Short-sighted and self-serving politics creates grave dangers for nations and societies across the world. Patronage of extremist groups for the sake of obtaining an advantage over adversaries eventually leads to catastrophic consequences. There are many examples of nations that have suffered from such circumstances and the most prominent one at the present is Pakistan. It has been caught in a whirlpool of self-inflicted misery that hit another milestone on Monday with the Peshawar mosque suicide bombing that claimed 93 lives, according to latest figures. The terrorist outfit that has claimed responsibility, the TTP, is a creation of its own ISI – one of many that have turned around to bite the hand that fed them.
With the generals having taken over command of the nation, either directly or indirectly, the focus from the 1960s has been on converting power into pelf. This has crippled the economy to the present level, where even the basics are not available to the people, and bankruptcy is around the corner. Conditions have been created where the doors to medieval fundamentalism have been opened. The Pakistani establishment and its people would never have imagined such a scenario at the time when they were the darling of the United States and the Arab countries during the conflict in Afghanistan.
It may seem a bit far-fetched but this scenario should serve as a warning to so-called ‘liberal’ democracies like Canada, the US, Britain and Australia that are happy to provide space and succour to extremist ideologies, such as that of Khalistan, in the belief that it provides leverage against India. This also applies to homegrown ‘woke’ leftists who have, among other fetishes, developed a serious strain of Hinduphobia. Instead of respecting India’s territorial integrity and democratic structure, support is being provided to a neo-colonialist interventionist ideology. This strategy is bound to have a backlash, threatening all the civilisational advances that have been made over the centuries. Power structures like those in China and Russia are going to get emboldened as a result.
A line has to be drawn by all democratic nations that prohibits and condemns the use of violence against innocent, unarmed non-combatants, in particular women and children. Failure to do so will open a Pandora’s box of complications very like those being faced by Pakistan at the present.
