Relations with India need revival

[Aarwaa]

Relations with India need revival

After a two-day ministerial conference of South Asian Association of Regional Cooperation (SAARC) states, Pakistan’s Foreign Minister, Inamul Haq, has tried to raise hopes about the signing of two important agreements on the disputes of Sir Creek and Siachen when the Indian prime minister Mr Manmohan Singh visits Pakistan early next year after the January elections in Pakistan are over and a new government is in place in Islamabad. Can he be taken seriously?

“Caretaker” Mr Haq, who had an “unofficial” kind of meeting with the Indian Foreign Minister, Mr Pranab Mukherjee, on the margins of the two-day SAARC gathering, nonetheless admitted that the overall talks between the two countries had “slowed down somewhat” due to “trouble” in Pakistan. That was an understatement considering the fact that the “trouble” in Pakistan has been simmering since March and relations with India cooled following Pakistan’s allegation that India was fomenting insurgency in Balochistan with money and weapons. On the other hand, the Indian foreign minister, Mr Mukherjee said that “we’ll need a month for the new administration to settle down and we can expect the prime minister to make his visit soon after that”.

Newspapers have said that Mr Haq’s optimism flowed from the “concession” made by his counterpart that “India acknowledged Kashmir was a dispute between the two countries”. He was likewise impressed by India’s “restraint in its public approach to Pakistan’s domestic difficulties, particularly by not raising the issue of the state of emergency on any public forum”. He therefore thought that India could agree on “three do-ables”: demilitarisation of the Indian side of Kashmir and signing agreements on Sir Creek and Siachen. But the Indian foreign minister thought that a foreign secretaries meeting would have to thrash out the issues in the Fourth Round of the composite talks before India could communicate at the highest level. After that, the Indian foreign minister is thinking of launching the Fifth Round, not signing any agreements. He said Indo-Pak talks on matters like trade had been on hold because of “trouble” in Pakistan.

In India there is much political snapping at the heels of each other with the Congress government on the defensive. This is the time of the supremacy of the External Affairs bureaucracy. It is they who are calling the shots while the prime minister is inert because of his weak political base. In 2006, when things were not so bad in Pakistan and President General Musharraf was inclined to embrace India on the basis of “normalisation” rather than “resolution of disputes”, the talks on Siachen had come to nothing. Pakistan lost its moral hold on the Siachen dispute after the fiasco of its Kargil adventure in 1999. In 2006, the trouble in Balochistan came in the way. And in 2007, Pakistan finally succumbed to its inner turmoil. Forget about converting Siachen into a Peace Park, you can’t even get India to think of “normalisation” properly. The civil servant in New Delhi wants to move in for the kill.

But the Musharraf government was also not clear about what it wanted to do from its minimalist position after it had put forth some “out of the box” ideas on Kashmir. When India did not budge — at times because of its “political” difficulties at home — Islamabad felt cheated out of a quid pro quo and started to link the trade talks to “progress” on the Kashmir dispute. It began its slanging match with New Delhi over what it thought the Indians were doing in Balochistan, but in its heart was offended by the freedom with which the Indians were moving around in Afghanistan and picking up strategic projects with President Karzai with the approval of the world. What it should have done instead was to sit down and think what it needed to do with India now that the Kashmir issue was finally out of its reach.

Now politics is back in Pakistan. The PMLN chief, Mr Nawaz Sharif, is making statements that will not be good for the Indo-Pak dialogue. Since he is the most popular leader in the country today, his statement that General Musharraf had sold the Kashmir issue cheap and that, if his government had not been overthrown in 1999, Kashmir would have been resolved — read, in Pakistan’s favour — is a spanner in the works. He has accused President Musharraf of beating a retreat in the face of India, a matter he will not forgive easily, he says.

Therefore Pakistan’s “trouble” is not going to go away after the January elections. In fact politicians who have concentrated hard on the more fundamental problem of the civil-military relations will face the bigger problem of the writ of the state. India is poised to win by doing nothing; Pakistan will lose by thinking that it too can benefit from doing nothing. *

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default...-12-2007_pg3_1