Army
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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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 )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 )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 )The dream of Teheran : nightmare for Iran
So at last we see the real reason behind getting B. Hussein Obama elected US president – the calculation by the power elite of USA was to use Obama to try and divide the Muslim world into as many fractures as possible. Construct “moderate” versus “extremist”, “modernizing” versus “retrogressive”, etc. Iran is the first gamble after the “coming out” debutante speech of extending a warm handshake to “Islam”. But the Iranian attempt was too quick. Is Obama in a hurry? Or is the US power elite in too much of a hurry? The danger is the possibility of a wave of reaction that the US simply cannot fathom, and will escape from as quickly as possible leaving the hapless neighbours and caught-in-betweens who cannot jump on to the evacuation flight.
In countries like Iran, urban “revolutions” against religious or theological establishment cannot sustain themselves at this stage of economic organization, unless these are staged and led by the armed forces. The rural Iran is still solidly behind the Ayatollahs. If Mousavi and Khatami are not careful they will simply serve as agents for liquidation of a generation of urban youth.
If we go back to Napoleon’s period, then there would be many examples – for example all the urban uprisings in Europe in the 1830’s and the widespread ones of 1848 – all of which failed or actually led to being defeated and creating conditions for more despotic or dictatorial regimes. The Chinese communist uprising is another example whose urban uprising phase failed horribly with the spectacular example of the Shanghai massacre. The crucial factor in urban uprisings is whether the army joins in or stays neutral or not. Consider the Afghan “revolutions”, the Iraqi -earlier Marxist revolution and then the Baathist “revolution”, same for the Iranian ones. Significantly, in Afghan, Iran, Iraq, no revolution/palace coup/ urban putsch succeeded without backing and involvement from the clergy and rural theologian networks.
Iran is no longer going to be pro-west. What the younger Iranians are looking for is a greater freedom to pursue modern “happinesses”. They will remain strongly nationalistic and in fact any overthrow of the Ayatollahs will lead to a stronger nationalistic reconstruction of the foundational values of Iran as a replacement for the “binder” of Ayatollahaic Islamic authority.
The Islamic clergy already senses the change in the mood of the younger generations and they have begun to hedge their bets as Islamic theologians always do historically. They try to dissociate in factions away from established but doomed or unpopular Islamic regimes so that the theologians ultimate hold on the population does not come under attack. In time they will grow back again in military and political power if they manage to survive with their ideological “sanctity” undamaged.
The pivotal changing years in Iranian history in the modern period have been 1919 (post WWI British+US penetration and disruption of Ahmad Shah’s hold – leading to the Pahlavi coup in 21-25), 1949 – the post WWII start of the replacement by a younger Pahlavi more likely to be open to western manipulation – leading to the upheaval of 51-53, 1979 – the Iranian “revolution” led again by “modernizers” and “leftists” giving vent to popular generational anger against the Shah’s regime and its western counterparts but taken over by the Ayatollahs because of their wider support base in the countryside and among rural populations. This was followed by the typical period of crisis from 1981-1983 when Iran won the psychological warfare with USA with perhaps secret Reagan help but forced to compromise and get mauled by Iraq. This 30 year generational cycle comes back in 2009. So the processes that started post WWI will start unravelling in the next 30 years.
Countries in the region like India should cultivate “nationalism” in Iran, and be firmly on the side of democracy. They should look for future populations who are going to increasingly take over the country and not bank calculations solely on the short term adhoc approaches so typical of the regimes in Indian politics. The US influence in the Caspian region is on the wane. Does the “West” want Russia and China to step in completely and fill in the blanks? A cautious but firm ideological commitment to see democracy in Iran cannot harm the “western” or Indian interests. It holds out hopes to the future generations, but it does not immediately threaten the Ayatollahs. But any country in the region or in Europe should be very very careful about being seen by the Iranians to be dealing with the “devil” – that is something that will be remembered.
As I have mentioned before, when popular support indicates anger turning against state authority which in classical Islamic terms is a fusion of theologian+military+executive, then the theologians typically split themselves into factions. One or more factions then disassociate themselves from the existing setup, and allow a change of faces. This is done so that the basic image of the theologians and the theology itself is not delegitimized. In time, when heads cool, the theologians can crawl back to their supreme seats of power.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 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 )Future scenario for the Indian subcontinent – 5 : Malegaon blast investigations – a turning point for the Right and fatal blunder for Centre-Left
It is unimaginable how the wise-old political wizards of the Centre-Left in India committed this monumental blunder of allowing the Mumbai ATS to suddenly discover “Hindutva terror” before regional elections and the general elections peeping in the horizon. The key figures chosen for media highlighting and vilification are significant : a mid-ranking male army officer and female religious activist. We can speculate whether these figures were deliberately chosen to make a plausible story (sourcing of explosives and technology from “military” experience and ideological motivation from religious activist – a “female” terrorist is also a scoring point in favour of Islam as apologists can shout – look, at least in India Islam is so good as not to make females into terrorists, and therefore how bad the “Hindus” are! the more this drama goes on the more it becomes too convenient a political scoring point for the Centre-Left). We can speculate if it was done to reassure Muslim voters that the Centre Left was doing all it could to demonize the “Hindu” and therefore the Muslims should vote overwhelmingly in their favour. However I am less concerned with motivations if any for concocting such a storyline – for as the future will show, the Centre Left loses the game in all possible ways.
