SIC's new report details how the Indian state sponsors terrorism and stages acts of terror to discredit and destabilize its non-Hindu communities. Click here to download or scroll down to read the introduction.
a report by
the Sikh Information Centre
a nonprofit organization
researched and written by
Bhajan Singh Bhinder & Patrick J. Nevers
www.sikhinformationcentre.org
Contents:
Introduction
1. Derailing the Peace Train for Social Disruption
2. Smuggling Weapons to Frame Sikhs
3. Planting Severed Cow Heads
4. Staging the Chittisinghpura Massacre
Conclusion
Glossary
Citations
Introduction
For the third year in a row, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has placed India on its “Watch List” of countries whose governments regularly tolerate or engage in extreme violations of religious liberties. Yet based on India’s widely perceived image as the world’s largest democracy, the USCIRF’s 2011 report noted: “Since 2004, Washington and New Delhi have pursued a strategic relationship based on common concerns regarding the growing threat of terrorism, energy security, and global warming, as well as on the shared values of democracy and the rule of law.” [1]
In its pursuit of ever closer ties with India, the United States government has termed that country a “strategic” and “natural” partner in its international war against terrorism. However, the central government of India has proven itself totally incapable of even punishing those who are clearly responsible for inciting large-scale communal violence against unarmed civilians, let alone instigators of more traditional terrorist acts such as bombings and smaller scale massacres. This is documented by the USCIRF, which states in its 2011 report:
Justice for the victims of large-scale communal violence in Orissa in 2007-2008, in Gujarat in 2002, and against Sikhs in 1984 remains slow and often ineffective. In some regions of India, law enforcement and judicial officials have proven unwilling or unable to seek redress consistently for victims of religiously-motivated violence or to challenge cultures of impunity in areas with a history of communal tensions, which in some cases has fostered a climate of impunity. During the reporting period, small-scale attacks on and harassment of Christians and Muslims and their places of worship continued. [2]
In every one of these incidents and many more which have received less international attention, Indian police officers and military members failed to intervene to stop the violence. In fact, they often passively stood by and allowed it to happen, literally watching as murder, rape and other atrocities were perpetrated before their very eyes. Rather than making the slightest effort to restrain bloodthirsty mobs, the authorities typically encourage and sometimes even join in deadly communalist riots against Indian minority communities. When the police force itself is consumed with such hatred for minorities, it is inevitable that such incidents will always be met with impunity.
The reason for this hatred generally lies in the spread of a Hindu supremacist ideology known as Hindutva. Most especially egregious acts of religious violence in the past decade have occurred at the behest of fanatical Hindu nationalist organizations such as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), groups that the USCIRF’s 2009 report said advocate an “ideology of Hindutva, which holds non-Hindus as foreign to India.” One of the most powerful political parties in India, the BJP controlled that country from 1998 to 2004 and provides the primary opposition to the ruling Congress Party. Yet even when the Congress, ostensibly a party of secular moderates, is in power, those guilty of communalist attacks continue to be met with impunity. For instance, the 2009 report also stated:
The failure to provide justice to religious minorities targeted in violent riots in India is not a new development, and has helped foster a climate of impunity. In 1984, anti-Sikh riots erupted in Delhi following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguard. Over 4 days, nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed, allegedly with the support of Congress Party officials. Few perpetrators were ever held accountable, and only years after the fact. [3]
Several sitting members of parliament from the Congress Party participated in the ethnic cleansing of Sikhs in 1984. Countless eyewitnesses testified that these MPs distributed weapons and locations of Sikh homes, issued orders to kill and offered cash bounties to the killers. Nevertheless, most of the the accused politicians remain heavily involved at high levels of the central government to the present day, including current Indian Cabinet Minister Kamal Nath. It is minority communities such as the Sikhs and Muslims, however, who are inexplicably treated as an anti-national threat disruptive to a peaceful India.
One of the few differences between the approach of the BJP and that of Congress is that the latter party often acts against minorities in a more nefarious, subtle fashion (the Delhi pogroms aside) which permits it retain its veneer of secularism. Attacks on non-Hindu communities in India continue unabated no matter which party is in power. Peeling away the mask to expose the real face behind Indian terrorism makes it clear that agents acting for and from within the Indian central government are frequently the actual culprits. In fact, the Indian state’s commitment to covertly sponsoring acts of terror for which it then frames minority communities runs so deep that it even impacts those who flee from oppression in India.
Jasbir Singh was a student living in Toronto on June 5, 1984, when he learned from radio reports that the Indian Army was conducting an unprovoked invasion of the Sikh Golden Temple in northwestern India. Dubbed “Operation Bluestar,” the attack coincided with a festival commemorating the martyrdom of Guru Arjan, the temple’s founder. He was infuriated and frustrated by news that tanks, helicopters and artillery were used to assault the Harmandir Sahib (the temple’s Punjabi name means “Abode of God”) on the busiest of Sikh holidays and heard radio reports “spelling out news of an all-out massacre of the pilgrims.” Confused and unsure how to react, Jasbir headed for the Indian consulate in downtown Toronto.
