Two days after the Uri attack, New Delhi has stopped short of a knee jerk reaction – albeit the clouds of a bigger confrontation haven’t drifted away. The cross-LoC firing has resumed in Uri sector and as is always the case with such exchanges, it is impossible to find out which side started it. However, so far as a major retaliation to Uri attack is concerned, New Delhi has decided to wait for the time and place of its choosing. The decision was taken at a meeting attended by Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Army chief Dalbir Singh, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and other officials. Later, in a briefing to president Pranab Mukherjee, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi told him that India would try to diplomatically isolate Pakistan.
In Kashmir, against expectations, the Caravan-e-Aman (Caravan of peace) plied as usual with eight passengers on board. Started in April 2005, the cross-LoC bus was billed as the biggest Confidence Building Measure between India and Pakistan on Kashmir since 1947. It was the outcome of the sustained peace process between Vajpayee and Musharraf and later between Manmohan Singh and Musharraf. Though only a limited number of the persons travel through the bus – the travel is limited to the divided families only – it stands as a symbolism of the normalcy between the two countries.
But the crossing of the bus can hardly hide the fragile nature of the existing state of affairs. As resumption of the LoC firing underlines, the situation is on a hair-trigger and could escalate fast if the leaders in both the countries don’t display some statesmanship. It hasn’t happened so far. A dominant and a vocal section of the media in New Delhi has been plying a toxic narrative and rallying public opinion around war with no thought for the consequences. A tiringly familiar spectacle of the long and shrill debates unfolds on primetime television every night which press for a war with Pakistan. The outrage is politically correct and fits the narrow ideological framework of today’s India. There is a constant focus on the tragedy of the families of the soldiers killed in Uri attack. The videos of the families crying for the deceased security personnel are painful. But the same channels steered clear of playing the similar videos of the families of 87 persons killed in Kashmir over the past 74 days. Or the videos of the children who lost their eye-sight due to the indiscriminate use of the pellet guns. One of the major causes of the deep alienation in Kashmir is this explicit bias, this selective highlighting of the humanitarian tragedy. There is no idea as to how pernicious the fallout of these debates can be.
Anyway, one can only hope that a better sense prevails among the leadership of India and Pakistan. The truth is that the sub-continent’s problems go back a long time. They didn’t originate because of the Uri attack, nor will they end with it. One of the biggest bane of the policy makers in India is that they tend to view these tragic developments independently, and isolated from the messy history around them.
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