Delirious rhetoric
ABOUT two weeks after the 2004 presidential election, on November 13, the British embassy held a surprise 50th birthday party for Condoleezza Rice. On her arrival, Ambassador David Manning presented her with a red Oscar de la Renta gown. When Rice changed into the dress and emerged like Cinderella, she was met by her Prince Charming, dressed in a tuxedo, the man she once called “my husband”, President Bush.
The following week, Bush appointed his national security adviser as his secretary of state. Bush’s relationship with Rice is perhaps the strangest of his many strange relationships. The mysterious attachment involves complex transactions of noblesse oblige and deference, ignorance and adulation, vulnerability and sweet talk. Like his other female enablers — Karen Hughes, his political image-maker and undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, and Harriet Miers, his legal counsel — Rice is ferociously protective. She shields him from worst-case scenarios, telling him to ignore criticism, and showers him with flattery that he is a world-historical colossus.
As national security adviser, before 9/11, Rice protected Bush from warnings by the counter-terrorism chief, Richard Clarke, about Al Qaeda attacks - and demoted Clarke. Before the invasion of Iraq, she lent her imprimatur to the disinformation about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and peddled it to the media. She did not demand an Iraq postwar stabilisation plan. Nor did she object to the Pentagon’s seizure of Iraq’s civil governance responsibilities from the state department. Before Israel’s attack on Lebanon, she did not caution against the possibility of Israeli failure against Hezbollah. She was party to the decision to lend full war materiel and intelligence support to the effort if Israel would undertake it.
In the beginning, the didactic academic lectured her pupil that he stood at a crossroads like in 1947, at the making of the cold-war policy. After 9/11, she inculcated in Bush the notion that he was a world-builder and could imprint his design on a scale to match the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 that established the sovereignty of nation-states.
A few months after Rice became secretary of state, in July 2005, she transported senior staff to a West Virginia retreat where her head of policy planning, Stephen Krasner, delivered a lecture on the Peace of Westphalia followed by one on the Truman Doctrine to explain the magnitude of Rice - and Bush’s - ambition for “transformational diplomacy”. This May, as the situation in Iraq drastically worsened, Rice told senior staff that she wants no more reporting from the embassies. She announced in a meeting that people write memos only for each other, and that no one else reads them. She said she wouldn’t read them. Instead of writing reports, the diplomats should “sell America”, she insisted. “We are salesmen for America!”
On Tuesday, kicking off the mid-term elections campaign, Bush delivered a speech that cited Bin Laden’s screeds, Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and promised “complete victory”. Rice contributed her own comparison of the “war on terror” to the American civil war. “I’m sure there are people who thought it was a mistake to fight the civil war to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold,” she said. But the more delirious the rhetoric, the more hollow the policy. “There is no plan for Iraq,” a senior national security official with the highest intelligence clearance and access to the relevant memos told me. “There is no plan.”—Dawn/Guardian Service
The writer is a former senior advisor to President Clinton.
The road to militarism
WE have just observed another Defence of Pakistan Day. The event has increasingly assumed an element of tokenism as the years have rolled by. But September 1965 itself was a strange time in the life of the nation. In some ways it was soul-stirring: never before had the people been so united as citizens of Pakistan.
They didn’t know the genesis of the crisis; they knew only what they were told. They saw only the threat to their homeland from a country that they felt had never shown itself to have had a friendly bone in its body. People had visions of Indian troops patrolling Anarkali Bazar and they felt both horrified and outraged.
There was genuine popular involvement in the war effort in West Pakistan, as people rallied to what they saw as the defence of their homes and families. This was also the sentiment that moved those brave soldiers who were thrown into the war by the Ayub junta and many of whom so distinguished themselves by their courage and heroism.
However, there was another side to the conflict. No one now disputes the fact that the operation in Kashmir that led to the war was badly prepared and was never fully thought through. The idea was to spark a war of liberation in Kashmir, an idea that was shaped a year earlier in 1964 reportedly by a secret cell consisting of the foreign office, the military and the intelligence services, chaired by the then foreign secretary Aziz Ahmad, who was influenced by the views of Foreign Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The effort was to defreeze the Kashmir issue, according to Altaf Gauhar, who was Ayub Khan’s propaganda chief.
The plan failed. The guerillas sent into Kashmir were unable to inspire a rebellion in held Kashmir. Pakistan did manage to defend itself when India attacked along the international boundary in the west, but it did not achieve its military and political objective. The world scrambled to contain the crisis, but blamed Pakistan for instigating it, most notably the United States, on which we depended for our military supplies. The people of East Pakistan realised for the first time how the military establishment based in West Pakistan had left them utterly defenceless, and the stage was set for the emergence of the sentiments that were to be reflected later in the Six Points.
