Thanks to the policies of appeasement, India has become one of the most unsafe locations in the world, a country where each city is in the sights of a deadly enemy, and where a citizen who goes to a shopping mall or a hotel or a railway station does not know if she or he will be alive to return from such an excursion. Nests of jehadists have been set up across the county, nourished not by those crossing the frontier illegally, but by thousands among the hundreds of thousands allowed by the permissive Sonia Maino to enter India from Bangladesh and Pakistan with visa. Since 2005, both countries have been transformed into locations where an Indian visa is almost as easy as buying a cake, a factor that has led to the multiplication of jehadist safe houses and training camps across India. Today, no frontier is safe. The coasts witness the arrival of unrecorded vessels from West Asia and Pakistan in the west and Myanmar and Bangladesh in the east. Recently illegal migrants were discovered, who were seeking to enter the Andaman Islands. Several of these have already been taken over, as has been Lakshadweep.
On land, whether across Rajasthan or Assam or even Kashmir, it has become easy to cross over, even when the Nepal route is not used. The country has become a sitting duck for the jehadists, courtesy the policies of appeasement followed since 1997. When will this lemming-style march to the destruction of India end? When will a government exist that takes the steely decisions needed to secure our interests? As yet, there seems little prospect of such a transformation. Meanwhile, the blood and treasure that is the price of wrong policies will continue.
Since Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the charmer who persuaded Indira Gandhi to surrender all the military gains of the 1971 war in just four enchanted evenings at Shimla, sought to pander to religious fanatics by imposing elements of Wahabbi law in Pakistan, the country has been descending into collapse. Once the appetite of the fanatics got whetted by Bhutto'sconcessions, they demanded more, and got much of what they sought during the stint in office of Zia-ul-Haq, who began the process of conversion of the Pakistan army into a jehadist force. Zia scorned the scions of feudal families who had filled the officer posts in the army till then, and began to replace them with products from the madrasas, who threw away any ethical scruples in war, and saw themselves as being the vanguard of the forces that would install a unified Caliphate on the lines seen in Afghanistan during the time when the Taliban were in charge (1996-2001).
By the 1990s, the fires of jehad were raging across Pakistan, fanned by the Zia-ist army, several of whose officers were prouder of the luxuriance of their facial hair than their knowledge of military science. First captains, then majors, after that brigadiers and finally generals began frequenting Wahabbi seances, where the thought leaders of this extremist tendency held forth on how nothing was impossible for a genuine Wahabbi, and that force ratios mattered as little as concepts such as military honour. Saurabh Kalia, who suffered indescribable torture before he was killed by Pakistan army soldiers in jehadi dress, was just one of the many victims of the unholy warriors that now constitutes the army in Pakistan, a country on whom Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh have lavished diplomatic and other concessions on a scale not seen since the days when IK Gujral implemented a policy of unilateral disarmament when faced with the covert war waged against it by India'swestern neighbour, stopping covert activities. 1997 saw the killing or capture of more Indian human assets in Pakistan than any other year since 1978, when the winner of Pakistan'shighest civilian award, Morarji Desai, was Prime Minister of India. These days, very few are caught, for the simple reason that almost none has been allowed to exist, much less function, by the appeasement-minded Prime Ministers of India. Whether it is the lure of a Nobel Prize or simply the Bhuttoesque charm of Pakistani leaders, India'srulers have consistently refused to acknowledge that Pakistan is a terrorist state.
Since 1997, India'sleaders have competed in joining the CIA and other agencies intent on whitewashing the core characteristic of the Pakistani state, which is that it is military-controlled and has jehad as its central purpose. Since the US attack on the Taliban in 2001, and more perceptibly since the 2003 occupation of Iraq, the targets of this jehad have expanded beyond India to include the US, Europe and now Israel. What is astonishing to those unversed in the reasoning processes of the CIA, the State Department and other pillars that support the Pakistan army, is the way in which US military and security planners have fashioned a strategy for taking out the extremists that depends on cooperation from the very agency that sustains jehad in the region, the Pakistan military. Clearly, the blowback from the Casey-Brezezinski war in Afghanistan has not been sufficient to shift policymakers in Washington away from such a strategy. Just as 9/11 finally resulted in an all-too-brief moment of clarity about the danger posed by the Taliban, hopefully it will not take another mass casualty attack on the US to prod Washington into taking action against the Pakistan army.
While in Pakistan it is the military that is the reason for the steady jehadisation of that country, in India it is the civilian establishment, including the media, which in Kashmir for instance has acted as a force multiplier for ISI-backed separatists, giving them much more coverage than is warranted by their influence on the ground. It is this near-monopoly of media attention that is giving oxygen to the separatists, as they seek to convince the Sunni population in the state to convert to Wahabbism and join in the jehad against India. Not that the media can be blamed, for successive Prime Ministers of India from IK Gujral onwards have lionised the separatists, preventing the Income-tax authorities, for instance, into investigating into the sources for their lavish lifestyle. The ?civilian? component of the jehad in Kashmir, including several leading politicians in the state, have apparently been given the status of a protected species by administrations in New Delhi that reflexively turn to appeasement, using the excuse that ?this is what the Muslim population wants?.
Such a view is a libel on the Muslim population in India, almost all of whom are patriotic citizens of India. Should the present flood of illegals from Bangladesh continue, it will be Indian citizens?Muslim as well as Hindu?who suffer. Should the terror spawned by jehad intensify, prosperity of the entire country would get affected, irrespective of religion. Since 1986, when Rajiv Gandhi was persuaded to surrender to extremists and pass the Shah Bano act, policy towards India'smost influential minority has pandered to the views and even the fantasies of the extreme fringe in that community. Muslims in India seek roti, kapda aur makan, they seek aman, shanti. It is the self-proclaimed ?secular? brigade that is insulting them by justifying the most repressive and sectarian policies in their name.
