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Scroll.in
a day ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Two Assam women allegedly pushed out of India towards Bangladesh brought back
Two Bengali-origin Muslim women from Assam, who were allegedly forced into the no man's land between India and Bangladesh by the Border Security Force, have returned to their homes. One of them, Shona Bhanu, a 59-year-old resident of Barpeta district, was dropped on the highway around 11 pm on Saturday, 120 km from her home, her brother Ashraf Ali told Scroll. The second woman, Rahima Begum, from Upper Assam's Golaghat district, was brought home by the police on Friday night, her family said. Only three months ago, Begum had got a favourable ruling from the foreigners' tribunals, her lawyer said. On Friday, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had admitted that Assam has been 'pushing' back to Bangladesh persons who have been declared foreigners by the state's foreigners tribunals. Foreigner tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies unique to Assam, which rule on citizenship cases. They have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor errors in documents. As Scroll has reported, at least three of these expelled from Indian territory, including Bhanu, have their cases pending in the Supreme Court. Neither the Border Security Force nor the Assam police have explained why the two women have returned. Scroll sent questions to BSF and police officials. The story will be updated if they respond. Case in Supreme Court Shona Bhanu was among 14 people, including the Morigaon teacher Khairul Islam, who were allegedly forced out of Indian territory on May 27. She returned home on Saturday night, her brother Ali, said. 'I received a call at 11.30 pm that she had been dropped on the highway. I hired a vehicle and brought her home last night.' Bhanu had been summoned to the Barpeta SP's office on May 25, from where she was taken to the Matia detention centre. Bhanu had been declared a foreigner in 2013 by the foreigners' tribunal in Barpeta. The decision was upheld by the Gauhati High Court in 2016. However, in 2018, the Supreme Court stayed the high court's order, Guwahati-based advocate Sauradeep Dey, who was associated with her challenge to the tribunal ruling, told Scroll. 'Caught in a crossfire' Begum, a 50-year-old resident of Village No 2 Padumoni at Sarupather, told Scroll that she was picked up from her home on the morning of May 25 by the police and taken to the Matia detention centre in Lower Assam's Goalpara district, 425 km away. On Tuesday night, Begum told Scroll, those detained along with her were fed khichdi and handed Bangladeshi currency notes. 'The [BSF officials] asked me to go to Bangladesh and asked us to admit that we are Bangladeshi,' she said. Around dawn, they were then separated into groups and 'pushed forward'. 'We did not have any other option but to listen to them,' she said. 'We were pushed across the border by the BSF. As soon as we crossed, villagers on the other side came and asked us where we had come from. The Bangladesh border police came and questioned us and asked us to return the same way. I was also beaten up by the Bangladesh police,' Begum told Scroll. Begum said she did not know where in Bangladesh she had been forced into. When they tried to return to the Indian side, Begum said, they were caught in crossfire between the two border forces. 'We were terrified and stayed in an open field in no man's land the whole day in the scorching heat,' she said. Around 6 pm, BSF officials brought them water. 'Then they asked us to come back to the India border and we were brought to the BSF camp where they gave us food and water. They later asked to return the Bangladeshi money,' Begum said. An Indian citizen Begum is a Sylheti Muslim and she and her husband Malek Uddin Choudhury had migrated from Cachar in Barak Valley to Golaghat. Her advocate Lipika Deb said that Begum was able to satisfy the Jorhat foreigners' tribunal that her family had entered the state before March 24, 1971 but after January 1, 1966. Both those dates are crucial to determining citizenship status in Assam, as laid out in Section 6A of the Citizenship Act, 1955. The section was enacted in 1985 to implement the Assam Accord, signed between Assamese leaders and the Indian government, which put an end to a popular movement against 'illegal immigrants' from Bangladesh. The law created two categories of citizens: those who entered Assam before January 1, 1966, and those who arrived between January 1966 and March 24, 1971. Both were granted citizenship, but the latter group had to register at the foreigners' regional registration office within 30 days and were denied voting rights for 10 years after being identified as 'foreigners'. 'A Jorhat tribunal on March 26 this year ruled that her family came to the territory of Assam between January 1966 and March 24, 1971,' Deb told Scroll. 'After that I helped her enroll at the foreigners' regional registration office on April 8 within 30 days.' Deb said her family had shown the FRRO order to some officials but they did not 'accept it'. 'They said it was a fake document,' she said. Begum's daughter said her mother is in trauma and questioned the police action. 'The government should do an inquiry before harassing people like this. Not a single Indian should go through this.'
