| March 2, 2002 | Saturday | Zilhaj 17, 1422 |
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Jack Straw’s balderdash
Honouring Sadequain
THE Hindu backlash to Wednesday’s Godhra train attack has been intensely brutal, horrific and tragic. Friday was also the day of a strike call given by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad to protest against the death of its activists in the attack. Close to 200 people, mostly Muslims, have been killed in Gujarat alone — mostly in Ahmedabad — with the death toll rising by the hour and the violence spreading to other parts of India, especially the sensitive Hindi belt. Mobs of frenzied Hindus armed with knives, sticks and pistols were in control of major parts of the city and its suburbs on the hunt for Muslims and their property. The police, reports suggest, have generally stood by and done nothing to stop the violence. In one locality, a mob burnt to death 38 people, while in another case a building, owned by a former Congress MP — and a Muslim — was set ablaze. He fired at the mob in self-defence but was dragged out and lynched. The rest of his family members, 19 in all, were all burnt alive. The way the situation is deteriorating it will be quite some time before normality is restored, and even when a calm settles the scars of the communal frenzy will be hard to erase.
However, Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes, who has sent in an army brigade into Ahmedabad, and is camped in the state, has dealt with the events in a manner that does not behove a senior cabinet member. In fact, this one-time self-styled socialist has been parroting what senior VHP leaders said on the day of the Godhra incident. Mr Fernandes’s allegation that the ISI has in the past tried to “create a divide between Hindus and Christians by attacking churches” in India and hence an inquiry should be conducted to determine whether Pakistan might be behind the train attack is absurd. Apparently, Mr Fernandes is not willing to look at the activities of some of the elements in his own ruling coalition. He also does not seem aware of the fact that communal riots have been occurring in India since 1947, well before the ISI was created. And talking of the present, it is the VHP and not any Pakistani intelligence agency that has given an India-wide call for a Hindu temple to be built at Ayodhya from March 15. If it were not for that provocative proclamation perhaps the Sabarmati Express would not have passed through a sensitive Gujarat city, with a sizeable Muslim population, filled with Hindu extremists.
The backlash to the Godhra incident, unfortunately, might rival the carnage of 1992 when thousands of Hindu extremists destroyed the mosque at Ayodhya. Those in responsible positions like Mr Fernandes, and surely many of his government colleagues, owe it to those who elected them to take a dispassionate view of the situation and resist the temptation to point fingers at Pakistan. Such finger-pointing will distract the Indian government from doing its real job, which is to first control the violence, and then rein in the extremists behind the violence. It would not be in anyone’s interest, least of all Pakistan’s, to instigate such events in India, especially when the armies of both nations are deployed eyeball-to-eyeball along their borders and when a miscalculation on either side could lead to war.
BRAZENLY parroting New Delhi’s line, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw stated on Wednesday that terrorism must stop before any meaningful dialogue between Pakistan and India could take place. Addressing a joint press conference with his Indian counterpart, Mr Straw went out of his way to endear himself to his hosts by adding that “terrorism is terrorism, wherever it occurs and for whatever reasons.” He also condemned those who supported and financed terrorism and reiterated the Indian position by claiming that talks were a bilateral issue between Pakistan and India. These sentiments must have come as music to Indian ears. Every time New Delhi refers to terrorism, it is actually alluding, in coded form, to Pakistani actions. It is astonishing, to say the least, for the British foreign secretary to support one Commonwealth member against another and encourage India in its bellicosity at a time when more than a million men are massed at the borders in a state of high alert and the risk of an accidental war between the two nuclear states is very real.
Rather than pressuring India to drop its current hawkish posture and resolve the issue through negotiations — as Pakistan has repeatedly suggested — Mr Straw went out of his way to pander to India’s obduracy. It is also quite ironic to see a foreign secretary from Britain — a country that played no small role in creating the mess in Kashmir in the first place — indirectly brushing aside that complex issue as one centring around terrorism. Not surprisingly, Mr Straw maintained a deafening silence on the widespread human rights violations in Kashmir where thousands of people have been killed and tortured by Indian forces. Mr Straw should know that what is going on in Kashmir is part of a freedom struggle by a people brutally subjugated by the force of Indian arms. If we go by his twisted logic, Winston Churchill supported terrorism when he backed the French freedom fighters and other anti-Nazi resistance forces during the second world war.
Incidentally, Mr Straw found time on his whirlwind visit to engage in negotiations with the Indians for the sale of 66 military jet trainers worth 1.4 billion dollars, as well as other British military hardware. If this fact had any bearing on the blatant tilt towards India, Mr Straw should spare us the high-minded lectures about fighting terrorism, defending democratic values and his government’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy the next time he travels round the globe hawking military hardware.
IN a befitting tribute to the most celebrated of Pakistan’s great master-painters, the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi has brought under one roof over 200 of Sadequain’s non-calligraphic paintings, murals, lithographs and sketches for public display. Entitled, ‘The Holy Sinner: Sadequain 1955-87’, the show is the largest and first one of its kind in Pakistan to honour an artist posthumously. The exhibit will open to the public next week. and will continued into June, giving the art lovers a rare chance to savour the visual delight afforded by the internationally acclaimed painter’s imaginative repertoire spanning three and a half decades. A labour of the artists’s first love and passion, the figurative genre, the exhibit is a celebration of this one facet of Sadequain’s impressive oeuvre, which, particularly in the latter phase of his life, nearly exclusively comprised calligraphy.
The high points of the exhibit are two of Sadequain’s acclaimed murals: Treasures of Time, which has been generously loaned by the State Bank of Pakistan, and The Last Revelation, which was donated to the Mohatta Palace Museum as a permanent exhibit by Begum Aamna Majeed Malik. In addition to these, the exhibit includes some of the artists’ most enigmatic works, composed to the verses of three of Urdu’s celebrated poets, Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz. All but one of the works on display have been loaned to the museum by a host of public and private collectors. The exhibit sets a commendable precedence for other museums in the country to follow, so that works by other great masters can also be made accessible to the general public and students of art.