| May 28, 2003 | Wednesday | Rabi-ul-Awwal 25,1424 |
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The troika of antagonism
Recognizing new realities
Whither India today?
AFTER an uneasy pause of about ten years, following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world is again in the midst of an environment of hostility reminiscent of the cold war years. Much of the hostility is an outcome of the conflicts involving the Arabs, Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, that have been going on now for more than half a century.
AS a result of the partition of the subcontinent more than half a century ago, it was expected that the two independent countries, India and Pakistan, would live as good neighbours and cooperate for stability and progress in the entire region.
THE resignation last Sunday of governor-general Peter Hollingworth could help to resolve the constitutional crisis that has dogged Australia since last year.
Earlier this month, an inquiry commissioned by the Anglican Church concluded that Hollingworth’s conduct had been unconscionable, while he was archbishop of Brisbane during the 1990s, in dealing with instances of paedophilia within the church.
That did not persuade the former archbishop to step down from his largely ceremonial but potentially powerful post as Queen Elizabeth II’s representative in the Commonwealth of Australia. Shortly afterwards it emerged that Hollingworth was secretly in the dock in a rape case. A church-going woman had accused him of assaulting her a couple of decades ago, and was pursuing a court action against him until she committed suicide last month.
At the relevant judge’s discretion, the case had been kept out of the view of the Australian public. But when an opposition member of parliament challenged the blackout, the stricture was withdrawn. Public support for the embattled governor-general, never very strong in the first place, plummeted to little more than 10 per cent. The governor-general did not react immediately. He waited until prime minister John Howard — who was at the time on a lap of honour following the Iraq war, personally collecting accolades from George W. Bush and Tony Blair — had returned to Australia.
Following consultations with Howard, the governor-general decided to “step aside” from his post until the rape case was decided. That was achieved last Friday, when the complainant’s children withdrew the charge. Hollingworth responded with a video statement (rather than a press conference at which he may have faced awkward questions), saying that since the rape charge — which he continued to vehemently deny — had been dropped, he would be able to concentrate on reassessing his position as the effective head of state.
The fact that he did not immediately return to his post prompted speculation that he was likely to opt for political euthanasia as the least painful way out of his predicament. Howard had been quick to state following the initial paedophilia allegations as well as after the results of the church inquiry became public that he would not ask Hollingworth to make way for a successor. The rape charges appeared to irritate him, however, and it became increasingly obvious that he was unwilling to stand by his appointee.
Howard did not say anything publicly, however, that would have gone against its political instinct, which is never to accept that he has erred. So ingrained is this instinct that Australia’s prime minister is not even willing to accept that his people’s ancestors may have made a grievous mistake in massacring Aborigines and trying to persuade survivors to assimilate with the dominant — that is, western — culture. Unlike the majority of white Australians, Howard has never been willing to say sorry to Aborigines for the treatment they have received — which has included, notoriously, the abduction of mixed-race children. Stolen from their Aboriginal mothers, these children were placed in (invariably) church-run institutions where their aboriginality was effectively bred out of them.
The more resilient of these children grew up to resent their abduction and to seek out their parents. None of them benefited in any conceivable way from their unnatural upbringing. Most Australians accept that the effort to relegate Aboriginality was tantamount to genocide. Not Howard, though. According to him, victimizing indigenous Australians was the perfectly natural thing to do — and he doesn’t have any serious objection to the practice being perpetuated through other means.
Hollingworth has never raised any objection to this or, for that matter, to any other matter of government policy. When the terrorist bombs went off in Bali last October, claiming scores of Australian lives, Hollingworth decided initially not to defer a planned trip to Anzac Cove in Turkey, to be present at the annual commemoration of a battle lost nearly a century ago. The governor-general has consistently offered a sharp contrast to his predecessor, William Deane.
A conservative former judge who grew in the job after being appointed governor-general by Labor prime minister Paul Keating, Deane developed a deeply compassionate view of society — which didn’t stand him in good stead after Keating was replaced by Howard. The prime minister was particularly upset by governor-general Deane’s interventions on behalf of reconciliation between white and indigenous Australians.
The dignity with which Deane conducted himself, however, made him an uncommonly popular governor-general — and his incumbency is likely to have played a role in rejection by Australians of a referendum in 1999 on transforming the nation into a republic, although the primary factor in determining that result was Howard’s devious strategy to place on the ballot a narrow alternative to the status quo: namely, the election of a head of state by parliament. Most Australians wanted the right to be able to choose their head of state through a direct vote, but that alternative has never been offered. However, had Hollingworth rather than Deane been the incumbent in 1999, it is perfectly possible that the referendum result would have gone the other way.
