War On Terror

International Seminar - War on Terrorism

London Institute of South Asia 23-24 July 2007

A Paper by M C Raj

Preamble Is war more destructive than terror or is terror more destructive than war? The dividing line between these two cannot be easily identified. The intended victims of both are the ‘enemies’. The unintended victims of both are innocent people in large number. It is unfortunate that today’s humanity is often compelled to make a choice between these two. Any right thinking and feeling person will know that there is no choice between these two. Both have to be condemned to the dustbin without a moment’s hesitation. War on terror is proposed as a solution whereas that itself has become the biggest problem of the contemporary world. The choice before the world today is either to accept the inevitability of the unipolar world or make the maximum effort towards the realization and sustenance of a multipolar world. This choice has almost been imposed on humanity because of the forces who are bent on subverting the systems and structures of governance in the nations towards a unipolar world. Terrorism is engineered either to achieve something or to oppose something. Any group or nation that is under compulsive need to establish its hegemony over another group or other nations generally takes up to violent methods that are understood as terrorism. On the other hand violence is also taken recourse to because no group or nation wants to be subjugated to the hegemonizing stratagem of another group. When a particular group or nation finds it difficult to resist the violence of another group or nation through resilience it takes up to similar or more aggressive violence. A look back at human history also proves beyond any doubt that the group that is originally violent and has a design of establishing its hegemony over all others develops the strategy of ascribing violent and bad characters to the groups or nations that are at the receiving end of its own violence. Thus the two pronged strategy of war emerged. One strategy of war is the violent conflict with weapons and the other strategy is the propaganda war with uninhibited ascriptions. The ancestors of the indigenous Dalit people in India were ascribed characters beyond human imagination in order to legitimize Brahminic violence on them and simultaneously camouflage

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terrorism under high sounding spiritual and mystical discourses. They were ascribed terrifying names such as Rakshasa and Asura along with figures that could terrify any fickle minded humans. Such ascription of bad names and characters to innocent simple people evoked no resistance in the conscience of the society at large against the aggressor. Instead often such killing led to the glorification of the oppressor as savior. The aggressor too systematically developed discourses bordering on blatant lies and kept on repeating the same so that a repeated lie ended up as the ultimate truth. Violence and counter violence may not engage each other always in a cyclic way. One nation may use violence on a resilient eco people in order to subjugate them for economic ends, in order to take away their resources. Where the transfer of resources takes place to the detriment of the original owners of such resources they may take up to resistance the intensity of which can also lead to violence which is equivalent to what is today described as terrorism. If there was no design to dominate and plunder there would be no need of resistance and its consequent violence. Generally it is the designers and executors of dominance and plunders that cry wolf at resistance. Contemporary war on terror is nothing new if one perceives the trajectory of terrorism as it developed in different epochs of human history. It almost looks like a copycat of the strategy of many predecessors of the past epochs. Interestingly three hegemonic forces emerge clearly as bed brothers in the engineering of what they call ‘war on terror’. All the three forces have their common roots in unmitigated violence and terror and have continuously drawn inspiration from the blood of others. Mired in myths of dominance the history of the Jews is smeared with blood of innocents throughout the history of humanity. As a rebellious extension of Judaism, Christianity emerged representing the many attempts at purifying the original tenets of Judaism, which believed in its unmatched superiority over the rest of human race. Christianity has a big history of crusades against Muslims whom they consider as infidels. Another not commonly recognized stock of the same nomadic race is the Aryan race which believes in the essentiality of violence to establish its hegemony over others. Just as the mythical and historical ancestors of the Jews who indulged in wars of hegemony, Rama who is one of the mythical ancestors of the Hindus went about killing 14000 of Dalit ancestors during his sojourn in the forest for fourteen years. There is no wonder then that in modern times there is a terrible combination of the trinity of the US-Israel-India in the war on terror. It is also significant that Rama’s terror on Dalit ancestors was to grab their land and to deny their human dignity for the purposes of appropriating their labor free of cost. The world is still undecided on whether the war on terror is really against terror or whether it is for greater economic business. Terror is a psychological phenomenon which may be caused by many provocative. A child is terrified by the strange appearance of any person with whom it is unfamiliar. Santa Claus for example can have a terror impact on the psyche of a child who is unfamiliar with Christmas. The images of Rakshasas and Asuras were created in India in order create a terror image about Dalit ancestors. Black faces, long hair, protruding teeth etc. add a lot to the psychic impact of terror. A weapon has not only a psychic impact of terror but also a physical impact. While in the case of 2

