Author: Saurav Basu
Publication: iVarta.com
Date: July 28, 2008
URL: http://www.blogs.ivarta.com/india-usa-blog-column138.htm
The UPA government smooth switch of allies
from lal to dalal has been hailed by most sections of our popular media proving
how corrupting tendencies has invaded even the fourth estate. Amar Singh and
his cohorts have been squarely implicated for buying MPs through we all which
industrialist"s money but the channel which was supposed to telecast
the tape has surrendered the idea itself by latching on the lame excuse that
their investigations were not complete. Perhaps, Rajdeep Sardesai needs to
be reminded that he is morally & duty bound to present the truth as it
is before the people instead of suppressing the truth to favour his favourite
secular party. Those political commentators who try to shield Manmohan are
seemingly oblivious of the fact that whatever Amar Singh did was at the behest
of protecting this UPA government with the PM at its helm. The moral and ethical
bankruptcy of Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi is evident from the fact that
they openly congratulated the CM"s of congress ruled Maharashtra and
AP for poaching away BJP MPs. [2] Shame on them for murdering the mandate
of the people who elected those BJP members against congress party and its
policies in the first place. The electorate is always known to principally
loyal to the national parties and their symbols rather than their candidate
as such. Therefore, the candidate is morally, ethically and to an extent even
legally bound to vote for his party in the house.
Analyzing Manmohan Singh"s trust vote
reply we find him indulging in several ad hominem and undignified attacks
on the leader of the opposition. His historical claims are untenable, and
most of his arguments appeal more to pseudosecular emotion rather than reason.
The cheap charades he frequently indulges in are uncharacteristic of a so
called progressive PM.
The initial reaction of Manmohan Singh is
against L K Advani alleging that the former devalued the office of PM. Is
there any doubt as to the veracity of this accusation? Manmohan Singh has
not won the confidence of the people before claiming the post of PM. He has
been elected to the Rajya Sabha from Assam by claiming to be a resident of
the same, a fact which is practically impossible. He has consented to be used
as a rubber stamp PM and debased the priceless institution by allowing Sonia
Gandhi to don the extra constitutional authority of UPA chairperson, effectively
a super PM in her own right! Taking inspiration from the mafia Italian PM
Berlusconi both have hijacked media houses and the Prasar Bharati has been
reduced to Congress serfdom, where any newsbyte on opposite leaders faces
blackout from I&B minister and the most excellent parliamentarian of the
year; Priya Ranjan Das Munshi. The draft for content regulation of news channels
is a step in that process.
Anyway, even a word to word scan of Advani"s
speech in parliament fails to detect any semblance of vituperation leveled
against Manmohan Singh, unless the latter is incapable of distinguishing criticism
from abuse. So here is the lie No. 1 at the floor of the house in the very
first allegation itself.
In the first para of his speech, he rants
about Advani"s age when Manmohan himself [Born in 1932] is only 5 years
his junior. The claims to destabilize his government are again patently false
at least in this case since it was the left front; a committed UPA ally which
walked out of the coalition. Did he expect the NDA to vote in favour of the
UPA whose anti-national policies have undid whatever gains were made during
the former"s reign? Thus it was the internal contradictions within the
UPA coalition which destabilized the government and not any opposition conspiracy.
Also, whether Advani believes in astrology or not is none of his concern.
Perhaps, he forgets that the ascension of Rahul Gandhi to the post of general
secretary of the Congress party was delayed by over 2 months because of astrological
reasons.
