The Indian Blind Spot towards Pakistan

I realised today that I have been guilty of the same blind spot towards Pakistan as so many other Indians.

For all their sophistication, Indian elites continue to understand Pakistan primarily with reference to the events of 1947. Anything else is incidental, not essential. The established Indian paradigms for explaining Pakistan, its actions and its institutions, its state and society, have not undergone any significant shift since the Partition. The tropes remain the same: religion and elite manipulation explain everything. It is as if the pre-Partition politics of the Muslim League continues to be the politics of Pakistan—with slight non-essential variations. More than 60 years on, the factors may be different but little else has changed.

That quote by Pakistani journalist Khurram Hussain sums it up accurately. He goes on to say

This view is deeply flawed. It reflects a serious confusion about the founding event of contemporary Pakistani society. The Partition has a mesmerising quality that blinds the mind, a kind of notional heft that far outweighs its real significance to modern South Asian politics. The concerns of the state of Pakistan, the anxieties of its society, and the analytic frames of its intellectual and media elites have as their primary reference not 1947 but the traumatic vivisection of the country in 1971 (emphasis mine). Indians have naturally focused on their own vivisection, their own dismemberment; but for Pakistan, they have focused on the wrong date. This mix-up has important consequences.

I would encourage as many people as possible to read this article, especially Indians. It is an eye-opener, because Indians typically do not realise how traumatic the 1971 war must have been to Pakistan. India's own defeat at the hands of China in 1962 is seared into the collective consciousness of more than one generation of Indians and is responsible for a deep and abiding distrust of China throughout the country. And this is even without an event as traumatic as the vivisection of the country. Indeed, contemporary commentary on the Indo-China border war now pins the blame on Indian foreign minister Krishna Menon's aggressive "Forward Policy" which had the effect of provoking China without actually having the military might to back up that aggressiveness. To the credit of the Chinese, they withdrew to their pre-conflict positions after making their point.

If Indians can be permanently scarred by such a relatively minor humiliation, one can imagine how much deeper the psychological wounds must be for Pakistanis, who lost half their territory (in terms of population). Indians have been naively oblivious to the impact of the 1971 war on their neighbours, and hence the entire approach to Pakistan has been one of righteous indignation - a country under attack from a "state sponsor of terror". But this is a great example of the saying, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter." Pakistan sees itself as the wronged party. India is an existential threat to that country because it has dismembered it once before. Never mind that India isn't interested in doing it a second time. What matters is that Pakistanis believe it can happen again.

Looking at how difficult it is for Indians to trust China after 1962, one can readily understand that Pakistanis would be extremely unwilling to trust India after 1971.

And so I have a curious idea for a solution to the eternal India-Pakistan conflict. I don't believe the peaceful resolution of the Kashmir dispute will necessarily solve the fundamental issue, because Pakistan needs something stronger to assuage its hurt. Pakistan will have to wrest Kashmir from India in a war that it wins. That is the only way 1971 can be avenged.

My idea is that the Indian government should apologise (yes, apologise) to Pakistan for breaking up the country in 1971. It has nothing to do with right and wrong and everything to do with emotion and moving forward. If the two countries are to move past the distrust, then Pakistanis must be made to feel India's genuine lack of interest in further harming their country. An apology followed by a settlement of Kashmir will probably do the job.

The prize is a South Asian Federation that will be bigger and potentially greater than China.

Cool Slogan for Troubled Economic Times

I thought of a slogan along the lines of "Make Love, Not War":

Exploit Technology, Not People

Recipe for Bread Upma

Wondering what to do about that slightly older loaf of bread once you've bought a fresh one? Too much of a waste to throw away, yet a bit dodgy to consume...

Try a bread upma snack. This is another of those offbeat, male-only recipes handed down from father to son :-).

Ingredients:
8 slices of bread (you do use multigrain, don't you? That's the best from both a health and flavour perspective)
4 medium sized red (Spanish) onions
1 red hot chilli pepper (preferably Jalapeno, my favourite - slurp!)
1 teaspoon mustard seeds
Any cholesterol-absorbing butter alternative
Cooking oil (grapeseed oil handles heat much better than olive oil, I'm told)
Chopped coriander

Process (two parallel processes, in fact):

Process 1:
Chop the chilli and onions. The chilli pieces should be really fine. We want a pervasive spicy taste, not islands of dynamite.
Heat a couple of tablespoonfuls of cooking oil, pop the mustard seeds into it and wait till they start to crackle. Add the chopped chilli and saute for a while, then add the chopped onions and stir until well-fried.
Add one or two teaspoons of salt depending on preference.

