Dhankar, RSS and Retirement

The resignation of Vice President Jagdeep Dhankar, the country’s second highest Constitutional functionary, hardly seemed to have created a crisis or even a political controversy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi set out on his foreign jaunts as if nothing significant had happened and the signing of the trade deal with the UK on Thursday soon pushed Dhankar out of the top news headlines.

There is doubt about Dhankar really suffering from a debilitating disease that deters him from chairing the Rajya Sabha or holding his office. Political pundits have latched on to the theory of Dhankar defying the BJP leadership in accepting a notice of impeachment of Justice Yashwant Varma by the Opposition as the reason for the government losing its faith in him. This, sure, is better than the official ill-health theory but still falls far short in the realm of possibilities.

A strong government that can without demur ease out a Constitutional functionary can also politely ask him or her to toe the line. There is no need for a person holding a high office to resign, that too during the Parliament session, if it were merely a case of difference of opinion about accepting a notice ahead of the Lok Sabha proceedings. Dhankar’s resignation smacks of a much bigger political plot. In fact, this is one of the bigger crises that Modi has tackled in his 11 years as Prime Minister.

Yet, the resignation has not rocked the boat as most resignations even from far more insignificant roles are wont to in this era of social media omnipresence. Four days have passed after Dhankar’s resignation; but he has not made a statement or anonymously leaked out a story in the press on what exactly transpired between him and the government.

Such unprecedent control over political messaging even during a high-profile political exit is rare and has been the hallmark of Modi’s tenure. But it has triggered an intense debate on a vital issue: the Modi-RSS relationship. Dhankar and Modi are 74 and the latter will be 75 --- the unofficial retirement age --- in a month and a half.

Dhankar’s resignation has made the Delhi commentariat wonder whether it has anything to do with RSS Sarsanghachalak Mohan Bhagwat earlier this month reminding the Sangh Parivar organisations, which include the BJP, that leaders ideally ought to retire at 75. Soon a former RSS spokesperson wrote an op-ed clarifying that it was not meant for the PM’s consumption and was a piece of general advice to the society at large.

However, Bhagwat has not made any such clarification yet. He may even shock the organisation and step down as he turns 75, six days before Modi does so. Sure, it is too close to the event and there are no signs yet of a successor getting groomed. So, all this could be mere pressure tactics as well. But Bhagwat’s recalling of Moropant Pingle’s advice on an age limit for public servants has suddenly opened up the fault lines that existed between the PM and the mother ship.

Unlike Vajpayee, who visited the RSS headquarters in 2000 within three years of becoming Prime Minister –– even while steering a tough coalition of constantly bickering allies –– Modi waited 11 years for this crucial visit. Modi was the first RSS Swayamsevak to lead the BJP to a simple majority in Parliament and head a government without the crutches of the alliance partners.

Yet, it was only after he fell short of simple majority in the 2024 polls and was forced to depend on the allies to form a government that he decided to visit the RSS headquarters in March 2025. Earlier during the inauguration of the Ram temple, Bhagwat was made a mere spectator while Modi presided over the priestly proceedings. The not-so-warm vibes between these two icons of the Sangh Parivar were on public display at Ayodhya in January 2024 and at Nagpur in March 2025.

Still, no Parivar insider envisages a change of guard at the Raisina Hill before 2029, if at all. The RSS appreciates all that the BJP has done for the organisation and understands the pitfalls of pushing its own government out of power as it happened in 2004. Dattopant Thengadi, the most credible RSS leader, probably more popular than the then RSS chief KS Sudarshan, had held a rally at Ram Lila Maidan and attacked the Vajpayee government viciously in 2001.

There will be no such public exhibition of sibling rivalry or maternal disappointment this time around. Yet, the fact that the BJP still has not chosen a new party president proves that there are points of friction between the two power centres in the Sangh Parivar that are not allowing a consensus candidate to emerge. Even Dhankar’s exit is being framed in an organisational paradigm –– an outsider who was showered with opportunities finally becoming a disappointment.

Like Dhankar, many of the new BJP’s top leaders have come from either Congress or other Opposition parties. This has irked the RSS to no end. And the loss of majority for the BJP in the 2024 elections has emboldened the RSS leadership to point out that the party is only a part of the Hindutva family. The results once again underscored the old organisational hierarchy and negated former party president JP Nadda’s claim that BJP is “capable” of running its affairs.

