The clear and present danger

Does it merely mean that if Pakistan carries on lighting up the Valley andthe Line of Control (LoC) with terror India will withdraw their MostFavoured Nation status on trade? Or that India will stop playing cricketwith them in Sharjah or Australia? Or that Vajpayee will suspend theDelhi-Lahore bus service? What this means, instead, is that if thePakistanis do not desist, and if the Americans are not able to drum somesense into their heads, India reserves the right to strike back inpunishment. Which means war.

So who are we kidding when we continue to protest that this is not the mostdangerous place on the earth? What is more scary than this? The kidnappers’alley on the Delhi-UP border, or the ghettoes of inner Los Angeles? Thebadlands of Bihar? Certainly, the larger, international claimants for thatdistinction are now on the mend. The Middle East, in spite of the hiccups inthe peace process, is moving in the direction of a resolution. Central Asiais settling down. Iran is moving, if anything, towards some openness anddemocracy. North Korea is making its peace in return for shiploads of rice.The China-Taiwan equation, yes, could be a contender. But recent history hasshown the Chinese to be far too pragmatic to let good old Hanpan-nationalism drag them into collective suicide. That leaves us, Indiansand Pakistanis, in a league pretty much our own.

But more than the Pakistanis, we Indians confuse the world a great deal bycontinuing to argue that we do not live in such a dangerous environment evenin a year when we increase our defence budget by 28 per cent and withinmonths of having fought a mini-war in Kargil. Besides Kargil, nearly 200Indian soldiers have died fighting the insurgency or facing the Pakistanifire across the LoC. And we acknowledge that we may not be able to sit backand take this nonsense for ever and, yet, instead of letting the world startworrying about it, we work so hard at putting its fears at rest.

There is obviously no doubt that most of us, outside the policymakingestablishment, don’t quite have the grey matter to comprehend suchdiplomatic nuances. If you ask the policymakers they will tell you anyacceptance of the most-dangerous-place-on-earth theory would open thefloodgates for foreign intervention in Kashmir. That it is will once againgive the US the status of a (not particularly) honest broker and give theWest another excuse to equate India and Pakistan as mere belligerents ratherthan treat one as a big regional power and the other as a minor,irresponsible irritant. The key nuance, they will have us half-wits believe,is that while the world needs to intervene, it must intervene only with thePakistanis to get them off our backs.

But since those who make policy for the big powers are not half-wits theyonly mock at this silly contradiction in our approach. We draw the world’sattention to Pakistani mischief, the dangers inherent in its terroristadventurism, its nuclear irresponsibility and its larger, more diabolicalplan to destabilise India, we want the world to worry about the crescent ofmilitant Islam growing out of Afghanistan and the Talibanised regions ofPakistan, the evolution of ma-drassas into a sort of a mu- lti-campusUniversity of Jihad. Then, when world powers acknowledge that, our Presidentand Prime Minister kick them in the shins, and the rest of us, including thepolicy pundits, cry blue murder.

This column has talked, in the past, about the inherent defeatism of theconcept of diplomacy as trench warfare. But, in terms of the fear of movingfrom fixed, intellectually secure positions, this one takes the cake. Wehave in our neighbourhood a nuclear armed Pakistan with a very unstablepolitical system, led by an insecure and edgy military dictator who hasalready displayed a dangerous commando mindset in Kargil, an uncontrollablephenomenon of terrorist lashkars and madrassas, blood on our streets and theLoC in Kashmir. If this does not make ours the most dangerous region in theworld, what else would?

The fundamental mistake we make is in applying the same paradigm to theregional equation that we accuse the world of doing. We complain that theworld looks at our region only in terms of the India-Pakistan hostility. Yetwe also cannot break out of that mindset. What we need to realise now, withour economy growing at nearly seven per cent and a renewed excitementinternationally about our booming markets and technological advances, theworld has begun to look at us differently. The developed world needsdeveloping markets and therefore has a strong stake in their stability.

Until now this applied to China. Today, given the high visibility of Indiansin the high-tech business, India is also being fastforwarded on to the sameradar screen. So when the world shows concern for the dangers in Kashmirnow, these are not rooted so much in the old sympathies for what seems to bea reasonable Pakistani argument on Kashmir. These now emanate from thegrowing stake in India’s strength and stability.

It is time, therefore, for a reality check. In any case nobody in the worldbelieves our current position. The fears that acceptance of this dangerousreality would invite intervention and apocalypse are entirely unfounded.This isn’t 1992 and those insecurities must be a thing of the past. Today,instead of protesting when the world points to the dangers of war inKashmir, we should actually underline these fears. The world will understandwho is responsible for these, and who they need to intervene with. It maythen be the turn of the Pakistanis to protest.

Tailpiece: President Narayanan, in his by now controversial address at thebanquet for Clinton, said that globalisation did not mean the world would beled by one village headman. It should be led, he said, by a panchayatinstead. An American guest on the table immediately quipped: "Does herealise the panchayat could be the P-5 instead?"