely non-committed, desperately trying to appear neutral middle-roaders, I feel that the task is not only to understand but also to try and share what I have felt to be the way forward while trying to understand.
However, I should stress that I do not support the idea of final answers and incontrovertible truths. More of that later, and I will try to explain why I think so. I am not demanding or claiming that others should think like me, or that what I say or think is important. But it is a deep seated, slowly maturing urge over the years to think aloud, to borrow the cliché. What do I expect out of it? A myriad small sparks, not the incinerating brilliance of a nuclear device, but the small, fragile, light of the primitive oil lamps, or the hopeful glowing embers of the evening fires of cooking of the first human settlements.
I am starting off this sequence with a topic that appears to hog the Indian subcontinental discourse for some time (apart from supposed uniqueness of Indian propensity to rape, or supposed waiting global disaster of a Modi led “saffron” resurgence, or the glowing future of a post NATO Afghanistan, and the continuously improving civilizational status of Pakistan) – namely, the recent elections in Bangladesh.
My thoughts on Bangladesh and its society has been laid out on this blog before. So I will only briefly touch and summarize.
Bangladesh was formed in 1971 as a result of an intra-elite factional contest for power over the Islamist movement that had managed in 1947 to use tactical violence, British covert support, and Delhi-Uttar-Pradesh-Gujarat based axis of the Indian Congress’s fear of the more populous two ends of the Gangetic plains – Punjab and Bengal’s long tradition of independent counter-Delhi political undercurrent.
For the Islamist, they needed a base in which they could nurture jihad and hopefully accumulate the resources for a future “final solution” of getting rid of all Kaffir on the subcontinent, and as many mullahs openly express – more openly in Taliban land fertilized by decades of Saudi funding and tacit support from the UK and the USA through their islamist allies in power in Pakistan. Pakistan was a good starting point for their agenda, as they felt that the liberalizing, modernizing, educating world of the Indian Hindu would eventually open up Islamic society beyond mullah sadistic control.
For the British, smarting under the loss of their global dominance to the Americans, Pakistan would be boots on the ground for British interests. Such interests would include long term hope of reviving sole control over Indian Ocean ring, use American fear of Soviet expansion to simultaneously get the USA involved in regional wars of attrition so over the that long term Americans would be weakened and hated sufficiently to leave the field open again for the British, while at the same time prevent modernization, liberalization and resurgence of cultural identities that the British had hated out of racial, religious and perhaps a bit of underlying twisted obsession with the darker side of human nature. One of the foremost targets of British hatred was anything to do with the “Hindu”. It was the “Hindu” they saw as the elusive system which sourced resistance to imperialist subjugation where as the supposedly more virulent and “martial” Islam quickly turned bootlickers. For the British – the Congress was “Hindu”, “Sanskrit” was Hindu, Hindu temple and architecture was ugly compared to the seductive feminine curves of the “domes” of Islam, Hindu texts, knowledge base and culture represented the apotheosis of all that was supposedly, pure, Christian and “white”. The rump state of India that was left after 1947, was still “Hindu” and the galling reminder that the Hindu failed to “convert” to submission to British claims of supremacy. Thus Pakistan, in its western and eastern ends would remain the best chance to gall India into the future, and be hopefully bases of jihadism if not outright British comeback – that will continue to bleed “Hindu” India. At least that was perhaps the hope anyway.
Where the British failed was their belief in their own propaganda, invented out of a necessity to play intra-Islam factionalism to subdue the Ottomans by raising the Wahabi-Saud jihad – that somehow intra-Islamic factional fight for dominance represented the non-monolithic nature of Islam. Islam being actually a cover for blatant imperialism, every regional power within a broader spectrum of Islamic following, will try to become the centre of that imperialist claim – so that they can then use the religious imperialist authority enshrined within Islam – to mobilize the total resources of global reach of Islam for their own individual regional power centre benefit. This has been the history of the Islamic politics right from its inception.
Contrary to western misrepresentation, this internal drive to become the supreme imperialist claiming the loyalty and support of all Muslims behind their power hunger, leading to inter-regional fights, does not represent any actual deviation from the core genocidic, culture erasing, enslaving agenda of Islam – where it concerns the as yet non-Muslim.
Now to understand Bangladeshi politics, this above understanding is crucial. The Awami League split from the Muslim League of Jinnah, not out of secular or non-Islamist core drives – but as power seeking movement that wanted the fruits of the partition of 1947, the control over the land and in more mundane terms, the wealth, property and women of the Hindu’s of eastern Pakistan and dominance over the whole of Pakistani state structure. The greater contiguity and inter-mingling of non-Muslim motifs and memes and the relatively later entry of Islam into the area historically, compared to the western end of India, implied a difficult task ahead for “eastern” Islamists. There were spontaneous popular movements influenced by the remnant secular, liberal and modernizing influences of pre-Partition Hindu-presence [the relative strengths were roughly 45/50-55/50 at the end of a disputed and allegedly biased-in-favour-of-the-Muslim in the last census before Partition], which was seized upon shrewdly and tactically by the Awami League leadership under Mujibur Rehman. But the fact is often forgotten that Mujibur started his political life as a student activist for the Muslim League in Calcutta, under patronage of Suhrawardy – the architect of government supervised and protected pogrom on Calcutta Hindus that led to the notorious pre-Partition massacres.
Independence for Bangladesh was therefore just a manifestation of the intra-Islamic fight within Islamic imperialism for monopoly of the imperialist claim, it no way represents any compromise at any fundamental level with the commitment to jihadist clearing of non-Muslim cultures, seizing their property and resources and enslaving their women. It would be natural to expect that after the formal separation of power and independence for Bangladesh was obtained by necessary tactical pretension by future leadership of Bangladesh to get Indian and global support – that the core of this political movement would quickly reassert its fundamental drive by getting rid of all symbols and structures that they saw as being tainted by the need to compromise even tactically to “Hindus” or non-muslim sympathetic powers. Mujibur was the most blatant symbol of this and therefore he had to be made an example of. Note that elements of the core of Awami League and the military which had apparently sided with the “liberation movement” collaborated in the bloodshed.
Since, Bangladesh has consistently seen expulsion and genocide of remnant Hindus, looting of their property, rape and abduction and forced conversion of their women. Islamic atrocities are also typical in the deliberate psychological cruelty or sado-masochistic practices involved – for example it is not enough to simply kill the kaffir, but make it horrific by torture of the most inventive imagination, not only rape but rape before a father or a husband and forcing them to watch – intended to not only cause psychological trauma, but also to burn into the helpless men their emasculation and ineffectiveness. This is an extremely sophisticated grasp over the psychology of coercion, ans shows that the mullah is a highly trained and conditioned psychological warrior who has almost no sense of guilt or empathy where it concerns unleashing the more twisted form of sado-masochistic tendencies in the human.
The recent elections, showing widespread torture, rape, genocide of Hindus as an aftermath, in which elements of both the supposedly winning “secular” Awami League, as well as the BNP and Jamaat combination participated – shows that nothing really has changed from the early days of Islam in that zone. Mymensingh Gitika, a collection of medieval folk tales in verse forms from a region in Bangladesh – tells the story of a Hindu housewife being forced to pleasure a Qazi. Whether a faction loses or wins, be it Awami League or BNP or Jamaat – Islamists would go out to rape Hindu women, torch their houses, and loot their belongings, be it to celebrate a win , or to grieve over a loss.
Bangladeshi core thinking is reflected in the blatant statement of academics of Jehangirnagar university (a deliberate naming done to emphasize the Mughal association, from the Mughal name given to the then town, over the more ancient Dhaka-Vikramanipur – having therefore Hindu connotations) aspiring for an unbroken new Mughalistan carved out of Northern India stretching from Punjab and Pakistan over the Gangetic Valley all he way to Bangladesh and hopefully even what is now North-Eastern India. Academics and “intelligentsia” of Bangladesh, openly discuss on media and TV shows, the desirability of destabilizing the North-East India so that eventually it gets detached from India and become ripe for Bangladeshi and “Islamic” expansion.
It is in the interest of the core drivers of Bangladeshi society – to preserve elements of Islamist jihadism. Over the years, Saudi and UK based funding sources have developed an extensive network of madrasshas and other institutional means of preaching the Arabic, Sunni-Wahabi views, and the result has been the increasing mass-presence of younger people in extremism, and obvious support enjoyed by the organizations like Hifazat whose members have played an increasingly visibly public as well as militant role.
Indira Gandhi scored a tactical brilliance in 1971, but a strategic blunder when she helped an independent Bangladesh to form. This independent nation immediately showed its fangs of islamism, has continued to expel Hindus, abduct rape and enslave Hindu women, and welcomed all possible transnational anti-India and anti-Hindu forces. As and when Pakistan falls, this nation will provide an alternative base for jihadis to retsart their movement.
