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EDITORIALS
A
Necessary War
And
India is morally bound to endorse it for its own national well-being
In
the lexicon of liberal morality, war is the worst word. It is a rage against
humanity, it is power enlarged by blood. Look back and see the defining
motif of the 20th century-the killer and the killed. Two world wars, two
revolutions (the Russian and the Chinese) and the Holocaust. All of them
were born out of a great sense of conviction, and all of them were essays
on man's immense capacity to hate and kill. The price was as huge as the
cause. So the natural reaction to what many see as World War III soon
to be started, is dread-or fear. And the liberal consensus in places like
India is: won't the reaction be even more bloodier than action? This is
an appealing moral position. But this moral argument is subordinated to
a situation that calls for a higher sense of morality.
 Call
it war. A necessary war. The enemy this time is not a nation or a group
of nations. This is the age of enemy as an idea. Osama bin Laden, the
marketeer as well as the mind of this idea, is not targeting America alone.
In his moral system, America symbolises the triumphant face of a broad
cultural system of which most of the civilised world, including India,
is a part. Someone has to assume the moral leadership to take on the New
Terror, which, actually, is not so new. One country that knows it and
lives through it is India. And India should know that this terror is not
negotiable, that it cannot be talked out. It has to be struck out. So
be it with the war against the enemies of civilisation.
After all, history is
full of lessons in the futility of waiting for the enemy to humanise himself.
Once it was Hitler, and it was thought he could be contained by appeasement,
but when the Holocaust revealed itself, it was too late. In the case of
the terror personified by bin Laden and his promoters, it is not too late.
Sadly, a great deal of posturing and bargaining is going on in the name
of multilateralism, in the name of evidence. What evidence, the fingerprints
of bin Laden? Here too, India is in a better position. The killer's footprints
and fingerprints are there in Kashmir. Looks like they have not yet registered
indelibly in the national psyche. Being a member of the community of democracies,
India now has an opportunity to be on the right side of history. Desperate
dictators may ask India to lay off. That's understandable. A sustained
war against terror will not spare those who turn approver and change sides
at the last minute.
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