Manmohan clearly shies away from fighting
the charges leveled against him by claiming he would not want to waste the
time of the house. This arrogant peremptory style of governance should actually
impress no one. Instead, as is common of defensive mindsets he charges Advani
with those same inane set of accusations which have been routinely adhered
to by his adversaries. The attack on parliament was repulsed at the cost of
four of our immortal martyrs. Whether Advani can be forgiven or not should
not be the concern of one who goes against the SC verdict and refuses to hang
Afzal Guru, the mastermind of the attack itself in fear of losing out on the
anti-national Muslim vote. The disgusted relatives of the guards who died
in the attack even threatened to return their medals if Afzal was not hanged
but Singh remained unfazed. Another common attack line is the handling of
the Kandahar issue despite the fact that the government was able to save all
except one of the hostages. Even the hijacking took place in an alien country
for which the Indian government could not be blamed. At that time, there was
genuine fear that the jihadis could blow up the plane itself. The UAE did
not co-operate with the Indian government. The Americans and the west were
busy celebrating Christmas and had no time to spare. Afghanistan under Taliban
was the most hostile of territories, a government which legally India did
not even recognize. Meanwhile, crooked congressmen were continuously instigating
the relatives of the hijacked victims to publicly demonstrate against the
government and pressurize the government into submitting to the terrorist
demands. Yet, a minister from the government of India risked his very life
to accompany those jihadis. And our hypocritical media and Congress sycophants
blame the BJP for handling of the crisis! There was nothing the UPA could
have done differently although I doubt whether the emasculated Pranab Mukherjee
would have had the balls to accompany those jihadis.
Singh blames Advani for being the chief inspiration
behind destruction of the Babari Masjid when video evidence proves how Advani
broke into tears at the conduct of the undisciplined militant Hindus who had
infiltrated the movement. But our secular media interpreted them as tears
of joy! Again, it was Rajiv Gandhi who had ordered unlocking of the gates
of the mosque and allow the Hindus to pray to the idols within the enclosure
as a conciliatory gesture to the Hindus after having successfully appeased
the Muslims in the Shah Bano case. But who can deny that the inspiration for
mosque destruction was appropriated by these Hindu extremists from those very
Islamic fundamentalists who in the past had shattered to smithereens no less
than 80,000 Hindu-Buddhist-Jaina temples! [3] The Indian muslim community
and its leaders also quite inexplicably refused to vacate three of the Hindu"s
most holy Indian sites at Ayodhya, Benares and Mathura which Babur and Aurangzeb
respectively had vandalized. Advani is cogent in is questioning that "if
Christians are entitled to a Christian atmosphere at the vatican, Muslims
to a Islamic atmosphere at Mecca then why are Hindus not entitled to a Hindu
atmosphere at Ayodhya?" The BJP intervention in the Ayodhya issue according
to Advani came only when it remained no longer limited to the construction
of the temple. Rather, it became the symbol of a struggle between genuine
secularism and pseudosecularism. It also provided for the context for a sharply
polarized debate between two opposite conceptions..the unifying concept of
cultural nationalism and the dividing concept of anti-Hindu nationalism. It
was in this context that the BJP decided to support the Ramjanmabhoomi movement.
[4] If Manmohan Singh is so convinced of the wrong committed by the Sangh
parivar militants then why doesn"t he fulfill the promise of P V Narasimha
Rao in rebuilding the Babri Masjid?
The question of Jinnah is also not easy to
comprehend for Congressmen who have no hesitation in aligning with his illegitimate
children like the late G M Banatwala and currently the MIM, another Islamic
fundamentalist organization who claimed to have extracted 5000 crores for
their community in exchange for their support. [5] Back in 1917, the deification
of Jinnah as the ambassador of Hindu Muslim unity was a continuing process
of the Congress party. Contrary to his later communal conversion; in 1921
he was dead against the Khilafat movement because of which he had to face
the wrath of the Mullahs and the Ali brothers. But irrespective of the evil
whose foundation he lay, Jinnah"s historic speech in the constituent
assembly emphatically guaranteed the rights of the minorities in Pakistan.
To quote Jinnah "You are free to go to your temples. You are free to
go to your mosques...you may belong to any religion or caste or creed; that
has nothing to do with the business of the state..you will find that in course
of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus, and Muslims would cease to be Muslims
not in the religious sense because that is the personal faith of each individual
but in the political sense as citizens of the State." The only conclusions
which can be drawn is that Jinnah wished Pakistan to be a non theocratic secular
state. Is there any difficulty in concluding that by quoting this specific
speech, Advani was reminding the authorities in Pakistan of the secular credentials
of its most important man in History and that the Hindu minorities deserved
better treatment than was being dished out to them? Advani not only stands
exonerated but is to be congratulated for his efforts in eliminating misunderstanding
and building bridges with the people of Pakistan.
