Attention Nobel Peace Prize Committee: You have a REAL winner

Source: http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200406/humanitarian.to.a.nation.htm

Authors: Richard Covignton, Shahid ul Alam

 

In the cool interior of a mental ward in Karachi, a short, powerfully built man with a flowing snow-white beard and penetrating dark-brown eyes is standing at the bedside of a distraught young woman. She has covered her head with a sheet and is pleading for news of the two children her husband took from her.

“I know you are suffering terribly, but this is no way to bring back your children,” says the man with stern compassion. “You have a college degree. You can do many things to help the other patients.”

Outside the room’s windows of latticed stone, several hundred other women stroll and lounge under pipal trees scattered around a courtyard as big as several football fields. All are here because their families cannot—or will not—cope with their mental illnesses.

“Self-help,” says the man as he walks away from the young mother’s bedside. “That’s the best way to get back on your feet.”

For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, now 76 years old, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. Firmly refusing financial support from both government and formal religious organizations, this self-effacing man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day.

Starting in 1951 with a tiny dispensary in Karachi’s poor Mithadar neighborhood, Edhi has steadily built up a nationwide organization of ambulances, clinics, maternity homes, mental asylums, homes for the physically handicapped, blood banks, orphanages, adoption centers, mortuaries, shelters for runaway children and battered women, schools, nursing courses, soup kitchens and a 25-bed cancer hospital. All are run by some 7000 volunteers and a small paid staff of teachers, doctors and nurses. Edhi has also personally delivered medicines, food and clothing to refugees in Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He and the drivers of his ambulances have saved lives in floods, train wrecks, civil conflicts and traffic accidents. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he donated $100,000 to Pakistanis in New York who lost their jobs in the subsequent economic crisis.

Remarkably, the lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. In the 1980’s, when Pakistan’s then-President Zia ul-Haq sent him a check for 500,000 rupees (then more than $30,000), Edhi sent it back. Last year, the Italian government offered him a million-dollar donation. He refused. “Governments set conditions that I cannot accept,” he says, declining to give any details.

Usually dressed in a simple tunic over gray pajamas, scuffed sandals on his feet and his trademark astrakhan hat on his head, Edhi outlines his philosophy in the Mithadar dispensary where he launched his charity more than five decades ago. “I tell people that, because I am working for you, the money must come from you,” he says. For years, this meant that Edhi would take to the streets to beg on behalf of his growing social programs. Even in his 70’s, he still occasionally begs on the streets, generally for the sake of severely ill individuals in urgent need of expensive medical care that his clinics cannot provide.

Generally, however, donors come in person to one of the 300 centers and clinics across Pakistan. One, who declined to give his name, explained that he gives money regularly to the Edhi Foundation because an Edhi ambulance once rescued his sister from an automobile accident. (The cost of an ambulance call—one of the few services for which the foundation charges—is less than 50 rupees, or around 85 us cents.) “When I give this 1400 rupees to Edhi, I know it goes to people who need it,” says the donor.

Some donors have been very generous. One family donated two villas in the wealthy Karachi suburb of Clifton for use as a residence and school for around 250 girls. A Pakistani expatriate in the uk donated office buildings worth £1.4 million ($2.5 million) that became the British headquarters of the foundation, which organizes local charity services both for expatriates and in support of the foundation’s work in Pakistan. In addition to money and property, contributors donate clothes, appliances, furniture—even goat and chicken meat, sometimes by the ton. The organization uses a portion of these gifts to feed and clothe residents of the homes; the rest is given away to other hospitals, prisons and disaster victims.

For this, Edhi may well be the most widely admired man in Pakistan. In 1986 he received the Ramón Magsaysay Award for Public Service, sometimes referred to as “the Asian Nobel Prize.” In 2000, he was awarded the International Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood. In 2002, he joined former us President Bill Clinton, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and others as an honorary board member of the newly founded Daniel Pearl Foundation, created in honor of the murderedWall Street Journal correspondent. Typically, Edhi pays his own way to receive awards and participate in conferences.

“What Edhi is doing is nothing short of a miracle,” explains Z. A. Nizami, former director-general of the Karachi Development Authority.

emmed in by a labyrinth of fabric shops, food markets and dusty, cart-filled lanes, Edhi’s three-story Mithadar center is a hive of activity. In the crowded front offices, men and women sit behind donated desks taking ambulance calls, ordering medicines and checking the accounts of clinics and centers across the country. In one room, three women are filling out adoption papers. Bilquis Edhi, who oversees adoptions, has placed more than 16,000 children in adopted homes. Outside every Edhi center there is a cradle—shaded from the sun—where unwanted babies can be left anonymously.

Upstairs, a dozen infants and well-fed toddlers, some rattling across the floor in walking strollers, play and doze as Bilquis chats with a woman who has come to adopt a child for her son and daughter-in-law in the United States.

“The baby she’s adopting was starving when it arrived,” Bilquis remarks. “When you nurse a child back to life, it really hurts to see her go, even after you’ve gone through the process thousands of times. Finding her a loving home makes it worth the feeling of loss.”

Bilquis tells of the 32-year-old woman who showed up recently at the Mithadar clinic looking for her. The woman explained that her parents had just revealed that they had adopted her as an infant from the Edhi center. “I’m a doctor now, with four children of my own,” she told Bilquis. “And I wanted to show my gratitude to the woman who nursed me.”

“We both broke down in tears,” Bilquis recalls.

With her head loosely covered by a brightly patterned yellow scarf and eyes that twinkle behind black-framed glasses, Bilquis’s sunny, lighthearted disposition contrasts with her husband’s severe, sometimes impatient manner. The pair met at the clinic when she arrived as an 18-year-old nurse in 1965. A year or so later, they were married.

Their wedding night set the tone for the relationship. Dropping by the dispensary after the ceremony, Edhi found a 12-year-old girl with severe head injuries. The newlyweds rushed her to the hospital and spent the night supervising blood transfusions and calming down distraught relatives.

“I didn’t mind at all,” Bilquis told Reader’s Digest for an article published in 1989. “Today that girl is married with children; that’s what is really important.”

Even so, Bilquis acknowledges in a playful way, life with Edhi can be trying. “Sometimes I wonder how I stayed my whole life with this man who is a mental case,” she says with a smile. “He won’t even attend the weddings of his own children, but if there’s an emergency somewhere he’ll dash out to help in an instant.”

In a room nearby, a teacher is conducting a class in Urdu, Arabic and counting for around a dozen children three to six years old, some of whom have Down’s syndrome. Next door, a female doctor is showing 10 aspiring nurses how to take blood tests; it’s part of a six-month course that will lead to their certification as nurse’s aides.

“I tell destitute women who come to the centers that they can learn nursing here and later earn their own money as nurses and midwives,” Edhi explains back downstairs in his office. So far, around 1500 women have received this training.

Edhi’s own passion for healing dates back to his childhood. At age 11, he was obliged to care for his mother, who was paralyzed with a severe diabetic condition. “I bathed her, changed her and fed her,” he recalls in his 1996 autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind.“Taking care of my mother made me ponder the misery of others who suffered; from that time on, I began to think of how I could help them, and to dream of building hospitals and a village for the handicapped.”

Born in 1928 in Bantva, a small Indian town of 25,000 inhabitants in Gujarat state, he was “not what I would call an obedient child,” he admits with a grin. A natural leader, when he was not prodding other kids to join him in stealing corn and fruit from wealthy farmers, he was organizing impromptu circuses and performing gymnastic feats for the neighbors. Although his father brokered textiles and other goods and provided the family with a middle-class income, both of Edhi’s parents instilled in him the importance of simplicity and frugal living.

“Every day before school, my mother would give me two paisa and say, ‘Spend one paisaon yourself and give the other away,’” Edhi remembers. “When I came home, she would ask me where I had given away my one paisa. It was her way of creating an awareness in me of the need for social welfare.”

At the same time he began caring for his mother, he also developed a habit of saving, putting aside one rupee for every five he earned working at a fabric shop after school. This thriftiness served him well, prompting him to gradually acquire government securities. Even now, Edhi takes no salary, choosing instead to live parsimoniously on the interest from these securities.

In 1951, four years after the family moved to Karachi following the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, the 23-year-old Edhi used some of his savings to buy a tiny shop, less than three meters (10′) on a side, inside what is now the clinic building. Together with a doctor who taught him the basics of health care, he set up a free dispensary, and he persuaded several friends to help him add free literacy classes. To be available at all times, he slept on a cement bench outside the dispensary.

In 1957, a virulent flu epidemic swept through Karachi. Edhi reacted with unselfish daring, using his own money to erect tented camps on the city’s outskirts where people received free immunizations. After the epidemic was brought under control, grateful residents chipped in to buy the rest of the Mithadar dispensary building, enabling Edhi to create a free maternity center and nursing school.

Over the years that followed, Edhi realized that Karachi desperately needed an ambulance service. Impressed by his handling of the flu crisis, a local businessman made a large donation, part of which Edhi used to buy a beat-up van that he converted into a free ambulance and drove himself. “I prided myself on being the first to arrive at an accident,” he recalls. Today, Edhi’s ambulance service has grown to a fleet of more than 600 nationwide, all paid for with donations. Dispatched from call centers scattered around the country’s cities and highways, Edhi ambulances are still usually the first to arrive at the scene, and they have helped cut the fatality toll from road accidents by half, he says.

In 1986, during a hijacking attempt at Karachi airport, Edhi marshaled 54 ambulances at the ready. When negotiations between the hijackers and the government broke down and Pakistani commandos stormed the plane, Edhi and other paramedics entered under fire to try to save wounded passengers and crew.

In 1993, during devastating floods in the Punjab, Edhi ambulances rescued 50,000 people. Using donated planes, volunteers also dropped food, water and supplies to isolated families. Edhi’s air ambulance service now numbers three planes and a helicopter, all donated by the US Agency for International Development—“without conditions,” Edhi is quick to point out.

“The 1993 flood was the biggest operation we’d ever done; it satisfied Mr. Edhi that we could handle major disasters,” explains Anwer Kazmi, a longtime friend and aide, who translates Edhi’s Urdu into English.

A stickler for organizational efficiency, Edhi stands up from his desk and goes over to a wall arrayed with stacked drawers of cardboard boxes, each carefully labeled with a year, a location and a subject. “How do you like my computer?” he asks, smiling, as he pulls out a box containing the expense records of the 1993 flood operation. Like his training in health care, Edhi’s expertise in administration is self-taught, his business savvy acquired over decades of running a foundation that now occupies some 7330 staff and volunteers. Back at his desk, he leafs through one of the oversize accounting ledgers that he fills with ruminations, anecdotes, recollections and plans.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down ideas in these ledgers,” he explains. “And in the morning, everyone groans about all the orders I hand down as I try to follow through on my inspirations.”

Recently one of those nighttime brainstorms involved setting up emergency clinics on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to treat victims of the 2001 war. Edhi’s son Faisal, 26, who works for the foundation, vividly recalls an incident at one of these clinics that encapsulated his father’s demanding nature.

At the new center in Jamun, Faisal explains, local staff members had purchased a dozen chairs for guests and journalists. When Edhi arrived for his own first visit, he blew up. “Why did you waste money on chairs?” he stormed. “Next, you’ll be buying beds and other things for yourselves instead of spending the money on the people we intend to help.” That night, Edhi himself slept with the ambulance drivers on the floor of the center.

As Faisal finishes his anecdote, Edhi rubs a hand across his balding head and nods in agreement. “People respect me because they see how simply we live and that all the donations go to the people who need help,” he volunteers. Only 10 percent of the foundation’s overall budget goes toward administrative overhead, including salaries, he adds.

Edhi and Bilquis still occupy a cramped, two-room apartment next to his office in the midst of the hubbub of the Mithadar clinic. He remains on call for emergencies 24 hours a day—just as he has for the past 52 years. “I am always available to all, rich or poor,” he says. “Anyone can come into this office and talk to me.”

Despite this open-door policy, growing up the children of such a father was not easy. Although Edhi’s children were raised largely by Bilquis’s mother in a house near the dispensary, they were exposed to pain and misery from an early age. At seven, Faisal recalls accompanying his father to recover the corpse of a murder victim. Edhi brought the body back to Mithadar, washed it and gave it a respectful burial. “I got very sick and couldn’t sleep for a week,” Faisal recalls.

By the time he was 10, however, Faisal had grown accustomed to riding with his father on ambulance calls to bring the dead and injured to morgues and hospitals. Now, Faisal is in charge of the ambulance service, whose costs he is trying to cut to make it self- sustaining. He’s also creating a new dispensary and ambulance center for some 50,000 people uprooted from their Karachi homes by a highway project and forcibly moved to a treeless settlement west of the city where there is no running water, sewage or electricity.

Running the Edhi Foundation is very much a family concern. Edhi, Bilquis and their children meet every Sunday at the girls’ home in Clifton to confer over problems at the centers and plan new projects.

“We discuss each girl individually,” says Edhi’s 36-year-old daughter, Kubra, who is as restrained as Faisal is extroverted. “Before the establishment of Edhi homes, young girls who ran away from their families fell into prostitution and other criminal activities. Now they have a place to take shelter.”

Some girls flee to the center to obtain the education their families deny them, while others are sent by parents eager to have their daughters educated, but too poor to pay school fees.

“When girls first come, they generally pass the first few days with great difficulty, often getting depressed and tense,” Kubra continues. “We involve them in work—taking care of children, mixing with other girls and women. Their lives become more normal after three or four days. If a girl continues to be depressed or has difficulty adjusting, we call a doctor to treat her.”

“This is very difficult work, because of fundamentalism,” Edhi interjects. “Our society does not want to give any facilities to females. When political opponents criticize us, we never fight them—we ignore them.

“Still, it’s very hard to survive if you are working for all the people, not just your particular religious or ethnic group,” he acknowledges. “With so much discrimination and growing religious divisions, my children will have a very, very tough time.”

In 1992, tragedy drew the family closer than ever. A mentally unbalanced woman staying at the Clifton home scalded Kubra’s four-year-old son, Bilal, with bathwater so hot that he died two months later. “Revenge will not bring Bilal back,” Edhi advised Kubra at the time. “You must try to forgive the woman.” Kubra decided to transfer her to another Edhi center, but not to punish her. That Kubra and the rest of the family continued their work with the mentally disturbed and destitute is powerful testimony to their commitment.

arly the next morning, Edhi sets out with Faisal and Kazmi to conduct a surprise inspection of Edhi Village, a home for runaway and abandoned boys with a separate asylum for mentally ill and physically handicapped men. Halfway into the 45-minute drive south of Karachi, Edhi stops the ambulance at a one-room cinderblock building with a red roof, one of 35 emergency first-aid outposts he’s created along the 1100- kilometer (700-mi) highway from Karachi to Peshawar.

As he chats with the paramedic on call, a pair of policemen pull up to the center. Seeing Edhi, they greet him warmly and join in the conversation.

“Before we set up these emergency centers, the police were stretched too thin and many people died in accidents,” says Faisal. “Now, they rely on us to respond to 75 percent of road accidents.” Nationwide, the Edhi ambulance service receives more than 6000 calls a day.

At the entrance to Edhi Village, the driveway is lined with tamarisk trees covered with yellow blossoms, eucalyptus and palm trees, and beds of purple and white flowers. The courtyard is sprawling and grassy, surrounded by classrooms and dormitories. It contains a playground, a soccer field and volleyball and basketball courts, all of which are used for competitive games with visiting school teams. “Faisal organized the boys to do the landscaping,” Edhi says proudly. “It’s part of our self-help initiative.”

When Edhi purchased the Village’s 26-hectare (65-acre) parcel in 1985, it was barren land. Now there are kitchens, workshops, recreation rooms and housing for 250 children in one complex and 1500 mental patients in another.

In one of the classrooms, Edhi singles out an alert-looking 10-year-old pupil with a congenitally deformed hand. “When he was a newborn, this boy was abandoned in one of our cradles outside a center in Karachi,” Edhi explains. “Bilquis named him Shazab and took care of him in Mithadar until he was old enough to come here. Now he’s one of our smartest students.” When Edhi asks him what he’d like to do when he graduates, Shazab breaks into a shy smile. “I want to be in charge of Edhi Village,” he says.

Further down the open-air hallway are workshops with sewing machines and stacks of electrical equipment. In one of the rooms, a teacher is demonstrating how to repair a refrigerator motor. Edhi pauses to talk with a 13-year-old boy who explains that he’s an Afghan refugee whose parents were killed in the 2001 war. Police picked him up begging on a Karachi street and brought him to an Edhi center. He was later transferred to Edhi Village.

“The boys install all the electrical wiring in the Village and receive enough training to become electricians,” Edhi explains. “We also teach them how to sew so that they can get jobs as tailors or clothes makers when they leave.”

“Sometimes, parents take their children back home and the kids run away again to come back,” adds Kazmi. “The education they receive here is better than the education even middle-class students receive. Also, we provide them with clothes and plenty of food.”

In the walled sanatorium for the mentally handicapped, physically disabled and mentally ill next door, the scene is more sobering. Several hundred residents lie on scattered mattresses or sit on the cement floor in one bare, cavernous ward. Elsewhere, groups of men mill about outside under straggly bougainvillea trees. Despite the spartan facilities, “the patients live under far better conditions than in other mental hospitals in Pakistan,” maintains Ghulam Mustafa, the senior doctor of a staff of five doctors and eight nurses on rotation.