It will not matter if the “Hindu” accused really were or were not involved in the blasts. Any calculation by the Centre Left of using this “case” to serve one or more of the three main possible objectives (1) in regional/provincial elections to gain Muslim votes (2) demonize the “Hindu” and make it embarrassing for the common “Hindu” to vote from community and cultural affiliations (3) to distract the general and rising anger in non-Muslim populations of India about the de-facto helplessness or lack of political will in the Centre Left whose only strong stands against Islamic Jihadi terrorism excel in the volubility of their media statements, will prove futile. The Centre Left completely fails to understand the long-term shift in the general non-Muslim Indian consciousness towards a open recognition of the extremely retrogressive and traumatic role of Islam on the subcontinent (this recognition remained deeply submerged but dormant under official educational propaganda and patronage of Islam compared to denigration and demonization of the Hindu starting officially approved school textbooks which detail plenty of “evils” of “Hinduism” but none whatsoever in the revealed traditions).
By picking on a “Hindu” armyman and a “Hindu” woman religious activist, ironically the Centre Left will realize soon what cultural icons they have created for the “Hindu” – symbols that will only gain stature if the government manages to prove them “guilty”. To the common Hindu mind, if they really carried out the “blasts”, they were for the first time in decades doing something in revenge or retaliation against persistent Islamic terror that started within India through Pakistan sponsored Talebani Jihad in Kashmir – in the face of what will appear to be consistent failure by the Centre Left to protect non-Muslims of India from Jihadi Sadism. This is the same strategy of “retaliation” from the population in a situation that appears to continue to provide relentless terror and repression “tolerated” or “indirectly protected” by a national government that was followed by the Palestine “Liberation” movement against Israel and was romantically lauded by the Centre Left for decades. This has proven quite successful for the Palestinians with Israel politically cornered, and the basis for this success, the gain of political legitimacy in the the minds of populations who had felt helpless and unprotected before has every likelihood of being repeated in the arena of social consciousness in India.
It is this tremendous blunder by the Centre Left in failing to read the basic social trend that will cause them to regret this incident in the decades to come. The Right of course in the future will come to realize this as a turning point that indicates the fundamental changes taking place in Indian society that ultimately will lead in its favour.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Future scenario for the Indian subcontinent – 3 : Bangladesh and the planned regime yet to come
Now that the Election Commission “of” (the technical and formal legal separation of the Election Commission as a completely independent entity can have some legal complications in the future as part of the broader problem of legitimacy of entire “reformation” process) the “interim” “Caretaker” government of Bangladesh has announced a tentative schedule for the December parliamentary elections, the question of the nature of the future regime comes up. The case of this “regime to be” is of crucial significance as an indication of how Islamic politics in South Asia is going to transform itself in the near future.
As I have speculated before, the elections will take place only if the two major groupings in Bangladeshi elite can be coerced into agreeing to the long term agenda of the military and its international allies – which come under two major mutually dependent but antagonistic international groups – the predominantly Christian, white industrial export oriented West, and the Islamic oil-gas exporters of the Middle East (historically no less colour based racist compared to Europe – for this it is enough to look at the Arabic and Persian Islamic chroniclers who inevitably refer to the people of Indic origin abusively and derisively as “black faced Hindoo”, or are always very conscious of “white” or “black” colour in the Indians and write appreciatively of “white” whenever they see them in an otherwise “dark” subcontinent – see Firishta, Biladuri, Masudi, and many others, especially the Arabic ones). The mutual dependence between these two international “blocks” (not homogeneous, they have their own internal conflicts, but here I refer to their block nature in terms of Bangladesh only) is over “energy” and “markets”, and the conflict is of course over “ideological domination” over the world (in both religions, historically at a practical implementation religion has always been very nearly indistinguishable from biological greed – i.e., religions simply justify and “legalize” taking over of the biological resources of the “others”).
The Awami League has shown its flexibility already (as it has done also on many occasions previously) by possibly agreeing to the terms and conditions which like many other such “agreements” before, will never be made public. As I have also speculated before, the two weapons of “persuasion” in this has most likely been (1) mediation by the West (which probably affected the change in the “mood” and “modus operandi” of the caretaker government over the last one year from aggressive deconstruction of the political apparatus to rehabilitation of the political apparatus) (2) the use of the trump card of the “Jamaat” – which typically is used by the military-feudal-business elite leadership to keep the “anti-Urdu non-Jihadist Bengali” elements in check.
The case of the BNP is more interesting. I have already written about my assessment that the elite and its social support heavily leans towards Islamic authoritarianism, and they remain the overall dominant force in Bangladesh politics. This ideological leaning should not be confused with formal party affiliations, as its elements will appear all across the political spectrum with the exception of perhaps the extreme Left. One of the features of any society where Islam has managed to finish off “almost all ideological opponents” is a distinctive feature of the mass psychological acceptance of “authority” endorsed by the Islamic theologians- which is consistent with the basic tenor of the Quranic and Hadithic “revelation” as a submission to some authority – and inevitably to the personification of that authority. In the struggle for claim over this authority the theologians always appear to have been stronger, and have always managed to keep Islamic societies closer to their own fossilized mindset that lives in the 7th century Arabian desert. Because Islam cannot deal with the complexity of modern science and technologically complex socio-economic superstructure, the theologians whose sole power derives from the existence of as near a copy as possible to the society of the prophet of Islam, the theocracy is ruthless in taking societies back as far as possible to their primitive ideal.
In the background of the history of Bangladesh, all this implies the incomplete Islamization of the region stemming from the late intrusion of Islam into the heartlands of Bengal, and the protracted struggle between predatory Islam and the non-Muslims as evident in numerous legends (which sometimes reveal the military resistance and the essentially initial military subjugation of mainly non-violent Buddhist groups followed by supposedly “peaceful” conversion as per modern propaganda – typically in modern renditions of the “spiritual” conquest by Islamic preachers and adventurers the chronicled accounts of initial military raids are either completely avoided or when undeniable are “mumbled” away as “defensive” actions, and the historically significant clues as to the presence of some major Islamic state-military machine in close proximity is also suppressed) and significant clues in the British censuses which indicate slightly less than half the population still remaining non-Muslim at the beginning of British Imperialist presence. This “incomplete” Islamization of Bengal was always a problem with the theocracy of Islam and their closely linked patrons in Islamic state machinery. To a certain extent, with the help of the British, and the political dishonesty of the Nehru-Gandhi axis, they managed to revive the classic Jihadi Islamic strategy of ethnic cleansing of non-Muslims to capture land, wealth and women of non-Muslims, during the partition of India to create Pakistan, and thereafter manipulate social conditions to ensure that non-muslims continue to “emigrate” out of Islamic Bengal.
