Source: http://www.india-defence.com/reports/617

Libertinism has crept in into our dealings with Pakistan?

Dated 15/10/2005

Like all societies, the Pakistani society must be looked at various levels. There are the poor, as poor as they are in India, if not worse, and it is a feat if they can live through the day.

Politics means nothing to them, the history of the India-Pakistan dispute is very far removed, Jammu and Kashmir is a place for the very poor boys to die violently in return for some small compensation to their families, which is then propagated as a great jihadi act.

The Pakistani middle class is probably like the Indian middle class, which wants no disruption in its daily comforts, and answers to political questions as and when the need arises. If it looks good to mount venom against India on Kashmir, then so be it, and if by way of people-to-people contacts, trips can be made to India, their children operated upon for heart and other ailments, the alternate being expensive treatment in the West, then that is fine too. Besides, for the fashionable among the Pakistani upper class, India is a great place to shop.

For Pakistani businessmen, it is good business, good relations with India. Indians goods which have to be, say, expensively routed through Dubai come much cheaper across the border, everything from pan to Benaras sarees, and it is less riskier than smuggling, although perhaps a little less lucrative. For the jihadis, the existence of India is a bane and a shame, like the existence of Israel for Hamas, and the Lashkar-e-Toiba revealed itself when it attacked the garrison in Red Fort some years ago. The Pakistani jihadis are not just fighting for J and K, they consider the entire country as rightfully theirs.

The hatred of the Pakistani military establishment for India we all know, beginning with the denial of J and K that lead to the tribal raid, then the wars in 1965, 1971 and the Kargil attack. 1971 was the only time the Indian political and military leadership acted decisively, to break away East Pakistan to create Bangladesh. To staunch the blow, Indira Gandhi returned all the POWs, walked out of territories captured in West Pakistan, and decently awaited for Zulfikar Bhutto to return to his country and announce the conversion of the Line of Control as the international border, as he had informally agreed to do with her in Shimla.

Not only did he go back on his word, he threatened to launch a thousand-year war against India, took the Shah of Iran


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