Chrar: Operation Devastation-III
Why did Indian forces facilitate Mast Gul’s job?

From B L Kak

Pakistan-aided terrorist, Mast Gul by name, had entered Chrar-e-Sharief town and occupied it with dominant intention to destroy it. This finding has come from the two researchers, GN Gauhar and Shahwar Gowhar.

What, however, has baffled them is the unanswered question: Why did the Indian forces facilitate Mast Gul’s job, own this stigma in history and widen the existing gulf between the people of Kashmir and India? "This is mystery that will be exposed sooner or later, but presently we are unable to solve it", says the book co-authored by GN Gauhar and Shahwar Gowhar.

The book has stated: "It is, if not proved with positive evidence, but established by strong inferences that in Mast Gul Pakistan has sent the curse for destruction of this town with a clear mandate. Who was that agency, is also not established". Gauhar and Gowhar have emphasised: "But to our view it was not a political decision of the Government of Pakistan as the destruction of Chrar was a political decision of South Block of New Delhi’s Secretariat".

According to the book, one section, particularly the youth "that were very close to Mast Gul, are of the view that his outbursts regarding detraction were due to his arrogant psychology". Mast Gul, the book says, would like to convey to the people of Chrar and through them to the people of Kashmir that they "should not hanker too much for worldly paraphernalia as they were in the midst of an armed struggle against a power intransigently insisting to continue the occupation of their land".

The second section of the populace attributes the designs of destruction of Chrar to the "deep-rooted game of Jamaat-e-Islami and its militant wing, Hizbul Mujahideen". This section, according to the book, argued that for the last five decades the Jamaat had been at pains to undo the mystic strain on Kashmiri thinking. However, it could not make any headway through sermons, literature and oratory; so, the gun which was taken for liberation was exploited.

The third view, brought to light by Gauhar and Gowhar, is that the pressure of agitation in J&K had exposed to the world that India was not able to hoist a Government in the State that could have a semblance of a rule established by law. Pakistan, they have recorded in their book, had exposed India’s weaknesses at international level through diplomatic activities and by making hard-hitting attacks at world and regional bodies. Pakistan was "able to expose the Indian rule in J&K beyond July 1990 as illegal and immoral under the provisions and spirit of Indian and J&K Constitutions".

Stating that the Indian position had been made precarious world-wide, Gauhar and Gowhar have also placed on record: "Internally, too, there was some pressure from the democrats in India to accord a semblance of rule of law in Kashmir. These pressures were imposing a situation upon the Indian Government to hold elections by ‘hook or by crook’. A section of public opinion argues that Pakistan had planned to make any exercise in this behalf impossible for the Indian Government. So, unmindful of the consequences, they made Chrar town a target for destruction".

The book has a significant piece of information: In spite of "wholesale acts of sacrilege" committed by the Army, the Chrar people do not hide their reaction against Mast Gul for his acts of omission and commission. The book says: "The fact that the people unanimously accuse Mast Gul of having made, at times, derogatory statements against the shrine shows that they were fair in their assessments. They have never attributed such an indecent remark to any Army man".

According to Gauhar and Gowhar, Mast Gul had organised his force of four dozen and odd soldiers in a manner that his adversary was so deceived that in spite of its check and cross-check of the infiltrators it could not be certain about their number. One of Mast Gul’s hoodwinking device was very novel. He had, the book says, got a long tunnel dug out from one house to the other adjoining and so on. The whole locality was connected through this internal tunnel.

The tunnel was not under ground. In ground floor of each house, Mast Gul had dug out gaps from every brick wall of every house and thus all houses-more than 1000-had become interlinked. "It is thus that Army had a wrong assessment that every house was a picket of militants", the book points out.

Gauhar and Gowhar have criticised the role and lack of appropriate strategy of the Indian Army during the Chrar crisis. Could the Indian Army allow either Birla Mandir or Khawja Nizamuddin shrine, both in Delhi, to be burnt in a similar situation? "No", is the reply from Gauhar and Gowhar. And the book contains the loaded observation: "Here in Kashmir they (Indian Army personnel) are reluctant to offer sacrifices because of the occupation of Kashmir. Here, in J&K, they do not care for Kashmiris, their property, cultural heritage, or sentiment".

Gauhar and Gowhar, apparently dissatisfied with the role of the Army, have vehemently argued that if the Indian troops had adopted the second course and allowed the stalemate to continue, the result would have been death by thirst and hunger for the leftover militants as all stocks in the town were burnt and important routes into the town stood completely sealed.

