Bangladesh
Bangladesh as second base of Jihad on subcontinent
Over the years, on this blog I have written several posts on Bangladesh and its role in Jihad on the subcontinent. On 1st July, jihadis confirming their Islamic credentials by shouting the customary laudatory exclamation by Muslims about their god, attacked the Holy Artesan Cafe near the posh Diplomatic Quarters of Dhaka, took hostages and stabbed/hacked to death most if not all of the 20 dead found later by the security forces. bbcnews
Abinta Kabir, Faraaz Hussein, and Tarushi Jain – three girls and all vacationing in Dhaka after their first year at US universities, were among those killed. While Abinta and Faraaz were Bangladeshi Muslims, Tarushi appears to be of Indian Hindu origins. Foreigners were separated from Bangladeshis and taken to an upper floor apparently for a Quran recitation test and torture. telegraph As per DailyStar Tarushi’s Indian origins is confirmed by the Indian Foreign ministers statements to the effect. The same site also states that Tarushi was a resident of Bangladesh but an Indian citizen, and her family had close personal friends among Dhaka’s Muslims such as her father Ziam Sanjeev’s friend Rashid Hassan Khan who has been quoted by The Daily Star. Daily Star also reports in greater details on the Quran test, (DailyStar)
“They (gunmen) did not behave rough with the Bangladesh nationals,” Reazul said quoting his victim son Hasnat. “Rather they provided night meals for all Bangladeshis.”“The gunmen were doing a background check on religion by asking everyone to recite from the Quran. Those who could recite a verse or two were spared. The others were tortured.”
The unexplained issue here is then how come the two Bangladeshi Muslim girls were also killed along with Tarushi? Did they fail the Quran test too, or they were executed for being male-guardian unaccompanied women in public? Or they were found out to have been in USA as students or no-longer Bangladeshi nationals? Given jihadi’s obsession with rape and sexual torture of captive women, were these women spared from rape before being tortured to death?
Over the recent years, AQIS, or Al Queda in Indian Subcontinent claimed the following as targeted victims of their jihad in Bangladesh: (Source: SiteIntel )
- 15/01/2013 Asif Mohiuddin, wounded, at Uttara, Dhaka
- 15/02/2013 Ahmed Rajiv Haidar, killed, Mirpur, Dhaka
- 24/06/2014 Rakib Mamun, wounded, Muhammadpur, Dhaka
- 30/09/2014 Ashraful Alam, killed, Savar, Dhaka
- 16/11/2014 Shafiul Lilon, killed, Binodpur, Rajashahi
- 26/02/2015 Avijit Roy, killed, Dhaka Uni area, Dhaka
- 30/03/2015 Washiqur Rahman, killed, Tejgaon, Dhaka
- 12/05/2015 Ananta Bijoy Das, killed, Sylhet city
- 07/08/2015 Niladri Chattopadhyay, killed, Goran, Dhaka
- 31/10/2015 Faisal Arifin Dipon, killed, Jagriti prakashani, Sahbag, Dhaka
- 31/10/2015 Ahmedur Rashid Tutul, wounded, Suddhaswar Prakashani, Lalmatia Dhaka
- 31/10/2015 Ranadip Basu, wounded, Suddhaswar Prakashani, Lalmatia Dhaka
- 31/10/2015 Tareque Rahim, wounded, Suddhaswar Prakashani, Lalmatia Dhaka
- 08/04/2016 Nazimuddin Samad, killed, Dhaka
- 26/08/2016 Xulhaz Mannan, killed, Dhaka
- 26/08/2016 Samir Mahbub Tanay, killed, Dhaka
IS or Islamic state (of Iraq and Syria) claimed the following as victims of their targeted jihad: (Source: SiteIntel )
- 28/09/2015 Tavella Cesare, killed, silenced weapons, Dhaka
- 03/10/2015 Kunio Hoshi, killed, firearms, Rangpur
- 24/10/2015 One killed, 80 wounded, Shiite site, explosive device, Husseini Dalan, Dhaka
- 04/11/2015 One killed, one wounded, Stabbing, Ashulia, Dhaka
- 19/11/2015 Piero Parolari, wounded, Silenced Pistol, Dinajpur
- 19/11/2015 Ruhul Amin, wounded, Silenced weapon, Dhaka
- 19/11/2015 Rahmat Ali, killed, Unspecified mode, Kawnia Rangpur
- 26/11/2015 One killed, 3 wounded, Machine gun, Bogra
- 26/12/2015 One killed, at least 3 wounded, suicide bomber, 1 attacker, Ahmedia mosque, Rajshahi
- 07/01/2016 Samir Al-Din, killed, stabbing, Jhinaidah
- 08/02/2016 Tarun Dutta, killed, unspecified mode, Gaibandha
- 21/02/2016 Jogeshwar Roy, killed, sharp weapons, Panchagarh
- 14/03/2016 Hdifh Abdul Razzaq, killed, stabbing, Jhinaidah
- 22/03/2016 Hussein Ali Sarkar, killed, unspecified mode, Kurigram
- 23/04/2016 Rezaul Karim Siddique, killed, machete, Rajshahi.
The reactions to the attack have been predictable.
Begum Khaleda Zia, the leader of the opposition BNP, while “gravely” condemning the incident, she apparently declared it to be “an outcome of the government’s undemocratic mentality that has been turned into an autocratic rule”. She held the government responsible for such an attack, and blamed the emergence of militancy and such “bloodstained incident” as “the outcome of the prevailing oppressive rule of the government”. (DailyStar) Thus Khaleda carefully avoided finding the root problem in the Islamic foundations of the nation and its society and its continuously maintained pace of Islamisation through riots, forced conversions, enforced exiles, rape and abduction of women, and alienation from land and turned it all into a blame game on her political rivals.
Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister, on the other hand thought that it was a “vested quarter [which] wanted to establish Bangladesh [as] a dysfunctional state keeping hostage innocent people. “They’ve taken a path of terrorism after having failed to win the hearts of people through the democratic process”. She blamed this same alleged “quarter” as “pushing the soft-hearted youths and children to the path of destruction confusing them in the name of religion”. It can be inferred that here she is referring to her rivals in national politics of which BNP is the most dominant electorally and the now somewhat disgraced (from trial and execution of their 1971 time war-crimes accused leaders) Jamaat-e-Islami.
Hasina further states “The peace-loving people of Bangladesh won’t allow the perpetuators to materialise their strategy. We‘ll resist their conspiracy at any cost taking the people of the country with us…We’re committed to protecting at any cost the sovereignty of Bangladesh that was earned at the cost of martyrdom of 30 lakh and sacrifice of two lakh mothers and sisters.”
However, the society of Bangladesh is part of the same society that stood behind Muslim League in the lead up to Partition riots and Noakhali genocide, and the general ethnic cleansing of Hindus by forced exile, land-grab, rape, abduction of women. Its the same society that split into two rival contestants for power during the lead up to independence in 1971, with a large contingent of locals helping and participating in the rapine of the Pakistani army. (See my earlier post on this https://dikgaj.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/sayedees-jamaat-e-islami-shows-how-islam-actually-spread-in-india-or-for-that-matter-in-arabia-too/).
Post independence, one half of Bangladesh polity – which by its length of occupation of state power, appears to be the more dominant faction, that represented by the BNP, rehabilitated the jihadis of 1971. The atrocities on Hindus and even Buddhists continued post-independence and the trend only has been more spectacularly splashed in the media recently due to the militant groups own propaganda and greater reach of the internet. (See another earlier post of mine on this: dikgaj on Bangladesh : counterstrategy). Hasina’s raising the issue of “sovereignty” is peculiar as its typically raised by Bangladeshis as a dark hint of alleged Indian eye on its territory and sovereignty. Possibly this was a diversionary tactic to prevent Indian reaction at popular level against the increasingly high profile targeting of Hindus in Bangladesh.
Hasina apparently addressed those “who are misguiding youths and children and patronising this” by claiming “Islam is the religion of peace. Stop killing people in the name of Islam; don’t blemish it with such incidents.” She also urged guardians to give proper education to their children and keep watch on them so that they cannot get derailed. Interestingly she does not explain why Islam is so susceptible to derailment.
Another group of so-called security “expertise” is trying to say that the violence was due to the competition between IS and AQS for base, recruits, and resources. In a sense they support my contention in my blogpost (dikgaj on ’71 blunder )
Indira Gandhi scored a tactical brilliance in 1971, but a strategic blunder when she helped an independent Bangladesh to form. This independent nation immediately showed its fangs of islamism, has continued to expel Hindus, abduct rape and enslave Hindu women, and welcomed all possible transnational anti-India and anti-Hindu forces. As and when Pakistan falls, this nation will provide an alternative base for jihadis to restart their movement.
What is the ground reality of Bangladeshi Islam that will increasingly jihadise the country on top of its latent Islamism and its foundations in jihad against Hindus and Buddhists?
Bangladesh hosts a number of transnational Islamic networks, and the second largest gathering of Islamic world takes place under a Tablighi Jamaat inspired and maintained so-called “world Istema”. Both Awami League and BNP led successive governments, seem to have warmly welcomed the Tablighi gathering with enthusiastic state involvement in its arrangements. Maulana Mohammad Ilyas established Tablighi Jamaat in 1926 to spread Deobandi Islam as a missionary line to reconvert the Muslims, who according to Tablighi notions ‘have gone astray’. The movement was in fact from the beginning considered as an extension of Deobandi movement’s preaching and proselytizing arm. ( Fred Burton and Scott Stewart, “Tablighi Jamaat: An Indirect Line to Terrorism”, Stratfor Global Intelligence, January 23, 2008, Burton and Stewart ).
Tablighi Jamaat is now a global network and as Furnish elaborates (Furnish)
it does promulgate a literalist reading of the Qur’an and strict emulation of Islam’s founder, Muhammad–both of which are problematic. Not only are the “sword,” or jihad, verses of the Qur’an numerous–numbering some 164 by one count[26]–but under the doctrine of naskh, “abrogation,” they supersede all of the Qur’an’s apparently peaceful verses. In addition, TJ members are taught to emulate Islam’s prophet unswervingly. Thus, when some learn about Muhammad leading armies in battle or ordering the execution of theological and political opponents, they may decide that the jihadist groups are more faithful followers of their prophet than TJ itself–and so make the transition. Thus, the key issue is not whether TJ is actively inculcating jihadist thought, per se. What is more important, and disquieting, is that the organization is instilling Qur’anic literalism and Muhammadan emulation, both of which are also staples of violent jihadist groups.
And there’s no arguing with TJ’s success. The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations may castigate the organization for its disengagement from politics and for its lack of popular welfare and education programs, but one could argue that Tabligh is better than its detractors at keeping its eye on the real prize: renewing piety among Muslims and indoctrinating them with a strong sense of Islamic community that is global in scope.
Tablighi Jamaat is singularly silent on Islamic terror incidents and is never known to have publicly condemned such jihadi acts. However its literal and orthodox insistence appears to be preparing a wide swathe of Muslim populations in countries it is allowed to operate towards first and acceptance of the historical claims of core texts of Islam, through its Quran and ahadith, and through this, secondly an acceptance of the violent, genocidal jihad waged by founders of Islam as proudly recorded or claimed in ahadith and Sira, or biographies of the founder of Islam.
Shoe bomber Richard Reid for attempted transatlantic airline bombing (2001), Jose Padilla for attempted dirty bomb manufacturing (2002) (Jane Perlez, “Pakistani Group, Suspected by West Jihadist Ties, Holds Conclave Despite Ban”, The New York Times, November 19, 2007,) in New York City, Barcelona terror plot (2008) (Kathryn Haahr, “Spanish Police Arrest Jamaat al-Tabligh Members in Bomb Threat”, Terrorism Focus Volume: 5 Issue: 6, February 13, 2000) and arrest of American Taliban John Walker Lindh in Afghanistan (2001) (Susan Sach, “A Muslim Missionary Group Draws New Scrutiny in US”, The New York Times, July 14, 2003), western Muslims involved in planning of terrorist attacks in the US, such as Portland Seven (2002), and Lackawanna Six (2002) all had one way or other been linked to Tablighi Jamaat and its proselytization.
French authorities have repeatedly blamed Tablighi Jamaat for promoting extremism as they found Tablighi involvement in more than 80 percent of cases. (Burton and Stewart) Pakistan is considered the primary base of Tablighis because of possible access and recruitment among upper echelons of Pakistani civil and military power structures. Several high ranking politicians like Pakistani president Rafiq Tarrar, during Prime Minister Nawaz Shariff’s second term (1996-99), was active Tablighis. According to Riaz ul Hassan, former PM Nawaz Sharif during his second tenure (1996-99) visited Tablighi congregation at Raiwand, Lahore and had requested Tablighi Jamaat’s leader Omar Palanpuri, an Indian, to convince Sipah-e-Sahaba and its splinter group Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) to end their violent anti-Shia terror campaign. The Tablighi leader replied, “there should always be a hot wire along with a cold one to light up the bulb’. (Riaz ul Hassan, “An insider’s account”, View Point Online, Hassan)
Former Pakistani intelligence chief (DG-ISI) Lt General Javed Nasir was an active Tablighi during his tenure (1995-97) and supported jihadis in Bosnia and Kashmir.(Khaled Ahmed, What did Husain Haqqani write?”, The Express Tribune, June 2, 2012, Khaled Ahmed ) Several members of 1995 attempted military coup in Pakistan against Benazir Bhutto were Tablighis. (Saba Imtiaz, “Tabligi cleric’s political meetings raise eyebrows”, The Express Tribune, August 22, 2011) During Benazir Bhutto’s second term (1993-96), a group of jihadi officers collaborated with HuJI to try and overthrow her in 1995. Investigations found the Islamist officers were influenced by Jihad bi-al Saif (Jihad by Sword) an offshoot of Tablighi Jamaat.( Burton and Stewart )
Tablighi Jamaat’s missionaries who were then actively recruiting volunteers to fight the anti-Soviet jihad, were invited allegedly to Pakistan Military Academy during 1980s, to indoctrinate and convert the officers to Deobandi Islam (Shuja Nawaz, Crossed Swords: Pakistan, its Army and the Wars Within, Oxford University Press, Karachi, 2008). But the official pretension of recruitment only for a defensive pseudo-nationalist cause, is falsified by HuJI being founded by among others, Tablighi Jamaat members Qari Saifullah Akhter and Fazal ur Rehman Khalil. It was from the platform of HuJI that other jihadist organizations such as HuM, JeM and SSP/LJ came into being (Alex Alexiev, “Tablighi Jamaat: Jihad’s Stealthy Legions”, The Middle East Quarterly, Winter 2005, pp.3-11). Thus the pseudo-nationalist pretension of Pakistani mobilisation was in reality a cover for wider transnational jihad not aimed only at Afghanistan, and the ideological grounding by Tablighi Jamaat appears to sharpen rather than lessen the urge for jihad among Muslims.
Jamaat Islami and JUI factions also have close interaction with Tablighi Jamaat with many having dual membership, and Tablighi Jamaat’s annual congregations are regularly attended by these parties’ leaders. Tablighi Jamaat’s claimed apolitical non-violent character is perhaps merely a part of Islamic core tradition of tactical hiding of militant agenda when revelation may jeopardise long term goals. But Islam’s core as politics and state power could not stay hidden forever, and during 2002 general elections Tablighi Jamaat announced its support for Muthaida Majlis-e-Amal, the alliance of Islamist parties which formed provincial government in KPK province and implemented its Islamist agenda, and is seen as promoting resurgence of Afghan Taliban and formation of Tehrik Taliban (TTP).
Tablighi Jamaat has been linked to ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh, Jose Omer Padila, David Hook ‘the Australian Taliban’, and Richard Reid ‘the Shoe Bomber’. (Muhammad Amir Rana, “Tablighi Jamaat: Discourse and Challenges”, Conflict and Peace Studies, April-June 2009, Volume 2, Number 2, Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies, p. 79.)
Thus the more intense proselytisation by Tablighi Jamaat type of transnational Islamic orthodoxification movements, allowed and even protected or sponsored actively by all ends of the Bangladeshi political spectrum, and even its state infrastructure, the possible jihadi penetration of the state coercive forces (BDR uprising), indicates both that Bangladeshi Muslim society in itself had the characteristics that welcomed radicalisation and in turn made it attractive for first “purification” and literalism based on the texts and claimed narratives of jihad campaigns and tactical or strategic practices of conflict of the founder of Islam – by organisations like Tablighis.
Bangladesh will turn increasingly jihadi. All its “secular” portions, minority numerically anyway, will either be killed or forced to flee. Its weaker Hindu, Buddhist, Christian minorities either converted or exiled – possibly mostly the men, while the women will be kept behind by jihadi Bangladeshis as sex-slaves, as they did during the Noakhali genocide.
Bangladesh, Pakistan, and even parts of Nepal, Myanmar are being activated in a systematic and long term manner by subcontinental components of transnational jihad, whose ideological leadership or the necessary theological framework to carry out practical implementation of jihad, appears to be coming from the entire subcontinent including those ulama in India connected to not only the Deobandi spectrum but also Barelvis.
Only Indian Hindus have the only remaining chance to fight this back and in fact reverse the process into a cleansing of Islam and Islamic jihadi infrastructure from the entire subcontinent. For various reasons the current Indian state is a confused state ob the question of Islam (which is a different discussion). The Indian army has been extended from the Raj imperial framework of excess “secularism” which was a cover to keep the army alienated from the native majority and thus make it easier to keep the people subjugated to the regime. Such an army will be incapable of dealing with the psychologically sophisticated jihadi armies of the current era. Hindus should learn to organise themselves for defence militarily in all the ways necessary to tackle forces built along ISIS(IL), AQ lines without relying too much on existing state armies and defences.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )On academics and their open letters : neo-imperialism from afar
A group of sixty odd academics in various UK institutions have decided to join the Indian electoral fray by posting an open letter to the “left” leaning Independent under the headline:
Letters: The idea of Modi in power fills us with dread
“As the people of India vote to elect their next government, we are deeply concerned at the implications of a Narendra Modi-led BJP government for democracy, pluralism and human rights in India.”
Concern is always nice. Concern about democracy, pluralism, and human rights are particularly nice to hear about. But when these concerns are raised by voice which are only selectively concerned, that troubles us. These academics are not concerned about continued Saudi rule and its impact on the middle East’s prospects for democracy, pluralism and human rights. They are completely silent about Palestinian ruling junta (that is what it is – because each one of them come solidly from military outfits, and once-dubbed-terrorist groups), or for China, or for Pakistan, or Afghanistan. But more of this at the end.
“Narendra Modi is embedded in the Hindu Nationalist movement, namely the RSS and other Sangh Parivar groups, with their history of inciting violence against minorities. Some of these groups stand accused in recent terrorist attacks against civilians.”
The slyness of academic evasiveness starts to reveal itself now. It is the same method by which so-called professional historians create new impressions of truth by weaving propositions into a narrative and creating a new narrative where propositions become blended into certainties. Note the smooth blending of “some” “stand accused”. At one smooth stroke, these academics of high integrity have made an “accusation” appear as “convicted”, and “some” is used to taint the “whole”.
By their logic, the Congress parivar (family) is embedded in a politics which has had very dubious roles, and sometimes outright bias in defacto protecting Muslim violence from Nehru’s time at power during the Partition, with selective targeting of alleged Hindu violence. Usually the Congress hides behind the legalistic excuse – again first used by Nehru to allow the Islamic violence in Noakhali, Bengal to continue while he personally and immediately intervened in Bihar where Muslims were at the receiving end – that when the Congress sees the victims as non-Muslim, non-Christians, it mumbles about law and order being a state prerogative. Whereas, when Muslims appear to be the target, Congress sees it as a union/federal/central issue. This was the cover under which Congress did not intervene in the genocide of Hindus of Jammu and Kashmir in the late 80’s because in this case it was the Muslims who were the perpetrators. The helplessness of the Hindu surviving refugees, was perhaps the root cause of the revival of the Hindutva” movement these academics so lambast – because many Hindus in the wider arena of India began to realize the selective bias of the Indian state under the Nehrus and the Congress in favour of whitewashing and allowing Islamist violence to thrive, especially if such violence was directed against Hindus.
The Congress is therefore imbedded in a movement, that has always protected Islamism and Islamist pretensions, and have at various times carried elements in its governments who are connected to or stand accused of rioting and communal hatred which amount to acts of terrorism.
“We recall the extreme violence by the Hindu Right in Gujarat in 2002 which resulted in the deaths of at least 1,000 people, mostly Muslims. This violence occurred under Modi’s rule, and senior government and police officials have provided testimony of his alleged role in encouraging or permitting it to occur.”
Recalling is a good thing, but if what happened before under a regime historically is proof of repeating the same then the Congress should be even more in the dock – for the Partition riots happened under the government of Jawaharlal Nehru, and ant-Sikh pogroms happened under Rajiv-Gandhi/Congress, and all the riots that happened before the BJP came first to power, with such spectacular ones as in Bhagalpur, were also under various Congress governments.
The academics think that by adding the word “extreme” to “violence” they can make a special case against Modi -as they perhaps feel, and rightly so, that “violence” has been the norm for anti-Hindu attacks by Islamists or Christianists too. Maybe for them those “other” violence are genuine expressions of grievances,
“Some of his close aides have been convicted for their involvement, and legal proceedings are ongoing in the Gujarat High Court which may result in Modi being indicted for his role. He has never apologised for hate speech or contemptuous comments about various groups – including Muslims, Christians, women and Dalits. His closest aide has been censured recently by India’s Election Commission for hate speech used in this election campaign.
