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| India-Pakistan |
| Book on Indo-Pak conflict borrows from Indian report on ISI |
| 2004-03-02 |
| A secret White Paper on Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) prepared by the Indian Bhartiya Janata Party government some time ago may have leaked to a think tank in India that has just published a new book on "The costs of the Indo-Pak conflict", say analysts. India's deputy prime minister, Lal Krishna Advani, had told the Indian parliament that the white paper was being prepared, but he stopped talking about it when he realised that publishing it might compromise the Indian intelligence agencies' "hard work" in keeping tabs on alleged ISI agents and activities in the country. Now a Mumbai-based think tank has come out with a book that may have taken information about the ISI's alleged activities from the secret paper. The book details "ISI activities in India carried out with the help of madrassas" but it doesn't indicate the source of its information. It tries to paint the madrassas in a bad light, which is what the BJP and its front organizations like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and the Bajrang Dal have been doing for years. The book published by the Mumbai-based 'Strategic Foresight Group of the International Center for Peace Initiatives' claims that "India identified enhanced ISI activities in nine states and an active network of ISI-sponsored illegal madrassas throughout the country" and that the ISI had 60 centres in India employing as many as 10,000 spies. The states identified are: Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Jharkhand. The book, described as a study report, claims that Kerala has the highest number of nearly 10,000 madrassas, followed by 6000 in Madhya Pradesh. The states of Maharashtra, West Bengal, Assam, Gujarat and Rajasthan have around 2,000 madrassas each, close to 1,000 each in Delhi, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and on the Indo-Bangladeshi border while the lowest number, 122, is in Jammu and Kashmir. It said the ISI spends Rs 600 million each year on funding these madrassas in India, noting that "India's fragile communal fabric is quickly becoming the primary target of Pakistan-sponsored terrorism, in addition to its Jihad-e-Kashmir operation and Lashkar-e-Taiba launched Jihad-e-Hind operation in early 2003 signifying the shift of LT focus from Kashmir alone to the rest of India." The book quotes Pakistani scholars as saying that if the ISI manages to persuade even one per cent of the Muslim population (1.5 million) to take up arms, 1.5 million people would create unprecedented internal turmoil in India. |
| Posted by:Paul Moloney |
| #3 A futile goal. If they can't be painted in that manner, then stomp on them, one by one. Either deal with them now, or deal with them later, when there's more to have to contend with. |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-3-2 2:06:27 PM |
| #2 It tries to paint the madrassas in a bad light A futile goal. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-3-2 6:48:51 AM |
| #1 little cancer cells, those madrassas. |
| Posted by: B 2004-3-2 6:33:30 AM |