What a state of mind!

ONE of life’s minor pleasures is listening to Hindi film songs, even if the newer ones prefer an uncomplicated thud to a fine beat. A new song is screaming its way through the music channels, sung onscreen by two Punjabi brothers, Sunny and Bobby, sons of the ageless Dharmendra.

The song has words to accompany the thud; I cannot quite call them lyrics. But they open something like this:

Bobby (younger brother) to Sunny: Parahji, tusi top ho! (Brother, you are a cannon!)

Sunny (in immediate response): Paape! Tusi India da hope ho! (Loved one, you are the hope of India!)

I have, over the years, heard more learned definitions of Indian nationalism, but could there be anything more earthy and forthright than this? The adoring younger brother finds the ultimate Punjabi accolade for his elder, and calls him a veritable cannon. (The song uses the soft ‘t’ and it is top as in cannon, not as in the toy.) And what is the best that the elder brother can wish for his beloved sibling? That he becomes the hope of India.

When Sunny and Bobby were in their short pants (actually, they still are, but you know what I mean) they would not have sung this song. The Punjabi might have been forgiven by those who wanted Khalistan, but not the sentiment. Twenty years ago, the Sikh was becoming the symbol of insurrection, and an Asiad in Delhi during the autumn of 1982 accelerated that process as the state, determined to enforce security, used counterproductive methods to impose it. Puss formed around the wound; India was in danger of getting septic. In the summer of 1984, the country looked septic. A darkness of fire, cloud, death, assassination and mass murder spread across the skies of India. Who dared dream that Punjab would be at peace once more?

That was the biggest challenge before Rajiv Gandhi as he inherited power over an India on the edge. It goes without saying that the challenge had a personal, tragic dimension. For fifteen years now it has been fashionable to dismiss Rajiv Gandhi as a failure: worse, a corrupt and immature failure. There were enough mistakes made by him to earn the censure of a historian — one need to think no further than Shah Bano, the mishandling of Bofors and the misjudgment in the 1987 Kashmir elections.

I must declare a personal bias in his favour; and a decade after his death it is possible to be objective. Rajiv Gandhi was a wonderful human being and a much better prime minister than his contemporaries or his Bofors-stained reputation will allow. There are at least three outstanding achievements to his credit: the introduction of the computer and the upgradation of telecommunication infrastructure; the Assam accord and the Punjab accord.

Peace in Punjab was his greatest legacy to his country. It took time and was extraordinarily difficult. He had to hold his nerve during periods of despondence, inertia and crisis, not the least of them being the second siege of the Golden Temple which he ended by taking personal charge of the counteroffensive, and which he neutralized without the loss of a single life in an atmosphere of relentless violence. His fellow architect of the Punjab accord, Sant Longowal, paid with his life not too long after the accord. India has been combating terrorism on a continuing basis far longer than any other country.

The key to Rajiv Gandhi’s strategy in Punjab was the Akali Dal. The Akalis, inevitably, occupied the space between Delhi and the secessionists. Historically, they had led the demand for the formation of a Sikh-majority state. The secessionists wanted to extend this to a Sikh-majority country. The Akalis could have gone either way. Indifference, or simple brutality (always a prerogative of the state) could have as easily pushed them away in the festering climate on the 1980s. Rajiv Gandhi’s method was simple: he drew the Akalis in by giving them power, and thereby a vested interest in the Indian union.

You did not need to be an Albert Einstein to understand the dynamics of this barter, but you did need imagination and a commitment to India that was greater than the commitment to your limited partisan interest. Rajiv Gandhi worked within the framework of a vision for India. One consequence was the cynicism of those Congress leaders who thought that sharing power, or, worse, conceding it, in the national interest was nothing but naivete. Naturally, they dressed up their greed in appropriate phrases, the favourite being the exclusive right of the Congress to uphold the national interest. In their hands history would have travelled in a different direction.

A decade after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, however, they are in charge of the Congress party. This is all the more surprising, perhaps even shocking, since the Congress is under the leadership of Rajiv Gandhi’s widow, Sonia. A combination of circumstances gave her the opportunity to play a positive part in the process that could — could is the only word that is possible to use; anything more optimistic would be misleading — lead to a resolution of the complex dilemmas in Jammu and Kashmir.

From the evidence of the first few days after the results were declared, Mrs Sonia Gandhi has opted for short-range partisanship that will hurt the country of course but could also leave her own party’s credibility severely mauled. It is as if she is concerned only with the interests of the party that has made her its leader. She will choose to bother about India only if India chooses to make her its leader.

