The Indian government has been hoisted on to the horns of a dilemma. The rightwing coalition government in Israel of Benjamin Netanyahu, not unreasonably, seeks universal branding of the Hamas (Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya — Islamic Resistance Movement) as a terrorist organisation in order to justify its all-out military campaign launched in the Gaza Strip. It was in response to the surprise combined arms attack October 7 on the nearby Israeli kibbutz (farming cooperative) and small towns across the “iron wall” the Israelis built along the border with Gaza to keep themselves safe. Had this Iron Wall worked as advertised, there would have been no Israel-Hamas war.
The so-called “Iron Wall” is a high advanced-tech steel wire fence interspersed with towers mounting machine guns slaved to banks of surveillance sensors, including aerostats (large ground-tethered balloons with radars and thermal sensors, cameras, and other devices that maintain a 24/7 vigil). The machine guns automatically fire in “kill zones” that cover the length of the wall on the Israel-Gaza border the instant sensors at any time detect breaches of the wall.
It is a solution, incidentally, the Indian government considered buying into to prevent infiltration across the Line of Control in J&K by Pakistan-based jihadi groups. But it was deterred by the high price. Just as well, because while it cost Israel a billion dollars to install this protective border complex, it took the lead Hamas elements only a few seconds to “blind” the thermal and imagery sensors, and a few precision drone bomblets dropped on the towers, to render the wall useless, and allow the Hamas fighters to flow unimpeded into Israel. The Israeli “iron dome” air defence system, was likewise defeated by a too large barrage of rockets fired from within Gaza.
So far so conventional military-wise innovative. Combined with the motorised gliders and high-quality coordinated actions by air, land and seaborne units conducted in “radio silence”, ‘Operation Al-Aqsa Flood’ marked the Hamas out as a force that had transited from hit and run actions to planning and carrying out a genuinely imaginative military breaching operation, and a uniquely effective proto-military in embryo of a future independent state of Palestine, whatever its current relationship with the civilian Palestinian Authority running the show in Gaza.
After the initial successes in nullifying the Israeli wall, the combined arms units began moving inland. And that’s when things began going very wrong. The Hamas fighters went rogue. Rigged up in proper battle uniforms and gear, they reverted to being terrorists — indiscriminately shooting up unsuspecting Israelis on the streets, lobbing grenades into basements filled with terrified defenceless people seeking shelter, surging into the Kibbutz Be’eri and killing everyone they saw on sight as they roamed the gated compound, and taking hundreds of men, women and children hostage. It lost Hamas its hard won status as a conventional military force deserving of respect.
In other words, Hamas proved to be a terrorist group after all, like the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba in Kashmir — a fact the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu reminded his good friend Narendra Modi about, by declaring the LeT a terrorist outfit in the runup to the 15th anniversary of the heinous 26/11 seaborne strike by the Lashkar on Mumbai in 2008. (Of course, the then Congress party government of Manmohan Singh, memorably, did nothing by way of retaliation.) It has put the Indian Prime Minister in a bind, especially because the Modi government has come out in favour of a “two-state solution” for Palestine that the Israelis are skeptical about. This is a compromise the Indian government has pushed and is a later development. Because, with the partition of India in mind, New Delhi in 1948 opposed the partitioning also of Palestine.
Netanyahu’s gambit is not only to blunt the political effects in West Asia of New Delhi’s advocacy for Palestine and Israel coexisting together, but also of the Mission of Arab foreign ministers making the rounds of various capitals presently in India seeking Modi’s support for, in effect, ending the Israeli military operations against Hamas, an option Netanyahu rejected out of hand when mooted by the US.
The Modi government cannot but revel in Israel’s coming down on India’s side where LeT and other Pakistan-sponsored jihadi outfits are concerned. But equally, it has to be mindful of the consequences of its adopting a too-pro Israel stance on Modi’s wildly successful policy of cultivating the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia.
Had Hamas’ initial military actions not degenerated into rank terrorism, Modi’s problem might have been trickier to deal with. But now New Delhi cannot but side with Tel Aviv because Hamas’ deplorable behaviour is akin to the LeT’s targeting mainland Indians and Indian troops in Kashmir. And if a harsh Indian response to LeT terror is appropriate in J&K, so is Israeli belligerance in Gaza.
The specific issue of India reciprocating by labelling Hamas a terrorist gang and thus legitimating the Israeli conduct of war in Gaza can be put off for the nonce, but cannot be avoided for long. Not if the conflict in West Asia festers and undoes the lasting rapprochement between Israel and UAE and Bahrain, with Saudi Arabia to follow, promised by the September 2020 Abrahamic Accord. Because then both the sides will be calling in their IOUs.
Like the one-time ruling Bourbons in France, the Indian government and military remember nothing, learn nothing!
Another India-US summit/2×2 or whatever meeting, yet another multi-billion dollar arms deal benefiting, this time General Dynamics Ltd and the US defence industry generally. This is in line with the Indian government’s consistent policy in the Narendra Modi era of buying American military hardware everytime US notables pass through Delhi, or come a-calling, of signing some large arms deal or the other, supposedly to ensure India is in good nick with the Administration of the day in Washington, DC.
The recent visit by US Secretaries of State and Defence, Anthony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, respectively, fetched for America a deal for the General Dynamics product — the Stryker infantry combat vehicle (ICV) ostensibly to replace the roughly 2,000 Russian lightly armoured and armed BMP-2 personnel carriers in service with the Indian army. A more ridiculous and redundant arms buy is hard to imagine if the ‘atmanirbhar Bharat’ principle is kept in mind. Of course, by now atmnirbharta or the arms self-sufficiency notion is so attenuated, it means whatever anybody wants it to mean!
The operating principle seems to be — and this has been so articlulated, if in not so many words, by defence minister Rajnath Singh, which is that because the strategic concerns of India and the US converge re: China, anything the US offers by way of a weapon/weapon system/weapon platform is ipso facto good for the Indian military. So, the Stryker deal may be the precursor for more such transactions to keep the US government happy with Indian monies upkeeping the US defence industry in return for all kinds of rubbishy hardware whose need is not immediately evident.
