WHY WE ARE NO LONGER AFRAID OF THE AFGHANS!

By   ARVIND BANAVALIKER

(It seems incredible that only upto about 200 years ago, horsemen and                                                                                marauders from Afghanistan and Persia regularly lorded it over India)

RECENT EVENTS in Andijan in the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan where the government had to suppress public protests against the jailing of a few business people set me thinking about that country. Babar, founder of the Moghul empire, was from the Ferghana Valley of Uzbekistan. He belonged to a family with Timur Lang on his father’s side and the even more famous Mongol, Genghis Khan, on his mother’s side. By now the word “Mongol” had come to mean “barbarian”. In contrast, Timur Lang’s descendants had created “highly cultured courts” in Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Babar would, therefore, have been disappointed with the name given by history to the Moghul empire, the word “Moghul” being an adaptation of the Persian word “mughul” for Mongol. On the other hand, he would have been enormously proud of the glorious achievements of this empire in India during the two hundred years which spanned the rule of the first six emperors.

Yet it seems incredible that for nearly one thousand years and right up to only about two hundred years ago, horsemen and marauders from Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Iran should have repeatedly crossed over and lorded it over India. Timur Lang was from Central Asia, Mahmud of Ghor, Mahmud of Ghazni, the kings of the Slave Dynasty, the Lodi kings, Sher Shah Sur, Ahmed Shah Abdali and even Ghulam Qadir were all from Afghanistan. Nadir Shah was from Persia.

Initially, even the British were not feared as much as the Afghans. The British empire in India is said to have begun with the defeat of Siraj ud Daulah by Robert Clive at Plassey in 1757.  “yet the best troops of the Nawab were not at all present at the battle scene. They were deployed on the Bihar frontier to meet a possible attack of the Afghan invader, Ahmed Shah Durrani (Abdali) who had sacked Delhi, Agra and Mathura and had proclaimed himself emperor and shahanshah of India. Apparently, Siraj ud Daulah considered the Afghan threat more dangerous than the British one and it is only with the benefit of hindsight (that) we may judge him wrong.” (Warfare and Weaponry in South Asia, 1000-1800) Today, with a resurgent India, with a million strong army, a modern navy and a confident air force, is it even conceivable? Why? What’s the difference? Why did India develop the way it did and Afghanistan not so?  The presence of the British for two hundred years of course had something to do with it. But the British have been gone for sixty years and at the time of leaving, some of even their statesmen thought that we were led by “men of straw” and that the nation would not endure. However, what the British did leave behind were the ideas of a modern nation and the tools and institutions with which to build it and to consolidate it. And this is what, despite many setbacks and much confusion, we have been busy doing. Unlike Afghanistan which unfortunately still remains a feudal, medieval, pre-industrial culture, we just happen to be going in the right direction. It must lead inevitably to India becoming, some day, a great economic and political superpower.

And Afghanistan? Nowadays, tragically, more associated with the Taliban and Al Qaida, it desperately needs to change. Whether feudalism or terrorism, serious course corrections are called for in that country and others like it. There isn’t any other way. To eliminate poverty, to become a modern, developed nation, you have to build on a platform of modern science and technology – not merely the apparatus but especially the thinking that goes with it.

(The above article is a slightly edited version by the author of an earlier article by him appearing in a Mumbai magazine)