Britain's True Role in Operation Blue Star

As I predicted, the “investigation” into the disclosure that Britain clandestinely “advised India” on Operation Blue Star has turned up nothing believable; but it has clarified one thing.

Britain’s proxy media in India are entirely unjustified in reporting that “Mrs. Gandhi asked for British help” in the 1984 assault on terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple.

It turns out there was a request from an anonymous “Intelligence” entity in India; the British thought it had Mrs. G’s authorization. Considering that the evidence of a "request" could have been generated by a mole expressly to cover Britain's real role in the Punjab, there is very little in the revelations so far that we can take seriously.   

Why are our suborned "elite" media reporting this fake story as a scandal?

I think they are following a game plan aimed at manipulating the Sikh community.

The British have a long history of such manipulation.

It goes all the way back to 1849 when, after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, they defeated the leaderless Sikhs and took as a “gift” from his 12-year old son the priceless Kohinoor diamond. They took the boy too and debauched him with opium and sex in Britain to prevent his emergence as a leader. He died under mysterious circumstances while trying, as an adult, to return to India.

During and after the 1857 Indian war of independence, the British made out that the Sikhs had supported their savage repressions, when, as Amaresh Misra has pointed out, the great majority of the community were supportive of the national struggle. 

At Partition, the British inflicted heavy costs on all Indians, but they were especially vindictive towards the Sikhs: the new border cut the community in half and gave Pakistan some of its holiest places of pilgrimage.

More recently, the manipulation has involved the Khalistan movement and its aftermath.  

The violent upsurge of the Khalistan movement coincided with the appearance in Mumbai of one Mark Bullough, a member of the elite Scots Guards unit of the British Army. He had fought in the 1982 war in the Falklands and was obviously a career military man; but oddly, he came to India as the Director of Hong Kong-based investment bank, Jardine Fleming. His bank had its roots in Jardine Matheson, one of the most prominent opium traders of the 19th Century, and had a reputation for being neck-deep in British spooks. During Bullough’s time in Mumbai Punjab saw the worst violence, ostensibly funded by anonymous “rich Sikhs” in Britain, Canada and the United States. (As I have noted in an earlier post, Bullough's decade-long presence in Asia -- he moved from Mumbai to Hong Kong and Singapore -- coincides with a great deal other mayhem.)

In June 1984, the Indian Army ousted a band of heavily armed terrorists occupying the Sikh Golden Temple in Amritsar -- the Operation Blue Star for which the British claim to have provided advice. The operation created great outrage among the Sikhs, which the BBC fed with incendiary coverage; on one show, an activist called for the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. The government of Margaret Thatcher dismissed a protest from the Indian government on the grounds of “Press freedom.”

A few weeks later, two Sikh members of Mrs. G’s security detail killed her as she was walking towards a BBC television crew set up for an interview on the occasion of a visit to Delhi by Princess Anne (with whom the Prime Minister was to dine that evening). The interview was delayed a half-hour at the last minute, just the time needed for one of the two assassins to begin his shift at the spot where the killing occurred.

Initially, one of Mrs. Gandhi's aides was suspected of arranging that delay, but the official inquiry exonerated him. The investigating judge noted the involvement of a foreign intelligence agency without explaining what that meant; whether he had more to say on that point is impossible to say, for a part of the report remains secret; it could be to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). For what it’s worth, the BBC interviewer waiting for her on that fatal day was the actor Peter Ustinov, whose father had worked for MI-5 (the domestic service of SIS).

When Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came to Delhi for Mrs. G’s funeral, she held an extraordinary Press conference, at which a reporter asked about the incitement to murder on the BBC. She responded: “Whether or not what he [the Sikh on the BBC] said actually amounted to a possible crime was a matter for the director of public prosecutions and the police, not for a politician. But I believe they looked at it, looked very carefully at what was said, and came to the conclusion that they could not in fact prosecute. You know there are sometimes very difficult cases. But whether they decide to prosecute or not is a matter for them. But they did not and that must have been because there was in their view not a sufficient case to prosecute.”

