Paper no. 908	28. 01. 2004
UK, US, PAKISTAN & SHISHUPAL- Stockholm Syndrome  Guest Column-by Gaurang Bhatt Afghanistan has been the buffer state between the British and Czarist empires in the past and the American and Soviet spheres of influence in the nineteen eighties.  There were a few like William Jones and Rawlinson, whose dark clouds of imperialism were redeemed by the silver lining of intellectual pursuits. The bulk of the mediocre chauvinists, who constituted the movers and shakers of the British Raj were ordinary people who rose to the occasion, hoisted by their petard to rule over the even more stupid, oppressed or indifferent Indians. A classic example is the obscenely rich Curzon, fired up by his immature dreams of Empire and the Great Game, who was a miserable failure in the fulfillment of his ambitions.  It is in his tragic bigotry that one finds the roots of his failures in India.  He admired the civilization and its antiquities and every Indian owes a minor debt of gratitude for his efforts at preserving our heritage.  It is equally important to realize that he detested the dark subjects. This was consistent with the prevalent contemporaneous attitudes. It was the Achilles heel that destroyed any intellectual pretenses to scholarship, objectivity or a place in history for this pathetic pretender to fame, desperately trying to overcome his own insecurities, just like Theodore Roosevelt of America.  They were both racist macho men without understanding, intellect or decency. They used their privileged position to climb to a higher perch.  The interesting corollary is that imperialists look upon the subjugated and subservient with disdainful contempt, which is barely concealed for diplomatic reasons.  The current American policy towards the Arabs, Africans and Indians of America or India is but a continuum of the attitudes of Britain, the prior sole superpower.  This stands out in sharp contrast to the attitudes towards the Chinese and Japanese who stood up against them to a stalemate or temporary victory in Korea or during WW2 temporarily and respectively.  The three Afghan wars with inconclusive outcomes and their resultant stemming of British imperial designs led to a healthy respect for the Afghans by the British. The mirror of self-delusion led them to overlook the crass sexual peccadilloes of Burns and the total incompetence of Elphinstone, to assign an undeserved respect for the viscerally violent Afghan tribes, susceptible to bribery, whose only redeeming quality was the noble treatment of guests. The defeated but unvanquished then are given respect to rationalize the inadequacies of the aggressors, blind to their own blunders. The Dulles brothers, who were responsible for the foreign policies of the US during the Fifties, stand out as sorry examples of the bankrupt intelligence and knowledge of American leaders. The laughable instance, where one of them said he wanted to establish good relations with Pakistan, so that he could recruit Gurkha warriors as surrogate fighters for America.  A knowing American informed the ignorant ideologue that Gurkhas were from Nepal or parts of India and had nothing to do with Pakistan.  The smarter British continued this exploitation by recruiting but underpaying the Gurkhas, until the recent class action suit revealed their perfidy and bigotry.  It is this American character for grandstanding that led Oppenheimer, otherwise a decent man subsequently condemned to mistranslate the famous verse of the Bhagwad Gita at Almogaardo. He said now I have become death the destroyer of all things, when the original verse of the Gita uses the word 'KALA', which means time and not death. Tennyson put it better in his poem.  The old order changeth yielding place to the new and God fulfills himself in many ways, lest one good custom should corrupt the world.  To return to my original premise there are British writers and strategists, who even to this day show a marked preference for the so-called martial ethnic groups of the Northwest parts of the subcontinent. This is still reflected in the present US State Department.  Some of this bias is on the basis of lighter pigmentation of the inhabitants of the Pakistan Afghanistan border.  The obviously pigment based Census classification put in place by Nixon is a compromise, but still retaining prejudice. He made a new category of Asians and Pacific Islanders while allowing Arabs, many of them from Oman, Gulf States, Saudi Arabia etc. to be listed under whites, when they are indistinguishable from many residents of the Indian subcontinent. It is the stupidity of the Pakistanis blinded by Islam and fooled by America, which makes them ignore the common heritage that they have of Pre-Islam with the Hindu, Jain and Buddhist history, they share with India. There is much that is bad and shameful about this baggage, but the foolish denial of Pakistanis is another rationalization to sweep under the rug, the truth of status and economics and the part they played in conversion to Islam, just like the convenient suppression of the basis for conversion by converts, be they rice Christians, Maranos or Muslims.  It is this inherent bias of the American executive that has been a victim of the hijacking of ideologues to incompetents and more recently idiots, due to the apathy, paranoid fear and ignorance  that has led to the connivance, oblivion and encouragement of the rogue behavior of Pakistan’s proliferation and clandestine spread of nuclear technology. From the earlier connivance under CENTO, to the blind eye under Zia, and the refusal to condemn Musharraf, America has taken the attitude of Krishna to forgive a hundred sins of Pakistan. The essential necessity of Pakistan’s co-operation to destroy the Taliban and to stabilize Afghanistan has held America hostage by Pakistan and its ISI, thus constraining it to develop a sympathetic attitude towards the terrorist state holding it hostage, as in the Stockholm syndrome. This misguided psychopathology makes the hostage falsely believe and tie up his or her security to that of the terrorists and the aims they intend to justify and propagate.  