I know that many have disagreed with me on this, but I still think, that in 1971, India should have raised the stakes by tantalizing the “west” with supporting Bangladeshi independence, but prepared to compromise if allowed to conquer and re-incorporate the northern “Pakistani occupied Kashmir”, hold on to the thin corridor to Rawalpindi up to the hills of the Swat, and extract a land corridor through Chittagong in the east to the sea. Impose demilitarization of east Pakistan on the formal logic of ensuring that Bengalis were not going to be subjected to Pakistani military atrocities, and guarantee autonomy within Pakistan. End of all manipulations by China, USA and the UK and their support for the violently sadistic societies and mullahs of jihad in both ends of Pakistan. The Indian naval presence on both sides of the mouth of the delta and demilitarization would ensure the prevention of Pakistani military presence for ever to repeat the type sex-alavery and torture camps that they ran in 1971, and end of Chinese imperialist expansion schemes and their consequent inputs in genocide on subcontinental soil. End of Karakorum highway being lucrative for geo-political sadism and an alternative and peaceful land network to central Asia, connecting to India the more liberalizable northern Afghanistan, Central Asian Republics bypassing the Pakistani/Gulf/Saudi proximity and mullahfied jihadi societies of Southern Afghanistan and starving them of the economic flow that they now hog and use to support jihad.
It sounds too cynical, too “reverse-imperialist”, “safffron-revivalist”? We have seen most of the previous liberalizing conquests. They have only enhanced the blatantly cynical, racist, and sadistic existing imperialistic implementations of the Abrahamic cults. Why not a counter offensive that has proven its secular, liberal and modernizing credentials?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )How Islam came to India and why now it needs to go from India -14 : removal of capital from the Indian economy under Islam
[authors note : posting on the theme that started the blog, after a long time. This item in the original series was drafted a couple of years go. But I realized that this portion may take up several blog-size posts, rather than one. Workload is heavy so – this sequence might come hence irregularly, but I am serious about taking up laying out the economic consequence of Islamic dominance on India. So please be patient.]
Removal of capital from the Indian economy by Muslims took place directly under three major forms (1) repeated invasions amounting or not amounting to permanent acquisition of territory with specific removal of capital in kind in the form of looted bullion and other valuables, as well as removal of human capital in the form of skilled and unskilled labour, and the basic reproductive unit for human labour, women, all as enslaved and exported commodity out of India, (2) extraction of capital by settled Muslim elite from the Indian economy for hoarding, and funding luxuries originating outside of India meant for pure consumption with no reinvestment or economic input into the local market (3) subsidizing religious activities primarily benefiting foreign Muslim countries and economies (4) Islam’s essential economic understanding amounting to only the desert-economy of Arabia and a complete failure to understand more sophisticated economies as reflected in the Muslim’s disastrous state interventions in the Indian market – also removed capital by impeding creation of value and growth and ultimately consumption and destroying already accumulated capital.
The indirect removal of capital was mainly under five forms (1) ruining and utterly destituting the basic producers of the economy, and extracting almost all surplus for personal consumption thereby preventing reinvestment and ultimately reducing total capital (2) continued and vastly increasing expenditure on military hardware and “software” such as horses imported from outside of India (3) destroying the non-Muslim intellectual classes and pre-Islamic centres of education that had promoted a wide variety of research into science and technology and substituting this by theological seminaries run by fundamentalist Muslim clergy usually imported from Islamic heartland in the middle east and whose qualifications usually did not rise beyond a strict Wahabi or Salafi interpretation of the Islamic religious texts learned by rote (4) institutionalization of endemic corruption and system losses that increased the cost of capital, and thereby its ultimate devaluation (5) Sadistic and violent Islamic military religious policy aimed at subjugation of the non-Muslim populations ultimately forcing productive social units off the land and the economy into forests or rugged badlands from where they either carried out military struggles [raising the cost of administration and expending capital on maintaining ever-increasing armed forces on the part of the Islamic administration] or engage in low-surplus marginal productions and economies.
removal of material capital through repeated invasions
Accurate estimates of capital removed by Islamic invaders are very difficult to arrive at, mainly because of lack “undisputed records” of “looting” and amounts. Most surviving records of looting and shipping of loot back to the respective power centres of the raiding armies, are naturally, from side of the raiding armies themselves or from subsequent chroniclers who draw upon or claim to draw upon earlier, relevant, and contemporary Islamic sources. As in the case all over the world, although historians try to shout a lot about absence of records of “trauma” on the part of the victims, who are not necessarily known to be illiterate, there is a persistent pattern of lack of such records, and we consistently find such records only from the “winners”. Logically thinking, such a situation is most natural to expect – a “traumatized” society is most unlikely to find time and resources to devote to keeping records “reliable” enough for modern professional historians with their highly selective and opportunistic use of logic in favour of hidden or sometimes not so hidden political agenda or political/academic patronage from interested regimes. Such a society is more likely to be obsessed about survival.
If we use modern, more closely observed from various sources, “history” of invasions by hostile regimes into an area, especially invasions that are also associated strongly with a particular hegemonistic ideology – we see certain persistent patterns – (1) specifically targeting the intellectuals [and try and eliminate them physically altogether] of the invaded society (2) destroy or suppress circulation of records, books, and other archival material of the invaded society (3) disrupt communication by actively discouraging native languages and imposing the languages preferred by the invaders (4) removal of capital resources from the invaded society (5) almost always a systematic programme of ethnic cleansing through genocide, a state sponsored regime of rape or enforced prostitution of the women of the invaded society – [which for very obvious physical reasons, targets more the women of the elite of the invaded society, and a section more likely to be a second line of repository of cultural heritage, or knowledge] thereby achieving two invader objectives in one stroke – removal of reproductive resources from the invaded society and increasing reproductive resources of the invader. This is what happened under the Nazis, and under units of the Red Army as retribution for the activities of the Nazis when they overran Germany in the final phases of WWII, under the Imperial Japanese army in South East Asia, Korea and China [there are indications that Bose’s INA had come to an agreement with the Japanese Army command that such activities will not be carried out in their joint march towards the Indian border, and a recent interview on the Delhi based news channel NDTV reported eye-witness accounts from a Naga dignitary of the period – that in spite of what the British administration had tried to say, the Japanese occupation forces never “used” Naga women the way the British officers were habitually prone to do], and then by US army units stationed in Japan after the capitulation of the latter, with similar patterns repeated in the wars between the African nations and regional-ethnic conflicts, in the persistent accusations [disputed hotly by historians] of such practices by the Pakistani army in its various operations in the subcontinent, [the British army’s record in India during the Raj appear to be increasingly coming under the cloud in this regard].
If we extend the modern experience to the “historical” period, we can see, that it is consistent with records of the Roman empire, or the Persian, Parthian, Egyptian, Chinese, empires. Historians appear to have no problems in accepting the claims of the Spanish or the Portuguese about the Latin Americas, even though hardly anything survives that can hold up to historian’s claimed level of reliability from the side of the “victims”. Similarly, hardly anything survives of records of trauma of the various Italian groups subjugated by the Romans, not all of whom were illiterates (e.g. Etruscans), or of the various Germanic and Celtic tribes of Europe, but historians appear to have no problems with the Roman records of claims of ethnic cleansing, torture, destruction, looting or organized rape and enslavement. There are hardly any historian voices trying to say that the records of repression on the Jews as claimed in Roman texts by Roman authors were propaganda, since nothing much exists from contemporary Jewish sources [ the most famous one, that by Josephus, can also become suspect as he was being patronized by the Romans at the time of his wrtings – and he is not very sympathetic to the Jewish cause either]. Historians even quote figures of dead, slaughtered, raped, straight from the Roman texts.
The only exception in this general pattern of historians’ acceptance of records of repression by an invading regime is that applied to Islamic armies into the Indian subcontinent, where all their records of repression are demanded to be treated as false and propaganda for glorification.
We will start with trying to get an idea of the amounts involved in the loot by the Islamic armies removed from India.
Muhammad bin Qasim [C.E 711-713 – the first Islamic record of a relatively successful invasion] Besides the treasure collected from the various forts of the Sindhi King, worship rights of Hindus were allowed only in exchange of pilgrim tax, jiziyah and other similar cesses. The campaign expenses came to 60 thousand silver dirhams and Hajjaj paid to the Caliph 120 thousand dirhams. In Muhammad bin Qasim’s administration of the conquered territories the principal sources of revenue were the jiziyah and the land-tax. The Chachnama speaks of other taxes levied upon the cultivators such as the baj and ushari. The collection of jiziyah was considered a political as well as a religious duty, and was always exacted “with vigour and punctuality, and frequently with insult”. The native population had to feed every Muslim traveller for three days and nights and had to submit to many other humiliations which are mentioned by Muslim historians.
Multan (Punjab) “…He then crossed the Biyas, and went towards Multan… Muhammad destroyed the water-course; upon which the inhabitants, oppressed with thirst, surrendered at discretion. He massacred the men capable of bearing arms, but the children were taken captive, as well as the ministers of the temple, to the number of six thousand. The Muslamans found there much gold in a chamber ten cubits long by eight broad, and there was an aperture above, through which the gold was poured into the chamber…” (Futuhul-Buldan of Ahmad bin Yahya bin Jabir, aka al-Biladuri).