The process having accelerated during the buildup to the Liberation War of 1971, (exact proportions of non-Muslims raped, murdered or forced to flee as refugees compared to overall estimates are never concretely discussed, and typically “patriotically” dismissed as all part of overall Bangladeshi casualties implying that any further demographic analysis which might reveal the basic Islamic Jihadi bias against non-Muslims would be “unpatriotic”), Bangladesh’s elite cleverly managed three basic objectives (1) reducing the number of non-Muslims (the census revelations of missing Hindu populations are indirectly blamed on the “unpatriotic” India leaning mindset of “Hindus”) and gaining their lands (the Enemy Property Act which was practically a license for Muslims to take over “Hindu” property without any compensation enacted by Pakistan was retained for a long time in independent Bangladesh) (2) manage to exclude West Pakistani elite from exploitation of Bangladesh resources which the elite could now control for their own private profit through the achievement of an independent nation (3) reestablish more direct ties and connections with the Islamic heartland as an independent nation without having to go through the regimes of Pakistan.
We have to remember that a substantial portion of Bangladeshi elite are ethnically descended from pre-Islamic non-Muslim elite, who as late as the waning Mughal period were converting into Islam to preserve their political and feudal existence. This is also evident in the anthropological composition and appearance of the spectrum of elite leadership – even if they have high flying claims of descent from “illustrious” Arabic or Persian Islamic roots. The fundamental concern of this elite is to hold on to power and hence overall control of exploitation of resources. There could also be a basic continuity of cynical Brahmanical priestly theocracy under the new garb of Islam which provides lots of opportunities to reduce embarrassment for evidence of personal biological greed compared to pre-Muslim ideologies. The incomplete Islamization has paradoxically given rise to this peculiar situation of polity in Bangladesh – it has transformed Brahminical theocratic exploitation (the Brahmins could have been eager converts as they were numerically weaker compared to the Buddhists, and could have found a better excuse for their greed in Islamic formalism) into a Islam justified feudal mindset and claims of authority. Having separated from the main subcontinental culture with violence, the elite needs the support of the Islamic power centres of Saudi Arabia and Iran, to maintain the predominance of Islamic theology which would allow a more natural submission of the non-elite to that of the elite – this comes out in the frequent defiant admissions of favouring “Islam” or “refusal to take action against Islamic theocracy” by spokespersons of the military-elite “caretaker” governments as well as “past” leaders from the military.
In the mindset of the elite, the key to holding onto state power is the deepening of Islamic authority under their political control, as otherwise the cultural tendencies of the Bengali’s (like their non-Muslim brothers in West Bengal) would lead them to experimentation of the most radical of modern ideologies which usually spells disaster for what one Bangladeshi author has translated as “timber mullah’s” (I would rather translate it as “dimwit”).
The Jamaat has been re-kitted out in formal political clothes that would make it less embarrassing for the military political elite in its international posturing towards the West, and promptly adopted into the political process. This is the key force of Islamic theocracy, and will never be abandoned by the elite. It will be used to keep those in favour of modernization and weakening of theocracy in the left-of-centre/centre as in the fourteen party alliance around the AL, under pressure. It will also be used to bring around the remaining right wing of the elite’s broader social basis of support based around the BNP into the agenda of the military leadership. The BNP leadership may rail its rhetoric against the “current government” in field “rabble-rousing” for political credibility, but incredible as it may sound, it is the wee little tail of Jamaat that will wag the dog of the right wing “led” by the BNP.
With consistent and persistent state patronage and extensive foreign support, Islamic theocracy has substantial hold on the common Bangladeshi now. It will be the height of political stupidity to assume that the Right has taken a knocking and will come out the worst in the “elections”. The campaign of the sector Commanders against the Jamaat and the existing “Rajakars” will not be very successful, as Jamaat’s role has been carefully politically rehabilitated by the military and allied political elite. Unless the West has worked out a compromise with the Saudis, to include and give a share of power to the AL, the military will actually ensure that the forces “centred” around Jamaat will win the elections to form the new regime.
This regime will be characterized by a strengthened Islamic theocracy, greater role of Islam in the long term internal and international policies, greater indirect military support, involvement in, control and mobilization of the Islamic forces, long-term eventual rise of Jamaaat as the dominant political force, greater penetration of the influence of the theologians into academics and the media and overt and covert liquidation of cultural entities deemed to be a threat to absolute eventual control by the Islamic forces (more of incidents like vandalization of the statue of the “integrative” “syncretic” Baul “emperor” will take place without any state retribution).
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Future scenario for the Indian subcontinent – 2 : Bangladesh and transformation of Islam
In my previous post I have written about the current political situation in Bangladesh, where I have expressed my serious concerns about the role of the army in consolidation of the Saudi theologian led radicalization of Bangladeshi Islam, and Islam’s agenda for the subcontinent as a whole. But in the introduction I have also promised visions of revolutionary and positive changes for the “immensely significant periphery”. In this post we will look at the potential for “positive changes” for Bangladesh.
