DIWALI pollution sends droves of Delhi residents scouring for somewhere to breathe. I thus learnt of the Paris outrage watching migratory birds 190 kilometres from the country’s smog capital, off the Agra highway. Sharing the news with a French couple at the Bharatpur avian sanctuary that morning offered a learning curve. They were from the embassy in Delhi. The man scanned the BBC bullet points on my mobile phone and translated the story to his wife. He then took a deep breath, shrugged his shoulders wryly and resumed fixing the telescope on a steel tripod.
The couple had seen a gaggle of rare ducks on the far side of the sanctuary the previous morning, the Frenchman informed me helpfully. The woman sat down silently on a bench atop the watchtower, where we met, as she resumed observing the cormorants in flight. Her knitted eyebrows were a giveaway though to concealed emotion.
That afternoon, in Delhi, still trying to figure out the composed response of the French couple to what I thought was a shocking carnage in their country, I scanned some more of the news. The approach of so many French people was uniformly similar to that of the two bird watchers of Bharatpur.
As Parisians struggled to make sense of their new reality, a report in the New York Times described parents whose children slept through the ordeal while they grappled to fudge the explanation to offer them in the morning why so many planned activities had been cancelled.
To my Indian sensibilities so used to one prime minister declaring aar-paar ki ladai (a fight to the finish) and another flaunting his supposedly 56-inch chest in response to terror provocations, the philosophical demeanour of Bertrand Bourgeois, a 42-year old French accountant, was eye-catching.
He was lost in thought as he cast a fishing line beneath the Invalides bridge. Bourgeois, the NYT told us, normally avoids fishing in Paris. Instead, he preferred the quieter sections of the Seine near his home in Poissy. But after the violence, he said he felt drawn to come into the city out of a sense of solidarity.
What an amazing response compared with the televised clamour in India after a similar attack on Mumbai. Shrill opinion vendors called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a weakling for refusing to carpet-bomb Pakistan. Singh saw through the insane chorus, as did the ordinary Indian people. They elected him for a second consecutive term just for keeping his nerve and for continuing to talk to Pakistan.
Drum beaters of war anywhere might want to benefit from the insights of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari.
“As the literal meaning of the word indicates, terror is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage,” Harari wrote in The Guardian after the Paris attacks. “This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties, who are unable to inflict much material damage on their enemies.”
Whatever be the score of the casualties inflicted by an act of terror it can never be even a fraction of the losses from a conventional war. “On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, 19,000 members of the British army were killed and another 40,000 wounded,” reminded the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
“By the time the battle ended in November, both sides together had suffered more than a million casualties, which included 300,000 dead. Yet this unimaginable carnage hardly changed the political balance of power in Europe. It took another two years and millions of additional casualties for something finally to snap.”
What was the reaction of President Hollande to the coordinated strikes in Paris? He threatened merciless retribution, but against who? If helpless Syrian or other refugees get caught in the crossfire between the government and the terrorists, well that’s playing to the wrong script.
To avenge the Paris attacks, French warplanes carried out heavy bombardments of the militant group that calls itself Islamic State. Should they not have been doing the bombings without the Paris carnage as justification? Would the terror command centres and fuel hubs not be touched if Paris were not attacked? Hollande can do no more than look over his shoulder to see the Le Pens and the Sarkozys mock him. But that is not the point.
Western powers have struck up a compromise with Russian President Putin for a coordinated strategy in Syria. Have the terrorists in Paris inadvertently cooked the goose of Kiev? What are the chances that a number of states in the Middle East that were seen as a source of strength to the Islamists, led by Israel and Saudi Arabia, accept the conditions implicit in a no-holds-barred targeting of Daesh?
In any case, what is in store in all this for South Asia, more so for Pakistan? We have discussed the hypocrisy of delinking Al Nusra from Al Qaeda. How many shades of extremists has Pakistan got in its arsenal to deal with India and Afghanistan or even Iran? Will a school in Peshawar remain more worthy of protection from future harm than schools in the neighbourhood?
As I was leaving the bird sanctuary, a guide pointed to a row of marble tablets with names embossed of viceroys, maharajas and even of Gen J.N. Chaudhuri. They had shot helpless migratory birds for sport. Lord Linlithgow — 4,273 birds with 39 guns led the field. Gen Chaudhuri shot 556 birds for half a day with 51 guns. That was in September 1964. Had the India-Pakistan war broken out a year before it did, at least the birds might have been spared a predatory assault. Such is the circuitous logic of terror and its remedies. Most people seem to know this though their governments may not.
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