Dateline Ground Zero

There is incredulity that life dares to go on as usual in the subcontinent. Britain’s FINANCIAL TIMES marvelled that there are no signs of panic buying or queues at petrol stations, most residents are more preoccupied with acute water shortage and more than 50 % of businesses expect demand and investment to grow in the CII’s just-released quarterly survey of domestic business confidence.

From Islamabad, the NEW YORK TIMES exclaimed that almost nobody is talking of nuclear war. ‘‘Not the schoolmaster, not the cook, not the real estate agent, not the librarian…’’

The western media has a diagnosis — it’s part Nuclear Illiteracy, part Nuclear Denial. And, guess what, it’s infectious. American and British papers reported concern that thousands of US and British citizens are not heeding advisories to leave India.

Same difference

Western commentators argue that ‘South Asia’s hair trigger’ is different from the US-USSR nuclear rivalry. The ‘‘internal and mutual constraints’’ that prevented nuclear weapons from being used during the Cold War, the NYT pointed out, are ‘‘conspicuously absent’’ on the subcontinent.

Dubbing India’s nuclear doctrine as ‘fuzzy’, NEWSWEEK warned that the ‘unknowns’ make this conflict truly the most dangerous in the world.

Kashmir on their mind

On days when nuclear forebodings loom not-so large in the western media, they talk of cross-border terrorism and, increasingly, Kashmir.

So entwined is the issue of cross-border terrorism with America’s War on Terror that near universal consensus has been achieved on this: General Musharraf has failed to honour his January 12 pledges.

Pakistan has trained, equipped and inserted terrorists in Kashmir. The onus is on Musharraf to move South Asia back from the brink.

The US media is beginning to look beyond defusing tensions between India and Pakistan to Kashmir. Its reference points are conflicts the West is far more familiar with: on the eve of Richard Armitage’s arrival in India, THE WASHINGTON POST wrote that the issue of governance in Kashmir has been ‘obscured’ and ‘distorted’ by the vocabulary of 9/11.

It said the diplomatic skill that is going into pulling the nuclear rivals apart must also focus on Kashmir. Because, just as ‘Russian ruled Chechnya’ or ‘Israeli occupied West Bank’, it needs ‘‘a deeper political solution’’.

The British media was raising the pitch on Kashmir long before the US media came to it. On the eve of the Armitage visit, the FT was ready with a solution: ‘‘New Delhi should consider granting maximum political autonomy to Kashmir while seeking to turn the Line of Control into an internationally recognised border… Pakistan must support any political settlement that the Kashmiri people can successfully negotiate with New Delhi.’’

The DAILY TELEGRAPH echoed the widely-promoted position that: ‘‘As with the Israelis and Palestinians, the two sides seem unable to lower the temperature on their own. And as in the Near East, it is America that provides the best hope of mediation.’’

PS: From THE ECONOMIST: ‘‘What is needed now is a sequence of steps to dance Pakistan and India away from the brink without allowing one to trip the other up … Mr Armitage can help with the choreography.’’ How language can sanitise.

TIME read out imagined scribbles from the reporter’s notebook in Kashmir: ‘‘Rebels today slaughtered 31 women and children in a savage attack beside a babbling brook in a meadow of wild irises, daisies, and tiny pink anemones’’.

On the day the DAILY TELEGRAPH announced: ‘India plans war within two weeks’, the FT headline was: ‘Tensions over India-Pakistan border recede’.