Indo-Pak Relations: Going Back to the Future

As is often the case, the restrained acumen of the unassuming observer, rather than the bluff and bluster of the mover and shaker, is really winning the day in the subcontinent. A panelist on a public service broadcast station (Lok Sabha TV) was the first to point out that in today’s turning-point the subcontinent could emerge as the remedial exemplar. The thought could sound ambitious at a time when terror is returning on a global scale. Pakistan is on the easternmost periphery of the radar dotted with various Al-Qaeda brands across West Asia and North Africa. The terror outfit Al-Shabaab hit the headlines with the Nairobi Mall killings in protest against Kenyan participation in sorting out Somali Islamists, arguably belying the hope that globally networked terror would be restricted to fanning localised outbursts from which the non-Islamic, preferably Western, world stay immune.

Numerous shades of, mostly extreme Sunni, terrorism are coalescing to fight the Ba’athist Shia regime in Syria (their counterweight is the Shia regime of Iran, possibly also latter-day Iraq whose Shia majority has come into the reckoning with the exit of Saddam Hussein’s minority Tikriti dictatorship). Analysts infer that after Syria, Afghanistan with its Al-Qaeda-related Taliban will be the trouble spot again. China has been alerting the US to the possibilities of a concerted strategy to meet that looming threat, concerned as it is with the fundamentalist threat in Xinjiang. It bears recalling that Russia had got a foot in the door by negotiating the re-think on bombing Syria over chemical weapons. Additionally, the nature of the terrorist threat has divided influential Western opinion and policy since Gaddafi’s overthrow in Libya (which is now supplying men and material to the anti-Assad cause). Can the West stand by and see the extremists take over? Afghanistan should not be treated as too distant a memory. The Taliban were among the Mujahideen who made the Russians withdraw. They are also the ideological kin to the Al-Qaeda, which is making many throw their hats in the ring.

Like the pacifist interlocutor on Lok Sabha TV, the official voice, Sashi Tharoor, also refused to be drawn into the vortex, seeking engagement to settle problems of the future. Dr Manmohan Singh reportedly put across to the American President the urgency of the kind of growth that befitted a people in our overall material condition. At the time the US was on the verge of the national economic shutdown that Obama-care (or the Republican response to which) had precipitated and Mr Obama was in a very good position to understand Dr Singh.

But it was followed by the Ordinance episode and the purported statement by Mr Nawaz Sharif (later denied). Dr Singh was supposedly likened to a village woman. A dodgy Pakistani mediaperson’s slant on Mr Sharif’s metaphor for a tiff between a rustic couple to describe chronic Indo-Pakistani acrimony, was fobbed off with a display of impeccable political correct-ness by Mr Salman Khurshid. He had asked: What’s wrong with being a village woman? Neither region nor gender is graded or unequal in Indian principle and precisely the bane of dated political praxis. Some sections of Mr Sharif’s domestic audience were possibly delighted with the cleverness of the Prime Minister’s figure of speech in proportion to the dismay it caused among their counterparts in India. At times we appear to be made from the same mould. At others, for example, when the Pakistani media critically acclaimed the bilateral diplomacy in New York, the recognition of complexity appears more evident. As one commentator noted, we have failed to learn from history.

Suffice it to say that India survived the hiccups that were external to the Indo-Pak agenda and delivered as promised. But the wider outline of a productive rapprochement was preserved for the future. The regional and global situations being what they are, namely, the continued shadow of the armed forces on the Pakistani political leadership, the global terrorist resurgence, the elections in India, the US Congressional crisis and so on, predicated the retention of the status quo for the time being, perhaps continued interaction at the Joint Secretary level and observance of the Line of Control. But it is the larger question, a very big one at that, which merits attention.

From Libya through Somalia and Syria to Afghanistan and Pakistan, ordinary people are fighting not only for their lives, but their cultures and resources. The Islamic world itself is broadly divided between Sunni and Shia, and (relatively) secular and fundamentalist. The beleaguered Assad belongs to the secular category, and as with Saddam and even Gaddafi, did not make the primary call on religion as the rallying cry. Assad enjoys Russian support, Saddam was once the Western bet against Iran and Gaddafi was doing flourishing business with the Euro-peans. Hamid Karzai is, of course, well and truly beyond the pale for the Taliban (despite the initial geniality). But therein also lies the rub because the middle classes and masses are reverting to the directness and aggression of organised fundamentalism. It is little wonder that the West tried limited adjustment with the Taliban in Afghanistan. On its part, Egypt showed how their incompatibility with contem-porary governance can be exposed.

We in India have the defining, perhaps unique, property of embodying all these strands, if not always in their Islamic incarnations, then within our own majoritarian monolith. An arguably pro-market Western journal, or newspaper as it calls itself, has just made the point through some professional reportage that the particulars of the huge unorganised sector in India, including its contribution to the GDP, continue to defy official assessment. Such conditions also obtain in vast swathes of territory in most of the developing world, including the areas in conflict. They have arguably acted as buffers for the common man during the vacillations of the formal financial world (whose scale is lower than its unmatched visibility).

Shoring up the non-mainstream masses, or at least respecting their integrity of thought and character (that is, culture, at places to include religion), could be central to peace and prosperity, in a qualified sense of the cliché. This is not an uncomplicated subject, with the compulsions of market economics, including capitalistic systems of agricultural production, being at odds with what modernists would consider going back in time. The awesome proficiency of modern technology and business is not in question. But when the asymmetry in resources and the quest for new markets are directly and indirectly leading to unabashed strife, a reconsideration of their mutual relationship, possibly creative reconciliation, should be the challenge before the formidable intellectual stars of the global financial and political firmament. The Indo-Pakistani cause célèbre reflects this conundrum in more ways than one. Both our low-key Prime Minister and the interlocutor on Lok Sabha TV, or for that matter the US President committed irreversibly to the health care of “millions” of his “hardworking” compatriots, appear to be wise to it.

The author is a Bengaluru-based journalist.