Free Republic

Dear bleeding heart secularists, I hope, despite having to nurse your recent wounds, you’re sitting somewhere safe in your psychological darkness that you have constructed around yourself. Since lots of open letters are being written to Narendra Modi advising him how to respect the secular and pluralistic fabric of the country I thought well, why not I too participate in this stimulating epistolary exchange, and hence, this open letter. I hope by now you have come to terms with the fact that there is going to be a “communal” government at the center despite your relentless pursuit to achieve the...

Modi’s triumph lays bare the electoral irrelevancy of his liberal opponents. Purely as a dispassionate observer of politics, it is amusing to watch the liberal implosion in Indian politics.

The crisis surrounding the case of the Indian consular official whose arrest last month sent U.S.-India relations into a tailspin was at least temporarily cooled late Monday when the diplomat agreed to waive a Jan. 13 deadline to indict her. In a request to federal court in New York, the attorney for Devyani Khobragade, charged last month with submitting fraudulent visa documents for her Indian maid, said that “significant communications . . . between the prosecution and the defense and amongst other government officials” could be undermined if the indictment threshold is crossed.

In Kashmir, in November 2000, the author was detained by Jihadi militants for one terrifying -- and instructive -- night. THEY BREATHE LIKE us, eat like us, sleep like us, perhaps dream like us as well. The only difference is that they know exactly when they will stop living. In the mysterious world of Fidayeens, where young men shun their names, their past lives, even the urge to live, death is not uncertain; it is planned.

Since colonial times to the present, the impetus for Christian proselytizing work in India has largely emanated from Western Christian Church groups and missions. The latter's continuing obsession for promoting religious conversions under the aegis of India's Constitutional guarantee of religious freedom has triggered a raging debate among religious and political leaders of that country. Many Hindus of the Indian Diaspora have also been drawn into it. Over seventy years ago, Mahatma Gandhi stated that: “proselytizing under the cloak of humanitarian work is unhealthy, to say the least. It is most resented by people here.[1]” The resentment that Gandhi alluded...

India’s leftists say it’s about oil. The VHP say it’s about the clash of civilisations. Everyone sees the US campaign against Saddam Hussein through their own prism. It’s true oil has a role. So does Islam. And WMD and terrorism. When the US decides to let slip its dogs of war, it does so for multiple reasons, for such decisions require multiple interests to feel they have a stake. Before 9/11, only two groups in the US security establishment were gunning for Hussein. One group was a traditional, ‘we-need-petrol’ school of thought. Under a policy going back to the Fifties,...

Britain and the US have "lost the right" to lecture New Delhi on how to respond to terrorist provocation by displaying double standards by tracking down bombers in Pakistan but letting them operate freely in Kashmir, India's foreign minister said yesterday. In an interview with the Guardian, Yashwant Sinha warned that relations between Pakistan and India remained tense despite the withdrawal of hundreds of thousands of troops from their shared 1,800-mile border. "There is a tremendous anger in the minds of the people of India," he said. "They are angry even with us. They feel we have taken a very...

As an Indian citizen, I have been troubled and frustrated at the lack of clarity with which the whole Kashmir issue receives treatment in the Western press. In light of 9/11/01, and the Dec. 13th parliament attack in India, with the subsequent war mobilization in both India and Pakistan, the Kashmir issue has been on the front pages of most western newspapers. So it is perhaps timely to visit this issue, and present an analysis of it without mincing any words or indulging in any propaganda. A history of the Kashmir issue As is well known by now, the Kashmir...

Any honest assessment on the anniversary of the World Trade Centre tragedy must surely conclude that there is no global coalition against terrorism. There never really was. The coalition was a polite term coined by US President George Bush Jr to garner the support (or mitigate the opposition) of the international community for his punitive strikes against the Osama bin Laden-Mullah Omar regime in Afghanistan, to give his people the satisfaction that the atrocity was being avenged and simultaneously topple a regime inimical to America's strategic interests. Both objectives being quickly achieved, the coalition (sic) simply evaporated, unnoticed. That is...

SRINAGAR, India (Reuters) - The chief minister of India's Jammu and Kashmir ( news - web sites) state escaped an attempt on his life on Saturday when two grenades were fired at a government building he was inaugurating in the region's main city, police said. In a separate attack later in the day, two children were killed and two people injured when unidentified militants hurled a grenade and fired on a group of Hindu devotees east of Jammu, the state's winter capital. The attack on Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah came as Indian and Pakistani troops, locked in a tense confrontation...