A reporter asked if there was not a case “for tightening up or altering the law” on “incitement to violence.” She replied, “Incitement to violence – I think the law is fairly clear. Sometimes it is not easy to get the precise evidence but we will have a look at it if need be. … But we must recognize again what is an apparent paradox, that if you are a free country then you are free to say what you think within the law, but a free society offers many more opportunities for doing the wrong thing than of course a tyranny. But then of course, who would wish to live under tyranny? And there are occasions when you do have a difficult question to ask. Do you resort to the methods of a tyrannical society in order to preserve freedom? You can see the paradox. Now I believe that we have got just about the right answer in Britain.”

[It is necessary to note that the BBC has been from its founding an organ of State propaganda; some prominent BBC “journalists” have a reputation for being spies, a matter of concern to professionals on its staff; see this fascinating blog. The recently revealed scandal about rampant pedophiles among senior BBC staff -- one of them arranged to rape children in hospitals near his office -- can only be explained as impunity resulting from connections to the Intelligence community.]

A month after Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination and anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, a set of multiple safety-system failures at Union Carbide’s chemical plant at Bhopal caused the “world’s worst industrial accident.” There was every indication that it was sabotage, but the new Rajiv Gandhi government sagely decided not to publicize that angle for fingers could have pointed to a Sikh employee. Clearly, whoever sabotaged the plant wanted to set off another assault on the community.

A few months later, in June 1985, another atrocity was blamed on “Sikh terrorists,” the blowing up of Air India Flight 182 over British waters as it made its way from Montreal to Delhi, killing all 329 people on board. One of the questions that has gone unanswered for three decades as Canadian prosecutors try to prove the heavily circumstantial case is why and how the amateur terrorists timed the explosion for that location. Whether it was a missile or a bomb that brought down the aircraft is an open question.

Against that background, the current controversy over a British role in Operation Blue Star appears to be an effort to manipulate the Sikh community a few weeks before a general election that will see a close contest in the Punjab.

It could also be that the effort to provide a new narrative for the events of 1984 is linked to the e-publication of my book 1001 Things Every Indian Should Know. The book tells the story outlined above about Bullough et al. Another recent development that points to MI 6 tying up loose ends is the murder of Mangla Prasad, the only living witness of the December 1995 British arms drop over Purulia, West Bengal. He disappeared early in January 2014 and his body was found on the 9th near Kiul Railway Station in Bihar; he had been strangled.

The Budget That Could Destroy India

If parliament enacts Finance Minister Chidambaram's proposals to liberalize the insurance sector the 2013 Union budget will destroy India.

Entirely ignored by mass media pundits, the proposals are that:

• Insurance companies be allowed to open offices in all Indian cities without prior approval from government; and

• Banks “be permitted to act as insurance brokers so that the entire network of bank branches will be utilized to increase penetration.”

What makes those innocuous proposals deadly to Indian nationhood is a bill tabled earlier that would:

• Allow 49% foreign ownership in Indian insurance companies;

• Let foreign reinsurers open branches in India; and

• Specifically allow Lloyds of London to set up operations in India.

In combination, those provisions mean that foreign companies and individuals, including those at the heart of Britain's enormously corrupt financial industry, will be able to collect and dispense money with no oversight or control anywhere in India. In effect, they will bring the global black market into every Indian town and village.

Insurance companies are unique in that they have access to the private details of every covered person and company. In the wrong hands, that information can be grossly misused, to extort, blackmail and manipulate.

Such manipulation was key to British control of India during the colonial era; to enable them to do the same again is to negate the enormous sacrifices of the struggle for independence. It is a betrayal of blood and honor.

The fear that the British will use increased access to the Indian economy to subvert it is firmly founded. As I detail at some length in 1001 Things Every Indian Should Know, Britain has used every opening offered by economic liberalization to do so.

I trace what happened after IMF pressure pushed India into the first market oriented reforms in the early 1980s. One of the new “investment bankers” who arrived in Mumbai at that time was Mark Bullough, a member of the elite Scots Guards unit of the British Army, the traditional foaling pasture for intelligence operatives.

