BLACK CAMPAIGN: SHEKHAR GUPTA IS BATTING FOR VK SINGH

EVERY SIN IS AGAINST VK SINGH ONLY

This is an article about two Indian express stories. First, the 5 April 2012 story, The January night Raisina Hill was spooked: Two key Army units moved towards Delhi without notifying Govt” (hereinafter COUP) - and the 20 January 2013 report, Unit set up by V K Singh used secret funds to try and topple J&K govt, block Bikram Singh: Army probe, (hereinafter TSD)

The two scripts were crafted “with extreme care and caution” ostensibly to narrate the “current state of top-level politico-military relations”. In both, TSD and COUP, the chief protagonist is General V K Singh and the broadcaster is Shekhar Gupta. On the face of it, the general is the anti-hero, trying to subvert and sabotage the system from within. 

However, the stories are so well spun by the mass media that VK Singh emerges as the victim-hero, and the government as a villain - first, for allowing subversion to happen on its watch and secondly for the inordinate delay in carrying out any action against V K Singh’s alleged misdemeanors. 

More importantly, for the public, the government is vindictive, week kneed and lame duck that had lost credibility to rule because even the army was also up in arms against it. One comment on the Indian Express website that tells the general mood among the urban middle class and armed forces community:

It's such a shame that the Congress government is using its muscle to strangle the voice of others, a few days back general V.K Singh shared the stage with Modi and now the inquiry commission is set on his name...!! what did the Congress government was doing all these days after the retirement of General V.K Singh, this General is known for his integrity and loyalty towards our motherland...but the issue is with General V.K Singh because he should have shared the stage with Rahul and then by this time Congress must have rewarded him with some hefty post like Governor...!!

LINKING UP UNCONNECTED EVENTS

COUP and TSD are so designed that they link up two unconnected events to put the government on the mat. 

TSD:-, V K Singh sharing a platform with Narendra Modi is cited as the reason for the government to book V K Singh for extra-constitutional espionage. 

COUP - V K Singh’s going to the Supreme Court to sort out his age row is conflated with allegations of the government’s vindictiveness that blames him for engineering a coup. 

V K SINGH MAY BE PLANTING STORIES 

It is natural for the reader to assume that V K Singh is not a fool to leak a story that has the potential to portray him as a saboteur and as a general who is willing to wreck the system for personal gains. And since the documents leaked to the press are secret and related to national security it is taken for granted the only some politician or bureaucrat could leak it to the newspaper. 

Although at the time of the release of ‘COUP’ V K Singh was in service and even post-retirement, he enjoys enough clout in the service to know the contents of the Army Headquarters secret reports that have questioned the illegality and extra constitutionality in the functioning of the Technical Services Division (TSD), a controversial Military Intelligence (MI) unit set up by General V K Singh in May 2010.

That the story could also be leaked by V K Singh is a proposition not considered at all by any journalist. 

SEEKING AN ANTI - ESTABLISHMENT MAN

The question is how V K Singh is able to emerge as a victim-hero - every sin is against V K only. This feat is the work of a well-knit team conceived by anthropologists and seasoned public relations (PR) experts. In both the stories “Black Propaganda” technique has been used. 

Black propaganda is false information and material that claims to be from a source on one side of a conflict but is actually from the opposing side. In our case, the two foes are V K Singh and the Indian Government. V K Singh is the perpetrator of the Black propaganda and the Government is the target. 

Here Shekhar Gupta acts first as a neutral broadcaster and second time as someone hostile to V K Singh. At the time of the ‘COUP’ story in 2012, the Indian Express and its editor Shekhar Gupta were good friends. So when the story that had strong undertones of the “C” word appeared on the front pages, it flummoxed many. 

While Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Defence Minister A K Antony had rubbished it as "alarmist" and "baseless", V K Singh in his many post-retirement chats with the news channels, described Shekhar Gupta and his COUP story as “Crazy”. (It is the same word that he is using in the TSD case too, saying “the charges against me are ‘crazy’.) 

During the interviews, he also revealed that just a few days prior to the appearance of the COUP story; he had lunch with Shekhar Gupta where they discussed the unusual troop movement on 16 and 17 January 2012 towards Delhi. The general also complained to the TV anchors that “with these journalists, for them, there is nothing off the record". 

