RSS IS THE NEW ISI, THE LATTER A FRIEND

RSS is the new ISI. Chetan Bhagat has hit the nail where the BJP should have but, inexplicably, hasn’t.

Ever since the Congress stormed back to power in 2009, it has launched such a vicious and relentless attack on the RSS that one cannot be faulted for believing that the organisation is as dangerous a terror outfit as the Al Qaida, and is out to destabilise and dismember India. At the same time, the party and the government have all but forgiven Pakistan for all its sins and launched an equally relentless campaign to convince Indians that they have more in common with Pakistanis than with Indians who do not subscribe to the views of the Congress and embedded media.

For Congress if the RSS is the new ISI, the latter has to be the new – though unstated, for obvious reasons -- friend. And so it seems it is.

When the Congress party did better than even it expected during the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, among the many theories doing the rounds was one that was whispered but not openly articulated, the evidence then being not solid enough to substantiate it. As per this conspiracy theory, the ISI had a role to play in the victory of the Congress and defeat of the BJP. This was based on the following conjectures and assumptions that would have motivated the ISI:

• A BJP government is most likely to react militarily to another Mumbai 26/11 type of attack. After the terror attack on Parliament in 2001, the then BJP government had given the go-ahead for launching a military offensive that was called off only at the very last minute, thanks to the intervention of the US. Next time, a BJP government is more likely to not give in to US pressure. The Congress, on the other hand, made a lot of noise but did little after Mumbai 26/11. In future too it will try its best to avoid precipitating a crisis, no matter how grave the provocation, with an eye on Muslim votes.
  
• The Congress has lost its core dalit vote in UP to Mayawati and Yadav vote to Mulayam Yadav. It also no longer has any core vote among remaining Hindus, who are vulnerable to advances of the BJP. Due to this fundamental weakness, it needs Muslim votes to survive and win. A Congress government will, therefore, per force be very soft towards the activities of the SIMI and the Indian Mujahideen, and give them much needed time and space to expand their influence and multiply their hit capability, to be activated at the right time. This will help in furthering ISI's long term strategy of bleeding India to death through a thousand cuts.
• The Congress will also turn a blind eye to the radicalisation of Indian Muslims that is vital to achieving the ISI’s plan of the creating and expanding an Islamic sub-state within the secular Indian state so that the avowed objective of the SIMI and Pakistan to turn India into an Islamic state is achieved when an opportunity presents itself.
  

In support of this theory, the following facts were cited then:

• There has not been a single terror attack, big or small, since Mumbai 26/11. This is because the ISI ordered all such attacks to be put on hold at least till the elections to ensure that no Hindu votes get diverted to the BJP.
• Compared to 2004, the Congress has gained around 6% vote share in UP and some other states. But in UP, where the Muslim population is large, the party has gained a huge 10% compared to the Assembly elections in 2007, when it got just 8.56% of the votes. The fact that the only other party to gain vote share in the state since 2007 is the BJP, although by only 0.57%, while the both the SP and BSP have lost around 2% and 3% respectively, is conclusive evidence that it is mostly the Muslims who have shifted to the Congress in huge numbers.
• This tectonic shift in the Muslim vote to the Congress in UP that has helped it increase its seat tally to 21 from a paltry nine, has taken place virtually unnoticed. This could not have happened on its own. There was obviously a concerted effort by influential and powerful extremist elements and possibly some fundamentalist religious leaders to keep this development under the wraps, as it were, to prevent any polarisation of the the Hindu vote in favour of the BJP and away from the Congress, as a reaction, because had that happened, this shift of the Muslim vote would have got negated.

Two years have passed since Congress won the elections. These two years too have been free of any terror attack. But note the total contrast in the manner this incident-free period is being projected by the Congress.

ISI, LeT, SIMI, IM and other umbrella terror outfits have been virtually removed from public mind, thanks to an obliging media and the candle brigade that either do not talk about them or do so in manner that makes them look almost benign. The speedy trial and acquittal of the Batla House accused tried under normal laws, not UAPA or MCOCA, right in the heart of India’s capital has also been quietly buried, so that memories of people are not refreshed, and the design of the Congress is not revealed.

