NEW DELHI, 8 July — History is a mystery word. It evokes the most curious reactions. Eyebrows are being arched in at least some ruling class drawing rooms in Delhi to emphasize a cynicism: “They want to make history!” It is not quite polite to make history, even possibly a little vulgar. Or perhaps there is an implicit suggestion that history should only be made by those Richard Attenborough considers worthy enough for a movie. You have to earn your page in history by long years of drama; you are not allowed to enter the text books if you need a knee operation or get lucky on a flight from Colombo. There may even be a feeling, among extremists, that history, properly, belongs to the dead and the living should not be so crass as to claim it.
A mood has suddenly seized India and Pakistan, of the kind that surrounds a great event. But what is happening is being misunderstood. It is not Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pervez Musharraf who are creating the excitement. If anything, they are worried about expectations rising beyond the low ceiling of reality. There is no denying this palpable spirit of hope; even the skeptics, may their tribe remain replenished, are wondering whether something might not actually emerge on the Ides of July. They too are influenced by the atmospherics.
But this is not a mood that has traveled down from the high reaches of government to the ground beneath our feet. It has instead taken the other direction. It has emanated from the people and is forcing the pace of the leaders. That is why it is so exhilarating, significant and so potentially frightening. The people of both countries want peace, however piecemeal, to happen.
The exhilaration is understandable. We may or may not admit it, but we are both a little exhausted by enmity, and the sheer uselessness of it. The war parties in both countries have drained our wealth; often with legitimate reason and popular support, but equally they have sustained the institutions of war as vested interests that feed a few at the expense of the many.
The power of friendship is built on common sense, and is all the more powerful for that. Peace brings prosperity. People do not have to learn this from a book, or from a dogma, or from philosophy; or from the history of other lands; they know this from the daily wear and tear of their lives. Confrontation and violence hurt, a mohalla as much as a nation. A very deep well of desire, poisoned so often by the events of the last hundred years, is bubbling again with fresh water.
So why should this induce any fright? Because of the dread of failure. No one quite knows the price of failure, and how it will be paid. Failure may not emerge necessarily from ill-will or malice; the best of intentions can light this tinderbox of passion, waiting for a spark from miscalculation.
This is the second time that the post-Independence generation has attempted to sort out this terrible consequence of British rule and Indian-Pakistani mistakes. Indira Gandhi was shaped by the experience of the Freedom Movement; her son Rajiv Gandhi brought a different mindset when he sought, sincerely, to bridge some of the gaps with the help of Benazir Bhutto.
Rajiv and Benazir made one fundamental error. They believed that they could move ahead with the momentum of their personal will, and the power of the governments that they controlled. They made no attempt to broaden the base of their support for this endeavor, even among the other political parties. This was partly because neither was on speaking terms with other political parties. Rajiv was not terribly keen on conferring with V.P. Singh, who had Bofors in one hand and a demand for his resignation in the other. I cannot recall who were the two BJP MPs in that parliament, but Atal Behari Vajpayee was not one of them: he had been defeated in Gwalior in the previous election by Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Neither was L.K. Advani.
Of course Rajiv could have stepped out of any mental block and conferred with the BJP, but that did not occur to him. Benazir would not even consider the possibility of a convivial word with any of the people or political forces that she held responsible for her father’s judicial assassination. Both erred. While their mistakes can be understood, they remain mistakes.
A basic fact about Indo-Pak relations is that governments can do nothing if the people do not want them to, for the problem started long before the two countries were born. Governments can, and must, help create a point of departure from convictions rooted in suffering and suspicion, but that is only one of the many starting points in a process replete with false starts and dead ends.
It is complicated; a political leadership must first be convinced, in itself, that there is value in compromise, and then begin the slow dance of carrying its own party, its own government, and then, with the cooperation of opinion makers, shift attitudes across a wide line. There has to be a corresponding effort, a parallel dance, on the other side. To get such an exercise going in one country is difficult enough, to expect a matching mirror across the border requires some serious help from all side. Time is the least of the requirements. Agra began at Lahore and passed through Kargil traversing perhaps every element of the Indo-Pak relationship within 29 months. Nawaz Sharif made the same mistake that Benazir did, possibly for similar reasons: his aversion to the armed forces had become pronounced during the continual battles for internal power. The armed forces were not consulted and signaled their separate India policy by starting to shell in the Kargil sector at the very moment that the Lahore accord was signed. The rest is familiar.
