Daily Times

It has been for a long time since one has been interacting with Indian friends, readers, retired military officers from juniors to three-star, bureaucrats, former diplomats, ambassadors, journalists, businessmen, students, and others from many walks of life. Someone interacted with personally during international conferences and visits abroad, but mostly through the internet, email and social media. It has been, altogether, a rewarding and precious experience.

One would have missed a good part of the worldview if the interactions had not taken place.Very heartening had been the knowledge that they too have their pride, prejudices, fears and aspirations just like us. They too fall sick, seek prayers, worry about the future of their children, are grieved at the loss of dear ones and concerned about rising prices and the worsening law and order situation around them. They too dislike animosity, bloodshed, lynching, rape, mob violence, terror strikes and needless hatred, particularly that which is encouraged and peddled by their electronic media. Pain, sickness and success affect them just as it does us. They too become stunned or emotionless witnesses to scenes of public violence like us.

Then why is it that there are major differences in both our reactions to certain collective and individual matters? There is a need to discuss and understand these apparently erratic reactions that we may call for ease of reference a fulminating phenomenon, so as to be able to properly interpret motivations and not lose our minds with the maddening crowd.

Pakistan’s case is relatively simpler, and stems mainly from the unjust apportioning of territory, including Kashmir, at the time of independence. The battle for Kashmir in 1948 and a serious shortage of military hardware placed a permanent stamp of chronic insecurity syndrome vis-à-vis India in the minds of our security planners, which world leaders and India did little to address ever since, world leaders because of unconcern, and India as a matter of hubris. The hurt at being ignored internationally and the deep injury caused by India’s aggression and arrogance have permeated and stayed in both Pakistani society and psyche both. It eventually culminated in the acquisition of nuclear weapons and readiness to use the same whenever the threat from India becomes existential.

The trauma of the final loss of the last symbol of sovereignty in India after the defeat in 1857 had provided humus for the seeds of Muslim sociopolitical insecurity to grow. Pakistan carried the wound. Futile attempts to wear the mantle of Arab history at the expense of our own magnificent past were more of a defensive mechanism and power elite’s expediency than anything substantial or well thought out. Before the concept and nuances of Pakistan movement’s two-nation theory could mature into constructive and inclusive practices, the clergy climbed up the rear wall and hijacked the national dialogue whose choke hold Pakistanis are still trying to loosen.

India’s case seems complex and needs a clinical analysis to properly understand how they think and perceive themselves, mainly when placed against Pakistan. They have many other ghosts to grapple with but China figures prominently. Therefore, this exercise is necessary to avoid provocations and knee jerk reactions at the state level. India is a larger country with regional ambitions and an exclusive view of itself, not necessarily accommodative of concerns of the smaller neighbours. Like the US, India also harbours the notion of an exclusive domain of influence around her where her diplomatic writ must take precedence, and this domain is expanding just as her military and economic clout increases.

India’s responses or rather irritants with reference to Pakistan can be placed in five broad pigeonholes: ideological, diplomatic, economic, military and civilisational. These, in fact, form the entire ecosystem of perceptions that India has constructed around the reality of Pakistan, and has, resultantly, become a prisoner of her own illusions. It is all really in the cognitive domain.

Before we go further, lets put to rest a widely held misperception that holds that Hindus betrayed Muslims during the uprising of 1857, and were thus rewarded by the British afterwards. The broader fact was that once the decadent Moghul Empire was decapitated after the fall of Delhi, the administrative and economic void was filled by a majority of Hindus by default. Otherwise, it is a historic fact that a sizable Hindu contingent and a similar Sikh contingent fought side by side with Muslims during the fateful siege of Delhi in 1857.However, individual acts of treachery always exist during momentous changes of fortune of a nation, which do not define the collective.

India’s responses or rather irritants with reference to Pakistan can be placed in five broad pigeonholes: ideological, diplomatic, economic, military and civilisational

Ideological caprice towards Indian Muslims can generally be pinned, in a way, upon repeated invasions of Muslim armies from the Northwest, but in modern times go back to a sort of reactionary rise of a ‘Hindu Mahasabha’, fearing a resurgence of Muslim political power after the Muslim League was formed in 1906,and similar streams of militant Hinduism, like the subsequent birth of RSS and the pugnacious Hindutva ideology. This, most sorrowfully, killed the great egalitarianism and delightful secularism and non-religiousness practised and promoted by the great Moghuls towards their subjects in India.

It should be music to most ears to know that Emperor Aurangzeb had been making large cash allocations for repairs of certain Hindu temples. During the siege of Delhi, the incapacitated Bahadur Shah Zafar issued and implemented just one royal decree and that was to enforce ban on slaughter of cows as it hurt the religious sentiments of Hindu population. Occasional acts of accidental or deliberate excess by ruling Muslims cannot be condoned either. The Muslim Pakistan naturally became the physical object of hatred created by Mahasabha and RSS ideologues, which has been recently fanned into a countrywide bonfire by BJP’s emphasis on Manusmriti, the Brahaminic code of exclusive life and governance.

Sadly, muscular Hindu nationalism has displaced secularism in India. Saffron fidelity not humanity or constitutional morality is being forced upon the people of India, which can have drastic consequences. In the current Hindutva scheme of things, minorities particularly Muslims and lower caste Hindus have no place. They convert, merge or perish.

Dovetailed into this is the deliberately manufactured civilisational haze created by the doctrinaires of Hindutva. Their worldview seems to have been quarantined by their mythical ideology, which tends to propose a purely Hindu land much against the historic evidence of a torrent of regional migrations spread over thousands of years, which populated and culturally enriched various parts of the subcontinent. By that token, it also distances from Budhism, Jainism and Sikhism as authentic indigenous faiths. However, the claim to be the sole inheritors of the Gangetic and Indus civilisations is as flawed as declaring the Indian Ocean the only ocean.

All races and nationalities that have inhabited the land are collective inheritors of both these great civilisations. Pakistan is where the Indus Civilisation took root and prospered. But our myopic historians, tainted academicians and religiously imbued fiction writers mindlessly disowned this great heritage and tried to wear the alien Arab and Central Asian history. That cut our historic roots from our magnificent past and made us practically rootless. This historic and civilisational tribalism played straight into the hands of Hindutva philosophers to fabricate that Pakistan is not a part of the subcontinent, culturally, morally and ideologically.

To be continued

The writer can be reached at clay.potter@hotmail.com