How Obama Administration Covered Up Swine Flu Pandemic?

It baffles the mind whether it’s willful blindness or anterograde amnesia but while drawing parallels with coronavirus outbreak, mainstream media appears to vividly recall Spanish flu of 1918 from a century ago and doesn’t seem to have an inkling about a much more pertinent example of H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009-10, even though it shared a lot of common characteristics with COVID-19 pandemic.

Although official statistics are much lower, according to subsequent peer-reviewed studies [1], H1N1 swine flu outbreak of 2009 infected 700 million to 1.4 billion people world-wide and caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities only in the first year of the outbreak in 2009.

Cumulative number of fatalities in subsequent years could be well above a million of which hundreds of thousands of deaths could have occurred in the worst affected countries, the US, Mexico and Brazil, though unreported because extensive testing wasn’t done at the time of the outbreak.

Even though vaccine was invented in 2010, the H1N1 virus was eventually defeated, particularly in the developing world, by natural immunity and not be medical remedies. WHO reclassified it as “variant of seasonal flu” and the dreaded designation “pandemic” was removed in August 2010.

The reason why corporate media and international health organizations shirked their responsibility to create public awareness on the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in the US, Mexico and Brazil was due to the fact that the US economy was going through economic recession that began in 2008 and lasted into 2009, whereas the swine flu epidemic began in March 2009 and lasted into 2010.

Extensive media coverage of the outbreak could have further exacerbated the recession, which it did in part, but thankfully no sweeping lockdowns or quarantine measures were enforced then. Mainstream news outlets were hushed up from reporting on the H1N1 epidemic by then newly elected Obama administration, and self-censorship from a decade ago appears to have restrained corporate media from mentioning the name of swine flu pandemic even now.

Whether it’s swine flu of 2009 or coronavirus outbreak of today, pandemics are like a deluge that can be managed to minimize the damage but cannot be contained. All it takes is a small crack in the embankment for the force of nature to unleash its fury and eliminate all obstacles coming in its way.

When the epidemic is surging exponentially, the contagion infects millions of people within the short span of several months, of which only a minuscule fraction exhibits symptoms and is diagnosed with the infection, while the rest are asymptomatic and go unnoticed. But they develop resistance against re-infection, thus contributing to achieving herd immunity.

Had political correctness been the remedy, designating coronavirus outbreak as seasonal flu would solve the dilemma, as WHO reclassified swine flu pandemic as common cold in August 2010 and gave the international economy breathing space in the aftermath of 2008-9 global recession.

Technically, a patient tested positive for HIV virus isn’t said to be suffering from AIDS. AIDS is the severe form of the infection when dormant HIV virus becomes active, begins replicating and starts causing harm to the body tissues and organs. Similarly, a patient tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 isn’t actually suffering from COVID-19, unless the patient develops symptoms of severe acute respiratory syndrome.

Treatment and hospitalization is only needed for severe cases of COVID-19, and asymptomatic and mild cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection simply have to be quarantined for a couple of weeks either at homes or at quarantine centers until their natural immunity overcomes the virus so they don’t pose a risk of spreading infection among communities.

Periodically, epidemics come and go. They are defeated by body’s natural immune system and don’t need treatment. Certain contagions, like Ebola with case fatality ratio of 90%, require preventive measures, such as quarantines and lockdowns, but the rest, like H1N1 swine flu, H5N1 bird flu and SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 with infection fatality ratio of less than 0.2%, are treated like common cold that causes tens of thousands deaths every year in the US alone. Common cold influenza spreads across the world in yearly outbreaks, resulting in about three to five million cases of severe illness and about 290,000 to 650,000 deaths.

Even though the infection fatality rate of H1N1 swine flu was lower, at 0.02%, compared to COVID-19’s 0.2%, if the total number of cases in the calculation is reduced from 1.4 billion to a few hundred million and the actual number of fatalities caused by swine flu in 2009-10 is accurately calculated, then H1N1’s infection fatality rate would probably be comparable to COVID-19’s fatality rate. Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 could even be less than 0.1% once the outbreak subsides and accurate number of infections and fatalities are correctly known.

Even the most accurate COVID-19 test RT-PCR only has an accuracy level of 50-60%, especially in asymptomatic individuals or if the virus has penetrated deep into respiratory tract. Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction, RT-PCR (viral testing), is considered the gold standard of diagnosis for COVID-19 and other viruses. Although it has high sensitivity and specificity in a laboratory setting, chances of finding virus in specimens are: 90% in Bronchoalveolar lavage fluid, 70% in sputum and 50-60% in nasal swabs, though used most frequently.

If extensive sero-epidemiological studies are done, it would be found out that actual prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 is much higher than 25 million reported infections, perhaps comparable to H1N1 swine flu’s 700 million to 1.4 billion world-wide infections.

At the peak of the outbreak in March and April, Italian doctors reported the actual number of cases could be as high as 6,50,000, particularly in the worst-hit Lombardy and Milan regions, though total cases in Italy until August are still reported to be only 2,67,000.

Similarly, Iranian epidemiologist Ehsan Mostafavi recently said: “About 15 million Iranians may have experienced being infected with this virus since the outbreak began.” That amounts to 1 in 5 Iranians or 20% of Iran’s population.

Coronavirus may have infected ten times more Americans than reported, according to a report [2] by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Thus, the actual number of infections in the US as well as Europe could be ten to twenty times higher than the official statistics, which is enough for the viral infection to reach endemic steady state and for the population to develop herd immunity against the contagion.

An extensive study [3] in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies, which means number of infections is ten times higher than reported 4,40,000 cases. People in urban areas have up to 10% prevalence of antibodies.

Though widely believed to have originated in Wuhan in January, the exact date and place of origin of SARS-CoV-2 are also doubtful. A Spanish research team found [4] traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample whereas the outbreak began in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January 2020. In fact, several Chinese diplomats recently cast doubts over the widely accepted theory that the flu virus mutated by consuming bats in wet markets of China.

Coronavirus outbreak is fundamentally the failing of highly commercialized medical science. Billions of dollars are invested in Big Pharma. But for what purpose, to make skin care products and aphrodisiacs, for performing needless cosmetic surgeries; and hundreds of billions are spent on manufacturing state-of-the-art weapon system as deterrence against adversaries. Yet no preparations were made for dealing with a contingency as catastrophic as a pandemic. That’s criminal negligence, and we have nobody to blame but the capitalist social order and commercialization of essential public services.

Even though corporate media promptly declared Trump’s “drug of choice” antimalarial chloroquine for treating a viral infection to be a hoax, its own prescriptions fared no better than placebos. For instance, dexamethasone would be as effective against coronavirus infections as it is in treating arthritis. Competent orthopedics seldom prescribe it because it’s a steroidal drug having more adverse effects than therapeutic ones. Apparently, the manufacturers of remdesivir and dexamethasone in Big Pharma paid millions of dollars bribes to the mainstream media to market the drugs, which in turn is inclined to sensationalize any news story pertaining to COVID-19.

The only remedy that has proved effective in treating COVID-19 thus far has been convalescent plasma therapy. Plasma therapy works on the principle that antibodies contained in the blood of previously infected person would provide resistance against infection through transfusion of convalescent plasma into a COVID-19 patient’s circulatory system.

Thus, it basically works on the same principle that vaccination does, though plasma therapy would be classified as therapeutic vaccine instead of more common prophylactic ones for treating widespread epidemics. A word of caution, though, it should only be used in severe cases of COVID-19 as prescribed by physicians. Because the treatment is still in experimental stages and antibodies could prove potentially harmful in patients with mild symptoms of the disease.

Globally, the leading causes of 56 million deaths every year are: 15 million deaths from heart diseases and strokes; 5 million from lung diseases; 2 million from dementias; 1.5 million from diabetes; over a million each from diarrhea, tuberculosis and AIDS; and 1.5 million deaths in road traffic accidents. In comparison, coronavirus pandemic has claimed less than a million lives thus far but is getting undue media coverage due to politicization of the pandemic debate.

