THERE is an international footwear company, Nike, I think, which has for its motto, just two words, DO IT. And this is what the Americans did in the early hours of Monday, May 2, when they stormed a house in Pakistan, ‘executed’ its infamous tenant, and went back from wherever they came, job done. “Do it”, their President had told them, and they did it, no questions asked, and went away with the dead man’s corpse.
Among the first to issue a statement was a man called P Chidambaram, who is supposed to be India’s Home Minister, and should have done what the Americans did in Pakistan. He patted himself on the back – and he patted the Americans too – as if it was he who had done the job. For over sixty years, a piece of our land has been under occupation in one corner of the country, but the man, and his predecessors before him, have done nothing to retrieve it. instead of throwing out the invaders, they play cricket matches with them. And when their Prime Minister comes here, our Prime Minister – yes, we have a Prime Minister too – plies him with biryani and talks about everything except Kashmir.
Ten years ago, over a dozen Arab Muslims hijacked planes in the US and rammed them into a couple of skyscrapers in New York, killing 3,000 innocent men and women, including 40 Indians, on the spot. This was a cowardly act but the cowards didn’t see it that way. They believed that they were acting on behalf of global Islam, whatever that means, though there is no evidence that global Islam was involved in such a heinous act. The man who masterminded the massacre was an Arab and a Muslim and the Americans ran him to earth, as a fox chases a terrified rabbit, in a shabby compound in a town close to the Pakistani capital and executed him point blank and dumped his body into the sea. “Justice is done,” said the US President, closing the file.
And what did the apologists of Islam in India do? Their chief joker, a man called Singh, complained loudly that the dead man had not received a proper Muslim burial, as if he was an expert on Muslim burials. All other Singhs and Nayars and Mahesh Bhatts are quiet, though these people fancy themselves as conscience-keepers of Muslims in India. They really believed that the man who massacred 3000 people in New York, and nearly 200 Indians and others in Mumbai on 26/11 had some divine powers, which made him indestructible. That he should be done away with by a handful of people in his own compound, and surrounded by his own family, must have come to them as the biggest shock of their lives.
Actually, Osama bin Laden was not killed because he was a Muslim and an Arab, but because he was a terrorist. There are millions of Muslims who go about their jobs – carpenters, plumbers, mechanics, brick-layers, taxi drivers and others – as best as they can, without bothering about Islam, or, until recently, without bothering about their oppressive rulers. They are so busy running their lives they have no time for anything else. But Osama bin Laden was different. He was a Muslim first, and everything else afterwards, just like our demented secularists, who are so taken with Islamists that they cannot see the world except through Islamic glasses.
Barak Obama made it a point to stress in his speech that this country was not against Islam. It was only against terrorists, and since most terrorists are Islamists, you could say that America was at war against Islamists, not against Islam.
I am not sure what all this means. Let us not be too finicky about it. When everything is said and done, Osama bin Laden was a Muslim, and for him, all non-Muslims, including Hindus, were enemies. Which is why, they, that is Osama’s friends came to Mumbai on 26/11/2009 and killed 200 innocent Indians, just as eight years earlier they had killed 3000 New Yorkers, most of whom happened to be non-Muslims. People like Osama are Muslims first and everything else afterwards, So I am not buying the argument that they are only terrorists, and only incidentally Muslims. Osama bin Laden was certainly not an incidental or accidental Muslim.
Now let us look at the role Pakistan played, or did not play, in this murky game. From what the Americans are saying, Pakistan played no role at all. This is not true. It is inconceivable that American troops should come in helicopters from hundreds of miles away right into the heart of Pakistan, only a few miles from the capital and right next to its military academy, strom into a big building and shoot up everybody in sight and set the three-storey building on fire – and do all this and escape away into the night without the knowledge of a single soul in the vicinity. In my view, Pakistanis behaved as a dog behaves when a thief throws a bone at it to keep his big mouth shut. Not a dog barked while the operation was on, because the dogs were busy chewing the juicy bones. The Pakistani big brass, from the President downwards, had been heavily birbed to look the other day, which they did.
This is one explanation. The other is that the Americans have realised that there is no such country as Pakistan, that the whole thing is a farce, and the place is so incompetent that anybody can be bought, and anybody can go in and come out, no questions asked. I have always maintained there is no such country as Pakistan, and the army and the government and the security agencies function independently of each other, and you can deal with them separately, or, if you choose to do so, not deal with them at all. I even doubt whether they have a nuclear bomb, or if they are really capable of making nuclear bombs. Their army, or so-called army, has been repeatedly defeated by India in battles, and if it exists at all, it does so because of our weakness. It is the sheer incompetence of their army and security agencies like ISI, which enabled America to enter the country at dead of night, create a ruckus and shoot dead half-a-dozen people at point blank, put them in bags and carry them hundreds of miles away in Afghanistan, without a dog barking. The entire deadly operation was over in 40 minutes flat, without a soul in Pakistan realising it had happened.
Would such a thing have happened in Delhi? And if it did happen, what would India’s reputation be in the world? Pakistan is supposed to have an army, a navy, and an air force, along with an outfit called ISI, which is always in the news for wrong reasons. But are they real? I have always suspected that almost everything in that country is fake – the country itself is fake and lacks physical, social and geopolitical integrity. I wouldn’t be surprised if tomorrow US planes knock out Pakistan’s nukes, unless they too are fake!
It is this fake country – which always talks about its sovereignty but lacks capacity to defend it – we are supposed to be having talks with and with which our leaders are keen to conduct “cricket” diplomacy. Instead, we should march into our own lands held by Pakistan and throw the rascals out. Just do it, as the Americans did in Abbottabad on the night of May 2 while the Pakistani army and its generals dozed half a mile away!