Historically, Bengal (the undivided province) was one of the richest areas of the subcontinent, with a thriving agrarian and “industrial” economy – with records and evidence for a flourishing trade link with Egypt, South East Asia, as well as the Roman empire, in commodities like sugarcane molasses, cotton and fine cotton textiles. The province was sufficiently rich to support independent Sultanates against the nominal control of the Delhi Sultanate, and whenever the central-Northern Indian empires weakened, this tendency of the region to secede politically revived. The same pattern emerged when the Mughal empire weakened, with the Subahdars, and the Nawabs emerging as semi-independent rulers of the region (the highly emotional claim in Bengali literature of the “last independent” Nawab is fallacious – technically and formally, the Nawabs were “vassals” of the Mughal emperors, and Siraj was not the last Nawab either, as he was “legally” followed by Mir-Jafar and Mir Qasim who were “formally” endorsed by the Mughal emperor). The revenue and the products of the province supported and provided a substantial portion of the income of Aurangzeb, towards the beleaguered dusk of his reign.
Bengal was also the first rich Indian plum in the East India Company’s pocket, whose looting of the province and its economy is far better recorded (and less suppressed than the records of destruction and denudation under Islamic rulers). The cumulative effect of Islamic looting for 600 years and British looting for 200 years could be seen in the Bengal famine of 1943 – as official records indicate that by this period, this once rich, net exporter province had become a net importer of its staple food -rice, and any obstruction in the flow of such imports could land up Bengal in severe famine. The previous notorious large scale famine of 1769 can be tied up very well with extreme taxation at the hands of tax-farmers employed by the Company, but once the tax regime normalized the province regained its vitality to a certain extent, although it never regained its pre-Mughal or pre-Islamic prosperity. The extent of Mughal and Sultanate period extraction and impoverishment of Bengal is well attested to by foreign travellers, [see my series on How Islam came to India…economic decline], but systematic British exploitation brought Bengal to its knees.
After Partition from India, Bangladesh was virtually treated as a semi-colony by west Pakistan, and the issue was partly a motivator for the independence movement. Even after independence and a tremendous growth in its productive capacity, population pressure has ensured that Bangladesh is still crucially dependent on imports of essential commodities from its neighbours, and mainly from it’s supposed nemesis-India. The main export earnings of Bangladesh comes from its historical main commodity of export – cotton textiles. Since the ethnic and cultural (in spite of religious divides) composition of Bangladesh is essentially similar to that of neighbouring Indian province of West Bengal, we should expect cultural biases in favour of intellectual and technological achievement. Thus with proper modern and widely accessible scientific and technological education, Bangladesh can achieve the potential it originally enjoyed before the advent of Islam or the British.
While most of Indian populations have had greater success with modern education and technological elevation, the main obstruction in the progress of Bangladesh has been the grip of Islam over its society. On the one hand Islam prevented the majority of Bangladeshi populations from joining the secular and modernizing trends within British India, and led directly to their subservience to Pakistani exploitation without any benefits of modernization. On the other hand Islam of the Arabic version had never had it easy with the ingrained traditions, beliefs and culture of the Bangladeshis – and nowhere in the subcontinent are syncretic tendencies between Islam and Hinduism so vividly apparent as in Bangladesh. This second largest community of Islam remained quite consciously distant from the Wahabi versions of Islam and the Islamic theologians are forced to tolerate the indignities of hearing the appearance and peaceful coexistence of Hindu Krishna or Radha together with calls towards the God of Islam in the ever-popular songs of Hason Raja (descendant of converted Hindu elite).
With the realignment of Bangladesh elite under pressure from the army to the Islamic axis, this struggle between syncretic Bengali Islam and the revivalist, orthodox, and extremely retrogressive Sunni Wahabi Jihadi Islam has been gaining virulence since the formation of Bangladesh. The Islamic Jihadi theologians are quite worried that left to its own wiles, Bangladeshi Islam will forget the Arabic Islam’s agenda of Jihadi expansion and total liquidation of all non-Muslim cultures. This is the reason there has been increasing flows of funds to strengthen the Islamic propagation networks of the madrassahs and maqtabs or “charitable institutions” – the net effect of all such efforts being visible in the increasing militancy of overground and underground Islamic organizations in Bangladesh. In spite of all propaganda as to the early “peaceful Sufi” converters of Hindu Bengalis, the general pattern on the subcontinent is also found with Sufi or other modes of conversion – that their “huge” success almost always coincides with the presence of Islamic military forces in close proximity – and just like other Sufis, the more famous Sufis of Bengal show fondness for direct military action to win converts or wives.
If the Bangladesh army’s command core, and the elite whose networks give support to this core, can be prevented in this agenda of Wahabi Islamization of Bangladesh, the natural tendencies of this emotional and spirited community will move against Islamic retrogression – the socio-cultural aspects of Arabic Jihadi Islam being completely alien to this more diverse, productive, and flexible Bengali culture. Bangladesh can realize its full intellectual, economic and technological potential only if it is no longer burdened with Islam – the creed that most violently suppresses all “quests”, “quests” that are the key towards progress. Modernization and technological upgrading of the productive forces would also bring in a fundamental change in the historical dynamic that at least partly fuelled Islamic conversions – the hunger for land in a highly productive agrarian economy, that forced Hindu elite to convert to preserve land ownership in the face of Turko-Afghan or Mughal aggression, or tempted the landless to convert and use the Jihadi sanctions to grab land from non-Muslims. In the process of this national redirection, such a liberation from the authoritarianism of retrogressive Islam, will also transform or redefine “Islam” as represented by the Bangladeshi Muslims, and could be a way forward or an example for other Islamic communities not under direct and total control of Wahabi Sunni Islamic theologians.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Islamophiles intensify campaign to consolidate Islamic penetration of the Indian state apparatus
In the wake of the recent Delhi blasts, and the encounter in high-Muslim density part of Delhi, close to a well-known mosque, an “Islamic” university, and the office or headquarters of most of the known Islamic organizations, Indian media shows indications of the revival of a persistent campaign to increase the recruitment of Muslims into all the branches of Indian security forces – the formal logic being given is a recommendation of a report prepared by a committee formed and commissioned by the UPA government to look into the “status of minorities”. On the face of it the recommendation appears sound and logical – make the representation of the Muslims in the security forces proportionate to their representation in the population. With any other religion, this need not have been much of a problem – but with Islam in perspective this is indeed a huge problem. Historically the experience of Muslims as defenders of Indian territories against foreign armies or forces dominated by Muslims or inspired by Islamic Jihad – has been appalling. The Thaparite school of Indian history picks up on a couple of textual claims of apparent participation of “Arabs” in the defence of Indian territory against “Turuskas” in an attempt to extend this to the claim of a society wide phenomenon.
