महती संसारवृक्षाची, गरज काळाची

Understanding the Pakistan Problem 

                  Since last some days social media is in frenzy with the various views first on Pulawama Attacks then on India's retaliation by pre-emptive action and then Pakistan F-16 going down with capture of Wing Cdr.Abhinandan and his eventual release as per the Geneva Convention..........

           आपण ह्या सर्वच गोष्टींना एक घटना म्हणून पाहत आहोत पण मला वाटतं एक इतिहासाचा विध्यार्थी म्हणून ह्या मागची विचारधारा समजून घेणे गरजेचे आहे.

       This article deals with the ideology behind the way Pakistani way of Bleeding India through thousand cuts. With my small intellect I think I have come up with certain solutions which will be the second part of this article.As usual your valuable comments are welcomed.Enjoy this Food for thought........

                The first Islamic invasion of India took place in the year 638 CE. With reinforcements from Iraq, Syria, Persia and several other Middle Eastern kingdoms, a large and powerful flotilla attacked Sindh, the Indian province closest to Arabia. The naval forces of Sindh soundly defeated this Islamic armada. Over the next 72 years, fourteen more attempts by nine Caliphs ended in utter failure. The Arabs lost such countless numbers of men in these campaigns – which were conducted both via land and sea – that the Caliphs declared India a no-go zone for Muslims.

However, in 710 CE the Arabs mounted a last-ditch invasion led by Mohammed bin Qasim. In 711 CE the Muslims tasted their first victory on Indian soil when they took the frontier town of Debal after a bitter battle. Like numerous previous campaigns, initially this one too seemed like it was going to be a disaster for the large Muslim horde against a small frontier city. The Hindu soldiers put up a valiant fight and were at the point of defeating the Muslim army when the Buddhist citizens of Debal betrayed the defenders during the battle, saying that as Buddhists it didn’t matter to them whether Hindus or Muslims ruled Sindh. They quickly learned their mistake when the victorious Muslim army massacred every single one of them along with the Hindus.

It was in Debal that the first recorded conversion of a Hindu took place. This man was promptly named Maulana Islami and sent, with a Syrian noble, to deliver a message to the court of Raja Dahir, the ruler of Sindh. According to the Chachnama, when the two entered Dahir’s court, the Syrian bowed low to salute, but the newly converted Indian Muslim refused to observe the mandatory diplomatic courtesy.

Dahir recognised him and asked him why he was not observing the court etiquette, and the latter said that with his change of religion his loyalty now was to “the king of Islam”. Change of religion had resulted in change of nationality. According to the late historian and politician K.R. Malkani, “The Pakistani mentality was born.” 

Pulwama and the Pakistan mentality

The Pakistan mentality involves

        (1) An implacable hatred of Hindus (as well as the less numerical groups such Sikhs,Buddhist,Jain,Atheist and Chritians.)

        (2) The defining belief that India is an ex-Islamic country that needs to be forcibly or demographically returned to Muslim control.

        (3) Unwillingness to accept India as a Hindu majority country.

        (4) Willingness to destroy themselves if in the bargain they can destrory India or at least cause it major damage.

          This mindset is not confined to the geographical boundary of Pakistan; it is a syndrome which can be found among large sections of Muslims across the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent. Among many Indian Muslims it is, of course, particularly ingrained.

            So why are Hindus hated? Because for over 14 centuries India resisted efforts to pass through Islam’s digestive tract and become a distant memory. The price of this struggle was colossal – hundreds of millions of Hindus were killed, all the ancient Indian universities were razed and hundreds of thousands of temples were demolished. But even more painful was the extensive loss of territory including Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh. And yet India remains thriving – a living, breathing symbol of Islam’s definitive defeat by the polytheists.

            For many Muslims of the Indian subcontinent, the very presence of Hindus is an act of intolerance. This is the crux of the problem, and this intense hatred of Hindus finds itself reflected in the vile language of Adil Ahmed Dar, the Kashmiri terrorist who blew himself up in a truck full of explosives, killing 45 CRPF jawans. According to Dar, Hindus are “cow urine drinkers” who must be killed so that an Islamic Caliphate can be established in India. The “cow piss” reference is frequently tossed at Hindus by Pakistanis who are clearly envious of India’s economic and scientific progress. Ironically, the Hadiths record that Mohammed, the founder of Islam, prescribed camel urine to his followers suffering from various ailments.

