'Clash of civilizations' renewing lives, communities

Tag: India

Gandhi: A martyr for Indian Muslims

WHEN INDIAN PRIME Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech, was extolling Vinayak Damodar Savarkar as one of India’s national heroes, Mahatma Gandhi’s soul must have responded, “I forgive you, Vinayak!”

In 1965 an inquiry commission was set up under the former Indian Supreme Court Justice Jiwan Lal Kapoor to investigate the Gandhi assassination. Its conclusion: “All these facts taken together were destructive of any theory other than the conspiracy to murder by Savarkar and his group.”

Forgiveness is the only gift that India’s latter-day Buddha would have for his murderers.  They killed the Mahatma because of what they despised as his “appeasement of Muslims.”

Savarkar was the mentor of Nathuram Godse, who pumped three bullets into Gandhi’s chest and abdomen, snuffing out his life in minutes. Savarkar also financed the newspaper Agrani (renamed Hindu Rashtra), of which Godse was the editor and Narayan Apte, the publisher.  Both of them would be convicted of assassinating Gandhi and hanged.

Godse was the organizer and Apte the secretary of Savarkar’s Hind Rashtra Dal outfit, set up to carry out the secret activities of the Hindu fundamentalist organization Hindu Mahasabha of which Savarkar would be the president.  Godse and Apte, too, were members of the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh (RSS), a paramilitary organization committed to making India a Hindu theocracy.

Modi’s introduction of Savarkar as a hero of India’s independence struggle reminded me of Sashi Tharoor, a prominent leader of India’s Congress party. Modi had built the world’s tallest statue for his other hero, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, a top Congress leader who was India’s first deputy prime minister and home minister. The statue cost Rs. 2,989 crores and is 182 meters tall, dwarfing China’s Spring Temple Buddha, which used to be the world’s tallest. Modi and his Hindu nationalists adore Patel, the so-called “Hindu face of the Congress,” because of his anti-Muslim biases. Referring to the outlandish statue built for Patel, Tharoor had accused the Hindu nationalist prime minister of trying to “hijack” the Congress statesman (Patel) because Hindu nationalists had “no heroes” of their own in Indian politics.

Was Modi responding to Tharoor’s taunt by billing Savarkar as a leader of India’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule? Savarkar never really bothered to plunge into the Indian anti-colonial movement. He invented “Hindutva,” Hinduness, the ideology of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and, as mentioned, headed the Hindu Mahasabha. But he’s hated widely in India for his ideology of hatred toward Muslims and Christians and, especially, for his role in eliminating India’s greatest saint and hero ever.

Patel was, of course, one of Gandhi’s two closest disciples, the other being Jawaharlal Nehru. But the Sudra lawyer-politician from Gujarat tried to disguise his animus toward Muslims while Savarkar did not. Well, sometimes the guise of Patel’s animosity toward Muslims was too flimsy as it was when he lamented to the Hindu fundamentalist leader Syama Prasad Mookherjee about “the dangerous possibilities inherent in the presence in India of a section of disloyal elements.” Those allegedly “disloyal elements” couldn’t have been anybody other than Muslims.  While publicly criticizing religious violence, Patel was often reluctant to act against anti-Muslim rioters.

Patel’s anti-Muslim attitudes were the main cause of his estrangement with Gandhi in the last years of the Mahatma’s life. Many attribute this fissure in their relationship to the home minister’s lack of interest in providing the necessary security to Gandhi while Hindu extremists were almost openly conspiring to murder him.

An attempt to bomb Gandhi’s prayer congregation and shoot him dead was botched on Jan. 20, 1948 – 10 days before he was actually assassinated – leading to the publicization of the plot and names of the plotters.  They included Godse, Apte, Madanlal Pahwa, Vishnu Karkare, Digambar Badge, Gopal Godse and Shankar Kistaiya. 

The conspiracy unraveled when Madanlal failed to ignite the bomb, which gave off a puff of smoke, followed by a firecracker-like eruption. One Sulochana Devi, who was among those who saw the incident, got a policeman to capture Madanlal. During a police interrogation, Madanlal confessed that he was part of a seven-member gang who wanted to kill Gandhi and described the plot. The police dragged Madanlal to two hotels where the other conspirators had been staying, but all of them had fled.

This led to public criticism of Patel for his and his Home Ministry’s failure to make proper security arrangements for Gandhi. As a result, the Home Ministry posted nearly two dozen plain-clothes policemen around Birla House, the mansion whose owner had let Gandhi and his attendants live there, but most of the conspirators remained at large. One of those cops, A.N. Bhatia, was assigned to guard Gandhi at his prayer meetings, and a personal attendant, named Gurbachan Singh, was given the task of walking in front of the Mahatma whenever he went to the prayer congregation.

Mysteriously, on the fateful evening of Jan. 30, Bhatia, the cop appointed to serve as Gandhi’s guard, didn’t show up because he had been assigned elsewhere! And Gurbachan Singh decided to walk behind the Mahatma, instead of in front of him, when Gandhi was arriving at his prayer congregation! Khaki-clad Godse, 37, approached Gandhi nonchalantly, shoved off with his left hand the Mahatma’s grand-niece Manu from his side, and fired the three bullets into Gandhi’s frail, 107-pound frame at point-blank range.

Mass butchery, dispossession

The Hindu extremist canard against Gandhi’s “appeasement of Muslims” became shrill and pervasive as anti-Muslim riots began to spread in India with the partition of the subcontinent and Gandhi stepped up his denunciation of the Hindu and Sikh butchery and dispossession of helpless Muslims.

Beginning in January 1947 West Pakistan began to practically empty itself of its Hindu and Sikh populations. These Hindu and Sikh refugees, who had lost everything, were streaming to Delhi and adjoining areas. Some of them, joined by local Hindus and Sikhs, were slaughtering Muslims, occupying their homes, mosques and shrines of Muslim saints. That hurt Gandhi deeply. In response to his pleas to stop the carnage, the refugees told him tales of horror visited on them by their Muslim neighbors in Pakistan.  Gandhi told them of his distress over their plight, but he kept admonishing them that their own religions did not permit them to avenge those injustices on Indian Muslims.

Gandhi told visitors that persecution of minorities would destroy Hinduism, Sikhism and Islam, but he warned Hindus and Sikhs that whereas if Islam died as an ethical system in India and Pakistan it would still have other countries for its ethical existence, but he warned them that Hinduism and Sikhism had “no world outside India” and that the loss of their ethnical core would spell the demise of both religions and social systems. He reiterated these pleas day and night to people in trouble-torn areas he visited, but the killing of Muslims and their expulsion from their homes and properties continued unabated.

Gandhi was outraged by Patel’s and his Home Ministry’s inaction to stop the anti-Muslim pogrom. On Oct. 2, 1947, Patel, among several other Congress leaders, dropped in to convey their good wishes to Gandhi on his 78th birthday. His Irish disciple, Mira, had decorated his room, but Gandhi was in no celebratory mood. He turned to Patel and asked, sternly, “What sin have I committed that He should have kept me alive to witness all these horrors?”

In January 1948 Gandhi learned, too, that Patel had decided to inflict what the Mahatma considered a serious injustice on Pakistan. At the time of the partition, India had assumed the obligation to give Pakistan Rs. 550 million as its share of the immovable property that belonged to the British Indian government. Citing the inroad of Pakistani Pathan tribes into Jammu and Kashmir, Patel announced that India wouldn’t, after all, transfer the money to Pakistan. To Gandhi’s surprise, Patel ignored his caveat to reverse his decision to withhold the payment to Pakistan.

His twin failures – to stop anti-Muslim riots in India and the confiscation of Pakistan’s share of British Indian assets – drove the Mahatma into using his “last weapon” to try to rectify them.

On the evening of Jan. 11, 1948, at his prayer congregation, Gandhi announced that he would soon begin to fast for an indefinite period to persuade the Indian government to pay Pakistan the Rs. 550 million India owed it and, secondly, to stop the killing and dispossession of Muslims by Hindus and Sikhs in India.

“I see the Muslims of Delhi being killed before my very eyes,” the Mahatma told the gathering. “This is done while my own Vallabhbhai [Patel] is the Home Minister of the Government of India and is responsible for maintaining law and order in the capital. Vallabhbhai has not only failed to give protection to the Muslims, he light-heartedly dismisses any complaint made on this count. I have no option but to use my last weapon, namely to fast until the situation changes.”

The Mahatma began his fast on Jan. 13. The news of his fast electrified India, especially Delhi. Initially, some activists of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha and some refugees raised anti-Gandhi slogans here and there, including at one of Gandhi’s prayer congregations. But everyday Hindus were alarmed about Gandhi’s health. They hit the streets of Delhi in droves, demanding the immediate acceptance of Gandhi’s demands.  RSS and Hindu Mahasabha offices were mobbed and activists of the two organizations were warned of dire consequences if Gandhi didn’t survive the hunger strike.

End of pogrom

It all worked more quickly and effectively than perhaps the Mahatma had expected. The government announced the transfer of Rs. 550 million to Pakistan. Clusters of leading citizens of Delhi and leaders of religious and social organizations visited Gandhi and promised to stop the rioting and persecution of Muslims. Leaders of the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha — Lala Harichand, Lala Hansraj Gupta, R.B. Narain Das, Ganesh Datt, Basant Lal and Narain Dutt — signed a written pledge to do the same thing.

Anti-Muslim riots came to almost a complete stop. More than 130 mosques and some shrines of Muslim saints that had been occupied by Hindus and Sikhs were vacated. Hindus got Muslims to reopen the shops and other business operations they had closed in the wake of the riots.

Gandhi broke his fast on Jan. 18.

That was an eye-opener for the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha. They realized more than ever how tight was Gandhi’s grip on Hindu society, and that their plans to make India a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu religious state) can’t be realized as long as he was alive.

Meanwhile, Gandhi had been working on a plan – almost as grand as the Indian independence struggle  – which was opposed by both Nehru and Patel and which had riled up the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha as never before. The plan called for the promotion of amity between India and Pakistan and reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in both countries.

On Sept 18, 1947, Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy, the last Muslim premier of pre-Partition Bengal, visited Gandhi in Delhi on his way to Karachi, then the Pakistani capital. The Mahatma asked him to remind Muhammad Ali Jinnah, now governor-general of Pakistan, of his pledges to protect minorities in Pakistan. And he asked Suhrawardy to inform Jinnah that he would be writing an important letter to the Pakistani leader soon. Later the same day Gandhi told a group of visitors that he hoped to soon “leave for Pakistan” to confront Pakistanis’ atrocities toward Hindus and Sikhs. “I shall not spare them,” the Mahatma promised. “I shall die for the Hindus and the Sikhs there. I shall be really glad to die there.”

In fact Gandhi was prepared to die for Hindus in 1946 in the East Bengal district of Noakhali, where Muslims slaughtered, tortured, and raped many thousand Hindus with hair-raising ferocity and converted many of them to Islam by force. Gandhi spent four months with a small entourage in the district, touring Muslim villages without any protection and preaching peace. Some of his associates said later that they didn’t think the Mahatma would leave Noakhali alive.

