Is India the root cause of Pakistan's problems?

denada · December 1, 2006, 4:26pm

Is India the root cause of Pakistan’s problems? I was reading this letter from Dawn which pretty much blames India.

Jaswant Singh’s talk

THE BJP leader and former Indian foreign minister, Mr Jaswant Singh, made some assertions while speaking at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies in the US (Dawn, Nov 3.)

First, that India will have to live with the fact that the US will continue to rely on Pakistan as a key ally in the war against terror. Not content with this apparent display of jealousy, he pretended that India was somehow being victimised as a consequence, by saying that the US has no other option and “therefore India would have to continue to pay a price.”

Second, that Washington must not act as an “external equaliser in South Asia but should leave the region alone.

Third, that “the US often loses interest and Pakistan on its own begins to flounder and when it flounders, there are difficulties for India.”

Finally, “One of the failures of India’s diplomacy has been its inability to manage its relations with all its neighbours,” he said, and “if I don’t admit it, then I am denying the existing reality.”

The first contention appears to reflect India’s unhappiness that soon after 9/11 the US had refused to avail New Delhi’s lightning fast offer of helping Washington in its plans to invade Afghanistan. Also, that accepting India’s, rather than Pakistan’s collaboration would have strengthened the former’s position and influence, at the cost of the latter.

The second point aims at keeping the US from involving itself in the affairs of the region, which would enable India to freely exercise its hegemony that it simply loves to do.

The third assertion regarding Pakistan’s ‘floundering’ has more to do with India’s behaviour towards this country than any other reason.

This, in reality, is the major cause of most of Pakistan’s problems. A couple of years ago the British Medical Journal (BMJ) had published a report stating that the people of India, Pakistan and other South Asian countries are in a dramatically poor health, both physically and mentally. It had made a special mention of Pakistan and said that about 34 per cent of the interviewees (and presumably, all Pakistanis) suffered from depressive disorders and anxiety, which was apparently the highest in the region.

The BMJ report considered the root cause of all this South Asian trouble to be socio-political instability, economic uncertainty, violence, regional conflicts and dislocation for the past three decades. One would add that in case of Pakistan the problems aren’t restricted to just these factors. At independence, nearly one million Muslims were massacred and nine million made refugees, whereas the corresponding figure for the Hindus was only a fraction of this.

This was followed by several wars; dismemberment of the country by India in 1971; the frightful Soviet invasion of Afghanistan when Pakistan had seemed the next target; arrival of four million Afghan refugees along with the ensuing gun and drug culture and the severe social and economic problems that caused enormous mental stress.

The single biggest stressor has been India’s constant bullying because we are only one-seventh in size and its unwillingness to accept the partition. The large defence spending necessitated by the Indian attitude and behaviour, including its nuclear status since 1974, compelled us to divert scarce resources away from health, education, poverty eradication and social welfare. Not only Pakistan but every neighbour of India has had grievances against it, which gets reflected in Mr Singh’s final remark.

As the largest country in the region, India owes it to its own poor people — who are themselves suffering, as is obvious from the BMJ report — and to its neighbours to treat everyone fairly and compassionately so that their lives can get better. To begin with, New Delhi must grant the rights of the Kashmiris and the northeastern states’ residents, the Dalits, Muslims and other minorities, which will eliminate all of the self-created militancy in India, for which it conveniently keeps blaming Pakistan.