Multan (Punjab) “Then all the great and principal inhabitants of the city assembled together, and silver to the weight of sixty thousand dirams was distributed and every horseman got a share of four hundred dirams weight. After this, Muhammad Qasim said that some plan should be devised for realizing the money to be sent to the Khalifa. He was pondering over this, when suddenly a Brahman came and said, ‘Heathenism is now at an end, the temples are thrown down, the world has received the light of Islam, and mosques are built instead of idol temples. I have heard from the elders of Multan that in ancient times there was a chief in this city whose name was Jibawin, and who was a descendant of the Rai of Kashmir. He was a Brahman and a monk, he strictly followed his religion, and always occupied his time in worshipping idols. When his treasures exceeded all limits and computation, he made a reservoir on the eastern side of Multan, which was hundred yards square. In the middle of it he built a temple fifty yards square, and he made a chamber in which he concealed forty copper jars each of which was filled with African gold dust. A treasure of three hundred and thirty mans of gold was buried there. Over it there is an idol made of red gold, and trees are planted round the reservoir.’ It is related by historians, on the authority of ‘Ali bin Muhammad who had heard it from Abu Muhammad Hindui that Muhammad Qasim arose and with his counsellors, guards and attendants, went to the temple. He saw there an idol made of gold, and its two eye were bright red rubies……Muhammad Qasim ordered the idol to be taken up. Two hundred and thirty mans of gold were obtained, and forty jars filled with gold dust… This gold and the image were brought to treasury together with the gems and pearls and treasures which were obtained from the plunder of Multan.” (Chachnama)
Yaqub bin Laith (CE 870-871) was a highway robber who succeeded in seizing Khurasan from the Tahirid governors of the Abbasid Caliphate and founded the short-lived Saffarid dynasty.
Balkh and Kabul (Afghanistan) “He first took Bamian, which he probably reached by way of Herat, and then marched on Balkh where he ruined (the temple) Naushad. On his way back from Balkh he attacked Kabul…
“Starting from Panjhir, the place he is known to have visited, he must have passed through the capital city of the Hindu Sahis to rob the sacred temple – the reputed place of coronation of the Sahi rulers-of its sculptural wealth…The exact details of the spoil collected from the Kabul valley are lacking. The Tarikh -i-Sistan records 50 idols of gold and silver and Masudi mentions elephants. The wonder excited in Baghdad by elephants and pagan idols forwarded to the Caliph by Yaqub also speaks for their high value. The best of our authorities put the date of this event in 257 (870-71). Tabari is more precise and says that the idols sent by Ya’qûb reached Baghdad in Rabi al-Akhar, 257 (Feb.-March, 871). Thus the date of the actual invasion may be placed at the end of CE 870.” (Tarikh-i-Tabari)
Mahmud of Ghazni [first quarter of C.E. 1000] Mahmud extracted 2,50,000 dinars as ransom from Jayapal (1001-02 C.E.). Jayapal’s necklace worth 2,00,000 gold dinars was appropriated by Mahmud, and twice that value extracted from the necklaces of his imprisoned or executed relatives. All the wealth of Bhera which was “as wealthy as imagination can conceive”, was captured in (1004-05 C.E.). In 1005-06 the people of Multan were forced to pay an indemnity of the value of 20,000,000 silver dirhams. When Nawasa Shah, who had reconverted to Hinduism, was deposed (1007-08), the Sultan confiscated his wealth amounting to 400,000 dirhams. Mahmud seized coins of the value of 70,000,000 Hindu Shahiya dirhams, from the fort of Bhimnagar in Kangra, and gold and silver ingots weighing some hundred maunds, jewellery and precious stones. There was also a collapsible house of silver, thirty yards in length and fifteen yards in breadth, and a canopy (mandapika) supported by two golden and two silver poles. This vast treasure could not be shifted immediately, and Mahmud left two of his “most confidential” chamberlains, Altuntash and Asightin, to arrange for its gradual removal to Ghazni. In subsequent expeditions (1015-20) Punjab and the adjoining areas were sucked dry. Over and above the looting by Mahmud, there was additional looting by his soldiers. From Baran Mahmud obtained, 1,000,000 dirhams, from Mahaban a large booty, from Mathura five idols which when melted [Should we apply the Thaparite algorithm of dividing by 10 or 100?] alone yielded 98,300 misqals (about 390 kg) of gold, and two hundred silver idols. Kanauj, Munj, Asni, Sharva and some other places yielded another 3,000,000 dirhams. Somnath yielded 20,000,000 dinars. [Utbi, the Secretary to Sultan Mahmud, reports this and if he exaggerated then as this was a contemporary record, the Caliphate would come to know of this and would be able to calculate that Mahmud had not sent full share of the Caliph. This is a part usually not much mentioned by the Thaparite School and generically dismissed as part of boasting].
Archaeologically there is a significant absence of Indian coins or artefacts made of precious metal from this entire period in the Punjab and Sind area. [The Thaparite school of Indian history typically remains silent on this or jokes that this could be a possible pointer that the stories of these Hindu kingdoms with fabulous riches are simply stories and fantasies and they probably never existed. In this sense nothing contemporary specifically archaeologically associated with the early founders of Islam including its Prophet has been found in Arabia. [Sunni Wahabis dispute the authenticity of the Ottoman collections in this regard]. However the Thaparite school will never dare raise a similar joke in the Arabian context. This also helps the Thaparite school in trying to prove that “Hinduism” did not exist in general before the pre-Islamic period. However it is a general principle of the Thaparite School to accept archaeology only if it supports the Schools hypotheses and it very angrily reacts and disparages archaeology if it dares to differ from its diktats] The flow of bullion outside India stabilized Ghaznavid currency and debased the Indian. The gold content of millenial north Indian coins reduced from 120 to 60 grams with a similar reduction in the weight and content of the silver coin. This in turn reduced credit of Indian merchants in the international market.
India had always been an exporter against bullion and had accumulated bullion from domestic sources as well mines of Tibet and Central Asia. Mahmud collected in loot and tribute valuable articles of trade like indigo, fine muslins, embroidered silk, and cotton stuffs, and items and raw ingots of famous Indian steel, lavishly praised by Utbi, Hasan Nizami, Alberuni and others. [this is the source of the famous Damascus steel coveted by both by Europe and the Muslim world. One valuable commodity taken from India was indigo. From Baihaqi, who writes the correct Indian word “nil” for the dye, it appears that 20,000 mans (about 500 maunds) of indigo was taken to Ghazna every year. According to Baihaqi, Sultan Masud once sent 25,000 mans (about 600 maunds) of indigo to the Caliph at Baghdad, for “the Sultans often reserved part of this (valuable commodity) for their own usage, and often sent it as part of presents for the Caliph or for other rulers”.
Mahmud also started the later consistent Islamic traditions of looting wealth and women whenever the Islamic heartlands of middle East or central Asia became “impoverished” as a result of intensive and destructive Islamic looting. Utbi writes “It happened, that 20,000 men from Mawaraun nahr and its neighbourhood, who were with the Sultan (Mahmud), were anxious to be employed on some holy expedition in which they might obtain martyrdom. The Sultan determined to march with them to Kanauj”. This is the tradition of Ghazis, (the Arabic root means one who has gone for a Ghazwa, literally a tribal raid typically mentioned in the context of looting wealth, animals, and women) as imposed on India. Even after the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate, Muhammad Ghori declared jihad in “Hind” (1205 C.E.- 13 years after the second battle of Tarain, decisively destroying his strongest Hindu opponent Prithviraj), “in order to repair the fortunes of his servants and armies; for within the last few years, Khurasan, on account of the disasters it had sustained, yielded neither men nor money. When he arrived in Hind, God gave him such a victory that his treasures were replenished, and his armies renewed”.
Nagarkot Kangra (Himachal Pradesh) “…He now attacked the fort of Bhim, where was a temple of the Hindus. He was victorious, and obtained much wealth, including about a hundred idols of gold and silver. One of the golden images, which weighed a million mishkals, the Sultan appropriated to the decoration of the Mosque of Ghazni, so that the ornaments of the doors were of gold instead of iron.” (Tarikh-i-Guzida : of Hamdullah bin Abu Bakr bin Hamd bin Nasr Mustaufi of Kazwin)
[to be continued]
Link to previous post in sequence how-islam-came-to-india-and-why-now-it-needs-to-go-from-india-13-economic-decline-under-islam-fate-of-producers
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Allegation: Hindu husband of a Muslim woman murdered by Islamists – and an Indian provincial government covers up for the Islamists.
I had to write allegedly in the title. First I have no real means of verifying the allegation, especially if any Islamophile regime in India decided to bring its full coercive power behind Islam. Second, I would not have needed the allegation qualifier – if it was say the case of a Muslim husband Rizwanur, being “murdered” (and no need for “allegedly” here) by Hindus for marrying a Hindu woman in the same province. As shown by the media of West Bengal, the then governments at centre and state, and the then fiery activist and the current Chief Minister of the province – who made it a public issue, offering namaaz e janaaja lamenting Rizwanur – and whose current police administration is now alleged to be suppressing the current incident from taking legal course.
