India’s retrogression

Pakistan has an extremist problem. It is a given. When you have lost over 55,000 souls in the fight against terrorism, that bit is a given. Our flawed policies, miscalculations, myopia and paranoia all have been thrown into sharp relief given the tragedies of the past decade. But what is wrong with India? Why has it lost it? Today, India’s security and defence-related advisers make no bones about their desire to violate the sovereignty of other states, even sponsor terrorism abroad. Nor does India seem to care much about how the world perceives its claims of being a terror victim. So what if the incidents in the past year appear really shoddy, at times even staged? India’s new ruling elite get more opportunities to exploit the basest of all human instincts: hate and fear. Want examples?

On New Year’s Eve, war hysteria was quite visible on Indian television, with there being reports about a Pakistani fishing boat which the Indian coast guards had intercepted. The story went like this. On December 31, following an intelligence lead, the state-of-the-art coast guard vessels managed to stop a beaten-down fishing boat allegedly smuggling terrorists into India after a thrilling hour-long chase. Ambushed in the middle of nowhere (some 365km from the city of Porbander, in the Indian state of Gujarat), the terrorists preferred to die, opting to set the boat on fire rather than making use of the explosives that ironically, also happened to be aboard. When one senior Indian journalist challenged the far-fetched story, his photos were burnt by an angry mob. Yet, it took only one coast guard official’s boasts to bring the entire story down. Since then, not even an iota of remorse has been shown by New Delhi about the unsubstantiated accusations. Also, there hasn’t been a word on the identity of the poor souls travelling on the boat that was so expediently destroyed. If anything, incidents of such sort, half-cooked terror plots, claims about Pakistani involvement and countless other things, are now occurring at a breakneck speed.

When more than one-seventh of the world’s population lives within your country’s four walls, you are bound to focus more on them rather than the rest of the world. Consider this a hostage crisis. Someone holds a sizeable population within a structure, hostage. By using the Stockholm syndrome to their advantage, radicalises the hostages and then blackmails the authorities on their behalf. All this in just one year. But the roots run deeper.

Of course, things were not as bad during Congress rule. Even when something as monstrous as the Mumbai attacks took place, the then Indian government managed to control public anger and painstakingly built global consensus. That kind of sanity now looks remote. Why? Because Narendra Modi became prime minister with a landslide majority. Narendra Modi of the BJP. A party that is member of the extremist Sangh Parivar (the RSS family). The RSS that has been selflessly devoting time to radicalising India’s Hindu majority since before Partition. The RSS is a hate monster. Any secular Indian will tell you that.

The RSS has been successful in exploiting these baser instincts owing to colonial and imperial legacy. Even before the British seized control of India, it had lived for a century under a monarchy representing a religious minority. Things of that sort easily mess up minds. Hence, the Hindutva brigade now claims to be working on purifying India today. But this desire to purify India of foreign influences seems eerily similar to what went on under the Taliban in Afghanistan. As unscientific minds prevail, papers are read at prestigious Indian scientific events on how India had invented spacecraft and plastic surgery 7,000 years ago. As India seeks to monopolise yoga, it silently seems ready to disown Kama Sutra.

Take it from the citizen of a country which has been through all these regressive stages. It is not worth it and will destroy you. Problem is, this new-found radicalism in India now threatens to derail the reform process in Pakistan too, as it plays right into the hands of hawks here. India needs to pull itself together and confront its demons before it is too late. 

Published in The Express Tribune, August 8^th,  2015.

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