Both India and Pakistan damaged their international image during their foreign ministers’ meeting last week–the first ministerial since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks–by demonstrating mutual antipathy and refusing to begin a productive dialogue. This has disappointed many of their citizens who had hoped for better relations. Ordinary people suffer the most when bilateral relations sour and mistrust prevails.
Pakistani foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was far more blunt and abrasive than India’s S M Krishna. Qureshi undiplomatically said the Indian minister hadn’t come to Islamabad with a full mandate and had to consult New Delhi periodically on the phone.
Yet, this wasn’t the cause of the talks’ failure, but the effect. The talks failed because India and Pakistan couldn’t agree on the bilateral agenda and a timetable for discussing issues of mutual concern. This failure is large even by the standards of the volatile, fractious and often tense India-Pakistan relationship.
Regrettably, Indian home secretary G K Pillai set the stage for the breakdown in an interaction with Indian Express journalists. He maladroitly alleged that Indian interrogators had obtained irrefutable evidence from David Coleman Headley, a Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) operative detained in the US, that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency had plotted the Mumbai attacks.
The interrogation happened in June. Home Minister P Chidambaram was briefed on it and raised the issue with his counterpart Rahman Malik during his visit to Pakistan three weeks ago. Chidambaram returned assured that Malik “understood the situation and agreed that we should address [it] with the seriousness it deserves.” The issue was also discussed between the two nations’ foreign secretaries.
Pillai’s remarks couldn’t have been more ill-timed. Krishna also didn’t help matters by announcing in Islamabad: “I am here to see what action Pakistan has taken so far” on Headley’s confessions. It’s ludicrous to take the confessions of a terrorist collaborator, who is looking to be an approver, as clinching evidence.
Underlying such remarks was India’s preoccupation with getting Pakistan to crack down on terrorist groups like LeT. True, no Indian government can ignore the scars and trauma of the Mumbai attacks. This concern is understandable, but not to the point of virtually excluding all other issues and risking the talks’ failure. That’s exactly what happened.
India didn’t accommodate Pakistan’s concerns, including a structured dialogue leading to progress towards a Kashmir settlement, non-interference in Balochistan, improved cooperation within the Indus Water Treaty framework, and a settlement on Siachen.
All India offered to discuss–besides action against jihadi terrorists–is cross-border confidence-building measures, improved trade relations, and people-to-people contacts. These issues are unarguably pertinent. But it was unrealistic to expect Pakistan to shelve its own legitimate concerns.
Nor did India agree with Pakistan’s proposed schedule for secretary- and minister-level meetings. India was apparently apprehensive that Pakistan would use the timelines to resume the “composite dialogue”–as if Mumbai hadn’t happened.
In the end, the timelines clashed. Pakistan wanted all outstanding issues addressed in a time-bound manner. India felt the terror issue must first be comprehensively addressed “to inject a degree of normality into the situation,” as Indian officials put it. There was no agreement.
There were some sharp exchanges between Indian and Pakistani leaders. But these were badly exaggerated and distorted by the media. An Indian paper alleged that Qureshi had called Pillai a “clone” of LeT leader Hafiz Mohammed Saeed. In reality, Qureshi only said that Pillai’s remarks had come up during the talks and Krishna agreed that they were unhelpful.
But the media declared an irretrievable breakdown–another “Agra.” However, both sides have put a relatively positive spin on the outcome. Krishna even said he had confined himself to his mandate and “I am quite satisfied.”
Both India and Pakistan must draw some lessons from this episode. The greater lesson for India isn’t that it’s futile to try to engage with Pakistan–as many hawks argue–but that engagement should be wholehearted and cover all outstanding issues.
Secondly, rigidity on the terrorism question is counterproductive. India must recognise that a civilian Pakistani government that’s considered weak and pliant vis-a-vis India will be vulnerable to extremists.
This would be especially unfortunate just when Pakistan’s public is outraged at the Punjab Taliban’s attack on the Data Darbar shrine. This shrine is an integral part of the Sufi and Barelvi traditions and Punjab’s cultural identity. The Taliban’s harsh Salafi Islam is hostile to Sufism and shrine-worship and rejects all folk-Islamic traditions.
India must not overreact to Qureshi’s abrasive behaviour and put form and optics before substance. India has a huge stake in improved relations with Pakistan and in pressing its concerns with Islamabad patiently. Results from the dialogue process cannot come instantly. But if there’s no dialogue, negative outcomes are virtually guaranteed.
The lessons for Pakistan are no less important. Islamabad cannot credibly claim to be a responsible state which acts against jihadi terrorists if it persists with its two-faced strategy–of hunting with the Americans while running with (and shielding) the extremists.
The jihadis have used the support offered by Pakistan’s covert agencies to create independent power centres, which now threaten the public. As the jihadis increasingly become uncontrollable, Pakistan will pay for their depredations with innocent blood. It’s in Pakistan’s interest to put terrorism on the bilateral agenda with India–albeit without being seen to be caving in.
Second, the only way in which Pakistan’s civilian government can consolidate itself, and build on its recent gains in getting the 18th Amendment passed, is to loosen the military’s hold on power by reining in secret agencies like the ISI. So Qureshi is probably making a mistake in pushing an agenda that could endear him to the army and help his political career.
Qureshi is an ambitious politician, who would like to replace his much-less-articulate fellow-Multani, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani. Qureshi comes from a far more powerful and more wealthy family than Gilani. But it would be disastrous for him to try and fulfil his ambitions with the army’s acquiescence or help. That course, as many Pakistani politicians have discovered in the past, is self-defeating.
Third, no matter how hard Pakistan tries, it cannot deny India a legitimate role in Afghanistan while using that country to gain “strategic depth” vis-a-vis India. India has had historically important trade and cultural links with Afghanistan.
India also enjoys a huge amount of goodwill in Afghanistan because of its well-targeted $1.75 billion aid programme which is far better tailored to Afghan needs than Western assistance programmes, which are typically routed through tiers of outsourcing agencies and middlemen.
It makes eminent sense for both Pakistan and India to get into a non-adversarial relationship in Afghanistan instead of stalking each other there. They should explore such cooperation.
There is no alternative to a dialogue that consolidates and puts real content into the notion of peaceful coexistence and mutually beneficial relations. These alone can free the two peoples from the burden of rivalry and allow them to realise the objective of equitable progress with human dignity and rights for all.
In the coming weeks, Indian and Pakistani leaders must engage in introspection and find productive ways of mutually engaging one another.
0 comments:
Post a Comment