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Voices that demand to be
heard
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - There is a flurry of activity on the
India-Pakistan diplomatic front. After 18 months of
extreme hostility, during which the two countries almost
went to war, Delhi and Islamabad have taken a series of
steps over the past week towards normalization of
relations. All of a sudden, the sub-continent's
squabbling siblings are cooing and billing.
On
Thursday, India announced that it would participate in
the forthcoming summit of the South Asian Association
for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to be held in Islamabad
in January. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee is
expected to go to Pakistan for it. What is more,
diplomatic relations are in the process of being
re-established at the highest level. Pakistan's new high
commissioner (ambassador) to India took charge in Delhi
on Thursday and the Indian high commissioner to Pakistan
is in Islamabad and will present his credentials to
President General Pervez Musharraf soon. And the
Delhi-Lahore bus is back on the roads, opening travel
links for some while.
Relations between the two
neighbors plunged to an all-time low following the
terrorist attack on India's parliament on December 13,
2001. Delhi held Pakistan responsible for the attack. In
a bid to step up diplomatic pressure on Pakistan to end
infiltration of terrorists into India, Delhi took a
series of steps, including snapping of road, rail and
air links with that country, recalling its envoy in
Islamabad and refusing to participate in the SAARC
summit that Pakistan was to host. Furthermore, it
mobilized its troops along its border with Pakistan.
With over a million soldiers from both countries
locked in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation for over a
year, there was a real possibility of war. The rhetoric
that emanated from the two capitals was extremely
hostile. In fact, the Pakistani leadership even
threatened to use nuclear weapons in the event of a
conventional Indian attack.
And then,
unexpectedly, in what turned out to be an icebreaker,
Vajpayee "extended a hand of friendship" to Pakistan in
May this year. That was followed by a spell of bilateral
goodwill gestures - there was much talk in both
countries regarding the resumption of dialogue, Pakistan
released Indian fishermen who had been held in its jails
and both agreed to depute high commissioners. Indian and
Pakistani parliamentary delegations visited each other's
countries. Suddenly, it seemed the two countries had
woken up to the great gains of being good neighbors.
Last week, when the bus from Delhi crossed the
Wagah checkpost on the India-Pakistan border into India,
a festive reception was accorded to the passengers. A
similar welcome awaited those arriving in Pakistan from
India. There was much bonhomie and backslapping. The
Lahore-Delhi bus trip was the lead story in every major
Indian newspaper. Suddenly, the average Indian had
re-discovered their affection and concern for his
Pakistani "brother". Ditto the Pakistani.
Yet it
is important to note that India-Pakistan interaction
swings between extremes and is marked by euphoria one
moment and by hysteria the next.
When bilateral
relations are on an upswing, both countries outdo each
other in their displays of hospitality. When Indians and
Pakistanis meet during a "high phase", they cannot stop
gushing at the common culture they share. "The Americans
and the British are the cause of all our problems," they
sing in unison during this phase. "Yeh log apne aap ko
kya samajhte hain?" (What do these people think of
themselves?), they smirk together.
And then the
downturn sets in. The goodwill evaporates rapidly; the
discourse is dominated by sighs of despair. And before
long, the siblings get busy settling scores. Discussing
the swing in bilateral relations between extremes,
Balraj Puri, noted political commentator and expert on
Kashmir, told Asia Times Online that the two countries
"perceive their relations as being limited to two
options - perfect peace or full-scale war, complete
settlement or no settlement".
The quest for
peace is not seen as a process that extends over time,
but as a one-time attempt at finding a solution. Take
for instance Vajpayee's dramatic grandstanding that the
current peace initiative would be his third and last
attempt and that he would retire from politics if it
failed. Rarely do leaders or diplomats from the two
countries approach the quest for peace as a process,
that there are degrees of friendship and that the two
neighbors should learn to co-exist, rather than view the
process as either peace or war situation.
This
either/or approach leads to agreements being hammered
out almost overnight. Not surprisingly, these agreements
then fall apart too soon after.
