The India-Pakistan Story

The India-Pakistan story
India file by Jyoti Malhotra

There are few places in the world better than Sri Lanka to discuss the fits and starts that currently characterise the state of the India-Pakistan peace process. For a start, the LTTE ever so often drives home the point — like it did with the suicide killing of Sri Lanka’s top general last week — that it will not hesitate to use terrorism as a bargaining tool. At once senseless and abhorrent, that all-too familiar strategy never fails to provide a cutting edge to the violence that is rife, especially in faraway Jammu & Kashmir.

Also, Colombo takes its commitment to South Asia much more seriously than both New Delhi and Islamabad, by stamping visas on arrival for both Indian and Pakistani nationals. That’s a small, but very important lesson for India, which yearns to be treated as a major player by the world : Giving visas to Pakistani visitors without putting them on the local version of the Guantanamo Bay merry-go-round will not amount to a threat to the Indian state. Those threatening the Indian state — in Jammu & Kashmir, for example — are not sending visa/travel permit application forms in triplicate to the requisite authorities in Delhi’s North Block.

And so Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the German NGO that seeks to promote dialogue and interaction between combative players, hosted a seminar on the state of the India-Pakistan peace process in Colombo last week. At hand were strategic analysts from both capitals as well as Srinagar, a handful of journalists, and very interestingly, actors from the Ladakh-Gilgit-Baltistan region, whose collective input at the seminar had the astounding potential of turning the whole thing upside down.

Back in Delhi as the drama over the ‘refusal’ of a visa by Pakistan visa to the noted Indian artist Javed Akhtar was being played out, participants at the Colombo conference agreed that while the state of the bilateral peace process could be characterised as reasonably healthy, the impact of an overweening bureaucracy and a substantial lack of political will ensured that it was often bogged down. At the people-to-people level between both Kashmirs, participants argued, the situation had become so bad as to be critical. The bus that was flagged off with such fanfare last year between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad across the Line of Control, for example, hardly carried any passengers any more, because it took months for Kashmiris to be first cleared by the Indian authorities and then their Pakistani counterparts. It was perhaps better, the participants sorrowfully argued, not to have raised expectations in the first place, if all both governments were going to do was to commit them to such slow torture.

Clearly, it was this lack of political will that seemed to be the crux of the problem. On the one hand, General Pervez Musharraf’s many propositions and initiatives on Kashmir, whether about demilitarisation of Kashmir or its division into seven regions, had pretty much drawn a blank from New Delhi, which suspected him of the ultimate ulterior motive of once more dividing India along religious lines. On the other hand, there was Manmohan Singh, prime minister but not the elected leader of the Congress party, whose refugee inheritance as well as economic background allowed him an exquisite sense of destiny — but, considering the historic moment at hand, which was turning out to be of little avail.

As CEO of India Inc., Manmohan Singh knew that the ability to trade and make money by both parties was perhaps the only way to overcome the political and emotional dissonance on Kashmir. Just like Shaukat Aziz, perhaps. And although Indian officials often liked to hang their Pakistani counterparts on MFN, truth was that at the 2004 SAARC summit it was Islamabad that had persuaded Bangladesh to sign on the dotted line that would ensure that the South Asia Free Trade Area (SAFTA) would one day become a reality.

The China comparison wasn’t far away. Could India and Pakistan do an India-China, participants asked at the seminar, considering both sides were still negotiating a boundary dispute, even as their bilateral trade was jumping up and beyond $10 billion? Once again, the answer boiled down to the lack of political will. Since there was an “active dispute” between India and Pakistan called “Kashmir” — unlike what existed between India and China — it was impractical to expect bureaucrats to persuade unimaginative politicians to think out of their status quoist boxes. All this was, however, par for the course. What took the conference’s collective breath away was the impassioned argument by participants from Ladakh-Gilgit-Northern Areas that while they “were not Kashmiris, they were part of the Kashmir dispute”.

How could that be possible? Or was this just a conspiracy by the Indian state to widen the scope of the “Kashmir” dispute, to include not only Jammu and Ladakh on the Indian side, but also Northern Areas/Baltistan from the Pakistani side? You could hear a pin drop as you heard those from there, speak. There were as many as 7,000 divided families across the LOC between Kargil and Skardu, but the all-weather road between those two cities, only 157 km long, could not be reopened because Islamabad refused to consider the possibility. “We carry Pakistani passports, but we cannot stand for national elections. We have a crisis of identity that nobody understands,” said a resident of Gilgit. Added a participant from the Indian side : “Why can’t the Indian government push for the opening of the Kargil-Skardu road as it has done with the connections between Poonch-Rawlakot or Srinagar-Muzaffarabad?”

All the generals in the room gaped in shock and awe. The India-Pakistan conflict was supposed to be about terrorist infiltration across the LoC, levels of violence and wars, like Kargil. Who had heard of people once beyond the pale of the Valley, onomatopoeic people from places like Gilgit and Hunza and Dras and Tololing, demanding their right to be heard? And then there was this to chew on, sitting on the edge of the Indian Ocean, painfully aware that as the waves crashed all around you, the sub-continent was really a speck on the star-studded horizon: With India and the US on their way to becoming the latest strategic partners on the block, courtesy their nuclear deal, whatever was going to happen to the India-Pakistan story?

The writer is diplomatic editor of Star News, India. Email: jomalhotra @yahoo.com