No wonder there was much speculation around Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s meeting with the Prime Minister last week. But all the talk about succession planning seems premature. Sure, there would be a shakeup with a new Vice President and party president offering signposts for the BJP’s future.

Till Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi keeps on pledging to purge the RSS, the PM has nothing to worry, because it becomes imperative for the RSS to support a strong leader who can keep its enemies at bay. But the moment the organisation finds a support base elsewhere the situation can get altered dramatically. Then, few contemporary Indian politicians are equipped to play such nuanced strokes of power politics like Modi.

Mending The Chinese Nets

 Jaishankar's meeting with Xi is a diplomatic breakthrough and a harbinger of peace. The Russia-India-China platform offers stability and prosperity for the region

Pic credit: Dr. S. Jaishankar's X post

It is indeed a massive breakthrough and a harbinger of peace. Minister for External Affairs Dr. S. Jaishankar has walked the tightrope to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation’s gathering at Tianjin early this week; his visit culminating with a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing on Tuesday. This is Jaishankar’s first trip to China after the military standoff in eastern Ladakh began in April 2020.

Such a diplomatic turnaround in just five years is no mean achievement, particularly when Indian diplomacy is hostage to domestic political wranglings. The magnitude of the icebreaker must be measured against the cost of hostilities with the world’s second largest economy and the second biggest arms producer.

India can ignore and punish Pakistan at will for Pahalgam-like transgressions, whatever the western press might say. But it must have a special relationship with China –– one with deep respect for mutual interests.

The media in India creates political and even diplomatic narratives. There were attempts to fashion a false bonhomie between India and Pakistan with certain individuals and media organisations beating the drums of people-to-people contact, exchange of “performers” and lighting of candles at the border.

All of this was triggered by western interests to create a seamless South Asian market and sphere of influence reinventing British India. Interestingly, the moniker “South Asia” replaced the geographical and historical reality of the “Indian subcontinent” to erase the shared civilisational footprint from Gandhara in the north to Kolamba in the south.

These South Asian propagandists never thought it proper to light a lamp of goodwill at the India-China border, thereby clearly exposing the interests of their promoters. If it is peace that India seeks then it is most imperative to light candles at Arunachal Pradesh or Ladakh because India has a longer border with China than Pakistan. And it is easier because there are common civilisational values of Buddhism in the East, whereas in the West there are only memories of invasion, colonial humiliation and the holocaust of Partition.

After every war with Pakistan and every act of heinous terrorism by its semi-state actors, India used to revive backchannel diplomacy, remotely controlled by puppeteers. Whereas in the East there was just one war, that too long ago in 1962, yet India never paused to arrive at a clear understanding of China’s strategic objectives in Ladakh and Arunachal Pradesh. India mistook Chinese tactical restraint for its timidity till it made salami slicing excursions a regular feature of its offensive military manoeuvres.

While sanctimoniously attacking China for its betrayal in 1962, India never thought that it could have been a response to its offering sanctuary to the Dalai Lama in 1959, apart from the disputes over the colonial maps. The war exposed Jawaharlal Nehru’s lack of understanding of Chinese sensibilities and capabilities, and his disastrous lack of preparedness. China understood the Dalai Lama as a western tool, hosted by India for strategic gains. Whereas India gained only China’s suspicion that grew into a long winter of animosity.

China was proven right when the West gave its grandest knighthood, the Nobel Peace Prize, to Tenzin Gyatzo in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Square uprising. India needs to introspect on its strategic objectives in hosting a government in exile that threatens Chinese territorial sovereignty. Nehru could have done it on a whim, or his western friends could have nudged him into setting up a Tibetan government by “betraying” the interests of a very friendly neighbour –– India was the first non-Communist country to recognise the People’s Republic of China.

After 38 years of relative calm and normalcy, the Ladakh standoff again made the Indian commentariat wonder why. Everyone pondered over the strategic objectives of the Chinese aggression. Now, the reason appears rather straightforward: India’s involvement in Quad. NATO getting replicated in the Indo-Pacific, just to contain China, obviously triggered a response. And it happened in a non-kinetic, hostile contact, leading unfortunately to casualties on both sides.
India, hopefully, understood the message that it cannot afford to play the Ukrainian comic’s role in the Himalayas to contain the US’ competitor.

