NEW DELHI — Rajiv Gandhi wanted to give Benazir Bhutto a welcome such as no visiting dignitary had ever received in India. Was this innocence or overconfidence? Some of the starry-eyed even had visions of a handsome Rajiv and a beautiful Benazir making a perfect pair on the ramparts of Red Fort while they declared peace before captive television cameras and liberated masses while their aides filed applications to Oslo for the next Nobel Peace Prize.
The opening moves between the two had been promising. Rajiv had taken the initiative, sent Ronen Sen to prepare the ground, and the two signed an agreement promising no first-attack on each other’s nuclear installations. The Soviet Union made this the basis for a message to Benazir that the Soviets were ready to help Pakistan build three nuclear plants if they could get their own quid pro quo, which was inclusion of Najibullah in the Afghan Interim Government following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan.
We are talking of the 1980s, and the Eighties were another world, much more distant from today than the lapse of a mere decade would suggest. For one, so many of the principals are dead. Rajiv Gandhi. Ziaul Haq. Najibullah. Even the Soviet Union is dead. There was a debate in Delhi even in the 1980s about whether India should deal with the leader of a military coup, Gen. Ziaul Haq, or wait for the establishment of a democratic order, which meant inevitably the arrival of Benazir Bhutto.
Gen. Zia, like any sensible military man, had both a deeper knowledge and a consequent respect for the abilities of the enemy. Even when Pakistan lost a few posts on the Siachen Glacier under his watch, he did not order expensive (particularly in human terms) retaliation; instead, he dismissed what had been lost as ice and stones.
Gen. Zia’s focus was on the lucrative Western front in the Eighties, on the dream war in Afghanistan against the might of Soviet troops, funded by the CIA, which meant hard cash in liquid flow without any questions asked. It was a war that the Soviet Union could never win and Pakistan could never win. If Gen. Zia had a post-Afghan war grand vision then that too lay in the West, of a great alliance of Muslim countries between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and all the Muslim Central Asian republics that would soon, he had no doubt, prise themselves away from the Soviet empire.
He was not wrong about the consequences of a Soviet defeat in Afghanistan but his great alliance was opium smoke. It had no basis in the realities and interests that govern relations between nations. Zia’s India policy had more to do with Punjab than Kashmir. All through his term the Valley was at peace with itself, and kept its undercurrents under control. Punjab was on fire, and Gen. Zia always kept a supply of match sticks on hand, but under cover. Out of cover he took the position of a peacenik, claiming that he could not fight on two fronts, and throwing more than one ball (occasionally a cricket ball) toward India for Delhi to pick up.
Rajiv was cool to the General, treating Zia’s overtures with a disdain that bordered on condescension. Rajiv did not need to be told what price India and his family had paid for the troubles in the Punjab. The official line was dutiful faith in democracy. But there was an unmentioned element as well. Zia was not “one of us”; Benazir was.
The Oxbridge factor was of great help to Benazir who maintained sometimes indiscreet channels to Rajiv through her years of exile and during her years of struggle against Zia. The Oxbridge types, who wanted to trust Benazir instead of the “unreliable” Zia, were elated when time and circumstance brought her to power. It was too good to be true. Oxbridge had been elected in both countries.
Rajiv took the first opportunity he got, that of a SAARC summit in Islamabad, to extend the visit into a bilateral. On their first evening in Islamabad, the Gandhis (including Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul) dined alone with the three reigning Bhuttos: Benazir, her mother Nusrat and her husband Asif Zardari. Both told their delegations later that politics was off the menu, and that they had fun. It was utterly believable.
There was agreement in that first summit on protection for nuclear installations, and some progress toward a common position on NPT. Rajiv suggested that secret negotiations should continue between officials on this: the “invisible” dialogue. More visible would be talks on reduction of conventional arms and Siachen. Rajiv urged free flow of information, travel and popular- cultural exchanges. Benazir on her part stressed that only a control of the arms race between the neighbors could alter the “poverty-heritage.”
As is evident there was no shortage of good English metaphor. Benazir mentioned Kashmir; Rajiv opted for silence. He realized later that this silence was not playing well back home, particularly on the eve of a general election, which, according to the opinion polls, would result in a sharp setback if not defeat. He stopped over in Pakistan a few months later, on the way back from a non-aligned summit in Belgrade. When asked about Kashmir at a joint press conference, he was vehement that it was an integral part of India. Although the fires burned in Punjab, Rajiv did not ignore Kashmir. He attempted a variation of the model that had worked with some success in Assam and Punjab, creating an electoral pact with Dr. Farooq Abdullah.
He analyzed, correctly, that the decline in the Valley began with the dismissal of Farooq Abdullah’s government by Indira Gandhi in 1984. But the answer the two found was no solution. The advantage of the Abdullahs had been that they represented Kashmir against the encroachment into the Valley by the Congress party (despite his differences with Sheikh Abdullah Jawaharlal Nehru never allowed the Congress to operate in the state). The raison d’etre of the National Conference was diluted by this alliance. The Congress gained nothing, while the National Conference lost all. When the unholy combination of Delhi and Srinagar once rigged the elections in 1989 to deliver a victory to Farooq Abdullah, a running fever became epidemic. In a few unbelievable weeks the peace of the Valley was gone, not to return till the moment of writing.
