The Age of Miracles

The Age of Miracles

Innocence and the miraculous somehow go together. Take out the one and the other wilts and fades. And along with receding innocence goes youth. And this can happen at any biological age. You can have 12 year old ravagees with “tombstones in their eyes” and 90 year olds with their impish inner-child intact.

Applied to the akhara of Indian politics, and indeed the international political landscape in all its varied hue, innocence would probably transform into idealism. And idealism is definitely in short supply in today’s world.

Idealism is ever denigrated as the dewy-eyed impracticality of school boys not fit for mature discourse in the thrust and parry of real politics. And where it rears its inconvenient head despite the almost universal attempt to scorn and shame it into decline, it is promptly corralled into a reservation of non-governmental activism. The suggestion is that idealism is not mainstream political activity, riddled with impracticality as it is. And thus, the baby goes out with the bathwater.

But if history and political theory is to be believed, it wasn’t always so. Great movements and struggles, we are told, were born out of lofty idealism. It was idealism that fired the imagination of people and received their commitment. It was the self- same that moved mountains of opposition and perceived injustice with its sheer motivational strength.

And yet, every once in a while, an act of political will cuts through the fog of cynicism and calibrated calculation that passes for political leadership. The bounty of $ 10 million announced for the head of brazen terrorist-at-large Hafiz Saeed by the US Government is one such clear-eyed act of idealism.

Hafiz Saeed, supported by the Pakistani Government and establishment, pretends to run a clutch of charitable organisations while preaching obscurantist hatred against the classic targets of Hinduism, Zionism and Christianity. It’s not that he doesn’t, but the charity is a cover.

But if Saeed Hafiz was just a rabid preacher and demagogue it would be bad enough. As it happens he is also a hands-on terrorist himself and a leading light of the infamous Lashkar-e-Taiba, which supports and trains killers and fanatics. They, in turn, go out and do its bidding and that of the Pakistani Government via the formidable Inter-Services-Intelligence (ISI).

Everything Hafiz Saeed’s followers do thereafter can be cloaked in the garb of “non-governmental actors” for the “plausible deniability” the ploy offers. And the Pakistani establishment nurtures a number of very competent Saeed Hafizes, many of them highly trained ex-army or ex-ISI operatives, along with their hate spouting organisations.

 It is now universally recognised that Pakistan has refined the techniques of terrorism as an instrument of state policy like no other country around the world. It has been called “the most dangerous country in the world” on more than one occasion. Even the LTTE was not the Government of Sri Lanka but only a break-away movement in the cause of an elusive Tamil Eelam, and neither was it a nuclear power!

But in Pakistan, this could change at any time, creating the first non-governmental nuclear power in the world.  So the long awaited decision to put Saeed Hafiz in the cross hairs of US accusation is not a hollow thing. After an interminable delay since 26/11 which took place in 2008, it strikes a clear cut blow at the root of international hypocrisy and selectivism in terrorism targeting.

The global nightmare is that the Pakistani Government and its nuclear arsenal could fall to the institutionalised terrorists in the country grown terribly powerful over the years. It is also a truism of history that revolution, even if one were to characterise the jihadi mindset as righteous, tends to devour its own children. While that would be very sad, particularly for the more enlightened sections of Pakistani Civil Society, it would be catastrophic for the targets of Islamic terror around the world.

The facts that have come to light since the US went into Abbotabad and eliminated Osama Bin Laden, shows him living in different locations in Pakistan with the connivance of the Pakistani Government, for most of the over 11 years since 9/11. The bluster and denial, the leaning on Saudi diplomacy to reduce the pressure from America, the petulant threats at large from the Pakistani military that violations of its territorial sovereignty, including the routine US drone attacks, would be stoutly resisted, have not worked. Neither has the admirable articulation of its foreign office and media stalwarts.

Intelligence sources around the world are of the opinion that the strategic triangle on which Pakistani political thinking is built involves first, the backing from China, second, an anti-India policy as a justification to nurture an elaborate terrorist network designed to bleed it, and third, the blackmailing of the West, particularly the US, over Afghanistan for money and military hardware to run an otherwise bankrupt economy.

The problem, as with all Frankensteinish creations, is that each tends to take on a life of its own and refuses to follow the script. And so, the “death by a thousand cuts” strategy against India has been largely stymied by the strategic depth provided by a country teeming with over 1.2 billion people. It is difficult to judge whether Maoist violence in India, or Islamic terrorism, or indeed border and territorial tensions with China have primacy here.

The backing of China for Pakistan comes at the price of being reduced to a satellite and subordinate state. It is forced to serve China’s own geo-political ambitions in the Gulf, Baluchistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Indian Ocean littoral and in international fora.

The West is now coming around to the view-point that crippling Pakistan’s terrorist factory is essential to draw its poison teeth, and not just in terms of its projected withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That still leaves its nuclear arsenal intact of course, but hopefully it will continue be the responsibility of moderate and reasonable people in the political and military space in Pakistan. Besides, the West knows that the main proliferator in nuclear matters in recent times is China, with Pakistan and North Korea only playing supporting roles.

But is there idealism afoot here too? Is the US Government putting the finger on Hafiz Saeed in order to seek retributive justice? Was that at the root of the action to kill Osama Bin Laden not so long ago?  Some would say that it is, and marks yet another instance of how the true and straight-forward can indeed serve statecraft and make the world a safer place to live in.

(1,093 words)

April 4^th, 2012

Gautam Mukherjee


Published as Leader Edit on the Edit Page of The Pioneer as "Return to idealism" on 16th April 2012 and online at www.dailypioneer.com