Ramankutty Maniappan, an Indian RAW operative, beheaded by drug smugglers in South West Afghanistan
Despite the Mukherjee explantion to parliament Security Advisor Narayanan remains adamant about Pakistan's involvement in the murder
Is the above 'Nura kushti' an attempt to hide India's drug smuggling fingerprints exposed in Afghanistan by the murder?
Or, is a tit for tat state-sponsored terrorist act, a la the March 2000 Chitthisinghpura Sikh massacre in Indian-held Kashmir, being planned in the 'dirty tricks' caldron of Indian 'Agencies' which will target Pakistan or some Indian minority like the Sikhs?
Washington, D.C., Wednesday, November 30, 2005 - India was up to its old Chanakiyan tricks following the Nov 19 kidnapping and murder of an Indian operative, Ramankutty Maniappain, by some drug smugglers, who are opposed to the Iran-Afghanistan link road (as it effects their livelihood) being financed and built by India in the drug-infested Nimroz province of Western Afghanistan.
The Western Afghan province of Nimroz which borders the strategic trijunction where the borders of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran meet, (a point about twenty miles North of the Iranian rail-head city of Zahedan) also happens to lie astride the traditional, but dangerous and lawless, Afghan drug smuggling route - mostly camel/ mule drug caravans - heading to Iran, Turkey and to countries beyond. These smugglers for obvious reasons don't like roads or railroads or outsiders!
The Indian operative, the late Mr. Ramankutty Maniappan, hails from the South India (village Chingoli in the district town of Alaphuza) in the Indian state of Kerala, which also happens to be the home state of Indian External affairs minister, E. Ahmed, a Muslim. Is this a coincidence? Operative Ramankutty Maniappan was in the employ of the Indian Army's Border Roads Organization, a hush hush semi-military organization infilterated by hundreds of RAW agents, (which is supposed to be building a 130-mile link road, under the on-the-spot supervision of an Indian army Brigadier-General named Sehgal. This road is supposed to connect Zabol in Iran to Zarang and Delaram in Afghanistan - all these three towns lie astride the the ancient drug route near the God forsaken border trijunction where Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan meet about twenty miles North of the Iranian border city of Zahedan.
Following the murder, New Delhi's notorious intelligence agencies, without any evidence, as is their wont, rushed to blame Pakistan -- a convenient scapegoat -- for the murder, using their boss, National Security Adviser M.K. Narayanan as their spokesman. The accusation stunned the Afghan government, and angered the Pakistan government, as the real facts are known to all concerned. Probably the protests from the two prodded the Indian Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee to contradict the statement of his own colleague when he told the Indian parliament that Pakistan was NOT involved.
According to a report in yesterdays (November 29, 2005) Chandigrah-based newspaper TRIBUNE, headlined 'India had sought Pakistan’s help to save Kutty', Defence minister and Leader of the House in the Lok Sabha (Indian parliament) Pranab Mukherjee, said that Pakistan declined to help. Mukherjee, also denied (during his November 28, 2005, speech in the Lok Sabha) that the Indian government had ever pointed an accusing finger at Pakistan for the gruesome murder of Ramankutty Maniappan's murder in Western Afghanistan. (www.tribuneindia.com/2005/20051129/main7.htm) This clarification came from Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee, when Leader of the Opposition, Mr. L. K. Advani drew the government’s attention to reports, quoting National Security Adviser M. K. Narayanan, that Pakistan was involved in the dastardly act in Afghanistan. Mr Advani wanted the government to take Parliament into confidence if this was so.
In reply to Advani Mukherjee said, "he had spoken to National Security Advisor Narayanan who told him that he was misquoted and that he (Narayanan) had not stated that Pakistan was responsible for the incident." Something is amiss here, and something is very rotten in the Indian state, as the powerful and well-informed National Security Advisor M. K. Narayanan, a very senior bureaucrat, did not take very long to contradict and ridicule Defence minister Pranab Mukherjee's November 28 statement to the Indian parliament about Pakistan's NOT being involved in Ramankutty Maniappan's killing in Afghanistan.
According to a Pathanamthitta-datelined Front Page report also in yesterday's (November 29, 2005) HINDU newspaper (www.thehindu.com/2005/11/28/stories/2005112819470100.htm) the National Security Advisor Narayanan contradicted the Indian Defence minister when he responded to the newspaper's correspondent who asked about CPI (M) MP Mr. T. K. Hamsa's reported criticism of his statement on a suspected Pakistan hand in the killing of the Border Roads Organisation employee Maniappan. The HINDU report states that Mr. Narayanan said, that he still sticks to what he had said earlier about Pakistani involvement. "People always overdo the matter when they attempt deception," wrote the great American essayist, editor and novelist Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900). Anyone can see that the Indian leadership, at the highest level, is overdoing the matter and seems to be attempting deception, as is its wont.
Khalistan Calling has now learnt on good authority - and we have a few sources as Sikhs have been in Afghanistan for centuries - that Kutty along with hundreds of other Indians (under cover of India's Border Roads organization) was actively involved in drug and currency smuggling in behalf of the Afghan War Lords and Indian Fat Cats in intelligence agencies. When Kutty was murdered after his abduction, Pakistan was a handy scape goat. They obviously wanted to shift the focus away from their Afghan drugs racket which generates billion of dollars annually for Indian intelligence agencies, Indian smugglers and corrupt Indian officials. No wonder India's foreign exchange reserves have been zooming, since 2001, despite the fact that India imports over 70% of its oil and Gas needs and its other imports far exceed its exports.
