The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

ARTICLE

Partition left only refugees
Muslims have been the biggest losers
Kuldip Nayar

The tragedy of Partition is too deep to describe in words. But to convert it into a Hindu and Muslim question is politicising the problem. The riots took the toll of 10 lakh people and uprooted more than two crore Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Some biased elements in Pakistan propose to depict the rioting in reliefs to highlight "the oppression of Muslims". Unfortunately, this will whip up hatred against Hindus, who were as much at the receiving end in Pakistan as were Muslims in India.

Despite the stories of brutal killings there were examples of bravery and courage shown by Muslims to save Hindus and that of Hindus saving Muslims in India. A study done by Ashish Nandy, a leading intellectual in India, has estimated that both communities saved 50 per cent of the opposite community from the brutality.

Independence or the migration of Hindus and Muslims on the basis of religion is as old as sixty-seven years. I remember leaving my home in Sialkot city on August 14 itself because the new state of Pakistan did not entertain non-Muslims, just as East Punjab did not want any Muslim in their midst. I heard Jawaharlal Nehru's famous 'tryst' speech at my home town, Sialkot, in Pakistan.

However, I crossed the border only on September 17, thirty-two days after Independence. By then, the fury of killings and lootings had subsided. I did not see Hindus and Muslims actually fighting. But I saw the pain-etched faces-men and women with their meager belongings bundled on their heads and the fear-stricken children following them. Both Hindus and Muslims had left behind their hearth, homes, friends and neighbours. Both had been torn on the rack of history. Both were refugees.

Why did people kill one another when they had lived together for centuries? Nothing will be more futile than the effort to pin down who was responsible for the Partition of the subcontinent. With the sequence of events stretching back for over six decades, such an exercise can only be an academic study. But it is clear that the differences between Hindus and Muslims had become so acute by the beginning of the forties that something like Partition had become inevitable. Pakistan founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah went on plugging that Hindus and Muslims were two separate nations and this made them increasingly distant from each other.

For those who still regret the division, I can only say that the British could have probably kept the subcontinent united if they had been willing to ladle out more power in 1942 when Sir Stafford Cripps tried to reconcile the aspirations of people in India with his limited brief. The Congress Party could also have done it if it had accepted in 1946 the Cabinet Mission proposals of a Centre with three subjects-Foreign Affairs, Defence and Communications-and four states included in the zones.

But history's ifs are at best hypothetical and at worst subjective. Partition was like the Greek tragedy. All knew what was happening. Still they could do nothing to check it. The climate in the country had become too polluted to escape the carnage and the migration that came in its wake. The speech on August 11, 1947, by Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah, a title given by Mahatma Gandhi, that you were either Pakistanis or Indians and that religion had nothing to do with politics could not assuage the parochial feelings which had been advanced to justify the constitution of Pakistan. The speech was too late. The mood of fanatics in that country can be judged from the fact that they suppressed the speech itself.

Has Partition served the purpose of Muslims? I do not know. During my trips to that country, I have heard people saying that they are happy that at least they have "some place" where they feel secure, free of "Hindu domination" or "Hindu aggression." But I feel that the Muslims as Muslims have been the biggest losers. They are now spread over three countries-India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Imagine the influence that their numbers-their votes-could have commanded in the undivided subcontinent! They would have been nearly one-third of the total population.

The reliefs at the border would only widen the gulf between the two communities. Instead of blaming each other, it would have been far better to deal with the enmity and hatred that has been the fallout, keeping the two countries on tenterhooks.

I have returned from the Wagha-Amritsar border disheartened, not because there is no lessening of the aggressive posturing by soldiers at the sunset parade, but because of a new monstrosity that has come up there. The Pakistan authorities have put up 10 reliefs, projecting figures in carving on boards to show how Hindus and Sikhs had killed and looted Muslims during Partition. The reliefs have been displayed in such a way that they are visible only from the Indian side. They cannot be seen from the Pakistan side because the back of the reliefs are merely large bill boards.

The happenings depicted are offensive in expression and depraved in purport. They have been installed in the last two months, probably because the voice of peace with India is gaining strength in Pakistan and because nearly 50 people came to the border, the zero point, for the first time last year to light the candles since Independence six decades ago.

Again, the reliefs put up at the border distort facts. Whatever has been shown happened on both sides. Hindus and Sikhs were victims in Pakistan and Muslims in India. It was the same sordid spectacle in the newly born countries, neither less in brutality nor more in compassion. Women and children were the main targets.

