We are talking of India becoming a superpower in a decade or two. Shall we analyse as to where do we stand today? We are no doubt a young nation as compared to other nations of the world. We have an English-knowing young talent. We have internationally renowned scientists. We have world-class economists and business managers. We have entrepreneurs who are innovative, brilliant and ambitious.
But our nationhood continues to remain under severe threat. We have every thing except the national ethos. We are of course too diverse a nation. But it has to be blended into one harmonious thread that runs through the land mass of India and is its throbbing soul. Our leaders represent one segment or the other of Indian society. No political party is credible enough to sell to the nation its vision of India, a great India.
RAND Corporation study
A study by RAND Corporation, a global policy think tank, observes: “India will continue to face a serious jehadist threat from Pakistan-based terrorist groups and neither Indian nor US policy is likely to reduce that threat in the near future.” The crux of the study is: “The terror attacks among other things suggest that attacking India with the aim of weakening it remains the ambition of at least some key elements in the Pakistani security establishment.” The study also highlights: “Pakistan has likely concluded from the events since December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament complex and prior that India is unable or unwilling to mount a serious threat to punish or deter Pakistan from these attacks.” “India is likely to remain a target of Pakistan-based terrorism. This is due among other things to India’s inability and that of the international community to compel Pakistan to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure comprehensively.”
Pakistan’s state policy tripod
Hussain Haqqani in his book Pakistan Between Mosque and Military has observed : “Since the country’s inception, Pakistani leaders have played upon religious sentiment as an instrument of strengthening Pakistani identity and that very soon after independence, Islamic Pakistan was defining itself through the prism of resistance to Hindu India.”
The late President of Pakistan Ayub Khan characterised India as a Hindu state and of Hindus as irreconcilable enemies of Islam and Muslims. He identified India as Pakistan’s eternal enemy, Islam as a national unifier and the United States as the country’s provider of arms and finances.
Stephen Cohen in his book Pakistan Army points out : “For Pakistani officers of succeeding generations, the distrust of India is a fundamental assumption.” “In the South Asia region, the Islamists have been allies in the Pakistan’s military’s efforts to seek strategic depth in Afghanistan and to put pressure on India for negotiations over the future of Kashmir.”
Cohen further says: “A few hardliners even look forward to the day when India might be broken up, adding to the list of independent South Asian Muslim states. A minority of Pakistani officers went further, arguing that since India was unviable, Pakistan only needed to give a push and this artificial Hindu” state would implode. The dominant view in Pakistan army is that Pakistan can continue to harass soft India. With nuclear weapons, missiles and tough army, Islamabad can withstand considerable Indian pressure as was proved in the last deployment of the Indian army in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Parliament and will usually find international supporters to back it up.
Cohen writes: “This could mean the occasional crisis or a fresh challenge to India with the ever-present possibility of a war or a nuclear incident. Pakistan might also be able to again assert a strategic presence in the West or the North. As for the Islamists, the scenario also assumes that the Establishment will continue to use Islamist forces and outright terrorist as instruments of diplomacy in dealing with its neighbours.”
This is the situation as on today. We cannot dissuade a relatively small neighbour from sponsoring terrorism against our nation, a neighbour which is itself beset with its internal problems of cohesion and is suffering from the phantoms of break-up and which according to Strobe Talbott, former Deputy Secretary of State, USA, “seemed to wear on their sleeve an insecurity about the cohesiveness and viability of their own state, not to mention the durability of its democracy and that after more than half a century Pakistan is still grappling with the questions of identity and survival.”
India, a strong nation, is just helpless. After every—even so severe as the one on our Parliament, killing and maiming of hundreds of Indians in the suburban trains in Mumbai and to top it all the siege of Mumbai—our national leadership irrespective of the political party just issues a strong statement shouting from the rooftops that all options are open but only wish that it does not happen again. The nation can do nothing more than putting up humble submissions to USA to persuade Pakistan to behave.