Trojans within

              It is fashionable among Indians leftists and liberals to say that Kashmir is on the boil because of poverty and lack of economic development. If poverty is the cause of terrorism, why don’t Bihar and Uttar Pradesh have large-scale terrorist movements? Clearly, this segment of society lacks the grey matter to connect the dots.

              Again, the left-liberal cabal, with funding from their ISI handlers, (3) argues that Kashmiris should be allowed to decide their destiny and either become independent or join Pakistan. By that logic, Muslims in districts of Kerala, Bengal and Uttar Pradesh where they are a majority can ask for freedom to secede. There will be complete chaos all across India if every Muslim – or Christian – majority area is allowed to secede.

              At any rate, allowing Kashmir to become independent won’t solve the problem. Islamists like Dar won’t be placated by the withdrawal of the Indian military from the region. Next, Kashmiri leaders and terrorists – speaking through their Pakistani controllers – will demand the incorporation of Jammu and Ladakh with Kashmir. The jehadis will want Punjab, Haryana and Himachal. Then Delhi as it was the capital of the Mughal Empire. Capitulation is incremental: Russia lost Ukraine the day it surrendered East Germany.

             The reason Kashmir remains volatile is that Kashmiri Muslims treat the state as their private sanctuary where they can do pretty much what they please. Kashmir’s special status has set a very bad example for Muslims in other parts of India. The unpardonable failure of the Indian state to protect the Kashmiri Pandits from murderous Kashmiri Muslim mobs, leading to the exodus of more than 500,000 Hindus from the Valley, has emboldened Muslims in other parts of India to employ similar strategies. They have developed the belief that if the Indian government didn’t protect the Kashmiri Hindus despite having 30,000 troops in and around the Valley, then Hindus are fair game in areas where the Indian Army has zero presence. (This has been discussed in detailed in one of my other article "Kashmiri Pundits")

           A stark example is Kairana, just over an hour east from Delhi, where Muslims systematically forced hundreds of Hindu families to flee the Uttar Pradesh town.  Such demographic aggression has picked up pace in every region in India where Hindus have dipped below the 60 per cent mark.

              Malayali Muslims are no doubt salivating at the prospect of their community reaching the 50 per cent point in Kerala. Coupled with the abysmal growth rate (1.6 per cent) of the Hindu population in the state and the comparatively fast growth rate (2.9 per cent) of Muslims, the latter are set to be the majority community in Kerala in a couple of decades.

               Since Malayali Muslims have adopted a particularly fanatic strain of Wahhabi/Salafi Islam, and are sending their boys to fight in Syria in droves, it is very likely that ethnic cleansing of Hindus will be on the agenda in Kerala once Muslims attain majority status.

                Again, in Assam two years ago illegal Bangladeshi settlers attempted to march through Assam, demanding Kashmir style special rights for Bengali Muslims. Thankfully, the Assam Police didn’t hesitate to give the protest leaders a sound thrashing and the marchers turned tail.

               The fact that illegal Bangladeshi settlers are emboldened to try and replicate the Kashmir model in Assam is a pointer to the danger lurking in appeasing Muslims and awarding them with special status. Don’t forget that in 1947, Muslims comprised just 25 per cent of united India’s population and yet they forced Partition.

Understanding the Pakistani mindset

                 In the 1965 and 1971 wars, India returned strategic borderlands captured after bitter fighting and for which hundreds of Indian soldiers paid the ultimate price. Prime Ministers Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi both held the belief that by returning captured land and prisoners of war (nearly 97,000 in 1971) they could score points with Pakistanis.

                 Again, in the two limited wars fought in 1948 and 1999, India’s leadership held back when its army had its boot on Pakistan’s neck. Again, Prime Ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Atal Bihari Vajpayi believed that the enemy, now defeated, would understand the futility of attacking India.