The only quandary that arises from this strange scenario is whether like Krishna, it will reach its limit of tolerance and do what he did out of the limits of his patience, for pragmatic reasons or the triumph of good over evil. My cynical prediction is, that it will in the future act for the first two reasons and justify it for it the third and live up to the hypocrisy of its founding, while ignoring the idealism that should have been its just place to make it the world leader.  No other country had the intellectual power of leadership in the history of nations that America had in the eighteenth century with the exception of Greece in the fifth century BC and India in 1500 BC. Such is the tragedy of history! From Chomsky on the left, to Andrew Bacevich on the right have categorically catalogued the imperialist policies of America and the purpose of this paper is not to criticize or condemn, but to alert the foreign policy mavens of India, that nations like individuals behave expediently for their own aggrandizement or convenience and regrettably the aspirations of individual leaders hold national policies hostage to their prejudices and personal gain. As Darwin put it so succinctly, the penchant for individual survival and flourishing is such a great motivating force, that it is oblivious to survival of the species or nations.  Hobbes said that it is important that that I not lose my little finger, even if the cost is destruction of the whole world. Will the delusions of grandeur that plagued Nehru, now become an individual and national scourge, which will lead the aging Vajpayee desiring a footnote in history, to sacrifice the national good to obtain an ephemeral place for utopian principles or the fifteen minutes of Warholian fame, like Gandhi and Nehru did, only later to be derided as foolish idealists on the everlasting scales of inexorable temporal analysis.   The Hindus have myriad faults and while they realized that imminent mortality leads to certain clarity of vision, in spite of the biological difficulty of focusing due to presbyopia, they still maintained a healthy skepticism due to their exacting pristine analysis for this ‘Smashan Vairagya’ which was suspect, as a forced choice and a desperate ploy to seek salvation by renunciation in the face of unavoidable loss.  I wish to reaffirm that I am a recalcitrant diehard atheist with a firm belief that life is of necessity fatal, has no purpose and is terminal without a future. Our only tenuous and half-assed passport to immortality, are our children and morality is the defense of the weak  The origin of virtue as Matt Ridley points out in his book is not altruism, but selfishness and the innate human desire to project the false image of reliability and respectability. To be a good and undiscovered liar, one has to believe that ones own lies are truths to fool the evolutionary evolved penchant and faculty of detecting cheaters as Wasson’s test reconfirms. Survival is the successful solution to the puzzle of life, but from the selfishly noble individual point of view, there is an inherent weakness ingrained into the animal that deludes it into a set of beliefs that there are some things at sometimes more important than survival. These philosophical dichotomies, conundrums and dilemmas are for individuals only. For groups, species and nations, morality, principle and virtue are self-destroying whimsies and pretended propaganda to be used by smart, amoral nations for collective brainwashing.  It is like the newly reformed and conveniently penitent sinner, currently basking in the light of freshly discovered humane principles to obliterate any memory of his illegitimate affluence, derived from prior unjust atrocities. They use this to subjugate, ensnare, confuse and thwart the foolish and poor nations to lull them into complacency, or even worse by their holier than thou attitudes into stupid self-abnegating subservience.  Latin America is the prime example of this manipulation, fortunately jolted out of disillusionment with the hope of enlightenment. The sad reason why this exploitation persists and flourishes is the powerful, greedy and corrupt minority, who once again fulfill the extreme of Darwinism that an individual will pursue his greed to the detriment of the species, as in the unnecessarily affluent personal survival at the cost of betraying and exploiting the ignorant and hapless populations of the oil rich Islamic countries, oblivious to their stranglehold on the financial survival of the West. Equally oblivious in its psychopathology is America forgiving the hundred sins of Pakistan like Krishna did to Shishupala, and identifying its own future happiness and security with terrorist Pakistan due to a paranoid fear of Islamic nuclear weapons falling into the hands of fanatic terrorists.  Thus it is confused into believing that its security is tied up with rogue Pakistan, which holds it hostage, just as hostages did with the terrorizing bandits in Stockholm!    (The author is a retired neurophysician and an occasional writer. The views expressed are his own. Email-  gpbhatt1@yahoo.com  .)
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