Author: Tunku Varadarajan
Publication: Wall Street Journal
Date: December 19, 2001
Consider dispassionately the following
account of events in India last week, and ask yourself two questions. What
should India do? And what, if anything, should the U.S. do for India?
Last Thursday, five Islamist terrorists--bent,
to a man, on suicide-by-jihad--attacked the Parliament building of the
world's largest democracy. They murdered eight policeman and one hapless
gardener (shot up in a bed of chrysanthemums, a sickle clutched to his
side), before being killed in the intense firefight. Their ghoulish aim
had been to enter Parliament and slaughter legislators and members of cabinet.
Not since the bombing by the Irish Republican Army of Margaret Thatcher's
hotel in Brighton, England, has there been such a brazen attempt to wipe
out the political leadership of a democracy.
Subsequent investigations have revealed
that the attackers belonged to the Jaish-e-Mohammed, or the "Army of Mohammed,"
an anti-India terrorist group that not only recruits and operates openly
in Pakistan, but is funded, trained and incited by that country's Inter-Services
Intelligence. This is the same terrorist group that car-bombed the state
legislature in Srinagar, in Indian-administered Kashmir, on Oct. 1, killing
40 people.
Unsurprisingly--for he is a charlatan
and a dissembler--Gen. Pervez Musharraf condemned the assault on India's
Parliament within hours of its containment. But when faced with evidence
of Jaish-e-Mohammed's authorship of the terrorist act, the Pakistani military
dictator grew fractious and belligerent, warning India not to engage in
retaliatory "misadventure."
For good measure, the general's
spokesman called for a "joint investigation" into the events of Dec. 13--meaning,
here, that Pakistani investigators, most likely from the Inter-Services
Intelligence, would join Indian police in an inquiry into an act of terror
in which the ISI had had a hand! Not content, however, with one risible
suggestion, he uttered another: that it was India itself that had orchestrated
the attack on its own Parliament, and killed its own policemen, in order
to tarnish the image of Pakistan.
The tenor of this last assertion
should not surprise us. It is, after all, of a piece with the many declarations
across the Muslim world made in reaction to the recent Osama bin Laden
videotape. Every shred of evidence that discredits an Islamic society--or
those who would act in the name of Islam--is an American fakery, done to
slander Muslims, or a Jewish counterfeit, or, as here, a monstrous Indian/Hindu
trick. ("American kosher deli," incidentally, is the wry phrase employed
by Western diplomats in the region to describe the popular Pakistani perception
of a hostile, anti-Islamic triumvirate--to wit, the U.S., Israel and Delhi.)
What should India do? After the
World Trade Center was attacked, the U.S. asked the Taliban to hand over
bin Laden. So India must--and surely will--ask Pakistan to hand over the
leaders of Jaish-e-Mohammed for trial. If Pakistan refuses, what is the
difference between Gen. Musharraf's regime and that of the Taliban?
India has the right to retaliate
in the manner and time of its choosing. While urging restraint, the U.S
government has recognized that "India has a legitimate right to self-defense."
Naturally, Delhi needs to consider the implications of its actions on the
region--retaliatory strikes on terrorist camps in Pakistan could ignite
a wider, possibly nuclear, war--but that should not provide an alibi for
doing nothing. Pakistan must not be allowed to practice nuclear blackmail
on India, whereby it bleeds the latter with an undeclared terrorist war,
while warning that any Indian riposte--any Indian assertion of self-defense--could
lead to a nuclear escalation.
Maybe Delhi might consider taking
a leaf from Israel's book and resort to targeted killings of known anti-Indian
terrorists in Pakistan. It has undercover agents on the ground and should,
by now, have acquired the ruthlessness to set them on its most visceral
enemies. The breaking off of diplomatic ties with Pakistan should also
be considered actively.
Doesn't the Pakistani regime have
a responsibility to ponder the consequences of its actions before conniving
in an attack on the heart of Indian democracy? Perhaps Gen. Musharraf has
the same contempt for India's democracy as he has for Pakistan's. This
is where the U.S. must take India's side. Instead of demanding restraint
from India--which has shown that it possesses that quality in abundance--it
must order Gen. Musharraf to restrain terrorist cadres that flourish in
Pakistan. The matter needs urgent attention now, as hundreds of al Qaeda
fighters, having crossed unmolested from Afghanistan into Pakistan, regroup
there for a next bout of jihad--against India.
Ultimately, the real threat to India
comes from the absence of democracy in Pakistan. Gen. Musharraf and his
coterie are accountable to no one. He may be regarded as an ally in the
war in Afghanistan, but that war is now near its end. The U.S. should read
him the riot act, impressing on him the need to shut down all terrorist
activity in his country. India asserts, and the U.S. knows, that the best
way to prevent an escalation of conflict in the Indian subcontinent is
not to lecture India on restraint, nor even to advise India to sacrifice
its democracy on the altar of a prevailing expediency, but to compel Pakistan
to mend its uncivilized ways.
Mr. Varadarajan is deputy editorial
features editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Tuesdays.
