Indian Press on Draconian ‘Love Jihad’ Laws, Faisal Khan and December 6: New Age Islam's Selection, 9 December 2020
By
New Age Islam Edit Desk
9 December 2020
• Public Discourse Surrounding 'Love Jihad' Misses One
Crucial Element: Criminalisation Of Muslim Men
By Zeenia Parveen
• Draconian ‘Love Jihad’ Laws Will Rob Our Young Of
The Glory Of Youth, The Very Essence And Purpose Of Life
By Captain Gr Gopinath
• Why I Think All Hindus Should Fight Against Faisal
Khan's Arrest
By Sunita Viswanath
• How Should We Remember December 6?
By Apoorvanand
• Golden Jubilee Of 1971 War: Triggering A New Resolve
By Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)
• Watch Afghanistan Closely, And Clearly
By Arun Joshi
----
Public
Discourse Surrounding 'Love Jihad' Misses One Crucial Element: Criminalisation
of Muslim Men
By
Zeenia Parveen
December
08, 2020
The law
against so-called 'love jihad' — formally known as the Prohibition of Unlawful
Conversion Bill, 2020 — has come into effect in Uttar Pradesh. On paper, it has
been put forward as a law that would nullify marriages if they are found to be
processed through forced religious conversion. In the recent past, two
BJP-ruled states, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, have already brought forth
similar laws.
After the
Uttar Pradesh government's proposal to table such a law, the home ministers of
Madhya Pradesh and Karnataka have decided to do the same in their respective
states. The proposed legislation and the rhetoric of the ministers pushing it
is in the same vein and reeks of anti-Muslim sentiment. This is especially so
in a context where an ostensibly anti-Muslim national political party has been
in power for two terms. The party's recent attacks against the Muslim community
with the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act and the series of arrests and
witch-hunts that followed in the aftermath are evidence of its outlook for the
future of India.
This
proposed law has stirred opinion across the political spectrum with many
Opposition leaders condemning it. There are two central arguments in their
opposition to the law. The first is the protection of 'personal freedom' of the
individuals as enshrined in the Indian Constitution. It centres on the choice
to choose, love and/or marry. The other comes in for safeguarding the 'agency
of women'. Although, non-BJP political parties have been regular in the
opposition of the proposed law with these two arguments, it is time to address
the elephant in the room.
Both of
these defences are reductive and ignore the critical issue at hand: The
criminalisation of Muslim men. With the State hounding Muslim men for almost
anything and everything, the concerning issue at this point should be to
safeguard their very survival. Ironically, all rationales of love and the
supposedly liberating choice of interfaith marriages fall flat if one party to
the clause is running to save from one prejudiced State institution to another
to save their lives.
The issue
is being oversimplified with a deviation and is robustly thrust over the
understanding of how the law would operate. The Left organisations, All India
Progressive Women Association (AIPWA) and the All India Students Association
(AISA) took up 'Love Azad' — a campaign against the lies of 'love jihad' as a
national campaign. On the surface, it comes across as a sincere effort, much
like the official name of the 'love jihad' law. With this take, the Left has
breathed life into a deliberate lie created by its Opposition in order to
criminalise Muslim men.
'Jihad' has
been neologised internationally as hateful propaganda against the Muslim
community. With no effort to address its theological context, its usage in the
popular culture is purposefully misleading. To create an alternative to the
word as a counter against itself is reinstating the binary of good and bad; it
takes no time to start labelling the members of the Muslim community along
these lines. Cultural hegemony has an overarching power, paying no heed to the
amalgamation of language and culture and the crucial role it plays in the
socio-political arena.
Moving to
the question of the agency of women, this one is an insincere and partial
approach. In the entire argument, the position of Muslim women is completely
missing. If one were to be honest with the reality playing out, it is clear to
see that this law corners Muslim women in particular. With this law
criminalising Muslim men, the women of the community are pushed further away
with deep socio-political and economic disadvantages. The State has so far
failed to push the Muslim community up the steps of development and on the
contrary, has played against them.
The
criminalisation of Muslim men under this law would be concentrated on the
economically weaker and marginalised sections of the community. Here, more
often than not, the male member(s) of the family are the sole breadwinners.
