Pakistaning is a unique, but apt new verb for Borgia-grade deceit. A process that has grown ever more thuggish over the 70 years that our India and Pakistan have had to co-exist
Indophile Francois Gautier posted a cartoon of a man and his wife on Facebook, in which the man balefully accuses his wife of Pakistaning him for years. It is a unique, but apt new verb for Borgia-grade deceit. A process that has grown ever more thuggish over the 70 years that our two nations have had to co-exist.
It was bumptious in the early years of Ayub Khan of the handlebar moustache and the beetle-browed Yahya Khan, whisky-swilling old-style British-trained soldiers, with a glad eye, and the usual quota of human weaknesses.
It continued to be tolerable, in the realms of fairly sharp diplomatic skulduggery, during the Sindhi Zulfiqar Ali, ‘we will eat grass but we will have the bomb’, Bhutto’s innings. He, of the designer choke-coat, god forbid, one couldn’t call it agalabandh, even if it wasn’t the same, because it had Nazi style work on the collar. And the vast Piloo Mody’s friend Zulfi, of the Simla (or is it ShimlaIJ) Accord. With our own Indira Gandhi, smiling fiendishly down her nose; dressed in a black cape.
Things started to go seriously downhill when Zia-ul Haq’s turn came — he of the middling intellect, but with a double-dose of cunning. Haq was the author of the ‘bleed India with a thousand cuts’ policy, and ‘I’ll hang the blighter, by Jove’. And so he did.
Benazir Bhutto, with her husband, Mr Ten Percent, was an interlude in rank insincerity; matched only by the reasonable incomprehension on the part of a personable but blank Rajiv Gandhi, and his dimpled Italian wife. It ended in pieces for both scions, in their own time; but that’s another separate irony of the sub-continental drama.
Nawaz Sharif, the quintessential lahori, would have preferred to have a cordial relationship, if history, and the chaps inkhaki didn’t keep prodding him in the midriff with their Glocks.
And then there was middle-parted Pervez Musharraf, who could never really disguise the loathing he felt for India. It had been bred into him during a walled city upbringing in Delhi. No one can hate as well, or quite as completely as a Mojahir.
Even an honorary one, like Dawood Ibrahim, has demonstrated that. Rotting away these days — he is, literally, with gangrene in his legs, and diabetes-ridden — under the watchful eye of wife, if not lover, the formidable Meejabeen.
But, getting away from this backdrop, and table-setting; it must be acknowledged that we have been on the receiving end, ever since Zia-ul Haq, the cunning General, changed Pakistan’s focus from trying to beat India in a conventional war to killing us every day in a perpetual war.
Things have never been the same since. Of course, why we don’t sneak across their borders, and let off a few crackers of our own, where they don’t like it, I simply don’t know. It doesn’t seem to jive with Indian policy and its world-view. But still, a fella might just be forgiven for wanting a little less maturity and a little more revenge.
Particularly since their only super-efficient entity, the dreaded Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has also been winding up the disgruntled elements in this country, and in Bangladesh, to do some of their dirty work for them.
Killing Indians, men, women, and children, is a Pakistani passion. And they don’t mind killing Indian Muslims any more than they mind killing any other kind, as long as it’s Indian. This war of attrition aka jihad/terrorism has worked very well for Pakistan.
The Pakistani regular Army doesn’t want to tangle with us in a frontal attack anymore, after losing 1965, and East Pakistan, and Kargil too; but speak often, and menacingly, of their new tactical nuclear weapons. They promise to use it on our Army, if we enter Pakistan, but seem to long to use them on us anyway. For good measure, they throw in threats of nuking us with their bigger ones, where we sleep, about once every two weeks.
And when the Pakistan Army, the ISI, their more trenchant media elements, and the politicos, run out of breath, from all the abusing and threatening, lashkar-e-Tayyeba supremo Hafiz Mohammed Sayeed promptly starts up, seamlessly — dipping into his bottomless wells of hate.
But through all this, there is a sense that poor blown-up Zia-ul Haq’s ghost is unhappy. His policy of them cuts, is now coming to a head. Indians are getting really good at catching infiltrators and local allies and despatching them post haste. There is too much matching muscularity, even if the Indian rhetoric is saved up for the various capitals of the world where a consensus is building. It’s building against all the good old holy warring that has kept so many home fires burning in Pakistan for so long.
And the propaganda of the vale of tears doesn’t seem to move the present dispensation a jot. They don’t even proffer a tissue. Pakistaning the West is getting difficult too. Besides Europe going broke and Britain going mad, threatening to nuke people just like Pakistan, even the US doesn’t just hand over the money and the planes like they used to.
The Chinese seem to believe all the Pakistaning still, but they are so inscrutable you never know what they’re really up to. They are building roads and pipelines through the length and breadth of Pakistan, all the way to Gwadar in Balochistan. But what will they say after it’s all doneIJ
India might be turning thisjihadism on its head with its preemptive strikes and talk of procuring Predator drones. Today they’re killing the helpless jihadis. Tomorrow they could try to ‘secure Pakistan’s nuclear assets’, egged on by a red-faced blond German-American called Trump.
It’s all changing. The Indians are not waiting for trouble to come to them like in the good old days like nice Hindu sitting ducks. The Indian Army is being given its head, and the poorjihadis don’t stand a chance. Forty-five infiltrators killed in the valley in one month! Actually, its more. But what can one say. Vegetarians are getting the better of red-blooded meat eaters. Shameful.
Pakistan needs a new strategy. But, more importantly, India must get itself a new Government. Congress is right. It’s shocking how this one doesn’t listen to anyone anymore.
