Junk junkets

Ghulam Nabi Fai, an American citizen of Indian origin, has hit the headlines in the US, India and Pakistan. He was arrested in the US for taking millions of dollars from the ISI to propagate the Pakistan case on Kashmir through high-profile seminars and also influencing US Senators and Congressmen. He had been at this for nearly two decades and is currently under house arrest.

As expected, Pakistan has supported him, saying that being a Kashmiri he had every right to support the Kashmir cause. The CIA must have been fully aware of his activities but had turned a Nelson’s eye to them for the sake of good relations with Pakistan, a long and trusted ally. Things have changed in the post-Osama phase and there is now a freeze in relations between the two allies. Moreover, with increasing demand for action against a duplicitous ally, US authorities have now chosen to take action against Mr Fai.
Indian intelligence agencies could not have been unaware of Mr Fai’s shenanigans over such a long period. They would have even known what transpired at his high-profile seminars for so many years. It has been the practice of our government, on the plea of freedom of speech, to allow Kashmiri separatists to openly express treasonable and anti-India views not only in Delhi, Kolkata and Chandigarh but also in Washington, London and Brussels. This only shows pusillanimity and abject appeasement. Eminent selected citizens from our country, chosen deliberately from the majority community, were invited by Mr Fai to his seminars on Kashmir in the US, to lend them respectability.
Executive-class air travel, five-star accommodation and other facilities were generously provided. Some of them may have projected the Indian viewpoint at the seminars but it appears that they were not reflected in the resolutions passed at the seminars. The one-timers going to Mr Fai’s seminars were taken for a ride but that cannot be said of those who went repeatedly — a senior journalist from Jammu is reported to have gone 17 times and has been writing prolifically against India’s stand on Kashmir while the Indian government has remained blissfully inactive. Prudence demanded that eminent Indians going to these seminars should have been circumspect.
It would not be out of place for me, in all humility, to mention how I responded to foreign invitations after resigning from the Army in 1983. I had launched a movement for restoring Patna’s glorious name of Pataliputra and was surprised to receive an invitation from Paul Berenger, then Leader of the Opposition in Mauritius, to visit the island as his guest. His proposal was to name a city on the island Pataliputra and twin it with Patna. Mauritius has a very large Bihari population and he obviously wanted to draw political mileage. I was tempted to accept. Apart from a junket to a holiday destination, it would have boosted a project dear to me. Notwithstanding this, I wrote to the ministry of external affairs seeking advice. They replied that our government had very cordial relations with the then Prime Minister Anerood Jugnauth and it would be inadvisable for me to go there as a guest of the Opposition leader. So I declined the invitation.
The second occasion was when I was on holiday in the US in 1994 and was invited to speak on India’s Kashmir policy by the Rand Corporation, a partly US government-funded leading security think tank. I held no official position at that time. Yet, as Kashmir was a sensitive issue, I sought the advice of Siddhartha Shankar Ray, then our ambassador in the US, whom I had known from before. He told me this was the first time they had invited an Indian to speak on Kashmir and that I must go there to put across the Indian viewpoint. I enquired if the embassy would like me to project any particular line. He laughed and said that I knew things better and should bat on my own. I went and addressed an audience of some 200 scholars from the US and Nato countries. During the question-answer session, I was asked a tricky question by an American. He said that irrespective of the merits of India’s stand on Kashmir, the fact was that there was widespread violence in Kashmir and the people wanted to break away from India. Being a democracy, India must respect popular will. My reply was that fundamental values are more important than the game of numbers in a democracy. Abraham Lincoln opposed slavery and believed in the liberty of the individual. Despite the will of the people of the southern states, he fought the American Civil War to uphold that basic value and the integrity of the Union. More Americans were killed in that war than the combined total of casualties suffered by them in the First World War, the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. Similarly, we in India believe in secularism and cannot afford to compromise on that fundamental issue. We could not sacrifice the interests of over 100 million Muslims in India for the sake of five million Kashmiri Muslims. I sent a synopsis of my talk to our embassy for record. Mr Ray told me I had given the embassy a good debating point in what I spoke about Abraham Lincoln.
We must be very careful while accepting invitations to speak in foreign countries as it may affect our national interests. The Indian government needs to be more vigilant and prevent separatists from pursuing their anti-national agenda in foreign countries. Apart from being reactive, we must be pro-active in projecting our national viewpoint. No doubt we must strive to have a peaceful solution in Jammu and Kashmir, but that cannot be Valley-centric, ignoring the rest of the state. The majority of the population of the state, comprising non-Muslims and other Muslims like Gujjars, Bakherwals and Kargil Shias, does not want any truck with the separatists. Even among the Kashmiri Muslims, there is a sizeable section which does not support them. As per a Mori opinion poll conducted in 2002 by a British NGO under the patronage of Lord Auckland, a known protagonist of Pakistan, 61 per cent Kashmiris want to remain in India, six per cent want to join Pakistan and 33 per cent are undecided. In 2007, the European Union Parliament endorsed Baroness Emma Nicholson’s fact-finding report by 400 against nine votes, despite desperate efforts by Pakistan. It strongly castigated lack of democracy in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and was appreciative of democracy in Indian-administered Kashmir. These facts are little known within our country, leave alone internationally. Pakistan relentlessly conducts high-decibel propaganda against India, even using the likes of Ghulam Nabi Fai, while we seem to have chosen to remain mute.

The author, a retired lieutenant-general, was Vice-Chief of Army Staff and has served as governor of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir.