Anadish Pal
Indian Politics
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Anadish Pal Indian Politics
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March of the Zero: Breathless beyond Indus
India and Pakistan had been breathlessly challenging each other for the past six decades.
Let us figure out our gains and losses from this breath stopping unbrotherly rivalry of far outstripping any Biblical proportions.
Is it going to ink a new world order and give the story of our world a new twist after the prehistoric cataclysmic volcanic
eruptions that took place from the volcanic belt in Deccan and clouded the globe for centuries and, more recently, after Cristopher
Columbus set out to search for India and lost his way to reach America?
Let us take a look from, say, a forest camp in Colombia. Who are Pakistan and India? They
both have nuclear missiles. Osama is hiding almost in Pakistan. Pakistanis and Indians try to migrate to every single country
in the world to mostly do small-time trade and some computers. Then, there is an offshoot of them called Bangladeshis who
simply try to be everywhere.
Let us compare us to other nations who were once colonized. Brazil, Argentina, South Africa,
Egypt, Korea: None of them have got such a blatant stockpile of nuclear weapons. What makes Pakistan the only Islamic country
to have nuclear weapons? Was it primarily its neighbourly rivalries to India? One should be amazed to realize that in spite
of a deep focus on each other on defense matters, both India and Pakistan effortlessly rose to the ranks of nuclear weapon
states; and to crown it, both are being wooed by the USA. Pakistan bargains with the USA to receive billions of dollars of
aid, while neither parting with Osama nor the nuclear warheads, not to mention Dr. A. Q. Khan whose charmed existence inside
Pakistan is conveniently forgotten by everybody. If India had remained unprtiotioned, the region that is Pakistan now, would
have been a mostly desolate and backward Northwest Frontier Province, an extension to the Indian Punjab and another state
called Sindh which would have been more or less like the Indian Gujarat. Bangladesh that way would have remained a completely
obscure extension to our present day West Bengal with may be a ubiquitous name Bengal.
Therefore, rather than hating the British for dividing India, we may allow the white British
to hate themselves, when after 30 years they would have an Asian as their prime minister; and that Asian would be either a
Bangladeshi, an Indian or a Pakistani. A restless bunch of people, always on the move is now what we have come to be known
as all over the globe. Unpartitioned, we would have remained self absorbed like the Brazilian – taking our Hindustani
to greater heights by winning Nobel Prizes in that language and ruminating in our past glory and our geographical integrity.
Stung by partition in 1947, we permanently turned into the kind of restless peoples we have come to be known as. The Bangladeshis,
Indians and Pakistanis (BIP) are well known for their love for their roots; but before partition they were very firmly rooted
too – a fact you would not miss while watching M. S. Sathyu’s classic Gharam Hawa. We cannot really thank the
British and the rest of the Caucasian world for the BIP brand of international success, as we have lost majorly on life’s
philosophy and leisure: A state of existence the olden Hindustanis were known for, documented and enriched by dilettante poets
like Amir Khusro to the last of them, Mirza Ghalib. In the early 17th century, travel writer Fanny Parks, a Scotswoman married
to the deputy collector of Allahabad, chronicled a largely ill-informed albeit well mannered people in north and east India
in her extensive travelogues. However, once the erstwhile Hindustanis and Deccanis were launched into post-partition chaos,
as if hurled rudely out of circus cannon, they diligently put their fine knowledge evolved through thousands of years of study
of gem stones, perfumes, condiments, textiles and numbers to extraordinary use. They quickly learned to put to good use canny
qualities of a snake charmer (many Americans still think India is a country of snake charmers) to spirit their way to world
wide corporate success.
If a Texan oilman can rule most of the world for eight long years without exceeding a word
store of 500 English words, the business acumen of an L. N. Mittal or an Indra Nooyi is to be understood in billions of genetically
wired up neurons inherited from ancestors who inexplicably attracted hordes of foreign merchants in the dangerous times of
shipwrecks and ever marauding pirates. Where were the adverts which attracted Columbus to undertake that journey in search
of India? There were none whatsoever. Starbucks too never puts out adverts, but they have a chain of stores worldwide; our
Indus valley merchants had none beyond their own limited shores. That clever piece of marketing acumen is still noticeable
in Pakistan; how the last confused steps of a tottering giant the USSR into Afghanistan were turned into the cleverest business
opportunity; and Pakistan played as if with a keen gut understanding of modern quantum mechanics to turn into profit two completely
different dimensions of Islamic fundamentalism and Nuclear technology; and a very deadly recipe of the two was forced down
the guts of the American for an astronomical restaurant big.
Partition of India in 1947 was unique in world history, as it never divided the people in
the manner the Palestinians, the Germans or the Koreans were. It was more of a violent soccer club fracture, where two club
supporters clashed, divided and kept dueling on a nerve racking, sexy level far outstripping the romantic proportion
of the immensely tragic Pushkin duel. There never was and is any divide; like charm Kashmir Singhs and Mohammad Arifs cross
the hyped up border to the divide; and lead mythically inexplicably tortuous and existence where they are benignly allowed
to live on too as a show of mutual respect by both the countries; where we were brought up on primary school fables of an
Abdul Hameed crawling under a Pakistani tank with a handgrenade. Where the Pakistani ladies swoon over Indian Saris and Indian
listeners on the songs of Nusrat Fateh Ali; and where all the British beauties swoon over either an Imran, an Arun Nayar or
a Dr. Hasnat Khan without bothering over which side of the border the comely gent came from. It is a very sexy divide, because
just like rich playboys focused on hooking up with beautiful women simply keep generating more wealth effortlessly, these
two nations progressed in international power and pelf with their eyes firmly focused on that unbrotherly frenzied challenge
of fighting each other. One after the other a dictator or a prime minister appeared in Pakistan and India, twirling an intimidating
moustache or letting out a shriek of a war cry – boastful of a thumping victory but very mindful of mutual annihilation.
If in future, world stage is captured by a swarm of PIB people, the Anglo Saxons shall definitely
rue in hindsight making dirt tracks in Mowgli’s jungle of a country which lies beyond the valley of Indus. Modern men
and women from Indus valley and beyond are animating an unthinkable saga of playing with the zeros (which their forefathers
had invented); they seem to add zeros to their bank balances at will. They have put post Marxian capitalism to shame by throwing
into insignificance the New World ideals of technological inventions and scientific discoveries. By their shameless art of
financial “figure skating”, they are also showing to everybody the nemesis that is pursuit of money, which now
seems an end unto itself and finally may lead to a destruction much more gigantic than what engulfed the Indus valley civilization
in the past. If nothing else, even Dr. Rajendra Pachauri’s IPCC reportings, can open our eyes to the ecological disaster
frenzied money making processes can usher in very quickly, surely, the sheer intensity of the march of zeros in PIB billionaires’
NAVs would provoke us into a situation where we have to pay to breathe and even think; and, fear not, it would not be too
late, as Einstein once put it, there is no fear after death.
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