It is impossible to disagree with India’s Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee that yesterday’s terrorist attack on Parliament was an attack on India’s sovereignty. If anything, that is an understatement. This outrage goes to the heart of India. Whoever the terrorists were, this was an attack on the very essence of India, on its highest institutions, on that which makes India a nation. In its own way Dec. 13 is as much an outrage to the Indian psyche as Sept. 11 was to the American one.
Both inside and outside India, the automatic assumption will be that the attackers were Kashmiri separatists. Even though there are other groups engaged in violent conflict with the Indian government, it is a reasonable assumption. The attack is all too similar to the one by separatist militants on the Kashmir state assembly in October. Militant Kashmiri groups have denied any involvement and indeed condemned yesterday’s outrage, but that means nothing. Even if they are telling the truth, there are enough outfits who are their own masters, and who bow to no one’s command. The suggestion from Home Minister L.K. Advani that the attack may be related to the Sept. 11 attacks certainly cannot be dismissed, especially in view of the reports that India had received warnings of an attack following the Taleban’s defeat in Afghanistan. It is known that Al-Qaeda had links to Kashmiri groups. It may well be that this was a gesture of defiance from an organization that may be dying in Afghanistan but is not without friends and activists elsewhere.
Questions are bound to be raised about security in India. The ease with which the attackers entered what is supposedly one of the most heavily protected buildings in the country will come as a shock to Indians, all the more so given the government’s recent warnings that India faced attack, and specifically that Parliament might be attacked.
However, the big question is what India proposes to do now.
There has to be a real fear that Vajpayee will follow in Sharon’s footsteps and use the attack to launch an all-out war against the Kashmiri separatists. His language in a televised broadcast after the attack, with talk of fighting terrorism for the past two decades, of it now being in its “last stages” and of a “do-and-die battle” ahead, points dangerously in that direction. That would be a disaster. It would have the same deadly effect as Sharon’s onslaught against Palestinians. Military repression will not settle Kashmir. It will fuel hatreds and lay the seeds for yet more chaos and terror. The hope must be that he will be smart enough not to try and exploit the outrage. But that is a small hope.
When Washington needed Arabs and Muslims, and most of all Pakistan, on board its international coalition against terrorism following Sept. 11, India and Israel were the two big losers: the Americans reactivated the old friendship with Pakistan and saw the need to bring the Palestinian peace process onto the front burner. Attacks by militant Palestinians gave the Sharon the chance to reverse the shift, claiming joint victim status with the Americans and presenting Israel as an equal partner in the fight against terrorism and the war against the Palestinians as equivalent to that against the Taleban.
Vajpayee may see this as his chance to do the same with Kashmir — and he is not likely to let it slip.
