Author: Vir Sanghvi
Publication: Time Asia
Date: November 5, 2001
URL: http://www.time.com/time/asia/news/magazine/0,9754,181662,00.html
Delhi has faced a jihad for years,
but Washington couldn't care less
When the war against terror began
in the immediate aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks, India cheered.
We are also a democracy, the largest in the world in fact-and we have also
suffered because of terrorist violence. We welcomed America to our fight.
Given that Washington and New Delhi have moved closer in recent years,
we believed that this would be a war fought by the free world against all
terrorists and the dictators who sponsor them.
We were wrong. Despite the rhetoric,
this war is not about freedom and democracy. Rather than fight international
terrorism, the U.S. seems to be concentrating on a single, limited objective:
replace the Taliban with a new government.
For India, the compromises dictated
by the pursuit of that one objective are worrying. We have also suffered
because of a jihad, or holy war, declared by terrorists. Each time Osama
bin Laden appears on TV to remind the world of his jihad on America, he
also slips in a mention of his jihad against India. Western intelligence
agencies concede that many of the militants operating in Kashmir have been
trained in camps run by bin Laden's network.
We had hoped that the war against
terror would treat both jihads on par. But the U.S. has decided to ignore
the one against India. It needs Pakistan as a strategic ally for its Afghanistan
operation, and it especially needs the intelligence available from Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, the very body that first sponsored
the Taliban. India believes that ISI also sponsors the terrorists in Kashmir.
As long as the U.S. works closely with ISI and with Pakistan's military
dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, there is no hope that the terrorism
directed against us will ever be addressed.
Predictably, this has led to both
anger and disappointment in India. When U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell
visited New Delhi recently, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee
warned him that Indians were so hurt by what we perceived as the unfairness
of Washington's approach that any politician who enthusiastically supported
the U.S. war effort endangered his own popularity. For instance, India's
External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh, who offered operational assistance
to the U.S. right after the World Trade Center attacks, has been criticized
by his own colleagues.
Such is the public anger that when
Vajpayee declared that he would not meet Musharraf in New York City as
originally scheduled, he was applauded. And India's Defense Minister George
Fernandes marked his re-induction to office with so-called punitive firing
on Pakistani border posts despite U.S. calls for restraint. From an Indian
perspective, the U.S. strikes on Afghanistan may have moral legitimacy,
but the U.S. errs by not extending that legitimacy to others who face identical
predicaments.
A nation that is the victim of terrorism
has the right to strike at the roots of that terrorism. But here's the
moral contradiction: if the U.S. has the right to bomb terrorist camps
in Afghanistan, then why doesn't India have the right to bomb terrorist
camps in Pakistan? The moral imperatives are exactly the same. To tell
us, as some Western observers have, that we should not fight terrorists
but instead engage in a dialogue with Pakistan over Kashmir is not particularly
useful. It is like telling the U.S., "Don't bomb Osama, talk to him." Or,
"Don't use violence, try to find out why the Islamic world hates you so
much." Dialogue is important, but it only works if fanatics and terrorists
are removed from the equation.
Saner voices in the U.S. have called
for introspection. When that process does begin, here is something worth
pondering: America has spent a half-century supporting dictators and tyrants
all over the world (and in the Muslim world, in particular). Its reward
has been global anti-Americanism. Perhaps it is time for the U.S. to abandon
the fingernail-pullers and make common cause with countries like India
that actually share the values that make America great-the values of freedom
and democracy.
Vir Sanghvi is editor of the Hindustan
Times
