Following the Wednesday terrorist attack on the Parliament
in New Delhi, India and Pakistan seem set to slide into war — now or a
little later. Their governments can scarcely rise above the futility of
angry mutual accusations and making hostile propaganda attain ever greater
intensity. Far too much poison has been injected into the public discourse
vis-à-vis the other within each country and between them.
At any rate, the two governments cannot be trusted to keep
peace between themselves because their politics — Pakistan demands serious
negotiations on Kashmir and India feels unable to talk on the subject —
brings them into conflict at every step. The Indian government, with
inflamed nationalistic opinion behind it, has barred all foreign
mediation. And yet without some outside help, the two can neither arrest
the powerful undertow towards all–out hostilities nor begin talking in a
civilised way to defuse the situation. They obviously need help, if not of
a government, then from non-official people, for resuming a serious
civilized dialogue.
Both sides make a case that is strong enough. The secular
framework of Indian politics and polity not only needs to be preserved but
strengthened. On the other hand, the present insurgency in Kashmir cannot
be allowed to go on; it is killing young men on a large-scale; wealth is
not only being destroyed, its new creation is being pre–empted; and
horrible violations of human rights are being perpetrated by ‘both’ sides.
A solution of some sort for the Kashmir problem is unavoidable if a
ruinous war is to be avoided. An India-Pakistan war now has more than one
dimension of terror for common people on either side. It will not be like
US’ war on Iraq or even Afghanistan.
Here religious passions of well over a billion persons,
men and women, are being steadily roused by hardliners on both sides.
Indeed, the governments in New Delhi and Islamabad are culpable: they keep
stoking the fires of what is religious intolerance through their
work-a-day Hindu and Muslim politics that is based on communal sentiments
with much dissembling rhetoric. They have a bad history of communal
hostility of over a century behind them. Evidence of religious intolerance
is everywhere in both countries.
Today’s rulers are legatees of those who carried out the
world’s largest ethnic cleansing and widespread genocide, not to mention
trampling of human decencies and rights underfoot in the days of the 1947
partition of the erstwhile British Indian Empire. Communal riots have been
frequent in both countries since. Should a war break out in the present
surcharged atmosphere, religious minorities stand to suffer horribly.
Ferocity of the war can set off a Prairie fire of religiously-motivated
strife — a prospect that should not be allowed to materialise.
Then, the two countries are nuclear powers. Should a war
erupt, there will be strong temptation to use nuclear weapons — to quickly
crush the losing side and by the weaker party to avoid being defeated. A
nuclear exchange on the populous subcontinent will cause horrible death
and destruction. India no doubt talks of no-first-use but is now said to
have evolved a doctrine that permits a conventional war — for which India
is better prepared — and thinks there will not be a nuclear exchange.
There is no reason to ignore the repeated Pakistani threat
of using the atomic weapons first if it looks like losing the war.
Moreover, in a war between two nuclear powers, no one can possibly wait
for the other side to obliterate a city or two before using one’s own
nuclear weapon; both may in fact race to be the first to use it.
A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would
otherwise be unthinkable because, all said and done, the human material in
the leadership on both sides is aware enough and human enough not to
inflict nuclear destruction even on the ‘enemy’ country. But the roused
passions on both sides that are strongly tinged with religious hatred and,
in conjunction with the profound mistrust that the mere existence of
nuclear weapons on the ‘other’ side inevitably generate, can cloud
judgments, especially of the political decision-makers that there
currently are on both sides.
What is needed therefore is for some wise people with high
statures to intercede with both to move back from forward deployments —
from high alerts and hair-trigger readiness — and to begin negotiations.
Now, it should be widely known that left to themselves neither of the two
governmental leaders — after the kind of exchanges they have indulged in —
nor their bureaucracies will find it easy to sustain a meaningful
dialogue. The ruling classes in both countries have boxed themselves in
formulations that leave no meeting point and which would drive each other
away.
The intervention from outside cannot however be too
intrusive. It can only initiate the process. Help for sustaining the
inter–State dialogue will have to come from leading members of the
intelligentsia in both countries, acting both nationally as well as
jointly for coordinated efforts to find principles and formulations that
the two governments can accept and which would eventually make the
negotiations fruitful.
We have thus to find individuals of wisdom as well as high
stature who can be persuaded to undertake this difficult task. Who can
such persons of goodwill be? Well, if a hundred persons were together to
find five to 10 persons from around the world, a few names that are
repeatedly by most of these, they can surely be agreed upon. Here is a
suggestion. Let there be an international seminar of prominent persons on
the subject. Let it suggest a committee of five, seven or ten. This would,
after studying the problems at issue exhaustively, press the two
governments to begin the dialogue at appropriate levels. They can then
retire after popularising their common approach, if any.
But the task of sustaining the official dialogue will then
devolve on prominent intellectuals of India and Pakistan. They will have
to jointly and separately find formulations and principles on which hopes
can be pinned and that can be usefully and productively accepted by the
two governments, on the one hand, and popular consensus can be created
among the two people, on the other. Let me set the ball rolling about
selections.
For the international committee, one should look for men
and women who have experience of national affairs, have conducted
international talks, possess high integrity as well as stature, not to say
wisdom. One can throw in a few names for a start. How about persuading
Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela from South Africa, Helmut Schmidt and
Helmut Kohl from Germany, Jimmy Carter and Michael Gorbachev, leaders of
the international peace movement and anti-nuclear campaigns and a few
Nobel Laureates? Persons noted for their human rights struggles such as
Wali Khan, Justices VM Tarkunde and Sachar to name only two, and a few
noted Gandhians, with a few litterateurs thrown in. Out of such a lot
volunteers must be sought and a few like Mandela and Tutu press-ganged, in
a manner of speaking.
The subcontinent is not devoid of persons of goodwill and
stature. National committees and an Indo-Pakistani steering committee can
be created, not only to help sustain the inter-governmental negotiations,
but also to organise brainstorming sessions at suitable intervals between
Indian and Pakistani intelligentsia, nationally and jointly.
Can some such thing be done?