Earlier yesterday, leftist propaganda outlet The Wire, infamous for its Tek Fog and Meta hitjobs, published a video of Karan Thapar interviewing former governor of Jammu and Kashmir Satya Pal Malik.

Karan Thapar, a known Modi baiter whose pathological and irrational hatred of the current dispensation is well-documented, found in Satya Pal Malik a fitting ally to propagate the Left’s anti-Modi propaganda that has come to define his brand of ‘journalism’ and his organisation, The Wire’s predilection for attacking the BJP and shielding terrorism and corrosive Islamist mentality underpinning it.

While the interview covered a broad range of topics and events, one thing that stood out in the interview was Satya Pal Malik’s comments on the Pulwama attack and Karan Thapar’s alacrity to perversely interpret them to show the Modi government in a poor light and give a free pass to terrorists and Pakistan-based terror organisations that were responsible for the death of 40 CRPF personnel in a suicide bombing attack in February 2019.

And on expected lines, the interview had the ‘liberals’ bouncing off the walls as they enthusiastically shared the video and hailed Malik and Thapar for ‘speaking truth to power’ and ‘hard-hitting journalism’—word salads that the Left ideologues often resort to—to aggrandise malicious sensationalism that aides them in their ultimate goal of undermining their beté noire, the Modi government. 

Satya Pal Malik, a mediocre administrator by all accounts, was until a few months back an object of criticism for the liberal ecosystem because he represented the Modi government. However, the change in the attitude of the Left came about after his fallout with the Centre. Moreover, his recent interview with the propaganda website The Wire washed him off of his past “sins” and firmly embedded him as the toast of the liberal firmament, with liberal ideologues and their trolls bending over backwards on social media platforms to exalt the former J&K governor. 

Even though Karan Thapar and Satya Pal Malik touched upon various issues, their evident bonhomie and assistance to each other during the interview gave one an impression that the proverbial ‘you scratch my back, I will scratch yours’ sentiment was at play. Malik, who had fallen out of favour with the current regime owing to his mediocre handling of responsibilities entrusted to him, was the perfect stick for the Left to beat the Modi government, especially when preparations for the all-important 2024 general elections are already underway.

Malik, on the other hand, was seeking recognition and acknowledgement and perhaps even political revival by making statements that were music to Thapar and were in line with the leftist worldview. Toward the latter part of the interview, the mask of neutrality and objectivity eventually falls off as Thapar prompts and hints Malik towards answers that reinforce the Leftist canards against the Modi government, most notably over the Pulwama attack.

Satya Pal Malik blames Centre for the Pulwama attack

In his interview, Malik blamed the Modi government for the Pulwama attack—a line of argument long parroted by the Left—describing it as a false flag operation months before the 2019 general elections. Malik hews to the liberal narrative, claiming that the Home Ministry under the Modi government refused permission for airlifting of the CRPF personnel to Kashmir, which he claimed ultimately led to the ensuing tragedy.

“The CRPF people had asked for aircraft to ferry their people,” said Malik, to which Thapar promptly asks if they asked him for providing an aeroplane for the transfer of the soldiers. “No, they did not ask me. They asked the concerned departments, which are the Home Ministry and the Defence Ministry, which refused to provide them with aircraft to ferry the soldiers.”

“That very same evening I told the Prime Minister that the attack has taken place because of our fault. If we had provided aircraft to the CRPF convoy, this attack could have been avoided. But he asked me to remain silent,” Malik goes on to say.

“Even Ajit Doval, the National Security Advisor who was once my classmate, told me to remain silent on the issue. I then realised that the onus of the attack will now be shifted to Pakistan,” Malik added.

“So it was the policy of the government to blame Pakistan for the attack and it will help us in elections,” said Thapar, elaborating upon Malik’s claims. 

Insinuating that the Pulwama attack was an inside job, Malik claimed that the road meant for the CRPF convoy was not properly sanitised. “There were 8-10 link roads on that specific stretch where the tragedy took place, and none of them was manned by police or Indian armed forces,” he said.

Subsequently, Thapar tries to absolve Pakistan of the attack, slyly asking Malik if they were indeed involved in the attack or wrongly blamed by the Centre for electoral gains in the upcoming general elections.

“Pakistan was involved in the attack. The amount of RDX that car was carrying could not have been internal, but we are responsible for not locating the car that was laden with such quantities of explosives running around in Kashmir,” Malik said. 

Thapar’s interaction with Malik provides a fascinating insight into the two personalities. Malik’s ‘conscience’ to come out clean was awakened only 4 years after the incident and conveniently just a year before the next general elections, posing obvious questions on the timing and his political expediency over the matter. If he felt the government had erred on the matter, what took him so long to come out and express his opinions on the matter? If he were really a conscientious politician as he casts himself to be, why did he keep mum on the turn of events that allegedly took place in the wake of the Pulwama attack in February 2019?

Secondly, Thapar’s reaction, which was predictable owing to his political leanings and ideological moorings, reinforces the Left’s position on the stand, which had always been on the prowl to give a clean chit to Pakistan and pin the blame of the attack on the Centre as an “insider job” carried out to reap electoral benefits in forthcoming general elections in May 2019. It shows that the Left is yet to reconcile itself to the fact that an overwhelming majority of the country, cutting across religious and caste distinctions they had fomented, voted for the Modi government in the 2019 general elections.

