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FAIZ Ahmed Faiz was decorated with the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize. Saudi Arabia’s highest civilian award has been conferred on Narendra Modi. That’s the natural order of things. Of course, I did venture to imagine the opposite — Faiz being the recipient of Saudi applause and Modi as the cynosure of Lenin’s admirers. I concluded that it would be far more dreadful had Saudi Arabia declared, say, Bertrand Russell as their inspiration, or had Modi been a graduate from the Patrice Lumumba University.
For that matter what if Romila Thapar became head of India’s refurbished history academy, all restructured amid Vedic chants by Smriti Irani. It would not be unlike imagining Asma Jehangir as the defence lawyer for Gen Musharraf. Conjure Kalidas Swaminathan, the classical music dilettante, joining Baba Ramdev’s yoga camp. Or suppose Nehru had focused his foreign policy on building a Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi, instead of nurturing his industrial vision for India.
How about Ziaul Haq handing Pakistan’s highest award to Indira Gandhi, perhaps for pleading against the death sentence on Bhutto, instead of wasting it on Morarji Desai though he endorsed the hanging by remaining silent? What if the dish did run away with the spoon, or Robert Fisk had won the Chameli Devi award for journalism? If I were Lord of Tartary, Walter Mitty would be my regent.
There could be another way to see a Saudi prizewinner. Remember how Majaz would introduce Salaam Machhlishehri at mushairas, the all-night poetic symposiums of yore. He would often announce his friend with a hint of wild humour. “Ab hum Salaam Machhlishehri sahab ko zehmat dete hain. Ye Machhlisheher ke bahot badey shaayar hain. (We will now hear the poetry of Salaam Mechhlishehri, a great poet of Machhlisheher.)” Today the prime minister of a nation on the move has become a recipient of the highest civilian award from the house of Saud. Small anomalies can be overlooked. Amid the xenophobic chants of Long Live Bharatmata, we could ignore the stinging insult delivered by the Arab king when he flatly refused to visit the shrine of Mahatma Gandhi in Delhi, saying it was prohibited in Islam.
What could be the real reason behind an apparent Indian-Saudi bonhomie?
And hopefully now that they have joined the ranks of the givers of civilian prizes, Saudi kings will try not to gouge any more eyes of Indian workers to fulfil a legal requirement, or chop off the hands of another to comply with the Sharia.
We may be missing the point though. What could be the real reason behind an apparent Indian-Saudi bonhomie? Will Saudi Arabia rein in Pakistani troublemakers? Perhaps the answer lies in the most recent outing undertaken by India’s most peripatetic politician to mind. Modi’s first stop was Belgium where he spoke about the carnage inflicted on innocent people (including an Indian) by the militant Islamic State group. He was then confabulating with Barack Obama in Washington. With Barack, as he calls him, he underscored the problems of sanctuaries for terrorists. Then he landed in Saudi Arabia, among other reasons, to receive his award.
IS, IS, IS. Indian sleuths claim to have caught so many of its supporters, a terrifying thought if true. And yet while he was on his anti-terror tour of the three countries that supposedly want its demise, it was the Syrian army that had inflicted the biggest military defeat that IS had suffered in over two years. Did we hear a word about this from Mr Modi in Brussels, Washington or Riyadh? “The recapture of Palmyra, the Roman city of the Empress Zenobia. And we are silent,” commented Robert Fisk. He was referring to the silence at 10 Downing Street. “Yes, folks, the bad guys won, didn’t they? Otherwise, we would all be celebrating, wouldn’t we?”
‘‘Less than a week after the lost souls of the ‘Islamic caliphate’ destroyed the lives of more than 30 innocent human beings in Brussels, we should — should we not? — have been clapping our hands at the most crushing military reverse in the history of Isis[IS].”
Fisk has been the most insightful chronicler of the Middle East in recent memory. Does Modi get to read him? “As the black masters of execution fled Palmyra this weekend, Messrs Obama and Cameron were as silent as the grave to which [IS] have dispatched so many of their victims. He who lowered our national flag in honour of the head-chopping king of Arabia (I’m talking about Dave, of course) said not a word.” Fisk wrote this last week. “Here are the Syrian army, backed, of course, by Vladimir Putin’s Russkies, chucking the clowns of [IS] out of town, and we daren’t utter a single word to say well done.”
Missing the point in the ever so volatile Middle East has been a forte of the BJP too. Atal Behari Vajpayee was the foreign minister when the Shah of Iran was welcomed in India with fanfare just when cataclysmic events were poised to pull the rug from under the monarch’s feet. The Delhi visit was to be the Shah’s last foreign trip as a ruler. With his overthrow soon upon his return, New Delhi had to perform diplomatic calisthenics to cosy up to the ayatollahs.
It was during Vajpayee’s premiership again that the 2003 US invasion of Iraq took place. Saddam Hussein had been possibly the only Arab leader who supported India’s stand on Kashmir. As one secular leader after another was decimated in the Middle East; from Palestine, to Iraq, to Libya, to the attempted complete destruction of multi-cultural Syria, a virulently anti-secular polity was rising in India. The Saudi prize was so naturally Modi’s.
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2016
