In an election campaign that has comprised mostly empty rhetoric and been devoid of meaty debates on real choices, the complete silence on what is going on across the border with Pakistan may not be perplexing, but is nevertheless worth some reflection. Could it be that national security concerns are not election issues (in which case, the obvious question would be: why not?)? It certainly isn’t the case that the issue is not new, live or real, because it is all three. It cannot be that there is no difference in the positions of the major parties when it comes to external security. It was the BJP and its predecessor, the Jana Sangh, that was pro-bomb from the very beginning. It is the BJP that has always argued in favour of a muscular stance on defence and foreign policy issues. And, of course, it is the BJP that has used Pakistan as a surrogate for its communal stance against Muslims. Indeed, given the BJP’s slogan offering a ‘nirnayak sarkar’ (decisive government), a strong counter to the jihadi threat from across the border would have been a good issue to highlight—or so one would have thought.
Just as any worthwhile opposition party would have sought to put the government on the spot by asking it to spell out its response to the very real possibility of Pakistan either collapsing or being over-run by the Taliban, any ruling party which feels it has done enough to secure the country against attacks from across the border would have tried to highlight that fact. It is when neither has done what is expected that the questions arise. Here is a country which represents India’s biggest (or at least most immediate) security threat, a country from where the attack on Parliament emanated, a country from where the attack on Mumbai originated. Its break-up, however, multiplies manifold the threat India that faces from it. The Taliban and other Islamist forces will be right at India’s doorstep, and their potential to attack that much greater. And as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pointed out, the US government is worried about the “unthinkable” in Pakistan, which is the Taliban and al-Qaeda getting “the keys to the nuclear arsenal”. In other words, even the world’s sole superpower is no longer certain that it can keep things under control when it comes to the “Islamic” bomb. So why are India’s two major parties silent?
Perhaps BJP leaders think this is an issue that could boomerang on the party. After all, the attack on Mumbai did not translate into the kind of pro-BJP wave that the party’s leaders had hoped would take place in the state elections that followed. The party could also be wary of a Congress counter-attack, asking what the BJP did when the attack on Parliament and the aggression in Kargil both took place on the BJP’s watch? Indeed, it amassed its troops on the border and almost got the country into a nuclear confrontation with Pakistan. So much safer, then, to take potshots at “weak” prime ministers! But it is obvious that whichever government assumes office after the elections will have Pakistan very high on its list of immediate concerns, and voters have a right to know what the issues and choices are. They remain in the dark because neither the ruling party nor the opposition is willing to focus on what could, in a worst case scenario, become an existential issue for the country.