The US army has the Bradley fighting vehicle and the Stryker infantry carrier in its inventory — two different platforms for differently nuanced battlefield roles. The Bradley is supposed to carry some 6-odd fully outfitted troops right into the battle area, for them to dismount and fight. The Stryker with lighter armour and a weapon — a machinegun, is also meant to carry troops but to an area proximal to the main battlefield — but not the site of actual battle, to allow troops to get out and to manoeuvre in larger space.
In fact, it is precisely the similarity in missions/roles that has led to the questioning of the Stryker in US army circles. And to the move not so much to discard it — because no armed service will ever admit it made a mistake in conceiving of the platform in the first place and expended a lot of funds in securing it, as to upgun it (to 30mm) and fit a mutipurpose turret able to take different weapons ranging from 30mm to 100mm guns, which actually compounds the confusion about its operational utility.
In this context, how does the Stryker fit into the Indian army’s plans? What is absolutely unclear is the rationale for the Stryker in Indian conditions, considering it is turning out to be something of a lemon with the US army. If the Stryker is thought of only as an interim solution to when a genuine light tank can be fielded by XIV Corps formations in Ladakh and in the upland plains of Depsang or in northern Sikkim, then it is an awfully expensive one. The all-up unit cost with full ordnance load of a Stryker could be anything between US$ 15-30 million depending on what version/variant the Pentagon is willing to part with.
Procuring it makes no sense when Tata has a tracked Futuristic ICV in the works. Were Tata to be assured that their product would be inducted (after prototype testing) if it were fast-tracked — this FICV would be available in about the same time frame the Stryker joint production program would get underway here. Then again, if the Stryker is for the Indian army’s consumption alone, why the qualifier ‘joint’ for its production? That’s a mystery as there’s no other potential buyer for it anywhere on the horizon. Indeed, were an assurance on an FICV to be offered all comers in the local defence industry, Bharat Forge and Mahindra too would enter the competition. These companies have already sold lightly armed & armoured wheeled vehicles (light special purpose anti-mine vehicles) to the security forces involved in counterinsurgency antiterrorism operations, as Tata has done with its Kestrel. They would all up their game and develop tracked/wheeled ICVs from new designs in next to no time. Each of these special vehicles has been produced with European help and tech transfer — important for the GOI-MOD-armed services brass who go into brain freeze contemplating wholly indigenous military hardware.
With oodles of prospective profit as effective motivator and driver of defence industries everywhere, why persist in a regressive policy of outsourcing a weapons platform based on automotive/vehicular technologies in a realm in which India has attained the necessary takeoff threshold? The reasonable premise here is that to assign such a high value, high priority, project to the public sector DRDO-Avadi tank factory combine, would be to court the usual disaster.
Why not instead challenge Indian private sector firms to produce in record time something better than Stryker, a challenge they would happily take up, even as other or the same Indian companies are incentivised to design, develop and manufacture, in parallel, on an accelerated schedule a 30-35 tonne genuine light tank to counter the Chinese ‘Black Panther’ ZTQ-15 light tank (with 105mm gun with auto-loader) equipping the PLA? Such an Indian light tank would also be a definite bestseller in the Third World arms bazaar and progressively reduce the unit cost to the Indian army.
The Indian army needs to bear in mind, however, that to field the Stryker or a Tata/Mahindra/Bharat Forge variant against the ZTQ 15 at the Himalayan heights would be to take a knife to a gunfight. The army, like its sister armed services, has over the years made no end of mistakes when it comes to arming itself, usually wastefully at the Indian taxpayer’s expense while reinforcing the country’s dubious status as a prime arms dependency. Unless the contract for it is stalled or sidetracked, which can easily be done, the Stryker in Indian army’s employ will only continue with this Service’s dismal capital acquisitions record.
The apparent success of the G20 summit in New Delhi in September this year no doubt spurred Prime Minister Narendra Modi into envisioning India as host of the 2036 quadrennial summer Olympic Games, which timeline is a bare 13 years away. If India does actually bid for the Games it will be commendable only as a show of the BJP government’s confidence that it can pull off such a gigantic global event. In reality, however, India has not a spitball’s chance in hell to be accorded such privilege.
In the main because the International Olympics Committee (IOC) is ever so picky about where these Games are staged and values the optics of a first class, First World site, perhaps, more than it does the actual competitive physical exertions on the fields of play (as long as they pass off without controversy!). Countries aspiring and eager to host the Games have to meet — and this is an unspoken condition — First World standards not just in the necessary infrastructure — massive modern stadia, large sized swimming pools, a world class velodrome, etc., but for the society to reach that level as well. Even if India is able to afford the price tag — just the sports infrastructure cost China $20 billion 15 years ago, the First World Western public social standards (of cleanliness, of law and order, etc) is a hurdle India cannot cross. It is not as if all that’s required is for the Central and Delhi governments to do what they did for the G20 conference — potemkinise parts of the city the foreign dignitaries would transit for the duration by clearing the underpasses of beggars and destitutes, filling some potholes, giving a new coat of paint to road dividers, placing flower pots at every turn, etc.
Speaking of flower pots — the lack of any basic civic sense or respect for public property in the population, which the IOC puts much store by — remember they prize Western social sensibilities, was evidenced on the day after the summit when whole families — and these did not appear really impoverished, descended on the roads and traffic roundabouts and simply ransacked whatever was not bolted down. The flower pots gracing the roads in Lutyen’s Delhi, for instance, were emptied by these scavengers of the mud and the flowering plants right where they were placed, who then happily decamped with the plastic pots they plan to put to better use. All this activity was, mind you, in full view of the media and no police anywhere in sight! The Times of India next day carried a page one picture of a smiling mother and son carrying away their loot. That photo and the accompanying story would by itself be a disqualification for an appalled IOC, if everything else was on the up and up, which it isn’t.
