Pakistani columnist Nusrat Mirza has admitted to spying on Bharat for Pakistan’s notorious spy agency Inter Intelligence Services (ISI) during his visits from 2005 to 2011, when the Congress-UPA government was in power.
During an interview with fellow Pakistani journalist and YouTuber Shakil Chaudhary, Mirza stated that he had visited Bharat five times. He first traveled to Chandigarh in 2005, then to Hyderabad, Bengaluru, and Chennai in 2006. He traveled to Patna, Kolkata, and other locations on a different tour.
Mirza remarked, “Usually, when you apply for a visa to India, they only let you visit three places. The foreign minister at the time, Khurshid Kasuri, was the one who assisted me in obtaining a visa for seven locations. I believe I comprehend how India operates. All of the Indian Urdu newspaper editors and I are pals. Owners of news channels tend to be close buddies. I’ve given multiple interviews each time I’ve been in India.”
In the interview, Mirza lamented that Pakistan did not make proper use of the ‘knowledge’ he had acquired on his visits to Bharat. He claimed that Khurshid Kasuri asked him to hand over the information he had gathered to the Pakistani Army.
In the interview, Mirza made reference to a trip in 2010 when he had been invited by Hamid Ansari, Bharat’s vice president at the time, to attend a conference on terrorism. Mirza also mentioned that he last traveled to Bharat in 2011 to meet with Dr. Zafarul Islam Khan, the Milli Gazette’s publisher there. He said that during this tour, he learned a lot of information that he later gave to ISI.
Zafarul Islam Khan was in the news in 2020 for threatening Hindus with an attack from the Arab world. He was appointed Delhi Minorities Commission chief by Arvind Kejriwal, and counts terror-preacher Zakir Naik as a ‘role model’.
Mirza claimed that he has visited 15 Bharatiya states and talked about ‘separatist movements’ in all of them. He said that at the time of his visits to Bharat, there were 56 Muslim members of Parliament and he was friends with every one of those and received help from them.
You can see the full interview here.
Hamid Ansari – Sonia’s choice as VP is a traitor?
Hamid Ansari had attended the inauguration of the International Conference of Jurists on International Terrorism and Human Rights in New Delhi on December 11, 2010. This could be the event that Mirza was alluding to.
Ansari has been accused by former RAW (Bharat’s external spy agency) officers of endangering lives of RAW members and exposing the RAW set-up in Tehran, while he was posted as Ambassador to Iran. These officers have demanded that Ansari be investigated as he was found to have leaked information about Bharat’s security operations to the Iranians, and the Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK. Several RAW agents were arrested and tortured as a result of Ansari’s actions. Ansari also held regular and long meetings with the Pakistan Ambassador in Tehran, which were not reported to the MEA (Ministry of External Affairs).
Hamid Ansari was one of the blue-eyed boys of the UPA administration – a career IFS diplomat, he served as Vice-Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University from 2000-02; then during UPA-1, he was first appointed as Chairman of National Minorities Commission from 2006-07; before being elevated to post of VP in 2007 and re-elected in 2012 by UPA-2. Soon after vacating his office, Ansari chose to attend a conference organized by Popular Front of India (PFI), a radical Islamist organisation involved in several terror and rioting incidents.
Pakistanis spying due to relaxed visa regime under UPA
Nusrat Mirza’s claims to have freely moved about in Bharat during the UPA era (2004-14), without usual visa restrictions should not come as a surprise.
Sajid Mir, the LeT mastermind of the 26/11 attacks who was recently found to be alive in Pakistan (they had earlier declared him dead), and other terrorists/spies had visited Bharat in 2005 as ‘cricket fans’ to recce terror targets. This was a time when Delhi’s elites were high on ‘Aman ki Asha’ rhetoric and cricket was bandied about as a tool that could solve Indo-Pak issues.
Now, you can guess why every sane citizen’s antenna should go up when the shameless Lutyens’ cabal talks about restarting sporting and economic ties with Pakistan, and the much touted track-two diplomacy.
Nusrat Mirza – the ‘educated’ Islamist supremacist mindset
Nusrat Mirza (80) is arguably the senior-most columnist in Pakistan. He was born in Delhi before the partition. He has been writing columns for the last 52 years. First he wrote for Nawa-i-Waqt, the purported guardian of Pakistan’s ideological frontiers, and then for Jang, the best-known Urdu newspaper in Pakistan. He has written 18 books. An engineer by training, he joined an Italian engineering company and worked in Saudi Arabia for many years.
In the interview, Mirza stated that Pakistan has not conducted any ‘activity’ in Bharat since it was put under the FATF (Financial Action Task Force, the international watchdog monitoring money laundering and terror financing) and got “its hands tied”. Pakistan was included in the FATF grey list in June 2018, and there hasn’t been any major terror strike on Bharat after Pulwama suicide attack of Feb 2019. Recently, the Western-dominated FATF has given signs that Pakistan could be moved out of the grey list – a move which analysts see as a slap on the wrist to Bharat for resisting Western diktats on the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Nusrat Mirza further said, “We are Mughals. We have ruled India for centuries. I understand their culture. I know about their weaknesses.”
This obsession of identifying with foreign invaders – Turkic Mogols like the Mughals, or Persians and Turks, and most of all to somehow concoct Arab ancestors – is unique to subcontinental Muslims, especially the Ashrafi (so-called high caste/’pure blood’) Muslims. One look at Mirza is all one needs to debunk the notions he harbors. The Mughal kingdom was founded by Babur, a descendant of the barbaric tyrant Timur. This is how Timur looked:
Apart from a brazenly supremacist mindset, the senior Pakistani journalist made no bones about his desire to see ‘Bharat ke tukde-tukde’ (Breaking India). He claimed that there are ’26 separatist movements going on in India’, but Pakistani establishment is ‘not exploiting’ the information he provided. He claimed that Pakistan had a right not just on Kashmir, but Hyderabad and Junagarh as well. He claimed that Pakistan did not have any roll in the 26/11 terror attack on Mumbai, and that it was an ‘inside job’. He further spoke of an impending ‘massacre of Muslims’ in Bharat, as experts from US were also saying so.
Then, he goes on to accuse Bharat of being ‘against peace’ and wanting to ‘finish off’ Pakistan to avenge its centuries-old conflict with Mughals!
Deep links with Indian Muslim universities and intelligentsia
So did Nusrat Mirza indeed make as many visits to Bharat and attend high-level conferences/seminars as he claims?
India Today TV reviewed several publications and found that Mirza attended the International Conference Against Terrorism on October 27, 2009 at Delhi’s Oberoi hotel. The Pakistani scribe was seen being greeted by Ahmed Bukhari, Shahi Imam of the Jama Masjid and Yahya Bukhari. The event organised by Jama Masjid United Forum was also attended by then VP Hamid Ansari and cabinet minister Ghulam Nabi Azad.
Images published by Mirza’s foundation RFI Pakistan also establish him delivering lectures at “Student Seminars” at Aligarh Muslim University’s Kennedy Auditorium as a guest in the year 2007 and 2010.
Images and publicly available data from February 2010 place Mirza at an interfaith religious conference “International Dialogue between Islam and Oriental Religions” held at the Ansari Auditorium of Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia university.
Clearly, the man had deep connections with the cream of Indian Muslim academic, political and intellectual circles. Pakistan may have split from Bharat after partition, but the spirit that led to the creation of Pakistan and the organizations like AMU and JMI which fostered that spirit, are very much alive in modern-day Bharat.