Hey Ram! Hey Sitaram!

After blaming (a) the country for creating disgruntled Muslims and (b) Hindu right, for the Mumbai terrorist attack, we have a new theory – this time from the folks who worship Joseph Stalin.

“What brought the terrorist outfits to our shores? With the Indo-US nuclear deal you are seen as an ally of the US, a strategic partner. There seems to be a total lack of appreciation of this thought from the government’s side,” CPM leader Sitaram Yechury said in Rajya Sabha on Thursday. [CPM links Mumbai attacks to Indo-US nuke deal-India-The Times of India]

In the interview with the media the terrorists never mentioned the Indo-US nuclear deal. In the letter sent to the media too they never mentioned it. Going by Mr. Yechuri’s theory, if the Indo-US nuclear deal was not signed, the terrorists would be sitting in Muridke watching re-runs of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi.
Maybe it had nothing to do with Indo-US nuclear deal and those misguided boys just came to eat some chaat and have a darshan of Shah Rukh Khan.

A Commando and a Politician

The Commando: Sandeep Unnikrishnan

He was a Major in the Indian Army serving in the elite National Security Guards (NSG) who was killed in an encounter with terrorists in November 2008 Mumbai attacks. “Do not come up, I will handle them.” These were probably the last words which Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan told his men as he was hit by bullets while engaging terrorists inside the Taj Hotel, Mumbai during the Black Tornado operation.[Help For Linux: I Salute You Mumbai…. & Your Heroes]

The Politician: Kerala’s Chief Minister Achyutanandan (CPI-M)

A day after Sandeep’s father heaped scorn on the chief minister and Kerala’s home minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, who visited his Bangalore home on Sunday, Achuthanandan retorted that “not even a dog would have visited the house” had it not been the martyr’s. [Kerala CM insults slain Major’s dad-India-The Times of India]

Meanwhile in Maharashtra

Among the assorted horrors that we as a nation have been subject to over the past few days, one more was added as Ram Gopal Verma, Riteish Deshmukh (son of the Chief Minister) and Chief Minister were given a guided tour through the wreck of what used to be the Taj hotel. So let me get this straight. What is essentially still a crime scene has now been officially transformed into a “house of horrors” where VIPs can take their sons and influential filmi people for guided tours so that they may enjoy the vicarious chills that the glimpse of human misery gives some [The Way Forward at Random Thoughts of a Demented Mind]

Nov 26: We Knew, but..

Our coastal areas are coming under increased threat from terrorist groups, which have decided to use the sea route to infiltrate into India. They also plan to induct arms and ammunition through the sea routes” – that is Shivraj Patil addressing the directors general and inspectors general of police in November 2006. “We understand they (the terrorists) have been collecting information regarding location of various refineries on or near the Indian coastline… Some Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operatives are also being trained specifically for sabotage of Oil installations. There are plans to occupy some uninhabited islands off the country’s coastline to use them as bases for launching operations on the Indian coast…”[Govt knew about the threat, did nothing: Arun Shourie (email from Atanu)]

Of course, Shivraj Patil knows all these things. The problem is that the terrorists don’t tell him the the date and time. This time he almost caught the terrorists, but they did not wait for his handshake.

Stop All Terrorists

Recently Bal Thackeray suggested that ‘Hindu Suicide Sqads’ be created to fight ‘Islamic Terrorism’. Thackeray was of proud some terrorists who planted a bomb in an auditorium in Thane which injured seven people. Justifying this, he said that Hindus were safe only because Shivaji took up arms against the Mughals.

Now according to an Indian Express report, there are other Hindu terrorist groups who are preparing to take arms.

While the SS and the HJS are both registered in Goa as charitable organisations, the Dharmashakti Sena was set up in 16 Maharashtra towns and cities on Gudi Padwa day this April. Its stated aim: establishing “Ramrajya” and to make Hindus “capable of action”.Publications linked to the three groups say the Dharmashakti Sena offers free training in self-defence and the training involves inculcating “mental courage”. It also reminds readers of the “armed battle of revolutionaries and saints”, RSS leader Golwalkar’s work on “protecting Hindus” and his teaching that “weapons should be countered with weapons”.[Those Hindu Terrorists]

This has to be nipped in the bud and such “leaders” should be stopped using strong anti-terror laws before these groups become deadly like SIMI or Naxalites. Now that the Hindu terrorists have arrived, the ‘concerned citizens‘ should have less opposition for such laws.

Shekhar Kapur, Karan Thapar & Pakistan

Pakistan is a major ally in the war on terror since most of the terror originates from Pakistan. Billions of dollars are pumped into Pakistan to improve the Army to fight the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Seeing  little ROI on the money, Americans are planning to conduct aggressive covert operations within Pakistan to strike the terrorists and capture or kill Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri. Shekhar Kapur is upset with this news

It will take a lot of will and hard thinking from the Pakistani people to stop this and not allow their nation to become the next battle ground between terrorism and the US. And neither can India now stand by and watch.

