India Retold

There is undeniably a serious, continuing communication gap between North and South Blocks. It is almost as though they represent the views of two different governments.

How else does one explain the fact that while the Foreign Minister believes that Pakistan remains the epicenter of terror, the Home Secretary has manifestly seen such a major improvement in the Pak-sponsored terror situation in Kashmir that he has unilaterally announced a major policy shift? Despite Pakistan’s dogged refusal to bring to justice sponsors of 26/11, despite its Army continuing to push terrorists into the Valley, GK Pillai has announced a 25% cut in security forces there and unilaterally offered, in the words of MJ Akbar, “multiple-entry, six-month travel permits (not Indian passports, but specially designed permits that might leave the nationality question vague) to Kashmiris to cross the Line of Control into Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir,” and from there, seamlessly into Pakistan.

This, as MJ Akbar notes, suggests that India has forgotten 26/11 despite Pakistan making no move to bring to justice its perpetrators, and has almost surreptitiously decided to resume the pre-Mumbai equation with Pakistan. “The UPA may be entirely rational in conceding defeat in the stand-off against Islamabad,” he argues, “but confession and clarity before the Indian people would help.”

The unilateral decision of the Home Ministry to issue permits to Kashmiris on the Indian side of the LOC is part of a plan first mooted by General Pervez Musharraf which, as per former Pakistan Foreign Minister Khursheed Mahmood Kasturi, India and Pakistan were just a signature away from signing in 2007. It is generally accepted that the deal involved demilitarisation along the LOC and within the state on both sides, maximum self-governance, free movement of Kashmiris within the whole state, and some sort of joint mechanism comprising Indians, Pakistanis and Kashmiris on both sides of the LOC to oversee self-governance and other issues.

The entire deal was, to my mind, a sell-out by India even at that time. Now, considering the Islamist abyss into which almost all organs of Pakistan have descended, as developments there after the killing of Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer have shown, it should not even be thought of. But the shift, announced by the Home Secretary, leaves little room for doubt that not only has Pakistan succeeded in defeating India over 26/11 but India has also chosen to ignore the fact that the Pakistan it is dealing with now is not the one it knows, the one that has been trumping it on the negotiating for decades: Qadri’s Pakistan is a dangerous, different beast altogether, not one that should be given even the whiff of victory over ‘Hindu’ India.

According to Pillai, Pakistan -- pursuing a comprehensive solution to the core problem of Kashmir -- rejected India’s piecemeal proposal to allow Kashmiris to move relatively freely across the LOC. There can, thus, be little doubt that his unilateral announcement is but the first step towards reviving at least the original deal, even though under General Kiyani, who had earlier gone along with Musharraf, Pakistan wants India to make even more concessions.

Let us examine some of the dangerous implications and ramifications of the deal that is being revived by a government that seems to have been 'stoned' into submission and is being led to believe that it has no alternative but to capitulate.

• Free movement across LOC. It needs to be emphasised that for Pakistan LOC is not the solution but the problem. It is not satisfied with the part of the state it has and wants all of it; it “runs in its blood”. Only Pakistan will gain if the LOC is made irrelevant. Given the different ethnicities of various regions of the state, the so-called free movement across the LOC will eventually be a predominantly one-way movement from its side into not just the Valley but the whole of the huge state. Considering what happened to Kashmiri Pandits in the Valley, non-Muslims from the Indian side will not only feel discouraged to travel to the Pakistan side of the LOC, but will also, one way or another, be prevented from doing so by fundamentalists there. Movement across LOC will be permitted on permits. India has Article 370 in place, so there will be almost no cases of false permits being issued to non-state subjects by the state government. On the Pakistani side, however, there is no similar restriction and Punjabis who now dominate Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) are little different from those from Punjab province, from where many more many have settled there after 1947. Given that Pakistan's real objective is to amalgamate J&K into Pakistan, what we will see is planned settlement of “Qadris” over time in parts of Jammu province where they can relatively easily merge with locals and radicalise them too. Non-Muslims in the state will become even more marginalised than they are now. Terrorists will also drive them out from more and more far flung areas and close in on towns and cities over time. The separatist sentiment now confined to ethnic Kashmiris and the Valley, will spread to other parts of the state too, with the collusion and active assistance of government officials.India’s nightmare will come true, no one but its own blindness to blame.
  

