Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's second meeting within a week's time with his three services chief in the wake of Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee's "all options on the table" threats against Pakistan, took the Indian media's unabated war mongering to its highest and nastiest pitch.
A Union minister, Jairam Ramesh, later complained that if the Prime Minister had met with the defence officials "that does not mean they were discussing war." An official statement later explained that the meeting discussed service matters, including the Pay Commission's recommendations, and that the Prime Minister was also briefed on the prevailing security situation.
If the bit about the prevailing security situation raised any doubts about the meeting's actual agenda, the minister tried to dispel it strongly as he went on to blame Indian, Pakistani and American media for creating hype about an imminent Pak-India war. He termed as ridiculous any talk of war and lamented that an unnecessary alarm was being created among the people even after the Prime Minister had issued a statement saying there is no question of a war. There is some tension along the border, he said, but no war-like situation.
So far as the international media, including America's is concerned, it cannot be accused of creating a hype by merely reporting the threats various Indian leaders have been hurling at Pakistan, given that the two countries are nuclear-armed and also happen to have a long history of conflict. And, of course, the Americans have also been worried about the repercussions of a Pak-India conflict on their own war in Afghanistan. Pakistani media had a responsibility to inform the people of possible consequences of India's increasingly belligerent rhetoric.
The closest it came to creating a hype was to criticise the government for not showing spine in the face of New Delhi's provocative propaganda campaign, and a mysterious menacing call to President Zardari that Islamabad insisted came from the Indian foreign minister's office. By and large, the media here underlined the need for restraint, highlighting the perils of war, which could spin out of control and result in a nuclear Armageddon. The case of Indian media, with honourable exceptions, has been the opposite. Taking its cue from the government leaders' anti-Pakistan rhetoric, large sections of the mainstream newspapers and television channels left no stone unturned to build war hysteria.
On Friday, the day the minister was vexing indignant about media hype, a Hindi language TV took the war mongering to new heights, presenting a ten-step military plan which would spell the destruction of Pakistan forcing it on its knees and begging for a cease-fire. Those who created that scenario to whip up war frenzy completely ignored the fact that even though the country they wanted to destroy might not be as strong as their own, but it did have a large, well-equipped professional military to retaliate.
And further that one to five ratio in numerical strength that exists between the two countries, is enough for defence. The worst case scenario would be mutual destruction. The government certainly understands the inherent dangers, but a lot of the right wing Hindu extremists, of whom there are aplenty in the Indian media and politics, do not. They want to use their country's growing strength and political clout to get even with history. Such elements need to be educated in civilised norms of behaviour. They must know that it would do the peoples of both India and Pakistan a lot of good if only they could get over their anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan bias rooted in history, and build a hype for peace rather than war.