India deliberately created a weak, insecure Pakistan!
-Dr. Abdul Ruff
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Obviously, as Great Britain decided to grand freedom to India in response to joint long struggle by Hindus and Muslims, first the Hindus tried all possibilities keep Muslims under its military control and for which it thought of tricks to avoid partition of Indian subcontinent that would create a new nation – Pakistan – out of India. When all its strenuous efforts not to let Pakistan cede from India and its control for a sovereign state to advance the Muslims interests failed, Pakistan was born in 1947. India played havoc including insecurity for Pakistan right at the beginning of its emergence as an independent and equal nation in South Asia.
As Pakistan becomes a reality to protect the interests of Muslims who can now live without Hindu domination, India sought to make its Muslim neighbor a weak and insecure so that Pakistani leaders would repent for partition in a couple of years and quickly beg Indian leadership to consider reunion with Hindu India.
India refused to share the colonial resources equally with Pakistan, except floods of Muslims refugees evacuated from Delhi and other parts of India, and in order to delay and reduce the resources, India tried many tragic tricks on Pakistan.. .
Of course, Indian foreign policy began in 1947 by targeting and weakening Muslim Pakistan by all means. By building up the British military equipment which it inherited as the successor state, India went overboard by upgrading its terror goods in a sustained manner in order to bully and conquer Pakistan by a military victory.
Of course, Indian military prowess, was a threat to Pakistan, its very existence with a new generation of free Muslims as Pakistani government struggled to give its people a new life and proper Islamic directions. Pakistan was always made to feel that its powerful enemy is very much at the gate. The Soviet arms and economic assistance as a non-capitalist nation during the Cold War helped Indian military and economy solidly while pushing Pakistan to its corner. American help in peanuts was nowhere to make Islamabad feel safe and secure against India. . In fact, USA also played its usual super power game with Pakistan being badly crushed by its poor economy and military. .
India occupation of Jammu Kashmir was a major issue for Pakistan to fight out. In order to ensure Jammu Kashmir’s brutal occupation and also to threaten Pakistan to surrender to New Delhi, India got nuke facility from Soviet Russia with possible US permission, forcing Pakistan to spend its scarce resources on nuclear facility. All UN veto members share intelligence and US knew about Soviet nuclear help for India. .
But, instead of surrendering to India, Pakistan also sought and got nuclear facility, making India furious. Spending huge resources on nuclear facility and nukes in fact drained all resources of Islamabad.
Pakistan’s resolve to make a home for Muslims to live in peace and prosperity, however, was final..
Nehru, Patel and Indian strategic lots decided to see that Pakistan being carved out of India to give voice to free Muslims does not become strong even by chance and India policy for Pakistan was based on New Delhi’s dominance in South Asia to cut Pakistan to size in all respects. In fact, Nehru always treated Indian prime minister shabbily like an unwanted small leader in the region. .
While struggling to survive as a sovereign nation near India, Pakistan government also promoted corruption, making Indian agenda in Pakistan fairly easy in weakening the faith and emerging Islamic society. . .
The partition riots were engineered by Hindus under Nehru -Patel combine to terrorize Muslims who were migrating to Pakistan and forcing rich Hindus living in Pakistani side to emigrate to Delhi and other places being made ready for protecting Hindus with money and other resources in order to ensure their full safety in emerging Hindutva India pretending to be a secular democracy to fool world powers.
Nehru regime could not even spare Mahatma Gandhi’s life from being targeted by Hindutva forces, empowered by the rise of an independent nation in August 1947. One can guess if it can save of help Pakistan or any other nations in real terms.
India behaved like big boss to South Asian nations but with Pakistan it does not even want to talk because all strenuous efforts of Indian government to weaken Pakistan did succeed in a big way but did not help India significantly. Congress and BJP behaved alike with regard to relations with Pakistan. India never would admit a ‘defeat’ in front of a “small” country called Pakistan which has to tolerate Indian big bossism. .
Even upon PM Vajpayee’s diplomatic exercise with India on a bus the Indo-Pakistan ties could not take off. Wars and cross fires characterize the relationship. Narendra Modi’s rise as prime minister of India one year ago was not meant to toxic, decades-long rivalry with Pakistan. Inviting his counterpart Nawaz Sharif to the swearing-in — remarkably, a first since their nations were born out of the Britain in 1947 — though bold and welcome gesture was not meant to speed up ties with India’s nuclear neighbor Pakistan but only showcase Indian power abroad and get western support for a UN veto handle. Modi seeks to make India a super power in shortest possible time frame. Indian corporates who become richer by efforts of Congress-BJP government decision to hand over the public sector assets to them, are being roped in push for big empire by spending and bribing all quarters to make India shine, rather abnormally. That India wants to use Pakistan in its big power efforts is resented by Islamabad. Within months of Modi’s inauguration, Indian and Pakistani forces exchanged some of the most intense shelling in years along their de facto border in Kashmir, signaling a no point of truly normalcy in relations to become true neighbors. Incipient peace talks thus foundered.
