Rejoinder to Mr. Tharoor's Malicious Misrepresentations

Dear Readers,

Following is my letter to the editor of the Time magazine. It is a rejoinder to an article published in it on Dec 8. We should send out letters to the Time, stating Pakistan's position in reference to this article.
The address is letters@time.com


Dear Editor,

This is in reference to Shashi Tharoor’s column ‘After the Horror’.

In his haste to bedevil Islam in general and Pakistan in specific, Mr. Tharoor proclaimed, “a succession of Pakistani military leaders [made] it a point to support, finance, equip and train Islamist militants to conduct terrorist operations in India.” His sweeping statement deserves a brief reminder of India’s checkered past pained red by the Hindu extremists:

1. 1971, at the cost of thousands of deaths, India maliciously severed Pakistan.
2. In June 1984, Indian army massacred over 7,000 Sikhs during the Operation Blue Star?
3. In November 1984, well over 3,000 Sikhs were butchered by the Hindu mobs in the New Delhi.
4. In 1992, VHP and Bajrang Dal men demolished the 500 years old Babri Masjid.
5. During last 20 years alone, thousands of Christians had been butchered by the Hindu extremists. A gruesome example of such atrocities stood out when Bajrang Dal’s activists burnt alive the Australian missionary and his two young sons.
6. In 2002, Hindu fundamentalists slaughtered some 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat. Sickening confessions of the VHP's leaders, responsible for the attacks, are available on the YouTube.
7. Since early 1990s, the Indian military systematically exterminated close to 80,000 Kashmiri Muslims.
8. In 2007, over 60 Pakistanis were burnt alive in India. The gruesome massacre was the handy work of Bajrang Dal’s shinning star Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit.
9. Just last September, VHP extremists destroyed dozens Christian churches. They also set a Christian orphanage on fire, and burned to death, a 20-year-old Christian teacher.

Mr. Tharoor wrote, "This was clearly not just an attack on India; the assailants were taking on the ‘Jews and crusaders’ of al-Qaeda lore." He deserves kudos for cunningly manufacturing a hapless troika of Christians, Jews and Hindus, besieged by the murderous Muslims. However, the reality doesn’t tally with his misrepresentations:
a. Pick any of US State Department report on the Religious Freedom in India; one realizes, Christians had been systematically persecuted far worse in India than in rest of the world put together. The reports blame the Hindu extremist groups, like BJP, RSS, VHP and Bajrang Dal for gross violations of the human rights of the minorities (including Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Dalits).
b. If the objective of the terrorists was to take on the ‘Jews and crusaders’, they would have to be out of their mind to spend so much resources to execute such a mission in India when they could have easily killed many more in Afghanistan, where all the help and resources are readily available.

Ironically, despite the bloodletting of hundred of thousands of minorities, not a single Hindu could be found on UN’s, EU’s or even on US lists of terrorists. Sadly, not a peep could be heard from the so-called fair and balanced Western media over the genocides that routinely take place in India.

Sincerely,

Adnan Gill