Millions of Muslims in India, as in Pakistan, Bangladesh and other countries, support Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war and wish him to win against the US-led coalition of which Saudi Arabia is the second most important constituent.
This is an extraordinary development which can be explained primarily in terms of widespread and deep Muslim distrust, indeed hatred, of the West. This factor operates as much in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, which has been a major beneficiary of US military aid in its permanent hostility towards this country, and predominantly Muslim Bangladesh, as in India where Muslims are in a minority. In plain terms, while their minority status in this country may be a factor in their pro-Saddam sympathies, it is apparently not a critical one. It could have become so if the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had come out in support of the US-led coalition. But the BJP has not done so for reasons which remain obscure.
The shift in the Muslim sentiment in the sub-continent away from Saudi Arabia in favour of Saddam Hussein could not have been painless. Saudi Arabia has been their ideal since the end of World War II. They have looked upon it as the guardian of Islam by virtue of its Wahhabi conservatism and the location of Mecca and Medina in it; they sided with it during the fifties and sixties even when Nasser was the darling of the Arab world. On top of it, the Saudi rulers have been generous in their support for a variety of Muslim institutions and causes. They, for instance, financed Pakistan’s purchase of the first squadron of F-16 fighter-bombers and their support has in no small way accounted for the spread of madrasah education in Kashmir under the auspices of Jammat-e-Islami which in turn has served as the basis for the rise of the terrorist-secessionist movement there.
Saddam Hussein has, on the other hand, not been what Muslims in the sub-continent would call a good Muslim. He has not sided with Pakistan on Jammu and Kashmir and he has not helped finance Muslim institutions and causes. His interests and preoccupations have been different. Equally significant, he has fought an eight-year-long war with the Islamic Republic of Iran which, despite its Shia character, has enjoyed considerable support among Muslims in the sub-continent by virtue of its crusade against the ‘great satan’ (the US) in particular and the West in general.
Several hundred thousand Muslims from the sub-continent working in Kuwait received a harsh deal at the hands of the Iraqi army in the wake of its occupation of the Sheikhdom last August. Most of them barely escaped with their lives; they had to leave all their possessions, including bank accounts, behind, with no hope of recovering them ever. When they returned home, many of them brought with them horrible tales of harassment and worse.
Perhaps these individuals and their relations are still angry with Saddam Hussein. But for the larger Muslim community, that appears to have become an old story of no relevance in the new context of the fight against the infidel Americans and their allies.
Though I cannot claim to speak with knowledge, it does appear to me that the attitude of Muslims in the sub-continent towards the Gulf war is still ambivalent on account of the presence of Saudi Arabia in the US-led coalition, though the element of support for Saddam Hussein is steadily becoming stronger. The ulema, long used to looking up to Saudi Arabia for support, inspiration and guidance, remain, in my view, reluctant to come out openly and strongly in support of Saddam Hussein.
If this were not so, we would by now have been inundated with demonstrations which could, as in 1969, have taken an overtly communal turn. That has happened in Ghaziabad in UP, near Delhi. But that is still an isolated incident. In 1969 riots beginning in Ahmedabad in connection with the desecration of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem by a demented Australian had rapidly spread to large parts of Gujarat. Similarly, demonstrations in Srinagar touched off by the execution of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto by President Zia-ul-Haq in 1978 had led to attacks on Hindus and Hindu temples in Anantnag.
The sympathy and support for Saddam Hussein is, of course, not confined to Muslims in our country. A lot of Hindus, especially among the educated, are also impressed by his spirit of defiance and his capacity to hold out in the face of overwhelmingly superior military might ranged against him. He impresses many of us just as Hitler did before the fortunes of the war turned against him at Stalingrad in 1943. Many of us are willing to ignore Saddam Hussein’s record at home, war with Iran and aggression against Kuwait just as we were ready to turn the proverbial Nelson eye in 1939-40 towards Hitler’s actions – massacre of communists and socialists and persecution of Jews and annexation of Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia.
At the time of World War II this malaise of the spirit could, however, be explained, though not convincingly, on the ground that the British had refused to concede our demand for independence. It can no longer be so explained and must, therefore, be cause for concern. References to pax Americana, Western imperialism, Zionism, Third World solidarity and policy of non-alignment cannot possibly cover up the proclivity of so many of us to put ourselves on the wrong side of history. .
Nehru said before the Quit India movement in 1942 that Gandhiji had convinced himself that the allies were going to lose the war and that this assessment influenced his approach towards the British. The truth of this observation became obvious when the Mahatma described the Cripps offer of dominion status in 1942 at the end of the war as a “post-dated cheque on a crashing bank”. The allies, of course, did not lose the war.
