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Friends,
I am about to begin writing my tenth book, starting January 1. Because of the focus and solitude needed to write this book, my personal replies to all of your letters will be far more infrequent in the coming year. I will try as best as I can to answer your many interesting questions at the end of each HogueProphecy Bulletin. These bulletins will come to you every four to six weeks.
Today we will examine dangerous developments in South Asia. Back in 1994, in The Millennium Book of Prophecy, I picked the region as the first most likely area to wage a third world version of mutually assured nuclear destruction; in other words, what I define as a “Nuclear Bush War.”
Here we go.
PARTITION AND A PROPHECY
In the monsoon season of 1947, in the final days of the British Raj in India, the key leaders of Indian resistance to British rule confronted each other over shape of the independence to come. Although for years Mohandas Gandhi, the spiritual and political father of the predominantly Hindu Congress party, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, were united in their fight for independence from British rule, they stubbornly disagreed about what shape that Indian independence should take. Gandhi believed that India should remain united, whereas Jinnah could not see how the new India, with its huge Hindu population of 250 million, could ever treat a minority of 90 million Muslims as anything but second class citizens. For Jinnah the only solution was the partition of India’s predominantly Muslim provinces into a new Islamic-friendly state of Pakistan (Urdu for “The Land of the Spiritually Pure”). Gandhi believed that a secular based democracy would eventually find a way to protect all minorities given time and patience. A rending of India into two nationally and religiously divided entities would create a climate of greater sectarian violence than ever before.
To accommodate Jinnah, Gandhi was ready to undercut his own political party and Jawaharlal Nehru, his chief disciple and designated choice for prime minister, for the sake of unity. If Jinnah would forego partition Gandhi was ready to order Nehru and the Congress party leadership to step aside and allow Jinnah and leaders of his Muslim League form the first Indian government.
Though initially stunned by the radical offer, Jinnah rejected Gandhi. To him no power on earth would prevent Pakistan, even if a partition of India created minorities of millions of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims stranded in new countries not of their choice. Jinnah’s dream of Pakistan would live, whatever the cost; even if the new state could hardly sustain itself as a viable nation.
“Better a moth-eaten Pakistan than no Pakistan at all,” Jinnah would later say.
British parliament passed a bill granting partition in July 1947. Independence came the following month with the birth of two new nations of India and Pakistan. The physical division led to an autumn of mass murder and bloodshed and the agonizing displacement of tens of millions. On the dusty roads and tracks across the new frontiers, hordes of Muslims refugees from Hindu dominated India passed millions of Hindus exiting Muslim dominated Pakistan. Over 1 million people died in Hindu-Muslim violence during the great exodus. On January 30, 1948, Gandhi himself was assassinated by Nathuram V. Godse. A Hindu fundamentalist, Godse believed Gandhi had sold India out to partition and to the Muslims.
Upon Pakistan’s independence, Jinnah was installed as Governor General of an economically feeble and politically stressed new country of diverse peoples who shared little else in common but Islam. Pakistan consisted of eastern and western provinces separated by a thousand miles of hostile Indian territory. Jinnah survived Gandhi by eight months. A chain smoker all his adult life, he finally succumbed to lung disease.
Before Gandhi’s martyrdom, and before he received the title Mahatma (great soul), he prophesied that any partition of India would magnify the historic discord and suspicion between Muslims and Hindus in South Asia. Partition, he said, would destine India and Pakistan to fight four wars — each more terrible than the last.
Gandhi lived to see the first Indo-Pakistani war erupt in the mountains of Jammu-Kashmir at the close of 1947. This disputed Himalayan kingdom ruled by a Hindu Maharaja before the partition of India had a predominantly Muslim population. Both India and Pakistan claimed it. After the Maharaja had ceded Kashmir to India, he requested military help as mobile columns of Pakistani troops and armed Pathan tribesmen invaded through the Himalayan passes heading for the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar. Indian forces checked their lightning strike and United Nations intervention resulted in the battle line becoming the de facto new border between Indian and Pakistani Kashmir known to this day as the Line of Control. The first war resulted in roughly two-thirds of Kashmir remaining in Indian hands. Pakistan would demand of India that she let the people of Kashmir hold a special plebiscite to decide whether to incorporate into India or not. India would delay the Kashmiri plebiscite for decades. In 1960, Communist China signed a friendship pact with Pakistan and seized a large portion of Indian-held Kashmir two years later in a surprise offensive
In 1965, India and Pakistan fought a second and much larger war over dominion of Kashmir across the frontiers of West Pakistan. India sent 900,000 troops in a crushing, three pronged offensive against the Pakistani defences on the approaches to Lahore. Over 450 Pakistani tanks were destroyed. A UN cease fire forestalled the intervention of Communist China on the side of Pakistan.
