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BOOKS
Apocalypse 2007
A
western journalist's new novel envisages a nuclear war in the Indian subcontinent.
Just how realistic is it?
By
Ashok Malik
"Let
me tell you this. You succeeded in Kosovo, Timor and Iraq because these
were dying regimes of a bygone age. Milosevic was no new Hitler. Saddam
Hussein was no new Ayatollah Khomeini. But India and China are new powers.
In a hundred, a thousand years, when the American empire has collapsed,
we will be ruling the world. Let us fight our wars. Let the tectonic plates
of history shift naturally."
Chinese
Foreign Minister Jamie Song to the American ambassador in Beijing, pages
162-63, Dragon Fire
At the simplest
level, Humphrey Hawksley's Dragon Fire is a frighteningly entertaining
tale, with an emphasis on both words. Set in a tense six-day period in
the near future -- May 3 to May 8, 2007 -- it paints a nuclear war scenario
involving India, Pakistan and China. Much of the information Hawksley
uses -- logistical details, military equipment and the like -- is authentic.
His bibliography is familiar. Anyone who follows Delhi's seminar circuitry
will recognise it instantly as the bedtime reading of geriatric generals
and silencer-challenged diplomats. Fighting hypothetical wars, at least
writing about them, is not unknown in these realms. Where Hawksley, a
war zone-friendly BBC journalist who spent a decade reporting Asian strife
from Sri Lanka to the Philippines, differs is in his delivery mechanism.
He has penned a thriller, a taut drama divided into chapters so short
they would qualify for scenes in a play.
To summarise
the story, a renegade unit of a Tibetan militia maintained by the Indian
Government shanghais a couple of aircraft and attempts an audacious assault
on Lhasa to rescue an imprisoned monk. Casus belli cries Beijing,
blaming Delhi. Next impetuous General Hamid Khan grabs power in Pakistan
and is keen to at least temporarily pacify extreme Islamists so that they
allow him to modernise the country. The price they ask for is Kashmir;
and so begins the fifth Indo-Pakistani war.
The dictator
in Islamabad desperately wants the Chinese on his side. He offers them
a formula: back me on Kashmir and I'll help you quell your Muslim insurgency
in Xinjiang. A Chinese negotiator recognises the "ideological contradiction"
but nevertheless congratulates Hamid on "an admirable example of
pragmatism" -- and hands him a neutron bomb.
The Chinese,
as inscrutable as they're innumerable, of course are playing for greater
stakes -- for a "one strike" resolution to an ancient civilisational
conflict. So while Hamid nukes Indian troops before his country is pummelled
to the point that "Pakistan no longer existed as a functioning nation",
India is simultaneously invaded through Burma, "a military colony
of China". Operation Dragon Fire is underway.
Pushed to
the backfoot by Indian resilience, China opts for the ultimate weapon.
Mumbai and Delhi encounter the Armageddon that was once Hiroshima's experience.
A principled Indian regime refuses to use the Bomb on Chinese civilians.
What does
the rest of the world do? An inward-looking US president with re-election
worries twiddles his thumbs and a gung-ho British prime minister curses
the Chinese, even invoking Francis Drake but not quite being able to put
the clock back. America's Manifest Domesticity, if a neologism be permitted,
and the geopolitical vacuum it is likely to create is one of the cornerstones
of the book.
Hawksley
began his research in October 1998 and was well into the early chapters
when the Kargil war broke out in the summer of 1999. In a sense, his plot
preempted the coup in Pakistan and the escape of the Karmapa. Dragon Fire's
principal attribute is the author's straight, reportorial but nevertheless
compelling power of description. His voyage through the streets of Lhasa
and into Drapchi prison -- where the monk is being kept -- in the initial
pages of the book is riveting stuff. Astonishingly, Hawksley told INDIA
TODAY he had never visited Lhasa, "The Chinese authorities have consistently
banned my going to Tibet. The information came from detailed maps of the
city and prison given to me by contacts."
Aside from
the images of holocaust Hawksley conjures, the names of his characters
demand notice. Prime Minister Hari Dixit -- despite the north Indian surname,
the development oriented former chief minister of "Andhra Pradesh"
-- appears inspired by Chandrababu Naidu but named for
J.N. 'Mani'
Dixit; a foreign minister called Prabhu Purie; a Ninan here and a General
Jyoti Bose there. Before you know it you're in the grey area between identifying
private jokes and unwarranted second guessing.
Not that
the book doesn't have its angularities. You are likely to grunt at the
spelling of "Arunchal Pradesh" and "Rajastan" and
"Vijay Chow", ask yourself if an Indian home minister would
walk around wearing "faded denim jeans", tell everybody that
you never knew Mumbai actually had a "Shivali bus terminal"
and raise your eyebrows at the geographical wonderment of the "Siliguri
corridor around Sialkot". Following that, you could sit down and
agree with Hawksley when he hopes "the war never happens". That
makes about a billion of us.
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