Framing the men of the family (even if the potential of justice awaits at some
point in future) leaves Muslim women without any source of income, at the very
least.
In any
case, a rampant Islamophobic gaze regularly brings their decision to abide by
their faith into question. This is closely linked with another critical aspect:
The politics of revenge on Muslim women as a site of power executed by the men
of the majority. The binary of 'us' and 'them' is built in with the historical
lie of 'power-yielding majority subjected to the tyranny of this 'other':
Muslims'. It creates a plot for seeking opportunistic vengeance, if Hindu women
have been deceived by Muslim men, the women of the latter's community
immediately become the end of their retributive justice.
When the
agency of women and her choice to marry and live is being fought for in this
context, why is it so difficult to stand up for the healthy survival of Muslim
women — a minority within a minority? What appears at the surface is a
progressive lens fogged by an elite outlook where the complex hierarchy of
religion, gender, political leverage, social status and public opinion is
deliberately simplified to ignore the real question.
At such a
socio-political crossroads, how are we supposed to find a solution when the
problem at hand is not even being acknowledged and in fact, being ignored? Not
one of the rational and emotional arguments presented by stakeholders in a
democracy has been at the forefront on the issue of criminalisation of Muslims,
which actually is the idea central to this bizarre law. In a time when
anti-Muslim sentiment is unprecedented, everything from political
power-wielding institutions to the mob of the majority and the physical
manifestation of this antipathy has been unfortunately quite visible; the
invisibilisation of this aspect is moral bankruptcy at its peak.
'Love
jihad' or any other tactic for criminalising Muslim men lies on the premise of
presenting them as mere 'bodies', devoid of any value to be considered human —
as an equal in the eyes of the otherwise majority. This unfortunate and brazen
attempt is executed to separate the co-existing or the very quintessential
quality of being a Muslim and a human together into two separate categories.
The very idea of being a Muslim is quintessentially and even theologically
ingrained in being a human. But with this categorisation, Muslim men are forced
to choose to either be a Muslim or a human and are not allowed to exist in both
of these categories collectively at all.
The idea
further presents Muslim men as machinery employed by this 'other' (their
religious identity) as a threat to the State and therefore, to its people. Who
are the people of this State now? This State has underpinnings to this
unrestrained mythical narrative of a 'Hindu Rashtra'. This depiction smoothly
translates into filtering Muslim bodies away from the 'living', what is left is
profane and undesired for (and by) the collective conscience of this nation.
We are
falling into the collective trap of a psycho-political understanding where the
only Muslim worthy of being 'asked' to be 'saved' has to be the one who fits
the mould of a stereotypical Indian Muslim, who is distanced from the faith and
does not claim their religious identity. Who they should marry, how they should
act, how they should speak, what they should eat, what they should wear, and
how they should question (if at all 'allowed' to); all of these questions are
being regulated under one homogenous category. This is reiterated again and
again in the rhetoric of mainstream political parties and in the 'saved' cases
of the Muslim community.
Eventually,
the crowd accepts it, not as a possible acceptable variation amongst the
diverse nature of Muslim identity but as the Muslim identity. Soon, the maybe
becomes the 'ought to be' and then, 'should be', and from there, there is no
coming back for the Indian Muslims if they don't want to live as second-class
citizens in this country.
https://www.firstpost.com/india/public-discourse-surrounding-love-jihad-misses-one-crucial-element-criminalisation-of-muslim-men-9090191.html
--------
Draconian
‘Love Jihad’ Laws Will Rob Our Young Of The Glory Of Youth, The Very Essence
And Purpose Of Life
By
Captain GR Gopinath
December 7,
2020
Love Jihad.
What an oxymoron. Even moronically incongruous. As Shakespeare said,
“Doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt
love.”
In my salad
days ‘when I was young in blood and green in judgment,’ and impetuous as a
young army officer, I and two youthful colleagues serving together in a
cantonment town were courting three girls, who were boarders in a local
missionary college. And it so happened one of them, who was seeing me, was a
Muslim girl.
Her parents
who were in the Middle East got wind of it, rushed back to India, grounded her
and locked her up in the house. And fixed up a boy for marriage post-haste. She
called me one day when I was wondering why I had not heard from her for a week,
and in desperation pleaded with me to get her out of her house at night before
it was too late, or she would be doomed.
