Asia Times: India/Pakistan


	May 18, 2002	atimes.com

India/Pakistan

Back on the brink of war
By Sultan Shahin

NEW DELHI – India and Pakistan are back on the verge of war following a terrorist attack on civilians in the state of Jammu and Kashmir on Tuesday, leaving 35 people dead, including women and 11 children. Three terrorists, believed to be Pakistani infiltrators, were shot dead by army guards on the spot.

The United States on Wednesday warned that India and Pakistan were dangerously close to war and a small spark could ignite a battle in the aftermath of the bloody attack in Jammu.

The attack took place as US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was beginning her visit to India in a bid to counsel restraint. It has almost become customary for a major terrorist strike against a high-profile civilian target to coincide with any American dignitary visiting India or an Indian leader visiting the US. The process began with then president Bill Clinton’s visit when a number of Sikhs were killed in Chhitisinghpura in Kashmir, forcing the president to issue a strong statement denouncing Pakistan-sponsored cross-border terrorism. The same thing happened on several occasions in the past year.

Rocca, too, felt obliged to denounce the terrorist attack vehemently, forgetting her mission of peace. President George W Bush too made a telephone call to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to express his horror at the attack. Vajpayee threatened "appropriate action" while talking to him. This has apparently alarmed the president and he has decided to rush Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to cool tensions in the region.

Defense Minister George Fernandes has held Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf personally responsible for the attack, prompting Pakistan, too, to use strong language. The Pakistan Foreign Office said that the general could have held Vajpayee and his cabinet colleagues responsible for "training fascist Hindu terrorists to kill and rape members of minority communities in India". Terming India’s charge of its involvement as "baseless", it said such allegations were aimed at deflecting the Muslim world's attention from communal violence in Gujarat as well as "domestic difficulties".

Vajpayee is under severe pressure from hardliners in his Hindu fundamentalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and his militant colleagues in sister organizations such as the Shiv Sena (Shivaji's Army), Bajrang Dal (Monkey God-Hanuman’s Party), Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP- World Hindu Forum) and other members of the Hindu fundamentalist family collectively known as the Sangh Parivar. Both Vajpayee and Home Minister Lal Krishan Advani have attracted ridicule from officials of various Parivar organizations for being high on rhetoric and low on action in countering Pakistan-sponsored terrorism.

Bajrang Dal convener Surendra Jain said, "No words will suffice now. Only Agni and Prithvi missiles [capable of carrying nuclear bombs] can do the needful." These terrorist organizations are starting country-wide demonstrations to pressure the government to start a full-fledged war. The ruling BJP has even said that war remains an option.

Expressing his personal views, Hindutva (the philosophy of Hindu domination of the subcontinent) ideologue and minister for disinvestment Arun Shourie suggested in a TV discussion that India should send terrorists inside Pakistan. There is no point in thinking of a rapprochement or dialogue with that country. "As long as Pakistan stays," he said, "it will continue to harm India," Obviously, the suggestion is that Pakistan should be obliterated if India is to survive and prosper. High-level Indian government functionaries expressing such views, with the track record of India having waged a war to dismember Pakistan before, are bound to alarm Pakistan and justify hawks in continuing supporting cross-border militancy.

Whether or not Sangh Parivar’s country-wide demonstrations will lead to war, they can certainly lead to civil war in the manner of the communal strife between Muslims and Hindus that is tearing Gujarat state apart. For the Parivar, the main agenda is to force Muslims to convert to Hinduism, as is being attempted in Gujarat without much success to date.

The movement Bajrang Dal is threatening to start may ostensibly be for promoting an all-out war against Pakistan, but the Parivar is aware that war has become a difficult option for India since it virtually forced Pakistan to acquire nuclear weapons four years ago, by conducting its own nuclear tests unnecessarily (India had already tested its nuclear capability in 1974).

Alarmed at the prospects, most mainstream English newspapers are advising restraint. In a typical comment, south India’s largest-circulated newspaper, The Hindu, suggested, "India's enlightened self-interest dictates that all options be weighed with the greatest care in a climate of utmost calm and absolute realism. India must reinforce its moral indignation with a prudent policy of spirited discretion. New Delhi will be well advised to resist the political temptation to opt for even a limited military strike against Pakistan. Two conspicuous factors militate against the feasibility of any form of military solution. First, conventional wisdom and creative prognosis indicate that it will be impossible to accomplish any objective of rooting out the suspected anti-India terror bases in Pakistan through a limited but surgically precise military thrust. In a perceptive scenario, the nuclear deterrence as independently possessed by India and Pakistan will themselves deter any such limited strike. Second, India is still far from sensitizing world opinion to its trauma of wounds inflicted by externally sponsored political terror."

English newspapers, however, do not make mass opinion in the country. Mostly run by Hindus educated in missionary schools and in Western universities, they represent the liberal, Westernized face of Hinduism. Most Hindi and some regional-language newspapers are virulently communal supporters of the Hindutva ideology. It is they that really shape the opinions of the Hindu masses, as was seen recently in the role of the Gujarati-language newspaper Sandesh in fomenting communal violence in Gujarat. Most Muslims, at least in north India, read Urdu newspapers, although their circulation is dwindling as they receive little government and no private sector advertising support.

