Jingoism is not patriotism

But in our neck of the woods…

Fresh tensions on the LoC were followed by yet another onslaught of verbal abuses and heated cuss words for our ‘traditional enemy’. As meaningless as the phrase ‘traditional enemy’ sounds, the nature of the verbal attacks were as hollow as two primary level kids fighting over whose daddy is stronger.

This trend was best demonstrated by the media and anchorpersons at both sides, going overboard at how well they can bash the other side. Relatively sane print media deemed it their responsibility to rescue their ‘national honour’ by totally ignoring the accusations hurled at their country and publishing altogether, new rounds of ‘hard questions’.

Government officials blurting lazy statements just for the sake of giving a statement made it almost impossible for one to calculate who went wrong and where both sides truly stand. To put it into simple words, every time there is a slight rift on the border, it becomes more of a match about which side can trump better patriotism. Not to mention, it comes as a golden opportunity for hate mongers, jingoists and fundamentalists to flutter their wings and woo fellow nationalists to their colours.

The frivolity and meaninglessness with which both Pakistanis and Indians are adamant on rubbing their respective flags onto others makes one truly believe in a notion which says, “Those who feel proud about trotting their flags don’t deserve to have one in the first place”.

There you go, I said it. Outcast me and call me unpatriotic for I am content to be one if patriotism asks for throwing filth on the enemy’s face and feeling elated every time when one of us stomps on human rights just to teach a lesson to the other side.

Let’s accept it: From time to time, both Pakistani and Indian armies have been guilty of violating Geneva conventions by mutilating the dead bodies of soldiers from the other side. Top brass’s screeching and shouting about ‘look-they-violated-again’ does not show any regard to their soldiers killed. For if that was the case, all of them should now have been sitting on the same table, at least showing willingness to negotiate instead of hissing on media about how much capable they are of hammering harsh lessons and trotting nuclear arsenals. The truth of the matter is that so far this has only resulted in the establishment of huge propaganda mills generating so much hatred that one begins to feel almost daft for questioning our motives and not being able to feel sorry about our soldiers dying for supposedly the holiest cause in the history of mankind.

For most part of the fresh Indo-Pak tension, our jingoists remained busy with a newer and much more interesting version of a messiah rescuing our very own Islamic republic of delusions. Finally when the state was done rescuing itself once again, another good old saviour’s stunt in one of the Indian talk shows came to the limelight. Ex-President Pervez Musharraf’s verbal attack on India redundant with lame accusations was well received by the Pakistani media and general public alike. A newsperson at our side couldn’t help grinning widely while telling his viewers about how our saviour made three sixes in a row on Indian batting field. Later on, one very widely followed Facebook group moved on to suggest that now India has a new rape victim and that is the anchor of that show, which had to bear with our general’s accusations, a clean sweep indeed.

Not to mention that our saviour’s disregard for dead soldiers of his own army was very well expressed by him just few days after his impressive performance. On yet another talk show, he casually dismissed Kargil war as a petty operation, claiming that some 300 causalities is not a big number to fuss about and that the Kargil war was just about teaching the Indians a lesson and taking revenge for 1971 and Siachin debacle.

Being a Pakistani I am not in a position to throw stones at Indian media and army generals when my own countrymen continue to shamelessly build and live in houses made of glass. Where generals choose to roll eyes and humph every time they are asked to come clean, one cannot tell who is lying but there are few things we do know for sure.

That is: we have deliberately nurtured an even deadlier weapon than the nuclear bomb. That is the terrorist organisations and we are still adamant on using them to gain strategic leverage in the region. Although Pakistan army under Musharaf’s rule claimed to turn its back on militant outfits, it still kept some factions of them as its secret allies. Zia-ul-haq established jihadis to gain strategic upper hand not only in Afghanistan but also in Kashmir and same goes for Musharraf regime. That’s how he was able to stoke fire for Kargil war. Tensions on LoC can imply a possibility that once again our establishment is preparing itself to exert strategic pressure by turning TTP’s attention towards Kashmir to keep ourselves in a favourable position in post-2014 scenario. The only difference is that by now TTP and other militant outfits are influential enough to exert their subjective agendas.

It is clear by now that we as a nation suffer from selective dementia and proudly so. We have been successfully able to process only that particular piece of information which does not put our own identities under doubt. The time to wakeup from our collective slumber of ignorance and to finally expect the bitter truth comes by only when the truth is not about us in the first place. We have clearly seen the outcome of this deadly love pact with the Taliban and selective dementia. Not asking for a complete cure but perhaps a little bit of reality touch every now and then can help us, I’m sure it won’t bite us as hard as choosing to relying on terrorists does.

The writer is a political satirist. She can be reached at [email protected]