Honour in citizens well being not in chauvinistic nationalism

Indo-Pak Relations :: Flawed notions of honour

Pakistan has no business to allow any wanted Indian national to take refuge on its soil. Such persons need to be put on the first available flight to India. How come those imprisoned in India and later exchanged as a result of an aircraft hijacking demand were allowed to roam around as free people in Pakistan?

By Naeem Sadiq                                December 17, 2008               Muslim India
Dawn/South Asia Citizens Web

NICOLAS Chauvin, a soldier in Napoleon’s army, may be dead and gone, but the chauvinist attitude named after him has not only survived, it has also been adopted as a popular pastime to be indulged in by politicians, military men, TV anchors, op-ed writers and religious obscurantists.

Not to be left behind, even supposedly rational scientists like Dr Samar Mubarakmand have joined the jingoistic ranks by calling on the government to show no flexibility in the face of India’s allegations, saying that after all it would take Pakistan only 10 minutes to fire the nuclear missiles.

It may be true that we now have the capability to fire our nuclear missiles in just 10 minutes. Our highest key performance indicator (KPI) for excellence seems to be the speed with which we can annihilate our enemy. Can we also rescue our citizens from a burning building in 10 minutes? Can we come to the rescue of a woman being raped within 10 minutes? Can we recover a child who has fallen into a manhole in 10 minutes? Can we take a sick person to hospital and give him treatment in 10 minutes? Can we stop the burying alive of helpless women in 10 minutes, or can we even register an FIR in 10 minutes? If we can do none of these, and can only annihilate our perceived enemies in 10 minutes, we have a perverted understanding of honour and need to revisit and revise our KPIs.

It is unsafe to have nuclear neighbours like India and Pakistan whose politicians, generals and bureaucrats have an obscurantist mindset, no better than that of feudal villagers who keep family enmities alive because of a conflict over a piece of land or a murder committed many generations ago. We have not been able to grow out of this ancient tribal concept of honour, ego, neechi naak and oonchi pagri. Our honour sleeps peacefully when the chief justice’s daughter’s marks are increased illegally. Our honour is not ruffled when we appoint jirga operators, vani dealers and supporters of women being buried alive as federal ministers. The examples on the other side of the border are no less in intensity or number.

The recent attacks in Mumbai were a great opportunity for Pakistan and India to come together. What if President Zardari had taken off for New Delhi instead of going all the way to Turkey to join neighbour Hamid Karzai for dinner? Why was the Joint Anti Terror Mechanism (JATM), already in place between the two countries, not immediately made to work? Here was a great opportunity for both countries to build mutual trust and clean up their respective backyards.

Pakistan has no business to allow any wanted Indian national to take refuge on its soil. Such persons need to be put on the first available flight to India. How come those imprisoned in India and later exchanged as a result of an aircraft hijacking demand were allowed to roam around as free people in Pakistan? Would Pakistan like India to protect someone who was a prisoner in a Pakistani jail? Such persons should either be sent back or made to stand trial in their own country. If Pakistan were to act in an open manner on these issues, it would also have strong reason to ask India to stop its covert support to militants in Pakistan.

It is time for Pakistan to act like a responsible state and take steps to dismantle the infrastructure operated by non-state militants on its soil. The world looks at all Pakistanis with suspicion, as if no Pakistani can consume his breakfast unless he has fired a few rounds from a rocket launcher. But this perception is not altogether unfounded. The fact is that there is hardly a day which does not see terrorist attacks killing dozens of innocent people in one or the other town or city of Pakistan. Pakistanis feel unsafe in their own country, and are least interested in seeing their neighbours annihilated.

Clearly the same would be the feelings of an average Indian. 60 years of militarisation has made the people of India and Pakistan more unsafe and more vulnerable. If one’s child is killed, it does not matter if the bullet has come from another country or from the barrel of the local terrorist. We have paid a heavy price for our capacity-building to kill others and doing little to protect our own citizens. The oxymoronic ‘arms for peace’ pursuit has made people of both countries poorer in every sense of the term.