But efforts continue in the western press, faithfully and devotedly copied by the Indian media, to paint China as the villain in the post-Pahalgam attacks on terror training centres in Pakistan. Sure, 80 per cent of Pakistani arsenal is of Chinese origin. But Pakistan used to acquire almost 100 per cent of its arms from the West till recently and particularly during the 1971 war. That never deterred India’s quest for a continuing unequal relationship with the West.
The US, after arming the Pakistanis to the teeth with fighter jets and tanks, sent its Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal to threaten India in 1971. But China refused to get involved despite Nixon’s National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger pushing Zhou En Lai hard.

And it has maintained its strategic restraint all along. A rising power would sell arms to anyone ready to buy. If Pakistanis are buying Chinese arms with American aid and World Bank loans, India is selling Brahmos missile systems to the Philippines, which does sabre-rattling with China. Arms sale, by itself, is not an offensive gesture.

Whether China offered operational transparency through its satellites or not is a question that can be answered unequivocally only by the two principals. So far, the primary proof of Chinese involvement in Operation Sindoor is gushing war poetry written for a London newspaper by a Churchillian writer, deeply despising India. This claim cannot be taken at face value.
If Pakistan is China’s iron brother, then it is the West’s iron child. A sibling can develop rivalry, but a parent will never give up on its child. India has overlooked the West supplying arms and legitimacy to Pakistan all along, now it must ignore Pakistan as a minor irritant that gets activated by the West to embarrass the incumbent Indian government.

A possible realignment of Asiatic forces on the Russia-India-China platform offers stability and prosperity for the region. A big eastwardly step by the government indeed.

 The spirit of Delhi, made of thrice distilled waste

Picture credit: Vijay Pandey

A metro line above and a bullock cart below; a makeshift house made of plastic sheets next to a condominium; a horse cart selling mangoes parked at the entry or exit of a flyover; and men dying while cleaning the carbon filter of a sewage treatment plant. These are some vignettes of the nation’s capital. Now it's pouring in Delhi and its neighbourhood. Monsoon is the season to rejoice when the pollutants are washed down and the air becomes breathable, yet it isn’t. For, the roads of Delhi, Gurugram and its neighbouring cities, that make the National Capital Region, become unnavigable water bodies after a spate of rains.

 

Congress was in power in Delhi for 15 years, Aam Admi Party for 10 years and now BJP has wrested power. In fact, the BJP is in power at the Centre, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana and yet the traffic to apartments worth Rs 100 crores in Gurugram is stuck in muck flowing freely. Sure, those who sell and buy penthouses for Rs 190 crores do not seem to bother. This indifference to the civic disaster that is Delhi is what evokes the spirit of Delhi. A spirit made of thrice distilled waste --- human, industrial, hospital and of every other kind.

 

I live in Delhi’s suburbs beyond the eastern waste dump. Every boundary of Delhi is marked by a mountain of waste that Delhiites create. Every time Delhi celebrates a surge in GDP numbers taking the country a notch higher in the scale of prosperous nations, the mountains of offal too grow several notches. Yet shamelessly all parties promise to clear the waste and clean the Yamuna. Some six years ago former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal promised to make Delhi look like London or Paris. But it still looks like Delhi --- dirty, slushy, crowded and polluted.

 

Every year, one has seen underpasses getting submerged during the monsoon without fail. Only a drought can avert this sight of floating vehicles. Every other tunnel and underpass in Delhi that has been built since the British left get flooded as a symbol of rising India’s engineering prowess. Last year, this month, three UPSC aspirants --- Shreya Yadav, Tanya Soni and Nevin Delvin --- were killed when the clogged drains outside, on the road, pushed dirty water into the basement of a UPSC coaching centre. As simple as that. Storm water drains and sewers do not get cleaned in Delhi NCR.

 

And when an attempt is made, it is often at the cost of the most dispensable human beings --- a group of people doomed to clean others’ waste in a nation that had by law prohibited manual scavenging.

 

Brijesh and Vikram --- workers who go down the waste holes may not have surnames --- died of suffocation in a Delhi hospital this week. Over 70 of them met with the same fate in the last decade or so just in Delhi. Brijesh and Vikram were healthy when they reached the hospital to clean the carbon filter inside the sewage treatment plant but died of negligence. And the hospital is blaming the contractor. The reason for death is as old as the mountains of Delhi’s waste: no safety gear. Workers are sent down manholes, sewer lines and sewage treatment plants without even ensuring their safe return. If they are lucky, they will get back, if not, the hospital, shopping mall or hotel will not be responsible.

