Modi’s India- Pakistan’s opportunity, Ayaz Mir.
'Narendra Modi is a godsend to Pakistan
Narendra Modi is the best thing that could have
happened to Pakistan. He is making India look like General Zia’s Pakistan. Can
there be a bigger favour to Pakistan than that?
Assaults on liberalism, threats to free speech, people
killed because of their beliefs or what they stand for, hate and bigotry on the
loose, extreme expressions of religiosity, indeed religion entering the
political discourse like never before…these were things that were supposed to
happen in Pakistan.'
And Indians were wont to preen
themselves no end because their country, ‘Shining India’, the India of myth and
fantasy, the India of the adman’s imagination, was above these failings which
painted Pakistan in dark colours. Small wonder, in conversations with
Pakistanis, Indians were all too apt to adopt a patronising tone…redolent of
smugness and a superior attitude.
And as the world was never allowed to
forget, India was the world’s largest democracy. The accepted wisdom was that
India was on the march while Pakistan was home to religious extremism and all
kinds of violence.
It was all a bit tiresome but there
was no cure for it as every now and then something would happen in Pakistan –
someone, usually someone poor, charged with blasphemy, a Christian community
attacked, someone shot because of his faith or denomination, another terrorist
incident – which captured world headlines and reinforced the image of a country
overwhelmed by its troubles.
But Narendra Modi’s election as prime
minister and the fillip this has given to Hindu fundamentalism – the idea that
India is a Hindu nation – have dramatically altered this equation. Whereas
Pakistan is slowly emerging from its fundamentalist quagmire, moving away from
the religious extremism that was its biggest problem, India is lurching in the
other direction.
Sonia Faleiro, an Indian journalist,
thus writes in the New York Times: “In today’s India, secular liberals face a
challenge: how to stay alive. In August, 77-year old scholar M M Kalburgi, an
outspoken critic of Hindu idol worship, was gunned down on his own doorstep. In
February, the communist leader Govind Pansare was killed near Mumbai. And in
2013, the activist Narendra Dhabolkar was murdered for campaigning against
religious superstition.”
And a Muslim man in an Uttar Pradesh
village is brutally beaten and killed over the rumour of beef-eating. Writers,
to their credit, have returned their awards and Sharmila Tagore, the well-known
actor, warns that the present climate of intolerance in India is like the
atmosphere prevailing at the time of Mrs Gandhi’s 1975-77 emergency and the
demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But these are voices in the wilderness.
The prevailing mood is one of intolerance and fear.
The prime minister himself is silent,
just as he was silent when rampaging Hindu mobs carried out a massacre of
Muslims in Gujarat, the state he ruled as chief minister. There were people who
believed that as prime minister he would be a different man. But as events in
India testify, he hasn’t changed his spots. Narendra Modi remains a man wedded
to the extreme Hindu ideology of the organisation of which he has been an
ardent follower most of his adult life: the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
Hindutva ideology is a form of Nazism.
Call it native or saffron Nazism. It is based on the racialist notion that
India is a Hindu nation with no place for Muslims or people of other faiths.
The opportunity for Pakistan in this mess is clear. For too long Pakistan has
been seen as a haven of bigotry and intolerance. And it has been vilified and
denounced for the same. Now India is becoming a Hindu Pakistan, or what
Pakistan had become before it decided to tackle the monster of religious
extremism. India’s loss should be Pakistan’s gain.
But this gain becomes worthwhile and
enduring if Pakistan opens the vistas of its mind further and becomes a more
enlightened place. The heyday of Pakistani fundamentalism is already over. The
power of the gun-wielding mullah wanting to establish an Islamic emirate, while
not eliminated, has been dealt a serious blow. The space so won needs to be
expanded and made secure.
There’s too much corruption in our
public life. Something needs to be done about that. The delivery of services
vital to everyday life – administration, police, judicial system – should
improve. Are we spending enough on health? Isn’t it high time we thought about
having one education system throughout the country, the same books for everyone
but better books and with none of the nonsense purveyed in subjects like
Pakistan Studies?
Our entire outlook, the way we look at
things, the way we discuss them, needs to become more rational and ‘modern’. We
have to move away from outmoded methods of thinking. If India is embracing
dogma, let it. We have been here earlier, with too much of dogma part of our
national thinking. We need to discard it. The spirit of enquiry is the basis of
learning. We must learn to foster this spirit.
Western countries are not irreligious
countries. Most of them subscribe to the Christian faith. Our faith is Islam,
the faith of the majority in this country. The west has gone through its religious
tribulations. It no longer wears religion on its sleeves. We also must learn to
discard the habit of wearing our religion on our sleeves.
The loudspeaker, more than the
Kalashnikov, is the single most important source of religious mischief in our society.
Its unchecked use and power has been tempered. It needs to be brought further
under control. And there must be no misuse of the blasphemy law. The Supreme
Court judgement rejecting Mumtaz Qadri’s appeal – pertaining to the man who
shot Governor Salmaan Taseer – is a landmark judgement in the way it throws
light on the blasphemy issue.
And we have to get one thing into our
heads. We don’t have to match India missile for missile and bomb for bomb. We
make our own bazookas, our own tanks, and our own nuke bombs. In any rational
calculation this is more than enough deterrence. We have a strong army, a
strong air force. We need better schools and colleges, more research, more
knowledge. We should have greater confidence in ourselves and we should learn to
talk less about India and the Indian threat. Not in nuclear arms but in
tolerance, enlightenment, rationality and understanding we must be seen as
superior to India…and in music too and in the arts.
Our wise men used to think that the
TTP (the Taliban native to Pakistan) represented an insurmountable challenge.
They thought Karachi was beyond solving. They have been proved wrong. Pakistan
has taken on tough challenges and is seeing them through successfully. Cannot
the people of Pakistan confront the problem of prohibition in a rational
manner? Cannot the veil of hypocrisy surrounding this issue, for issue it is,
be rent asunder?
The law forbids the acquisition and
consumption of liquor. The reality is otherwise, with every known brand of the
forbidden stuff in every large city just a telephone call away. The law and
reality must be brought in harmony – through whatever stratagem or hypocrisy
comes readily to hand – because prohibition, like it or not, is not a hallmark
of a rational society. It serves to promote Pakistan’s backward image, besides
encouraging criminal behaviour. What goes to the bootleg man must go to the
legitimate taxman. In this respect our model should be Dubai, not Saudi Arabia.
Dubai is an eminently pragmatic emirate, which is the outstanding reason for
its economic success.
To sum up, Narendra Modi is a godsend
to Pakistan. More power to Hindutva, more power to the saffron Nazism of the
RSS, the spiritual fountainhead before which the Indian prime minister bows. If
we master our internal weaknesses, expand the sphere of enlightenment and
tolerance, there is nothing that we have to fear from any other quarter.
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/opinion/modi-s-india-pakistan-s-opportunity/200647.html
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