FAMILY FEUD : Will India & Pakistan come to blows?

When the Indian Parliament was attacked by terrorists on December 13, 2001, we watched the news reports on television with even more than our usual concern. My husband's Mamaji (mother's brother), Krishan Kant, is the vice president of India and presides over the Rajya Sabha, a legislative body analogous to the British House of Lords, which meets in the Parliament building, and which was in session when the incident took place.

When we were finally able to speak with Mamaji in the evening, we learned that he had narrowly escaped with his life. He had been on his way out of the building to his car when, by chance, a member of Parliament asked to speak with him. They moved into a small antechamber to talk and in the few moments that they were inside, his own driver was shot as he stood by the car waiting for Mamaji to emerge.

To many here in India, Pakistan was the obvious villain. The standoff is an old one, and has been played out at different intensities since British India's partition in 1947. The repository for all of the grief and animosity between the two countries is the paradise state of Kashmir. Pakistan wants to go to the negotiating table to discuss it, India refuses to consider it even, and many Kashmiris themselves say "a plague on both your houses--we want independence."

In India, many citizens are getting tired of the whole affair. "Is there gold there? Silver?" asks Shanti Bhushan, one of the country's leading lawyers and a former law minister in the previous Janata government. "What is so precious that we can't live without it?" But in an era of coalition politics here, where every single vote counts, the ruling party cannot afford to alienate its huge bloc of Hindu voters.

Once the cold war began between the Soviet Union and the United States, no Democratic Party leader in the United States could safely consider negotiating with the Chinese for fear of being accused of pro-Communist leanings. It took the Republican Richard Nixon, whose anti-Communist credentials were impeccable, to make the leap. Here in India, there was some hope that when the present ruling party (the Bhartiya Janta Party) took over, given its equally impeccable pro-Hindu credentials, a similar process could unfold vis-a-vis Pakistan.

Those hopes are now being dashed as the BJP repeatedly proves that its leadership is unable to rise to the occasion. The present situation has been attributed by many political commentators here to the BJP's nonperformance since coming to power. Desperate to hold on to the Hindu vote, it is deliberately playing upon nationalist sentiments, with military displays and rousing anti-Pakistan rhetoric. One-fifth of India's Parliament comes from Uttar Pradesh state, which goes to the polls in mid-February to elect a new state government. The present crisis is seen by many as directly linked to these elections, raising fears that a confrontation may actually be forced in time to justify postponing them. Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Home Minister L. K. Advani, like Nixon, want to make their mark on history, however misguided. Their goal, however, seems rather small, historically speaking: It appears to be nothing more than to successfully intimidate Pakistan.

General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, while managing extremely well, and occasionally even showing signs of brilliance, may also prove to be ill-equipped for a crisis of these proportions. In deep trouble with conservative Muslims for his own Western leanings, he is walking a tightrope between those in Pakistan who back a fundamentalist theocracy--and who supported the Taliban--and a more liberal but less-vocal minority. Placating both constituencies, especially given his own divided loyalties, is a difficult task.

In a speech to the nation on January 12, Musharraf appeared to rise to the challenge, taking enormous political risks as he took his country to task for the shambles it is currently in. For the first forty minutes of his speech, he never even mentioned Kashmir or India but stuck to his theme of transformation from within. Sounding at times like an angry father scolding his children, he listed the issues that he said should be occupying the mind of every citizen of Pakistan: illiteracy, hunger, atrocities against women and the poor; he reminded them of the scandalous reputation the nation now holds in the eyes of the world and that it is seen as a rogue state with which no other country wants to do business. Only then did he address the issue of terrorism, banning several extremist organizations and inviting India's prime minister to the negotiating table.

Liberal Pakistanis were delighted with the speech. Najam Sethi, the editor of the Lahore-based newspaper, Friday Times, welcomed it, saying that Musharraf had "used words we have never heard in this country--he actually said that we do not want Pakistan to be a theocracy." India's reaction was more guarded, saying it would first have to see evidence of Pakistan's commitment to combating terrorism.

Family feuds are often more bitter and harder to resolve than those between strangers. At times of crisis, all the old grievances are dragged out of whatever closets they have been stuffed into and used to make the present case sharper and more emotional--relevant or not. India and Pakistan were once one nation. The people of the Indian border states of Rajasthan and Punjab are indistinguishable from the people of Pakistan. So when one betrays the other, it hurts more.

The present leadership in both countries is made up of people who actually have the Partition and its terrible atrocities in living memory. It will be very difficult for either side to move beyond that to the negotiating table. But unless both tone down their inflammatory rhetoric, we may have to wait for the next generation to bring peace to this troubled region--that is, if we live so long.