What would India do without the ISI?

What would India do without the ISI?
Mubarak Shah

What if Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, generally known byits shortened name, ISI, is packed up?

Gosh! That should plunge the neighbouring India into turmoil, throwinginstantly hordes of its politicians, security people, diplomats,think-tanks, political analysts, defence experts and journalists out ofbusiness.

Over time, hundreds of its rightists, centrists, leftists and politicians ofall other hues have made their political fortunes by bashing ISI for everyill and calamity afflicting their country. Their flourishing vocation willcome to a grinding halt! And many promising careers will be nipped in thebud!

Nervously grappling with their slipping dhotis and saris, the Vajpayees, theAdvanis, the Gujrals, the Fernandes', the Jaswant Singhs, the ManoharJoshis, the Sharad Pawars, the Rajesh Pilots, the Mulayam Singh Yadavs, theUma Bharatis, the Sheila Dikshits, and the whole lot of their clan will allbe running helter-skelter in search of a new scapegoat and whipping boy tostay in business.

The Thackerays and their Shiv Sena brigands will be out, desperatelycreating a new deity in whose name to brand afresh Indian Muslims as theagents of Pakistan, and keep murdering them on the streets of Bombay and itssuburbs, and keep threatening them to convert to Hinduism or face the cruelpunishment of being thrown into the Arabian Sea. The Rashtriya SwayamsevakSanghs, the Vishwa Hindu Parishads, the Bajrang Dals, and dozens of rabidHindu militant outfits will be exposed for being plain murderers ofminorities, destroyers of mosques, churches and gurdwaras, and the rapistsof Christian nuns and women of the minorities.

With the ISI gone, the Inder Malhotras, the Arun Shouries, the PrabhuChawlas, the M.J. Akbars, the Tavleen Singhs, the Mani Shankar Aiyars,together with a huge Press corps of senior editors, commentators, analysts,reporters and cartoonists will turn out to be a two-penny-a-piece crowd,adept only at spinning yarns but with no real journalism in them. With noprospects in the profession, they will all hit the job market to cut hair insaloons, wash cars at service stations, repair cycles in shops, massage oldpeople in clinics, stitch ladies dresses in draper shops, and hawk `papri'chat at Bhor bazaars.

With the major source to fire the imagination of their editors and reportersand try their skills in invention and fabrication gone, newspapers will gohalf dry on the flow of news and views and cut down their pages from 10 tofive.

And as Doordarshan will chop its news bulletins drastically to run in theirplace entertainment programmes of Hindi movies and pop music, privatechannels will devote most of their newscasts to interviewing Bhola Pehlwans,Nandu Panwallahs and Birla Burfiwallahs instead of self-styled Pakistanspecialists and defence experts.

The self-assuming Subrahmanyams, S.K. Singhs and the whole lot of theirtribe, now making up the much-sought-after mob for the media and keepingnewspaper pages and the airwaves overflowing with their ire against the ISI,will be revealed as great pretenders of intellectual pursuits and profoundthought....

Going down with them will also be the institutes carrying such impressivenames as the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses and the Centre ofPolicies Planning Studies, with their specialisation being only to churn outfanciful accounts of ISI's exploits in India. They will be converted intodandy restaurants, coffee shops, ice cream parlours and shopping arcades.The K.P.S. Gills of Punjab fame and their police and army counterparts ofNortheastern states will be discovered to be the biggest murderers inuniform, for having butchered wholesale innocent Sikhs, Assamese, Mizos,Nagas, Manipuris and Tripurans, dubbing them agents of the ISI.

The country's top-brass and their field commanders will shiver in theirpants, knowing not what terrible fate awaits them henceforth when the ISI isnot there to take the blame for their own security lapses, blunders andmistakes...

The writer is a former press minister at the Pakistan High Commission.This has been excerpted from his column in `The Frontier Post', entitled,`Indian Analysts Will Be Idle If ISI Is Wound Up!', and syndicated byVANA