A youthful, vibrant India ushers in 5 more years of geriatric, nepotistic, dynastic rule

I guess I am not entirely unhappy with the outcome of last month's elections. It is quite commendable that the electorate was discriminating enough to choose the lesser of the two evils - a supremely tough decision.  

But now we have a cabinet whose average age (66) is more than twice the median age (25) of the population. Half the population of India is less than half the age of the youngest cabinet minister (54). 

And both the cabinet and the parliament are stacked with sons, daughters, nieces and nephews of corrupt old coots that swindled the people and led the nation down a disgustingly deteriorating path in the past. What's more stunning is that there is absolutely no public reaction to this blatant and sickening nepotism. I see no outrage at the fact that Karunanidi is openly bargaining for cabinet positions for his sons, daughter and grand-nephew in exchange for his support for Congress. The only thing that matters to this guy is that the fruit of his loin be raised to powerful positions. It doesn't matter what the policies of the ruling coalition will be - that is not the deciding proposition for his supporting or not supporting the Congress party. Whether he participates in the government depends solely on whether his family members get cabinet positions. This is nauseating. 

The preliminary list of charges

Wow! After one whole week, she figures it out! Somini Sengupta and Jane Perlez now have the list of evidence that we already know of. But rather strangely, they attribute to an unnamed "Western intelligence official" and another unnamed "retired DoD official" some of the facts that were given out by the Mumbai police commissioner Maria in an interview 3 days back! Anyway, the NYT is slowly waking up to the truth. Let us hope they don't go back to their bullshit about how "some security experts insist" the "militants" are "likely to be Indian muslims". I hope they apologize to Indian muslims but I am not holding my breath. Mind you, the article is not without its signature Sominism - she quotes a worthy, upstanding LeT terrorist to let us know what a bad, bad, bad country India is!

But the article - titled Mumbai Attack Is Test of Pakistan’s Ability to Curb Militants - is quite detailed and informative about the LeT-ISI-Mumbai attack link and is certainly worth a read. It lists the mounting evidence against Pakistan and calls out the Zardari government. Here's a snippet:

LAHORE, Pakistan — Mounting evidence of links between the Mumbai terrorist attacks and a Pakistani militant group is posing the stiffest test so far of Pakistan’s new government, raising questions whether it can — or wants to — rein in militancy here.

President Asif Ali Zardari  says his government has no concrete evidence of Pakistani involvement in the attacks, and American officials have not established a direct link to the government. But as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice landed in Pakistan on Thursday, pressure was building on the government to confront the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which Indian and American officials say carried out the Mumbai attacks.

Though officially banned, the group has hidden in plain sight for years. It has had a long history of ties to Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. The evidence of its hand in the Mumbai attacks is accumulating from around the globe:

¶A former Defense Department official in Washington, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that American intelligence analysts suspect that former officers of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency and its army helped train the Mumbai attackers.

¶According to the Indian police, the one gunman who survived the terrorist attacks, Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, 21, told interrogators that he trained during a year and half in at least four camps in Pakistan and at one met with Mohammad Hafeez Saeed, the Lashkar-e-Taiba leader.

¶And according to a Western official familiar with the investigation in Mumbai, another Lashkar leader, Yusuf Muzammil, whom the surviving gunman named as the plot’s organizer, fielded phone calls in Lahore from the attackers.

That is a damning indictment of Pakistan. The ball is now in their court. The article has lots of details about the LeT but doesn't really get to the bottom of this nefarious group. More on that later.

The latest

1. Mike McConnell, US Director of National Intelligence, has said the LeT is responsible for the attacks. Reports here, here, and here.
2. Our favorite New York Times reporter files this new gem: A former Defense Department official said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies had determined that former officers from Pakistan's Army and its powerful Inter-services Intelligence agency helped train the Mumbai attackers. Of course, I don't understand why a former DoD official would come across this information and why US "intelligence agencies" would leak it to him. But I do know that almost 4 days back several Indian newspapers reported: Kasab, 21, the only terrorist arrested by the Mumbai police, told his interrogators that Abdul Rahman, an ex-soldier popularly called Chacha, had given them training. The FBI is in Mumbai interviewing Kasab. May be they are relaying this old news back to the US. Or may be the US intelligence has really found some new evidence for this in Pakistan. Still wonder why NYT keeps someone as flaky as Sengupta on its payroll? (Hint: see my previous posts and this).
3. ABC News asks the million dollar question: Where are the 14 other Pakistani-trained terrorists? I wonder if Mr Zardari will go on Larry King again tonight and say these 14 guys are also "stateless actors". 
4. Condi Rice shot right back Zardari with this:  “Non-state actors are still a matter of your (Pakistan) responsibility ...”.