               However, the Pakistani mindset doesn’t quite work like that. Pakistan is only the second Islamic country in the world; the first one was in Mecca, founded by Mohammed 1,400 years ago. According to Indian author Tufail Ahmed, Indian Muslims who moved to Pakistan at Partition in 1947 compare their migration with the flight of Mohammed and his followers to Mecca in 622 CE. And they also believe that just like the Prophet returned victorious to Mecca, the Pakistanis would one day enter India as victors.

                Pakistan’s raison d’etre is entirely to re-conquer India. F.K. Khan Durrani put it in 1943: “But that India is a geographical unity is also a fact which the Muslims must never forget. There is not an inch of the soil of India which our fathers did not once purchase with their blood. We cannot be false to the blood of our fathers. India, the whole of it, is therefore our heritage and it must be re-conquered for Islam. Expansion in the spiritual sense is an inherent necessity of our faith and implies no hatred or enmity towards the Hindus. Rather the reverse. Our ultimate ideal should be the unification of India, spiritually as well as politically, under the banner of Islam. The final political salvation of India is not otherwise possible.”

               Among those who understood the real purpose of Partition was Rajendra Prasad, who went on to become India’s first President. According to US-based historian Faisal Devji: “Rajendra Prasad, quoting from a number of books written by Muslim nationalists shows that none was content to stop at the achievement of an independent state. Instead they saw Pakistan’s true or ultimate role as the liberation of Muslims oppressed in places like China and Soviet Central Asia, and even to ‘free’ India herself by a process of conversion”. 

             Chaudhry Rahmat Ali, the Cambridge undergraduate who came up with the idea and name of Pakistan in the early 1930s, envisioned a country or set of countries distributed all over the map of India, in what can only be called a counter-nationalist vision, one entirely lacking territorial integrity. In a later iteration of his theory, Rahmat Ali imagined India not as a country at all, but rather a continent of religious groups. This continent named Dinia – which he formed by transposing the word India to get out of it a word derived from din, the Arabic word for religion – would be made up of a number of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and other states, including one for Dravidians and ‘Untouchables’. According to Devji, “it is a vision that survives today largely intact in the ideology of Pakistan’s pre-eminent militant group, the Lashkar-e-Taiba”.

              In 1940 when the Muslim League passed the Lahore Resolution, which was the first concrete demand for the division of India, there were protests from Indian leaders. To this Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the architect of India’s partition, said: “Where is the country which is being divided? Where is the nation being denationalized? India is composed on nationalities, to say nothing about the castes and sub-castes.”

             In 1947, when India was divided, Jinnah said what he got was “a moth eaten State”. Indeed, the constant narrative in Pakistan is that it is already a rump State which will be complete only when all of India (and Bangladesh) would come under one Islamic flag.

Pakistan cannot wag the dog

             There is a section of Indians which believes “a weak Pakistan is not in India’s interests”. Some like former speech writer Sudheendhra Kulkarni have even suggested providing it a low interest loan of $4.5 billion because that is “padosi ka dharma” or the duty of a neighbour.

             However, anyone who believes a stable Pakistan is good for India has merely internalised what liberal think tanks have been dishing out for decades. In fact, the contrary is true. Picture this: if India hadn’t intervened in East Pakistan in 1971, the Indian Army would have had to station half a million troops on the eastern border today. The demilitarized Bangladesh border is therefore a huge dividend from the 1971 War.

             With Pakistan showing no signs of backing down from its old policy of low-intensity, low-risk attacks – interspersed with full-on wars – against India, negotiations are a waste of time and effort. In fact, talks are a clever distraction ploy by Islamabad so India lowers its guard. Indians should never forget that in 1999 while late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was bussing across the international border to Lahore for a historic summit, the Pakistan Army was busy occupying mountain ranges in Kargil.

         India must drop all niceties aside and treat Pakistan like a mortal enemy. For those with short memories or who believe the Pulwama attack is an isolated one, here’s a list of some major terror strikes by Pakistan: Mumbai 1993, Indian Parliament 2001, Delhi 2005, Mumbai 2008, Gurdaspur 2015, Pathankot Air Force Station 2016 and Uri 2016.

          In this backdrop, here is what New Delhi can do to remove this existential threat to India’s security and a major roadblock towards its destiny as a great power.

      Some of things that India can do to tackle this mentality will be discussed in next Part of this article.... 

Your valuable suggestion and input are welcomed.