|
RAW and the war against
terror
It
hurts when raw nerves are touched. It hurts much more when RAW's
nerves are touched. An officer of the RAW, who has now applied for
asylum in the United States, has proved beyond doubt that he indeed
was a person working for India's external sleuthing agency whose
credentials have been in doubt for decades now. Recently, a spate of
books has exposed the seamy underworld of RAW and its
unaccountability to any form of authority. Indian Parliament is not
even empowered to ask questions, and RAW has nowhere to testify
about its activities.
Now, this Sikh officer of the RAW who worked in Amritsar for years,
and as per RAW, "with distinction", during the troublesome 1980s,
has spilled the beans about how he was asked to help eliminate a top
Sikh religious leader. The motive can't be clearer: pin the blame on
any of the Sikh militant organizations, give them a bad name so that
the world can be told that somehow the Sikhs are terrorists.
No
one in India can ever forget that political parties issued huge ads
in the mid-1980s showing a Sikh taxi driver and asking in an ad
libbing fashion whether one would like to send his daughter with
such a cabbie. What was the motive behind such ads? Paint all Sikhs
as terrorists. The RAW and several sleuthing agencies were also put
full time on this job. We now have it on the authority of no less an
insider than the former Punjab DGP S S Virk and the leading
killer-cop KPS Gill that it was common for police officers to have
their separate groups of "Cats", the renegade militants who were
made to betray their loyalties and asked to identify and help in
murdering of erstwhile colleagues.
So
there you are: spooky RAW men ordering killing of religious leaders,
Cats scouting for victims, and police officers sharing the rewards
for killing dreaded "terrorists" who only came over ground to tell
their tale after a few years. Often they used to be innocent people
who became victims of police, ran away and changed identities while
police declared them as big time terrorists, killed some other
innocents in their place, and then claimed rewards of lakhs of
rupees.
But this one takes the cake. The RAW officer asks for asylum on the
basis of claim that he was asked to help kill a Sikh religious
leader. When US authorities question his claim about working for
RAW, he dutifully has produced extensive documentary evidence
including postal receipts to prove that he indeed was a RAW man. The
United States court has finally deduced through several legal
instruments that the RAW does indeed exist, that it works from
inside the office of the Prime Minister of India, and, in fact, that
part of the office of the Prime Minister of India, is RAW.
But the fact that the US court minced no words in saying that RAW
does indeed indulge in counter terrorism is what proves the point
that the Sikh nation has been trying to make for years. Of course
several other human rights bodies and regional aspirational
movements have also been saying the same thing that the Government
of India has been using the RAW to discredit their movements and
that the RAW, unaccountable and flush with money, has been playing
the tune of its real masters.
The week has also seen Indian judiciary trying to save some of its
reputation. The Jaswant Singh Khalra case has seen the Punjab and
Haryana High Court actually enhancing the jail sentence of four of
the accused from seven years to life imprisonment. The Sikh Nation
has fought hard and long for justice in this, but it has taken so so
long just in the case of Sardar Khalra that the Sikhs have lost all
hope of ever getting justice for those thousands and thousands of
Sikhs who were killed and cremated as unclaimed, the ones that
Sardar Khalra was fighting for and documenting. The Government of
India did not see it fit to ask its CBI or RAW to find out who were
the culprits who were killing innocents, a sure shot way of
producing terrorists, but was rather joining in the bloodbath of
Sikhs. This is how the state works overtime to produce terrorists
and induce terrorism. No war against terror can be complete, or even
find legitimacy, till it also becomes a war against those organs of
the state which produce terror. The Sikhs are fighting this war
because they are against terrorism.
17
October, 2007
|
Read More