The Congress is not the largest single party in the newly elected Jammu and Kashmir assembly. That status remains with the National Conference. Dr Farooq Abdullah has shown more wisdom after defeat than he did when in power. But that too is common. Power is a drug that induces various forms of hallucination; defeat is a slap that opens your eyes with a start. Farooq Abdullah was right in all he said, including a post-office wish to play golf till he died and then beyond into paradise. More crucially, he realized that credibility is more essential in public life than numbers, and for the moment he had lost credibility. He refused to buy or bait MLAs to cobble a majority. He was perfectly within his rights as well to demit office on the date on which the life of the last assembly expired. He was not obliged to give time to his opponents to settle contentious differences.

The Congress is the single largest party in the Opposition, but that achievement is not totally what it seems. Jammu and Kashmir is a clearly divided state with three parts representing different ethnic majorities. In a similar sense the political culture of Punjab too was divided till Haryana was separated. The largest single party in the opposition to have emerged from the Muslim-majority valley of Kashmir is not the Congress, but Mufti Mohammad Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party. The chief minister of the state has always, and understandably, come from the valley. If the Congress cannot understand this much then it has lost all sense of responsibility.

The manner in which the declared leader of the Congress, Ghulam Nabi Azad, with full approval from Sonia Gandhi, has behaved since winning 20 seats out of 87, is extraordinarily foolish and even malevolent. All he has concentrated on doing really is trying to purchase MLAs with money today and the offer of more to come once they become ministers or ministers’ henchmen. The stench of corruption now and loot later trails the Congress even before it has come to power in Srinagar. A party with 20 MLAs has been trying over more than its own number to get a majority. Each day a sort of tally is announced. A horse auction was never more garish.

To do this in any state would have been unethical enough. To do this in Kashmir at this moment is unforgivable. Sonia Gandhi has lost more credibility in the last seven days than she gained in the last seven months.

It is not unreasonable for any political party to ask for support. But that support is sought on the basis of a programme, or a policy line. No one in the Congress has offered any construct of what it hopes to do in power, apart from the standard offer of good governance. A leader of the Congress in Kashmir should have announced a course of political action, and a policy framework for regional economic development, talks with Delhi and its approach to negotiations with extremists and with Pakistan. We have not heard a word on issues. Instead all we hear is special pleading, and see thin honey-laden smiles, as the Congress tries to add Jammu and Kashmir to its national body count. Making it her fifteenth state is more important to Sonia Gandhi than forming a coalition government that can help calm the crisis in Kashmir.

The Indian political class could lose, by its selfishness, what the Kashmiri people gained with their courage.

The writer is the chief editor of the Asian Age based in New Delhi

Sniper arrests

In a compelling, weird way, the arrest of two suspects in the Washington-area sniper shootings seems like the cancellation of an awful reality-TV show that we hated but couldn’t resist watching. The terrible deaths and injuries to innocents, made worse by a bewildering randomness, terrorized that area while TV instantly home-delivered matching fears across the land. The manhunt now becomes a process story in more familiar legal forums, allowing us to see institutions determining facts, innocence or guilt and punishment.

The nation has had serial killers and mass murderers before, but none so ongoing, so quickly and deeply penetrating the nation’s psyche. That’s a measure of two things. It re-demonstrates TV’s permeation of life, especially the all-news cable channels with their own peculiar, at times perverse, competitive drives.

— The Los Angeles Times

Falling apart at the seams?

THE games being played out in and around Islamabad, and possibly elsewhere across the globe, have a familiar ring. Each pretender to the throne is busy repainting his image and crying himself hoarse that he is not what the power brokers think he is, not even what he might have said he was. The funniest of all roles has been assumed by the party with the longest roll-call in the new National Assembly. Its failure to name its leader merely confirms the view that the task perhaps does not lie within its domain.

Among other things the principle that a parliamentary party leader is elected by members of that party and not by heads of factions or alliances has been thrown overboard. And somebody is enjoying a laugh at fresh evidence to support the theory that politicians in particular and civilians in general can do nothing right.

The question uppermost in the minds of the people is not who will rule Pakistan, because only the purblind are still asking that question. For them the issue is: how is the state to be governed? The question has acquired extraordinary importance in the light of evidence that the state is falling apart at the scams. Concepts of rule of law and conventions about propriety of administration’s actions are receiving short shrift almost every day.

The household effects of Major-General (R) Ahsan Ahmad littered outside the house he had occupied for quite some time offer evidence that the state not only has contempt for law, it has also lost its manners.

