vibe.pk

Size matters. With a billion plus people who appear to have gotten their economic and political act together, and as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh concludes his visit to the USA, the talk is of India’s status as an emerging global power. The hype may be way over board.

When the USA was consolidating itself in the nineteenth century, it expanded to both coasts as part of its “Manifest Destiny”, but following that, maintained good relations with both its neighbors – Canada and Mexico. China has issues with a host of its neighbors – Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong amongst them – but that did not prevent it from growing peaceful economic ties.  India, on the other hand, has failed to demonstrate this largeness of vision and strategic thought. Its relations with its smaller neighbors – Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh – remain mired in mutual suspicion, resentment and bullying.

A major gripe of India’s neighbor’s is her attempts to de-stabilize them through the promotion of insurgencies and terrorism. In 1970, India housed, trained and funded the Mukhti Bahani insurgents in the erstwhile East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Their well-documented terror tactics included a special dagger to gouge out women’s breasts and blinding through public smoldering of eyes with cigarette butts.

Even these terror tactics were overshadowed a decade later in Sri Lanka where the brutal Indian-backed LTTE utilized suicide jackets and truck bombs to take the carnage to a new level. When the reviled Indian RAW intelligence agency, bowing to international pressure, reduced support to the LTTE in 1990, one disgruntled member of this Sri Lankan terrorist organization, a frail old woman, blew herself next to Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi killing him.

The most “favored” target of this terrible Indian largesse however is Western neighbor, Pakistan, with whom India has fought three wars. The nadir was just last month when suicide bombers blew themselves daily in the Western Pakistani city of Peshawar. One of the targets was Peepal Mundi, where over a hundred women and children perished with another hundred being severally injured and probably handicapped for life. Over the last year, the number of dead in such barbaric attacks in public markets, schools and hospitals – that are hard to defend and are frequented by civilians usually the poor, elderly, women and children – eclipses the 166 dead in the 26 November 2008 Mumbai attacks by an order of magnitude.

As in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka before, the attackers are local fanatics but the funding, training, and intelligence provision is Indian – in this case provided by nine Indian consulates or Government centers adjacent to Pakistan’s Western border in Afghanistan. The vehicle bombings and suicide jackets are vintage RAW – first introduced into the sub-continent by LTTE in Sri Lanka. Recent Pakistani Army operations against terrorist bases in South Waziristan revealed Indian arms caches, medicines, and communication equipment.

In the face this history, Indian accusations against Pakistan of “using terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy” appear disingenuous not only to Pakistanis but also to India’s other neighbors. All nations indulge in double speak and “covert actions” – these are perhaps the trappings of modern state craft – but the Indian “zeitgeist” has taken the art of deception to an entirely new level and has become self-defeating.

The fountainhead of this zeitgeist may well be “Chanakya”, prime minister to revered Indian King Chandragupta, whose grandson Ashoka’s wheel adorns the Indian flag today. Often termed the “Indian Machiavelli”, the brilliant Chanakya is considered a pioneer of the field of political science and the actual founder of the famed Mauryan Dyansty; his precepts are as avidly studied in Indian think tanks as those of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu elsewhere. Chanakya advocated deception as a key tenet of state craft: “Do not be very upright in your dealings for you would see by going to the forest that straight trees are cut down while crooked ones are left standing.”

In 1974 an Indian Nuclear explosion was successfully hyped as the “Smiling Buddha” and as a “peaceful” nuclear explosion. Needless to say, that did not prevent the development of dozens of nuclear weapons and of missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Ever since the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the 150 million Muslims in India have borne the stigma of splitting “Mother India” along religious lines. Accusations of being a “Pakistani” have been both overt and covert, as has prejudice;the concept of “secular” India has been promoted versus “Islamic” Pakistan. But just last month, in a popular revelatory book, former foreign minister of the right wing, Hindu fundamentalist Indian party BJP, Jaswant Singh, established that the partition was actually due to the Hindu-centrism of Jawaharal Nehru, first Prime Minister of India, and of Mahatama Gandhi who was later assassinated by a rabid fundamentalist Hindu.

