The truth behind Tarek Fatah's video about India's break-up

The Pakistan ISI uses Khalistanis and Islamists to undermine me in India

Tarek Fatah, New Delhi Times (April 22, 2016):

Many of you have been sent an underhandedly recorded video of me talking about what appears to be the future of India. Except the discussion was about the bankruptcy of the idea of Khalistan, not the future of India. The editors of this video have carefully excluded from the clip any reference to the real subject of the discussion that took place between me and a group of young Canadian Sikhs associated with the World Sikh Organisation (WSO), and who were sympathizers of the Pakistan-based Khalistan movement. The edited video being distributed by Pakistani and Indian Islamists with the active help of left-wing Indians on Twitter was shot around 2003 or 2004 in Toronto. It happened after I had come out denouncing the WSO and the Khalistan movement, condemning it as a Pakistan-based terrorist movement. These young Sikh students called me and wanted to meet me and debate the controversy. The discussion took over an hour during which my position was very clear: If these Sikhs in Canada wanted to have an independent Punjab, I was all for it if its capital was the Pakistani city of Lahore and included not just Amritsar, Jullundur and Ludhiana, but also Nankana Sahib, Gujranwala and Rawalpindi (all inside Pakistani Punjab). It is an argument that I still make in all my confrontations with the supporters of Khalistan who have thrived in Canada, thanks to vote-bank politics and an active role played by the Pakistani consulates both in Toronto and Vancouver. It is in this context that I made the following remarks that are today being distributed to position me as some ISI plant working to undermine India. “…You see it (India) was never one country, even during the British. British India is not not once.. India has never been one entity even under Asoka, even under Aurangzeb; it has never been a country. The future that I see, if I had my dreams come true, are about the sub-continent being something like Europe where the entities that exist are Bengal, places like Punjab shouldn’t be single entities, shouldn’t have borders but should have common currencies, but we are different countries, I don’t disagree. There is more in common between someone between say Lahore and Delhi than there is someone between Delhi and Madras.” I still maintain that Hindustan was never one sovereign territory under one ruler whether it was the Gupta dynasty, the Moguls, the barbarian Sultans or under Vijayanagra Empire. In fact Kerala has only been ruled from Delhi under British colonial rule. If this was not a discussion about Khalistan, there is no way I would have made the above statement. In polemics the absurdity of an argument is at times best exposed through an equally absurd argument. Such is the battlefield of impromptu debate over heated issues. Notwithstanding the unethical practice of the Khalistanis of secret recordings and and then dispensing it to the Pakistani Islamists, the agenda of the Pakistani Islamists and their Indian soul mates to depicted me as a ISI mole trying to weave myself into the Indian fabric and narrative will not succeed. I’m sorry Islamabad and Rawalpindi, but I don’t scare easily. In 2008 when I wrote “I am an Indian born in Pakistan…” as the first words of my book “The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State,” I had never visited India and never thought I’d be so involved in the fight against Islamism that faces India from within and from across the border. Tough luck ISI, you guys are good, but not as good as you claim to be. Your touts inside India have been exposed and I am still standing strong. The Pakistani and Indian Islamists and the ‘Hindu Left’ who have flooded Twitter to undermine my credibility, need to answer one question:

“Where is the full unedited unaltered copy of this video and why are you not sharing it?”