“There is widespread agreement about the authoritarian nature of Modi’s rule in Gujarat, further evidenced by the recent sidelining of other senior figures within the BJP. This style of governance can only weaken Indian democracy. “
Different groups of people agree among themselves about different things. Concepts like “authoritarian” are so abstract, and inconcretizable, that tons of academic papers have tried to make academic careers out of hair-splitting over the very definition of “authoritarian”. Many communists are still dewy eyed over Stalin or Mao, and have “widespread agreement” among themselves over their most fortunate appearance on earth. Same goes for Hitler. Jews have “widespread agreement” in spite of a portion of Jewish origin academics hosted by various UK universities to the contrary – that existence of Israel is perfectly justified even at the cost of Palestinians. There is widespread agreement among large swathes of Muslims about the necessity and justifiability of historical violent genocidic jihad, and significant groups have “widespread agreement” among themselves about the benevolence of sex-slavery of the non-Muslim as part of jihad.
Typically when groups do not want to spell out the membership of the group, or are unsure about their numerical strength in proportion to the wider population – they turn to vagueness, or unpinnable conjectures -so that they can never be called out for lying or pretending, and claiming “widespread agreement” is one way of doing that.
The “widespread agreement” is among this tiny coterie of Indian origin academics – probably groomed and selected in the early days of their studenthood and careers by previous generations and peer groups of British interest serving academics, like the Marxist academics who desperately denied any role of triangular Atlantic slave trade in the kickstart of the British industrial revolution.
The curious bit is about somehow Modi being guilty of sidelining “senior” party members as proof of exceptional authoritarianism. All the Nehru-family members have sidelined senior party members to come to power. Does it not make them even more authoritarian already?
“Additionally, the Modi-BJP model of economic growth involves close linking of government with big business, generous transfer of public resources to the wealthy and powerful, and measures harmful to the poor.”
This is actually hilarious. For this is what actually has been happening since Margaret Thatcher in Britain, happened too even under Tony Blair, and has accelerated under Cameron. Do they want to say that all that has led UK down the drain? Or do they have not the courage to spell out those pearls of wisdom to the masters of their souls? It happens at even grander scale in China, where party-apparatchiks and their minions or progeny ruling over millions in their regional satrapys hog investments from a financial sector which is still centrally and nationally owned as well as managed. No, these academic’s can only open their mouth against the “Hindu” India, and the BJP and Narendra Modi. They have not open lettered even on the very entertaining case of Ukraine, where “right wing nationalists” have been on the rampage with alleged support of big biz and oligarchs who grew into tycoons with diversion of state investments. Naturally – since doing so is not in the current interests of the British ruling interests.
“A Modi victory would likely mean greater moral policing, especially of women, increased censorship and vigilantism, and more tensions with India’s neighbours.”
These academics never protested Muslim censorship, moral policing of women, vigilanteism in Indian Kerala, or Uttar Pradesh, or Bihar, or West Bengal, or Assam, or Christians doing exactly the same in Nagaland and Mizoram, and attempting to do the same in Manipur. They cannot mention anything about those other communities or religions or states, because they cannot afford to show these other ones in the same or worse light than the “Hindus” – then they lose the affection of the system.
Overall, then what does it show about such concerted concerns from such groups?
Let us go back to the very beginning again of their open letter. They are claiming that democracy, pluralism, human rights in a one specific distant nation, is going to be trumped if one man and his party or political alliance gets elected in a plural democracy which as yet respects human rights. One can see why they have been allowed to succeed as academics, because they can pretend an intellect which can be used to legitimize the complete lack of any logical capacity on issues that are of interest to a post-imperialist neo-imperialist state.
The west-European political dogma of the political class has now run into a fatal dilemma. They either have to accept that democracy and pluralism can be used, to subvert, overturn, or cover anti-democracy and non-pluralism – which makes themselves open to analysis as tow whether they had been doing and continue to do so themselves.
Or they have to find escape clauses that can be used selectively to target nations and regimes that they see as obstacles in the way of their agenda of global domination, within their dogma that still allows some mantle of legitimacy for their own systems.
The method being tried out in general for a couple of decades, is trying to enforce a so-called consensus or “widespread agreement”, on very vague and often duplicitous or contradictory criteria to judge if the “consensus” value system is being subverted or not. The west-European dogma thinks it has found an escape clause that can cover their selective neo-imperialist agenda – claim that a certain vague outline of democracy, pluralism and human rights exists – whose identification and verification lies solely in their own hands, which then justifies imperialist intervention in other nations, to overturn regimes, assassinate significant individuals, or economically and militarily destroy the fundamentals of that nation.
In order to find out in whose interests any self-proclaimed group of experts, academics, humanitarians, activists actually are acting for – we just need to check out what they remain silent on in contrast to what they choose to pick on. These open-letter academics do not criticize Hamas or Palestinian authority parts for their Jew-cleansing hate campaigns, torture, rape, murder, or that by the so-called freedom-fighters in Syria, or those in Kosovo and Croatia against Serbs in the 90’s, or the Bahraini state, or the Saudis, or Pakistan, or China, or western Ukraine, or Turkey, or Egypt, or even in their own backyard where the state ruthlessly cracks down with full state violence on peaceful protesters against economic destruction of the commoner.
Just compare their stances on these “other” stuff – and you can identify whom they work for, in whose interests.
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CounterThoughts-1 : India’s failure in Bangladesh is a failure to understand Islam.
It is almost six years since I started writing on this blog. As with most of my intellectual forays, it was to search for root causes to phenomena on which people seem to be talking from belief, bias, preconception and conscious or subconscious agenda, and on which I seemed to find no answers of my own yet.
Six years later, and a myriad interactions with ideological friends and foes or the merely non-committed, desperately trying to appear neutral middle-roaders, I feel that the task is not only to understand but also to try and share what I have felt to be the way forward while trying to understand.
However, I should stress that I do not support the idea of final answers and incontrovertible truths. More of that later, and I will try to explain why I think so. I am not demanding or claiming that others should think like me, or that what I say or think is important. But it is a deep seated, slowly maturing urge over the years to think aloud, to borrow the cliché. What do I expect out of it? A myriad small sparks, not the incinerating brilliance of a nuclear device, but the small, fragile, light of the primitive oil lamps, or the hopeful glowing embers of the evening fires of cooking of the first human settlements.
I am starting off this sequence with a topic that appears to hog the Indian subcontinental discourse for some time (apart from supposed uniqueness of Indian propensity to rape, or supposed waiting global disaster of a Modi led “saffron” resurgence, or the glowing future of a post NATO Afghanistan, and the continuously improving civilizational status of Pakistan) – namely, the recent elections in Bangladesh.
My thoughts on Bangladesh and its society has been laid out on this blog before. So I will only briefly touch and summarize.
Bangladesh was formed in 1971 as a result of an intra-elite factional contest for power over the Islamist movement that had managed in 1947 to use tactical violence, British covert support, and Delhi-Uttar-Pradesh-Gujarat based axis of the Indian Congress’s fear of the more populous two ends of the Gangetic plains – Punjab and Bengal’s long tradition of independent counter-Delhi political undercurrent.
For the Islamist, they needed a base in which they could nurture jihad and hopefully accumulate the resources for a future “final solution” of getting rid of all Kaffir on the subcontinent, and as many mullahs openly express – more openly in Taliban land fertilized by decades of Saudi funding and tacit support from the UK and the USA through their islamist allies in power in Pakistan. Pakistan was a good starting point for their agenda, as they felt that the liberalizing, modernizing, educating world of the Indian Hindu would eventually open up Islamic society beyond mullah sadistic control.
For the British, smarting under the loss of their global dominance to the Americans, Pakistan would be boots on the ground for British interests. Such interests would include long term hope of reviving sole control over Indian Ocean ring, use American fear of Soviet expansion to simultaneously get the USA involved in regional wars of attrition so over the that long term Americans would be weakened and hated sufficiently to leave the field open again for the British, while at the same time prevent modernization, liberalization and resurgence of cultural identities that the British had hated out of racial, religious and perhaps a bit of underlying twisted obsession with the darker side of human nature. One of the foremost targets of British hatred was anything to do with the “Hindu”. It was the “Hindu” they saw as the elusive system which sourced resistance to imperialist subjugation where as the supposedly more virulent and “martial” Islam quickly turned bootlickers. For the British – the Congress was “Hindu”, “Sanskrit” was Hindu, Hindu temple and architecture was ugly compared to the seductive feminine curves of the “domes” of Islam, Hindu texts, knowledge base and culture represented the apotheosis of all that was supposedly, pure, Christian and “white”. The rump state of India that was left after 1947, was still “Hindu” and the galling reminder that the Hindu failed to “convert” to submission to British claims of supremacy. Thus Pakistan, in its western and eastern ends would remain the best chance to gall India into the future, and be hopefully bases of jihadism if not outright British comeback – that will continue to bleed “Hindu” India. At least that was perhaps the hope anyway.
Where the British failed was their belief in their own propaganda, invented out of a necessity to play intra-Islam factionalism to subdue the Ottomans by raising the Wahabi-Saud jihad – that somehow intra-Islamic factional fight for dominance represented the non-monolithic nature of Islam. Islam being actually a cover for blatant imperialism, every regional power within a broader spectrum of Islamic following, will try to become the centre of that imperialist claim – so that they can then use the religious imperialist authority enshrined within Islam – to mobilize the total resources of global reach of Islam for their own individual regional power centre benefit. This has been the history of the Islamic politics right from its inception.
Contrary to western misrepresentation, this internal drive to become the supreme imperialist claiming the loyalty and support of all Muslims behind their power hunger, leading to inter-regional fights, does not represent any actual deviation from the core genocidic, culture erasing, enslaving agenda of Islam – where it concerns the as yet non-Muslim.
Now to understand Bangladeshi politics, this above understanding is crucial. The Awami League split from the Muslim League of Jinnah, not out of secular or non-Islamist core drives – but as power seeking movement that wanted the fruits of the partition of 1947, the control over the land and in more mundane terms, the wealth, property and women of the Hindu’s of eastern Pakistan and dominance over the whole of Pakistani state structure. The greater contiguity and inter-mingling of non-Muslim motifs and memes and the relatively later entry of Islam into the area historically, compared to the western end of India, implied a difficult task ahead for “eastern” Islamists. There were spontaneous popular movements influenced by the remnant secular, liberal and modernizing influences of pre-Partition Hindu-presence [the relative strengths were roughly 45/50-55/50 at the end of a disputed and allegedly biased-in-favour-of-the-Muslim in the last census before Partition], which was seized upon shrewdly and tactically by the Awami League leadership under Mujibur Rehman. But the fact is often forgotten that Mujibur started his political life as a student activist for the Muslim League in Calcutta, under patronage of Suhrawardy – the architect of government supervised and protected pogrom on Calcutta Hindus that led to the notorious pre-Partition massacres.
Independence for Bangladesh was therefore just a manifestation of the intra-Islamic fight within Islamic imperialism for monopoly of the imperialist claim, it no way represents any compromise at any fundamental level with the commitment to jihadist clearing of non-Muslim cultures, seizing their property and resources and enslaving their women. It would be natural to expect that after the formal separation of power and independence for Bangladesh was obtained by necessary tactical pretension by future leadership of Bangladesh to get Indian and global support – that the core of this political movement would quickly reassert its fundamental drive by getting rid of all symbols and structures that they saw as being tainted by the need to compromise even tactically to “Hindus” or non-muslim sympathetic powers. Mujibur was the most blatant symbol of this and therefore he had to be made an example of. Note that elements of the core of Awami League and the military which had apparently sided with the “liberation movement” collaborated in the bloodshed.
Since, Bangladesh has consistently seen expulsion and genocide of remnant Hindus, looting of their property, rape and abduction and forced conversion of their women. Islamic atrocities are also typical in the deliberate psychological cruelty or sado-masochistic practices involved – for example it is not enough to simply kill the kaffir, but make it horrific by torture of the most inventive imagination, not only rape but rape before a father or a husband and forcing them to watch – intended to not only cause psychological trauma, but also to burn into the helpless men their emasculation and ineffectiveness. This is an extremely sophisticated grasp over the psychology of coercion, ans shows that the mullah is a highly trained and conditioned psychological warrior who has almost no sense of guilt or empathy where it concerns unleashing the more twisted form of sado-masochistic tendencies in the human.
The recent elections, showing widespread torture, rape, genocide of Hindus as an aftermath, in which elements of both the supposedly winning “secular” Awami League, as well as the BNP and Jamaat combination participated – shows that nothing really has changed from the early days of Islam in that zone. Mymensingh Gitika, a collection of medieval folk tales in verse forms from a region in Bangladesh – tells the story of a Hindu housewife being forced to pleasure a Qazi. Whether a faction loses or wins, be it Awami League or BNP or Jamaat – Islamists would go out to rape Hindu women, torch their houses, and loot their belongings, be it to celebrate a win , or to grieve over a loss.
Bangladeshi core thinking is reflected in the blatant statement of academics of Jehangirnagar university (a deliberate naming done to emphasize the Mughal association, from the Mughal name given to the then town, over the more ancient Dhaka-Vikramanipur – having therefore Hindu connotations) aspiring for an unbroken new Mughalistan carved out of Northern India stretching from Punjab and Pakistan over the Gangetic Valley all he way to Bangladesh and hopefully even what is now North-Eastern India. Academics and “intelligentsia” of Bangladesh, openly discuss on media and TV shows, the desirability of destabilizing the North-East India so that eventually it gets detached from India and become ripe for Bangladeshi and “Islamic” expansion.
It is in the interest of the core drivers of Bangladeshi society – to preserve elements of Islamist jihadism. Over the years, Saudi and UK based funding sources have developed an extensive network of madrasshas and other institutional means of preaching the Arabic, Sunni-Wahabi views, and the result has been the increasing mass-presence of younger people in extremism, and obvious support enjoyed by the organizations like Hifazat whose members have played an increasingly visibly public as well as militant role.
Indira Gandhi scored a tactical brilliance in 1971, but a strategic blunder when she helped an independent Bangladesh to form. This independent nation immediately showed its fangs of islamism, has continued to expel Hindus, abduct rape and enslave Hindu women, and welcomed all possible transnational anti-India and anti-Hindu forces. As and when Pakistan falls, this nation will provide an alternative base for jihadis to retsart their movement.
I know that many have disagreed with me on this, but I still think, that in 1971, India should have raised the stakes by tantalizing the “west” with supporting Bangladeshi independence, but prepared to compromise if allowed to conquer and re-incorporate the northern “Pakistani occupied Kashmir”, hold on to the thin corridor to Rawalpindi up to the hills of the Swat, and extract a land corridor through Chittagong in the east to the sea. Impose demilitarization of east Pakistan on the formal logic of ensuring that Bengalis were not going to be subjected to Pakistani military atrocities, and guarantee autonomy within Pakistan. End of all manipulations by China, USA and the UK and their support for the violently sadistic societies and mullahs of jihad in both ends of Pakistan. The Indian naval presence on both sides of the mouth of the delta and demilitarization would ensure the prevention of Pakistani military presence for ever to repeat the type sex-alavery and torture camps that they ran in 1971, and end of Chinese imperialist expansion schemes and their consequent inputs in genocide on subcontinental soil. End of Karakorum highway being lucrative for geo-political sadism and an alternative and peaceful land network to central Asia, connecting to India the more liberalizable northern Afghanistan, Central Asian Republics bypassing the Pakistani/Gulf/Saudi proximity and mullahfied jihadi societies of Southern Afghanistan and starving them of the economic flow that they now hog and use to support jihad.
It sounds too cynical, too “reverse-imperialist”, “safffron-revivalist”? We have seen most of the previous liberalizing conquests. They have only enhanced the blatantly cynical, racist, and sadistic existing imperialistic implementations of the Abrahamic cults. Why not a counter offensive that has proven its secular, liberal and modernizing credentials?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )The Youth Uprising in Bangladesh – as expected, now a target of both Islamists and the government
On 28th February this year, I had written on this blog – about the Youth demonstration at Shabag in Dhaka, Bangladesh :
What should the Shabag youth be aware of ?
(1) They should remember, that Fascists always triumph when a more liberal, critical, popular movement with progressive aspirations starts and shows promise of almost nearing success, but cannot or is prevented from succeeding to gain a decisive share of power. This was how Russian Bolsheviks, French Jacobins, German Nazis gained power.
(2) Bangladeshi society as a whole is tilted towards youth – age wise – demographically. But the entire society is a continuous demographic relic of past times and social as well as religious fossils. The hold of mullahcracy runs deep – fostered by decades of dictators, sections of the army, and international Islamist forces as well as their cold-war patrons in the west.
(3) In a confrontation like this, Bangladeshi society is likely to split into roughly a 40-40-10-10 split. This is based on a rough estimate from past few elections, where, 40% go for what I dub the covert Islamists, represented within the Awami League, 40% go for the overt Islamists, represented within the BNP+Jamaat spectrum, 10% are really seculars, and 10% are undecided – who swing elections in the first past the post system.
(4) The Shabag youth probably represent around 15-20% – the more educated, more urbanized, sections of the overall youth population. This does not mean that they are going to be defeated. Determined and audacious minorities have always been the one and only harbinger of change of societies and political systems. However, the dangers they must be aware of is that of complacency. There is a portion of rural youth kept carefully away from modernization by the collaborative structure of feudal remnants, land-grabbers (the primary motivation for supporting Pakistan was the hope in the middle and upper-middle level of rural Muslim gentry to gain the land and women and wealth of Hindus), virulent Islamists, collaborators and rapists and genociders of ’71 protected under pressure subsequently by the international Islamist networks, and the network of predominantly Saudi funded (and funded by charities working from western nations like UK) dawa-madrassa net.
(5) the state structure of Bangladesh will necessarily carry Islamist elements in its armed wings, intelligence, and administration. These have been carefully nurtured from even the Liberation war times. There is a genuine possibility of a covert call to arms by the jihadists against the Shahbag movement.
(6) the youth should form an organizational structure, while keeping leadership in a group – so that individuals targeted for elimination will not stop the movement. They should remember that Islamist strategy of terror is “total terror”. From the time of the founder, verbal dissenters or critics were targeted for elimination – as in a female poetess accused of lampooning the leader of the early Islamics – and whose assassination was called for from within the early mosque. Families, loved ones, are targeted too – for the Fascist Islamist mullahcracy’s mind is a sadist one. It seeks not only to give pain, but it enjoys the very act of giving pain and that its victim is suffering mentally as well as physically.
The Egyptian youth have had trouble because they trusted the more established political parties pretending sympathy and failed to create a political structure of their own. The Shahbag youth should not make this error. They should understand that even the Awami League represents primarily an aging generation – and who therefore have greater identification with Islamist undercurrents. They will show this in signs of conciliatory tone towards Islamism, and try to prove themselves as “proper Muslims”. In turn this shows the inner ideological affiliations which even if weaker than that of BNP – is still an affiliation to the Islamists.
The Shahbag youth resistance will be sought to be controlled by both the major power elite factions in Bangladeshi politics. If they can manage to control, they will eventually dismantle this movement – for they do see it as a threat to their own established power structures.
I would suggest the possibility of underhand deal cutting going on with the Hifazat right at this moment under the overt excuse of dividing up the Islamist opposition from the government side. Awami League is most likely to come to an understanding with the Hifazat – where both sides will agree to an official “scaling down”.
Most likely that the Awami League government will offer token punishments to the bloggers already arrested, and enact more stringent mullah-appeasing laws against “cyber-defamation” of Islam – so that the Hifazat Ameer can show his followers that he has “won”. If as alleged by the government the Hifazat movement has monetary backers, then they will be able to show possible Islamist sponsors abroad – that the money has not been wasted. Awami League will then be able to claim it has contained and diffused the “communal” threat and not allowed “communal forces” to consolidate.
Both sides will find it convenient to target the “bloggers” and the “Shahbag” youth. The latter represent a political threat to both the covert and the overt Islamists. Net gain – both covert (AL) and overt (BNP+Jamaat) as well as sundry mullahcracy – all gain one more notch of taking Bangladesh further along the Islamism line by state enforced curtailing of exploration and exposure of the religions’ real totalitarian heart and agenda for the subcontinent.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Sayedee’s Jamaat-e-Islami shows how Islam actually spread in India or for that matter in Arabia too
The first one is the fear in parties like Awami League stemming from the uncertainty of not really knowing how much of covert Islamist sympathy lies within their own ranks, or in the state machinery, or in the police and armed wings. Then there is also the fear of what pressures might be applied by external forces which no regime of Bangladesh can afford to displease. A possible spectrum of such forces can perhaps be hypothesized as the covert state wings of UK, USA and KSA. Islamic leaders, or political and military leaders from Islamic nations on the subcontinent – typically get immediate shelter in one of three countries when things get too hot in their native land and in anticipation of placing them back in their proper “roles” once things cool down – UK and KSA primarily, and USA secondarily. The eldest son of the current opposition leader has been “recuperating” quietly in UK ever since he went there for treatment after suffering health problems while in custody in Bangladesh under corruption charges. We can hear nothing, not even a murmur, from the anti-corruption agencies in Bangladesh over this – even though we do hear murmurs about the other son who is sheltered in Singapore. Another leader of the “interim-caretaker-government” is sheltered on the island too, and nothing is heard of him even though the opposition makes noises from time to time (not very loudly though). Musharraf has sheltered on the island too.
United Kingdom was instrumental in creating the Islamist problem on the subcontinent as part of a consistent and premeditated political programme of subverting Indian society, and there is some indication that the British state machinery had set the task of outlining separatist Islam based territorial and political units – to Islamic civil servants in the Indian administrative services as early as 1934. Then the remarkably successful British Indian intelligence service, which penetrated almost each and every anti-Britsh peaceful or covert political groups, apparently failed completely in anticipating how demobilized Muslim soldiers of British Indian Army were being recruited by the Muslim League to train jihadi gangs as part of a planned pogrom and genocide move to be unleashed in the infamous “Direct Action Day”. The Partition violence was orchestrated to a very large extent from within resources ultimately traceable to the British Indian army (demobilized soldiers) and administration.
