Thursday, May 14, 2015

Sloganeering - 10

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The bloody nose that the Chinese gave us in 1962 was nothing compared to the ignominy they dumped on us by offering a:

"unilateral ceasefire"

which we accepted gladly. 


This was like spitting on the face of a man whose nose you rubbed on the ground. It was a shame we all felt in our teens (I was 19) that rankles even today when our neta is preparing to travel to China to mend the fences, among other things. Ha!

This slogan of a "unilateral ceasefire" so bewitched us that we ourselves dumped it on our western neighbor less than a decade later and crowed.

Nehru, being a fond devotee of Russia then, sought her help in combating China. And the Russians politely smiled saying:

"India is our friend while China is our brother"

meaning:

"Blood is thicker than water"

After Nehru died in 1964, his mantle ultimately fell on a diminutive gent who was as tough as steel otherwise. His name was Lal Bahadur Shastri (no relative of mine).

Before he could recover from his sudden uplift, Pakistan thought the time was ripe for them to recover Kashmir by either bullying or fighting, when India was still licking her China wounds...

"Kick a fallen man"

They remembered the slogan of their progenitors:

"Laughing we got Pakistan, fighting we will get Hindustan!"

Well, it ultimately turned out to be no laughing matter for what was once Pakistan and now got trimmed to (West) Pakistan...today there is a news item that 47 of our innocent Muslim brethren were slaughtered by even more zealous Muslim brethren in a bus in Karachi which happens to be the birthplace of their hated BJP stalwart who paid the price for it later. This is apart from their favorite pastime of shooting down hundreds of their own school kids and downing sundry helicopters thinking that their neta is traveling in them, only to find to their merriment that a mere half a dozen foreign ambassadors died collaterally.

In the 1965 that I was talking about, Pakistan (the whole then, not the leftover) was under the benign military boots of one Marshal Ayub Khan who invented the lovely slogan:

"Guided Democracy"

meaning that our is a misguided one. 

Pakistan forever has been, willy-nilly, a guided democracy under the guidance of their guardian angels in uniform.

 


But Jinnah had never dreamt of Controlled and Guided Democracy by Military Dictator as well as he never dreamt of that a Military Dictator would be addressing a forum founded by a Lawyer of Impeccable Character i.e. Mohammad Ali Jinnah.

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