This might hurt Modi’s amor propre, but the hints of First World prosperity — the metro railways, ‘cyber hubs’ in many cities, notwithstanding India does not remotely meet the eye test of a coming power. Motor past the new airports in the country and one is plunged into the trademark Indian over-populated urban chaos with no urban planning worth the name, decrepitude, filth, and traffic jams everywhere, with lane driving an entirely alien concept to most Indians taking to the road. Whence, two lanes are converted to five with every bit of space occupied by every sort of wheeled vehicle imaginable jostling to get ahead, even as people nonchalantly breathe air so foul IOC board members would baulk at overflying the country let alone landing to take in the scenery.
India is nowhere near a developed state — the absolute prerequisite for any winning Olympics bid. It is still only a slightly improved version of the socialist Third World country it has been since 1947. Little substantive change has occurred because, despite Modi’s election promises of thinning the government and minimizing the government’s role, the sarkari hand is still heavy with everyone who somehow manages to get on the public payroll being guaranteed a life of relative ease and a career doing little except further gumming up the works. As cogs in an over-large brain-frozen bureaucratic state not much more is expected of him. Hardly surprising then, as many have argued, that every caste and sub-caste is agitating for ‘sarkari naukri’ for their youth, and a reservation quota for the purpose. This hankering for government jobs (to wit, Maratha protests) may be reducing even a once vigorous and economically vibrant free enterprise-minded Maharashtra state to a coastal variant of benighted Bihar. “It is all very well to speak of a market-led society”, writes Sanjay Srivastava in the Indian Express of Nov 2, 2023, with Modi’s electoral plank in mind, “but if this happens in a context of an overweening state presence in everyday life, no one is silly enough to actually believe it.”
An overweening government is why India will forever remain under-developed, its people used to government doles wanting more and more freebies until the productive portion of the economy sinks under the weight of the cost of government and the monies it ladles out in the form of unending subsidies and synthetic job creation by padding its rolls. And why the country’s bid for Olympics will continue to be dismissed with barely concealed contempt.
In Asia, Japan had its coming out party as a phoenix rising from the ashes of abject military defeat in World War Two in 1964 with the Olympics and marked the occasion as a technological power by inaugurating the Shinkansen (Series 0, Hikari) ‘bullet train’ speeding at 130 mph — then the fastest in the world . When Seoul had its Olympics in 1988, it marked South Korea’s similarly accelerated ascent from absolute penury and the devastation of war to economic powerhouse and First World state — the first of the ‘little dragons’ to come to the fore. Ten years later, China at the 2008 Beijing Olympics (and with the Winter Olympics last year) spectacularly showcased its all round prowess and new found status as the peer-rival to the United States. The Games also were a salute in kind to the foresight of the ‘Great Helmsman’ — Dengxiaoping who exchanged Maozedong’s ‘Red Book’ for good sense and unleashed the private sector and individual enterprise.
For India’s bid not to be perfunctorily rejected therefore necessitates India’s first making the steep climb to become a genuine developed country in all respects. The rate at which India is actually progressing, however, and realistically speaking, even a bid for the 2060 Olympics — when the population is expected to stabilise around 1.6 billion people — appears a bit optimistic.
This is a wide-ranging interview conducted via video a little over a month ago by Dr. Stephen Hsu, Professor of Theoretical Physics and of Computational Mathematics, Science & Engineering at Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, USA, for his ‘Manifold ‘ podcast No. 46.
[Hamas rockets from Gaza streaking towards Israeli settlements]
The Hamas operation staged out of the Gaza Strip against the adjoining settlements in southern Israel yesterday was astonishing in its complexity and effectiveness. It was not terrorist action, but an extraordinary full-fledged military operation, carried out in complete radio silence, combining absolute surprise with precision coordinated moves involving fighting assets in air, sea and land.
To conceive of such a plan was mindboggling enough. To actually carry it out with such success without Mossad or any other Israeli intellignce unit getting a whiff of it is unthinkable. I mean, where did the Hamas units practice these actions? In Iran? Perhaps. Because this operation couldn’t have been carried out without repeated and intense exercises and live gaming anywhere else. Because it certainly would have been noticed if done in Gaza, or in Jordan, or even in the Sinai Peninsula. Think of it — a coordinated attack by powered gliders, seaborne commando, and bulldozers as infantry-carriers ploughing through the walls Israel had erected to protect its border towns. The operation got underway under the cover of a rocket barrage that overwhelmed the ‘Iron Dome’ — the vaunted Israeli tactical air defence system! What chutzpah (a Yiddish word derived from Hebrew denoting audacity, and pronounced ‘hutspah’)!
Of course, the Hamas aim was to kill Israelis indiscriminately and also to take a large number of them as hostages for eventual exchange of prisoners because the only thing the Israeli state values more than its territory are its people. The casualty-death rate of some 1,250 Israelis in a population of some 10 million may not seem large in absolute numbers. But it becomes earthshaking when one realizes — just to get a perspective — the potential proportionate effect on India if 87,000 Indian citizens were killed in a surprise terrorist attack in a population of 1.3 billion. It is a readymade setting for a ferocious blood-fevered response, and Palestinian Gaza would by now have been decimated but for the fact that the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) does not know where the Israeli hostages are hidden by Hamas, and they cannot take a chance of hurting any of them. So, of course, known Hamas facilities will be bombed as has already been done. But a full Israeli retribution will have to await the hostage return, which fact has bought Hamas a bit of time and even leverage with Jerusalem. But agencies or persons in nearby Islamic countries if they are fingered as having the remotest role in the Hamas operation, will get it in the neck.
And then there is Iran — Israel’s Number One sworn enemy with a prime role in the Hamas op, and against whom IDF would very much like to move soonest. Except, there’s a little political complication. Leading Israeli strategists doubt if US President Joe Biden’s statement issued in support of Israel, tolerates precipitate Israeli reaction. “It is not clear”, writes Eldad Shavit, a former Mossad agent and colonel in Israeli Defence Intelligence, now with the Institute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv, “whether [the US] would support an Israeli response against Hezbollah (or other actors) or would act independently to fulfill its warning.”