Thus it might actually be in the interest of sections of political and covert intelligence wings of both UK and KSA, not to allow the violent Islamist factions in Bangladesh (and in Pakistan) to be completely destroyed, as these may appear to be valuable destabilizing assets for future manipulation of subcontinental politics. If Awami League moves to the extent of destroying these assets, their leaders may suddenly find themselves assassinated or coups mounted.
The other reason, potentially, is the awareness that what Jamaat is doing – is actually consistently within the ambit of Islamism, and very much practised and used as precedence from the founding days of Islam. Thus countering the Jamaat is not possible from the Islamic religious angle. For every supposed “peaceful conversion” verse in the Quran, there are many more in the ahadith that makes deceptive, violent and genocidic jihad on the non-Muslim the norm.
That Jamaat is carrying out an Islamic programme is clear in the way it is actually repeating the Islamic jihadi meme for non-muslims on each and every excuse on which violence can be mounted, even if officially the call by them was simply to protest against the hanging order on Sayedee.
(1) In Chittagong, Jamaati Islamists attacked Hindu majority localities at Jaldi union of Banshkhali upazila and set fire to a Buddhist temple.(2) Jamaat members also burned houses at Dhopapara and Mohajonpara and attacked people with sticks, iron rods and sharp weapons.
(3) The rioters also burned three shops belonging to Hindus at Kaliash union of Satkania upazila.
(4) Members of Jamaat-e-Islami and its student wing Islami Chhatra Shibir attacked a temple and business establishments belonging to Hindus at Bhelkobazar in Sundarganj upazila of Gaibandha district.
(5) Rioters also vandalised some houses in Shovaganj union.
(6) Vandalism, arson and looting took place in temples, houses and business establishments of Hindus in Sylhet, Rangpur, Thakurgaon, Laxmipur and Chapainawabganj.
(7) Attackers had vandalised the central Kali temple at Mithapukur upazila in Rangpur and another at Kansat in Chapainawabganj.
Jamaat is indeed following in the same order of politics of violent provocation, and using legitimate retribution from the victim side as the excuse to increase the level of violence in a bid to extract totalitarian state power – that was laid down in the early battles and campaigns of the founding of the religion in northern Arabia, targeting deceptively, by ambush, by flouting of all then prevalent code of conduct of war, by rape, genocide, and again betrayal of the basic human values.
As expected, while Islamist march in violent demand of action against the Shahbag youth in Kolkata, the “progressiveness” capital of India under watchful protection of the state police [that which also maintains watchful protection of Islamist and jihadi campaigns in Hindu villages along the border with Bangladesh on the Indian side], no protests or marches or sit-ins have happened from the left and secular brandholders of the state. After all, there could be much higher than allowed to be known – electoral and financial benefits from the Muslim population in the state.
What is happening in India and the neighbouring Muslim states – is a repeat, and therefore revealing of actual totalitarianist strategies by which Islam originally spread on the subcontinent. It is just a renewed attempt after gathering the strength that was needed to make the move – recovering from the losses of defeat at the hands of European imperialism, and pretension of submission and alliance with the west.
Ending with a full list of the 20 charges against Sayedee for a sample of those activities reported and could be supported by witnesses : many others could not make it to the courts because of the successful delay in the trial for 40 years, by which time many witnesses had died or “vanished” when the Jamaat was rehabilitated under international and military-dictatorship patronage.
1. On May 4, 1971, Delawar Hossain Sayedee as a member of Peace (Shanti) Committee carried secret information to the Pakistan army about a gathering of a group of people behind the Madhya Masimpur bus-stand under Pirojpur Sadar and took the army to the spot. The army killed 20 unnamed people by firing.
2. On May 4, 1971, Sayedee along with his accomplices accompanied by the Pakistan army looted belongings of members of the Hindu community living in Masimpur Hindu Para under Pirojpur Sadar. They also set the houses of Hindus alight and opened fire on the scared people, who started fleeing the scene, killing 13 people.
3. On May 4, 1971, Sayedee led a team of the Pakistan army to Masimpur Hindu Para, where the team looted goods from the houses of two members of the Hindu community — Monindra Nath Mistri and Suresh Chandra Mondol — and destroyed their houses by setting them on fire. Sayedee also directlytook part in the large-scale destruction by setting fire to the roadside houses of villages Kalibari, Masimpur, Palpara, Sikarpur, Razarhat, Kukarpara, Dumur Tola, Kalamtola, Nawabpur, Alamkuthi, Dhukigathi, Parerha and Chinrakhali.
4. On May 4, 1971, Sayedee and his accomplices, accompanied by the Pakistani army looted the houses of members of the Hindu community and opened fire indiscriminately on them in front of Dhopa Bari and behind the LGED Building in Pirojpur, leaving four persons killed.
5. Sayedee declared publicly to arrest Saif Mizanur Rahman, then deputy magistrate of Pirojpur Sub-division, when the magistrate organised a Sarbo Dalio Sangram Parishad to inspire people to join the Liberation War. On May 5, 1971, Sayedee along with his associate Monnaf (now deceased), a member of Peace (Shanti) Committee, accompanied by the Pakistan army picked up Saif from the hospital where he was hiding and took him to the bank of the Baleshwar river. On the same date and time, Foyezur Rahman Ahmed, sub-divisional police officer, and Abdur Razzak (SDO in charge of Pirojpur), were also arrested from their workplaces and taken to the river bank. Sayedee as a member of the killer squad was present there and all three government officials were gunned down. Their bodies were thrown into the river Baleshwar. Sayedee directly participated and abetted in the acts of abduction and killing of those three officers.
6. On May 7, 1971, Sayedee identified the houses and shops of Bangalees belonging to the Awami League, Hindu community and supporters of the Liberation War at Parerhat Bazar under Pirojpur Sadar. Sayedee as one of the perpetrators raided those shops and houses and looted valuables, including 22 seers of gold and silver from the shop of one Makhanlal Saha.
7. On May 8, 1971, Sayedee led a team of the Pakistan army to the house of Nurul Islam Khan, where he identified Nurul Islam as an Awami League leader and his son Shahidul Islam Selim as a freedom-fighter to the army. Sayedee then detained Nurul Islam and handed him to the army, which tortured Nurul Islam. His house was then looted and finally set on fire.
8. On May 8, 1971, Sayedee and his accomplices accompanied by the Pakistan army raided the house of one Manik Posari at Chitholia under Pirojpur Sadar and caught his brother Mofizuddin and one Ibrahim. Sayedee’s accomplices then burnt five houses there. On the way to the Pakistani army’s camp, Sayedee instigated the members of the occupation force to kill Ibrahim by gunshot and dump his body near a bridge. On the other hand, Mofiz was taken to the army camp and tortured. Sayedee directly participated in the abduction, murder and persecution of the victims.
9. On June 2, 1971, armed associates of Sayedee under his leadership and accompanied by the Pakistani army raided the house of one Abdul Halim Babul at Nolbunia under Indurkani Police Station and looted valuables from Halim’s house. The team then reduced the house to ashes.
10. On June 2, 1971, Sayedee’s armed associates under his leadership and accompanied by the Pakistan army burnt 25 houses of a Hindu Para in Umedpur village under Indurkani Police Station. At one stage, a victim, Bisabali, was tied to a coconut tree and was shot dead by Sayedee’s accomplice.
11. On June 2, 1971, Sayedee led a team of Peace (Shanti) Committee members, accompanied by the Pakistani army, to raid the house of Mahbubul Alam Howlader (freedom-fighter) of Tengra Khali village under Indurkani Police Station. Sayedee and the team then detained Mahbubul’s elder brother Abdul Mazid Howlader and tortured him, and looted cash money, jewellery and other valuables from the house.
12. One day a group comprising 15-20 armed accomplices of Sayedee under his leadership entered the Hindu Para of Parerh at Bazar under Pirojpur Sadar and captured 14 Hindus, who were all supporters of Bangladesh’s independence. The fourteen were then tied with a single rope and dragged to Pirojpur and handed over to Pakistani soldiers, who killed them. Their bodies were thrown into the river.
13. One night, about 2 to 3 months after the war commenced, some members of Peace Committee under Sayedee’s leadership accompanied by the Pakistan army raided the house of Azhar Ali of Nalbunia village under Pirojpur Sadar Police Station. They then caught and tortured Azahar Ali and his son Shaheb Ali. The team then abducted Shaheb Ali and ultimately he was taken to Pirojpur and killed.
14. During the final stages of the war, Sayedee one morning led a team of Razakar Bahini consisting of 50 to 60 Razakars, into attacking the Hindu Para of Hoglabunia under Pirojpur Sadar. Seeing the attackers, the Hindus managed to flee but one Shefali Gharami failed to do that. Some members of Razakar Bahini entered her room and raped her. Being the leader of the team, Sayedee did not prevent them from committing rape upon her. Sayedee and the members of his team also set fire to the dwelling houses of the Hindu Para.
15. During the last part of the war, Sayedee led 15 to 20 armed Razakars who entered the Hoglabunia village under Pirojpur Sadar Police Station and caught 10 members of the Hindu faith. The attackers then tied all the members of Hindu community with a single rope, dragged them to Pirojpur and handed them over to the Pakistani army. They were all killed and their bodies were dumped into the river.
16. In the course of the Liberation War, Sayedee led a group of 10-12 armed Razakars and Peace Committee members, which surrounded the house of Gouranga Saha of Parerhat Bandar under Pirojpur Sadar. Subsequently, Sayedee and the others abducted three women and handed them over to the Pakistan army at Pirojpur where they were confined and raped for three days before being released.
17. During the Liberation War, Sayedee along with other armed Razakars kept Bipod Saha’s daughter Vanu Saha confined to Bipod Saha’s house at Parerhat under Pirojpur Sadar Police Station and regularly used to go there to rape her.
18. During the Liberation War, one Bhagirothi used to work in the camp of the Pakistan army. One day, after a fight with the freedom fighters, and at the instance of Sayedee, Bhagirothi was charged with passing information to the freedom fighters and killed.
19. During the war, Sayedee, being a member of Razakar Bahini and exercising his influence over the Hindu community of Pirojpur, converted 100-150 Hindus of Parerhat and other villages and compelled them to go to the mosque to offer prayers.
20. On a day at the end of November 1971, Sayedee got information that thousands of people were fleeing to India in order to save their lives. A group of 10-12 armed members of the Razakar Bahini, under Sayedee’s leadership, then attacked the houses of Talukdar Bari at Indurkani village and detained a total of 85 persons and looted goods from there. Of them, all but 10-12 persons were released in exchange for bribes negotiated by Fazlul Huq, a member of the Razakar Bahini. Male persons were tortured and female persons were raped by Pakistan soldiers deployed in the camp.
[Source : http://www.thedailystar.net/suppliments/charges_sayedee.pdf ]
Why a terror blast at inner-city Hyderabad : Owaisi’s Caliphate? Possible green on green Sunni Wahabi/Salafi jihad against Shias and Ahmedyyas.
Indian and international media will have a field day speculating on the twin blasts killing many and injuring even more in the Indian city of Hyderabad, India. The security agencies of India, perhaps under proper political correctness imposed by “secular” regimes, will discover “saffron” hands behind the blast.
However, I would like to speculate on another possibility. That of “green on green” jihad by one sect of Muslims against others. The bane of all monotheistic, organized, textual and doctrinaire religions is the need for evermore apparent perfection and purity. That in turn almost always leads to hyperfine distinctions in interpretation of fixed ancient texts, based on which each new faction derides and when feasible, tries to eliminate the other factions if necessary by violent means. The reason as to why strictly textual religions almost surely land up in such political struggles for power is an entirely different issue, and not for this post.
The fact of the matter is however, that all three of Judaism, Christianism, and Islamism – would have fared far better had they not bled each other and themselves, in fratricidal and internecine bloodshed sourced from this contest over who is the “purest” within the family -so to speak. The Byzantine and Italian Roman church’s murderous jealousy of Arrianism had no small role in the eventual fall of Gothic Christian power in Spain to yield place to Al Andalus. In the end the “Roman” calculation paid off through the Reconquista -but meanwhile almost 800 years of Islamic rule had to be endured (how “glorious” or “civilizing” it was – is issue of another debate).
The Byzantine iconodule versus iconoclast violence, and the three-cornered fight with the Coptic brotherhood, led to possibly quick capitulation of Coptic Egypt before Arab Muslim armies, and the roll-back of Byzantine power from south of the Bosphorus before the early pious Caliph armies.
The violent iconodule versus iconoclast Christian contest again perhaps had a significant influence on how early Islam shaped itself and placed itself as, with similar intra-faith conflicts starting up within Islam from its earliest days.
Most of the world has become aware of the intolerance of the most influential, (because of oil and “western” connections) faction of Islam – that of Sunni Wahabism, and in another direction also Salafism. However what is often overlooked is that as much as the Ummah theological leadership is looking to subvert the non-Muslim world for eventual conquest and enslavement, they reserve an equal violence for those they deem “less pure” than themselves in doctrinal interpretation of the unchanging text.
Recently Hyderabad was in the news – because a scion of the wealthy Islamic clan of the Owaisis of Hyderabad, had made typical Islamist speeches warning of violence towards Hindus. Owaisis have old family connections to pre-Independence reactionary regimes of the Nizam. The Nizam was a key figure of Islamism in pre-Independence India, and had many close and influential friends among the planners and plotters of the British ruling circles. Nizam was a reluctant joiner of the Republic, and as a last ditch effort had unleashed his genocidic jihadi Razakars on the majority Hindus of his state, in looting, raping and massacres as per true jihadi legacy prior to the Indian army marching into the capital. In fact a certain ancestral clan relative of the current Owaisi’s had been very active in the Islamist movement that turned violent, and had been imprisoned by the Indian government after accession of the state.
It has been suggested by some researchers that he was “released” and quietly allowed to emigrate to Pakistan and his Islamist party under its new avatar MIM allowed to “revive” post-Independence because the Congress got increasingly worried at the resurgence of the Communists in the state and the city.
Subsequent Congress governments, appear to have coincided with the increasingly sharp religious identity politics among competing factions of both Christianism and Islamism that in a lop-sided but indirect way also involves the Maoists. The pulse of this three-cornered and very murky religious politics can be estimated from under the heavy fog of media and regime protection of so-called “minority” sentiments in the periodic and too stinky to be entirely suppressed scandals involving financial and other sorts of corruption that also reach into religious halos.
But what perhaps has gone under the radar for a long time, is the observation that more Sunni influence appears to be showing up in Andhra Pradesh – and its capital city Hyderabad – mainly though the tell-tale signs of spread – the mosques and “dawa” institutions. With such growth, and a possible Gulf connection behind providing the material means to sponsor such institutional growth – has come the inevitable signs of Saudi-esque Wahabi intolerance – against other Muslim factions deemed “less pure”.
These less pure factions are those of the Shia and the Ahemedyya. Orthodox Sunnis berate the Ahemedyyas verbally when they are militarily powerless, and behead or torture to death when they have state protection – as in Pakistan and in some cases even in Indonesia or Bangladesh. Hyderabad is actually a significant centre for the Ahmedyyas and the Shias. In fact , just the previous year there were reports headlined :
India: Ahmadiyya Muslim Mosque Attacked by Militant Clerics and Mob in Hyderabad
Source: http://ahmadiyyatimes.blogspot.ie/2012/03/india-ahmadiyya-muslim-mosque-attacked.html
The new angle to be looked into Islamic terror on the subcontinent is the added Sunni Wahabi and Salafist trend of also cleaning up their intra-Islamic rivals, especially Shias and Ahmedyyas.
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The Fascist Mullahcracy strikes in Bangladesh : blogger knifed and hacked to death for demanding justice for war-crimes.
Rajiv Haider, an activist young blogger from Bangladesh was stabbed and hacked with clovers, to death. His crime : his demand for justice for the war-crimes committed in 1971, by the so-called Razakars, Al-Bdrs, Al-shams, and various Islamist collaborators of the Pakistani occupation forces – running sex-slavery camps, torture chambers, and systematic genocide, massacres, forced conversion of Hindus.
While bloggers of the world seem to have come out in support of the “occupy Shahbag” movement and condemned the murder of Rajiv, Pakistani websites have been reported to have celebrated Rajiv’s murder.
The intolerance of any criticism is a common feature of all Islamists, and whenever a voice protesting any of the genocidic aspects of Islamism is cut off by the assassin’s hand, it is a call-sign of the mullah and his fascism. Pakistan was created by a fascist movement that used the tacit support of British intelligence and post-war demobilization policy of the British Indian army to employ Muslim ex-soldiers go out to train and lead armed Muslim gangs in preparation for jihad – which was given the spin of “direct action” by Jinnah and his Islamist advisors.
The then Congress leadership, in which Gandhiji had been sidelined, and Bose expelled [perhaps suitably “advised” to be lured into “escaping” so that the more amenable sections of the Congress leadership could be played into accepting a separatist Islamist homeland] – seems to have thought of the distant extremes of Punjab, North West Frontier Provinces, Balochs, and Bengalis as peripheral. Perhaps they also remembered that these were the regions which were the earliest militant dissenters against British imperialism – and hence likely to be rebellious against the Delhi/Uttar-Pradesh based “core” they were basing their new empire about. So it would be good riddance in a political sense, to allow these areas to be decimated by jihadis, and the non-Muslims/Hindus of these regions to be broken for generations so that they could not strike back politically against the new dynastic system fashioned along the British system.
In the process, they left the liberal and modernizing forces among the Muslims, decimated and cornered too – and left to the tender mercy of the mullah, who represent the darkest caverns of sadomasochistic evil in the human mind. Now, not only the Pakistanis or the Bangladeshis themselves, but the world suffers from the consequence of what happened in a power sharing game played by British imperialism, Sunni-Wahabi jihadism, and an immature and entirely devoid of statesmanship section of the Congress leadership keen for personal power.
We are facing a resurgent totalitarianism. This time its the totalitarianism of the mullahcracy.
Note: it is fascinating to see that the Bengali intelligentsia, and the Muslim rioting hordes that took over the streets of Kolkata – the supposed capital city of everything progressive, to hound Tasleema Nasreen out – is not to be seen on the streets protesting Haider’s murder. Tasleema was a Bangladeshi – so it was okay for Indian Muslims and mullahcracy to come out into the streets against her. If she could be demonstrated against and rioted against even as a foreigner and for alleged insults she heaped on Islam by exposing the role of Islamists in raping or committing genocide on non-Muslims in Bangladesh – why is it so difficult to come out now similarly to condemn the murder of another Bangladeshi?
And, Indian intellectuals, especially of the Leftist variety from West Bengal – are nowhere to be found with their shrill cries of indignation. Isn’t that funny!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Who’s afraid of Afzal Guru’s hanging and “damaging consequences”? The thin shell of India’s self-appointed secularists.
Seema Mustafa, a noted journalist, wrote a piece on Rediff http://www.rediff.com/news/column/hanging-could-have-damaging-repercussions/20130209.htm– about the possibly “damaging” consequences of the rather quiet hanging of Afzal Guru – an Indian from the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, and an accused as well as convicted of a murderous terrorist attack on the Indian Parliament.
Mustafa’s primary concerns can be summarized as
(1) supposed signs of “bias” in a section of Indian journalists over questions of “nationalism”
(2) supposed allegation that Afzal did not have a fair trial or adequate representation
(3) supposed fear of “damaging consequences” of the hanging.
Mustafa brings out everything that is wrong with the Indian media’s long history of playing and pretending “secularism” which effectively became Hindu/Saffron bashing while selectively whitewashing, even protecting the image of so-called “minority” religions by clamping down on anything negative motivated by such religions. She writes in such frank tones of a sense of betrayal, that she possibly does not realize how she has exposed the underlying religious politics of selective favouritism that plagues her profession.
A television news anchor, shortly after Parliament terror attack accused Afzal Guru was hung by the government in Tihar jail, declared, ‘All nationalist, secular and progressive people support this.’
That was just one statement amidst a cacophony of euphoric reactions to the hanging, but stood out as many of us who have been opposing the death penalty and questioning the fairness of the Afzal Guru trial certainly do not regard ourselves as communal and reactionary or for that matter anti-national.
Quite the contrary really, and so it did sound strange when journalists supporting death by hanging, refusing to question the fact that Guru did not get a capable lawyer through the trial, and blocking out the responses of those raising such issues, so easily put large segments of the Indian population into their self-defined ‘anti-national’ frame.
And so before analysing the possibly disastrous consequences of this hanging, it is imperative to understand the mindset of television news anchors who have successfully managed to convert personal beliefs into news, and trash all voices of sanity and sobriety that seek answers to complex questions. News channels are supposed to report the news and not give their editorial comments to a point where contrary voices are restricted from giving their views.
Most interesting to read! Now did the colleagues of Mustafa, only report the “news” and not give their editorial comments to the point of restricting contrary voices from giving their views when it came to talking about the rape, eviction, enforced migration – each and every element of genocide by most current standards of definition of a genocide – on the Kashmiri pundits? How many of Seema Mustafa’s colleagues practised what she wants them to – when the targets were Hindus from Kashmir Valley, or did they care to give space to view from the “other” side of what is alleged to have happened in the burning of returning Hindu pilgrims in a locked train compartment at Godhra, that is supposed to have led to the inter-community clashes in Gujarat which has been mad einto an international issue. I remember watching a news report from a well-known “secular” channel of India based in New Delhi – during the heyday of the Kandhmal (Orissa) conflict, when Hindu tribals hiding out in the forests express their fear of being lynched by Christian mobs or their Maoist collaborators – but the news-anchor comments before them along the lines of “look how much they have been threatened so that they they lie out of fear”. What reports have ever been covered by Mustafa’s secular colleagues on the atrocities carried out by Muslim gangs in Kerala, or West Bengal, or Assam? Did they go and ever give any space to any views on the “other” side, if that other side did not happen to be Muslim or Christian? It is exactly these sort of biased behaviour that strengthens the more radical among the Hindu!