“We organize games and art activities, and the retarded patients do most of the work themselves, keeping the place neat and clean,” he says. “The better-off patients take care of the ones who are more dependent.”

Back in Karachi, Edhi stops by a men’s psychiatric center to meet with Mohammad Ayaz, a soft- spoken, 40-year-old psychiatrist whom Edhi hired after witnessing his success in rehabilitating mentally ill inmates of the city’s central jail. In the front reception room, former patients are busy answering telephone calls and dispatching ambulances.

“Many of our patients can be cured,” Ayaz explains, “but their relatives reject them, leaving them here to languish unnecessarily in long-term care.

“Our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough trained staff,” he continues. “Twelve doctors in rotation have to look after a total of 3500 patients in Edhi Village and six residential centers in Karachi.”

One of the men manning the phones stands up to introduce himself in American-accented English. A self-possessed character with a shock of swept-back black hair flecked with gray, 53-year-old Tariq Ayubi says he perfected his English in Miami, where he went to business school. Moving back to Karachi, he married, went into business and thrived. Gradually, however, he began drinking heavily, and he soon lost his job and his wife. Severely depressed and penniless, he sought refuge at the Edhi center. Volunteering for work here saved him, Ayubi says.

“The Edhi Foundation is the only social welfare organization in the country that works,” he declares.

Afterwards, Edhi expertly maneuvers the ambulance through teeming streets to the women’s sanatorium in north Karachi. As he ambles down the immaculate marble hallways, residents cluster around him, calling out “Abu-ji!” (“Daddy!”). “This adulation makes me nervous,” he says. “I’m not some kind of saint.”

Seeing one woman sitting on concrete steps distractedly waving flies away from an open sore on her foot, Edhi bends close, asking her gently how long it has been infected. “Two days,” she replies, “but it’s much worse this afternoon.” He calls out for a nurse to attend to the sore. When no one comes, he stalks away impatiently. “Don’t worry,” he calls over his shoulder to the suffering woman. “I’ll be back with a bandage before you know it.”

Later on, after Edhi has disinfected and dressed the woman’s wound, he sits on a stone bench and listens to other residents tell him heartrending stories of cruel husbands and family betrayal. Driving back to the Mithadar center, he vents his long-running frustration with the plight of women in Pakistan.

“Society goes against the teachings of the Qur’an in mistreating women and not giving them equality,” he says with indignation. “Only 10 percent of Pakistani women know how to read and write. That’s why we try so hard to give the girls who come to us a good education. Once they get an education, they can start to take control of their lives.”

Back at Mithadar, a businessman in a crisp linen shirt and polished shoes is waiting for Edhi in his office. “Here’s one who has come around,” he says, gripping the man’s shoulders in a friendly embrace. Edhi explains that the waiting businessman has launched a partnership with the foundation to assist the poor in starting fabric shops, food stalls and other small businesses. “He’s helping them stand on their own rather than giving them handouts that only make them more dependent,” says Edhi.

“That’s the humanitarian revolution we need,” he continues with a weary smile. “But still so few understand. Let’s spread the word.”

	Paris-based author Richard Covington(richard.covington@free.fr) writes about arts, culture and the media in Europe, the Middle East and Asia for the International Herald Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian, Reader’s Digest and other publications.
	Shahidul Alam is founder of Drik Picture Library (www.drik.net), the Bangladesh Photo Institute, Pathshala (the South Asian Institute of Photography) as well as the biennial Chobi Mela Festival of Photography in Asia. He lives in Dhaka.

www.paks.net/edhi-foundation/
www.balzan.com

MAIN OFFICE
Boulton Market
Mithadar, Karachi 740000
E-mail: edhikarachi@yahoo.com

Edhi International Foundation USA
42-07 National Street
Corona NY 11368
Tel: (718) 639-5120

Edhi International Foundation UK
316 Edgeware Road
London W2 1DY
Tel: +44 (20) 7723-2050

 

This article appeared on pages 33-43 of the November/December 2004 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.

 

Check the Public Affairs Digital Image Archive for November/December 2004 images.

Acid-Throwing Feudal Terrorist Remains Free — Bilal Khar

http://www.newslinemagazine.com/2004/01/justice-denied-2/

 

Look at this scumbag rage with anger – you can see the same attitude come out that was witnessed by his alleged victims.

 

 

Pakistan’s holy cow – the army – heavily criticized (as it should be) in parliament

Source: http://www.dawn.com

It was during debates on more than 200 opposition cut motions on demands for grants for two federal ministries and two divisions that the military role came under what was probably the severest criticism during a budget discussion in the country’s parliamentary history.

This is because “Pakistan’s people are now compelled (to ask questions)”, the PML-N’s main speaker on the subject and former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister, Sardar Mehtab Ahmed Khan, said in a pointed speech before another prominent party figure and former minister, Ahsan Iqbal, and a couple of back-benchers also came hard on the role of generals for involvement in politics since first military ruler Field Marshal Ayub Khan seized power in 1958.

“Pakistan’s defence failures for some years have shaken the people of Pakistan,” Sardar Mehtab said as he accused the General Headquarters of imposing its will on domestic and foreign policy issues. “In the past few years, particularly in the past one year, people’s confidence has been badly affected,” he added.

This was the latest of a series of attacks on the military leadership in the lower house from the country’s largest opposition party since the presentation of the budget for fiscal 2011-12 early this month.

Leader of opposition Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan’s was only a subdued criticism when he opened the general debate on the budget on June 6, but two other senior PML-N members, Khwaja Mohammad Asif and Ms Tehmina Daultana, came out with strident attacks in their speeches afterwards in what seemed to be a party policy, which attracted the charge, in a statement of a June 9 corps commanders’ conference, of a showing “conceptual biases” to run down the armed forces.

Defence Minister Chaudhry Ahmed Mukhtar came out with only a brief ridicule of what he called Sardar Mehtab’s “drum-beat” and politicisation of the situation and, while declining to go into politics, said the government would make every effort to strengthen the country’s defence, before the house rejected all 34 cut motions and approved the defence ministry’s demands, including the largest of Rs495 billion for defence services.

A total of 30 demands for grants worth about Rs653.4 billion was approved — Rs505.7 for the defence ministry, Rs141.97 billion for cabinet and establishment divisions and over Rs5.7 billion for the communications ministry.

Sardar Mehtab said the security policy bequeathed by former military ruler Pervez Musharraf had made the previously safe Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the tribal region unsafe, besides plunging Balochistan into military operations and that the May 2 US commando raid that killed Osma bin Laden at his Abbottabad hideout as well as militant attacks on the GHQ in 2009 and on Mehran Naval base in Karachi last month had “shaken Pakistan’s foundations and shattered the feeling of security”.

He regretted that despite prevailing poverty in the country, the generals were said to be “owning 25 to 50 crore rupees” at retirement and demanded that salaries and perks should be not more than those of their counterparts in neighbouring India.

The PML-N member also opposed presently shelved plans to shift the GHQ from Rawalpindi to Islamabad, which he said should only be a civilian city — and was later reminded by the defence minister of a statement by Chief of the Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani that it would not be done for now due to lack of funds.

Mr Ahsan Iqbal, who said he would salute ordinary soldiers for their role in the defence of the country and recalled what he saw as political motives of all the four military coups since 1958, called for accountability of those who he said used security institutions for politics so nobody could dare do it in the future.

His another senior party colleague, Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, called for more transparency of the defence budget, which he said would strengthen rather than weaken the defence services, while a Musharraf-era minister, Zahid Hamid, wanted the house to be told of more non-classified information about the defence budget.

One PML-N back-bencher, Ms Qudsia Arshad, in an apparent contradiction of some of her party members’ observations, regretted criticism of the military, which she said was the only institution looking after the country’s defence. And later, when asked by Speaker Fehmida Mirza that if she were of this opinion, then why she had become a party to cut motions, Ms Arshad said she was against any cut in the defence budget.

Another PML-N back-bencher, Tahira Aurangzeb, withdrew a cut motion much after moving it. More demands will be taken up when the house meets at 4pm on Monday

Pakistan & India – Two different nations indeed

There are some fundamental differences in Hindu & Muslim culture that are simply incompatible.  We are indeed two cultures and two histories.  Here are some Hindu practices.

• SUTTEE – burning a widow alive (voluntarily or not) on the funeral pyre of her husband. If she did not willing jump into the fire, she was often thrown into it by the mob gathered to watch her burn to death.  THis practice was common until outlawed by Muslim rulers.  Credit is given to the British for outlawing it (which they did later). Child sacrifices to animal gods such as sacred crocodiles were common until this Hindu practice was criminalized by the British

3) THUGEES KALI CULT –  ritual murder and burial of travelers by the Kali cult

4) DEVDASISM – using children as sex slaves in Hindu temples.  They not only served the sexual perversions of the priests and gurus but were used as prostitutes to bring in money.

6) temple art that depicts sodomy, child sex, orgies and bestiality
7) drinking urine from animals and humans and smearing dung in their
hair and on their body.
8) soul-transmigration, karma, race and caste.
9) acceptance of incest
10) bestiality
11) Cannibalism,
12) urine-drinking,
13) dung-eating,
14) castration of Aboriginal males (Hijrah cult),
15) devadasism (Aryan Hindu sexploitation of Abroginal women),
16) human sacrifice (purushamedha),
17) Kautilyan totalitarianism and apartheid (varnashrama dharma)
18) Castism – Religion sanctioned racism
19) cow genital worship
20) rat worship
21) drinking milk in rat temple from bowls of milk and rat feces
22) genitial worship
23) shiva’s sex orgies
24) ‘holy images’ of man, woman and animal in every single sexual
position imaginable
25) countless and pointless holy pornographic scripture about shiva
and ejaculation
26) no rules or regulations or limitations on sex
27) ritutals of pouring milk on large statues of a holy penis
28) the brutal application of untouchability
29) Sex Magic (tantric practices)

================================
Hindu Scriptures
================================

(Lust)
main Vedic god also displayed animal characteristics.
He had incest with his own daughter, an act that is perfectly legal in
Vedic law : Sarasvati, who became the wife of her own father, was the
daughter of Brahma. There are 2 stories about her genesis in the
`Saraswati Purana’. One is that Brahma created his beautiful daughter
Saraswati direct from his `vital strength’ or seminal fluid

(Masterbation)
Brahma used to collect his semen in a pot whenever he masturbated
fixing his carnal eyes on the celestial beauty Urvasi. Brahma’s semen
in the pot gave birth to the sage Agastya, and Agastya in turn gave
birth to Saraswati. Thus, Saraswati had no mother.

(Incest)
Brahma and his daughter Saraswati lived as husband and wife indulging
in incest for 100 years. They had a son Swayambhumaru and a daughter
Satarupa. THrough the incest of Brahma’s son and daughter Brahma got
two grandsons and two grand-daughters There are other abundant
examples of incest from the Vedic age.
These prove that the Vedic Aryans regularly practiced incest of the
father- daughter type and the brother-sister type ( Sita ). Moreover,
the Vedas fully legalise this abominable practice.

(Bestiality)
Brahma, the main god of the Vedic religion, was so lecherous that he
was not satisfied with his own daughter. In fact, feelings of lust
crept up when he saw even females of animal species ! He was so
frustrated that he copulated with a bear :

(Necrophelia)
Other examples of beastiality abound. The Vedic Ashvamedha involved
the Chief Hindu Aryan Queen copulating with a dead horse ! Rama’s
mother herself copulated with a dead horse during the asvamedha
ceremony of King Dasaratha, after which she was handed over to the
disciples of the officiating Brahmin, one of whom fathered Ram
Vasistha, so acclaimed as a sage, was the son of a prostitute, and
thus fulfilled the dictionary definition of `bastardness’
Brahma succeeded in convincing his daughter with the help of the Veda
and enjoyed her.

(perversion)
Brahma’s semen entered the womb of his daughter. But somehow, for
reasons not known he sucked back his semen from the womb of his
daughter, through his own penis…

(prostitution)
” 12. Then Brahma met Urvasi a divine prostitute. He was erotically
aroused by her beauty. He wooed her and had sex with her on a
condition. Accordingly after enjoying her, he pumped back the semen
sucked from the womb of his daughter Padma into the womb of Urvasi.
The child born was named Vasista. Brahma transferred his powers to
Vasista and went away to perform penance for his sinful sexual
exploits.” ( Puran )

Brahma ejaculated his semen in a vessel nearby. Agasthiar was
delivered out of the vessel! 2. When Parvathi came around the sacred
fire Brahma was once again blessed, with the beautiful sight of her
thighs and he once again ejaculated. This time a number of saints
(Rishis) were born in no time. Of them Valkilliyatha was one.

(Violence)
Shiva cuts of Brahman’s Head Shiva, the Dravidian God, was naturally
enraged at this profligate conduct of the savage Aryan Brahma. Hence,
he cut of Brahma’s head : The news about god Brahma and his lustful
extravagances reached the ears of king of devas-Devendra. He was
excited and sent

(Rape)
Thilothama, a dancing girl of Devalok, to dance before Brahma. She did
so. Much enamoured of the beauty of Thilothama Brahma followed
Thilothama to rape her. God Eswara observed the madness of Brahma. He
got angry and cut away one of the heads of Brahma.”

(Miscellaneous??)
Cannibalism, urine-drinking, dung-eating, castration of Aboriginal
males (Hijrah cult), sati
(widow-burning), devadasism (Aryan Hindu sexploitation of Abroginal
women), human sacrifice
(purushamedha), Kautilyan totalitarianism and apartheid (varnashrama
dharma)

(PORNOGRAPHY IN RAMAYANA )
Pornography is replete in the Ramayana, especially in the older
unedited versions. The oldest Ramayanas are in fact Buddhist versions,
and they preserve much of the true character of the vicious Rama and
his adulterous wife Sita. Much of this material was later on deleted
by the Brahmin crooks, so one must go to the older Ramayanas in order
to uncover the truth.

Thus, Dr. Charles claims that Ramayana contains much pornographic
material and cannot be read in public. He gives the following
examples: Rama’s description of Sita’s beauty is lewdly detailed and
full of obscene details (refer to C.R. Srinivasalyengar’s translation
of Aranya Kandam – chapter 46).

This shows the truly lecherous nature of Rama, who considered women as
mere sexual objects. In Kiskind Kandam, the `great’ Rama of the
`wonderful’ religion of Hinduism explains to Lakshmana in graphic
details his sexual experience with Sita. This shows that Rama was a
pornographer and lecher to boot. Not only did he seduce Sita, but had
to tell the whole world about it ! He viewed marriage simply as a
means of fulfilment of base passions. The intelligence, her virtues
and personality do not count. According to Ramayana, the Aryans

(Brahmins) used to drink liquor (of nine different kinds), eat meat,
marry many wives and prostitution was an accepted way of life amongst
the priests and gods. This proves that, even during the Ramayanic era
of the Brahmanic Dark Ages, the `noble’ Aryan Hindus lived in the
manner of the animals with whom they shared the jungles.

Ramayana also recounts the “story of King Dasharatha who, in order to
have a baby son, made a big sacrifice (yagnam) of sheep, cattle,
horses, birds and snakes. He then delivered his three wives
Kaushaliya, Sumatirai and Kaikeyi to three priests. These holy men,
having fully satisfied their carnal desire, returned the ladies to the
King. By this means, the King was able to have three sons – Ram,
Lakshman and Bharat” (Bala Kandam, Chapter 14. For more details on
yagnam, refer to the book “Gnana Surian”, published by Kudi Arasu
Press). This
shows the truly cheap nature of Rama’s immoral father. He was willing
to prostitute his wives merely in order to gain personal benefits. the
handing over of Rama’s mother to the three disciples occurred after
the Vedic horse
sacrifice (ashwamedha), in which Rama’s mother copulated with the dead
horse in accordance with Vedic Hindu requirements. This example shows
the truly debauched nature of Rama’s mother. Why did she have to have
intercourse with a dead horse ? Would not a living horse do ? The
Ramayan tells us much about the unlawful relationship of incest
(Please refer to Aranya Kandam, chapter 45, verses 122, 123, 124 &
125).

Incest is the prime speciality of Hinduism; thus Brahma had
intercourse with his own daughter Sarasvat; and even Sita is, in the
older Buddhist and more authentic versions of the Ramayana, the sister
of Rama. One may ask, why are such perversions as incest, beastiality
prevalent in Hinduism, and in fact sanctioned in Hindu scriptures ?
The answer is that the Brahmin imposed a strict sense of `brahmacarya’
(ascetism) onto a previously Aryan barbarian society. As a result,
common Aryans could not satisfy their urges in normal and healty
manners and were thus forced to resort to perversions such as incest,
zoophilia,
etc. The following Hindu practices will reveal how immorality and
indecency are sanctified in the name of Hinduism.

LINGAM & YONI Lingam and Yoni are the male and female sexual organs
respectively. Hindus are allowed to worship anything – including
sexual organs. It is not unknown for them to name their children Shiva
Lingam (God Shiva’s sexual organ) or Rama Lingam (God Rama’s sexual
organ). (In some places in Karnataka, the gods demand both male and
females to pray naked together.) This practice is not so much a
survival of pre-Brahmanic Saiva religion, but arose as a means of
Brahmins ensuring a constant supply of lower-caste women to satisfy
their lecherous needs. The Brahmins, who possessed absolute power over
all other races, lived a life of constant debauchery, raping the
non-Brahmin women and forcing them into prostitution.

