Sunday, November 23, 2008

Obama and Kashmir

We can see more Atlanticist media re-writing the Kashmir issue while stoking it up again, seizing on Obama's remarks on the subject.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Testing if I am banned here.

Anonymous said...

Okay, that message went through. I was not able to post messages here when I tried last, a month ago. If was banned then thats fine, I have enough respect for the courageous work done here. If not please let me know.

Shahryar said...

Are Americans like Obama's South Asia adviser Bruce Riedel so effing stupid and ignorant? Do they not realise that the perception of Americans by Muslims worldwide changed in 1979 when Khomeini kicked their arses out of Iran and established the Islamic republic? The resurgence of Muslims worldwide started with that epochal moment. Including the ousting of the communist regime in Afghanistan followed by the ethnic cleansing of non-muslims in Kashmir.

Shahryar said...

Extract from Turkey supports J&K separatists by Premen Addy Saturday, November 22, 2008

The Organisation of Islamic Conference met recently in Istanbul, where its Turkish SecretaryGeneral Prof Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu voiced concern at ‘human rights violations’ in Jammu & Kashmir allegedly perpetrated by the Government of India. He was referring, among other things, to the detention of Kashmiri Islamist leaders who advocate the State’s separation from India in a conversation with local and visiting reporters.

Prof Ihsanoglu called for their immediate and unconditional release in order to improve the territory’s security situation. He supported the Kashmiri people’s right to self-determination. “OIC endorses a 1948 UN resolution mandating a plebiscite in Kashmir,” he declared.

The insolence that comes with political illiteracy is an endless source of wonder. The professor would have been enjoying the comforts of a Turkish prison were he to issue minimalist sympathy for the victims of the Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman authorities in 1915 during the Great War, when the empire fought alongside its German ally. A full 90 and more years later, modern Turkey, an avowedly secular state seeking admission into European Union with help and support from the US and the UK, cannot bear to own up to this black deed.

In 1974 when Turkish troops invaded Cyprus, dividing the island and establishing an illegal Turkish enclave in the north, they also kept faith with their time-tested atavistic traditions by breaking into Greek churches, urinating at the altars, defacing the frescoes of Christ and replacing these with a giant plaster cast image of Kemal Ataturk. A UN report has faithfully recorded these events but blow me if you can unearth it, for Turkey’s staunchest friends in Nato are the US and Britain.

So we return to Jamu & Kashmir. Prof Ihsanoglu, suffering from the amnesia to which many Muslim divines are sadly prone, has no memory of the Hindu Pandits who have been driven from their ancestral homeland by jihadis eager to proclaim an Islamic state cleansed of idol worshippers, and now live in ignoble penury as ‘internally displaced’ refugees in squalid camps. Why would Ladakhi Buddhists wish to perjure their freedom, to surrender it to would-be rulers in scriptural denial of minority rights?

I must confess to experiencing a dream which revealed Prof Ihsanoglu to be the acclaimed Nobel laureate, our own Prof Amartya Sen, in disguise. Prof Sen has been ensconced in the bowers of American and British academe for a good many years now. He is today the occupant of a prestigious chair at Harvard University; and his selective espousal of noble causes is worthy of a mid-afternoon TV gameshow when adults prefer sleep as an escape from the fevered activity of free spirits in the household.