• Joint Control.This is a misnomer. It will be nothing less than ceding control to Pakistan. On ground, control of Kashmir Valley has already been ceded involuntarily along many significant dimensions by India. The joint control mechanism will spread that span to Jammu and Ladakh regions too. Representatives of POK, Indian Kashmir, Pakistan and India will form part of this mechanism. Effectively, three out of four of these groups will be under Pakistan control ab initio. India will also, undoubtedly, be pressured to place religion-blind, 'secular' representatives in the body from its side. Need more be said? With such a body monitoring self-government, one can be sure that demands for more and more areas of governance to be liberated of Indian (notionally Pakistani too) control will be made, militants on call to drive home the point: that is how Pakistan will complete creeping acquisition of not just the Muslim majority Kashmir Valley but the rest of the state too.

• Demilitarisation. Demilitarisation of POK is virtually meaningless from the Indian point of view as there will no gain to India there along any dimension. It is the demilitarisation of the Indian side that will have devastating short and long term consequences. Almost immediately, thanks partly to joint control, the writ of the Indian state will become less than notional in the Muslim Kashmir Valley. Without a bullet being fired, the situation will become worse than it was in the early Nineties when Pakistani currency was openly used in parts of the Valley, and people had set their watches to Pakistan Time. The writ of militants - non-state actors if you like - will run unchecked over vast swathes. Coupled with free trans-LOC movement, it will also result in more and more areas being cleansed of Hindus with ease, often undetected, in a re-run of what happened to Kashmiri Pandits. After 20 years of fighting terrorists and after losing the lives of thousands of sons of India, its leaders will have done no more than quietly lay down arms and set the clock back to 1989, worse to follow.

These changes are not going to convert the whole state of Jammu and Kashmir into a Europe with people moving happily across as civilised human beings who are nicely settled and at peace with the world. When love and trust is absent across a settled international border drawn on the basis of religion, how can it blossom in an area that one desperately wants to snatch from the other on that very basis? Put another way, if the two countries can make their borders like the European ones, will the LOC not dissolve on its own? Why has that not happened till now? Is there even a remote chance of it happening given the trajectory that Pakistan is now on, that may well see it implode?

The answer is self-evident. Yet, a defeatist India continues to delude itself into believing that it has no choice but to give in to a failing Pakistan that is rapidly becoming become as radical and Islamist as the many groups nurtured by it. Qadri’s Pakistan is never going to be the strong and stable neighbour at peace with India that India hopes it will be after it gets what it want in Kashmir. Quite the contrary.

Solutions lie on this side of the LOC, problems on the other. India has to start thinking out of the box so that it can put Pakistan out of the Kashmir equation, not integrate it into it. Old templates need to be incinerated, not given a deceptive gloss.
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If the creation of Pakistan can be visualised as heavy snow falling on and covering upper reaches of precipitous slopes, then the calamitous avalanche that seems to have taken many by surprise, that suddenly seems unstoppable, that is poised to flatten everything below the snowline, should have been anticipated and strong barriers constructed in its predictable path so that it could have been checked and contained before it began its destructive descent.

Jinnah may have, at one level, visualised Pakistan as a modern Muslim state that viewed religion as a purely private matter – a mirror image, really, of secular India – but he would have known that the jihad that even he flirted with to violently snatch his state, was not an idea that would be forgotten after Pakistan was created. That is perhaps why he wanted to erect a barrier between the state and religion. But other Pakistanis, flush with success and angry that it was not complete, had different ideas. To cut the long story short, the snow continued to fall silently till General Zia-ul-Haq purposefully picked up a few fistfuls, made a snowball and set it rolling down the steep Islamist slope, in the hope that it would gather Kashmir and Afghanistan, and eventually the whole of ‘Hindu’ India, for Pakistan.

