Pakistan playing dirty with India is an everyday fact of life. Not a day passes when the rulers, the media and vast sections of the civil society of that benighted land do not come together to sing a chorus against India, with or without any provocation from India. Unexpected disasters, not attributable to rivalry between the two neighbours, make no difference to their compulsive desire to snipe at India.

This Pakistani instinct is clear from the reaction to the Indian offer of $5 million aid.  The civilian rulers in Pakistan sat over the offer for a week, presumably fearful that its acceptance might not go down well with the real rulers, the military-ISI set up. The acceptance was reluctantly announced after the US had a word with the loquacious foreign minister, when he travelled to Washington to plead for aid.

Here are some of the views of a section of Pakistanis, who influence and mould views of their policy-makers, as reported in the western media, particularly the government-backed Voice of America. A professor at an Islamabad university who is said to be an expert on international relations, Ishtiaq Ahmad, said the Indians were forced to offer some aid to Pakistan because they did not want to be left out ‘when the whole world is out there.’

Pakistan had become the focus of world aid and this presented a dilemma to the Indians. Even impoverished and war-ravaged Afghanistan had offered $ 1million.  ‘They (Indians) would have been the odd man out in a situation where everyone is coming,’ declared the learned Pakistani.

Another luminary from the Pakistani academia, Rifat Hussain, from the Islamabad University’s department of peace and conflict management, said, ‘It (the Indian aid offer) is a drop in the ocean, not even in the bucket’. He was obviously angry at his government’s acceptance of the Indian aid recalling that it had rejected the Indian offer after the devastating earthquake in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir in 2005. The reason was that the Indian aid would have come in Indian helicopters flown by Indians. Some ground for rejection!

The Professor dutifully proceeded with a sharper attack on India by saying that India had rejected the Pakistani offer when Gujarat was hit by an earthquake nearly a decade ago. The man was speaking like a True Blue Pakistani: India had not rejected the Pakistani offer.

Another Pakistani ‘analyst’, this one from Lahore, with the name of Rasool Baksh Rais, was plainly unhappy because the quantity of Indian offer had ‘added insult to injury’. To him it meant that ‘you are acting like a regional hegemony and look at the growth of your economy.’ Clearly, his angst would have been less if India had set aside a sizeable portion of its GDP for helping Pakistan regularly, nearly the same proportion that Pakistan spends on its military. Floods, earthquakes and grinding poverty in the land of the pure make no difference to this Pakistani spending.

This ‘Rais’ (rich) is absolutely rich in imagination and optimism. His suggestion was that there was no need to accept aid from India (and perhaps other countries viewed as unfriendly) because enough resources can be mobilised within the country!

The severest criticism of not only India but also the Pakistan government for accepting the Indian offer came from the presiding deity of India-baiters among the Pakistani editors, a lady who in her previous role had presided over a ‘think tank’ that specialised in fuelling the Pakistani paranoia about India. It was nothing less than a ‘shame’ for Pakistan to have touched the filthy Indian lucre under pressure from the Americans, especially at a time when they were on a spree to suppress the Kashmiris, she yelled.

The reaction from the Pakistani ‘intellectuals’ towards Indian aid offer will not be less caustic if India does decide to loosen its purse strings in response to appeals from within the country. The shrill noises against Indian aid coming from Pakistan, however, sound odd.

Their own leaders have been shouting from house tops that they are desperately in need of help from the world. Any trouble in Pakistan sees its leaders rushing with appeals for help from the ‘international’ community, as though it is the duty of the rest of the world to perpetually underwrite all Pakistani expenses.

President Zardari was asking the much-hated and abused Americans to come up with a ‘Marshall Plan’ to the tune of $100 billion to help Pakistan fight the terrorists. He would no doubt expect this amount to be doubled now because not only the flood victims have to be rehabilitated but also to make good the losses that the military and its vast apparatus might have suffered as a result of the monsoon floods.

It is interesting that the Pakistanis who berate India for offering ‘peanuts’ and that too only to save itself from adverse international publicity have not pressed their all weather friends for being more generous in giving aid than, say, the US which is seen by the overwhelming number of Pakistanis as an ‘enemy’.

The Americans and the British lead the pack of donors to Pakistan at this juncture. Saudi Arabia is the only ‘brotherly’ nation but a distant fourth (after EU) in the list. China, the second largest economy in the world has offered $10 million.

Reports on the aftermath of the flood in the western media suggest that the Pakistanis have not been impressed by the generous US and UK offers and question their country as being seen as the epicentre of terrorism. Both these western countries, which are the second home to many Pakistanis, have a long way to go to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the Pakistanis. With a ‘peanut’ of an aid offer or even by multiplying it, India has a much less chance of expecting any change in the mind of its western neighbour.