US diplomat and South Asia expert, Dennis Kux, senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington, says in his book ‘The United States and Pakistan 1947-2000: Disenchanted Allies’, that while President Lyndon Johnson personally liked Ayub Khan, his assessment of the 1965 episode was: “He (Ayub) had gone on an adventure and been licked (memorandum of the Ayub-Johnson meeting, Washington, Dec 15, 1965).” Mr Kux leaves little doubt that this was the prevalent view in the US government.
No serious and transparent study of the war was carried out; we were fed on total lies. The result was the headlong rush into the abyss of 1971, again with its cloak of dishonesty and deceit and self-delusion, and later the Kargil gamble. Even more disturbing was how the Ayub establishment decided to use religion and downright superstition to manipulate public opinion in favour of the war.
It was not depicted as a war to defend our homeland or even to liberate Kashmir, but as a confrontation between Islam and ‘kufr’. Stories were churned out from the information ministry and carried in the National Press Trust papers that wanted to show how drunk all of us were with the desire for martyrdom. Accounts were published, particularly in the vernacular press, of how “sabz-posh” had come and caught Indian bombs in their hands to save the bridge over the Ravi at Shahdara in Lahore, thus downgrading the valour of those defenders who had fought off Indian attacks.
Ayub Khan, considered a secularist when he started out in 1958, in a broadcast to the nation after the outbreak of active hostilities said India should remember that it had challenged (“lalkara hai”) a nation that believed in the kalima. Jingoism and religiosity were fanned — trends that have continued to distort society and indeed in many areas have become more deeply entrenched.
The same jingoism, religious obsessions and misplaced patriotism swept India. Muslims feared for their lives and lived under a cloud of suspicion. A well known mujtahid, who taught at Lucknow University and always wore a black silk ‘chogha’ to denote his status, was rounded up by residents on the suspicion that he was a Pakistani parachutist. Hysteria reigned on both sides of the border; both countries lost — or, more correctly, their people lost because the conflict ate up resources that should have gone into the welfare of millions. Pakistan failed to get any progress made towards a solution of the Kashmir dispute and India was not allowed to occupy Lahore. Ayub’s military regime was shaken, but that led only to another martial law, the Bangladesh conflict and the loss of East Pakistan, whose people we had already forsaken in 1965.
A new militarism was born, as the national songs written in those days — some composed and sung beautifully — testify. Symbols of military might began to permeate civic life, and this is something we have not been able to get rid of even now, not least because the military remains the constant factor in our politics. Politically, all the most reactionary trends were set in motion. Even some progressive writers wavered, and one of them lauded Ayub Khan as a ‘ghazi’ in one of his poems. Few dared to disagree with the prevailing pro-war and militant mood.
The Jamaat-i-Islami, consolidating its hold on the campuses, now felt encouraged to penetrate the establishment even more deeply. The link between the military and the mullahs was strengthened, and the effort to divide the nation into “Islam-pasands” (lovers of Islam) and others, relevant only in a non-Muslim society, were stepped up. (The war also later resulted in the populist Bhutto phenomenon, but that is another story for another time, marked as it was by many contradictions.)
Such reactionary trends have thrived in an atmosphere of conflict and suspicion that has marked our relations with India, and this has happened on both sides of the border. It fed also on the war in Afghanistan. Since war and the strident patriotism it breeds are bad for democracy, civil liberties and for social emancipation (look at America before and after its invasion of Iraq), the sensible thing should be to avoid glorifying war. But we persist in doing so something that only helps puff up the military.
1965 also saw the art of telling lies reaching Goebellian proportions and gaining a new acceptability — an acceptability that is not really questioned even today, four decades down the line. How the whole house of cards built on lies collapsed in 1971 should also jog our memory now and then. The fog surrounding Kargil and most recently the killing of Nawab Bugti only underlines how much the establishment is reluctant to tell the truth.
In the latest development, the people have a right to know what has led to the so-called peace agreement signed by the government with the militants in North Waziristan who are described as the “local Taliban”. Are we now ready to countenance another group of Taliban, this time in a pocket within our own borders? The military has even agreed to dismantle all its checkposts and to settle all disputes according to local customs and traditions. That means that the state is sanctifying also all forms of tribal jirgas and the Talibans’ stultifying control of the morals of the area’s people. The contrast with what the military is seeking to do to extend its writ in Balochistan is marked. Why wasn’t the same accommodation — one writer has described it as “capitulation” — shown in Balochistan as has been practised in the Tribal Areas?
The best tribute we can pay to those who laid down their lives in 1965 is to stop lying to and deceiving ourselves.
“— Recently, a young Kashmiri friend was talking to me about life in Kashmir. Of the morass of political venality and opportunism, the callous brutality of the security forces, of the osmotic, inchoate edges of a society saturated in violence ...He spoke of having to live with the endless killing, the mounting ‘disappearances’, the whispering, the fear, the unresolved rumours, the insane disconnection between what is actually happening, what Kashmiris know is happening and what the rest of us are told is happening in Kashmir ...the schism between ...what is concealed and what is revealed ... has become a place of endless speculation and political insanity. It’s a poisonous brew which is stirred and simmered and put to the most ugly, destructive, political purpose.” — Arundhati Roy in An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004).