With the Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer’s assassination by Malik Mumtaz Husain Qadri, his bodyguard, only because he called Pakistan's blasphemy law a black law, and the subsequent developments on Pakistan, the avalanche has dramatically demonstrated how strong and powerful it has become and how powerless and defenceless are those who stand in its path.

Details of the Qadri-generated shock waves have been extensively covered in the media and by analysts, and I do not wish to tread the territory again. I would, however, like to draw the attention of readers to what two of India’s best and brutally honest Pakistan analysts have to say. MJ Akbar warns: “ we are seeing, unless we are lucky, the future of Pakistan on the face of Malik Qadri.” Tavleen Singh explains that the real danger of Pakistan imploding is because its “descent into venomous, violent Islamism is mostly the fault of their leaders and...this idea of faith has seeped into the fabric of Pakistani society. It is not just mullahs who spread the message but lawyers, policemen, judges and army officers.” It must be mentioned that it is not the first time this has been seen, though never openly on this scale. Even Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-politician loved by India’s secularists, is a fundamentalist who supported handing over of Swat Valley to the Taliban and the latter’s system of justice. But, till Qadri struck, India’s media pretended otherwise and chose see only the ‘liberal’ PLU in him.

Many analysts have been arguing that a strong, stable Pakistan is in India’s interest and that India should make every concession possible, including over Kashmir, to strengthen the democratic government and, by implication, moderate voices there, because we are same people, because Pakistanis love Bollywood as much as we do, because you cannot change geography -- the usual nonsense. The frightening and ridiculous alternate scenario that some have been painting is that presently Pakistan stands between India and the Taliban – they are already just 150 km for our border, they shout -- and that if Pakistan goes, we will have thousands of armed radicals on India's border, creating havoc in India.

Let us face the harsh truth that but a few have been speaking about: the real danger that India faces is not from lightly armed groups like the Taliban and the LeT. There is no way that they can defeat a half-million strong military and take over Pakistan. The nightmare scenario, clear and near-present, is that the whole state, including the military, will become as Islamist as the radicalised groups nurtured by it.

It is worth recalling that in 1947, Muslim soldiers of Indian Army who opted for Pakistan, an idea that almost till the end many believed would not take the shape it did, overnight became enemies of their regimental colleagues. Within months of the creation of Pakistan, they fought against and killed the men they had fought with and killed for. If that dramatic transition was easy, formal adoption of the radical and extremist ideology that has been pursued by the state of Pakistan for decades will be seamless. In fact, as the Qadri case shows, it is substantially already in place in not just the military but all organs of the state and civil society too.

The radical Islamism that is now no longer deniable in Pakistan has been visible almost openly in India’s Kashmir Valley for many years. It manifestation, not growth, has been restrained because of the presence of Indian security forces. But India as not been looking. Partly because its liberals have got the idea of secularism messed up and, more importantly, because its policy makers have embraced a ‘drift, hope and react-only-when-forced-to’ policy. Eyes wide shut. Even the US has not paid attention to the mistakes India has made in Kashmir. It is repeating them, much to Pakistan’s joy. No amount of bribing or “winning of hearts and minds” is going to work in Afghanistan. The billions of dollars it is giving to Pakistan too is not going to make the latter give up its duplicity and help the US win its war in Afghanistan. Nor is it going to retard the unstoppable radical avalanche.

Tavleen Singh knows that there is little that can now be done to stop the tearing avalanche from reaching the bottom of the Pakistani mountain. Unlike Sudheendra Kulkarni and others like him, she knows India can do nothing to save Pakistan. But she too falls into the trap, perhaps due to the pain she feels for that country, of seeing a faint flicker of hope if the US stops the war in Afghanistan because then, according to her, Pakistanis will not be able to find someone else to blame for their problems.

