It’s one minute to twelve: NOTES FROM DELHI

IF India and Pakistan did not have nuclear weapons they would have fought their fifth war by now. (Kargil was the fourth.) Is that good news or bad? Which is worse? The periodic blood lust of the past or holocaust postponed? The promise of mutually assured destruction (appropriately acronymed MAD) kept the peace in Europe after the Second World War.

There was more than one occasion when NATO could have moved against the coalition under the Warsaw Pact led by the Soviet Union: in 1956, when Hungary was invaded by Soviet troops; twice in 1961, when Soviet missiles were deployed in Cuba and; when the Berlin Wall came up; perhaps even in 1967 when the Czech uprising was crushed.

Each time, one side blinked and catastrophe was averted. In the 1960s there raged proxy wars between the West and the Soviet Union. (West, of course, is a notional term. Australia, which is about as east as you can get, thinks of itself as part of the West, as indeed it is, politically, economically and ethnically.) Vietnam was the high point of this confrontation, but wars in the name of decolonization and neo-colonialism were rampant through Africa, Latin America and Asia.

It was the Great Game played in every part of the world. But the principals, America and the Soviet Union, made absolutely sure that they did not lose the world in the process of trying to gain it.

(China spent this phase of history quietly building up its strength and waiting to see which elephant survived before it took on the exhausted victor.)

Eventually, when the death count became unacceptable, and public opinion could no longer be as easily manipulated by artificial or simulated scare tactics, America changed its strategy. It decided to bleed the Soviet Union to death.

Moscow cooperated by its biggest blunder, the invasion of Afghanistan. But someone was also doing some sharp thinking in Washington. Even as the physical and economic cost of pacification rose in Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan upped the ante in nuclear capability.

Both sides always knew that the strength of their economy would be a crucial determinant in the confrontation. The stratified, over indulgent and undernourished communist economy could not keep pace with the rapacious vigour of capitalism. The colour television set defeated the black and white television set, to use a metaphor. Comrade Humpty Dumpty had a big fall.

But at least part of the reason for the unprecedented half a century of peace in Europe after the Second World War was that Europe was exhausted. It had inflicted too many wounds upon itself; it had raped itself too often.

The nature of war changed. At the beginning of the twentieth century less than five per cent of the causalities of war were civilians. By the end of the century the percentages were reversed.

The Second World War destroyed the barrier between battlefield and civilian life over and over again. Between Germany and the Soviet Union alone they lost some 37 million lives; add to this the six million Jews that the Nazis devastated and destroyed and the word carnage takes on a new meaning. By the 1960s, American soldiers were being officially encouraged to take their frustrations out on Vietnamese civilians through stark murder or serial rape. (The prostitutes of Saigon were better off; at least they got paid.) There was no urge towards ethics or discipline on the Soviet side; and Russian soldiers in Chechnya today have inherited the characteristics of savagery disguised as war.

But, once again, Europeans and Americans never turned their own homelands into battlefields.

India and Pakistan are not tired of war. One reason may be because their four wars have been short, and the collateral damage has been minimal. Their longest war was the first one, lasting some fourteen months during 1947 and 1948. The field of operations was limited to the province of Jammu and Kashmir, and air power was not used to any significant extent. 1965 did see dogfights, but civilian targets were scrupulously avoided.

1971 was a walkover, once the talk began. And Kargil was again limited in both scope and operations. All four were very professional wars, to put it accurately. None spilled over into the kind of attrition displayed by Iran and Iraq during their terrible war of more than eight years.

From the year of Kargil, or a bit before, a strange kind of artillery exchange has gone on, whose purpose is beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. It is a slogging match on either side, empty of evacuated terrain that sends shudders of delight through the hearts of arms merchants but is of no practical use to anyone else. A more purposeful confrontation might be taking place in Siachen, but I am no expert on glacier warfare.

The nature of Indo-Pak wars began to change when the use of terror became an element in the overall Pakistan strategy. This was both more surreptitious and more immature during the Punjab days, when abatement and succour were on offer rather than official endorsement and policy-support to separatists. The elimination of the Valley of Kashmir from the Indian Union is the declared aim of Pakistan. The support to terror in the valley, and for the valley, is qualitatively and quantitatively different.