For all those on the net, who believe in the supposed one-sided repression and violence on Muslims by Hindus in India, here is version that looks at cases on the ground from the other direction. This might not have been what really happened, this might be an exaggeration, murderers and criminals have no religion, yadda, yadda. But do we allow such doubts to creep in when we accuse non-Muslims on supposed atrocities on Muslims?
http://southbengalherald.blogspot.ie/2012/12/hindu-man-marries-muslim-woman-shot.html
Dipankar Roy, 22 years old (Hindu) was brutally murdered as he had married Salima (Muslim). Both of them had been in love for a while. The victim was riding his motorbike coming back from Chandpara to his own house, when he was lynched and shot dead by Muslim activists led by Aamir Mandal, a member of the local Islamist organization. Dipankar’s body was found in a pool of blood and bore multiple bullet wounds in the chest, abdomen and shoulders. But West Bengal police has not bothered to arrest the murderers, as there is intense pressure from the local Muslim religious bodies. Instead, the police is trying to shield the perpetrators. District: North 24 Parganas. Subdivision: Bongaon. Near the Bangladesh border.
The alleged role of the provincial administration:
on December 5th, 2012, 05/12/2012 when the relatives of Dipankar Roy, who was killed by Aamir Ali on 03/12/2012, went to RG Kar Hospital morgue. At first, Shri Malay Roy (cousin brother of the victim) and Shri Haridas (brother in law) remained unattended for several hours. Later, when they insisted for the dead body, local police under Tala police station informed them, off the record, that it is instructed from the higher position to delay the process so that no sentiment can be created amongst Hindus while returning to their home town.
After intervention of Hindu Samhati activists, the deadbody was finally released at around 4pm, post mortem was done, but that too without a medical certificate. One police from Bangaon police station Mr. Ranjan was posted in the hospital for passing minute by minute report to Bangaon police station. He insisted to accompany the deadbody in the small truck but family members objected to that citing very small place inside the truck. Then he called In-Charge Bangaon police station and forcibly entered into the truck under his instructions.
Later, the body of the victim was brought at Barasat. Activists of Hindu Samhati paid their homage to the victim. Then similar kind of program was also organized at Chandpara, Nera Pukur Pas en route to their house.
Late in the night, police came to the house of the victim and forced the family members to perform the last rites in the night itself as the Administration was scared of any communal tension in the area arising out of the cremation of the victim. Sisters and brother-in-laws of the victim strongly turned down the proposal of the administration and stuck to their demand for cremation in the morning. Then, local MLA (member of legislative assembly) came to their house at around 2330 hours and again, for half an hour, tried to convince the family for early cremation but it went in vain.
According to the blog, on 6th December morning, the family members proceeded towards the crematorium for last rites.
Police had been deployed in huge numbers, especially in front of houses of Hindu Samhati activists. 500 plus people blocked the road in front of SDPO office at Bangaon town, as they carried Dipankar’s corpse. They were demanding immediate arrest of the killers of Dipankar.
This is not an isolated story in India. There is a huge propaganda machinery that runs in overdrive about supposed atrocities on Muslims in the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. The reality is that the troubles in Kashmir started long before the so-called 1990’s demolition of the disputed structure at Ayodhya, or the so-called one-sided riot on Muslims in Gujarat, with several cases in the Kashmir Valley in the 60’s and 70’s whereby Hindu girls were abducted and raped systematically by Muslim gangs. Throughout northern India, especially in places of high muslim concentrations, riots and conflicts frequently break out on instigation by Islamics. They know, that their specific religious agenda and role will be protected by the politico-business-mafia interests that control the Gangetic Valley – and since the media is under constant threat unless it toes the regime lines (two Zee news functionaries were recently dragged to jail on allegations of extortion by a Congress MP) – no reports on any Islamic atrocity gets ever published or aired in India. A string of recent atrocities in the southern state of Kerala against Hindus, where a spate of gruesome ritualistic slaughter of animals, especially dogs, have also taken place and been interpreted to reflect the Islamic hatred and love for torturing dogs out of their founder’s possible hatred of Hekate. (There have been reports of the Afghan National Army members bringing in stray dogs into their compounds to torture and mutilate them to death.)
Just because the Indian state machinery manages to suppress the release of such information in the public domain, does not necessarily mean that Islamist atrocities on non-Muslims in India, are not happening. Non-Hindus might rejoice secretly if Muslims eliminate Hindus, imagining that the space might then be clear for other proselytizing religions to harvest new slaves of their respective religions. But the fact remains that once mullahcracy takes over a country – Christians are constantly tortured and eliminated too, and the supremely confident Christian evangelists in the west, who boast such spectacular success on “pagans”- fail completely and abjectly and run with their tail behind their hind legs where it comes to harvesting Muslims.
It is crucial for the non-Muslims to unite in their perception of the totalitarianism represented by Islamism.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )When Iran and Aarb League agree: revolutions are bad if they are not under their control
When do we hear the Arab League and Iran agreeing on something? Now both do not like the actions undertaken under the no-fly-zone agreement. One is trying to condemn “indiscriminate” bombing, and the other warning against allowing western dominance. Both groups want the popular uprisings (they are popular, by all indications) to serve their agenda, rise and fall and bark according to the sweet wills and paranoid ambitions of the ayatollahs and sheiks and emirs. They are as much scared of revolutions as Americans or the West are. This is the key to understand the statements being made and potential behaviour from the existing leaders of the Arab world and Iran over the Libyan action.
Americans should not have said that they were leading it but allow UK or France to do the honours. Moreover they have a short window in which to decimate Gaddafi’s forces, and restock the opposition.
As for Russia, India or anyone else mumbling and playing it safe, it is important to realize that historical turning points do not stay on forever. It is a tendency in Indian analysis of situations to be confounded by complex contradictions in political developments and get stuck in an overemphasis on “nothing is entirely black and white” which then becomes the excuse for decision paralysis. On the other hand it is this same “nothing is black and white” mindset to stick to paradigms and never update even with real experiences. Thus it appears that policy-makers of India have a rigid mindset to think that the Islamic regions do not have forces and dynamics of change within themselves that are not entirely mullahcratic.
It is critical to support the non-mullahcratic component against the mullahcratic component in the uprisings or movements that at the moment have converged on the point of common hatred against their ruling regimes. If we don’t support the more modernizing trends within these movements, the elite of Islamic systems will hijack this popular sentiment into their pet agenda – hatred of the “qufr”, wallowing in the Sharia, and erasure of the Jews as a first step towards erasure of all perceived obstacles to their absolute mullahcracy.
The West once made the blunder of encouraging Islamism and authoritarian dynastic or dictatorial regimes in their short-sighted strategy of tackling the so called Red-Menace. As a result the world suffers from the genocidal and totalitarian mindset of the mullahcracy.
The same blunder should not be repeated. It is important for the younger generations within the uprisings to be aware that both the Arab and Iranian leadership, the Islamic organizations, as well as the West, or even say China, (Russia and China are more scared of getting burnt unnecessarily and therefore non-intervention) are scared of independent popular uprisings. They want these revolutions to serve their own desires. Iran wants to paint these revolutions as anti-Israel and will rant and rail and turn against the revolution if that does not happen. Arab league wants to maintain their filthy rich lifestyles of their emirs and their sheikhs and the network of feudal patronage and arbitrary power. The west wants a pliable regime popular or not.
For the West or less-sectarian countries like India, it is crucial to realize that it is in their interest to encourage the modernizing sections within these revolutions. Next time around there will be little opportunity left to correct such errors as made in wiping out modernizers in Afghanistan, Iran or Iraq or even Saudi Arabia.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Is it time for the West to plan for dissolving Pakistan?
How many nations of our times are based purely on a religion and recognized by other nations as independent nations? Only two – the Vatican City and Pakistan. Ironically they share in common some traits. Both have helped in the unravelling of the USSR but not of Communism – for it still survives behind the People’s Republic of China and is working towards global dominance. Both have been courted by the USA in its Cold War struggles. Neither has disappointed. Both exert influence on the global politics disproportionate to their actual size, economy, military capabilities, and the capacity to contribute in any meaningful way towards a modern, knowledge based, technological and information society. Both manage to do so by manipulating their historical images as projections into the future.
But there the similarities end. The Vatican’s leadership has made amends to its historical victims, and has shown its flexibility and readiness to change with the times. It has steadfastly refused to underwrite radicalism of the theological variety [the severe castigation of the Liberation Theology for example]. This may change in the future. But the leadership of the Vatican have proved themselves consummate statesmen in the concessions and compromises that they have made while never abandoning the fundamental objective of total global ideological domination. This is an objective that would have been a crime if not from the “one and only true message” for any other “religion” in the times when the Church ruled supreme. But now in the days of “total religious tolerance”, there is nothing wrong in having a declared agenda of “harvesting all souls”. In fact, legal and state coercive machinery can be used to guarantee protection of any proselytizer – even someone swearing by texts that recommend putting the unrepentant unbeliever to the sword.
Where Pakistan differs is not in its protection of organizations claiming the right to practice “Dawa” or spreading of the Islamist beliefs – but in its total lack of statesmanship. Unlike the Vatican, the Pakistani leadership never apologizes to the victims of its Islamists, never acknowledges that it has nurtured Jihadis in its madrassahs, never concedes to modernization in education and social practices, never really allows any land reforms or dismantling of feudal exploitation in its backyard.
Pakistan is basically an anachronism, a nation whose only foundational claim for identity is a religion – in a historical period where the world is leaving behind, exclusive and historical claim based religions. Moreover, that religion is not even unique to the country – it is shared by a host of other nations, some of whom have louder and more well established claims of being the centre for that religion. So Pakistan is based on a type of ideology increasingly irrelevant globally as national foundation, and moreover on an ideology based identity shared with other “nations” – and therefore has no real claims of distinction from other nations. It cannot look at history and culture, for in spite of the best sadistic efforts of generations of “mullahs” – elements of pre-Islamic cultures lie firmly interwoven in the national fabric, and those elements are shared by its imagined nemesis – India. In fact the pre-Islamic cultural element proved so strong that a part of it broke away in reaction in 1971 as Bangladesh.
