Daily Times, Nov. 4, 2005
COMMENT: Power of inertia —Tanvir Ahmad Khan
If the highest leaders carried the mutual conviction that violence and war stood banished irrevocably they would have responded to the natural calamity in Kashmir differently. There would similarly be no suspicion about the complicity of the other state in the carnage in New Delhi
In my perception (A case of humanitarian deficit, Daily Times, October 28) it was a case of humanitarian deficit caused by outmoded security doctrines. Writing in the Indian Express, Pamela Philipose observed that “the adamantine matrix of indo-Pak diplomacy” is built to “withstand the shifts and eddies of the passing decades, reinforced brick by verbal brick, on a 58-year old blueprint based on mistrust and equivalence”.
As if to reinforce her observation, India’s defence minister wryly pointed out that an earthquake could not obliterate 50 years of history. Representatives of the two foreign offices finally met on October 29 i.e. Day 22 of the horrific tragedy, and agreed to provide five temporary openings for the divided Kashmiri families in the Line of Control with effect from November 7. Procedures for travel remain as cumbersome as ever and there is hardly any prospect of a significant relief effort.
On October 29, as diplomats reached this agreement, bombs went off in Delhi on the eve of Diwali and Eid ul Fitr killing 60 innocent people. Mentioned among the possible demons that cast a dreadful shadow on a great Hindu and an equally auspicious Muslim festival of light and joy were religious militants, ethnic terrorists and underworld killers. India will doubtless use its vast forensic and intelligence apparatus to identify the perpetrators of this terrible atrocity.
Already an accusing finger is being vaguely pointed at some militant group that wants to disrupt the India-Pakistan peace process. So far the evidence is slim and inconclusive. But the event, even without an authentic signature, is a powerful reminder that new emerging threats to the stability of all the South Asian states warrant cooperation and collaboration.
There is a proliferation of armed groups that cause mayhem to pursue projects of communalism, sectarianism, terrorism, cross-border smuggling, drug trafficking and organised crime. There is probably networking among them and certainly no respect for international frontiers. Deprivation, marginalisation of considerable segments of societies, sheer hunger and demographic pressures breed violence and terror. It is doubtful if the states of South Asia, big or small, can meet this challenge singly. There is undeniably a case for a shift to cooperative security embodied in arrangements that can be triggered off without time-consuming negotiations.
Admittedly, substantive disputes still inhibit cooperative security. Nearly all the regional states can point to well-documented acts of interference, even armed intervention, by one neighbour or the other. Mistrust is embedded in history and not just in fevered imagination. The Indian press has reported a flood of letters reflecting a resurgence of mistrust in the wake of the Delhi bombs. Clearly peacemakers are still skating on thin ice.
As Pranab Mukherjee says, one should be realistic, not romantic; divisive issues that have defied solution for 58 years will not be solved in weeks or months. But what has become possible is to reassure one another credibly that overt or covert war, or the threat of the use of force, will not be the instrument of settling them. This message has not gone home as yet.
Despite a Hobbesian stamp on much of human history, war is not a natural and inevitable aspect of human condition. The wars of our times are made possible through a diabolical manipulation of masses through explicit and subliminal messages, camouflaged in the self-serving language of distorted ideologies, falsified history, national interest and economic ambitions.
In a deeply moving essay, “The end of imagination”, written after the nuclear tests of 1998, Arundhati Roy spoke of “the orbits of the powerful and the powerless spinning further and further apart from each other, never intersecting, sharing nothing.” This may well be the image of India-Pakistan diplomacy that the benighted people of Kashmir behold today.
Perhaps force disparities, more than anything else, have devalued conflict as a viable choice in Pakistan. Perhaps it is the grave social distortions produced by a combative approach to security that have enlarged the constituency of peace. But in India’s strategic enclave, war with Pakistan is still a thriving industry.
Few years ago, there was the concept of limited war that led to the standoff of 2001-2002. Now internationally-known nuclear hawks argue that nuclear deterrence is irrelevant. They come very close to arguing that India can wage war against Pakistan with impunity, and without the fear of a nuclear tripwire.
The diplomats cannot but address the minutiae of bilateral relations. No wonder then that the Line of Control would have only tightly controlled crossing points a full month after the earthquake. What is more lamentable is that the highest leadership still does not carry mutual conviction that violence and war stand banished irrevocably.
If they had already done so, as claimed in many statements, they would have responded to the natural calamity in Kashmir differently. There would similarly be no suspicion about the complicity of the other state in the carnage in New Delhi. There should have been an instant agreement that the criminal elements behind it are enemies of both countries.
Since Kashmir has been the main area of contestation, it has once again borne the brunt of the lingering distrust between the two sub-continental powers. There will be no great homage to the dead and dying, no deeper remembrance, than for these nuclear-armed neighbours to devise trusted measures ranging from a no-war pact to joint strategies for combating terrorism.
Once they have truly resolved that their disputes and differences will be settled only through negotiations, they will be able to fight nature — red in tooth and claw — as well as numerous kinds of mischief that misguided men get up to.
The writer is a former foreign secretary
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