Arun Shourie
The first thing that strikes one upon reading the books of these eminent historians, of course, is the double standard. Recall how, without an iota of evidence, our eminent historians advanced the most far-reaching assertions about ancient India -- about its having been a period riddled with tensions, inequity and oppression. And how, in cases such as Aurangzeb and the Sultanate, these very historians shut their eyes to what stares them in the face. In a word, their approach is set to a formula : pre-Islamic India must be presented as a land of discord, a land in the grip of a social and political system marked by injustice, extreme inequities and oppression; and the Islamic period must be presented as a period in which "the composite culture" flowered, a period in which the norm was a policy of "broad toleration", and such departures from it as took place were just the aberrations of individuals, aberrations which themselves can be tracked down to wholly secular causes.
The second point is the brazenness with which our historians suppress the evidence and, having done so, slip in falsehoods. To take just one example, recall how Satish Chandra concludes the account of Aurangzeb's deeds vis-a-vis temples : The order for destroying temples was not a new one; the order was limited to new temples and not to existing structures; the order let a great deal of latitude to local officials; Aurangzeb adopted "a new stance" only when he encountered political hostility and when he came to conclude that the temples had become centres from which "subversive ideas" were being spread; that the destruction of temples was more or less confined to periods of hostilities. And finally that "it seems that Aurangzeb's zeal for the destruction of temples abated after 1679, for we do not hear of any large scale destruction of temples in the South between 1681 and his death in 1707."
How does this assertion compare with what the Akhbarat of Aurangzeb themselves state, as well as other accounts recorded at the time? Here are some of the entries:
25 May 1679 : "Khan-i-Jahan Bahadur returned from Jodhpur after demolishing its temples, and bringing with himself several cart-loads of idols. The Emperor ordered that the idols, which were mostly of gold, silver, brass, copper or stone and adorned with jewels, should be cast in the quadrangle of the Court and under the steps of the Jama Mosque for being trodden upon."
January 1680 : "The grand temple in front of the Maharana's mansion (at Udaipur) - one of the wonderful buildings of the age, which had cost the infidels much money - was destroyed and its images broken." "On 24 January the Emperor went to view the lake Udaisagar and ordered all the three temples on its banks to be pulled down." "On 29 January Hasan Ali Khan reported that 172 other temples in the environs of Udaipur had been demolished."
"On 22 February the Emperor went to look at Chitor, and by his order the 63 temples of the place were destroyed."
2 August 1680 : Temple of Someshwar in western Mewar ordered to be destroyed. 10 August 1680 : "Abu Turab returned to Court and reported that he had pulled down 66 temples in Amber."
September 1687: "On the capture of Golkonda, the Emperor appointed Abdur Rahim Khan as Censor of the city of Haidarabad with orders to put down infidel practices and (heretical) innovations and destroy the temples and build mosques on their sites." Circa 1690 : Instances of Aurangzeb's temple destruction at Ellora, Trimbaakeshwar, Narsinghpur (foiled by snakes, scorpions and other poisonous insects), Pandharpur, Jejuri (foiled by the deity) and Yavat (Bhuleshwar) are given by K.N. Sane in Varshik Iribritta for Shaka 1838, pp. 133-135.
1693 : "The Emperor ordered the destruction of the Hateshwar temple at Vadnagar, the special guardian of the Nagar Brahmans."
3rd April 1694 : "The Emperor learnt from a secret news-writer of Delhi that in Jaisinghpura Bairagis used to worship idols, and that the Censor on hearing of it had gone there, arrested Sri Krishna Bairagi and taken him with 15 idols away to his house; then the Rajputs had assembled, flocked to the Censor's house, wounded three footmen of the Censor and tried to seize the Censor himself; so that the latter set the Bairagi free and sent the copper idols to the local subahdar."
Middle of 1698 : "Hamid-ud-din Khan Bahadur who had been deputed to destroy the temple of Bijapur and build a mosque (there), returned to Court after carrying the order out and was praised by the Emperor." "The demolition of a temple is possible at any time, as it cannot walk away from its place." -- Aurangzeb to Zullfiqar Khan and Mughal Khan. "The houses of this country (Maharashtra) are exceedingly strong and built solely of stone and iron. The hatchet-men of the Government in the course of my marching do not get sufficient strength and power (i.e., time) to destroy and raze the temples of the infidels that meet the eye on the way. You should appoint an orthodox inspector (darogha) who may afterwards destroy them at leisure and dig up their foundations" -- Aurangzeb to Ruhullah Khan in Kalimat-i-Aurangzib.
January 1705 : "The Emperor, summoning Muhammad Khalil and Khidmat Rai, the darogha of hatchet-men... , ordered them to demolish the temple of Pandharpur, and to take the butchers of the camp there and slaughter cows in the temple .... It was done."
The eminent historian did not need to trouble himself by going to the primary sources. He could have found these and other entries in a single compact Appendix in Volume III of Sir Jadunath Sarkar's well known History of Aurangzeb. That history has been in circulation since 1928! Our writer, writing in 1996, is conveniently oblivious of the evidence which even an elementary student of Aurangzeb's period would have come across!
However, there is little mystery. For there are two pillars to progressive history-writing in India : first, one must fabricate evidence which will establish Hindus to be intolerant; second, one must respect and show an empathetic understanding of Islamic communalism. And the litmus test is : are you prepared to stand up for Aurangzeb ?!
The third thing that strikes one in the tortured explanations our historians dole out is how closely they parrot the volumes of a person like Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi. As is well known, Qureshi taught History at the Delhi University. He migrated to Pakistan. There he became one of the early and ardent proponents of Islamisation : he is credited with having been one of the principal drafters of the "Objectives Resolution" which was passed by the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in 1949, and became the fount of Islamization; he became a Minister in the Government of Liaqat Ali Khan and later the President of the Pakistan Historical Society. He was eventually decorated with the high honour, Sitara-i-Pakistan.
In his volume The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent, Qureshi remarks about the reimposition of jizyah by Aurangzeb as follows:
"When Alamgir I reimposed jizyah after a lapse of 115 years, no sudden spurt in the number of conversions is recorded. Without the availability of statistics a definite conclusion is difficult to reach; but even in the epistles of such an ardent advocate of the reimposition of jizyah as the Mujaddid-i-alf-i-Thani, the argument that the abolition of jizyah had in any way affected the propagation of Islam was not advanced; nor does Bada'uni, who bewailed Akbar's lapse from orthodoxy and disapproved not only of the abolition of jizyah but also of the growth of Hindu influence in the affairs of the Empire, say that the abolition of jizyah had hampered the spread of Islam. There is no record of any significant difference in the rate of conversion either as the result of the abolition of jizyah or of its reimposition....
"If jizyah had been a crushing burden upon the non-Muslims, it could have led to conversions, but it was not too heavy a burden. It was levied only on able-bodied male adults who had a surplus of income after meeting the necessary expenses of maintaining themselves and their families. The religious classes like priests and monks were exempt.... The assessment seems to have been lenient because at no time did jizyah form an important source of revenue, and a very large percentage of the non-Muslim population was exempt for one reason or another. Even if a tax is heavy but bearable, people are averse to changing their religion to escape it; but when it is not heavy, there is little inducement for conversion. Therefore, it does not seem likely that jizyah helped, in any significant manner, conversion to Islam."
And our eminent historian says :
"We are told that after accession to the throne, Aurangzeb contemplated revival of the jizyah on a number of occasions but did not do so for fear of political opposition. Ultimately, in 1679, in the twenty-second year of his reign, he finally re-imposed it. There has been a considerable discussion among historians regarding Aurangzeb's motives for the step. Let us first see what it was not. It was not meant to be an economic pressure for forcing the Hindus to convert to Islam for its incidence was too light -- women, children, the disabled and the indigent, that is those whose income was less than the means of subsistence were exempted, as were those in government service. Nor, in fact, did any significant section of Hindus change their religion due to this tax. Secondly, it was not a means of meeting a difficult financial situation. Although the income from jizyah is said to have been considerable, Aurangzeb sacrificed a considerable sum of money by giving up a large number of cesses called abwabs which were not sanctioned by the shara and were hence considered illegal.
"The re-imposition of jizyah was, in fact, both political and ideological in nature. It was meant to rally the Muslims for the defence of the state against the Marathas and the Rajputs who were up in arms, and possibly against the Muslim states of the Deccan, especially Golconda which was in alliance with the infidels. Secondly, jizyah was to be collected by honest, God-fearing Muslims, who were especially appointed for the purpose, and its proceeds were reserved for the ulama. It was thus a big bribe for the theologians among whom there was a lot of unemployment."
The historian then notes the infirmities in implementing the tax but his final verdict remains as considerate as that of Qureshi :
"Some modern writers are of the opinion that Aurangzeb's measures were designed to convert India from a dar-ul-harb, or a land of infidels, into dar-ul-Islam, or a land inhabited by Muslims. Although Aurangzeb considered it legitimate to encourage conversion to Islam, evidence of systematic or large-scale attempts at forced conversion is lacking. Nor were Hindu nobles discriminated against...."
Similarly Qureshi emphasizes in the same volume that Aurangzeb had no option but to wage his campaigns against Golconda and Bijapur. He remarks :
"The Sultanates were incapable of even keeping peace within their territories. The Marathas got their sinews of war by plundering them. Besides, the sultanates, in spite of the growth of Maratha power at their expense, were secretly in alliance with them and helped them with money and supplies. The situation in Golconda was even worse because the real power was in the hands of two Brahmin officials, Madanna and Akanna, whose obnoxious rule was resented by the Muslim population of the sultanate and who were even more enthusiastic supporters of the Marathas. Under such circumstances it would have been foolish to leave the sultanates alone."
In his volume Ulema in Politics, Qureshi reverts to the same matter and remarks :
"The Sultanates of the Deccan had been so weakened by the Marathas that they were fast sinking into a state of anarchy. They, because of this weakness, became almost the storehouse of Maratha resources who grabbed whatever they needed from their territories. Besides they were in alliance with the Marathas, because they perversely thought that after the threat from the Mughuls had been averted, the Marathas could be dealt with more easily. This was a gross underestimate of the potentialities of the Maratha activities. So far as Alamgir was concerned, he had no choice. The Marathas and the Sultanates constituted a single problem and could not be detached from each other. Those who suggest that the Sultanates could be persuaded to act against the Marathas or could become a bulwark against Maratha expansion ignore the realities of the situation."
The verdict of our eminent historian is identical. He says :
"Aurangzeb has been criticised for having failed to unite with the Deccani states against the Marathas, or for having conquered them thereby making the empire 'so large that it collapsed under its own weight.' A unity of hearts between Aurangzeb and the Deccani states was 'a psychological impossibility' once the treaty of 1636 was abandoned, a development which took place during the reign of Shah Jahan himself. After his accession, Aurangzeb desisted from pursuing a vigorous forward policy in the Deccan. In fact, he postponed as long as possible the decision to conquer and annex the Deccani states. Aurangzeb's hand was virtually forced by the growing Maratha power, the support extended to Shivaji by Madanna and Akhanna from Golconda, and fear that Bijapur might fall under the domination of Shivaji and the Maratha-dominated Golconda. Later, by giving shelter to the rebel prince Akbar, Sambhaji virtually threw a challenge to Aurangzeb who quickly realized that the Marathas could not be dealt with without first subduing Bijapur and possibly Golconda."
And though Satish Chandra is inclined to concede, "perhaps Aurangzeb might have been better advised to accept the suggestion apparently put forward by his eldest son, Shah Alam, for a settlement with Bijapur and Golconda to annex only a part of the territories and let them rule the South Karnataka which was far away and difficult to monitor," his understanding of Aurangzeb's compulsions is no less than that of Qureshi!
Qureshi is at pains to emphasize that Aurangzeb did not institute new laws, that, therefore, the collapse of the Empire after him cannot be attributed to his religious policies. As he puts it :
"The Muslim Empire had endured in the subcontinent for several centuries. The orthodox laws of Islam had been imposed with varying degrees of thoroughness. Alamgir I did not bring into existence a new set of laws. In the course of these centuries the jizyah had remained in abeyance only for a period of one hundred and fifteen years. The order for the demolition of unauthorized temples had been given under Shah Jahan and Alamgir did not enforce it for the first time. If the Empire collapsed like a house of cards after the death of Alamgir I, the main causes must be sought elsewhere than in the religious policies of that emperor, though these also played some role in its disintegration."
Our eminent historian emphasizes the same point in almost the same words in context after context : "Aurangzeb's order regarding temples was not a new one. It reaffirmed the position which had existed during the Sultanate period and which had been reiterated by Shah Jahan early in his reign... " And of course, jizyah was not being imposed for the first time, -- it was being re-imposed after a gap of 115 years !
And so on. Thus the "explanations" for Aurangzeb's policies are identical, all that is missing is the adoration that Qureshi holds for Aurangzeb. Either the string of similar explanations are instances of great minds thinking alike, or of the fact that in the mind of one the test of intellectual daring and secularism is whether one can internalize and repeat the assertions of the one who went away!
Showing posts with label islam. Show all posts
Showing posts with label islam. Show all posts
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
To Undo the Scandal, Undo the Control
To Undo the Scandal, Undo the Control
Arun Shourie
"There can be no doubt that the fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans," writes the author. "Islam came out as the enemy of the 'But'. The word 'But,' as everybody knows, is an Arabic word and means an idol. Not many people, however, know that the derivation of the word 'But' is the Arabic corruption of Buddha. Thus the origin of the word indicates that in the Moslem mind idol worship had come to be identified with the Religion of the Buddha. To the Muslims, they were one and the same thing. The mission to break the idols thus became the mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed Buddhism not only in India but wherever it went. Before Islam came into being Buddhism was the religion of Bactria, Parthia, Afghanistan, Gandhar and Chinese Turkestan, as it was of the whole of Asia...."
A communal historian of the RSS-school?
But Islam struck at Hinduism also. How is it that it was able to fell Buddhism in India but not Hinduism? Hinduism had State-patronage, says the author. The Buddhists were so persecuted by the "Brahmanic rulers", he writes, that, when Islam came, they converted to Islam: this welled the ranks of Muslims but in the same stroke drained those of Buddhism. But the far more important cause was that while the Muslim invaders butchered both -- Brahmins as well as Buddhist monks -- the nature of the priesthood in the case of the two religions was different -- "and the difference is so great that it contains the whole reason why Brahmanism survived the attack of Islam and why Buddhism did not."
For the Hindus, every Brahmin was a potential priest. No ordination was mandated. Neither anything else. Every household carried on rituals -- oblations, recitation of particular mantras, pilgrimages, each Brahmin family made memorizing some Veda its very purpose.... By contrast, Buddhism had instituted ordination, particular training etc. for its priestly class. Thus, when the invaders massacred Brahmins, Hinduism continued. But when they massacred the Buddhist monks, the religion itself was killed.
Describing the massacres of the latter and the destruction of their vihars, universities, places of worship, the author writes, "The Musalman invaders sacked the Buddhist Universities of Nalanda, Vikramshila, Jagaddala, Odantapuri to name only a few. They raised to the ground Buddhist monasteries with which the country was studded. The monks fled away in thousands to Nepal, Tibet and other places outside India. A very large number were killed outright by the Muslim commanders. How the Buddhist priesthood perished by the sword of the Muslim invaders has been recorded by the Muslim historians themselves. Summarizing the evidence relating to the slaughter of the Buddhist Monks perpetrated by the Musalman General in the course of his invasion of Bihar in 1197 AD, Mr. Vincent Smith says, "....Great quantities of plunder were obtained, and the slaughter of the 'shaven headed Brahmans', that is to say the Buddhist monks, was so thoroughly completed, that when the victor sought for someone capable of explaining the contents of the books in the libraries of the monasteries, not a living man could be found who was able to read them. 'It was discovered,' we are told, 'that the whole of that fortress and city was a college, and in the Hindi tongue they call a college Bihar.' "Such was the slaughter of the Buddhist priesthood perpetrated by the Islamic invaders. The axe was struck at the very root. For by killing the Buddhist priesthood, Islam killed Buddhism. This was the greatest disaster that befell the religion of the Buddha in India...."
The writer? B. R. Ambedkar.
But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate the concoction. In one typical instance, three inscriptions were cited. The indefatigable Sita Ram Goel looked them up. Two of the inscriptions had absolutely nothing to do with the matter. And the third told a story which had the opposite import than the one which the Marxist historian had insinuated: a Jain king had himself taken the temple from Jain priests and given it to the Shaivites because the former had failed to live up to their promise. Goel repeatedly asked the historian to point to any additional evidence or to elucidate how the latter had suppressed the import that the inscription in its entirety conveyed. He waited in vain. The revealing exchange is set out in Goel's monograph, "Stalinist 'Historians' Spread the Big Lie."
Marxists cite only two other instances of Hindus having destroyed Buddhist temples. These too it turns out yield to completely contrary explanations. Again Marxists have been asked repeatedly to explain the construction they have been circulating -- to no avail. Equally important, Sita Ram Goel invited them to cite any Hindu text which orders Hindus to break the places of worship of other religions -- as the Bible does, as a pile of Islamic manuals does. He has asked them to name a single person who has been honoured by the Hindus because he broke such places -� the way Islamic historians and lore have glorified every Muslim ruler and invader who did so. A snooty silence has been the only response.
But I am on the other point. Once they occupied academic bodies, once they captured universities and thereby determined what will be taught, which books will be prescribed, what questions would be asked, what answers will be acceptable, these "historians" came to decide what history had actually been! As it suits their current convenience and politics to make out that Hinduism also has been intolerant, they will glide over what Ambedkar says about the catastrophic effect that Islamic invasions had on Buddhism, they will completely suppress what he said of the nature of these invasions and of Muslim rule in his Thoughts on Pakistan, but insist on reproducing his denunciations of "Brahmanism," and his view that the Buddhist India established by the Mauryas was systematically invaded and finished by Brahmin rulers.
Thus, they suppress facts, they concoct others, they suppress what an author has said on one matter even as they insist that what he has said on another be taken as gospel truth. And when anyone attempts to point out what had in fact happened, they raise a shriek: a conspiracy to rewrite history, they shout, a plot to distort history, they scream.
But they are the ones who had distorted it in the first place -- by suppressing the truth, by planting falsehoods. And these "theses" of their's are recent concoctions. Recall the question of the disappearance of Buddhist monasteries. How did the grand-father, so to say, of present Marxist historians, D. D. Kosambhi explain that extinguishing? The original doctrine of the Buddha had degenerated into Lamaism, Kosambhi wrote. And the monasteries had "remained tied to the specialized and concentrated long-distance 'luxury' trade of which we read in the Periplus. This trade died out to be replaced by general and simpler local barter with settled villages. The monasteries, having fulfilled their economic as well as religious function, disappeared too." And the people lapsed!
