A summit of new opportunities

INDIA AND PAKISTAN have given themselves another historic chance to rise above the pervasive prejudices of their estrangement and to weave a pragmatic pattern of constructive engagement. The arrival of Pakistan's President and Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in New Delhi today for tomorrow's summit in Agra with the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, will mark the beginning of a truly new exercise in bilateral diplomacy. It is important to remember that India had in the past too engaged Pakistan's leadership-in-governance that was drawn from the military stream. Yet, given the Vajpayee administration's perception of Gen. Musharraf as the man who wrecked the spirit of the previous historic experiment in bilateral diplomacy, which culminated in the Lahore Declaration of 1999, the uniqueness of the upcoming Agra summit is really difficult to capture in words. It is in this context that the expectations about the imminent encounter of the diplomatic kind between Gen. Musharraf and Mr. Vajpayee should be tempered with a great deal of realism. A caveat of this order is not necessarily related to the possible notions of an asymmetrical exchange between a military ruler with an appropriated constitutional status and the Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy. The simple but substantive factor at stake is the enormity of the task of renouncing a bilateral culture of political and diplomatic mistrust and hostilities.

Given the cumulative experiences of India and Pakistan in dealing with each other since Partition in 1947, Mr. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf will do well to seize the new moment of opportunity with much care. There is no place for either the illusions of crafting a grand charter of dramatic friendship or even the undue circumspection of avoiding creative options. While New Delhi has repeatedly clarified that it wants to address the totality of the India-Pakistan relationship as a dynamic reality, Gen. Musharraf is eager to place the Kashmir dispute at the heart of this equation. Islamabad's constant refrain about a core issue, another term for the Kashmir question, is sought to be matched by New Delhi which wants the spotlight to be turned upon its core concerns pertaining to this problem itself. The people of India and Pakistan will be the obvious beneficiaries if the two leaders can, therefore, strive to envision an institutionalised architecture of dialogue spanning the entire range of bilateral issues. As for Kashmir in particular and the inter-linked questions concerning peace and stability including nuclear security, a strong case can be made for a bilateral working group, at the political level of Ministers, which could be mandated to negotiate in a professional mode divorced from ideological and polemical considerations.

New possibilities exist for bilateral engagement at the people-to-people level too. Some of the pre-summit gestures announced by New Delhi seem to have been guided by such considerations in a fair measure. So, Mr. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf can usefully consider expanding the scope of bilateral engagement so as to give the people on either side some genuine space for creating a joint but informal constituency for sustainable peace and friendship between the two countries. It is in this larger setting that the two leaders should seek to jettison the old baggages of misgivings and explore the scope for charting afresh a possible path to normalisation of ties. To some extent, the pre-summit atmosphere has already been vitiated by the political heat and dust over the relevance of `Kashmiri groups', notably the All-Party Hurriyat Conference, to the India- Pakistan dialogue process. Gen. Musharraf and New Delhi may today find themselves with qualitatively different options to ensure that this issue does not shatter the hopes about the summit even before it begins.

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Section  : Opinion
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