The hijacker within

It was a truly wise Japanese who on-ce wrote that when a country won a war it was time to mourn. Because a victory involves someone's defe...

It was a truly wise Japanese who on-ce wrote that when a country won a war it was time to mourn. Because a victory involves someone8217;s defeat and defeat is a poison that burns. A poison that gets washed away only by reversing the defeat.

When India became independent, we cut off one of our own limbs which became Pakistan. From then began a long, difficult journey of hatred and unforgiveness. When India pushed back the invaders from the mountain peaks of Kashmir last year, and the country celebrated, somewhere the seeds of the hijacking of IC 814 were being fertilised. Now all I hear around me is talk of launching an aggressive attack on Pakistan, to reverse our own defeat at the hands of those marked terrorists. And on this merry-go-round of bloodshed and tears we promise to keep going till it gets so dizzying that we all fall down.

I realise this will be a highly unpopular view at this time but I think we would do better by waging a war not against Pakistan but our leaders in our bureaucracy and evenourselves for allowing the gross mismanagement of India. Si-nce 1947 what have we really given Ka-shmir? Besides singing songs on our television networks about the stunning beauty of this crown that adorns India our government has hardly invested in its well-being. Rampant unemployme-nt, rickety educational and legal institutions, regular fighting between Delhi and Srinagar, ever growing poverty this has been the reality.

Could the people of Kashmir eat Nishat Bagh? Could they wear Pehelguam as a badge of achievement? What could they possibly do with all the beauty that surrounded them when their hearts and minds were filled with the ugliness of social discontent? They turned to killing, bombing and throwing the Hindu Pandits, whom they wrongly blamed for their misery, out of their homes. And Pakistan, which has always breathed the air of defeat because of India could feel vindicated only by these significant victories. Today we have all but lost Kashmir much less politically, more morally, in faith, indeed, in affection. And perhaps unintentionally we have ourselves given birth to that most destructive of all off-springs the Terrorist.

That neglected and irrational off-spring which now mistakenly finds a more sympathetic parent in Pakistan and imagines that he will find the deliverance of all his deepest dreams there.

Because a terrorist is a thoroughly di-ssatisfied and angry person. He is deeply fearful of the changing world around him and is wracked with insecurity about coping with it. He stands isolated beca-use he becomes forever unacceptable to ordinary society but he still harbours a strong need to belong to a group. This gr-oup then has single-minded dedication to a cause that it feels will bring about victory, happiness, status and prosperity. And religion is the most volatile of all re-asons for a terrorist to justify the violence he lets loose on people who he fears will be the source of his cultural extermination, because religion gives him a moral certainty and a divine sanction.

Thehijackers of IC 814 are certainly criminals of the worst kind but a hate-Pakistan campaign is a self-serving, self-indulgent whitewash that will only give rise to more hijackings. What we need to launch is an attack on our own weaknesses and shortcomings. The real enemy is the lack of resolve within. Terrorism might never be wiped out but we must not let our passionate cries to fight the bully in Kashmir cover our own abject inefficiency, ill-knowledge, and laziness to punish people who simply fail to do their jobs in the government offices.

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At the end of the hijacking crisis, our Prime Minister, instead of having the courage to declare national regret because he was forced into negotiating with the terrorists, put on a fake smile, spoke in a fake tone, of a fake brave, new tomorrow. And now, having no strength of conviction of his own, is asking America to admonish Pakistan for being a 8220;terrorist state8221;. It is so typical of both India and its neighbour to flail their arms about desperately at the time ofcrisis, so that the din of war-mongering will distract the people from making the leaders accountable for their bad governance. We must not be stupid enough to swallow the bait being handed to us that Pakistan is responsible for all our problems because then we would be the ho-stages and our leaders the hijackers ho-lding our freedom, our future and this very democracy to ransom.

The writer is a Mumbai-based film-maker