So now Pakistan finds itself in a terrible dilemma. To strengthen and give uniqueness to its national foundation, it has to become more Islamic than “others”. Becoming more Islamic means more and more unquestioning obedience to a strict and literal interpretation of the core texts. That in turns means more Jihad with violent means which accelerates the competition between the ruling feudal elite, the army, the mullahs, the commons, the militants – to become “purer” than the others. That means an almost perpetual state of national Jihad. Purer Islam can only be maintained by preventing modernization – in education, productivity, technology and above all the questing mindset. Which means Pakistan will become more and more dependent on largesse from interested external sources and be a drain on the global economy as the sources would spread the cost around.
So the West and the global community should perhaps start thinking of dissolving the entity called Pakistan. Here are the brief reasons :
(1) Dissolving Pakistan saves the West (and therefore the world economy )a huge amount of money and resources needed to keep the state afloat, and a total drain, because none of that capital goes into productive capacities.
(2) Even though the Chinese are now playing second fiddle to the West, it is uncannily similar to the Ribbentrop-Molotov handshake where both sides appear to be buying time. Eventually, Russia and China could come together with Iran (or whatever is left of it even if a so-called revolutionary liberalization and democratization takes place there under non-theologians) to which the CAR will lean. As long as Pakistan remains an independent entity, it can play the prostitute and threaten to kiss the higher bidder or the one more willing to pay. That is both a security risk and a potential disaster, if everything given to Pakistan lands up in Russian, Iranian or Chinese hands and the West’s presence is virtually terminated in the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Dissolving Pakistan takes away this worry.
(3) Dissolving Pakistan and putting up new independent states actually creates new multiple centres where Jihad can be protected and nurtured. One Pakistan becomes many and the western problem multiplies. One of the best bets is to allow India to absorb the populations and the territories. India is a growing economy which can absorb the costs. It has the capability and the will to manage multicultural groups and religious animosities. Culturally Indians of the western part of the country will be closer to the Pakistanis across the border [Punjab for example shares the language across the border in spite of the state sponsorship of Urdu] compared to any other external ethnicity or country. Moreover the costs of developing infrastructure and the economy or carrying out necessary social reforms will be borne on Indian shoulders and not on the west.
(4) As the price for non-intervention in the absorption, the West could extract concessions from India that it will have assured access and facilities to reach the CAR through channels and routes maintained and developed through Pakistani territories connecting the Karakorum Highway and other CAR approach routes.
(5) The Taliban lose their foster home, and are buffered off from the crucial supply routes of Karakorums and the Arabian Sea. The so-called Kashmir problem vanishes as the Pakistani military and ISI mechanism to foment terrorists inside India vanishes. So one of the greatest excuses for maintaining Jihad from the Pakistani side vanishes.
India, because of linguistic and unique cultural history, will remain firmly in western and specifically the Anglo-Saxon or Atlanticist orbit for generations to come. There are sufficient fissures in the Indian ruling class for the west to exploit and protect western interests.
It is worth a try – at least the largest source for generating terror of the Jihadi and allied kind (through international crime and other non-religious or ethnic militancy) will be effectively liquidated. At one stroke West no longer has to face Islamist terror, pay for upkeep of Jihad, and instead can profit from a growing economy which bears all the costs!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 5 so far )Yemen – turning point of Islamism in the Middle East
Whereas if Iran gains Yemen, it can stretch out and outflank the USA+Saudi Arabia strategic presence on the western side of the Gulf. Both sides are therefore likely to accuse the other of carrying out a proxy war in Yemen. What is strange is the supposed existence of the Al Qaeda in Yemen, with solid origins from Saudi Arabia and one-time collaboration with USA (Osama’s connections during the anti-USSR AFG war), and the simultaneous supposed Iranian sponsoring of the Shi-ite Houthi’s. But no reports of conflict between Qaeda and the Houthis.
Added complication is the often missed problem of the Al Ahwaz area under Iran. This is claimed to be a primarily “Arab” area and population with the greatest concentration of natural gas/petrol resources of Iran. There is a separatist movement based on this claim, and their spokespersosn find sympathetic ears in Yemen. It is possible that USA+Saudi Arabia allows Al-Ahwaz separatists to function to pick at Iran, while Iran allows the Shia tribes in north Yemen to function to pick at USA+Saudi Arabia. But a connection between Qaeda and Iran is interesting to the point of absurdity. They obviously can have common purpose – overthrow of the Saudi Royal regime and then wiping off Israel. But how far will this Shia-Sunni collaboration go? Iran can very well think of sponsoring Osama, as an antidote to Israel+USA. But how much will the Arabian Sunnis accept Shi-ite domination? They have accepted “non-Arabic” Islamic over-lordship before though – Ottoman Turks for example. Or is it entirely a representation to tar and feather Iran and Qaeda together? It will be important to see how far Iran digests attacks against Shias in Pakistan and still does nothing against Pakistan.
Being seen as “sympathetic” to theologians in the various Islam dominated countries can appear sweet as a strategy for the moment – but it is much better to think of the future in these countries in the long run. The best bet lies in holding out the hope for a liberal democracy in today’s youth in these countries. If we have to choose sides, lets choose it on the side of the future of these countries. Assuming a blanket trend towards extremism could be realistic but does not help us to divide up these societies so that the theologians do not get all the advantages of a united society behind them!
The death sentences against the condemned army- personnel indicted for the assassination of Sk. Mujibur Rehman in Bangladesh, are most likely to be carried out early this morning. There may not be any immediate backlash against the hangings. But the hangings are likely to convert the executed into icons for the militant Islamists and their supporters in the Islamic world. The trial and execution already generated several threats against state personnel and politicians, but nothing concrete has yet taken place. There was a substantial proportion of voters who voted for candidates not belong the Awami League led alliance, and a proportion of this vote would overlap with the “Islamist” vote. The move towards de-religionization of politics in Bangladesh has already brought out the Islamists in protest especially against any move aimed at weakening or delegetimizing “Islamic poilitics”.
The result has now been an extension of the “west” versus “Islamism” war – from a small zone in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Sudan, into all of Afghanistan and Pakistan, into the Horn of Africa – Mauritania, sub-Saharan Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, and Yemen, with branches leading into Bangladesh, Malaysia, southern Thailand, Indonesia, parts of Philipines, almost the entirety of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, and spreading into Central Asia.
For Bangladesh, the executions will probably be used by the Islamists as an indication of the Awami League government’s connections and alleged “dependence” on countries like India and the USA – deemed to be among the “enemies” of Islam – (in spite of the zealous protestations to the contrary from the most vocal sections of Indian society and polity). If Islamism gains in sentiments in Bangladesh, the Awami League government will be forced to depend more and more on India and this will push the polarization further. Such a polarization in itself is not bad for India, if India can see a clear policy towards Islamic radicalism. However, so far Indian reaction has been self-contradictory – as it still mostly holds on to the Marxists myths of “all radicalsim comes from lack of economic development”. So this part remains uncertain for the future.
The dynamic of the “Islamist politics” is changing. Regimes like the “royal” house in Saudi Arabia will become increasingly identified with and dependent on the “west”. Looking carefully as to how USA is being forced to shift its military attention, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, back to Afghanistan, back to Iraq, to Yemen – all the while the militancy is gaining recruits across north and central Africa – spanning the two oceans is illustrative. Increasingly the Islamist militancy is taking on its traditional twin front struggle. On the one hand it is the struggle between theologians and temporal rulers for ultimate dominance of the Islamist movement. On the other it is the dream of conquering the whole world in the name of Islam.
In time, the “royal houses” in Saudi Arabia/Jordan or the emirates – will lose their prestige and position if the Islamist movement continues under the radical theologians. On the one hand – there is the exclusivist strand of claims of bloodline/clan connections to the Qureyish. On the other there is the urge to gain popular representation and empowerment irrespective of bloodlines within the “greater” Islamic identity – this is the Iranian trend. Over the long run, the ideals of “democracy” and empowerment prevalent in non-islamic societies will reinforce and strengthen its twisting into Iranian style theocracy dominated “populist” Islamic rule.
The “life span” of the Saudi royal house will be short if the “house” does not make tactical compromises with the “populist Islamism”.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )TalebPak : towards the new Caliphate
The new leadership of the Taleban have openly laid out their formal objectives. Once they establish “purer” Islamism on Pakistan they are going to target India. This was stated in an interview broadcast by the Sky. This fits perfectly the scenario that I have been promoting as possible- perhaps for many, a bit too paranoid.
There can be all sorts of explanations and possibilities of deception to explain this away. One of the most plausible ones will be that of the need in some school of opinion within the USA to create the impression that India should contribute towards US plans as India is also “threatened” – or that if the collapse of Pak is not staved off with Indian contribution also, India will “suffer”. UK’s inner strategy or secret services may also be interested in maintaining their own strategic asset which they had created by the Partition on the subcontinent – Pakistan. China has contributed its own towards this “save Pakistan” bandwagon by raising the spectre of a “threat” in Arunachal Pradesh. At the same time Naxals have been activated inside India.
