Engaging Pakistan: after Agra

By C. Raja Mohan

WHY HAS India chosen to engage Gen. Pervez Musharraf beyond Agra? The answer is fairly simple. Getting a handle on Pakistan, remains at the top of India's foreign policy priorities. Fixing the `Pakistan problem' has become vital in the realisation of India's own aspirations for a larger role on the world stage. After having initiated a successful redefinition of India's relations with the major powers in the last couple of years, New Delhi now hopes to demonstrate its ability to manage the affairs in its own neighbourhood.

Despite all the difficulties and frustrations that arise in any serious interaction with Pakistan, India hopes to stay the course. It has no other realistic alternative. Pakistan is too large to be either ignored or isolated. It is equipped with nuclear weapons and cannot be coerced into accepting solutions imposed from outside. It has the unique ability to get under our skin. For historical and cultural reasons, Pakistan is inextricably tied to our domestic political discourse and there is no running away from it. Few major nations have had to face the kind of problem that India faces from Pakistan - an intense but intimate adversary.

There were no shortage of provocations this time around from the Pakistani side. Gen. Musharraf's insistence on meeting the leaders of the Hurriyat Conference in New Delhi and the leak of the videotape of his `off- the record' meeting with Indian editors queered the pitch in the final stages of the Agra talks and left a bitterness among his hosts.

Beyond the provocative style of Gen. Musharraf, there were serious differences on substantive issues, in particular on cross-border terrorism. The Agra talks highlighted India's basic difficulty in dealing with Pakistan. Islamabad's reluctance to give up its lever of cross-border terrorism leaves New Delhi in an untenable position of negotiating with a gun to its head.

Equally troubling for India has been the attempt by Gen. Musharraf to discard the past agreements between the two nations at Lahore and Shimla, to reshape the negotiating framework between the two nations to focus exclusively on Kashmir.

In spite of all these problems, the talks between the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, and Gen. Musharraf came very close to being declared a huge success. The two sides were just a couple of steps short of an agreed formulation on Kashmir and an ``Agra Declaration''. India and Pakistan are now not too far away from defining a mechanism to address the deep differences that divide the two nations.

The decision to invite Gen. Musharraf, the initiatives taken in the runup to the visit, and the way its outcomes were handled suggest India is groping for new ways to address the problems with Pakistan. The long- term success of India's engagement with Pakistan will, however, depend on a four-pronged strategy.

First, India needs to overcome the parity syndrome. The nature and history of Pakistan's quest for parity with India is well known. It is deeply rooted in the divide that emerged in the Indian national movement between the Congress and the Muslim League. A sequence of wars between the two new nations, the dynamics of the Cold War, and the acquisition of nuclear weapons tended to reinforce the image of parity between India and Pakistan. Calling the meetings at Agra a `summit' adds to the semiotics of parity.

But there is no reason why India should tie itself down with the parity syndrome. India has always objected to being treated on a par with Pakistan. Yet India has also found it difficult to rise above the parity syndrome. If India can lift itself up, it can get a totally different perspective on Pakistan. Today the major world powers are beginning to acknowledge the different directions in which India and Pakistan are headed. They are also adopting policies based on their different interests in both countries.

The Vajpayee Government has sought to take advantage of this opportunity to overcome the parity syndrome. But its policy initiatives are often cramped by its ideological mentors in the Sangh Parivar who find it impossible to grow out of the self- imposed notion of parity with Pakistan. The world view in India defined by deep-seated religious hatred demands tit-for-tat responses, and it plays into the hands of the religious extremists in Pakistan.

The antedeluvian thinking of the Hindutva forces is reinforced by those demanding, in the name of national security, mindlessly muscular policies towards Pakistan. For many of these tough talking strategists, there is only one way of skinning the cat - through force and perpetual antagonism towards Pakistan. India needs to resist demands for a Rambo-like approach and develop a smarter strategy that combines political, cultural and economic factors to alter the dynamics of the relationship with Pakistan.

Second, India must always retain the initiative. Traditionally, Indin foreign policy has been reactive and reluctant to take the initiative in crafting a different relationship with Pakistan. But in inviting Gen. Musharraf, taking unilateral initiatives in the runup to the summit, and in handling the outcome, India has shown a different temperament today.

India has finally begun to discover the value of taking unilateral steps that might help redefine the context of the ties with Pakistan. The decision to act without reciprocity on educational exchanges, on granting access to its market, and in offering talks on confidence- building measures is an important breakthrough in Indian thinking. To be effective, this policy needs to be sustained and better presented than it was this time around. The first step for India is to quickly implement the many unilateral measures it announced before the arrival of Gen. Musharraf.

Third, India needs to separate its Pakistan policy from emotionalism. In war or peace, Indian policies towards Pakistan tend to be dominated by sentimentalism. That is rooted in the intimate but adversarial relations between the two countries. Many of the earlier initiatives towards Pakistan were grounded by the mismatch between the romantic sentiment and the harsh reality. India should not expect dramatic advances in its relationship with Pakistan. Instead, it must concentrate on a process of patient engagement that would let one concrete step follow another.

Finally, India needs to work with the broader global forces to transform the relations with Pakistan. India's experience in the Cold War demanded that it resist the impingement of the outside world in its dealings with Pakistan. But now India has a great advantage in letting the forces of globalisation transform the economic and political context of Indo-Pakistan relations.

It is in India's strategic interest to promote regional economic integration in the subcontinent and facilitate cross-border and trans- national projects such as natural gas pipelines. Pakistan cannot hope to meet the challenges of globalisation by shutting itself off from the Indian economy. This gives India, for the first time, a powerful lever to reshape the political relations with Pakistan over the long term.

In seeking to remove the real sources of threat from Pakistan, India needs to work closely with the major powers to prevent its neighbour from heading down the path of a failed state. India alone does not have the power to transform the internal dynamics of Pakistan. Only a cooperative endeavour between India and the major powers can produce stable arrangements that will help Pakistan overcome its current internal difficulties.

A Pakistan at peace with itself and its neighbours will dramatically transform the regional situation. Such a Pakistan can prosper by linking the economies of the subcontinent, the Gulf and Central Asia. Creating that `bridge state'in Pakistan must be one of the most stimulating strategic tasks India has ever undertaken.

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