On the flip side they have got into overdrive about the common culture, language and ethnicity – the sameness -- of the people of India and Pakistan (South Asia for bubble gum kids) and the great love they have for each other. Indians are being told ad nauseum that a vast majority of ordinary Pakistanis are secular and want to have very close relations with their Indian brothers, but – this is critical – their wishes are not being fulfilled primarily because the RSS and the Sangh parivar are poisoning the atmosphere in India, just like terrorists with AK47s are in Pakistan.

The almost total silence about the many Pak-sponsored terror attacks that killed thousands of Indians, is being matched by the almost daily front-paging and prime-timing of leaks about four bomb blasts carried out a few years back – the last was in 2007 – by a handful of misguided Hindu extremists, in reaction to Pak-sponsored attacks. Almost all of them are in prison and no one has yet been convicted. But every other day, there are leaks by state agencies to the media about confessions or new leads found.

The picture being Photoshopped, very systematically and deliberately, is of a Hindu terror that is happening now and one that poses a real, present and growing danger to India and Indian Muslims. The RSS and the Sangh parivar, we are being helpfully told, are the only enemies that Indians need to worry about: India’s real war is not against Pakistan or Islamist terror promoted and supported by the ISI, but against Saffron terror spawned by the RSS.

The aim of this Goebbelsian refrain, tragically, is no more than to convince us to vote for Congress as our only hope, even as it plunders India like no one has ever, right in front of our eyes, with an arrogance and shamelessness that defies understanding.

The party, as I said in my previous post too, has so completely put all its eggs in the minority basket, that the only Indians left to oppose it, exceptions apart, are Hindus. Thus each one of us who raises his voice against the government is by default a RSS worker. It is, therefore, only natural that Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev, the two leading faces of the anti-corruption movement that has erupted on the back of strong popular revulsion against what appears to be the only agenda of the present dispensation at the Center, are being vilified by the Congress as RSS agents.

The success that the Congress party achieved in UP in 2009 has manifestly led its strategists to believe that it can retain power in Delhi if it can get Muslims to vote for it en bloc again. The Hindu vote, splintered along every fault line possible, cannot pose any challenge to it as long as hatred and revulsion can be generated for the RSS and the Sangh parivar among enough Hindus. Other Hindu caste based parties and regional outfits will fall in line and make up the shortfall in seats, if any. The ongoing caste census may well divide them even further, making Congress rule even easier.

‘Unite Muslims, divide Hindus’: this is evidently the fail-safe election mantra that is being chanted in 10 Janpath now.

Why has there been no Pak-sponsored terror attack since 26/11? The answer, to my mind, is simple. When the Indian government has taken upon itself to unwittingly further the agenda of the ISI, where is the need for it to resort to active jihad that will inflame passions and undo the good work prematurely? For the last two years, little has been heard of the SIMI and IM too. Have these outfits dissolved or are they, with ISI’s help, quietly expanding their base even as Indian intelligence agencies look the other way in line with the dictates of their political masters who see the voting machine and nothing else?

Sonia Gandhi’s hatred for the Hindu Right is well known. Vir Sanghvi wrote about it and Wikileaks has confirmed it. But it now appears that her antipathy extends to Hindus as a whole. Nothing else can explain the manner in which the the Communal Violence Bill that she has approved, has been prepared in unholy haste by her handpicked, unelected team that includes known Hindu haters, even though there have been no communal riots for almost a decade.

In one stroke, the bill has achieved what a thousand terror attacks cannot. The Hindu has been virtually declared The Terrorist in his own country and, – if the bill is passed – subject to draconian provisions of law that even terrorists who blast innocent people are not. He cannot speak, he cannot write, much less do, anything that can be construed as offensive by a member of a minority community. Worse, even democratically elected governments, where Hindus are going to be in majority, have been declared untrustworthy; unelected bodies where minorities are in majority will decide whether the Hindu is guilty or not. His voice has, thus, been throttled and his spirit, his freedom killed far more effectively than the ISI could have in a hundred years, if at all.

When your own government nukes you, where is the need for the ISI to send Fedayeen to kill a few innocent people here and there?

