O Gentle and Patient Reader,  I take the liberty of posting an article—a lament of sorts—written by my dear and departed friend Ghatotkacha in late 2008, soon after the terrible attack by Pakistani-trained terrorists on Mumbai on 26^th November 2008. Ghatotkacha was my guide, my teacher, so close to my heart, in a very real sense my alter ego. I empathized with and endorsed every word in his article then. as I do now.

I post this the day after India’s Independence Day, 2025; a time when India and Pakistan still obsess over Operation Sindhoor, the name given to India’s short but devastatingly effective military campaign against Pakistan-based terrorist and military  infrastructure in  May 2025.

I post this article even though it is filled with anger and bitterness. I post this for the simple reason that I, like my fellow Indians, am conditioned to ignore and forget my own history…and worse, to eagerly seize upon and adopt, on continuous basis, others’ versions of my own history without a care.

I believe we must be brave enough to remember and come to terms with all that we ever really were, and really did, and really experienced: whether right or wrong, good or bad, sublime or horrific.

Because only then can we learn, only then can we act. With neither self-loathing nor hatred. But with Equanimity.

Only then can we heal ourselves, and move on…

[That’s what another old and eternal friend Krishna counselled…]

Happy Janmashtami! May the Playwright of the Eternal Drama

Bless us, illumine our minds, guide our actions

So we don’t forget our lines, lost control of our passions

Or trip and fall, arse over elbow, on this Great Stage of Dharma

Boil the Pakistani frog

26/11, Mumbai: In Memoriam

[© Ghatotkacha Hidimbi Bhimasena (late): December, 2008]

First there was the rage.

Fury poured out on to the streets of Mumbai post 26^th November 2008, fiery words spewed from the mouths of countless anchors on a hundred TV channels. There was much talk of retaliation, of revenge, of this latest atrocity by Pakistan-sponsored and Pakistan-supported and Pakistan-sheltered and Pakistan-trained terrorists being the last straw.

“India has been restrained all these decades…but enough is enough!” These words about summed up the collective feeling of the Indian people after 200 innocent men, women and children were slaughtered by 10 murderers from Pakistan. Murderers helped overtly and covertly by the Pakistani military, the Pakistani establishment.

The evidence of Pakistan’s complicity was clear.

The world witnessed the massacre of innocents, on live TV.

The world awaited India’s response…as the Indian people did.

Two weeks passed, during which for the first time in memory the Indian political establishment actually appeared to have achieved the unimaginable – namely, to unite and speak as one in national interest.

“We are with the government in combating this evil force that has attacked our nation, that threatens the future of India,” said Opposition leader and BJP member (late) L K Advani on the floor of Parliament.

The Congress-led UPA leadership, in a symbolic move, sent the derelict Home Minister Shivraj Patil home and appointed the inflationary and inflated-ego Finance Minister P Chidambaram in his place.

In a rare and refreshing contrast to the Congress’ customary rodent-like squeak-speakers, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee fumed and fulminated against Pakistan and its deceitful references to the attackers as ‘non-state actors’, at one point memorably asking: “Do these non-state actors come from heaven?”

Equally remarkable was the fact that during these two weeks the Indian media collectively stayed with the Pakistan-sponsored terrorist attack story – that too sans the usual faffing in politically correct journo-speak, which requires that any atrocity by any kooks who claim to be ‘Muslim’ can only be reported as such when it can be ‘balanced out’ by reportage on a similar atrocity—real or imaginary— committed by kooks claiming to be ‘Hindu’. [This is, of course, the famous Balancing of the Kookery Equation Principle formulated by British sociologists in the 1850s, refined by the Congress and Communist Party of India (Marxist) post-Independence, and taught as a foundational course by mainstream Indian media houses to trainee reporters and journalists.]

Curiously, the English-language Indian media (seriously! That’s what they call themselves, and we call them) named the atrocity ‘26/11’—because ‘26/11’ resonates so well with the USA’s ‘9/11’—and so this name has stuck, even though it blithely ignores the fact that for the Americans, ‘9/11’ actually stands for September 11^th (and not 9^th November); by that logic we Indians should have called this Mumbai attack ‘11/26’. 

But then, what’s in a name, no?

