The vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not ‘White Privilege’, is finally being dragged out into the open

To lose one parent...may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness,” wrote Oscar Wilde in his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895.

In somewhat the same spirit, British journalist Robert Fisk wrote last week: “At some point in the next two months, we are going to have to decide whether we absolve the American people if they re-elect Donald Trump.” Losing one election to Trump is unlucky; losing two in a row may be saying something about the national character.

Fisk has been the Middle East correspondent of various British newspapers since 1976, so he was not on familiar ground when he wrote that about the US in The Independent recently. On the other hand, he was expressing a mostly unspoken but widespread attitude among all Europeans except the extreme Right. Let me quote some more: “Like all snobs, we’ve taken the view that Trump did not really represent American values — any more than the Arab dictators reflect the views of their people. We’ve hoped and prayed and fooled ourselves into believing this was only a temporary autocracy, a deviation, an old and reliable friend suffering from a serious but ultimately curable mental disease. Yet...I wonder how we are going to react to Americans if the Trump years become the Trump era; or if his dreadful, ambitious family transform themselves into the Trump Caliphate....if the America we felt we could always ultimately rely on — once they’ve straightened out their little Trump misadventure — turns into the nation we can never trust?”

I grew up in Canada, and Canadians, like Mexicans, while fond enough of individual Americans, are by nature mistrustful of the American State. “It’s like sleeping with an elephant,” as Pierre Elliott Trudeau put it. If it just rolls over or wakes up cranky, you can get badly hurt.

Europeans have a different perspective. Fisk grew up in the UK, which, like France, remembers (most of the time) that it would have lost both World War-I and II without American help. Even if the US was years late to both world wars, it showed up both times in time to save the day. And US troops stayed in Western Europe to protect it from Soviet power throughout the Cold War. Most Eastern Europeans see the US as the instrument of their liberation from the Soviet Union, even though it did not in the end involve a hot war.

So there is still a deep well of respect and trust for the US in Europe. Fisk is probably right that a second Trump election victory would finally poison that well, which would be a pity. Another four years would also see him complete the destruction of the existing international order (without giving a single thought to a replacement). Trump is, as Michael Moore noted in 2016, “A wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath.”

But would two terms of Trump mean the end of American democracy? Not necessarily. Not even likely. What Trump has triggered — and somebody was bound to trigger it around now, because every political niche, like every evolutionary niche, is always filled — is a final reckoning on the “race problem”, about 150 years after the American Civil War.

At the time of the Civil War (1861-65), Black Americans accounted for around 12 per cent of the total population and four-fifths of them were slaves. Whites accounted for almost all the rest; only a quarter-million were Native Americans. African-Americans still account for the same 12 per cent  share of the population today, and many of them are still victims of the same White fear, exclusion and official violence that their ancestors experienced (mainly because they were slaves) 150 years ago. But since US immigration law changed in 1965, allowing people from the entire world to immigrate, the non-Hispanic White share of the population has dropped to only 60 per cent.

That share will to drop to 50 per cent by 2044, according to forecasts based on current birth rates and immigration trends. This has triggered a huge panic among the working-class White Americans, who often compete for the same jobs and used to depend on their whiteness as a competitive advantage. Trump is personally a racist, if his remarks and behaviour are any guide, but he is a cynical populist and would be exploiting White fears right now even if he really loved non-White Americans.

That is why the vicious legacy of the Civil War, which ended slavery but not “White Privilege”, is finally being dragged out into the open. Having been so exposed, it will probably finally be extinguished — but not necessarily in time to thwart Trump’s re-election. This is not the end of the US, nor the advent of a new Hitler either. It is a necessary evolution of American history, for which some people living elsewhere may also pay a substantial price.

(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy and Work.’)

Religio-political parties struggle to command a major chunk of the Pakistani votebank. Why then do they play an oversized role in the country’s politics?

The combined vote share of religio-political parties in the 2018 elections in Pakistan was 9.58 per cent, slightly lower than what it was in the 2013 polls and much lower than the 11 per cent they bagged in 2002. The 2002 tally was the highest the Islamist parties have ever received in polls. In 2018, the performance of religio-political parties was weak because there were a lot more Islamist parties competing. Apart from the established ones, two new religio-political outfits emerged: The Milli Muslim League (MML) and Tehreek-i-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). Their entry into electoral politics was encouraged by the establishment to usurp the “religious vote” of the Centre-Right PML-N so that Imran Khan’s Centre-Right PTI could benefit. None of the new religio-political parties could win many seats, but that was never the “plan.” 

