Praful Bidwai in The Frontline, 22 October, 1999

New Delhi has become an obsessive defender of absolute national sovereignty - unfettered by human rights or other universal criteria. It failed to take a stand on the vital issue of human rights in Kosovo. It only opposed the NATO-led multilateral action as a violation of national sovereignty. But surely, in extreme, exceptional situations, for example apartheid or genocide, sovereignty must yield to other criteria.

On East Timor, India has not let out a squeak on the horrific repression unleashed by the Indonesian forces -- one of the worst cases of near-genocidal terror anywhere killing a third of the population ... Perhaps (the) reason is New Delhi's Kashmir and Pakistan reoccupations. It fears that supporting intervention in one region – however genuinely humanitarian, well-intentioned, multilateral and balanced it may be - would invite similar demands in Kashmir, opening a can of worms.

India's insecurities over Kashmir have intensified despite Pokhran-II. After all, nuclear weapons are utterly useless in the face of low-intensity warfare or insurgencies ... There is no coherent link between India's foreign policy and its pursuit of democratic domestic priorities.

With the BJP's aggressive, bellicose, chauvinistic, nationalism, these tendencies have got further accentuated. New Delhi's notion of sovereignty is divorced from the people and the public interest ... It affirms sovereignty only when it comes to human rights violations, threats to religious freedom, and the "right" to make weapons of mass destruction. Such sovereignty is irrelevant, even hostile, to the public interest.

Freed from a commitment to principle or universal doctrine, India's foreign policy establishment now takes whatever positions seem expedient ... the latest shibboleth, fashion, or flavour of the month, is "counter-terrorism" and the "global" fight against (Islamic) fundamentalism.

This has become a bandwagon slogan. In place of the K-word (Kashmir), which long spelt embarrassment, we are told, South Block has moved on to the T-word (Terrorism or Taliban), about which it can feel upbeat. The T-word gives India respectability, a feel good proximity to, and a joint project with, the Great Powers, above all, the US, no less.

That is why Jaswant Singh in the UN General Assembly went all out to underline not just Pakistan's role in "terrorism" in Kashmir, but its links with Afghanistan and the "larger disorder" that makes it the main source of global terrorism. Jaswant Singh, Vajpayee and Advani have been at pains to present the anti-terrorism platform as the principal plank of India's new foreign policy. It is not hard to see the real motive: to focus on "Islamic fundamentalism" as the root of contemporary "terrorism" in its most menacing form; and then make a come hither gesture to the US (and secondarily to Russia too, which faces the Daghestan and Chechnya crises) and to campaign jointly with New Delhi.

South Block's fond hope here is that this will help it isolate Pakistan and build a strong strategic relationship with the US under which Washington decisively distances itself from Islamabad.

This Brave New Campaign against Terrorism has an implicit, unstated, anti-Islamic angle, building as it does on prejudices prevalent in the West, and the need for its right wing to find new enemies to perpetuate high levels of military-nuclear preparations. It confuses popular Islam, first with political Islam, and then the latter with fundamentalism. In reality, there is little in common between practised Islam and the fundamentalism associated with the Taliban and so on.

The azadi movement in Kashmir can be hardly assimilated to Taliban fundamentalism. The Hurriyat has explicitly distanced itself from the Taliban. Omar Farooq has emphatically said: "Laden has no role in Kashmir ...

He has no locus standi in the Valley ... his movement is aimed at spreading Islamic jehad which is not our objective".

It is also wrong to believe that foreign militants' or mercenaries' weight has increased in the current movement in Kashmir, especially after Kargil. Going by the Army's own figures, the proportion of foreign militants to the total number of those killed was 22 per cent over the past three years. It has fallen to 15 per cent in 1999. The militancy is primarily domestic and must not be falsely "externalised".

We have to deal with it without creating scapegoats. Another pitfall of the counter-terrorism shibboleth is that it wholly ignores state terrorism, which tends to be far more effective, widespread, institutionalised and vicious than sub-state terrorism, and which state-based systems like the UN do not question.