by JAWED NAQVI
What if? History students often ask the counterfactual question, which actually can be of interest to anyone of us for a range of excellent and ordinary reasons.
Had the horse not been domesticated what would have become of Genghis Khan’s ambition to conquer the world? Had China not discovered gunpowder, how would Indians celebrate Diwali? And what would Iran and Iraq have used to wreck each other for eight years without a break? Had the gunpowder not been discovered in China, American Democrats and Republicans would have one agenda less to quarrel over — the gun laws.
Ergo, next time someone blames Xi Jinping for exporting a pandemic to their country, they should go back to tackle a far more fateful event that occurred in mediaeval China.
In a similar vein, the discovery of the wheel produced the chariot, which created empires. The building of ocean-friendly ships turned England, hitherto an isolated speck on the western fringes of the happening world, into the most strategic hub between Europe and America. This prowess in turn handed it an empire on which the sun never set.
There are pivotal moments too in history — “tide in the affairs of men”, Brutus called them in a Shakespeare play — which if lost could lead to untold buffeting and miseries.
Jaswant Singh, India’s former foreign minister, who died on Monday after six years in a coma from a fall at his home, was carrying a history-making sheaf of typed papers in his briefcase on July 16, 2001, in Agra, papers of immeasurable importance to the future history of South Asia.
So powerful were the contents in Jaswant Singh’s draft he had agreed with his Pakistan counterpart that it had the potential to forestall any future war between India and Pakistan. Singh’s far right colleague and home minister L.K. Advani torpedoed the draft pact moments before Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf were to accept it.
The sabotaged Agra summit could have saved India and Pakistan an endless need to procure military hardware at prohibitive costs to their poverty-stricken masses. Had history not played truant that day in Agra, there would be a hoard of money available for healthcare and education for both countries — saved from scandal-tainted Rafale jets in India, for example — which in turn would have enabled both to better fight the coronavirus menace, and perhaps even spare precious resources for the less endowed neighbours.
The French Rafales were meant to deal with the military contingency in Ladakh with China, one might argue. Yes and no. Jaswant Singh’s peace deal carried the power, in fact, to vacate the need for even India and China to think of war or to send hapless men to inhospitable climes for guarding their ill-defined frontiers. There would be perhaps no deaths from frostbite or avalanches in Siachen either. There would be no need to interdict the Karakoram Highway.
There is a humanitarian catastrophe brewing in Jammu and Kashmir. An Agra pact would have made unnecessary the perverse annexation of Jammu and Kashmir last year. True, there were howls of protest from right-wing nationalists when Jaswant Singh proposed in a subsequent TV interview that India could accept the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir as a hard border and thus end a core dispute with Pakistan.
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