Call Fascist Modi’s Bluff
By Karamatullah K. Ghori
Toronto, Canada

 

It’s hard to be precise who was actually in the cross-hairs of MohsinBhopali’s immortal quatrain:

Jahilko Agar JehlkaInaam Diya Jaey

IssHadsa-e-Waqtko Kya Naam Diya Jaey

MeyKhaneykiToheen Hai, RindonkiHatak Hai

Kam Zarf key Hatoon Mein Agar Jam Diya Jaey.

What the bard meant, in a nut-shell, was that it was an insult to common sense and intelligence to put an undeserving person of limited education and exposure in an office of authority.

Whoever may have been at the back of Bhopali’s versatile mind, a half-century ago, India’s reigning monarch, PM Narendra Modi, fits Bhopali’s description of that upstart thrust upon greatness. Modi is a personification of Bhopali’s stirring lament of a puny person saddled with responsibility far beyond his ken.

That the- once -Tea-seller- Modi of Indian Gujrat’s Ahmedabad, and now Prime Minister of what’s supposedly the largest democracy in the world, is an epitome of an upstart crowned with glory is fully borne out from his recent infraction on the disputed Indian-occupied Kashmir.

In a fit of arrogance triggered by raw power, Modi has scrapped the 70-year-old Special Status of Kashmir guaranteed under India’s own constitution. Power corrupts, as the old adage says, and absolute power corrupts absolutely is so categorically writ large in Modi’s latest shenanigan.

The Indian-occupied Kashmir has been a cauldron of brute repression by more than half-a-million armed-to-teeth Indian boots on its ground. Since the brutal murder of that valiant freedom-fighter, Burhan Wani, in the summer of 2016, tens of thousands of freedom-wanting Kashmiris have been mercilessly butchered by gung-ho and trigger-happy Indian military.

The saga of repression in Kashmir is a carbon copy of what Israel has been meting out to its hapless Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. Indian special units of the army have, for years, been trained in both India and Israel.

This latest antic of Modi is a leaf straight out of the brute occupation of someone else’s land.

Modi’s doing away of Kashmir’s Special Status, under Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, is not an end in itself; it’s just the beginning of putting teeth into BJP’s nefarious grand design to create a Bharat Versh (India) sans its 200 million-strong Muslims.

What better strategy to win the hearts of Modi’s rabid BJP aficionados than start the implementation of the long-term agenda of a Muslim-free India with India’s only Muslim-majority state, Kashmir?

Removing the cover of Article 370 from the valley of Kashmir amounts to throwing it open to vultures waiting in the wings to pounce on the bounty of Kashmir.

BJP has India’s mega-rich corporations and their robber-baron bosses anxious to lay their grabbing hands on Kashmir. The idea ruling the roost among BJP ideologues is to emulate in Kashmir what their counter-parts are doing in the Occupied Palestine. Modi’s mealy-mouthed platitudes that investments from India would enrich the Kashmiris is a fig-leaf that will drop when hordes of Indians start putting down roots in Kashmir. Settlements would soon be sprouting all over the valley. It wouldn’t be long before the Muslims of Kashmir are rendered a minority in their ancestral land.

Pakistan has been provoked, there’s nary a doubt in it. But if Modi’s idea was to ‘shock and awe’ Pakistan it hasn’t quite worked that way. Pakistan may have been shocked but far from awed.

Pakistan has given back Modi as well as it took his brazen challenge. That’s the least Imran Khan’s government could do. India deserved that Pakistan scale down its diplomatic relations with the erring Modi regime. Showing Indian HC in Islamabad the exit door was fully warranted. So is the decision to cut off all trade with India. The Banyas should fully understand the severity of their crime against the Kashmiris once it starts hurting their pocket books.

But what other options has Pakistan to checkmate Modi’s provocation, apart from these symbolic gestures?

The foremost call, of course, for Imran Khan is to answer and assuage the people of Pakistan’s sense of grievous hurt. 12 million Kashmiris, incarcerated in their state under lock and key should only be grating on the hearts and minds of the Pakistanis. The Kashmiris, groaning under India’s fascist yoke, are their kith and kin; their harrowing suffering at the hands of a racist BJP regime that subscribes to the Nazi agenda of genocide and ethnic cleansing, must be wrenching for every conscientious Pakistani.

Imran Khan has done well to rush to Muzaffarabad, the set of AJK government, to be with them in this hour of trial. His address to the AJK Assembly was a stirring call to the international community to open up its eyes—so far barely open, if not completely shut—to the mayhem being perpetrated of innocent Kashmiris by brute Indian military whose behavior pattern in Occupied Kashmir is a carbon copy of what has been meted out to hapless Palestinians.

