Author: K.P. Nayar
Publication: The Telegraph
Date: June 12, 2002
Just as it happened during the Kargil
settlement three years ago, New Delhi's terms for diffusing the latest
India-Pakistan crisis were set out by national security adviser and principal
secretary to the prime minister, Brajesh Mishra. With a clarity which has
been part of Mishra's public persona since his famous enunciation of the
Indian position in the United Nations on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
33 years ago as South Block's permanent representative in New York, Mishra
drew the lakshmanrekha on Kashmir during his one-day air-dash to Moscow
from Almaty last week. The media blitz around the high profile involvement
of the United States of America's envoys, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Armitage,
has somewhat obscured the important role that Russia played in lowering
the temperature in south Asia in the last few days. A crucial 10-minute
meeting on Thursday between Mishra and the Russian president, Vladimir
Putin, who had just returned home from Almaty, resulted in a chain of events
without which Armitage's visit to Islamabad and New Delhi would not have
produced any results. For the prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who
had a two-hour meeting with Putin in Almaty, it was history repeating itself.
Three years ago, Bill Clinton, another honest broker between India and
Pakistan, had created a dilemma for Vajpayee. Clinton had invited Pakistan's
then prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, to the US and he wanted Vajpayee to
join the duo in working out a settlement on Kargil. Vajpayee could not
be seen as agreeing to Clinton's mediation - or any mediation - on what
was a clear case of Pakistani invasion of Indian territory. Apart from
the principle involved, there was politics. With elections just round the
corner, Sonia Gandhi would have attempted to make electoral mince-meat
of the Bharatiya Janata Party on that one issue alone.
So it was left to Mishra to tell
Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, why Vajpayee could not
accept the White House invitation, howsoever well-intentioned it may have
been. Last week, there was an uncomfortable resurrection of the same dilemma.
This time, its author was Putin, who asked the Indian prime minister if
he would join the Russian and Pakistani presidents for a meeting in Moscow
similar to the one Clinton had proposed in 1999.
Putin is a keen follower of history,
and in making decisions he looks to the past as a valuable guide in his
efforts to restore Russia's glory. The Russian president was only 13 when
the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, mediated between Lal Bahadur
Shastri and Ayub Khan in what was then a breakthrough for Soviet diplomacy
in south Asia. Putin's personal interest in India has grown since his years
as deputy mayor in St. Petersburg, and after becoming president, he has
talked to some of those still in the Kremlin, who were associated with
the Tashkent declaration.
Vajpayee knows that Putin is eager
to play a greater role in world affairs, and if anything was tailor-made
for that role, it was the subcontinental crisis, given Moscow's history
at Tash- kent three and a half decades ago.
Putin met Pervez Musharraf before
his talks with Vajpayee, and put it to the Pakistani president that a trilateral
Moscow summit could be arranged. Musharraf eagerly seiz- ed on the idea.
But when the proposal was mooted with Vajpayee, the prime minister had
exactly the same reaction that he had when Clinton extended the invitation
to Washington three years ago. And yet, Putin's enthusiasm had to be checked
without appearing to be dismissive. After all, Russia has been the staunchest
supporter of India on the global stage since the fight against terrorism
became everybody's war, and has repeatedly equated America's fight against
terrorism post-September 11 with India's own struggle against cross-border
terrorism at his meetings with world leaders. And as recently as last fortnight,
when Pakistan threatened to take its crisis with India to the security
council, Moscow had communicated to New Delhi a readiness to use its veto
in the UN if it came to that.
But these were not the only reasons
why Mishra was detained to draw the lakshmanrekha in Moscow. Putin's proposal
for a trilateral summit and Musharraf's reaction to the idea in Almaty
gave the Indian delegation a valuable insight into Pakistan's thinking
on the crisis. Because Musharraf had rushed to the media with Putin's suggestion
of a trilateral peace summit in Moscow without leaving the Russian president
- as etiquette demanded - to announce invitations to India and Pakistan,
Vajpayee's delegation concluded that India's stern messages were not getting
through to the core of the Pakistani establishment. By pre-empting Putin
and announcing the invitation to himself and to Vajpayee, Musharraf was
proclaiming his genuine belief that Vajpayee would not turn down the idea
of a Moscow summit. This, in turn, signalled Pakistan's belief that India
was looking for a way out of the current military stalemate.
