If a deal is to be struck with Pakistan, the time is now. A look at the issues on the table and the realities on the ground, on the eve of the Vajpayee-Musharraf Summit, July 14-16.
THAT the coming Agra Summit should be welcomed, and welcomed with enthusiasm, goes without saying. Three years after the Pokhran explosions which did so much to destabilise the politics of the subcontinent, there is now a genuine chance to restore some degree of normalcy in the conduct of relations between India and Pakistan, across the board. Nothing resembling peace is yet on the horizon in Jammu and Kashmir but it would be reasonable to hope for a considerable de-escalation in the bloody spiral of terror and counter-terror, hence welcome reprieve for the battered people of the state. The sublime presence of the Taj Mahal in the background would, one very much hopes, help both sides acquire a kind of vision and civility that they have so grievously lacked.
There are indications of positive movement on some other fronts as well. Some moves are afoot for the expansion of trade and economic ties between the two countries. India has already granted the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) status to Pakistan, and it would be good if Pervez Musharraf were to use the occasion to return the compliment. Legalised trade between India and Pakistan currently stands at $200 million but estimates of unofficial trade stand anywhere between $1 billion and $2 billion. This needs to be regularised and made subject to revenue collection as much as possible. There is a large number of Indian products, such as chemicals and engineering goods, on which Pakistan could save as much as 35 per cent to 40 per cent of what it pays for western or Japanese imports. India, similarly, could take things like yarn and grey cloth from Pakistan, or absorb some of Pakistan's surplus electrical capacity (especially in order to resolve the perennial power shortages in Jammu and Kashmir). If nuclear power and military confrontationism have turned the two fraternal countries into permanent enemies, the creation of increasingly interdependent economies may bring them closer. Eventually, there is really no alternative to the creation of an economic bloc and common market throughout South Asia.
On the people-to-people front, too, the draconian diktat of the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry that no participant in academic seminars would be allowed from neighbouring countries without prior clearance on a one-to-one basis has been rightly set aside for the planned South Asian Scholars' meet. Atal Behari Vajpayee is to be congratulated for having intervened personally on this count and for suggesting that "a lady... from a minority community" be invited to open the conference, nipping Murli Manohar Joshi's designs in the bud. India needs to relax the visa regimes, make travel across the Indo-Pakistan border as easy and dignified as it is for foreigners from some other parts of the world; it is really not too much to ask that India extend to its neighbours the courtesy it routinely offers to Western travellers. One hears a great deal these days of "softening" the Line of Control (LoC) and facilitating trade and travel across it. That is desirable but would remain anomalous without a more general relaxation. What needs to be softened are the borders between the two countries, for the movement of peoples and goods, with as little hindrance as possible, without posing any threat to the respective sovereignties. Numerous Arab countries enjoy this kind of easy travel regimes across the respective state frontiers. A mere driving licence makes it possible to travel between the United States and Canada. The European Community has already advanced to the higher stage of a two-passport regime whereby one carries an E.U. passport alongside the passport issued from one's own national government. Why not at least the vision of such civility among India and Pakistan within a foreseeable future?
THREE years have passed since the competing lunacies of Pokhran and Chagai. Pakistan should have learned by now that the possession of nuclear toys did nothing to save it from disarray and humiliation in the Kargil adventure. Indian hawks, led by the Home Minister himself, declared that the geo-strategic situation in Kashmir had been greatly altered in India's favour after Pokhran-II. The reality is that at no point in these three years has India's status as a nuclear power made a whit of a difference to the insurgency, and India's face today in Jammu and Kashmir is in a more unfavourable situation, militarily and politically, than at any point since 1994-95. India and Pakistan need a complete turnaround in their nuclear posture toward each other. India and Pakistan should move toward a pact that neither would, under any circumstances, use nuclear weapons against the other. Instead of developing doctrines that offer mutual destruction, they should share the burden for developing doctrines that assure peace and stability in the region, institute reliable regimes for sharing of information and inspection, and move the two countries toward cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
Then there is the issue of what one might euphemistically call "the peace dividend". On this, indeed, we may take a leaf out of Pakistan's book. Given the historic propensities of confrontationist states and of military regimes in particular, it is an astonishing fact that Pakistan has cut its defence budget for two successive years under General Musharraf's stewardship, even as India increased its defence spending so spectacularly that the increase alone was larger than Pakistan's annual budget. When I asked a Pakistani defence analyst to explain this contrast, he said that the existing disparity between the military capabilities as well as the size of the respective economies was such that the silliest thing Pakistan could do was to enter an arms race with India. When I pressed him further, he said: "Pokhran was a great gift to us. We could now announce our nuclear capability to the whole world and cut our expenditures on conventional weapons. How many nuclear weapons do you need to secure your borders against an ambitious neighbour?" The time has probably come for India to start cutting its own military budget as well.
There are numerous such areas where progress can begin alongside some perceptible movement on the Kashmir issue, and the Summit should address such possibilities and signposts along the high road to peace. Ashraf Jehangir Qazi, the Pakistan High Commissioner to India, was being at least very coy when he claimed that summits never have an agenda. The fact of the matter is that summits do often have an agenda but only when much time and much hard work has already gone into hammering out some areas of concrete agreement, identifying other areas where progress is expected and others which may be left for a future occasion. Such agendas presume that some common ground has been found between the two parties and, even more crucially, that a prior consensus exists on each side behind the positions that the respective leaders are to enunciate. The coming Summit has no agenda for the good reason that no such work has gone into preparing for it, and because neither leader actually represents any kind of national consensus. Vajpayee is probably finding it easier to gain the confidence of the plethora of ex-Prime Ministers whom he is taking into confidence than any real support from key figures in his party and government. Hours before Vajpayee prevailed over his Cabinet on the issue of inviting Musharraf, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh himself had dismissed as "hollow" Musharraf's insistent offer to meet Vajpayee "anywhere, any time". Farooq Abdullah, the elected Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has meanwhile retreated to London.
HOWEVER, if the two leaders were to muster the requisite courage and vision, even the lack of an agenda can be turned to advantage and the Summit can offer a number of small steps toward normalisation, revive the Secretary-level talks and Joint Working Groups (JWGs), acknowledge the violence and suffering that the misguided policies of the two states have perpetrated against the people of the two countries, and offer a vision to correct the wrongs of the past and find pathways out of the present impasse. There is really no sensible alternative to the recognition that in Kashmir at least, which indeed is at the very heart of the subcontinent's tragedy, both countries have reached the end of the road that they have been walking for the past half a century, and most brutally over the past decade or so. Nor is there any alternative to the hope for an altogether new beginning. That hope should be separated, however, from the kind of facile euphoria that surrounded the Lahore Declaration. For that reason alone, one should take the full measure of the difficulties that lie in the way before one gets to that "high road to peace".
Musharraf is likely to be quite mindful of the fact, for example, that the invitation to him is overwhelmingly Vajpayee's own initiative - the last great initiative before he recedes into the twilight - and that it may not have full support of the sundry prime ministerial aspirants waiting in the wings. Added to this is the fact that Vajpayee has managed to remain at the top of the Bharatiya Janata Party because he is a loyal swayamsevak and is so perceived by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS); it is unlikely that, when the crunch comes, he will substantially deviate from his master's voice, especially on Kashmir and in relation to Pakistan. That is more the case because most of his senior colleagues in the BJP are equally veterans of the RSS while Jaswant Singh, who has a different past, is too keen to become Prime Minister, too intoxicated on ideas of a great alliance with the great powers, and too deeply invested in delusions of even his own personal grandeur to deviate from his characteristic hawkishness. It would also be very surprising if the Pakistani establishment did not notice the fact that Vajpayee has a virtually characterological flaw whereby he finds it difficult to sustain any policy position for long, keeps shifting from one position to another, gets surprised when that does not yield the desired results, and rapidly shifts to another.
