Roadblocks to a summit

The soured relations between India and Pakistan make the fate of next year's South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit, scheduled to be held in Islamabad, uncertain.

UNTIL a couple of months ago, senior officials of the External Affairs Ministry had indicated that the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) summit would be held in Islamabad as scheduled. A senior official said in September that despite the tense bilateral relations, New Delhi would not like to give Islamabad an opportunity to score a point in the propaganda war. Other SAARC member-countries have not been too happy with India's attitude towards the regional economic grouping for quite some time. They see New Delhi's obduracy as the main reason for the repeated postponement of SAARC summits and the slow progress towards the goal of regional integration.

Indian officials had said that attending the summit in Islamabad would in no way indicate a mellowing of New Delhi's attitude towards Islamabad. They had pointed out that bilateral issues were never raised or discussed at SAARC summits. The focus was always on economic issues, they said. But the very fact that the Indian Prime Minister would visit Pakistan had raised hopes regarding the resumption of the dialogue process between the two belligerent neighbours, a development that the international community and India's immediate neighbours have been wanting for some time now.

The India-Pakistan impasse has been one of the major factors stalling South Asian integration. In summit after summit, other South Asian leaders have called upon New Delhi and Islamabad to resolve their disputes so that the larger goal of South Asian unity can be achieved.

In October, Defence Minister George Fernandes and Minister of State for External Affairs Digvijay Singh had also said that the Prime Minister would visit Pakistan to attend the SAARC summit.

Pakistan, which is to host the summit this year, had indicated that it would like to hold the summit in the second week of January. All SAARC members except India and Bhutan had consented to the Pakistani proposal. New Delhi seems to have had a rethink on the issue lately. Many had expected the atmosphere to thaw after both India and Pakistan withdrew their forces from the border in October. Instead, there has been a noticeable hardening in India's diplomatic posture towards Islamabad.

Both Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Deputy Prime Minister L.K. Advani have been sharply critical of Gen. Pervez Musharraf's policies in recent weeks, virtually ruling out high-level bilateral talks in the near future. The Bush administration, which has acquired considerable clout in New Delhi in recent times, has been urging for a resumption of the dialogue process. After the recent elections in Pakistan, U.S. support for Musharraf has further strengthened, given the impressive performance by Islamic parties. American multi-national companies also have a vested interest in the return of normalcy in the region. U.S. oil companies have long been waiting to construct an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to India. This would have to pass through Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The official reason being given for India's reluctance to participate in the SAARC summit is the lack of progress in regional economic integration. India blames Pakistan saying that it is not "serious" about regional economic integration. Pakistan fears that if it throws open its doors to Indian goods, its beleaguered economy will collapse under the pressure that would generate. The Indian side feels that Pakistan has not been too keen on the establishment of a South Asian Preferential Trade Arrangement (SAPTA) and the eventual goal of establishing a free trade area in the region. Other SAARC members, however, feel that differences over the economic agenda should not be a reason for scuttling SAARC summits. A senior-level SAARC meeting held in Kathmandu in the first week of November aimed at hammering out an agreement on SAPTA ended inconclusively.

NEW DELHI had refused to attend the SAARC summits in 2000 and 2001 as Vajpayee did not want to share a platform with Musharraf in the aftermath of the Kargil War. According to the SAARC charter, summits can be held only if there is a consensus, and all member-countries will have to participate. Indian officials have, however, kept the door open. They are waiting to see the type of government that would assume office in Islamabad. External Affairs Minister Yashwant Sinha, speaking to reporters in Phnom Penh during the recent India-ASEAN summit, said that "there was no government yet in Pakistan and we do not know who is attending the (SAARC) summit". If the new Pakistani Prime Minister is from one of the militant Islamist parties, New Delhi may keep stalling diplomatically.

Indian officials say that they are waiting to see the steps the new Pakistani government will take to curb "cross-border" terrorism. They made it clear that if somebody like the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam's leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman is appointed the new Prime Minister, the chances of Vajpayee visiting Islamabad for the summit will diminish further. Rehman has toned down many of his hardline positions. Recently, he said that he accepted the Simla Agreement as the basis for dialogue on the Kashmir issue.

New Delhi also wants Islamabad to take steps on the issue of tariff concessions for Indian goods. It was agreed at the Kathmandu summit last year that a draft treaty framework towards the establishment of a South Asian Free Trade Area would be finalised before the end of this year.

A Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman said that progress on the economic front depended to a large extent on the resolution of political differences between the two countries. Islamabad insists that it acted "responsibly" on the issue. The spokesman said that India had tried to bring to the SAARC process extraneous bilateral elements such as Pakistan according MFN (most favoured nation) status to India. "Pakistan made a substantive offer of tariff concessions on a number of tariff lines identified by India. This offer was motivated by a genuine desire to undertake meaningful cooperation under SAARC and to ensure a successful conclusion of the SAPTA meeting. India, however, refused to present its List of Concessions to Pakistan as per the agreed agenda," the Pakistani foreign policy spokesman said in a statement.

Indian officials also point out that no specific date for next year's SAARC summit was announced at the Kathmandu summit. They say that the only understanding was that the summit would be held some time in early 2003.

Islamabad, on the other hand, has accused New Delhi of raising extraneous issues" and issuing "conflicting and misleading" statements. "India's reluctance to deal with Pakistan under the SAARC framework and its suggestion during the SAPTA meeting to handle economic cooperation issues bilaterally or under other forums is a manifestation of its desire to scuttle the SAARC process, which in any case remained suspended for close to three years due to Indian intransigence,'' the Pakistani statement said. It added that the Indian government's whimsical attitudes towards SAARC also "betray its policy to impose India's political and economic hegemony on South Asia".

The killing of two "Pakistani terrorists" by the Delhi Police in the first week of November and L.K. Advani implying that Islamabad was behind the plot, has further soured the relations (see separate story on page 45). Islamabad has reacted by characterising Advani's comments as baseless and symptomatic of "a deep malaise that afflicts the Hindu fundamentalist leadership".

AS the war of words continued, Islamabad received a diplomatic setback when the Commonwealth Foreign Ministers upheld Pakistan's suspension from the organisation. In a meeting in London in the last week of October, the Foreign Ministers said that the Pakistani government had not completed the transfer of power from military to civilian authorities despite the holding of general elections in early October. The military coup in 1999 had led to Islamabad's suspension from the Commonwealth.

Member-countries such as Australia and the United Kingdom wanted the Commonwealth to reward America's best ally in the region for the conduct of the October elections. The majority of the African countries, along with India, did not go along with this view. "The benchmark for Pakistan is the restoration of democracy. No government is in place. We don't know how many of the executive powers held by the President are going to be transferred to the elected Parliament," said Mompati Merafhe, the Foreign Minister of Botswana and the Chairman of the eight-member Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG).

The Ministers agreed that Pakistan should remain suspended until they had a clearer picture of "the role and functioning of the democratic institutions". Commonwealth observers had only given qualified approval to the October elections, declaring the voting on election day as "credible" while describing the overall process as "unfair". Yashwant Sinha said in London that despite the "referendum" and the "elections", Pakistan did not fulfil the conditions necessary for revoking its suspension from the Commonwealth.