If Sonia’s Congress continues to speed India to its ruin in this manner, a deceptive peace will prevail. This is not a peace to celebrate; it is a peace to fear. This is not a peace that will lead to peace; it is a peace that will end in mayhem. This is not a peace that will make India strong; it is a peace that will make its enemies strong. Do you want to go along, or would you rather be dubbed the new ISI?
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ANNA, RAMDEV: DIVIDED THEY FELL

Flattery can fool the best of them. What to talk of a naïve Yog Guru and a simple villager surfing into the murky, merciless world of Indian politics on the wave of popular support and truth. In retrospect, it is evident that a great deal of thought -- and equal or more misinformation -- went into the strategy adopted by the Congress party to defeat an anti-corruption movement that had energised Indians across all classes and castes.

Baba Ramdev, before he made a triumphant entry into Delhi airport, had done nine months and one lakh kilometers across India to enlighten people about the abyss of corruption that the country had fallen into and muster their support for his fight against it. That heady feeling clearly got the better of commonsense. And led him to make a few elementary blunders that quickly deflated him and his campaign, and enabled the Congress to turn the table he was standing on.

The first mistake Ramdev made was about the timing. Anna Hazare had launched a similar movement at Jantar Mantar in April and had achieved a fair degree of success. The Congress, after attacking him viciously, had capitulated, rattled by the popular support his fast had generated. Negotiations were going on between his team and the government for a preparing a joint Lok Pal Bill to tackle political and bureaucratic corruption. In the beginning of June, the impression generated, deliberately it is now evident, was that Anna’s civil society would have its way. The energy and support for Anna had not waned; he had not yet failed. Therefore, for Baba Ramdev to start his own show then was a clear sign that he was, to an extent, motivated more by the desire to take the limelight and credit away from Anna Hazare than by commonsense. Even if he had planned his satyagraha earlier, he should have postponed it.

Ramdev may have been right in his belief that Anna enjoyed little popular support beyond a small section of the TV-friendly urban middle class, and that he was the one with the weight of masses and money behind him. But, he failed to realise that his hunger to be seen as the real leader of the anti-corruption movement was just the weakness that the Congress party was waiting to exploit in order to slice the movement in two and kill its momentum.

When Pranab Mukherjee and three other ministers landed up at Delhi airport to receive him, – an honour not given even to the US President – Ramdev should have smelled a rat. They even held it to his nose: keep Anna Hazare away from your stage. But he smelled the scent of victory instead, a ridiculously easy victory that made him foolishly feel that he was a real Maharaja and Anna a tiny speck of no consequence getting attention it did not deserve.

That is precisely what Mukherjee and Co. had calculated. Their best hope of victory lay in ensuring that these two sections of “civil society” that had got together for the possibly the first time ever were separated and made to turn hostile to each other again. United, they would have been impossible to defeat; divided, they could be taken apart easily. Baba fell straight into the simple trap. As did the members of Anna's team.

Emboldened by the grand reception and imagining that Delhi was already his, Baba Ramdev added fuel to the fire lit at the airport. He got Sadhvi Rithambara on his stage. This was like showing a red rag to a herd of bulls. There is no doubt that the Sadhvi is now engaged solely in social work. But during the Ram Janmabhoomi movement, she had delivered many strident speeches bordering on hate. No one was looking at the present; for Congress and media, only the past mattered. That sealed it for Ramdev. With the media turning openly hostile, Anna’s team had a similar and stupid reflex reaction, blinded to the larger game plan of the Congress, just as the baba was. The split in the movement was complete. The downhill journey had begun.

Mocking the merits of some demands made by Baba Ramdev, just to run him down, was also part of that game plan. His views on homosexuality, for example, are identical to those held by religious leaders of all religions, but no one mentioned that. Similarly, his views about giving death penalty (changed to life sentence) to those guilty of corruption are little different from those of the ‘civilised’ who demand death for rapists in TV studios and newspaper columns. He made some terrific suggestions too, like having world class educational institutions in India, couched in simple words that everyone understands. But, no surprise, you didn’t get to hear about them much, if at all.

Notwithstanding the negative blitz, the fact of the matter is that the government, by its own admission, agreed to almost all his demands, a fact that even he acknowledged on TV.

That is where Ramdev made his biggest mistake. It did not occur to him that with the Anna camp having deserted him and embedded media having turned hostile, Sonia Gandhi would not hesitate to use brutal force to evict him from Ramlila ground. Having got even more than he expected and that too so easily, he probably got carried away. Instead of calling off the satyagraha at that point of time, he dug in. And dug his grave in the process. The police, in a midnight swoop, arrested him and attacked 60,000 peaceful satyagrahis, women and children among them, forcing them to flee.

