Point of View, 1971 Through Now

There are never any victors in war, both sides lose and it is the families that have to pay the price and suffer the most. As someone once said ‘ Wars are created by politicians, compounded by bureaucrats and fought by soldiers.`

I dont think that either Pakistan or India care much about their soldiers. There is a lot of noise which is made about the great soldiers of each country but if one does a bit of filtering then one realises that there is no substance. They are nothing but cannon fodder. Caring starts with the very institutions where they come from, that is the respective armies itself. However besides the great amount of propaganda, the very institutions that the men and women belong dont care a bit. Numerous examples can be given, the most immediate one being during the Kargil conflict, one side refusing to accept its dead bodies being returned by the other side and the other side declaring its POW`s as deserters without verifying facts or bothering about it. That is why families end up going to the media in frustration to put pressure on the goverment to help them. I wonder in the Indian army how many Army Chief`s after 1971 have put any kind of pressure on the Indian Government to get answers about the forgotten 54, on whom this articles is based. I dont know the answer but I suspect that it has been a very low priority issue for them. I know that in Pakistan the army is politically very powerful, but it seems that this is at a senior level and the ordinary sepoy is not effected by it.

The last 50-60 years is over and part of history. Assigning blame to people is not going to help anyone. I personally believe that there is nothing divine about nations, that is if you call something divine in the first place. Nations are like clubs where you usually get membership by your birth. Each `club` has certain characteristics, which differentiate it according to beliefs, culture and freedom etc.

As human beings it is very difficult to differentiate between the people in our respective countries. On the positive note both countries are very good hosts, warm and friendly. On the negative our minds are primative. We are out and out racists, and believe in the superiority of our own community/ tribe and religion as against others. We have become very intolerant, and also tend to treat women very poorly.

Unless we develop as human beings (author of this post included), we are going to see people mud slinging at every available opportunity and through every meduim, including chowk. Chowk in a way reflects the state of our intellectual mind of the so called educated elite in the subcontinent. If we think in such a negative manner, imagine how the uneducated masses would think. Most people read the articles without commenting, but they are the silent majority. The `radicals` have taken over, and when the silent majority read the posts, they tend to ignore their own country`s people radical post and get agitated with the radical posts written by the other side, coming to a conclusion that the other side is full of fanatics.

The future is for each one of us to develop in our small way.

Urstruly`s #258 article`s headline reads(I`m almost sure) `Moonh mein ram-ram nahi aur cchaDi ab haath mein`

(cchaDi - big stick)

You can guess the rest. I am :)

On second thoughts, that is `cchuri` (knife) not `chhaDi`, of course.

AlephNull#255:

All said and done, this is primarily a Pakistani website, albeit a very liberal and welcoming one. If we accept that, we are guests here -some of us permanent- invited by the banner. So, perhaps we should at least be polite in our criticism, especially in the areas in which they are quite sensitive.

re: #248 by CoolAL
So, an autocratic Jinnah thought democrazy was in the muslim blood!
And listen to what the present dictator of Pak has to say about democrazy in Pak. He thinks democrazy is thriving under his benign dictatorial rule!
http://www.dawn.com/2005/01/12/top1.htm
(President Gen Pervez Musharraf has said Pakistan is moving forward on the path of sustainable democracy as firm foundations have been laid for real and participatory democracy.)
May be Pakistan should rename itself as Islamic Democratic Republic of Pakistan (IDRP, wow an impressive name). BTW, East Germany called itself German Democratic Republic before its collapse and merger with its western counterpart.
Sridhar

dost-mittar #96

The ‘CREIP’ designation is a ‘hatemongerer’ fatwa. Only the name has been updated to reflect 21st century fashions; nothing else has changed. It is fascinating to see the public consultation between various learned scholars before they issue a CREIP ruling. Apparently a fatwa backed by a consensus of the ulema has special force …

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I just did a quick scan. No less than 22 of the first 250 interacts on this article are by tahmed32. Of these, only the first two have the slightest connection with Veeresh’s article. The rest are mostly disquisitions on CREIPs, exchange of pleasantries with various Chowkies, etc.

There are some other mashahoor pehelvans who have done likewise on this board, but tahmed stands out. Clearly the FP interacts and UP together are not enough space for his talents.

Is there any way Chowk could provide tahmed sahib with a regular column or perhaps a designated interact corner where he can hold forth on any subject, from the natural history of CREIPs to the essence of the Quran, that engages his attention? He is already a much-published Chowk author and seems to spend most of his waking hours on Chowk, so a column shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. People who agree with him could congregate there to applaud, those who disagree can throw their rotten eggs there, and other boards would be left free of total irrelevancies.