Following Suhrawardy’s visit, Gandhi wrote a note to Jinnah, proposing to move to Pakistan and live in Lahore. In a gracious reply, Jinnah welcomed him to Pakistan and suggested that Gandhi live in Karachi, instead. But the Mahatma was determined to settle in Lahore, the capital of the Pakistani province of Punjab, where the worst of the anti-Hindu and anti-Sikh riots had occurred.  Gandhi’s migration to Pakistan was set for Feb. 14. He asked 50 Hindu and Sikh refugee families from Pakistan to get ready to accompany him on his journey to Lahore.

Gandhi’s decision to settle in Pakistan and, especially, try to build close ties between India and Pakistan, angered Patel and Nehru. Always hateful of Muslims and Pakistan, Patel had nothing to do with them. Nehru, happily receiving accolades from the world over as prime minister of one of the world’s largest countries, had no use for Gandhi’s new mission, either. But they didn’t dare to approach their “Bapu” (dad) to ask him to cancel his Pakistan trip.

They sent Lord Mountbatten to try to dissuade him from the journey. The governor-general told Gandhi that his relocation to Pakistan would undermine the positions of his two closest disciples: Prime Minister Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Patel. Both of them, he said, opposed his Pakistan plans. Mountbatten didn’t make any argument about the interests of India or the Indian people that could be hurt by Gandhi’s Pakistan mission. The Mahatma responded to the governor-general’s plea with silence.

The news of Gandhi’s decision to resettle in Pakistan, which circulated in Delhi in early January, drove the RSS and Hindu Mahasabha stark raving mad. They had blamed Gandhi, falsely, for the Congress’ acceptance of Pakistan. In fact in the Congress High Command, Patel was the first to accept the plan to divide old India to create Pakistan, followed by Nehru. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad (who never accepted the partition of India) visited Patel and demanded to know if he really wanted to split India to carve out Pakistan.

 “I was surprised and pained,” the Maulana wrote in his memoir, India Wins Freedom, “when Patel in reply said that whether we liked it or not, there were two nations in India.”

The Hindu Mahasabha (like the Muslim League) had proclaimed that the Hindus and Muslims of the subcontinent were two different nations. Patel took his cue from it on many Muslim-related issues.

But Gandhi’s acceptance of Pakistan and plans to reconcile with it and his defense of Muslims against Hindu and Sikh rioters cost him his life.

At his trial for Gandhi’s assassination, Nathuram Godse began his statement with the complaint that the Mahatma had “compel[led] the Dominion Government to pay the sum of Rs 55 crores [550 million] to Pakistan” and said later that “his last pro-Muslim fast, at last, goaded me to the conclusion that the existence of Gandhiji should be brought to an end immediately.”

Gandhi valued Patel’s hard work for the Congress organization. While Nehru pontificated about Fabian socialism in living rooms and had no clue about organizational matters, Patel built the All-India National Congress of the 1930s and 1940s from the grassroots and was in regular contact with its key leaders in the provinces. But the Gujarati lawyer often sizzled in private with ill-disguised anti-Muslim vibes, which was the main reason Gandhi had reservations about his leadership of the Congress or the country. In 1929 and 1937 Gandhi overruled nominations for Patel’s presidentship of the Congress and picked Nehru for the position, instead.  Patel, still an admirer of Gandhi’s, took those two incidents with relative equanimity.

Crucial Choice

But the 1946 election to the party presidency was different. India’s independence was at hand and everybody knew that the Congress president of the day would become prime minister of independent India. Congress presidents were, as a rule, nominated by provincial Congress committees, and in 1946, 12 of the 15 provincial committees nominated Patel for the position while three abstained, and not a single committee nominated Nehru.

Nevertheless, Nehru told Gandhi that he wouldn’t accept any position other than that of the president, and the Mahatma asked Patel to let Nehru have the post. Patel, usually expressionless and inscrutable, frowned. He obviously felt that Gandhi was doing him a grave injustice: He was being asked to hand undeserving Nehru not only the leadership of the organization he had built but also the prime ministership of India against the wishes of nearly the entire Congress organization. But Gandhi was the embodiment of the Congress, and to a large measure of India, and the dyed-in-the-wool Hindu chauvinist couldn’t say no. But it killed the lifelong Gandhi devotee in him, replacing it with a deeply resentful antagonist.

On April 29, 1946, when Gandhi asked Patel to forgo the Congress presidency in favor of Nehru, he knew that he was hurting the man deeply and perhaps losing him as a devoted follower. But the Mahatma had to make a crucial choice. He can either keep a loyal disciple happy or pursue his core value and mission in life, but can’t do both. For a man with a mission of Gandhi’s, the choice was easy. Compassion was Gandhi’s core value (which he said he had learned from the Christian Bible and Leo Tolstoy), and his goal in life was promoting peace and resisting violence, whose worst victims in post-independence India were the Muslims. He believed that violence and injustices against Indian Muslims would get far worse under a Patel-led government.

Prior to the failed attempt on his life on Jan. 20, Gandhi had survived four other assassination attempts, all from Hindu extremists. The elaborate conspiracy that led to this fifth attempt and the fact that most of the conspirators remained at large convinced him that his days on earth were numbered. Other people were talking about it openly. Puchalapalli Sundarayya, the prominent Communist leader of Hyderabad, said at a public meeting that the Hindu Mahasabha, RSS and Sardar Patel planned to “kill the Mahatma to perpetuate fascist rule in India.”

Gandhi hinted and talked openly about his sojourn on earth coming to a rapid end. On Jan. 28, two days before his assassination, he said to his associates, “If I’m to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. God must be in my heart and on my lips. And if anything happens, you are not to shed a single tear.”

Early on the morning of the fateful day, Jan. 30, he said to Manu, “If someone fires bullets at me and I die without a groan and with God’s name on my lips, then you should tell the world that here was a real Mahatma…”

A few hours later the Mahatma wondered aloud: “Who knows, what is going to happen before nightfall or even whether I shall be alive?”

In the early afternoon, a delegation of Delhi Muslim leaders showed up. They talked about communal tensions and the refugee crisis. Gandhi said he had planned to visit Wardah in early February and was alerting them about his possible absence from the trouble-torn city for a few days. Then he added: “But if Providence has decreed otherwise, that is a different matter. I am not sure, however, whether I shall be able to leave here even on the day after tomorrow. It is all in God’s hands.”

After 4 p.m. Sardar Patel came in to see Gandhi. They talked about a feud between Patel and Nehru. The visitor told Gandhi that if Nehru did not “change his way of working,” – Gandhi apparently knew what he meant – then Patel would resign from the Cabinet.  

Gandhi told Patel that he had discussed the matter with Mountbatten and agreed with the governor-general that both of them – Nehru and Patel — were “indispensable.” They must work things out, Gandhi admonished.

In came Manu to tell Gandhi that two leaders from Kathiawar had arrived and wished to see the Mahatma.

With Patel sitting by, Gandhi instructed his grand-niece: “Tell them that I will, but only after the prayer meeting, and that too if I am still living!” 

Patel had no reaction to the comment but continued his conversation with Gandhi. Gandhi always began his prayer meeting at 5 p.m., punctually. As the time for the meeting was approaching, his attendants ended his conversation with Patel and rushed him out toward the prayer congregation, where Godse was waiting with his Beretta M1934.

~Mustafa Malik, a retired American journalist, is an international affairs commentator, living in Bangladesh.

India’s lesson for Lebanon

India and Pakistan could have been spared catastrophes by power-sharing systems they rejected. The Lebanese should hold on to the one they have.

I NORMALLY CAN’T stand Boris Johnson because of his demagoguery and conservative political creed. But last week Emmanuel Macron made me appreciate the British prime minister, for the first time.

The French president was in Beirut, on his second trip since last month’s massive explosion in the Lebanese capital. He warned politicians there that they had “the last chance for [their] political system,” which is based on sharing political power and interests among the country’s half a dozen religious-political factions.

The system had been introduced in Lebanon by imperial France after World War I when it created and colonized that Arab country. Macron, like many other critics of Lebanon’s consensus democracy, now says the power-sharing model has bred corruption and inertia among Lebanese officials, which somehow caused the devastating blast of a stockpile of ammonium nitrate at Beirut port.

On his first visit to the city soon after the August 4 explosion, the French president had given the Lebanese a tongue-lashing for their corruption and called for “a new political pact,” which would, he explained later, transform that country’s consensus democracy into some kind of a majoritarian one.

A democracy can be based on a consensus among groups or communities, or on the strength of a legislative majority. Under the consensus model, executive powers and legislative seats are shared by a country’s ethnic, religious or other communities, and government decisions are arrived at through dialogue among representatives of those communities. A majoritarian democracy, on the other hand, is a winner-take-all game in which a political party (or a coalition of parties), which wins a majority of seats in a parliamentary election, forms the government and enacts laws without input from minority parties of communities. 

On his second trip Macron warned his Lebanese hosts that if they failed to reform their political system, he would push the international community to stop aiding Lebanon financially and sanction those among them who had amassed wealth through corruption. 

I was born in India and spent part of my childhood there and then lived for years in Pakistan’s eastern province before migrating to the United States. I have been dismayed lately to see that tensions between India and Pakistan have spiked to new heights since the government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi wiped out the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state. The British had colonized the Indian subcontinent for nearly two centuries. After reading Macron’s comments on the Internet, I wondered how Indians and Pakistanis would feel if Boris Johnson were to descend on Islamabad and New Delhi and tell Modi and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan how to settle the Kashmir issue and warn of dire consequences if they failed to follow his diktat.

I am grateful that Johnson apparently has better sense than today’s occupant of the Elysée Palace in Paris, whose forebear Henri Gouard carved out and ruled Lebanon.  General Gouard had suffered two humiliating defeats at the hands of the Turks in World War I. Never mind, the French general tucked his tail between his legs and marched on Damascus, where he kicked the tomb of Salahuddin Ayyubi, the Kurdish victor over French and other European Crusaders, and thundered: “Wake up, Saladin! We are back. My presence here marks the final victory of the Cross over the Crescent!”  I am afraid Macron’s current posture in Lebanon and vision about its future will prove as delusional.

The Beirut blast – which killed 181 people, wounded 6,000 others and made 300,000 homeless – pained me much as I once fell in love with that city and cherish fond memories of my three visits there. But I am nettled, really, by the attacks, mostly by Westerners, on Lebanon’s consensus system, as I believe in my bones that such a power-sharing arrangement could have spared my native Indian subcontinent two horrifying tragedies. One was the 1947 partition of British India into the modern Indian and Pakistani states, during which Hindu, Muslim and Sikh rioters massacred 800,000 souls and uprooted 14 million others from their homes and lands. The other was the dismemberment of old Pakistan in 1971 during which hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis perished in a savage Pakistani military crackdown in what was then East Pakistan.

