Democrats in India may well believe that the Pakistani people deserve better, but it is difficult to imagine a viable alternative to military rule, cloaked to a greater or lesser degree in civilian raiment. As explained earlier, the central fact of Pakistani politics has always been the power of the military, which has ruled the country directly for thirty-two of its sixty-four years of existence and indirectly the other half of the time. The military can be found not only in all the key offices of government, but running real-estate and import–export ventures, petrol pumps and factories; retired generals head most of the country’s universities and think tanks. The proportion of national resources devoted to the military is by far the highest in the world. Every once in a while a great surge of disillusionment with the generals pours out into the streets and a ‘democratic’ leader is voted into office, but the civilian experiment always ends badly, and the military returns to power, to general relief. The British political scientist W.H. Morris-Jones once famously observed that the only political institutions in Pakistan are the coup and the mob. Neither offers propitious grounds for believing that an enduring democracy is around the corner.
The elections that created Pakistan’s current civilian government saw Benazir’s party benefiting from a sympathy vote after her killing, but in the absence of a charismatic leader, it was inevitably obliged to come to an accommodation with the generals. Despite widespread anger at Musharraf’s failure to protect Benazir, his successor, General Kayani, determines how far the civilian government can go on all the issues that matter to the country, and his personal authority has been confirmed by a three-year extension of his tenure beyond the scheduled retirement age. Kayani, a former head of the ISI, knows how useful the Islamist militants are to his military goals, but he is also conscious that his men have lost control of many of the more wild-eyed elements they had previously encouraged and funded. The result is a particularly delicate version of running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. The Islamists, who have never won more than 10 per cent of the popular vote nationally, fared even worse electorally in the aftermath of Benazir’s killing; most people assume her killers were religious fundamentalists. The Islamist sympathizers in the Pakistani military, of whom there are many in key positions (notably in the ISI), are also on the defensive in the face of popular fury at Benazir’s murder and the assaults on Pakistani military installations (IGHQ Rawalpindi and the naval base in Mehran, near Karachi) by Islamist fundamentalists. The great danger in Pakistan has always lain in the risk of a mullah–military coalition. The death of Benazir and the events in its aftermath have made that less likely for now, and that may remain her most significant legacy.
International affairs all too often seems a weighty subject, full of complexity and nuance, laden with portents of tension and conflict. No wonder it lends itself to overly solemn treatment, full of abstract analyses and obscure allusions: the relations between countries, it is usually assumed, cannot be understood through the recitation of trivial anecdotes.
True enough. And yet sometimes a minor incident, a tempest in a teacup, can illuminate broader foreign policy challenges. Something of this nature happened in the hot summer of 2011, when Aatish Taseer, the estranged son (by an Indian mother) of the assassinated Governor of Pakistani Punjab Salman Taseer, wrote a searing column in the Wall Street Journal, with the provocative title ‘Why My Father Hated India’, on the pathologies of hatred that in his view animated Pakistan’s attitude to our country.
‘To understand the Pakistani obsession with India, to get a sense of its special edge—its hysteria—it is necessary to understand the rejection of India, its culture and past, that lies at the heart of the idea of Pakistan,’ Aatish Taseer averred. ‘This is not merely an academic question. Pakistan’s animus toward India is the cause of both its unwillingness to fight Islamic extremism and its active complicity in undermining the aims of its ostensible ally, the United States.’
He went on to make his point in language that was sharp and, at least to this reader, heartfelt and accurate. I do not know Aatish Taseer, nor had I met his colourful father, but I have admired the young man’s writing, particularly his poignant ruminations on Salman Taseer’s murder by his Islamist bodyguard earlier this year. So I was surprised to see the outraged reactions his article provoked from Pakistani liberal journalists. A number of them whose ideas I have appreciated and whom I ‘follow’ on the social networking site Twitter—the likes of Marvi Sirmed and Mosharraf Zaidi, widely respected progressive thinkers both—reacted with rage and derision. One of them, the estimable Ejaz Haider, who has penned some courageous pieces in the Pakistani press criticizing his own country and some morally deplorable ones defending Hafiz Saeed, went so far as to author an entire column to disparage and deconstruct Aatish Taseer’s.
Young Taseer had, in his piece, put the onus on the Pakistani Army for that country’s problems, and particularly for diverting the vast amounts of American aid it has received (he underestimated it at ‘$11 billion since 9/11’) to arming itself against India. He added, powerfully, words I would have gladly put my own name to: ‘In Afghanistan, it has sought neither security nor stability but rather a backyard, which—once the Americans leave—might provide Pakistan with “strategic depth” against India. In order to realize these objectives, the Pakistani army has led the U.S. in a dance, in which it had to be seen to be fighting the war on terror, but never so much as to actually win it, for its extension meant the continuing flow of American money. All this time the army kept alive a double game, in which some terror was fought and some—such as Laskhar-e-Tayyba’s 2008 attack on Mumbai—actively supported.
