New vistas beyond Agra summit?

THE CONCERTED FASHION in which India and Pakistan have expressed their willingness to look positively beyond the latest Agra summit is a welcome sign of their maturity. Yet, as they seek to sustain a difficult re-engagement, India and Pakistan should first draw appropriate lessons from the summit which concluded on July 16 in circumstances that the two countries have so far chosen to leave unexplained. In a general psycho-political perspective, the summit did initially appear to have been a somewhat asymmetrical dialogue between the Prime Minister of the world's largest democracy and Pakistan's military ruler. However, the absence of a codified accord at the conclusion of their meeting at Agra may indeed have much to do with the qualitative asymmetry of a different kind that could be traced to the conflicting expectations of the two sides. Now, even this aspect is not unusual in international diplomacy, but the leaders of India and Pakistan seem to have failed at this time to resolve their differences regarding the very definition of a bilateral dispute concerning Jammu and Kashmir. In a sense, an effort was obviously made on this occasion, without a definitive acknowledgment by the two parties though, to delineate the integral aspects of this critical dispute. If this really signified a serious prelude to the search for an explicit problem-solving approach, the past was not much of a guide. Consider two of the major bilateral summits that preceded the present one. The subject of Jammu and Kashmir was identified as a ``question'' at Shimla and as an ``issue'' at Lahore. The Lahore Declaration and the associated documents outlined a dialogue mechanism without actually defining the various ingredients of the Jammu and Kashmir ``issue''.

At Agra, India and Pakistan apparently tried and failed to agree on the degree of centrality that the Jammu and Kashmir issue could be accorded within the broad spectrum of bilateral concerns. Closely linked to this were the transparent diplomatic challenges of defining the issue in terms of the ``wishes of the Kashmiri people'' as demanded by Gen. Musharraf and in the context of Islamabad-inspired ``cross-border terrorism'' with adverse consequences to India as outlined by Mr. Vajpayee. As a result, there was no semblance of an accord of any kind about an architecture of dialogue to address these and other concerns of the two countries. It is, therefore, a matter of considerable satisfaction that the External Affairs and Defence Minister, Mr. Jaswant Singh, has now affirmed New Delhi's decision to stay engaged with Islamabad despite ``the difficulty in reconciling (their) basic approaches to bilateral relations''. In a cooperative gesture, Pakistan's Foreign Minister, Mr. Abdul Sattar, has drawn attention to Gen. Musharraf's belief that ``the existing goodwill on both sides'' will lead to ``mutually desired results'' in the future. Islamabad is hopeful that the deliberations at Agra, which remained ``inconclusive'', can serve as the ``foundation'' for future parleys.

The realisation of these hopes, which seem laced with a tinge of despair, will depend on how India and Pakistan can seek common ground without rancour. Mr. Vajpayee remains convinced that the normalisation of ties with Islamabad is a desirable endeavour that transcends the Jammu and Kashmir issue without sidelining it. It remains to be seen whether Pakistan, which does not disdainfully ignore the larger picture of many possible interactions, is keen to conduct a ``composite dialogue'' at more than one level depending on the relative importance of the subjects that include nuclear and conventional security as also people- to-people contacts. So, the misguided move by a Union Minister, Ms. Sushma Swaraj, to fragment the larger mosaic of subjects and portray a lopsided picture of the discussions in progress at a critical stage of the Agra summit drew a spirited denunciation by Gen. Musharraf who too overreacted on television. In the end, however, the complexity of issues and not the public relations exercises seemed to have determined the course of the Agra summit.

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