Khaled Ahmed - Pakistan does not know what it has lost. India doesn’t recognise where it is winning // Alizay Jaffer's moving Facebook post on India-Pakistan relationship
India doesn’t know where it is winning. It is in “soft power” where it has emerged as the most influential state with three SAARC states walking in lock-step with it against Pakistan. For the past decade, Pakistan too has been “softened” by what the jingoists in Pakistan have dubbed “cultural invasion” by India. Indian films have “conquered” an increasingly jihadi Pakistan. Far more important than the money earned by Indian film-makers is the disarming of the textbook-poisoned Pakistani mind. Indians back home can’t visualise the kind of positive emotion visiting actors like Punjabi-speaking Om Puri arouse in Pakistan.
Responding to national
war hysteria, Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave
the go-ahead for a “surgical strike” inside the Pakistani side of the Line of
Control (LoC), and it took place in the early hours of September 29. Director
general military operations, Lt. General Ranbir Singh, told the nation: “Based
on receiving specific and credible inputs that some terrorist teams had
positioned themselves at launch pads along the LoC to carry out infiltration
and conduct terrorist strikes inside Jammu and Kashmir and in various
metros in other states, the Indian army conducted surgical strikes at several
of these launch pads to pre-empt infiltration by terrorists.” A meeting with
journalists was a “details later” session and no one asked for more.
It was supposed to be
a ground strike with special forces, assisted by helicopter gunships. On the
Pakistani side, the attack was declared routine with ground troops crossing the
LoC and killing a havildar and a naik of the Pakistan army whose parents
immediately declared joy at their martyrdom swearing that more boys in the
family could have been available for this ecstasy if they had them.
Pakistan
declared that it was a ground trespass in which India lost eight soldiers. The
low point reached in the Indo-Pak media war went further through the floor.
Cheap sarcasm was hurled at each other by the two sides, pretending to have
become “internally” united against an “external” foe. The farce of being
“united” was revealed by the ongoing campaign unleashed by the opposition to
unseat the PMLN government whose leader Nawaz Sharif “sucks up” to India and
“made a bad speech at the UN”.
A “surgical strike”,
it seems, has performed no surgery of the South Asian mind gone off the rails.
India declared victory; Pakistan denied it and it sounded like Pakistani
victory. Analysts said it was not a surgical strike because it was not done by
the air force. But the term is so loose you can define it whichever way you
like, it could be an artillery battle with precision-guided rockets. Pakistan
is making “armpit sounds”, as they say in Urdu, declaring victory. Religious
parties thought jihad was finally on and offered militant manpower to the army.
No one cared about the escalation such an incident on the LoC could provoke
leading to a nuclear alert.
Prime Minister Modi
didn’t get much out of the surgical strike. The outside world got worried,
America telling India to cool it, letting Pakistan off the hook. But Pakistan
didn’t have the mind to take advantage of it at the international level.
Defence Minister Khwaja Asif was careless in his bluster, promising “every kind
of support” to the Kashmiri “freedom fighters”, giving the lie to the old
diplomatic pledge to only offer “political support”. Everybody and his uncle in
the world outside knew that Pakistan was nursing non-state actors that struck
across the LoC, at times without the permission of Islamabad, and at other
times did so to punish the army chief who they thought was “calling off jihad”
with India. The world, led by America, repeats the mantra of “get rid of your
terrorist organisations” while determined to not let Pakistan’s Kashmir policy
bear any fruit.
Pakistan’s real state
power is at a low ebb, having seeped into empowered madrasas and a military
mind that clings to the non-intellectual exercise of “irregular warfare” which
the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu called “noise before self-defeat”. The Indian
mind is into a low swoop to match Pakistan’s non-cerebral rhetoric. What India
needs to do next is develop some “non-state actors” to start its own
asymmetrical warfare, paying for it by losing its writ just like Pakistan has
with terrorists on the UN’s head-money list.
