A Quiet Indian Peace Bid on Kashmir

Just after the conclusion of the general elections and before the results were known, the Prime Minister’s Special Envoy on Kashmir, Satinder Lambah, made a speech in Srinagar laying out the most comprehensive peace plan India has ever made.

He said the speech reflected just his personal views but The Times of India's brief report by Indrani Baghchi (buried at the bottom of page 15 in my edition of the paper), said “the highest levels of government” were involved in crafting it.

The proposal is that that Line of Actual Control (LOC) become the de jure international border while India and Pakistan move to erase it for all practical purposes.

For that to happen, there would have to be a general demilitarization and normalization throughout Kashmir, and the winding up of terrorist training facilities in Pakistan. There would be no tariff or non-tariff barriers to trade and no constraints on the free passage of people or on development of transport infrastructure.

Presumably, somewhere along that continuum, the special constitutional provisions in effect on both sides of the border would be brought in line with the new realities.

What might give the proposal a chance of success is the changed regional dynamic resulting from the projected withdrawal of NATO forces from Afghanistan at the end of 2014.

A significant element of the new dynamic has been the Pakistani response to the American effort to bribe the drug-running Haqqani terrorist network away from control by the ISI: Islamabad is now engaged in bombing the assets of its former client, inflicting heavy losses.

Other aspects include the energized Moscow-Beijing axis in the face of the situation in the Ukraine, Uighur terrorism in China and the tensions boiling up along Asia's eastern seaboard.

From West Asia shell-shocked by what can now be called the Arab Winter to China teetering on an economic precipice, there is a new sense of vulnerability throughout the continent.

That has caused erstwhile supporters (Saudi Arabia and China), to cool towards Pakistani sponsored “Islamic terrorism,” and even the ISI might have begun to see that if the Haqqanis can be turned into a Frankenstein’s monster, so can all its other proxies.

The wild card in all this, of course, is the British interest in continuing to control the $60 billion drug trade out of Afghanistan. That is the glue binding the ISI to British policy, and it remains to be seen if the new regional situation can weaken the bond. .

In the past, India-Pakistan peace initiatives have led to violent provocations to prevent progress. In the current circumstances, that will have to be more than the usual cross-border terrorism or attacks on consulates. It will have to be something of the order of 9/11 or 26/11, precipitating war. As I have noted before, there is evidence the British and their allies in the United States have been trying to set the scene for that.

Among the recent signs that something nasty is in the works is the disappearance from his Karachi residence of noted Indian gangster-terrorist Dawood Ibrahim. He can only be up to no good.

I do not think we will have to wait long to find out if we have chaos in South and Central Asia or a major move towards regional peace.

Cancel Prince Charles' Visit to India

New Delhi should cancel the projected Indian tour of Britain’s Prince Charles and spouse Camilla set for November 6 to14.

Their nine-day perambulation (Delhi, Dehradun, Mumbai, Pune, Kochi), will add immeasurably to the difficulties of maintaining a secure environment in the country as it holds the first of five Assembly polls on 11 November.

In fact, security will be virtually impossible to maintain, for there are multiple indicators that the Brits are moving toward a radical endgame to the India-Pakistan face-off they initiated with Partition in 1947.

They have tried this twice before. In 1984, a visit by Princess Anne provided the distraction that allowed the Game of Thrones assassination of Indira Gandhi, followed by anti-Sikh riots calculated to wreck Indian unity. In 1991, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of the Tamil Tigers – the killers brought their own cameraman to ensure that everyone would know who did it – was clearly supposed to set off anti Tamil riots, but failed in that.

This time around, I think the target will be another candidate for Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

If the assassin is a Muslim – easily ensured by people who control the ISI and its many proxies – it could precipitate communal bloodletting on a scale that would make Gujarat 2002 look like a nosebleed, set off an India-Pakistan war and balkanize India.

There are numerous indicators that such a scenario is in the works. They include the steep escalation of Pakistan’s outrageous aggressions in Kashmir, General V. K. Singh’s treacheries, Baba Ramdev’s 2011 boast that he could field an armed force, recent attempts to push large quantities of lethal weapons into India, and Navaz Sharif’s bid to get Washington to play a part in Kashmir. (The firm American denial of any such role will not stand when a nuclear war is in the offing.)

William Dalrymple’s bizarre essay “A Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India,” published by the Brookings Institution a few weeks ago set the scene for American intervention. In arguing that India-Pakistan rivalry was the main reason for the Afghan war it ignored entirely the Cold War roots of the conflict and the drug trade out of Afghanistan that is now its primary reason for continuing. The trade sluices some $60 billion into the British-run global black market annually (with $2 billion of that going to the ISI/Taliban).

The 1984 and 1991 assassinations show that the plan to destroy India is not new; and a 20 May 2011 article in The Financial Times made quite clear that it is being dusted off for use again.

The article, headlined “Henry Kissinger talks to Simon Schama,” ended thus:

Kissinger laughs even as he sketches a scenario for an Afghanistan even grimmer than anything anyone has yet imagined, where the presence or absence of al-Qaeda will be the least of its problems. What might happen, he says, is a de facto partition, with India and Russia reconstituting the Northern Alliance, and Pakistan hooked to the Taliban as a backstop against their own encirclement.

