The conventional wisdom is that Pakistan is the aggressor in South Asia.  This narrative has taken almost has a mythical status in Indian media.  Indian leaders love to talk up Mahatma Gandhi when they travel abroad. It plays well to the popular notion of India as a land of peace and love and boosts its moral authority as a responsible democracy on the world stage.  This perception is not accurate. India has a long history of strong-arm tactics, hegemony, and naked aggression in South Asia.

India’s Land Grabbing & Invasions

During the partition, India swallowed multiple principalities in South Asia on an entirely contradictory basis.  This laid the groundwork for the Indo/Pak enmity to this day.

• India invaded Junagarh against the wishes of the Muslim ruler who had acceded to Pakistan on the basis of a Hindu majority population.
• India invaded Hyderabad against the wishes of the Muslim ruler on the basis of a majority Hindu population causing tens of thousands of deaths.  (Operation Polo)*
• Most controversially, India swallowed Kashmir on the basis of the Hindu ruler’s wishes irrespective of the Muslim majority population.
  • This treachery would the stage for the catastrophic beginning of Pakistan/India relations.
• India also swallowed the princely state of Bantva-Manavadar and its 26 Muslim villages.
• India also swallowed Muslim-populated Minicoy Islands (forgotten by the British) without any negotiation with the other dominion (Pakistan) nor the Maldives who also lay claim to the Muslim majority island.

Other Land Grabs:

• In 1974, India invaded and absorbed Goa.  India attacked 4,000 Portuguese security with a force of 30,000.  This was done on the basis of a foreign, colonial presence on “Indian land”. The Christian Goans were humiliated and less than happy about their “liberation” by Indian soldiers who looted their shops.
  Subsequently, Portugal broke relations with India.
• In 1973, India annexed Sikkim by fomenting a coup against the Buddhist king by manipulating the grievances of his subjects. 5000 Indian soldiers stormed a force of 243. 1 nineteen-year-old palace guard was killed. Sikkim the tiny country was no more.
• In 1984, India invaded Siachen Glacier and maintains an environmentally catastrophic presence there to this day.
• India proceeded with the provocative “forward policy” to lay claim on contested Chinese territory based on the British McMahon line.  Facing an opponent of equal size, India was handed a humiliating defeat by the Chinese.

With his invasion of Goa, Prime Minister Nehru has done irreparable damage to India’s good name and to the principles of international morality.” – The New York Times (December 19, 1961)

*Operation Polo in 1948, a five-day conquest of Hyderabad, a wealthy and Muslim-run state in the south, was a bloody affair. Official estimates, only made public in 2013, suggest the fighting and subsequent Hindu-Muslim clashes there killed between 27,000 and 40,000 people. Some historians claim the real toll might have been five times higher.

Kashmir

• 70,000-130,00 Kashmiri civilians have been brutally murdered by the Indian Security Forces in the past 20 years and thousands more have been intimidated and terrorized.
• The Armed Forces (J&K) Special Powers Bill (1990), which has been passed by the parliament of the world’s largest democracy. This Bill grants authorization to members of Indian Security Forces to fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death against any person” without fire orders.
• International human rights organizations and the international press has been refused entry into the State by the Indian government.
• India has banned Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International from Kashmir for over 20 years.
• India also regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates. In 2003, India denied a visa to the head of Amnesty International, Irene Khan.
• A delegation from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a congressionally mandated body, was denied Indian visas.
• Kashmir was under direct President’s rule in the 1990s, after the state legislature was dissolved. The federally appointed governor had admitted that the Kashmiri legislature had a history of rigged elections.
• Kashmiri youths have been murdered in cold blood in fake encounters and Kashmiri women of all ages were and are gang-raped in the presence of their families.  Indian forces have raped 9900 women in Kashmir.
• India maintains an army 0f 700,000 soldiers in Kashmir (50% of its total army and greater than the entire Army of neighboring Pakistan) against the civilian population of that small state which numbers less than 4 million people.
• India massacred peaceful Kashmiri protests in Gowkadal, Maisuma, and Bijbehara

Afghanistan

• India supported the Northern Alliance against the Pashtuns majority.
• India supported the illegal, immoral, and brutal Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Unlike the rest of South Asia, India did not boycott Moscow Olympics along with other democracies of the world.

