Author: Ejaz Haider
Publication: The Friday Times
Date: December 31 - January 06
2005
We will make a final deal with Pakistan
when the latter pares down its expectations and accepts what we have to
offer it, not what it wants
It's curtains on 2004. If the Islamabad
Declaration of January 6, 2004 is taken as the baseline for the normalisation
process between India and Pakistan, then the two sides have been talking
for nearly a year. It is appropriate to take stock of what has happened,
or not happened, during this period in order to project into the next year.
I shall mostly use 'we', the plural
personal pronoun instead of 'India', the impersonal third-person, to indicate
to Pakistanis that I am arguing on the basis of majority consensus in India.
We want to have peaceful relations
with Pakistan, there should be no doubt about that. But Pakistan needs
to understand that its expectations about what we can, or must, do to have
peace are somewhat unrealistic. We accept Pakistan's existence as a sovereign
state. To this extent we are equals. But equality in this sense is theoretical.
In the real world, when we sit together, we want Islamabad to appreciate
the unavoidable fact that it cannot expect parity with us.
The acid test of that is Kashmir.
We may talk about Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but we would be happy to cut
a deal on the status quo. Pakistan, on the other hand, wants us to concede
territory. That's what it means by phrases like India should take bold,
visionary steps on Kashmir. It alternates between threatening us and beseeching
us. But as we have made plain, territory-for-peace is a non-starter.
There are other issues, too. Consider.
India has evolved a nationalist
elite, which subsumes a wide range of our people, from right-of-centre
and centre to left-of-centre and cuts across the ethnically and linguistically
diverse states that comprise India. We have our differences, but we are
agreed on certain basic issues. The most important is our sense of Indian-ness
. I'll leave aside the mathematically negligible quantities of people who
disagree with India's nuclearisation, its military modernisation, its integration
into a globalised world, its relations with the United States and Israel,
its commitment to defend its territory, its natural and legitimate desire
to play a bigger role within and beyond the region etc. The existence of
dissidents only proves our pluralism. They are very much Indian and are
entitled to their views. But they do not impact policy.
In short, we have a secular, culturally
liberal but strategically conservative (more appropriately, realist) elite.
Pakistan is very different. It has
still to decide on a political system. It lacks, even after 57 years, a
succession principle. It is stricken with an imbalance in civil-military
relations that has helped thwart the emergence of a nationalist elite which
is evolved through harmonising the interests of state and civil society.
Its policymakers - as well as the intelligentsia - do not realise that
secular-cultural liberalism and strategic realism are not mutually exclusive.
To fight cultural obscurantism, its nationalist elite, or whatever is left
of it, needs to link up with the outside world to bring some normalcy to
Pakistan. Pakistan's defence and security policies have wedded the strategic
conservatism of the state to the cultural obscurantism of the rightwing.
This process has, inevitably, eroded the ability of the nationalist elite
to take charge of the state and, over the past quarter century, has created
the chasm between cultural liberalism and strategic realism.
So we are two states: one sure of
itself and its objectives; the other flip-flopping through crises. The
outside world has noticed this difference.
We aren't complacent, though. Pakistan
can hurt us. It has developed a nuclear-weapons capability in the teeth
of pressure from outside. This is a problem for us because we lost the
window of savagery in the early eighties when we could have knocked it
out in its infancy. If Pakistan didn't have the bomb we could have had
peace much earlier. Now we have to use a more sophisticated, multi-pronged
strategy to pressure it from outside and wait for it to fall under the
weight of its own contradictions from within. But neither do we want it
to fail because that would be dangerous for us. So this policy has to be
calibrated properly. We are also aware of the rather annoying Pakistani
ability to turn its disadvantage into momentary advantages - 9/11 being
one recent example. But this only delays the inevitable.
We know that the world is focused
on us because we interest it; it focuses on Pakistan because it worries
the world. That's a huge difference.
I mention all this because it is
relevant to the ongoing normalisation process. Our foremost objective is
to avoid hot conflict on the one hand and to bring down the cost of peace
with Pakistan on the other. We are looking beyond Pakistan, but we also
have to deal with it. For this we need to tire Pakistan out.
We will not refuse to talk about
Kashmir, but we will shift the focus from territory to people. Let people
meet each other while states retain their territorial possessions. People-to-people
contact is an important plank of our strategy because it not only improves
the atmospherics but it could help further alienate Pakistani policymakers
from the common citizens. It's easy to do so with Pakistan because of its
ever-growing fault-line between state and civil society.
This policy is more workable now
because circumstances have forced Pakistan to reverse its strategy of bleeding
us. In the foreseeable future at least, Islamabad cannot revert to that
option.
We are also interested in doing
trade with Pakistan. But this is an issue for Pakistan to decide since
we have already granted it the MFN status. Pakistan is interested in the
overland gas pipeline and wants it to be a standalone project. We have
linked it to MFN because Pakistan has linked MFN to Kashmir. If Pakistan
removes that linkage perhaps we could think about dropping the pipeline's
linkage with MFN. As for other issues on this front like our hidden barriers
- subsidies and higher tariff rates - we could discuss them in good time.
There is also need to discuss nuclear
CBMs but we can't accept Pakistan's linkage of nuclear risk reduction with
conventional force reduction. Pakistan must understand that our nuclear
capability is defined more broadly. So, while we can discuss Pakistan-specific
weapon systems and deployments, the discussions cannot include what we
consider vital for our security or force projection in the region and beyond.
This also holds true for our conventional forces.
Meanwhile, we have other issues
that help to complicate the process and even divert attention from the
more substantive ones. No one familiar with statecraft would grudge us
this tactic. It is understood on all sides. It also allows us to keep talking
and hold bargaining chips. The crucial requirement is to avoid hot conflict
because the standoff caused us economic harm and brought negative world
focus to bear on the region. It also threatened investment and ongoing
projects that are crucial to India's economic health. In any case, now
that Pakistan's ability to do covert mischief has been drastically curtailed,
the possibility of a hot conflict has also come down.
The Pakistani state is sharp and
knows that it can't expect to get much out of us. It will try to do its
own manoeuvring but will ultimately lose out to us because its current
structure does not allow it to harness the total energy of its people behind
a national effort. It may have pinpricked us long enough and still retains
some of the potential to do so, but it doesn't have the stamina to match
ours.
We want to make a final deal with
Pakistan but will do so only after the latter has pared down its expectations
and accepts what we have to offer it, not what it wants.
