WHILE on the one hand the calls to war currently being bandied about by hawks on both sides of the Pakistan-India border should have us all worried, on the other hand it is hard to take any of the jingoism seriously. Remember, we have been here many times before, particularly over the past 15 or so years, and heightened tensions have never translated into fully fledged conflict.

In both countries, the corporate media is responsible for much of the sloganeering. After all, ratings have to be driven up by any means necessary, and what better method than to simulate a war with the neighbour everyone loves to hate?

Needless to say both the Pakistani and Indian establishments are also making the most of the temporary escalation of tensions. In India, the Modi sarkar desperately needs a smokescreen to distract a disgruntled electorate from the failings of what only a couple of years ago was described as the most powerful Indian government in a generation. The Indian military — and the permanent state apparatus as a whole — is quite happy to tag along.

How long can we hide behind nationalist slogans?

Of course in Pakistan, the establishment is at its happiest when the gullible ordinary mass is consumed by India-baiting. Frothing at the mouth at the mention of ‘Hindustan’ is as close to a national pastime as exists among several sections (a cricket match against India is probably the pinnacle). At different points over the past few years there have been vague suggestions that religious militancy, and not India, is our biggest security threat. But that all goes straight out the window whenever an ‘opportunity’ like the present spike in tensions presents itself.

What was already a testy situation got considerably worse when India unilaterally announced it would not attend the next Saarc summit which was scheduled to be held in Islamabad next month. Bangladesh, Afgha­nistan, Bhutan and Sri Lanka followed suit. The continuing spate of rhetoric against India notwithstanding, the pullouts left Pakistan in an untenable diplomatic position.

Cue a hastily called multiparty conference behind closed doors, and then, more notably, a special joint session of parliament which began on Wednesday. It is of course a matter of conjecture how genuinely the elected representatives of the people actually represent popular aspirations. But it is in any case true that the utterances of those sitting in parliament can herald either more warmongering, or the possibility of peace and prosperity for the people of the subcontinent.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the prime minister initiated the joint session by parroting his Indian counterpart who had, a day earlier, asserted that India and Pakistan should cooperate to extricate hundreds of millions of people from the clutches of poverty, backwardness and so on. Also predictable was Mr Sharif’s selective barbs against Indian aggression and misinformation as well as the standard set of statements about Pakistan’s commitment to upholding the Kashmir ‘cause’.

In the speeches that followed, many parliamentarians — in particular those from the opposition benches — lamented Pakistan’s pariah status on the international stage, especially in South Asia, due to the fact that the state’s security apparatus continues to adopt an ambiguous posture towards right-wing militant groups. Yet these same parliamentarians tempered their positions by accusing Nawaz Sharif of going easy on India during a recent speech at the UN General Assembly.

It is of course to be expected that our mainstream political leadership would engage in polemic against India, especially at a time of not insignificant LoC skirmishes and covert operations. It would also be naive to expect too much criticism of the establishment, no matter how isolated Pakistan is internationally.

Yet one cannot help but wonder how long we can hide behind tired nationalist slogans. Yes, the Indian state has never gone out of its way to build bridges with us, but the fact of the matter is that our political leadership needs to get its own house in order, which requires, in the first instance, the assertion of civilian supremacy in matters of so-called national security.

In this regard, it is worth noting the prime minister’s closed-door meeting with top civilian and military officials, which, as reported in this newspaper, appeared as close to an ultimatum to the security establishment as there can be in Pakistan. In short, it was pointed out to the head of the country’s premier intelligence agency that the security establishment undermined the action taken by civilian law enforcers against right-wing militants.

One can only hope that all our elected representatives agree to push for abandonment of a failed policy of patronising religious militancy that has not only incurred the wrath of our neighbours, but more importantly has wrought much death and destruction within our borders. That is about the most patriotic thing that our political leadership could do right now.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 7th, 2016