musings

I do not have an iota of sympathy for either the Taliban or Al Qaeda. But I cannot understand what NATO and the Americans are doing there in the Tribal regions straddling the Pak-Afghan border. It seems to be a modern replay of the medieval crusades.

On the pretext of fighting terrorism these modern day crusaders are ruining thousands of innocent lives of people who had nothing to do with what happened on 9/11.

Pakistan has become a hot bed of terrorist activity. It is both a safe haven for terrorists and is also a victim of terrorism. Maybe in the case of Pakistan terrorism is self-inflicted. But as a result India too is suffering. In the near future Indians may have to forego many of their personal freedoms in exchange for safety from terrorist attacks.

. If all the money that is being spent on the war in Afghanistan were to be spent on peaceful means of uplifting the lives of the poor in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal regions, one can be sure that both Al Qaeda and the Taliban would find it difficult to survive for want of volunteers and recruits a generation or two from now.

One reason why the Americans have got into this mess in Afghanistan is that the white warriors have to show the world their machismo in response to what happened on 9/11. In the process they are creating a huge reservoir of recruits for future terrorist activities.

A primary reason the Americans and their NATO allies are fighting this unwinable war is not to make their countries and world at large safe from terrorist attacks but are doing so at the bidding of the fundamentalist Christians in the United States and their American Jewish allies whose religious beliefs makes them blind to the anomalous existence of a belligerent and artificial state of Israel which is based on mere biblical lore.

Until the people in the United States understand this and force their government to rein in the Israelis who are at present mollycoddled with arms and money from the U.S., there is very little hope that we will be seeing the end of terrorist attacks including suicide bombings in the near future.

Interestingly, it is a fact that the original perpetrators of terrorism were in fact the Jews, a prominent Jewish terrorist being no less than the former Prime Minister of Israel, Mr. Menachem Begin who was the head of Jewish terrorist group called Irgun until the creation of Israel in 1948. The original Palestinian terrorists belonged to that gene pool. It is sad irony that besides himself the terrorist in Osama bin Laden too has a Jewish progenitor.

Now there is talk in the air about forming a federation with Pakistan in order, ostensibly, as a protection from Jihadi Islam as represented by Al Queda and the Taliban. This, ironically, is perhaps the brainchild of the extreme right wing in India that has always dreamt of ‘Akhand Bharat’ and has never fully reconciled itself to the creation of Pakistan.

We must remember that India was never one nation until the English literally handed the country to us as one entity, from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, on a platter, so to say. Unfortunately or fortunately, depending upon one’s own views, the country was partitioned on the eve of independence into two sovereign nations, a predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan.

I am of the view that what happened was for the best because the country’s Hindu identity has been largely instrumental in holding the country together in spite of our myriad cultures and languages.

Having said that it must not be forgotten that religion as a unifying force linking the various parts of the country is at best a rather tenuous item and we are lucky that the existence of Pakistan as a separate entity acts as a reinforcement of the Hindu identity.

We need only look at the nation states of Europe, where even today after the formation of the European Union (EU), they dub each other as foreigners, to realize how tenuous a link religion is and how lucky we are, at least thus far

One could even say that the asymmetrical war perpetrated on India by the Pakistani army and its intelligence services even at the best of times is undoubtedly a blessing in disguise in this regard.

Forming a federation with non tribal Pakistan which hopefully is only a dream of the extreme right wing extremists and bleeding heart liberals at the other end the nationalist spectrum, would only result in the dilution of the nation’s Hindu identity thereby giving a fillip to regionalism and other fissiparous tendencies already extant.

The Hindu identity of our country is not the only factor that has held our country together however. The other main factor is our adoption of a secular liberal democracy, which would also suffer distortion as a consequence of any federation with Pakistan (or parts thereof) with its huge, mainly monotheistic population.

I may be corrected, but as I see it, monotheism, has been the bane of humanity throughout history. Be it the Jewish variety, the Islamic variety or of late, the Christian fundamentalist variety. Unfortunately for our country, fundamentalist Hindus are indeed not too far behind in this regard.

It is difficult to understand the Europeans and the Americans stand on the issue of Iran’s nuclear programme.

In the first place, Iran, as a sovereign nation, has every right to pursue its nuclear ambitions if, as it has reiterated time and again, it is in the process of enriching uranium for peaceful use. This no doubt requires a considerable amount of the proverbial salt for the rest of the world to swallow.

But even if Iran does eventually acquire nuclear weapons how could it be any worse than other nuclear armed countries, including Israel, having such weapons.

It must be remembered that the Europeans are in fact living under the threat of Israel’s so called ‘Samson Option’ which is hardly ever mentioned when various threats to global peace is discussed in the media. The Europeans are shamelessly kowtowing to the United States’ unconditional support for the state of Israel.

This unthinking support for Israel and its depredations in what was Palestine, is the product of what is unconscionable, even to a large section of the American public, i.e. strong influence of the American Jewish lobby backed by the stronger influence of Christian fundamentalists for whom the very creation of the present state of Israel is the realization of biblical prophecy.

If Iran does indeed acquire nuclear weapons in the not too distant future it might prove to be a blessing in disguise by acting as a catalyst for the leading nations of the world to seriously consider abolishing nuclear weapons altogether as propounded by many eminent persons around the world. Besides, it might even accelerate the peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine problem.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is reported to have hailed the launch as a historic event aimed at “ expanding monotheism, peace and justice.

How the expansion of monotheism can be something desirable is beyond me. Historically it is monotheism that has been at the root of much trouble around the world.

Peace imposed by monotheists has historically been the peace of the grave as it were, usually accompanied by forced conversion at the point of the sword; and monotheistic justice has always been a misleading notion as it hardly ever extended to the unfortunates who resisted conversion. The existence of the Parsis in India is testimony to what happened when Arab monotheism extended to Persia.

It is a fact of history that the Jews made themselves disliked by all those who came in contact with them after they began to assert their monotheism as a reaction to queen Jezebel’s (around 800 BC) public propitiation of her own god(s) by virtue of the fact that she was not a Jew.

The Jews are still paying the price for that cardinal mistake which among other things made them unwelcome among the practitioners of what is described as a dishonest compromise between monotheism and polytheism viz., the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity.

According to Edward Gibbons relative peace reined within the polytheist Roman Empire because as he put it “ all the people believed all gods were equally true, all the philosophers thought all the gods were equally false and all the magistrates thought all the gods were equally useful.”

It is in this context that we Indians should thank the Gods of our land that the vast majority our people are polytheists and hence we enjoy relative peace and security in spite of our myriad cultures and languages and lately, cowardly terrorist attacks by (misguided?) monotheists.

I might mention here, that it is because of this polytheism that the phrase anti-Semitism does not exist in Indian vocabularies.

Perhaps Iran does have a right to have nuclear weapons even if today they assert that their nuclear programme is solely for peaceful purposes. If monotheistic Israel can have nuclear weapons, and the Europeans can live under the threat of their (Israel’s) ‘Samson Option’, why not Iran!

Iran’s acquiring of nuclear weapons might even, God willing, yield a universal nuclear disarmament agreement as proposed by eminent people around the globe.

Mr. Ahmadinejad and his ilk would do well to ponder over the fact that Indians as also most East Asians are quite happy with and proud of their polytheism and/or atheism. All that monotheism has done in South Asia is partitioned it, the pain of which is manifest in the troubled relations between India and Pakistan.

Historically, monotheism has always been associated with trouble. It has either dished out trouble or invited trouble from the time of the Assyrians and Babylonians to that of the Romans, the crusades and up to the present day Arab-Israeli conflicts.

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