This is as naïve and dangerous an argument as asking India to leave or, at the very least, make major concessions on Kashmir to Pakistan. One more perceived victory against a super power will be the perfect fuel to fire Islamists to re-energise Pakistan and put India in the fore sights of their Kalashnikovs -- nuclear bombs too -- with renewed confidence and venom. If India too ‘loses’ in Kashmir, both will only be doubled.

The time for indulging in the luxury of romanticising a strong, stable, non-radicalised Pakistan that is at peace with India and the West is over. That such a Pakistan was never going to be a reality has been clear for a long time. Qadri has only made sure no one can pretend anymore. An Islamist Pakistan is a danger not just to India but to the whole world. This reality has to be confronted head-on and the danger neutralised, sooner the better.

Has anyone heard Pakistan ever say that a strong, stable India is in Pakistan’s interest? How can the reverse be true? Let us stop even thinking of saving Pakistan. Five fingers, separated, cannot deliver the punch that a fist can. They need to be worked on. Carefully.
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Who was on auction yesterday and is even today? Yes, everyone knows that cricket players are being bid for and bought by owners of various IPL teams. Exciting? Sure, to some. Glamorous? You bet. Do the proceedings spread over two days merit being screened live? Arguably yes, on sports channels. On national news channels? Are you crazy?

You and I may not be crazy, but some owners of India’s 'free' media think we are. That’s why they have decided that a nation of 1.2 billion people grappling with innumerable problems, wants to see nothing but the entire proceedings, live on, yes, news channels and regional channels too.

Is there any such precedent anywhere else in the world other than in a failed banana republic, even there? I cannot imagine. Why, then, is India being subjected to this blitz by media barons?

On Jan 07, Rajdeep Sardesai, part-owner and part-editor-in-chief of CNN IBN, tweeted: “while aam admi worries about price of onions, franchisees will worry about the price of players. yeh hai india.” Touching sentiments. The same gentleman had, however, a minute earlier tweeted: "tomorrow morning, IPL 4 auction. dont miss our coverage 10 am onwards with harsha bhogle and sanjay manjrekar, should be fun.” Many on Twitter spotted the emotional disconnect, the hypocrisy, and there was a barrage of tweets highlighting the same. On Jan 08, he replied to one: “@alok10823 everyone loves a good auction, esp when cricketers are on sale, including the aam admi.” If Sardesai is to be believed, he is loving it today too.

The aam admi, as you can easily infer, has become some kind of a joke. Earlier only politicians used to claim to speak on his behalf even as they lining their pockets with money meant for him. Now the media is doing the same. Politicians have to speak of and for him because they need his vote once in a few years. Media needs no votes but cannot do without him too primarily because it has unilaterally appropriated the right to question politicians and everyone else, on his behalf. For both he is the real sovereign. However, the media is completely unaccountable to him and, therefore, has no interest in him save the revenue he generates by watching himself being made the invisible star every evening in someone else’s voice and of someone else’s agenda.

Rajdeep Sardesai the businessman understands what a terrific tool this media-created aam admi is. Even a chameleon can’t do what he can be made to. That is why Sardesai can in one breath make him look worried about onion prices and in the next project him as someone who loves watching, for two full days, ‘news’ showing cricketers being sold. The real aam admi may forget his onions, media owners never forget theirs.

The question that is begging to be asked, but never will be on any TV channel, is: why are news channels run this tamasha, suspending everything else in time and space?

News channels are not entertainment channels for running shows that people love; nor are they sports channels, otherwise they would telecast revenue-jackpot 20:20 matches live. Then why? The entire IPL auction drams, as I understand, is nothing more than one big non-stop advertisement whose sole objective is to increase consumer awareness of the IPL brand so as to maximise spectator and viewer participation in the upcoming tournament. Since it is not a live cricket match, playing it live on the one authorised sports channel that will telecast the tournament, will not get its promoters and owners the number of eyeballs they want to attract. Viewers across India can, however, be carpet-bombed and mind-numbed into making IPL a bumper success if news and regional channels carry it live.