She
suggested I arrange to have her secretly lifted out of her room past midnight
and send her to her friend, who had a place in Bangalore and agreed to give her
board and lodging till she found some job. She was shy of 20 and still an
undergraduate. I was in my mid-20s. Marriage was not on our minds.
Young blood
danced through our veins and there was tumult in our hearts. It all did seem
“apparelled in celestial light.” If in youth girls and boys – hearts enflamed
and suffused with tender emotions – don’t love, what can be more unnatural and
unholy?
Coming back
to the story, swept away by reckless emotions, imagining myself a white knight
to the rescue of a damsel in distress, I went with my buddies at midnight to
her house, jumped the high rise compound wall and clambered up to her room on
the first floor. We helped her out of the house over the barriers and on to my
motorcycle pillion, whisked her away to the railway station and packed her off
to Bangalore in the overnight mail train.
When her
parents discovered next morning that their daughter had taken flight, all hell
broke loose. Police were alerted, and eventually the girl went back after extracting
assurance from her parents that she wouldn’t be married off forcibly. I escaped
court martial thanks to an army commander who was magnanimous and forgiving.
Luckily the
Muslim family never accused me of jihad, or dharmayudh. They were conservative,
just as my parents were, and they were not supportive of their children
marrying outside their community and their comfort zone.
It’s
presumptuous and delusional of upper castes to think the families of backward
communities and Dalits are happy when a girl or boy marries a Brahmin or a
Thakur or a Jat. In the main they all are as chary of it and don’t encourage
their children marrying outside their castes and religions. But when the young,
on reaching adulthood, fall headlong in love and wish to tie the knot, it’s
barbaric of elders to come in the way and stop the union of hearts.
Love Jihad
is also cruel double speak. The campaign by many saffron parties and the UP
ordinance is selectively aimed at Muslim boys marrying Hindu girls and not
targeted at Hindu boys marrying Muslim girls.
It’s also
perverse logic because Hinduism is resilient and all embracing, and has
absorbed influences and enriched itself without losing its core civilisational
identity. No other religion has celebrated love in all its many splendoured
facets and through its rich mythology, glorified in its temple architecture and
other forms of art and literature, Lord Krishna being its pre-eminent deity and
beloved symbol of love.
This fear
of an imaginary ‘love jihad’ reflects an insecurity and inferiority complex,
stemming from a diminutive and dwarfed civilisational outlook that does
injustice to a mighty civilisation as imagined by the rest of the world. As the
Allahabad high court commendably said in its November 11 verdict: “Right to live
with a person of his/ her choice irrespective of religion professed by them, is
intrinsic to right to life and personal liberty. Interference in a personal
relationship would constitute a serious encroachment into the right to freedom
of choice of the two individuals.”
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/captains-musings/draconian-love-jihad-laws-will-rob-our-young-of-the-glory-of-youth-the-very-essence-and-purpose-of-life/
------
Why I
Think All Hindus Should Fight Against Faisal Khan's Arrest
By Sunita
Viswanath
9 December
2020
On November
3, just about a month ago, my dear friend and colleague Faisal Khan was
arrested for doing namaz in a Hindu temple in Mathura. He was about to go
outside to pray, but the priest invited him to pray right in the temple
compound. Faisal bhai is being charged with praying in the temple without
permission, with an intent to cause communal disharmony.
Faisal bhai
is on the advisory board of my organisation, Hindus for Human Rights. We are in
regular touch because his work of peacemaking takes him to temples and mosques,
and I am myself devoted to interfaith dialogue and unity. Faisal bhai is a
devout Muslim, but he can also recite Hindu prayers and scriptures with more
authority and passion than most Hindus I know.
A few
months ago, I interviewed Faisal bhai for a blog on present-day nonviolent
resistance movements. Every time I broached politics, he steered the
conversation towards love. He said, “Of course I am very concerned about the
state of the Indian democracy. It is a challenging time, I don’t deny that. A
dark time. Some people think I am mad, but I maintain that the only way we will
bring light to this darkness is with even more truth and love. Khudai Kidmatgar
is doing it, but we need to do more. We must take from Gandhi’s example and
Bacha Khan’s example, and go among the people with love and humanity. And the
most important thing is to work with both Muslim and Hindu youth.”
