The Times Of India

25 July 2010

Abdicating India

Tarun Vijay

On Kargil Victory Day (July 26), the UPA government has gifted the Indian forces a bizarre decision: scrapping the purchase of artillery guns, which the Army has been demanding urgently. As a defence report says, artillery guns ran havoc on the enemy during Operation Vijay in the Kargil war. These guns are extremely necessary for mountain conflicts. It is predicted that there is 80% probability that the next war India will fight will be in mountains. Nobody answers why we have not bought any artillery guns for long. Whatever we are left with are in bad condition. This news shows the lacklustre attitude of the UPA regime. For the fifth time in the last eight years such a process has been stalled.

The second major fiasco has happened on the external affairs front.

Even in the worse days of the Gujral doctrine, Indian interests were never abdicated the way this government with a CBI mascot has done. The Indian foreign minister not only swallowed the bitter pill of humiliation on a land hostile to us, yielding to an arrogantly unmannered Qureshi, he committed a diplomatic sin against his own country by criticizing his home secretary, synchronizing his fool mouth with Qureshi's foul one on Pillai. What a Track 2, friendly diplomacy at zero level by state players.

Even if Pillai was wrong and the content and the timing of what he said was not music to Krishna, the faceless minister for foreign affairs did a great disservice to Indian interests and honour by publicly lampooning his own government's secretary and choosing to walk with a Qureshi, who is not even a Congress voter. It seems the Congress has waged a war on the home ministry. First, the minister was targeted by none other than the centre of all decisions — Sonia Gandhi. She was religiously followed by the beguilers Digvijay and Mani. Poor Chidambaram couldn't even expect help, or even feeble support, from his constitutional boss, Man Mohan Singh. And a failed leader from Madhya Pradesh, seeking solace in the lap of Naxalites and jihadis through ill-timed pilgrimages to their homes sought to get a few headlines by certifying Chidambaram left-handedly through ‘arranged' interviews on news channels and in the print media. The government and the party are managed through the media a la Rakhi Sawant's Swayamvar. "I won't speak anything till the media is present."

When the mechanic loses the will to repair the car, he fights with his tools to harass the complaining clients. The people, in this case are the receivers of a failed government's irritation, born out of self-realized incompetence. The governors intimidate an opposition through the most-abused tool of CBI in preparation of elections and then ask its leaders to enjoy lunch with them! They say no one should use the term Islamic while reporting terrorism and then make sure that a new term Hindu terror is widely circulated on the basis of a few unbaked ‘homemade' servings of politicized Intelligence agencies. Their CBI lets off Mr Honey “Q” of an Italian clan and unfreezes his London accounts while a blue-eyed boy of 10 Janpath is let off by the same agency which is now sarcastically believed to have shifted it headquarters to Congress party's tool room, earning its daily bread by exonerating Jagdish Tytlers from having any ‘hand' in the massacre of 3,000 Sikhs. The same clan gives Bharat Ratna to a person who had justified the killings by an infamous line "when the big tree falls earth shakes", and refuses honours to Savarkar and Syama Prasad Mookerjee, who lived and died for the unity of the nation. Yet, they say, they believe in democracy.

They have no qualms in inviting the divisive Muslim League to join the Cabinet and talking affectionately to the traitors and offering olive branches of love and ‘understanding' to Naxalites. But have you ever heard a Hindu leader was ever invited by the PM on lunch for exchanging notes on what's happening in the nation? It's the most revengeful governance horrendously practising ideological apartheid against a particular section of believers who happen to be Indians and patriotic. They are harassed, condemned and sought to be banished just because they demand Kashmiri Hindus' return with safety and honour, and a temple where Ram was born. They get delisted for saying no to the destruction of a bridge that was built by Ram. These saffrons are not Nehrus and believe that even a boy who was pasting posters of the party in his young days can become party president and you don't have to be essentially born in a family to dream high. They oppose tooth and nail any theocracy -- no Hindu state and no special privileges to any one on the basis of religion and want a united India.

But they are projected as the biggest threat to Muslims who have fared worst in any secular regime from West Bengal to UP and Kashmir to Kerala. From Day 1, when we got a truncated independence, the Nehrus were always inlvolved in unsavoury deals. First we saw the Jeep scandal involving Nehru's blue-eyed boy Krishna Menon, while jawans were fighting a battle in Kashmir. Followed by Mundhra and Nagarwala cases. India lost 1.25 lakh sq km of land to China and Pakistan after 1947 and under a Congress regime suffered 1962's humiliation due to ignoring defence preparedness. We lost Haji Peer in spite of the 1965 win and left Kashmir unresolved at Simla after 1971's great victory. The Congress rate of own-goals was furthered by assaults on Justice Jagmohan Lal Sinha's verdict, Emergency, Blue Star, faux pas of IPKF in Sri Lanka, Bofors deal, Submarine purchase scandal and kowtowing to Washington's pressures.

Poverty and rural unemployment has increased abysmally in Congress regimes forcing thousands of farmers to commit suicide while 40% of India lives on a mere Rs 20 a day earning. The footpath people, who are born, live and die on the pavements of the metros have got no solace while the multistorey buildings of the rich get even higher. This government has proved that the Nehruvian doctrine of the elite has only fattened the rich and robed the emasculated masses. And the world's most atrocious exile of an entire community too occurred in Kashmir under the dispensation of the Congress, whose flagship is marked with a soft attitude on Afzal and affectionatly mourning LeT's Ishrat Jahan.

The most scandalous incident of ignoring the nation's defence needs relates to the inability of the Congress/UPA regime to purchase urgently needed military hardware for the forces.

A kiddish media fed on government largesse and ready to be used for revenge killings becomes a tool of the secular machinations to mount assault on the Hindus on the dotted pattern of the Stalinist Soviet Russia. They forget tarnishing Hindu name tarnishes India too. They forget that Hindus have never ever supported any extremism in their age-old lifespan. Pluralism and a warm appreciation of a different viewpoint are intrinsically woven into the Hindu fabric, which has given shelter to the persecuted communities of the world and the uniqueness is expressed through Dargah worship to the Indian Islam, a trait which is strictly forbidden in the Wahhabi lands. They appropriated Gandhi murdering his legacy of tolerance and an indigenous pattern of development seeking to eliminate the fact that Gandhi represents not only the best in India but the best in Hindu Dharma. They never gave anything substantial to Muslims and the worst-ever riots since 1947 against Sikhs and Muslims occurred during Congress regimes, read the home ministry's reports. It was the Congress that showed all the love for the world's biggest perpetrators of mass murderers who unleashed dictatorial terror regimes like Stalin and Mao, inviting their Indian followers to share governance and copied the hateful Godse to suffocate Gandhi's legacy in governance and organization by supporting family rule and intimidating everything that represented the Indian ethos, from Ayodhya to Sharda in POK, yet claim to be ‘tolerant, objective and cultured' politicians.

They support the separatists in Kashmir, help them gain weight and provide medical help and logistics to them, yet want Kashmir to remain in India. They wish the world would recognize the fact that Kashmir is India but we fail to emphasize the unanimous resolution of Parliament that pledged to regain the land Pakistan and China grabbed illegally.

Governance was never at such low ebb. And at its riotous best. Keep your fingers crossed as it can go to any length in ts hunger to harvest elections in Bihar and UP.

The only loser would be the idea of India.