The concept of national sovereignty implying non-interference in a country’s ‘internal’ affairs has for long been a convenient myth. So the less frequently we employ it the better. In a number of cases, it is counter-productive. The officially-sponsored Pakistan National Assembly’s resolution on the Ram Janambhoomi-Babri Masjid issue and references by President Rafsanjani to the Kashmir dispute during his recent visit to Pakistan are cases in point.
Instead of routine protests, silence would have been more effective. The message to Islamabad would have been that we treat its pretensions of solidarity with Indian Muslims with contempt and to Teheran that we understand its compulsions arising out of its competition with Saudi Arabia for influence in Pakistan.
The history of Indo-Pakistan relations reveals that Pakistan’s rulers are utterly indifferent to the well-being of Indian Muslims. 45 years after partition, they need and seek justification for it in the often imaginary difficulties of Indian Muslims. So they seize every opportunity to ensure that Muslims do not live in peace with their fellow countrymen. The National Assembly resolution on Ayodhya is clearly intended to block an agreement on the Janambhoomi question with the cooperation of Muslims.
As for Teheran, if New Delhi has concluded, as it doubtless has, that the presence of a fundamentalist regime is not an obstacle in the path of cooperation in areas of mutual interest, it should not allow itself to be deflected either by seeking Iran’s endorsement of its position on the Kashmir issue and by taking exception to pro forma statements President Rafsanjani and his aides are obliged to make at the insistence of their Pakistani counterparts. It has done both. Teheran has not sought our support on its territorial claims.
Iranian rulers are obviously trying to find a way to reconcile their national interests with the compulsions arising out of their 1979 revolution. It is, as we know from the experience of the Soviet Union, not an easy task. In fact, like the Soviets, the Iranians might end up paying a high price for no durable results.
The Soviets provoked a second Cold war in the seventies with their interventions in Ethiopia, Angola and Afghanistan. The consequences are well known. At the very least, it hastened the crisis which has overwhelmed them. The Iranians may find themselves similarly over-extended. But that is their business, not ours.
Pakistan is very different from Iran. Pakistan’s predominantly Punjabi elite has not been known for religious ardour ever; it has always been power-oriented. In the absence of anything else, it uses the Islamic rhetoric as a legitimising principle for its imperial domination over the hodge-podge known as Pakistan.
Pakistan is not even an imagined community in the sense defined by Marxist intellectuals since the struggle for Pakistan was not waged primarily on the territories which constitute Pakistan. It has no history, real or invented, which is different from the larger history of India. Anti-Indianism has to be its sole raison d’etre.
Iran, in contrast, has, for millennia, been a great and autonomous civilization. The Arab conquest and conversion to Islam did not end its autonomy. The Abbasid revolution in the 8th century was largely an Iranian enterprise. Persian, though substantially Arabised, became the language of Muslim elites in India and much of Central Asia which also adopted the Persian court culture and administrative practices. The Iranian genius and spirit of independence has found expression in Sufism and Shi’ism.
Just as the Communist revolution in Russia was the product of a mix of Russian messianism and imperialism, the Iranian one too is a result of a combination of shi’ism and the country’s millennial imperial tradition. Indeed, Islamic universalism itself bears the stamp of the Iranian concept of ‘universal empire’. Indian has no reason to fear either tradition. This incidentally is not true for predominantly Sunni Pakistan.
Economic Times, 18 September 1992