The brutal assault by six inmates of Lahore’s Kot Lakhpat prison on the Indian prisoner on death row Sarabjit Singh on April 26, and his subsequent death in the intensive care unit at Lahore’s Jinnah Hospital has once again raised the tensions between India and Pakistan. Hit by bricks and iron rods, Singh had sustained several injuries including a fractured skull. According to his lawyer, Singh had received threats following the execution of a Kashmiri separatist, Mohammad Afzal Guru, in Delhi earlier this year. Guru was accused of abetting a deadly attack on the Indian parliament. Carried out by fundamentalist terrorists, this attack left 13 people dead in 2001. Similarly, Singh was convicted for his alleged involvement in a string of bomb attacks in the Pakistani Punjab in which 14 people were killed in 1990. After the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, the tautness between India and Pakistan rose sharply. War hysteria was whipped up in society. The army convoys started to move towards the borders. The reactionary media and the religious right cried hoarse to attack Pakistan to avenge the assault on the Indian parliament. They nudged the BJP government of Prime Minister A B Vajpayee to the brink of an outright military conflict. At one point a war between the two nuclear neighbours seemed inevitable. It was only through US intervention that the Vajpayee government was persuaded to back off. However, Mr Vajpayee capitulated only when corporate capital threatened him to withdraw investments in India if New Delhi went to war. Similarly, after the execution of Guru, the religious right in Pakistan began to lobby for a retaliatory action against India. The dilemma is that even the so-called secular and liberal parties in Pakistan joined the Jamaat-ut-Dawa and other reactionary religious outfits in this hate campaign. However, due to the debilitated social base of the religious right, this reactionary crusade fizzled out in Pakistan rather unceremoniously. Although Guru’s execution was controversial and doubts were expressed even by some sections of the mainstream Indian media, a sizable section of the intelligentsia, mainly on the left, termed it as outrageously biased. The story of Singh’s murder is equally ambiguous. Who were the ‘inmates’ who fatally wounded Singh? In a society inundated with hypocrisy and intrigue, conspiracy theories abound. The fragile nature of the state and its burgeoning internal contradictions make these speculations even more rife. Singh’s family’s version is that “he strayed across the border in a state of drunkenness”. The judiciary in Pakistan is deeply infiltrated by right wing and religious tendencies as is evident from the rulings on the Laal Masjid and several such cases. More frequently than otherwise, a court verdict has gone in favour of Muslim fanatics. In fact, jingoism, religious bias and nationalistic chauvinism in state institutions and the petit bourgeoisie on both sides of the divide at the present period in time are fuelling reaction. This hatred is a tool in the hands of the ruling elites to crush internal dissent through fabricated external threats and fomenting religious hatreds and animosities. This ploy was inherited from the former colonial masters. The British imperialists used the policy of ‘divide and rule’ to perpetuate their colonial rule in the subcontinent. Even when they physically left, they ensured that this policy continued to operate to suppress the class struggle and ensure the continuity of imperialist plunder. Winston Churchill, the arch-imperialist, aptly described Hindu-Muslim antagonism as “a bulwark of British rule in India” and noted that, “were it to be resolved, their concord would result in the uniting communities joining in showing us the door.” The outcome of the partition was bound to provide a fillip to religious reaction on both sides of the Radcliffe line. This degeneration in India in the aftermath of the partition was confessed by no other than the founding prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. In a letter to Rajagopalachari, the Bengali who replaced Mountbatten as the governor general of India, Nehru wrote in May 1948, “Our politics have lost all real character or moral basis and we function as pure opportunists…I have little doubt that we are rapidly deteriorating and becoming reactionary in our outlook and activities.” The situation in India despite its secular connotations has worsened ever since. In spite of ceaseless references by civil society in Pakistan to a one-off speech of Jinnah mentioning secularism, the reality is that in a country created on a theocratic basis, religious content dominated politics and the state from the beginning. It assumes a virulent character in periods of social stagnation and inertia of the class struggle. On September 7, 1947 Jinnah told a cabinet meeting: “Communism could not flourish ‘in the soil of Islam’…Pakistan’s interests would be best served by friendship with the two great democratic (capitalist) countries, namely, the UK and the USA.” There have been three and a half wars between India and Pakistan in the last 65 years. There have been countless negotiations and rounds of talks mainly talking about talks. As social unrest and movements threaten to erupt, a single incident like the killing of Singh or execution of Guru is fabricated that unravels the whole ‘peace process’. Every new initiative has to be started from scratch after frustrating delays. The reality is that now with the new balance of forces, the ruling classes of the two countries can neither afford to launch a full-scale war nor can they maintain a sustainable peace. This vicious cycle is used to confuse, distract and subjugate the teeming millions who are suffering from misery, poverty, disease, terrorism and deprivation. Whenever a crisis intensifies, such incidents are manufactured in an irregularly regular pattern and frequency. Pakistan and India are amongst the top six buyers of armaments from the imperialist military-industrial complex. Hence, the imperialist interests are best served when these tensions and hostilities are kept simmering at a sub-threshold level. While cynically applauding every ‘peace initiative’ between the two antagonist states, the imperialists never want to resolve issues like Kashmir that they had contrived to keep the antagonisms festering, at the time of the bloody partition. Meanwhile, the Hindu and Islamic fundamentalists feed upon each other’s brutalities. Once the toiling masses realise the stark reality that the Indian and the Pakistani ruling classes have common interests of plundering in connivance with the imperialists and are partners in the class oppression and mass suffering, the working classes will unite and rise in a revolutionary upheaval to end this exploitative system leeching the blood of more than a billion inhabitants of the subcontinent. The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com