India and Pakistan must rise above past failures

By AD Moddie

NEW DELHI: The Kashmir ceasefire needs to be viewed in the larger context of Indo-Pakistani relations. Should the past psyche of Hindu-Muslim conflicts be allowed to deteriorate into chaotic fundamentalism on both sides, or should it be a fresh new millennium opportunity with new sane mindsets?

Put in a different way, will Hindu-Muslim, India-Pakistan conflicts be allowed to drag us back to medieval times, or do both societies, and, as a result, the whole of South Asia move into the dangers posed by globalization?

The mindsets of leaders on both sides needs to surmount historical conflicts aided by the media and public opinion. First, what are the historical realities which created long conflicts?

The history of the last millennia has seeped into Hindu and Muslim consciousness. Islam caused hurt to Hinduism by conquest and conversion over seven centuries.

In that time there were palliatives and a little harmonization.

There was a brief period of anti-British reconciliation between the Mutiny of 1857 and the Khilafat movement of 1919. But in the same period, Hindu progress in education, employment and business, and the Muslim incapacity to cope with a changing, modernizing world, brought political separateness. The Muslim League turned Jinnah and Iqbal from nationalists to separatists, the makers of Pakistan. Rioting drew the blood of both communities over decades.

Muslims forgot that their hurt psyche over the loss of empire was due to the British, not the Hindus, and in the last run-up to Independence, they seemed to lack an appreciation of the hurt which 700 years of conquest and domination had inflicted on Hindus. Modern Muslim politics from Jinnah to Suhrawady to Banatwala, to revenge-filled Imam Bukhari fed on the backwardness of the Muslim masses and produced medieval separatism.

When the political testing time of sharing power came after 1937 in the states, Nehru could not rise above the petty politics of sharing power more equitably. That was a critical lack of trust. The road to Pakistan was paved in that last decade before Independence in mutual distrust.

And Nehru's foreign concept of secularism (based on the Western history of conflicts between Church and State) was irrelevant in India. If he sought a truer Indian synthesizing dharma, he should have turned to Sufism, Nanak, and Kabir, meaningful Indian roots.

After Nehru, Congress proclaimed secularism, but blatantly played the communal and caste cards. Kashmir could have been India's prize in a synthesizing "dharma", but politics gave rise to prolonged corruption, maladministration and rigging of elections. Nehru's secular vision proved hollow.

The political mistake of taking the Kashmir issue to the UN was compounded by not having a plebiscite in the first three years after the Pakistani raids of 1947, when the Kashmir people's verdict would have gone in favor of India. So India's political failure in Kashmir in the last 50 years has compounded a wider centuries-old problem of hurt psyches.

Two fundamentalisms have torched those psyches. They are, ironically, fighting past battles from Somnath to mosque pulpits, to Ayodhya, and now in ancient Buddhist/Hindu Afghanistan. All fundamentalisms share three things: first an irrational violent insanity; second, an inability to cope with the problems of the contemporary world of hunger, education, and development of people, their human rights and the Rule of Law, the institutions of democracy, and international problems of trade, technology and capital flows.

The third is a lack of future vision. Hence frustration and anger. Globally and regionally, the future lies in liberal democracy, in liberal economies, and in environmental policies in harmony with Nature -- all on the side of sanity and progress.

So the fundamental issue is not a splintered response to the Kashmir ceasefire. It is only one more statesmanly opening of the door of lost opportunities to make this rise above the continuous failures of the past. It is whether Hindu and Muslim can rise above a millennium of social and state failures and find a higher mutual destiny which can then benefit the smaller surrounding states of South Asia also. This is strategic realism, not wishful thinking. What could be the elements of that shared, happier destiny in this 21st century? Let me suggest the obvious.

1. A greater sense of mutual security between Hindu and Muslim, India and Pakistan, the boundaries of which are as much in the psyche as in territory. Then a huge peace bonus devoted to the uplift of over 1,200 million people across those boundaries and the removal of the shame of the world's worst poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, and the largest numbers of the wretched of the earth. Also mutual anti-terrorist global interests, as terrorism is a global virus disrupting societies. Pakistani generals, politicians and public opinion must know that the modern sane world cannot equate terrorism and jihad.

2. The sharing of energy flows -- as of the Indus water flows earlier. Poverty means low energy consumption.

3. An economic mutuality in agriculture, industry, trade and services, the big healer of poverty and unemployment, which form the basis of fundamentalist terrorism. And the old economy bolstered by mutuality in the new economy of IT and bio- technology could put South Asia on a rising road in the new century.

4. There could be a mutuality in tourism, eco-tourism and culture tourism of enormous dimensions, multiplying wealth and employment in the two countries along with the revival of the Mughal-style composite culture in arts, architecture, cinema,literature, and philosophy.

Will the leaders of both countries, political and religious, be sane enough? Their place in history lies there. Or else, the world's worst form of anarchy and the collapse of governments and societies are painful realities staring both countries in the face. Enough damage has been done already.

The author is formerly of the Indian Civil Service.

-- The Statesman/Asia News Network