THE dialogue process between India and Pakistan, which has been dormant for a long period, is finally on track again with the announcement that the Foreign Ministers of the two countries will meet in Islamabad on July 15. The composite peace process between the two countries was derailed by the November 2008 terror attacks on Mumbai. On May 11, after a telephonic talk with his Pakistani counterpart, External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna announced that he would be travelling to Islamabad. Pakistan has reasons to be relieved at the turn of events.
New Delhi's decision to carry the dialogue process forward came at a time when the Barack Obama administration was piling pressure on Islamabad to escalate the fight against its home-grown militants. Following the arrest of terror suspect Faisal Shahzad in the bombing attempt at Times Square, United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened Pakistan with dire consequences in case another Pakistan-linked terror plot was executed on American soil. India, too, had threatened a military response after the Mumbai terror attacks. Senior officials in the Obama administration even accused sections of the Pakistani establishment of harbouring Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar respectively.
India's decision to send its Foreign Minister to Islamabad has also followed the pronouncement of the death sentence on the Pakistani national, Ajmal Amir Kasab, the only surviving member of the 10-member terror group that attacked Mumbai. The presiding judge implicated the Pakistani establishment in the Mumbai terror attacks. The Pakistani side has for some time been saying that it was not satisfied with the official talks between the two countries being relegated to the Foreign Secretary level. The Foreign Secretary-level talks held in New Delhi in February had in fact ended on a not-too-friendly note, with both sides accusing the other of insincerity.
The decision to initiate dialogue at the Foreign Minister-level without any preconditions was taken at the recent South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit at Thimphu, Bhutan. The announcement came soon after an hour-long meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Pakistani counterpart, Yusuf Raza Gilani, on the sidelines of the summit. Gilani described the meeting as very positive. S.M. Krishna told the Rajya Sabha that India had agreed to the resumption of talks because of a transformation in its relationship with Pakistan. The Pakistan Prime Minister had given assurances that India's core concern of terrorism would be addressed adequately.
At Thimphu, the two sides agreed not to issue a joint statement. The diplomatic and political furore resulting from the joint statement issued during the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt, seems to have left a lingering impact on the Prime Minister's Office.
Restoring trust'The Indian side has made it clear that there is no going back to the composite dialogue format. The main purpose, from New Delhi's point of view, is to restore trust between the two countries. Indian officials have said that the key step to restore trust has to be taken by Islamabad that is, credible action on New Delhi's concerns on terrorism. Convictions in Pakistani courts in cases relating to the 26/11 attacks would be viewed very favourably in Delhi.
Islamabad has also given an assurance that it will expeditiously explore legal means to curtail the activities of Hafiz Saeed, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) leader. The JuD is the front organisation of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which masterminded the Mumbai terror attacks. The Pakistan Prime Minister reassured Manmohan Singh in Thimphu that those responsible for the 26/11 attacks would be brought to justice.
Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said in Thimphu that the two sides had acknowledged that there was a trust deficit and had therefore decided to task their Foreign Ministers to bridge the gap and take the process forward. The Indian government also does not want to give the impression to the international community and the Pakistani public that it remains inflexible on the issue of resuming the dialogue process. The resumption of the dialogue process, Indian officials caution, is not immediately to find solutions to all the outstanding problems between the two countries but to restore trust. At the same time, they have said that they are not averse to discussing all the contentious issues, including Kashmir and the water issue.
The internal power shift in Pakistani politics after the passing of the 18th Amendment Bill has been a factor in New Delhi's decision once again to engage Islamabad in serious talks. With President Asif Zardari now reduced to a figure head, it is the Prime Minister and the Army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who are believed to be calling the shots in Islamabad. Gilani is now able to speak with authority and has been able to carry the opposition with him on key issues, including the resumption of the dialogue process.
Washington prefers to do business with the Army chief directly. Kayani is viewed as the interlocutor by U.S. officials and the link between the Pakistani military structure and the civilian government. India, for obvious reasons, does not have this kind of access to the Pakistani military establishment. But Pakistani officials connected to the military have told this correspondent that the mindset of the military establishment vis-a-vis India has changed after the former military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, changed policy and opted for a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict. The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), they claim, has since long snapped links with anti-India terror groups. The Pakistani military establishment seems keen to open channels of communications with its Indian counterparts.
Islamabad has said that it is fully cooperating with India. The government claims it is doing all it can to rein in organisations such as the LeT and the JuD, which claims to be a charity organisation. In April, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik revealed that the government had frozen 16 Jamaat bank accounts, blocked six websites and closed down 143 of its offices. Pakistani officials, noting the initial reluctance of the Indian government to send its External Affairs Minister to Islamabad, said that their government was even ready to despatch Qureshi to New Delhi to kick-start the dialogue process. Home Minister P. Chidambaram is also slated to visit Pakistan on June 26 for a meeting of SAARC Home Ministers. He is likely to have a meeting with Rehman Malik on the sidelines of the official talks.
