Partners in spite of themselves

By Teresita C. Schaffer

AFTER SOME confusing signals, it now appears that Prime Minister Vajpayee and President Musharraf will meet at the United Nations General Assembly in New York. The publicity buildup for this next encounter is not as frenetic as the pre-Agra news blitz, which is perhaps just as well. The important thing about New York is not the meeting, but the opportunity for India and Pakistan to move toward a serious and sustained peace process. Like it or not, they must be partners in this endeavour.

The objective of such a process would be to craft a peaceful and stable solution to the issues that have bedevilled India-Pakistan relations for over half a century, with Kashmir as a critical element. All recent peace processes have taken at least several years, and all have suffered crises and breakdowns. The parties' commitment and the process itself need to be robust enough to survive interruptions.

In the past, successful peace processes have been structured to handle more than one topic at a time, to accommodate the participants' different needs. In Lahore, India and Pakistan used this formula to ensure that their preferred topics (terrorism and Kashmir respectively) received appropriate prominence. It should be well within the talents of both sides to give the Lahore arrangement a facelift and if necessary a new name.

A process needs a ``story line'' - a description that all participants can publicly accept. Agra broke down because the two leaders could not combine, in a manner that satisfied both, the ``centrality of Kashmir'' and the ``centrality of violence in the Valley'' or the ``broad perspective on India-Pakistan relations''. In a statement launching a long- term peace process, I would argue for an inclusive formulation. Both Kashmir and violence in the Valley truly are central issues, and saying so will add a refreshing dimension of honesty.

India and Pakistan have announced new negotiating initiatives before, and the results have been disappointing. The pattern is all too familiar. Meetings on Kashmir are a dialogue of the deaf, utterly devoid of substance. Partly as a result, even apparently successful meetings on other subjects stop short of actually resolving them. Both Governments fear being seen to be giving something away; they are reluctant to defend India-Pakistan agreements as being good for their own country. Any two readers of The Hindu could probably play the roles of the Indian and Pakistani Foreign Secretaries and come up with a reasonable approximation of the sterile conversations they and their predecessors have often had.

In order to sustain the rest of the process - the part closer to India's heart - the Kashmir discussion needs to have enough substance not to be an embarrassment to the Pakistani participants. To accomplish this, they need a menu of topics that can be discussed as ice-breakers, to buy time and build confidence before tackling the more fundamental compromises a settlement will require. India is in the best position to come up with an initial list. The economic status of different parts of Kashmir might be a candidate, or the problems of electricity and water supply in the State (including the Wular Barrage issue), or the implementation of India's proposals for issuing visas at locations on the Line of Control, or a discussion on how local commanders can communicate to defuse incidents.

Pakistan may not be willing to enter a discussion labelled ``terrorism,'' but perhaps the two sides could compare their records on numbers of incidents and people killed in the Valley, and could issue a joint statement of regret at the loss of civilian life. These discussions are sure to be difficult, and will probably sound at first as if the two sides inhabit different planets. But it is a way to get started, and can eventually lead to more honest dialogue - an essential prerequisite for a stable settlement.

India and Pakistan cannot dispose of Kashmir without the Kashmiris. The eventual Kashmiri role in the process needs to be affirmed right at the start, otherwise they already have both means and motive to torpedo India-Pakistan talks. India needs to maintain an active Delhi-Srinagar dialogue including the forces represented in the All-Party Hurriyat Conference. India also needs to acknowledge publicly that both Kashmiris and Pakistan have a role to play in defining the Kashmir portion of a settlement, and it needs to allow easy communication between Kashmiri political figures and Islamabad.

There is no guarantee that this approach will produce a cooperative policy in Islamabad or Srinagar. But the law-and- order-centered approach India has followed since the Kashmir insurgency burst forth in 1989 is sure to fail. India's security successes to date have led quickly to cyclical resumptions of militant violence fuelled by fresh humiliation and resentment.

There is an argument that India can handle the violence in Kashmir, that it loses more people to traffic accidents than it does to fighting in the Valley, and that as the stronger power it need only stand firm, confident that Pakistan and the militants cannot threaten the Indian state. This is, in a narrow sense, true. India's one billion-plus people and its 1.1 million-strong army are nowhere near being bled white, and the rest of the country is enjoying progress and prosperity. The budgetary costs of the security operations in Kashmir are manageable.

But the price India pays, if this issue festers, is in its broader international ambitions. India's prosperity has come from greater integration with the world economy, and its international prestige depends on its being seen as a stable and resilient factor in a world torn by local conflicts. The countries whose cooperation India seeks in this endeavour - including the United States - will have doubts about India's standing as a serious player as long as India and Pakistan are eyeball to eyeball over an issue that could lead them to the nuclear brink.

These are ultimately the stakes, both in New York and in the further India-Pakistan relationship. The only way to get there is for Mr. Vajpayee and Gen. Musharraf to become partners, and to find Kashmiri partners. This brings us back to Agra. Whatever it was that doomed the hoped-for joint statement, the real problem was that both the Indian and the Pakistani teams seemed to approach negotiations with a view toward scoring points.

It is a game diplomats play from time to time: you start with your own draft and struggle mightily to make sure as much as possible of your own language appears in the final text. Your own side's ``victory'' comes at the price of the other side's ``defeat''. There is a time for this sort of tactic. It is singularly out of place, however, when one is trying to build a common political commitment to resolving difficult issues.

Making peace is hard work, and cannot be done by weak leaders. If the Indian Prime Minister wants to reach a settlement because it is good for India, he needs to make his Pakistani and Kashmiri counterparts into partners, at least in the sense that they too want a settlement. That elusive goal - a settlement that is peaceful, honourable and practical - must be held in common. The participants will start with incompatible definitions of what that means, but will work toward a definition they can all live with.

(The writer, Director for South Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, is a retired U.S. ambassador with long service in South Asia.)

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