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Vajpayee at the Potomac

It is a thin red line that separates mature deshbhakthi from its yodelling version. Heaping shagadelic plaudits in print on our martyrs or installing them in video Valhalla in this age of saturation coverage will not, and should not, justify even one casualty than is absolutely necessary. As a way of offsetting World Cup ignominy we should resist the temptation of being obsessed with Deathwatch Kargil.

More than 60 days after full-fledged operations to evict the intruders began the Kargil crisis has entered a qualitatively new phase. Tiger Hill and the Clinton-Sharief confabulations point to the unmistakeable reality on the ridges. As Indian forces begin mopping up operations to rid Kashmiri soil of the last intruder, it's time to ponder on what next.

It is to the credit of the caretaker Vajpayee government that beneath the high moral ground that it has understandably tried to occupy on the issue, it has on the whole prosecuted the Kargil operations in a reasonable, non-reckless manner. It's another matter that to a great extent it was actually making a virtue of necessity.

After almost three decades of complacency, a firefight made us confront realities that seemed to make a mockery of our vaunted superiority in conventional forces and the claims of, if the need arose, repeating a 1971 by getting our armour to cut through Pakistan like a knife through butter.

The glaring paucity of combat-ready officers, a fleet of MiGs half of which remain stranded on any given day, dated Soviet hardware reputed more for their robustness than efficiency, painful lack of spares, shells and snow shoes not to mention the Bofors guns -- our saviour in Kargil -- whose automatic functions failed due to sloppy maintenance, have prevented us from maximising our gains.

No wonder then that sane advice prevailed upon would-be hawks in the political establishment against widening the conflict unless preceded by months of intense preparations. And it is to the utter credit of our armed forces that they have achieved what they have despite all these odds.

For that very reason it becomes incumbent not only on our policy makers but also on the educated elite of this country -- who, in trying to sublimate its guilt of converting gory death into sublime spectacle and war into voyeurism, emotionally go over the top -- to think through the problem of how best the nation can consolidate the gains made on those icy heights.

Such consolidation, it should be remembered, has in the context of 50 years of Indo-Pak relations and three wars been always considered condescendingly as the diplomatic equivalent of a mopping up operation -- something akin to a scene where the party is over but the lights are still on or to the tailenders wrapping up a walkover.

There cannot be greater folly than this: in 1965 Shastri, persuaded by Kosygin, ceded huge chunks of captured territory while in 1971 Indira Gandhi, in her misplaced magnanimity, refused to make Shimla a sort of Versailles for Pakistan, though that should have been the logical conclusion to the Bangladesh war.

Ironically, it is regret over these missed chances that is driving current opinion on what ought to be done on the diplomatic front, the principal thrust of which is a loud no to any third party mediation.

It is only natural that Kashmir being the political hot potato that it is at the moment, Vajpayee turned down Clinton's invitation to go to Washington. More significantly, given America's track record in the subcontinent it rightly deserves to be judged guilty until proven innocent.

But there are important changes too. It is evident that the United States is genuinely sensitive about forcing anything upon India this time around. This new found sensitivity is not due to any simple matter of niceties. There are powerful subterranean currents at work which India better pay heed to and capitalise if we are not to go back to square one with Pakistan: go back to routine secretary-level talks after all that has happened at Kargil.

Kosovo, many political observers rightly pointed out, heralded a new international order, but not as they would have everyone believe, one that is uni-polar with the US as the headquarters of Arrogance Unlimited Inc.

Post-Cold War the principal menace to peace will emanate not from strong states bursting out of their borders but from weak ones that cannot keep the peace within. This makes the United Nations Charter that confers nationhood on every scrap of territory, and its corollary that what goes on within these half-incubated polities is their own matter, dangerously redundant.

Realpolitik in the interests of peace demands that some sort of rapid deployment diplomacy -- preferably, of course, under the aegis of the Security Council, that allows intervention, if necessary militarily, when internal situations in these 'not-quite states' get out of hand -- is legitimised.

If such a system works without hitches, often it will not come to military intervention. Arm twisting in the form of withheld loans will necessarily suffice to make these uniformed thugs, juntas or fundamentalist cliques, as the case may be, see sense.

Pakistan without doubt belongs to this category of 'not-quite states' and to enable it to grow out of it requires, though it is not politically correct to say so, a partial return to the good old days of the British district commissioner dispensing justice under the date palm.

More than territory or the shariat, what Pakistan's entrenched elites -- and these include the generals -- seek out of issues like Kashmir is to be transported from the perpetual squalor and disgrace of their domestic situation to the heaven of chauffeur-driven Mercedes, luxurious embassies, Swiss bank accounts and glamorous photo ops with Clinton and Blair.

India should help them along in this.

Admitting America or the United Nations into the picture will involve, if we are clear-minded about it, in essence only a change in nomenclature and not, as our modern-day Cassandras have it, agreeing to a plebiscite on Kashmir and the like. The Lahore declaration will simply become the Maryland or Potomac agreement.

In sum and substance the framework of Indo-Pak relations will remain bilateral except for a vital caveat that the international gloss will confer: Pakistani truculence will invite multinational retribution, a Kosovo replay.

All this, of course, requires as a precondition a suspension of suspicion of America's motives -- the kind of quid pro quo it might demand for such a role etc -- which most of us have in common with the mullahs and Mujahideen of the Muslim world. When India is beginning to flex its economic muscle and fully integrate into the global economy it is distressing to see grown ups voice fears of some secret American agenda with respect to this nation.

Building a strategic partnership with the US -- like the one we had with the Soviet Union during the Cold War -- is a wager India must cover. In the short run it will deliver us a coup by allowing us to extricate ourselves from the tribal conflict in Kashmir while making the Americans, and by extension the international community, the hatchet man in case our intransigent neighbour refuses to go by the script.

A beginning can be made by agreeing to, as Netanyahu and Arafat did earlier, a Vajpayee-Clinton-Sharief summit sometime in the coming months in the sylvan surroundings of Washington-on-the-Potomac.

Anil Nair