Until only a couple of months ago he was refusing to deal with Musharraf on the ground that (a) Kashmir was India's internal matter, (b) Pakistan had to put a stop to "cross-border terrorism" before expecting a dialogue with India, and (c) Musharraf was in any case a military dictator. We shall see, below, the rapid policy shifts - and failures - which lie behind the dramatic invitation to Musharraf. Now, having suddenly decided to invite to India the man he was only some months ago unwilling to meet even on the sidelines of a SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) conclave, he seems to know no limits to his own new-found effusiveness. Musharraf's utter disregard for the most minimal constitutional or even procedural niceties in unilaterally abrogating the national and provincial assemblies while appointing himself President, without as much as consulting most civilian members of the Cabinet of his own sycophants, amounts to a second coup d'etat, far less justifiable than the one in which he had ousted Nawaz Sharif. It is not possible to concentrate more power in one person than what Musharraf has arrogated to himself as the Army Chief, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Committee, Chairman of the National Security Council, Chief Executive and President.
Of course, India's invitation to him should not have been withdrawn; the constitutionality of Musharraf's usurpation of the Presidency is a matter for the Pakistan Supreme Court to examine. India should have, however, registered its displeasure in the many ways that are open to governments. Instead, Vajpayee had the audacity to address Musharraf on the phone as "President" even before he had officially transformed himself into one. The President of India sent a letter of congratulation with remarkable alacrity and swiftly upgraded the level of hospitality India was to offer him; the self-appointed President of Pakistan was now to be the guest not of the Prime Minister, upon whose invitation he was coming in the first place, but of the President of India himself. It would be better, one should have thought, if he was politely but firmly asked to skip New Delhi altogether and proceed directly to Agra and then Ajmer. That would have sent the right message to the liberal Opposition and the feisty press in Pakistan, and Musharraf was already too committed to the trip to turn down the invitation altogether. When the whole world was dealing with Musharraf, India had refused to do so; now, when the whole world was denouncing what Musha-rraf had done, India gave him an enthusiastic seal of approval - lurching from one extreme to another.
LET us ignore this latest outburst of unwarranted effusiveness and simply hope that the dramatic turnaround which Vajpayee's invitation signifies rests on a more sober assessment of India's recent policy failures and of the grim realities prevailing on the ground (see "Illusions of Indian foreign policy"; Frontline, June 8, 2001). Musharraf's compulsions are, if anything, even greater. If handled correctly, the Agra Summit yet has greater chances of some success precisely because both sides shall be coming to it with a sense of having been, well, cornered. And cornered not so much by the other as by circumstances and compulsions of their own, aggravated by the other, so that they meet not only as adversaries but also as partners in a common dilemma. To these compulsions of the present we shall return. It might be useful, though, to start by recalling that last summit, in Lahore, to which the coming one shall be inevitably compared. The contrast between the two situations is what gives much more hope today.
The Lahore Summit was an ill-prepared response to international pressure on the part of two second-rate military powers suffering from delusions of grandeur brought about by nuclear fireworks. Both then needed the Kargil fiasco to inject in them some sense of sobriety. For a year or more, though, even that fiasco led to other kinds of delusions in both countries. Nawaz Sharif had risen to power as a creature of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and had responded to Pokhran with his own explosions in Chagai; there is overwhelming evidence that he was as much part of the Kargil adventure as anyone else in Pakistan. However, he deluded himself with the thought that he could take credit for the nuclear explosions but no blame for the military disaster in Kargil. And, because Sharif had given India the Lahore Declaration, India too found it convenient to blame the whole Kargil mess on Musharraf, while both Gujral and Vajpayee still recall Sharif with much inexplicable affection as their trusted partner in search for peace. This ill-placed nostalgia for a crook then meant that when Sharif engineered a coup against Musharraf, his own Army Chief, and Musharraf responded with his own counter-coup and sent Sharif into oblivion, Vajpayee went into something resembling mourning.
The Indian government contrived to believe that it did not wish to deal with Musharraf because he was a military dictator, forgetting that India had been merrily dealing with dictators and monarchs around the world, because that is what international diplomacy requires; the establishment of SAARC itself had been negotiated when both Pakistan and Bangladesh were under military rule. But there was also a deeper delusion. India possessed nuclear weapons and had, at the same time, forced Pakistan to beat an ignominious retreat from Kargil through perfectly conventional means. India was thus powerful twice over. Equally significant was the fact that for all the Western denunciation of the Pokhran explosions, the United States stood firm on India's side. These successes in other areas persuaded the government to believe that the balance of forces within Kashmir had somehow turned against the insurgents. Some sort of victory in Jammu and Kashmir was said to be at hand.
