Normalisation?
Having spent 18 months on the knife-edge of a nuclear war, the result of a unilateral decision by India, for reasons that are still mind boggling, to put almost its entire Armed Forces on our doorstep, and only a week or so after Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha was advocating a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan a la Iraq, Atal Behari Vajpayee offered unconditional talks on all issues including Jammu and Kashmir. There is a “blow-hot blow-cold” situation here since Sinha’s tone and tenor remains aggressively anti-Pakistan despite the peace moves, one is rather skeptical about the very sudden sea-change of heart.
Minding his political back by neither accepting Jamali’s spontaneous invitation or rejecting it, the Indian PM reciprocated Jamali’s further initiatives by announcing resumption of full diplomatic relations (by appointment of a permanent High Commissioner) and allowing of overflights. An Indian Foreign Office spokesman went to great lengths to emphasize that “overflights” was a part and parcel of any air transit agreement. A suspicion therefore arises, could the whole objective of the Indian diplomatic overdrive be only to re-open “overflights”? The Indians had themselves suspended “overflights” in the first place, and have been economically repenting ever since. The westward operations of Air India were seriously disrupted, devastating the Indian aviation industry. SARS has caused all Air India flights to the East to now cease, a few more weeks without overflights permission from Pakistan would bankrupt the prime Indian air carrier. Indians have a habit of camouflaging their faux pas by grand gestures, can anyone forget their “generosity” last year in recalling the Indian Navy as a “goodwill measure” from the Indian Ocean where it was positioned to blockade Karachi in case of war, this had been coupled with loud talk of “quarantining” Pakistan during peace, i.e. not allowing any sea traffic to and fro our ports. The badly maintained Indian Navy took a massive beating during the storm-ridden Arabian Sea’s summer months, it takes no genius to work out why the Indians needed to get their seasick sailors (and their ships) to the relative safety and comfort of their home ports. That is why the focus on overflights in supercession to everything else among confidence-building measures (CBMs) is rather suspicious. If the Indians are serious, call their bluff by requesting Vajpayee’s presence at an overdue SAARC “Heads of State” Meeting in Islamabad.
The Drums of War
Those of us who will be alive after the war being forced on us by India will lament the sheer helplessness of the lack of cogent reason for India to consign millions of Pakistanis and Indians to their death. Even as war hysteria engulfs India, or at least that part of India where BJP’s Hindu chauvinism is very much manifest, Pakistan remains a sea of calm. With war seemingly imminent people are going about their business unbelieving that death from the skies may rain down on them at any moment. To a great extent this epitomizes the absolute calm within the present Pakistan government, belied even by the headlong fall of the stock market. If there is fury in Pakistan at the Indian obduracy it is displayed in resigned disappointment rather than equivalent belligerent rhetoric. Exhorted to prepare the Pakistani public for war by at least initiating visible civil-defence measures, the President demurred. He was not going to initiate panic, that would be dancing to the Indian tune. While Mr Majid Nizami and a couple of senior media personalities have always maintained a constant principled stand through the years without any fear or favour, some others suddenly found their voices and went over the fail-safe line due to his position and person, mistaking the President’s calm approach as a sign of weakness. Unlike some of his predecessors, khaki-clad and mufti alike, Pervez Musharraf readily accepts objective criticism if it is made without motivation, his patience defines the measure of his persona, calm in the face of danger. Not everyone remains cool under fire.
The briefing by the Director General Military Operations (DGMO) Pakistan Army made the hitherto “possible” war into a real-time issue. Hoping that it would be limited to Indian action across the LOC in Kashmir, the military hierarchy are quite prepared for a worst-case scenario, an all-out attack across the international border. Into his 80s and with one foot visibly in the grave, Indian PM Atal Behari Vajpayee exhorted the Indian Armed Forces, mostly in their 20s and 30s to “fight a decisive war and win victory” (sic against Pakistan). In any conventional war between India and Pakistan there will certainly be many more civilian casualties than military ones but in case of nuclear exchange, and there is no guarantee that any limited war will not escalate into a general all-out war and than into a nuclear one, there will be hundreds and thousand times more civilian casualties than military ones, innocents caught in the crossfire of unnecessary conflict. The number of dead and wounded in a nuclear exchange in densely populated South Asia may exceed in one day that equivalent to the number of casualties in the entire Second World War.