appearance it is ignorance that increases the quotient of terror, in the case of weapons it is the knowledge of the weapon that increases both the psychic and physical impact of terror. The terror impact of an image can be removed to a large extent in the course of time by increasing familiarity with the image. On the other hand the terror impact of a weapon gets asserted and reasserted by creating a familiarity about it. Both the image and the weapon have a predominant space in the contemporary war on terror. Islamic religion, Muslim and Islamic states are images that are ascribed horrific character of terror in the ascribed image of “Islamic Terror”. Such images are engineered so that a psychological impact of terror may be created as soon as these images are invoked. There are myth-producing laboratories which keep churning out image after image that could create terror impact among those who are unfamiliar with such images. It has been an essential war strategy to demoralize the enemy. In order to do that, parties in war plant false stories about the enemy. The United States of America and India are the two major powers of the world who are indulging in such propaganda war against the Muslims. A propaganda war can be in force even when there is no direct war of weapons. Such unprovoked war of propaganda is engineered with a long term strategy for hegemony. However, this terror impact can considerably be reduced or even removed by breeding more and more familiarity with these images and by increasing the knowledge quotient of these images. It is not the same when weapons are produced. The image of terror is an idea and sometimes has a visible appearance. The impact of such a terror idea can considerably reduced by breeding familiarity with those to whom such terror images are ascribed. However, possession of weapons increases the terror impact in those who become familiar with such weapons. Weapons are produced not to produce an image of peace and serenity but an image of war and destruction. An image or its appearance does not kill but a weapon kills people. Many nations of the world today blatantly display their arsenal of weapons of mass destruction precisely because they want to send a message of terror to their neighboring countries as well as to their own citizens who may rebel against the dominance of the ruling class/caste. Quantum of weapons possessed by any particular group or nation increases proportionately the intensity of terror impact in those who come to posses the knowledge of the ‘interior’ of the weapons. The terror impact of a group or nation to whom certain characteristics are ascribed can be removed by ‘educating’ the ‘consumer’ on the other side of such groups and nations. However, the terror impact of weapons of mass destruction can be removed not by the ignorance of the ‘consumer’ but by actually destroying the weapons. A casual perusal of the quantity of weapons of mass destruction possessed by different groups or nations of world today will automatically point fingers to the United States of America as possessing the largest arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. It is not ironical then that it is the US who is going about trumpeting its intensions to wage a war on terror. It is those who possess the worst type of weapons of mass destruction and those who are in league with them who are championing the cause of anti-terrorism. The indigenous people of the world have no time to indulge 3

themselves in the fear of terrorism nor do they have the luxury of energy and resource to wage a war on terror. It is the ruling oligarchy in different parts of the world that is constantly under the compulsion of safeguarding themselves and their expropriated wealth. The one nation that has the worst fear becomes the champion of war on terror. The one nation that has the most powerful strategy for hegemonizing the rest of the world has designed the war on terror precisely because it wants to spread terror on the face of the earth and subdue the people of the earth to its designs. This is the United States of America.

The United States The US is trying in the last sixty years to control all those countries that want to have nuclear power. In 1943 Leslie Groves who was in charge of the bomb project proposed a total control of Uranium supply in the world. US was the first ever country in the history of humanity to build an atom bomb. It must be noted that during the cold war period the US financed and armed many ‘fundamentalist’ organizations in West Asia and other Muslim countries to fight secular and left oriented nationalist forces that supported the Soviet Union. After the end of the cold war these organizations have started training their gun on the US itself which in turn has launched an open war against them in the name of “war on terror”. It is evident that ‘terror’ in the first place is the brainchild of the US. Now having nurtured this child and seeing it grow beyond an expected and pre-determined size the US wants to exterminate its own offspring at any cost. The United Kingdom is a war ally of the US. However, when UK wanted to produce nuclear weapons the US refused to help Great Britain. UK then decided to go ahead on its own and produced the bomb. In 1947 the US wanted to attack Soviet Union and in 1963 planned to attack China even with nuclear weapons. The US maintains the world’s largest nuclear arsenal. A visit to Lawrence Livermore Laboratory will expose the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Programme which still keeps producing nuclear weapons. The Kennedy regime in 1962 engineered a re-ordering of the military in Latin American countries, especially in Brazil through subtle manipulations. It decided to shift the role of the Latin American Army from hemispheric defense to safeguarding of internal security. For this the American army offered to train the Latin American army. Through such training the transition from hemispheric defense to internal security took place according to the specific designs of the American regime. By setting internal security as a priority for Latin American countries what the Kennedy regime managed to achieve was setting up the army against its own people so as to 4