Imran was bang on target in reminding a soulless international community that Hitler was reincarnated in Modi; that the Nazis had a rebirth in India’s fascist RSS and its political arm, BJP.

Imran was equally unequivocal and categorical in reminding Modi, the fascist, that any adventure by his military machine against AJK will trigger a wider war. Pakistan will be well within its rights to answer with a stone every brick the coward Modi pelted at it.

The world should take note of a Modi regime going berserk. Pakistan shouldn’t be blamed for any fitting reaction and response, if provoked by a war-mongering Modi. All stops will come off from Pakistan, and the world should be prepared to deal with the fallout of Modi’s Himalayan miscalculation.

His landslide triumph at the last Indian general elections has so swayed a fascist-bent Modi that he can’t any longer see beyond his nose. Pin prick provocations from the Indian army have already started. An unprovoked barrage of gun-fire from the Indian side of the LOC, on August 15, India’s Independence Day, have led to three soldiers killed on the Pakistan side.

However, Pakistan’s call, in response to what the fascists of India have thrown at it, has a much wider and diverse field to cover.

Pakistan’s suave diplomacy has already yielded one early success—and that too at the UN paralyzed by big-power rivalry. The UNSC meeting on August 16 for consultations among its 15-members is a victory of sorts for Pakistan. This UNSC meeting is the first in 50 years on the 70-year-old Kashmir dispute, exclusively. More redeeming for Pakistan is that UNSC was meeting despite India’s frantic lobbying with its many friends to not let this conclave happen.

However, it’s very unlikely that UNSC would live up to discharge the role mandated for it under the UN Charter. There’s too much of narrow self-interest of its member states at stake poised to check any meaningful action in the interest of peace and settlement of this long-festering dispute. The most likely outcome would be a cliched-laced statement from the Security Council member states calling on India and Pakistan to sue for peace and enter into peaceful negotiations. End of UN diplomacy.

Pakistan’s overly emotional reliance on the Muslim world owes to its irrational infatuation with its sense of Ummah and its supposed unity. This is despite a long history of disappointments in crucial moments and setbacks suffered at the hands of affluent Arab states of the Gulf who have far greater regard for their business and economic ties with India than their concern for a Muslim ‘brother’ Pakistan.

The tepid—in fact out-rightly disappointing—response from the Gulf potentates to Modi’s fascist move on Kashmir should be an eye-opener to Pakistan. It’s the same old story of their business interests with India trumping Pakistan’s expectations of them standing as one behind Pakistan.

In a nutshell, rich Arabs couldn’t care less what epic sufferings the hapless Kashmiris are being exposed to under India’s brutal occupation of their valley. It doesn’t move them, at all, that so suffocating and wrenching is India’s chokehold over Kashmir that its eight million Muslims couldn’t even be allowed to perform their Eid-ul-Azha prayers.

What matters to the Gulf Sheikhs is that India’s trade with the Arabian Peninsula amounts to more than $ 100 billion; that 7 million Indian expatriates are contributing to the affluence of these Gulf economies; that in Dubai, alone, Indian investments total more than $ 55 billion and Indian-UAE bilateral trade is worth more than $ 50 billion, annually.

So, it’s understandable that Gulf states should have a soft corner for India, whether it disappoints Pakistan is immaterial to them, and is of precious little concern to their money-minded and narcissistic rulers and leaders. The glue of Islam—or the fable of Ummah being one body-and-soul—is too thin for them to have any bonding with fellow Muslims.

Imran may have succeeded in getting them on board on economic ties but it’s highly unlikely that Pakistan’s entreaties for unvarnished diplomatic support in this critical hour for Pakistan will have any traction with them.

With diplomatic odds so heavily loaded against Pakistan getting any edifying support in its moment of crisis from OIC—which is largely in hog to affluent Arab member states—the only alternative to Pakistan is to rely on its own national strength, unity and resilience. Our utmost call should be to expose Modi’s India’s fascism, and its slide into a racially-driven Hindu fundamentalist state, as much as we can within our resources.

At the same time, Pakistan can’t let its guard down. A frenzied Hindutva-driven Modi regime is already prone to overestimating its power and flexing its military muscle. Pulwama should have taught India a lesson that its racist, bigoted policy of keeping Kashmir under its tutelage will always be a recipe for its disaster. But Modi is too incorrigible and too fascist in his basic instincts to draw any lessons from a debacle. He should be left in no doubt that another misadventure of his, against Pakistan, will be the trigger for his doom. Fascists can only understand the language of power. - K_K_ghori@hotmail.com

(The author is a former ambassador and career diplomat)