Rana Ayyub and her ilk are a symptom and a revelation. Of several things simultaneously. Operating almost in concert
I never imagined myself writing about someone like Rana Ayyub, the poster girl of the dregs of Nehruvian secularism, an unabashed apologist for manufactured Muslim victimhood, an inveterate India and Hindu-hater, and a desperate milker of the Gujarat riots cottage industry. Even if we ignore all this for a moment, we can only gape in disbelief at the breathtaking manner in which she keeps a straight face and continues her self-righteous propaganda chiefly against Prime Minister Narendra Modi… this when she faces grave criminal cases for money laundering and is currently out on bail.
Last week, the same Rana Ayyub was invited to some International Journalism Festival in Italy to speak about her “journalism” in which she repeated the same phoney tropes about how India is one of the most unsafe countries in the world for journalists. Expectedly, her prime hate targets included Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
That the Delhi High Court in all its learned and ethics-imbued wisdom granted permission to Rana Ayyub to travel to this journalism conference is just the latest pointer to an ideological ecosystem that allows folks like her to thrive. The latest judicial precedent has been set: you can get bail if your financial misdemeanour does not exceed a certain amount.
On this end of the spectrum, her fact-free rants once again elicited outrage from all Hindus who continue to fume at how she manages to get away with all this every time. While I share their angst, I must also point out an underlying phenomenon that they mostly miss: The Western media loves people like Rana Ayyub.
Rana Ayyub and her ilk are a symptom and a revelation. Of several things simultaneously. Operating almost in concert.
Changing contours
The first is India’s meteoric ascent as a power to reckon with on the global stage under Narendra Modi’s leadership. His astute diplomacy is marked by an unapologetic stance of operating from a position of strength. The outcomes are showing in a multi-pronged fashion eight years after he took over.
One major outcome is the slow peeling away of the ornate Western — especially American — makeup vis a vis India. A notable facet of this makeup mostly after the fall of the USSR was an escalation of the American big-brotherly condescension towards us. Needless, our political leadership fashioned in the colonised Nehruvian template was largely responsible for this sorry image of the seventh largest and second most populous nation on earth. Indeed, every Indian who deeply cared about the honour of his motherland cast his head down in shame at the appalling spectacle of former PM Manmohan Singh asking the US to “take Pakistan to task” over the ghastly 26/11 attacks. This, instead of teaching an unforgettable lesson to Pakistan in the only language it understands.
However, Manmohan Singh’s shame-inducing action was actually the climax of a cringe-worthy journey that had been put in motion decades ago.
The first step was begun obviously by Jawaharlal Nehru whose incurable fascination for Stalinist Russia hurtled us on a ruinous path. As early as in November 1955, former communist Philip Spratt predicted that while Nehru was enamoured by the communist ideology, communist Russia was working towards annexing India into its extended empire, which was swelling each year. In just three decades, it had used a variety of tactics including armed aggression, internal destabilisation, and civil wars to prop up satellite regimes in Eastern Europe, North Korea, and China.
Thus, Spratt warned in the Public Affairs journal (Nov-Dec 1955 issue): “India’s policy of friendship with the Soviet Government, therefore… will strengthen the trend among the Soviet ruling class towards expansion. Far from promoting peace, India is encouraging Soviet aggression and making eventual war more likely… Khrushchev, on his return to Moscow, claimed India as an ally in the ‘struggle for peace’; since in the communist vocabulary ‘peace’ is synonymous with ‘revolution’, this is a far-reaching claim… What is to be feared from this visit is a change in India’s internaI policies. ln other countries Russian commercial and technical personnel are always used for political infiltration, and no doubt that will be the case here too. The balance of forces within the Congress is likely to be disturbed: the wing which is inclined towards Communism will be strengthened, and its opponents will be weakened.”
Needless, history has proven Spratt right. But it was Indira Gandhi and her communist clique in the PMO who actually converted India into a quasi-Soviet colony. The USSR had its best years in India as long as she was Prime Minister. Indeed, the short-lived Janata government became a frustrating obstacle that put a temporary halt in their expansionist plans.