In his weekly column, on 22 June 2012, “referring to V K’s interviews, Gupta wrote, 

“It’s tempting to take the general's statement to imply that it liberates me from the "off-record" limitations on my conversations with him. He can lift it for himself. But I am not sure he can do so for connected conversations between me and his close friends and family members who must be entitled to their confidentiality as well. Nevertheless, his point is noted. I will reflect on it. “

The editor-in-chief of the newspaper put his name in the byline along with his other colleagues to appear as an unhinged, dispassionate reporter. The story became more believable because in the true spirit of journalism a friend was reporting against the actions of a friend with whom he had lunch a few days back. Although Shekhar got a lot of flak for the story, he took it in his stride. 

The entire episode established Gupta as the anti-VK Singh man, who was now ready for the next phase of the campaign. 

Here one must add that both in 2012 as well as 2013, the Left media too ran positive stories about V K Singh. Endorsement by the left and left-leaning retired admirals is akin to Chomsky giving a clean chit to CIA by saying that they did not supply the Al Qaeda mercenary army with arms in Syria. 

Another interesting aspect in Shekhar-V K campaigning is that prior to being splashed on the front page, many elements of the Express story had already been published in an article on Rediff.com,“Rediff scooped: How India's elite force was stumped”. (13 March 2012) 

Similarly much before the TSD story came into the limelight on 03 September 2013, 

V K Singh had extensively talked about the TSD controversy to Nitin Gokhale of NDTV. 

GUPTA USES GOVT STORIES TO THROW MUCK ON GOVERNMENT

Shekhar-V K Black Campaign uses the government’s report to ultimately put muck on the government’s face. The purpose is to sow suspicion between the Government and the Indian people. It also has a purpose to recruit informants and create deserters and defectors within the administration. To imagine that Indians are capable of achieving such finesse in their black campaign would perhaps, be fooling oneself. This is possibly a small detail in a rather complex game plan to take on the Indian state. 

Whether the story harms V K Singh or the Congress is immaterial? Does all this help the country, is a moot point? 

Lies, Damned Lies, and Killing Fields in Syria

The world has an America problem. Washington’s paranoiac claims of armed altruism in Syria are a humbug. They regularly lie to use force and shamelessly sell wars to the American people. They bully nations to accept their version of the half truths. Please Read...

http://orientalreview.org/2013/09/05/lies-damned-lies-and-killing-fields-in-syria/

Warmongering and the Civil-Military “Schismogenesis”

How much war and how much militarization our society can accept must be decided by the people and not through sinister games orchestrated by a few

Every move we make in fear of the next war in fact hastens it. 

                                                                                                          

                                                                                                                        -Gregory Bateson

Since the beginning of this year, Rajouri, Mendhar, Poonch and Uri sectors have been witness to repeated incidents of senseless violence, accompanied by equally vociferous debates on news networks. Each incident has left the government more embarrassed. On the other hand, the army, despite inept border management, has ended gaining greater autonomy for local commanders to manage border incidents, including the right to retaliate with maximum force. 

The media has been constantly accusing the government of timidity in its policy towards China and Pakistan. The government on the other hand is trapped in a “double bind”. It cannot openly chide the military for its incompetence nor can it afford to grant the military greater independence in border management, which impacts significantly on foreign policy. The result is that the government’s choices have reduced and it gets the blame for whatever the option is chosen. 

Defence Minister Antony’s flip flop on the issue of who killed the five Indian soldiers in the Poonch sector in the August 6 incident, actually conforms with the “double bind” theory where the “victim” gets embroiled in a communicational matrix, where every message contradicts the first and all utterances only generate negativity.

A persistent fusillade of accusations, communication chaos and “black propaganda” is being used to push the government deeper into a situation where it will have no other option but to plunge the nation into war either with Pakistan or China. An environment is being created where the Indian state will either relinquish democratic control over the conduct of the military arm and hand it over to hawkish uniformed officers and their allies within civil society – notably, the retired generals who have nothing to lose and much to gain from arms dealerships and contracts -- or develop schizophrenic tendencies that eventually manifest in the form of panic or rage.

It is hard to imagine that five young Indians boys had to sacrifice their lives just to prevent the two prime ministers from having a convivial meeting, perhaps over pomegranate juice, at New York. The senseless killings in Poonch were not the work of some uneducated non-state actors. It was ordered by Pakistani generals, graduates of American War College and military academies. 

