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Towards all-party diplomacy
THE NATIONAL CONSENSUS on ways to deal with Pakistan in the context of the recent terrorist attack on Parliament House in New Delhi must serve as the motive force of India's planned all-party diplomacy. Yet, the consensus should first be fine-tuned to address the new situation which the international community seems to visualise following Pakistan's latest declaration of intent to rein in anti-India terrorism. Earlier, the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has had to engage the Leader of the Opposition, Sonia Gandhi, in an effort to reassure all concerned that there will be no politicking by the ruling establishment in constituting inter-party delegations to travel abroad and espouse India's anti-terror cause. In a sense, the political storm in New Delhi over the composition of such delegations now appears to have blown over after both the Government and the opposition Congress(I) agreed to work together on this and related issues in the supreme national interest. It is essential, therefore, that the Vajpayee administration does not lurch back to any kind of unilateralism in preparing for a pan-party diplomatic offensive in the larger international arena. If the conscience of the global community is to be awakened, India ought to vigorously articulate its concerns about the external terrorist threats to its stability as the world's largest secular democracy. Any real or apparent signs of national dissonance over the basic thrust or over the political logistics of the planned Indian diplomatic campaign of this kind will only impede it even before it can reach the boost-phase. The diplomatic task of winning friends and influencing nations to promote India's anti-terror objectives is a serious matter that rightly belongs to the realm of the national interest itself.
The pan-party initiative of presenting New Delhi's case to the global community reflects a considered non-militarist way of addressing the terrorist challenges. An obvious sphere of New Delhi's attention in this context is the bloc of Islamic countries on account of Pakistan's dynamic association with it. To push this core agenda forward, India's political leaders must act with unity of purpose to promote the crux of India's national consensus in a wholly transparent fashion. If diplomacy is given a fair chance, the international community might be able to persuade or pressure Pakistan to completely roll back its tactical-strategic agenda of encouraging cross-border terrorism in various parts of India including Jammu and Kashmir.
It is in this overall situation that India's inter-party delegations, which are still being constituted, will find it necessary to neutralise the international misgivings about some of the latest observations by the Indian Army Chief, S. Padmanabhan. Now, Gen. Padmanabhan has on the whole discounted the likelihood of an apocalyptic scenario of a Pakistan-India nuclear exchange. However, India's political leaders will need to reassure their foreign interlocutors about the credibility of New Delhi's commitment to a policy of not being the first to launch a nuclear strike against any country, Pakistan included. India's no-first-use doctrine of nuclear security is indeed rooted in the moral and pacifist fervour of its people. Nonetheless, Gen. Padmanabhan's statements and the general drift of the Union Home Minister, L. K. Advani's latest conversations with the top U.S. leadership seem to have had a definitive tactical purpose. They appear to have reckoned that India should speak from a position of perceivable strength so that Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, might feel compelled to seriously address New Delhi's concerns. Yet, with Pakistan too constituting a Kashmir panel of its own to try and woo the international community, India's political delegations may discover that their planned diplomatic offensive abroad is even more of a challenge.
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