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Sowing wind, reaping whirlwind

Premen Addy

THE midsummer silly season and the rioting season are as one. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis riot in Bradford, Oldham and, most recently, in the neighbouring Lancashire town of Burnley; and the politically correct broadsheets -- their unctuous liberalism un der threat -- cower behind frayed cliches and shibboleths as they spread their gospel of reassurance. The counterfeit rhetoric of freedom and tolerance disguises a form of censorship every bit as offensive in its patronising conceit and dishonesty as the more open variety.

The Fourth Estate in Britain, as an old Fleet Street veteran, Tom Bairstow, remarked is now a fourth-rate estate. We are into an era of news-speak, where half-truth, falsehood and the occasional truth can be as interchangeable as Einstein's mass and ener gy. Facts are no longer sacred, and comment is either a sugar-coated tranquiliser or a pep pill calculated to induce a brainstorm. The establishment agenda is all.

The heart of the matter is Pakistan and its bloodied progeny, Bangladesh, and their client relationship with the West. Down the year, Islamabad has done the American and British states some service. Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and those who lead them are perceived as useful counters to the suspect Indians and can expect the patronage once afforded them by the Raj. Old attitudes die hard. They bring to mind a remark made by Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the Nicaraguan dictator Samoza who, complained a visitor to the White House, was a bastard. ``So he is'', replied the US president with a smile, ``but he is our bastard''.

The former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic wasn't, hence is to be arraigned at the Hague for alleged war crimes. The late Yahya Khan and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were, so they got off scot-free as valued allies of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The Pakistan military's genocide in East Pakistan in 1971 scarcely rates a mention these days, even as leader-writers expend reams of print on how best India could cut the Gordian knot in Kashmir.

The BBC and most British newspapers would perforce have to rifle their archives to find their last reference to Pakistan's murderous campaign of Islamisation and ethnic cleansing in its former province. Collective amnesia on the subject informs the West' s South Asia policy.

President Lyndon B. Johnson waxed lyrical over Ayub Khan; Lord Bernard Wetherill, the former speaker of the House of Commons, launched an eloquent defence of General Pervez Musharraf's coup in October 1999, in a speech to the second chamber redolent of k hidmatgars and cavalrymen and burnished memories of loyalty to the Empire, while Professor Stephen Cohen, the Brookings Institute guru, pronounced in a BBC World Service interview, after Pakistan's chief executive officer had metamorphosed into a preside ntial swan, that the country's ``military dictatorship is the most democratic in the world''. The shade of George Orwell must tremble in admiration. The French have a saying: Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose -- the more things change, the more th ey remain the same.

But history's enduring truths do eventually catch up with the falsifiers. The writer V. S. Naipaul, than whom there is no keener iconoclast, described Pakistan as a ``criminal enterprise''. In almost every corner of a foreign field with a Pakistani prese nce, criminality in some shape or form inevitably follows. The Canadian intelligence service has warned that Pakistani immigrants tend to bring with them the destructive sectarian politics of their homeland.

Earlier, this year, the British government introduced an Anti-Terrorist Act which bans groups and organisations using Britain as a base of operations to fund and recruit terrorists for action in third countries. Most of the banned organisations, includin g the Lashkar-e-Taiba, are of Pakistani origin.

The Countess of Minto, way back in 1906, may have gloated that British sponsorship of the Muslim League would fundamentally alter the history and politics of India. It certainly did. But the wind sown thousands of miles away threatens to become a whirlwi nd in the centre of the former empire. The best laid plans of mice and men -- the man in this case was Lord Minto, the British viceroy of India -- are apt to go awry.

The recent violence in the north of England have multiple causes, each feeding the other and acquiring a life of its own. They are not always easy to sift, but the attempt surely has to be made. High unemployment, poor housing, inadequate recreational fa cilities and white fascist provocations explain much of the explosive resentment of the ethnic Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities, but they do also leave a number of critical questions unanswered.

Why is educational performance among Pakistanis and Bangladeshis so poor, when among Indians and Chinese it is the highest in the land? Does this not carry a message of cultural rigidity, a sufficient lack of respect for the language and traditions of th e host community, on the one hand; and on the other, a willingness to learn and adapt, while remaining true to certain values of one's inheritance? Wealth and achievement strengthen self-esteem and are a stake in social peace and stability. A moral visio n that coheres to the needs of a civil society, respects pluralism and diversity and the rule of law and permits an honourable place for doubt underpins this commitment.

