Author: Premen Addy
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: August 2, 2008
Pakistan has been at war with India since
the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Its raison d'etre has been the
destruction of 'Hindu' India, and the restoration of pristine Islamic power
and glory. A Muslim League resolution in the aftermath of World War II called
for the quick departure of Britain, so that the forces of Islam could wreak
havoc on the country in the monstrous tradition of Ghaznavi, Tamerlane, Nadir
Shah and Abdali.
It was in the reading room of the old India Office Library (now part of the
magnificent British Library) that I read these incendiary words following
an accidental reach of the arm to the appropriate volume of the Annual Indian
Register on the open shelves. I drew the attention of an English post-graduate
student -- a friend as it happens -- who was prone to see no evil and hear
no evil in and about the League leadership. He perceived in cold print what
he had been unable to see through the distorting prism of his supervisor's
received wisdom.
I remember many hours of conversation with the late Air Commodore MK Janjua,
Pakistan's first air chief who, falling foul of his political masters, was
falsely arraigned and sentenced in the 1951 Rawalpindi Conspiracy case, which
allegedly was Communist driven. A fellow prisoner, the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz,
in 1979 assured me during a visit to London that Janjua was neither conspirator
nor Communist, but a victim of events over which he had no control. He was
eventually cashiered and released and ended his long years of exile in London
where I came to know him well.
Islamabad's genocide in the country's eastern
wing had shredded the conceptual paradise of a South Asian Muslim homeland,
forcing Janjua who, in his time, had fought resolutely for its realisation,
to meditate on this blood-stained saga. The unburdening of a tortured soul
requires a sympathetic witness: I was that person, the right man at the right
place.
I became a repository of my subject's confidences and confessions, of the
grandiose fantasies that haunted Pakistani officers' messes, where the faithful
swore to "bleed the bastards" from across the border to extinction.
It could be a perilous exercise with unforeseen consequences, warned Janjua
to an exuberant acquaintance who came calling, as he related the incident
ruefully.
Jinnah, as Islamic Sisyphus, made the initial charge to the heights of an
imagined triumph by directing his Pathan hordes to Kashmir in October 1947,
but they failed to deliver the prize to their genie. His successors, seized
by Jinnah's spirit, have sought repeatedly to roll the stone up the mountain
to only see it roll back to the bottom. So the labours of every would-be Sisyphus,
under an ancient curse, are condemned to continue ad infinitum.
Bombings in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Jaipur, Mumbai and myriad other places take
their toll of innocent lives. The Pakistan military, the shadowy ISI and their
jihadi collaborators are no nearer their goal of laying hated India low today
than they were some 62 years ago. The only way to release Pakistan from its
burden is to smoothen the wheels of an honourable and peaceful exit from the
stage. The dodo may be extinct but its image draws crowds of sightseers to
every museum where the creature's skeletal remains are housed. We pick at
the zoological past to understand the evolution of life on earth, so might
not we profit from a similar exercise on political forms that have outlived
their purpose?
Take heed of Kemal Ataturk's caution to Turkey's new National Assembly in
1921, in the wake of the Ottoman Empire's defeat and dissolution: "Gentlemen,
by looking as though we were doing great and fantastic things, without actually
doing them, we have brought the hatred and rancour and malice of the whole
world on this country and this people. We did not serve pan-Islamism. We said
we would, but we didn't, and our enemies said: 'Let us kill them at once before
they do!' And there you have the problem... Rather than run after ideas which
we did not and could not realise and thus increase the number of our enemies
and the pressure upon us, let us return to our natural, legitimate limits.
And let us know our limits... Those who conquer by the sword are doomed to
be overcome by those who conquer with the plough... That is what happened
to the Ottoman Empire."
Britain and America, having delivered and succoured Pakistan, like the famous
Dr Frankenstein, are being stalked by the monster of their creation. Influential
British and American voices across the political spectrum refer increasingly
to Pakistan as the global hub of Islamist violence and conspiracy against
the non-Islamic international community.
"Breaking the silence on Pakistan and terrorism" is the title of
Con Couglin's recent Sunday Telegraph report on the expanding Taliban insurgency
in Afghanistan. The Pakistani hinterland bears the primary characteristics
of a failed state equipped with nuclear weapons, he opines.
Fraser Nelson, in an article headlined "Don't Mention The Afghan- Pakistan
War" published in the Spectator, analyses the West's stark predicament.
"Like it or not, war is being waged on Afghanistan from Pakistan... In
theory, the Pakistan Government has signed up to the war on terror... But
in practice it is playing a double game... The American failure to understand
the complexity of the Pakistan problem is perhaps one of the biggest strategic
errors of the war in Afghanistan." This is now a single conflict, pronounced
a British officer on the ground.
US covert action, through the CIA, in Afghanistan was "actually authorised
full six months before the Soviet invasion" -- in July 1979 -- wrote
veteran American reporter John K Cooley (Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America
and International Terrorism). President Jimmy Carter's Polish American National
Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's insouciant admission that this was
a Machiavellian ploy to trap and weaken the USSR is not without irony. The
boot today is not on Washington's foot.