India doesn’t know
where it is winning. It is in “soft power” where it has emerged as the most
influential state with three SAARC states walking in lock-step with it against
Pakistan. For the past decade, Pakistan too has been “softened” by what the
jingoists in Pakistan have dubbed “cultural invasion” by India. Indian films
have “conquered” an increasingly jihadi Pakistan. Far more important than the
money earned by Indian film-makers is the disarming of the textbook-poisoned
Pakistani mind. Indians back home can’t visualise the kind of positive emotion
visiting actors like Punjabi-speaking Om Puri arouse in Pakistan.
Now, both
countries have become unhinged. Pakistani singers and actors have been sent
home amid curses no one in the world outside can comprehend. On the Pakistani
side, a similar surge is in evidence: Punish the blokes who travel to India to
shamelessly suck up to the enemy. Ban Indian movies, which will automatically
lead to the revival of a collapsed Pakistani film industry, under Islam. Like
the clerics in Pakistan, BJP hoods
on the roads can rough up anyone they like, the glint in the eye resembling
that of their blasphemy-aroused counterparts in Pakistan.
A day before October
1, which was Annie Besant’s birth anniversary, the newspaper Dawn celebrated
the Diyaram Gidumal National College in Hyderabad Sindh — now simply Government
College — which she had founded in 1917 with the help of Hindu well-wishers
like Deewan Bolchand Shahani “because the nearest college was in Bombay”. Once
we were not so bad.
http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/surgical-strikes-indian-army-india-pakistan-narensra-modi-uri-attack-saarc-summit-once-3058801/Moving Facebook post by a Pakistani girl on India-Pakistan relationship
... Islamabad-based girl Alizay Jaffer
penned down a moving post on India-Pakistan relations that has garnered massive
support on social media.
“To the world, most of
the time, we are siblings; constantly at loggerheads, trying to get into
daddy’s good books so that he may buy us a toy, or take us for a drive, or
better yet, increase our allowance. Other times, we are like a divorced couple,
sharing space, constantly bickering over who lost out in the settlement, unable
to finally come to terms with the fact that we are no longer together. It seems
the scars of our separation are still so ripe, so painful, that they can’t accept
that we left, and we can’t accept that they let us leave. In an event like
this, we only find solace in making sure the other is just as hurt as we are,
so we put in our all our resources, our best efforts, to do exactly that,” she
wrote... Read her full post
here.
It’s strange, this
affinity with India. I find myself getting increasingly upset at the abuse and
hatred tossed from one border to another, with little rationale apart from the
69 year old chips on our shoulders. These chips have, over time, turned into
boulders, and who doesn’t crumble under the weight of those?
It’s very strange,
this affinity with India. When Amitabh Bachchan is
in the hospital, we pray for his good health; when Ranbir Kapoor’s film is
a hit, we’re prouder than Neetu and Rishi; we never deny that no one brings
romance to life like the voices of Kishore and Rafi; they are in unanimous
agreement that their local music scene is not a patch on ours; if we happen to
interact abroad, they’re the only pardesis we include in the ‘desi’ category; their monuments
carry our history; our language carries their roots.
It’s far too
strange, this affinity with India. Like siblings, we retaliate to each other’s
provocations. Ultimately, we both share the label of being impulsive and
emotional in our responses to one another – ‘Look at what you’re doing in
Kashmir’ ‘Hah, look at what you’re doing in Balochistan’; ‘You attacked us
first in Uri’ ‘Have you forgotten about Kargil’?; ‘You started it!’ ‘No! You
started it!’
Like orphaned trust fund babies, we feel entitled yet have no idea how to cope. They neither acknowledge nor respond to Muslims being massacred for eating beef in Gujrat, for instance, and we? We turn a blind eye to Christians and Hindus being physically assaulted for eating before Iftar in Ramzan. They’re destroying Kashmir, we say, Kashmiris have a right to be independent (or choose us, of course), but we forget how we throttled Bangladesh – why should a Bengali speaking majority not accept Urdu as its national language? We never speak about that, do we? Too soon, perhaps.
Like orphaned trust fund babies, we feel entitled yet have no idea how to cope. They neither acknowledge nor respond to Muslims being massacred for eating beef in Gujrat, for instance, and we? We turn a blind eye to Christians and Hindus being physically assaulted for eating before Iftar in Ramzan. They’re destroying Kashmir, we say, Kashmiris have a right to be independent (or choose us, of course), but we forget how we throttled Bangladesh – why should a Bengali speaking majority not accept Urdu as its national language? We never speak about that, do we? Too soon, perhaps.