If someone were to tell me that Hinduism is greater in generosity or that Islam emits more love, I would beg to differ. I saw the followers of the two religions killing in the name of faith. They were raising slogans of Har Har Mahadav or Ya Ali while piercing swords or spears into one another.

MIDDLE

With memories of Lahore
V.K. Kapoor

The recent meeting of an Indian journalist with a top terrorist revived the memories of my trip to Lahore. I was deputed to accompany the hockey team to Lahore for the World Cup.

The PIA flight landed at Lahore airport. A cop received us, collected our passports, had them stamped and took us to the hotel. On arrival he told me, "Aawam mein bahut gussa hai" (There is a lot of anger in people).

I sought a meeting with the DIG of Lahore. After a couple of formal greetings, we switched to Punjabi. He was very warm, and asked me if it was my first visit. I told him that I had left Lahore as a three-year-old in 1947. He laughed and said: "Phir tan ghar aa gaye" (you have come home).

When the Indian team started playing, hostility was in the air. People on the stands started beating their breasts and performed "siapa" (mourning rites) and yelled: "Maro juttian ehna saale kuttian noo" (Give a shoe-beating to these dogs). It was the elemental and raw hatred of an animal for another. In one enclosure schoolchildren started chanting: "East or West, India is the worst". I was thinking that this was the generation of tomorrow and they would grow up with this hatred. The bazaars in Lahore had posters proclaiming "Kashmir Banega Pakistan".

At the personal level, I found them very warm. The atmosphere was feudal. I met a number of "Khan Zadas" "Sahib Zadas" and "Sardars" in positions of authority. The DIG wanted to arrange "shikar" for me. The Commissioner offered to arrange a "mujra". The older generation displayed more emotion and nostalgia. The Mayor of Lahore arranged a reception for the teams at Shalimar Gardens. He said that had this Punjab remained as it was from Peshawar to Delhi, the Prime Minister would have always been from Punjab.

I was always under surveillance. They knew I was a DIG from the Intelligence Bureau. I visited the Food Street. Suddenly, I felt three-four persons whispering. I quickly finished my food and asked for the bill. The elderly man refused and said that as long as I was in Lahore I should have my food there, "Watna dian gallan kKaran ge" (We will talk of our lands).

I wanted to buy a Pathan suit. After I had shopped and paid the bill, the shopkeeper brought another suit and told me that it was from his side. "Jadon pao ge tan mainu yaad karo ge" (Whenever you wear it, you will remember me). On his insistence, I accepted it. The next day I purchased a Pathan cap and went back to his shop. I gave it to him. He expressed gratitude and put it on his head.

At General Tikka Khan's reception, I was sitting next to a former minister. He was remembering his old friends in Jalandhar and Gurdaspur. I asked him how he kept himself busy. He said casually that he had some land. On asking about the size of the land, he replied: "Panch chhe railway station lagde Ne" (The land is spread across five-six railway stations).

Many a time I caught my "tail" looking at me very intently. I asked him the reason. He told me that I had a remarkable resemblance with the SP who had recruited him: "Tusi dono eko maa de jai lagde ho" (Both of you look like born of the same mother).

After spending 15 days in Lahore, I found Punjabi domination in Pakistan. All the top politicians and top Generals are Punjabis and the biggest landlords are Punjabis. While flying back to Delhi, I was thinking that the decisions of a few individuals had affected the destinies of millions. "Lamhon ne khata ki thi/Sadion ne saza pai".

OPED WORLD

Latest play in timeless cat-&-mouse game
The tactic is as old as the hills, but tunnelling has a new relevance in the age of the drone attack. The more powerful the eye in the sky, it seems, the more tunnels will be dug
Robert Fisk

The US intervention in Iraq is a turning point in the conflict. The US Navy photograph shows sailors as they guide an F/A-18-C Hornet assigned to the Valions of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George HW Bush in the Gulf. Bush is supporting maritime security operations in the US 5th Fleet area of responsibility. afp

From Aleppo to Gaza, they are digging tunnels. In Aleppo, the Syrian army have dug down into the tunnels of their Islamist opponents; in Homs, they even dug counter-tunnels. In Gaza, the Israelis have blown up the underground earthworks of the Palestinians.

But a visit to the great Sheikh Najjar industrial estate north east of Aleppo — base for more than a year to the al-Qa'ida-Nusra-Islamic State forces fighting the Assad regime in Damascus — proves that underground warfare is in the blood of Islamist forces.

