WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange will get into trouble, potentially a 35-year sentence in the United States, if he leaves the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which he says he would to mend his health and catch some healing sunlight. Regardless of what he might have done to offend powerful countries with his treasure trove of revelations, South Asians should be grateful to him for shining the light on key issues that are as relevant today as they will be in the future. <\/p>\n
He exposed, for example, senior Indian leaders for their fawning connections with American diplomats contrary to public postures of aloofness. Everyone from journalists to BJP leaders to Rahul Gandhi bared their hearts to US interlocutors. Assange also traversed issues that threaten the security and prosperity of India. <\/p>\n
Lets consider two. Prime Minister Modi last week alerted his military commanders about future threats his country faces. Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who has never been in any agreeable position to brief the military on vital issues, found an audience in former US ambassador Timothy Roemer during the latters tenure in Delhi. It took WikiLeaks to tell us how the worried Congress leader shared his perceptions of what threatens India. <\/p>\n
The Congress scion, according to WikiLeaks, told Roemer that his fear for India came from right-wing Hindu groups. They posed an emerging challenge to Indias survival as a secular democracy. This is a view shared by other mainstream parties, for better or worse, chiefly the left. <\/p>\n
Mr Modis unexplained reference to an invisible challenge, on the other hand, has been interpreted to mean various things from Pakistan to China, from cross-border terror groups to home-grown challenges he might have had in mind. Be that as it may, it should be strongly hoped that the invisible threat the prime minister spoke of took into account an invisible threat that has sent the US and President Barack Obama into a tailspin. We have already written about the incalculable threat South Asia faces from the intractable Ebola outbreak in western Africa, not by accident alone, which is the usual route of transmission, but by design. <\/p>\n
Julian Assanges findings give a direr context to the threat. US diplomats were concerned, as their cables revealed in December 2010, that India could be the target of a biological terror attack. <\/p>\n
In an unanticipated variation of the WikiLeaks revelations the Ebola virus, focus of military research for several decades in many countries, seems to have wormed its way into the United States, in fact, more worryingly than has been reported in our patch. Last week, the Chinese military reportedly sent vials of its purported antidote, which no one claims to know much about, to its citizens potentially exposed in western Africa. <\/p>\n
According to WikiLeaks, a senior Indian diplomat told the US as early as in 2006 that concerns about biological weapons were no longer academic, adding that intelligence suggested terror groups were increasingly discussing bio-warfare. WikiLeaks cables confirmed this. <\/p>\n
A recent link between Muslim terror groups eyeing the Ebola virus as a weapon unfolded cannily along the lines that WikiLeaks cables etched out. The Islamic State terrorists in Iraq have demanded that the US release a suspected Al Qaeda conduit who was arrested in Afghanistan with alleged plans to weaponise Ebola. IS links up with Al Qaeda which links up with Ebola in one stroke. <\/p>\n
The Indian intelligence picked up chatter indicating jihadi groups are interested in bioterrorism, for example seeking out likeminded PhDs in biology and biotechnology, a cable presciently sent to Washington was quoted as saying in the 2010 trawl. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n