Malik’s contentions gloss over the role of Islamist ideology that underpinned the Pulwama attack

In essence, the conversation between Karan Thapar and Satya Pal Malik held the Indian government and its concerned institutions responsible for the Pulwama attack that led to the death of 40 CRPF personnel because they had allegedly turned down the request to fly the soldiers directly to their desired destination.

What such spurious arguments do is that it provides a free pass to the terrorists and Pakistan-based terror outfits and shifts the onus of responsibility for the attacks on the victims. In this case, India and the Indian government suffered a terrible blow when a convoy of vehicles carrying Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel to Srinagar via National Highway 44 came under a suicide bombing attack on February 14, 2019.

A 22-year-old Adil Ahmad Dar, a Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) terrorist from Kakapora in Jammu and Kashmir, rammed his explosive-laden vehicle into a bus carrying the CRPF personnel, resulting in the death of 40 jawans. 

Tellingly, the Jaish-e-Muhammad terrorist even shot a video of himself justifying his act before carrying out the suicide attack against CRPF personnel. In the video released following the attack, Adil Ahmad Dhar referred to Indians as “Gaay ka Peshab Peene Wale(People who drink cow urine)”. Boasting about the terror attacks carried out by Jaish-e-Muhammad, Adil said those who committed such acts got Hoors in the afterlife and insisted that he would be in heaven by the time this video is released to the public. 

Dar’s video laid bare the religious undertones of the attack and the extent of indoctrination carried out by Pakistan-based terror outfits against India, a Hindu-majority country. It also underlined the longstanding goal of Pakistan to continue sponsoring and carrying out terror attacks in India. 

While Malik claims that the terror attack took place because the Home Ministry refused aircraft to CRPF personnel, the religious fanaticism reflected in Dar’s video and the history of terror attacks in Jammu and Kashmir reveal that the attack would have taken place regardless of the Indian government’s permission to CRPF. If the paramilitary forces had opted to fly through to their destination, Dar, like scores of other Pakistan-trained terrorists, would have attacked other police or military contingent to continue perpetuating their Islamic jihad in India.

In a nutshell, blaming the refusal of permission to CRPF to airlift their personnel is akin to blaming the creators of Mumbai for having turned a place on the Arabian Sea shore into a city that enabled Pakistani terrorists to carry out 26/11 attacks. Surely, Mumbai could have been a land-locked city, the Left would argue, and it was because of its proximity to the sea that Ajmal Kasab and his fellow terrorists managed to enter India. Such arguments take the onus away from the anti-social elements responsible for wreaking havoc and instead pin the blame on the administration for the attack, which is what happened during Satya Pal Malik’s interview with The Wire’s Karan Thapar.

Hours after The Wire published Satya Pal Malik’s interview, the Pakistan state media used it to give a clean chit to the country from its involvement in the Pulwama attack. Quoting Malik, the Pakistan state media claimed that it was immediately clear from the Pulwama attack that it was aimed at blaming Pakistan and advancing BJP’s gains in the elections.

The former governor says that in February 2019, Modi prevented him from revealing the truth about the Pulwama attack and it was immediately clear from the Pulwama attack that the attack was aimed at blaming Pakistan and benefiting the BJP in the elections. pic.twitter.com/P7FXTR65d7

— PTV World (@WorldPTV) April 15, 2023

How the Indian Left continues to act as toilet cleaners of terrorists and Islamists

Indeed, the Pulwama attack underscores the shocking failure of India’s intelligence agencies in sensing and warding off a devastating terror attack. But it in no way eclipses the role of Pakistan and radicalised youth in Kashmir, who are willing to offer themselves as suicide bombers and killers to achieve the mirage of Islamic supremacism, first in Kashmir and then in the rest of the country.

However, Thapar and Malik conveniently gloss over the scourge of Islamism facing the country and went on to blame the Indian government for the attack because it simultaneously allowed them to discredit the Modi government’s victory in the 2019 general elections and act as the toilet cleaners of the Islamists and terrorists. Such a lucrative opportunity could not be missed when PM Modi and the Centre could be blamed for the Pulwama attack over an administrative decision while terrorists and terror outfits based out of Pakistan could be exculpated for attacking the CRPF personnel.

Islamic terrorism emanating from Pakistan and growing radicalisation among the youth remains at the top of the list of the security challenges faced by India. By downplaying these grave security challenges, Malik and Thapar are not only shielding Islamist mentality and undermining India’s security apparatus but also providing ammunition to Pakistan and local non-state actors to continue inflicting wounds on the country with impunity as they are there to shift the blame on the Centre for any untoward incident in the future. 

The Left often wrongly blames the Centre for exploiting the dead bodies to bolster its electoral prospects. But if the recent interview of Satya Pal Malik is anything to go by, it is the Left ecosystem, which feels no compunction in using dead bodies, that too of our soldiers, and in whitewashing Islamist criminality in their pursuit to malign the Centre and attack their ideological and political opponents.