Man who took on God & Gandhi dead – ToI -17.12.11

Hitchens Also Flayed Pakistan, Teresa

    One of the world’s finest public intellectuals and polemicists, a thoughtful and fearless friend of India who profoundly understood its evolution and role in a complex geo-political world, passed away on Thursday in Houston. He is being mourned by his legion of fans and peers that included writers, scholars, and politicians, many of whom he befriended and offended. 
    Christopher Hitchens was one of a kind, a master of the rhetorical flourish and verbal joust, whose fondness for thrust and parry (and cigarettes and alcohol) made light of his deep learning andscholarship on staggering range of topics. In a writerly career that lasted some four decades, Hitchens, who was 62, excoriated public figures ranging from Mahatma Gandhi to Mother Teresa to Henry Kissinger to Princess Diana to GeneralMusharraf, ripping the hypocrisy and cant that accompanied their posturing and image. 
    An unapologetically heavy smoker and capacious drinker, Hitchens died of oesophagal cancer, which was detected in 2010 when he was on a book tour to promote his memoir Hitch-22. It was the latest tour-de-force in a brilliant career that really grew after he conceived The Missionary Position, a scathing attack on Mother Teresa, whom he denounced as a “fraud”, and her Missionaries of Charity, which he regarded as a cult. He burnished his reputation for controversy with ‘In The Trial of Henry Kissinger’, in which he accused the former secretary of state of “war crimes”, and argued that he should be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity”. 
    He didn’t spare Mahatma Gandhi too, saying “Gandhi cannot escape culpability for being the only major preacher of appeasement who never changed his mind.” Hitchens’s rant on Pak rocked Washington 
    It was his scathing takedown of Islamic Republic of Pakistan and its terrorism-supporting military, particularly after the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden (at which point he knew he was dying of cancer) that rocked Washington, whose panjandrums had long coddled what Christopher Hitchens regarded as a venal and “shameless” artificial state. 
    In an essay in Vanity Fair, he berated the US administration for its Pakistan policy, maintaining that “the two main symbols of Pakistan’s pride — its army and nuclear programme — are wholly parasitic on American indulgence and patronage”, and explaining to “big, rich dumb Americans” that the army and nukes from that “degraded” country are intended to be reserved for war against the neighboring democracy of India, of which he was an unabashed admirer. 
    In one of the most passionate pleas to the US for a policy shift in the region (echoes of which are now reverberating in Washington), Hitchens wrote: “If we ever ceased to swallow our pride, so I am incessantly told in Washington, then the Pakistani oligarchy might behave even more abysmally than it already does, and the situation deteriorate even further. This stale and superficial argument ignores the awful historical fact that, each time the Pakistani leadership did get worse, or behave worse, it was handsomely rewarded by the United States.” 
    He then went on to needle a capital that lives on conformist wisdom: “We have been the enablers of every stage of that wretched state’s counter-evolution, to the point where it is a serious regional menace and an undisguised ally of our worst enemy, as well as the sworn enemy of some of our best allies. How could it be “worse” if we shifted our alliance and instead embraced India, our only rival in scale as a multiethnic and multi-religious democracy, and a nation that contains nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan?” 
    It wasn’t the first time Hitchens explained to “dumb” Americans the distinction between a liberal, multi-ethnic, multi-religious parliamentary democracy and an artificial theocratic state born of “manipulation and middleman tactics” and confected from an alphabet soup (he mockingly called Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan “Akpistan” and its border with Kashmir “Kapistan”). He was at his dazzling best after the 26/11 Pakistani attacks on Bombay (he disliked “Mumbai”) informing his readers of the energy and vitality of a city that was home to Portuguesespeaking Catholic Goans to the Zoroastrian Parsis to Baghdadi Jews. 
    “This comity and integration is one of the many targets of the suicide killers, and it is another reason why firm, warm solidarity with India is the most pressing need of the present hour,” he argued. “The people of India need to hear this from us, as do the enemies of India, who are our sworn enemies, too,” he pleaded. It was an entreaty that the White House, for once, heeded.