Footnotes:

[1] H1N1 swine flu caused 1,50,000 to 5,75,000 fatalities:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/spotlights/pandemic-global-estimates.htm

[2] Coronavirus may have infected 10 times more Americans than reported, CDC says:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-cases-idUSKBN23W2PU

[3] An extensive study in Spain shows 5% population has developed antibodies:

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/07/06/health/spain-coronavirus-antibody-study-lancet-intl/index.html

[4] A Spanish research team found traces of the virus in a March 2019 sewage sample:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-spain-science-idUSKBN23X2HQ

History of Roman Empire is Fictitious

Christianity in its present form came into being after the eleventh century schism between the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Church. Before that, it used to be an exclusively Byzantine affair and most of Western Europe followed pagan customs. The reason why Catholic historians fabricated the history of ancient Roman civilization was to dissociate Christianity from its Byzantine heritage.

The theory that Christianity spread into Europe, and also in Russia, from the Byzantine Empire is validated by the fact that early Middle Ages – from 5^th to 10^th century, when the Byzantine Empire reached its zenith and a split occurred between the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches in 1054 – are referred to as Dark Ages, whereas the period between 8^th century BC and 6^th century AD is rather ironically called Classical Antiquity.

There appears to be clear historical bias because in descending order, as we go back in time, the reliability of information reduces proportionally. Thus, the 11^th century recorded history of the Roman Catholic Church is comparatively credible, whereas Before Christ folklore transmitted mainly through oral traditions of fabulists is simply implausible.

  

Historically, on Christmas Day 800 AD, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, forming the political and religious foundations of Christendom and establishing in earnest the French monarchy's longstanding historical association with the Roman Catholic Church.

Thus, ninth century appears to be a watershed moment of increasing proselytization of Europe to Christianity, which obviously had its impact in Britain and Germany later. After that, the influence of the Byzantine Empire, lasting from 4^th to 15^th centuries, waned and a rival power center emerged in the form of Roman Catholic Church patronized by kings of Franks and Lombards in Italy.

Evidently, Christianization of Eastern Europe and Russia is attributed to the Byzantine Empire and Western Europe to the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, the history of ancient Romans, whose empire purportedly fell in 476 AD to Germanic tribes, is nothing more than folklore and the history of the Roman Catholic Church in earnest began after the coronation of Charlemagne as the Holy Roman Emperor.

The title of Holy Roman Emperor remained with Carolingian family of Charlemagne, the ruler of Franks, up to 840, and then it passed on to Germans when Otto I was declared Holy Roman Emperor by the Pope in 962. Thus, the Frankish Empire constituted the Holy Roman Empire during the early 9^th century, and then the title was assumed by the Germanic Empire for the next eight centuries.

The Germanic decentralized phase of the Holy Roman Empire never reached the glory of the Frankish Empire under Charlemagne and his successor Louis the Pious. They adopted Latin as the official language of the Empire to forge a political identity distinct from the Byzantine Greeks.

Carolingians jointly ruled over Franks and Lombards in Italy, thus the Roman Catholic Church was under their suzerainty, which at the time was nothing more than a diocese of the Eastern Orthodox Church. During the period of the Byzantine Papacy from 6^th to 8^th centuries, the title of the Pope was equivalent to the bishop of Rome.

Although according to oral traditions, the Roman Catholic Church was founded by the apostles of Jesus, St. Peter and Paul, and was recognized by Byzantine Emperor Constantine, it’s not proved by credible history and many secular historians doubt the assertion.

In the medieval era, the theological creed of the Eastern Orthodox Church was vilified as Arian heresy by the Roman Catholic Church to establish a monopoly over Christian faith in Western Europe. Arius was a theologian of the Antioch school in Hatay province of modern Turkey in 270 AD. Most of the Germanic tribes who in the following centuries invaded the Roman Empire had adopted Christianity in its Arian form, which later transformed into German Protestantism.

It is generally claimed that Byzantine Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and reorganized the Empire from 324 to 337 AD. Moreover, it is also alleged, albeit mistakenly, that under the reign of Heraclius (610–641), three centuries later, the Empire adopted Greek for official use in place of Latin.

Fact of the matter, however, is the Byzantine Empire wasn’t a monolith, as it had myriad dynasties of usurpers from Macedonia, Armenia etc. which spoke several East European dialects, but Latin was never introduced into the Byzantine Empire. In fact, the Byzantine Empire appears to be a continuation of Alexander’s Hellenistic Empire, as both had their arch-foes in the ancient kingdoms of Persia – Achaemenids and Sassanids.

The Justinian dynasty is generally regarded as the Golden Age of the Byzantine Empire that lasted from 518 to 602 AD. During the reign of Justinian I (527–565), the Empire reached its greatest extent after reconquering much of the western Mediterranean coast, North Africa, Italy, and Rome itself, which it held for two more centuries.

Hindu Majoritarianism and Pakistan Movement

Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan.

The prefix ‘Pak,’ which is the root of the word Pakistan, literally means clean or pure in Urdu language. Choosing the name Pakistan for their newfound country sheds light on the mindset of our founding fathers. As the readers are well aware that Hindu religion is a caste-based religion which regards people belonging to other faiths, and even low-caste Hindus, as sleazy untouchables.

The Muslims of India suffered this discrimination at the hands of the numerical majority during the British Raj, that’s why they chose the name Pakistan: the land of the clean or pure, for their newfound sanctuary. Thus, Pakistan and the oft-quoted pejorative, ‘the land of the pure,’ isn’t as much about some conceited sense of superiority as it was about redressing a historical injustice, and the demand for a separate homeland was basically a reaction to the discrimination and persecution suffered by the disenfranchised Muslims of India at the hands of Hindu nationalists.

Sociologically, ethno-linguistic groups are generally regarded as distinct nations but sometimes one’s religious sect can take precedence over ethno-linguistic identity. The Syrian and Iraqi Shias speak Arabic while the Iranian Shias speak Persian; despite the linguistic difference, during the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, the Shia-led Baathist regime of Syria took the side of Iran against the fellow Arabic-speaking and Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. After the fall of Saddam, when the government in Iraq has now been led by the Shias, the three Shia-led states have formed an alliance comprising Iran, Iraq and Syria against the Sunni-led Gulf Arab States.

Having a secular bend of mind, I personally find Sunni and Shia Muslims to be virtually indistinguishable. Although they do have a few minor theological and doctrinal differences but culturally they belong to the same religion and civilization. I have drawn attention to the Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East only to emphasize the importance of religion in the Eastern societies. Modern secularists regard the social aspect of religion as some outdated medieval notion, but conformity to ethno-religious identity is a visible and ubiquitous reality in our part of the world.

Now, Sunni and Shia are only two sects of the same religion, Islam, and these minor sectarian differences can make their followers forget their ethno-linguistic identities in choosing friends and forming alliances, while Hinduism and Islam are two radically different religions, so much so that many Muslims in Pakistan don’t even know what deities the Hindus worship. By uncritically imitating Orientalist historians, however, many secularists assume that the creation of a nation state on the basis of ethno-religious identity was an imprudent decision by Jinnah and the Muslim League.

Regardless, here we must try to understand the attitudes and mindsets of the British Indian leaders that why did they favour certain rallying calls and disapproved the rest? In my opinion, this preferential treatment had to do with personal inclinations and ambitions of the British Indian leaders and the interests of their respective communities as perceived by the leaders in heterogeneous and multi-ethnic societies like British India.

A leader whose ambitions are limited only to his own ethnic group would rally his followers around their shared ethno-linguistic identity, but politicians who have larger ambitions would look for common factors that unite diverse ethnic groups, that’s where the role of religion becomes politically relevant in traditional societies.

It suited the personal ambitions of the Muslim League leadership to rally their supporters around the cause of Islamic identity, and it benefited the political agenda of the Congress leadership to unite all Indians under the banner of a more inclusive and secular Indian national identity in order to keep India united under the permanent yoke of numerical Hindu majority.

However, mere rhetoric is never a substitute for tangible actions, no matter how noble and superficially appealing it may sound. The Indian National Congress right from its inception was a thinly disguised Hindu nationalist party that only had a pretence of inclusive secularism, that’s why some of the most vocal proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity, like Jinnah and Iqbal, later became its most fierce critics, especially when Gandhi and his protégé Pundit Nehru took over the leadership of Congress in 1921.