Who is to blame, really?

There is a loose cabal of ill-informed pseudo-intellectuals across the world that frequently opines on world events with a common theme. It is very hard to define the true nature of these individuals - some often come across as conspiracy theorists, others define themselves as "leftists", or even communists. But two common characteristics of these dingbats are, of course, the things I mentioned above: a certain willful ignorance and an emotionally-wrought, illogical, and pseudo-intellectual "reasoning" in their arguments. 

Take for example Arundhati Roy. It saddens me to think about what she has become. I remember reading her first (and only) novel, at one sitting, right through the night because I really couldn't stop mid way. She very deservedly won the Booker for that novel. When she started speaking out for various causes and for the victims of bone-headed government policies, I was truly glad she was passionately defending these people and these causes. But, like a fragrant and vibrant flower that withers away with time and turns into putrid crap if it happens to fall into a compost heap, the activist in her gave way to an intolerant polemicist with time and eventually turned into a conspiracy-mongering, race and caste baiting, shrill alarmist. 

She was interviewed by some British radio program (BBC?) during the Mumbai attacks. Here's the audio. I couldn't believe what I heard. As I posted earlier, there is very clear evidence that the perpetrators of this crime came from Pakistan and that they belong to the LeT, whose main "grievance" is the Kashmir dispute. So the terrorist attack on Mumbai had nothing - whatsoever - to do with any religious or ethnic or socioeconomic issue within India. And yet, Roy rambles on, blaming the Mumbai attacks on a variety of things that she sees as the "diseases" that plague India, from its "politics of hatred"  to "nationalism" to "ethnic nationalism", the "muslims [who] were massacred and slaughtered", and the "dalits" who "cannot expect justice". She says India is "one of the most brutal societies in the world" and so the Mumbai attack is just "chickens coming home to roost".

One of the most brutal societies in the world? 

I believe that there is a lot of competition for that title and India is not even in the top 100. This is the willful ignorance - and distortion - of facts I am talking about. Does she really think India is as bad as North Korea, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, any number of middle-east petro-dictatorships, Zimbabwe, Myanmar, and so on? Would she be willing to live in any of these countries? When I leave my home in the morning, I do see poverty and I see extreme hardship in the streets of my city but I don't see religious and ethnic minorities being persecuted. Sure, terrible things have been done to them and there are extremists who would like to turn India into an intolerant theocracy and autocracy like Saudi Arabia. But guess what Arundhati - there are a lot more secular, tolerant voices and people than these extremists and that's why we have a secular democracy instead of a fascist theocracy. And, we are still a democracy. So just like we let you make a thorough fool of yourself, we have to let those religious extremists express their opinion as well - that is the hallmark of a free society. 

"chickens coming home to roost"?

This is the most despicable thing that has been said about these terrorist attacks - when did India, as a nation, or the 174 188 innocent people that were massacred by these terrorists - ever, ever do anything even remotely as vile as this act of terrorism? You are saying somehow this happened to them because of something they did? That is disgusting. No one in the Indian media - or the international media - should give this nitwit any amount of credibility after this stupid statement. She should of course apologize for pouting such filth and nonsense.

So, who or what is really to blame for these attacks? India? "nationalism" is India? the "most brutal society" that is India? What kind of a person or persons would commit such a disgusting act of cowardice? I believe John Oliver has the right answers to these questions:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Mumbai Tragedy

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

There will be no Tomb of the Unknown Terrorist in Mumbai

Well, the Indian Muslims  -  blamed by some New York Times "reporters" and their ilk (pompous, presumptuous, pseudo-intellectual assholes) for the terror attacks  -  have spoken! And how! They have decided muslim cemetaries in Mumbai will not be used to bury the dead terrorists.

"The killing of innocents is against Islam. They are bringing shame to 25 crore Muslims of India. These men are not Muslims. Why should we give them place anywhere? There is no place for them in our hearts and in our cemeteries," said Hamid Abdul Razzak, president, Dawat-e-islami.