Manmohan Singh"s predictable rants against
Advani during the Godhra riots are devoid of any objective evidence. Singh
for his part has superseded the goebbelian propaganda of the Indian English
and associated foreign media by upgrading the latter"s claim of genocide
into holocaust! To rub salt into the wounds of the 58 women, children and
kar sewaks murdered by the Islamic fundamentalists, the illegal Bannerjee
commission was setup by Laloo Prasad Yadav which came to the egregiously false
and politically motivated conclusion that the fire was the result of an accident.
The Muslim mob pelting stones at the train with the simultaneous train burning
were explained as an unlucky coincidence by the proponents of this dastardly
theory! As for blaming Advani for turning a nelson to the riots, the facts
state otherwise. The Godhra carnage took place in the late hours of the 27th
of February. Shoot at sight orders had been issued on the 28th itself. Army
units were performing flag marches on 1st March within 53 hours of the initial
violence. Advani was touring the state within the three days of violence and
issued the statement that "we would not allow any kind of communal tension".
Is this called criminal negligence? Is this the manner in which pogroms are
organized? As for the malicious claims of genocide, the religion wise breakup
of the death toll released by the UPA government was 790 Muslims and 254 Hindus
with 233 missing. The Muslim contribution in the riots was equivalent to their
Hindu counterparts. We should not forget in the heat of emotion that Muslims
despite constituting less than 8% of the population of Gujarat state had inflicted
heavy losses on Hindus and the ratio of Muslim: Hindu killed was only a little
above 1:3. The claim for police inaction is repudiated by the fact that over
200 rioters had been killed in police fire across Gujarat. Nearly 10,000 rounds
of bullets were fired by the police. In the initial days, the police made
preventive arrests of nearly 18,000 Hindus and 3,800 Muslims. The Justice
Nanavati commission found no police lapse in the riots [6] which was contrary
to the norm as the independent study of Vibhuti Narain Rai in 1999 found that
policemen in all states during riots harboured an anti Muslim mindset - they
are convinced of the mischievous role of Muslims in riots and rarely entertain
doubts regarding the modalities required to check them. The Tewaria commission
investigating the Gujarat riots had noted how ISI and other terror elements
had infiltrated the minority community in the course of the riots. Perhaps,
the PM needs to be reminded of the conduct of his own party in 1969, when
over 424 Muslims were killed as against only 24 Hindus in Ahmedabad.
What moral authority has a sikh PM to speak
against communal riots? Manmohan in 1999 had the audacity to propose lie that
it was not the Congress party but the RSS which was involved in the 1984 sikh
riots. [7] The lies of Manmoahn Singh apart it was the BJP and the RSS which
played a key and constructive role in protecting the Sikhs to the best of
their capacity. Even Khushwant Singh, a bitter critic of the BJP frankly admits
in his History of the Sikhs "it was the congress leaders who instigated
mobs in 1984 and got more than 3000 people killed. I must give due credit
to RSS and the BJP for showing courage and protecting helpless Sikhs during
those difficult days. No less a person than Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself intervened
at a couple of places to help poor taxi drivers" It was Rajiv Gandhi
who cynically exploited his mother"s murder for political gains. Even
when terrorism in Punjab was at its zenith it did not consummate in communal
riots, although there were some grave provocations. For instance, 27 RSS syamsevaks
were shot dead at Moga in 1989 by Sikh terrorists during their morning Shakha
but again the BJP and the RSS took the lead in ensuring no untoward incidents
happened proving their loyalty to real secularism
How many ounces of self respect the PM has
for himself or the Sikh community can be gauged from the fact that right under
his very nose, the HRD minister Arjun Singh singing his customary annual paean
for Rajiv, claimed the latter had brought murderers of his mother into the
mainstream. [8]
The question raised by the PM whether Mayawati
was acceptable to him as PM does not arise because Advani had already declared
the NDA"s will to go for fresh elections in case the UPA government failed
to win the trust vote. [9]
I will not go into length again of the manner
in which Manmohan Singh"s anti-national UPA government has compromised
national interests since it has been dealt by me earlier. [10] As for his
achievements none of them are commendable in itself. The NREGA was a feudal
farce, the farmer subsidy was ill constructed and improperly directed and
hence has failed to contain continuing farmer suicides in Maharashtra and
AP which both congress ruled states. The Nuclear deal is not the panacea for
our growing energy needs as even by 2030 it can gratify only 5% of our total
