| History has no option but to repeat itself, because it finds every generation of leaders does no better than imitate the mistakes of its predecessors. And this is no truer than in the subcontinent where yet another generation of leadership – successors to Ayub Khan and Jawaharlal Nehru/Lal Bahadur Shastri, and to Indira Gandhi and Yahya Khan – has chosen to revive previous confrontations and to bring their countries again to the crumbling brink of war. History is not being re-lived so much as re-enacted by another set of actors, using the same costumes. In 1965 as in 1971, an elected Hindu politician wearing a dhoti is again pitted against a Muslim self-appointed president in military uniform. |
| The 1965 war - the war that was not necessary - ended with the Tashkent declaration of 10 January 1966 in which both parties, with more optimism than sincerity, undertook not to have recourse to force and to adhere to the principles of non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. The 1971 war – the war that was inevitable - began when India had decided to dismember a disconnected Pakistan. |
| Today, thirty years later, many of the key players of that earlier time– Mrs Gandhi, Yahya Khan, Mujibur Rahman, Richard Nixon, Zhou Enlai and Kosygin - whose decisions affected the lives of so many millions of citizens in India, Pakistan, and the prospective Bangladesh are no longer alive, with the possible exception of Dr Henry Kissinger, then Special Assistant to President Richard Nixon for National Security Affairs. Although his involvement with the subsequent disintegration of relations between India and Pakistan since 1971 has been negligible, he would undoubtedly recall the elements of what Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – the Iago to Yahya’s Othello – described as ‘The Great Tragedy’ |
Published in Dawn, 8 June 2002, titled: The more they seem to change, and reprintd in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006) |
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