The first major incident was the kidnapping of then Home Minister Mufti Muhammad Sayeed’s daughter; that was how Kashmir welcomed the first Kashmiri home minister of India. The government traded militants for the hostage. Farooq Abdullah resigned. Bullets began to ricochet through the city and the Valley. The Mirwaiz was killed. His funeral became a protest demonstration against India.
The irony is that Benazir’s ignorance may have been genuine. Rajiv and Benazir shared at least one problem. Because they were elected to power they assumed they understood the complexities of power. In fact, both inherited an election victory with the tragic death of a parent. Both needed to learn on the job, and took too long to do so.Destiny made them prime minister when they were young, and then snatched time away from their grasp. Rajiv’s government had frayed at both the edges and the center when he launched his Pakistan initiative; his own credibility had soured. However, there was no objective reason for any radical rethink on Kashmir in the late Eighties: the problem of Kashmir waxed only after Rajiv began to wane.
Benazir’s naivete may be understandable in retrospect but that hardly makes it more forgivable. Worse, she learned nothing from the dismissal of her first government, within a year or so of Rajiv’s defeat. She thought that she had been removed because of her rapport with Rajiv and her Indian maneuvers.
That was a symptom, not a cause. No one in Pakistan’s Establishment could have seriously considered her unpatriotic; she had no reason to be. Her problem was her visceral hatred of the army that had supported the hanging of her father and kept Gen. Zia in power, and her suspicion of the army as an institution and its senior officers as a permanent enemy. But when she came to power a second time, again fortuitously, she thought she could appease her tormentors by being holier than thou on India.
She became hysterical on Kashmir, using language that would embarrass a jihadi in an effort to mobilize support in an election she would lose to Nawaz Sharif (who kept his cool and advocated better relations with India). Sitting in Delhi at that time was the sphinx P.V. Narasimha Rao. The visual comparison between a ranting Benazir and a pouting Rao as the two dominated their respective obedient television channels was almost funny. Benazir was having a baby at the time, and enjoying two honeymoons: one with her husband, and a political one with Sharif, who even sent flowers to her.
The generals were not necessarily better equipped intellectually than their civilian competitors, but they had the enormous base of the one stable institution in a country that has not been able to create a reliable polity. Hindsight provides a better line of vision.
When Benazir claimed that she had no knowledge of any Pakistani help to Kashmiri insurgents in 1989 and 1990 she was only providing evidence of her own incompetence. What is clear now is that certain elements, across the arc from Kashmir to Afghanistan, decided to follow up the Decade of Punjab with the Decade of Kashmir. The objective situation was right for this. The war in Afghanistan was over, leaving thousands of trained, motivated and well-armed fighters with no place to go for a holy war. These men could not have been used in Punjab. But Kashmir could become a battleground for such heros, as the killing fields of Afghanistan had once been.
One of the perceived problems of militancy in Kashmir had been the Kashmiri’s reluctance to indulge in violence. A gun culture had to be induced into the Valley, leaving the rest to the inevitable fallout of a few years of point and counterpoint between insurgents and India’s security forces. Battles take time. They may also be independent of other impulses. Clearly Sharif felt some urge to practice what he had preached during the election campaign that gave him an unprecedented majority. While he moved toward Lahore, the parallel policy begun some years ago found its culmination in Kargil.
In a remarkable repetition of what had happened in 1990 Sharif sent word to Delhi that he was not behind Kargil, although he did not deny complete knowledge of what was happening. Was Sharif being disingenuous? Frankly, it does not matter much now. For those who ran the Kargil sideshow are officially in charge of Pakistan, and they want their own dialogue with India. Is this an invitation to an Abbasid dinner? (The Abbasids seized power in Baghdad after they invited their rivals to a dinner at which they massacred them). Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee is, understandably, a little anxious: a man who has felt cold steel in his back is loathe to leave it exposed a second time. Is there a rational reason for a change of attitude in the Pakistan Army?
Sentiment is best left out of calculations; even if it exists, it is too sloppy to hold anything together. Is there a hard and rational reason to expect sincerity? Yes. Why? Does the Pakistan Army accept that its policy has failed in Kashmir? No. That is not the reason.
Irrespective of what we may feel, Islamabad does not believe that its Kashmir Decade has been a failure. They believe that these 10 years have weakened India economically and psychologically. Nor do the generals believe that they were defeated in Kargil, where we had to conquer to win and they had to survive to declare victory.
It was the denouement that was critical. Bill Clinton has now revealed what was known already, that he forced Islamabad to withdraw its own and auxiliary forces from the hilltops where the battle raged. One thing became clear after Kargil, that was not a solution. India had the power to reverse any tide. Second, the world was not ready to stand by and watch two nuclear powers battle. Suddenly, the meaning of international intervention, which Pakistan has always wanted, changed. America twisted Pakistan’s arm because it had clearly initiated hostilities. The world wants a settlement, not a victory. This is the world of the 21st century, not of the 1950s or even the 1980s and 1990s.
Equally, India and Pakistan, now rescued from any self-induced sense of insecurity by their nuclear status, are at a point where their people dearly want to leave the poison of confrontation behind and challenge that poverty-heritage that Benazir spoke of.
Who could want nuclear destruction when there is so much to live for? There is so much faith in the idea that if only India and Pakistan cooperated they could leap toward prosperity. It is a dream waiting for its chance. And, of course, the army and the BJP are in power in Pakistan and India.