What does
it say about our world, about India, that a man that represents love and peace
is in prison, accused of inciting communal disharmony, and denied bail twice?
This time
last year, my organisation along with so many others in the diaspora took to
the streets to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and National Register of
Citizens.
Sunita with
her son Gautama and a friend at an anti-CAA rally in NYC, in January 2020.
Photo: Special arrangement
But things
seem so much worse than they did a year ago. More activists and dissenters have
been imprisoned – Faisal bhai is one of thousands in a growing list of
prisoners of conscience. Amnesty India has been shut down. The mainstream media
in India speaks of a parallel universe to the one I am aware of: one in which
freedom of speech, protest, expression, thought and belief are being diminished
to the extent that I wonder if India can still be called a free country.
In the past
month, I have been working daily on the #FreeFaisalKhan campaign. We were part
of a press conference as soon as Faisal bhai was arrested, and will soon have a
second press conference. We have been mobilising Hindus to defend Faisal bhai.
We have launched a petition, and have been promoting it. Rajmohan Gandhi and
Anand Patwardhan, both of whom are close to Faisal bhai, wrote heartfelt
appeals for his release. Anand ji also made a short video on Faisal bhai’s
arrest, in both English and Hindi. We cannot and will not give up.
And yet, I
feel powerless. Are the things we are doing making any difference, or worse,
causing the enemies of justice to be even more entrenched in their position?
Some of the conversations I have had during this month of trying to bring
attention to this crisis have been painful and discouraging..
One Hindu
friend who didn’t think Faisal should be in prison, still felt the need to ask:
Is there any mosque in the world that would allow aarti?
I don’t
know if there are mosques that would allow aarti. This is a question for
Muslims to answer, not me. I know that if Faisal bhai ran a mosque, he would
allow aarti.
For my
part, even if not a single mosque in the world would allow aarti, I would still
ask that Hindu temples remain open to all. In the Bhagavad Gita, when Lord
Krishna tells Arjuna, “If anyone offers Me with love and devotion a leaf, a
flower, fruit or water, I will accept it,” he didn’t say he is only addressing
Hindus. Hindu philosophy and faith are expansive and inclusive, and invite us
to see the divine not only in each other, but in every leaf, flower, river and
mountain.
Is our
faith as Hindus so insecure today that we need to constrain and limit this
universal and eternal notion of the divine?
The
Taittiriya Upanishad tells us, Atithi Devo Bhava. Atithi means guest or
stranger, and we are being told, “Be one for whom the guest or stranger is
God.” And it doesn’t describe atithi in any way. It doesn’t say “atithi of the
same faith, race or opinion.” The stories of our Gods include so many instances
when God arrives in disguise, and people are either blessed or cursed depending
on how they treat the stranger. I believe that the Nand Baba Temple priest did
see his atithi, Faisal bhai, the way the Upanishads taught. The video and
photos of the visit shows pleasant exchanges: Faisal bhai reciting the
Ramcharitmanas, and the priest inviting Faisal Bhai to have prasad.
However,
four days later, the same priest filed the FIR against Faisal bhai. When an
aggressive journalist asked Faisal bhai repeatedly about this just before his
arrest, Faisal bhai refused to speak badly of the priest. Faisal Khan is the
best kind of Indian, the best kind of human. He sees no difference between us,
he devotes his life to peace and harmony between us all, and he refuses to
focus on the negative, but instead lives and spreads love. Why are we so
threatened by Faisal Khan’s message of love that we need to imprison him?
Recently, a
prominent Hindu priest in India, who cannot go on the record for his safety,
told me: “They (the BJP government) don’t care about Badshah Khan and Khudai
Kidmatgar. As far as they are concerned, India was born in 2014. Any of us who
care for Hindu-Muslim unity are a problem for them.”
I wept
during this conversation because I desperately want this priest to stand up in
our press conference and say these words openly. I understand that he is a good
man, on the side of truth, but he has to be responsible to his temple and his
family. He does not want to land up in jail.
