Reach out for change

Ayub did the opposite. He, in fact, gave China Balisthan and some territory from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It was an effort to befriend Beijing, which has stoodPakistan in good stead. But Ayub alienated India still further.Shastri8217;s comment on the Shah8217;s letter was that if Pakistani troops had split blood along with Indians, the entire climate in the subcontinent would have undergone a change. There would have been such an emotional response in India, Shastri said, that India would have found it difficult to say no8217; even if Pakistan had asked for Kashmir.

I think that Islamabad missed an important turn in the history of India-Pakistan relations. The two countries have been drifting apart ever since. They are today inveterate enemies, rejoicing in any adversity that visits the other. Nuclear tests on both sides have made the situation worse. It is a volcano on which the two countries sit. They can continue to be enemies at their peril. Some day one of the two countries will have to take the initiative to break the vicious cycle of hatred.

Today, India has the opportunity that Pakistan lost in 1962. The hawks on our side probably congratulate themselves that theyhave ruined Pakistan economically and even politically by forcing it to explode the bomb. Its budget shortfall this year will be 5 billion. Nobody will lend it money to make up the shortfall. America or the IMF looks like helping Pakistan. But they may exact their price in terms of dignity and honour, which Islamabad cannot afford to pay.

Why shouldn8217;t New Delhi step in to provide Pakistan a leverage against America? At least it will lessen, if not stop, the weight it throws about. India8217;s initiative will disabuse Pakistanis of the impression they have that India enjoys their miseries. What I have in mind is an economic assistance to Islamabad. A delegation should go there to assess the needs of the country and try to meet them as far as possible. Steel, cement, coal 8212; all these can be supplied on the basis of long-term credit. This will save much-needed foreign exchange for Pakistan.

Such a move will sweep the Pakistanis off their feet. They have been fed on the belief that India has not accepted theidea of Pakistan. Once they find us helping them in their gravest hour, they will feel that they have been under a wrong impression. They may even recall those days when the two communities were on the best of terms. The Pakistanis still recall fondly Mahatma Gandhi8217;s gesture to force New Delhi, through a fast unto death, to pay Rs 70 crore to Pakistan as its share of assets in the wake of Partition.

In this context, the criticism of former Defence Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav8217;s statement to provide financial aid to Pakistan appears motivated and jingoistic. It reflects the thinking of hawks, who stoke the fires of enmity all the time. Left to them, they will do everything to harm Pakistan. What Mulayam Singh Yadav has tried to do is to remove the wool from the eyes of the rulers in New Delhi. It is too bad that the suggestion has not been taken seriously.

The past is too much of an obsession with both countries. And it is not the recent past. It dates back to the time when Muslims advanced their claim tonational expression on the basis of religion and when the Hindus tried to gloss over their sentiments, however exaggerated, saying that all Indians were the same. Both communities have distorted history to serve their parochial ends.

Wars between kings and overlords have been understood as wars between Hindus and Muslims. Muslims recall the days when they ruled India and Hindus see themselves as the rightful owners of Aryavarta the land of Aryans, treating others as intruders or plunderers. Both communities miss the dominating and determining force of economic factors in all of history.In fact, history between India and Pakistan is the obverse of hostility between Hindus and Muslims. The two communities continue to think more as Hindus and Muslims than as citizens of the countries in which they live.

Pakistan has not realised that with Partition it snapped its relations with the Indian mainstream. India has not learnt how to adjust and live with an intransigent neighbour like Pakistan and often tendsto behave like a big power which has an area of influence and which expects small countries to look up to it. Pakistan genuinely fears that India, a far bigger and more powerful country, will one day gobble it up. It imagines that New Delhi is not as yet reconciled to the creation of Pakistan, and cites statements of Indian leaders on the need for the reunification of the subcontinent as evidence of this.

I do not see the subcontinent being reunited. But I do believe that one day the high walls that fear and distrust raised on the borders will crumble and the people of the subcontinent, without giving up their separate identities, will work together for the common good. This might usher in an era more fruitful than our wildest dreams.

Political leaders and bureaucrats on both sides have only helped to widen the gulf because they find that the more rigid the line they take against the country across the border, the higher they rise in public esteem. Foreign powers have also contributed in keeping the twonations apart. They have stoked fires of enmity either to preserve their 8220;areas of interest8221; or to maintain what they consider the 8220;balance of power in the region8221;. Their policies are aimed at the division of the peoples of the subcontinent.

Islamabad missed a chance in 1962 to come closer to Indians when it sided with Beijing instead of standing by New Delhi in the first attack on the subcontinent by a third country. India should not commit the same mistake by not offering Pakistan the economic aid it so urgently needs at this time.