Aware of history or trapped by it?

What moving on means

“To Fight India, We Fought Ourselves” is how Mohsin Hamid, internationally renowned novelist, titled one of his essays a little over two years ago. This title could easily be offered as a six word summation of our 67 year old history. Rarely will poignancy and truth intersect so perfectly.

Because Hamid was right 67 years on, from the day blood and bodies were transacted for a new land, a land for Muslims; we haven’t come along that far. Blood and body remain the currency. Back then we killed the ‘other’ to be with our own. Today we are killing our own and deeming them the ‘other’. Back then we killed for Islam. Today we kill in its name. And how we got here is captured, in large part, in Hamid’s phrasing of the title. We fought India — for 67 years. Yes even when we weren’t fighting India, we were fighting India. Behind the scenes. In dingy shadow offices stretching from north to south, tribal to the urban, we created an invisible army of “hit-men” with only one mission and one mission alone – kill the enemy. Be it intrigues of the most colourful variety or religiously marinated insurgencies, we changed masks all through our history, stabbing a much larger Leviathan hoping to bleed it to death. We sanctified death in song and ode. Gave it lovely names like ‘patriotism’ and ‘martyrdom’.

The generals say India was bigger and meaner. They took our Kashmir, they complain. ‘If Kashmir was theirs then Hyderabad and Junagarh were ours,’ is the common refrain. Fair point. All of partition was a suspect affair. From the initial intentions to the drawing of the actual lines. Our able and former masters — the Brits — were doubtless good at quite a few things but cartography wasn’t one of them. They cut lines through centuries old ethnicities and communities and left India dismembered in two distinctly uneven portions. The smaller portion, made even smaller by Kashmir’s annexation, much to the generals’ woe, soon became the more paranoid of the two. Awful separations can have such effect.

Be it intrigues of the most colourful variety or religiously marinated insurgencies, we changed masks all through our history, stabbing a much larger Leviathan hoping to bleed it to death

A question, then, to the gentlemen in khakis: which one of the two will outlive the other — the paranoia or the state? Surely the two cannot co-exist, by definition. It’s been 67 years. We have fought four wars with India. Lost the eastern wing in one of them. Are we any safer today? Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing repeatedly, expecting a online casino different outcome. Our paranoia has made us insane. And even though we make grand promises of reversing failed policies of the past, or starving the monster we nourished in our own backyard, just like we have made equally grand gestures of hanging terrorists of late, the paranoia nevertheless remains alive. It is everywhere. It stared at us when Jamaat-ud-Dawa – that lovely precursor to Lashkar-e-Taiba — burnt Indian and British flags in a rally on Kashmir day only a month ago. That a terrorist organisation, better understood as a death cult, founded by a terrorist, better understood as a mass murderer, continues to strut around in public, without apology, raises serious doubts over the establishment’s commitment to rooting out the scourge of which the said organisation is one many hideous and revolting faces. Lest we forget, Hafiz Saeed is not some shadowy figure operating out of a cave in some obscure hinterland, the man makes frequent public appearances. The ASWJ, another death cult, is thriving. They just recently rallied in Karachi. And in another shocker, the mastermind of the Mumbai attacks, Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, was granted bail. And here we thought 12/16 may have made a difference and stirred passions in souls that had long forgotten empathy. What, other than the paranoia of an existential threat presented by India, keeps the military from taking Hafiz Saeed types out? Some might offer other explanations, say, fear of reprisal. And they may have a point, but a weak one when one considers that this military fought the Russians, albeit through proxy, and made bold advancements in Kargil against an army much bigger. Surely Hafiz Saeed with his small band of lunatics is no scarier than the Kremlin’s Red Army.

The reality is this: India is an emerging superpower. Pakistan is not. The time is upon Pakistan to identify her enemies, and let’s hope to God that India is no longer considered to be one of them. Because the real enemy is already killing its people, eating it up from the inside. India, too, needs Pakistan. A stable Pakistan can only be good for India, if one excuses the tautology. India cannot achieve a viable leadership status in South Asia if its relations with Pakistan remain strained. So now is the time for both countries to make amends. Which makes the latest meeting of their respective foreign secretaries extremely important. These talks have come after eight months of dormancy when these meetings were cancelled by Modi as a reaction to Pakistan’s engagement of Kashmiri separatists. The talking points have remained much of the same: good old Kashmir, Siachen, Sir Creek, LoC/working boundary confrontations, insurgencies on Pakistan’s side and Samjhauta Express on India’s, among other bilateral concerns. But hopefully, if bilateral engagement/composite dialogue continues, then maybe, at some point, there will be something like what happened between Sharif and Vajpayee in the 90s, when a compromise on some of these lingering issues was almost reached by both parties; all of which came to a dead end due to Musharraf’s eagerness to storm into Kargil.

Pakistan will need to accept that on some of these issues like Kashmir or Siachen, there will no immediate solution, and even if there is one, it will come packaged in several layers of compromise

Pakistan will need to accept that on some of these issues like Kashmir or Siachen, there will no immediate solution, and even if there is one, it will come packaged in several layers of compromise. But this is what ‘moving on’ means. It is one thing to be aware of history and a different thing altogether to be trapped by it. There are other avenues more pressing for Pakistan at this stage of the game. Bilateral trade being one of them. Pakistan must wean itself off American tax dollars and IMF loans. It has to build strong and lasting ties with its neighbours on both its east and west. Just the same way China improved its relations with Vietnam, Cambodia, Russia and India; not by fighting proxy wars but by increasing trade. If European countries that were painting all of Europe with each other’s blood in the 20^th century are now part of a European Union, why can’t India and Pakistan bury nearly seven decades of hate and paranoia and rise in unison?

Whether the decision by India to resume diplomatic talks was influenced by American pressure and Obama’s recent visit to the country, or not, the bottom line is that such talks and initiatives will determine the direction of the entire region in the not too distant future. The three big powers – India, Pakistan and China – will need to assess their strengths and weaknesses and create the necessary synergies that have long been absent in all this time. China being a manufacturing giant has much to leverage from India’s services industry, just like India must move to a greater manufacturing role and a ‘value chain’ model if it wants to stay competitive and viable in today’s global economy, and in that it needs China more than ever. And both countries need Pakistan for regional stability, trade routes, and a largely untapped market of 200 million people.

For too long, the narrative of Indian partition has remained steeped in melancholy and regret. Although history’s script is only ever written once, the future is in our hands. Let’s change the narrative today and write a better script for the generations to come.