contain any internal unrest that might arise because of the selling of Latin American interest to Americans. The Americans would sell their arms to Latin American countries for fighting their own people thus ensuring a veritable market for the arms that were produced in American industries. Chomsky cites another example of the invasion of Panama by the Bush administration under the pretext of capturing Noriega who committed all his crimes while he was still on the payroll of CIA. After considerable analysis he concludes thus, “The current upsurge of military-paramilitary atrocities in Colombia seems to be part of land-grab efforts related to a multi-billion dollar development project in the region. The paramilitary are closely linked to the land owners, ranchers and narco-traffickers…The agents of this macabre plan of death and destruction are the usual ones and so are the targets: grassroots civic and popular organizations and their leaders, peasants, indigenous people and the black population, in fact anyone who gets in the way of the alliance of the government, drug rackets, and legitimate economic powers.”1 We may add to the above the war against the people of Vietnam, the attack on Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the open support to Israel etc. The litany of the working of the US in different parts of the world can go on endlessly. The US will not perhaps stop its march of state terrorism till it sees the dawn of a unipolar world whose hegemony cannot be challenged. The image of terror that the US has designed in order to achieve its hegemony over the rest of the world is “Islamic Terrorism”. We limit ourselves here as we need to move on to what is happening in India as a consequence of India becoming an ingredient part of the Trimurthy of the world’s hegemonizing oligarchy. One of the major programmatic manifestations of the design of war on terror is the production of nuclear weapons. The programme of nuclear weapons forms the nucleus of a strategy for multiple forays into the social, political and more especially the economic life of the nations of the world.

India and War on Terror Before moving into the question of terrorism and war on terrorism the mindset of the ruling caste oligarchy in India needs to be understood. The origin of this mindset takes one to the core essence of Hinduism as enunciated in the Bhagavad Gita. In the battle of Kurukshetra Arjuna refuses to fight the war against his own brothers, cousins and teachers as he fears that they are sure to fall victims of his powerful arrows. Wily Krishna takes him out of the battle field and explains to him the reasons which should become compulsion on him to fight. This would later become the core essence of Hinduism which a majority of Indians follow till today. Arjuna is born in the Kshatriya caste. Therefore, by his birth it is determined that it is his ‘karma’ to wage battles and 1.Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects, pp.99-100

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kill people. By doing his karma he fulfills the obligations of his Dharma. Only if he follows his Dharma faithfully he can dream of achieving Moksha. But Arjuna has a commotion in his conscience. “How can I kill my teachers who taught me the art of war? How can I kill my cousins and brothers with whom I played, dined and slept together? How can anyone legitimize my killing them?” Krishna comes out with a queer legitimization. The brothers and teachers of Arjuna would die because of their own karma but not because of the karma of Arjuna. As a Kshatriya it is his duty to wage a war. But if people die in the battlefield because of the arrows of Arjuna it is the consequence of their karma either in the present life or in the previous life. Therefore, Arjuna need not bother about the consequences of his karma of killing anybody in the battlefield. It is not a sin. Indeed, it is a virtue for a Kshatriya to kill in the battlefield. In no other religious scriptures will anyone be able to find such philosophical legitimization of violence. Killing has virtuosity in Hinduism. Every Hindu is violent in his/her essence because of this pernicious doctrine of karma. If the Kshatriya is able to do it physically the Brahmin is the schemer of unlimited violence on innocent people of the earth and they both become a terrible and terrorist combination against humanity. It falls only into natural logic that the Indian rulers join hands with the USA whose fundamental doctrine is to establish its hegemony through the war on terror. The Indian ruling caste is in natural league with the Jews because of their historical and cultural roots. Israel remains the biggest source of nuclear threat in West Asia and it spearheads the terror plots engineered by the US and supported by the EU. Lohia described Israel as a dagger driven into the heart of independent West Asia by imperialist powers. India has joined the league of Israel and has not hesitated to call Iran a rogue state. As India moved closer to the US it opened up its doors to Israel and its voice became feeble and fumbling vis-à-vis Palestine. Though the US was slow to India in the beginning and was testing the waters it was under strategic compulsions to appreciate the partnership of India in its violence against many nations of the world. Therefore, in the year 2001 the US designed the “Strategic Partnership of 2001” and in the year 2004 it signed with India, “The Next Steps in Strategic Partnership of 2004”. The first reward of the US to India for this unsolicited compliance is the present nuclear agreement. The New Framework of US-India Defense Relations was signed on 28 June 2005. This was capped by a Joint Statement issued by Bush-Singh on 19 July 2005.

