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| Sunday, 4 August 2002 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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President Musharraf on 'terrorism', SAARC : 'Vicious global campaign against Islam' Observations by LAKSHMAN GUNASEKERA
The object of the "true king", says Abu'l Fazl in his A'in-i-Akbari (The Institutes of Akbar) is "to remove oppression and to provide for everything that is good". The medieval Islamic political philosopher, famous as the Emperor Akbar's close mentor, lived and died in Agra, not far from the beautiful palace-fortress of Fatehpur Sikri where his Emperor engaged in his legendary philosophical debates. Agra was where, four centuries later, another Islamic potentate, General-turned-President Pervez Musharraf, held his summit meeting with Prime Minister A. B. Vajpayeee. I wonder how Abu'l Fazl would have felt if he knew that the seat of his beloved and great Emperor, the 'Padshah' ('pad' meaning 'possession', 'control'), would be later possessed by a Hindutva potentate and be the venue for a meeting of potentates in which the Islamic one was the visitor, the 'outsider'. The irony is that President Musharraf is actually no outsider to India having been born in Delhi (the capital of the first major Sub-continental Islamic polity) in August 1943 where he spent the first four years of his childhood before becoming part of the great, tragic trans-migration of Muslims to East and West Pakistan and Hindus from these regions into India, as the Sub-continent broke up into majority Hindu and majority Muslim polities in the 'Partition' that followed the retreat of British imperial rule. During that famous (if un-successful) visit to India, President Musharraf took the opportunity to visit his first home in Delhi. Today, thanks to the Indo-Pak tensions, he has had to avoid the entirety of Indian airspace and fly thousands of extra miles in his tour of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. 'end of history' On the other hand, Abu'l Fazl 'Allami, with his deep understanding of the life and death of empires and other polities, may not be at all surprised by the disappearance of the Mughal Empire. In any, case the federal State of India is far bigger than any previous Sub-continental empire in fact, almost double the size of either the Mughal or Maurya. He and many others of his time (and other times) would hasten to disillusion modernists who conjure up the 'end of history' and its corollary presumption of an eternal ethos (of modernity, of course). Pervez Musharraf himself is keenly, if uneasily, aware of the harsher reality of a clash of ethos - not only between modernity and tradition but also between different ethno-centric conceptions of modernity and post-modernity: European, 'Western', Sub-continental, Japanese, Chinese, Latin American, Mayan, Caribbean etc. defends own legitimacy That President Musharraf is an Islamic potentate, I am sure the General himself would not deny (although, anxious to defend his own legitimacy, he may quibble over 'potentate'), having heard him before at a gathering of the cream of South Asian mass media professionals in Islamabad where he quite categorically insisted that the "liberation" of the people of Kashmir was a "jihad" of the people of Pakistan. In any case, one of his predecessors in martial law rule had firmly established Pakistan as an Islamic State and, in making himself constitutionally 'legitimate', President Musharraf is committed to upholding the Faith, the Sharia and the Ummah. That this commitment springs from the heart was clear last Thursday morning at the Colombo Hilton Hotel when he met with local newspaper editors and took the opportunity, quite un-prompted, to raise the issue of the ideological war being waged, largely in the West, against Islamic civilisation. The President himself described it as "a vicious campaign unleashed against Islam around the world". Westerners, who are so nurtured in individualism and must uphold it in order to legitimise their economic way of life, would find it difficult (yes, even now, despite the compulsions to engage with other cultures) to understand the Pakistani President's ready identification with a collectivity, a community - in fact, one that transcends his own nation-state. The General had no hesitation in placing himself squarely within the global Islamic community, the Ummah, as he responded to the unrelenting ethnic bias and 'psychological warfare' indulged in by the Western...oops! Sorry... global mass media. He declared: "We, the Muslim community, the Muslim Ummah, need to address this issue collectively". And the General clearly feels for his Community as it is besieged not only with such propaganda by the dominant mass media, but must also the political oppression some sections of it suffer in places like Palestine while elsewhere Muslims of all races and classes must face up to a growing socio-cultural discrimination due to paranoias aroused by militant actions or 'terrorism'. He went on to lament at the Ummah's current inability to combat such propaganda: "I am afraid we are not, at the moment, doing it in a capable manner. We need to do it. " In doing so, however, the good General inevitably slipped into a logic that will certainly not please his global