 

That is, the glittering half of the national capital is not responsible for the waste it creates and for the lives of those who clean the waste, often with bare hands without any equipment. This morally repugnant system should not gloat over GDP numbers because our GDP numbers are made of transactions of our teeming, hungry billion and a half; and not of prosperous households. Every packet of the cheapest biscuit and unbranded atta adds to the growth numbers, which to be meaningful should offer a dignified living to those who sustain the economy.

 

The callousness of a society that sends some of its most miserable members down the septic tank to near certain death, extends to the choked drains in Gurugram roads that lead up to Rs 200-crore apartments. Passengers dying in floating cars is not unheard of in this country. 

 

Civic infrastructure needs accountability more than investment. Every road, drain, sewer line and streetlamp that fails ought to be paid by the contractor, the engineer, the babu and the politician --- the bigger the loss the greater the accountability. Just as the kickback goes up the chain all the way till the politician, the accountability too ought to reach till the secretary and the minister who run the department. Once a token amount is deducted from the salaries of the minister and the secretary, not a single drain would get clogged anywhere in Delhi NCR or any other part of the country.

 

And when lives are lost cleaning the drains and STPs, the contractors and those who hire them ought to be tried and convicted under section 106 of BNS for criminal negligence. Or else, India would no longer have the moral right to talk about its economic miracle, military might or national pride because all of this get submerged in a Gurugram road and all the achievements of honest tax-paying individuals die a suffocating death in the blocked sewer lines.

 

India cannot expect integrity from its babus and netas, so it must be enforced. Every stretch of road should have the name of those responsible for its upkeep and when a piece of civic infrastructure goes under, the one named for its upkeep should be held accountable. Bureaucracy is the vilest cog in the Indian wheel, and it needs to be replaced every time it brings normal life to a grinding halt. 

 

Congress abandoning the linguistic aspect of Gandhian nationalism

It remains a spectator as some allies attack Hindi and Hindi-speakers. Hindi as the national link language was an essential part of Gandhian nationalism, without which Congress is but a party without a programme.

President Kovind inaugurates the centenary celebration of Dakshina Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha in 2018. Source: X 

Prakash Raj’s performance as a skilful weaver who steals silk for his daughter’s wedding saree in Priyadarshan’s Kanchivaram (2008) is an unforgettable experience, perhaps one that earned him his immortal place in the pantheon of India’s great actors. But that does not qualify him to speak on land acquisition and fair compensation at a Parliamentary panel, where he was invited early this week. The Congress party, while embracing him, seems to have confused his anti-Hindi activism for his acumen in land acquisition. Well, therein lies the rub.

 

The actor made an infamous statement on March 15 against the Hindi language with a social media post, “Don’t impose your Hindi language on us. It is not about hating another language; it is about protecting our mother tongue and our cultural identity with self-respect…” The argument has an inherent flaw: how does learning Hindi rob one off his cultural identity while speaking English strengthen it? In fact, if any language acts detrimental to one’s mother tongue, it is the alien tongue of the coloniser not that of the north Indian commoner.

 

Meanwhile, the Congress’ newfound regional allies in Mumbai have begun attacking those who speak Hindi. Since when has the Congress party begun to endorse people who attack Hindi? Secularism as professed by the Congress and all anti-BJP parties is but one part of a package called Gandhian nationalism, which included the propagation of Hindi as a national link language.

 

Gandhian nationalism offers the central idea that despite Partition, despite India being torn by the British into Hindu and Muslim nations, people belonging to these two religions can and should live together in peace and prosperity. Largely, this coexistence --- however tenuous --- has been made possible by the strength of the founding principles of Gandhian idealism. It was utopian to believe that after Jinnah’s Direct Action Day in August 1946, the great Calcutta killings, the massacre at Noakhali, the retaliatory riots in Bihar, with all of it ending in the genocide of 20 lakh people during the Partition a year later, Hindus and Muslims would still settle down to live together to thrive as a nation.

 

Then came the next round of genocide and exodus --- 30 lakhs killed and over a crore of refugees --- in 1971 when Pakistani army targetted Hindus and Bengali Muslim intelligentsia in East Pakistan. Yet, India remained the Gandhian Republic of Hindus and Muslims and all other communities. The BJP has been in power since 2014. Still not a single family of Muslims has migrated to Pakistan or Bangladesh over religious oppression. True, India is an imperfect nation with warts all over and every single time there is a riot or police atrocity Indians themselves term it genocide and ethnic cleansing, still Hindus and Muslims have live together. Even Gujarat had recorded an increase from 45.9 to 58.4 lakhs in Muslim population between 2001 and 2011 after one of the worst anti-Muslim riots in the recent history.