DEVADASI (RELGIOUS PROSTITUTION) The Devadasi system was set up,
according to a Times of India report (10-1 1 -87) as a result of a
conspiracy between the feudal class (pseudo-secular word for
`Rajputs’) and the priests (pseudo-secular word for `Brahmins’).

The latter, with their ideological and religious hold over the
peasants and craftsmen, devised a means that gave prostitution their
religious sanction. Poor, low-caste girls, initally sold at private
auctions, were later dedicated to the temples. They were then
initiated into prostitution. Thus Devadasism is a system of legalised
rape, enforced prostitution and sexual expoitation of Black Sudra
women by Brahmin men. Moreover, by raping Sudra women the Brahmins
could breed a new mixed race of middle castes which would serve to
divide the Sudras ! BHARAT NATYAM & THE BRAHMINS The Bharat Natyam is
a dance performance which, because of the Brahmin media, has gained
much recognition as a form of art. However, the origin of this dance
lies in the Brahmins abducting low-caste women, raping them and
forcing them to become prostitutes in order to earn money. As part of
the captured womens’ training as `Devadasis’, they were required to
learn the Bharatnatyam. The celebrated Bharat Natya expert, Rukmini
Devi, admits in a National Geographic video programme, that the
Baratha Natya was really the art of Devadasis (temple prostitutes) to
please their audience
and admirers. This is the reason why you might have seen various
Baratha Natya’s postures in Hindu temples. The Bharat Natya helped the
poor low-caste women who had been raped and incarcarated by the
Brahmins, to attract customers and eke out a living. To top it all,
the cunning Brahmins took most of her earnings too ! Maybe like the
art of KARATE to the Japanese, the BHARAT NATYAM is a shameful
national art of the Brahmins and very much part of their culture.
Whilst Sudra women were shamefully exposed to the views of the
lecherous

Aryan male, the Brahmin females were locked up in a life of seclusion
! That is why Sudra women in Kerala were, down to the 20th century
forbidden from wearing bodices or any form of upper body-garment which
the Aryan women were forced to wear. The Sudra women thus had to
appear top-less in order to satisfy the voyeuristic desires of the
ogling Brahmin males !

THE KAMASUTRA Brahminism has also created Kamasutra -a set of
instructions on how to have sexual intercourse. Some of the postures
detailed in Kamasutra are so complex that they can only be performed
with the help of one or more ASSISTANTS! The Kamasutra was written in
one of the Devadasi temples, those brothels where Sudra women were
forced to a life of prostitution by their Brahmin captors. It is in
these brothel-temples that Sanskrit, that hybrid mongrel language
descended from the Old Indo-Aryan tribal tongues and the Sudric

(Dravidian & Kolarian languages. THE DEVADASI SYSTEM THRIVES UNI. -
TIMES OF INDIA – 10th Nov. 1987: confirms that the practice of
dedicating young Harijan girls (Mahars, Mangs, Dowris and Chambhar) at
childhood to a goddess, and their initiation into prostitution when
they attain puberty continues to thrive in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh
and other parts of South India. This is largely due to social
backwardness, poverty and illiteracy, according to a study by two
doctors of the India Health Organisation. The report clearly indicates
that the Devadasi system was the result of a conspiracy between the
feudal class and the priests (Brahmins), who with their ideological
and religious hold over the peasants and
craftsmen, devised a practice which acquired religious sanction. They
noted in their study on – “Devadasis – the link between religious
culture and child prostitution”. The study revealed that girls from
poor families were sold after puberty at private auctions to a master
who initially paid a sum of money to the families ranging from Rs. 500
to 5000.

(Modern Day application)
The study, made during health camps organised by the World Health
Organisation (WHO) in the devadasi populated areas, revealed that the
dedicated girls formed 15 percent of the total women involved in
prostitution in the country, and as much as 70 percent to 80 percent
of the prostitutes in the border districts of Karnataka and
Maharashtra. This shows the extent to which the lecherous Brahmins
raped and exploited the Negroid Sudra women of South India.

THE NAKED HINDU YOGIS OF KASHI Many of the Yogis of Kashi (Banaras)
live naked and beg for their living. They live in dirty, unhygienic
conditions, and drug addiction is rife among them. Our so-called
leaders and intellectuals have all contributed to the superstitious
beliefs and they have helped these saints to thrive and practise
deceptive methods to cheat the public. It is an utter shame that among
the worshippers of such naked godmen, there are a number of high court
judges, advocates, engineers, doctors, professors, politicians, cinema
actors and actresses. For more details on these Hindu saints and
Yogis, watch the documentary video – “SHOCKING ASIA” – which is
available from the following addresses: Atlas

International Film GMBH, Munich, W. Germany. Replay Video, London, G.
Britain. Distribution

First Film Organisation, Hong Kong.

STARK NAKED BATHS! AGENCIES News Agency reports on 23-9-87 that at
Kurushetra (India) about 1,000 NAKED Hindu “Sadhus” (saints) plunged
themselves into the river during a solar
eclipse, claiming this to be a “holy dip”. Over one million pilgrims,
naked and semi- naked, both male and female, also followed them into
the river. The largest of the pools is Brahmasarovar, and is said to
accommodate 100,000 bathers at a time. There was still no room for
everyone in the water at one time and there was much pushing and
shoving. The huge crowds waiting on the banks barely had space to turn
around. People crowded the shore waiting for their chance. This is the
position of “holy dip” everywhere in India. A Haryana

Government spokesman said that they posted 20,000 policemen to avoid
misuse of this mixing opportunity for perverted reasons. The reason
why the Brahmins walk naked is that they could more easily force the
lower castes to consume their urine and dung; the Brahmins could also
more easily rape lower-caste women. Thus, when Brahmins walk along the
road, they stop at intervals in order to relieve themselves, when
their disciples immediately crowd around to obtain a piece of `holy’
excrement in order to consume it. If a Brahmin decides to copulate
with any low-caste woman he sees, he immediately rapes her in public
without any fear of retribution. These disorders were put down by the
British in the bigger cities, but they continue in the rural
countryside. For those who don’t know why the Brahmins forced the
Sudras and other lower castes to consume dung and urine is that by
this means, diseases and ailments would develop among the Sudras.
Thus, the non-Brahmins would suffer from perpetual diseases and death.
In addition, it reminded the Sudras of their

`rightful and correct’ place in Hinduism – namely, as the animal
slaves of the Brahmins.

Maybe, even animals were treated better than Sudroids. In addition to
this spectacle, the pilgrims also look directly at the sun with the
naked eye. Scientists and doctors strongly advise against this as it
is likely to cause blindness. The reason why the Brahmins encouraged
the low-caste people to look at the Sun is that they desired to blind
them into

sightless slavery. Due to Brahmin brainwashing, a large fraction of
the population became blind by staring at the Sun, thereby becoming
further degraded in status and posing no threat to the evil
Brahmanism.

THE MIRACLE MAN DPA News (6-1 1 -86) reports that Police have arrested
a “miracle man” in the Western India city of Prune for raping a number
of women, on the pretext of solving

their troubles, by making them sit naked before an idol which was
supposed to render “divine advice”. He would hold a blank sheet of
paper over a fire on which written words would

appear. He would then convince the women to have sex with him on the
strength of the “miracle”. Police discovered that his “divine advance”
was nothing but a simple chemical trick by which words written on
paper with invisible ink became legible when held over a flame.

HOW RISHIS WERE CREATED? According to the Hindu Holy books, God Brahma
arranged the marriage of god Shiva to goddess Parvathi. When they went
around the fire as per Hindu religious ritual, god Shiva looked at the
thighs of goddess Parvathi and ejaculated his semen into the Fire and
they became Rishis (priests). According to the Hindu Puranas this
“god” can do such

a filthy act! SEX WITH COWS In many Hindu temples there are sculptures
depicting men having sex not only with women but also cows. What is
the meaning of this? Is not the cow sacred? If it is, then it should
be worshipped not sexually assaulted! The answer is that the low-caste
people were so frustrated because the Brahmins had abducted all their
women as Devadasis that they had to satisfy their desires with cows.
Whilst the Brahmins were busy raping their women, the Sudra men had to
copulate with cows !

RAMAYANA IS THE CULTURE OF ARYANS (BRAHMINS)! Dr. Charles claims that
the Ramayana is nothing but the culture and way
of life of the Aryans (Brahmins) which is still having a great impact
on present day India. According to Ramayana, the Aryans (Brahmins)
used to drink liquor, used to eat meat, used to have many wives, and
prostitution was a way of life to the Rishis (Priests) and even the
gods. This was true to the barbaric Aryan way of life. The concept of
“re-incarnation” or
avtar is the bed-rock of the Hindu belief. Rama, Vishu, Hanuman etc
… are all believed to
be avtars. But according to Hindu scholar Kshiti Mohan Sen, there is
nothing in the Vedas to
support this belief! Rather, it is an Aryan / Chinese concept that may
have crept into the
Hindu thoughts. This shakes the whole foundation of Hinduism! “Hindus
accept many incarnations of God. While some Hindus take the doctrine
literally and accept figures like Rama, Krishna, and Buddha as actual
incarnation, others prefer to treat it as a useful myth. The origin of
the concept of avatara is obscure. It cannot be found in the Vedas,
but it is possible that it came from the Aryan settlers in Iran. The
idea of discontinuous incarnations can be found in the Bahram Yasht,
which forms part of the Zoroastrian corpus, where incarnations of the
deity Verethragna can be seen. According to another theory, the
concept originated in central Asia, as the Bahram Yasht shows traces
of Chinese influence and mythology. In none of these beliefs, however,
does the concept play as important a part as it does in post- Vedic
Hindu thought, particularly that of the epics, Ranayana and
Mahabharata. And the reason why it forms an integral part of
Brahmanism is that it sanctions the inhuman slavery to Brahmins in
Hinduism. Since the lowe-caste persons had committed sins in their
previous lives, the Brahmins were justly punishing them ! This form of
mental pollution served to further buttress the legalised slavery to
Brahmins that is Hinduism.

HOW HOLY IS THE COW? The origin of the holiness of the cow in popular
Hinduism is not quite certain. The Aryans loved to eat beef, though
they seem to have admired the cow as a very useful animal. However,
now the Hindu even goes to the extent of drinking the urine of the
cow. How come ? The reason why Hindus drink cow’s urine and eat
cow-dung is that the Brahmins have enacted laws which force the
non-Brahmins, especially the Sudroid Blacks, to eat not only cow-dung
and drink cow-urine, but the urine and excreta of Brahmin males as
well. These laws and customs show the abject depth to which the
Brahmins had crushed the non-Brahmins. So lowly and animal-like was
the status of the Sudras that they even had to consume the urine and
dung of their Brahmin masters ! Nowhere on the face of the earth, not
even during the darkest days of slavery in the US South, or apartheid
in South Africa, did a race of masters inflict a more dehumanising
tyranny over a subject population.

(More Modern day behavior)
Bihar tantriks offer youth’s head to deity for magical powers
Indo-Asian News Service Patna, October 7

Tantriks beheaded a youth and offered his head to a local deity to
gain supernatural powers at a village in Bihar, reports said on
Tuesday.

The tantriks cut off the head of 25-year-old Binay Kumar of Barbigha
village in Sheikhpura district on Monday night and offered it to
Dakbaba, the local deity.

The incident comes close on the heels of Union Minister of State for
Human Resources Sanjay Paswan encouraging witchcraft practitioners by
calling them traditional healers in Bihar.

The youth, who ran a sweets shop in the village, was abducted
recently. His headless body was later found in a field, and his head
discovered later in a temple. The incident has created panic and fear
among villagers. But some believe the head being found in the temple
was a smokescreen and the youth had actually been murdered. His head
was offered to the village god to mislead people about the motive
behind the murder, some villagers said.

Gujarat Witnesses speak

Section I

SEXUAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

The fact-finding team found compelling evidence of the most extreme form of sexual violence against women during the first few days of the carnage – in Ahmedabad on February 28th and March 1st and in rural areas up to March 3, 2002. The testimonies point to brutal and depraved forms of violence. The violence against minorities was pre-planned, organized and targeted. In every instance of large scale mob violence against the community in general, there was a regular pattern of violence against women. Given the fact that the data on crimes against women has not been systematically collected, it is impossible to ascertain the extent of the outrage. We believe, however, that crimes against women have been grossly under-reported. For instance, in Panchmahals district only one rape FIR has been filed, though we heard of many other cases. There has been a complete invisibilisation of the issue of sexual violence in the media[1].

The situation is compounded by the apathy of law-enforcement agencies and the indifference of political representatives. In our interview with Maya Kodnani, BJP MLA from Naroda Patia[2], where several brutal gang rapes and rapes of minor girls have been reported (see testimonies below) we found that she was indifferent, complacent and even bemused. When questioned about the reported rapes she said – Accha, kya ye sach hai? Suna hai. Ek police wale ne mujhe bataya ki aise hua hai par usne dekha nahin. (Is this true? One policeman mentioned this to me but he had not seen anything) She had not taken the trouble to investigate further, and clearly indicated no intent to do so.

Given the gravity of the situation, it is incomprehensible that until the writing of this report the National Commission for Women, mandated as the apex body for protection of women’s rights guaranteed under the Constitution of India, had not visited the State. This indicates a complete institutional breakdown as far as issues such as violence against women are concerned. As the District Collector of Panchmahals, clearly told us – ‘Maintaining Law and order is my primary concern. It is not possible for me to look into cases of sexual violence. If something is brought to my notice (like the Bilkees case, see below) I can take action, but nothing more than that. NGOs should take on this job. I would welcome their involvement.’

During our visits to the camps, we were besieged with detailed testimonies from rape victims themselves and from eyewitnesses – both activists and family members who witnessed the crime. For instance, in the short time we spent at Halol camp (Panchmahals district) we were able to get information about four incidents of rape. The fact-finding team also saw video footage where women spoke of witnessing rapes. In the film we saw slogans like – Muslims Quit India – or we will f*** your mothers – written on the walls of charred houses.

We reproduce below some of the testimonies that we were able to record.

A. Testimonies of Sexual Violence

WITNESSING MASS RAPE (INCLUDING MINOR GIRLS)

NARODA PATIA, AHMEDABAD, FEBRUARY 28, 2002[3]

“The mob started chasing us with burning tyres after we were forced to leave Gangotri society. It was then that they raped many girls. We saw about 8-10 rapes. We saw them strip 16-year-old Mehrunissa. They were stripping themselves and beckoning to the girls. Then they raped them right there on the road. We saw a girl’s vagina being slit open. Then they were burnt. Now there is no evidence.”

Source: Kulsum Bibi, Shah e Alam Camp, March 27, 2002

“I saw Farzana being raped by Guddu Chara. Farzana was about 13 years old. She was a resident of Hussain Nagar. They put a saria (rod) in Farzana’s stomach. She was later burnt. 12 year old Noorjahan was also raped. The rapists were Guddu, Suresh and Naresh Chara and Haria. I also saw Bhawani Singh, who works in the State Transport Department kill 5 men and a boy.”

Source: Azharuddin, 13 years. He witnessed the rapes while hiding on the terrace of Gangotri Society. The Chara basti is located just behind Jawan Nagar.

The mob, which came from Chara Nagar and Kuber Nagar, started burning people at around 6 in the evening. The mob stripped all the girls of the locality, including my 22-year-old daughter, and raped them. My daughter was engaged to be married. 7 members of my family were burnt including my wife (aged 40), my sons (aged 18, 14 and 7) and my daughters (aged 2, 4 and 22). My eldest daughter, who later died in the civil hospital, told me that those who raped her were wearing shorts. They hit her on the head and then burnt her. She died of 80% burn injuries.

Source: Abdul Usman, Testimony recorded by Citizens Initiative

SULTANI, A RAPE survivor, SPEAKS

VILLAGE ERAL, KALOL TALUKA, PANCHMAHALS DISTRICT, FEBRUARY 28th, 2002[4]

On the afternoon of February 28th to escape the violent mob, about 40 of us got on to a tempo, wanting to escape to Kalol. My husband Feroze was driving the tempo. Just outside Kalol a Maruti car was blocking the road. A mob was lying in wait. Feroze had to swerve. The tempo overturned. As we got out they started attacking us. People started running in all directions. Some of us ran towards the river. I fell behind as I was carrying my son, Faizan. The men caught me from behind and threw me on the ground. Faizan fell from my arms and started crying. My clothes were stripped off by the men and I was left stark naked. One by one the men raped me. All the while I could hear my son crying. I lost count after 3. They then cut my foot with a sharp weapon and left me there in that state.

Source: Sultani, Kalol Camp, Panchmahals District, March 30, 2002

Additional facts about the case:

· We had heard about Sultani’s case from her relatives in Halol camp. The details and sequence of events of both testimonies matched.

· Sultani has not undergone a medical examination. Her leg had been swollen for three weeks as a result of the injury inflicted by a sharp weapon, but it is healing now.

