Being the Other: The Muslim in India

by Saeed Naqvi

Pakistan, on the other hand, had remained the West’s ally since 1947 because that was the pre-determined trajectory it was supposed to follow. Narendra Singh Sarila’s The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition explores the role played by Pakistan as one assigned to it by imperial powers. After the discovery of oil on an industrial scale in the Gulf, which the West was thirsty for, it needed a major Muslim country as a ‘pliable’ ally, and Pakistan more or less chose itself for historical as well as geopolitical reasons. So Pakistan was nursed along in every possible way since Indian non-alignment was declared ‘immoral’ by John Foster Dulles who served as Secretary of State under US President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Even Pakistan’s nuclear programme was silently tolerated. Pakistan paid its dues by allowing the US and the Saudis to help create the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. These Islamic militants would drive out the Soviets from Kabul in 1989, an event which was a precursor to the collapse of the Soviet Union. All this was not without costs, including to the US. The spare jihadi reservoir exported militancy to Kashmir, Egypt, Algeria and eventually to New York on 9/11. Zbigniew Brzezinski’s remark to an interviewer in January 1998 will be remembered for its callousness. The priority, he said, was to defeat the Soviet Union and not worry about ‘some stirred up Muslims’. Well, the ‘stirred up’ Muslims are plaguing the world today.