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AntiWar.com, Wednesday, January 2, 2002
INDIA'S TERRORIST MINISTER
Defense chief George Fernandes raised
funds and supplied arms to the terrorist Tamil Tigers
by JUSTIN RAIMONDO
As India took full advantage of the instability in Central Asia
to push its agenda in Kashmir, and force a showdown with
Pakistan, the rattling of the nuclear saber by Indian defense
minister George Fernandes sent a collective shiver down the
world's spine. The Pakistanis, emphasizing the need for
negotiation, were rebuffed by New Delhi's arrogant Brahmins, who
stoked war hysteria to shore up their faltering political
fortunes at home – and openly bragged that they would
"win" a nuclear exchange with Pakistan. Said
Fernandes:
"We could take a strike, survive and then hit back.
Pakistan would be finished. I do not really fear that the nuclear
issue would figure in a conflict."
WAR & REINCARNATION
But surely this is unthinkable, and not only for reasons of
morality. After all, the nuclear devastation of Pakistan's cities
would blow right back in India's face, poisoning the land with
radioactive elements and taking a huge toll of Indian as well as
Pakistani lives. Ah, yes, but if you believe in reincarnation, as
India's predominantly Hindu rulers do, then what's the problem?
Why, all these people will just come back in another form,
perhaps as dung beetles that glow in the dark. So, you see, it's
no sweat, and no sin, to murder millions with the push of a
button.
RARIN' TO GO
How the supposedly Christian Fernandes, who presumably doesn't
believe in reincarnation, reconciles this threat of mass
indiscriminate murder with the demands of Christian morality is
anyone's guess. Certainly he was more than forthcoming in
describing Indian bloodlust. The Times of London reported him
saying that India's military, "from the top down, was eager
to fight," and boasting that "Everyone is raring to go.
In fact, something that actually bothers them is that things
might now reach a point where one says there is no war."
THE CREATURE FROM 20,000 FATHOMS
Wading into the center of Asia to slay the monster Bin Laden, we
have stirred up other creatures more monstrous than we ever
imagined possible. In going after the poisonous snake of Al
Qaeda, which has apparently slithered off into the high grass, we
have disturbed the sleep of a much bigger and far more powerful
reptile – a Tyrannosaurus Rex lurking in a forgotten corner
of the world.
A PRISON-HOUSE OF NATIONS
India swarms with dozens of nationalities and thousands of
religious, ethnic, and social subgroups: it is, like its old
Soviet ally, a vast prison-house of nations, struggling to be
free. The Indian elite's efforts to forge a truly federalized
central state apparatus over the heads of these squabbling
interest groups have threatened, on occasion, to fall apart.
Awash in corruption amid pervasive poverty, the moderate-left
Congress Party, after years of virtually uninterrupted rule,
could never come up with one unifying idea that would bind the
many different strands of Indian society together and rope in
fractious minorities. So a new movement rose up, based on the
concept of Hindutva, a racial and religious mythology similar to
the old German racialist concept of the Volk, the nation-race or
collective soul of a people. Like the extreme fundamentalist
version of Islam practiced by the Taliban, this deviant strain of
Hinduism was a largely artificial construct that increasingly
bore little resemblance to the original.
BLUE-EYED AND BEAUTIFUL
The parallels with German Nazi ideology do not end there,
however. According to the ideologues of Hindutva, the present-day
Indians are the descendants of pure "Aryans" who
conquered the subcontinent some 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, and
are also the also the heirs of today's northern Europeans. One
guru floated the theory that the original "Aryas" came
out of the Arctic circle, and then descended on India where they
established their empire and divided society into castes, with
themselves, naturally, at the top. The group at the center of the
Hindutva movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has a
provision in its constitution that its Supreme Leader must be a
blue-eyed Sarasvat Brahmin. The symbol of this Hindu-fascist
movement is, appropriately enough, the swastika, which Hitler
originally borrowed from the ideologues of Indo-Europeanism.
SHIVA RISING
This burgeoning Hindu-fascist movement is a many-headed hydra,
which presents various faces to different publics. The Bharatiya
Janata Party (BJP) is its political wing, run mainly by high- and
mid-caste activists, drawn in by its appeal to a new Indian
nationalism; Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), a clerical-fascist
propaganda group, and the openly fascist and brutally violent
Bajrang Dal, the Hindutva equivalent of Hitler's Brownshirts,
which regularly attacks minorities, such as Christians, and is
always ready for street action against the BJP's political
opponents. Along with a women's auxiliary, a youth group, and
other organizations, this Hindutva hive is collectively known as
the Sangh Parivar. Together, these groups forged an ideology that
seeks to "saffronize" the culture, the government, the
schools, and "Hinduize" a formerly pluralistic nation.