The former health minister in the Sindh cabinet says he resigned his office in protest against what he describes as extra-legal actions of the provincial authority. The governor claims the minister was sacked for misconduct over a long period, conceding that misconduct was condoned for quite some time. Maybe, the minister chose to resign after getting wind of gubernatorial action or intention. Who struck earlier than the other is a mystery which is unlikely to be resolved. Public mind may, however, be influenced by the memory of a Balochistan judge’s exit from the Election Commission and his subsequent departure from the bench, and the sequence of events that could not be shrouded in secrecy.

Some incorrigible quibblers about legal formalities wish to know about the sanction for the governor’s decision — obviously because it is customary to quote chapter and verse even when an orderly is sacked or a procession banned or a book proscribed. But is that question relevant in the present situation? Be that as it may, how does one defend the throwing out of Mr Ahsan Ahmed’s belongings into the open? Was he defying a court’s eviction order or a notice that he was not entitled to the rule under which an ex-functionary of the state can retain his residence for some time? The public has no evidence to reject the view that what has been done in this case constitutes a most petty-minded resort to police raj methods.

But even the police can plead helplessness where this is convenient. The detention of a well-known surgeon of Lahore raises a host of questions. Conventional wisdom tells us that if a person is deprived of freedom of movement and cannot sleep at home, he is under detention and must be produced in a court within 24 hours of his arrest. Who arrested the doctor? The Punjab home secretary and the Inspector-General of Police disclaim responsibility for his arrest. This in a country where the Karachi police cannot normally arrest a murderer in Malir district without informing the police of the latter district. Completely forgotten is the rule that every citizen is under the protection of the local police without whose satisfaction no interference with one’s basic rights is possible. No law authorizes detention for asking some questions. How does this incident reflect upon claims to rule of law?

Two persons were killed recently by the levies in Panjgur, a relatively peaceful part of Balochistan. The incident reveals a new high in excesses by the levies against which the people of the province have been clamouring for years. Apparently, there is no law to prevent the levies and other forces (Rangers and Frontier Constabulary) from harassing road users, extorting money from wayfarers, or taking citizens’ lives.

The Election Commission announces the electoral victory of a favourite son from a Shikarpur constituency contrary to the Returning Officer’s finding. The RO declares this candidate to be the loser even on recount. The commission now sheepishly wishes to inquire into the cause of confusion, which expression is not ordinarily used for breach of law. What is unlawful must be undone before a search for those responsible for ‘confusion’ is launched.

Doctors, teachers and students have been out in the streets in Lahore for days in protest against changes in the charters of health and educational institutions. Authority refuses to listen to them. It is not even prepared to pacify the protesters with false promises, as was done in the case of the teachers’ agitation against denationalization of their institutions or regarding protests against authoritarianism on the Karachi University campus.

Disregard for solemn pledges and the demands of equity is writ large in the decision to bring the Associated Press of Pakistan at par with radio (and one knows how independent the Pakistan Broadcasting Corporation is) by turning it into a corporation dominated by officials. Nobody has time to examine Section 5 of the Associated Press of Pakistan (Taking over) Ordinance of 1961, which says:

“After the affairs of the undertaking have been put on a sound footing with respect to its finance, management and the efficiency of its news service, the Central Government shall make such arrangements for running and managing it on a permanent basis in order to ensure that the undertaking shall provide independent, health and efficient news service, as to it might appear proper (emphasis added). To this end the central government may transfer the whole or a part of the undertaking or any interest in it to an individual, or an organization or a Board of trustees set up for this purpose.”

The commitment was to give up control of the news service. After 41 years of attempts to put APP on “a sound footing” all that the government can bring itself up to doing is a change in the label of its authority, because determination of what is proper is the exclusive prerogative of the central government. The people have no say in the matter.

Will the distinguished claimants to high elective offices care to answer a simple question: do they have the good sense to grasp in full measure the degeneration of the state and the courage to restore to the people their right to participate in governance?

Delayed but not cancelled

Hopes have risen recently that the United States may not attack Iraq and risk unleashing chaos in the Middle East despite the Bush administration’s obsession with getting Saddam Hussein. The Bali bomb and even the Washington sniper have reminded the Americans that the goal was originally to thwart terrorist attacks, not to bring about a ‘regime change’ in Iraq.

The United Nations Security Council seems likely to pass a resolution that gives Washington much of what it wants; and the revelations about North Korea’s nuclear weapons have provided an alternate focus for American fears.