One consequence of the Kargil eruption was that Vajpayee hardened his attitude toward the military government that took over from Sharif after a coup. In the last 29 months therefore we have seen in Pakistan an elected civilian government; a coup; the institutionalization of the coup by making the successful general President and executive authority; an accord; a war; ferocious militancy; a long freeze in ties; the promise of a thaw, and then, suddenly, a burst of hope. Vajpayee has done in 29 months what other prime ministers collectively took 50 years t o experience. Perhaps that is why he believes that he knows what he is doing. Both Vajpayee and Musharraf have taken care to arm themselves with some form of a mandate before they talk in Agra next Sunday. If Vajpayee has any critics of his maneuver, then they are within his own party, making them (presumably) more manageable at any moment of decision. All other political parties have offered him the support he needs.
Musharraf does not have parties to deal with, just at this moment, but he has spent a good deal of his time since he received the invitation to India consulting his corps commanders, the Kashmir lobby and their hard-line supporters. It has been a carrot-and-stick operation. He has described the Jamaat-e-Islami’s chief as insane (in an interview to The Asian Age, among other places), and told the jihadis that it was time they entered the 21st century. The carrots were fed to those who were persuaded to give this summit a chance. The upshot is that even the Jamaat-e-Islami, which organized demonstrations when Vajpayee went to Lahore, is silent as Musharraf prepares to fly to the city where he was born.
The Jamaat would not get an audience if it tried to disrupt this effort. It will however get its audience back if the summit ends in disarray. The principals know that much; the risks they carry are subjective as well as objective.
When Musharraf said that he was flexible and would go to Delhi with an open mind, he had to face questions asking precisely how open that mind of his was going to be on Kashmir. His questioners did not want his mind to be so open that a valley would get lost in it. It stands to reason that if Vajpayee’s mind had not been similarly open he would never have risked the invitation, but the question is the same.
If this is going to be an exercise in the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, then the point of the summit is pointless. Both sides must begin the dialogue from one premise: in order to take, they must first have to give. What, how, how much, how much of what: the riddle will take its own time to solve, if there is any answer at all.
So is there? What has disappeared from the Indo-Pak equation? Confidence. Neither side has any confidence that the other will honor any agreement, any gesture; there is no goodwill left. We have scraped the barrel to reach Agra. Pakistan does not believe that India will ever do anything on Kashmir; India believes that Kashmir is only an excuse for Pakistani activists in collusion with governments to bleed India — and if Kashmir is not available then terror will be exported through Punjab, or through soft points in Nepal and Bangladesh. The culture of distrust has affected all else, from business to cricket. Communication is dead. The electric wall that glows like some surreal work of art along the border is a wall that has cut off sound and sense and warped human feeling. Long before there is success of any other issue, the two countries must begin to build confidence in each other, at both the government and the people-to-people level. Vajpayee has already begun to do so: when 20 Pakistani students study in our superb institutes of technology and management schools they will be symbols of this new confidence.
We have to discuss options on Kashmir, without either side feeling that it is negotiating its way to defeat. Kashmir is not a collection of fragmented realities, with both sides clutching their preferred fragments. Nor is reality frozen.
Ten years ago no Indian would have accepted a solution any other than the whole of Kashmir for India, if settlement there was to be. Today an overwhelming majority would accept a Partition of the Kashmir Valley along the cease-fire line. We have therefore seen that famous “paradigm shift” from principle to pragmatism: Maharaja Hari Singh after all did not accede only half of the Kashmir Valley to India. But we are willing to accept a partition in the interests of peace.
What happens if we take this logic a couple of steps further, and include the proposition that the Kashmiri Hindus who have been made refugees have as much a right to a place in the Valley as the Muslims? Should there be a reorientation of the line to accommodate all demands? Or can this concept be addressed through some form of autonomy guaranteed by both India and Pakistan to the whole of the state? The legislative assembly of our Kashmir has already passed an autonomy resolution: was that done as a stray thought or with some future purpose in mind?
I do not know the answers; but I do know that within those questions lie options that must be discussed with minds that are open to the future, not closed by the past.
Machiavelli, who does not deserve the reputation he has, asked a good question: how far are affairs governed by fortune? “I compare fortune,” he wrote, “To one of those violent rivers which, when they are enraged, flood the plains, tear down the trees and buildings... Everyone flees before them... Yet although such is their nature, it does not follow that when they are flowing quietly one cannot take precautions, constructing dikes and embankments so that when the river is in flood it runs into a canal or else its impetus is less wild and dangerous...”
To the dikes and embankments, please.
