I
HAD meant it as a joke, but India took it seriously. I had written the other
day to some Indian friends to wish them on the festival of Dussehra (Rama’s
victory over his demon opponent Ravana), commenting flippantly that there would
be no marks for guessing who would be Ravana this year.
Whoever in India monitors circumcised carrier pigeons and
wingless emails must have intercepted my message, for sure enough a few days
ago, in Amritsar’s main Ranjit Avenue, in addition to the traditional effigy of
a multi-headed Ravana, was an even larger figure draped in the Pakistani flag
with an image of Nawaz Sharif pasted on its head. The actors portraying Rama
and Lakshmana were shown aiming their gilded arrows at them.
Mr Modi commemorated his Dussehra/Vijayadhashmi in Goa.
There, at the BRICS summit, he took pot shots at an unnamed but identifiable
demon, ‘the mother-ship of terrorism’. None of the leaders present needed help
to translate that phrase. Modi meant clearly what he did not say. In his
lexicon, Pakistan is synonymous with terrorism, just as to him India is a
sobriquet for Hinduism.
India’s repeated discomfiture is not always of Pakistan’s
making.
Such juxtapositions can be slippery. In the 1970s,
loyalists once proclaimed that ‘Indira is India; India is Indira’. Her
supporters went a step further, venerating her as the multi-armed goddess
Durga. Mr Modi, a devout Hindu, knows his Devi Mahatmya, both chapter and
verse. He is familiar with Chapter 2, verses 10-33, of the moment when the
deities endow the emergent Devi with a distinctive personal weapon with which
to combat the buffalo-demon Mahish-asura. Perhaps this precedent tempted Mr
Modi to use the BRICS meeting to extract anti-Pakistan endorsements from Russia
and China, which he could then use as ammunition against his foe, equally their
neighbour.
Surely someone in the MEA must have cautioned him that
1.4 billion Chinese, 207 million Brazilians, 146m Russians, and 55m South
Africans may not share his monocular obsession with Pakistan. Apparently no one
dared, just as no one advised him on the open-ended provisions (unless all
parties agree otherwise) of the Indus Waters Treaty or the sham of the
scalpel-less ‘surgical strikes’. Should Mr Nawaz Sharif unpack the turban he
received from Mr Modi in Lahore less than a year ago, he might find it has
darkened from an optimistic pink to an embarrassed, angry red.
India may well have more than a billion grievances
against Pakistan, but India’s repeated discomfiture is not always of Pakistan’s
making. Pakistan was not to blame at the 1955 NAM conference in Bandung when
Premier Zhou Enlai refused to kowtow to Pandit Nehru’s lofty condescension. The
Sino-Indian spat in 1962 was between them; Pakistan abstained by not siding
with either party. India’s inability to consummate its shot-gun marriage with
Jammu & Kashmir (even after 69 years of arm-twisting coercion) cannot be blamed
squarely on Pakistan. Sage, wiser minds understand the truth in W.R. Inge’s
maxim: “A man may build a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.”
In today’s fetid atmosphere, peace between India and
Pakistan may appear to be beyond reach, but it is not impossible. The first two
clauses of the Shimla Agreement of 1972 provide a crutch: “(i) That the
principles and purposes of the Charter of the United Nations shall govern the
relations between the two countries. (ii) That the two countries are resolved
to settle their differences by peaceful means through bilateral negotiations or
by any other peaceful means mutually agreed upon between them.”
Another is the Lahore Declaration of 1999, which, after
reiterating the determination of both countries to implementing the Shimla
Agreement in letter and spirit, undertook to “intensify their efforts to
resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir”. Every rational,
educated moderate human being — whichever side of the border happens to be his
home — yearns for peace in the region, and none more so than the beleaguered,
pellet-pocked Kashmiris.
However, the inescapable realities though are that India
cannot isolate Pakistan internationally. Pakistan is too large a country to be
hidden under the smock of hegemony. India cannot integrate Pakistan. Mrs Gandhi
threw the concept of Akhand Bharat out of the window in December 1971 when she
created Bangladesh. Forty-five years on, the last thing Mr Modi needs is 200m
more Muslims with a memory of two generations of freedom. India cannot
annihilate Pakistan. Puranic demons were destroyed by multi-armed devis, not
through Security Council resolutions or BRICS communiqués.
Every true friend of India of whichever nationality or
religious persuasion hopes that, before the next Dussehra in September 2017,
better sense will prevail between our “two peoples fanatically at odds,/With
their different diets and incompatible gods”. These lines from W.H. Auden’s
poignant poem Partition remind us of Radcliffe’s inhuman joke that history took
seriously.
The writer is
an art historian.
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