The shape of things is getting more and clearer. The Indo-U.S. axis is moving fast. The Bush administration has been getting what it wants from Delhi. The latter is getting what it seeks. India sent its army chief to Washington. The U.S. administration is reciprocating. Its defense team is going to Delhi next month. India has moved miles away from Moscow. The latter created a record of sorts by voting against India on the nuclear issue. Delhi scuttled the SAARC summit to please its new masters. In short, India and U.S.A. are acting as allies and are planning joint strategies on economic, political and military fronts.
On the domestic front, Prime Minister Rao was elected to Lok Sabha. His principal rival, Sonia Gandhi, has been persuaded by unseen forces to withdraw from politics. The way is thus carried for Washington’s trusted friend in Delhi to give concrete shape to his ambitions. Prime Minister Rao is said to be ruling by “consensus”. The R.S.S. has advised its front organization, B.J.P., to keep supporting Raos government, if not lend it stronger backing by joining in a coalition with him. The B.J.P. chief, L.K. Advani, has some differences with R.S.S. on tactical matters but the two are one on their appreciation of the Indian Prime Minister as eminently qualified to get their support. The “consensus”, thus, is nothing but unity of Hindu fundamentalism against India’s other nations such as Kashmiris, Sikhs, Assamese and Tamils.
Armed on one side by Washington’s promise to protect India’s “unity and integrity” and assured on the other of Congress (I)-R.S.S. “consensus” politics, Rao has given marching orders to the army to invade Punjab, Kashmir and Assam and later possibly Tamil Nadu to crush Sikh, Kashmiri, Assamese and Tamil nationalism, Scores of Sikh, Kashmiri, Assamese and Tamil nationalist revolutionaries are being killed daily by India’s security forces. Thousands of others are being arrested for torture and perhaps for elimination. The various nations of the former U.S.S.R. did not have to shed as much blood and suffer as much pain to gain freedom as is being done by the nations of the Indian sub-continent.
The pity of the matter is that the Bush administration has been maintaining deafening silence on the vast massacre of human rights in Indian in general and of Sikhs, these days, in particular. In fact, India is crushing the human rights so confidently that one is tempted to believe that President Bush has given Delhi the green signal. As a backdrop, the world public opinion is being assured that what the Indian army is doing in Punjab, and elsewhere in the troubled states, is to restore “democracy” and “normalcy”. The world is, of course, in dark about certain glaring facts of India’s so-called democracy. For instance, the fact that Delhi never allowed any elected government in Punjab to stay in power for its full, statutory term since 1966, when the present Punjab state was created, has been swept under the carpet. The only difference between the previous situations and the present one is that while traditional Akalis were on sale, the Sikh revolutionaries, now leading the Punjab movement, are men and women of integrity and they mean business the business of freedom from Indian imperialism.
The Sikhs in the United States, Canada, UK, and other Western nations must rally around and do their bit. Congressmen and Senators must be contacted again and again to drive home the point the taxes paid by Sikhs here are being sent to India as “aid” which is used to arm the police and army to kill Sikhs. Part of the money comes back to Senators like Stephen Solarz who have a symbiotic relationship with India.
Rao and India’s ruling class are utterly oblivious of the futility of their game plans. If a powerful U.S.S.R. could not keep its nations in bondage, a weaker India is far less capable of doing so. President Bush must wake up before India’s soon-to emerge nations reject him and his administration and India’s bloody, fascist rulers as unholy allies ranged against peoples human rights.
Article extracted from this publication >> December 6, 1991
