Pakistan Our Difficult Neighbour and India's Islamic Dimensions

Iwas born in an environment of ample Islamophilia. It had to do with an upbringing in what was then the Princely State of Patiala, defacto East Punjab, in the pre-partition days where there was great bonhomie between the communities. Some of my father’s best friends were Muslims, one of whom (Muqim Khan) went on to become a major general in the Pakistan army and a famous military author. A few of them continued to visit us periodically till about mid-1950s, but soon after that attitudes appear to have hardened between our countries and the visits ceased quite abruptly. Besides our father being well versed in Urdu and Persian, he loved to recite poetry in these languages and regaled us, mostly after dinner, with fascinating tales from the Arabian Nights, Alif Laila and Hatim Tai. It was probably our father’s friendship with Muquim Khan that inspired him to make two of us brothers to join the then Prince of Wales Royal Indian Military College at Dehradun (renamed as Rashtriya Indian Military College-RIMC) and subsequently three of us to the National Defence Academy at Kharakvasla.

In our army there have not been many Muslim officers (most having gone over to Pakistan) but they have been and are amongst the best in our cadre and some of them have risen high. Same holds good for the Muslim other ranks or the jawans. It would be appropriate to recount two outstanding examples that best describe their great contribution in two of our wars with Pakistan. The first one is that of Brigadier Mohammed Usman who in 1947 could well have joined Pak army but chose to stay on in India and fight against Pakistan during J&K operations in 1947. As commander of 50 Parachute Brigade it was his resolute leadership where he led from the front that saved Naushera from repeated Pakistani attacks. It was an extremely crucial battle and had Naushera fallen, the Indian Army might not have been able to capture Rajauri and eventually link up with the tenuously held defences at Poonch. Many others played significant part in the hard fought battles of Naushera, Rajauri and Poonch but clearly it was Usman’s leadership that set the momentum. Brigadier Usman laid down his life during this battle and was awarded the very well deserved Maha Vir Chakra, India’s second highest gallantry award in war. The second incident is the hair raising feat of all Muslim C Company of 4 Grenadiers for thwarting a most audacious Pak armoured offensive at Khemkaran during the 1965 Indo-Pak War (a master stroke if it had succeeded) and it is here that Havildar Abdul Hamid an ace RCL gunner made the supreme sacrifice, but not before he had personally shot down three Patton tanks and thereby halting the Pak offensive in its tracks that enabled the Indian forces to regroup and turn the table on the enemy; consequently Khemkaran became the graveyard of 92 Patton tanks. Havildar Hamid was awarded Param Vir Chakra (posthumous), India’s highest gallantry award in war.

There are indeed other examples where Indian Muslims individually and collectively in various walks of life have contributed immensely both in peace and war but yet a perception that the majority of them are reluctant to join the mainstream and that quite a few have extra-national loyalties (Pakistanis under the skin) has persisted. This is a kind of prejudice which simply won’t go away. Is there a basis, because if we observe objectively, we will find that Islam is probably the only religion in the world today that is a typical case of ideological bipolarity.

In my view the Muslims of India can be divided into three categories. There is a fundamentalist fringe that is covertly and even overtly anti-national and pro-Pakistan. Considering that there are nearly 180 million Muslims in India and given the global surge of Islam, this is nothing abnormal, but it is not to be ignored if you consider the Law of the Few. Then there is a small minority which is avowedly patriotic and against Pakistan. On the other hand the majority of the Muslims is neutral and is more concerned about a better deal and getting on with their lives but they remain in a stranglehold of the mullahs and unscrupulous politicians. The environment on the whole is complicated in an interplay of poverty, unscrupulous politics, bigotry, appeasement and a feeling of insecurity occasioned by the periodic Hindu-Muslim riots and the partisan role of the state police-all this in order to ensure that the Muslims remain alienated and serve as captive vote banks.

