Too clever by half

The situation between India and Pakistan may not be bleak, as Pakistani spokeswoman Tasnim Aslam clarified on Monday, but it is most certainly grim. The chill is manifest in the distinct dip in the euphoria surrounding the tour of the Indian cricket team in Pakistan, prefaced by the alacrity with which New Delhi announced that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will not be visiting Pakistan to watch any of the matches.

It was just last April when the Indian leader and Pervez Musharraf, who had come to New Delhi, incidentally on the occasion of a cricket match, had declared that the peace process was now irreversible. Perhaps it still is, but things appear to be moving at a glacial pace. On the Indian side, a spate of high-profile terrorist attacks have roiled the atmosphere between the two countries. Pakistan, for its part, complains that India is not responding to the ideas that they have offered to resolve the Kashmir dispute.

Take the terrorist activity first. The attack on the site of the Babri masjid came shortly after the intelligence services had thwarted an attack on the Indian Military Academy in Dehradun. Then came the Diwali eve bomb blasts in Delhi, followed by the attack in Bangalore at the Indian Institute of Sciences. The surge of infiltration across the LoC in the wake of the October 8 earthquake would have been bad enough. But what has been disturbing is the sight of the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba, the suspect on most Indian terrorist attacks, openly functioning in ‘Azad Kashmir’ as an Islamic charity.

When pressed to respond in an interview this week with Karan Thapar, all Musharraf could argue was that it was not the same organisation, it was the Jamaat-ud Dawa. When told it had merely changed its name after being banned, the general’s lame response was “No, yes, I know that but it is not a banned organisation.” Pakistan’s too-clever-by-half denials about its continuing support to terrorist attacks aimed at India are as big a problem as the attacks themselves.

Islamabad’s grouse, expressed in the same interview and separately by its official spokeswoman is that India is not responding to its proposal for demilitarisation of key areas of Srinagar, Baramulla and Kupwara, followed by self-governance for the state.

Pakistan is clearly once again pursuing the tactic of insisting that “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is negotiable.” This is, of course, an old method, used successfully from the very outset when Pakistan invaded the state and occupied one-third of it. Then, with the help of Britain and the US in the United Nations, it succeeded in getting resolutions passed that would have subject the region to a plebiscite.

Here again, the ploy was apparent. The Pakistanis wanted the commitments made by India to be pressed, while avoiding accepting their own obligations. This was most manifest in the response to the main August 13, 1948, resolution that called for a ceasefire, a withdrawal of Pakistani forces, followed by a reference to the will of the people of the state. Pakistan rejected this resolution.

According to Josef Korbel, it “had so many reservations, qualifications and assumptions that the commission had to consider its answers as ‘tantamount to rejection’.” But in the ensuing months and years, Pakistan was able, with the help of its Western friends, to ensure that a plebiscite did not take place, in the terms set out by the UN resolutions.

In the meantime, Pakistan has held on to the parts of Kashmir it had occupied without as much as a by-your-leave. Even today, the western part — the so-called ‘Azad Kashmir’ — has had some form of representative government, while the Northern Areas of Gilgit and Baltistan have had none. They are neither legally parts of Pakistan, nor independent entities, yet they are under the physical control of Islamabad.

A variation of this tactic is the ease with which Pakistani governments uphold or abandon agreements. In 1972 in Simla, when Pakistan managed to get 90,000 prisoners-of-war back, with the verbal promise that it would convert the Line of Control into an international border. Bhutto was able to successfully play on India’s fears that harsh peace terms would undermine his civilian government. Subsequent Pakistani governments repudiated the commitment.

But we need not go that far to see this tendency. On February 1999, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif signed the Lahore agreement with India. But his successor, General Musharraf, repudiated it and insisted on negotiating a separate deal. After one misstep in Agra, he did sign one on January 6, 2004, and now he wants India to modify and amend that agreement. The January 6 agreement contained in a joint press statement noted Prime Minister Vajpayee’s view that “to take forward and sustain the dialogue process, violence, hostility and terrorism must be prevented”, while it also noted that President Musharraf “reassured Vajpayee that he will not permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner”.

Musharraf’s most recent remarks on ‘self-governance’ with ‘demilitarisation’ appear to be an effort to impose retroactive conditions on the January 6 agreement. As indeed do his comments on the status of terrorist organisations who have merely changed their names.

The part of J&K held by India provides a far greater degree of autonomy and self-rule as compared to the two areas controlled by Pakistan. New Delhi remains committed to bettering the arrangements through negotiations. But a self-governing entity cannot have an international personality. It still requires someone to look after its defence, foreign affairs and currency. In the Karan Thapar interview, there are suggestions from the general that there could be some sort of an India-Pakistan condominium over J&K. This idea is unlikely to have much traction in India, at least not in the near term that Pakistan remains a military-dominated political system.

In the long history of efforts to resolve the problem, a key feature of the Pakistani effort has been overreach. This happened right at the outset when it sent tribal raiders to capture the state. Later, it was visible again as Pakistan ducked and weaved to prevent a plebiscite taking place in the years immediately after the ceasefire. In 1963, it was apparent when Bhutto summarily rejected a generous Indian partition offer by an insulting counter-offer — India could keep the Kathua tehsil in Jammu, roughly one-tenth of the state, and allow Pakistan to take the rest, including the Hindu-majority Jammu city. Sadly, what we are witnessing now is yet another instance of the temptation — or the folly — of overreach.

In 1953, Nehru wrote to his Pakistani counterpart Mohammed Ali  Bogra, “We are not going to solve this problem by mere cleverness or trying to overreach each other. We are also not going to settle it by coercive processes, whether they are of the nature of war or some other. Nor can they be settled by coercion exercised on the people of Kashmir...” In Nehru’s view, there was need to craft a settlement that would not leave any bitterness in either India or Pakistan, as well as take into account the need to maintain communal peace.

If there are people in Pakistan who feel that minus the instrumentality of the gun, India will not negotiate, there are also those in India who are allergic to doing so with a gun pointed at their heads. New Delhi is not unaware of the need to complete the discussion it began with Kashmiri opinion that led to the Delhi agreement of 1952, the Beg-Parthasarthy accord in 1975 and the autonomy resolutions of the J&K assembly,. But it cannot do so as long as the gun dictates the discourse.

Nehru was right when he situated the Kashmir solution in the evolution of a larger India-Pakistan relationship. There is no way in which the two countries can resolve their problems over Kashmir, minus a larger reconciliation. And this cannot happen unless there is a significant reorientation of Pakistan towards the principles of liberal democracy, away from the chimera of exceptionalism.