India Retold

Long after it became history elsewhere, communism has fallen in its last bastion. “Hindu” West Bengal has, at long, long last, freed itself of another foreign yoke, one that it had enthusiastically embraced three decades after India had freed itself of a colonial one, and one it had all but surrendered to. It had to take Bengal’s own Ma Durga to appear in flesh and blood to slay this alien Mahishasur who had not only terrorised ordinary Bengalis for the better part of three decades but had also ensured that the state fell back along all parameters of development to become one of the poorest, though still intellectually pretentious, states of India.

Shorn of sophisticated and sometimes unintelligible jargon, there is much in common between communism and ‘Ladenism’. Both promise utopia but in practice deliver hell. Across the world, communism went horribly wrong, as it had to, because of the explosive marriage of an uncompromising ideology with the absolute power of the ruling dictatorship. As a result, it morphed into an almost fanatical religion, with a revealed text whose interpreters dictated the rigid path to be followed, without deviation, to reach the promised materialistic paradise – minus the sex -- on earth itself. To achieve their objective, communist ‘jihadis,’ as it were, destroyed or took control of all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and, of course, the family. Non-believers were simply eliminated in cold blood. The net result was a hell that had to fail. Had the elusive heaven been promised in the unseen world beyond, communism would almost certainly have been alive and killing today.

It is worth digressing a little more to put in perspective some of the horrors that communism unleashed in its run of almost nine decades in different parts of the world before it collapsed, in most cases dramatically and in a few, particularly China, almost imperceptibly. According to some estimates, communists murdered close to 110,000,000 people, several times more than the 38,000,000 killed in wars fought in the 20th Century. The Soviet Union heads the list of communist mass murderers, apparently killing nearly 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself was responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000, were due to forced labor in gulag. Communist China, which during Mao’s Cultural Revolution alone saw over 10,000,000 murdered, is the second on the list. By far, the most deadly of all was the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia who killed some 2,000,000 people between April 1975 and December 1978, out of a population of just around 7,000,000.

The communist heaven-turned-hell may not have manifested in all its ugliness in West Bengal, but that is only because it had to remain subservient to democracy as it was unable to extend its rule over the whole of India. But, despite this fundamental and, for India, fortunate limitation, wherever and whenever it could, it did show its ugly, dangerous, intolerant fangs. It is no secret that had it not been for the passive acceptance of brutal intimidation by the cadres and scientific rigging by them during elections, communists would not have been able to rule the state for 34 years. In fact had Mamata Banerjee not appeared in the ferocious Warrior-Goddess mode that she did to fight them relentlessly for 15 long years, docile Bengalis who, in my view, have a fundamental weakness in their collective psyche, would have continued to suffer while their “intellectual” gas bags would have kept producing tons of copy-pasted garbage divorced from them and their painful reality.

That is one reason why not only are leading communist ideologues not contrite about what they have done to their people and their land, but are actually confident of making a come back five years down the line, un-chastened, unchanged. Much like some of us who, no matter what happens, trust Pakistan more than we do our some of our own, they remain detached from reality and continue to repose faith in a dead ideology that has caused unprecedented human suffering almost wherever it has been in command. Their cockiness may not be entirely misplaced.

After taking over as Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee walked to her office in Writer’s Building along with thousands of ordinary men and women, powerfully symbolising the return of power to the people in the real sense of the word. A supporter even held a placard saying that this was West Bengal’s second freedom, the first being in 1947. Dramatic scenes and scary expectations of a people for long oppressed and effectively voiceless, democracy notwithstanding.

Mamata now faces an even bigger battle than the one she has fought long and hard to emerge victorious. She is untested yet as an administrator and as a leader in power. Her record thus far, coupled with her dalliance with the Maoists and fundamentalists, not only does not inspire confidence but gives rise to serious misgivings. If she fails to deliver something substantial, sustainable and tactile, Bengalis may, without as much as a murmur, fall prey to rogues again. So much they seem to have been broken in spirit. I wonder whether she realises that the victory she has achieved is not ordinary, that the heavy weights of history and expectations rest on her frail but tough shoulders. If she can carry them and emerge triumphant, Bengalis will have something real to cheer about and be proud of after a long time.

Can she make the transition that Winston Churchill failed to? Can she win the war of peace and prosperity that she has to fight now? Can she visibly demonstrate to the people of Bengal that she has indeed saved them from the deathly clutches of Mahishasur? Can Bengal’s Durga become Lakshmi?
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Some things are best said bluntly. Yes, wise men advise that it is better to lace the truth with sugar. But there are times when sugar cannot be its own antidote. And, with much syrup being served by some, this to my mind is one of them.