Unfortunately, Pakistan’s insanity was matched by the naïveté of forty former Indian soldiers, spies and babus, who have signed a joint statement asking the Indian government to adopt a tough military stance against Pakistan. The situation has reached such a pass that even outside powers have started hinting at a possible war. In a recent interview, Marie Harf, the US State Department spokesperson said that it would be “getting ahead” of events on the ground to suggest that South Asia was moving towards yet another war between nuclear-armed neighbours.” To use Arthur Sibler’s words, for these so-called nationalists, “war dead are props used to purify and sanctify the ongoing and future campaigns of slaughter, in an endless procession of slaughters throughout history. The war dead are especially useful since they have been rendered forever mute; they are unable to tell us the truth of what they endured, or about the lies for which they died.”

Mutilated young men and wailing war-widows is what warmongers seek to satiate the machinery of war. They refuse to use their minds to create conditions for a reduction of violence. They demand memorials not to honour the brave-hearts but to further militarise society. For them, poverty and unemployment are healthy because it ensures uninterrupted supplies to military manpower markets. They demand valorous men not for national security but to protect a notion of nationhood that is entirely about territory, not people. The retired Indian hawks who are now demanding more war had given similar policy prescriptions while they were in service. Despite the endless list of war-widows and war wounded, they refuse to introspect on the ultimate futility of the five wars that India has fought since independence. But how does one expect these warriors of primetime television to value human lives when their minds are programmed to think property and profits? 

The shameless use of dead-soldiers for political purposes is abominable. However, more shocking is the use of beheaded and mutilated-soldiers to alter the civil-military relations in the country. The border incidents are being used to vilify and embarrass the government more than targeting the enemy. It is intriguing - this year’s three major incidents on the northern borders have exacerbated the existing acrimony between the army and the government. And all three occasions have displayed the emerging fissures in the Indian polity. 

There are only two players that wish to see the national military stand apart from the Indian state. The first is the frustrated right-wing conservatives who don’t see power flowing into their hands through the democratic route. For them, a disenchanted military is a must to catapult them to power. In addition, the talk of masculinity and manhood also helps them reinforce notions of patriarchy that their social and political identity is built on. 

An Indian military estranged from the state is also an outcome that the besieged superpower, the U.S., would greatly appreciate. It has been very cumbersome for the U.S. to take Indian military personnel out on expeditionary assignments and junkets in support of its imperial agenda since the rules of civilian supremacy in force require that permission be granted by the elected government. The Pentagon has to follow procedures in its home turf, but intensely dislikes the procedures it encounters elsewhere, which it dismissively describes as “red tape”. It would prefer to deal with the Indian military in about the same way that it deals with the Pakistan military. Through the military-media games recently launched in India, it seems that there is a clear agenda from an as yet unidentified quarter of the global power matrix, to produce an Indian version of a Musharraf or a Mubarak.

·     

Snowden: Herald of New Age or a Pawn In Information Warfare?

Much to the chagrin of American intelligence, Edward Snowden melted away from Hong Kong hotel to flow into the – ‘no extradition’ – transit zone of a Moscow airport. Looking at the US government, pleading in front of President Putin for Snowden’s extradition – one is reminded of Indian government’s numerous requests to Washington to extradite, David Coleman Headley, the 26/11 Mumbai attack mastermind. If the US has the temerity not to extradite a proven terrorist like Headley, then it certainly must feel ashamed to ask for return of Snowden – a noble soul – a global hero.

The US crescendo of protests against Russia and China is a typical case of a “pot calling the kettle black”. The US is forgetting, CIA’s most famous public relations coup of the Cold War. In April 1967, Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, Svetlana (Allilueva – OR) was picked up from India and transported to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport only to denounce her nation and father as a “moral and spiritual monster.” READ MORE...

http://orientalreview.org/2013/07/02/snowden-herald-of-new-age-or-a-pawn-in-information-warfare/

Nehru and Patel Jointly Dealt with Communism and Communalism

Sardar Patel was as much a secularist, as Pandit Nehru was a socialist. The duo could co-exist because Nehru was a willing warrior against communism and Patel agreed to keep RSS at bay. Patel wanted the RSS to dissolve into Congress. Nehru desired the communists to buy his half-baked socialism called the “socialistic pattern”. The two were  diiferent to the extent that Nehru could hide his politics under the garb of ‘humanistic paternalism’ - While Patel's  saffron slip showed. 

Patel died in 1950 and could not taste success of seeing the Congress flooded with cultural nationalists. Nehru who died 14-years later - almost succeeded in his objective to de-fang the communists. Paradoxically, Patel’s stature grew after his death; Nehru’s reputation took a nosedive. 

Ignoring, Nehru-Patel’s primary allegiance to the nationalist bourgeois, the right wing academics and analysts insist on the apparent differences between the two. Patel’s 07 November, 1950, letter to Nehru is cited as proof of former’s vision and latter’s myopia. 

