Haqqani's Latest Salvo: "Pakistan's Elusive Quest for Parity"
By Riaz Haq
CA
"The alphabet agencies — ISI, RAW, and so forth — are often the chosen instrument of state policy when there is a conventional (and now a nuclear) balance of power, and the diplomatic route seems barren." -Stephen Cohen
"Pakistan is India’s rival in real terms only as much as Belgium could rival France or Germany and Vietnam could hope to be on a par with China. India’s population is six times larger than Pakistan’s while its economy is 10 times the size of the Pakistani economy. Notwithstanding internal problems, India’s $2 trillion economy has managed consistent growth whereas Pakistan’s $245 billion economy has grown sporadically." - Husain Haqqani
Contrast the words of Husain Haqqani, the disgraced former Pakistan Ambassador to Washington, with the statement of Stephen Cohen, a seasoned US expert on South Asia, with regards to India-Pakistan "balance" or "parity". Also note the lack of Haqqani's basic arithmetic skill in his India-Pakistan GDP comparison. The ratio of $2 trillion (exaggerated as of now) to $245 billion is closer to 8, not 10.
Haqqani's latest Op Ed in The Hindu is part of his continuing campaign to please his Western and Indian patrons by launching periodic attacks on Pakistan. It makes sense for him. His main target are the book buyers in the United States and India which represent two of the three biggest markets for books in English.
Anyone who has read Haqqani's "Magnificent Delusions" is struck by the fact that almost all of his research is based on the work of press reporters like Time-Life's Margaret Bourke-White and her fellow American journalists. Haqqani finds them more credible and insightful than Jinnah, Liaquat, Truman, Eisenhower, Dulles and other top leaders and policy-makers. If one really analyses Haqqani's narrative, one has to conclude that Pakistanis are extraordinarily clever in deceiving the United States and its highly sophisticated policymakers who have been taken for a ride by Pakistanis for over six decades.
Haqqani's latest salvo "Pakistan's Elusive Quest For Parity" published in Indian newspaper "The Hindu" begs the following questions:
1. Why would any country, including Pakistan, wish to seek parity with India which is only slightly better than Afghanistan in the South Asia region in terms of multi-dimensional poverty assessed by Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OHDI)?
2. Why would any country, including Pakistan, wish for parity with India where a farmer commits suicide every 30 minutes?
3. Why would any country, including Pakistan, strive for parity with India where nearly two-thirds of the population still defecates in the open?
4. Why would Pakistan want parity with India which suffers some of the heaviest disease burdens in the world?
5. Why would any country, including Pakistan, seek parity with India which leads the world in child marriages?
6. Why would Pakistan seek parity with India which has among the highest levels of poverty in the world?
Finally, it's important to note that Haqqani's Op Ed plays right into the Indian obsession with Pakistan as manifested in the continuing India-Pakistan de-hyphenation debate.
For the last several years, Indian elites have been quite obsessed about de-hyphenating their country from Pakistan and fusing it with China by inventing such words as "Chindia". However, it's also clear from the Indian media reactions to Kerry's words that India's rivalry with Pakistan inflames far more passion in India than does India's self-proclaimed competition with China.
Robert Kaplan of Stratfor questions the Indian policy elite's obsession with hyphenation with China in a recent piece as follows:
Indian elites can be obsessed with China, even as Chinese elites think much less about India. This is normal. In an unequal rivalry, it is the lesser power that always demonstrates the greater degree of obsession. For instance, Greeks have always been more worried about Turks than Turks have been about Greeks. China's inherent strength in relation to India is more than just a matter of its greater economic capacity, or its more efficient governmental authority.
Kaplan goes on to say the following about India-Pakistan hyphenation:
The best way to gauge the relatively restrained atmosphere of the India-China rivalry is to compare it to the rivalry between India and Pakistan. India and Pakistan abut one another. India's highly populated Ganges River Valley is within 480 kilometers (300 miles) of Pakistan's highly populated Indus River Valley. There is an intimacy to India-Pakistan tensions that simply does not apply to those between India and China. That intimacy is inflamed by a religious element: Pakistan is the modern incarnation of all of the Muslim invasions that have assaulted Hindu northern India throughout history. And then there is the tangled story of the partition of the Asian subcontinent itself to consider -- India and Pakistan were both born in blood together.
It's a rarely acknowledged fact in India that most Indians are far more obsessed with Pakistan than any other country. But the ruling dynasty's Rahul Gandhi, the man widely expected to be India's future prime minister, did confirm it, according to a news report by America's NPR Radio. "I actually feel we give too much time in our minds to Pakistan," said Rahul Gandhi at a leadership meeting of the Indian National Congress in 2009.
The rise of the new media and the emergence of the "Internet Hindus", a term coined by Indian journalist Sagarika Ghose, has removed all doubts about many Indians' Pakistan obsession. She says the “Internet Hindus are like swarms of bees". "They come swarming after you" pouncing on any mention of Pakistan or Muslims.
Here's a video demolishing the Chindia myth:
http://youtu.be/_bR3IjrMXc4
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