The BJP is in a mess and heading towards total disarray. This is the only truth that both its enemies and well wishers agree on. And this is where the divergence starts: What is the way forward for the party, if it has to re-emerge as a real alternative to the Congress?

The dominant current view, propagated by sections of media that are difficult to distinguish from the publicity wings of the Congress and, ironically, by some BJP leaders and their agents in the media, is that the BJP needs faces and projections that are “acceptable” to those who might be its future allies, and not “communal” leaders, no matter how good their record of governance etc.

Is this approach going to get the BJP anywhere at all? Or is it only going to hasten its decline and bring its tally down so dramatically in the next general elections that it may cease to be even the principal opposition party if Cong wins, and if its routed, in no position to project one of its presently favoured candidates as PM?

All the players who conspired to convert what at one stage looked a near certain win into a rather humiliating defeat in 2009 still have the BJP in their vice-like grip in Delhi. The only exception is, perhaps, Sudheendra Kulkarni who, in an almost ‘Mission Accomplished’ mode, quit the BJP after the debacle.

Has this caucus done anything at all, on its own, to rejuvenate the party and increase its footprint and vote-share anywhere in the country? The recently concluded Assembly elections should have come as an eye-opener, but exactly the opposite seems to have happened. The depressing and demoralising results are actually being distorted to project the leaders responsible for it as indispensable!

Their continued failure – deliberate or otherwise – is being dumped on the party. So, the BJP’s worst ever performance in Assam where it won a pathetic four seats and its failure to get even one seat even in West Bengal, not to mention Tamil Nadu and Kerala where again it failed to open its account, is deviously being shown as its inability to increase its presence beyond the areas where it is strong. Implied in this argument is that the failure is only due to its policies, programs and ideology, and that the so-called national leaders of the party cannot be blamed for it. They remain the best thing that could have have happened to the BJP.

Out of this deceitful argument flows the next one: the BJP has no hope of reversing the situation and must accept the reality that, no matter what the Congress does to destroy itself, it is not the BJP but other parties who will reap the benefit and emerge stronger. Therefore, in 2014, if a weakened BJP wants to have any chance of coming back to power, it has to project a “secular” leader who will be acceptable to all the allies that the party will have to rely on more than ever to get that coveted chair in South Block. If it projects a polarising leader like Narendra Modi as PM, its dream will die.

And who are the two most “acceptable” leaders that the BJP has? Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj -- unless, of course, Advani decides to take another shot. And which one of the two can and will be summarily turned into an also-ran, thanks to very, very serious allegations of corruption, media frenzy and – I have little doubt – some tapes ready to be played at just the right time? That will leave only Arun Jaitley in the race.

I may be wrong – and I sincerely hope I am – but it seem to me that the whole drama that has been playing out over the last few years is to pitch-fork Arun Jaitley as India’s next PM should disaster strike in the form of a Congress defeat. He is perhaps the only BJP leader who would look as at home, perhaps more, in the Congress than the BJP. He heads the DDCA in a Congress-governed Delhi and is part of the larger Congress family via the IPL too, not to mention his many abiding links as a lawyer and friend. The media, particularly editors who are very close to the Congress leadership and NDTV, spare no effort to project him as the leading, if not the only, “sane voice” in the BJP, and as future PM.

A weakened BJP suits Jaitley perfectly. The greater the say of alliance partners in choosing BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate, the better his chances. In fact this is the only way he can ever become PM. He is not a mass leader and has neither any pretension nor desire of being one. Connecting to the people is manifestly nowhere on his list of to-dos.The arrogance and aloofness that he exudes precludes any connect with the masses. He has risen in the party hierarchy solely because of his backroom skills bereft of certain core values and ethics, particularly as an election strategist who, at one point, appeared to be smarter than the rest, and claimed credit for delivering one victory after another. Till personal ambition took over.

Arun Jaitley has never won an election in his whole life and is not likely to ever too. Yet, propped and promoted by a powerful clique within the BJP and without, he aspires to be India’s Prime Minister. By manipulation alone. At the party’s expense. In my humble opinion, he has already harmed and damaged the party more than anyone else. Thanks in no small measure to his value- and party-neutral skills, the BJP today looks like a poor ‘B’ team of the Congress party.

Is that the way forward for a party that once claimed, with some justification, to be a real alternative to the Congress? Is it ever going to get any stronger in the hands of a few individuals who are driven blind by their individual ambitions? Is it ever going to replace a decayed and dying Congress by embracing the same degenerate values that have reduced the grand old party to a den of dacoits and plunderers, ready to sell the country’s security and future in their limitless hunger for power and pelf?

