The 1971 war between Pakistan and India crops up so often in comments on this blog that I’d been thinking of creating a South Asian equivalent of Godwin’s law - that any discussion that goes on for long enough will eventually get back to what happened then. At the very least, it seemed like a good idea to set up a post into which all comments about 1971 could be channelled.

Khurram Hussain, a Pakistani writing in India’s Outlook magazine, has started the discussion by arguing that the way to understand Pakistan is not through the lens of partition in 1947, but through the war in 1971 which led to the division of the country and the creation of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan. Here are some excerpts, but do please read the full article:

“The Partition has a mesmerising quality that blinds the mind, a kind of notional heft that far outweighs its real significance to modern South Asian politics. The concerns of the state of Pakistan, the anxieties of its society, and the analytic frames of its intellectual and media elites have as their primary reference not 1947 but the traumatic vivisection of the country in 1971. Indians have naturally focused on their own vivisection, their own dismemberment; but for Pakistan, they have focused on the wrong date. This mix-up has important consequences,” he writes.

“First, Indians tend not to remember 1971 as a Pakistani civil war, but rather as India’s ‘good’ war. It is remembered as an intervention by India to prevent the genocide of Bengalis by Pakistanis. The fact that the Bengalis themselves were also Pakistanis has been effaced from the collective memory of Indian elites. This makes 1971 merely another Kargil, or Kashmir, Afghanistan or Mumbai—an instance of Pakistan meddling in other people’s affairs, and of the Pakistani military’s adventurism in the region.”

“Pakistani intellectual elites share with their Indian counterparts the normative horror of what the West Pakistani military did in the East. How can anyone in their right mind not deem such behaviour beyond the pale? But horror does not preclude abiding distaste for the Indian state’s wilful opportunism in breaking Pakistan apart. It is for this reason that while the intellectual classes in Pakistan, especially the English language press and prominent university scholars, have almost always condemned their state’s involvement in terrorist activity inside India proper, they have remained largely quiet concerning Kashmir. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Kashmir does not seem so different to them than East Pakistan.”

Whether you agree or not with his analysis, what he has done is try to explain why the historical narrative about the last four decades is very different in both countries.  As is evident from the many comments on earlier posts, there is a huge gap in perceptions about 1971 and its very different impact on India and Pakistan. So how do you narrow that gap?

(Photos: General Jagjit Singh Aurora looks at a photo of the signing of the surrender in a museum in Dhaka; war memorial in Drass to Indian soldiers who died in the Kargil war)

A billion fans in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka -- all test nations -- have used the game of cricket as a balm for their myriad problems.

That myth was exploded on Tuesday after gunmen wounded six Sri Lankan players after firing heavy weapons as their team bus wound its way towards the Gaddafi stadium in Lahore to start the third day's play in the second test.

While the players apparently escaped without serious injuries, at least eight Pakistanis lost their lives and a local umpire was critically wounded.

Cricket will never be the same again in the region.

Sri Lanka's tour had itself come in the shadow of violence after the Indian government, its bilateral relations with its neighbour nosediving after the deadly November militant attacks in Mumbai, refused permission for its team to tour Pakistan in January-February.

The island team stepped into the breach, with Pakistan desperate for test cricket and money, having gone over a year without five-day games.

Former skipper Inzamam-ul Haq betrayed the helplessness of cricket administrators in Pakistan, unable to believe that militants, to draw global attention, could have targeted their favourite game.

"Such an attack on a sub-continent team means other teams will simply refuse to come," he told a television channel.

Inzamam's comments showed the realisation that the attackers had wiped out cricket's healing touch in one go. 

Even at the peak of the ethnic strife in Sri Lanka, cricket teams or even media covering matches never felt threatened, although bombs have gone off in capital Colombo leaving teams such as New Zealand and South Africa shaken and abandoning their tours.

Players have never been targets and many were confident the kind of deadly attacks on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics would never be repeated.

So has the attack finally dashed Pakistan's hopes of staying on as a joint-host of the 2011 World Cup alongside India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka?

Pakistan seemed to nurse hopes even when the International Cricket Council (ICC) postponed the Champions Trophy last year with five of the eight teams set to boycott due to security fears. They then shifted the second most important one-day event in February out of Pakistan.

Although the influential Indian cricket board has largely stood by their Pakistan counterparts, attacks such as the one in Mumbai and Lahore have meant governments and security experts of the ICC have taken charge.