Whereas the MML could not perform in the manner in which some expected it to, the radical Barelvi TLP not only succeeded in usurping PML-N’s Barelvi vote, but also gobbled up the secular MQM’s lower-middle-class Barelvi votes in Karachi. This certainly aided PTI in challenging the PML-N in Punjab and the MQM in Karachi. Historically, Islamist outfits in South Asia are not built as electoral parties. They emerge as evangelical groups or residues of movements. And even when they do convert into electoral outfits, they struggle to do well in polls because the non-religion-based mainstream parties pragmatically co-opt their causes and rhetoric.

Plus, the religio-political parties are closely associated with one Islamic sect/sub-sect or the other. This limits their appeal to voters from other denominations. Some are even understood to have developed a sect of their own, as the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI) was once accused of doing. Islamist groups in South Asia developing political interests is a 20th century phenomenon rooted in the Khilafat Movement of 1919-1924. When the European theory of the State began to attract Centrist and Leftist groups in South Asia in the early 20th century, Islamist groups, too, began to be attracted by it and started to theorise the possibility of creating an “Islamic state.” But most of them could not find the means or the need to devise any electoral tools to achieve such a State. They often saw electoral politics as contrary to their Islamist dispositions. That’s why the demand for a Muslim-majority State Pakistan arose from a Centrist and quasi-secular All India Muslim League (AIML). What’s more, almost all major Islamist parties opposed this demand on one pretext or the other. But they could not neutralise AIML’s plans because, by the 1940s, it had not only become an experienced electoral entity, but it was able to juxtapose its “modernist” Muslim nationalism with rhetoric from their Islamist opponents. These opponents had no plan to stall the League through electoral means.

The Islamist parties remained in an electoral limbo during the first 20 years of Pakistan but they did retain their evangelical and agitational disposition, in an attempt to influence the ideological character of the new country. But even during the years of indirect elections (1957-58) and hybrid democracy (1962-69), they could not devise any effective electoral tools and  send members to the first two constituent Assemblies, and the two Assemblies that came into being during the Ayub Khan dictatorship.

Yet, just before the country’s first direct elections in 1970, parties such as JI were claiming that they would sweep the polls. But the opposite happened. From 1947 till 1972, Islamist parties operated from outside the Assemblies and had no significant influence on policymaking, other than through the threat of agitations. Though 18 members from three religio-political parties managed to enter the 1972 Parliament, they were no match for the mainstream electoral parties. That’s why, in 1974 and then again in 1977, Islamist parties once again banked on their penchant for agitational politics to undermine a regime. With the sidelining of some major parties during 1977, the religio-political parties were given space to develop their electoral skills and expand constituencies. Separate electorates were introduced to favour them. But the idea, on the part of the military regime, was to manoeuvre them in a manner that would help the Zia dictatorship ward off challenges posed by the Opposition parties.

Most of them became tools of the establishment, without whose backing they believed they could not become effective electoral entities. In the 1990s, the PML-N continued to co-opt religious rhetoric of the Islamist parties. However, the self-proclaimed “enlightened moderate” Musharraf decided to aggressively sideline the PML-N and the PPP during the 2002 polls, by creating the conditions required for the religio-political parties to win in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This was when these parties bagged 11 per cent of the vote but this could not halt the return of the PPP and the PML-N after the 2008 elections.

In the eyes of the establishment, the mutable utility of the old religio-political parties has been exhausted. With growing mistrust between the PML-N/PPP and the establishment, the latter “allowed” the growth of new religion-based groups like the TLP and the MML. In an environment where the State was at war with religious militancy and with the sword of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) still hanging over the country’s head, the idea was to quietly nurture new religious groups, not to help them win, but to aid the pro-establishment PTI by way of scattering PML-N’s religious votebank. The fate of the religio-political parties in politics is thus likely to continue being dependent on their utility to the establishment.