Fresh from the 1982 war in the Falklands, he came to Mumbai as the representative of Hong Kong-based Jardine Fleming, an investment bank with roots in Jardine Matheson, one of the most prominent opium traders of the 19th Century and a company with a reputation for being neck-deep in spooks. (See here for a fascinating blog item by a BBC staffer.)

All kinds of hell broke loose in India during Bullough’s time in Mumbai (followed by stints in Hong Kong and Singapore). Much of what happened was linked to new flows of funds from abroad to violent groups in the country. A brief resume:

1. In the cataclysmic year 1984 anonymous “rich Sikhs” in Britain, Canada and the United States reportedly funded the drive for an independent Khalistan that pushed Punjab into virtual civil war. In June, the Indian Army dislodged terrorists from the Golden Temple; in October, after a call for Indira Gandhi's murder on a BBC show (officially protested by the Indian government), she was assassinated.

2. A month later, an incredible set of multiple safety-system failures at Union Carbide’s chemical plant at Bhopal caused the “world’s worst industrial accident.” It was a clear case of sabotage, meant to implicate a Sikh staffer and set off another round of attacks on the community but the Rajiv Gandhi government went with the accident-due-to-negligence scenario even though the repercussions killed its bid to attract foreign investment to India.

3. A few months later, in June 1985, “Sikh terrorists” operating out of Canada were blamed for blowing up of Air India Flight 182 over British waters as it made its way from Montreal to Delhi, killing all 329 people on board. Canadian prosecutors are still trying to prove the heavily circumstantial case.

4. In 1986 came the “Bofors scandal” manufactured from whole cloth after the Swedish arms manufacturer beat out Britain's BAE Systems to supply field mortars to the Indian Army. The scandal was pure media hype but it destabilized and helped unseat Rajiv Gandhi; in 1991, weeks before his certain return to power, he was assassinated. (India got the Bofors mortars but only after that company was ruined and taken over by BAE Systems.)

5. In 1992 came Harshad Mehta’s stock market manipulations using misappropriated funds from several Indian and four major foreign banks. He generated an enormous flow of funds just as “rich Hindus abroad” were supposedly sending their hard-earned money to Hindutva extremists, making possible the mobilization that led to the demolition of Babri Masjid and the rise of the BJP to power in Delhi. (Interestingly, National & Grindlays, now Standard Chartered, refused to take legal action to try and retrieve its reported loss of $130 million to Mehta.)

6. Mehta's stock frauds, the demolition of the mosque, communal riots in several cities and the 1993 terrorist bombing of the Bombay Stock Exchange, all projected a deeply negative image of India, again blunting the Narasimha Rao government's push to open up the economy to foreign investment.

7. In 1994, a British national, Peter Bleach, was arrested from an aircraft that dropped crates of AK-47s, rocket launchers and ammunition for use by the Ananda Marg, a violent Hindu cult in West Bengal. During his trial in Calcutta on a charge of waging war against the Indian State, his lawyers argued that MI-6 had organized the flight and that Bleach was only a contract employee; they produced a tape recording of a phone conversation to support that claim. Bleach was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2000, but was released in 2004 after persistent representations by the British government culminating in a private chat between Tony Blair and Deputy Prime Minister Advani on the eve of the 2004 Indian general election.

All this underlines that the British cannot be trusted to behave like the normal run of foreign investors in India, especially at a time when a global economic crisis is looming.

Surely, Mr. Chidambaram is aware of all this, so we must interpret his action in one of three ways.

• He could be driven by ambition -- The Economist mentioned him approvingly as a viable Prime Ministerial candidate;

• He (and the Congress leadership) might be fearful of another spate of subversion that could include a nuclear attack by British proxies in Pakistan; or

• He/they are unable to face down London's demands because they have black money abroad.

In those equations the ordinary people of India are viewed as helpless pawns, as indeed, they are. Only a quantum jump in political awareness can change that.

Unless we do something to bring about that change India will have to win its independence all over again.

