Regional/International Affairs
By N. P. Upadhyaya (Aryal)
Kathmandu: India’s decadence, rather end-is approaching. But Why?
Here is the answer predicted by none less than Khuswant Singh who was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. Khuswant died on March 20, 2014, which means PM Modi’s advent was a disaster for this eminent Indian writer. He was educated at a government college in Lahore (now Pakistan) and at King’s college and the inner temple in London.
Look what he said of his own country in the book “The End of India” published in the year 2003. Singh had in early 2000, already visualized or foreseen that India’s days ahead were numbered which may even bring in the ‘End of India’ itself.
In his own words, “these are the dark times of India. The carnage in Gujarat, Gandhi’s home state, in early 2002 and the subsequent landslide victory of Narendra Modi in elections will “spell” disaster for our country. The fascist agenda of Hindu fanatics is unlike anything we have experienced in our modern history”.
He continues, “After partition, I had thought we would never again experience a similar holocaust. I may be proved wrong. Far from becoming great, India is going to the dogs, and unless a miracle saves us, the country will break up! It will not be Pakistan or any other foreign power that will destroy us; we will commit hara-kiri”.
Arfa Khanum Sherwani, an award-winning distinguished Muslim lady who is the senior editor of the WIRE, India, laments April 14, “In the history of independent India, perhaps this is the most difficult month of Ramazan for the Muslims of the country”.
She is perhaps speaking on behalf of the Indian Muslim population whose strength in India is around 220 million-plus.
Then come the hair-raising declaration of the Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s chief Mohan Bhagwat who says terrorizes entire South Asia when on April 13 he says, “While talking about non-violence, India will also carry a stick. The world only understands the language of power”.
The RSA chief further added, “India will soon realize India’s cherished dream of having “Akhanda Bharat (greater/indivisible India) by swallowing up the entire South Asian countries currently housed in the SAARC regional body.
What is frightening is Mohan’s announcement that “anyone standing in the way of India’s progress (implied for Akhanda Bharat?) will be either removed or finished”.
Nepali observers say that India emerged itself in the comity of nations just on 15 August 1947 then wherefrom the Greater India?
The fact is that the theory of greater India is in itself a “dark chamber” manufactured assumption by those Indian littérateurs who out of frustrations and also of centuries of painful slavery of the Moghuls and later of the Britishers gave birth to this supposition that greater India existed since the time of Lord Krishna. Bhagwat’s greater India theory thus be dismissed outrightly. Instead, Nepal did exist even in the Time of Mahabharata.
One story in these great epic talks is that Kunti’s rejected son Karna had come to Nepal once to observe the beautiful Himalayan range. India was then nowhere. Indians are hereby suggested to admit this fact. The Sooner the better or as Khuswant Singh claimed in his famous book, the end of India is around the corner.
Is Modi presiding over the end of India Replying to the RSS chief’s announcement one Twitterati Mihir_THE1 says, “You forgot to add the 220 million Muslims of India! All added the tally would be six hundred million Muslims, almost half of India’s population. The Akhanda Bharat utopia would turn into the largest Islamic nation in the world”.
Much ahead of all this continuing Hindu fanaticism in India, Ms. Ilhan Omar, a US Democratic politician, appropriately equated Indian PM Modi with the leaders such as Augusto Pinochet of Chile and Suharto of Indonesia.
The US democrat Omar asked soberly Wendy Sherman, the US Deputy Secretary of State “how much must the Modi administration have to criminalize the act of being Muslim in India for us to say something?
What will it take for us to criticize outwardly the actions the Modi administration is taking against its Muslim minorities?”, Omar tweeted recently.
She Tweets further, “Why has the Biden Administration been so reluctant to criticize PM Modi’s government on human rights?
What does Modi need to do to India’s Muslim population before we will stop considering them a partner in peace? These are the questions the Administration needs to answer.”
She then acknowledged China’s HR records as “atrocious” and also took a jibe at PM Modi and said, “what about Modi in India? How are we promoting a free and open region by supporting Modi?”
