Season of madness in the age of terror

Matein Khalid

He was a handsome young Gen-Z kid from Dubai, son of a Sindhi family long settled in the UAE, only a few years older than my twins. I can just imagine him as a toddler, all decked out in ​Babyshop diapers, then a little guy having his birthday bash with his classmates at McDonalds​ or Kidzania, as an IHS student on a school bus in Oud Metha Road​. Then a young college graduate, I can imagine his parents’ sheer joy when he married his beautiful bride and who would have ever thought that the​ir last picture together would be a testament to a lost youth and a doomed love. He made one fatal mistake that cost him his life and a lifetime of grief for all those who loved him in a life cut short by merciless animals with guns who decided that he and 25 other innocent human beings must die, ​just because they hated his religion.

Neeraj Udhwani’s life was stolen by a cabal of terrorists in an exquisite Kashmir resort town called Pahalgam, his murder, an act of political symbolism in the lethal game of nations by murderers who have broken every shred of decency that defines the human condition. Dr. Lambert, my old prof., used to say ​”there is one compelling reason ​why we should study international politics​” – “this stuff kills”. Neeraj is with God now, as is Dr. Lambert. RIP.

The powerless have always been defined in terms of the powerful in India and Pakistan, two states created amid the bloodlust of one of history’s most obscene spasms of violence in August 1947, the summer of Partition. Kashmir was the jewel that both successor states to the British Empire wanted to annex to their tarnished, bloodstained crown in the name of a phony Two Nation Theory. In an ancient land that encompassed a thousand nations, 330 million Gods, religious/cultural syncretism and a society that is a laboratory of human diversity and communal coexistence.

Yet as in 1965, 1971, 1999, 2001, ​2008, 2016 and 2019, India and Pakistan are mired in the pantomime of war that will claim countless more lives on both sides just to appease the sacred fury of mindless nationalism. 25 centuries ago great souls like Mahavira and the Gautama Buddha walked the face of the earth and we now live in the age of space travel, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. Yet we have not lost the primal urge to kill and murder to sacrifice the young and the innocent in the name of vengeful ​deities, like the tribe of hereditary stranglers known as thuggis who committed mass murder of strangers on the remote roads of late Mughal India in the name of the Goddess Kali.

Why does this undercurrent of bestial violence disfigure the kaleidoscope of the subcontinent’s history? Why was the tryst with destiny so hollow and the freedom at midnight such a cruel illusion​ if the endgame was to have midnight’s grandchildren massacred in terrorist outrages from Peshawar to Colaba, Kashmir to Balochistan, Dhaka to Jaffna​?

Modi will launch a retaliatory strike and General Munir, the Luminous One, has every political incentive to climb up the escalatory ladder to whip up the nationalist zealots who legitimize his praetorian regime. Balakot was a close call but sanity prevailed on both sides before either reached the point of no return. Yet who knows if a miss calculation now could lead to a tactical nuclear ​strike by a Pakistan high command that has never abandoned a first ​use capability​ doctrine? Will the ultimate act of terror be a mushroom cloud over a subcontinental battlefield or God forbid an entire city via a nuclear weapon fired in blind anger or primal fear? If this is freedom at midnight, India and Pakistan can have it. May the Gods destroy the miasma of evil that swirls in the netherworld of our ancestral motherlands’ pathological power politics. John Lenon was so right in Imagine, all we are saying is, give peace a chance!