RIGHT
ANGLE
Shoring
Up Our Nerves
It's great
to think lofty, but not when there's a war in Kashmir
By
Swapan Dasgupta
 Since
the time Sonia Gandhi assumed charge in early 1998, the Congress stand
on national security has oscillated between delinquency and plain cussedness.
Egged on by those who supported the other side in the Sino-India war of
1962 and bolstered African dictators and Soviet puppet regimes, Sonia's
Congress took positions wildly contrary to the national mood on the Pokhran
blasts and the Kargil war. It was perhaps to rectify this departure from
the mainstream that the party was relatively more restrained in pressing
for a judicial inquiry into the "security lapses" that it claimed
were responsible for the seven different massacres in Kashmir on August
1 that left nearly 100 people dead.
In his Lok
Sabha speech last Tuesday-more erudite than all the interventions of his
leaders and deputy leaders put together-Congress' Priya Ranjan Das Munshi
zeroed in on a dilemma confronting our licentious liberals. Responding
to Home Minister L.K. Advani's assertion that a judicial inquiry would
bolster Pakistani propaganda and demoralise the security forces, Das Munshi
spoke about the quality of our democracy. Are we so fragile, he asked,
to allow our actions to be determined by the trumpeters of some tin-pot
dictator? Surely, India has the maturity and the resilience to cope with
its own shortcomings. After all, wasn't there a judicial inquiry when
an Australian missionary was brutally killed in Orissa last year?
Granting
there is no fool-proof deterrence against determined killers, Das Munshi's
larger point about the quality of our democracy needs to be addressed.
Yes, Indian democracy has matured sufficiently for the Government to make
public and debate the K. Subrahmanyam Committee report on the Kargil conflict-a
far cry from the Nehru government's suppression of the Henderson Brookes
report on the 1962 war. It has developed sufficient tolerance to permit
the secessionists of the Hurriyat Conference to come to Delhi for consultations
with the Pakistani high commissioner. It is permissive enough to allow
a self-confessed errand boy of General Pervez Musharraf to sit in the
Rajya Sabha as a nominated MP. It is even vain enough to overlook a show
in Delhi by a Dalai Lama foundation where the Indian Army is equated with
the Lashkar-e-Toiba. Das Munshi is right. India can stomach anything,
particularly self-flagellation.
However,
an unending bout of depositions and interrogations would end up compromising
something that is coterminous with our democracy: our national resolve.
Why are we so afraid to admit that Kashmir and Orissa are not comparable?
In Orissa, a murdered missionary was enough to warrant a Wadhwa Commission.
In Kashmir, however, a savage bout of ethnic cleansing wasn't deemed sufficient
to make our enlightened intelligentsia acknowledge the assault on our
nationhood. Now the Congress wants to put our soldiers in the dock for
failing to save pilgrims to Amarnath from suicide killers. Just because
it's good politics to weaken Advani.
The issue
isn't one of "security lapses". What is being witnessed in Kashmir
over the past 11 years is war, call it "holy" or "proxy".
In a war, there are successes and setbacks. True, maturity demands we
take both in our stride. As our soldiers battle the murderous jehadis
nurtured by Pakistan, the task of the political class is to keep the nation's
nerve. Praising democracy cannot go hand in hand with demoralising India.
Sonia should try and learn from her disgraceful conduct during the Kargil
war.
Top
|
The
stock markets are humming, and it's feel-good time once again, writes
INDIA TODAY Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in 
