Daily Times

“Pakistan’s powerful army chief’’ Aljazeera says, ‘’has called on archrivals India and Pakistan to “bury the past” and move towards cooperation. Bajwa said the economic potential of South and Central Asia had “forever remained hostage” to the India-Pakistan disputes’’. The awakening from the pillows of illusions has not streamed in by a nudge of a peace-loving Zarathustra, but by the brute shock of economic necessity. Fear of war is commonly a rationalized wish for having a war, it realizes the stagnant capital and can be postponed but not given up. ‘’The wars” Leonard Cohen says, ‘’will be fought again, the holy dove will be caught again, bought and sold and bought again, the dove is never free’’.

Peace, once an idealist slogan of exchange society scarcely materializes under its horrors, but its yearning needs some introspection. Burying a belligerent past is a noble and laudable wish, but history tells a different tale. A cursory glance on the history reveals that in its chequered journey the state of Piety has fought many battles but barring the debacle of East Bengal when the interest and contradictions of the dominant state actors of either side of divide took them to the point of no return making enemy’s intervention inevitable, foreign aggression is barely detected, for no one wants to destabilize a self-destructive state.

Air Marshal Asghar Khan, an outspoken politician, albeit a failure in politics, ‘’used to lament that the Pakistan army not only initiated every single war of the four with India but also kept the PAF [Pakistan air force] in dark about each one…. That Pakistan has nothing to fear from India unless it keeps provoking its giant neighbour (Taqi,2018). If the late Air Marshal was privy to the painful fact rarely revealed to public, it is hard to believe that the current army chief is alien to it. To challenge Asghar’s authenticity will be asking for trouble, for he was the one who dragged a former army and ISI chief to the Supreme Court; they were proven guilty of stealing elections.

Everything, Marx says, owes its existence to certain material conditions, war and peace are no exceptions. The contracting economy, massive inflation, reduction in the buying power, the ever-rising army budget, declining public health and education facilities, failure to manage COVID, have led to disquiets among the masses. The state of Indian polity is no different. Populism on either side of the divide has failed to provide any relief to the wretched of the earth. Both the ‘elected’ and allegedly ‘unelected’ are facing the despair of the people that has not translated into fury yet, but the storm is brewing.

Peace is war for it is Orwellian, played to the gallery it is theatrical but what changes is theatre alone.

In the process of accumulation through dispossession, Modi in his majoritarian arrogance has brought the wrath of Indian farmers upon him. His reforms were nothing more than shoving the farmers into market den to be devoured by the capitalist wolves. However, the farmers fully conversant with Modi’s tactics have dragged the premier in the proverbial Nietzschean abyss. Wounding the BJP’s Achilles heel they have turned the table upon the government having fascistic tendencies. But the Achilles heel of Pakistani politicians provided they cool it under the shadow of invincible Khakis is apparently well protected. But even Thetis, the sea-goddess while dipping the body of Achilles in river Styx to make him immortal, had forgotten to dip his heel held in her hand, making him vulnerable to the lethal arrow.

Independent of the invincibility of the dominant institution, the objective historic necessity follows its own dynamics. When people face the demons of hunger and deprivation, the enticing slogans of religiosity, faith and jingoism—the expression of scarcity in mutilated or masqueraded forms— meet their limit. ‘’Seek for food and clothing first, then shall be the kingdom of God be granted to you’’, by turning the Biblical injunction upside down Walter Benjamin has revealed the hidden truth and helped it to find its feet. The popular unrest, an outcome of the anarchic system and the misery it produces has forced the guards of either side of the divide to mollify their aggressive instinct. But untamed or repressed instincts invariably come back with a vengeance, they have shattered the peace on many occasions in the past.

In the era of neoliberalism and imperialism, meanings of many sublime words have undergone a sweeping change, peace is one of them. Peace is war for it is Orwellian, played to the gallery it is theatrical but what changes is theatre alone. Even now, the waring-peace is being fought within the country against the forces of dissent. One of its recent casualties was an academic conference meant to discuss the reasons behind the fall of East Pakistan. The conference was cancelled, and peace was restored.

Does it mean the temporary and fragile external peace is achieved to impose silence at home? Keeping the internal conditions of either side of the divide in view, the hypothesis carries some legitimacy. The farmers’ strike, unrest in Kashmir, clashes at Sino-Indian borders, elections in various Indian states necessitated the Indian ruling class to seek an assurance of peace on one of the fronts no matter how fragile it had to be. Both countries facing the fate of Sisyphus are striving to glide the economic stone upwards that continues to roll back. For now, they have little or no appetite for an active war. The current situation has some semblance with the historic situation of Paris Commune when the vanquisher German army cobbled up with the vanquished French army to thwart the Paris workers’ uprising. It was a vivid show of unity of the ruling class otherwise loggerhead but eager to save each other when threatened by the uprising of the subaltern.

The situation in Pakistan is equally bleak. The inept, and impotent and spineless government has decided to surrender the State Bank, its jugular vein to the hegemonic power of the imperialist institutions. Once done not the government but the state will become permanent hostage to the metropolitan capital with no hope of salvation. At the time of its independence the South African government was shoved in this pigeonhole by the hegemon, it ended up compromising its sovereignty for good. When the state loses the control of its financial institution, it loses the right to whatever sham freedom it has. Bartering one’s freedom for one time relief is not opportunism, it is an outright betrayal and betrayals have consequences. To curb the consequences through violence, assurance of peace at its borders is vital. Even the best army cannot fight on two fronts simultaneously.

In the recent days four bullet-ridden bodies were recovered buried in graves from Janikhel area of Bannu district, these were the cadavers of the ‘missing persons’ while the premier credited his government of propelling the country into a welfare state, a logic that bewilders many but runs parallel to the one willing to bury the past and moving forward to cooperation, but at the same time turning the country into one of the largest importers of major arms globally. Expecting mercy from those who inflict misery is naivety, especially when one comes across those who accumulate wealth but socialize misery, for Marx the believers of ‘’communism of the rich’’. Saga of missing people is neither new nor unique, persecution is inherent in the system, propertyless are powerless and if they refuse to integrate, they must be liquidated. The final solution of fascism, the other name of capitalism is liquidation, and it needs the silence and peace of the grave to impose its logic devoid of rationality.

The author is a Pakistani-Australian writer, columnist, and an academic. He can be reached at saulatnagi @hotmail.com