It is sad that India and Pakistan could never be friends and would probably remain enemies in the foreseeable future. There has been diabolism in the relationship from the very beginning and there have been other factors; starting with Britain’s duplicity, and then China and USA who have individually, and in tandem, contributed to the continuing hostility between our two countries. The global rise of the Islamists has further contaminated the atmosphere and affected the psyche of a significant section of the Indian Muslims. We have fought three and a half wars during the last sixty seven years and over the last twenty five years Pakistan has been waging a war by proxy by aiding and abetting insurgency/militancy in India’s troubled provinces. It has been significantly emboldened after acquiring nuclear capability and has ever since carried out blatant and audacious terrorist attacks in India’s mainland with impunity. The climax and most audacious act was the 26 November 2008 terrorist strike in Mumbai. The last five years have seen marked reduction in the terrorist activity, chiefly because Pakistan has been hoist with its own petard; fighting monsters of its own creation. But one must admit that this incorrigible country has been a hard customer to deal with. It has outsmarted India and continues to dupe the Americans from whom it has received nearly forty billion dollars in economic and military aid over the last twelve years and for all purposes will continue to retain its status as a strategic frontline state. In spite of having been caught red handed over its direct involvement in the Mumbai Attack and much international noise and pressure, as so often in the past it has succeeded in making a monkey out of us. Some of us no doubt believed that 26/11 outcome had put SIMI and Indian Mujahedeen on the defensive, but it would have been rather wishful and unrealistic if we had thought that these terrorist organizations had vanished into the thin air. 26/11 could well have been a defining moment in India’s fight against terrorism but we lost the opportunity because of vote bank politics by unnecessarily playing up the bogey of saffron terror and thereby scoring a few self goals in the process. The fact of the matter is what we are witnessing is a period of tactical lull, when the Islamists are busy reorganizing and regrouping.

But let us pause and consider a counterpoint, the belief that Hinduism and Islam are two inherently antagonistic religions. But then aren’t all religions antagonistic? Even various factions within one religion usually engage in bloody wars with each other. On the other hand, the Hindu and Muslim communities may not have got on exactly like a house on fire but had been by and large living together for a few hundred years, more peacefully than the Catholics with the Protestants or Christians with Muslims or Sunnis with Shias. One reason could be that as long as the Muslims were in power in most of India for nearly six centuries, even though the Hindus were the majority community, there was relative peace because the latter adapted and accepted their role as second class citizens.

Yet it must be conceded that amidst the near constant iconoclastic fervor of the Muslim invaders, the Hindu Bhakti movement also came to flourish very vividly from the 14th to the 16th centuries. Tulsidas wrote one of the world’s greatest masterpieces ‘Ramcharitmanas’ and there were other Hindu poets and saints as well like Namdev, Ravi Das and Kabir, Sur Das and Meera Bai. And Guru Nanak was able to lay the foundation of Sikhism without any hindrance. Trouble began only with the period of their fifth Guru onwards when Sikhism became a socio-political force to reckon with and a potential threat. Historical evidence also suggests that by and large Hindus continued to hold the Kumbh Melas and celebrate their religious festivals like Holi, Janam Ashtami, Dushehra and Diwali with fair amount of freedom, the only exceptions where they faced considerable repression was under Firoz Shah Tughlaq and Aurangzeb. Paradoxically both these rulers had Hindu blood in their veins. Firoz Shah’s mother was a Hindu princess from Dipalpur while Aurangzeb’s grandmother and great grandmother were from Hindu Royal Families of Rajputana. Alongside there were the famous Sufi saints revered both by the Muslims and Hindus. Indeed this could have happened only in an environment of tolerance and harmony. Things did not exactly change with the decline of Islam in India and the rise of the Marathas and the Sikhs as Muslims by and large were quite happy serving under them. The real problem surfaced under the British with the advent of renaissance amongst the Hindus and other progressive minorities like the Sikhs, Parsees and the Christians making the Muslims suddenly realize that they had lagged behind. It came as a great psychological shock with the foreboding prospects of the role reversal after the departure of the British where they would have to play second fiddle to the Hindus. The fact of the matter is that it was the British who mischievously abetted the process by arousing a sense of insecurity and fear among the Muslim elite and also introducing the concept of ethnic nationalism. Their aim was no doubt to prolong their rule in India through their by now infamous policy of divide and rule which had for over a century enabled them to conquer the whole of the subcontinent. It is sad and ironic that the British having governed India so well (probably one of the best Masters we ever had), now acted cussedly out of sheer bitterness.

I believe that Muslims hold the key to India’s integrity. They have been exploited and their affairs mismanaged resulting in the persistent disquiet. I have no doubt that future of Muslims in India is bright. India would be quite a lustreless country without them. It is a matter of time before we have a Muslim Prime Minister as India goes on to become a truly affirmative, pluralistic and inclusive country. This will happen once we get a Muslim leader who represents interests of all Indians and not those of only the Muslims-someone the like of APJ Abdul Kalam.

