India's swift response to the vandalism of its London Mission is a saga of history and assertion of self-confidence

The alacrity with which the Indian government has retaliated against the Khalistani vandalism of the Indian High Commission in London deserves our kudos. By downgrading the security of the British embassy in Delhi, India has demonstrated again that it can no longer be bullied. Nor is it ruled by a dispensation that looks for western approval. If this had happened just a decade ago, the government would have made calls to friendly journalists, editors and academics who would then write 4000-word pieces calling for “restraint” on the part of the Government and variants thereof.   The Khalistani desecration of the Indian flag on British soil is the latest eruption in a chain of several such anti-India attacks across the globe that are taking place at a frantic pace. They are anti-India, but they are fundamentally anti-Hindu. Spread across the US, Canada, and Australia, the targets of Khalistani militants were  Hindu temples. No mosque or church or synagogue was harmed.   But on an even deeper plane, the so-called Khalistani “movement” — to the extent it has seen “success” (sic) — is a worrying proof of how a section of the Sikh community has been thoroughly delinked from its mothership: Sanatana Dharma. The philosophical and spiritual oneness and centuries’-long amity was slaughtered at the altar of Congress politics and accelerated most notably, by Indira Gandhi. She was arguably the last practitioner of an age-old dark art of political manipulation which has never worked: of creating an enemy where none existed. The fact that that dark art has never worked throughout history was proved when  she paid for it with her own life. The revival and resurgence of Khalistani militancy was neither sudden nor unexpected, especially when we recall the events in the run-up to the Punjab elections concluded last year. Following AAP’s tremendous victory there, things wouldn’t have turned out in any other fashion. Just to cite the most recent example, the Amritpal Singh episode was simply waiting to happen.   As this article argues quite well, the so-called Khalistani movement has received renewed support largely from two major sources: (1) ideological sympathisers in the Sikh diaspora — the hardcore believers (2) various linked terror groups: Kashmiri separatists, ISI handlers, etc.   Within the broader Sikh community in India, there is no real support for the Khalistani dream project of carving out a separate Sikh state by slicing India. An Amritpal Singh could do what he did because he had the green signal of a tacit free-run given by the AAP in Punjab.   When we return to the Indian High Commission in London, we notice a familiar theme playing out. I clearly remember a newspaper headline of the 1990s. It basically said that one of the major revenue sources for the British Government was the visa fees deposited by Pakistanis pouring into the country in record numbers. Thirty years later, large tracts of British land have been overwhelmed by these very immigrants. The rise and rise of London’s most prolific and controversial Mayor, a Pakistani British Muslim, Sadiq Khan is a phenomenon that deserves a more comprehensive scrutiny. This theme is consistent with the British policy towards India which can only be described as Pakistan-friendly. Some of its historical roots lie, for example, in the cynical manner in which Winston Churchill was cultivating Muhammad Ali Jinnah even as the Round Table Conferences were ongoing. A combination of factors including these shadowy Churchillian manipulations culminated in the partition of India, as Tunzelmann demonstrates in her brilliant Indian Summer.  Indeed, some  powerful sections in the British establishment haven’t yet reconciled with the permanent loss of the British Raj for which they still pine and yearn. These sections are also allied with the Deep State and forces which hate to see Rishi Sunak as their prime minister. How would the British Government have reacted if the American embassy in London was vandalised by a bunch of US-hating fringe militants? More so if the British Government had been forewarned of such an attack but had still chosen to ignore it? “A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, ordinary working man he suddenly said: ‘If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country…I have three children…I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.’… What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying…not throughout Great Britain…but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are…the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.  [Emphasis added]" That was Conservative British MP, Enoch Powell addressing a meeting of the Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, UK on 20 April, 1968. This was his response to the raging debate on the proposed Race Relations Bill. This speech later became infamous as the “Rivers of Blood” speech. To this day, the politically correct British establishment prefers to pretend that this speech never took place but let’s just leave it at that.   A war veteran, Enoch Powell had served in India and was an eyewitness to the horrific Partition riots. He had correctly understood it as the outcome of Gandhi’s Muslim appeasement and the British policy of divide and rule.   Powell was also an eyewitness to the outbreak of race riots in 1960s America. When he examined the Race Relations Bill which thoughtlessly allowed mass immigration of numerous alien cultures into Britain, he was outraged and terrified at what it could do to his own country. But the political climate of England of that era was suffused with an overdose of colonial and racial guilt. It didn’t want to offend any immigrants.   Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech received overwhelming support but opposition was also swift, pervasive and unsparing. The then Conservative Party chief Edward Heath (later UK Prime Minister) sacked him from his Shadow Cabinet within three days. The legendary music band, Beatles savaged him in what’s known as the “Commonwealth” song with lyrics like “dirty Enoch Powell.” Powell’s career never recovered from this.   The Race Relations Bill was passed and paved the way for laxer and laxer immigration policies leading up to the aforementioned harvest in visa fees. Eventually, it ended up achieving the exact opposite of what it had intended. While racial integration was the ultimate goal, in practice, watertight segregation was attained. The litmus test of integration via multiculturalism seemed to be premised on a spurious and impractical concept of not offending any immigrant group even in face of bad behaviour and criminality.   The 1981 Brixton race riots unleashed by Blacks and other ethnic minorities, which lasted a record three months, was characterised by the BBC as “London’s worst 20th Century disorder”.   And how did the British Government respond? By injecting multiculturalism in greater doses. Thus, about thirty years later, England treated itself to shocking spectacles like rampant child abuse in Madrassas and the notorious Rotherham grooming of underage girls into sex slavery by Jihadi gangs in 2015. A majority of these depraved criminals were descendants of immigrant Pakistani Muslims. The last we heard, the UK has retained its Pakistan-friendly foreign policy almost intact. Then there is the gnawing question: why do doomed and disgraced and out-of-power Pakistani dictators find in England such a safe asylum? Oh! And the sinister role of the ISI in England is quite well-known…its prolonged and radioactive lobbying for Kashmir’s secession from India notably led by Ayub Thakur was truly devious, to put it mildly. In 2014, the Indian intelligence community produced information showing that the ISI supported Khalistani activists in Britain and conducted training courses for them in Mae Scot, Thailand.         Clearly, England has learned nothing from Enoch Powell’s 1968 caution and has in fact obstinately journeyed in the opposite direction. Turning a blind eye to — or covertly supporting — Khalistani militants on its soil is part of this journey towards “heaping up its own funeral pyre,” to borrow from Powell.   As far as India is concerned, this script was working as long as we had weak and unstable governments and a weaker economy. The moment that changed, the delusional ancien regime began what can only be termed as a series of panicked reactions. The most recent one was the vile BBC hit job masquerading as a documentary.   The breach of security of the Indian High Commission in London and India’s swift and tough response is thus not merely a tale of two embassies. It is a chequered saga of history and an assertion of national self-confidence but more significantly, it is also a demonstration of how change in the balance of power looks in the making. The author is the founder and chief editor, The Dharma Dispatch. Views expressed are personal. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News , India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.