Moreover, while I concede that the colonial divide-and-rule policy was partly responsible for sowing the seeds of dissension amongst the British Indian religious communities, but generally most outcomes cannot be understood by adopting a simplistic and linear approach that tries to explain complex socio-political phenomena by emphasizing a single cause and downplaying the importance of other equally significant, albeit underestimated, plurality of causes.

Islamic nationalism in British India had as much to do with the divide-and-rule strategy on the part of the British colonisers as it was a reaction to exclusionary Hindu majoritarianism. As I have described earlier that different rallying calls are adopted as political agendas by politicians to rally support for their individual ambitions.

Looking at the demeanour of ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi and his aspirations of being a Hindu saint and a messiah, did he look like a secular leader by any stretch of imagination? But he chose the rallying call of secularism because it suited his personal ambitions and the interests of Hindu community which he really represented.

Finally, every political rallying call has its express wordings but it also has certain subtle undertones. It is quite possible that some Westernised Congress leaders might have genuinely believed in the ideals of secularism and pluralism, but on the popular level of the traditional Indian masses, the Hindus of British India coalesced around Congress not because of its ostensible secularism but due to its undertones of Hindu Raj. A fact which has now become obvious after the election of an overt Hindu nationalist, Narendra Modi, to the premiership of India 70 years after the independence.

Relationship between Power and Sex

Imran Khan and General Qamar Bajwa

A question naturally arises in the minds of curious students of regional geopolitics that why did Pakistan choose to wage Washington’s proxy war against the erstwhile Soviet Union in Afghanistan back in the 1980s? Was it to strengthen its defences against India, the oft-quoted ‘strategic depth’ theory, or the fear that the former Soviet Union might make further advances into Pakistan’s Balochistan province to reach the warm waters of the Arabian Sea?

All these geopolitical considerations might have played a part, but to understand the real reason why Pakistan decided to become Washington’s accomplice in the Afghan conflict, we need to understand the nature of power. Rationally speaking, power ought to be means to achieve higher goals, but in practical life, we often face David Hume’s ‘is-ought dilemma,’ where rather than means to an end, power becomes an end in itself, and it is the nature of power to expand further and to grow more powerful.

Thus, Pakistan’s security establishment did not collaborate in Washington’s ‘bear trap project’ for any ulterior strategic goals, the goal was simply to exercise power by taking advantage of the opportunity. In order to elaborate this abstract concept, I would like to draw a parallel between power and sex. In the grand scheme of things, sex is not an end in itself; it is means to an end, the end being the procreation of offspring.

But many hedonic couples nowadays use contraceptives and don’t consider it worthwhile to procreate and nurture children, due to economic constraints or the unnecessary effort that nurturing children inevitably entails. Social scientists have no business offering advice or moral lessons; to each his own. But if the ultimate end for which nature has invented the agency comes to a naught, that does not per se renders the agency any less significant, instead the agency itself becomes an end in itself. Thus, power is like sex; its exercise is pleasurable and its goal is further expansion and amassing of more power to satisfy the insatiable needs of compulsive power maniacs.

Notwithstanding, many Leftist activists nowadays commit the fallacy of trying to establish an essentialist and linear narrative to global events. One cannot question their bona fide intentions, but their overzealous efforts sometimes prove counterproductive to their own credibility and the causes that they are striving for.

All the contemporary conflicts are not energy wars. The Iraq and Libya wars were obviously energy wars, because Iraq has proven petroleum reserves of 140 billion barrels and it can produce 5 million barrels of crude oil per day, which is second only to Saudi Arabia’s 10 million barrels daily oil production and 266 billion barrels of proven petroleum reserves, while Libya used to produce 1.6 million barrels per day before the civil war in 2011 and has the proven reserves of 48 billion barrels.

The Syrian conflict has a different dimension to it. Syria does not produce much oil except approximately 385,000 barrels per day from the north-east in Deir al-Zor and has proven petroleum reserves of only 2.5 billion barrels. NATO’s involvement in the Syrian conflict is for the sake of ensuring Israel’s regional security. The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Shi’a resistance axis comprising Iran, the Assad regime in Syria and their Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah.

During the course of 2006 Lebanon war, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel, and Israel’s defence community realised for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah and its patrons, Iran and the Assad regime in Syria, posed to Israel’s regional security. Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what will happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel.

Washington’s military intervention in Afghanistan in October 2001 in the backdrop of the 9/11 terror attack, however, was different from all other wars. It was a war of imperial hubris and a war of liability rather than a war of choice. That’s why we didn’t see much commitment of troops and resources by the Bush administration in the initial years of the Afghan war, and only an year into the Afghan war, Bush invaded Iraq in March 2003 for its 140 billion barrels of petroleum reserves.

It was the Obama administration 2009-onward that made the Afghan war a bedrock of its foreign policy. By going dovish on Iraq, Obama wanted to offset his public perception of being a weak president by offering an alternative of a ‘just war,’ the Afghan war. And consequently, the number of US troops in Afghanistan spiked from 30,000 during the tenure of the neocon Bush administration to more than 100,000 during the term of the supposedly ‘pacifist’ Obama administration.

It bears mentioning that during the election campaign of 2008 before he was elected president, Barack Obama made an artificial distinction between the supposedly ‘just war’ in Afghanistan and the unjust war in Iraq. In accordance with the flawed distinction, he pledged that he would withdraw American troops from Iraq but not from Afghanistan.

The unilateral intervention in Iraq by the Bush administration was highly unpopular among the American electorate. Therefore, Obama’s election pledge of complete withdrawal of the US troops from Iraq struck a chord with the voters and they gave an overwhelming mandate to the ostensibly ‘pacifist’ contender during his first term as the president.

In keeping with the election pledge, President Obama did manage to successfully withdraw American troops from Iraq in December 2011 during the first term as the president, but only to commit thousands of American troops and the US Air Force to Iraq just a couple of years later during the second term as the president when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in early 2014.

The borders between Iraq and Syria are poorly guarded and highly porous. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Assad regime in Syria for the first three years of the Syrian civil war from 2011 to 2014 was bound to backfire sooner or later.

Was Jinnah an imperialist collaborator?

There are only two illustrious South Asian leaders who never went to jail during their otherwise stellar political careers. One was the founder of Pakistan, Jinnah, and the other a crusader against corruption who has been given the sobriquet ‘Pakistan Khan’ by his cultist followers. Perceptive readers are already well aware of the reason why nobody can dare to arrest the latter, even if he lays a four-month-long siege to the paramount institutions of state and stops the state machinery from functioning.

Regarding the allegation levelled against Jinnah by Orientalist historians that he was an imperialist collaborator, it is so preposterous that it would be a waste of time trying to dispel the ludicrous accusation. Instead, I would implore the readers to allow me the liberty to scribble a tongue-in-cheek rant here.

It’s an incontestable fact that Jinnah, Iqbal and Sir Syed were imperialist collaborators who fell prey to the divide-and-rule policy of the British Raj. There were only two progressive Muslim leaders who joined forces with Mahatma Gandhi’s socialist and anti-imperialist Congress against the tyranny of the Raj. One was Sheikh Abdullah of Kashmir and the other was Abdul Ghaffar Khan (Bacha Khan) of Pashtunistan.

After the partition of British India, Sheikh Abdullah worked hand in glove with Pundit Nehru to make Muslim-majority Kashmir a part of secular Indian utopia. The Muslims of Kashmir trusted the charismatic messiah with their lives and the latter met their expectations by conniving with the Congress’ pundits. Today Kashmir is thriving and prospering under the suzerainty of India and the dynamic leadership of Sheikh Abdullah’s descendants, Farooq Abdullah and Omar Abdullah, the true representatives of Kashmiri Muslims.

Had it been up to the visionary and tactful Bacha Khan, he too would have made sure to make Pashtunistan a colony of India. However, a plebiscite was held on the eve of independence in the erstwhile North West Frontier Province; and regrettably, the gullible Pashtuns of the doomed province overwhelmingly voted to become part of an Islamist and reactionary Pakistan.

