Chapter 28
Delusions of Grandeur
Peace being the ‘supposed’ message of Islam, the religion that the Palestinians and the Pakistanis together profess, strife seems alike to be their political fate. While it is apparent that the Arab hostility towards Israel is steeped in the legality of tenancy, it can be seen that the Kashmir quagmire is rooted in Pakistan’s delusions of Islamic-grandeur. Whatever, it is the paradox of the Muhammadan creed in that that it provides a common ground for the Palestinian need, and the Pakistani greed, for ‘land’ that leads them on their self-destructive course.
Even before the ink was dry on the British deed of Hindustan’s partition, Pakistan surreptitiously pressed its tribal Muslim hordes into the Kashmiri flux to annex the Paradise on Earth to its Land of the Pure. What with Raja Hari Singh, the ‘vacillating’ Hindu King, having had no army to name, the mujahideen, armed to the teeth by Pakistan, could overrun a large chunk of his land, but owing to their jihadi habit to plunder, and the acquired vice of rape, these marauders had senselessly antagonized even the Kashmiri Musalmans, who came under their sway. Nevertheless, before the mujahideen could turn the fabled valley into a Pakistani trophy, Hari Singh’s Hindu sentiment and Sheikh Abdullah’s patriotic fervor saved the day for Kashmir as the former, acquiesced by the latter, inalienably aligned the State with the Union of India. Though the Indian forces entered the scene and stalled Pakistan’s progress through its proxy rogues into the heart of the valley, yet, stymied by the cease-fire call of the comity of nations, the wooly Nehru’s own making, the Indian State couldn’t reclaim all of Kashmir to itself. If anything, the geo-political game of the Western nations in those cold war days enabled Pakistan, which teamed up with them against the Soviet Union, to usurp the thirteen-thousand-odd km square area, which it ironically calls ‘Azad Kashmir’.
Thus lying divided in the laps of the adversaries, Kashmir became an arena of strife with many sub-continental twists and turns. Whatever may be the Pakistani brief over all of Kashmir; it cannot harp on the legality of its accession to India for after all, Raja Hari Singh derived the power to accede his kingdom, the way he willed it, from the same document that created Pakistan! So be it, but to which group the Pakistani blood that its ‘jugular vein’ carries belongs to? Is it Rh+ for Kashmiri Muslims or the Rh- for Kashmir Valley?
Well for the right answer, the question is better addressed to mohajirs, the Muslim migrants from the Gangetic plains into the Pakistani Sind. Why didn’t Pakistan fail them by not letting them feel at home in the homeland of the Musalmans of Hindustan that it was supposed to be? So also, the Bihari Musalmans, though they were cohorts with the Punjabi Muslims in the massacre of the Bengali believers in the then East Pakistan, yet fail to get the entry visas into what was left as Pakistan.
Won’t it then serve the secession-mongers of the Kashmir valley to ponder over why the Pakistanis, unwilling to suffer the presence of those faithful in their midst, are so fond of the Kashmiri Musalmans living beyond their borders? Unless they had turned morons by the Islamic death wish to sink with the failed state of Pakistan, it should be apparent to them that unlike the Bihari believers, they have a fabled valley to add to the map of Pakistan. And that is about the Pakistani land greed camouflaged with the religious solidarity to seduce the Kashmiri Muslims into its inimical fold.
Be that as it may, way back in the 16th Century, had not the Portuguese wrested Goa from Islam and ousted its believers, Pakistan would have an irrefutable claim on it in the partitioned Hindustan, but that again is history! Whatever, the urge of the Musalmans has always been to expand the Islamic territory on the global terrain, and thus Pakistan’s Decommissioned-Adult-Muhammadans fail to take India’s Kashmiri perspective into account, much less analyze it to see if any course correction is needed in their India outlook.
The two-nation theory by which the ancient land of Arya Varta was partitioned was an illusion of the Indian Musalmans that was not subscribed by the Hindus of India, and had they wanted a country for them only, wouldn’t they have ceded some more land to Pakistanis, if that were needed, as a quid pro quo for ridding the Islamist presence from their Indian midst. But, rightly or wrongly, that was not the way Hindustan was partitioned, and if so, what’s the rationale for those millions of Musalmans to stay back in Hindustan even after Pakistan came into being?
So, any Pakistani argument for wanting Kashmir, citing its Muslim majority would be untenable to any reasonable mind, and likewise, the urge of those Kashmiri Musalmans to merge the valley with the Islamic Pakistan wouldn’t sync with the spirit of partition. If not, won’t it make a case for the Indian Musalmans to seek the merger of those areas with Pakistan, wherever they happen to form the majority, and let their brethren, wherever they are in minority, to continue living in India that is until they cross the half-way mark! Thus, when push comes to shove, the moral right of the Indian Musalmans to live in India would become questionable, and if Pakistanis, in the spirit of their pan-Islamic credo, wish the Indian umma well, then they should become wiser to their ‘hate India’ campaign, which only exacerbates the Hindu-Muslim apathy in India.