Scroll.in
a day ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
The hypocrisy of India's brutal deportations
In February, when several of the 333 undocumented Indian migrants deported from the United States on military planes said that they had been shackled during the flights, there was an uproar. New Delhi said that it had 'strongly registered its concerns' with Washington, Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi declared that 'Indians deserve dignity and humanity, not handcuffs' and social media was a tsunami of indignation. This month, though, it became clear that while Indians believe that their compatriots must be treated humanely while being repatriated, the same considerations do not apply when New Delhi is deporting people who it claims are undocumented migrants. Scroll 's reports on four separate instances in recent weeks of people being brutally expelled from India have barely elicited comment, let alone stirring up a debate on the chilling lack of compassion evident in these actions. On May 8, reported Rokibuz Zaman, a group of 78 people believed to be undocumented Bangladeshi migrants were herded aboard Indian boats, given life jackets and thrown into the water off Bangladesh's Satkhira district. These people had been detained in raids in Gujarat in the aftermath of the Pahalgam terror attack. They told the Bangladesh Police that they had been flown across India in blindfolds on a military aircraft before being put aboard a ship. En route to Bangladesh, they had been beaten and barely fed, they claimed. The same day, reported Vineet Bhalla, 40 Rohingya refugees who had been detained in Delhi were forced off a navy vessel in the Andaman Sea with life jackets and told to head towards Myanmar. They possessed identity cards issued to them by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The Rohingya community have been subjected to a well-documented campaign of massacres, rape and arson by the Myanmarese military since 2017. For India to send them back into the cauldron of violence is unconscionable. On May 27, Rokibuz Zaman wrote about 14 people stranded in no-man's land between India and Bangladesh. The Border Security Force claimed they were 'infiltrators' who had been 'pushed back' – a benign euphemism that aims to mask the shocking violence of the action. As Zaman reported, these purported infiltrators had lived all their lives in this country but had been declared non-Indian by Assam's foreigners tribunals. These quasi-judicial bodies that rule on citizenship cases in Assam reverse the principles of natural justice – anyone hauled up before them is deemed to be guilty until they prove themselves innocent. The tribunals, Scroll has noted, have 'been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory'. On May 28, Safwat Zargar reported on a tragedy on another border. Eighty-year-old Abdul Waheed Bhat, paralysed and unable to speak, died alone in a bus at the Attari crossing to Pakistan after being deported from Srinagar shortly after the Pahalgam attack. Bhat had been born in Srinagar but found himself stranded in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as a child in 1965 when war broke out between the neighbours. He had travelled there with relatives on a permit, as was common at that time. He was there for 15 years, and was forced to apply for a Pakistan passport in order to cross the border to return home. He had lived in India since then. Though a case had been filed against him for overstaying his visa, he was acquitted since the government failed to establish that he was Pakistani. After Bhat was served a 'Notice to Leave India' at the end of April, his relatives pleaded with officials not to deport him. They submitted medical reports to show that he had suffered from several strokes which 'triggered a neuromuscular disability resulting in his confinement to bed'. When Bhat died at the border crossing, the same one through which he had returned to India in 1980, 'he had nothing on him, except a few medicines, some diapers, prescriptions, a blanket and a water bottle', his relatives had told Zargar. These cases raise a great many questions: about the rigour of the legal process to verify citizenship; about India's refusal to become party to international refugee treaties or frame a refugee policy; about the bigotry of the current deportations which involved only Muslims, even though 20,613 of the 47,900 people declared foreigners by Assam's tribunals between 1971 and 2014 are Hindu. They also expose an untenable double standard. If Indians believe that their compatriots should be treated with empathy at moments at which they are vulnerable, we cannot continue to treat citizens of other nations with the cruelty that has been on display these past weeks. We deserve better of ourselves. Here is a summary of the week's other top stories. Defamation suit. YouTuber Mohak Mangal told the Delhi High Court that he would remove portions in his video about Asian News International that were purportedly objectionable. His submission came after the court directed Mangal to take down some sections, observing that they contained defamatory language about the news agency. The judge said that the YouTuber should have put out his message in a more civilised manner. The court was hearing a defamation suit filed by ANI against Mangal for posting the allegedly defamatory video accusing the news agency of extortion and blackmail. The suit also listed comedian Kunal Kamra and AltNews co-founder Mohammed Zubair, among others, as defendants for sharing Mangal's video on social media. Staged gunfights? The Supreme Court ordered the Assam Human Rights Commission to investigate the alleged 'fake encounters' by the state police since 2021. The court passed the direction in response to a petition claiming that more than 80 staged gunfights had taken place in Assam since May 2021, when Bharatiya Janata Party leader Himanta Biswa Sarma became the chief minister. The bench said that while a mere compilation of cases could not lead to blanket judicial orders, allegations of staged gunfights were serious. It said that the allegations, if proven, would amount to grave violations of the right to life. Indians deported. One thousand and eighty Indians have been deported from the United States since January, the Ministry of External Affairs said. Sixty-two percent of them had come back on commercial flights, the ministry said. This came amid the tightening of immigration regulations under the Donald Trump administration, which took office in January. In some cases, the US government had used military aircraft to repatriate undocumented migrants. Follow the Scroll channel on WhatsApp for a curated selection of the news that matters throughout the day, and a round-up of major developments in India and around the world every evening. What you won't get: spam.