Indian Muslims & ‘Vande Mataram’
IN the light of protests by the Samajwadi Party and some Muslim organisations against a central government directive to all educational institutions to ensure the singing of the Vande Mataram, the Press Trust of India recently quoted the Congress spokesman, Abhishek Singhvi, as saying that the “Congress party and the country is proud of the national song Vande Mataram, which had electrified our freedom fighters, who made umpteen sacrifices.
Even then, if a community or group feels otherwise, they are free to recite it or not.” The centenary of the song was celebrated on September 7 across India.
Reacting against the revised stand of the Congress that the singing of Vande Mataram was not mandatory, the Bharatiya Janata Party condemned some Muslim clerics for their refusal to abide by the directive, saying that those who opposed the national song should “leave the country”. The question arises whether it is the BJP alone which owns India. It belongs to the Muslims and other minorities too.
The BJP contends that while Vande Mataram — perceived by many to be polytheistic and idolatrous in content — is not the national anthem, it is no less and, therefore, must be sung by Muslims and Christians, adherents of monotheistic faiths.
Vande Mataram was included in the Bengali novel ‘Anand Math’ authored by Bankim Chandra Chatterji whose BA degree was possible because of the funds provided by a Muslim trust. It was written by Bankim Chatterji well before the novel was conceived. It was inserted in the second and subsequent editions at that point in the story when armed Hindus sing it while indulging in the looting and killing of Muslims.
Vande Mataram, was associated, in the novel, with Hindus carrying out Muslim cleansing in Bengal on the one hand and welcoming the English on their arrival in Bengal on the other. What is narrated above explains why the Muslims were against the singing of Vande Mataram, before as well as since August 15, 1947.
Like most Hindus outside Bengal, Muslims all over India were unaware of what Vande Mataram was all about until 1938. In those days, Mr Altaf Husain, who belonged to Sylhet in today’s Bangladesh, and who before and after 1947 became famous as the editor of Dawn, used to write a column in The Statesman of Calcutta on Sundays under the pen name “Shahid”. One such column, which was on Vande Mataram, asked the Muslims not to sing the idolatrous song. The weekly Deccan Times of Madras, reproduced it in toto with a bold headline on the front page.
Apart from Yaqoob Hasan, who was in the Congress and a minister in C. Rajagopalachari’s cabinet, there were around six Muslims in the opposition then in the Madras Legislative Assembly. Bulusu Sambamurthy, who was famous for dressing like Gandhi, was the first speaker of the Madras Assembly. He was perhaps the only speaker among those in the seven Congress-governed provinces who started each day’s proceedings with the singing of Vande Mataram, accompanied by all the members.
When the issue of the Deccan Times carrying the article on Vande Mataram reached the streets of Madras, Mr Lal Jani of Guntur raised a point of order before the members of the Assembly stood up to sing Vande Mataram. Informing the speaker that he and other non-Congress Muslims were boycotting the singing of Vande Mataram, he walked out of the House. That evening’s and the next morning’s newspapers and the day’s news bulletins of All India Radio informed the people of India what Vande Mataram was all about. The Muslim members’ boycott of the singing of Vande Mataram in the Madras Legislative Assembly made this possible.
Sanskrit and not Bengali is the language of Vande Mataram — to the Bengalis, who pronounce ‘v’ as ‘b’, it is Bande Mataram. Naturally, it could not have been meaningful to the people of the remaining 35 federating states of India whenever they sang it. The electrifying effect of that song on non-Bengalis could only have been because of its music composed by Rabindranath Tagore.
The locale of the novel ‘Anand Math’ was Bengal and the story focuses on the elimination or banishing of Muslims from Bengal as they were looked upon as enemies occupying the motherland. Under the command of their hero, orthodox Hindus singing Vande Mataram loot the Muslims and kill them. Thereafter, they ask their hero when the mosques will be destroyed and replaced by temples. The hero tells them that the English have arrived to protect them and their property.
Given this background, the meaning and the exhilarating music of Vande Mataram could have electrified the Bengali Hindu freedom fighters. However, the question is: how could the non-Bengalis of the remaining 35 federating states of India have been electrified by the singing of Vande Mataram when they did not fully know its meaning? Under these circumstances, can anybody explain how the people of the 35 non-Bengali states owned it as a national song at par with the national anthem?
Because of the idolatrous content of the song and because its central theme is anti-Muslim, the Muslims are against the singing of Vande Mataram. Recognising that the first two stanzas of the song were devoid of idolatrous content, Nehru and Subhash Bose considered that those two stanzas alone should be given the status of a national song. Ram Manohar Lohia contended that the novel ‘Anand Math’ was a blot on the national struggle as it contained a declaration that welcomed the British who would protect the life and property of the Hindus from the Muslim rulers.