The flood of silence
Aditya Sinha
20 Aug 2010
There has been a deafening silence in India vis-à-vis the recent flood in Pakistan. After three weeks of devastation (with more predicted as the monsoons are not over), our prime minister finally did speak to his counterpart to convey his sorrow and to offer more. Manmohan Singh’s words came a fortnight after our foreign minister wrote to his counterpart offering sympathy but no aid. But if you think the official commiseration was miserly, listen to the media silence. In newspapers, on TV and in cyberspace, Indians appear unconcerned with the tragedy next door.
Part of the reason for this apathy is the anger that has built over the years due to one terrorist attack after another on India. For our middle class — now said by the World Bank to be, along China’s, the engine of global economic growth — the 26/11 attack was the last straw. Worse is the kind of callous evasions by official Pakistan to India’s demands for action against the attack’s instigators and planners. Shah Mahmood Qureshi’s equation of our home secretary with the insidious Hafiz Saeed left a bad taste that we are still trying to spit out. It was akin to salting wounds that are slowly healing, as evidenced by the proud re-opening of the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai last weekend. And it only served to remind us that ever since India and Pakistan began their separated-at-birth Bollywood drama, our neighbours have never missed a chance to break a promise (as in Shimla 1972) or thumb their noses at us.
Part of it is also a determined effort by our middle class to move beyond being bogged down in that tired Bollywood melodrama. For decades India and Pakistan were “hyphenated” in the view of governments and peoples around the globe; with the end of the Cold War and the opening of our economy has India made a deliberate effort to “de-hyphenate” by (a) deepening its relationship with the US, and (b) by focusing on its relationship with China. Now our middle class speaks in awe about China’s economic growth; our strategic community warns about China’s proliferating capabilities; and even Bollywood occasionally plagiarises Chinese films. It’s as if India decided that association with Pakistan in any form only serves to pull us to a lower tier of nations. Dealing with the big boys makes us a big boy too, so to speak.
Adding to the “trust deficit” is the sheer cussedness of the people who run Pakistan. Islamabad took till Thursday night (in the USA) to accept India’s aid of $5 million — only after Manmohan Singh’s phone call. Though it is a modest sum, it is nowhere as paltry as the $1.48 million initially pledged by Pakistan’s “all-weather friend” China (Beijing raised it to $9 million on Thursday after a taunt by US diplomat Richard Holbrooke). The coyness with which Pakistan accepted India’s offer of aid is symptomatic of the paranoia of Pakistan’s army. If you remember the 2005 earthquake in both parts of Jammu and Kashmir, it killed 79,000 on that side and 1,400 on this side of the Line of Control (LoC). Some casualties were in their line of defence; soldiers were crushed to death in their bunkers. The then army chief, Pervez Musharraf, ordered several divisions to march straight to the LoC, past destroyed villages with trapped children and desperate people, but not for relief efforts; they marched to make sure that India did not take advantage of the earthquake and invade Pakistan. Yes. (Five checkpoints on the LoC were eventually opened so that India could provide aid and succour).
The civilian government in Pakistan, castrated as it is, has done nothing to close that “trust deficit”. Qureshi says the damage to Pakistan from the flood so far is $43 billion (the UN has been trying to raise $459 million for initial relief work, but has only mustered $270 million). Pakistan received aid of $5 billion after the 2005 earthquake; it would be logical to expect a greater sum seeing how Pakistan’s few bridges and power plants have been destroyed by the flood. However, you cannot blame anyone for worrying that much of any aid, besides going into fat UN salaries, will find its way into President Asif Ali Zardari’s already heavy pockets. We are all reluctant to help an infamous bunch of bandits.
Lastly there are the Islamists. They blame India for the flood, ironically after months of blaming India for depriving them of water (instead of introspecting on their own non-governance). The likes of former ISI chief Hamid Gul and rabble-rouser Syed Zaid Zaman Hamid even recently starred at a seminar on “water terrorism by India” (no wonder some cyber-Indians refer to Zaid Hamid as Pakistan’s greatest comedian). It is also the Islamists who try to fill the governance-vacuum; after the 2005 earthquake the Lashkar-e-Toiba did extensive medical, relief and charity work. The Islamist surge is the kind of thing that scares people, not just in India but around the world, into averting their eyes or looking the other way.
Having said this, it is undeniable that Pakistan is our neighbour and that its people are suffering. Though only 1,600 have died, the government says 20 million have become homeless (adding to the millions already destitute). Its poor-excuse-for-an-infrastructure has collapsed. It’s still raining, leading UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon to predict a “slow-motion tsunami” whose devastation will be felt for the next two years. Relief workers still cannot reach many affected areas as the Indus River keeps rising; it’s an unwinnable race against cholera, hepatitis, etc.
India ought to do more. After all, it is a matter of relief not to GHQ in Rawalpindi or to the Taliban, but to a large number of the hapless 170 million who happen to be Pakistanis, who have suffered 63 years of poor governance and are on a downward spiral of illiteracy and hunger — unlike our burgeoning middle class. Helping them does not equate to helping a failed state fall into the hands of terrorists, though the silence in our country makes it seem as if that’s what many Indians believe. The blame for this silence should fall squarely on the media, particularly the TV channels, which don’t hesitate to tie up with a Pakistani counterpart to telecast live images of a terrorist attack, but have been criminally negligent in giving air-time to the flood.
The silence is also a shame for our middle-class. A trust deficit should not translate to a deficit of humanity. It’s never too late to sit up and do the right thing; helping one’s distressed neighbour is an ethic we were each raised with. Some will argue that helping a recalcitrant country is not realpolitik. Yet true realpolitik does not translate to a deficit of morality
editorchief@expressbuzz.com
About The Author: Aditya Sinha is the Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express and is based in Chennai
The flood of silence | recent flood | Pakistan | Indian Express
The flood of silence - Aditya Sinha, Editor-in-Chief of The New Indian Express
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