Spelling out his concerns about communist China Patel had then written, "Chinese ambitions in this respect not only cover the Himalayan slopes on our side but also include important parts of Assam. They have their ambitions in Burma also…While our Western and North-Western threat to security is still as prominent as before, a new threat has developed from the North and North-East. Thus for the first time after centuries, India’s defence has to concentrate on two fronts simultaneously."[1]

Patel did not have to inform Nehru. In 1949, speaking to Indian army officers in Srinagar Nehru had said, “Chinese revolution has upset the balance of power and the center of gravity has shifted from Europe to Asia thereby directly affecting India.“[2]

There was no difference between Nehru and Patel on the Chinese issue. The latent bonhomie between the two resulted from their joint vision that informed them that China was the only route through which communism could ingress into India. 

It was well known in early 1950s that the US had embarked on a Soviet containment strategy. Willy-nilly both were too eager to be a part of this western game; because such a global game helped them tame the domestic communists like the BT Ranadive and EMS Namoodripad. 

The major difference between Patel and Nehru was on the approach to be adopted to contain communism. Patel wanted an all out aggression against China. Nehru’s approach was more nuanced. Much like the Americans, Nehru saw Mao’s communism as an opportunity drive a wedge in the Soviet camp as well as slice the Indian communist movement. 

Nehru’s Tibet policy in the early 1950s was in tune with the American thought process. With the Korean front about to open up, America wanted the issue to only simmer and not blow up. Patel was in a hurry to join the western bandwagon and rhetoric on Tibet. And there in lay the genesis of India- China war of 1962. 

In the 1950s Patel and Mao were both involved in the process of consolidating their nations. Throw out the last vestiges of imperial legacy. However, the Chinese never questioned Patel’s tactics in Hyderabad or Kashmir, the question that we need to dispassionately ask is why did Patel shout about Tibet? 

Post Independent India had been truncated and vast chunks of territory sacrificed at the altar of Western strategic imperatives - similarly, China too had been chipped (Taiwan, Macau, Tibet, and Hong Kong) by the transatlantic big bankers.

In 1950s our Air and Naval chiefs were still British - Nehru had PMS Blackette as his military advisor and Chester bowels as his international affairs guru. Under such circumstances, India was as independent as Afghanistan or Iraq is today.

The Pakistan front had been kindled through regular arms supplies and support on Kashmir from America. Therefore, any Indian leader who even thought of opening up the China front in the East could hardly be called a visionary. It is for this reason that on Sino-Indian question Patel should fall into the category of class warrior rather than a statesman. 

Both India and China were in the same boat, yet Patel saw evil in China. The only explanation for these leaders and many others with similar ideological bent of mind is that they were driven by the interests of propertied elite rather than any larger national interests. Their sense of detachment from their class and American interests were not as complete as the Chinese, who not only refused Soviet nuclear submarines in the 1958 to protect their land from becoming a Soviet military base but also told the Soviets in the 1960s, 

“If the international Communist movement collapsed, this will not cause the sky to fall down.”

---

[1] See ‘Deputy Prime Minister (PM) Vallabhbhai Patel’s Personal Letter to Nehru, 7 November 1950’, in   Vallabhbhai Patel, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence 1945–50, Vol. X, Ahmedabad: Navajivan, 1974, pp. 335–41.

[2] British Foreign Office document 371-84457

Digging out the American Terror Code from a Hollywood plot

Thu, May 2, 2013

Phenomenon of Terrorism, United States

By Atul BHARDWAJ (India)

The Marathon and finish line kept ringing in my mind after listening to the news of the twin blasts at Boston. After a couple of days, I saw a child wearing a t-shirt with a “swoosh” and “there is no finish line” printed on it. This was probably the clue I was looking for.

Coincidentally, soon after the Boston bombing, Nike recalled all its “Boston Massacre” blood splattered T-Shirts[1]. Nike has a long history of provocative adverts using blood and religious symbolism, but the “Boston Massacre” is dangerously uncanny. Nike says the T-shirt is rooted in the history of World Series baseball championship, “the late-season sweep by the New York Yankees of the rival Boston Red Sox in 1978.”

Unfortunately, the company that inspires so many young athletes seems to be precariously perched in the history of American terror. Its advertising campaigns and association with a popular Hollywood movie, Go for it seem to be the primary source of inspiration behind the post- blasts stories.

