India’s foreign secretary handed over a dossier of the information India has gathered regarding the planning and execution of the criminal assault on Mumbai in November 2008 to Pakistan’s high commissioner, Shahid Malik. It was a determined way to start the week, and will be followed by the Union home minister’s trip to the United States of America to compel the American government to act upon its ‘words’ and deliver what it keeps promising. We can all see through the charade conducted by the Bush administration, and performed by Condoleezza Rice who is an unconvincing and untrustworthy ‘actress’.

It was the grand plan of America to ‘trouble’ this region, to divide loyalties, to encourage dissidence between cultural brothers, to arm one against the other, to misuse poverty, to create scenes based on half-truths verging on blatant lies to rationalize its military and illegitimate activites, and to disrupt the lives of a majority of the people for the sake of petty gains. It has masterminded the creation of numerous monsters, all of which are now beginning to gobble it up. As the world changes, and as a new generation begins to take the reins of administration, America is caught in a trap, which is of its own making, and is therefore unable to stall the horrors that its ‘puppet’ states, propped up and trained by it, are inflicting upon the rest of the world.

The demand of all these ‘powers’ to provide proof of terror groups and training camps operating in Pakistan and Bangladesh, sponsored, and more importantly protected, by state forces, the Inter-Services Intelligence and the army carried no weight at all. India has been the target of terror groups for decades. Kashmir has been mutilated by their antics, our Muslim citizens have been traumatized, right-wing nationalists have been given a fresh lease of life and fanatics who thrive on such polarized realities have gone on killing sprees.

Killer disease

‘Pakistan-based’ intrusions have damaged the fabric of this secular, multilayered and pluralistic society. The US has periodically mouthed demands for peace and dialogue, but has been incompetent when it comes to playing the moderator. India sees that truth clearly. It sees the inefficiency of the Bush-Rice combine, and will respond emphatically to the attack on its own terms when the time is right. Never forget that this nation is an ancient and dynamic civilization, and once its patience wears thin, nothing will stall its decision, whatever it may be.

Wherever one looks, there is an unfolding horror that has stemmed from the cruel interventions of the Western powers. The brutal bombing of Gaza by Israel will only foster the birth of more self-sacrificing terrorists, who will take their revenge. To have created Israel on the edge of the Middle East was one of the most perverse decisions of history, as was the arbitrary division of the Indian subcontinent by drawing a border from air, dividing a people, destroying families, killing a culture. These two decisions, among many others, have managed to make our planet a place of unnecessary deaths and strife.

The nations of the West will have to pay a price for their actions, sooner or later. China and India, with their vast populations and civilizational resilience, will survive despite the losses but smaller nation-states and newer ‘cultures’, with all their money and staying power, could well begin to disintegrate in different ways. The economic meltdown in the US and the Western world is one symptom of a killer disease. Now that India is a member of the international club, we must assert our many strengths and force dialogues by confronting the US and Britain about the grave results of the policy initiatives they have orchestrated and endorsed, leading to inhuman turmoil.