Pakistan should support Modi

Modi has successfully converted his own people into his biggest challenge

The online troll world makes fun of the singer/musician, Adnan Sami Khan, as a Pakistani agent in India. In the real world, however, rhetoric apart, Modi is doing Pakistan huge favours. Pakistan never believed that India was indeed a secular state. Neither does Modi. And now he is proving it to the world. Discrimination and hatred based on faith is now the law of the land. And we have Modi to thank for this remarkable achievement. World renowned thugs and fascists before him had come close to that level of official discrimination, hatred, and bigotry. He is in their league.

The Indian parliament has enacted the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). On the surface, the law gives asylum to persecuted non-Muslim minorities in neighbouring Muslim majority countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. But earlier this year, the National Register of Citizens (NRC) asked Indians to prove through documentation, that they came to India on or before March 24, 1971. The inability to provide documentation resulted in rendering close to two million Assamese residents stateless.

This is where the game gets creative. The NRC is designed to push out almost two million residents, many of whom are Hindus. The CAA allows Hindu, Parsi, Jain, Buddhist, and Christian minorities to stay in India and even be a citizen, but excludes Muslims. In reality, the CAA is like an insurance policy preventing non-Muslims from expulsion by the NRC and blocking incoming Muslims from neighbouring countries. India’s de jure and de facto logo is: no country for Muslims.

We should thank Modi for validating the two-nation theory that many in our society question as perhaps a sign of intellect. The left-wing intellectuals (an oxymoron in Pakistan) like to indulge in counterfactuals regarding the need to create Pakistan in the name of a religion and that we could all have lived peacefully in a united India. They should know they would be living in a state where their faith would have been discriminated against legally. They should know that the only Muslim majority territory that India has is the world’s most densely militarised territory of Occupied Kashmir, which is an open air prison.

India is a nuclear-armed country. Militarily-strong countries cannot be defeated militarily. The only way a strong country or an empire has crumbled was when they defeated themselves — effectively imploding. Modi’s moves are a perfect recipe for self-destruction and this writer has complete faith in the wisdom Napoleon offered. He said, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”

I strongly believe Pakistan should let Modi’s self-destructive propensity go unchecked. He has successfully converted his own people into his biggest challenge. Gandhi’s great-grandson is protesting too. No wonder Modi’s right-hand man is not his Foreign Minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, or his Army Chief, General Bipin Rawat (who might be mistaken for a real life joker by those who don’t know him), but rather his Home Minister, Amit Shah.

Dealing with the domestic enemy is more important than external threats. It is the Muslims, whom Modi wants to be identified by their clothes, that are viewed as the enemies and those who do not adhere to the deep-seated belief religiously held by radical Hindus that all Indians are Hindus because they were forcefully converted to other faiths, especially Islam. Now, Modi is forcefully converting India into a fully-Hindu nation. Amit Shah advocated for replicating this experiment of deporting or jailing Muslims, which he called “infiltrators” and “termites” across India.

India presents a perfect case study for understanding the dark side of democracies. When a democracy goes rogue, it is more lethal than non-democratic regimes because in the former, the despotic and fascist moves become legal.

I say we sit back and relax and watch our enemy commit suicide. No harm in that.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 26^th, 2019.

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