25 August 2021
SAHRDC Think Piece 2 on Afghanistan (May be freely reproduced with due credit to SAHRDC)
The mythological yarns of Hinduism are many splendoured. They make for many hours of wonderful reading. They also attest to the fertility of the Hindu imagination more than any sound historical record. The revanchist Hindutva supporter who dreams of an ‘Akhand Bharat’, or ‘Greater India’, would like us to believe that the Gandhara kingdom mentioned in the great Indian epics of the Mahabharata and Ramayana comprises most of what was part of Pakistan’s North West Frontier province, now called Khyber Pakhtunwa, along with modern day Eastern Afghanistan.
There has always been a special place for India’s civilizational and historical relations with Afghanistan in public memory, in spite of the horror stories spun around Mahmud of Ghazni, who, like any medieval soldier of fortune in any part of the world at that point of time, was more freebooter and pillager than conqueror intending to stay and rule. Lest it be forgotten, Afghanistan gave India one of its best rulers. The standardization of coinage and the fixed value given to the rupee was no small feat. And the rupee, the name he gave it, is what we call our currency today. The construction and upkeep of the Grand Trunk road has stood the test of time. The incipient steps to create an equitable system of land revenue collection in much of northern India were started by Sher Shah Suri. Akbar, the truly great, completed it.
Fast forward to partition. The post 1947 government had its hands full. It was dealing with massive refugee influxes from West and East Pakistan, a communist insurgency in Telengana, a recalcitrant Nizam of Hyderabad, a ruler in Travancore egged on by his Machiavellian prime minister and wanting to declare an independent kingdom, the Maharaja of Manipur thinking on similar lines, and the Janus faced Maharaja of Kashmir. Afghanistan was the least important issue on New Delhi’s to do list.
The problems between the new state of Pakistan and Afghanistan relating to the Durand Line, the demarcation the Pashtun inhabited could have been a major issue between Kabul and Karachi, the first capital of Pakistan. However, the short sighted boycott of the referendum by the Khudai Khidmatgars as to whether the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) would join the dominions of India or Pakistan spelt doom for any traction for the demand in the long term.. With the Congress and the Muslim League both supporting the holding of the referendum there was little hope of the Pashtun quest for self-determination moving forward. The Khidmatgars wanted a third option, an independent Pasthunistan or enosis with Afghanistan. The outgoing British ruled it out. The old Russian bear in its Soviet Communist avatar with the cold war having set in could not be given a weak Afghan lamb as offering. Good old Blighty was also aware that the situation in China was none too good.
The Khan of Kalat made noises, to little avail. The troubles in Baluchistan continue till date. They were then too far away and the Baluch were considered too vexatious by Kabul, New Delhi and Tehran to give it any serious attention. The important port of Gwadar which holds the fortunes of Pakistan, China, Iran and India’s access to Central Asia today is in Baluchistan.
Fast forward to the last day of the stillborn government of Charan Singh. A retired senior Indian diplomat, Mr. TP Sreenivasan, who is now part of the BJP stable in Kerala, recounts an interesting anecdote.:
“First, it was the night in December 1979 when the Soviet forces entered Afghanistan at the invitation of a president who was killed in the first hours of the occupation. I was present at the meeting of the Soviet ambassador with the Indian foreign secretary. The ambassador read out a statement from a note from the Soviet leadership stating that a limited contingent of Soviet troops had entered Afghanistan at the invitation of the Afghan government to counter a threat to international peace. He added that the Soviet forces would withdraw from Afghanistan as soon as possible.
Since the foreign secretary had heard the BBC before the ambassador arrived, he was prepared for the news. After promising the ambassador that the message would be conveyed to the prime minister, the foreign secretary expressed concern that foreign forces had entered an independent country and expressed the hope that the situation would be reversed. The ambassador was visibly embarrassed, but said that the Soviet forces would remain in Afghanistan only for the shortest time necessary.
The foreign secretary met Prime Minister Charan Singh early next morning and briefed him on his meeting with the Soviet ambassador. The prime minister decided to receive the Soviet ambassador immediately and told him in no uncertain terms that India would not support foreign intervention in Afghanistan. The Soviet ambassador responded rather calmly, but added rather triumphantly that he had just met the Prime Minister-designate Indira Gandhi, who showed some understanding of the Soviet compulsion for taking action in Afghanistan. The conversation ended abruptly.”
The Soviet ambassador, Yuly M. Vorontsov, was in India from 1977 to 1983. A wily and capable diplomat, he went on to bigger things both in the Soviet Union and subsequently, Russia. He even quietly lobbied for Mrs. Indira Gandhi with all those who were willing to lend him an ear in the cesspool of intrigue during that period. The Indian spook agencies who were miffed with Morarji Desai’s threat to cut their unaudited secret budgets were also quite helpful to Raj Narain, who had an inflated sense of his importance in helping establish lines of communication to Sanjay Gandhi, but that is another story for another day. An understanding government in New Delhi was a Kremlin priority.