A CATALYZING MOMENT
The Sangh Parivar was largely discredited until the 1990s, when
the failure of the sclerotic Congress Party to revive the nation
had become all too apparent. The catalyzing moment came in 1992,
when the BJP went on the offensive with a series of violent
street actions that left more than 1,200 dead. The crisis was
sparked by a Hindu-fascist mob that pulled down an ancient mosque
in the city of Ayohya, believed to be the spot where the Hindu
warrior-god Ram was born. The BJP state government, rather than
go after the vandals, cleared away the rubble and put up a Hindu
shrine. Already in control of several state governments, the BJP
finally overtook the Congress Party and, in 1996, formed a
coalition government with various regionalist,
formerly-secularist and even socialist critics of Hindutva.
COCA-COLA AND ANTI-AMERICANS
But how was this religious obscurantist movement, one associated,
after all, with Gandhi's assassin, to garner an electoral
majority or cobble together a coalition government? The BJP and
its rightist allies couldn't get more than 35 percent of the
vote, and were forced to share power with other factions and
parties. The solution: reach out to the traditionally
anti-American left. A key link in the BJP-led coalition
government is Samata Party leader George Fernandes, a devout
Christian and a socialist whose previous claim to fame was that
he led the effort to send Coca-Cola packing – during his
stint as a government minister from 1977-79. The company was
denounced by Fernandes as a symbol of American imperialism and
economic exploitation: today, he seeks a military alliance with
the American "exploiter" against supposedly
"pro-terrorist" Pakistan. What gives?
THE JEWEL IN THE CROWN
As the Indian government's public face to the world during the
war crisis – a kind of South Asian Donald Rumsfeld –
Fernandes and the BJP are now claiming to be "partners"
with the US in the war on terrorism. As the governing coalition's
chief foreign policy hawk, Fernandes is a key figure whose
absorption into the BJP-led coalition was a triumph for those
advocates of Hindutva who wanted to see their movement grow
beyond its rather limited ethnic and religious constituencies.
In his belligerence – and his political history –
Fernandes represents the imperial ambitions of the Indian federal
state. A Christian and a leftist who formerly campaigned against
the "communalist" politics of the BJP, he is the jewel
in the crown of the governing "National Democratic"
coalition – and his rise to prominence points to an ominous
development in the growth of a nuclear-armed Hindu-fascism.
Hindutva is being secularized, if not exactly mainstreamed.
GEORGE FERNANDES – PRO-TERRORIST ACTIVIST
Another interesting fact about Fernandes is that the man who
wants to nuke Pakistan in the name of India's "war on
terrorism" was himself intimately involved with a known
terrorist organization, the LTTE or Tamil Liberation Tigers, who
seek to create a separate Tamil state in Sri Lanka, formerly
Ceylon. The Tigers assassinated Indian Prime Minister Rajiv
Gandhi, in 1991, and were into suicide bombing in a big way well
before Hamas and Al Qaeda got into the game. Their terrorist
tactics long ago labeled them a terrorist outfit in the eyes of
the US government.
In 1999, the BJP government lost a vote of confidence because, as
it turned out, Fernandes was not just sympathetic to the
pro-Indian Tamils, but was an activist in their
"liberation" movement: he had led fundraising efforts,
helped procure arms, and used his authority as defense minister
to make it easier for the Tigers to smuggle arms – even
going so far as to dismiss an Indian navy commander who had
intercepted one too many sea-borne Tigers. The man who once
hosted a conference of the LTTE in his own home is now saying
that Pakistan must be nuked in order to defeat terrorism –
is it me, or does anybody else see something wrong with this
picture?
A STRANGE TURN
Prior to the signing of the Indo-Sri Lankan Peace accords of
1987, Sinhalese-Tamil ethnic warfare on the island had
increasingly drawn in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, right on
the other side of the Palk Strait from Sri Lanka, in support of
the Tamil separatists. When the flow of arms and support was cut
off, and the Indian Army sent in to keep the peace, the Tigers
waged a war of "liberation" against what they saw as an
occupation force. Truck bombs, suicide squads, assassinations,
attacks on civilian and governmental offices, hijackings, all
carried out by an extensive international network with units in
60-plus countries – and with the full cooperation of India's
"anti-terrorist" minister of defense.
Here, indeed, is a strange turn in the worldwide war on
terrorism. What next? Will the Irish Republican Army be recruited
to "fight terrorism" alongside Fernandes?