The majority of Australian citizens may be descended from convicts or economic refugees from the British Isles, but not many of them are proud of the fact that more than 100 years after the nation’s ostensible independence from what is still frequently referred to as the “mother country”, it is the British monarch who is formally Australia’s head of state.
Admittedly, this does not mean much in practical terms. Although the governor-general is technically the British sovereign’s representative, for several decades now the appointment has been made strictly according to the recommendation of the prime minister in Canberra. The constitutional umbilical cord makes no sense whatsoever except as the expression of nostalgia for the British empire.
Queen Elizabeth has made it clear more than once that she has no interest in playing any role whatsoever in Australian affairs. She probably feels the same way about other countries — among them Canada, New Zealand and Fiji — that still feature her on their postage stamps and currency notes. The sovereign’s nationality has never acquired the status of a controversy in New Zealand and Canada, but it is fairly likely that were Australia to opt for republicanism, they would follow suit in due course.
Australia isn’t about to do anything of the kind for as long as Howard, a proud monarchist, is the prime minister. But his days could be numbered. The incumbent has held the post since 1996, winning three elections in a row. If he wins a fourth time, it will be only because the opposition Labor Party has lost most of its credibility as it struggles to come up with policies at variance with those of the ruling Liberal-National party coalition.
There can be little question, though, that the Hollingworth debacle has hurt Howard. The prime minister is, like his current best friends Bush and Blair, a deeply religious person, and he picked the archbishop as governor-general against the advice of senior party members who were concerned that the separation of church and state would be compromised by Howard’s choice. If the prime minister wasn’t aware that Hollingworth had been accused of protecting paedophiles, that would suggest that background checks on the candidate were less than thorough.
It is more likely, though, that Howard simply sought to keep a lid on the allegations, hoping that they would not become public knowledge. Such behaviour is quite in keeping with his character. The sort of deviousness he is willing to condone in the service of electoral gains was perhaps best exemplified a couple of years ago when, in order to squeeze maximum advantage from a carefully orchestrated xenophobic and racist backlash against refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan, Howard’s government knowingly spread the lie that some of the “boat people” were flinging their children into the sea. We don’t want such people in Australia, said the prime minister, and several of his ministers faithfully parroted the mantra.
When the truth eventually emerged, thanks largely to navy personnel appalled by the enormity of the government’s deception, Howard made sure that the blame was directed towards bureaucrats and the then defence minister. These are not the actions of a “man of steel” — a title conferred on Howard by Colin Powell for leading Australia into a war that most Australians didn’t want to have anything to do with. The wholly inappropriate appellation has thrilled the diminutive prime minister, who may well be unaware that in Russian the phrase translates into Stalin.
Hollingworth’s apparent improprieties may have fuelled Australia’s most serious constitutional dilemma since 1975, when another governor-general, Sir John Kerr, summarily dismissed the Labor government of Gough Whitlam. However, the misjudgments and possible misdemeanours of the queen’s supposed representative, as well as the national immaturity implicit in the continuing links with the British crown, pale into relative insignificance alongside John Howard’s deceptions and misgovernance. A more principled and less timid opposition (which, incidentally, comfortably controls state governments throughout the country) would by now have succeeded in effecting regime change in Canberra.
There’s another federal election due next year, and one can only hope the electorate will have the common sense to confound conservative expectations of yet another term in office for the Liberal-National coalition.
E-mail: mahirali@journalist.com
Since the adversaries happen to profess different religious beliefs, these conflicts have assumed a religious character, spawning a host of fanatics of every hue, and opportunistic academics who have flooded the bookstores and confounded the readers with theses, often irresponsible and partisan, on the supposedly on-going ‘clash of civilisations’ which is a widely accepted euphemism for clash of religions.
The truth, drowned out under the roar and thunder of religious slogans and invocations, is that the cause of these conflicts is as secular and mundane as land, both in Kashmir and in Palestine. The separate religious faiths of the belligerents identify only the disputants, not the dispute; and provide only the vocabulary, not the argument.
Again, behind the belligerence of a faith in rage there is a distinct ethos or mindset of each community that is a mesh not only of the religious but also of historical, cultural, political and other strands which have evolved in the course of a community’s history. It so happens that while there is a distinct Muslim, Jewish and Hindu ethos, there are some commonalities too and, oddly enough, it is those commonalities that are at the root of the failure of these communities to generate any goodwill for each other, or to moderate their suspicion of the rest of the world.
