'Hard-kneed' Image Vital to Vajpayee: Analysis

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Monday, June 03, 2002

'Hard-kneed' Image Vital to Vajpayee: Analysis

For Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, the outcome of military brinkmanship with Pakistan is as vital to his own future as his nation's.

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For Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, the outcome of military brinkmanship with Pakistan is as vital to his own future as his nation's.

Dogged by political setbacks and an image as a weak leader, and under pressure from hardline Hindu allies who see a reunified India and Pakistan being as natural as a united Germany, Vajpayee cannot afford to give ground this time, analysts say.

"The Vajpayee government has developed a public image of being weak-kneed," said Brahma Chellaney, a defence analyst with New Delhi's Centre for Policy Research.

"It has a history of defensive responses," he said, citing the 1999 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane when India handed over jailed militants - among them the leader of an Islamic group India blames for several attacks and the man now on trial in Pakistan for the murder of US journalist Daniel Pearl.

India and Pakistan, which conducted back-to-back nuclear tests in 1998, have massed a million men along their border in a conflict over disputed Kashmir and what India calls "cross-border terrorism" by militants it says are armed and trained by Pakistan.

Driven as much by domestic political concerns as international geopolitics, both sides are talking tough and say, while they don't want a war, they are ready to fight.

Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is in a shaky position at home.

The coalition government it leads is divided and fractious, the BJP has lost power in key states - including its north Indian heartland - and it has angered its grassroots by toning down its Hindu nationalist stand to keep secular allies on its side.

"The BJP is not in imminent danger of falling," said political analyst Inder Malhotra, "but I think at the moment it's a wounded animal. One more injury would be one too many."

A tough stand against Pakistan is popular in the world's second most populous nation.

Polls show three in four Indians want Vajpayee to take a hard line after an attack on India's parliament in December that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan-based militants fighting its rule in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.

That strike against the heart of the world's largest democracy, clearly aimed at its political leaders, shook India as much as the September 11 attacks shocked the United States.

But neither side wants war. They have fought three, two over Kashmir, since Britain split its Indian empire into Islamic Pakistan and mainly Hindu, but officially secular, India in 1947.

And hundreds died in a bitter quasi-war in Kashmir in 1999.

But to step back from the brink, Vajpayee faces two major problems: He cannot be seen to be giving in again and the latest confrontation has aroused nationalist fervour on the Hindu right.

"Vajpayee is under a lot of pressure," says analyst Kuldip Nayar. "At least it must look like victory."

Convincing his Hindu powerbase of that will not be easy.

"For many people who are frighteningly close to the levers of power, cross-border terrorism is just an excuse for a war they have been seeking all along," Delhi School of Economics analyst Jean Dreze wrote in The Hindu.

"The BJP hardliners have never made any secret of their military ambitions."

The BJP's ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteer Corps), openly backs reunification with Pakistan.

"Conceptually we do because we have seen the two Germanys united, two Viet Nams coming together, two Koreas trying to come together," said RSS official Madhav Govind Vaid.

"Why not Pakistan, Bangladesh and India?"

Critics say Vajpayee's sabre-rattling is partly aimed at pacifying Hindu hardliners whose support is vital.

The rise in tension with Pakistan since an attack on an Indian army camp in Kashmir two weeks ago has also shifted the spotlight from some of India's worst ever religious bloodshed.

Officially, almost a thousand people, mostly Muslims, died in weeks of Hindu-Muslim violence in Gujarat state after a Muslim mob burned alive 59 Hindu activists. Human rights groups say the real toll is more than 2,500.

"You don't hear a word about Gujarat now," said a New Delhi-based diplomat. "It's been drowned by all this war fever."

But as Vajpayee and Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf search for a face-saving compromise to avert war, the risks of a conflict triggered by another spectacular militant attack are growing.

Given the pressures at home, such an attack clearly linked to Pakistani-based groups would leave Vajpayee little choice.

"If that happens," says Nayar, "then we will only hear about it when the bombs are being dropped."

Agencies via Xinhua

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