From ancient Greece to the present day, notions of honour have had a critical impact on the causes and conduct of wars. It is dangerous for modern nations to cling on to feudal and fake concepts of honour. Ever so often, it pushes us to take refuge in chauvinistic nationalism. We need to revisit and give up this mediaeval sense of honour, even if it calls for serious psychiatric interventions for our leaders. Our honour lies in the well-being of our citizens and in building peace and security for them as well as for our neighbours. Most of all, our honour lies in being honourable people — those who do not tolerate corrupt rulers, PCO judges and militancy in all its forms.

Terror in the Name of God

By Yoginder Sikand          01 December 2008              Muslim india

"Never forget that the life of this world is only a game and a passing delight, a show ….the life of this world is nothing but means of deception:. (The Quran, Al-Hadid: 20)"

"There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim" (Baba Guru Nanak Sahib)

According to media reports, it is possible that the recent deadly assault on Mumbai was masterminded by the Lashkar-e Tayyeba, a Pakistan-based self-styled Islamist terrorist outfit. Whether the attacks were indeed the handiwork of the Lashkar, as is being alleged, or of some other agency, such as the CIA and the Israseli Mossad, as others believe, remains to be fully investigated, but there can be no doubt that radical Islamism, like radical Hindutva, poses a major threat to peace and security in both India and Pakistan.

What makes such terror-driven self-styled Islamist groups thrive in Pakistan? It would appear that the very foundational myth of Pakistan, the so-called 'two nation theory' on which the country was founded, is itself conducive to militaristic interpretations of Islam. In a mirror image of the thesis propounded by the early ideologues of Hindutva—that the Hindus and Muslims of India were two entirely different nations and that the latter could live in India only if they agreed to turn Hindu or else be stripped of all civic rights—the ideologues of the Pakistan movement claimed that the Hindus and Muslims of pre-Partition India were two irreconcilable nations that could not live together. On the basis of this specious argument, they demanded a separate state for the Indian Muslims. This is how Pakistan came into being.

Thus, the very basis of the Pakistan movement was the myth of undying hatred and hostility between Hindus and Muslims. This so-called 'two-nation theory' remains the official ideology of the state of Pakistan, and is taught to every Pakistani child in school through carefully doctored textbooks. To question the theory, as many Pakistanis privately do, is considered a punishable crime and as akin to sedition. Accordingly, the Pakistani state has, since its inception, seen its survival as being crucially dependent on actively promoting as well as indirectly abetting anti-Indian and anti-Hindu sentiments. As movements for autonomy in provinces increasingly restive of Punjabi domination mounted, first in the erstwhile East Bengal, and then in Baluchistan and Sindh, the Pakistani state came to increasingly rely on an instrumental use and cynical manipulation of Islam and on the bogey of Hindu or Indian domination to ensure its survival and increasingly threatened legitimacy. Naturally, this expanded the space and scope for groups, not just the Lashkar, but scores of others as well, who claimed to speak in the name of Islam to whip up anti-Indian and anti-Hindu sentiments. For them hatred of India and the Hindus were considered as among the defining features of Pakistani nationalism.

The rise of the Lashkar and similar self-styled jihadist groups thus cannot be understood in isolation from these broader political processes. These groups received a major impetus under the American-backed and hugely unpopular military dictator, General Zia ul-Haq, who cynically backed radical Islamist groups to win public support as well as to pursue the CIA-funded war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was at around this time that self-styled Islamist groups began entering the political arena in a major way, setting up political parties and fighting elections. This led to all sorts of compromises, to widespread corruption and to rapidly escalating militancy by different Islamist groups competing with each other to prove to the electorate their purported claims of representing and speaking for Islam. The more obscurantist a group's approach was with regard to a whole host of issues—women's rights, the Kashmir question, relations with India and so on—the more ardently 'Islamic' it considered itself to be and it presented itself so to the public whose support it sought to win.

