This is not a coincidence that as soon as Barack Obama became the nominee of the Democratic Party last summer, his personal opinions became the policy positions of the incoming administration. Obama has been saying that he would like to facilitate a dialog between India and Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir issue. In other words, he buys the argument that the terrorism on the Indian subcontinent is a result of the Kashmir dispute. This also means that if Kashmir is handed over to Pakistan as a reward for 60 years of terrorism in that part of the world, terrorism will stop the next day and all Muslims would live peacefully ever after! President Obama will give the world an ironclad guarantee on behalf of Pakistan and all the terrorists on their soil. In case this does not happen, he would resign as the president of the United States and by a UN mandate, the whole of Kashmir would be returned to India within 24 hours with a profound apology by this august world body. Are you ready to make this deal?
What is this, is it just a young president’s naivete or plain stupidity? I am not sure but my suspicion is that Barack Obama has some close personal friends from Pakistan who have been feeding him this garbage for an extended period of time. On the other hand, most of the Democratic Presidents have paddled the same idiotic foreign policy line during the past 61 tragic years for the whole of the Indian subcontinent. In the current circumstances India has no choice but to go back to the torturous years of Jimmy Carter presidency and wait for another calamity to hit the world and then do what needs to be done in the first place. For any lasting peace in that part of the world India must prevail! The world has to stand behind a democratic India to enforce law and order and dismantle Pakistan’s army and their ISI once and for all. This would happen some day if peace and prosperity has to return to the subcontinent. This might take another 20 years till India finally finds the courage to do the needful!
From 1947 onward, America and the Western World was obsessed with the idea of India-Pakistan and their cooked-up dispute. This frustrating hyphenation went on till May 1998 when India officially declared itself a nuclear power. Pakistan followed suit and tried to show the absurd parity with India. Kargil War followed and another naive US President Bill Clinton called the game over. He not only forced the Pakistanis to get back in their breaches but scolded the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to stay in his league. Bill Clinton finally found India on March 20, 2000 just like Vasco-da-Gama did on May 20, 1498. From this point forward the US State Department was reluctant to use hyphenated India-Pakistan line. The rise of India since 2000 and the arrival of George W Bush as president of the United States on January 20, 2001 changed the whole paradigm. India was now being compared to China, the two emerging economies. The India-Pakistan hyphenation was instead replaced with India-China.
Pakistan sulked on the sidelines from 2004 till the end of 2007. However, its economy grew by 6% a year and for these four years some form of stability was seen in this troubled land. Obviously, the fundamentalists and the militant forces were unhappy to loose their hold over the population and so targeted the government of General Pervez Musharraf. The Mullahs and the Military got Benazir Bhutto assassinated as she was talking peace and good relations with India. These extremists and terrorists started periodic bomb-blasts in India during 2008 thereby reigniting an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Pakistan obviously couldn’t stand the new China-India hyphenation and wanted to insert itself into a familiar India-Pakistan mindset. The establishment in Pakistan was able to achieve that by a brutal and frontal assault on Bombay on 26/11. Now we know that Pakistan’s military as well as their Inter-Services Intelligence were an active participant in the whole episode. The Pakistani establishment is fully aware that the only glue that holds their country together is a “hate India diet”. There is no other justification for the existence of Pakistan as a separate country. Pakistan lives to hate India, just THINK about it!
Filed under: American, Indo-US relations, International, Pakistan Tagged: | Barack Obama, Democratic Party, India, India-Pakistan, Indian subcontinent, Inter-Services Intelligence, Jimmy Carter, Kashmir, Kashmir issue, Muslims, Pakistan, re-hyphenated India and Pakistan, UN, United States of America
I share the author’s frustration at this hyphenation. There is no denying that India and Pakistan are intrinsically linked by history, politics, religion etc but that is not the same as saying that our identity exists only as part of this hyphen.
Our context has changed. We are the worlds fourth largest economy with a lot to play for. For the first time in our 60 year history we’re not looking back but forward at what could be? We’re talking about taking our IT prowess to the next level, to develop our cities as they have never been developed before, to lift the poor out of depredation as has never happened before.
We need therefore to focus on the size of the prize and not Pakistan. Pakistan’s entire existence has been defined in opposition to India and look where its got them. We have much bigger fish to fry than a country which bears the tag of an almost failed nation state.
Our comparison should be China and how far behind we are versus them rather than how for ahead we are versus Pakistan, because Pakistan in the end analysis doees not compare and they know it. Pakistan’s oft discussed fear of India is an irrelevance concocted by an establishment that fears irrelevance, one which is desperately trying to shore up its meaning and purpose based on the significance of its enemies rather than its own accomplishments.
We have nothing to gain from destabilizing them because they have nothing we could possibly want. At the end of it, frankly all we need is for them to be quiet, to leave us alone to get on with the job of building a budding economy. We can’t afford to display the same nihilistic streaks as inform opinion and action over there, because we have a lot more to lose than they have.
India hyphenated with China? Gimme a break! One is a country that still struggles and fails to feed more than 20% of its population, has a shameful functional literacy rate of barely 50%, a caste system that oppresses more than 160 million Untouchables, with 47 out of a 100 children suffering from malnutrition, has 400 million people with no access to electricity, where 2.5 million children die each year before reaching the age of three, and has 41% of citizens living below the international absolute poverty line; the other country is already acknowledged to be the second most important country in the world, a member of G2, one half of Chimerica, the creditor bankrolling Uncle Sam, the locomotive driving much of East Asia and South East Asia during this economic downturn, a country with impeccable infrastructure, whose functional literacy rate is over 92%, a forex reserve war chest set to surpass 2.5 trillion dollars by the end of this year, and sometime next year will become the second largest economy after the US, etc.
These two countries are not even in the same league. Only the Indians/mental masturbators still hyphenate India with China, trying desperately to bask in reflected glory, when in reality India is to China what a bullock cart is to a Ferrari. End of story.