To Fight India, We Fought Ourselves
By MOHSIN HAMID
Published: February 21, 2013 188 Comments
ON
Monday, my mother’s and sister’s eye doctor was assassinated. He was a
Shiite. He was shot six times while driving to drop his son off at
school. His son, age 12, was executed with a single shot to the head.
Tuesday,
I attended a protest in front of the Governor’s House in Lahore
demanding that more be done to protect Pakistan’s Shiites from sectarian
extremists. These extremists are responsible for increasingly frequent
attacks, including bombings this year that killed more than 200 people,
most of them Hazara Shiites, in the city of Quetta.
As
I stood in the anguished crowd in Lahore, similar protests were being
held throughout Pakistan. Roads were shut. Demonstrators blocked access
to airports. My father was trapped in one for the evening, yet he said
most of his fellow travelers bore the delay without anger. They
sympathized with the protesters’ objectives.
Minority
persecution is a common notion around the world, bringing to mind the
treatment of African-Americans in the United States, for example, or
Arab immigrants in Europe. In Pakistan, though, the situation is more
unusual: those persecuted as minorities collectively constitute a vast
majority.
A
filmmaker I know who has relatives in the Ahmadi sect told me that her
family’s graves in Lahore had been defaced, because Ahmadis are regarded
as apostates. A Baluch friend said it was difficult to take Punjabi
visitors with him to Baluchistan, because there is so much local anger
there at violence toward the Baluch. An acquaintance of mine, a
Pakistani Hindu, once got angry when I answered the question “how are
things?” with the word “fine” — because things so obviously aren’t. And
Pakistani Christians have borne the brunt of arrests under the country’s
blasphemy law; a governor of my province was assassinated for trying to
repeal it.
What
then is the status of the country’s majority? In Pakistan, there is no
such thing. Punjab is the most populous province, but its roughly 100
million people are divided by language, religious sect, outlook and
gender. Sunni Muslims represent Pakistan’s most populous faith, but it’s
dangerous to be the wrong kind of Sunni. Sunnis are regularly killed
for being open to the new ways of the West, or for adhering to the old
traditions of the Indian subcontinent, for being liberal, for being
mystical, for being in politics, the army or the police, or for simply
being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
At
the heart of Pakistan’s troubles is the celebration of the militant.
Whether fighting in Afghanistan, or Kashmir, or at home, this deadly
figure has been elevated to heroic status: willing to make the ultimate
sacrifice, able to win the ultimate victory, selfless, noble. Yet as
tens of thousands of Pakistanis die at the hands of such heroes, as tens
of millions of Pakistanis go about their lives in daily fear of them, a
recalibration is being demanded. The need of the hour, of the year, of
the generation, is peace.
Pakistan
is in the grips of militancy because of its fraught relationship with
India, with which it has fought three wars and innumerable skirmishes
since the countries separated in 1947. Militants were cultivated as an
equalizer, to make Pakistan safer against a much larger foe. But they
have done the opposite, killing Pakistanis at home and increasing the
likelihood of catastrophic conflicts abroad.
Normalizing
relations with India could help starve Pakistani militancy of oxygen.
So it is significant that the prospects for peace between the two
nuclear-armed countries look better than they have in some time.
India
and Pakistan share a lengthy land border, but they might as well be on
separate continents, so limited is their trade with each other and the
commingling of their people. Visas, traditionally hard to get,
restricted to specific cities and burdened with onerous requirements to
report to the local police, are becoming more flexible for business
travelers and older citizens. Trade is also picking up. A pulp
manufacturer in Pakistani Punjab, for example, told me he had identified
a paper mill in Indian Punjab that could purchase his factory’s entire
output.
These
openings could be the first cracks in a dam that holds back a flood of
interaction. Whenever I go to New Delhi, many I meet are eager to visit
Lahore. Home to roughly a combined 25 million people, the cities are not
much more than half an hour apart by plane, and yet they are linked by
only two flights a week.
Cultural
connections are increasing, too. Indian films dominate at Pakistani
cinemas, and Indian songs play at Pakistani weddings. Now Pakistanis are
making inroads in the opposite direction. Pakistani actors have
appeared as Bollywood leads and on Indian reality TV. Pakistani
contemporary art is being snapped up by Indian buyers. And New Delhi is
the publishing center for the current crop of Pakistani English-language
fiction.
A
major constraint the two countries have faced in normalizing relations
has been the power of security hawks on both sides, and especially in
Pakistan. But even in this domain we might be seeing an improvement. The
new official doctrine of the Pakistani Army for the first time
identifies internal militants, rather than India, as the country’s No. 1
threat. And Pakistan has just completed an unprecedented five years
under a single elected government. This year, it will be holding
elections in which the largest parties all agree that peace with India
is essential.
Peace
with India or, rather, increasingly normal neighborly relations, offers
the best chance for Pakistan to succeed in dismantling its cult of
militancy. Pakistan’s extremists, of course, understand this, and so we
can expect to see, as we have in the past, attempts to scupper progress
through cross-border violence. They will try to goad India into
retaliating and thereby giving them what serves them best: a state of
frozen, impermeable hostility.
They
may well succeed. For there is a disturbing rise of hyperbolic
nationalism among India’s prickly emerging middle class, and the Indian
media is quick to stoke the fires. The explosion of popular rage in
India after a recent military exchange, in which soldiers on both sides
of the border were killed, is an indicator of the danger.
So
it is important now to prepare the public in both countries for an
extremist outrage, which may well originate in Pakistan, and for the
self-defeating calls for an extreme response, which are likely to be
heard in India. Such confrontations have always derailed peace in the
past. They must not be allowed to do so again. In the tricky months
ahead, as India and Pakistan reconnect after decades of virtual embargo,
those of us who believe in peace should regard extremist provocations
not as barriers to our success but, perversely, as signs that we are
succeeding.
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