Prescience or “common sense”?

Late last year, soon after the earthquake in PoK and Kashmir, I wrote an article about my fears that funds being generated for earthquake relief will find their way into “jihadi coffers”.

I offered a mass of evidence to support this and concluded that:

If nothing else, these amounts would ensure that the Lashkar will continue to operate on its own for at least several years (possibly a decade). There is also the possibility that the Lashkar will “inflate” its looses to attract more funding from the Islamic charities and the Gulf states. I need not even mention that most of these “Islamic Charities” operate well beyond the pale of any international oversight or accountability.  

Worse, the “new” terrorist camps that will no doubt come up to replace the ones in Muzzafarabad and Balakot will in all likelihood be earthquake-proof and therefore more likely to withstand any air-strikes. 

I find it hard to explain the almost complete lack of sensitivity (and apathy) amongst the general public towards the fact that many terrorist groups are based in this region and that earthquake aid could very easily end up as arms for these groups.

One recalls the storm kicked up by the “secular” media about the earthquake aid disbursed in Gujarat and its effect on “extremist Hindu groups” in 2001.  

Such a discussion is conspicuously missing even as millions of dollars are going to an area infested with Islamic terrorists.

Is it not time to make the wider world aware of this? 

Of course the powers that be in Delhi and the Government knew better than to listen to the rants of semi-literate and ignorant people like me who support their argument with uncomfortable facts.

So, in what I called a divinely orchestrated irony, we had a picture of a beaming Shyam Saran (Foreign Secretary) donating $25m to Pakistan for victims of the very same earthquake – on the same morning  as deadly bombs were being planted in Mumbai (11th July).

I thought I was becoming increasingly paranoid – until I came across reports in the Washington Post and the New York Times implicating Pakistani earthquake relief funds in the latest airliner bomb plot in Great Britain.

Of course our political masters in New Delhi have no time for such “speculation” – and in any case why would they ever trust an American “rag” like the Washington Post?

But thank God – at least I am not going mad.