The ease with which Anna Hazare and his NGO hordes have stormed Delhi could lead to another era of colonisation, this time without a fight.
The ease with which Maoists can operate in the corridors of power in New Delhi is illustrated by this incident, which took place nearly six years ago. In December 2005, a woman activist from an eastern Indian NGO approached a senior editor in New Delhi, who incidentally moonlights as an events manager, to conduct a seminar at the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. As would be expected in a seminar in the Capital, the woman told the editor that some noted politicians and academics were to be invited. The editor said that would not be a problem and a fee of Rs 70,000 was agreed upon.
One of the editor’s key contacts was a senior official in the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, a Congress dominated organisation. This official managed to invite a couple of top level Congress leaders to the event. The seminar went off smoothly with participants from various organisations. Despite the un-glamorous subject the media came in reasonably good numbers, probably enticed by the lovely non-vegetarian buffet. NGO members took the opportunity to get themselves photographed with Congress leaders.
Turns out, the photo-op was exactly what the NGO was after. Well, this is how the rest of the story goes. When the editor sent in his bill, the courier company returned the envelope with the message that the NGO had vacated the premises. When he called the woman on her mobile phone, she said she was travelling to her HQ in an eastern Indian state but promised to pay him the money after she returned in a few days.
Two weeks later when the editor called her, she seemed very irritated and asked him to stop bothering her. When he said that he was only calling her to get his fee, she told him bluntly, “Look, by calling me repeatedly you are only putting your life in danger.” When he asked what she meant, she said, “The NGO I work for is a front for Maoists, we can get you killed.”
The editor was predictably alarmed and said he didn’t care about the money they owed him. He ran a respectable magazine and did not want to be tainted by any link to the Maoists. However, he did ask her one final question: “You are obviously well funded, so why don’t you pay people for their services?”
Simple – it was their way of showing their class enemies their place. The woman then boasted how her organisation operated. The NGO’s job, she revealed, was to develop links with journalists and use them to get close to senior political leaders. Often the politicians would not even remember the NGO’s name, but that didn’t matter, as the photographs taken at seminars, meetings and forums were enough for the NGO. These were used to establish that the NGO was a legitimate organisation which was ‘close’ to top Indian leaders. Armed with these photographs, they tried to influence the United Nations, international development organisations, aid agencies and the media.
The woman ended the call with an offer he could have hardly refused: “Forget about us or the Maoists will kill you.”
NGO’s and charlatans like this woman will now suddenly become the kingmakers of India thanks to Anna Hazare’s Gandhi style activism. It is a brand of street power that seeks to emasculate nation building and kill our institutions, which might be rather slow on the draw but are certainly not incapable of taking on corruption.
It is worth asking how Hazare, until now a virtually unknown commodity, managed to grab middle class India’s attention. That too in a matter of just four days.
In the days and weeks leading up to the point when Hazare’s hordes stormed primetime TV, it was the ascetic Baba Ramdev who was taking the issue of corruption to the masses. You had to see the passionate speakers and the non-trucked attendees at his massive rallies nationwide to understand how he was shaking up Sonia Gandhi’s corrupt Congress cabal.
Go to YouTube and watch clips of the Ramdev rallies to understand the true depth of the Indian people’s anger against the Congress, anger at the European Christian remote control and frustration with a hapless Prime Minister, who seems to not only lack a backbone but also principles.
But from the English language media’s perspective, Ramdev didn’t exist. Somehow they all managed to think collectively and block coverage, which is why middle class India missed it totally.
Then, suddenly Hazare steps in with his group of NGOs and activists, and all they have to do is speak in English to get the media’s, and the nation’s, attention.
There is a very uncanny parallel that happened during an equally significant juncture in India’s history. In the early part of the 20th century, an individual of average education and mediocre intellect named M.K. Gandhi scrambled on to the platform created by stalwarts like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Aurobindo Ghosh and hijacked India’s freedom movement. It was India’s greatest misfortune that two proud nationalists, highly erudite, intellectually without equal were replaced by Gandhi who was responsible for sparking the nascent Islamic fundamentalism in India.
Gandhi cooled down the revolutionary fervour of Indians, made it easy for the British to despatch thousands of Indian revolutionaries to the gallows, send thousands more to jails, and bomb public gatherings from the air. Thanks to Gandhi, the British, who were most likely staring at a wholesale massacre or at best an ignominious exit, managed to hang on to India for several decades more. The colonialists grabbed this opportunity to sow separatism among Muslims which ultimately led to India’s division along religious lines. Pakistan was the first artificial country created by the Anglo-American empire to serve its geopolitical interests. Libya is yet one more chapter in this empire’s sordid saga.
No study of Hazare is complete without analysing Gandhi’s rise, which coincidentally saw India’s fall. Just like Gandhi’s idealistic ideas – such as launching a movement to support Turkey’s Caliphate, an institution hated by modern Turks themselves – hurt India seriously, Hazare’s movement will lend legitimacy to suspect NGO’s and might emasculate our national institutions.
Does Hazare’s planned Bharat Swabhimaan Andolan sound familiar? Of course, it does. It is not a coincidence that the word Andolan is used here. Decades ago Hazare’s guru Vinoba Bhave led the Bhoodan Andolan (Donate Land Movement) which met with patchy success in getting land for the landless.
Bhave has not been given proper credit for his hare-brained idea to bring several hundred thousand Mewati Muslims back from Pakistan. In 1947, when India was reeling under riots, Bhave conducted one of the most shameless cases of Muslim appeasement.
It is well known that despite assurances by Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the Muslim figurehead behind India’s partition, large swathes of Pakistani Punjab, Sindh and the Pathan dominated areas were being ethnically cleansed of Hindus.