Surprisingly, the present discourse is not about strengthening the BJP at all. It is about meekly accepting decline and defeat, and banking on sordid manipulations and compromises to get power.

Manipulators do not work to strengthen organisations; they exist to feed off them. And they try every trick in the book to hold on to their perches. A few such leaders have already brought the BJP down and are now working to ensure that in the forthcoming Assembly elections in UP, it finishes last. The same Rajnath Singh who, together with the likes of Jaitley, has done colossal damage to the party, is set to lead it to defeat there again. Without recovery in UP, as any idiot knows, the BJP is going to be nowhere in 2014. That’s probably the idea. That is why they are trying to deflect attention from the rot they have have spread; that is why they are echoing the warnings of the Congress about the dangers of replacing them with a "divisive" leader.

The BJP, as one sophisticated Jaitley-worshipper and Modi-hater recently wrote, needs a big idea. Unfortunately, his ‘big idea’ is all about petty manipulation, has little to do with the BJP and is limited to the object of his worship. He knows better than anyone that the caucus running the party has not brought any incremental votes to the party and will not in future too. On the contrary, it will only lose votes, and many.

The big idea, therefore, has necessarily to be a bold idea, one that can credibly project the BJP as significantly different from the Congress, not as the poor photocopy it is looking like now. There is one such idea that the Congress party is most worried about, and to destroy which it has deployed the complete might of the party and the state. This idea, as you must have guessed, is an epochal change-agent called Narendra Modi. If this huge idea cannot do it for the BJP, the small, stale and smelly ones in circulation certainly will not.
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Do also read: Modi's double blow hits where it hurts
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The obfuscations, the denials, the pretensions have gone on for far too long. For far too long the mountain of damning evidence that has been surfacing with telling regularity, steeped with the blood of hapless individuals, both soldiers or civilians, has been simply ignored and filed. For far too long policy makers have stuck mindlessly to the adage “this too shall pass,” ignoring what has been clear even to them and what many informed analysts have been saying ad nauseum for years.

Osama bin Laden has, in his death at the hands of US Navy Seals in a compound bang in the middle of a secure Pakistani military station, delivered a blow so severe to nations and leaders thus far unwilling to face the fundamental truth of the foundation of the terrorism of which he was the most visible face, that it will be a crime if they do not still rouse themselves and do what they have been running away from till now.

As I wrote in my previous piece and in many others before that, the real terrorists who threaten the world are not the ones who carry out terror attacks in India and elsewhere. They are merely foot soldiers assiduously created, cultivated, protected and deployed by the military machine of Pakistan that believes terror is a technique of war that the state is entitled to use in furtherance of its religious and political objectives.

We in India have been facing terror without facing the reality that is carefully concealed behind it and paying a very heavy price, unfelt and un-understood by weak, ignorant and unwise policy makers personally untouched by this two decade old undeclared war. Despite increasing provocations, the last visible one being 26/11, we continue to fool ourselves into believing that we can defeat terror by talking and making concessions to the very guys who are using that weapon with precisely that objective.

After 9/11, the US bullied a very reluctant and duplicitous Musharraf into becoming their ally in their war in Afghanistan. Possibly they were then confident that their ‘shock and awe’ operations in Afghanistan would scare Pakistan’s military leaders into abandoning their relationship with the Al Qaida and Taliban. The LeT and other terror groups operating against India were then of no concern to them. Never did it strike them, on the face of it at least, that they were fingers of the same Pakistani hand. Had their cocky analysis – amnesic of the lessons of the Soviet misadventure -- of the mindset of Musharraf & Co. been right, the US would have achieved a relatively swift victory. It did not.

There lies the real story and the lesson that has been ignored by the US for almost 10 years. And, despite Laden, there are efforts being made still to make sure it remains so.

Like India, the US is worried about waging a war with a nuclearised Pakistan and wants to avoid it all costs, particularly since the threat to its mainland is not even near the kind that India has been, and is, dealing with. In addition, it needs Pakistan as a logistic conduit for the 120,000 US troops in Afghanistan. There is no other practical sea-land route available to maintain such a large fighting force there. The wily Musharraf, his DG ISI Kiyani -- now Army Chief -- and other Pakistani generals grasped the strategic significance of these paralyzing constraints even before America invaded Afghanistan and saw in them an opportunity to not only keep India under attack but also to score a spectacular victory for what we call terror and they Islam, over the second super power to invade Afghanistan. And they went about achieving this objective with single-minded, indeed manic devotion.

