Did you hear what Sitaram Yechury told the Rajya Sabha during the debate on the tragedy in Mumbai?
'With the Indo-US nuclear deal, with the strategic partnership that you are building with the United States of America, are you prepared to face the threats of Taliban and Al Qaeda reaching our shores, not that Indian Muslims will be converted but the attacks will come from outside India because you are seen as a strategic ally of the USA? Has this even entered our radar of thinking that because of this nuclear deal and the strategic relationship we are exposing ourselves to new types of terrorist threats, which did not exist in India earlier?'
First, I hope Comrade Yechury was merely letting his dislike of the United States come through. If he was sincere in what he said, doesn't that amount to handing a veto over Indian foreign policy to the likes of the Taliban?
Comrade Karat was quick to disown the Kerala chief minister's remarks about Major Unnikrishnan's family. May we expect a clarification soon, or was Comrade Yechury actually expounding the CPI-M's official policy?
Second, Sitaram Yechury was just plain wrong. This is scarcely the first time that India has emerged on the Taliban's or Al Qaeda's hit-list.
On October 26, 2001 the Arabic television channel Al Jazeera broadcast a message from Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban. The relevant passage read: 'This world has long been troubled, and full of wars and... these troubles will continue and these wars intensify. This is not caused by terrorism, but by the four countries which bear the responsibility for terrorism: America, India, Russia and Israel... This is why Muslims worldwide hate these states and want revenge.'
Mullah Omar was speaking almost seven years before the United States Senate approved of the Indo-American nuclear deal. His dislike for India stems from his belief that India must revert to Muslim rule.
That is not an isolated view. In the wake of the Mumbai tragedy, an article appeared in
Time magazine under Aryn Baker's byline. It carried the following: 'We (
Muslims) were the legal rulers of India, and in 1857 the British took that away from us,' says Tarik Jan, a gentle-mannered scholar at Islamabad's Institute of Policy Studies. 'In 1947 they should have given that back to the Muslims.'
If that is what 'gentle-mannered scholars' believe in Pakistan would you care to imagine what 'militants' think?
There is no reasoning with such men, no amount of 'promoting people to people ties' is going to convince the likes of Mullah Omar to back off. It is quite possible that he sees himself following in the footsteps of certain earlier residents of what is now Afghanistan, men such as Mahmud of Ghazni and Mohammed Ghori.
Sitaram Yechury spoke in the Rajya Sabha of a 'total lack of appreciation.' One might argue that the blindness, deliberate or otherwise, is squarely that of the Left. One point, however, on which I might agree with the Marxist leader is that there is -- or could be -- a larger strategic aim behind the Mumbai tragedy. Previous attacks proved that Mumbai cannot be brought to a halt by terrorism. (Assuming the official statistics are correct, 173 people were killed in the November 2008 attack, fewer than the 209 who lost their lives in the Mumbai trains blasts of July 11, 2006.) So what was the terrorist objective?
Mullah Omar has made his dislike of India amply clear. But take a look at the map of Asia, and you will find that there is a rather large chunk of territory between India and any Afghan warlord with visions of conquest, namely