Pakistan is India's enemy: Their cricketers and artists must be too

Let's not yoke the issue of the Ghulam Ali concert in Delhi to the outrage over the ongoing saffronisation of our public institutions or to the nationwide deterioration of civil liberties and the rule of law.

Let's also disregard fringe politicians like Shiv Sena's Uddhav Thackeray (he opposed the concert in Mumbai) and CMs beleaguered over other issues like Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee (they offered alternative venues) who seek to score short-term brownie points. The issue is an old one, and needs to be addressed as a problem of international relations.

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Patronage

Apart from economic sanctions against an enemy country, depriving its nationals of benefits and privileges ordinarily available to other foreigners falls well within a nation's sovereign rights. So does the right of reciprocal action. A time-honoured principle of diplomacy, it's a perfectly legitimate instrument of state policy. India therefore is well within its rights to restrict in its territory the performances of artistes who are citizens of any nation-state that has historically restricted similar concerts by Indian artistes within its borders.

Compare the lavish patronage a legion of Pakistani singers continue to receive here, particularly since the post-Emergency Janata government opened our borders to facilitate India-Pakistan cultural contacts, with the abysmally fewer times a handful of Indian artistes - Talat Mahmood and Jagjit-Chitra Singh come to mind - have performed publicly at a Pakistani venue.

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Ever heard of a Lata Mangeshkar concert in Lahore or Islamabad or anywhere in Pakistan? The last time a notable Indian singer went there for a public concert in 2004, he narrowly escaped getting blown off by a car bomb near the Karachi concert hall. On his return, Sonu Nigam compared the fiery welcome he got with the benefits Pakistani musicians enjoy in India. He revealed a "secret" well known in music circles: Pakistanis get paid in cash whenever they perform in India - even at government-organised events! It's not simply a matter of religion. From its very inception, Pakistan never took kindly to Muslim musicians from India - even if they were keen to immigrate. It apparently mattered little to its philistine military regimes that those greats, after settling down and accepting Pakistani nationality, would contribute to their people's cultural upliftment and to their nation's image in the world of performing arts. Rajasthan-born ghazal maestro Mehdi Hassan was the rule-proving exception. Even he, with all his talent, bore the derogatory tag of "muhajir" (a lowly immigrant from India) during his early career when he worked as an automobile mechanic in Pakistani Punjab's Sahiwal district to make ends meet.

The tale of legendary classical singers - Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan (no relation of Ghulam Ali) and Roshanara Begum - is telling. The Ustad fled back to India comparing Pakistan to hell, while the Begum stayed on (for reasons best known to her) to die in near-penury in 1982. The virtuoso sitarist Rais Khan tried his luck there after marrying a Pakistani lady. When last heard of, he had returned to regale fawning audiences and to promote his sitarist son.

Inequity

One could have condoned this jaw-dropping inequity and welcomed Pakistani artists had they stood up to their government's anti-India policies and demanded that their Indian counterparts should have equal access to Pakistani audiences. But that has never happened. Let alone a collective effort, there's never been a squeak of protest from any Pakistani artiste in this regard. They have luxuriated - financially and otherwise - in what frankly amounts to cross-border parasitism. Even poet-activists Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Ahmed Faraz, who dissented against the suppression of fundamental rights by Pakistan's military junta, failed to include the discrimination against visiting Indian musicians and performers in their protest agenda.

Pro-Pakistan lobbyists shout hoarse that Pakistani musicians and sportsmen do not necessarily share their government's bias against Indians and that barring them from performing in India would be detrimental to their careers. They preach that we shouldn't mix politics with sports and entertainment. Go tell that to the athletes and sportsmen from 65-plus countries who missed out on their career-enhancing medals because of the US government-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. And to those from the Soviet Union and its allies who were similarly victimised when their governments did a ditto for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.

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Retaliation

Tell that to South Africa's athletes - and to its gifted cricketers like Barry Richards and Graeme Pollock - who suffered the brunt of their government's apartheid-ridden policies. In fact, tell that to the world at large which rallied against the inclusion of racist South Africa in the comity of nations, effectively endorsing the diminution of so many brilliant careers. Is the discrimination by a regime against its own citizens on the basis of skin colour any more heinous than the remote-controlled genocidal murder of literally hundreds of innocent citizens of another country by the so-called "non-state" functionaries of a government?

If disallowing Pakistani musicians to further their careers in India seems like retaliation against guiltless citizens of a rogue-state, so be it. Nations routinely - and invariably - exercise the right of reciprocity when it comes to declaring diplomats persona non grata and enforcing tit-for-tat expulsions against one another. Was the American diplomat we threw out in response to the US government's expulsion of Devyani Khobragade guilty of anything other than possessing a US passport and representing that country? Nobody called that move churlish, right?

It's time we began leveraging "soft power" (the ability of a nation to persuade another through non-military - ie economic and cultural - means) to get our artistes and musicians a fair deal. It could well mean a small but significant step toward shedding the "soft state" label we've earned with our spineless response to the outrageous acts of our western neighbour.

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