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?
'