The Pakistan-India logjam

Legal eye
History shows that countries - like individuals - have an amazing capacity to pursue mindless short-sighted policies even in the face of the general recognition that such policies produce nothing but wretchedness for their people.
The current state of hostility between India and Pakistan confirms the ability of states to be dogged in stupidity. Imagine that in these countries (comprising over 1.2 billion people with umpteen challenges and tremendous potential), pride and shame hang over which prime minister took more steps towards the other before a handshake.
What is clear from what was said and what wasn’t during Nawaz Sharif’s trip to India to attend Narendra Modi’s swearing-in, and now from the Pakistan-India joint statement issued at Ufa, is that Sharif is more eager to kick-start the peace process than Modi and more willing to offer compromises unilaterally in relation to India-Pakistan peace talks. During Sharif’s trip to India in 2014 he didn’t meet Kashmiri leaders, he didn’t raise the Kashmir issue with Modi and the K word found no mention in his pre-departure statement or any other statement in India.
Once back home, in the face of bitter criticism, the Prime Minister’s Office forced the Foreign Office to go into overdrive to reaffirm Pakistan’s commitment to the Kashmir cause and somehow create the illusion that the Kashmir issue was implicitly there somewhere all this time. Subsequently, Pakistan’s high commissioner to India convened a meeting with Kashmiri leaders in Delhi. In an angry reaction to the meeting, India cancelled the agreed foreign secretary level talks that were to be held in August 2014.
The wide dissemination of the Indian national security adviser’s views endorsing sponsorship of terror as a preferred means to get even with Pakistan and Modi’s proud acknowledgment in Bangladesh that India helped break Pakistan up sullied the environment further. Prior to Ufa, Pakistan’s high commissioner to India was obliged to revoke an iftar invite issued to Kashmiri leaders. The joint statement in Ufa highlighted the need to fight terror (which in the India-Pakistan context everyone understands to mean Pakistan curtailing its jihadists) and expedite the Mumbai case trial. But Kashmir found no mention – again.
So for a second time in a year, once Sharif returned to Pakistan after meeting with Modi the need for damage control was acutely felt. In his press conference Sartaj Aziz exhorted that Kashmir was at the top of Pakistan’s agenda for talks and there could be no peace talks without Kashmir on the table. Pakistan’s high commissioner to India also hurriedly extended an Eid Milan invite to Kashmiri leaders, which one of them has refused to attend to protest Pakistan’s failure to highlight Kashmir in Ufa.
Our hawks would have us believe that anyone willing to reconsider our traditional position (ie implementation of UN Security Council resolutions in letter and spirit) is selling out Kashmir almost as if it might be handed to us on a platter any minute by the UN. These folks (and they are in abundance on both sides of the fence) need to be ignored and their narrative challenged and defeated if there is to be peace in this region. Every realist understands that the India-Pakistan peace process won’t succeed on the basis of maximalist positions.
The decolonising world that saw UN resolutions on Kashmir being passed back in the day was very different from the world we live in today with limited appetite for redrawing boundaries. General Musharraf moved us away from our traditional position on Kashmir, while making a bona fide effort to resolve this long festering dispute, and there is no going back to the original position now. So it isn’t Sharif’s Kashmir policy per se, but his treatment of this foundational dispute as symptomatic of his overall approach to the peace process that is problematic.
Pakistan and India haven’t been peaceable towards each other since their creation. Those in charge of these countries have had their consciousness nurtured in an environment of acrimony and are used to the status quo. The weight of this conflict is already being borne by the populations and they have neither reaped nor yet imagined the benefits peace would offer. Equally importantly, the people of India and Pakistan are cut from the same cloth: they can exhibit generosity of spirit if appropriately inspired and can be petty when entangled in false bravado, primitive notions of honour and delusions of grandeur.
And this is where individual leaders at the helm become relevant. Why did successive American presidents continue the vacuous policy of clamping down on Cuba that Obama just ended? Could a Bush-led US and an Ahmedinejad-led Iran clasp the nuclear deal that a conservative yet pragmatic Rouhani and the charismatic Obama have concluded? Peace in the Subcontinent will only be possible when India and Pakistan are led by leaders who genuinely believe that their respective countries are being held back by resolvable disputes and who are willing to liquidate some of their political clout in pursuit of this larger good.
It appears that Sharif wishes peace with India to be part of his legacy. This is a worthy ambition. But can he do it alone? We know it takes two to tango. So in order to do what he wishes to do, Sharif needs Modi to meet him somewhere close to halfway. Is Modi the Indian leader committed enough to the ideal of peace to be willing to absorb the abuse of Indian hawks and cash out his political clout in making compromises with Pakistan? Has Modi done anything so far that leads one to believe that he is interested in a deal with Pakistan and able and willing to sell it to India the way Obama is selling the Iran deal to America?
Modi’s ascendency could have been a source of optimism for India-Pakistan peace. But only if his paramount object was fast-paced economic growth for India, only if he believed that this wasn’t possible with clouds of war hovering over the Subcontinent, and only if to achieve this end he was willing to rally his conservative support base as opposed to pandering to their raw emotion. The contrast between Sharif and Modi couldn’t be starker: Modi creates opportunities to chide and rebuke Pakistan; Sharif doesn’t even want to mention Kashmir to avoid Modi’s ire.
So let’s assume that Sharif’s strategy of enticing Modi into peace talks works and the two countries start talking again. What can Pakistan expect to get out of the process if getting into it requires not mentioning the root cause of our dispute with India? To the objective observer it would appear that both Pakistan and India see India merely engaging in peace talks as doing Pakistan a favour. This would be ok if Pakistan believed that the growing disparity between the two countries is such that later it might not even be possible to get the existing status quo legitimised.
But we are not there yet. A majority in Pakistan is unwilling to move away from our stated position, even if we realise that our formal position isn’t realistically attainable. There would then be two roads to peace. A: both India and Pakistan show flexibility, back off from stated positions and make compromises. And B: Pakistan unilaterally yields to the Indian position. The first option requires leadership in India as eager about peace as that in Pakistan, which there isn’t. And the second requires such disparity of power between the two countries that Pakistan has no option but to yield completely, which isn’t the case either.
The question for Sharif then is: should he burn valuable political capital in betting on the not-so-unpredictable Modi?
The writer is a lawyer based in Islamabad.
Email: sattar@post.harvard.edu