Anti-Pakistan Campaign

[Surmount]

Anti-Pakistan campaign

Published in The Nation: April 14, 2009

FEW parties in India will shy away from banking on anti-Pakistan campaigning to secure gains at the polls, which reflects poorly on the Indian political culture. With the forthcoming elections, Pakistan-bashing has reached an all-time high. To begin with, it is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, who gave a warning earlier that terrorists from across the border could do serious damage to the electoral process. But the Hindu extremist party, the BJP, seems to be ahead of everyone else in its campaign of badmouthing Pakistan and making threatening statements in the hope of winning popularity. The sabre-rattling by BJP President Rajnath Singh is an example, who seemed to project Pakistan as some kind of monster. Harping on the theme of crossborder infiltration, he said on Monday that if voted into power the BJP government would send troops across to Pakistan to stamp out terrorism.

By and large, it looks as if this is an election stunt, and it is expected that such rhetoric would come to an end once the elections are over. However, these utterances concurrently provide a peep into the mind of the Indian leadership and the kind of fallacious premises they reason from. They often forget that Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state with armed forces capable of defending the country. Besides, resorting to such a hardline course merely for seeking better election results would, to all intents and purposes, further fuel the animosity between the two countries.

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