Suddenly, spring goes chilly. The prospect looms of a centennial commemoration of the First World War through a half-awake re-enactment … Sarajevo. Think proxy half-states; the paranoia of encirclement; the bristling arsenals, in this case nuclear; the nervous, beleaguered Pakistanis lashing out in passive-aggressive insecurity. “An India-Pakistan war becomes more probable. Eventually,” says the Doctor, his voice a deep pond of calm. “Therefore some kind of international process in which these issues are discussed might generate enough restraints so that Pakistan does not feel itself encircled by India and doesn’t see a strategic reserve in the Taliban.” He looks directly at me. “Is it possible to do this? I don’t know. But I know if we let matters drift this could become the Balkans of the next world war.”

What this makes crystal clear is that very powerful forces outside India plan to make the 2014 general elections our last. The reference to the “next world war” indicates that there will be attendant crises also in Russia and China.

It should also make very clear to the BJP that its British supporters are not interested in Modi’s promise of a reformed and well administered India. They want India broken up and at their mercy.

If Charles-Camilla are not in the loop of these plans, they also have cause to worry. The coldblooded strategists of Empire would think nothing of sacrificing them at the altar of a really believable crisis.

A Conspiracy Theory About Modi, Ramdev and Gen. V. K. Singh

In March 2012, I equated General V. K. Singh with the infamous Mir Qasim, whose hunger for power made him an ally of the British as they maneuvered to take control of Bengal in the 18th Century.

It seemed to me that Singh's dash to London immediately after losing a graceless bid to stay a year longer in office pointed, at the very least, to involvement in helping Britain land a major arms contract. His subsequent letter to the Prime Minister declaring India scandalously deficient in military preparedness tended to confirm that reading.

It now turns out that Singh was engaged in something much more treasonous.

A military panel that looked into his activities as Chief of Army Staff (2010 to 2012), has reported that he set up an unauthorized surveillance unit in Delhi to spy on the Defence Minister, and that he misused official funds to try and unseat Chief Minister Omar Abdullah in Kashmir. It has recommended a full-blown criminal investigation.

More must be done, for there are clear signs that the matter is not one of individual malfeasance but of high-level and dangerous political conspiracy. Items:

• The BJP's sudden rush to declare Narendra Modi its Prime Ministerial candidate was patently irrational in the face of serious opposition within the party and concerns about his involvement in the Gujarat killings of 2002. It makes sense only if someone promised an enormous amount of money to buy the 2014 elections and soothe inflated/bruised egos within the BJP.

Britain and Hinduism 6: Empire of Crime

 In 1916, the third year of Europe's Great War, Grigory Efimovich Rasputin the “mad monk” from Siberia, who had gained access to the Tsar’s family as a faith-healer, was brutally murdered in St. Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia.

A clique at court was blamed for the crime but although its members fed him large amounts of potassium cyanide, bashed in his head with a heavy candlestick, stabbed and shot him, none of them actually did the killing. That was done by a young British Cavalry officer sent from London; he shot Rasputin in the head as the bleeding coatless cleric fled into the freezing night. The British government had anticipated that the Russian amateurs would need help. London wanted Rasputin dead because his pacific influence on Tsar Nicholas II was raising the possibility of a unilateral Russian withdrawal from World War I, and that would have been disastrous for Britain.

Background to the Nuke Warning in Kashmir

The Indian government has told Kashmiris to prepare for a nuclear attack. The paragraphs below, from the concluding chapter of my book "1001 Things Every Indian Should Know," explain the background to that startling development.

The chapter sets out a number of specific recommendations for action, then adds the following:

"These measures should effectively roll up the international black market, reduce crime and corruption globally, and provide funding for the most urgent anti-poverty and environmental action. However, there is acute danger that before any of this can happen the British elite will plunge us into another major war with assassinations and false flag operations.

Another World Conflict?

It would also be prudent to spread awareness that we can expect strong opposition from Britain and its allies and proxies. An extrapolation of the British record suggests that it will be violent, perhaps involving war. Previous chapters have noted in detail the breathtaking variety of treacheries that led to the acquisition and retention of the British Empire. They have also made clear how the British elite has, from early days, considered the blood of its own people and those of other nations a cheap currency to trade for power. Massive death tolls accompanied the forcible trade of slaves out of Africa and opium into China, the genocides that drove to near extinction the American Indian, the Australian Aborigine and the Maori of New Zealand, and the great man-made famines of India. Britain fought two ruinous wars with Germany in defense of its imperial interests, killing several million of its own people and forcing the loss of some 100 million lives on other nations. Chapter 6 looked at how Britain maneuvered the world into the Cold War and engineered the great communal killings in India that led to Partition. Other parts of the text have reviewed how Britain gave itself room for strategic maneuver in the Middle East and South Asia by deliberately creating the conflicts over Kashmir and Palestine. In post-colonial Africa it has played a merciless game that has claimed the lives and livelihoods of millions of the poorest people on earth.

