Columns: Fifth Column

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India Today, June 14, 1999
June 14, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
War Games

Even the Kargil crisis has become a political plaything.

By Tavleen Singh

As I watched the dead being brought down from Kargil this past week, I found myself wondering if those of our political leaders who have reduced Indian politics to a farce in recent times slept well at night. Were they haunted by the images of small boys lighting funeral pyres while their painfully young mothers wept? Did they stop for a moment and ask themselves whether they were in any way responsible? Did it occur to them that the attack on their "vaatan" (Hin-talian for country) would perhaps not have happened if every government in Delhi since 1996 had not been constantly weakened by needless attempts to topple it?

It needed only a quick glance through the comments of the likes of Jayalalitha and K. Natwar Singh -- who speaks for the Congress -- to realise that they were not having sleepless nights and that they were still more interested in playing politics than in India's security. Jayalalitha, too sick to appear in court to answer corruption charges, was apparently strong enough to yet again demand the arrest of the defence minister. In the middle of a war? With Pakistan constantly threatening to use nuclear weapons "if necessary"? Mercifully for us Jayalalitha is unlikely to ever become prime minister and we can ignore her silly comments.

Much more worrying is the fact that the Congress appeared unable to rise above petty politics and behave like the national party that it claims to be. Instead of standing by the government in the worst crisis the country has faced in years, Congress spokesmen continued to gloat over what they consider the failure of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's attempts to bring peace between India and Pakistan. "The BJP government was crying hoarse about the Lahore Declaration," said Natwar Singh, "even as Mr Vajpayee today conceded that Pakistan was planning the infiltration while the draft for the Lahore Declaration was being prepared."

Are we to take it then that the Congress believes there should be no effort to bring peace? Will a Congress government, if it comes to power after the next election, end all attempts at diplomacy with Pakistan until the Kashmir problem is solved? If not, is this the time for making political capital out of the tragic fact that our soldiers are dying in a war that India certainly did not want.

Vajpayee's bus ride across the Wagah border was a brave attempt at peace. It should be remembered as such, despite what is happening in Kargil. If his government had been given half a chance to breathe in its 13 months in office, it might have been able to spend more time thinking about policy and strategy. Unfortunately, it was forced to remain almost entirely preoccupied by what a Pakistani prime minister once described as "the noise and chaos of India's democracy".

Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto meant it as a compliment and grateful though we must be for the vitality of our democracy, we also need to recognise that there are democratic countries in the world where opposition parties behave with a sense of responsibility in times of national crisis. The war in Kargil is a crisis for India, not just for the BJP.

Having said that, it is hard to deny that the Government cannot entirely escape blame. Nor can the army or our intelligence agencies. The defence minister announced in an interview to Star News that the first people to notice the infiltrators were shepherds. This is a very frightening admission. Here are two nuclear powers, eyeball to eyeball across a permanently hostile border and it takes shepherds to do the work of our intelligence agencies?

We then had the defence minister putting his foot, yet again, into his mouth as he informed us that the incursion into our territory occurred without the knowledge of the Pakistani prime minister or the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). It was entirely the fault of the Pakistani Army, he said, apparently without realising the ISI is Pakistan's military intelligence.

It really isn't the job of the Indian defence minister to be defending the Pakistani prime minister. His job is to tell us how 600 mercenaries, armed with heavy artillery, occupied Indian army positions without anyone -- except those vigilant shepherds -- noticing their presence. His job is also to tell us how those Stingers got in and how many more there are. Is it safe, for instance, for civilian aircraft bearing tourists to be landing at Srinagar airport as long as there are Stingers still hidden in Kashmir's forests? We have been told for several months now, by people like the home minister himself, that militancy in Kashmir has been beaten. Would he now like to explain exactly what he meant?

The prime minister could also have behaved more like a leader than a politician. He has been so busy organising all-party meetings and a special, private audience for Sonia Gandhi, that he appears not to have noticed that his primary duty is to the people of India. When his government fell he showed no hesitation in addressing the nation to defend his case. Was it more important than war? Surely his spin doctors -- if he has any -- should have advised him on the first day of the fighting to go on national television to reassure ordinary Indians about what was happening in Kargil.

But perhaps he too is only a politician; and that is our real tragedy. What we need desperately are leaders and what we get, election after general election, is yet another bunch of second-rate politicians. Is it any wonder that a country the size of one of our provinces should feel emboldened enough to risk attacking our territory? Is it any wonder that the world's remaining superpower should think of Pakistan as India's equal, thereby providing insidious encouragement to its reckless actions?

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