· No FIR has been filed though a written statement has been submitted to the DSP. In her statement she names some men from the mob (Jitu Shah, PDS Shop owner of Delol village; Ashok Patel alias Don Dadhi of Ramnath village)

· When we spoke with her and her sister-in-law they both said they were feeling numb and lost, as they did not know where to go from the Camp. She categorically stated that they could not go back to her village. She was terribly worried about the future especially her children’s. Sultani has still not been told that her husband had died in the attack. She believes he is missing.

A MOTHER’S ACCOUNT OF HER DAUGHTER’S RAPE

VILLAGE ERAL, KALOL TALUKA , PANCHMAHALS DISTRICT. MARCH 3, 2002[5]

My father-in-law, a retired schoolteacher, refused to leave the village with the other Muslim families who fled to Kalol on February 28th. He believed no one would harm us. From the 28th about 13 members of my family sought refuge in various people’s houses and the fields. On Sunday afternoon (March 3rd) the hut we were hiding in was attacked. We ran in different directions and hid in the field. But the mob found some of us and started attacking. I could hear various members of my family shouting for mercy as they were attacked. I recognized two people from my village – Gano Baria and Sunil – pulling away my daughter Shabana. She screamed, telling the men to get off her and leave her alone. The screams and cries of Ruqaiya, Suhana, Shabana, begging for their izzat could clearly be heard. My mind was seething with fear and fury. I could do nothing to help my daughter from being assaulted sexually and tortured to death. My daughter was like a flower, still to experience life. Why did they have to do this to her? What kind of men are these? The monsters tore my beloved daughter to pieces. After a while, the mob was saying “cut them to pieces, leave no evidence.” I saw fires being lit. After some time the mob started leaving. And it became quiet.

Source: Medina Mustafa Ismail Sheikh, Kalol camp, Panchmahals district, March 30, 2002

Additional facts about the case:

· Medina’s testimony has been corroborated by the other two living witnesses – Mehboob and Khushboo. Khushboo in her testimony also recounted how her grandfather (Medina’s father-in-law) and Huriben were killed. She also narrated how Ruqaiya’s pajamas were taken off and then one by one the men started “poking her in the lower part with their body”.

· We saw a copy of Medina’s FIR, where the police has charged 5 persons with murder under section 302. Charges of rape have not been included. The FIR uses the colloquial phrase ‘bura kaam’ rather than the specific term ‘rape’. We were also given the case report prepared by the camp leaders. The names of some of the accused are mentioned in the FIR.

GANG RAPE OF 25 YEAR OLD ZARINA: A HUSBAND’S ACCOUNT

HUSSAIN NAGAR, NARODA PATIA, AHMEDABAD. FEBRUARY 28, 2002

It started at 9 am on February 28th. That’s when the mobs arrived, shouting – Mian Bhai nikalo (Bring out the Muslims). Many of them were wearing kesari chaddis (saffron shorts or underwear) The mob included boys from the neighbouring buildings – Gopinath Society and Gangotri Society. I ran out of my house with the entire family – mother, father, sister, sister’s daughter, my wife Zarina, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my niece…there were 11 of us. We all ran towards the Police chowki. The Police said, ‘Go towards Gopinath and Gangotri’. In the melee, I was separated from my wife. What happened to her, she told me later. She tried to escape the mobs by leaping over a wall. But found herself in a cul-de-sac. They gang-raped her, and cut one arm. She was found naked. She was kept in the civil hospital for many days. Now she is recovering with her mother near the Khanpur darwaza.

Source: Naimuddin Ibrahim Sheikh, 30 year old husband of Zarina. Shah-e-Alam Camp, March 27, 2002. His family migrated from Gulbarga in Karnataka in 1971. He was born in Naroda. Naimmudin’s testimony was corroborated by Mumtaz, who was among the women who found Zarina naked in the maidan.

RAPE OF 13 YEAR OLD YASMIN

VILLAGE DELOL, PANCHMAHALS DISTRICT. MARCH 1, 2002

The extended families of Mohammad Bhai and Bhuri Behn – about 20 people – were chased by the mob to the river. Javed and another boy who managed to escape and hide behind a bush saw the mob kill Mohammad Bhai and rape Yasmin. They were about to kill the mother of the other boy who was hiding with him. So he screamed and ran out from behind the bush and was caught. He was made to walk around the dead bodies that were burnt (as if around a pyre) and he was then pushed into the fire.

Source: Women from Delol at Halol Camp, Panchmahals district, March 30, 2002. Javed, Mohammad Bhai’s nephew, had come to Delol to help his uncle. He had narrated this to several of the women from Delol. Javed has returned to his village, Desar.

STRIPPING AND BRUTALISING OF AN ENTIRE FAMILY, LIMKHEDA VILLAGE.

DHEROL STATION, HALOL TALUKA, PANCHMAHALS DISTRICT. FEBRUARY 28, 2002

35 year old Haseena Bibi Yasin Khan Pathan along with her entire extended family of 17 people ran from Limkheda on the morning of February 28th. At 7 am they caught the train from Limkheda Station, disembarked at Dherol Station at 10 am. That’s when they encountered the mob. Every one ran helter-skelter and the family got separated. Haseena, her husband, and young daughter managed to run towards Halol. Two children, Farzana (10 years old) and Sikandar (7 years old) escaped into the fields. Four boys – Ayub, (age 12), Mushtaq, (age 12), Mohsin, (age 10), and Shiraz (age 7) managed to hide behind bushes, and witnessed what happened. There was a large crowd. They were wearing pant-shirt and brandishing swords. According to Ayub, the mob caught his sister Afsana and cousins Zebu, Noorjehan, Sitara, Akbar, Rehana, Yusuf, Imran, Khatun (Aunt) and Zareef (brother). They were all stripped naked and made to run towards a nearby canal. That’s the last Ayub saw of them. The bodies turned up charred near the canal the following day. He doesn’t recognize the mob. No FIR has been lodged.

Source: Ayub, Halol Camp, Panchmahals district. The first part of the testimony is corroborated by his mother, Haseena Bibi.

ACTIVISTS’ EXPERIENCES OF DEALING WITH RAPE survivors

SHAH-E- ALAM RELIEF CAMP, AHMEDABAD.

Naseem and Mahmooda, from nearby Millat Nagar, work with Sahrwaru, a voluntary organization. They are presently working at the Shah Alam camp. They testified that many women arrived stark naked at the camp. Men took off their shirts to cover the women’s nakedness. Some could barely walk because of torn genitals as a result of gang rapes. While talking to them we met Zubeida Apa, an elderly woman who has witnessed girls being gang raped. Her trauma was writ large on her face. We did not dare to rake up her pain by asking her more questions. We were told about Najma Bano who was brought to the camp unconscious, her body covered with bites and nail marks. She was bleeding profusely. Pieces of wood, which had been shoved up her vagina were extricated by the women who dressed her wounds. Najma Bano herself was too traumatized to recount her own story. She says she does not remember anything, except being chased by the men from Gangotri Society. Accounts like these require further follow-up.

Source: Naseem and Mehmooda, Millat Nagar

The following testimonies have been taken from documentation supplied to the fact-finding team by Citizens Initiative, Ahmedabad:

MASS RAPE AND MURDER

NARODA PATIA. FEBRUARY 28, 2002[6]

By now it was 6.30 in the evening. The mob caught my husband and hit him on his head twice with the sword. Then they threw petrol in his eyes and then burned him. My sister-in- law was stripped and raped. She had a three-month old baby in her lap. They threw petrol on her and the child was taken from her lap and thrown in the fire. My brother-in-law was also struck on the head with the sword and thrown in the fire. We were at the time hiding on the terrace of a building. My mother-in-law was unable to climb the stairs so she was on the ground floor with her four-year-old grandson. She told them to take away whatever money she had but to spare the children. They took away all the money and jewelry, then burnt the children with petrol. My mother-in-law was raped too. I witnessed all this. Unmarried girls from my street were stripped, raped and burnt. A 14-year-old girl was killed by piercing an iron rod into her stomach. The mayhem ended at 2.30 am. Then the ambulance came and I sat in it along with bodies of my husband and children. I have injury marks on my both my thighs and left hand, which were caused by the police beating. My husband (48 % burns), my daughter (95 % burns) both died in the hospital after three days. The police was on the spot but they were helping the mob. We fell at their feet but they said they were ordered from above not to help. Since the telephone wires were snapped we could not inform the fire brigade.

Source: Jannat Sheikh, testimony to Citizens Initiative.

BILKEES: ACCOUNT OF A RAPE Survivor

RANDHIKPUR VILLAGE, DISTRICT DAHOD[7]. MARCH 3, 2002

Twenty-one year old Bilkees was five months pregnant. When Muslim houses in her village were attacked on February 28th, by a mob comprising upper caste people from her own village and some outsiders, she and several of her family members fled. For two days they ran from village to village. At a mosque near Kuajher, her cousin Shamim, delivered a baby. But there was no respite for them. They had to leave immediately, including Shamim who could barely walk, carrying her newborn baby.

On March 3rd we had started moving towards Panivela village, which was in a remote and hilly area. Suddenly we heard the sound of a vehicle. A truck came with people from our own village and outsiders too. We realised that they had not come to help us. They stopped us and then the madness started. They pulled my baby from my arms and threw her away. The other women and I were taken aside and raped. I was raped by three men. I was screaming all the time. They beat me and then left me for dead. When I regained consciousness I found I was alone. All around me were the dead bodies of my family, my baby girl, the newborn baby, their bodies were covered with the rocks and boulders used to kill them. I lay there the whole night and most of the next day. I do not know when I was conscious and when unconscious. Later I was found by a police squad from Limkheda police station .I was taken to the hospital and then brought to the Godhra Camp.

Testimony to AIDWA and Anandi

Additional facts about the case:

· Her FIR has been filed and a medical examination done on the insistence of the District collector, Jayanti Ravi, even though six-days had passed. Rape has been confirmed.

· She has named the people who killed her family members and those who raped her: Sailesh Bhatt, Mithesh Bhatt, Vijay Maurya, Pradeep Maurya, Lala Vakil, Lala Doctor, Naresh Maurya, Jaswant Nai and Govind Nai (the last three gang-raped her)

· Initially all her family members were missing. Her father and husband have been traced to another camp at Dahod and her brother, Saeed, is with her in Godhra.

A META-NARRATIVE OF BESTIALITY

“But what they did to my sister-in-law’s sister Kausar Bano was horrific and heinous. She was 9 months pregnant. They cut open her belly, took out her foetus with a sword and threw it into a blazing fire. Then they burnt her as well.”

Source: Saira Banu, Naroda Patia (recorded at the Shah-e-Alam Camp on March 27th, 2002).

During our fact-finding mission, we were to hear this story many times. We read about it in other fact-finding reports. We were told about it by many survivors at the Shah-e-Alam camp. Sometimes the details would vary – the foetus was dashed to the ground, the foetus was slaughtered with a sword, the foetus was swung on the point of the sword and then thrown into a fire. Each teller of the story owned it. It was as if it was their own story. Were these simply the fevered imaginings of traumatized minds? We think not. Kausar’s story has come to embody the numerous experiences of evil that were felt by the Muslims of Naroda Patia on February 28, 2002. In all instances where extreme violence is experienced collectively, meta-narratives are constructed. Each victim is part of the narrative; their experience subsumed by the collective experience. Kausar is that collective experience – a meta-narrative of bestiality; a meta-narrative of helpless victimhood. There are a thousand Kausars.

Members of the fact-finding team have seen photographic evidence of the burnt bodies of a mother and a foetus lying on the mother’s belly, as if torn from the uterus and left on the gash. We do not know if that was Kausar Bano.

B. Sexual Violence and the Media

In many ways women have been the central characters in the Gujarat carnage, and their bodies the battleground. The Gujarati vernacular press has been the agent provocateur. The story starts with Godhra, where out of the 58 Hindus burnt, 26 were women and 14 children. But to really arouse the passions of the Hindu mob, death is not enough. Far worse than death is the rape of Hindu women – for it is in and on the bodies of these women that the izzat (honour) of the community is vested. So on February 28th, Sandesh, a leading Gujarati Daily, in addition to reporting the Godhra tragedy in provocative language, also ran a story on Page 1 saying the following: “10-15 Hindu women were dragged away by a fanatic mob from the railway compartment”. The same story was repeated on Page 16 with the heading “Mob dragged away 8-10 women into the slums”. The story was entirely false. The Police denied the incident, and other newspapers, including the Times of India could not find confirmation of this news. A day later, on March 1, 2002 Sandesh carried a follow-up to this false story on Page 16 with the heading – “Out of kidnapped young ladies from Sabarmati Express, dead bodies of two women recovered – breasts of women were cut off.” [8] Violation of Hindu honour was now compounded by extreme sexual violence and bestiality. Both the abduction and the cutting of breasts were lies – totally baseless stories, which were denied by the Police. The fact-finding team was told that later Sandesh did publish a small retraction, buried in some corner of its pages. But the damage had been done. The murder and rape of Hindu women, emblazoned in banner headlines across the vernacular press became the excuse, the emotional rallying point, the justification for brutalizing Muslim women and children in ways not ever seen in earlier communal carnages. Unhonne hamari auraton aur bachchon par hamla kiya hai. Badla to lena tha (they have attacked our women and children we had to take revenge) – goes the sentiment of the angry Hindu. The newspaper literally became a weapon of war. According to a series of eyewitness accounts from Naroda Patia, the worst affected area in Ahmedabad, the mobs who attacked Muslim shops, homes, and brutalized Muslim women and children, were brandishing in their hands not only swords and stones, but copies of the Sandesh with the Godhra attack as the banner headline, shouting “khoon ka badla khoon” (blood for blood).

This one false story about the rape and brutalizing of Hindu women has spread like wildfire across Gujarat, almost assuming proportions of folklore. It now rests easily in the annals of undisputed common knowledge, and cannot be dislodged. Where ever the fact-finding team went, we heard some version of this story, spreading through word of mouth, through the channels of overworked rumour mills – sometimes it was 10 Hindu women raped, sometimes it was 6 Hindu women – but the essential contours remained the same. In one place we heard details like “The Muslims took the Hindu women to their madrasa and gang-raped them there.” Because the madrasa is the site of learning, raping women there projects the perpetrators as truly bestial men to whom nothing is sacred. In another village, “Hindu women” had been replaced by “Adivasi women” and this was given as the justification for Adivasi participation in the attacks on Muslims.

When the fact-finding team met Aziz Tankarvi, editor of Gujarat Today, known to represent the Muslim voice’ He said clearly. “ Murder ho jata hai, chot lagti hai, to aadmi chup sahan kar leta hai, lekin agar maa, behen, beti ke saath ziyadti hoti hai to voh jawaab dega, badla lega.” (When someone is murdered you are hurt. But man can bear it quietly; it is when your mothers and daughters are violated, then he definitely responds, takes revenge). The fact that rape is perceived in this manner (as violating the honour of men, and not the integrity of women) is problematic in and of itself. What is particularly heinous is the fact that the Sandesh newspaper should fabricate stories of sexual violence, and use images of brutalized women’s bodies as a weapon of war; in terrible ways deliberately designed to provoke real violence against women from the Muslim community. What provocative lies a la Sandesh do, is to provide justification for the carnage – both in the minds of the mobs who carry out the violence, and in the minds of the general “Hindu” public which may be far removed from the site of the violence.

Ironically while false stories about the rape of Hindu women have done the rounds, there has been virtual silence in the media, including in the English language papers, about the real stories of sexual violence against Muslim women. Barring Gujarat Today, none of the Gujarati vernacular papers has carried stories about the brutal, bestial ways in which Muslim women were raped and burnt. Even Gujarat Today, despite being sympathetic to the Muslim experience, could only supply us with one clipping where the brutal experience of rape has been written about. The Times of India, since the beginning of the carnage, until April 1,2002, carried only one story about rape. The excuse was March 8th, International Women’s Day (TOI, 9/3/02, “Women’s Day Means Nothing for Rape Riot Victims”). When members of the fact-finding team spoke to senior journalists in Ahmedabad, their explanation was that rape stories are provocative, and that in the early days of the violence, they had to play a socially responsible role, and not incite more violence. But in the weeks that followed, the Press has continued to do self-censorship about rape stories.[9]

We find that, yet again Muslim women are being victimized twice over. They have suffered the most unimaginable forms of sexual abuse during the Gujarat carnage. And yet, there is no one willing to tell their stories to the world. Women’s bodies have been employed as weapons in this war – either through grotesque image-making or as the site through which to dishonour men, and yet women are being asked to bear all this silently. Women do not want more communal violence. But peace cannot be bought at the expense of the truth, or at the expense of women’s right to tell the world what they have suffered in Gujarat.

SCARS ON THE MIND

Saira age 12, Afsana, age 11, Naina, age 12, Anju, age 12, Rukhsat, age 9, Nilofer, age 10, Nilofer, age 9, Hena, age 11

They’re all survivors from the horrors of Naroda Patia in Ahmedabad where more than 80 people were burnt alive and many women raped and maimed in what is probably the worst carnage in the current spiral of violence. The girls are young and making sense of what they have seen and heard seems impossible. But they have been scarred for life, their trust in Hindus shattered. They speak of ‘evil Hindus’. The Hindu who burnt our home. The Hindu who didn’t let us escape.