Yaseer,
Thanks. Mandal`s months were just to have a little fun but you appears to be under a good influence. You do not get triggered easily these days. Convey my congratulations to that good influence.

HP # 244:

Sorry but you disqualified yourself. I have no reason to disbelieve what you said first time about your ancestors. No need to sneak in through the back door. Next!!!

Satyamvada`s (post # 243): excellent post. Precisely my point...

Ana: Thanks for the note. Sorry to have reported your conversation on the UP here. Anytime there is a Mela on a Chowk article , all types of Chabri Wale, jugglers, sword-swallowers and hawkers show up to sell their wares. Manto has his little Jinnah dolls with two tone shoes on clay feet, TAhmed has his indignant piety, knowledge of Desmond Morris and his toy CREIP (It is my invention and mine alone) and HP has his bleeding heart for his ancestors among Indian Shudras (Not really, just kidding) to display. They are all part of the scene.

Manto: Excellent post on your contacts. No I am not Veeresh. He is a far better writer than I am or ever will be.

friend,

I have already discussed the matter with you. You know what my position is.

CoolAl,

We have had long discussions about this article. Here is the discussion

http://www.chowk.com/show_forum_topic_post_list.cgi?tid=00017334

http://www.chowk.com/show_forum_topic_post_list.cgi?tid=00017293


Gandiv...

That is a very wrong view. There is no record of Jinnah wanting to be the first Prime Minister... infact it is clear that he was going to settle with the Congress Party on the basis of the Cabinet Mission Plan. When Mountbatten brought up the first prime minister issue, Jinnah indicated that this would not solve anything to have a Muslim League Prime Minister.
He could have easily made it with the popular will, had he called Gandhi a Mahatma and started wearing khaddar kay kapray, gone along with the Khilafat movement... but he was no demagogue you see.

Netizen

Thank you for your response. Please read Ayesha Jalal`s Sole Spokesman if you can.

Anil,

Thank you for your kind words.

-YLH

Yasser/237 - thank you. Thank you very much. Some day you are going to have to deliver on that Corona . . .

Ok, to the point.

In all the other cases of contacts in Pakistan working on this matter, I have been taking things forward ``off-chowk``, I know you shall appreciate the sensitivities. At some later date I may merge some of the efforts, but I doubt if I shall ever be able to publicise them.

The first name on the list is that of Dr. Simmi Waraich`s father. She is reading this board and the interacts therein, and I am asking her to get in touch with you. The list is open domain.

I stand by my promise of the reward sum.

#215 by HP.

“So do you believe that your ancestry is living in present day India?”

Have you killed them all already?

It thought you were a stupid, but you`re a headless buffon instead.

How can anyone`s ancestry live at the same time as himself?
Hope this is not too dificult to understand for you, is it?

HP#244
Don`t be so dumb about ``a female political leader in UP insist on being called a chamaar because the society would not accept her in any other manner though she may attain some prominences due to her leadership skills or following amongst the people``

She is doing so to get votes. This political leader is being accused of keeping her mentor in illegal confinement for last two years, no one can do anything because of her using this caste trump card.

You are using ``chamaar or chora or Bhangi`` terms freely. Using these terms in India will land me you a jail.

Through out my student life in Delhi I had more than one scheduled caste family for neighbour. We fought, argued, ate and drank (only water & tea - no other drink was allowed to me at that time) together. Atleast in Delhi that was not uncommon.

This is for Manto. Enjoy!!!

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The Messiah and The Promised Land
Excerpts from Halfway to Freedom: A Report on the New India, By Margaret Bourke-White Simon and Schuster, New York, 1949.

Pakistan was one month old. Karachi was its mushrooming capital. On the sandy fringes of the city an enormous tent colony had grown up to house the influx of minor government officials. There was only one major government official, Mahomed Ali Jinnah, and there was no need for Jinnah to take to a tent. The huge marble and sandstone Government House, vacated by British officialdom, was waiting. The Quaid-i-Azam moved in, with his sister, Fatima, as hostess. Mr. Jinnah had put on what his critics called his ``triple crown``: he had made himself Governor-General; he was retaining the presidency of the Muslim League -- now Pakistan`s only political party; and he was president of the country`s lawmaking body, the Constituent Assembly.

``We never expected to get it so soon,`` Miss Fatima said when I called. ``We never expected to get it in our lifetimes.``

If Fatima`s reaction was a glow of family pride, her brother`s was a fever of ecstasy. Jinnah`s deep-sunk eyes were pinpoints of excitement. His whole manner indicated that an almost overwhelming exaltation was racing through his veins. I had murmured some words of congratulation on his achievement in creating the world`s largest Islamic nation.

