India: A Country Of The Future Forever

In 1947 India was the country of the future – a lightunto the emerging post-colonial nations. In 1992 when far too long delayedeconomic reforms began under Narasimha Rao, India was again the country of thefuture. Today it is still the country of the future. If you wish to understandwhy India may always be the country of the future, you need look no farther thanthe bizarre response of large sections of its political, strategic and mediaelites to the events of September 11^th in the United States and totheir aftermath.

What Happened

Objectively, India gained enormously from these awfulevents.

The American columnist George Will likes to say that thebest thing that happens to those afflicted with a problem is when celebritiesare afflicted with it for they then bring great resources to bear upon it. (Mr.Will himself is the parent of a Down’s syndrome child and has written oftenand movingly on the dignity of his son’s life.) On September 11^ththe United States came face to face with the risks to modern, complex, opensocieties in an age when technology has shrunk the globe and enormously enhancednetworking, while placing much greater destructive technology at the disposal ofsmall numbers of individuals.

As the world’s most powerful nation comes to grips withthese risks it will, inevitably, make the world a safer and more predictableplace for other modern(izing), complex, open societies such as India. Some ofthis will happen by a direct crackdown on terrorist groups that threaten boththe United States and India. Some by action against groups that do not threatenIndia, but with the indirect benefit of leaving a smaller number of terroristorganizations worldwide that are able to network (as they do) and sharetechniques and weapons, especially those of mass destruction.

Above all, by the United States pushing for a morestringent norm against the use of violence against civilian populations, nomatter what the provocation. While the US will not seek to enforce the norm onall occasions against all comers, for that would be foolish given the nature ofthe international state system, the strengthening of the norm can only benefitIndia’s infinitely complex society where terrorist violence always runs therisk of igniting a far wider conflagration.

I should remark parenthetically that while there is noquestion that these developments will be in India’s best interests, the samecannot be said for sectors of its power elite. An American attempt to reduce hawalatransactions (a phrase now available on American TV) will require that largenumbers of India’s senior politicians find other ways of ill-getting theirgains, greater financial transparency in banks worldwide will make it necessaryfor them to keep much more of their wealth in cash and kind. Furthermore, Indianintelligence agencies and its foreign policy elite may never again have thesatisfaction of creating their own pet suicidal terrorists (the LTTE) against aweaker, democratic neighbor (Sri Lanka) only to find it turn against them.Something to keep in mind when your friends are ranting and raving against thefolly of the United States in creating a situation in Afghanistan that turnedagainst it.

TheUS is currently engaged in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and destroyingthe set of camps that trained jehadis for action in Kashmir among otherthings. This is consummation that India has devoutly wished but lacked the powerto bring about.

TheGovernment and Army in Pakistan have turned their back on their policy of"strategic depth" in Afghanistan, on the maintenance of the Taliban and onmanufacturing jehadis in that country. They have also, for the first timein twenty years, put themselves on the side of Pakistan’s moderate middleclass and its ambition to have Pakistan be something other than a militarized,extremist polity, against blackmail by the Islamist fringe that wants to rushheadlong in precisely the opposite direction. This is another consummation thatIndia has devoutly wished but found itself unable to do very much about.

Thereis every reason to believe, that as the dust settles, the United States willcome to see the belt of authoritarian states across the Middle East ending inPakistan as fundamentally inimical to stability. For example, it was one thingto overlook the ideological extremism of Saudi Arabia when it was a distant landvisited occasionally by Secretaries of State, it is another to ignore the natureof its Faustian governing bargain when planes zip around the world and largenumbers of Saudis are in a position to fly to the United States (9 out the 19that hijacked planes on September 11^th). The New York Times andmore thoughtful politicians such as Senator Joseph Biden have already spottedthis and once the current crisis subsides, others will too. Perhaps the processwill begin with Iraq with its Anthrax stocks being traded for elections, perhapsnot, but its time has come. The main beneficiaries of this process will beIsrael and India, too long lonely sentinels of democracy in this part of theworld. Once they have more predictable and transparent neighbors, they will findit easier to live with them.