Let me clarify here that I am not against Bacha Khan and his Red Shirts, ‘Khudai Khidmatgar,’ movement, as such. It was a laudable achievement that he politically mobilised the Pashtuns for independence and enfranchisement. But I have doubts about his political acumen. From his bearing, he appeared like a simpleton who was given to whims and personal attachments. But the people that he was dealing with, Gandhi, Nehru and Patel, were shrewd politicians.

The astute leadership of Congress wheedled and coaxed Bacha Khan and Sheikh Abdullah to form a political alliance with the thinly veiled Hindu nationalist Congress against the interests of Pashtun and Kashmiri Muslims, whom the aforementioned leaders respectively represented. And the way I see it, it had less to do with any political convergence of ideas; rather, it was more about their personal bonding with the shrewd leadership of Congress.

Jinnah was a brash and forthright statesman who used to treat his party workers and associates as subordinates. And Pashtuns, as we all know, are given to ‘Pashtunwali’ (honour), courtesy and other such trappings of symbolic respect. Gandhi and Nehru struck a chord there with feigned cordiality and ensnared two leading Muslim luminaries of freedom struggle, hence striking a political marriage of convenience between the Congress and the Pashtun and Kashmiri nationalists.

In the end, Sheikh Abdullah legitimised the Indian occupation of Kashmir by becoming its first chief minister, though he was later imprisoned by none other than his good old friend, Pundit Nehru. But when Pakistan and, more importantly, the Kashmiri Muslims needed his leadership and guidance the most, he backstabbed them simply because of his personal friendship with Jawaharlal Nehru.

More to the point, in the British Indian context, the divide-and-rule policy originally meant that imperialists used this strategy to sow the seeds of dissension and communal hatred to prolong their tyrannical rule in India. However, some Indian historians later came up with the fancy notion that the colonial powers lent their support to the idea of creation of Pakistan in order to use the latter as a bulwark against communist influence in the region; this latter conspiracy theory is farthest from truth.

Firstly, the British imperialists took immense pride in creating a unified and cohesive British Indian army, and it’s a historical fact that the latter organisation was vehemently opposed to the division of the British Indian armed forces. It simply defies common sense that if the colonial power was apprehensive of the expanding influence of Soviet Union in the region; in that case, it would have preferred to leave behind a unified and strong India army, rather than two divided armies at loggerheads with each other.

Secondly, although Pakistan joined the Washington-led and anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the 1950s and it also fought America’s Jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the 1980s, but we must bear in mind that there were actually two power-centres of communism during the Cold War, i.e. the Soviet Bolshevism and the Chinese Maoism.

If the intention of the colonial powers was to use Pakistan as a bulwark against communist influence in the region, then how come Pakistan established such cordial relations with the communist China during the 1960s that it voted in favour of China’s membership into the United Nations in 1971, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto played a pivotal role in arranging Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Fact of the matter is that both India and Pakistan had good relations with the Western powers during the Cold War. However, India had friendly ties with Soviet Union and adversarial relations with China, while Pakistan had adversarial relations with Soviet Union and friendly ties with China. The relations of India and Pakistan with the communist powers were based more on their national interests than on ideological lines.

The relatively modern Indian historians who came up with this fancy conspiracy theory have actually retrospectively applied the theory to the historical chain of events: that is, they conceived the theory after Pakistan joined the anti-communist alliances and after it played the role of Washington’s client state during the Soviet-Afghan Jihad. At the time of independence movement in 1940s, neither the Hindus nor the Muslims knew anything about the aftermath of their respective freedom struggles.

Metrosexuality and Family Values

Bilawal Bhutto's selfie with Paris Hilton.

In the light of my limited experience with the Western culture, I have come to realize that a fully functional family is hard to find in the modern Western societies. Coming across a functioning family unit is more of an exception than a norm in the Western culture.

Most Western women with whom I have interacted are generally divorced, single mothers who are raising their children all by themselves; while the men folks either don’t get married at all, or even if they do get married under some momentary impulse or infatuation, they tend to leave their wives and kids behind them and either run away with their newfound girlfriends or they are otherwise non-committal in their relationships.

Although this behavioral infidelity can be found in both genders but it is much more prevalent in metrosexual men of modern societies. Since women are physiologically built to raise children and since they occupy a comparatively insecure position in male-dominated cultures, therefore they generally take their relationships seriously.

Unlike the traditional Eastern societies which are family-centric, the Western societies are mostly individual-centric. Reductive individualism and runaway hedonism might sound theoretically alluring but this unnatural state of affairs cannot last for long.

Birth rates all over the Western world are already dwindling, and in some countries, population growth rate is in negative. There was a time that population growth rate in Europe was so prolific that the Europeans had to colonize Americas and Australia to settle their surplus population. But now, the only thing sustaining their population growth rate is not their natural birth rates but the immigration of people from the developing world to the Western countries.

The institution of a fully functional family is the cornerstone of a healthy society and if the social environment is not conducive to the development of such a pivotal institution, then there is something fundamentally wrong with our social axioms.

Marriage is basically a civil contract meant for the purpose of raising children and family; and if one of the partners leaves the other midstream, it creates an unmanageable burden on the other partner (generally women) to raise children single-handedly. Sweeping such serious issues under the carpet that affect every individual and family on a personal level by taking an evasive approach of ‘see no evil, hear no evil’ will only exacerbate the problem.

Individualists generally posit that an individual holds a central position in society; the way I see it, however, being human is inextricably interlinked to the institution of family. The only things that separates human beings from the rest of species is their innate potential to acquire knowledge, but knowledge alone is not sufficient for our collective survival due to excessive and manifest intra-special violence in the form of conflicts and wars. Unless we have social cohesion -- which comes from love, compassion and empathy -- we are likely to self-destruct as specie.

The aforementioned empathy and altruism, however, are imparted by the institution of family, within which spouses love each other and their children, and in turn, children love their parents and siblings. This familial love then transcends the immediate environs of family and encompasses the entire humanity.

Thus, without the institution of family, there will be no humanity, or individual, in the long run. In order to reap the fruit of love, one first needs to sow the seeds of love. One cannot expect to raise loving and caring human beings with authority and teaching alone, only the institution of family has this unique gift of teaching love by practicing love.

Although family life in the Eastern societies isn’t as perfect as some of us would like to believe, but they are traditional societies based on agriculture-era value systems. Industrialization and consequent urbanization is the order of the day. These rural societies will eventually evolve into their urban counterparts.

My primary concern, however, is that the modern paradigm that we have conjured up is far from perfect in which divorce rates are very high and generally mothers are left alone to fend for themselves and raise their children single-handedly; consequently, giving rise to a dysfunctional familial and social arrangement.

Paradoxically, some social scientists draw our attention to the supposed ‘unnaturalness’ of the institution of family and the practice of polygamy and polyamory etc. in primitive tribal societies, but if we take a cursory look at the history of mankind, there have been two distinct phases of cultural development: the pre-Renaissance social evolution and the post-Renaissance social evolution.

Most of our cultural, scientific and technological accomplishments are attributed to the latter phase that has only lasted for a few centuries, and the institution of family has played a pivotal role in the social advancement of that era. Empirically speaking, we must base our scientific assumptions on proven and verifiable evidence and not some cock and bull stories peddled by self-styled anthropologists.

Regarding the erosion of the institution of family, I am of the opinion that it has mainly been the fault of the mass entertainment media that has caused an unnatural obsession with glamor and consequent sexualization of modern societies.

Regardless, modern liberals generally are educated and pacifist people. They abhor violence in all its forms and manifestations; so much so that they are appalled by the mere thought of murder, even if it is justifiable and legally sanctioned execution such as capital punishment. Some of the more ‘tender-hearted’ sorts go even a step further and give up eating meat by becoming vegetarians, whether as a matter of moral principle or for reducing weight is anybody’s guess.

I find it curiously intriguing, however, when some ‘bleeding heart’ liberals blatantly violate their own sacrosanct tenets by endorsing the practice of feticide in the form of abortion. What moral high-ground do they have despite their revulsion at capital punishment and animal slaughter when they endorse the gruesome practice of killing unborn babies?

