Rogue neighbour

Sumit Ganguly

It is only fitting that India has postponed the Foreign Secretary-level talks with Pakistan. There is little or no utility in pursuing this ‘composite dialogue’ with a partner who is hell bent on dispensing terror across India and then shouting from the rooftops about its undying concerns of human rights of the Kashmiris.

India’s policymakers regardless of regime, for far too long, have failed to develop a coherent, consistent and effective policy to put an end to Pakistan's continuing support for a variety of terrorist organizations.

The moment for embarking on such a policy and an accompanying set of strategies is now at hand. If the Manmohan Singh government continues to vacillate and temporize, the squalid military regime of General Musharraf will simply infer that for all India's periodic outbursts, all it can do is engage in is mere bluff and bluster.

India's intelligence and security agencies is yet to produce any clear-cut evidence of Pakistan's involvement in the grisly bombings on July 11. Nevertheless, the sheer complexity of the blasts, their sequential timing and their extraordinary destructiveness, suggests that this grotesque attack could not have been the work of some small group of disaffected individuals. Nor should anyone attach or credence to Pakistan’s hasty and the Lashkar-e-Taiba’s prompt denials of any involvement in the blasts.

As far as Pakistan's involvement is concerned, it continues to fall back on the canard, routinely trotted out by their sympathizers in prominent western news media, that it only provides moral and diplomatic support for the Kashmiri insurgents.

Yet after the brazen attack on the Indian parliament on December 13, 2001, even the US State Department, under the ever-gullible Colin Powell, felt compelled to place both the Lashkar-e-Tayiba and the Jaish-e-Mohammed, on its Foreign Terrorist Organization list. In the wake of this listing, the organizations came under some cosmetic pressure from Musharraf and laid low for the next few months. As the memory of that attack started to fade, they once again came to the fore.

Even as it seeks to establish the identity of the perpetrators of the Mumbai bombings India should do far more than merely defer the ‘composite dialogue’. Instead, it needs to embark on a relentless campaign to isolate Pakistan diplomatically and to reveal, the Musharraf regime's organic ties to the jihadi terror network. To do this will require verve, persistence and imagination.

To start with India should dramatically downgrade its diplomatic presence in Islamabad as it has done before. The substantive consequences of this gesture are limited but the symbolic consequences are significant. It should also end all on-going cultural exchanges and temporarily suspend the bus and train services that have been recently instituted.
The latter might have adverse consequences, but such qualms need to be set aside when dealing with a state apparatus that has scant regard for lives of India’s citizenry. What will, however, make real difference is a sophisticated, orchestrated and sustained diplomatic campaign on a global basis that uses information available in the public domain to depict the Pakistani state as an incubator of terror.

India has done this for years but in a very clumsy, sporadic, ineffectual and ham handed manner. What it needs instead is a calibrated approach that provides specific, clear information without compromising clandestine sources and methods. Fashioning such a strategy will not be easy but it is not beyond India’s reach.

In addition to this campaign India should be willing to bluntly press the US, the UK and the members of the European Community to exert tangible pressure, on the Musharraf regime.

If necessary, India should be willing to place on-going cooperative ventures with these states at some risk unless they prove willing to listen and act on India’s vital concerns as regards Pakistan’s feckless promotion of terror. Delhi cannot remain satisfied with pious and anodyne expressions of concern and sympathy from the West. 

This concerted strategy will require a departure from the inherent cautiousness that characterized the making of India’s foreign and security policies. However, the time for such circumspect methods is long past.

India is dealing with an enemy and its acolytes who brook no restraint. Cautionary moves, in the face of such an adversary, amount to little more than a strategy of appeasement. The world knows only too well what consequences ensued in the 1930s after the United Kingdom pursued such a policy.

(The writer is the Director of India Studies Program at Indiana University in Bloomington.)