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India's anti-terror agenda
THE PRIME MINISTER, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, has clearly sought to sensitise the people of India to the challenges of fighting the external terrorists. In sounding a wake-up call for this purpose by ruminating on the state of India's tenuous relationship with Pakistan, he appears to have been guided by an urge to do some plain-speaking.If his ``New Year Reflections'' on India's anti-terror agenda are short on specific steps, that is only to be expected from an exercise of this sort. The sheer complexity of the terrorist threat to India might have also compounded his task. Yet, discernible through the labyrinth of ideas is a thrust for peace that Mr. Vajpayee seems inclined to portray as his primary policy preference in dealing with Pakistan at this critical juncture. Addressing the Indian people directly, he spoke of his administration's ``current multi-pronged strategy'' to ``defend ourselves'' by ``forcing Pakistan to stop cross-border terrorism''. By avoiding a public discourse on the option of a military response to Pakistan- encouraged terrorism, the Prime Minister appears to have wanted to reassure both India and the larger global community about New Delhi's present priorities. The Vajpayee administration will therefore do well to build its current anti-terror strategy on the foundations of the latest all-party consensus to work together.
Quite unusually, the Prime Minister has also tried his hand at some public diplomacy directed at the ``people of Pakistan and all the right thinking persons in its ruling establishment''. His purpose was to urge them to recognise that it was in their own national interest to stop ``their Government's appeasement of terrorism'' that might be designed to destabilise India. He served a pointed message to the ``leadership of Pakistan'' in the context of its ``commendable decision to join the international coalition against terrorism in Afghanistan''. India, according to Mr. Vajpayee, would be ``willing to walk more than half the distance'' to ``resolve, through dialogue'' all issues including the ``contentious'' one concerning Jammu and Kashmir. The rider in his reckoning was that Pakistan should ``shed'' its ``anti-India mentality''. Now, it requires no clairvoyance to know that a conditionality of psychological proportions will be almost impossible to verify as a tangible catalyst of dialogue. Yet, the broad sweep of a New Year message is not the right medium for a precise diplomatic formulation for reviving the India-Pakistan parleys.
On the whole, Mr. Vajpayee's political objective is to try and convince the leaders and people of Pakistan that there can be ``no double standards on terrorism''. The central point, in his view, is that Pakistan, which decided to sever its links with the Taliban-Osama axis of terror despite the perceived tactical advantages, should think of jettisoning terror as a strategy in relation to India. However, it is in New Delhi's interest to let the Pakistanis act autonomously. In any case, the U.S. President, Mr. George W. Bush, seems to be pressuring and persuading his Pakistani counterpart, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. At one level, Mr. Bush has sternly asked the Pakistani leader to ``eliminate'' the terrorist groups which are hostile to India as also to the very idea of any rapprochement between Islamabad and New Delhi. At another level, the U.S. President has also praised Gen. Musharraf for arresting some key purveyors of terror. On a related plane, New Delhi too should act with a deep understanding of the present ground realities in Pakistan while asking Gen. Musharraf to clean up the anti-India terror dens. While this does not mean that India should soft-pedal its anti-terror drive, the need is for the kind of spirit that the External Affairs Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, has displayed in welcoming some of Gen. Musharraf's recent steps.
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