*********
P.S: Mark Bullough surfaced in Iraq in 2003 as a partner of Aegis Defense Services, a London based company founded by fellow Scots Guards operative Tim Spicer. It got a $293 million contract to create what was then the largest private army in the world. In August 2010, the Basler Zeitung reported that Aegis Defence Services had moved its base to Basle, Switzerland, and that its partners were Spicer, Bullough, the former British Chief of Army Staff Peter Inge, and two former members of the Foreign Office.

 

Who's Behind The Indian Mujaheddin?

The terrorist attacks on Delhi have brought forth the usual condemnations and declarations, but nothing has been said that adds anything to our understanding of a phenomenon that seems beyond rational analysis. Who are the “Indian Mujaheddin?” Who finances them, and to what end?

It no longer makes much sense to accuse Pakistan of being the villain, for Islamabad is itself under terrorist assault, and in a state of near-terminal crisis. Despite the claim of the authorities that they have firm leads, it would be unrealistic to expect much. The search for clues in the bloody mess left by the four bombs that exploded and the three that did not will, at most, lead to the “narco-analysis” of yet more SIMI suspects, but it is unlikely to add anything to our capacity to prevent the next spate of terrorist attacks.

In this situation, it is essential to examine our basic assumptions about what is happening. Do they rest solidly on the available historical evidence? Do they make sense in the current international context? The answer to both questions is a resounding NO. Our basic assumptions about terrorism do not reflect our own historical experience, but are based on the highly selective rendering of history by Western analysts. What has been happening makes no sense in the current international context, for neither Indian Muslims nor any Islamic State has anything to gain from supporting terrorism that immediately boomerangs on their own interests. Repeated public opinion surveys have shown a dramatic decline of support for terrorism among ordinary Muslims worldwide, and the anti-terrorist fatwa of the Deobandi ulema earlier this year has clarified the situation within India. In Pakistan, approval ratings for erstwhile jihadist hero Osama bin Laden have plummeted, and some American journalists have reported that he is viewed as a CIA agent whose activities allow Western intervention in and control of the Islamic world. Clearly, there is need for a new paradigm to make sense of the current situation.

To arrive at a new non-Western paradigm we must locate events in a post-colonial context; in India that means putting the relationship between Britain and India at the core of the construct. That will require us to question the prevalent Indian tendency to assume that the two countries parted as “friends” in 1947, and that all has been well between them because of the cultural affinities created by a century of colonial association. Neither assumption is correct. The British left India after arranging for the holocaust of partition, which killed a million people and devastated the lives of many millions more. This was done not because the demands of the Muslim League for Pakistan were politically irresistible, but because the division of India was deemed essential to British strategic interests.

In War and Diplomacy in Kashmir (2002), former Indian diplomat C. Dasgupta quoted from two British reports in 1946 that outlined those interests. One concluded that “If India was dominated by Russia with powerful air forces it is likely that we should have to abandon our command of the Persian Gulf and the Northern Indian Ocean routes;” the other pointed out how essential India was to any future “offensive air action” that might be necessary in the region, requiring “the right to move formations and units, particularly air units, into India at short notice, in case of threatened international emergency.” If independent India could not “be persuaded to accept the assistance of the necessary number of British personnel,” the report said, there was only one course open, to split the country and create a weak entity that would accept a continuing British role.

David Monteath, Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office, summed up the situation in a memo: “If India falls apart we may, I suppose, expect the Muslims to try and enlist British support by offering us all sorts of military and political facilities, to commit ourselves to what would be in effect the defense of one Indian state against another.” Things turned out exactly as he foresaw: Pakistan became a firm “ally” of the West in the Cold War (which Winston Churchill flagged off with his March 1946 “iron curtain” speech). In the decades that followed, it became, under a succession of military leaders, a largely helpless appendage of the West, used as a base of operations against the Soviet Union, as a tool to influence and manipulate other Islamic countries, and as a “balance” to neutralize and contain Non-Aligned India.