Under Zia, several dozen radical Islamist groups were liberally funded by the Saudis and the Americans in the war in Afghanistan, but soon these went out of control. They turned against their American patrons and started dreaming of exporting their self-styled jihad to the rest of the world. Some of them, including the Lashkar, even went to the extent of calling for the establishment of a global so-called Islamic Caliphate and for conquering the entire world under the 'Islamic flag'. Whether or not the leaders of these groups actually believed all this bombastic rhetoric no one can say, but it certainly appealed to vast numbers of youth, particularly from impoverished families, who were fed on a steady diet of fanciful tales about the luxuries they would wallow in if they died or were 'martyred' in the cause of what was presented to them as a divine mission.

These groups went on to serve what were seen as the strategic interests of the Pakistani state, as for instance in Kashmir, where they were sent to battle Indian forces as well as Kashmiri nationalist groups struggling for a sovereign Jammu and Kashmir, which would be independent of both India and Pakistan. Since Pakistan was a crucial ally of the West, America chose to remain mute in the face of these developments. Likewise, these groups were solidly backed by the Pakistani state in its desperate effort to install the pro-Pakistan Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and this also received American support. The Lashkar set up several training camps in Afghanistan and gave the Taliban considerable military and moral support.

It is thus the consistent assistance given by the Pakistani state to self-styled Islamist groups that has allowed them to flourish in the country, so much so that now, when the Pakistani state has itself begun to face an immense threat from these very groups, it finds itself helpless. It is an indicator of how powerful these groups have become in Pakistan that even though the present government might want to clamp down on them it cannot do so. Large parts of Pakistan are today characterized by extreme lawlessness where the writ of the state does not run. Decades of cynical manipulation of Islam by the Pakistani state for the narrowly construed ends of Pakistan's elites have now led to a situation where even if the state wants to curb these self-styled Islamist groups it finds itself helpless. Powerful sections within the Pakistani state apparatus, including in the ISI and the Army, are fiercely averse to taking any action against these groups, and are said to be consistently providing support to them.

But is the Pakistani state serious in its claims of being determined to take on Islamist terror groups that have mushroomed across the country? It appears not, just as the Indian state has not taken any serious steps against Hindutva terror groups in India. The Pakistani government claims to have banned the Lashkar, to have frozen all its assets and to have put its leaders under arrest. But ample indications exist to suggest that, in actual fact, the Lashkar is being permitted to operate freely after being conveniently allowed to change its name and re-christen itself as the Jamaat ud-Dawa. The Jamaat ud-Dawa's website is freely accessible on the Internet, relaying incendiary, hate-driven speeches of its senior leaders, who seem to be under no control whatsoever. The Markaz's magazines in English, Arabic and Urdu continue to be published, with a reported circulation of several hundred thousand. On a visit to Lahore three years ago I chanced upon a bookshop in the very heart of the sprawling Urdu Bazaar that specializes in Lashkar literature that spews venom and hatred against India and the Hindus, but also against a whole host of Muslim groups that the Lashkar does not consider genuinely Islamic—including the followers of the Sufis, the Barelvis, the quietistic Deobandi-related Tablighi Jamaat and the Shias, all of which it brands as 'enemies of Islam' or their 'agents'. And, I was told, despite the fact that the Lashkar was officially 'banned', it still operated from its headquarters in Muridke, not far from Lahore, and also managed several dozens of centres across the country under various names. Is one to imagine that the Pakistani government is so weak in the face of radical groups as to be unable to close all these institutions down?

In this context, the question arises as to why Pakistani civil society has been unable to effectively challenge the venomous (and what I, as someone who has studied Islam for the past two decades, regard as a wholly distorted) version of Islam that is propelled by self-styled Islamist groups such as the Lashkar. This issue is particularly intriguing given the fact that radical Islamist groups have consistently received only a relatively small share of the vote in successive elections, indicating that their hate-driven vision of Islam does not appeal to the majority of Pakistani people.