Bangladesh

• 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 Buddhist 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.
• In 1971, Elements of the Indian Army looted Bangladesh while the high command benefited from the loot.
• India border forces have killed hundreds of Bangladeshi border guards.
• India continues to fence the disputed borders with Bangladesh regardless of the Bangladeshi protests.
• Bangladesh often finds itself on the receiving end of Indian development projects utilizing the numerous rivers that flow through the country apart from the construction of Indian fences along the Bangladeshi border to placate Indian xenophobia resulting in ruined commerce interactions and livelihood for villagers on either side of the border.
• India supported the Shanti Bahini insurgency in the Chittagong Hill Tracts according to Bangladesh.
• India stalled resolutions with Bangladesh over river boundaries, hundreds of enclaves for decades. This was only recently resolved after much acquiescence by Sheikh Hasina.
• The adverse effects of India’s Farakka Barrage, which has been correctly termed as the ‘Death Trap’ for Bangladesh, built on the international river – Ganges/Padma. It has raised salinity levels, contaminated fisheries, hindered navigation, and posed a threat to water quality and public health, let alone leading to desertification of vast territories inside Bangladesh.

Bhutan

• India forced Bhutan to sign a peace treaty with his country in 1940 and made the former an Indian protectorate.

China

• India continues to support the Dalai Lama & Tibet Separatists to instigate the Chinese.
• Indian government warned: If the Chinese will not vacate the areas occupied by her, India will have to repeat what she did in Goa. She will certainly drive out the Chinese forces.
• India initiated the Forward Policy setting up checkpoints north of the McMahon line.
• Indian claim on the northern territory of Asiatic populations was based on serious distortions of 19th-century British-Chinese documents. “I was amazed by the seeming vehemence of New Delhi’s very weak claim to the territory.” – Lamb (Distribution of Lamb’s book was banned in India at the time.)
• India forced China into war due to its inflexibility with border territories unjustifiably inherited from the British Raj and India’s provocative forward policy.

Maldives

• Indian conducted military regime-change operations in the Maldives

Nepal

• In 1950, India forced the crumbling Rana oligarchy represented then by Mohan Shumsher-the grand father of Pasupati S. Rana to sign a treaty with India on solely unequal terms.
• India maintains contested boundary sections with Nepal including 400 sq. km over the Kalapani River.
• From Jhapa in the east, all the way to Darchula in the west where the Indian military has even set up a permanent base, the pattern of border encroachment is repeated, with forceful displacement, shifting of border markers, and appropriation of territory.
• India imposed an economic blockade on land-locked Nepal in 1989.
• The Indian Ambassador to Nepal, Mr. Sood, interfered in the choice of Nepal’s Commander-in-Chief. By doing so, he has made it clear that Nepalese right to choose their government remains a right as long as their choice does not contradict India’s vested interest in Nepal.
• India backed a feudal aristocracy for four decades, reinstating the monarchy by force after repeated popular revolts. It trained the Nepalese military and orchestrated political marriages between Nepalese aristocrats and wealthy Indian families.
• Indian encroached on Nepali lands and committed atrocities along with the border villages of the western district of Dang. These actions resulted in the displacement of more than 6000 people from their homes. Cases of rape and disappearance have been reported.  India has appropriated some 59,970 hectares of Nepali territory at 54 points in 21 districts.

Pakistan

Pre-partition Hostility

• India threatened England in order to take Gurduspur and Ferozpur allocated to Pakistan
• India withheld Pakistan’s share of funds and resources from the very beginning of its birth. The newborn nation financed its treasury with donated silverware from ordinary citizens and funds from the Nizam of Hyderabad, Habib family.
• Krishna Menon wrote a private letter to Mountbatten on 14 June 1947 warning him of dire consequences for the future of Anglo-Indian relations, if the State of Jammu and Kashmir were permitted to go to Pakistan
• This was followed by the land-grab of Junagarh, Hyderabad and Kashmir (mentioned above).