Scroll.in
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scroll.in
‘Not ethical questions, but aesthetic ones': What's on Keshava Guha's mind while crafting a novel
Keshava Guha was born in Delhi and raised in Bangalore. His debut novel, Accidental Magic, was published in 2019 and his most recent novel, The Tiger's Share, was published in 2025 Besides novels, Keshava Guha has also written short stories and essays on politics, culture and sport. He is also a journalist and was previously a senior editor at Juggernaut Books. The Tiger's Share revolves around two women protagonists. After having dedicated her life to achieving professional success in Delhi, Tara is everything her brother isn't: steadfast, independent, thriving. Meanwhile, Tara's friend, Lila, has it all: the great job, the lovely home, the beautiful family. But when her father dies, Lila's brother wastes no time in claiming what's his. Together, Tara and Lila are forced to confront the challenge that their ambition and success have posed to patriarchal Delhi society. In a conversation with Scroll, Guha talked about why he wanted to write about the conflict between different notions of inheritance, why the novel is a love–hate letter to Delhi, and why as a novelist he is more concerned about aesthetics than ethics. Excerpts from the conversation: The Tiger's Share is filled with characters who are intelligent, conflicted, and more often than not, a little out of step with their times or families. Could you share with us what drew you to exploring the inner lives of people who are both privileged and deeply uncertain about their place in the world? Inner life is fiction's particular and exclusive realm; it's what novels and short stories can do, and journalism and cinema/television, on the whole, cannot. That's one reason why the claim, so popular a few years ago, that 'prestige TV is to the 21st century what novels were to the 19th' was a load of nonsense. Indian fiction in English is, more or less by definition, an elite activity – and yet there can be a certain hesitancy about the non-satirical portrayal of English-speaking elites themselves. The notion that in a poor, unequal society literature ought to be 'progressive' – highlight injustice, advance noble causes –has meant that Indian writers, not only in English, have stayed well away from Henry James/Edith Wharton territory. I saw an opportunity, therefore, to write about a world that I knew and that hadn't been fully explored. The feeling of uncertainty you refer to has two sources: one, moral confusion brought on by the pace of social change, and two, a more specific anxiety about the place of the English-speaking elite in today's India. Throughout the book, there is a quiet but powerful commentary on what it means to 'inherit' – not just tangible wealth like money, jewellery, property, land, etc, but also values, identities, even moral burdens. What do you think Indian families today are truly passing down to the next generation? You are absolutely right that questions of 'inheritance' – not only in the material sense – are at the heart of the book. I wanted to write about the conflict between two notions of inheritance that seemed to me to define life in this part of Delhi. First, the idea that wealth belongs to a family, not to individuals, and that means that future, unborn generations too have a stake – this is often cited by rich Indians as a justification for not giving money away to those who actually need it (or, implicitly, as a justification for tax avoidance). 'It's not my money', they say, not mine to give away. One the one hand, this 'Patek Philippe' approach to inheritance – you're not an owner, just a custodian – on the other, an approach to nature which says that all that matters is to accumulate and consume as much as possible right now, and to hell with future generations and giving them a city or planet fit to live in. So Delhi parents hope to pass on physical property, even if that property is in an ecological hellhole. But a question that animates my novel is, what nonmaterial values are they going to pass on? Brahm Saxena's ambition – to pass on, not only to his children but to anyone who will listen, an awareness of what humans have done to our environment and why we have done it – is a throwback to an earlier era, that of the freedom struggle, in which parents might bequeath idealism as well as apartments. As someone from Calcutta who moved to Delhi for work, I often find myself caught in a love-hate relationship with this city. In that sense, one of my absolute favourite aspects of your book was its deeply vivid portrayal of Delhi. It wasn't just a backdrop – it felt like a living, breathing, even rotting organism, thick with unbearable heat, tangled politics, and lingering memories. How did your own experiences of the city shape the way you wrote it into the novel? Like you, I did not grow up in Delhi, and moved there primarily for professional reasons. Very little in the book is directly autobiographical, and I chose to write from a perspective quite different from my own, in that Tara has lived in Delhi all her life and, except as a student or tourist, has known no other city. The novel is, to appropriate your own phrase, a love-hate letter to the city. I hope that enough of the love is evident. I made lifelong friends in Delhi and found it a much more welcoming place than it is sometimes reputed to be. But the balance sheet of love and hate does not even out – it was ultimately