archive: Psychotic State-I
Psychotic State-I
AD Moddie
The Statesman
July 19, 1999
Title: Psychotic State-I
Author: AD Moddie
Publication: The Statesman
Date: July 19, 1999
India Has Failed To Assess Pakistan
THE Kashmir incidents of 1948, the wars of 1965 and 1971, and
ISI-sponsored infiltrations in the last decade, have all been
forgotten in the hope that the Kashmir problem can be settled
bilaterally and relations with the Islamic world, leaving aside
Pakistan, can be managed diplomatically. India's secularism prevented
a realistic analysis of the nature of 20th century Islam, its
ambitions for power.
Delhi has nurtured nostalgic, pre-Partition Punjabi secularists,
(mainly ex-Lahore, ex-Government College) who have lived in the fond
hope - despite three wars and a decade of armed infiltrations - that
in some happy dawn, the old "composite culture" of Hindus and Muslims
would bring about good sense and reconciliation. (Ironically, all
these decades, the most hard-core aggressors against fellow Pakistanis
and Indians have been Punjabi Muslims, who have never been known to
solve any problem except by force.) It congealed in the minds of one
of them as the "Gujral doctrine", in which Pakistan was blindly
equated with India's other neighbours.
NEW ISLAM
An amazing incapacity to probe into 20th century Islam from North
Africa to Indonesia and refusal to face the realities of a new
non-Koranic Islam led by people after power and wealth, following the
medieval principle of social cohesion by religion, not modern
principles of democratic nations, liberal economies, and human rights.
This has induced Indian complacency since 1971, and the neglect of a
realistic long-term security strategy, and defence investments. So,
India finds itself confused between the euphoria of the Lahore bus
"biradari", and the rude shock of Kargil. For this unreality, we are
once again experiencing a betrayal similar to that in Nefa in 1962: an
unprovoked aggression, now compounded by the uncivilised, brutal
mutilation of seven Indian returned soldiers.
In a television programme after the rude awakening of Kargil, we were
reminded by an ex-chief of the army that India's last investment in
modern weaponry was in 1986, 13 long years ago - the Bofor's guns -
now a godsend. In these years, all political parties and Parliament
passed salary-oriented, rather than weapons-oriented defence budgets
in Parliament for all the armed services, without concern for future
consequences. The armed forces were starved of weapons and strategic
concepts for a decade and a half. There is now a belated recognition
that a safer course would be to realign the Srinagar-Leh road. Nobody
knows where we are heading after decades of apathy and unreality. The
ex-Chief of Army Staff thought we would "go to sleep" after the
present crisis is over, as before. All this is a small reflection of
the illusions in which India has lived, swinging from short periods of
patriotic euphoria to long periods of unpatriotic apathy and political
self-seeking. A fearless, non-establishment, Indian John Maynard
Keynes should write the "Economic and Security Consequences" of
post-Shimla pact Indian somnolence. It would be a story of economic
suicide by politicians of all parties, Congress and Communists most of
all. It would also be a story of India, with no strong will to
negotiate Kashmir, and Pakistan politically incapable of negotiating.
NAIPAUL THESIS
Not seldom the most insightful people are great writers. Nearly two
decades ago, VS Naipaul went to the heart of Islamic fundamentalism,
and into the Muslim psyche in non-Arab lands in Among The Believers.
His thesis was that Islam is finding it difficult to adjust to the
modern world; hence, it is in frustration, rage, and aggression. It
was a remarkably simple and true insight, even prior to Khomeini's
Islamic "revolution". We have known this phenomenon well in India,
when Muslim leaders since the 19th century, sulked after the loss of
empire after seven centuries, and, unlike other Indian communities
failed to join the mainstream of modernising India in education and
enterprise. They remained backward, and wrongly attributed it to their
minorityhood, unlike other minority communities.
They found easy escape in poet Iqbal's dream of Pakistan, where Indian
Muslims would make an earthly paradise among themselves. What would
Iqbal have said of his daydream, if he had seen the martyrdom of
Bangladeshi intellectuals and leaders, the hatred of "mohajirs" in the
killing fields of Sindh, the Pakistan army's deliberate destruction of
the pastoral assets of the nomadic Baluchis, the roguery of the drug
trade and the ISI - apart from the long inherited harsh feudalism in
Bahawalpur and the Punjab - in his precious Pakistan? How can this
feudal, psychotic state find peace with India, if it cannot find peace
within itself? Its own failed psyche and failed state compels it to
find an ideal enemy in "kafir" India.
In his recent Beyond Belief, on the same non-Arab Muslim societies
from Iran to Indonesia, Naipaul offers another sad thesis about the
psychosis of converts to Islam in non-Arab lands. Islamic converts
have to renounce their own glorious past: from Persepolis and the
ancient Persian empires which once challenged ancient Greece and Rome
in Iran, to the marvel of Borobodur in Java. A member of the
Indonesian elite thought such world heritage sites should be left to
Unesco.
HUMAN REALITIES
These converts had not only lost their names for Arab ones, but also a
sense of their own glorious history. They had lost also the
pre-Islamic sense of sacredness of their ancestors in sacred natural
stones, springs, groves in their own lands. They were culturally
disembowelled people, promised a new Utopia of the Koran by
power-seekers, but had to face the human realities of the rabid lust
for power and wealth, and all its clerical and militarist rogueries.
It led to the psychosis of those who totally renounce their past for
an Arab imperium of the mind, a psychosis which has led everywhere to
violence and killings, to the disillusion of Iqbal-like dreams, to
political and economic ruin, to the nihilistic terrorism produced by
the drugs and arms traffic, and to the deaths of youthful "martyrs",
whilst older ulemas preached in safe mosques and grew rich on the
Islamic state. The idea of the state as God, as the manifestation of
the Koran, has given way to the state as the old instruments of
cruelty, plunder, exploitation, and power. VS Naipaul found Pakistan,
in particular, "still pursuing imperialist Islamic fallacies". As for
Iqbal, he says, "poets should not lead their people to hell". Nor our
unrealistic politicians.
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