Observing the mayhem visited upon Britain by the Pakistani diaspora, enraged at media coverage of Islamabad's repression and brutality in East Bengal in 1971, the distinguished Marxist historian and polymath, Victor Kiernan, translator of Iqbal and Faiz, questioned, at the time, their value as fellow citizens, in a famous letter to The Guardian.

It is a sentiment that resonates today, not least among Indians, who have been voicing strong objection to the media's use of the generic `Asian'. ``We don't want to be divisive, nor do we want to be dragged down through no fault of our own. The word `As ian' has outlived its usefulness'', exclaimed Yogesh Virmani, president of the Indian Association in Manchester, to a Daily Telegraph reporter.

There is an embarrassed media silence about the numerous Indians, Hindus mostly, who are leaving the riot-affected areas of northern England as their homes and properties have become targets of Pakistani Islamist violence. Some members of the Afro-Caribb ean community have also suffered similar harassment. It was, alas, left to Mr John Griffin, a leader of the far right British National Party to point this out in a spirited exchange with the BBC's foremost television interviewer, Jeremy Paxman, on the po pular Newsnight programme.

If the truth is concealed for reasons of political correctness, it will inevitably break out through the seamiest channels. The fact that Mussolini may have accepted the scientific truths of Galileo do not undermine their validity; their universality mer ely reinforced his courage in questioning the received wisdom of the church and standing up to its tyranny.

Cricket reflects its society, as the late John Arlott sagely proclaimed. Pakistani mob violence in the recently concluded one-day internationals involving Pakistan, England and Australia has been little short of traumatic. No scenes like these have ever been witnessed in England. No sets of supporters have been so driven by hate, none have been as violent and loathsomely abusive.

Two local Pakistani reporters, Mr Aamer Khokhar (in The Times) and Mr Burhan Wazir (in The Observer) produced dissembling pieces that sought answers in high unemployment and simple crowd exuberance. But the time for such weasel words has passed. The publ ic mood has darkened. The former Tory minister in the John Major government, Mr David Mellor, writes a widely read sports column (football is his true passion) in the Evening Standard.

Apropos of the Pakistani behaviour, he has this to say: ``Many decent British people, who are not instinctively racist, will wonder why people come here, take all the benefits of being British, including our nationality, and yet not only can't bring them selves to support our national team but jeer a decent man who does, Naser Hussain, and insist on supporting Pakistan in a way that has become totally unacceptable in public order terms''.

Mr Michael Henderson, arguably the doyen of contemporary English cricket writers, was scathing in his dismissal of liberal hypocrisy. He set the scene in the Daily Telegraph after the final at Lord's, where Australia demolished Pakistan, with these words : ``Then, with the cricket done, some half-wit in the gathering of the Lord's pavilion took aim and lobbed a beer can towards the balcony where it struck Michael Bevan, the Australian batsman, a glancing blow on the cheekbone... In the next few days, if the commentaries of the last fortnight are anything to go by, some earnest sixth formers in the liberal press will label that flying can a `symbol of Pakistani resistance' to `the establishment' a `defiant statement' against `cultural exclusion'. The MCC will probably be portrayed as `fascist junta', and English cricket in general as a `repressive oligarchy'...

``There is another way of looking at it, though, and that is how most people will reflect on the not particularly nice and sometimes downright nasty, incidents of the last three weeks... The mob which invaded the field at Edgbaston, causing a half-hour d elay, was Pakistani. The spectators who ran on at Leeds, prompting Alec Stewart to concede the game, were Pakistani. The person who threw the firecracker that landed near Brett Lee at Trent Bridge, forcing Steve Waugh to take his men from the field, was Pakistani. The fool who hurled the beer can at Lord's was a Pakistani. These are facts: hard, unpleasant, indisputable''.

As hard, unpleasant and indisputable were the Pakistani invasions at Lord's, a few seasons ago, during the final of the Under 15 World Cup, when India was heading for victory against their side. There was a similar occurrence during a charity match at Cr ystal Palace to raise money for Imran Khan's cancer hospital in Lahore, when India was on the brink of victory.

``If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two imposters just the same,'' wrote Kipling. That would be a true measure of the manhood that continues to elude Pakistan and its people, riven by discord and conflict and not knowing what the future will bring.

(The author, a visiting tutor in Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based India Weekly.)