THANKS to this illusion, then, India kept lurching from one policy failure to another. Farooq Abdullah was the great ally and the elected Chief Minister, but the Autonomy Report he brought forth with the authority of the State Assembly was brusquely rubbished, with no chance of it even being tabled in Parliament. Abdullah upheld the position that Jammu and Kashmir was an integral part of India but autonomy could not be negotiated with him because he had no purchase on the insurgents. The Hizbul Mujahideen, who rejected the idea that Jammu and Kashmir was a part of India, became, for some two weeks, the favoured partners in dialogue because they were 'sixty per cent of the insurgency' and 'our own' dissenters; but they too were dismissed as soon as they said that they needed Pakistan as a third party in the negotiations to guarantee whatever agreements were reached between the government of India and their own little group. Then came India's "unilateral ceasefire" (a time-bound policy of relative restraint, really) which most people in the All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) welcomed, and to which Pakistan responded with a complete ceasefire on the LoC. That too collapsed, however, because the real jehadis saw nothing in it for themselves; because talking openly to Pakistan, as a full negotiating partner on Kashmir, was still anathema; because India never indicated what level of flexibility it was prepared to consider if real negotiations were to take place; and because leaders of the APHC were treated so shabbily that the hardliners had no reason to respond and the more moderate ones could not afford to do so without being seen as mere stooges. The hapless K.C. Pant walked into this deadlock.
Quite a few things had by then become clear. First, Farooq Abdullah was the wrong negotiating partner because he could not control the insurgency; even autonomy had to be negotiated with those who held the gun. Second, even though the guns at the LoC had fallen silent, the insurgency within Jammu and Kashmir gave no indication of abating; the reality on the ground showed that the insurgency could be sustained well enough without Pakistan providing covering fire for the infiltrators. Third, India really had no settled policy toward the APHC. G. Parthasarthy, the former High Commissioner in Pakistan, was recently quoted as saying that "The Hurriyat represents a sentiment of public opinion in Kashmir the same way as Gerry Adams represents a section in Northern Ireland." (Outlook, December 18, 2000). However, neither he nor any policymaker seems to have grasped the implications of the fact that the situation in Kashmir could be plausibly compared with what prevailed in England's oldest colony; nor that the projected settlement in Kashmir could perhaps contain elements modelled on the recent accords in Northern Ireland; nor even that if the APHC could be compared with Gerry Adams, then it should have been granted that same kind of freedom of movement and interlocution.
Fourth, the major powers did not endorse the Pakistani position, so that Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General, went so far as to declare on Pakistani soil itself that the U.N. resolutions were no longer applicable. And, ever sensitive to India's sensibilities, no Western power directly questioned the validity of the Instrument of Accession. However, none of the G-5 countries - or the Shanghai Six now, for that matter - accepted the actual content of the Act of Indian Parliament which declared that the whole of Jammu and Kashmir, including the areas under Pakistani control, was inalienable Indian territory. They continued to speak of a "dispute" and urged a "compromise". Thus, for example, in his interview with Shobhana Bharatia which appeared in The Hindustan Times of September 3, 2000, Clinton said "I am troubled by the threat to peace posed by the Kashmir dispute". He went on to urge "direct discussions between India and Pakistan... And, of course, the wishes of the Kashmiri people must be taken into account".
On October 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in New Delhi that the Kashmir issue should be resolved bilaterally, peacefully and "on the basis of a compromise" (emphasis added). The Chinese are known to have said similar things to their Pakistani friends.
Fifth, as the insurgency progressed despite the nuclear explosions, the Lahore Declaration and the Kargil fiasco, it became quite clear that India needed not one interlocution in search for peace but two - with militants within Jammu and Kashmir, and with Pakistan. With respect to the insurgents, meanwhile, there was a virtually insuperable difficulty: statecraft required that India affirm its historic positions publicly even if it were prepared to make far-reaching concessions eventually; but hardly anyone in the APHC - not to speak of the militant outfits outside it - could be seen as negotiating with India without first obtaining at least very substantial concessions.
