Long Live Appeasement

When England and France finally declared war on Nazi Germany on September 3, 1939, disrupting a policy of appeasement towards Hitler, appeasement did not end there. Instead, it keeps rearing its ugly head from time to time and shows to the world that it remains a potent tool in the hands of weak and un-leader-like politicians who are unable to take a firm and principled stand on any issue. History is replete with examples of such leaders or kings who gradually lost their countries in the hope that by giving in to the seemingly modest demands of the bully they would be able to avoid war. But, it is not in the nature of bullies to be appeased. When their first demand is met, the bullies are emboldened to make their next demand, and so it goes on and on. There is no end.

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, is a classic example of a weak politician who took the baton of appeasement from Neville Chamberlain within a decade of him (Chamberlain) laying it down reluctantly. Nehru’s appeasement of the British government and of Jinnah in the early forties, led to India’s partition and a permanent headache in the form of ‘Special Status for Kashmir under Article 370’ for generations of Indians. The repercussions of Nehru’s appeasement policy have kept India bogged down in a relentless faceoff with Pakistan, and provided an opportunity to Pakistan to hone its skills in waging and spreading global terror, since it cannot win a direct and conventional war with India.

Today, on June 26, 2020, I am seeing another Western leader, “Sleepy” Joe, as Donald Trump calls him, pick up the baton of appeasement and declare his full support for Islamists and Pakis by attacking the abrogation of Article 370, the CAA and NRC. It is hugely shocking that despite Mr. Biden having been in politics for more than half a century, he does not understand that by making such a statement, not only is he interfering in the internal affairs of India, he is also supporting a failed and terrorist state of Pakistan, and siding with a country that helped bring about the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. He is supporting a country that has always milked the United States of tens of billions of dollars during the long period of America’s War on Terror, by playing the double game of “running with the hares, and hunting with the hounds”. And, when President Obama was in the ‘War Room’ of the White House directing and watching the United States’ mission to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan where he was being hidden by that treacherous country, did you fall asleep “Sleepy” Joe? Or have you been sleeping throughout the frustration-filled years of your one-way alliance with Pakistan? Have you slept through the seventy years of free India’s history during which your friend Pakistan has waged a proxy war on the world’s largest democracy, India, wherein its terrorists, jihadis, infiltrators, ISI, and the regular army have conducted non-stop warfare/shelling killing three or four people almost every day along or inside our border.

What is most shocking about this act of appeasement, is the fact that despite America being the land of immigrants where millions of people come to escape persecution and genocide, the president-in-waiting of this great nation sees fit to oppose India’s parliamentary passage of the CAA and NRC bills, the main purpose of which is to give citizenship and home to the persecuted (bordering on genocide) minorities in Pakistan and other Islamic countries.