Page 1 of 2 Two wars heat up India's elections By Santwana Bhattacharya
NEW DELHI - In this year's national elections, there's no hiding from history -
or, if you like, geography. No escape from invocations of the 1971 Bangladesh
war or the Indian army's peacekeeping adventure in Sri Lanka in the late 1980s.
Past wars have a life beyond memory and rhetoric, too. They live on in cyclical
re-runs, in morphed forms. Or maybe they simply never end.
Thus it is with the Sri Lanka civil war and the India-Pakistan war of nerves
sparked off by last November's terror attack on Mumbai, two separate war fronts
joined together only by the fact that they provide context to India's general
elections.
There's no outright victory in sight in either case - it would be
foolish to predict an end to such long-range enmities - but both give the
impression of at least a provisional closure. The look that a phase is nearing
its end. There's no denying that Pakistan looks a bit cornered on the
diplomatic front, just as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) chief,
Velupillai Prabhakaran, is down to the last line of defense, despite the
appointment of his son Charles Anthony as the next chief commander.
The jungles of northern Sri Lanka, Southeast Asian sea lanes, Pakistan's
frontier tribes, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, satellite phones from
Vienna: these are strange issues to be buzzing around in the run-up to an
Indian election.
Still, India is no different from other democracies: its elections are for the
most part a study in self-absorption, characterized by local actors and issues
that do not travel well beyond the immediate horizon. But with a truly
globalized recession, the transnational flavors of terrorism, and an American
election lost and won at least partly on foreign policy, could there be a more
auspicious time for things to change?
It bears watching, therefore, as the world's largest and most cantankerous
democratic race literally goes around the bend for its home stretch, with only
a few months before polls are due. Signs abound that the political lexicon is
expanding to include themes that relate to events and people beyond India's
borders.
One strand comes from the south, in the form of the LTTE's near-decimation and
the very high human cost it is exacting. In the other case, India has scored a
moral victory by extracting a partial confession from Pakistan that its soil
and the sons of its soil were involved in last November's Mumbai massacre.
Both the developments are being chewed, digested and converted into lively
calories by India's election machine.
The handling of the Mumbai terror strike - vis-a-vis exposing Pakistan's role
before the international community - has clearly gone in the favor of the
ruling Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA). And with good reason. To
Pakistan's initial evasion of responsibility, India's Foreign Minister Pranab
Mukherjee had responded with the question, "Do non-state actors come from
heaven?"
From that point to last week's admission by Islamabad that the 10 gunmen who
landed at the Gateway of India were indeed not from heaven but Karachi took a
lot of diplomatic heaving. But if one looks at what had happened after the
terrorist strike on India's parliament on December 13, 2002 - the government of
the time massed thousands of troops on the western border for months and more
soldiers died of heat stroke than anything else - it was decidedly an
improvement.
The same cannot be said about India's response to the Sri Lankan civil war,
though. The humanitarian crisis caused in its wake flows naturally into the
volatile political mix in the southern state of Tamil Nadu and could cost the
Congress quite dearly.
It could be argued that New Delhi was preoccupied with Pakistan and all it did
vis-a-vis Sri Lanka was hurriedly rustle up a visit to Colombo by Mukherjee
when temperatures rose in Tamil Nadu. Whether the Congress can really hope to
recreate a mini 1971-like wave in its favor using the small gains made on the
Pakistan front is, of course, another question. Whether it would be good enough
to compensate for the debit incurred in the south will be evident only in the
next two months.
Western front: All disquiet
However, the signs are a little more positive on the northern front. Things
must surely get much worse before they get better. But analysts dulled into
habitual cynicism about South Asia's future are wondering: will not a final
showdown with the Taliban, and a clear-eyed confronting of terror as state
policy, actually contribute to Pakistan's health?
From now on, if India does not overplay its cards, if the Barack Obama
administration does not change tack to refocus on Afghanistan, and if Pakistan
can really be forced to clean its closets, it could bring the curtains down on
two decades of incessant bloodletting and proxy wars. That surely means more
than just an election bonanza for the Congress.
Of course, to imagine a post-terror world from the contingent fact of a few
terror camps being shuttered down may seem like going too far. For now, there
seems to be no easy return of security for common citizenry, no sense of
relaxing from constant vigil, no decisive escape from the construct used to
snatch their tiny little democratic rights as payment for insurance against
future terror strikes. As long as the mysterious provinces around the Khyber
bleed from injuries sustained in pursuit of strategic depth, as long as
Kalashnikovs pass for small change on the mountain trails to Kashmir, there
would appear to be no danger of the region breaking out in peace.
But there is also an inexorable logic in numbers. A sizeable percentage of the
Indian votebank is between 19 and 35 years of age, and they want no albatross
around their necks. It is in response to their slightest change of mood - say,
from anger to one of faint hope - that the Indian government is crafting its
decisions. What carries the day is, no doubt, the opinion of the
"urban/literate" segment within this votebank. They could be prone to
simplistic formulations, but they behave as if they were the spokespeople for
an entire age. And with the threat that millions really think like that, even
the naive optimism of the average voter can come to have the force of a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
It's because the government has kept a finger on the pulse of this outspoken,
blog-sporting generation that it has not stopped talking tough with Pakistan.
With an eye on what they might do to election results, the ruling dispensation
has kept the heat on, so that Pakistan takes the next logical step ... and the
next. That is, it must dismantle the terror infrastructure and lock up dubious
assets (like jihadi masterminds Masood Azhar and Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi) who
obsessively plot to destabilize India. Given that in its northwest it is forced
to make peace with a homegrown Taliban (who now officially run all of the Swat
Valley according to sharia law), it must appear to some that it is the
Pakistani state itself that is being dismantled. But Islamabad has found its
room for maneuver shrinking on all fronts and must make these tactical retreats
for now.
This suits any government in New Delhi just fine. The question is, how far can
Pakistan be pushed to make vital concessions before it starts becoming
seriously counter-productive? The speculation in New Delhi's power circles is:
a bit more. The idea that a further climbdown by Pakistan is possible arises
because it just has to act to keep the international financial aid flowing. The
Asif Zardari government badly needs external help to tide over its deep
economic crisis and even deeper internal strife. It would also go down well
with Obama's special emissary for the troubled zone, Richard Holbrooke, who is
in India at the time of writing and making appropriate noises. (The fact that
Kashmir was kept out of his terms of reference is itself a tribute to India's
growing clout.)
In the aftermath of spectacular terror strikes like in Mumbai, more militarist
options too frequently come up for debate. No one has yet sprouted the Obama
catchline "Yes, we can" as a retaliatory message to Pakistan, but one never
knows: the diminutive Mukherjee may just do it. His manner of working out an
immunity package against future terror attacks (like the one the US seems to
have worked out) relies entirely on his acerbic, inflected speech.
After Pakistan retracted from its first flush of empathy after Mumbai, and
started upping its ante in response to domestic fears, Mukherjee slipped into
Code Red mode. Ever since, a daily dose of cross-border verbal exchanges has
kept the issue on front pages in both Pakistan and India. Between Mukherjee,
Home Minister P Chidambaram and the gaffe-prone National Security Advisor, M K
Narayanan, the radar is furiously beeping.
The public hostilities were in a sense necessary because Mumbai had other
visible effects. To contain the initial public anger about the UPA government's
"impotence" and the age-old accusation that the Congress fosters a "soft
state", the government had to finally fire its then home minister Shivraj Patil
and also a state chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh of Maharashtra.
Not quite the thing to hope for in the last quarter of a government's reign, so
a spot of revenge was in order. (Pakistan also sacked its
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