World War II ended with a horrible bang. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were wiped out of existence with nuclear bombs and the devastation was of catastrophic proportions the likes of which the world had never seen before and one earnestly wishes never does again. Millions of people were simply incinerated to charcoal, buildings evaporated and whole blocks levelled like houses of sand before a steamroller. Those who survived were disabled for life and the land has become unusable for thousands of years due to residual radioactivity. Nothing grows there as nothing can grow in that nuclear wasteland.
Only the formless ghosts of those who perished as a result of the nuclear attack may be wandering around every now and then wondering about the ultimate human cruelty. What happened to all the sermons of humanity, kindness and compassion? Where had those fiery speakers and saintly campaigners of goodness and charity gone when they decided to bomb these cities? However, what goes around comes around. Right now there is some important business to attend to at home.
There is a particularly pernicious government that has risen to power in neighbouring India whose ambition, coupled with ominous submission to the hard crusted savants of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to the extent of being physically made to appear before them and account for their performance in governance, is rather worrying. That kind of culpable accountability before the mighty doctrinaires on their high podium used to take place in Nazi Germany or, to a lesser extent, in Khomenite Iran. But that too not with so much grim authority as was exercised by the RSS high command over Modi and his cabinet ministers recently at Ahmedabad. This should practically be a terrible dilution of India’s prized secularism. Modi’s India is going to be a Saffron India, reads the banner across India Gate. But it is not just Modi who is foaming at the mouth or, for that matter, the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP); Pakistan has turned out to be the ‘unfinished agenda’ of partition for the Indian political philosophers, leaderships, academicians and policymakers across almost the entire national spectrum. There had been patches of sanity and sagacity in that vast inhospitable landscape but few and far between.
In their bitter disagreement with Jinnah, the Indian leadership tipped over and disastrously overlooked the reconciliatory and extremely significant amity signals Jinnah was radiating. But when dark sentiments overtake state policy, a sickly animus grows between countries like what has happened between India and Pakistan. None of the common citizens of these Siamese twins had ever asked for such a pervasive revulsion to spread as has so insidiously been done ever since. Bloody massacres at the time of partition acted as the wheels of hatred and a poignant indicator of the physical and moral atrocities to come, which have occurred with discomforting regularity, mainly in India. Sorrowfully, none on both sides of the divide (but more so in India) had the vision and strength of conviction to reverse the ever expanding tide of hostility towards Pakistan and a corresponding sense of insecurity in that struggling country.
The unfortunate but logical upshot of this politically hard baked and ideologically prejudiced mindset towards Pakistan’s existence as a whole has been an incipient realisation of insecurity and destructive aggression by all and sundry in Pakistan. Slowly but surely this unremitting animosity began to push Pakistanis and their leaders to look elsewhere for support. Pakistan walked into the web of US regional treaties knowingly, as it gave it a sense of security. It opted for a Muslim ummah (community) fraternity much against the logic of thousands of years of history, in the hope that the country would get some help, moral if not material, in its time of need. Soon the time arrived when its psychological and military breastworks were put to the test. The Indo-Pakistan War of 1965 was instructive in many ways. The foremost lesson was that Pakistan would have to depend upon itself to defend its integrity, US pacts or no US pacts. The second was that the Muslim ummah could help only as much as it did: a cup of tea and sympathy. Pakistan was on the edge of the precipice in September 1965 but for the superhuman fight put up by our vastly outnumbered forces.
That harsh and cheerless realisation sowed the first seeds of yearning for nuclear capability, as a balance of conventional forces with India was not a possibility even in the distant future. If you are following what one is looking at, then we may agree that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons stockpile is a direct corollary of the continued but utterly senseless military threat posed by India to Pakistan’s security, US failure to strengthen our defensive capabilities and toothlessness of the Muslim ummah. The nagging sense of acute and present vulnerability and inadequate defence ability spurred the search for nuclear weapons technology.
A decisive moment arrived in 1971. As a result of India’s adroit diplomacy and successful military invasion on the back of our hopeless failures in nation building and statesmanship, Jinnah’s Pakistan was destroyed. It split into two and with that the shaft of India’s visible determination to wipe out truncated Pakistan squarely and irretrievably ran right through the bruised Pakistani psyche. It confirmed in one single deadly stroke what the naysayers have been saying for a long time: India and Pakistan were mutually incompatible. Radical anti-India sentiments began to find traction among the people.
Borders expand and shrink, the centre of gravity of power shifts hither and thither but what gets hot-ironed into popular belief is extremely hard to erase. The Indian leadership of 1971 comprehensively failed to realise the horror of their miscalculation under the heady feeling of Pakistan’s reduction in size and has now to pay for that massive error. It was firmly established that Pakistan, in its reduced geo-strategic capacity, cannot survive for any considerable length of time given India’s mounting military power and increasingly strident anti-Pakistan rhetoric.
There was another, more toxic and unexpected consequence. While the Pakistani leadership fully and finally concluded that nuclear arsenal was essential for the country’s survival, a lot of disillusioned people in the cities and villages were deciding upon a different but known resolve: an ominous resort to their age old and tested resilience under duress as enunciated in Islam. Meanwhile, India’s deep state (Hindutva ideologues and the like) went on to compound matters. Contentious issues like the Kashmir dispute, Siachen, fair distribution of river waters and Sir Creek demarcation were deliberately left unresolved. Pakistan’s diplomatic isolation and degradation became an article of faith with South Block and the campaign to delegitimise Pakistan was widely and openly patronised. Popular disillusion ultimately found its expression in various shades of jihadist movements that one sees in Pakistan these days.
(To be continued)
The writer is a retired brigadier of the Pakistan army and can be reached at [email protected]