In clandestine meetings with NEWSWEEK, Pakistani extremists say attacks in Indian-held Kashmir will continue — The Pakistani guerrilla commander is thin, soft-spoken and ever so polite. So when Pakistani military officers invited him to an emergency meeting two weeks ago, he showed up as requested, even though he suspected that he might not like what he heard. The guerrilla, whom we’ll call Atif, directs several hundred fighters who operate deep in Indian-held Kashmir. He was one of some two dozen Kashmiri commanders invited to the meeting, held at a Pakistani Army base 25 miles from the front lines. THE MOOD...

THE BUSHIES BUNGLE SOUTH ASIA. Silent Partner When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, it's not true that September 11 changed everything. In the case of America's relationship with its cold war client Pakistan, it actually restored the status quo. In the months before September 11, relations between Washington and Islamabad rapidly soured as the Bush team became enthralled with India--a country that, unlike Pakistan, offered a valuable market, a democracy, and a potential strategic partner against China. Last summer Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage lumped Pakistan in with other "rogue states"; announced that our cold war friendship with...

"We control two nuclear missiles" Hafiz Muhammad Saeed Islamabad, June 3: Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, Amir Jammat-ad Dawa today said that they have loyalists among the personnel who control two missiles with nuclear warheads. They shall be used against the enemies of Islam. He made this statement while in the custody of Islamabad Police.

Under President Vladimir Putin, ties between India and Russia have recovered the closeness that was a geo-political given until the Yeltsin years, when the Mafia ruled in Moscow and was manipulated by external interests into compromising national interests in exchange for protection abroad. Today, India’s best friend has recovered from the chaos of those years and is on track to restoring its superpower status and responsibilities. New Delhi and Moscow come as a package. An alliance with the one implies an accommodation with the other. While the US is a bi-continental (in fact, quadric-continental) power thanks to its superb cultural...

In the information age, both India and Pakistan know only too well how effective words can be during tense times over the disputed Kashmir. Pakistan lost the propaganda war during the last round of military clashes with India in Kargil. No nation believed Islamabad's original claims that the Kashmiri Islamists had initiated the conflict, and that its forces had no role in it. Then, it was only a matter of time before it had to withdraw its troops from there. The then premier, Nawaz Sharif, was left with no other choice, even though Pakistani forces had a tactical advantage over...

KARACHI - With even US President George W Bush joining the chorus of voices assailing Pakistan for not appearing to be doing enough to curb cross-border terrorism into Kashmir, the military leaders in Islamabad have launched a diplomatic offensive of their own. Senior intelligence sources say that Pakistan will try to convince nations that the Kashmiri movement is not terrorism but a pure uprising on the part of the indigenous people seeking the right to self-determination. Under rules guiding the 1947 partition of British India that gave birth to India and Pakistan, overwhelmingly Muslim Kashmir went to Indian control because...

WASHINGTON: The US has begun distancing itself from Pakistan’s military dictator Pervez Musharraf and reconciling to the possibility of an all-out war in the region. Having clearly laid the onus of de-escalation on Musharraf, to the extent of repeatedly asking him to stop cross-border terrorism, the Bush administration issued a dramatic travel warning with respect to India, authorising all its non-essential diplomatic staff to leave the country and advising its nationals to return home by any means available. Washington is now convinced that India is serious about prosecuting a war against Musharraf and his hardline militarists – and not the...

WASHINGTON: American diplomacy in the sub-continent has moved into high-gear amid reports – denied by Washington – that the United States is drawing up contingency plans to evacuate nearly 65,000 Americans from the region. As reported in these columns last week, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is also leaving for the region, closely following Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage's visit next. The Rumsfeld mission was announced by Bush after a cabinet meeting, following which the US President once again reminded Musharraf of his committments, thus making it clear where the onus for de-escalation lay. "He must stop the incursions...

WASHINGTON: World opinion has swung decisively against Islamabad on the Jammu and Kashmir issue even as Pakistan itself is cleaved between the country's moderates and liberals on the one hand and the fundamentalists and militarists on the other. In the past week, almost every major country in the world, from the United States to Australia, has rejected the Pakistani argument that it is innocent of the terrorism in Kashmir, which it describes as a freedom struggle. Neither the Islamic world, nor its closest ally, China, has backed Pakistan's position. Unambiguously terming the violence as terrorism and implicating Pakistan for it,...

<p>SRINAGAR, India (AP) -- Unidentified gunmen ransacked the office of a Kashmiri newspaper and shot an editor in the head. He was in serious condition, hospital officials said.</p> <p>At least three men walked into the office of Zafar Iqbal, a copy editor at Kashmir Images newspaper, on Wednesday and started arguing about a story that appeared in the morning edition of the daily newspaper, staffers said.</p>