When Paradise Is Not Enough

AN UNANSWERED QUESTION that has been sitting on the shelf of history for half-a-century may offer a clue to the volatile imponderables of Pakistan today. A distance of 50 years is sufficient for an objective appraisal even within the emotive turbulence of a war that was started by Pakistan in October 1947 and could easily continue till 2047.

The first three phases of the longest continuous conflict in modern times established lines of demarcation that resemble lava more than stone. Pakistan’s capricious, ruthless terrorist invasion of Kashmir on October 22, 1947 ended on January 1, 1948 on a ceasefire line which has not stopped a continual offensive by terrorists who remain as barbaric as they were in October 1947.

Pakistan’s second war to take Kashmir by force, in the autumn of 1965, ended in a fiasco and ended the political career of its first military dictator Ayub Khan, who had upgraded himself from general to field marshal, pos­sibly in anticipation of a military triumph against India. He learnt the depth of Indian resolve when Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri ordered Indian troops across the international border into the vicinity of Lahore. The Pakistan army has never again attempted to seize Kashmir through conventional war.

The 1971 war began in March with a horrific genocide by the Pakistan army on Bengali civilians in what was then East Paki­stan who refused to sacrifice their language and culture at the altar of fanaticism. Some 10 million refugees took refuge in India to escape the authorised massacres. The situation was resolved only with the birth of Bangladesh after the Pakistan army was annihilated over a two-week war in December 1971 which ended with the surrender of 93,000 Pakistani troops and officers in Dhaka before the commanders of the Indian Army, Lt General Jagjit Singh Aurora and Lt General JFR Jacob.

A simple question has never been answered: Why did 93,000 Pakistani officers and soldiers, in good health and fully armed, choose the humiliation of surrender instead of continuing to fight when they had the weapons to do so? Every soldier is not expected to die in war, but military valour is about the will to die in the course of action. That is why the armed forces are such a hallowed institution. This enormous force of Pakistani troops was outmanoeuvred by a brilliant Indian operation, but they could have continued to fight longer. They chose the option of cowards: surrender.

Pakistan did not ask the question since the answer would have undermined its existence; India did not ask it because no one questions victory.

Pakistan’s military and civilian leaders were unanimous in the proclaimed view that their army was fighting for Pakistan and Islam. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the maverick demagogue who took over governance from the bloodstained hands of General Yahya Khan famously told the United Nations (UN) that Pakistan was ready to fight for a thousand years, after having been defeated in 14 days. Bhutto was echoing the birth rationale of his country.

In 1946 and 1947, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the sole proposer, propeller and spokesman for the concept of Pakistan, sold the preposterous notion that Islam was in danger in order to persuade the credulous elite among Indian Muslims that their future lay in Partition. By the value system of religion this was heresy: if you are a true Muslim, you cannot believe that Islam can be in danger. Muslims can be in danger, but then that proposition has to be endorsed by the Muslim masses.

The idea of Pakistan was never supported by any mass movement. Partition got traction only after engineered communal vio­lence. The British colonialists, masters of manipulation, chose to treat the results of the 1946 elections as the alleged basis of Muslim opinion, but this was a gigantic fraud since the electorate was limited to only the upper 10 per cent of the population who were ratepayers. The British supported Partition with barely concealed glee since this was the best way to maim the future of the first nation to demand, and get, liberation from their insidious and corrosive colonial rule. Every successor of Jinnah had parroted the lie that Pakistan and Islam are synonymous and told the army to die in defence of the faith.

This was the fundamental article of faith for the Pakistan armed forces in 1971. If those 93,000 soldiers had truly believed that their reward for martyrdom was an eternal place in Paradise, they would have chosen death. Paradise must be a better option than the more crowded lanes of Lahore or Sialkot or Karachi or a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Instead, Pakistan’s soldiers chose the comfort of their pind over the streams of Paradise. General Zia-ul-Haq, the first of the Islamist generals (his predecessor Yahya Khan loved a bottle a day), understood this contradiction even if he never publicly admitted it. He changed the motto of the Pakistan army from Ittehad, Yaqeen, Tanzim (Unity, Belief, Discipline) to Iman, Taqwa, Jihad fi sabilillah (Faith, Piety, Holy War). Islam was the basis of each element in General Zia’s formulation, having been merely implied before.

