End of barbaric rule in Afghanistan
Men, Matter & Memories

By M L Kotru

With Amir-ul-Momineen, Mullah Mohammad Omar and 'Sheikh' Osama bin Laden on the run, the Talibans' barbaric rule in Afghanistan appears to have finally ended. That's unless some divine force intercedes on behalf of the Mullah and the ''Sheikh''- both are self-confessed agents of God- and persuades the Afghan warlords to give play to their personal ambitions, a game they are very adept at. One saw the beginnings of it in Kandahar after Mullah Omar and his band melted away into the unknown, in the jungle terrain of the neighbouring mountains, when at least three warlords staked their claim to the country's most important city. Some deft handling of the situation by Hamid Karzai, the designated head of the new interim regime in Afghanistan, appears to have averted a crisis for the present, but given their strong tribal loyalties-forget the ethnic loyalties for the present- the Afghan scene can at the very best of times be extremely volatile.

I am not just now talking of Gen Rashid Dostum's reported disappointment at having been left out of the interim arrangement. A good omen on that account was his presence at the reopening, after five years, of the Friendship Bridge on Uzbek Afghanistan border, after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. The bridge will be a virtual lifeline for the starving people of the North and north-eastern Afghanistan.

That the Karzai administration, when it takes over on December 22, will be up against insurmountable odds is well understood by the international community and the men who spent some ten days hammering out the accord at Koeingswater in Bonn in West Germany. That's why a 17-member special expert team has been provided for, to guide the new administration in the basics of administration. The Karzai administration has literally to build up from scratch. The Taliban have destroyed every single institution. Some government departments, if any at all, exist in name only under nomenclatures which even a George Orwell would find hard to comprehend.

Thus the Ministry of Finance has no finances, no records and even the so-called Central Bank doesn't know what it is expected to do. The Taliban, God-fearing men as they are, took away all the money, mostly foreign currency, that they could lay their hands on. After all, all wealth belongs to Allah! There is a stock exchange of sorts that has reappeared but it is more like an open-air mart for money-changers. If the Afghani, the Afghan currency, has marginally picked up in Kabul after the Taliban left, it speaks highly of the resilence of the people. And the Afghans are truly very resilient. I remember at the height of the Soviet invasion of the country in January 1980, walking down the streets of Kabul, as Soviet tanks and armed personnel carrier trundled by, being told by my guide-cum-taxi driver not even to look at the Ruskis----- ''ignore them'', he admonished----- and instead concentrate on the job which at the moment was to locate the cable office. The office was non-functional but Malang, that's the name I was asked to call him by, had a ready-made answer. ''Let's go the airport (still functioning) and you may find some passenger who will carry your message to Delhi''. Even the awesome presence of Russian Security men at the airport did not worry him- until he found an Indian for me to talk to. That kind of presence of mind or call it investiveness gives me hope that the Afghans, with the help of the international community, may pull it off this time, warlords willing.

I have known Sati Lambah, our special envoy for Afghanistan, for over three decades. A most consummate diplomat and a former Ambassador to Moscow, Pakistan and Germany, Lambah is not the type to get flustered easily. Nor does he seek the limelight as many of his peers in the Foreign Service would. His presence in Bonn during the Afghan talks was welcomed by most and he did by all accounts do well on the sidelines and within the limitations of his assignment. But what beats me is the hoo-ha the Indian media made over the fact that Hamid Karzai, the designated new Afghan leader, did is post-graduation from Himachal University. I have known in my time of many Jordanians, Africans et al studying at Indian universities and not in the 80s as Karzai did but in the 50s- and some of them rose to high positions in their countries. So what if Karzai studies at Himachal University? So many Indians in pre and post-independence years have studied at Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale etc. Does that make them super humans or does that make them Brits or Yankees? I know in Karzai's case, it is our age-old Kabuliwallah complex at work. The truth is that Karzai is a sensible man in his mid-40s, he heads a major Pushtun tribe and obviously his father wanted him to complete his post-graduation before the Soviets established a total stranglehold on Afghanistan. Karzai went back home after acquiring his degree at a time when the Mujahideen were busy fighting the Soviet invaders.

Similarly, it ill behoves a mature nation like ours to make such a song and dance over the Afghan Minister designate for Interior, Mr Qanooni, when he comes to Delhi almost directly from Bonn at the conclusion of the talks there. I am afraid both our media and politicians have this tiring tendency to overplay ordinary occurencies. In Mr Qanooni's case it so happens that his ageing father, his brother and their family, have been living in Delhi for the past few years. As an oriental it was only natural for Qanooni to call on his father after the success of the mission in Bonn. Again, there was nothing sensational in Qanooni meeting the Indian Home Minister L K Advani. It was a courtesy call which the designated Interior Minister of Afghanistan paid on his Indian counterpart. It was good that he made that call.

What surprises me is not that the media went berserk over the Qanooni visit, but the numberless implications they invested the call on Advani with. Some saw him seeking advice on administrative matters others on how to police the liberated Afghanistan. This last, did amuse me somewhat. Imagine someone seeking advice on policing from an Indian Home Minister, a country shaken by insurrectionary movements for decades, where the crime graph hardly ever shows any sign of a downward dip.

