Professor Gulshan Dietl, who effortlessly combines lucidity, rigour of logic, and diligent research, was till recently Professor at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University heading the Gulf Studies Programme. She was also Chairperson of the Centre for West Asian and African Studies. She has taught also at universities outside India, in New York, Paris, Copenhagen, and elsewhere.
The title says it all. India’s approach to Afghanistan has little to do with Afghanistan. It has everything to do with Pakistan. This tells us something about India, about how we see ourselves, which is essentially in relation to our Siamese twin, Pakistan. This is not quite how we project ourselves—as a regional power and emerging great power, measuring up against China and a strategic partner of the US.
Historians, political commentators, journalists have all, almost uniformly, depicted an objectified Afghanistan: it is played upon by external powers, not a player. A ‘great game’ has, since at least the nineteenth century, been played out by these powers, but Afghanistan itself is not supposed to have agency. That phrase was first used by a British intelligence officer, Arthur Conolly, in 1840, in a letter to a colleague.
This feisty book as echoed in the title, We Are All Revolutionaries Here, is a fascinating mapping by a Pakistani woman of the journey that a generation of ‘born again’ Pakistanis have taken towards the re-constitution of a Pakistani Islamic identity that rejects the hotchpotch of western culture and Pakistan’s plural ethnic cultures to embrace a version of militant Islam that erases all other versions and problematically condones ‘fringe’ vigilante groups using violence in the name of faith. Babar unpacks the contestations in Pakistan’s socio-cultural dynamics which have been framed in a context produced by the nexus of political Islam and militarism.
Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), signed between India and Pakistan in September 1960 to share water from the Indus Rivers System (IRS), has survived the wars (1965, 1971 and 1999) and all other forms of tensions between them. However, the Treaty and people engaged in making it possible are, till today, being accused of selling out their ‘own’ water to ‘them’ by majority of the scholars…
In September 1960, during a rare five-day visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Pakistan, Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistan President Ayub Khan drove in an open car together to the hill station of Murrie. The air would have been chilly, but not colder than the mood in the car, and the two leaders spent most of the drive without uttering a word. The outcome of the drive that dispelled all chances of a thaw between India and Pakistan is detailed in various accounts by Nehru, Ayub and diplomats of the time, which have been collated in former High Commissioner to Pakistan TCA Raghavan’s book under review.