Territorial Disputes

• India continues to stall negotiations on disputed territory in Sir Creek with Pakistan

Afghanistan

• 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 cozy up to certain members of the political elite in the NWFP.
• India financed the anti-Pakistan Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance is responsible for many massacres in Kabul.

East Pakistan

• RAW began its activities much earlier in what was then East Pakistan. The short-sightedness and neglect of Bengali sensitivities by foolish Pakistani governments provided the perfect milieu for RAW to lay the seeds for wrecking Pakistan from within.
• RAW has a long history of activity in Bangladesh, supporting both secular forces and the areas 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.
• 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 defense forces.
  • Source: A Bengali, who was a Mukti Bahini activist, Zainal Abedin, has written a revealing book that includes his personal experience in Indian training camps, entitled RAW and Bangladesh

Nuclear Agitation

• India started the nuclear arms race in South Asia in 1974 and called it a peaceful program.
• During the spring of 1979, when Washington made unsuccessful attempts to frame a regional solution involving mutual restraint by India and Pakistan of their nuclear activities, Indian prime minister Morarji Desai declared that if he discovered that Pakistan was ready to test a bomb or if it exploded one, he would act at (once) to smash it
• India started the nuclear provocation by testing nuclear weapons on Pakistan’s border in 1998 leaving smaller Pakistan no options to demonstrate her own deterrence capability.
• Indian governments have refused to sign nuclear testing and nonproliferation agreements accelerating a nuclear arms race in South Asia. (India’s second nuclear test in 1998 on Pakistan’s border led to Pakistan’s decision to detonate its own nuclear weapons.)

Baluchistan

• India has supported the Baluchistan liberation army and related terror outfits.
• 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.

Even if the Indo-Pakistan relationship is set aside for a moment as one of peculiar nature and even if Pakistan is presumed to be responsible for all the wicked behavior, the question arises why do other countries of the region find it so difficult to forge a closer relationship with India?  The following list might explain this dichotomy.

Sri Lanka

• India overtly and covertly supported the insurgency against the state by LTTE, a nationalist Tamil group in the northern Jaffna region of this small island country of Sri Lanka, which kept it politically and economically destabilized for decades.
• In Sri Lanka, India funded SWRD, trained Tamil terrorists in Palestine camps, and in Tamil Nadu, brought CBK back and funded her, resurrected JVP with funds then SF.
• India sent their military to Sri Lanka and massacred both the Sinhalese and the Tamils in Velvettiturai and Trincomalee
• Ignoring and reputing Sri Lanka’s sovereign and independent status, and violating all limits of shamelessness, M K Narayanan, India’s National Security Advisor, on May 13, 2007, thundered out like a so-called superpower declaring,

“We are the big power in this region. Let us make it very clear. We strongly believe that whatever requirements the Sri Lankan government has, they should come to us. And we will give them what we think is necessary. We do not favor their going to China or Pakistan or any other country”.

• 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.
• According to Rohan Gunaratna, in his book Indian Intervention in Sri Lanka, RAW waged a secret war in India beginning in 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.
• Up to the mid-seventies the Sri Lankan government had kept India happy by following policies that 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.
• RAW saw a perfect opportunity to exploit within the prevailing dispute between the Sinhalese majority (74 percent) and Tamil minority (14 percent) over the 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 organizations, 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 of 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.
• But even more, crucial, India by now was systematically destabilizing 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.