"The people whom they had helped lead out of savagery (though plenty of aborigines survive in the Western Ghats to this day), to whom they had given their first common script and common language, use of iron, and of the plough," Kosambhi wrote, "had never forgotten their primeval cults."
The standard Marxist "explanation" -- the economic cause, the fulfilling of historical functions and thereafter disappearing, right to the remorse at the lapsing into "primeval cults". But today, these "theses" won't do. For today the need is to make people believe that Hindus too were intolerant, that Hindus also destroyed temples of others....
Or take another figure -- one saturated with our history, culture, religion. He also wrote of that region -- Afghanistan and beyond. The people of those areas did not destroy either Buddhism or the structures associated with it, he wrote, till one particular thing happened. What was this? He recounted, "In very ancient times this Turkish race repeatedly conquered the western provinces of India and founded extensive kingdoms. They were Buddhists, or would turn Buddhists after occupying Indian territory. In the ancient history of Kashmir there is mention of these famous Turkish emperors -- Hushka, Yushka, and Kanishka. It was this Kanishka who founded the Northern School of Buddhism called Mahayana. Long after, the majority of them took to Mohammedanism and completely devastated the chief Buddhistic seats of Central Asia such as Kandhar and Kabul. Before their conversion to Mohammedanism they used to imbibe the learning and culture of the countries they conquered, and by assimilating the culture of other countries would try to propagate civilization. But ever since they became Mohammedans, they have only the instinct of war left in them; they have not got the least vestige of learning and culture; on the contrary, the countries that come under their sway gradually have their civilization extinguished. In many places of modern Afghanistan and Kandhar etc., there yet exist wonderful Stupas, monasteries, temples and gigantic statues built by their Buddhist ancestors. As a result of Turkish admixture and their conversion to Mohammedanism, those temples etc. are almost in ruins, and the present Afghans and allied races have grown so uncivilized and illiterate that, far from imitating those ancient works of architecture, they believe them to be the creation of super-natural spirits like the Jinn etc. ...".
The author? The very one the secularists tried to appropriate three-four years ago -- Swami Vivekananda.
And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?
Swamiji focussed on another factor about which we hear little today: internal decay. The Buddha -- like Gandhiji in our times -- taught us first and last to alter our conduct, to realise through practice the insights he had attained. But that is the last thing the people want to do, they want soporifics: a mantra, a pilgrimage, an idol which may deliver them from the consequences of what they have done. The people walked out on the Buddha's austere teaching � for it sternly ruled out props. No external suppression etc., were needed to wean them away: people are deserting Gandhiji for the same reason today -- is any violence or conspiracy at work ?
The religion became monk and monastery-centric. And these decayed as closed groups and institutions invariably do. Ambedkar himself alludes to this factor -- though he puts even this aspect of the decay to the ravages of Islam. After the decimation of monks by Muslim invaders, all sorts of persons -- married clergy, artisan priests -- had to be roped in to take their place. Hence the inevitable result, Ambedkar writes: "It is obvious that this new Buddhist priesthood had neither dignity nor learning and were a poor match for the rival, the Brahmins whose cunning was not unequal to their learning."
Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and others who had reflected deeply on the course of religious evolution of our people, focussed on the condition to which Buddhist monasteries had been reduced by themselves. The people had already departed from the pristine teaching of the Buddha, Swamiji pointed out: the Buddha had taught no God, no Ruler of the Universe, but the people, being ignorant and in need of sedatives, "brought their gods, and devils, and hobgoblins out again, and a tremendous hotchpotch was made of Buddhism in India." Buddhism itself took on these characters: and the growth that we ascribe to the marvelous personality of the Buddha and to the excellence of his teaching, Swami Vivekananda said, was due in fact "to the temples which were built, the idols that were erected, and the gorgeous ceremonials that were put before the nation." Soon the "wonderful moral strength" of the original message was lost "and what remained of it became full of superstitions and ceremonials, a hundred times cruder than those it intended to suppress," of practices which were "equally bad, unclean, and immoral...."
Swami Vivekananda regarded the Buddha as "the living embodiment of Vedanta", he always spoke of the Buddha in superlatives. For that very reason, Vivekananda raged all the more at what Buddhism became: "It became a mass of corruption of which I cannot speak before this audience...;" "I have neither the time nor the inclination to describe to you the hideousness that came in the wake of Buddhism. The most hideous ceremonies, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism"....
With reform as his life's mission, Swami Vivekananda reflected deeply on the flaws which enfeebled Buddhism, and his insights hold lessons for us to this day. Every reform movement, he said, necessarily stresses negative elements. But if it goes on stressing only the negative, it soon peters out. After the Buddha, his followers kept emphasising the negative, when the people wanted the positive that would help lift them.
"Every movement triumphs," he wrote, "by dint of some unusual characteristic, and when it falls, that point of pride becomes its chief element of weakness." And in the case of Buddhism, he said, it was the monastic order. This gave it an organizational impetus, but soon consequences of the opposite kind took over. Instituting the monastic order, he said, had "the evil effect of making the very robe of the monk honoured," instead of making reverence contingent on conduct. "Then these monasteries became rich," he recalled, "the real cause of the downfall is here... some containing a hundred thousand monks, sometimes twenty thousand monks in one building -- huge, gigantic buildings...." On the one hand this fomented corruption within, it encoiled the movement in organizational problems. On the other it drained society of the best persons.
From its very inception, the monastic order had institutionalized inequality of men and women even in sanyasa, Vivekananda pointed out. "Then gradually," he recalled, "the corruption known as Vamachara (unrestrained mixing with women in the name of religion) crept in and ruined Buddhism. Such diabolical rites are not to be met with in any modern Tantra..."
Whereas the Buddha had counseled that we shun metaphysical speculations and philosophical conundrums � as these would only pull us away from practice -- Buddhist monks and scholars lost themselves in arcane debates about these very questions. [Hence a truth in Kosambhi's observation, but in the sense opposite to the one he intended: Shankara's refutations show that Shankara knew nothing of Buddha's original doctrine, Kosambhi asserted; Shankara was refuting the doctrines which were being put forth by the Buddhists in his time, and these had nothing to do with the original teaching of the Buddha.] The consequence was immediate: "By becoming too philosophic," Vivekananda explained, "they lost much of their breadth of heart."
Sri Aurobindo alludes to another factor, an inherent incompatibility. He writes of "the exclusive trenchancy of its intellectual, ethical and spiritual positions," and of how "its trenchant affirmations and still more exclusive negations could not be made sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility, many-sided susceptibility and rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people..."
We find in such factors a complete explanation for the evaporation of Buddhism. But we will find few of them in the secularist discourse today. Because their purpose is served by one "thesis" alone: Hindus crushed Buddhists, Hindus demolished their temples... In regard to matter after critical matter -- the Aryan-Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the nature of Islamic rule, the character of the Freedom Struggle -- we find this trait -- suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is the real scandal of history-writing in the last thirty years. And it has been possible for these "eminent historians" to perpetrate it because they acquired control of institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, you have to undo the control.
Arun Shourie
"There can be no doubt that the fall of Buddhism in India was due to the invasions of the Musalmans," writes the author. "Islam came out as the enemy of the 'But'. The word 'But,' as everybody knows, is an Arabic word and means an idol. Not many people, however, know that the derivation of the word 'But' is the Arabic corruption of Buddha. Thus the origin of the word indicates that in the Moslem mind idol worship had come to be identified with the Religion of the Buddha. To the Muslims, they were one and the same thing. The mission to break the idols thus became the mission to destroy Buddhism. Islam destroyed Buddhism not only in India but wherever it went. Before Islam came into being Buddhism was the religion of Bactria, Parthia, Afghanistan, Gandhar and Chinese Turkestan, as it was of the whole of Asia...."
A communal historian of the RSS-school?
But Islam struck at Hinduism also. How is it that it was able to fell Buddhism in India but not Hinduism? Hinduism had State-patronage, says the author. The Buddhists were so persecuted by the "Brahmanic rulers", he writes, that, when Islam came, they converted to Islam: this welled the ranks of Muslims but in the same stroke drained those of Buddhism. But the far more important cause was that while the Muslim invaders butchered both -- Brahmins as well as Buddhist monks -- the nature of the priesthood in the case of the two religions was different -- "and the difference is so great that it contains the whole reason why Brahmanism survived the attack of Islam and why Buddhism did not."
For the Hindus, every Brahmin was a potential priest. No ordination was mandated. Neither anything else. Every household carried on rituals -- oblations, recitation of particular mantras, pilgrimages, each Brahmin family made memorizing some Veda its very purpose.... By contrast, Buddhism had instituted ordination, particular training etc. for its priestly class. Thus, when the invaders massacred Brahmins, Hinduism continued. But when they massacred the Buddhist monks, the religion itself was killed.
Describing the massacres of the latter and the destruction of their vihars, universities, places of worship, the author writes, "The Musalman invaders sacked the Buddhist Universities of Nalanda, Vikramshila, Jagaddala, Odantapuri to name only a few. They raised to the ground Buddhist monasteries with which the country was studded. The monks fled away in thousands to Nepal, Tibet and other places outside India. A very large number were killed outright by the Muslim commanders. How the Buddhist priesthood perished by the sword of the Muslim invaders has been recorded by the Muslim historians themselves. Summarizing the evidence relating to the slaughter of the Buddhist Monks perpetrated by the Musalman General in the course of his invasion of Bihar in 1197 AD, Mr. Vincent Smith says, "....Great quantities of plunder were obtained, and the slaughter of the 'shaven headed Brahmans', that is to say the Buddhist monks, was so thoroughly completed, that when the victor sought for someone capable of explaining the contents of the books in the libraries of the monasteries, not a living man could be found who was able to read them. 'It was discovered,' we are told, 'that the whole of that fortress and city was a college, and in the Hindi tongue they call a college Bihar.' "Such was the slaughter of the Buddhist priesthood perpetrated by the Islamic invaders. The axe was struck at the very root. For by killing the Buddhist priesthood, Islam killed Buddhism. This was the greatest disaster that befell the religion of the Buddha in India...."
The writer? B. R. Ambedkar.
But today the fashion is to ascribe the extinction of Buddhism to the persecution of Buddhists by Hindus, to the destruction of their temples by the Hindus. One point is that the Marxist historians who have been perpetrating this falsehood have not been able to produce even an iota of evidence to substantiate the concoction. In one typical instance, three inscriptions were cited. The indefatigable Sita Ram Goel looked them up. Two of the inscriptions had absolutely nothing to do with the matter. And the third told a story which had the opposite import than the one which the Marxist historian had insinuated: a Jain king had himself taken the temple from Jain priests and given it to the Shaivites because the former had failed to live up to their promise. Goel repeatedly asked the historian to point to any additional evidence or to elucidate how the latter had suppressed the import that the inscription in its entirety conveyed. He waited in vain. The revealing exchange is set out in Goel's monograph, "Stalinist 'Historians' Spread the Big Lie."
Marxists cite only two other instances of Hindus having destroyed Buddhist temples. These too it turns out yield to completely contrary explanations. Again Marxists have been asked repeatedly to explain the construction they have been circulating -- to no avail. Equally important, Sita Ram Goel invited them to cite any Hindu text which orders Hindus to break the places of worship of other religions -- as the Bible does, as a pile of Islamic manuals does. He has asked them to name a single person who has been honoured by the Hindus because he broke such places -� the way Islamic historians and lore have glorified every Muslim ruler and invader who did so. A snooty silence has been the only response.
But I am on the other point. Once they occupied academic bodies, once they captured universities and thereby determined what will be taught, which books will be prescribed, what questions would be asked, what answers will be acceptable, these "historians" came to decide what history had actually been! As it suits their current convenience and politics to make out that Hinduism also has been intolerant, they will glide over what Ambedkar says about the catastrophic effect that Islamic invasions had on Buddhism, they will completely suppress what he said of the nature of these invasions and of Muslim rule in his Thoughts on Pakistan, but insist on reproducing his denunciations of "Brahmanism," and his view that the Buddhist India established by the Mauryas was systematically invaded and finished by Brahmin rulers.
Thus, they suppress facts, they concoct others, they suppress what an author has said on one matter even as they insist that what he has said on another be taken as gospel truth. And when anyone attempts to point out what had in fact happened, they raise a shriek: a conspiracy to rewrite history, they shout, a plot to distort history, they scream.
But they are the ones who had distorted it in the first place -- by suppressing the truth, by planting falsehoods. And these "theses" of their's are recent concoctions. Recall the question of the disappearance of Buddhist monasteries. How did the grand-father, so to say, of present Marxist historians, D. D. Kosambhi explain that extinguishing? The original doctrine of the Buddha had degenerated into Lamaism, Kosambhi wrote. And the monasteries had "remained tied to the specialized and concentrated long-distance 'luxury' trade of which we read in the Periplus. This trade died out to be replaced by general and simpler local barter with settled villages. The monasteries, having fulfilled their economic as well as religious function, disappeared too." And the people lapsed!
"The people whom they had helped lead out of savagery (though plenty of aborigines survive in the Western Ghats to this day), to whom they had given their first common script and common language, use of iron, and of the plough," Kosambhi wrote, "had never forgotten their primeval cults."
The standard Marxist "explanation" -- the economic cause, the fulfilling of historical functions and thereafter disappearing, right to the remorse at the lapsing into "primeval cults". But today, these "theses" won't do. For today the need is to make people believe that Hindus too were intolerant, that Hindus also destroyed temples of others....
Or take another figure -- one saturated with our history, culture, religion. He also wrote of that region -- Afghanistan and beyond. The people of those areas did not destroy either Buddhism or the structures associated with it, he wrote, till one particular thing happened. What was this? He recounted, "In very ancient times this Turkish race repeatedly conquered the western provinces of India and founded extensive kingdoms. They were Buddhists, or would turn Buddhists after occupying Indian territory. In the ancient history of Kashmir there is mention of these famous Turkish emperors -- Hushka, Yushka, and Kanishka. It was this Kanishka who founded the Northern School of Buddhism called Mahayana. Long after, the majority of them took to Mohammedanism and completely devastated the chief Buddhistic seats of Central Asia such as Kandhar and Kabul. Before their conversion to Mohammedanism they used to imbibe the learning and culture of the countries they conquered, and by assimilating the culture of other countries would try to propagate civilization. But ever since they became Mohammedans, they have only the instinct of war left in them; they have not got the least vestige of learning and culture; on the contrary, the countries that come under their sway gradually have their civilization extinguished. In many places of modern Afghanistan and Kandhar etc., there yet exist wonderful Stupas, monasteries, temples and gigantic statues built by their Buddhist ancestors. As a result of Turkish admixture and their conversion to Mohammedanism, those temples etc. are almost in ruins, and the present Afghans and allied races have grown so uncivilized and illiterate that, far from imitating those ancient works of architecture, they believe them to be the creation of super-natural spirits like the Jinn etc. ...".
The author? The very one the secularists tried to appropriate three-four years ago -- Swami Vivekananda.
And look at the finesse of these historians. They maintain that such facts and narratives must be swept under the carpet in the interest of national integration: recalling them will offend Muslims, they say, doing so will sow rancour against Muslims in the minds of Hindus, they say. Simultaneously they insist on concocting the myth of Hindus destroying Buddhist temples. Will that concoction not distance Buddhists from Hindus? Will that narrative, specially when it does not have the slightest basis in fact, not embitter Hindus?
Swamiji focussed on another factor about which we hear little today: internal decay. The Buddha -- like Gandhiji in our times -- taught us first and last to alter our conduct, to realise through practice the insights he had attained. But that is the last thing the people want to do, they want soporifics: a mantra, a pilgrimage, an idol which may deliver them from the consequences of what they have done. The people walked out on the Buddha's austere teaching � for it sternly ruled out props. No external suppression etc., were needed to wean them away: people are deserting Gandhiji for the same reason today -- is any violence or conspiracy at work ?
The religion became monk and monastery-centric. And these decayed as closed groups and institutions invariably do. Ambedkar himself alludes to this factor -- though he puts even this aspect of the decay to the ravages of Islam. After the decimation of monks by Muslim invaders, all sorts of persons -- married clergy, artisan priests -- had to be roped in to take their place. Hence the inevitable result, Ambedkar writes: "It is obvious that this new Buddhist priesthood had neither dignity nor learning and were a poor match for the rival, the Brahmins whose cunning was not unequal to their learning."
Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and others who had reflected deeply on the course of religious evolution of our people, focussed on the condition to which Buddhist monasteries had been reduced by themselves. The people had already departed from the pristine teaching of the Buddha, Swamiji pointed out: the Buddha had taught no God, no Ruler of the Universe, but the people, being ignorant and in need of sedatives, "brought their gods, and devils, and hobgoblins out again, and a tremendous hotchpotch was made of Buddhism in India." Buddhism itself took on these characters: and the growth that we ascribe to the marvelous personality of the Buddha and to the excellence of his teaching, Swami Vivekananda said, was due in fact "to the temples which were built, the idols that were erected, and the gorgeous ceremonials that were put before the nation." Soon the "wonderful moral strength" of the original message was lost "and what remained of it became full of superstitions and ceremonials, a hundred times cruder than those it intended to suppress," of practices which were "equally bad, unclean, and immoral...."
Swami Vivekananda regarded the Buddha as "the living embodiment of Vedanta", he always spoke of the Buddha in superlatives. For that very reason, Vivekananda raged all the more at what Buddhism became: "It became a mass of corruption of which I cannot speak before this audience...;" "I have neither the time nor the inclination to describe to you the hideousness that came in the wake of Buddhism. The most hideous ceremonies, the most horrible, the most obscene books that human hands ever wrote or the human brain ever conceived, the most bestial forms that ever passed under the name of religion, have all been the creation of degraded Buddhism"....
With reform as his life's mission, Swami Vivekananda reflected deeply on the flaws which enfeebled Buddhism, and his insights hold lessons for us to this day. Every reform movement, he said, necessarily stresses negative elements. But if it goes on stressing only the negative, it soon peters out. After the Buddha, his followers kept emphasising the negative, when the people wanted the positive that would help lift them.
"Every movement triumphs," he wrote, "by dint of some unusual characteristic, and when it falls, that point of pride becomes its chief element of weakness." And in the case of Buddhism, he said, it was the monastic order. This gave it an organizational impetus, but soon consequences of the opposite kind took over. Instituting the monastic order, he said, had "the evil effect of making the very robe of the monk honoured," instead of making reverence contingent on conduct. "Then these monasteries became rich," he recalled, "the real cause of the downfall is here... some containing a hundred thousand monks, sometimes twenty thousand monks in one building -- huge, gigantic buildings...." On the one hand this fomented corruption within, it encoiled the movement in organizational problems. On the other it drained society of the best persons.
