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writing for godot

REINCARNATION OF HITLER

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Written by Dr. Kausar Talat   
Thursday, 12 June 2014 14:09
Reincarnation of Hitler
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Dr. Kausar Talat
Positive Pakistan
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As the dust of elections settles across India and the honeymoon period takes over, it is difficult to say which way the camel will settles down in the Indian tent. While the world adjusts itself to the reality of an Indian racist politician, once barred from many countries of the world. One wonders what will be the reaction of the West to the rise of a low caste Hindu over a billion people. Most interesting observation would be of those Brahmans (highest caste) who have been ruling India mostly since its independence.
As Muslim of India, it must be a time of trial and great anxiety. The butcher of Gujrat now is in control of the government, not just of Gujrat. It is ironic for Indian Muslims that they failed to get even one seat in United Province (UP) also known as Utter Pardesh – largest Muslim majority province. Failure to capture any seat in congress was solely due to differences among various ulemas, major players in dividing Muslim votes who have failed again to provide leadership to Indian Muslims or elsewhere. The Muslim religious leadership appears to follow the script written by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for elections. There were no riots, no destruction of Muslim property though plenty of hate speeches and collusion with the Mullahs. This is the future of Indian Muslims as they will be denied any economic upward mobility which is currently at the lowest level for Muslims in India.

On international scene, I expect the west to behave exactly in similar manner as they had behaved with Hitler during his rise to the power until the day Japanese mistake of bombing Pearl Harbor. On this note, let me remind that Prescott Bush, the grandfather of President George W. Bush, served as a business partner of U.S. banking operative for the financial architect of the Nazi war machine from 1926 until 1942, when Congress took aggressive action against Bush and his "enemy national" partners. Many companies had tight economic relationship with Germany and human rights violations may have been protested but the business relationship was maintained. It is expected that same will prevail as defense deals and nuclear trade with India will have priority for the west regardless of Modi’s past, until the history repeat itself. One hopeful variable here that was not present to the Jews of Germany is the existence of nuclear Pakistan on the borders of Modi’s India. The facts that cannot be denied and must be faced by Modi, if intend to implement his evil agenda.

For Pakistan the Modi’s invitation to PM Nawaz Sharif a ‘politician’ (so eager t0 please US and the West) devoid of any political acumen and political intelligence, is the best move in the ‘great game’ that is about to begin in south Asia. In fact Nawaz had no choice but to accept the invitation to convince IMF and the World Bank of his liberal thinking. Modi, actually outplayed the Pakistani establishment to the pleasure of SarTaj Aziz, foreign advisor of Nawaz who is known to have business and personal contacts in India. Whatever the case may be, Nawaz Sharif still has a great opportunity to set the tone for future relations by bringing up the issue of Kashmir and India’s involvement in Balochistan. Should he not do that and follow the appeasement policy of promising trade access, which he would in my opinion, he must be ready to face the wrath of the majority of Pakistani public along with Pakistan defense establishment-guardian of Pakistani ideology. I would like to caution PM Nawaz Sharif to remember the history as remembered by his guardian general Zia-ul-Haq. Unfortunately PM Nawaz is no Zia-ul Haq who was the master of foreign policy game. For that reason, let me give a brief description of Modi and RSS in the words of William Dalrymple (blog dated May, 12, 2014).

Modi, the president-elect of India in Dalrymple d words as follows:
Modi is the Hindu nationalist son of a station chai-wallah, and as different a man as could be imagined from the shahzada, or “princeling”, as Modi mockingly refers to the heir to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. With Kejriwal reduced to a minor player, the election in most of the country has been an unequal contest between the Modi juggernaut and a beleaguered Rahul, who is in the process of taking the can for the failings of a government he didn’t lead and can do little to redeem.