Lebanon’s French colonial rulers who succeeded Gouard had the insights to realize that any European political model would not work in the chimera of a “nation” they had jumbled together out of Muslim and Christian sects who had never lived together in a nation-state. In cooperation with native elites, they developed a structure to provide autonomy for the country’s different sectarian communities and allow them to share executive and legislative powers. Lebanon’s political and social leaders saw the wisdom of the arrangement had it incorporated in the 1943 charter of their country’s independence from French colonial rule. Lebanon has since customized the system in response to the exigencies of the times.

Under the system, as it operates today, the president of Lebanon is to be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of the parliament a Shiite Muslim, and the deputy prime mister and deputy speaker Eastern Orthodox Christians. The sects are also allotted parliamentary seats roughly in proportion to their population ratios.

Indian confederation

Three years after the Lebanese independence, the British colonial power in the Indian subcontinent realized that the time had come for them to pull up their stakes in that country. And like the French in Lebanon, they realized that the two major religious communities there needed a power-sharing political structure to live relatively peaceably in an independent country.

Accordingly, in the summer of 1946 a British Cabinet delegation, led by then British Secretary of State for India, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, worked out a confederal arrangement for an independent successor state to British India. Under it the country’s provinces would be grouped into Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority ones, and those provincial groups would enjoy wide autonomy in managing their administrative, economic and social affairs. That would leave the government in New Delhi with only four subjects: foreign affairs, defense, currency and communications. The plan was initially accepted by the Indian National Congress, led by Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as the Mahatma, the great soul; and the Muslim League, led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Both were Oxford-educated barristers.

Gandhi’s Congress was mostly a Hindu organization whose top leaders wanted the country to run as a secular majoritarian democracy like Britain in which people would be expected to vote without regard to their religious and ethnic affiliations, and a parliamentary majority would legislate for the country and govern it through a Cabinet at its will. Jinnah, a Shiite Muslim, was actually more secular than the Hindu Gandhi. But he believed, unlike the Mahatma, that religious consciousness would dominate the minds of everyday Indian voters.

And he feared that because Hindus made up three-quarters of the British Indian population, the overwhelmingly Hindu parliament of a united democratic India would suppress Muslim interests and discriminate against Muslims unless the Muslim minority’s basic political and religious interests were safeguarded by a constitution. He proposed a list of 14 Muslim demands to be incorporated in the future constitution of India. In American parlance those demands outlined an affirmative action plan for the Muslim minority.

The Congress turned down Jinnah’s 14-point Muslim safeguards. The Muslim leader then pushed for an alternative project to preserve Muslim rights: the creation of an independent Pakistan, consisting of British India’s Muslim-majority provinces. But after the British delegation proposed a plan offering wide autonomy for the provinces, including Muslim-majority ones, Jinnah embraced the new plan for a united, confederal India.

Despite the Congress’s initial acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Jawaharlal Nehru, Gandhi’s chief lieutenant, had reservations about it.  Anointed president of the Congress in the final year of British rule, Nehru knew, as did everyone else, that he was going to be prime minister of independent India. The last thing he wanted to do as prime minister was dabbling only with four subjects, leaving all the rest of governmental powers with groups of provinces.

On July 10, 1946, the new Congress president called a world press conference in New Delhi and went on a tangent tearing the British plan apart. An independent India would not “be bound” by any provisions of the Cabinet Mission Plan, Nehru declared, and its “sovereign parliament” would legislate and govern the country as it saw fit. Nehru found himself in alliance with his rival for the leadership of the Congress, Vallabhbhai Patel, a rabidly anti-Muslim Hindu politician.

Jinnah’s foresight

Jinnah was horrified. India was still under British rule. If the Congress president was now renouncing the plan that offered, among other things, autonomy to Muslim-majority provinces and thus the preservation of Muslim rights and interests, what would Muslims do if and when a “brute majority” of Hindus in the sovereign parliament of a united India actually enact laws and take action trampling Muslim rights? The Muslim leader withdrew his earlier acceptance of the Cabinet Mission Plan. He brushed aside clarifications by other Congress leaders that Nehru’s comments had been out of line with the policy of the movement because, again, who would keep a future Congress leadership or sovereign Hindu-majority parliament from scrapping the British plan? Jinnah reverted to his earlier demand for a partition of the subcontinent to create an independent Pakistan, which eventually became a reality.

I was raised by an anti-Pakistan Muslim father in northeastern India, and in my boyhood I loathed Jinnah. I came to appreciate the founder of Pakistan and his wisdom in pulling out of the Cabinet Mission Plan more than half a century later when India’s anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist groups began to rise and ultimately win successive elections through their political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). BJP leader Modi was elected prime minister in 2014 and reelected to the post with an overwhelming parliamentary majority in 2019. His government has been adopting policies and getting laws passed curbing Muslim rights, allowing the lynching and widespread persecution of Muslims and stamping out the autonomy of the Muslim-majority Kashmiri state.

The Pakistan that Jinnah and the Muslim League created would fall apart 24 years later, this time because of a Pakistani ethnic community’s refusal to share powers with another. The Muslims of Bengal (along with those of the United Provinces) were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement and in 1946 elected the only Muslim League provincial government in all of British India. But once Pakistan was created, its bureaucracy and military came under the domination of elites of Punjab province in West Pakistan. Those bureaucrats and military officers relentlessly refused to share political power with the Bengalee Muslim ethnic community, who made up more than 90 percent of the population of East Pakistan province and a majority of the entire Pakistani population.  To hold on to power, the Punjabis – Punjabi elites, that is – repeatedly disrupted Pakistan’s democratic process and staged one military and military-backed coup after another. They spurned Bengalee demands for “provincial autonomy,” which, ironically, was the salient feature of the British Cabinet Mission Plan, rejected by Nehru and Patel, paving the way for the partition of old India.

By 1970, when Pakistan had its first parliamentary elections, most Bengalees in East Pakistan had been fed up with Punjabi domination, especially the dictatorship of a West Pakistan-based Punjabi military junta, led by General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan. East Pakistan voted near-unanimously for the Awami League party, which had called for a confederation between East and West Pakistan under a 6-point plan, similar to the one proposed for a united India by the British Cabinet mission and a bit looser than the Lebanese accord of 1943.

Pakistani’s military dictatorship spurned the Awami League’s power-sharing formula, triggering a full-blown Bengalee independence movement in East Pakistan. India, Pakistan’s archenemy, seized the golden opportunity to wreck Pakistan, invaded East Pakistan and midwifed the creation of independent Bangladesh on December 16, 1971.

Two weeks earlier, on December 2, I had arrived in Beirut on a stint from the Pakistan government. Among the people I met there was Ihsan Rabah, a Ph.D. candidate from the American University of Beirut, who told me that he wanted to learn about “the civil war in your country.”

Before flying in to Beirut, I had spent a few days in Baghdad, where officials of the ruling Baath Party griped about the Kurds hatching an often-bloody independence movement in northern Iraq under their redoubtable leader Mulla Mustafa Barzani. Fayyad Alwan, a Farsi professor at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, blamed the Kurdish movement and Sunni-Shiite cleavage in Iraq on “Muslims [being] forced to live like the English and Russians” under the Baath Party’s secular socialist laws, which had uprooted them from “the brotherhood of Islam.

While India advanced its military juggernaut toward East Pakistan, I discussed with Rabah the bloody independence struggles in East Pakistan and the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq. He told me that he gave the French “the credit for our consociational system,” which had allowed “our [sectarian] communities to share powers and responsibilities of government” and cultivate the values of their religious communities into which they had been “rooted for centuries.” The arrangement, he added, had “enabled us live more or less peaceably” and let Lebanon “flower as a democracy,” while the people of neighboring Arab states had to endure repressive measures of ruthless kings and dictators to keep their states from breaking up.

Did I think, my friend asked, that a “consociational system like ours” could have spared Iraq and Pakistan the ethnic bloodletting that I had talked about? I did not meet Rabah again, but after the breakup of Pakistan I would have answered his question affirmatively.

The “more or less peaceable” lives of the Lebanese were subsequently shattered by a brutal sectarian civil war. More than 150,000 of them perished and 1 million were displaced during the 1975-1990 conflicts. I spent much of my 1995 visit to Beirut bemoaning the demise of the prosperous, boisterous shining city on the Mediterranean shore. Aside from Cairo, Beirut is the Arab city I have been most excited to visit. My precious memories of the city include my leisurely strolls with friends from An Nahar newspaper, and others, along Hamra Street, the so-called Champs Elysees of the Arab world, which was a hangout of Arab intellectuals, artists, visitors like me, diplomats, millionaires and billionaires. Among my favorite spots on the street were The Strand and Movenpick restaurants, where I used to dine – alone, and with friends.

Enduring, too, is my memories of evening rendezvous with friends in my room in The Lord’s hotel on the Mediterranean. On one of those evenings, I opened the window. A silence descended in the room as a heavenly scene unfolded before our eyes: gently rolling sea waves sparkling gloriously in the crimson rays of the setting sun.

All that seemed to me now to have “gone with the wind.” The city once known as the “Paris of the Middle East” had become a ghost town. Dour-faced managers watched solitary customers at Hamra Street stores. Sparse passersby plodded unhurriedly on the streets once bustled with boisterous crowds. Nearly half of the 180,000 homes and flats destroyed during the civil war were still to be rebuilt. Beirut’s population of more than 1 million had dropped to 400,000.

But just as the Americans had done more than a century earlier, the Lebanese eventually pulled together after their disastrous civil war and moved on. The religious sects already had regrouped under their modestly reformed power-sharing accord, negotiated in Taef, Saudi Arabia, and approved by the Lebanese parliament on November 4, 1989.

Successful political systems often take centuries to evolve through vicious conflicts among their religious, ethnic and political communities. The British took seven turbulent and bloody centuries to do so.  In the meantime, the English and Scotts fought bloody wars; the military locked down Parliament and Parliament rose and sent the army back into the barracks; a prime minister committed regicide; and guided by bishops in the House of Lords, Parliament passed many laws denying basic rights to Catholics and nonconformists. 

Democracy in America allowed, and sometimes facilitated, slavery, segregation and the lynching of African Americans. Many people don’t know how vicious were American whites’ relations with blacks and other racial categories and how long American democracy turned a blind eye to it.

Conservative progressives’

In 1975 my would-be wife, a bleeding-heart progressive from New Hampshire, arrived in Frederick, Maryland, to enroll in a master’s degree program at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. Patricia Susan Gawdy, 22, was aghast at seeing the statue of former Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, a native of Frederick, standing majestically in a small park in front of the city’s courthouse. In 1857 Taney had written and delivered the notorious Supreme Court decision denying American slaves’ right to flee to freedom.

Pat asked a white couple passing by why people of Frederick were “still putting up with the statue of this monster”?

“Who is a monster, young lady?” the man asked indignantly.

Pat pointed her finger at Taney’s statue.

“How dare you, girl? He is one of the heroes of our town, don’t you know?”