(Courtesy: Dawn)

If people want change, they should rally around Alexei Navalny. Today, the grandiose support for Putin is on the wane, primarily because of years of declining wages and fiscal tightening. This is a perfect atmosphere for Opposition political forces to muster public support for themselves, but the fact is they have utterly failed in that effort so far

Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader, is the staunchest critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has painted Putin’s United Party as a place of “crooks and thieves”. In his public speeches, he accused the Putin’s system of “sucking the blood out of Russia”. Thus he has committed to the Russian populace that he is all out to demolish the “Feudal State”. However, he has not been able to challenge Putin in the election so far. When in 2018, he tried to contest the presidential poll, his candidature was banned by the state over his conviction by a Russian court in an embezzlement case. His Anti-Corruption Foundation is known for exposing cases of graft and corruption by Russian politicians, oligarchs and top bureaucrats. He has been jailed in the past for bringing out unauthorised demonstrations. Navalny was forced to close down his foundation

in July after it was badly crippled by a multitude of fines and charges. Before this move, the Kremlin moved to froze his bank accounts, and those of his family members, including his children.

Last month, on August 20, he suddenly fell unconscious aboard while travelling from the Siberian city of Tomsk to the capital city Moscow. Hence an emergency landing was arranged on the way in the city of Omsk and he was admitted to hospital with suspected poisoning. As per his staff, he was poisoned in the airport café where he had tea just before flying. His supporters believed that the hospital at Omsk was under pressure to delay his transfer to a German facility as his wife Yulia Navalny demanded. The intention was to prevent a detailed investigation into what caused his sudden illness. Interestingly Alexander Murakhovsky, the head of the medical team that attended Navalny, stated that Navalny had not been poisoned but diagnosed with a metabolic disease caused by low blood sugar. And this may have caused his immediate collapse onboard the flight. But he failed to explain why Navalny could not regain consciousness even after a day. Finally, the Russian Government allowed him to be transferred to a German healthcare centre based in Berlin known as Charite Hospital. The doctors in Berlin said the test results suggested he had been poisoned with a “cholinesterase inhibitor”. It is a group of chemicals that are also used to treat diseases like Alzheimer’s.

Cholinesterase’s use ranges from pesticides and medicines to nerve agents. But when used in nerve agents and pesticides, that can be really harmful to human beings. Further, the worst part is that the cholinesterase inhibitors block a crucial enzyme that circulates messages from nerves to muscles. And this particular enzyme is called acetylcholinesterase. And the inhibition of this enzyme interferes in nerve-to-muscle messaging process. Once it happens, the muscles fail to contract and relax. Thus this leads to the muscles into a stage of spasm. Looking all these complexities, Navalny demands a fair treatment and post-medical care too. Currently, he has been given an antidote called “atropine”. In fact, the same antidote was used in the case of former KGB spy Sergei Skirpal and his daughter Yulia Skirpal by the doctors in the UK after their poisoning with the nerve agent called Novichok in Salisbury in the year 2018. But both of them had a miraculous recovery in the UK.

Jaka Bijilz of Cinema for Peace Foundation, the German group that airlifted Navalny to Berlin, revealed that initially his condition was very critical and worrying. But now the moot question is that whether Navalny will survive the attack without lasting damage. However, the German doctors say that the recovery may take long.

The recent attack on Navalny, the sixth such attempt on a Russian dissident in the last five years, invited Putin a slew of scathing criticisms from the international community. Meanwhile the Russian Government denied the accusation that Navalny was poisoned. And the state apparatus has dismissed the accusation of the Kremlin’s involvement simply as “empty noise”. However, what comes from the allies of Navalny is a secret planning of the state to kill another Putin baiter. Vladimir Milov, a former Russian Deputy Energy Minister, who currently advises Navalny, said, “It’s essentially an attempt to remove him as a threat. They consider this with a classic KGB mentality: no man, no problem.”

At the moment, the top European leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have demanded Moscow to launch a full investigation to this incident. In fact, both the leaders stood side by side at a news conference to assure the Kremlin critic medical services and asylum. Finally, the Kremlin ordered for a thorough and objective investigation. Around the same time, Merkel said Navalny had been poisoned with a Soviet-style Novichok nerve agent in an attempt to murder the critic.

Protests in authoritarian nations like China, Russia, etc, can simply be branded as either a brave act or foolhardy. In reality, Putin has embarked on a repressive path to consolidate his power. The Opposition in Russia works under absolute pressure and surveillance of Moscow. Precisely, the law enforcement agencies and secret agents are too cautious not to allow the Opposition a Maidan-style revolution that emerged in Kyiv, the capital city of Ukraine, in the last part of the year 2013 and continued till the beginning of 2014. Therefore, simply to prevent such uprisings, the Russian authorities are too alert to deal with any unauthorised protests very swiftly and decisively.