Modi is a strong speaker. In the past few months he has been transformed into a hugely popular, even cult figure for many around India and is now widely admired by many who do not share his Hindu nationalism. This is because he has come to embody the collective longing, especially among India’s middle class of 300 million, for an economic rebirth of the nation: after all, under his stewardship, the economy of the state of Gujarat, for which he has been chief minister since 2001, has nearly tripled in size. He also has a reputation for decisiveness, getting things done, rooting out corruption, stimulating investment and slashing through the bureaucratic red tape and outdated, cumbersome regulations.

It is easy to understand why so many Indians feel a need for bold change and why the thought of another five years of a dithering, divided and corrupt Congress government fills them with dismay. But it is frightening and difficult to understand why so many are willing to overlook Modi’s extremely dodgy record with India’s religious minorities.

In 2002, the year after Modi became chief minister of Gujarat, as many as 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed and about 200,000 more displaced in an inter communal bloodbath. Large numbers of girls were raped; men were cut to pieces and burned alive with kerosene or burning tires. Pregnant women had their womb slit open and the fetuses smashed in front of their eyes. Modi, who prides himself on his hands-on administrative skills, was accused of allowing the 2002 riots to happen, or even of ordering the police to let the rioters get on with their work – something he has denied.
A report by Human Rights Watch asserted that his administration was complicit in the massacres. “The attacks were planned in advance,” a senior researcher for the organization said, “and organized with the extensive participation of the police and state government officials.”
Modi has survived several formal investigations by the courts without conviction, but he has never apologized for his gov¬ernment’s failure to protect the minority or shown the slightest remorse for what happened. He refuses to answer questions about the riots. In a rare comment on the subject last year, he said he regretted the Muslims’ suffering as he would a “puppy being run over by a car”. Once he seemed to half-justify the actions of the rioters: in the US, he said, “An innocent Sikh was murdered after 9/11. Why? Because he looked like as terrorist. If the educated in America can get provoked, why use a different yardstick to evaluate Gujaratis?” On another occasion, even more chillingly, he told the Washington Post: “Why even talk about 2002? . . . It’s the past. What does it matter?” His only regret, he told the New York Times, was his failure to handle the media fallout.

None of these statements has done anything to reassure anxious Indian Muslims, or liberal Hindus who value the pluralistic mosaic of their society. Nor has his party’s ongoing hostility to Muslims: 50,000 of the riot victims of 2002 continue to languish in extreme poverty, displaced in 83 “relief colonies”. Although there is only one known instance of his visiting them, Modi has derisively described the camps as Muslim “baby-making factories”. He continues to refuse to wear a Muslim skullcap on the election trail, saying that the cap is a “symbol of appeasement of the minority”.

Moreover, on Modi’s watch there was not a single Muslim candidate in Gujarat for member of the legislative assembly on the ticket of his Bharatiya Janata Party; across India, if you exclude Kashmir, there are only two Muslim BJP candidates. Muslims make up 20 per cent of India’s 1.2 billion people, but of the 449 BJP candidates now running for the lower house of parliament, all but eight are Hindus. One of Modi’s closest associates, Amit Shah, has gone even further, and called on voters in Uttar Pradesh to reject parties that put up Muslim candidates. He also openly urged voters to use the ballot box to seek “revenge for the insult meted out to our community. This election will be a reply to those who have been ill-treating our mothers and sisters” – this in an area where dozens were killed in Hindu-Muslim riots last year. Amit Shah is widely expected to become India’s home minister. If Modi is a frightening figure, it is properly terrifying to imagine Shah controlling the fate of 1.2 billion people.

Given that by most calculations Narendra Modi will be holding the reins of power in Delhi in a fortnight’s time, it is surprising how few people here, outside a small inner circle of diehard sycophants, know the man at all. He has avoided Delhi for most of his life, and his team – with a few exceptions such as the dark legal genius of the BJP, Arun Jaitley, who is running in Amritsar – are largely those with whom he has worked in Gujarat.

