India’s varied threat to Pakistan
As India-Pakistan military tension increases and their armed forces confront each other on the borders, the deeper Indian intentions towards Pakistan become clear. Although becoming obvious is the manner in which India wants to undermine Pakistan politically and economically if it cannot engage it militarily and defeat it decisively on the military front. India wants to have far more powerful weapons than Pakistan, and in large numbers. They want to manufacture most of them or obtain them cheap from countries like Israel. And it is succeeding pretty well, as it is able to obtain sophisticated weapons in plenty from Russia and other republics of the former Soviet Union at very low prices. And it is able to prevail on some of those countries not to supply the same kind of arms to Pakistan.
India’s capacity to manufacture such weapons is also on the increase and as its Defence budget increases, its capacity for manufacturing is also on the rise.
Compared to that Pakistan’s defence budget is small even at the enhanced 145 billion and is under pressure from the IMF to reduce it further to balance its budget or reduce budget deficits. The donors too have been exerting pressure on Pakistan to reduce its defence spending.
India has also been expanding its Blue Water navy in an effort to dominate the Indian Ocean and parts of the Pacific, making other countries in the region including Australian and Indonesia uneasy. It has acquired aircraft carriers as well as nuclear submarines in sizeable numbers. Economically India has been signing free trade treaties with other countries in the region like Nepal, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, while trying to isolate Pakistan and smuggling from India to the extent of a billion dollars has been hurting Pakistan’s economy previously. Such smuggling is bound to increase in the coming months and years.
Politically India has been trying to assist, encourage and promote disaffected groups in Sindh and Balochistan by sponsoring seminars abroad where speeches are made on how Pakistan had dropped its sub-nationalities of their rights and privileges, It has also been encouraging Muhajir elements campaigning against the Federal government or against Pakistan. It suits India to see Pakistan in the political boil.
While the bomb explosions in mosques, buses, railway stations and other places have been numerous we do not know how many of them were caused by Indians allegedly as a reprisal to the bomb explosions in Indian Occupied Kashmir. Too many of them are said to be of Indian origin but we are not too sure as our Police and intelligence agencies are not good at tracking down the culprits in most of the cases and suspension alone is not proof of the guilt of India.
We need a far more vigilant, vigorous and effective intelligence system to be able to investigate each case and establish the complicity of India in many of these explosions. And they include the explosions in the church in Bahawalpur earlier, in another church in the diplomatic enclave which killed several foreign nationals. And finally the suicide bombing in Karachi that killed twelve French Navy engineers.
It would be irrational to assume that those who were ready to go to war at any cost will hesitate to take to such explosions in Pakistan to prevent terrorist explosions in Indian Held Kashmir as they ruled them or to punish the perpetrators as they viewed them.
India has discovered after forty-two years a new tool to hurt Pakistan decisively. And that is scrapping the Indus Water treaty to deny the waters of the Indus System to Pakistan, make the crops fail and cause widespread famine in a land of one hundred and forty million people of whom thirty million are undernourished. India says it can scrap the treaty and then it says it won’t. The treaty signed under the auspices of the World Bank President Eugene Black is coming to be more like a Sword of Damocles hanging over us despite Indian assurances.
India realizes it is running grave political risks in trying to undo Pakistan. If Pakistan is undone, the hundred and forty million Muslims of Pakistan will join together with one hundred and forty million Muslims of India. Together they will be almost four hundred million of Pakistan or over one third of the population of the two countries put together. A minority that large cannot be held down by the eight hundred million Hindus of India who may like to treat them more like the manner the Hindus of Gujarat treat their Muslims.
In an election with the Hindu majority divided as between the Congress and the Hindu extremist BJP and its more vicious factions. The Muslims may have the swing vote and that is not what the Hindus would like and the Hindus cannot eliminate them. Such considerations barred India from absorbing Bangladesh with its preponderant Muslim population into India after the break-up of Pakistan in 1971.
India has hence to learn to live with Indian Muslims and with Pakistan instead of blaming its neighbours for its failures and problems.
It has to seek peace with Pakistan however irksome it may regard that to be, reduce its military expenditure and spend more on its social sector particularly for poverty reduction when 45% of its people are living below the poverty in India. India owes a responsibility not only to its poor masses but also the impoverish people of the region as a whole. India’s great traditions as those said by Ashoka should be used for peace, prosperity and progress in the region not for negative pursuits and create scenes of horror.
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