Dear Mr.President,
Addressing an inter-religious meeting in Washington on March 10,
you are reported to have stated as follows while alluding to your forthcoming visit to
South Asia: " The most dangerous place in the world today, I think you could argue,
is the Indian sub-continent and the Line of Control in Kashmir. Is that an ethnic conflict
or religious one? To understand and make the journey, one would have to learn not only
about ethnic and racial differences, but also religious differences."
This is yet another example of the ignorance about India and
Pakistan, which prevails in the US academic, and policy-making circles.
It would be useful if the South Asia Division of the US State
Department would highlight the following points in their briefing notes for you,
Mr.President, provided you have the time and inclination to read them:
* In 1947, when India and Pakistan became
independent, India had an estimated Muslim population of about 50 million; today, the
number of Muslims in India is more than the total population of Pakistan (130 million.).
In 1947, Pakistan (the Western part of it) had a Hindu population of about 10 million.
Today, it has less than one million. Last year, a Balochi associate of Qazi Hussain Ahmed,
the Amir of the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan, had quoted the Amir as bragging how the
Islamic fundamentalist parties of Pakistan had drastically reduced the number of Hindus,
either by forcing them to convert to Islam or by driving them out of Pakistan.
* Under the Indian Constitution, any citizen, irrespective
of his religion, ethnicity or mother tongue can hold any office. In its 53-year-old
history, India has had two Muslims, one Sikh and one member of the so-called Hindu
backward classes as the President of the country. Muslims, Sikhs, Christians and other
minorities have held sensitive charges as Home Ministers, Defence Ministers and Ministers
for External Affairs. Under the Pakistan Constitution, only a Muslim can be the President.
Though there is no bar on non-Muslims holding other offices, there has been no instance
since 1947 of a non-Muslim being appointed to any sensitive post.
* The Indian armed forces have been headed at various times
by non-Hindu religious minorities such as Christians, Muslims, Sikhs and Parsis. Members
of the linguistic minorities have headed the armed forces for more number of years than
those of the linguistic majority group. No non-Muslim and very few Sindhi and
Balochi-speaking Muslims have ever headed any of the Pakistani armed forces. No Hindu has
ever been recruited to the commissioned ranks of the Pakistani armed forces.
* India's civil administration has had and continues to
have many Departments, including sensitive ones, headed by religious, ethnic and
linguistic minorities. Of the three members of India's present Election Commission, one is
a Sikh (the head of the Commission), the second a Christian from the North-East and the
third a Hindu. Pakistan has had two Parsis occupying important positions in its Foreign
Service, because of their personal friendships with Zia-ul-Haq and Benazir Bhutto. There
is no other instance of a non-Muslim occupying sensitive positions in the civil
administration.
* Some racial minority members of the US Secret Service
have recently complained of discrimination against them in the US Secret Service.
According to their petition as reported in the "International Herald Tribune"
(February 25), less than 10 per cent of the supervisory posts in the Secret Service are
held by the racial minorities and, for the first time in the history of the Service, a
racial minority officer was put on close-proximity security duty with the President only
last year. Even though racial minorities have risen to senior positions in the US Armed
forces, no one has ever headed any of the sensitive agencies of the US intelligence
community. No non-Muslim is ever recruited to the agencies of the Pakistani intelligence
community and no Sindhi and Balochi-speaking Muslim has ever been appointed to senior
level supervisory posts except under Benazir Bhutto, a Sindhi. More than 33 per cent of
the middle and senior level posts in India's intelligence community are held by religious,
ethnic and linguistic minorities. Of the 13 officers who had headed the Research &
Analysis Wing (R&AW), the most sensitive of the Indian intelligence community, since
its creation in 1968, 10 belonged to the religious and linguistic minorities-- four of the
10 being from the non-Hindu religious minorities. Only three of the 13 chiefs belonged to
a linguistic majority group. After the raid by the armed forces into the holy Golden
Temple of the Sikhs in June, 1984, Indian security officials consulted their counterparts
in the Western countries, including the US, on how to strengthen the security of
Mrs.Indira Gandhi. They unanimously advised that all officers belonging to religious and
ethnic minorities should be removed from close-proximity duties. They pointed out that no
minority officer was ever put on close-proximity security of the President and no Irish
Catholic was ever deployed on the close-proximity security of the Queen and the Prime
Minister of the UK. Mrs.Gandhi was horrified by the advice and rejected it indignantly.