This means that all of the non-Indian parties involved in this merry game think that for one reason or the other, the time for loss of direct handle on the Pakistani Jihadi state is imminent. The Jihadis have organized and overcome their factional divisions, to further the overall aims with which the Islamists joined the British project of creating Pakistan. This overall aim on the part of the Islamists, was a revival of the legendary and mythical Caliphate that sat astride the main economic exchange route between the main production centres of the world – East and the West. The Islamists’ extremely low intellectual and educational level, combined with the aridity and nonproductivity of the lands they occupied, implied they could only live off the produce of others. Once oil runs out or is replaced by alternatives, the temporary productivity in economic terms that allowed them to flourish – will be lost. Then they will need to go back to the Caliphate model – which was essentially a way of justifying the basically looting economy of Islam – to extract surplus from allowing trade between the east and west.
Islamists cannot allow modern educational pursuits that could have allowed them to try and climb back on to the current knowledge based economy. Modern education is typically based on open exploration and unrestricted questioning. This is dangerous for Islam – as learning to question in one direction can spill over on to questioning the very claims based on which theologians and Islamic social system imposes itself on human society. So the Islamists’ very own obsessive search for permanent and absolute power, limits their educational, research and knowledge-base improvement. This leaves them only with the old Caliphate model to extract a peace-tax on global trade between the two main regions of innovation and productivity.
The Islamists have seen their chance now. USA the main thorn in their side (as the controller and chief patron – although supportive but still restraining beyond a certain limit) has been weakened. China has come up as a competitor economy to the USA, and is willing to take up the role of the patron. Also because of the competition, China will be more lenient than the USA in allowing the Jihadis greater freedom in their murderous objectives as long as such objectives do not directly infringe on China’s own imperialist designs.
Contrary to popular speculation I had tried to emphasize that Pakistan will not implode on its own. Instead, the basic Jihadi core behind Pakistan’s state will activate its programme of Jihadi expansion in both directions – Afghanistan and India. This is part of recreating the only economic model they can understand and which they feel will still allow them to maintain their lifestyle and power structures – that of the mythical Caliphate (in historical reality a very short period of success).
The conflict we see now is a superficial one – maintained only because of external interest and pressure. This does not mean that every part of the state machinery of Pakistan is insincere in its formal confrontation. But only those parts which are vulnerable to western pressure or believe in a middle road between the Jihadis and the west are participating actively. This is a minority in Pakistan. Over the years, Arab patronization of Wahabi radicalization through education and other sociopolitical means have practically erased all resistance to the core Jihadi ideology within Pakistan. The society itself has no firm ideological and cultural basis to resist the Jihadis.
Sooner or later, India will have to face the Jihadis. It cannot do so by imagining and trying to convince the Indian people – that Islamic ideology is completely detached from what Islamists are practising. It cannot pretend that preserving the roots and basis of Islamic culture on the subcontinent will allow peaceful coexistence of Pakistan and India. By doing any such pretension, any Indian regime betrays its people – for it creates the false impression and expectations of inherent “benevolence” that is the source of confusion in being ruthless towards Jihadis.
There is only one solution for this whole problem – dissolution of Pakistan as a state, and complete dismantling of Islamic educational system, complete deactivation of those theologians already brought up in the Wahabi tradition. These in turn can only be done if the current populations under Pakistan comes under direct control of a secular regime that is also firmly anti-Islamist.
One way of course is the reunification of the people and land currently under the control of Islamophile and Jihad-tolerating-supporting regime in Pakistan, with that of a firm and no-nonsense secular power based in India. That will be the opening of untold opportunities for the people now living in Pakistan in terms of health, education and an open society where voices of dissent and protest against arbitrariness cannot be silenced by fatwas and fanatical Islamist zealots. Freedom from the terror of violent and personal-greed-hiding imposition of Sharia – is something which these people have even forgotten to dream about. The Indian ruling elite has proved its secular credentials by being more ruthless on what it dubs “Hindu right wing fascism” than it ever showed the teeth against Islamic Jihad. The “Muslims” of Pakistan will actually be treated more fairly than the “native” Hindus under such Indian regimes.
Those who will oppose this objective will do so from a variety of covert and overt interests and positions. This will include excuses of humanitarian values, claims of inherent benevolence of the ideology and all blames only on “misinterpretation”, supposed positive and inseparable cultural contributions, as well as claimed inherent superiority of the ideology compared to all other pre-existing ones on the subcontinent in terms “equality/fraternity” etc. with attendant suppression of real historical experience.
Covert interests will primarily be external – with strategic interests of continued energy, economic and territorial imperialism. These can also be tackled, if India shows the will and determination to do so.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 3 so far )Indian concession at Sharm-el-Sheik : breathing time for Jihad
Manmohan Singh (MMS), the economist PM of India is being buffeted from both sides of the political divide about the mysterious origins of the supposed joint statement in Egypt at Sharm-el-Sheik (S-e-S). He has apparently conceded a lot to his Pakistani counterpart.
Any strengthening of the hands of the semi-feudal elite at the head of Pakistani regime and military, means strengthening of Jihadi Islam. For only by propagating Jihad, Pakistan has been able to ransom the world, and particularly the West, to survive on a state which was, right from its paranoid conception, unsustainable.
So what really could have been the run-up to the supposed concession by the Indian Prime minister?
Suppose we have the following hypothesis :
The inner echelons of decision making within the Congress hierarchy decides in tandem with (or is persuaded by) USA and UK, that, in the short term – stabilization of the Gilani government is necessary. If the Gilani government falls, and the unreliable Pakitani Army (PA) is left with government powers, or Musharraf makes a comeback, or the PA teams up with the Talebs, or atleast some sort of Terrorist State of Pakistan (TSP) government pressure is not mounted against the Talebs until the Afghanistan elections are over, USA will lose all its bases in TSP although TSP will still carry on with support of China.
This could panic the Congress leadership, if they do not have much faith in the fighting ability of the Indian people. The current Congress-top-think is probably geared towards equating survival with the proximity of USA. USA could convince the Congress leadership that, it was more important to increase the prestige of Gilani in the eyes of the “commons” of TSP, since Gilani was actually on amuch weaker political basis and is only being propped up because of USA. The Congress on the other hand has been given a strong electoral mandate recently to do as they please. So some concessions, to Gilani, would be important.
As is usual in such cases, MMS might have been reassured that it would all only be verbal, and not meant concretely and as a commitment. The coterie around the dynasty however were not sure of the political fallout, and hence the “future leader” was solidly kept out of any association with this. If any negative thing comes out of S-e-S, it will be blamed on the benign ego of a well-meaning but elderly gentleman inching towards senility (no MMS is not senile – but I am saying it could be passed off as such).
I also think of him as amenable to “persuasion”. Of course he is subject to “influence”. But he is too weak politically to take such decisions all alone. Such decisions have to come from a more protected and better hidden core. The script is definitely there – and I had been worrying for quite some time that the new Government of India seemed too “eager” and over-ambitious and was in a hurry, and for me that was a possible indication that they knew they had little time before something quite negative was possible.
My worry is that the phenomenon that happened around Sanjay, is repeating itself around Rahul Gandhi. A so-called young gun think-tank could be forming. But this time around, the interested “outsiders” will not take the risk, and will ensure that at least some of their controllers belong to this circle. Likely candidates will be those who have had long “foreign” stints – I have a certain gentleman from “God’s own” in mind.
A Bharatyia society that takes the decision to reincorporate territories currently under Government of TSP occupation, will only do it after it has come to certain decisions about TSP and the people under it. People are not born with genes for Islamic Jihad and universal hatred for the Quafir. Children born in TSP and Afghanistan are not born with a gene for Jihad either. These are people, who are kin of the Indic (in spite of their tall-claims of having Arabic descent) – they have almost entirely Indic roots. I, for one think of them simply as blood brothers and sisters of Indians who are forced into a crucible of hatred from birth and not given any other options to even think of other options. Incorporation under a liberal, democratic and modernizing nation of India gives them that option to be otherwise – to be different from the rabid pack of animals they seem to be headed towards.
I would consider it a civilizational duty of Bharat to create conditions under which branches of the Bharatyia civilizational family, however distant they might have become, and however wayward they might have become, are brought back to the family hold – by the ears, if need be, kicking and screaming if needs be. To be thrashed if they want to go back to the lawless streets, and loved if they behave. This is to ensure that we do not have a vicious bandit on the loose whom we could have easily controlled and made otherwise useful.
It will also be much safer for the “neighbours”.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Talebani Pakistani Army unleashed – the great gift of the West and China to the subcontinent
The Taliban thrust towards India is now probably materializing. Those who have been dreaming for implosion of Pakistan should sit up and notice. A lot of the strategic negatives for India I had scoped for are possibly coming together now. Obama’s policy as I mentioned before was about stabilization and all his initial bluster would be simply to not be outdone by Bush’s legacy. His ultimate goal would be a compromise with Jihad, minimize US commitments and withdraw without appearing to withdraw. The US is leaving the neo-caliphate, and Obama is simply trying to buy it out by paying Pakistan lavishly.
