Never, ever forget those sacrifices

It was on February 5, 2013 that the young in Dhaka came out to Shahbag Square to protest and demand capital punishment for the Butcher of Mirpur, Abdul Quader Mollah, along with others who had been sentenced to life imprisonment, for their war crimes during the Bangladesh Liberation War. The movement had quickly spread to the rest of the country and the Jamaat Islami reaction was immediate and has remained violent. Nevertheless, Sheikh Hasina has remained constant in her action against the right wing fundamentalists who, aided by the BNP, acting out of electoralcompulsions and its own convictions, has encouraged nationwide violence.

Sheikh Hasina has remained constant in her action against the right wing fundamentalists who, aided by the BNP, acting out of electoral compulsions, has encouraged nationwide violence

Shahbag was about closure. It was a war against fundamentalism and was not about revenge. Many of the protestors were young boys and girls born after 1971 who gave the famous slogan ‘Joy Bangla’ a new relevance and a new meaning. It is in Bangladesh that they wish to remember the discrimination in all the 25 years preceding 1971 and the genocide in the nine months that preceded that December 16. It was too soon after independence to find out what happened during those horrible months as the new nation had to be built from the debris and the devastation that the West Pakistanis had left behind. Yet they needed to remember all that to build their future.


The then Karachi-based journalist, Anthony Mascarhenas, was the first in June 1971 to break the news internationally of the genocide in East Pakistan, leading the Pakistan Government to white wash the events in its white paper of August that year. The young nation needed more than anecdotal references.
The Bangladesh Collaborators (Special Tribunals) Order soon after liberation and the 1973 War Crimes Tribunals Act were lost in the assassination of Bangabandhu and some members of his family. It took the Awami League twenty years to regain power in 1996 only to lose it to the right wing BNP supported by the Jamaat-e-Islami, the party that had supported the Pakistan Army and had opposed independence.
Attempts at discovering what happened in 1971 and to record Pakistani atrocities remained haphazard. There was no systematic fact finding and War and Secession — Pakistan, India and the creation of Bangladesh by Richard Sisson and Leo Rose in 1991 was more an account covering the military aspects of the war and did not cover the activites of the Pakistan Army before the war.


Robert Payne’s Massacre has several anecdotal references but his book was published soon after independence as was Mascarenhas’ book The Rape of Bangladesh, so could not give accurate estimates. Susan Brownmiller (Against Our Will) refers to 400000 rapes by the Pakistan Army and its collaborators, of which nearly 80 per cent were Muslim women.


Centuries of Genocide (4th edition in 2013) edited by Samuel Totten and William S Parsons has a chapter — Genocide in Bangladesh by Rounaq Jahan that has detailed graphic descriptions of the killings and depredations. She also says 3 million were killed. Yet Sarmila Bose's book Dead Reckoning has remained controversial as it sought to find proof for a predetermined finding that the Bengali claim was grossly exaggerated and accepts the Pakistan Army figure of 26,000 Bengalis killed. Bose is dismissive of Bengali claims about the extent of genocide.


It was left to Dr M A Hasan, a medical student in 1971 who had joined the Mukti Bahini resistance movement. He painstakingly researched the events of 1971 through his NGO, The War Crimes Fact Finding Commission established in 1999 produced an accurate report entitled War Crimes, Genocide and the Quest for Justice in 2008. This report should ideally be in research and history libraries given the meticulous details and perhaps not something the average reader would read. Fortunately, Dr Hasan has now published Beyond Denial — The Evidence of a Genocide for the average reader. Hasan’s study says that the figure of 3 million innocent civilians killed is the more likely figure. The book describes in considerable detail some truly blood curdling systematic massacres; only those with strong hearts should read these pages.
Bangladesh needs full closure of this painful aspect of her history and a move away from fundamentalism that threatens it today. Bangladesh has to see the fulfillment of its Shahbag moment. The recent hanging of Mollah, is a process in that closure. But when Pakistan’s National Assembly expressed concern at the hanging of Mollah and Interior Minister Nasir Ali Khan criticised this hanging, this only shows how dangerously delusional Pakistan’s leaders have become. No wonder this prompted Sheikh Hasina to comment that Pakistan had not accepted liberation of Bangladesh.

 
Source : Mid Day , 26th December 2013 

The message stands delivered

Quite often it is a thoughtless or tactless statement but it also serves the desired purpose of saying something and then denying or giving it a spin. The message stands delivered. Maybe that was what Nawaz Sharif intended when he spoke about flashpoints in the India-Pakistan relationship during his visit to Muzzafarabad. It is to be expected that he would talk about some such issue when in POK and he cannot be expected to talk about subjects like the Iran-US agreement at that venue. Denials followed but that evening we watched our own TV channel go ballistic with the usual panelists from across. We still do not know whether or not this was a Freudian slip or a deliberate statement.

In his absorbing book, Magnificent Delusions -- Pakistan, the United States and and Epic History of Misunderstanding, Husain Haqqani describes a conversation between Henry Kissinger and Air Marshall Nur Khan (then Governor) in Lahore in 1969. Nur Khan told Kissinger that in the prevailing situation Pakistan was not going to get what it wanted. A settlement would require appeasement of India, which would relegate Pakistan to a subordinate status in the subcontinent. Consequently, waiting for an opportunity to arise that would force India’s hand in Kashmir and that Pakistan was in a permanent state of war with India. There was no interest in resolving the conflict through talks.