* The counter-insurgency forces in Jammu & Kashmir and in the
North-East have often been headed by non-Hindu officers. In the 53-year-history of India,
there has been no instance of an officer of the religious or linguistic majority group
prosecuted for acts of violence or other illegal acts against the minority being acquitted
by the courts because of his belonging to the majority. The recent case in New York, where
some White Police officers who brutally killed an innocent Black Senegalese, were
acquitted by the jury, doesn't strengthen the USA's credentials to preach to India on the
rights of the religious, ethnic, racial and linguistic minorities.
* The founding fathers of independent India had laid down that no
member of the majority group from outside Kashmir and the North-East should be allowed to
acquire land or other immovable property in those areas so that the economic rights of the
minorities were not affected. Security officials from a number of countries, including the
US and Israel, had pointed out to their Indian counterparts in the past that this
self-imposed prohibition on the majority from settling down in the minority areas was the
root cause of India's problems with terrorism in Kashmir and insurgency in the North-East.
India's enlightened political leadership and civil administration have steadfastly adhered
to this prohibition and refused to dilute them, even if they had to pay a heavy price for
it. In Pakistan, Zia had Punjabi ex-servicemen settled all along the irrigation canals in
Sindh to weaken the Sindhi nationalist movement, Punjabi and Pathan ex-servicemen settled
in Balochistan to weaken the Balochi nationalist movement and in the Northern Areas
(Gilgit and Baltistan) to reduce the local Shias to a minority. Quetta, the capital of
Balochistan, is fast becoming a Punjabi-Pathan city, with the Balochis reduced to a
minority in their own capital, and in the Northern Areas, the Shias are a
fast-disappearing group. The officer, who faithfully carried out these programmes to
weaken the linguistic and sectarian minorities in their traditional homelands, on behalf
of Zia, was Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the now blue-eyed General of the American academic and
policy-making communities.
* There have been no Shia-Sunni clashes in India. In
Pakistan, hardly a month passes without a massacre of the Shias in some part of the
country or the other. During a meeting with Ashok Mehta, an important Minister in the
Cabinet of the then Prime Minister Morarji Desai, at Paris in January 1979, Ayatollah
Khomeni, the leader of the Islamic Revolution of Iran, thanked the Government of India for
the way it was protecting the Shias of India. He described India as the safest country in
the world for the Shias and alleged that Zia-ul-Haq and the other Pakistani army officers
overthrew Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto in 1977, because, according to the Ayatollah, his wife
Nusrat Bhutto was a Shia from Iran.
Of course, there have been horrendous acts of violence against
the minorities in India, the latest of them being the brutal murder of an Australian
Christian missionary in Orissa last year. Various sections of the majority community---the
academic circles, the media, the non-government organisations and many political
leaders---were the first to condemn these acts of brutalities against the minorities.
The electronic and printed media spared no efforts to expose
these acts of violence against the minorities and those responsible. In Pakistan, apart
from odd individuals such as Ms.Asma Jehangir of the Human Rights Commission, has any
section of the society raised its voice against the atrocities on the Hindus and the way
they have been reduced to almost extinction, with those still left reduced to the status
of third class citizens? Has any TV channel thrown the spotlight on the pitiable plight of
the Hindu minority?
People in India are sick and tired of the way American
policy-makers, academic personalities, analysts and the media downplay the way mercenaries
from Pakistan belonging to organisations such as the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, the
Lashkar-e-Toiba and the Al Badr have been playing havoc with innocent lives in Kashmir in
the name of the so-called Kashmiri cause.
Since 1996, the people spreading mayhem and violence in Kashmir
are not Kashmiris, but Pakistani nationals, many of them Pakistani ex-servicemen,
belonging to these organisations, but American observers continue referring to them as
Kashmiri militants, just as Pakistan has been doing. The hijacking of the Indian Airlines
plane to Kandahar was carried out by Pakistani nationals of the Pakistan-based HUM, but
still the American analysts continue to refer to them as Kashmiri nationalists.
The Hindu Pandits of the valley, the original inhabitants of this
land before Islam made its appearance--many of them highly-educated engineers, doctors,
software professionals etc--have been driven out of their homes and lead miserable lives
in refugee camps in Jammu and New Delhi. How many American policy-makers, analysts, media
and academic personalities have raised their voice against this genocide of the most
cultured segment of the Hindu community of the world?
Even if one-twentieth of the number had belonged to the Jewish
community and had met a similar fate at the hands of Islamic fanatics, would these
sections in the US have remained quiet?
Mr.President, during your briefings by your advisers in
Government and the academic institutions, kindly do ask them the following question and
see whether they can reply satisfactorily: For the first time since the assassination of
Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan's Mohajir Prime Minister, in the early 1950s, a Mohajir (the
General) is now ruling Pakistan.Indians, particularly, those in North India, always have a
soft corner for the Mohajirs and the Bengali Muslims, many of whom migrated from the
Indo-Gangetic plains of India, the cradle of the Hindu civilisation as it exists today and
were converts from Hinduism to Islam, like Gen.Musharraf. They should have, therefore,
been delighted by his coming to power, despite his military background. Similarly, the
Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), led by Altaf Hussain from his political exile in the UK,
should have been equally delighted by his assuming power, even though illegally. How is it
they are the most critical and distrustful of him?
The answer is simple: Hindu religion teaches that God forgives
all sins except the sin of ingratitude and betrayal of trust. Gen.Musharraf betrayed the
trust of India in Kargil and Kandahar and of the Mohajirs of Sindh by helping the Punjabi
officers in crushing them.
Mr.President, one doesn't know whether your advisers have told
you that in the history of the Pakistani Army, two officers, despite their indifferent
record, managed to rise to the top by ingratiating themselves with politicians and, once
having come to the top, kicked the political leaders with whose help they rose--- Gen.
Abdul Waheed Kakkar, a Pathan from a well-connected feudal family of Balochistan, and Gen.
Musharraf.
Gen. Kakkar was removed from service as a probationer because of
his failure to pass the examinations at the training academy. He managed to get himself
re-instated through family connection and rose to be the Chief of the Army Staff (COAS),
by ingratiating himself with former President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, whom he later forced to
resign in 1993. This is the only instance in the Pakistan army of a probationer, who
failed to complete the training, continuing in service and rising to the top.
Gen. Musharraf was rusticated during his training for
insubordination and lack of straightforwardness, but managed to continue in service
through his political contacts. He rose to be the COAS by ingratiating himself with
Mr.Nawaz Sharif and then had him overthrown and arrested for dismissing him for
insubordination.
American analysts, while writing of the Indian distrust of
Gen.Musharraf, speak of India's humiliation at the hands of Gen.Musharraf at Kargil and
Kandahar. It was not humiliation, Mr.President, but indignation and disgust.
If you leave your house open trusting your neighbour and he
betrays your trust and steals, you don't feel humiliated. You feel indignant and
disgusted.
Trusting Pakistan, India had left the ridges of Kargil unguarded
during the severe winter months since 1985. It never occurred to Gens. Zia, Mirza Aslam
Beg, Asif Nawaz Janjua, Abdul Waheed Kakkar, and Jehangir Karamat to take advantage of
this and occupy Indian territory. Such a perfidious idea could have occurred to only a
devious mind like that of Gen. Musharraf.
After 1984, all succeeding regimes of Pakistan strongly prevented
Pakistan-based terrorist groups from indulging in hijacking of aircraft and jeopardising
the lives of innocent civilians. The use of hijacking as a weapon against India was
revived within 10 weeks of Gen.Musharraf assuming power.
Before Kandahar, large sections of Indian society were looking
forward to your visit as a landmark in Indo-US relations, but they no longer do so after
seeing the way the US has been downplaying the involvement of the Pakistan army and the
ISI in acts of terrorism against India.
They have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the US has not
changed. It is the same old US bereft of understanding, bereft of vision and bereft of the
ability to see beyond its nose.
Mr.President, you will be the fourth US President to visit India.
Dwight Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter never went to Pakistan. Nixon did. People in India
still recall with nostalgie the visits of Ike and Carter. Your White House archives must
be having films of the memorable welcome, which Ike received. It took his motorcade almost
two hours to reach the town from the airport. It had to go through a vast sea of humanity.
No other foreign dignitary had ever received such a memorable welcome. Ike was so
overwhelmed that he almost broke into tears.
Nobody even remembers about Nixon's visit. He was politely
received, politely heard and applauded and speedily forgotten.
If you want to avoid a fate similar to that of Nixon, you have to
do some serious introspection in the days still remaining before you embark upon what
could have been a historic visit to India.
With deep respects and warm regards,
Yours sincerely,
B.Raman
11-3-00
