India and the future of Pakistan - M V Kamath
Nov 23, 1999, 16:50 Hrs (IST) -IndfiaInfocom
Pakistan never was, is not now and will never in the future be, a friend of India. To think it could ever wish India well is to indulge in fantasy. This raises certain fundamental questions. How should India react to events in Pakistan, especially when it is taken over by the military? A civilian administration might have shown some goodwill towards India but we can't expect that of the armed forces which suffer from all sorts of complexes. They can never forgive the fact that in three wars with India they have been worsted. All these years that have been seething with ideas of revenge and their active interference in Jammu & Kashmir along with cross-border terrorism will continue till kingdom come. We have to learn to live with it. We don not have to shed tears for Nawaz Sharief under whom democracy hardly existed in Pakistan. He was a much a tyrant as the worst of the military dictators. He was merely tolerated by the armed forces which even before he was deposed had a finger in every administrative pie.
If the Karach-based journal The Herald is to be believed, the armed forces were running a parallel government even before Nawaz Sharief was formally thrown out of office. The armed forces were merely tolerating him for want of any other alternative. The civilian authorities had no voice in the running of the armed forces which was the exclusive prerogative of the generals. The development of nuclear weapons continues to remain in the hands of the military to this day. The dismissal of the Nawaz Sharief government, in the circumstances, was only a formality. And in Pakistan there have been apparently no tears shed for him.
What many believe is that in dismissing him, the armed forces have merely jumped from the frying pan to the fire. Nobody apparently believes in Pakistan that a military rule will be any better than a civilian administration in the long run. Pakistan, to state it bluntly, is a failed state. It has no future. But what does it mean to be a failed state? It means many things: it means the break down of law and order, of authority and legitimacy, of institutions and banking. It means the disintegration of society, of production and distribution, of peace and tranquillity, of transport and communication. In his column in Outlook, Prem Shankar Jha painted a horrifying picture of Pakistan in an advanced stage of disintegration. Like a tornado, he writes, "a failed state generates its own destructive power and energy until it destroys all semblance of civilised life or until one warlord, stronger and more sagacious than the others, eliminates his rivals, liquidates their armies and crowns himself sovereign" for the state-building process to start all over again. That the process of disintegration has been on for a long time is fairly will-known.
Pakistan's cities are infested with Islamic and drug-trafficking private militia that do not listen even to the strong-arm tactics of the armed forces. The country apparently is awash with arms. In the last one decade alone murders have been on a steep rise. The courts, such as they are, hardly function. What does all this mean for India? Writes Jha: "Were the state to fail, Pakistan would be over-whelmed by sectarian violence. Islam and Jehad would become the battle-cries in the contest that would ensue. Militant attacks on the India would multiply and not confined to Kashmir". It is a horrifying picture. Were Pakistan not a nuclear state, India could have lived with a disintegrating state. But with nuclear bombs under the control of the armed forces there is no saying what can happen in the future either with the military getting out of hand or coming under the control of irresponsible elements. And there's the rub. There's one body of opinion in India which feels that the sooner Pakistan disintegrates the better for India which can then pick up the pieces. That is more easily said than achieved. There is much truth in the belief in some quarters that the sooner Pakistan breaks up into constituent states such as Baluchistan, Sind, Punjab and North West Frontier Province, the easier it will be for India to control the militants in our neighbourhood.
That remains to be proved. But how will China and the United States, two close friends of Pakistan, look at the picture of a country that is breaking up? Would they stand by idly and watch the tamasha? Already there are indications that Washington is becoming concerned. China, one can imagine, is watching the situation closely. Will either country or both together, eventually interfere to bring sanity and peace in Pakistan? It is Washington and Beijing that need to be watched, not London or any of the Commonwealth capitals. They don't matter in the long run. But what matters to Pakistan matter to India if for no other reason than that a Pakistan broken up can mean a greater threat to India. In such a situation India can hardly afford to be happy over recent developments in Pakistan. The car bombs in front of the US Embassy and UN office buildings indicate that for all Mushaffar's hard talk, the armed forces are not yet completely in control even in Islamabad. Murder stalks the city. It is in this context that one must assess talk about suspending Pakistan from Commonwealth membership. It is not something over which India can afford to gloat. True, Pakistan remains India's enemy but Delhi has to look beyond its nose to find out what is good for all of South Asia. A total breakdown of Pakistan could mean the return of the Mohajjirs to India, a pathetic reversal of the 1948 scene when literally millions left India in search of an Islamic paradise. It could spell disaster for India. It is for this reason that one must be careful not to sound too antagonistic towards the United States in its own quest to bring stability to our western neighbour.
A broken-up Pakistan is not necessarily a boon to India; for all one knows it may mean more trouble. It is therefore necessary for India and the United States to hold talks on Pakistan between themselves to chalk out a meaningful policy towards Pakistan for our won good. Possibly, in this matter, there could be a convergence of thinking in Delhi and in Washington.
Pakistan, to begin with was never a viable state. It was kept alive by the United States for its own reasons that had to do with the Cold War. There are some in India who hope and pray that with Pakistan's breakdown the old dream of akhand Bharat would finally be achieved. To believe so would be indulging in pure fantasy. We have to be realistic and proceed on the theory that partition was the inevitable and correct thing to have happened. What we should presently concentrate on is to see that we survive Pakistan and not go down with it, not so much in Pakistan's interests but in our own. Keeping Pakistan out of the Commonwealth, as some wish, is not necessarily the best thing to happen for India. Delhi must think again.
(M V Kamath needs no introduction to Indian people. A journalist par excellence, Kamath has decades of experience in the field having held key positions such as the editor of Illustrated Weekly of India, Sunday Times of India, Free Press Bulletin and many more. He has authored 35 books in History, Journalism, Politics including biographies of Henry Kissinger, Ramakrishna Bajaj and T A Pai. He is also a trustee of TMA Pai Foundation, Manipal, Karnataka. Currently, Kamath writes for many newspapers and periodicals in India.) |