too difficult for me to look past the reality of class segregation, patriarchy, materialism and ecological catastrophe. As Brahm Saxena implies right at the start of the novel, Delhi ought to have been the greatest city in the world. You have also subtly been able to interrogate masculinity, especially modern Indian masculinity, through characters like Rohit, Kunal, and even Brahm Saxena to an extent. What were you trying to uncover about how men relate to legacy, failure, and self-worth? Rohit and Kunal are not meant in any sense as representatives or exemplars. There are many kinds of Delhi or Indian masculinity – look at the evolution of someone like Virat Kohli, who used to be thought of as the archetypal macho West Delhi man, and ended up as perhaps India's most influential advocate of the importance of fatherhood. I wasn't trying to uncover anything about men, or Indian men, in general, through Rohit, Kunal or Brahm. Kunal and Rohit are responding to what they see as threats – the threats posed by their sisters, and by the values of feminism, as well as (although this is explored less directly in the novel) the potential threat of men from less-privileged backgrounds who are more driven. India is more unequal than ever, but the English-speaking south Delhi elite is in some ways less protected than it was before 1991. At some point in the book, Brahm Saxena's character and narrative arc made me wonder: Can someone be good without being useful? And in a deeply compromised world, is moral clarity enough? Were you also consciously grappling with these kinds of ethical questions while writing the novel, in how you shaped your characters, what they stood for, and the story you wanted to tell? These questions are above the pay grade of not just this novelist, but of novelists in general. We dramatise ethical dilemmas, but the point is to show life is or might be lived, not to arrive at generalisable moral claims or precepts. Interviews – and, increasingly, reviews – tend to focus on the moral and political content of novels, to mine them for lessons or controversy. That's appropriate to the form of the interview, which, after all, is meant to be of interest to someone who hasn't read, and may never read, the book in question. I don't mean to diminish the importance of these matters – but they tend not to be top of mind, at least not for me. What is top of mind are not ethical questions, but aesthetic ones – matters of form, above all, prose. Prose is of such primary importance to writers – but we find ourselves reviewed and interviewed with almost no reference to style or form. That is not a complaint; just a reflection on how different the experiences of writing a book and talking about it are. Staying with Tara for a moment, I found her perspective to be particularly fitting for the story you've told. At the same time, I couldn't help but notice how she vocal she is on being self-righteous and yet her actions, such as distancing herself from 'feminist lawyers', activist causes, amongst others, often seem to fall short of the ideals she claims to uphold. What does this ambivalence say about the pressures on women who 'succeed' within the system but are also expected to critique or resist it? I'm not sure that I agree that Tara is 'vocal on being self-righteous'. She certainly can be self-righteous, but at the same time, as her father's daughter, I suspect she would reject the label. Her decision not to become a certain kind of lawyer is down to her awareness of trade-offs. Again, she would disclaim the label, but many people would say that Tara is in fact ambitious. I see her as someone who is morally serious – that is to say, she thinks seriously about moral questions – but not as any kind of earnest 'do-gooder' who, when confronted by a trade-off, always takes the high road even when that means giving up something of value. To your final question – Tara, as I see her, is more committed to succeeding within the system – on her terms – than to critiquing it, except in private. Many moments and instances in the novel seem to resist a resolution as characters choose uncertain paths, and readers are left sitting with open questions. Is this refusal to tie things up a conscious choice? Do you see ambiguity, much like our lives, as a more honest form of storytelling? I don't know if it is more honest, but it is what I prefer, both as a writer and a reader. I love the fact that fiction is a collaboration between writer and reader – that every reader can make up their own mind about whether or not, at the end of Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Archer is really going to go back to Osmond. In the case of The Tiger's Share, some of the lack of resolution has to do with the fact that lives are not lived, and ethical questions not resolved, in the abstract. Tara decides that she cannot choose based on moral principles alone, but has to also consider what her choice means for her relationship with her mother. What conversations do you hope this novel sparks – in families, among readers, or in public discourse? If you had to sum up the message in one sentence, would would it be? This is, as your previous question implies, not a didactic novel: it has no message. Of course, I'd be thrilled if it sparks conversations about inheritance, or how to recover idealism, or how to stop and begin to reverse the destruction of our ecology, but it is a novel, not a work of social and political commentary, and I hope it is read that way.