And about a week after Qanooni's visit we are informed by one of the newspapers that an Indian police team might be assigned to Kabul to help Afghanistan reorganise its police force. I hope this is not true. For whatever chance Afghanistan may have of putting together an efficient police force for the country- a very hard task indeed-it would evaporate the moment on Indian team goes there. I don't know how highly our police rates itself but it must, in my view, come very low if a merit list were to be drawn. For one thing they are guided by outdated, antedeluvian codes of law which, if anything, breed lethargy and corruption, a luxury Afghanistan can ill afford. Then, for the sake of their readers, why don't our media check out on the task assigned to the 17-member expert panel set up by the UN for Afghanistan. One of these is to build up a police force for the newly liberated nation. That does not leave much room for Mr Advani or his police to enter the Afghan scene. It's something else if the UN panel asks India to provide help but I doubt it will. It's one thing for Indians to assure the new Afghan administration that it has a friend in this country but quite another to act in a manner that is seen as patronising. Afghans are too proud a people to accept that.

Indianness is an anathema here'.......
Yours Randomly

Dr R. L. Bhat

India must be the only country in the world that considers everything except being Indian as the true expression of the Indian essence. Indian historians are the only specimens of the tribe who have little patience for the ideas, things and ethos of India. Indian intellectual are perhaps the only ones of the species in the world who are dismissive of the assertions of Indianness its culture and greatness. Indian politicians too are there with these peers of theirs and are busy trashing the Indian essences and elements in their thoughts, acts and politicks. On the face of it they are all for India but dig a bit deeper and you find that the base is all ‘foreign’ there. It is foreign not in the sense of being perceptive of the modern thinking in the wider world but phoren in the sense of being subservient to the alien interests and agendas. From the cares of Arab supra-Nationalism, to lauding British imperialism... err, intellectualism, on to the obligation of loyalties to the Communism of Russian and Chinese varieties, the Indian intellectual carries a baggage all alien.

Take the 'origin of the Indian civilization’. It is irrevocably linked to the Aryans, Vedas and Indus Valley, in an order that may yet have to be established. Indeed, the original place of Aryans, the writing of Vedas and the time and tides that swept over the Indus Valley Civilization are all issues open to high debate at present. The world- over the theory of the central Asian origins of the Aryans, as the British imperial/missionary historians taught it, is being rejected. The basis or the ‘proofs’ for the hypothesis, of the Aryans having come from somewhere outside and 'conquered' the local populations here, have been shown to be defective and inadequate. The chronology that the researchers in the Raj era imposed upon the Indian history and its landmarks is widely, being questioned all over the world. Yet the Indian historians are not only, sworn-supporters of the Raj theory but are still interpreting of the country in its terms.

Similarly many assumptions have been made about the social history of the country - its culture and ethos, languages and customs -over the past hundred years. At times they were made with defective instruments and on the basis of understandings that have, over the years, been proved to be incorrect. Thus the broad staging of the rise of the human civilization from ‘hunter-gather’ to ‘pastoral’ or agricultural and ‘urban’ has come under serious question after recent reevaluation of the archeological evidence from a number of places. From China to Italy, to the finds in India and Africa everything points to the fallacy of the assumptions about this staging as well as the presumed chronology of the stages. The beginnings of human civilization that, a few years ago, did not go beyond four or five thousand years before the Christian era, is now reckoned as extending at least ten or fifteen thousand years back in the past.

In no case are the four ancient centers of civilization namely, Indus, Huang Ho, Euphrates and Nile, taken as the earliest of these. There is pointed evidence to show that the history of human society and ethos goes much further. This is almost in line to what the Vedas insisted upon and Indian lore and memory reiterated. The Raj historians just dismissed them as either fantasies or fictions, which had no ‘proof in their eyes. Sometimes this rejection was ‘sincere’ being a result of the defective understanding and instruments of those times. At other times, there was a deliberate attempt to adhere to the chosen pictures as they helped the larger interest of the empire. Thus the great linguist Grierson invented the theory of ‘waves of Aryan immigration to support an unfounded Iranian base for the origin of the Kashmiri language. Now the imperial slant in many of these conclusions has become apparent and the defects of understandings in others have been, or are being, corrected.

But not in India. The British imperial agendas have found great sticklers in the legions of ‘intellectuals’ they left behind. These men and women are still propagating those weak beliefs even when the original propounders have rejected them. Thus they insist upon the racial explanation of the caste system even though the original theories that lead to this set of explanation are no longer valid historical truths or correct sociological explanations. Likewise, the accepted theories of the development, descent and evolution, and of the whole group of Indo-European languages are not thought to be correct representation of how it might have occurred. The spread of languages and their influences are believed to be more complex than the simplistic model of linguistic groups conquering regions and peoples. Yet the Indian linguists, historians, sociologists and intellectuals are insistent upon adhering to them and interpreting the Indian society, its evolution and stratification in their light.

It is remarkable that all these ‘understandings’ and ‘theories’, when they came, generally trashed the Indian character of the sub-continental ethos. One said that there were no true Indians; the other ‘proved’ that the Indian society had been unjust since times immemorial, and yet others showed that there was nothing that could be called Indian in a true sense. This suited the British. It also suited the Islamists like Sir Syed. But how it came to suit the Indians themselves is a story more wondrous than any ever told. While the former looked to lands and shores away from India, the intellectuals looked up to ideals that had nothing to do with India. India, indeed, appeared a stumbling block that almost disproved those ‘truths’ and, therefore, had to be crushed. And they have been doing it assiduously over the past century or so. They are all Indians yet being Indian is an anathema to them.