Some of them have seen with their eyes things no child should see. Others have only heard things. But they are still things no child should hear. “Hinduon ne bura kaam kiya”(Hindus have done ‘bad things’ – a euphemism for rape), they tell us, as their eyes shift uneasily. They look at each other as if seeking silent affirmation of what none of them really comprehended.

Or, did they?

“Balatkaar” (Rape) – they know this word. “Mein bataoon Didi” (Shall I tell you?), volunteers a nine year old, “Balatkaar ka matlab jab aurat ko nanga karte hain aur phir use jala deta hain.” (Rape is when a woman is stripped naked and then burnt) And then looks fixedly at the floor. Only a child can tell it like it is. For this is what happened again and again in Naroda Patia – women were stripped, raped and burnt. Burning has now become an essential part of the meaning of rape.

Hindus hate us, they say.

Why?

Because we celebrate all their festivals – we play Holi, we love patakas at Diwali, but the Hindus can’t celebrate our festivals. That’s why they’re jealous. So jealous that this year they did not even let us take out Tazia processions (in fact the decision to not allow tazia processions on the 10th of Moharram was taken by the Muslim community itself, for fear of violence).

These girls became friends only in the camp, although they all grew up and lived in Naroda Patia. Now they will probably share a life-long unspoken bond of victim-hood. But they are children still. Resilient. Survivors. Their eyes still bright and curious. They even giggle occasionally, as they follow us around Shah-e-Alam, scampering easily over human beings scattered like debris around the relief camp. But will they ever forget? Will Naina, who once had scores of Hindu friends, have them again? Will she trust again?

Venue: Shah-e-Alam Relief Camp, Ahmedabad

Date: March 27, 2002

Section II

WOMEN’S EXPERIENCES OF THE STATE

A. POLITICAL COMPLICITY

“Arre ye Narendra Modi ne hi sab kuch kiya. Hamara zindagi barbaad kiya.” (That Narendra Modi, he did all this. He is the one who has ruined our lives) This is how the Muslim women of Gujarat see their Chief Minister – as the man who has ruined their lives forever. “Sarkar” (Government)? “What sarkar, they ask?” In the words of countless women who have been devastated by the continuing violence, the State of Gujarat had simply disappeared when they needed it most. The State – including elected representatives, the political executive, the administration, and the police – abdicated its responsibility to protect all its citizens. Far worse, it actively connived in the maiming, raping, and butchering of hundreds of women and children of Gujarat. More than five weeks after the post-Godhra carnage began, no effort is being made to ensure punishment of the guilty. FIRs are not being lodged, compensation not given. The relief camps are running only through the efforts of the Muslim community, with occasional help from the government. Narendra Modi visited the Shah-e-Alam relief camp (among the largest, housing over 10,000 refugees) for the first time when he accompanied the PM on April 4th, 2002.

MAYA KODNANI, BJP MLA

The fact-finding team met Maya Kodnani, the BJP MLA from Naroda Patia, one of the worst affected areas in Ahmedabad. She has also been named in an FIR as having participated in the Naroda Patia carnage on February 28th, 2002.

• She showed no remorse at the State abdicating responsibility. There was nothing the State could do, she says. “There was a natural ghrina (hatred) and aakrosh (anger) in the heart of every Hindu and we could not control it.”

• Maya Kodnani’s estimates of the size of the mobs that attacked Naroda Patia (50,000 to 1 lakh) far exceed the largest estimates given by eyewitnesses to the mob violence. Her claim, therefore, that the Police were “utterly helpless” in the face of this flood of anger, appeared untenable.

• Maya Kodnani found time to visit Ahmedabad Station to receive bodies of the Godhra victims, who are not her constituents. But not once in over a month has she found time to visit the Muslim relief camps, where thousands of her constituents are strewn around like human debris.

• Ms. Kodnani denies even knowing where all her Muslim constituents have fled.

• She also denies any knowledge about the large number of rapes having occurred at Naroda Patia during the mayhem.

• She admitted that only 16 people were arrested in the Naroda Patia incidents, out of which only 5 or 6 remain in jail, while the rest have been released on bail.

• Maya Kodnani claims that this kind of communal violence is part of Gujarat ki prakruti and Gujarat ki taasir. It is a natural part of life, and should be accepted as such.
  
• She dismissed the FIR lodged against her as being false merely because it was filed 18 days after the violence. She claimed that Doordarshan had footage proving that she was elsewhere at the time.

(A detailed account of the conversation with Maya Kodnani is attached in Annexure 2.1)

NATHIBEHN: MAHILA SARPANCH

Another case of State participation in the violence was provided by Laxmipura Village in Khed Brahma Taluka of Sabarkantha District. The fact-finding team visited this village because it had a Mahila Sarpanch, Nathibehn, whose husband and son have been identified as leading the mobs who torched Muslim homes on the evening of February 27th, 2002. .

• Nathibehn was clearly only a puppet Sarpanch. The de-facto Sarpanch was her husband Jitu Bhai Patel.

• Jitu Bhai Patel and his son Ramesh Patel (both members of the local VHP unit) justified the torching of Muslim homes, saying Godhra was the beginning and that Muslims always start everything, never the Hindus. They also claimed that Muslims from almost every village in Gujarat had gone to participate in the Godhra ‘murders’.

• The entire family – Nathibehn, Jitu Bhai, and Ramesh expressed a great deal of hatred for Muslims, and said that Muslims could only live in the village if they followed village tradition i.e. shaved their beards, stopped wearing caps etc.

• Sarpanch Nathibehn denied knowing the whereabouts of the Muslims who have been forced to flee Laxmipura.

(A detailed account of the discussions in Laxmipura is attached as Annexure 2.2)

KESHUBHAI PATEL, SARPANCH

While there are examples of elected representatives actively participating or condoning violence against Muslims, blaming it on an “unstoppable flood of Hindu anger”, the fact-finding team also found evidence that where State actors chose to protect Muslims, they managed to do so successfully. Chithroda Village in Khed Brahma Taluka provides an example. Here the Sarpanch Keshubhai Patel claims that he got anonymous phone calls from mob leaders trying to assess the level of support inside the village for their entry. He refused to allow the mobs to enter his village, or harm the 40 odd Muslim families in any way.

(A detailed account of the discussion with Sarpanch Keshubhai Patel is attached as Annexure 2.3).

The fact-finding team was convinced that mob violence was unleashed only in those areas where the mobs were sure of getting full support from local leaders and the state machinery.

B. ROLE OF THE POLICE

This time round in Gujarat, far more than in previous episodes of communal violence, women have been fair game. Forced out of burning homes, running for their lives on violent streets, they have been targeted not only by rampaging mobs hell bent on hurting every Muslim woman, man and child in sight, but far worse, by the Police, whose job it was to protect them. Just as the mobs sought revenge on behalf of Hindu women (refer previous section on Sexual Violence) so too it appears did the Police. This we have on the word of Gujarat’s Chief Minister – ‘Police are human beings as well’, he said, shortly after the carnage began, ‘and not inured to the sentiments of society’. Everywhere the fact-finding team went, women narrated graphic, first-hand tales of police complicity.

• Several accounts speak of policemen actively aiding, abetting, and in some cases leading the mobs. Video footage seen by the fact-finding team showed slogan’s like, Yeh andar ki baat hai, Police hamare saath hai (The inside story is that the police is on our side) – written boldly on the walls of gutted Muslim homes

• A pattern that was often repeated was that the Police would open fire at the Muslims rather than at the mob, which was attacking them.

• In other cases, the police turned a deaf ear to cries of help, or simply told women, in so many words, that they did not have ‘orders from above’ to help them. Women and children were repeatedly turned away from Police chowkis and stations and told
  to fend for themselves.

• At best, the Police would take a crowd of frightened Muslims and dump them in safer Muslim majority areas. The message was clear – ‘Protecting Muslims is not our responsibility; Other Muslims can look after them’. Muslims were no longer citizens of the state.

• In no instance did the fact-finding team hear of Mahila Police being deployed in areas where women were being brutalized.

• In a vast majority of the cases, FIRs have not been lodged. Several accounts say that the Police simply refuse to lodge the FIR, saying, ‘you don’t have enough evidence, there is no case’.

• Victims of sexual violence do not even have the confidence to approach the Police, let alone walk the long path to evidence gathering, and getting justice. In the words of one Muslim woman, “Yeh to Hinduon ki Police hai” (`This is a Hindu Police’).

• Muslim women surviving in relief camps across the state are not the only ones who dread the Police. Outside the camps, in several Muslim dominated areas in Ahmedabad, they live in forced imprisonment and constant terror of another kind. Curfew has been imposed in these areas, including Millat Nagar, visited by the fact-finding team. Under the guise of ‘combing operations’ the Police are picking up young Muslim boys at random. Mothers live in constant fear.

• In order to protect their men, women are being forced to venture out of their homes for daily chores, and encountering the Police. The fact-finding team heard specific accounts of continuing police atrocities – of women being severely beaten or killed in Police firing.

However, even in its worst moment, there remained in Gujarat isolated pockets of calm where the police and the administration stood firm, giving the lie to the theory that the post-Godhra carnage was an unstoppable case of spontaneous communal combustion. For example, no casualties have been reported from Panchmahals District since March 5th, including in Godhra town where the spiral of violence first started and which has a long history of communal tension. The fact-finding team believes that this is in large part due to the sincere efforts of the District Collector Jayanti Ravi in ensuring that law and order is maintained.

WOMEN’S TESTIMONIES OF THE ROLE OF the STATE

Shabnam, Resident of Vatva, Ahmedabad

Date of incident: March 1, 2002

Shabnam, 23, recounted the events of the afternoon of March 1: “The mob arrived, armed with trishuls and swords, shouting – Miya ne maro, Miya ne kato. (Kill the Muslims!). Some of them started pelting stones. We were 50 odd people, they were a few thousand. As we ran for our lives, the police blocked our escape, chasing us in the direction of the mob `Chalo maar do saalo ko’ (Kill the bastards!), they shouted. This is the first time this has happened here. Where can we go? What is to become of us?”

(Qutb-e-Alam Dargah Relief Camp, Vatva, Ahmedabad. March 27, 2002)

Saira Bano, Resident of Khed Brahma town, Sabarkantha.

Date of Incident: February 28, 2002

It was 9:30 in the morning when the attack started. A large crowd came at us. They were all our neighbours. I recognize each one of them – I know the castes: Bhatt, Vaghri, Prajapat. We ran to the Police Station. The Police gave us shelter, but said that they could not protect us for long. They put us in dabba gaadis (police box-cars) and packed us off into the care of local Muslim leaders in Vadali. That’s how we landed up at the relief camp.

(Vadali Relief Camp, March 28th, 2002)

Kulsum Bibi and Jannat Bibi, Residents of Jawan Nagar, Naroda Patia, Ahmedabad.

Date of incident: February 28, 2002

The day began like any other. We were all drinking tea when we heard that the (local) masjid had been attacked. The men and boys went out to see what was happening. They were confronted by a crowd of several thousands, armed with trishuls and swords. Some of the swords had Bajrang Dal written on it. They were wearing khakhi shorts. Some were carrying petrol. This we now know they had got from nearby Bipin Auto. The owner is a Bajrang Dal agyavan (leader). The trucks that had brought these men were stacked with gas cylinders…Suddenly the police fired. Some of our men were killed in the firing. The women and children started fleeing. Our colony is sandwiched between the State Reserve Police (SRP) Colony, the State Transport workshop and the Hindu housing societies- Gopinath and Gangotri. We all rushed towards the SRP Colony. We were not allowed inside. We begged but the gates remained shut. We kept running back and forth like caged animals. Then there was a lathi charge. Many of us got hit. We heard the police say things like – yeh aap logon ka aakhri din hai – (this is your last day).

(Shah-e-Alam Relief camp, Ahmedabad. March 27, 2002)

Saira Bano, Resident Navapura, Vatva, Ahmedabad

The maidan was full of thousands of trishul and sword wielding men. I have never seen so many people. Everyone was panicking. We lost all hope when the police came with the crowd. When we pleaded with the police that they were meant to protect everyone, they told us- “Tum lad lo. Jitni takat hain mukabala kar lo”. (You fight them with whatever strength you have.)

(Qutb-e-Alam Relief Camp, Vatva, Ahmedabad. March 27, 2002)

Saira Bano, Resident Hussain Nagar, Naroda Patia, Ahmedabad

Date of Incident: February 28, 2002

Saira used to live in Hussain Nagar Chali in Naroda Patia. She is now at the camp with her 3 children. “I heard girls screaming. I saw a naked girl running with 25 men chasing her. The sweet shop owner was distributing sweets to the rioters. The police fired on the Muslims rather than the mob”. She said that women were beaten with sticks. She saw her husband being killed in the police firing. She was hiding on the terrace of someone’s house. “At least I saw him die. There are many women here who don’t know what has happened to their husbands. Are they widows or not? Should they mourn or not?”

(Shah-e-Alam Relief Camp, Ahmedabad. March 27, 2002)

Nagori Bibi, Resident Khed Brahma near State Transport bus stand, Sabarkantha District.

Date of incident: February 28, 2002

The tension escalated and the mob (which she estimated as being over 2000) started throwing stones. By about 12 noon about 50 -60 people were taking refuge in her house. 25 of these people belonged to her extended family. Her brother-in-law then phoned the police to be told – “We neither have the time nor the staff. We can’t come”. They then phoned Amanullah Khan the local Muslim leader and also a member of the Congress. It was only after he put pressure on the police that they came.

(Vadali Relief Camp, Sabarkantha. March 28, 2002)

Shamshad Bibi, Resident Khed Brahma (near dargah), Sabarkantha.

Date of incident: February 28, 2002.

On February 27th when my sons went to the dargah they heard rumours that a dhamal (incident) was about to take place. There were other rumours of impending tension. 4 families slept at the dargah that night. In fact 2 policemen were posted outside. “Now when I look back the police had come around asking questions about the Muslim residents, like how much cattle we possessed.” One policeman asked – “Mutton vutton milega kya?” Nothing happened that night. I was cooking lunch the next day when the mobs came shouting – Maro, Maro (Kill! Kill!) They were carrying trishuls. We ran. We had to cross the river, which is dry. Finally we reached the dargah. I found many other Muslims there. About 300 to 400 of us were cramped into a room. Then they came and set fire to the dargah wall. The police was around but did not stop the crowd. In fact we could hear them shouting looto! All we could do was pray. The police squad finally came and took us to the Police Station. We could hear them talking on the wireless – sab tod diya, phod diya. (everything is broken, destroyed) Then suddenly we were told – chale jao nahin to police station ko jala denge. (Go from here or they will burn down the police station)

(Vadali Relief Camp. Sabarkantha. March 28, 2002)

Farzana: Resident of Vatva, Ahmedabad (Story narrated by her sister-in-law Naim)

Date of Incident: March 20, 2002.

Farzana, 25, lived behind the Dargah. She was shot dead by the police on the 20th of March. Her family members said: “First, we heard a commotion outside. Then we noticed a pall of smoke. As we came out into the courtyard to check what was happening, the police fired indiscriminately, killing Farzana. There were no men around as they had all gone to read the namaaz”. Among the policemen identified by the residents of the area are SP KC Patel, PSI Baluch, PSI Siddiq Sheikh and PI Singh. “The Hindu mobs were gathering near Ashopalo housing society, some distance away. Par Police ne wahan nahin, hamare par hi attack kar diya. (But instead of going there, the Police came here and started firing). In the same shooting spree a young man Sikandar, 20, was killed. Six others, including Mumtaz Bano, were wounded. She is a polio victim. Her neighbours are bewildered. “Why shoot at a handicapped girl? Poor thing had one bad leg, now she has two damaged legs.” Farzana’s older sister, Shahnaz Bano, was lathi charged when she came out to save her sister. Shahnaz is angry and bitter. “How can they enter our homes and kill us. We only ask for one thing – insaaf”

We saw the bullet holes in the wall and the memorial they had made for Farzana. A crumpled dupatta marks the spot in the courtyard where Farzana first fell. An aluminium pot covers the spot where she died.

(Vatva, Ahmedabad. March 27, 2002)

Naseem and Ameena, Residents of Bahar Colony (an upper middle class colony) Vadodora

Date of Incident: March 17, 2002

When the fact-finding team arrived there shortly before noon, the road was deserted since the area was under curfew. Only women were allowed to venture out in the day. On the main road we were met by one of the residents, Naseem. She told us of the events of March 17.

The mob came at 11 PM but could not enter the colony because of police patrolling. Then they retuned at 3 PM the next day. First, they blasted a godown. Then they began to burn the few `jhonpar pattis’ (slum dwellings) nearby. These were owned by some Hindu families who had already been evacuated. Suddenly police jeeps were seen. 200-300 women tried to stop the police jeeps. It is alleged that the police just went ahead saying `Ab to yahan aisa chalay ga!’ (From now on, this is the way it will go here).Then they returned and started firing during which one bystander was shot. Since the women were outside on the road, the police started beating them with lathis to herd them inside. Amina Haroon Memon was one such woman.

Amina took us aside, removed her shalwar and showed the laceration mark from the police danda. ‘They hit me even as I was trying to get back inside my house. And such filthy gaalis. We went out to call the police because if our boys would have gone they would have forcibly taken them away. Even if I die it does not matter. I am forty plus. But not the young boys, they have a life ahead. The people who come they have ‘sadhan’ (arms) we have nothing.’