“Where are you from?” asked the woman.

Before she could reply, another white man, who had lumbered toward them, pointed his right index finger to Pat, and roared: “Are you a Communist?”

On March 17, 2017, a crew of three men pulled down the Taney statue with a crane at that park and loaded it onto an old Chevy pickup truck to be discarded at an undisclosed location. In the wake of nationwide protests against Confederate symbols that had been smoldering across America since 2015, the people of Frederick, where I had made my debut as an American journalist, finally decided that they had had enough of Chief Justice Taney.

My wife of 41 years was terminally ill with cancer. She read out to me a snippet from her laptop screen about the departure of the Taney statue from Frederick.

“How do you feel about it, dear?” I asked.

“These are among my better moments in life,” she said. “I think, though, that many people in Frederick still think of him as their hero.”

“What makes you think Justice Taney was a monster?”

“It’s the Roaring Sixties during which I grew up, I guess. And the progressive ghetto in which we have lived all these years.”

After a pause she added: “We remain unreconstructed progressives, don’t we? Very conservative progressives.”

My much-loving and beloved wife’s insights into life and society, and her inexhaustible generosity, sustained me during the very best years of my life.

America’s long-troubled democracy is a functioning enterprise now.  Workable democracies don’t come as prefabs. They grow through trials and errors.

There are working democracies, majoritarian and power-sharing, in the West and the East. The majoritarian ones that come to mind include Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Bangladesh and Nepal, although the last two have their limitations. Among the stable consensus democracies are Sweden and the four other Nordic democracies, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Japan, and Malaysia.

Historical communities

Westerners steeped in their white-liberal political and cultural monochrome would accept any democracy as long as it has free elections and its people don’t discard it. The great German sociologist and philosopher Max Weber would find any democracy kosher as long as it is based on “popular belief in its legitimacy.” Ever since the French Revolution most Westerners, including Weber, have failed to realize the limits of such democracies in multi-religious, multi-ethnic societies outside the West.

Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and other non-Western faith groups cherish their traditional religious, ethnic, linguistic and territorial communities. Their lives and aspirations are, in many ways, fulfilled better by the heritage and cultures of those communities than their newer “imagined communities,” the term used by the Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson to describe modern nations. The moral values, lifestyles and we-they social boundaries of most peoples outside the West are shaped by their affinity with those historical communities.

Naturally, in the polling booths they usually vote for candidates who belong to and espouse communal causes and interests. Unfortunately, the values and cultures of those communities can become frigid, some quite malignant. The challenge of the coming era is going to be unfreezing those cultural rigidities and heal the malignancy of those values. Many among the non-Western elites who emerged during the late-colonial era shied away from healing the malignancy of some of those values, infecting the social and cultural norms and institutions of their societies. Instead, they got sucked up by the dominant institutions and outlook of colonizing European powers. They left the task of cultural and social reforms to religious fundamentalists, whose performance, often retrograde, is outside the scope of this article.

Beginning in the early decades of of the 20th century native leaders of European colonies plunged into struggles for their countries’ independence from European colonial rule. Many of them had a Western education. Most of these patriots fought valiantly and many suffered hardships during their struggles. They included Ahmed Sukarno of Indonesia, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk of Turkey, Riza Shah of Iran, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Mohammad Siad Barre of Somalia, Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, and Gandhi and Jinnah of British India.

In India a British education and exposure to the Western civilization apparently clouded the political vision of Mahatma Gandhi, an otherwise searingly intelligent and insightful man. He – and Nehru – failed to realize that Hindus and Muslims of their native land could not be secularized the way Western Europeans had been to work out a civic majoritarian democracy of the Westminster variety. If they had, they would have anticipated Narendra Modi, who has been elected Indian prime minister twice under its majoritarian democracy by Hindu voters, in spite of – for many of them, because of – his anti-Muslin bigotry. The Modi government has faced no effective opposition from India’s overwhelmingly Hindu society as it has launched an anti-Muslim pogrom with alarming ferocity.

No form of government can function flawlessly in any society, but social science research has preponderantly established that in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies the consensus model is much fairer and more successful over the long haul than the majoritarian model. Arend Lijphart, a renowned political scientist who has researched democratic categories extensively, calls consensus democracies “kinder and gentler” than majoritarian ones. He says the power-sharing system promotes dialogue between ethnic and religious groups and incentivizes mutually beneficial compromises.

Consensus democracies’ proportional voting systems lead to the formation of governing coalitions that take care of the interests of a cross-section of society. They also promote close relationships between the state and interest groups and bargaining between employers and employees. All these reduce the exploitation of workers by corporations, as it is occurring in America, where more than 90 percent of the national income is piling up in the coffers of the top 1 percent of the population.

Yes, negotiations and compromises, which sometimes encounter partners’ vetoes, slow the process of governing. And assured shares of power often make leaders of constituent groups corrupt and allow them to dish out largesse among their cronies. A lot of this is happening in Lebanon, as in other democracies.

But is a quick decision, without enough reflection on its consequences, always better than a slower one made with careful deliberation among the parties it would affect? Political scientists such as Aurel Croissant of Heidelberg University in Germany argue that “democracy must grant effectiveness over representativeness.”  They obviously have not carefully studied the case of  Muslims living under the effectively running Modi government in India, or that of Hindu Tamils in Sri Lanka, a majoritarian democracy, where the Tamils have no agency through which to share with the Buddhist government in Colombo their torture, rape or extortion by members of the Buddhist majority.

And how valid is the argument, now being made by critics Lebanon’s consensus system, that doing away with that system would reduce political and financial corruption in government? It’s actually baseless propaganda made mostly by Europeans and Americans who think, apparently without a basis, that a majoritarian-type system would checkmate certain Lebanese factions they don’t like, especially Hezbollah, a nemesis of Israel and ally of Iran.

Studies have found that both majoritarian and consensus systems can be equally prone to corruption. Transparency International’s 2019 corruption index ranks Lebanon 137th among the 180 countries it surveyed. (The greater a country’s number on the corruption scale, the more corrupt it is assumed to be.) Here are the corruption levels in the public sectors of six of Lebanon’s neighboring majoritarian democracies, determined by Transparency. Three are more corrupt, and three less so. The three more corrupt are Bangladesh (146), Iraq (162) and Afghanistan (173). The three less corrupt are India (80), Sri Lanka (93) and Pakistan (120). So the notion that community-based power-sharing has necessarily made Lebanon more corrupt than majoritarian democracies does not hold water.

As we discussed, democratic journeys are long and arduous. But societies have to go through them to mature and stabilize. Britain and the United States endured long and scary roller coaster rides to do so. In what would have been a democratic Indian subcontinent the trip was botched up before it began. In old Pakistan it was interrupted after it had.

If and when Macron calls Michel Aoun to talk again about turning Lebanon into a majoritarian democracy, the Lebanese president should answer him with two words: Get lost.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

China plots to encircle India

“Yay!”

I exclaimed within myself. China was going to upgrade the Sylhet airport, said a blurb on the Internet. Sylhet is my hometown in northeastern Bangladesh.

Sylhet’s Osmani airport is rather small and every time I fly in to the city, I have to hustle through a crowded arrival lounge into the hurly-burly of a packed parking area. Sylhet, too, is close to the Indian state of Assam, where I was born. I felt good about the prospect of traveling more comfortably from Sylhet to see my friends and relatives in India.

I was browsing through news sites on my laptop in my living room in the Washington suburbs. I now wanted to know more about the airport project and gradually found out, through Google search, that it was a much bigger story than I had thought. The modest $248 million project was just the tip of an iceberg of growing bitterness between Bangladesh and India, and more startlingly, part of a grand Chinese strategy to contain India.

The Chinese venture in Sylhet was big news in the Indian media. Some Indian bureaucrats and pundits were fuming at the Bangladesh government for cozying up to China and giving the airport contract to a Chinese company when India was reeling from its border clash with the Chinese in the Himalayas that killed 20 Indian troops. One commentator pointed to Sylhet being next door to Assam, a caldron of unrest against India. Was the Bangladeshi airport going to be a nest for Chinese spies, fomenting trouble for India in Assam? The Bangladeshi government was ignoring these Indian criticisms and not making secret of serious strains in its relations with India.

A report attributed to the Bhorer Kagoj (Morning paper), a Bengali-language Bangladeshi daily, revealed that for four months the Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, had been turning down requests for a meeting with the Indian high commissioner (ambassador) to Dhaka, Riva Ganguly Das. Some in the media speculated that Hasina did not want to hear any Indian carping about the growing Bangladeshi-Chinese ties. In mid-July India finally decided to remove its envoy from her Dhaka post.

The relationship between Dhaka and New Delhi had been flustered, as never before, by two apparently anti-Muslim measures adopted by the Hindu nationalist government of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. A new Indian law provides Indian citizenship to immigrants of all faiths from neighboring countries – with the exception of Muslims. And nine out of 10 Bangladeshis are Muslim. Then a new survey of citizenship status of people in Assam, widely criticized as a Muslim witchhunt, has stripped 2 million Assamese, mostly Muslims of Bangladeshi origins, of their Indian citizenship. As a result, anti-Indian outrage was sweeping Bangladesh, and the Hasina government, which had been chummy with New Delhi, had to downgrade its ties to India to an all-time low.

China obviously lost no time in exploiting the animus between Dhaka and New Delhi and reached out to Bangladesh with largesse. Besides taking up the Sylhet airport project, Beijing is working on other trade and investment ventures in Bangladesh. On June 19 Bangladesh and China signed a trade agreement under which China provides duty-free access to 97 percent of 8,200 Bangladeshi products, an undreamed of bonanza for Bangladesh. Then Beijing signed an agreement with the Hasina government to build a submarine base at the Cox’s Bazar harbor of Bangladesh.

While this was going on, the Pakistani prime minister, Imran Khan, surprised the region by making a widely publicized phone call to his long-estranged Bangladeshi counterpart, Hasina. Khan complained to her about India’s annexation of the Muslim-majority Kashmir state. The call had considerable optical implications. In 1971 India went to war with Pakistan to let Bangladesh (then Pakistan’s eastern province) secede from Pakistan and become an independent state. Ever since, relations between Bangladesh and Pakistan had been on the rocks. It appeared that China’s long arm of diplomacy had got Khan to call up Hasina as part of Beijing’s broader anti-Indian strategy.

Besides Pakistan and Bangladesh, Nepal has also been at loggerheads with India. For years the Nepalese have been accusing India of having illegally annexed three of their territories.  The festering feud led Kathmandu to try to wiggle out of India’s economic orbit by courting China. Beijing grabbed the overture enthusiastically, dishing out loans, aid and investments to Nepal. Last year, during Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Kathmandu, the two countries upgraded their relationship to a “strategic partnership.”

