New America Media, Commentary, Sandip Roy, Posted: Jul 20, 2007
Editor's Note: As Indian media report on the unrest in Pakistan the pervasive sentiment is that it’s a Pakistani issue, not an Indo-Pak issue.Not that long ago India and Pakistan seemed never able to escape the hyphen that bound them together, especially in the eyes of the West; Indo-Pak war, Indo-Pak peace moves, Indo-Pak tensions, even Pakistani-Indian cuisine. But as Pakistan seems on the verge of imploding, with its lawyers and students protesting on the streets, radicals holed up in mosques and suicide bombers causing mayhem in its cities, Indian media seem to have finally shaken free of that hyphen.
As they report on the meltdown across the border the pervasive sentiment in Indian media, is that it’s a Pakistani issue, not an Indo-Pak issue. “Pakistan is at a crossroads today” editorializes the Hindustan Times. “If it turns the right way it could shake off its ‘failed state’ flag.” The implication is obvious. According to the Hindustan Times, India doesn’t really have a dog in this fight. It does call for cooperation on anti-terror mechanisms. But the editorial makes it clear “there is much more at stake for Pakistan in this move.”
If it is to be hyphenated at all India, tired of the Pakistan-India coupling, is much more eager to be hyphenated with China these days. The U.S. certainly has been encouraging that notion. President Bush has all but promised that America will act as midwife to India’s emergence as a power-to-reckon-with in the 21st century (and a counterbalance to China) India is in no hurry to get back into the tit-for-tat relationship it’s been locked into with Pakistan ever since Independence in 1947.
Even the news that the U.S. funneled a $4.2 billion “blank check” to Pakistan under the war-on-terror program has only produced an unsurprised shrug in India. The Times of India called it “the unprecedented and unaccounted US munificence to the military junta” and made jabs about how “enamored” the Bush administration is of the “junta.” The money made Pakistan third in terms of U.S. military aid and assistance after Israel and Egypt. But it did not produce the usual aggrieved litany from an insecure India. The top headline in The Times instead was “Cheney steps in to push nuclear deal.” To the Indian newspaper, the $4.2 billion gift to its neighbor is paltry compared to a nuclear deal.
There is an oddly dispassionate air of objectivity in the Indian media as it observes Pakistan’s imminent unraveling. Even as Pakistan burns, the top emailed story on the Indian news portal Rediff.com is about the Taj Mahal making into the new list of the Seven Wonders of the World.
On the same news portal South Asia expert Frederic Grare describes Musharraf as “the firefighter who sets off fires himself” and the West should call his bluff. But what would the impact of that be on India? Grare shrugs, saying the (Red Mosque) “incident is not India-specific and one should not try to read too much into it, in this regard.”
Once India would have been quick to remind Pakistan about the dangers of playing with fire. Pakistan is being raked over the coals, not by Indian writers as much as by their Pakistani counterparts. “Jihad has failed to bleed India or earn ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan. It has brought only international contempt for Pakistan,” writes Islamabad-based journalist Mohammad Shehzad in The Indian Express.
Instead of “I-told-you-so” finger wagging, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is trying to be the magnanimous statesman. He’s offered to make the Line of Control in Kashmir a “Line of Peace” and end what he calls the “bitter legacy of the last 60 years.”
An editorial in The Hindu praised Dr. Singh for reminding everyone of the “enormous dividend” of the “evolving peace formula” at a time when President Musharraf’s “domestic difficulties” could give the impression that the peace process was “on the back-burner.”
Indian media can be praised for not rushing to pillory its besieged neighbor. But its general tone of blasé resignation (as if watching a troubled younger sibling get into yet another fracas) might be a little delusional. One unnamed Indian government official told a reporter for Pakistan Today "Musharraf is our best bet? No way! It doesn't make any sense to ally with one party or one individual." But what happens in any botched transition in Pakistan cannot but affect India. As the Kashmir earthquake vividly demonstrated two years ago, when the ground shakes in one part of the subcontinent, landslides do happen on the other side of the border.
(This article is picked up from the website of New America Media)
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