When two democracies head towards war
There is a popular theory in foreign policy circles that democracy is a cure for warmongering. It encourages compromise and sidelines extremism, students of international relations are told, and therefore makes war between two democracies highly unlikely. India and Pakistan seem on course not just to tear up this received wisdom but to incinerate it with their arsenals on the Kashmiri border, where the two countries are facing off.
In each country, popular pressure is working to prevent compromise between two leaders who each fear seeming weak in the eyes of their voters. As a consequence, India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed powers, are sliding closer to the brink than Washington and Moscow ever did.
Pakistan developed effective atomic weapons, giving it nuclear parity with India, soon after their last conflict over Kashmir in 1999. Everyone assumed that mutually assured destruction would teach New Delhi and Islamabad the need for detente in the way it had for the Americans and Russians. But on the ground, nationalist and religious fundamentalist forces were gaining support in each country.
Narendra Modi has come to dominate India’s politics by playing up Hindu identity – Hindutva – at the expense of the vast country’s minorities, especially Muslims. Before he became prime minister in 2014, he was widely accused of fostering sectarian divisions in his home state of Gujarat. This legacy has also poisoned India’s relations with Muslim Pakistan. Having stirred up such feelings, Modi cannot now ignore them.
Imran Khan’s decades at the top of international cricket and his contacts in the West give him a sophistication unmatched by his Indian counterpart. But he has since become more obviously religious and his political career is largely based on appealing to traditionalist voters. More worryingly, within the coalition on which he relies are hard-line Islamists who back groups such as the Jaish-e-Mohammed militants responsible for the suicide bomb attack two weeks ago that killed 44 Indian troops and triggered the current standoff.
In India, where elections are looming, the chance to look tough has been an electoral gift for the populist prime minister who was already beating the nationalist drum and playing to a strong strain of domestic anti-Muslim sentiment. Public opinion in both countries supports assertive action, one of the reasons why the situation has escalated so quickly. Historic antipathies going back even before partition in 1947 make bellicose behaviour a sure-fire vote winner.
But there are modern sources of tension, too. Modi’s New Delhi feels like the capital of an emerging superpower, a status which has given India the self-confidence to take a tougher line on Pakistan. In Islamabad, Pakistan’s generals fear that being the first to blink will destroy the credibility of their nuclear deterrent, their only point of parity with their neighbour. There are concerns that Khan, who has made some conciliatory noises, has little control over the military.
It is all a sharp contrast with how a dictator such as Kim Jong Un wields the total power necessary to be able to ratchet up tension and dial it down again. In the run-up to his second summit with Donald Trump, Kim is reported to have removed, even executed, up to 70 ‘‘hardliners’’ who opposed his conciliatory gestures to the Americans.
As the world watches the events in Hanoi and Kashmir on its splitscreens, dialogue seems much easier between an imperious President Donald Trump and a tyrant such as Kim than between democrats in Delhi and Islamabad. Whatever the horrors of any renewed conflict on the Korean peninsula, they would pale by comparison with the scale of casualties in an all-out war between India and Pakistan.
‘‘There goes the people,’’ the founder of independent India, Mahatma Gandhi, once remarked, ‘‘I am their leader, I must follow them.’’ It’s not such a straightforward decision for his successors who may now find that their jingoistic electorates prevent them from making the compromises needed to deescalate a confrontation that risks national annihilation.
■ Mark Almond is director of the Crisis Research Institute, Oxford
– Telegraph Group