Finally, it would be unfair to lay the blame squarely on the Western culture. The reason why people shy away from getting married and raising children has partly been the doing of modern economics. Industrialization and capitalism have created an unnecessary burden on the lives of individuals and families in modern times. The agriculture era used to be a labor-intensive epoch. Back then, a household with large number of children used to be a boon because the manpower was utilized for cultivation and farming.

After the industrial revolution and consequent urbanization, however, most of the physical labor is being performed by machines. Thus, the cost of raising and educating children in the post-industrial societies outweighs their utility and benefits, that’s why many middle-income families keep the number of children to a bare minimum to avoid financial burden.

Moreover, it has also been the preferred state policy of many Third World countries with large populations and meager resources to restrict the number of children to a minimum in order to reduce the burden on their developing economies, such as the one-child policy of China and the two-child policy of India and Pakistan.

The ‘China Model’ of Development

Mao and Nixon in 1972.

It’s an incontrovertible fact that the British colonizers built roads and railways in India, they established missionary schools, colleges and universities, they enforced the English common law, and the goal of exploiting the natural resources and four hundred million strong Indian manpower at the time of independence in 1947, and trading raw materials for pennies and exporting finished goods with huge profits to the Indian consumer market never crossed the ‘altruistic minds’ of the British imperialists.

Puns aside, there is an essential precondition in the European Union’s charter of union, according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow the free movement of labor. What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base, and the free movement of workers only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their biggest donors by shares, the developed countries.

Some market fundamentalists, who irrationally believe in the laissez-faire capitalism, try to justify this unfair practice by positing Schumpeter’s theory of ‘Creative Destruction’: that the free trade between unequal trading partners leads to the destruction of host country’s existing economic order and a subsequent reconfiguration gives rise to a better economic order. Whenever one comes up with gross absurdities such proportions, they should always make it contingent on the principle of reciprocity: that if free trade is beneficial for the nascent industrial base of developing economies, then the free movement of labor is equally beneficial for the workforce of developed countries.

The policymakers of developing countries must not allow themselves to be hoodwinked by such deceptive arguments; instead, they should devise prudent national policies which suit the interests of their underprivileged masses. But the trouble is that the governments of the Third World countries are dependent on foreign investment, that’s why they cannot adopt independent economic and trade policies.

The so-called ‘multinational’ corporations based in the Western financial districts make profits from the consumer markets all over the world and pay a share of those profits to their respective governments as bribes in the form of taxes. Every balance of trade deficit due to the lack of strong manufacturing base makes the developing nations poorer, and every balance of trade surplus further adds to the already immense fortune of the developed world.

A single, large multinational corporation based in the Wall Street and other financial districts of the Western world generates revenues to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is more than the total GDP of many developing economies. Examples of such behemoth business conglomerates include: Investment banks - JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Barclays, HSBC and BNP Paribas; Oil majors - Exxon Mobil, Chevron, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell and Total; Manufacturers - Apple, Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Pakistan’s total GDP is $300 billion and with a population of 210 million, its per capita income amounts to a paltry $1450; similarly, India’s per capita income is also only $1850. While the GDP of the US is $18 trillion and per capita income is well in excess of $50,000. Likewise, the per capita incomes of most countries in the Western Europe are also around $40,000.

That's a difference of more than twenty times between the incomes of the Third World countries and the beneficiaries of neocolonialism, North America and Western Europe. Only the defense budget of the Pentagon is $700 billion, which is more than twice the size of Pakistan's total economy. Without this neocolonial system of exploitation, the whole edifice of supposedly ‘meritocratic’ capitalism will fall flat on its face and the myth of individual incentive will get busted beyond repair, because it only means incentive for the pike and not for the minnows.

Regarding the contribution of British colonizers to India, the countries that don’t have a history of colonization, like China and Russia for instance, have better roads, railways and industries built by natives themselves than the ones that have been through centuries of foreign occupation and colonization, such as the subcontinent. The worst thing the British colonizers did to the subcontinent was that they put in place an exploitative governance and administrative system that catered to the needs of the colonizers without being accountable to the colonized masses over whom it was imposed.

It’s regrettable that despite having the trappings of freedom and democracy, India and Pakistan are still continuing with the same exploitative, traditional power structure that was bequeathed to the subcontinent by the British colonizers. The society is stratified along the class lines, most of South Asia’s ruling elites still have the attitude of foreign colonizers and the top-down bureaucratic system, ‘Afsar Shahi Nizam,’ is one of the most corrupt and inefficient in the world.

Finally, China is an interesting case study in regard to its history. First, although it did fight a couple of Opium Wars with the British in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the influence of Western imperialism generally remained confined to its coastal cities and it did not make inroads into inland areas. Second, China is ethno-linguistically and culturally homogeneous: more than 90% Chinese belong to the Han ethnic group and they speak various dialects of Mandarin, thus reducing the chances of discord and dissension in the Chinese society.

And third, behind the ‘Iron Curtain’ of international isolation beginning from the Maoist revolution in 1949 to China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, China successfully built its manufacturing base by imparting vocational and technical education to its disciplined workforce and by building an industrial and transport infrastructure.

It didn’t allow any imports until 2001, but after joining the WTO, it opened up its import-export policy on a reciprocal basis; and since labor is much cheaper in China than in the Western countries, therefore it now has a comparative advantage over the Western capitalist bloc which China has exploited in its national interest. These three factors, along with the visionary leadership of Chairman Mao, Zhou Enlai and China’s vanguard socialist party collectively, have placed China on the path to progress and prosperity in the twenty-first century.

Gender Identity as a Social Construct

The distinction between male and female genders is based less on their physiological traits and more on their respective mindsets. These mindsets, in turn, are a product of social expectations of behavior in a cultural milieu. It is expected from male members of a society to behave in a supposedly manly fashion and it is similarly expected from female members to act in a purportedly feminine manner.

But this emphasis on binary distinction of genders in a rural-agrarian setting served a purpose: the division of functions between male and female members, where women were expected to do housekeeping and nurturing children, while it was expected from men to produce food for the family. Although this distinction is still maintained, to a lesser or greater extent, in urban and industrialized societies, but a distinction based on division of functions is a hypothetical imperative: as means to achieve certain ends and not an end in itself.

Moreover, it would be normative to contend that in primitive tribal societies, women had the same social status as men. The nomado-pastoral and agricultural eras were the age of hunting-gathering, farming and strenuous physical labor, and it is a known fact that women are physically a weaker sex, that’s why we have separate sports and athletics events for men and women.

Women attained the status of equality after the onset of industrial revolution and a shift to mechanized labor, when the focus shifted from physical labor to intelligence and information; and when it comes to cognitive faculties, women are just as intelligent as men, if not more so.

Notwithstanding, instead of taking a binary approach to classification of genders, modern feminists now favor to look at the issue from the prism of a whole spectrum of gender identities. The way I see it, it should not be about being manly; rather, it should be about being human, which is the common denominator for the whole spectrum of gender identities.

When we stress upon manliness, it’s not manliness per se that we are glorifying, but the presence of feminine attributes in the socially-elevated male gender is something that we, as agents of patriarchal structure, frown upon. But such machismo is not a natural order of things, because more than the physical attributes, the rigid segregation of genders is a product of social constructions that manifest themselves in artificial cognitive and behavioral engineering of male and female mindsets.

In our formative years, such watertight gender identities and their socially-accepted attributes are inculcated in our minds by assigning gender roles, but this whole hetero-normative approach to the issue of gender identity is losing its validity in a post-industrial urban milieu, where gender roles are not as strictly defined as they used to be in the medieval agricultural societies.

More to the point, what are the virtues that are deemed valuable in women separately from the ones that are deemed desirable in men? If meekness, diffidence and complacency are disapproved in men, then why do we have double standards for separate genders? Self-confidence, assertiveness and boldness should be equally encouraged in both genders without discrimination.

However, the dilemma that we face is that the mindsets of individuals and gender roles are determined by culture, but if the society itself is patriarchal and male-dominated, then it tends to marginalize and reduce women to a lower social status. Therefore, a social reform is needed which can redefine "virtue" and the qualities that are deemed valuable in human beings should be uniform and consistent for both genders.

