At UN General Assembly, Manmohan Singh addresses wannabe Islamists of Azamgarh.

A  decade after 9/11 when Governments around the world are reassessing the heightened threat posed by radical Islamists and their jihad brigades to their national security, Mr Manmohan Singh, who notionally heads the morally decrepit and functionally paralysed Government of this wondrous land of ours, would rather, ostrich-like, bury his head in the gravel that paves the path to the Prime Minister’s Office in South Block and pretend, as Law Minister Salman Khurshid is fond of saying, all is well. It’s not difficult to spot the three idiots of the Congress regime which goes by the moniker of United Progressive Alliance. Others may have a different opinion of him, but I have always held that Salman Khurshid has a wry sense of humour.

Hence, it comes as no surprise that Mr Singh, while addressing the 66th session of the UN General Assembly on September 24, should have made a bland, meaningless, one-sentence reference to terrorism at paragraph 11 of his rambling, 50-paragraph-long speech whose text would reassure those who grew up in the 1960s on a steady diet of ‘internationalism’ that the lamp of their cause still flickers in some hearts and restore faith among chronic insomniacs that it is possible to have a good night’s sleep. “Terrorism continues to rear its ugly head and take a grievous toll of innocent lives,” Mr Singh droned from the dais, making it sound as no more than a customary mention, as is done by billion-dollar charlatans who gather at Davos every summer to hunger in Africa. At paragraph 36, Mr Singh added three more sentences on terrorism: “The fight against terrorism must be unrelenting. There cannot be selective approaches in dealing with terrorist groups or the infrastructure of terrorism. Terrorism has to be fought across all fronts.” He could well have been referring to the breakout of a strange disease in Timbucktoo.

And while Mr Singh held forth on the “need to address the issue of the deficit in global governance” (yawn), blithely glossing over the huge and ever-increasing deficit in India’s governance ever since he found himself being pole-vaulted into the PMO in the summer of 2004, the Prime Minister of Israel, the only democracy between India and the Maghreb, took it upon himself to say it as it is, bluntly telling the world that the real danger to our present and future emanates from radical Islamism. “A malignancy is now growing between East and West that threatens the peace of all. It seeks not to liberate, but to enslave, not to build, but to destroy. That malignancy is militant Islam… (applause)… Since 9/11, militant Islamists have slaughtered countless innocents — in London and Madrid, in Baghdad and Mumbai, in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, in every part of Israel. I believe that the greatest danger facing our world is that this fanaticism will arm itself with nuclear weapons. And this is precisely what Iran is trying to do.” Mr Benjamin Netanyahu is not known for being politically correct. But he knows that we live in a politically incorrect world.

A measure of just how politically incorrect is our world was provided by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Islamist President, Mr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose bilious rant at the General Assembly led to a walkout by all delegates barring those representing the Organisation of Islamic Conference. Further confirmation of the strange times we live in was provided by Mr Singh in his speech which marked a formal departure from India’s long-standing position on Palestine whose formulation was in keeping with the UN Security Council’s Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967, which was adopted following the Six-Day War in which David beat Goliath to pulp. The operative portion of Resolution 242 calls for the “Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgement of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognised boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

Extrapolating from Resolution 242, India’s position on the demand for Palestinian statehood was restricted to reiterating support for a two-state solution based on the “sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of Israel and Palestine and their right to live side by side in peace within secure and recognised boundaries”. On occasion, there were minor deviations (especially when politicians spoke extempore without a prepared text) but broadly the thrust would remain the same. Mr Singh has now introduced, in his standard and sly manner, a new element to India’s position on a crucial issue without bothering about the need for public deliberation or parliamentary debate. In his address to the General Assembly he went out of the way to raise a contentious issue in whose resolution India has no perceivable role and which really is of no concern to us: “The Palestinian question still remains unresolved and a source of great instability and violence. India is steadfast in its support for the Palestinian people’s struggle for a sovereign, independent, viable and united state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital, living within secure and recognisable borders side by side and at peace with Israel.”

That’s a bizarre proposition, not the least because reiterating support for East Jerusalem as the capital of a ‘united’ state of Palestine amounts to endorsing the belligerence of those who wish to see Israel “wiped off the map of the world”. A ‘united’ Palestine, as in a state with a single territorial identity, is a geographical and political impossibility; Palestine, as and when it gains statehood, will be no different from Mohammed Ali Jinnah’s “moth-eaten Pakistan” and in due course will collapse into two entities. That apart, Mr Singh calling for the inclusion of ‘East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine’ from no less a platform than the UN General Assembly may serve to excite the imagination of wannabe Islamists who dwell in sequestered mohallahs in Azamgarh and similar places across India and aspire to join the ranks of God’s Army, but it is not going to bring about any change on the ground.

The Green Line belongs to the past, as does the Ottoman Empire’s occupation of the House of David. Mr Singh is expected to be aware of basic historical facts, including the UN’s 1947 resolution declaring Jerusalem a “corpus separatum” which was accepted by Jews on the premise that Arabs, too, would accept it. But that resolution was rejected by the Palestinians and Arabs do not even concede the legitimacy of Israel.

There’s a postscript to the Prime Minister’s uncalled for ministration of a demand that is untenable and flies in the face of what he himself says, and ironically so, at one point in his speech: “Actions taken under the authority of the United Nations must respect the unity, territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of individual states.” That postscript is about Hurriyat leader Mirwaiz Umar Farooq’s visit to New York, coinciding with that of Mr Singh. The Mirwaiz was at the UN to attend the OIC’s Kashmir Contact Group meeting where the demand for Kashmir’s ‘azadi’ was reiterated. The meeting was attended, among others, by Palestinians who unhesitatingly recorded their support for the OIC’s resolve to see Kashmir separated from India. Which only proves how inconsequential is Mr Singh’s gratuitous offer of ‘steadfast’ support for ‘united Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital’. But then, national interest was never a priority for our Prime Minister. Nor does the nation seem to care how its interest is being compromised, again and again, by him.

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