June 29, 1998

The wooing of America will take more than one visit by Jaswant Singh

Tavleen Singh

Jaswant Singh -- the prime minister's friend, trouble-shooter and vital link to the English-speaking world -- was in New York during the same week I was. I got to know this from a couple of Indian businessmen who had heard him speak at some NRI luncheon. He was terrific, they gushed, really held his own. Spoke such good English, they added, as if surprised someone representing the BJP Government could speak English at all. "The Government needs people like him to come here," they said, "and explain that it isn't some bunch of lunatics who have the bomb but a serious, responsible country."

Even so, I read nothing about Singh's visit in the New York press. So I called him at the UN Plaza to find out how his damage control campaign was going. Very well, he said. He had given several interviews to various television channels and was off to Washington the next morning to further the cause.

It is, alas, going to need a lot of furthering. The post-Pokhran II publicity has been very bad. Cyclones can devastate entire coasts, killing hundreds; governments can rise and fall -- and usually the average person in the world's sole superpower remains blissfully oblivious of India. But the nuclear tests are another story. I have had total strangers stop me on the street and ask about the bomb. Is it true India and Pakistan are on the verge of a nuclear war?

The sense of alarm is reflected in the newspapers. So USA Today carries a front page story about how in the bad old Cold War days, American children were taught how to duck and hide if there ever were a nuclear war and how everyone had underground shelters at hand. The point of the story was unless India and Pakistan were contained there could be a return to those long-forgotten days. In an editorial, the newspaper described the CIA's failure to predict the Indian nuclear tests as evidence that the agency's analysts were "under-trained, unincisive and just plain blind".

From the Indian point of view, the worst part of the story is that we are being seen as the villains and the Pakistanis as hapless victims. This is not just puzzling, it's bizarre. Clearly, if Pakistan could explode its device within days of the Indian test it must have been pretty close to having its own little (Chinese) bomb. Surely this should cause concern in the western world, terrified as it usually is by the prospect of Islamic terrorism.

But somehow you don't sense this in America. Indians who live there say it is because Pakistan has been much better at lobbying in Washington than we have. There is disappointment at the performance of our ambassador: "He sounded like a typical Indian bureaucrat, whereas the Pakistanis flew in a delegation to the UN within a day of their tests. It articulated their position very impressively."

The Pakistani argument is their country would never have gone nuclear if India had not. That they have been forced into a nuclear arms race by a country which is not just bigger but more aggressive. This sounds ludicrous when you consider that every war fought in the subcontinent in the past 50 years has been on account of Pakistan trying to break up India, not the other way round. But somehow we remain unable to make this point. Just as we are unable to explain that Kashmir has always been part of India and is not some piece of territory we stole from Pakistan in 1947.

Most Indians would be stunned by this impression. It exists mainly because it is perpetrated by foreign correspondents who parachute into the subcontinent without any serious understanding of what the Kashmir problem is really about. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), despite having an entire department to deal with external publicity, has been singularly deficient in explaining our side of the story.

Matters have not been helped by the fact that ever since insurgency began in the Valley in 1989, the mea has been forced to spend most of its energy defending our appalling human rights record in Kashmir. Instead, it should have been explaining that what is left of the militancy consists almost entirely of foreign Islamic warriors.

How is it, you wonder, as you scan American newspapers for news on India, that nobody mentions this interesting little fact? How is it that nobody mentions it is Pakistan which, yet again, wants to break up India -- and it was to achieve this goal that it plotted and planned to get its nuclear bomb?

Clearly, we are going to need more than one short visit by Singh to tell our side of the story. Clearly, when it comes to the telling of stories Pakistan is ahead of us. If the BJP Government wants this to change then it is going to have to plot a whole new strategy. Meanwhile, it would help enormously if L.K. Advani could exercise firm control over the lunatics spawned by his original rath yatra. Their mad plans to build a temple to the bomb and carry Pokhran dust around the country in celebration of the tests received huge publicity in the US. It all served to emphasise the point that India was as irresponsible a country as Pakistan.

The impression of the subcontinent, post-nuclear tests, is of Hindu fanatics on one side of the border and Muslims on the other -- with a new and dangerous weapon in their hands. Changing this impression is going to need very hard work.

Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions

© Living Media India Ltd