Let's say there was a school somewhere in Bengal that was built on the intelligence failures of both James Jesus Angleton and Heinrich Himmler, so both sides of World War II.
That school feared only one entity, Moscow, since it was impossible to ascertain what information was present in the Soviet archives and how much the Russians were letting on.
Yet by 1991, the Soviet Union was struggling to stay together and Kamala Gopalan (Harris) was 27 years old. Kamala needed a direction in life, what kind of influence and clout could she grab for herself within the United States?
It was at such a crucial moment in world history that the Principal of the said school decided to hold an elaborate Scripture lesson (let's say for Antara's class, the Class of 1995) on the life of Moses.
Hello, you were Pentecostal by denomination, therefore evangelical by attitude, every few years you distributed pocket-sized New Testaments free of cost to all students.
"More free Bibles? Shouldn't you have the right to refuse them, India was a secular country?" Antara's parents would tell her.
"Stop bothering so much, it would just lie forgotten in a corner of the bookshelf," Antara would reply.
(The New Testaments always had silk ribbons as bookmarks.)
"Why not the entire King James' Bible, why did the school just distribute the New Testament?" Antara had wondered later in life.
But back in school, where not a single chapter of The Bible was taught, not even Genesis, why did the authorities suddenly seize on the life of Moses? Antara's class even wrote an exam on the topic. Was that the decision, Israel would be used to build the career of Kamala Harris?
By the next year, 1992, India had established diplomatic ties with Israel. Antara started having severe nightmares from that time, waking up from her sleep, screaming and shouting, her parents and sibling rushing to her side. "It's Israel, it's Israel, why were you staring at me, asking me to hush up, don't you realise it's Israel?" Antara was 13 years old.
In case some of you analyse how Kamala Harris' political career was built from Asansol, you'd consider the Bengali Communist milieu and the lingering influence of Lavrentiy Beria among the police cadre. The reality was somewhat more complicated than that.
Antara had a batchmate whose father was in the police, they lived at the local Police Lines. She was nicknamed 'Pola' at school. Decades ago, she had settled in Chicago as a physician. It was in 2024 that Antara realised that 'Pola' implied Jonathan Jay Pollard.
The following had come up in the course of Antara's research into Pollard, a former US Navy intelligence analyst.
"It was not easy for a Jewish family (the Pollards of South Bend, Indiana) to survive in the United States of the 1950s, not so much for the Nazi Holocaust but because the surviving Jews and Europeans were not surrendering their wealth to Indian Communists...the Holocaust had taken a horrific toll on Pollard's mother's family in Vilna, Lithuania and Pollard had forced his parents to later visit the Nazi death camps.
Pollard went to Israel in 1970 as part of a science programme. He realised that a visit to the Nazi death camps in Europe was not the same as a trip to Israel. In Israel, you landed right in the middle of the Holocaust narrative, with annoyance at both JP Morgan and George Kennan but not the Tagores. BT couldn't be mentioned at all. Israel was an attractive package to Communists, hence Israel could do or say whatever and get away with it."
Antara was of the opinion that when the Radakins made their frequent trips to Annapolis to promote Batanagar, it was implied that in any European Holocaust research, Israel was the real challenge, not INC or Alimuddin Street.
May 1, 2025.
No comments:
Post a Comment