What India is facing in what should be called its third Kashmir war is what the Soviet Union faced in Afghanistan: a struggle between regular and irregular armies. (This is exactly what American and British troops will face, by the way, in the next phase of the Afghan war, with the irregular forces still using Pakistan as their operating base, with or without the formal help of the Islamabad establishment.) Such a war is debilitating and provocative because it is conducted without rules.

It suits Pakistan perfectly, because Islamabad can choose the distance it wants to maintain between itself and the successes or failures of this clandestine force. A regular army such as ours will search for a pitched battle. An irregular one such as Pakistan’s will seek darkness and offer suicide. “Tiger” Prabhakaran has been conducting exactly such a war in Sri Lanka, and with more tenacity, since he has no safe base to fall back upon for rest and regrouping.

Such a war is also clearly a war of nerves. Pakistan has acquired extraordinary expertise in this war of nerves.

What can Delhi do in response? It can, and does, threaten a larger war. But this threat is partly compromised by the absence of clearly defined war objectives. The terrorists are effective, or not, on Indian soil. There is sufficient evidence to indicate that for one successful terrorist attack perhaps a dozen or more have been intercepted and aborted. But success is a one-paragraph story, while failure dominates the headlines. The most familiar stated objective is to cross the Line of Control in “hot pursuit” of terrorists into Pakistan-held Kashmir. But there is no Jenin across that Line of Control; and if a terrorist camp had any sense it would probably be operating from Peshawar or Balochistan. How far do you go in search? How far can you go?

Pakistan’s military rulers live on the brink in more senses than one. Their rule is amoral and, by any modern standards, illegitimate. To turn Marx on his head, they have nothing to lose but their chains. Shifting the line of vision to a subjective perspective, what does Pervez Musharraf have to lose by war? Nothing, and he may have everything to gain.

At which point comes the paradox: can anyone gain from a war that everyone might lose? A nuclear war is implicitly and explicitly civilian; that bomb will not do surgery; it will flatten and mass-destruct.

It serves the Pakistan military establishment twice over to raise the ante, because nothing is better guaranteed to bring the world scurrying to South Asia than the prospect of nuclear devastation.

The Pakistan government is the only government in history to openly and regularly threaten to use nuclear power. Armageddon is a weapon in the range of its options. Its strategic thinking can be summed up in a sentence: if we go, we take you along with us.

As the problem goes down to the wire it becomes a game of finer and finer calculation: what level of desperation is needed to touch that button? The trouble with the answer is that it is human. And no science has been devised that can accurately measure the vagaries of humanity. There are no standards to determine the power of anger or desperation.

The volatile passions that rule the fate of the subcontinent, fermented by religion and history and experience, are too provocative for a nuclear age. But one thing, and perhaps only this thing, is clear.

The stalemate has become dangerously stale. It cannot continue without a geometric escalation of risk. Between the Second World War and the erosion of the Soviet Union, the nuclear clock wavered at five minutes to twelve across Europe and America. In India and Pakistan it is now one minute to twelve.

Restructuring the Senate

THERE are democratic or quasi-democratic polities where the legislative authority resides in a single house. Others have bicameral legislatures, meaning that two houses share the legislative function. Federal polities are more likely to have bicameral legislatures, but some unitary states also have them.

Great Britain, a unitary state, offers the oldest example of bicameralism. Until the Constitution of 1973 went into effect, we in Pakistan had a single legislative organ, but since then we have had a parliament consisting of two houses, the National Assembly and the Senate.

The government of Great Britain is currently considering proposals for reforming the House of Lords, the “upper” house of its parliament. But the criteria that might guide this endeavour are not settled, raising the larger question of the need for a second house. Some participants in this debate would abolish the House of Lords, others would change its composition so as to make it elective, still others would have half its membership elected and the other half appointed, and some would leave it the way it is. Thought is also being given to the jurisdiction of the reformed House of Lords.

Until recently sharp class distinctions characterized British society and a hereditary aristocracy constituted the ruling class. With the advent of democracy it yielded more and more of its authority to the representatives of the people assembled in the House of Commons. Eventually, the aristocrats, represented in the House of Lords, were left only with the role of delaying legislation that the House of Commons might have adopted hastily, thus allowing second thoughts and cooler deliberation to bear on the process.

