Editorials

India Today, issue dated July 19, 1999
July 19, 1999

Moment for Magnanimity

Keeping Pakistan healthy and safe from anarchy is in India's interest

Editorial With Tiger Hill in the bag and the popular mood gung ho, it is easy to wish damnation upon Pakistan. Indeed, the predicament of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and the possibility of a military coup evoke a certain glee. This view is both short-term and perilous. Pakistan's stability is not a concern for that country's nationalists alone; equally, it is an imperative for India. An Islamabad that is little more than a jackboot jungle and where tinpot theocrats run riot is a threat to peace. When these forces seem to upset the strategic balance -- as they did in Kargil recently -- the West flies off the handle. It is this balance that the US and its allies are determined to maintain in south Asia. As such, they will be equally loath to see Pakistan turn into an Islamic Weimar Republic. This is the perspective of great powers, one India would do well to share.

Of the many shibboleths that guided India's pre-Kargil world policy, surely the most confounding was the one that demanded "Kashmir should not be internationalised". At the root of this were two assumptions. First, that a bilateral problem was nobody else's business. Second, that the western bloc was blindly antagonistic towards India. Whatever the wisdom of these beliefs, it is silly to expect that the world will not be alarmed when two nuclear powers are on the verge of war. To that extent, the internationalisation of the subcontinent's security is a fait accompli. After the expected removal of the intruders from Kargil, the attention will be on Pakistan -- where the mood is turning decidedly recriminatory. India simply does not have the leverage to bring tranquillity to Pakistan. That task has to be left to those with greater influence there, namely the US. All India can do -- and should do -- is facilitate the process. Don't surrender advantage as was done in Simla in 1972 -- but keep Pakistan from going berserk. It is the buffer state between peaceful south Asia and anarchy. In a convoluted sense, it is fighting India's battle.

Saluting the Hero

Make sure rehabilitation schemes for soldiers and their families are foolproof

Editorial Perhaps the only worthwhile outcome of the chief ministers' conference called to discuss the Kargil war was the setting up of a committee to put in place a welfare policy for India's soldiers. To comprise of the defence minister, finance minister and six chief ministers drawn from an equal number of parties, the committee's brief is to institutionalise and make uniform the rehabilitation programmes across the country. This is a non-partisan, truly national endeavour in both ideal and practical terms. For instance, the families of those who gave their lives for India at the heights of Kargil have been promised monetary help, land and so on. The onus of actually making these facilities available is on the state governments. As such a joint Centre-state initiative is called for. In an hour of patriotic fervour, the gritty jawan is everybody's favourite hero. As calm descends upon the chilly battlefields of Kargil, the adulation will soon give way to amnesia. Public memory is fickle; India's gratitude to its valiant sons should not be. This is what the committee has to ensure.

There is enough reason to worry. In no country is the old soldier treated with as much callousness as in India. True, there are the relief schemes; but there is also the tragedy of making a war hero suffer a bureaucratic system to get what is rightfully his. In recent weeks, the media has brought to light stories of numerous retired soldiers -- some of them permanently crippled in active combat -- who lie forgotten in corners of India, fighting a new battle against the poverty line and sheer indignity. Ordinary Indians would recoil in horror at the thought that the brave men of Kargil, whom they have so readily saluted, could some day have to struggle to make ends meet. Yet this is the lot of heroes in a land wedded to memory loss. It is now up to eight senior politicians to create the permanent corrective.

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