Remarkably, unlike the Kiev protests wherein the demonstrators demolished the statutes of Lenin and even started occupying some government buildings, accompanied by clashes with the security forces, Muscovites have remained peaceful so far. These protesters at times only block traffic flows and occupy public spaces. They are not even like the Jilets Jaunes in Paris (who almost created a total chaos for Macron Government) and the pro-democracy young protesters of Hong Kong (who occupied government buildings just before the coming of the draconian National Security Law in June this year).

Navalny’s has been a sustained attempt to raise the banner of protests for long. Good that till date he is alive. It’s not only Navalny, someone or the other in the past, has been trying to topple Putin and his allies. But then why the Opposition is not been able to dethrone Putin so far? The excessive forces used by the Kremlin are continuously frightening off people at times to come out in open against the Putin regime. Secondly, the hardcore Opposition groups are not a big worry for Putin and his administration. The reason behind is these forces can hardly gather some thousands only in major cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. Thus, radical Opposition is not an immediate threat for Putin. The authorities are apprehensive about mass protests. But so far Moscow has not encountered a scenario like the Arab Spring.

But today, the grandiose support for Putin is gradually declining. One of the primary reasons for this is years of declining real wages and fiscal tightening by the Putin Government. In an atmosphere like this, radical political forces and activists should have mustered more public support by now. But it is not becoming a reality as of today.

With Putin, you don’t see any dynamism and change. Only change that you overwhelmingly witness is dwindling grace and pace of Russia accompanied by a top down administration full of nepotism and corruption. The commoners are fast fading from the public square. Kremlin reprisals of the critics are a regular affair. Putin is quite unique in carrying out these attacks. But Russia’s Putin era will not come to an end so easily. Resistance to Putin in public may lead to bloodbath. However, the Russian people cannot just seat idle.

What David Thomson wrote in his “Europe Since Napoleon” once again reminds all of us of the agony of the Russian people under the current Putinista. He rightly stated: “History offered no warrant for either complacent optimism or black despondency. It offered no simple answer: only a challenge to reasonable hope and strenuous, unremitting endeavour.” If people want change, they should throw weight behind Navalny.

(The writer is an expert on international affairs)

There is a growing sense of insecurity in the ruling elite that makes it impatient to stamp out differences and deviations from the norm

Residential schools were a common feature of European settler societies (except New Zealand) until quite late in the 20th century, and their purpose was not just to educate but to “deracinate” their aboriginal pupils: That is, to cut them off from their roots. The Chinese Government would reject the analogy with its last breath, but it is now doing the same thing. Last week, in China’s Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region, ethnic Mongolian parents began holding rallies and keeping their children home from school in protest against new measures to reduce teaching in the Mongolian language in favour of Chinese. Under the new rules, history, politics, language and literature will be taught in Mandarin Chinese, not in Mongolian.

It has not been reported in the Chinese media, of course, but the BBC reports that students at one demonstration chanted “Our language is Mongolia and our homeland is Mongolia forever!”  At another school, only 40 students registered for the autumn term instead of the usual 1,000 — and most of them left after the first day. It should be noted that in Inner Mongolia, ethnic Chinese (Han) people are a four-fifths majority of the 25 million residents. The province is beyond the Great Wall and was once almost entirely Mongolian, but it was already majority Han before the current Chinese Communist regime came to power in 1949.

Most of China’s five million Mongols are concentrated in three eastern districts of Inner Mongolia, but even there they are not a majority of the population — and many of these Mongolian-speakers are urbanised people who are fully bilingual and intermarry freely with their ethnic Chinese neighbours. The core of the unrest is among the million or so who still pursue a modified version of the old “nomadic” culture. They are the traditional Steppe-dwelling people who follow their herds on horseback or in all-terrain vehicles through their seasonal rounds. Unlike aboriginal languages, Mongolian has been written in its own script for many centuries, and Genghis Khan’s empire once briefly ruled about a quarter of the world, but the “nomadic” Mongols do depend on boarding schools.

Such schools are simply a practical necessity for people who live in small groups and move frequently, and in the Chinese case, they were not originally conceived as instruments of cultural genocide. Until recently, in fact, they operated entirely in Mongolian, with Chinese taught as a second language. The Chinese policy towards “tribal” minorities has traditionally been more tolerant than the US or Canadian policy towards native Red Indians, the Australian policy towards Aborigines, the Scandinavian policy towards Sami (Lapps) or the Russian policy towards Siberian native peoples. All of those unlucky people got the kind of residential schools that aimed at cultural assimilation and religious conversion.