With teams such as Australia, New Zealand and England already refusing to travel to Pakistan, will the attack be the last straw for sub-continent teams in the years to come?

It looks like Pakistan cricket is set for a long winter.

PHOTO: Sri Lankan cricket team members prepare to board a Pakistani military helicopter at the Gaddafi stadium after the shooting in Lahore March 3, 2009. REUTERS/Syed Mujtaba

For a slideshow of photos on the shooting, please click here.

Sheikh Hasina, the leader of an avowedly secular party, is set to return to power in Bangladesh, the 
other end of South Asia’s arc of instability stretching from Afghanistan through Pakistan to India.

And because the teeming region, home to a fifth of the world’s population, is so closely intertwined 
Hasina’s election and the change that she has promised to bring to her country will almost certainly have a bearing across South Asia, but especially for India and Pakistan.

Bangladesh, as far as New Delhi is concerned, is the eastern launching pad for Islamist militants hostile  to it, complementing Pakistan on the west. So even if the heat is turned on the militants in Pakistan as India is  demanding following the attacks in Mumbai, they or their controllers can unleash groups such as  Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami  (HuJI) based in Bangladesh.

(more…)

In the absence of any claims, and a denial of involvement by the main local separatist group, the Indian media is  are starting to point the finger at a Bangladeshi militant Islamist group for Thursday’s multiple bombings that left 65 left dead and more than 300 wounded in Assam state.

If it is indeed the Harkat-ul-Jihad-al Islami (HuJi) Bangladesh that orchestrated one of the most deadly attacks in the far flung northeast state, then it could end up hardening the mood in India against not just Bangladesh, but also once again against Pakistan.

For the group, which was formed in the early 1990s to establish Islamic rule in  Bangladesh, is an organisation with tentacles running all the way to Afghanistan and to Osama bin Laden and in so doing, is seen as linked with Pakistani militant groups, some of whom have enjoyed backing in the past from the Inter-Services Intelligence. (more…)

Pakistan has just moved to daylight saving time, the first country in South Asia to try this to stave off a crippling energy shortage. But will it work ? Or will it make life a bit more difficult for people travelling across South Asia where most countries have their own national clocks, sometimes minutes apart, largely as a mark of national sovereignty more than anything else?

 Opinion in the media and on the blogs is divided over Pakistan’s decision to move clocks by one hour until August, with some pointing out that this had been tried
out in the past and it didn’t really work.

“People were  confused and were always referring to dual timings, saying Musharraf time is 4 p.m. but actually it is 3 p.m,” wrote Shahid Sohail in a comment on All Things Pakistan. Prayer times were affected and there was chaos until the authorities withdrew the measure.

Another reader on the same blog wasn’t sure what difference it would make in a city like Karachi where businesses don’t start until 12 p.m, itself a problem.

Pakistanis must cooperate in the national interest, the government said, perhaps mindful of the past experience. The power shortage is indeed so serious that there have been riots in recent months.  There is a shortage of 4,500 mw at the moment, forcing recurrent power cuts across the country.

Still, the idea of Pakistan now half an hour ahead of India - when it actually should be behind given its location to the west - adds to the chronological confusion. 

The Los Angeles Times said it’s like saying California is ahead of Utah. But then scientific logic hasn’t traditionally set times in South Asia. Nepal wanted to be on its own time zone, rather than live in Big Brother India’s lengthening shadows, so it chose to move its clock by 15 minutes.

Sri Lanka, which was on the same clock as India, moved half an hour ahead, which was again seen as asserting its identity, But the Tamil Tigers fighting for an independent homeland refused to make the switch, emphasising, in turn, their distinctiveness.

So the tiny island which has been tearing itself apart in a 25-year civil war ended up with two different sets of times. They used to call it  Jaffna time in the north as different from the clock in the rest of the island. Ultimately the government moved back the clock and today they are on the same time zone as India.

And if your head isn’t spinning by now, try Bangladesh  which sits in a geographical location such that it has India on both its western and eastern borders. But that hasn’t stopped it from having its Bangladesh Standard Time half an hour ahead of the Indian clock. So you have a situation where if you travelled east from Bangladesh to India’s northeast you would have to turn your watch back by 30 minutes,  so you actually end up gaining time while travelling east.

Mental calisthenics ?