A Music to Musharraf's ears
Men, Matters, Memories

By M L Kotru

I don’t know why, but 1 am beginning to feel sorry for Pakistan’s military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Not that he needs any sympathy. He, as you, 1 and he himself knows, is a very clever man. Remember the day he outflanked Indian policy makers with that remarkable offer of unconditional assistance to the US- led coalition in its campaign against the Taliban and their guest, the most wanted man by the Americans, Osama bin Laden. New Delhi was, of course, the first to offer support but then the politics and geography of the situation made the Pakistani offer irresistibly attractive. Gen Musharraf was on a song thereafter. He worked relentlessly on his own people, cutting across the broadly secular spectrum of public opinion in his country; he convinced his own Corps Commanders of the advantages that would accrue to Pakistan as a consequence; and his money-wise American-trained Finance Minister clearly saw dollars cascading into the empty coffers of his Government. The Islamists were quietly confined to their houses or challenged on the streets. Musharraf quickly saw himself adored by the Americans, headed by George Bush himself and Tony Blair who until only the other day had looked upon him as a pariah, a military dictator who had overturned democracy in his country. Many leaders from distant shores came acalling and Bush received him in New York with unmistakable warmth. Musharraf suddenly was a performer on the world stage. He advised Bush to halt bombing of Afghanistan during the holy month of Ramzan; he asked that moderate Taliban (as if such a thing ever existed) be found room in the new dispensation in Afghanistan; he advised that the Northern Alliance should be shunned and in no case be allowed to come anywhere near Kabul.

Bush encouraged Musharraf into believing that Pakistan was a frontline State in the battle against terrorism. It was music to Musharrafs ears. For he would no longer be asked to answer the strident Indian cries of Pakistan being a sponsor of terrorism. The Pakistan leader looked very impressed indeed, with himself and by those whom he had spoken to in Washington, Paris, Turkey and all those who visited him in Islamabad. But then there was that annoying push by the Northern Alliance, supported by massive American air support, towards southern Afghanistan. The Tajiks, Uzbeks, the Hazaras and even the Pushtuns in Jalalabad, were making menancing advances. Musharraf, remember, had just before September 11 tried to convince the Americans that talking to Taliban directly may not be a bad idea. Around the time Musharraf was celebrating, the Russians also decided to get into the act and they, not surprisingly, chose to back the Northern Alliance. Putin meantime went to Washington and onto that famous visit to the Bush ranch. Putin’s reaction to the September 11 terrorist assaults on the US had already persuaded the American leader that Putin had finally understood that the cold war was finally over and that a new strategic bargain could be had. In Texas Putin confirmed Bush’s belief He avoided a standoff with Bush on limited missile defences and instead used the anti-terrorism campaign to gain an unexpected diplomatic opening to show that Russia is a country worth doing business with. Putin also discovered that Americans were willing not to mention Russia’s record in Chechnya, its human rights record and indeed that he may even get access to Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. In fact by the time Putin returned home from Texas, there was talk already of better working relations between NATO and Russia. Simultaneously, Putin offered his country’s total support to the US in its Afghan campaign. And taking advantage of the nervousness of the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union over the Taliban phenomenon, he offered his good offices with-the nations of the region. All of it put together made the Northern Alliance a reliable ally; it would keep up the pressure on ground while the US put the heat on by exercising its massive air power. Bush was flush with excitement the day Kabul fell. He did, for the record, hope that the Alliance would not take over Kabul but didn’t quite disapprove of it when it did happen.

Americans do agree with the view held by almost the entire membership of the UN that the new government in Afghanistan should be a broadbased one, representing all the ethnic strands, including the Pushtuns who are the most dominant of all the groups. But then the Pakistani view that Pushtuns, because of their numbers, should have a dominant say, got punctured when a leading Pushtun leader argued that Pushtun is the language of the tribes inhabiting Southern Afghanistan. Pushtun thus denoted the linguistic base alone and not the diversity of the tribes that are covered by the word Pushtun. Each Pushtun tribe has its own distinctive flavour. This does not mean that Pushtuns can be kept -out of an overall arrangement for the future governance of the wartorn country. On the contrary, any such arrangement is doomed to fail.

The UN special envoy for Afghanistan early this week clarified that leaders of all Afghan factions would be asked to attend a consultative meeting at a place outside the country. The Northern Alliance leader and "de jure" President of the country, Burhanuddin Rabbani and his Foreign Minister, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah sensibly fell in line with the UN representative after initially trying to act as the de facto functionaries. The best bet for an interim coalition to materialise at the moment seems to be the former King Zahir Shah, the 86-year-old monarch who has been living in exile in Rome since mid-70s. Zahir Shah is a Pushtun who, even when he may not be the most popular Afghan, is still the least controversial of them all. The King has already said that if he returns to Kabul he will do so not as a King but as a servant of the people. The outlines of a final arrangement should start revealing themselves later this week once the venue for a meeting of faction leaders has been found.

This brings me back to Gen Musharraf, the man who asked India to lay off Afghanistan, believing, as he did, that Kabul was his little backyard over which Islamabad had held sway for more than a decade. In the event, Musharraf had counted his chicks even before they were hatched. In the power play involving the biggies like the US, Russia and EU, Musharraf found himself marginalised. One thing that might have gone against him though is the picture of the Taliban’s awesome might which he had projected before the Americans struck back after September 11. While the ISI may have kept up the Talibans supplies of arms and ammunition throughout, the Pakistani belief that Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden could fight on for another decade or so has turned out to be woefully off the mark. The relief in Washington over the collapse of Kabul and of Taliban resistance is visible. The alacrity with which young Afghans rushed to the nearest barber shops to shave off their beards, to buy music systems and TV sets, wherever possible, must have come as a shocking revelation to the Islamists who saw the Taliban and the AI Qaeda as the "future Islam."

