NEVER in history was India a single nation, or one country, until united by the East India Company. The artificial nature of modern India, created by the British colonialists, adopted the art and science of instigating and managing insurgencies and separatist movements, as and when needed, to keep itself united through frictions and divisions in its post-colonial existence.

At the time of partition, India was in the grip of violent insurgencies and separatist movements many of which continue to smoulder underground even today. Wikipedia lists 68 major organisations as terrorist groups. Of them, nine are in the northeast, four in the centre and the east, 17 in the west and 38 in the northwest. India has kept itself afloat as a union because of its treachery. As new states were created, insurgents became chief ministers!

It is a documented fact that India is stroking insurgencies in neighbouring countries. Unlike the Indian-occupied Jammu and Kashmir, East Pakistan was not a disputed state. It was an integral part of Pakistan.

Indian diplomats and RAW cover officers have made startling revelations in their books about involvement in insurgencies or terrorism in neighbouring countries. For instance, R.K. Yadav and B. Raman (The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane) made no bones about India’s involvement in Bangladesh’s insurgency.

They admitted that India’s prime minister at the time Indira Gandhi, parliament, RAW and armed forces acted in tandem to dismember Pakistan.

Raman recalled: ‘Indian parliament passed a resolution on March 31, 1971, to support insurgency. Indira Gandhi had then confided to Kao that if Mujib[ur Rahman] was prevented from ruling Pakistan, she would liberate East Pakistan.”

India’s security czar Ajit Kumar Doval publicly claimed that he acted as a spy under a pseudonym in Pakistan for 11 years.

India’s then army chief Sam Manekshaw confessed in a video interview that Indira Gandhi ordered him to attack the erstwhile East Pakistan.

In a newspaper article appearing in The Hindu (Sept 1, 2019), titled ‘How India secretly armed Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance’, India’s former ambassador Bharath Raj Muthu Kumar said a few things about India’s secret support to the Northern Alliance, disclosing how, with the consent of Jaswant Singh, the then foreign minister, he “coordinated the military and medical assistance India was secretly giving to [Ahmed Shah] Massoud and his forces.

The support involved “helicopters, uniforms, ordnance, mortars, small armaments, refurbished Kalashnikovs seized in [occupied] Kashmir, combat and winter clothes, packaged food, medicines, and funds”.

These supplies were “delivered circuitously with the help of other countries” or “through Masssoud’s brother in London”.

India now paints freedom-fighters in occupied Kashmir as terrorists. To refresh India’s memory, it called insurgents in erstwhile East Pakistan ‘Mukti Bahini’, which is the Bengali equivalent of ‘freedom-fighters’. Remember?

Ahmed Jameel Malik
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2020