By Ahmad Faruqui, Danville, CA

Tunku Varadarajan points out the horrific nature of the terrorist attack on the Indian parliament building, and asks General Musharraf, who he calls a charlatan and dissembler, to restore democracy in Pakistan (WSJ, 12/19/01). Democracy should indeed be restored in Pakistan this August, and these terrorist attacks have to be stopped. Yet, saying that “India has the right to retaliate in the manner and time of its choosing,” and suggesting that Delhi consider taking a leaf from Israel’s book, by targeting and killing well-known terrorists in Pakistan, demeans the Journal’s editorial pages.

Pakistan, unlike the Palestinian territories, is a sovereign state. It would regard any Indian attack as an act of war. Is India prepared to take that risk, for an attack that killed nine Indians? Mr. Varadarajan argues that the real threat to India comes from the absence of democracy in Pakistan. In fact, the unpleasant reality is that the real threat to India comes from its own policies. India waged a civil war in its Punjab province against the Sikhs, and invaded the holy grounds of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. It was this act that led two of her Sikh bodyguards to gun down Indira Gandhi. Later, under her son’s rule, India sent its army into Sri Lanka to fight on one side of that nation’s civil war. The backlash from that failed intervention resulted in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination at the hands of a female Tamil bomber.

Since 1989, the people of Jammu and Kashmir have been living under a state of siege that has been enforced by 500,000 Indian security forces. More than 50,000 people have been killed or injured in the resulting clashes between separatist groups and the Indian military. The insurgency in Kashmir was home grown, due to India’s neglect of economic and social development in that region. It was subsequently exploited by groups on the Pakistani side, but much of that happened when civilian governments were in power in Islamabad.

Accusing Pakistan of nuclear blackmail glosses over the fact that it was India that first carried out a nuclear test within 100 miles of the Pakistan border in 1974. Coming just three years after India had dismembered the Pakistani state by intervening in the civil war in East Pakistan, this test forced Pakistan to develop its nuclear program. India carried out five nuclear tests at the same site in 1998, forcing Pakistan to conduct several of its own, since there was a widespread fear that India was getting ready to invade Pakistani Kashmir. It is important for both countries to exercise restraint during this difficult time, and to resume diplomatic negotiations that have lost their momentum since the Agra Summit in July. It is unfortunate that Mr. Varadarajan has instead called on India to cut off diplomatic ties with Pakistan.

India has demanded of the Pakistani government to disband the two Pakistan-based freedom fighter groups - Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed - because of their involvement in the attack on the parliament building in Delhi. But on what evidence? India does not have any conclusive proof to substantiate its claim and also refuses third party intervention to probe into the incident. All these tactics are aimed at suppressing the Kashmir freedom movement.

The US offer of a probe by the FBI and Pakistan’s offer of collaboration with the Indian investigative team in the Parliament attack incident, have both been rejected by India. India claims to have found all the clues and arrested all the suspects in the case which, according to India, prove Pakistan’s complicity. Since India has already debarred any third party from investigating in the matter, it is hard to resist the feeling that all or most of the so-called investigation is cooked up. Its only purpose is to implicate Pakistan, which in turn, would provide India the justification to attack Pakistan.

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