Unfortunately, the hopes are probably misplaced. There is unlikely to be enough time for popular opposition to the war to grow irresistible before the attack on Iraq starts. What’s happening at the United Nations is not quite what it seems. And the real lesson of the North Korean imbroglio is that any government anticipating a confrontation with the United States should make sure it has nuclear weapons, because they raise the tone of the discourse wonderfully.

When North Korean representatives revealed to their US counterparts earlier this month (in what an American official called a “belligerent” fashion) that their country was still working on nuclear weapons despite a 1994 treaty with the US in which it promised to abandon its programme, Washington did not demand a ‘regime change’ and threaten to invade. On the contrary, it suddenly became a model of politeness.

It’s an old axiom that societies which allow duelling are very polite. When insulting or bullying someone can lead, quite legally, to a bullet between the eyes, the whole standard of courtesy rises remarkably.

Iraq, which denies having nuclear weapons, has been the target of almost weekly threats of attack by President George W. Bush since he first discovered the ‘axis of evil’ last January. North Korea, by contrast, is being treated with the softest of kid gloves. “The president believes this is troubling and sobering,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan after the news of the North Korean claims came out. “We are addressing this through diplomatic channels.”

No threats of regime change, no demand for arms inspectors to go in at once, none of the abuse that is daily rained down on the (richly deserving) head of Saddam Hussein. Why? Because the US government does not really believe that Saddam Hussein has any seriously threatening weapons of mass destruction (despite what it tells the children), whereas it suspects that Kim Jong-Il does.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he believes that North Korea has “a small number of nuclear weapons “ — which means, in practice, that there is zero likelihood of a US military attack on North Korea. The probability of an American attack on Iraq remains high precisely because it does not, in Washington’s view, pose a serious danger to America’s armed forces.

The UN probably can’t head the attack off either. The Security Council may meet US demands for a resolution that will send the arms inspectors back into Iraq with a tougher mandate, but it will not explicitly authorize Washington to launch an attack without seeking a further resolution whenever it judges that Saddam Hussein is trying to hinder the inspectors’ work. On the other hand, it is probably willing to fudge the wording of the resolution so that Washington can claim to be acting with UN authority when it does exactly that.

What is going on at the UN is pure damage control. One of the most deeply entrenched bits of wisdom about international affairs is that the League of Nations, the UN’s predecessor, failed mainly because the US was not a member. Nobody wants to go through that again, so the permanent members of the Security Council are fashioning a resolution that will let them accept (or at least not violently object to) Washington’s claims to be acting legally when it attacks Iraq in a few months’ time.

Britain will gladly vote for any resolution Washington wants, and China will abstain as usual. To win over the awkward squad, Russia and France, President Bush has now promised to go back to the Security Council for consultations before he declares the arms inspectors a failure and launches his attack on Iraq — but he has given no promise that the US will wait for UN authorization before going to war.

Sending UN inspectors into Iraq probably does mean a postponement of the US attack until early next year, but it was never clear that Washington wanted to act earlier anyway. A November attack would have an unpredictable effect on voting patterns in the Congressional elections, and a December attack could undermine the Christmas retail binge. In the middle of a recession, you want the consumers out at the malls, not sitting at home glued to CNN.

But the American invasion of Iraq has just been postponed, not cancelled. The Arab world does not want it, NATO doesn’t think it’s necessary, the Pentagon and the CIA are clearly very unhappy about it in private, and American public opinion is getting increasingly diffident on the question, but President Bush still has enough clout to make it happen. It remains a mystery why he wants to blow most of his political capital on this enterprise, but there almost certainly will be a US attack, probably in January or February.—Copyright.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.

The death of deterrence

WHATEVER the outcome of the intense diplomatic manoeuvres at the UN, whatever cover the UN might give to an American attack on Iraq, they cannot hide a fundamental truth. It has profound implications for future relations between states.

Henry Kissinger, archpriest of realpolitik, has called it “revolutionary”. Tony Blair appears to have embraced it, though we cannot be sure.

A new doctrine of war has been laid down by the Bush administration that casts aside all the traditional tenets of international law as well as the UN and Nato charters. It abandons the concept of deterrence, considered the bedrock of stability throughout the cold war and cited by successive British governments as justification for their nuclear arsenal.

Ever since September 11 last year, it has been reflected in speeches, notably by Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, and Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. It was spelt out most clearly by Bush himself in June. The US, he said, would no longer rely on “deterrence” and “containment”; it had to be “ready for pre-emptive action”.

