Running Naked

"Two or three years after the partition, it occurred to the governments of India and Pakistan that lunatics, like prisoners, should also be exchanged -- Muslim lunatics should be sent to Pakistan, and Hindus and Sikhs be transferred to India," writes Urdu short story writer Saadat Hasan Manto.

Published in the early 1950s, it is considered so far the best story on the human tragedy that accompanied the partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. Parts of the story, still read and enacted in schools and colleges on both sides of the dividing line, aptly describe the madness that has plagued both the nations during the last 53 years.

Three wars and countless skirmishes have failed to resolve their disputes. Equally useless have been dozens of meetings and conferences arranged by the international community to let the two neighbors resolve their differences.

They are still at each other's throats. At least once in a decade, their madness gets out of control and they dash at each other with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on. Exhausted, they pause and wait another decade to build up enough hatred to dash at each other again.

The Muslim majority Himalayan valley of Kashmir is the main dispute that caused two of the three wars India and Pakistan have fought. But any issue, even a friendly cricket match, can turn ugly and stir their madness. Kashmir also is in the center of the current crisis stirred by an attack on the Indian parliament by a group of armed men last week. India says the attackers were Pakistan-backed Kashmiri fighters. Islamabad denies the charge and says they could have been Indian agents who attacked the parliament to justify an armed Indian incursion against Pakistan.

"One inmate had got so badly caught up in this India-Pakistan-India rigmarole that one day, while sweeping the floor, he dropped everything, climbed the nearest tree and installed himself on a branch. From this vantage point, he spoke for two hours on the delicate problem of India and Pakistan. The guards asked him to get down; instead he went a branch higher, and when threatened with punishment, declared: 'I wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan, I wish to live in this tree,'" writes Manto.

Unfortunately, unlike Manto's lunatics, today's Indians and Pakistanis do not have this option. They have no tree to climb. They have to live through this insanity and suffer. And now that their leaders have nuclear toys to play with, their sense of insecurity has increased. The theory of nuclear deterrence that Indian and Pakistani leaders invoked to justify their nuclear tests in 1998 does not make them feel better.

"There are enough crazy people on both sides of the border. Besides, the chance of an accidental nuclear war is greater here than it was between the United States and the former Soviet Union, who coined the theory of nuclear deterrence," says Pervez Hoodbhoy, a Pakistani scientist. Hoodbhoy, a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from MIT, is an anti-nuclear lobbyist and a campaigner for peace between India and Pakistan.

"We share a long border, and it will take a nuclear-tipped missile less than a minute to hit its target on either side of the border. There's no room for correcting an error as it was between the United States and the Soviet Union," said Hoodbhoy.

Rulers on both sides of the border, however, assure that their insanity will not lead to a nuclear war. "We are talking about precise attacks on terrorist targets, not an all-out war against Pakistan," India's minister of state for foreign affairs, Omar Abdullah, told journalists in New Delhi on Tuesday. He, however, did not say what will prevent Pakistan from going for an all-out war if attacked.

Similarly, Pakistani rulers have long defended their open and hidden support to Kashmiri militants as a reminder to India, and the rest of the world, that the Kashmir dispute needs to be resolved. They also fail to explain why should India continue to suffer these hit-and-run attacks by Kashmiri militants without engaging Pakistan in a war.

"We are sitting on a powder keg which can explode any moment," says N.H. Nayyar, another anti-nuclear lobbyist in Islamabad, Pakistan. Authorities on both sides of the border describe such people as alarmists, arguing that "both India and Pakistan are mature enough to understand the repercussions of a war between two nuclear neighbors," as a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Islamabad said. "They do not want to commit suicide."

But to ordinary observers it seems that suicide is what the two governments want to commit. "People who understand what a nuclear weapon can do, live under great stress," says Nayyar.

"Peace campaigners and anti-nuclear lobbyists are too weak to affect decision making in India or Pakistan. All we can do is to sit and pray," said Rashid Khalid, another anti-nuclear lobbyist who teaches defense and strategic studies at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam University.

In Manto's story, characters at the Lahore asylum, where lunatics were being divided on the basis of their religion, reacted differently to the stress of the partition. "A Muslim radio engineer ... who never mixed with anyone ... was so affected by the current debate that one day he took all his clothes off, gave the bundle to one of the guards and ran into the garden stark naked."

Maybe this is what peace lovers in India and Pakistan ought to do: Run stark naked in the streets to force their leaders to give peace a chance.