Author: Koenraad Elst
Publication: Rediff on Net
Date: August 30, 2002
URL: http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/aug/30guest.htm
The American South Asia scholar
Robert M Hathaway has used the opinion page of the Chennai-based daily
The Hindu (August 8, 2002) as a forum for tendering advice to his own government.
Dr Hathaway is director of the Asia Program at the Woodrow Wilson International
Center for Scholars, a famous think tank in Washington DC.
The beautiful think tank network
in Washington DC should, to judge from the generous amounts of money oiling
it, provide American policy-makers with the fullest information and analysis
base available to any government in world history. And yet, American foreign
policy is by no means the most intelligent even in the contemporary world
scene.
Hathaway's article illustrates what
the problem is. Instead of laying down general principles or specific American
national interests, his advice concerning Washington's South Asia policy
focuses on sectional demands whispered into his ear by a foreign lobby
whose nature and motives he fails to comprehend. In particular, he wants
his own employer to investigate and eventually to block fund- raising in
the US by "groups implicated in the Gujarat violence." This is a demand
recently pushed by US-based Indian Communists such as FOIL (Forum of Indian
Leftists) as their latest weapon in their struggle against their nationalistic
compatriots.
Hathaway correctly reminds us that
"terrorism comes in many guises:" armed assaults, suicide bombings, assassinations
and "yes, hate-consumed mobs butchering innocent women and children". The
latter expression presumably refers to the Muslim attack on Hindu pilgrims,
a majority of them women and children, in a train in Godhra, Gujarat? Well,
no, unfortunately Hathaway is blind in one eye and exclusively refers to
those phases in the conflagration when Muslims were the victims. I will
charitably assume that this bias is not a matter of considered opinion
on Hathaway's part, merely an unreflected borrowing from his Indian sources.
Terror in Kashmir
Apart from poetry about a "sore"
to be "healed," Hathaway takes no interest whatsoever in India's main terrorist
problem, Islamic armed separatism in Kashmir. He merely warns Hindus not
to use Kashmir as an excuse for Gujarat, and denies that Hindu exasperation
at Muslim violence in Kashmir has anything to do with the Hindu reaction
in Gujarat, as if he had investigated the matter. Yet, it is precisely
on the Kashmiri frontline that America is most directly concerned, for
it has provided indirect support to the terrorists for more than a decade.
Many Hindus have been killed with American-made weapons and bombs.
The only act of terrorism in Kashmir
which has registered in his consciousness is "the assassination earlier
this year of Abdul Ghani Lone, who opposed Indian rule in Kashmir but who
in his final years had come to the realisation that violence and extremism
offer Kashmiris no way out in their struggle with New Delhi," a struggle
which Hathaway refuses to take distance from.
Outrageously, he insinuates that
this murder is the handiwork of the Indian government or its much- maligned
Hindutva allies. That indeed is the unmistakable implication of his statement:
"The Gujarat violence, Lone's assassination, and most recently, the designation
of L K Advani as deputy prime minister and most likely successor to Mr
Vajpayee have all raised new concerns about India's future among India's
friends in the US."
Misinformed by Indian "secularists,"
whose Communist background seems unknown to him, Hathaway assumes that
the soft-spoken Advani is some kind of extremist, and he blames the Indian
government for Advani's promotion as this is obviously a governmental decision.
(It is of course none of America's business whom the democratic Indian
government nominates; for months after his election, George W Bush rightly
gave the cold shoulder to European politicians who had overstepped diplomatic
decorum by openly supporting Bill Clinton and deploring Bush's victory.)
Again leaning on secularist sources, Hathaway blames the Gujarat violence
at least partly on the Indian government; why else should it "raise concerns"
as potentially damaging the inter-state relations between India and the
US?
Finally, in the same breath, in
his list of blameworthy moves tainting the Indian Government, Hathaway
claims that Lone's murder is a cause for worry about the course India is
taking. This is simply despicable.
Lone was murdered by Islamic separatists
more extreme than himself, by the very terrorists whom India has been fighting
for over a decade. The murder was one more anti-Indian blow struck by the
international Islamic terrorists against whom America claims to be waging
a war. How should it be a cause for worry among pro-Indian Americans that
India was targeted once more, now in the person of the relatively loyalist
Opposition leader Lone, by the terrorists? Isn't the merciless hostility
of the terrorists rather proving that India is doing something right?
Sovereignty
Hathaway probably doesn't understand
why the vast majority of the human race is fed up with American arrogance.