The Senate, which is the “upper” house of Congress in the United States, is reputed to be a great deliberative body. But unlike the upper house in Britain, its authority and jurisdiction have always been essentially the same as those of the House of Representatives. American society did not admit of rigid class distinctions, but originally it was understood nevertheless that the Senate would represent the wealthy, and until about the end of the nineteenth century it was, in fact, called the “rich men’s club.”

Much more than class distinctions, federalism is the reason for the existence of the American Senate and its wide-ranging authority. The federal government is the creature, not the creator, of the federating states. The states (as “colonies”) preceded the Union and, after independence, called it into being.

Even today the ordinary American is a carrier of two identities. He is an American citizen, but he is at the same time a citizen, not just resident, of his state. A Texan is every bit as proud of being a Texan as he is of being an American. Senators are just as dedicated to the national interest as members of the House of Representatives may be, but they are primarily the spokesmen for their respective states.

In pre-independence India the central government made and remade provinces mainly from considerations of administrative convenience. The post-independence government in both India and Pakistan has retained the authority to redraw provincial boundaries. Unlike the American situation, the federal union and its government are the creators, not the creatures, of the federating units (provinces). The ruling elite in Pakistan have preferred to think of it as a unitary state rather than as a federation. They have maintained the central government’s supremacy over the provinces in the mistaken belief that a “strong centre” is essential to the country’s preservation.

The civil war in East Pakistan, its secession from the union, and visible persistence of separatist sentiment in some of the remaining provinces gave our new system builders the idea that some additional gesture of recognizing the distinct provincial identities should be made. And, so, they provided for a Senate in the Constitution of 1973. But even then they don’t seem to have taken an adequate measure of the prevailing sense of provincial identity.

It is a known fact that our ruling elite have made no effort to cultivate a sense of nationhood in the minds of our people. We may become a nation in course of time, but as of now our sense of belonging to our respective provinces and/or ethnic communities is much stronger than our sense of being Pakistanis. This is a “ground reality.” Nothing will be gained from lamenting it, and we ignore it only at our peril.

The central elite’s suppression of the provincial counter-elite intensified the campaign for Pakhtoonistan in the NWFP and provoked revolts in Balochistan which had to be subdued by the use of military force. Separatist sentiment has subsided in these two provinces but it has not disappeared. Sindh has always been dissatisfied, but for the last several years this dissatisfaction has been rising to a state of severe alienation.

Some of the political elite in the smaller provinces, more notably Sindh, maintain that Punjab, which contains more than sixty per cent of the country’s population, dominates the central government to their substantial disadvantage. One way of doing away with Punjabi exploitation, popular in Sindh, is to break up Punjab into three or more provinces. As I have argued in an earlier article, this is a bad idea because it will not accomplish the desired result. For one thing, folks in the resulting provinces will still be Punjabi-speaking people. If we must assume that they are bent upon exploiting Sindh, then given the fact that they will still be the same people, what is to prevent them from joining hands to plunder Sindh and share the spoils? The remedy lies in strengthening federalism by enlarging the scope of provincial autonomy and by further empowering the Senate, not in dismembering Punjab.

Let us take a quick look at the American political landscape. The states of Rhode Island and Delaware are tiny as compared to Texas, California, New York, and Pennsylvania. Nobody in the smaller American states has ever called for the breaking up of the larger ones, for even though California has a much larger presence in the House of Representatives than does Rhode Island, they both have equal representation in the Senate (two Senators each). The Senate has equal powers with the House, and both the rules and tradition (“senatorial privilege”) enable its members to block federal legislation that may be unacceptable to their respective states.

What shall we do to enliven our Senate? In the first place, its members should be elected directly by the people in each province so as to enhance their sense of responsibility to the constituents and political forces in their home base. Direct election will also bring the Senate on a par with the National Assembly in terms of its democratic credentials and status. Even if it is primarily a guardian of provincial rights, the Senate will nevertheless be a deliberative body that reaches decisions through debate. That brings up the question of its composition. By way of emphasizing the federal character of the state, the provinces should have equal representation in the Senate.

The issue of size is related to the efficacy and meaningfulness of debate. A chamber consisting of ten members, for instance, is more of a cabal than a deliberative body. It would be too small to allow the diversity of insights and perspectives for debate to be useful. The American union is composed of fifty states and the Senate here consists of one hundred members. But it was a great deliberative body even when it consisted of only fifty (and at the very beginning only twenty-six) members. In our own case, I think, a membership of forty-eight would be quite adequate.