There are several reasons for this, among the most salient being the fact that the liberal, progressive middle class in Pakistan is very miniscule, the country still remaining largely feudal, tribalistic and extremely patriarchal in its set-up and ethos. Efforts by the few liberal Islamic scholars that exist in Pakistan to articulate progressive interpretations of Islam on a range of issues—including women's rights, relations with non-Muslims and relations between India and Pakistan—have generally met with stern opposition and even violence from Islamist outfits, with some of these scholars being forced to flee for safety to the West. The sheer fear of being killed for publicly opposing radicals and their perverted brand of Islam keeps numerous progressive thinkers in Pakistan silent, thus perpetuating a vicious circle in which the radicals are allowed to go unchallenged. Furthermore, the state has consistently denied space to progressive Islamic scholars, fearing their potential for dissent from the official view, seeing the radicals as more pliable and amenable to manipulation. This explains, for instance, the fact that despite its bombastic 'Islamic' credentials, Pakistan is yet to produce any well-known Islamic intellectual who has sought to deal creatively with the manifold demands and challenges that modernity poses. The status of Islamic, in addition to social science, research in Pakistan is woeful, and this can be explained, in part, by the fear on the part of the establishment of voices of dissenting scholars that might challenge ruling myths. The fact that Pakistan spends less than 2 per cent of its budget on education and that numerous Vice-Chancellors of Pakistani universities are retired army generals are indicators of this mind-set.

Terrorism—and this includes terror resorted to by non-state actors as well as by the state—today poses a grave threat to the peoples of both India and Pakistan. Islamist and Hindutva terrorism feed on each other, while posing to be each other's most inveterate foes. I recall reading some years ago—I cannot recall where, though—the perverse pleasure that a senior Lashkar expressed when the BJP-led NDA government came to power. Syed Maududi, the chief ideologue of the Jamaat-e Islami, who can be considered the major architect of modern-day Islamism, is on record as having declared that he would prefer India to be an officially Hindu country to being secular because that would further his case for the 'Islamic state' that he dreamed of establishing in Pakistan. Islamist outfits in Pakistan find ready fodder for whipping up anti-Indian and anti-Hindu passions by pouncing on acts of terror and anti-Muslim violence spearheaded by Hindutva groups in India, often abetted by the state. Likewise, gruesome acts of terror committed by Pakistan-based Islamist groups are quickly seized upon by Hindutva forces in India to further demonise Muslims and to build their Hindu vote-bank. Hindu and Islamist terror thus enjoy a symbiotic or mutually beneficial relationship while claiming to oppose each other. This obvious fact must be recognized when conceiving responses to the challenge of terrorism in our region.

There are no easy solutions to the predicament we find ourselves in today. But there is surely at least one thing that we must do, and this was suggested to me by the noted New Delhi-based Arya Samaj scholar, Swami Agnivesh, who has consistently been speaking out against all forms of terror, including in the name of Islam and Hinduism as well as state terrorism. The most effective way to challenge terrorism in the name of religion, Swami Agnivesh suggested, is for Muslims to denounce and stiffly oppose terror engaged in by self-styled Islamic groups who claim to speak in the name of Islam, and for Hindus to do likewise with regard to terror spread by militant Hindu groups. Sadly, today, the approach of many of us to the phenomenon is selective and skewed, with many Hindus denouncing only the terror unleashed by self-styled Islamist groups, and many Muslims denouncing only acts of terror masterminded by Hindu groups. At the same time, many Hindus and Muslims continue to turn a blind eye to, or even support, forms of terror being perpetrated in the name of the very religion which they claim to follow.

And there is something else that we need to do as individuals, and I have found that this simple principle works wonders even at a very personal level. It might sound 'unfashionable' or even 'purile' for those who do not find any place for God in their lives, but for millions of people in India and Pakistan who do believe in some higher force, no matter what they name it, it would strike an immediate chord.

This principle I owe to Rano Devi, a landless Dalit labourer from the Bhil tribe who had been released through the efforts of a human rights' group from slavery-like conditions in the estate of a powerful landlord. I Rano met while on a visit to Sindh in southern Pakistan three years ago. A powerful woman she was—dark and tall, and walking proud and erect. A courteous hostess, she welcomed me into her one-roomed hovel built on a scrawny patch of land that a social activist friend of mine had provided her and plied me with milk-less tea and a roti, which was all that she could afford.

