TENSIONS, if prolonged, burst into consequences which are hard to handle. A warlike atmosphere comes to develop. Nations are sucked into jingoism because they feel insecure. In the process, people restrict their liberty willingly. New Delhi has enacted a new, harsher law on detention. And all know who calls the shots in Pakistan. Still, for Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee to ask with whom India should deal is meant only to score a point.

It is the army which has been operating for more than 50 years, often overtly and some time behind the democratic façade. If New Delhi has done business with the governments which the army guided then why ask President Asif Ali Zardari to prove his credentials? However weak and wanting, his is a democratically elected setup. The voters queued up before polling booths to elect their representatives.

General Pervez Musharraf, chief of the army staff, ruled Pakistan for some nine years. New Delhi never questioned his legitimacy. Why in the case of Zardari? True, Zuflikar Ali Bhutto enjoyed all powers as Prime Minister of a democratic country. But he came in the wake of Bangladesh formation. Then the army was blamed for having lost half of Pakistan. The circumstances are different now.

Zardari too assumed that like Bhutto he had all the power. But he found out it was not so when he wanted to send the ISI chief to Delhi after having accepted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s request. What should he have done: Admit his helplessness in public? No ruler does so. He blamed the media, as governments do, for misquoting him. He could have resigned but Pakistan does not have the tradition of doing so.

Knowing all this, Mukherjee should have refrained from asking who rules in Pakistan. This has further exposed the Zardari government. But then New Delhi’s problem is that it is under a lot of pressure to act after the terrorist attack on Mumbai. Yet, India might have strengthened Zardari if it had not posed the question that Mukherjee did. Top brass in Pakistan might have realized that New Delhi preferred to do business with the democratically elected government even though the real power was in the hands of the army. The suo moto statement by General Asfaq Parvez Kiyani that Pakistan would retaliate within minutes was meant to underline the point.

The question to ask from Islamabad is not who governs Pakistan, but how can it be helped to get back to democracy which the country enjoyed for a few years after its birth? Yet the Zardari government should understand and appreciate the extent of anger which is sweeping India. However helpless Pakistan has to deliver. It cannot be party to the cover-up job. Why should Prime Minister Yousuf Reza Gillani and his master’s voice Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi go on saying that the terrorists attacked Mumbai were not Pakistanis? Ajmal Amar Kasab, the terrorist caught alive, has sought legal assistance from the Zardari government. Former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whose prestige is going up day after day, was quite right when he said that Kasab’s case gave the impression as if Pakistan was a failed state. Why should Islamabad go on repeating that India had not given any credible proof on the terrorists being Pakistanis?

Zardari’s embarrassment is understandable. It is apparent that he came to know about the attack on Mumbai only after it had taken place. After all, Nawaz Sharif did not know Musharraf sending troops to Kargil till the operation began. However, once Nawaz Sharif became aware of it he made clean breast of it before the world through President Bill Clinton. It cost Nawaz Sharif his prime ministership because when he tried to take action against army chief Musharraf, the latter took over the government.

A respected Pakistani expert, Ahmed Rashid, has said that the attack on Mumbai is the handiwork of the Pakistani Taliban who are said to have become part of the Al-Qaida Taliban. It is possible that the Taliban and the jehadi straddling over Pakistan and Afghanistan have jointly conducted the Mumbai carnage. This development is as much disturbing for Pakistan as it is for India.

Yet Zardari cannot run away from the fact that the Pakistan territory was “used” for planning and executing the attack. He, who has made friendly statements, should have taken not only measures to expose but also curb the terrorists and those behind them. Had he done so, he would have sustained the goodwill he evoked in India within the first few weeks of his taking over. Even now it is not too late. The mood in India is nasty and the parliament session has shown that Zardari will have to come really hard on terrorists in Pakistan. Laskhar-e-Toiba chief Azar Massud should have been tried by this time. He was responsible for the attack on the Indian Parliament House in 2001. He is at the back of what happened in Mumbai.

Surely, Zardari and his colleagues do not entertain the thesis which even some Indian Muslims and Urdu newspapers adumbrate that the entire operation was that of certain elements in the Indian government, helped by the BJP extremists. The very idea is preposterous: India killing nearly 200 people of its own, causing a loss of at least $2 billion and exposing its ineptness before the world. (It took 60 hours to kill nine militants).

The thesis was built after the killing of Anti Terrorists Squad chief Hemant Karkare who found the Vishwa Hindu Parishand hand in the Malegaon blasts. It was assumed that he was silenced because he had a lot more to say. A high-level police inquiry has proved that Karkare was killed by the terrorists. Doubts had unnecessary arisen when A.R. Antulay, Union Minister for Minority Affairs, posed the question: On whose direction did Karkare go towards the Cama Hospital when the operation was at the Taj and the Oberoi? Antulay did not realise that the terrorists first went to the Cama Hospital. Ultimately he did when Home Minister P. Chidambara made a detailed statement in Parliament. But his remark, untimely as it was, created a furore. Muslim clerics also came on the side of Antulay, giving the happening a communal colour.

What is disconcerting is the attitude of Islamabad which believes that it has no explanation to offer. It has not even dismantled the training camps, a worldwide demand. The whole thing is getting messier and messier. True, the two countries have to sit across the table to reconstruct the whole attack, from the beginning to the end and see where the blame lay. Weak as the Zardari government is, it looks weaker and gives the impression of not being its own master. Rhetoric can make it worse.