Passionate About India

Strange as it may seem, despite India’s image of an amiable and polite nation, the country is surrounded by a league of adversaries with their noose always sharp to bait the hinterland and disturb the peace-cord of the nation. Needless to say, Pakistan is a major player in the league; China too is not far behind for all the obvious reasons. But what is most disconcerting is that the entire set of our neighbours, including Bangladesh and Nepal, have left no stone unturned to create political fissures in the border states; thus creating a rift between various ethnic and racial classes. Not only by our immediate neighbours, but India is also attacked with venomous content by and from unlikely quarters including apparently non-interfering Saudi and UAE communities. The malicious exercise against India has been active since quite a long time and today has enveloped all border-sharing states with its circumference engulfing almost all possible ethnic communities. To get the best desirab...

Lest we forget, not very long back, Pervez Musharraf, former president of Pakistan told in an interview to CNN, “I think now, frankly, he [Osama bin Laden] Osama Bin Laden is dead for the reason he is a kidney patient. I don’t know if he has been getting all that treatment in Afghanistan now. And the photographs that have been shown of him on television show him extremely weak. I would give the first priority that he is dead and the second priority that he is alive somewhere in Afghanistan.” Cut to 2011, Osama bin Laden was hunted, and killed, not in any remote hideout in any tribal area of Pakistan but in Abbottabad, which is just a few kilometres away from the Pakistan Military Academy and merely 60 miles from Islamabad. So much so, the entire region is known to be a hotspot and boiling epicentre of terrorists, particularly al-Qaeda. This March, an Indonesian terrorist, Umar Patek, having links with al-Qaeda, was captured from this region. He was the one behind the Bali bombings and ...

Imagine the worth of the 70 Taliban fighters that Pakistan is claiming to have killed in its latest, but disputatiously reluctant assault over the ever expanding and over ambitious Taliban. Well, hold your breath – it’s an incredible US$1billion! Yes, that’s the amount that the US government has gratifyingly pledged to give Pakistan for carrying out its indolent military operations against the Taliban, which was within touching distance of Pakistani nuclear establishments. While Pakistan is too happy to oblige the US dictums for the bait of $1 billion, what is completely getting ignored is the fact that this operation in the districts of Buner, Swat and Dir is nowhere near to routing the Taliban. And yet, Pakistan gets the money! During the Bush regime, Pakistan had to embrace the American war against terror in the post 9/11 era and had to perfunctorily fight those very rogue elements which it had incubated, nurtured and nourished over decades. In return to this so called ‘favour’ that...

What a venue they chose to assassinate Benazir Bhutto. At the same venue, in the year 1951, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated. Fifty six years later, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated on 27 December 2007, indicating the state of security quagmire Pakistan has been in. The state of affairs is so appalling that the assassins could have terminated her life whenever they had wished. The fact is that the perpetrators had plotted to blow Benazir up targeting the day she had returned to Pakistan. They missed! And after that, within themselves, they must have discussed casually – ‘Well, no issues, we missed today, will try again, next month!’ It is unbelievable how easily they almost killed her once (during the first blast) and then actually killed her in a matter of a few more days. These shocking incidents only indicate the state of security quandary that the South Asian countries face, wherein the killing of top political figures is carried out almost at will...

On November 3, 2007, it was as if history was repeating in Pakistan. General Pervez Musharraf once again imposed emergency in Pakistan – suspended the constitution, dismissed the Pakistan Chief Justice, Iftikhar Chaudhury, along with seven other judges (this being the second time in his tenure as a President), ordered troops to seize the equipment of independent television stations and also ordered for some popular leaders’ house arrest! Sequence of events beginning March 9, 2007, (with the arrest of Iftikar Chaudhury, followed by Lal Masjid siege on July 10, 2007, Supreme Court reinstating Justice Chaudhury, challenging Musharraf’s power on July 20, 2007, Nawaz Sharif’s arrest at Islamabad airport, after his eight-year exile, killing of 139 people in Benazir Bhutto’s procession in Karachi), indicated that a state of emergency in Pakistan was on the cards. In fact, for more than half of the period, since Pakistan separated from India and became an independent state, it has been under p...

The ghost of possible nuclear holocaust in South Asia simply refuses to die down. While in the last few years the chances of a nuclear catastrophe have come down considerably, time and again some or the other incidence has kept the region in perennial tenterhooks. The recent revelation that Pakistan is building a third nuclear reactor comes as a shocker and adds to the existing paranoia. Well if Pakistan puts forward the contention that it is building this nuclear reactor to mitigate the problem of power supply and to make sure that it gets an uninterrupted supply of nuclear power, even the most diehard proponent of the cause of Pakistan would find it difficult to accept. But then history is testimony to the fact that Pakistan would essentially put forward this contention only as it has always done to bring some sort of parity with India. Though it cannot be completely ruled out that Pakistan is doing this to sort of avenge the Indo-US nuclear deal as it had expected the US to give a s...