The US in Need of India The collapse of the Soviet Union and the fast mode economic liberalization in the early 1990s paved way for the 1995 January US-India “Agreed Minutes of Defense Relations”. In May 1998 India conducted nuclear test which was a setback for India. However, the US regretted it soon and rolled back sanctions. India supported the Ballistic Missile Defense in May 2001 though Russia, China and other NATO countries opposed it. In February 2002 the US sold eight Ray-

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theon Counter Battery Radars to India. This is the first military sale in four decades. The US also supported the sale of several Israeli weapons systems including Phalcon mini-AWACS. In August 2002, India and the US signed a General Security of Military Information Agreement. In November 2002 a US-India High Technology Cooperation Group (HTCG) was constituted. Following on the HTCG the Next Steps in Strategic cooperation (NSSP) were announced in January 2004. Speaking in military terms India is insignificant for the US. The weapons that India possesses are two generations older than those of America’s and any military cooperation will be futile. Yet, the US wants to make sure of India’s support. In order to contain the nuclear programme of Iran the US has managed to rope in the support of Russia and China. It tries to convince India that it is interested in the emergence of a multi-polar world. India knows that it is a lie and the US knows that it is telling a lie and yet or because of that both have decided to support each other. India professes to work towards the emergence of a multi-polar world but is doing everything possible to sabotage such emergence. America does not believe in a global equilibrium. It wants to be the sole inheritor of the future of the world and makes convenient alliances only to achieve its own ends. The double talk technology of both makes them convenient bed-fellows. The Indian communists are aware that they have been solidly ditched by Russia and China and are unable to take a clear stand vis-à-vis India’s support to the US. The UPA knows this particular weakness of the Indian Left and is cashing in on it to the hilt. Moreover, Indian communist leaders are supine Brahmins who are hand in gloves with the Congress as their caste identity is much stronger than their class identity. Moreover one cannot expect much from the Left in India as both Russia and China have proved themselves to be supine in the face of increasing American hegemony over the rest of the world. India has joined hands with the US on the issue of Iran arguing against a nuclear neighbor. It legitimized its own nuclear programme showing China as a threat. Once again the double talk technology of Indian ruling caste comes to the fore. However, India has no right to tell other nations not to have nuclear weapons as India is as much a threat to other nations as they can be to India. In his visit to Pakistan on 04 March 2006, George Bush advised Musharaff on the need to fight terrorism more effectively. Condoleezza Rice ruled out a nuclear agreement with Pakistan similar to the one with India. For the US, India is needed as it is a giant consumer of the nuclear products of the US. This will increase the demand of Pakistan for more sophisticated weapons in order to strike a balance of power with India. The Pakistani elites have already started demanding an increase in its military consumption. While this will escalate cross border terrorism, the US will gain both ways as it can sell its WMD to both the countries and yet pretend to be a Good Samaritan for both. US Firms see India as a big market. Even in the market US will only sell arms that have reached shelf life in their country. US have a technology that is many times superior and it will have the ultimate control over India in all spheres of national life. Besides, there are many areas of com-