From its very inception, the monastic order had institutionalized inequality of men and women even in sanyasa, Vivekananda pointed out. "Then gradually," he recalled, "the corruption known as Vamachara (unrestrained mixing with women in the name of religion) crept in and ruined Buddhism. Such diabolical rites are not to be met with in any modern Tantra..."
Whereas the Buddha had counseled that we shun metaphysical speculations and philosophical conundrums � as these would only pull us away from practice -- Buddhist monks and scholars lost themselves in arcane debates about these very questions. [Hence a truth in Kosambhi's observation, but in the sense opposite to the one he intended: Shankara's refutations show that Shankara knew nothing of Buddha's original doctrine, Kosambhi asserted; Shankara was refuting the doctrines which were being put forth by the Buddhists in his time, and these had nothing to do with the original teaching of the Buddha.] The consequence was immediate: "By becoming too philosophic," Vivekananda explained, "they lost much of their breadth of heart."
Sri Aurobindo alludes to another factor, an inherent incompatibility. He writes of "the exclusive trenchancy of its intellectual, ethical and spiritual positions," and of how "its trenchant affirmations and still more exclusive negations could not be made sufficiently compatible with the native flexibility, many-sided susceptibility and rich synthetic turn of the Indian religious consciousness; it was a high creed but not plastic enough to hold the heart of the people..."
We find in such factors a complete explanation for the evaporation of Buddhism. But we will find few of them in the secularist discourse today. Because their purpose is served by one "thesis" alone: Hindus crushed Buddhists, Hindus demolished their temples... In regard to matter after critical matter -- the Aryan-Dravidian divide, the nature of Islamic invasions, the nature of Islamic rule, the character of the Freedom Struggle -- we find this trait -- suppresso veri, suggesto falsi. This is the real scandal of history-writing in the last thirty years. And it has been possible for these "eminent historians" to perpetrate it because they acquired control of institutions like the ICHR. To undo the falsehood, you have to undo the control.
Not Just Macaulay's Offspring
Arun Shourie
"We must at present do our best to form a class," Macaulay wrote in his famous Minute of 1835, "who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
Now, many of the strictures in his Minute were entirely to the point: the texts which were in use at that time in Arabic and Sanskrit schools were out-dated, they were teaching notions about geography, astronomy and the rest which had been superseded by recent researches. And in this sense, modernising the syllabus and imparting education through English, opening our eyes to the world was indeed to raise Indians.
But there was another aspect to the Minute: utter scorn for all that had been written or developed here. And more than the knowledge they imbibed of the world, it is this disdain for everything Indian that the products of the new education system internalised.
"...the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that until they are enriched from some other quarter it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them," Macaulay wrote. "I have never found one among them (the proponents of continuing to stress oriental learn- ing)", he wrote, "who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." "It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say," he wrote, "that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books which have been written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England...."
With the British gaining supremacy several things happened. The scorn, falsifications and caricatures of our culture by the missionaries had a free field. They were buttressed by the sway the British acquired in the political sphere - even apart from the assistance this gave to missionary propaganda, political tutelage bred inferiority among us, a feeling that our culture was inferior as it had led us to enslavement. Such acquaintance that educated Indians came to have with our tradition was what they learnt from western books and missionaries. How pervasive the effects of the system were and how they have endured to our very day will be evident from a single consideration: although each is among the simplest of the hundreds upon hundreds that can be set out, every single example cited above - descriptions of our land in the Vedas, Puranas and epics, Shankara's journeys, the Granth Sahib, the linkages between temples and pilgrimages -- will be a surprise to most of us, educated Indians today.
The scorn was deepened in part because of the truimph of western science and technology, but even more because of the fact that educated Indians acquired just a smattering of anacquaintance with even this new learning -- they concluded that the 'scientific temper' and 'reason' were all; they knew next to nothing about our culture... The scorn was made repudation by the spread of Marxist ideas: for these ideas every feature of our culture was an expression of, indeed an instrument of a system of exploitation. Crude and vehement examples of this attitude can be had by the ton from the writings of communists and fellow-travellers right upto the 1980s as also from those of editorialists and pontificators right upto today's newspapers. But the effects did not spare the outlook -- and therefore the writings and, when they attained office, the policies -- of the very best.
Pandit Nehru is the most vivid example of the type. He was the truest of nationalists. His sacrifices for our independence compare with those of anyone else. But he had little acquaintance with our tradition -- his description of it, even when they seek to laud it, do not go deeper than the superficial cliche: one has only to read his account of even a relatively straightforward text such as the Gita alongside that of Sri Aurobindo or Gandhiji or Vinoba to see the chasm. There was in fact more than a mere absence of acquaintance. Deep down Panditji felt that whatever worthwhile there might have been in tradition had long since expired, that it had now to be replaced by the "scientific temper" and "reason". It was not just that the Bhakra-Nangals should be "our new temples," but that the old temples were nothing but spreaders of superstition and devices of inequity and exploitation...
Lack of acquaintance with our tradition was one factor. But this new class was -- and remains to our day -- equally ignorant of, and distant from the life of our common people. In addition therefore to not seeing that which was common in our past, it did not, it does not today, as we noted earlier, see the commonalities in the life, in the beliefs and practices of ordinary people across the country.
Giants such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Gandhiji did all they could to awaken us to the essential elements of our tradition. They saw the essence behind the forms, their eye took in the whole, it did not get stuck at the parts. Others -- from Ramakrishna Paramhamsa to Ramana Maharishi to the Paramacharya at Kanchi -- lived that essence. But after independence offices of State and even more so public discourse came to be filled by the other sort -- the best among them only Macaulay's children.
The result is before us: for seven hundred years to talk of the essence of our tradition was blasphemy; for a hundred years it was stupid; for the last forty years to do so has been "revanchist", "chauvinist", and, the latest, "communal".
Politics
The argument thus far has been as follows: the core of our tradition was the spiritual quest; the core of this spiritual quest was Hindu; the way in which this core manifested itself in the life of our people was the religious. To the western educated Indian the spiritual was just mumbo-jumbo, religion was just opium to entrap the masses, and Hinduism just a particularly pernicious form of that opium. That which was the very essence of our nationhood was thereby denounced. The character our politics too compounded the evil.
When examined closely enough every aggregate disaggregates -- even the atom disaggregates, as do the components into which it disaggregates. A society, a country is an aggregate too: it consists of groups that have both -- features that are common to them and features which differentiate them one from the other...
A Gandhi focusses on that which is common to them, where he sees distances between groups he builds bridges to span them. On the other hand a Jinnah insists that because there are differences, the groups just cannot live together, and he bases his politics on this premise or calculation. A Nehru tries to turn all the groups to values and pursuits -- "our temples, the Bhakra Nangals" -- which vault over those differences. On the other hand, a Ramaswami Naicker, a Lohia, a VP Singh, a Mulayam Singh, a Shahabuddin sees an opportunity in those differences: he focusses on them, he exaggerates them, he enflames in the group he sets out to bamboozle into following him the feeling of having been wronged, of being in peril unless it "preserves its identity" vis-a-vis the engulfing ocean.
In one type of politics the whole is the focus, in the other the parts are -- to the point that the "reality", the very existence of the whole is denied, the very notion that it exists is denounced as a device which has been fabricated to crush the parts one by one. Our politics since Jinnah's time, and even more so since the passing of Panditji has been of the latter kind.
In a word, that which was the essence of our nationhood had come to be denied and denounced already. since then the refrain has been that the parts -- of castes, of religious and liguistic groups, of this class and that -- alone are "real"....
For eighty years, for instance, the Marxists talked in terms of a lofty "internationalism": classes are the only valid category, they said, and these cut across national or state-boundaries. But the moment the War broke out, workers everywhere reacted entirely along reactionary "nationalist" lines -- the German proletariate most of all. "the Only Fatherland" -- the Soviet Union -- too relied wholly on stoking natinalist passions to save itself. Mao's fight against the Japanese, that of the Vietnamase against the Americans, and later against brother-communists, the Chinese -- all these were nationalist strugglers. The name they chose for them were told the tale: they were Wars of National Liberation. The theory was "internationalist", the practice was nationalist. At home here the chasm was even greater: while the resolutions were lofitly "internationalist", in practice the politics of the Marxists was dependent on fanning the sectional demands of "sub-national" groups and caste-groups. Their espousal of the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan was typical: their calculation was that this would endear them to Muslim youth, but they dressed it up in "theses" of Stalin! The Muslims are a separate nation they concluded -- on the basis of an article written by Stalin in 1912! -- and so they must have their separate country. But on Stalin's authority, "A nation is a historically evolved stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture." The Bengali Muslims and Punjabi Muslims, to take just two groups which were to be yoked to form Pakistan, had not even one of the four factors in common -- neither language, nor territory, nor economic life, nor "psychological make-up". What they had in common -- and that too, as was to be soon evident, only in a notional sense -- was religion. But that the Guru, Stalin, had not included among his criteria. Yet the demand for Pakistan was espoused and everyone opposing it was denounced as reactionary communalist wanting to establish Hindu-hegemony. The same hypocrisy continues to this day -- their "internationalism", for instance, keeps these progressives from taking up the cause of the one people who qualify as a nation by their oracle's definition, the people of Tibet; while their calculations goad them to fan the demands of "sub-national" and caste groups in India. As this hypocrisy continues, so does the vehemence.
The case of the liberals is no different. They denounce Hinduism in public but consult astrologers in private and get paaths and havans done in closets. They glorify the "masses" but denounce the sentiment of the masses for Rama. They denounce our tradition, donning modernism, but hail every politician with a casteist plank. They proclaim, "India is not one nation," and give as proof the Muslim's different perceptions of our past. And simultaneously proclaim, "Muslims are an integral part of India, they are as loyal to India as anyone else," and give as proof the performance of Muslim soldiers in wars against Pakistan. Every effort to remind us of our commonalities, they denounce as a design to swallow up the minorities. And then the absence of a fervour for those common elements they proclaim as the proof of our not being one nation!
Thus, out-doing what they said the last time round, and in many cases, factors of a much more personal kind account for their proclaiming the perverse And hypocrisy and the apprehension that if they allow the discussion to proceed they will be caught out are what account for their vehemence.
From 'A Secular Agenda'
"We must at present do our best to form a class," Macaulay wrote in his famous Minute of 1835, "who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."
Now, many of the strictures in his Minute were entirely to the point: the texts which were in use at that time in Arabic and Sanskrit schools were out-dated, they were teaching notions about geography, astronomy and the rest which had been superseded by recent researches. And in this sense, modernising the syllabus and imparting education through English, opening our eyes to the world was indeed to raise Indians.
But there was another aspect to the Minute: utter scorn for all that had been written or developed here. And more than the knowledge they imbibed of the world, it is this disdain for everything Indian that the products of the new education system internalised.
"...the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that until they are enriched from some other quarter it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them," Macaulay wrote. "I have never found one among them (the proponents of continuing to stress oriental learn- ing)", he wrote, "who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia." "It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say," he wrote, "that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books which have been written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England...."
With the British gaining supremacy several things happened. The scorn, falsifications and caricatures of our culture by the missionaries had a free field. They were buttressed by the sway the British acquired in the political sphere - even apart from the assistance this gave to missionary propaganda, political tutelage bred inferiority among us, a feeling that our culture was inferior as it had led us to enslavement. Such acquaintance that educated Indians came to have with our tradition was what they learnt from western books and missionaries. How pervasive the effects of the system were and how they have endured to our very day will be evident from a single consideration: although each is among the simplest of the hundreds upon hundreds that can be set out, every single example cited above - descriptions of our land in the Vedas, Puranas and epics, Shankara's journeys, the Granth Sahib, the linkages between temples and pilgrimages -- will be a surprise to most of us, educated Indians today.
The scorn was deepened in part because of the truimph of western science and technology, but even more because of the fact that educated Indians acquired just a smattering of anacquaintance with even this new learning -- they concluded that the 'scientific temper' and 'reason' were all; they knew next to nothing about our culture... The scorn was made repudation by the spread of Marxist ideas: for these ideas every feature of our culture was an expression of, indeed an instrument of a system of exploitation. Crude and vehement examples of this attitude can be had by the ton from the writings of communists and fellow-travellers right upto the 1980s as also from those of editorialists and pontificators right upto today's newspapers. But the effects did not spare the outlook -- and therefore the writings and, when they attained office, the policies -- of the very best.
Pandit Nehru is the most vivid example of the type. He was the truest of nationalists. His sacrifices for our independence compare with those of anyone else. But he had little acquaintance with our tradition -- his description of it, even when they seek to laud it, do not go deeper than the superficial cliche: one has only to read his account of even a relatively straightforward text such as the Gita alongside that of Sri Aurobindo or Gandhiji or Vinoba to see the chasm. There was in fact more than a mere absence of acquaintance. Deep down Panditji felt that whatever worthwhile there might have been in tradition had long since expired, that it had now to be replaced by the "scientific temper" and "reason". It was not just that the Bhakra-Nangals should be "our new temples," but that the old temples were nothing but spreaders of superstition and devices of inequity and exploitation...
Lack of acquaintance with our tradition was one factor. But this new class was -- and remains to our day -- equally ignorant of, and distant from the life of our common people. In addition therefore to not seeing that which was common in our past, it did not, it does not today, as we noted earlier, see the commonalities in the life, in the beliefs and practices of ordinary people across the country.
Giants such as Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and Gandhiji did all they could to awaken us to the essential elements of our tradition. They saw the essence behind the forms, their eye took in the whole, it did not get stuck at the parts. Others -- from Ramakrishna Paramhamsa to Ramana Maharishi to the Paramacharya at Kanchi -- lived that essence. But after independence offices of State and even more so public discourse came to be filled by the other sort -- the best among them only Macaulay's children.
The result is before us: for seven hundred years to talk of the essence of our tradition was blasphemy; for a hundred years it was stupid; for the last forty years to do so has been "revanchist", "chauvinist", and, the latest, "communal".
Politics
The argument thus far has been as follows: the core of our tradition was the spiritual quest; the core of this spiritual quest was Hindu; the way in which this core manifested itself in the life of our people was the religious. To the western educated Indian the spiritual was just mumbo-jumbo, religion was just opium to entrap the masses, and Hinduism just a particularly pernicious form of that opium. That which was the very essence of our nationhood was thereby denounced. The character our politics too compounded the evil.
When examined closely enough every aggregate disaggregates -- even the atom disaggregates, as do the components into which it disaggregates. A society, a country is an aggregate too: it consists of groups that have both -- features that are common to them and features which differentiate them one from the other...
A Gandhi focusses on that which is common to them, where he sees distances between groups he builds bridges to span them. On the other hand a Jinnah insists that because there are differences, the groups just cannot live together, and he bases his politics on this premise or calculation. A Nehru tries to turn all the groups to values and pursuits -- "our temples, the Bhakra Nangals" -- which vault over those differences. On the other hand, a Ramaswami Naicker, a Lohia, a VP Singh, a Mulayam Singh, a Shahabuddin sees an opportunity in those differences: he focusses on them, he exaggerates them, he enflames in the group he sets out to bamboozle into following him the feeling of having been wronged, of being in peril unless it "preserves its identity" vis-a-vis the engulfing ocean.
In one type of politics the whole is the focus, in the other the parts are -- to the point that the "reality", the very existence of the whole is denied, the very notion that it exists is denounced as a device which has been fabricated to crush the parts one by one. Our politics since Jinnah's time, and even more so since the passing of Panditji has been of the latter kind.
In a word, that which was the essence of our nationhood had come to be denied and denounced already. since then the refrain has been that the parts -- of castes, of religious and liguistic groups, of this class and that -- alone are "real"....
For eighty years, for instance, the Marxists talked in terms of a lofty "internationalism": classes are the only valid category, they said, and these cut across national or state-boundaries. But the moment the War broke out, workers everywhere reacted entirely along reactionary "nationalist" lines -- the German proletariate most of all. "the Only Fatherland" -- the Soviet Union -- too relied wholly on stoking natinalist passions to save itself. Mao's fight against the Japanese, that of the Vietnamase against the Americans, and later against brother-communists, the Chinese -- all these were nationalist strugglers. The name they chose for them were told the tale: they were Wars of National Liberation. The theory was "internationalist", the practice was nationalist. At home here the chasm was even greater: while the resolutions were lofitly "internationalist", in practice the politics of the Marxists was dependent on fanning the sectional demands of "sub-national" groups and caste-groups. Their espousal of the Muslim League's demand for Pakistan was typical: their calculation was that this would endear them to Muslim youth, but they dressed it up in "theses" of Stalin! The Muslims are a separate nation they concluded -- on the basis of an article written by Stalin in 1912! -- and so they must have their separate country. But on Stalin's authority, "A nation is a historically evolved stable community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a community of culture." The Bengali Muslims and Punjabi Muslims, to take just two groups which were to be yoked to form Pakistan, had not even one of the four factors in common -- neither language, nor territory, nor economic life, nor "psychological make-up". What they had in common -- and that too, as was to be soon evident, only in a notional sense -- was religion. But that the Guru, Stalin, had not included among his criteria. Yet the demand for Pakistan was espoused and everyone opposing it was denounced as reactionary communalist wanting to establish Hindu-hegemony. The same hypocrisy continues to this day -- their "internationalism", for instance, keeps these progressives from taking up the cause of the one people who qualify as a nation by their oracle's definition, the people of Tibet; while their calculations goad them to fan the demands of "sub-national" and caste groups in India. As this hypocrisy continues, so does the vehemence.
The case of the liberals is no different. They denounce Hinduism in public but consult astrologers in private and get paaths and havans done in closets. They glorify the "masses" but denounce the sentiment of the masses for Rama. They denounce our tradition, donning modernism, but hail every politician with a casteist plank. They proclaim, "India is not one nation," and give as proof the Muslim's different perceptions of our past. And simultaneously proclaim, "Muslims are an integral part of India, they are as loyal to India as anyone else," and give as proof the performance of Muslim soldiers in wars against Pakistan. Every effort to remind us of our commonalities, they denounce as a design to swallow up the minorities. And then the absence of a fervour for those common elements they proclaim as the proof of our not being one nation!
Thus, out-doing what they said the last time round, and in many cases, factors of a much more personal kind account for their proclaiming the perverse And hypocrisy and the apprehension that if they allow the discussion to proceed they will be caught out are what account for their vehemence.
From 'A Secular Agenda'
Objective Whitewash for Objective History (PART I of II) !
Arun Shourie
"This is an old charge which keeps surfacing now and then," wrote one of those "eminent historians", K. N. Panikkar, in an vituperative response to an article of mine -- the charge that close to two crores had been spent on the "Towards Freedom" project of the Indian Council of Historical Project, and little had been achieved. "About a year back Times of India carried a front page story on this. The historians had then clarified through a public statement published in several newspapers, that they have not drawn any money from the ICHR and that they worked for five years purely in an honorary capacity. When he [that is, me] gets the information from the ministry, if he does, that the editors have not taken any money, I would normally expect Shourie to tender a public apology. But given the intellectual honesty and cultural level reflected in his article, I do not think it would be forthcoming. The alternative of suing for defamation the likes of Shourie is below one's dignity. But I do expect at least the ministry to make a public statement on the factual position."
