Poor Mr Abdul Sattar. Since the foreign minister began to advocate a pro-CTBT position, he has been variously rubbished as a “dove”, snubbed as an “opportunist” or branded a “traitor” by a pack of super-patriots spitting fire and venom at all the “lily-livered”, “weak-kneed”, “panic-prone”, “pessimistic”, “pusillanimous” “capitulationists” with “derivative”, “pro-West” mindsets who are in favour of signing the CTBT or negotiating a constructive dialogue with India and the Western powers not because of any intrinsic or intellectual conviction which they may have about the merits of the issues but because they are “agents” of “anti-Islamic imperialists and regional hegemonic powers” with “ulterior designs”. Phew! That is one helleva charge-sheet.
It is odd, however, that not one of our super-patriots, who stake monopolistic rights over received wisdom or political clairvoyance and are tilting at the windmills of the “enemies of the state”, has had the courage to look General Pervez Musharraf in the eye and tar him with the same brush. After all, it is hardly conceivable that Mr Sattar would utter a single word on foreign policy, including the CTBT, unless it perfectly reflected the position of his military masters.
Our super-patriots are a rather motley crew. They comprise leaders of so-called religious groups, a handful of retired generals, some former foreign-office types and a few judges — all of whom strut about as “expert-columnists”, “leading opinion-makers” or budding politicians. Included also are certain owner-editors of the press whose chummy relationship with the most venal and corrupt politicians of our time is no less reprehensible than their enthusiasm for rabid provincial sub-nationalism and sectarianism. Three decades ago, these people and others of their ilk had exhorted the military to crush the “treacherous” Bengalis of East Pakistan for demanding their constitutional rights. Two years ago, they blasted the opponents of tit-for-tat nuclear tests as “western agents”. Today, they are among the fiercest proponents of changing the status-quo in the region by the use of armed force, directly or by proxy. Under their command and control systems, policies of nuclear bravado would have precedence over nuclear ambiguity, strategies of nuclear defiance would overtake nuclear restraint and militant jihad would replace serious diplomacy. It is a heady mix.
This is a “confrontationist orthodoxy” that masquerades as a “national consensus”. It seeks to crush dissenting opinion by juxtaposing “patriotism” and “conspiracy theories” against the immutable logic of facts. It belittles intellectual adversaries as “renegades” from “Pan-Islamic nationalism” (a contradiction in terms) even as it cloaks its own intellectual poverty in the rage of passion or the pride of self-righteousness. Its discourse is couched in the thunderous language of the weak and the insecure rather than in the cold-blooded rationality of scientific knowledge.
The situation on the other side of the border has become no less bigoted or hysterical. A different sort of “national consensus” forged by resurgent Hindu extremists has determined to drag Pakistan into an arms race and try to crush it under its own weight — just the US$ 3 billion increase in New Delhi’s defense budget for next year is more than the total current defense budget of Islamabad (US$ 2.8 billion). But there is one critical difference between India and Pakistan’s defense strategy. India’s defense expenditure projections are based on a self-reliant and buoyant economy growing at above 7% per annum in the next few years, dynamic IT-led export growth (target US$ 50 billion in 2010) leading to huge balance of payments surpluses, solid forex reserves and multi-billion dollar inflows of foreign investment. Pakistan, on the other hand, will remain critically dependent on scarce foreign handouts to stave financial default on a year by year basis unless it puts its house in order. How then will a hard state with a soft core like Pakistan cope with a hard state with a hard core like India?
Our super-patriots have a brilliant answer. Kashmir must be liberated and India must be crushed before the conventional balance of economy and weapons becomes asymmetrical. That means that the jihad must be reinforced in Kashmir immediately. It also means that the jihad must be swiftly extended to other parts of India as a low-cost-high-efficiency method of undermining India’s state. This would entail a state of continuous military confrontation with India till death do us part. In other words, the arrival of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent is not to herald durable peace based on nuclear deterrence but nuclear destruction initiated by limited wars. Nuclearisation is to be used to change the status quo. If this is not the route to mutually-self-assured-destruction, we don’t know what is.
Our angry super-patriots won’t like our line of argument. It defies their nationalist yearning to avenge gross wrongdoing by India and immoral tilting by the western powers. But at the end of the day we must ask ourselves whether we want to provoke a suicidal nuclear holocaust in South Asia or try to negotiate a durable peace with our neighbour.