The humiliating way in which Indian migrants have returned from the US demonstrates the extent to which India has lost respect, especially in the worldโs chanceries. No wonder Forbes published a list of the most powerful countries, putting India at number 12, behind Saudi Arabia, Israel, and ageing Japan. Even after three years of potentially debilitating war, Russia is number three on that list.
Propaganda on social mediaโand by the shameless noisemakers who pretend to be our countryโs `mediaโโhas blinded most Indians to their collective fall from grace, but it is now disgustingly obvious. Some journalists who have travelled to Russia during the ongoing war in Ukraine say that even Russian opinion-makers have contempt for India, even though India helped Russia to navigate around Western oil embargoes. They see through the policy of trying to please all sides.
This is a shameful switch from the days when that great patriot, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, walked out of the White House when President Nixon made her wait for her meeting with him. Nor did Indian leaders then feel the need to organise cheesy hoopla or beg invitations to domestic events abroad.
Uneasy slide
Far worse, and equally hidden from most Indians, is the countryโs loss of sovereignty. This can be dated to the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, after which Montek Singh Ahluwalia orchestrated economic reforms. But that was not bad for the country, and Prime Ministers Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee held the line on key Indian interests.
Indeed, Rao ended the challenge to national sovereignty that had kept Punjab burning for several years. And Vajpayee solved the longest-festering challenge to national sovereignty in Kashmir. At the SAARC summit at which he achieved this in the first week of January 2004, he also forged South Asian unity and opened the way for a corridor of cooperation, trade, and cultural exchanges that could have extended from Central Asia to Southeast Asia.
Vajpayee was brought down a few months after that, to the shock of even those who came to power. Since then, we have silently (and, to a great extent, blindly too) witnessed declining sovereignty. I have never understood why India more or less begged for a waiver from the Nuclear Supplierโs Group during the Manmohan Singh years. India was the biggest (if not the only) buyer of nuclear reactors in the world, and the US was eager to sell.
Not only that, the US was the prime architect of embargoes regarding nuclear materials and equipment. After President Kennedyโs assassination, it had covertly exempted Israel and South Africa. It should have been up to the seller to rearrange its legal requirements, rather than the buyer with the deepest pockets at the time.
Kashmir insurgency recreated
At home meanwhile, alienation, insurgency, and violence were revived in the Kashmir Valley. Around the time when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had appointed the current National Security Advisor as Director of the Intelligence Bureau, Yasin Malik was able to weave his way around south Kashmir in what he called a `safr-e-Azadi.โ
Since Musharraf was still committed to Vajpayeeโs peace process, `azadiโ became a fad. Around 2006, preparations were made for international celebritiesโand Kashmiris who were turned into international celebritiesโto promote `azadiโ through books, documentaries, and partisan journalism.
Alienation and militancy were in deep retreat thanks to Mr Vajpayeeโs peacemaking, but engineered incidents added to the tempo of violence, and statistics painted a picture different to the ground reality. Meanwhile, Kashmiri boys were harassed, beaten, and arrested by the forces under the benign gaze of the agencies. Predictably, that provoked resentful agitations and insurgency.
All this suited world powers. Those to the West and the East did not want a strong emergent India, and even less so a united South Asia. The most tragic aspect of this is that foreign powers found willing tools in South Asia, sometimes in key positions. Once insurgency had gone through agitations in 2008 and stone-pelting in 2010, new militancy quietly came up in south Kashmir from 2010 to 2017, apparently unnoticed by the state until 2015.
(Similar blindness to what was afoot had preceded the earlier insurgency and militancy, which exploded onto the national consciousness with the abduction of Rubaiya Sayeed, the then home ministerโs daughter. Even after that, Kashmir had remained largely un-patrolled during many months of ethnic cleansing.)
A Pakistani called Abu Qasim lived unchallenged in a Pulwama village from 2010 to 2015, from where he recreated Lashkar-e-Taiba. During the same years, Burhan Waniโwho had gone underground after being abused and beaten by special policeโregenerated Hizb-ul Mujahideen, again unchallenged until 2016.
Current threats
Fresh efforts are underway now to reignite insurgency, and a lethally potent militancy emerged in Jammu and Kashmir from the very moment Prime Minister Modi took the oaths for the third time. The momentum for the new effort is being built up from very far afield. Efforts to revive the Khalistan movement had already begun from almost the moment the Modi government came to power for the first time in 2014. Coordination and activism for this, even in India, was centred in Canada.
It is incredible that Indian agents should have so badly bungled alleged operations in North America that governments of those countries have been able to vilify India by name over the past couple of years. Realising what could unfold, I had written on the night Burhan Wani was killed that anyone associated with national security or intelligence ought to be sacked for incompetence or investigated for treason.
That still holds. This country and its people have been ill-served by those who have been trusted with vast resources to protect it. The erosion of national sovereignty, and now of national dignity too, is unacceptable.
