The Hindu : Negotiating with Pakistan

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Aug 25, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Negotiating with Pakistan

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI Aug. 24. This week's talks between India and Pakistan on resuming air links between the two countries are likely to reflect the enduring complexity of Indo-Pakistan relations and the impossibility of progress even on small issues.

The restoration of air links is in the interest of both countries and should have been a simple matter to deal with. But it has taken nearly four months to merely to set the date for the talks on the subject. The question of air links in fact came up more than a year ago amidst the international efforts to defuse Indo-Pak. tensions.

Unless there is political intervention at the highest level in both the capitals, there is little prospect that the talks this week could lead to an easing of air travel between the two countries.

Islamabad believes, perhaps rightly, that India has hurt itself more than Pakistan by snapping air links after the terrorist attack on Parliament on December 13, 2001. While the ban has hurt Pakistani airlines, India has suffered more. There are more Indian flights overflying Pakistani territory than those of Pakistan traversing Indian air space.

Further, it has made it difficult for New Delhi to operate its own airlines to Afghanistan, once again a friendly territory to India after the American ouster of the Taliban.

Pakistan does not want to offer overflights to India without making New Delhi sweat it out a bit. Islamabad wants New Delhi to express contrition for its decision to cut air links.

It wants a political guarantee that India will not resort to this stratagem on air links again. That precisely is where the Indo-Pakistan negotiations this week will hit a roadblock.

In response, India has three options. First, it could take a deep breath and negotiate diplomatic language that signals a commitment in some form not to disrupt air links in the future.

The Foreign Office may not be prepared to swallow this bitter pill. India could decide to forget about air links and look elsewhere for a positive movement in bilateral relations. But then the lack of progress on air links has the potential to stop all advance in bilateral relations.

After the Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee unveiled his peace initiative at Srinagar four months ago, the Foreign Office has insisted that movement in bilateral relations must now take place "step-by-step".

Put another way, New Delhi will look at additional confidence-building measures only after the current problems on the restoration of air links are sorted out. That brings us back to square one.

The third option for India is to act unilaterally in giving landing and overflight rights to Pakistani airlines without engaging in further negotiations.

The idea is to shame Pakistan into reciprocating the gesture. Unilateral gestures, however, are not popular in the Foreign Office.

Without a political reconsideration of tactics and strategy, it is inevitable that Mr. Vajpayee's peace initiative will soon run out of steam. Any review of the current diplomacy towards Pakistan would necessarily have to reflect deeply on the nature of negotiations with the western neighbour.

The record of the talks with Pakistan, on-again and off again over the last decade and a half, is a dismal one. All one can count as results from this enervating exercise are a handful of nuclear and military CBMs, an intent to negotiate some more, an agreed agenda for bilateral talks, the Lahore Declaration, and a bus service between New Delhi and Lahore.

Lack of trust, a persisting climate of violence, absence of shared objectives, a welter of inter-linkages between different issues, and different priorities within the negotiations are factors that have condemned the negotiations to remain an unproductive exercise.

Negotiations between nations are a mechanism for an agreed rearrangement of their relationship. Any belief in New Delhi, however, that formal talks alone will lead to a transformation of bilateral relations with Islamabad is a triumph of hope over experience.

While negotiations are important, they are not the only means to reorder ties between two nations. Unilateral actions by one or both can transform the political context and create conditions for a more productive engagement.

Mr. Vajpayee can either see his peace initiative grounded by an excessive emphasis on a "step-by-step" negotiations between the two bureaucracies or make bold by experimenting with a series of unilateral steps to regain the political initiative towards Pakistan.

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