The reason Israelis are right is that US security promises are one thing. But quite another thing for IDF to attack Iran frontally and endanger a likely reworked Iranian nonproliferation agreement junked by Trump that’s on the anvil and which, Washington has long argued will address the Israeli government’s fears of Tehran covertly crossing the nuclear weapons threshold. The US fear is also that it may ignite yet another theatre of war with Russia and China jumping in on Iran’s side. But the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu faces a dilemma. He cannot not react violently and order punitive strikes, or something visibly lethal and still keep his government in power, as he has only a slim margin of safety relying as his Likud Party does in the knesset (Parliament) on other rightwing parties, some more extreme than his own. It will be interesting to see how Netanyahu resolves this problem — do something in Gaza and possibly hurt the hostages, take action against Iran and face American wrath, or do neither of these things and see his regime fall.
But to get back to the Hamas action — the uniqueness of this multi-medium, multi-pronged, Hamas operation and the success it fetched is all the more stunning compared to Russia’s failed but ambitious curtain raiser-action to take Kyiv and end the hostilities on the very first day of the war against Ukraine that has gone on for over a year and pretty much dragged the Russian military’s reputation through the mud. On that first day (February 24, 2022), Russia’s plan involved simultaneous paradropped Spetznaz (Special Forces), row upon row of low-flying Su-25 ground attack aircraft, and armoured columns converging on the Ukrainian capital. All this came to nought when the paracommando got shot up when descending, and those who landed were hunted and killed, the Su-25s lost their punch owing to intense and accurate Ukrainian Igla (manpads) strikes and ack-ack, and Russian tanks got bogged down in their advance for a host of reasons.
So, the unexpectedly imaginative Palestinian actions will have several effects: It will pump up the military reputation of, and legitimate, Hamas as Arab Palestine’s premier fighting arm and, proportionately, take down Israel’s well-earnd reputation for a proactive military stance, preparedness and precocity, and especially Mossad’s preternatural situation awareness. It is, moreover, the first notable Islamic military success in, what, a millenniumm?! Islamic military successes have been so few and far between, Muslim peoples everywhere will bask in Hamas’ reflected glory for a while. Politically, it will compel all Islamic countries to fall behind Hamas and the Palestinian cause — blighting certainly in the medium term future the prospects of the Abrahamic accords that the supposed leader of the sunni Islamic world, Saudi Arabia, was all set to join in order to forge an ostensibly permanent Israel-Arab peace. That’s gone for a toss. The calls for jihad against Israel in the Islamic bloc will revive, gain new adherents, new strength, new financing, and Hamas’ future has suddenly brightened beyond its wildest dreams.
But militarily, it is shia Islamic bloc leader, Iran, which will have the most to crow about, and whose image will be burnished because the low level powered-glider descent of the aerial attacking force– the great military innovation in these hostilities, was something Tehran’s shia armed militia in southern Lebanon, Hezbollah, tried out first in 2007 against Israel, and tips and lessons from which action were doubtless onpassed to the Hamas command. It will also be seen as avenging Israeli assassinations over the years of Iranian nuclear/missile scientists and, in January 2020, of the head of the Quds Force — the lead offensive element of the Pasdaran (Iranian Revolutionary Guard), Major General Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad.
What’s the fallout, if any, for India? Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon staffer presently with the conservative think tank — American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC, for one fears that the Hamas action will resonate in terrorist (ISI-aided Laskar-e-Tayyaba, Harkat ul-mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Tehreeq-i-Taliban Pakistan) circles in Pakistan and extremist outfits in J&K, arrayed against India, and that some of these groups would be tempted to try and execute a still bigger bang operation. In the event, if there’s again a Mumbai-type attack or strike on Parliament or worse, India should be prepared to pull out terrorist gangs root and branch from Pakistan, or where ever else they may be found. This is a plausible case for a very hard Indian reaction. May be this is what Prime Minister Narendra Modi is thinking, whence his whole hearted support for Israel even at the cost potentially of harming relations with the Gulf countries with whose leaders he has developed a special warmth.
But should the Indian government not ponder more sustained, harsher, response targeting the violent Khalistani groups residing in safe havens in the US, Canada, and Australia? Ah, there’s the rub!
A Sept 23 Washington Post story (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/23/targeted-killing-canada-india-nijjar/) regarding the killing in Canada of the Khalistani terrorist Harmeet Singh Nijjar quotes a “former senior U.S. intelligence official” as saying “This is Modi looking at the world and saying to himself, ‘The United States conducts targeted killings outside of war zones. The Israelis do it. The Saudis do it. The Russians do it. Why not us?’ And none of the [nations] we just mentioned pay much of a price.”
The above-quoted American intel officer was honest. But India’s case for extra-judical, extra-territorial killing of Nijjar, the terrorist — assuming it is at all true — is far beefier than the instance of an Indian PM ordering the elimination of an outlaw. If Indian government is proven to have a hand, then it is in good company because India will merely have emulated these other countries, with the United States in the lead, who quite routinely bump off not only terrorists in their safe havens — think Osama bin Laden — but foreign individuals they deem a threat or an obstacle to achieving their foreign policy goals. Recall in this respect the cold-blooded assassination of Dr Homi J Bhabha because Washington apprehended he was getting India the A-bomb. A timed explosive placed in the cargo hold of the Air India Mumbai-Geneva flight AI 101 carrying Bhabha blew up in January 1966 on the slopes of Mount Blanc.
An US Central Intelligence Agency operative, Robert Crowley, who later headed clandestine ops for the agency confessed to carrying out this “kill” that along with Bhabha took the lives of hundreds of innocent passengers. But the Indian government made no fuss about this act of assassination-sabotage, nor was anyone held responsible, even though America’s hand in the death of their chief has ever since been the talk in Trombay circles. It became a precedent-setter for other countries. Israel, for instance, has regularly done away by various means numerous Iraqi and Iranian nuclear scientists.
