Besides pushing Gujarat and Modi off our front pages, the Jammu outrage has had another unintended consequence. It has broken the logjam in our post-Dec 13 strategy of coercive diplomacy. The truth is that that policy has paid rich dividends but most of these had come in a windfall of sorts by the middle of January, with the Musharraf speech, the crackdown, howsoever selective, on the jehadis and the flurry of high-ranking visits to the subcontinent. But since then the policy had stalled. The Pakistanis had settled into a new tactic, of hastening slowly, of continuing infiltration and militancy at a pitch just enough to keep the pot boiling without actually doing something so spectacular as to give India the opportunity of using its massed forces, or even flexing its military muscle. At the same time, it wasn’t going to give India any real reason or justification to pull back from the borders. Since the world of diplomacy loves jargon, you could call it the strategy of double denial: don’t do so much damage that India can up the ante and use the forces massed on the borders, don’t become such good boys that India is able to declare victory and send its troops back into the barracks. So far it was working. The Pakistanis never tired of telling the world they had called India’s bluff, that India erred in not declaring victory on January 12, when Musharraf delivered his famous speech and that now India has to find its own face-saver as Pakistan would neither give it the excuse to wage war nor the justification to de-escalate and initiate negotiations. This may have worked for sometime. But schoolboy one-upmanship like this always comes with a fairly short ‘‘use-by’’ label. Particularly when you have among your own ranks people who are far too irrational, hateful and desperate to let such a thing work. The jehadis do not want any slow-burn diplomatic victories for Musharraf of Pakistan. They want an India-Pakistan war, and preferably a defeat for Pakistan’s regular army so they could unfold their dream of a nationwide and, hopefully, even a pan-national jehad against India. The jehadis’ dream is the control over a defeated Pakistan which still has its nukes intact and an India battered by war it may have won on points and internal communal strife. It is with this objective that the jehadis struck in Jammu. Hence, also, the choice of the target. Hit the children of Indian army personnel, then the pressure for war would grow from within the Indian armed forces. Once war begins, the jehad industry will be back in fashion in Pakistan and elsewhere, the Americans will be driven out of the region and, who knows, communal riots will break out all over India. It may sound far too simplistic to you and me, but that is the kind of people we are dealing with. The jehadis, and those Islamic warriors in the ISI and the Pakistani army who still obviously control them, are no Henry Kissingers. But to be fair to them, nor is Musharraf. His strategy of double denial had one fundamental contradiction. It implied squashing the jehadis as far as the Americans were concerned, but nurturing them vis-a-vis India. He was submitting to American pressure, collecting his compliance dividend from Washington and other lending consortiums, but was loathe to give up what he saw as his main leverage against India. The jehadis are his instrument of coercive diplomacy. We have to mass seven lakh soldiers on the borders and hope that it will make him see reason. He thinks he can have us off-balance with 7,000 infiltrators in Kashmir. My coercive diplomacy versus yours, except mine is so much cheaper. Or, at least that is what a simplistic commando may have thought. But commandos tend to miss the big picture. It has now been unravelled for him by his own boys. Unless a war breaks out now and actually brings him a reprieve, he will be back on bended knee, pleading his good intentions with the Americans. See, I am doing my best, but it is not so easy. You could call it the strategy of double denial: don’t do so much damage that India can up the ante and use the forces massed on the borders, don’t become such good boys that India is able to declare victory and send its troops back into the barracks If it was so, would they have been able to kill Daniel Pearl? Would they have been able to blow up a bus carrying French engineers working on his own submarine. His boys have given us so much grief, agony and anger. They have also landed him such a wonderful self-goal. How does India respond to this new turn? It is a terrible, terrible tragedy, but the world of diplomacy is a cruel, cynical one, and would see it as an opportunity. The outrage has broken the stalemate. It has brought some mobility back to what was a very uneventful, lazy phase of trench warfare where not a shot was being fired in anger. But more than that, it has shaken us out of our own complacence. Over the past three days we have seen politician after politician asking for revenge, retaliation, strikes and so on. But if Jammu hadn’t happened, would any of them even have demanded a full discussion on the security situation in view of the fact that the world’s fourth largest army (ours) had been fully mobilised against the world’s fifth largest army (Pakistan’s) for a whole five months along our borders? In typically lazy Indian tradition we had made mental adjustments as to what is normal. So what if the troops were sitting on the borders. A war wasn’t about to break out soon. So what if the troops were on the borders, instead of being in the barracks? Until May 13 we were not even willing to remember that a threat existed. Post-May 13 we want to go to war as of yesterday. In diplomacy as well as warfare, you don’t flex your muscle by jerking your knee. Nor do you land a punch of any kind that way. We cannot exterminate the pestilence of terrorism by going to sleep during periods of respite and waking up crying for retaliation the moment another incident takes place. We have to remember during times of relative peace that another incident is around the corner and that situation will remain so for a long time unless one of the two things happens: either that the nature of Pakistani society changes for the better, towards modernism and liberalism, or the Pakistani state gets weakened to such a level it is not able to sustain its own version of coercive diplomacy. Jehadis are Musharraf’s instrument of coercive diplomacy. We have to mass seven lakh soldiers on the borders and hope he will see reason. He thinks he can have us off-balance with 7,000 infiltrators. My coercive diplomacy versus yours, except mine is so much cheaper India’s future lies in a strategy that works towards one of these two objectives. It will take time. It will have to be a combination of diplomacy, military muscle and economic clout, it will also be a function of our internal resolve and peace and harmony. This is the strategy Parliament and the cabinet committee on security should have been discussing whether or not the Jammu attack has happened rather than being jolted into a retaliatory frenzy in reaction to the attack. If terrorism is like cancer, you cannot cure it by treating it episodically. You don’t have to waste time looking for any consensus. No Indian disagrees that terrorism has to be stamped out and you do not need to take a vote on the strategy or the tactics to do so. We only have to ensure we do not go to sleep during periods of quiet or, as former army chief General V.P. Malik put it so succinctly in an interview with this paper on Friday, react so hastily to an incident as to let our enemy determine our responses for us.
