Manmohan Singh’s Washington Visit

Indian Prime minister, Manmohan Singh’s yatra to the United States came on the heels of President Barrack Obama’s visit last month to the Peoples Republic of China. In the joint Sino-US communiqué the two nations declared their readiness to facilitate dialogue between the rival neighbors, India and Pakistan, which could facilitate peaceful resolution of the South Asian conflict.

Instead of welcoming the letter and spirit of the joint statement, India once again reacted with angry tantrum over the peaceful gesture of the two superpowers. India threw a fit and went in to a rage at a benign, positive and peaceful gesture which would usually be welcomed by any calm, secure, civilized and peace-seeking nation. This is very typical of  India which sees itself beyond any advice and counsel or offer of help. In its mean-spirited arrogance Indians bite even the hand that feeds them. Indians should know that their economy and technology is heavily dependent on US benevolence. Its scientists could never have learnt what the have, but for US institutions and governmental assistance. India is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the US academic institutions and high-tech companies, like Bill Gates Microsoft Company, to name just one. For all the decades of being one of the closest friends of the Communist Soviet Union against the United States, India should feel indebted to the US for granting it the status of a favored business partner. US has a short memory and tends to forget its true friends, and India certainly is not one of them. This latest absurdity over the Sino-US declaration is very typical of Indian character and the US must not lose sight of that.

Indians wasted no time in dispatching their prime minister to neutralize any positive effect of the China trip on the president of the United States. China is a gigantic country with an unparalleled civilization and a positive sense of its destiny. It is not as petty and quarrelsome as India traditionally has been. It is not trying to project itself beyond its worth and importance in the world affairs. It does not bully its neighbors. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of India. India has tried hard to make things difficult for its neighbors, not only for Kashmir and Pakistan, but even for Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim and Bangladesh. It has been meddlesome and subversive in all of these nations ever since its emergence as a free country fro the British Occupation.  It even invaded its gigantic neighbor, the third largest and the most populous nation in the world, China in 1962. It is locked in an ongoing dispute over Arunachalpardesh with China. Despite this hostile history and adversarial attitude, President Ho Jintao made a peace overture in the joint statement with President Obama, jointly offering their good offices in promoting reconciliation between  Pakistan, a long standing friend of both China and the United States, and India, a long standing enemy of both.

One is not very sure which one is the bigger obsession of India, Pakistan or China? It keeps fighting against both, even though neither one of the two is an avowed enemy of India. India has received a huge tonnage of military hardware and technology from the Soviets, the French, and the Israelis and of course the US. It received accelerated nuclear weapons technology and assistance during the Bush era for the ‘sweet mangoes’ as former president, Bush put it. All that deadly weaponry, the US thought, would  groom India as a counterbalance against the rising power of China as a superpower. This is a deadly mistake on the part of the United States. India is nobody’s friend. It uses all at its own terms and for its own narrow purpose. It  will only serve to escalate a destructive arms race in the region. This policy is fatally flawed. The Indians will use the American-supplied weaponry first and foremost against Pakistan which is their immediate and intrinsic obsession. It will, probably never use it against the might China and if it ever does so, it will not be to defend American national interests, but to further Indian nefarious designs in the region. No matter what the Indians say about their superiority over Pakistan, it is Pakistan whose ghost is riding over Indian mind ever since the emergence of Pakistan. As the smaller nation, Pakistan, having had the audacity to seek a secure homeland of its own, to protect its Islamic cultural heritage, is driving Indian mind eternally crazy. That gives India the negative energy to be strident and boastful at every chance it gets.

That brings us to Mr. Singh’s nonsensical interview with Washington DC think tanks during his recent visit. He blames Pakistan for all of India’s ills. He rants about terrorism over and over again. He scoffs at Pakistan’s sacrifices in combating extremists in the frontier region. He would like Pakistan to kill its own people to protect India against Freedom fighters in Kashmir. He makes no mention of the massacres of Muslims and other minorities by Hindu extremists ever since1947 were never met with force by successive Indian regimes. Nor does he address the root cause of violence in Pakistan and Kashmir.  The fact is that Indian occupation of Kashmir for the last 62 years is the primary cause of the turmoil. It is Indian barbarity, repeated massacres, gang rapes and state terrorism in Kashmiris that is the root cause of the violence. Kashmir has been terrorized by the Indian soldiers since 1947 and again since 1990. India has been illegally holding millions of Kashmiris under a totalitarian regime against their wishes. That is the cause of the unrest in the region.
Why? Mr. Singh, do you think Kashmiris are frustrated, exasperated and in open revolt against your murderous rapist army?  Why do you call the civilian terrorists from other nations as ‘murderous terrorists’ while you do not control, let alone condemn with equal vehemence, your rogue military which has perpetuated a reign of terror in the State of Jammu and Kashmir for the last six decades. Your soldiers had fresh Kashmiri blood on their hands even as you were talking big to the media in Washington DC.

Force will never solve the Kashmir issue. Kashmiris will never give in to Indian military force. Sooner or later David will triumph over Goliath and force it to retreat in humiliation. Brute force and genocide may have silenced the Sikhs( Mr. Singh’s religious kins) in Punjab, as an ex-prime minister of India, Narsima Rao, proudly boasted on a British radio show during his regime. But, Kashmir is a different story altogether. Impossible as it might seem from the snapshot view of the regional politics; many invaders far more powerful than Kashmiris, have had to beat a retreat in the past Kashmir. The will and the staying power of the Kashmiris must prevail over the might of the invader.