In Pakistan, do as the Indians do...

In Pakistan, do as the Indians do...
Sonia Trikha

Just as everybody in the world was beginning to understand the futility of signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), given that the new administration in Washington is actively rubbishing it at all multilateral fora abroad and in the Congress at home (US Secretary of State Colin Powell consigned it to the graveyard in his Senate Confirmation), Pakistan seems to have discovered a use for it.

This inventive thinking has allegedly come as the result of a trip by Pakistani Foreign Minister Abdul Sattar to Tokyo. During that visit, which most diplomatic circles, by standards only diplomats understand, are calling a success, Sattar said Japan now has a better understanding of Islamabad's position on the nuclear issue. It's still unclear what that ``understanding'' is and if it is favourable to Sattar's government.

What really happened was that Japan remains reluctant to renew the nearly $500 million Overseas Development Assistance to revive Pakistan's beleaguered economy. That money could begin to flow thick and fast if the neo-nuclear power signs the CTBT. It is necessary because Tokyo must deny and/or restrict economic assistance to any country involved in developing nuclear weapons capability or is in any way dealing in nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction. Pakistan qualifies in all categories of that statement.

So what is Islamabad's favoured course of action? It could sign the CTBT and the yen will come. But then Pakistan's chief provocateur, India, is showing no signs of doing the same. They are instead calling for creating a consensus on the issue. That consensus building exercise has been going on since the Bomb exploded and looks set for a marathon innings to rival V.V.S. Laxman's. But then that's how democracies work (or don't work).

Regardless of the fact that Pakistan has saved itself most of the pitfalls of democracy, it has remarkably adopted the same tone on creating a ``national consensus'' in that country on signing the CTBT. Someone should remind General Pervez Musharraf that he is a military ruler and need not suffer such indignities. Creating a consensus among his Corp Commanders should hardly take more than an office memo from the Chief Executive. In any case, Pakistan's national security interests are the sole preserve of the Defence Cabinet Committee. Apart from the ease with which a nation can be united in military dictatorships, there is the issue that Pakistan hardly has a precedence in national consensus.

Parliament -- when it has existed -- has not debated the issue. Just as no one was ever asked if they wanted their elected leaders ousted in a coup on yet unproven charges, the General should be able to command a consensus and divine what the people of his nation want him to do on the issue.

It seems unreal that Pakistan, which has shown no ethical standards on national consensus on any subject of national interest before this, is suddenly beset with unending angst on an issue that the world considers a lesson in modern history.

Ejaz Haider in The Friday Times explains the politics of consensus, ``national consensus (in Pakistan) is the unicorn that no one has ever seen. In this country, either it can never be reached or it is never sought.''

The reality is that there will be no consensus till India signs. The argument is that Pakistan will hold out, with the promise of a consensus, till the last for getting the world's attention. Then, in that unforeseeable and unlikely future, Pakistan will receive its rightful quid pro quo for joining in. But the other reality that Islamabad must recognise is that, in the meanwhile, this striving for a ``consensus'' comes at a price and no one's coming forward to foot the bill.