I ask
anyone reading these words to remember that there are many like this Hindu
priest, who are decent and kind, but are not yet speaking up openly. I will
keep pushing Hindus to speak up because otherwise India will keep moving
towards Hindutva authoritarianism (if not fascism). My deepest fear is that
they will only speak when it is too late.
-----
Sunita
Viswanath is a co-founder of Hindus for Human Rights (HfHR), a US-wide human
rights advocacy group that is committed to the ideals of multi-religious
pluralism both in the United States and India, the country of her origin. She
was honoured by President Barack Obama at the White House in 2015 as a
“Champion of Change” for her work. Sunita has edited Women for Afghan Women:
Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future (Palgrave McMillan), a book of essays.
https://thewire.in/communalism/faisal-khan-arrest-hindu-muslim-unity
-----
How
Should We Remember December 6?
By
Apoorvanand
9 December
2020
“…[T]here are two types of human relations and
the obligation to remember is not moral but ethical. I try to make memory and
communities of memory a basic unit. The notions of nation and community rely
upon the idea of community of memory. I think that the discussions about what
is a nation and what is ethnic, if a nation is ethnically based or whatever,
should rely upon the idea of whom we think belongs to the same community of
memory. An identity, namely a group identity, for me depends on the idea of a
community of memory.”
~ Marglit Avishai
We started
from home for Mandi House. We were late. The march was to start at 11 am.
Suddenly, a message from a friend popped up in my inbox, telling me that the
demonstrators had been detained by the police and the march was disrupted. He
advised me not to go to the protest site.
It was
December 6. We wanted to remember the sixth of December, 1992. Together. A day
when a mosque was torn apart, razed to the ground by hundreds of goons under
the watch and open instigation by leaders of a political party which is now
ruling India. One of them, riding on this wave of hatred, became the deputy
prime minister of India and was in charge of the home ministry. Rakesh Batabyal
had likened nation building to home making, in his essay from Nehru’s India:
Essays on the Maker of a Nation. Here was a man who had created walls in this
home and was later assigned to supervise its functioning. Another one of the
hate mongers became the education minister of India and equated intellectuals
with terrorists.
There was
also the presence of an absence. The absentee legitimiser of the politics of
hate. Who made hate against Muslims palatable to those who wanted to be known
as decent people. He had flown away from the place of the atrocity after
cleverly instigating his crowd the previous evening to raze the ground where
the Babri Masjid stood. The man rose to be the Prime Minister of India. He was
used as an excuse by a great many people to support his politics of division
and hate. They argued that not everything could be appalling about a party
which had a “poet” like him at its helm.
The man in
question brings to the mind another absentee participant in this act: the
invisible hand of the Supreme Court. The man had, in his exhortation, told
people that what was to be done the next morning was nothing but an
implementation of the order of the Supreme Court to do ‘kar seva‘. The wise
heads had permitted kar seva on the site where lakhs of people had been
mobilised as part of a long campaign of hatred against Muslims. It was not
reverence or love for Lord Ram which had brought them to his imagined land of
birth but a pent up desire to put Muslims in their place in India – to
humiliate and subjugate them. If the honourable justices could not foresee what
their permission would ultimately do, can it be dismissed as a mere error of
judgement?
This
ostensible lack of judgement is further reinforced by the fact that the Supreme
Court did not think it was necessary to punish those who had violated the
undertaking to ensure the safety of the mosque. That case is still lingering in
the Supreme Court. Rakesh Bhatnagar recalls his interaction with Justice
Venkatchaliah and Justice G. N. Ray who were astonished that the Supreme Court
could be treated in this manner by a state government.
The Supreme
Court, however, never corrected this ‘mistake’ on their part. It only
perpetuated it. Last year on November 9, it handed over the land on which the
Babri Mosque had stood for more than five centuries to those who had demolished
it. The order which accepted the status of the VHP representative as the
guardian of Lord Ram who was to be ‘given back’ his birth place demonstrated
that the crime of the demolition of the mosque had been legitimised.
The Supreme
Court has again allowed the central government to go ahead with another kar
seva, this time in Delhi while placing a condition before it not to demolish or
construct anything for its dream project, the Central Vista. Some will argue
that the issue in question is an entirely different matter and any reference to
demolition of the Babri Masjid, while discussing it, is unwarranted. But is the
similarity entirely misplaced?
