The Hindu : Return to Lahore, but carefully

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Monday, Jun 09, 2003

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Return to Lahore, but carefully

By Pran Chopra

Instead of trying to rubbish agreements made in the past or failing to learn from past mistakes, a conscious effort has been made to see what can be built, and how, upon earlier gains in Indo-Pak. relations.

THE PRIME Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has been publicly raining gestures of peace on Pakistan in recent weeks. In the meantime, a group of Indians and Pakistanis, veterans of peacemaking exercises on official and non-official tracks, have been conferring privately on how best some progress can be made.

Such efforts are not new. The subcontinent is crowded with such tracks, and traffic on many of them has been getting heavier of late. What is new, however, is the speed with which a broad consensus, even if imprecise as yet, has emerged on one track at least on what should be attempted and when and what should be left for better times. The consensus is neither limited to singing the virtues of peace nor pretends to prescribe comprehensive agreements, here and now. But it does mark a stage, cautiously but concretely, neither ignoring the probability that much bigger hurdles may lie farther ahead nor remaining stuck in the grooves of past disagreements.

This track, like others, has been provided by "facilitators". But it bears no mark of the "pressures" which imaginative people in both India and Pakistan see emerging from every third country plane that lands in either. Such progress as has now been made on this track has mainly resulted from one change: instead of trying to rubbish agreements made in the past or failing to learn from past mistakes, a conscious effort has been made to see what can be built, and how, upon earlier gains.

This change has also helped everyone see once again that the best gains were made when the effort was most clearly bilateral and indigenous, without third-party interests playing collateral games. The consensus in question emerged over just two meetings, together lasting less than one week, one in early November last year and the next in mid-May this year, both in Geneva, under the auspices of the Pugwash Workshops on South Asian Security. Under the protocol of the workshops, what is said by whom is not cited or quoted without the permission of the participant concerned. But enough has been permitted by some participants or made public by Pugwash itself on its website to show the extent of consensus.

As was narrated on this page soon after the first meeting, a prominent participant from Pakistan, Gen. Asad Durrani, former head of the all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence, enlivened the proceedings there by saying that the three documents resulting from the Lahore summit between Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Mr. Vajpayee had created an "opportunity" but unfortunately it was "squandered". This was also the view of the Indian side of the summit when it saw that Gen. Musharraf, who had banished Mr. Sharif from Pakistan after staging a military coup against him, was also busy burying the summit and the "opportunity" created by it.

Therefore, Gen. Durrani's constructive description of the documents prompted an Indian participant to suggest in the November meetingthat Pugwash invite Gen. Durrani to constitute a small group of Indian and Pakistani participants to see how best the "opportunity" may be revived, if necessary by revising and updating the documents too. No one opposed the suggestion but it got shelved when the discussion took an acrimonious turn later, on the unrelated issue of why the Agra summit failed.

However, when Pugwash began to draw up the agenda for the meeting in May this year, an Indian invitee suggested that the programme include a revisit to "the Lahore process". The suggestion prospered and when the re-visit began, Gen. Durrani widened the "opportunity" by saying that even better than the Lahore documents was an agreement signed by the Foreign Secretaries of the two countries in 1997. The implications of what he said are as interesting as the reasons he gave for saying it, and the reasons as well as the implications would be widely acceptable in India.

He said the 1997 agreement covered a broad and yet integrated agenda, and while it was inevitable that progress on some issues would be slower than on others, there would be a "synergy" between them, the speed of progress on some prodding the slower coaches as well. Few in India would disagree with this reason. Fewer still with the first implication, that since the 1997 agreement was a purely bilateral effort, the merit seen in it by the General gives greater depth to the chronology of successful bilateralism, extending it back to times when the norm was third-party intervention.

Second, it showed that Pakistan was no longer rigid on its stand, which Indian interlocutors had found frustrating for years, that nothing can be discussed until the Kashmir issue is solved. Much else can be discussed, he implied, so long as Kashmir also is. Kashmir was, of course, a "core issue", but, he argued in his quiet irrepressible way, you cannot reach the core of anything without dealing with the crust.

Third. Pakistan has at last responded to the advice its closest friend, China, had given to it way back in the mid-1990s, that a difficult issue is sometimes made amenable if easier issues are resolved in the meantime. Fourth. Since the "Lahore documents" are basically a re-make of the 1997 agreement, they show that summits are more likely to succeed if the ground is carefully prepared for them at lower levels. In other words, a rush to the summit, as at Agra, is better avoided than attempted.

And finally the fifth, that with skilful preparation at appropriate levels, even touchy issues can be smoothly taken on board at summits, as the nuclear ambitions or fears of the two countries were in Lahore.

The nuclear issue was not even mentioned in the 1997 agreement because neither country had carried out nuclear explosions till then. By 1999, it had mushroomed into the hottest issue between the two countries, next only to Kashmir. And yet it was not only taken up at Lahore but, as can be seen in the texts crafted by experts on the two sides, some intricate and far-reaching approaches were adopted.

There is no implication here, none at all, that part-time peacemakers finally won the day last mid-May in Geneva, point, set, and match. No, the game has not even begun as yet, and India still faces a cruel enigma, whether or not you may call India's position on it a "precondition" for talking to Pakistan. The enigma is in two parts.

First, wherever the Indo-Pakistan border might come to be in Jammu and Kashmir as the result of a settlement, whether along the present or a modified Line of Control, or the border as it existed at the time of the creation of Pakistan, given the present ethnic, religious, political and geographical terrain of the western strip of the state, it will always be vulnerable to the kind of violence `jehadi' bands can work up in their lairs on the Pakistan side unless Islamabad decides to nip them in the bud.

Second, however large the fund of goodwill at the negotiating table, either the Indian or the Pakistani hand will freeze in the act of signing if cries of the victims of clashes break in through the window. To what avail will all the negotiating be then?

A senior Pakistani participant gave a partial answer to that, and an Indian counterpart gave a response. The former said let stable peace first settle into normality before trying to find new frontiers, and, in the meantime, take every step with the utmost care. The latter said it would be enough for the day if broad principles were settled first and details left for better times to fill in. In the general spirit of consensus, which existed at the meeting, none disagreed with the other.

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