Hug them to know them

It is universally acknowledged that attacks on the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon or infiltration by Pakistanis into Kargil were on account of a colossal intelligence failure. A hard look at the two events would confirm that intelligence failure was not because of a lapse in an otherwise secure system: the system itself was structurally flawed. The surprise is, it was not ripped open earlier.
In the early 70s, when the Al Fatah were operating against Israel, I visited Damascus, which offered easy access to the area past Mount Hermon. In those days Damascus had two decent hotels: Semeramis and Omayyad. I stayed at the latter because, as a Muslim, the name had a certain historical echo for me.

Since I understood little Arabic, evenings began to hang heavy until something strange happened. From the direction of the bar came sounds of animated conversation in Hindustani. I got into my suit and reached the bar and introduced myself, spelling out my name loud and clear. I was received with warmth by Zahid, Musheer and Hashim.

They were pilots from the Pakistan Air Force training their Syrian counterparts. They kept me in stitches with stories of Syrians, Palestinians, Israelis, their strengths and weaknesses in flying and, of course, the relative promiscuity of women in the region.

A very pleasant evening, it was decided, should be followed up with dinner at the next hotel, Semiramis. We would retire to our respective rooms, shower, meet in the lobby at 9 p.m. and walk across to the Semiramis grill. Just then Zahid asked me quite innocently: “By the way you haven’t told us where you live in Pakistan”. I summoned up every ounce of histrionic ability not to give away anything by the changing shades on my face. “I live in New Delhi” I said. The next question was inevitable. “What do you do for a living?”

“I am a journalist”.

The three of them suddenly straightened themselves and stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, like in an airforce drill. They looked at each other, then dropped their jaws as if in a choreographed act. They about-turned, and walked up the banister presumably to their rooms. A budding friendship had been nipped. What is the moral of the story?

Wait a moment. The second story, nearer home will amplify what has been my conviction for years.

During the horrible communal situation generated by the Ramjanambhoomi agitation, a story was floated that doctors at the Aligarh Muslim University medical college were murdering the seriously injured Hindu patients who had escaped fierce rioting in the city. When I turned up for the story, I found reporters seated on chairs outside the campus around the BJP MLA who was providing graphic accounts of brutalities in the medical college. “Should we not go inside and find out?” “How do we go inside?”, one of them murmured.

He was white as a sheet. News stories had conjured up images in his mind of doctors turned butchers in a moment of communal frenzy.

I walked towards the medical college. Doctors were in tears. They were treating patients round the clock and were naturally pained by the canard being spread. Worse, reporters were not even asking them for their version.

Taking heart from me, a TV producer Prashun Bhaumik also walked in followed by a distant shadowy figure we could not identify. Once near the medical college, the shadowy figure caught up with Prashun and requested him to step aside in the shade of a nearby neem tree. He asked Prashun for details of what he had seen and took down copious notes at dictation speed. Lucknow would require his intelligence report that afternoon. A Hindu police officer, watching Prashun enter the campus had followed him. Even if he had disguised his name, his non-Urdu accent would have given him away. The remarkable fact of course is that these currents and crosscurrents were going on inside his mind. The doctors were aching to talk to anybody who would help them nail the lie.

In the first instance, at Damascus, supposing I had not been a journalist but an intelligence agent, with aliases, just imagine how far I might have penetrated the airforce story in the region just before the 1973 war. I doubt if the Pakistani officers would have let down their guard so easily in the presence of an Ashok or a Vinod.

The case of Aligarh amplifies that intelligence gathering instruments controlled by one group of people in a situation of sectarian strife, apartheid of the mind, is going to be totally ineffective.

What am I trying to recommend? Hire mercenaries from the other community? Can mercenaries be relied upon when the issue at stake is the security of the state? The answer must be a resounding no. A country with 150 million Muslims lives perilously if this large segment (hardly a minority) is not slowly and deliberately co-opted into all our activities.

On September 11 the world changed. Let this not register with us as passing rhetoric. We must shuffle ourselves out of the coils of communalism and sectarianism. We must hug those people close to our bosom whom we have not hugged for a long while.

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