Scroll.in
2 days ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Interview: India's options are limited but military strikes are ‘symbolic', won't deter terror
Military strikes will not deter Pakistan from using terrorism as a tool of foreign policy since Kashmir and the conflict with India are existential to the Pakistani army, said Christine Fair. 'The purpose of this was more illustrative than it was deterrence,' Fair told Scroll in an interview. India's options remain extremely limited, said Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown University who is considered an expert on the Pakistan army and the country's terrorist network. Terror groups, like the Lashkar e Taiba, are domestically crucial to Pakistan while Islamabad's use of nuclear threats in negotiating with the West will ensure its continued survival, said Fair. 'The only thing that really changes Pakistan is a decisive military defeat of the Pakistan army that leaves the Pakistan army in complete disarray,' she said. 'This is not something that India can do right now or for the policy-relevant future. It's not possible at all now [given the nuclear umbrella].' Referring to the military strikes, she said they generated a lot of jingoism in India and were risky but didn't change anything on the ground. 'They're really important symbolic attacks – but they're symbolic attacks. They don't degrade the ability of these organisations to operate.' Fair also pointed out that the off-ramp in this case was manufactured, like it was during the 2019 military strikes in Balakot after the Pulwama terror attack. In both instances, she said, the Indian and the Pakistani publics were left with this 'enormous sense of victory'. The Indian media's 'bakwas', or nonsense, said Fair, also made it difficult to evaluate the implications for foreign policy. Edited excerpts: Play Do you think Pakistan will be deterred by what just happened? No, not at all. The Pakistan army is an insurgent army – it can't defeat India conventionally. And for that matter, India can't defeat Pakistan in a short war because the forces along the IB [international border] and the LOC [Line of Control], are similarly poised. India's advantage can only kick in during a long war and that's increasingly difficult because of nuclear weapons and so forth. So India can't defeat Pakistan, Pakistan can't defeat India. But Pakistan views Kashmir as part of this incomplete process of Partition and that Pakistan itself is not complete without Kashmir. This is a story that all Pakistanis learn. It gives rise to every army chief. There was a lot of hay made about [General Asim] Munir's speech about Kashmir being the jugular vein of Pakistan. The fact is every army chief says this and every prime minister says this. The Pakistan army can't take Kashmir. But what the Pakistan army can do is deny India the victory of saying that Kashmir is calm and a peaceful part of India. I also wanted to dispel any criticism that has been leveraged against the Indian state saying this is an intelligence lapse. I was in Kashmir two years ago [and] the counter insurgency grid is very robust. But the fact is you can't stop every attack. It's just not possible. So, Pakistan has to do this to show that India hasn't compelled or deterred it. What this means is that we're going to see a return to normalcy – just as we did after Pulwama. But mark my words, there's going to be another terrorist attack. It'll likely be in Kashmir. I don't think anything has happened here strategically that is going to deter Pakistan from using terrorism as a tool of foreign policy. But does it increase its cost? In Balakot in 2019 and again this time, we're seeing credible sources that Pakistani air bases have been hit. So does increasing that cost at least impose a further barrier on Pakistan exporting terror to India? The short answer is no and the evidence really shows this, right? Pulwama was pretty costly, but let's look at the lessons that came out of Pulwama. This is important because it involves the duplicity of Indian and Pakistani media. What the Pakistanis, credibly, can say is that they shot down a MiG and they returned its pilot and they were accoladed for doing what a country is supposed to do. What allowed India to back down was this complete fabrication of an F-16 shootdown. There was no F-16 shot down. I say this with 100% confidence. This entire off ramp was manufactured, right? Let's take a look at the off ramp here. It is from the Indian public and from the Pakistani public. The Indian public believes if I listen to [Republic TV anchor] Arnab Goswami, apparently Pakistan took Karachi port. The Indians have these fictive beliefs about these capacious gains that were made vice Pakistan. Pakistan, for its part, believes that it shot down five Indian aircraft. Now, there is evidence that it shot down two, but we don't know about the other three. The Indian and the Pakistani publics are both left with this enormous sense of victory. It's going to take a really long time to do satellite imagery analysis. India made very capacious claims about damage that was made to Balakot. It turned out to be absolute nonsense. But it took a couple of weeks for those claims to be interrogated through satellite imagery analysis. By the time that the actual truth comes out, the media has moved on to something else. In any event, neither the Pakistani or Indian media are interested in what actually happened – because that's just not the way they're operating. Both of the publics have been misinformed, which allows them to have very different beliefs about the costs and the benefits that have been. So what can India do now? India really pulled out all its stops in some way. What do you think that India could do now to credibly deter the Pakistan army from misadventure. The only thing that really changes Pakistan is a decisive military defeat of the Pakistan army that leaves the Pakistan army in complete disarray. That happened in 1971. And yet, within a matter of years, we had Zia ul Haq and we know about the terror story under Zia's