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Indien & Pakistan - et håb!India and Pakistan: states of mind, contests of perceptionMaruf Khwaja, 23. januat 2002 The hair-trigger hostility between India and Pakistan is felt in the recesses of national psychology as well as the competition over territory. It is an intimate as well as a bitter enmity. An exiled Pakistan writer analyses the roots of polarisation and asks whether the insane logic of intolerance offers paradoxical seeds of hope. As an expat-exile from Pakistan, safe in Middle England, perhaps enjoying the
blessings of both hindsight and foresight, I seem to see things through the
man-made fog. I can see, for example, that deep in the subconscious of most
Pakistanis born after 1948 are embedded three articles of faith that have worked
their way into the Pakistani gene.
This set of beliefs, and the fervour with which it is held, grows or falters
according to how and where the child is nurtured to maturity. Of course it helps
if the Fluid of Faith is kept flowing through an umbilical cord that reaches
back home from the farthest corners of the world, thanks to cheap air transport,
legal and illegal immigration, the mobile telephone and the even more mobile
mullah. It helps further if the now strapping youth grows a bushy beard, puts on
a turban, learns the Quran by rote and spreads the message that Osama bin Laden
is the long promised messiah sent to deliver Kashmir to Pakistan, just as he
delivered Afghanistan to the Taliban. India is to be confronted in every field
of human conflict, be it a cricket match in Sharjah, a conference at the UN or
the edge of an icefall in Baltoro Glacier. It is a never-ending battle between
truth and falsehood. Similar psyches exist in like political environments, the most conspicuous
being that other set of Terrible Twins conjoined at birth – Israel-Palestine.
Note that the Israeli genesis bears a startling resemblance to Pakistan’s and
retains an equal potential to set off Armageddon. Like Pakistan, that entity was
born in adversity, and weighed down from infancy by a divine mission; in short,
an improbable ideological state, doomed to eternal conflict (the last a fate
suggested in the Quran itself). Of course Israel had far better pre and
post-natal care and had inoculations that enabled it to double its size every
ten years. No such inoculation is given to the Palestinians, whose lands seem to
diminish every year. Let us now move to the “other side” of the Line of Control in Kashmir for
a profile of the Indian state of mind. Embedded deep in the subconscious of
every believer in Mahabharat (Greater India) are three articles of faith.
Such are the perceptions, however, seen from each side of the polarisation.
Both stereotypes inform and shape the other’s public attitudes and make up the
lethal polarisation that now threatens to suck the entire world into a black
hole. Mistrust vies with disbelief, half truths with propaganda, sabre-rattling
with bravado and hypocrisy with expediency to make a lethal cocktail that could
explode any moment in the faces of its creators. Let us review, while we still
can, the most recent developments and see how they look from each side of the
great divide. One reality, two filters Until the day Bush unleashed the war over and across Pakistan, the New Delhi
government had reputedly done everything in its power to persuade the Americans
to shun “that vile pariah” – and use instead an “untainted” Indian
springboard to launch its attacks on Islamic terror. Many diplomatic devices
were employed to lure the US war machine to a ready-made base camp in India.
Senior “commentators” and “analysts” made repeated appearances on CNN
and Sky, pleading Delhi’s case. But bitter disappointment clouded their faces
when it became clear that the Americans had decided to take up the more feasible
Pakistani option – even at the cost of readmitting that “pariah” into the
ranks of the righteous. And it didn’t stop there. Salt was rubbed into
“wounded Indian self-esteem”, as ally after American ally announced handsome
financial rewards for the former outcast whose economy, just days previously,
had been sounding its death rattle. The outrage was that an ancient enemy that
should have died from its own self-inflicted wounds had been brought back to
life. Official Indians appeared to seethe with frustration and the government’s
professional propagandists have kept up their sniping at the Pakistani enemy
during the “war on bin Laden”. When the Taliban seemed momentarily elusive,
some reports from Delhi would suggest they were being supplied with inside
information on American bombing plans by Pakistan’s ISI. When an American
raiding party fell foul of defenders around Mullah Omar’s compound in Kandahar
and nearly came to grief, it was supposedly the Pakistanis who had “tipped
them off”. And when an American helicopter crash landed on the Pakistani
border, there were Indians who “knew” it was a Pakistani sniper that had
brought it down. As the Americans hunted for Bin Laden and his accomplices in
the caves of Bora Bora, some Indian sources placed them in “safe havens”
deep inside Pakistani territory, perhaps even the President’s own house in
Islamabad, which is implausible to say the least. Any disappointment at watching the Pakistani phoenix rise from the ashes by
Indian extremists was to prove shortlived. What the Delhi government couldn’t
achieve before the “war on terror”, Kashmiri militants hand-delivered in a
few moments of a suicidal bloodbath on the pavement outside the Indian
parliament building. It wasn’t just a few crazed men who died as they launched
into the biggest act of crass, mind-boggling stupidity since Beant Singh and his
partner assassinated Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the Khalistan Movement
self-destructed. The militants took down a lot more than a few chips of cement
from the parliament building – their lifeline to Pakistan, the credibility of
the Kashmir freedom struggle, its future and the future and very existence of
Pakistan itself. Never in their wildest dreams could Indian propagandists have
hoped for a more perfect denouement! For Pakistan, the attack on the Indian
parliament building was akin to its own notional Twin Towers collapsing on the
President’s House in Islamabad. Deep down Pakistanis should know that they are no match for India. They have
found out to their cost twice in the past, the second time forfeiting half their
country. They don’t need reminding. But does the Indian government know enough
to know when to stop pushing? There are Indians like the Shiv Sena (Shiv’s
Army, erstwhile BJP allies) who have been urging for years that Pakistan should
be driven into the sea. But can you crush 140 million people? Shouldn’t the
Shudhmat (Untouchables) throw the high caste Brahmins back over the Hindu Kush
from where they came first? Today India needs an army of half a million to keep
down 14 million Kashmiris. What will it require to keep 140 million Pakistanis
under the heel? Of course Pakistanis are reluctant learners too – and at least as stubborn.
