We, The People

NOVEMBER 2001 - So they are dancing in the streets in Kabul and miraculously there are flowers that have sprung up in a city that wears a permanent look of devastation. Transistor radios that survived five years of trampling are belting out music and men are flocking to have their beards shaved. The good guys, the Northern Alliance who spent most of Operation Enduring Freedom parked safely watching the B 52s carpet bomb the mad Taliban, have rolled into the capital and taken over a city that no one owns. The Taliban slipped away into the shadows – more strategic vision from OBL and John Simpson was able to walk with a handful of street urchins and a few battered tanks to signal a victory of the coalition forces. Kabul has fallen. The Taliban have fled. Now the stew is really going to cook.

There is possibly no angle from which this two-month-old conflict – actually far older than two months, more like 20 years plus, has not been covered, analysed, discussed and debated. Over here, overnight, experts on Afghan policy have sprung up and held forth on their perception of things. It seems that everyone who can write or type with two fingers has been able to astutely look deep into the Afghan situation and then explained to us what is happening and if it is not happening why it isn’t happening. It is baffling to realize that we have hundreds of men and women who are supreme strategists and were only waiting to be discovered. In that department, this country can now be safely assumed to have assumed self-sufficiency. In the long days ahead while we all scratch our collective heads and wonder for the millionth time how we can ever hope to bring a shred of normalcy to that war-torn, conflict-ravaged land, there will be no shortage of experts who will tell us what to do. Into that profusion of opinions, half-baked and badly cooked, will be the added chaos provided by the do-gooder fundos who will advocate more war, more killing and more unrest till the crusades are over. All this means that the coming months present a scenario that is frightening in the extreme as men will grind out their agendas and the powers that be, will manipulate and maneuver one another to establish their writ on a land no one owns, no one wants and over which everyone is deeply interested. Some want revenge, some want oil, some want access; some want religion and some want all these and some want none of these and quite something else. With our economic future a cause for much anxiety, all our energies are going to be diverted to the solution for Afghanistan and perhaps no one is going to admit that possibly, Afghanistan has no solution, is too war-scarred and too fundamentally unhinged to become normal. In any event what is normal to one faction is abnormal to the one three feet next to it. In the final analysis, the great game that has been played in Afghanistan for years, will in all probability, continue and while theorists check out their scripts with live models – the poor, wretched, deprived and hungry people of Afghanistan, the human misery will multiply and the human condition sadder than ever before. It is always the people who pay the price even before all the dust has settled down. But you can’t really get up and say that because the hordes of experts will tell you that they are only doing what they are doing, for the sake of the people. It’s a no win situation. You can turn it upside down, or downside up – but like former President Rafiq Tarar who had the unique distinction of looking the same, upside down or downside up, the end will still be the same. No answer.

We have all been so caught up with the events in Afghanistan that we have more or less forgotten that we have a bigger problem that is older than the Afghan crisis and dare one say, of considerable importance to our well being and that of our big neighbour. Although the grim reality of Kashmir is brought home virtually every day, when there is a breakdown in Indian-held Kashmir and buildings explode, people get killed, troops are ambushed and homes get torched, it seems to have been placed squarely on the back burner. In the larger context of things, our relations with India are worse than ever before, which is a pity. In the post-11 September world, we have been swept away by events over which we cannot exercise any control and the slight ray of hope that we were beginning to see when leaders of India and Pakistan began to talk, has vaporized into thin air. There is not even a small sliver of hope now that had become visible till the Agra Summit collapsed. It’s been downhill since then. How sad for all the people of Pakistan and India that during the current UN session, our two leaders did not even have a one to one discussion. While our President is treading a path, which has more landmines than land, the Indian Prime Minister is hostile and angry. Nothing short of a miracle would change things and miracles, as we all know too well, are in ever-decreasing short supply.

From 1947 to this morning, India and Pakistan have a history of conflict and mistrust – some say the conflict is even older. First Muslims rode over the passes and plundered the Hindus at will, then they even started to rule this land till the British opened a trading office and changed history here, choosing to perpetuate the divide so that the two major communities were constantly at each other’s throats – till partition and its bloody aftermath firmly cast our animosity into stone. We have fought three wars, came close to a fourth, we have somehow blundered into nuclear technology, we constantly rattle our sabers and gnash our teeth while the bulk of our people cry for drinking water and two square meals a day. We distrust one another totally and completely and are willing to believe the worst of each other. The divisions are in the minds and hearts of the people, fed by history, fuelled by the present and stoked by the armed forces, the bureaucrats and the politicians.

No winds of peace will waft over our lives from the officials on either side. In the serious and tension-ridden post-Taliban scenario that will unfold day after day, both India and Pakistan have to start thinking about an enduring peace. It is perhaps one of the most difficult things to achieve in today’s world, but surely not beyond human capability. Kashmir remains the issue and cannot be solved. Neither can one Pervez Musharraf visit or earlier, one Vajpayee trek tilt the scales. The two countries will drive each other into oblivion if they continue with their mindsets fixed forever. Since India is larger it will go down later, but it will be small consolation and there will be no one to cheer their end eventually. Peace will not come easy and only common people on either side can begin the impossible task - not bringing down the barriers – that will not happen, but first steps towards a live and let live way of thinking, an attitude that will need a great deal of divine help to succeed. People have century after century, through troubled and rife-ridden times, found the will to rise above differences and reach a balanced approach to living. It happens less and less. We have more information than ever before and we are more intolerant than ever before, but unless we, the people take that first difficult step, things will progressively get worse and a hundred years from now, we will be the accursed forefathers who let our two countries sink into a hole we dug together.