ON OBAMA'S PRESIDENTIAL CHALLENGES
It took the descendants of black slaves 400 years to produce Dr Martin Luther King. It took John F. Kennedy's intervention and four generations of education to produce his successor Barack Obama. It is tribute to the American system that it could make a public holiday out of a Dr King's public assassination, and that it could swear-in a black as the 44th President of the United States.
No black slave ever entered life with more shackles than does President Barack Obama. He has every moment of every day to earn the respect of every white American who did not vote for him. He has to repay the confidence millions of his fellow-tinted Americans have placed in him to consummate their mandate.
He has to repair a bankrupt economy, salvage insolvent behemoths in the automotive industry, rescue banks from their own previous follies, and convince the American public that it cannot spend indefinitely beyond its own means and beyond the resources of other countries.
Perhaps the most difficult challenge President Obama faces is to persuade the military octopus whose tentacles radiate from the Pentagon that it is as much a victim of the recession as the rest of America's less lethal industries.
Today, wars are not fought for territorial gain. Battles are not fought for valour or aggrandisement. Troops are sent into conflict not to test their endurance. They are sent as guinea pigs to test the effectiveness of the software they carry on their backs and the hardware they carry in their arms.
How else can military contractors be kept in business, if the goods they manufacture with relentless regularity are not used up? How else do the Dick Cheneys of this world live if their friends in dark corners do not make landmines and rockets?
Of all the countries in the world in which the use of arms is still an integral part of its diplomacy, India is perhaps the one least hostage to its armament industry — Bofors notwithstanding. India's Presidents do not shed tears — even after the Sino-Indian war — as Kennedy was found doing after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. India's military knows that it is not an alternative Government, nor a Government within a Government. If it is a Government it is a Government contained within a cantonment.
That is in a sense what provides security in the last resort to its neighbours like Pakistan. However noisily sabres may rattle and however loudly tanks may rumble, there is a sense of security that war will be the last resort, the final abyss after the terra firma of diplomacy. No one in Pakistan has any illusion that the nerves of India are raw and inflamed. No amount of rhetoric and no number of resignations in the Pakistan set-up are likely to assuage the deep sense of hurt and outrage felt by Indians.
Whether that pent-up rage erupts now or years from now, the 1971 war had its genesis in the dugouts of the inconclusive 1965 war, friends of India hope that wiser counsels will prevail where the military dares to tread. Within Pakistan, battles are already being fought on too many fronts for yet another to be opened. We have too many amorphous enemies, too many intangible evasive demons to grapple with for us to take on a larger, better-equipped adversary.
Day by day, the schisms within our own body politic are making it all the more apparent to rational Pakistanis that the clash of civilisations exists not simply in Samuel Huntington's mind. A conflict is raging between reason and religion, with dogma becoming a weapon instead of a tool towards better understanding. Religious extremism cannot be vanquished by half-hearted liberalism. It takes more than drawing-room platitudes to counteract determined fascism.
Whatever demons beset Pakistan, have a parallel in India. Extremism in any country is no virtue, and resistance to it is no vice. Fortunately we do not have Hindu extremists on our side of the border. It has taken India over 60 years to produce a Bal Thackeray. One wonders how long it will take to produce his antidote.
[COVERT MAGAZINE, New Delhi, 1-15 February 2009]
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