ON MUMBAI ATTACKS





Nationality should be a distinction, a badge that distinguishes. Today, it has become a political slur. As a Pakistani Muslim, I feel within me stirrings of empathy with the Jews in Nazi Germany who were forced to wear a yellow Star of David, to advertise that they were not Aryans but belonged to a lower genus of humanity.


The recent focus on the nationality of Ajmal Kasab (the only surviving terrorist of the Mumbai bombing) makes me uneasy and uncomfortable. I was expected to believe that a five member FBI team that visited Fareedkot early this month affirmed unequivocally that Kasab was not a Pakistani. Whether the hapless Americans intended it or not, their report was put to good use by the Pakistan Government that felt its position had been exonerated.


I was expected to believe the repeated denials by the Pakistan Government. I am now expected to believe the unexpected denouement. On 7th January, various government officials (some of whom preferred to remain anonymous) admitted that Kasab was in fact a Pakistani. A news channel broke their story. The Pakistani Foreign Secretary Salman Bashir issued a denial. Then the Prime Minister's National Security Adviser Major General (Retd.) confirmed Kasab's nationality. Durrani lost his job and Kasab gained consular access.


The whole episode reminds one of the absurdity of the FBI's bungling over the identity of Lee Harvey Oswald, President John F. Kennedy's assassin. By the time the media had exhausted its camera footage over the details fed to it by the FBI, we knew more about Oswald's Russian mother-in-law than we did about whether it was Oswald or a sharper marksman hidden behind a grassy knoll who killed Kennedy.


No rational Pakistani male or female endorses the carnage that occurred in Mumbai, no more than any Russian Soviet would have welcomed Kennedy's murder over forty years ago. Mumbai was not simply a crime against human beings; it was a violation of every finer instinct that distinguishes us from animals. Those instincts are what bind ordinary Indians and Pakistanis to each other as fellow human beings.


I feel disquiet that governments should use nationality as a weapon in statecraft. Kasab's crime was an act of terrorism. It would not have been less heinous an act, had he been Mongolian or Tibetan or Mauritian. The insistence that he was a Pakistani seems to shield a motive that is invisible to the naked eye of ordinary citizens such as myself.


It is a reflection of India's cohesion as a state that when threatened – whether by conventional armies or by unconventional adversaries such as terrorists – the country pulls together. The media, public opinion, the intelligentsia pull together. It is a sad truism that when confronted by similar odds, Pakistanis fall apart.


Major General Mahmud Durrani's unceremonious dismissal by Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani is the most recent example of such structural fragility. While it is difficult to see what other option the beleaguered premier could have had – he could not have continued with a leaking National Security Adviser – the swiftness of the dismissal has made one realize how many power centres operate often independently of each other in Islamabad.


The Pakistani public will need to take this shifting paradigm into account when approaching its selection of a government at the next general elections. A voter casting his vote will be doing so not simply for one political party but for a shadow government representing myriad interests.


Not for us the example of the United Kingdom where a Shadow Cabinet functions as an alternate government, a phalanx of stand-ins being groomed to take over when they swop aisles in the House of Commons. Our shadow cabinet remains in power, it seems, regardless of who is in government.


Over the years, Pakistanis have learned to become obsessive optimists. There is no other way for them to survive. Had they not believed in a better future, they could not have endured the past that they have. As tempers cool on either side of the border and missiles gather a film of dust, one can only pray that wiser counsels will prevail. To paraphrase Khalil Gibran, such wisdom should not be either in the cradle or in the grave.





[COVERT magazine, 16-31 January 2009]