(Vadodra. March 28, 2002)

Testimonies of Continuing Fear, Ajwa Road, Vadodara

This is a Muslim area consisting of several 8 or 9 storey buildings. We went into the house of Daud Shaikh where about 20 women had collected. First they told us about the Best Bakery massacre which has been recorded in detail by Sahiyar, an NGO working in Vadodara. Maimuna Shaikh told us that they were running a Chinese fast food business but everything is at a standstill for the past month. Maimuna’s daughter-in-law Farhana, an outspoken young woman, spoke to us about the daily harassment. ‘The mobs come on motorcycles. We can’t recognize them because of the helmets. They threaten us. At night they clang the thalis, clang the electricity poles, whistle. We have not slept for one month, so acute is the tension. When the ‘tola’ (mob) comes the Police are at the vanguard. Maimuna’s young son was picked up by the Police. Zehra, who was 3 months pregnant had gone out with the women to plead with the Police not to take him away. She showed us the spot where she was hit with a Police danda (stick).

(Vadodara, March 28th, 2002)

Testimonies of women whose young sons have been picked up in combing operations, Millat Nagar, Ahmedabad.

There is curfew in the area. As a result, daily wage earners, small shop owners, vendors, tailors, butchers have all been unemployed for over a month. Adding to this forced imprisonment, and virtual destitution is the atmosphere of terror – because the Police have started ‘combing operations’ in Muslim dominated areas, picking up young Muslim boys at random. So acute is this fear of the Police that even for small tasks to be done outside the home women venture out more rather than men. No one knows why and under what charge these young men are being arrested.

The fact-finding team met 5 mothers in Millat Nagar, in the offices of Sahrwaru, an NGO, which has been working in the area for several years. Their sons were picked up by the police during a combing operation on March 21st, 2002- Bugo Bibi’s son Akeel Khan, age 22; Badla Bibi’s son, Arif, age 20; Noorjehan’s son Saleem, age 25; Abida’s son Imran, age 18; Ammu Bibi’s son, Feroz Khan, age 20. The families do not know what the charges are. All that the distraught mothers can say is “Combing mein le gaye mere bete ko” (They took away my son in combing). They weep all the time, dying a thousand deaths a day not knowing if their son’s are alive or not. Every day they come to the Sahrwaru office trying to find ways to get a bail hearing for their sons. Life, said one, means – “Na din ko neend, na raat ko. Na rozi, na roti, na chain”. ( No sleep during the day or night. No income, no food, no peace) That’s life in Gujarat today if you are the mother of a young Muslim boy.

(Sahrwaru Office, Millat Nagar, March 27th, 2002)

A COMMON MAN’S IMPRESSION

Shankar our driver for one day felt that the attacks on Muslims were justified because of Godhra. However, he was equally clear that it had all been possible because the Government and Police had been on the side of the Hindus and that it was an organized attack. “Hindu sarkar hain to Hinduon ki madad karenge.” (It is a Hindu government so naturally they will help the Hindus). On the role of the police he said – “ Police ko jaan bujh kar shaant jagah mein bhej diya.” (They knowingly deployed the police in the relatively peaceful areas). On the behaviour of the police – “jahan tola tha vahan police bachke nikle.” (Where there were mobs the police carefully avoided those areas).

Shankar, Resident of Chamunda bridge area, Ahmedabad

A MEETING WITH POLICE SUB-INSPECTOR PATIL, INCHARGE OF KALOL POLICE STATION,

KALOL TALUKA, PANCHMAHALS DISTRICT, MARCH 30, 2002

PSI Patil and DySP Parmar had both been named by Muslims in Kalol as having led the mobs who burnt and looted. Jamadar Uday Singh, Badge # 1272 was identified as having started burning a Muslim owned vehicle. Kalol has one of the highest death tolls in Panchmahals (26 dead: 23 Muslims and 3 Hindus). The taluka has also reported extreme brutality against women (Ref: Sultani’s testimony in Section 1 on Sexual Violence).

As the interview progressed, PSI Patil’s initially confident attitude was replaced by suspicion and defensiveness. He was also joined by other policemen, including a policewoman. She said that during this period she was always in the office and had not been assigned “field duty”. PSI Patil denied playing any role in the violence. And to prove his impartiality he kept mentioning an incident where he saved 15 Muslims from a crowd of over 4000 near Jethral station. He also justified the high death toll by stating that the situation could not be controlled as it was a natural reaction to Godhra. 4 karsevaks who died on the Sabarmati express were from Kalol taluka, from nearby Bhadroli village. Among the dead were a mother and child. This image had a deep impact on the people and they reacted. The extent of outpouring was such that the police could have done nothing. They had not anticipated this therefore there was inadequate “bandobast”.

When told that many victims claim they are being refused the right to lodge FIRs, he hotly denied this, and said, proudly that Kalol Station had lodged 13 FIRs. We asked for details of these FIRs. Closer examination revealed that only 6 FIRs had been lodged by victims. 7 FIRs had been lodged by the State with Patil himself as the complainant. The State FIRs were an eyewash – since the accused in each FIR was simply written as ‘tola’ (mob). Obviously not a single arrest has been made in these State FIRs. We examined the other 6 FIRs:

1. Complainant: Medina Bibi, Eral. Out of the 39 named as accused, only 13 have been arrested

2. Complainant: Arvind Bhai Parmar. Out of 5 Muslims accused, all have been arrested.

3. Complainant: Ilyas. No arrests

4. Complainant: Ahmed Haji Mohammed: Out of 10 named as accused, none have been arrested.

5. Complainant: Shiraz Abdul: 4 arrests

6. Musa Bhai Sheikh: Out of 2 accused, none have been arrested.

One Muslim died and 3-4 were injured when the Police fired to control a volatile situation that arose when 3 Hindus were stabbed on the 27 of February. The firing was done by Dy SP Parmar, who many testified as having seen leading the mobs. However, when the firing was against large Hindu mobs there were no deaths. We asked PSI Patil how was it possible that when firing at a large mob, the Police did not manage to injure even a single person? He smiled and said Yeh to chance ki baat hai (It’s all a matter of chance).

There is a clearly a long road ahead to justice, rehabilitation and recovery for the victims of Gujarat. The fact-finding team tried to meet Mr. Kumaraswami, who is in charge of the Human Rights Cell in the office of the DG Police. Although too busy to meet the team because of the PM’s impending visit, he agreed to a phone interview. He was asked to comment on the charge made by almost every victim met by the team that the Police was aiding, abetting and colluding with the looting and marauding mobs – what action was being taken on these charges? What action was the Human Rights Cell proposing on the evidence of several cases of rape? What, according to him, should have been the role of the Mahila Police, in preventing sexual violence?. Mr. Kumaraswami’s responses were that he was simply a part of the DG’s office, working as a bridge between the NHRC and the DG. His office merely laid down the policy about women police, and about other human rights aspects. Since he was not a field officer he did not have answers for the rest of the questions.

The fact-finding team was concerned that with the total collapse of the State machinery in Gujarat, there was no alternative institutional mechanism in Gujarat through which women could seek justice. Gujarat does not have a State Commission for Women, and until the writing of this report, the National Commission for Women had chosen not to visit the State.

India sabatoge in Pakistan according to Christine Fair

I think it would be a mistake to completely disregard Pakistan’s regional perceptions due to doubts about Indian competence in executing covert operations. That misses the point entirely. And I think it is unfair to dismiss the notion that Pakistan’s apprehensions about Afghanistan stem in part from its security competition with India. Having visited the Indian mission in Zahedan, Iran, I can assure you they are not issuing visas as the main activity! Moreover, India has run operations from its mission in Mazar (through which it supported the Northern Alliance) and is likely doing so from the other consulates it has reopened in Jalalabad and Qandahar along the border. Indian officials have told me privately that they are pumping money into Baluchistan. Kabul has encouraged India to engage in provocative activities such as using the Border Roads Organization to build sensitive parts of the Ring Road and use the Indo-Tibetan police force for security. It is also building schools on a sensitive part of the border in Kunar–across from Bajaur. Kabul’s motivations for encouraging these activities are as obvious as India’s interest in engaging in them. Even if by some act of miraculous diplomacy the territorial issues were to be resolved, Pakistan would remain an insecure state. Given the realities of the subcontinent (e.g., India’s rise and its more effective foreign relations with all of Pakistan’s near and far neighbors), these fears are bound to grow, not lessen. This suggests that without some means of compelling Pakistan to abandon its reliance upon militancy, it will become ever more interested in using it — and the militants will likely continue to proliferate beyond Pakistan’s control.

Here’s another, similar view of India’s involvement with the Taliban to foment trouble in Pakistan as seen by Laura Rozen in her article in Foreign Policy Magazine:

The former (American) intelligence official strongly supported the regional approach to Afghanistan suggested by US special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke. “Afghanistan is a classic power vacuum,” the former official said. “Neighbors see it as point of instability to guarantee their own stability or an opportunity to score points.”

While the U.S. media has frequently reported on Pakistani ties to jihadi elements launching attacks in Afghanistan, it has less often mentioned that India supports insurgent forces attacking Pakistan, the former intelligence official said. “The Indians are up to their necks in supporting the Taliban against the Pakistani government in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” the former (US) intelligence official who served in both countries said. “The same anti-Pakistani forces in Afghanistan also shooting at American soldiers are getting support from India. India should close its diplomatic establishments in Afghanistan and get the Christ out of there.”

“None of this is ever one-sided,” he added. “That is why it was so devastating and we were so let down” when India got taken out of Holbrooke’s official brief.

RAW terrorism

he Cabinet Secretariat Research and Analysis Wing [RAW], India’s most powerful intelligence agency, is India ‘ s external intelligence agency. RAW has become an effective instrument of India ‘ s national power, and has assumed a significant role in formulating India’s domestic and foreign policies. RAW has engaged in disinformation campaigns, espionage and sabotage against Pakistan and other neighboring countries. RAW has enjoyed the backing of successive Indian governments in these efforts. Working directly under the Prime Minister, the structure, rank, pay and perks of the Research & Analysis Wing are kept secret from Parliament. Terrorist activities in Pakistan attributed to the clandestine activities of Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies include: A car bomb explosion in Saddar area of Peshawar on 21 December 1995 caused the deaths of 37 persons and injured over 50 others. An explosion at Shaukat Khanum Hospital on 14 April 1996, claimed the lives of seven persons and injured to over 34 others. A bus traveling from Lahore to Sahiwal was blown up at Bhai Pheru on 28 April 1996, causing the deaths of 44 persons on the spot and injuring 30 others. An explosion in a bus near the Sheikhupura hospital killed 9 persons and injured 29 others on 08 May 1996. An explosion near Alam Chowk, Gujranwala on 10 June 1996 killed 3 persons and injured 11 others.

A bomb exploded on a bus on GT Road near Kharian on 10 June 1996, killing 2 persons and injuring 10 others. On 27 June 1996, an explosion opposite Madrassah Faizul Islam, Faizabad, Rawalpindi , killed 5 persons and injured over 50 others. A bomb explosion in the Faisalabad railway station passenger lounge on 08 July 1996 killed 3 persons and injured 20 others. RAW executed a hijacking of an Indian Airliner to Lahore in 1971 which was attributed to the Kashmiris, to give a terrorist dimension to the Kashmiri national movement. However, soon the extent of RAW’s involvement was made public. Current policy debates in India have generally failed to focus on the relative priority given by RAW to activities directed against India’s neighbours versus attention to domestic affairs to safeguard India ‘ s security and territorial integrity. The RAW has had limited success in dealing with separatist movements in Manipur and Tripura in the northeast, Tamil Nadu in the south, and Punjab and Kashmir in the northwestern part of the country. Indian sources allege the CIA has penetrated freedom fighters in Kashmir and started activities in Kerala, Karnataka, and other places, along with conducting economic and industrial espionage activities in New Delhi.

In 1968 India established this special branch of its intelligence service specifically targeted on Pakistan . The formation of RAW was based on the belief that Pakistan was supplying weapons to Sikh terrorists, and providing shelter and training to the guerrillas in Pakistan. Pakistan has accused the Research and Analysis Wing of sponsoring sabotage in Punjab, where RAW is alleged to have supported the Seraiki movement, providing financial support to promote its activities in Pakistan and organizing an International Seraiki Conference in Delhi in November-December 1993. RAW has an extensive network of agents and anti-government elements within Pakistan, including dissident elements from various sectarian and ethnic groups of Sindh and Punjab . Published reports allege that as many as 35,000 RAW agents have entered Pakistan between 1983-93, with 12,000 are working in Sindh, 10000 in Punjab, 8000 in North West Frontier Province and 5000 in Balochistan. As many as 40 terrorist training camps at Rajasthan, East Punjab, Held Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh and other parts of India are run by the RAW ‘ s Special Service Bureau (SSB).

Throughout the Afghan War, RAW was responsible for the planning and execution of terrorist activities in Pakistan to deter Pakistan from support of Afghan liberation movement against India ‘ s ally, the Soviet Union . The assistance provided to RAW by the KGB enabled RAW to arrange terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities throughout the Afghan War. The defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan did not end the role of RAW in Pakistan, with reports that suggest that India has established a training camp in the town of Qadian , in East Punjab , where non-Muslim Pakistanis are trained for terrorist activities. Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has blamed India for funding the current upsurge of terrorism in Pakistan, and senior ministers have blamed the Research and Analysis Wing for the sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis which has resulted in thousands of deaths every year.

Terrorist activities in Pakistan attributed to the clandestine activities of Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies include: A car bomb explosion in Saddar area of Peshawar on 21 December 1995 caused the deaths of 37 persons and injured over 50 others. An explosion at Shaukat Khanum Hospital on 14 April 1996, claimed the lives of seven persons and injured to over 34 others. A bus traveling from Lahore to Sahiwal was blown up at Bhai Pheru on 28 April 1996, causing the deaths of 44 persons on the spot and injuring 30 others. An explosion in a bus near the Sheikhupura hospital killed 9 persons and injured 29 others on 08 May 1996. An explosion near Alam chowk, Gujranwala on 10 June 1996 killed 3 persons and injured 11 others. A bomb exploded on a bus on GT Road near Kharian on 10 June 1996, killing 2 persons and injuring 10 others. On 27 June 1996, an explosion opposite Madrassah Faizul Islam, Faizabad, Rawalpindi , killed 5 persons and injured over 50 others. A bomb explosion in the Faisalabad railway station passenger lounge on 08 July 1996 killed 3 persons and injured 20 others. RAW executed a hijacking of an Indian Airliner to Lahore in 1971 which was attributed to the Kashmiris, to give a terrorist dimension to the Kashmiri national movement. However, soon the extent of RAW’s involvement was made public. RAW has a long history of activity in Bangladesh, supporting both secular forces and the area ‘ s Hindu minority.

The involvement of RAW in East Pakistan is said to date from the 1960s, when RAW promoted dissatisfaction against Pakistan in East Pakistan, including funding Mujibur Rahman’s general election in 1970 and providing training and arming the Mukti Bahini. During the course of its investigation the Jain Commission received testimony on the official Indian support to the various Sri Lankan Tamil armed groups in Tamil Nadu. From 1981, RAW and the Intelligence Bureau established a network of as many as 30 training bases for these groups in India. Centers were also established at the high-security military installation of Chakrata, near Dehra Dun, and in the Ramakrishna Puram area of New Delhi . This clandestine support to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), some of whom were on the payroll of RAW, was later suspended. Starting in late 1986 the Research and Analysis Wing focused surveillance on the LTTE which was expanding ties with Tamil Nadu separatist groups. Rajiv Gandhi sought to establish good relations with the LTTE, even after the Indian peacekeeping Force [IPKF] experience in Sri Lanka. But the Indian intelligence community failed to accurately assess the character of the LTTE and its orientation India and its political leaders.

The LTTE assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was apparently motivated by fears of a possible re-induction of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in Sri Lanka and a crackdown on the LTTE network in Tamil Nadu. The RAW and the Ministry of External Affairs are provided Rs 25 crore annually as “discretionary grants” for foreign influence operations. These funds have supported organisations fighting Sikh and Kashmiri separatists in the UK, Canada and the US. An extensive network of Indian operatives is controlled by the Indian Embassy in Washington DC. The Indian embassy ‘ s covert activities are reported to include the infiltration of US long distance telephone carriers by Indian operatives, with access to all kinds of information, to r blackmail relatives of US residents living in India . In 1996 an Indian diplomat was implicated in a scandal over illegal funding of political candidates in the US . Under US law foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal elections. The US District Court in Baltimore sentenced Lalit H Gadhia, a naturalised US citizen of Indian origin, to three months imprisonment. Gadhia had confessed that he worked as a conduit between the Indian Embassy and various Indian-American organisations for funnelling campaign contributions to influence US lawmakers.

Over $46,000 from the Indian Embassy was distributed among 20 Congressional candidates. The source of the cash used by Gadhia was Devendra Singh, a RAW official assigned to the Indian Embassy in Washington. Illicit campaign money received in 1995 went to Democratic candidates including Sens. Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), Paul S Sarbanes (D -Md.) and Reps. Benjamin L Cardin (D-Md.) and Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.).