The Nepali-Indian tensions heated up in May when India opened a new road through the territories claimed by Nepal, which reached the Chinese border. China was not amused. New Delhi also put out a map showing the territories claimed by Nepal are part of India. Nepal responded by publishing its own map showing the disputed territories to belong to Nepal. Indian politicians and news media are accusing China of orchestrating Nepal’s anti-Indian moves. They are branding Kathmandu a Chinese “proxy,” trying to create troubles for India at Beijing’s behest.

China isn’t bothering to deny these Indian accusations. On the contrary, it apparently has decided to put its potentially anti-Indian ducks in a row. On July 27 Beijing held a virtual conference with Pakistan, Nepal and Afghanistan, ostensibly to adopt a four-point plan to tackle the Covid-19 pandemic. But significantly, the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, also discussed plans to boost economic recovery in the region and prodded Afghanistan to get on with Beijing’s global infrastructure project, known as the Belt and Road Initiative. Largest of its kind in history, the BRI is focused on making huge investments in transportation, communication, education, power grid, iron and steel manufacture, and so on. China expects the initiative, involving more than 68 nations, to accelerate economic growth across the Asia Pacific region, Africa and Central and Eastern Europe.

Pakistan was among the first countries to jump into the BRI. Bangladesh and Nepal then joined in. And impoverished Afghanistan is unlikely to pass up the opportunity to embrace the mammoth project that would accelerate its economic growth.

The United States, India, Japan, Australia and some other pro-Western countries have stayed away from the BRI. Some have denounced the project as China’s mega strategy for world domination, a mechanism to financially trap countries into the Chinese orbit. Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros warned governments against joining the venture, calling China a “mortal threat to open societies.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose government had joined the BRI, has dissociated his country from it, citing Chinese persecution of Uighur Muslims.

All the same, China has invested billions of dollars in India’s neighborhood – in Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. It obviously is now using those investments and the lure of the BRI to stitch these countries together into a pro-Chinese albatross around India’s neck.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington.

Mahmud Ali: Generals wrecked Pakistan

MAHMUD ALI’S BIRTH centenary on September 1 reminded me of a comment Jawaharlal Nehru made during his meeting with George Bernard Shaw in London.

Independent India’s first prime minister, a driven Fabian socialist, had been invited to attend the June 2, 1953, coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey. That was “a formal occasion,” he told Shaw when the celebrated Irish playwright arrived to see Nehru at the Indian prime minister’s personal invitation, sent from Delhi nearly a month before.

‘Mahmud Ali (right), then minister of social work in Pakistan, is greeted by then Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972.’

The more important event for him, Nehru added, was “meeting you,” the best-known ideologue of Fabian socialism. Shaw said he had been “deeply gratified” by his host’s compliment.  But he asked why Nehru had said that.

“Because what I am is because of what you have written,” replied Nehru.

I’m no Jawaharlal Nehru. But I am what I am largely because of what I learned from Mahmud Ali – and Nurul Amin – during my years as a student, journalist and political activist in what used to be East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh.

I was 17 and about to graduate from high school when I first met Ali, then revenue minister of East Pakistan, at an election rally in his native Sunamganj subdivision, which is now a district (administrative regions). He was one of four visiting government ministers, and the shortest and youngest of them. They spoke at a public meeting in a rice paddy field, blanketed with crumbling stalks of harvested crops.  Ali’s speech drew the most enthusiastic and sustained applause from the crowd. Their acclaim for the other speakers was lukewarm.

During his speech the revenue minister denounced the “exploitation” of peasants and workers by land owners and industrialists. And he told the audience, twice, that if he should fail to push through certain legislative initiatives to mitigate their plight, “I will leave the government and come back and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you” to continue his struggle for their “lentil and rice,” staple food for poor Bengalees.

I was impressed by Ali’s expressions of empathy for the poor, and the passion with which he made them. Faking as a restaurant worker carrying food to the ministers, I slid through a police cordon around a government bungalow in Guwainghat town in which the dignitarieswere resting after the meeting. I asked Ali a couple of questions about the anti-poverty initiatives he had talked about. He flattered me as “an intelligent young man” and asked about my family and plans for further education.

My admiration for Ali soared a few months later when I, now a college freshman, heard over the radio that he had resigned from the East Pakistan government. Mahmud Ali was the only government minister ever to resign voluntarily in the 24-year history of East Pakistan. (In 1971 that Pakistani province would emerge as independent Bangladesh.) A couple of days after Ali’s resignation I buttonholed one of his close associates in Sylhet town, from where I was attending Murarichand College.

“Do you know why Mr. Mahmud Ali has resigned,” I asked Motassir Ali.

“He was not getting anything done” that he wanted done, replied kala (black) Motassir, as he was popularly known.

I realized that Mahmud Ali was delivering on his pledge to the people of Sunamganj.

His unswerving struggle for the rights of peasants and industrial workers earned him the label of “Communist” from his right-wing political adversaries. In the 1960s, as a student of Dhaka University, I became close to him, while also moonlighting as the press aide to Amin, the leader of the opposition in the Pakistan National Assembly and a former chief minister of East Pakistan. The political circle in Sylhet came to know about my being a close associate of Ali’s. To that circle belonged my former host at a lodge from where I had attended college.

Abdullah Chowdhury asked me one day why I had become a “henchman of that Sunamganji politician.”

What was wrong with that? I inquired.

“You are the son of an alem, you should stay away from him,” replied the social conservative belonging to Sylhet’s landed aristocracy. “Mahmud Ali is always fighting rich people, people richer than his family. Do you hear him talk about Islam?”

I replied that Ali was “fighting for economic and social justice,” which was a core Islamic value but was being opposed by Muslim aristocracy.

Ali is better known, however, as a trailblazer in the struggle to restore democracy in Pakistan, abolished by the military dictatorship of Gen. Mohammad Ayub Khan. He founded and led the Ganatantri Dal (Democratic Party) and was a top leader of the National Awami Party, National Democratic Front, Pakistan Democratic Movement and Pakistan Democratic Party all of which he helped organize to achieve his seminal goal of wresting democracy back from the clutches of Pakistani generals.

He faced the most crucial decision of his turbulent political career in the wake of the movement for East Pakistan’s secession from Pakistan and reincarnation as independent Bangladesh.He just couldn’t reconcile with the idea of dismembering the country he had struggled long and onerously to help create and build.

Ali knew too well about West Pakistani political and bureaucratic elites’ neglect of economic development in East Pakistan and abolishment of democracy by the West Pakistan-based military brass – the two issues that fueled the Bangladesh movement. But he believed,and argued over and over, that the answer to those abuses of power lay in the democratization of Pakistan. East Pakistanis, 98 percent of whom are Bengalees, made up the majority of the Pakistani population, and he believed that full-fledged democracy would empower East Pakistanis and get them to end the injustices done to them. Ali, Amin, and a host of other Bengalee leaders who were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement also feared that Bangladesh would become a satellite of India, which would border three sides of the impoverished and defenseless country.

I shared Ali’s and Amin’s political prognoses and defended and promoted them through my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published in Dhaka, the capital of East Pakistan. In the late 1960s Bangladeshi activists harassed and denounced Ali, kidnapped and persecuted him and bombed his house in Dhaka. (I, too, faced harassment and death threats for my writings against the breakup of old Pakistan.)

But despite those adversities and dangers, Ali never budged from his staunch support for the “unity of democratization” of Pakistan. On the eve of the birth of Bangladesh he and Amin, facing security threats in East Pakistan, moved to West Pakistan with their families. Nurul Amin served as Pakistan’s last Bangalee Prime Minister and Vice President, and Mahmud Ali as a federal minister .

Toward the end of his life Ali anguished over the “continued suppression” of Pakistani masses by the political-military-feudal elites. During my continual telephone conversations with him from the United States, he would lament the “economic plight” of everyday Pakistanis and maintain that “freedom and justice for which we have Pakistan” remained to be realized.

“Why?” I inquired of my mentor.

“Because of the power structure,” he replied.

Was it not “the same power structure,” I asked, that had disrupted democracy and sustained economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, driving that province into breaking away from Pakistan?

“You have a point,” he said, “but some politicians on both sides [East and West Pakistan] were busy exploiting the problems [instead of finding] their solutions.”

He believed to his dying day that unfettered democracy, restored in time, “would have saved [old] Pakistan.” He explained that the Ayub Khan regime should have re-established democracy in the early 1960s when the people of the two parts of Pakistan had “deep brotherly relations.”  The military dictatorship of Gen. Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan held Pakistan’s first national elections in 1970, when many East Pakistanis had been “fed up with economic disparity and military rule.” That led to the “victory of the secessionists” in East Pakistan and its “rupture” with the western wing.   “Military dictatorships killed Pakistan,” he added.

Ali, Amin and most other leaders of the democratic struggle in Pakistan blamed the United States for “abetting the killing of our democracy.” American administrations, Republican and Democratic, coddled each of Pakistan’s military dictators, who overthrew democratically elected governments and abrogated democratic constitutions. From the Cold War to the “war on terror, the United States has always used Pakistan to fight its strategic enemies. Never did an America administration put pressure on a Pakistani dictatorship to restore democracy.

I returned to the truncated Pakistan after the independence of Bangladesh and came away with a different take, however. I interviewed dozens of Pakistani politicians, military officers, journalists and civic society leaders about their thoughts on economic disparity between East and West Pakistan, dismissal of Bengalee-led central governments (of Prime Ministers Khwaja Nazimuddin and Hussein Shaheed Suhrawardy), the Bengalee demand for East Pakistan’s autonomy, and West Pakistani elites’ support for military dictatorships, all of which had poisoned relations between the two wings of old Pakistan. The mentality and priorities betrayed by those leading lights of Pakistani society showed that very few of them had the kind of commitment to Pakistan that Amin and Ali did. I figured that the Pakistani military and civilian leadership, centered in Punjab, wouldn’t have conceded real power to the Bengalees or allowed the establishment of real democracy, which would have done so.

As I was flying back to London from Islamabad, my mind was flashing with memories of my political activities and thinking during the pre-Bangladesh years, including what appeared now to be mymisinterpretation of events and mistaken judgments. In came rolling the last episode of Victor Hugo’s breathtaking novel Les Misérables.

Monsieur Gillenormand, the aristocratic grandfather of Marius, had bitterly opposed for years Marius’ marriage to Cosette, Jean Valjean’s adopted daughter. Valjean was a lower-class man who had served a prison term for stealing pieces of bread to feed his starving family. When Gillenormand finally realized that his aristocratic pride was destroying what would be his grandson’s lifelong pleasure and happiness, he consented to the marriage. As he was taking leave of Valjean after a glamorous wedding ceremony, Gillenormand apologized for his mistake of not approving the marriage earlier.

“Don’t most of us make mistakes most of our lives?” responded Valjean. It was better to learn of a mistake, he added, than never realize and come to grips with it.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

India’s empty threat to Pakistan

Pakistan was protesting, vociferously, India’s decision to wipe out the “special status” of the part of the Jammu and Kashmir state under its occupation. Rajnath Singh, the Indian defense minister, told Islamabad to hush up. He said New Delhi may be changing its “no-first-use” policy on firing nukes.