Historically we find records of significant populations of settled Islamic traders, deep inside “Hindu” territories especially near important commercial, political, and cultural centres [Buddhist university townships] which are later on targets of surprise military attacks by Muslims with surgical precision. Ibn Asir mentions explicitly in his Kamil-ut-Tawarikh, that there were “Mussalmans in the country of Banaras” from the days of Sabuktigin.[Elliot and Dowson]. Muhammad Aufi also speaks of Bahram Gur of Iran coming to Hindustan under the guise of a Muslim merchant [although a historically unlikely event, as this particular name is given to Bahram V, a pre-Muslim Persian ruler]. When Bakhtyiar appeared in Nudiya people thought that he was a Muslim trader come to sell horses – implying that visits to this old Hindu city on the banks of the Ganges in modern West Bengal, by Muslim traders was quite common and that Muslim military leaders were in the habit of using this acceptance to disguise themselves for spying or raiding or surprise attacks. Taranath mentions settlement of “Turuskas” (at this period a generic name for Muslims) in the AntarVedi or Ganges-Yamuna Doab. He also significantly mentions that during the time of Lavasena and his successors and prior to the invasions and destruction of the Buddhist university townships of Odantapuri and Vikramasila the number of “Turuskas” had significantly increased. Muhammad Habib in his introduction to Elliott and Dowson suggests that the far-flung campaigns of Mahmud Gaznavi would have been impossible without an accurate knowledge of trade routes and local resources of India, which he probably obtained from Muslim merchants. Many Arab narratives [including that of Al Beruni, who had been allowed to learn Sanskrit and copy and translate Hindu texts] contain accurate accounts of land-routes in India with minute details of the distances between cities and their products and other strategic details whose context shows that these were supplied mostly by Muslim merchants who had visited these places in person and recorded these details back at home accurately for future use by their fellows.
Amir Khusrau writes that under Jalauddin Khalji (1290-96), after a battle, “whatever live Hindu fell into the hands of the victorious king was pounded to bits under the feet of the elephants. The Musalman captives had their lives spared”.[Miftah-ul-Futuh (Aligarh text, 1954), p. 22 -za hindu harche amad zinda dar dast/bazere pae pilan khurd ba shikast/musalmanan-i-bandi gushta ra baz/ bajan bakhshi chu isa gasht damsaz]. Malik Kafur, the notorious general of Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316), and a Hindu-woman-lifter extraordinaire, while on his expeditions in South India, spared the lives of Muslims fighting on the side of the Hindu Rai as they deserted to his army [Lal, Khaljis, p. 250].
North Indian Muslim armies, under Muslim rulers, have faced foreign invasions by other Muslim armies, and have been only successful once – that under Alauddin Khalji against one Mongol attack. The Delhi Sultanate lost miserably under Ibrahim Lodi to Babur, who was invited and supported by an influential Multani Muslim administrator. The Mughals lost abjectly to the Persian looter Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali, or became pensioners of the British before being humiliatingly hanged or exiled by the British. After the initial reports of collaboration by a few North Indian Hindu rulers with Mahmud, or Muhammad Ghori, we do not hear of any further collaboration by the Hindus with invading forces. On the other hand, even when they had not been in control of the state and its resources for centuries, and ruthlessly exploited and decimated by Islamic Jihadi onslaught, they have tried to muster forces to resist foreign invasions when the relevant Muslim ruler of northern India gave up easily – Babur met his serious opposition in the Rajputs led by Sanga, Akbar met his first serious opposition in Himu, it was the Marathas that undertook to fight the Persian adventurers, while the Nizam of Hyderabad – the ancestor of the dynasty that later patronized the Rajakars in Hyderabad – the Islamic fundamentalist group that carried on looting, abduction of Hindu women and murders for a sufficiently long period to provide the Indian army the necessary excuse to annex this princely state, collaborated right from the beginning with the British.