There was a time when reporters followed the news, reporting it as it was, communicating and informing the public, without wearing their prejudice, bias or for that matter, views on their sleeves.
How many times have details of religiously motivated atrocities been ever objectively and impartially reported by the media – without considering the supreme objective of not allowing the tarnishing or exposure of the on-ground modus operandi of extremist religious movements if and only if those movements happen not to be “Hindu”? Riots have been frequent in the state of Uttar Pradesh, atrocities by organized muslim gangs in Kerala, or Bengal – but Mustafa’s colleagues never find the space to report them. By accusing her colleagues of biased and ideologically motivated reporting, Mustafa confirms that Indian media can be and does operate on religious and ideological bias in reporting. In fact many like us draw the inference that it must have been this or that Muslim gang that started a riot – if the media reports it as a violent clash between “two communities”. One way or the other, if the responsibility can be or needed to be – put on “Hindus”, the names or details will be leaked to the sufficient degree to make sure that the conclusion or impression holds.
Afzal Guru has been hung. And apart from the main story the news media has a responsibility to:
one, trace his story with the facts of the case highlighted;
two, review the trial through important voices to see whether he had the best legal advice at hand or whether he was virtually left unrepresented;
three, to find out (and not just from official quotes) whether his family was informed in time, and were asked to meet him as per the humane provisions of law;
four, to seek answers to the commonly asked questions as to why the rush now, has it been prompted by political considerations;
five, to look at the possible political consequences of the hanging at this point in time and analyse whether the death of one man was worth what might follow.
This constitutes responsible reporting. As for the beating of the drums, this can be safely left to the political parties and the government who have held innumerable press conferences to applaud the act.
Has this ever been done by Mustafa’s colleagues when the victims of religiously motivated violence were non-Muslims or non-Christians? Even Sikhs were not always given the benefit of “unbiasedness”! Recently unusually (for Indian courts in such cases) harsh sentences were passed on BJP political leader for her alleged complicity in riot violence against Muslims – and a woman to boot – in Gujarat, on a peculiar legalistic claim that her “crimes” deserved exemplary punishments (I thought law was usually claimed to be about “fairness” and not about “examples”). Did Mustafa and her colleagues go and research the “other” side’s views? Did they report allegations of one “victim” having been in the habit of pulling out his firearm on previous occasions to threaten non-muslims or even use the firearm [I did not see any follow-ups, even debunking attempts, of this by any of Mustafas secular colleagues]. Significantly, she uses an expression that has often been used in the past by the Indian state, predominantly the Congress and the Leftists, and in some cases – ideology-less regional charismatics, to clamp down on protests against Islamic claims of immunity from even verbal criticism. The ubiquitious claim is that “any crackdown on Islamic violence, protests, or outrage, or even protest or criticism of an Islamic gang coercive street rampage behaviour – is going to lead to a deterioration of law and order problem”. On this excuse Indian state regimes often pre-emptively strike on opposition to Islamic claims, and such an attitude has been primarily responsible for the threats and attacks on writers the Islamic shariacracy in India think of as damaging to their agenda of Islamization of India – like the banning of Salman Rushdie’s book, or the hounding out of the exiled woman author from Bangladesh – Tasleema Nasreen.
Journalists are supposed to play the devil’s advocate, be on the other side of the fence as it were, and review the story in all its dimensions. Indian democracy has many views, and a media that insists only on one view as ‘nationalist’ promotes a monolith that is in contradiction to the pluralism and diversity of this country..
Unfortunately, Mustafa’s case seems to rest on having all these benefits as privileges of the Islamic only – and her voice comes out when she effectively sees these privileges being taken away from the Islamic. Mustafa even does not realize that “nationalism” has its boundaries and terms of debate that cannot be allowed to be infinitely stretched. Otherwise, no attack on the “nation” can be opposed logically, for there will always be a “diversified” view that supports exactly such attacks as valid becausee they do not agree to “our” definition of “our nationhood”. One day, the presence of non-Muslims will become problematic for “nation-hood” – the argument used by the jihadis of Muslim League and Jamaatis to unleash the partition genocide and carve out “Muslim” nations.
The terror attack on Parliament was heinous. And could have been far more disastrous had the terrorists been able to enter the building.
But Mustafa fails to say that 12 people were killed in that attack. Is this part of merely factual reporting too?Is not “heinous” a qualitative expression and not an objective one?
It was clear at the onset that the police had no clue about the attackers. Finally, Delhi [ Images ] university lecturer S A R Geelani was arrested, and then Afzal Guru was picked up. Geelani’s trial took a chequered course, but because of the support in Delhi and the involvement of wellknown lawyers, he was finally released.
Guru was from Kashmir and unable to afford a decent lawyer. He did not have the money and as senior advocate Kamini Jaiswal managed to say hastily on a news channel, he went virtually unrepresented.
Geelani, contacted by Rediff.com, one of the news sites doing its job professionally, said, “Afzal Guru was denied a fair trial. This has been proved in his last moments. I do not understand the attitude of the government. They have done nothing but play to the gallery.”
“Do you know there is a case pending in the Supreme Court of India ? The court has been looking into the delay into this case, arguments are going on and the matter is pending justice.”
‘Do you think it was right to hurry up the matter?’
“The due process of law has not been followed. This is nothing but a flawed process.”
But somehow we have becomes so blood thirsty as a nation, so wedded to war and violence (largely because of TRP ratings) that we do not like to ask any questions. After all, even a death row convict has rights, or is the case now that all these chaps should be shown no mercy and hung the moment they are convicted by the courts?
As wellknown women rights lawyer Indira Jaising said, while arguing against the death penalty, is there not a right to reform, and if even reform for some is seen as impossible, is there not a right to remorse? And should not it be the job of the sane voice of journalism to ensure that at least the rule of law is respected, and the rights of an individual acknowledged?
The interesting piece about Indian journalism is revealed in the way the “facts” are presented here. Somehow the Indian “police” are seen to be “obviously” not having a clue “right from the beginning”. I am not sure how many police forces of the world have clues to crimes being committed “right from the beginning” – for such details in prior knowledge would in most case lead to prevention of the crime actually being committed. From this “obviousness” in the eyes of the journalist, an ominous silence hangs to the onset of the next statement about Afzal being picked up after the arrest of another. The insinuation perhaps intended is that somehow this allegation of “obvious lack of clue” should encourage the reader to suspect that the police arrested Afzal without any proof or evidence. If the evidence gathering process was so good and reliable in passing sentences on Kandhmal and Gujarat riot accused after long delays and twists and turns that could have raised even more serious concerns about police “capabilities or intentions” – why is it suddenly so unreliable when the accused is implicated in a violent terrorist attack on the very symbolic seat of Indian democracy?
The impact of the hanging can have damaging repercussions at different levels, and far more than this government will be able to handle. The media informs us, through the usual sources, that the decision was taken after top-level meetings and discussions. So one is led to believe it was a considered decision.
Instead of instilling confidence, this actually evokes fear, fear of being led by a government that clearly is unable to make the right assessments and basically does not care if parts of the country go up in flames.
The government has bitten the bullet as channels screamed with joy, but there is every possibility of the bullet exploding in its mouth. And this is what makes one wonder at a political leadership that willfully invites trouble.
Aspects of the case, as has been pointed out by lawyers as well, were before the Supreme Court and the government could have easily ridden the issue out instead of converting it into a storm that will hit it, in all likelihood, in Kashmir.
The military has clamped down in Jammu and Kashmir. As a resident there said, “Not even a leaf is fluttering here.” But while the state can be confident of maintaining control in normal circumstances, and beating down demonstrations, it also realises that one civilian death will snowball into a major uprising.
The February 11, 1984 hanging of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front leader Maqbool Bhatt led to a decade of the worst violence that India has ever seen. It is true that Afzal Guru does not have the same stature in terms of a leadership profile, but in terms of sympathy and support he was probably far ahead.
Besides, the alienation and anger in Kashmir is in a heightened stage, more so after the death of the young boys in the 2010 stone pelting incidents. A Facebook post by this columnist on Afzal Guru’s hanging has elicited a volley of responses reflecting this anger and alienation and asking why those responsible for the death of the boys have not met with similar punishment.
Now that sounds like a threat, isn’t it? It is time that the pretenders of secularism who actually effectively, on the ground, promote and protect Islamism by their selective reporting or campaigns at manufacture of social consensus in favour of Islamist agenda – realize, that a new generation is coming up. They are seeking to search out the reality of religious politics, especially of the medievalist brand of religiosity represented by modern Islamism. Even a Morsi cannot easily take an Egypt back to the 7th century one-sided propaganda that targeted all other cultures and human freedoms or civilizational achievements for erasure.If Mustafa is so concerned about the Kashmiri boys trained to give a Intifada style uprising – is she also concerned about the Kashmiri Hindus murdered, raped, looted at the start of the Shariafication drive of the Valley in the late 80’s – long before the excuse of all Muslim reaction stemming from the destruction of the disputed structure at Ayodhya could be given ?
The only logical explanation, thus, for the sudden hanging of Afzal Guru is the fact that general elections are around the corner.
And the Congress in its usual cynical manipulation of the votes is trying to eat into the majority constituency with this action. As for the Kashmiris they do not figure in Delhi’s plans. As for the secular forces, the argument voiced by Congress leaders is: ‘Where will you go. If there is Modi as prime minister you will have to be with us.’
So the minorities do not figure either, as they are the bechaara who can easily be made to run into Congress arms while fleeing from communal shadows. The secularists too, in the Congress analysis, will not be far behind as there is no Left and hence no Third Front alternative that could attract them in the polls.
So all in all a cozy scenario, except for the fact that the dynamics of India and the aspirations of the people cannot be controlled and tend to upset the most careful calibrations.
Tut -tut! why such a frustration? Is it so bad to be on the receiving end of the religious politics which had been so good for so many decades in expanding the network of madrassahs and Islamism spreading structures fueled by Gulf money and complicity by Islamophile regimes of the Left and Congress? If the Congress is really the supreme popularists they are made out to be, if saffron is really the outcast of Indian politics, and yet the Congress feels the pressure to need to appease the “majority” of the populations of India – that appeasement politics has run its steam off? That no longer should any population be hostage to the type of totalitariansim represented by Islamism – under excuses or threats of “potential damage”?
Take Islamist threats of damaging more liberal societies, and the tactics of emasculating entire societies by trying to raise apocalyptic visions of destruction and “damages” if terrorists are not pampered – with yourselves away from the public space! Nay! Better – speak more about this – because by doing so, the cozy arrangement to manipulate public opinion through clever manipulation of appeal to liberal values to progress non-liberal agenda and veiled threats of violence otherwise – gets more and more exposed.
The Delhi Rape as punishment of the uterus – a common theme in areas influenced by Jihad
The alleged gangrape and torture of a young woman in the Indian capital of New Delhi, which ultimately led to her death two weeks later has become partly an international, and definitely an Indian national issue. The youth of the capital took to the streets, and soon the government was seen to be on the backfoot. It had failed to gauge the game changing paradigm of electronic bypassing of older political mobilization forms. It unleashed its police on the youth while keeping up the appearance of listening to youth grievances by meeting student leaders from its own and other official political party student fronts.
The reaction to the protests and the nature of the protests – both represent a sign of things to come for the existing political parties of India, but more of that in a separate post. Today, I will only raise a disturbing angle of the alleged rape that haunts me through my comparison of notes of rape as a penal instrument, used all around the subcontinent. The issue is that, unconfirmed but semi-official media reports indicate the possibility of the woman having been subjected to sharp instrument insertion into the vagina, as well as the possibility of an attempt to tear out the uterus.
The use of metal/hard objects after or during the rape – is usually a feature of penal rapes, typically done in a gang/group, and is reported more from Islamist or Muslim contexts. The rape is not just about sex, but also about penalizing – for being a woman, for being a non-muslim, for being the “temptresses” and leaders of going astray – as portrayed repeatedly in various contexts in the core texts of the theology.
I would expect such penal rapes to be more frequent the closer we get to long-time centres of Islamic military power in the subcontinent, in a gradient of increasing intensity as we move from the east to the west of Gangetic Valley, increasing from India to the Middle East across Pakistan.
Although the Ayatollahate would deny this – the following has consistent commonality with what the Pakistani soldiers do wherever they go, with concrete evidence for 1971 in now Bangladesh :
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/the_islamic_republic_of_tortur.html
“On August 9, in a letter published in the Etemad Melli paper, the reformist presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi wrote that some detained individuals stated that some authorities have raped detained women with such force, they have sustained injuries and tears in to their reproductive system.”In another high-profile case, the very pretty 19-year old Taraneh was not shot with a single bullet to her chest, as was the case with Neda Agha Sultan There were no bystanders in the dungeon with a cell phone to capture the prolonged torture, rape, and sodomy of this teenager.According to reports, as well as testimony on the House floor from the honorable U.S. Congressman McCotter, on June 28, 2009, Taraneh Mousavi, a young Iranian woman, was literally scooped off the streets without any provocation on her part and with no arrest warrant. This young woman was taken to one of the regime’s torture chambers, where she was repeatedly brutalized, raped, and sodomized by Ahmadinejad’s agents, and with the consent of the “supreme leader,” Ali Khamenei.Near death from repeated beating, raping and sodomizing, the fragile young woman, bleeding profusely from her rectum and womb, was transferred to a hospital in Karaj near Tehran. Eventually, an anonymous person notified Taraneh’s family that she had had an “accident” and had been to be taken to the hospital.
The devastated family rushed to the hospital only to find no trace of their beloved daughter. The foot-soldiers of Allah’s “divine representative” Ali Khamenei decided to eliminate all traces of their savagery. These vile people decided to remove the dying woman from the hospital before the family’s arrival, whereupon they burned her beyond recognition and dumped her charred remains on the side of the road.
Note that the intent is not to just to rape, but to kill. The target is the uterus. Here is the evidence from Beslan :
http://crombouke.blogspot.ie/2010/01/beslan-child-rape-torture-enforced.html
It was then that they began raping the girls. They wanted sex as they killed, and this is sexual homicide. A sex killer gets excited when he thinks about forcing himself inside an unwilling victim, but the rape itself does not produce the ultimate excitement. It is the rape followed by the killing that is arousing. This is what happened at Beslan.One by one, females were targeted. The sex killers looked for the perfect victims, and after zeroing in, they grabbed and disrobed the little girls in the middle of the gym. There were muffled cries as the girls were humiliated in front of everyone. They were stripped, raped, and sodomized by several men. Not content to simply rape, the terrorists used their guns and other objects to penetrate the screaming victims while the other hostages were forced to watch. And the terrorists laughed. They laughed as they violated the children and made them bleed. What few people know is that some of the girls died as a result of being raped with objects. The internal damage was so severe that without immediate medical attention, the girls bled to death. Those who managed to survive required extensive reconstructive surgery and painful recoveries.But raping the girls was not enough for the deviants who had entered the school. The terrorists beat the other children. In fact, beatings took place regularly, and as they pummeled the little ones, the terrorists smiled and laughed. It was said that they would strike a child and then watch the child cringe. When the youngsters recoiled, their captors laughed. This says the offenders enjoyed inflicting the suffering. They wanted their victims to suffer.
Use of similar methods was peculiarly more intense in post-Islamic Spanish inquisition – compared to the rest of Europe. We know now, that opportunist Muslims switched sides during the final days and became devout Catholics. We see similar attitudes in Afghanistan, or Pakistan, or in the cancer that is now attempting to take over the frontier space across Russia in Daghestan or Chechnya.
Psychologically speaking, it could have connections to some hatred of the “mother”, the “uterus” being symbolic of that, a convoluted connection to self-hatred and hatred for imagined or real neglect/abandonment by the mother [and very peculiarly prominent in the founding stages of the leaders of the theology itself].
Whoever had primary role in that gang in doing this, is likely to have been exposed to the inner anecdotal/undercurrent of the meme of “penal rape” in the theology. By the way, with a lot of talk about Honey Singh, an Indian origin rapper apparently noted for raunchy lyrics and what has been described by womens’ rights groups as being misogynist and almost condoning rape – is claimed to be extremely popular or topping the chart in the Punjab and North India – and expectedly Bollywood. Now why exactly is he so popular exactly in that region, that saw the earliest and longest entrenchment of Islamic military power in the subcontinent – lies the answer.
Given the patterns, the psychological drive would be to dehumanize the woman – that is the reason even the penis is not used finally to commit the rape – it becomes a disembodied, dehumanized blunt or sharp tool. I would expect it to be accompanied by related dehumanizing actions – like urinating on the mouth/body etc. If they ever fully make the chargesheet public there is likely to be indications of this. But officially administrations typically drop the actual details of torture from public access. One cannot find the details in the judgment copies available for open access – on torture of women in police custody, for example. The now well-known case of Archana Guha’s is an example where public domain material, including the judgments, do not have the attached evidence – claims, and to know about what possibly this woman had to face, one has to look up a biography of her written by another woman.
Why the Indian Left fails to understand religious extremism
For some time now, the Indian state of Assam has been on the news due to its large-scale civilian strife and internal displacement of communities. But even more spectacularly, the internet and the media to an extent – has been ablaze with the issue of alleged threat mails and texts that perhaps forced a lot of migrant labour and students from the North Eastern ends of India. Following up, the government of India apparently has moved on in its bid to control the net, just like almost any other government on the planet, on the formal platform of protecting vulnerable people.
I will not go into the details of the Assam ethnicity, migration, religious divide problem that is essential to get a perspective of what is happening there and why. But in this Kafkaesque world of interest groups, doublespeak, hidden motivations shaped in their outward expression by complicated legacies of history and concocted morality, what is much more revealing is what the intellectuals and the self-acknowledged voices of nations and communities say on the issue.
I will pick on a very interesting voice pointed out to me by a friend, that of Amaresh Mishra in his timesofIndia blog. Mishra gives a good clue to his ideological lens in the very beginning lines
Before joining the Times of India in 1993 as a roving correspondent, I was part of the radical Left movement led then by the CPI-ML (Liberation). However, sufferings of dalits, adivasis and the working classes—natural Left constituencies—did not contribute to my early, personal radicalization. Still a student leader in the Allahabad University, I took active part in debates, discussions concerning national-international topics—and agitations mainly—on student issues.
In 1984, the day our Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated, I was in Calcutta. I had gone there to take part in the national conference of the Indian Peoples Front—the only attempt of its kind—of a Communist Party sponsoring a democratic-peoples party in India—made under the leadership of late comrade Vinod Mishra—the then general secretary of the CPI-ML (Liberation).
Mishra, says much more about where his mindset comes from – that of the Maoist strand within Indian communism, which typically frantically tries to distinguish itself from the second attempt at puritanism within Indian Marxism – that of CPI(M=Marxist), by adding the claim to be closer to Lenin in the L of its CPI(ML). In so many ways, the communists seem to uncannily reflect the classical search for ever more purity and a return to the golden mythical pure origins of all totalitarian and monoiconic ideologies including totalitarian religions – through evermore stringent factional and sectarian schisms.
Eric Hoffer writes : “Whence comes the impulse to proselytize? Intensity of conviction is not the main factor which impels a movement to spread its faith to the four corners of the earth. …Nor is the impulse to proselytize an expression of an overabundance of power. …The missionary zeal seems rather an expression of some deep misgiving, some pressing feeling of insufficiency at the center. Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. The proselytizing fanatic strengthens his own faith by converting others. …It is also plausible that those movements with the greatest inner contradiction between profession and practice – that is to say with a strong feeling of guilt – are likely to be the most fervent in imposing their faith on others.” (The True Believer, Psychology of Mass Movements, 1948, p. 110-111)
This sense of inadequacy and insufficiency, minus the humility of spirituality, leads to a constant instability and inequilibrium that leads the communist radical as much as a religious one, into a permanent search for something to feel guilty about and atone for that guilt by extreme action on a focused enemy, the “other”, the devil of his instantaneous ideology. Note that Mishra is perhaps subconsciously aware of this – in that he claims that his radicalism did not stem from communism per se but had existed even before – that his innate fanaticism and radicalism perhaps only found an appropriate vehicle to express itself.
Mishra explains his “anti-right wing” radical thoughts based on his glimpse of communal violence in 1984, when according to him he witnesses an atrocity:
Back then, I was only 18 years of age; the incident traumatized me so deeply that after I got back to Allahabad I fought with everyone—including my close relatives—who—as per the norm those days—were abusing Sikhs incessantly.
For several days, I was unable to sleep; I was full of rage; it was good that I did not have access to a gun those days—I would certainly have used it on some right-wing, communal/anti-Sikh element in Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh.
I am expressing my inner most urges to make a point—that during desperate/unjust times—a sensitive human being—belonging to the majority community—can be driven to anti right-wing violence. Being a ruling class brahmin—whose family had protected Muslims during the 1947 riots—and who took any violence against minorities as a challenge to his sense of honour directly—also must have contributed a lot to my aggressive stance.
So, imagine the plight/mindset of minority communities who saw unspeakable crimes—raping of daughters and mauling of children—being committed on their kith and kin.