Strong stuff, and definitive, one would think. It turns out that on 17 July, 1998, in answer to a question tabled in the Rajya Sabha, the Ministry stated that only one part of the project has been completed and published since the original volume of Dr. P. N. Chopra. This is the volume -- in three parts -- by Dr. Partha Sarthi Gupta covering 1943-44. In answer to another question, the Ministry has reported that "After publication of the Volume he was paid an honorarium of Rs. 25,000 in September, 1997."
Dr. Partha Sarthi Gupta, in other words, is the one editor who has completed the work which he had undertaken. For that he has been paid Rs. 25,000. The others have not completed the work they had undertaken, they have therefore not been paid the Rs. 25,000 which are to be paid to them only when their volumes are completed and published. That is how they go about proclaiming themselves to be social workers -- we have been working in an honorary capacity, we have not taken a penny !
And as bits and pieces about the ICHR at last start trickling out, we learn that the "Towards Freedom" project isn't the only one on which large amounts have been spent and which has not been completed. There is an "Economic History of India Project." Rs. 1,955,000 have been spent on it. Nothing has been published as a result. Though, the Ministry told the Rajya Sabha that "according to the information furnished by the ICHR," two volumes of the project -- on Railways and Agriculture -- are "ready for the press".
The Ministry also told the Rajya Sabha that "Professor Bipin Chandra was sanctioned a sum of Rs. 75,000 during 1987-88 for the assignment entitled 'A History of the Indian National Congress'. A sum of Rs. 57,500 has been released to him till 23-6-1989. The remaining balance of Rs. 17,500 is yet to be released because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received." In a word, spare readers this social-worker stance -- "doing all this in a strictly honorary capacity". It is as if Bipin Chandra were to go about saying, "See, I have not even taken the Rs. 17,500 which the ICHR still owes me." And do not miss that effort from the ICHR to help to the extent possible -- "The remaining balance of Rs. 17,500 is yet to be released because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received." Does that mean that some "informal" manuscript has been received, or that no manuscript has been received?
As newspapers and magazines such as Outlook had done, Panikkar had concocted his conspiracy theory on the charge that the BJP Government had changed the word "Rational" into "National", and that it had suppressed three of the five objectives of the ICHR by changing the Memorandum of Association of the ICHR. I had reproduced relevant paragraphs from the Resolutions to show that the same wording had continued for at least twenty years. I had given the numbers and dates of the Resolutions. I had also reported that I had requested the Secretary of the Ministry to help ascertain the year since which the same wording had continued. And what was the response of this "eminent" historian who, as he said, writes signed articles in publications of the Communist Party "because I believe in the ideals it stands for"? "Even if Shourie's contention is true (unlike Shourie who is a BJP MP, a resident of Delhi elected from UP, I have no means to ascertain from the Ministry)..."
That is a much favoured stance: when caught peddling a lie, insinuate that the other fellow is privileged! And that as you are from the working masses, you cannot ascertain whether the facts he has stated are true. Therefore, what you stated must stand as fact -- Q.E.D. !
Exactly the same dodge was used a day or so later by another of these progressives. Manoj Raghuvanshi had invited K. M. Shrimali and me to discuss on Zee Television's Aap ki Adalat the charge that history was being rewritten in communal colours. Raghuvanshi read out what Outlook had reported -- that the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education had issued instructions in 1989 that "Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned."
Raghuvanshi asked Shrimali, whether this did not amount to distortion? True, that was a painful period of our history, Raghuvanshi said, but should it be erased from our history books? Would that be objective, rational history? Shrimali's response was the well-practised script : firstly, he did not know that such an instruction was ever issued; if it was issued, he said, he was against it; but one must see what the context was in which the instruction had been issued...
Concerned teachers in West Bengal have been so kind as to send me the circular relating to textbooks for class IX. Dated 28 April, 1989, it is issued by the West Bengal Secondary Board. It is in Bengali, and carries the number "Syl/89/1".
"All the West Bengal Government recognised secondary school Headmasters are being informed," it begins, "that in History textbooks recommended by this Board for Class IX the following amendments to the chapter on the medieval period have been decided after due discussions and review by experts." "
"The authors and publishers of Class IX History textbooks," it continues, "are being requested to incorporate the amendments if books published by them have these aushuddho [impurities, errors] in all subsequent editions, and paste a corrigendum in books which have already been published. A copy of the book with the corrigendum should be deposited with the Syllabus Office (74, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, Calcutta -- 16)." Signed,
"...Chattopadhyaya, Secretary."
The accompanying pages contain two columns : aushuddho -- impurity, or error -- and shuddho. One has just to glance through the changes to see the objective the progressives are trying to achieve through their "objective", "rational" approach to the writing of history. Here are some of the changes.
Book : Bharat Katha, prepared by the Burdwan Education Society, Teachers Enterprise, published by Sukhomoy Das....
*
Page 140 : Aushuddho -- "In Sindhudesh the Arabs did not describe Hindus as Kafir. They had banned cow-slaughter."
Shuddho -- "Delete, 'They had banned cow-slaughter'."
*
Page 141 : Aushuddho -- "Fourthly, using force to destroy Hindu temples was also an expression of aggression. Fifthly, forcibly marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam before marriage was another way to propagate the fundamentalism of the ulema."
Shuddho : though the column reproduces the sentences only from "Fourthly....", the Board directs that the entire matter from "Secondly.... to ulema" be deleted.
*
Page 141 : Aushuddho -- The logical, philosophical, materialist Mutazilla disappeared. On the one hand, the fundamentalist thinking based on the Quran and the Hadis...."
Shuddho -- "Delete, 'On the one hand, the fundamentalist thinking based on the Quran and the Hadis'...."
Book : Bharatvarsher Itihash, by Dr. Narendranath Bhattacharya, published by Chakravarty and Son...
*
Page 89 : Aushuddho -- "Sultan Mahmud used force for widespread murder, loot, destruction and conversion."
Shuddho -- "There was widespread loot and destruction by Mahmud." That is, no reference to killing, no reference to forcible conversions.
*
Page 89 : Aushuddho -- "He looted valuables worth 2 crore dirham from the Somnath temple and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni."
Shuddho -- "Delete 'and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni.'"
*
Page 112 : Aushuddho -- "Hindu-Muslim relations of the medieval ages is a very sensitive issue. The non- believers had to embrace Islam or death."
Shuddho -- All matter on pages 112-13 to be deleted.
*
Page 113 : Aushuddho -- "According to Islamic law non-Muslims will have to choose between death and Islam. Only the Hanafis allow non-Muslims to pay jaziya in exchange for their lives."
Shuddho -- Rewrite this as follows : "By paying jaziya to Allauddin Khilji, Hindus could lead normal lives." Moreover, all the subsequent sentences "Qazi...", "Taimur's arrival in India..." to be deleted.
*
Page 113 : Aushuddho -- "Mahmud was a believer in the rule of Islam whose core was 'Either Islam or death'.
Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by Shobhankar Chattopadhyaya, published by Narmada Publishers.
*
Page 181 : Aushuddho -- "To prevent Hindu women from being seen by Muslims, they were directed to remain indoors."
Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Itihasher Kahini, by Nalini Bhushan Dasgupta, published by B. B. Kumar.
*
Page 132 : Aushuddho -- According to Todd [the famous chronicler of Rajasthan annals] the purpose behind Allauddin's Chittor expedition was to secure Rana Rattan Singh's beautiful wife, Padmini."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 154 : Aushuddho -- "As dictated by Islam, there were three options for non-Muslims : get yourself converted to Islam; pay jaziya; accept death. In an Islamic State non-Muslims had to accept one of these three options."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 161 : Aushuddho -- "The early Sultans were eager to expand the sway of Islam by forcibly converting Hindus into Islam."
Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by P. Maiti, Sreedhar Prakashini.
*
Page 117 : Aushuddho -- "There is an account that Allauddin attacked the capital of Mewar, Chittorgarh, to get Padmini, the beautiful wife of Rana Rattan Singh."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 139 : Ashuddho -- "There was a sense of aristocratic superiority in the purdah system. That is why upper-class Hindus adopted this system from upper-class Muslims. Another opinion has it that purdah came into practice to save Hindu women from Muslims. Most probably, purdah came into vogue because of both factors."
Shuddho -- delete.
The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on "Aurangzeb's policy on religion". Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule -- to spread the sway of Islam -- are directed to be excised from the book. He is to be presented as one who had an aversion -- an ordinary sort of aversion, almost a secular one -- to music and dancing, to the presence of prostitutes in the Court, and that it is these things he banished. The only allusion to his having done anything in regard to Islam which is allowed to remain is that "By distancing himself from Akbar's policy of religious tolerance and policy of equal treatment, Aurangzeb caused damage to Mughal rule."
Book : Swadesho Shobhyota, by Dr. P. K. Basu and S. B. Ghatak, Abhinav Prakashan.
*
Page 126 : Ashuddho -- "Some people believe that Allauddin's Mewar expedition was to get hold of Padmini, the wife of Rana Rattan Singh." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 145 : Ashuddho -- "Apart from this, because Islam used extreme inhuman means to establish itself in India, this became an obstacle for the coming together of Indian and Islamic cultures." Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Bharat Katha, by G. Bhattacharya, Bulbul Prakashan.
*
Page 40 : Ashuddho -- "Muslims used to take recourse to torture and inhuman means to force their religious beliefs and practices on Indians." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 41 : Ashuddho -- "The liberal, humane elements in Islam held out hope for oppressed Hindus." Shuddho -- The entire paragraph beginning with "the caste system among Hindus.... was attacked" is to be deleted. Instead write, "There was no place for casteism in Islam. Understandably, the influence of Islam created an awakening among Hindus against caste discrimination. Lower caste oppressed Hindus embraced Islam."
*
Page 77 : Ashuddho -- "His main task was to oppress non-believers, especially Hindus." Shuddho -- This and the preceding sentence to be deleted.
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by A. C. Roy, published by Prantik.
*
Page 102 : Ashuddho -- "There is an account that Allauddin attacked Chittor to get the beautiful wife of Rana Rattan Singh, Padmini." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 164 : Ashuddho -- "It was his commitment to Islam which made him a fundamentalist." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Book : Bharut Kahini, by G. C. Rowchoudhury, published by A. K. Sarkar and Co.
*
Page 130 : Ashuddho -- "That is why he adopted the policy of converting Hindus to Islam -- so as to increase the number of Muslims. Those Hindus who refused to discard their religion were indiscriminately massacred by him or his generals." Shuddho -- Delete.
In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam !
Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away.
Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the scream, "Communal rewriting of history."
But there isn't just whitewash of Islam. For after Islam came another great emancipatory ideology -- Marxism- Leninism.
The teachers furnish extracts from the textbook for Class V.
".... in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and in other East European countries, the workers and peasants are ruling the country after capturing power, whereas in U.S.A., England, France and Germany the owners of mills and factories are ruling the country."
".... after the Revolution in Russia the first exploitation-free society was established."
".... Islam and Christianity are the only religions which treated man with honour and equality...."
Thus, not just whitewash, there is hogwash too.
"This is an old charge which keeps surfacing now and then," wrote one of those "eminent historians", K. N. Panikkar, in an vituperative response to an article of mine -- the charge that close to two crores had been spent on the "Towards Freedom" project of the Indian Council of Historical Project, and little had been achieved. "About a year back Times of India carried a front page story on this. The historians had then clarified through a public statement published in several newspapers, that they have not drawn any money from the ICHR and that they worked for five years purely in an honorary capacity. When he [that is, me] gets the information from the ministry, if he does, that the editors have not taken any money, I would normally expect Shourie to tender a public apology. But given the intellectual honesty and cultural level reflected in his article, I do not think it would be forthcoming. The alternative of suing for defamation the likes of Shourie is below one's dignity. But I do expect at least the ministry to make a public statement on the factual position."
Strong stuff, and definitive, one would think. It turns out that on 17 July, 1998, in answer to a question tabled in the Rajya Sabha, the Ministry stated that only one part of the project has been completed and published since the original volume of Dr. P. N. Chopra. This is the volume -- in three parts -- by Dr. Partha Sarthi Gupta covering 1943-44. In answer to another question, the Ministry has reported that "After publication of the Volume he was paid an honorarium of Rs. 25,000 in September, 1997."
Dr. Partha Sarthi Gupta, in other words, is the one editor who has completed the work which he had undertaken. For that he has been paid Rs. 25,000. The others have not completed the work they had undertaken, they have therefore not been paid the Rs. 25,000 which are to be paid to them only when their volumes are completed and published. That is how they go about proclaiming themselves to be social workers -- we have been working in an honorary capacity, we have not taken a penny !
And as bits and pieces about the ICHR at last start trickling out, we learn that the "Towards Freedom" project isn't the only one on which large amounts have been spent and which has not been completed. There is an "Economic History of India Project." Rs. 1,955,000 have been spent on it. Nothing has been published as a result. Though, the Ministry told the Rajya Sabha that "according to the information furnished by the ICHR," two volumes of the project -- on Railways and Agriculture -- are "ready for the press".
The Ministry also told the Rajya Sabha that "Professor Bipin Chandra was sanctioned a sum of Rs. 75,000 during 1987-88 for the assignment entitled 'A History of the Indian National Congress'. A sum of Rs. 57,500 has been released to him till 23-6-1989. The remaining balance of Rs. 17,500 is yet to be released because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received." In a word, spare readers this social-worker stance -- "doing all this in a strictly honorary capacity". It is as if Bipin Chandra were to go about saying, "See, I have not even taken the Rs. 17,500 which the ICHR still owes me." And do not miss that effort from the ICHR to help to the extent possible -- "The remaining balance of Rs. 17,500 is yet to be released because a formal manuscript in this regard is yet to be received." Does that mean that some "informal" manuscript has been received, or that no manuscript has been received?
As newspapers and magazines such as Outlook had done, Panikkar had concocted his conspiracy theory on the charge that the BJP Government had changed the word "Rational" into "National", and that it had suppressed three of the five objectives of the ICHR by changing the Memorandum of Association of the ICHR. I had reproduced relevant paragraphs from the Resolutions to show that the same wording had continued for at least twenty years. I had given the numbers and dates of the Resolutions. I had also reported that I had requested the Secretary of the Ministry to help ascertain the year since which the same wording had continued. And what was the response of this "eminent" historian who, as he said, writes signed articles in publications of the Communist Party "because I believe in the ideals it stands for"? "Even if Shourie's contention is true (unlike Shourie who is a BJP MP, a resident of Delhi elected from UP, I have no means to ascertain from the Ministry)..."
That is a much favoured stance: when caught peddling a lie, insinuate that the other fellow is privileged! And that as you are from the working masses, you cannot ascertain whether the facts he has stated are true. Therefore, what you stated must stand as fact -- Q.E.D. !
Exactly the same dodge was used a day or so later by another of these progressives. Manoj Raghuvanshi had invited K. M. Shrimali and me to discuss on Zee Television's Aap ki Adalat the charge that history was being rewritten in communal colours. Raghuvanshi read out what Outlook had reported -- that the West Bengal Board of Secondary Education had issued instructions in 1989 that "Muslim rule should never attract any criticism. Destruction of temples by Muslim rulers and invaders should not be mentioned."
Raghuvanshi asked Shrimali, whether this did not amount to distortion? True, that was a painful period of our history, Raghuvanshi said, but should it be erased from our history books? Would that be objective, rational history? Shrimali's response was the well-practised script : firstly, he did not know that such an instruction was ever issued; if it was issued, he said, he was against it; but one must see what the context was in which the instruction had been issued...
Concerned teachers in West Bengal have been so kind as to send me the circular relating to textbooks for class IX. Dated 28 April, 1989, it is issued by the West Bengal Secondary Board. It is in Bengali, and carries the number "Syl/89/1".
"All the West Bengal Government recognised secondary school Headmasters are being informed," it begins, "that in History textbooks recommended by this Board for Class IX the following amendments to the chapter on the medieval period have been decided after due discussions and review by experts." "
"The authors and publishers of Class IX History textbooks," it continues, "are being requested to incorporate the amendments if books published by them have these aushuddho [impurities, errors] in all subsequent editions, and paste a corrigendum in books which have already been published. A copy of the book with the corrigendum should be deposited with the Syllabus Office (74, Rafi Ahmed Kidwai Road, Calcutta -- 16)." Signed,
"...Chattopadhyaya, Secretary."
The accompanying pages contain two columns : aushuddho -- impurity, or error -- and shuddho. One has just to glance through the changes to see the objective the progressives are trying to achieve through their "objective", "rational" approach to the writing of history. Here are some of the changes.
Book : Bharat Katha, prepared by the Burdwan Education Society, Teachers Enterprise, published by Sukhomoy Das....
*
Page 140 : Aushuddho -- "In Sindhudesh the Arabs did not describe Hindus as Kafir. They had banned cow-slaughter."
Shuddho -- "Delete, 'They had banned cow-slaughter'."
*
Page 141 : Aushuddho -- "Fourthly, using force to destroy Hindu temples was also an expression of aggression. Fifthly, forcibly marrying Hindu women and converting them to Islam before marriage was another way to propagate the fundamentalism of the ulema."
Shuddho : though the column reproduces the sentences only from "Fourthly....", the Board directs that the entire matter from "Secondly.... to ulema" be deleted.
*
Page 141 : Aushuddho -- The logical, philosophical, materialist Mutazilla disappeared. On the one hand, the fundamentalist thinking based on the Quran and the Hadis...."
Shuddho -- "Delete, 'On the one hand, the fundamentalist thinking based on the Quran and the Hadis'...."
Book : Bharatvarsher Itihash, by Dr. Narendranath Bhattacharya, published by Chakravarty and Son...
*
Page 89 : Aushuddho -- "Sultan Mahmud used force for widespread murder, loot, destruction and conversion."
Shuddho -- "There was widespread loot and destruction by Mahmud." That is, no reference to killing, no reference to forcible conversions.
*
Page 89 : Aushuddho -- "He looted valuables worth 2 crore dirham from the Somnath temple and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni."
Shuddho -- "Delete 'and used the Shivling as a step leading up to the masjid in Ghazni.'"
*
Page 112 : Aushuddho -- "Hindu-Muslim relations of the medieval ages is a very sensitive issue. The non- believers had to embrace Islam or death."
Shuddho -- All matter on pages 112-13 to be deleted.
*
Page 113 : Aushuddho -- "According to Islamic law non-Muslims will have to choose between death and Islam. Only the Hanafis allow non-Muslims to pay jaziya in exchange for their lives."