Muslim dominated armies in India have a fundamental weakness, their ideology teaches them that they should prefer Muslims over “infidels”, in friendship, in social interactions, in loyalty and war – and that their ideological centre lies outside of India – in Arabia. Any religious ideology that has its centre outside the borders of India, and that believes in aggressive proselytizing – ultimately is a cover for imperialist ambitions of foreign nations. I have already predicted in my previous articles on the blasts, that the Islamic Jihadi Wahabi imperialists are getting panicked that if they do not accelerate the process of Islamization in India, it can get out of their hands, and that non-Muslim consolidation would outpace their efforts so that they can never hope to bring India under Islamic rule. Islamic forces have now sufficient backing and contacts within the general administration and political party structures that ensures protection of their religious agenda for India. They have been able to protect their Islamic agenda dissemination, and indoctrination through the Islamic educational systems and organizations, which in several areas have seen continuous growth in resources from foreign inputs, as well as indirect contribution from the Indian government such as persistent refusal to bring Muslim institutions under the tax net [unlike Hindu institutions] as well as public audit. Muslims insist on and protect their right for a separate civil law – something they usually deny in the core Islamic countries to Hindus, and in states like Kashmir they have even been able to get away with imposition of the Shariah law through the backdoor of the special-“status” state legislature. The Indian governments consistently protects Islam by choosing to or threatening to dismiss state governments that fail to protect “minority” rights even for a month, under Article 355 of the Indian Constitution, but has never used this to protect the rights of Hindus or Buddhists in Kashmir, when they were subjected to ethnic cleansing for years, when their women were abducted or raped, when their properties, their religious shrines, were destroyed and when they were being murdered – never, ever, in no instance did the Central government under various Congress regimes come out with even a strong statement. The remaining obstacle in Wahabi Islamic Jihadis eventual takeover of the nation is the fact that the security forces have remained strongly non-Muslim, and therefore as correctly “lamented” non-“secular” in composition – in India this means non-Muslim, as “secularism” practically translates into “Islamo-philia” in the Indian context. The few examples of Muslim majority units that remained loyal against the Pakistani forces in action during the 1965 war comes from a period before the rising strength and penetration of the Wahabi Islamic aggressive proselytization, and should not be used as self-lulling agent towards destruction of the non-Muslims.
If this campaign to increase Islamic proportion in the Indian armed forces succeeds, it will lead to a serious weakness in the ultimate defence of India as a functioning non-Islamic state – because the insidious propaganda that hides the violent agenda of Islam’s core principles for the non-Muslim population at large, while at the same time training and indoctrinating Muslim youth in its various madrassahs and cultural organizations to wait and prepare for the eventual military conquest of non-Muslims to appropriate their land, wealth and women, is accelerating, and sooner or later, such elements in the Army will collaborate with or defect to Pakistani or other Islamic invasions at opportune moments.
It is possible, that internal security systems, such as the police as well as various state security organizations have been very well aware of Islamic Jihadi activities and preparatory movements towards Islamic takeover of the country, but have been held back from taking action, by the Islamo-phile governments that have been at the centre of the Indian state. As previously proposed by me, the Islamic terrorists will act from bases in areas that have sufficiently high concentration of Muslims to provide social cover, but will carry out their terror in mixed areas within their geographical reach where non-Muslims are a majority, so that in any blast or public outrage, more non-Muslims are victims together with a few Muslims which can of course be accepted as necessary “costs of war”. The fact that the Indian Home minister, or his corresponding counterparts for the state of Delhi, had little or no foreknowledge or concurrent knowledge of the “Delhi” encounter, together with angry protests from the Muslim leadership in the area as well as leadership of so-called national level Muslim organizations that the police should have “consulted” local Muslim leadership before launching an “encounter”, implies that the police mounted this operation on extremely short notice and either did not have time or did not consider it safe to inform the “politicians”. It could be an indication that certain sections of the command of the security forces have already decided that that they can only tackle this “Islamic terror” by avoiding the politicians as far as possible, as the main motivations of the politicians are to protect “Islamic votes”. An insistence by the Islamo-philes to increase Muslim presence in the armed forces which have had to face the brunt of Jihad in Kashmir and elsewhere, will only lead to an increased politicization of the armed forces against such moves.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Some Indian Hindu’s need for the supreme and pure divine: the Army – always secular, and without any regional or ethnic bias
Recent comments from obvious Indian “Hindus” who think that any negative criticism of aspects of the functioning of the Indian Army is a critcism inspired by “blindly communal” feelings, prompted me to look into the apparent need in some Hindu minds to construct a supreme “divine”, an ultimate icon of reliability and “purity” making up for whatever the Hindu feels insecure about.
Let us look into the “secular” and “unbiased” aspects of the Indian Army, so fervently declared by VKDas and YamirB.
Recruitment Policy
The British East India Company created three ethnically mixed armies, one each in the three presidencies of Bengal, Madras and Bombay (Bengal Army was predominantly high-caste Hindus and Muslims of Oudh and Bihar). In the 1857 First Indian anti-British Uprising, majority of the Bengal Army rebelled or were pre-emptively disarmed, while the Madras and Bombay Armies remained mostly loyal, and fought with distinction against their rebellious counterparts. In contrast to the upper-caste Hindu and Muslim soldiers of the Bengal Army, Sikhs and other Punjabis, Garwalis and the Gurkhas in the same army actively fought for the British. Post rebellion, the British rewarded the Dogras, Garhwalis, Gurkhas, Pathans, and Punjabis- whether Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh- the so-called “martial races.” The martial races theory predates the mutiny, according to some historians according to which some Indian “races” (actually ethno-religious groups) such as the Dogras, Garhwalis, Gurkhas, Kumaonis, Marathas, Pathans and Punjabis (of all religious affiliation); Rajputs: as well as Hindustani, Deccani and Moplah Muslims make good soldiers (meaning they remain loyal to those who pay them above and any other considerations of religion, or nationality). The martial races could also have been constructed out of affinity with emerging British racism based on Caucasoid/White European physical body types. The recruitment to the army along constructed military qualities of certain groups was carried out from 1858 to 1939. The colonial British Indian army therefore formed along ethnic lines with Dogra, Garhwali, Gurkha, Jat, Kumaon, Mahar and Sikh regiments- the socalled “one class.” There were also “fixed class” units – a regiment or battalion having two to three classes, but with each of its subunits belonging to “one class”. Finally, there was the “mixed class,” comprising soldiers from different groups. The much smaller non-combatant supporting services were composed of men from all ethnic, caste and regional groups. Officers of this army were British, while Indians were admitted to the ranks only after world War I. Officer recruitment was based on social class and loyalty to the Raj.
