Archive for February, 2014
Counter Thoughts -2: Pakistan should be dissolved as a nation and absorbed into India.
[First written almost 4 years ago: updated!]
How many nations of our times are based purely on a religion and recognized by other nations as independent nations? Only two – the Vatican City and Pakistan. Ironically they share in common some traits. Both have helped in the unravelling of the USSR but not of Communism – for it still survives behind the People’s Republic of China and is still working towards global dominance. In spite of the UK and West’s blatant support for Pakistani sadism on both Afghans and Indians, for its supposed role in overthrow of USSR – Pakistan is desperately grabbing the Chinese communist hands in gratitude for having benefited from Chinese nuclear proliferation. Pakistan showed that gratitude by dealing in stolen or robbed property – so typical of Islamism, by gifting China territory Pakistan received from its British facilitated deceptive raid mounted on Indian territories in 1948.
Both the Vatican and Pakistan have been courted by the USA in its Cold War struggles. Neither has disappointed. Both exert influence on the global politics disproportionate to their actual size, economy, military capabilities, and the capacity to contribute in any meaningful way towards a modern, knowledge based, technological and information society. Both manage to do so by manipulating their historical images as projections into the future.
But there the similarities end. The Vatican’s leadership has made amends to its historical victims, and has shown its flexibility and readiness to change with the times. It has steadfastly refused to underwrite radicalism of the theological variety [the severe castigation of the Liberation Theology for example]. This may change in the future. But the leadership of the Vatican have proved themselves consummate statesmen in the concessions and compromises that they have made while never abandoning the fundamental objective of total global ideological domination. This is an objective that would have been a crime if not from the “one and only true message”, for any other “religion” in the times when the Church ruled supreme. But now in the days of “total religious tolerance”, there is nothing wrong in having a declared agenda of “harvesting all souls” and poaching on the following of looked-down-upon religious cultures. In fact, legal and state coercive machinery in liberal states can be used to guarantee protection of any proselytizer – even someone swearing by texts that recommend putting the unrepentant unbeliever to the sword, while raising no questions as to the right of the followers of those very same religions – where they are a majority – to deny exactly those very same rights to non-co-religionsists. How tolerant Christianity can be with regards to cohabiting with Islamists, and vice versa – especially where Christians have sufficient numerical strength – was and is being shown in Sudan. But no great talk is being thrown about in the liberal western media about what is going on in Sudan and why.
Where Pakistan differs is not in its protection of organizations claiming the right to practice “Dawa” or spreading of the Islamist beliefs -in parallel to Christianist demands for the right to badmouth non-Christian religions and beliefs and “spread the light” – by any and all means possible, and where even “charity” as concrete monetary benefits is kosher in a process of buying religious allegiance that in the corporate world would be condemned as criminal bribing – but in its total lack of statesmanship. Unlike the Vatican, the Pakistani leadership never apologizes to the victims of its Islamists, never acknowledges that it has nurtured Jihadis in its madrassahs, never concedes to modernization in education and social practices, never really allows any land reforms or dismantling of feudal exploitation in its backyard.
Pakistan is basically an anachronism, a nation whose only foundational claim for identity is a religion – in a historical period where the world is leaving behind, exclusive and historical claim based religions. Moreover, that religion is not even unique to the country – it is shared by a host of other nations, some of whom have louder and more well established claims of being the centre for that religion. So Pakistan is based on a type of ideology increasingly irrelevant globally as national foundation, and moreover on an ideology based identity shared with other “nations” – and therefore has no real claims of distinction from other nations. It cannot look at history and culture, for in spite of the best sadistic efforts of generations of “mullahs” – elements of pre-Islamic cultures lie firmly interwoven in the national fabric, and those elements are shared by its imagined nemesis – India. In fact the pre-Islamic cultural element proved so strong that a part of it broke away in reaction in 1971 as Bangladesh.
So now Pakistan finds itself in a terrible dilemma. To strengthen and give uniqueness to its national foundation, it has to become more Islamic than “others”. Becoming more Islamic means more and more unquestioning obedience to a strict and literal interpretation of the core texts. That in turns means more Jihad with violent means which accelerates the competition between the ruling feudal elite, the army, the mullahs, the commons, the militants – to become “purer” than the others. That means an almost perpetual state of national Jihad. Purer Islam can only be maintained by preventing modernization – in education, productivity, technology and above all the questing mindset. Which means Pakistan will become more and more dependent on largesse from interested external sources and be a drain on the global economy as the sources would spread the cost around.
