Zaheer Bhatti
INDIAN hypocrisy and ill-will for Muslims of the sub continent is deep-rooted in its inherent inferiority coplex of having been subjected to Muslim Rule for over a thousand years. The Hindu community which the Moghal Emperor Jalaluddin Akbar vainly tried to merge with Muslims by cross-marriages more out of love and understanding rather than hatred, paid back with palace intrigues even then by a certain extremist class and not all Hindus. Today the same 10-15% of Indians are hell bent on taking it out not just on Muslims but all the other minorities little knowing what they were sowing for themselves across the world. In some saner moment they will have to reflect that even if they succeed in wiping entire India of all the rest, would they be content becoming recluses within a walled Hindu India; which is how rest of world would treat them outside.
Coming to grips with reality today, Pakistan must no longer fall into the trap of infructuous bilateralism or third party mediation. Making amends for its past inaction, Pakistan should refuse any meeting or talks with Modi and focus on resolution of the Kashmir dispute onlythrough self-determination as per Security Council Resolutions, since all other options had been exhausted over the past 72 years. India ought to have realized and considered it enough in hindsight that Pakistan conceded on Hyderabad Deccan and Junagarh according to the partition plan to go to India for the sake of contiguity and majority Hindu population even though the Muslim Rulers of both these States had decided to join Pakistan. But the sly mentality of Indian leadership at the same time manipulated an accession Instrument with the Ruler of Kashmir Hari Singh instead of reciprocating with the same analogy of the majority Muslim State, to join Pakistan. If India is planning to replicate Israeli pattern of illegal Jew settlements in the Palestinian land, in its occupied territory of Kashmir, it must not forget that Kashmir unlike Palestine abandoned by its Arab protectors is not rudderless, nor the Kashmiris a forsaken people. In Kashmir, China, a superpower and Pakistan, the only Muslim Nuclear Nation, have direct stakes. History has witnessed the fall of the greatest on earth when they got obsessed with their apparent power, little knowing that man proposes but God disposes.
Modi is undertaking persecution of Muslims as Hitler did to the Jews, but the mysterious manner of his own demise and disappearance is nature’s lesson to mankind. Today, the German President Frank Walter Steinmeier is publicly asking Poland’s forgiveness for Germany’s historical guilt, while the note of anger in Polish President’s response emphasized that had Europe stood up against Hitler’s imperial ambitions earlier, the Second World War may not have broken out. Even though Modi trying to ape his mentor is at best a copier, he is full of contradictions which he will find impossible to sustain. It is for the world conscience to wake up in time to Modi’s erratic aggrandizement plunge, in order to prevent another world war, after which there shall be none.
Narendra Modi’s first fault-lines surfaced as his planners made him bring the Issue of Kashmir; the unfinished agenda of partition internationally alive, which by Indian machinations and diversionary tactics, and Pakistan’s apathetic manner in the past had been allowed to be shoved under the carpet for seven long decades, while India continued to steadily bleed the State. That the issue was discussed in the Security Council despite Indian opposition was indeed due also to Pakistan’s intensive diplomacy, it was largely due to another faux pa by Modi treading on the Chinese toe by tinkering with the Status of Laddakh area of the State of Kashmir claimed by the Chinese; thereby activating the superpower to make the meeting happen.
India illegally merging Kashmir and divesting the State of its special status which was an important proviso in the manipulated instrument of its accession to the Indian Union, has not only made such an instrument automatically redundant and infructuous, but also legitimized the Kashmiri struggle for freedom, and entitled them to financial and material support from anywhere; thereby opening the way for any and all State and non-State volunteers to join the struggle. Concurrently, it has transformed dozens of separatist movements in India, into legitimate freedom struggles; energizing them and their diaspora all over the world.
As to Indian plans to force-change the demography of Kashmir to be followed in other restive States, it has started from Assam with the ploy to register in the State only those as legitimate residents who have been its citizens prior to 1971. But it encounters a stark contradiction whereby Modi Government is likely to fall in its own set mousetrap. Seeking to scrap citizenship of 2 million mostly Muslims who may have migrated to Assam from East Pakistan after creation of Bangladesh, it firstly faces a backlash with its local BJP leadership contending that at least two hundred thousand of them were Bengali-speaking Hindus, a key vote Bank for the Party.
More importantly, the majority of them being Muslims allegedly crossing over from Bangladesh in 1971 if true and not belonging to Pakistan-sympathizing Jamaat-e-Islami, would bring Bangladesh under great stress to take them back. But the bigger dimension of this move should put Modi into a spin because by the same analogy and logic, the citizenship of Kashmir will have to be determined on the basis of citizenship as at the time of partition in 1947 which will nullify his nefarious merger plan to change its demography by force-settlements; since what is good for the goose should also be good for the gander. What ploys Modi employs to quell, crush or put down secessionist movements in at least a couple of dozen other Indian States, may well be the beginning of the end for India; his own fate not being any different from his mentor.
—The writer is a media professional, member of Pioneering team of PTV and a veteran ex Director Programmes.