When I think about
some of my best days and nights in the last ten years, more than 50% of them
were spent with my brothers and sisters from across the border; sharing a meal,
listening to music, discussing politics, or anything but; laughing, dancing,
singing; but most importantly, completely aware yet in vehement passive
rebellion against the lines that keep us apart.
Come to think of it now, it isn’t
strange at all, this affinity with India. Our proverbial Lord and
Master, the gargantuan power that rules us, ‘The West’, is an absentee parent;
one we’re constantly trying to please but one who never really loved us anyway.
If there is anyone for us, it’s each other. What’s strange is our reluctance to
acknowledge this.
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What’s strange is
the burden we carry of decisions made in our pasts, based on an entirely
different socio-political context, when a common, exploitative antagonist made
sure we saw each other as the aggressor, and boy, did we fall for it. What’s
strange is our prolonged blindness to the immense opportunities that lie before
us as a unit, and the vast desolation that lies before us as enemies.
The strangest thing
about our relationship, in fact, is our propensity to change roles. To the
world, most of the time, we are siblings; constantly at loggerheads, trying to
get into daddy’s good books so that he may buy us a toy, or take us for a
drive, or better yet, increase our allowance. Other times, we are like a
divorced couple, sharing space, constantly bickering over who lost out in the
settlement, unable to finally come to terms with the fact that we are no longer
together. It seems the scars of our separation are still so ripe, so painful,
that they can’t accept that we left, and we can’t accept that they let us
leave. In an event like this, we only find solace in making sure the other is
just as hurt as we are, so we put in our all our resources, our best efforts,
to do exactly that.
I read today that
India claimed they carried out a surgical attack in Uri. Ridiculous. I
immediately read several, equally ridiculous Pakistani reactions; some hitting
below the belt, others claiming that one shouldn’t expect more from mass
murdering politicians, like the ones we have across the border. Somehow,
suddenly, we are all too forgiving of our own ‘glorious’ politicians. It’s
strange how quick we are to forget how much trouble governance is in, on both
sides, when we jump up to point fingers.
I’m sure this news
will leave me in a month’s time. What hasn’t left me is the news about a
Pakistani Head of State’s arrival in Delhi for a test match, ultimately
averting the threat of war; or an Indian politician putting his hand forward to
greet his Pakistani counterpart, to curb tensions; or that time when Ganguly
acknowledged that there’s no one greater than Wasim; or when Shoaib Malik
married Sania Mirza; or that image of the guards in the most beautiful
fraternal embrace I have ever seen, on Holi at Wagah Border. I suppose it’s
because some of us look for peace, we hanker for it, while others, they look
for war.
I suppose what I’m
trying to say is, in 20 years’ time, Uri will be just another event in the text books. It will be labeled as yet
another period in our collective histories when our ‘cold war’ with India
almost turned into ‘hot war’. It will be just another opportunity for me to
pick on my Indian friends or vice versa. It will be just another event our older
uncles will discuss when they try to feel better about Pakistan’s failures and
convince themselves that partition was the best thing that could’ve happened
for us and that, without India, ‘we’re better off’.
What will never be
‘just another event’ is one we never address. The fact that we are now
divorced; the fact that our separation is painful for both of us; the fact that
where there is now hate, there was once unity and a common pride; the fact that
we allowed an external power to come in and manipulate us, and we fell prey;
the fact that no one will know us like we know each other, because after all,
we were once but one.
It is comforting
somehow, that when I messaged one of my closest friends across the border,
expressing concern over the destructive megalomaniac tendencies of our
governments, he responded and said, ‘It doesn’t matter what they do, you know I
will always love you’. It is comforting somehow, that in 20 years’ time, if you
look away from the textbooks, and turn to your ancient scriptures or your holy
books, it won’t take you long to see that since time immemorial, there is only
one message they are trying to convey, only one message we should be paying
attention to; and that message is Love.
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