READ MORE...

http://orientalreview.org/2013/05/02/digging-out-the-american-terror-code-from-a-hollywood-plot/

“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) Or “Instigate to Intervene” (I2I)

“Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) Or “Instigate to Intervene” (I2I)

Fri, Apr 12, 2013

Anti-Human Rights, Chaosistan, Phenomenon of Terrorism, Syria

By Atul BHARDWAJ (India)

American democracy appears to be in jeopardy. Irrespective of the political dispensation at the White House, the policy of promoting proxy wars and covert military operations across the globe continues to mutate.

Any nation that decides to exercise its sovereign right to protect its citizens from armed insurgents incurs Washington’s wrath. America wants to permanently amend the rules of the game by stating that a nation’s right to protect is subordinate to the international community’s responsibility to Protect (R2P). Syria is the latest in the long list of nations that is suffering to sustain American imperialism.

R2P is the new name for humanitarian intervention, a norm adopted by the UNO in 2005. According to Gareth Evans, R2P equips everyone in the international community to prevent the “catastrophic human rights violations taking place behind sovereign state walls,” with “coercive military action as a last resort, not a first.”

The problem with analysts like Gareth is that their vision permits them to peep through the walls of sovereignty but not through the iron curtain of the empire that adheres to the doctrine of Instigate to Intervene (I2I). It is through use of such dubious norms and instigations that America attacked Libya and is now in the process of destabilizing Syria. Russia, China and Iran are the three countries preventing the Western military juggernaut to roll over Syria completely.

In an open defiance of well established international practices, Washington is blatantly using Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and UAE to lead an armed insurgency inside Syria. As a result the three-year-old dissent in Damascus is now an international problem. The Western media, with an agenda to flare up the situation in Syria began beaming in the misdemeanors of Bashar Al-Assad and his dynastic rule; projecting the opposition as victims of political atrocity.

Political struggle is a part and parcel of any state. The problem begins when political fissures are exploited by external actors. This is exactly what has happened in Syria where the government’s legitimate actions against the opposition-armed militancy are being dubbed as human rights violations.

The branding of Assad as a tyrant is a ruse to plunge the nation into a war of attrition. Since the beginning of January 2012, the C-130 transport aircraft loaded with weapons have been regularly taking off at the American military base in Qatar to land at Turkish airports. From the airports, the arms consignments travel by road to rebel-military camps on the Syria-Turkey border.

The NATO’s encouragement to Syrian rebels is not limited to moral and material support; the NATO countries are also in the forefront to mobilize manpower to augment the foot soldiers of the Free Syria Army (composed of Syrian military officers who have defected from their parent outfit, a bunch of mercenaries and Al-Qaeda terrorists). According to a study by King’s college London, “Hundreds of Europeans have travelled to Syria since the start of the civil war to fight against the country’s President, Bashar al-Assad…600 individuals from 14 countries including the UK, Austria, Spain, Sweden and Germany had taken part in the conflict since it began in 2011. European fighters made up to between 7% and 11% of the foreign contingent in Syria, which ranged between 2,000 and 5,500 people.”

America has anointed the main opposition party, Syrian National Coalition (SNC) to occupy the official Syrian seat at the Arab League. It is perhaps for this reason that Moaz al-Khatib the former leader of SNC, admitted, “We thank all the governments who supported us, but the role to be played by the United States is much bigger.” To democratize the instigation to intervene, and retain American control, the US has appointed Ghassan Hitto, an IT professional from Dallas, US, as the head of the planned interim government.

The imperial American obduracy flows from the ideological belief that the nation-states’ ‘monopoly over organized violence’ is not a right that can be exercised without the approval of the empire. Thereby meaning that the states are authorized to use violence within their own territory, only to protect those people certified as victims by the empire. Any violence against the American certified victims is branded as human rights violations and genocide.

The Western fetish for R2P and their so-called ‘good intentions’ have already caused mayhem in the lives of ordinary Iraqi or Libyan. The Russian President Putin says,

“The state is falling apart, Inter-ethnic, inter-clan and inter-tribal conflicts continue.”

However, the Americans will not abandon R2P because it is a tool to re-order the states in accordance with what Stephen Gill has identified as “new constitutionalism – imposition of new constitutional and quasi-constitutional political and legal frameworks – with respect to the state and the operation of strategic, macroeconomic, microeconomic and social policy.”

published in ORIENTAL REVIEW JOURNAL

http://orientalreview.org/2013/04/12/responsibility-to-protect-r2p-or-instigate-to-intervene-i2i/