political backers in the West with whose geo-political interests his country has long identified itself in order to stand up to its peceived 'rival' state, India. Washington and London, if not the other capitals of the Western capitalist powers, so fanatical as they are becoming with their own "anti-terror" mantras, will be very uncomfortable with President Musharraf's rationalisation of what he too insists on calling 'terrorism'. The General argued: "Terrorism has absolutely no link with Islam. Whatever terrorism that is going on, whatever acts of extremism, whatever suicide bombing we have seen, were the result of political deprivation, political disputes". Note that the President also tagged on the categories, 'extremism', 'suicide bombing', thereby clearly seeking to transcend the narrowly limiting definition of 'terrorism'. After all, as we Sri Lankans too will acknowledge today, now that the Tamil militant resistance has so powerfully and brutally (here and in Tamil Nadu) made its point, the word 'terrorism' only serves to cloud the reality of political crisis arising out of injustice and alienation and the failure to deal with the crisis in a civilised, democratic manner. Having lived in the depths of that crisis and been forced by the Tamil militants to share in its terrifying consequences (now Colombo knows the terror of bombing that Jaffna learned much earlier) for so long all of Sri Lanka at last knows of the dangers of mere wordplay to satisfy egos, soothe consciences, cover up injustices and failures and, to justify further injustice. One would have thought that the great Western civilisation would not have needed the attacks on Washington and New York to come to a similar realisation that there must be societal reasons for collective and organised acts of violence whether they be conventional wars or insurgencies. Sadly, the West seems set to go through the same ridiculous but tragic ideological cycle that we Sri Lankans went through from that first bombastic directive by President J.R. Jayawardene (to General 'Bull' Weeratunge in 1979 to "wipe out the terrorists in six months", through decades of insurgency and the worst war this island society has ever suffered in its long history, to our latest Cease-fire. Today, Sri Lankans have long given up that mulish mindset, now adopted in the capitals of the great powers that no social causes can be linked to social violence. Such 'linkage' is not acceptable in the now besieged West. It seems that they, like we did, will have to suffer more such besieging before mindsets begin to turn around. President Musharraf, since he lives amid the vast morass of multiple crises in South Asia, does not need such education. He is fully aware that, even if he is geo-politically tied to the Western 'campaign against terrorism', he certainly cannot go along with that simplistic logic. Hence, his firm support for Colombo's efforts to make peace with 'terrorists'. More importantly, the General recognises the reality of what is happening in Kashmir and in Palestine and, in so many other places like Nepal, the Philippines, Western Sahara, India's north-eastern states, Sudan, Kurdistan, etc. etc. The list of such campaigns (some, like Nagaland, dragging for more than a half-century) of collective violent resistance to social injustice, ethnic marginalisation or domination is very long and the General himself may hesitate to so identify some of them, given his diplomatic obligations and state-military loyalties. diplomatic necessity It was diplomatic necessity and not obligation that prompted President Musharraf to use last Thursday's media meet as a platform for yet another diplomatic offensive against India, though. After all, Islamabad is set to host the next SAARC summit and must surely anticipate yet another round blocking moves by Delhi that scuttle previous SAARC summits. Here, the Pakistani President, in criticising what he called "the politicising of SAARC by one country", can only echo the worries of the other, smaller South Asian states. In doing so, however, he must keep in mind that Pakistan too is engaged in geo-political manoeuvres, including cross-border ones, that certainly do not help to move the region away from the kind of obstructive diplomacy that led to the disruption of the SAARC process. It is this same geo-politics that will compel President Musharraf to again make a lengthy aerial detour when he finally returns home, after his current visit to China. He will then have time to ponder further on his plans for Pakistan's political future, which, as he insisted during the media briefing, will be democratic. Even as we Sri Lankans nervously ponder our future or futures, we must pray along with the General for his country. President Musharraf seems fully aware of the immense challenge he faces in taking Pakistan towards a form of democracy that, as he put it on Thursday, must in accordance with Pakistan's specific environment and needs. He knows that, as the Sunni theologian Abd ul-Haqq al-Dihlawi al-Bukhari (born, like the President, in Delhi, but in the Mughal period) wrote in his wrote in his Perfection of Faith: "Although the individual may have had choice in his (or her) action, yet he did not have any choice in its first beginnings". |
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