June 21, 1999

What India can learn from the Kargil war.

By Swapan Dasgupta

It is not necessary to echo the war cries of the retired generals to realise that there was something grossly inadequate about India's response to the Pakistani invasion in Kargil. Nor is it imperative to cheer the demoralising side-swipes at the government by the Congress, particularly by its smug, know-all external-relations department head K. Natwar Singh. India, it is clear, was taken unawares by Islamabad and has paid a very heavy price for lowering its guard. After the euphoria over Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee's bus journey to Lahore, India believed Pakistan could be trusted. It was a wrong assumption. Pakistan cannot be trusted. More important, it mustn't be trusted.

This is the most devastating conclusion to emerge from the war in Kargil. Our desire for peace in the neighbourhood is not shared across the border and won't be as long as Pakistan wants to finish the "unfinished agenda" of Partition. For India, the Line of Control is the international boundary and has been so since the Simla Accord. There will be no adverse domestic fallout if this reality is institutionalised. Tragically, no government in Pakistan can countenance abandoning its claim on Kashmir. Doing so would destroy its fragile self-image. Nawaz Sharif did try to imagine life beyond Kashmir but ended up passively acquiescing in the army and ISI's Kargil offensive. Pakistani politicians are not free agents. They are obliging prisoners of a virulent ideological framework that is at odds with Indian nationhood.

It is naive to believe that the collective will of all the good souls in both countries can change the atmospherics. The wave of primordial passions released last Tuesday when the two cricket teams battled it out in Manchester demonstrates that it will require more than a generational shift before Indians and Pakistanis shake hands without suspicion and rancour. Track-II can't change bilateral equations any more than NGOs can remove poverty.

For India at least, the Kargil war has ensured that Pakistan will remain the primary focus of national security. There can be no more ambiguity on this score. Following the revelations of shoddy intelligence, lax monitoring of Pakistan and its troubled neighbourhood will no longer do. A security doctrine for India will have to abjure the abstruse blueprints and junkets of the national security talking shops and resume from where the colonial practitioners of the Great Game left off. Our academic institutes and think tanks must abandon their preoccupation with US-defined notions of international relations and begin brushing up their Pushtu, Persian, Turkmen, Tajiki, Tibetan and Kazakh. The Indian Foreign Service, whose standing in the bureaucratic hierarchy is at present a notch below the Indian Revenue Service, may have to be refashioned completely to attract the right sort of talent. If the present rot in the service is not arrested, we may soon have totally unsuitable joint secretaries manning crucial desks in South Block. And as for raw, it will have to be overhauled along the lines of Mossad -- combining in-depth knowledge with covert operations.

In a sense, Kargil is a timely warning and even a blessing in disguise. As the army gets on with its job, the political establishment must realise that national security demands India becomes the unchallenged neighbourhood power. Only that can guarantee that Pakistan never has the gumption to repeat Kargil. Till then, we must regard bus diplomacy as a noble mistake.

© Living Media India Ltd