In March this year, the mood in the Pakistan Foreign Office about the progress made in the three-year-old composite dialogue with India was upbeat. Its top-most official said that 2007 was a critical year and that it could be a watershed in transforming the bilateral relationship. This optimism was probably based as much on the forward movement in parleys as on the desire to make the 60th anniversary of independence a real turning point in regional history. There were, indeed, some clouds of uncertainty but Islamabad had apparently hoped that an expected visit to Pakistan by the Indian prime minister, Manmohan Singh would blow them away.
Barely eleven weeks before the two successor states of the British Indian Empire celebrate 60 years of freedom, India-Pakistan peace process seems to be losing momentum. The schedule of meetings approved by their foreign ministers not very long ago is in no danger of collapsing but there is an increasing fear that there may be more form than substance to them. Domestic factors in both countries are working to slow down rapprochement. Simultaneously, the deepening of Indo-US strategic understanding may be making India contemplate progress with Pakistan with less urgency even as Pakistan had hoped for the opposite.
March was also the month when President Pervez Musharraf triggered off the worst political crisis of his eight— year-old rule by a highly controversial move to remove the chief justice of Pakistan. The country has been in turmoil ever since and it is becoming increasingly difficult to predict the outcome of the unfolding crisis.
The Indian government has not done anything to exacerbate the situation in Pakistan but there is evidence of mounting pressure on the Indian prime minister to put on hold any initiative to energize the dialogue with Pakistan with personal summit diplomacy. Opinion makers in New Delhi argue that if India could not openly support a movement for democracy in the neighboring country, it should not, at least, strengthen the hand of the general-president to implement his plan to retain the office of the army chief during his projected new term as president. This caveat is frequently entered into otherwise positive assessments that India has found Gen. Musharraf more amenable to making substantial concessions on contentious issues like Kashmir than his elected political predecessors.
In India too, the coalition government has to watch the BJP and its more strident communalist allies with concern as its position has weakened in recent provincial elections. Manmohan Singh may not wish to expose his flank by appearing to be too conciliatory to Pakistan at this point of time.
The objective situation between the two countries is rather mixed. On the positive side, the two sides have made a beginning in reaching an accord on nuclear risk reduction that may in time develop into a more comprehensive strategic restraint regime. The 60-year— old dispute on the delimitation of frontier in Sir Creek that opens on their western shore has moved a little closer to settlement with the completion of a joint survey of the area. So far their arguments have been based on competing interpretations of old maps dating back to early 20th century. The joint survey provides useful data for exploring a mutually satisfactory solution. On the negative side, the Indian position on the expected demilitarization of the dizzy heights of the Siachin Glacier has perceptibly hardened. It has become one of those rare cases where the Indian military has asserted itself and virtually pre-empted the political inclination to bring about disengagement of troops through redeployment without imposing difficult preconditions on Pakistan.
Nicholas Burns, the United States undersecretary of state for political affairs, recently observed that “these are heady times for India and the United States” and that he saw every day “signs of the strategic benefits our efforts can bring our two counties”.
Pakistan is the country that has lost most lives of its soldiers in helping the US war on terror in the neighboring Afghanistan. Pakistan is also a formal non-NATO ally of Washington. The two equations are, however, exerting rather an ambivalent influence on subcontinental relationships. The Indo-US nuclear deal and the American offer to sell some of the most advanced weapon systems to India are, in fact, fuelling an arms race; Musharraf has just talked of a 15-year plan to upgrade Pakistan’s defense capability. At the psychological level, the American connection has encouraged a school of thought in New Delhi that India need not concern itself too much with subregional cooperation.
This is erroneous thinking; neither India nor Pakistan can attain their full potential without taking their current peace process to a logical and happy conclusion. Never before in the last 60 years were the prospects of achieving this goal so good.
Musharraf has scaled down Pakistan’s expectations on the core issue of Kashmir to an extent that no elected political leader could ever have done. His unilateral “concessions” have been instrumental in promoting not only a serious discussion on the Kashmir question in secret negotiations with India but also in persuading the so-called Kashmiri “separatists” to talk to New Delhi, albeit inconclusively, about a solution based on autonomy for the embattled state. It will be a grave mistake to let the momentum thus generated fade away because of the domestic problems of either side; the peace process should transcend such expedient situations. At the end of the day India and Pakistan living in mutual peace would find it easier to live peacefully with themselves. Their people will benefit substantially from the promised peace dividend.
— Tanvir Ahmad Khan is a former foreign secretary and ambassador of Pakistan.