Walking past the security guards straight into the consulate’s lobby, Jasbir stopped before a picture of Indira Gandhi, the Indian prime minister who ordered Operation Bluestar. Grabbing a wooden chair, he smashed it against the framed photo “again and again.” His rage spent, Jasbir ran from the consulate as guards tried to grab him. T. Sher Singh, a Canadian attorney and former police commissioner who recorded the incident, explains how Consul General Surinder Malik, a Punjabi Hindu, seized immediate advantage of Jasbir’s outrage, writing:
Surinder Malik was thorough and efficient.He began with Mrs. Gandhi’s portrait, and went at it until the frame disintegrated and the damaged face fell to the floor.
Then he went for the old man Gandhi’s picture, and did the same with it. Legs had fallen off the chair in his hands. He crashed it heavily on the coffee table, and picked up another chair. And then went around the room - well, like a wild bull in a china shop, if I may be forgiven the cliché.
He tackled the tourism poster, the reception desk, the metal almirahs, the coffee table again, and then the bare walls. He yelled out at his staff and chided them for merely looking on. When they joined in the mayhem, he screamed: Jaldi, jaldi! Hurry, hurry! Before the saala [a Hindi expletive] media arrive!
They picked up the other chairs and threw them around until they were all broken. He stood back, and surveyed the scene. Kicked at the magazines and newspapers until they lay scattered around the floor. Dusted his hands. Walked over to the telephone. Called 911 and, in a frantic voice, demanded police help: “We’ve been attacked”, he spat into the receiver, feigning distress and terror. [4]
Surinder Malik’s deception illustrates the typical pattern of the Indian central government’s attempt to intentionally create and fuel a vicious cycle of violence. When minorities protest against discrimination and abuse, agents of the state covertly orchestrate terrorist incidents to blame on the discontented communities. The spectre of terrorism provides a justification for the more blatant use of violence to crack down on nonconforming minorities and simultaneously tarnishes peaceful protesters who raise legitimate grievances by inextricably linking their cause to terrorist actions. Sometimes this approach merely results in the destruction of office chairs in a consulate lobby, but other times it results in the massacre of thousands of unarmed civilians.
The Toronto police force quickly apprehended and interrogated Jasbir Singh Saini, who had no qualms in confessing his responsibility, as Singh recounts:/
Not surprisingly, it didn’t take them long to track down the young man. When they turned up at his door, he readily accepted his guilt. And explained, without hesitation, what he had done, and why he had done it. He confessed to having smashed Mrs. Gandhi’s picture. That’s it. No more, no less. [5]
The deftly created puzzle which Indian central government representatives present to sustain their claims sometimes contains pieces that simply do not fit. Sometimes these discrepancies are more glaring than others. In this case, the Canadian police had very little difficulty seeing through Surinder Malik’s fraudulent explanation:
To begin with, the officers were convinced of Jasbir Singh’s sincerity. He had been forthright in all of his answers and had held back on nothing. But one other thing intrigued them even more: Jasbir Singh had only one arm. The other was not only completely missing, but its absence was routinely hidden by him in an empty shirt-sleeve. The guards at the Consulate offices had failed to notice this fact. And neither Mr. Malik nor his staff were aware of this.The officers went back to the scene of the crime and it didn’t take them long to determine that it was impossible for a young man, slight in stature and with an arm missing, to cause the damage Mr. Malik claimed Jasbir Singh had caused, within the timeframe each witness had reported.
They dug deeper. And here’s what they obtained:
A sworn statement from one of the security guards - who was employed by a private security company and merely contracted out to the Indian Consulate - declaring that she had personally witnessed Indian Consul General Surinder Malik destroying the portraits and damaging the furniture. [6]
Dana Lewis, then a radio reporter and now a Toronto-based TV news correspondent, confirmed Malik’s story as a lie. According to Canadian journalists Zuhair Kashmeri and Brian McAndrew, the authors of Soft Target, the security guard’s “testimony was corroborated by a radio reporter, Dana Lewis, who picked up the emergency call on his police monitor. He arrived at the consulate in time to witness Malik finishing what the one-armed student had started.” [7]
Malik escaped all legal consequences by pleading diplomatic immunity as consul general, although “considerable encouragement from Canada’s Foreign Affairs and the Policing community” inspired his replacement. This helped to avert international news coverage anyways since “after a short and convenient lapse of time” the guilty Malik was “quietly pulled back to Mother India.” The pattern of terror revealed by Malik, however, continues to be enthusiastically employed by India’s central government to oppress non-Hindus.
