After all the emotional froth that preceded the Summit and the waffling that followed, equations between India and Pakistan take on the familiar ring of antagonism.
FOR all their apparent futility, bilateral engagements between India and Pakistan have in recent times managed to produce a steady stream of diplomatic cliches, which may come as welcome respite for those who have had enough of the invective that was till recently the official currency in such exchanges. "Friendly and very useful" was the official summation of the 75-minute meeting between the Foreign Secretaries of the two governments in Colombo, on the sidelines of a conference of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). By all accounts, what happened behind the scenes is that India served notice on Pakistan that it was time to end the unseemly self-congratulation over the propaganda victory in Agra and renew the focus on substantive issues. The recent killings of civilians in Jammu and Kashmir had engendered extremely negative sentiments at the public and political levels, said Indian Foreign Secretary Chokila Iyer. And there could be no terminological waffling over the nature of these heinous deeds. With the generous foreign assistance that was going into the planning and execution of these acts, no description could be more accurate than "cross-border terrorism".
The future content and character of bilateral relations was entirely a matter of Pakistan's choice, said Chokila Iyer. But a minimum requirement for progress was a demonstrated commitment from that side on curbing cross-border terrorism. The status of Kashmir had little to do with bilateral relations, though Pakistan had the resources necessary to make a material difference to the situation of strife and suffering in Jammu and Kashmir. Significantly, in reasserting the well-worn list of India's demands on Pakistan, Chokila Iyer also decisively shut the door on the impression that India had been on the verge of conceding, at the verbal plane, that Kashmir was a 'dispute' or an 'issue' deserving priority over all others.
On its side, Pakistan deplored the Foreign Secretary's very public statements as "unhelpful" to the cause of better bilateral ties. But significantly, in briefings to the Pakistan media, official spokespersons were at pains to emphasise that many of the proposals advanced by India - including nuclear risk reduction, confidence building measures, facilitation of contacts between the people of the two countries and regular interactions between the military establishments to ensure the cessation of hostile activities on the international border and line of control - were under consideration. It is not yet clear whether there has been a retreat from the "Kashmir only" agenda that Pakistan brought to the negotiating table in Agra. But clearly there are some compulsions on their side now for a meaningful dialogue that is not held hostage to either side's most extreme vulnerabilities.
As in the case of most other meetings between India and Pakistan, the Foreign Secretaries went into the Colombo encounter with no agreed agenda. There was an expectation, though, that some groundwork would be done in preparation for two high-level visits from the Indian side to Pakistan - first by External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh and then by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. But the progress on this count was cursory. Chokila Iyer conveyed India's acceptance of the invitation from Pakistan for the ministerial visit as also for summit-level contact. Pakistan Foreign Secretary Inamul Haq conveyed his side's sense of anticipation over the promised visits. But firm schedules, it was agreed, would need to be finalised after much further discussion.
Addressing various segments of their domestic constituencies, both Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh have been keen to deflate Pakistan's claims that Agra was a symbolic triumph for its position. Responding to criticism from Opposition benches in the Lok Sabha about a lack of preparation for the Agra Summit, Jaswant Singh sought to reverse the onus. Contrary to such impressions, he said, it was the Indian side that had made all the concrete proposals to set down an agenda prior to the Agra event. However, repeated such efforts met with a lack of enthusiasm from the Pakistan side. For Jaswant Singh, the inference that could be drawn from this was very clear: that "the Pakistan establishment until the last was not clear because (it) had not been taken into full confidence by the President of Pakistan...".
When it came to the choice of venue, the Indian side had proposed that the ceremony in Delhi be kept to a minimum, so that the two leaders would have ample time to retreat to a more congenial venue for the serious deliberations. Goa was a location that India proposed. But Pakistan, said Jaswant Singh, was insistent that the visiting President should spend a whole day in Delhi, following which the discussions could shift to Agra.
Having conceded this much on the choice of venue and the scheduling of talks, India proposed that the cloistered dialogue at the apex between the visiting Pakistan President, General Pervez Musharraf, and Prime Minister Vajpayee, must be followed by a broader discussion between the two delegations. This perfectly unexceptionable suggestion too, in Jaswant Singh's narration, seemed to take the Pakistan side by surprise. They only began making the notes for the intervention by their President as Vajpayee began the proceedings by reading out from a prepared text, laying out all the areas of concern for the Indian side.
What India confronted in Agra, said Jaswant Singh in evident exasperation, was a negotiating situation not in a diplomatic context, but in one of "military simplicism": "The President of Pakistan never fights shy of extolling the virtues of soldierly qualities. He is not at all hesitant or inhibited in putting across the attribute of soldierly directness. We all greatly admired the soldierly qualities." Pausing for a bit of banter with the Opposition on his own military service credentials, Jaswant Singh proclaimed that India too did not lack soldierly qualities. But what was required in Agra was not "soldierly directness". Rather what needed to be done was to address the complex issues involving the "mistakes of history" and the "sentiments of the peoples". Carefully, Jaswant Singh underlined that the question of Jammu and Kashmir was a question involving several "peoples" with diverse cultural affiliations and different political aspirations.
