ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

The 20 billion rupee question

Home Minister L K Advani has reacted furiously to Mulayam Singh Yadav's startling suggestion that India loan Rs 20 billion to Pakistan to help it tide over its present sanctions-induced economic problems.

As is only to be expected, all that Advani can see in this proposal is an attempt by Mulayam Singh to appease his Muslim vote-bank. Advani apparently does not see that to term the offer a sweetener for the Indian Muslim is to imply that the Muslims of India are with Pakistan and that only the Hindus are patriotically anti-Pakistan. Obviously, then, Advani's angry remarks are designed to appease his Hindu vote-bank. All it amounts to is the pot calling the kettle black.

Mulayam's suggestion merits deeper reflection. But before we do so, let us put the matter in perspective. First, Pakistan has not asked for the loan. And there is nothing to suggest that, if offered, the loan will be accepted. After all, there is such a thing as self-respect and many a Pakistani might feel slighted at the suggestion that Pakistan turn to India, of all countries, for a bail-out.

Secondly, Pakistan's economic problems are so humongous that Rs 20 billion would be neither here nor there. Pakistan requires a bail-out that only its petroleum-rich friends in the Organisation of Islamic Conference or the IMF or the United States could extend it. India, herself stricken by sanctions-related problems, in addition to a BJP-stricken economy, is hardly in a position to offer more than token assistance. Rs 20 billion would be much too heavy a burden on the Indian exchequer and much too little to do Pakistan much good.

Still, would even a token gesture be in order? Advani, fuming, asks whether Mulayam can guarantee that Pakistan will not divert the money to fund cross-border terrorism in Kashmir and elsewhere. The question seems misplaced. For, after all, it is Advani's government that is engaged in strengthening economic and commercial ties with Pakistan and it is the BJP prime minister who wants the South Asian Preferential Trade Area to become a South Asian Free Trade Area as soon as possible. Can Advani or Vajpayee ensure that the gains that accrue to Pakistan from such intensified economic co-operation will be put only to such uses as are approved by the Government of India?

There is, indeed, a disturbing parallelism between Advani's fury at Mulayam and Nathuram Godse's fury at Mahatma Gandhi when Gandhiji insisted on the Government of India releasing what was then the considerable sum of Rs 550 million to Pakistan as its share of the foreign exchange reserves which the two countries had inherited from their common British predecessor administration.

Godse held Gandhi guilty of placating the enemy when many hundreds of thousands of his co-religionists had been killed, maimed and rendered refugees in the riots that accompanied Partition. Godse could not abide the thought of Gandhi going on a fast unto death in protest against the Indian government's failure to live up to its obligation to make the foreign exchange available to nascent Pakistan. He, therefore, assassinated the Mahatma. There is, of course, no question of Advani resorting to such extreme action against Mulayam but there is the same tone of indignation in thinking that we must do no right by Pakistan to long as they are doing us wrong.

That appears to be quite the wrong perspective in which to be viewing things. Both India and Pakistan are the victims of third country opposition to each doing what they thought was in their national security interest. After all, neither India nor Pakistan considered imposing sanctions on America or Russia when the two between them built up nuclear arsenals capable of destroying the would no less than 51 times over. True, neither was in any position to impose sanctions. But the point is that whatever reservations either or both countries might have entertained about superpower arsenals, neither attempted to invade the sovereign space of decision-making in the national security interest.

I, for one, am far from persuaded that India has added to its security by undertaking the Pokhran-II tests. That makes me rather doubt the national security value for Pakistan of its tests at Chagai. But whatever one's view of the need for these tests, the fact is that both countries are being punished for the same reason. The greater resilience of the Indian economy is helping it stand up to sanctions on its own feet; and Pakistan's large army of friends are doing all they can to ensure that Pakistan does not go under.

But a definitive end to the isolation of both countries in the international community can come only from there growing an element of solidarity between the two in their having become N-6 and N-7 in an international order determined to preserve the nuclear hegemony of the earlier N-5. The best possible expression for such India-Pakistan solidarity on global nuclear issues would be for the two to together pilot an international initiative for negotiations at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva aimed at concluding a treaty for the time-bound elimination of nuclear weapons in identifiable and verifiable phases.

Both countries separately and in NAM subscribe to this goal. Perhaps the time has come for India and Pakistan to stand up and be counted as the leading global campaigners for general and complete disarmament. Certainly that would be the first time that N-weapon powers worked for the complete elimination of N-weapons.

And if such substantive co-operation were based on financial self-help, well, why not?

How Readers reacted to Mani Shankar Aiyar's last column

Mani Shankar Aiyar