He added: “America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge, thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless.”

The new doctrine includes the right of the US to use its unsurpassed, indeed unsurpassable, military power, to overthrow governments by force if, in Washington’s view, they attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction — vice-president Dick Cheney has suggested this includes no fewer than 60 states — or harbour terrorists.

At least Kissinger, a historian by profession, appreciated the significance of the new doctrine. Regime change as an aim of military intervention is a direct challenge to the international system established by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, he recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times. That treaty established the principle of “state sovereignty”: that war is justified only by aggression across a national border. Though he argued that Saddam Hussein presented such a danger as to make pre-emptive action “an imperative”, he warned: “It is not in the American national interest to establish pre-emption as a universal principle available to every nation.”

Bush and his advisers have made no such qualification in their quest for a new, aggressive, Pax Americana, something they had wanted from the start but for which they were confident of attracting sufficient US domestic support only after the September 11 attacks.

Bush, who, judging by American opinion polls, desperately needs Britain to join any military action against Iraq, was persuaded by Blair, among others, to follow the UN route, if only for presentational purposes.

“Any action that we in the United Kingdom take will be strictly in accordance with our obligations in international law and under the United Nations charter,” Foreign Secretary Jack Straw insisted last week. “Under the charter,” he explained, “individual countries can act against others without a security council resolution, for example in the case of self-defence.”

His choice of language was deeply misleading. In international law, as in the UN and Nato charters, nations can attack others only in “self-defence”. As Kissinger suggests, this has always meant defence against an actual attack by another state, though more recently international lawyers have said it could also cover an imminent attack. As the government’s law officers have advised, it certainly does not allow for war for regime change.

Bush, who says his aim is to topple Saddam, has been persuaded by Blair among others to use the UN as a figleaf. It is now incumbent on Blair to say whether, as he colludes with Bush, he accepts the new American doctrine of military intervention. Blair must also explain why he believes Saddam cannot be deterred from using weapons of mass destruction (as he was during the 1991 Gulf war).

The prime minister, as well as his foreign and defence secretaries, must say what they really mean. Do they really believe the concept of deterrence, and the established principles of international law, can be abandoned — with the huge risks that implies — and are they prepared to argue their case with the British public?

The writer is the Guardian’s security affairs editor

Delhi’s pressure on Pakistan

ON October 17, India announced its decision to withdraw some of the forces it has concentrated on its international border with Pakistan since December 2001. Pakistan announced its decision to reciprocate the following day. This de-escalation which Pakistan had been seeking, and the rest of the international community was urging, will come about after two sets of elections.

The state elections held in Indian-occupied Kashmir which marked the tenth time India tried to gain a semblance of democratic legitimacy, produced results that did not suit the BJP government in New Delhi which found it necessary to introduce presidential rule in the state.

The other elections, held in Pakistan that India may have sought to influence through its attempted intimidation proceeded smoothly, without creating an opportunity for India to obtain political advantage. One can only guess that if the military regime in Pakistan had not fulfilled its commitment to restore democratic governance India might have sought to exploit the situation. That opportunity also did not materialize.

The BJP government’s deliberate decision to resort to coercion rather than conciliation was based on a perception that the events of 9/11 had created an opportunity to pressure Pakistan over Kashmir. India had achieved a degree of success in establishing a linkage between the intifada in Kashmir and the jihadi organizations straddling Taliban-held Afghanistan, and Pakistan. President Clinton, during his visit to South Asia in March 2000, had acknowledged this linkage by setting up a joint US-India working group on terrorism. This took cognizance of the fact that the US missile attack against Afghanistan in August 1998 had hit some members of the Harkatul Mujahideen, who were known to be active in Kashmir. Consequently, there was eager anticipation in New Delhi that the war against terror in Afghanistan would naturally extend to the activities of the jihadi groups in Kashmir.

Geography played a major part in the critical role assumed by Pakistan in the first operations launched against terror in Afghanistan following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, against targets in the US. India’s immediate reaction had been almost gleeful, in the certain expectation that as Pakistan had been backing the Taliban, the US would also eventually target it. India had hastened to offer to the US not only its land, sea and air bases but also the full backing of its armed forces.

The one country whose political and logistical support was critical for the planned US military campaign was Pakistan, which has a 2,500 kilometres long border with Afghanistan, surrounding the land-locked country on the east and south. Therefore, President Bush urgently, sought Pakistan’s participation in the coalition against terrorism, without taking much notice of India’s keenness to join in the war against terrorism. He also made it clear that those not joining the coalition would be deemed to be on the side of the terrorists. President Musharraf displayed adroitness in making a decision, and not only did he join the coalition, but also offered unstinted cooperation. Given the relevance of Pakistan’s total support to the US operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan emerged as a major ally of the US in the war against terrorism. This turn of events became a source of great frustration for New Delhi.