Dozens of miles of tunnels criss-crossed the now-captured fortress south of the Turkish border, in some cases wide enough for vehicles to be driven through. In the old city of Homs, which endured months of siege by the Syrian army, Sunni Muslim groups used mining drills to cut through the living rock beneath ruined apartment blocks. The tunnels of Gaza have been built and rebuilt — and rebuilt again — under Israel's siege, complete with internal railway tracks and pre-stressed concrete walls and ceilings, a subterranean world created both for the transportation of food and weapons into the Palestinian enclave and for attacks, literally underground, against Israel.

There is, of course, nothing new in what Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu — with his usual facility for cliché — calls “tunnels of terror”. Tunnels have always provoked fear. The Romans were petrified of the tunnels constructed by the Jews in the great revolts in Judea and Samaria. The Crusaders and Saracens undermined each other's castles by digging beneath the walls. In the Great War, as the world has been constantly reminded these past few weeks, the British and Germans tunneled and counter-tunneled each other beneath the battlefields of the Somme.

The huge British mine explosions at Messines in 1917 have been repeated in miniature in Aleppo this past year, when Nusra and other Islamist groups have dug beneath the Syrian government front lines and blown up military offices in the government-held part of the city. Syrian officers say that it was a mine shaft dug beneath the 13th century Omayad mosque in the city which brought the minaret crashing to the ground last year with the “vibration of an earthquake”. Civilians on the army side of the Aleppo front line — under the eyes of government militiamen — have been digging up the streets to prevent tunnelers from undermining their homes. Militias in the Damascus suburbs — perhaps because of the rocky terrain — vainly attempted to dig their own tunnels.

For years, the hundreds of tunnels of Gaza — those running between Egypt and the 141 square miles inhabited by 1.8 million besieged Palestinians — have been the capillaries of life for both civilians and fighters. Entire cars, live animals, beds, household goods and food, as well as rockets and ammunition, have passed through these often professionally-built transit routes, constantly bombed by the Israelis and, most recently, flooded with water by the Egyptian military. Hamas makes millions in taxes from their operation — another reason why the organisation will fight for them to remain open.

Just why it took so long — in a Middle East laced with barbed wire frontiers, walls and checkpoints — for Muslim military forces to resort to tunnels, remains unclear. Al-Qa'ida's cave tunnels at Tora Bora stretched up to 15 miles through the mountains outside Jalalabad, and the success of Osama bin Laden's fighters in eluding their Russian — and later US — enemies, may have been an inspiration for those who followed them in Syria, even in Gaza. The Islamic faith may have played a role; as bin Laden himself was well aware, the Prophet Mohamed received his message from God in a cave.

Light and darkness are constantly invoked in the Quran. But the vast underground trench network built by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and army during the 1980-88 war against Iraq — battlefields which often resembled the killing fields of the 1914-18 war — may also have influenced the Muslim guerrillas of the Middle East. The tunnels which the Israelis uncovered stretching deep beneath their land border with Gaza appear to have been constructed with curved concrete walls remarkably similar to those built by the Iranians during their war against Saddam.

The same must surely apply to the warren of tunnels which the Syrian army have been discovering during their own battles with Islamists. In Homs, the underground passageways were groined through solid rock — the tunnelers obligingly wrote their names and their date of completion at the entrances — the direction changing course to avoid gas pipes and subterranean waterways. North east of Aleppo, the tunnels — in this case, built under Al-Qa'ida's direct control — were also connected with miles of deep trench-works lined with iron and sandbags, a replica of the Iran-Iraq war front lines. One Palestinian official in Beirut, who remembers the weapons and makeshift rockets stored under the city during the 1982 Israeli siege, believes that the introduction of pilotless drone aircraft — used by the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by the Israelis over Gaza — drove fighters underground. “Conventional armies like daylight, guerillas prefer darkness,” he says. “When drones could see at night, we had to go beneath the earth.”

In Homs, the Syrians also used drones and, within the past two years, the Iranian-supported Lebanese Hizballah, which have been fighting alongside Assad's forces in Syria, have launched their own drone flights over Israel, taking pictures of Israel's own underground communications centre outside Haifa. Hizballah's machines were made in Iran, which has itself seized US drone aircraft which crashed - or were shot down - over Iranian territory. The more powerful that eye in the sky, it seems, the more tunnels will be dug. If, in the mantra of US forces, guerrilla war is asymmetrical, it is becoming ever more three dimensional.

