hindustantimes.com
Musharraf’s bluff
It was a handshake meant to impress a western audience, much like Pervez Musharraf’s repeated offers to talk to India anywhere and at any time. But the distinction the Pakistani dictator continues to make between terrorists and ‘freedom fighters’ exposes his real intention.
His hope evidently is that the old saying about one man’s terrorist being another’s freedom fighter will explain the violence perpetrated by the insurgents in Kashmir and help Pakistan to continue its support for them. The linkage of the events in Kashmir with what is happening in Palestine is another of General Musharraf’s favourite themes. However, the flaws in his contentions are too obvious to be ignored.
It is a matter of political experience that the votaries of violence invariably undermine their own cause. This is the reason why all genuine freedom fighters from Gandhi to Nelson Mandela abjured the use of violence. They preferred to stick to the constitutional path of peaceful demonstrations and courting arrest. While Gandhi had no truck with the so-called anarchists during India’s independence movement, Mandela chose to spend 27 years in jail to drive home the point about civil disobedience. Terrorism, therefore, has no place in a legitimate freedom struggle, something which the LTTE, too, may be beginning to realise. Besides, the unrest in Kashmir can by no stretch of imagination be called a fight for freedom simply because the essential condition for such action, viz. the denial of freedom, is absent in a state where elections are held at regular intervals. As long as the voters are allowed to exercise their franchise — a luxury unavailable in British India and South Africa under apartheid — the question of a ‘freedom struggle’ obviously cannot arise. In fact, it is actually more relevant in a Pakistan under an unelected military ruler than in Kashmir.
Kashmiris can not only preside over their own destiny through their popular representatives, including the chief minister, but can also become ministers at the Centre, and perhaps even a prime minister one day. This isn’t an opportunity which is available to Palestinians where Israel is concerned. The comparisons which General Musharraf is in the habit of drawing in this respect are, therefore, absurd. No less fatuous is his harking back to the Security Council resolutions on Kashmir, whose irrelevance has been underlined by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. It has to be remembered that the Pakistan to which the resolution refers is no longer in existence. It disappeared in 1971. |