How does
one recall December 6? As an event or as a milestone of a process in which
nearly all actors of Indian politics played their role? Was it only the
political class? Could December 6 be possible without active complicity from
the Hindi media? We, who rue the downfall of the media in our times, forget
that it had long been acting as the mouthpiece of the ideology of hate against
Muslims.
So, when we
remember December 6, we understand that we never seriously attempted to define
the content of a decent society that we should have become. For us there was no
non-negotiable. The ideology of hatred against Muslims always got its
validation by those who called themselves ‘secular’ or ‘humanists’. Can we
imagine December 6 without the date when the lock on the Babri Mosque was
removed under the leadership of a moderniser prime minister, a nice loveable
man?
Remembering
December 6, therefore, not only entails condemning active criminals but also
those who made it possible for the crime to happen in the first place, those
who allowed it to be done on their behalf.
There were
dates before December 6 and after December 6 which give meaning to it. February
28, when the Gujarat pogrom started, August 5, when Jammu and Kashmir was
dismembered and downgraded, November 9, when the land of the Babri Mosque was
granted to the demolishers, December 11 when the Citizenship Amendment Act was
passed in the parliament.
It is
important to remember December 6. But now the number of those who have borne
this memory is dwindling. We did not hear any major political leader, barring a
few left leaders, talking about the meaning of December 6 for us. The Congress
wants us to ignore it, for the regional parties it is too national a date to
stir their partial memory, for the media there are far too pressing and
relevant issues vying for its attention. Good natured and peace loving people
will advise us to forget the day to make living possible.
A life
which does not examine itself is no life. Memories help us in this act of
scrutiny. If an event or a date evokes two disparate and antagonistic memories
in two sections of society, it is impossible for us to become one people.
December 6
is a date which forces us to think about our laziness, our compromises and our
complicity which led to a crime which was not inevitable. It could have been
pre-empted and prevented. December 6 was a culmination of events which could
not have been possible without well thought out decisions and was also the
beginning of the processes which have led us to the present state – a situation
in which all of us feel trapped.
There is a
responsibility we have with our memories of December 6. What is that? It has do with the damage that it was meted
out to our cognitive and affective faculties. It is a task to create a decent
society. A society in which atonement is possible and memories are not tools to
humiliate a section of society and isolate it.
Remembering
December 6 is, in the words of Marglit Avishai, a necessary step in creating a
community of memory, a moral task, of moving away from the thick to the thin
and feeling responsible towards each other.
-----
Apoorvanand
teaches at Delhi University.
https://thewire.in/rights/december-6-babri-masjid-demolition
------
Golden
Jubilee of 1971 War: Triggering a New Resolve
By Lt
Gen Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)
08th December
2020
India is
stepping into the 50th year after its spectacular military campaign that led to
Pakistan’s capitulation on 16 December 1971. Current public knowledge of those
landmark days remains severely limited. The Golden Jubilee year of the successful
completion of the 14-day war will no doubt be celebrated but it must equally be
utilised to enhance public knowledge on how victory was achieved. People are
aware of the 1971 Indo-Pak war as a dot in history but not with the nuances of
it.
Pakistan
existed from 1947 to 1971 with two segments separated by 2,000 km of India.
United only by religion, East and West Pakistan had major cultural, linguistic
and ethnic differences that could not allow their integration as a nation
state; the entire two-nation theory based on which Jinnah’s Pakistan was
created struggled to justify its existence. Proportionally in minority, West
Pakistan attempted to dominate the East in every way, the Punjabis, Sindhis,
Balochs and Pakhtuns of the West looking down upon the Bengalis of the East and
hoisting their perceptions on the majority.
Language
was one of the major issues as was the allocation of funds. Attempts to make
Urdu the dominant language of the state was the trigger which led to a chain of
events that ultimately saw efforts to scuttle the majority electoral mandate
won democratically by Sheikh Mujibur Rehman’s Awami League in December 1970.