Although large-scale recruitment of Muslim ethnic groups took place, there were no pure Muslim regiments – probably stemming from iconic role of the Mughal Badhsah in the Great Uprising and continued pan-Islamic intrigue with Afghans by sections of Indian Muslims. World War II in 1939 required relaxation of the martial races theory and led to increased the recruitment of soldiers from non-martial races because of the manpower shortage. After the end of WWII, there was some demobilisation and the policy of recruitment reverted to the pre-war patten.
The Indian National Congress criticized this policy as restrictive and discriminatory. Nirad C. Chadhuri (1935), an avowedly sympathetic writer towards British culture, argued that “a national army” recruited from all parts of the country will be “animated by a national spirit”. “It should be a self-contained fighting machine able to do without the help and guidance of foreigners and, above all, it should foster the military capacity of the whole nation and be directly related to it.” On 14 February 1947, the Secretary of Defence Ministry said in the Central Legislative Assembly that it was the government’s policy to do away with the distinction between martial and non-martial races in recruiting. Since the soldiers were already Indians, the nationalists demanded full “Indianization”- the opening of the officer level for the natives of India. During the partition, the British Indian army was still largely composed of soldiers of the “martial races” and junior officers of Indian origin, while the higher officers were all British. The army had 30-36% Muslims, 8% Sikhs, with the remainder predominantly Hindu, including Gurkhas, Indian Christians and Anglo-Indians.
In mid-August 1947, at independence, the British officers left the subcontinent. By the terms of partition, soldiers and officers of the Raj’s army were given the choice of joining the forces of India or Pakistan. Most of the predominantly Punjabi or Pathan Muslim soldiers chose Pakistan. But 215 Muslim commissioned officers and 339 VCOs (Viceroy’s Commissioned Officers, later called Junior Commissioned Officers), chose India, according to the Ministry of Defence. Among these were officers such as Brigadiers Muhammad Usman and Muhammad Anis Ahmad Khan, Lt. Col. Enayat Habibullah. Partition divided the Muslim nobility – Major Yunus of the influential Rampur aristocracy remained in India, while Sahibzada Yaqub KhanYaqub, chose Pakistan and became its foreign minister in the 80s.
A highly significant proof of the nationalism, and lack of regional, political or ideological bias of the post-Indpendence Indian Army as donated by the British to the Congress government was the refusal of the Army or the Defence ministries to absorb or restore the captured and surrendered soldiers of the Indian National Army (whose loyalty to the nation was vouched for by Nehru himself in his very emotional speeches before the angry mass sentiments in favour of the INA – but promptly obliterated from Nehruvian memory once the popular crisis passed) into the new Indian Army. Similar were the the treatment of the Indian Naval forces in 1948 who had mutinied against the British, and who were tricked by leaders of the stature of Gandhiji, and Nehru into surrendering to the British. Service records of those who had gone against the British were maintained to penalize them after Independence, whereas those who had remained loyal to the British were rewarded. One strange case here is ofcourse that of the WWII overseas Indian volunteers, who fought for the British in the African theatre as well as in the European theatre of the Allied invasions. It is probable that highlighting their case too much could have been an embarassment for the British, as even now, some British openly declare on public media that “they never heard of any f*** Pa.. or In.. of having fought in WWII – my [relative who was in the war] never saw any!”, and the loyal new “Indian government” obliged their “British friends”.
When India went to war against Pakistan over Kashmir in 1947 Brig. Muhammad Usman died fighting for India, earning him a posthumous gallantry award. A year later, during India’s military operation in Hyderabad, Operation Polo, about 700 Muslims left the army after it invaded Hyderabad. Maj.Gen. Muhammad Anis Ahmed Khan, who opted for India and was promoted to a Major-General, gained access to secret information and then retired voluntarily in 1955 and at once settled down in Pakistan, accepting a Pakistan government post. Organiser published the views of the former Indian Army Commander-in-chief Gen. K.M. Cariappa., that Muslim “Loyalty seems to be primarily to Pakistan. This is a crime unpardonable. This is also the impression of a large percentage of non-Muslim intellectuals in India. Here is the root cause for there being a none-too-happy feeling towards Muslims by a large percentage of the majority… This is understandable.” Raju Thomas, an American academic who interviewed army officers, found that “when the [India-Pakistan] war began in September 1965, a Muslim majority battalion of the Rajput Regiment stationed in the crucial Poonch sector of Jammu and Kashmir, far from being hastily withdrawn, was allowed to play its part in the execution of the army’s forward actions. According to several high-ranking Indian army officers, the fact that the battalion did not flinch and carried out its assigned role with considerable credit, sufficiently dispelled worry- at least within the military- about the loyalty of Indian Muslim soldiers.” However, Daljit and Katherine Singh, “were able to find not a single Muslim officer above the rank of a major-general occupying a responsible position of military command.”
In 1953, Nehru noted the absence of Muslims from the army in a communication addressed to the chief ministries, observing that “in our Defense Services, there are hardly any Muslims left… What concerns me most is that there is no effort being made to improve this situation, which is likely to grow worse unless checked.” Mohair Tyagi, the Minister of State for Defense told the Aligarh University Union that in 1953, “the percentage of Muslims in the armed forces forces, which was 32 percent at the time of partition” had come down to around 2 percent. Before independence, the Kashmir’s Dogra Maharaja’s Force consisted of Dogras and Sikhs, with some Muslims, but not Kashmir Valley Muslims, who were excluded from the state army as matter of policy. In October 1947, the State Force’s Muslim soldiers rebelled and joined the Pakistan-supported tribal invasion.
To be continued…..
Sources:
1. David Omissi, “Martial Races: Ethnicity and Security in Colonial Indian 1858-1939.” War & Society vol. 9, no. 1 (May 1991).
