[Reader-list] Running Naked by Anwar Iqbal

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire -  Dispatch #2  |    2 January 2002
http://www.mnet.fr/aiindex

#1.

Running Naked
by Anwar Iqbal

"Two or three years after the partition, it occurred
to the governments of India and Pakistan that
lunatics, like prisoners, should also be exchanged --
Muslim lunatics should be sent to Pakistan, and Hindus
and Sikhs be transferred to India," writes Urdu short
story writer Saadat Hasan Manto.

Published in the early 1950s, it is considered so far
the best story on the human tragedy that accompanied
the partition of the Subcontinent in 1947. Parts of
the story, still read and enacted in schools and
colleges on both sides of the dividing line, aptly
describe the madness that has plagued both the nations
during the last 53 years.

Three wars and countless skirmishes have failed to
resolve their disputes. Equally useless have been
dozens of meetings and conferences arranged by the
international community to let the two neighbors
resolve their differences.
They are still at each other's throats. At least once
in a decade, their madness gets out of control and
they dash at each other with whatever weapons they can
lay their hands on. Exhausted, they pause and wait
another decade to build up enough hatred to dash at
each other again.

The Muslim majority Himalayan valley of Kashmir is the
main dispute that caused two of the three wars India
and Pakistan have fought. But any issue, even a
friendly cricket match, can turn ugly and stir their
madness. Kashmir also is in the center of the current
crisis stirred by an attack on the Indian parliament
by a group of armed men last week. India says the
attackers were Pakistan-backed Kashmiri fighters.
Islamabad denies the charge and says they could have
been Indian agents who attacked the parliament to
justify an armed Indian incursion against Pakistan.

"One inmate had got so badly caught up in this
India-Pakistan-India rigmarole that one day, while
sweeping the floor, he dropped everything, climbed the
nearest tree and installed himself on a branch. From
this vantage point, he spoke for two hours on the
delicate problem of India and Pakistan. The guards
asked him to get down; instead he went a branch
higher, and when threatened with punishment, declared:
'I wish to live neither in India nor in Pakistan, I
wish to live in this tree,'" writes Manto.

Unfortunately, unlike Manto's lunatics, today's
Indians and Pakistanis do not have this option. They
have no tree to climb. They have to live through this
insanity and suffer. And now that their leaders have
nuclear toys to play with, their sense of insecurity
has increased. The theory of nuclear deterrence that
Indian and Pakistani leaders invoked to justify their
nuclear tests in 1998 does not make them feel better.

"There are enough crazy people on both sides of the
border. Besides, the chance of an accidental nuclear
war is greater here than it was between the United
States and the former Soviet Union, who coined the
theory of nuclear deterrence," says Pervez Hoodbhoy, a
Pakistani scientist. Hoodbhoy, a Ph.D. in nuclear
physics from MIT, is an anti-nuclear lobbyist and a
campaigner for peace between India and Pakistan.

"We share a long border, and it will take a
nuclear-tipped missile less than a minute to hit its
target on either side of the border. There's no room
for correcting an error as it was between the United
States and the Soviet Union," said Hoodbhoy.

Rulers on both sides of the border, however, assure
that their insanity will not lead to a nuclear war.
"We are talking about precise attacks on terrorist
targets, not an all-out war against Pakistan," India's
minister of state for foreign affairs, Omar Abdullah,
told journalists in New Delhi on Tuesday. He, however,
did not say what will prevent Pakistan from going for
an all-out war if attacked.

Similarly, Pakistani rulers have long defended their
open and hidden support to Kashmiri militants as a
reminder to India, and the rest of the world, that the
Kashmir dispute needs to be resolved. They also fail
to explain why should India continue to suffer these
hit-and-run attacks by Kashmiri militants without
engaging Pakistan in a war.

"We are sitting on a powder keg which can explode any
moment," says N.H. Nayyar, another anti-nuclear
lobbyist in Islamabad, Pakistan. Authorities on both
sides of the border describe such people as alarmists,
arguing that "both India and Pakistan are mature
enough to understand the repercussions of a war
between two nuclear neighbors," as a spokesman for the
Foreign Ministry in Islamabad said. "They do not want
to commit suicide."

But to ordinary observers it seems that suicide is
what the two governments want to commit. "People who
understand what a nuclear weapon can do, live under
great stress," says Nayyar.

"Peace campaigners and anti-nuclear lobbyists are too
weak to affect decision making in India or Pakistan.
All we can do is to sit and pray," said Rashid Khalid,
another anti-nuclear lobbyist who teaches defense and
strategic studies at Islamabad's Quaid-i-Azam
University.

In Manto's story, characters at the Lahore asylum,
where lunatics were being divided on the basis of
their religion, reacted differently to the stress of
the partition. "A Muslim radio engineer ... who never
mixed with anyone ... was so affected by the current
debate that one day he took all his clothes off, gave
the bundle to one of the guards and ran into the
garden stark naked."

Maybe this is what peace lovers in India and Pakistan
ought to do: Run stark naked in the streets to force
their leaders to give peace a chance.

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About the author: A Washington-based journalist
working for an international news agency. This article
appeared in Chowk.com