Regardless, if we study the behavioral patterns in the animal kingdom, a tigress is as good a hunter as a tiger; in fact, the females of most species are generally more violent than their male counterparts; because they fight not only for food, but also to protect their offspring. But how often do we find a violent woman in human history and society?

Excluding a handful of femme fatales like Cleopatra, bold women are a rare exception in human history. Thus, even though by nature, women are just as assertive and violent as men, but the patriarchy-inspired nurture and male-dominated culture have tamed women to an extent that they have unlearnt even their innate nature.

Two conclusions can be drawn from this fact: first, that it’s always nurture and culture which play a more significant role in determining human behavior compared to some far-fetched concept of essential human nature; and second, that essentially human nature is quite similar for both genders, it’s only the behavioral process of social construction of gender identity that defines and limits the roles which are deemed proper for one gender or the other.

Additionally, regarding physiological distinction between male and female genders, evolutionary biologists are of the opinion that such differences only have a minor importance. Even if we take primary reproductive organs, for instance, clitoris is regarded as a rudimentary penis in females and nipples in males are regarded as rudimentary breasts, a fact which proves beyond doubt that specialization of male and female reproductive organs is merely a mechanism to keep genetic material unimpaired by preference for meiosis division over repetitive and harmful mitosis reproductive division.

Moreover, it is generally assumed about males that due to the presence of testosterone, they are usually more aggressive and competitive than females. If we assess this contention in the light of global versus local character traits theory, however, testosterone only promotes a specific kind of competition: that is, competition for mating. When it comes to competing for food, however, males and females of all species exhibit similar levels of aggression and competition.

Therefore, it would be reductive to assume that the distinction between male and female attitudes and behaviors is more physiological and hormonal than it is due to the difference of upbringing and separate sets of social expectations of behavior that are associated with the members of male and female sexes.

Finally, there is no denying the fact that testosterone is primarily responsible for secondary sexual characteristics in the males of all species. Through the process of natural selection, only those males that have succeeded in mating are able to carry forward their genes, which proves that males with higher testosterone levels do have a comparative advantage in competition for mating, but its effect on attitudes and behaviors of animal species, and particularly in human beings with their complex social institutions and cultures, is tentative and hypothetical, at best.

Identity Crisis: Who is Pakistani and Who isn’t?

Imran Khan, Jemima and Diana.

There are two contrasting styles of debating an issue: those who prefer normative arguments, and those who choose descriptive line of reasoning. Most pop intellectuals nowadays adopt the former approach, but the truth unfortunately is generally bitter.

Let me admit at the outset that I do understand that race relations are a sensitive issue in the modern world, particularly when millions of skilled and unskilled immigrants from the Third World countries flock to the economically prosperous developed countries every year to find a better future for themselves and their families.

However, instead of bending over backwards and demanding from the natives of their host countries to be more accommodating and totally non-communal, the immigrants need to understand that migration is not the natural order of societies.

In order to elaborate this paradox by way of an analogy, when we uproot a flowering plant from a garden and try to make it grow in a different environment, sometimes the plant blooms in the changed environment but at other times it doesn’t, depending on the adaptability of the plant and the compatibility of the environment. If you want to change the whole environment to suit the needs of that particular uprooted plant, such an unrealistic approach may not be conducive to native flora and fauna of those habitats.

The right way to tackle the immigration problem is to discourage it by reducing the incentive for the prospective immigrants to permanently abandon their homes, families and communities to find a better job in a foreign country and a radically different culture, where they could be materially better off but might find themselves socially isolated and emotionally desolate.

In order to minimize the incentive for immigration, we need to revamp the global economic order which makes the rich nations get richer and the poor poorer. Once the relative imbalance of wealth distribution between the developed and the developing world is narrowed down, then there will be no need for the people of one region and culture to relocate to another, except on a temporary basis for education, traveling and cultural exchange.

Notwithstanding, throughout our anthropological evolution, from our nomado-pastoral, hunting-gathering phase to the golden era of agriculture, the humans have never lived as individuals, but as social groups, clans and tribes. The ‘individual’ is only an artificial modern construct that has been conceived to suit the needs of urbanized, industrial economies.

There are no two views about the fact that individuals must have intellectual autonomy and freedom of investigation and information, but “individualism” as an ideology with complete disregard for the innate social nature of human beings only nurtures lost souls who sometimes find solace in existential acrobatics and sometimes in alcoholism and drug addictions.

More to the point, there is an obvious difference between a Chinese and an American: a Chinese speaks Mandarin while an American speaks English; they don’t understand each other, because they can hardly communicate with one another due to the difference of language.

Now, if the difference amongst people on the basis of language is duly accepted and appreciated with the naked eye, then we should try to understand that under the sociological microscope, the cultural ethos and social values of two or more radically different cultures don’t always blend seamlessly.

Humanism only implies that we should be just and fair in our approach: that we should try to understand that subaltern people and cultures also have their legitimate material, moral and social needs and aspirations; instead of imposing our Orientalist ‘vision’ on them, we should let them choose and facilitate and expedite their choice and vision.

The human mindsets, attitudes and behaviors are structured and conditioned by their respective cultures and environments. A person born and bred in Pakistan or India generally has more in common with the people of the subcontinent.

For instance: when the first generation Indo-Pakistani immigrants relocate to foreign countries, they find it hard to adjust in a radically different culture initially. It would be unwise to generalize, however, because it depends upon the disposition and inclination of immigrants, their level of education and the value system which they have internalized during their formative years.

There are many sub-cultures within cultures and numerous family cultures within those sub-cultures. Educated Indo-Pakistani liberals generally integrate well into the Western societies, but many conservative Pakistani and Indian immigrants, particularly from backward rural areas, find it hard to adjust in a radically different Western culture. On the other hand, such immigrants from underprivileged backgrounds find the conservative societies of the Gulf countries more conducive to their individual and familial integration and well-being.

In any case, the second generation immigrants, who are born and bred in the Western culture, seamlessly blend into their host environments; and they are likely to have more in common with the people and cultures where they have been brought up. Thus, a first generation Pakistani-American is predominantly a Pakistani, while a second generation Pakistani-American is predominantly an American, albeit with an exotic-sounding name and a naturally tanned complexion.

Notwithstanding, the rise of Trump in America, Brexit in the UK and anti-immigration protests all over Europe, North America and Australia are the manifestation of the underlying sentiment against the so-called globalists’ normative approach toward the issue of immigration, which generally goes against the interests of the working classes of developed countries.

Therefore, instead of offering band aid solutions, we need to revise the prevailing global economic order; and formulate prudent and far-reaching economic and trade policies that can reduce the imbalance of wealth distribution between the developed and the developing nations; hence, reducing the incentive for the immigrants to seek employment in developed countries.

Keeping this background of immigration, globalization and consequent identity crises in the modern world in mind, in the Pakistani socio-political milieu there are three important political forces: the dominant Islamic nationalists; the ethno-linguistic nationalists; and the Westernized liberals.

The Islamic nationalists are culturally much closer to the traditionalist, ethno-linguistic nationalists, but politically, the latter have been marginalized in Pakistan’s power structure. And as we know that politics is mostly about forming alliances, therefore the astute liberals wooed the naïve ethno-linguistic nationalists and struck a political alliance with them.

But this alliance is only a marriage of convenience because culturally, both these camps don’t have anything in common with each other. The Islamic nationalists and the ethno-linguistic nationalists belong to the same social stratum and they go through thick and thin together, while the comprador liberals, who are numerically insignificant but politically vocal, derive their inspiration from foreign sources.

Ostensibly, the liberal elites preach minority rights and take a less hostile approach towards the ethnic minorities’ cultures than they take towards the majority’s culture. At times, they are even generous enough to wear a Sindhi ajrak in a social gathering or listen to the folk music, but their purported “indigenousness” never goes beyond cuisines and music.

Pray tell us, which local traditions, customs and values you live by? You live in your quarantined suburbs, study in London and vacation in Hawaii, but when it comes to politics and getting the votes of the masses, you pretend that you are a native?

What do you have in common with the local cultures? You employ a Pathan chowkidar, a Punjabi cook and a Sindhi chauffeur; certainly quite a blend of local cultures you have in your household. So, spare us the lectures on minority rights and cultural diversity and preach the creed that you really believe in: that is, complete Westernization, liberal values and social Darwinism.