What is less well known is how a potentially dangerous situation developed around Delhi because of the radicalisation of the Meo Muslims of the Mewat region in western India. In 1947, over 30,000 Meo Muslims marched on Delhi with a plan to massacre the Hindus of the city. When the Jats of the surrounding areas came to know of the march, they hastily gathered a Jat army which defeated the Meos and pushed them out to Pakistan.
Here another sorry chapter in Indian history unfolded. Forever willing to please his British friends and totally lacking in realpolitik Indian Prime Minister Nehru, under pressure from Bhave, allowed several hundred thousand Meos to return to Rajasthan and Haryana.
While secularists will no doubt say these Muslims deserved to be in their homeland, the reality is that it was a fair exchange because what else was Pakistan created for if not as a homeland for the Indian Muslims? It wasn’t created for the comfort of the Muslims of western Punjab, Sindh, Balochistan, or the north-west frontier because in those areas the Muslims formed big majorities and in fact did not even demand Pakistan. The most strident demand for Pakistan was made by Muslims living in India’s current boundaries because they felt Muslims could not co-exist with Hindus.
By that logic, and because of the fact that Pakistan was created for Indian Muslims to carve out their own destiny, there should not be a single Muslim in India. So the Jats were only playing by the rules created by the Congress, the Muslim League and the British, and were well within their right to evict the Meo Muslims. In fact, it was their patriotic duty to do so. Look at what the remaining Muslims in Bengal, Kerala and Hyderabad are doing – creating mini Taliban strongholds with Muslim youth training for jehad while their parents keep up the demographic war by producing many many children per family.
And what is Bhave’s legacy? Are the Meos thankful? Take a drive on the Delhi-Jaipur highway and you’ll see how the Muslims have multiplied in Mewat. After the Babri mosque demolition, the entire region rose in revolt. Talibanism is taking root among them and from a 2 percent minority in 1947 they have grown to 8 percent of Haryana’s population.
For idealists like Gandhi, Bhave and Hazare, it doesn’t matter that their actions will hurt their country. For them what matters are vague concepts; it’s immaterial if they do not create lasting peace, wealth or security for the people. It’s always back to the villages for them. The village is the right place for Indian masses to live blissful lives in a state of idealism–induced torpor.
No thought is given to what will happen to science, industry and progress. National security does not belong in their scheme of things. Gandhi, Bhave and Hazare are the Hindu Taliban, believing that a pure state of rural existence, untrammelled by urban intervention, is the ideal state of living.
We mustn’t forget Gandhian J.B. Kripalani who whilst speaking, in 1957, on the Defense Budget in the Lok Sabha said: “The mounting expenses on the Army must be cut down. The followers of Gandhi and adherents of universal peace should not increase military expenditure.”
Five years later when the Chinese attacked India he was hopping mad and accused the defence ministry of negligence. Gandhian ‘principles’ did not prevent Kripalani from launching a witch hunt.
Hazare is the last of this Gandhian breed. True, Indians see in him a crusader against corruption but his effort pales when compared with the efforts of more popular leaders like Jaiprakash Narayan in the 1970’s and Vishwanath Pratap Singh in the late 1980’s.
There is an overlap in membership of the Jan Lokpal draftees and Sonia Gandhi backed National Advisory Committee. It seems both the draft bill and the agitation to inflict it upon the nation draw strength from the NAC.
According to Sandhya Jain, editor, Vijayavaani, “The draft bill is nothing more than an uber ordinance trying to force Parliament to enact it into an uber law in order to make the NAC the de jure power of the nation. With such totalitarian powers at its command – equivalent to wielding Emergency style powers without invoking an Emergency and without needing Parliamentary endorsement for any action – Ms Sonia Gandhi and her coterie will elevate themselves into the ranks of awesome leaders like Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, and her own native Benito Mussolini.”
In today’s climate, anyone attacking Hazare will be accused of being needlessly alarmist but the reality is that NGO raj is a bigger threat to India than corruption, Chinese expansionism or global warming. In fact, intelligence agencies have gone hoarse urging the Centre to clamp down on their operations because most of these NGOs are funded by foreign governments, and the Church with plans to destabilise India.
Take a look at the proposed selection committee for the Jan Lokpal. It includes lawyers Shanti Bhushan and Prashant Bhushan. Shanti has fought cases for Shaukat Guru (one of the terrorists who attacked India’s Parliament in 2001), corruption-plagued H.D. Deve Gowda, and Arundhati Roy who went to Kashmir and egged on the separatists to kick out “Indian beggars”.
Shanti’s son Prashant had this to say after 76 soldiers were murdered by Maoist terrorists in Dantewada in eastern India: “What did the government expect when they called it a war? Did they think that there would be no retaliation?”
The list also includes winners of the Bharat Ratna and Ramon Magsaysay awards. Why these two awards specifically? Is it because the Bharat Ratna ensures automatic entry for Amartya Sen who is married to Emma Rothschild of the infamous banking family from England? Sure, Ramon Magsaysay was a Filipino but no, the Magsaysay Awards are not decided by the Philippines government, but by the Rockefeller Foundation.
If you are not aware that the Rothschild and Rockefeller families are spearheads in the ongoing desperate efforts to perpetuate Western domination of the planet, then it’s time for you to wake up.
(About the author: Rakesh Krishnan Simha is a features writer with Fairfax New Zealand. He has previously worked with Businessworld, India Today and Hindustan Times, and was news editor with the Financial Express.)
Also read:
1. What India must do to reduce corruption -
2. Do Foreign contributions to Indian NGO’s impact national security -
3. Did India get freedom because of Gandhi -