Sixth, there is a real policy vacuum. Not a single political party of any size dissents from the historic official positions, regardless of the scale of terror and counter-terror and the attendant sufferings of the Kashmiri people. The Valley has - and has had for some 12 years now - the world's highest ratio of security personnel in relation to the population. Casualties as ratio of the population have been higher in the Valley than in all the regions of the former Yugoslavia. Yet, there has not emerged a visionary leadership - not even in the Opposition - that advocates a historic compromise which saves the Valley from the jehadis and fundamentalists and yet answers to those aspirations which have consistently expressed themselves in terms of a vaguely defined 'azaadi'. India is one of the world's most liberal, freewheeling, outspoken polities and yet, when it comes to Kashmir, there is an astonishing lack of nerve and imagination.
Finally, it is quite clear that India is far from losing the war in Jammu and Kashmir; it is able to sustain the operation almost indefinitely, at enormous human cost of course. But it is just as far from winning. Indeed, perfectly patriotic mediapersons and other observers are increasingly of the view that a majority of the people is already inclining toward Independence rather than affiliation with either India or Pakistan, and that a point is fast approaching when there shall be no takers for autonomy, no matter how "maximum". This is this impasse that needs to be addressed, before it is altogether too late.
Fortunately for India, Pakistan is equally cornered. If state terror is making life difficult for India in the eyes of the international community, sponsorship of not just "cross-border terrorism" but of the worst kind of jehadi fundamentalists who are carrying out this terror, has isolated it from foreign countries and threatens to rip apart its own social fabric. If the Deobandi Sunni extremists can happily set the shrine of Charar-e-Sharif ablaze because it is connected with Kashmir's own traditions of Sufic Islam, their friends are part of the marauding militias terrorising the Shia population within Pakistan itself. If Iran is enraged by this Sunni rampaging against the Shia and the shielding of the culprits by the Taliban, Pakistan's own Interior Minister had submitted to the Taliban lists of dozens of these Sunni fundamentalist terrorists who are hiding in Afghanistan and are at the top of the Wanted lists within Pakistan.
The U.S. crusade against "Islamic fundamentalism", with all its opportunisms, is well known. However, an extraordinary international consensus is also evolving. China, for example, took the initiative in bringing together Russia and some smaller countries on the Afghan border into the Shanghai Five (now Six) because they are all threatened by those same militias which are spawned by Afghanistan but also have extensive ties with the Pakistani militias. This too poses an immense problem for Pakistan which is already disenchanted with the Americans but has always considered China as its most indispensable strategic ally. Can it afford to lose that friendship for the sake of a bunch of Islamicist hotheads?
No Pakistani ruler can for long accept this increasing isolation and pressure from virtually every quarter of the world without looking for a way out, unless the ruler is himself possessed by fundamentalist delirium, which is not the case with Musharraf. His dilemma is that he is a secular officer - politically authoritarian but socially liberal and enlightened - who is nevertheless running a state machine which uses the jehadi groups as a main instrument of policy against its neighbours. At what point does an instrumentality become an unacceptable liability? Musharraf seems to recognise that the point has already arrived, and my hunch is that he is looking for a safe way out. India should not doubt his intentions on this score but should keep two things in mind.
ONE is that he is an ambitious man and, lacking the popular legitimacy of a democratic order, his love of power shall constantly push him into compromises with the Islamicist establishment every time he feels that he is risking too much. Musharraf is no hero; if he cannot crush them, he might well be tempted to join them. Secondly, it is also a fact that the jehadi establishment in Pakistan is very extensive indeed, in both the civilian and military spheres. To cite only one example: Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the Jamaat-e-Islami chief, called Musharraf a "traitor" and openly called upon the "patriotic corps" commanders to remove him; he could do nothing to the Qazi. One heard in Pakistan at that time that Lt.General Usmani and Lt.Gen Aziz were particularly close to the Jamaat-e-Islami. It might or might not be significant that these were the two most senior officers of the Army who did not attend the oath-taking ceremony when Musharraf assumed the Presidency. More significant is the fact that we now know that the decision to assume the Presidency came in April, at a meeting attended by ISI chief Lt. Gen. Mahmood, Director-General Military Intelligence Lt.Gen. Ahsan and Chief of staff Lt.Gen. Yousuf, but neither Lt.Gen. Aziz nor Lt.Gen. Usmani is known to have attended that meeting. In context, then, it is not at all clear whether his assumption of the Presidency is a sign of strength or of weakness. Rafiq Tarar, whom he summarily removed from the Presidency, is a notorious member of the fundamentalist fraternity; in an earlier incarnation, Tarar was a judge on the Sharia bench and was much given to approving amputation of limbs and other such corporeal punishments. Did Musharraf suspect that he was vulnerable so long as Tarar was a constitutional head of state? And, was his move to assume the Presidency yet another pre-emptive coup, like the one he carried out against Sharif (with key assistance from Usmani, we might add)?
