Let’s get on with developing our country, as China did
This newspaper’s Monday
headline said it all: “India out of Control”. It conveyed our bemusement over
India transgressing the LoC for no rhyme or reason when our prime minister had
been sending out friendly feelers to restart peace talks even before taking
office.
John Kerry lectures us
on improving relations with India. He should understand that it is India that
needs lecturing. America is childish, not ‘innocent’. What America means by
‘normalization’ is, “Accept Indian regional hegemony and its role as America’s
policeman in South Asia” – the usual American pipedream. It was tried with the
Shah of Iran and it trashed him. Ask America’s old satraps in the Arab world
and they will tell you with tears in their eyes, “This is what America gives us
for being so faithful to it.” They forget that if they are faithful to their
own people no one can touch them.
In offering mediation
Ban Ki-moon is both childish and innocent. If India had any respect for the United
Nations it would have implemented the Security Council resolutions asking for a
plebiscite to which it is signatory. India will reject Ban’s offer with
contempt for mediation implies dispute when India says none exists as
Kashmir-in-revolt is its integral part if you please. Yet an out of control
country wants a seat in the Security Council with the Hegemon and its toadies
wagging their tails. Thank God for China.
India’s madness happens
periodically, triggered off by different circumstances every time. Just as the
moon has to be full to make a werewolf, thus too it has to be monsoons for
India to go loopy. However, while India is out of control once again, it is not
beyond control even if it goes beyond the Line of Control. What will bring
India back in control are its domestic problems and internal conflicts and
contradictions, pretending to be what it is not. Every country suffers from
such problems but when the reaction descends into a fit it is time for analysis
towards understanding.
Underlying India’s
conflicts with Pakistan and China is water. The rivers that matter to Pakistan
and India are born in Tibet and go through Indian-occupied Kashmir before
reaching Pakistan, thus the India-China kerfuffle over Tibet and the
India-Pakistan contretemps over Kashmir. It is serious because most wars this
century will be fought over water. It’s a big issue for Israel too: it’s not so
much about oil but the water of the Euphrates that passes through Turkey and
Iraq. Water from the Euphrates is already being siphoned off from Turkey to
Israel under an agreement, threatening Iraq the lower riparian with drought.
India does not want
peace with Pakistan because it already has control over that part of Kashmir
that matters. Why would they wish to change the equation? Anyway, with nuclear
parity war is no longer an option. It will be MAD, Mutually Assured
Destruction. Having started nuclear terror in the subcontinent, India couldn’t
be that loopy.
But why did India go
loopy this time? There are as many as 10 reasons for it.
1) The rebellion in
Kashmir has heated up again. If India is delusional enough to think that
grabbing Azad Kashmir will end the Kashmiri freedom struggle, it has another
thought coming. It will multiply manifold.
2) India wants to be
accepted as the regional hegemon. Why else would they waste so much money
building their first aircraft carrier when millions of their people are living
in abject poverty and some 40 per cent of the country is in insurgency? What
will they do with it? Patrol the Indian Ocean? For what? Who do they think they
will conquer? Aden, the Gulf, China, Karachi, Gwadar? Give me a break. An
Indian submarine caught fire and burned down a day before the country’s
Independence Day. Mercifully, Pakistan wasn’t blamed this time because it would
make Pakistan look very powerful and decrease domestic morale. But when they
can’t even look after what they have, what will they do with their aircraft
carrier? Make it fly like a pig?
3) The Indian economy is
going through a serious downturn and they wish to divert domestic attention
from it.
4) Fear unifies a
diverse country in the face of failure to improve the human condition. It has
to keep itself together by stoking up the fear factor – threats from marauding
Muslim hordes from the northwest as in the days of yore.
5) With difficult
elections nigh war hysteria helps the ruling Congress party – or so it
imagines. Actually, it would help the Hindu fundamentalist BJP because when
people are afraid they usually turn right. Raising temperature is easier when
your army chief is a warmonger spoiling for a fight. His bombast waits to be
hoist on its own petard.
