Pakistan’s Game With Kulbhushan Jadhav Should End Liberal Delusions     

Pakistan knows just how to stick a knife between India’s ribs and twist it to let the air in, all the while feigning a grand diplomatic gesture. The relief that Indians felt when it was announced that Kulbhushan Jadhav’s mother and wife would be allowed to travel to meet him turned into ashes in their mouths when Pakistan released a picture of their devastated faces, looking through the glass that denied an aching mother the chance to hug and hold her boy to her bosom. Pakistan cruelly turned a grieving Indian mother into a spectacle, to make all Indians see and feel her pain.

This is psychological warfare straight out of the ISIS playbook, making the enemy suffer by creating a public spectacle of the suffering and humiliation of those who have fallen into their hands. And yet there are informed Indian intellectuals who ask for Pakistan to be treated as a reasonable nation-state with legitimate concerns and grievances. It is a delusion caused by the belief that the liberal era of nation states had extinguished the power of sociological psychologies like malice and ancient forms of statecraft that make skilled use of dissimulation, deceit and treachery. Indians and Americans simply fail to comprehend the dark arts that Pakistan is such a master of, and the dark motives that drive it.

It’s all very well to talk of improving relations through cultural exchange and trade relations, culture and trade suffer precisely because the state of Pakistan does not want the distinctiveness between India and Pakistan to be dissolved by the people of India and Pakistan bonding through intermixing, culture and trade.

We Indians swoon to Meesha Shafi on Coke Studio and sway at parties to Abida Parveen, and feel like we’re all one people. And indeed we are, through and through. But the state of Pakistan is real. And Pakistan is real as a state of mind for a very large number of people. This Pakistan doesn’t love Mohammad Rafi or Amitabh Bachan or Gurdas Maan or Ghalib, and it doesn’t go gooey about how those guys and Pakistanis are the “same people”. This Pakistan has been waging jihad against India from day one. It is implacable. It is relentless. And it will never be satisfied, not until it has prevailed completely and finally, or itself been destroyed in the process.

In 1948, Pakistan sent Pashtun tribesmen led by army officers in civil clothing to attack Kashmir with the promise of loot and plunder, and the objective of capturing Kashmir, without the appearance of having used its uniform forces, that provoked the first India-Pakistan war. In 1965, it again sent soldiers out-of-uniform to cause sabotage and provoke a rebellion in Kashmir, triggering the second India-Pakistan war. Again in 1999, Pakistan provoked a war by sending in regular troops dressed as tribal militias to capture the then only functional supply route to Ladakh.

Elsewhere, hell came to Punjab as Pakistan sponsored and trained zealots, claiming to be warriors of the Sikh faith, set up a criminal empire of gangsterism, extortion and violence, which along with the reaction from the Indian state brought savage cost to the social and cultural fabric of Indian Punjab. A few years later, fresh off the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan, Pakistan sent battle hardened veteran mujahideen along with well trained locals into Kashmir and set fire to that paradise, its people, and to India’s relationship with its Muslim minority.

And that’s not counting the drugs being pumped into India by the operatives of the Pakistani state, the vast quantities of Indian currency forged and converted to dollars for funding the Pakistani mujahideen while fake currency ends up in the Indian economy. Not counting the slaughter on 26/11 in Mumbai, the attack on the Parliament building in Delhi, the unrelenting efforts via Canadian Khalistanis to alienate Sikhs from India, and the activities of sabotage, terrorism, and jihad that some Indian Muslims have been seduced into.

India should expect no peace from Pakistan. There is no possible resolution of the India-Pakistan conflict that India can agree to. If India handed Kashmir to Pakistan on a platter to occupy or set free, as it wished, do you imagine that would usher in an era of peace in which the Pakistani army doesn’t stand prepared for war with India, has cut back its size and budget, and hostilities over, has gone out of Pakistani politics and foreign affairs? That the civilian government would be free to make whatever visa, border, and trade arrangements it felt were in the best interest of the people?

Of course not. Any significant success on Kashmir would be immediately seized as a celebration and validation of a 70-year struggle, of not giving up no matter how futile the struggle seems, no matter how big and strong the enemy be, of striving relentlessly until the enemy’s strength fails him. Every movement in India against the state, Khalistan, Naxal, Tamil, Naga, will be given assurances that with the right friends, they can bring down the Indian state. They’d get shiploads of money and weapons, delivered in crates marked “diplomatic and moral support”. Operations to alienate Indian Muslims and weaponise that alienation would kick into top gear.

Commentators, such as Suhasini Haidar who advised an India-Pakistan re-engagement recently in The Hindu, should explain the strategic objectives of thawing relations with Pakistan. What would it achieve? Except for creating a pretence of a peace process, and opening up the avenue for India’s liberal elite to hobnob with visiting Pakistani celebrities in Mumbai, get stuffed on biryani in Islamabad, and come back to India singing tales of what wonderful decent chaps Pakistanis are, that is.

Talks with Pakistan are only ever an opportunity for the Pakistani wolf to smile at us from behind a Red Riding Hood mask. Sometimes it’s necessary to go through the charade because the Americans insist on it. But let us all be clear. Any relationships, historical, commercial or cultural ties that exist between the people of India and the people are Pakistan, are not remotely relevant to the attitudes, intentions and ambitions of the State of Pakistan. For Pakistan, they are only an opportunity to create a stage play of diplomacy.

Whether the ghazis of Pakistan like it or not, Pakistan and India are intertwined culturally and historically, and they will remain so long after the state of Pakistan has ceased to exist, for the simple reason that Punjabi-ness, Sindhi-ness, Hindustani-ness, are all far deeper, and far more deeply rooted in the psyche, than the nebulous idea of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

But while the state of Pakistan exists, we must live with the malignant, tireless hatred that the state has for India. Kiss and smile if we must, but have no illusions about the wolf that is tossing Kulbhusan Jadhav about in its jaws right now.