SO, how do we assess Musharraf as he comes to India for this historic summit? First we have to get rid of some past prejudices. Musharraf was by no means the lone architect of Kargil. Contingency planning for such an operation had been on the shelves well before he became the army chief. When, in the post-Chagai euphoria (and well before the Lahore yatra), it was finally decided to execute the plan, he was of course in charge but the whole of the Pakistani Establishment was in the know. Second, his coup (really a counter-coup) had little to do with Kargil or even India generally. The army was enraged by the way Sharif had peremptorily dismissed Jehangir Karamat, the previous chief, and closed ranks behind their new chief when Sharif tried to remove Musharraf in even more high-handed fashion. Third, there is no reason to believe that he has wanted to pursue a particularly hard line in relation to India. All Pakistani rulers have had an extraordinarily consistent policy toward India, with minor fluctuations here and there, and Musharraf belongs in that mainstream. However, we also know from Majid Dar himself that it was in March 2000, barely five months after Musharraf took power, that the Hizbul Mujahideen had first decided to make a ceasefire offer which only materialised some three months later. Since then, Musharraf has been more forthcoming on issues of de-escalation in Jammu and Kashmir than his predecessors and he has sought a summit much more fervently than India has, but without raising false hopes.
The leaders of the three mass parties in Pakistan are cooling their heels abroad, wallowing in all the wealth they have amassed through corruption that has since been well-documented; they shall either not return or return under Musharraf's own umbrella. There is absolutely no political challenge to Musharraf's power, as we saw in the utter lack of popular protest against his assumption of the Presidency. That the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), along with their rag-tag allies, would not attend the all-party meeting he had called to garner support before his India trip was only to be expected. What was surprising was that even they clarified that their opposition was to his assumption of the Presidency and not his travel to India in search of peace. Invitations were in any case sent and 20 of the 24 who were invited did attend. The most significant fact, however, was that he received the blessings of an impressive cross-section of the Islamicist establishment itself, most notably by Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the influential Deobandi leader of a powerful faction Jamiatul Ulema-e-Islami (JUI) who has close connection with the Taliban and had recently approved of the destruction of the Bamiyan sculptures in Afghanistan. (The leader of the other faction, Maulana Noorani, actually represented the religious establishment in the meeting itself.) Speaking one day before the meeting, the good Maulana described the upcoming Summit as a "sensible step", urged Musharraf and Vajpayee not to remain "prisoners of the past", called upon the jehadi groups as well as the Indian Army to cease fire "for some time" (emphasis added), and endorsed the Iran-India pipeline. The whole of the secular, liberal spectrum in Pakistan has of course supported the initiative with great enthusiasm.
In other words, Musharraf today has more power and room for manoeuvre than any Pakistani ruler since Zia-ul-Haq, and he has overwhelming compulsions, domestic as well as international, economic as well as military, to seek normalisation. If he cannot start the process of normalisation, no one can. The Pakistan Army has powerful traditions of cohesion and unity behind the chief, and its officers share the perception that in a country where no other governing institution functions, the unity of the armed forces is the great bulwark against national collapse. There may well be grumbling and dissension but a coup against him in the foreseeable future is unlikely; if one comes, Pakistan shall descend into full-scale chaos anyway and there shall be no one left to negotiate with.
If a deal is to be struck with Pakistan, the time is now. Will the real Mr. Vajpayee please stand up?
