The Nine Lives of Pakistan Dispatches' from A Divided Land by Declan Walsh A Review

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The Nine Lives of Pakistan Dispatches from a Divided Land

Declan Walsh

Bloomsbury 2021

I heard of this book in a YouTube pod cast of the Lahore Book Club presented by Shri Adnan Moiz and since I am a keen observer of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and have been following the byzantine politics of the Garrison State rather closely. The dramatic events leading to the exit of Shri Imran Khan has had the nation transfixed even as the Soap Opera unfolded over an entire month. It seems that the Establishment, the Paistani euphemism for its Deep State consisting of the Army and its Secret Service finally had its way. 

This book by Declan Walsh, a correspondent of the New York Times and The Guardian, who spent a decade covering Pakistan from the closing years of the Premiership of Benazir Bhutto through the years of Nawaz Sheriff follows the developments on the political stage by in-depth interviews with men and women not the movers and shakers but humble folks. Friends in low places help us understand reality better than friends perched higher up the ladder. He seeks out human rights activists like the woman lawyer Asma Jehangir, the "encounter specialist" of the Karachi Police and follows the adventurers of a true believer in the Islamic Jihad, Colonel Imran as he sped from Taliban hideouts in Waziristan to a dusty death on the road to Peshawar. Like a cat Pakistan has had Nine Lives and how many of them has it used.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan made wrong political and ideological choices and the society is paying a huge price for them. The whole idea of Pakistan as a home for Indian Muslims which culminated in the state being created by the British did not involve even the courtesy of a perfunctory consultation with the indigenous populations of the region that came to be called Pakistan. Thus Punjab, Sindh, North West Frontier Province now called Khyber Pukhtunwa  were not taken into confidence. The result is the huge fault line the divides the Mohajirs from India and the rest of the population. The Mohajirs are a discriminated lot and have turned to urban terrorism in Karachi in order to carve out political space for themselves. The MQM is a potent political force and its exiled leader Altaf is able to control the city from his exile in London. 

The other fault line is more elemental and this goes back to 1893 when the Durand Line was established. I have given the link of my study of the Durand Line here.https://wordcraftandstatecraft.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-great-game-all-over-again-durand.html. The Historical and geopolitical aspects of the 1893 Boundary are spelt out in my essay. More important is the fact that Zia ul Haq the Military Dictator of Pakistan walked into the American trap in Afghanistan with his eyes wide shut. A Soviet occupied Afghanistan could have been prevailed upon to accept the Durand Line as the international border. Instead the Pakistani Army and its ISI entered th war against the Soviets by acting as conduits for supplying weapons and arms to the "mujahudeedn" the freedom fighters who were recruited on a pan Islamic basis thereby laying the foundation for the Global Jihad that we see all around us. The second mistake was to fall under American threats and signing up on the War on Terror in 2001. US for reasons that are as yet unclear decided that al Qaeda was behind the attack on the Twin Towers in New York on 9/11. Consequently Pakistani Army was forced to fight the very Taliban it had created trained and helped capture power in Afghanistan. Now the War of Terror turned out to be a disaster both for Pakistan and Afghanistan. The unrestricted use of drones in their war killed large number of civilian non combatants. Link:http://bahuvirupaksha.joeuser.com/article/426514/president-barack-obamas-play-station-war In this Essay we have assessed the impact of Drone attacks and Declan Walsh has drawn attention to the fact that only Imran Khan condemned the attacks. The American War on Terror turned Pakistan into an enemy and the Taliban have not forgotten that betrayal and unfortunately the Army and its leadership seems to be quite indifferent to the ground reality.

The most fascinating part of the book is his use of personal stories to flesh out the rancid realities of politics in Pakistan. The life of the Imam of the Red Mosque who became the founding member of the TeT and the life of Salmaan Taseer are both done to bring out the deepening social divide in Pakistan. The western elite lead a life insulated from the harsh realities of price rise, fuel shortages, lack of medicines and health facilities while the poor have only their Allah and their religion for comfort. The result is a deadly cocktail of social unrest and religious fanaticism and Wash uses the example of Qadri the man who shot and killed Salmaan Taseer to show how deep the poison of religion has seeped. And this toxic legacy is here to stay.