U.S.' back-channel diplomacyObama, while addressing a joint press conference with the visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the third week of May, said that Pakistan seemed to have left its obsession with India behind. I think that there has been in the past a view on the part of Pakistan that their primary rival India was their only concern, Obama said. He emphasised that the U.S.' goal was to break down some of the old suspicions and the old bad habits and continue to work with the Pakistani government.
The U.S. has been continually pursuing back-channel diplomacy to get India and Pakistan to resume the dialogue process. Washington and its allies feel that the tensions between India and Pakistan are detrimental to the fight they are waging inside Afghanistan.
Washington feels that reduction in tensions between the two countries will motivate Pakistan to move its troops from the Indian border to the Afghan border, to help in the fight against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Jim Jones, a senior U.S. State Department official, told the U.S. Congress recently that easing India-Pakistan tensions was a very high priority for Obama. Jones, who is the Deputy Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, said that U.S. support for the peace process was being done in a discreet way.
The focus of the renewed India-Pakistan talks will be on terror, Kashmir and the water issue. During the interaction in Thimphu, Islamabad was told that it was the lack of credible action on terror-related issues that had prevented the dialogue process from moving forward. Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao told the media, in Thimphu, that the issue of terrorism is holding back progress in bilateral relations.
She said the Pakistan Prime Minister had given assurances that his country was serious about prosecuting the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks and that all efforts are being made to bring the trials to a speedy conclusion.
Returning from Thimphu, Qureshi told the Pakistan National Assembly that the country had returned to its historical position on the Kashmir issue after the wavering by the previous regime led by Gen. Musharraf. He told Pakistan's Parliament that no concessions would be given on the Kashmir and water-related issues. He also emphasised that the dropping of the nomenclature of the composite dialogue was not a concession to New Delhi.
He said the term composite dialogue was coined by the Indian side when the process began in 2004 and that Pakistan preferred the term comprehensive dialogue. He assured the House that eight points mentioned in the earlier composite dialogue process would figure in the renewed dialogue process. During the Foreign Secretary-level talks in February, Pakistan had insisted on giving precedence to political issues, while the Indian side wanted to focus on humanitarian and terror-related issues first.
Water disputeOn the water dispute, Qureshi agreed with the former government's decision to go in for a neutral expert to decide on the Baglihar hydroelectric project constructed on the Chenab river on the Indian side of Kashmir. He also reconfirmed that the Pakistan government had approached the International Court of Arbitration over India's Kishenganga hydroelectric project, also located in Kashmir. Manmohan Singh told Gilani that a lot of hype was being generated on the water issue. He said the controversy would die down when the facts were put on the table.
The Pakistan Foreign Minister, in his speech in the National Assembly, also urged his countrymen to be more prudent in their management of water resources. India is not stealing Pakistan's water, but it is going waste because of mismanagement, Qureshi said. He has come in for criticism for his statement within Pakistan.
Some Urdu newspapers said that the statement would weaken Pakistan's case at the negotiating table.
Extremist groups such as the LeT have used the emotive issue of water to rally people. Pakistan, which is one of the driest places in the world, has been facing the effects of a prolonged drought. Besides, the high population growth has put added pressure on its limited water resources. Under the 1960 water-sharing agreement between the two countries, Pakistan will receive for unrestricted use all waters from the three rivers, the Indus, the Chenab and the Jhelum, originating in India.
India has the right to use the waters from the Sutlej, the Beas and the Ravi. India also has the right to use limited amounts of water from the Indus, the Jhelum and the Chenab for agricultural purposes and has the right to construct hydroelectric dams as long as they do not divert or store large quantities of water.
Islamabad has not accused India of diverting water but has complained about the lack of transparency about its upstream projects. Pakistan's Indus Water Commissioner, Jamat Ali Shah, has said that India is not providing information required under the 1960 pact to substantiate that the allegations about water diversion are misplaced. Many observers of the Indian subcontinent are of the opinion that if the water issue is allowed to fester, it could lead to serious problems and further complicate the resolution of the Kashmir dispute.
John Briscoe, who has worked on water issues on the subcontinent for more than 30 years and is currently a Professor at Harvard, has said that while there is no inherent conflict between India and Pakistan on the water issue, the dams that India was building will give it the ability to choke off water if it wanted to pressure its neighbour. Briscoe, who hails from South Africa and was the World Bank's senior water adviser, has suggested that India should provide water flow data to Pakistan. He has also warned Pakistan against encouraging heated rhetoric on the subject. The JuD recently issued a statement accusing India of using her disputed occupation of Kashmir to carry out a deep conspiracy of turning Pakistan's agricultural lands into barren lands.
India and Pakistan will have much to talk about besides terrorism when the two Foreign Ministers meet in Islamabad. In the year and a half when the two governments had kept communications to the basic level, a number of issues relating to trade, commerce and transit have piled up.
The Indian role in Afghanistan does not seem to be much of a sore point with Islamabad these days. With the Obama administration officially bestowing primacy to Pakistan's role in Afghanistan and giving back-channel assurances to Islamabad that there will be a friendly successor regime in Kabul, there have been few complaints about India's alleged machinations from its consulates along the Afghan-Pakistan border.
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