By Kollengode S Venkataraman. June Written 17 June, 2002.

The farther away people are from their ancestral land, the stronger is their cultural identity with their ancestral roots. And for people who also have survived the horrors of man-made disasters, such as what millions of people in the Indian subcontinent went through during the 1947 partition, what Jews experienced in World War 2, what Palestinians are experiencing now, what Kashmiri Pandits went through in the Islamic ethnic cleansing of Kashmir in the 1980s, their cultural identity quickly becomes their political identity as well. New. Better.

That is why in the US, the Irish are more Irish, Jews are more Jewish, Indians are more Indian, Pakistanis are more Pakistanis, Hindus, Sikhs, Parsis and Muslims are likewise more so than what they would have been had they stayed in their own respective lands. That is why emigre publications have no clout among policymakers.

We must keep this in mind when we look at the reaction of people from the Indian subcontinent to the war-like situation that would have billowed into full war. Since everyone in the world has an opinion on the subject, it’s OK if we also express our words in this space.

In the past, the Patrika has written cynically on both Pakistani and Indian bravado after their nuclear/missile tests, given the poor social indicators in both countries. If direct military provocation was bad, psychological provocation was worse, as when Islamic Pakistan named its missiles Ghazni and Gauri, after the Turkish Afghan marauders, who centuries ago, repeatedly raided and plundered the Indian subcontinent, that ironically, also included today’s Pakistan.

We, like others, have stressed that better trade and people-to-people contacts would tone down the high-temperature rhetoric that is second nature to Desis. But the Pakistani military, fearing that this would erode its stranglehold in Pakistani polity, has rejected this route.

The US recognized the menace of Islamic fundamentalists only when it was hit. First, WTC bombing years ago, then the US embassy bombing in Africa, then USS Cole, and finally the horror of September 11.

But India has been living with the Pakistani proxy war through jihadis since the 1980s after the US war against the Soviet-backed Afghanistan regime. During that war, Arab militants trained and armed by Pakistani army in Pakistan, with CIA and Saudi money were portrayed in the Western media as Mujahideen (freedom fighters). After the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan, the US had no use for the Mujahideen. Instead of disbanding the Mujahideen operations in Pakistan, the US simply walked away. These are Pakistanis’ observations, not Indians.

The Pakistani military, not succeeding in the three earlier wars in 1948,1965, and 1971 it imposed on India. And was always itching to settle scores, Pakistan let the Mujahideen-turned jihadis infiltrate into Kashmir in India since the 1980s. The military being the de facto ruler of Pakistan, the khakis laid the policies and called the shots.

For the Pakistani military, the jihadis are the most cost-effective way to bleed India, forcing it to take countermeasures that are prohibitive for India in terms of money, military preparedness, and anxiety created in the nation’s psyche, much like what is happening here in the US after the Islamist pierced commercial rejection to the Twin Towers

Arming the Arab mercenaries and calling them Kashmiri freedom fighters also gave Pakistan diplomatic deniability. Among the Pakistan-trained Kashmiri freedom fighters are Islamists from Egypt, Algeria, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, leftovers from US-Soviet war in the 1980s in Afghanistan, not to speak of Pakistani army regulars.

When India cried horse on the menace of Islamic terrorists for years, the US mainstream media paid no attention till September 11. But then, in the vocabulary of the US media, the mighty mujahideens had morphed into menacing jihadis.

On December 13, 2001, Pakistan-trained jihadists attacked the Indian Parliament, the living symbol of India’s democracy. One wonders how the US and its allies, or even Pakistan itself for that matter, would have reacted if their national legislative institutions were attacked by state-sponsored terrorists. And then in May this year, Pakistan-supported terrorists, entered the housing quarters of soldiers in India and shot at point-blank range women and children, even a 2-month-old baby. We can’t have one set of rules for engagement for the West and Israel and entirely another set of rules for developing countries unless we say human life in the developing world is cheap.

General Musharraf, after spending years and billions of Pakistani taxpayer money in training and arming the jihadists, now tells the world that he himself, and Pakistan itself, have become the victim of terrorism. Well, General, as in stories of Hindu mythology, the Rakshasas (demons) you created and nurtured are beginning to devour you.

After his January speech, General Musharraf arrested 2000 militants only to release them soon, for them to infiltrate into India.

So how long did the power brokers of the world expect Prime Minister Vajpayee to exercise restraint that they don’t do it themselves? Besides, Vajpayee was not sitting on sitting idle, twiddling his thumb.

Vajpayee took a considerable risk in visiting Pakistan in 1999 to normalize relations. What did the general give him in return? The Kargil war. Then again in 2001, Vajpayee invited the general to India for talks. What did Bajpai get in return from General Musharraf? More jihadi attack. So, Vajpayee was entirely justified in rattling his Saber using ambiguous imagery in his speech, telling Pakistan and the West that the status quo was unacceptable.

What has prevented a war so far between India and Pakistan is that India is a democracy. No democratic government has initiated war in recent times with a formidable enemy. And the Pakistani army is formidable vis-à-vis India. In the 1980s, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, with US support, invaded Iran under the Ayatollahs. The war dragged on for eight years and consumed over one million Muslim young men simply because Iraq was under dictatorship and Iran was ruled by Islamic theocracy. What would have happened if both Iraq and Iran had elected governments is not just a rhetorical question. Again, Iraq under military invaded Kuwait under an oligarchy of sheikhs. So, the best guarantee against war in South Asia is for true democracy to evolve in Pakistan. But General Musharraf has given himself five more years as President in a sham one-man referendum. However, in the last standoff, the general declared and assured his Western donors that he would no longer allow jihadists to use Pakistani territory as a launching pad to infiltrate Kashmir. This should give some manoeuvring room for the new government in Pakistan after the October election to negotiate with India. With the entire world watching, the odds for an honest election in Pakistan are more