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| What to do with Pak, wonders govt |
| BS Reporter / New Delhi Dec 01, 2008, 01:22 IST |
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After a ministerial reshuffle as part of the damage control exercise in the wake of the terror attacks on Mumbai, the government is now grappling with the issue of what to do about Pakistan.
 Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in his address to the nation that costs would have to paid by the ‘neighbours’. This was echoed by Rahul Gandhi. Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel told colleagues some decisive action was needed against Pakistan. Some Congress Working Committee (CWC) members asked for ‘surgical strikes’ against camps in Pakistan. Others suggested banning cross-border trade and snapping diplomatic ties. All these were rejected emphatically by External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee.
As there was concerted call from the “BJP-minded members” in the CWC (as a member put it) at the meeting on Saturday night, the government was under severe pressure to demonstrate it meant what it was saying on Pakistan.
The question is: what, if anything, can India do about Pakistan and how will this alter geopolitics in this part of the world?
On Sunday morning, former National Security Advisor Brajesh Mishra got a call from the prime minister: what had the NDA government done in the wake of Operation Parakram, the India-Pakistan standoff following the attack on Indian parliament which led to a massing of the two armies eyeball to eyeball along the Line of Control?
But one fiasco had already occurred over the ‘summoning’ of the chief of the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) to India. Was he summoned or not and, if so, whose idea was it to tell the government of another country, which bureaucrat they should send to India for talks ? All that the episode produced was confusion: the Ministry of External Affairs said it was President Asif Ali Zardari who suggested the ISI chief come to India, but the way it was presented was that it was the Indian prime minister who had asked him to come. This, they said, was part of the Pakistani strategy to provoke India into taking some step to escalate the tension between the two countries which would divert attention from the war in Afghanistan and refocus attention on Kashmir. The Pakistani strategy would be to tell the world that Kashmir continued to be the hot spot between two nuclear arms powered nations, giving the new dispensation in the US a reason to appoint a presidential envoy on Kashmir.
This is all the more reason why both Manmohan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee counseled patience with Pakistan at the CWC meeting on Saturday. Although the government is conscious that public sentiment is running high, it does think it would be a mistake to ratchet up tension because such a move will find little or no support from world opinion.
What is more, the government is clear that there are two regimes functioning in Pakistan at the moment: Although there is a civilian government in command, there is little corresponding reduction in the power and influence of the Army and the ISI. The latter, in its search for strategic depth, continues to keep Kashmir as a live issue.
India is hamstrung by the same factors that made it stop short of a war with Pakistan after the attack on Indian parliament. At that time, it was the United States that prevailed citing its first priority as the war in Afghanistan. Then, as now, the need to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan was the priority.
In the circumstances, the range of options of acting against Pakistan are few for India. It can ask Pakistan to wind up training camps, or else it can lobby the US to lean on Pakistan for effective results. But the more demonstrable measures like snapping trade ties, stopping the people-to-people measures including the bus service and Samjhauta Express, cutting off diplomatic relations and calling off the ceasefire are pretty much ruled out.
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