Geopolitically, with Indira Gandhi back in power, Afghanistan firmly in the Soviet orbit, an increasingly anxious Pakistan and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran which created the jitters in Delhi, Islamabad, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia; South Block was at sixes and nines, initially.
An inspired choice then as Ambassador of India to Iran in 1980 was the appointment of A M Khalleli. Immediately after the Iranian revolution, he was able to allay most fears about India in the clerical regime and stay above the fray between the moderates led by Banisadr and those who looked towards Qom. During his four year tenure in Teheran, relations in fraught times could not have been better. This was the only relief that Delhi had in those difficult years. With Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination, Rajiv Gandhi, well-intentioned, but clearly out of his depth on matters geopolitical, was handed the baton. Sri Lanka, Nepal and Burma to cite only three examples. Ill-advised Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) intervention in northern Sri Lanka, the blockade of Nepal’s land frontiers with India and the neither here nor there support to the Burmese democratic forces. The cover on Time magazine, emblazoned with a photograph of an Indian warship, with the words, ‘Super India- The next military power’, had Rajiv groupies walking nine feet tall on very thin ice!
Then comes PV Narasimha Rao. Donning a shade of khaki under his immaculate white dhoti, he aids and abets the destruction of the Babri Masjid by conveniently going into a séance with his gods until the Masjid was levelled to the ground. It has baffled me till date that the Hindutva right wing has forgotten him in its statue building spree. The European and North American loony right is clearly way off the mark when it eulogizes Hindutva as their long lost pagan Aryan kin. It was Narasimha Rao who formally established diplomatic relations at the ambassadorial level with Israel and gave Taiwan its first formal diplomatic toehold in India. And signaled that we were open for multinational plunder. Oops, I forgot, the Right is as fractious as the Left!
The Soviet defeat in 1992 in Afghanistan coincided with discontent in Kashmir flaring into a full blown insurgency. New Delhi was taken off guard. It rushed in all its top sleuths, plane loads of olive green and khaki to little avail initially. Contrary to received wisdom, if you closely read the Pakistani and Indian print media of that time, the Pakistanis were as surprised as Delhi was. In the pre-Internet age, I was fortunate to have English friends, part of my regular table at Queen’s head, who knew of my abiding interest in all lost causes from the Kurds to the Timorese, and diligently sent me news clippings.
Amanullah Khan, then head of the united Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) in Muzaffarabad had no love lost for the red tabs in Rawalpindi. He was no Islamist. Delhi and Pindi had to wait until the split in the JKLF took place between Muzaffarabad and downtown Srinagar. Till what the Kashmiris had put together on both sides of the border was sundered by both Delhi and Islamabad helping in their own byzantine ways.
The Sandhurst and Dehradun trained red tab in Pakistan had long moved on to retirement with their whisky and sodas. The new brass hats thought they were a cross between Saladin and Muhammad bin Quasim. The new red tabs in Pindi were seeing all the investments going up in smoke with every Afghan Mujahedeen warlord deciding to play Buzkashi amongst themselves rather than create the post-Soviet Afghan client state.
Bereft of historical insight, with an Ambassador in Kabul known more for his absolute loyalty to Mrs. Gandhi then diplomatic acumen, New Delhi was ill served. As recounted above, the Foreign Secretary had to learn about the Soviet invasion from BBC rather than urgent cables from the mission in Kabul. In Indira Gandhi’s durbar, mediocrity was fine as long as you sang hosannas to the putative Empress of India. The Ambassador in Kabul went on to be India’s Ambassador in Islamabad from 1980 to 1985, crucial years in the Af-Pak region and more importantly in the vale of Kashmir.
New Delhi for all its much vaunted experience in India’s north east with insurgency, discovered a new mantra – Islamic terrorist under your bed! What was evidently at first, a good old movement for self-determination, albeit now armed, which Delhi had oodles of experience in handling , was transmuted by soft Hindutva alchemy that Indira Gandhi and her coterie practiced in her second coming. Her new found advisors gave her fool’s gold in the form of the Islamic terrorist threat. All the soft Hindutva chatterati in Delhi, irrespective of the shade of political opinion, quickly created this demonic image of Islam, just as the Jew was the caricature in pre Second World War Europe and Russia. It so very nicely fitted into so many agendas not only in India but in many parts of the world.
The vilification of one of the great religions of the world was underway. The myth of the wandering Jew was now replaced with this shrouded figure with a burnoose and a Kalashnikov protruding from under the folds!
As Oscar Wilde so correctly puts it, “They’ve promised that dreams can come true, but forgot to mention that nightmares are dreams too.”
The table was set. Enter the Talib.
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SAHRDC Think Piece 1 on Afghanistan is given below: