The honesty deficit

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif made a reasonable address at the UNGA. In normal circumstances it would have been considered a statesman-like speech. He addressed the future, proposed to resolve the past and mentioned the present. As the directors of the project, Messrs Aizaz, Fatmi and Lodhi can be satisfied with the product. But what got the PM in a bind was his own past – and the recent one at that.
The guffaw at Ufa needed a resolute performance at the next such opportunity, and that came via the UNGA platform. What should have been said at Ufa – and was not – was finally stated in New York. That made the occasion, the venue, and the composition misplaced and ill-timed – precisely months late. If Modi and his team of major and minor mandarins, including Sushma Swaraj, scoffed, it was as much expected as it was planned. The I of India comes before the P of Pakistan, which would have meant India speaking in an early turn, but they conveniently entered their foreign minister as their nominee to speak and got the chance to follow the prime minister of Pakistan in a designed and a planned rebuttal.
In both cases, India and Pakistan were playing to their domestic galleries. As much, in addition, was the Pakistani side covering up for their misstep at Ufa when the PM could not manage to even laterally slip in the ‘K’ word. Why they agreed to a joint statement at all at Ufa will forever remain a mystery. You can meet, talk, and not declare till you are actually ready to, and avoid making a spectacle of it. Along the way, in the preceding years, Pakistanis – in due deference to Indian sentiments – had begun calling their ‘core issue’ in simple, symbolic terms as the ‘K’ word. Where else in the world would you get such compliance?
Imagine the expectations that we infuse in our people on how crucial and core each issue is to our national existence, and how we raise the spectre of the consequences in our discourse if these are not given due attention by the world at large. And then, how easily we succumb to the slightest inducement of an engagement delivered with such suavity and sophistry that we willingly shed all pretensions and convictions at the peril of what we swear by. We have continued to fall for the possibility of a ‘dialogue’ repeatedly, paying for it by an induced numbness of a softening rhetoric till we are made to appear without clothes before the world; and shamed at home when we get found out. This gives cause to more guffaws, in New York.
Don’t get me wrong. When you want to resolve issues, what the PM stated on Kashmir is roughly what will shape the course of such a resolution; but why wouldn’t there be any takers for such an offer? First, I don’t think the world believes us, or at least our seriousness on what we say. If we quote Kashmir, Siachen and the LoC to paint India in a bad light, the Indians retort with terrorism and the LoC, again, to prove our insidiousness. Earlier they only had Mumbai to prove their point, now they have added to their repertoire courtesy some home-grown enactment at Gurdaspur and Udhampur. We are late to the game of dossiers, and have produced some, finally, in evidence of the Indian mischief in Balochistan and Fata via Afghanistan.
How much weight these will carry is only a matter of conjecture. With the speech or without the speech, with the dossiers or without the dossiers, it was not exactly that the world was falling over itself to get involved in the India-Pakistan quagmire. They have, as always, kept their distance – smiling away the juvenile quibble, and proving the point that whatever these two countries do is mostly driven by their domestic branding.
The trouble is also in how India perceives its relations with Pakistan. From bilateralism, the mantra that gave India exclusive hold over what to talk about, when to talk or whether to talk at all, they have now graduated to the point of believing that they actually do not want to talk at all with Pakistan. They realise that were they to talk with Pakistan, whenever, it will be on a list of issues which will require India to give something away as a result of the intended resolution. Who in their right (Indian) mind will give up what they already own? That is the problem with the current format on how the issues between India and Pakistan are framed. It is time to rethink the terms of engagement and make intended resolutions mutually gainful. Old wine will not do.
On Kashmir, it is the remaining part of the state; hence the refrain of atoot-ang. The Indians have instead begun to eye what we own. They unabashedly extend their claim to the northern areas and have successfully had international funding for Diamer-Bhasha stalled – claiming it to be ‘disputed’ territory. Somehow such formulation has missed our attention. Whatever India does on the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab, even within the run-of-the-river construct, also happens to be in a disputed region. Pakistan too must raise sufficient noise to seek parity in treatment; otherwise the certainty of Indian investment already made in permanent structures could alter the case to its advantage were any adjudication sought on the issue.
Siachen is India’s intended gateway to reclaiming the Aksai Chin. As it holds its position on the ridges, it sets itself north-west of Pt 9842 towards Indra Kol which will bring the ceded areas of the larger Aksai Chin in its contiguous proximity. That way India can also keep Pakistan’s north in play, casting a virtual shadow over the extended regions of Kashmir. It is in this backdrop that it objects to the CPEC. India finds support of its position, for the world at large is wary of the expanding Chinese influence. There is also the minor matter of Hillary’s new Silk Route vs China’s Old Silk Route. Were Hillary Clinton to become America’s new president in 2016, what are semantics now may just flip into a competitive discomfort.
Modi and his men are a problem too. Ajit Doval is an operator who has been given the keys to the Pakistan policy. When ‘operators’ design ‘policy’, it usually spells disaster. That is why there is no respite in the cycle of violence that continues to bedevil both countries in a tit-for-tat resort at the LoC and the Working Boundary. This leaves space for evil genius to contrive hostilities and hate between the two countries. As in Pakistan now, where India is spoken of once again as an enemy country – I may add as a reflux to the continuing venom from across the border – it is a test of patriotism in India to demonise Pakistan. The currency is hate. So much so that politicians in trouble at home use it as a magic potion to exorcise political demons. Both PMs Modi and Sharif are guilty of the act.
Sushma Swaraj is a livewire. In 2001, when Musharraf almost brokered a breakthrough at Agra, and gave away almost all, it was this wily wielder of influence that kept hopping from one media-camp to another insinuating Musharraf’s overreach at the breakfast the day before. Ultimately, the sprightly Swaraj and some of her more belligerent colleagues denied India, and Musharraf, their moment of truce.
As the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, she was never the diligent deliberator but an impulsive grandstander. At the UN she took that role literally. One wonders how Hina Rabbani Khar would dealt with her? And why can’t we have Khar back as the foreign minister? It just might turn some good magic on. If not bilateralism, some bipartisanism at home may just be the cure we need.
Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com