The cover off the raw facts about RAW in SOUTH ASIA

The publication of the Jain Commission Report for the Indian Government has confirmed what many in South Asia had suspected all along: That Indian intelligence services Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) has been fomenting violent destabilisation within the domestic polities of the South Asian states. This helps to explain why dissenting political movements in countries like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Pakistan – as well as in the other South Asian states – suddenly became more militant and violent in their political behaviour. Why did India feel the need to get into this form of activity within its neighbouring states? The answer to that question lies in understanding India’s power ambitions.

Seeking regional hegemony and recognition as a major global actor since independence, India initially relied on military force to expand its borders as well as intimidate its neighbours into accepting Indian diktat. India’s military moves into Kashmir and Goa emboldened it enough to get embroiled in a military encounter with China in 1962. The ensuing defeat at the hands of the Chinese as well as the stalemated war with Pakistan in 1965 made India rethink its overt military tactics in order to assert its hegemony regionally.

Thus it shifted its focus vis-a-vis South Asian states and China (as reflected in the refuge given to the Tibetan dissidents and the Dalai Lama) to covert interventions aimed at destabilising the domestic polities of its neighbours. It was for this purpose that RAW was created in 1968. The extent of RAW terrorist activities in neighbouring South Asian states is only now formally coming to light with the publication of the Jain Commission Report which establishes a clear link between the Indian government and the LTTE terrorists in Sri Lanka which eventually led to the murder of Rajiv Gandhi.

However, RAW began its activities much earlier in what was then East Pakistan. The short-sightedness and neglect of Bengali sensitivities by successive Pakistani governments since independence provided the perfect milieu for RAW to lay the seeds for wrecking Pakistan from within .

Bangladesh: RAW facts

The Indians played upon Bengali sentiments in the aftermath of the 1965 Pakistan-India war through RAW so that when opportunity struck the Indians were well-prepared. It was RAW that gradually converted Sheikh Mujibur Rehman from being a staunch supporter of Pakistan as a student leader to envisaging himself as the possible ‘Father’ of a new nation – Bangladesh. Indian sources, including journalists, have put on record how much before 1971 RAW had established the network of a separatist movement through ‘cells’ within East Pakistan and military training camps in Indian territory adjoining East Pakistan. The Mukti Bahini were all in place organisationally to take advantage of the political trouble in 1971 and carry out acts of sabotage against communication lines so that Indian forces simply marched in at the ‘right’ time. RAW agents provided valuable information as well as acting as an advance guard for conducting unconventional guerrilla acts against the Pakistani defence forces. A Bengali, who was a Mukti Bahini activist, Zainal Abedin, has written a revealing book which includes his personal experience in Indian training camps, entitled RAW and Bangladesh. It was the post-fall of Dhaka period which exposed the Indians’ true intentions and made Abedin realise that It was evident from the conduct of the Indian Army that they treated Bangladesh as a colony … It is now evident that India had helped the creation of Bangladesh with the aim that it would be a step forward towards the reunification of India.

Because Mujib returned, Indian forces could not remain in Bangladesh permanently and so it fell on RAW to initiate other fronts to undermine the sovereignty of Bangladesh. RAW has since been seeking to create Indian dominance culturally, ideologically and economically in Bangladesh.

In addition, RAW has also created another insurgency force: The Shanti Bahini (Fighters for Peace). This force comprises the Chittagong Hill Tracts Hindu and Buddhists tribesmen (the Chakmas) and the intention is to bleed the Bengali military and keep the border area tense. The Chakmas used to embarrass the Bangladesh government especially when the latter protested over Indian policy on the sharing of waters’ issue.

Sri Lanka: RAW facts

Up to the mid-seventies the Sri Lankan government had kept India happy by following policies which followed the Indian line – domestically and externally. The trouble began in 1977 when the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) lost power to the Jayewardene-led United National Party in elections. He moved towards a more cooperative policy with the United States and Sri Lanka chose to oppose the Indian demand for the withdrawal of all foreign naval forces from the Indian Ocean. Mrs. Gandhi had already been irked by Sri Lanka’s support to Pakistan during the 1971 war when it allowed landing and fuelling facilities to Pakistan’s East-West commercial flights. So RAW saw a perfect opportunity to exploit within the prevailing dispute between the Sinhalese majority (74 percent) and Tamil minority (14 percent) over distribution of economic and social spoils of independence. Before the two sides could work out a compromise, India, through its RAW, managed to polarise the two sides as well as militarise this essentially political conflict. On the Mukti Bahini model, RAW built up terrorist training camps in India for a number of Tamil terrorist organisations, while India suddenly began orchestrating a public campaign feigning concern because of the links the Tamils had with the 50 million Indian Tamils of Tamil Nadu state – which was separated from Sri Lanka by the Palk Straits. It was only a matter of time before the militants trained in India began sidelining the moderate Tamils and instead demanding complete independence – Ealam. Ironically, the presence of Tamil training camps in Tamil Nadu often created a law and order situation when large arms were captured by the state police. The surprise for the state government came when New Delhi ordered that such captured material be returned.

According to Rohan Gunaratna, in his book Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, RAW waged a secret war in India beginning 1983 so that when the Sri Lankan armed forces launched a major offensive against the Tamil militancy in 1987, the Indian government had already ensured that the Tamils were well supplied and were able to conduct terrorist acts that brought the war closer to Colombo. Tamil Nadu had become the sanctuary for the Tamil terrorists in their hit-and-run tactics. Already, a year prior to this offensive, that is by 1986, there were over 20,000 Indian trained and financed Tamils and India forced Sri Lanka through this militant pressure to alter its foreign policy. But even more crucial, India by now was systematically destabilising Sri Lanka. Being unable to resist the temptation to now intervene directly, India used the Sri Lankan offensive against the Tamil terrorists to force Sri Lanka to accept India’s armed intervention ostensibly to save ‘ innocent Tamil civilians’. Unfortunately for India, the controversial Indo-Sri Lankan Accord of July 1987 proved to be as much of a failure as India’s policy of direct intervention. The result was India’s massively assisted LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) turned on its benefactor and declared war against the Indian forces in Sri Lanka. All in all, this Indian adventure killed 60,000 men, women and children and forced the Indians to withdraw their forces without successfully completing their mission. The price has been steep for both India and Sri Lanka and even today Sri Lanka is paying the price for this Indian-initiated and RAW inspired polarised conflict. The extent of RAW’s role in this affair has been painstakingly documented by Gunaratna in his book on the Indian intervention.

Bhutan, Nepal & Sikkim: RAW facts

The ethnic crisis in Bhutan led by people of Nepalese origin is also said to have been aggravated by RAW – to try and turn the political crisis to India’s advantage.

In Nepal India has consistently intervened in the politics of this Hindu kingdom by promoting pro-India politicians. The economic dependence of this land-locked state on India makes it very difficult for any Nepalese government to assert its sovereignty. Whenever an attempt has been made, the Indians have reacted violently. Presently, the RAW is pushing its pro-India politicians to push for official recognition of Hindi.

As for Sikkim, despite the 1950 agreement between this tiny state and India which allowed for Sikkim’s nominal independence, India, through RAW, began encouraging various groups to oppose the Chogyal (the dynastic head of state). When the Chogyal married an American, India was able to use the anti-CIA card to eventually push the Sikkim National Assembly into ‘requesting’ India for merger of Sikkim into the Indian Union – after an Indian-engineered referendum on this subject. And India ‘eventually’ decided to accept this request in April 1975.

The Maldives

Even as the Indian forces were bogged down in the Sri Lankan quagmire, RAW created a bizarre drama in The Maldives. Terrorists belonging to the RAW-funded Eelam Peoples Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF) staged an attack on Male ostensibly in an effort to use The Maldives as a base for anti-Sri Lankan action. The whole drama ended when, within 24 hours, Indian troops arrived on the ‘request’ of Maldives’ president and captured – effortlessly – the EPRLF personnel. However, no one at home or abroad was deceived by this RAW engineered drama.

While the Jain Commission Report and several publications have reaffirmed Indian intelligence services Research and Analysis Wing’s (RAW) violent interventions within the domestic politics of Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, there has been, surprisingly, no comprehensive publication dealing with what is the most extensive canvas of RAW operations – Pakistan. Yet it has been in Pakistan that RAW has, over the years, exploited societal conflicts and nurtured them into full-fledged violent polarisations.

Pakistan: RAW facts

RAW used the growing disaffection of the Bengalis in East Pakistan to build up the foundations of Bengali separatism. It lay the ground for the Indian military entry into what was then East Pakistan by building up, training and arming the Mukti Bahini. RAW’s failure lay in being unable to lead the Mukti Bahini and the Bengalis to the ‘natural’ conclusion of their struggle against Pakistan – as planned by India – that was a union with India. Instead, perhaps RAW overkill helped the Bangladeshis into seeking a gradual distancing from India so that in the end the creation of Bangladesh only helped to reassert the relevance of the Two-Nation Theory. This has not prevented RAW from focussing its activities in Pakistan – keeping a careful eye on all developments within Pakistan’s domestic polity. In Pakistan RAW has had a multi-pronged strategy using the Indian media, abetting political subversion and actively developing a terrorist network which becomes operationalised within Pakistan as and when RAW feels the time appropriate. That is why there has been a gradual transformation of simple political dissent into a violent form of political polarisation and subversion.

That the opportunities have been provided by the local political machinations cannot be denied – but RAW has been quick to take advantage and introduce an ever-spiralling element of violence within the political discourse and conflict that prevails in all the South Asian countries.

So the fringe minority elements within the Pakistani polity have found themselves receiving RAW largesse which has allowed them to build up their militant resources. RAW has insidiously played the tune of a ‘common subcontinental heritage’ despite the fact that, barring the period of British colonialism there never was a ‘united India’ except in the minds and dreams of Hindu chauvinists. RAW has of course varied its tactics keeping in mind the groups it was seeking to bolster or influence.

Before the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan altered the dynamics of the whole Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship, RAW sought to nurture the Pakhtunistan issue clandestinely even as the Indian government sought to overtly cosy up to certain members of the political elite in the NWFP.

When RAW saw an opportunity in Balochistan in the form of Baloch discontentment – especially in the face of ZA Bhutto’s dismissal of the elected government of that province – it moved in fast to play up the issue of Punjabi dominance. While the Baloch insurgency may have had indigenous roots, it was nurtured and sustained with external aid and assistance and RAW’s trademark was clearly evident through the Afghan route.

While the Pakhtunistan issue gradually faded away with the altered realities on the ground and the Baloch insurgency was isolated and put down, a more serious crisis was brewing for Pakistan when General Zia imposed Martial Law and then hanged ZA Bhutto, who came from Sindh. The Sindhi distress at this act was seen by RAW as an opportunity to exploit. Already there had been disaffection in rural Sindh when One Unit had been established in 1956. Rural Sindhis had also become increasingly wary of what they saw as a high concentration of Urdu-speaking Muslim migrants from India in Sindh. The language issue further aggravated this division within the population of Sindh while self-serving local politicians constantly played the theme of underdevelopment and deprivation of Sindhi and the Sindhis. With Bhutto’s removal from power by the military and his subsequent hanging, all the Sindhi discontent gelled together. So for RAW Sindh became an increasingly fertile ground for their seeds of violence and terrorism.

RAW also upped the violence ante by brazen acts of terrorism which had the RAW hallmark all over them. So blatant was RAW in its earlier terrorist activities in Karachi that the Pakistan government could not turn a blind eye to these activities – especially since they also involved the Indian Consulate in that city. When the links between the Consulate personnel and ethnic dissidents became too obvious to ignore, the government had to have the Consulate closed. However, this closure has not stopped RAW from infiltrating ethnic groups so that the ethnic conflict in Sindh continues to remain highly militarised and there are constant links emerging between RAW and the acts of terror conducted by these groups.

Nor has RAW ignored Punjab in Pakistan. Again, exploiting opportunities provided by indigenous developments, RAW has ensured that socio-political conflicts get more violent and thereby more polarised. By turning political conflicts into military conflicts, RAW hopes to make them more intractable. In Punjab, RAW has made inroads into the sectarian groups so that there are now heavily armed and trained terrorists who have infiltrated these groups. Random acts of terror are also conducted within range of Punjab’s urban centres so that an element of fear creeps into the polity at large. The number of bomb blast incidents in Pakistan for the year 1998 (given below) show how violent the Pakistani polity has become – and RAW can claim credit for a large part of this development.

Moving beyond physical terrorism, RAW has also inundated Pakistan with inflammatory literature to play on the sentiments of minority groups, as well as sectarianism and ethnicity. While Pakistan has been evolving its democratic ethos after the last bout of military dictatorship which spanned over a decade, RAW has attempted to take advantage of the multiple levels of political dissent that any democratic polity – including India – has to contend with within the framework of democracy.

RAW has also sought to undermine Pakistan’s external image, especially in the West – taking advantage of the Western phobia of ‘Islamic fundamentalism-terrorism’. The Indian media and responsible leaders have orchestrated the campaign to hold the ISI responsible for India’s troubles in her northeastern states and East Punjab. In April 1995, the Indian Army Chief of Staff, General Chaudhri, went public in his accusation against the ISI whom he held responsible for the guerrilla movement in the northeast as well as the troubles in Indian-held Kashmir.

RAW also conducted a well-organised campaign to try and have Pakistan put on the terrorist watch list and, for a while, in the early 90s there was a fear that Pakistan would be declared a ‘terrorist state’ by the US.

At present, RAW has launched a new offensive against Pakistan to try and counter Pakistan’s successful efforts to expose Indian human rights violations in Indian-held Kashmir internationally. With the Indians desperately seeking a way out of their Kashmir quagmire, RAW has started a new propaganda offensive focussing on what it refers to as Pakistan’s ‘Proxy War’ in Kashmir. With the rise of the Madrassah culture in Pakistan and its links to the Taliban in Afghanistan, RAW is trying to create a linkage of this with the Kashmiri freedom fighters in Kashmir. One does not need too much intelligence to see where the RAW campaign is leading. But it should at least make the Pakistanis realise that India is seeking a way out of its untenable position in Kashmir.

All in all, when the international community is increasingly condemning overt war as an instrument of state policy, India has already sought an alternative, indirect and covert mode of warfare through RAW which seeks to destabilise and weaken the states of South Asia from within. Given the changing nature of war one should be prepared for more RAW activities since politics is increasingly becoming the ‘continuation of war by other means’ – and RAW has evolved the expertise on ‘other means’ in South Asia.

Our nation needs reform

BRUTE

The sexual undertones of this brute are pretty obvious. Do we really want this brute roaming around in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad?

ABUSIVE SEX IN MADRASSAH

Acid attack on boy who ‘refused sex with Muslim cleric’
By Massoud Ansari in KarachiOn his hospital bed last week, 16-year-old Abid Tanoli sat listless and alone, half of his body covered by burns that all but destroyed both his eyes and left his face horribly disfigured.The teenager talked, with difficulty, of how his life had been destroyed since the fateful day in June 2002 when he refused to have sex with his teacher at a religious school in Pakistan.

The boy was horrifically injured in an acid attack after he rebuffed the Muslim cleric’s sexual advances. Now, he has alarmed Pakistan’s powerful religious establishment by pressing charges against his alleged assailants.

A teacher at the school, who cannot be named for legal reasons, and two of his friends are in prison awaiting trial for attempted murder and rape. All three deny the charges. A fourth alleged attacker is still at large.

It is the first such case to be brought against a Muslim cleric and threatens to expose a scandal of sex abuse within Pakistan’s secretive Islamic schools.

Abid was blinded and maimed in the assault, which he says came shortly after he rejected sexual demands from the Islamic teacher at a madrassa in a crowded, lower middle-class district of Karachi. “He threatened to ruin me for life,” Abid recalled, “but I didn’t take him seriously. I just stopped going to the madrassa”.

Abid, who was 14 at the time, told neither parents nor friends what had happened because, he said, he was ashamed. A few days later, as he played with his brothers and sister at home, he said that his religious teacher – accompanied by three associates – broke into the house, bolted the door and threw acid over him, screaming: “This should be a lesson for your life.”

Abid was taken to a public hospital, where doctors told him that he would be scarred for life.

Lawyers and campaigners against sexual abuse of children say that it is not uncommon in Pakistan, especially in the segregated surroundings of the country’s estimated 20,000 religious schools, but cases involving members of the clergy are rarely – if ever – exposed.

“They are either hushed up and sorted out within the confines of school, or parents are pressurised not to report the incident to the media as it would give religion a bad name,” said Zia Ahmed Awan, the president of Madadgaar, a joint project of LHRLA (Lawyers for Human Rights and Legal Aid) and Unicef, the United Nations children’s fund.

Haroon Tanoli, Abid’s father, met strong resistance when he tried to take up his son’s case with officials at the school. He says that they offered to help him secure a cash payment from the alleged attackers, provided that he did not involve the police. Since then, he has been threatened with harsh consequences for refusing to back down.

“I despise hypocrites who sport huge beards in the name of religion and hinder the passage of justice in the name of Islam,” said Mr Tanoli.

“I had a beard, and all my four sons were studying in a madrassa. However, following this incident, the first thing I did was to pull my children out of the madrassa – and shave off my beard.”

Even as Abid was receiving treatment, the religious authorities pressed the hospital to discharge him. Mr Tanoli managed to get him admitted to a different hospital, where he is being treated free, although the family cannot afford an operation to save his sight.