India is in many ways uniquely placed to find a solution given its ancient history of tolerance and that majority of the people now desire social harmony, stability, and good governance. The rest of world would do well to follow the Indian success story when it happens.

I think it pays to be free, fair and frank and pull no punches. I do not pretend to have written about Muslims as Muslims see themselves. It has been said that you need a mirror to have a good look at yourself. The reader must bear with me when I blow hot and cold, probably in equal measure but my endeavour is to remain as objective as is possible.

This book is a very heavily revised version of a fairly short one that I wrote five years ago which was self published for limited readership and was well received. Five years in current affairs is a long period indeed, during which as the saying goes, a lot of water has flown down the Ganges. What has emerged is a new book in its own right.

Most of what I have written is based on research and decades of experience, observations and an unorthodox approach as a free thinking Indian and unabashed nationalist. I would like to acknowledge my gratitude for the inputs taken from the writings of eminent authorities on Pakistan, National Security, Islam and Islamic terrorism which I have collated and sifted. A select bibliography is enclosed at the end of the book. A fair amount of information has been obtained from the internet. I am grateful to Major General Rajendra Prakash, VSM, one of the most distinguished generals of the Indian Army for allowing me to include his piece on Kashmir. I would also like to thank the General as also my brother Brigadier Subhash Khullar for going through the draft and for their valuable comments and suggestions. My special thanks go to Brigadier Pradip Vij, MD Vij Books for his support and for taking on publication of the book.

I must hasten to add that the views expressed in the book are my own for which I alone am responsible.

Had Muslims been the majority community in the erstwhile British India, the chances are that they would have never agreed to the Partition, leave alone granting any special privileges or guarantee to the minorities and instead would have ensured a second class status for the latter, unless of course they converted to Islam. It is a hypothetical conclusion but I am placing it here to show how our ever above the board secularists have not only turned the term Secularism on its head but have ensured that it remains a mill stone around the Hindus’ neck. There is among our Hindu elite a feeling of an indefinable guilt for reasons that require psycho analysis. There is a strong suspicion that in 1947 some of our top leaders, Mr. Jawahar Lal Nehru, the would be PM of India and the Qaide-Azam of Pakistan, were in too much of a hurry to gain independence, more to attain personal power than freedom for their people per se. Amidst great euphoria and public adulation they seem to have been fatally distracted from the terrible fate that would savage millions of their countrymen. They and their colleagues were collectively responsible for turning our independence into one of the worst tragedies of the Twentieth Century and yet mark the irony and the delusion of grandeur and power on both sides. On 14 Aug, Jinnah made his famous speech of an avowedly secular Pakistan that would never be and twelve hours later at midnight, Nehru made an emotive exhortation about India’s A Tryst with destiny-all this when millions were being butchered or were fleeing to safety across hurriedly defined borders. One can understand the reasons for the British hurry to cut their losses and quit and for a terminally ill Jinnah for whom time was running out and he had to get Pakistan before he died but what about the leaders of the Congress Party, surely they were not unaware of the communal tensions that had seized Bengal and Punjab. The happenings of 16 August 1946 - the Direct Action Day (more aptly known as the Day of the Knives) called by the Indian Muslim League which led to massacre of nearly two thousand Hindus in Calcutta followed by retaliatory killings of equal number of Muslims and then in its wake the bloody riots in Naokhali and then reprisals in Bihar and UP were wake up calls, which called for some very sober thinking on the part of the Congress Party. Partition of India had become inevitable. It had to happen sooner or later but it did not have to be such a cataclysmic event-a terrible holocaust that it turned out to be. How did this fierce madness take hold of people who had lived together for centuries in a spirit of mutual tolerance and understanding? The People of Punjab; Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs were in fact living most happily under the rule of the composite Unionist Party under Sikander Hayat Khan and no one wanted any kind of partition, at least not till the Lahore Declaration of 1940 that was adopted overwhelmingly by the Indian Muslim League. That was the beginning of the poisoning the minds which in turn caused disquiet for the first time amongst the Hindu and the volatile Sikh leaders of Punjab like Master Tara Singh, Sardar Baldev Singh, Kartar Singh and Gurmukh Singh Mussafir, an aspect well documented in the dispatches of the then British Governor of Punjab. The ignorant masses remained unaware that there was in fact a conspiracy at work. What was intriguing is as to why has no research scholar carried out a study in depth of this ghastly event; to establish its causes, the conspiracy, the trigger and the chronology of the massacres that took place - whose main objective was undoubtedly to achieve ethnic cleansing in what was to become West Pakistan. There has recently been a very well written book from the other side Punjab Bloodied Partitioned and Cleansed by Ishtiaq Ahmed, a noted academic, but it falls short of being brutally frank. On the whole there is a great intellectual dishonesty and a tendency for various reasons and as a matter of convenience, to treat this vast crime as an unanticipated and a spontaneous occurrence which it most surely was not. Why this shying away from the ugly truth? The aim here is not to dig in the dirt and open old wounds but to caution ourselves against the coming events as the Muslim demography assumes its pre-1947 dimensions in what is now India. We need to revisit the various aspects of the Partition to draw lessons lest we stumble onto yet another terrible slaughter of us fellow Indians and avoid further vivisection of our country by taking some sensible preventive measures.

