Daily Times

Given Pakistan’s thumping victory over India in the final of the Champions’ Trophy in England and Wales last week I feel it is opportune to vent on an issue that has personally troubled me for while now.

When the “Mauka Mauka” ad first came out in 2015, I was not amused at all primarily because it was just blatantly wrong in giving the impression that Pakistan does not win against India. In actual reality Pakistan has won 73 one day internationals to India’s 52. Pakistan has won 12 Test Matches to India’s 9. In bilateral ODI series Pakistan has won 11 and India has won 5. Pakistan has won 13 series involving a third team and has a record of 34 to 17 in its favour in those. In fact Pakistan has won more ODIs against India in India than India has against Pakistan in either India or Pakistan. Needless to say we have had more than our fair share of “maukas” to set off fireworks and we have. The entire Indian case revolves around their superior ICC tournament record which is 13-3 in their favour, and that is not much if you consider the bigger picture where Pakistani cricket team has always trounced the Indian cricket team.To me though the “Mauka Mauka” ad was not merely banter in good fun. It was indicative of the mean-spiritedness coupled with intellectual dishonesty that I have always found in the general Indian attitude towards Pakistan.

The phrase ‘bad faith’ is the perfect description for the grand Indian project unleashed over the last decade and a half. The objective has been to drive down Pakistanis by any means necessary, including profound intellectual dishonesty

I have known Indians long enough, going back to my college days in the US, to know that not all of them are cut from the same cloth. Indeed some of them I count amongst my closest friends. That said though there is this one kind of Indian, the kind you find on the internet, trolling Pakistani websites and Pakistani social media accounts, which needs to be called out. This Indian predates the social media revolution of the last decade. Before twitter and Facebook, there was a website called Chowk.com which was launched with the specific intent of initiating dialogue between Pakistanis and Indians. By and large the attitude of Indians on that website was that of smug know-it-alls whose entire purpose and mission in life was to drive home to Pakistanis that we were the scum of the earth utterly undeserving of even an iota of self respect. The comment sections under the articles on this website were the proto-types for the kind of loathing and abuse that one routinely experiences at the hands of Indians online today.

I suppose it is some other kind of inferiority complex that makes these armchair warriors to behave the way they do. Even the best of them end up making fools of themselves publicly. Consider for example the case of Venkat Dhulipala, the so-called historian who teaches at the prestigious University of North Carolina at Wilmington. A couple of years ago he wrote a polemic with footnotes called “Creating a New Medina” the objective of which was to denigrate Pakistan’s founding as a millennial Islamist project to recreate a New Medina. What he shamelessly left out was that Pakistan’s founding father Jinnah, not an Islamist in anyone’s wildest imagination, never used that term and was at pains to decry theocracy through out his career. Indeed it was so historically inaccurate and baseless that even a historian like Faisal Devji, himself of Indian origin and no fan of the Pakistan project, lambasted the book as being utterly biased and worthless. Yet another historian from Cambridge described the book as having been written in bad faith. These two words “bad faith” are in essence the perfect description for the grand Indian project that they have unleashed over the last decade and a half. The objective is to drive down Pakistanis by any means necessary, including profound intellectual dishonesty.

Back on Chowk, there were a brother and sister, the Guptas, two non-resident Indians living in New Jersey, who had made it their mission to expose “liberal Pakistanis”. After Chowk wrapped up, they started their own website called “Observing Liberal Pakistan”. How strange is this obsession with Pakistan that it forces Indians living thousands of miles away in the US to “observe” liberal Pakistanis and call them out. Note that it is not about observing Pakistani right wing or Pakistani ultra nationalists or Pakistani Islamists but Pakistani liberals for it is Pakistani liberals who challenge their myopic view of Pakistan.

Obviously our own terrible failings, like the innumerable bad laws against Ahmadis and against religious minorities, only give these obsessive morons more fodder. Well I for one have always been critical of Pakistan’s failings. That does not mean however that one rolls over and plays dead as so many in Pakistan have chosen to do. So many of us internalized the “Mauka Mauka” narrative in all things, especially those who were feeble minded.

The Champions’ Trophy victory therefore meant something more than cricket. I should think that our valiant young cricket team has cleared up the foul air of malaise that had been blowing from the East. May we have it in ourselves to stand up and be counted in the service of this country, which at the end of the day is the only country we have. Pakistan Zindabad.

The writer is a practising lawyer. He blogs at hhtp://globallegalforum.blogspot.com and his twitter handle is @therealylh

Published in Daily Times, June 26th, 2017.