A third and even bloodier Indo-Pakistani conflict came six years later in 1971. A civil war in East Pakistan between Muslim Bengali insurgents (tacitly supported and armed by India) and an occupying army of mainly West Pakistanis escalated into a wider war with India. It started when the wholesale round up and massacre of hundreds of thousands of suspected Bengali civilians by West Pakistani soldiers caused ten million refugees to flood into India and overwhelm its emergency food resources. US President Richard Nixon declared that India’s support of Bengali insurgents was an attempt to destabilize Pakistan — a US client state during the Cold War— and he cut off India’s American credit. Pakistani jets promptly bombed Indian airfields in Kashmir. The Indian army entered the war on the side of the insurgents. In twelve days they successfully shattered Pakistani forces on two fronts and captured an entire Pakistani army of 90,000 men in East Pakistan. East Pakistan became the new country of Bangladesh.
Pakistan had not only lost the war but lost half of its population and two-thirds of its export economy. The army and economy were on the verge of collapse. Pakistan stressed its economy further trying to catch up with India in a nuclear arms race optaining nuclear weapons capability at the close of the 1980s. Around the same time it also supplied arms and safe havens for Kashmiri insurgents to wage a decade-long civil war in Jammu-Kashmir. Border clashes across the Line of Control were frequent throughout the 1990s.
I was traveling through India in the spring of 1990 when the two countries nearly fulfilled Gandhi’s prophecy and fought a fourth war. Rumors abounded in the Indian press that India was contemplating a preemptive blitzkrieg strike to take out Pakistan’s nuclear program before they could make deliverable nuclear weapons. However, a report from Indian spies in Pakistan made an ominous discovery. They saw new bomb racks on the wings of Pakistani jet bombers large enough to load atomic weapons. Was Pakistan bluffing? Could they really deliver their nuclear payloads? The Indian government ordered their conventional forces to stand down.
I wrote the following observations in India, during the last crisis of 1990. They later appeared in The Millennium Book of Prophecy, published in 1994:
“Now that Pakistan has nuclear capability, India’s atomic weapons race may have resumed. Both countries deny they are building bombs. Western intelligence agencies estimate that by mid-decade, Pakistan … will be capable of manufacturing six Hiroshima-sized bombs per year. Experts believe that India has already stockpiled three hundred kilograms (660 pounds) of weapons-grade material. Current intelligence estimates put its nuclear arsenal at twenty bombs. And if a future Chinese regime should threaten another invasion of India’s Himalayan provinces, the Indians are capable of transforming their current stockpile of plutonium into an arsenal larger than the entire Chinese arsenal to date.”
During the Cuban Missile Crisis I watched loved ones peer into soft October skies waiting for Armageddon to fly on the contrails of missiles and B-52 bombers. The tension I experienced in India reminded me of those thirteen frightening days from my childhood. I walked in the Indian valleys in the shadow of immanent nuclear death. That feeling returns to me now eleven years later as I watch developments in this newest crisis. I feel India and Pakistan moving inexorably towards the dark frontiers of a fourth war on the tank treads of mobile ballistic missile launchers.
A FOURTH — AND NUCLEAR — WAR?
In mid-December 2001, eight terrorists identified as members of the Kashmiri insurgent organizations of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba, stormed the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. All eight men were killed along with six Indian security servicemen in a failed attempt to annihilate the political leadership of India. Soon afterwards large contingents of the 1.3-million-man Indian army and six-hundred-thousand-man Pakistani army began moving into position facing each other in the winter fastness of Kashmir along the disputed Line of Control. Farther south you see them park their tanks and set up their mortars and artillery along the partition line drawn 54 years before, dividing the heavily populated regions of Punjab. They position their anti-aircraft batteries and mobile ballistic missile launchers behind dunes in the deserts along the western edge of Rajasthan. They prepare dugouts for over a million soldiers down along an invisible line, drawn on the maps of politicians, across the Himilayan fastness of Kashmir all the way down to the salt marshes of the Rann of Kutch along the Arabian Sea.
And there those million men of India, and a half-million men of Pakistan, wait; hopeful for a diplomatic solution.
