The Hindu : Potential for a new beginning

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 02, 2002

Opinion

Opinion - Editorials

Potential for a new beginning

THE DISARMING CANDOUR of the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, in asking India to de-escalate the present "explosive" tensions in bilateral ties reflects some positive diplomacy. He fielded urgent topical questions during the course of an exclusive interview to this newspaper in a forthright manner and addresses Pakistan's highly emotive estrangement with India with a mixture of peace overtures and the assertion of Pakistan's national positions on the issues in contention. New Delhi will do well to respond meaningfully by losing no further time to begin a process of withdrawing the military formations that were forward-deployed within striking distance of Pakistan in the context of the terrorist outrage against India's Parliament last December. Drawing a line in the sand, Gen. Musharraf has said that Pakistan is capable of maintaining its own counter-deployment of military forces for as long as India might wish to stay its present course. Far more evocative than the blunt signal of his willingness to try and hold off India is his call that the two countries should "stop damaging each other". Now, even while suggesting that India should not equate itself with the U.S. and must not seek to treat Pakistan as if it were another prototype of the Talibanised Afghanistan, he does not make light of his country's internal predicament in the current international milieu. What comes out is Gen. Musharraf's optimistic assertion that there is still a "meeting point" between the two states. His prescription that "we have to start talking and without preconditions" seems particularly relevant in this tense situation.

New Delhi would do well to go for an immediate military de-escalation as a possible prelude to the resumption of bilateral parleys with Islamabad on the entire gamut of issues at stake. Underscoring the relative failure of New Delhi's coercive diplomacy, which is anchored in a strike-threatening configuration of its military forces, Gen. Musharraf cites his refusal to deliver to it the 20 terrorists and criminals believed to be harboured in Pakistan. In a narrow perspective, it is no music to the Vajpayee administration's ears that Gen. Musharraf should portray the list of 20 as a scrap-heap of "rubbish" and insist that New Delhi has given "zero evidence" to establish the relevant terrorist charges. However, also significant is his contention that Pakistan has done enough to roll back its internal terrorism in a way that would "very fortunately... coincide in certain forms with whatever (the) Indian desires are" about the dos and don'ts for Islamabad.

The point he makes is that the measures he has taken to "crush extremism" in Pakistan's own national interest have produced a beneficial fallout for India too. Yet, his continued assertion that Pakistan is not fomenting cross-border terrorism in India and that Kashmir is the "focus" of bilateral rancour shows that the gap on substantive issues is wide. As he sketched out during the interview, the unfulfilled story of the Agra summit last July still holds out the promise of a future beginning. The Agra process need not be pronounced dead. In a critical sense, the revival of mutual confidence may also depend on how New Delhi addresses Islamabad's suspicion that the Vajpayee administration has exploited the global impact of the traumatic terror strikes of September 11 in a way designed to transform the dynamics of the skewed India-Pakistan equation itself. The road to the resolution of the issues is no doubt long and hard but Gen. Musharraf's remarks hold the potential for a new and fruitful engagement.

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