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Some Indians need a reality check – badly
By
Karamatullah K. Ghori
MY
previous column on the subject, Mumbai Mayhem: Facts and Fiction has
the Indian tails up. They are denouncing me — often in language and
syntax betraying lack of schooling and culture — for daring to
question the integrity of their mahan India. My In-Box has been
flooded with furious messages pouring scorn on Pakistan and its
diplomats, including this ex-ambassador.
That cheesed-off and irate Indians should be unhappy with my take on
Mumbai’s gory drama is not surprising at all. Many of them seem
incapable of digesting the fact that what their sanctimonious
government wants them to believe as gospel truth is largely
make-believe. Their sensitivities have been dulled by slogans
concocted by their half-literate television reporters and anchors.
I was, in fact, complimentary to the Indians for having honed a
democratic culture in which cabinet ministers and state chief
ministers have the moral grain to accept responsibility for their
acts of omission, something that Pakistan, very sadly, hasn’t, to
date, and resign gracefully. But having steeped a democratic polity
doesn’t mean that most of Indians have attained nirvana and cleansed
themselves of all those evils that have the traction to lead the
best of democratic societies into a cesspool of ignominy. United
States is the best example of an almost perfectly functioning
democracy in the world, and yet the Americans allowed themselves to
be taken advantage of by a duplicitous George W. Bush, who led them
into the worst nightmare of their history.
So what was so sacrilegious to suggest that Manmohan Singh saw in
the Mumbai drama the chance of a life-time to shore up his electoral
fortunes? Did he have a divine revelation that told him the
terrorists had come from Pakistan? But a section of the Indian
intelligentsia isn’t prepared to countenance the possibility that
their PM took them on a flight of fantasy and was guilty of
triggering a schizophrenic hate campaign against Pakistan.
A cool and calm reality check, and analysis of the gory saga in
Mumbai, should easily remedy the paranoia of the Indian pundits
claiming to know the truth but actually swallowing without demur the
officially sanctioned version of events. Some Indian intellectuals
and analysts, thankfully, have started raising questions that all
others in their community should also be raising.
Take, for instance, the mystery surrounding the actual count of the
alleged terrorists involved in the episode. The official brief says
there were only ten, out of which one — still alive and in captivity
— was overpowered at the railway station. That leaves nine of them.
Two are said to have held the inmates of Nariman House, the Israeli
enclave. That leaves just seven. These seven must have divided
themselves into two groups. Let’s assume they split 4:3. It couldn’t
be 3 ½ for each of the two giant hotels invaded and occupied by
them.
Can anyone in their right mind perceive, for a moment, that three or
four people could hold up a huge 600-plus room hotel like Taj, and
an equally cavernous hotel like Oberoi, for more than 60 hours,
fight off hundreds of counter-insurgency commandoes, terrorise and
kill scores of their hostages, trash the hotels from inside (as
subsequent television footage so graphically displayed for the
world)? They had to be supermen to accomplish all that.
Independent analysts and terrorism experts are at one in their
prognosis that to carry out so many tasks simultaneously, over such
a long period of time, there had to be at least 50 to 60 terrorists
actively engaged in this episode. The question that India’s
self-righteous intelligentsia refuses to answer is, who were the
people assisting the impugned terrorists? They had to be local
facilitators and accomplices, if they had not descended from the
ethereal world that vanished in a UFO as soon as the job was done.
But they close their eyes to the stark reality that for well over
the past two decades the Indian polity has been sliding, at an
alarming pace, into the abyss of Hindutva, which not only pursues a
philosophy of unremitting hate toward all minorities — exceptionally
the 180 million Muslims of India — but also subscribes to the use of
force as part of their dharma or belief to achieve its goals.
It should be a matter of shame to most Indians, intellectuals or
not, that their commitment to the ideals of a saint like Mahatma
Gandhi is now only skin-deep. In actual fact, the heroes of many
Indians, Hindus in particular, today are persons like LK Advani and
Narendar Modi — with the latter’s hands soiled with the blood of
thousands of innocent Muslims of Gujrat. What else could explain the
rise of BJP, VHP, Bajrang Dal and such others of their ilk in a
supposedly secular India?