energy needs. The government has done nothing to harness India"s abundant
renewable energy sources. When Pranab Mukerjee indulges in the sophistry of
pointing out the nuclear energy assets of France we are not told the almost
100 fold increase in infrastructure it would entail; he also fails to take
into account the criticism of the deal by top scientists who warn the government
whether we want this mythical extra "energy security " through this
deal , paying almost thrice the unit capital cost of conventional power plants
, with the additional burden of subjugating the freedom to pursue a foreign
policy and indigenous nuclear R&D programme of our own. [11] The internal
inconsistency of the government is highlighted by the fact that it aims to
tackle the provisions of the draconian Hyde by framing a separate law. Doesn"t
the PM, the congress and India"s vain intellegensia realize that just
like American laws don"t apply to us, similarly India"s law cannot
apply, forget counteract American laws. The fact of the matter remains the
123 agreement is bound by the Hyde act and only the American government can
amend the agreement to make it immune to the provisions of the Hyde act. The
BJP planned to pressurize the Americans into amending the 123 agreement suitably
similar to their agreements with China and Japan, but the emasculated CIA
appeasing UPA government has no such considerations. The 123 agreement does
not recognize India as a nuclear state. Secondly, the waiver which allows
American companies to sell uranium to India will be cast aside the moment
India conducts a nuclear test something which is the need of the hour in pressing
forth for a creditable nuclear deterrent against the Chinese. The government
as well as some pro government scientists attempt to obfuscate the argument
on what happens if we conduct a test, since there is no way we can resist
the NSG cartel. So Manmohan Singh"s claim of the deal signaling an end
to India"s nuclear apartheid is incompetent and unintelligent. As P K
Iyenger, former chairman Atomic Energy Commission explains "It is easy
to see why the US wants this deal so badly. At virtually no cost, since there
is no commitment towards fuel supplies, they can cap our strategic programme,
bring us into the NPT net, through the back door, as a non-nuclear power,
keep a close eye on our nuclear activities, including R&D, through intrusive
IAEA inspections, and subjugate us to the wishes of the nuclear cartel."
[12] Some like B Raman curiously slander these scientists on the petulant
reasoning that they were raised in cold war environments. If this is so the
case, then did the Americans impose sanctions on India in 1998 and consistently
refuses to accommodate it as a responsible nuclear weapons state?
On a side note, much has been written on Pranab
Mukherjee catching the faux pas of Advani when the latter alleged that Pandit
Nehru wanted to sign the NPT unaware that the NPT had become operational only
in 1970, a good 6 years after his death. Advani may have been technically
incorrect, but the main crux of his argument is not at all violated. The idea
of creating a Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was born in February 1960, when
the first French atomic bomb was detonated in the Sahara [13] Nehru quite
incredibly was convinced "that if any country adopted unilateral disarmament
through strength, nobody would be able to injure it and it will win in the
end" His idealism for world peace is indeed laudatory "for the moment
we should concentrate on the stoppage of nuclear tests, though I shall be
very happy to subscribe to the banning of the whole manufacture.but ultimately
war must be abolished" [14] Taking into account Nehru"s views on
disarmament, it leaves us with no doubt towards his intentions for signing
the NPT whenever it became operational. We may assume that his enlightened
views would have prevented India from conducting any nuclear tests. Pokhran
I did not make India a super-power. The BJP catapulted the nation to the status
of a super-power within weeks of assuming power. Yet, authors like Bipin Chandra
would want to find fault against the BJP for their speedy success [in India
Since independence, a book written entirely from a Congressman"s perspective].
These uncharitably specious accusations aim to veil the uncomfortable facts
on why previous attempts by India to test in 1983 and 1995 failed. The answer
lay precisely in the fact that CIA agents had infiltrated successive Congress
governments even within the cabinet. In stark contrast was the conduct of
the Vajpayee government. The expert and writer Jeffrey T Richelson reminds
us that "India"s success in preventing U.S. spy satellites from
seeing signs of the planned tests days to weeks in advance was matched by
its success in preventing acquisition of other types of intelligence. India"s
Intelligence Bureau ran an aggressive counterintelligence program, and the
CIA, despite a large station in New Delhi, was unable to recruit a single
Indian with information about the Vajpayee government"s nuclear plans.
