[Congressional Record Volume 148, Number 73 (Thursday, June 6, 2002)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E974-E975]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[[Page E974]]
                 IS INDIA AN ALLY OR A TERRORIST STATE?

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. DAN BURTON

                               of indiana

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, June 5, 2002

  Mr. BURTON of Indiana. Mr. Speaker, recently, the news website 
NewsMax.com ran a vary comprehensive article called ``India: Allies or 
Instigators?'' It details India's pattern of abuse against the 
Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, and other minorities, its anti-Americanism, 
and its support of terrorism against its neighbors.
  The article shows that the Indian government has killed tens of 
thousands of Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, and other minorities; that it 
holds tens of thousands of political prisoners; and it is funding 
terrorism in Pakistan and created and supported the Liberation Tigers 
of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), an organization the U.S. government has called a 
``terrorist'' organization. It shows India's domestic terrorism against 
Sikhs, Christians, Muslims, and all the other minority groups.
  Reading this article should cause any fair-minded reader to ask 
whether or not India is a terrorist state seeking hegemony in South 
Asia and questions whether India is a country we should trust as an 
ally. The United States should work for freedom for all the people of 
the subcontinent. I was proud to be one of 42 Members of Congress from 
both parties who signed a letter urging President Bush to press for the 
release of Sikh and other political prisoners in India. The 
Administration should do that. But it should do more.
  After reading this article, it is clearly time for the U.S. 
government to cut off its aid to India and to come out in support of 
self-determination for all the peoples and nations of South Asia. This 
is the best way to spread liberty, democracy, prosperity, and true 
stability to the subcontinent.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to place the article into the Record at 
this time. I urge my colleagues and all people interested in South 
Asian affairs to read it.

                     India: Allies or Instigators?

                             (By Tim Phares)

       Trouble is brewing again in South Asia, as India and 
     Pakistan move troops to their border. The recent violence in 
     Gujarat, in which over 540 people have been killed, has 
     merely heightened tensions.
       It follows an attack by Muslims on a train full of Hindu 
     activists headed for Ayodhya, where the BJP government in 
     India is seeking to build a Hindu temple on the site where 
     the most revered mosque in India was destroyed by Hindu 
     militants a few years ago. It was reported that the 
     passengers were taunting the Muslims by chanting slogans 
     about rebuilding the temple.
       Unfortunately, India, which proclaims itself ``the world's 
     largest democracy,'' has made moves that undermine America's 
     war on terrorism. Indian military maneuvers have forced 
     Pakistan to divert troops from the border with Afghanistan to 
     the Line of Control in Kashmir, creating a potential opening 
     for terrorists to escape.
       On January 2, Tony Blankley wrote in the Washington Times 
     that India is sponsoring cross-border terrorism in the 
     Pakistani province of Sindh.
       Journalist Tavleen Singh has reported in India's leading 
     newsmagazine, India Today, that the Indian government created 
     the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which the U.S. 
     government has identified as a ``terrorist organization.''
       According to Internet journalist Justin Raimondo, the 
     Indian Defense Minister, George Fernandes, raised money and 
     arms for the LTTE.
       Pakistan and minorities within India's borders charge that 
     India is seeking hegemony in the South Asian subcontinent. 
     Certainly its deployment of new missiles that can reach deep 
     into Pakistan and its tests that began the nuclear escalation 
     in the region suggest that this may be true.
       While India blames Pakistan for the attack on its 
     Parliament, President Pervez Musharraf says he has evidence 
     that the Indian government itself was responsible. No Indian 
     soldiers were killed, just guards, workers, and other lower-
     caste people.
       The book Soft Target, written by Canadian journalists Brian 
     McAndrew of the Toronto Star and Zuhair Kashmeri of the 
     Toronto Globe and Mail, shows that India blew up its own 
     airliner in 1985, killing 329 people, apparently in order to 
     blame Sikhs for the atrocity and create a pretext for more 
     violence against them.
       It shows that the Indian Consul General in Toronto pulled 
     his daughter off the flight shortly before it was due to 
     depart. An auto dealer who was a friend of the Consul General 
     also cancelled his reservation at the last minute. Surinder 
     Singh, director of North American Affairs for the External 
     Affairs office in New Delhi, also cancelled his reservation 
     on that flight. The Consul General also called to finger a 
     suspect in the case before the public knew that the bombing 
     had taken place. The book quotes an agent of the Canadian 
     State Investigative Service (CSIS) as saying, ``If you really 
     want to clear the incidents quickly. take vans down to the 
     Indian High Commission and the consulates in Toronto and 
     Vancouver, load up everybody and take them down for 
     questioning. We know it and they know it that they are 
     involved.''
       India has a long record of Anti-Americanism. On May 18, 
     1999, The Indian Express reported that Mr. Fernandes, the 
     Defense Minister, organized and led a meeting with the 
     Ambassadors from Red China, Cuba, Russia, Yugoslavia, Libya, 
     and Iraq to discuss setting up a security alliance ``to stop 
     the U.S.''
       India votes against the United States at the United Nations 
     more often than any country except Cuba. It had a long term 
     friendship with the former Soviet Union and supported its 
     invasion of Afghanistan.
       India's implicit support for terrorist activity is 
     consistent with its internal behavior. It has a record of 
     repression of minorities that undermines its proclamation of 
     democratic values.
       The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads a 23-
     party coalition, is a branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak 
     Sangh (RSS), an organization founded in 1925 in support of 
     the Fascists.
       The governing ideology of the BJP and all the branches of 
     the RSS is Hindutva, the subjugation of society, politics, 
     and culture to Hinduism. Last year, a cabinet member said 
     that everyone living in India must either be a Hindu or be 
     subservient to Hinduism. And in New York in 2000, Prime 
     Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee said, ``I will always be a 
     Swayamsewak.'' This is the ideology behind the attacks on 
     Christians, Sikhs, Muslims, and other minorities.
       The target of choice these days seems to be Christians. 
     Human-rights organizations report that more than 200,000 
     Christians in Negaland have been killed by the Indian 
     government.
       On February 17, the Associated Press reported an attack on 
     the Catholic church on the outskirts of Bangalore in which 
     several people were injured. The assailants threw stones at 
     the church, then broke in, breaking furniture and smashing 
     windows before attacking worshipers. the February 25 issue of 
     the Washington Times reported another church attack in which 
     20 people were wounded.
       In February, two church workers and a teenage boy were shot 
     at while they prayed. The boy was injured. Two Christian 
     missionaries were beaten with iron rods while they rode their 
     bicycles home. A Christian cemetery in Port Blair was 
     vandalized.
       These attacks continue a pattern of oppression of 
     Christians that has been going on heavily since Christmas 
     1998. Since then, members of the RSS have murdered priests, 
     raped nuns, burned churches, and committed other atrocities 
     with impunity.
       The RSS published a booklet last year detailing how to file 
     false criminal cases against Christians and other religious 
     minorities. The RSS objects to the presence of missionaries 
     in India.
       The missionaries are having a good deal of success in 
     converting members of the lower castes, especially Dalits, 
     also known as ``Untouchables.'' This removes the lower-caste 
     people from the stratification of the caste system, which is 
     essential to the Hindu religion and social structure.
       RSS activists also burned a missionary and his two sons to 
     death while they slept in their jeep. They surrounded the 
     jeep and chanted ``Victory to Hannuman,'' a Hindu god. Now 
     the Indian authorities have found a single individual to 
     blame and they are moving to throw the missionary's widow out 
     of the country. In 1997, Indian police broke up a Christian 
     religious festival with gunfire.
       In 1994, the U.S. State Department reported that the Indian 
     government paid out over 41,000 cash bounties to police 
     officers for killing members of the Sikh minority. In the 
     same year, the Indian newspaper Hitavada reported that the 
     Indian government paid the late governor of Punjab, Surendra 
     Nath, the equivalent of $1.5 billion to foment terrorist 
     activity in Punjab and in Kashmir.
       According to the book The Politics of Genocide, over 
     250,000 Sikhs have been killed by the Indian government's 
     forces. According to human-rights groups, Indian forces have 
     killed over 75,000 Muslims in Kashmir and thousands of other 
     minorities, including Dalit ``untouchables,'' Tamils, and 
     other groups.
       A report issued last year by the Movement Against State 
     Repression (MASR) showed that India admitted to holding 
     52,268 political prisoners. Amnesty International reports 
     that tens of thousands of other minorities are also being 
     held as political prisoners.
       These prisoners continue to be held under a law called the 
     ``Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act'' (TADA), which 
     expired in 1995, It empowered the government to hold people 
     virtually indefinitely for any offense or for no offense at 
     all.
       According to many reports, some of these political 
     prisoners have been in custody for almost two decades. 
     Amnesty International reported last year that tens of 
     thousands of minorities are big held as political prisoners. 
     On February 28, 42 Members of the U.S. Congress wrote to 
     President Bush asking him to work for freedom for these 
     political prisoners.
       MASR also co-sponsored with the Punjab Human Rights 
     Organization an Investigation of the March 2000 massacre of 
     35 Sikhs in Chithisinghpora. It concluded that Indian forces 
     carried out the massacre. A separate investigation conducted 
     by the International Human Rights Organization came to the 
     same conclusion.
       As Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Cal.) said on the floor of 
     Congress on August 2, 1999, ``for

[[Page E975]]

     the people in Kashmir and Punjab and Jammu, India might as 
     well be Nazi Germany.''
       In the words of Narinder Singh, a spokesman for the Golden 
     Temple, the seat of the Sikh religion, who was interviewed in 
     August 1997 by National Public Radio, ``The Indian 
     government, all the time they boast that they are secular, 
     that they are democratic. But they have nothing to do with a 
     democracy, nothing to do with a secularism. They just kill 
     Sikhs to please the majority.''
       In the March 4 issue of Forbes, Steve Forbes compared India 
     to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, arguing that as a 
     multinational State, India is inherently unstable. Prior to 
     the British conquest of the subcontinent, there was no 
     political entity called India. It was a series of princely 
     states brought together by the British.
       The Kashmiri people were promised a referendum on their 
     status in 1948, but that vote has never been held. The Sikhs, 
     who were supposed to receive independence, have never had any 
     of their representatives sign the Indian constitution. 
     Instead of respecting ``the glow of freedom'' that Nehru and 
     Patel promised the Sikhs, the government declared them a 
     ``criminal class'' as the ink was dry on the constitution. 
     Currently, 17 freedom movements are going on within India's 
     borders.
       Some Members of Congress have called for sanctions against 
     India and for an end to American aid. Some have also endorsed 
     self-determination for the peoples seeking freedom from India 
     through a plebiscite on independence. While these events seem 
     unlikely to occur any time soon, the Indian government has 
     held negotiations with the freedom fighters in predominantly 
     Christian Nagaland. Home Minister L.K. Advani recently 
     admitted that if Kashmir achieves freedom (which now seems 
     more likely than ever), it will cause India to break apart.
       Some experts have predicted that within a decade, neither 
     India nor Pakistan will exist in the form we know them 
     presently. The Indian subcontinent will continue to be a 
     region that bears close attention by American policymakers.

     

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