Indian national interest requires that we not help create a situation where the Far Right takes over in Pakistan. Towards that end, India must deal with Musharraf not as a General but as the only leader that country currently has, just as Pakistan must deal with Vajpayee as the Prime Minister of India regardless of his life-long RSS credentials.

Why has India then adopted a posture where we insist that nothing but bilateral talks would solve the problem but also insist that we shall not talk until after Pakistan returns what we call PoK and they call "Azad Kashmir"?

Why is the Indian Defence Minister expounding a doctrine of "limited war" directly in relation to Pakistan, if not to hold out the threat that India now reserves the right to send  its troops across the Line of Control (LoC)? And why is Vajpayee so keen to deploy his characteristically cynical double-speak where he says in one breath that Indian nuclear policy abjures the right of the first strike and says, in the very next breath, that India is "not going to wait"?

These men are neither inexperienced nor dim-witted. Where, then, lies the method in this madness ?. First, our rulers are yet to overcome the delirium caused by the Pokhran lunacy ... Second, we are more or less intoxicated now on the prospect of a "strategic relationship" with the U.S., hoping that the messiah shall bring hard cash and he'p us bully our neighbours, quite forgetting that the plight that Pakistan is in today is in considerable measure a product of the "strategic relationship" that Pakistan used to have with that same country. We wish to be where Pakistan was until quite recently, unmindful of the fact that in consequence of this change of roles we shall one day be where Pakistan is today. The hope in India, before the rise of the RSS to power, was that Pakistan, authoritarian at home and a U.S. client in foreign relations, shall one day follow in the footsteps of a non-aligned and democratic India; the result of the RSS coming to power is that India is following in the footsteps of Pakistan, authoritarian at home and begging the sole superpower for a smile and a wink.

Third, though, behind this show of cockiness there is  also a real panic. Even in the dead of winter the insurgentshave struck with great impunity at any target in Kashmir or Jammu that they have chosen; what will happen when summer . comes?

... The panic, combined with the intoxication on the prospect of hosting Clinton, expresses itself in the swagger, the rhetoric, the threat of crossing the LoC, teaching Pakistan a lesson, dropping a nuclear bomb if necessary.

Fourth, the bluster is meant to conceal the reality of extraordinary diplomatic isolation on the core question of Kashmir which we are unwilling to acknowledge. The Western countries ..do not approve of Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism or its deployment of its own troops beyond the LoC, Those same powers, though regard Kashmir as a "disputed territory" and, even mor significantly, are not willing to brand all Pakistani involvement in Kashmir as "terrorism". They wish to restrain Pakistan in some important ways but they also want India to respond; hence the emphasis on "bilateral talks" but also, as high up as Clinton himself, the offer to "mediate" - "if asked". Has the mediation actually begun.

The line between "mediation" and "consultation" is always thin ...

This problem is compounded by India's even greater isolation in the very environment in which Pakistan lives and where India once had much greater presence and influence, namely the so-called "Islamic World" ... The Indian State finds it difficult enough to represent the generality of Indian Muslims at home (except its own clients among them). It does not even try to represent them abroad, except in such politically inconsequential matters as arranging for the pilgrimage to Mecca. Pakistan does live within its own environment .... we now have very little relationship with that world ... Our delusions of grandeur conceal from us how isolated we actually are in the world of Asia, and therefore in the world of small and medium-scale powers in the world that we, objectively, share with Pakistan.

... Against whom is this "strategic partnership" of India with the U.S. being forged? ... Who is the enemy in Asia, for N ATO, but then also for India?

The real method behind New Delhi's move to a hard line on all issues pertaining to Pakistan may actually lic elsewhere: in the calculation that a Pakistan ruled by Islamic extremists would in fact help the RSS build the kind of a National Security State of the Hindu Right that it aims to do and to emerge as the U.S.' great ally in the containment of "fundamentalism" - implicitly a counterweight against China as well. Full-scale Islamisation of Pakistan is thus expected to make the saffronisation of India that much easier. Jehadi groups becoming the official paramilitary units of the state in Pakistan would help further justify the integration of the Indian police forces with the RSS and the emergence of the Bajrang Dal as the Patriotic Youth of India, so certified by the state itself.

Foreign policy thus emerges yet again as an extension of domestic policy and the new-found bellicosity in directly related to a new political offensive at home underwritten by the comfortable margin that the BJP-led Government commands in Parliament, the supind character of its allies and the utter disarray in all sections of the Opposition ...

The radical shift in our posture towards Pakistan is part of this larger pattern. The "limited war" doctrine of George Fernandes is the other side of the gangs of self-appointed defenders of Indian culture at home ... We intend not to resolve but to intensify the conflict, so as to institutionalise a permanent war psychosis which can be used to constitute a right-wing consensus at home ... It becoming difficult to say just where this politics of violence, hysteria and spectacle is taking the country ... (Source: The Frontline, 17 March, 2000)