The children spent most of the year in boarding schools, not with their families. They were taught the religion of the settlers, not that of their native culture. They were forced to use the language of the dominant European group and forbidden to speak their own. And most of them were subjected to violence. (Yes, most.) Many of the adults who emerged from this ordeal were tormented men and women, and their legacy of alcoholism, drug abuse, child abuse, nihilism and despair is still being passed down the generations. Nothing of the sort has happened to the Mongols of Inner Mongolia, so far as is known — but something bad is starting to happen to them now. The Chinese culture has always been patronising towards the minorities living within China’s borders, but it didn’t usually see them as threats. They aren’t threats now, either, but there is a growing sense of insecurity in the ruling elite that makes it impatient to stamp out differences and deviations from the norm. You can see it in Tibet, where the screws have been turned so tight on dissent that more than a 100 people have burned themselves to death in protests since 2009. You cannot avoid seeing it in Xinjiang, where more than a million Uyghurs have been sent to concentration camps that operate like residential schools for adults, trying to separate the residents from their religion, language and values.

And you can detect it in a minor key even in Inner Mongolia, in a needless, destabilising attempt to force Mandarin down the throats of loyal, innocent people who pose no threat whatever to the State. What drives President-for-Life Xi Jinping and his advisers to such ridiculous and counter-productive extremes? The only plausible answer is fear that history will repeat itself. China’s rulers are all Communists in theory (though how many still really believe it is another matter), and so they rightly worry that what happened the communist parties of Europe in 1989 could also happen to them. However, two years after that the Soviet Union broke up as well. It’s really unlikely that China will ever do the same, because more than 90 per cent of the population is ethnic Chinese, but the guilty flee where none pursue.

(Gwynne Dyer’s new book is ‘Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy and Work.’)

The West’s response to the Coronavirus shows that we have succumbed to a collective obsession and become a society enraptured by medieval superstitions

Can this really be happening? The British are famously — and proudly — the most difficult people in the world to terrorise or bully. The population that stood with tireless phlegm and humour against relentless bombardment, that made its historical mark with an unflinching rationality which never permits hysteria to sweep the public discourse — must now be chivied into leaving the confines of their own homes or the safe harbours of their immediate neighbourhoods.

And the most perplexing thing of all is that this is the response of most of the Western world. They, who have always stood up for their personal liberties, are now willingly covering at home at the thought of an invisible virus getting them. It is like the Bogeyman of the Middle Ages has been let loose upon the planet and if we don’t hide from it, that will be the end of us.  If we look back at history, it seems that over time, society goes from “terror to terror.” Whether the “Red Scare” of communism in the 50s, or the Al Qaeda, immigration, and the Bear market, the Swine Flu and now the Coronavirus. 

Where did this come from? Well, on the one hand, it is perfectly clear: With an official Government campaign deliberately designed not only to inculcate fear but to suggest that protection against the great threat of the contagion was simple and clear-cut. And furthermore, obeying the “stay safe, stay home” edict would not just protect you and your immediate family but the rest of society as well. So locking yourself away was a moral obligation as well as an insurance against the personal danger of catching the dreaded Coronavirus. The combination of anxiety and appeal to the conscience of the common man was unbeatable — even when it involved deprivations of liberty which would once have been unconscionable.

So where are we now? Trapped in a state of what appears to be a spiral of fear so profound that it has become a permanent condition. Of course, as everybody has said, the Government’s incoherent messages have something to do with this: One day there is solemn talk of an inevitable “second wave” of the Coronavirus and the next day... well you know the rest.

But the big question on everybody’s minds is how much of this epidemic of national trepidation is pretext? We gather that a great many professionals — particularly those in the service industries on whom the British economy depends — are really quite smugly pleased with their new home-based work arrangements.

They are so relaxed, it seems, that when Government Ministers try to tell them that, actually, they might be putting their jobs at risk by becoming permanent ghost-like unpersons in the workplace, they rise up indignantly — as if refusing to venture into the office was now a right.

In fact, of course, the new Government advice is simply common sense. If an employee can do his job from home indefinitely, so could a floating free-lancer who will be owed no security, no sick leave, no health insurance, pension benefits or parental leave.