Process 2:
Toast the slices of bread in a regular toaster until nice and brown (that's to ensure that any nasty effects of the mild staleness are burned away).
Apply small amounts of the butter substitute to soften each slice, then cut the slice into 16 square pieces (3 cuts in each direction).

Merge process:
Add the toasted, "buttered" bread pieces to the fried onion/chilli combine and stir well for a few minutes.
Add chopped coriander, turn off heat and continue to stir for a couple of minutes.
Serve hot.

Serves 2-4, depending on appetite :-).

I would have included a photograph because it looks really yummy, but then it was all gone before I could get my camera!

From Ayn Rand to Antitrust - Alan Greenspan's Remarkable Journey to Enlightenment

Will miracles never cease? Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand "devotee" and former advocate of laissez-faire capitalism, now favours aggressive antitrust! "Break up the big banks," he says.

“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Mr. Greenspan said. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!

I must say it's very flattering when a major public figure reverses position to agree with you! It also invites contempt for the public figure in question.

Is the Australian government listening? We need a Ten Pillars Policy, Mr Rudd.

Neat Slogan for Hindu-Muslim Amity

I saw this comment on a blog today and thought it was cool.

"When Qaynat* has put Ali in Diwali and Ram in Ramadan, who are we to fight?"

* Nature, the Universe

JDRF Walk to Cure Diabetes 2009

Sunday Oct 18th, 2009: Like we did last year, my wife and I signed up to join the JDRF (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation) Walk to Cure Diabetes.


This year, the venue was Parramatta Park and not the Sydney Olympic Park. The crowd was decent-sized, but I thought it was half or even a third the size of the turnout last year. Someone told me there were two or three different walks this year at different venues, so the crowd was probably split between them.


The surprise VIP appearance at today's event was NSW Premier Nathan Rees, who said a few encouraging words about Australia being a world leader in several areas of medical research and expressed the hope that Australian research would pioneer a cure for diabetes. He then flagged off the walk, which lasted a little over an hour.


It was a cloudy day, so thankfully it wasn't too hot. There was a relaxed atmosphere throughout. Families with kids in strollers, on bikes and scooters, and with dogs in tow. There had been some fun events in the morning before the walk got started, but we missed them, having arrived with just minutes to spare for the main event.

Disappointingly, no other families could join us this year. We had about four families in our team last year, so we could enjoy a little picnic after the walk. This year, Diwali happened to be just the previous day, so many Indian families had a late night the previous day and couldn't join us for a morning walk.


Though the walk is over, readers are still welcome to donate to the cause through my collection page. It should be open for a few days more. Here's hoping the money raised helps to find a cure for juvenile diabetes. At the end of the day, it's about finding a cure, which is neither a picnic nor a walk in the park.

A Schizophrenic View of the Threat from Pakistan

I had to laugh when I read this news item, dour as it was. Here's an unprecedented attack by militants on the Pakistani army's headquarters. It signals a strength and reach of terrorism within Pakistan that should unnerve watchers of the subcontinent. Wouldn't a reasonable person be worried about Pakistani nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists? September 11 has made the US absolutely paranoid, as we all know, and the London bombings have given the UK a similar jolt.

But what do we hear from the top diplomats of the Western world about this latest development? One has to wonder what Hillary Clinton and David Miliband are thinking/smoking. If their statements represent the views of the US and UK governments (as they surely do), they invite utter contempt for the leading Western powers.

"Yesterday was another reminder that extremists ... are increasingly threatening the authority of the state, but we see no evidence they are going to take over the state," Mrs Clinton said.

"We have confidence in the Pakistani government and military's control over its nuclear weapons," she added.

[...]

UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Pakistan faced a "mortal threat", but there was no risk of its nuclear weapons falling into terrorist hands.

I have to ask - Is there some magic spell that protects Pakistan's nuclear weapons, such that even though the Pakistani state may be in mortal danger from "militants" (read "terrorists"), those weapons will always be safe?

You know what I think? Here's my conspiracy theory. I think the US swooped down on Pakistan in 1998 as soon as that country demonstrated its nuclear capability, and took away all its weapons. After all, what Pakistan requires for its purposes is just the façade of nuclear capability to bluff the world with, not the weapons themselves. I'm sure the Americans assured the Pakistani generals that this would be their little secret. I can see no other reason for the sanguine response of Western countries to what should otherwise be a very worrisome situation indeed.

Corollary: If this is true, and Pakistan is indeed a toothless nuclear tiger, there should be nothing to hold India back from rolling over that country the very next time there is a terrorist attack launched from there. A risky gamble, though.