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mon interests between these two countries. These are: economic cooperation, democracy promotion, energy, terrorism, non-proliferation, regional security and Asian power balance. During the Narasimha Rao regime in India with Manmohan Singh as the finance minister India formally opened up its economy to globalization in 1991. Thence defense cooperation and technology transfer became key areas of negotiations with the US. The US perception of India’s role in Asia can be summed up in three key words- Terrorism, Energy and China. The defeat of India by China in the war of 1962 still lingers strongly in the memory of the Indian ruling caste. Subsequently China supported Pakistan in its nuclear programmes. The US does not want China to become an unchallenged power base in Asia and in order to resist China’s increasing clout in the region the trump card role of India will come handy to the US. Asian power balance is now the major concern for containing China. Immediately after the 1962 Indo-China war the US offered to cover India under its nuclear umbrella and set up an intelligence post to monitor China. Later this offer was shelved because of Indian’s tilt towards Russia, India’s war with Pakistan and much later in 1974 the nuclear test by India. American and Indian interest in Central Asia is to contain the rise of Islam. India has increased its cooperation with Central Asian States and even has established an air base in Tajikistan. An increasing role for India in the affairs of Central Asia will free the US military of fighting ‘terror’. In containing ‘Islamic terrorism’ Pakistan is a suspect in the eyes of the US. Therefore, while keeping up a Muslim face to effect a sharp divide in the region, US also want to have an alternative. India is much more of a natural partner in hegemony than Pakistan. In the exercise of power as dominance Christians and Muslims are historical rivals and enemies. Only India can be an ally as India can never challenge the unipolar hegemony of the US. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 the US started strategically arming Pakistan. In the aftermath of Kargil war the Clinton Administration pressured Pakistan to withdraw and set up with India a Joint commission of Counter Terrorism. From 1992 Israel has become the second largest seller of weaponry to India. Israel is now providing the sub-systems to upgrade India’s Russian arsenal. With this a US-Israel-India nexus against terrorism has emerged. Its clear implication is a Christian-ZionistHindu alliance against “Islamic Terror”. However, it must be noted that though India wanted the US to put an end to ‘cross border terrorism’ the US is unable to achieve it for India. Moreover, the war on terror has had its economic benefits to Pakistan. It has managed to obtain US and IMF assistance and loans and is stabilizing its economy well.

India’s Need of the US

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Ashley Tellis, a specialist in South Asian strategic affairs and nuclear policy, played an important role in finalizing the nuclear agreement with India. He presented the following in his testimony to the House of Representatives Committee on International relations hearing on “US-Indian global Partnership” 1.India endorsed the United States’ new strategic framework at a time even when formal American allies withheld support. 2.India offered unqualified support for the US anti-terrorism campaign in Afghanistan to use many Indian military bases. This was not offered to the Soviet Union even in the best of times. 3.India endorsed US position on environmental protection and global climate change though there was a vehement global opposition to it. 4.India assisted US move to remove Jose Mauricio Bustani, the Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical weapons despite strong third world opposition. 5.India protected high value US cargoes transiting the Straits of Malac during the global war on terror despite the fact the New Delhi did not have a covering UN mandate to do the same. 6.India kept silent on US’ “war on terror’ invasion of Iraq. 7.India came close to providing an Indian army division for post war stabilization work in Iraq. 8.India signed a 10 year defense cooperation framework agreement with the US. 9.India voted with the US at the September 2005 IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) Board of Governors meeting to declare Iran in ‘non-compliance’ with non-proliferation treaty. India did all this when it was not a formal ally of the US and was not at all bound to do all this. The US did not apply any significant pressure on India. While doing this India simultaneously used the rhetoric of non-alignment and independent decision making thus manifesting a double talk technology at which the US is adept and India has traditionally excelled in it. All these voluntary submission to the US began during the NDA regime and the UPA faithfully continues the legacy. As a consequence India’s strategic autonomy and independent foreign policy has been severely punctured. A simple comparison between the quotient of war and the quotient of terror in the gamut of war on terror would reveal that it is the former that is in high intensity and the latter can be tackled with much more ease than it is made out to be. For the predominant actors in the war on terror the war is more important than terror itself as the war that is engineered in the name of countering terror has many tags attached to it. India perceived this advantage of the war clearly and 9

therefore joined hands with the US to also have similar booty in its courtyard. The UPA regime has broadened the scope of the US-India convergence to also economy, trade, science, technology, agriculture etc. This will also mean more conditions on policy. An immediate fallout of this on trade and economy is the Iran gas pipeline project. It is now only going through mere motions. The defense deal of 2005 speaks of economic cooperation between the two countries. This will mean that the US will benefit most as it will be the seller. The US undoubtedly wants to be the supplier of arms to India easing out the Soviets and the French. Transfer of military technology which virtually means the sale of arms or the buying of arms from the US is a dire need for India as military technology is one to one and a half generations behind that of the US technology. If this is the case military cooperation between these two countries cannot be symmetrical. What can the US possibly gain from such an outdated armory of India? It can only mean an asymmetrical cooperation which will literally be an imposing sale of arms to India from the US. India wants to be the ultimate beneficiary of this brand of cooperation in order to establish itself as a giant in Asia.

