1914 Serbia, 2014 Pakistan

One assassination a hundred years ago sparked the First World War. The writer traces similarities between Serbian terrorists then and Pakistani terrorists now, and the actions taken — or not taken — by both governments.

The K. Subrahmanyam report has indubitably established that plenty of intelligence about what was happening on the other side of the Kargil range was available with the Indian military and civilian authorities even as Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was preparing for his ‘historic’ bus-trip to Lahore in February 1999. The establishment brushed all this aside the better to concentrate on making a huge success, in event-management if not substantive terms, of the bus-ride. Not even the Pakistan government’s decision to cancel the half-hour bus-ride from Wagah to Lahore for security reasons alerted the Indian government to the fragile nature of the goodwill on display. So also did Oskar Potiorek, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s Governor in Bosnia, ignore numerous intelligence warnings of the security dangers attendant on the Archduke’s insistence on visiting Bosnia as the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Bosnian army.

The Archduke’s adamant insistence on making the visit was as much a turning a blind eye to evidence as was Defence Minister George Fernandes being complicit in not passing on with adequate stress the information flowing into military intelligence of unseemly activity in Skardu. And for much the same reason as overtook Governor Potiorek: currying favour with the Boss. In Governor Potiorek’s case, there was the personal determination to show his authorities in Vienna how firmly and irreversibly he had consolidated the Empire’s annexation of Bosnia; in the case of Vajpayee’s cohorts, it was the earnest desire to not play spoil-sport to their hero’s race to the Nobel Peace Prize. Anything that would detract from the occasion as evidence of a conspiracy was brushed aside in 1914 by Vienna and Sarajevo just as unwanted evidence was studiously ignored by Delhi and Srinagar in 1999.

The lesson for India and Pakistan of The Sleepwalkers who led their countries to collective disaster in 1914, a disaster that none wanted but none could prevent, is that menacing mutual brinkmanship must be replaced by pragmatic understanding. We in India need to understand that Pakistani terrorism cannot be ended for talks to begin; and that unless talks begin, there is no handle in the Pakistan government’s hands to contain India-specific targeted terrorism. We can climb as many pulpits as we wish, make as many impassioned appeals to the world and Pakistan as we desire, prepare ourselves for the worst and ready ourselves to inflict on Pakistan the worst, but the end result will be an Armageddon worse than anything our imagination can conceive or our mythology grasp, if we do not agree now to an ‘uninterrupted and uninterruptible’ dialogue with Pakistan.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/1914-serbia-2014-pakistan/article6158040.ece?ref=sliderNews