In April, a Pakistani court freed on bail Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, supposedly operational commander of the militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LT) and the India’s alleged mastermind of the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, infuriating many in India that is unable to explain the Pakistani logic of using fish boats to execute the Mumbai terror show by evading the powerful India remote technologies, including high precision radars, placed over the sea.
Today, India’s major worry is the strength and efficacy of Pakistani military equipment, provided mainly by the USA and China to match Russian military gifts made to New Delhi over years.. Moreover, Pakistan is also a nuclear power today. When Pakistan blasted its own nuclear devise to match the India’s smiling nukes, India got the Pakistani message loud and clear but yet pretends it has no interest to know such small details. Pakistan keeps testing high precision missiles that would target Indian territories and India also does the same thereby signaling to show that it is not legging behind any weakness on its part.
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India claims its military obeys Indian government; it does not allow the military to decide crucial defence matters and directs the military establishment on important tactical moves. New Delhi talks about military ruling Pakistan even when an elected civilian government is in business. . .
Soviet occupation of Pakistani neighbor Afghanistan tested the seriousness of India for genuine ties with Pakistan. While USA used Pakistan to fight against Soviet brutal occupation of Afghanistan, India supported and assisted Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. This strange politics did not let India and Pakistan understand each other, on the contrary, being on the opposite camps only antagonized them..
As if the military does not decide anything in India, Indian strategist community blames Pakistani military for playing important role in the management of the nation. As if India seeks peace indoors and nearby, most Indians say Pakistan’s generals have little interest in peace, and, hyping the threat from across the border they have got disproportionate resources and influence in Pakistan. In Pakistan, they argue, policies are made by the military and its intelligence ISI.
However exaggerated Pakistan’s fears may be, Indian leaders bear great responsibility for creating them in the first place as a key policy. Indian resistance to the very idea of Pakistan made the 1947 partition of the subcontinent far bitterer than it needed to be. Within hours of independence, huge sectarian massacres had broken out on both sides of the border; anywhere from 200,000 to a million people would ultimately lose their lives in the slaughter. Pakistan reeled under a tidal wave of refugees, its economy and its government paralyzed and half-formed. Out of that crucible emerged a not-unreasonable conviction that larger, more powerful India hoped to strangle the infant Pakistan in its cradle — an anxiety that Pakistan, as the perpetually weaker party, has never entirely been able to shake.
Then as now, Indian leaders say that they seek only brotherhood and amity between their two nations, and that Muslims in both should live free of fear. They said so during the partition too but created panicky situation for Muslims. In fact, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi himself — the sainted “Mahatma,” or “great soul” in the words of Nehru — helped breed the fears that still haunt Pakistan today.
Apparently, (Nehru) Gandhi’s leadership of the Indian nationalist movement in the 1930s and 1940s contributed to Muslim alienation and the desire for an independent homeland. He introduced religion into a freedom movement that had until then been the province of secular lawyers and intellectuals, couching his appeals to India’s masses in largely Hindu terms. “His Hindu nationalism spoils everything,” Russian writer Leo Tolstoy wrote of Gandhi’s early years as a rabble-rouser.
The louder Gandhi and Nehru derided the idea of creating a separate state for Muslims, the more necessary one seemed. Muslims, who formed more than 400 million citizens of pre-independence India, could judge what Congress would do with Muslims in India after independence from the British. India would have used both military and police to silence Muslims. Hindus would control Parliament and the bureaucracy, the courts and the schools absolutely; they’d favor their co-religionists with jobs, contracts, and political favors. Today, India Muslims face the music.
When the first pre-Partition riots between Hindus and Muslims broke out in Calcutta in August 1946, exactly one year before independence, Gandhi endorsed the idea that thugs loyal to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, the country’s dominant Muslim party should be kept under control.
In fact, Congress and RSS behaved alike even before the independence. According to New York Times reporter George Jones, in their foaming outrage “it became rather difficult to differentiate” between the vicious sectarianism of Congress and radical Hindu groups like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), whose cadres had begun drilling with weapons to prevent the Partition of India.