Indian State Terror India uses the rhetoric of Islamic terrorism more than America uses it. India does it for mobilizing Hindu votes and for galvanizing international Christian support against Pakistan. Such a move by the ruling caste of India is in natural order as most Muslims in India were Dalits before their conversion to Islam. While there is a natural hatred of the Dalits among the Hindus there is also the history of taking revenge for converting themselves to Islam. While using the discourse of Islamic terrorism it is the Hindutva forces that actually terrorize the Muslims and dent their dignity by the mindless destruction of the Babri Masjid, the Gujarat violence etc. These were blatant acts of terrorism that have gone unpunished by law till today. The architect of such terror was even rewarded with Deputy Prime Ministry. In his speech in the House of Representatives on 30 September 2004, Hon. Edolphus Towns said the following about India in the context of the visit of the Indian Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh to the US. Mr. Singh spoke against terrorism but India has inflicted a reign of terror on its people and has sponsored terrorism in the Pakistani province of Sind. He spoke against poverty ignoring the fact that 40% of Indians live on less than $2 a day. Farmers in Punjab are underpaid for their products. He spoke against Weapons of Mass Destruction. But India started the nuclear competition in South Asia. He spoke of human rights while simultaneously violating basic human rights.

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52000 Sikhs and other minorities languish in Jails as political prisoners India has killed over 250,000 Sikhs, over 89000 Kashmiris, over 300,000 Adivasis. Since 1994 India has suffered 20000 fatalities as a result of acts of terror. Who is a greater terrorist is anybody’s guess.

Future Notes War on Terror is an engineered strategy and slogan of the global market whose leader is the US. This is an essential part of the creation of a unipolar world with the recognition of the US as unquestionable leader. The US is using its military power to bring nations of the world to their knees and make salutations to it. However, its ultimate goal is economic aggrandizement. A war on terror will be to the best advantage of the US in the global weapons market. Sale of WMD is clear market potential for the business of the US. “There is no question that terrorists want to cast a shadow of fear on the business of America. They understand how important our business is to our way of life….and the more that can be disrupted, that spirit of commerce and enterprise; the more successful they think they will be. But they are not going to succeed…In all our wars, the productive power of the economy has been one of our nation’s great advantages. And that is true today”2 Many nations of the world are joining hands with the US in the war on terror not because they have much terror perception but because of the economic advantages that their respective countries will have as a consequence of the US war on terror. India, with its vast population is a veritable market base. However, with the level of poverty that it has managed to sustain, its market potential exclusively for consumer products of American industries is very thin though it is significant. India, with the natural desire of its ruling caste for hegemony can become a veritable market for WMD. The US is aggressively pushing its market agenda based on sale of WMD down the throat of India. The ruling caste in India is enjoying it as India is now being propelled to a power equation in Asia that it much desired for a long time. If the US has been bullying the rest of the world, India has been bullying the rest of Asia. In the whole gamut of alignment-realignment-non-alignment, a new nexus has clearly emerged. It is the Christian-Zionist-Hindu alliance. Historically speaking this alliance has never been comfortable with the rise of Islam as an alternative force in global politics and economy. The slogan of “Islamic Terror” has been created to legitimize its hatred towards the subscribers of another worldview. Islam will be one of the biggest roadblocks to the firm establishment of a unipolar world. What India does not realize is that it is a negligible entity in the unipolar design of the Christian-Zionist conglomerate though it is a natural ally. There are many Islamic nations in West and Central Asia that have opted to become client regimes of the US. As long as these Muslim client regimes exist, and they will always, there is no way that India can substitute them as a 2. www.atimes.com/global-econ

