A sappy (but patently true) line to say on Mothers’ Day or Fathers’ Day is that everyday is Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day.
In our hapless Republic, the same seems to be true for Defence Day. Everyday is Defence Day. The younger of our citizens — I am talking about the 10-year-olds here — might even be perplexed by the need to have a special day.
The Pakistani state and its defenders have been conflated. That much is visible on Independence Day. The iconography on display on the 14th is almost identical to what you get to see on Defence Day. The same tanks, fighter aircraft, navy destroyers. Every August, we seem to commemorate the birth of the Pakistan armed forces, not Pakistan.
A blitz of such imagery passed by last week on the 6th of September.
Now the case of the sixth is a bit interesting. You see, the date commemorates an event during the ‘65 war. Yes, we will also talk about the fallen sons of ‘71, but if we mean to celebrate our defence forces, ‘65 is the war we keep wanting to talk about.
Which is interesting. Because Pakistan also fought a fourth war with India, a “miniwar” in Kargil. The media recollection of that war isn’t flattering. Barring occasional episodes of hyper-jingoism, our media generally thinks that Kargil was a debacle.
In fact, blame is constantly passed around about it, with Musharraf saying Nawaz Sharif knew all about it and the latter denying it till this very day. And the media plays the part; always trying to investigate who was responsible every anniversary of the misadventure.
The question: why does the media, then, have different standards for the ‘65 war?
What differences can you spot between the two wars? They were both acts of infiltration into Indian territory (in de jure, de facto terms). They were both unacknowledged till the very end. In fact, Operation Gilbraltar still hasn’t been recognised by Pakistan. They both involved sending over troops to Indian-occupied Kashmir and hoping for a mass uprising. They were both extremely ill-planned.
The few differences: one had a military government, the other had a military bypassing the political government to do what it had wanted.
So why, specifically, is this war venerated and Kargil trashed?
Independent, neutral historians seem to be split into two camps. There are those who say India won the war. Then there are those who say it was a stalemate. Within this second category, the overwhelming majority still believes that had an internationally-brokered ceasefire not taken place, India would have won the war. Lal Bahadur Shastri simply didn’t want the bother of all that international pressure. Plus, it has to be remembered, his was the side that didn’t want the war in the first place.
Let us now look at another weak case for victory: that, yes, we started it and failed what we’d started. But the Indians then wanted to teach us a lesson by occupying Lahore and we didn’t let that happen. First, Lahore wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place if we hadn’t initiated Operation Gilbraltar. Two, Lahore would most certainly have fallen had the aforementioned international intervention not taken place.
Now if we were to look right next door to India itself, we would find that just three years earlier than Operation Gilbraltar, the Indians lost a war to the Chinese. Friendship with China had been a cornerstone of Nehruvian foreign policy doctrine but a series of missteps on India’s part and perhaps some sabre-rattling on China’s part led to the war.
The Chinese beat the Indians hollow and, just when Assam was all but theirs to take, they simply retreated and the war was over. The Indians certainly did not pretend to have won the war. If it were Pakistan, we would have claimed to have thwarted back Chinese aggression. That they couldn’t take over Assam. Hell, if we’re in the business of making things up, we could even say they let go of Assam when we let go of the several Chinese cities that we had captured.
“The past is never dead,” said William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.” The problem with our flawed interpretation of history is that we are still in the same ridiculous mindset that got us in the war in the first place. Back then, we actually thought a single Muslim soldier could take on twenty Indians. Building up on that, we probably thought that the elite SSG commandos could probably take on more than a hundred each. Well, this elite cadre were air-dropped into India in an operation that even an English writer that the Pakistan military otherwise loves called “an unmitigated disaster.”
Bah, humbug, you say? That we need all this to keep morale up? Yes, fair point. But that problem is that we tend to believe our own BS.
Slow change?
Capital TV’s National Security Editor Ejaz Haider, a former army officer himself, isn’t generally thought of as a member of the anti-establishment camp. His views can be pretty jingoistic. Some of that jingoism could be seen, of late, when it came to the tensions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
But the fellow does colour outside the lines that have been set for him.
On Capital TV’s Awaam on the 6th of September (online viewers can click on the link below) he critcised the army chief’s address. It should have been his boss, the defence minister, who should have been making the speech. And this business of talking about CPEC is certainly not in the COAS’s purview.
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4s60ot_awaam-6th-september-2016_news
The failures of the war we are remembering are being reinforced by the current scheme of things, he says.
The problem here, one that he would surely realise — I’m sure he moves about in the real world and talks to real people — is that the public does not consider those failures in the first place.