It is most illuminating that Mishra always thinks of the “majority” in the context of the “Hindu”, and never ever expresses similar thoughts about the plight of the “minority” Hindu or Buddhist in Muslim majority areas or societies. In his memory and narrative, the “majority” member Hindu-Brahmin ancestor of his, is and does what is expected of the “majority” in any society. However, he conspicuously avoids the issue of duty of similar muslim majorities to protect the humanity and dignity of minorities in Muslim majority countries – even on the subcontinent and as neighbours, as in Pakistan and Bangladesh, where minorities have been systematically targeted for elimination and have been constantly dwindling from the time of Partition. Mishra of course needs to be completely silent about similar trauma and reaction in the “Hindus” seeing similar action during the Partition – when a future luminary of Pakistan, and icon of Bangladesh , Hussein Suhrawardy allowed a planned pogrom of Hindus to go through in Noakhali and Calcutta. Mishra cannot cite Liaqat Khan’s role in organizing a pogrom of Sindhi Hindus and what effect such memories should have had on Hindu survivors!
Amaresh Mishra then goes on to list the long tale of alleged woes of Muslims in India and allegations of state connivance in supposed “right-wing” torture. For Mishra’s deracinated guilt-ridden conscience, however, it does not pay to remember the case of the Kashmir Valley and the state sponsored “Muslim” “right-wing” atrocity on the Kashmir Valley Hindus from as early as late 60’s and early 70’s. Mishra has never heard of a certain Kashmiri Pundit girl who was abducted and the consequences thereof – long, long before the destruction of the disputed structure at Ayodhya.
Mishra accepts that in India, it was possible to flourish as an “upper-caste” “ex-Naxalite”. He fails to realize, that in his clever self-pity, he shows that even after passing through “Naxalism”, it was impossible for someone to leave behind his awareness of privileged birth. Or therein lies the tragedy and the real failure of the Indian leftist, the failure to realize that his leftist radicalism often has its roots in an imperfect digestion of his Hindu cultural roots. The reason that the ranks of leftism are dominated by “upper castes” and Hindus, but not Muslims or Christians – who only make rare appearances, lie in Hindu threads of a pervasive universal humanism that has remained alive through texts and folk belief in spite of the louder voices of so-called elitism of caste or jaati-varna hierarchies. Islamic culture theologically endorses property, and the imperialism shaped later Christianity similarly endorses authoritarianism and property, and discourage rebellions against the theologically approved regimes which protect those very things that the Left seeks to destroy.
The remainder of Mishras’ article goes on to repeat the allegations in the current Congress led Indian regime’s attempts at sticking the blame for almost each and every terrorist atrocity on Indian soil at the door of Congress’s hated “other”, the apotheosis, the “devil” – of the saffron, or the “Hindu”. Mishra’s political project therefore does not wait to mention the fact that many of these alleged cases against the so-called saffron terror themselves suffer from allegations of torture, political witchhunts, use of state machinery to serve electoral calculations, and that some of the accused could very well be agents provocateurs sent deliberately by the state – like a certain Col Purohit.
Is it so that Mishra perhaps needs a devil, a satan, on whom he can put the sense of all his inadequacies, and transfer all his guilt to? The underlying Hindu memes of equality of all mankind – amritasya putra of the Upanishads, the persistent and recurring post-Vedic Indian thinkers who repeatedly fought with the elite against claims of hierarchy and superiority, prepare him to expect social justice for all humanity- something a predominantly Muslim society never, ever feels towards the non-Muslims. But the established social hierarchy that gave birth to him practices differently from the underlying memes, and this contributes part of the guilt.
But the major part of the guilt comes from the colonial project of Macaulay, prompted by his dear friend Sir William Jones, and other missionaries aligned to the imperialist project on British India. Jones’s favourite textual representation of “Hinduism” was the work attributed to Manu, even though at the time, there was ample evidence that in India, various other Hindu texts were actually followed – like the various grihya sutras of Apastambha, Baudhayana, or Gautama – many far more liberal than that of Manu. In fact modern scholarship excavates increasingly the reality of 18th and 19th century Indian “Hindu”legal practice as far more heterodox and non-Manu like than the British colonial project wanted it to be. For the British empire, demonizing the “Brahmin” was a primary necessity – just as it was for the centuries of Muslim invaders before them. The cultural and intellectual legitimacy of the “Hindu” needed to be undermined and associated with guilt before the colonial project could succeed fully. The source of Mishraic guilt lies in that colonial project. Even the very fact of his “Brahmin” upper-caste ancestor behaving very un-Brahmin-like during 1947 fails to stir him to question the Islamist and British colonial stereotype of the evil caste-repressive “Brahmin” exploiter.
The intellectual limitations that lead to Mishra’s feverish imagination of conspiracy theories could have been overcome had he allowed himself to look at news items like the following:
Khine Myo Min: Myanmar government authority in Sittwe evacuated ninety eight Hindu refugees from Bengali Muslim dominated refugee camps to downtown Sittwe on Wednesday.
98 people from 18 Hindu families were moved from their current shelter of Thae Chaung and Thak Kay Pron camps to Sittwe city due to increased threats by Bengali Muslim extremists after many reported rapes and attempted rapes and tortures committed by the Bengali Muslims who are majority in the camp.
A mind more used to logical dissection without ideological preoccupations, would have immediately noted the peculiarity by which even the horrors of a common refugee existence fails to suppress the Islamic urge for genocide or repression/exploitation of the non-Muslim.
In constructing grand saffron conspiracies, Mishra ignores news items that come from his trusted “secular” side of the narrative construction business :
Rogue sms’s traced to Kerala and Bangladesh
Cyber security agencies have apparently detected the hand of radical groups, such as the Popular Front of India (PFI) in Kerala and Bangladesh-based Harkat-ul-Jehad al Islami (HuJI), while tracking SMSs that led to the exodus of Northeast people[…] they have been successful in detecting forwarding of bulk messages going viral from Bangladesh groups and PFI activists. Some of the messages hold out communal threats of retribution for alleged atrocities on Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, a community in the Arakan state linked with Bangladesh, traditionally backed by Islamist and jihadist groups, such as the HuJI.
The Arakan state, in west Myanmar, lies on the route for supplying guns to Northeast insurgents through Cox’s Bazaar, in Chittagong in the past. The HuJI, formed by former Bangladeshi jihadists who took part in the Afghan civil war, was involved in the attack on Sheikh Hasina, now Bangladesh PM, in 2004.
The agencies, monitoring Facebook and Twitter, are also examining the possible role of the Hindu radical groups and the underworld.
Mishra, if he had retained his critical intellectual faculties, would have noticed that the “security” agencies could give much greater details in case of Islamist outfits, and could only add the “possibility” of “Hindu radicals” too being involved. Such equating of Islamism with saffronism seems to have become a requirement of Indian political correctness, often resulting in hilarious columns. Actually, such perspectives should have led to exploring the “possible role” of “Christian” groups in the North East too, with some prominent insurgent groups in the past having paraded their Christian identity a lot possibly in the hope attracting international sympathies from appropriate corners.
It is understandable as to why Mishra cannot quote the following items, or even dismiss them as concoctions of a right-wing state. His devil then has to be extended to icons he needs to clutch on to as the last remaining helpless wronged victims of his limitless guilt. If he has to acknowledge the reality, he loses the fulcrum of his life.
When armed communities are at each other’s throats in the three violence-hit western districts in Assam, the unarmed and unorganised are fleeing the state — mostly to West Bengal and Meghalaya. The fear factor has gripped Bengali Hindus — the softest target whenever violence takes over the state’s fragile peace — and Koch-Rajbonsi tribals are fleeing the Muslim-dominated Dhubri district over the last one month since the Bodo-Muslim clashes broke out on July 20.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Curfew was today clamped in an Allahabad locality as a precautionary measure while stray incidents took place in Lucknow during a street protest against the ongoing ethnic strife in Assam.
“The curfew was imposed in Kotwali police station area from 7 P.M. And will remain in force till midnight when further decision will be taken after reviewing the situation,” Additional District Magistrate (City), D P Giri told PTI. Trouble began this afternoon when a procession was being taken out by some members of a minority community in localities falling under Kotwali police station.
However, policemen deployed in the area objected to the procession pointing out that no prior permission had been obtained and that order had to be maintained in view of large crowds expected at places of worship on the occasion of the last Friday prayers of Ramzan.
The agitators allegedly reacted strongly and tried to proceed with the procession with some of them indulging in heavy stone-pelting which left several persons, including some policemen, injured and caused damage to a number of shops in the vicinity and vehicles parked nearby.
[…]
Earlier, the protest march in Lucknow after the Friday prayers turned violent here as a group of people, shouting slogans against alleged atrocities on minorities in Assam and Myanmar, resorted to stone pelting and vandalism. The protest march which started from near the Tile Wali Masjid created a ruckus on its way forcing business establishments to close down and vandalising parks and vehicles, a senior police official said.When the RAF and PAC tried to stop them they indulged in brick batting damaging public properties and vehicles. The protesters also took offence to the presence of media covering the event and damaged their vehicles and equipments, police said.
Later police resorted to baton charge as the protesters tried to march towards Vidhan Sabha.
With such a single-track focus, Mishra therefore shows no grasp of the longer social processes of history and reconstruction of history by both the colonial forces as well as those to whom the colonialists handed over power. He shows in exemplary detail, why the Indian Left had long stopped thinking and questioning themselves, their very own belief systems and values – to check for how those very concepts and values were shaped. In thinking how others wanted them to think for their own geo-strategic purposes and projects, projects which themselves are now defunct – there might still have been a way out.
But indulging in such conspiracy theories actually helps the neo-imperialist strategies to succeed. Mishra will be nowhere to defend whatever is left of his society when the time comes, a society which people of his ideology have helped undo out of unthinking and politically created guilt.
Why there cannot be any news of Islamist provocation in India?
A friend from India has just now let me know that apparently 25 cows were slaughtered by alleged Islamists on the Hindu festival of Ashadhi Ekadashi in Malegaon, Maharashtra on 23/07/2010. There had been allegedly a “lathicharge” (liberal use of sticks and batons by police and paramilitary forces – in Indian parlance) on protesting Hindus. The Muslim MLA was taken into “custody” (or as my friend says, protected from public retribution) and the Central Reserve Police Force deployed in Northern Maharashtra. Police protection has apparently been extended to every mosque in Western Maharashtra. But nothing on this, even so called “factual reporting” to denounce “rumour mongering” against a “forever peaceful and repressed community” has not been undertaken by the Indian media.
Same has been the case with a certain Christian lecturer in the so-called “socialist republic of Kerala” where leftists and Islamists are two sides of the same political coin. This lecturer allegedly earned Islamist wrath by giving the name of the prophet of Islam to a character quoted from a play in one of his question papers, and he was ambushed and his hands chopped off. Not much has been heard of this in the world news papers and no discussion at all from Islamophiles in the west who jump and down on the slightest wind passed by any critique of the ideology. Not much is being heard even from the Christian denominations and Church organizations who were so loudly present in all forms of the media regarding alleged atrocities on Christians in the Indian state of Orissa. Then of course the alleged perpetrators were “Hindu”, but with any Islamic perpetrator – apparently atrocities are sweeter and the true forgiving and forgetting principles of Christianity are to be stringently applied.
These are not uncommon news for most parts of India. Some time ago, this year, a certain town in Uttar Pradesh, one of the electorally key political provinces of India, was engulfed in violent riots. The source of the riot was apparently another trivial incident in the increasingly bitter fights beteen the Barelvi and Deobandi schools of Indian Islam. These two have been fighting a sometimes violent and sometimes polemical battle for centuries now – in rhetoric over the “true” interpretation of Islamic doctrine. In reality, as many locals observe, it is about a fight to posses the mosques, Islamic institutions and financial networks – and in this recently the Deobandis have been winning. [the factors of external monetary inputs, the success of Deobandis in both Pakistani Punjab and Indian Gangetic Valley as well as Kerala, role of Islamic charities and their global networks of raising money in non-Muslim lands and transferring it to other places to expand Islamism is a much larger issue to be touched on perhaps in another post].However, the known victims of this Islamic factional rioting turned out to be Hindus.
The provincial government, led by one of the stalwarts of the abstract and twentieth century created Indian category of “Dalits”, clamped down on all information regarding the rioting to come out into the media. Apparently this censorship, imposed by the administration or voluntarily adhered to by Indian media – who typically suppress anything that may show the Islamic in bad light, but who are quite eager to report anything that will show the non-Muslim except Christians in bad light – was quite successful.
So the outside world does not come to know of the constant attrition or provocation faced by the “Hindus” spread over India from over-zealous factions or leaders of Indian Islam. The world does not come to know of fanatical Indian Muslim mobs in southern and eastern India rioting to banish the Bangladeshi female author, Tasleema Nasreen – who writes in Bengali – one of the national languages of India, and was hosted by India after her virtual exile from Bangladesh at the behest of equally fanatical Bangladeshi Islamists. The primary crime of Tasleema was of course that she had dared to write about the rape, and abuse of Hindus and other non-Muslims in Bangladesh by Islamists, as well as the abuse and torture of women by the Fatwaists.
Both the Marxist provincial government of Indian West Bengal, as well as the superbly “secular” central government at New Delhi, quickly succumbed to Islamist pressure and Tasleema was forced to come under virtual house arrest in the name of “safe house” and then bundled out of the country.
The Indian system is ruthless only if there appears the possibility or imagination of a “law and order” deterioration. However the state’s reaction is entirely dependent on who can “cause” the deterioration of ‘law and order”. If it is the “Muslim”, then of course all their demands are to be met in the name of “communal harmony”, whose maintenance in India apparently is the responsibility of only one community. This is why even the media cooperates to prevent any news of any atrocity by any Muslim or Islamic group of Indian origin, from being spread around or known globally. This was why, the rape and genocidic ethnic cleansing of Indian hindu Kashmiri pundits from the Valley portion of Jammu and Kashmir was never allowed to be publicized, and the Indian government simply keeps shut as if the Pundits never existed in the province. But all the while Islamophiles in the West and in Indian cry themselves hoarse about supposed repression on muslims in “Kashmir”.
Why do I write this? Because one day, all this one sided propaganda in favour of Islamism and total suppression of all information about its continual atrocious behaviour on Hindus and other non-Muslims of India, will come to haunt the world. Just as north Europe and the USA conveniently forgot the atrocities by Islamists and the Ottomans on Balkan society, and ignored the careful planning by Islamist organizations to use this weakness to create a beachhead for an Islamist state in Europe and moved against the Serbs – they may have to try and do the same in India. Because the anger and frustration will accumulate and burst one day. Yes with external help from Christian West, Islamism can perhaps win the day using the shared deep-lying hatred of the “pagan” – but then the West should not be surprised.
It is the price of suppression of any information that does not suit a desired world-view. Once of course the Islamists win in India in any major way, the Christian “white”, “non-mud-race” West will enjoy the Islamist attention fully! Cheers to that future!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )Is it time for the West to plan for dissolving Pakistan?
How many nations of our times are based purely on a religion and recognized by other nations as independent nations? Only two – the Vatican City and Pakistan. Ironically they share in common some traits. Both have helped in the unravelling of the USSR but not of Communism – for it still survives behind the People’s Republic of China and is working towards global dominance. Both have been courted by the USA in its Cold War struggles. Neither has disappointed. Both exert influence on the global politics disproportionate to their actual size, economy, military capabilities, and the capacity to contribute in any meaningful way towards a modern, knowledge based, technological and information society. Both manage to do so by manipulating their historical images as projections into the future.
But there the similarities end. The Vatican’s leadership has made amends to its historical victims, and has shown its flexibility and readiness to change with the times. It has steadfastly refused to underwrite radicalism of the theological variety [the severe castigation of the Liberation Theology for example]. This may change in the future. But the leadership of the Vatican have proved themselves consummate statesmen in the concessions and compromises that they have made while never abandoning the fundamental objective of total global ideological domination. This is an objective that would have been a crime if not from the “one and only true message” for any other “religion” in the times when the Church ruled supreme. But now in the days of “total religious tolerance”, there is nothing wrong in having a declared agenda of “harvesting all souls”. In fact, legal and state coercive machinery can be used to guarantee protection of any proselytizer – even someone swearing by texts that recommend putting the unrepentant unbeliever to the sword.
Where Pakistan differs is not in its protection of organizations claiming the right to practice “Dawa” or spreading of the Islamist beliefs – but in its total lack of statesmanship. Unlike the Vatican, the Pakistani leadership never apologizes to the victims of its Islamists, never acknowledges that it has nurtured Jihadis in its madrassahs, never concedes to modernization in education and social practices, never really allows any land reforms or dismantling of feudal exploitation in its backyard.
Pakistan is basically an anachronism, a nation whose only foundational claim for identity is a religion – in a historical period where the world is leaving behind, exclusive and historical claim based religions. Moreover, that religion is not even unique to the country – it is shared by a host of other nations, some of whom have louder and more well established claims of being the centre for that religion. So Pakistan is based on a type of ideology increasingly irrelevant globally as national foundation, and moreover on an ideology based identity shared with other “nations” – and therefore has no real claims of distinction from other nations. It cannot look at history and culture, for in spite of the best sadistic efforts of generations of “mullahs” – elements of pre-Islamic cultures lie firmly interwoven in the national fabric, and those elements are shared by its imagined nemesis – India. In fact the pre-Islamic cultural element proved so strong that a part of it broke away in reaction in 1971 as Bangladesh.
So now Pakistan finds itself in a terrible dilemma. To strengthen and give uniqueness to its national foundation, it has to become more Islamic than “others”. Becoming more Islamic means more and more unquestioning obedience to a strict and literal interpretation of the core texts. That in turns means more Jihad with violent means which accelerates the competition between the ruling feudal elite, the army, the mullahs, the commons, the militants – to become “purer” than the others. That means an almost perpetual state of national Jihad. Purer Islam can only be maintained by preventing modernization – in education, productivity, technology and above all the questing mindset. Which means Pakistan will become more and more dependent on largesse from interested external sources and be a drain on the global economy as the sources would spread the cost around.
So the West and the global community should perhaps start thinking of dissolving the entity called Pakistan. Here are the brief reasons :
(1) Dissolving Pakistan saves the West (and therefore the world economy )a huge amount of money and resources needed to keep the state afloat, and a total drain, because none of that capital goes into productive capacities.
(2) Even though the Chinese are now playing second fiddle to the West, it is uncannily similar to the Ribbentrop-Molotov handshake where both sides appear to be buying time. Eventually, Russia and China could come together with Iran (or whatever is left of it even if a so-called revolutionary liberalization and democratization takes place there under non-theologians) to which the CAR will lean. As long as Pakistan remains an independent entity, it can play the prostitute and threaten to kiss the higher bidder or the one more willing to pay. That is both a security risk and a potential disaster, if everything given to Pakistan lands up in Russian, Iranian or Chinese hands and the West’s presence is virtually terminated in the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Dissolving Pakistan takes away this worry.
(3) Dissolving Pakistan and putting up new independent states actually creates new multiple centres where Jihad can be protected and nurtured. One Pakistan becomes many and the western problem multiplies. One of the best bets is to allow India to absorb the populations and the territories. India is a growing economy which can absorb the costs. It has the capability and the will to manage multicultural groups and religious animosities. Culturally Indians of the western part of the country will be closer to the Pakistanis across the border [Punjab for example shares the language across the border in spite of the state sponsorship of Urdu] compared to any other external ethnicity or country. Moreover the costs of developing infrastructure and the economy or carrying out necessary social reforms will be borne on Indian shoulders and not on the west.
(4) As the price for non-intervention in the absorption, the West could extract concessions from India that it will have assured access and facilities to reach the CAR through channels and routes maintained and developed through Pakistani territories connecting the Karakorum Highway and other CAR approach routes.
(5) The Taliban lose their foster home, and are buffered off from the crucial supply routes of Karakorums and the Arabian Sea. The so-called Kashmir problem vanishes as the Pakistani military and ISI mechanism to foment terrorists inside India vanishes. So one of the greatest excuses for maintaining Jihad from the Pakistani side vanishes.
India, because of linguistic and unique cultural history, will remain firmly in western and specifically the Anglo-Saxon or Atlanticist orbit for generations to come. There are sufficient fissures in the Indian ruling class for the west to exploit and protect western interests.
It is worth a try – at least the largest source for generating terror of the Jihadi and allied kind (through international crime and other non-religious or ethnic militancy) will be effectively liquidated. At one stroke West no longer has to face Islamist terror, pay for upkeep of Jihad, and instead can profit from a growing economy which bears all the costs!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 5 so far )Yemen – turning point of Islamism in the Middle East
Whereas if Iran gains Yemen, it can stretch out and outflank the USA+Saudi Arabia strategic presence on the western side of the Gulf. Both sides are therefore likely to accuse the other of carrying out a proxy war in Yemen. What is strange is the supposed existence of the Al Qaeda in Yemen, with solid origins from Saudi Arabia and one-time collaboration with USA (Osama’s connections during the anti-USSR AFG war), and the simultaneous supposed Iranian sponsoring of the Shi-ite Houthi’s. But no reports of conflict between Qaeda and the Houthis.
Added complication is the often missed problem of the Al Ahwaz area under Iran. This is claimed to be a primarily “Arab” area and population with the greatest concentration of natural gas/petrol resources of Iran. There is a separatist movement based on this claim, and their spokespersosn find sympathetic ears in Yemen. It is possible that USA+Saudi Arabia allows Al-Ahwaz separatists to function to pick at Iran, while Iran allows the Shia tribes in north Yemen to function to pick at USA+Saudi Arabia. But a connection between Qaeda and Iran is interesting to the point of absurdity. They obviously can have common purpose – overthrow of the Saudi Royal regime and then wiping off Israel. But how far will this Shia-Sunni collaboration go? Iran can very well think of sponsoring Osama, as an antidote to Israel+USA. But how much will the Arabian Sunnis accept Shi-ite domination? They have accepted “non-Arabic” Islamic over-lordship before though – Ottoman Turks for example. Or is it entirely a representation to tar and feather Iran and Qaeda together? It will be important to see how far Iran digests attacks against Shias in Pakistan and still does nothing against Pakistan.