Were it not for its unseemliness on human grounds, thesewould be cause enough to celebrate in New Delhi. What about the attack onSrinagar, you say? I can’t improve on Dr. Farooq Abdullah’s heart rendingspeech in the Assembly in its evocation of the terrible fate of the Kashmiris,but the attack represents the last stretch of a period when Pakistan was able tooperate on Kashmir at full tilt – it simply will not be possible to do this inthe near future in the same fashion. That doesn’t mean that the securityproblems are solved, but that the balance has moved in India’s direction by asizeable amount which makes the problem much more amenable to a solution.

What New Delhi Thinks Happened

Contrast this with the actual reaction in New Delhi.India feels

Confirmed in its self-righteous belief that no other country has been victimized as it has by terrorism (Israel, Sri Lanka, Bosnia? Never mind) and that it is therefore owed an apology by the world.
Betrayed by the United States since the latter has, sensibly, chosen to seek Pakistan’s help in going after Bin Laden and the Taliban. Nervous that somehow the 1950s and 1980s are going to be repeated all over again with a Pakistan Army flush with American arms gunning for us, and as part of that, deeply distressed that Powell agreed with Musharraf that Kashmir is a central issue between India and Pakistan which it surely is, although not the fundamental one.
That this is a good time to turn its back on the Lahore-Agra process and start firing at the Pakistanis, if nothing else, to get Mr. Powell’s attention.

As a result instead of celebrating, New Delhi isdepressed and feels that the United States does not love it anymore.

Is there anything excusable that can account for thiscomplete incapacity to compute one’s own true interests and to therefore feeldefeated when victory is in plain sight?

What New Delhi Should But Probably Won’t Do

First and foremost, stop whining about how the US has not declared war on Pakistan. About all this accomplishes is to give Americans struggling to deal with 6000 dead, the specter of bioterrorism and a war in Afghanistan, the sense that India has no common sense and would rather fight Pakistan than do almost anything else.
Enter the debate on Afghanistan, not by running down the Taliban but by offering ideas on Afghan reconstruction. For instance, why not propose a constitutional monarchy under Zahir Shah and send Mr. Jaswant Singh off to call him "my friend Zahir" at a joint press conference in Italy? A silly insistence on nailing India’s flag to the mast of the Northern Alliance continues to infuriate the Pashtuns and is hardly constructive. India could also propose to the US a consortium of countries that would rebuild modern institutions (schools, universities, hospitals) in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. The US will surely provide the money for such ventures, but India has manpower that could be usefully deployed in this cause.
Enter the debate within the United States on the aims of the anti-terror campaign by making the argument that what the world (with the Middle East in mind) needs is more democracy and a greater dose of pluralist values. A general statement to this effect would be a fine declaration to issue along with Mr. Bush during Mr. Vajpayee’s coming visit to Washington. In less official settings a more crisp message can be broadcast, and a working alliance with Israel is surely the need of the hour. A year from now, the gains may be immense.
And finally, reach out to Pakistan at this most opportune of moments – there will be time enough to take the war in Kashmir to them later, if warranted.

Musharraf And Gorbachev
General Musharraf is as close to a Gorbachev as aPakistani leader has ever come in a while. Like Gorbachev, he is a product ofthe system, the architect of Kargil no less, but again a man who has come torealize that Pakistan is in danger of not being worth defending. I personallydecided that he was not so bad when he said to a gathering of Ulema, "Inthe entire Muslim world there are some 380 universities of which only 25 are ofa world ranking. In Japan 1000 universities award PhD degrees. The entire MuslimUmmah can boast of a total of 500 PhDs. In England, each year 3000 PhDs areawarded and in India 5000. It is this that should engage our attention."As an academic, it is hard not to have a soft corner for a man who proposes tocreate a large number of jobs to which one’s students can go.