Fact of the matter is that liberalism in Islamic societies is only skin deep, it is restricted mostly to the privileged elites. The real flesh and bones of the Islamic societies is comprised of either the Islamic nationalists or the even more backward and traditional ethno-linguistic forces.

The latter’s Westernized leadership may sometimes employ inclusive, Gandhian rhetoric to create a political constituency for itself, but they have as much in common with the native cultures, whether Islamic or ethno-linguistic, as Nehru’s political dynasty has in common with the Indian masses.

Leadership is a two-way street: a judicious leader is supposed to guide the masses, but at the same time he is also supposed to represent the disenfranchised masses; the detached and insular leadership that lives in a fantasy world of outlandish theories and fails to understand the mindsets and inclinations of the masses tends to lose its mass appeal, sooner or later.

How Orientalism pitted Hindus against Muslims in India?

Jinnah and the Mountbattens.

The most outstanding feature of Islam is its history; if you study Islamic history, you would come to realize that Islam did not spread by force alone, it was the superior moral appeal of its peerless ethics that won the hearts and minds of medieval masses. For instance: Mongols conquered most of the eastern lands of the Islamic Empire during the thirteenth century, however, the Muslims of those lands did not convert to the religion of the conquerors: that is, the Mongolian Shamanism. Instead, the conquerors adopted the religion of the vanquished, i.e. Islam. Not only the Mongols, but several Turkish tribes also voluntarily converted to Islam. Such was the beauty of Islamic teachings and its sublime moral appeal in ancient times.

During the medieval times, when Europe was going through an age of intellectual and moral regression, Islamic culture thrived and flourished under the Abbasids, Ottomans and Mughals. Muslims ruled over India for more than six centuries; despite that, at the time of the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, Hindus outnumbered Muslims three to one (there were only 100 million Muslims in the population of 400 million Indians in 1947). That’s how tolerant and inclusive Islamic culture was back then. By comparison, the Red Indians of America and the Aborigines of Australia were reduced to a tiny minority of those continents after the European invasions.

The Sultanate of Delhi and the Mughal Empire were regarded as benevolent rulers by ancient historians. But when India was conquered by the British Empire, their Orientalist historians deliberately propagated the myth of supposedly “savage and rapacious” rule of Muslims in India in order to sow the seeds of dissension between Muslims and Hindus. In the nineteenth century, the newly established British education system in India deliberately portrayed Muslim rulers of India as marauders, rapists and looters in order to malign them. By contrast, the British rule in India was portrayed in a positive light: that the British Empire built roads and railways and established schools, colleges and hospitals in India.

If we were to compare the British and Muslim rules in India, the Muslim rulers at least resided in India and shared their wealth and fortune with their subjects. The British rule, on the other hand, was a foreign rule; the affairs of the state were run by viceroys and governors on the behalf of the monarchs of England who resided thousands of miles away in London. A small number of European colonizers in India treated their subjects as untouchables; they traded raw materials for pennies and sent finished goods back to the Indian market with huge profits, thus enriching themselves and the British Empire.

Up until 1857, the Hindus and Muslims of India were united enough to rise up in arms together against the British colonizers under the nominal command of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. But after that, the British education system introduced by Lord Macaulay in India entrenched communal divisions and made it virtually impossible for Hindus and Muslims to understand each other, even though both religious communities were the victims of exploitation of foreign rule.

Regarding the notion peddled by the Orientalist historians that Muslims or Islam were somehow foreign to India, we need to settle on the definition of nativity first. If an Indian settles in the US, for instance, how would you define such a first generation immigrant? Since he was brought up in India and subsequently migrated to a Western country, therefore such a first generation Indian-American would have more in common with Indians than Americans, as such. But how would you identify the children of an immigrant who have been brought up and educated in the West? The second generation Indian-Americans, for all practical purposes, would be more American than Indian in their outlooks.

Similarly, although I concede that the invading armies of Muslim rulers from Central Asia, Afghanistan and Iran were foreign to India; but once they settled in India, made Delhi their seat of governance, intermarried and gave birth to Indian children, then how come the descendants of such benevolent rulers be labeled as foreign invaders? Excluding a few odd adventurers, like Mahmud of Ghazni, who had his seat of government in Afghanistan but plundered the wealth of India by conducting raids on Somnath, the Muslim rulers of India, particularly the Sultanate of Delhi and the Mughal Empire, were as much native to India as the Hindu and Sikh rajas and maharajas.

Notwithstanding, the only true sociological definition of nation is ethno-linguistic group. The concept of modern nation state, particularly in multiethnic federations like India and Pakistan, is an artificial construct which is predicated on nothing substantive but on myths, fables and symbols. Rather than monolithic communities, the Hindus and Muslims of India were more parochial and tribal in character.

The astute Orientalist historians of British India debunked the myth of six centuries’ old Muslim rule in India by calling them “marauders” and substituted it with the fables of the pre-Christ Maurya Empire in order to forge and reify Hindu identity against Muslims. The primary concern of impoverished Indian masses was to earn bread and butter for their families. The metanarratives of Hindu and Muslim nationalism were taught by the British rulers, Hindu elites and Muslim ashrafiya to their subjects in order to distract and exploit them.

Here, let me clarify that I am not giving a free pass to the Muslim rulers of India. Their rule must have been as tyrannical as any other undemocratic, elitist rule throughout the history has been. I am only contending that the Muslim rulers were deliberately singled out and vilified in order to sow the seeds of dissension between the two communities.

After all, if the British rulers who resided in England and ruled over India can be hailed as saviors who built roads and railways and established schools, colleges and hospitals, not by academics but by common Indian citizens, then why can’t the Sultanate of Delhi and the Mughal Empire that ensured peace and stability in India and built architectural wonders in Delhi, Lahore and Agra be granted a similar level of deference?

By the British divide-and-rule policy in the Indian context, it is generally assumed by Indian historians that the British rulers used the Muslim minority against the Hindu majority by giving the former preferential treatment, separate electorates etc. but the fact is often overlooked that the British imperialists in equal measure used the Hindus against the Muslims by vilifying the latter’s culture, rule and religion.

Moreover, the partition of Bengal on religious lines in 1905 was another classic instance of the British divide-and-rule policy through demographic change. In this case, the British imperialists cleverly partitioned the Hindu-majority Bengal province into the Muslim-majority East Bengal and the Hindu-majority West Bengal. As a consequence, the Hindus felt aggrieved and launched a mass movement against the partition; the Raj obliged the Hindus by accepting their demand of reunifying Bengal in 1911 which created a sense of alienation and deprivation among Muslims.

This time around, however, despite unifying the province along linguistic lines, at the same time the British rulers split up Bihar and Orissa province to the west and Assam province to the east; thus, reducing the initial Hindu majority (pre-1905) that included Bihar, Orissa and Assam, in favor of Muslim majority (post-1911) in the reunified Bengal. Additionally, the British rulers also devised separate electorates for Muslims in 1909; thus, pitting one community against the other which had lived peacefully for centuries before the arrival of British in India.

Finally, rather than cultivating inclusive Indian nationalism that would glorify Hindu, Muslim and Sikh identities and histories in equal measure, the British rulers maliciously nurtured exclusionary Hindu and Muslim nationalism in order to divide the communities and prolong the British rule. As several contemporary Indian historians have contended that Muslim nationalism in India was a reaction to exclusionary Hindu nationalism.

The political leadership of India was the product of British education system that forged artificial identities and entrenched communal divisions, therefore it was not possible for them to rise above their communal prejudices and work for the betterment of all Indians as a nation. This self-serving, divide-and-rule policy by the British rulers and their Hindu, Muslim and Sikh collaborators eventually led to a carnage and mass exodus of people on the eve of independence the likes of which history has seldom witnessed.

European Union as a Counterweight to Russian Influence

Is this not the international politics’ most significant coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that laid the foundations of the European Union was signed in February 1992? The basic purpose of the EU, it appears, has been nothing more than to induce the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering incentives and inducements, particularly in the form of the Schengen Agreement that has allowed the free movement of labor from the impoverished Eastern Europe to the prosperous countries of the Western Europe.