In yet another scathing criticism that has emanated from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Hend F. Q. Tweets on April 13, “Two hundred twenty million Muslims in India are facing “extermination”. They burn their homes, ban them from working or trading, kill and rape them as the world watches silently”.
“Democracy is selectively blind and mute when it chooses to be”.
Hend aka Lady Velvet_HFQ is a UAE princess and lives in Sharjah.
Quite often, Lady Velvet talks against those Indian Hindus working in UAE to be dismissed and sent back home but her UAE government fails because UAE fears India. This applies to almost all Arab countries including Saudi Arabia.
Swedish Professor Ashok Swain jolted the entire world when he tweeted on 15 April, “In Uttar Pradesh, UP, India, two minor Muslim boys, aged sixteen and seventeen, were kept under the Police lockup and charged with criminal cases for listening to Pakistani music in their home!”
This explains how narrow-minded India has become after the advent of the Hindu fascist Prime Minister Modi. Khuswant Singh is perhaps correct!
Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) leader Jagmeet Singh, Ottawa, has demanded that PM Modi’s government stop stoking anti-Muslim sentiments in India, (The Star, April 14).
Singh tweets, “I am deeply concerned about images, videos and targeted threats of violence against the Muslim community in India”.
The now-ousted Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan in a way had remained a single Muslim leader in the world who made sharp comments against the people and the countries in the West who have had developed some sort of hatred against the Muslims.
Later Erdogan of Turkey too spoke on the plight of Muslims. Khan raised this issue at the UN and the recently concluded Islamabad meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of the Islamic Countries.
Addressing the OIC meet in Islamabad held on March 22 Khan had said, “Islamophobia grew after the 9/11 terror attacks and went on unchecked because the Muslim countries did nothing to check the wrong narrative that Islam was equated with terrorism”.
Khan added saying that “there is not any difference between types of Islam, and that the faith has nothing to do with terrorism.
PM Khan before his “unceremonious” ouster had welcomed a decision by the UNGA to approve a resolution setting March 15 as the “International Day to Combat Islamophobia”.
South Asians presume that the UN must have acted on PM Khan’s repeated talks made in different international forums on the hatred against Muslims across the world more so in the developed West.
PM Khan before his ouster had asked “Muslim majority nations to help end Russia’s war in Ukraine, appealing also to China to join the efforts. To recall, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi was a special guest at the OIC meeting held in Islamabad.
Michael Kugelman, deputy director of the Asia Program at the US-based Wilson Center, had tweeted that “it was rather ironic to see Wang Yi at the OIC conference in Islamabad.
If so then why was the US annoyed with PM Khan on his maiden trip to Moscow and too when he was formally invited?
Khan had also asked the OIC nation to help starving Afghani people and the India oppressed people of Kashmir.
“We have failed the people of Kashmir”, Khan had told the gathering.
Interestingly, new Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has sent signals to India that Pakistan’s peace with India rests upon the amicable settlement of the overly stretched issue of the Kashmiri people residing in the India Occupied Kashmir.
Dr. Shireen Mazari, a cabinet minister in PM Khan’s dissolved government in her fresh Tweet says, “Glad to hear the ISPR say if the Military asked by the US bases the answer would also be “absolutely not”! Of course decisions in democracy would rest with the Cabinet but let that pass! Our history sadly tells a different story. General Ayub Khan gave the US Badaber in July 1959! General Mussaraf gave Shamsi and Jacobabad to the US”.
The Director-General of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) too said recently at a press conference that had the US asked for bases in Pakistan, the Armed forces too would have said the same “Absolutely Not”.
To recall, on 21 June 2021, in an interview with Axios HBO, Jonathan Swan, Imran Khan had categorically stated that he would not allow the US to use Pakistan as a base for its Afghan operations.
Jonathan had asked PM Khan: “Will you allow the American government to have the CIA here in Pakistan to conduct cross border counter-terrorism missions against Al Qaida, ISIS or the Taliban?
Then PM Khan replied, “Absolutely Not”.