Experience has taught us Sikhs that when an Indian publication like the Chennai-based English language newspaper, THE HINDU (one of India's oldest and most prestigious) plays truant with a major front page news story, one can be sure that there is something fishy. There is evidence of some subterfuge when the Hindu newspaper removed a November 29, 2005, front-page report, after posting it on its website -- a no no for a prestigious publication. The report in question was written by Hindu's 'Special Correspondent', headlined, "Pakistan pleaded inability to help in Maniappan rescue -- M.K. Narayanan was misquoted, Pranab Mukherjee tells Lok Sabha." The report was posted on the Hindu website at 9.30 PM GMT or at 16.30 P.M. EST on November 28, 2005 (or at 3.30 A.M. Indian Standard Time on November 29, 2005) and was one of many reports about the Indian operative's murder in the South Western Afghanistan province of Nimroz. That report mysteriously disappeared from the HINDU website at 18.30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, the same day, after an exposure on the internet of less than two hours! At this point in time the above mentioned November 28 front page report is nowhere to be found on the HINDU website unless one was quick to save the link to the HINDU story before it vanished as we did. This hanky panky was brought to our attention by a reader of this column which has aroused our suspicion and we decided to investigate.
We, and our numerous contacts in India (and we have twentytwo million unhappy and restive Sikhs captive in that South Asian Indian demoNcracy since 1947, and three million more who live FREE and prosperous in the diaspora) who are always listening and watching, have been closely watching the reports of Kutty's murder and kidnapping in Afghanistan. We have not forgotten how the Indian propaganda machinery projected the 1984 nation-wide anti-Sikh pogroms and the Chitthisinghpura Sikh massacare of March 2000 and quite a few other sad episodes of state-sponsored terrorism. Readers may recall that over seven years ago, our inside sources in India - always reliable - alerted us that India was about to test a nuke near Pokharan in Rajasthan. We carried that expose in the Khalistan Calling of May, 07, 1998 nearly a week before the dirty deed. The then Pakistani ambassador to the United States (now retired) Mr. Riaz Khokhar, a top notch professional diplomat, took our May 07, 1998 expose to Mr. Karl Inderfurth, the then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State to ask why the United States, with all its spy satellites and human intelligence operatives, had failed to predict India's May 1998 nuclear test when a small Sikh newsletter had got it right. Mr. Inderfurth was stunned!
Ms. Elaine Sciolino (currently posted in Paris as New York Times correspondent) honored Khalistan calling, and our expose about the Indian nuclear test, with a write up in the New York Times of Saturday May 16, 1998, headlined, "Scooped on Tests. U.S. Scorns a Sikh Journal." Three years later, in 2001, Gregory F. Treverton, Senior Consultant at RAND and former Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council in Washington DC made honorable mention of our column, and our expose of India's nuke test, on page 02, of his excellent 2001 book 'Reshaping National Intelligence For An Age Of Information' which has been recommended as a MUST READ by four former Directors of CIA and Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to President Carter among others.(Cambridge University Press - ISBN 0-521 58096 X hardback)
We have been closely monitoring the tragic story of Indian operative, Ramankutty Maniappan who was kidnapped on November 19 and later beheaded, a la Iraqi beheadings, by some Afghan drug smugglers (posing as insurgents) in Southwestern Afghanistan's province of Nimroz. Kutty was travelling by car (along with three Afghani armed guards) between the villages of Gurguri and Minar on or about Saturday, November 19, 2005, when he was abducted. This ghastly deed, by a strange coincidence (is it a coincidence?) seems to have been synchronized to the day - November 19, 2005 - or a few hours after the announcement from New Delhi that Afghan President, Mr. Hamid Karzai has been awared the Indira Gandhi prize, which is usually sugar-coated with a large cash prize.
Our inside sources in India report that some hush hush deception is brewing in the offices of the umpteen Indian intelligence agencies/ organizations located in palaces in New Delhi, (built by the Colonial British on stolen Sikh Gurdwara lands) which might result in some kind of Indian state-sponsored act of terror inside Pakistan. Indian agencies might even recruit some Sarabjit Singh clones to plant bombs inside Pakistan maybe! A vulnerable Indian minority could also be targeted (a la the dozens of innocent Sikhs who were murdered in cold blood, Al Capone style, in March 2000 in Chitthisingpura, in the Srinagar valley in Indian-held Kashmir, to shock & awe President Bill Clinton, and his entourage, on the very first day of his state visit to South Asia. India's Brahmin-caste dominated rulers will never learn that their Arthasastra, their guide to statecraft, written by a morally repugnant Brahmin, one Chanakiya or Kautilya, many years ago is out of date as it advocates treachery, extensive espionage, the use of agents provocateurs, fraud, rumourmongering, poison, forgeries, torture and rruthless use of force to achieve unity within the state and dominance over its neighbors. In this day and age neighbors, even weak ones, are not walk overs. They can and will retaliate.
India's rulers ought to remember the advice that, "Propaganda is a soft weapon: hold it in your hands too long and it will move about like a snake, and strike the other way." wrote Jean Anouilh the famous French playwright in his book 1955 book - The Lark.