The prophecy is more than seeing into the future. For the prophecy sees without the element of time. For the prophecy sees things as they were, as they are, and as they always shall be.
This
double game is a big reason that the administration has been unable to
fulfill Congress’s mandate to certify that Pakistan has met certain
requirements, including preventing its territory from being used for
terror attacks, as a condition of assistance. Instead, officials have
had to rely on a national security waiver to keep aid flowing.
There
is a case for doing that. After much foot-dragging, the Pakistani army
is finally battling militants in the North Waziristan region, and
American officials say there has been real progress.
Also,
Pakistan has allowed American drone attacks against militants along the
border to resume, and is cooperating with the new Afghan president,
Ashraf Ghani. Pakistan’s help is essential as Mr. Ghani pursues peace
talks with the Taliban. It also counts as progress that Pakistan
completed a transition from one civilian government to another in 2013
and that the current government, while fragile, remains in place.
American
officials say aid has allowed them to maintain some modest leverage
with Pakistan’s leaders and to invest in projects that advance both
countries’ interests, including energy, more than 600 miles of new roads
and support for democratic governance. But it makes no sense to
subsidize Pakistan’s policy failures, which include an obsession with
nuclear weapons, paltry investments in education and a refusal to
seriously combat extremism.
Are there any takeaways for India from the sickening slaughter of
hundreds of innocent school children, teachers and other enablers at the
Army school in Peshawar? Was it an act of utter depravity by the
Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan which underscores that no abomination is
beyond them? Was it unfortunately a cataclysm waiting to happen with the
cycle of violence becoming all the more brutal in Pakistan? To answer
these questions one has to take a step back into history. A recap is
imperative to contextualise the chronicle.
By the beginning of the Eighties, all three projects were well
underway. A.Q. Khan, ably assisted by the Pakistani intelligence
services, was stealing nuclear technology wherever it could be purloined
from. The transformation of the Pakistani armed forces from an
institution incubated in British traditions to an Islamic military was
on a roll. A proxy war against India, first targeting Punjab and, by the
late Eighties, encompassing Jammu and Kashmir was being implemented.
What proved to be providential for the Pakistani establishment
through the Eighties and later became their Achilles’ heal was its
voluntary enrolment as a frontline cat’s-paw in the West’s cold hot war
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan ubiquitously referred to as
the “Afghan jihad”.
Advantageous because it gave Pakistan access to billions of dollars
and sophisticated weaponry that it was able to divert into funding and
equipping its proxy war with India. Expedient because it provided the
human resource in the form of internally displaced Afghans who had
crossed over from Afghanistan to Pakistan to execute its diabolical
agenda. Disastrous because the legacy of those years the use of
religious institutions to radicalise young minds to keep the human
resource for the Afghan jihad and the proxy war against India flowing,
coupled with the adoption of terror as an instrument of state policy has
brought Pakistan to the state it finds itself in today.
By the end of the Eighties, the Cold War had ended, the Soviets went
back over the Amu Darya, but Pakistan could not dismount the tiger it
had willingly straddled petrified that it would devour it. Pakistan,
therefore, did what it thought would provide it strategic depth:
unleashing the Taliban on the war ravaged people of Afghanistan and
broadening the proxy war with terrorist strikes deep into Indian
mainland.
By the time the millennium turned the Al Qaeda had already attacked
American assets worldwide from its safe havens in Afghanistan. On
September 11, 2001, Al Qaeda launched the most audacious outrage on the
American mainland that dwarfed even Pearl Harbour. The Americans came
back to the Afghanistan they had abandoned a decade ago. Pakistan, under
the threat of being bombed back to the Stone Age, was again a frontline
state in the notorious “war against terror”, overcharging and
shortchanging its allies simultaneously.
In this process, the major fatality was the collective ethos of
Pakistan. To sustain these multiple conflicts Pakistan had to demonise
other nations and peoples, especially India. It had to patronise multiple terrorist groups. What
it did not perhaps visualise is that when hate and negative energy
begin to override national impulses, then all that you are doing is
traipsing on the edges of a catastrophe. That is the tale of Pakistan
over the past four decades.
This is exactly the tutorial that the Bharatiya Janata Party
government, its fellow travellers and doctrinal mentors need to absorb.
Ever since this government came into existence, it has left no stone
unturned to polarise society. From “love jihad” to religious conversions
they have run the entire gauntlet. What is playing out is a very
insidious attempt at the “Pakistanisation” of India. Just as in the late
Seventies, President Zia-ul-Haq erroneously thought that the idea of
Pakistan should begin and end with a strictly circumscribed Islamic
identity, similarly our home grown zealots speciously think that the
philosophical postulate that should underpin the Indian identity should
be that of a “Hindu rashtra”.
The reason why the idea of India survived and has thrived in the past
67 years is primarily because of its holistic and pluralistic
conception what is often referred to in a dismissive manner as
pseudo-secularism nowadays. This perhaps is the most vital ingredient
that has held India together, notwithstanding the multiple stresses and
strains on its substance and structure.
The cause for Pakistan to go belly up was the proclivity to move away
from the conception of Pakistan as envisaged by its founder Muhammad
Ali Jinnah, howsoever hypocritical it may have been, to the vision of
Zia-ul-Haq.
Just as in the Eighties and the Nineties, the toxic hot mix of the
politics of identity and religion the ubiquitous “Mandal and Mandir”
left in its wake a noxious legacy whose after-affects the nation has to
still contend with, the attempt to equate national identity with a
undenominational religious identity is a very hazardous hand to play.
