SA'FAI' BEGINS, PURGE NEEDED

The whitewash, sa’fai’, of the damning Faigate revelations that have sinister implications for India, both internally and in its responses to Pakistan, has begun. And, as expected, the usual suspects are at it.

Prannoy Roy and Barkha Dutt’s NDTV, chastened by "guilt-tweets" of Ms. Dutt before and after the Radia tapes rash hit and claimed her, continuing histrionics notwithstanding, has chosen to remain silent lest it is unable to pull its smelly foot out of its mouth subsequently. Their burden has been taken on by two old friends of the channel, the publicly exposed Vir Sanghvi and the yet to be Shekhar Gupta.

Vir Sanghvi, now reduced to writing on the net, the very medium he derided at the peak of his wholly "paid" arrogance, has written another Radia piece “ dressed up” to look as a pat in the back for India, but meant to exonerate his many corrupt liberal friends who have been found to be anti-national as well. If you read the whole piece, you will find that Sanghvi has been unsparing in exposing the well-known game plan of Pakistan – which, let us be clear, means the ISI, which in turn means Pakistan’s Army Chief – for Kashmir which, as he brings out, India has been been warning the world about.

Yet, Mr. Sanghvi wants us to believe that the real issue about Faigate is that Ghulam Nabi Fai's organisation, the Kashmir American Council, was “created by the Pakistani state to con Americans!” You don’t expect men of Vir Sanghvi’s integrity to tell us why the ISI wanted to con the Americans over Kashmir. Because if he does that then he knows he cannot conjure the lame and disgraceful defence that he offers, in just a couple of lines, for Indian liberals and peaceniks, among them Justice Sachar, author of the infamous Sachar Commision report, who were regulars at Fai’s Kashmir conferences that were micro-managed by the sinister ISI. They, he claims, were unaware of Fai’s sources of funding and whitewashes their culpability by saying: “it is sad and unfortunate that they were duped into lending legitimacy to an ISI-sponsored initiative.”

The Editor of Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, has, for once, beaten Vir Sanghvi and conjured an even more absurd defence of the indefensible, but one that some of those caught will try to employ to escape the accusation of committing plain treason.

Gupta rubbishes Sanghvi's line that those who enjoyed Fai’s hospitality were unaware that he was a Pak/ISI agent. This is what he says of Fai: “But all of it, the injured air of Kashmiri victimhood, and Americanised English would not fool you about who he exactly was, and what precisely he was after. He was a Pakistani lobbyist for “their” Kashmir cause, leading a very cleverly constructed over ground support base for the malevolent movement that was picking strength in the early nineties. You would have to be utterly nuts, delusional or smoking some awful prohibited substance to not figure this out. Would you have known he was funded by the ISI? Again, you had to be from another planet to believe anything else.”

As every donkey and his son knows, Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is driven wholly by the military and its outstanding covert operations outfit, the ISI, that has been fermenting trouble in the Valley and other parts of India for a long, long time. That is the reason why Gupta has abandoned the unaware line. But, he also knows that sleeping with the ISI is an unforgivable act of treason, soaked in blood. So, he bails out the likes of Justice Sachar and many others yet to be exposed by inventing a high moral ground where none can be: “A more honest — and morally totally convincing — answer would have been the straight one. That as an intellectual or, in case of some, as a civil society activist, you were fully within your rights to go and speak at any forum, even if it was funded or organised by the Pakistanis and that just the fact of accepting a free ticket and a tiny per diem would not have compromised your integrity.”

As I understand this bizarre argument, it is perfectly fine for well-known Indians who are representing India to lend respectability and credence to, and bolster the ant-India position of the ISI on Kashmir across the world, knowing fully well that it is one over which three wars have been fought and over which a proxy war is still on. So, by the same logic, Indians should also be at liberty to go to Kashmir and physically fight ISI’s war against India, or do the same in other parts of India by carrying out a terror attacks and killing innocent people.

A war is fought more in the minds than on the battlefield. How can any sane man argue that while Indian foot soldiers of the ISI (a wing of Pakistan's military) are guilty and should be hanged, those who are knowingly furthering its hostile-to-India cause and its war across the globe are not only innocent but have a right to do so?

But Gupta has the the nerve to say that it is entirely irrelevant as to “who accepted Fai’s free tickets and hospitality, knowingly or unknowingly.” Perhaps Gupta no longer needs such petty perks. But, the same gentleman, knowing what he does about the military’s vice-like grip over Pakistan's India policy, was among the first to articulate, and repeatedly, after 26/11 that India should actually strengthen Pakistan and give to it concessions over Kashmir and other issues to “enhance the power and credibility” of Pakistan’s government, one that even prints fake Indian currency in its mints. Then I had imagined that he was writing the nonsense he was because someone in the corridors of power that he lives in had asked him to. Now the picture is getting frightening.

