WATCH THE FORKED TONGUE
Fairness, undoubtedly, is foreign to the politicians of every hue. Yet politics is not wholly devoid of a code. It has its rules, its method and its propriety. A system without a well-defined code is bound to crash in chaos. Even the bandits and gangsters, who prow! The dark corridors of the crime world have a fairly rigid code, the violation of which invites grim venalities. For the Indian rulers, however, there is no such thing as principles, morality, ethics or propriety. Their chief deities are deception, duplicity, fraud and hypocrisy.
Rajiv Gandhi’s address to the United Nations on June 9, 1988, will go down in the U.N. records as an unassailable specimen of his forked tongue. Each word of his grandiloquent rhetoric presented a sharp contrast to India’s actual policy on nuclear nonproliferation. His call for the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2010 and his branding of the “doctrine of nuclear deterrence as the ultimate expression of terrorism” could not have impressed his enlightened audience who are more than familiar with India’s stubborn refusal to sign a treaty for the nuclear nonproliferation in South Asia. Members of the World Body know how contemptuously India has been rejecting Pakistan’s offers for a nuclear test ban treaty, a joint declaration renouncing nuclear weapons and a no war pact. They are also aware of India’s purchases in the black market of the smuggled Heavy Water, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of atom bombs, In fact U.S. intelligence has, on more than one occasion, maintained that India has already developed its atom bomb.
It is ironic that a practitioner of state terrorism at home should be talking of an “action plan to usher in a world order free of nuclear weapons and rooted in nonviolence”. It is, indeed, intriguing that one who is frantically building up his nuclear arsenal, purchasing submarines fitted with nuclear warheads from the Soviet Union and manufacturing ballistic missiles, should be asking the international community to “negotiate a binding commitment to general and complete disarmament’.
India’s commitment to nonviolence and to its own defunct principle of “Panch Sheel” that advocated peaceful coexistence, can be easily judged from its record since it gained independence from the British in 1947. In the last forty years, India has fought three wars with Pakistan, one with China besides annexing, by military force, the terrorists of Hydrabad, Junagarh, Kashmir, Goa, Daman and Diu. It was instrumental in training and arming the Mukti Bahani of East Pakistan that led to the creation of Bangladesh and is currently fighting the Tamil guerrillas in Sri Lanka who were originally armed and trained by India itself to create a foothold for itself on the soil of Sri Lanka.
No other single country in the world has invaded, conquered or fragmented so many neighbors as India has done during the brief period of forty years. Yet it claims to be the champion of nonviolence. India making such a claim is not surprising but it certainly is a matter for a thousand pities when, blinded by their trade lust, representatives of democratic nations like Joe Clark of Canada not only start swallowing whatever rubbish is fed to them but also become willing instruments in targeting the religious minorities of their countries.
Let not the pompous words trickling down a forked tongue dupe any one anymore. The world must realize that the religious minorities in India are treated not as men and women of flesh and blood but as convenient tools to inflame communal passions. They are massacred to promote personal ambitions and to register electoral gains, making a mockery of the loudly professed secularism. In fact, secularism there is just a facade to cover up a fundamentalist Hindu regime. What can the World expect from a Prime Minister that dons the mask of Mr. Clean but turns out to be the central character in the Bofors bribes scandal? The future historians will not find much difference between Noriega’s drug deals and Gandhi’s arms deals.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 17, 1988
