IN a statement, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai said he ‘appreciated’ Indian Prime Minister Modi’s statement on the human rights situation in Balochistan and had every right to respond to Pakistan’s `provocations’ (Aug. 20).

He also claimed India didn’t have any intention of going to any proxy wars in the region because “it has a tradition of peaceful coexistence.…”

In his anxiety to please the Indians, Mr Karzai has conveniently forgotten how this ‘peaceful’ India had annexed Junagadh, Hyderabad State, Kashmir, Goa, Sikkim and Siachen between 1947 and 1984.

Above all, he failed to remember the Sino-Indian war of 1962 for which many independent Western observers blamed India. This well-kept secret of the Indian government finally got exposed through a Times of India story (April 2, 2014).

According to it, Australian journalist Neville Maxwell, who was the New Delhi correspondent of The Times, London, during that time has made public part of the Henderson Brooks report, which was an internal Indian army inquiry into its rout in the 1962 war.

It was written by Lt- Gen Henderson Brooks and Brig P.S. Bhagat but successive Indian governments had refused to make it public. Maxwell has said: “It wasn’t China, but Nehru who started the 1962 war”.

Apart from him, eminent British philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell had in his 1962 book levelled the same charge against India. There also have been others saying the same thing.

Mr Karzai evidently has no love lost for South-Asian Muslims. How can he forget the anti-Muslim pogroms in Modi’s rule in Gujarat after which many Western governments had imposed a visa ban on him and only lifted it out of diplomatic necessity after he became premier?

He doesn’t realise that if it hadn’t been for Pakistan’s help, no power on earth could have dislodged the USSR from his country after the 1979 invasion. Besides, Pakistan had hosted up to five million Afghan refugees and still has nearly three million of them, registered or unregistered on its soil.

M.Y. Khan
Karachi

Published in Dawn, August 30th, 2016