A little known fact that Indian intelligentsia gurus strive hard to
hide — but which has been well documented, independently — is that
the bulk of the funding for BJP and VHP is being done, for many,
many years, by NRIs ( Non-Resident Indians) in North America, Europe
and Australia-New Zeeland. These countries have been regularly
pouncing on Muslim charities on flimsy suspicions of sponsoring
terrorism but the NRIs are getting away with murder because BJP and
VHP et al are not regarded as terrorist outfits in a classical act
of western double-standards.
In the latest bout of chauvinism and skewed nationalism, these NRIs
in the US have embarked on a campaign to enlist official American
support to sponsor a resolution in the UN Security Council to grant
India a carte blanche to strike Pakistan’s alleged ‘terrorist sites’
if Pakistan fails to act on the Indian diktat.
Another such campaign has been started by US-India Political Action
Committee — obviously inspired by the example of the notorious
American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — to force US
Congress to make all assistance to Pakistan contingent upon the
extradition of Dawood Ibrahim to India. These nouveau riche Indians,
who have come into money by the miracle of dot.com, think they now
own the US and can have their way with their American mentors just
like the Zionists have in Israel.
Their arrogance has been whetted, no doubt, by the West’s
gullibility to swallow whatever their Indian ‘allies’ conjure up and
dish out in a massive disinformation campaign, of which the sole
objective is to lampoon Muslims all over the world. The saturation
coverage of the Mumbai drama by the likes of BBC and CNN was graphic
evidence of the western unqualified concurrence in whatever the
Indian propagandists would spoon-feed them.
India, quite convincingly the most stratified society in the world,
has treated its minorities shabbily as a matter of routine. Muslims
have fared worse than any other religious minority at the hands of
bigoted Brahmins, to whom hundreds of millions of their own
low-caste Hindus are also, for all practical purposes, outside the
pale of humanity. Christians, too, have lately been targeted for
‘special treatment’ by Hindutva goons.
However, the worst sufferers are the hapless Muslims of Kashmir,
claimed as an inseparable part of the Indian Union. As per India’s
own statistics, eight Kashmiris have been killed every day over the
past 18 years since they rose in revolt against Indian hegemony of
their land. This makes it a cool 55,000 Kashmiris — at the very
least — killed at the hands of 600,000 trigger-happy Indian soldiers
encamped in the valley. The mahan Indians are wailing to the world
for the loss of 170 lives in Mumbai. But why haven’t these mahan
people ever shed a tear for the Kashmiris murdered in a blind frenzy
of arrogance of power by India’s ‘brave soldiers’?
Blowing one’s own trumpet doesn’t make a people mahan or great.
Greatness is a virtue which can only be earned by rising above
pettiness and puny thinking.
The Pakistanis are not a mahan people and don’t claim to be one.
They have umpteen weaknesses but have at least one great quality:
they never hide or cover up their appalling weaknesses. It’s hard to
come by a Pakistani intellectual that would be condescending to the
rise of militancy and fundamentalism in their polity. There is zero
tolerance among the Pakistani intelligentsia for a militant Islam or
its purblind practitioners.
The Pakistanis may be nationalistic but they aren’t chauvinists and
don’t take the words of their leaders for gospel truth. In fact,
Pakistan’s ruling elite have an abiding grouse against their
intelligentsia for being their harshest critics and detractors. Just take
the recent example of a dictator like Pervez Musharraf who was
chased out of his powerful niche by the combined strength of the
people and what he and his cronies disdained as the ‘chattering
class’ of Pakistani intellectuals.
Thank God the Pakistanis, in general, aren’t self-righteous like
their eastern neighbours. A self-righteous people are niggardly and
self-centred. Pakistanis give credit, generously, where it’s due and
admire India’s great achievement in consolidating democracy and
democratic institutions, something they haven’t been so successful
at themselves. But that doesn’t mean they will take Indian dictation
or accept Indian hegemony, physical or intellectual.
Let there be no fanciful ideas exciting fertile Indian imaginations.
They aren’t mahan, or gurus to the world. Let there also be no
doubt, anywhere, that the Pakistanis covet to be friendly with India
but only on terms of strict equality and mutual respect. Pakistan
simply refuses to be muzzled by a self-righteous India. The real
world is a far cry to the Pakistanis from a Bollywood thriller, if
only the Indians would digest this fact.
The writer is a former ambassador. E-mail:
k_k_ghori@yahoo.com
DAWN:Saturday, 13 Dec, 2008 |