Shuddho -- Rewrite this as follows : "By paying jaziya to Allauddin Khilji, Hindus could lead normal lives." Moreover, all the subsequent sentences "Qazi...", "Taimur's arrival in India..." to be deleted.
*
Page 113 : Aushuddho -- "Mahmud was a believer in the rule of Islam whose core was 'Either Islam or death'.
Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by Shobhankar Chattopadhyaya, published by Narmada Publishers.
*
Page 181 : Aushuddho -- "To prevent Hindu women from being seen by Muslims, they were directed to remain indoors."
Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Itihasher Kahini, by Nalini Bhushan Dasgupta, published by B. B. Kumar.
*
Page 132 : Aushuddho -- According to Todd [the famous chronicler of Rajasthan annals] the purpose behind Allauddin's Chittor expedition was to secure Rana Rattan Singh's beautiful wife, Padmini."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 154 : Aushuddho -- "As dictated by Islam, there were three options for non-Muslims : get yourself converted to Islam; pay jaziya; accept death. In an Islamic State non-Muslims had to accept one of these three options."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 161 : Aushuddho -- "The early Sultans were eager to expand the sway of Islam by forcibly converting Hindus into Islam."
Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by P. Maiti, Sreedhar Prakashini.
*
Page 117 : Aushuddho -- "There is an account that Allauddin attacked the capital of Mewar, Chittorgarh, to get Padmini, the beautiful wife of Rana Rattan Singh."
Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 139 : Ashuddho -- "There was a sense of aristocratic superiority in the purdah system. That is why upper-class Hindus adopted this system from upper-class Muslims. Another opinion has it that purdah came into practice to save Hindu women from Muslims. Most probably, purdah came into vogue because of both factors."
Shuddho -- delete.
The most extensive deletions are ordered in regard to the chapter on "Aurangzeb's policy on religion". Every allusion to what he actually did to the Hindus, to their temples, to the very leitmotif of his rule -- to spread the sway of Islam -- are directed to be excised from the book. He is to be presented as one who had an aversion -- an ordinary sort of aversion, almost a secular one -- to music and dancing, to the presence of prostitutes in the Court, and that it is these things he banished. The only allusion to his having done anything in regard to Islam which is allowed to remain is that "By distancing himself from Akbar's policy of religious tolerance and policy of equal treatment, Aurangzeb caused damage to Mughal rule."
Book : Swadesho Shobhyota, by Dr. P. K. Basu and S. B. Ghatak, Abhinav Prakashan.
*
Page 126 : Ashuddho -- "Some people believe that Allauddin's Mewar expedition was to get hold of Padmini, the wife of Rana Rattan Singh." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 145 : Ashuddho -- "Apart from this, because Islam used extreme inhuman means to establish itself in India, this became an obstacle for the coming together of Indian and Islamic cultures." Shuddho -- Delete.
Book : Bharat Katha, by G. Bhattacharya, Bulbul Prakashan.
*
Page 40 : Ashuddho -- "Muslims used to take recourse to torture and inhuman means to force their religious beliefs and practices on Indians." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 41 : Ashuddho -- "The liberal, humane elements in Islam held out hope for oppressed Hindus." Shuddho -- The entire paragraph beginning with "the caste system among Hindus.... was attacked" is to be deleted. Instead write, "There was no place for casteism in Islam. Understandably, the influence of Islam created an awakening among Hindus against caste discrimination. Lower caste oppressed Hindus embraced Islam."
*
Page 77 : Ashuddho -- "His main task was to oppress non-believers, especially Hindus." Shuddho -- This and the preceding sentence to be deleted.
Book : Bharuter Itihash, by A. C. Roy, published by Prantik.
*
Page 102 : Ashuddho -- "There is an account that Allauddin attacked Chittor to get the beautiful wife of Rana Rattan Singh, Padmini." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Page 164 : Ashuddho -- "It was his commitment to Islam which made him a fundamentalist." Shuddho -- Delete.
*
Book : Bharut Kahini, by G. C. Rowchoudhury, published by A. K. Sarkar and Co.
*
Page 130 : Ashuddho -- "That is why he adopted the policy of converting Hindus to Islam -- so as to increase the number of Muslims. Those Hindus who refused to discard their religion were indiscriminately massacred by him or his generals." Shuddho -- Delete.
In a word, no forcible conversions, no massacres, no destruction of temples. Just that Hinduism had created an exploitative, casteist society. Islam was egalitarian. Hence the oppressed Hindus embraced Islam !
Muslim historians of those times are in raptures at the heap of Kafirs who have been dispatched to hell. Muslim historians are forever lavishing praise on the ruler for the temples he has destroyed, for the hundreds of thousands he has got to see the light of Islam. Law books like The Hedaya prescribe exactly the options to which these little textbooks alluded. All whitewashed away.
Objective whitewash for objective history. And today if anyone seeks to restore truth to these textbooks, the scream, "Communal rewriting of history."
But there isn't just whitewash of Islam. For after Islam came another great emancipatory ideology -- Marxism- Leninism.
The teachers furnish extracts from the textbook for Class V.
".... in Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba and in other East European countries, the workers and peasants are ruling the country after capturing power, whereas in U.S.A., England, France and Germany the owners of mills and factories are ruling the country."
".... after the Revolution in Russia the first exploitation-free society was established."
".... Islam and Christianity are the only religions which treated man with honour and equality...."
Thus, not just whitewash, there is hogwash too.
The Jihadi Mentality: Its Recoil and Danger
Arun Shourie
The war in Kargil has ignited an intense reaction across the country. War does. War that results from aggression by the other does even more. This time round two factors have caused the reaction to be even more intense. There is the element of betrayal: India had extended the hand of trust and friendship; Pakistan, it now turns out, merely pretended to reciprocate. And then there is the effect of television. This is the first war which has been brought into our living rooms: we see the extreme conditions in which our soldiers are defending our country, we see the majesty and beauty of our sacred mountains which the enemy has violated, we see the bodies arrive, we see and hear the valour of the bereaved parents and wives.
There is another reaction. We are all humbled: by the valour of the soldiers, by the fortitude of the relatives. Would I agree to begin the trek up some God-forsaken, distant hill, each of us is forced to think, knowing that as a result, within three-four hours, I may be dead?
The form the reaction has taken is just as telling. Each time a body is taken back thousands upon thousands stand in reverence along the route. When it arrives in a city or a village, thousands come out to pay homage. Neighbours and others visit the family of the soldier. Contributions to funds have exceeded all expectations.
The visits are out of empathy. The funds are for caring: to care for the soldier who has been disabled, to care for the wife and children of the soldier who has been killed.
The papers of Pakistan, especially the Urdu papers, on the other hand, have been full of reactions of an entirely different kind. Of "Jihad conferences" being held, of "Jihad centers" to be opened for recruiting volunteers, of collections for yet another "Jihad fund". The volunteers are not to care for anybody, their mission is to go across, and vanquish and destroy the land of kufr, the Hindu-India. The funds are not for caring, they are to destroy and dismember the land of kafirs, the Hindu-India. The speeches that are made at these gatherings, the slogans that are raised -- "Kashmir banega Pakistan" -- the very words that are used -- "Hindu-India, the birth-enemy of Pakistan," the "Battle for Hind" -- contain a venom, which we cannot comprehend.
But it is something we should learn to comprehend. For our neighbour is saturated with it. The venom, and the actions it triggers, will recoil on Pakistan of course. But that will take decades. In the meanwhile, unless we develop antigens to that poison, untold costs will be inflicted on our country. Moreover, if we falter in crushing every single action which that poison triggers, the poison will acquire greater and greater potency in the eyes of the Jihadis -- see, it is because of the Jihadi-spirit that our mujahideen have given those banias such a licking, they will conclude. So, every single action that is spurred by that sort of spirit must be completely crushed. But how will be ever ensure that it is crushed if we turn our eyes from what triggers it?
Lt. General Javed Nasir is one of Pakistan's "thinking Generals". He has been head of the ISI. He is among the Generals who were associated with Pakistan's successes in Afghanistan. Not just a typical voice, therefore, a crucial one. Recall that Nawaz Sharif made his desperate flight to Washington on July 3, that he signed the capitulatory joint-statement with Clinton on July 4. On July 1 -- that is, just three days before Nawaz Sharif had to accept that Pakistan would withdraw behind the Line of Control -- Lt. General Javed Nasir was telling Pakistanis that India was on the brink of defeat and collapse and disintegration! Readers would have concluded that the Indian defeat was so overwhelming that Vajpayee had as good as lost his mind!
Defeat in Kargil will spell disaster at the polls, that is what is staring Vajpayee in the face, this former controller of the ISI wrote. "He was angry," the General wrote, describing, no doubt from secret sources of the ISI, a meeting of the Indian Prime Minister with our Service Chiefs, "froth coming out of his mouth, shaking with anger, a little bit stammering [sic.], he let the Khakis have it." "I order you to throw them out, otherwise there will be large-scale sackings irrespective of ranks."
The Kargil operation has already inflicted unbearable cost on India, the General calculated. Each shell of Bofors costs a thousand dollars, his spies told him; in just one week India has fired nearly 30,000 rounds, his sources on the front told him. That means India has burnt up three billion dollars in just one week, his calculator indicated. And now India will have to spend another ten billion dollars to replace the barrels of the guns. Four days earlier, in another article, the General had recalled how, at the time of the Lahore Bus diplomacy, in an article in The Nation, "I had implored the Pakistani Army and Mujahideen to interdict the Srinagar-Drass road to make things more difficult for the Indians in Siachin. The Mujahideen executed a brilliant plan." His brilliant plan having been executed so brilliantly, Indians are on the run, the General informed his countrymen.
And for good and obvious reasons, he said. "Whereas the Mujahideen are fighting for a just cause and Shahadat is the greatest honour they can receive and as such they are fighting for this noble objective, the Indian soldiers are highly demoralized. Most of them have already completed their Kashmir tenure and want to go back to the safety of the mainland. They are being forced into the attacks and kept in Kashmir against their will. They only fulfil the formality of attack." This plain truth was being portrayed by Pakistan TV, he said, and that is why the Indian Government banned it! But Indians continue to watch Pakistan TV "for factual and correct situation", using dish antennas, he said, "despite house raids by police"! All we have to do is to keep the road to Siachin closed, he wrote the next day. That will force India to spend Rs 30-40 crore a day, "which will break the Indian back"! The General painted even rosier gardens. If the Indian Army can be prevented from retaking the Kargil positions, Vajpayee will be forced to lunge into Pakistan crossing the LoC. This prospect "offers the Pakistan Army the opportunity of the century to redeem its honour and take revenge for Dhaka." Once Pakistan makes a major penetration into India, the Sikhs will get and grab "the opportunity of the millennium to rise and play havoc with India's lines of communications." And once there is a major setback to India in Punjab, "the Sikh dream of Khalistan will become a reality." And that will induce the Tamils to revolt in the South, and the Nagas and the Mizos to proclaim their Unilateral Declaration of Independence"!
Faced with disintegration, Vajpayee will have to opt for the nuclear option, the General forecast. Therefore, he counseled the world, before India reaches that point, the world should solve the Kashmir problem "in accordance with the resolutions of the Security Council." Q E D! Not only has Pakistan the opportunity of a century because of the bind in which India is caught, Allah has conferred a special boon on Pakistan to enable it to avail of this opportunity, the General's reasoning went. And what is that boon? "In Parvez Musharraf we have an excellent General," he explained, "who has the blend of dynamism (his SSG background) and superb professionalism. Allah chose him for this occasion. He will not only deliver but deliver beyond expectations of all. He is the gift of Allah to the nation."
The only thing to guard against is American perfidy, the General wrote. On his reckoning, the Pakistan Army has won each and every war with India, and it is only the USA, "which has a history of betrayals towards Pakistan," that has compelled Pakistan to forgo what it had won on the ground! General Hamid Gul, an even more formidable former head of the ISI, was announcing victories in even more vivid colours. "General Gul predicts Indian troops surrender," ran the headlines of The Pakistan Observer on 27 June. That the Indians were concentrating so many troops in the area is all to the good, General Gul told the paper. Soon, the monsoon will set in, and they will be trapped in "the hills, dales and jungles of Kashmir while this terrain is familiar and friendly to the Mujahideen." "He said," the paper reported, "it is pre-ordained that this military machine that subjected Kashmiris to terrorism will be humiliated and disgraced at the hands of a handful of Mujahideen."
These are the analyses of Pakistan's "thinking Generals," of its "strategic thinkers," these are analyses appearing in the country's "responsible, sober" English papers. The Urdu papers of course carry reports of even more glowing victories -- as I write this I have at hand reports from Nawa-e-Waqt, al Dawa, Ausaf, Jasarat, Khabrein, Din -- they give even more Allah-ordained reasons on account of which India is about to disintegrate before the might of the Mujahideen. "Enemy is being thrashed from all sides;" "These militants are battle-hardened having fought in Afghanistan for over ten years;" "The Mujahideen have been waiting for open war with India since long. Now they have the opportunity with the opening of the Kargil front;" "The Amir of Markaz Dawat wal Irshad, Professor Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, further claimed that the foolish Europe does not know that Mujahideen have arrived there also in a clandestine manner;" "Maulana Mohammed Azim Tariq, President Sipah-e-Sahaba, said that the moment Government declared Jihad the Sipah-e-Sahaba would provide 50,000 trained Mujahideen for fighting alongside the Pakistan Army;" "The meeting of the Jamiat Ahl-e-Sunnat-o-al-Jamat held in Islamabad under the Chairmanship of Qazi Abdul Malik decided that the Jamiat will send 20,000 volunteers;" "Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Amir Jamiat-e-Islami has started collecting Jihad-e-Kashmir funds, and Jamat-e-Islami is issuing pamphlets urging people to obtain the blessings of Allah by taking part in the Battle of Hind;" "A pamphlet issued by Abdur Rashid Turabi, Amir of the Jamiat-e-Islami in Azad Kashmir says that the shadows of war are deepening, and Pakistanis should give a fatal blow to the birth-enemy of Muslims, India, the Mujahideen have reduced the pride of the enemy to ashes, he says;" Ausaf reports that according to its survey ninety five per cent of the people in Islamabad and Rawalpindi believe that the Kashmir issue can be solved through war and not through negotiations; according to the survey, 99 percent of the people in the North West Frontier Province want the Government to declare Jihad against India for solving the Kashmir issue; "Thousands of armed tribals at a public meeting on 27 June at Miran Shah in Northern Waziristan Agency announced Jihad against India and took an oath that they would not rest unless they hoist the Islamic flag in Delhi".
The article of faith, that India is the "birth-enemy of Muslims," the conviction that the opportunity of the century has come, that Allah has given them an instrument for availing it, the hallucinatory reports that the enemy is being routed, the conviction that Jihad is the solution, the fever for it.
And the foundation of all this: the conviction that everything that is being done is in the cause of Islam. The Ausaf of 30 June: " A group of Al-Badar mujahideen left Mansehara for Kashmir on June 29 for taking part in the Battle of Hind. Bidding them farewell, Commander Ejaz Ali, Amir Lashkar-al-Badar, instructed them to eliminate Indian troops and hoist the flag of Islam in Kashmir. They had to fight the Indian Army from Kargil to Delhi." Two days later, on 2 July, the Ausaf reported, "Pakistani ulema, including Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, Mufti Jamil Khan and Dr. Abdur Razaq issued a Fatwa of Jihad against India in Islamabad on July 1. In the Fatwa, issued in response to a query from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, they said that students should be sent on Jihad by shutting down all religious schools." Ideologies become blinkers: believers keep looking at the world through one pair of pre-fabricated spectacles, they keep fitting developments into one straitjacket when in fact the world is changing inside out. The adherents are therefore "pre-ordained", to snatch General Hamid Gul's expression, to flounder. Hallucinatory reports of non-existent victories can only make the ultimate defeat more certain, more thoroughgoing, and swifter. But that very preconditioning predisposes believers to invade and assault.
That is what we must see, at last. 1948, 1965, the brutality unleashed on East Pakistan in 1971, the terrorism they caused in Punjab throughout the 1980s, the insurgency they spawned in Kashmir in the 1990s, Kargil now: is it right to be surprised each time?
And, other things apart, Pakistan is by now the hub of what can only be described as an "International Islamic Rapid Action Force": Jihadis from various Islamic countries, available for one Jihad after the other.
Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, of course and always, Kashmir. "Taliban Minister for Communication, Naimatullah Khan Naumani, Minister Hajj-o-Auqaf, Maulana Abdul Wali, Special Force Chief, Maulvi Gul Zarin, I.G. Police, Maulana Anwar, addressing a function on the occasion of the 14th death anniversary of Maulana Irshad in Kabul (on 29 June) announced war against India alongside Kashmiri mujahideen," reported the Ausaf on 30 June. "They said that the help of Kashmiri and Pakistani mujahideen during Russian aggression was a debt on them, and it was now high time to clear this debt. They did not fear India, they said, nor any other power. They would fight alongside Kashmiri mujahideen for the freedom of Kashmir and their preparations in this regard are complete."
In a word, Kargil is but one step for the Pakistan Army and the terrorists Pakistan has spawned. We must see that defeating them in Kargil can be but one step for us.
India Connect
July 12, 1999
The war in Kargil has ignited an intense reaction across the country. War does. War that results from aggression by the other does even more. This time round two factors have caused the reaction to be even more intense. There is the element of betrayal: India had extended the hand of trust and friendship; Pakistan, it now turns out, merely pretended to reciprocate. And then there is the effect of television. This is the first war which has been brought into our living rooms: we see the extreme conditions in which our soldiers are defending our country, we see the majesty and beauty of our sacred mountains which the enemy has violated, we see the bodies arrive, we see and hear the valour of the bereaved parents and wives.
There is another reaction. We are all humbled: by the valour of the soldiers, by the fortitude of the relatives. Would I agree to begin the trek up some God-forsaken, distant hill, each of us is forced to think, knowing that as a result, within three-four hours, I may be dead?
The form the reaction has taken is just as telling. Each time a body is taken back thousands upon thousands stand in reverence along the route. When it arrives in a city or a village, thousands come out to pay homage. Neighbours and others visit the family of the soldier. Contributions to funds have exceeded all expectations.
The visits are out of empathy. The funds are for caring: to care for the soldier who has been disabled, to care for the wife and children of the soldier who has been killed.
The papers of Pakistan, especially the Urdu papers, on the other hand, have been full of reactions of an entirely different kind. Of "Jihad conferences" being held, of "Jihad centers" to be opened for recruiting volunteers, of collections for yet another "Jihad fund". The volunteers are not to care for anybody, their mission is to go across, and vanquish and destroy the land of kufr, the Hindu-India. The funds are not for caring, they are to destroy and dismember the land of kafirs, the Hindu-India. The speeches that are made at these gatherings, the slogans that are raised -- "Kashmir banega Pakistan" -- the very words that are used -- "Hindu-India, the birth-enemy of Pakistan," the "Battle for Hind" -- contain a venom, which we cannot comprehend.