Rano told me her story, of how she was enslaved by a landlord, who happened to be a Muslim, and who kept her for four years in shackles. Then, after a protracted legal battle, she was released through the efforts of my friend and his comrades, all of who happened to be Muslims.

She went on to enunciate a simple but very compelling principle thus:

'Live for your religion, don't die or kill for it. Express your religion through love and service, like the brothers who rescued me did, not through oppression, murder and mayhem, for that is a heinous crime in God's eyes. After all, we are all accountable for all our actions to God. To Him we shall return after we die, when He will decide our fate till eternity based on our deeds in this world'.

'If we were to realize that this world is temporary and that real, eternal life starts after death,' Rano continued softly, tears welling up in her eyes, 'and if we were to constantly keep this in mind, perhaps people would dread to misuse God's name for un-Godly acts'.

And there was another thing that Rano said that inspires me as I write these lines:

'We call Him Ishwar, and Muslims call Him Allah, but He is one and the same', said Rano. 'There are good people in every community, just as there are bad people, too. Just as that landlord who enslaved me claimed to be a Muslim, the brothers who freed me were also Muslims. And there are both good and bad people among Hindus as well. Remember that, brother. It is only when good people in every community join hands that this Hindu-Muslim problem or the problems between India and Pakistan can ever be resolved'.

That sage advice from this impoverished Pakistani Dalit woman is, to my mind, a basic premise we need to start from in our joint struggle against terror in the name of religion and national chauvinism.

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Photo: Hundreds of civilians held a candlelight march along Marine Drive toward Mumbai's Oberoi Hotel, the second luxury hotel to be attacked. Photo:Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Kashmir Conflict And The Emerging Political Scene In South Asia

By Shah Faisal                                           Muslim India

Srinagar :: The sequence of events in Jammu & Kashmir since May 26, 2008 has once again added some definite firmness to the possibility of an early conflict resolution. With the calls of separation being echoed by many czars of the Indian civil-society, it seems imminent that the familiar cycle of quiescence-chaos-quiescence may finally break now in favour of an acceptable conclusion.

However, parallel to the emergence of a novel political scene in Kashmir, a lot more action and drama has heated-up the regional and the larger global race-course also, something that will have an important bearing on the final outcome of Kashmir dispute in times to come.

To serve as a premise for further argument, three important observations need to be made at this point. One that the Indian establishment has almost frankly demonstrated now a deep seated malaise regarding the Kashmir issue. Walking away from that old and bold crown-of-the-head rhetoric, the Kashmir is now being plainly seen as a gangrene-of-the-limb scenario. This admission is in itself going to be of immense relevance in the times to come.

Secondly, the image of India as an Asian megalith has also suffered formidable insult from its defiant immediate neighbours recently. In past few months, the Nepal and Bangladesh in a fit of assertiveness have not hesitated to thumb their noses openly at India by aspiring for a warmer hand-shake with China. This is besides the ever-increasing distance between India and its other neighbours who are not enjoying the economic rise of India.

And lastly, the Nuclear Deal between US and India coupled with deteriorating US-Pakistan ties on Taliban issue will also affect the further course of Kashmiri resistance movement in their own queer ways.

When we say realisation and admission by India of the bitter realities in Kashmir, we automatically stand up to accept the inevitability of separation. The fact is that the earlier rigid stance and faked confidence has been replaced to a large extent by a strong feeling of disillusionment and surrender. Under such circumstances, India would agree to let go even tomorrow but for that handful of internal and international compulsions faced by it.