There is no getting away from the conclusion that both Musharraf and Kiyani were not only in the know of Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts but would have personally authorized his protection and concealment from the Americans. Deniability of their complicity had to be built into the method used for this – think ‘non-state’ actors in 26/11 and other terror attacks – and that is precisely what is being attempted now to convince the world that they did not know that he was where no one would have suspected him of being, where he would never have chosen to go unless he was sure that the US would not get him, where a confident Musharraf probably agreed to shift him after having successfully hidden him in less incriminating places for many years.

From incompetence to complicity of a few low-level ISI operatives to involvement of India-specific terror outfits like Hizbul Mujahideen, analysts -- free and embedded -- in India, the US and Pakistan are trotting out stories that absolve Pakistan’s top leaders. A few analysts believe that various DGs of ISI were in the know but not the Army Chiefs. Implied in this reasoning is that hand-picked ISI heads and their subordinates were engaged for years in an operation of such a huge magnitude and having such enormous implications in willful defiance of the orders of the most powerful man in Pakistan. This is as absurd as it can get.

Behind the elaborate and almost impenetrable smoke screen placed with great skill by Pakistan’s military, one could always see, with some effort, that terror in Kashmir and Afghanistan were two sides of the same coin minted by it. The logical deduction from that was that the war on terror had to be won in Pakistan and that both India and the US were fighting the wrong guys in the wrong place. But the US, preferring to look only at its end of the terror matrix and focusing on a narrow, short-term objective, thought it could to get clever, determined and driven Pakistani generals to do what it wanted in Afghanistan by nudging India to give them what they wanted, at least partially, in Kashmir.

Laden has, for the first time, laid bare the real face of terror and the terrorist like never before.

This leads to the inevitable question about where the shattered US-Pakistan alliance goes from here. If Kiyani and his men in uniform – literally the state of Pakistan – are the leading soldiers of global jihad, then how does the US defeat this enemy of the world and ensure that it does not raise its ugly head ever again? A 600,000 strong Army with nuclear bombs to throw around is no pushover. Does that mean that the only super power in the world is going to accept defeat garnished with the semblance of victory and let it grow even stronger and more destructive till a bigger catastrophe strikes and results in an extremely violent and costly war?

Or is it time to kill the monster that has inflicted more misery and havoc upon its own people than it has on its many perceived enemies, and free Pakistan from its clutches? The answer is obvious but the path to it is perilous. No one knows it better than the generals who have brought Pakistan to the brink of ruin and who are going to bash on if they get away. They are not going to willingly loosen their vice-like hold over Pakistan and its resources; they have to be forced to and then weakened enough so that they do not rise again, even more murderous, as they did after the 1971 debacle.

It should not take the US more than two days to incapacitate Pakistan Army and secure its nuclear weapons. With a ready and willing India to its East, it just needs to take out Pakistan’s Air Force, making its ground forces sitting ducks from the air. With the US becoming guarantor of its security, like it is of Japan, dismantling of the military-terror apparatus can follow. Without patronage, funds and professional guidance, terrorists outfits will dissolve into the countryside, just as the Nazis did.

Yes, things may go wrong; that is a calculated risk experts in the game have to take. But, if the terrorist-generals get away even now, chances are high that things will go horribly wrong some years down the line.
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Think of Abbottabad as Ramgarh and Khadakvasla rolled into one, with a bit of old Dehra Dun thrown in. It is as complete a military town as you can find. With two Regimental Centers, Baluch and Frontier Force, an Officers’ Training Academy and a large number of retired military officers who have settled down there, it makes for an excellent place to hide someone like Osama bin Laden.

Given the the fact that Pakistan military has been radicalised and its officers, right up to the Army Chief, have helped create and sustain the Al Qaida ever since Laden made Afghanistan-Pakistan his home, the chances of a such a valuable asset being accidentally spotted in Abbottabad and the information being leaked out are minimal. In addition, very few will suspect that Pakistan will be so foolish as to do hide someone like him there, for it will implicate both the military and its rogue outfit, the ISI – many erroneously believe it is an autonomous monster – in the event of him being caught.

In the middle of such a town, for over five long years, Laden lived in a house unlike and much larger than any in the neighbourhood, fully fortified with up to 20 feet high perimeter and internal walls topped by barbed wire and watched by cameras 24/7, but with no telephone or internet that could be used to track him down through electronic surveillance. The three-storied mansion was constructed in 2005 and, as per numerous reports, was occupied since then by an ailing Laden till a US bullet sent him to the 72 virgins he had been promising to thousands who died fighting his hate-filled, religion-driven war.