All the protections and rights which employees have fought hard to win over the generations will count for nothing once managements discover that most of the functions now carried out by those in formal employment can be done anywhere by people prepared to carry out the same functions on their own premises (and providing the necessary equipment at their own expense).

But surely those clever professionals in their home offices could have come to this conclusion themselves. Anybody who has ever worked in an organisation knows that there is more to a successful career than simply doing the tasks that are required. So why has such a large cohort of the educated population suddenly become so perversely obtuse about what was once a commonplace of adult life?

There has to be something bigger involved in this startling social development which nobody, so far as I recall, foresaw. Nursing my own personal grief over the loss of the cultural landmarks of the year — the concerts and the theatre, the opera and the art exhibitions — it suddenly struck me that virtually all of these events had been hit recently by their own traumatic identity crises.

I found myself thinking aloud: “Western culture has been considering a means of suicide for a while. Maybe it’s finally found it.” In moments of despair it had occurred to me that there was something of a medieval Dark Age about the current mood: Extinction Rebellion with its child saints and the self-flagellating Woke culture.

Being given an apparently sound reason to disable the most notable manifestations of that historical tradition which we are now being encouraged to denounce: What could be better suited to the weird, vaguely hysterical, fashion of the times? Fear may be the most dangerous contagion but I am coming around to the view that this is not simple fear. It is a mass neurosis of which irrational and prolonged anxiety is a symptom. A corrosive loss of confidence and understanding of one’s role and identity which will, if it prevails, ultimately undermine the quality of modern life more irrevocably than any virus.

It is not only our official cultural institutions that are at risk here. One of the most fundamental principles of post-war liberal democracy is on trial  or, at least, coming up for examination.

The pandemic has been a moral predicament at least as much as a health crisis. When this whole bizarre chapter is finally over, the questions that needed to be put, but for which there was no time, will be luminously clear. How much should we have asked the general populace to sacrifice in order to protect what we knew, almost from the start, would be a quite small, vulnerable minority?

Is personal liberty — normally of unquestionable value in a democracy during peacetime — expendable when healthcare systems are under sufficient strain? Where exactly do we draw the line on the right of governments to dictate the terms of personal relations?

Perhaps we have learned more than we wished to know about the assumptions that underpin the Government in the modern era. If, for example, we accept that the State should provide healthcare in some more or less comprehensive form, does that mean that it has the right (or even the duty) to ensure that its medical infrastructure is not threatened?

And does that provision oblige the State to put the protection of every individual life above, say, the quality of life of the unaffected majority? Is that the essence of the modern political conscience, and if it is, hadn’t we better discuss it openly? After all, these are our personal liberties at stake.

So there was an odd mix here: On the one hand, the very modern idea that it is the duty of governments to prevent a single life being lost — a notion which  the medieval mind with its fatalistic acceptance of mortality would have found absurd — combined with a darkly superstitious dread of some unfathomable threat. Everybody is saying that we have lived through a strange time. It may have been stranger than we knew.

(Courtesy: The Daily Telegraph)

Imran Khan has been boxed into a tight corner as the Saudi-UAE duo has called the bluff on Pakistan trying to be too clever by half with Turkey

Last year, visiting Arab princes from Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) were given Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s privileged treatment of personally chauffeuring them in a bit to dial up charm offensives. Pakistan’s situation was precarious as its coffers were dangerously depleted and in dire need of Arab largesse. Also embarrassingly for Pakistan, both monarchies had just expressed displeasure at the Pulwama terror attack. While the princes did loosen their purse strings and provide generous financial support, something was amiss. Soon the UAE announced its highest civilian award, i.e. Order of Zayed, for the Indian Prime Minister for boosting “comprehensive strategic ties.” A few years earlier, the Saudis had conferred their highest award, King Abdulaziz Sash, on the Indian Prime Minister.

Whispers of Pakistani unreliability and undercutting were gaining credence in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – the Arab monarchies were picking signs of trapeze artist Imran Khan’s growing dalliances with their nemesis of Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar and Iran. In the imploding world of Organisation of Islamic Countries (OIC), fissures have developed, and new power centres are emerging to the discomfiture of Saudi-UAE led Gulf Sheikhdoms. Within that churn, Pakistan is no longer perceived as a dependable ally.