No wonder then, the Western political establishments, and particularly the US, are as freaked out about the outcome of Brexit as they had been during the Ukrainian Crisis in November 2013, when Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and tried to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting a billions of dollars of loan offered by Vladimir Putin to Ukraine.

In this regard, the founding of EU has been similar to the case of Japan in the Far East. After the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of the geographically-adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman Administration had authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and also to send a signal to the leaders of the Soviet Union, which at the time had not developed their nuclear program, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in the Europe.

Then, during the Cold War, the American entrepreneurs invested heavily in Japan’s economy and made it a model industrialized nation to forestall the expansion of communism in the Far East. The revolutionary Marxist manifesto of the communal ownership of the modes of production had such an appeal among the dispossessed masses of Asia, Africa and Latin America that the capitalist “trickle-down” economics was simply not a match for it.

Eventually, the pragmatic Machiavellian strategists of the Western capitalist bloc had to invent democracy as a ground for intervention in order to offset the moral superiority and mass appeal of the communist bloc.

Notwithstanding, there is an essential precondition in the European Union’s charter of union according to which the developing economies of Europe that joined the EU allowed the free movement of goods (free trade) only on the reciprocal condition that the developed countries would allow the free movement of labor.

What’s obvious in this stipulation is the fact that the free movement of goods, services and capital only benefits the countries that have a strong manufacturing base; and the free movement of workers only favors the developing economies where labor is cheap.

Now, when the international financial institutions, like the IMF and WTO, promote free trade by exhorting the developing countries all over the world to reduce tariffs and subsidies without the reciprocal free movement of labor, whose interests do such institutions try to protect? Obviously, they try to protect the interests of their biggest donors by shares, i.e. the developed countries.

Some market fundamentalists who irrationally believe in the laissez-faire capitalism try to justify this unfair practice by positing Schumpeter’s theory of “Creative destruction:” that the free trade between unequal trading partners leads to the destruction of the host country’s existing economic order and a subsequent reconfiguration gives birth to a better economic order.

Whenever one comes up with gross absurdities such proportions, they should always make it contingent upon the principle of reciprocity: that is, if free trade is beneficial for the nascent industrial base of the developing economies then the free movement of labor is equally beneficial for the workforce of the developed countries.

The policymakers of the developing countries must not allow themselves to be hoodwinked by such deceptive arguments, instead they should devise national policies which suit the interests of their underprivileged masses. But the trouble is that the governments of the Third World countries are dependent on foreign investment, that’s why they cannot adopt an independent economic and trade policy.

The so-called “multinational” corporations based in the Western financial districts make profits from the consumer markets all over the world and pay a share of those profits to their respective governments as bribes in the form of taxes. Every balance of trade deficit due to the lack of strong manufacturing base makes the developing nations poorer, and every balance of trade surplus further adds to the already immense fortune of the developed world.

A single large multinational corporation earns more revenue annually than the total GDP of many developing nations. Without this neocolonial system of exploitation the whole edifice of supposedly “meritocratic” capitalism will fall flat on its face and the myth of individual incentive would get busted beyond repair, because it only means incentive for the pike and not for the minnows.

Notwithstanding, while joining the EU, Britain compromised on the rights of its working class in order to protect the interests of its bankers and industrialists, because free trade with the rest of the EU countries spurred British exports.

I am of the opinion that the British working classes overwhelmingly voted in the favor of Brexit, because after Britain’s entry into the EU and when the Schengen Agreement on abolishing the internal border checks between the EU member states became effective in 1995, the cheaper labor force from the Eastern and Central Europe flooded the markets of Western Europe; and consequently the wages of indigenous British labor force dropped and it also became difficult for them to find jobs because the foreigners were willing to do the same job for lesser pay.

Hence raising the level of unemployment among the British workers and consequent discontentment with the EU. The subsequent lifting of restrictions on the Romanians and Bulgarians to work in the UK in January 2014 further exacerbated the problem.

The biggest incentive for the British working class to vote for Brexit is that the East European workers will have to leave Britain after its exit from the EU, and the jobs will once again become available with better wages to the indigenous workforce.

Although the champions of globalization and neoliberalism all over the world are bemoaning the fate of the EU after Brexit, but the recent success of right-wingers all over the world: like the rise of Trump in America, the Brexit referendum in the UK, the success of Modi and his hardline BJP in India, the emergence of Buddhist extremists in Sri Lanka and Myanmar and the ascendancy of Islamic hardliners in the Muslim-majority countries, all of these are not the success of conservatism, as such. Conservatism is an outdated political creed which is simply not a match for the more refined liberal worldview.

The aforementioned reactionary anomalies signify only one thing: the failure of neoliberalism as a political and economic ideology. Social liberalism of ‘60s and ‘70s used to be an inclusive and egalitarian philosophy while neoliberalism, ‘90s-onward, with its exclusive emphasis on economic growth and elitist values, and without any regard for social justice and class equality, is losing its appeal among the masses all over the world.

In fact, politics has become such a comic business after the onset of neoliberalism and the so-called “globalism” that actual comedians, like Jimmy Morales, have won a resounding victory in the Guatemalan elections last year; similarly, the Italian comedian, Beppe Grillo’s, “Five Star movement” has also secured more than 100 deputies in the last Italian elections; and the biggest tragicomic of them all, Donald Trump, too, has been elected as the president of the US.

Notwithstanding, although the EU's labor provisions ensure adequate wages and safeguard the rights of workers, but the British working class chose to quit the EU on the basis of demand and supply of labor. With East European workers out of the country, the supply of labor will reduce hence increasing the demand. The native British workforce can then renegotiate better terms and conditions from the owners of industries and businesses, and it will also ensure ready availability of jobs.

Regardless, instead of lamenting the abysmal failure of globalization and neoliberal economic policies, we need to ask a simple question that why do workers choose to leave their homes and hearths, and family and friends in their native countries and choose to work in a foreign country? They obviously do it for better wages.

In that case, however, instead of offering band aid solutions, we need to revise the prevailing global economic order; and formulate prudent and far-reaching economic and trade policies that can reduce the imbalance of wealth distribution between the prosperous and impoverished nations; hence, reducing the incentive for immigrant workers to seek employment in the developed countries.

Free movement of workers only benefits a small number of individuals and families, because the majority of workforce is left behind to rot in their native developing countries where economy is not doing as well as in the developed world, thanks to the neoliberal economic policies. A comprehensive reform of the global economic and trade policies, on the other hand, will benefit everyone, except the bankers, industrialists and the beneficiaries of the existing neoliberal world order.

More to the point, the promotion of free trade by the mainstream neoliberal media has been the norm in the last several decades, but the implementation of the Schengen Agreement in March 1995 that allowed the free movement of people between the EU member states has been an unprecedented exception.

Free trade benefits the industrialized nations of the EU, particularly Germany and to some extent the rest of the developed economies of the Western Europe; but the free movement of labor benefits the cheaper workforce of the impoverished Eastern and Central Europe.

The developed economies of the Western Europe would never have acceded to the condition of the free movement of labor that goes against their economic interests; but the political establishment of the US, which is the hub of corporate power and wields enormous influence in the Western capitalist bloc, must have persuaded the unwilling states of the Western Europe to yield to the condition in order to wean away the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe from the Russian influence.

Had there been any merit to the founding of the EU, the Western Europe would have promptly accepted Turkey’s request to join the EU. But they kept delaying the issue of Turkish membership in the EU for decades, because with a population of 78 million, Turkey is one of the most populous countries in Eurasia. Millions of Turks working in Germany have already become a burden on the welfare economy of their host country. Turkey’s accession to the EU will further open the floodgates of immigrant workers seeking employment in the Western Europe.

Moreover, Turkey is already a member of the NATO and a longstanding and reliable partner of the Western powers; while the limited offer to join the EU, as I have already mentioned, serves as an inducement to the formerly communist states of the Eastern and Central Europe to forswear their allegiance to Russia and to become the strategic allies of the Western powers.

Thus, all the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and the equality of opportunity aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the Western military alliance against the erstwhile Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to punish the adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policy as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.