I have been following this story with great interest.
This is a very nuanced debate which is every country is going to have in one form or the other in coming days.
What does it mean to be a Patriot? Is the question at the heart of matter! You can give any issue a patriotic tinge - immigration, Minority Rights, Profiling, Govt infringement on privacy, 2nd Amendment issues etc etc.
In the present scenario as far as I understand there is a concentrated effort by academicians, liberals and left wing ideologues to battle what they perceive is the centre - right agenda of neo-conservatism. Of-course all this is not the battle of pure ideologies but is heavily colored by political agendas and electoral machinations.
We Americans are as flawed a bunch of humans as anyone else but we saw what happened in the name of National Interest post 9/11. Post '07 there has been push back and now we are at a stage when every one and their grand-mother agree in hindsight that we got into a mess.
What I mean to say in conclusion - that it is good that India is actively debating this issue in their dens, newsrooms, senates and congress. The time to worry is when there is no debate and hysteria of nationalism over-rules reason and logic. That is when terrible mistakes are made with unforeseen consequences.
LOL.... this is nothing but politics by other name and means. Its the the new guard vs the old guard.
JNU used to be one of the propaganda houses of KGB back in the good old days of cold war. Millions of KGB money had flowed into JNU to create a firm support for USSR back in the days. What you are seeing now are the after effects of the cold war.
KGB's favourite methods was to target Educationalist and Journalist. One of the Journalist who worked with KGB was Nikhil Chakravartty. Nikhil Chakravartty photo today hangs in the Press Council of India
JNU School of Social Sciences also has a Nikhil Chakravarty Foundation and the Centre for Media Studies
KGB's 'most extensive intelligence' files from Mitrokhin archive open to public | world | Hindustan Times
A 2005 book based on the files by intelligence historian Christopher Andrew claimed that India during Indira Gandhi’s tenure as prime minister had been infiltrated at several levels by the KGB, prompting demands for a parliamentary inquiry by the then leader of the opposition, L K Advani.
The KGB files, reproduced by Andrew in 'The Mitrokhin Archive II', claimed that ten Indian newspapers and one press agency were on the Soviet payroll. In 1972, the KGB claimed to have planted more than 3,500 articles in Indian newspapers.
Much of the material in the archives are included in Andrew’s book, but he told HT that the files contain “lot of detail”. The files in Russian language range in time from the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution to the eve of the Gorbachev era.
Andrew made several controversial revelations based on the files, including that suitcases of money had been sent to Indira Gandhi’s house when she was prime minister, that former railway minister L N Mishra accepted money, that KGB funded the CPI and that in the 1977 elections, 21 non-communist leaders had been financed.
Files related to India are also among the 19 boxes and thousands of papers open to the public by the Churchill Archive Centre, Churchill College, university sources said.
The Mitrokhin Archive was described by the FBI as ‘the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source’. Some experts have raised questions about the archive but the man and the archive's origins remain an enigma.
From 1972 to 1984, Major Vasiliy Mitrokhin was a senior archivist in the KGB’s foreign intelligence archive, with unlimited access to hundreds of thousands of files from a global network of spies and intelligence gathering operations.
At the same time, having grown disillusioned with the brutal oppression of the Soviet regime, he was taking secret handwritten notes of the material and smuggling them out of the building each evening.
From 1948, he worked in foreign intelligence before being assigned to the foreign intelligence archives in the KGB First Chief Directorate. From 1972 until 1982 he was in charge of the transfer of these archives from the Lubyanka in central Moscow to a new foreign intelligence HQ at Yasenevo.
Following his retirement in 1984, Mitrokhin organised much of this material geographically and, in ten volumes, typed out systematic studies of KGB operations in different parts of the world.
After his exfiltration to London, Mitrokhin continued to work on transcribing and typing his manuscript notes, producing a further 26 typed volumes
In 1992, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, he, his family and his archive were exfiltrated by the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service. He died in January 2004.
Andrew said: “The inner workings of the KGB, its foreign intelligence operations and the foreign policy of Soviet-era Russia all lie within this extraordinary collection; the scale and nature of which gives unprecedented insight into the KGB’s activities throughout much of the Cold War."
............ has anyone suggested otherwise ? Another strawman ? old habits die hard.
