Shake off that hyphen

Almost as much of a ritual as the September UN General Assembly Session itself is the Indo-Pak boxing bout that the session invariably showcases. This year was no exception. There, on the podium on Friday, was Prime Minister Vajpayee fervently defending his government and nation against the Pakistani general8217;s overblown, obstreperous and entirely gratuitous comments of the previous day.

The question is should India have allowed itself to come across as so obsessed with the 8216;Pakistan factor8217; that it thinks it fit to devote at least a third of the prime minister8217;s 15-minute speech at the UN to rebutting the general? Would not the finer nuances sought to be made by India in countering Pakistan have been lost on a world assembly unacquainted with anything but the broad contours of this hostile engagement? Would it not, then, have been wiser to have used press conferences and interviews with newspapers to get the country8217;s viewpoint on Pakistan across to the world media and kept those valuable 15 minutes to flag more useful issues? This is not to argue that a few short sentences in the direction of the general, and in defence of the J038;K elections, would not have been in order. But anything more than that would, and in fact did, invite the provisions of the law of diminishing returns. No one, in fact, knows this better than the wily general himself, who has used the fact that he is invariably slated to speak before the Indian prime minister at such assemblies to get India into a reactive mode. Not only did he seem to enthusiastically endorse UN Secretary General Kofi Annan8217;s observation that South Asia was one of the four potential trouble spots in the world, he even 8216;confessed8217; to the media that his was the 8216;language of desperation8217;. More importantly, he revealed that no Pakistani head of state could afford not to espouse the Kashmir cause if he wanted to remain in power. In other words Kashmir, for Musharraf, is not so much an issue that defines Pakistani nationhood, as he has often argued in his TV appearances, but one of simple political expediency and an useful stick to beat India with.

So why do we allow ourselves to be beaten by that stick? Since, by our own claims, India8217;s engagement with the world 8212; and specifically the US 8212; goes much beyond the Indo-Pak impasse, should we not then begin to conduct ourselves in a manner that proves this? It is time, then, for us to shake off this wholly unnecessary and demeaning hyphen that has conjoined India and Pakistan for ever in the eyes of the world.