NEW DELHI, 3 June — Barring the unthinkable or the unbelievable Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Chief Executive Gen. Pervez Musharraf will meet in Delhi in July. That is the easy part. The truth about this dialogue is that failure will have many fathers and success will be an orphan.
Cynicism is now inbuilt into India-Pakistan relations; and more people with influence on both sides of the border want this dialogue to fail than those who want it to go somewhere. It is a mistake to believe that everyone wants something as obvious as peace, and its first cousin, prosperity.
Time — and we are talking five decades and two generations in power now — breeds, sustains and encourages a vested interest in confrontation. The cost of confrontation is huge, but its benefits are wide.
As the witty bureaucrat pointed out to his successor on the eve of his retirement, just because a policy has failed is no reason to change it. On one level this vested interest is material interest. There is money in war. The game of defense-offense requires vast outlays of hard cash (hard as in dollar-hard) that feed mammoth institutions, turn huge corporations profitable and look after the needs of layers of individuals.
But this too is easier to negotiate than the other problem. A vested interest also develops in the mind. Hatred can become comfortable and comforting, particularly when cloaked in simulated ideology of paranoid nationalism. Even those free from the poison of hatred are prone to the temptation of suspicion. After all what can 50 year of continual war breed except evidence that trust is foolish if not suicidal? Vajpayee rose above his party when he traveled to Lahore.
He left behind his baggage of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) political and emotional history when he took that short bus ride across Wagah in the penultimate year of a century that had ripped and shredded a common subcontinent.
Today he has risen above himself. For who can have experienced more than him, with his political background, evidence of the proposition that trust is a foolish virtue? The participants were still heady with the intoxicating spirit of Lahore when the intrusions along the Kargil cease-fire line took place, blowing up eventually into a nasty mountain-top war that shook the Vajpayee government before it consumed the Nawaz Sharif regime.
Vajpayee’s instinctive aversion to the coup that overthrew his Lahore comrade underlined his anger against the perpetrators of Kargil. In meeting the general with whom he had to do literal battle, Vajpayee has placed his perception of the national interest above his own sorrow and anger. It is obvious that this would not have happened if, so to say, the general mood in Pakistan had not changed. The warriors of Kargil adopted the language of accommodation the moment they seized power. Words alone however do not create trust. Words can be pre-planned, manipulated. But Gen. Musharraf has proved a surprisingly effective communicator; few men in uniform have used television better than he has. But Gen. Musharraf is a bad actor; you can see him getting uncomfortable when compulsion requires him to be evasive. But this also doubles the effect of his sincerity when he is being sincere. When he reaches Delhi Gen. Musharraf will bring with him the promise of sincerity.
This is what makes Delhi more dangerous than Lahore. Too many things are right. The talks are between representatives of hard-line constituencies and therefore leaders whose commitments will be backed by parties that could have sabotaged any agreement, as indeed they have done in the past. The timing is right, since American interest in the dialogue is a given: six months ago, Washington had a mess instead of an administration. This is going to be a dialogue pregnant with possibility. An abortion will depress both countries immeasurably, and there may be no medicine available to stop the bleeding.
The stakes could hardly be higher: we are playing nuclear poker out here. The first, and immediate, requirement, therefore is a definition of success. Success in any manifestation is a comparative fact. Only those who want failure see it in absolute, and therefore unachievable terms. There will be one chorus (you can hear it practicing already) in both India and Pakistan that will measure everything said and done against a “solution” to the Kashmir dispute that achieves their present positions. No dialogue can survive the scrutiny of such parameters.
If one wants to be disputatious, there is no end to this game. There is enough ammunition to blow apart any position, including the ones that the hard-liners assume.
Self determination might be a very noble idea, but it does tend to sound more relevant in the vocabulary of a nation committed to democracy. A country that has not managed more than two or two-and-half honest general elections in five decades, that has been ruled by unelected bureaucrats, presumptive politicians and dictatorial generals is hardly qualified to preach about the will of the people.
The people of Sindh and Punjab could make a good case for self-determination at this moment, having seen their elected leaders dismissed and exiled. India, has had its share of incompetents but its leaders have only been removed from office by the will of the people, not by the will of army officers.
There is a growing view in India that the best solution to the Kashmir problem is to convert the cease-fire line into an international border; this was believed to be the “secret” (although there is no evidence of any “secrecy” in Pakistani records) understanding behind the Simla Agreement between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto. Logic is acid to this idea. Why does an accident of Jan. 1, 1949, have to become a permanent fact? Would we have been equally sanguine if the cease-fire line had been 10 miles further to the east? If Maharaja Hari Singh ceded the whole of Jammu and Kashmir to India and that is the basis of our international position, what right does any government have to hand over any portion of that land?
Does this not dilute and destroy the very principle on which Jammu and Kashmir came to India? It does, but the counter argument is that this is the only pragmatic solution left. Ah. So we have conceded the role of pragmatism. This opens a whole new world. The only sensible definition of success in the Delhi talks is this: if the gamut of problems between India and Pakistan stretches from A to Z, then the Delhi summit should be deemed successful if Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf achieve clarity on A.
At this moment relations are in negative space, outside the alphabet and therefore outside the flexibility of dialogue. To reach the beginning may sound paradoxical, but that is the only phrase that does justice to the truth. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf must create a new beginning. And they must find the structures, preferably stable, in which to house and nurture this new beginning. To send them into the doghouse conventional formats would be equivalent to infanticide.
A series of parallel streams, or feeder systems, needs to be put in place to create a political-government-popular interface that begins to soothe the stretched nerves of the subcontinent. If this does not happen together, it will not happen at all. It is these feeder systems that will keep the momentum rolling when the high drama of Delhi and Ajmer Sharif has crossed the clock.
Politicians have their role, but they also have their limitations. Government, in the form of bureaucrats, is by training careful to the point of immobility, and will only respond to factors rather than create them. If there is spring in the air, the bureaucrat will stir (stir, not leap). If there is winter approaching, he will freeze by autumn.
Both governments need to involve those outside the political machinery. To expect a breakthrough in people-to-people relations at this point is to expect too much. But there are sectors that can be linked. Media is always a good starting point; it controls communication and can, deliberately or inadvertently, shift the mood. Pakistan TV and Zee have already done their bit by informing India and Pakistan that they are exactly alike when it comes to scheming in-laws, mischievous relatives, flirtatious cousins and ruthless impostors. This must be reassuring to mothers-in-law all over.
But more important than media is business, and particularly private sector business. Why has Dhirubhai Ambani become such an advocate of friendship between India and Pakistan? I doubt if he wants to win the Nobel Prize for Peace. He wants peace between India and Pakistan because he wants an even fatter bank account. That is an excellent reason. Peace must bring a dividend to attract motivators. Those Pakistani and Indian sugar dealers who traded right through the Kargil war may have been members of the Jamaat-e-Islami or the RSS in their spare time. In their useful time they were making money for each other.
Money is a very strong cement for trust. When Iran, Pakistan and India begin to make or save money out of their gas pipeline, improving the lives of countless millions in the process then the peace dividend will become a daily fact. You should be able to bank on peace. If the account can be opened in Delhi, even if there is not enough for an initial deposit, then the Delhi talks can be considered successful.
