The visit of Prime Minister Modi to Bangladesh had the usual Indian air of triumphalism. This has been the establishment’s attitude since Bangladesh had its bloody birth in 1971. One searches in vain for an Indian reappraisal of the cataclysmic event that goes beyond the popular ‘authorised’ version. Rather than continuing to reiterate to ourselves that the creation of Bangladesh was one of post-Independence India’s most remarkable achievements, we need ask ourselves if the long accepted narrative of 1971 continues to hold in the light of subsequent developments in Pakistan.

Was contributing to the break-up of Pakistan a good thing from India and South Asia’s point of view? What exactly are the long-term consequences of the events of 1971 and do we need to revise our Pakistan-centric South Asian strategy? How can we help that blighted country recover its balance and give its saner elements — and that is most Pakistanis — a chance to help get over a sense of aggrievement and victimhood that seem reasonable from their point of view, and not very different from our own vis-à-vis China?

Past continuous The defeat in East Pakistan still rankles for Pakistan as 1962 does for us, and we all know that within the Pakistani military establishment and amongst its extremists, it is a rallying point for revenge some day. A gloating India makes it only more difficult for moderates in Pakistan to gain the upper hand. One wishes there is some discussion on all these. But our country’s intellectuals have come short.

Historian EH Carr observed that “history consists essentially in seeing the past through the eyes of the present and in the light of its problems, and the main work of the historian is not to record but to evaluate”. There was, he felt, sound reason for doing that as the past which a historian studies “is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present”. The best of our historians have clearly failed Carr’s test, leaving the field to the rabble-rousers amongst them.

Thus, whether it is on China or Pakistan or even the West, our historians — for it is mostly they but our political analysts and policy makers as well — have more often than not justified rather than critically evaluated developments involving or concerning India.

This attitude is reminiscent of that of the famous but now somewhat discredited 19th century German historian, Ludwig Von Ranke. “Ranke,” AJP Taylor observed, “spoke of historians as priests… The State could never sin and if it did it was not his affair. This was the spirit of the learned classes in Germany which brought Hitler to power.” One can add that this is the attitude of India’s learned classes as well.

A special responsibility At the end of the day we need to accept that a Pakistan free of its eastern parts has become a much more compact and more formidable and fanaticised foe, complete with nuclear weapons matching or exceeding anything we have.

If Pakistan had stayed together as a geographically-challenged country, with much more of a racial and linguistic mix, it would have had many more reasons to negotiate with India than it has now; it is also possible that Pakistan would have escaped the kind of rapid radicalisation that has overwhelmed it.

Pakistan’s Kashmir focus would, in all probability, also not have the hate-filled intensity it has today; there then was also the very real possibility that it might even have emerged as the second fully-secular state in the Islamic world in line with Jinnah’s post-Independence vision that “The minorities in Pakistan will be the citizens of Pakistan and enjoy all the rights, privileges and obligations of citizenship without any distinction of caste creed or sect.”

Far from believing it has no role to play in improving Pakistan’s internal situation, we need to accept that India has a primary one there. In some way one cannot help feeling that since Nawaz Sharif, with his shrewd business instincts, returned as prime minister of Pakistan, our shrill rhetoric has weakened him while strengthening his beleaguered army to go ballistic against India.

Going by the US experience in West Asia and Israel’s in Palestine, the more extreme our reaction the more justified the extremists in Pakistan feel about their belligerent approach towards India.

As the largest and most powerful state in the subcontinent and its principal economic driver, India has a special responsibility to take the lead and change the charged ground situation dramatically for the better. Herein also lies an unprecedented opportunity for an Indian leader — Modi for the moment — to do for India and South Asia what Konrad Adenauer did for Germany and Europe in the 1950s. He could even pave the way for a strong South Asian economic union, bringing unimaginable prosperity to the impoverished millions instead of putting up with an anaemic talking shop, Saarc. But for that he needs to risk it all, including the possibility of being just a one-term Prime Minister.

It is to India that the subcontinent’s cricketers, actors and musicians head; given the chance the businesspersons of South Asia will follow too, to make it big, achieving the kind of shared success that all South Asians will applaud while experiencing and benefiting from its spin-offs.

An opportunity for Modi India is standing on the cusp of an extraordinary opportunity to usher in a South Asian renaissance along with an economic transformation that can equal or exceed China’s — such is the wealth of possibilities that exist. In a famous interview with Edgar Snow, Mao opined that “a thousand years from now all of them … even Marx, Engels and Lenin would possibly appear rather ridiculous”. In fact, it did not take a millennium for that to happen.

Improbable as it might sound now, it is just possible that Modi might find a way to rise over his and India’s limitations and make the country act its size. He has the rare opportunity to be the statesman South Asia so badly needs today — one willing to take the risk of a bold gamble with Pakistan, forcing the establishment to follow him rather than be led by it.

By doing so he would have given political activism a whole new meaning. In the process our historians and other intellectuals, caught on the backfoot, will also find the courage to back him.

The Nobel prize-winning economist, Daniel Kahneman, observed: “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.” So it is with our certainty that Pakistan as a whole is irredeemable and see nothing for India to do in bringing that country from the brink.

Too long have we been satisfied with equating ourselves with a snarling wounded neighbour, one which continues to thirst for revenge for being — from its point of view — cheated out of Kashmir and dismembered in 1971.

South Asia has been blighted by the Indo-Pakistan conflict for far too long and the entire subcontinent, and not just India, has suffered. Resolving that should be something that India should work towards with the imagination and boldness it has only sporadically displayed. Now that is what a peripatetic Prime Minister should see as his life’s mission.

The writer is visiting faculty, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru

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