But it is something we should learn to comprehend. For our neighbour is saturated with it. The venom, and the actions it triggers, will recoil on Pakistan of course. But that will take decades. In the meanwhile, unless we develop antigens to that poison, untold costs will be inflicted on our country. Moreover, if we falter in crushing every single action which that poison triggers, the poison will acquire greater and greater potency in the eyes of the Jihadis -- see, it is because of the Jihadi-spirit that our mujahideen have given those banias such a licking, they will conclude. So, every single action that is spurred by that sort of spirit must be completely crushed. But how will be ever ensure that it is crushed if we turn our eyes from what triggers it?
Lt. General Javed Nasir is one of Pakistan's "thinking Generals". He has been head of the ISI. He is among the Generals who were associated with Pakistan's successes in Afghanistan. Not just a typical voice, therefore, a crucial one. Recall that Nawaz Sharif made his desperate flight to Washington on July 3, that he signed the capitulatory joint-statement with Clinton on July 4. On July 1 -- that is, just three days before Nawaz Sharif had to accept that Pakistan would withdraw behind the Line of Control -- Lt. General Javed Nasir was telling Pakistanis that India was on the brink of defeat and collapse and disintegration! Readers would have concluded that the Indian defeat was so overwhelming that Vajpayee had as good as lost his mind!
Defeat in Kargil will spell disaster at the polls, that is what is staring Vajpayee in the face, this former controller of the ISI wrote. "He was angry," the General wrote, describing, no doubt from secret sources of the ISI, a meeting of the Indian Prime Minister with our Service Chiefs, "froth coming out of his mouth, shaking with anger, a little bit stammering [sic.], he let the Khakis have it." "I order you to throw them out, otherwise there will be large-scale sackings irrespective of ranks."
The Kargil operation has already inflicted unbearable cost on India, the General calculated. Each shell of Bofors costs a thousand dollars, his spies told him; in just one week India has fired nearly 30,000 rounds, his sources on the front told him. That means India has burnt up three billion dollars in just one week, his calculator indicated. And now India will have to spend another ten billion dollars to replace the barrels of the guns. Four days earlier, in another article, the General had recalled how, at the time of the Lahore Bus diplomacy, in an article in The Nation, "I had implored the Pakistani Army and Mujahideen to interdict the Srinagar-Drass road to make things more difficult for the Indians in Siachin. The Mujahideen executed a brilliant plan." His brilliant plan having been executed so brilliantly, Indians are on the run, the General informed his countrymen.
And for good and obvious reasons, he said. "Whereas the Mujahideen are fighting for a just cause and Shahadat is the greatest honour they can receive and as such they are fighting for this noble objective, the Indian soldiers are highly demoralized. Most of them have already completed their Kashmir tenure and want to go back to the safety of the mainland. They are being forced into the attacks and kept in Kashmir against their will. They only fulfil the formality of attack." This plain truth was being portrayed by Pakistan TV, he said, and that is why the Indian Government banned it! But Indians continue to watch Pakistan TV "for factual and correct situation", using dish antennas, he said, "despite house raids by police"! All we have to do is to keep the road to Siachin closed, he wrote the next day. That will force India to spend Rs 30-40 crore a day, "which will break the Indian back"! The General painted even rosier gardens. If the Indian Army can be prevented from retaking the Kargil positions, Vajpayee will be forced to lunge into Pakistan crossing the LoC. This prospect "offers the Pakistan Army the opportunity of the century to redeem its honour and take revenge for Dhaka." Once Pakistan makes a major penetration into India, the Sikhs will get and grab "the opportunity of the millennium to rise and play havoc with India's lines of communications." And once there is a major setback to India in Punjab, "the Sikh dream of Khalistan will become a reality." And that will induce the Tamils to revolt in the South, and the Nagas and the Mizos to proclaim their Unilateral Declaration of Independence"!
Faced with disintegration, Vajpayee will have to opt for the nuclear option, the General forecast. Therefore, he counseled the world, before India reaches that point, the world should solve the Kashmir problem "in accordance with the resolutions of the Security Council." Q E D! Not only has Pakistan the opportunity of a century because of the bind in which India is caught, Allah has conferred a special boon on Pakistan to enable it to avail of this opportunity, the General's reasoning went. And what is that boon? "In Parvez Musharraf we have an excellent General," he explained, "who has the blend of dynamism (his SSG background) and superb professionalism. Allah chose him for this occasion. He will not only deliver but deliver beyond expectations of all. He is the gift of Allah to the nation."
The only thing to guard against is American perfidy, the General wrote. On his reckoning, the Pakistan Army has won each and every war with India, and it is only the USA, "which has a history of betrayals towards Pakistan," that has compelled Pakistan to forgo what it had won on the ground! General Hamid Gul, an even more formidable former head of the ISI, was announcing victories in even more vivid colours. "General Gul predicts Indian troops surrender," ran the headlines of The Pakistan Observer on 27 June. That the Indians were concentrating so many troops in the area is all to the good, General Gul told the paper. Soon, the monsoon will set in, and they will be trapped in "the hills, dales and jungles of Kashmir while this terrain is familiar and friendly to the Mujahideen." "He said," the paper reported, "it is pre-ordained that this military machine that subjected Kashmiris to terrorism will be humiliated and disgraced at the hands of a handful of Mujahideen."
These are the analyses of Pakistan's "thinking Generals," of its "strategic thinkers," these are analyses appearing in the country's "responsible, sober" English papers. The Urdu papers of course carry reports of even more glowing victories -- as I write this I have at hand reports from Nawa-e-Waqt, al Dawa, Ausaf, Jasarat, Khabrein, Din -- they give even more Allah-ordained reasons on account of which India is about to disintegrate before the might of the Mujahideen. "Enemy is being thrashed from all sides;" "These militants are battle-hardened having fought in Afghanistan for over ten years;" "The Mujahideen have been waiting for open war with India since long. Now they have the opportunity with the opening of the Kargil front;" "The Amir of Markaz Dawat wal Irshad, Professor Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, further claimed that the foolish Europe does not know that Mujahideen have arrived there also in a clandestine manner;" "Maulana Mohammed Azim Tariq, President Sipah-e-Sahaba, said that the moment Government declared Jihad the Sipah-e-Sahaba would provide 50,000 trained Mujahideen for fighting alongside the Pakistan Army;" "The meeting of the Jamiat Ahl-e-Sunnat-o-al-Jamat held in Islamabad under the Chairmanship of Qazi Abdul Malik decided that the Jamiat will send 20,000 volunteers;" "Qazi Hussain Ahmed, Amir Jamiat-e-Islami has started collecting Jihad-e-Kashmir funds, and Jamat-e-Islami is issuing pamphlets urging people to obtain the blessings of Allah by taking part in the Battle of Hind;" "A pamphlet issued by Abdur Rashid Turabi, Amir of the Jamiat-e-Islami in Azad Kashmir says that the shadows of war are deepening, and Pakistanis should give a fatal blow to the birth-enemy of Muslims, India, the Mujahideen have reduced the pride of the enemy to ashes, he says;" Ausaf reports that according to its survey ninety five per cent of the people in Islamabad and Rawalpindi believe that the Kashmir issue can be solved through war and not through negotiations; according to the survey, 99 percent of the people in the North West Frontier Province want the Government to declare Jihad against India for solving the Kashmir issue; "Thousands of armed tribals at a public meeting on 27 June at Miran Shah in Northern Waziristan Agency announced Jihad against India and took an oath that they would not rest unless they hoist the Islamic flag in Delhi".
The article of faith, that India is the "birth-enemy of Muslims," the conviction that the opportunity of the century has come, that Allah has given them an instrument for availing it, the hallucinatory reports that the enemy is being routed, the conviction that Jihad is the solution, the fever for it.
And the foundation of all this: the conviction that everything that is being done is in the cause of Islam. The Ausaf of 30 June: " A group of Al-Badar mujahideen left Mansehara for Kashmir on June 29 for taking part in the Battle of Hind. Bidding them farewell, Commander Ejaz Ali, Amir Lashkar-al-Badar, instructed them to eliminate Indian troops and hoist the flag of Islam in Kashmir. They had to fight the Indian Army from Kargil to Delhi." Two days later, on 2 July, the Ausaf reported, "Pakistani ulema, including Mufti Nizamuddin Shamzai, Mufti Jamil Khan and Dr. Abdur Razaq issued a Fatwa of Jihad against India in Islamabad on July 1. In the Fatwa, issued in response to a query from the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, they said that students should be sent on Jihad by shutting down all religious schools." Ideologies become blinkers: believers keep looking at the world through one pair of pre-fabricated spectacles, they keep fitting developments into one straitjacket when in fact the world is changing inside out. The adherents are therefore "pre-ordained", to snatch General Hamid Gul's expression, to flounder. Hallucinatory reports of non-existent victories can only make the ultimate defeat more certain, more thoroughgoing, and swifter. But that very preconditioning predisposes believers to invade and assault.
That is what we must see, at last. 1948, 1965, the brutality unleashed on East Pakistan in 1971, the terrorism they caused in Punjab throughout the 1980s, the insurgency they spawned in Kashmir in the 1990s, Kargil now: is it right to be surprised each time?
And, other things apart, Pakistan is by now the hub of what can only be described as an "International Islamic Rapid Action Force": Jihadis from various Islamic countries, available for one Jihad after the other.
Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and, of course and always, Kashmir. "Taliban Minister for Communication, Naimatullah Khan Naumani, Minister Hajj-o-Auqaf, Maulana Abdul Wali, Special Force Chief, Maulvi Gul Zarin, I.G. Police, Maulana Anwar, addressing a function on the occasion of the 14th death anniversary of Maulana Irshad in Kabul (on 29 June) announced war against India alongside Kashmiri mujahideen," reported the Ausaf on 30 June. "They said that the help of Kashmiri and Pakistani mujahideen during Russian aggression was a debt on them, and it was now high time to clear this debt. They did not fear India, they said, nor any other power. They would fight alongside Kashmiri mujahideen for the freedom of Kashmir and their preparations in this regard are complete."
In a word, Kargil is but one step for the Pakistan Army and the terrorists Pakistan has spawned. We must see that defeating them in Kargil can be but one step for us.
India Connect
July 12, 1999
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Not Just an Islamic, But a Psychological State
Arun Shourie
India's size has become "an unmanageable liability," writes an analyst in Pakistan's Frontier Post of June 9. "As a result, nearly one-third of its 25 states are at war, where military troops are routinely called out to keep peace." The cause for this is largely "India's exclusionary political, religious and social order that is heavily biased against non-Hindu minorities," he says. This from an analyst whose own country is being torn apart by killings of Shias by Sunnis, of Sindhis and Mohajirs by Punjabis, by tensions between Baluchis, Pakhtuns and Punjabis. Second, except for a brief period, he observes, India's economy has been stagnating around "the Hindu pace of growth." This from an analyst whose country is living from month to month on what is the seventeenth bail-out package from the IMF since 1958, this from an analyst the currency of whose country has been devalued over forty five times in the last decade, this from the analyst in whose country even the management of the Water and Power Development Authority, even of the Karachi Electricity Board has had to be handed over to the Army! Third, its military power has remained "less than decisive in its conflicts with Pakistan except for its military action in East Pakistan." The Pakistan Army has lost every single war it has fought with India, yet India's military power has been "less than decisive"! And as for that one exception which even he acknowledges, the case of 1971, it seems that in the author's view, it is "the backing of the overwhelming majority of native Bengalis" which enabled Indian forces to prevail.
A bit of a change in that last bit, I must say in fairness! For in their history textbooks, children are taught that the "native Bengalis" very much wanted united-Pakistan to continue and it was only the cunning of Hindu-Bharat which waylaid them.
The next point will truly be news to us. Recalling some hare-brained proposals for "solving the Kashmir problem," he says "Even if I were Indian, I couldn't help but support Pakistan's so very obviously rational approach to the conflict on Kashmir." Not just that, this analyst knows something we don't, for he continues, "This rationality in Pakistan's position has the majority of Indians re-looking at the Kashmir conflict in terms of 'justice' although their immediate motive is economics. In survey after survey, the majority of Indians have come to believe that the cost of keeping Kashmir is higher than leaving it alone..." The only way out for India is to resolve the Kashmir issue "in accordance with the wishes of the people of Kashmir, and in accordance with UN resolutions," writes a former Army colonel in the June 11 issue of the same paper. Till it does so, not only will it keep bleeding, such analysts write, it will be exposing the region to "power-play by the West under CIA machinations." "But India," the colonel continues, "with typical narrow-minded bania mentality, refuses to see the realities on the ground and the resultant fall-outs of a continuing impasse over the Kashmir issue..."
"The latest Indian Army operations in Kashmir are due to the adamance of the mujahidin who are waging war to achieve their aim of self-determination," observes the Jang in its editorial on June 4 - two lies in those few words: that the invaders are mujahideen, and that the goal of their invasion is self-determination! "History tells us that when people of any region start sacrificing themselves for their rights then no power on earth can restrain them from their goal. This time mujahideen have given a new life to the movement and the Kashmir issue has become prominent. The Indian government has tried to crush the mujahideen but all in vain..." The invasion has given a new life to the secessionist movement in Kashmir? That will certainly be news to the tourists in the Valley!
"No doubt India is losing on the war front," the Jang announces, "but at the same time the Indian propaganda machinery has become very active with western media support..." In a word: only mujahidin from within Kashmir are involved, militarily they are prevailing, if at all India is scoring a point it is only in propaganda, and that too only with western help! Still the latter is a matter of concern to the paper. "We fail to understand," the paper says, "why our 'grand official intellectuals' have failed in convincing the foreign media that the Kargil war is not based on fundamentalism. Why most of the foreign media reports on Kashmir are anti-Pakistan and anti-mujahideen and why our diplomats and embassies are unable to present the mujahideen's case in its right perspective. And finally why western rulers are endorsing the views of Vajpayee in the context of Indo-Pakistan relations and the Lahore Declaration."
A week, and that lacuna too seems to have been made up! "Its (India's) casualties are mounting," writes an analyst in the Nation of June 13, "and there is a grudging acceptance that it is also losing the media war to Pakistan. These twin pressures are beginning to take their toll on a wary populace which has seen political instability followed by military failure. Elections are less than three months away and no one seems to know which way the country is headed." "In such a situation," he concludes, "Pakistan should stand its ground with grit and determination and appreciate its brave men in uniform who are manning our territory with courage and ensuring that India's aggressiveness is countered swiftly and severely."
Soon, however, that Pakistan is completely isolated diplomatically cannot be denied. But that only proves that it is a martyr in the cause of Islam! Taking note of the US reluctance to swallow the Pakistani version, the Army colonel observes that the US has always been bending backwards to "placate India." And for reason, he writes, "We may be aware of the US role the world over against the interests of Muslims. And its desire to somehow contain China, its only possible rival after the disintegration of the USSR. It will like the dispute over Kashmir to be so resolved that as a result of it the present land linkage between Pakistan and China is severed. In this context, its best bet is India as a countervailing power... In fact the US is / has been actively helping India in its technological attainments through Israel." In a word, if the US is not swallowing the Pakistani version that is because it is congenitally anti-Muslim, and if India has achieved something technologically that is because the US has been helping it via Israel!
Hence the colonel's ringing exhortation: "Let there be no misconception about the US and Indian collusion where interests of Muslims and the western nations clash. For the loss of Muslims also becomes the gain of India. It is time we realised this and the OIC, the Arab League and Mutamar-e-Islami worked together towards unity and greater cohesion in their ranks to thwart the designs of these enemies of Islam."
A complete rupture from reality. That one-third of India's states are at war, that our economy is collapsing, that India is losing on the war front, that Pakistan has overcome the initial Indian advantage and is now winning the diplomatic battle too, that to the extent that the US etc. are not endorsing Pakistan's position that is because they are anti-Muslim, that India's technological advances are due to American help via Israel, that Pakistan's rational position on Kashmir has led every Indian to re-think his country's stance... A psychological condition, schizophrenia. To the onlooker the figments are so absurd that he tends to disregard them. But the person concerned actually believes the hallucinations. He acts on them.
That is one lesson: we must at all times be alert to what Pakistani society and rulers are reading into developments in India, for those inferences will tempt them to instigate, and to invade. The manifest instability of our governments during the last few years, their being pushed and pulled from every side would have been an important factor in the Pakistani calculation. So myopic, so self-centred are those who have been pulling down governments, those who have fractured the electorate that it is useless asking them to see the consequence of what they are doing. At least the rest of us should heed this consequence -- of tempting a neighbour who is so apt to misread the situation in any case -- and quarterise these politicians and groups.
But that is just the preliminary lesson, almost an incidental one.
First, we must bear in mind that the one -- Pakistan in this case -- who conceives of himself as an enemy has an inherent advantage. He can prepare for one type of operation -- it was sponsoring insurgency last time, it is high-altitude warfare this time -- at a place and a time of his choosing. We have to prepare ourselves to counter that entire gamut of possible operations.
That will take resources. Therefore, we must not cavil at sparing them. There is no other way to survive. Things which have come to light during the past few months also show that we must rethink management of defence at several levels.
The management of production and procurement of defence equipment, for instance. The sorry tale of snowmobiles is well known by now. But it is just one of many. From the fate of the plan to produce ammunition for the Bofors guns within the country to the way proposals to produce bullet-proof vests have been knocking around - all speak to the same state of affairs.
The relationship that should prevail between the defence forces and the defence ministry, for another. To refuse to re-examine this on the clich�, "The forces must be subordinate to civilian authority," is to ensure that many operational requirements will not be attended to in time. It is also to ensure that resentments which have erupted in the past few months will continue to fester.
The composition of the National Security Council, the staffing of its secretariat, its function and role, for a third. The council really has to be more than a version of the India International Centre's Saturday Lunch Club.
But the basic lesson that Pakistan's Kargil invasion holds out is the old one, an unfortunate one but an inescapable one: Pakistan remains an implacable enemy. It sees only one role for itself: to break India. It is doubly convinced of this purpose because it sees itself as a state dedicated to Islam, and India as a dar-ul-harb, the land of war to vanquish which is an Allah-ordained duty. It stokes insurgency in Punjab, that leaves 21,000 dead. But it fails to wrest Punjab from India. Therefore, it inflames insurgency in Kashmir.
That leaves 15,000 dead. But that too fails to break India. So, it begins planning Kargil... Pakistan will just not abandon these operations. It sees no other role for itself. It sees that mission - of breaking India - as a divine mandate. At each turn it is convinced that while the particular operation which has just concluded has failed, the next one will break India.
Therefore, a united, prosperous Pakistan is not in India's interest. It will only be that much more zealous, and more effective in carrying out its mission.
