ISLAMABAD, 20 March 2004 — The political commitment in Pakistan and India to continue discussions on Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles and resume the composite dialogue ensures the robustness of the peace process. Any intentionally created “crisis” notwithstanding, the thorough behind-the-scenes preparations of the current process make any major breakdowns unlikely.

In his engagement, via satellite at the March 14 “India Today” Conclave, with “who’s who” of India’s civil society, President Parvez Musharraf articulated his future vision of South Asia. He identified the challenges and opportunities that Pakistan and India jointly face in pursuit of the vision. After Agra this was perhaps his frankest intellectual engagement with the Indians on how best to ensure that the dialogue process yields tangible dividends. Musharraf repeated his commitment to peace and a realistic road map for peace.

However New Delhi’s reaction came as no surprise. It was a “programmed” rejection to Pakistan’s emphasis on the centrality of the Kashmir dispute in bilateral negotiations. Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee has repeatedly said in interviews with media, including the January 2004 interviews with PTV and with India Today plus his 2002 musings that peace between India and Pakistan requires concentrated dialogue on Kashmir. What the Indian statement correctly emphasized was that Kashmir was one of the many unsettled disputes — a fact that the president himself acknowledged in urging that settlement of all disputes through the composite dialogue was necessary for optimum bilateral cooperation. He specifically said, “The composite dialogue scheduled for May and June this year should augur well for our future relationship.”

The deliberate distortion of the Indian statement was regarding the president’s “double-standard” while condemning suicide attacks on him and justifying as freedom movement the December attack on the Indian Parliament and on the Jammu-Kashmir chief minister. Those who watched the discussion or read its text know that when the compere repeated Musharraf statement that he was extremely angry at the suicide attackers who targeted him on Dec. 25, the president said if you are trying to draw a parallel between this and what happens inside Kashmir, there is a freedom struggle going on there and that is not terrorism. Clearly South Block in its March 15 statement chose to draw an incorrect if convenient inference from Musharraf’s statement. The government of Pakistan had specifically condemned the two attacks as it always does the killing of innocents whether by freedom fighters or in state terrorism by Indian forces. On the broader question of “terrorism” Musharraf reiterated in his opening remarks at the conclave what he first emphasized in his October 2001 United Nations address that one key prerequisite for tackling terrorism is removing the root causes of terrorism.

Despite Pakistan’s changing scale and nature of support to the freedom struggle what is going on inside the Kashmir Valley is a popularly supported indigenous freedom struggle. Take for instance the BBC report on the early March funeral of two commanders attended by 30,000 Kashmiris. The only way to alter this situation inside the valley is to initiate genuine three-party negotiations — India and Pakistan as the two principals and Kashmiris as the primary. The Jan. 6 statement in which Pakistan again committed to stop cross-border infiltration while India undertook to bilaterally engage to work for the “settlement of all outstanding disputes including the Kashmir dispute” provides only the necessary framework for starting this process. Addressing the hard questions is essential to make the process sustainable and successful.

He spoke of the issue not to appease anyone at home or abroad or to “complain” to the Americans. Indeed for the first time the president categorically called for bilateralism. He said, “We have to show enough maturity to be able to resolve disputes bilaterally within a reasonable time line.”

The thrust of Musharraf’s response to most of the questions which sought his views and support for increased Pakistan-India cooperation in fields of trade and commerce, culture, education and technology was that “we can’t sprint on the CBMs while moving at a snail’s pace on the dialogue process; there has to be simultaneity.” He was clear that “CBMs cannot outstrip the dialogue process on all substantive issues including Kashmir.” Emphasizing the point the president said: “ If Pakistan and India could settle Kashmir in accordance with aspirations of Kashmiris a new chapter in our troubled history could begin. “

He dealt with questions ranging from the need to follow the India-China model for peace making to a veiled critique of Pakistani democracy. On the democracy question Musharraf should have added though that while democracy combined with a credibly functioning state apparatus does effectively hold state and political power accountable, the irony is that the world’s two notable democracies, India, the largest in the world and Israel, the solo in the Middle East, are responsible for the occupation of Kashmir and Palestine in violation of UN resolutions and for conducting mass-scale human rights violations and that the two nuclear-armed democracies have violated all universally accepted legal, moral and political norms. The two are the only countries in the world that have since World War II expanded their territories through aggression.

Finally, Musharraf’s intellectually rigorous engagement with dispute settlement could facilitate Vajpayee’s task of peace making with Pakistan. Although he may have papered over the fact that the peace process has started because both India and Pakistan have opted to alter their positions on Kashmir and on terrorism, Musharraf’s “India Today” engagement should have helped the Indian prime minister to convince his nation that CBMs alone can only help improve atmospherics, that there is no overlooking the hard issues for a “quick and dirty” peace. In fact in locking “intellectual” horns with the Indian elite Musharraf has lend a helping hand to the Indian prime minister who appears keen to work for lasting peace with Pakistan.

— Nasim Zehra is an Islamabad-based security analyst and fellow of the Harvard University Asia Center.