India's problem is two-fold. On one side are the questions of strategic interest. The apprehension of losing out to emboldened North Eastern and Naxalite movements. The fear of a national hue and cry against the nerve-breaking decision. But it is evident that the most important reservations are related to external circumstances of India. As has been said earlier, the India finds the possibility of secession totally adverse to its regional and international image as for now. The fear is that with birth of a China-led power-bloc in Asia, there is every risk that sooner or later India may find itself completely gheraoed by a chain of increasingly reluctant nations. As such an independent Kashmir will just complete the loop that has Pakistan and Afghanistan as one limb and China-Nepal-Myanmar as the other. After having tested missiles at the behest of Chinese technology, the Bangladesh can be seen as becoming the knot of this scary loop around India.

As such, these regional developments torpedo the scarce amount of hard-managed Indian will to go for one-time dispute resolution in wake of the present uprising in Kashmir. Thus the current Indian establishment seems to be pitched against a very tricky situation, making it difficult to handle the crisis faithfully and balance the internal and external compulsions in favour of a useful solution. So it can be said with fair degree of confidence, that unless India reassures its place in the troubled power-equation of South Asia, not much head-way can be expected on the Kashmir issue from its side. And till then it is going to be the same old story of evasion, unrest and deadlock.

Then remains the question of 123 Agreement and its affect on the Kashmir issue. It seems in the long-run this deal is perhaps going to be in favour of Kashmir, although apparently it points otherwise. By jumping into the arms of America, India has only addressed the insecurities imposed on it by the ever-rising influence of various antagonistic powers in the Asian continent. For India it is a way of dealing with this so called "Evil-Bow" formed by Pakistan-Afghanistan-China-Nepal-Myanmar and Bangladesh, despite superficial pretensions of friendship with the later trio. However, after regaining its confidence and veto in the regional matters, there is every like-hood that India will renounce its iron-fist policy on the Kashmir issue in favour of long-term gains.

These gainswill be in the form of reduced terrorism threat to India, and lesser defense expenditure, once having redefined its strategic interests and creating a higher level of deterence . Here the argument can not be refuted on the basis of a presumption that a more mighty-India will act with even more rigidity in future. It is because; India has already realized the futility of its integral-part rhetoric and the perils of a forceful military occupation.

In coming years the nations are going to be over-busy in altogether different wars of survival and a powerful India will have a new set of challenges to confront, so as to affect the course of all existent problem-phenomena, including the Kashmir issue.

In midst of all this fury, special mention of Pakistan needs to be made. The way things are shaping up, it seems Pakistan may soon solemnize its marriage to China by gradually coming out of the American charm. Under present conditions of a US-centric world order , it will cause an added disadvantage to a China-backed Pakistan by passing on the reins of Kashmir issue further into the hands of a US-aided India. That means the negotiability of Kashmir dispute may in future reduce to a differently bilateral India-Kashmir domain to sheer disappointment of Pakistan. If that happens ever, the chances of an Independent Kashmir will increase as much as scuttling the hope of a Kashmir that cedes to Pakistan.

In times to come there is going to be a lot of churning and shaking and Kashmir issue will increasingly get connected to movements on the global platform. Although no one can risk his money on betting for an early conflict resolution, the way nations are experimenting with newer power equations day in and day out, it can easily be fathomed out that the days of conflict are numbered.
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Photo: Veiled Kashmiri women voters stand outside a polling booth to cast their votes during the first phase of local elections in Bandipora, 60 km (37 miles) north of Srinagar, November 17, 2008     REUTERS/Fayaz Kabli

Shah Faisal is a Freelance Columnist based in Srinagar-190001
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The economic partition that still grounds us

By M J Akbar      November 16, 2008          Muslim India

Imagine, if you will, a nation unborn; the map of the Indian subconscious had the Indian subcontinent not been subdivided in 1947 and 1971.

Pakistan and Bangladesh are facts. It is idiocy to sneer at them as failed states. You have to look at facts without the sticky impediment of sentiment. After much consideration, with cold evidence in front of me, I am pleased to announce a personal somersault. After years of examining the validity, or otherwise, of the seeds that nurtured the idea of Pakistan, I am now relieved that it came into existence. Who would ever have believed what Pakistan has grown up into, if it had never been born at all?

