Can anyone even imagine Dr Manmohan Singh or Nirupama Rao doing in Beijing what Musharraf did in Agra and Bashir has done in New Delhi now? In Beijing, Manmohan will be even more docile and servile than he normally is while Rao will readily jump out of bed at 2:30 AM in response to a Chinese call.Why will they do it? Because China has drive fear into our bones. It is not what happened in 1962 that scares us now but what China has done in the years since to make itself look bigger even as India has readily allowed itself to become even smaller.
Pakistan, on the other hand, despite its dismemberment in 1971, has consciously made itself much bigger than it was then, while India has stuck to the idiotic belief that between nations, strength is determined not by the penis, as it were, but by many layers of clothes of morality, trust and goodwill; the peanut beneath them is a useless appendage meant for peeing alone, so what if it is in the pants.
Another round of talk between India and Pakistan has concluded. One more time, India has allowed Pakistan to aggressively project India as the wrongdoer and itself as the victim. After meekly allowing Pakistan to wage a low-cost, low-intensity war against itself for over two decades, India has yet again not only not failed to get that nation to concede even an inch of its stated objective of liberating Kashmir, it has actually let it - that too after 26/11 - point additional accusing fingers at it with respect to Baluchistan and water.
Ever since the capture of Ajmal Kasab exposed the involvement of the Lashkar -e-Toiba in the terror attack on Mumbai on November 26, 2008, India has been demanding the arrest and prosecution of mastermind Hafiz Saeed. Dossiers containing evidence have been submitted - this time too - but the state of Pakistan says they contain no evidence at all. To cut the very long story of Pakistan's carefully calibrated deception short, not only does Saeed continue to roam free but his anti-India tirades have become even more belligerent after the Mumbai attack.
Is it a mere coincidence that a couple of weeks before the latest round of talks, the Jamat-ud-Dawa held a huge rally in Lahore - the first after 26/11 - and similar rallies in 36 other cities of Pakistan to renew calls for jihad against India? Is it of no significance that, with thousands of supporters brandishing Ak47s on Mall Road, Saeed yelled that one Mumbai was not enough and asked his cheering followers to wage jihad against India? Was it mere rhetoric that Saeed demanded that a dialogue with India must not only include Kashmir but also the sending of Indian troops into East Pakistan and even Partition, with respect to Jamnagar and Monawadar, the two princely states that had declared accession to Pakistan? Has it been forgotten that the same Saeed had, as far back as 2000, declared that Kashmir was a mere 'gateway to the capture of India' and has been reiterating that intention time and again?
Only the naïve will believe that such a huge Pakistani Punjabi anti-India jihadi rally would have taken place in Lahore without the blessings - even at the instance - of the military that effectively rules Pakistan and lays down the agenda for any engagement by the puppet civilian regime with India. Only the blind will not see that the grand design of the Pakistani state is being thoughtfully voiced through organisations like the JuD and individuals like Hafiz Saeed presently only to prepare ground so that once a significant breach is made against India, beginning with Kashmir, it can be more openly adopted by the state itself.
Unfortunately for India, there is a powerful clutch of journalists and analysts who have ether been asked by India's political leaders with a votes-only outlook or who have themselves willingly clouded their own analytical abilities by their peculiar concept of secularism, to pretend to see little wrong in anything said or done by anyone if there is a danger of it having the effect of consolidating majority opinion in India. The direct effect of this warped and dangerous, almost anti-India stance is that it always hastens to blank out or suppress anything that points to Muslim Pakistan's pathologically communal anti-India position because of the fear that it will reduce the vote share of the Congress party, with whose non-ideology these guys are comfortable and due to whose patronage many of them have benefited along more dimensions than one.
The net result of the hopeless muddle that India has got itself into, and is not even thinking of finding a way to get out of, is that it is always reacting, always defending, always pacifist, always conciliatory, always looking at the hug and not the dagger, always hoping that Pakistan, thanks to its own existential problems, will pull it out, always believing that Uncle Sam will get Pakistan to fall in line. In short, there is no strategy whatsoever to proactively compel Pakistan to behave its size and stop bleeding this country. The only 'strategy', if one abuses the word, is of inaction, in the dumb hope that, like it happened with insurgencies in the North East that got solved simply because the people got tired, in this case too, Pakistan will eventually tire, throw away that bloodied khanjar, and embrace India.
As the self-inflicted disaster of the latest round of talks shows once again, Pakistan believes it has scored a major victory with 26/11. The 14-month gap in terror attacks after 26/11 was not reflective, as some of our corrupted-by-Pakistani-kebabs journalists and analysts want the nation to believe, of any fundamental change in Pakistan's congenital stance towards India. It was a well-thought out strategy to blunt the outcry that followed and that too because of the looming presence and pressure of America. The dishonest cry of the Pakistanis that they too were victims of terror was only to lull believing, goodwill-dependent, paralytic Indians into complacence.
Many Indians readily forget that for Pakistan, terrorists are primarily Pashtuns and Baluchis who are fighting against Pakistan; Punjabis fighting against India in Kashmir and the rest of India were, are and will remain its frontline soldiers even though, for very elementary reasons, they cannot be formally inducted into the military or openly owned up. Yet. That is why we keep falling into Pakistan's trap again and again. That is why our diplomats keep making the mistake of imagining that Pakistani diplomats sitting across the table are also there without any map and that they too are hoping that some direction will emerge out of those parleys or rote discussions in Indian TV studios. Like diplomats are meant to, Pakistan's diplomats employ their training and skills to further their nation's India strategy as laid down - have no doubt - by its Generals. Indian diplomats, on the other hand, not only have no national strategy to pursue, but, in the absence of any political and military vision, have appropriated for themselves the role of formulating and projecting it. It is due to this that we continue to witness, in fits and starts, reactive, disjointed, incoherent plans that lack any objective. That is why a much smaller Pakistan, rather than being scared, remains aggressive and hostile.
Pakistan smelled the coward in India decades ago. After Indira Gandhi, India has not had a leader with balls. Worse, we had the misfortune of having an unfit Prime Minister, Inder Gujral, who not only formulated a juvenile 'Gujral Doctrine' that was totally out of touch with reality but also was so morally appalled by India's feeble covert operations in Pakistan that he wound them up. That blunder has not only not been undone, even bigger blunders have been made, the most striking being those by Atal Bihari Vajpayee whose vision was debilitatingly impaired by a completely absurd understanding of the 'reality' of geography.
Manmohan and his team are continuing in that tradition that will have no parallel in history outside of the subcontinent. That is why we are continuing to witness this pitiable spectacle that is akin to a muzzled and chained Great Dane being incessantly surprised, bullied and bitten by a Daschund who has been allowed to think that he is a tiger. The Dane, rendered incapable of any worthwhile reaction by his masters, continues to wag his tail in the belief that he is too big, can live with the minor discomfort of tiny bites and that the much smaller Daschund, no matter how hard he tries, has no chance of winning.
But the Pakistanis have read their history well. They have not forgotten Prithviraj Chauhan. They can see that India is following in his footsteps, in fact doing worse; they have understood that India will keep letting Pakistan bite, pause, bite again, ad infinitum, without biting back. They also know that all that they need is one good grip on the jugular. Even if it takes a thousand years. Till that happens, India must also be harassed and forced to talk and yield, even if it is a little, each time.
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Readers may also read:
1. Don't 'bugger-my-buggering-nation', strengthen him
2. A year after 26/11, calls for a strong Pakistan
3. No price is too high, just 'love Pakistan'
4. Musharraf's shockers on terror, Kashmir and Indian Muslims
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