On Friday, 21 December, the Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan, Vijay K. Nambiar, promptly left the Pakistani capital declaring a diplomatic impasse. He had learned that Pakistan would not immediately arrest all leaders and members of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba organizations and dismantle their training camps in the Pakistani occupied portion of Kashmir.
Given the new and darker world we live in after terrorists harbored by rogue nations crashed hijacked jets into New York’s skyline and the US Capital, India feels within its rights to demand of Pakistan what America demanded of Taliban ruled Afghanistan: a) arrest all terrorists within their borders; b) close down and destroy their training camps; c) seize and destroy their weapons; and, d) face a full scale military retaliation if there is no compliance to every demand.
What indeed would Americans demand of Pakistan if they where in India’s place? If terrorists from camps in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir had sprayed the US Capitol Building with grenades and machine guns in an attempt to slaughter the US Senate and US House of Representatives, what would the United States do?
By adopting the Bush terrorism doctrine, India could soon launch an attack on terrorist camps in Pakistani territory but this time, the fourth war foreseen by Gandhi could go nuclear. Current estimates place Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal at 8 to 20 atomic bombs, each with a destructive force similar to those used by the United States in their nuclear attack on Japan in 1945. India may have anywhere from 25 to 40 similarly destructive atomic weapons in its arsenal.
When Gandhi and Jinnah debated the partition of India, there were 340 million people in the balance. Fifty-four years and an explosion of population later, Gandhi’s warning of a fourth and catastrophic war places up to 1.2 billion South Asians in the balance. In the worst case scenario, history’s first nuclear “bush” war could extinguish far more people than all those lost in both world wars of the 20th century. The death toll could be in the hundreds of millions.
A FUTURE NUCLEAR WAR
LOST BY A COUNTRY SYMBOLIZED BY “THREE LIONS”
The prophet Nostradamus may have foreseen its outcome in Century 7 Quatrain 16. If the leaders of India and Pakistan could read this following warning, perhaps they would pause and reflect before they pass over the Line of Control, and send history out of control.
Entree profonde par la grand Royne faicte
Rendra le lieu puissant inaccessible:
L’armee des troys lyons sera deffaite,
Faisant dedans cas hideux & terrible.
The deep entry made by the great queen
Will render the place powerful and inaccessible:
The army of the three lions will be defeated,
Causing within a hideous and terrible event.
In 1996 I wrote the following interpretation for this quatrain in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecy:
“In 1985, Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India, was gunned down by Sikh separatists who had infiltrated her bodyguards. The murder was in retaliation for her ordering the Indian Army’s bloody attack of Khalistani guerrillas holding out within the holiest shrine of the Sikhs, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. The ‘great queen’ could be Mrs. Gandhi or her granddaughter, Priyanka, who is being groomed for power by the Congress Party. The army of ‘three lions’ is the Indian Army, (the Republic of India has ‘three lions’ huddled together in its federal device). If Nostradamus is not alluding to this incident, perhaps, he is implying some future defeat of a descendant of Gandhi in a war over Jammu-Kashmir and the Punjab. The final line could describe a breakdown of Indian society in the wake of sectarian violence after the defeat. Or perhaps ‘within’ something worse. Maybe our prophet is warning of a plague from ‘within,’ in other words, a radiation scourge caused by a nuclear disaster at the atomic plant near Mumbai (Bombay), or from a nuclear bush war with Pakistan sometime between 1996 to 2026.”
RUSHING OVER THE LINE OF “NO” CONTROL?
As I prepare to send you this bulletin, President George Bush, (the leader of the free world) is putting pressure on the his new ally in the war on terrorism, General Pervez Musharraf (the dictator of Pakistan), to arrest leaders of both militant Kashmiri groups responsible for the Indian Parliament attack. US Secretary of State Colin Powell on 26 December (and a whole three months after America declared war on terrorism) announced that the United States is freezing the assets of Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba organizations.
Spokesmen for the Indian army have made it known that their forces will be ready for war by New Years Eve (2001). However, war may not be as immanent as it appears. Some news services speculate that Indian forces will not fight a winter war and postpone their full scale incursion into the Pakistani-held portion of Kashmir until the spring. Hopeful signs have just evaporated that talks may take place between the Indian and Pakistani leaders at a gathering of seven South Asian leaders in Katmandu, Nepal, on 4-6 January 2002. Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has said there will be no talks.
Both countries have imposed economic sanctions on the other. No over flights by the other’s planes will be allowed, yet India’s Foreign Ministry said Friday that Indian armed forces would make an exception to the ban to allow Musharraf to fly through its airspace to attend the Nepal summit.