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Hindu Majority nation. India does not realize that ultimately Indo-US relations will be decided solely by the US basing itself on the type of relationship that the US wants to build. The mindset of the ruling caste in India is guided by fatalism. It has now resigned itself to the fate of unipolar dominance by the US and wants to join the bandwagon of US supporters to gather the crumbs beneath the dining table of the US. A pertinent question about the war on terror is the purview of terror within war. Generally it is terror against the State that is being targeted in the war on terror. The heavy emphasis on the State and its institution as targets of terror has taken away the sheen from the war on terror. There are many countries in the world whose citizens are targeted by terror tactics of dominant forces within the purview of the nation state. A country that can be singled out for the perpetration of such terror on a large scale is India. The type of internal colonization of Dalits that is being practiced in India even 60 years after the colonizers left India must put any human being in any part of the world to shame. Even the official records of the government in most states of India mark the area in which Dalit people live in a village as ‘colony’. The type of everyday killing of the Dalits by dominant caste forces in India is the type of terror that is being pushed under the carpet in a systematic international campaign. India must indeed start a war on dominant caste terror in order to restore a semblance of sanity in governance in India. This must be a war of priority against terror. The US must sell arms to India not to fight against “Islamic terror” but against “caste terror” within India. This is not possible unless the ruling combination in India changes and is effectively transferred to the hands of a Dalit-Muslim-Adivasis combine within India. In order to achieve this, the electoral system in India should go through a radical transformation. The present majoritarian electoral system in India is beneficial only to dominant caste forces. A proportionate representation system will go a long way to usher in governance in India by a coalition of Dalit-Muslim-Adivasis. India governed by such a combine should take the lead for a nuclear weapon free world through hard negotiations with its neighbors. Violence and mass destruction of people in any form must be shunned by humanity. They will not be in the ethical trajectory of such a ruling combine in India. India and Pakistan have been indulging in unmitigated propaganda war against each other in terms of their religious identity. The false propaganda against simple and innocent Muslims in India is so intensive that even a small Hindu child has come to dislike its Muslim peers. The general public in India buys the anti-Muslim propaganda very easily as it is also simultaneously packaged with American attractive packets. Probably the same thing also happens in Pakistan to a lesser degree. The media in both countries are also doing irreparable damage to the social fabric of both the countries by their mindless sensationalism of the Indo-Pak conflict. This should stop and a constructive image building on both sides should start as the common people in both countries are in deep friendship with one another. Why is it that only at the time of elections in both countries that the propaganda war becomes very intensive? Political leaders in both countries would strategize the continued existence of the Kashmir problem with an unquestionable calculation of vote bank. The sooner this propaganda war stops the better it will be for the people

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of Pakistan and India. Once again, this is easily possible if the responsibility of governance is shifted to the hands of the coalition of Dalit-Muslim-Adivasis in India. India has not nurtured a symmetrical relationship with its neighbors. It has always tried to prove itself to be a superior power. It has been engaged in war with two of its proximate neighbors, namely, Pakistan and China. Of late it has tried to develop a cordial relationship with China because of China’s unstoppable growth in the global scenario. With its caste philosophy India loves isolationist thinking and strategies. It will reach out only to the most powerful even if it meant a subjugated existence. This is not going to help the interests of India in the long run. If China, India and Pakistan can forge an alliance in Asia they will be a power to reckon with and no other power can easily bully them. If they can also take Afghanistan on board, they cannot be shaken at all. This will mean quite a bit of give and take and recognition of one another’s strengths. When Russia joins forces with such a coalition of nations the possibility of a unipolar world with US hegemony will be only a mirage. Russia and China with their energy based alliances seem to be sure winners of the future and US will increasingly become a nation of the past. If India and Pakistan join hand with them the revival of a multipolar world will become realizable. When such a situation becomes a reality there will be no need for terrorism by any group or nation in the world. Terrorism cannot be reduced by war which will only breed more terrorism.

(M C Raj is spearheading a powerful Dalit Panchayat Movement in Karnataka, India together with his wife Jyothi and is a leading Dalit intellectual with many books to his credit. His contact details are given below.) M C Raj, Booshakthi Kendra, Nelahal Post, Tumkur Tk. 572128, Karnataka – India Email: [email protected] Web: www.dalitreds.in Mobile: (0)9845144893

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