Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Cancel Prince Charles' Visit to India

New Delhi should cancel the projected Indian tour of Britain’s Prince Charles and spouse Camilla set for November 6 to14.

Their nine-day perambulation (Delhi, Dehradun, Mumbai, Pune, Kochi), will add immeasurably to the difficulties of maintaining a secure environment in the country as it holds the first of five Assembly polls on 11 November.

In fact, security will be virtually impossible to maintain, for there are multiple indicators that the Brits are moving toward a radical endgame to the India-Pakistan face-off they initiated with Partition in 1947.

They have tried this twice before. In 1984, a visit by Princess Anne provided the distraction that allowed the Game of Thrones assassination of Indira Gandhi, followed by anti-Sikh riots calculated to wreck Indian unity. In 1991, Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of the Tamil Tigers – the killers brought their own cameraman to ensure that everyone would know who did it – was clearly supposed to set off anti Tamil riots, but failed in that.

This time around, I think the target will be another candidate for Prime Minister, Narendra Modi.

If the assassin is a Muslim – easily ensured by people who control the ISI and its many proxies – it could precipitate communal bloodletting on a scale that would make Gujarat 2002 look like a nosebleed, set off an India-Pakistan war and balkanize India.

There are numerous indicators that such a scenario is in the works. They include the steep escalation of Pakistan’s outrageous aggressions in Kashmir, General V. K. Singh’s treacheries, Baba Ramdev’s 2011 boast that he could field an armed force, recent attempts to push large quantities of lethal weapons into India, and Navaz Sharif’s bid to get Washington to play a part in Kashmir. (The firm American denial of any such role will not stand when a nuclear war is in the offing.)

William Dalrymple’s bizarre essayA Deadly Triangle: Afghanistan, Pakistan and India,” published by the Brookings Institution a few weeks ago set the scene for American intervention. In arguing that India-Pakistan rivalry was the main reason for the Afghan war it ignored entirely the Cold War roots of the conflict and the drug trade out of Afghanistan that is now its primary reason for continuing. The trade sluices some $60 billion into the British-run global black market annually (with $2 billion of that going to the ISI/Taliban).

The 1984 and 1991 assassinations show that the plan to destroy India is not new; and a 20 May 2011 article in The Financial Times made quite clear that it is being dusted off for use again.

The article, headlined “Henry Kissinger talks to Simon Schama,” ended thus:

Kissinger laughs even as he sketches a scenario for an Afghanistan even grimmer than anything anyone has yet imagined, where the presence or absence of al-Qaeda will be the least of its problems. What might happen, he says, is a de facto partition, with India and Russia reconstituting the Northern Alliance, and Pakistan hooked to the Taliban as a backstop against their own encirclement.

Suddenly, spring goes chilly. The prospect looms of a centennial commemoration of the First World War through a half-awake re-enactment … Sarajevo. Think proxy half-states; the paranoia of encirclement; the bristling arsenals, in this case nuclear; the nervous, beleaguered Pakistanis lashing out in passive-aggressive insecurity. “An India-Pakistan war becomes more probable. Eventually,” says the Doctor, his voice a deep pond of calm. “Therefore some kind of international process in which these issues are discussed might generate enough restraints so that Pakistan does not feel itself encircled by India and doesn’t see a strategic reserve in the Taliban.” He looks directly at me. “Is it possible to do this? I don’t know. But I know if we let matters drift this could become the Balkans of the next world war.”

What this makes crystal clear is that very powerful forces outside India plan to make the 2014 general elections our last. The reference to the “next world war” indicates that there will be attendant crises also in Russia and China.

It should also make very clear to the BJP that its British supporters are not interested in Modi’s promise of a reformed and well administered India. They want India broken up and at their mercy.

If Charles-Camilla are not in the loop of these plans, they also have cause to worry. The coldblooded strategists of Empire would think nothing of sacrificing them at the altar of a really believable crisis.

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