From the earliest days of the “tribal” invasion of Kashmir in 1947, Pakistan's relations with India involved terrorism; however, the brain behind that operation and all those that followed was Western, specifically British. The Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was established in 1948 to direct the war against India by Major-General R Cawthorne, a British Army officer who stayed on in independent Pakistan as the Army's Deputy Chief of Staff. Since then, the West has been the unseen factor in everything that has happened in Kashmir; without the support of the West, Pakistan would hardly have dared to behave the way it has. It is significant that the first foreign trip Pakistan's new President has taken is to Britain.Relations between the ISI and the British intelligence community have been close over the decades, and have extended into a variety of areas. Britain's post World War II role as patron of the Muslim Brotherhood (inherited from Nazi Germany), developed into a low-profile alliance with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, to guide the most effective anti-communist movement in the Islamic world. The Brotherhood has provided the leadership of every major “Islamic” terrorist organization, including the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

The cooperation of Britain and Pakistan in supporting terrorism was most open in the effort to expel the Soviet Union from Afghanistan during the 1980s. Those operations involved running the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which was wound up when American regulators began an open investigation of its activities after the end of the Cold War. US Congressional reports have detailed BCCI involvement in a range of criminalities, including laundering drug money and supporting terrorists. The specifics of British involvement in BCCI have been difficult to put on the record because the Bank of England has claimed sovereign immunity to shield itself from investor law suits aimed at discovering them.

Media coverage of the escalation of terrorist action against India in the wake of the Cold War has focused on Pakistan's role in Kashmir, but evidence of British involvement is not altogether lacking. The curious case of British national Peter Bleach provides the most direct evidence. He was caught by Indian authorities in 1995 after dropping a plane-load of lethal arms for use by terrorists in Bengal, and at his trial in Kolkata, produced a taped conversation to prove he was not personally responsible but was working for MI6, British Military Intelligence. That had little effect on the outcome of the case: Bleach was convicted of making war on the Indian State and sentenced to life imprisonment. However, he served less than a decade of his sentence: after Tony Blair interceded personally with Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani, Bleach was released in 2004 as the BJP government prepared for general elections.Publicly, the Indian government has done little to make an issue of the Bleach case or to draw the unavoidable policy conclusions from it. The only time when New Delhi complained publicly about British support for violent insurrection in India was when, in the wake of Operation Blue Star in June 1984, a Sikh spokesman appeared on BBC television and called for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination. A few months later Mrs. Gandhi was murdered as she was walking to a BBC interview that had been set up so that she would have to pass a gate manned by two Sikh security guards, one of whom had specifically asked to be posted there that morning. The occasion for the interview was the visit to India of Princess Anne, and to conduct it the BBC had rolled out Peter Ustinov (whose father, incidentally, was a British intelligence operative during World War II).

When Prime Minister Thatcher came to attend Mrs. Gandhi’s funeral in New Delhi, she was asked at a Press conference about her government’s failure to take action against the individual who had called for the assassination on the BBC. Her reply was that the British government was faced with an “apparent paradox, that if you are a free country, then you are free to say what you think within the law. But a free society offers many more opportunities for doing the wrong thing than, of course, a tyranny. But then, of course, who would wish to live under a tyranny?”Terrorist attacks on India have escalated every time when there has been a major effort at opening up the Indian economy to foreign investment. Rajiv Gandhi's efforts to do so in 1985 were derailed by the blaze of bad publicity brought on by the sabotage of the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal.As Narasimha Rao renewed efforts at economic reform, there was more financial and political mayhem. By coincidence – or not – a member of Britain’s shadowy world of “former” military officers arrived in Mumbai just about the same time as the Rao reforms were being introduced. Mark Bullough came as the Managing Director of Jardine Fleming, an investment bank with a name that traces its lineage back to one of the biggest opium traffickers into China in the 19th century.

A year after Bullough’s arrival in India there was a major financial scandal involving domestic and foreign banks: money siphoned off from them, supposedly without their knowledge, was used to manipulate the Bombay Stock Exchange. When the scheme was exposed by an enterprising journalist, it caused such a momentous loss of confidence that the exchange had to be closed for the first time in its history while regulators reviewed what had happened. A parliamentary investigation later concluded that there had been a criminal conspiracy to manipulate the Exchange, but attempts to trace responsibility beyond the central figure in the scandal, stock broker Harshad Mehta, were not successful. In part that was because some of the major institutional victims, including Standard Chartered Grindlays, a British bank which claimed to have lost $300 million, refused to press charges.