Understanding Each Other
At Agra Pakistan and India seemed very close to an agreement, post-Summit statements make it quite clear that both sides were in fact far apart in their respective perceptions about what the agreement amounted to. Pakistan held out that their long-standing stand on Kashmir being a core issue was about to be formally recognized, India felt that its main concern, “cross-border terrorism” was going to be addressed by Pakistan and this would drastically curtail the freedom struggle within Kashmir. Such different interpretations post-Summit would have made any Declaration a non-starter, the various clauses could have been used as enough pretext by extremists on either side to destroy whatever understanding was developing among the leaders and intelligentsia of both the countries, seriously retarding the peace process. Both Musharraf and Vajpayee are very conscious of hard-liners in their constituencies, that is why they avoided eroding each others’ domestic standing by giving these hard-liners due cause. When two people meet to solve a problem, the sensitivity each displays for the other’s problems despite disagreeing with each other goes a long way in creating the right atmosphere for eventual solution. The good chemistry between Musharraf and Vajpayee was the main success of Agra, that it did not result in an “instant Declaration” may be temporarily disappointing, in the cold light of reality one can understand it has created the foundation that will eventually lead to lasting solutions.
Horse Trading
One of South Asia’s problems is the ridiculous claim that our democracy is moulded according to the “genius of the people” while in actual fact it is an imperfect electoral exercise that is copied from western models with very little relevance to the local environment. This type of democracy bedevils good governance, particularly because the low rate of literacy provides opportunity for a high rate of malfeasance. The voters in India having given a mixed verdict, parties and individuals in a “hung Parliament” have been engaged in compromising ethical principles in the scramble to acquire the seat of power. The commonly used term for this ambiguous post-electoral exercise is “horse-trading” and except in Sri Lanka, which delivered a complete mandate for change, things are the same in Pakistan, Nepal, India and in the near future will most probably be the same in Bangladesh. With every passing election, the verdict of the electorate is increasingly being blatantly corrupted, with a commensurate loss of public confidence in the electoral process. The crossing of the ideological floor is not confined to post-election power plays only, candidates and parties now search for each other pre-election to determine the best electoral winning combination. One begins to wonder whether a commitment to any party line can survive serving the motivated interests of one’s personal self, materially more important than ideology.
A hung Parliament sets in motion forces that are morally repugnant to the exercise of the free vote. To attain a majority Atal Behari Vajpayee’s BJP government is now engaged in a scramble to influence smaller parties and individuals, who on their part want a binding commitment from the would-be suitors for their special interests or more directly, money and lots of it. This democratic farce of “horse-trading”, is not confined to India or South Asia but is a common practice in most third world countries. Accountability, which is at the heart of the democratic process, is lost at the very outset when stepping into the governance mode. Having violated ethical principles and compromised on election promises to accommodate potential allies in reaching for power, the incumbents are ill-suited as responsible mentors of any exercise in accountability. The result is that increasingly governments rely on the rewards of corruption for survival. In some countries it has become a socially acceptable thing to be blatantly corrupt i.e. the Marcos Syndrome where the rulers brazenly flaunt illegal wealth knowing that a significant part of the gullible public will keep on believing their denials about corruption. Faced with retribution in various forms if they do not conform, senior government functionaries are now finding it more profitable to join in with the loot, some even falling over themselves to ingratiate themselves with the political rulers by teaching them how to increase their looting of the public till while carefully skirting around the laws of the land. A democracy without accountability is akin to dictatorship, a dictatorship that does not compromise on nepotism and corruption would then logically be better than such a democracy. Given that dictatorship almost never accepts accountability about itself, the whole thing slides into a Catch-22 situation.