AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        Why have we handed over India to UPA men of straw? This is the question that is being asked by all right thinking and patriotic Indians today. Winston Churchill in one of his immortal war-time speeches during II World War said:

        Never give in! Never give in
        Never, Never, Never, Never
        In nothing great or small,
        Large or petty
        Never give in except to convictions of honour
        And Good Sense.

        About India's approach to the supremely critical and important Siachen issue today Dr. Manmohan Singh has this to say:

        We will not fail to flag or fail
        We will not fail to fail and falter;
        We will not fail to shake and shiver;
        We will not fail to tremble and tremor.
        We will not fail to surrender.
        We will never fail to give in to convictions of dishonour and arrant Pseudo-secular nonsense.

The Neville Chamberlain of India, I mean our Prime Minister, seems to be giving the following political message all the time to his newly declared bosom friend Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan; We have absolute and indivisible faith in peaceful and compassionate ISLAM. We have unshakable faith in your noble and peaceful intentions. We want your peace-loving country to understand that the days of unabashed and unprovoked violence of India against its neighbouring countries like Pakistan and Bangla Desh are over forever. Perhaps, according to the humble and meek opinion of Dr. Manmohan Singh, Pervez Musharraf richly deserves the Noble Prize for Peace for having so effectively put down cross border terrorism against the Hindu Minority in Jammu and Kashmir during the last six years. Dr.Manmohan Singh has come to this historic conclusion after full consultation with that iron and steel de facto Prime Minister. She is ever buttressed by that ever-trembling trio of our ever meek Prime Minister, shaky and confused Defence Minister and a shakier Home Minister. Behind all this drama looms large the figure of M K Narayanan the foremost champion of suave and soft-spoken National Insecurity at any cost and in spite of all and known dangers of Pak-sponsored cross-border terrorism.         This shamefully lurid political drama is nothing new in our disgraceful history after our independence in 1947. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was completely oblivious to the crucial strategic significance of Aksai Chin (North Ladakh) when he gifted it away to China in the early 1950s. India rues till today this Himalayan blunder in strategic terms. Nehru hid the fact of the Chinese annexation of Indian territory for nearly eight years. He later justified the loss by terming Aksai Chin as a desolate area where not a blade of grass grew.

Map showing Siachen Glacier

         Jawaharlal Nehru let down the nation with his self-chosen swan song of Hindi China Bhai Bhai only to be stabbed by Chou-en-lai and Mao-Tse-Tung in 1962. Haji Pir Pass was conquered by the Indian Army in 1965 and was returned to Pakistan by Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966. All the military and political advantages gained for us by our Defence Forces following the Indo-Pak war of 1965 were sacrificed in one stroke by Lal Bahadur Shastri at Tashkent in January 1966. Haji Pir Pass was again annexed by the Indian Army in 1971 and again given back to Pakistan by Indira Gandhi in 1972. Indira Gandhi let down the nation in 1972 following her meeting at Simla, with Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan when she agreed to return 92,000 Pakistan prisoners of war without bargaining for any political advantage from the point of view of India's territorial integrity and national security. All the great advantages gained by our glorious Armed Forces after great sacrifice and heavy loss of precious lives were bartered away for nothing in a matter of seconds by Indira Gandhi. Then came her son Rajiv Gandhi who sent an army to Ceylon called the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) in 1987 with disastrous consequences for everyone in the whole drama excepting the LTTE.

        Against all this background, the UPA Government under its non-descript Prime Minister today has evolved a new slogan called 'Hindi Pakistan Bhai Bhai' and has gradually opened up all the lines of communication based on the philosophy of borderless frontiers between India and Pakistan, so ably advocated and championed by the pseudo-secular mafia of mass media in India. We seem to have learnt no lessons what so ever from our past mistakes and blunders. We seem to be back again to the weak position of 1962 at the time of Chinese Invasion of India. To draw a parallel, Dr. Manmohan Singh has taken over the place of the then blundering Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru and M K Narayanan, a known Mansabdar of the great Mughal Nehru-Gandhi family, has come in the place of wily V K Krishna Menon of yesteryears. In this context I am reminded of what Edward Gibbon said in his famous history of 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire':

Indian Army on Patrol in Siachen Glacier

History is little me than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. If that be so, Indian History after independence in 1947 is nothing but the register of the political crimes, political follies, national misfortunes and tragedies inflicted by the Nehru-Gandhi family upon the helpless millions of India.         Nearly 50 years after the Aksai Chin strategic blunder, the present UPA government seems to be all set to repeat the same story. If we have to go by the recent utterances of our National Security Adviser, India seems all set to gift away Siachen to Pakistan on the plea that our Prime Minister wants to convert the area as mountains of peace. It is useless for sheep like Dr Manmohan Singh to pass resolutions in favour of vegetarianism when wolves like Pervez Musharaff are of a different opinion.         Let me go into the genesis of the Siachen dispute. Siachen dispute became a major bilateral issue in 1984, when the Indian Army air lifted mountain-trained forces to positions overlooking key passes in the Saltoro range, a spur of the Karakoram mountains that flanked the glacier's southern rim. The unexpected Indian action saw the start of a costly high-altitude military struggle for supremacy in this North-West Himalayan region.

       For more than 22 blustery, shivering years, the Indian and Pakistani armies have been fighting a ' No-Win ' war on the 20,000-foot-high Siachen Glacier, the world's highest battleground. Both India and Pakistan have more than 10,000 soldiers each camped on this glacier. For a soldier, this is where hell freezes over, a 46-mile river of slow-moving ice surrounded by stupendous towers of snow. This area is a desolate stretch of about 2,500 sq km situated immediately south of the Chinese border. The United Nations-supervised cease fire line (CFL) of 1949 extended from the international border between India and Pakistan near Chhamb in Jammu and Kashmir in a rough arc that ran nearly 800 km north and then northeastwards to a point, N J 9842, nearly 20 km north of the Shyok river in the Chulung group of mountains of the Saltoro range. Since the territory beyond this point witnessed no military activity and appeared inaccessible, no attempt was made at the time to extend the C F L beyond N J 9842 to the Chinese border. At least a 65-km stretch was left undelineated.

        The 1949 Karachi Agreement between the two countries contained a generalised statement which said that the CFL ' moved thence north to the glaciers '. We have used this line to justify our claim that most of the Siachen glacier is unambiguously and lawfully part of our territory. Pakistan has always rejected this interpretation and insisted that the delimitation agreement of 1949 contained no reference to the CFL beyond NJ 9842.

        Indian armed forces were air lifted to the Siachen Glacier in 1984 mainly with the idea of staving off an attempt by the Pakistan Army to gain control of the Siachen glacier around that point of time. In the first few months after the Indian military action in Siachen glacier in 1984, the Pakistan Army tried repeatedly to remove the Indian Army from the commanding heights it had captured, but after some time the Pakistan Army got reconciled to a strategy of containment, operating as it did from a lower height.

        India's National Security Adviser seems to be giving a very strategically supine message to the Prime Minister which can only be summarized in a well-known comic verse as follows:

        He who in battle runs away
        May live to fight another day
        He who is in battle slain
        Can never rise to fight again!

        Tail Piece:

        Timid and interested civil servants, more than politicians, think much more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country. Amen!