The Irtiqa Institute of Social Sciences organised its first Hamza Alavi Distinguished Lecture in collaboration with the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) and Hamza Alavi Foundation on Saturday.
One of the speakers for the session was Dr Tariq Rahman, who has many feathers on his cap. He is a writer, philosopher, professor and a publisher, an awardee of Pride of Performance in 2004, Sitara-e-Imtiaz in 2013 and also the first Pakistani to be honoured Germany’s highest award, called Humboldt Research Award.
The Higher Commission of Pakistan has conferred upon him a Lifetime Research Award, which has made him a distinguished national professor. Rahman spoke at length on his book ‘Pakistan’s Wars an Alternative History’. Initially speaking on Alavi, he said, Alavi had great deliberation on Marxism.
On the passing away of Alavi, he said, he wrote an article in which he mentioned how the great scholar had passed away and no flag was lowered, no cannon fired and no prime minister and president spoke about it. He didn’t know he would get the distinguished lecture. He said that he was humbled and honoured for being invited to speak on the occasion.
Speaking on his book, he said, Pakistan had fought many wars -- in 1947, in 1948 war, in 1965 and then Kargil -- and various other wars in Afghanistan and India. He asked whether those wars followed the same pattern or they were initiated by Pakistan and later answered this during the session.
“Did Pakistan take inordinate risks in those wars?” he asked. He said that wars are always a gamble, and the decision made for war and peace were made in a clandestine manner. Whether the decision for wars, he asked, are taken by a sitting government or a clique. “This has to be the major question,” he said.
Every war, he said, has risks. Even when a big country like America or Russia fight, he said, there are risks. America lost in Vietnam. “When a small country with a weaker economic base fights a larger country with modern weapon, it puts that country in extraordinary danger,” he said, referring to Pakistan fighting wars with India. He called all those wars a gamble.
The other idea he has mentioned in the book is looking at the effects of the war. People are killed, buildings are broken, women are raped, minds are affected, and these are the most obvious effects of wars, he said.
The less obvious effects, he said, are that people stay in tension, innocent people are caught up and they are treated as spies. The elite in the case of war is a very small one. Even the middle rank officers, he stressed, are used in wars. They are seduced into way of thinking in certain ways, but they don’t take the decisions, he said. The soldier on the peripheries, “they don’t have the power to decide.”
In the 1965 war, he said, it was quite clear Nehru was not going to concede Kashmir. Nehru expressed the idea that Kashmir is an old story and the situation had changed. By that time there were grumbling against the ruler of that time, Sheikh Abdullah. He was arrested as he demanded that New Delhi should move out. Sometimes, he said, they would join Pakistan and sometimes he spoke of having a separate state.
He said that on September 6, 1965, when India launched its defensive attack on Lahore and Sialkot, the Indian and Pakistani armies faced each other on that morning without eating and sleeping for 24 hours. The planners of that war, he said, were a clique. The President of Pakistan was Field Marshal Ayub Khan, while Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and Aziz Ahmed were also part of the clique. Bhutto had said India is not going to attack Sialkot and Lahore, and Ayub had somehow bought this. Speaking on the Bangladesh war in 1971, he said, narratives of all the three nations were more or less false. He spoke at length on the first Afghanistan war. Due to the decisions taken back then, he said, today we see extremism in Pakistan. The Soviet Union, he said, could’ve bombed Pakistan. The high command of Russia didn’t do it, so we escaped it.