Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (13 page)

This means that talking to plausible civilians has severe limitations. A smooth president, a bluff prime minister or a glamorous foreign minister makes for good television, but behind their affability they are each aware that a step too far could make them the targets of their own military establishment. We should be aware of this too, and we should ensure they are aware that we are aware. And yet we must engage Pakistan because we cannot afford not to. For even if we are talking to people who do not have the ultimate power to call off the killers, we know that their military overlords are listening, and that in the complicated arabesque that is Islamabad’s civilian–military relationship, some of our messaging will get through to those who need to hear it.

As these words are written in March of 2012, it does seem that a subtle shift may be occurring in the atmospherics surrounding one of the most intractable problems of recent years, the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. The Pakistani military may have once thought that the fomenting of militancy and terrorism in India was an effective strategy of hurting the enemy on the cheap, but civilians in Islamabad have increasingly begun to realize (and to express the view) that Pakistan may have become the biggest victim of its own Kashmir policy. Its legacy has left the country with a distorted polity where the military has conducted four coups and is used to calling the shots behind the scenes; a collapsing economy, high unemployment and raging inflation; and a large number of unemployed and undereducated young men radicalized by years of Islamist propaganda against the Indian infidel. The result is a combustible mixture that threatens to consume the Pakistani state, with terrorists once sponsored by Islamabad now turning on their erstwhile patrons.

Leading members of the Pakistani establishment now say they are beginning to see this too. On a recent visit to Islamabad and Lahore, I sensed a widespread desire to put the dispute on the back burner and explore avenues of mutually beneficial cooperation with India. This impression emerged from private conversations, but Pakistanis are saying it openly too. In a recent interview, the Pakistani politician and religious leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman spoke frankly about Kashmir: ‘Obviously, we are in favour of a political solution … Things have changed so much.
Now the concept of winning Kashmir has taken a back seat to the urgency of saving Pakistan
’ (emphasis added).

Younger Pakistanis are going even further. The columnist Yaqoob Khan Bangash, for instance, openly derided the hallowed Pakistani argument that, as Muslims, Indian Kashmiris would want to join Pakistan: ‘despite being practically a war zone since 1989, Indian Kashmir has managed a higher literacy, economic growth and per capita income rate than most of Pakistan,’ he wrote. ‘Why would the Kashmiris want to join Pakistan now? What do we have to offer them?’

Beyond that, many argue, the costs of the prolonged obsession with Kashmir have become unsustainable for a Pakistan mired in severe internal problems. Kashmiris, Bangash declared, ‘should certainly not
come at the cost of our own survival and not when all that we will be able to offer them is a failed state’. This is still a heretical position in Pakistan’s public discourse. But it’s a view that is gaining ground. When Indian Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, a consistent advocate of peace with his nuclear-armed neighbour, suggested last summer that Pakistan should ‘leave the Kashmir issue alone’ and focus on its own internal problems, the comment did not elicit the customary howls of outrage in the Pakistani media. Instead, it was met with a grudging acknowledgement in Pakistan that perhaps, this time, the Indian leader was right.

It’s a new national mood in Pakistan, and it may well be the time for India to seize the moment to build a lasting peace.

And yet—the problem will not be solved overnight. Even if, by some miracle, the Pakistani civilian and military establishment suddenly saw the light, concluded that terrorism was bad for them and decided to make common cause with India in its eradication, the task will not be accomplished with a snap of the fingers. Extremism is not a tap that can be turned off once it is open; the evil genie cannot be forced back into the bottle. The proliferation of militant organizations, training camps and extremist ideologies has acquired a momentum of its own. A population as young, as uneducated, as unemployed and as radicalized as Pakistan’s will remain a menace to their own society as well as to ours. As a former Indian high commissioner in Pakistan, Satyabrata Pal, noted: ‘These jihadi groups recruit from the millions of young Pakistanis who emerge from vernacular schools and madrassas, imbued with a hatred for the modern world, in which they do not have the skills to work. So while young Indians go to Silicon Valley and make a bomb for themselves, young Pakistanis go to the Swat Valley and make a bomb of themselves, the meanness of their lives justifying the end. Pakistan has betrayed its youth, which is its tragedy.’