Instead, the deputy chief of the CIA station in New Delhi was expelled after
a botched try at recruiting the chief of Indian counterintelligence operations.
[15]
The same PM who devalued institutes of excellence
like the IITs and AIIMS through the cancer of OBC reservation now unveils
new universities. Even the extant IITs and other prestigious institutions
are reeling because of faculty shortage. So Manmohan"s ingenious solution
is to enjoin caste based reservation within faculty positions. As long as
the nation keeps churning its share of engineers and doctors; nothing else
matter, especially the small issue of their quality is of no concern whatsoever!
There is also no mention as to what happened to the 6 AIIMS level institutions
which were sanctioned by the NDA government? The implementation of the Pradhan
Mantri Gram Sadhak Yogna [conceptualized and implemented in its major phases
by the Vajpayee government] has slackened under the UPA. The Bharat Nirman
project itself is a gigantic fraud as it simply clubs together previous schemes
on similar lines while scripting a series of underachieved targets. The farmer
loan waives scheme does not even remotely influence more than 5% of the 90
million farmer households it is supposed to help.
Finally, Manmohan Singh lamenting the hardships
he faced during his schooldays in the end of his speech is cruelly hypocritical
of failing to recognize the failures of his cherished Congress government
which despite 60 years of governance has not been able to provide those very
same elementary facilities of water, electricity, roads, basic education,
jobs, sanitation to more than half of the national population.
For those Manmohan mongers who claim the pre-eminent
finance minister will usher in reforms, they are in for a long haul. The first
reform the pseudosecular Manmohan government undertook at the behest of the
fascist DMK was land an affidavit in the Supreme court which declared Rama
had himself destroyed the Setu according to the Kamba Ramayana, an 8th century
text! Now, if such a travesty of history was only played by the BJP government
you could have anticipated the howl it would have generated from our marxist-secularist
historians like Romila Thapar and Irfan Habib. In case of disinvestment unlike
the NDA government; the UPA believes in first reducing profit making companies
into sick units, and then selling them at dirt cheap prices to rake in the
moolah. Consider the case of BSNL whose profits have shrunk to merely 300
crores during the UPA tenure. The Nehru Gandhi parivar is also pressuring
the same public sector organization to merge the diseased ITI into its gambit
in order to hasten the former"s demise [16], something which will sound
sweetly to the Ambani brother"s ears.
References & Notes:
1. Full text of speech http://www.ibnlive.com/news/full-text-pm-slams-advani-in-trust-vote-reply/69334-3-single.html
2. TOI 25.7.2008 Congress pat for Andhra,
Maha CMs
3. See Hindu Temples, What happened to them
Volume 1 and 2; Sita Ram Goyal; Voice of India. Until 1989 there was common
consensus on the issue. For instance, the 1989 edition of Britannica Encyclopedia
read (entry Ayodhya) "There are few surviving monuments of any antiquity.
Rama"s birthplace is marked by a mosque, erected by the Moghul emperor
Babur in 1528 on the site of an earlier temple
4. My Country My Life, L K Advani, Page 367, Rupa, 2008
5. MIM paid 5000 crores http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jul/20inter1.htm
6. http://www.rediff.com/news/2003/may/18guj.htm
7. http://www.sikhtimes.com/news_090299a.html
8. TOI 21.5.2008 http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Arjun_heaps_praise_on_Sonia_Rahul/articleshow/3060349.cms
9. Advani asks for fresh elections http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1175929
10. http://www.boloji.com/analysis2/0358.htm
11. Top scientists say no to deal http://www.rediff.com/news/2008/jun/24ndeal.htm
12. Ten misconceptions about nuclear deal,
P K Iyenger http://www.deeshaa.org/2008/07/21/about-the-nuclear-energy-deal/
13. History of NPT, Mattheas Kunzel
14. Disarmament from strength, J L Nehru,
June 16, 1962 http://www.indianembassy.org/policy/Disarmament/disarm6.htm
15. Spying on the bomb, Jeffrey T Richelson.
Review by A G Noorani http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/fl2316/stories/20060825001007500.htm
16. TOI 17.6.2008 ITI merger to put stress
on BSNL http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Business/ITI_merger_to_put_stress_on_BSNL/rssarticleshow/3242266.cms