Moreover, they don’t grovel before mere ‘infidels’, even if a million of
them are massed on the border. That would be ‘unIslamic’, even an insult to
the mantle of the Mogul Empire. After all, didn’t Babar, the founder of that
Empire, lead a mere 15,000 Muslim warriors into battle against a Hindu horde ten
times that number and send their 300 elephants stampeding back on the massed
armies with a few well chosen shots of Chinese artillery? And the Chinese have been a factor more than once since that fateful day in
Panipat nearly 500 years ago. Not only did they help Babar’s descendents build
an arsenal of atom bombs to defend that inheritance, according to some reports
they even helped the Pakistanis temporarily secrete the bombs at the height of
the Afghan crisis, in case the Indians and the Americans decided to launch
pre-emptive joint surgical strikes to put the weapons beyond the reach of the
now thoroughly-beaten fundamentalists. Those weapons are said to be secure, primed and ready for deployment. For a
country even less resourceful than it was 30 years ago, there isn’t much to
fall back on. Indeed, if its back is pushed to the wall and India pushes harder
and harder, the nuclear option may seem to be the only one for Pakistan. That
is, unless Musharraf changes its course. Extremism in retreat? Musharraf’s hour-long TV address to the nation on 12 January was not
revealing but it was a fighting speech, a bit reminiscent of Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto, only without the eloquence. Its most important element was the
declaration of war on Pakistan’s mullahs – something no ruler, civil or
military, has dared to do in 54 years of Pakistani history. He’s taking them
head on. Goodness knows, having brought the world to the brink twice in three
months, they need taking on! But it’s a colossal undertaking. On a scale of
difficulties, I’d put the vanquishing of Pakistan’s mullahs alongside the
Five Tasks of Hercules. Can Musharraf do it? He might, if the New Delhi
government lets him by lifting the threat of immediate war. As a section of the population, Pakistan’s mullahs are unique in the world
of Islam and combine wild-eyed fanaticism with stupefying ignorance and deep
seated prejudices in a way that no other group of Muslim fundamentalists can.
Assembled under one banner, in sheer number they could be an army to rival
Musharraf’s own, especially in the countryside of the North-West Frontier. But
that banner is not easy to put up, for the schisms and divisions that rend the
Muslim world from Morocco to Indonesia are almost entirely the making of
Islam’s sharply divided religious establishments and are too deep seated even
for a populist mullah like Osama bin Laden to remove. Musharraf’s bigger worry
will be the mullahs’ strength in his own regiments. The late, unlamented
dictator Zia ul Haq packed the army with them. Not just as unit imams and
muallams (religious teachers), but also in the officer corps as a means of
strengthening his only constituency. Of course he had to substantially lower
officer entry standards to make that possible. Candidates who had only religious
qualifications were exempt from sitting rigorous math, science and technology
tests. And that leads to the army’s other worry. Were standards allowed to fall so
far that a section of the officer corps is sub-standard in terms of
technological training? Could that have led to a fall in the capability of the
army to fight a modern war with modern weaponry? Let us hope that some Indian
strategists are not hoping that is the case – and let’s hope they don’t
have the chance to find out. This is an important moment. The two extremes in both countries are
irrational and illogical, living off a polarisation which if it erupts will
destroy what they claim to preserve. There must be a different way forward that
people on both sides, and of all religions, can agree upon. It needs concessions
and, just as important, the respect and restraint which stops the fanatics from
greeting any such moves as weaknesses that can be exploited. Pakistanis need to
accept that Muslims can live in India and regard themselves as Indian without
this being treason. Hindus need to accept that Pakistan is here to stay and has
every right to do so. Neither need to ‘prove’ themselves in Kashmir or turn
it into their battleground. Otherwise… we will all go together when we go, as
radiation respects no gods and its lethal half-life will outlast that of any
human faith.
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