Assassination as a diplomatic tool is of ancient origin and in the policy toolkit of most leading countries. “Holier than thou” states, such as Nehruvian India, refrained from deploying it, and were victimised. Things may have changed in the Modi era, by how much is not clear. There is still institutional reluctance to go after terrorists who do the nation serious harm while living abroad.
The good thing is not only has New Delhi not been apologetic about its stance on the Nijjar issue, it has taken the offensive in painting Canada as a facilitator of terrorism, which it is, in that it indiscriminately lets in Khalistani terrorists-criminals-gangsters and compounds the problem for everybody by letting them openly pursue terrorist aims of reviving an extinguished secessionist movement in Punjab from their refuge in Canada, UK and the US.
The Indian external affairs minister S Jaishankar is in the US for the next 8-odd days. He will hopefully take the natural step of declaring Canada an epicentre of international terrorism. If Pakistan harbouring a variety of Islamic extremists has been hauled up in the UN, FATF, etc why should Canada get a free pass just because it justifies terrorism promoted in Indian Punjab by Khalistanis it has welcomed as something protected by free speech? India has all the evidence it needs for crucifying Ottawa’s complicity as aider and facilitator of terrorism.
How fertile a ground is Canada for these Khalistani terrorists? Whole swaths of Canadian territory are today overrun by these militant Sikhs — as has been reported in the Canadian Press and media — engaged in illegal enterprises from running drug and crime syndicates, suspicious nightclubs, to murdering each other for any of a host of reasons — which is the likely cause of Nijjar’s mafia style execution, for the control of the lucrative gurdwara businesses dotting the Canadian landscape on that country’s eastern and western seaboards.
As regards the Canadian government’s complicity: How about Nijjar being allowed entry into Canada on a passport saying ‘Ravi Sharma’ and, who instead of being returned by the first available flight, was offered refugee status by the Canadian immigration authorities obviously under Ottawa’s instruction to admit into the country any and all Sikhs claiming political persecution irrespective of their criminal/terrorist background, or even a red alert Interpol notice as was the case with Nijjar. If Canada is politically unwilling to act on an Interpol red alert because the Liberal Party ruling with a slim majority can ill aford to upset its coalition partner — the Khalistan-leaning New Democratic Party of Jugmeet Singh, can it be relied on to respect any other international law? In the event, how is Canada different than, say, Pakistan, where too state agencies provide anti-India Islamic terrorists succour, residence, and legal and physical protection?
Nijjar was no workaday plumber peacefully propagating the Khalistan cause on weekends at his gurdwara as Ottawa would like the world to believe, but the head of the dreaded Khalistan Tiger Force committing atrocities, and charged with several murders and bombing of a cinema house in Punjab — information long ago transmitted to the Canadian government. Col. Amarinder Singh, then chief minister of Punjab reveals he gave a list of 16 Canada-based Khalistani terrorists to Justin Trudeau when he visited India in 2018, which fetched only Canadian inaction.
It is important in terms of what I flagged in the previous post about the US and the West using Khalistan as leverage against India that, it is now reported by New York Times, Trudeau based his allegation of India’s role in Nijjar’s death on signals intelligence onpassed by the US. So the Biden Administration is here playing a bit of double game — encouraging Ottawa to stick with its accusatory stance while informing Delhi that India enjoys no “exemption” from whatever punitive action Washington may decide on at an opportune time when the Modi regime does not jump when the White House asks it to.
Then again there are different yardsticks to gauge violation of law. If an assassination is carried out by the US, UK, Australia, it presumably is okay; not so much if it is done by other countries. The Washington Post story referred earlier, picked up this point. “U.S. officials have long argued”, it notes, ” that these and other operations bear little resemblance to the actions of states like Russia, noting that U.S. operations involve extensive legal review, assessments of an imminent threat and determinations that a capture or arrest of the suspect in question are not possible.” These rationales, the story concludes, “often ring hollow overseas.” And for good reason because the US and the West fail to acknowledge that other countries who may decide on assassinating a terrorist, say, may do so after they have exhausted all the available legal remedies and their patience has run out, and that such extra-judicial kills are not ordered for fun, or for the heck of it but because the host nation that is supposed to apprehend the terrorist, does not. The dossier given Ottawa was full of evidence to nail Nijjar, and yet the Trudeau regime deliberately did nothing. And now it is squawking because Nijjar got his just deserts, and the US, the most brazen perpetrator of extra-territorial mayhem, is harrumphing about it?
Risbly, Trudeau in New York brought up rules-based order. “We’re not looking to provoke or cause problems” he explained. “We’re standing up for the rules-based order.” So, India is expected to follow the rules while Canada is free to ignore them? This is the attitude that has spurred Delhi’s contempt for Canada, which Modi tried hard not to show on his face but failed, when he perfunctorily shook hands with Trudeau at the G20 summit.
Still, however Nijjar was got rid off, it will send a salutary message to other would be Khalistani terrorists that there’s nowhere to hide. Combined with the measures to expropriate their properties in Punjab, it should have the desired chilling impact. Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the so-called “General Counsel” of the Sikhs for Justice — a thinly veiled peaceful front for the terrorist Khalistan movement, for instance, is the first one to thus lose his properties. He is supposed to be a “sleeping” partner in several commercial enterprises, which also should be on the radar of the NSA Court.
It will help to snuff out the Khalistan issue for good if combined with property expropriation, Artificial Intelligence and face-recognition technologies are used, as has been suggested by many, to identify Sikhs in Canada indulging in violent protests targeting Indian diplomats, consular offices and the High Commission in Ottawa, and to revoke their PIO (persons of Indian origin) card and permanently ban their entry into India. These moves should be well publicised by Indian diplomats in Canada and the effect of all these actions is bound to deflate the publicity-seeking Khalistanis, and thin out the crowds supporting their cause. And finally, the entry of Sikh Canadians into Punjab during state or general elections should also be prohibited because, if the previous elections are a guide, they are the source of much violence and corruption, as they used strongarm methods to try and get elected their slate of sympathizers, which is something India cannot afford to see happen.