And, therefore, we must engage Pakistan in the arms race which it cannot afford, we must lift restrictions we have put on our agencies and ask them to widen the fault-lines which have developed in Pakistani society and polity.
That is the basic lesson. Do not shy away from it. Listen to what the enemy is saying. Look at what he is doing. Look at his nature - full-face. Look at what he conceives his nature to be. As a first step, learn not to drown voices which try to awaken you to that enemy, and his nature.
Asian Age
July 2, 1999
India's size has become "an unmanageable liability," writes an analyst in Pakistan's Frontier Post of June 9. "As a result, nearly one-third of its 25 states are at war, where military troops are routinely called out to keep peace." The cause for this is largely "India's exclusionary political, religious and social order that is heavily biased against non-Hindu minorities," he says. This from an analyst whose own country is being torn apart by killings of Shias by Sunnis, of Sindhis and Mohajirs by Punjabis, by tensions between Baluchis, Pakhtuns and Punjabis. Second, except for a brief period, he observes, India's economy has been stagnating around "the Hindu pace of growth." This from an analyst whose country is living from month to month on what is the seventeenth bail-out package from the IMF since 1958, this from an analyst the currency of whose country has been devalued over forty five times in the last decade, this from the analyst in whose country even the management of the Water and Power Development Authority, even of the Karachi Electricity Board has had to be handed over to the Army! Third, its military power has remained "less than decisive in its conflicts with Pakistan except for its military action in East Pakistan." The Pakistan Army has lost every single war it has fought with India, yet India's military power has been "less than decisive"! And as for that one exception which even he acknowledges, the case of 1971, it seems that in the author's view, it is "the backing of the overwhelming majority of native Bengalis" which enabled Indian forces to prevail.
A bit of a change in that last bit, I must say in fairness! For in their history textbooks, children are taught that the "native Bengalis" very much wanted united-Pakistan to continue and it was only the cunning of Hindu-Bharat which waylaid them.
The next point will truly be news to us. Recalling some hare-brained proposals for "solving the Kashmir problem," he says "Even if I were Indian, I couldn't help but support Pakistan's so very obviously rational approach to the conflict on Kashmir." Not just that, this analyst knows something we don't, for he continues, "This rationality in Pakistan's position has the majority of Indians re-looking at the Kashmir conflict in terms of 'justice' although their immediate motive is economics. In survey after survey, the majority of Indians have come to believe that the cost of keeping Kashmir is higher than leaving it alone..." The only way out for India is to resolve the Kashmir issue "in accordance with the wishes of the people of Kashmir, and in accordance with UN resolutions," writes a former Army colonel in the June 11 issue of the same paper. Till it does so, not only will it keep bleeding, such analysts write, it will be exposing the region to "power-play by the West under CIA machinations." "But India," the colonel continues, "with typical narrow-minded bania mentality, refuses to see the realities on the ground and the resultant fall-outs of a continuing impasse over the Kashmir issue..."
"The latest Indian Army operations in Kashmir are due to the adamance of the mujahidin who are waging war to achieve their aim of self-determination," observes the Jang in its editorial on June 4 - two lies in those few words: that the invaders are mujahideen, and that the goal of their invasion is self-determination! "History tells us that when people of any region start sacrificing themselves for their rights then no power on earth can restrain them from their goal. This time mujahideen have given a new life to the movement and the Kashmir issue has become prominent. The Indian government has tried to crush the mujahideen but all in vain..." The invasion has given a new life to the secessionist movement in Kashmir? That will certainly be news to the tourists in the Valley!
"No doubt India is losing on the war front," the Jang announces, "but at the same time the Indian propaganda machinery has become very active with western media support..." In a word: only mujahidin from within Kashmir are involved, militarily they are prevailing, if at all India is scoring a point it is only in propaganda, and that too only with western help! Still the latter is a matter of concern to the paper. "We fail to understand," the paper says, "why our 'grand official intellectuals' have failed in convincing the foreign media that the Kargil war is not based on fundamentalism. Why most of the foreign media reports on Kashmir are anti-Pakistan and anti-mujahideen and why our diplomats and embassies are unable to present the mujahideen's case in its right perspective. And finally why western rulers are endorsing the views of Vajpayee in the context of Indo-Pakistan relations and the Lahore Declaration."
A week, and that lacuna too seems to have been made up! "Its (India's) casualties are mounting," writes an analyst in the Nation of June 13, "and there is a grudging acceptance that it is also losing the media war to Pakistan. These twin pressures are beginning to take their toll on a wary populace which has seen political instability followed by military failure. Elections are less than three months away and no one seems to know which way the country is headed." "In such a situation," he concludes, "Pakistan should stand its ground with grit and determination and appreciate its brave men in uniform who are manning our territory with courage and ensuring that India's aggressiveness is countered swiftly and severely."
Soon, however, that Pakistan is completely isolated diplomatically cannot be denied. But that only proves that it is a martyr in the cause of Islam! Taking note of the US reluctance to swallow the Pakistani version, the Army colonel observes that the US has always been bending backwards to "placate India." And for reason, he writes, "We may be aware of the US role the world over against the interests of Muslims. And its desire to somehow contain China, its only possible rival after the disintegration of the USSR. It will like the dispute over Kashmir to be so resolved that as a result of it the present land linkage between Pakistan and China is severed. In this context, its best bet is India as a countervailing power... In fact the US is / has been actively helping India in its technological attainments through Israel." In a word, if the US is not swallowing the Pakistani version that is because it is congenitally anti-Muslim, and if India has achieved something technologically that is because the US has been helping it via Israel!
Hence the colonel's ringing exhortation: "Let there be no misconception about the US and Indian collusion where interests of Muslims and the western nations clash. For the loss of Muslims also becomes the gain of India. It is time we realised this and the OIC, the Arab League and Mutamar-e-Islami worked together towards unity and greater cohesion in their ranks to thwart the designs of these enemies of Islam."
A complete rupture from reality. That one-third of India's states are at war, that our economy is collapsing, that India is losing on the war front, that Pakistan has overcome the initial Indian advantage and is now winning the diplomatic battle too, that to the extent that the US etc. are not endorsing Pakistan's position that is because they are anti-Muslim, that India's technological advances are due to American help via Israel, that Pakistan's rational position on Kashmir has led every Indian to re-think his country's stance... A psychological condition, schizophrenia. To the onlooker the figments are so absurd that he tends to disregard them. But the person concerned actually believes the hallucinations. He acts on them.
That is one lesson: we must at all times be alert to what Pakistani society and rulers are reading into developments in India, for those inferences will tempt them to instigate, and to invade. The manifest instability of our governments during the last few years, their being pushed and pulled from every side would have been an important factor in the Pakistani calculation. So myopic, so self-centred are those who have been pulling down governments, those who have fractured the electorate that it is useless asking them to see the consequence of what they are doing. At least the rest of us should heed this consequence -- of tempting a neighbour who is so apt to misread the situation in any case -- and quarterise these politicians and groups.
But that is just the preliminary lesson, almost an incidental one.
First, we must bear in mind that the one -- Pakistan in this case -- who conceives of himself as an enemy has an inherent advantage. He can prepare for one type of operation -- it was sponsoring insurgency last time, it is high-altitude warfare this time -- at a place and a time of his choosing. We have to prepare ourselves to counter that entire gamut of possible operations.
That will take resources. Therefore, we must not cavil at sparing them. There is no other way to survive. Things which have come to light during the past few months also show that we must rethink management of defence at several levels.
The management of production and procurement of defence equipment, for instance. The sorry tale of snowmobiles is well known by now. But it is just one of many. From the fate of the plan to produce ammunition for the Bofors guns within the country to the way proposals to produce bullet-proof vests have been knocking around - all speak to the same state of affairs.
The relationship that should prevail between the defence forces and the defence ministry, for another. To refuse to re-examine this on the clich�, "The forces must be subordinate to civilian authority," is to ensure that many operational requirements will not be attended to in time. It is also to ensure that resentments which have erupted in the past few months will continue to fester.
The composition of the National Security Council, the staffing of its secretariat, its function and role, for a third. The council really has to be more than a version of the India International Centre's Saturday Lunch Club.
But the basic lesson that Pakistan's Kargil invasion holds out is the old one, an unfortunate one but an inescapable one: Pakistan remains an implacable enemy. It sees only one role for itself: to break India. It is doubly convinced of this purpose because it sees itself as a state dedicated to Islam, and India as a dar-ul-harb, the land of war to vanquish which is an Allah-ordained duty. It stokes insurgency in Punjab, that leaves 21,000 dead. But it fails to wrest Punjab from India. Therefore, it inflames insurgency in Kashmir.
That leaves 15,000 dead. But that too fails to break India. So, it begins planning Kargil... Pakistan will just not abandon these operations. It sees no other role for itself. It sees that mission - of breaking India - as a divine mandate. At each turn it is convinced that while the particular operation which has just concluded has failed, the next one will break India.
Therefore, a united, prosperous Pakistan is not in India's interest. It will only be that much more zealous, and more effective in carrying out its mission.
And, therefore, we must engage Pakistan in the arms race which it cannot afford, we must lift restrictions we have put on our agencies and ask them to widen the fault-lines which have developed in Pakistani society and polity.
That is the basic lesson. Do not shy away from it. Listen to what the enemy is saying. Look at what he is doing. Look at his nature - full-face. Look at what he conceives his nature to be. As a first step, learn not to drown voices which try to awaken you to that enemy, and his nature.
Asian Age
July 2, 1999
What Propels Them? What Blinds Them?
Arun Shourie
"India has massacred 60,000 Kashmiris, but the people of Kashmir will never rest till they have won freedom;" "India has deployed 700,000 soldiers in the Valley, and yet the Kashmiri mujahideen are inflicting heavy losses on them every day;" "How laughable it is that India has packed the Kargil sector with 40,000 troops, and just a handful of mujahidin are able to inflict humiliation upon humiliation on them;" Indian infrastructure has collapsed to such an extent that even those Indian casualties which were "lucky enough to be evacuated by air, had to wait for three days for a bed in Srinagar hospitals" -- such "facts" are repeated ad nauseum in Pakistani papers. Sixty thousand Kashmiris killed by India? Seven hundred thousand troops in Kashmir? Forty thousand troops in Kargil? Soldiers waiting for three days to get a hospital bed? We tend to dismiss such assertions as the usual lies -- friends who run one of our most conscientious news services about happenings in our neighbourhood, Public Opinion Trends, are so inured to these concoctions that they excise them from their reports! In fact, the concoctions deserve attention.
For one thing they are part of a world-view, they are part of an Ideology. Everything Pakistan does about Kashmir -- stoking terrorism, sending army regulars, spreading fabrications at every international gathering -- it pictures to itself as jihad, as a religious undertaking, indeed as an Allah-ordained duty. Concocting lies then becomes a device for discharging that duty. "War is stratagem," the Prophet has said, "War is deceit." [Sahih Muslim, Volume III, pp. 945, 990-91; Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume IV, pp. 166-67; Sunan Abu Dawud, Volume II, p. 728] Thus one may lie, one may kill the enemy while he is asleep, one may kill him by tricking him. [For instance, Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume IV, pp. 164-65, 167-68.] That is one problem: for the man or force weaned on jihad, the concoctions are an intrinsic part of the struggle he is waging, for him the fact that the war he is waging is Allah-ordained is a complete justification for cruelty, for lies and the rest; on our side, we don't just shut our eyes to the concoctions that result from it, we shut our eyes even more tightly to the Ideology of which they are but the result.
There is an immediate, practical result also. These sorts of "facts" and assertions are repeated so often that by now they have sunk into the subconscious of the average Pakistani. He actually believes that India has massacred sixty thousand Kashmiris, he actually believes that Kashmir is aflame, that Kashmiris are dying to merge into Pakistan, that it is just a matter of months and they will be able to do so. From this it is but a step to conclude that all that is necessary is to give one more push, to launch one more offensive, and the Kashmiris will rise, the place will go up in flames, India will be broken, the job will be done.
The believer, having internalised the concoction, just can't see why the world doesn't believe what he is putting out. As we have seen, Pakistani papers had themselves been reporting -- with evident self-congratulation -- that soldiers of the Pakistan Army have wrested posts from the Indian Army, that they have occupied a village in... As international opinion turned against Pakistan for that very reason, suddenly, as if a switch had been turned, references to the Pakistan Army ceased, and the victories were ascribed to the valiant mujahidin. Within days, references to these mythical mujahidin too were replaced -- now it was the "Kashmiri freedom fighters" who were inflicting the "humiliating defeats" on the Indian Army. One feature of course is that these switches come naturally -- as the war is a jihad in the cause of Allah, whichever thesis will serve The Great Cause is the one which must be pushed. The other is that the believer is just not able to see why the world does not swallow his fabrication.
As everything is a matter of belief in Allah, to question the "fact" which has been put out, to doubt a scenario -- the sheikhchili's scenario in which one favourable twist leads to another devastating turn -- becomes blasphemy, it becomes proof that one lacks faith, it is betrayal. Thus, not to believe that Indians have massacred sixty thousand Kashmiris, to doubt that Kashmir is on the brink of breaking away from India, not to believe that Kashmiris are pining to join Pakistan is to be unpatriotic, it is to lack faith in the fundamental notion that, as they all believe in Islam, all Muslims constitute one, seamless ummah. As a consequence, while not even the allies and props of Pakistan are buying its assertions today, self-delusion remains a duty!
The insurgency which Pakistan had orchestrated in Kashmir is dead: to cite a single index, while the number of tourists in the Valley had fallen to just 600 in 1996, this year they are running close to 250,000. Recruitment of locals has evaporated. But in the Pakistani press the insurgency is at the point of overturning the Indian State! A fundamental change has taken place in the area, writes a commentator in The News of 3 June. " ...Freedom fighters in Kashmir have attained self-sufficiency in weapons and have developed indigenous techniques of fighting which have become a way of life for them," he writes. "They fight under the cover of darkness, under the protection of mountains and in their own area which they know very well. They move in the area like wild goats and can reach anywhere without any difficulty. They return to their homes and hearths in the morning after accomplishing their task and join their family on the jobs which are needed to be done to earn livelihood." "Two weeks of fighting in the Kargil sector have established the following facts," the analyst continues. "That the indigenous insurrection movement in Kashmir is so strong and so well-armed that India can no longer hold it in check. It is also no longer possible for India to cross the international boundary and so the fighting will remain confined to Kashmir where India has always been the loser..."
"On the diplomatic front the Indians are playing on the back-foot," writes an analyst in The News of 4 June. "....The Kargil operation [of India], aimed at killing the Kashmir issue, will have helped to chisel away at the paralysed and hardened Kashmir position of the international players [an acknowledgment there!]. And the Kashmiris living under Indian control know that. Much like the Intifada which proved to be a potent stimulus for the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, India's Kargil fiasco will renew the Kashmiri resolve to fight on. Psychologically, the fact that a mere 400 - 600 mujahidin have bogged down the world's third largest army for a few months, irrespective of the final outcome [another acknowledgment there!], will be a major morale booster for the Kashmiris of Kashmir." The diplomatic isolation of Pakistan is for all to see, but the analyst remarks, "Nawaz Sharief meanwhile, ably supported on foreign policy issues by his Information Minister and Foreign Office, has pursued a near-faultless India policy. He has mixed peace offers with commitment to his country's defence and projected nuclear strength with gentleness. He is indeed South Asia's strong man of peace...." Remember, The News is the paper which was till recently the special target of the attentions of Nawaz Sharief and his Information Minister!
Belief makes one not just blind, it makes one reckless. The Taliban in the madrasas are of course fed Quranic stories of the "wars" of Badr etc. But they are not the only ones. The regular soldier and officer of the Pakistani Army has them drilled into him just as deep. And the lesson from these stories which is stuffed into him is not some particular stratagem to be followed in a siege or an assault, say; the lesson he internalises is that Allah shall always come to the aid of believers, that the side of Allah shall prevail. So all one has to do is leap.
One of the things that strikes one in reading books from Pakistan, the analyses in their newspapers, judgments of their courts is the singular absence of subtlety, of shades. The analyses are gross: the categories are basic, the conclusions predictable. This is not the result merely of mental habits or capacities. Ideology makes grossness inevitable. Everything is either black or white, everyone is either a co-religionist or one who will some day deceive one, every engagement is going to turn out one way -- capitalism is certain to collapse, it is on the verge of collapsing, Allah is bound to come to the assistance of believers, His cause is bound to prevail...
There is another consequence -- Pakistani newspapers are replete with instances of it. The belief having been drilled into him that he is doing Allah's Will -- or, as in Marxism-Leninism, of History -- the believer just cannot believe that the fault may lie with him. As the war he is waging has been ordained by Allah, the one who is opposing him must, by definition, be doing so for some perverse reason, for some ulterior purpose. Pakistanis have been genuinely surprised at Washington's statements disapproving their crossing the Line of Control. They just cannot see that Pakistan might be in the wrong. Their analysts hint that the USA is tilting towards India because it is drooling at the prospect of India's large market! Commenting on a statement of the American Secretary of State, The Nation of June 6 remarks ruefully, "India being the bigger market for trade does not mean that the world should give up its moral values on political issues"! By the 8th, the paper is hinting at some even deeper mystery! Repeating the new fabrications on the Line of Control, the paper remarks in an editorial, "If despite India's strange illogicality, the US State Department chooses to buy the Indian accusations and discounts the Pakistani version of the incident, there has to be more to it than a fair assessment of the situation"!
The Indians cannot be fighting Pakistani troops because they have occupied Indian territory. They are doing so for some other, unworthy, deplorable reasons. Vajpayee is facing an election, and launching a war against Pakistan has been his party's traditional way of gathering votes! "The BJP government has collapsed despite its 'popular' nuclear policy," observes Najam Sethi's The Friday Times of 4-10 June in its editorial, "but it still clings to the old political tricks to garner votes. It is also hostage to an aggressive policy in Kashmir. If it lets up, the Congress will pillory it by adopting a more hawkish stance. India's politicians have therefore hog-tied themselves by their devotion to this vote-getting gimmick..." "They [the Indian politicians] have made de-escalation more difficult all round," it continues -- Pakistani troops cross the Line of Control, our forces, by fighting back, make de-escalation difficult! "The Congress government committed the 'popular' folly of sending troops to Siachin. But no later government has dared to withdraw troops from it..." So long as Pakistani troops were occupying Siachin it was far-sightedness, it became folly when Indians occupied it! And daring would consist in vacating Siachin for the Pakistani Army, not in holding it!
In this analysis the BJP government is strong enough to push its "old tricks to garner votes". In other analyses, the reason is the opposite! Writing in The Nation of 28 May, an analyst tells his readers that an Interim, weak government is in office in Delhi, and that "hawks in the Indian military establishment are ruling the roost," and that this is what accounts for the scale of the response, the air-strikes and the rest!
