Moment of truth
âIn 1905 Lenin asked âWhat Is To Be Done?â
Long before him, Bachchoo asked âHow Can One Avoid Doing It?ââ
From Biographia
Bachchoopediaâ
Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan, has not cancelled his tour of Great Britain in the wake of David Cameronâs blunt speaking on his own recent tour of India. Mr Cameron accused Pakistan of nurturing terror, exporting it and facing two ways when it came to the allied effort to defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan and in the notoriously open frontier between the two countries.
Some referred to the pronouncement as bold. It would have been much bolder if he had made such pronouncements in Islamabad. Indian audiences and the media take it as read (what the Americans and their pretentious imitators call a âno-brainerâ) that Pakistani groups such as the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba train terrorists and send them, for instance, to Mumbai with guns, grenades and explosives and maps marking hotels where the rich take their entertainment and rest and houses owned by Jewish sects.
Indians, with most of the civilised world, take it as self-evident that the Pakistani state did, and perhaps still does, finance, shelter, entertain, arm, nurture, protect and turn a blind eye to terrorist groups who operate from its soil to terrorise Kashmir or fight their jihad in Afghanistan. Neither is it any great secret that Pakistan, with the connivance and finance of the US, generated the Taliban to bring Islamic uniformity to the upheaval and anarchy that resulted from the (yes!) American-nurtured MujÂahideen war-lordism that butchered a reformist government and drove their supporting Soviet troops out. US policy created one chaos to replace the other they had nurtured.
This is history ââundeniable. One may quibble about the definition of âwivesââbut it will be generally accepted that Henry VIII had six.
Mr Cameronâsââfacing both waysâ allusion was not an accusation against the poor Zardari government. Everyone knows that the poor man holds his position as a licensee of the armed forces. They have ruled Pakistan for three quarters of the years of its existence and they permit civilians to hold elections and set up governments when it suits them. The Army, Navy and Air Force reserve real powers for themselves and their Inter-Services Intelligence (an official oxymoron?) had and possibly still has umbilical connections to the Taliban.
Mr Cameron was alluding to this paradoxical position when he spoke to his Indian audience. He wasnât telling them anything they didnât know.
Neither was he saying anything that the rest of the world, including Mr Zardari, his foreign minister and the outraged mobs that burnt effigies of Mr Cameron on the streets of Karachi, doesnât know. But should he have said it?
Should the child who noticed that the Emperor was walking down in state bollock-naked not have loudly announced the fact? No doubt the courtiers and some of the public that watched the parade and were full of praise for the monarchâs outfit were outraged. They didnât burn effigies of the little boy but surely his parents berated him for his bad manners and for breaking the spell.
That is presumably what Mr Cameron set out to do. If the alliance of which Mr Cameron is now one of the chief leaders does not recognise that the West is fighting the wrong war in Afghanistan and has never publicly identified or characterised the enemy formation it faces, they will continue to be humiliated. The spell of unknowing had to be broken.
Why hasnât any British politician ventured to say what Mr Cameron has just begun to say? Because they are more cautious and experienced than the tyro Prime Minister? There is a political lobby in Britain that contents itself with pronouncing the new Prime Minister ânaiveâ.
They are wrong. Mr Cameron was not simply sucking up to the prejudice of his Indian hosts. He was not simply acting on the obvious â that India can be a senior trade and international policy partner and that in the immediate future Pakistan and Afghanistan are together a threat and a drain on life and money.
He didnât say it because he is naive, blundering and inexperienced. He said it because itâs true and because he can! The reason he can is that his domestic constituency and that of the MPs of his Conservative Party is not reliant on the votes of the ex-Pakistani and ex-Bangladeshi immigrant population of Britain. The Labour Party to a significant extent and in key constituencies is reliant on the âMuslimâ vote. This is the result of early immigration from Mirpur and Sylhet supplying labour for inherently working class towns and cities. Even if six per cent of the population of these mosque-and-redundant-mill towns is of immigrant extraction, victory at the ballot box can depend on their loyalty.
In the 1980s, when I worked for a bold and innovative national TV channel, one of the programmes in my remit investigated the constituency of Roy Hattersley who was then the deputy leader of the Labour Party. One organiser of the Labour Party, an immigrant of Pakistani extraction, persuaded that he was not being filmed and was speaking off the record, told the interviewer, âOf course, we fix the (internal Labour Party) vote for Hatterji sahib. We register hundreds of people under Muslim names as members and we pay their membership fees and add some houses and addresses onto each streetâ.
The Liberal Democrat Party, now in coalition with Mr Cameronâs Conservatives, were the only major party to oppose the Iraq war and on that platform of oppositionâwon the support of whole Muslim constituencies.
To gain support by providing policies that sections of people want or trust is democracy in action and long may the mechanism operate. The point is that Mr Cameronâs vote doesnât depend on these communities because they donât vote Tory and he and his advisors have realised that they neednât, unlike their opponents, suffer from that particular electoral inhibition.
That the democratic process itself allows the views of a minority to be overlooked, ignored or traduced is not a cause to celebrate. Except perhaps if the views of that minority support the burning of radical novels, the murder of writers, translators, cartoonists and filmmakers, the stoning of women accused of adultery, the bombing in the name of religion of innocents on trains and planes and denial of the fact that Pakistan has been the training ground for the leaders and activists of every group of mass murderers or would-be mass murderers apprehended, tried and jailed in Britain.
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