Who could have convinced two generations of post-1947 Indian Muslims that Pakistan was not the heaven that had dominated its advertising before Partition? Six decades later, every Muslim of the subcontinent knows that suicide bombs and Kalashnikovs can extract a daily diet of death even in a country where there is no Hindu to call an enemy. Facts are the coolest needles to puncture fevered fantasy.

Pakistan was only ever a very partial answer to what the British called the “Muslim question”. By 1971, with the emergence of Bangladesh, the partial became twice partitioned. 1971 also proved that the slogan that created Pakistan, “Islam in danger!”, was a concoction designed to serve politicians, and not save the faith. As Maulana Azad repeatedly emphasized, even when the winds were against him, Islam is a brotherhood, not a ‘nationhood’. If Islam were sufficient to create a modern nation state, the Arabs would not be divided into 22 countries. They even have a language in common.

Indian Muslims now know that Pakistan has bounced in and out of army rule, to land, today, in a quagmire that might have neither the freedom of democracy nor the frigid certainty of dictatorship. Fatima Bhutto, Benazir’s niece, does have a grudge against uncle Asif Zardari; she believes her father Murtaza, was shot dead in a family power struggle. But the opening sentence of her recent piece in the New Statesman (October 30) is startling enough to demand attention.

Pakistan’s newly elected government, she writes, is “the first in the world headed by two former convicts (between them the President and the Prime Minister have served time on charges of corruption, narcotics, extortion and murder, no less...”

A state may not fail, but a profligate government can teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Pakistan’s desperation for a bailout loan is not news. What deserves a headline is that its closest allies, including China and Saudi Arabia, have had enough of the loan-bowl. Zardari cobbled together something called “Friends of Pakistan” only to discover that friendship doesn’t fetch dollars. The top priority of its ambassador in Washington, Hussain Haqqani, is to plead for $10 billion as reward for participation in America’s “war on terror”.

Individuals have always been mercenaries; this could be a case of a whole army being parlayed for cash. The Pentagon audits the money Pakistan gets for military operations. If the Pakistan army is fighting on the Afghan border in defence of its national interest, why would it send a bill to Washington?

The leadership of a nation forged out of millions of dreams seems to have lost its sense of nationalism. Paradoxically, the sense of a great national destiny would have flourished if the nation had been denied an existence.

But the discomforts of Pakistan are of little comfort to Indian Muslims. They are convinced now that 1947 was a mirage; but there is too much fog between them and the next horizon. The principles of the Indian Constitution, sustained by democracy and secularism, are the ideal commitments for any group that considers itself disadvantaged. But neither democracy nor secularism is an industry offering jobs. Economics has flattened the world into a racetrack, and not every community is in the race.

1947 was a geographical and political partition, a screaming laceration through the heart. Since then we have had a silent partition: the economic partition of India. The educated middle classes and the rich are rising with rising India; the rest are stagnant.

This was not conceived on communal lines and yet, as the dice has rolled, it involves communities, whether tribals or Dalits or Muslims. The Sachar Commission report is a snapshot portrait of the utter neglect that Muslims have suffered under largely Congress governments. Check with the community and the grievance is unequivocal: others get reservations, we get enquiry commissions. The Congress mantra for Muslims, its favourite vote bank, has been a single emotion, fear: after us, the deluge. If you don’t keep us in power, saffron will strangle you. It works, but only up to a point.

As the clichés on dozens of book covers suggest: the Indian elephant has lumbered towards take-off, the tiger has launched its spring. The India of yesterday’s imagination is turning slowly, untidily into a reality, hiccups notwithstanding. But does every Indian deserve the privilege of imagination, or it is reserved only for those who emerged from the womb of luck?

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Photo: Jawans (Soldiers) from Indian Border Security Force...and Pakistani Rangers..standing side by side at the Border Closing Ceremonial Drill at ..Wagah Border Check Post. The Ceremony is a unique, spectacular and charged with emotions. It is a memorable experience...Thousands of people throng to witness this drill. Note the two different uniforms of the Indian soldiers (in khaki) & the Pakistani soldiers (in Black).

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