Sunday, 03 April, 2011
By Anum Yousaf
“B
eta, taalay toh dil ki tassalli kay liey hotay h a i n … Lutaray toh warna joh chahay loot latay hain” (Son, these locks are for our own sake..they don’t stop looters from looting) This is what Kuldip Nayar’s mother told him when she locked her precious shahtoos shawl as they departed from Sialkot to India at the height of Hindu-Muslim tensions during the Partition of the subcontinent. And this is one of the many incidents that the seasoned journalist shared with a panel of students and former ambassadors headed by Mr Shahryar M Khan and Babur Ali Syed at LUMS last week. Kuldip Nayar was visitingPakistan with an Indian delegation as a goodwill mission to meet and greet people on this side of the border and this short talk at LUMS was part of this cultural exchange. As Mr Khan put it, the aim was to facilitate meeting with civil society members and have Mr Nayar address students interested in foreign affairs and student activisim. Mr Nayar started his talk with fond reminisces of his time in Pakistan before they migrated to Pakistan and said that no matter where he lived, his hometown Sialkot had a special place in his heart. The town of Sialkot had 70 percent Muslims and 30 percent Hindus, almost all of which migrated in parts before, after or during the Partition. He recounted that his parents came later and they were boarding a train from Narowal when a Muslim boy stopped them and said that “yeh sab kat jai gi” (This will be carnage). That boy took Mr Nayar’s parents home, gave them boarding and lodging for a couple of days before leading them to a train which was sure to reach India safely. At the beginning of the talk, Mr Shahryar Khan posed a question, which he said his students kept repeatedly posing to him, to Mr Nayar who then used it as springboard for his entire talk and used it as a framework to discuss India-Pakistan relations and the outstanding issues that are hindrances in amicable relations between the two countries at loggerheads. The question was that France and Germany have fought many bitter wars and have a much longer history of animosity than Pakistan and India. Yet they had learned to love with their differences and co-exist not only cordially but have increased their bilateral co-operation over the years. Kuldip Nayar then narrated that the same example was quoted by Jinnah when he visited Mr Nayar’s college while he was still a student of law. Kuldip Nayar, then a young man, had wondered outloud to Jinnah if Pakistan and India could ever be friends to which Jinnah replied that France and Germany were the worst of enemies but they are now the best of friends. We, too, shall be best of friends. We shall be like the USA and Canada. But Kuldip Nayar appended this anecdote with the fact that Jinnah did not live long and this
The past is another country was one of the major reasons why India-Pakistan relations turned out as they did. Liaquat Ali Khan was also assassinated and the problems of Pakistan after that are well-documented and continuous interruptions from military rule did not let a Pakistani leadership take shape. According to him, Pakistan’s crisis of leadership was a huge factor because the vision of the country died with its leadership and it is the leadership of the country which provides it with direction. To illustrate, he quoted Gandhi who said “Hindus and Muslims are my two eyes in my system” and Nehru who used to say that “India cannot be a democracy if it is not secular.” He stressed that he was not whitewashing over India’s mistakes as a democracy (such as
as a country afford seccession, whether its Tamil Nadu, Khalistan, the Valley or any other state. He then made a proposal for the solution of the issues. Indianheld Kashmir and Pakistancontrolled Kashmircould be given full autonomy as autonomous regions except for the portfolios of defence and foreign relations. The autonomous regions could even have trade, independent currencies etc. The LOC would be a soft border allowing Kashmiris from both Kashmirs to cross easily into the other side. He further stated that Pakistan-held Kashmir would have a representative in the Indian Lok Sabha whereas Indian-held Kashmir would have a representative in the Pakistani parliament. This would ensure that the system functions smoothly
rioting, discrimination etc) but he wanted to highlight the fact that the democratic experiment had continued unabated there and was allowed to take root. He then moved on to discuss the two thorniest issues in PakIndia relations: Kashmir and the water dispute. Beginning with the Kashmir issue, Mr Nayar said that he blamed Pakistan for the problem. There was a slight ripple of discomfort around the room filled with bleeding hearts but Mr Nayar went on to explain. He said Pakistan had exhibited more impatience than India with regards to the issue of Kashmir. He said that the argument that Kashmir was a ‘Muslim’ state did not hold sway as India was constitutionally a secular democracy and a judicial decision protected this status and not even the Lok Sabha could overturn India’s status as a secular democracy. He said, according to India, Kashmir had legally ceded to India and Sardar Patel had made some kind of offer to Pakistan as well which didn’t pan out and all of this is history now. What he stressed was that India has so many Muslims, probably more than in Pakistan. Thus, the fact that Kashmir was a Muslim state is an argument that didn’t hold sway with the Indians. He said that India will never give up Kashmir as it cannot
and the autonomous regions can raise their voices in a legitimate manner in the highest forum in the other country. He said that this solution would be a hard-sell to everybody. But he kept stressing that the past is in the past and both countries had a hard time of letting things go. They keep fixating on the fact that Partition took place, wars took place, the genesis of the Kashmir dispute etc. He said that but those were all matters bygone now and it is the right time to move forward. Since his generation had made so many mistakes, he said that it was the turn of the youth in both countries to step up to the mantle and stop being angry young men about things past. Talking about the Indus Water Treaty, he said that it was the fruit of long hard labour by many intelligent technocrats but it had some serious flaws. Stressing that water is a global not a local issue, he proposed that the best longterm solution would be integrated development of the Indus Basin. Why share three and three rivers amongst ourselves when both countries can benefit from all the six together and help the entire region develop. He said that Indian democracy had its shares of warts too but it was the best system for a pluralistic country like India. While he was stationed as Indian