They Indian Army could have, at least for three days, evolved the policy of wait and watch and only resorted to intermittent firing. Gauhar and Gowhar ask: But why, after the destruction of the town, did the military intensify its firing and direct attacks towards the shrine, when there was no offensive from the other side? The co-authors of the book have drawn this conclusion: "But the Indian military has never cared for the sentiment of the Kashmir people. It is thus that from this very hasty action that people safely inferred that this destruction was deliberately designed".

(To be continued)

Today the sheep, tomorrow the shepherd?

By Prakash Chandra

Recent developments in different parts of the world make it look as if it will be sooner rather than later before man assumes some of the controls that now belong to Mother Nature.

Here in the subcontinent, India recently marked her entry into the cloning hall of fame with the announcement that the country's scientists are planning to clone the extinct Indian cheetah.

The Government has reportedly sanctioned Rs 50 million to the Hyderabad-based Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) to try and transplant genetic material from live cheetah cells elsewhere in the world into subcontinental leopards, so that the latter can play surrogate mothers to cloned cheetah cubs.

In other words, if all goes well, this magnificient beast that is only a painful memory now for Indians -- having been mercilessly hunted down into extinction decades ago -- may soon be gracing the country's wildlife reserves and forests again. But there is a long way to go yet before that happens.

First of all, there is the problem of finding enough genetic material from 'donor' cheetahs to transfer to a receptive embryo -- possibly that of a leopard -- whose eggs had been suitably doctored by removing its "original" genetic material.

The idea is to let this cocktail embryo develop naturally in the surrogate mother's womb for the full gestation period required for a cheetah cub to be born. But this is going to be an uphill task as cheetahs are now found in the wild only in Iran.

So at least one live specimen will have to be imported from there. The ball is now in the court of the External Affairs Ministry and the Central Zoo Authority, and the timing and success of this remarkable experiment would depend on these authorities.

There have, indeed, been similar experiments to clone extinct animals elsewhere in the world.

A cloned animal is one which is derived non-sexually from a single parent and it is physically and genetically identical to its parents, unlike in the case of sexual reproduction where the progeny inherits one half of its genetic matter from the father and the other from the mother.

Cloning involves the mechanical transfer of the nucleus of a cell, along with all its genes and chromosomes, to an egg which has also had its nucleus removed. This enucleated egg is then 'deceived' into thinking that it has been fertilised.

An ambitious essay is now underway in Australia where biologists are trying to bring back the extinct Tasmanian tiger. The biggest stumbling block for them is not so much the technology as the ethical and moral issues raised by pro-life campaigners.

They argue that pushing the frontiers of such cutting edge technologies takes man dangerously close to playing God? But scientists probably have the last word when they point out that man was actually playing God when he exterminated these animals in the first place!

If these are some of the hurdles before biologists bent on xeroxing extinct animals back to life, an even more daunting task awaits the scientist who wants to clone human embryos. It was, therefore, a legup for aspiring embryo-cloners the other day when conservative members of Britain's House of Lords nodded their ayes to the controversial legislation on cloning of human embroys.

The bill is, of course, loaded with riders. The research is permitted exclusively for "therapeutic purposes" and would be strictly regulated. And the bill makes it clear that the ban on reproductive cloning of human beings would continue. In other words, it would still be illegal to attempt to produce a human version of the famous sheep, Dolly.

Pro-life campaigners will now no doubt dust off their ethical arguments and reignite the debate on how far science should interfere with nature's mechanisms.

But it will not detract any from the fact that this is a positive step towards exploring that gaping moral black hole which undermines experimentation on embryos.

The idea is to create an embryonic clone of a sick person and extract cells from it so that they can be used to treat the patient. The genetically identical cells can be used to grow tissues, which, in turn, would replace damaged tissues and organs.

Thus a child suffering from leukemia could have bone narrow transplants, just as a heart patient could replace his cardiac tissue, which has been damaged in a heart attack. The human body has some strange attributes.

For instance, even if 80 per cent of your liver were to be removed, the remaining part would continue to function and, remarkably, within a few months, the organ would have reconstituted itself to its original size.

But not all organs enjoy such powers of regeneration, and man will probably continue to depend on organ transplants to replace his ailing or damaged body parts till such time when biocybernetic sciences provide him with better alternatives.

So the recent British initiative marks an important step in man's march towards becoming an organ orchardist, harvesting genetically compatible organs from test-tube gardens and 'donor' human clones.

If research in this direction progresses well, medical science will soon be able to routinely offer custom-made, if cloned, body parts for immediate transplantation.
PTI Feature