FOR the first time, a US President came to India looking for a job – not for himself, of course, but for his compatriots. Things are apparently so bad in his country that no less a person than a President has to go around looking for jobs. And what did he get? A few thousand jobs from some of the deals, he is supposed to have sewn up during his visit here.
Of Barack Obama’s visit to India, the less said the better. He came, he saw and was conquered. Indians have been going to America looking for jobs; now, it is the other way round. You may say that this is a result of the recent recession. Actually, it is much worse than that. The US economy has gone haywire and all the king’s men and all the king’s horses will not put Humpty Dumpty together again, unless the government – which means Obama & Co – does something drastic.
Obama has a guilty feeling about India, and it showed through his speeches. He began his Indian tour with a visit to Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai where over a hundred people, mostly Indians, were shot down in cold blood by trained terrorists who came by sea from Pakistan. Who trained them and who financed their murderous trip? Technically, the Pakistani army and may be the ISI (which is the same thing) but actually, the Americans themselves, who have been pouring cash into Pakistan as if there was no tomorrow.
In his first statement in Mumbai, the President scrupulously avoided mentioning Pakistan. It was only after the pressmen quizzed him about Pakistan and its role in the Taj affair that Obama mentioned Pakistan. Why does the US President hesitate to utter the P-word? Because he knows that there is no such country called Pakistan, that it is solely the creation of the West, and when western forces, which means American forces, depart from its shores, the country will disappear from sight. In the meantime, the Americans and the British and others will continue to pour money into the bottomless pit that Pakistan has become, and the Obamas of this world will continue to sing its praises, though nobody will believe them.
Obama said that his country as well as India suffered from terrorist attacks, which is true enough, but not in the manner he suggested. There has been only one attack on the US, while Indians have been suffering from 1947 onwards when hordes from Pakistan, backed by the Pakistani army, attacked Kashmir, and have been a pain in the neck ever since. Obama did not mention Kashmir at all.
Can the Americans say they are not responsible, directly or indirectly, for what is happening in Kashmir, and what has since been happening elsewhere, including the sea-borne attack on Mumbai on November 26, 2008? Terror is a big industry in Pakistan – and in several other Islamic countries – and much of it is financed from the funds these countries receive as military aid from the United States. As Krishna Menon once said, a gun that fires only in one direction has yet to be made. The guns and the AK-45 and missiles that the US pours into Pakistan find their way into the murderous hands of Pakistani terrorists and from them into the hands of the Talibans in Afghanistan and may be other places. The main source of all these weapons is the United States.
It is the height of hypocrisy to provide weapons to terrorists and then go about offering condolences to the families of those killed by terrorists, as Obama & Co did in Mumbai this week. It is after all the US that foots the bill for the weapons, and only the US can stop their falling into the hands of terrorists. Why doesn’t the US President stop it?
He says, or his apologists say for him, that he has his limitations. What limitations? Has Obama taken New Delhi into confidence about these so-called limitations? He cannot have it both ways. He cannot arm the terrorists with weapons, albeit indirectly, and then turn round and watch them being used by terrorists against India. He has said – and he repeated it in India – that it is in American interest to have a stable Pakistan. Is it also in American interest to have terrorists operating freely out of Pakistan?
The United States is not the country if used to be. It is now under some kind of siege, and so self-absorbed it has no time for anything else, certainly not for the world at large. There was a time when the President of the United States was automatically considered to be the President of the free world, and the word “freedom” meant something in those days.
At the height of the Second World War, when Hitler’s armies had swallowed the entire continent of Europe and were on the tail of Soviet Russia, President Franklin Delano Roosewelt could still take time to write to Winston Churchill about India’s demand for independence. Indians and others could still rely on Roosewelt to bring pressure on die-hard imperialists like Churchill to accede to India’s demands.
But instead of Roosewelt we now have men like George W Bush and Barack H Obama, for whom double standards are second nature and who can mouth platitudes about terrorism with a straight face, and sign away billions of dollars to terrorists. And all this is done with a straight face under the signatures of Presidents and Prime Ministers, and no questions asked.
There was a time when most Indians trusted the US, though our political leaders from Nehru to Indira Gandhi had their doubts. Now their doubts have percolated down to the rest of Indians, with the result that there is now a barrier of suspicion between the two countries. Most of us expected Barack Obama to help remove the barrier, but this has not happened, and will not happen until the US stops treating Pakistan and its Islamic terrorists with kid-gloves.
When the Americans leave Afghanistan for good, as they are supposed to after July 2011, most of the war material will fall into the hands of the Taliban, who are waiting anxiously for it, and who will use it, as they are planning to do, against India. The Americans are actually arming the Taliban, maybe indirectly, against India. And we thought Americans were our friends!
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