A Quisling too many

Among the many reasons why we study history, one is the wisdom we are supposed to gain, so that errors committed in the past do not get repeated.

This belief seems little grounded on facts when we see people indulging in those precise behaviors which facilitated occurrences of tragedies in the yore.

At one level, we have a situation where profligate governance and red tapism has brought the country back to the economic brink of 1991. Then, as we see now, the leadership was engaged in platitudes and character assassination of political opponents rather than on governance, all while being deeply committed the failed & discredited socialist model of economy.

While the economic ills plaguing the nation are certainly debilitating, concerted policy and decision making can still salvage the situation. What is more serious and will certainly have a much longer terms implication are political acts, at times committed by the righteous but most of the time, guided by those intending to serve narrow self interest.
 

Our Nation has had more than its fair share of quislings. If the Nation saw Ambhi helping the Greeks over 2400 years back, a more devastating help was offered by Jaichand of Kannuaj in the second millennium. If Chittor was laid to dust by the covert helping of Raghav Chetan to Alauddin, Ranthambhore was sacked not by the Sultan, but by the mechanisms of Bhoj Deva. And anyway, it was Shah Waliullah, who had invited the Emir of Afghanistan to restore India to its pristine Islamic glory! If one were to think that such seditious acts were limited to people looking for personal political glory, one would be mistaken. KM Munshi chronicles in his work, Jai Somnath, the travails of Shivrashi, an ordained Shaivaite priest, who guided Mahmud Ghazni to the weak defences to the temple city, helping him wreak devastation on the Hindu psyche. Shivrashi was not guided by personal glory. He believed that the head priest and the king had lost moral authority to officiate and hence wanted them removed to restore Dharma!

Sadly for our Nation, the long, very long list of people who helped invaders and bloodthirsty maniacs is still getting added to. At a more organizational level, first we had the Communists and now the Maoists who look to USSR/China as the model state and wish to turn India into a vassal again. We have continued to have organized groups of separatists operating from foreign sanctuaries, seeking to help destroy India with foreign help. To cap it all, we have always had motley individuals; self declared one-person nations, who in their insatiable hunger for attention, go around making incredulous claims against the Indian people.

What has changed over the last few years is that sustained Institutional support to such individuals/institutions is now being offered by the Indian state itself. The spectacle of ‘activists’ holding seminars and conferences on foreign lands, holding seminars in India but getting people with pronounced anti India/anti Hindu leanings to harangue on their pet hates and petitioning foreign bodies with a long list of imagined grievances, is to put it mildly, dangerous. What can the attempt to get foreign judicial bodies intervene in Indian issues be called, if not seditious? Unless legal credulity is stretched to the extremes, how can acts committed by foreign individuals, in foreign lands and on foreign people be tried in some other country?

There are groups which are trying to get indictments against sundry Sikh politicians and of course, the pet hate of the so called liberal sects of India in the UK, USA and Canada. Just imagine a situation where some court does proclaim some Indian leader a proclaimed offender and issues warrants for his/her arrests? Will police of that Nation land up in India (with permission of the Indian Government) or will that Nation conduct an Abbottabad like expedition. In case the said Nation desist from taking up such ambitious acts, will it proceed to issue a red corner Interpol notices against the ‘offender’?

For those who would be ecstatic with glee at such an event befalling their pet ogre, let that glee be tempered with the awareness that at the receiving end, may not be their hates alone. Only a couple of years back, a US Court upheld the rights of Narain Kataria and a few others to continue their libelous and distasteful campaign against Sonia Gandhi in the USA. What if some people file a case in some court, either in USA or UK or even in Nepal or Mauritius against some worthies on grounds of massive corruption or on restriction of right to practice and propagate their Hindu religion? If this sounds fanciful, what about a scenario where some Mirpuri files a case against the Indian Defence established on some ground of Human Rights violation in Kashmir. While some ‘liberals’ may find such event warming cockles of their hearts, will the Indian establishment respond with equal glee?

How will that impact India? Extension of legal jurisdiction to India would automatically mean that India is not Sovereign Nation. Without much ado, our Nation would have lost a short lived independence and come back under foreign yoke.

Political faultlines run deep in the most advanced of democracies. The visceral hatred of the Democrats against George Bush did not result in senior Democrats berating Bush in foreign lands, condemning him in Op-Eds in foreign publications, even as exalted as the Times of India or pontificating on NDTV/IBN Live on why Bush was evil personified.

For all the pretence of a disdain for the West, our people still fall over each other to gain acceptance as a ‘progressive’ in the western sense. While the so called liberal otherwise sees the USA is as an emblem of the worst model of a capitalist and hegemonic state, a singular act of this country denying visa to their pet hate, makes the ‘liberal’ become a ‘visa-denial-thumper’.

Just what were those 65 MPs (incidentally 64 as MA Jinnah has signed both as a Lok Sabha and a Rajya Sabha member) trying to achieve? A curtain raiser to their lurking request to ‘righteous’ Nations to march into India, if horrors of horrors, their pet hate does becomes the Prime Minister of India?