There were several other significant developments in India during Bullough’s five-year stay in the country (he left in 1996 and when last heard of in 2004, was in Iraq, helping another British operative, Tim Spicer, set up the world’s largest private army). One was the rise of a suddenly well-funded “fundamentalist Hindu” movement to demolish Babri Masjid. The demolition of the mosque in December 1992 was followed by communal riots all over India, and that in turn, by the multiple “revenge” bomb blasts that demolished the Bombay stock exchange building. It is necessary to remember in this context that Britain invented the Indian “communal riot”, which was unheard of before the final phase of the British Raj. William Shirer, the Chicago Tribune correspondent in India who wrote a book on Gandhi in 1979, recounted in it how it was difficult to find out how many of the riots “were incited by the British in their effort to keep both communities at each other’s throats so that they could not unite in their drive for self-rule.” Shirer noted: the “British Chief of Police in Bombay once told me – almost as a joke – that it was very easy to provoke a Hindu-Muslim riot. For a hundred dollars, he said, you could start something really savage. Pay some Muslims to throw the carcass of a cow into a Hindu temple, or some Hindus to toss a dead pig into a mosque, and you could have, he said, a bloody mess, in which a lot of people would be knifed, beaten and killed.”

In recent years, as the Indian economy has boomed, terrorist attacks have become widespread, targeting political targets and key centres of growth and innovation. However, except in Gujarat after Godhra, these attacks have not resulted in “communal riots” and the Indian economy has continued its rapid growth. One reason for this is obviously the growing political maturity of Indians; another is India's emerging strategic alliance with the United States, which has put a growing distance between Washington and London on South Asia policy. (A strong indicator of that dissonance was Afghan President Hamid Karzai's January 2008 rejection of Paddy Ashdown, Britain's candidate to head the UN-NATO-EU presence in Afghanistan; he could not have done it without American support.) Following the 12 July 2008 attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul, the United States took another clear step away from the Britain-ISI tie-up in Pakistan, when it sent two high-level emissaries to Islamabad to express concern and demand explanations.

British Motivations
What are Britain's interests in maintaining its anti-Indian stance? Obviously, the reasoning of 1948 is now completely outdated, for Britain's vestigial military power is irrelevant to Asian equations. To understand the imperatives driving London we have to look at the nature of the international power it does command: as a financial centre that is a growing rival to New York. If we ask how a mid-size nation can possibly rival the American economic behemoth, there is only one answer: London is the world centre for money-laundering (a term popularized by Americans as they began pushing in the 1980s for G-7 action to keep tabs on the vast amounts of money swilling around a globalized world economy). And where does most of the estimated $2 trillion that is laundered every year originate? In drug trafficking, gun-running and other criminal enterprises, most of it located in the former British Empire.South Asia is a key element in Britain's underground empire. Afghanistan produces 80% of the world's heroin. Pakistan, through “rogue elements” of the ISI, provides links to “Islamic” terrorist groups. Both are essential to keep up the flow of illicit money that feeds London's financial power. Britain's control of these assets is threatened by the growth of Indian economic, political and military power, so we can expect terrorist attacks to continue. It does not bode well that London is the first foreign capital that Pakistan's new President has chosen to visit, and that he is consulting with the bigwigs there on how to respond to Washington's activist new policy on attacking terrorists in Pakistani territory.

How can India best deal with this situation? In addition to tightened security all-round, and the education of ordinary Indians to be watchful of their own welfare, it might be useful to call for an Independent International Truth Commission on the Colonial Era. The colonial period passed into history with no reckoning of its many sins because the world slid into the Cold War as Asia and Africa were shaking off foreign rule. If India works with African nations (which have suffered far worse at the hands of their former rulers), we could together expose the cabals responsible for much of the mayhem in the developing world.

[Originally published by Vijayvaani.com on 27 September 2008]