 

 India owes this miracle to Gandhi and his brand of all-embracing nationalism. The Congress party has been the greatest beneficiary of this politics and still claims to adhere to Gandhian ideals. But then there is no Gandhism without nationalism. Coexistence of Hindus and Muslims cannot be merely for the sake of Muslim votes to gain power, but to build a prosperous and powerful nation celebrating its glorious civilisation. And the “prachar” or propagation of Hindi as a national link language was an essential part of the rebuilding of the Indian nation. Gandhi sent his youngest son, Devadas Gandhi, to Madras in 1918 as the first missionary to teach Hindi to south Indians, thereby setting up the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachara Sabha.

 

Ramachandra Guha in his book Gandhi; the years that changed the world 1914 – 1948 refers to the Mahatma telling the famous physicist CV Raman that English cannot be India’s link language and that it had to be Hindi. How can a post-colonial society retain the coloniser’s language as its link language while rebuilding a civilisational nation? Language like religion was one of the fault lines that the coloniser tried to exacerbate while making Indians fight among themselves. The entire anti-Sanskrit and anti-Hindi movement in the Madras presidency, which came to be termed as Dravidian ideology, can be seen as an attempt at repackaging the pro-British Justice Party of the non-Brahmin elites into a secessionist vehicle impeding the national movement. The Brahminical stranglehold of the bureaucracy and its omnipresence in the higher echelons of society made the anti-Brahmin rhetoric credible. 

 

But then there is nothing Dravidian in south India. A Malayali will never accept Tamil as a link language, he would rather speak English or Hindi to a Kannadiga or Telugu and vice versa. In the last three decades, English has made considerable inroads into the Indian cultural space, primarily due to the mass media --- TV soaps, music, movies, gadgets, software --- and foreign-controlled or foreign-funded platforms. The idea of Hindi as a link language is losing its grip as English is becoming synonymous with modernity. 

 

The Hindi proponents are to be blamed entirely for this predicament, particularly the Hindutva-affiliated Hindiwallahs who want to impose a national language instead of nurturing an organic link language. They condescendingly refused to learn another Indian language, thereby defeating the three-language formula and the idea of bilingual or trilingual Indians. It is dishonest to ask south Indians to accept Hindi when north Indians have no concept of learning another language.

 

However, that is not going to help the Congress. This is a moment when demands for deletion of the word secular from the Constitution’s preamble are being made by the Hindutva advocates. How can secularism be divorced from the idea of an Indian link language? If Hindus are to be asked to restrain their majoritarian instincts and accord equal status and equal space to all religious groups in the spirit of inclusive nationalism to build a prosperous new nation, then that society ought to have a post-colonial language to talk to each other. 

 

Mahatma Gandhi was the president of the Dakshin Bharat Hindi Prachar Sabha from 1918 to 1948, then Rajendra Prasad took over the mantle, which was passed on to Lal Bahadur Shastri and then to Indira Gandhi and later Rajiv. Strangely, Sonia and Rahul never seem to have bothered to steer this institution, which has lost all its relevance. Congress without Gandhian nationalism is a political party without a programme. And when it invites those who want English as a national link language into its fold, it would be getting reduced to one of those many petty projects the colonialists devised to keep India divided.

 Emergency, Regime Change and Iran

No amount of foreign interference can justify the arrest of Opposition leaders, but the inimical West did make Indira vulnerable to regime-change threats after Bangladesh liberation and nuclear test

   Source: Congress party's post on X

The brouhaha over the fiftieth anniversary of the Emergency brings up certain unpleasant questions: Have we really analysed why Indira Gandhi imposed the Emergency? Was the “foreign hand” (her favourite expression those days) going to succeed in deposing her? Since then, have we got used to the foreign hand so completely that nobody bothers to research the impact of foreign interference against the Indira Gandhi government? The interference was real, however excessive her response might have been. The response was indeed excessive. No amount of foreign interference can justify the arrests of all the Opposition leaders or all the atrocities unleashed in the guise of Emergency.

 

Yet, it needs to be retold that Indira Gandhi was a victim of foreign interference. Like all the leaders who stood up to western hegemony, Indira too was felled, politically and then physically. It is inconceivable now that a High Court would entertain an election petition, cross examine witnesses, conduct a trial and then hold the Prime Minister guilty of election malpractices over discrepancies between the date and notification of the resignation of her Officer on Special Duty Yashpal Kapoor. All the other charges read like a litany of a loser’s lament --- like the district magistrate and superintendent of police getting involved in the preparations for the PM’s rally and the use of Airforce aircraft for her transport, etc.

