TENSIONS, if prolonged, burst into consequences which are hard to handle. A warlike atmosphere comes to dominate. Nations are sucked into the cycle of jingoism because they feel insecure.

In the process, people have their liberty restricted willingly. New Delhi has enacted a new, harsher detention law. 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.

In Pakistan, it is the army which has been operating for several decades, often overtly and sometimes behind a democratic facade. If New Delhi has done business with army-guided governments then why ask President Asif Ali Zardari to prove his credentials? However weak and wanting, his is a democratically elected set-up. The voters queued before polling booths to elect their representatives.

Gen Pervez Musharraf ruled Pakistan for nine years. New Delhi never questioned his legitimacy. Why in the case of Zardari? True, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto enjoyed all powers as prime minister of a democratic country. But he came in the wake of the creation of Bangladesh when the army was being blamed for losing half the country. The circumstances are different now.

Like Bhutto, Zardari assumed that he had all power. But he found that this was not so when the government first declared it would send the ISI chief to Delhi after having acceded to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s request in the wake of the Mumbai blasts and then was not able to do so. What should he have done? Admitted his helplessness in public? No ruler does. He could have resigned but Pakistan does not have a 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. The top brass in Pakistan might have realised that New Delhi preferred to do business with a democratically elected government even though the real power was in the hands of the army. The statement by army chief Gen Kayani that Pakistan would retaliate within minutes in case of an Indian strike was meant to underline the point.

The question to ask Islamabad is not who governs Pakistan, but how can it be helped to get back to the democracy that the country enjoyed for a few years after its birth? Yet the Zardari government should understand the extent of anger which is sweeping India. However helpless, Pakistan has to deliver. It cannot be a party to a cover-up job. Why should Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani and his master’s voice Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi indicate that the terrorists who attacked Mumbai were not Pakistanis? Ajmal Kasab, the terrorist caught alive, has sought legal assistance from the Zardari government.

Former Pakistani premier, Nawaz Sharif, whose prestige is going up by the day, rightly pointed out that Kasab’s case gave the impression that Pakistan was a failed state. Why should Islamabad go on repeating that India had not given any credible proof about the terrorists’ Pakistani identity?

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 was sending troops to Kargil until the operation began. However, once Nawaz Sharif became aware of it he came clean. It cost him his prime ministership because when he tried to act 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. It is possible that the Taliban and the jihadis straddling Pakistan and Afghanistan have jointly conducted the Mumbai carnage. This development is as disturbing for Pakistan as it is for India. Zardari cannot ignore the allegations that Pakistani territory was used to plan and execute the attack. He should have not only taken measures to expose but also to curb the terrorists and their sponsors. By doing this he would have sustained the goodwill he won 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 down really hard on terrorists in Pakistan. Jaish-i-Mohammad chief Masood Azhar should have been tried by this time considering his links to the attack on the Indian Parliament House in 2001. Surely, Zardari and his colleagues do not entertain the thesis that the entire operation was carried out by certain elements in the Indian government helped by BJP extremists. The very idea of India killing nearly 200 of its own, causing a loss of at least $2bn and exposing its ineptness before the world is preposterous.

This theory circulated after the killing of Anti Terrorists Squad chief Hemant Karkare who found a Vishwa Hindu Parishad 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 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. His remarks created a furore. Muslim clerics on the side of Antulay gave the happenings a communal colour.

What is disconcerting is the attitude of Islamabad which believes that it has no explanation. It has not even dismantled the training camps, a worldwide demand. The whole thing is getting messier.

True, the two countries have to sit across the table to reconstruct the whole attack from beginning to end to see where the fault lies. Weak as Zardari’s government is, it will appear weaker still by not giving the impression that it is its own master. Rhetoric can make it worse.

The writer is a leading journalist in Delhi.