Being seen as “sympathetic” to theologians in the various Islam dominated countries can appear sweet as a strategy for the moment – but it is much better to think of the future in these countries in the long run. The best bet lies in holding out the hope for a liberal democracy in today’s youth in these countries. If we have to choose sides, lets choose it on the side of the future of these countries. Assuming a blanket trend towards extremism could be realistic but does not help us to divide up these societies so that the theologians do not get all the advantages of a united society behind them!
The death sentences against the condemned army- personnel indicted for the assassination of Sk. Mujibur Rehman in Bangladesh, are most likely to be carried out early this morning. There may not be any immediate backlash against the hangings. But the hangings are likely to convert the executed into icons for the militant Islamists and their supporters in the Islamic world. The trial and execution already generated several threats against state personnel and politicians, but nothing concrete has yet taken place. There was a substantial proportion of voters who voted for candidates not belong the Awami League led alliance, and a proportion of this vote would overlap with the “Islamist” vote. The move towards de-religionization of politics in Bangladesh has already brought out the Islamists in protest especially against any move aimed at weakening or delegetimizing “Islamic poilitics”.
The result has now been an extension of the “west” versus “Islamism” war – from a small zone in Afghanistan-Pakistan and Sudan, into all of Afghanistan and Pakistan, into the Horn of Africa – Mauritania, sub-Saharan Africa, Somalia, Sudan, Iraq, and Yemen, with branches leading into Bangladesh, Malaysia, southern Thailand, Indonesia, parts of Philipines, almost the entirety of Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa, Egypt, and spreading into Central Asia.
For Bangladesh, the executions will probably be used by the Islamists as an indication of the Awami League government’s connections and alleged “dependence” on countries like India and the USA – deemed to be among the “enemies” of Islam – (in spite of the zealous protestations to the contrary from the most vocal sections of Indian society and polity). If Islamism gains in sentiments in Bangladesh, the Awami League government will be forced to depend more and more on India and this will push the polarization further. Such a polarization in itself is not bad for India, if India can see a clear policy towards Islamic radicalism. However, so far Indian reaction has been self-contradictory – as it still mostly holds on to the Marxists myths of “all radicalsim comes from lack of economic development”. So this part remains uncertain for the future.
The dynamic of the “Islamist politics” is changing. Regimes like the “royal” house in Saudi Arabia will become increasingly identified with and dependent on the “west”. Looking carefully as to how USA is being forced to shift its military attention, from Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, back to Afghanistan, back to Iraq, to Yemen – all the while the militancy is gaining recruits across north and central Africa – spanning the two oceans is illustrative. Increasingly the Islamist militancy is taking on its traditional twin front struggle. On the one hand it is the struggle between theologians and temporal rulers for ultimate dominance of the Islamist movement. On the other it is the dream of conquering the whole world in the name of Islam.
In time, the “royal houses” in Saudi Arabia/Jordan or the emirates – will lose their prestige and position if the Islamist movement continues under the radical theologians. On the one hand – there is the exclusivist strand of claims of bloodline/clan connections to the Qureyish. On the other there is the urge to gain popular representation and empowerment irrespective of bloodlines within the “greater” Islamic identity – this is the Iranian trend. Over the long run, the ideals of “democracy” and empowerment prevalent in non-islamic societies will reinforce and strengthen its twisting into Iranian style theocracy dominated “populist” Islamic rule.
The “life span” of the Saudi royal house will be short if the “house” does not make tactical compromises with the “populist Islamism”.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )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 )A large, if not the final nail in the coffin of Islam in India – Mumbai blasts signal the end of an era of Islamophile regimes
What Islamic Jihadis have done in Mumbai has been micro-covered by the world media now. It is not my task to repeat what cameras and anchors have been ranting about. However, it is a day of great sadness as well as a day of great hope. For with this attack Islam has sealed its fate in India. It will continue to survive for years but its end has begun. The Hindu has now essentially broken its final shred of shyness and philosophical disregard of its own relentless annihilation. I have warned in this blog before that this is one community that appears docile on the outside, but with great resilience, persistence and determination that had fought the Islamic hordes for more than a 1000 years – this is how nearly 80% still survive within the borders of India.
The media under the overwhelming influence of a leftist political correctness imposed by almost 60 years of Islamophile and blatantly anti-Hindu propagandist regime dependent Thaparite school of Indian history, will continue to do damage control in favour of Islam, and the Indian political establishment will try to divert attention by hinting at “foreign hands”. But this is one damage that cannot really be covered. The bulk of the Indian population has disjointed itself psychologically from everything Islamic – including every element in the apparatus of state and civil society that appears to have sided with Islam, protected Islam or patronized Islam. If the BJP fails to give shape to this disjunction, the momentum of the “Hindu” will not stop, and we will see a new nationalist avowedly Hindu movement taking birth.
The Taleban, the Al Qaeda, Pakistani state and security apparatus that supplies and sources terror outfits and outrages in India, the ideological backbone from which modern Jihad took its inspiration – the return to orthodoxy movements of the Tabliqi Jamaat and the Deobandis in the subcontinent, in spite of all their tactical show of condemnation of terrorists as unIslamic (but not antiIslamic and not punishable like sexual offences by stoning or death), the communist imperialism of China which sponsored both Iran and Pakistan, all will now be clubbed together by the “Hindu” as the enemy – and anyone, any force in the world that sympathises, patronizes, justifies Islami Jihad will be silently assigned the status of enemy by the “Hindu”. The Congress’s political future is doomed, the BJP may not fare much better if it does not reflect this rising silent rage in the Hindus. The Congress will still survive in the next general elections but its political pre-eminence is now on inevitable decline.
As I have tried to warn many times in this blog, once this Hindu consolidation takes place, the days of Islam on the subcontinent are numbered. Once India itself frees itself of Islam, the new “Hindu” India will turn its attention to Pakistan and Bangladesh and the next round of retaliatory and liquidation moves against Islam will take place. Its start of the endgame in the Indian subcontinent at least for Islam – a faint glimmer of hope in an otherwise overwhelming gloom.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 3 so far )The Centre-Left regime of India has scored once again – Mumbai mauled by Jihad while security forces are busy painting the “Hindu” as terrorist
All Indian media has been buzzing with images and sounds of the Mumbai Taj hotel burning as a result of an encounter between Jihadi terrorists and Indian security forces. There could be more fatalities, and more casualties. Encounters have been going on in other places in Mumbai too. But the main target of the Taj was also an important place where corporate India met regularly and at the time of the Jihadi attack several important trans-national business meetings were going on. The Trident is another hotel where terrorists have struck.
Why did the Jihadis get so bold? They have got the clear message from the Left of Centre Indian regime currently in power that with the general elections next year in sight, the regime will do everything to convince the Muslim populations of India that the regime is prepared to go to any lengths to please Islam – what better method than to try and paint the “Hindu” – the hated “infidel”, the “qufr”, whose land is to be looted by Jihad, whose women are to be raped and captured and enslaved by Jihad, and all whose cultural icons to be erased by Jihad, as the “bad guy” and therefore gain the gratitude of Islam.
The Islamists know that the Islamophile regime of India will use its state power to prevent any retaliation – the only language of retaliation and revenge that Islam understands will not be spoken to the Muslims. This whole game of Islamic Jihadi sadism on the non-Muslims of India would have been over forever in a matter of months if the “Hindus” decided and were allowed to take matters into their own hands. The Islamophile regime at the centre knows this very well and has used every means possible to prevent the majority community come to exactly such a conclusions – including traditional state influence and regime sponsored academics’ control over the media. It is possible, that Centre-Left has already decided or panicked that the next general elections could be quite bad for them and that the majority sentiment was veering away from them – so they desperately went out to ensure minority support which because of long term steady mobilization by Muslim theologians and infiltration from the neighbouring Muslim countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh has now significant vote swing capabilities in terms of sheer numbers.
The Centre-Left regime’s tactic is self-defeating. Its antics and Jihad’s singleminded agenda of destroying non-Muslim cultures has now more or less ensured that non-Muslims of India mostly have now come out of the traditional illusion of mythical peaceful advent of Islam in India propagandized by the Thaparite school of Indian history. There will be a huge campaign now mounted by the Indian media and the regime in power that the greatest need of the hour is for Indians to respect “communal harmony” – so that the only language Islam understands (and if spoken, historically, Islam always turned “peaceful” – for their greatest theological concern is to survive and increase in numbers) that of retaliation and liquidation of Islamic leadership and support bases, will not be used – giving time and confidence for Jihad to expand further in India. There will also be an attempt perhaps to divert attention and justify Jihadi action in two cliche modes (1) “we have to understand the frustrations that lead to such desperate actions!” (implying that Indians should concede more and more to Islam while similar logic should not be applied to non-Muslim frustration) (2) “it was because of the Hindu terror that Muslims reacted” – implying that Hindus should never think of resisting Jihad.
Non-Muslims of India should identify which political groups appease Jihad and Islam and vote accordingly. At this stage, India will not survive, if Islam and its Jihadi agenda cannot be contained and liquidated – this will be the primary issue for the nation’s existence. If India survives only then can it deal with its economic problems – and non-Muslims have to consolidate their position with respect to Islam. For those in the West who have been supporting and still continue to think of protecting Islam in India as continuation of British Imperialist and Cold war western strategy – should get it into their myopic thick heads, that the fall of India to Islam will complete the pan Islamic regime running from NorthAfrica through the Middle East to Malaysia and Indonesia and will nicely cut the West off from all the major sources of world’s oil and the Asian markets.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Future scenario for the Indian subcontinent – 4 : India’s long term drift towards the Right
Before I continue with my series on the “immensely significant periphery” of the Indian subcontinent, I would like to touch here briefly on the “heartland” India itself, as its fundamental trends are going to have an impact on the developments in the periphery. India is crucially and deeply involved in almost all the countries of the “periphery”.
The recent investigations and attempts by the Mumbai ATS to implicate the so-called “Hindu Right Wing” in the blasts in the predominantly Muslim areas of Nanded and Malegaon in Maharashtra is significant for more reasons than the obvious immediate ones in the minds of the investigators or in their political “motivators” within the Congress led government both at the state as well as the national level as suggested by the political detractors of the Congress. Any speculation as to the political motivations to paint the “Hindu” as terrorist and equate with the “Islamic” terrorists with the next general elections in sight is good food for the “political” media. So far all the “brain mapping” and “modern” techniques of extraction of truth has failed to provide any basis for the speculative allegations against the so called “Hindu Right”. Scanning the media reaction and media trial by “secular” forces of the security apparatus’ attempts at “nailing” Islamic terrorists we can find a deep suspicion and derision of any “identification” of Islam with “terrorism” and where it becomes really indefensible – we hear loud protests that we should all actually look into the real “provocations” behind such “Muslim reactions”. The same voices appear to be instantly convinced about the legitimacy of the Mumbai ATS’s claims, and leads us to realize the real political affiliations of this “progressive” “neutral and objective” voices which are allowed solely to be voiced on the media. In any case these are all processes of short term duration played out in the immediate future. We should look at the real significance of this phenomenon for the longer term.
The fact that some “Hindus” could decide to take matters into their own hands, was always a possibility, and I have repeatedly stressed this out here in my blog. The root of this phenomenon goes back a long way into the history of the Indian subcontinent and how that history has been reconstructed in the modern period under the British and its successor regimes for their own hegemonistic purposes. The fundamental problem is that of the complete denial by regime dependent historians of the Nehruvian and post Nehruvian Congress-(pro-Soviet)-Leftist schools of Indian history of Islamic atrocities on the non-Muslims of India throughout the numerous invasions and conquests and the various Islamic state authorities, and the struggle carried on by the non-Muslims against such Islamic behaviour. The fact is that the memory of Muslim torture, rape, abduction and forced marriage of women, enslavement, extreme economic exploitation with religious justifications, carries on in non-Muslim groups who have strong traditions of intergenerational transfer of knowledge and experiences. The handing down of this memory, a basic distrust of all things Islamic, runs deep in most strongly bonded “Hindu” clans and communities that have faced Islamic onslaught and survived still maintaining their “Hindu” identity, and does not need the “official” vehicle of “historical education” under the watchful reconstructive eyes of the Thaparite school of Indian history.
Just as Islam failed to completely convert all Indians because of the intensive and long drawn out struggle against Islam – an aspect completely suppressed by the Thaparites as it would jeopardize their “idyllic” myth of peaceful conversions and perfect communal amity – the Thaparites failed to completely brainwash all Hindus and rewrite the history of Islam in India in their minds. The Hindu appears docile, compromising, philosophical, “other-worldly” etc., but this is a deceptive impression – for the story of their struggle and their survival against the ruthless barbarities of Islam have been edited out of public representation through the media or education. This long struggle, which preserved their culture to a great extent (although traumatized and showing the cultural effects of such trauma in “self-repression”) if studied properly and honestly, will show that this is a community which appears “loose”, divided, ritualistic and carrying a lot of baggage like “caste” which can mostly be traced surprisingly to modern colonial regimes of Islam and the British – but all these are mere superficial features, the social veneer hiding their actual strategic flexibility and determination that have continuously produced characters like the legendary founders of the Vijaynagar empire, or Shivaji and Ranjit Singh.
The transition to “independence” in India followed the general subcontinental pattern of elite mobilization to get control of state power and machinery established by a colonial regime for the elites’ monopolistic hegemonistic enjoyment. This meant that the British actually handed over power to a regime that was likely to remain in the British sphere of influence and carry out policies in favour of British interests. The British helped liquidate opposition to Nehru within India by using discriminatory repression against likely alternative popular candidates, because Nehru showed significant psychological disjunction from the majority culture on the one hand and great affinity for the British “taste” or Islam on the other- thereby ensuring continuation of long term British imperialist design on the subcontinent.
The apparatus of state control under colonial regimes depended on the apparatus of personal power, and this structure was retained essentially even after transition. This implies retention of personnel and systems faithful to the previous colonial masters, with direct and indirect structures of ideological and cultural hegemony of the British continuing through various mechanisms like education (the current Prime Minister proudly reminded his British audience once that he was an “Oxonian” himself and that “many Oxonians” have in the past gone forth to rule India). This regime embarked on the project of redoctrinating the forthcoming generations of Indians into a soporific mythical history of India where everything “Hindu” was retrogressive and evil, and only those aspects of Hinduism which tried to be syncretic with the revealed traditions were worth treating without disdain – and all the revealed traditions as practised or introduced in India as paragons of virtue and as liberating for Indian society (The Thaparites actually manage to “confess” this agenda in their public posturings). Such indoctrination programs could be maintained only as long as the generation represented in the state apparatus derived from colonial affiliations, remained active. Natural causes progressively diminish the proportion of such elements in the apparatus of social control, and it was a matter of time only that newer generations of Indians from the majority community would reassert their deep cultural affiliations to their own community.
All this will lead to a gradual strengthening of the “Hindu” community bonds, and cultural affinities. Modern generations of professionals or intellectuals will gradually erode or eliminate practises that are seen as retrogressive or obstructive towards reassertion of “Hindu” hegemony. This cultural consolidation would not have taken a political turn, if the Indian regimes did not try to denigrate or delegitimize this “Hindu” cultural identity. Blatant whitewashing and patronizing of religions like Islam, in complete contradiction to social historical memory of the “Hindus”, alienated the community from political forces that supported such regimes. We have to remember, that there are concrete case studies of how Islamic forces were encouraged by such regimes when faced with possible electoral defeat at the hands of “leftists”, beginning in the 60’s – long before the rise of the BJP. Similarly the Kashmiri Islamic aggression, the atrocities and ethnic cleansing of non-Muslim Kashmiris, continued without hindrance under these very same regimes beginning in the 70’s and intensifying into the late 80’s, long before the BJP became a significant electoral force. Early 70’s also showed that the essential character of Islam on the subcontinent had remained unchanged from its first appearance through the Arab raids into Sindh – through the brutal massacre, organized rape, and destruction of cultural icons of the “Hindus” in the then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. All these factors combined with the relentless terrorist activities of Islamic groups supported by Pakistan, forced the “Hindu” cultural consolidation process to take a political turn -as Hindus probably came to realize that they would need to control the apparatus of state power to ensure survival against violently retrogressive Jihadi Islam whose sole aim is to completely liquidate all traces of non-Muslim cultures.
The more the “Hindu” is demonized, and Islam raised sky-high in praise, the greater will be the politicization of this essentially cultural reassertion. Retaliation against atrocities that appear to continue under state “non-chalance” has been found to be effective – and is romantically praised in many circles both in the West and India – take the case of the Palestine “Liberation” movement for example. The Indian state has not been able to stop Kashmiri Jihadi Islami atrocity nor has it been able to prevent explosions at huge human costs sourced by Islamic militants. It was only a matter of time before some “Hindu” thought of retaliation seeing in the government’s consistent failure and indirect “encouragement” and protection of Islam – the root ideological cause and motivation for such violence (and not the humans who are brainwashed at madrassah’s from childhood in hatred of the Qafir). Just as in Palestine, or Algeria, such retaliation will unfortunately prove quite effective – and the “villains” of today have every likelihood of turning “heroes” or “liberators” of the future. A long term side-effect of continued demonization of the “Hindu” will be an increasing acceleration of the community towards the “Right”, and I feel that the process has now become irreversible. The next general elections may not reflect this, but over a longer span of 10-20 years the trend will be evident.
This Right-wing tendency will not necessarily be characterized by a dominance of “Brahmins” (as its opponents hopefully try to prophecy). The leadership is more likely to come from the “middle/upper middle” order of the social hierarchy, and surprisingly or in complete contradiction to “social wisdom” could even contain so-called “backward castes”. This wil be a defensive consolidation initially, and then turn increasingly aggressive towards all forces it sees as potentially hazardous for its cultural survival. Once this trend takes political shape, there is hardly any force left in the subcontinent that will be able to survive against it without huge foreign intervention. This Right wing consolidation also has effects on the periphery. Its immediate beneficial effects will perhaps be first felt by Sri Lanka and Nepal. But more of this later!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 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 )Future scenario for the Indian subcontinent – 1 : Bangladesh elections hopefully
The future scenario for the subcontinent is intricately linked with what happens in what we can loosely call the “greater” Bharatavarsha – the original Sanskritic name in literature for not only the subcontinent as we understand today but also including adjoining areas currently in Afghanistan, Iran, and central Asia. India derives from Graeco-European corruption of possibly Persian rendering of Sindhu [the Satem/Hatem divide in Indo-European] and is used mostly in European colonial terminology.
I am starting this series with what I choose to call the “immensely significant periphery”, the countries of Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. I feel that the force of historical development is accelerating now in all the countries of the “immensely significant periphery” and the future trends are dangerous, revolutionary on the one hand and hold also tremendous possibilities for positive change on the other hand and at the same time.
I will deal with the case of Bangladesh first, as it has been going through a peculiarly significant phase in its tumultous political history. I have already written about my analysis of the balance of forces in Bangladesh society as developed through its separation from India during the Partition, and its separation from Pakistan in 1971, previously in this blog. I see no reasons to change my estimate, that forces of modernization and Bengali nationalism is slightly weaker than Islamic retrogression. The 1971 war against Pakistan was an anomaly in the sense, that apparently this weaker force managed to get rid of Pakistan’s grip on Bangladesh. However, we can see, that this tilting the balance in favour of the nationalists and modernizers was essentially due to the long covert and finally short overt support given by India. The two forces within Bangladesh fought under their respective leadership which however as in most Asian nationalist struggles, were mostly derived from the same social elite class networks. Factions within the elite fight it out for their personal ambitions and look for support among potential social groups whom they can manipulate to bolster their personal claims for state power. Thus, at the upper levels of this political contest, dividing lines of ideology tend to get blurred. As members of elite have the same social networks tugging on their sentiments, leanings and deep hidden inclinations.
It is critical to understand and identify this distinction between supporting social groups and their leadership to understand the evolution of subcontinental politics. In Bangladesh for example, the “nationalist” faction leadership originally evolved out of the Indian Muslim League (both radicalized under and radicalizing Jinnah), and contained leaders like Suhrawardy (a great hero of “nationalist” Bangladesh) whose role in the Calcutta riots has remained questionable. The core elite leadership around Mujibur Rehman, managed to retain elements like Khondokar Mushtaq, and representatives of the strong force of Islamic fundamentalism which in the case of Pakistan or Bangladesh is usually only expressed in ethnic cleansing of Hindus or Buddhists, or abduction, rape and forced marriages of non-Muslim women, and grabbing non-Muslim property. Mushtaq later turned out to be the figurehead of a coup by officers of the Bangladesh Army that assassinated Mujibur and his entire family then present, in classic Islamic style reminding us of the great traditions of Caliphate – wipe out even the toddlers, so that no male descendants can turn up later to become focus and claim for political power (another sign of the medieval Islamic thought patterns of the Bangladesh elite that dominated the Army).
Subsequent history of Bangladesh has shown clearly that its armed forces are dominated by an Islam leaning leadership. The Army managed to liquidate “left leaning” army officers and members, (like Col. Taher) but brought to power commanders with overt, distinct, and explicitly Islamic agenda – like Gens Jiaur Rahman and his successor H.M.Ershad. These army regimes protected, and revived the Islamic fundamentalists represented and regrouped under the Jamaat e Islami, an organization openly against the nationalist liberation movement and many of whose leadership are also implicated in genocide, organized rape, and torture of people they considered “pro-India”, Hindu, and anti-Pakistan or anti-Islamic. The military regimes saw to it that war-crimes accusations were never seriously taken up, promoted Islamic education and propaganda machinery primarily through the madrassahs, and began to steer the country back towards the Islamic axis of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan.
