March of the lemmings

[HASEEB ANSARI]

March of the lemmings
By JAWED NAQVI

UNLIKE the US and Japan or Britain and France today, India-Pakistan ties look set to continue to be governed by their colonial history and certain perverse impulses it engendered in the people. Let us see why, and how.

William Shirer is better regarded for his insights into the dark world of Nazi Germany than for his fondness of Mahatma Gandhi. A friend in Lucknow lent me a paperback copy of Gandhi, the American journalist’s take on the Indian leader he befriended.

The Chicago Tribune correspondent also threw light on other dramatis personae of the period, including a close look into the evolving mind of Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

Many of Shirer’s observations are relevant today, and as the ground is prepared for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to visit Pakistan, at least in my mind, the American journalist’s insights take the front row.

I believe the focus on India-Pakistan ties will continue to produce cosmetic outcomes if the two countries remain tethered to colonial precepts of governance and exploitation of their own people.

A reference to Hindu-Muslim communalism by Shirer gave an intriguingly factual account of the genesis of the religious fault lines in South Asia and how they were exploited and honed into full-blown communalism to serve colonial purposes.

Shirer’s inquiry into how many of the communal riots “were incited by the British in their effort to keep both communities at each other’s throats so that they could not unite in their drive for self-rule” revealed a startling perfidy.

He records how the “British chief of police in Bombay once told me — almost as a joke — that it was very easy to provoke a Hindu-Muslim riot. For a hundred dollars, he said, you could start something really savage. Pay some Muslims to throw the carcass of a cow into a Hindu temple, or some Hindus to toss a dead pig into a mosque, and you could have, he said, a bloody mess, in which a lot of people would be knifed, beaten and killed”.

Shirer was of course not swayed completely by what he heard from his colonial contact.

“Whatever the British role may have been in inciting many of these massacres, it did not excuse the leaders of the two communities,” he observed tartly. “There seemed to be plenty of unscrupulous and irresponsible fanatics among them who would turn their followers to butchering those of the other faith.”

Religious fault lines carry an old birth tag but their evolution into usefully exploitable communalism is patently a modern-day phenomenon. The Jamaat-i-Islami and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh were founded in the British era. Communalism endured the demise of colonialism and was quickly harnessed to serve the purposes of the newly independent nation states the British had helped create.

The fault lines were always there. The British administrators merely exploited them. Now it was the turn of the new states to put the lingering, often bitter differences to use. One of the features of communal riots during colonialism was the equal empowerment of the two sides to carry out vicious attacks against each other.

The division of the subcontinent into predominantly Hindu and Muslim partitions presented a new challenge. The states could no longer remain neutral in a communal riot nor could they continue to nurture the dream offered by Nehru or Jinnah of a secular and equitable contract with the people within their respective areas of governance.

Thus when Manmohan Singh visits Pakistan he can go on to sign as many agreements as he wishes, ranging from trade to mutual exploitation of Kashmir and Afghanistan, with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Their predecessors did the same. But these were and will be agreements between two states that continue to resort to Machiavellianism of colonial proportions in their governance and exploitation of the subjects.

India’s communal arithmetic as also its older caste fault lines are not only excavated for votes in elections, they form the spine of governance. The Indian state though notionally secular has nurtured Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communalists equally but it has behaved as an upper-caste Hindu state to settle their disputes.

The Pakistani state has veered to the far right too, so much so that it looks with embarrassment, if not outright hostility, at Jinnah’s secular prescriptions.

I have ceaselessly asked my Pakistani friends to explain the basis of their belief that a country created on the basis of a communal award could keep its tryst with Jinnah’s secular musings. On most occasions they have said: “Exactly as your country strives to find its secular feet in a predominantly Hindu format.”

However, the bitter truth is that both countries have failed miserably to stay with the laudable objectives of their founders.

Ask a liberal Sikh or Muslim, or a Christian in India if their communities can expect justice from the state in incidences of communal violence. The answer will be overwhelmingly in the negative.

When the state becomes communal it comes close to fascist administration, and communal violence assumes the form of police encounters.

The world is talking about the cold-blooded murder of Ishrat Jahan, the college girl who was kidnapped and killed by Narendra Modi’s police chiefs to deepen his anti-Muslim agenda, but my mind strays to the thousands of Sikhs who were disappeared or killed in encounters in the 1980s, or were lynched by mobs, and who haven’t got justice.

In Pakistan these fault lines exist within the perceived homogeneity of Islam. As a sage said, Muslims had sought inclusion of others into their fold. Now they want the exclusion of Muslims from Islam.

Thus, if Dr Singh and Mr. Sharif want to solve the problems of Kashmir, or attempt to figure out Afghanistan, they need to return to the promise of equity and secularism their nations’ founders offered. Anything less would ominously resemble the march of lemmings to suicide.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.