Thread by @FriedrichPieter

“Regime mouthpieces in New Delhi tried to spin the Kabul massacre as an attack on Indian interests,” says Kite Fights co-author Pieter Friedrich. “The reality is the murder of those 25 Afghan Sikhs vastly benefited the Modi regime in a myriad of ways.”

sikhinformationcentre.org/2020/06/17/kit…

My new work now available in print via Amazon:

“The circumstances behind the Kabul massacre offer the global community a chance to witness the potential launch of a similar script as laboratories of terror are replicated and set loose by rogue actors.”

amazon.com/dp/B08B7LNQ5B/

Read "Kite Fights" for free at the link.

“India for some time has always used Afghanistan as a second front, & India has over the years financed problems for Pakistan on that side of the border.”

US Senator (later Defense Secretary) Chuck Hagel
— 2011 —

sikhinformationcentre.org/kite-fights-th…

"Kite Fights" is wide-ranging, covering:

- Afghanistan/Pakistan relations
- Afghanistan/India relations
- India/Pakistan relations
- India/Sri Lanka relations
- Cross-border terrorism
- ISIS in South Asia
- Hindutva
- Kashmir
- and more

"When militants in Kabul, Afghanistan stormed into Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib during morning prayers on 25 March 2020, spraying gunfire and tossing grenades, they were killed in a shootout with Afghan security forces only after slaughtering 25 Sikhs."

Within 2 weeks, Afghanistan arrested Aslam Farooqi as the alleged mastermind of the massacre. Farooqi, the head of Islamic State (ISIS) affiliate Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), was soon accused of ties to the Taliban’s militant Haqqani Network & named as a former...

... commander of Pakistan-based Islamist terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). ISKP released a statement claiming the attack was revenge for India’s actions in Kashmir — yet the stated motive (which is truly bizarre in context of the Sikh/Kashmiri relationship) is but one of...

... many reasons that the official narrative demands scrutiny when the incident is examined from a broader, more nuanced perspective that takes into consideration similar historical incidents, recent regional developments, and current geo-political realities.

Peace does not seem to be India’s agenda for Afghanistan. India is much more interested in using the country as a “second front” against Pakistan. For decades, India’s RAW and Pakistan’s ISI have waged an intelligence war against each other in Afghanistan.

“The ongoing dispute in Kashmir continues to fuel these clashes, but experts say Afghanistan may be emerging as the new battleground. Islamabad sees India’s growing diplomatic initiatives in Afghanistan as a cover for RAW agents working to destabilize Pakistan." @jayshreebajoria

Explaining his agency’s perspective, former RAW special secretary Anand Arni writes, “India’s interests in Afghanistan haven’t changed. India hopes to build up Afghanistan’s state capacity so that Pakistan’s desires of extending control can be thwarted.”

The Kabul massacre could not have come at a more opportune time for New Delhi. While India’s influence over Afghanistan is waning, the country’s reputation — under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership — is growing increasingly tarnished in the global arena even while...

... Pakistan charts a more moderate, humanitarian course.... The Sangh thrives on a “divide and conquer” strategy of creating discord among minorities. One of its worst nightmares is any kind of trusting, intimate bond between minority groups — including between Muslims & Sikhs.

Aside from its perceived usefulness as a second front and new battleground in India’s perpetual conflict with Pakistan, there appears to be an ideological reason underlying the Modi regime’s obsession with Afghanistan.

The fundamental tenet of Hindutva is that non-Hindus are foreign to the country. Yet Hindutva also insists the whole of South Asia (and even beyond) should be a single, unified empire — which, its ideologues claim, it once was.

VD Savarkar, the man who first articulated “Hindutva” as a religious nationalist political ideology in the 1920s, claimed that the Hindu deity Ram once ruled over an empire that stretched from the Himalayan mountain range in the north to the island of Sri Lanka in the south.

This region, Savarkar wrote, represented the original “geographical limit” of what he considered to be “not only a fatherland but a holy land” for Hindus. In the modern day, however, Savarkar insisted that those Hindus living elsewhere must continue looking to India as their...

... fatherland and therefore “continue unabated their labors of founding a Greater India, a Mahabharat.” Assuring them that “nothing can stand in the way of your desire to expand,” he declared, “The only geographical limits of Hindutva are the limits of our earth.” Restoration...

... of this mythical empire remains as central to the Hindu nationalist agenda today as transformation of India itself into a formal “Hindu Rashtra” (or nation). “Akhand Bharat is one of the mainstays of Hindu nationalism,” writes French political scientist @jaffrelotc.

While the specific tactics for achieving that goal may only be discussed behind closed doors, the Sangh has made no secret about its continued desire for Akhand Bharat — an undivided India.