‘The army’s duplicity was exposed decisively this May,’ he went on, ‘with the killing of Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. It was only the last and most incriminating charge against an institution whose activities over the years have included the creation of the Taliban, the financing of international terrorism and the running of a lucrative trade in nuclear secrets. This army, whose might has always been justified by the imaginary threat from India, has been more harmful to Pakistan than to anybody else. It has consumed annually a quarter of the country’s wealth, undermined one civilian government after another and enriched itself through a range of economic interests, from bakeries and shopping malls to huge property holdings.’
It is hard to imagine anyone in India, however sympathetic they might be to Pakistan, dissenting from this view of the malign role of the Pakistani military. In our naivety, we also tend to assume that Pakistani liberals would agree with us, seeing the salvation of their land lying in greater democracy and development, free of the stranglehold of the world’s most lopsidedly funded military. Alas, judging by their reactions to Taseer’s article, this seemed not to be the case.
In his rebuttal, Ejaz Haider went into great detail about the strength and deployment patterns of the Indian Army, as if to justify the Pakistani military’s behaviour. But there was no recognition whatsoever that India’s defence preparedness is prompted entirely by the fact that Pakistan has launched four incursions into our territory, in 1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999; that India is a status quo power that manifestly seeks nothing more than to be allowed to grow and develop in peace, free from the attentions of the Pakistani military and the militants and terrorists its sponsors; and, bluntly, that there is not and cannot be an ‘Indian threat’ to Pakistan, simply because India wants nothing from Pakistan except peace.
No, as I have already argued, the ‘Indian threat’ is merely a useful device cynically exploited by the Pakistani military to justify their power and pelf. But Pakistani liberals are particularly prone to the desire to prove themselves true nationalists; it is the best way to ensure that their otherwise heretical opinions are not completely discredited by the men in uniform who hold the reins of power in the state.
In a newspaper column, therefore, I wrote that this otherwise minor editorial spat had demonstrated to me that Indians needed to put aside ou
r illusions that there are many liberal partners for us on the other side of the border who echo our diagnosis of their plight and share our desire to defenestrate their military. Nor, I added, should we be surprised: a Pakistani liberal is, after all, a Pakistani before he is a liberal.
This column provoked howls of even greater outrage across the border than young Taseer’s original effort had. (It didn’t help that an Indian headline writer had chosen to title it ‘Delusional Liberals’, which raised additional hackles among those in Pakistan who felt the noun, but not the adjective, applied to them.) The reactions, both in print and even more angrily in social media forums, were sharp. Inevitably, I was subjected to the usual bouts of invective and abuse that have so cheapened discourse in the age of the Internet, where the refuge provided by anonymity has encouraged a level of vileness that few would permit themselves to express face-to-face. But those need not detain us here. Far more interesting and worthy of attention were three columns in the mainstream Pakistani media responding to mine. By broadening and deepening the terms of the debate beyond the Taseer piece, they made my original column worth writing.
The tenor of the three articles (none of whose authors I had met by then or known personally) varied. The most liberal of the trio, Marvi Sirmed, in her column in the Daily Times, began by clarifying that she had actually no disagreement with the central thesis of Aatish Taseer’s article (on the various misdeeds of the Pakistani military establishment), but had rejected the author’s assertion that his father, Salman Taseer, the late Governor of Pakistani Punjab, ‘hated’ India. She also objected to Aatish’s claim that Pakistan was the ‘dream of a poet’ (Muhammad Iqbal, who first wrote of a Muslim homeland within India), though this was not an issue I had dwelt on in my own piece. And she ended with two impressive points I had no difficulty acknowledging: that I should be more conscious of the diversity of the Pakistani liberal community, and that Ms Sirmed saw herself as a proud Pakistani whose love of her country did not oblige her to hate India. Marvi Sirmed is the kind of intelligent, broad-minded Pakistani most Indians would have no difficulty engaging with, and I tipped my (metaphorical) Gandhi cap to her.
Ejaz Haider, whose riposte to Aatish Taseer had sparked my initial piece, was less accommodating of my core argument, seeing it as an exercise in ‘considered perception-formation and reinforcement’. By this he seemed to imply that my article was part of a devious Indian conspiracy to affect perceptions of his country negatively; in fact he titled his column ‘It’s Not Just Mr. Tharoor!’ My fellow conspirators (on the basis of recent articles we had each written) apparently included young Taseer, the Mumbai-born American strategist Ashley Tellis and the Indian analyst Nitin Pai, who has suggested (as I have done separately) that the United States should end its overgenerous aid to Pakistan’s military–jihadi complex. Ejaz Haider then proceeds to put words in our collective mouths to the tune that we seek ‘India’s supremacy in the region’ and the resolution of disputes only ‘on India’s terms’. None of us has made so fatuous a suggestion, but the exaggeration was, alas, necessary to demolish our case.
Then Ejaz Haider (who, it must be said, is one of Pakistan’s finest columnists, and whom I have enjoyed reading for years) got on to firmer ground. He admitted that there is a military–civilian divide in Pakistan, but argued that most of his country’s conflicts with India have originated under, or at the instigation of, civilian politicians, not military rulers. In any case, this is ‘Pakistan’s internal matter’ and acknowledging it should not imply any neglect of national security or abdication of Pakistani self-interest. And the clincher: ‘we don’t need advice from across the border’ (especially, he adds gratuitously, from pundits who ‘crawled on their bellies’ during the Emergency, a charge from which all those he was responding to are in fact exempt).