For India, what Faigate means to the Americans is, at one level, peripheral. It is undoubtedly a cog in the big picture, but for us the immediate and extremely worrying concern is that it is the tip of a very large ISI iceberg that is attacking India at all levels in pursuance of the Pakistan military’s single-point objective of bleeding India to death through a thousand cuts.

What the likes of Shekhar Gupta and Vir Sanghvi will not speak of are the scary logical deductions that must come first to the minds of all analysts as a result of Fai exposure as an ISI agent. The simple fact is the Fai was used by the ISI to defeat India internationally in so far as its position on Kashmir is concerned. And it spent millions of dollars over the counter and -- there can be little doubt -- many more below it, to get Indians to help it win this small but integral part of its existential war against India. The real war is being fought and will be fought on ground in India, including Kashmir. Does it take rocket science to understand that ISI must have been spending a thousand times more here, at every possible level, starting from sleeper cells to the media, academia, think tanks, babudom, and India’s political leadership, right up to and including 10 Janpath?

Rahul Gandhi’s assessment, shared with an American, – no electoral politics there – that Hindu terror posed a bigger threat to India than Pak-sponsored terror, is irrefutable proof that – notwithstanding his limited intelligence and grasp – even the future Prime Minister of India (as some believe) is being deliberately misguided by his trusted advisers. This cannot be a coincidence. The ISI has penetrated even his innermost circle.

While one can accept that the daily front paging of Hindu terror is essentially driven by the compulsions of vote-bank politics, it cannot be an accident that the whole mainstream mind-space has become irrationally pro-Pakistan during the last few years.

Sonia Gandhi has appointed the lawyer who defended ISI’s front organisation SIMI, the mother of the Indian Mujahideen who have carried out many terror attacks, as India’s Law Minister. She has also filled the NAC with hate-filled activists of very dubious antecedents and got a former bureaucrat who has given SIMI a de facto clean chit to draft the pernicious Communal Violence Bill that emasculates Hindus and puts the reins of determining culpability of individuals and all state organs, including the military, in the hands of unelected representatives from minority communities, in so far as Hindu-Muslim tensions (let's cut pretences) are concerned.

Seen in isolation, as indeed, liberals and ISI agents want us to, the many steps being taken by Sonia’s government and NAC seem innocuous, even harmless. But when viewed holistically, one cannot miss the fact that there is a method behind it all. Liberals and peaceniks and Hindu-haters are all pushing the “Break-India” agenda of the ISI.

The labyrinth of terror of which Fai was a part runs deep in India and many of these guys who have virtually been dictating India’s policies along all dimensions with regard to Pakistan and, by extension, Indian Muslims, who the ISI has been trying to turn into its assets, are central players in it, many willing, aware. That is why the hushed silence. That is why these fraudulent defences.

“ISI has more freedom of opinion than us.” This tweet unknowingly sums up the picture that India’s traitors have helped paint. They are many, they are powerful, they are dangerous, they have vested interests. And they have already begun the Big Cover Up. They may have much at stake, but India has much more. So, they have to be taken on by the state, by each one of us. The sa’fai’ under way must be exposed, and pressure put on the government to uncover and remove all termites who have gnawed deep into India, right to the doors of Sonia Gandhi who seems to have got caught in a trap of her own making.

The purge has to be ruthless and untouched by any political or personal considerations. This is the real lesson of Faigate.
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MUMBAI ONCE MORE

Mumbai has been hit once more. Will be hit many times over. Given the trajectory that our leaders and policy makers have put this nation on, it not a question of whether but when another terror strike will take place.

Notwithstanding Rahul Gandhi’s baseless claim that 99% terror attacks have been prevented, it is true that the frequency of attacks has reduced since 26/11. But this is not because of the few half-measures taken by the government to bolster internal security but because a) Pakistan’s hands have got a bit tied after they were completely exposed for the first time ever in that attack b) Sonia Gandhi has gone into a maniacal mode to consolidate her Muslim and minority vote bank guided by her personal predilections and her campaign team consisting of the NAC and dubious NGOs and hate-mongering activists, prompting terrorists and their masters across the Radcliffe Line to pull their foot off the terror-attack pedal till she delivers, so that reaction from the majority community is muted, and c) focus of the intelligence agencies has been diluted and diverted to create a big media tamasha of the clear, present and growing danger of a virtually non-existent Hindu terror which was the creation a handful of people involved in four attacks, the last of which was in 2007, giving them time and space to consolidate and build.