As the US proceeded with its military build-up, depending substantially on Pakistan’s intelligence and logistic support, India stepped up its efforts to highlight Pakistan’s support to jihadist groups. Before the US launched its operations against Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, a “terrorist” incident happened in Srinagar against the Kashmir Assembly on October 1 and blamed on Pakistan-based terrorist groups. As this did not affect the close Pakistan-US cooperation against terrorism, a major terrorist incident, this time targeting the Indian parliament, was stage-managed on December 13, and blamed on named jihadist groups, namely Lashkar-i-Taiba, and Jaish-i-Mohammad, that were known to have their headquarters in Pakistan. Though Pakistan condemned the attack, India proceeded to hold Islamabad responsible, without any formal inquiry, and took a series of actions predicated on blame being assigned to Pakistan.

The post December 13 measures marked the beginning of coercive diplomacy, through a series of moves that included ending of land. sea and air communications, withdrawal of high commissioner, halving of diplomatic staff, and the most serious concentration of land, sea and air forces by India along its borders with Pakistan. Pakistan was obliged to reciprocate, except that it did not withdraw its high commissioner till he was “expelled” by India in May 2002. India also called for the surrender to India of 20 terrorists, majority of them non-Pakistanis. President Musharraf had responded to these measures with restraint, and took a significant step towards reining in Jihadists and militant organizations through his address to the nation on January 12, 2002.

The address, which even the BJP leadership in India called “path-breaking”, did not lead to any reduction in the menacing Indian concentrations along Pakistan’s borders. President Musharraf had banned five Jihadi groups, including those named by India, and announced that Pakistan was committed to eliminating terrorism in all its manifestations. However, the coercive approach was maintained for another nine months, the justification offered being that Pakistan had not stopped “cross-border terrorism”, or had not handed over the 20 terrorists, though India had refused to provide proof of guilt of the named persons. Various vague deadlines were mentioned from time to time, such as end of winter, when local elections were due in India, in the hope that the confrontation might improve the prospects of the BJP. This did not happen, and President Musharraf’s call for de-escalation, and for resumption of a dialogue continued to fall on deaf ears.

The effort at intimidation was further intensified after the referendum held in Pakistan by President Muharraf on April 30. Various terrorist incidents were cited to justify threats of decisive military action, and as Pakistan declared its resolve to defend itself, the international opinion became concerned over the threat of a conflict between the nuclear armed neighbours.

By that time, the Indian leadership had begun talking about maintaining the coercive approach till October, when the two sets of elections were scheduled. Indian spokesmen maintain that they have “achieved their aims and objectives” and have acted independently of any external pressures. At the same time, the withdrawal would not be followed by a resumption of dialogue, since “cross-border terrorism” is continuing.

The belated decision to de-escalate reflects a realization that the attempt at coercion had proved futile. Indeed, given the impact of the ten-month standoff on the morale of the Indian armed forces, it has proved to be counterproductive. According to Indian analysts, there was a three-fold increase in incidents of indiscipline, and recently, evidence of the tattered morale of the Indian security forces was seen at the Wagah border where the Indian soldier participating in a regular border ceremony lost control of himself. Even financially, the costs have been mush higher for India, whose economy also suffered from the departure of thousands of expatriate investors.

The most significant effect of the eyeball to eyeball confrontation created by the Indian attempt at intimidation has been to highlight the need to resolve the Kashmir dispute. The US and the EU are now fully alive to the risks of this standoff, and the missile tests India and Pakistan have carried out over this period have added to the sense of urgency to address the basic cause of tension.

There is now broad international support for the resumption of a dialogue that Pakistan has been urging, as the most practical means of ending tensions, and resolving problems peacefully. The Indian prime minister is expected to attend the SAARC summit due to be held in Islamabad in January 2003. He has been claiming the credit for initiating the process that began with the Lahore Declaration in 1999, and was resumed at Agra in July 2001. India’s attempt to capitalize on the 9/11 events and to use coercion has proved futile, and the withdrawals now announced will create the opening to resume that dialogue. Given the growing incidence of poverty in this region, the political leadership owes it to the toiling masses to move towards a peaceful resolution of all disputes, including the core issue of Kashmir.