Popular discontent with the political and military regimes have erupted from time to time, which were most likely to have been prompted and utilized by elite factions desperate in their “prolonged” lack of access to state power. But the character of the social elite that thrived on Islam, in their early land-grabbing from Hindus under the Sultans or the Mughals (or conversion of Hindu elite to preserve their land), and Islam sanctioned Jihads or Ghazwas to loot women and property of non-muslims, never changed. This elite is obsessed with possession of land, (the only country in the subcontinent that maintained and justified looting of non-Muslim land and property under an “enemy property act” was Pakistan, and Bangladesh continued to enjoy this law long after its independence from Pakistan – a clue to the mindset of the Bangladeshi elite) and they need Islam to complement and maintain the semi-feudal rural social structures that ensure elite control (just as in Pakistan).
The latest feather in the cap of the Bangladesh army is what is popularly mentioned in the Bangladeshi media as “1/11” (1/11/2007) in that the army engineered what can only be seen as a coup – with possibly active involvement and covert support from a host of Western powers – a formal replacement of the “caretaker” government with a group that quite ruthlessly moved towards dismantling the established political power centres. The military elite quietly and quickly eliminated the captured alleged leaders of extremist Islamic outfits, in total secrecy from the media – possibly to suppress any potentially damaging leaks of connections to the elite itself, and we cannot completely rule out the possibility of covert connections between military intelligence and the so-called Islamic extremist as part of a much broader pattern of connections and support of the military of Islamic countries provided to hardline Islamic militant organizations like that of the ISI in Pakistan.
The military continues to be extremely shy of appearing to be “hard” on the Jamaat, or any Islamic organization – the latest parody being the “inability” of the police to arrest the secretary general of the Jamaat, who freely roams the country and the capital giving speeches or meeting politicians from the Right side of the political spectrum.
The army had managed to chastize the existing politicians under corruption charges, and given the history and record of Islamic armies or secret services, it is safe to assume that substantial doses of torture and ruthless psychological manipulation was liberally applied to neutralize the leadership or make them sufficiently pliable – the favourite method of dealing with those whom the Bangladesh Army finds unpleasant was recently illustrated by the fate of an expat Bangladeshi barrister from London by Air Force personnel. What the army is aiming for is quite clear : it wants the ruling social-military elite’s interests protected. Given the close alliance the Bangladesh army has developed over the years with the Islamic axis, this also means forwarding the agenda of Islamic absolute control over the subcontinent.
The army needs the two main factions within the ruling class to converge to this overall agenda, and for this it is prepared to sacrifice or coerce individuals from among its own class who have become more a liability than an advantage – as it eliminated Jia or sent Ershad to jail, and turned the “next generation of political inheritors” either “physical wrecks” like Jia’s sons or ensure Haseena’s son’s virtual exile in the USA. Political legitimacy independent of Islamic control and dependent on charismatic tradition is an obstacle in the army’s overall plans, and it appears that the army is desperate to ensure subservience of the two elite factions into a national “consensus” framework, and in this a key role will be played by the hardcore Islamic faction led at least superficially by the Jamaat. The Jamaat’s involvement in crucial “dark episodes” of Bangladesh’s history ensures its continued influence within the elite including perhaps even the core driving the military – with mutual dependence and “sensitive knowledge” about each other. The Jamaat is the hidden trump card to “soften up” one faction and “threaten” the other, and will be used by the military to enhance its agenda for Bangladesh.
The promised elections in December will not be held unless concrete commitments are obtained from both elite factions to follow and toe the line given by the army, and this will involve the strengthening of the Jamaat’s role in Bangladeshi politics, as well as overall gradual manifestation of the agenda of Islam for the subcontinent. In its turn it means continued sheltering of Islamic militants for infiltration into India through the border state of West Bengal ruled at present by a sympathetic “Left”, continued protection and enhancement of the madrassah system of education, continued attacks on cultural items deemed “un-Islamic”, and providing a second base for the flourishing and operations of the Islamic theologians hell-bent on returning the world to the looting, raping, genocidic, ethnic cleansing ideology of 7th century Arabic Islam.
The media has had a field day in blaming the politicians for this situation. But in reality the politicians were never strong enough to override the military, and the nationalists who emotionally fought for a “Bengali culture” as distinct from the “Urdu-Pakistani” Islamic state were of necessity too humane to match the cunning, ruthlessness and pathologically Sadistic upbringing of the Islamic elite of Bangladesh. It was only a matter of time, before the Islamic leadership panicked sufficiently that if they delayed any further they might never recoup their agenda at all.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Religious conversions in India : a strategy for the future
Religious conversion in India is a hotly debated and highly controversial topic. The fact is that the modern Constitution of India does not prevent a “genuine change of heart” but it is illegal to “entice” or “force” conversions. This was expected of course, since the early politicians under Nehru who dominated the legislative process would be very much aware of the success of both these strategies under Islam and Christianity. The Muslim invaders from Qasim, Mahmud, Ghori, the Delhi Sultans, or the Mughals have consistently used forced conversions, and enticements – either direct aggression with the only choice being given as either death or conversion, or penalizing taxation.
Another highly enjoyable conversion activity of the Muslims was of course abduction, rape, and enslavement of non-Muslim women, and raising the children from such unions as Muslims. So the Islamo-philes under Nehru decided to block these Islamic technique of conversions specifically fearing that the remnant majority Hindus in India could decide to copy the Muslims now that they are no longer under the military threat of the Muslims. Nehru was genuinely saddened at the loss of Muslim populations who migrated to Pakistan, and we can understand his sense of loss of people from a culture he identified with. It is a deep irony of Nehruvian politics however, that it was mostly his rivals whom he eliminated with the help of Gandhiji and indirect help of the British, like Bose or Sardar, [Bose was consistently kept under house arrest, or exiled from India, so that he could not carry on political activities or maintain connections with his organizations, and as usual with all all nationalists anywhere whom the British hated, from Napoleon to Shyamaprasad Mukherjee, Bose consistently fell “ill” in British captivity – while Nehru was never exiled, was given the right to freely carry on his political work while free] who had genuine influence and acceptance with the “Muslims” – Bose was helped by loyal Afghan “Muslims” in his “escape”, and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan – “frontier Gandhi” declared the Congress leadership under Nehru to be one which “stabbed” his people “in the back” over the Partition. Nehru knew that he was deeply resented in many parts of India outside the Uttar Pradesh, particularly by Sikhs in Punjab and Bengali Hindus in West Bengal, and Nehru needed Muslims as a counterbalancing force to prevent the non-Muslim consolidation to maintain his tenuous control over the fractures which he could use in Indian society.
There are speculations about possible personal reasons behind Nehru’s Islamo-philia, but I am against discussing them without concrete proof. Overall, however, we can see the basic motivations behind banning “illegal” methods of conversion by “force, enticements” – as without military support, Muslims would not be able to carry out these methods of conversion, whereas sheer number and resources of the Hindus could make these methods even non-militarily feasible given that there could not be official justification for use of “Indian” security establishment to continue protection of Islamic proselytization. So the most important task in front of the Nehruvian regime was to protect the gains of Islam in India already achieved under the methods now banned and made unavailable to others.
But as I have written and given detailed historical, and practical justifications in these posts before, Islam must go from India as a “practising religion”, and I want the Muslims to come out of “Islam” but continue to be Indians – what should be the policy and strategy of the Indian nation about conversions in general?
The two most common issues that give rise to controversy about conversions are (1) inter-faith marriages/”abductions for sex” (2) enticements. It is a consistent feature of Islam that everywhere it insists on the conversion of a non-Muslim groom before he can marry a girl born a Muslim – and they are prepared to go to any length or violence to ensure this, depending on the level of support they can obtain from state authorities they live under – so that the entire state apparatus of Islamic states jump on to enforce this like in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia or Arab states, and the maximum possible help is given by the administrative and legislative institutions of countries that have usually Islamo-phile regimes like in India. On the other hand a Hindu or non-Muslim woman can be easily married [or abducted and forced in Islam dominated countries like Pakistan] by a Muslim, as once married or taken to Islamic countries such a “wife” will be treated as a Muslim, and children will be automatically deemed to be Muslim. The fact is that this is supported by the Quran, the Hadiths, the Sunnah of the Prophet of Islam, and the Shariah and the Hidaya – however much the modern Muslim theologians try to sanitize and whitewash these injunctions in the core texts of Islam away from their misrepresentation of Islam before non-Muslims – and which they are very much aware of and openly teach/preach for and within “safe” and secure Islamic audiences. There is a similar insistence on conversion into Christianity before marriage from certain denominations within Christianity, although not carried out with such violence as in the case of Islam. The Sikhs, Buddhists, also have similar insistence but over many decades now, there are fewer and fewer incidences of violence from these faiths.
In India, only objections by the relatives of a Hindu or Hindu religious groups against the marriage with a non-Muslim are supposed to be seen as “proof of fanaticism” and the “evil right-wing Hindu fascist” who “trample on the pure love between a Hindu and a Muslim” – for all other religions it is an “internal matter” of the religion concerned and Hindus are expected or demanded to shut up as Hindus should respect the “religious sentiments of Muslims” etc. In India it seems to be tacitly accepted that all other religious groups except the Hindus have the right to convert “freely” and their “forcing” should be seen as “genuine change of heart” and “friendly ardent persuasion” rather than forcing – as accusations of “forcing/enticing” are only genuine if it comes against the “Hindus”.
How do Indians tackle the task of removing extremely dangerous, deceptive, violently intolerant, and aggressively expansive movements like Islam from their immediate surroundings?
(1) Bring in a complete civil law that is not binding initially on all citizens, but which can be adopted formally by an oath and declaration voluntarily by any adult Indian citizen. This should include a complete marital, family, and inheritance law guided by modern humanitarian principles. At the moment Indians do not have any choice in their religious denomination and they are considered to belong to the religion they are born into or “adopted”. This can be a good way out for those who want to come out of Islam but do not want to face “charges” of apostasy and hence the Hadithic/Sharia injunctions not to really wait for the day of “resurrection” but to carry out immediate retribution for converting out of Islam.
(2) give a very clear warning against Muslim countries that are carrying out forced conversions of Hindus, that Islam stands to lose a much larger chunk if Indians decide to get serious about “persuading” Indian Muslims to convert out of Islam.
(3) ensure that surviving Hindus, Buddhists and Sikhs in Pakistan, or non-Muslims of Indic origin faiths, in Malaysia or Indonesia are protected, either by exchange of populations or establishing direct diplomatic centres.
(4) enforcing all religious institutions to register, and have a separate unit set up, possibly under the Ministry of Culture, that will formally not only audit but have representatives on the board of trustees or management. All religious institutions will have to make transactions through bank accounts, and will not be allowed to receive foreign funding, and accounts will be regularly audited. All citizens will have to be registered in one of the religions recognized or declare themselves to be under the civil law who will not be then considered legally as belonging to any religion. Also legal steps can be taken if someone who has declared in favour of the civil law, continues to participate in activities under a specific religious institution.
(5) religions which prescribe a fixed rate of contribution from their followers, will be guaranteed the required proportion deducted in addition to regular income tax from the source of income of the religion’s followers. This money will then be forwarded to one or more religious institutions of choice as indicated by the donee. Islam prescribes Jakaat and fitra, which should then be deducted from the income of Muslims at source and handed over to Islamic institutions. All religious institutions will have to function within this source of revenue, as transparently audited and supervised by the Government, and no external source of funding will be allowed. Any breaking of this stipulation will lead to criminal proceedings against the religious institution. Those who adopt civil law will not have to pay this “religious contribution”.
(6) educational activity carried out by religious organizations will have to conform to a National Education policy, and have to cover the basic elements including all modern science subjects required in a national syllabus. Material declared objectionable and not in consistency with the Constitution, or the legal system will have to be removed, and if retained will lead to closing down of the educational setup.
(7) Conversions have to be applied for to the government, together with documentary evidence of sanction by a recognized religious body, and subject to a waiting period, during which people or bodies that have objections can raise it with the appellate body. The convertee can be subjected to repeated interviews by independent experts, and have also to agree to audit of personal accounts, sources of income expenditure and wealth, for an unspecified period of time before and after the recognition of conversion. This process will not have to be gone through in case of adopting the civil law.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Delhi explodes – price of India’s ruling elite’s love affair with Islam paid by the common Indian
“Indian Mujahideen” claims responsibility in an email for blasts that have left at least 30 dead and 100’s injured in the capital of India, New Delhi.
Many times have I written on the tolerance of Islam in India by a section of Islamo-phile non-Muslim elite and how none of the accumulated grievances in non-Muslims due to the historical rape, torture, massacre and exploitation by the Muslim elite have been ever acknowledged. I had already warned explicitly that even after the “capture” of a few suspects connected to the Gujarat blasts, and claims of catching key terrorists, these were most likely peripheral units, and the main network is under deep cover all over the western Indian hinterland. These terrorists can only function with a certain minimal support from local Muslim communities. [extract from original post dated 17th August]
“While this pussyfooting is going on in Kashmir, the Gujarat police has claimed to nab the main culprits behind the Gujarat blasts, and identified them as a breakaway hardline faction of SIMI, calling itself the Indian Mujahideen. However sometime ago, in the aftermath of the blasts media leaks from officials appeared to project the theory that Indian Mujahideen did not really exist but was a “shadow name” of a Pakistan based outfit that specifically wanted to pretend to be “Indian”. Both cannot be true at the same time, and it is quite possible that neither of the two theories are entirely correct. It seems unlikely that the main culprits behind the Gujarat blasts have been nabbed. These are people still under deep cover all over the western coastal areas of India, with strong underground networks between Communist extremists, and ethnic separatists throughout India as well as groups based across the border not necessarily with Pakistan. The people nabbed are most likely to be the peripheral weak links. The ideological shortsightedness of these groups may make them itch in “righteous anger” to prove that the Indian authorities have barely even scratched their bottoms, and more public outrages or “show of strength” can probably be expected.”
I had also given a list of provinces in India whose Muslim population proportion was within a certain critical range – not too small so that sufficient social depth of cover is not available, not too high as then blasts jeopardize the existence of the Muslim population itself providing excuses for security forces to move in. Here is an extract from the original post dated 26th July. ” Now blasts have taken place in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, a day after blasts in Bangalore, Karnataka. It is interesting also that recently the three states which suffered from blasts are Rajputana, Karnataka, and Gujarat, all states which have recently come under BJP led state governments. It is quite clear now that these are Islamic extremists who are behind these blasts. These are states which have a small but significant Muslim population. We can look at the states with medium to low concentrations of Muslim populations (Census of India 2001):
(State – total population – percentage of Muslim populations)
Kerala 7,863,842 24.6969
Uttar Pradesh 30,740,158 18.4961
Bihar 13,722,048 16.5329
Jharkhand 3,731,308 13.8474
Karnataka 6,463,127 12.2291
Uttaranchal 1,012,141 11.9225
Delhi 1,623,520 11.7217
Maharashtra 10,270,485 10.6014
Andhra Pradesh 6,986,856 9.1679
Gujarat 4,592,854 9.0641
Manipur 190,939 8.8121
Rajasthan 4,788,227 8.4737
So the pattern indicates, the following factors, between 7-8% on the lower limit and 25% as upper limit on Muslim populations, with a BJP led government or where BJP may come to power in the near future through the electoral process, centres of commercial and industrial activity with current or future potential for FDI’s, are possibly ripe for continued “blast” violence. A much higher percentage of Muslim population’s religious leadership obviously feels secure enough that nothing against their religious agenda will be undertaken by the respective state governments. A much lower percentage simply does not have the community resources to provide cover for extremists.”
I had also warned that Musharraf’s departure will signal increased power of Kiani to carry on his activities from the time he was chief of the Pakistan ISI, and increase it with indirect material and resource help from the “democratic” political government. [original post dated 18th August] Added to this of course now the failure of Pakistan, China, and other nations who prize the Islamo-Chinese axis, to stop the NSG waiver for India. These have made the Islamic Wahabi Jihadist leadership and networks extremely anxious – and from now on India should expect increasing attacks from Muslim networks in the subcontinent. Indian governments have always been soft on Islam, especially the fundamental sources of Islamic expansion and growth in India – the countless Muslim religious trusts and Madrassahs which claim and are allowed the right to function completely unsupervised. Unlike any other educational institutions run by other religious groups, Islamic madrassahs function in a closed manner with complete immersion in Islamic propaganda and religious texts. In my blog posts I have tried tos how what is the real message and agenda of Islamic religious texts – loot, murder, terrorise, rape and enslave under deceptive war on non-Muslims with coveted resources – land, wealth, women and live off this resource like a band of marauding robbers.
Indian government does not have any financial supervision on the activities, funding and expenditure of these Muslim institutions – in fact whereas Hindu institutions are taxed normally, no Muslim institution is taxed or audited under government supervision. Additionally these institutions are funded or subsidized partly, using public money. The Indian government has proved its complete failure intelligence wise to deal with the Islamic terror threat. The Delhi police and the Home Minister, who just days ago had turned down a request from the Gujarat government to introduce tougher anti-terror laws – repeats the lines learnt by heart now – stay calm, don’t panic, don’t heed rumours, don’t add to social discord, we will nab the culprits and give them tough punishments – his main concern as always is the protection of “Islam” – see to it that no retribution takes place on the Muslim networks by popular anger. As always, he is never able to catch “the culprits”, his main concern being protecting Muslims. It is obvious why the Indian intelligence fails completely to break Islamic terror networks and only wisecracks after the blasts have already taken place: because these Islamic networks have developed political connections within the ruling elite and serve as conduit of critical information from the ruling side to the Muslim leadership and disinformation from the Muslim side to the government. Ruling elite’s conscious or subconscious involvement in the protection of Islam game is now so deep that almost nothing can be done without a complete rehaul of the political and administrative structure of India.
This terror will only stop if it can be shown to the Islamic networks that each such attack will actually decrease the “number of practising Muslims” – a call should immediately be given to the Muslim community and leadership in India, that they should offer to publicly declare and promise that each such attack by Islamic Mujahideen or other terror outfits will be met by pubic renouncement of Islam and coming out of the religion of Islam by a number equal to the number of non-Muslims dead or injured – only in this way can non-Muslims believe in the sincerity of Muslim’s claim of peaceful intent. Similarly, It is the Muslim communities themselves who must give up these terrorists, otherwise the entire Muslim community will be deemed to be in support of these terror tactics.
The soft border in West Bengal with Bangladesh, which allows coninuous unhindered infiltration by Islamic terrorists from Bangladesh with ultimate routes to the middle East whose petro-dollar now is pouring into Bangladesh at an accelerating rate to build mosques and madrassahs – all centres of Islamic propaganda and institutionally protected centres to store, train and serve as bases of Islamic terror when the opportunity arises – as in the Lal Mosque of Pakistan and many others [ Ibn Ishaq, and Tabari write how many of the initial jihadi calls for raids and assassinations of non-Muslims around Medina were given from within the mosque] and is a long tradition of Islam right from the days of its foundation – can only be checked by a state government that is not ideologically dependent or soft towards Islam. Both the Left as well as its current nemesis the Trinamool Congress have proved their complete failure in statesmanhip over the Tata nano plant. It is the need of the country as well as the common people of West Bengal that there is a regime change there that can fight the Islamic infiltration as well as industrialize – it perhaps should start looking for a Modi.
Ultimately in the long run, as long as Islam is practised in India and the Indian subcontinent, the terror threat will never go. The Islamic and Islamo-phile false propaganda that Islam is peaceful and has no evil intentions on the land, property, and women of non-Muslims and complete destruction of all non-Muslim cultures, have hidden for a long time the real reasons behind the rise of Islamic terror. Complete eradication of Islam as practised religion in the subcontinent must take place, and non-Muslims, mainly the Hindus, the Christians and the Judaic communities should come to an understanding between themselves to fight unitedly the common threat of Islam – its not very difficult to do, if the Quranic observation that “un-believers” are always torn by dissension and that they cannot take united action against Muslims, is remembered.
Jihad and coming of Islamic war to India
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )India’s NSG fever : the China-Islam-Europe axis
In my previous posts on this subject, I had repeatedly tried to dampen the apparent euphoria in Indian circles about the passage of the Indo-US N-deal through the IAEA. Like many others, I had tried to point out that the greatest difficulty would be at the NSG. This was predictable from at least two different angles: the first was that at that time China was preparing for the Beijing Olympics, and needed all possible cooperation from the international powers to suppress the Tibetan protests, secondly the powers that are most likely to be opposed to any significant increase in India’s strategic defence capabilities because of their own designs on Indian territories would be misled by their ignorance of how far India has changed in recent years to hope that internal dissent would prove sufficiently strong to scuttle the process anyway from within India. Once the IAEA passage went off relatively smoothly, these powers were likely to be panicking, and would begin lobbying in earnest to delay the passage through the NSG if not scuttle it altogether. The three natural allies in this game against India would be the forces represented by China, the Islamic expansion movement within Asia, and the smaller countries in EU. Each has its reasons, and we can analyze them one by one.
