“Hate Thy Neighbor”

Does the “friendly neighbor” exist anymore in international relations? “Y-yes,” some may hesitantly say as they welcome the EU-UK agreement to revive a few of the mutual favors in trade and travel that were terminated a few years ago when Brexit happened. In east Europe, however, despite a two-hour conversation between an eager Trump and a dour Putin, Russia seems to have refused to cease its war on Ukraine. Being a feud not merely between neighbors but also within an ethnic and religious family, that war possesses greater intensity. Interestingly, Pope Leo, newly chosen to head the world of Catholic Christianity, with which Orthodox Christianity (to which the bulk of both Russia and Ukraine belong) has disagreed for centuries, is reported to have offered his Vatican City as a venue for fresh talks between Moscow and Kyiv. 

The above is part of the global setting for what I look at this time, namely the current scene in South Asia, where the May 10 truce between nuclear neighbors India and Pakistan, who had found themselves in a mini-war from the predawn hours of May 7, seems to be holding, but where post-conflict drumbeats of “victory” continue to be sounded on both sides. A New York Times article tells us that in India “even some long-trusted outlets” not only “reported unverified information”; going further, these outlets “fabricated stories”. The article also says: 

“One of India’s most prominent journalists and an anchor at the India Today television channel, Rajdeep Sardesai, apologized on air to viewers last week for running [unverified] reports about Pakistani jets being shot down. (The reports were later found to be untrue.) 

CONSCIOUS CAMPAIGN 

“On his YouTube video blog on May 17, [Sardesai] again apologized, saying that some of the falsehoods were part of a deliberate campaign by the ‘right-wing disinformation machine under the guise of national interest,’ and that 24-hour news channels can sometimes fall into the trap. 

“Last week, several well-known TV stations ran with the story of the Indian Navy attacking Karachi. The reports spread quickly. The terms “Karachi” and “Karachi Port” began trending on X, and images appeared on social media of dark clouds over the city caused by explosions. 

“Fact-checkers eventually found that those visuals had been from Gaza. In their briefing after the conflict ended, the Indian Navy said that it had been prepared to attack Karachi but had not done so.” 

While common worldwide in social media, the deliberate use, in “long-trusted outlets,” of videos from another time and place for projecting a desired image is a new sign of our world’s current sickness. Another sign from India of this sickness is the astonishing arrest of a young political science professor in the prestigious Ashoka University, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, for a tweet in which he said that while he was “very happy to see so many right-wing commentators applauding Colonel Sophia Qureishi” – he was referring to the Muslim officer in the team that presented the Indian government’s report – “perhaps they could also equally loudly demand that the victims of mob lynchings [and] arbitrary bulldozing and other victims of the BJP’s hate-mongering be protected as Indian citizens.” 

PATRIOTIC STATEMENT 

For this tweet, police from the state of Haryana (where Ashoka University is located) went to Mahmudabad’s home in New Delhi at around 6:30 AM on Sunday May 18 (when his pregnant wife was close to giving birth) and arrested him on charges similar to the offence of sedition. On Tuesday May 20, a local court in Haryana sent the professor to 14 days of judicial custody. It is said that on May 21 India’s Supreme Court may hear a challenge to the arrest. On his behalf, senior lawyer Kapil Sibal has told the court, “[Mahmudabad] has been arrested for a patriotic statement.”  

Meanwhile both India and Pakistan have assembled large delegations of MPs for being flown to different capitals to present their nation’s case. (India took the lead in planning this exercise, but Pakistan followed very quickly.) New Delhi has taken care to include a couple of Muslims in its teams. But there’s a question. Will ministers, parliamentarians, officials and journalists in Europe, Asia and the Americans find the time to listen to the competing and conflicting versions of these MPs from India and Pakistan? If they do, I hope they will question MPs from the subcontinent on the nature of their country’s democracy, and on the arrests of people like the young Muslim professor at Ashoka. 

Over a thousand Indian academics have signed a letter of protest at Mahmudabad’s arrest. It has been pointed out, among other things, that the professor’s maternal grandfather, Jagat Singh Mehta, heading India’s foreign ministry in the 1970s, worked closely with Atal Behari Vajpayee, then minister for external affairs in a coalition government and later India’s first BJP prime minister. However, such details provide a reminder that thousands of other Indians subjected to unjustified arrests and persecution do not invite similar attention; they are not well connected. Hindu nationalism has ensured, we should remember, that Muslims, Dalits, Sikhs and Adivasis are victimized in proportions far greater than their numbers warrant, which does not necessarily mean that Hindus are safe. 

KABUL AND DHAKA

Beijing is one capital that Indian MPs will not visit. Pakistan’s foreign minister, Ishaq Dar, has already gone there and just met the Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi. Interestingly, however, Afghanistan’s acting foreign minister, Amir Khan Muttaqi, is also expected in Beijing, which seeks a reduction in the violence from extremists with sanctuaries in the always tense Afghan-Pakistan border against the great road that China has been trying to build in Pakistan, starting from the China-Pakistan border in the high mountains and ending in the port of Gwadar on the Arabian Sea. Friendship between Afghanistan and Pakistan is in China’s interest. 

Global Times, mouthpiece of the Communist Party that rules China, cannot be viewed the way we see an independent newspaper like the New York Times. Newspapers in India such as the Times of India, the Indian Express, the Hindustan Times, the Telegraph, or the Hindu, and the Pakistani paper, Dawn, are also, probably, a good deal freer than Global Times is. Nonetheless we may note the claim of the Beijing newspaper, in relation to the recent India-Pakistan conflict, that “as a responsible major power, China has always been a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and a defender of the international order.” (May 20) 

Which may be taken to mean, among other things, that neighbors are a factor wherever you are -- in Moscow, Kiev, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Beijing, Kiev, New Delhi, Islamabad, Kabul, or anywhere else. This brings me to my final point. Does anyone gain from the mounting mistrust between New Delhi and Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh? The severe restrictions lately imposed on trade between India and Bangladesh not only make no economic sense; they make no political sense. No party and no capital city profits from this mindless tit-for-tat. 

I will end by quoting lines just published (May 20) in Dawn of Karachi by its New Delhi-based columnist, Jawed Naqvi: 

“India might consider starting anew with the resumption of a great platform that was created by South Asian countries to sort out their mutual problems, including terrorism, in Dhaka in 1985. The seven-member club (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) came to be called SAARC, which grew to eight with the inclusion of Afghanistan. Modi initially made a welcome gesture to invite SAARC leaders to his inaugural, but then took the view perhaps that India had outgrown the neighbourhood. There’s no rocket, however, that can launch itself into outer space without the assurance of a firm ground beneath.”