…. It is time for India to go out and actively extend our help to the people of Pakistan to move to a more stable democracy. It is time to forget the past and help Pakistan develop economically. [Bush expands his ‘war on terror’ to inlude all of Pakistan]

A similar surge in sympathy towards Pakistan was seen when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. While the news was tragic, some Indians were commenting that Benazir was India’s best hope and Karan Thapar wrote a warm and personal article in which she manifested as Saint Bhutto. According to Mr. Thapar she was a warm, understanding and caring person, which might be true, but  secondary if you care about India’s national interests.

She was also the prime minister who gave the ISI the go-ahead to wage jihad on India. She was the one who exhorted the Pakistan trained and financed terrorists to ‘jag-jag mo-mo han-han’ Jagmohan the then governor of Jammu and Kashmir with an explicit chopping motion of the right hand across the open left palm. She was the one who shrieked ‘Azadi-azadi’ from across the LOC and extended Zia-ul-Haq’s doctrine of death by a thousand cuts to Kashmir[Remembering the truth about Benazir]

Zulfikar Bhutto proudly announced, “Pakistanis would eat grass”, referring to their nuclear program.  Pakistan is facing a shortage of wheat, sugar and cooking oil and the ongoing energy shortages and hoarding of wheat have worsened the wheat flour crisis.  Still the American money contributed for the war on terror has been used for developing weapon systems to counter India. Even if Benazir, who Henry Kissinger thought was more intimidating than Zulfikar is dead, the anti-India stand espoused by her is alive under the baleful influence of  Musharraf, ISI and the Pakistani Army.

Also, we have bitten many times before. On February 20, 1999 around 4:10 PM, Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee crossed to Pakistan in the Delhi-Lahore bus and he was  greeted by the Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. They pledged to “open the gates of friendship and demolish the wall of hatred.” Few months later,  in May 1999, the the elite Special Services Group as well as four to seven battalions of Pakistan Army backed by Kashmiri guerrillas and Afghan mercenaries covertly occupied vantage points in Kargil inside India. Finally Indian Army with Israeli and American support regained the territory. Who is going to guarantee that such state sponsored tourism won’t happen again?

Unless there is an attitude change across the border (which will happen when David Dhawan starts making Pather Panchali type movies), any talk about forgetting the pasting is a stultifying discussion.

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The Buddha loses

Nitin, you were right. They came back.

MINGORA: Some unidentified militants blew up the historic statue of Buddha in Jihan Abad area of Swat district on Saturday.

The curator maintained that the statue belonged to 7th century A.D, and it was the most complete and inspiring symbol of Gandahara art. After the historic statues of Bamyan in Afghanistan, which were destroyed by the Taliban, the swat statue was the sole example of Buddhist cultural heritage.

“It was seven meters tall and 20 feet high from the land, showing Buddha in the condition of meditation. I don’t know what they want to achieve by such actions,” he added. Aqleem said he had reported the incident to the local police but he did not think that the police would be able to protect Buddhist cultural sites in swat as they themselves were the victims of terrorist attacks.[Militants blow up Buddha statue in Swat]

Buddha wins

Islamic terrorists, this time from Pakistan, continue their fight against Buddhist rock carvings.

There was, however, no damage to the image of the sitting Buddha carved into a 40-metre high rock in mountains 20 km north of Mingora, a town in the scenic Swat valley, northwest of the capital, Islamabad.

A group of masked-men tried to destroy the carving on Tuesday, said provincial archaeology department official Aqleem Khan.

“Militants drilled holes in the rock and filled them with dynamite and blew it up,” Khan said on Wednesday.

“The explosion damaged the upper part of the rock but there was no damage to the image itself,” he told Reuters.[Pakistani militants try to blow up Buddha carving]

Sacrificed for "Secularism"

Lumbini was the place where Buddha was born, but Lumbini Park in Hyderabad is the place where 10 people were killed along with 32 others who died in another explosion near a popular eatery. Many others were saved, not because of any great work by Indian police, but due to the ineptness of the terrorists.

After the Mumbai terrorist attacks on the trains, Home Minister, Shivraj Patil told the media that he knew such an attack was going to happen, but since no one told him the time or place and so he could not prevent it. This time the intelligence agencies knew that explosives were delivered to terrorists in Hyderabad in March 2007.

The first page in an Indian passport has a request from the President of India to let the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford him or her every assistance and protection of which he or she may stand in need. The Congress party seems to have requested such privileges for Harkat-ul-Jihad-e-Islami terrorists carrying eight kilograms of military-grade explosives within the country as well.