China has yesterday come out with a statement in its official mouthpiece [ and therefore of the state and therefore of the Communist Party of China] that passage of the N-deal with India would represent “a blow to non-proliferation”. This coincides uncannily with the apparent views of the leading non-proliferation groups within the EU. This could be a calculated move on the part of China to utilize the dissent from within EU, or a coordinated move. China’s real reasons for opposing this deal has as much to do with the “geo-strategic” interests it accuses India of – China was the aggressor in 1962, and invaded Indian territories without warning or a formal declaration of war – a-la-Islam. China knows that even historically they have had to fight with indigenous Tibetans for control over Tibetan territories – we have concrete evidence for this at least from the 1st millenium CE. China occupied Tibet by force and desperately wants to push through to the Indian Ocean. It sees India as the largest obstacle to its dominance in South Asia. After Mao’s split with the USSR mainly due to Russia’s formal split with Stalinism, Mao was quite worried at the growing ties between the Russia he did not understand or thought a betrayer to the “Stalinist cause” and India, as well as the protection nd asylum given to the Dalai Lama by India and decided to bring in pressure on India. China still holds on to Indian territory in the East and the North, and its main objective is to isolate Tibet from Indian reach [thus it helped the Nepali communists to come to power] and sever any strategic land connection that India can possibly have with Russia. China very possibly helped Pakistan with Nuclear and missile technology, as Pakistan has not shown any other independent parallel comprehensive development in indigenous technology and scientific research in other areas that could justify its “sudden” and “miraculous” nuclear weapons capability. China has also consistently tried to cultivate the Muslim nations, and especially Pakistan and Bangladesh who it knows to be vehemently opposed to the existence of a “non-Muslim” India. Chinese communists encourage Islamic movements against India since in the limitations of Communist ideology they think that they can “manage” Islam, whereas the Islamic forces use China according to their successful tactic as revealed in the Quran and in the Sunnah of the prophet – ally and use one “unbeliever” against another, until they are all weakened and ripe for subjugation. By China’s statement against India, China shows that it is now a completely blinded fool driven only by its imperialist ambitions and blind also to the growing Islamic insurgency in its own backyard. China also knows its economic importance for the smaller countries of the EU. so it may be more than a coincidence that these countries and China appear to speak in the same language as regards India.
For the smaller EU countries, their considerable markets in both the Islamic world as well as China, for dairy and meat products, as well as other manufactured exports [as so aptly evidenced by the retreat of certain North European countries over “freedom of expression” as applied to Islam, because of a boycott of products from that country in the Middle East], it is understandable that the non-proliferation argument will appear to be strongly appealing and most important. In this it will not be convenient for them to remember that many of them as a part of NATO are installing a missile defence system in anticipation of attacks from a country which has had no history of attacking them and is much farther away geographically compared to both Pakistan and China from India – two countries which are both nuclear missile-delivery capable and have already militarily attacked India and still hold on to Indian territories. Their economic dependence on the oil from Islamic countries, and Chinese markets will obscure them to the real defence needs of India in possible future testing and upgrading of nuclear weapons capabilities as deterrent and strategic neutralization of danger from aggressive Chinese imperialism and Jihadi Islamic aggression.
As for the Muslim countries, their theologians are always baying for non-Muslim blood and non-Muslim lands and women. With immense physical coercion this theocracy has managed to indoctrinate its subjects in an atmosphere of physical violence which is used to root out physically any alternative idea, of science, of modernization, of liberal modern humane ideas of equality between genders or of freedom of speech and thought. India’s vibrant much freer culture is a thorn on the sides of the Alims and the Ulemas of Islam whose flock are being constantly tempted by the visions in the neighbouring country of the “pagans”. In this their natural allies are “sympathetic” admirers of Islam in EU countries and business or governmental strategic interests, as well as the extreme paranoid jealousy of the Chinese communists who like Muslims do not like ideological competitors who can tempt their flock and therefore undermine their narrow selfish megalomania.
In the end, I personally feel that Europe with its classic shortsightedness that gifted the world with the horrors of colonial looting and destruction of civilizations, will only be concerned with the Islamic horror as and when it threatens its own gates, and not otherwise. Thus they may even help indirectly the Islamic cause by proving mostly a reluctant ally of the USA in the latter’s bid to neutralize the Jihadists, and may even decide to oppose strengthening India in order to preserve their commercial and strategic interests with the Islamic countries and China. It is already known that the EU exports to the Islamic middle East is three times that of the USA to the same region.
It is important for Europe to realize that China’s rise to importance started with its formal role in tying up a large Japanese occupation force in the Pacific theatre during WWII. However this importance was simply formal as the internationally recognized Chinese government and an ally of the Western allies, was the so-called Nationalist government under Chiang-Kai-shek and the Kuomindang – a government which consistently failed in preventing the Japanese advance, but consumed a huge amount of resources as supplied by the USA. Even the Communists in the North were not much of a success although they at least managed to carry on a guerrilla fight against the Japanese near the coastal areas of occupation. There was a time towards the close of the Pacific war, when USA toyed with the idea of supporting the Communist Red Army and suddenly Mao waxed eloquent about US friends. Turn of political climate in Washington removed the pro-Chinese element in US state policy, and Mao went back to his “anti-imperialist” stance. It is significant to note that Chinese success in recovering their country only gained momentum after the surrender of the Japanese, and Stalin did not initially allow the Communists to occupy Manchuria which surrendered to the Russians and not to the Chinese. The Communists could only make their major moves to occupy the whole of China after 1948, when Soviet support turned in their favour due to Stalin’s realization of the process of Cold War. Throughout the war, the Chinese were more an absorber of military resources and money from the Allies rather than an effective contributor. Contrast this with the tremendous amount in men and material supplied by India, and its contribution to winning the war for the Allied forces, which remains rarely acknowledged.
Not India’s current policy-makers, but the future generations should start thinking of who they can really rely on in their strategic plans to exist in the face of determined Islamic expansion programmes.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 4 so far )Leftist Islam or Islamic Left : Rizwanur properly vindicated and Tasleema properly exiled
The CBI has recommended chargesheets to be drawn against suspected abettors of the “suicide” of Rizwanur, husband of a daughter of an influential and prosperous Hindu Todi “business” family currently residing in Kolkata. The case was initially tried by the media, with widespread public anger expressed against the Todi family which stopped just short of calling the father-in-law of Rizwanur as the killer or hirer of assassins of Rizwanur. A high ranking police officer in Kolkata was also indirectly implicated, and the net widened daily in the public discourse like a modern who-dun-it – with the “usual suspects” – “upper class” “business house” “elite”. The case was a high profile one, and it took the form of a trial of “hindu right wing” fundamentalism that was so anti-liberal that it could not tolerate the pure love that broke religious barriers – with the underlying implication as apparently in this particular case, that barriers are always put up by “Hindus”.
For a long time the Hindu-Muslim marriage or love-affairs have intrigued me and I found some of the most interesting stories or a majority of the stories were never brought up by the media or were in public discourse. Only those stories are widely publicized that shows Hindu resistance to marriages or romantic connections between Hindu girls and Muslim boys. I will discuss this in a subsequent series of posts. However in this case, what is more interesting is the fact that a Muslim agitation was successful in panicking the bastion of the Left in India – the West Bengal Government led by the CPI(M) to quietly and quickly banish Tasleema Nasreen – the exiled Bangladeshi lady and writer from the city of “joy” and all things “progressive”. Tasleema has long been at the centre of two controversies – (1) her apparently candid and not necessarily “authenticated” writings about sexual intrigue and sexual harassment of women at all levels of Bangladeshi society and by all sections of the male population – from the “most sophisticated and educated” to the least (2) her criticism and description of atrocities on minority Hindus of Bangladesh by Muslims.
It was primarily the second controversy, that intensified after the publication of her book “Lajja” (Shame) which explicitly describes atrocities by Muslims on Hindus, that fatwas (Islamic diktats) poured forth from the liberal Islamic society and leadership of Bangladesh. With open threats on life in typical Islamic fashion (of beheading or declaring “murtad”) which were not protested by the liberal and progressive government of a “people’s republic” of Bangladesh, Tasleema decided to leave Bangladesh. After travelling widely in the West, Tasleema had tried to return to the subcontinent. For a writer in Bengali, Tasleema’s natural choice would be West Bengal and the city of Kolkata.
However, the Muslim population of West Bengal promptly began to react against the presence of Tasleema. They ultimately managed to burst out in rioting processions through the streets of Kolkata, and the brave custodians of revolutionary fervour, the Communists of West Bengal promptly buckled under the pressure. Tasleema was quietly removed to Rajasthan and placed under semi-virtual house arrest. Tasleema has since gone out of the country to the West and returned again, trying wistfully to return to her friends and well-wishers in Kolkata. The governments both at the centre and the state have opened their mouths saturated with infinite wisdom – she is a guest , should behave as a guest , and not do anything that disturbs the “peace” of the country. Apparently if Islam in India sneezes the whole country catches cold. The guardians of principle, and morality who flaunted their “principled stand” in the runup to the trust vote in the parliament on the N-deal, those very people who claim to stand above narrow communal feelings and stand for the forces of freedom, liberation, justice and progress find Islam’s inherent murderous hatred of its critics worth supporting or giving in to – but Tasleemas right to freely speak about what she felt were injustices done to a minority under the guidance of a religion were not worth supporting.
So Rizwanur gets justice in India, and Tasleema who spoke about atrocities on minority Hindus across the border is a persona-non-grata or a gagged “guest” in India. Maybe Hindus will learn from the success of this Islamic strategy of manipulation as they have learnt from Kashmiri Muslims in Jammu. Any Indian government with any spine left should have offered Tasleema Indian citizenship, and therefore with automatic rights of protection from the Indian establishment. That would have completed the partial attempt at pretending to be impartial by recommending “abettors” to be chargesheeted.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Continued threat of terror inspired by Islam – 3 – the strange case of Bangladesh
In 1971, at the end of what is typically referred to in Bangladesh as “Muktijuddho” or in the English language media as the Liberation War continuing in its “direct actions” stage for approximately 9 months beginning in March and ending in the official surrender of the Pakistani Army’s eastern command in December, East Pakistan formally was recognized as an independent nation called Bangladesh by among others, India. India’s involvement in this campaign has roots in quite complex and intricate historical and geo-political strategic considerations. India actively participated in the final phase of the campaign by directly invading East Pakistan, and forming a joint military campaign referred to by Bangladeshi media when at its gracious best, as the “Mitra Bahini” (or Allied Forces – to preclude any controversy, I am simply using standard military history terminology as applied in the case of Allied Forces in WWII – and as this term is typically translated in Bengali). Prior to this, India allowed a Provisional Bangladesh Government to be formed with its later headquarters in Calcutta, India. India also allowed one of its radio transmitter stations to be used for broadcasting under the aegis of “Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra” (Independent Bengal broadcasting Centre). Apart from this, both countries allude to the existence of training camps for volunteer Bengalees from East Pakistan with the aim of producing guerrilla fighting units. East Pakistan’s extensive borders with India, in some of the most inhospitable and well “covered” terrain helped fluidity of guerrilla movements across the border. As will be noted later, this feature of the “border” remains a factor of crucial importance.
What happened in the roughly 9 months of the Liberation War has been highly controversial. Without going into the actual incidents, how this Liberation War has been seen and represented is highly relevant and illustrative for our current discussion. There are broadly three distinct classes of opinions within Bangladesh –
(1) The Liberation War was won by the “MuktiJoddha”‘s ( although the English translation of this term first were actually used by the Salvation Army) whom I will refer to as Liberation Soldiers (Some of them definitely aimed for “freedom” but freedom has a much wider connotation than “liberation” – freedom from parochialism, religious bigotry, etc) with some “tactical” input at the final stage from the Indian Army. The political leadership and inspiration of this struggle was from Sk. Mujibur Rehman. Three million “martyrs” (“Shahid” is the term actually used, and is reserved in Islam for fighters who die fighting in the cause of Allah, and are greeted in “Behest” or paradise with the “sherbet” of “Shahidi” as well as other “gifts and pleasures”) gave their lives and thousands of Bengali women were raped or enslaved in sex-slavery or enforced prostitution for the pleasure of the Pakistani Army. In this the Pakistani army was helped by a section of Bengali Muslims organized under the names of Rajakar, Al Badr or Al Shams (all Arabic words referring to important and significant phases in early Islam) as paramilitary forces with the political leadership being given by the “Jamaat” (originally an Arabic word meaning gathering, usually religious gathering) with deliberate massacres by the paramilitary to liquidate Bengali intelligentsia when facing defeat.
(2) The Liberation War was won by the “MuktiJoddha”‘s led by the rebel breakaway regiments of the East-Pakistan Army under the command of Maj. Zia and General Osmani[ there was some unfortunate oversight about the then military rank of this superb military talent causing some protocol problems with the Indian Army – authors comments]. The Indian Army joined this liberation campaign because of its own strategic considerations in its on-going war on the western front with Pakistan. Three million “martyrs” gave their lives and thousands of Bengali women were raped or enslaved in sex-slavery or enforced prostitution for the pleasure of the Pakistani Army. Some “misdirected” Bengalees helped the Pakistani Army.
(3) The Indian Army overran Bangladeshi territory. There is now “nothing wrong” in the “then” formation of Bangladesh, but the greatest danger was the possibility of “colonization” by India. This was “rightly” opposed by the truly “patriotic” and “properly Islamic” leadership of the “Jamaat”. Many Bangladeshis gave their lives in this fight between India and Pakistan. Bengali women were not raped or enslaved in sex-slavery or enforced prostitution for the pleasure of the Pakistani Army, or even if they were, it was not done by Rajakars, Al Badrs or Al Shams. This “fact” is proved by the inadequacy of evidence as well as the failure of succeeding Bangldesh governments to “make their case” in courts of law.
On the whole, the dominant regime sponsored opinion in Bangladesh has remained heavily inclined towards (2) and (3). We can see that in all three major trends, India is cause for lots of unease. The fact that all Bangladesh governments, including those led by the “followers” of Sk Mujib (his assassination “miraculously” made the way clear for his erstwhile follower Khondokar Mushtaq who happily collaborated with the Army leadership involved in the assassination) as well as the current “care-taker” government (“backed” or “not-backed” by the Army, depending on “occasion” and “spokesperson” ), have managed not to bring alleged perpetrators of atrocities to trial in spite of the issue being a strong theme in the public consciousness as reflected in the media implies one thing only – the overwhelming social, political and military clout of sections represented by opinions (2) and (3).
I have seen media interviews where (1) those from the military typically react quite angrily to any suggestion that links atrocities with Islamic name bearing groups – implying that any group bearing Islamic name cannot be involved in “atrocities” (2) a well known Bangladeshi intellectual comments with a beaming face, that a British “Lord” praised Sk. Mujib’s greatest achievement to be his ability to “force” out the Indians after the liberation of Bangladesh. It is interesting to note that the Indian Muslim’s (apologies Titumir, Ashfaqulla or Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and his Khudai Khidmatgars) admiration and courting of the British has not changed its nature right from the days of the Partition -leading to the sheer audacity and lunacy of implying that India wanted to annex East Pakistan (without any concrete proof and given completely opposite indications in India’s real actions such as recognizing the independent state of Bangladesh or recognizing a provisional government in exile etc) and gloating in the certificate of a doyen of an Imperialist regime famous in history for its “extreme reluctance” to leave any conquered territory before sucking it dry.
Like Pakistan, the essential grip of Islam over the society of Bangladesh has not loosened substantially over the last 60 years. Given the continued development and trends in Bangladesh society, we can infer that (1) in 1971, the forces for liberation of Bangladesh as a separate cultural entity distinct from Pakistan with the cultural element overriding the only link with Pakistan, Islam, were more or less evenly balanced against the forces identifying with the driving principles of Pakistan – reorganization of society on Islamic lines (2) India’s entry into the campaign tilted the instantaneous military balance in favour of the “cultural supremacy” pro-liberation component (3) as in any revolutionary campaign, the forces for change usually suffer greater casualties, and even if successful almost inevitably come out with a depletion of the most dedicated and the most revolutionary among its ranks, for these are the people who are foremost in the battle-lines. Survivors have a greater proportion of fence-sitters and opportunists than before the revolution. This was true also of the pro-liberation movement.
Thus once India was removed from the scene, with a weakened revolutionary force, the balance shifted in favour of orthodox Islamic resurgence, and it has continued to grow in strength. Some would try to say that there were economic motivations behind the liberation movement. Yes to a certain extent, but if it was economic motivation alone, the overwhelming exploitation of the East Pakistan should have led to the triumph of the spirit of the “Muktijoddhas”, as collaborators or “compradors” benefiting from this exploitation would have been few. A significant economic motivation in maintaining hostility towards India however could be the continued enjoyment of “enemy properties” of Hindus on the part of some. There will be continued hostility towards Indian culture, by portraying Indian culture as monolithic, “Hindu”, Hindi and mainly “Bollywood” , decadent and therefore distinct from, “pure”, Islamic and “Bengali” culture – (the latter, “Islamic+Bengali” therefore subtly merged together to bridge the distinction that led to the fracture between Pakistan and Bangladesh). There are sometimes attempts to portray the “Kolkata” language as no longer “Bengali”, etc. At the same time there are conspicuous attempts at avoiding Bengali words from Sanskrit roots and try to substitute as much as possible by words of Arabic or Persian origin. (A cliche would be the persistent use of “pani” for water, a word shared by Hindi and Urdu but not used by the non-Muslim Indian Bengali, similarly words for social relations etc). This type of Arabic or Persian admixture is noted much more in the elite of West Bengal society (probably from historical contact with Turko-Afghan/Mughal administration) rather than the general West Bengal non-Muslim population – e.g., use of “Saran” (from Sanskrit/Prakrit “Sarani” meaning road) among the non-elite rural populations in some regions compared to the more common elite usage “rasta”.
Some would even try to say that the recent capture of some of the leadership of Islamic extremists supposed to have been behind blasts killing hundreds, and their almost secret trial, and execution points to determination to move away from the Islamic Jihadist path. Not really, as a large number of these extremists are likely to be hiding in India, as well as being protected or covered by sympathetic forces within Bangladesh. It is even more likely that extremists are regrouping with proper “help” using the complacency sought to be generated after the executions. The supporting networks were never revealed or evidence for liquidation of these networks provided.
The Bangladesh elite attitude towards India continues to be hostile. Media appears to equate “India” with “Hindu”, and only softens its language when Indian help is badly needed. In general the popular entertainment items project Hindus as “inferior”, with “sampriti” (harmony) typically manifesting only in situations like a Hindu girl falling in love with or marrying a Muslim boy (never the other way round) – or being designated by the disparaging “malaon” (probably referring to the importance of garlands in certain Vaishnavite sects of Hinduism – the most popular form in East Bengal – unfortunately the rosaries of Catholics also contain the same number of beads as in the Hindu and Buddhist “japamalas” – 108, and the “Tasbi” in certain Muslim sects are also connected to religion and have similar functions). Proportions of Hindu population in Bangladesh will continue to decrease as revealed in “missing populations”, most likely to be explained as basic “hatred” Hindus have towards Islam and therefore their unpatriotic flight to “India”.
Thus the balance of forces, including the military, the lumpen proletariat, and the elite is overwhelmingly in favour of classic Islamic attitude towards non-Muslims, and Hindus in particular – probably because of the typical excessive zeal in distancing from the parent culture of the newly-converted (the “Hindu” Bengali adage “natun Mussalman goru khawar jom” – a newly converted Muslim is an extra-avid beef eater). India can expect continued covert support of Islamic radicals and extremists from powerful sections within Bangladesh society and establishment. Formally the issues under which this agenda will be carried out are “border incidents” – resulting from impossibly difficult to demarcate boundaries on extremely fluid eco-systems, cross-border smuggling of both animals and humans -(animals from India and humans from Bangladesh – both persistently denied by Bangladesh and insisted on by India), sharing water resources, and extraction of economic favours from India.
Typically the language used by the media and the elite is quite revealing in these issues – the India bashing is carried out in popular media including the printed in the total absence of any voice or views from the Indian side. These bashing campaigns are usually dominated by essentially political personalities – for example, the most ardent discussions on water sharing will be led not by hydrologists, and even if they are present they will carefully avoid the scientific issues of effect of climate change on overall precipitation in the Himalayan catchment areas and blame shortfalls in water supplies entirely on India, the issues of landgrabbing and unplanned constructions within Bangladesh that cause flooding will be carefully avoided and flooding blamed entirely on India, and sometimes this will reach to the level where India’s own huge populations and its needs are completely neglected with the demand being placed that amounts to demands for guaranteed maintenance of whatever Bangladesh wants and when it wants. The elite knows quite well that such demands are unrealistic and will never be met.
Bangladesh will demand investment from India but if such investments are actually initiated, they will be vehemently opposed, and any presence of anything connected to India will be immediately equated with “Indian Imperialism”. By this duality, Bangladesh maintains its propaganda for its sympathisers in the West that India is “hostile” towards it by not “investing”, and reveals its real ideological considerations that override real economic considerations – its essentially Islam inspired hostility towards “Hindus”. Similar imperialist charges are not leveled at initiatives coming from “proper Islamic” sources – for example buying up Bangladeshi financial institutions from the Middle East were welcomed even if the offer finally did not materialize but Indian industrialists such as the Tatas would be vehemently opposed. In the case that an “Islamic” investor turns out to be a failure, there will be no criticism at all – but the harshest of propaganda reactions will be reserved for India if the Indian investor withdraws.
These are the indications of an essentially ideological hatred against India and its majority community, the Hindus. And there is no reason why this should actually decrease. India should expect much more sophisticated collaboration of powerful sections of Bangladeshi society with the Pan-Islamic movement now shaping up. Deception, pretension, and protestations of peace and harmony will be employed only until militant, terroristic strength to overcome non-Muslim populations on the subcontinent has been achieved. It will be a huge mistake on India’s part to be lulled by such protestations of innocence.
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