That a little prosperity can transform the demeanour of a nation with its neighbours or even the world at large can be judged by the way India has changed. How often in recent years have we heard diplomats and editorial writers urging the American establishment to stop hyphenating our ties with Pakistan? We even invented a nearly unpronounceable antonym for the proposed approach with our main South Asian neighbour: we want to “dehyphenate” the relationship. It’s almost as if we don’t like the sound of India-Pakistan coming from Indian analysts nor from the overseas observers who otherwise shepherd our difficult ties.

Part of the Indian compulsion to stress the separateness seems to flow from a perceived acceptability Indians now find in the comity of nations. It’s a way of asserting their upwardly mobile economic and political clout so to speak. But the hyphen has not become completely redundant. It has in fact been harnessed to indicate a set of better aspired relationships that appear to go with our new national class character as it were. A typical new facet is the US-India strategic bonding. The Sino-Indian hyphen too is of a higher caste enabled in the common man’s perceptions by the Agni missile, even if other more telling indicators reveal a yawning gap between the two in crucial areas of their profile not the least in their respective economies. The general drift is to have India bracketed with those at the high table of world affairs. Prosperity, it is suggested, has enough clout to assert a new grammar, new political punctuations in relationships. This euphoria of course is misplaced. The world knows and most Indians acknowledge that India had a pride of place in world affairs under Nehru and later during his daughter’s stewardship. There was a momentary flicker of hope when Rajiv Gandhi took charge of the global disarmament campaign, but then it was subverted by the domestic moneybags he had set out to eject from the political mainstream. What we have celebrated since then is a mediocre leadership unable to fix the massive gaps our little prosperity has generated. But then that is the way the cookie crumbles with an upwardly mobile middle class, which decides the way India thinks – heart and body, mind and soul.

A feature of most love-hate relationships is an intrinsic inability to ignore the unhappy state of play and thereby to move on with life smugly. The tedium of drawing room conversations reveals a near schizophrenia that is often passed off for the high moral ground with Pakistan. Comparisons we say are odious. With Pakistan the same comparisons become the very elixir that drives our energies. You could test this for yourselves very soon. When the Indian squad struggles to find a berth at the winner’s podium in Beijing later this year, there would be a hunt for countries that we have done “better” against at the Olympic efforts. And there would be Pakistan to comfort our conscience, or maul it if it wins the hockey. (Since Pakistan is suspended from the Commonwealth, I am not sure if the country would be represented at the Commonwealth Games to be hosted in Delhi in 2010. Perhaps we are looking too far into the future.)

A typical drawing room conversation has one central point. India has proved to be a durable democracy and Pakistan, prone to military coups, has struggled to survive as a culturally moderate nation state. The fact that Pakistan is currently going through a particularly rough patch is not lost on anyone. That there is a genuine fear of religious fanaticism gaining the upper hand in national institutions and on the streets, not the least because of Pakistan’s ill-considered alliances with the United States, which encouraged the state to crush voices of moderation since the 1950s. This is a widely shared view and there should be no quarrel with it. What doesn’t make any sense is for people who have campaigned for the world to “dehyphenate” the relationship to continue to relish the poor grades Pakistan gets in comparison to India. Some, like the editor of a leading daily last week, tend to fly off the handle. Pakistan’s misery is because of military rule and India is today prosperous and stable because of democracy, they argue. There is of course no such nexus between democracy and prosperity nor between dictatorship and backwardness.

Sri Lanka is a good example of a country with deep roots in democracy which has a modest Third World economy. At the same time, it is true that genuine democracy has given Sri Lanka a lead in enviable social indices something that democracy in India has failed to deliver. Pakistan with its dictatorial tendencies is not too far behind India in economic performance and is at par in social indices albeit in the company of countries both India and Pakistan would hate to be compared with. Military rule and authoritarianism, contrary to the claims of the editor, have produced amazing economic results. The Soviet Union, China, South Korea and most of the Asean countries have risen from scratch to become imposing economic powers. It is in fact tempting to consider a similar paradigm for India domestically. Authoritarian rule in Gujarat compared with deep-rooted democracy in Kerala have shown opposite economic results. And yet Kerala’s social development indices are higher than any other region in India. Therefore, if any criticism has to be made of Pakistan it is in the fact that it has remained economically tardy despite military rule, not because of it.

The itch to compare India and Pakistan can produce laughter too. Take for example the following message doing the rounds on the internet.

“Twenty-five thousand years ago, haplogroup R2 characterised by genetic marker M124 arose in southern Central Asia. Then began a major wave of human migration whereby members migrated southward to present-day India and Pakistan (Genographic Project by the National Geographic Society; http://www.nationalgeographic.com/). Indians and Pakistanis have the same ancestry and share the same DNA sequence. Here’s what is happening in India:

“The two Ambani brothers can buy 100 per cent of every company listed on the Karachi Stock Exchange (KSE) and would still be left with $30 billion to spare. The four richest Indians can buy up all goods and services produced over a year by 169 million Pakistanis and still be left with $60 billion to spare. The four richest Indians are now richer than the forty richest Chinese.

“In 2004, India became the 3rd most attractive foreign direct investment destination. Pakistan wasn’t even in the top 25 countries. In 2004, the United Nations, the representative body of 192 sovereign member states, had requested the Election Commission of India to assist the UN in the holding of elections in Al Jumhuriyah al Iraqiyah and Dowlat-e Eslami-ye Afghanestan. Why the Election Commission of India and not the Election Commission of Pakistan? After all, Islamabad is closer to Kabul than is Delhi.

“Indians and Pakistanis have the same Y-chromosome haplogroup. We have the same genetic sequence and the same genetic marker (namely: M124).

We have the same DNA molecule, the same DNA sequence. Our culture, our traditions and our cuisine are all the same. We watch the same movies and sing the same songs. What is it that Indians do and we don’t: Indians elect their leaders.” So you see why Indians will continue to need Pakistan with or without the hyphen?

jawednaqvi@gmail.com