This is not a counsel of despair. It is, instead, an argument to offer a helping hand. A neighbour full of desperate young men without hope or prospects, led by a malicious and self-aggrandizing military, is a permanent threat to twenty-first-century India. If India can help Pakistan transcend these circumstances and help it develop a stake in mutually beneficial progress, it will be helping itself as well. In such an approach lies the slender hope of persuading Pakistan that India’s success can
benefit it too, that, rather than trying to undercut India and thwarting its growth, Pakistan should look to the advantages that might accrue to it as a neighbour and partner of an upwardly mobile and increasingly prosperous India.

Such an India can build on the generosity it has often shown—as witness the unilateral MFN status it gave Pakistan—by extending itself to its neighbour, offering a market for Pakistani traders and industrialists, a creative umbrella to its artists and singers, and a home away from home for those seeking a refuge from the realities of Pakistani life. Many Pakistanis now realize that perpetual conflict with India is hampering Pakistan’s own aspirations for economic growth and development. Multiplying our channels of contact—with ‘back-channel diplomacy’ conducted by ‘special envoys’ of the two leaderships (a formula used effectively by Musharraf and Manmohan Singh), direct contact between the two militaries (of which there is very little) and extensive people-to-people contact—is indispensable to the peace effort. NGOs and civil society—particularly those that channel the energy of young people, who are impatient with decades of hostility—can also play a useful role in developing relations that go beyond the prescriptions and the proscriptions of governments.

Sadly, India has reacted to 26/11 and other Pakistani provocations by tightening its visa restrictions and restraining other possibilities of cultural and social contact. This may be an area in which risks are worth taking, since the advantages of openly issuing visas and enhancing opportunities for Pakistanis in India outweigh the dangers; after all, the terrorists of 26/11 did not apply for Indian visas before coming onshore with their deadly baggage. I am strongly in favour of a liberal visa regime, which would require India to remove its current restrictions on which points of entry and exit the Pakistani visa holder can use, the number of places that may be visited and the onerous police reporting requirements. To begin with, a list can be drawn up of prominent Pakistanis in such fields as business, entertainment and media, who would be eligible for more rapid processing and for multiple-entry visas. It will be argued that Pakistan will not reciprocate such one-sided generosity, but India should not care. Insisting on parity with Pakistan is to bring ourselves down to their level. Let us show a magnanimity and generosity of spirit
that in itself stands an outside chance of persuading Pakistanis to rethink their attitude to us.

More difficult politically but well worth doing might be to make concessions on issues where vital national interests are not involved. Not all the issues that divide India and Pakistan can be resolved across a table, but specific problems like trade, the military standoff on the Siachen glacier, the territorial boundary between the two nations at Sir Creek or contention over water flows through the Wullar Barrage and many other points of detail are certainly amenable to resolution through dialogue. It seems silly that public passions in Pakistan are being stirred over false claims that India is diverting Indus river water; much of this could be dispelled by candid and open talk to the Pakistani public by Indian officials. The new-found Pakistani willingness to reciprocate India’s offer of MFN status in trade relations should be seized upon by India taking concrete steps to reduce the non-tariff barriers relating to security inspections, lab checks and clearances that have limited the extent of Pakistani exports to our country. India’s financial services industry and its software professionals could also offer themselves to Pakistani clients, giving themselves a next-door market and providing services that Pakistan could use to develop its own economy. The education sector offers obvious opportunities, especially in these days of videoconferencing, which could allow students from one country to listen to lectures delivered in another. The prospects for cooperation in such areas as agriculture or the development of wind energy are bright. These are all ‘easy wins’ waiting to be pursued at the first opportunity.