The net result is that the people of India are today more vulnerable than they were earlier to terror; sitting ducks, as a leading daily headlined their plight after the Mumbai serial blasts on July 13, 2011.

What does it take to fight terror? First, a country has to put in place internal measures, including a robust real-time intelligent network, to make it extremely difficult for terrorists to get funding, local support and freedom to move around with little fear of getting caught before they launch an attack. After an attack, not only should getaway be made very difficult but there should be swift and stringent punishment, mainly as a deterrent for those who might be contemplating joining such outfits. Second, the external factors responsible for propagating and exporting terror should be made to feel the cost of their misadventure to the degree that they are compelled to put a stop to their activities. Unless the second part is conclusively addressed, the first will yield only limited results, and lower the morale of the people and the nation as a whole.

But, be it in the corridors of power or in post-attack discussions and columns, despite the sound and fury, despite the very detailed knowledge some analysts have about the mother-terror architecture in Pakistan, in the end, the refrain remains the same: we can do no more than talk to Pakistan, and we must improve police and intelligence set up at home.

The first part, the easy, meaningless one really -- except for analysts and commentators -- continues to be pursued, while the second remains as neglected as it always was.

In fact, given Sonia Gandhi’s seemingly obsessive compulsion to woo the minorities, central agencies are increasingly looking the other way as the Indian Mujahideen consolidates and spreads it wings, and as Pakistan deploys more and more local sleeper cells to be activated at a time of its choosing. Home Minister Chidambaram, who initially promised much, seems to have been effectively been done in by Sonia’s team that is more focused on emasculating the majority and splitting the society communally to deliver an electoral victory to Sonia in 2014, than on allowing the government to fulfill its constitutional obligation of protecting the lives of its citizens and securing the nation from the menace of terror of which it has been a victim for almost a quarter century.

Talking to Pakistan is not going to yield anything for India. Pakistan is getting India to the negotiating table at the point of gun not to give but to extract, to extort. Our leaders and babus have made their mouths and minds the weapons of choice to deflect and defeat the aggressive, never-say-die, hate-filled minds ready to wage – and doing so – a thousand year war. They think little about the helpless and innocent Indians who are getting killed again and again, because they and their kith and kin are safe and secure. They believe that giving some concessions will get the Pakistanis off their back, and they spend their energies solely on trying to give only that much as will not raise a furore in the country.

The Pakistanis, who smelled the coward in them long back, on the other hand, keep shifting the goal posts and outsmarting them at every turn, so as to wear them down till finally they --India -- submit. It does not seem to have struck our guys that the more we give, the more the demands will increase, after suitable pauses. May be they know it; but if that be so, it means that their ignorance of and abhorrence for the employment of force to counter and defeat force overrides their commonsense, live and effective examples of other nations notwithstanding.

The US is a democracy like us, but after just one major attack on mainland US, they went for the perpetrators of the attack even though they were non-state actors in a sovereign country. And, though it took them ten years, they hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden. They knew that unless they struck terror back in the hearts of the terrorists, attacks on the US would not only continue but would increase in intensity and frequency. Though they that also put in place very stringent measures to almost eliminate the chances of further major strikes, they were never under any illusion that mere defense would defeat fanatic warriors who were not fighting a conventional war and who thought nothing about losing foot soldiers fed to fight and die for virgins in paradise.

That is why there have been no attacks on America till now, while here the sense of despair is becoming alarming. Make no mistake: if there are more such attacks, that country will not hesitate at all to introduce even harsher measures, at greater cost to individual freedom temporarily. Liberty comes at a price and can be enjoyed unfettered only in a secure nation not facing a serious threat. Many terror attacks and decades later, we refuse to learn even basic lessons.

Is this the response expected from a huge nation of 1.2 billion to such a grave threat? Every time a terrorist attack takes place, our politicians almost proudly and openly announce that a neighboring country, Pakistan, is behind it. It is almost as if they are telling the nation that they have done their job by blaming Pakistan, which is all they can do, and that the nation has no choice but to meekly continue accepting this evil. Having identified the source two decades back, why has no effective response been formulated yet? Why do we continue to wail like a helpless, defenceless woman who is being repeatedly raped by a small boy 1/6th her size?

Just imagine a scenario in which Pakistan was six times our size rather than the 1/6th it is. What would it have done by now? Do I need to spell out? We probably would have long been splintered and devoured as a nation by that country, and run over by Talibani extremists. And what have we done? For six decades, we have aimlessly and apathetically allowed a tiny Pakistan to fearlessly keep trying to do precisely that, and have not yet formulated a terminal response that can put an end to this cancer that is going larger and that will, inevitably, afflict our own Muslims in the long run, just as is being planned.