 

It is strange to believe that Indira after coming back to power in 1980 never tried to really investigate or expose the conspiracy, if any, to depose her, though she kept on provoking the West by talking about a foreign hand. She had won the 1971 elections on a Left Wing platform trumping the combined Right Wing forces with 352 seats, proving that her splinter group --- Indian National Congress (Requisitionists) --- is the real one. She tackled a refugee situation of well over 10 million who were running away from a genocide of 3 million people, mostly Hindus, in East Pakistan. She was snubbed by US President Nixon, pushing her to seek “peace, cooperation and friendship” with the Soviet Union.

 

Later that year she went to war changing the global map, creating a new sovereign nation --- something only colonial powers and victors of WWII had done hitherto. She went further. She tested a nuclear device thereby ensuring India’s sovereignty. In May 1974 when Buddha Smiled at the Pokhran test range in Rajasthan, Indira made India the first nation outside the charmed P5 circle to possess nuclear capabilities. She was obviously a prime target --- the leader of a miserably poor, post-colonial nation, that too a woman, trying to punch way above her weight. 

 

In fact, much before all this, a leader of an Opposition party (the party of feudal lords and princelings) was hobnobbing with the CIA. Frances Stonor Saunders in her brilliant book Who Paid the Piper; the CIA and the Cultural Cold War refers to Minoo Masani as ‘the’ leader of the Opposition party in India, who was closely linked to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert CIA operation. The bhishmapitamah of the Indian Opposition, its moral force, Jayaprakash Narain, was the chairman of the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom, and when the CIA connection got exposed some time in 1967 he wrote, “It is inconceivable for me how anyone who believed in freedom, in the open society, in the moral correspondence between means and ends, could have thought it proper to accept funds from an agency of international espionage…” (as quoted by Saunders in her book). 

 

This was the backdrop of the competitive politics in India when Indira rose to become an unchallenged leader of the masses liberating Bangladesh and testing a nuclear device.

 

Then why didn’t she call for early elections in June 1975 when hit by the Allahabad High Court verdict? Why did she squander away all her fiercely-won nationalistic capital by imposing Emergency and destroying her democratic credentials for ever? Did her Soviet friends inform her about an impending coup or removal through lawfare or worse, India imploding? Or did the Soviets for their own geopolitical interests want her to become a dictator? Well, her defeat and that of her son in an election held during the Emergency is proof of how free and fair the elections were. No dictator holds free and fair elections to lose them. Indira obviously believed that there was a regime change attempt being made against her. The Emergency was her response to this attempt, not an endeavour to become a dictator.

 

Now, when Iran is being bombed for its efforts to build a nuclear weapon, India needs to pause and ponder that it was in a similar situation in 1974 --- a post-colonial nation inimical to the West trying to build a nuclear weapon to assert its sovereignty and status as a regional power. The Iran-Israel conflict is a reenactment of the continuing India-Pakistan conflict. A civilisational nation plundered and subjugated by the West for centuries is being pitted against a post-war creation of colonial powers (sure, Balfour Declaration goes back to 1917). All Western arguments over freedom, democracy and nuclear non-proliferation fail miserably when applied to the deeds of the last born darling of the British empire, Pakistan.

 

Iran still does not have a nuclear weapon, Pakistan has about 170, but it is not a threat and Iran is. Both are Islamic nations, and both have nurtured proxy terrorist outfits, and both have been inflicting a thousand debilitating cuts on its neighbours. However, Iranian semi-state actors haven’t got caught like Kasab in Mumbai in 2008 or identified like the three Pahalgam terrorists who killed tourists checking their religion in April this year. Why semi-state actors, a serving Pak army officer Col R. Sadatullah of Special Communications Organisation bought the Voice over Internet Protocol connections for the Mumbai attackers to talk to their Pak army handlers.

 

Yet, Pakistan is an honourable western ally to be feted, fed and cheered by the President of the United States of America. And in turn a self-promoted Field Marshal would nominate that very President for the Nobel Peace Prize. Irony dies a miserable death every day in Islamabad and Washington DC. The nomination came in while the US was bombing the three nuclear facilities in Iran. At least Obama got the peace prize before he set out to drop 26,000 bombs in seven countries.