The Pakistani government will be damned before it accepts any help from us

How should one react to Pakistan’s initial refusal to accept aid from India?

I say initial because the Pakistanis indicated on Thursday – after being yelled at by their American allies – that they might condescend to accept money

for the benefit of the victims of their floods even if it came from India.

 

   At one level, you could say that Pakistan’s hesitation is understandable. After all, India is their traditional enemy. It is also the bigger country of the two. And over the last two decades it has become easily the more prosperous entity, courted by the world’s industrialists while Pakistan is haunted by the world’s terrorists.

 

   You could argue that Paksitani sensitivities are such that accepting aid from India would be akin to rubbing salt into that nation’s wounds.

 

   Or, you could say, as some Pakistanis have claimed over the last week, that the Indian offer is derisory. We waited too long before saying we would send money. And five million dollars is much too little when the need is for millions of dollars.

 

   That objection is easily disposed of. First of all, five million dollars is not a tiny sum compared to the aid given by other countries: it is on par with the amounts promised by most individual western countries. Secondly, there is no suggestion that India will stop at five million. When there was an earthquake in their part of Kashmir some years ago, we offered over 20 million dollars in relief. Why should anyone assume that we will be less generous this time?

 

   But the fate of the earthquake relief some years ago may explain many things. The Pakistanis did not use our relief materials. The only gifts that were distributed were the blankets we sent over. And even there, Pakistan deputed people to handle each blanket individually and to scissor out the label that read ‘made in India.’

 

   This time around, New Delhi was not sure how the offer of aid would be received (with justification, as it turns out) and so took slightly longer than it should have to decide whether or not to offer aid. It does not suggest callousness on our part, quite the opposite. We were just worried about being snubbed. (As indeed we were when we did offer the money).

 

   More revealing has been the nature of the Pakistani response. Instead of saying thank you and getting on with the serious job of organizing relief, the Pakistanis have spent rather a lot of time reading motives into the Indian gesture and sneering at us. One senior functionary from the ruling party even tweeted that the roof of India’s Parliament was leaking. Should Pakistan send relief to help fix it? (I think it was meant to be a sneering joke. This is probably what passes for humour in Pakistan in these troubled times.)

 

"They react like this to Indian offers of friendship and assistance at a more basic level. They hate us. They resent us. And they’ll be damned if they accept any help from us."

   But, to be fair to the Pakistanis, let us accept the position that decades of hostility between our two countries have led to a situation where the Pakistanis simply do not trust us. Let us also accept that they are so resentful of India that even in their hour of greatest crisis when thousands of people have died and millions are homeless, they will still spurn India’s hand of friendship. And let us grant them their claim that given our history, they are justified in being suspicious of India.

 

   So, here’s my question: if this is how their government reacts to an offer of humanitarian aid at a time of crisis, then how exactly do we expect Pakistan to react to the peace process?

 

   Advocates of the peace process argue that our two nations have so much in common that any contact at the level of people to people is bound to yield results. Once we get beyond political considerations and talk to each other at a human level, progress is assured.

 

   But here we are, reaching out to Pakistan at the most basic human level of them all, offering assistance at a time of grave crisis. And guess what? They would prefer to spit on the hand of friendship than to shake it.

 

   Another argument frequently used by peaceniks is that hostility towards India is largely the preserve of the Pakistan army which has a vested interest in prolonging conflict to maintain its own importance. Civilian governments on the other hand are more open-minded. As Benazir Bhutto told the Hindustan Times Summit some years ago, “Democracies do not go to war with each other.” (This is demonstrably untrue. Nawaz Sharif was prime minister during Kargil. Perhaps Benazir regarded every government not run by her People’s Party as undemocratic).

 

   I’ve lost count of the number of times Pakistani journos and intellectuals have arrived in Delhi as part of some peacenik process and have declared that it is India’s job to help Pakistan’s civilian politicians. The civilian politicians, we are told, have no mindless hostility towards India. After all, they are south Asians just like us etc etc.

 

   So, the snub over aid is interesting. It is not the army that has been reluctant to accept our help. Pakistanis keep telling us that the army cares nothing for the people. It is the civilian politicians who are voted to power who need to keep the people happy. But in this case, it is the civilian politicians who have decided that the suffering millions are better off without our five million dollars in aid. (As a matter of interest, there have been suggestions that the Pakistan army has actually done a better job of relief work while the civilian politicians have diverted the relief money and Asif Zardari has toured the world even as his people die.)

 

   This snub suggests to me that civilian politicians are just as hostile to India as the army. You could argue – as Pakistani journos do – that the army has a stake in keeping the conflict going. But the civilian politicians have no such excuse or rationale. They react like this to Indian offers of friendship and assistance at a more basic level. They hate us. They resent us. And they’ll be damned if they accept any help from us.

 

   I am not one of those who believes that we should never talk to Pakistan. All I say is that we should go into any peace process with our eyes open. All too often we believe nonsense about the inherent goodwill of the Pakistani political establishment. We are conned into believing that we are better off with civilian politicians. And when things go wrong, we blame it all on the evil Pakistani army.

 

   The response of Pakistan’s government, led by a party that professes peace, to our offer of aid demonstrates what the truth is. So let’s stop kidding ourselves.