




Yet another crisis in Indo-Pak relations is at hand. The prospects for its rapid regionalisation, to include Afghanistan, and inevitable internationalisation, involving the US and NATO, are now real.
India’s friends will wonder — its enemies have already bet on the UPA government’s weakness — whether Dr Singh has the strategic resolve for a new confrontation with Pakistan’s armed forces and direct it towards a credible set of political objectives.The decision to replace Shivraj Patil with P. Chidambaram at the home ministry suggests that the UPA Government may finally be ready to take major political decisions in confronting the national security crisis at hand.
In developing a response to the Mumbai aggression, Dr. Singh will have to review the military/nuclear crises with Islamabad over the last decade.
In 1999, when the NDA government led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee discovered the occupation of Kargil heights in Jammu and Kashmir by the Pakistan army, it had no option but to embark on a limited war to reclaim Indian territory. Vajpayee faced a more complicated situation during 2001. In its audacity and intended political consequences, the attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001 is the closest parallel to the Mumbai attacks last week.
After considering and ruling out immediate air strikes on terrorist camps across the border, and announcing a series of rather ineffective sanctions against Pakistan, Vajpayee turned to what was then called “coercive diplomacy”. He ordered the full mobilisation of the Indian armed forces on the border and gathered the navy in the Arabian Sea.
India threatened to go to war with Pakistan, with all its consequences including nuclear, if Islamabad did not end cross-border terrorism. Analysts in India and abroad are divided over the effectiveness of India’s coercive diplomacy during 2001-02. It nevertheless saw the US along with Britain exert pressure on Pakistan’s president, General Pervez Musharraf, who agreed to end cross-border terrorism on a permanent basis.
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