The split wide open

Vappala Balachandran
Ex-special secretary, cabinet secretariat

The crescendo in US-India relations which reached its zenith with the ‘Howdy, Modi!’ event in Houston on September 22 has crashed into a diminuendo within three months after the August 5 crackdown in Kashmir, passage of Citizenship (Amendment) Bill (CAB) and the possibility of nationwide NRC. The reason is the growing perception that India is a violator of human rights and religious freedom.

The US Congress, its committees and commissions, whose members were paraded during the PM’s Madison Avenue event, and at ‘Howdy, Modi!’, are now being accused of interfering in our domestic affairs. US congressional circles have found it difficult to accept our official spokesperson’s statement in response to the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom’s (USCIRF) release on the CAB. His defence that the Bill was meant to benefit ‘persecuted religious minorities already in India’ was unacceptable as it excluded Muslim refugees in India from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, Rohingya and Sri Lankan Tamils. The USCIRF had complained that the CAB, which lays down a pathway to citizenship that specifically excludes Muslims, was a dangerous turn and would ‘strip citizenship from millions of Muslims’, together with the NRC process.

The passage of the CAB was greeted by violent protests in the Northeast. Even BJP MPs from there publicly admitted that there was a lot of misunderstanding about the Bill. Mature voices had advised Home Minister Amit Shah not to hurry up with the Bill unless the provisions were explained to the affected people. There was also a request to refer it to a select committee. That the BJP, with its fabled propaganda prowess, is not able to counter rumour-mongering is evident by the statement of its MP from Tezpur that lakhs were pouring into Assam through the broken Bangladesh border gates.

Meanwhile, our continued crackdown in Kashmir would be discussed by the US House of Representatives through a congressional resolution, urging India to ‘end restrictions on communications in J&K as swiftly as possible and preserve religious freedom for all residents’. The discussion is taking place at a time when their sympathy with India for Pakistan-sponsored terrorism is being replaced by deep anxiety over continued detention of even pro-Indian Kashmiri politicians.

The continued lockdown has almost killed Kashmir’s tourism. A report said domestic tourist arrivals were only 32,000 between August and November, whereas it was 2.49 lakh during the same period last year, a drop by 87%. Foreign tourist arrivals had dropped by 82%. The approach to the revered Srinagar Jamia Masjid was opened only on November 23 for the first time in 109 days, although the mosque was shut because the Mirwaiz was under house arrest.

An avoidable sideshow to this imbroglio was our New York Consul General (CG) Sandeep Chakravorty’s speech to a private audience on November 25 that ‘India will build settlements modelled after Israel for the return of the Hindu population to Kashmir’. London-based Middle East Eye was the first to publish the report (‘If the Israeli people can do it, we can also do it’) with a one-hour video. Later, it was widely circulated, giving an impression that the continued Kashmir lockdown was to facilitate Kashmiri Pandits returning to the Valley for rehabilitation on similar lines as the Palestine’s ‘occupied territories’.

The learned CG’s comparison was inappropriate as the Pandits have a legal right to go back to their homes, whereas Israeli settlers were forcibly replacing Palestinians. By citing this wrong analogy, the CG gave credence to the rumour that Kashmiri Muslims would be forced out, taking advantage of the abrogation of Article 370.

Was the CG under delusionary anticipation that this arrangement would be blessed by the Trump administration, just as it had, on November 18, reversed a 1978 policy of President Jimmy Carter that the Israeli ‘settlements’ were ‘inconsistent with international law’? President Reagan differed from Carter’s policy, although he had sought a freeze on settlements. The same policy was followed by subsequent US Presidents by avoiding to give legal opinions, and using their personal influence on Israel to discourage settlements.

Theoreticians in BJP’s ‘brain trust’ want India to emulate Israel, hoping that the US will forge closer ties with India, like with Israel. Perhaps they overlook the traumatic passage Jews had to traverse, the sacrifices they had made and the ingenuity they displayed on each occasion to overcome obstacles. The story starts in 1898 when Theodor Herzl, convener of the First Zionist Congress, met with German Kaiser Wilhelm II during his visit to Jerusalem, then under the Ottoman Empire, for lobbying to create a Jewish homeland. It was of no use. Later, Herzl thought of buying Uganda from the British Empire to accommodate Jews scattered all over Europe in ghettos ‘piled up on top of one another like grasshoppers in a ditch’, with half the world’s Jewish population of 7 million in Russia.

The story shifts to Paris when Chaim Weizmann, a biochemistry ‘reader’ of Manchester University held 2,000 meetings with world leaders and officials attending the 1919 Paris Peace Conference to lobby for awarding Palestinian ‘mandate’ to Britain. He had already known PM Lloyd George as the minister for munitions (1915-16) as he had helped him during the war with a process of making acetone, badly needed for making explosives. In return, he asked for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. That was how the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was issued. In the same year, the Jewish Legion within the Royal Fusiliers captured Palestine from the Ottoman Empire. The seeds of future Israel were laid, formalised in November 1947 by the UN Partition of Palestine Mandate. Weizmann’s pressure made President Truman overrule the State Department to vote for the partition, thus creating Israel.