US THINKER GIVES UNTHINKING SUPPORT TO ANTI-INDIA DEMANDS

A Reply to Robert Hathaway

by Dr. Koenraad Elst

The American South Asia scholar Robert M. Hathaway has used the opinion page of the Chennai-based daily The Hindu (8-8-02) as a forum for tendering advice to his own Government. Dr. Hathaway is the director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a famous think-tank in Washington D.C. The beautiful think-tank network in Washington D.C. should, to judge from the generous amounts of money oiling it, provide the American policy-makers with the fullest information and analysis base available to any government in world history. And yet, American foreign policy is by no means the most intelligent even in the contemporary world scene.

Hathaway's article illustrates what the problem is. Instead of laying down general principles or specific American national interests, his advice concerning Washington's South Asia policy focuses on sectional demands whispered into his ear by a foreign lobby whose nature and motives he fails to comprehend. In particular, he wants his own employer to investigate and eventually to block fund-raising in the U.S. by "groups implicated in the Gujarat violence". This is a demand recently pushed by US-based Indian Communists such as FOIL (Forum of Indian Leftists) as their latest weapon in their struggle against their nationalistic compatriots.

Hathaway correctly reminds us that "terrorism comes in many guises": armed assaults, suicide bombings, assassinations and "yes, hate-consumed mobs butchering innocent women and children". The latter expression presumably refers to the Muslim attack on Hindu pilgrims, a majority of them women and children, in a train in Godhra, Gujarat? Well, no, unfortunately Hathaway is blind in one eye and exclusively refers to those phases in the conflagration when Muslims were the victims. I will charitably assume that this bias is not a matter of considered opinion on Hathaway's part, merely an unreflected borrowing from his Indian sources.

Terror in Kashmir

Apart from poetry about a "sore" to be "healed", Hathaway takes no interest whatsoever in India's main terrorist problem, Islamic armed separatism in Kashmir. He merely warns Hindus not to use Kashmir as an excuse for Gujarat, and denies that Hindu exasperation at Muslim violence in Kashmir has anything to do with the Hindu reaction in Gujarat, as if he had investigated the matter. Yet, it is precisely on the Kashmiri frontline that America is most directly concerned, for it has provided indirect support to the terrorists for more than a decade. Many Hindus have been killed with American-made weapons and bombs.

The only act of terrorism in Kashmir which has registered in his consciousness is "the assassination earlier this year of Abdul Gani Lone, who opposed Indian rule in Kashmir but who in his final years had come to the realisation that violence and extremism offer Kashmiris no way out in their struggle with New Delhi", a struggle which Hathaway refuses to take distance from.

Outrageously, he insinuates that this murder is the handiwork of the Indian Government or its much-maligned Hindutva allies. That indeed is the unmistakable implication of his statement: "The Gujarat violence, Lone's assassination, and most recently, the designation of L.K. Advani as Deputy Prime Minister and most likely successor to Mr. Vajpayee have all raised new concerns about India's future among India's friends in the U.S."

Misinformed by Indian "secularists", whose Communist background seems unknown to him, Hathaway assumes that the soft-spoken Advani is some kind of extremist, and he blames the Indian Government for Advani's promotion as this is obviously a governmental decision. (It is of course none of America's business whom the democratic Indian Government nominates; for months after his election, George W. Bush rightly gave the cold shoulder to European politicians who had overstepped diplomatic decorum by openly supporting Bill Clinton and deploring Bush's victory.) Again leaning on secularist sources, Hathaway blames the Gujarat violence at least partly on the Indian Government; why else should it "raise concerns" as potentially damaging the inter-state relations between India and the US? Finally, in the same breath, in his list of blameworthy moves tainting the Indian Government, Hathaway claims that Lone's murder is a cause for worry about the course India is taking. This is simply despicable.

Lone was murdered by Islamic separatists more extreme than himself, by the very terrorists whom India has been fighting for over a decade. The murder was one more anti-Indian blow struck by the international Islamic terrorists against whom America claims to be waging a war. How should it be a cause for worry among pro-Indian Americans that India was targeted once more, now in the person of the relatively loyalist opposition leader Lone, by the terrorists?  Isn't the merciless hostility of the terrorists rather proving that India is doing something right?