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Civilisation itself is under withering attacks by barbarians

India Today managed a coup with their publishing of the Hamoodur Rahman report on the 1971 India-Pakistan war that created Bangladesh. I take my hat off to them for having managed to find the document, every copy of which was supposed to have been burned. For, it is entirely damning. Even in the dry and legalistic words of the official investigator, the then chief justice of Pakistan, it comes across as a devastating indictment of that nation and its army. On the strength of this report alone, Pakistan can be declared a rogue state.

If further evidence were needed about Pakistan's nefarious intent, it was supplied by Hizbul Mujahideen leader Salahuddin, who recently asserted that it is only Pakistan that has supplied any arms and ammunition to him and like-minded terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir for the last 11 years. Straight from the horse's mouth. How Orwellian, but not surprising, that 'moral and diplomatic support', to quote the Pakistani refrain, takes the form of weapons!

In the interest of transparency on the other side, The Times of India group managed to publish, on September 6th, the official Indian report on the 1965 war. I am told this is available in full as a pdf file on the Times site, but I haven't been able to find it. It must make compelling reading, especially as Gen Harbaksh Singh (commanding offer, Western command) apparently said interesting things about incompetence at the highest levels during the war. I am told Gen Singh's autobiography (In the Line of Duty: A Soldier Remembers, Lancer, Rs 595) is a gripping read.

I read a rediff.com article about the effort by R V Pandit and others to bring to the attention of the world the degree of State terrorism imposed on India by the Pakistani army. I think all Indians who think India's publicity campaigns are wanting should support the cause of the People of India group both with money and by ensuring that their local politicians and other important people see this ad and realise what is going on. Civilisation itself is under withering attacks by barbarians. And propaganda to that effect is important. I am contributing to this effort, putting my money where my mouth is. I respectfully suggest you do the same.

Reader Sunil brought to my attention an article in The Hindustan Times about a Hindu Bodo leader, Bineshwar Brahma, being shot dead by Christian-missionary-backed militants in Guwahati. Naturally, Brahma being a Hindu, this did not get any headlines in the Indian media. Apparently he had angered missionaries by championing Devanagari versus Roman script; but of course the real reason is that he dared to be a Hindu in the Christian-dominated Northeast. And some readers wonder why I talk about the Christian Taliban in the Northeast.

But we got angry headlines about Christian priests being paraded naked or whatever for the apparently innocuous act of 'handing out religious literature'. Unmentioned is the fact that said literature contains pure hate speech, unbelievable lies and fabrications about Hinduism that would make even the Ku Klux Klan blush. Unmentioned also is that these people were accosting Hindus during a major religious festival, Janmashtami, and pressing their hate literature on them. Some of these missionaries are evil, fanatic, brainwashed fascist monsters, whom no civilised society could tolerate.

S Gopikrishna's column on rediff.com pointed out that SAJA ("South Asian" Journalists Association) had given an award for 'excellence in reporting on "South Asia"' to Eric Margolis! I now await with bated breath their award to Barbara Crossette for 'excellence in factual and error-free, unbiased analysis of the region'.

In case the point is not clear, Margolis is an extremely biased writer, whose perspectives for all practical purposes are indistinguishable from those of China's Xinhua propaganda agency and Pakistan's ISI's propaganda wing. This man, 'excellence in reporting'! He claimed on Canadian television that Christian Ostroe, the Norwegian kidnapped and beheaded in Jammu and Kashmir by Pakistani terrorists in 1994, was actually killed by the Indian Army! Reader Shripad wrote saying that Margolis received another award for 'journalistic excellence'. No prizes for guessing that it was from the Canadian Islamic Congress.

As for Crossette, she doesn't quite know what to do with her visceral hatred towards India. On June 4, 2000, she wrote yet another hilarious piece in The New York Times. Summary: India is a rogue state, but gets away with it because it has the trappings of a democracy. Whereas true democracy is actually practiced in China and Pakistan! Yeah, and war is peace, too. This is prize doublespeak, and it would be laughable if the writer weren't deadly serious.

Out of curiosity, I once checked on Crossette's credentials before she was sent to India by the NY Times. Her sole published work: a guide to the country inns of New England. Obviously, that qualified her fully to be foreign correspondent. Now she is, in the usual American way, an instant authority on India, and has even written a book (another is in the works).

I read a devastating review of that book (I think on Indiastar) by Philip Oldenberg, professor at UC Berkeley, who said this was the worst book ever written on India. If you already knew something about India, said Oldenberg, you'd see Crossette hadn't a clue what she was talking about. If you knew nothing about India, you'd learn nothing about it by reading her book, either. A gem from this book: Indians don't play American football, tennis or baseball, so they do not like sports. No, I am not making this up. Apparently, she has not heard of the cricket fanaticism in India.

My friend Francois Gautier talks about foreign correspondents living in a journalistic ghetto in Delhi without ever understanding what happens in India. Crossette apparently spent her entire term in India in the company of Jawaharlal Nehru University types. No wonder she has a warped perspective: these folks, like Apple's Steve Jobs in a different context, have a 'reality-distortion field'. She trots these guys out to mouth inanities to present an 'Indian' perspective. She seems to forget that many JNU people are actually Chinese in disguise. What do you call a person that's brown outside and yellow inside? A rotten banana?