In a shocking disclosure, the late legal legend, Nani Palkhivala wrote a letter to Prime Minister Morarji Desai dated 22 January 1979: “Last week a source from the [US] State Department here called on me and told me in strict confidence that according to American Intelligence, the government of the Soviet Union had decided that they should work…to see that you cease to be the Prime Minister and he added that some chosen persons in the Communist Party of India who are pro-Soviet had already received the message.” [Emphasis added]
The shock intensifies when we also observe the treacherous role played by our communist parties in this episode. Arun Gandhi who has written a first-hand account of the Janata government based on the official papers given by Morarji Desai gives us another stunner: “But by 1978 when there were dissensions within the Janata Party and there was a distinct possibility of Morarji Desai being unseated, they (Russians) began to encourage the factions which, opposed Morarji… the point to be emphasised here is the interest that foreign countries take in India… The suspicion that Madhu Limaye was instructed abroad of the strategy to be employed to get rid of Morarji Desai cannot be dismissed altogether. Then in March 1979, when Kosygin was on an official visit to India, George Fernandes was designated his Minister-in-waiting. George took the opportunity to request Kosygin to extend an invitation to Charan Singh… Morarji says George, like the others, was an ambitious fellow and fancied himself as the first Christian Prime Minister of India. And that George and Madhu worked closely is a known fact.”
The story of the Janata government’s fall and Indira Gandhi’s return is well-known. But what is perhaps forgotten today is how Indira Gandhi visited England in the aftermath of Emergency, in December 1978 to ostensibly, publicly justify the “inevitability” of her short-lived despotism. Showing absolutely no remorse, she made the tour all about her victimhood and met Margaret Thatcher, Barbara Cartland, Mountbatten, deputy Prime Minister, Michael Foot, and 100 members of both houses of the British parliament. How much that tour contributed to her return to power is a matter of speculation.
But the tenures of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai and Indira Gandhi again are united by a single theme: Of barefaced and ethics-free jostling for political power at the cost of the nation. That revelation surfaced once again in the infamous Mitrokhin Archives: “Oleg Kalugin, who became head of FCD Directorate K (Counterintelligence) in 1973, remembers India as a model of KGB infiltration of a Third World Government: We had scores of sources throughout the Indian Government — in intelligence, counterintelligence, the Defence and Foreign Ministries, and the police…. Kalugin recalls one occasion on which Andropov personally turned down an offer from an Indian minister to provide information in return for $50,000… It seemed like the entire country was for sale; the KGB — and the CIA — had deeply penetrated the Indian Government. After a while neither side entrusted sensitive information to the Indians, realising that their enemy would know all about it the next day.” [Emphasis added]
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We suppose further commentary is unnecessary. However, the penetration and infiltration at this level, on this scale, sustained for so many decades had its inevitable consequences. It had created two generations of Indians against India, each pursuing their own agendas but united in their goal of dismembering this ancient civilisational nation. Its ugliest and most frightening manifestation was the Sonia-Gandhi-led National Advisory Council, a code word for extreme Leftists, the missionary and Islamist lobby. That they had the open support and patronage from various international forces (including the then Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton), which encouraged them to destabilise their own homeland shows how things had come a full circle under the Congress, which “got us freedom”. That they had a veto over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself demonstrates the truth that his was a puppet regime — there’s just no polite way of saying this.
The overwhelming consecutive mandates that Narendra Modi got from the Indian electorate pretty much smashed this break-India party. Even worse, the Congress party, which this entrenched Far-Left lobby had under its yoke, managed to throw up a poor show like Rahul Gandhi. While it is true that he is now mouthing the JNU-brand of propaganda scripted by this lobby, he is costing them dearly.
This brief history yields us two important insights into the larger scheme of things.
One, for more than half a century, the West had ensured that India was kept under a tight leash by internally rigging our political system. Needless, blame for allowing that rests on our political class.
Two, Narendra Modi has signalled the end of that era in a significant fashion. The first is an enormous shift that has happened before our own eyes. From the recent, weakling discourse of “let’s mollycoddle Pakistan because it has the nuclear bomb”, to reducing it not only to a global pariah but a self-destructive wreck. But even more importantly, Modi has shown that the US — or, the Anglosphere in general — is dispensable in the vital arena of the Indian national interest. And that is the source of much of the unending stream of invectives against India led prominently by the Western media and its Indian recruits like Rana Ayyub.
However, it has deeper roots.
This is Part 1 of the two-part series.
The author is founder and chief editor, ‘The Dharma Dispatch’. Views expressed are personal.
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