National/Regional Affairs

By N. P. Upadhyaya (Aryal) Kathmandu: Two ministers in the same Pakistani cabinet possess two different views on India occupied Kashmir. If the first one is flexible but the other rather appears fairly strong and while the senior minister rankwise has a soft tone towards the rival nation-the Indian establishment then the junior minister has a different posture on India which to a greater extent appears close to anger. To cut the story short, Pakistan Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari says that “he is hopeful that a day will come when his country will be able to engage with India diplomatically as well as economically”. He recently said that “Aaaj nhin to kal”, a day will have to come soon. That day we will unlock our full economic potential, and all will share the fruit of prosperity”. Implied is his (Bilawal’s) desire is to build peace with India and that he hopes that one day, better late than never, peace will prevail. It is said that Zardari-Bhutto’s and Sharifs of Pakistan possess a bit of Indian bend. Look what he said of recurrent conflict with India on Kashmir and on so many issues. FM Bilawal Bhutto said, (May 25) while speaking at the annual Pakistan Breakfast session in Davos, organized by Pathfinder Group and Martin Dow Group on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2022, “that a day will come when his country will be able to engage with India diplomatically as well as economically”. Zardari, however, asserted that Pakistan will never compromise on its national interests whenever it engages with any other country diplomatically or economically. FM Bhutto appears ready and a bit merciful to live in peace with India but at the same time reiterates that “such an engagement with India” will not be at the cost of Pakistani national interests. He says, “Pakistan shall not compromise, however”. This analysis brings us all to conclude that Bilawal would very much want peace with India but without compromising Pakistani core national interests and structured policies”. This then again means that FM Bilawal has both carrots and sticks for India. But the manner with which Bilawal lambasted India over the Kashmir issue and also his outbursts made recently in New York against the UN body more so to the United Nations Security Council which had miserably failed so far in bringing to implementation the “resolutions” that the UNSC body had made some seven decades ago on holding of an impartial and a fair plebiscite which shall allow the people of Occupied Kashmir to decide their fate as to whether they prefer to live with India or Pakistan. The new Pakistani foreign minister though would like “friendship” with neighbor and traditional enemy since the partition days, but concurrently hints that relations with India are a bit what he calls “complicated”. What he means by the use of the term “complicated” is not known nor Bilawal at best has explained it, however, observers in Nepal guess the “complication” could be, the non-resolution of the Kashmir issue and the second complication may be “India being excessively “Islamophobic” and the country possessing profuse “hatred against Indian Muslims”. The third could be the “dis-information Lab” that India is which disseminates “manufactured news of hatred against Pakistan and the smaller neighbors of India” which in many more ways than one damage the credentials of these countries whose borders are contiguous to the Indian regime. India is certainly a menace to several countries. This is really unfortunate that India is a neighbor of the smaller nations of the South Asian region. Most unfortunate is the location of Nepal whose borders are open for the poor and starving Indian nationals. A rough estimate has it that one-third of the Nepali population is comprised of the Indian nationals with “dual citizenship” certificates and the rest are beggars from India scattered across all over the Nepalese territory. Child pickers/kidnappers are all from India in Nepal. Some even authentically claim that “thuggery” was an act Nepal didn’t know till the early fifties, however, the open border that allows the “Indian thugs” to enter Nepal in a free and open manner thus has swelled the Nepali population to an unimaginable scale. The Indian objective is to guzzle Nepal much the same way independent Sikkim was swallowed through the grand connivance of the posted and paid RAW agents in Sikkim. One Lendhup Dorje was enough for Sikkim and Nepal has thousands of Quislings. Thanks to the current Nepali leadership running Nepal, some eighty percent of the political animals are said to have been “elevated” by the Indian regime to force Nepal to embrace the Sikkim fate of the mid-seventies. Yet some other high placed intellectuals claim that the “ouster” of the Nepali monarchy was a calculated design of the Indian establishment through the use and overuse of some domestic “traitors” of the Lendhup Dorje infamy to finally swig Nepal like Sikkim. However, who were the domestic traitors in Nepal is yet to be made public “officially”. In addition to the traitors in the political sector, sources say that most of the so-called “vibrant Nepali media” too were in India’s or better say RAW’s good book. These media men would prefer Nepal to merge with the Indian regime unhesitatingly and unashamedly. Curse be upon these traitors. Whatever may be the case, the fact that India has almost captured entire Nepal and the Indian spy agency RAW has deeply penetrated even remote villages in Nepal is no longer a secret. The best and the easiest way for the RAW penetration in Nepal is through the ruse of “school building” construction through the Indian embassy in Kathmandu. Only recently, the RAW entered the Mustang/Jomsom area in the name of building a primary school. The fresh RAW activism: On May 16 the Indian Prime Minister landed in Lumbini. A sizable team of Nepal’s foreign ministry officials led by Foreign Secretary Bharat Poudyal were deputed in Lumbini. Look at the RAW trickery which saw the entire Nepali foreign ministry officials boarding the Buddha Air, and had the RAW Kathmandu chief seated in the same aircraft.  