The Senate should be “co-equal” with the National Assembly in terms of its authority and jurisdiction. It should not be necessary for legislation to be passed by the Assembly before it is considered in the Senate. Provision should be made in the Constitution for any and all legislative measures, except perhaps the “money bills,” to be initiated in the Senate as well as in the Assembly. Concurrence of the Senate should be essential before a bill is deemed to have been passed by parliament and sent to the president for his approval.

The Assembly should not be able to override the Senate’s rejection of a bill. If it “dies” in the Senate, it should simply be given up as dead. Alternatively, a joint committee of the two houses should consider appropriate amendments that might salvage the bill. If this is too excessive a concession to the “will” of the provinces, at the expense of the “will of the people,” then perhaps a two-thirds majority of the total membership of the two houses, meeting in joint session, might be required to move the bill to passage. I should add, however, that I do not favour this option, because in such a joint session the Assembly, being much larger than the Senate and therefore certain to prevail, may not be inclined to make any concession to the Senate’s point of view.

One might object that my proposal for strengthening the Senate would often create a deadlock between the two houses and bring the work of legislation to a halt. Not necessarily. The Assembly and the Senate will work together harmoniously if the same party or coalition of parties forms the majority in each house. If that is not the case, we would have to depend on the patriotism, regard for the national interest, common sense, and the negotiating skills of politicians in both houses to reach compromises. Moreover, when each house knows that its agenda cannot go forward without the consent of the other, members in both will develop the disposition to make mutual concessions.

Nuclear chest-thumpers

THE presence of one million stalemated troops along the border between India and Pakistan, the nuclear-armed foes who have fought three wars in the last half-century, has set off alarm bells across the world.

Aside from a desire to see war averted, Washington has another interest: Pakistan says it will move troops from its west, where they should be hunting for the Al Qaeda forces that fled Afghanistan, to the east, to face Indian soldiers.

The leaders of India and Pakistan should take advantage of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s suggestion that they hold an informal side meeting next week at an Asian regional conference in Kazakhstan.

Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is happy to see Putin, President Bush and leaders of NATO countries pressuring Pakistan to stop terrorists crossing into Kashmir. But he also should be willing to talk with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf without demanding that Pakistan first stop abetting terrorism.

Musharraf did crack down on Islamic militants in January, after supporters of Kashmir secession from India attacked the Indian Parliament in New Delhi. But he later freed most of those rounded up, and this month separatists attacked an army housing complex in Kashmir, killing more than 30 people.

As with the Palestinian Authority, there is some question of the willingness or ability of Pakistani authorities to stop terrorism. Islamic radicals have killed Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, 11 French contract defence workers and four worshippers at a Protestant church favoured by foreigners. All of these attacks were designed to humiliate Musharraf for helping the United States against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But Musharraf, who seized power in a coup in 1999, does have power over the military. He should have delayed the recent tests of three Pakistani missiles capable of carrying a nuclear payload.

The Pakistani leader should now order his generals to crack down on cross-border terrorism. India might then pull troops back from the border and de-escalate its own nuclear chest-thumping.

—Los Angeles Times

Winning a war without fighting

IN THE current crisis why the world believes India but not Pakistan? The short answer is because it views India as a democracy and Pakistan a theocracy. This view stays constant no matter whether the government here is elected or military. It is a failure not just of diplomacy but of the national way of life itself.

The intentions of Pakistan, whether it is human rights, economic development, nuclear capability or the people’s right of self-determination in Kashmir, remain suspect and its standpoint suffers just because in all these activities the name of religion is invoked but without its gentle or moral touch.

The disability that the Constitution imposes on some classes of citizens on grounds of religion or the penal laws like the one which provides for stoning to death of an adulteress (who, in fact, may be a victim of rape), or the judicial verdicts like the one which has outlawed the modern banking system create an impression worldwide that Pakistan’s laws and institutions are both archaic and harsh. Ironically, these innovations in the system hurt many but hardly benefit any. The people at large remain unaffected or unconcerned.

