Last weekend I suddenly remembered a discussion
with a relative of mine in the late 1980s. This relative was about
50 years old then and had been a government servant for his entire
career. With some bitterness he was talking about the sad state of
affairs in the country, the corruption, the petty rivalries and so
on. I was nodding in agreement. He kept going. “Everyone thinks only
of themselves. And that too in narrow terms — their state, their
village, their caste, their community. No one thinks of the country
as a whole. No one thinks of themselves as an Indian.” Then he
suddenly dropped a bombshell. “But now I can tell you that there is
at least one person who thinks of himself as an Indian and puts the
country’s interest first — L K Advani.” Before I could explode and
tell him that one could only be thankful that only a few think like
Advani, the phone rang and he left.
I remembered this
discussion because on Saturday, November 30, L K Advani commenced
the Bharatiya Janata Party’s election campaign in Gujarat by
throwing a challenge to Pakistan. Speaking in the town of Bhuj, he
said: “Let us fight it out face to face. We have fought thrice; let
there be a fourth war.” Advani’s remarks were made in the context of
the recent terrorist attacks on Hindu temples that he, not
surprisingly, attributed to Pakistan, and expressed his opinion that
“killing of innocent civilians by attacking temples like Akshardham
and Raghunath is unacceptable.”
Now, as during my discussion
with my relative, I am truly thankful that only a few think like
Advani. But since in these intervening years Advani has gone on to
becoming the Deputy Prime Minister of India, his statements become
worthy of analysis. To start with, Advani talks about fighting
face-to-face. A scene from the documentary Under the Nuclear Shadow
where Maulana Masood Azhar of the Jaish-e-Mohammed is giving an
impassioned address at a meeting of Jihadi groups comes to mind. It
has been too long, Azhar says, and now we have to enter the maidan.
The parallel between the two calls for war is striking. However,
what makes such calls completely hypocritical is that neither Azhar
nor Advani are ever going to really enter a maidan to fight face to
face.
Such talk of war might be tolerable if all it means is
that Advani would fight, say, Pervez Musharraf at New Delhi’s
Ferozshah Kotla stadium or Lahore’s Qaddafi stadium. Unfortunately
that is not how wars are fought. The people who are going to do the
actual fighting are poor soldiers whose families cannot, by and
large, manage two square meals a day. And even in the most limited
of wars, they are likely to die by the thousands. Leave alone the
three official wars, even at the last conflict, which was completely
localised to a small mountain ledge near Kargil, the death toll was
somewhere between 1,300 (according to the Indian government) and
1,750 (according to Pakistan) lives.
There are no guarantees
that the fourth war that Advani wants would stay even as limited as
Kargil. Even during the Kargil war, there were calls to open up
other battlefronts or start bombarding Pakistani supply routes to
the border. Soon after the Kargil war, the then Indian army chief, V
P Malik suggested that future wars between India and Pakistan would
be limited. However, he could not rule out the possibility that the
war could increase in scope though he held out the hope — baseless,
one might add — that the “escalation ladder would be carefully
climbed in a carefully controlled ascent by both protagonists.” He
therefore called on the political leadership “to remain
operationally prepared for the entire spectrum of war — from proxy
war to an all-out war.”
One of the fallouts of the nuclear
tests of May 1998 is that an all out war between India and Pakistan
would almost definitely turn into a nuclear one. In an interview
with the Landau network, an Italian institution that promotes
scientific cooperation for international peace, General Kidwai of
the Pakistan Army’s Strategic Planning Division laid out some
plausible scenarios when Pakistan may use nuclear weapons. Two of
these scenarios involve a war between India and Pakistan where India
conquers a large part of Pakistan’s territory or destroys a large
part of Pakistan’s land or air forces. These are not unimaginable
circumstances given the military superiority that India possesses.
Should Pakistan use nuclear weapons, India is almost sure to
respond likewise. Any use of nuclear weapons in India and Pakistan
would, in light of the high population densities in Indian and
Pakistani cities, lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Given
Advani’s moral outrage at the killing of civilians in terrorist
attacks at the temples of Akshardham and Raghunath, it may be worth
reminding him that most of the casualties in a nuclear war would be
innocent civilians. That their countries are at war does not make
their deaths any more morally acceptable. Neither would the fact
that they may not be praying in temples but sleeping in their homes
or drinking tea at a tea shop.
Advani’s reckless challenge
comes at a bad time. Finally, after months, India and Pakistan have
been pulling back military forces from the border. But clearly
Advani’s concerns lie more with making Narendra Modi win in Gijarat.
One may be tempted to dismiss it as election time bravado designed
to raise passions and attract votes. But therein lies a greater
tragedy. Some decades ago politicians would promise jobs and running
water and things of that sort at election time. Now Advani promises
war to attract votes. The depth to which political rhetoric has sunk
is truly depressing.