6) India has just caused
floods in Pakistan by releasing excess water from the River Sutlej and wishes
to divert attention here too.
7) India violates the
Indus Basin Water Treaty by building dams and again wants to divert attention.
8) India wishes to push
Pakistan to the brink by forcing it to deploy troops from its western border to
its eastern borders.
9) The insurgency within
Pakistan fuelled by Indian and American support of the ‘Balochistan Liberation
Army’ is over control of Balochistan’s coastline – if Pakistan didn’t control
it, it and China couldn’t reap the benefits. The 2000 km China-Pakistan
Economic Corridor from Gwadar to Xinjiang will change the economic complexion
of the region covering Afghanistan, Iran and Central Asia. India fears this
would diminish its importance. India could get into the equation and benefit
too, but a state under superpower delusions couldn’t countenance being co-opted
by Pakistan and China.
10 ) Gwadar being the
world’s largest deep-sea port, India and America worry about it becoming a
Chinese naval base also housing nuclear submarines close to oil’s main supply
route, the Straits of Hormuz. China’s influence and ingress in the Arabian Gulf
would increase. If China builds a railway from Afghanistan to Gwadar it would
change Afghanistan’s economic equation dramatically and increase Pakistan’s
importance for it.
How times change.
Pakistani politics have moved on from a 1,000-year war with India and eating
grass to India not even being on the radar screen during the recent elections.
Sadly, India has not. India’s media have been embarrassingly jingoistic and
raised the temperature while Pakistani media have been most mature and
measured.
There’s India’s usual
pettiness too – large country with a small country mentality born of over a
thousand-year rule by the Muslims and the British. Get over it. Pettiness has
swung from an inferiority complex to a superiority complex. Time to get real.
It’s time for the world
to get real too. It is. The realization is dawning about India’s human rights
atrocities in Kashmir and many other parts of the country. India’s immaturity
and hysteria, its baseless accusations against Pakistan and China and its gross
human rights abuses are coming into the limelight, as is its nefarious role in
Afghanistan and its numerous ‘consulates’ along the Pakistan border begetting
insurgencies and abetting terrorism in our country.
The truth always outs.
For the last many years Pakistan has been relentlessly maligned for encouraging
terrorism in India and destabilizing it when all the while it was India that
was the culprit. Pakistan was accused of being behind the attacks on India’s
parliament building and in Mumbai. It now transpires that it was the work of
India’s state institutions themselves. Soon the world will realize that all
terrorism in India is begotten by its own state terrorism on its people. We
know that it was a serving Indian army colonel that burned down the misnamed
‘Samjhota Express’ killing over 50 Pakistanis, but not a peep out of a world in
thrall of India’s ‘culture’ that is mostly Muslim. We are accused of having an
India-centric foreign policy. What do you think? If India’s recent behaviour is
not Pakistan-centric you have to be stupid.
It’s time for Pakistan
to come real too. When India doesn’t want peace why go on asking for it? India
raises facetious arguments to stall talks – give us Dawood Ibrahim and Hafiz
Saeed first but without cogent proof. We don’t say, “Give us the Bugti boy first”
even when we have cogent proof. They say, “We don’t know who to talk to since
real power is with the Pakistan army.” We don’t say, “We don’t know who to talk
to since real power lies with Sonya Gandhi and Manmohan Singh is only a proxy
prime minister.” Grow up.
We should forget about
talks until India rises to at least our maturity level. Let’s ignore India as
far as possible and get on with developing our country, like China did and look
where it has got in three decades. Leave India to its own devices. It matters
not beyond its nuisance value. Let it wallow in its own delusions. America and
China have finally understood that they are in a symbiotic relationship where
one cannot do without the other and if one goes down so does the other. India
doesn’t fit into that scheme of things and America or China will not go down
trying to humour its pretensions.
Frankly, I would be
loath to write about India if only they would stop their shenanigans and
tamashas. They simply are pathetic attempts to camouflage its own failures and
put Pakistan in the dock. The world is beginning to see through them. So are
many Indians.
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