tenure. That's the best example we have. But there was a period of relative peace between '71 and '77 or so. So the only way to really deter Pakistan is to decisively defeat and dismember and dismantle the Pakistan army and thoroughly vilify it in the eyes of the Pakistanis. This is not something that India can do right now or for the policy-relevant future. It's not possible at all now [given the nuclear umbrella]. At a strategic level, it's very unfortunate for India. The only way forward, is the path that won't be taken, which is the international community has to resolve that the Pakistani state as it is currently constituted is a menace not only to India but to the international order. What what we've seen instead is that Pakistan gets away with this every single time. It was never on the blacklist FATF [Financial Action Task Force] because that would have deprived it of IMF [International Monetary Fund] funds – and no one wants to deprive Pakistan of IMF funds because it's too dangerous to fail. So absent a consolidated and concerted effort by the international community to reorder the way Pakistan does business, this is going to continue. I have a lot of empathy for the paucity of options that India possesses. As this conflict was going on Pakistan received a $1billion loan from the IMF. Even in a post-Afghanistan situation, we are seeing a Pakistan which does have support from the West and is best friends with China. Practically, will the West ever completely turn away from Pakistan and want to dismember it or completely change the way the state is currently? It's never going to happen. And it's never going to happen because Pakistan uses its nuclear weapons to blackmail the West that we're too dangerous to fail. In the old days we had a parking meter: you put a quarter in it, you got 15 minutes. With Pakistan, you put a quarter in it and you got two minutes – but it was a reliable two minutes. People are afraid that if you change the policy with respect to Pakistan, you'll put that quarter in and you'll get negative 15 minutes. People feel confident that they can manage Pakistan – sort of like mowing the lawn. But in this belief that it has somehow managed Pakistan and managed the conflict that it generates, it actually enables the very same conflict that is so dangerous. What has this conflict meant for Munir. The Pakistan Army's popularity has been declining over the last few years. Does this reverse that decline? It's really fascinating because the Pakistan Army hates me and its enthusiasts have hated me. There have been several occasions over the past year… I was at an airport with a former army officer of all people… So I've had a number of people reach out to me and say, '...I used to hate you because of your views about the Pakistan army, but now I love you because you were right.' This was an actual quote from a former army officer at the Dubai airport. And I was absolutely gobsmacked. So I said, 'It's because of Imran Khan, isn't it? You're an Imran Khan supporter.' And he said, 'Yes'. Imran Khan has put a huge wedge between the Pakistan army and the Pakistan people. And Munir has been suffering tremendously. Imran Khan really was the first prime minister – whether you love him or you hate him – to aim his sights at the Pakistan army, which is why he is in jail. You don't do that and get get away with it. We saw remarkable scenes – people overrunning Pakistani cantonments. The Lahore core commander's house. Just things that you don't see. Domestically, not just Munir, but the Pakistan army is really on its heels. The other issue that doesn't come up, of course, is Balochistan terrorism. In the same way that Indians believe there's a Pakistani hand behind every explosion in Kashmir, the Pakistanis believe there's an Indian hand behind every explosion in Balochistan. There was just a very horrific terrorist attack on a train in Balochistan. In terms of the timing, what explains what's going on with Pahalgam is threefold. There had been normalcy, for the most part, in the Valley. Tourism was returning. Kashmiris were making money off of the increased tourism. You have the declining popularity of Munir specifically, but the army more generally, and then you have this pretty severe spike in terrorism in Balochistan. Those three factors account for why Pahalgam and why now. When there's a war, there's a sense of national unity, especially behind the army. Will this end up badly impacting the PTI [Imran Khan's Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf]? This is going to give the army a very temporary respite from the criticism. There's always been discussion about corruption within the army. But for the first time you have the 'core' commanders being called the 'crore' commanders. There's a much more systemic rot in the Pakistan army. The Pakistanis themselves are attuned to. This is going to provide some temporary respite, but it's not going to provide a permanent solution to the gap that has emerged between army supporters and PTI supporters. Can you describe for us how this terror network works? Right now is the Lashkar-e-Taiba as strong as it was 10 years back or has there been a decline in how Pakistan looks at and supports these terror groups? I would say just the opposite. Everyone knows about the LET conducting operations on behalf of the army. But what very few Indians are aware of is the domestic utility of the LET within Pakistan itself. The Lashkar-e-Taiba opposes all of the violence that's taking place within Pakistan, not just obviously the Baloch violence, but also the Islamist violence. They take aim at those that engage in takfir [excommunication]. They take aim at those that are trying to destabilise the government. Lashkar-e-Taiba has this really important domestic function as well as an external function. It is a militant opponent of the Islamic state. The LET is much more important in this post 9/11 world than it was before. You called the Pakistan army an insurgent organisation rather than one that behaves like a conventional army. It's very difficult to defeat an