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2007-08-12 India-Pakistan
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Time to rest partition file
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Come August 15 and the well-worn tale of the sub-continent's partition is retold with an enthusiasm worthy of the Arabian Nights. It is, methinks, an insurance against Indians in cocky celebration of Independence Day rather than in modish flagellation over the lost paradise of Lahore and Karachi, Dhaka and Chittagong. Maudlin sentimentality laced with large doses of prescriptive guilt make for a heady brew. Fevered memories race ahead of torpid minds, inducing a disoriented sense of loss.
This generally is establishment British theatre, its scripted sense of disbelief. Pakistan may have sprung from Islam's sacred seed, but it needed the earthly intervention of John Bull, as imperial British house doctor, to release the struggling infant from the womb. There were once fond hopes that the mewling creature would grow into healthy, tameable manhood. Alas for the best laid plans of mice and men.
Britannia's hound has mutated into a defiant latter-day Hound of the Baskervilles. From the blasted heath of Afghanistan, to the killing fields of Iraq and the bomb-strewn debris of London and New York, we hear the chilling jihadi howls of the darkest night. The monster has slipped its leash and the handler's own hearth and home are now in peril.
Even as television and radio documentaries expose the searing hostility of Britain's jihadi citizens towards the country of their birth or adoption, the British media - with the BBC leading from the front - subject their public to the seasonal India-Pakistan construct based on counterfeit moral and political equivalence. Partition films and programmes should be seen as calls to a dirge.
Deaths beyond imagining and the cruelties of the world's greatest forced migration are grim reminders of human depravity. Like the Holocaust, they should never be cast into some anaesthetised limbo.
But the Nazi Holocaust possessed the organising intelligence of a totalitarian state bent on the final solution of racial extermination. The holocaust that accompanied the sub-continent's partition belongs to the category of random and locally driven slaughter not unknown to history.
The Caesarean operation resulted in the twin births of a free India and a homeland for the region's Muslim population called Pakistan, which translates as 'Land of the Pure'. Free of the primordial tensions of inter-communal living, India and Pakistan have gone their separate ways.
India and Pakistan represent opposing political and moral poles and hence, it would appear, never the twain shall meet. Perhaps they will some day. After all, the Good Book tells us that Christ raised Lazarus from the dead, fed the multitude with five loaves and two fishes and turned water into wine.
So one lives in hope. The children of the present are condemned to embark on life's long crusade with Gen Pervez Musharraf and Osama bin Laden, an arduous undertaking best likened to a relationship of parallel lines, which, say wise mathematicians, meet in infinity.
Apart from its politicians - a heavy cross stoically borne by the Indian people - India today has much to celebrate. The entire gamut of science and technology, thrusting business enterprise keen to conquer new worlds, and a functioning democracy, warts and all, constitute the epic of our times. The vicissitudes of six momentous decades have tempered a nation whose future was the frequently predicted apocalypse of dissolution and fratricidal strife.
For much of the West's far-Left and hard-Right Oriental despotism, not democracy, represented the true grain of history. Such ideologues perceived Maoist China as the lighted beacon, India as the beacon quenched in smoke.
The India-US civilian nuclear accord is seminal recognition of India as a state whose time has come. The leader of the Western alliance, the world's sole superpower and progenitor of the sanctions regime against India, is signalling a diplomatic revolution of far-reaching consequences to the international community, which it would do well to take on board.
It is scarcely a coincidence that the right-Wing, India-baiting, London-based Economist's broadside at the Bush Administration is matched by a similar diatribe from the Indian Communist parties who lay exclusive claim to the copyright of Indian patriotism, the same who once derided Indian independence as counterfeit, the brainchild of Anglo-American imperialism.
The great Dr Johnson, blessed with second sight, described patriotism as "the last refuge of a scoundrel". Time magazine, The Times of London and the Left broad church New Statesman have published supplements and special articles on the India phenomenon. Consider that, in February 1967, a year before the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was signed and the sanctions regime against India seeded, the India correspondent of The Times, Neville Maxwell, signed off his stay in New Delhi with the prediction that India's general election would be the country's last before the arrival of Indian military rule.
Mention of Chairman Mao's People's Communes and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would induce in our scribe the usual levitation of ecstasy. It was popular sixties' circus.
Ptolemy's universe may have collapsed under the weight of the Copernican revolution, but the far-Left and the hard-Right, long mired in their semi-literate conceits, have yet to appreciate the true significance of change.
We return thus to the partition file. What should be celebrated in its myriad contents is the separate emergence of a sovereign India secure in its democratic pluralism, firm in its uses of science and technology.
The dream of a united sub-continent would surely have turned into a nightmare of competing confessional dispensations, of which Lebanon is a prime example. The supreme irony is that the murderous politics of Mohammed Ali Jinnah's 'Direction Action Day' and 'Deliverance Day' has become the staple Pakistani life. The Quaid-e-Azam bears prime responsibility for the rivers of blood that flowed from partition, yet this also is an eternal warning to Indians to guard against their inner demons and the incendiary lunacies of mob rule.
The liberal imperialism of Britain and America has played Russian roulette with Pakistani militarism and its jihadi allies. The game has not been worth the candle. The spectre haunting civilised humanity today is not that of international communism but a crusading Islam bent on chastening a diverse world into a common, dreary shape.
This conflict of minds and bodies will not be won until the West draws on the special strengths of Russia and India, said one George Bathurst to The Spectator. He saw no room for cherry pickers.
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Posted by john frum 2007-08-12 07:45||
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Posted by McZoid 2007-08-12 18:34||
2007-08-12 18:34||
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