The big questions—the Kashmir dispute and Pakistan’s use of terrorism as an instrument of policy—will require a great deal more groundwork and constructive, step-by-step action for progress to be made. Afghanistan is an area of contention that, given a new climate of peace, could become an area for cooperation rather than a site of proxy conflict. By showing accommodativeness, sensitivity, foresight and pragmatic generosity in all the ways suggested above, India might be able to turn the bilateral narrative away from the logic of intractable hostility in which both countries have been mired for too long. Once that happens, it may even be possible to look beyond each other to economic cooperation with third countries: the Iran–Pakistan–India pipeline,
for instance, or overland access for Indian goods through Pakistan and Afghanistan to Central Asia, neither of which looks feasible as long as Pakistan remains hostile territory.

The elephant in the room remains the Pakistani Army. Until the military men are convinced that peace with India is in their self-interest, they will remain the biggest obstacles to it. One hope may lie in the extensive reach of the Pakistani military apparatus and its multiple business and commercial interests. Perhaps India could encourage its firms to trade with enterprises owned by the Pakistani Army, in the hope of giving the military establishment a direct stake in peace. More military-to-military exchanges, even starting with such basic ideas as sporting contests between the two armies, would also help. The idea of joint exercises between the two militaries seems preposterous today, but it is entirely feasible in a UN peacekeeping context: just a few years ago, Indian aircraft strafed Congolese rebel positions in support of besieged Pakistani ground troops as part of a UN peacekeeping operation, MONUC.

In my UN days I personally witnessed the extraordinary degree of comradeship between Indian and Pakistani officers serving in the Peacekeeping Department headquarters in New York; perhaps being among foreigners served as a constant reminder of how much more they had in common with each other, so that they were frequently lunching together, visiting each other’s homes and seeing the local sights together. Such contacts can and should be built upon to develop the right atmospherics for peaceful relations, which unavoidably require engagement with the Pakistani military. Indians are, understandably, among the strongest supporters of Pakistani democracy, at least in theory, but we have to live with the realities next door, and that requires us to see the Pakistani military not just as the problem, but as a vital element of the solution.

As good neighbours, Indians should be saddened by the continuing incidents of terrorist violence in Pakistan; we must wish Islamabad well in its efforts to repel militancy and fanaticism within its own borders. We would welcome indications that Islamabad shares our view that the forces of terrorism emanating from Pakistani soil are indivisible and that those plotting attacks on India from Pakistani territory are as much the enemies of Pakistan as they are of India. From such a diagnosis, the
only possible prescription is that of cooperation, to build peace and security together. We hope that those who rule that country will make that diagnosis, and share the same prescription.

A former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, G. Parthasarathy, once famously remarked that promoting peace between India and Pakistan is like trying to treat two patients whose only disease is an allergy to each other. This allergy has to be overcome. India does not covet any Pakistani territory. Because we wish to focus on our own people’s development and prosperity in conditions of security, we remain committed to long-term peace with Pakistan. If the civilian government in Islamabad sees that the need is for concerted action against terrorists wherever they operate, whether in Pakistan, in India or in Afghanistan, we can find common ground. Our willingness to talk will best be vindicated by their willingness to act. Trust can be earned, which is why peace must be pursued. But we must pursue peace with our eyes wide open. To do so is, in the words of the veteran Indian diplomat K. Shankar Bajpai, the ‘right, rational choice for a mature power’.

Too much of Indian public opinion is divided into sharply polarized camps of hawks and doves—the former insisting on nothing less than implacable hostility towards Islamabad, and hoping for the eventual destruction of Pakistan as we know it, the latter offering peace at any price, through a process ‘uninterruptible’ even if new terrorist strikes emanating from Pakistan were to occur. Neither position, in my view, is tenable, for all the reasons explicated above. Hostility is not a policy, and hostility in perpetuity is neither viable nor desirable between neighbours. And while the doves may be right that New Delhi’s visceral reaction to the terror attacks is tantamount to giving the terrorists a veto over our foreign policy choices, no democratic government can allow its citizens to be killed and maimed by forces from across the border, without reacting in some tangible way that conveys to Pakistan that there is a price to be paid for allowing such things to happen.