- Why blame the Arabs?
AT PENPOINT
As the world watches, something incredible is happening in Indian Held Kashmir; the lockdown clamped on the Valley, with curfew imposed while occupation forces have been moved in, is completing a month. Rather, the world is not watching, for while this human tragedy was occurring, the architect of this misery, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was busy in the Middle East, receiving civil awards from the UAE and Bahrain. Saudi Arabia’s Aramco, though a private company, is closely supervised by the government (which owns it), chose this time to announce its $15 billion investment in India’s Reliance Group.
Pakistani opinion has been shocked by this apparent callousness of the Arabs towards the Kashmiris. That should serve as a reminder that the Arabs have not been committed to Arab causes, let alone Islamic ones. Egypt most openly, and other Arab states to some extent, have betrayed the Palestinian cause. It is worth noting that Pakistan was very early struck by the similarity of the Kashmir and Palestinian dilemmas. Both lands had come under alien occupation after an act of British decolonisation.
The real problem seems to be the nation-state. Pakistan can deal with the Kashmir issue as a nation-state, in which case it would not be a Muslim issue, and thus not be relevant to other Muslims. Pakistan should not exercise itself over the Rohingya, Uighurs or Assamese, (or Palestinians, Iraqis or Syrians, for that matter) because none of these involve it as a nation
Over the decades, what has heightened the similarity is how the respective oppressors and illegal occupiers, Israel of the Palestinians and India of the Kashmiris, have come closer, to the extent that Modi included Israel in his Middle East itinerary. Another development has been how both countries have a diaspora in the USA, the Jewish one long having been influential, the Indian now growing in influence.
If one is to ask questions about Arab commitment to non-Arab Muslim causes, one would have to ask whether the Arab governments supporting India represent the wishes of the masses they rule. The Arab Spring indicate that they do not necessarily. However, even if those masses are not pro-Indian, they are very much under the control of their governments. It should be recognised that if the Pakistani government had had its way, the Pakistani masses would not indulge in the kind of ‘emotionalism and wishful thinking’ that is now manifesting itself about Kashmir.
Indeed, if Pakistan was to examine itself and its role in the Palestinian liberation movement, perhaps the first name that comes to mind is Ziaul Haque, who was a brigadier on secondment to the Jordanian Army when he played a major role in the Black September suppression of the PLO and other Palestinian armed groups, and also in fighting against Syria. The next is Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who courted PLO chief Yasser Arafat when he visited Pakistan to attend the 1974 OIC Summit.
If Kashmir is not a Muslim cause, then what is its special resonance for Pakistanis? Is it a ‘lost glacis’, in the sense of being a territory, that, like Bahawalpur, should have acceded to Pakistan? It would have, had its Maharaja not been a Hindu. True, Kashmir is mostly a North Punjabi land, but it is separate enough, and large enough, not to have been absorbed into the Punjab, as Bahawalpur was in 1969, as a civil division of Punjab, which it still is.
One reason is that it is the only Muslim-majority area still in India. Pakistan was conceived as a twist on nationalism, which saw religion as a possible national marker. The Congress first fought this, but as it moved in the 1920s and 1930s, under the influence of Mahatma Gandhi and the Hindu Mahasabha, towards seeing only Hindus as true Indians, it became increasingly closer to the Hindutva ideology.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) provides the template on which to judge this latest move. With the hindsight of about a century, it is possible to see the All-India Muslim League as fighting not so much the Congress, as the RSS. Indeed, the RSS sees the BJP as its political arm, and why not? One of its prachariks (Modi) only became PM at the head of the BJP, not the RSS.
It should not be forgotten that RSS was influenced by fascism. The Aryan master-race theory of the Nazi party found resonances with the RSS, who claimed the mantle of the original Aryans. And just as the fascists were racists, so were the Hindus, who had constructed a religion on the basis of racism, in the form of the caste system.
It should also not be forgotten that the Hindu society was larger than just India. Chauvinists see the whole Indian Ocean as its area of influence, and the role of mariners in maintaining relations between what is now the Gujarat and the Arabian Peninsula should not be forgotten, and indeed deserves more study from historians than it has received. It is thus perhaps appropriate that a Gujarati should be Indian PM and engaged with the Gulf Arab states.
It should not be forgotten either that fascism had got traction in the Subcontinent and the Arab world because anything opposed to the British had to be good. The racism inherent in it was overlooked, with the anti-Semitism being particularly welcome in Palestine, where the pre-Holocaust Jews had already placed pressure on the local Arabs.
Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has spoken of the RSS ideology in the context of the leaving of an estimated 1.7 million Assamese off the National Citizenship Register, on the pretext that they, or their ancestors, migrated from Bangladesh in 1971. The people are Muslims, so they do not fit in with the BJP’’s image of Indians, and must be rendered stateless.
These people are off the books for Pakistan, even though they are supposed to have migrated during a time when Bangladesh was still Pakistan. Another group of modern refugees supposed to have migrated from East Pakistan are the Rohingya, millions of whom have been rendered refugees, who have been refused citizenship by Myanmar.
The real problem seems to be the nation-state. Pakistan can deal with the Kashmir issue as a nation-state, in which case it would not be a Muslim issue, and thus not be relevant to other Muslims. Pakistan should not exercise itself over the Rohingya, Assamese, or Palestinians, Iraqis or Syrians, for that matter because none of these involve it as a nation. Even in the Kashmir issue, the nation-state framework does not seem helpful, for the main centre for resolving intra-national issues, the UN, cannot take up the issue without Indian consent. No wonder the sufferings of the Kashmiris will continue.