India adopted the policy of not using its nuclear weapons against an adversary unless that adversary had attacked it with nukes first.

Singh warned Pakistan, in effect, that the Indians were now prepared to rain their nuclear bombs on Pakistan without waiting to be targeted by a Pakistani nuke.

The Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir principality was never part of the Indian mainland, even though Indian emperors occasionally had invaded and occupied it. In 1948, after “British India” had been split into independent India and Pakistan, Pakistani tribes overran a third of the Muslim-majority kingdom, while India grabbed the other two-thirds. The dispute went to the United Nations, where then Indian prime minister, Kashmiri pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, promised to hold a plebiscite to let the Kashmiri people decide whether to join India or Pakistan or to remain independent. India eventually reneged on its plebiscite commitment and, instead, allowed Kashmir a “special status” with wide autonomy. Two weeks ago India’s Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked Kashmir’s special status, triggering a new round of row between India and Pakistan, which had fought two wars over the fate of Kashmir.

As I read Singh’s comment online, my mind raced to the dreary, darkish afternoon of Jan. 21, 1972. My friend Asrar Ahmed had dropped in to see me in the Pakistani vice presidential compound on Peshawar Road in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. I worked as press secretary to Vice President Nurul Amin. My boss was in the living quarters and I was drafting a speech he would be delivering he next day at a student gathering in Peshawar, the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

“Bhutto stirred up the Qiyamah in me,” said Ahmed, seating himself on a coach next to my desk. Ahmed and I had become friends a couple of years before when he was elected president of the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists of which I was an active member.

“Qiyamah in you?” I said, staring into my friend’s eyes.

In Islamic scripture Qiyamah means the Day of Judgment when terrified throngs of resurrected humans would be streaming to the field of Arafat in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, (by some accounts, somewhere in greater Syria) to be dispatched to hell or heaven, depending on their sins or virtuous deeds in their lives.

Ahmed asked for tea, which I ordered.

He said the day before he had “sneaked into” a meeting of leading Pakistani physicists, nuclear scientists and engineers in the city of Multan. He had got a tip, saying the new Pakistani president, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, had called the meeting to talk about a “new security strategy” for the country, which had lost its eastern half to an invading Indian army just six weeks earlier.

India had invaded East Pakistan, facilitating its secession from West Pakistan and emergence as independent Bangladesh. The Pakistani army’s Dec. 16, 1971, surrender to Indian forces in Dhaka, the East Pakistani capital, had led the Indians to drag 93,000 Pakistani troops and civilians into Indian detention centers as prisoners of war. Some Pakistanis I had talked to asked whether India would now be using its overwhelming military might to pulverize the rest of Pakistan.

Ahmed said that on his way to the Multan meeting he had wondered if Bhutto, a widely known boozer, had been “drinking too much” as he was trying to get “people who only know to peep into microscopes and telescopes” to help him hash out a national security strategy

Bhutto warned the gathering that what had been left of their country after the secession of Bangladesh existed “on borrowed time.” India could chop up the rump of Pakistan, too, but was giving the world the time to “digest its tearing up a sovereign country.” A time could come, the president warned, when New Delhi could decide to turn Pakistan into another “Muslim Spain.” In the fifteenth century Catholic armies and militias had reconquered all Muslim domains in Spain and Portugal, obliterating the flourishing Islamic civilization there.

The president told the scientists that Pakistan’s only defense against India lay in acquiring the nuclear bomb. He kept asking them: “Are you going to give me the bomb”? Pakistan’s Nobel laureate physicist Abdus Salam was among the first to assure him that he would get his wish. Bhutto then wanted a time frame. One scientist said it would take five years to build a nuke from a scratch. “Five years!” the president howled. “Can’t you do it in three? Come on, three years!” Siddique Butt, a younger physicist, jumped to his feet and punched the air with his fist. “Yes sir,” he declared. “three years. You will get it in three years, Mr. President.”

Ahmed told me that he didn’t “really know how long it will take” Pakistan to get the bomb, but that he, too, believed now that “Pakistan can’t survive without the bomb.”

Forty-seven years later Rajnath Singh’s threat to nuke Pakistan vindicated to me the panic that had driven Bhutto into his no-holds-barred, whirlwind drive to get Pakistan its own nukes.

Getting Pakistan the bomb became Bhutto’s all-consuming mission in life. He probably gave his life for it. On a visit to Pakistan in August 1976 Henry Kissinger, then U.S. secretary of state, twisted Bhutto’s arms brutally to get him to abandon his nuclear program. When Bhutto refused, Kissinger warned the Pakistani statesman – in presence of Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir; and then deputy chief of the US mission in Islamabad, Gerald Feuerstein – that in that case “we will make a horrible example of you” of resistance to U.S. will. Zulfikar and Benazir Bhutto believed through their dying days that Kissinger and the CIA had got Gen. Ziaul Haq to overthrow the father of the Pakistani bomb in a military coup and then hang him on trumped-up murder charges.

Singh’s bluster reminded me that the populist Pakistani leader’s mission had been crowned with success. New Delhi’s threat to launch a nuclear strike on Pakistan was actually empty. Hindu nationalist Indians are of course going bonkers with their animosity toward Pakistan. But I doubt that they’re total loonies. They know that Pakistan, with its stockpile of more than 150 nuclear warheads, can turn such an act into a suicide mission for India. That makes such a misadventure highly unlikely.

To get Pakistan to this point, Bhutto had once declared, “We will eat grass, even go hungry. But we will have our own [nuclear bomb]. We have no choice.” With their near-melting economy, Pakistanis are eating grass, so to speak; but thanks to their hard-drinking, “Islamic socialist” leader, they’re unlikely to be herded into Indian detention camps again.

Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog. 

Bangladesh, Pakistan trade luck

Bhutto

I FEEL GOOD about living to see this day.  Bangladesh, whose creation I once opposed, is belying my forebodings about its future. It has surpassed Pakistan and, in some cases, the economic behemoth of India in economic development and well-being. Bangladeshi economic performance glows brighter when you compare that with the near-meltdown of the Pakistani economy.

Here’s how Bangladesh compares with Pakistan and India economically and socially, as shown by four key indicators. The first three are from the World Bank database, and the fourth from that of UNICEF.

Economic growth rates: Bangladesh – 7.9%; Pakistan – 5.4%; India – 7%.

Per capita income: Bangladesh – $1,700; Pakistan – $1,400; India – $2,000.

Life expectancy: Bangladesh – 73 years; Pakistan – 67 years; India – 69 years.

Literacy rate (15-24 years): Bangladesh – 73%; Pakistan – 56%; India – 69%.

First, a bit of the genesis of Bangladesh and Pakistan. In 1947 old Pakistan was carved out of two Muslim-majority slices of the Indian subcontinent, separated by 1600 miles of Hindu-majority India. East Pakistan, agrarian and flood-prone, was inhabited mostly by impoverished Bengalee Muslims. West Pakistan, especially its Punjab province, throbbed with industries and flourishing farms and was the locale of most of the country’s armed forces.

Bengalee Muslims had struggled onerously to create the “Muslim homeland” of Pakistan while the ethnically diverse Muslims of what became West Pakistan were opposed or indifferent to the Pakistan movement. The irony of ironies, 24 years after the creation of Pakistan, Bengalee Muslims in East Pakistan split Pakistan to make their eastern province independent Bangladesh. They had become fed up with army rule, economic exploitation and political suppression by West Pakistan’s mostly Punjabi military, feudal and political elites. Ever since Pakistan is what had been West Pakistan. 

Bangladesh’s quite rapid economic progress and strides toward modernization have been an agreeable surprise to me because I had underestimated the progressive and creative potential of my fellow East Pakistanis. I believed that the relatively backward East Pakistan, with its stagnant economy, couldn’t survive, or at any rate would suffer, without the support of Pakistan’s western wing. In my column in the Pakistan Observer newspaper, published from Dhaka, now the Bangladeshi capital, I argue repeatedly that the “real task before us,” East Pakistanis, was to restore democracy in Pakistan, not dismember the country, which we had fought hard to create. East Pakistanis accounted for 56 percent of the Pakistani population, and I maintained that under a democratic system that would ensure free and fair elections, “we will rule Pakistan,” ending military rule and economic exploitation of the Punjabi clique.

On the morning of March 22, 1969, I was abducted at dagger-point from Dhaka by a dozen or so rowdy activists of the Bangladesh independence movement. My kidnappers called me a “Punjabi agent” and tormented me for my “filthy writings” against the Bangladeshi “national liberation.”  They eventually let me go with the warning that if I dared to write “one more word” against their movement, my corpse would be “floating in the Burigunga,” the river snuggling Dhaka’s southern border.

I soon dropped my byline from my commentaries and the Observer’s publisher, Hamidul Huq Choudhury, arranged to send me out to work as the paper’s London bureau chief. I wasn’t surprised when I learned that I was among about 200 East Pakistanis who had become persona non grata in the newly independent Bangladesh. I immigrated to the United States as a political refugee.

From America I began to watch Bangladesh’s steady economic rise, after two decades of economic downturn, a famine and two military coups. It led first to my confusion and then soul searching and research. From my inquiries I realized that Bangladeshis’ innate spirit of enterprise and ingenuity, which I suspect party derives from their genetic inheritance, have been propelling their rapid rise. I was at once embarrassed and elated. Embarrassed because of my underrating Bangladeshis’ capabilities and opposing their independence struggle, and elated because of the accomplishments of my fellow natives of the new nation. 

Bangladeshis are a hybrid racial strain, belonging to Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Australoid other racial stocks. In 2014 I ran into two German researchers in Dhaka who were investigating the genetic components of Bengalee ethnicity in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, also inhabited by Bengalees. Ninety-eight percent of Bangladeshis are ethnic Bengalees. Fritz von Meyer, from Lower Saxony, told me that the “very rich racial mixture” in their genome had made Bengalees more inquisitive and innovative than people with less variegated racial and ethnic genealogies. I realized that prolonged military-political suppression by the Punjabi-led West Pakistani elites had, partly, kept that ingenuity and creativity from flowering among Bengalees in East Pakistan. 

Today I see the same deplorable drama playing out in what is left of Pakistan. I didn’t research the genetic or societal characteristics of Pakistan’s diverse ethnic communities, but Punjabis are known for their talent and enterprise, Pashtun for their indomitable courage and perseverance, Baloch for their vigorous spirit de corps and artistic aptitudes, and so on. If harnessed, these gifts of character and abilities could catapult Pakistan into high levels of progress and prosperity. 

Yet Pakistan is facing the deepest crisis in its history. In April a Pakistani economist warned that his country had “reached the point of collapse.” Kaiser Bengali said, “The alarm bells are ringing. We have no choice but to beg. I fear starvation, poverty and unemployment.”

Prime Minister Imran Khan, once an internationally famed cricket star, came to power promising to create 10 million new jobs and 5 million new houses and revitalize the economy. Little did he know that the burden of running an impoverished country with domineering army generals looking over his shoulders is quite a bit heavier than running through the cricket field with leg pads, thigh guard, helmet and gloves.