But officially condoned or sponsored assasination is a sovereign imperative of a state to protect itself. Like the US, India too needs a law to legitimize such kill operations, a law that the Indian government then makes the world aware of both as a deterrent and by way of providing legal cover and protection to RAW agents and their affiliates. It is precisely the absence of such a law that led to KPS Gill’s special Punjab Police commando who stifled the Khalistan movement in Punjab with exemplary ruthlessness being targeted by Human Rights advocates and social do-gooders in the post-insurrection phase that led to many among these anti-Khalistan fighters facing the ignominy of prison sentences committing suicide — a denouement Gill to the very last never forgave the Indian government for.
So, a priority is for the Modi Government to draft and pass such a law legalizing the dispatching of terrorists with “extreme prejudice”. It can be subsumed under the “Self defence” Chapter VII, Article 51 of the UN Charter. So that extra-judicial and extra-territorial punishments carried out to quell terrorism and in the furtherance of state objectives are openly and legally permissible. China has passed its sovereignty law that legitimates Beijing’s decisions, policies and practices. India needs such a law to provide the legal undergirding to shrug off the pressure from the overly legalistic US government.
[After first uploading this post, someone sent me a notice about a 2004 book referencing Canada’s emergence as spawner of international terror that makes the point I have been making about Canada as epicentre of international terrorism: The book is by Stephen Bell — ‘Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World’ (John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd., 2004, 2007)]
“Khali stan”, I recall the late Khushwant Singh guffawing, “is the vacant space between the ears of some Jat Sikhs safely settled in Canada, America and Britain!” He had in his hand a map he had secured from somewhere showing a supposed sovereign Sikh state carved out of the Indian Union in what is Indian Punjab but with a corridor to the sea, mirroring the equally ridiculous “corridor” Mohammad Ali Jinah sought in 1947 to connect the two wings of Pakistan!
With or without this corridor, ‘Khalistan’ is a quixotic concept first mooted by Master Tara Singh-led Shiromani Gurdwara Prabhandak Committee in the heyday of Partition politics leading upto independence in 1947. It has even less to do with recovering Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s realm that mostly stretched west and northwestwards from Lahore to the gates of Kabul and was amalgamated in British India after the two Anglo-Sikh wars of the mid-19th century had reduced that kingdom. The British cleverly coopted the youth of Sikh yeomanry into the British enterprise by claiming for them as for other similarly placed ‘Kulak’ communities of the Indian subcontinent (such as Punjabi mussulmans) “martial race” status and recruiting them in droves into the colonial army.
The departing British played a whole lot of mischief but even they saw just how ridiculous and geographically impracticable this Sikh nation concept was and, certain sections within Whitehall apart, urged the Sikh leadership to unite with India. In the main, because Jinnah’s claim for separate nationhood for India’s Muslims was at least based on the religio-cultural cleavage between Islam and Hindusim. Whence the Qaid’s famous remark in 1946-47 to the visiting Field Marshal the Viscount Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial Defence Staff, to the effect that you expect the Hindu and the Muslim to live together when “one venerates the cow and the other eats it”? The link between Hindus and Sikhs, however, is as it is said between teeth and gum, and how it was the social norm until not too long ago for Hindu families to have at least one son take “amrit” and adopt Sikhism — a religion the founding gurus, especially Guru Gobind Singh, conceived as the protector arm of Hinduism to deal with Mughal excesses. Inter-marriage between Hindus and Sikhs, therefore, was commonplace in Punjabi society. It is the aggressive attitude Jat Sikhs in particular took as their calling card and which animates the Khalistan promoters today.
It may be recalled that the renewed calls for Khalistan in Punjab began to be heard once again in the 1970s when the Indian government, in order to make the army more representative, decided on halving the Sikh component from 10-12 % to around 5%. 10-12% of the Sikh male youth population constituted a fairly large percentage of the potential military labour market and made for the relative prosperity of the landed peasantry in Punjab. It is the 5-6% of the Jat Sikh sections, who could not anymore be accommodated within the army, that took to the Khalistan movement as essentially an employment generation scheme, just as many in the Muslim middleclass saw Pakistan and moved there.
The DG, Punjab Police, the late legendary KPS Gill, in fact, put to work precisely the militant Jat Sikh mentality to counter Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his motivated horde that ran amok in the 1980s. Bhindranwale was the political monster the Dr Frankenstein in Indira Gandhi had created in Punjab to undercut former Punjab chief minister Zail Singh and his cronies! All this is what Gill, whose daughter married a Hindu, recounted to me about how he had contained the extremist Khalistanis. He did this over an extended evening in his Z-security covered house in Lodi Estate while polishing off an entire bottle of Black Label without any slurring of speech at the end of it, displaying an amazing level of tolerance for liqour. I asked him to write it all down, which he did in an eye-popping chapter — “The Dangers Within: The Internal Security Threats” in a seminal collection of essays I edited — ‘Future Imperilled: India’s Security in the 1990s and Beyond’ published by Penguin in 1994. Among the essayists was also General Khalid Arif who ran the Pakistan Army even as fellow Ariani and Jullundar native, General Zia ul Haq, ran Pakistan.
