Stand up, be counted

Now that George W. Bush’s bombing of Afghanistan is proving the flop show of the millennium, is it not time India injected some good sense into the so-called global war against terrorism? We cannot have it both ways; either Gandhi was a fraud or his values are eternal. Yet, our government is not prepared to invoke either his name or his doctrine of non-violence.

Non-alignment was the extension into foreign policy of the principles that informed our freedom movement. Yet, the fierce independence of mind and spirit which once so characterised us as a nation is nowhere to be seen as we hobble behind others hoping our presence in the queue will be recognised. At the Non-aligned Summit in New Delhi in 1983, Indira Gandhi described the non-aligned movement as ‘‘the biggest peace movement in the world.’’ Today, we are embarrassed to talk about peace for fear it might mute the thumping of our chests.

In 1989, Rajiv Gandhi wrote a hundred-page letter to Gorbachev — at Gorbachev’s request — explaining how insurrection against the state cannot be met by violence alone and how the Indian experience of tackling terrorism showed that it was only through dialogue, accommodation and reconciliation that the root causes of terrorism can be contained. Now when Vajpayee gets a call from Bush, one can hear the strains of the Stars and Stripes being played in the PMO as background music.

Terrorism of the kind we saw at the World Trade Center is not about homicide. It is about suicide. Almost any Chhota Shakeel or Abu Salem can be hired at a price. They take it to flee. But when it comes to terrorists who are ready to sacrifice their lives to get the lives of others, all the conventional answers to violence pale into impotence. Gandhi brought down the Empire by threatening to kill himself, not others. Of course, what distinguished him from Osama bin Laden is that Laden’s acolytes and Laden himself are ready to die but only if others die with them. Yet, that very willingness to meet a certain death demands that answers be found which do not merely cater to the terrorist demand for martyrdom.

The global war on terrorism is not only about terrorism. It is also about global dominance. The essence of non-alignment lies in the rejection of such dominance. Whether those at the high table want us there or not, non-alignment demands a place at the high table. And if that is not available, it intrudes on the menu with a menu of its own.

Till the end of the eighties, that kind of preachy self-confidence was still our hallmark. Through the Gulf War, the Congress, if not the country, displayed some independence of mind. Now the national desire appears to be to keep the Americans happy, hoping the time will come when they will keep us happy.

We lost our moral leadership of the non-aligned movement when we went nuclear. We are now selling our faith in ourselves. For the bilateralism of the Shimla Agreement was the expression of our trust in ourselves to sort our problems with our neighbours between ourselves. When Bill Clinton stepped into the picture at Kargil, the Vajpayee government came to the conclusion that it was not our jawans but Clinton’s wigging which had brought Pakistan to its heels. Ever since, South Block has started looking to Foggy Bottom, and Race Course Road to the White House, for solutions to our problems.

The tattered Oslo process shows that the centre of our universe lies here, not there. Repeatedly, over half a century, it has been demonstrated that solutions imposed through dominance do not endure. If the Anglo-American combine had not so foolishly overthrown Mossadeq, not just Iran but much of West Asia would have progressed to modern and prosperous democracy. If France and the United Kingdom had not invaded Egypt in 1956, they might have counted for something more than poodles. Similarly, if the West had not egged on Saddam Hussein to invade Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, he would not have felt able to barge into Kuwait with impunity.

In Korea, the Uniting for Peace resolution was rammed through the UN General Assembly when the Soviet Union blocked the matter in the Security Council, but, as in Afghanistan now, the war did not go the way the West imagined and fifty years on, Korea is still a divided country. Even that armed peace was made possible by a maverick India chairing the Neutral Nations Repatriation Commission.

In Indo-China, it was V.K. Krishna Menon camping at a hotel in Geneva who brokered the 1954 agreement without India even being a participant in the conference. A grateful world turned to independent-minded India to chair the international commission for the supervision and control of the Geneva accords. So, in South Africa. We boycotted apartheid when not a single other country in the world shared our view. Eventually, it was the world which endorsed us, not we the world. That was how we counted.

Asymmetrically. We fought our battles on our own — and made peace on our own. When we let others dictate the peace, as at Tashkent, that peace did not endure.

As the military stalemate in Afghanistan blurs the dividing line between civilisation and barbarism and degenerates into political stalemate over what, if anything, can or will replace the Taliban, the need for independent thinking becomes more pressing each day.

An India as anxious to be a camp-follower as this India under Vajpayee is hardly the India which might be expected to do the right and honourable thing. But perhaps there is a Third World Nehru somewhere out there who will take up the baton which Jaswant Singh has dropped with such a clang.

Those of us who espouse the fundamental values of our freedom struggle and the first half-century of nation-building owe it to ourselves, our forebears and our children to not sit by as passive spectators to the massacre of innocents being undertaken in our name, but to stand up and be counted.

Earlier Columns