But more seriously, these were the beginnings of glasnostand in the about face on Afghanistan we now have a full-fledged perestroika.Gorbachev set out to make the Soviet Union a worthier competitor to the West butrealized along the way that there was no way to reform the Soviet Union withoutwithdrawing from the imperial overstretch that had led it to annex EasternEurope, build a global military, march into Afghanistan and generally attempt toreinvent the wheel when it came to economic growth. He wasn’t planning on theSoviet Union’s own dissolution and perhaps that was not inevitable, but shortof that he went along with what he realized had to be done to preserve a futurefor the Russians. (In retrospect, it would have helped if he had displayed abetter grasp of economics and used the last days of the authoritarian system toreintroduce capitalism a la Deng Xiaoping – a lesson Musharraf shouldheed. Really, he needs to bePino-chev!)

Musharraf began in a similar bind. Like the Soviet Union,Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with an aggressive military culture but withan impoverished civil society underneath. Imperial overstretch was plain tobehold a month back – a client state in Afghanistan and a perpetual standoffwith India. He has retreated from the Afghan adventure with the assistance ofAmerican pressure. (It is worth remembering that India’s economic reforms weresold as inevitable adjustments to external, IMF, pressure.) While it will beimpossible for him to retreat unilaterally from the Kashmir adventure, it is notout of the question that a co-operative minuet between him and Mr. Vajpayee caneffectively accomplish this. This is the great opportunity that India shouldnot fail to explore.

Going back to the other Cold War for a moment, inGorbachev a failing system produced a young, energetic leader who looked good ontelevision and succeeded in putting his counterpart Ronald Reagan – an older,less crisp leader with a talent for personifying his country’s virtues, butnot for debate – on the defensive at their first few summits. America’selite was annoyed at this reversal of the roles they had come to expect based onthe underlying realities and many remained deeply suspicious of Gorbachev tilllate in his tenure in office. But a year into the first Bush Administration, thepenny dropped – the chap was for real - and the US and the Soviet Union wereable to manage the disengagement of the Soviets from Eastern Europe.

At Agra, another failing system produced a young,energetic leader who looked good on television and succeeded in putting hiscounterpart – an older, less crisp leader with a talent for personifying hiscountry’s virtues, but not for debate – on the defensive. This is annoying,but hardly any reason not to see how far the chap is willing to go. The groundrealities are that Pakistan has a recovering fundamentalist nation on one(Iran), a beginning recovering fundamentalist nation on another (Afghanistan),an authoritarian, culturally alien state on a third (China) and a pluralistdemocracy with an irresistibly attractive and subversive culture on the fourth(India). By far the fastest way for Pakistan to find its way out of the dead endin which it finds itself is to give up on the notion that it can reinvent thewheel when it comes to social arrangements in the subcontinent and to settledown to an independent but interdependent existence with its larger culturalkin, much as other nations elsewhere have done at earlier times in history(Canada with the United States, Austria with Germany). It strikes me thatcrafting a process that accomplishes this with Pakistan’s dignity intact maypersuade Musharraf, like Gorbachev before him, to go an extra mile. Pakistan’smiddle class may feel a symbolic loss (much as the Russians miss being a globalmilitary power) but in their heart of hearts, and in the writings of some intheir media and academia, they know that this is a lost cause and one that iskeeping them from a more normal existence that they would find compensationenough.

Twice before, events on a larger scale have producedopportunities for India to make substantial progress on its relationship withPakistan. The first came when the entry of Chinese forces into Tibet led AyubKhan to offer a mutual defense pact to India and the second when the entry ofthe Soviet Union into Afghanistan led Pakistan to fear for its own existence.The events of September 11^th have again caused Pakistan to wonderwhere it is headed. For India to retreat to a reflexive pessimism and to fail toseize this moment would be to accept defeat when an even greater victory ispossible. This failure will be a great loss for Pakistan, which desperatelyneeds a return to cultural normality, but it will also be a great loss forIndia. Not merely because its influence in the world will continue to havePakistan’s hostility subtracted from it. It will be a loss, above all, becausea distorted Pakistan will continue to mask India’s own failings in the eyes ofits political and strategic elite, which will therefore continue to have itsimagination hemmed in by the natural geographical boundaries of thesubcontinent.

(The author is associateprofessor with the Department of Physics, Princeton University)