``Oh, it`s not just the largest Islamic nation. Pakistan is the fifth-largest nation in the world!``

The note of personal triumph was so unmistakable that I wondered how much thought he gave to the human cost: more Muslim lives had been sacrificed to create the new Muslim homeland than America, for example, had lost during the entire second World War. I hoped he had a constructive plan for the seventy million citizens of Pakistan. What kind of constitution did he intend to draw up?

``Of course it will be a democratic constitution; Islam is a democratic religion.``

I ventured to suggest that the term ``democracy`` was often loosely used these days. Could he define what he had in mind?

``Democracy is not just a new thing we are learning,`` said Jinnah. ``It is in our blood. We have always had our system of zakat -- our obligation to the poor.``

This confusion of democracy with charity troubled me. I begged him to be more specific.

``Our Islamic ideas have been based on democracy and social justice since the thirteenth century.``

This mention of the thirteenth century troubled me still more. Pakistan has other relics of the Middle Ages besides ``social justice`` -- the remnants of a feudal land system, for one. What would the new constitution do about that? .. ``The land belongs to the God,`` says the Koran. This would need clarification in the constitution. Presumably Jinnah, the lawyer, would be just the person to correlate the ``true Islamic principles`` one heard so much about in Pakistan with the new nation`s laws. But all he would tell me was that the constitution would be democratic because
``the soil is perfectly fertile for democracy.``

What plans did he have for the industrial development of the country? Did he hope to enlist technical or financial assistance from America?

``America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America,`` was Jinnah`s reply. ``Pakistan is the pivot of the world, as we are placed`` -- he revolved his long forefinger in bony circles -- ``the frontier on which the future position of the world revolves.`` He leaned toward me, dropping his voice to a confidential note. ``Russia,`` confided Mr. Jinnah, ``is not so very far away.``

This had a familiar ring. In Jinnah`s mind this brave new nation had no other claim on American friendship than this - that across a wild tumble of roadless mountain ranges lay the land of the BoIsheviks. I wondered whether the Quaid-i-Azam considered his new state only as an armored buffer between opposing major powers. He was stressing America`s military interest in other parts of the world. ``America is now awakened,`` he said with a satisfied smile. Since the United States was now bolstering up Greece and Turkey, she should be much more interested in pouring money and arms into Pakistan. ``If Russia walks in here,`` he concluded, ``the whole world is menaced.``

In the weeks to come I was to hear the Quaid-i-Azam`s thesis echoed by government officials throughout Pakistan. ``Surely America will build up our army,`` they would say to me. ``Surely America will give us loans to keep Russia from walking in.`` But when I asked whether there were any signs of Russian infiltration, they would reply almost sadly, as though sorry not to be able to make more of the argument. ``No, Russia has shown no signs of being interested in Pakistan.``

This hope of tapping the U. S. Treasury was voiced so persistently that one wondered whether the purpose was to bolster the world against Bolshevism or to bolster Pakistan`s own uncertain position as a new political entity. Actually, I think, it was more nearly related to the even more significant bankruptcy of ideas in the new Muslim state -- a nation drawing its spurious warmth from the embers of an antique religious fanaticism, fanned into a new blaze.

Jinnah`s most frequently used technique in the struggle for his new nation had been the playing of opponent against opponent. Evidently this technique was now to be extended into foreign policy. ....

No one would have been more astonished than Jinnah if he could have foreseen thirty or forty years earlier that anyone would ever speak of him as a ``savior of Islam.`` In those days any talk of religion brought a cynical smile. He condemned those who talked in terms of religious rivalries, and in the stirring period when the crusade for freedom began sweeping the country he was hailed as ``the embodied symbol of Hindu-Muslim unity.`` The gifted Congresswoman, Mrs. Naidu, one of Jinnah`s closest friends, wrote poems extolling his role as the great unifier in the fight for independence. ``Perchance it is written in the book of the future,`` ran one of her tributes, ``that he, in some terrible crisis of our national struggle, will pass into immortality`` as the hero of ``the Indian liberation.``

In the ``terrible crisis,`` Mahomed Ali Jinnah was to pass into immortality, not as the ambassador of unity, but as the deliberate apostle of discord. What caused this spectacular renunciation of the concept of a united India, to which he had dedicated the greater part of his life? No one knows exactly. The immediate occasion for the break, in the mid-thirties, was his opposition to Gandhi`s civil disobedience program. Nehru says that Jinnah ``disliked the crowds of ill-dressed people who filled the Congress`` and was not at home with the new spirit rising among the common people under Gandhi`s magnetic leadership. Others say it was against his legal conscience to accept Gandhi`s program. One thing is certain: the break with Gandhi, Nehru, and the other Congress leaders was not caused by any Hindu-Muslim issue.