insurgent. Take a look at the Taliban. Look at how many hundreds of thousands of forces, during the height of the surge, and we still couldn't defeat the Taliban. But how does an insurgent organisation prove that it hasn't been defeated? It just has to conduct one attack. It's very easy for the Pakistan army to show that it hasn't been defeated by conducting attacks in Kashmir. More structurally, the Indians are at a huge disadvantage. If the Indians want normalcy – or the semblance of normalcy – which is usually measured by terrorist attacks to return to the valley, they have to have an increasingly impressive counter-insurgency regime, which causes a lot of resentment in the Valley, which furthers the goal of of making Kashmiris feel that they're part of the Indian project. The Pakistanis win this game because it's not a game that's hard for the Pakistanis to win. But on the other hand, it's a very difficult game for the Indians to win. What is the end game for Pakistan and its army here? It keeps exporting terror to Kashmir? Pakistan itself becomes poorer and poorer. Where does this go and end? The Pakistan army only thinks of its own corporate interests. Having an aggressive India that the Pakistan army can credibly say menaces Pakistan, burnishes the Pakistan army's credentials – it allows it to have this huge conventional footing. If there were to be peace with India, the Pakistan army, as it exists today, could not exist. There's no rationale for its existence. For the Pakistan army to have the size that it has, to have its outsized role in politics – it has a hegemon that claims the state's resources – it needs a strong India that looks menacing. I think it might be difficult for Indians to understand that all of this just benefits the Pakistan army. It's almost as if conflict is existential to the Pakistan army. People say if there were peace, there would be a better economy – and this is of course true. But the Pakistan army puts its existential needs above material gains. We've seen that happen in '71 where the Pakistan army was ready to have Pakistan divided rather than lose power. Correct. How popular is support for these terror groups domestically in the public in Pakistan? Your average Pakistani doesn't view these groups as terrorist groups for one thing. They view these groups as fighting a good fight in Kashmir, helping to liberate their Kashmiri brethren from an oppressive Indian state. If people are familiar with the group, they don't view them as terrorists. The other thing that Lashkar e Taiba does [is] it has a bunch of front organisations that do things like health and social service outreach. For example, in Sindh, the state has completely neglected to provide water to the residents. It's also an area that has a lot of Hindu residents. The Lashkar e Taiba provides water services and actually through those service provisions, they've also converted several Hindus to their creed, which is really amazing. Through these health and services outreach, coupled with those who know what they do in Kashmir not being viewed as terrorists, the support is reasonably high. I did a survey of Pakistan. It's very, very out of date – I think it was done in 2013. Obviously, support for the Lashkar-e-Taiba is highest amongst the Punjabis [of Pakistan's province] and it is lowest amongst the Baloch – because Lashkar-e-Taiba is also used as a bulwark against Baloch terrorism and against Baloch nationalism. There are 10 districts in Punjab [province] that account for about 90% of LET recruitment. It's very similar to the Pakistan Army actually. There's an overlap. And the reason for that is they need people with similar skill sets. A lot of what India did in this conflict is to target Punjab, which is such a stark diversion from Indian policy earlier. Do you think that will have an impact on Pakistani army morale? I support the attacks. I'm not criticising India for the attacks. I want to be very very clear. But I also want to be very clear that it was very very risky. And the fact is none of those targets are going to strategically degrade the ability of Jaish-e-Mohammed or Lashkar-e-Taiba to operate. That's a fact. So, it was a lot of risk for not a lot of gain. And by the way, that's why it assured that there would be a strong Pakistani response because when the Indians struck, they didn't go into Pakistani airspace. Within Indian airspace, they used standoff missiles to attack Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. That was pretty provocative, right? We saw the escalation at Balakot pretty quickly. So, obviously the Pakistanis were going to respond robustly to an attack upon the Punjab. But what I wish people would reflect upon – how do I put this nicely? This burnished the credentials of the chappan-inch sinawala [the one with the 56-in chest]. It generated a lot of jingoism in India. It had a lot of risk, but it didn't change anything on the ground. The purpose of this was more illustrative than it was deterrence. I think they were much more political in calculation than they were aimed at degrading the organisations. They're really important symbolic attacks – but they're symbolic attacks. They don't degrade the ability of these organisations to operate. Where does the US-Pakistan relationship stand now post the Afghanistan withdrawal? During the Afghan war, we were really dependent upon Pakistan because of the ground lines of communication. All the war material, most of it flew through Pakistan's airspace or was transported on the ground through Pakistan's ground lines of communication. So we needed them and we were much more willing to put up with their nonsense. But after the withdrawal, the essential concerns about Pakistan's failure remain in place. You still have the constituent of people saying that we should be engaging the Pakistanis, we shouldn't be isolating them. This conflict is going to burnish the credentials of those people who are arguing for engagement. Paul Kapoor has been tapped to be the Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, and it's very unfortunate