By Sandhya Jain
America’s startling political decision to arrest US citizen-cum-ISI lobbyist Ghulam Nabi Fai last month, almost coinciding with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to India, follows a string of continuing face-offs between Washington, DC and Islamabad, and suggests that the US may have decided to dismount the Pakistani tiger. Tensions peaked with Islamabad closing NATO supply routes to Afghanistan; the arrest of CIA agent Raymond Davis and subsequent expulsion of many CIA agents from Pakistan; the May Day midnight murder of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad; and the continuing Drone attacks on the western frontier, which ISI chief Shuja Pasha’s fence-mending visit to Washington could not fix.
New Delhi’s muted reaction is understandable. Fai’s arrest exposes UPA appointees, Justice Rajinder Sachar and journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, for hobnobbing with the ISI and other anti-India agents abroad and later accepting positions to empower the Muslim minority and Kashmiri separatists respectively, at the cost of the Hindu community and the nation. This raises larger questions regarding the reasons why the Union Government found jobs for persons with anti-India and anti-Hindu proclivities, and why the nation should accept their so-called reports which stand tainted by association.
Going by the FBI’s revelations, Islamabad covertly funnelled more than $4 million to Fai’s Kashmiri American Council over two decades to influence American and international opinion against India’s claim to Jammu & Kashmir. The FBI’s main charge is that Fai and his associate, Zaheer Ahmed, failed to register with the Department of Justice as Pakistan lobbyists. Of course, the FBI knew this and was monitoring the duo for many years; it refrained from acting against them while Pakistan was perceived as useful in the war against terrorism. Now, the knives are out; hence the naming of Fai’s handlers — Major General Mumtaz Ahmad Bajwa; Brigadier Javed Aziz Khan, Brigadier Sohail Mehmood, Lt Colonel Tauqeer Butt and a man codenamed ‘Abdullah’.
Fai’s job included getting Pakistani and Indian eminences to attend conferences on human rights violations in the Kashmir Valley and escorting men like Mirwaiz Omer Farooq to meet White House staff. Recently, the Mirwaiz and Hurriyat leader SAS Geelani met Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar at the High Commission of Pakistan in New Delhi on the eve of her talks with Minister for External Affairs SM Krishna, a move which reduced the official talks to a formality.
Fai’s Indian friend, Justice Rajinder Sachar, was in 2005 appointed by the UPA to head a high powered committee with a mandate to ‘prove’ the backwardness of the Indian Muslim community, and attribute this alleged backwardness to ‘institutional discrimination’ at the social, political and economic levels. Though completely lacking empirical data, Mr Sachar strove to entrench a Muslim communal identity in India by pressing for an ‘Equal Opportunity Commission’ and paving the way for unmanageable communal discord.
The Union Ministry of Minority Affairs, egged on by the National Minorities Commission, is working overtime to secure for Muslims an undeclared religion-based reservation in the public and private sectors. Mr Salman Khurshid, as Minister for Minority Affairs, strove through 2009 to get reservations for all Muslims under the ‘Backward Communities’ category, and to persuade the corporate sector to give minorities reservation in lieu of tax rebates. Mr Sachar stressed proportional reservation for Muslims in the police, administrative services, armed forces and public sector. For a nation divided by the impetus created by separate electorates under the British Raj, this is truly macabre.
A discriminated community suffers in terms of parameters like health (IMR, lifespan, growth rate), education (literacy, mean years of schooling, female literacy), general living conditions (absence of overcrowding, access to potable water, toilet facilities) and economic status (participation in work force, per capita income). But most of these human development indicators are favourable for Muslims as compared to Hindus, and in certain instances they are even better than the Hindu community (eg, Infant Mortality Rate for Muslims is 59, as compared to 77 for Hindus). No variation can be attributed to state or institutional discrimination.
Mr Sachar’s most dangerous move, however, was to rectify the low participation of Muslims in politics by proposing de-reservation of Scheduled Caste constituencies where Muslim population is greater through ‘rational delimitation’. The idea is that Muslim voters will polarise themselves into voting for a Muslim candidate or one compelled to exclusively pander to Muslim interests. This crude cynicism is matched only by his attempt to force the armed forces to submit to a Muslim head count, which was robustly resisted by the then Army chief, General JJ Singh.
Fai’s other friend and Union Ministry for Home Affairs-appointed chief interlocutor on Jammu & Kashmir is currently under fire from his own colleague Mr MM Ansari, as the untimely exposé has blighted their report which was only awaiting the end of the Amarnath Yatra before being submitted to the Government so as not to incite Hindu sentiments. Mr P Chidambaram fears that the report may now meet the same fate as the Justice Saghir Ahmed-led Working Group’s report, and has tried to downplay Mr Padgaonkar enjoying Fai-ISI hospitality and legitimising the Pakistan-sponsored hate and break India campaign.
But as Mr Ansari has pointed out, one cannot join a conference without knowing the credibility of the individuals and the institution. Indeed, if the UPA regime wishes to have even an ounce of public credibility, it must crack down on the Kashmiri separatists who attended the conferences organised by Fai and other seminars and defamed the nation abroad. The Minister for Home Affairs must explain if he was aware of Mr Padgaonkar attending these seminars and his biases before appointing him as chief interlocutor on Jammu & Kashmir. If not, what kind of vetting does the Ministry do before making sensitive appointments?
Mr Chidambaram must urgently bring out a paper listing all Indian nationals who have travelled abroad at the invitation of known India-baiters like Fai, Farooq Kathwari and their ilk, with details of the presentations they made there on Kashmir and other alleged human rights violations by Indian security and armed forces. These fifth columnists must be named and shamed, and asked to tender an unconditional apology to the nation for eating its salt, enjoying all the prestige and privileges it bestows upon its unworthy children, and then playing footsie with its enemies.
Above all, we must be told how the ISI, the pro-Pakistan Western nations, the ruling UPA and the anti-national elite have been found to be on the same page. Shame!
Source: Daily Pioneer
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