Gill narrated his use of an attribute of Jat Sikh mentality of feeling easily aggrieved against the Bhindranwale crowd, who had let loose a reign of terror against the nationalist Sikhs in the Punjab countryside. He told me in that evening of reminiscences — a sanitised version formed the essay in the book — how he visited each family of nationalist Jat Sikhs who were terrorised by the Khalistanis, and asked them to offer up recruits for a special commando force to be formed within Punjab Police. He promised the youngmen who saw their fathers and mothers killed, and sisters raped and killed, “before their eyes” by the Bhindranwale Khalistani extremists, that they would be appropriately trained and would have the opportunity and the official license to hunt down and kill those who had visted attrocities on their families “like dogs”. Nothing is so central to Jat Sikh mentality, Gill told me, than to avenge a personal wrong. These Punjab Police commando had absolute freedom and they used it ruthlessly and bloodily to eliminate the Khalistanis — literally “one by one” until the relatively few who remained ran, hid and survived, finding refuge in Canada and the US. It broke the back of the Khalistan movement in the country. But prophetically, Gill warned that the Khalistani element had NOT been pulled out “root and branch” from Punjab because he was prevented by Delhi from doing so. And, that there were enough sympathizers who had gone “deep underground” or were being nursed by ISI in Pakistan, with a small, vocal group in Canada and Britain where their numbers provided the Khalistan movement visibility and the electoral and political clout to keep it going in foreign lands.
I remember visiting Mississauga, a suburb of Toronto dubbed the “the capital of Khalistan” in Canada in the mid-1980s. By 2011, Canadian census indicated, there were 23,995 Sikh residents, some 25% of the population of that township. Some estimate that the Sikh population figure today has gone up to 50,000! Notable Sikh communities have since grown in other suburbs in the Greater Toronto region — Stockdale, Rexdale, Malton, etc.. There are equally large Sikh enclaves, such as Surrey, in the western Canadian province of British Columbia, where the Canadian government alleges a Gurdwara head and well known Khalistani — Hardeep Singh Nijjar, was “assasinated” by Indian agents, and in response kicked out Pawan Kumar Rai identified by Ottawa as “head of Intelligence” in the Indian High Commission. Nijjar is an extremist who entered Canada on fake visa and papers! How was he allowed into Canada? Then again, how did the Indian immigration permit him to get out of India in the first place? The Modi regime reacting in double quick time declared Rai’s opposite number here non grata and asked him to to leave the country immediately.
It is this issue that reportedly led to a very frosty meeting of Modi with the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau on the sidelines of the recent G20 summit. Trudeau is a dynastic politician, whose father Pierre Trudeau was the fashionable “new age” leader who was prime minister in two stints (1968-1979, 1980-1984) for over 15 years and in a sense bequeathed the Liberal Party leadership to his son — a phenomenon not unknown in Indian politics! Justin Trudeau understands the electoral logic of courting Canadian Sikh votes and has always been solicitous of Khalistanis within the Canadian fold. The Canadian government’s attitude to Sikh terrorists in their midst is a farce. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police took forever to find the Sikh extremists hiding in plain sight responsible for blowing up over the Atlantic Air India flight AI 182 enroute Mumbai via London in June 1985, and then they were let go with light prison sentences. And this for the cold-blooded murder of 329 passengers on-board. But how this Anglosaxon quartet (US, UK, Canada, Australia) moaned, groaned, swore vengeance against Moamar Gaddafi and eliminated him in 2011 for, among other things, the supposed bombing of the New York-bound Panam Flight 203 with only 270 passengers over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988! And these are the governments hyperventilating about the shooting down of Nijjar?
The trouble Justin Trudeau has created for the Modi regime is this: He revealed that he had initiated an investigation into the potential Indian government role in Nijjar’s elimination after consulting with the US and British governments. The fact is it won’t be long before Ottawa squarely and formally blames New Delhi for the killing. And then what? The Biden Administration will be as “principle”-bound as the Conservative party government of Rishi Sunak to support Trudeau. Economic sanctions may not follow, but Washington will dangle it over Modi’s head like a Damocles’s sword — a pressure point to get Modi to do what Washington wants. Sure enough the British and Australian governments too followed in wagging their fingers at India, and reminding India to make good on its liberal professions! And Canadian pension funds who have made a pretty penny out of investing in Indian banks (like Kotak Mahindra) and companies will be ordered or feel compelled to withdraw the billions of dollars they have in equity, and lose out big time.
This is the downside I have been warning about with regard to Modi’s policy of cultivating the US and the West. It can at any time come back and bite India. The shortfalls in a still maturing Indian democracy will always be held against this country and used as leverage. In the instant case, the West-based Khalistanis are a venomous lot and some opponent faction likely killed Nijjar — a pattern long established in intra-Sikh politics of Punjab. These terrorist outlaws will do everything in their power to provoke and have their governments act punitively vis a vis India by mobilising public opinion — which is easily done everytime a local, state, or federal election rolls around, which is all the time in Canada, UK and the US. It is unlikely Ottawa will investigate the often violent gurdwara politics in Canada for Nijjar’s demise when it is much easier and politically beneficial for Trudeau to cast aspesions on India.
The Indian government has to not only strongly refute and rebuff Western governments but also make it absolutely clear to Ottawa, London and Washington that Khalistani Sikhs can happily shout and scream all they want, but if they cross the line in attacking Indian diplomats and diplomatic premises and agitate violently for a sovereign state of Khalistan, they do so at their own risk. But that Delhi will happily help anybody — if Ottawa wishes — to carve out a Khalistan in Canada where there’s lot of space available for such venture. And, moreover, that India will brook no Khalistan activity in Punjab or anywhere in India and, like it or not, the more rabid and risk-acceptant among the Khalistanis should prepare to pay a heavy price. Expropriation by the state of their valuable agricultural land and other wealth in Punjab presently held as “benami” properties, etc being only one such measure.
To end on a joke, because for some Sikhs in the “gurdwara business” in North America, “Khalistan” has always been a shrug and wink away from being a full-fledged money-making racket. I remember writing in 1983-84 about Ganga Singh Dhillon and his separatist cause in the US being funded by American intel agencies, which report was publicly picked up and commented by Prime Minister Indira G (few months before her assassination). The jovial looking Ganga Singh, who was banned in 1981 by the Indian government from travelling to India, got in touch with me and, on our meeting, reduced me to helpless laughter. “Arrey, Paji”, I vividly recall him saying in his thait Punjabi English, “You are blaming CIA, DIA, next you’ll blame PIA!”