Indian Pogroms & Terror

• RSS
  • In the run-up to the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, the UP police made a sensational discovery. A house used by RSS supremo Guruji Golwalkar had been raided and two locked trunks recovered. When B.B.L. Jaitley, the inspector general of police, opened the trunks, what he found shook him to the core. There before him lay a detailed district-by-district, qasbah-by-qasbah blueprint for the physical elimination of the provinces’ Muslims. The documents revealed incontrovertible evidence of a dastardly conspiracy to create a communal holocaust.  The trunks were crammed with blueprints of great accuracy prominently marking out the Muslim localities. Timely raids conducted on the premises of the RSS had brought the massive conspiracy to light, recalled Dayal in his autobiography, A Life of Our Times.
    • Source: https://www.outlookindia.com/magazine/story/what-if-godhra-hadnt-happened/224884
• Operation Bluestar
  • India rampaged through the sacred Sikh golden temple, killed Sikh leaders, and humiliated its followers.

• • India used artillery against its own Sikh people in the residential neighborhoods of Amristar
  • Indian police and paramilitary stood by idly as 3000+ Sikhs were murdered during the Sikh Riots sponsored by the govt

“We must remember Indiraji. We must remember why her assassination happened. We must remember who could be the people behind this. When Indira’s assassination happened, there were riots in the country. We know that the hearts of the Indian people were full of anger and that for a few days people felt India was shaking. When a big tree falls, the earth shakes.” – Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi on the massacre of Sikhs in 1984

Human Rights

• The plight of the Muslims in India today is worse than even the low caste Dalits and other minorities; a fact verified by the 2005 Justice Sachar Committee’s report to ascertain the latest social, economic and educational condition of the Muslim community of India. In fact, the venomous pronouncement of extremist Hindu Mahasabha, President Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and Dr Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, the founder of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) that “…….the Muslims are not Indians, but foreigners or temporary guests – without any loyalty to the country or its cultural heritage – and should be driven out of the country or convert to Hinduism…….”, is still being propagated today and leads to the genocide of the Indian Muslims in Kashmir, Maharashtra and elsewhere.

  India did not outlaw the practice of forced temple prostitution until 1988.

Disinformation Against Neighboring States

• RAW funds have supported organizations 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. [1]
• EU Labs Disinformation by Saravastava Group.

Indian Fascism

• India banned the book on the partition by Jaswanth Singh
• India arrested prime minister Abdullah of Kashmir in 1953 when he did not tow the Indian line.
• India rejected UN proposals to keep 16,000 troops until a plebiscite is held.
• India banned an Indian book on Sikkim called: Smash and Grab by author Sunanda Datta Ray
• Huge chunks of the region come under draconian laws like the Armed Forces Special Protection Act or the Disturbed Areas Act, which have been in place in Manipur, Nagaland, and many parts of Assam, thereby covering a significant geographical chunk of Northeast India for more than two decades. These Acts essentially give the security forces a free hand.
• The Indian state government of Gujrat headed by Modi committed a state-sponsored pogrom in Gujrat killing 2000+ Muslims and displacing 100,000.
• Modi (whose visa had previously been disallowed in the USA due to human rights violations) was elected prime minister of India.
• Indian Armed Forces are allowed to arrest non-violent protesters in Kashmir and slap them with 2 years imprisonment under PSA laws
• Human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Asia Watch constantly report of indescribably inhumane treatment meted out to Kashmiris in government-run torture cells and elsewhere
• India regularly arrests India Muslims if they simply cheer for the Pakistani cricket team.

Islamophobia

• Indian government stood by idly as the destruction of Babri Masjid took place.

_____________________

[1] The US District Court in Baltimore sentenced Lalit H Gadhia, a naturalized 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 organizations for funneling 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.

[2] Post 1971.

After 1971 war, the world chose Pakistan for Security Council instead of India due to India’s aggresssion.  Pakistan triumphed over India in the 1976 elections to the Security Council, Indias then permanent representative, Rikki Jaipal, confided ruefully that he had received written commitments from well over a two-third majority of the General Assembly membership required for election. But India’s policies of the time its 1971 military intervention to dismember Pakistan, absorption of Sikkim, and the 1974 peaceful nuclear explosion had created disenchantment within the international community and played in Pakistans favour in the election. Indeed, these considerations were factored into the calculation that led prime minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto to decide to challenge India’s bid for the Security Council seat that year. Pakistan and Bangladesh became friends in 1974.  Bangladesh terminated its treaty of friendship with India.