L'affaire Vaidik-Saeed: Limited utility of useful idiots

Only in India will a self-styled journalist’s dalliance with one of India’s most wanted terrorists make the kind of news it has.

Let’s be clear, Ved Pratap Vaidik, who is reportedly close to Yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who, in turn, is alleged to wield some degree of influence with the Narendra Modi government, committed no sin in hobnobbing with Hafiz Saeed even if he has managed to embarrass the government.

Through innuendo and mock shock, the Congress party has managed to embarrass the “hardline” BJP by suggesting that one of their own may be schmoozing with a terrorist; the media has got itself a couple of hours worth of empty fulmination and debate-mongering.

The debates though are unwatchable.

The only guys who are having real fun are Saeed and his ISI pals, who have managed to create a few more “useful idiots” who might do their work of sowing confusion in India’s Pakistan policy.

Vaidik’s crime is not that he met Saeed and told him a few things about Modi. I would have been happy to meet up Saeed myself to tell him a few educative tales from the Panchatantra or point out the stupidity of his Islamism and the wisdom of India’s pluralism.

Purely as a journalist, I would interview him on his attitudes to India, terrorism, secularism, jihad, et al.

However, there are two real questions to ask: First, why would the ISI want to get some woolly-headed Indian like Vaidik to meet a Saeed? And, second, even assuming the Congress’ suspicions are remotely correct, that Vaidik was sent on a fishing mission with some kind of a wink-and-a-nod from the Indian side, what could have been the purpose of it all?

The answer to the first question is probably this: the ISI knows that it cannot win a war with India by periodically shipping terrorists over and maintaining a permanent state of jihad in Kashmir. Despite our bumbling efforts, India is too big and too powerful in relation to Pakistan to give up Kashmir with these pinpricks.

The chances are that the ISI, which is the mischief-mongering action arm of the Pakistani army, wants to weaken the country’s resolve from within so that it can continue to nurture the hope of ultimately prising Kashmir from us. Unlike India, which would like Kashmir swept under the carpet, the Pakistanis are in this bit of warfare for the long-term, even if it means that they will destroy themselves in the process. This is why it is fostering “useful idiots" in India who may be well-meaning people, but effectively sow the seeds of doubt within us.

A clue to this effort came to us three years ago, almost to this date, when the US government arrested Ghulam Nabi Fai, a Kashmiri lobbyist funded by the ISI to take Indian “liberals” on junkets where they can happily denounce the Indian government’s attitudes to Kashmir.

Among the “intellectuals” who are known to have enjoyed the hospitality of Fai are Dileep Padgaonkar, who was the UPA government’s J&K interlocutor some years ago, Kuldip Nayar, a known Indo-Pak peace-monger, Justice Rajinder Sachar, who was the author of the Sachar report on the economic status of Muslims in India, and Gautam Navlakha, a peace activist.

The Indian media had a field day in 2011 questioning the patriotism of these people, but, as in the case of Vaidik, it is not the patriotism of these individuals we need to question, but their inability to see that they may be inadvertently dancing to the ISI’s tune. But then, “useful idiots” are useful to the ISI only as long as they don’t realise their utility to the latter.

The ISI probably scents an opportunity in the rise of Modi, whose victory in May sent many of these liberals to the fringes of relevance – and are still nursing their wounds. So one should expect this dirty-tricks department of the Pak army to organise more trips of “liberals” to Pakistan (and participate in seminars in India itself) to show how peaceable the likes of Hafiz Saeed and the Lashkar-e-Taiba are. The ISI’s job is to proliferate more “useful idiots” like Vaidik and, in this activity, they will get the support of “human rights” campaigners like Arundhati Roy and Prashant Bhushan of the Aam Aadmi Party, among others.

One can only hope our “useful idiots” realise they are being used, but that still does not make them unpatriotic. Positions that individuals legitimately hold may or may not be helpful to the enemy, but they are valid positions to hold in a democratic country. It is the job of the government and other Indians who do not think like them to call out their stupidity.

This brings us to the next question: could the government have had anything to do with the Vaidik mission, if there was one?

One can only speculate on this. It is well-known in the world of spooks that even while a government may be fighting terrorism. some arms of the intelligence agencies keep lines of communication open to informers and jihadists, both to gather intelligence and to send covert messages to them indirectly when needed.

The CIA built jihadi groups in Afghanistan and still maintains links with them in order to have some leverage over them. When needed – say, to free an American hostage, or to launch a top-secret mission – these links are activated. The Israeli Mossad uses these weak back-links to terror groups to bring back Israeli soldiers captured by Palestinian jihadis or Hamas or the Hezbollah during periods of conflict.

The question is whether Vaidik was one such person used to touch base with Saeed for some such undercover work. I doubt it, though such things are not entirely unthinkable.

But one thing is certain: they do not, they cannot, reflect any softening of the Modi government’s views on Kashmir. Sometimes these links prove useful in hostage or prisoner exchange situations. Even now, there are Indian hostages being held by ISIS in Iraq.

A few weeks ago, the US government exchanged five Taliban leaders for the return of US soldier Robert Bergdahl held in captivity by the Taliban. This exchange could not have happened without linkages with the Taliban.

The question is: if Vaidik was on a feeler mission from the government, what could that have been? The mission must have been a failure, for the release of Vaidik’s photograph with Saeed would have blown that project to smithereens. The ISI may be chortling in the background at our own media’s gullibility in for going after Vaidik, but it has also managed to show up the limited usefulness of its own “useful idiots.”