Muslims, Jews and Hindus have lived under alien rule or hostile domination for long periods of time. Jews, the second most persecuted people after the black Africans, have experienced persecution and expulsion on numerous occasions during a period of about 2,500 years, beginning with half a century of captivity (586 to 539 BC) when they sat ‘by the rivers of Babylon’ and wept when they ‘remembered Zion’. Their longest lasting loss of statehood began in 44AD, when Rome imposed its direct rule over Judaea, and ended only in 1948 when they regained statehood, and also assumed the role of oppressors.
Hindus have lived under a slowly expanding alien rule that began in the 11th century, and ultimately expanded to the whole of the subcontinent, not to mention numerous intermittent invasions of its western periphery that have a much longer history. A peculiar feature of that longest, continuous and most extensive alien rule (1021 to 1947) is that while the identity of the rulers kept changing from the Turks and Afghans, for example, to the Mughals and British, the continuity of the alien rule itself remained unbroken. When freedom came at midnight on the 15th day of August, 1947, it heralded, for the Hindus of India, a dawn that had eluded them for 900 years.
Muslims, on the other hand, have been empire builders themselves, and did successfully invade and conquer large parts of Europe as well. The high point of their expansionist impulse was the siege (unsuccessful) of Vienna by the Ottomans in 1683, and the lowest point of their political decline was reached with the defeat of the Ottomans in the First World War. The colonization of the Muslim world by the European powers had begun in a significant way as early as the 1750s when Java in Indonesia and Bengal in India came under the control of the Dutch and the British respectively. Fresh acquisitions continued till 1920s when various parts of the defeated Ottoman Empire were granted by the victors to themselves.
Thus, during a period spread over 200 years, the Muslim countries came under the rule of European powers at different times and for different periods. Freedom, came to the Muslim world with the winding up of the European empires that began in the 1940s and continued for the next four decades, till 1984 when the last colonial outpost, Brunei, too became independent.
There is, however, some unfinished business of colonial cartography that remains to be concluded, and the Muslims, Jews and Hindus happen to be the victims and also the unrepentant instruments of a violent conclusion to that unfinished business. Oddly enough, as hypothesized in the beginning, it is the commonalities in their ethos, not the theological differences, that are at the root of their failure to generate any goodwill for each other, and to moderate their suspicion of the rest of the world. Now, what are those commonalities?
The common elements of the otherwise distinct ethos of the Muslims, Jews and Hindus are no less than five: all the three communities keep brooding over the real and perceived past injustices and reversals of fortune; all three are obsessed with their ‘past glory’ that they would like to recreate; all three can hardly conceal their passionately held desire for global pre-eminence, if not world domination; all three believe that they are a chosen people or, in the case of Hindus, have a chosen caste. With such a mindset it is no wonder that all the three communities deeply mistrust the rest of the world, and suffer from a kind of siege mentality.
Now, a little elaboration of these five commonalities. First, brooding over past injustices and reversals. On a spectrum of intensity of feeling, Jews are obsessed the most, and Hindus the least. A constant reminder of the Holocaust has become almost an article of faith with the Jews; the Muslims simply refuse to forget the loss of conquered territories; and the Hindus continue to resent, for example, the excesses of Aurangzeb even 300 years after his death. These are but examples. Consider, by way of contrast, the fact that about 20 million Russians and other Soviet citizens were killed during the Second World War, but the Russians do not remain emotionally engaged with what can truly be described as the greatest holocaust in the history of the world.
Second, the obsession to recreate the ‘past glory.’ Jews would like to recreate the Jewish kingdom, if possible a larger one extending from the Nile to Euphrates; Hindus would like to re-build the Ram Mandir and restore the glory of the Epic Age; and Muslims would like to recreate that part of their history which was also a period of fast expansion of the Muslim rule. The obvious implication is that the glory of one would be the ruin of the other.
Third, the desire for global pre-eminence. This desire is not, by itself, questionable so long as it does not degenerate into a desire for world domination. But there are reasons to believe that the desire for pre-eminence is not entirely innocent. For a large number of Jews the US is the New Zion, and they would like to achieve world domination through the irresistible power of the US. The imperial theme in the policy papers produced by the Jewish dominated think-tanks of the US is not merely implied, but brazenly explicit. The Muslim clerics do, through their rhetoric, make wild claims that world domination is, in fact, the destiny of the Muslims. Hindus happen to be a little modest. They would be content with being the regional hegemon, though the definition of ‘region’ will remain flexible and expandable.
Fourth, the belief of being a ‘chosen people’. The mandate syndrome, clearly visible in the thinking of Jews and Muslims, is not an active principle in the Hindu thinking in the sense that it is for the world to seek wisdom and guidance from Hinduism, and not for the Hindus to exert themselves to undertake a reformatory mission. The Jews and Muslims think differently.
