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Sticks And Stones Are OK; Words Are Not

"All of us remain concerned that the issue of Jammu and Kashmir should be resolved through peaceful negotiations, and should be willing to lend all the strength we have to the resolution of the matter."

I have hunted high and low, torn this sentence apart every which way, read between the lines as best I could. I think it has to be said: I cannot for the life of me see what is so horribly objectionable about these words. I cannot.

And yet, if Kanchan Gupta altering the contents of these very memory chips a few days ago, is to be believed, there was a wave of "hurt that must have swept through my country, India, following Mandela's remarks." He himself is "overwhelmed by a deep sense of personal grief and sadness." (That sentence above being "Mandela's remarks").

No, I don't feel the hurt. I am bewildered, that's all. I mean, here's a man concerned about the steady loss of precious human lives in Kashmir; a man urging us to talk so we might save those precious human lives; a man saying he and others are ready to help save those precious human lives if India and Pakistan want. Besides, this is someone who, as a statesman of integrity and vision, stands nearly alone on the world stage. This is a man whose words carry a sincerity and credibility they would not if they were spoken by a Suharto, a Fujimori.

Yet our prime minister, our government, our diplomatic panjandrums, some of our journalists at the non-aligned gathering, others -- all have taken prickly offence. They are hurt. Sure that Nelson Mandela is an ungrateful wretch who has displayed "brutal callousness" towards us. Convinced that "South Africa clearly does not believe in the dictum of friendship in gratitude."

And I am bewildered. What could possibly drive this extreme touchiness, this startling immaturity? Why do we react, over and over again, in ways that betray such an enormous lack of confidence in ourselves?

I cannot see what is offensive about a man -- a Mandela -- showing the concern he has. It's like this. If you stand at your window and see my neighbour and I clawing, slashing, tearing at each other on the street below, it is hard to believe you would be utterly unmoved. OK, maybe you would let us go at it for five minutes, hope we'll stop fighting by then. But what if we went on all day? All week? Fifty years?

Is it plausible that you would not be concerned? And what if my neighbour and I began threatening to use bombs on each other that would not just reduce us to cornflakes, but mutate you too? Is it plausible that you would not be concerned?

That's what's going on in Kashmir. At one level, Mandela reacted as any human being might react: with sorrow and concern for the way Pakistan and India are spilling blood. For how we are so blithely throwing away our most valuable treasure -- human lives. At another level, he must be worried sick because of our recent nuclear misadventures. He knows: if we are tempted into plastering each other with nuclear bombs, there is going to be a price to pay around the world as well. And it won't be either India or Pakistan paying it.

Driven by that worry, Mandela urged us to resolve our quarrel. Again as any human being might, he said he was even ready to help us do so if needed.

No, for the fourth time, I cannot understand why we are so upset.

Of course, we flung the same limp allegations at him that we always rustle up. Mandela's comment, his offer of help, amounts to interference in our internal affairs. NAM has a "long tradition" of not raising any "bilateral issue of contention"; by doing so, Mandela has created a "dubious first in the Movement's history." In any case, we are quite capable of solving our problems bilaterally.

Well, it seems to me there are several grounds on which these fall flat.

First, we ourselves have a long tradition we have every reason to be proud of -- of expressing concern about conflicts around the world. In particular, there was our support for South Africa's own struggle against apartheid, to the related Namibian war of Independence. In Windhoek not long after Namibia became free, I stood before several huge wall murals that celebrated Independence in exuberant colour and slogans. Admiring these freedom murals, I was humbled and yet thrilled to catch some of the passion in them. Especially because India was a part of that passion: on some, I found "Thank you India!", even an Indian tricolour. That's how much our support had meant to that young nation.

Yet today, when a product of that very struggle tells us he is concerned about our own blood-letting, he angers us.

We have another long tradition: of offering our help to help resolve conflicts. We tried to end Sri Lanka's vicious civil war ourselves; that effort, of course, turned into a disastrous nightmare. But at other times, our troops have been part of successful UN peace-keeping forces in numerous trouble spots. It is India that has so often said, as Mandela did: "We are worried about your fighting and are ready to help if you would like us to."

Given that record, we don't have even our own logic, our own moral stand, on our side in being so prickly about his words on Kashmir.

Also, are we really as capable of solving our problems "bilaterally" as we think? Our quarrel with Pakistan has dragged on for half a century, far longer than so many other conflicts that have played out their bloody paths. Regardless of who forms the governments our two countries give themselves, one thing remains constant: we keep the hostility, the conflict, vibrantly alive. The evidence Pakistan and India offer the world is that they are either uninterested in or incapable of negotiating a real peace.

But apart from all this, what really puzzles me is just why we are so hostile to help. If we believe we have right on our side, as we always claim we do, why should we be wary of anybody trying to bring us peace, particularly a man like Mandela? Are we that unsure of our case on Kashmir? Or does the hostility come from a sneaking recognition of just how badly we have screwed up -- without at all ignoring Pakistan's sleazy machinations Kashmir and its lives? A recognition we are too weak to admit?

It is simply unbelievable to me how we go to these international gatherings with two aims and those alone. One, that we must rub Pakistan's face in the dirt for its fiddling in Kashmir. Two, that nobody else can be allowed to mention Kashmir.

Thus it is that, when Atal Bihari Vajpayee led an Indian delegation to a 1994 Geneva meeting that managed to defeat a meaningless Pakistan-sponsored resolution on Kashmir nobody else cared about, we claimed a historic diplomatic "victory" that we gloat over to this day. Thus it is that, when Nelson Mandela is worried about the killing on our borders, we act as though he has called our very existence into question. Thus it is that, when South Africa's deputy president gave in to our petulant tantrum about Mandela's words and apologised, we claimed another great diplomatic "victory."

This is how insecure we are about our own country.

A previous prime minister, I K Gujral, said it best. The way we behaved at the NAM meeting, he remarked, showed neither statesmanship nor maturity. "We reacted as if Mr Mandela committed an outrage by making what was an innocuous reference to Kashmir," he said. Gujral continued: "It is time we grew up as a nation and learned to react more responsibly, soberly and diplomatically."

But a sadly missing maturity apart, there is something utterly perverted at the core of all this. That's why I mentioned "precious human lives" three times some paragraphs ago. What is our land, after all, without the people who live on it? Must we ignore the lives -- valiant Indian soldiers, innocent Indian civilians -- we lose in Kashmir every day? When is this loss going to be too high a price to pay for a tantrum in Durban?

When will Indian blood lost, not a few words in a speech, "overwhelm us with a deep sense of personal grief and sadness"?

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