And Laden was not there alone. He lived with two wives, seven children and many servants and bodyguards. According to some reports, there were as many as 22 people in the mansion when US Navy Seals slithered into it in the pitch of the night on May 1, 2011. So many Arabs, who looked and spoke different, could have neither slipped into Abbottabad quietly nor stayed there for so long unnoticed and unreported. Unless, of course, the top Pakistani military, and I dare say even the civilian leadership, not only knew about it but was completely committed to protecting the Islamic hero that they themselves had created and nurtured.

Many Indian analysts, including the usual suspects – pun intended – like Barkha Dutt who are hell-bent on making Pakistan emerge smelling good even when it stands completely exposed, have been desperately making out a case that the US could not have carried out this operation without the knowledge and assistance of Pakistan. The logic is that after 10 long years, Pakistan had decided that Laden has become lead around its legs and that sacrificing him would help it extract some strategic advantage from the Americans in so far as Afghanistan is concerned. If this indeed was the case, to an even uninformed observer it would have occurred that the safe house in Abbottabad cantonment, built when Kiyani was the ISI chief, was the last place where they would have wanted him found out. They would have first mover him out to a ‘neutral’ hideout which did not point to its top military leadership and then given him away to the Seals.

Only the naïve will believe and the not-so-naive will want to make others believe that Pakistan was in the know of the Laden operation but is not claiming credit for fear of backlash. The cold truth is that had it got even a whiff of what was under way, Laden would have whisked away within minutes from what undoubtedly was a safe house provide by the Pakistani state. Moreover, had there been any Pakistani boots in and around the mansion when the Seals were sealing Laden’s fate, and had Kiyani known what was happening, he would have not let the Americans take Laden's body out of Pakistan. His subsequent hasty burial at sea shows that the Americans did not want the body to be taken over by the Pakistanis who would have, without doubt, helped turn his burial spot into a shrine to motivate more brainwashed murderers.

The Americans have since confirmed that Pakistan was informed about the operation only after American troops had killed Osama and flown out of Pakistani airspace. Many will continue to doubt this version, but I have little doubt that the tracking down and killing of Laden was a solely American affair.

For Pakistan, Laden was a living symbol of victory, a very motivating slap on the face of the world’s only super power, a statement to faithful radicals that although Pakistan appeared to be fighting with the Americans, it was actually fighting to defeat it and achieve for radical Islam a spectacular victory without a parallel, a victory that would lead to The Flag of Islam being hoisted in Delhi and eventually the whole world. Few would have missed the victorious smirk on the faces of Pakistanis from Musharraf to Kiyani when they denied that he was in Pakistan. So confident they were of their ability to hide him from America might forever.

Laden’s killing has dealt more than just a symbolic blow to the Al Qaida. It has changed the very dynamics of the war on terror that America and the rest of the free world is fighting. With Pakistan having been exposed in the worst possible manner it could have been, Obama will now be able to justify to the American public the eventual pushing of the war into and against Pakistan.

Pakistan cannot be America’s ally. It has been forced to become one only because the US cannot prosecute a war in land-locked Afghanistan if Pakistan does not give access its sea ports and surface transport networks to provide logistic support to the troops operating there. Had there been a US-friendly regime in Iran, Pakistan’s bluff would have been called long back. It is primarily due to this crippling logistic constraint that after 9/11 the US had threatened to bombard Pakistan back into stone age if it did not join its war on terror.

In private, the Americans must know that though they have taken out Laden, his is not the head whose decapitation will suffice. The real terrorists who need to be eliminated are Kiyani, Pasha and the rest of the gang of generals and political leaders who have turned Pakistan into one big terror factory that is beginning to swallow itself, not to die but to morph into an even more radicalised and dangerous monster.

The US is most likely not going to simply walk off from Afghanistan and Pakistan like the Soviets did, leaving behind an even more radicalised Pakistan in the hands of Kiyani & Co., the very people who have betrayed the US while pretending to fight with it, so that they can start the game all over again after a respite. They too will have to be taken out along with the massive architecture that supports the beast they have unleashed. The marriage of compulsion has not and cannot produce sweet fruit. It has to and will be ended. To the advantage of the US and the rest of the world. The only question, to my mind, is when, not if.

On the other hand, the Indian foreign policy establishment, hijacked as it has been by time-pass talkers, woolly-headed romantics, Nehruvian apologists and those driven by petty politics will, as always, do nothing except talk about chemistry and 'history', enjoy great (mis)guided trips to Pakistan and elsewhere and parrot that it is in India's supreme national interest to have a strong Pakistan!
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Related reading:
1. No answers to Pakistan's formidable force multipliers
2. Should Pakistan be saved?
3. Don't beggar my buggering neighbour, make him bigger
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