Musharraf charts a path to Agra

THE HIGH STAKES of summit diplomacy have impelled Pakistan's President and Chief Executive, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to try and steer away from apparent craters as he explores an uncharted terrain before his scheduled meeting with the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, in Agra next month. This should explain the clarification by Pakistan's officials that Gen. Musharraf does not subscribe to the theory that India's invitation to him for the proposed bilateral summit was determined by the U.S.' pressure on New Delhi to settle its disputes with Islamabad at this stage. It is quite immaterial whether the clarification is in response to New Delhi's stinging rebuttal of some earlier reports from Pakistan that its sole leader saw an American sleight of hand behind Mr. Vajpayee's current initiative for a definitive detente with Pakistan. Now, even prior to this storm in a tea cup on the India-Pakistan front, it was indeed clear that the U.S. had played no proactive role of exerting pressure on New Delhi to call Islamabad for direct talks at the highest level at this time. So, a prime reality relevant to the prospective summit in Agra is that the Musharraf administration simply wants to dispel any impressions which might only endanger a mutual spirit of goodwill during the delicate run-up. Moreover, Gen. Musharraf seems to be conscious of the subdued but substantive scepticism within Pakistan that he is but a stranger to international diplomacy of the kind required to engage India. While this may also account for his eagerness to sustain a certain upbeat mood of flexibility, he is no less keen to appear firm too.

Having brought all levers of Pakistan's executive and legislative powers under his absolute control very recently, Gen. Musharraf has not only startled large sections of the international community but also many of his compatriots. It is in this context that his latest consultations with Pakistan's military establishment and civilian-political `leadership' on the India- Pakistan differences acquire a rare degree of importance. A faction that is believed to owe allegiance to Mr. Nawaz Sharif, who was toppled by Gen. Musharraf in a bloodless coup in October 1999, was not invited to participate in the latest confabulations on the imminent Agra summit. In contrast, Ms. Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party, which is active abroad in seeking to unfurl a flag of rebellion against Gen. Musharraf's rule in Islamabad, does not wish to associate itself with his current political gestures towards India in any manner. As a result, Gen. Musharraf's consultative preparations at home for the proposed talks with Mr. Vajpayee have certainly not set the Indus on fire.

In a different but equally important sense, though, Gen. Musharraf has secured a broad pre-summit `mandate' from his military and civilian interlocutors inside Pakistan, where he faces no conspicuous resistance at this moment. Armed with this general `mandate', he hopes to assess Mr. Vajpayee's priorities for peace with Pakistan as also the Indian leader's options over the Kashmir dispute in particular. As a consequence, many ideas are being bandied about in public discourses in Pakistan and, of course, India. Yet, official Pakistan (as also India) will do well to follow a prudent course of managing the present bilateral expectations by simply brushing aside the temptation to turn the public spotlight on one or more sets of ideas in the name of idealism or even pragmatism. For Pakistan, a particularly emotive issue is whether or not the leaders of the All Party Hurriyat Conference, an umbrella conglomerate of `Kashmiri' groups, should brief Gen. Musharraf before he meets Mr. Vajpayee. A simple standard of statemanship is that both New Delhi, which seems obsessed with the notion of keeping the Hurriyat out of the India-Pakistan spectrum, and Pakistan, which appears insistent on engaging the APHC somehow, should not allow this issue to cloud the bilateral ambience at this sensitive juncture of fragile hopes.

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