Walsh is careless in his research. On page 70 he writes that Gandhi was killed by the RSS. This narrative was pushed by Nehru and his cohorts but the reality is that the Courts and three Commissions of Inquiry appointed by the Government of India has shown conclusively that the RSS had nothing to do with the killing of Gandhi. By lining Gandhi's assassination with the RSS Nehru sought to gain political mileage in the  days  following the Partition. It is not necessary for a western journalist to repeat this canard even in a book for a general audience. 

I liked this book as I am familiar with the main events. However there are larger questions that Walsh ignores. Pakistan today is caught in a quagmire of Jihadi inspired militancy, Taliban assertion, Baluchi resistance and Sindhi Nationalism. Its survival is now seriously in doubt as the leaders have made wrong choices at each and every critical moment of its history. The War on Terror is the most recent and accepting Chinese loans for the CPEC is another. India will watch what is happening and will not interfere.

The Massace of the Innocents at Peshawar, Pakistan

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

The massacre at the Army Public School located near the Cantonment at Peshawar has shocked the world and India is aghast at what happened. A two minute silence was observed in educational institutions all long the length and breadth of the country. Cynics might say that this is only a ritual for public consumption. However as a teacher myself and as a parent I, an ordinary citizen felt the pain and anguish of the ordinary Pakistani man and woman. To dismiss the gesture as a mere choreographed display of hypocritical concern will not help anyone. Unfortunately there are sick elements in the Pakistani civil society who have gone to town blaming India for the massacre and this propaganda is only to serve the purpose of diverting attention from the real perpetrators of this outrage. The longer Pakistan lingers in the twilight zone of denial the longer tit will suffer. India cannot do such an act not because it is an innocent country of lambs, but because such attacks do not serve India's interests in the region.

The Pakistani Taliban has taken responsibility for the attack which killed 132 children and 9 teachers. The motive behind the attack is said to be the ongoing Army operations against the Taliban which is going on in the North West Province, the Kim country. Apparently, the Taliban hoped to weaken the resolve of the Pakistani Army in hunting down the militants in the mountain territory. However, they seem to have seriously miscalculated an the Pakistani Army corrupt and criminal force that it is, will not forgive a blatant attack on its own raison d'etre.  I think a turning point has been reached, the tipping point which will see a dramatic changes on the ground. I wish the Army well in its hunt.

Is India responsible for what is going on in Pakistan. I have no doubt that some financial and perhaps military support is being given to some secessionist groups in the Baluchi region. However beyond that India's responsibility  lies in the fact that at the time of Partition the Pakthtoons who were led by the Frontier Gandhi were staunchly against Partition and the silly criminal man called Nehru sold them short and therein lies the roots of the problem. Nehru who wanted his seat of power by all means possible just allowed the Pakhtoons to be swallowed by the Pakistani state in the same manner that Baltistan too was taken over. Had there been an exchange of population, then the demographic character of Pakistan would have changed and the mohajirs would have been in the majority. Since the demand for Pakistan essentially came form this section, they would have defended the nation by not leaning on Islamic fundamentalism as the ideological glue to hold the disparate nation together.

India has to answer the question raised above.

The Massacre of the Sikhs by the Congress Party in 1984: Memory and History, Helium, a Novel

A look at the world of politics, statecraft, diplomacy and books

Helium
Jaspreet Singh
Bloomsbury, 2013

Violence is a part of History and the Nation States of today prefer to erase violence, especially collective and concentrated acts of demonic destruction of life from the pages of History. India is not an exception. In the West, the Holocaust is passed off as a Nazi aberration with the ordinary Germans participating only as innocent bystanders and this version history sits quite comfortably with the ideological and political realities of the Cold War and post Cold War geo political environment. In India too, there has been a denial of violence as a factor in the collective existence of India. The "Secular" scholars wax rather eloquently about the "Idea of India" which they associate with Jawaharlal Nehru ignoring the fact the he oversaw the largest mass killing in the history of the Indian subcontinent when the political leadership of the Congress and Lord Mountbatten decided to bring forward the date of Indian Independence from 1948 without bothering to prepere for the enormous tragedy that was to unfold. We may not ever know the numbers, but a figure of 3 million killed or displaced on both sides of the border is certainly possible, making the birth of the so called democratic republic of India one of the most bloodstained in the twentieth century. Yet the acolytes of Nehru pretend that Nehru and his Interim Government cannot be blamed.

