Opinion

The Cry of the Hawks
By Ahmad Faruqui, PhD
Dansville, CA

The carnage in Mumbai has yielded one benefit. It has unmasked the war mongers on both sides.
The picture that has emerged is not pretty. Editorial pages overflow with poisoned words. And the air waves are thick with bigotry.
Unlike Abraham Lincoln at the close of the American Civil War, there is no one in either India or Pakistan who has found a transcendent meaning in the carnage.
On the Indian side, one hears talk of revenge and instant justice. Muslims, not just Pakistanis, are the eternal villains in this plot, pumped up with the passions that flow from consuming the sacred cow.
The hawks have little interest in negotiating a solution to Kashmir. In their eyes, that means handing victory over to the enemy. They contend that it is vital for the Indian Union to have a Muslim majority state.
On the Pakistani side, a hawk argues that the Indians cannot be trusted to abide by any peace agreement. Another claims that the fourth war between India and Pakistan has already begun, citing the IAF’s violation of Pakistani air space. He refuses to accept the official Pakistani explanation that it was a technical error. He goes on to brag that Pakistan will prevail militarily over India in any conflict even though it has lost in all past encounters.

Un-named military officials declare that if India attacks, the Pakistani army would transfer troops from the tribal areas to the eastern front and the “patriotic Taliban” would be enlisted to assist in the final encounter with India.
A retired general officer is even less shy about invoking Armageddon. He says Pakistan would unleash a nuclear barrage on India in the event of an attack.
Such bluster by senior military officials would never be aired anywhere else.   They simply confirm that Pakistan’s national security establishment does not have the maturity to be trusted with nuclear weapons.
The hawks refuse to accept responsibility for harboring terrorists on Pakistani soil and continue to blame the Mumbai attacks on agents of the CIA and the Moussad. One conspiracy theorist even accuses the Indian intelligence agency of self-engineering the attack.
In their eyes, India has not reconciled itself to the Partition of 1947. Ergo, it is an existential threat. Having created Bangladesh out of East Pakistan in 1971, it is now out to create a West Bangladesh and re-establish Akhand Bharat.
Sadly, schadenfreude about India abounds in Pakistan, even among the moderates. For many, the Mumbai tragedy simply highlights serious fissures in India’s polity.
They took comfort in seeing ten militants holding up countless hotel guests and hundreds of commandoes at bay for 60 hours. To them, this was proof that Indians did not know how to fight, that India was nowhere close to being the rising power that the world media was saying it had become.
The hawks on neither side see the deep-rooted problems in their own strategic culture. Introspection is not their forte. Nuance and texture are nowhere to be found in their diction.
The hawks in India don’t realize that the secularity of India, a country with a billion citizens, cannot rest on the inclusion in its body politic of a state of 10 million. It is time that the authorities in New Delhi did something to improve the lot of the 150 million plus Muslims that reside in India.   Criminals like Chief Minister Modi who presided over a pogrom in Gujarat should be brought to justice, not left free to roam the country, fanning the fires of communal hatred.
And, most fundamentally, India has to accept its responsibility for creating the conditions that led Jinnah, the fierce champion of Hindu-Muslim unity, to seek a separate nation for the Muslims. The German word for coming to terms with the past, Vergangenheitsbewaltigung, is worth pondering.
As for the hawks in Pakistan, they have to realize that when their leaders have made a hash of managing their four provinces, why would they fare any better in a fifth?
It is time to stop indulging in past glories. It does little to name ballistic missiles after the Muslim rulers from Afghanistan who conquered India during the Middle Ages. Nor does it do much to name naval ships after the great Mughals.
In the 21st century, one has to look beyond territory and ideology and focus on human and social development. Against this backdrop, militants who kill innocents emerge as enemies of the human race, the “hostis humani generis” of Cicero.
Despite the crying of the hawks, armed attacks in the Valley of Kashmir are at an all time low since the insurgency of 1989. As Yaroslov Trofimov noted last week in the Wall Street Journal, India’s biggest foe in Kashmir is no longer a Pakistani-sponsored militancy.
The new threat comes from a civil disobedience movement that is being carried out in the best Gandhian tradition. It is being led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq who says, “India is not scared of the guns here in Kashmir … [but it is scared of] … people coming out in the streets, people seeing the power of nonviolent struggle.”
Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, India’s home minister at the peak of the insurgency and the state’s chief minister during 2002-05, agrees. Sayeed notes that there is a big difference between killing a militant versus killing a demonstrator. The general public, which regards the former as justified, condemns the latter.
The zeitgeist of the resistance in Kashmir is hewing toward protests, not bombs. Policy makers in New Delhi and Islamabad need to capitalize on this shift in tactics to solve the Kashmir problem.
This shift in tactics in Kashmir is a pointed rebuke to the terror mongers in Pakistan . It is time for them to stop brainwashing the youth of the land and sending them abroad on missions of hatred.
Acts of terror present the biggest threat to the arc of progress in Pakistan. History has shown over and over again that confrontation with India is pointless.
It is time to extend the hand of friendship toward those who reside east of the border. Indians are more like Pakistanis than any other nation.
It is time to unite to fight the common enemy, which is terrorists in the near term, and poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease in the long term.   It is time to stop being prisoners of the past. It is time to focus on the future.
Faruqui@pacbell.net

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