Jaswant Singh also revealed details of the negotiating record in Agra that have so far remained obscure. He has claimed that the Indian team had a draft text ready by the evening of July 15, which was put forward to the Pakistan counterparts for approval. There was a suggestion that the two delegations could sit together through the evening so that final agreement could be reached prior to the banquet that was being hosted later that day by the Governor of Uttar Pradesh. The Pakistan delegation, in Jaswant Singh's narration, simply would not accept the proposed time-frame. This, he claims, is clear evidence that they were not really sure what they wanted out of the Summit. Finally, the delegations managed to put their heads together after the banquet and work through the night, so that a draft text - with a number of bracketed items indicating lack of consensus - was ready by 4-30 a.m. on July 16. But then, Jaswant Singh claimed, the Pakistan President came up with the perfectly outlandish proposal that he would personally sit with Vajpayee to iron out the differences. This was not acceptable to the Indian delegation, and from then on the talks were seemingly doomed to failure.
Needless to say, the version that Jaswant Singh has laid out before Parliament differs in crucial respects with the account that the Pakistan side has been freely giving out. Although Vajpayee himself did not give any further elaboration on the detailed narration of the External Affairs Minister, he identified the moment that the talks began to meander into a slough of futility at a much earlier point. This happened on the first day when Pakistan refused to acknowledge that it had any means of assuaging India's concerns on terrorism. And though Vajpayee was unwilling to reveal the details of his sequestered discussions with Musharraf, he did gather the distinct impression that his interlocutor from Pakistan had no inclination to talk of any issue other than Kashmir.
Although a shared vocabulary for productive dialogue was evidently missing at the Agra Summit, in the weeks following, there has been a curious symmetry in the concerns that India and Pakistan have expressed about their domestic situations. Addressing a seminar on "arms control" in Pakistan early in August, Musharraf seemingly borrowed a favoured word from the lexicon of Home Minister L.K. Advani. "Let me assure you," said Pakistan's military ruler, that "we will be conclusive, proactive and offensive after the completion of elections and we will search targeted areas and it will be done at all costs." This locution had the distinct echo of Advani's long-standing promise that he would adopt and encourage a "proactive" strategy in dealing with terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. In the days following, Musharraf adopted an equally tough line while addressing a special meeting of provincial Governors and federal government officials to deal with the problem of terrorism: "The government will not let terrorists spread scare and terror. My government shall not be deterred by such acts and we shall chase them till the last of the terrorists is apprehended."
As certain commentators in Pakistan wryly observed, even as Musharraf and his Interior Minister, Moinuddin Haider were engaging in tough talks on arms control, a "jehadist" outfit was out in strength in Karachi, flaunting its lethal weaponry under the watchful gaze and protection of the federal law enforcement agencies. The problem clearly has acquired endemic proportions, leading to a political analyst in The Nation to propose an ingenious solution: "An order should be given for the shifting of the so-called jehadi outfits along with their trained and undertraining cadres and their authorised arms and ammunition, to territories adjacent to where they are to operate. In any case, they should be required to leave the territorial limits of Pakistan, for no so-called jehad is to be fought in Pakistan."
Clearly, the mood within Pakistan suggests that Jaswant Singh's monitory warnings are uncomfortably close to the reality: "It is Pakistan that has to resolve the inner turmoil within its society, the sectarian violence. It is Pakistan that has to realise that if it continues to promote the kind of fundamentalism that it is promoting, it is unleashing a variety of medieval malevolence that can only harm it."
Jaswant Singh continued with a rather confident prognosis of India's ability to confront this challenge. He has also in recent times been repeatedly asserting that Kashmir is a symbol of India's commitment to a civic vision of nationalism rather than a denominational one. But if the government responds to the challenge of terrorism by disabling all civic institutions and arming its military forces with sweeping powers - as it has recently done - then it only undermines this claim.
After all the emotional froth that preceded the Agra Summit and the indecisive waffling that followed, Advani's statement of August 9 in the Lok Sabha restored the equations between India and Pakistan to the familiar pitch of antagonism: "It must be appreciated, that what we are fighting is a proxy war of multiple dimensions unleashed by an inimical neighbouring country which has had no qualms in rationalizing the brutal killing of innocent men, women and children as a 'freedom struggle'." In the rancorous and partisan debate that followed, the voice of reason, as articulated by Somnath Chatterji of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) was an isolated strain. What was missing in Kashmir, said the veteran MP from West Bengal, was trust and not the draconian powers that the armed forces have now been endowed with. But in the fraught atmosphere that has been engendered following the failed promise of Agra, such sage counsel is unlikely to win any adherents.
