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June 12, 2002

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Arvind Lavakare

Lessons in 'morale terrorism'

Has the Texan cowboy of 9/11 turned a coward? Fearing an imminent Indo-Pak war, the US of Bush Junior recently asked its citizens in the two countries to vamoose, go back to their home, sweet home. And the cowboy's lackey, one Blair of the UK, followed suit. This then is the duo's hyped harangue of their 'global war on terrorism'.

Instead of just taking over the nukes of Pakistan, if not the whole of Pakistan, the US and the UK have turned yellow, mortally afraid probably of a fundamentalist Islamic backlash on their own dear citizens at home, sweet home. They knew, the US and the UK, that Pakistan was the aggressor in October 1947 in J&K and that J&K was legally India's, but didn't raise even a finger against it in the UN.

Today, they know, the US and the UK, that Pakistan is the mother of international terrorism without any DNA test being required, but they will not act decisively against it. A decimated Statue of Liberty and an exploded Buckingham Palace probably haunts their vision. No problem, really, if only they didn't exercise 'morale terrorism' on India by forever pulling us down over human rights or labour laws or the Enron failure, by humiliating us by holding up arms deals or imposing economic sanctions or issuing 'advisories' or 'demarches' or what have you, even as they heap eulogies on the double-dealing Musharraf, father of jihadi terrorism -- no DNA test required.

Some defence 'experts' -- and the breed is now swarming the international circuit, almost cheaper by the dozen -- say that the US and the UK 'advisories' to their citizens is not an act of panic, but only a pressure tactic to make the two brown-skinned quarrelling neighbours see reason and withdraw to the cuddly, mediating arms of the 'civilised' white world. Well, well, no Hollywood movie depicted John Wayne or Randolph Scott ordering his followers to run away from action while the cowboy hero himself simply chewed away at his rolled cigarette, both hands away from the holster. The cowboy hero's 'pressure tactic' lay, rather, in shooting at the villain's hat or his heels.

Our real-life cowboy from Texas has no such target in mind when it comes to Pakistan; he prefers to horse-ride in his ranch and order out his fellow Americans from the likely scene of battle.

His country continues to play the nosey parker nonetheless, indulging in something or the other that will harass and embarrass the largest pluralistic democracy in the world. Its latest invasion into what is purely India's domestic matter was the hearing last week of some crusty US commission on the recent Gujarat riots, which, never forget, began after the hell-like carnage of 58 of Lord Ram's karsevaks at Godhra, the predominantly Muslim-populated region of the state.

While the fraudulent 'secularists' of this land may well be tickled at the proceedings of that hearing last week and while Soli Sorabjee may see nothing wrong in it, the time seems to have come when India, the nation, must retaliate against the West with similar 'morale terrorism'. Below are suggestions for our government in that direction in the context of some events of the last week reported on just one day by The Asian Age, Mumbai edition, of June 5, 2002.

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