Forty-six years ago I crossed the Pakistan – India
border. On both sides there were tangible signs of the forthcoming war between
these two countries. Under the warm December sky, against the backdrop of the
people going about their everyday business, soldiers were on the move by the
truckload; tanks crept along the narrow highway, jeeps mounted with machine
guns weaved between them – they meant business. After all, that is what the
military is for; we keep them well- resourced so that they can go about their
business and their business is killing. I was the nineteen year old product of
a system of deprived privilege; a system that had been developed over a period
of one hundred years to ostensibly educate the ruling class to operate both at
home and in the colonies; a system that enabled the domination of vast numbers
of people by a relatively small number of men.
It is now seventy years since the creation of the
state of Pakistan in the extraordinary act of partitioning the sub-continent by
religion. In the British media there has been significant coverage of this
event, mostly through the stories of individuals who survived the mass
slaughter brought about by the polarisation of communities through religion,
and the consequent movement of vast numbers of people. Many of these people had
subsequently made their homes in Britain, and were still haunted by what they
had seen and experienced. It is not beyond the edges of imagination to see
significant similarities with this and what is happening in the Middle East,
conflict, misery and suffering arising out of human arrogance, stupidity and
cruelty.
Travelling in an old coach that I had boarded on the
edge of Clapham Common in London, we passed through Lahore, the old capital
city of the Punjab, over the border to the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, a road
that had been awash with blood not so many years before; now the machines of
violence were driving over the ghosts of women, children and men with the
expressed purpose of wreaking more havoc and misery in the name of one of the
most pernicious of ideas we so love to cling to – nationalism. On the way to
Pakistan, amongst many other countries, we had passed through Syria, Iraq,
Iran, Afghanistan and Kashmir; entering Pakistan by way of the magnificent Khyber
Pass. In those days it was the well-worn path of many a young Western
traveller, fired with a sense of exploration and the wish to find something
different. These countries were, to our eyes, whole, containing vast peaceful
lakes, snow-capped mountains, clear seas and dark-green jungles; animals and
birds beyond description, and people, whose many smiles would shake the
dullness of a culture determined that the only way to live was to be materially
successful. So many of the buildings and monuments incorporated extraordinary
craft and skill; the timeless devotion of their nameless, forgotten builders –
memorials to a world beyond the self- enclosure of the individual. In the
ensuing forty-six years, how things have changed!
It has been said that the savagery brought about by
Partition was without comparison in the history of Asia in its ferocity and
long-term effect. Despite the fact it may be thought that the realisation of
this might bring some semblance of sanity, Pakistan and India remain deeply
entrenched in their inability to forge a peaceful relationship. The war in 1971
was one of the shortest wars in history, lasting thirteen days, and saw the
creation of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh from what was established as
East Pakistan. In the early 2000s, Maggie, my wife, and I were in India during
a particularly tense phase, many people we talked to were openly fearful of war
between these two nations, who by then were both in possession of nuclear
weapons. At present there appears to be little or no positive relationship between
them: any public communication being confined solely to words of aggression.
In fact, disintegration, insensitivity to others and
hatred are occurring on a global level fuelled by fear, greed and the deep
insecurity brought essentially by the knowledge of the limitations the planet
faces. The division of the many by the extremes of the few appears to be taking
hold in the U.S, the U.K, India and many other areas of the world. Recently,
some politicians have spoken of the use of nuclear weapons in terms of
possibility or even probability; open hostilities have broken out between
people who refuse to go any way towards respecting each other; it appears that
hatred has been made acceptable, in the same way greed has. We are all in
serious trouble.
The lessons of the past are clearly laid out before
us, but many of us do not understand the past, or we only have a partial view
which severely distorts our actions in the present. Often this distortion is
used to further the aims of particular groups in order to support their
specific ideologies, whatever the consequence. The present contains both the
past and the future, in acting intelligently one has to have some awareness of
where this action is coming from: that is the conditioning of the individual. We
are imprisoned by our own backgrounds, and in order to be able to act
intelligently and creatively it is from our backgrounds that we must free
ourselves.
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