War is always ugly and painful but this time India had no choice. What happened in Pahalgam was so awful, so calculatedly cruel that if some action had not been taken against the Islamist republic next door every Indian would have been left enraged, ashamed and feeling hopeless. Pakistan’s spokespersons and sympathisers have gone to extraordinary lengths to convince the world that India acted without proof that there was Pakistani involvement in the Pahalgam atrocity. They miss the point. There has been ample proof given by India in the past and it has been pointless. Besides, the kind of monsters who can shoot husbands dead before their new brides and fathers in front of their children are those who subscribe to the ideology of Pakistan.
It is the sort of ideology that breeds monsters who can behead a journalist like Daniel Pearl simply because he was Jewish. The kind of ideology that can shelter Osama bin Laden for years in a military station and lie about this to the world. What I have found depressing in the past few days is that someone as important as the American President should dismiss what happened as a fight that has gone on “for decades, maybe centuries”. Donald Trump probably said what he did because the entire Western media has described India’s Pahalgam response as just another war over Kashmir. This is because of Pakistani propaganda. General Asim Munir said days before the Pahalgam attack that Kashmir was Pakistan’s ‘jugular vein’. It is time that Pakistan got over its Kashmir obsession. Kashmir is going nowhere, and most sensible Pakistanis know this.
The war that India has been forced into this time is a war against jihadi terrorism. It is not at all about Kashmir. Pakistan needs to get used to living without its ‘jugular vein’ and stop bringing up generations of schoolchildren on the mythical possibility that Kashmir will one day become part of their country. Those who subscribe to the ‘Akhand Bharat’ myth privately admit that it is not going to be ‘akhand’ again. And Punjabis like me learned long ago to accept that the homes our parents left behind on the other side of the border are gone for good.
It is tiresome to hear supposedly educated and intelligent Pakistanis bang on about how there will be peace with India as soon as there is a ‘solution’ to the Kashmir problem. They know that their real problem with India is that it has moved so far ahead economically that Pakistan can no longer compete. There was a time not that long ago when Pakistan was ahead of us in many ways. Karachi had a modern airport long before Delhi and Mumbai and there was an access-controlled highway from Lahore to Islamabad long before any existed in India. This is because we were paralysed by socialist economic policies that kept us poor and backward.
So, it did seem as if the one country in the world created in the name of Allah was correct to believe that Islam was the reason for its prosperity. The sad truth is that it was not. And the only way to keep ordinary Pakistanis engaged with Pakistan’s reason for being was to resort to breeding jihadist terrorists whose purpose was to harm India economically. Let us remember that the attack on Mumbai had everything to do with crippling our commercial capital and almost nothing to do with Kashmir. It was after that attack that distances between India and Pakistan really grew and became increasingly difficult to cross. But it was Indian prime ministers who continued to try and lessen these distances and the response from Pakistani’s military rulers was always to reject their overtures.
It is hard to say what will happen next. I write this at a time when there have been attempts by Pakistan to attack fifteen of our cities and when they claim to have brought down five Indian fighter jets so it is safe to say that the war will last longer than we thought. It is also hard to say whether the destruction of the headquarters of jihadi terrorists like Hafiz Saeed and Maulana Masood Azhar will send a clear message to Pakistan’s military rulers. The fog of war is now thick and impenetrable.
Once it lifts, there needs to be a serious effort on India’s part to convince the leaders of the world that we are no longer ‘fighting over Kashmir’. We are fighting the same war that is being fought in other countries which is a war against jihadi terrorism. India has been a victim of this barbarous, cowardly violence for longer than most other countries, but we have somehow not been able to convince the world that this is not about Kashmir. It is time for the leaders of the world to believe us and stop believing Pakistani propaganda.
It is also time for Pakistan’s ‘bonsai democracy’ to grow some deeper roots. Allah seems not to like military men putting popular leaders in prison or executing them even if, as with General Asim Munir, they have learned the Quran by heart. Pakistan’s military rulers often talk of India as an “existential threat” without noticing that it is they who are the existential threat. But these are things for later. For now, we need to see what is likely to happen when the fog of war lifts.