NEW DELHI — The lady at the counter of the Virgin clubhouse at Heathrow on Friday night looked up at us, her eyes brimming with sympathy, her voice down to a hush. Did we know that the British government had just issued an advisory asking all British citizens to leave India as well as Pakistan because of an impending war that could go nuclear? She looked bemused when we began to laugh.
We were going home, we said; and if that was the way the cookie exploded, well, what could be done about it? Home would remain home, even under a nuclear cloud. I am pleased to report that ours was not a singular reaction. The Virgin flight to Delhi was full to capacity. I learned that Air-India, flying at about the same time, had been forced to offload 40 passengers.
My very reliable guide to matters of life and death, Veenu Sandal, informs me that on May 15 something happened in the skies above that made things down below a dangerous place. This turmoil in the skies is scheduled to last through June. There may be a story to tell after that if India and Pakistan do not blow each other up first.
The conflict between the two is a war between frustration and hypocrisy. India is frustrated by its inability to settle its longest and most cancerous problem, over the status of the Kashmir Valley; and Pakistan has spent more than 50 years using this problem to spread the cancer across the region.
Given the values of our age, it is perfectly in order that hypocrisy should hold the edge. Our prime minister often resorts to poetry to express his frustration, although it is a moot point how many time you can cry “Wolf!” in verse.
Atal Behari Vajpayee does give the impression that he would rather be a poet than a prime minister, a useful suggestion in a country that prefers power to be leavened by some degree of self-denial. At times of crisis he whips out one of his own poems in the hope that they are of some therapeutic value.
When dealing with the terrorist attacks launched by Pakistan-supported elements, he has returned to the skies for imagery. There was a point when he could not see any war clouds, but just in case you went away relieved he added that lightning could always strike from a clear sky.
He has, less poetically, also suggested that the restraint he showed when suicide-missionaries from Pakistan attacked and nearly destroyed the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13 last year was a mistake. That was when the famous million soldiers mobilized along the world’s most dangerous border. As it happens the mobilized armies have remained immobile since then. That by itself is an unstable fact. Armies can stare at each other only up to a point without someone squeezing a trigger. India and Pakistan would probably have finished their fifth war by now if they had not been nuclear powers. There is still hope that the prospect of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) will maintain the peace, but there is also the fear that someone may yet be too mad to worry about MAD.
There are growing whispers from hawks on both sides that the nuclear option was created in order to be used. There is enough residual and continuing hostility to make this a real possibility. Pakistan has a first-strike policy that it does not pretend to hide, and has said that it will implement it if India’s forces succeed in a conventional war. So India loses if India wins, with unimaginable consequences when it retaliates. The rough estimate of nuclear capabilities made by Western experts is that Pakistan has some 35-odd nuclear warheads capable of reaching India by missile, while India has between 100 and 150.
The present crisis is a continuation from the one that began in December, but significant and even critical differences have occurred along the way. Gen. Pervez Musharraf brought the temperature down in January with a much-admired speech whose candor was even more impressive than its courage. He accepted that fundamentalists and militants had created a “state within a state” in Pakistan and warned that they were as much a threat to his own country as they were to India. He arrested hundreds of fundamentalists, banned their organizations and set the mood for a new phase of relations between the warring neighbors.
But a paradox has overwhelmed him after that brief moment of glory. In January Musharraf was a man of destiny. By May he had become only another general who had stolen a country. The central purpose of Musharraf’s policies and politics this year has been survival. Like so many of his predecessors, he promised a return to democracy when he seized power in a coup in 1999. The courts gave sanction to his rule but with a two-year limitation, which expires in October. Musharraf has managed to convince George Bush and Tony Blair that he is indispensable to their war in Afghanistan. But that was the easy part. He also had to convince the people of Pakistan, who are more skeptical about generals, that he was useful to them.
