We can’t say that all of us were grieved by the fact that pneumonic plague was killing the poor in India. Glee quivered under the mast of false concern. We counted all the ways the rascally government of India was embarrassed by the outbreak of a disease long conquered by civilisation. We took in the sight of Hindus appearing on Doordarshan, apologising for the outbreak and trying to play it down. We were not the only ones; most of India’s neighbours went through the same not-so-noble experience. We forgot that there were Muslims living in India and that most of them were poor enough to be the targets of the epidemic.
The BJP in New Delhi said the plague was somehow spread by Pakistan’s rascally ISI. The party thought the idea would go down well with the stricken masses: the ISI that has been engaged in sabotage in Bombay and terrorism in Kashmir has finally restarted to chemical warfare they said, putting the plague bacteria in bombs and letting them off in Surat. No one in the world bought this; but the Indian government didn’t treat the stranded Pakistanis too well after the outbreak, perhaps unconsciously equating them with ISI operatives come to destroy India.
The fact is that the outbreak in India was caused by squalor born of poverty. As a rule, South Asian cities clean up only half of their refuse, the other half lies around in heaps and disappears into the air. This is what happens in Delhi; this is what happens in Karachi and Lahore. Sanitary conditions in the fast-growing cities are pathetic and the poor have to live surrounded by rubbish heaps. There was a time we used to go to India and come back preening ourselves over the fact that we were less poor. But this ‘poverty-gap’ has been filling up. Now plague can strike us too because we have the same kind of rats. Hence, the feverish cleaning up in the rubbish-laden cities of the motherland.
But Ms Bhutto caught the other side of the story, the allegorical side. She said India had a large standing army, had an arsenal bursting at the seams and bombs to throw with the help of long-distance missiles, but it was vulnerable to the aggression of plague. Some clerics add that India was being punished for the Hindu cruelty against the Muslims of Kashmir. Plague has been inducted into the equation of national security on both sides.
It is not a natural calamity targetting both India and Pakistan, but a ‘weapon’. BJP saw it as Pakistan’s ‘weapon’; we have tacitly agreed that it is so as we frantically clean up our cities. We have a dim memory of how these SAARC-type calamities can be embarrassingly supranational. Not long ago tree-cutting in the catchment areas in India caused flooding in Pakistan. We couldn’t secure ourselves against this ‘weapon’ because we didn’t talk to the enemy. The only time we talk is when one of us is holding military exercises close to the other’s border. When the locust attacked Pakistan, were happy it didn’t fly North but when to India from Sindh. SAARC may envisage all sorts of cooperation to forewarn about calamities and permit joint action to prevent them, but SAARC doesn’t know that these are in fact the weapons of our mind.
This is symptomatic of the growth of the national security state in South Asia. We raised armies, then we sought alliances outside the subcontinent, and then we went to war. We have thought strategy most of the years that the rest of the world has taken to start thinking of the economy. We have deprived the masses of a minimal living standard, allowed poverty to become criminalised, and suffered cruel internal rifts so that we could raise large armies to ‘secure’ ourselves.
Elsewhere in the world when the economy buckles under ‘strategy’, governments scrap their arsenals; in South Asia, you can’t even talk of a marginal reduction in defence budgets in the fact of mass homelessness and starvation. The ‘security’ of one is the ‘insecurity’ of the other. Outsiders say the only way India feels secure is when its neighbours are insecure. It cannot undertake normalisation of relations with them because that will take sorting out some of the running disputes; and if you don’t have disputes, your neighbours are secure, and that gives rise to insecurity.
The plague is a symbol of something quite different. It is a reminder that the world no longer agrees with the insights on which we have based our lives. The world doesn’t believe our pledges of progress and development; it is convinced that we will probably stage another war which might go nuclear. It fears that the population in South Asia will soon outstrip the region’s ability to grow food. Even if India and Pakistan continue to rattle their sabres, they have no real wars to win except their internal ones against poverty and destruction of environment. The plague may not have crossed the border this time, but it does indicate that we may perish without getting strong enough to settle our mutual scores.