Daily Times

The sudden exit of the United State from Afghanistan has caught Indian drug trafficking network in a highly compromising situation as the country is currently trying to destroy evidences of its links to drug money there.

Ignoring its disastrous impacts on Indian society and pouring of illicit money in national kitty, India has got indulged into drug trade to satisfy its greed for money.

According to an estimate, India’s illegal drug business has swelled to Rs 300 billion and the seizure made roughly around 10 percent of the trade.

The exponential increase in size of Indian domestic drug consumption owing to cheap and uninterrupted supply can be judged by a 2019 report by the Indian union ministry of social justice and empowerment pegs opioid use in Indian at 2.6% of total drug use, thrice the global average of 0.7% the veins and windpipes of an estimated 57.8 million users worldwide.

After the Taliban ouster in 2001, poppy cultivation in Afghanistan jumped to 3400 tons in just a period of two years from 180 tons because the Taliban had banned opium cultivation. According to UNODC, by 2003 the Afghan drugs were raking in $2.3 billion from growing poppies to trafficking its derivatives. Even amidst the exit of international forces from Afghanistan, the poppy production had reached astronomical levels of around 9000 tons. The drug mafia is rescuing this bountiful crop of 2020-21 from the Taliban, who ironically are being accused by the India and the West for living off drug proceeds.

The children in Indian society are the most susceptible to the easy availability of drugs. Juvenile cases registered under the NDPS Act rose to 264 in 2020 from only 123 in 2015 and 82 in 2010.

An estimated one million cocaine users in India can afford to pay upwards of Rs 5000 a gram. When the heroin leaves Afghanistan, it has a value of around Rs 10000 a kilo. A 2019 study by two JNU professors, based on the National Family Health Survey 2015-2016, found that, at 70.8 percent, the prevalence of substance abuse among northeastern men is 20 percent higher than the rest of India.

A report by the National AIDS control Organization (NACO) last year found that the AIDS-related mortality per 100,000 population in India was estimated to be the highest in Manipur (36.86), followed by Mizoram (28.34) and Nagaland (26.20).

The two major seizures of drugs in India within a month have raised alarm bells and serious concerns regarding the credibility of Indian security agencies in international Drug Regulatory bodies. A fortnight later, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) arrested a group of partygoers in Mumbai for consuming drugs. Among them was also the son Bollywood actor Shah Rukh Khan. The narcotics were headed to Delhi, the Mundra Port shipload of heroin originated from Kandahar and was loaded into two containers at Iran’s Bandar Abbas Prot. An earlier seizure in Mumbai had originated from Iran’s Chabahar Port, owned by an Indian company and managed by India business tycoon Adani.

This raised serious questions as how the Mundra Adani Prot benefited from the consignment landing there. It also raised questions whether the drug cartels were aware of the coming of the Taliban so they wanted to clean up the fields as they had earlier banned opium cultivation.

The analysts believed that it required a paradigm shift for the world from the biggest democracy to drug haven to deal with India.

But strangely, what never gets traction is the complicity of Western powers in the enlargement of poppy plantations in the war-ravaged country. The western media, which monopolized the coverage of Afghanistan, never seriously blamed the occupiers as they went about perpetuating a myth of the country being a “graveyard of empires. The acclaimed analysts and mainstream international media are inclined to draw solid conclusions based on recent events and past facts regarding Indian state’s involvement in worldwide sophisticated drug peddling network.