By MARK TULLY “I can say without the shadow of a doubt that when history will be written, the period over which she (Sonia Gandhi) presided, both over the Congress and India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense corruption and of a democracy verging towards autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single person, a non-Indian and a Christian like me. Truth will also come out about her being the main recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G, which she uses to buy votes.” The sun has already set; darkness is just about to start. Do you blame it on bankruptcy/blindness of Congress or country’s misfortune. It is both.Now read the complete analysis, which follows. THE TRUTH & THE HIDDEN FACTS. I was surprised when the Congress party gave me aPadma Shri – I am the only foreign journalist to ever get it. For, in my forty years of political reporting in India, I have always been a vocal critic of the Nehru dynasty. Someone even called me recently: “a vitriolic British journalist, who in his old age chose to live back in the land he never approved”. It started withOperation Blue Star. I was one of the few western correspondents who criticized Indira. As I have said since then numerous times, the attack on the Golden Temple and the atrocities that followed the army operations, produced in all sections of the Sikhs a sense of outrage that is hard today to alleviate. As everybody knows,Indira Gandhihelped my fame grow even more, by wanting to imprison me during the Emergencyshe clamped and finally throwing me out of India for a short while. But the result was that the whole of India tuned in, then and thereafter, to my radio’s broadcasts, ‘The Voice of India’, to hear what they thought was ‘accurate’ coverage of events. WhenRajiv Gandhicame to power, I first believed that he was sincerely trying to change the political system, but he quickly gave-up when the old guard would not budge. I criticized him for hisfoolish adventure in Sri Lanka,although I felt sorry for him when he was blown to pieces by Dhanu, the Tamil Tiger. It is inKashmir, though that I fought most viciously against his Govt and subsequent Congress ones for its human right abuses on the Kashmiri Muslims of the Valley. The Congress Governments tried indeed several times to censor me and the army even took prisoner my Kashmiri stringer, whom I had to rescue by the skin of his teeth. I am also proud that I was the first one to point out then, that the Indian Government had at that time no proof of the Pakistani involvement in the freedom movement in Kashmir. Thus I always made it a point to start my broadcasts by proclaiming that the Indian Government accuses Pakistan of fostering terrorism», or that “elections are being held in Indian-controlled Kashmir”…As I was so popular, all the other foreign journalists used the same parlance to cover Kashmir and they always spoke of the plight of the Muslims,never of the 400.000 Hindus, who after all were chased out of their ancestral land by sheer terror (I also kept mum about it). As forSonia Gandhi, I did not mind her, when she was Rajiv Gandhi’s wife, but after his death, I watched with dismay as she startedstamping her authority on the Congress, which made me say in a series of broadcasts on the Nehru Dynasty:“It’s sad that the Indian National Congress should be completely dependent on one family;the total surrender of a national party to one person isdeplorable.You have to ask the question:what claims does Sonia Gandhi have to justify her candidature for prime-ministership?Running a country is far more complicated than running a company. Apprenticeship is required in any profession — more so in politics”. I heard that Sonia Gandhi was unhappy about this broadcast. Then, after President APJ Abdul Kalam called her to the Raj Bhavan and told her what some of us already knew, namely thatfor a long time, she had kept both her Italian and Indian passports,which disqualified her to become the Prime Minister of India,she nevertheless became the Supreme leader of India behind the scenes. It is then that I exclaimed:“the moribund and leaderless Congress party has latched onto Sonia Gandhi, who is Italian by birth and Roman Catholic by baptism”. She never forgave me for that. Yet, today I can say without the shadow of a doubt that when history will be written,the period over which she presided, both over the Congress and India, will be seen as an era of darkness, of immense corruption and of a democracy verging towards autocracy, if not disguised dictatorship, in the hands of a single person, a non Indian and a Christian like me.Truth will also come out about her being themain recipient for kickbacks from Bofors to 2G,which she uses to buy votes, as the Wikileaks have just shown. Finally, I am sometimes flabbergasted at the fact that Indians – Hindus, sorry, as most of this country’s intelligentsia is Hindu – seem to love me so much, considering the fact that in my heydays, I considerably ran down the 850 million Hindus of this country, one billion worldwide. I have repented today: I do profoundly believe that India needs to be able to say with pride,“Yes, our civilization has a Hindu base to it.”The genius of Hinduism, the very reason it has survived so long, is thatit does not stand up and fight.It changes and adapts and modernizes and absorbs – that is the scientific and proper way of going about it. I believe that Hinduism may actually prove to be the religion of this millennium, because it can adapt itself to change.Hindus are still slaves to MUSLIMS and CHRISTIANSOn the name of secularism,lots of facilities and cash incentives are given to Muslims and Christians.Hajsubsidy is given to Muslims for Haj yatra,wages of Muslim teachers and Imamsare given to Muslims are given by looting the Hindu temples.No such subsidy is given to Hindusfor going to Hindu religious places or any wages to Hindu religious priests or Hindu teachers.In fact congress secular government creates many obstacles for Hindus for going to Amarnath Yatra. Even after 65 years of independencereservation is given on religious groundswhile it should have been abolished by this time. If at all reservation or subsidy is needed, then itshould be purely on economic groundsrather on the grounds of minorities. Such reservations affect the quality of work. Congress party giving various kinds ofallurements to minorities to buy their voteswith Hindu money. In the government, many people are with Hindu names but in fact many are Muslims and Christians with Hindu names (**) to fool Hindus and to show in the government, majority people are Hindus.
