Cry Of The Hawks

The carnage in Mumbai has yielded one benefit. It has unmasked the warmongerson both sides. The picture that has emerged is not pretty. Editorial pagesoverflow with poisoned words.

And the air waves are thick with bigotry. Unlike Abraham Lincoln at the close ofthe American Civil War, there is no one in either India or Pakistan who hasfound a transcendent meaning in the carnage.

On the Indian side, one hears talk of revenge and instant justice. Muslims, notjust Pakistanis, are the eternal villains in this plot, pumped up with thepassions that flow from consuming the sacred cow. The hawks have little interestin negotiating a solution to Kashmir. In their eyes, that means handing victoryover to the enemy. They contend that it is vital for the Indian Union to have aMuslim-majority state.

On the Pakistani side, a hawk argues that the Indians cannot be trusted to abideby any peace agreement. Another claims that the fourth war between India andPakistan has already begun, citing the IAF’s violation of Pakistani air space.He goes on to brag that Pakistan will prevail militarily over India in anyconflict even though it has lost in all past encounters.

Unnamed military officials declare that if India attacks, the Pakistan Armywould transfer troops from the tribal areas to the eastern front and the‘patriotic Taliban’ would be enlisted to assist in the final encounter withIndia. A retired general officer is even less shy about invoking Armageddon. Hesays Pakistan would unleash a nuclear barrage on India in the event of anattack.

Such bluster by senior military officials would never be aired anywhere else.They simply confirm that Pakistan’s national security establishment does nothave the maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons. The hawks refuse to acceptresponsibility for harbouring terrorists on Pakistani soil and continue to blamethe Mumbai attacks on agents of the CIA and the Mossad. One conspiracy theoristeven accuses the Indian intelligence agency of self-engineering the attack.

In their eyes India has not reconciled itself to the partition of 1947. Ergo, itis an existential threat. Having created Bangladesh out of East Pakistan in1971, it is now out to create a West Bangladesh and re-establish Akhand Bharat.

Sadly, schadenfreude about India abounds in Pakistan, even among the moderates.For many, the Mumbai tragedy simply highlights serious fissures in India’spolity. They took comfort in seeing 10 militants holding up countless hotelguests and hundreds of commandos at bay for 60 hours. To them, this was proofthat Indians did not know how to fight, that India was nowhere close to beingthe rising power that the world media was saying it had become.

The hawks on neither side see the deep-rooted problems in their own strategicculture. Introspection is not their forte. Nuance and texture are nowhere to befound in their diction. The hawks in India don’t realise that the secularityof India, a country with a billion citizens, cannot rest on the inclusion in itsbody politic of a state of 10 million. It is time that the authorities in NewDelhi did something to improve the lot of the 150-million-plus Muslims thatreside in India. Wrongdoers like Chief Minister Narendra Modi who presided overa pogrom in Gujarat should be brought to justice, not left free to roam thecountry, fanning the fires of communal hatred. And, most fundamentally, Indiahas to accept its responsibility for creating the conditions that led Jinnah,the fierce champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, to seek a separate nation for theMuslims. The German word for coming to terms with the past,Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, is worth pondering.

As for the hawks in Pakistan, they have to realise that when their leaders havemade a hash of managing their four provinces, why would they fare any better ina fifth? It is time to stop indulging in past glories. It does little to nameballistic missiles after Muslim rulers from Afghanistan who conquered Indiaduring the Middle Ages. Nor does it do much to name naval ships after the greatMughals.

In the 21st century, one has to look beyond territory and ideology and focus onhuman and social development. Against this backdrop, militants who killinnocents emerge as enemies of the human race, the ‘hostis humani generis’of Cicero.

Despite the crying of the hawks, armed attacks in the Valley of Kashmir are atan all-time low since the insurgency of 1989. As Yaroslov Trofimov notedrecently in the Wall Street Journal, India’s biggest foe in Kashmir isno longer a Pakistani-sponsored militancy. The new threat comes from a civildisobedience movement that is being carried out in the best Gandhian tradition.It is being led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq who says, "India is not scared of theguns here in Kashmir … [but it is scared of] … people coming out in thestreets, people seeing the power of non-violent struggle."

Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, India’s home minister at the peak of the insurgency andthe state’s chief minister during 2002-05, agrees. Sayeed notes that there isa big difference between killing a militant versus killing a demonstrator. Thegeneral public, which regards the former as justified, condemns the latter. Thezeitgeist of the resistance in Kashmir is hewing toward protests, not bombs.Policymakers in New Delhi and Islamabad need to capitalise on this shift intactics to solve the Kashmir problem.

This shift in tactics in Kashmir is a pointed rebuke to the terror-mongers inPakistan. It is time for them to stop brainwashing the youth of the land andsending them abroad on missions of hatred. Acts of terror present the biggestthreat to the arc of progress in Pakistan. History has shown over and over againthat confrontation with India is pointless. It is time to extend the hand offriendship towards those who reside east of the border. Indians are more likePakistanis than any other nation.

It is time to unite to fight the common enemy, which is terrorists in the nearterm, and poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease in the long term. It is timeto stop being prisoners of the past. It is time to focus on the future.