Mending fences? Nawaz Sharif spoke about flashpoints in the India-Pakistan relationship during his visit to Muzzafarabad and expressed his resolve for settlement of the Kashmir issue

Subsequent efforts to destabilise Punjab through assistance to Sikh terrorists in the 1980s, the jihadi hordes that were thrown at us in the 1990s culminating in General Musharraf's monumental folly on the Kargil Heights, the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001 and the sustained terrorism that led to the infamous Mumbai Terror in November 2008. Apparently there had been no rethinking in Pakistan military circles to what Nur Khan told Kissinger and what in any case many of us have always believed to be Pakistan’s policy toward India.

Pakistan’s proclaimed support for the ‘Kashmiri cause’ and acting or supporting the wishes of the people of Kashmir has begun to sound hollow and unsustainable given its own track record in dealing with the legitimate grievances of the Baloch, victimisation of Ahmediyas and a relentless violent Sunni campaign against Shias. The world was no longer willing to ignore terrorist activities originating from Pakistan and India was not about to succumb. A new cause for staying relevant in Kashmir had, therefore, to be invented.
It was evident at some of the various Track 2 dialogues a few years ago, where water from Kashmir was the issue that Pakistani delegates wanted to discuss saying that this could become the new flashpoint. Actually, water from rivers that flow through Kashmir has always been the real issue for Pakistan and not Kashmiris or their religion. Ayub Khan, in his meeting with President Eisenhower said he did not trust India because that country “had taken away rivers that should belong to Pakistan and upon which Pakistan’s life depended.” Of course, Eisenhower did not know that of the six rivers, only one, Jhelum originated in the Kashmir valley. Pakistan had been claiming that it was necessary for it to have physical control of the territory in order to ensure that water from these rivers would flow into Pakistan.

The Pakistani plank seeks a reinterpretation of the Indus Waters Treaty without amending it, where water must flow unimpeded. There is no question of sharing waters from ‘my’ rivers with ‘yours’, is the new argument. The Kashmiris must not have electricity, even from run of the flow, hydel projects. The constant Pakistani complaint now getting louder is that water from the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab must flow exclusively for their Punjab even though India is not using fully the acreage allowed under the Treaty and could easily within the rules increase this.

J&K Hurriyat leaders, who go off scampering to meet every Pakistani dignitary who visits India, would do well to understand that Pakistani interest in Kashmir is not about the well being of Kashmiris but for the farmers of their Punjab and themselves.

Source : Mid Day , 13th December 2013   

Being there , with friends

Next year we will  have in our armoury, nuclear capable Agni-V  missiles capable of hitting targets 5000 kms away. We already have an aircraft carrier that is the size of three football fields, is 20 stories high and can cover 600 nautical miles in a day. We are the proud owners of the Chandrayan mission to Mars and have the Brahmos missile which is the world's fastest cruise missile and can be launched from submarines, land or eventually be tested for launching from our  Sukhoi SuMk30 aircraft. India is the largest country, with the largest population, the  largest and paramilitaries in the sub-continent backed by the third largest GDP (in PPP terms) in the world. And one day the country aspires to be a permanent member of the UNSC. All this should give us immense confidence in handling our relations with other countries. Yet, when it comes to handling affairs with our neighbours we seem to be diffident and indecisive.

The latest in this are our relations with Sri Lanka, a neighbour where an Indian  Prime Minister last visited in 1998 and that too to attend the SAARC conference. There has not been a bilateral visit all these years, an adequate reflection of our attention span.  There was an opportunity to visit the island nation earlier this month for the CHOGM conference and convey our message but we snuffed it. The reason for our absence was not because the CHOGM in its present form has become a quaint and irrelevant fossil but because we let sectional interests over ride national interests. We were driven by competitive electoral opportunism of regional politics and New Delhi's inability to ride above short term interests and take care of the country's long term interests. 

The decision not to to the conference after weeks of indecision would be defensible if it were in the national interests but becomes inexplicable to the host nation in the context of bilateral relationships. So when President  Rajapakse remarked that he understood why PM Manmohan Singh was unable to come, we all knew what he understood what he meant. In bilateral relations, local conditions and local sentiments in either country do matter but they cannot be allowed to become over riding factors.  In that sense a foreign policy cannot be allowed to become 'federal' where the regional parties  for their local political battles seek to influence national foreign policies to the extent that has happened in this case.

Considering that some of us are forever keen to talk to Pakistan, to the point of almost wooing them, it is strange logic that we continue to ignore  Sri Lanka. Not talking to neighbours has a negative impact; it is like a silly tantrum by an aged aunt at a wedding who is sulking about an imagined insult. No one pays attention to such sulks and is no substitute to being there at the venue, as the major power of the region and saying your piece. A one-on-one meeting in Colombo with the Sri Lankan President could have been used to convey precisely the concerns we have in Tamil Nadu. Not being there conveys nothing.

The main political protagonists in Tamil Nadu today were perfectly willing, in May 2009, to ignore Sri Lankan Army's action against the LTTE that culminated in the killing of Prabhakaran. The terror of the LTTE had been crushed by the Sri Lankan Army with discreet assistance from the Indian Armed Forces and intelligence.  There was a mutual national interest in ensuring success of this action by the Sri Lankan Army. It was a brutal war as all terrorism and counter terrorism is.  At that time, Tamil Nadu leaders like Karunanidhi went on a fast unto death that lasted all of six hours in sympathy with the Sri Lanka Tamils. That was the extent of empathy for Sri Lankan Tamils and very little has changed except for the forthcoming elections in India and political gamesmanship in the run up that has now become common in india. 

However, elections will not be won or lost because of events in Sri Lanka but Sri Lanka could be lost because of our electoral politics. Our absence at this juncture is akin to a public snub to Sri Lanka and the vacuum that we create and show little intention or urgency to fill, can only be filled by one country - China. This will happen incrementally, one thing at a time as powers seek to protect their growing commercial interests with military power. 

 Source : Mid Day , 28th November 2013