Even in that small circle, few feel intimate with their idol, and what they tell you about his personal life adds to the sense of the man’s extreme austerity, self-discipline and self-sufficiency. “He is teetotal and vegetarian and lives an almost monastic lifestyle,” one told me. “He is extremely focused. When he talks to you he really listens: he can focus like few people I know.” “He calls it a day by eleven and gets up at four in the morning,” another aide said. “He spends the first 90 minutes of the day happily surfing the internet for articles about him. His staff starts getting calls by 5.30, latest.” “He is obsessed with personal hygiene,” said a third. “He changes his clothes at least four or five times a day. And he always eats alone, always.”

Louis XIV was also said to eat alone but Narendra Modi was born in rather different circumstances from the Sun King’s. He was the third of six children born to a family from the low, oil-presser Ganchi caste in the small town of Vadnagar, in the heart of Gujarat; to provide for his large family, Modi’s father also ran a tea stall at Vadnagar railway station. Modi used to help his father in the early mornings at the station, then cross over the tracks to go to school.
A shaft of light has recently been thrown on his childhood after a bizarre revelation midway through the campaign. Modi has always talked of himself as single, but when he filed his papers to stand for this election, he declared for the first time that he was in fact married. According to the custom of his caste, he had been engaged at the age of three or four, underwent a religious ceremony at 14, and began cohabiting at the age of 17. After three months, he walked out to go on pilgrimage in the Himalayas and never came back.

In the subsequent fallout, Modi kept his usual silence, but his elder brother issued a statement saying that “45-50 years ago our family . . . led a rather ordinary and poverty-stricken life. We belong to a family which was then bound by orthodoxy and plagued by social, educational and financial backwardness . . . Our parents were not very literate and that is why they thought Narendrabhai was like all the other children. Our parents earned a livelihood and led a life according to their intellectual capabilities and conditions. It was this which later saw our parents get Narendrabhai married at a rather young age . . . Today Narendrabhai remains as detached from his family as he was then.”

Modi returned from his pilgrimage and set up a tea cart outside the Ahmedabad bus stand, and it was here that he found a new family: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or Association of National Volunteers, which started life in 1925 as a far-right paramilitary organization. Like the Phalange in Lebanon, the RSS was founded in direct imitation of European fascist movements, and like its 1930s fascist models it still makes much of daily parading in khaki drill and the giving of militaristic salutes: the RSS salute differs from that of the Nazis only in the angle of the arm, which is held horizontally over the chest. The RSS sees this as an attempt to create a corps of dedicated paramilitary zealots who, so the theory goes, will form the basis of a revival of a golden age of national strength and racial purity. The BJP was founded as the political wing of the RSS and most senior BJP figures have an RSS background, holding posts in both organizations. The RSS and the BJP both believe, as the centerpiece of their ideology that India is in essence a Hindu nation and that minorities, especially Muslims, may live in India only if they acknowledge this. Madhav Golwalkar, the early RSS leader still known simply as “the Guru”, was the man who formulated the outlines of the RSS world-view and looked directly to the Nazi thinkers of 1930s Germany. He took particular inspiration from Hitler’s treatment of German religious minorities. “To keep up the purity of the Race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by her purging of its Semitic Race, the Jews,” Golwalkar wrote admiringly in 1938. “Race pride at its highest has been manifested there. Germany has also shown how well-nigh impossible it is for Races and cultures having differences going to the root to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by . . . The foreign races in Hindustan must either adopt the Hindu culture and language, must learn to respect and hold in reverence the Hindu religion, must entertain no ideas but those of glorification of the Hindu race and culture . . . or may stay in the country wholly subordinated to the Hindu nation, claiming nothing, deserving no privileges, far less any preferential treatment – not even citizen’s rights.”

During Partition, the RSS was responsible for many of the worst atrocities against Muslims, and it was a former RSS swayamsevak, Nathuram Godse, who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi in 1948 for “pandering to the minorities”. In the aftermath of the assassination, Pandit Nehru decided to deal firmly with the Hindu nationalists and he denounced the RSS as a “private army which is definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines”. Partly as a result of this, the Hindu nationalists were an insignificant political force during the first decades of independent India; but by the 1980s they had returned with a vengeance. Today the RSS has roughly 40 million members, organized under 40,000 district centers across the country.
This was the organization that took Modi in, and which, he acknowledges, made him what he is. “I got the inspiration to live for the nation from the RSS,” he said recently in an interview. “I learned to live for others, and not for myself. I owe it all to the RSS.”