A two-day running advertisement for India’s most successful sports brand is a mouth-wateringly lucrative business proposition. An independent news editor concerned about core values and principles of journalism will, as per my understanding, not be a party such blatant prostitution of a news channel. An owner, possibly lubricated even more by additional ‘personal’ payments/inducements under the table, will, on the other hand, hasten to summon the non-existent aam aadmi, like Sardesai has done, to justify the decision, to hell with ethics, to hell with the real aam aadmi.

Now this is not an isolated aberration. This is one more recent example that I must briefly dwell upon to highlight the fact that media has become slave to pecuniary interests of owners in a tearing hurry to become billionaires, whatever it takes. Yes, Radia tapes also tell us much about the deep rot and the quid pro quos, but this is not the time to discuss them.

Post Radia, there’s been much debate about the alarming manner in which lobbyists have infiltrated and corrupted the media and the government. Sardesai, one of ‘Radias’ still not singed due to lack of 'clinching' evidence of quid pro quo, cleverly used his position as editor-in-chief to host a program on the channel he owns, to lobby for legalizing lobbying. An alert netizen caught him in the act. Sardesai -- difficult to swallow -- actually went to the extent of creating false Twitter accounts to deceive viewers – and policy makers too -- into believing that public opinion was in favour of lobbying. When caught, he and Sagarika Ghose, his wife, tried to get away by fibbing that the comments were genuine but were wrongly attributed to Twitter. To their bad luck and surprise, alert netizens dug deeper and discovered that lie too. The faking was wilful. Full details, available on dalalmedia posterous will shock you. CNN IBN was finally forced to tender an apology. And the furore subsided. It should not have.

The cleverly-worded apology was not a call of conscience; it was given out of sheer compulsion, to plug further damage. Sardesai had simply no choice, the documentary evidence, like in the Adarsh society case, was clear and damning; there was no escape route available. It was TINA that got Sardesai to cut his losses and pour ganga jal over the crime he had deliberately committed with all his faculties in fine fettle.

The question that was not asked loudly enough then was: what was Sardesai’s motivation to go to the extent of faking public opinion in favour of lobbying? That there had to be a strong personal stake in, firstly, asking such a question at such an inopportune moment and, secondly, taking the risk of falsifying tweets, was clear as day light. But, no one else, including in the media, probed any further. No one asked him why he instructed his staff to create false tweets; his staff was also not asked what exactly they were told by him. Who knows what else would have spilled out after the questioning had started? There is little doubt in my mind that an honest follow up would have opened the eyes of the whole country to the fact that the then President of the Editor’s Guild is a corrupt man who can go to any extent to push his personal business interests on the platform of his channel. The journalist in him, there is little doubt, has been all but killed by the businessman he has chosen to become.

You can close your eyes and bet that this was not the first such case. Before Radia, no one suspected the integrity of these guys and no one bothered to check. Now every little twitch is viewed with suspicion, and that is why Sardesai was caught. He will be much more careful in future, but remains otherwise unfazed. That is why on being questioned about telecasting the IPL auction live he has summarily informed us that 'his' aam aadmi, who is no one other than him, wants it. You and I can take a walk, and can keep walking.

Know and never forget that rich Radia media owners are in the game only for the bucks. And they won’t let you, even India, stop them. That's why they are not at all concerned that they and the journalists they employ have been exposed as a class and that trust has been lost. It does not trouble them that the quid pro quo is now visible even to the blind, that though the evidence may or may not stand scrutiny in a court of law, in the court of public opinion it is more than enough.

So the next time you switch on a news channel and hear an anchor passionately asking a question on behalf of the aam admi, be very wary. Always try to imagine what might have gone on behind the scenes, and what the unspoken agenda is, personal, political, pecuniary. Someone, something is being 'auctioned' behind the scenes all the time. Radia may have not have been the TINA that India had hoped it would be. But if you and I are alert, and the few men and women of unimpeachable integrity in the bordello can muster enough courage, it is only a question of time before the sticky garbage is shoveled out.
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