Misleading Mid-East Punditry

The edit page of The Hindu is a far cry from the shouters of Times Now but there too punditry can be misleading noise.

The latest case in point is Suhasini Haidar’s analysis of “The West and its flawed anti-IS strategy” published appropriately enough on 1 April.

Here are some of its errors:

1. Throughout the piece there are references to “the West,” as if it is still a global political entity. The “West” of the Cold War has been gone for over a quarter century and in those years the United States and the countries of Western Europe have gone their separate ways.

2. It is true, the British and their military-industrial friends in Washington tried to extend the shelf-life of “the West” with the rigged election of Bush Jr. followed immediately by the Saudi-managed 9/11 attacks. But despite enormously profitable wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the “special relationship” has become increasingly irritable and now is little more than a joint enterprise to wiretap everything that moves.

3. Meanwhile, the Americans have retreated to their historical default position of being leery of most things European except their wine, cheese and women. Britain, France and Germany awakened to that reality when a fit of post-Cold War hubris led them to implode Yugoslavia; they created an unmanageable mess and had to call for Yankee help.

4. The British have been especially hard hit in recent years by the end of transatlantic bonhomie. United States regulators have gone after the largest British banks with a hatchet for such things as money laundering, manipulating global gold prices and fixing interest rates. Under American pressure the Bank of England even had to accept a Canadian Governor. All this has made it difficult for the British elite to continue as usual with their profitable business managing the proceeds of global organized crime. In fact, they have been forced to pay off their multi-ethnic mafia/terrorist clientele with high-end British real estate. To prevent London becoming home to the world’s worst hoodlums the British parliament made it illegal for anyone with a criminal record to enter the country. And to ensure that the long-suffering people of Britain will not turn on their betters for selling off the country to criminals another law has completely delegitimized public protest: a 12-year old can now be arrested for standing on a street corner and cursing the government loudly.(The punishment will probably include non-stop viewing of Downton Abbey.)

5. Haidar’s assumption that the United States and Britain are on the same Mid-East page has never been true. Transatlantic differences have been a major factor in regional politics ever since FDR’s famous deal with Ibn Saud stuck a large American thumb in Churchill’s strategic eye. Things have got much worse of late. The Arab Spring” began when Washington withdrew support from long-established clients in the Middle East, and its failure is not the result of any “misreading” as much as it is of European support for favoured (read profitable) tyrants. That explains the seesaw process of democracy one day and mob/military rule the next. The Benghazi mob attack that killed the American Ambassador was clearly an MI 6 operation in revenge for the loss of Britain’s lucrative interests in Libya and the revelation of its long support for Gaddafi.

6. The Islamic State is essentially a British attempt to squelch the democratic potential of the Arab Spring and not, as Haidar seems to think, an ideological vehicle attractive to young Muslims. The streams of teenagers going to join IS from Western countries and the Russian Federation are drawn more by talk of parties, booze and sex than any desire for jihad. “Jihadi John,” the British face of televised IS murder, is reported to be an MI 6 operative ensconced in 5 star luxury. It is a mystery who the non-foreign IS fighters are; they could all be mercenaries.

7. To conclude, Haidar seems unaware that the whole fight against international terrorism is sham. There is incontrovertible evidence that Britain is the birth mother of modern international terrorism and that major NATO members are its godparents.

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.