ON THE ATTACK ON SRI LANKAN CRICKETERS IN LAHORE, 3 MARCH 2009





Yes, I know that India is over 5000 years old. Yes, I am aware of India’s claim to being the world’s first proto-secular society and of its achievements as the world’s largest democracy, but would modern India please grow up?


Nothing detracts from the pseudo-maturity of a nation than its inability to live up to its own lofty ideals. Nothing diminishes the stature of a state than its determination to wield a stick instead of an olive branch.


In the 1960s, Paki-bashing in the United Kingdom for a while threatened to out-strip football as a national sport. Earlier, migrant Indians had found common ground with migrant Pakistanis in the streets of Southall and Oldham, sharing the same food and films in seedy cinema houses or odour-sodden restaurants located off main roads. Then, they began distancing themselves from their fellow Pakistani migrants. The border created by a UK government from the Indian Himalayas to the Indian Ocean gradually extended across the United Kingdom. The South Asian political divide split the British High Street.


Today, the South Asian migrant in the UK – whether from India, Bangladesh or from Pakistan – has been able to sublimate his incipient prejudices under the common cloak of a red British passport. The Indian left behind in India has not. Paki-bashing seems to have become a national sport in India, and as a Pakistani I find that uncomfortable and disquieting.


I have written earlier that rational Pakistanis share the grief India feels over the Mumbai attacks. If Indians feel that any such expression is a tacit, self-conscious admission of guilt by association, they are wrong. I condemn the Mumbai attack because it was wrong. It was an unconscionable violation of every norm of civilized behaviour and any standard of compassionate humanism.


Like-wise, I condemn the attack on 3 March on a convoy of cricketers in Lahore. That they happened to be a visiting cricket team from Sri Lanka is to miss the point. The attack resulted in the death of Pakistanis. That surely deserves a tear. Did they too not bleed to death? Or does the blood of every dying Pakistani, like the demon Rakta-vijya in the Devi-Mahatmya, coagulate into yet another terrorist asura?


If I condemn that attack in Mumbai and the attack in Lahore, I deplore the resultant attacks by the Indian Government and the Indian press on my country. I find an obsession growing in India centred on its own tragedies. Like Queen Victoria after the death of her beloved consort Prince Albert when she found solace in self-pitying grief, India has begun wallowing in its own lachrymose traumas.


One cannot change the mind-set of a billion people especially when that is being nourished by a single-minded policy that puts a premium on Paki-bashing. One realises that Paki-bashing remains a potent ingredient in Indian domestic politics. One wishes though that someone in authority in India would admit that they foment hatred of Pakistan not because they need to, but because they want to.


Pakistanis are not a species of savages that have to be tamed by diplomatic homilies and retaliatory reprimands by RAW. We too drop our children at school, we too hope that they make it alive to university, we too work for a meagre living, we too fall sick and we too grow old. We too die.


I believe it an increasingly pressing imperative that people on both sides of every border to peel away the layers of rhetoric that obfuscate the truth. Beneficiating terrorist attacks with the label of a War on Terrorism is to escape from the real truth. Should not someone be asking how such attacks are paid for? Who can afford to finance them? We know as victims we cannot afford their effect? But who pays for the cause?


Once upon a time, a once upon a time Princess Diana found a role prodding tentatively at landmines. The press applauded her bravery. No-one asked who manufactured those millions and millions of landmines, and where? Who made millions and millions from that lethal manufacture? If any-one knows, tell the maimed and the dying. They deserve to know.





[COVERT magazine, New Delhi, 16-31 March 2009]