As India pursues bigger global role, Pak sticks to hostility
The striking contrast between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), and that of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan reflects the different trajectories the two countries have been following. India aspires to play a bigger political, economic, security and cultural role internationally, for which it seeks to build its economy, use new technologies to modernise its society, pursue social uplift programmes, and become internally stronger. Pakistan finds political, emotional and psychological comfort in sustained hostility towards India, for which deepening its Islamic identity, appealing to the Ummah for support, seeking security in nuclear threats, and nourishing its obsession with Kashmir are core elements. India’s yardsticks for measuring its diplomatic successes include building rewarding relationships across continents, forging several strategic partnerships, and retaining its strategic autonomy. Pakistan measures success by how much it can thwart India regionally, bleed it through terrorism, malign it, refuse economic cooperation and connectivity, and constrain its global rise.
Modi’s address was relevant to the agenda of the UNGA session climate change, universal health care, Sustainable Development Goals, and multilateralism. He referred to India’s staggeringly ambitious target of 450 gigawatts of renewable energy, its massive health scheme, the elimination of single-use plastics, housing for the poor, accelerated eradication of tuberculosis, the Clean India campaign, digital identification, and so on.
He projected India’s success in these areas as a development exercise that could benefit other developing countries by example, as distinct from the Chinese model that President Xi Jinping advocates.
Khan’s speech was trivial, a litany of lies, and overwrought with a sense of victimhood. Making wild allegations about the plight of Kashmiris, he not only endorsed jihadi terrorism by exhorting the Kashmiris and the 180 million Muslims of India to stage a bloodbath, he also countenanced a religious war against India by the 1.3 billion Muslims worldwide. If radical Islam is an invention of the West and does not exist, as he claimed, he offered no explanation for the type of Islam represented by al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, the Taliban, the Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the extremist groups in Thailand, the Philippines, or in
WHILE INDIA MEASURES DIPLOMATIC SUCCESS BY BUILDING REWARDING RELATIONSHIPS ACROSS COUNTRIES, PAKISTAN FOCUSSES ON THWARTING INDIA REGIONALLY
Bangladesh. The Islamic State has cited Islam’s tenets for its terrible exactions. Are the radical preaching on social media and the lone wolves using vehicles to mow down innocent civilians on streets and bridges an invention of the Europeans? Jihad, as a concept, is specific to Islam and jihadi organisations are involved in horrible violence not only against non-Muslims, but also Muslims who are not considered adequately Islamic in belief and conduct.
His other argument absolving Muslims of having invented suicide attacks because the Hindu Tamil Tigers, and the Japanese (during World War II) resorted to them is spurious, in that the former did not cite Hindu scriptures for their heinous acts, and the latter followed an ancient warrior tradition. The nexus between the madrassas and mosques - the centres of religious teaching and preaching- and radicalised Muslims has no parallel in the examples Khan cited. Radicalisation and de-radicalisation are being carefully examined today. Khan came across as a small-town religious preacher, addressing a simple-minded and ignorant audience incapable of questioning, which speaks of the man’s vanity and conceit.
Khan is obsessed with the 14 centuries-old Medina model of supposed perfect gender equality, justice, and respect of minorities for today’s Pakistan. He is not visualising any modern societal model of democracy, rule of law, constitutional government, and liberty of thought and expression or individual rights for Pakistan’s redemption. The Islamic State too harks back to the same era of Islam for the regeneration of Islamic countries. Khan admitted in his UNGA speech his opposition to America’s war on terror, arguing falsely that Pakistan had nothing to do with the Taliban when its leadership emerged from Karachi’s Binori mosque, and Mullah Omar and his successors have operated from Pakistan. For Khan, the shelter the Taliban gave to Osama bin Laden was evidently never an issue. He is today leveraging Pakistan’s longstanding Taliban connections to advantage, by fa-cilitating a US-Taliban dialogue.
Khan had earlier admitted in New York the existence of 30,000 to 40,000 militants in Pakistan who had fought in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Suddenly they have vanished because at the UNGA he invited UN observers to come to Pakistan to verify their elimination by his government, a brazen untruth when those responsible for the Mumbai and Pathankot attacks have not been prosecuted and most ofthe Financial Action Task Force’s injunctions on terror-financing have not been met.
Displaying a political dilettante’s tormented mind, Khan ended his UNGA speech with his willingness to take to arms against India in the spirit of jihad, and warned the world about an impending India-Pakistan nuclear war. His conduct in abusing Modi from the UN podium was most undignified. The man, who earlier constantly advertised his desire to have a dialogue with India, has now wilfully closed all doors.