Determined to deny the terrorists the martyrdom they seek, Muslim organisations have written to senior Mumbai police officials as well.

"The cemetery should not allow the police to bury the nine dead terrorists in their premises," said Ibrahim Tai, president, Muslim Council Trust.

About the Pakistani connection and media reports

Here's what we know so far:

1. The lone suriviving terrorist has confessed he is from Pakistan and that he belongs to the LeT. "There were 24 of us who took one-year training in camps organised by Laskar-e-Taiba (LeT) at Mansera and Muzzarafabad in Punjab province of Pakistan. Ten of us were later handpicked for the Mumbai operation,'' said Ajmal Amir Kasab during interrogations.
2. WSJ reports some hard pieces of evidence recovered so far: Most of what Mr. Kasab has said so far has proven accurate, the commissioner said in the interview. After his capture, the young man had become resigned to helping the Indian police, Commissioner Maria said: "He knows the game is up for him." The key piece of evidence he provided is information about the hijacked fishing vessel that ferried terrorists from near Pakistan to waters off Mumbai. On the fishing trawler, investigators discovered -- just as Mr. Kasab said they would -- the slain lead crewman who had been thrown into the engine room, a satellite phone, and a global positioning device for navigating. Another GPS unit recovered in Mumbai suggested that the terrorists planned to return to the vessel if they survived the attacks, Commissioner Maria said.
3. A senior US State Department official has also said "the perpetrators were "wholly or partially" a group based in Pakistan". A number of US media reports have cited US intelligence and counter-terrorism officials now, pointing to Pakistan. 

So, we have the terrorist confessing that he is from Pakistan, that he was trained in Pakistan along with many others by a ex-soldier, that ten members of his group were then handpicked, and that they hijacked a fishing boat to get to Mumbai from Karachi. The Indian navy found the boat and recovered satellite phones and a GPS. The phones also show that a number of calls were made to Pakistan. US officials are also confirming the Pakistan link (this is the second time since the Indian embassy bombing in Afghanistan that the US has independently confirmed the Pakistani link - see here for a detailed account). 

And yet, there have been a number of articles in the international media that have dismissed - with no justification whatsoever - the Pakistani links mentioned by Indian officials. Here is what New York Times "reported":

But some security experts insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda.

This article, co-authored by one SOUAD MEKHENNET, of course doesn't say who these "security experts" are. This was published on Nov 27th even as people were dying. The NYT did not spare a moment in unleashing its anti-India, blame-the-victim crusade.

Some of you may be familiar with the name Somini Sengupta, a self-hating Indian who does almost-comical hit pieces periodically to please her Manhattan bosses. She just could not wait till the blood letting was all done to blame India for this carnage. Under the somewhat gleeful headline India Faces Reckoning as Terror Toll Eclipses 170 she goes on to insinuate that "the attackers had collaborators already in the city" and that "Indian security forces" were too weak because it took them "more than three days" to fight "just 10 gunmen". There is no mention in the article of the ammunition stocked in room 630 at the Taj, the chinese grenades, booby-trapped bodies (NSG was not sure if these were corpses or just wounded people), the 565 rooms that had to be checked, more than a hundred people who were stuck on 7 floors, and all manner of complexities faced by the commandos. Some Psychology experts (who will not be named, of course) insist that such a degree of complexity is too much for Sengupta and the NYT to grasp. But I don't think that is the reason for this work of impeccable journalism from Ms Sengupta. As some of you may already know, Sengupta has a long history of getting all things Indian completely wrong. You'll find some hilarious commentary here and here.  

Why?

I was 25 when I left India for the US. That was almost 15 years ago. India has given me a lot, including a heavily-subsidized top-rated technical education and I have given very little back to it in return. Watching the horror of the terrorist attacks on Mumbai unfold over the past 3 days finally jolted me to action. The occassional donations to charities and disaster relief funds are not going to be sufficient to overcome my guilt anymore. Over the past few days I have been searching and looking for a forum that allows people to freely discuss issues that plague India, to analyze events that offer hope, to organize the millions of voices on the internet, and to propel some of them towards action to change the Indian government and Indian politics for better. I found none. So here is a start.