Hindutva is a pan-Hindu worldview which preaches a goal of regional supremacy. This supremacist ideology was woven into the Indian Constitution through Article 25, which reads, in part: “...the reference to Hindus shall be construed as including a reference to persons professing the Sikh, Jaina or Buddhist religion.” This definition of “Hindu” is viewed by Indian minorities as an attempt to forcibly convert Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists with the stroke of a pen. Modern India has consequently seen proponents of Hindutva win countless bloody victories over non-Hindus who object to the state-assisted absorption of their distinct religious and cultural traditions.
Although Indian politicians, especially those from the ostensibly secular Congress party, often subtly conceal their adherence to Hindutva, many of the country’s police and military forces align themselves openly with supremacism. Some of them even publicly admit as much. For instance, M. K. Dhar, a former joint director of India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB), confessed: “I had acquired a passion for hating the Muslims and I had chose the RSS and the Jan Sangh as my ideological vehicle to avenge the civilizational vermin.” [8] S. M. Mushrif, a former inspector general of police, explained in his book Who Killed Karkare how Hindu supremacism has influenced the IB, writing:
The IB does not stop at spreading baseless rumours about the activities of so-called terrorists. In order to give credence to its rumour-mongering, it occasionally engineers “terror attacks” and manipulates “encounters” in which, more often than not, all the “terrorists” are killed, who are later declared “Muslims” belonging to some known or unknown terrorist outfits.... In such attacks and/or encounters, automatic weapons and explosives are shown on the persons of the slain “terrorists” in order to give the incident a real-life touch. But this fact, by itself, is not a proof that the persons killed were real terrorists, as the IB and RAW have easy access to such weapons and explosives. [9]
There is an undeniable connection between agents of the Indian state and the underlying cause of many acts of terror within India. Whether such acts are sponsored from deep within the government or by rogue agents, the end result is that perpetrators are always met with impunity. Innocent people are arrested, tortured or killed, dissenters are silenced through bloodshed and so millions languish as virtual captives within a deeply repressive legal and social environment, the creators of which never suffer the slightest consequence. India’s central government maintains its iron-gripped monopoly on political power while refusing to fully or openly prosecute and punish any of those responsible for the ongoing use of state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, these acts are expertly blended with anti-minority propaganda that besmirches non-Hindus as violent people who hate the government without reason, consequently forcing non-Hindu Indian communities to adopt permanent defensive postures within India.
Many Indian minorities believe that there is no longer any room for them in a country ruled by supremacists whose first resort is violence and those supremacists are thrilled to have conveyed such a message. The suppression of staged terrorism has proven highly beneficial for obtaining Hindu votes, places the Indian state on a higher pedestal than ever and sanctions the worst kind of bullying. It should go without saying that this bullying behavior gravely distracts from genuine problems of terrorism which persist in Southeast Asia and directly works against legitimate efforts to curb the use of terror tactics.
A new book titled “By The Way of Our Fathers: “ suggests that one lesson to be learned from “experiments on India’s minorities” is that Hindu supremacism has flourished. In the process of being printed by Sovereign Star Publishing, this book also accuses the Indian state of having covertly sponsored terrorism for decades and suggests political gain as one primary root cause. Drawing from research published in that book, this report will examine several particularly notable incidents that the central Indian government has attempted to blame on proverbial one-armed perpetrators. These include the 2007 Samjhauta Express bombing and 2008 Malegaon bombing, the smuggling of weapons into Punjab in 1988, the 1982 severed cow heads incident and the Chittisinghpura massacre in 2000. The reader is especially asked to consider how the world might feel if it were known that extremist factions within the Indian government brought the country to the brink of nuclear war with Pakistan through the intentional derailment of the Samjhauta Express.
Notes:
1. USCIRF. “United States Commission on International Religious Freedom Annual Report 2011,” May 2011, p. 253.
2. Ibid., p. 12
3. USCIRF. “India Chapter - Addition to the 2009 Annual Report of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom,” August 2009, pp. 2-3.
4. T. Sher Singh. “1984 & I: The Indian Diplomat.” World Sikh News, March 3, 2009, p. 10.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Kashmeri, Zuhair and Brian McAndrew. Soft Target: India’s Intelligence Service and Its Role In The Air India Disaster (Toronto: J. Lorimer, 1989), p. 42.
8. Dhar, Maloy Krishna. Open Secrets: India’s Intelligence Unveiled (New Delhi: Manas Publications, 2005), p. 438.
9. Mushrif, S. M. Who Killed Karkare: The Real Face of Terrorism in India (New Delhi: Pharos Media, 2009), pp. 43-44.
Click here to download the entire "Faces of Terror in India" report.
Published 2011 by Sovereign Star Publishing, Inc.
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