India-Pak Nobel: Damn we got hyphenated again

Pipe down and smoke the peace pipe. That seems to be the clear message that the Nobel Peace Prize committee has sent out to India and Pakistan by giving away the Nobel Peace Prize to India’s Kailash Satyarthi of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan and Pakistan’s Malala Yousafzai who survived a gunshot to her face and became a representative of gender rights and by extension peace. With extensive shelling along the border by the two countries leaving villagers homeless on both sides, India and Pakistan are staring at each other in one long, cold stare that could go either way.

The Nobel Peace Prize is yet another knot that will keep India and Pakistan connected like the age-old hyphen that irritates hawks on both sides. Why do we still have to be compared to India feel the hawks in Pakistan, while in India the partition left a deep, living wound that throbs whenever border skirmishes heighten or on the cricket field where sport substitutes war and its costs in life and material, the loss of territory in 1947 still rankles and is kept in living memory by the invocation to unite Akhand Bharat.

Malala Yousufzai’s winning the Nobel is something the Pakistani establishment cannot digest easily.

While ordinary Pakistanis suffer the Kalashnikovs and other sundry firearms of the militant jihadist even with death and loss of limb, Malala became a cause celebre for reasons best known to a few.

Pakistan has an unfortunate history with Nobel winners. It’s first Nobel winner, the physicist Dr Abdus Salam, got the prize in 1979, in a country that was fast shedding any pretension of secularism expounded on by its Quaid-e-Azam as it embraced the other half of its identity of being the first Islamic republic under General Zia.

An Ahmadiyya, Dr Salam left the country after its parliament, the National Assembly, declared Ahmadi Muslims non-Muslims in 1974. But he didn’t snap ties with Pakistan, after his death in 1996 he was buried in Rabwah, Punjab. The epitaph on Salam’s tomb read “First Muslim Nobel Laureate” but the word “Muslim” was defaced after a local court enforced the 1974 law.

Pakistan’s acceptance of Malala is again caught in a bind: as many Pakistanis ask, what has she done exactly? She survived a fatal attack, we survive them too, will we all get Nobels for surviving Pakistan?

Every Indian should also get the Nobel, maybe in a new category. Child labour and child slavery is an everyday phenomenon in this country. Many families employ underage children in kitchens in the cities.

The wisdom, they offer, is that he/she is earning a living at least. The grim Indian reality is that many Indians are desensitised to poverty and its sub-products like child slavery. But they will tweet and shout from the rooftops, like after every victory against Pakistan as if they scored the match-winning knock, their support for a campaigner against child trafficking and child slavery.

Kailash Satyarthi had less than a 100 followers on Twitter before the announcement, now the floodgates are open, every Ramesh, Lokesh and Honey wants to follow him now. Will it trickle down into every Indian that child labour is a heinous crime after Satyarthi’s Nobel? Will child labour be something every Indian will speak against? The neon-glow of an India Shining hides many freckles and moles. Maybe we should look at the moles as we hail putative victories in Madison Square Garden.