The professionally orchestrated terrorist attacks on Lahore did dampen the proceedings for the peaceniks but only just about. —AFP/File Photo

It was too idyllic a picture to be missed. The local heads of Pakistan Rangers and India’s Border Security Force (BSF) celebrating the Indian festival of lights with a warm hug and traditional sweets on no man’s land, while somewhere near Amritsar, just across the border from an exploding Lahore, peace activists, overwhelmingly from both sides of the divided Punjab, were locked in a ‘japphi’ to the accompaniment of theatre and music and lots of promises of abiding love and amity.

The professionally orchestrated terrorist attacks on Lahore did dampen the proceedings for the peaceniks but only just about. Parents who were to send their children across the border to join the revelry opted for restraint and kept their wards home. Madanjeet Singh, a mild-mannered philanthropist and a votary of India-Pakistan friendship, called me from Amritsar to explain how many more millions he planned to invest in art and culture for peace in the subcontinent, most of it in India and Pakistan.

Madanjeet Singh, a Unesco goodwill ambassador, had staged a cross-border musical festival in Srinagar last year. In Amritsar though it was probably not on his agenda to consider the absurdity of a few familiar people from Lahore celebrating love and affection for Indians while home-grown suicide bombers were running amok across Pakistan, spurring the military to brace for a bloody showdown in Waziristan.

I understand that most (not all) of the leading lights in the Indian delegation belonged to the ideological corner that would find it difficult to concede anything but a picture of relative tranquillity in their own country. Sometimes though their ilk makes grudging acknowledgement of ‘minor’ rights excesses in Kashmir but that’s it.

That the Amritsar jamboree (or the women’s meet in Lahore around the same time) coincided with the launch of a full-scale war in Waziristan and against Maoist extremists in central India was noteworthy but evidently not so for the peaceniks. According to the Outlook magazine the Indian war could go on for five years or more. The army would wade into areas that were never hitherto part of even the colonial expansion.

Explaining the stated aim of the Indian offensive, the Outlook said: ‘The objective is to proceed on a north-to-south axis from Kanker and a west-to-east axis from Gadchiroli, and meet at the 6,000 sq km swathe of forest called the Abuj Marh, which is ‘unknown jungle’ in the local Gondi dialect of the tribals. Indeed, the Marh is an impenetrable forest that has not even been mapped for revenue records and has therefore served as a major training and logistics base for the Maoists for years. The strategy now is to push ahead, hit Abuj Marh and then hold ground.’

Several similarities exist between the Waziristan operations and the arriving military thrust into central India’s forestlands. Both target militants who have their base among, and are often popular with, the local tribespeople. There is no media out there to give any sense of the ground reality, leaving much to be divined from the daily dole of official handouts and counter-claims by militants. Usually, in such situations, the human dimension of the tragedy goes unseen and therefore unreported.

The scale of the Indian operation appears massive. According to the Outlook’s account, the Indian air force will, for the first time, have a task cut out for it in anti-Maoist operations. Six Russian Mi-17 helicopters have been earmarked to aid the paramilitary forces on ground. The choppers will also carry the IAF’s special forces – the Garuds – to secure the aircraft and conduct combat search and rescue operations. The cabinet committee on security is said to have agreed that the air force choppers will have the permission to fire back in self-defence. This would be a first in five decades.

Pakistan’s and India’s military thrusts have other similarities. The assaults are both generally applauded by multinational interests. The given reason for the Pakistani operation is the terror unleashed by the home-grown militants in the country and abroad. The daring attack on the army headquarters followed by the brazen assaults in Lahore became the proverbial last straw that broke the camel’s back. For India, the trigger was the beheading of a policeman by suspected Maoists.

Dissenting analysts who offer a different view are sought to be marginalised, increasingly even threatened. According to a report in the Statesman on Sunday, India’s home ministry has chalked out a plan to launch a crackdown on ‘over ground workers’ (OGW) allegedly working for the Maoists. They are suspected of providing the guerrillas with logistic and financial support.

The Statesman said these OWGs ‘have intruded into human rights organisations, NGOs, schools, colleges, and workers’ unions to indirectly help their armed comrades.’

The government’s aim is to first ‘cut the supply chain of arms, ammunition and various other logistics and then start an offensive attack against the Naxals (Maoists)’, the Statesman said quoting intelligence sources. It was of course not quite clear how human rights groups, NGOs and schoolchildren among the so-called OWGs could be connected with the supply chain of arms for Maoists.

In a recent public speech, in which he laid the ground for the arriving assault, Home Minister P. Chidambaram berated civil society groups for harbouring a soft corner for the Maoists. In his view, he said: ‘It is a sad fact that some sections of civil society continue to romanticise the left wing extremist movement. It is seen as a friend and defender of the poor. It is seen as incorruptible and motivated by the highest ideals of service. It is seen as a bulwark against capitalism and neo-colonialism.’

Mr Chidambaram himself conceded ‘there may be some truth in these perceptions’. But, he asserted, ‘The few grains of truth must be seen in proportion to the mountain of deceit, violence and exploitation.’

Some members of the civil society have questioned Mr Chidambaram’s motive, accusing him of having represented powerful mining interests in his avatar as their lawyer.

Whatever be the merit of the questions or allegations against him, the man in charge of the no holds barred strategy to disarm the Maoists should be seen as clean and transparent. One of the as yet unanswered and probing barbs thrown at him came from writer Arundhati Roy.

She questioned Mr Chidambaram’s notion of progress and development that is often used as a battle cry to evict the poor from their land.

‘The battle for land lies at the heart of the ‘development’ debate,’ Ms Roy wrote. ‘Before he became India’s finance minister, P. Chidambaram was Enron’s lawyer and member of the board of directors of Vedanta, a multinational mining corporation that is currently devastating the Niyamgiri hills in Orissa. Perhaps his career graph informed his worldview. Or maybe it’s the other way around.’

Arundhati Roy recalls an interview a year ago, in which Mr Chidambaram said that his vision was to get 85 per cent of India’s population to live in cities. ‘Realising this ‘vision’ would require social engineering on an unimaginable scale. It would mean inducing, or forcing, about five hundred million people to migrate from the countryside into cities. That process is well under way and is quickly turning India into a police state in which people who refuse to surrender their land are being made to do so at gunpoint. Perhaps this is what makes it so easy for P. Chidambaram to move so seamlessly from being finance minister to being home minister.’

As we can see there is a lot of mayhem happening in our respective countries, which is rare and unprecedented in its ferocity and destructive energy. Indian and Pakistani peace activists who had a role in the past will be needed again to play that part to give a fillip to the stalled ties in the future.

However, at present, with their respective houses on fire and with so much of their talents as peacemakers in demand at home, there is every reason for them to evolve a new curriculum to address the raging issues of peace within their respective borders. This is not the time to repeat the familiar lines about a Neelam Valley formula or an Irish model for Kashmir. Nor is it the time to yet again break into a love song between separated friends. For if they do, they would only be re-enacting Dilip Kumar’s skeptical lines from Sagina. In that film, in his role as a disillusioned Naxalite sympathiser, he sang: ‘Aag lagi hamri atariya mein hum gaawaein Malhaar.’ (My house is on fire and I am singing Raag Malhaar to bring on the rains, to douse the fire.)

jawednaqvi@gmail.com