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Concentric circles of dread

F.S. Aijazuddin
WE are back in the doghouse yet again. Has there ever been a time ever since we opened our eyes on August 14,1947 when we have not found ourselves in the crib of a controversy?
The only red associated with our independence was not the colour of the rose petals that should have been showered but the colour of the blood that flowed from the massacre of unwilling migrants.
We hurriedly -- some say, necessarily — allied ourselves with the US then, and again repeatedly thereafter without a second look at the consequences of such a fealty, nor at other countries that might have provided our foreign policy with other legs to balance upon.
Over the past 62 years we have witnessed political mayhem and madness, militarism and militancy, mediocrity in leadership and mendaciousness in our governance. Whenever we thought we had reached rock bottom, we discovered that the bottom is itself layered into a thousand slices. How much further do we have to fall before we crawl back towards our potential?
The latest spate of terrorist attacks in Mumbai has disturbed the mechanical equilibrium of India's commercial capital, a city that prides itself on being the brain of India to New Delhi's brawn. It survives not because it is there, like Kolkata, but because it possesses an unquenchable determination to survive. It is Karachi during the riots, London during the wartime blitz.
It is precisely because of its fragile
vulnerability - hundreds of foreign visitors, millions commuting in and out of Mumbai on caterpillar trains everyday, trillions being made every hour at business bourses -- that it represents such a tempting and visible target. It is like the unguarded refinery tanks in Karachi's Keamari terminal were at the onset of the 1971 war. Every Karachiite alive at the time will recall the two Indian planes that flew across the mudflats of Korangi and then bombed the petroleum tanks, igniting a blaze that illuminated a blacked-out Karachi.
But that was wartime. Come to think of it, there has never been a declaration of war between India and Pakistan. We fought in 1965 and in 1971 without such diplomatic niceties. The present assaults in Mumbai are qualitatively different. They are not acts of war; they are acts intended to provoke war.
The very selection of the targets -- the two most famous and luxurious hotels in Mumbai (watering holes for the limit-lessly rich and ineffably famous), a railway station crowded with plebeian commuters, a hospital for helpless mothers and innocent children, and a Jewish centre with an expatriate rabbi -- make one wonder whether such an attack could have been state-sponsored terrorism? Would any government, even a dyslexic Pakistani government, have the capacity to plan such a focused attack, or dare to undertake such a misadventure, cognisant of its consequences? After the lesson of Kargil, would any thinking government want to receive such extra coaching?
Think about it for a moment. The Pakistan army is stretched to uncomfort-
able limits in FATA and the NWFP and hardly needs the additional strain of defending another front on our country's ragged borders.
Our government has just received a shot in the arm from the IMF that has provided fiscal respite until we sink into a predictable relapse. The trends in the economy show a downward slide rather than an upward incline. Would any government dare risk losing such a lifesavinglifeline?
The Pakistani public is neither pre-pared nor equipped for a war against India. Where are the civil defence units that can mobilise our men and convert them into trained combatants? Switzerland which has not fought a war in ,500 years keeps its male population per- j petually trained as a military Reserve. Who . has the evacuation plans ready for our women and children, and where are the centres to which they will be taken swiftly and safely, beyond harm's way?
Who is the Pakistani Yudhishtra who would dare risk everything -- the future of the peace process, the future of Indo-Pak relations themselves, the future of 170 million essentially peace-loving people, in security and with neighbours, the future of the very state of Pakistan itself — on such a foolhardy gamble?
Anyone who has walked in the last footsteps Mahatma Gandhi took in the grounds of Birla House, anyone who has stood at the spot where Mrs Gandhi fell in crumpled heap of a once-starched sari in the garden of her Safdarjang Road residence, anyone who has seen in a glass showcase all that was left -- a pair of • empty joggers —of Rajiv Gandhi after that» suicide bomb attack (a macabre first) in , Sriperumbudur (Tamil Nadu), anyone who has stood on Shahrah-i-Quaid-i-Azam in Karachi where Benazir Bhutto almost lost her life and on the busy road in Rawalpindi where she finally did, anyone aware of these mute cenotaphs of sacrifice must know that terrorism is an explosive weapon whose shards hurt and wound each one of us, regardless of whether we are Indians or Pakistanis.
Patriots on both sides of the border know that they too are being held hostage, as surely as the victims in the Taj and the Oberoi were, by terrorists whose perverted dogma knows no theology except nihilism and hate.
It was once asked by someone of a senior functionary in the ISI what, if he was his counterpart in RAW, would he fear most from the ISI. He responded: the very fact that RAW fears us is a measure of our success. One wishes that the terrorists who jeopardise our lives daily were as afraid of both the ISI and RAW Meanwhile, over a billion people who do not know enough about each other to hate each other with conviction are condemned to move within concentric circles of dread.
F.S. Aijazuddin is an eminent Pakistani writer and columnist.