This sudden dissonance was contrary to Pakistan’s traditional status as Saudi Arabia’s “closest Muslim ally.” From supporting Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pak war, opposing the creation of Bangladesh, supporting Pakistani machinations in Afghanistan and Kashmir, to even supposedly funding the “Islamic Bomb,” the Saudis were once the most generous Pakistani supporters. Pakistanis had reciprocated by providing security to Saudi Arabia in terms of military, training and weaponry, as also affording the singular honour of taking Riyadh into confidence before conducting its atomic tests. The Saudis also entrusted the former Pakistani Military Chief, General Raheel Sharif, to lead the Riyadh-based 41 nation, Islamic Military Counter-Terrorism Coalition (IMCTC). UAE was part of this triumvirate and had conjointly recognised the Pak-backed Taliban government in Afghanistan and was the only country along with Saudi Arabia to hail the Pakistani atomic tests as a “bold decision.” Also, energy, commerce and expat repatriation made both these Sheikhdoms life-sustaining for governments in Islamabad. Above all, the co-religiosity and the Shariaisation project of Pakistani dictator, General Zia-ul-Haq, in the 80s was principally funded and abetted by these two nations. UAE’s founding father, Sheikh Zayed, used to consider Pakistan his second home and when Dubai’s airline Emirates was launched, it was Pakistan International Airlines (PIA) that the Emiratis turned to. The cash-rich Arab royalty was feted and they treated beholden Pakistan as their backyard, with private houbara grouse hunting trips arranged for their princelings.

But the times soon changed and new considerations and urgencies kicked in with the “war on terror,” Arab Spring, deepening of sectarian faultlines and the independent assertion of countries like Turkey. But Pakistan refused to change its ways and was embarrassingly caught harbouring global terrorist Osama Bin Laden till he was “taken out” and continued playing havoc in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Pakistan also refused to participate in the Saudi-UAE’s war in Yemen, fearing sectarian repercussions on its own soil, to the chagrin of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. But Pakistan’s unpardonable undoing with the Saudi-UAE duo was its growing proximity with Turkey and assuming over-enthusiastically that it could now flex its muscle within the ummah with the support of Turkey. While countries like Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar and Iran have historically claimed “fraternal” relations with Pakistan – they are nothing compared to the financial, energy, diplomatic and strategic support that had been given by the Arab duo. Imran Khan had ungratefully partaken the opportunity to cock a snook at his biggest benefactors.

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood cuttingly accused the Saudi-led OIC of “dilly-dallying” on Kashmir and in an unprecedented manner alluded to breaking ranks by saying, “I’ll be compelled to ask Prime Minister Imran Khan to call a meeting of the Islamic countries that are ready to stand with us on the issue of Kashmir.” The Arab duo noted the implied import of the loaded statement that intended to shame them and repercussions soon followed.

They decided to halt their crucial three-year aid plan to Pakistan after just a year. They repeatedly snubbed Pakistan on Kashmir. UAE faced the wrath of “Boycott UAE” trending on Pakistani social media, as it was postured that only Turkey “stood by” Islamabad. To make matters worse for an increasingly isolated Pakistan, UAE has now recognised Israel and that has weakened Pakistan’s ability to rake up issues like Palestine and more specifically, Kashmir, as the practicalities of the looming economic crisis, fight against Covid pandemic, fight against extremism and quest for regional peace override all manufactured passions of Islamabad. Pakistan’s duplicity of terror is globally established and its ability to run with the hare and hunt with the hound on terrorism in Kashmir is becoming indefensible for one-time allies like Saudi Arabia and UAE, who seek progressive equations with the West, India and even Israel. Meanwhile, Pakistan is harping and walking the opposite direction of revisionism and religious extremism.

It has tried to mend fences by dispatching the Chief of the Army Staff to Riyadh but Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman refused to meet General Qamar Bajwa. Imran Khan is boxed into a tight corner as the Saudi-UAE duo has called the bluff on Pakistan trying to be too clever by half with Turkey and has made normalcy conditional to Islamabad reneging on Ankara. Abandoning Turkey at this stage will lead to a loss of face for Pakistan as it will count as yet another act of Pakistan’s patented untrustworthiness and unreliability. Clearly Imran Khan has bitten more than he can chew – he remains saddled with a flailing economy, disrupted aid lifelines, isolation among his traditional allies and a selfish agenda of Kashmir, in which not too many are interested. The proverbial chickens are coming home to roost as Pakistan mulls over yet another botched act of biting the hand that fed it.

(The author is former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)