— The Independent

An act of duplicity
Obama has not said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan
Robert Fisk

The Kurdish Peshmerga troops in Khazer. AFP

Obama's air strikes on Isis in northern Iraq are hypocritical, and a sense of déjà vu is understandable He wouldn't bomb Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's bloody caliphate when it was butchering the majority Shia Muslims of Iraq. But Barack Obama is riding to the rescue of the Christian refugees — and the Yazidis — because of “a potential act of genocide”. Bombs away. And thank heavens that the refugees in question are not Palestinian.

This hypocrisy almost takes the breath away, not least because the US President is still too frightened — in case he upsets the Turks — to use the "G" word about the 1915 Turkish genocide of a million and a half Armenian Christians, a mass slaughter on a scale which even Abu Bakr's thugs have not yet attempted. We'll have to wait another year to see how Obama wriggles out of the 100th anniversary commemorations of that particular Muslim massacre of Christians.

But for now, “America is coming to help” in Iraq with air strikes on “convoys” of Isis fighters. But isn't that what the Americans staged against the Taliban in Afghanistan, often mistaking innocent wedding parties for Islamist “convoys”? Dropping food parcels to minority refugees in fear of their lives on the bare mountainsides of northern Iraq — also under way — is exactly the same operation US forces performed for the Kurds almost a quarter of a century ago; and in the end, they had to put American and British soldiers on the ground to create a “safe haven” for the Kurds.

Nor has Obama said anything about his friendly ally Saudi Arabia, whose Salafists are the inspiration and fund-raisers for the Sunni militias of Iraq and Syria, just as they were for the Taliban in Afghanistan. The wall between the Saudis and the monsters they create — and which America now bombs — must be kept as high as it must be invisible. That is the measure of American dissimulation in this latest act of duplicity. Obama is bombing the friends of his Saudi allies — and the enemies of the Assad regime in Syria, by the way — but won't say so. And just for good measure, he believes that America must act in defence of its consulate in Erbil and embassy in Baghdad. That's the same excuse the US used when it fired its naval guns into the Chouf mountains of Lebanon 30 years ago: that Lebanon's pro-Syrian warlords were endangering the US embassy in Beirut. That the Islamists are as unlikely to seize Irbil as they are to capture Baghdad is neither here nor there. Obama says he has a “mandate” to bomb from the Iraqi government of Nouri al-Maliki, the elected but dictatorial Shia who now runs Iraq as a broken and sectarian state. How we Westerners love “mandates”, ever since the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which drew the borders of the Middle East for our “mandates” — the very frontiers which Abu Bakr's caliphate has now sworn to destroy. There is not much doubt about the awfulness of the equally sectarian Isis which Abu Bakr is creating. His threat to the Christians of Iraq, convert, pay tax or die, has now been turned against the Yazidis, the harmless and tiny sect whose Persian-Assyrian roots, Christian-Islamo rituals and forgiving God have doomed them as assuredly as the Christians. Ethnic Kurds, the poor old Yazidis believe that God, whose seven angels supposedly govern the Earth, pardoned Satan: so inevitably, this ancient people came to be regarded as devil-worshippers. Hence their 130,000 refugees — at least 40,000 of them living on mountain rocks in at least nine locations around Mount Sinjar — tell stories of rape, murder and child-killing at the hands of Abu Bakr's men. Alas, they may all be true. The Yazidis are probably descended from supporters of the second Umayyad Caliph, Yazid the First; his suppression of Hussein, the son of Ali, whose followers are now the Shia of the Middle East, might theoretically have commended the Yazidis to Abu Bakr's Sunni Muslim army. But their mixed rituals and their denial of evil were never going to find favour with a group which — like Saudi Arabia and the Taliban — believes in “the suppression of vice and the propagation of virtue”. In the fault lines that lie across ancient Kurdistan, Armenia and what was Mesopotamia, history has dealt the Yazidis a bad hand. But for them and the Nestorians and other Christian groups, Obama has gone to war.

The French, their old Crusader spirits reawakened, called the Security Council to reflect upon this Christian pogrom. But the question remains: would America have done the same if the wretched minority refugees of northern Iraq had been Palestinians? Or will Obama's latest bombing campaign merely provide a welcome distraction from the killing fields of Gaza?

— The Independent