Our leadership plays politics even with the investigation and detection of terrorist crimes, which is obvious from the editorial of Shekhar Gupta, Chief Editor, The Indian Express, about two years back on the government of the day, when he said: “Has it served itself and India well by communalising the very approach to fight against terrorism? Ask the police forces in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Hyderabad and counter terror veterans in the intelligence agencies and even the army and the answer will stare you in the face. After the attacks they faced in first flush of the Mumbai rail attacks for targeting Muslims and the hurry in which they were forced to call off the searches and interrogation have put the fear of God in the minds of security establishment.”
I make two suggestions here, though a layman’s suggestion: Strengthen Indian identity and go in for drastic reforms in our electoral system.
Establish, nurture, propagate, assimilate and further strengthen the identity of India. India is said to be a collection of disparate parts. Some eminent intellectual has asked: “Where is the Indianness that transcends narrow identities and vested interests, one that is worth sacrificing for?” It has been observed that in their pursuit of personal goals, Indians are intensely competitive. But we lack consensus on a shared national essence and hence there is no deep psychological bond between the citizen and the nation. Self-identity should be stellar and evident all the time and in all the facets of our lives and not contingent on any adverse situation.
We need to make drastic changes in our electoral system. It should be made mandatory for every citizen of India to go to the polling booth and exercise his right of vote. Avoidance should be made punishable under the law.
We should ensure that there is no criminalisation of the governance of our nation. The spectacle of seeing a person who after having been convicted for aiding and abetting terrorism to the extent of accepting prohibited weapons from terrorists and allowing them to dismantle the vehicle in which the explosives were smuggled into India in his own house, adorning our Parliament, could be rather repulsive.
Nation must ensure that no political party exploits communal and caste affiliations to ensure a win in the multi-cornered contests. The procedure of first-past-the-post must give way to getting at least fifty per cent of the votes polled. It will mean that candidate will have to cultivate all segments of society and not whip up the communal passions to consolidate votes.
There must also be a provision of negative voting. It must get registered in the electronic voting machines. Anyone getting more negative votes than the affirmative ones, should not be declared elected.
Parliamentary system is good for our country as it sensitises our national governance to the regional aspirations and also to the sensibilities of other communities, which do not have a sizeable number in the legislature. But at the same time, quite often our representatives, keeping the communal demands of their constituents in mind, even when these are against the national interest, force the coalition government, which is dependent on the numbers for its survival, to give in. As such, nation may also consider presidential form of government or any other suitably modified system of governance.
India is great and will remain great but the signs of the government paralysis before the onslaught of Pak-sponsored terror is a cause for great concern for all the citizens. I must quote from a Pakistan army Brigadier SK Malik’s book Quranic Concept of War, the foreword of which was written by the late Zia-ul-Haq, the then President of Pakistan, that “concept of terror is central to the Islamic conduct of modern war” and that “terror struck into the hearts of the enemy is not only a means, it is the end in itself.” I must also add that this aspect is a part of the strategic studies at the training institutes of Pakistan army.
In the end, I will quote Rousseau: “If Sparta and Rome perished, what state can hope to endure for ever?” And what Samuel P Huntington said in his book Who Are We: “Even the most successful societies are at some point threatened by internal disintegration and decay and by more vigorous and ruthless external barbarian forces.”
There is no need to be disappointed. India has a great power of resilience and indomitable will. I am reminded of our great leader the late Lal Bahadur Shastri. Pakistan attacked India in 1965, thinking that the Indian leadership was week at that time. But Shastri sprang a surprise on Ayub Khan, the then President of Pakistan, by allowing the Indian army to strike across the international border which Ayub had not catered for in his wildest of imaginations. The nation has to relive the Sardar Patel, Lal Bahadur Shastri and Indira Gandhi.
(The writer is President of Forum on Integrated National Security, Chandigarh.)
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