The aircraft was bound to Kathmandu from Bhairahawa. Was it a mere twist of fate or a deliberate one to malign the ministry officials? Or an Indian scheme to… show the entire world that Nepal’s foreign ministry has proximity with the RAW agency? International relations experts in Nepal opine that the Nepali officials should have avoided the RAW men by selecting other airlines. In diplomacy, such events are taken with suspicion. Defend it but the damage has already been done. The news about the RAW men boarding the plane together with the Foreign Ministry officials had appeared in one of the reliable online portals of Nepal. Yet, it was an unfortunate event speaking in terms of “preservation” of Nepal’s national interests. The message is loud and clear. This is India’s “game plan” to destroy the rest of Nepal left undestroyed by the Nepal Maoists who were for a decade or so residing in Delhi under the protection of the RAW plus Indian establishment. Needless to say, the Nepal Maoists were the “brainchild” of the RAW much the same way as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka was. Both Maoists and the Tamil tigers devastated Nepal and Sri Lanka as per the instructions and the “orders” from the New Delhi regime plus the notorious RAW agency. Notably, RAW took birth solely to damage India’s smaller neighboring countries. Currently, Nepal is the “hub” of the RAW men posted by Delhi and assisted by “salaried domestic pets”. If they used comrade Prachanda, it is believed, for damaging Nepal then for the Island nation, it was Prabhakaran, the Indira Gandhi’s adopted brainchild. The present political hotchpotch in Sri Lanka too, we believe, is the “structured” making of the Indian regime vacate China from the Island nation. For this, India is being assisted by some countries of the developed West, it is strongly believed. Enters Hina Rabbani Khar: Now that Bilawal Bhutto possesses some soft corner for the Indian regime and hopes that someday, the estranged ties in between India and Pakistan would be normal with the solution of the irritant Kashmir issue, then concurrently the deputy foreign minister of Pakistan Ms. Hina Rabbani Khar speaking in Davos, Switzerland struck a slightly different note on Kashmir issue taking the overly stretched Kashmir dispute as an “elephant in the room” and any, Khar says, efforts to integrate South Asia and boost trade would be futile without resolving the seven decades-long dispute. She means the “elephant in the room needs to be removed first to restore friendly ties with India-the immediate neighbor of Pakistan. Minister Hina made this somewhat unusual but hard-hitting statement while speaking during a session on “Strategic outlook on South Asia’ at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting on May 24. She was replying to some of the questions posed to her at the World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting. Talking about the Kashmir issue, the State Minister for Foreign Affairs Khar observed at the Davos meet stating, “I did not want...to go in detail…as it is an economic debate…but it is an elephant in the room and you can’t ignore it.” She claimed, as per news nine on May 26, her party when in power earlier had made a lot of efforts to normalize ties with India, including her visit to India in 2011, inking of a visa agreement as well as opening up of trade”. Moreover, as the global leaders debated the Ukraine crisis, writes PTI on May 24, (The Hindu) and condemned Russian Aggression, Ms. Hina Rabbani Khar said the world has reached an inflexion point where every country was being asked to choose sides or get branded as being on the opposite side. She mentioned this while speaking at the session on geopolitical outlook at the WEF meet 2022, as stated earlier. Adding needed and timely weight to Bilawal and Hina Rabbani’s statements on Kashmir, the new Pakistani PM Shehbaz Sharif, on May 28, too “called upon India to restore article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir for the durable peace in South Asia and that India should reverse August 5, 2019 move in Kashmir”. In his inaugural address, Shehbaz invited India saying that “why do we want our coming generations to suffer? Come let’s resolve the issue in line with UN Resolution and Kasmiri’s expectations to end poverty on both sides. India on the other hand, claims the disputed issue of Kashmir to be its integral part and thus has been influencing the UN body not to implement its own promised resolutions for a plebiscite which allows the Kashmiri people to decide their own fate as to whether they wish to live with India or Pakistan. For Pakistan, Kashmir is a disputed territory but not an integral part of India. But India is adamant. This reminds us of a famous quote by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth”. This again reminds us of what the French scholar Voltaire says, “Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities”. How much these two famous quotes fit into the acts of the current Indian regime that is declared Islamophobic is anybody’s guess. The highly Islamophobic Indian regime could take learn much from Indonesia, Tweets CJ Werleman in the recent days. Werleman Tweets, “Hindus and Muslims live together in peace and harmony where there doesn’t exist the Nazi-inspired Hindutva ideology. For the record, in Indonesia, 90% are Muslims, Hindus 2% and temples 11 thousand. Have you heard of any riots out there? No, because there is no communal organization. Most interestingly, writes Werleman that there is a picture of Ganapathi in the (bank) notes. CG Werleman is an activist against Islamophobia and a correspondent for Byline Times. On a different note, Mehbooba Mufti, a Kashmiri leader of PDF tweets, (ANI-May 22) “ A man was lynched in Pakistan, they sentenced 6 people to death by hanging and 12 others to life imprisonment. Several Akhlaqs have been lynched here (India) after 2015. They are garlanded, not punished. That’s the difference b/w their judiciary and this judiciary”. In conclusion: The Kashmir issue is being raised by the new Pakistan government which must have built pressure on India and the UNSC Body both. Bilawal alarmed the UN Body in New York and much ahead of this, he wrote a letter to Hissein Brahim Taha, the Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation (OIC), on May 13 and held a telephonic talk appraising the OIC that the so-called delimitation commission has validated the worst fears of the Kashmiri people that the BJP government in India sought to disempower and disenfranchise them by altering the demographic structure of IIOJK to convert the Muslim majority into a minority”. The Kashmir dispute needs to be sorted out as this issue has the potential to destabilise the entire South Asian region-obviously Nepal included. That’s all.