Musharraf has shown remarkable sangfroid in the face of an obvious discomfiture. He has continued to come down heavily on the extremists, is harping on a brighter future for his countrymen as a consequence of the alliance with Americans and has been seen even speaking less critically of mainstream politicians. The danger, however, is that an extremist backlash, should it materialise, might persuade him to embark on a misadventure in Jammu and Kashmir.

That would be an awful mistake. As Putin discovered in his talks with George Bush, there is a consensus now that maps of nations cannot be redrawn any more. Nor will Musharraf pet theory that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter hold good. No more. The coming weeks will see the US President doing a most unusual thing: putting pressure on Israel to let the Palestinians live in peace. He is not going to take kindly to any attempt by Pakistan to cause a flare up in the sub-continent. This is not to say that the two countries should not settle down to the business of finding a solution to the Kashmir problem, one that does not add to the existing tensions. The Kashmiris too have drawn their own lessons from the Taliban fiasco and they certainly would not allow Pakistan or its surrogates to convert Kashmir into another Afghanistan. Musharraf may yet see the wisdom of turning the line of control into an International boundary. That could well open a new era in the lives of the people of the sub-continent.

Suave westerners, naive Indians........
Yours Randomly

By Dr. R. Bhat

Kipling had said it graphically: west is west and east is east/ and never the twain shall meet. We called him a racist and dismissed him not without reading and imbibing all the jungle books he wrote about us. Of course, all his bhalus, shersinghs, langdas and mogli-meaning-frog were we, as conceived by the racist in the poet. Those images still persist there in the west. More than the snake charmers it is these jungle-tales that have formed the stereotype for Indians there. Others races they considered even baser. As we, tried to ape the west they kept seeing us as vindications of the Kipling's monkeys doing the manly tricks. The robust Indian democracy does not deserve even a respectable mention in their perceptions. The traditions and lore are enchanting snake charmers' tales and the justices and propriety here are taken as crude copies of their innovations. Nor has the fact that the tribes in American Wild West were called '.....Indians' helped. It only strengthened the stereotype, which forms the basis of the western perception even today. Thus it comes to pass that Indian cricketers are naturally suspect, Indian science is by definition mediocre, and Indian administration is inefficient.

Not that there is not much to be desired in the Indian profile in these fields. But that is because of the innate Indian penchant for perfection, not because of any failing in the standards by comparison. Of course, many people would point to the high level of efficacy that has been attained in the west. That may be so. It, in fact, would have been a surprise had the occident not excelled in these matters of the world. They have been stressing the here-and-now in life, philosophy and even religion for ages. That perspective helps in building a strong materialist base. And they have built it. But when it comes to things thereafter, they have been shown to be hugely deficient. That is why there is more cynicism in the west than anywhere else. Or, should we say there was? The victory of the west has been that it has fully conquered our visions and world-views and replaced it with theirs. Today we measure success by their standards and find ourselves wanting. We find our ethos empty when it does not fill bellies and we grow cynical when we find the well-fed westerns roaming around aimlessly.

Since we have rejected our values on emulation of the alien cultures, the Indian ethos is not able to satisfy us. We feel like laughing on seeing the plump westerners seeking nirvana in the skimpy Indian jungles. And grow more cynical, more dismissive of everything. Of course, the first thing that we dismissed was the nation and its ethos. Now that the west has dismissed itself we have nothing to fall back upon. There is a void and the Indian is hanging by a thread. He ridicules the ones sticking to the Indian nationalism, because the masters have 'shown' that thing to be hollow. He rejects the other as the 'master' himself is roaming naked in search. No wonder we find no succor, nothing to salvage. That is how the Indian intellectual comes to loath progress as well as spiritualism. He dismissed POTO as well as the terrorism. He finds nothing to love, to revere in anything and laughs at all appeals to self.

Then comes a graphic illustration. A whole America, which he supposed was steeped in liberty and rationalism, becomes a vindicitive avenger who would not stop at anything. A single warning turns the whole American media into a mouthpiece of the foreign office. A single excess by an Indian cricketer calls up all the rules in the rulebook. A single blast by India calls up all the sanctions there are in the non-proliferation treaty, which incidentally American Congress has rejected as unsuitable! The naive India is baffled how the paragon of equalities could act so iniquitously. He calls it 'racialism' as he called Kipling racist, in an attempt to isolate the disease and save his model west. And finds that the entire west is so oriented. But so deep is the slavery to the west that he does not believe in his own perceptions. And becomes an iconoclast bent upon breaking all idols. Mind it is not the dubious idols of west he attacks. Arundati Roy, for example, stays in the atom-stubbed America and comes to denounce the odd Indian blast. She stays with the America attacking Afghanistan and tells us to love terrorists.

Her companions in India keep the flag high. They keep damning dams here, while they tell us at the same time how inefficient we are in not harnessing the full potential of energy we have. They keep castigating the Indians for caste and inequalities, while the open racialism in the west is not seen and hence never commented upon. They criticize India for being a police State and ignore how closed agreed country like America got a single terrorist attack. In fact, so sauve have the westerners been in this smooth talking to the naive Indians that it is difficult even to point to that double standard. America did not tarry a day after its terrorist attack yet has been asking India to restrain herself, for ten long years. It again counseled India about that very restraint, while it wrecked its vengeance over Afghanistan. And we agreed. Just as the international Cricket committee says that the rules would not be changed and we may end up agreeing. And allowing the superficially polite west to get away with yet another deep hurt inflicted upon our dignity. And it is not only in cricket that we are doing it. We are pocketing indignities all over. And keeping suitably silent in our naivete while they pile one suave trick on another, smartly. The tricks of pure racism, pure selfishness, pure chauvinism.