The main opposition Congress party is demanding a comprehensive, integrated, long-term policy towards terrorism, Kashmir and Pakistan. It can’t be knee-jerk all the time, said Congress chief and the leader of opposition Sonia Gandhi. While supporting any move that the government may make, Gandhi told parliament on Friday that the government has so far failed to provide safety to the people of Jammu and Kashmir. It was known that with the snows melting, terrorist activities would increase, she pointed out. She also referred to the recurring coincidence of Indian-US interactions taking place against the background of major terrorist attacks. Apparently the government, in her view, was not vigilant enough.

While there is no dearth of hawks in India’s defense and foreign policy establishment, some responsible commentators are suggesting a graduated response. Former head of a government-funded think tank (IDSA), Jasjit Singh, for instance, says, "At the end of the road, the military option will be available, but it must remain the instrument of last resort, and very carefully employed even then. Taking the last point first, the way to look at it is not in terms of the traditional use of military power, that is, in a full-scale war. That is what the world is worried about and, more important, it carries numerous risks, including escalation to the nuclear level. We must avoid that. This is also why the US is concerned about the potential for conflict between two nuclear-armed neighbors. But they need to understand that after al-Qaeda were dispersed from Afghanistan, US-India counterterrorism interests have nearly started to overlap. The American war against terrorism, like ours, has to zero in on Pakistan. But the US does not appear to be ready to deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir [POK], which is being built up. At the same time, the problem is that Musharraf would not take serious action to fulfill his own commitments unless the pressure increases.

"It is often forgotten that we have many options well below the military one. Political signals would need to go out to highlight our increasing concern. A special ambassador for counterterrorism could be the focus as well as the points man of diplomatic efforts. Our diplomatic staff in Islamabad could be further cut down and trade, what little exists, stopped. These would not hurt Pakistan in any serious way. But they would convey a political resolve that the status quo, where hundreds of innocents are being killed every month in India by jihadi terrorists from across the borders, will not be acceptable for long, especially in the context of December 13 [when the Indian parliament was attacked]. But the more substantive option would be to reexamine our commitment to the Indus Waters Treaty. Pakistani elites know the importance of this treaty to its own economic well-being."

What has rattled most sober India-Pakistan watchers is the publication of a gripping account of an episode of the 1999 Kargil war by a key Clinton aide showing the Pakistan military to be a trigger-happy rogue outfit that deployed nuclear weapons for possible use against India. According to a report filed by the Times of India’s Washington correspondent, a reckless Pervez Musharraf, a feckless Nawaz Sharif, a resolute Vajpayee and a principled Bill Clinton are central characters in an unusual policy paper titled "American Diplomacy and the 1999 Kargil Summit at Blair House", by former White House official Bruce Riedel. The paper, presented at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Advanced Studies of India, reads more like a fast-paced film script than a foreign policy critique.

Riedel's account of the Kargil episode portrays Pakistan as an extremely unstable country where the military was at odds with the political and civilian leadership and it was not clear who was calling the shots. But the narrative suggests that the architect of Pakistan's reckless adventurism at that time was none other than its current ruler, Musharraf, who comes across as a war-mongering general who brought the region to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

"Prime Minister Sharif had seemed genuinely interested in pursuing the Lahore process when he met with Vajpayee and he had argued eloquently with a series of American guests ... that he wanted an end to the 50-year- old quarrel with India. His military chief, General Pervez Musharraf, seemed to be in a different mould. He was said to be a hardliner on Kashmir, a man some feared was determined to humble India once and for all," writes Riedel.

According to Riedel, US intelligence had information that the Pakistani military, then led by Musharraf, was preparing its nuclear arsenal for possible use in a wider war arising from the Kargil clash, most likely without the knowledge of Sharif.

When Sharif pleaded with Washington to save Pakistan from rout following a determined Indian response to the Kargil incursion, Riedel says that he recommended to Clinton that he use the information about Pakistani nuclear readiness only when Sharif was without his aides, especially Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad, who was known to be very close to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence.

When Clinton later reveals the extent of Islamabad's nuclear preparedness, Sharif "seemed taken aback and said only that India was probably doing the same", says Riedel, who was asked to stay behind as a notes-taker by the US president despite Sharif's plea that they have a one-on-one meeting. Clinton then berates Sharif, asking "did he know how crazy that [getting nuclear missiles ready] was?"

The same "crazy" Musharraf is now the unquestioned leader of Pakistan. A chain of circumstances has once again made his country an ally of the United States. In India too, it is hardliners and outright terrorists who seem to be ruling the roost in the present administration. Vajpayee, who has assiduously built up the image of a moderate and sober leader, has been forced to throw off his mask of statesmanship. There is no longer any talk of dialogue with Pakistan. In a sense, it is a more honest position. India doesn’t really have anything to offer to Pakistan on Kashmir. What dialogue, Vajpayee asked a few months ago: Kashmir belongs to us and that is the end of the issue. The so-called secular allies of the Hindu fundamentalist-led coalition government have almost completely abdicated their responsibility. The US worry for south Asian stability is thus not unfounded. Kashmir does remain a nuclear flash point.

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