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Friday March 29, 2024

Near war and peace

The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.Sushma Swaraj gave an interesting description in her presser on how talks between India and Pakistan have been framed in the Indian view. Understanding this peculiarity is fundamental to understanding the prospects for peace between the

By Shahzad Chaudhry
September 02, 2015
The writer is a retired air-vice marshal, former ambassador and a security and political analyst.
Sushma Swaraj gave an interesting description in her presser on how talks between India and Pakistan have been framed in the Indian view. Understanding this peculiarity is fundamental to understanding the prospects for peace between the two neighbours.
The ‘Composite Dialogue’ – a basket of eight issues that bedevil India-Pakistan relations – began in 1998. The two nations had gone overtly nuclear, and with eleven blasts between them had gate-crashed into the privileged world of nuclear-haves. It was in the aftermath of that that PM Vajpayee had decided on a Lahore yatra. Reality bit rational conscience hard on both sides and PM Vajpayee thought it better to talk than war; statesman-like.
1999 brought Kargil, and Musharraf trumped politics on both sides. Soon after he trumped Nawaz Sharif too and took charge. Before then two rounds of the Composite Dialogue had already been held. After Musharraf took over he pursued the Indians for resumption of the dialogue and invited himself in 2001 to Agra to accost PM Vajpayee. In all probability that is when he floated the four-point formula on the resolution of Kashmir as an initial feeler. Somewhere along the way, the Indians got apprehensive; perhaps a bit unnerved by the speed with which Musharraf moved to mend a broken relationship. Musharraf was a man in a hurry, knowing well what he had wrought on the two nations in the form of Kargil, and of having dented the detente of a strategic balance in South Asia.
The talks in Agra stalled – thanks to hawks like L K Advani and Sushma Swaraj in the BJP government. It wasn’t until 2004 that contact was re-established. Under Congress four further rounds were held in the second phase; Sushma Swaraj calls it, interestingly, ‘Resumed Dialogue’. You ‘resume’ what is ‘halted’. And, things ‘halt’ for a reason. Also, if you can resume once, you can resume again. Corollary: for the talks to ‘resume’, what ‘halts’ must be removed. What happened at Ufa, thus, begins to make sense.
Under Manmohan Singh, India warmed up to Musharraf. This is when the four-point solution of Kashmir began to trek and low-hanging fruits began to be spoken of. Not only did we hear that Sir Creek was almost resolved and simply awaiting a signature, we also heard – by none other than Manmohan himself – that Siachen is best turned into a Peace Park. Kashmir was already under the four-point process. Things haven’t been rosier in South Asia since those heady days. But then 2008 struck.
Who created Mumbai 2008 will remain a gaping hole in the chequered history of the two nations. Was it a jaded Musharraf who per some quoted agreements was to remain president even as the military rule was replaced, but was almost at the point of being impeached under the new civilian set-up when he resigned? Or was it in actuality non-state actors who, suspecting a pliable Zardari regime of the PPP which couldn’t be trusted with India, wished to redefine the paradigm of future India-Pakistan relations? In the event, practically every inch of progress that had come by a way of genuine possibility of turning the page was lost, probably for a long time. The dialogue process ‘halted’ perpetually.
Gradually, the vocabulary of interaction between the two nations underwent a change. The ‘low-hanging fruits’ were replaced with ‘deliverables’; and those in India working with their Pakistani colleagues on proposing solutions on Siachen in various Track-IIs were castigated to the point of being excommunicated. Positions hardened on both sides; even the Track-IIs became feisty and contentious.
On the ground the cumulative effect today is that the LoC and the Working Boundary have been actively violated on both sides since January, 2013 with loss of life and property now a routine affair. War, the way it was known, now not possible because of the nuclear dynamics, has been replaced with the coinages, ‘limited war’ – erroneously, since it defines a full war with limited aims, again not possible under a nuclear overhang – and ‘near war’ – a state of violent exchange as seen on the LoC and the Working Boundary, in accompaniment of RAW-fuelled insurgency in parts of Pakistan. This to perpetuate a continuing state of instability and uncertainty on the internal front. If this explains how we see Pakistan today, we happen to be in a state of ‘near war’ with India.
But this is a consequence, not a determinant; though it has the making of a new determinant. Which really means that South Asia could become even worse if every consequence becomes an agitator of further decline.
What then of Ufa and of the latest disaster of the cancelled NSA talks? When India began to phrase the interaction with Pakistan in terms of ‘deliverables’, it literally meant handing over or prosecuting Lakhvi and Co for Mumbai. Euphemistically, she leveraged the ‘dialogue’ with the progress on prosecuting and punishing the alleged Mumbai perpetrators. Today it will mean much more. India had its own set of deviants who did Samjhota, and then Makka Masjid, Malegaon etc, but Pakistan did not opt to convert those responsible into ‘deliverables’. This emerged less like altruism than an overt urge to somehow seek accommodation with India.
Asif Zardari made trips to India as did his ministers, betraying their unreserved romance with normalised relations. Not only was it the right thing to do on the face of it, it would also give the politicos a much stronger leverage in the civil-military equation within, when India was no longer the factor for the military’s extended influence in matters of the state. I have heard politicos betray such dependence by pitching for Indian indulgence.
Such supineness of the political and civilian elites in Pakistan, and their granting to India the leverage to help define internal equilibrium meant that India had found a backdoor entry into how it could influence events inside Pakistan. This only generated even more arrogance in India. It also entrenched the transactional nature of an evolving modus operandi – dialogue for deliverables.
As Pakistan held out and did not still cave in, the Indians upped the ante by cancelling the ‘Composite Dialogue’ construct, claiming it had run out of useful life. A desperate Pakistan began creating alternate options and offering it to their Indian counterparts. This further weakened Pakistan’s position in the Indian perception. Any chance that Pakistan could talk Kashmir, Siachen and Sir Creek with India was taken out of their reach. ‘Dialogue’, rather than being a means to an end, became an end in itself. Now a product, it began to be dangled for suitable favour.
And then came that final stroke: separating ‘terrorism’ from the basket of composite issues, unique in its criticality and equal to the composite seven that remained clumped. ‘Terrorism’ as an issue became a stream of the dialogue, with the other seven the second stream. If, thus, dialogue ensued and India chose to only talk terror that would still be dialogue under the larger rubric. Gradually, Pakistan even fell for this tactic.
There couldn’t have been greater desperation on display; such was the temptation of simply getting the dialogue started, somehow. This is what happened at Ufa. The prime minister would have said, ‘take what they offer; at least we will be talking. If they say, no Kashmir, we will not even mention it’. Sartaj Aziz said as much. In this case India chose to only talk ‘terror’.
Pakistan’s desperation to ‘talk’; its inability to fathom the greatly improving bargaining position of India, and India’s deeply embedded strategy to initially trivialise Kashmir as an issue and then to move it beyond the reach of Pakistan for any decent engagement on it is perhaps the most embarrassing diplomatic set-back for Pakistan. We traded the moral and legal strength in our argument on Kashmir to our amateurish fantasy of simply ‘talking’. Is it any surprise then that our corrective recourse is even more venom; the centrality of the military firmly in place?
Email: shhzdchdhry@yahoo.com