Mr Tanoli refuses to back down, despite being offered one million rupees (£12,000) by the teacher’s relations if he withdraws the charges. He has moved to a secret location for his own safety.

MULLAH HYPOCRISY

Mullah’s Naked Butt With Hooker Is YouTube Hit In Iran (Video)
So Hot– Top Mullah is busted on camera with a hooker in Iran.

Totally Hot Iranian Cleric Porn.
The Daily Beast reported:

A hidden camera catches an Iranian cleric committing adultery, and the video rockets around the blogosphere, where a new generation can finally skirt state censorship.

A video scandal has hit the Iranian Internet scene. Like many online scandals in the West, it involves a model. Not Paris Hilton, but a supposed model of virtue: a cleric.

In the video—for weeks voted the top story on Balatarin.com (an Iranian version of Digg.com)—a robed cleric is caught on a hidden camera in a private room. He walks to the door to let a chador-clad woman enter.

“Nobody saw you come in, did they?” he asks her lightheartedly. As she removes her chador, he continues in the same tone: “Want to do some Nasnas?”

Iranians know Nasnas as a mythological monster. What the cleric means by “do some Nasnas” is clarified by what happens next in the clip. Americans have a similar expression: the beast with two backs.

The cleric was apparently a member of the government-run Friday Prayers Committee in Hamadan province. Semi-official news sites tried to downplay the impact of the video, which leaked out of an Intelligence Ministry investigation. But their reports did acknowledge that the man involved was a married cleric, and that the video depicts the consummation of an unlawful affair.

“One thing we had never seen before was a cleric’s naked butt,” commented one young Iranian below the online video clip. “Thanks to the Internet, that is no longer impossible!”
Hamadan Province is the same area where a young female doctor was arrested and later murdered for sitting with her fiancee alone in a public park in 2007.

Doctor Zahra Bani Yaghoob arrested by the head quarter of Basig’s Militia at a public park in Hamadan while she was walking with her fiancé. The couple was stopped by the militia and requested to show a legal marriage certificate. For the reason of not having that marriage certificate handy to show, she was arrested and 2 days latter she died suspiciously.
The regime called it a suicide.

YOUNIS KHAN ON TERRORISM

“When we left for the airport to fly out to Dubai at 2am in the morning there was just so much security around us, it was unbelievable,” Younis told Cricinfo.

“We were on the bus and it was on everyone’s minds, so much security for us, in our own country. There was talk among the players that maybe we should have travelled separately,” he said. “I asked Misbah [ul-Haq] what he would do if something like that [attack] happened to us and he didn’t really know. If something like that did happen, in our own country, on us, I would retire from cricket the very next day. How can someone do it to anyone, let alone their own countrymen?”

“All of us were just shocked that something like this can happen. We have talked about it…you know you read about these unfortunate things in papers or see it on TV, but when it happens so close to you, to sportsmen it is difficult to fully comprehend.

“To take someone’s life, or try and take it, is the lowest thing anyone can do and to try and do it to people who are considered heroes around the world, is just impossible to grasp,”

Is this our Islam? A taliban kills school children. Horrific.

Watch this cowardly, despicable act. Moderate Pakistanis unite.

Dear “Islamic” Terrorists… Read this and then burn in hell.

About 6,000 Muslim clerics from around India approved a fatwa against terrorism Saturday at a conference in Hyderabad.Maulana Qari Mohammad Usman Mansoorpuri, president of the Jamaiat-Ulama-i-Hind, called terrorism the most serious problem facing Islam, The Hindu reported. He blamed Islamic radicals for their actions and the news media for failing to distinguish between the radicals and the majority of Muslims.”We have no love for offenders whichever religion they might belong to,” he said. “Our concern is that innocents should not be targeted and the career of educated youth not ruined. The government should ensure transparency in investigation.

India has the world’s second-largest Muslim population after Indonesia, although Hindus outnumber Muslims. The meeting was also expected to address issues like national integration.

“Islam rejects all kinds of unjust violence, breach of peace, bloodshed, murder and plunder and does not allow it in any form. Cooperation should be done for the cause of good but not for committing sin or oppression,” the fatwa written at the Darul Uloom Deoband, India’s foremost Islamic seminary.

Reformistan Exclusive – More Zardari scumbaggery

This is from a direct source. Specific details are purposely being witheld to protect the identify of the source.A businessman was facilitating the trasfer of some equipment to Pakistan that was required for a public project. The businessman rec’d a call from a man claiming to be a representative of Mr. Zardari. He said a substantial amount must be paid to his “organization” to allow the transfer of the equipment.Is it any wonder that doing business in Pakistan is so difficult?
Is it any wonder that the treasury of Pakistan is empty?

Dear readers, if you have any stories of corruption in Pakistan that can be substantiated with evidence, please post here.

Reformistan Exclusive – Zardari up to old tricks.

I have been informed by a dependable source of the following events that happened recently in Islamabad.Mr. Zardari & associates wanted to purchase a home in a posh “embassy” area of Islamabad. The seller agreed to sell his property for 5 crores PKR. Mr. Zardari & associates agreed to purchase said property immediately. Papers were signed and a check for 5 crore was presented to Mr. Zardari and associates.The check bounced.

When the seller attempted to contact Mr. Zardari and associates… He was given the run-around and eventually provided a check for 2 crores PKR, less than half of the agreed amount. According to the source, the seller was told there were “fees” to doing business with Mr. Zardari and criminals… I mean associates.

Drones made for export by Pakistani Companies.

Looking at the facility from outside, no one would guess what goes on within the 90,000-square-foot research facility of Integrated Dynamics (ID), a privately owned company in Karachi’s Korangi area. There are no signboards indicating that ID is in the business of developing drone technology for military and civilian use. Surprisingly, there isn’t even an army of security guards manning the complex as one would expect upon entering the gate. A lonesome gate keeper lets us in without a fuss.Even more startling is the ease with which Raja Sabri Khan, ID’s chief executive, states that ‘drone technology has existed in Pakistan for the last 20 years.’Khan, who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics, is quick to clarify that his company has ‘never been asked to develop a drone which has an armed implication.’ Instead, ID develops advanced Unmanned Autonomous Vehicle (UAV) systems capable of reconnaissance missions as well as target decoys for anti-aircraft missiles. His customers, he says, include the armed forces of the country as well as foreign buyers from the US, Australia, Spain, Italy and France.

Although he may not have been asked to develop an armed drone, Khan, who previously worked as a consultant for Pakistan’s aerospace agency Suparco, points out: ‘If we consider the fact that drone development has been taking place in Pakistan for the last 20 years, I think the technology for flying long-range autonomous missions has existed for at least 10-12 years.’

Interestingly, there are several public sector companies involved in developing UAVs in Pakistan, including the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex (PAC), Air Weapons Complex (AWC) and National Development Complex (NDC).

The PAC’s Uqaab drone is in use by the Pakistan Army, and, according to unconfirmed reports, is being upgraded with Chinese help to carry a weapons payload. Other PAC UAVs include the Bazz and Ababeel. AWC’s Bravo+ UAV is in use of the Pakistan Airforce (PAF). The PAF recently acquired an unarmed Italian drone called the Falco UAV, which is reportedly being used for surveillance and battleground assessments in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. In 2008, the Pakistan Navy also reportedly completed trials of UAVs – the Austrian Schiebel Camcopter S-100 and Swedish Cybaero – from a Pakistani frigate in the Arabian Sea.Private sector companies are also involved in the design and development of UAVs. Apart from ID in Karachi, East-West Infinity (EWI), Satuma and Global Industrial Defense Solutions (GIDS) are in the drone-making business.

The EWI’s Heliquad UAV is considered a stealth design because of its small size and Whisper Watch signals intelligence package, which is capable of picking up radio and other communication signals. ID’s Nishan Mk1 and TJ1000, Vision MK1 & MK2, Tornado, Border Eagle, Hornet, Hawk and Vector are also popular models employed by the armed forces for reconnaissance missions and target practice (each model varies in range and endurance). Satuma’s UAVs, with similar functionalities, are called Flamingo, Jasoos and Mukhbar. For its part, the GIDS develops the Huma-1 UAV and its own version of the Uqaab.Even though almost all UAVs in the country have been built for military applications – reconnaissance, simulations, decoy systems, remote sensing – none of them are reported to be capable of firing arms. Moreover, none of the above-mentioned facilities are involved in large-scale, mass production of UAVs.

Pakistani leadership – It’s about time

dawn.com

AHORE: Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has accepted a suggestion by PML-N chief Nawaz Sharif to convene a ‘national conference’ in order to hammer out a strategy against terrorism.

Mr Sharif came out with the suggestion at a press conference on Saturday and Mr Gilani conveyed his acceptance just hours later through a phone call. The conference is likely to take place next week.

The two leaders showed good sense and avoided adding fuel to the blame game set in motion earlier by the federal law minister by calling for resignation of the Punjab government in the wake of the Data Darbar suicide blasts and the chief minister’s allegation that federal agencies were not sharing information on terrorist networks.

“Being a coalition partner in Punjab how can I demand resignation from my own government,” was Mr Gilani’s response to a question by a journalist at Ganga Ram Hospital, where he visited those who were injured in Thursday’s strikes.

Although the PML-N chief reiterated Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s allegation that federal agencies under the control of the interior ministry were not cooperating with the provincial government, he avoided indulging in a blame game in public, suggesting the PPP-led government convene a ‘national conference’.

The former prime minister also stressed finding ways and means for changing the strategy on war against terror by bringing Taliban to the negotiating table.

Terrorism was a serious national problem and no political party could alone tackle it, the prime minister told the media, adding the federation and provinces would jointly fight out the menace.

About sharing of information regarding terrorists with federating units, the prime minister said it would be done whenever credible information was made available. He said he had convened a meeting of secret agencies on Monday to thrash out measures to counter the terror menace.

In reply to a query about the use of the term, ‘Punjabi Taliban’ by the interior minister, Mr Gilani said Rehman Malik had clarified that he had not done so.

A question was put to the prime minister about an allegation by the Sunni Ittehad Council that southern Punjab was turning into a hub of terrorists. Mr Gilani made it clear that a decision regarding an army operation in any area would be taken collectively and based on “reliable information”, and not on hearsay.

Asked if army operation would be launched in North Waziristan, he said action would be taken wherever writ of the government was challenged.

In his press conference, Nawaz Sharif suggested that the government activate the parliamentary committee on national security for framing a joint anti-war strategy as terms of reference of the committee had already been finalised.

The committee, he asserted, could have given the government proposals and initiatives like the one being adopted by Washington and London.

Expressing his support to the clamour for a dialogue with the Taliban, he said there was no harm in negotiating with those militants who were ready to discuss peace. But at the same time, he added, concerns of countries having stakes in Afghanistan need to be addressed.

“We have this problem in our home. Why shouldn’t we take initiatives?” he said. “Terrorism is acceptable at no cost, but we also need peace.”

Mr Sharif, ridiculing insinuations that his party had contacts with terrorists, wondered why then were Punjab, especially Lahore, going through bloodbath after bloodbath.

In reply to a question, he said although it was true that law and order was the responsibility of provinces, but the menace of terrorism was the outcome of policies set by the federation.

The former premier said it was regrettable that the PPP-led government had done nothing to reverse policies framed by former president Pervez Musharraf.

Referring to a statement of Babar Awan holding the Punjab government responsible for the Data Darbar tragedy, Nawaz Sharif said the law minister’s outburst suggested he had been waiting for an ‘attack like this’ to vilify the provincial government.

Indian Perception: No such thing as Indian/Hindu terrorism

Pakistan Perspective:  Extradition is a two-way street.  hand over your terrorists to pakistan for questioning and punishment.

(1) Ajay Verma, a Karnatika resident and directly involved in bomb blast at Sialkot in which 7 people were killed
(2) Manoj Shastri alias Javed Khan, resident of Mumbai, wanted for killing of 14 Namazees at a Karachi Mosque
(3) Raju Mukherjee, resident of Calcutta, wanted for bomb blast in Lahore in which 9 people were killed
(4) Mr. Bal Thackeray, resident of Bombay, Chief of Shiv Sena, wanted for organizing at least three major massacres in Pakistan in which some 33 people were killed and a highly active in organizing ethnic and sectarian clashes in different parts of Pakistan
(5) Vivek Khattri alias Kaala Pathaan, resident of Maharashtra, wanted for at least four bomb blasts in which over seventeen people were killed
(6) Ashok Vidyarthi alias Aslam resident of Ajmair Sharif, wanted for sniper shooting at an Imam baargah in Karachi, killing some 14 Shias
(7) Rajan Nikhalje alias Chhota Rajan, wanted for a number of terrorist attacks in different cities of Pakistan including a bomb blast in Sabzi Mandi Islamabad and a bomb blast in Quetta. Chhota Rajan is now launching terrorist operations in Pakistan from Indian Missions in Kandahar and Jalalabad (Afghanistan) and is head of RAW’s organized Crimes Wing or Special Operations Division (SOD), he is also wanted for killing of Chinese Engineers in Baluchistan and organizing the murder of some Chinese workers near Peshawar
(8) Asotosh Srivastava alias Maulvi Nazir alias Mulla, resident of Alahabad, wanted for firing on an imambargah in which 9 people were killed
(9) Ashok Dube alias Shah Jee, resident of Gandhi Nagar (New Delhi), wanted for killing some 11 Namazees in a Lahore Mosque
(10) Sanjive Joshi, resident of Bombay, wanted for comprehensive assistance in terror attack on a Christian Mission School near Murree
(11) Ramparkash alias Ranu alias Ali, resident of Hyderabad Daccan, wanted for terror attack on a Christian Hospital in Taxila (he is also identified as a graduate of Hindutva Brotherhood’s terror training camp, located near Sarojini Nagar)
(12) Ramesh Verma, resident of Pune, wanted for terror attack in Sheikhupura, killing 7 innocent citizens
(13) Bihari Mishra, wanted for organizing a number of terror attacks in Pakistan through his terrorists of Hindutva Brotherhood’s terrorist school
(14) Manoj Kulkarni, resident of Colkata, wanted for terror attack in Attok , killing 17
(15) Venkatash Raghwan, resident of Mahablaishwar, wanted for terror attacks in Rawalpindi, killing some 9 people
(16) Ajit Sahay, a former RAW Deputy Director, now attached with Chotta Rajan, wanted for organizing attack in Hyderabad (Sindh)
(17) Ashok Vohra alias Nepali, wanted for printing fake Pakistani currency and spreading it worldwide, particularly in Nepal, UAE and UK and also organizing a terror attack in Gujranwala in which 8 people were killed
(18) Vijay Kapali alias Guru, resident of Maharashtra, wanted for terror attack on an AJK village, killing 13 of a family. He is also working for RAW’s cross border operations wing
(19) Vivek Santoshi, resident of Calcutta, wanted for organizing terror attack on some US citizens and killing them in Karachi
(20) Mohandas Sharma, resident of Patna, wanted for planning and executing terror attacks on foreign nationals in Pakistan at least on three occasions
(21) Ramgopal Soorati, resident of Soorat, wanted for terror attack in Jhelum, killing 9 through a bus blast on the highway
(22) Rakesh alias Kalia, resident of Bombay, wanted for terror attack in Kasur
(23) Parkash Santoshi, resident of Lucknow, wanted for terror attack on a religious gathering in Lahore
(24) Aman Verma alias Pappoo alias Gulloo, resident of Aagra, wanted for terror attack in Peshawar in which 11 people were killed
(25 Mohinder Parkash alias Yasin Khan alias Riaz Chitta, resident of Lucknow, wanted for organizing terror attacks in different parts of Sindh
(26) Ashish Jaithlee alias Shaikh alias Osama, resident of Bombay downtown, wanted for providing explosives to the terrorists who killed French engineers in Karachi and also to those who carried out Marriot bombing, these explosives were provided through Pak-Afghan border
(27) Manohar Laal alias Peer Jee alias Ubu Khalid, resident of Gohaati, wanted for providing explosive devices for attack on Foreign Mission building in Karachi
(28) Ramnarayan alias Mufti, resident of New Delhi, wanted for providing huge consignments of automatic weapons to activists of banned Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and banned Lashkar-e-Tayyaba
(29) Arun Shetty, resident of Bombay and wanted for bulk infiltration of explosives, arms and ammunition into Pakistan
(30) Nikhanj Laal, resident of Hurryana, wanted for terror attack in border city of Narowaal, killing seven people
(31) Sunil Verma alias Httyara, resident of Maharashtra, wanted for organizing terror attack on Daily the Nation’s office n Karachi
(32) Ashish Chowan, resident of New Delhi, wanted for supply of arms and assisting latest terror attacks in Quetta. Ashish is presently reported to be present in Indian Consulate of Kandahaar (Afghanistan)
(33) Babloo Srivastva of Chhota Rajan gang for providing highly sophisticated weapons to a sectarian outfit in Pakistan and assisting in missile attacks on UN offices in Islamabad in year 2000
(34) Suresh, alias Aamir alias Akbar Khan wanted for providing weapons and explosives to militants in Wana and North Waziristan through Afghanistan
(35) Abu Bakkar, wanted for a number of terror attack in different parts of the country and now living in India with a new identification under the blessings of Indian spy agency RAW