Equally troubling was the moral cover the Mahatma granted his longtime followers Nehru and “Sardar” Vallabhbhai Patel — a Gujarati strongman much admired now by Modi, who also hails from Gujarat and who served as the state’s chief minister for over a decade. Echoing Gandhi’s injunction against pushing anyone into Pakistan against their wishes, Nehru and Patel insisted that the huge provinces of Punjab and Bengal be split into Muslim and non-Muslim halves, with the latter areas remaining with India.
Jinnah rightly argued that such a division would cause chaos. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs were inextricably mixed in the Punjab, with the latter in particular spread across both sides of the proposed border. Sikh leaders vowed not to allow their community to be split in half. As Nehru -Patel were planning to disturb the partition, the Sikhs helped set off the chain of partition riots in August 1947 by targeting and trying to drive out Muslims from India’s half of the province, in part to make room for their Sikh brethren relocating from the other side.
Jinnah correctly predicted that a too-weak Pakistan, stripped of the great port and industrial center of Calcutta, would be deeply insecure. Fixated on building up its own military capabilities and undermining India’s, it would be a source of endless instability in the region. Yet Nehru and Patel wanted it to be even weaker. They contested every last phone and fighter jet in the division of colonial assets and gloated that Jinnah’s rump state would soon beg to reunite with India.
Worse, Congress leaders threatened to derail the handover if they weren’t given power almost immediately. The pressure explains why Britain’s last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, rushed forward the date of the British withdrawal by 10 months, leaving Pakistan little more than 10 weeks to get established. Excoriated ever since, the British seemed vaguely to believe they might keep governing Pakistan until the state had gotten on its feet. Nehru and Patel cared little for Jinnah’s difficulties. “No one asked Pakistan to secede,” Patel growled when pressed by Mountbatten to show more flexibility.
Now a days, RSS and BJP show a lot of respect for Gandhi. Maybe because they believe Gandhi was very much a Hindutva leader. Once the Partition riots broke out, Gandhi and Nehru strove valiantly to rein in the killings, physically risking their own lives to chastise angry mobs of Hindus and Sikhs. Gandhi and Nehru couldn’t stop underlings from sabotaging consignments of weapons and military stores being transferred to Pakistan. They didn’t prevent Patel from shipping out trainloads of Muslims from Delhi and elsewhere, which raised fears that India meant to overwhelm its neighbor with refugees. They didn’t silence Kripalani and other Congress leaders, who warned Hindus living in Pakistan to emigrate and thus drained Jinnah’s new nation of many of its clerks, bankers, doctors and traders.
Nor did the Indian leaders show much compunction about using force when it suited them. After Pakistan accepted the accession of Junagadh, a tiny kingdom on the Arabian Sea with a Muslim ruler but with a large Hindu population, Congress tried to spark a revolt within the territory — led by Samaldas Gandhi, a nephew of the Mahatma’s; eventually, Indian tanks decided the issue. When Pakistan attempted in October 1947 to launch a parallel uprising in Kashmir — a much bigger, richer state with a Hindu king and Muslim-majority population — Indian troops again swooped in to seize control.
The pacifist Gandhi, who had earlier tried to persuade Kashmir’s maharajah to accede to India, heartily approved of the lightning intervention: After Gandhi’s assassination in January 1948, Nehru continued to cite the Mahatma’s blessings to reject any suggestion of backing down in Kashmir.
Gandhi’s motivations may have been pure. Yet he and his political heirs never fully appreciated how the massive power imbalance between India and Pakistan lent a darker hue to their actions. To this day, Indian leaders appear more concerned with staking out the moral high ground on Kashmir and responding to every provocation along the border than with addressing Pakistan’s quite-valid strategic insecurities.
Indian strategists talk loosely of striking across the border in the event of another “Mumbai-style” high smoke terrorist attack; Pakistani officials speak with disturbing ease of responding with tactical nuclear weapons. From their safe havens in Pakistan meanwhile, the Taliban have launched one of the bloodiest spring offensives in years in Afghanistan, even as U.S. forces prepare to draw down there.
A note
Having created and promoted further a weak Pakistan, India now obviously wants to sustain the destabilization tempos in its neighborhood. That would not help India at all. Pakistanis are scared of their security against a powerful India having got strong inks.
Pakistan, a nation born out of paranoia about Hindu dominance, should be encouraged not to fear India as its permanent enemy so that a good beginning could be made to understand each other passionately. Cross border trade has no meaning when both hate and fear each other. Both should shed their past and come forward to discuss and resolve Kashmir issue.. .
India should avoid rushing to Washington probably with money bags each time when trouble starts with Pakistan just because Islamabad refuses to obey Indian orders.
Dr. Abdul Ruff Colachal Blog 