And by this, I don't just mean the anti-American fanaticism and conspiracy
theories in the Muslim world, but also the healthy skepticism about the
boundless American self- centredness which you may encounter in India,
China or Europe. He might do well to reread this statement of his: "Some
Indians, of course, say that the tragic events in Gujarat are a domestic
Indian affair, and that the United States and the rest of the world have
no business intruding into a purely internal Indian matter. This is a self-serving
falsehood."
No, this is purely a matter of national
sovereignty. India wants no foreign interference, a principle which America
not only endorses but takes to inordinate lengths. Just recently, President
Bush has declared he will not tolerate the arrest and sentencing of American
intervention personnel by a non-American court, not even the UN-sponsored
international tribunal in The Hague. He even reserved the right to invade
the Netherlands to free American citizens brought before that court. India's
insistence on managing its own communal problems is far more modest than
the bullying American conception of national sovereignty.
America and the Muslim world
While not providing any reason whatsoever
why India should have an interest in conceding to America a right to intervene,
Hathaway focuses on America's own self-interest in supporting the Muslim
pogromchik side in the Gujarat carnage: "Important American interests,
including the global war against terrorism, can be directly impacted by
what the US says -- and fails to say -- about Gujarat. At this particular
moment in history, the US cannot allow the impression to take hold that
Americans somehow value a Muslim life less than the life of a person of
another religion."
In the Indian subcontinent, there
is no danger whatsoever that anyone will get this impression, for the reality
is too obviously the opposite. American meddlers, Hathaway among them,
consistently turn a blind eye towards Hindu victims of Muslim violence,
in India as well as in Pakistan and Bangladesh. America has consistently
given material and diplomatic support to the very forces which have been
butchering Hindus.
Hathaway insists strongly on this
point, that America is not at all anti-Muslim: "Sadly, there are those
in the Islamic world who assert that the present conflict is a war directed
not against terrorism, but against Islam. That the US does not care about
Muslims. That Washington seeks to hijack the tragedies of 9/11 to carry
out long-held plans to repress the Islamic world. These are detestable
lies, but many in the Muslim world are prepared to believe them."
If Muslims believe these "detestable
lies," it must be because of America's anti-Palestinian position in the
Middle East, or because of its tacit support to Russia's campaign in Chechnya.
It seems that Muslims just want to have it all and are ungrateful for the
American support to the Muslim side in many other conflicts: against the
Greeks in Turkish northern Cyprus, against the Soviets in Afghanistan,
against the Serbs in Bosnia and Kosovo, against India in Kashmir. No further
pro-Muslim gesture is going to convince those who attribute anti-Muslim
motives to an American government which has already so consistently supported
Muslim interests on many fronts.
What anti-American Muslims also
fail to understand, is the structural economic reason for America's preferring
the Muslim world over the fledgling infidel superpower India. The Muslim
world is not very dynamic and has a lot of purchasing power, so it is the
perfect market for American hi-tech (and low- tech, eg, agricultural) products.
India, by contrast, has only limited purchasing power but is a very dynamic
competitor in all advanced industrial sectors. For this reason, and also
to compensate the Muslim world for the permanent grievance over American
support to "the Zionist entity," America is bound to take the Muslim side
in purportedly peripheral conflicts, especially against India. The peptalk
about India and the US being "natural allies" as "the biggest and the oldest
democracy" has little impact on real-life policies.
War against terrorism
Hathaway's concept of a "war against
terrorism" is flawed: terrorism is a strategy, not an enemy. As Daniel
Pipes has remarked, "war against terrorism" makes as much sense as "war
against trenches" or "war against carpet-bombing". If American policy-makers
cannot define their enemy more properly, their mindless muscle-flexing
dooms them to misdirected aggression and ultimately to humiliation and
defeat. You can bomb only so many Afghan wedding parties by mistake without
paying a price.
But at least Hathaway is aware of
India's consistent stand against terrorism: "Following the trauma Americans
experienced on September 11, India was one of the first countries in the
world to step forward with a pledge of unconditional and unambivalent support
for the US in its quest to bring to justice those responsible for the terror
attacks in New York and Washington. The administration of George W Bush,
already keen to upgrade relations with Delhi, took notice."
Unfortunately, it is unclear to
what this "notice" has amounted in practice. True, the US has lifted the
sanctioned imposed against India for conducting nuclear tests in May 1998.
But this gesture of goodwill toward an anti-terrorist frontline state was
counterbalanced by the same gesture towards Pakistan, the prime sponsor
and organiser of terrorism, eventhough Pakistani links have been proven
in a number of terrorist attacks against not only Indian but also American
targets. Just recently, the US has resumed the delivery of advanced weaponry
to the Pakistani army, whose prime target is not terrorism but India.
(Dr Koenraad Elst is a Belgian author
who has written more than 15 books on Indian nationalism, history, politics,
religious conflict.)
