By M D NALAPAT
ISI is activating its India-specific modules to create mayhem once the National Register of Citizens is made public.
Now that the
Pakistan military has succeeded in ensuring that a candidate of its
choice has been selected as the next Prime Minister of Pakistan, the ISI
is gearing up to intensify the ongoing global campaign against efforts
by the Sarbananda Sonowal government in Guwahati to identify the
millions of illegal migrants in Assam. The identification will be done
through the preparation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC),
which will eliminate those illegally present within the state. Chief
Minister Mamata Banerjee of Bengal has adopted the opposite strategy,
that of apparently welcoming such migrants into her state on the ground
of human rights, including Rohingyas, thereby becoming a heroine to the
many agencies funnelling illegal migrants into India on a daily basis.
Assam CM Sonowal’s efforts to weed out illegal migrants from genuine
citizens are not based on religion, but on origin. However, Assam’s NRC
is being characterised in a focused way as being directed solely against
a particular community. Several NGOs in India—some of whom are acting
from genuinely altruistic, if misguided, motives—have been petitioning
the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and other
consequential entities to stop work on the NRC, arguing that it is
intended to “send Muslims to prison camps for life” and to create
conditions for “mass murder, genocide, mass rape” and other human rights
violations. The objective is to ensure that every individual now
present in Assam be declared a bona fide citizen of India and be given
voting and other rights on an immediate basis. A collateral effect of
the campaign has been to impact the global image of the world’s most
populous democracy.
Meanwhile, around 6 million more
individuals in Bangladesh and Myanmar have been identified by the ISI as
being “suitable for early entry to India” in view of their dedication
to Wahhabism. Among these, the Pakistan army expects to recruit large
numbers of extremists in order to intensify their covert campaign to
ensure through riots, chaos and terrorism that India does not ever take
off into a high growth trajectory, but follows Pakistan in becoming a
divided society. Once the clamour in the US erupted last month over the
separation by the Donald Trump administration of children from their
parents, several of the groups promoting automatic citizenship to
illegal migrants into India have been alleging that “children are being
forcibly separated from their parents by (Indian) authorities”, and even
that “they are being sold as juvenile sex slaves”. The absence of any
evidence that such fake atrocities are taking place has not dimmed the
decibel level of the “Instant Citizenship” campaign.
There has been a visible concentration of
effort by the present UN Human Rights Commissioner on issues concerning
a single community, with relative silence on the situation of
minorities in Pakistan, with forced conversions of the few remaining
Hindus and Christians, or the brutal treatment being given by Wahhabi
fanatics in Bangladesh to hapless Hindus in much the same way as took
place during 1989-91 in Kashmir. A special effort has been launched by
ISI proxies since 2015 to ensure that as many media outlets as possible
carry false reports on India, while ignoring the situation in Pakistan
and Bangladesh. However, there are also several campaigners who are
working entirely independent of the ISI, but are active for reasons of
personal conviction. A noted crusader for the right of migrants to
settle in India, Harsh Mander, has several times warned international
agencies and tribunals that “detention centres are being prepared for
lakhs of innocent people” because of religious reasons. He recently
resigned as Special Monitor from the National Human Rights Commission
(NHRC) because the agency refused to act on the basis of unsubstantiated
information and wild allegations against authorities in India, but
instead demanded proof of the many charges made by Mander. Others are
asking why Harsh Mander has been silent not only on the situation in
India’s neighbourhood, but in Europe, where the Roma as well as Muslim
refugees are suffering discrimination on a scale unprecedented since the
1939-45 war across the world and its aftermath. Mander’s silence on
Europe is disturbing those who wish to see the same standards applied
across the board, rather than selectively. It is claimed by those
familiar with his activities that former bureaucrat Harsh Mander “has an
obsession with the Narendra Modi government and wants to discredit it
globally”, although there is no evidence to back the oft-repeated claim
that he is serving as a catspaw for the Congress party in its campaign
against the Modi government. This effort acquired a new edge after Rahul
Gandhi took over as Congress president.
A particular focus of the ISI is to try
and send in hundreds of thousands of more Rohingyas into India via Assam
and Bengal. In the latter state they get a much warmer welcome, thanks
to the policy adopted by the Bengal government of welcoming rather than
discouraging migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh. Several of the
representations and news reports being sent to global agencies
(including by the ISI-funded campaign to ensure immediate citizenship to
all illegal immigrants) give particular attention to the Rohingyas,
whom they wish to see resettled in India on a mass scale. False reports
with morphed images have been circulated by ISI fronts purporting to
show rapes and massacres of members of the minority community in Assam
since Sonowal took over as the Chief Minister, the intention being to
portray Assam as a “cauldron of hate”. The Delhi Press Club was the
venue for a report by the Students Islamic Organisation of India made
public on 23 June 2018. This alleged that “over three million will face
deletion from the National Register of Citizens” purely on grounds of
faith. Among those who have jumped on the Instant Citizenship bandwagon
is S.R. Darapuri (former IGP, Uttar Pradesh), who released alarming
figures about the situation in Assam on 13 July 2018. It must be added
that several of those active in the Instant Citizenship campaign are
unaware of the ISI’s involvement in parallel movements working with the
same objective as themselves. Both Mander and Darapuri are sincere
citizens who have somewhere along the line begun to believe that their
government is unreliable and even dangerous. Darapuri in particular has a
record of working in defence of the rights of the underprivileged even
while he was in service, and before he became a leading supporter of the
“Instant Citizenship” campaign, effectively on behalf of illegal
migrants.
Meanwhile, the ISI is activating its
growing number of India-specific modules to create violence and mayhem
not only in Assam, but in nearby states once the NRC gets completed and
made public. The intention is to inflame the situation on communal
grounds so as to create mindsets calling for a fresh partition of what
is left of India after the partition of 1947. This is despite the fact
that almost as many Bangladeshi Hindus as Muslims will be left out of
the NRC in Assam because their entry was illegal. Fake news is being
deliberately manufactured to generate fears and tensions such that they
may explode into violence, as a consequence of which it is expected that
Government of India will instruct the Assam government to scrap the
NRC, and regularise the flood of illegal immigrants the way more than 13
million have already found refuge, many in Bengal but in other states
as well. The ISI operation to sabotage the NRC is hitting high gear, and
Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal will, as a consequence, find it
increasingly difficult to implement the pledge of his party to ensure
that the NRC gets completed soon so that genuine citizens get separated
from illegal settlers of whatever faith through proper identity papers.
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