The Hindu : Incremental militarism

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Feb 25, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Incremental militarism

THE UNTENABLE ESCALATION of clearly militaristic strategy by the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and his `brains trust' is pushing India inexorably towards a qualitatively new crisis in its dangerously estranged relationship with Pakistan. It is indeed amazing that New Delhi hardly cites a convincing reason why it cannot take steps that could de-escalate the current tensions. The Vajpayee administration has consistently ignored all sensible calls for a pullback of the Indian military units which were deployed within striking distance of Pakistan in the context of the heinous terrorist attack on Parliament House in New Delhi on December 13. Not only that. The Prime Minister's growing penchant for polemical anti-Pakistan rhetoric has only managed to scale up the temperature on the bilateral front without actually advancing India's anti-terror cause. The forward-deployment of India's military personnel and assets along the border with Pakistan was portrayed as the prime element of pressure-diplomacy. If the political logic of that deployment in a strike-threatening formation was to unnerve Islamabad, the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, appears to have neatly turned the tables on New Delhi. Gen. Musharraf has banned two key Pakistan-based terrorist organisations — the Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Lashkar-e-Taiba, both `jehadi' outfits — which were implicated in the attack on India's Parliament. Now, Gen. Musharraf argues that his action has had nothing to do with any external pressure (from either the U.S. or India) and that he has acted solely in Pakistan's own enlightened self-interest. New Delhi itself does not openly acknowledge the ban on the two networks as a beneficial spin-off effect of its ``coercive diplomacy''. Is it not unwise of India to disregard the ban and portray it as a dubious step or as a matter of peripheral implications?

Mr. Vajpayee has indeed locked himself in a posture of incremental militarism by ratcheting up his rhetoric and by appearing to take little note of the dangerous drift implicit in a fierce standoff on the India-Pakistan frontier. He has voiced some dark hints about New Delhi's own capabilities to foment ``internal trouble'' for Pakistan even while asserting that any interference of this order in the domestic affairs of Pakistan ``is not our policy, not our style''. Yet, the overall militant language, even if devoid of any intended policy thrust, is patently absurd on two major counts. First, India may now become a focal point of the needless attention of some terror-watch activists on the international stage. Second, the Prime Minister's political bluster will further fracture India's already fragile relationship with Pakistan.

Having failed to draw up a meaningful exit strategy even at the time of massing India's troops on the border with Pakistan — a step that prompted Islamabad to act in a similar fashion — the Vajpayee administration now finds itself at odds with serious international opinion. New Delhi's ostensible strategic purpose and political objective were to induce Pakistan to extradite or deport 20 identified terrorists/criminals and to end cross-border terrorism that has been of deep concern to India. Of these, cross-border terrorism is an issue that can only be monitored over a relatively long timeframe, while Gen. Musharraf is now reported to have offered to discuss the 20 names as part of a renewable India-Pakistan dialogue on a range of issues. If New Delhi's plan all along has been to avoid a war with Pakistan despite the forward-deployment, it is high time for de-escalation. There is no place for simplistic assertions of the kind being made by the Defence Minister, George Fernandes, that India can easily cope with the uncertainties on the border.

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