| October 22, 2007 | Monday | Shawwal 9, 1428 |
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War on terror, a cure worse than the disease?
The Press Information Bureau in Delhi hands out a complimentary calendar to accredited journalists at the beginning of the year. An ageing page in the 2007 calendar shows Jawaharlal Nehru on the banks of River Ravi in Lahore on Jan 26, 1930, when he gave the famous call for India’s complete self-rule. Known as the pledge of independence, the emotional address could even today inspire any populist leader in South Asia, including of course Benazir Bhutto, who was the target of a devastating terrorist attack in Karachi onThursday night.
There is a strange passage in the speech which has a direct bearing onwhat we have come to know as the war on terror, or conversely, on the rise of religious fascism in South Asia. While our anti-colonial struggle is applauded the world over for its apparent non-violent methods, Nehru’s address presented another option. He exhorted his countrymen thus: “Compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly and the presence of an alien army of occupation, employed with deadly effect to crush in us the spirit of resistance, has made us think that we cannot look after ourselves or put up a defence against foreign aggression, or even defend our brothers and families from the attacks of thieves, robbers and miscreants.”
Simply translated Nehru was pleading for freedom to bear arms as a fundamental, inalienable right of every Indian. In other words, had he as India’s first prime minister kept his pledge, Indian citizens would be having the same right as free Americans do today, to carry arms for self-defence and, why not, for resistance against foreign aggression if necessary. Would that be a good idea for a country as fractured as India has become along caste and religious lines and so polarised in its diverse ethnic identities? That is not the issue here, nor should we have an iota of sympathy for America’s notorious gun lobby.
The point here is that if the proud people of India, on whose behalf Nehru was surely speaking, were made ‘unmanly’ because the colonial state took away their means of ‘resistance’ why did he not give those rights to the citizens in the evidently independent India? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that no state, colonial or post-colonial, is willing to see itself as an oppressor of its own subjects or citizens. On the contrary, it strives to take monopoly over the means of coercion, which it otherwise uses to subjugate the people.
Today as our native rulers continue to align themselves in the contrived battle between good and evil using points of reference that may be germane to US President George Bush but have the potential to spell disaster for our polity, there are serious questions that need to be asked. The most important of these is whether we really need American help and blessings to fight Al Qaeda and Taliban in our own backyard and if so for whose benefit? Why should we listen to Bush and not to Denis Healey, WW II veteran and ageing but still lucid Labour Party ideologue instead? Mr Healey was very clear in an interview on BBC last week that there was no military solution to what the Americans call terrorism. His counsel was to talk to terrorist leaders instead. “If to end terrorism we do not talk to its leaders who are we to talk to?” he asked
Ask any ruler from Pakistan to Bangladesh or from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka about the vision they nurture and they all want to transform their countries into moderate, liberal states. But look again. We were not doing too badly on that front. We had fought wars. We had fought separatists of different hues. Yet there was nothing ever so brazenly mediaeval or obscurantist about these engagements on either side of the equation as it has become today.
Afghanistan was not quite the basket case it became, breeding fundamentalist rebels. Nor was ISI hatching ‘mujahideen’ in Saudi and CIA-funded incubators at the behest of Zbigniew Brzezinski. And when Brzezinski was asked in the context of the Taliban why he had fanned religious extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, his cynical reply was: “What is more important — demise of the Soviet Union or a few stirred up Muslims?”
Stirred up Muslims indeed. The fact is that it is not just the Muslims that American policy has used and abused cynically. It has equally lethally “stirred up” Jews, Christians, Sikhs and Hindus, directly or indirectly on their day. And heaven knows what awaits the docile Buddhist people of Myanmar now that Laura Bush has taken it upon herself to usher democratic change there.
The other fact is that to confront the stirred up Muslims we now have stirred up armies that are armed to their teeth. They have a vested interest to ensure that Healey’s counsel falls on deaf ears. In fact it is baffling that the very people who are appalled at the sight of blood and gore, like the one we saw in Karachi on Thursday night, merrily endorse bloody mindedness on other occasions. There is no other way to explain our obeisance to the holy cow we euphemistically call military might and another recently added deity to our fundamentalist pantheon of unbending nationalism we know as nuclear weapons.
Take Lal Kishan Advani’s words of sympathy when he spoke to BenazirBhutto. No one could doubt his sincerity when the leader of India’s rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party condoled the death of scores of innocent citizens of Pakistan in terror attacks on her caravan of democracy. And yet if the same Mr Advani had his way in 2002 there would have been a nuclear war between India and Pakistan. The mildly termed ‘collateral damage’ then would make Thursday’s bloodbath look like a picnic.
Another country that instantly expressed solidarity with Ms Bhutto was the United States, which too mourned the loss of innocent lives. How hypocritical these condolence messages sound when their authors on other occasions show no qualms about their willingness to annihilate millions if they feel like it. The Karachi bloodbath was traumatic not just for Pakistan. It has a chilling message for India. If Afghanistan falls to the Taliban, for example, India will feel the heat in Kashmir and elsewhere. Have no doubts about that. But there is an even worse nightmare looming on our heads in the form of a wayward American president threatening to annihilate the entire planet with World War III? Is there anything to choose between the two?
We do not know whether Benazir Bhutto will go along with Denis Healey or George Bush in her promise to remove the forces of mediaeval barbarism in Pakistan. But she said something else on her arrival in Karachi that may hold the key to everyone’s security in the region. She spoke for the impoverished people of Pakistan, the underdogs. She will notice from Nehru’s speech in 1930 that not much has changed to improve their lot despite all the populist slogans of her party and of her counterparts in India and elsewhere.
“Politically”, said Nehru, “India’s status has never been so reduced as under the British regime. No reforms have given real political power to the people. The tallest of us have to bend before the foreign authority. The rights of free expression of opinion and free association have been denied to us and many of our countrymen are compelled to live in exile abroad and cannot return to their homes. All administrative talent is killed and the masses have to be satisfied with petty village offices and clerkships.”
The amazing similarity of the situations then and now doesn’t end here. Nehru says: “Currently, the system of education has torn us from our moorings and our training has made us hug the very chains that bind us.” Lessons from history may still hold some answers for the future as we dust ourselves back on our feet from the blood and gore of daily terrorism. One such lesson is that there is little to choose between global terrorism and an increasingly cynical imperialism. It must have been suffocating for Nehru to denounce the forced disarming of Indians by their colonial masters, particularly so when he was speaking on behalf of Gandhi, the icon of non-violence. It is just as suffocating today. The choices are not too different.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