Packed off to his Ashram in Hardwar, Ramdev called of his fast unto death after nine days, beaten blue by a cleverer and far more devious Congress that not only refused to negotiate with him any further but went back on the agreement it had reached with him in Delhi.

Isolated and weakened, Anna Hazare has now met the same fate. After many solemn assurances that a joint draft of the Lok Pal Bill will be presented in Parliament during the monsoon session, the government has shown him the middle finger. Two drafts will now go to the cabinet; one prepared by the government, the other by Anna’s team. No prizes for guessing which one will go through, if at all.

As of now, the anti-corruption movement stands divided, defeated. The Congress has again hit the fail-safe nerve that has thus far seen it through many difficulties: the RSS card to discredit and dissipate any opposition to it. Both Ramdev and Anna are accused of being RSS agents and worse. The “non-communal” members of civil society have been left stranded in their ivory towers without popular support of even “secular” urban Indians.

The war on corruption has successfully been turned into a war between communal Hindus and the rest represented by the Congress. You are now being asked to make a simple choice: do you prefer RSS/”Hindu communalism” or corruption that is endemic to all parties?

No one is telling you that with Sonia’s Congress openly wooing only Muslims and Christians, with the NAC unleashing a draconian anti-Hindu Communal Bill etc. the only Indians who will oppose it for poor governance and its unprecedented plunder of India are Hindus, exceptions apart. The communal bogey is, thus, ready for the Congress to exploit. Slandering and splitting those who raise their voice against its misdeeds and failures has been and will remain its prime weapon.

No matter how hard the BJP tries, no matter which face it projects as leader, the communities being courted by the Congress are not going to desert it en masse for the BJP. Since Sonia's Congress is leaving little doubt in anyone's mind that its pro-minority stance is fundamentally anti-Hindu, the way to counter it politically is not by being even more pro-minority but by actively protecting the interests of the majority and consolidating it without feeling guilty and without being anti-minority, the last bit being vital.

Unless the “unite minorities, divide Hindus” strategy of the Congress is defeated decisively, what happened at Ramlila grounds and to the Anna camp will happen again and again. This is the first real defeat that Baba Ramdev, the Yog Guru from a small village in Haryana has faced. In the whole drama, he has undoubtedly lost a lot of his luster. Regaining it will take a lot of doing. The swell of anger against the Congress for its brutality can be used to take the anti-corruption struggle to great heights. The slighting of Anna Hazare will also help reinforce the belief that Sonia Gandhi will go to any length to protect corrupt leaders.

But for a new momentum to be built up, Ramdev and Anna will have to come together. The civil society members surrounding Anna will also have stop playing into the hands of the Congress by showing their allergy to anything that is dubbed by it as Hindu/RSS, both being synonymous for Congress. Ramdev will also need to completely shed personal political ambitions that will, invariably, cloud his judgment again.

It has to be a totally united effort for a common objective; all have to be welcomed from every religion, political party and section of society. At stake is the very future of India being mortgaged by an arrogant political class that has got used to blatant abuse of power, limitless corruption and worse. Anna and Ramdev and others must not allow themselves to be divided again.
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Related: Anna Hazare, listen to the rage
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INDIA AND THE SERPENT

India, an idea, is the plasticine of a few
who mould it as per leader’s mind
and shout from every pulpit: it’s true.
Freedom indeed it is for them, and the led blind;
blasphemy if you call their myth,
or uncover their ugly truth.

Petty leaders battle for power,
no mercy to each other shown,
ever slicing India, tinier pieces to own;
but fearful of neighbours' guts and gun,
and wrapped in the vote-god toe to head,
dead doves they are -- how own loss they dread.

Sedition is new heaven of freedom,
‘hate' its hate-filled line, minority
dog tag a badge of honour, majority
a dirty slur; ‘The Red Saree’ troublesome
locked away, ‘Broken Republic’ given wing;
Self is the new India, Singh its dummy king.

Asurs alone churn the ocean -- the serpent
coils devs long beaten and quite bent --
bringing up with wine much venin given vent.
No hiss to alert fools he waits, silent,
for their fall; if he is not soon cut in two,
he will get India, the nectar pot, anew.
.