The bloody high price of peace

Imagine the class's biggest boy being roughed up by a little rogue. He then runs to the principal, who asks him to shut up and patch up.

He goes back to the smaller boy begging for truce, gets kicked and insulted again, comes back sulking, and announces that this was all part of a highly intricate, mature and sophisticated diplomacy.

India's latest "peace process" with Pakistan has been just as ludicrous.

What has India done in the 597 days after Pakistan-trained and -sponsored terrorists slaughtered 173 people in a four-day spectacle across Mumbai's hotels, railway station, holy places and pubs?

It went whining to the US, meekly accepted the orders of the Obama administration -- which is only concerned about baddies on Pakistan's northwestern border with Afghanistan where US interests lie -- not to create trouble, and started a "peace process".

What has India gathered so far: an accidentally captured terrorist; curt, mocking slips of denial from Pakistan to our copious dossiers of evidence; a fresh round of insults to our external affairs minister; and little else.

However, every time one demands action, politically correct pundits call it "jingoism".

How can you sit and negotiate with an attacker without taking strong action on the ground? What is jingoistic about defending your citizens and attacking, reaching grave harm to the people who attack and kill your people? Why should a nation forget the audacity with which commuters returning home after a hard days work were killed?

Who is to answer for November 26, 2008, and hundreds of other massacres?

The Congress government seems only too eager that the nation's collective memory lapses. What is more insidious and dangerous is that the Congress seems convinced that hostile action against Pakistan, or even the hanging of Pakistani terrorists, will enrage our Muslims. Ironical that the biggest insult to Indian Muslims should come from a party that claims to be the biggest champion of secularism.

And let the BJP not fish for brownie points, for its government escorted terrorists to Kandahar, helplessly watched lynched Indian soldiers sent back from Bangladesh hung like animals to bamboo poles, and merely managed to regain Kargil after grave loss of soldiers' lives. And yes, it also gave up our conventional weapons edge with a loud, hollow nuclear noise.

India's last diplomatic, intelligence and military victory was 1971. Defeat of Pakistani troops. Creation of Bangaldesh. There was strong, decisive action on the ground. Imagine if '71 hadn't happened, we would have another Pakistan to our left today, in addition to the one on our right!

One doubts if Mrs Indira Gandhi -- for all her dark flaws -- would have allowed the nation to be humiliated like this, or would have started a peace process without a trace of retaliation after 26/11.

Pakistan today knows well that India has no teeth. It'll never as much as touch a single terror camp across the border, or assassinate ISI's men in cold blood as an Israel would.

Pakistan has successfully convinced the world that any act of aggression by India will result in war, and no act of aggression by Pakistan will.

There lies the biggest failure of India's foreign policy. And that is why a man named Shah Mehmood Qureshi can't stop flashing his smug smile on television these days.

Abhijit Majumder
Executive Editor, MiD DAY