The Hindu : Pakistan: taking the longer view

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Sep 29, 2003

Opinion

Opinion - News Analysis

Pakistan: taking the longer view

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI Sept. 28. Few Indian Governments have experimented as much with Pakistan policy as that of the Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Since March 1998, when Mr. Vajpayee took charge of the nation, the relations with Pakistan have gone through a roller coaster.

Wars — real and verbal — have been interspersed with peace initiatives and high profile summitry laden with exaggerated expectations of peace. Despite these ups and downs, Mr. Vajpayee has stayed with the line that friends can be changed but neighbours cannot.

After the bitter taste in the mouth left by the trading of insults in New York at the United Nations General Assembly last week, Mr. Vajpayee will have no choice but to restart his Sisyphean exercise aimed at transforming relations with Pakistan.

Mr. Vajpayee has rightly said the spat in New York will not be allowed to undermine his peace initiative towards Pakistan unveiled last April at Srinagar.

If those words have to acquire some meaning the Prime Minister will have to find a way out of the current impasse through decisive action.

First, Mr. Vajpayee must review the value of the current "step-by-step" approach towards normalising relations with Pakistan. While it has generated some results such as the restoration of bus links, there is no real momentum. Mr. Vajpayee must choose between either letting the two bureaucracies define the pace of the initiative or take unilateral political actions to break the deadlock.

Second, there must be an early decision on whether to attend the summit of the seven South Asian nations in January at Islamabad.

Letting it hang fire serves no purpose. If the decision is to go to Islamabad then Mr. Vajpayee must begin to prepare the political ground.

Third, New Delhi needs to end the ambiguity about Prime Minister's bilateral meetings with Pakistani leaders, including the Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf. Any visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Pakistan will inevitably become bilateral, irrespective of the multilateral context. New Delhi might as well accept this reality and take advantage of it.

The Government has come to attach far too much political importance to bilateral meetings with Pakistan by refusing to have them on the margins of international gatherings.

In the early 1990s, the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, met the former Pakistan Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, innumerable times at different venues. There was no great political outcomes from these encounters. But they did no harm either. Restoring such contacts will at least bring some civility back to Indo-Pak diplomacy.

Finally, and most important, India must decide whether Gen. Musharraf is the sole interlocutor in Pakistan it will focus on. A departure from the current obsession with Gen. Musharraf will open the doors for engaging a wider section of the political spectrum in Pakistan.

For starters, there is the Pakistan Prime Minister, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali, who is travelling to Washington this week. While the Army might remain supreme in Pakistan for the foreseeable future, India has every reason to intensify its efforts to engage the civilian leadership in Pakistan and strengthen its hands.

* * *

Instead of complaining that the rest of the world is not doing enough to restrain Pakistan from stopping cross-border terrorism, India must focus on improving its national capabilities in counter-terrorism through expanded cooperation with other nations.

One such opportunity comes this week in the talks with the visiting U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defence for Special Operations and Combating Terrorism, Michael Westphal.

Rather than bemoan the fact that India did not figure in the list of terror-victims in the U.S. President, George W. Bush's speech in New York last week, New Delhi should be pressing Washington to step up bilateral cooperation against terrorism.

India should formally convey its understanding of Washington's limitations in getting Gen. Musharraf to end infiltration across the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir.

But there are no constraints on the U.S. ability to expand India's military technical capabilities in countering cross-border terrorism through technology transfer, use of advanced sensors, intelligence-sharing, and advanced training.

This is the least Washington owes New Delhi after its failure in the summer of 2002 to get Gen. Musharraf to keep his word on permanently ending cross-border infiltration.

* * *

The Dalai Lama's remarks that he is prepared to travel to China have not surprised observers of Sino-Tibetan relations here.

In an interview at the end of his recent trip to the United States, the Dalai Lama said he was ready to undertake a trip to China to overcome the suspicions in Beijing about his political intentions.

"To find a mutual agreement or solution, I am ready to meet the Chinese leadership or, if I get a chance, to meet the Tibetans inside Tibet and explain or clarify my position," he told the Voice of America.

There have been indications for a while that the special envoys of the Dalai Lama have been exploring the prospect of such a visit with the Chinese authorities.

Two rounds of consultations have been held over the last year between the two sides.

These talks have been widely seen as an exercise in "pre-negotiation" to end the long-running divide between the exiled Tibetan leadership and the Chinese Government.

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Pakistan: taking the longer view