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Pakistan: Our Difficult
Neighbour and India’s Islamic Dimensions
God created Eve by taking out a rib from Adam’s body. Eve was, in Adam’s words, "Flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone"; she became his soulmate and companion through thick and thin. Likewise, the British created Pakistan out of India’s flesh and bone, but from the day one Pakistan became India’s sworn enemy. There is unmitigated angst in Pakistani minds against India. What a stinging irony it is! Brig Darshan Khullar in his book calls Pakistan "a difficult neighbour" who harbours animosity against India and is keen to deliver India "a thousand cuts". Khullar had served the Indian Army with distinction and has an in-depth knowledge about the wars Pakistan has fought with India and about her daredevil machinations and unfulfilled ambitions. But besides Pakistan’s misadventures against India, the author rues the unfortunate lapses on the part of Indian leaders. "One wonders why Gandhi did not go on a fast unto death to prevent Partition, as was his wont", exclaims Khullar with biting sarcasm, and adds that Gandhi did go on a fast a little later to prevent Muslims in India from going to Pakistan, although pragmatism demanded that transmigration be allowed so that the Hindu hordes being driven out of Pakistan might be sheltered in houses vacated by Muslims. He believes that the continuing presence of a sizeable Muslim population in India helped Gandhi and Nehru to debunk Jinnah’s two nation theory.
In Khullar’s view, if Nehru had left the Kashmir issue to be handled by Patel as in the case of other princely states, the matter would have been sorted out in 1948 itself. Misguided by Mountbatten, Nehru unnecessarily raised the issue in the UN, where UK played a perfidious role by siding with Pakistan, and J&K became a bone of contention. Even Shastri erred in giving back the strategic Haji Pir pass to Pakistan in 1965 at Tashkent. Indira Gandhi had brought Pakistan to heels in 1971 but in a bout of magnanimity released 92,000 POWs without securing India’s interests. V.P. Singh government capitulated by acceding to the release of three dreaded terrorists in return for home minister Mufti Mohammad Syed’s kidnapped daughter. Vajpayee ignominiously sent foreign minister Jaswant Singh to Kandhar, escorting top detained terrorists to be freed in lieu of securing release of the hijacked Air India plane. But it’s the appeasement of Muslims by successive Congress governments that’s hurting the national interest most in Khullar’s view. Indira Gandhi was horrified when in 1971 seven million East Pakistanis took refuge in India, but in subsequent years 30 million Bangladeshis have been given shelter in India for they are swelling the Congress vote bank. When during Rajiv Gandhi’s time, the Supreme Court, in a landmark judgment upheld a divorced Muslim woman Shah Bano’s right to alimony from her husband, overruling Shariat law, Rajiv Gandhi succumbed to the depths of appeasement by enacting a law to make the State liable to pay alimony to divorced Muslim women in place of the husband, just as the State was footing the bill for the Haj travel of Muslims — the ‘State’ being a euphemism for the Indian taxpayer. A significant demographic change that has come about in many parts of the country, showing upsurge of Muslim population vis-`E0-vis Hindus, is most worrisome according to Khullar. He says the Government had deliberately withheld publication of religion-wise statistics after the 2011 census, but in fact the ratio of Muslim population which was seven per cent in 1947 has now risen to about twenty per cent, at par with the pre-partition level, sowing the seeds of another similar catastrophe. Khullar is unsparing in making hard-hitting statements against the ‘secular’ intellectuals abound in our county. It is evident that a tremendous amount of research has gone into the making of this eye-opener book.
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As for Nehru, Khullar
says he had met his match in Jinnah. Both came to appreciate each
other’s invincibility in the power struggle. Neither was prepared to
be anything but number one. Inevitably the country had to be
partitioned. Furthermore, Khullar reveals that the Congress Working
Committee was all set to elect Patel as India’s first Prime Minister
by an overwhelming majority. But Gandhi intervened and asked Patel to
withdraw from the contest, thereby ensuring Nehru’s election.