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Old Tuesday, November 15, 2011
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Default Euphoria over Indo-Pak relations

BY Mohammad Jamil
PAKISTAN OBSERVER, 15-11-2011

The prime ministers of India and Pakistan met in Addu on sidelines of the Maldives SAARC summit and vowed to open up a new chapter in the bilateral relations. Such rhetoric is not new, as whenever the two countries’ top leaders meet, they come out with similar upbeat notes, proclaiming they have left the past behind, but one terrorist attack on Indian Parliament or 26/11 Mumbai attack bring the entire edifice of normalization. In Addu, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh lauded Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani’s desire for good relations with In dia called him as a “man of peace’, and said Pak-India peace dialogue would resume soon. While accepting Yousuf Raza Gilani’s invitation to visit Pakistan, he declared that he would not visit Pakistan till an effective action against terrorists is taken.

The question is where is the gesture of goodwill, and the desire to normalize relations with Pakistan. The problem is that there are serious issues like Kashmir, Sir Creek and Siachen keeping the two countries perpetually at loggerheads, and an extraordinarily strong will is required from their leaderships to tackle them firmly and bring to finality.

There have been many rounds of talks between India and Pakistan to resolve all outstanding issues including the core issue of Kashmir. But when Pakistan expressed dissatisfaction over the prolonged talks without any progress, the talks came to an abrupt end on one pretext or another. Yet, former Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif claims that during his second stint India and Pakistan were on the verge of resolving the issue of Kashmir, but Kargil adventure roiled the chance. Similar wishful thinking was observed during Mursharraf era, and even recently he claimed that both countries had almost reached an agreement on Siachen and Sir Creek, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was to announce the resolution of Siachen issue during his visit to Pakistan.

But 26/11 Mumbai terrorists’ attacks stalled the composite dialogue process. The fact of the matter is that India is not interested in resolving the issues and wants to keep Pakistan under pressure by keeping the water sources in Occupied Kashmir and by constructing some 80 dams on Pakistani rivers. India in fact wants to keep its hegemony in this region, and it considers nuclear Pakistan as an impediment to its hegemonic designs.

It is unfortunate that four rounds of composite dialogue covering the whole gamut of disputes keeping the two countries at loggerheads had passed without any remarkable progress on any of the important issues including the core issue of Kashmir. After November 2008, the dialogue between India and Pakistan took place in New Delhi on February 25, 2011. Earlier, India had given an indication that the talks would only revolve around terrorism but after Pakistan’s initial reaction that resumption of composite dialogue is the only way that New Delhi indicated that it was open to discussing all subjects, including Kashmir and water. Later, during the meetings Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at Sharm-al-Sheikh in Egypt and in New York, both had reached an understanding that the acts of terrorism by non-state actors would not be allowed to influence relations between the two countries. Anyhow, India uses every event to denigrate Pakistan, and to prove that Pakistan as a state sponsors terrorism.

The truth of the matter is that the composite dialogue was moving at a snail’s pace even on the issues that were not as thorny as the Kashmir dispute; and when after protracted negotiations the core issue comes under discussion, India does something to roil the dialogue. International community does not exert pressure on India because of its size and market, but it is too well known that Kashmir is a disputed territory and there are resolutions passed by the United Nations Security Council to that effect.

Unfortunately, the two countries also failed to settle their disputes over India’s water reservoirs with the result that Pakistan had to take the Baglihar Dam issue to the World Bank for arbitration. The leaderships of both India and Pakistan should resolve the long-standing issues, and should now focus on ‘conflict resolution’ - the core issue of Kashmir and construction of dams on Pakistani rivers - because Pakistan would consider it an effort to make Pakistan a wasteland, which Pakistan would never allow. But India does not like to take chances; there fore Indian military keeps the bulk of its strike might deployed perpetually against Pakistan.

India also enunciates a Pakistan-specific cold start doctrine, has raised a rapid strike command to take on Pakistan along their Punjab-Rajasthan sector, and propounds a doctrine of two simultaneous wars against Pakistan along with China. What else could you rationally expect if not unease in the Pakistani security establishment? Indeed, for such a thorny issue and dispute as Kashmir, Pervez Musharraf had gone out of the way for an out-of-the-box resolution for which he drew a lot of flake at home and went through a very rough patch domestically. The present Pakistani government is also being criticized for its decision to give India ‘Most Favoured Nation’. Despite the fact that there was a hostile reaction from some political parties and section of the business community, Federal cabinet meanwhile has given approval to the proposal. The cabinet met under the chairmanship of Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani, and Commerce Minister Amin Fahim had briefed the cabinet about the outcome of his visit to India. In fact, he had assured Indian government of Pakistan’s wish to give India the status of Most Favroured Nation.

The government arguably made another mistake. In Australia, after the Commonwealth summit, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani supported the extension of the tenure of Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamlesh Sharma of India, and had in fact seconded the Indian candidature for a second stint. This seems to have been done to appease the US and the West.

Since the 1993 the Commonwealth Heads of Governments had decided that the Secretary-General will be elected to a maximum of two four-year terms. Nominations are received from the member states’ governments, who sponsor the nomination through the election process and are responsible for withdrawing their candidate as they see fit. The Chair (Head of Government of the host nation) is responsible for ascertaining which candidate has the greatest support, through the conduct of negotiations and secret straw polls. There is usually a convention that an incumbent seeking a second term in office is elected unopposed for his or her second term. When it was preordained that Kamlesh Sharma of India would get the extension, there was no need to give this gesture of goodwill.
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