If even 20,000 of the 93,000 had chosen Paradise instead of their village, the war of December 1971 could have extended to January. Pakistan would not have won the war, but the political consequences might have been different since the world was tak­ing a call at the UN on how to intervene. The UN was still young and credible in 1971, quite different from its current dotage. Pakistan’s abject surrender on December 16 made the UN debate infructuous. De facto prevailed, as it often does, over de jure.

Ironically, the best argument for a soldier’s duty was made during the first India-Pakistan war by the Mahatma of non-violence. Seven days after Jinnah sent the raiders into India, Gandhi told his prayer meeting on the evening of October 29, 1947 that the “job of armed soldiers is to march ahead and repel the attacking enemy. They die in fighting but never retreat….” He described the Pakistan-sponsored terrorists as aggressors and plunderers. On January 27, 1948 Gandhi told the British journalist Kingsley Martin that the government of India could not be non-violent in its defence of the nation.

An assumption is valid: those 93,000 soldiers and officers did not risk their lives because they did not believe in either jihad or Pakistan. They did not believe that Pakistan was worth dying for. Such has been the trauma of 1971 that the Pakistan army has never fought another war. After that defeat, the Pakistan army decided that its regular troops were much safer in the barracks and behind barbed-wire walls than on a battle­field. War was outsourced to terrorists on a wholesale basis.

Pakistan invented modern terrorism in the first war when it sent some 5,000 raiders to loot, pillage and rape in Kashmir; but in 1947 and 1965 this was the opening act before regular troops entered battle. After seizing power in a coup, General Zia converted terrorism, the immoral doctrine of the impotent, as his army’s central strategy, giving military and financial aid to secessionists in the hope that they would weaken India and segregate its northwest from the rest of the mainland. Kargil was its most ambitious terrorist operation. Failure has not deterred the killer-fantasists. One definition of insanity is re­peating the same thing in the hope of getting a different result. Pakistan has become addicted to belligerent insanity.

The possession of nuclear weapons persuaded Pakistan’s military complex that it had found an invincible cloak for its policy of sustained terrorism. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s stark announcement that the age of nuclear blackmail is over has ended any ambiguity. The fog of war has not fully lifted, but there are credible reports that Pakistan was shaken and Washington stirred when deep-penetration Indian missiles hit the Nur Khan airbase adjacent to Pakistan’s nuclear assets. The air is currently alive with talk of satellite images showing dam­age, and a rise in the radiation count over the Sargodha region. Washington certainly began to use the telephone lines to Islamabad and Delhi when its intelligence agencies reported that the subcontinent could be on the brink of unprecedented disaster. When public opinion, inflamed by war rhetoric, becomes a judge in the competition between tit and tat, it is dif­ficult to quantify the first in order to measure the second. One miscalcula­tion is sufficient to trigger catastro­phe in the name of Armageddon.

It is far easier to start a war than to stop it. Pakistan started this war. Pakistan recognised India had a leader with nerves of steel. Pakistan accepted that once again its commu­nal terrorism had become counter­productive. Terrorism may remain the same, but its consequences have changed after Operation Sindoor.

To prevent the unthinkable from becoming reality you must make it thinkable. Prime Minister Modi has done so.

More conventional parameters have also shifted, as the new normal begins to be defined. Water strategy is as old as the Biblical age: around 2,700 years ago, King Hezekiah of Judah, one of the “good” monarchs of the Old Testament, stopped the flow of “brooks” to prevent water from reaching the Assyrians. The thesis is the same when Modi says about the Indus: “India’s water will flow for India’s benefit, it will be conserved for India’s benefit, and it will be used for India’s progress.” Water is not soft power; it is a hard and even harsh weapon. In a coincidence, the man who coined the term soft power, Joseph Nye, passed away very recently. Soft power was never more than a business proposition, the soap opera of the global economy.

History is patient. It may take its time when asking a question about the DNA of a dangerous dilemma, but it will compel an answer.

1971 India-Pakistan WarIndia-PakistanIslamic radicalisationMuhammad Ali JinnahPakistan Politicspolitical ideologyterrorism