The Narendra Modi government apparently does not know when it is ahead, and why not to retard the country’s rise by a self-inflicted wound that may appear trivial — such as changing the name of the country — but is not.
The Modi government is reportedly threatening to do something recklessly foolish that will leave everyone befuddled, scratching their heads in incomprehension. In the instant case, it is the Modi regime’s prospective re-branding of India as Bharat. Of course, I was quite happy that the country was being named after me, but disappointed to learn from the official spoilsports — S Jaishankar and Co., who rather warily explained to the Press that it is the alternative moniker for the country mentioned in the very first line of the Constitution — “India, that is Bharat…”, etc. Then Sanjeev Sanyal, economic adviser to the PM, educated us TV newswatchers on history stretching back to God knows when and the birth of the “Bharati empire” originating in present day Haryana, and whatnot. All this was informative and enlightening, but I still felt a little uneasy, my immediate concerns being practical.
My unease was with the name Bharat, my name and touted as possibly the country’s as well. Years of my early adult life spent in California had accustomed me to Westerners, even well meaning ones, routinely mangling my name. Scouring my memory, I cannot recall a single American from among my friends, fellow students, girl friends, class mates, project colleagues, and professors in all my years as an undergrad and grad student at the University of California and, later in life, professional acquaintances and, generally, lay people I met over the decades in Western countries, getting my name right. Despite extended personal tutorials from me the most the best among them could manage was a variation of “Baharat” (with empasis on RAT pronounced as in rat, the rodent). My friends, showing less patience, just called me “Brat” (with the snarky among them suggesting this abbreviated form fit my personality better)!
The trouble Westerners have with this word is because the aspirated “bh” is missing from the English language — look up the Oxford Dictionary (and, as far as I know, from any known European language)! Therefore, try as hard as they might, Westerners invariably will mispronounce it. Beyond a point, I discovered, it was futile to correct them, and even less to badger them to get it right. Asians — Arabs, who also can only say Baharat, but Chinese, otherAsians in the Sinic sphere, are in many respects worse, and I could never, and still cannot, make out whatever they call(ed) me (in seminars, conferences, etc) and short of being directly addressed or tapped on the shoulder, I always fail(ed) to respond.
This post is a cautionary one for the “President of BAHARAT” — whatever that is, who is set to dine with G20 dignitaries and fated hereafter — if the name sticks — to hear Western pooh-bahs standing up to give a toast and tripping right away on the word and, amidst much embarrassment among natives of this land present on the occasion, generally making a mess of the intended goodwill, as well!
It is obvious that prompted by the RSS, the change of name for the country from the G-20 platform was a trial balloon sent up by Modi. Many foreign delegates getting an invitation from the Rashtrapati Bhavan to the high dinner may have done a double take, wondering if by mischance their planes had landed in the wrong, but for some reason dressed up, country and they were missing out on the G-20 confab happening in India. If it was a balloon, it has fallen flat. Best to keep Bharat for domestic consumption where it belongs and makes sense, and then only in domestic political discourse. Because commercially some have taken this name changing move seriously enough for wags to twitter that Indigo airline, for instance, would be rebranding itself as ‘Bhago’! In other words, ‘Bharat’ will be the butt of unending jokes. Not to mention the enormous cost — as in literally tens of billions of dollars to advertise the change worldwide, and on all mastheads, crests, on government stationery, etc., only for non-South Asians to mutilate it any way.
INDIA is an extraordinarily evocative historical name derived from the word Sindhu that was persianised to ‘Hindu’ as Sanyal mentioned. Recall why the legendary leader of the XIV Army, Field Marshal William Slim, considered the greatest field commander in the Allied ranks in the Second World War, when offered the post by Nehru of Commander-in-Chief, India, declined saying that Pakistan was no more a part of the India his army would have to protect. But that’s a historical piffle compared to the fact that over several millennia literally millions of peoples everywhere, and especially in the modern era, have been familiar with ‘India’ and relatively few with ‘Bharat’. Reviving an ancient name for the country for the heck of it, or to get back to cultural roots, is all very well as an RSS-BJP hobbyhorse until it runs up against reality, and then it will be an incalculable diplomatic and all-round disaster.
A Bloomberg story mentions the economic cost to the country that Modi did not factor into his decision to overnight demonetise high denomination currency notes. The political, diplomatic, and economic costs of the name change will be unimaginably higher. For one, as has been pointed out, Pakistan, presently in the depths of despond, could rightly claim India as its name, as a co-successor state to British India, and make a new and fresh start, at our nomenclatural expense, ride on the goodwill and visibility India has generated over time even as we curdle in our own reduction to ‘Bharat’, and this when the country is set to make an economic leap. American and Japanese companies and Saudi and UAE sovereign funds are keen on investing massive amounts of monies in India. Will they be as enthused to do so in Bharat?
There is universal goodwill and name recognition attached to ‘India’ that Indians have benefitted immensely from. Think IT. India is an incomparable and unmatched supernumerary brand. Pettily then, does Modi really want to cut off the I.N.D.I.A political opposition’s nose to spite India’s face by promoting ‘Bharat’? Wouldn’t it be better if he approaches the Election Commission to reject the INDIA name for the opposing coalition gunning for him in the 2024 general electionsr?
The Harvard development economist Lant Pritchett has called India a “flailing state”. A key attribute of such a state is that it often does not know why it is doing what it is does (or, why else would it flail?). In any case, such a state often ends up hurting itself, its cause. In this context, what’s worse than a deep, irreparable and self-inflicted wound than changing the name of the country just when it is finally taking off? It is nothing like changing the Indian Navy’s flag — removing the St George’s cross from its ensign. No one has quite explained why such a formal name change is necessary or even right other than as an RSS-Modi brainwave of the moment that the country can well do without.
Let Bharat remain the common currency in the realm of internal politics and in the language of cultural discourse. But, otherwise, let India be India. “India” carries heft, has a full history behind it, and the name resonates expansively worldwide. It is ludicrous to give up so much for relatively so little. Let it be. Let India just be.
Security Wise 