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| India-Pakistan |
| Bush, and the bushmen |
| 2006-03-04 |
| By TAVLEEN SINGH Even as someone who has difficulties with many aspects of President Bush’s policies I found myself on his side last week when the streets of Delhi and Mumbai filled up with the sort of people who oppose him. They were a motley crew. A melange of Marxists, Islamists and well-meaning loonies of activist genre and if they should ever be in a position to create the world of their dreams it would be a totalitarian, Marxist, Islamist theocracy. How scary is that? Give me the US of A any old time. It is a free society as is our own, and we would like to keep it that way. While President Bush and our Prime Minister were signing the ‘‘historic’’ nuclear agreement, anti-American protesters used television to enunciate their worldview. It is a simple one. Everything American is bad and George Bush is the ‘‘biggest terrorist’’ and mass murderer. Pretty rich coming from Marxists and Islamists. On the mass murder front how does Bush compare with Chairman Mao and Comrade Stalin? Osama bin Laden? Saddam Hussein? Advertisement Arundhati Roy, who has the unique ability to approach politics through fiction instead of reality, made the amazing claim that she and the Marxists she marched with represented popular Indian sentiment while Bush was speaking only ‘‘to a few caged rich people in the Delhi zoo’’. She uses words so imaginatively she must go back to writing fiction. Politics and economics are not her forte or she would not have blamed the American President for India’s ‘‘new economic order’’, which in her view is ‘‘garroting’’ the poor. It has escaped her notice that in the days before India opted for a new economic order there were twice as many garroted poor people than there are today. At least she was not carrying a placard supporting Ayotollah Khomeini. This was left to more Islamist protesters who appeared to have confused the American President with the Danish cartoonist. The largely Muslim rally in Mumbai came together mainly to express rage against the cartoons apparently without noticing that they have nothing to do with Bush. TV anchors had a hard time explaining the situation to their viewers. The protesters had a cartoon quality and a serious one. The serious aspect is that Indian Muslims who have so far stayed away from the Islamist war against the West now seem to be joining in. When was the last time Muslims came out in such large numbers to protest against anything? In doing so they showed that they were at odds with the general sentiment of the country. Recent polls indicate that most Indians feel no resentment against the United States and many think of it as the promised land. The largest number of foreign students in American universities come from India and in the global war against terrorism most Indians think we are on the same side as America. As for Dr Manmohan Singh’s Marxist supporters, it is time that he asked them whether they seriously believe that Iran going nuclear is good for India but India coming to an agreement with the United States on nuclear energy is bad. What kind of twisted logic is that? Not only was last week’s nuclear agreement very much in India’s interest but, as the Prime Minister said, ‘‘we made history’’. More is the shame that he could not persuade his commie friends to be more dignified in their protests. It is extremely bad behaviour to call a visiting head of state a ‘‘mass murderer’’ and considering how well our Prime Minister was received in Washington last July it is unfortunate that leftist bullying tactics prevented President Bush from addressing Parliament. How would we have reacted if our Prime Minister was invited to a foreign capital city and called a ‘‘mass murderer’’ on account of the situation in the Kashmir Valley? How would we have reacted if our Prime Minister was prevented from addressing the American Congress because a small group of badly behaved congressmen shouted and screamed? If the protests in the streets were bad, the behaviour of Marxist MPs on the doorstep of Parliament was disgusting and should not have been permitted. ‘‘He is the biggest killer of humanity,’’ shrieked one CPI(M) MP, ‘‘and we will not let him spread his tentacles on our soil.’’ Let us not pretend either that this is acceptable, democratic protest, because it is not. In all the years I have covered politics in Delhi I have never seen a foreign head of state called a ‘‘mass murderer’’, and in the bad old days when Moscow dictated India’s ‘non-aligned’ foreign policy there were many visiting dictators for whom that term could have been appropriately used. |
| Posted by:john |