But such objective factors -- "old political tricks to garner votes" and the like -- are never enough for a believer. He must detect something deep, some fundamental perversity in the one who is being so obdurate as not to fall at the believer's feet. Predictably, therefore, that staple of Pakistani papers has returned: "Hindu cunning"! And this time, just as predictably, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee is the epitome of it. "Mr Vajpayee has proved more two-faced than his predecessor," notes The Friday Times. "Vajpayee -- the man who showed statesmanship by describing his visit to Minar Pakistan as 'the defining moment in history' -- has only appeared at the bar of history as a clumsy pygmy," The News of 30 May tells its readers. "A short-sighted and pathetically parochial politician whose instincts for political survival are both reactionary and jingoistic. His passion for the cheap thrill coupled with the BJP's desire to regain a foothold in contemporary Indian politics have resulted in airstrikes on Kashmiri freedom fighters..."
It isn't just information from which Ideology insulates one. Ideology insulates one from experience just as much. When the believer succeeds, he is confirmed in the belief that the Ideology has driven into him -- that Allah is with him. But the Ideology has also driven another notion into him -- a notion that protects the Ideology from an adverse outcome, but by the same token disables the believer from learning. When they are defeated, the faithful have been taught to conclude, Allah is just testing their faith: Allah has put defeat in their path, they have been taught, to ascertain whether at such a time they lose faith in Allah's promise. Do they abandon their faith in Allah?, Allah wants to see. Do they blame Him rather than themselves?, Allah wants to make sure.
This Ideology-induced deafness is compounded in the case of Pakistan by the essentially authoritarian nature of both -- its society as well as polity. In free, democratic societies there is incessant self-examination. In authoritarian societies pasting blame on The Other becomes nature. The defeat in Vietnam caused an enormous amount of introspection in America: it led, among other things, to new strategic thinking, to new technologies. The rout in Bangladesh caused none in Pakistan. We see the same sequence today. Indian forces are rolling back the Pakistanis in Kargil. Internationally Pakistan stands isolated as never before. But Pakistani press is singing hosannas: the success of the mujahideen in holding the Indian Army at bay has inspired the freedom fighters of Kashmir, they sing to themselves, the uprising against India will now reach new heights; the Kashmir issue has been "irretrievably internationalized," they exult; the world now realizes that Kashmir can be the nuclear flash-point, they declare to their own satisfaction.
These features hold for Pakistanis in general, immersed as they are in, committed as they are to an Ideology, Islam. Each of them is compounded ten-fold in the case of the officer and soldier of the Pakistan Army. Stephen Cohen has noted how the "Sandhurst" and "American" generations of their officers have passed, how the officer-class consists increasingly of persons from the lower middle class and peasant stock. In the country at large these classes are among the ones which have been swept up most by Islamic rhetoric: and, what with the continuing collapse of educational institutions, at an accelerating pace. The success which the Army has achieved through the Taliban in Afghanistan also buttresses the notion that "the time of Islam has returned".
There are other factors too. The more intense Islamic rhetoric has become, the more cut-off from outside influences and opinions Pakistan has become, the Army even more so than other sections: almost the only thing which has kept an aperture open to the rest of the world is Pakistan's technological backwardness -- because of this backwardness, it has had to continue relying on other countries for technical upgradation, and hence some contrary ideas must still be sneaking in. But it is a tiny aperture: the countries from whom it secures the weapons are also ones whose life and ways its Ideology teaches it to hate and reject.
Not only is the Army, like other sections of Pakistani society, insulated from the world, it is insulated from those other sections within Pakistan too. The Army is overwhelmingly Punjabi. Within that one province, its recruits are overwhelmingly from a small clutch of five or six districts.
Furthermore, that the Army has such an over-weaning, predominant status in Pakistani society and governance impels a certain deafness: few dare question what it says and does, all the greater reason for the Army to conclude that what it is thinking is valid. And there is another twist. The Pakistani Army has great power, overwhelming power vis a vis other sections of society, but not esteem. That went -- first with the way it lost Pakistan in 1971, and then with the mess that the Army made of the country during the years it had absolute sway, the Zia years. Since then, while the success in Afghanistan has restored its esteem somewhat, this is counter-balanced with the reputation for corruption, the reputation for being involved in the drug-trade etc. which have got stuck to it.
To the faith of the believer, therefore, has been added a compulsion -- to prove itself again.
Each of these factors applies to organizations like the ISI twenty-fold. And to the terrorist organizations the ISI etc. have spawned -- a hundred-fold.
In a word, Kargil is but the latest of what Pakistan will continue to inflict on us. Defeating each such venture with demonstrative harshness is as much a part of the peace-process as pursuing every opening like Lahore.
The Afternoon Despatch & Courier
June 25, 1999
"India has massacred 60,000 Kashmiris, but the people of Kashmir will never rest till they have won freedom;" "India has deployed 700,000 soldiers in the Valley, and yet the Kashmiri mujahideen are inflicting heavy losses on them every day;" "How laughable it is that India has packed the Kargil sector with 40,000 troops, and just a handful of mujahidin are able to inflict humiliation upon humiliation on them;" Indian infrastructure has collapsed to such an extent that even those Indian casualties which were "lucky enough to be evacuated by air, had to wait for three days for a bed in Srinagar hospitals" -- such "facts" are repeated ad nauseum in Pakistani papers. Sixty thousand Kashmiris killed by India? Seven hundred thousand troops in Kashmir? Forty thousand troops in Kargil? Soldiers waiting for three days to get a hospital bed? We tend to dismiss such assertions as the usual lies -- friends who run one of our most conscientious news services about happenings in our neighbourhood, Public Opinion Trends, are so inured to these concoctions that they excise them from their reports! In fact, the concoctions deserve attention.
For one thing they are part of a world-view, they are part of an Ideology. Everything Pakistan does about Kashmir -- stoking terrorism, sending army regulars, spreading fabrications at every international gathering -- it pictures to itself as jihad, as a religious undertaking, indeed as an Allah-ordained duty. Concocting lies then becomes a device for discharging that duty. "War is stratagem," the Prophet has said, "War is deceit." [Sahih Muslim, Volume III, pp. 945, 990-91; Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume IV, pp. 166-67; Sunan Abu Dawud, Volume II, p. 728] Thus one may lie, one may kill the enemy while he is asleep, one may kill him by tricking him. [For instance, Sahih al-Bukhari, Volume IV, pp. 164-65, 167-68.] That is one problem: for the man or force weaned on jihad, the concoctions are an intrinsic part of the struggle he is waging, for him the fact that the war he is waging is Allah-ordained is a complete justification for cruelty, for lies and the rest; on our side, we don't just shut our eyes to the concoctions that result from it, we shut our eyes even more tightly to the Ideology of which they are but the result.
There is an immediate, practical result also. These sorts of "facts" and assertions are repeated so often that by now they have sunk into the subconscious of the average Pakistani. He actually believes that India has massacred sixty thousand Kashmiris, he actually believes that Kashmir is aflame, that Kashmiris are dying to merge into Pakistan, that it is just a matter of months and they will be able to do so. From this it is but a step to conclude that all that is necessary is to give one more push, to launch one more offensive, and the Kashmiris will rise, the place will go up in flames, India will be broken, the job will be done.
The believer, having internalised the concoction, just can't see why the world doesn't believe what he is putting out. As we have seen, Pakistani papers had themselves been reporting -- with evident self-congratulation -- that soldiers of the Pakistan Army have wrested posts from the Indian Army, that they have occupied a village in... As international opinion turned against Pakistan for that very reason, suddenly, as if a switch had been turned, references to the Pakistan Army ceased, and the victories were ascribed to the valiant mujahidin. Within days, references to these mythical mujahidin too were replaced -- now it was the "Kashmiri freedom fighters" who were inflicting the "humiliating defeats" on the Indian Army. One feature of course is that these switches come naturally -- as the war is a jihad in the cause of Allah, whichever thesis will serve The Great Cause is the one which must be pushed. The other is that the believer is just not able to see why the world does not swallow his fabrication.
As everything is a matter of belief in Allah, to question the "fact" which has been put out, to doubt a scenario -- the sheikhchili's scenario in which one favourable twist leads to another devastating turn -- becomes blasphemy, it becomes proof that one lacks faith, it is betrayal. Thus, not to believe that Indians have massacred sixty thousand Kashmiris, to doubt that Kashmir is on the brink of breaking away from India, not to believe that Kashmiris are pining to join Pakistan is to be unpatriotic, it is to lack faith in the fundamental notion that, as they all believe in Islam, all Muslims constitute one, seamless ummah. As a consequence, while not even the allies and props of Pakistan are buying its assertions today, self-delusion remains a duty!
The insurgency which Pakistan had orchestrated in Kashmir is dead: to cite a single index, while the number of tourists in the Valley had fallen to just 600 in 1996, this year they are running close to 250,000. Recruitment of locals has evaporated. But in the Pakistani press the insurgency is at the point of overturning the Indian State! A fundamental change has taken place in the area, writes a commentator in The News of 3 June. " ...Freedom fighters in Kashmir have attained self-sufficiency in weapons and have developed indigenous techniques of fighting which have become a way of life for them," he writes. "They fight under the cover of darkness, under the protection of mountains and in their own area which they know very well. They move in the area like wild goats and can reach anywhere without any difficulty. They return to their homes and hearths in the morning after accomplishing their task and join their family on the jobs which are needed to be done to earn livelihood." "Two weeks of fighting in the Kargil sector have established the following facts," the analyst continues. "That the indigenous insurrection movement in Kashmir is so strong and so well-armed that India can no longer hold it in check. It is also no longer possible for India to cross the international boundary and so the fighting will remain confined to Kashmir where India has always been the loser..."
"On the diplomatic front the Indians are playing on the back-foot," writes an analyst in The News of 4 June. "....The Kargil operation [of India], aimed at killing the Kashmir issue, will have helped to chisel away at the paralysed and hardened Kashmir position of the international players [an acknowledgment there!]. And the Kashmiris living under Indian control know that. Much like the Intifada which proved to be a potent stimulus for the Palestinians under Israeli occupation, India's Kargil fiasco will renew the Kashmiri resolve to fight on. Psychologically, the fact that a mere 400 - 600 mujahidin have bogged down the world's third largest army for a few months, irrespective of the final outcome [another acknowledgment there!], will be a major morale booster for the Kashmiris of Kashmir." The diplomatic isolation of Pakistan is for all to see, but the analyst remarks, "Nawaz Sharief meanwhile, ably supported on foreign policy issues by his Information Minister and Foreign Office, has pursued a near-faultless India policy. He has mixed peace offers with commitment to his country's defence and projected nuclear strength with gentleness. He is indeed South Asia's strong man of peace...." Remember, The News is the paper which was till recently the special target of the attentions of Nawaz Sharief and his Information Minister!
Belief makes one not just blind, it makes one reckless. The Taliban in the madrasas are of course fed Quranic stories of the "wars" of Badr etc. But they are not the only ones. The regular soldier and officer of the Pakistani Army has them drilled into him just as deep. And the lesson from these stories which is stuffed into him is not some particular stratagem to be followed in a siege or an assault, say; the lesson he internalises is that Allah shall always come to the aid of believers, that the side of Allah shall prevail. So all one has to do is leap.
One of the things that strikes one in reading books from Pakistan, the analyses in their newspapers, judgments of their courts is the singular absence of subtlety, of shades. The analyses are gross: the categories are basic, the conclusions predictable. This is not the result merely of mental habits or capacities. Ideology makes grossness inevitable. Everything is either black or white, everyone is either a co-religionist or one who will some day deceive one, every engagement is going to turn out one way -- capitalism is certain to collapse, it is on the verge of collapsing, Allah is bound to come to the assistance of believers, His cause is bound to prevail...
There is another consequence -- Pakistani newspapers are replete with instances of it. The belief having been drilled into him that he is doing Allah's Will -- or, as in Marxism-Leninism, of History -- the believer just cannot believe that the fault may lie with him. As the war he is waging has been ordained by Allah, the one who is opposing him must, by definition, be doing so for some perverse reason, for some ulterior purpose. Pakistanis have been genuinely surprised at Washington's statements disapproving their crossing the Line of Control. They just cannot see that Pakistan might be in the wrong. Their analysts hint that the USA is tilting towards India because it is drooling at the prospect of India's large market! Commenting on a statement of the American Secretary of State, The Nation of June 6 remarks ruefully, "India being the bigger market for trade does not mean that the world should give up its moral values on political issues"! By the 8th, the paper is hinting at some even deeper mystery! Repeating the new fabrications on the Line of Control, the paper remarks in an editorial, "If despite India's strange illogicality, the US State Department chooses to buy the Indian accusations and discounts the Pakistani version of the incident, there has to be more to it than a fair assessment of the situation"!
The Indians cannot be fighting Pakistani troops because they have occupied Indian territory. They are doing so for some other, unworthy, deplorable reasons. Vajpayee is facing an election, and launching a war against Pakistan has been his party's traditional way of gathering votes! "The BJP government has collapsed despite its 'popular' nuclear policy," observes Najam Sethi's The Friday Times of 4-10 June in its editorial, "but it still clings to the old political tricks to garner votes. It is also hostage to an aggressive policy in Kashmir. If it lets up, the Congress will pillory it by adopting a more hawkish stance. India's politicians have therefore hog-tied themselves by their devotion to this vote-getting gimmick..." "They [the Indian politicians] have made de-escalation more difficult all round," it continues -- Pakistani troops cross the Line of Control, our forces, by fighting back, make de-escalation difficult! "The Congress government committed the 'popular' folly of sending troops to Siachin. But no later government has dared to withdraw troops from it..." So long as Pakistani troops were occupying Siachin it was far-sightedness, it became folly when Indians occupied it! And daring would consist in vacating Siachin for the Pakistani Army, not in holding it!
In this analysis the BJP government is strong enough to push its "old tricks to garner votes". In other analyses, the reason is the opposite! Writing in The Nation of 28 May, an analyst tells his readers that an Interim, weak government is in office in Delhi, and that "hawks in the Indian military establishment are ruling the roost," and that this is what accounts for the scale of the response, the air-strikes and the rest!
But such objective factors -- "old political tricks to garner votes" and the like -- are never enough for a believer. He must detect something deep, some fundamental perversity in the one who is being so obdurate as not to fall at the believer's feet. Predictably, therefore, that staple of Pakistani papers has returned: "Hindu cunning"! And this time, just as predictably, Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee is the epitome of it. "Mr Vajpayee has proved more two-faced than his predecessor," notes The Friday Times. "Vajpayee -- the man who showed statesmanship by describing his visit to Minar Pakistan as 'the defining moment in history' -- has only appeared at the bar of history as a clumsy pygmy," The News of 30 May tells its readers. "A short-sighted and pathetically parochial politician whose instincts for political survival are both reactionary and jingoistic. His passion for the cheap thrill coupled with the BJP's desire to regain a foothold in contemporary Indian politics have resulted in airstrikes on Kashmiri freedom fighters..."
It isn't just information from which Ideology insulates one. Ideology insulates one from experience just as much. When the believer succeeds, he is confirmed in the belief that the Ideology has driven into him -- that Allah is with him. But the Ideology has also driven another notion into him -- a notion that protects the Ideology from an adverse outcome, but by the same token disables the believer from learning. When they are defeated, the faithful have been taught to conclude, Allah is just testing their faith: Allah has put defeat in their path, they have been taught, to ascertain whether at such a time they lose faith in Allah's promise. Do they abandon their faith in Allah?, Allah wants to see. Do they blame Him rather than themselves?, Allah wants to make sure.
This Ideology-induced deafness is compounded in the case of Pakistan by the essentially authoritarian nature of both -- its society as well as polity. In free, democratic societies there is incessant self-examination. In authoritarian societies pasting blame on The Other becomes nature. The defeat in Vietnam caused an enormous amount of introspection in America: it led, among other things, to new strategic thinking, to new technologies. The rout in Bangladesh caused none in Pakistan. We see the same sequence today. Indian forces are rolling back the Pakistanis in Kargil. Internationally Pakistan stands isolated as never before. But Pakistani press is singing hosannas: the success of the mujahideen in holding the Indian Army at bay has inspired the freedom fighters of Kashmir, they sing to themselves, the uprising against India will now reach new heights; the Kashmir issue has been "irretrievably internationalized," they exult; the world now realizes that Kashmir can be the nuclear flash-point, they declare to their own satisfaction.
These features hold for Pakistanis in general, immersed as they are in, committed as they are to an Ideology, Islam. Each of them is compounded ten-fold in the case of the officer and soldier of the Pakistan Army. Stephen Cohen has noted how the "Sandhurst" and "American" generations of their officers have passed, how the officer-class consists increasingly of persons from the lower middle class and peasant stock. In the country at large these classes are among the ones which have been swept up most by Islamic rhetoric: and, what with the continuing collapse of educational institutions, at an accelerating pace. The success which the Army has achieved through the Taliban in Afghanistan also buttresses the notion that "the time of Islam has returned".
There are other factors too. The more intense Islamic rhetoric has become, the more cut-off from outside influences and opinions Pakistan has become, the Army even more so than other sections: almost the only thing which has kept an aperture open to the rest of the world is Pakistan's technological backwardness -- because of this backwardness, it has had to continue relying on other countries for technical upgradation, and hence some contrary ideas must still be sneaking in. But it is a tiny aperture: the countries from whom it secures the weapons are also ones whose life and ways its Ideology teaches it to hate and reject.
Not only is the Army, like other sections of Pakistani society, insulated from the world, it is insulated from those other sections within Pakistan too. The Army is overwhelmingly Punjabi. Within that one province, its recruits are overwhelmingly from a small clutch of five or six districts.
Furthermore, that the Army has such an over-weaning, predominant status in Pakistani society and governance impels a certain deafness: few dare question what it says and does, all the greater reason for the Army to conclude that what it is thinking is valid. And there is another twist. The Pakistani Army has great power, overwhelming power vis a vis other sections of society, but not esteem. That went -- first with the way it lost Pakistan in 1971, and then with the mess that the Army made of the country during the years it had absolute sway, the Zia years. Since then, while the success in Afghanistan has restored its esteem somewhat, this is counter-balanced with the reputation for corruption, the reputation for being involved in the drug-trade etc. which have got stuck to it.
To the faith of the believer, therefore, has been added a compulsion -- to prove itself again.
Each of these factors applies to organizations like the ISI twenty-fold. And to the terrorist organizations the ISI etc. have spawned -- a hundred-fold.
In a word, Kargil is but the latest of what Pakistan will continue to inflict on us. Defeating each such venture with demonstrative harshness is as much a part of the peace-process as pursuing every opening like Lahore.
The Afternoon Despatch & Courier
June 25, 1999
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