Twenty-first Century India

Reclaiming Our Birthright: Justice, Liberty, Equality

"Give me your blood, I will give you freedom." -- Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose

"One Country, One God. One Caste, One Mind. Brothers all of us, Without Difference, Without Doubt." -- Veer Vinayak D. Savarkar

"Say with pride, I am a Hindu." -- Swami Vivekananda

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." -- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Did Pakistan lie about the Kashmir earthquake casualties ?

The Kashmir earthquake is distant memory for most people now, but it happened just 16 months ago and was on our front-pages for several months afterwards (being used by Pakistan for fund-raising), till just about six months ago.

Pakistan raised a massive hue and cry about the earthquake, asking for millions of dollars from the international community. A large number of Islamic "charities" also sprung up workdwide to collect money for aid, as people all over the world, of all religions, donated with an open hand, hoping that this would make the Radical Islamists trying to kill and terrorize us that they were making a mistake by considering us the enemy.

But neither Pakistan nor the "charities" published any detailed accounts of how the money was spent and by whom, and on what. Several news reports have told us that Lashkar-e-Tayiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorists with Kaslashnikov rifles were going about all over Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir, in charge of "relief work".

It was also reported that money raised by Islamic "charities" had been used to plot and organize Islamic terrorist attacks, such as the recent plot by 23 British-born Muslims of Pakistani descent to blow up 10 airplanes en route from UK to USA.

The earthquake in Jammu and Kashmir occurred close to the Line of Control separating Indian Kashmir from Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir -- just about 50 miles from the LoC on the Pakistani side.

About 1400 people were reported dead on the Indian side. Pakistan started screaming and howling on the international arena, saying that over 73,000 people had been killed on its side of the border, and asking for large amounts of money.

Since the epicenter was so close to the LoC, and the population density is roughly the same on both sides of the Loc (because of the mountainous terrain that cannot support heavy densities of human population), shouldn't one have expected the casualties to have been roughly equal on both sides ?

How did Pakistan come to have 52 times as many people dead in the earthquake than India did ? Did Pakistan lie ?

True, a lot of dead-bodies were shown; several hundred bodies, though no international agency actually inspected and verified that 73,000 bodies were there as claimed by Pakistan. I accept that this verification was hard to do because the immediate priority was to bury the bodies before they started rotting -- though it was pretty cold and rotting was not as major a problem as it would have been in hotter climes.

So, let's even say we believe that Pakistan actually had 73,000 dead bodies.

But how do we know all of the dead-bodies people who had really died in the earthquake ? Or were many of the dead-bodies that of hapless Pakistani minority Hindus kidnapped from other parts of Pakistan, killed and left to rot among the earthquake debris to attract International sympathy and money ?

Pakistani Hindus have been reduced from over 16% of Pakistan's population after the Partition of 1947 to less than 0.1% today. It is no secret that they are regularly intimidated, their property taken away, their temples demolished, their women kidnapped, tortured and forcibly converted to Islam, and their menfolk killed in broad daylight while the police and the judiciary turn a blind eye.

An organized ethnic cleansing program has been systematically run for 60 years, that the International community has chosen to ignore. Protecting Hindu lives is not a priority for the Christian West. Protesting persecution of Hindus by Pakistani Muslims is not useful politically for the Muslim-vote-banking "secular" leaders of Hindu-majority India.

Hindu-majority India, trying to prove itself "secular", chooses never to protest against crimes perpetrated on Hindus by Muslims.

How do we know that Pakistan did not kill off a few thousand more Hindus from the minuscule number that remains, and use their dead-bodies to get international sympathy and aid ? They had been killing the Hindus anyway, so this would be hitting two birds with one stone: easily getting rid of evidence of genocide -- dead-bodies -- using the opportunity provided by the earthquake, and getting vast amounts of foreign money at the same time; money that was used right back to carry out more terrorist attacks on the un-Islamic "infidel" world.

As I have said before, it is very suspicious to see claims of 73,000 killed on one side of the LoC and only 1,400 on the other side, by an earthquake that occurred practically on the LoC (the epicentre only 50 miles away on the Pakistani side) and had roughly the same sparse population on both sides in that inhospitable mountainous terrain.

Did Pakistan lie ? I guess we may never know.

Labels: Pakistan