Such popular but spurious myths extend to Indian perceptions about Pakistan. For example, one popular belief is that Pakistanis are taught or exposed to “doctored” history, but a visit to any popular bookstore in Pakistan reveals dozens of critical books by Indian generals, security analysts, and politicians. When Indian Sikh, Kanwal Rekhi, attempted to set up Pakistan offices of the Silicon Valley-based entrepreneurial organization, TIE, he received death threats from rabid Hindu members.

Such myth propagation, supported by a compliant media and lapped up by a large part of the indigenous populous, is hurting India’s own interests in increasingly clear ways: First of all the myth of “India Shining” is antagonizing a large part of the population which is disenfranchised. Fully one third of Indian districts are caught up in the Maoist Naxalite rebellion; just last year over 600 policemen were killed.

Second, the almost-exclusive focus on Muslim fundamentalism has allowed Hindu fanaticism to rise alarmingly. Suicide bombers in Pakistan and elsewhere are faceless, fringe individuals backed by a shady nexus of fanatics and foreign intelligence thatabhorred by the general populace. In India on the other hand, genocides of Muslims in Gujrat and Mumbai and of Christians in Assam and elsewhere, were committed by large enraged mobs comprised of mainstream, visible, “boys-next-door” who were supported overtly and covertly by elected political parties. Perhaps as alarming was the conviction of a serving Indian Colonel of Military Intelligence by an Indian Court for the bombing of a train, the Samjhota Express, on Indian soil in which some sixty Muslims perished. The daring investigating officer, Karkare, was one of the first casualties – under mysterious circumstances – of the Mumbai attacks in October 2008 which prompted an Indian Muslim Minister to resign while demanding an investigation into possible Hindu fundamentalist complicity in the assassination. 

These papered-over “Have-Have Not” and “Hindu-Non Hindu” fault lines have the capability of breaking India despite its much vaunted democracy which is failing to vent centrifugal passions – perhaps due to corrupt political leaders who actually exploit these fault lines to their own ends.

The third dangerous impact of the successful myth propagation is on relations with nuclear-neighbor Pakistan. Here India’s approach has been to continuously strive for the moral high ground by sanctimoniously demonizing Pakistanis and accusing the country of being the “epicenter of Terrorism”. This may well be in keeping with Chanakya’s precepts of “crooked” being preferable to “straight” and of keeping the “hinterland weak and destabilized”, but it has painted Indian leadership into a corner with respect to its voting public and made its position inflexible with respect to the bone of contention with Pakistan – the Indian-controlled Muslim region of Kashmir. The United Nations General Assembly resolved, on a request filed by India itself, that a plebiscite be held in the region in order to decide its future. But India refused to do so after its troops forcibly occupied the area – as they did several other independent states that had refused to join the Indian Union, including one that wanted to join Pakistan. While the latter conquests may be explained away as “Manifest Destiny” a la the USA, Muslim Kashmir, with contiguous land boundaries with Pakistan, was a different matter.

Over half a million Indian troops brutally control Kashmir. The price has been terrible – seventy thousand civilians slaughtered and four thousand women raped by Indian troops. Like Palestine, every family it seems has lost a loved one and experienced tragedy. Kashmir has caused three wars between India and Pakistan and actors in Pakistan, who share ethnic and religious blood ties with their Kashmiri cousins, have supported its militant resistance.

This support has been the basis of India’s accusations against Pakistan about fanning terrorism. Kashmir is the fountainhead of problems between India and Pakistan; if this perennial predicament is to be resolved, both countries have to sit across the table from each other and have serious discussions. Shackled by its myth-perpetuation, the Government of India refuses to so. The world must make sure it does, however, in the worlds own interest and that of the two nuclear and missile powers.