Friendly Neighbourhood

The two most decisive human emotions, apart from greed, that have played a role in shaping mankind’s evolution are “love” and “hatred”. Love/like and hatred/dislike can be of two kinds: instant and built up.

Any entity can evoke instant hatred or love from us, irrespective of whether it is really worthy of that emotion.

Take, for instance, one’s attitude towards an overflowing sewer laden with the most gross of the city’s waste. One need not think too much to react in a particular way in this case. Similarly, the sight of a new born elephant calf in all its joyful impishness brings overwhelming feelings of tenderness to our hearts.

But, sometimes the feeling is built across a period of time – often through indoctrination (though not in the negative sense here). Our general view of Adolf Hitler is a case I point. Communal hatred too has such roots.

Most of us are prisoners of such attitudes, particularly the latter kind, which become a part of an individual’s socialisation process. One could, however, add a third category here – the love-hate relationship. One loves and hates the same entity or idea with more or less the same intensity but for evidently different reasons.

This third category is what the Indian subcontinent’s inhabitants have towards each other; all the more so if it is Indians and Pakistanis. Indians love as well as hate Pakistanis with the same degree of acuteness. Pakistanis, essentially of the same nature as Indians, reflect this attitude.

The vice-like grip of mutual mistrust that has bedeviled the relationship between the two countries is often coupled with the fondness for each others’ pop culture. Their decades-old quest for peace is pock-marked by wars and skirmishes.

Destiny also often plays a role and comes up with strange opportunities to reinforce either of these attitudes. History is dotted by instances where world statesmen have grabbed opportunities provided by fate with both their hands and that one act ended up being the game changer.

Tony Blair’s visit to the US in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks – the first by any foreign dignitary to the US post attack – was an ultimate gesture in friendship. It reinforced the UK’s image in the US as THE ‘friend in need’ and reversed the drift in US-UK relationship.

In 1962, immediately after India’s defeat at the hands of the Chinese PLA, Pakistan gifted to China nearly 5,000 sq km of land in Pakistan-Occupied-Kashmir. Sensing an opportunity to form an alliance against India, it was a masterstroke by Pakistani President Ayub Khan and remains the bedrock of its all-weather friendship with China.

The Indian Navy’s timely assistance to Sri Lanka during the December 2004 tsunami did a world of good to a relationship traditionally marred by the ethnic Tamil issue. The navy rushed to the Indian Ocean nations, particularly Sri Lanka, with 19 warships, 11 helicopters and four aircraft for rescue, relief and reconstruction on the very day the tsunami struck. This not only dramatically boosted India’s image in these countries, but also gave it strategic leverage among these states, something even China could not manage.

In such a context, India’s almost non-existent reaction to recent events in Pakistan is nothing less than astonishing.

Here is a country that is struggling with one of the worst floods in nearly 80 years, with 14 million displaced – more than the cumulative figure for the 2005 Kashmir earthquake, the 2004 tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake -- and billions worth of property lost.

Apart from the $900 million that the World Bank has committed, the international community has not been really forthcoming with help. Only the US, for strategic reasons, has been of any substantial help.

Given such a scenario, one wonders what would have been the impact on the common Pakistani, if India had made a gesture of unilateral help for the ravaged country, keeping aside for the moment the current chill in relationship.

It would, of course, be preposterous to say that it would have annihilated overnight the years of vitriol. But it would certainly have touched the Pakistani’s heart – which is where everything begins.

Irrespective of whether the Pakistani state accepts such an offer, I strongly believe the lay Pakistani would have thought, “Wow, when the world community virtually left us high and dry, India extended its hand of friendship? That is something.”

If India could extend $1 billion in soft loans to Bangladesh, what stopped it from helping Pakistan during such a catastrophe? Especially, when the Indian government itself is led by a supposedly humane Prime Minister, whose vision it is to permanently mend ties with the long-standing rival.

I guess, the government’s attitude is also reflective of the general mood in this country. Consider the coverage of the devastation in the Indian media. According to the Mint, dated August 13, Total prime time news coverage of the Pakistani floods among Indian television channels between August 1 and 11 amounted to a pathetic 13 minutes and 55 seconds.

The leading Hindi news channel, Aaj Tak’s, share? 0 minutes.

Leave aside the fact the country in question is Pakistan or the strategic import. Does this kind of indifference make any journalistic or humanitarian sense?

But then, history can also be portrayed as a series of missed opportunities. At least in India’s case.

If Jawaharlal Nehru had heeded Vallabhai Patel’s words and waited till the army finished its job of ousting the Pak-backed tribals from Kashmir before taking the issue to the UN, we probably wouldn’t have the Kashmir problem as we know it today.

Had India accepted the big powers’ offer of permanent membership in the UN Security Council when it was formed, instead of gifting it away to China, the dynamics of India’s role in the world would in all likelihood have been be qualitatively different today.

If India had not contemptuously rejected the membership to Asean when it was formed and offered, we wouldn’t have had to beg to be part of it today.

“If” is history’s biggest redundancy. Yet, I am left wondering.