So the West and the global community should perhaps start thinking of dissolving the entity called Pakistan. Here are the brief reasons :
(1) Dissolving Pakistan saves the West (and therefore the world economy )a huge amount of money and resources needed to keep the state afloat, and a total drain, because none of that capital goes into productive capacities.
(2) Even though the Chinese are now playing second fiddle to the West, it is uncannily similar to the Ribbentrop-Molotov handshake where both sides appear to be buying time. Eventually, Russia and China could come together with Iran (or whatever is left of it even if a so-called revolutionary liberalization and democratization takes place there under non-theologians) to which the CAR will lean. As long as Pakistan remains an independent entity, it can play the prostitute and threaten to kiss the higher bidder or the one more willing to pay. That is both a security risk and a potential disaster, if everything given to Pakistan lands up in Russian, Iranian or Chinese hands and the West’s presence is virtually terminated in the Afghan-Pakistan frontier. Dissolving Pakistan takes away this worry.
(3) Dissolving Pakistan and putting up new independent states in its place actually creates new multiple centres where Jihad can be protected and nurtured. One Pakistan becomes many and the western problem multiplies. One of the best bets is to allow India to absorb the populations and the territories. India is a growing economy which can absorb the costs. It has the capability and the will to manage multicultural groups and religious animosities. Culturally Indians of the western part of the country will be closer to the Pakistanis across the border [Punjab for example shares the language across the border in spite of the state sponsorship of Urdu] compared to any other external ethnicity or country. Moreover the costs of developing infrastructure and the economy or carrying out necessary social reforms will be borne on Indian shoulders and not on the west.
(4) As the price for non-intervention in the absorption, the West could extract concessions from India that it will have assured access and facilities to reach the CAR through channels and routes maintained and developed through Pakistani territories connecting the Karakorum Highway and other CAR approach routes.
(5) The Taliban lose their foster home, and are buffered off from the crucial supply routes of Karakorums and the Arabian Sea. The so-called Kashmir problem vanishes as the Pakistani military and ISI mechanism to foment terrorists inside India vanishes. So one of the greatest excuses for maintaining Jihad from the Pakistani side, vanishes. With dissolution of Pakistan, one of the persistent Pakistani revivalist jihad trends that periodically and insistently reappears in Bangladesh, gets cut from its roots – leaving only Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and elements from Malaysia as remnant patrons.
(6) India can and should promise land reforms, and redistribution of concentrated big-landholding from Pakistan’s obnoxious feudal lords and the military upper echelons who are either created landlords as rewards or come from the feudal network itself – to landless and marginal farmers of Pakistan. These are the same people who are exploited ruthlessly, often sexually and through slavery, by the Pakistani elite in an obvious extension of the worst aspects of casteism, but on which no Christian or western liberal intelligentsia will comment upon as it shows Islam in a bad-light compared to eminently much more bashable “Hindu”.
If it is any consolation, MacArthur broke the Japanese feudal class’s back to an extent through land-reforms, in post war Japan. Moreover all the off-shore money laundering units that UK maintains for complete deniability from its colonial days can still harness and will definitely attract Pakistani Islamist and feudal military elite’s looted capital for parking on the prospect of imminent fall before Indian troops, and to play with for financial speculative profits and bonuses by the “city” bosses. That in itself should convince the UK and its ally across the pond, to allow the “fall” to happen.
India, because of linguistic and unique cultural history, will remain firmly in western and specifically the Anglo-Saxon or Atlanticist orbit for generations to come. There are sufficient fissures in the Indian ruling class for the west to exploit and protect western interests.
It is worth a try – at least the largest source for generating terror of the Jihadi and allied kind (through international crime and other non-religious or ethnic militancy) will be effectively liquidated. At one stroke West no longer has to face Islamist terror, pay for upkeep of Jihad, and instead can profit from a growing economy which bears all the costs, together with an alternate route to get closer to tantalizing natural resources to be looted in Central Asia and keep a nervous eye to the age-old threat – Russia! After all, the greatest threats come from those shared common ideological roots, and who are well-versed as brothers from the same family school in the tactics of robber imperialism that originated in “greater” Europe!
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