In any case, Jinnah revived the moribund Muslim League in 1936 after it had dragged through an anemic thirty years` existence, and took to the religious soapbox. He began dinning into the ears of millions of Muslims the claim that they were downtrodden solely because of Hindu domination. During the years directly preceding this move on his part, an unprecedented degree of unity had developed between Muslims and Hindus in their struggle for independence from the British Raj. The British feared this unity, and used their divide-and-rule tactics to disrupt it. Certain highly placed Indians also feared unity, dreading a popular movement which would threaten their special position. Then another decisive factor arose. Although Hindus had always been ahead of Muslims in the industrial sphere, the great Muslim feudal landlords now had aspirations toward industry. From these wealthy Muslims, who resented the well-established Hindu competition, Jinnah drew his powerful supporters. One wonders whether Jinnah was fighting to free downtrodden Muslims from domination or merely to gain an earmarked area, free from competition, for this small and wealthy clan.

The trend of events in Pakistan would support the theory that Jinnah carried the banner of the Muslim landed aristocracy, rather than that of the Muslim masses he claimed to champion. There was no hint of personal material gain in this. Jinnah was known to be personally incorruptible, a virtue which gave him a great strength with both poor and rich. The drive for personal wealth played no part in his politics. It was a drive for power. ......

Less than three months after Pakistan became a nation, Jinnah`s Olympian assurance had strangely withered. His altered condition was not made public. ``The Quaid-i-Azam has a bad cold`` was the answer given to inquiries.

Only those closest to him knew that the ``cold`` was accompanied by paralyzing inability to make even the smallest decisions, by sullen silences striped with outbursts of irritation, by a spiritual numbness concealing something close to panic underneath. I knew it only because I spent most of this trying period at Government House, attempting to take a new portrait of Jinnah for a Life cover.

The Quaid-i-Azam was still revered as a messiah and deliverer by most of his people. But the ``Great Leader`` himself could not fail to know that all was not well in his new creation, the nation; the nation that his critics referred to as the ``House that Jinnah built.`` The separation from the main body of India had been in many ways an unrealistic one. Pakistan raised 75 per cent of the world`s jute supply; the processing mills were all in India. Pakistan raised one third of the cotton of India, but it had only one thirtieth of the cotton mills. Although it produced the bulk of Indian skins and hides, all the leather tanneries were in South India. The new state had no paper mills, few iron foundries. Rail and road facilities, insufficient at best, were still choked with refugees. Pakistan has a superbly fertile soil, and its outstanding advantage is self-sufficiency in food, but this was threatened by the never-ending flood of refugees who continued pouring in long after the peak of the religious wars had passed.

With his burning devotion to his separate Islamic nation, Jinnah had taken all these formidable obstacles in his stride. But the blow that finally broke his spirit struck at the very name of Pakistan. While the literal meaning of the name is ``Land of the Pure,`` the word is a compound of initial letters of the Muslim majority provinces which Jinnah had expected to incorporate: P for the Punjab, A for the Afghans` area on the Northwest Frontier, S for Sind, -tan for Baluchistan. But the K was missing.

Kashmir, India`s largest princely state, despite its 77 per cent Muslim population, had not fallen into the arms of Pakistan by the sheer weight of religious majority. Kashmir had acceded to India, and although it was now the scene of an undeclared war between the two nations, the fitting of the K into Pakistan was left in doubt. With the beginning of this torturing anxiety over Kashmir, the Quaid-i-Azam`s siege of bad colds began, and then his dismaying withdrawal into himself. ....

Later, reflecting on what I had seen, I decided that this desperation was due to causes far deeper than anxiety over Pakistan`s territorial and economic difficulties. I think that the tortured appearance of Mr. Jinnah was an indication that, in these final months of his life, he was adding up his own balance sheet. Analytical, brilliant, and no b1got, he knew what he had done. Like Doctor Faustus, he had made a bargain from which he could never be free. During the heat of the struggle he had been willing to call on all the devilish forces of superstition, and now that his new nation had been achieved the b1gots were in the position of authority. The leaders of orthodoxy and a few ``old families`` had the final word and, to perpetuate their power, were seeing to it that the people were held in the deadening grip of religious superstition.

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