Pakistan’s growth rate has plummeted to a nine-year low, to 4 percent; 35 percent of its population languishes below the poverty line. Yet curbs imposed by the IMF bars the government from launching public sector programs that could have alleviated the hardships of the poor. The IMF has given Pakistan $6 billion in loans to help stabilize the economy, imposing constraints on the government’s economic and financial policies. Meanwhile, prices of sugar, flour, electricity and most other essential commodities and services are rising unremittingly. On top of it, the Pakistani government has had to announce a sharp tax hike, also under IMF pressure, which, when presented before the parliament, drew angry shouts and howls. The country’s productivity, reflected in its export earnings, has dropped significantly. It’s telling to recall that as late as in 1992 Pakistan’s per capita real GDP, adjusted for purchasing power of the currency, was 65 percent higher than India’s. Today it’s 28% lower than that of its larger neighbor.

The rise of productivity, a fast rise, would be the key to restoring Pakistan’s economic health, and with it political and social advancement. But raising productivity requires a motivated manpower with animated hopes and aspirations. The problem is you can’t truly motivate people into doing anything consequential if it doesn’t enkindle their creativity and energy and offer them a stake in the outcome of their drudgery. It all calls for social and political freedoms, which Pakistan’s power-drunk military brass, landed aristocracy and government bureaucracy have resisted tooth and nail so far.

The military, in collaboration with the aristocracy and bureaucracy, has continually interrupted in the democratic process throughout Pakistan’s history. Imran Khan is Pakistan’s 19th elected prime minister. Thanks to military-bureaucratic interventions none of the 18 before him completed his or her five-year term in office. Khan is trying to do so by accepting the military tutelage – practically ceding foreign relations to the generals and clearing his key domestic programs with them. That’s not a recipe for economic recovery or growth, let alone promoting freedom and democracy in Pakistan.

As I said on other occasions, I’m an optimist who is waiting for the day Pakistanis say enough is enough. That day they will rise to beat their swashbuckling generals and colonels back into the barracks – as the Turks did in the wake of the aborted Turkish military coup in 1916 – and win their freedoms and their and their children’s’ future.

  • Mustafa Malik is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He hosts this blog.

Modi, Bibi, Trump & liberal order

Narendra Modi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday on his reelection as Israeli prime minister. India’s Hindu nationalist prime minister has been one of the closest allies of the Israel’s right-wing racially inspired one.

Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, has offered a piece of good news to Donald Trump, the racially motivated American president. Trump, too, is going to win re-election next year, “absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it,” Cohen predicted. What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

Roger Cohen, a New York Times columnist, has offered a piece of good news to Donald Trump, the racially motivated American president. Trump, too, is going to win re-election next year, “absent some decisive factor to upend the logic of it,” Cohen predicted.

What’s the logic behind Netanyahu’s re-election and Trump’s anticipated one? They both have succeeded in putting together a “structural majority of the right,” composed of religious and racial groups.

Cohen’s piece reminded me of John Mearsheimer’s latest book, The Great Delusion, which I finished reading last week. The international relations scholar says America’s “liberal hegemony” in the world is about to end partly because liberalism is failing. Liberalism, the ideology of the Enlightenment, wanted rational individuals to build peaceable, humanist societies around the world. Protagonists of the ideology believed that people’s religious and ethnic prejudices had kept them from building such societies and hence these thinkers wanted men’s and women’s affiliations with religious and ethnic systems replaced by their allegiance to institutions of liberal states, which would uphold the liberty and promote good life.

Mearsheimer says individuals “using their critical faculties, reach different conclusions about what constitutes the good life.” This has happened because Enlightenment philosophers ignored the fact that cultural systems, created through living in communities, “shaped how individuals think and behave.” If we follow the political scientist’s logic, liberalism is failing because it failed to recognize people’s affinity with religion, race and ethnicity, which have produced Netanyahu, Trump and Modi. Well, Mearsheimer is kind of echoing the thinking of a host of powerful minds from Isiah Berlin to Reinhold Niebuhr to our own Martha Nussbaum.

Mearsheimer says, correctly, that Americans’ commitment to liberalism has always been “flexible.” Religion never really left the American public square. Neither has race, as shown by the malignant episodes of slavery, Jim Crow, segregation and now Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s crusade against Hispanic immigration. Would Trump have been so obsessed with building a wall along the Mexican border if the immigrants from the south were whites from Britain, France or Germany?

The case is not fundamentally different in Europe. Western and Northern Europe have, of course, succeeded in banishing religion from public and private spheres. But racism? It lay dormant for several decades after the Holocaust and has now revived with a vengeance. My direct encounter with European racism occurred during 1998-1999, when I was researching the outlook for Turkey’s accession to the European Union as a fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. My inquiries about the issue drew negative responses throughout the five EU countries in which I conducted the fieldwork. In France, Germany and Austria – part of the white cultural monochrome (with largely suppressed Muslim subcultures) – discrepancies in “cultural” and “democratic” institutions were cited as the main reasons Turkey wouldn’t fit into the EU. In Britain and the Netherlands, avowedly “pluralist” democracies, I was told that Turkey’s relatively poor economic performance and also “slow progress” toward a full-fledged democracy would “create problems” if Ankara were to join the bloc. These were the general lines of feedback from my unscientific samples, with exceptions, of course.

In reality, Turkey has outpaced the economic performance some of the countries that have joined the Union since, e.g. Slovenia, Croatia and Lithuania. Its democratic evolution, with the inevitable blips of an emerging democracy, is more striking than that of some of the bloc’s latest members, especially the post-Communist ones.  Poland and Hungary are virtual autocracies. Yet Turkey’s chances of accession to the EU is more remote today than was two decades ago when I investigated the question.

Turkophobia of the “white-Christian club,” as the former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu once described the EU to me, dates back to Ottoman Turks’ conquest southeastern Europe and march to the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683. Race and culture, informed by the values of Western Christianity, remain a stumbling block to the bloc’s acceptance of brown-skinned Muslim Turks’ membership application.  Racism in Europe has reached the highest levels since the Holocaust mainly because of an influx of Muslim immigrants with different shades of brown skin tones. Muslims make up 6 percent of the European population. Islamophobia is but a new incarnation of anti-Semitism, which raged in Europe for many centuries.

Britain, viewed as a model of racial and religious tolerance, is a case in point. In no other Western country would you see so many brown Muslims and black Caribbeans serving proudly in public offices from the government ministry to Parliament to city councils. Much of it, however, reflects the traditionally pragmatic Britons’ acceptance of the demographic reality. Non-whites make up 13 percent of the British population of 64 million. Actually, race consciousness remains endemic to British psyche and has been heightened by the growth of non-white communities. Polls have shown that fear of Muslim immigration has been a key driver of the Brexit campaign. One poll put out last November by The Independent newspaper found that 31 percent of white Britons feared that “Muslim immigration is part of a bigger plan to make Muslims a majority of this country’s population.”

If race is eating away at liberalism in Europe, religion and ethnicity have kept it from taking root in most of the rest of the world. The concepts of church-state separation and rights of the rugged individual are among the basic principles of liberalism. But these ideas have been alien to Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Pashtun, Palestinian, Kurdish, Balinese, Hutu, Tuareg, Mulatto, and Zambo communities. Many people in these religious and ethnic groups would sacrifice their individual well-being, and sometimes lives, for communal solidarity and interests.

We need a new world order that safeguards the cultural, economic and political interests of autonomous religious and ethnic communities. Netanyahu must be barred from continuing to dispossess and subjugate the Palestinians, Modi from suppressing the freedoms of Kashmiri and other Indian Muslims, and Trump from trampling the rights of Hispanic immigrants and would-be immigrants at the Mexican border. An American citizen, I am voting for Bernie Sanders who, as president, would promote these cherished aspirations of mine, along with others.

  • Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, hosts this blog.

‘Islamic bomb’ scare, again!

“Persuading Pakistan to rein in its nuclear weapons program should be an international priority.

“The major world powers spent two years negotiating an agreement to restrain the nuclear ambitions of Iran, which doesn’t have a single nuclear weapon. Yet there has been no comparable investment of effort in Pakistan.”

The New York Times Editorial Board

HERE AGAIN is an ‘Islamic bomb’ alert! And the scaremongers this time aren’t some Islamophobic American politicians, but the editorial board of America’s greatest newspaper.

We just saw that American and European governments get struck by amnesia when someone asks about Israel’s formidable nuclear arsenal of 200 or more nukes, but they did not rest until quarantining Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

The same way they and the “free press” in the West have been scaring the Westerners about Pakistan’s ‘Islamic bomb’ for four decades. They have been doing so ever since Pakistan’s Zulfikar Ali Bhutto regime felt compelled to begin exploring a bomb after India had detonated its first nukes in 1974. Three years earlier, the Indira Gandhi government in New Delhi had invaded and dismembered old Pakistan. Pakistanis – not just politicians and generals, but everyday workers and shoppers – were scared to death of India getting nuclear bombs, besides having conventional military forces that were three times bigger than Pakistan’s. To allay the widespread panic, one evening Z.A. Bhutto went before TV cameras to assure his nation that he would do all he could to counter Indian nukes.

“We shall eat grass,” he paraphrased an earlier comment in his innately colorful language, “and make the bomb, and fight India for a thousand years.”

The phrase “eat grass” was meant to show how hard it would be for impoverished Pakistanis to spare their meagre resources to build a nuclear deterrent against the India, but that after India had once broken up their old country, people in what was left of Pakistan had no choice but pursue the bomb.

Yet the Times editorial board is mum about India’s nuclear weapons stockpile, and wants Pakistan to unilaterally disarm!

It reminds me of the late Pakistani statesman Mahmud Ali, who had been angered by Henry Kissinger’s brutal pressure on Z.A. Bhutto to dismantle Pakistan’s nascent nuclear program. In his August 1976 meeting with Bhutto in Lahore, the U.S. secretary of state even warned that the Pakistani prime minister would “make a horrible example of yourself,” if he defied the American instruction. (The quote is from Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, Daughter of Destiny). Ten months later Gen. Ziaul Haq overthrew the enormously popular Pakistani prime minister and hanged him in 1979, despite intense international pressure to spare the life of the democratically elected prime minister.

Meanwhile, about two months after the fateful Kissinger-Bhutto meeting, Mahmud Ali, a former minister in the Z.A. Bhutto Cabinet, had told me on the phone from Islamabad about Bhutto’s decision to brush aside “the enormous American pressure to terminate our nuclear program.”

“See,” added my political mentor, “Christians can have the bombs. Jews can have them. The Hindus can have them, too. And Russian and Chinese Communists also can. No problem. If only a poor Muslim country tries to have a couple of them to defend itself against a mortal enemy … skies would be coming down.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/08/opinion/sunday/the-pakistan-nuclear-nightmare.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Bringing Indian Muslims out from cold

THE INSTALLATION of India’s Narendra Modi government has triggered concerns among many Indian Muslims.

