The impact of fundamentalist groups on policy

  Bharat Bhushan, editor, Delhi, The Telegraph Let us look at some internal factors. Does internal electoral compulsion affect India-Pakistan relations in India? Certainly it does, and it should. Because in an inclusive democracy, you must take the views of all constituents into account, irrespective of what we might call vote-bank politics. However, having said that, there are cynical politicians – and not only in the Congress, right across all kinds of parties – who see their policy towards Pakistan as an extension of their domestic compulsions. So, for example, the elections in Uttar Pradesh, which are due in February next year, before that you will see a certain kind of polarisation. There is a lot of guesswork involved in democratic politics, so there will be parties who think that being softer towards Pakistan, being reconciliatory, would help them with votes of certain communities or certain sections of society. The second question is – do fundamentalist groups influence policy towards Pakistan? They certainly try to do that; sometimes they're effective, sometimes they're not. Fundamentalist Hindu groups like the RSS, Bajrang Dal, they're only anti-Muslim. They have a bias against Pakistan, to put it mildly. But they tend to have far greater influence on BJP-led governments. For other governments, they create communal tension, they create problems, law-and-order problems which can be dealt with. Are there Muslim fundamentalist groups in India which influence policy? We have an absolutely amazing organisation called Jamaat-e-Ulema-Hind, which took on Jinnah earlier with the two-nation theory. Exceptionally nationalist, even today they argue for moderation, particularly after the Bombay serial blasts; its influence on policy has been fairly remarkable. There is another element in the Muslim community that has emerged, but this is more a response to a lack of social and political justice. If I was a young Muslim kid living in Gujarat and I found that there was no justice for Muslims of Gujarat, I would turn towards extremism. My next point is terrorist acts influencing policy. Some of these kids can get used by the powers that be to create terrorism in India. Are terrorist acts in India an internal problem in India? People suspect they are part of an external policy that Pakistan follows towards India. I've had very liberal Pakistani friends tell me that if we give up – not now, five years ago – if we give up using violence against India, you would never talk about Kashmir. I suspect they're right. But after every big terrorist act, whether it is the market blasts in Delhi, or Bombay, or Malegaon, it becomes that much more difficult for the leadership to pursue a line of reconciliation with Pakistan. Popular will influences relationships. Popular will expresses itself in various ways – elections are one of them, and people by and large want peace with Pakistan, despite these aberrations and terrorist acts. The people-to-people contacts, which have gone up in the last five or six years, have had an amazing influence – the kind of warmth that has developed between the two peoples is amazing. The media is a major problem, because in India it has become a force multiplier of the Defence Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, by and large. The best of our correspondents have become nothing more than stenographers, somebody who could go to the Foreign Office briefing and people would say, 'Sir could you go a bit slower, I missed that line.' We have internalised the national-security paradigm completely. There are very few newspapers which are outside of that paradigm. We do unsourced stories from Kashmir, we accept what the military intelligence says about Mr X being a Pakistani agent or his name being this or that – there is no way of cross-checking.