Looking back on that record it would be silly to expect that a few billion-dollar fines on its banks and the prospect of the economic collapse of China, its most lucrative source of criminal loot, will force Britain to mend its ways. It is an almost certain bet that London will try to provoke international conflict, most likely in South Asia where its geopolitical interests are concentrated. At this writing, the sudden deterioration in the India-Pakistan situation in January 2013, the staggering hate speech of an Indian Muslim politician, and the warnings of Hafeez Syed that things will hot up again in Kashmir are firm indications that it is trying. If there is inadequate temperance on both sides the situation could escalate in tit for tat violence and get completely out of hand. As with the beheading and mutilation of two Indian soldiers that led to the current deepening of tensions, it might not be easy to fix responsibility if “terrorists” get some of Pakistan’snuclear weapons. Another emergency Britain could set off easily is global hyperinflation. That would destabilize its nemesis, the United States, and ease all pressure to abandon its empire of crime. The only thing it cannot count on in undertaking such actions is its usual shroud of secrecy and persiflage. Too many people now are aware of its role and watchful of its actions. Despite that, the situation is extremely dangerous."

Keep your fingers crossed!

Prashant Bhushan Assault

The shameful assault on Prashant Bhushan by thugs from the Sri Ram Sene has been condemned around the country, but our political class should be aware that it too stands heavily indicted in the criminal incident.

The anger that drove the attack on Bhushan must be seen as an indication of our political failure, not only in containing and defusing it, but in the inability to forge an ironclad national consensus on Kashmir.

What Bhushan said about Kashmir -- that India should dismantle all its defensive measures and submit to a plebiscite -- cannot be looked upon merely as an issue of free speech. That is so because Kashmir is not an issue merely of territory or "self-determination."

The British destroyed millions of Indian lives to split the country on communal lines, and deliberately created the dispute over Kashmir to keep South Asia permanently at war. Our defence of Kashmir is not just of territory but of the idea of India. To declare otherwise is not just to ignore the tremendous sacrifice of Indian blood and treasure to protect and preserve that idea, it is to open up the country yet again to brutal foreign manipulation and control.

For make no mistake about it. When British proxies like Bhushan and Arundhati Roy speak so blithely about India giving up Kashmir, they are opening up the rest of the country to new rounds of communal warfare that will certainly destroy our democratic system and our way of life.

We can condemn the Sri Ram Sene for its tactics but we must acknowledge the legitimacy of its anger. It is time the rest of us felt it too.

Miliband And Root Causes of Terrorism

Last week Britain's Foreign Minister David Miliband visited India and took time off from his diplomatic work in Delhi to spend a night in Amethi, the parliamentary constituency of Congress heir apparent Rahul . Himself the Labour Party's heir presumptive waiting in the shadow of the dour Gordon Brown, Miliband slept on a charpoy in a Dalit hut and told reporters that except for some restless cows in the next room, the night was uneventful. (The Indian side was, as ever, clueless that the Brits were using the opportunity to continue denting the India Shining image. Thank God they didn't have a kid jump into the local dung heap a la Slumdog Millionaire.)

The visit to the village was ostensibly to show Miliband in a context appealing to the "ordinary Indian". But the sight of him with cows and a charpoy failed to charm many Indians, especially after it got around that Miliband had published an article saying the resolution of the Kashmir issue would end terrorism in India. In fact, the responses from Delhi were decidedly tetchy. A Congress Party spokesman asked reporters rhetorically if Britain, when it suffered terrorist attacks, looked to its own policies as the source of the trouble. A BJP spokesman dubbed the minister's visit to India a "diplomatic disaster".

Both comments were apt, but inadequate, for neither took into account that Miliband's egregiously stupid statement was not meant for the audience in Delhi but in Islamabad, his next stop. It was meant to signal one thing very clearly: Britain will continue to back Pakistani terrorism against India. With that in mind, the political response from Delhi should have been something along the following lines:

"The situation in Kashmir is not the root cause of terrorism in South Asia. The dispute over Kashmir was deliberately created by the British to promote hostility and conflict between India and Pakistan. The root cause of terrorism in South Asia is the British attempt to continue manipulating the region more than six decades after the end of colonial rule.

"Initially the British propagated terrorism to drive Indian Muslims into supporting the partition of their country, a process that killed a million people and made 14 million refugees. After the independence of India and Pakistan, the British have used terrorism to keep both countries in a state of hostility towards each other.

"Pakistan has been more of a victim of this terrorist policy than India. While India has managed to make substantial economic and social progress, Pakistan has found itself reeling from one political crisis to another, becoming progressively weaker and more divided as its military leaders serve Western strategic interests.

"The Pakistani military created the Taliban and Al Qaeda movements to serve Western interests. Both movements have been responsible for the most reprehensible actions in the name of Islam, bringing into disrepute not only Pakistan but the entire Ummah. In addition, their actions have provided the justification for Western intervention in oil-rich and strategically important Muslim countries and the continued theft of their natural resources.

"As the leaders of Pakistan look to the future, the hope of all political parties in India is that the civilian and military authorities in Islamabad will weigh very carefully the wisdom of continuing to cooperate in policies that serve Western strategic interests but not those of the Pakistani people or the global Ummah."