Khan used the word “absolutely not” which was perhaps the first reason for the US to get annoyed with Khan.
With Khan’s ouster, it is hoped that the US administration will be resetting its deteriorated ties with Pakistan. But how?
A Pakistani expert says ‘now it would be interesting to see as to how the US approaches Pakistan for shaping the future ties with its former Cold War ally, Pakistan?’
“Madiha Afzal, a fellow in the foreign policy programme at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, Afzal said, (Al Jazeera, April 15) that it now will be interesting to see how the US approaches Pakistan under Sharif’s leadership. Biden was the US vice president when Sharif’s older brother, Nawaz, a three-time prime minister, held the post, “so the Biden administration is familiar with the Sharif family”.
After the sharp comments of the US Democrat leader Ilhan Omar on India’s hatred against Indian Muslims, it is the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken’s turn who said on April 12 that the “United States is monitoring what he describes as a rise in human rights abuses in India by some officials, in a rare direct rebuke by Washington of the South Asian nation’s rights record.
The US takes India as a strong and strategic partner perhaps to contain China’s rise in South Asia. India is a member of the QUAD that houses Australia, India, the US and Japan.
Al Jazeera (April 12) reports that Secretary Blinken point-blank told India that “We regularly engage with our Indian partners on these shared values (of human rights) and, to that end, we are monitoring some recent concerning developments in India including a rise in human rights abuses by some government, police and prison officials,” Blinken said addressing a joint press 2+2 briefing with the US defence secretary Lloyd Austin, Indian foreign minister S. Jaishankar and India’s defence minister Rajnath Singh.
India Foreign Minister S. Shankar is the one whom the Nepali population loves to “HATE” for his poking nose in Nepal’s internal affairs regularly.
Shubhajit Roy writes in The Indian Express (April 13), “this is unusual for a US Secretary of State to make such assertions, in the presence of a visiting Indian Foreign Minister, especially in recent years. But this is in sync with a Democratic administration’s focus on human rights”.
Minister Shankar whose tilt in the recent days is with the Russian Federation like a chameleon unhesitatingly and unashamedly rebuked the US stating that “human rights issues were not discussed in bilateral dialogue, and hinted that “interests, lobbies and vote banks” had driven the US position, pointed to human rights violations in the US itself, and claimed that India would not be reticent about the issue”.
With this prompt “rejoinder” from the Indian Minister, the US must have guessed the “Indian change of hearts” for the Russian Federation.
India is a chameleon/camp changer that takes sides of “powers” that suits its political and security interests.
The US should now realize that if India can dump the Russians (the real heir apparent of the now-dissolved USSR) then it could any time abandon the US.
However, this chameleon act is defined by India as “for India’s prime interests”.
If a big offer from the US, India will switch its allegiance to the US, its partner in the QUAD.
India’s shaky and treacherous foreign policy has to a greater extent annoyed President Joe Biden and South Asian nations for obvious reasons.
The US, frankly saying, included India in the QUAD which perhaps, Nepali observers, say was the “Himalayan blunder”. Its long time Cold War ally, Pakistan, must not have been abandoned.
Indian FM Shankar could ditch America at any opportune moment if and when that suits India’s prime interests.
Putin’s cheap Oil has brought Russia closer to India once again which demands “diplomatic” attention from the US administration. Earlier the better.
Iran too has invited India for cheaper Oil purchases.
In the end: What has been proven by now is India’s establishment being ruled by the Gang of Four (Modi, Amit, Shanka and Doval) plus some fundamentalist Hindu priests who have made it a point to continue their hatred of the Indian minority Muslims and the Dalits (untouchables) as a state policy that has gone largely unnoticed by the Great Powers of the World.
We are thus once again reminded of Khuswant Singh, “The End of India” wherein he quotes Pundit Nehru in his book saying that “Nehru was the first and probably the only leader of the time who sensed that the challenge to India’s democracy would come not from communism but a resurgence of religious fanaticism”.
Singh says quoting Nehru that “he knew every organized religion harkened back to an imagined glorious past and opposed change”.
That’s all.
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