India can recover from the physical assaults against it. It is striking that both the assaulted hotels, the Taj Mahal and the Trident, reopened their doors within a month of the terrorist attack. We are a land of great resilience that has learned, over arduous millennia, to cope with tragedy. Within twenty-four hours of an earlier Islamist assault on Mumbai, the Stock Exchange bombing in 1993, Mumbai’s traders were back on the floor, their burned-out computers forgotten, doing what they used to before technology had changed their trading styles. Bombs and bullets alone cannot destroy India, because Indians will pick their way through the rubble and carry on as they have done throughout history.
But what can destroy India is a change in the spirit of its people, away from the pluralism and coexistence that has been our greatest strength. The prime minister’s call for calm and restraint in the face of this murderous rampage was heeded; the masses mobilized in candelight processions, not as murderous mobs. My big fear was that political opportunism in a charged election season could have led to some practising the politics of hatred and division. Indeed, I wrote while the attacks were still going on that ‘if these tragic events lead to the demonization of the Muslims of India, the terrorists will have won’. I am heartened that instead Indians stayed united in the face of this tragedy. The victims included Indians of every faith, including forty-nine Muslims out of the 188 killed. There is anger, some of it directed inward, against our security and governance failures, but none of it against any specific community. That is as it should be. For India to be India, its gateway — to the multiple Indias within, and the heaving seas without — must always remain open.
Clearly, the international community would want to see that Pakistan implements its stated commitment to deal with terrorist groups within its territory, including the members of Al Qaeda, the Taliban’s Quetta Shura, the Hezb-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and so many other like-minded terrorist groups that have been proliferating on Pakistani soil. Without this, the gains made in the last few years of international intervention in Afghanistan will be compromised, and it will become difficult to forestall the resumption of violence and terror in Afghanistan. The world has come to realize, at considerable cost, that terrorism cannot be compartmentalized — that any facile attempt to strike Faustian bargains with terrorists often result in such forces turning on the very powers that sustained them in the past. This implies exacting cooperation from Pakistan.
Some in Washington, notably the late Richard Holbrooke, tried to put the burden of this on India, suggesting that settling the Kashmir dispute on Islamabad’s terms would remove the incentive for Pakistan to continue to seek ‘strategic depth’ (in other words, control of a puppet Islamist government) in Kabul. Such an approach would boil down to surrendering to blackmail. It is difficult to believe that any responsible policy-maker in Washington seriously expects India to compromise on its own vital national interests in order to persuade Pakistan to stop threatening the peace. India has taken upon itself the enormous burden of talking peace with a government of Pakistan that in the very recent past has proved to be, at best, ineffective and, at worst, duplicitous about the real threats emanating from its territory and institutions to the rest of South Asia.
In pursuing peace with Pakistan, the Government of India is indeed rolling the dice: every conciliatory gambit is a gamble that peace will not be derailed by the insincerity of the other side. There are not many takers in the Indian political space right now for pursuing a peace process with a government that does not appear to control significant elements of its own military. Few in India are prepared to accept the notion that the world in general, and India in particular, is obliged to live with a state of affairs in Pakistan that incubates terror while the country’s institutions remain either unable or unwilling to push back against the so-called non-state actors that are said to be out of the government’s control. Events in Pakistan, including attacks on its own military headquarters and a naval base, may, we hope, have stiffened Pakistani resolve to confront these ‘non-state actors’. But it remains to be seen whether some in Islamabad are still seduced by the dangerous idea that terrorists who attack the Pakistani military are bad, but those who attack India are to be tacitly encouraged.
Our government is committed to peaceful relations with Pakistan. Indeed, our prime minister personally — and therefore the highest levels of our government — has a vision of a subcontinent living in peace and prosperity, focusing on development, not distracted by hostility and violence. But we need to see evidence of good faith action from Islamabad before our prime minister, who is accountable to Parliament and a public opinion outraged by repeated acts of terror, can reciprocate in full measure.
For the past three years, under sustained American pressure, the Pakistani Army has begun, however selectively, to take on the challenge of fighting some terrorist groups — not the ones lovingly nurtured by the ISI to assault India, but the ones who have escaped the ISI leadership’s control and turned on Pakistan’s own military institutions. Indians, for the most part, feel a great deal of solidarity with the Pakistani people. It is striking that no one in any official position in India has, in any way, given vent to Schad enfreude, or implied that the violence assailing Pakistan itself is a case of Pakistani chickens coming home to roost.
But the unpalatable fact remains that what Pakistan is suffering from today is the direct result of a deliberate policy of inciting, financing, training and equipping militants and jihadis over twenty years as an instrument of state policy. As Dr Frankenstein discovered when he built his monster, it is impossible to control the monster once it’s built.
Attempts by glibly sophisticated Pakistani spokesmen to portray themselves as fellow victims of terror — indeed, to go so far as to compare the number of deaths suffered by Pakistan in its war against terrorism on its own soil with those inflicted upon India — seek to obscure the fundamental difference between the two situations. Pakistanis are not suffering death and destruction from terrorists trained in India. No one travelled from India to attack the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad or the naval base at Mehran. Indians, however, have suffered death and destruction from terrorists trained in and dispatched from Pakistan with the complicity — and some might argue, more — of elements of the Pakistani security forces and establishment. Pakistan has to cauterize a cancer in its own midst, but a cancer that was implanted by itself and its own institutions. And this will only happen if they eliminate the warped thinking, among powerful elements in Islamabad, that a terrorist who sets off a bomb at the Marriott in Islamabad is a bad terrorist whereas one who sets off a bomb at the Taj in Mumbai is a good terrorist. The moment the Pakistani establishment genuinely disavows the nurturing and deployment of terror as an instrument of state policy, and concludes that it faces the same enemy as India and should make common cause with it to stamp out the scourge, is the moment that a genuine prospect of peace will dawn on the subcontinent. Such a sentiment is, alas, far from even glimmering on the horizon.
And yet India has doggedly pursued peace. Within six months of 26/11 the prime minister travelled to Sharm el Sheikh in Egypt to meet with the Pakistani prime minister, where his conciliatory language in the joint statement that followed got him into a huge amount of political hot water back home, because he was perceived as offering the hand of peace at a time when Pakistan had done nothing to merit it. In any democracy, there are always limits as to how far a government can go in advance of its own public opinion. Subsequent moves have been undertaken a little more gingerly, but ‘cricket diplomacy’ (the invitation to Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani to watch the World Cup semi-final between the two countries in Mohali, India), ‘designer diplomacy’ (the visit of the elegantly and expensively accoutred Pakistani Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar to New Delhi, both in 2011) and ‘dargah diplomacy’ (a lunch invitation to President Zardari from Prime Minister Singh when the former sought to make a ‘spiritual visit’ to a Sufishrine in Ajmer in April 2012) have all been attempted to take the process of dialogue, however haltingly, forward. The resultant thaw, while involving no substantive policy decisions, has demonstrated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s determination to change the narrative of Indo-Pak relations, and seize control of a process mired in stalemate.