that he had not been confirmed prior to this crisis. He will be very welcomed in India. He will not be welcomed in Pakistan. It is going to limit our ability to engage Pakistan. We'll just have to see what happens after we have an assistant secretary of state in place. How do you evaluate India's foreign policy performance during this conflict? It's hard to evaluate because the Indian media was just a sea of bakwas [nonsense, rubbish]. And I have to say, after the whole Balakot affair and the manufactured F-16 shootdown, I no longer take Indian announcements as being credible. India lost a lot of credibility for me in the Balakot affair. Because of the media? Because the media was so bad, but also the Indian government directly participated in this fabrication of an F-16 shootdown. So, it's not just the media, it was the Indian government, and specifically the Modi government. I can't just take Indian pronouncements at face value, but what I can see is that the proof is in the pudding. You had a bunch of people engaging on both sides. We encouraged both sides to engage peacefully to resolve their outstanding issues peacefully. But India sees that as a defeat, right? For India that's a defeat. For Pakistan it's a victory. Because it's an acknowledgement that Pakistan's equities are valid. But for India it's a defeat. I can't evaluate the rigorous efforts that were made, but what I can see is that in the outcome of those efforts, India did not secure unequivocal support from international capitals. [Donald] Trump's tweet is something that in India we're looking at with a lot of disfavour. Let's be really clear, right? Trump and JD Vance are not reliable narrators. I actually don't know the extent to which to trust their pronouncements. The Indians have pretty much rubbished a lot of what Trump has said. I don't know the truth because my media is also unable to get to the bottom of things. But today's tweet is a really good example of what I would say is a failure of Indian foreign policy. Because if India had successfully persuaded the United States of its position, we would not have seen such an obtuse statement coming from the President of the United States.
Scroll.in
3 days ago
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Assam Opposition leader raises concern about state ‘pushing back' allegedly undocumented migrants
Assam's Opposition leader Debabrata Saikia on Friday wrote to External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar raising concern about the state government's recent exercise to 'push back' allegedly undocumented migrants to Bangladesh. In his letter, Saikia accused the Assam Police of carrying out the crackdown in violation of constitutional rights and due process. The leader of the Opposition in the Assembly said that the state's actions 'appear to target Muslim communities, undermining India's secular fabric'. Saikia alleged in the letter that since May 23, hundreds of Indian citizens 'not involved in any citizenship-related legal proceedings' had been 'arbitrarily detained'. While many have been released, the detentions highlight 'serious procedural lapses', the Nazira MLA said. In several cases, families were not informed about the whereabouts of the detainees, violating basic norms of transparency, he added. Citing media reports, Saikia also alleged that several detainees, including women, were forcibly pushed into the no man's land along the border between India and Bangladesh, 'leaving them stateless as Bangladesh refuses to accept them'. On May 10, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had said that several inmates of the Matia detention centre in Assam – Rohingya refugees and undocumented migrants from Bangladesh – had been ' pushed back ' into Bangladesh as part of a nationwide operation by the Union government. On Friday, Sarma said that the state was 'duty bound to protect the interests" of Assam and ' expel all illegal immigrants from the state through any means and as per directions of Supreme Court'. The chief minister appeared to be referring to the court's February 4 ruling that the state must deport persons who had been declared foreign nationals. Sarma claimed that persons who have pending citizenship cases in courts had not been detained. On Tuesday, Scroll reported that a former teacher from Morigaon district, Khairul Islam, whose citizenship case was still being heard in the Supreme Court, had been picked up from the Matia detention centre and forced out along the Bangladesh border near Assam's South Salmara district in the early hours of May 27. In the video recorded by journalist Mostafuzur Tara from Bangladesh's Rangpur division, Khairul Islam alleged that he was among 14 persons 'pushed' into Bangladesh by India's Border Security Force on Tuesday morning. Islam and the others were reported to be in no man's land, between the two countries. On Thursday, the nephew of two men from Kamrup district moved the Gauhati High Court, seeking information about his uncles. The two men, Abu Bakkar Siddique and Akbar Ali, were summoned to the Nagarbera police station on May 25. 'Since then, the authorities have refused to give details of their whereabouts,' Aman Wadud, one of the advocates representing them in the court, told Scroll. The petitioner, Torap Ali, had said that he was 'apprehensive that his uncles will be pushed back into Bangladesh, in light of recent reports'. The court has issued a notice to the state government, seeking its response. Saikia said in his letter to Jaishankar on Friday that since several cases are pending before the Supreme Court, the detentions and pushbacks were a 'clear violation of the judicial process'. He also alleged that the Assam government's actions violated international human rights standards. 'This action directly contradicts India's stated position on deportation,' the MLA said. Saikia said that he was seeking the Union government's intervention 'before more lives are destroyed' and urged the state government 'to make public the number of persons in detention and their respective places of confinement'.