At least for a change, there were no cut-and-paste editorials in the newspapers and magazines on how India must exercise ‘restraint’, no pious and ponderous platitudes on why India must follow the process of ‘dialogue’ and ‘negotiation’ with Pakistan rather than that of ‘confrontation’…

For the first time in history we were spared the logorrhea of human rights activists campaigning for the well-being of Ajmal Kasab, the sole Pakistani terrorist captured alive; spared, too, the hysterical outpourings of assorted pamphleteers drawing parallels between Mumbai 26/11 and Gujarat 2002 and Mumbai 1992/93.

By the time December 12^th 2008 dawned, one actually dared wonder: had we, in India’s Civilian Street, finally discovered those rare qualities, Courage and Resolve?

Would the Indian political leadership, along with the bureaucrats and policy wonks and diplomats and strategic eggheads have the guts and the gumption to unshackle and unleash the calibrated might of our defense forces to strike and eliminate the sources of terrorist infection in our neighbour Pakistan’s ailing body? To strike not to destroy Pakistan, but rather to strengthen the Pakistani people in their silent, six-decade-old war against the Pakistani religious fanatics who rule them with fear; the monsters in clerical and military uniforms who have created schools of pain in the name of God, schools in which they have brutalized innocent young Pakistani boys and transformed them into the twisted, hate-filled murderers who call themselves Al Qaeda, Lashkar e Tayyeba, Harkat ul Jihad Islami, Jaish Mohammed?

We hoped so. The signs were good.

Alas, it was a futile hope.

In the two weeks since December 12^th, 2008, the great show of bravado put up by our politicos and the media has all come unstuck faster than the dhoti of a certain senior Congress leader with a penchant for flashing.

As of 26^th December, 2008 – exactly a month after the attack on Mumbai – India’s measures to avenge the Mumbai atrocity and cleanse Pakistan of terrorists comprise the following key elements:

• Our nominal and notional PM, Manmohan Singh, has repeatedly appealed to the US, Britain, Australia, and any other country that might listen (and there haven’t been too many) to urge Pakistan not to send terrorists to India.
• The PM and the Minister of External Affairs have repeatedly appealed to the United Nations to tell Pakistan not to send terrorists to India.
• The PM and the Minister of External Affairs (as well as assorted Ministers of other Infernal Affairs) have repeatedly expressed disappointment that the international community is not telling Pakistan not to send terrorists to India.
• The de facto PM Sonia Gandhi has repeatedly declared that India will give a ‘befitting reply’ to terrorists who think they can divide India on communal lines. (She is, apparently, even now drafting out the befitting reply on a standard-issue Congress party greeting card, which will doubtless be sent duly by Registered Post (with Acknowledgement Due) to Pakistan’s notional President Asif Zardari with copies for information and necessary action to Hafiz Muhammad Sayed of Lashkar e Tayyeba and Masood Azar of Jaish Mohammed..
• The PM and the new Home Minster have announced the formulation of a new anti-terrorist law that will also include, in its ambit, heinous offences like smoking ganja and abusing politicians (might as well turn myself in).
• The Hon’ble Union Minister A R Antulay has declared that the entire Mumbai atrocity was just a pre-planned strategy by Hindu fanatics to conceal the assassination of certain Mumbai police officers who were inquiring into bomb attacks targeting Muslims in Malegaon, Maharashtra by their brethren Hindu fanatics.
•  The MEA has denied Pakistani media allegations that India had a hand in a car bomb attack in Lahore on 24^thDecember – and continues to deny it even after the Pakistanis lost interest in the case after a Taliban splinter group claims responsibility for the Lahore car bomb attack.

Saddest of all, the print media editors, the TV talk-show hosts and their attendant analysts, the academia and intelligentsia and not-so-intelligentsia,  caution the Indian government with increasing shrillness and anxiety, about the dangers of any kind of strikes against a ‘nuclear-armed Pakistan’.

It makes one wonder:  why doesn’t Pakistan ever worry the same way about striking against a nuclear-armed India?

How the late and much-unlamented Paki dictator Zia-ul-Haque of the ‘boiled-frog’ strategy must be chuckling— even in his special cell in Shaitan’s Eternal Abode— at India’s self-imposed paralysis following the attacks of 26^th November.

And so India’s leadership will wait—as always.

And so India will wait, as ever making a virtue out of inaction and passiveness; wait for the next attack by Pakistani terrorists…

http://creative.sulekha.com/boil-the-pakistani-frog_383941_blog