The government on Monday distanced itself from the reported meeting of an Indian journalist with 26/11 attack accused Hafiz Saeed in Pakistan, saying it had “not sanctioned” it and asserted there is no change in its stand on the terror mastermind.
Reports said Vaidik, a freelance journalist, had met the Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief in Lahore on July 2 while touring Pakistan with a group of journalists and politicians invited by a peace research institute. Officially India accuses Saeed, the founder of Pakistan-based terror outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks in which 166 people were killed. However a report published in January of this year by a Paris based task force FATF (Financial Action Task Force) titled Money laundering and Terrorist financing through trade in Diamonds revealed the role of Diamonds in various terrorist attacks in India including 26/11.
“For the government, there is no change of stand as far Hafiz is concerned. For India, Hafiz is an accused in the terror attack. He is a terrorist who conspired to attack India,” Information and broadcasting minister Prakash Javadekar told reporters outside Parliament. The minister said there is no track-2 or track-3 diplomacy involved and for the government “Hafiz is a terrorist. Rajya Sabha leader has already clarified it in the House.”
However serious questions were raised in connection to Vivekananda International Foundation, an organisation Mr Vaidik belonged to.
“This is a very serious issue with regard to national security. The PMO is directly involved in it. Vaidik belonged to the same organization Vivekananda International Foundation, whose three members Nripendra Misra, PK Mishra and Ajit Doval are working for the Modi government as principal secretary, additional principal secretary in PMO and as national security adviser (NSA) respectively,” party spokesman Shakeel Ahmed said at the AICC briefing.
He added, “Now the fourth person, who also worked in the foundation, Vaidik, whom we knew more as a columnist rather than a regular journalist, had met the most wanted terrorist in India, who is an accused in Mumbai terror strikes.
Also a report or transcript of the meeting was also demanded.
Former Union minister and senior Congress spokesman Anand Sharma said that the government needs to answer whether it was “in the loop”.
“Such meetings cannot take place without the knowledge of the officials. Therefore a legitimate question arises, was the government of India in the loop? Has our foreign ministry received a report?”
The Real #TeaWithTerrorist
What is shocking is that the Vivekananda International Foundation was already on the radar of Intelligence Bereau for anti-national activities since 2012. The Intelligence Bureau (IB) has been keeping tabs on one of its former directors, Ajit Doval, and Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF), of which he is a director. Based on IB reports Doval and his team at VIF, which include prominent RSS ideologues, are the brain behind the anti-corruption movement in the country, especially the one led by Baba Ramdev. It was in April 2011 that VIF organised a seminar on corruption and black money. Soon after, Anna Hazare’s fast began and Ramdev announced his June 4 Ramlila Maidan protest. IB men have since been keeping a keen eye on VIF.
As per Indian Express report dated Aug 20 2012
A high profile institute-cum-think tank in the heart of New Delhi’s diplomatic area in Chanakyapuri, set up on land allotted by the then Narasimha Rao government, a clutch of former intelligence officials running the place, and a group of well-known RSS swayamsewaks — they are the silent force behind the recent anti-corruption movements in the country, especially the one led by Baba Ramdev.
In fact, it was at the Vivekananda International Foundation last year that a decision was taken to form an anti-corruption front under Baba Ramdev — this was just days before Anna Hazare sat on his first fast. The foundation’s director is Ajit Doval, a former director of the Intelligence Bureau. It was at the foundation again that the first serious attempt was made to bring Ramdev and Team Anna members together.
Inaugurated in 2009, the Vivekananda International Foundation is a project of the Vivekananda Kendra, founded in the early 1970s by former RSS general secretary Eknath Ranade and headed now by RSS pracharak P Parameswaran.
It was in April last year that the foundation, together with RSS ideologue K N Govindacharya’s Rashtriya Swabhiman Andolan, organised a seminar on corruption and black money attended by both Ramdev and Team Anna members Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi.
At the end of the two-day seminar, held on April 1 and 2, an “anti-corruption front” was formed with Ramdev as patron and Govindacharya as convenor. The members included Doval; RSS swayamsewak S Gurumurthy; Bhishm Agnihotri, who was India’s ambassador-at-large during the NDA regime; and Prof R Vaidyanathan of IIM-Bangalore, who co-authored a BJP task force’s report on black money along with Doval and Ved Pratap Vaidik.
The two-page statement at the end of the seminar said that Ramdev had declared an “all-out war on corruption and that the front would announce immediate actionable programmes and reach out to like-minded anti-corruption organisations, institutions and individuals”.
