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Pakistan's anti-India pathology

Pakistan's anti-India pathology

Author: Harold A. Gould
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: July 21, 2003
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=27990

Probably the most significant utterance made by General Pervez Musharraf made at his Camp David meeting with President George Bush last month went unnoticed by the press. At one point, after US President Bush declared that he is "hopeful that the two countries will deepen their engagement on all issues, including Kashmir", the General dutifully intoned his hope that this will be the case but nevertheless felt constrained to reiterate that Pakistan has "our sovereign equality to guard, vis-a-vis India". It was his way of saying that Pakistan's obsession with the "India threat" remains alive.

What is the India Obsession? The political divide between Hindus and Muslims originally arose from the fact that for centuries a Muslim minority had enjoyed political hegemony over the subcontinent's Hindu majority. Over the last century, as the power of the demographic majority ramified, the Muslim elites found their political dominance increasingly challenged. Many perceptive Muslims - such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan - realised the importance of Muslims achieving a relationship with the emerging Hindu majority.

While the struggle against British colonialism was taking root, a sub-plot of political manoeuvring was simultaneously occurring between the subcontinent's increasingly strident Muslim leadership and a determined Hindu-based leadership, whose differences were so intractable that Partition was the only way that imagined Muslim fears of Hindu demographic inundation could be assuaged. Unfortunately, however, the fear of Hindu inundation did not end with Partition. The Kashmir conflict provided a context for propagating the Hindu Threat on both sides of the LoC, but especially in Pakistan. In part this stemmed from what can only be called the deleterious consequences of a prolonged, communally-driven political psychopathology.

In part it also stemmed from the successful exploitation of this political bugaboo by the Pakistani military, in concert with the civil service cadres inherited from colonial rule, and the feudalistic landed elite in the western and northwestern provinces, to justify preventing the evolution of a viable secular parliamentary democratic system of government. Claims on Kashmir enabled this authoritarian cabal to create a military machine out of all proportion to Pakistan's strategic requirements which was and continues to be employed to make war on India, ostensibly in the name of Kashmir. In reality, however, it is nothing more than a quixotic perpetuation of the old separatist thirst for political parity with a dominant India. Kashmir could be settled overnight if there were not a section of a Pakistani elites that feeds off it for domestic political reasons.

America's tragedy was its decision to nourish the megalomaniacal fantasies of Pakistan's anti-democratic elites by sucking Pakistan into its militarised Cold War grand strategy. This is an old story which need not be elaborated here. But the aid packet US President George Bush made available to Musharraf during his visit to Camp David follows the same misguided pattern as all of its predecessors. At least half of the amount will go for military assistance, the very thing that economically desperate and politically frail Pakistan needs the least.

President Musharraf's assertion that any concessions made to US concerns does not mean Pakistan will abandon its obsession with the mythical Indian threat has an ominous ring. It reeks of the self-aggrandising preoccupations and jingoistic political illusions which continue to pervade the ranks of the extra- parliamentary junta who rule Pakistan. Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland, in one of his recent columns, has referred to the placatory pursuit of Musharraf as "fool's gold". It is an apt phrase.

The Bush-Musharraf tryst reveals that Cold War baggage remains embedded in US diplomatic culture. Certainly it survives in the Pentagon and undoubtedly in the ranks of the neoconservative set that has settled in around President Bush. In the circumstances, India will be compelled to adopt a wait-and-see posture pending some indication of whether Musharraf will, one, keep his promises and, two, be able to survive the slings and arrows of political dissent, jihadism and economic collapse. The inevitable wait will provide India with an opportunity to test its own political maturity and formulate policies that will maximise its own regional and global interests. This can be achieved from a position of strength, as India has now reached the level of a mature nation-state.

(The writer is Visiting Scholar, Center for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia)
 


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