2. Indian Army Handbook. Muslims: P.Holland – Proyor, Mapplias or Moplahs, 1903;R.M. Bethan, Marathas and Dekhani Musalmans, 1908; R.T. Ridgreway, Pathans, 1910; W.F.G. Bourne, Hindustani and Musalmans of the Eastern Punjab, 1914; and Punjabi Musalmans, 1915; (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing).
3. Defence of India or Nationalization of Indian Army, Congress Golden Jubilee Brochure no.8 (Allahabad: All India Congress Committee, 1935).
4. Daljit and Katherine Singh, “The Military Elites and Problems of National Integration in India and Pakistan.” Indian Journal of Politics, vol. 7, 2 (1973);
5. K.M Cariappa, Organiser (15 August 1964).
6. Raju G.C Thomas and Bharat Karnad, ” The Military and National Integration in India, “in Ethnicity, Integration and the Military, Henry Dietz, Jerrold Elkin, and Maurice Roumani, eds. (Boulder, CO: West View Press, 1991).
The Indian Army warns agitating Hindus in Jammu – good job! Hindus are not the Chinese Army or Islamic Militants and they deserve to be warned.
The Indian Army has warned the agitating Hindus in Jammu, that it will “use force if necessary in Jammu”. This is quite consistent with past behaviour of the army and quite expected also. The Congress led UPA has now an overwhelming array of Islamic sympathisers, people who fell head over heels in love with “SIMI”, and with the Deobandi’s officially falling in line with token “appeasers”, the electoral “boot-licking” to try and gain “Muslim” votes has started. So the government has tried its ultimate weapon – the threat of army action. This is something it never dares against Muslims, but typically against forces deriving from within social groups and regions dominated by non-Muslims from which it had the greatest competition for leadership of the nationalist movement during colonial days – the predominantly Hindu Bengali communist extremists in the 70’s of Bengal which had given rise to Bose the nemesis of Nehru (of course as is typical with non-Muslim communities, there were Bengalis who were eager to lick Nehru’s boots), the predominantly Sikh Akalis in Punjab and the Sikh separatist movement in the 80’s, who during the Partition had given Nehru quite a lot of trouble in his confused dealings with Pakistan.
The methods employed aginst the Sikhs and the Bengalis were perfected during the first campaigns of liquidation of the Telengana communists in the 50’s and 60’s. The inventive genius of the Indian security forces including the army, in new methods of torture that can surely shame Marquis de Sade, were freely used. However the viciousness of this army always seems most effective against idealistic and more emotional youthful uprisings, which can be chewed up with delight. This brave army retreated before the Chinese Red army, and surrendered thousands of square kilometres of Indian territory. It could not recover these lands from enemy hands, neither did it recover lands seized by Pakistani tribals and army in Kashmir in the late 40’s. It has held on tenuously to the Siachen glacier, but has never been able to face up to Islamic militants with the viciousness it managed againts the Sikhs or the Bengalis.
The Indian army will never dare to challenge the Muslim militancy with the attitude it has done against the Hindus of Jammu. Because the Muslim militants will be more than its match in viciousness and non-standard or unethical combat. The Indian army’s top echelon comes from traditional non-Muslim military career families and aristocrats in India. The traditional non-Muslim military aristocracy of India has throughout Indian history been quite quick in capitulating before foreign invaders or allying themselves with the invaders. This alliance was most common with the Islamic invaders and the British, sometimes sealed with giving up daughters in marriage to Muslim rulers, and helping to liquidate uprisings against the British ( some of the descendants of the Maratha “aristocracy” raised by Shivaji as a liberating force or the descendants of the Rajput clans fighting against Mughal repression eagerly collaborated with the British in suppressing opposition to the British). These military aristocrats are most effective against the underclass in their own communities, but quite servile before Islam or Europeans – in other words, most servile to forces which surpass them in unethical warfare, or military ideologies that have no pretensions to humanitarian or ethical considerations (note that they are only effective against groups that have ideological qualms against using “any and every” combat activity – such as the Sikhs or the Naxals in the early phase of their uprisings).
One of the greatest weaknesses of modern democracies, is that the elite from a social class (parties can change) in such democracies can continue in power with the help of the ultimate threat that it can employ against its own underclass – the army maintained by the extraction of resources from this very same underclass through taxation. The weakness of the underclass stems from the fact that they are deliberately kept from having independent weapons or military hardware, so that the security forces or the army can be effectively unleashed against them if necessary. The strength of the US democracy comes from two fundamental aspects – (1) its complete right to free speech (2) its citizen’s rights to bear arms. The US will continue to lead in democratic forms before other “democracies” because of these two features (it may very well elect Barack Obama, a second generation non-white immigrant from an African country, its President). Militarily, the army can concentrate its efforts for defence only and being effective overseas as it knows that it can be quite costly in trying to deal with a full fledged armed rebellion by its own citizens.
In India, the army command should not make this mistake. Time and again, when the military aristocracy has failed its underclass, and sided with foreigners against indigenous cultures, it has given rise to new political forces and new military forces that overthrow hated regimes (the royalty of princely states must remember the boot-out they were meted out after independence – horse polo had to be replaced with bicycle polo). This should not be a preferable way for India to adopt and most unfortunate in terms of its economic development.
What is highly unusual is for the Army to issue directly an independent statement about using force against its own civilian population in the presence of a democratically elected government. Such statements are acceptable only from the elected government and not from the Army which is not directly accountable to the people. It is this grave departure from democratic practice that is significant to note. This has not happened before in independent India – all such threats typically came from the government about using the Army to quell internal problems. If the government has done this, then it only indicates the ultimate knee-jerk reaction of a frightened elite, and sets a dangerous precedence for the only remaining broad based and functioning democracy on the subcontinent.
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