We say this because some aggressive policing would have protected the city, but the Congress Governments, both at the center and the state, chose not do so so because it would not have gone well with people who worship Gen. Musharraf and Osama bin Laden. Thus when the Government possibly could have prevented this incident, it did not, for fear of upsetting the vote bank.

Then the Congress party big wigs have to ask themselves, what good is a dead vote bank?

(Cross posted at INI Signal)

Ominous Patterns

This week the British Police foiled a plot to kidnap, torture and murder a British Soldier by nine British citizens, all of Pakistani descent. Earlier the Police had foiled another plot which involved bombing several airlines flying from London to United States, again planned by British citizens of Pakistani descent. Intolerance has been spreading in Britain and the ingredients required for creating terrorists are all present in sufficient quantities, like availability of weapons and indoctrinated civilians. The British Govt. also had no problems in letting in Mullahs preaching jihad and now all that is coming to bite them.

Though no such plots have originated or have been busted in Kerala, the stage is slowly being set for it to be a base for future activities. Recently the Customs officials in Kochi seized a huge quantity of rifles and air guns, concealed among more innocent looking cargo in a ship which arrived from Dubai. Also found in the boxes were copies of Qur’an and police has been searching for an importer named Koya Haji. In 2003 when a group of Hindu fishermen were murdered in Marad, a large quantity of arms were discovered in the local mosque. According to the reports in a local newspaper, the collection of arms started four months before the incident.

Terrorism needs foot soldiers and that too is being setup. Though Frederick Forsyth’s new novel, The Afghan, had two terrorists who were Muslims from Kerala, that doesn’t seem like fiction now. Migrants are returning back from the Persian Gulf with stricter views of Islam and there has been rise in fundamentalist tendencies. There is stress on abiding by the strict Islamic dress codes for women and recently one organization even demanded that Muslim youth stop watching soccer. Muslim groups are also asking their followers to keep their children away from Hindu ceremonies. This was never the case in Kerala and such situation of intolerance for other religions can easily exploited for mischievous purposes.

When you spot such tendencies, you would think that politicians would rush to defuse the situation. Not in Kerala. Both the ruling Communists and opposition Congress have found it convenient to close their eyes. After the Marad incident, when the police wanted to search the local mosque for arms, they were stopped by the leaders of the Muslim League (partners of the Congress) and later when the police entered, they found a large amount of weapons. A judicial commission which probed this incident reported that at least one senior politician of Muslim League had advance knowledge of the conspiracy. For the recent state elections, the Communist Party openly courted Abdul Nasser Madani, who is in jail for the 1998 blasts in Coimbatore.

In Bob Woodward’s book, The State of Denial, there is an incident, a few months before Sept 11, 2002 when George Tenet tells the National Security Advisor Condi Rice that he is able to see a pattern in intelligence which suggests that al-Qaeda is planning something big.  He says he cannot find the smoking gun, but on connecting the dots, he seems something ominous.  Condi Rice did not do anything with this information. The pattern in the information from Kerala suggests that something is afoot. In fact Defense Minister, A. K. Antony, a former Chief Minister has said that the Kerala’s coastal region is unsafe.

In the late 70s in Punjab, the Congress followed a policy of communal appeasement which bough the Sikh right into politics and we got Bhindranwale. The state later exploded with violence as a result of the violence used for suppression. After 30 years we are now starting along the same path in Kerala showing us that we have learned enough from history to repeat it again.

(Cross posted on INI Signal)

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The 1921 Model

It was on  March 3rd, 1924 that Kemal Ataturk abolished the Caliphate and transferred the power to to the Turkish Grand National Assembly. But sometime in 1921, rumors spread in India that the Caliphate was abolished  and violence erupted in Kerala.

Arsonists took to the street, burning and destroying government property. The initial focus was on the British, but when the limited presence of the British was eliminated, Moplahs turned their full attention on the Hindus. One Mohommed Haji was proclaimed the Caliph of the Moplah Khilafat and flags of Islamic Caliphate were flown. Ernad and Walluvanad were declared Khilafat kingdoms.[Moplah rebellion]

Following that there was a large scale murder of Hindus for something which happened in some other part of the world. This 1921 model is now being followed again to destroy lives and trigger communal trouble.

Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Iraq was captured and hanged and immediately there were protests in Kerala. That is nothing new for the goal in Kerala is to have a hartal every day and any reason including Britney Spears’ divorce is acceptable.

In Bangalore, it has taken a communal turn. Three weeks after the hanging, a protest was organized, deliberately to coincide with with a Hindu Samajotsav planned four months in advance. Then the predictable happened followed by the spin. All the usual suspects were blamed without any analysis of the intention of the Saddam fans.

Another “great” leader, Fidel Castro is either dead or is in the process of dying and it is time to wonder how many Indians will be killed for it.