Peace with Pakistan?

My uneasiness stems from my fear that the optimism may be misplaced. Certainly, the record of the last six years gives us very little reason for hope. The whole country was on a high after Lahore. And yet, Lahore was followed by the war in Kargil. We were absurdly over-excited when the Vajpayee government did a 180 degree about-turn and invited General Musharraf to Agra. But that summit ended up as a fiasco.

Now, we are treating the (admittedly, brave and imaginative) initiatives taken by AB Vajpayee in what turned out to be his last few months as Prime Minister as the basis for a new round of optimism.

Look at the success of the cricket tour of Pakistan, we say. Who would have expected a Pakistani crowd to cheer for an Indian team? Look at the way in which both sides are finally talking to each other after the extended sulks of the Vajpayee era, we exclaim. Every day, there’s a new round of talks. The Defence Secretaries are talking. Natwar Singh made an immensely successful visit to Pakistan last month. And so on.

All this is true. And much of it is certainly encouraging. There seems no doubt that, on the Indian side, both the government and the people want a lasting peace. After the cricket tour we can probably conclude that on the Pakistan side, there’s a similar desire for better relations. The ordinary Pakistani has begun to tire of the constant tension and wants an end to some of the hostility.

So why then am I uneasy about the optimism? Partly, it is the bitter experience of the last five years. But mainly, it is because I’m not convinced that the Pakistani establishment (which, these days, means the army) shares the public enthusiasm for better relations.

In India, the interests of the government and the people are the same. (That’s because we are a democracy). But in Pakistan, the army has its own vested interests and they don’t always coincide with those of the people.

And then, there’s the old conflict about which approach to follow. India’s position has remained the same through the years, despite changes of government. We want the India-China model in which we concede that we have a border dispute (in this case, Kashmir) which we must try and resolve. But everything else cannot be held hostage to that single issue. As two nuclear neighbours, united by ethnicity and culture, we must move forward in other areas (trade, people-to-people contacts, sport etc.) and not wait till the border dispute is resolved.

At last year’s HT Peace Dividend Conference, Benazir Bhutto appeared to endorse the Indian approach (though whether she will take the same line if she returns to office remains to be seen). But she argued that the Pakistani army would never agree. The army, she said, derives its strength from the perceived threat from India. Why would it agree to an approach that devalues the military confrontation (over Kashmir) and focuses on trade, culture etc?

She may have had a point. At the notorious breakfast that General Musharraf had with the media at the Agra summit, he told us clearly what his approach was: Settle Kashmir first, everything else will follow. When we protested that this approach would lead us nowhere, he turned insulting. Pakistan believed, he said, that India had no interest in resolving Kashmir. All this stuff about people-to-people contacts and trade was just eyewash, a ploy to keep the talks from focusing on the one issue that matters: Kashmir.

In recent interviews, the General has repeated his Kashmir First formulation though he has varied the time-frame for settling the dispute. (It now ranges from two-months to three years depending on the mood he’s in).

But here’s the problem: what concession can we possibly offer him over Kashmir? Our solution seems to be that Pakistan should accept the Line of Control (LoC) as the international border and forget about the valley. This amounts to saying: buzz off; we’re not giving you anything more than the status quo. Musharraf made it clear in Agra that this was not acceptable to him and no matter how many stories we hear about American pressure, he has not varied his stand.

It seems unlikely — given the climate of domestic Indian opinion — that any government can offer any concession at all on Kashmir. Had the Vajpayee government survived, it would have come up against the same problem: we want him to do things our way but on the one issue that matters to him, we will not yield an inch.

I suspect that Musharraf knows this. He knows also that Pakistan has nothing to gain from people-to-people contacts. Pakistanis are always being told that India is a poverty-ridden country where evil Hindus torture hapless Muslims on the streets. When they come here and see that India has managed to combine democracy with economic growth, that the President and the Prime Minister are both members of religious minorities and that, despite the obstacles faced by Indian secularism, it still manages to hold India together, they begin to question the sorry state of affairs in their own country. That’s why Musharraf has nothing to gain from people-to-people contacts.

So why does he talk about peace and the need to improve relations? The charitable view is that he is bowing to public pressure and that he’s recognised that his people want peace.

The cynical view is that he’s been forced into talking about the need to improve relations by his American benefactors who are concerned about tensions between two nuclear neighbours.

Neither view suggests a long-term improvement in Indo-Pak relations. Even if the General is sensitive to Pakistani public opinion, his own constituency (the army) and his critics (the mullahs) will not let him come home with an agreement that gives them nothing on Kashmir. And while the BJP, over the last six years, talked about peace in Lahore, Agra and Islamabad, it did nothing to prepare the country for any compromise on Kashmir. And now, if the new Congress government suggests any concessions, the BJP will call it a sell-out.

That’s the charitable view of Musharraf’s motives. The cynical view is that all his overtures have been insincere — this man was the architect of Kargil, for God’s sake! — and that he will back out the moment the Americans turn their backs on him. (Source: Hindustan Times)