Whether India likes it or not, my envisioned TalebaniPakistani caliphate expansive thrust from their base area in the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, into the South East will start now in earnest. They will be helped by China, who will see this as a golden opportunity to seal off India’s potential linking up with Afghanistan and blocking Chinese access to the subcontinent through north Kashmir. The Caliphate’s expansion into Kashmir is a big strategic gain for Jihad. A weak and Islam-appeasing Government of India will simply give this as proof that Indians are not doing sufficiently in appeasement. Even the unthinkable could happen – the Indian state could fall before Jihad in the North. And this would then be an unrelenting aggression from neo-caliphate jihad.
With the declared and proposed “army action” by Pakistani Army against the Talebs, one of two things is going to happen. Either the Pakistani Army command arranges for an “eyewash” of temporary retreat by the Talebs so that international pressure can be staved off a bit. But a worse future scenario would be the formal switching over of sides by the Pakistani Army troops once they are in the “contact zone”. This would lead to a very rapid “collapse” of the entire north of Pakistan.
For the moment, it is not in the interests of the Pakistani Army to reveal to the world that the entire north collapses before the Talebs or that the Talebs are simply the irregular wing of the theologian-Jihadi-military structure of the Pakistani Army. This will choke up the material resources supply that it needs to finance and support its long term Jihadi ambitions for the subcontinent. With the recent phased supply promised by the “west” it needs to formally wait until this resource is delivered. Also, China would be under pressure to and there could be concerted effort by the US to remove the nukes from within Pakistani territory. Which would be a great loss of bargaining power for the Pakistani Army.
So my guess will be a formal temporary retreat by the Talebs, and much fanfare about assembling troops for military action against the Talebs. This will never materialize fully on the ground. Any formal engagement that Pakitani Army is forced to go in with the Talebs now, is problematic. If they really have to take action, for the sake of the media and the western opinion, this would mean a war of attrition between irregulars and regulars of the same force. This is not good for the future projections and ambitions of the Pakistani Army. So there is going to be no serious fight. At most those units will be sacrificed deliberately whose loyalty to the essential Jihadi cause of the Pakistani Army leadership, is suspect. Or whose future preservation could preserve military expertise in “undesirable” ethnic communities.
The promised huge western help and the undercover help provided by China and the Islamic powers has to be built up sufficiently, as stocks have been depleted to provide for the success of the Taleb adventure in Afghanistan, and maintaining terrorist activities against India. Once sufficiently built up, the resources will be used to plan and support the next phase of Jihadi expansion – more into Afghanistan and east and north into Pakistan, and finally on to India – the ultimate target.
But any serious attempts by the Pakistanis to use the Talebs to finish their unfinished agenda of grabbing Kashmir by People’s Liberation Army, will necessitate actions on many fronts, both to the general direction of south-west and west from Srinagar. The complication can be facilitation by the PLA of the Talebs from the “north” or Karakorum highway, and any diversionary attacks or movements by the PLA in Chinese occupied sectors of India.
Hopefully the USA is not at the same time manipulated by its allies and “business interests” like UK or China, to treat this as an opportunity where the Talebs appear to be less strong in the Afghanistan sector as they appear to have moved their momentum to the east. There could be genuine agreements between the so-called good-Talebs and the USA to “shift east”. On the other hand it could all be a part of ruse and deception, where the Talebs want to appear to have moved to the east, but in reality preparing to trap the NATO forces in the west.
Some Indian political parties have promised Indian army support to tackle terrorism inside Pakistan. Promising openly, Indian soldiers to fight Taleban in Pakistan, can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, this can activate US and western forces who have interests in the outcome of Indian elections in favour of the “promiser”. But on the other hand this will prompt the Taleb-Pakistanis to intensify their campaign against Kashmir and western India in general. Given that the grounds have been prepared for both “withdrawal to save the skin” as well as “jingo” mentality, this can lead to an uncertain outcome. There can be loud cries of, “more needs to be done to assure the communities, since all these attacks are actually because of rise of right-wing Hindutva”.
What appears to be lack of control by the government, is actually an appearance. This is partly true but represents possibly a deliberate attempt by the ISI+Pakistani+Taleb combination to delegitimize the civilian governmental structure. Behind all this facade, the combination is working towards its traditional goal – the overall subjugation of the subcontinent under an Islamic regime, and restoration of what they consider their glory days of lording it over India.
They have managed to coax Obama admin’s funds, which in-spite of all attempts to the contrary, will still be surreptitiously diverted to fund the Pakistani national project of conquering at least part if not whole of India. USA is trying to find glorious ways of covering up withdrawal from Afghanistan. Already this has led to inventing a “moderate” Taleban (Islamic Jihadis always pretend to be moderates when they think they can extract resources, or buy time). If the plan has been hatched between Pakistan+China on one side and USA+UK on the other, it can be a dangerous trap for India, if India has to divide its forces and get bogged down in a war which China and allies sponsor as a proxy war, while the entire north-west of India lies vulnerable.
Suppose, US cuts a deal with its invented “moderate Taleban” and brokers an agreement between Zardari and the Talebs for power-sharing in the North West. This will simply be a ratification, according to my thinking, of the TalebPakistaniArmy plan to coax USA into a position where, the defacto transition to a TalebPakistaniArmy Islamic state is tacitly endorsed by the USA in the “hope” of showing to its electorate and the world media that USA has retreated “ethically”. This plan could have the support of UK+China. Karazai could be brought in on this out of necessity on his weak power and resource basis. Russia+Iran could be made to wait and watch. So in that case the entire brunt of the TalebPakistaniArmy expansionist plan would fall towards India. Why India? Because of many different possible calculations.
TalebPakistaniArmy can hope to get tacit Chinese support. It can hope to get US reluctance to commit forces in this theatre as a favourable scenario. It can calculate that Government of India can be made to negotiate in an international form of “zazyia” extraction. This can be made in a form very similar to the way in which “zazyia” was extracted from the USA – by posing as “funds” required to “develop” sufficiently “to alleviate poverty and economic factors that gives rise to terrorism”. A situation can easily be developed by which India is made to look like a “miser” “who is reluctant to share her fortune” with the poor “neighbour”, and therfore must face the consequences of continuing “terror attacks”.
Internal divisions, fractured and antagonistic opinions within the “anti-Jihadi” section in India, who still agonize over the “hows” and “why’s” of Jihad and what strategy should be appropriate, can be banked upon to provide the typical scenario of lack of ruthless retaliation that probably existed during the early years of Islamic invasions into India. It can also be a military preemptive move to prevent India participating in any joint military operations in the core areas of Pakistan. China could panic if Indians start talking too much of sending expeditionary forces into Pakistan.
The asinine policy of inventing a “moderate Taleban” to cover up the eventual retreat from the Afghan theatre, is the latest in the superb series of contributions from the Anglo-US to human civilization. The help provided to Pakistani Army (the state and the army is the same in Pakistan, at least from the army viewpoint – so resources provided formally to the civilian government will be surreptitiously moved to Pakistani Army disposal or manipulation) will simply be used against remaining “divergence” in Afghanistan and the final push towards the Jihadi dream of an uninterrupted Islamic empire running from Arabia to Indonesia.
Whether that dream is realistic or feasible is an entirely different question, but the enormous pain and horror on the way even towards the eventual demise of that dream, is something that the west will forever be guilty of.
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Bangladesh Rifles Uprising : A Jihadi Warning
I began to write this post on the 26th of December last year, but held it as I thought it might appear too paranoid. Now the drama of the BDR uprising made me rethink that my earlier worry about the real strengths of the Jihadis within the Bangladesh state machinery and armed forces were justified. I have already written at some length about the general long term societal balance of forces within Bangladesh society. Here I have maintained that the forces of Bengali nationalism is slightly weaker than the forces of Islamic retrogression – and it has been so right from the post-47 start of the journey as part of Pakistan.
The immediate background of the BDR uprising could turn out to be a damp squib officially – it will be blamed on long-standing grievances, and “wayward” soldiers. But it takes a greater significance in the light of the recent urging by the emissary of Pakistan to the BD government to drop the proceedings towards war-crimes trials of the Rajakaras and the AlBadrs, Al shams for their atrocities during ’71. On top of that the AL led government moves ahead with transit and trade agreements with India, a reasonable and pragmatic move on the part of Bangladesh as the country is even now crucially dependent on Indian imports of essential commodities. This draws immediate vehement protests by the nearly decimated BNP, as expected. Just like many political parties in Pakistan, a lot of political careers are made in Bangladesh by inflating up the “demonic” “Hindu” India. However, it is Pakistan’s palpable fear at possible re-exposure of Pakistan’s role in the ’71 war of liberation that is significant.
Why does Pakistan have to be so paranoid about it ? It is already almost 40 years old – and could be passed off as a historical event, and not redounding on the current regime! There could be question of compensation and fear by a bankrupt Pakistan government. But financial compensation is a lesser worry, given the Pakistan government’s traditional expertise in moving money around meant for one purpose to fuel another pet agenda, and the fact that it can still milk the USA for some time into the near future. With the increasing acceleration of the Pakistani Army and the Taleban coalescing into a neo-Caliphate on the gray borderland between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the now overtly Jihadi Pakistani state can be worried that the war-crimes trials could damage and expose the true character of Jihadi Islam, to a population which has so far proved a safe haven for Jihadi terror to be launched on India. It is the ideological delegitimization that worries the Jihadis of the subcontinent, and the transit agreements could actually cover eventual move towards military agreements between India and Bangladesh to destroy the Jihadis themselves in the eastern part of the subcontinent.