The same applies to the Bangladeshi believers, likewise afflicted with the Decommissioned Adult syndrome of their erstwhile Pakistani masters. Why at the dawn of the ‘original partition’, even before the Bengali Muslim celebrations for having seen the back of the hated Hindu were over, the ugly reality of the Punjabi Musalmans stared them in their Islamic face! It’s as if the Muhammadan creed of equality before Allah was of no avail to the Bengali Muslims in the Pakistani version of the Islamic democracy, and so, in the hour of the Bengali glory, Bhutto’s political greed and the Punjabi fauzis’ prejudice to their dark skin, upstaged their right to have their man, Mujibur Rahaman, to head the Islamic Pakistan. Well their agitation for their democratic right to see Rahaman as the Prime Minister of Pakistan made the Bengali Musalmans appear like idolaters to the Islamic Generals of Pakistan, and they treated them likewise – massacring the men and raping their women. This about speaks for the hypocrisy of the Muslim Brotherhood, not to speak the way the Musalman expatriates from Pakistani and India are treated in the land of their Messenger.
Where did the hapless Bengali Muslims flee to escape from the repression of their fellow Musalmans than to Hindustan! It is another matter though that all this was ‘the godsend’ to India to grind its own Pakistani axe by helping the freedom struggle of rebellious Bengali faithful. It’s thus, in what was a unique instance in the Islamic saga, so as to oust their Punjabi brethren; the Bengali Musalmans welcomed the Hindu kafirs into their dar al-Islam! Well, India did oblige them, and Bangladesh came into being, and this one gesture could have been sufficient for the Bangladeshi Musalmans to shed their old Hindu hatred and hold the hand of eternal friendship to the Indians. Why not? In the ever changing world, that is what the ‘nations at odds once’ are doing now, and that’s what the Bangladeshis would have done in the normal course. But then, for them there is the Islam to contend with.
Before long, the initial euphoria of the Hindu-Muslim bhai-bhai, occasioned by their Bengali sense of gratitude, gave way to India-animosity brought to the fore by their Islamic upbringing on the staple diet of kafir hatred, which goaded them to murder their own savior, Mujibur, perceived to be India friendly, and to wipe out his kith and kin in cold blood to boot. That’s not all for they began persecuting the Hindu minority in every possible way to force their exit from their Islamic midst. That Sheik Hasina his daughter providentially survived that heinous massacre and in later years brought some sanity into the bigoted Bengali Muslim polity is the saving grace of Bangladesh’s bloody history.
Why, it can be reasonably assumed that but for their inculcated Islamic bigotry, Bengali Musalmans, as a people per se, would have appropriately responded to the Indian goodwill gesture, as any other people of the world would have. It’s thus, in what could be termed as the great human tragedy, Muhammad succeeded in cementing the bigoted Islamic cult in the Arabian soil, which his zealot followers religiously planted in other lands to their hurt of their people, but for which the Bangladeshis would not have been what they have come to be. So, it’s one of the ironies of Islam in that it gives with one hand and takes away with the other, and thus it is the destiny of the Musalmans to suffer on that score, even as they make ‘the others’ to suffer as well.
As for the truncated Pakistan, obsessed as it was with its idea of a strategic depth against India, when the time came, it thought it was jolly well holy to foster terrorists on its Islamic soil to play the American cold war game in the Soviet occupied Afghanistan. What with the eventual Russian withdrawal under the Islamic duress, and the Taliban coronation that followed, Pakistan had reassigned the mujahideen to serve its Kashmiri cause. And by then, Osama bin Laden too had set up the international terror network of Al Qaeda for Muhammad Atta and others to exhibit the Islamic derangement on 9/11/2001 for the world audience.
When came the American pressure on Pakistan in its wake, its Generals have chosen to hunt with the hounds and run with the hares in their terrorist badlands but wouldn’t Washington know that the jihadis of Pakistan meant for Srinagar might go astray and attack New York all again? After Iraq, wouldn’t it be Pakistan’s turn to face the American music after its Al-Qaeda ghost is exorcized? Even otherwise, till recently, one would have thought that the fate of the Islamic militancy would be decided in the Promised Land but meanwhile, it is as if the Sunnis are at the Shia-throats in Iraq and Pakistan to snatch the terrorist standard of Islam from the Hamas.
Meanwhile, the un-Islamic world is unable to counter these loose cannon of a fidayēn but would it forever like to remain a hostage to the Islamic terrorism? How long would ‘the others’ bear with the unpleasant task of clearing the human debris that the Islamic terrorists would be leaving behind in their midst? Won’t the world lose its patience with the Musalmans at some point of time?
Why, going by its ruthless campaign against all things Islamic, the formidable China has already lost, so to say, its bearing even. Would the umma be able to take on the rest of the world, if and when it chooses to crack the whip, without their Angels of War, which, anyway, never returned to aid the Musalmans after their brief appearance in the Battle of Bardr to rescue Muhammad? Why, in this ‘neutron bomb era’, Islam seems to be really in danger for once, and the fidayēn of the Baghdadi’s ISIS-School might be bringing the Mohammedan D-Day closer to our times.