The Jewish view has been best expressed by Rabbi Waldman (quoted by Thomas Friedman in From Beirut to Jerusalem) in these words: the Jewish people were ordained to be “a light unto the nations that will show the way to spiritual and moral perfection for the whole world”. The Muslim view about their own mission is no different. From Allama Iqbal to Imam Khomeini, message is the same. This reformatory zeal, it should be obvious by now, brings these communities into clash not only with each other, but also with the rest of the world. The fifth common factor is the siege mentality and a suspicion of the rest of the world — a legacy, perhaps, of a long history of alien rule and domination experienced by all the three communities. In the case of Muslims that experience has not yet quite ended, but for the Jews and Hindus it is history. Even so the suspicion persists even among the Jews and Hindus. The case of Jews is perhaps the strangest for they hardly trust any people or country, not even the United States. According to Thomas Friedman, quoted earlier, “Israelis were nurtured on the myth that American tolerance and pluralism won’t last”, and that “an increasing number of Israelis have opted for impugning American Jewish life and crying wolf about the coming pogrom in America”. Consequently, Israel has the fourth most powerful military machine in the world, complete with more than 200 nuclear warheads.
Hindus, on their part, have not yet ruled out the possibility of the Chinese rolling down the slopes of the Himalayas and swarming over the Indo-Gangetic plain. Muslims, equally suspicious, feel that they are up against the combined might of the Christians, Jews and Hindus. There is, however, some change visible as massive anti-war demonstrations in Europe, America, India, and even one in Tel Aviv, have persuaded a large number of Muslims to rethink their simplistic us-and-them worldview. But the suspicion persists.
In conclusion, one would like to say that the world would be a much better place were the Muslims, Jews and Hindus to think more of the future than of the past, more of life than of land, more of secular equity than of divine partiality, and, surely, more of peace agreed than of strife ordained.
E-mail: tvo@isb.comsats.net.pk
THE United Nations Security Council merely acknowledged reality Thursday in voting to lift more than a decade of sanctions on Iraq, thus accepting the role of the United States and Britain as occupying powers.
The United States did, however, listen to council members — even France — and modify its original proposal so the U.N. could be more involved in monitoring the reconstruction of Iraq. That concession should help win outside money and labour to aid in the rebuilding, which will reduce the burden on U.S. taxpayers.
French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, who was demonized in Washington for blocking U.N. support for the invasion, said he was not completely satisfied with the resolution but supported it in the interests of “unity of the international community.” Translation: We give up, you’re bigger than we are.
Washington has an opportunity now, with the United Nations coming on board, to get North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops into Iraq as a peacekeeping force. It should not waste a minute. Iraq is still largely in chaos more than a month after the war’s end, with looters and robbers continuing to terrorize their fellow countrymen.
The United States should still bolster its troop presence, but the sooner some could be replaced with NATO forces the better, for purposes of reducing the U.S. burden and gaining legitimacy for the occupation.
Last week, the Bush administration agreed to let International Atomic Energy Agency sleuths inspect a Baghdad-area facility, at Tuwaitha, where the agency fears nuclear material is missing and where some residents may be suffering radiation poisoning from looted materials. The United States should keep going and also invite back U.N. weapons inspectors to search for chemical and biological weapons. The presence of such weapons was a chief rationale for the U.S. war against Iraq, and U.S. troops have had no luck in hunting for them.
In Thursday’s action, France, Germany and Russia dropped their insistence that Iraq be certified free of weapons of mass destruction before sanctions were lifted.
The council also agreed to wind down its so-called oil-for-food programme in Iraq within six months, half the time it originally wanted. The programme, designed to keep oil money out of Saddam Hussein’s hands, was a failure at that and, by many accounts, was afflicted with corruption.—Los Angeles Times
Unfortunately, the short history so far has been bloodstained. More than ever, the circumstances now demand, and demand indispensably, a peacefully reconciled subcontinent for stability and progress.
It is encouraging to note a shift in the traditional Indian attitude in agreeing to negotiate with Pakistan for a better understanding. Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee’s offer to talk to Pakistan to settle all outstanding bilateral issues, including Kashmir, must be welcomed, as has been done by Pakistan.
If we want to build lasting friendship between India and Pakistan, it is of utmost importance for both sides to understand the real causes of strained relation resulting in three wars. For that we must seriously try and study the personality and mindset of India and the way that country interacts with Pakistan at regional and bilateral levels.
The country’s geography and history have had a profound effect on the Indian mind and to a very large extent, the Indians of today are a product of this crucible. They expect that the world should take them seriously. They feel inclined towards grandiose dreams and ambitions. The media, both national and international, has played its dubious role in building up this aspiration.