We seem to know well only how to rush quickly to the high moral ground of fatal weakness that our first Prime Minister taught us, and camouflage the overriding concern for electoral victory that his Italian grand daughter-in-law is pursuing with deathly determination.

Till this debilitating paradigm remains in place, the ordinary people of Mumbai, indeed the whole of India, will continue to live with the fear that they may not return home in the evening, that their blood soaked bodies will be dumped like garbage at the back of trucks.
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SUNETRA HARASSED, PRANNOY, MEDIA SHAMED

Sunetra Chaudhury’s stunning revelation about the sexual harassment she was subjected to by a senior politician has raised issues much more disturbing than the trauma she went through and had the courage to speak about in the public domain.

Ms. Chaudhury, if one can believe what her senior colleague at NDTV, Barkha Dutt of Radia fame, tweeted some days back, is one of the brightest journalists working with the media house. Is it not, then, to begin with, odd, that her story, her cry, was not carried by her own channel, 24/7?

What happened to all the pontification in innumerable ‘We The People’ shows and other programs about women’s emancipation, equal rights, stringent laws to protect women against sexual harassment in the work place etc.? Why the stoned silence when harsh reality has hit home?

Did NDTV refuse to carry her story because, if rumours are to be believed, Prannoy Roy himself has a glad eye? Or is it because he holds the view that it is a part of the job of female journalists that he employs to get horizontal to “rise” vertically in political circles, right up to RCR, as we have seen happen? Or is it because the politician involved is a Congressman, not someone from the opposition, and that too, as it appears from the language employed by him, someone whose sole claim to stardom is his friendship with Rajiv Gandhi, and now Sonia Gandhi?

Remember how a few years back, Tehelka had entrapped military officers and politicians with prostitutes and money in a manifestly politically motivated and paid sting operation? If that was a big story, was not Sunetra’s story even bigger? A politician shamelessly seeking sexual favours from an NDTV employee in the presence of a third person?

Manifestly, the politician was ‘cock’sure that Prannoy Roy would take no cognisance and would bury the matter, even if his employee mustered enough courage to complain to him. And that the famed Barkha Dutt would also not have any courage to fly into her famous rage to come to the rescue of her colleague, and, in the process, spill the many rotten beans that have for decades remained canned.

The Indian media maintains an Omerta about the “private” lives of politicians. As Barkha Dutt said once, it is nobody’s business to know who sleeps with whom. No one can argue aganist that view. But is sleeping for pleasure or love same as sleeping for business or career advancement/getting an inside scoop? Does it not, then, become a straightforward case of corruption, of giving and receiving a plain bribe? Can the sexual harassment that Chaudhury was subjected to construed by any sane person as the private matter of a politician? The guy was aggressively and arrogantly seeking sexual favours to give her the story she wanted, and it is not news for NDTV, or even rival channels?

Is the rot deeper than we know? Is the nexus between politicians and journalists far more perverse than we believe?

When the ND Tiwari sex scandal came to light last year, thanks not to the mainstream media which would have known about him for decades, Madhu Kishwar openly said on Face The Nation that Delhi's political landscape was one giant brothel.

Sunetra’s story and the manner in which it has been hushed up by NDTV, forcing her to write her tale of woe in DNA, perhaps the only leading newspaper that was willing to carry it, tell us that Kishwar was not only right but that the rot is far deeper, and that some politicians brazenly treat female journalists as no more than easy meat. In fact, Sunetra herself has made a mention -- not without reason -- about the text messages being received by an unnamed NDTV colleague from a cabinet minister seeking her sexual services. That the colleague has chosen to remain silent, possibly like others at NDTV, gives a very disturbing picture about the code of professional and journalistic ethics that Prannoy Roy has instituted at the channels that he owns.

The picture in other media-cum-business houses is probably no better, given that no other female journalist has ever mustered the courage to complain in the manner the Sunetra Chaudhury has.

Yes, no one has any business to know who is sleeping with whom. But, the first-hand peek that Sunetra has given to the public in near real-time leaves little room for doubt that this self-imposed silence of the media is more to protect the reputations of its fraternity that has been and is using sex a potent investigative/information/power/pelf tool, than to keep their private lives private. NDTV, of course, stands exposed and shamed as it has never been. But, like Dr. Manmohan Singh, Prannoy Roy has once again neither spoken nor taken any action. And he is not a puppet on a string. May be along some dimensions he is.

The litany of exposures about media’s dark deeds gets longer with every passing day. The fig leaf is beginning to fall.
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