Why we mustn't forget Emergency as we try to scare Myanmar and Pakistan

This June 25 will mark the 40th anniversary of the declaration of the "internal emergency", so called because there was no threat to the state and its apparatus, neither from a foreign power nor from internal forces of "destabilisation" and yet the people had to bear the consequences of the refusal of a member of Parliament (MP) to accept an adverse judgement.

All that had happened was that the MP in question, who was also the prime minster at that time, was unseated by the Allahabad High Court for using unfair means to win an election. Suddenly, the political party that had led the anti- imperialist struggle for freedom from foreign yoke and had laid the foundations of a pluralistic democratic republic, swiftly but not unexpectedly, turned autocratic and began a systematic dismantling of the fragile democratic political system that had been put in place barely 25 years ago.

I recall the dark days of the Emergency not for this brazen attack on democratic institutions, terrifying as it was when it first appeared, but for another reason altogether. I recall those days not because I had to spend some time in the Tihar Jail, along with some others from my university, as an accused in a trumped up case of trying to overthrow the government of the day and for planning general mayhem, I recall those days of the Emergency for a totally different reason. I recall those days to record a conversation that I had with someone who was looked at with certain awe and grudging admiration inside the jail. He was a well-known criminal and was serving a life term for despatching, as the expression goes, with extreme prejudice, several people to meet their maker, much before they had planned to undertake their last journey. He looked the part but was rather soft-spoken and appeared rather reasonable in his normal conduct.

One day, while talking to some of us, he said, it was not difficult to acquire a weapon, it was not difficult to use it to bump someone off, but what was most difficult was to decide when not to use a weapon that you had and that the world knew that you were capable of using.

What he said to us in ward number 13 of Tihar Jail that muggy evening of July, 1975 has stayed with me and I was reminded of it, when I read the papers the other day, claiming that our armed forces had responded to cross-border terrorism by crossing the international border to destroy two terrorist camps in Myanmar. I am not going into the counter claims that insist that the operation did not take place at all, I am going by the claims being made by the military establishment and the government and trying to understand its implications, in the light of the lesson that I had learnt at Tihar from a killer. I'll go back a little before returning to this theme.

It was in May, 1974 that India tested its first nuclear device, the test now known as Pokhran 1, delivered a yield of around 8Kt and this from a country that had been at the forefront of the effort to develop the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The obviously contradictory position of detonating a nuclear device and describing it as a peaceful explosion served two purposes simultaneously; it told the world that India had nuclear capability, it also foregrounded the fact that she was not going to be browbeaten by the five nuclear powers to stop its own defence preparedness, while a select group of nations had the freedom to proliferate their own nuclear arsenal. She wanted the world to know that despite possessing the know-how, she was committed to the idea of a nuclear weapons-free world and peaceful use of nuclear power but as long as others were not going to dismantle their nuclear arsenal, it was not going to sign the NPT.

This position stayed from 1974 to 1998. There were only six countries in the world that had proven and publicly established nuclear capability; there were others, including Israel and Pakistan, and a few more that were suspected to possess this capability but they weren't talking and so India enjoyed a certain psychological edge in multilateral fora for close to 14 years.

But then we went for Pokhran 2. The second set of the detonation of five devices was set off with two detonations on May 13, 1998 and the rest a couple of days later. We also declared this a great achievement and claimed that this event marked India's entry into the elite nuclear club as its sixth member. In fact, we had quietly but definitely and without making a spectacle of ourselves, joined this club, way back in 1974. But in 1998 and our self-congratulatory, back slapping did not last even a fortnight. Whatever Pokhran 2 achieved was more than equalled by Pakistan a fortnight later when she exploded five nuclear devices in one day on May 28, 1998. Why must we recall these events today? Because there is an urgent need, in the present context, to remember the different, political and tactical yields that Pokhran 1 and 2 delivered.

Within three days of the great "hot pursuit" of terrorists into Myanmar and a "quick, almost surgical elimination of their training and holding facilities" there were a lot of red faces among the army brass, among the bureaucrats at Raisina Hill and it led to a rather severe dressing down of our diplomats in Myanmar. Myanmar has, in fact, issued a terse statement insisting that whatever happened a few nights ago took place firmly on the Indian side of the border.

The "action" if one may call it, was almost immediately followed by the thumping of a 56-inch chest and the shooting the mouth off by a minister and a former Olympian who does not know when to keep his double trap firmly closed. The minister in the style of a local toughie, flaunted his newly acquired triceps, made bold to threaten all those, including Pakistan, who had designs on India, to draw appropriate lessons from India's action and to recognise that India was not going to take it lying down any longer. Pakistan responded by reminding India that it was a nuclear power too and her nuclear weapons were not kept for a fireworks display on religious festivals.

This is not the end of this story. Apparently, covert operations against terrorists who had built safe havens in Myanmar were carried out on at least two earlier occasions, much before the present dispensation took over, at a time when a prime minister, dubbed "Mr Silent" by the chatterati used to live at 7RCR. So there are many lessons to draw from 1974 and from 1998, the principal one being that bilateral arrangements need discretion, tact, restraint and a certain finesse and that there is no need to go into a dandiya routine at the drop of every hat.