By M H Ahssan
Mumbai terror attack has redrawn earlier borders.
The divisions we split the world into during the Cold War have at long last crumbled thanks to the Mumbai terrorist attacks. No longer will we view South Asia as a region distinct from the Middle East. Now there is only one long continuum stretching from the Mediterranean to the jungles of Burma, with every crisis from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute in the West to the Hindu-Muslim dispute in the East interlocked with the one next door. Yet this elongated Greater Near East does not signify something new but something old.
For significant parts of medieval and early modern history, Delhi was under the same sovereignty as Kabul, yet under a different one from Bangalore. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, the Mughal dynasty governed a sprawling empire encompassing northern and central India, almost all of Pakistan and much of Afghanistan — even as Hindu Maratha warriors in India’s south held out against Mughal armies. India’s whole history — what has created its rich syncretic civilisation of Turko-Persian gems like the Taj Mahal — is a story of waves of Muslim invaders in turn killing, interacting with and ultimately being influenced by indigenous Hindus.
Hindu-Muslim relations have historically been tense. Remember that the 1947 partition of the subcontinent uprooted at least 15 million people and led to the violent deaths of around half a million. Given this record, the relatively peaceful relations between the majority Hindus and India’s 150 million Muslims has been testimony to India’s successful experiment in democracy. Democracy has so far kept the lid on an ethnic and religious divide that, while its roots run centuries back, has in recent years essentially become a reinvented modern hostility.
The culprit has been globalisation. The secular Indian nationalism of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress, built around a rejection of western colonialism, is more and more a thing of the past. As the dynamic Indian economy merges with that of the wider world, Hindus and Muslims have begun separate searches for roots to anchor them inside a bland global civilisation. Mass communications have produced a uniform and severe Hinduism from a host of local variants, even as the country’s economically disenfranchised Muslims are increasingly part of an Islamic world community.
The Muslim reaction to this Hindu nationalism has been less anger and violence than simple psychological withdrawal: into beards, skullcaps and burqas in some cases; selfsegregating into Muslim ghettos in others. The terrorist attacks in Mumbai had a number of aims, one of which was to set a fuse to this tense inter-communal standoff. The jihadists not only want to destroy Pakistan, they want to destroy India as well. India in their eyes is everything they hate: Hindu, vibrantly free and democratic, implicitly and increasingly pro-American, and militarily cozy with Israel.
Just as the chaos in Iraq through early 2007 threatened the post-Ottoman state system from Lebanon to Iran, creeping anarchy in Pakistan undermines not only Afghanistan but also the whole Indian subcontinent. The existence of terrorist outfits like Lashkar-e-Taiba that have links with the Pakistani security apparatus but are outside the control of Pakistan’s own civilian authorities is the very definition of chaos.
A collapsing Pakistan, and with it the loss of any real border separating India from Afghanistan, is India’s worst nightmare. It brings us back towards the borders of the Mughal world, but not in a peaceful way. The jihadist attack on India’s financial centre not only damages India-Pakistan relations, but makes Pakistan’s new civilian government — which has genuinely tried to improve ties with India — look utterly pathetic. Thus, the attack weakens both countries. Any understanding over Kashmir, the disputed Muslim-majority territory claimed by Pakistan, is now further than ever from materialising, with mass violence there a distinct possibility. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s military suspects that Washington will desert their nation the moment the leadership of al-Qaeda is, by any chance, killed or captured.
Making matters worse, every time the US launches an air attack into Pakistan from Afghanistan, it further destabilises the Pakistani state. That is why the Mumbai attacks bring true joy to the most dangerous elements of the Pakistani security establishment: the tragedy has caused the world to focus on India’s weaknesses that have been obscured by its economic success. See, many Pakistanis are saying, your beloved India is not so stable either. This is nonsense, of course. India, with all its troubles, is far more stable than Pakistan. In the meantime, every day that goes by without riots in India is a defeat for the Mumbai terrorists. Indeed, India’s own Muslims have demonstrated against the attacks.
But India, not just Pakistan, desperately needs help. Just as solving or at least neutralising the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is a requirement for reducing radicalism and Iranian influence throughout the Levant, the same is true of the India-Pakistan dispute at the other end of the Greater Middle East. Our notion of the “peace process” is antiquated and needs expanding. We need a second special negotiator for the Middle East, a skilled diplomat shuttling regularly among New Delhi, Islamabad and Kabul.
Our best strategy is, as difficult and trite as it sounds, to be at all places at once, not with troops, necessarily, but with every bit of energy and constant attention that our entire national security apparatus — and those of our allies — can bring to bear.
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