One must keep the objective realities in mind while assessing India. Those realities will lead us to a more balanced view of that country and a blend of weaknesses and strength. A one-sided view of either can be misleading. If its strengths are counted, we will be close to the propagandist view of India as a big power. Taken in its totality, including the country weighed down by limitations and serious ones at that.
From the point of view of its demography and size, India is a rightful candidate for a big-power status. It has developed its military might to an extent that it now possesses the world’s third largest standing army, fourth largest air force and sixth largest navy. It has developed a sizable nuclear capability. It would be pertinent to take into account the political considerations that impel India to accumulation of power.
K. Subramanyam, writing in Indian Quarterly states: “Any nation state which does not develop national power commensurate with its size and population is not likely to be permitted to continue that way for long. It will be reduced in size and population commensurate with its power”. Uma Shankar Phadnis, writing in Dawn states: “Given the geopolitical configuration of the South Asian state system and the integrated nature of the region, a certain nexus between India and the domestic political developments in neighbouring countries has necessarily to be accepted as a fact of life”.
Nehru had felt that India’s security interests were best served by having the West Asian states of the subcontinent and South-East Asia free from the dominant influence of any external power. To clarify this thinking of Nehru, ‘Indira Doctrine’ explicitly enunciates the point. The Doctrine stipulates that India would not accept any external intervention in South Asia, requiring any South Asian state in need of external assistance to first seek assistance from regional countries and that India’s exclusion from regional assistance by a South Asian country would be regarded as an unfriendly act.
India sees its security perimeters as encompassing the entire South Asian region inclusive of Myanmar and Afghanistan and the Gulf and the straits of Malacca. As the largest country in the region, it regards itself as the arbiter of regional security. Pakistan looms large in India’s security perceptions.
India’s national aim in the short term is to become the dominant power in South Asia and in the longer term to emerge as a world power — a status to be recognized in the form of making it a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It is an ambitious aim, the result of a grand design and India has been directing all its energies and resources towards realizing this aim. It must also be noted that the United States is apparently not averse to India making a bid to be recognized as a dominant regional power.
All this provides a clear picture of India’s ambitions. However, there is another side to the picture. A close look at India exposes an unending series of paradoxes — social, cultural, philosophical, political and even historical. India claims its greatness and strength as derived from the Mauryan kingdom which reached its zenith under Asoka, whose ‘Trimurto’ is displayed on the flag of India today.
But even then the areas that today form the states of Kerala, Tamilnadu and parts of Karnataka and Andhra Perdesh were outside Asoka’s empire. In fact, Bharatvarsh was never a historical reality. The inability of India to exist as one single unified state and the geophysical division within its frontiers point towards its incapacity of maintain such a state for very long. A historical process can only be retarded or delayed it cannot be completely eliminated.
India is considered the largest democracy in the world. Viewed closely, its democracy is a functioning anarchy. But due credit must be given that whatever its form, democracy continues to function. However, Hindu exclusivism is already weakening the fragile structure of the federal policy, of India. The Muslim, Sikh and Christian communities are currently bearing the brunt of growing menace of violent Hindu chauvinism.
India’s relations with Pakistan have been of deep distrust. Kashmir embodies most of the elements of that hostile attitude. India wrongly believes that if Pakistan becomes strong and stable, its internal instability will get accentuated. it sees Pakistan as the chief obstacle to its regional security. The result is that the establishment of a stable regional order which is essential for India’s own security appears more distant. The actual reason is India’s troubled or uneasy relations with all its neighbours and the increasing subordination of its foreign policy to domestic politics.
Apart from the fact that there have been three wars with Pakistan, India has been pursuing the policy of ‘coercive diplomacy’ as an adjunct of military hostility towards it. It has aimed at fomenting internal socio-political upheaval in this country so as to force a diversion of resources and effort and try to set a process of disintegration. It has continued to threaten Pakistan so as to ensure diversion of resources from development to defence.
To be able to achieve the aim of playing a meaningful role in the region, India must take the initiative to ensure a conflict-free South Asia. So far it has projected itself as a dominant, paramount and hegemonic power demanding rights and privileges that go with such a status.
This has not worked and will not work in the future. In any case, piling up of weapons and armaments is not going to help India play any significant role in the region or in the international arena. It has to renounce its policy of coercive diplomacy and help establish a conflict-free relationship with the countries of the region. Stable and strong countries of South Asia, particularly Pakistan, are the only way to ensure the security of India.
The writer is a retired major-general of the Pakistan army.
E-mail: genumar@yahoo.com