That he may have been encouraged
in this belief by the statements and actions of other leading nations also
became clear at Musharraf's press conference. He asked India to shed its
hypocrisy about third party involvement in the Kashmir dispute. What are
the envoys from Britain, America, Russia and many other governments doing
if not mediating, he sarcastically asked at his press conference.
Vajpayee's team in Almaty concluded
that it was necessary to put the record straight, and that unless this
was done, India's message would not get through to Musharraf, just as it
did not get through to Nawaz Sharif during Kargil until India used its
air force against the Pakistani invaders. Then too, it was Mishra who firmly
and persistently argued for the use of the air force in Kargil.
So, during his talks in Moscow,
Mishra carefully outlined the parameters of Indian cooperation with the
international community, including Russia, on the efforts to diffuse the
crisis in south Asia. He said Vajpayee was grateful to Russia and other
friends of India for what they were doing to bring peace; but a distinction
needed to be made between international involvement in the current military
crisis and any global role in facilitating a settlement between New Delhi
and Islamabad. India, he enunciated, was all for an international role
in checking, choking off and altogether eliminating the terrorist menace
coming out of Pakistan.
India also welcomed any outside
role in avoiding a war in south Asia. But when it came to working out any
broader or permanent equations with Islamabad, third parties could have
no role. Kashmir, Siachen, Wullar barrage, whatever, has to be settled
bilaterally between India and Pakistan. Whether it was the US, Britain
or Russia, they will be kept out and this was non-negotiable.
Mishra's elucidation of the Indian
position has already had, and will continue to have, very significant repercussions
on the course of Indo-Pak relations in the months and years to come. An
immediate fall-out of this clarification was Musharraf's realization that
neither he nor the international community could bend India to suit their
plans. That became clear when the much-touted US-British proposal for monitoring
infiltration - which in any case had received a negative reaction from
New Delhi - went flying out of the window as soon as Mishra made the Indian
position clear in Moscow.
But Mishra's Moscow parleys also
made Musharraf realize that his game was up: he could no longer pursue
his double-talk and subterfuge. A clever survivor, Musharraf realized that
he could be the casualty of any continuing Indian hardline stance against
Pakistan. Soon after Mishra finished his meetings in Mos- cow, the Russian
foreign minister, Igor Ivanov, spoke to his counterparts in London, Paris,
Tokyo and Washington. The contents of the briefing of the defence minister,
Sergei Ivanov, for Rumsfeld, his US counterpart, in Brussels the following
day changed considerably in the light of the national security adviser's
talks. The Russian foreign minister's phone calls prepared the ground for
a 20-minute phone conversation between Putin and George W. Bush the following
day: the Kremlin admitted that the conversation was almost entirely devoted
to south Asia.
The Russian defence minister's subsequent
briefings to the media party which accompanied him from Moscow to Brussels
have been very revealing. He said there was complete understanding among
Russia, China and the US on the India-Pakistan situation and that the three
countries were acting in concert. Therefore, Mishra's discussions in Moscow
were not Russia-centric. They influenced the attitudes of everyone who
was trying to make peace, including Armitage.
Ivanov also told Russian reporters
in Brussels that the south Asian scenario was linked to Musharraf's ability
to control the internal situation in Pakistan. It was an acknowledgement
that the military crisis was the direct result of Pakistan having become
the fountainhead of global terrorism. Ivanov hinted that Russia, China,
India and the US were making common cause against this terrorist threat
when he hoped al Qaida, the Chechens and the Uighurs of China would not
find shelter in Pakistan. For the Vajpayee government, it is the second
major gain in the last four years in its efforts to tame Pakistan. Any
composite dialogue with Pakistan in future will not have the same structure
as before of eight subjects even if those eight subjects may continue to
be reiterated in communiqués.
Peace, security and terrorism are
no longer bilateral subjects. New Delhi has succeeded in internationalizing
this issue. It comes three years after the Vajpayee government's earlier
success of making the world accept that the line of control is sacrosanct
even if it is not an international border.