Soon after the seminar, Hazare’s fast began, and in April end, Ramdev announced his June 4 Ramlila Maidan protest — his first public showdown with the UPA government.
Apart from the fact that it operates from government-allotted land, the foundation’s advisory board and executive council consist of a host of former intelligence officials, retired bureaucrats, diplomats and ex-military men. These include former RAW chief A K
Verma, ex-Army chief V N Sharma, ex-Navy chief Vijai Singh Shekhawat, ex-air chiefs S Krishnaswamy and S P Tyagi, former BSF chief Prakash Singh, ex-foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal, former deputy national security advisor Satish Chandra and ex-home secretary Anil Baijal.Interestingly, apart from Ramdev and Team Anna members, another of those who had attended the seminar, Swamy, also announced the formation of an anti-graft front — ‘The Action Committee Against Corruption in India’. While Ramdev was the chief guest at its first meeting, the committee’s members included the same cast of Govindacharya, Gurumurthy, Doval and Vaidyanathan.
Asked about Ramdev’s connection to the foundation, Govindacharya said he has been a “frequenter”. “Ramdev and I have been in constant touch since August 2010 (Ramdev had travelled to Gulbarga in December 2010 to attend Govindacharya’s Bharat Vikas Sangam). He used to come to the Vivekananda Foundation. He had a few places in Delhi, but the foundation was the easiest place for him and for others too for meetings,” he said.
Govindacharya also admitted that the seminar hoped to have “some sort of closer coordination” by bringing together the Ramdev and Anna camps.
The RSS ideologue didn’t deny the Sangh link either. Asked if it would be wrong to assume that the Vivekananda Kendra and foundation were all connected with the RSS, he said: “One can deduce that… Organisationally, the RSS doesn’t get involved. Swayamsevaks take initiatives.”
Mukul Kanitkar, who was with the foundation earlier, pointed out that bureaucrats, including those from the PMO, regularly attend seminars organised by the foundation on issues of national security.
Despite his association with Ramdev’s campaign, Govindacharya now feels the movement is over. “Both the movements (Anna and Ramdev’s) are lost in the black hole of power and party politics… Ramdev would now become an ally or promoter of the BJP cause,” he said.
What is interesting however is that the Vivekananda Kendra was funded by the CIA through the Ford Foundation.
Even Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party was funded by the CIA through funds from the Ford Foundation (Rs 86,61,742), PRIA (Rs 2,37,035), Manjunath Shanmugam Trust (Rs 3,70,000), Dutch Embassy (Rs 19,61,968), Association for India’s Development (Rs 15,00,000), India’s friends Association (Rs 7,86,500), United Nationals Development Programme (Rs12,52,742).
Further another VIF member Subramaniyan Swamy was revealed by cables released by Wikileaks to be a CIA Agent who is also involved in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi and who also had close relations with the terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale.
India’s growing clout has persuaded the CIA to turn the spyglass on New Delhi as already reported by BodhitaNews on May 1st how CIA is interested in tracking Indian Citizens. As per a report titled India & the Grand Blueprint for CIA’s Resurrection;
CIA’s best men are secretly travelling through different states and are setting up networks to watch political developments and separatist movements. These networks will seek information about India’s nuclear arsenal and military modernisation. They will also keep their eyes peeled for terrorists who might prove dangerous to the US. Based on all this information, Langley will predict India’s strategy viz-a-viz Pakistan and China.
The spooks in the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, are tracking virtually everything from Parliament proceedings to political parties to arms deals to internal security issues.
The home ministry confirmed that more than 3,500 Americans are illegally overstaying in India since 2006.
The CIA is expanding its operations in India. The CIA is sending Indian-origin and south Asian-origin officers to India so that they can merge better.
The basic approach [of the CIA] will be to befriend senior bureaucrats, senior military officials, politicians to find what our intentions are and what we are planning to do.
Furthermore CIA is tracking Indian Citizens through an American tech company called MongoDB. As reported in our earlier report titled CIA interested in tracking Indian Citizens ?
MongoDB has partnered with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for a contract that will help bolster the voluntary individual voter ID system in place for Indian citizens, but some people are concerned about how trustworthy MongoDB is because a large chunk of its funding is from the CIA.
One of the key investors in MongoDB is a firm called In-Q-Tel, which, as it turns out, is actually a non-profit venture capital branch of the CIA. With security leaks being on the front of everyone’s minds due to the Edward Snowden NSA leak fiasco this year, some eyebrows are raised over the CIA potentially being able to track voters in India.
