So, has America succeeded in making a case for war on Iraq? As you might have done, I spent the Wednesday evening last week watching the live telecast of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council. To make sure I had not missed anything I downloaded it the next day from the New York Times and read it carefully and at the end of this exercise concluded that although Saddam Hussein is clearly a very bad man, possibly concealing chemical and biological weapons and attempts to make nuclear ones, it still seems (at least to me) that the target should be Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and their financiers and fellow travelers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But, having watched the American Secretary of State speak twice (once in Davos) in the past couple of weeks what has also become clear to me is that we in India have much to learn from the Americans. We need to learn, for a start, the importance of making our case plainl and dispassionately instead of hysterically. I speak of the fact that every time there is a terrorist attack on Indian soil our most senior, most respectable leaders blame Pakistan without even attempting to find proof. By way of ‘‘proof’’ what they have come up with so far is too ludicrous to be taken seriously. Letters in Urdu, Pakistani sweets and cinema tickets without anyone asking why a Pakistani terrorist would deliberately leave these kind of clues in his pocket. If he were a true professional would he not, instead, be trying to mislead the police with letters in Sanskrit or perhaps Tamil? We have, as our leaders never fail to point out in the forums of the world, faced terrorism for more than twenty years and in all that time we have never come up with anything like the evidence that the American Secretary of State presented to the Security Council. The intercepts of conversations between Iraqi army officers in which they speak of concealing weapons, the details of aluminum tubes that can only be used in nuclear weapons and the information about Al Qaeda terrorists operating from inside Iraq. Not only have we never produced real evidence to substantiate our charges against Pakistan but in twenty years we have not even taught our security forces how to look for it. So, when the bombs went off in Mumbai an American journalist friend I was with at the stock exchange were horrified to see local policemen tramping about the bomb site oblivious to the possibility that their shoes could be destroying valuable clues. Last year’s ‘‘encounter’’ in the Delhi shopping plaza came as further evidence that our police officers continue to be a bunch of brutal amateurs with not the remotest idea of how much the world has changed. Our intelligence agencies, as this column has pointed out before, also remain substandard relics from a time when professional terrorists were unknown. So, they seem able only to pursue soft targets. Whole armies get deputed to follow Pakistani housewives around as they shop in the bazaars of Mumbai and Delhi for their daughters’ trousseaus but when it comes to exposing terrorist networks our spooks are nowhere in sight. On the basis of information provided at what our government calls the ‘‘highest level’’ I once went in search of terrorist training camps in Pakistan and found that every bit of information provided in my voluminous ‘‘top secret’’ file was wrong. At the root of our inability to combat terrorism is the inability of successive governments in Delhi to come up with a proper policy and here again we can learn from America. Whether you and I agree with the ‘‘lean forward’’ policy that has come into being because of September 11 there is no doubt that it is a carefully formulated policy whose objective is to destroy militant Islam. The impending war on Iraq is the first step towards this goal and, whether you agree with leaning forward or not, it makes you wonder how many more times innocent Indians will need to die in terrorist acts before our own government comes up with a clearly articulated game plan. The occasional policy statements that emerge — mostly from the mouth of the Deputy Prime Minister — have never been fully explained. He talks, from time to time, of ‘‘hot pursuit’’ but never clarifies what he means by this. Other members of the Sangh Parivar talk of destroying Pakistan and even the Prime Minister once talked of a conclusive battle (aar-paar ki ladai) but by no stretch of the imagination can any of this be described as a policy. Even the government’s decision to oppose an attack on Iraq seems like an idea that has not been fully thought through. If our biggest problem is militant Islam, and our Hindutva government has been unambiguous in stating that it is, then what are we doing on the other side in this war? If there is a war, and it now seems more likely than not, then India — as an island of democracy and relative sanity — has an important regional role to play. But we can only play it if we start thinking more carefully about our responses and reactions. Where do we stand in this international war against militant Islam? Answering that question might help us stop seeing the world entirely through the prism of Pakistan and that would be a good beginning if nothing else. Write to the author at tavleensingh@expressindia.com