One sometimes wonders how the faith of the people would have come to harm if Justice Cornelius were to be made the president of the broken country in its reconstruction years instead of Chaudhry Fazal Elahi, and again, in the more recent times, the indignity and upheaval the people and the country would have been spared had Nawaz Sharif chosen Dorab Patel instead of Rafiq Tarar as the president, and the image of the country as well as of Islam would have shone brighter.

Likewise, the raped woman, perhaps, will never die the cruel way the court has ruled nor the banking will be abolished but the shame of one and uncertainty of the other will stick on the country for all times.

India has its more numerous fanatics and cults deadlier than Pakistan’s and they were never represented in a government more than they are now in Vajpayee’s coalition. Yet the world listens to India for it is a democracy in which the laws and public policy make no distinction between one citizen and another on grounds of religion. In practice the discrimination against the minorities in secular India may be severer than in Islamic Pakistan but the world judges the two countries by the fact that a Muslim or a Dalit can be, and has been, the president of India but a Hindu or a Christian simply cannot be in Pakistan.

The complexion of its laws and policies has cost Pakistan dear in its relations with India. Nowhere has this cost been greater than in the context of Kashmir and never fraught with greater danger to the existence of the country than at present. It has also brought the credibility of Pakistan in world power circles at an all-time low.

Ignoring President Musharraf’s categorical statement that there is no infiltration across the Line of Control in Kashmir nor is Pakistan allowing the use of its soil for terrorism, the visiting ministers and UN officials continue to condemn Pakistan for “cross-border terrorism” without mentioning even in passing the revolt of the people against Indian repression in which, by Indian admission, thirty thousand and, by independent accounts, twice as many Kashmiris have lost their lives. Against that, the troops and the police killed by the Mujahideen, or terrorists, even by the Indian accounts, are fewer than five thousand. Thus, even with the alleged cross-border support, it is an uneven contest and its economic misery is borne by the people alone.

Chris Patten, EU’s commissioner for foreign relations, sounded almost like a spokesman of the Indian government when he said that the patience of India was at a breaking point. British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw spoke no less when he said that Britain firmly stood behind India against cross-border terrorism even if it were labelled freedom-fighting. The Russian backing for India, as always, is unqualified. The refrain of the statements of other world leaders may be less partisan but all of them, Kofi Anan included, have demanded of President Musharraf to match his words with action. Even President Bush in whose war on terrorism Pakistan is a key player had to warn Musharraf to stop raids rather than fire missiles. The silence of the Muslim countries is deafening

All these statements came after their authors had heard Pakistan’s viewpoint first-hand. Whatever the ultimate outcome, Pakistan has already lost the battle of reasoning and propaganda. The past denials of its participation in the Afghan conflict and in Kashmir freedom movement, when it had become common knowledge, had robbed the country of all credibility. In order to restore international confidence in its commitments as also for its own survival and stability, it must now change the strategy and posture both.

In the current state of world opinion Pakistan cannot win the war nor the heart of the Kashmiris. Whether it is the Indians or Pakistanis who fire across the Line of Control only the Muslims get killed and displaced. In the desperation of their unending agony, they might reconcile to live under Indian domination rather than continue to fight for accession to Pakistan. The world press, like the world leaders, also holds Pakistan’s aggressive intervention in Kashmir responsible for bringing the two countries to the brink of war. A prominent exception is The Economist which finds it wrong to heap all the blame at Pakistan’s door. “The encouragement of Pakistan’s security apparatus”, the paper said in its last issue, “is only one of the things that make the jihadis such an intractable problem. Another is the way in which mainly Hindu India has treated mainly Muslim Kashmir since independence. The record of abuses committed by the hundreds of thousands of troops stationed there is a blot on the reputation of the world’s largest democracy. ...In Pakistani eyes, arming the jihadis is the only available response to an India that refuses to compromise.”

With this fair assessment, The Economist poses a question: “Could the general (Musharraf) rein in the militants even if he wanted to?” An answer to it may be found in the general surrendering to the demand of his not-so-militant an audience on the birth anniversary of the holy Prophet to keep the voting lists of the minorities apart from the Muslims even though now they have to vote jointly.

When the general has driven the main body of the politicians out of public life and some into exile, he has to keep the maulanas — mild or militant — on his side. He can rein them in if he doesn’t want to use them.

So could have his predecessors. Fundamentalism has thrived on Pakistan’s power tussle, and not on the support of its people.