Maybe foreign correspondents get to truly despise the countries they live in. Humphrey Hawksley, former BBC correspondent in Beijing, has written a thriller, Dragonfire, wherein, to summarise, China drops nuclear bombs, first on Bombay and then on Delhi. The Indian government does not retaliate after the first bomb because it does not want to inflict civilian casualties; and then gets wiped out in the second. To me, this is a fairly accurate representation of how the two countries will react. The Chinese with ruthlessness, the Indians with pusillanimity.

I haven't read the book. It appears Hawksley does use the scenario of escalation of tensions in Kashmir that the US Army College uses in its war games, that I detailed in my earlier column Kargil, the China Connection. I guess I should recommend Hawksley also to SAJA: they will be happy to felicitate him for his accuracy.

I find SAJA quite remarkable. I wrote a column Why I am not a South Asian a while ago, wherein I suggested that "South Asia" is meaningless, and that Indians should always use "Indian subcontinent" to retain the brand-equity in the name. I mentioned SAJA, SAWNET and SASA as well-meaning but pointlessly inclusive groups. Someone I know proposed to the SAJA moderator that he post this column on the SAJA mailing list.

The moderator, Sreenath Sreenivasan, wouldn't post it, apparently to protect the tender sensibilities of those on the list, but he did send me a form letter inviting me to join. A blind-copied e-mail form letter -- talk of half-heartedness. I refused politely, pointing out that I am allergic to anything "South Asian". However, it appears that Sreenath Sreenivasan (who emphasises that he is not related to me) was stung by what I said, for he pointedly referred to it in a recent speech, without rebutting anything I said. I will repeat myself: "South Asia" is a wholly imaginary homeland, about as coherent as the Equator, to paraphrase that arch-imperialist Winston Churchill. Whereas the Indian identity is concrete and real.

People occasionally forward me the tripe that earnest 'secular' 'progressives' spout on SAJA's list, and I find it quite entertaining. I guess they too see the writing on the wall -- the likely end of their tenure as the culturemeisters of India. Ordinary people are beginning to challenge their minorityism, which is anyway rather skewed: only religious minorities matter in their opinion; they have no regard for linguistic minorities, to whom they offer mealy-mouthed platitudes. They never defend the rights of the non-Hindi-speaking minorities, for instance.

I came across a word recently: 'verbicide', the murder, as it were, of a word. This is precisely what the 'secular' pretenders of India have done to the word secular. Whereas it really means treating all religions equally, in India the 'secular', Nehruvian Stalinist cabal has twisted it to mean the trashing of Hinduism and Hinduism alone. For instance, there is one A J Philip, an editor at The Indian Express, apparently a Kerala Christian. He is quick to condemn the foolish things the Hindu establishment does; but there is thunderous silence from him when Christians do similar things. For instance, when that outstanding and medieval example of hate speech, the 'Dominus Iesus' document, was inflicted on the world by the Catholic church.

As someone said about the US's Moral Majority, the 'secular' 'progressives' are neither secular nor progressive. Neither are they moral, nor a majority.

Speaking of 'progressives', I have another candidate to suggest to SAJA for an 'excellence in journalism' award by their lights. An obscure American sociologist living in India, named Gail Omvedt, whose main claim to fame is that she gets many column inches in The Hindu, thanks to her violently anti-Hindu and anti-India views. Omvedt, I gather from her writings, is married to a Dalit, and therefore apparently feels free to condemn Hinduism in extremely abusive terms.

I have Indian friends married to blacks in America, but they, unlike Omvedt, aren't crass enough to attribute everything that is wrong in the US to the not-so-egalitarian Christianity, although we are all familiar with slavery and apartheid, justified with recourse to the Bible (sons of Ham and sons of Shem etc.) by the Southern Baptists and the Dutch Reformed Church respectively. Real life is rather more complex, and Omvedt apparently refuses to acknowledge this.

Anywhere else in the world, Omvedt would be dismissed as a hopeless crank, but in India her vitriol is treated as something insightful. Probably because she is a white female (she has written about her Scandinavian ancestry, perhaps she's a blonde, blue-eyed Nordic 'Aryan' type): another sign of the Nehruvian Stalinist inferiority complex. Really, folks, whiteness doesn't necessarily equate to wisdom!

I could personally write equally obtuse drivel about the sociology of Americans based on my many years of observation of the country and its foibles; I wish I could convince some US newspaper to publish it. Sigh! Omvedt obviously is more persuasive than I am, or maybe the Marxists who infest the Hindu are just more persuadable.

LINKS:

The Hamoodur Rahman report on the 1971 Bangladesh war.

The rediff.com article about the ad effort. The People of India website has details of the advertisement to be released in twenty different languages, with a heart-breaking photograph of 4-year old Purnima mourning at the death of her Bihari labourer father during the Kristallnacht of August 1.

The report on the murder of Bineshwar Brahma

The Hawksley home page.

Indiastar is a literary magazine run by my old acquaintance CJ Walia of UC Berkeley.

Rajeev Srinivasan