(In the context of the recent blasts in Karachi, noted columnist with Dawn Jawed Naqvi recalls the role of US imperialism in fuelling terror in the sub-continent and discusses the futility of allying with the US ‘war on terror.’)
Jawaharlal Nehru’s pledge of independence on 26th January 1930 can even today inspire any populist leader in South Asia, including of course Benazir Bhutto, who was the target of a devastating terrorist attack in Karachi on Thursday night.
There is a strange passage in the speech where Nehru says: “Compulsory disarmament has made us unmanly and the presence of an alien army of occupation, employed with deadly effect to crush in us the spirit of resistance, has made us think that we cannot look after ourselves or put up a defence against foreign aggression, or even defend our brothers and families from the attacks of thieves, robbers and miscreants.”
The point here is that if the proud people of India, on whose behalf Nehru was surely speaking, were made ‘unmanly’ because the colonial state took away their means of ‘resistance’ why did he not give those rights to the citizens in the evidently independent India? The answer perhaps lies in the fact that no state, colonial or post-colonial, is willing to see itself as an oppressor of its own subjects or citizens. On the contrary, it strives to take monopoly over the means of coercion, which it otherwise uses to subjugate the people.
Today as our native rulers continue to align themselves in the contrived battle between good and evil using points of reference that may be germane to US President George Bush but have the potential to spell disaster for our polity, there are serious questions that need to be asked. The most important of these is whether we really need American help and blessings to fight Al Qaeda and Taliban in our own backyard and if so for whose benefit? Why should we listen to Bush and not to Denis Healey, WW II veteran and ageing but still lucid Labour Party ideologue instead? Mr Healey was very clear in an interview on BBC last week that there was no military solution to what the Americans call terrorism. His counsel was to talk to terrorist leaders instead. “If to end terrorism we do not talk to its leaders who are we to talk to?” he asked
Ask any ruler from Pakistan to Bangladesh or from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka about the vision they nurture and they all want to transform their countries into moderate, liberal states. But look again. We were not doing too badly on that front. Afghanistan was not quite the basket case it became, breeding fundamentalist rebels. Nor was ISI hatching ‘mujahideen’ in Saudi and CIA-funded incubators at the behest of Zbigniew Brzezinski. And when Brzezinski was asked in the context of the Taliban why he had fanned religious extremism in Pakistan and Afghanistan, his cynical reply was: “What is more important — demise of the Soviet Union or a few stirred up Muslims?”
When a country like the United States mourns the loss of innocent lives, how hypocritical it sounds, as on other occasions it has no qualms about annihilating millions because it feels like it. There is a similar nightmare looming on our heads in the form of a wayward American president threatening to annihilate the entire planet with World War III? Is there anything to choose between mindless terrorism and well strategised imperialism?
We do not know whether Benazir Bhutto will go along with Denis Healey or George Bush in her promise to remove the forces of mediaeval barbarism in Pakistan. But she said something else on her arrival in Karachi that may hold the key to everyone’s security in the region. She spoke for the impoverished people of Pakistan, the underdogs. She will notice from Nehru’s speech in 1930 that not much has changed to improve their lot.
What Nehru said in his Poorna Swaraj speech has amazing relevance for Ms Bhutto today. “The tallest of us have to bend before the foreign authority. The rights of free expression of opinion and free association have been denied to us and many of our countrymen are compelled to live in exile abroad and cannot return to their homes.”
Given the conditions, it must have been suffocating for Nehru to denounce the forced disarming of Indians by their colonial masters, particularly so when he was speaking on behalf of Gandhi, the icon of non-violence. It is just as suffocating today. The choices are not too different.
