Let’s keep our powder dry

“If they want peace” said Napoleon Bonaparte to the Russian Czar Alexander, “they should avoid the pinpricks that precede canon balls”. He may as well have been addressing Pakistan and India.

Since 1971, the two have succeeded in averting war by a hair’s breadth, only by exercising restraint and striking a balance between the demands of hawks and peaceniks. But in India’s case the problem today is not with those Indians at the opposite ends of the policy spectrum but those in the middle – the silent majority. And I do not mean the actual majority – because the 900 million Indians who earn only Rs20 per day, of which 500 million earn only Rs10, of which 250 million make only Rs5 and as many as 50 million who earn nothing at all hardly count – but the 300 million or so that comprise India’s middle class. It is this lot that most strikingly influences the policies and attitudes of government. They have the might to make their voice heard, regardless of whether they are right.

So, where does the Indian ‘majority’ stand today? It’s been a heady past ten years for India. Near double-digit growth rates have buoyed public confidence. ‘Shining’ India; ‘nascent superpower’ India and prospective permanent membership of the UN Security Council have boosted the Indian ego. So much so that arrogance and pride prevail as never before. The Indians have fallen in love with themselves.

Fed on virulent anti-Pakistan stories they see Pakistan as a house divided, in the throes of an economic meltdown, in the grip of terror and on the verge of disintegration. We are viewed condescendingly and with a pity bordering on contempt. India’s stubborn failure to broach the Kashmir dispute, even though the application of overwhelming force in Kashmir has only perpetuated the cruel and dangerous status quo, is in no small measure due to the vanity and swagger imparted by India’s impressive economic growth but also due to our decline. All this makes it harder for Indians to tolerate Pakistani pinpricks and many feel this is the right moment to teach Pakistan a lesson. A good thrashing, they argue, would deter further pinpricks and ensure the lesson remains learnt.

The trouble is that Pakistanis aren’t good students of history. They prefer to write their own history. And there are many here who are equally stupidly spoiling for a fight with India, regardless of the consequences. This is the same lot of Pakistanis who coined the slogan, ‘crush India,’ which turned out to be a dangerous fantasy. ‘Bleed India’, another of their concoctions, only brought more suffering for the very Kashmiris they wished to save.

“The great proof of madness”, said Napoleon “is the disproportion of one’s designs to one’s means” and there always has been a huge element of madness in Indian and Pakistani designs with regard to each other. The latest example is the hysterical Indian reaction following the discovery of a beheaded Indian soldier at the Line of Control. India rained fire and brimstone on Pakistan, suspended ongoing peace talks and threatened to escalate the incident into something far more serious.

While all that may be considered par for the course, what was especially galling was the reaction of the Indian army chief considering that the Indian army allegedly has the head of a Pakistani soldier mounted as a trophy stored in the Mess (?) of an Indian brigade in Occupied Kashmir which, according to Indian journalists, is trotted out for viewing on demand. Furthermore, there is a former Pakistani soldier who is walking around here with only half a tongue; the other half was cut off by his Indian captors for refusing to shout anti-Pakistan slogans in an Indian PoW camp in 1971. By the looks of it, the Indian army chief practices hypocrisy as a full-time job and not only one in which he indulges in his spare moments.

It was pleasing to hear that India “would not be influenced by jingoistic conversations” in the Indian media, following the LoC killings. Alas, too late, India had already been so influenced, and all too readily, as the expulsions from India of Pakistani artists, cricketers, hockey players and delegations revealed. Whether Minister of Commerce Amin Fahim took the hint and decided not to travel to India on January 27 or his Indian counterpart, Anand Sharma, withdrew the invitation to attend a trade fair at Agra, does not really matter, since the outcome is the same. It made no sense for Indian leaders, who have invested political capital in forging better relations with Pakistan to run away from the peace table on the pretext of the LoC incident because that’s exactly what would make our mutual enemy happy.

Two individuals who publicly disassociated themselves from jingoistic responses were the two foreign ministers. Admittedly they did so only with the approval of their governments but it was also, I would like to think, because it is what they believe, want and must have advised their respective governments.

Hina Rabbani Khar’s invitation to her Indian counterpart which, in effect, said ‘Grow up, if you have a problem let’s discuss it but let’s not wreck what has been achieved thus far’ was good. Salman Khurshid’s response, that implied ‘Glad you feel that way, so do we; and we don’t intend to let all the progress made thus far go to waste. But hang on till people (the TV anchors and the BJP) calm down’, was equally welcome. But even more impressive was the stance of the Indian home minister, Sushil Kumar Shinde. Although he has nothing to do with foreign affairs, what he said did and should have a lasting impact on Pak-India relations.

Shinde must have been fuming that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was making capital out of the Congress’s ‘soft’ response to the Pakistani ‘provocation’ and had stooped as low as to play politics with matters as serious as war and peace. So he let on that the BJP and the RSS “conduct terror training camps to spread (anti-Muslim) terrorism” and, in the same breath, accused the BJP of being involved in the killing of 88 Pakistani pilgrims travelling on the Samjhota Express as well as in the Mecca masjid and Malegaon blasts. Shinde must have had solid evidence before levelling such a serious charge against what is the official opposition in the Lok Sabha.

Of course, Shinde has only publicly admitted what he privately already knew and believed to be true and what Pakistan has long maintained. But Indian anchors, especially the Paki-phobe on whose show I appear regularly, were incensed that Shinde had levelled such an accusation. In fact, this particular anchor seemed so distraught that Pakistan could take advantage of the admission by the Indian home minister to malign India that I offered him a gun to shoot himself. Hopefully, after Shinde’s disclosures, India’s ‘armistice with the truth has finally ended’.

That said, it’s not enough to show India had been in error, it’s more important to put them in possession of the truth and the quicker the better, both in the case of the beheaded Indian soldier and the Mumbai matter. This is the right psychological moment to reciprocate Shinde’s candour. I hope we have the good sense to do so by fast-tracking the Mumbai case and conveying the truth about the Indian soldier and, if it is one of our jawans who is responsible, to hold him to account for his reprehensible behaviour which ill befits a professional army. Meanwhile, as always with India, let’s keep our doors open for negotiations and our powder dry.

The writer is a former ambassador. Email: charles123it@hotmail.com