A trap in the making

By Pran Chopra

SIMPLE FALSEHOOD travels faster and goes farther than complex truth. India has experienced this problem for decades. The danger is that we might be adding another chapter to that. First. In 1947 India failed to counter the falsehood that the country was partitioned on the basis of religion. It wasn't. It was partitioned as a result of territorial referendums which were held on the basis of the Indian Independence Act of the British Parliament, which made not a single- reference to religion. That is why referendums were held, directly or indirectly, even in territories in which Muslims were in overwhelming majority. This was not a technical distinction without a difference. It was at the heart of the demographic problem that no matter how the lines of partition might be drawn there would always be more Muslims in what would remain India than in what would become Pakistan. Their future would have been in peril in any partition mandated by religion.

Second. Pakistan got away with the falsehood that because India was partitioned on the basis of religion, Kashmir should have acceded to Pakistan because of its Muslim majority. The world could not digest the constitutional complexity that the Indian Independence Act left it to the rulers of all ``princely'' states, including Kashmir, to decide whether to accede to India or Pakistan, and the ruler of Jammu and Kashmir acceded to India only when Pakistan, impatient to grab Kashmir, let loose an invasion upon it. Third. While India was branded for not implementing a U.N. resolution which called for a plebiscite in Kashmir, India failed to bring it home to the world that, as recorded by the U.N. itself, it was Pakistan which nullified the resolution by refusing to meet three obligations which it was required to before India could be asked to hold a plebiscite.

It is true that the fault was not India's alone. The ``Kashmir dispute'' was still in its infancy when the world caught the high fever called the cold war. In that conflict many countries, notably led by the United States, considered India to be on the ``other side'' and Pakistan a close ally. Therefore India could do nothing right and Pakistan nothing wrong in their eyes. India lost the audience before it could carry conviction with anyone. Thus it happened that India was caught in the three traps one after another, each made of simple falsehoods spread by Pakistan. But a fourth is being laid, and India is not being wary enough.

Pakistan's guilt in Kashmir has been recognised and condemned by most countries in the post-Kargil world. But they are also agreed that future disasters must be avoided by India and Pakistan through direct bilateral negotiations. They are all agreed and eager that both countries must return to and resume the ``Lahore process''. As the author and initiator of that process, India should be at least as keen to do that as anyone else. But with a few verbal flourishes, which are as simple as they are false, Pakistan's Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has tried, during his recent diplomatic road-show, to spread the impression that Pakistan is keen but India is not. India's own responses are adding to that distortion of the reality. The reality is not, as Gen. Musharraf claimed in Southeast Asia, that Pakistan is willing to sit down ``at any time with anyone at any table''. Or that he is willing to discuss anything with anyone ``without any conditions'' as he claimed on arrival in Paris. The reality is that he is trying to get away from the best table at which India and Pakistan have ever sat, with the best fare that has ever been served to them and the tragedy is that, however unwittingly, India is playing into his hands.

Ever since Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr. Nawaz Sharif met in Lahore, all countries which have taken an interest in peace in South Asia have praised the ``Lahore process'', the courage shown by the two leaders in promoting it, and the wisdom embodied in the documents which came out of it. Their reason is obvious. These are the best documents in the whole history of ``Kashmir diplomacy'', whether in the U.N. or outside, in a bilateral or any other mode. The ``process'' required no midwives or mediators, was directly the product of the good sense displayed by both Prime Ministers, covered the agenda comprehensively, gave pride of place to the Kashmir dispute itself without denying due status to other issues between the two countries, and laid out a clear programme of work on them, clearer than in any other document so far. The documents are an improvement over the Shimla Agreement because neither country signed them in the shadow of a military defeat, as Pakistan did at Shimla.

But the first thing that Gen. Musharraf did was to rubbish the process, the documents and their authors, apart from hanging a noose over the head of Mr. Sharif. It is unfortunate that the ``process'' has been overtaken by the bitterness and sense of betrayal felt in India - rightly - because of what has become known since the meeting in Lahore: that even while Mr. Sharif was giving the hug of peace to Mr. Vajpayee and was negotiating blueprints for future peace, his generals, and particularly the future CEO, were planning and preparing for the bloody conflict which followed in Kargil.

For this reason it is understandable why India is insisting on conditions which would ensure that such betrayals do not occur in future, but it would not be understandable if India also insisted, as it is doing to an avoidable extent, on conditions which have the makings of a future trap for India. India is prescribing four kinds of conditions before it can agree to resume the ``Lahore process''. First, India is insisting, as Mr. Vajpayee is quoted to have done in a speech at Anand on April 11, that ``Pakistan must express regrets for the Kargil misadventure''. But regrets are not worth the paper they are written on. Those who express them are the first to forget them if they get the chance to do so. What matters is the price which the perpetrator is forced to pay for his misadventure, and Pakistan must not be allowed to forget that, whether it ``regrets'' Kargil or not. Second, in the same speech, Mr. Vajpayee also demanded that Pakistan must ``desist from repeating (Kargil)''. Any such assurance by Pakistan is superfluous so long as it is not allowed to forget that if another ``Kargil'' recurs, as hotheads in Pakistan say it may, India will insist on its right to complete its response even if other countries requested it hold its hand. Third, Mr. Vajpayee has also demanded that Pakistan ``must learn to respect... bilateral understandings''. Of course it must, and a country's signature to an agreement is supposed to be an affirmation of just such respect. But who can enforce this respect better than the other party to the ``bilateral understanding'' if it can make infringements of the understanding very expensive for the offending co- signatory.

But the worst mistake is the fourth. In different forms of words India has been saying Pakistan must first discontinue its violent transgression across the LoC. Pakistan is denying it is making any. In this situation what is there to prevent Gen. Musharaf from demanding, either on his own or through a friendly intermediary, that the U.N. or other international neutrals must actively patrol the LoC to see whether India's allegations are more correct or Pakistan's denials, and whether what India calls incursions from the other side are in fact only local insurgencies? It would not be easy for India either to accept what would be a blatantly international intrusion or to reject it without appearing to be dragging its feet on the road back to the ``Lahore process''. That appearance would be expensive and unwise because it would put India at odds with those numerous countries, all of them strongly in favour of an early return to ``Lahore'', whom India has - rightly - thanked for their new and at last correct understanding of the realities of Kashmir, even if it has taken long to dawn on them. Once again the victim would become the accused and the offender the accuser.

The sanest and safest course for India would be to ensure early resumption of the process, and in the meantime to leave no one in any doubt that any violation by Pakistan of what India now calls conditions for resumption would be dealt with, promptly and fully.

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