High Comissioner in London, Ms Thatcher told Mr Nayar that her country’s problems were out of her hand. He then proudly told her that look at India; so many different castes, religions, ethnicities and yet it was functioning. When she pressed for a straighter answer, he said that India existed in shades of grey instead of black-and-white. He again stressed that there was a lot of discontent in India and communal harmony was often disrupted but the spirit of democracy persisted. He said that a society that lets people get away with murder was badly affected and both India and Pakistan must learn this to establish better relations. He said he met Benazir Bhutto a few months before her assaination and she asked him what India could give Pakistan and vice versa? Mr Nayar replied that Pakistan could give India secularism and India could give Pakistan democracy. He said that she had expressed her desire to make South Asia borderless but that is not going to take place anytime soon where the security paradigms and military spending in both countries persists. He concluded with the hope that the young generation could bury the past and take up the issues since his generation had failed. Responding to a student who brought up the mistakes of his generation, he said that that was precisely his point. The new generation needs to move forward and those that blame the elder generation has given up before they have even tried. He said that he was one of the few people who lit candles at Wagah for peace 17 years ago and was ridiculed as a ‘senile Pakistani agent’ but now, people showed up in droves to do it. He said that his generation might not live to see it, but South Asia may yet become like the EU. The ifs and buts of history need to be forgotten. Whereas the talk was a great initiative by the organisers and Mr Nayar, it felt like the same old broken record. Maybe that’s because this rhetoric has been recycled so much that it stands the danger to lose it potency. This people-to-people contact may be great for relations as young students nodded fervently when Mr Nayar talked of peace and moving forward. But there can be no progress without leadership and implementation. The recent meeting between the two Interior Secretaries and the Prime Minister at the semifinal in Mohali has been constructive to say the least. But the two countries are in a habit of taking a step forward only to be followed by a two-step regression not much later. Let’s hope the process now underway is here for the long haul.
From page 1
Why, when and how the match was lost? We lost because of Asma Jahangir’s strange statements against the Supreme Court judges. We lost because of the ‘multiple offenses’ of Shoaib Akhtar for which he was fined $2000 and his brawl with Kamran Akmal after the New Zealand match. We lost because of the ‘Brothers’ and Misbah-ul-Haq, who earlier could do no wrong. We lost because our politicians are incorrigibly corrupt and greedy selfservers, who pay no taxes and care nothing for the nation’s prosperity. We lost because we have lost the moral high ground. We lost because our economy is doing so badly. We lost because of Kargil and Mumbai 26/11. We lost because of the rampant inflation and unemployment. We lost because we have no self-respect and are sunk in depression and fearfulness. We lost because we no longer have the will to win, and experience the joy of victory. We lost because we have banned Basant, that great relaxant. We because we have lost our way – the way so clearly delineated by the Quaid. We lost because we are selfcentered, with gigantic egos, and seek personal glory instead of the collective or the national. We lost because we think the individual is everything, the nation is nothing. We lost because of the fanatics who are running amok in our land. We lost because of the demoralising load shedding and gas shortages. We lost because of long queues and waiting for everything from sugar to CNG. We lost because of our blood and gore Punjabi movies. We lost because of our VIP culture. We lost because of our complete lack of honesty and ethics. We lost because of the hanging of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. We lost because of the serious and rapidly deteriorating situation in Balochistan. We lost because of the unabated target killings in Karachi. We lost because of the unchecked brutality of our police force. We lost because of our (longlost) missing persons. We lost because we are the stooges of decaying foreign super-powers. We lost because of General
Musharraf ’s decade-long rule and the evils it bequeathed us. We lost because of our lust for wealth, ever more wealth, by hook or by crook. We lost because we imprisoned most our great men of letters, poets and writers. We lost because we have no social conscience and cannot look beyond our own noses. We lost because we have developed a caste system based purely on material worth. We lost because of our divided families and divided selves. We lost because of 1971: ‘the humiliation of a shameless capitulation can never be erased. This drop of poison in the blood of a nation is passed on and undermines the strongest of the future generations’. We lost because of the superfloods and the guilt that the affected people are still suffering. We lost because of our inability to build the Kalabagh Dam. We lost because of the terrorist attacks on our cities, mosques and shrines. We lost because of the drone attacks which mock our sovereignty and kill innocent civilians. We lost because both our ‘Houses’ did not speak out unequivocally against the killers of Salman Taseer and Shahbaz Bhatti. We lost because we repeatedly use brute force against our own people and brethren. We lost because we ignore our one Nobel Prize winner. We lost because of the horror spread by the suicide bombers. We lost because of the all-pervasive corruption in our society, both moral and intellectual We lost because of our double-speak (with a forked tongue) and hypocrisy in everyday life. We lost because of the growing sectarian divide fracturing our society. We lost because of the ethnic ruptures and the use of so called ‘cards’. We lost because of the Hajj scandal involving the highest in the land. We lost because of the lack of merit in our society. All these things have debilitated our minds and bodies and warped our personalities. Combined with the absence of any hope for the future under the prevailing circumstances we have become increasingly defensive and vulnerable to pressure. That is why we lost. And of course, there was the more than usual dreadful fielding and the irresponsible moronic batting that also contributed to the latest downfall…