Daily Times

Few things are as certain in today’s world as Modi’s India making a desperate anti-Muslim, preferably anti-Pakistan, dash for the headlines every now and then. The decision to mark August 14, which happens to be Pakistan’s Independence Day, as Partition Horrors Remembrance Day was actually taken last year, and had to be put back because of a host of factors including Covid, so it’s not as if it took the Pakistani foreign office by surprise.

That and the fact that Islamabad is so used to these antics that it can practically tell when the next ugly provocation is going to come explains why it dispensed with diplomatic necessities by just calling it “mischievous”; and rightly so.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that partition extracted a very heavy human and social toll on both sides, and this is something that should be debated honestly and sincerely to no end, but nothing can come of it if the exercise is motivated only by achieving the twin sinister objectives of sidelining a minority and rallying the ruling party’s extremist support base. And that, quite literally, is what the Modi administration has been getting away with all these years. And in doing that it has not only openly persecuted Muslims (and other minorities as well), it has also disfigured India’s civil society and abused its constitution; something that progressive liberals are slowly and surely waking up to.

Pakistan, for its part, can do no more than what it has already done and continues to do. Prime ministers and president-generals alike have now offered peace to India, which must include game-settling negotiations about Kashmir, yet Delhi always shies away and then plays the terrorism card. And it always works because the international community chooses to stay mum about it; and that, in turn, is because India offers them the kind of lucrative market that Pakistan is incapable of. Yet the difference now is that in the past their indifference only allowed an abusive occupation of Kashmir to go on without too much inconvenience. Now it is effectively green-lighting a bigoted, Hindutva takeover of the world’s largest democracy. *