Prepare for the information war, too

Given the nuclear status of both countries, itis not inconceivable for so-me countries to make more active efforts to get India and Pakistan to talk wh-ich can also lead to a ceasefire. That wo- uld mean altering the LoC. Pakistan can be expected to shout from the housetops that the Kargil conflict is linked to the larger issue of Kashmir, and this is the refrain of Nawaz Sharif to the G-8 leaders in Cologne.

Pakistan is fighting with four hands today, two of their army8217;s and two of the mercenaries8217;. India is being asked to fight wi-th both its hands tied at the back, as the world counsels it restraint, ev-en as its soldiers are sitting ducks today with the enemy atop the he-ights. And yet it has not crossed the LoC, tho-ugh this may become difficult with the passage of time because of the need to cut off the supply routes of the intruders. Despite its str-ength in the nuclear fi-eld, it has not once talked about nuclear war. But restraint should not be equated with weakness.

The truth is that India accepts Pa-kistan as a nation state and PrimeMinis-ter Vajpayee specially made a point of this by going to the Minar-e-Sharief. So great was the emotional hype in India over Vajpayee8217;s visit to Lahore that even the loony fringe dare not strike a discordant note. But Pakistan is a state which, according to report after report during the past decade, has taken recourse to money generated by the sale of drugs in Europe and the US to finance terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir and for the attainment of its nationally stated objectives. It is a state which sent back six bodies of Indian soldiers who had been to- rtured before being killed. Sadly it is a co-untry which is willing to wound itself in the hope that it may al-so wound the enemy too.The saddest aspect of Kargil is that it has made a whole generation of Indians cynical about resolving conflict through a dialo-gue alone.

Kargil has also become a symbol of the kind of world we want to create in the next fifty years. The issue for In-dia is larger than one of territory. For us the ummah'family is notlimited to people professing one faith, but is created through the coexistence of all religions. Kashmir represents our faith that diversity and harmony go hand in hand.

The world has to stop equating India with Pakistan. On the threshold of a new millennium, it is otherwise moving towards greater integration. The German-ys have united; the European Union is a reality. It will have to decide whether it is for nation states based on liberal, democratic values or it wants to encourage the Talibanisation of states.

This is the kind of thinking we will have to get across to those parts of the world which are likely to take a simplistic view of what is happening in Kashmir.

The Indian thinking has to shift gear. This war has shown how reactive has been our approach. We have now to anticipate, to be prepared for the possibility of fati-gue setting in internationally. Our resp-onse has to become more proactive, yet calibrated. We have to get across to governments, foreign media, universities in the weeks tocome, which influence policymaking.

The question arises who will do this. The National Security Council has been effective only in name. Unfortunately, the lead will have to be taken by the government. Something is already being done, and there is a group active under Jaswant Singh. It will have to utilise some of our best governmental and non-governmental minds to analyse reports emanating fr-om different parts of the world and disseminate the Indian responses, to give a lead to Indian missions abroad, to brief the media. If the Japanese papers are not convinced that India has been wronged, it will have to swing into action to ensure that the editorial writers and policy makers there get the Indian point of view.

This crack group will have to be necessarily small and compact.It will have to take special care of the Islamic group of nations, and tell them again and again that it is India which continues to be the biggest homeland of Muslims in the subcontinent, and the second largest in the world, andthat the cause of the well-being of Muslims in India is not served by the Islamisation of Kashmir.

Even as its soldiers are fighting a difficult battle on the snow peaks, India has now to get ready to win the information war which has the potential to influence the other war.