Ejaz Haider was joined in the pages of Pakistan’s Express Tribune by Feisal Naqvi, who found my arguments ‘cretinous in the extreme’ and ‘gratuitously smug about India’s lack of strategic ambitions’. Invective aside, Naqvi’s argument was that while Pakistanis were obsessed with India, ‘the opposite of India-obsessed is not India-submissive’ (which, again putting words into my mouth, I allegedly want them to be). Mr Naqvi also finds, somewhere between the lines of my column, something I never wrote—a rejection of the very legitimacy of Pakistan’s existence. Pakistani liberals, he asserts, are happy being Pakistani, value their military and have no desire to dismantle it. My article instead ‘delegitimizes’ them in the eyes of the Pakistani establishment. (Sigh.)
What was particularly interesting about these well-written responses is that they relied principally on refuting arguments I haven’t made. I am totally reconciled to Pakistan’s existence as an independent state, and have no desire to reintegrate it into a pre-Partition ‘Akhand Bharat’—indeed, the demographic, social and political evolution of Pakistan since 1947 makes it quite unsuitable for any such reabsorption. I do understand that Pakistan has to survive in a tough neighbourhood and it needs a capable military. And I do not expect any Pakistani government, military or civilian, to act in anything but Pakistan’s own best interest.
But—and alas, there is a but—I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be the country whose armed forces consume the largest percentage of national income of any military in the world. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to adopt a policy of seeking ‘strategic depth’ by destabilizing its neighbours. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to try to wrest Kashmir from India by fair means or foul. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be the cradle and crucible of militant Islamist terrorism. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be a country where no elected civilian government has ever served a full term. And I do believe that any Pakistani liberal worth the name (take a bow, Marvi Sirmed) should have no difficulty in agreeing with any of these propositions.
Even if they come from an Indian. Ay, there’s the rub …
The same problem surfaced, in different guise, a few weeks later, when New Delhi played host to a visiting delegation of Pakistani parliamentarians, brought to India by an enterprising Islamabad NGO called PILDAT (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency). Few things in international affairs are more agreeable, all round, than the non-official dialogues diplomats refer to as ‘Track-II’. But for all its non-official character, this was a high-powered delegation, including a vice-chairman of the Pakistani Senate, a deputy speaker, former ministers and a serving information secretary of the ruling party. On India’s side of the parliamentary border, the meeting was co-chaired, in a commendably bipartisan spirit, by a former Congress party minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s last foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha. I was, without quite intending to be it, the only dissident.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favour of Indo-Pak peace and bonhomie. I’ve seen a lot of it in my decades abroad—many is the time a Pakistani cab driver in New York has attempted to decline my money for the fare, saying that I was a brother (this of course always won him a bigger tip, but the spirit was genuine). Indians and Pakistanis overseas are almost always the best of friends, since being in foreign lands enhances their consciousness of what they have in common, which vastly exceeds what divides them. I would love to see a time when Pakistanis and Indians can cross each other’s borders with the insouciance of Americans and Canadians, work in each other’s countries, trade freely with each other and contribute equally to each other’s films, music, clothing and creative lives, just as they did before 1947. I would be happy if that time came sooner rather than later. But, sadly, I am only too aware that it’s not now.
The problem with Indo-Pak Track-II dialogues of the kind I witnessed in the capital is that they are essentially built on denial. They focus on making the visitors feel welcome, emphasize the feel-good aspects of their presence in our midst, celebrate the many things we have in common and try to brush the real problems und
er a carpet (not a Kashmiri carpet, since that might provoke disagreeable thoughts). In other words, they are a self-fulfilling exercise in self-vindication. Their success depends on denying the very disagreements that makes such dialogues necessary in the first place.
The event began with a somewhat odd opening panel discussion, where members of the audience rounded on the moderator, News X’s Jehangir Pocha, for moderately raising some real questions, when his job had apparently been intended to be to orchestrate a paean of pious homilies to peace and brotherhood. So when I took the floor late in the next morning’s session, I had been fairly warned. But after listening to several bromides from parliamentarians of both nationalities, I felt a dose of candour was necessary. So I pointed out that there were some genuine obstacles to be overcome if the peace and love we were all affirming was in fact to take root, rather than briefly blossom in the illusory sunshine of Track II. And those obstacles all lay in Pakistan.
First, India has long been in favour of placing the Kashmir dispute on the back burner and promoting trade, travel and the rest; it is Pakistan that has taken the view that there cannot be normal relations with India until Kashmir is settled, on terms acceptable to Islamabad. So inasmuch as there is hostility that such dialogues attempt to overcome, the hostility starts with Pakistan, which wants a change in the territorial status quo, and not with India, which is perfectly content to leave things as they are. Unless the Pakistani MPs present were willing to advocate a policy of across-the-board engagement with India despite the lack of a solution to the Kashmir dispute, our words would be just so much hot air.
Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century Page 9