I will primarily characterize this election as a four-cornered struggle for state power in which the forces in order of “strength” are (1) the military establishment (2) the Jamaat (3) the Awami League and associates (the so called “great alliance”) (4) the BNP +non Jamaat associates. The military as per my earlier analysis is in favour of Islamic consolidation of the state regime – in tune with the power base of the military command among the elite of Bangladeshi muslim society, whose prime feudal motivations of gaining and controlling “land” and dominance over society is best served under strengthened Sunni Wahabi authoritarian framework. The military has consistently reasserted its dominance over the state machinery whenever it had felt that its long term strategy of bringing Bangladesh closer to the Islamic axis centred in Saudi Arabia is being threatened – this was why it eliminated Mujibur and even its own – like Jia, or leftist “heretics” like Col. Taher. At present, the prime tool is the Jamaat. As I have mentioned before, the Jamaat will be the key political force which can be used by the military to serve its agenda. The Jamaat was allowed to suffer the least in the anti-corruption drive against the political establishment. To be fair, the military’s weakness for the Jamaat could be coming out of reasons very similar to those that kept the two major political groups also “strangely” weak towards the Jamaat – that all the political elite including the Jamaat share core social networks at the same level and that all the non-Jamaat political elite share political secrets as to activities during the 71 struggle as well as post-Independence that could be used by the Jamaat to manipulate them.
The Jamaat is the direct descendant of the philosophy of Moududi – the ideologue and founder of a strict Wahabi/Sunni interpretation of Islam whose core message therefore almost always inevitably landed up into the domain of cataclysmic confrontation with everything deemed “unIslamic and therefore anti-Islamic”. The top leadership has been accused persistently of war-crimes but they take pride in claiming that apparently none of these accusations could be proved – they can do so, as the Bangladesh military post-Independence ensured (with the help of factions within the “liberators”) that cases/investigations/charges were withdrawn and that the Jamaat were politically rehabilitated. The Jamaat has minuscule vote share, but displays an impact and influence on Bangladesh state power hugely out of proprtion to its apparent electoral strength. The Jamaat will be the most likely stable political Islamic group to receive Saudi and extended Islamic expansionist network support, and this Islamic axis will see Bangladesh and Jamaat’s role as crucial to its overall expansionist agenda of takeover of the subcontinent in the name of Islam. The Jamaat of course has now turned ultra-nationalist and pretends to fight “colonial aggression” which of course as conveniently for Islamic agenda is seen only in India which is portrayed as “Hindu/Kaffir”. Hiding under the ultra-nationalist slogans is of course the mother of all colonialism – the ultimate Jihadi Islamic takeover of not only Bangladesh but the entire subcontinent – an experiment already started by the Taleban in the west of the subcontinent. The recent Mumbai attacks is a signal that Islamic agenda for the subcontinent is intensifying and Indian “war posturing” will be used as a rallying cry and panic button to push further for Islamic consolidation in Bangladesh. (Mumbai Islamic message)
The Jamaat’s strength does not lie in numbers, but the social networks among the elite, the theologians and the international Jihadi and Sunni Wahabi fundamentalism – (1) the military has ensured that it suffered almost nothing in the anti-corruption drives and so will claim themselves as “pure” and untainted compared to the others – and is likely to be rewarded for this by the electorate (2) the various military regimes as well as political ones, by failing to try the culprits of war-crimes and infighting among the “liberators” has ensured that newer generations have far less concerns about what happened almost 40 years ago than other “more pressing” concerns (3) the Islamic propaganda machinery allowed to flourish under the pro-Islam military regimes as well as political forces have been able to increase the rate of Jihadi Islamization of the rural as well as a section of urban Bangladeshi youth – Islam holds several attractions for males especially – it promises all that they biologically desire, consumption, women and power – without having to make the hard effort of intellectual skills development required to compete in a modern knowledge based economy, or having to tolerate modern rights given to women over their sexuality or their bodies. (4) sections of the younger generations are likely to be relatively free of qualms about experimenting with an authoritarian Islamic system which of course at first they would like to believe would be along the lines of Malaysia or Iran- especially since the military has succeeded in discrediting the pre-existing political establishments. All these factors could have been instrumental in repeating the general pattern observable all over the subcontinent – of increasing radicalization of younger recruits who gravitate to the armed forces in Islam dominated countries.
The Awami League represents strongest electoral combine as of date but will have to reckon with the Jamaat. The BNP has taken a bad knock but will not lag far behind the Awami League, as the military would have strong connections with the setup and would like to keep it afloat as a second line of defence and the major political face of the Islamic agenda which will be led from behind by the Jamaat – this is simply a tactic to allow the Jamaat to grow and takeover.
The uprising was most likely to have been carefully planned, with sleepers trained by Pakistan and Jihadi organizations acting in careful coordination to use genuine grievances and liquidate the older generation of commanding officers – a group less likely to be submissive completely to the charms of the Jihadis. The core group has most probably now vanished, and been taken to safe havens maintained by the Jihadis in West Bengal under a tolerant Leftist regime. This was simply a warning, in showing that the force which is on the border of Bangladesh is out of control, and that the Jihadis still hold the keys of state power. It could not have happened unless key elements of the security apparatus allowed it to happen.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Change of regime in the USA : strategic implication for the Indian subcontinent
Obama’s takeover could actually be a dampener for all those hoping to see more positive action in favour of India. His primary concern will be restoration of the US economy. US strategic interests in Asia will therefore be intimately tied in with strategies for growth of the US economy. In spite of rhetoric, economic calculations will impose restrictions on where and how far Obama will go. It seems most unlikely that Obama will increase overseas military commitments and war or surgical strikes against Iran is most unlikely unless Iran deliberates provokes US into a position where it will be embarrassed internationally if it does not retaliate. Obama will try to hold the “line” rather than expand or contract. His main tactic will be to retain the bluster to outshine Bush in foreign affairs but basically do nothing. He will try to achieve more with bluffs and diplomatic pressure and nerve wars rather than do anything that escalates military commitments. He will be under pressure to be seen not to retreat compared to Bush’s legacy, which will be a dampener for those within and outside US who hope that Obama will reverse many of the aggressive Bush moves.
For the subcontinent, Obama’s main strategic steps will be to reassure and to a certain extent increase cooperation with India mainly in the economic arena. Obama will also see to it that Indian regimes are not penalized at the elections by not taking aggressive retaliatory measures against Pakistan. Obama’s tactic will be to increase public visibility of military collaboration with India, and a declared programme of strengthening defence capabilities of India, and maybe even some kind of enhanced NATO type guarantee of alliance/protection in case of third party aggression. Similarly Obama will see to it that any Pakistani regime is not penalized by the people, by holding off India from POK. If India can bargain here properly, it can wrangle out an agreement to station troops on the eastern border of Afghanistan as part of a strategy of anti-terror and disruption of Taleban supply lines to the POK.
The key here again will be to stabilize rather than expand. This is here where Obama and US policy will begin to unravel. The situation in the Afghan+Pakistan front needs expansion and dynamic rather than stabilization. Stabilization of control would mean the beginning of loss of initiative on NATO part and the turning point of the campaign. The reason static war would be disastrous for the US, is because of the peculiar ground situation. So far the anti-US forces have been fighting Chinese Red army style mobile warfare. Such war style can only be matched by continuous positional movement and encirclement of mobile warriors. As soon as this movement is lost, the mobile warriors gain advantage. For now, in an unfamiliar and unaccustomed territory, positional static NATO can be picked off at ease by its opponents.
Obama’s concentration on economic affairs out of necessity, is likely to lead to less stress on foreign affairs that are seen to be expensive and without direct long term benefits. This in turn is likely to lead to less clarity on strategic military objectives, and a corresponding confusion in the military command over operations. It will not be as if Obama himself will be directly responsible, but his preoccupation with internal affairs and priority to world economic manipulation will lead to a neglect of military expansion and therefore adoption of stop-gap stabilization tactics. Obama will try to get India onboard for the US economic recovery programme, and formulate joint policies to counter China. Strategically, this can benefit the entire Indian subcontinent, especially those economies in a position technologically and educationally to benefit from such US-India relationship – especially India, Bangladesh and SriLanka. But this will also be a great opportunity for India to push through in strategic initiatives of its own about the central Asian republics. India can shrewdly play around to force US acceptance of Indian military presence, if India offers to provide substantial military and economic help directly to the Afghan government. Most diplomatic pressures are only effective when the other party realizes that the pressurizing party will go ahead and do something anyway – and that it is better to join in before it is too late to appear to be a reliable “friend”.
US current needs coincides with India’s on the economic front, primarily against Chinese capture of world markets, and I think there will be no problems in the evolution of collaboration here. But overall this economic movement will subtly and in a very complex way, leave its mark on the military/political strategic scenario, whereby the US and the NATO will ultimately retreat from the Afghan front. This is both a danger as well as an opportunity for India, if it has the correct leadership.
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