Initially he swept and washed for the local RSS boss; but quickly he rose up the ranks, gaining a reputation as an efficient organizer. By the late 1980s he had become a senior figure in the RSS’s Gujarat chapter. From here, he was given the job of liaising with the Gujarat BJP and before long had moved across from the RSS into its political wing. His first big assignment came in 1990: to help organize the Gujarat leg of the Rath Yatra chariot march on Ayodhya from the great Hindu temple of Somnath, a campaign in which Modi played a crucial role. The campaign led to the destruction two years later of the Babri Masjid, a mosque said to have been erected by the first Mughal emperor on the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Ram – and which for Hindu nationalists is a symbol of the centuries-long oppression of Hindus by Islamic rulers, an injustice they are determined to avenge.

On 6 December 1992, after being whipped into frenzy by the speeches of BJP leaders, a crowd of 200,000 militant Hindus stormed the barricades protecting the mosque. Shouting slogans – “Victory to Lord Ram!”, “Hindustan is for the Hindus!”, “Death to the Muslims!” – The militants began pulling the building apart with sledgehammers and pickaxes. One after another, like monuments to India’s time-honored traditions of tolerance, democracy and secularism, the three domes of the mosque fell to the ground. In as little as four hours the entire structure had been reduced to rubble.

Over the next fortnight unrest swept India: crowds of angry Muslim demonstrators came out on to the streets only to be massacred by the same police force that had earlier stood by and allowed the Hindutva (Hindu nationalist) militants to destroy the mosque without firing a shot. Mobs went on the rampage across India as Muslims were hunted down by armed thugs, burned alive in their homes or knifed in the streets. By the time the army was brought in, at least 1,400 people had been slaughtered in Bombay alone. In all, about 2,000 people were killed and 8,000 injured.

By this stage, Modi had been rewarded for his work by being promoted to serve as the BJP’s national secretary – a remarkable achievement for a low-caste politician from the provinces in a party still dominated by metropolitan Brahmins. He moved to Delhi and began to work on converting himself from a backroom provincial figure into a recognizable national politician. Modi took office on 7 October 2001. He had been chief minister only four months when, on 27 February, a party of Hindutva activists, returning from Ayodhya, where they had been holding a tenth-anniversary celebration of the destruction of the Babri Masjid, was caught in a burning wagon as their train stopped in Godhra station. Fifty-nine people were burned to death. A subsequent investigation found that the fire started by accident, due to a malfunctioning gas cylinder, but Modi, without evidence, immediately announced that it was a Pakistani-Muslim conspiracy. He called a statewide strike and had the burned bodies of the Hindutva activists paraded around Ahmedabad while he made a series of incendiary speeches.

The following day, a huge mob of Hindu militants, armed with petrol bombs, iron rods and swords, gathered outside the Gulbarg Society, a residential complex in an upper-class Muslim area, home to a former Congress MP, Ehsan Jafri. Seeing that the police were observing the mob but making no attempt to control or disperse it, Jafri began calling round his contacts and begging for help. According to several survivors, Modi was among those he called. “After calling Modi, Jafri was totally depressed,” Imtiyaz Pathan, an electrician who had taken refuge in the house, told the Independent. “When I asked him what had happened, he said, ‘There will be no deployment of police.’ ” According to Jafri’s widow, Zakia, Modi taunted her husband and expressed surprise that he was still alive. Shortly afterwards, at around 3pm, Zakia Jafri watched in horror from her balcony as rioters marched her naked husband from their home and chopped off his fingers, hands, arms and head, then tossed the body on an open pyre. All the while the police looked on without intervening, telling victims, “We have no orders to save you.” An investigative magazine later caught several ringleaders on camera claiming that the chief minister had approved the attacks: “Modi had given us three days to do whatever we could,” one of them boasted.

