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fat marwaris, who had done more to fatten their pockets and very little to serve the people of the country. One of their illustrious ancestors had sold Bengal and India to Robert Clive, the British clerk turned a General and a plunderer. The
It was palpably clear that a vital part of Bengal was very fast losing its Bengali and aboriginal characters. The Bengali refugees from East Pakistan had no fixed vocation. They grabbed anything they could.
The new inheritors had failed to pick up the signals that ‘sonar Bangla’, the golden Bengal had started withering away. Its
To blame the Church for all the ills in the tribal entities, I thought, was as wild a logic as the flight of the crow and unexpected fall of a ripe coconut on the head of the farmer sleeping below the tree.
hated the Muslims. They, I believed, were responsible for partition of the country and excesses committed against the Hindus. I would never forgive them for raping Manorama, my childhood companion back in East Pakistan, and uprooting us from our real motherland.
Meitei Vashnavites, a stream of Hinduism,
My Kashmiri DCIO too deserted me and managed a transfer to Delhi when he found that the work termite would not allow him to sleep on piles of unacceptable excuses. He was a paper pusher and had good connectivity with the elites of the ruling ethnic group in Delhi.
The Meitei, suffering from the illusion of past grandeur and a fabricated sense of being cheated into a merger with India could hardly find any other target, but India to blame for their woes.
In independent India violence had become a part of civic expression. Most Indians had turned violence prone with the progressive failures of the post-independence administration. Anarchy ruled in the name of democracy.
Manipur is a unique example of Indian expertise in allowing the simple democratic aspirations of the people for better political dispensation, economic advancement and cultural assimilation to degenerate into a cult of violence. Assam emulated the Meiteis after about two decades.
Meitei revivalist movement, which denounced the merger of Manipur with India. They strived for the revival of the Sanamahi worship, restoration of the Kangla, the mythological site of the Meitei deities and replacement of the Bengali script with the ancient Meitei script.
Manipur. Merged with India in 1949 the former princely state was still administered as a Union Territory by a Chief Commissioner, in the same style as the British agents did in the thirties and forties.
The vast majority of the Indian officers posted to Manipur, irrespective of their service affiliation, indulged in smuggling of gold and precious stones.
I was later informed that the Commanding Officer, his number two and Angad were cashiered from service. Angad had to undergo a stint of imprisonment. The 31 Mahar was
The Congress party normally suffers from claustrophobia once it is denied power by the people.
The post-partition miseries had embedded in my thought process some elements of hatred; disliking and disdain for the civilisational forces that had enslaved India;
However, there were times when the Muslim populace of Bengal freely borrowed from the Bengali storehouse rather than falling back on characteristic Arabic and Urdu names.
the geographical territory defined as India. In fact it did not. Independence to Punjabis and Bengalis meant a millennium of unsung exodus. To the Nagas it meant fear of the uncertain and domination by the people who were as stranger as Martian creatures.
The RSS too did not venture beyond the urban area of Dimapur, Haflong. Their Hindutwa pretensions dried up before the Pakistani and Chinese bullets.
This officer had simply closed his mind and believed that the Nagas still roamed the hill jungles in loin clothes and lived in the civilisation of hunter-gatherer.
This was followed by a cleverly manipulated referendum on April 14 that returned an overwhelming verdict in support of Sikkim’s merger with India. Barring a handful of collaborators most Sikkimese had no illusion that the referendum was manipulated and rigged. It indeed was. It
Indira used cannons to maim a small potentate that could be done by an ordinary swatter.
though I developed a secret admiration for her grit. All said and done she represented the new brand of womanhood, who had the courage of challenging the mightiest in the land.
It would be futile to paint Indira as an aggressive mother in law. She had seen her mother being tortured and insulted.
Sanjay had filled in the gap left by some of the lesser day Mughals, who believed more in fencing with scimitar than the weapons of statecraft.
India. I often suspected that the Nehru-Gandhi genes contained certain contradictory chemical combinations that forced even Indira Gandhi to be vanquished when on a winning spree. She simply did not know when and where to stop.
with the majority ethnic, racial and linguistic groups. Many observers suspect that Indira Congress promoted the Bodo and Gorkha agitations with a view to containing the Ahom parochialism in Assam and the Marxist power base in West Bengal.
The fire triggered off by the mindless denial of democratic rights to the Kashmiris in 1987 haunted Rajiv and the successor governments.
The details of the secret visit of the terrorist leaders to Delhi at the invitation of the Prime Minister were leaked out to a few members of the Panthic Committee by a member of the Rangreta Dal, another underground outfit launched by the Union Home Minister. That was the height of treachery-to Rajiv Gandhi and a small fry like me, if not the nation.
But they did not take into account the crucial factor of slavish attachment of a section of Congressmen to the family of Motilal, Jawaharlal and Indira.
Rajiv had rather proved again that Congress treated ‘secularism and minorityism’ as a ‘policy of apartheid’—segregating a major religious group from the mainstream of the country.
propped up the Bodos against the Assamese on the demand of Bodoland,
But Rajiv’s political aides, open market troubleshooters and intelligence abettors were in no mood to listen to sane advice.
Rajiv had closed all doors to saner advice and had surrounded himself by sycophants, who were more preoccupied with self-aggrandisement than serving the nation.
He proved only a shade different from his brother Sanjay.
That very night a gang of criminals headed by a brother of the caste-baron ‘secular politician’ stormed the police station and freed the detained ISI operatives,
There are examples galore to prove the point that ‘sterile secular’ stances had grievously compromised national security.
The ostriches around Rajiv, like Vasant Sathe, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Vishwajit Prithwijit Singh etc, ganged up with some media ostriches and tried vainly to keep up Rajiv’s sagging moral.
History is yet to assess which of the two blunderers—Advani’s rathyatra and V. P. Singh’s Mandal Commission action —had inflicted the maximum injury on Indian society.
was later informed by a very reliable source in the IB that an organisational faction opposed to me (personally and professionally) had leaked out the identity of the journalist friend.
The Indian National Congress was responsible for creating apartheid segregation between the Hindus and the Muslims, in as much as the Muslim League and other Muslim organisations were.
Hiteshwar’s hands were clearly discernible behind the formation of the ULFA in 1979.
Some chilling details of Hiteshwar’s linkages with the breakaway AASU leaders, who cobbled up the ULFA, were narrated to me by Samiran way back in 1981,
The Congress party has the distinguished history of supporting divisive forces in the North East to its political advantage.
That was the high mark of sycophancy of Mr. Naraianan. He was sold out to the Congress and became a Gandhi family loyalist.
Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference had badly humiliated Indira Congress by securing 46 of the 75 seats. Indira Gandhi refused to accept the defeat gracefully. G.
as this category of bureaucrats feign to be direct descendants of God Almighty Himself.
Indian Muslims have always used religion for furtherance of their political objectives.
The fundamentalists loathed the ‘assimilistic’ tendency in Indian Islam and socio-religious practices of the Hindus polluting their ‘khalis’ (pure) identities.
We lost at least a decade beating around the bushes of ‘secularism’, ‘democracy’ and non-existent constitutional and legal constraints.