Wishing to avoid rule by the Bengalis, the Army in connivance with the crafty
Zulfikar Bhutto avoided the convening of the Assembly session that would have
led to Sheikh Mujib proving his majority and thereby being handed the reins of
power. Instead, the Army went on a killing spree, many times referred to as a
virtual genocide. Sheikh Mujib, although arrested, declared secession from
Pakistan and a war of independence began.
For India,
the choice was to either watch from the sidelines the slaughter of innocents
and the pouring in of thousands of refugees into its territories or proactively
do something about it. The global community had no resolve to end the internal
turbulence in Pakistan but India was suffering the consequences of it. PM
Indira Gandhi called the then Army Chief General Sam Manekshaw to a meeting
with her important Cabinet colleagues and asked for his readiness to undertake
proactive operations to enter East Pakistan, put an end to the massacres by
defeating the Pakistan Army and help create an independent state for the
Bengali people of Pakistan.
Manekshaw’s
conversation with Indira Gandhi’s cabinet is legendary and mentioned by him in
his numerous speeches, although many today contest that no official record of
the same exists. What is clear is that Manekshaw told the PM that entering the
erstwhile East Pakistan territory would be tantamount to a declaration of war
with Pakistan on both eastern and western fronts, which he was in no position
to fight given the state of the Army and the timing of the events. He demanded
time and resources to ensure the Army was fully ready to deliver what the
government demanded.
Among the
constraints he listed were lack of spares and ammunition. Regarding the timing,
he did not wish to engage Pakistan in the approaching summer when China’s PLA
could prevent our pulling out troops from the northern borders. In addition,
the war in Punjab and north Rajasthan would lead to movement of our tanks
destroying the summer crop, which would be most harmful for an economy already
stretched by the war effort. Lastly he informed the PM that the war could
extend to the monsoon season when the east-west movement of reserves would be
severely hampered by the state of communications in northern India. The PM
could not have had more sage advice given by a professional soldier, frank and
to the face.
The PM gave
Manekshaw a free hand in planning while she undertook the diplomatic campaign.
The signing of the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship was a landmark achievement
to bolster the confidence in the military effort underway. Pakistan perceived
that India could not fight on two fronts and that the fear of Chinese
intervention would dissuade it from launching a war. When it discerned serious
Indian intent, Pakistan decided to trigger hostilities on the western front in
the fond hope that it could prevent India undertaking operations in the East; 3
December 1971 witnessed air attacks on Indian airfields all along the western
front, which gave New Delhi sufficient reason to unleash its plan.
Manekshaw
decided to fight limited on the western front and go for a focused campaign to
liberate East Pakistan. Only once marked success was achieved in the east with
no loss of territory in the west would he allow his commanders to undertake any
offensive operations in the latter. In the east, he built a sizeable advantage
by concentrating three corps size formations and tasked them to advance
rapidly, bypassing major opposition. The Indian Army engineers played a
significant role in bridging the many rivers and creating loop roads for
sidestepping main arteries.
Capture of
Dacca was not the initial aim. It was due to the operations led by Lt Gen Sagat
Singh, in command of 4 Corps, which were unconventional and achieved such
spectacular success in quick time that capture of Dacca became a possibility.
With Dacca as the revised centre of gravity, rapid concentration was achieved
around it even as islands of Pakistani resistance had enough ammunition and
supplies to last a month.
With all
means of reinforcement cut off, the Indian Air Force ruling the skies in the
east and progressively in the west, and the Indian Navy undertaking spectacular
operations against the Karachi harbour threatening Pakistan’s national
logistics, the die was cast for a massive Pakistani defeat. It eventually
happened with the surrender on 16 December 1971 at Dacca’s famous Maidan as Lt
Gen A A K Niazi handed over his pistol to Lt Gen Jagjit Aurora, India’s Eastern
Army Commander and 93,000 Pakistani servicemen overnight became prisoners of
war.
Bull-headedness
and inability to foresee anything beyond conflict initiation became a
characteristic of Pakistan’s leadership. Hopefully 2021 will see a mature
awakening there for the need to pull back from conflict as the only means of
resolving differences.
