SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA
ARCHIVES

Round And Round We Go, Doing the Indo-Pak Tango

There's only one question, always. This time, it's being asked after Pakistan announced its possession of a missile called Ghauri. In India, this move is denounced as being "far in excess of Pakistan's security needs." After that, the debate turns to: what's India's move going to be? For that's what it all comes down to, doesn't it? That's the only question there is.

If Pakistan gets itself some deadly new gizmo, we in India must respond by acquiring our own. Naturally, in Pakistan they'll denounce that for being "far in excess of India's security needs." Then they will ask the same question; then they will respond with some other deadly whatchamacallit. That will toss the ball back on our side of the fence. And so it goes. Prithvi, Ghauri, Agni, F-16, Mirage, Sukhoi, who-knows-what-else. All have been answers to that one damned dumb question, asked over and over again for half a century.

Whatever they stock up on, neither side ever has enough. In fact, in this crazy game, "enough" is a word that can never apply. In each country, at any random moment, the other guy always has something that is a terrible threat. We must buy something to counter it. That becomes a grave threat to him. He has to respond. He buys something else. That becomes a menacing threat to us.

So it comes about: we move ahead to another random moment, but we also move ahead to precisely the same place we came from, that we have always been in, that we will always remain in. So it has been for all our 50 years.

Can there be any end to this cycle? Not the way it turns today. Will I be considered a naive knave for even suggesting that we stop it? Most certainly. There are actually people, many people, who see virtue in staying on this treadmill, both countries pawing at it steadily, mindlessly. On this, whether in India or Pakistan, there is a 'national consensus'.

It might as well be a consensus that arches gracefully across the border, so in lock-stepped understanding are the two nations when it comes to investing in arms. You buy more, I'll buy more. With that dubious motto to drive us, we are two nations screwed forever into an arms-shopping, arms-stocking, pas-de-deux.

The Great Indo-Pak Tango. Carlos Gardel, eat your heart out.

If it's defence being discussed, the language from those in the know is invariably thus: "no compromise can be made;" or "there is no doubt that it must be given the foremost priority;" or "we shall spare no effort, no expense, to modernise our forces." Fifty years is a long time to have to swallow these catchy phrases without argument. Yet we do, with no signs of any scepticism about them.

But now I want to ask, I want some answers: about priorities, about compromises not made. What have we -- in India, certainly in Pakistan as well -- got by these 50 years of no compromises, of giving the foremost priority to defence? What is the price we have paid?

The answers are clear, aren't they? We have kept hundreds of millions of human beings poor, uneducated and unhealthy. Where sheer human talent might have made this corner of the planet an economic powerhouse for the world, we have instead the world's largest pool of human misery.

Even so, we buy still more arms: the misery on our end of the pool must be protected from the misery on their end! The Tango Must Play On!

And yet, while Ghauri will get Indians all riled up, while Prithvi will get Pakistani backs up, the pool of misery gets nobody up. I have never heard this phrase or variants thereof: "We shall spare no effort, no expense, to educate all Indians." I feel sure its mirror image has not been heard in Pakistan either. Is it really naive to hope we will, one day, hear it? That we will, one day, break free of the routine we dance so beautifully with each other?

There is, after all, at least one example out there we can follow. Costa Rica has been peaceful, democratic and progressive for decades. While its neighbours, year after year, spent money on arms and wars and killing each others' citizens as well as their own, this little Central American country invested in education and health and democracy. In Ticos, as Costa Ricans call themselves.

The result? Literacy is near total. Nearly all Ticos have access to sanitation, compared to three of every ten Indians and Pakistanis. Per capita income is the highest in Central America, seven times higher than in the south Asian giants. Costa Rica may not be as outwardly prosperous as the USA or Western European countries are, but unlike in other Central American countries, or in India, there is no widespread poverty. Cities are clean. Ticos are a healthy people. They enjoy an enviably high quality of life.

This is not to say Costa Rica does not have its share of problems. It does. Foreign debt remains high. Inflation is rising. The banana industry collapsed years ago and there hasn't been a real substitute. Its famed national park system is facing the same pressures from encroachment and logging that we are too familiar with. Those are all true and the country must solve those problems.

But they don't tarnish Costa Rica's undoubted success story.

Most astonishing of all in that success story, most pertinent of all, is this: Costa Rica has no army. It was abolished after a civil war about 50 years ago. Ticos view the military as a hindrance, preferring to channel their energies and resources into social justice. That's the foundation, they believe, of peace at home and abroad. After over a generation without an army, Ticos know that being armed to the teeth is not any kind of guarantee for peace, far from being a good one. And despite the absence of an army, none of its war-loving, war-mongering neighbours have attacked Costa Rica.

Offer the example of Costa Rica here in India and you'll get scorn, chuckles, excuses thick and fast to avoid learning its lessons. It's a small country, I was told, its experience does not apply to a huge one like ours. It isn't as geo-politically strategic, or geo-strategically politic, whatever, as India is. It has a powerful sugar-daddy, the USA. It doesn't have a neighbour as untrustworthy and inimical as we do. Come on, a friend asked, do all Nicaraguans hate Costa Rica? Like all those stinking Pakistanis hate India?

Frankly, I don't know. Nor do I care. I do know that there is, demonstrably, another way to live than under a 'consensus' that 'there can be no compromise' on defence. A way that offers hope to an entire subcontinent, that half a century of missiles and tanks and planes has not. Cannot. A way we can at least think about. Maybe it is time we called this no-compromise bluff and tried that other way. The invest-in-our-people way.

Today, half of India and nearly two-thirds of Pakistan remains illiterate. That's six hundred million people -- the USA and Europe put together -- denied the right to knowledge. Denied, among other things, the ability to comprehend this facile 'consensus' on defence matters that is assumed to include them. What if they were educated, if they did have that knowledge? What might happen then? Would we collectively decide to continue with the same tango, now with more feeling, more force, more arms?

Or might we tap out a new dance altogether, a turn away from missiles and towards people?

Whichever it is, it would certainly be a more meaningful 'consensus' than the one we claim today, the one that rests shakily on a leg that's illiterate and uninformed.

After all, how long can you dance the tango on one lame leg?

Tailpiece:

Here are two more in my weekly series of excerpts from news reports about the 1992-93 riots in Bombay and the Srikrishna report.

"For the victims of the 1992-93 riots, the chances of justice from the courts is bleak, given the poor conviction rates of criminal cases lodged during the riots. A mere eight cases have been convicted so far.... At least 165 people, whose bodies were not recovered, were reported missing after the riots. Although the [Maharashtra] Government recently announced that it would compensate their families, procedural delays continue." The Sunday Times, April 5 1998

"[N]either the BJP nor Shiv Sena were against tabling of the report in the legislature [said Suryabhan Wahadane, Maharashtra state president of the BJP]. ... Mr Wahadane was not sure when the report would be placed before the legislature. 'That is for the government to decide,' he said. ... [T]he committee of bureaucrats headed by the Chief Secretary, Mr P Subramaniam, would not be in a position to draft the Action Taken Report before the current session of the state legislature. The committee is yet to hold its first meeting. This has raised doubts about the government's intentions to make the report public. According to Mantralaya officials, advisers to the government have suggested that it may refuse to accept the findings and recommendations made in the [report]." The Statesman, April 8 1998

How readers reacted to Dilip D'Souza's recent columns

Dilip D'Souza