The sham-referendum as a fig-leaf convenience was initiated and perfected by Gen. Zia-ul Haq, who used it often. His situation was very similar to that of Gen. Musharraf. The world was far from happy at the coup. Zia ignored the world and hanged his predecessor Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. Musharraf ignored the world and banished Nawaz Sharif. Both were rescued within two years by Afghanistan, Zia by a Soviet invasion and Musharraf by an Anglo-American one. Both generals became “indispensable” to the Western cause (the Soviet Union was also a Western power). However, both had to pretend that they were indispensable at home as well. The sham-referendum was the preferred methodology.
The comparison begins to weaken after this. The nature of the two wars in Afghanistan is different. Zia could use Islam, as well as the “state within a state” in the service of his Afghan war, with full approval from America and Britain. Zia could reserve his vast resources of duplicity for others. Musharraf is required to confront powerful fundamentalist forces within his own country as part of his obedience test. Zia could depend on this constituency. Musharraf cannot. Army rule is never popular. Musharraf has to walk without a single crutch. He clearly never conceived the possibility of walking away from power. So out popped a referendum meant to legitimize his rule.
It flopped. The referendum weakened him, instead of strengthening him. The turnout was abysmal. Even political parties normally sympathetic to the army shunned this sham. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Musharraf’s much-awaited speech on Monday was the time he took to apologize to his country for this sham. He was defensive and looked wounded. And so when he switched to belligerence against India, it was more shrill than powerful. At times he chose to make debating points like an ebbing politician. And you don’t really have to go on national television to repeat what you tell your cronies over breakfast.
The flat denial of any Pakistan support for militants in India was just that — flat. He reiterated Pakistan’s support for Kashmiri separatism and vowed that every Pakistani would become a “holy” warrior if India attacked. He did not mention nuclear weapons but his fellow generals have not been remiss in their promise to blow everything into a cloud if war comes. The general ended his speech on a plaintive note: You have always shown faith in me, he told Pakistanis, show faith in me in this crisis too.
Always? How long is always? A question frames the dilemma faced by the generals of Pakistan: If you do not represent the people, then what do you represent? What is your rationale for seizing and then holding on to power? Patriotism becomes the first refuge of the general. And patriotism is synonymous with confrontation against India.
This time around the generals of Islamabad have some help from the hawks flapping at the outer regions of the ruling BJP in Delhi. These hard-liners have taken control of the agenda ever since they cowed down the prime minister over Gujarat, and prevented him from changing Narendra Modi for fomenting riots against Muslims. Vajpayee may have thought then that he was taking one step back in order to move two steps forward later, but he has been trapped.
The world would probably not bother too much if India and Pakistan destroyed each other if they did not also threaten to contaminate the oil-rich world around them.
In the past the world has waited for the two to exhaust their ammunition and return to sense, but the first sign of nuclear war came in 1999 when Bill Clinton had to inform the then Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that some generals were planning a nuclear attack on India during the brief but intense conflict over Kargil. Sharif stopped the fighting and ordered Pakistani infiltrators to return home. One of the chief architects of that war was Musharraf.
Bush has brought Donald Rumsfeld into play, and Russia has asked India and Pakistan to meet and talk, with help from Vladimir Putin if necessary, at a scheduled conference that both will attend in Central Asia in the first week of June. It is safe to assume that the antagonists will pay some heed to advice from abroad before they do pursue any option more dramatic. Relief comes a week at a time on the subcontinent. But in one sense the threat of war has already internationalized the Kashmir problem. Rumsfeld and Putin will hardly leave the room when the subject of Kashmir comes up. A London postscript: Much to my dismay, I cannot blame the British for our ills this time around. There is no divide and rule policy to hang out as an excuse for our murderous, or suicidal, tendencies. But I do blame the British for one thing. They could have taught us better football than cricket.
While the rest of the world exhilarates over a festival of football in June India and Pakistan talk of nuclear war. Would we have gone to war if we had qualified for the World Cup? Maybe Britain can still do something useful. Instead of sending Jack Straw Britain could have sent David Beckham to the subcontinent. He would certainly have had a better chance of reaching a goal.