What happened in Gulbarg that day lies at the heart of the accusations against Modi. He denies all knowledge of events there and claims that he was not informed until 8.30pm, five hours after the massacre had finished. This version of events has been accepted by the Supreme Court-appointed special investigation team, which examined the matter at length. However, there are clear contradictions in the SIT report that make it hard to accept: for instance, records of a flurry of communications during the afternoon, as the violence unfolded, between police officers present in Gulbarg and their superiors. The SIT report praises Modi for holding a series of meetings with police officers throughout the day. If he was being briefed hour by hour, how then could he not have known about Gulbarg until late that evening? As a result, the report has been much criticized, especially since a former associate of Modi’s took out an affidavit claiming that a draft of the report had been sent to the Gujarat state lawyers for vetting and possible redrafting.
In the meantime, the case, including a new challenge from Zakia Jafri, continues to work its way through the legal system and there has not yet been a final ruling. But it is not true, as is often stated by Modi’s supporters, that the Supreme Court has given him a “clean chit”. In reality, the court has yet to rule on the matter; the facts remain in dispute and the case is ongoing.

For several years after the riots, Narendra Modi was a political pariah. Thirty-two people were finally convicted of murder, attempted murder and conspiracy over the riots, among them Maya Kodnani, Modi’s one-time minister for women; she was sentenced to 28 years in jail. Sonia Gandhi denounced Modi as a “merchant of death” and several BJP MPs also broke ranks to criticize him. The US and UK refused him visas. The turning point came in October 2008, when Tata Motors moved its car plant for its much-publicized new budget hatchback, the Nano, from the leftist-dominated West Bengal to the pro-business Gujarat. In 2011, Ford invested $1bn (£630m) in setting up another car plant. Before long, Gujarat started to make headlines, not for riots, but for its new image as an economic powerhouse. From 2003, Modi began holding an annual summit, Vibrant Gujarat, which cumulatively generated investment pledges of $920bn. All the most prominent Indian captains of industry, from Ratan Tata to the Ambanis and Mittals, rallied behind Modi and declared him India’s most business-friendly chief minister.

However Modi remains the most polarizing figure in Indian politics. Many intellectuals and urban liberals view him as an almost satanic figure pushing India towards fascism. They point to his record with dissent: journalists from the Times of India who wrote against his government had sedition charges brought against them; Rahul Sharma, a policeman who helped convict many of the 2002 rioters, had his promotion blocked (“due to misspellings”); Teesta Setalvad, the lawyer who brought riot cases against him, had charges of embezzlement slapped on her. Most sinister of all, Haren Pandya, Modi’s former home minister, who agreed to give evidence against him to an independent commission of inquiry into the riots, was first made to resign his position, then deprived of his seat and finally murdered in mysterious circumstances in 2003. “Modi, the argument goes, displays all the signs of reincarnated Hitler.” William Dalrymple.

With a haul of almost 280 out of 543 seats gives Modi a free hand to bring about deep-seated change – similar to tectonic shift that may change the face of India or even sub-continent including Bangladesh and Pakistan. For this reason PM Nawaz Sharif must be extremely cautious in dealing with the new government of India. He must pay attention to history and past dealings with India. This is the time Pakistani political and defense leadership work closely emphasizing common strategy. Pakistani PM must listen to ISI and Pakistan Army remembering that Modi met him only because he is the president of Pakistan while his agenda and priority is to dismantle Pakistan. PM Nawaz Sharif must realize that any little success of Modi shall result in dethroning Nawaz and his family from the ruling elite of Pakistan forever.

Pakistan should expect the West supporting India under Modi for couple of reasons: one the agenda of both parties is common – to destroy nuclear Pakistan and to make more money as George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.

Note: William Dalrymple is the New Statesman’s India correspondent.
Dr. Kausar Talat can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
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