----
Lt Gen
Syed Ata Hasnain (Retd)is Former Commander, Srinagar-based 15 Corps. Now
Chancellor, Central University of Kashmir
https://www.newindianexpress.com/opinions/2020/dec/08/golden-jubilee-of-1971-war-triggering-a-new-resolve-2233265.html
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Watch
Afghanistan Closely, And Clearly
By
Arun Joshi
December 8,
2020
A number of
foreign policy experts have listed Afghanistan on the to-do-list of
President-elect Joe Biden, though only next to China. These analysts have
viewed things through American prism; how soon American troops would return
home from the war-torn country where nothing is stable except the instability,
and also how that will help the new administration to establish its good
foreign policy credentials.
America has
no other interest. It is plain and simple. India cannot sit pretty in this kind
of situation unless its strategic interests are served. The country has an
interest in ensuring that things stay under control in Afghanistan and its
influence in the region doesn’t suffer any erosion.
America
will serve its strategic interests only for it will help India only in as much
of space where it could without getting involved directly into any conflict
situation. At best, it will offer mediation and that any self-respecting
sovereign country like India will never accept .
Each
anti-China statement from Washington is seen as an endorsement of the Indian
stand against Beijing’s belligerence and aggressive expansionist policy. There
are other dimensions too. Simple aggressive statements by Washington are not
going to help India to see back of Chinese troops from Ladakh. The US has its own reasons to prick China.
Its anti-China stand against Beijing’s expansionist policies is not
India-centric. Its anti-Beijing narrative anti-China stance fits into its worldview wherein China is seen as an
aggressor, be it what it is doing in South China sea where reefs have been
militarised or where it is threatening Japan over Senkaku islands, encroaching
Bhutanese villages. Therefore, it is necessary to understand that anti-China
statement will not ease situation for India in Ladakh where China has amassed tens
of thousands of its troops.
America
will say and do only as much its institutions permit. Joe Biden, as per the
rules of the constitutional democracy demands, owes accountability to other
institutions too. He is unlike his outgoing predecessor Donald Trump who gave a
damn to the democratic institutions. There are consequences, Trump must have
understood it by now.
China and
Afghanistan have figured on the foreign policy agenda of the Biden
administration that will start functioning from January 20, 2021. But the
importance of these issues varies.
China poses
an altogether different problem for Washington where it has to navigate the
trade issues and check its growing influence in the markets across the
continent. There is not going to be any direct or indirect military
confrontation between the two countries.
In
Afghanistan, the US is trying to wriggle out of the situation of its own
creation. It had attacked Afghanistan in October 2001 in less than a month
after 9/11. It thought that its aerial bombing has done job for it. Far from
it, the things have lingered on till date. There were more complications. One
after another experiment was undertaken to find a way out, but without success.
A lesson, which is universally true, must have been learned by America, never
enter a land where neither geography and demography is known to you.
Satellite
images are not the true reflection of the ground situation nor drones achieve
the political and strategic objectives. What they had thought was an opening
turned out to be a dark alley. That explains why the war went on for 19 years
and it is continuing.
Whatever
America may decide to do vis-à-vis Afghanistan, it will affect the
geo-political landscape of South Asia. With China supporting Pakistan to the
hilt, because of its huge investment there, it will strengthen Islamabad’s hold
on the levers with which it controls affairs in Afghanistan. Pakistan’s
relations with Afghanistan are rooted in history. Pakistan controls levers of
Taliban that controls most parts of the country. The Ashraf Ghani government in
Afghanistan is having very limited influence, that became clearer when despite
Doha agreement of February this year, Taliban did not downscale the violence.
That has all the parties worried.
India is
worried, too. No doubt Pakistan’s influence will grow because there will be
less of American oversight. China is fully backing Islamabad. China will have
its own share in the whole scene that will emerge. It wants complete security
of its assets in Balochistan and for that it is committed to help Pakistan in
all manners. Chinese footprints are deepening in the area and it would not like
those to overrun by any quarter. Pakistan’s support is crucial to its long-term
strategic goals that it seeks to achieve trough One Belt Road Initiative. This
will push the scale of balance of powers in the region .
India
facing tough situation on borders with China and locked in daily skirmishes at
the Line of Control needs to devise its own strategy to stay in control of
things. It will have to sort out the problems within, and in that context, it’s
very crucial that Jammu and Kashmir is stable.
https://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/watch-afghanistan-closely-and-clearly/
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