Many of us aver as to what would have been the state of relations between Hindus and Muslims had there been no Partition? Would they have learnt to live together in amity? Or would they have been a continual civil war? In Khalid Hasan’s words, ‘while most Indians hold the Muslims responsible for the vivisection of Mother India, the Muslims, certainly those who became Pakistanis or came to live in Pakistan, believe that a short sighted Congress leadership failed to furnish the Muslim minority with the guarantees and reassurances it was looking for. This could only have led to a parting of ways.’ The aforesaid perception is trifle self serving and misleading. The problem is the manner in which the Partition came to be executed.

Hasan further argues that had the Muslims been accorded credible guarantees of constitutional protection of their rights and freedoms in a united India, separation may not have been their chosen option. The vast majority of Muslims who supported the demand for a country of their own was afraid that British Raj may make way for Hindu Raj. How wrong and misleading this thinking was can be gauged by the following facts; first, so called majority of Muslims who supported the demand for a separate Pakistan were the elite and represented barely 10 percent of the total Muslim population. Second, the Muslims had been quite happily employed as mentioned above in various fields, even before the arrival of the British, especially in the armies under the Marathas and in the kingdom of Ranjeet Singh and various smaller principalities like Kapurthala which even had Muslim prime ministers to boot. Third, in a secular democracy the very idea of special rights and privileges goes against the very grain of secularism. Protection is a different matter but it can’t be all encompassing or a carte blanche. Is there any secular democratic country in this world where this is so. Fourth, we have seen how in independent India, Muslims now with only 15-16 percent population have a decisive say in about 200 out of total 542 Lok Sabha seats and how all so-called secular and regional parties fall over themselves for garnering their votes. No party can in fact come to power without their support. Is there any doubt that had there been no Partition, the percentage of Muslims would have by now risen to 35-40 and India would have had its share of Muslim prime ministers? The sad truth is that a significant section of the Muslim Intelligentsia could never get over the fact that for six centuries (1092 to about 1720) the Muslims had ruled over most of India, forgetting that those who came from outside and conquered, numbered in thousands and that 60 percent of Indian Muslims have always been indigenous converts from what we now refer to as Dalits and OBCs and about 30 percent from upper and dominant castes like the Rajputs, Pathans, Jats, Pandits, Khatris, Khojas, Gujjars and so on. As some body has said that yesterday’s untouchable converted to Islam and soon thereafter began to claim Arab ancestry causing much delusion of a glorious past that was never theirs. They also overlook the fact as mentioned above that it was not the British who came and dispossessed them of their rule but that the Marathas, Sikhs, Rajputs and Gurkhas had already established their supremacy over most of India by the time the British began their Indian conquest.

It has been sixty seven years since this madness happened and there is a call for introspection from peaceniks including those who hold candle light vigils on the Wagah Border. There is a section of people who now feel that time has come to move forward by discarding the baggage of history. The premise is however; quite different in that in their own manner all religions have their wicked side that incites man to hatred and violence. Heinous crimes can only be prevented if there are courageous leaders who are pragmatic and can rise above personal egos, ambitions, sectarian and religious labels, and when required, ruthlessly put down intolerance and all kinds of indiscrimination. It won’t do to give emotive and high flown speeches at midnight in the Indian Parliament or exhort the crowds in Karachi to mark a highly fractured freedom with ill-disguised hypocrisy and self deception? Why don’t we own up to the bare truth that the ethnic cleansing in West Pakistan was masterminded by Liaquat Ali and his henchmen of the Muslim League who in all likelihood had reckoned to achieve their objective by scaring away the mostly passive Hindus with just