In view of what we came to know subsequently of the nature of Nazi Germany – the massacre of six million Jews and reduction of Slav peoples in occupied Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union Hitler regarded racially inferior to the status of slaves – it is painful to recall that so many of us could have favoured it against the British and even more painful to imagine a world under Nazi domination with the cruel Japanese militarists as their partners in the east. As Prime Minister of India, Nehru incidentally showed a similar incapacity to grasp the truth about the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
The central issue for us in 1939-40 was not who would win but whether we would prefer a world dominated by Nazi Germany and militarist Japan to one under the hegemony of the allies. Similarly, the central issue for us now is not who would emerge victorious but whether we would prefer a chaotic world with no leader to one the United States presides over.
We evaded the central issue in 1939-40. Fortunately for us, as for the rest of humanity, including the Germans and the Japanese, this did not materially affect the fortune of the war. But it should be obvious in retrospect that the Congress leadership paved the way for a disaster for the country. The Muslim League, with British encouragement and support, filled the vacuum arising out of the resignation of Congress governments in the states and the subsequent imprisonment of its leaders. It is, at the very least, open to question whether the League would have dared opt for the partition demand in 1940 and grown in influence the way it did between 1940 and 1946 if the Congress had not for all practical purposes left the field open for it.
On achievement of independence, Nehru tended to tilt towards the communist side which was indefensible in moral terms and weaker in economic and military terms. And he compounded this failure of moral instinct and political judgement when in 1954 he turned down President Eisenhower’s offer of ‘proportionate’ military assistance, proportionate, that is, to India’s size, importance and potentiality, in comparison with Pakistan with which the United States had then concluded a mutual security pact. China ‘repaid’ him with occupation and militarisation of Tibet, demands on Indian territory in disregard of the internationally recognised watershed-highest mountain range principle, friendship with Pakistan and outright attack in 1962.
Mercifully for humankind, once again the forces of tyranny have collapsed in central and Eastern Europe and they are in a state of confusion in the Soviet Union and China. But surely we cannot claim to have made whatever contribution we were capable of towards this happy denouement. In fact, we cannot claim to have promoted even our own national interests. Pakistan’s acquisition of nuclear weapons capability and audacity to train, arm and finance secessionists in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir speaks for itself. The current furore over refuelling facilities to US transport planes suggests that we remain prisoners of the past. But even now it is not too late for us to try and get out of the iron cage of our own making and look at the reality.
Such an exercise cannot leave us in doubt that in Saddam Hussein we are not faced with just another Third World dictator given to ruthless suppression of his own people and acting on impulse. On the contrary, we face in him a man of enormous guile, perseverance, courage, determination and planning. I for one cannot say how long he had planned for the war with Iran. But it is evident that he has planned for the present war for long and carefully.
The purchase of thousands of dummy tanks from an Italian firm supposedly at the price of $25,000 a piece, the construction for himself and his aides of underground palatial bunkers even nuclear bombs cannot penetrate, the erection of a command and communication system capable of surviving aerial bombardment, establishment of hardened sites for his fighters and bombers and a number of other actions show that it was not on a sudden impulse that he decided to seize Kuwait and to defy the powerful coalition President Bush managed to bring about.
Similarly, his decision to release millions of barrels of oil into the sea at the risk of precipitating a major ecological disaster, his threat to use what he calls unconventional weapons, perhaps an euphemism for chemical weapons he has boasted of possessing, and to turn the Arabian peninsula into ashes and Gulf oilfields into a “sea of fire” speak of the extent to which he can go in the pursuit of his goals.
And pray what are those goals? Domination of the Gulf region which possesses two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves, in the service of what? The rhetoric of Arab nationalism, otherwise totally empty and devoid of any moral content and historical justification? Attempt at the destruction of Israel, though it involves the risk of a nuclear war and the incineration of much of West Asia?
On the other side, we have Western Europe, a fictional entity in political and foreign policy terms, with except for the British, little appetite for a military response to any challenge. And then we have the United States which sets in advance the limit of casualties – 20,000 – it can accept in a war it itself regards a being of decisive historic importance.
Saddam Hussein did not miscalculate when he decided to seize Kuwait. He had almost got away with it. Remember there was virtually no US response for four days after August 2. The movement of Iraqi troops in Kuwait towards the Saudi border alone alerted the Saudis and the Americans to the need to respond. Even then Bush spoke of drawing the ‘line in sand’, obviously indicative of a defensive approach.
We do not know what accounts for the subsequent change in the US approach. But we know that it has been a matter of touch and go, that Bush would have had no choice but to sit back if the Soviet leadership had not been desperate to cultivate US goodwill and therefore willing to cooperate, that already Moscow is busy distancing itself from Washington, and that if America gets hurt this time, it will be a long time before it agrees to act firmly ever again.
Americans are not a warlike people. That is one reason why they give so much importance to hi-tech weapons. Their armed forces are a variant of their civilian workforce. Even in war conditions they expect facilities of civilian life – 700 tonnes of mail daily in Saudi Arabia currently. No wonder, Washington is already willing to agree to cessation of hostilities in return for “an unequivocal commitment to withdraw from Kuwait” by Iraq. So much for the unipolar world some of us fear.
Sunday Mail, 3 February 1991