Prof Javed Mughal
The main tragedy with the modern world in general and more with India in particular is that they have developed an obnoxious habit of living in the ‘futile hallucinations of the fertile mind’ with not even a iota of acceptance to the truth and reality. We have ever failed to understand; rather to admit that the truth and reality become more painful and excruciating when we reopen our eyes to them after a temporal respite into the world of false imagination. We have been living in a fool’s paradise. We have been accustomed to tell ourselves that we are prepared for all contingencies. When a contingency arrives, and there are many that appear to have congregated at this time, we find ourselves totally unprepared for the consequences let alone predicting and neutralizing it before it happens. We make policies, programmes and plannings, but their translation into action, has, at every tick of clock, not been even a distant possibility for us. From the highest pedestal of administration to a little affair of life, we don’t have any cut and dried mechanism to control problems. Our leaders make empty promises, shallow announcements and superficial speeches with no practical out-put at all. This does not happen only in India but with a little difference in degree it has become a west and style of the modern world as a whole. The mass exodus of children of the North-east from parts of India triggered by poisonous SMSs deliberately injected into cyberspace from Pakistan and followed up by rioting in the streets of Mumbai and Bengaluru and Pune was not the kind of warfare that our security establishment had ever dreamed could happen. India could have gone up in flames from one end to the other if there had been retaliatory strikes or reprisals of the post-Godhra kind. It could be argued that such events are spontaneous and unpredictable but that is only half the truth. Recent events around the world should have opened our eyes to the possibilities of use and misuse that the social media lends itself to, remarkably and easily. Tehrir Square in Egypt, the cataclysmic movement in Tunisia, sudden uprising in Libya and the several other manifestations of what came to be described as the ‘Arab Spring’ had lessons for us which we unffortunately ignored. The protraction of Kashmir tangle is also the by-product of our deep slumber over it. We manipulated public, befooled them, put them on the track to distraction and then destruction, oriented them on the deceitful lines, gave to them wrong assurances and ultimately brought them to an irreparable loss. Our leaders were cunning enough to use the innocent Kashmiris as vote-bank, our law and order system was incompetent to control the situation and our intellectual class that ever played a vital role to emancipate this nation out of the quagmire of turmoil, was just a mute spectator of the whole show. Ignored also were the dangers inherent in the unhampered influx of Bangladeshis into Assam and the North-eastern states over the years. We have suddenly discovered that many of them have valid voter ID cards, ration cards and land documents that underpin citizenship. This conspiracy was well documented and highlighted by many news agencies and the electronic media but vote-bank politics did no let the action be taken. As on its western flank, India needs to set up a barbed wire fence reinforced with sentry posts, approach roads and floodlights to try and stem the continuous tide of immigrants that is threatening to distort the demography and kindle ethnic backlash symptoms which have already been seen in the massacres at several places over the years. It is accepted that given the lay of the land – homes and villages that lie on both sides of the international border and enclaves that are islands of extra-territoriality is mind-boggling. It would be difficult to set up a continuous barbed wire fence. But national interest demands that as many gaps as can be filled up ought to be considered on priority. The rest can be managed with adequate manpower, the use of patrol dogs and a mutually beneficial border trade and commerce that is well supervised and channeled that will give people on both sides a reason for investment in peace and tranquility. The sequence of recent events has a grave relevance to our defence and security. In the international sphere the efficacy of the social media as a means of disturbing the well-entrenched political entity was demonstrated in the Arab world. Pakistan’s military strongman General Ashfaq Kayani suddenly showed signs of softening on Siachen in a very convoluted manner; the Kandahar jail-break through the use of underground tunneling had demonstrated certain finesse; the killing of Muslims in Myanmar became cause célèbre for the Islamic fundamentalists to get irritated. Even as this was brewing, Pakistan had made preparation for an invasion through a critical piece of territory in the Samba sector that would, if successful, undermine Indian defence of Jammu and Kashmir. The trigger was a communal element in far off Myanmar that had nothing to do with India. While all this was happening, a part of a field in the Samba sector collapsed, revealing a tunnel built from the Pakistan side of the international border. On the one hand General Kayani was trying to alleviate India’s well-founded suspicions about the Pakistani military mind but was busy constructing the tunnel on the other hand. The triggers to confusion in India were the carefully planted SMSs filled with hate messages and incendiary thought. Indians may have to engage Pakistan at every level but they will have to avoid lapsing into a state of mind called ‘the world of hallucinations’ or ‘fool’s mind’. If the tunnel had not collapsed due to natural causes, things could have been very different.We, desisting from pretending to be Satyawadi Harishchandra, must gird up our lions against nefarious designs of 24-carat enemy paying him back in his own coins. A country who can’t even stand on his feet as yet, is major threat to our being simply because we are not serious about our mission and the political executive is allowing our defence mechanism to act independently. Our bad luck consists in the fact that our ‘Fauj’ is not designed to act on Pakistani pattern where the Army rules the roost. Hence our system in dire need of introspection as well as retrospection and mend our style of governing the country.
Follow our WhatsApp channel