The Associated Press reports on 28 December that the Indian army told some 20,000 people in more than 40 villages in Kashmir to leave their homes within 36 hours. The army had already warned about 10,000 people in 24 villages near the Pakistani border to move.
New Years Eve is tomorrow. Villagers in Indian-ruled Kashmir, who have lived for over a half century in the twilight zone of war and peace continue to flee their homes with cots and clothes. Many are convinced that this time India and Pakistan will fight their fourth war.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
AN ASSESSMENT OF FUTURE SCENARIOS
This is history’s newest variation of the Cuban Missile Crisis. If there is war, then it will happen in the next seven to fourteen days. If there is war, it will most likely start with a conventional clash of armies. In less than a week of combat India will overwhelm the Pakistani army. That is when Pakistan could consider a nuclear option to stop the Indian Juggernaut. The immanent collapse of Pakistan could also bring a third nuclear power into the war — its longtime ally, China.
Now, if we get through the next seven-to-fourteen days without a war then it may only be a postponement of the fighting until spring. My study of political astrology would place the next time windows of greatest danger for war in February and in April 2002. If Pakistan has not disbanded the Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e Tayyaba organizations and their camps by springtime, India may do it for them with Agni and Pritvhi ballistic missiles and commando raids.
Then again, maybe not.
These strange new times see leaders from volatile regions developing a skill for making a mad dash towards the abyss of doomsday only to stop just in time before the plunge. I sincerely hope the hot “heads” of state in Indian and Pakistan cool down in time before they tumble over the edge from the momentum of their current and bellicose rush of stupidity.
If General Musharraf can negotiate a cessation of the conflict, I cannot say the future for the Pakistani dictator and his government is bright. Volatile and polarized forces are pulling General Musharraf’s power base apart. The Pakistani dictator by siding with President Bush and the Americans has angered a whole lot of Islamic fundamentalists and radicals in his country. It is true that only a minority of Pashtuni Pakistanis support Usama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; however, a substantial majority of the Pakistani population — and the officer corps supporting Musharraf’s junta— does not see the Kashmiri insurgents and their camps in Pakistani-held Kashmir as havens for terrorists. They are viewed as freedom fighters. If Musharraf bows to diplomatic pressure coming from American friends and Indian foes alike and shuts down the Kashmiri camps, he may avoid war with India this winter, but fall in a coup d’état later in the year.
George W. Bush, the president of the most powerful democracy in the world, must rely on the political health of a dictator he could not even name a year ago.
I am certain the president remembers Musharraf’s name now.
He has become a critical linchpin to Operation Enduring Freedom.
The fall of Musharraf and Pakistan’s descent into chaos — or its descent into the hands of a new al-Qaeda friendly radical Islamic regime — would seriously jeopardize the American president’s war on terrorism.
In the final reckonning, we are at the highest danger of a nuclear bush war in South Asia if Pakistan slides into social and political chaos. India may sheath its nuclear saber for now, but be inclined to launch punitive attacks on a debilitated Pakistan later on this year for its support of Kashmir insurgents who shot up Indian Parliament House.
But India beware!
A mortally wounded or radicalized government of Pakistan may take you to the nuclear funeral pyre of mutually assured destruction with its final desperate act.
Eleven years and a new threat of nuclear bush war later, I convey to all of you the same message I gave in interviews to the Indian press back in 1990:
“My research [into prophecy and how to forestall dire events, like an Indo-Pakistani nuclear war] deepened and was revolutionized by the addition of meditation into my life. Meditation made me aware that no safe place exists for anyone except within consciousness. [Through meditation I have recognized] that you , me, everyone, is responsible for the misery and auto-suicidal tendencies which are destined to destroy this beautiful planet. What is needed from all of us is an inner revolution; a new science of self-observation that can make us first aware of the roots of our suffering. That has to be understood before any successful attempt to alter human destiny is possible. So far we have failed to fix our world because we deal with the symptoms not the disease itself.” (The Sunday Mail [Calcutta, West Bengal], March 18-24, 1990)
I close this essay with sage observations from two sons of South Asia:
“This is the beauty of life, that is goes on growing, and it knows no end; that it goes on living and knows no death — that is eternity….And it is time we should have a look inside our own beings, because within our own being is all that we are looking for outside. We will not find it on the outside, it is not there. It is here.” (Osho)
“We must be the change we wish to see in the world.” (Mahatma Gandhi)
John Hogue
(31 December 2001)
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