- The enmity is instinctive
Many believe the world has gone to the dogs. Fewer and fewer are hopeful about it coming back from the precipice where chaos, entropy and sheer jingoism is becoming the norm. Whether it is Iran/USA, Pakistan/India, China/USA, the propensity to loathe the other is getting translated into actions and assassinations.
The past demons have started to rear their ugly heads like real life maniacs hellbent on hunting them whom they have haunted before.
Pakistan and India have a long history and an amnesia that keeps them doing all of it over and over again.
Does anyone remember when Prime Minister Imran Khan wrote a letter to his Indian counterpart Narender Modi on his re-election and how it wasn’t exactly reciprocated in the manner expected? Nothing new here, dear reader. Alas, nothing at all new. The same old circuitous, never ending, always simmering, shenanigans-dominated soap opera where characters remain the same while the actors playing them differ only in height, complexion and size. This time around they proved that they all are small men occupying offices that await greater, more sane, more sagacious men.
Many a brilliant, good willed and upright people both in India and Pakistan of late have come to mistake jingoism for patriotism and narrow, harrowing chauvinism for nationalism. It is pertinent that these folks understand that peaceful co-existence is not a choice, it is the compulsory condition for both states whose populace is in the throes of want, misery and need. With the war-mongering and intense escalation the dream to uplift millions of their inhabitants remain just that– a dream.
Both India and Pakistan run, move, crawl, loiter around in circles, and they never bother to catch their breath and ask few simple questions: What is it that makes us tumble every time; why we are quick to form bonds, give assurances, and make tall claims; careless in keeping them whole, reluctant to abide by what we’ve vouched for and pull the plug right before our palates prepare to taste the much-anticipated fruit of peace and prosperity? This is the Sisyphean circle and both septuagenarians plan to perpetuate it.
Fortunately or unfortunately, the past is no foreign country where people did things differently. Don’t both of us believe in doing anything differently? Have we learned our lesson? Have we opted for a different path to tread upon? We, dearest sirs and ma’ams, just underwent a change of small men in highest offices, and no change of path or heart. No epiphany dawns upon small men.
the big lands governed by small men have made their people master the art of hating their neighbour. And the people are loving it
Such incidents, calling other person small, happens when ruthless reciprocity attains the reverence of religious ritual. The practice of returning in the same coin, the tit-for-every-tat, has been etched so deep in our minds that it has become the rule of thumb that trumps all other modes and modalities. Thorough deliberation has given way to a I’ll-teach-a-lesson-they’ll-always-remember mindset.
Read the above lines over and over again whenever things go south between Pakistan and India and they will sound fresh as a daisy.
Too wise to not realise that one can fight history, but not geography. Too smart to not learn the latest lesson other nations have learned. We, for the lack of better luck, still assume that we live in a dog eat dog World, where three out of four neighbours are utterly ill at ease with us and have on their fingertips all the instances when they were dealt a wrong hand and left in the dark by their now-friend, now-enemy neighbour, that is, Pakistan.
Alas, to the world the ‘all the fiasco and failures’ are just another episode of where we, the Midnight’s Children, are at each other’s throat. Remember the Jadhav fiasco, where both Pakistan and India found another opportunity to teach each other an ‘unforgettable lesson’. Congratulations to the bombastic, tech-savvy, saffron-clad Shri Modi ji and stubble-brandishing, serious-looking former PM Abbasi for enjoying the ringside view of the endless fight that has consumed many ‘Udaas Naslain’ (Weary Generations) with its appetite not even half diminished.
If familiarity breeds contempt on one hand on other, the land, people and things you don’t have are always more beautiful, more splendid, more worthy than the land you possess, people you have and things you own. This good old ‘grass is always greener on the other side of fence’ mindset still sways our kind.
Many of us share the fate of our beloved motherlands. We have to put up with misery in all its gory forms because the ‘husbands’ (read leaders) of our land are either posing as mythic Titans or busy in one-upmanship. Pakistan and India have barely lost any opportunity to teach each other ‘lessons’. Now both neighbours revel in a schadenfreude that was cultivated over time and has become so mammoth it’ll take years before Pakistanis and Indians even begin to think of each other as regular human beings, capable of basic human emotions.
Dear reader the big lands governed by small men have made their people master the art of hating their neighbour. And the people are loving it.