Prime Minister Modi of the Hindu nationalist Bharatya Janata Party (BJP) has included in his Cabinet some of the well-known Muslim baiters such as Indresh Kumar and Sadhvi Rithambara. He has given top administrative posts to bureaucrats accused of involvement in anti-Muslim riots. He also has kept mum on the right-wing Hindu demand for a nationwide ban on calls for dawn prayers from mosques over microphones.

A Muslim friend from my native Assam state says these developments “contradict your writings” during and after two recent trips through India, in which I anticipated a diminution of Hindu-Muslim tensions. Did I get it wrong?

Politicians are mostly products of their times. John F. Kennedy emerged at the onset of the “Roaring Sixties,” a liberal social explosion that shook America and Europe. Religion was pretty much contained in the private sphere of American life. Kennedy was a Catholic. The Democratic senator’s candidacy for president unsettled many Americans who feared that, if he were elected president, his public policy would reflect papal dictates.

On Sept. 20, 1960, in Texas, Kennedy assured Americans: “I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair. Whatever issue would come before me as president … I would make my decision … in accordance with what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” Kennedy echoed that theme many times on the campaign trail.

Six decades later liberalism wasn’t “roaring” anymore in America and, in fact, had become a dirty word in American politics. Another Democratic presidential candidate was being attacked by a surging Christian right and other conservatives for allegedly not being a good enough Christian. Propaganda about his perceived religious deficiency threatened to undermine his candidacy. Obama launched a full-throated defense of his Christian credentials.

Early in his life, he said, “I let Jesus Christ into my life.” Christian values would be “a moral center of my administration.” He would introduce “faith-based” social programs because “religion strengthens America.” Obama reiterated the theme on the stump.

Narendra Modi, too, is a man of his time. Gone are the days when Indian political and social elites widely believed in the robust secularism of their Fabian socialist Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Most were still under the ultra-secularist cultural influence of the just-departed British colonialists, which had little relevance to native cultural values. Today India is going through an unprecedented Hindu religious revival. Hindu social and political organizations, once marginalized, have gained the passionate support of a wide swath of the Hindu mainstream. Modi has been part of this religious wave. He and his BJP rode its crest to come to power in New Delhi.

Throughout history, religious and ideological upheavals have, unfortunately, spawned extremism and hostility toward those who don’t belong to the movements. We saw that in the wake of the French, Russian and Iranian revolutions; the Protestant Reformation; and Puritan surge in New England; and several Islamic revivals. India’s Hindu nationalist movement is no exception. Its rise has heightened anti-Muslim and anti-Christian hostility among its ideologues and activists and, more tragically, large numbers of everyday Hindus.

Yet I still don’t share some Indian Muslims’ concerns that the Modi government would go on an anti-Muslim witchhunt. I doubt that the regime would try to abolish Muslims’ separate family laws. I don’t think it would build a temple to the Hindu deity Ram on the site of the historic Babri Mosque, which was demolished by Hindu extremists. Nor do I see it scrapping Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which guarantees wide autonomy to the Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir state. These have been on the BJP agenda and make Muslims shiver.

Muslims are close to 15 percent of the Indian population of 1.2 billion, advancing educationally and economically and more assertive of their rights than ever in the history of independent India. I believe Modi and his inner circle know that new attacks on their cherished institutions and culture would trigger a political and societal earthquake, which would threaten the exciting economic development programs for which they won the elections. Many in the top tier of the BJP, some of whom I interviewed, are highly educated, and want to see India as a modern, advancing society. They know that new interfaith convulsions would make it appear to the world as a backward nation, steeped in religious hatred and prejudices.

I noticed the dawning of this realization among some BJP leaders after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in Gujarat. Hindu nationalists in that state had started bone-chilling anti-Muslim rioting in which more than 1,000 souls perished, most of them Muslims. Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, is widely believed to have instigated the slaughter, even though the Indian Supreme Court cleared him of any legal responsibility for it. The new thinking in the BJP is reflected in the fact that none of the states the party has ruled since 2002 have seen an anti-Muslim riot.

It’s impractical, however, to expect the BJP government to heal the entrenched Hindu nationalist chauvinism overnight. The appointment of some of the chauvinists to high government positions seems to show that predicament.

A more formidable challenge to improving Hindu-Muslim relations in India is the widespread social ostracization of Muslims. Muslims have a hard time landing a government job, getting admission to schools or moving into a Hindu neighborhood. I know Muslim businessmen and journalists in New Delhi who failed to rent an apartment or buy a house in upscale mostly Hindu residential areas and are living in Muslim ghettos.

One of them, a medicine distributor, said, “One [Hindu] landlord settled on the rent and date I could move in, but when I was signing the contract, he saw my [Muslim] name and said, ‘Come tomorrow. Let me talk it over with my family.’ That tomorrow he told me that the family had decided to bring in a relative, instead.”

Modi or the BJP can’t eradicate such widespread social prejudices in an election cycle or a decade. They have, however, a golden opportunity to begin the process through legislation, education and pro-minority social and economic programs. A progressive party government would face strong right-wing Hindu resistance to such projects.

* Mustafa Malik, host of this blog, is an international affairs commentator in Washington. He’s on research trip through his native Indian subcontinent.

Struggle for Bangladesh’s cultural soul

SYLHET, Bangladesh: Is modernity finally putting brakes on the Islamization campaign in Bangladesh? Is it eroding the nation’s ethnic culture? These questions keep haunting me during trips to Bangladesh. A visit yesterday to  Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet lent the two questions special poignancy.

The population of what is now Bangladesh is nearly 90 percent Muslim. They were in the vanguard of the Pakistan movement. By the 1940s they had been fed up with the economic and cultural suppression by the dominant Hindu elites. They pulsated with the pan-Islamic fervor and  joined other Muslim communities in the Indian subcontinent in a campaign to carve out the Muslim state of Pakistan. Ironically, a veteran of the Pakistan movement was  Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who would later lead the struggle to dismember Pakistan to create independent Bangladesh.

In fact Muslims in Bangladesh, which used to be called East Bengal and later East Pakistan, began to feel their Bengali ethnic pull soon after they had helped create Pakistan. Beginning in 1952, just five years after the birth of Pakistan, a movement to make Bengali an official language in Pakistan dramatized that ethnic resurgence. It was fueled by the repression of Bengalis in East Pakistan by non-Bengali political and military elites of West Pakistan. In 1971 that struggle culminated in East Pakistan breaking away from Pakistan’s western provinces.

But then, almost immediately after Bangladeshis severed their ties with their fellow Muslims in (West) Pakistan, their Islamic spirit began to revive again, almost with a vengeance. During several visits to Bangladesh I almost dazed from the sights of mosques and Islamic schools proliferating and prayer congregations overflowing mosques buildings. More and more Bangladeshi Muslim women began covering up their heads in colleges, government offices and market places. More and more Bangladeshi men wore Islamic clothing.

“It’s incredible,” Hamidul Huq Chowdhury, publisher of the Bangladesh Observer newspaper (where I once worked), exclaimed during my 1991 visit to his home in Dhaka, the Bangladeshi capital. He said the Islamic upsurge in post-independence Bangladesh, “is stronger and more widespread” than it was during the Pakistan movement.

Today Bangladeshi society appears to be undergoing a third cultural twist. Islam and modernity seem to be squaring off for the domination of Bangladeshi culture. Jannatul Ferdous Shikha, a demographic researcher I met yesterday at Shahjalal University, said Bangladesh was “Islamizing and modernizing” simultaneously. She didn’t wear a headscarf and expressed strong secularist views. She predicted that “secularism will overcome the backwardness and bigotry” of Bangladeshi Islamists. Shikha praised a “growing secular movement,” which she said was widening and deepening in Bangladesh.

“But it’s true,” said the political scientist, “that people [Bangladeshi Muslims] are acquiring religious habits. They follow whatever the “huzurs” [Muslim clerics] say. I don’t know why.” She said the Muslims showing enthusiasm for Islam don’t read Islamic scripture. “Many of them don’t pray, but are crazy about Islam, whatever they think it is.”

Some of the other professors and students I met on Shahjalal University campus pointed out that Bangladesh had been making notable progress economically and educationally.

During the last four decades the country’s capita GDP increased 10-fold to $2,000, and literacy rate tripled to 66 percent. Significantly, the modernizing trend has defied the equally dramatic increase in political and bureaucratic corruption and the endemic political violence and instability.

A Transparency International survey for a four-year period has found Bangladesh to be the world’s most corrupt country. My refusal to bribe Bangladeshi officials has made me face difficulties in reclaiming some of my farmlands and shares in fisheries from usurpers. I have learned from several reliable sources that magistrates in this Bangladeshi town take bribes for favorable judgments in criminal cases.

Yet I have been impressed by sights of the rapid improvements in Bangladesh’s roads and highways, and the mushrooming of schools, colleges, businesses and industries. Shaheena Sultana, assistant registrar at the university, said the economic progress and modernization was a “bigger story” than Islamization.

The physical and social spectacles in Bangladesh are sparkling with symbols of modernity and globalization. Roads and streets – once shared by bicycles, bullock carts, goats and cows and occasional passenger buses – are now often clogged by cars, trucks, and streams of buses. Cell phones, including smartphones, are used almost universally throughout the country. An ever-growing number of Bangladeshis wear blue jeans and slacks, dropping the native male skirt called “lungi.” Most urban dwellers can speak English or  understand necessary English terms.

In fact English is replacing Bengali in the business and industrial culture of Bangladesh. On my way to Shahjalal University, I could hardly see an all-Bengali store sign. Those signs bore wholly or partly English names, usually written in the Bengali script: Holy City Grammar School and College, Modern Hair Dressers, Shourobh [Bengali word for fragrance] Stationery Store, Shopto Dinga [seven-canoe] Foreign Furniture, Derai [name of a place] Bedding House, Baraka [Arabic word for blessing] Arabic Learning Center, Messrs Ilyas [man’s name] and Sons, and so on.

On some of those signs, the English script is appended to the Bengali one.

What a paradigm shift! Who could have imagined during the Bengali language movement in East Pakistan in the 1950s that Bengali Muslims would one day trade their cherished native language and concepts for foreign ones?

The twin movements of Islamization and modernization, which are at loggerheads themselves, are clearly corroding Bengali ethnic values and cultural idiom in Bangladesh. I’m wondering whether Islam or modernity is going to be the final winner.

Or modernized Islam?

  • Mustafa Malik, who hosts the blog ‘Beyond Freedom,’ is traveling in Bangladesh and India.
MugX
Mustafa Malik, the host and editor of the blog ‘After the Clash,’ worked for more than three decades as a reporter, editor and columnist for American, British and Pakistani newspapers and as a researcher for two American think tanks. He also conducted fieldwork in Western Europe, the Middle East and South Asia on U.S. foreign policy options, the “crisis of liberalism” and Islamic movements. He wrote continually for major U.S. and overseas newspapers and journals.
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