The "communal factor" and the "comunalism" in Indian politics is one thmeme that plays itself out in Indian historiography without any theoretical or empirical understanding. The framing of the political issues either prior tpo Partition or Post Partition (I deliberately do not use the world Independence) as "communal" or "secular" is a game that began with the Congress when it participated in the 1937 Elections in the United Provinces and other parts of British India under the Government of India Act of 1935. The Congress did not win a single seat earmarked for the Muslims though it presented itself as a "secular" and the only organization that represented all sections of the Indian population. Instead of introspecting and trying to comprehend the alienation of the Muslim population the Congress did what it always does best: it created a bogey man so that it could use the bogeyman to frighten the Muslims into supporting the Congress. From 1937 after the Congress failed to win even a single seat and when the Muslim League swept all the Muslim seats thereby exposing the fact that the Congress did not enjoy the support of the muslim minority, the Congress leadership particularly Nehru and his "progressive" faction within the Congress started virulently attacking the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtrtiya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS) and converted the political discourse on the future of India as a common homeland for both Muslims and Hindus into one of conflicting religious identities.  The more stridently Nehru lambasted the so called Hindu organizations whose strength was very poor amidst the electorate, the more aggressively Jinnah put forth his case for Pakistan. The fact is that the failure of Congress leadership and its cynical use of a non existing threat to garner support of the Muslim minority resulted in strengthening the march toward Partition. To this of course, we can add the folly of the resignation from the Minstires in 1939 anf the 1942 Movement. This rehearsal of history is needed to set the stage for the most horrendous act of violence committed by the Congress party in Novemnber 1984 when it organized the killing of Sikhs in different parts of Northern India and the capital, New Delhi on  a scale that even the Germans would have found amazing.

The failure to confront the real the structural underpinnings of violence in modern India, meant that the country could live in denial and pretend that violence did not exist in India in any organized sense. The fact is that the Congress party, particularly in Northern India had begun to use violence as an instrument of political mobilization even in the pre partition days. Gyanendra Pandey and other historians conflate all acts of political violence as "communal violence" thereby giving the Congress party the benefit of doubt. 

In 1984 soonn after BBC announced the death of Indira Gandhi at the hands of Beant Singh and Satwant Singh her two Sikh bodyguards, the leadership of the Congress party in New Delhi decided to take vengence. Rajiv Gandhi famously justified the violence saying , "When a big tree falls, the earth shakes". For three whole days rampaging mobs of Congressmen went from house to house looking for Sikhs. They were armed with a database of names and addresses inn the form of telehone directories and electoral rolls. Whereever Sikh men were found, the Congressmen cut their beards and hair and doused them with petrol and burnt them alive. What was worse is that successive Congress Governments abetted the crime by destroying evidence and impeding investigation. Not a single man was convicted though it is well known thta H K L Bhagat, Lalith Maken, Arjun Das, Sajjan Kumar, and Jagdish Tytler were all involved in the killings. In several of them were even appointed ministers.

The novel, Helium which we are reviewing is a classic inn its own right. It is a work of fiction but fiction is only the form because it explores the dark savagery of 1984. Violence is often the starting point of great works of literature of which Primo Levi's works come to mind. Jaspreet Singh too has done just that. He is a memory keeper, a conscience keeper, a record keeper and above all a Historian who uses his novel to memorialize the unthinkable and verbalize the pain and suffering of countless victims. As one who has also relentlessly worked to keep the memory of 1984 alive, I salute Jaspreet Singh and have no hesitation in saying that this is one of the best novels ever written on a difficult and contentious theme. The acolytes of the Congress Party and the apologists of 1984 want to deflect blame and undermine memory by drawing a false parallel with 2002. 1984 like the holocaust is a unique event. and cannot be that easily domesticated in categories of ordinary experience.

The story revolves around the son of a Delhi IPS officer who perhaps under political compulsions looks away when a Sikh Professor at IIT is killed. Raj carries the burden of the guilt of his father and much later in life meets Nelly Kaur, the widow of the Professor who has collected the documentary and visual evidence of the horrors of 1984 in an archive in Simla. The memory of dark deeds committed even in the soft glow of political and ideological consensus can devastate a human being and this novel explores that aspect in detail.

Lastly: In these so called post colonial times when History is seen as a "discourse" without any contact with a reality, we need novelists like Jaspreet Singh who use the craft of the historian to document the horrors of the past as sirens warning the future about the devils lurking within us.And History has to be retrieved, recorded and remembered.