Unlike the
agreements reached between the Americans and the Soviets
during the Cold War, which were negotiated over many
months, if not years, and by experts, the India-Pakistan
agreements have been reached in ridiculously short
periods. In an article "Rigor, not flamboyance" in the
Indian newsmagazine Outlook, Raja Menon points out that
in the West "negotiating a peacemaking or risk-reduction
treaty is a long, laborious and unglamorous grind, never
lasting much less than one full continuous year and
always conducted by professionals. People like the
foreign minister and foreign secretary are called in to
sign the memorandum and take the credit, but do little
of the real work, which is done by the experts."
In contrast, the Tashkent Agreement that ended
the 1965 India-Pakistan war was reached in three days,
the Simla Agreement that followed the 1971 war was
concluded in six days, the Indo-Pak agreement on
prevention of air space violations in two days, points
out Menon.
He writes that if the agreement on
military conventional ballistic missiles and the
prevention of air space violations have held over the
years this is because they, although concluded in few
days, were negotiated by professionals. The Indus Water
Treaty, 1960, which is often held up as an
India-Pakistan success, took six years to negotiate and
was drafted by experts from the World Bank.
Menon writes, "Prime Minister Vajpayee and his
Pakistani counterpart can at most give broad
directives." He describes the Lahore Agreement of 1999
as a "good example of the most comprehensive and
brilliant set of directives" given by the leaders of the
two countries to their governments to work out
modalities for expanding hotlines. Menon warns that
India and Pakistan are approaching the next summit "in
the same disorganized way in which we approached
Tashkent, Simla and Lahore". To this list one could add
the fiasco at Agra in 2001, where the two sides had done
little homework ahead of the summit, reducing it to a
mere photo opportunity that ended in acrimony.
"If the next Indo-Pakistani summit is not to
turn into another dog and pony show, we should be
identifying six negotiating teams of 15 to 20 officers,
each to work on trade and commerce, visa and travel,
nuclear risk reduction, stabilizing the LoC [Line of
Control that separates the Indian and Pakistani states
in Kashmir], the future of Kashmir and smaller teams to
tackle the [disputed] Siachen [Glacier], the Wullar
barrage and the maritime boundary."
If
professionals are excluded from the India-Pakistan
negotiations, the "real people" are left out of
people-to-people interaction between the two countries.
"A predictable escapism surrounds the
people-to-people process," writes Sagarika Ghose in the
Indian Express. "They invariably take place in
air-conditioned resorts where the sub-continent only
intrudes in the shape of waiters serving chilled juice
and other prohibited beverages. Journalists retreat to
Italian towns like Bellagio, academics and retired
bureaucrats head to scenic mountain hotels in
Nathiagali, Kathmandu or the Pearl Continental Hotel at
Bhurban [Pakistan] to pretend that they are solving the
Kashmir dispute. Mushairas are sung wafted by the breeze
of the Delhi Golf Club at soirees that take place under
a mushroom cloud of cigarette smoke. Various excellent
sufis are pressed into service, their undoubtedly
beautiful lyrics set in sharp contrast with the brutal
insanity of the political leadership. People-to-people
contact is simply not reaching out to real people."
Indeed, the kind of people that participate in
these confidence-building efforts and exchanges are
usually upper class, whose problems are quite different
from the overwhelming majority of people in these two
countries, or left-leaning liberals who are already
converted to the idea of peace and co-existence. The
"real people" rarely talk to each other and if they
would be encouraged to the issues that would come up
would be the ones on which real and sustained
cooperation would be possible.
The star
passenger on the Delhi-bound bus from Lahore was infant
Noor Fatima. Noor is in Bangalore now for heart surgery
at the Narayana Hrudayalaya, a hospital that has treated
around 50 Pakistani children with cardiac ailments over
the past two years. When Noor arrived in Bangalore with
her parents on Saturday, hundreds of people were at the
airport to welcome her. Several middle-class Indians
have come forward to bear her hospital expenses.
If "real people" from India and Pakistan were
engaging in the people-to-people dialogue, they would
perhaps talk about availing of each other's health
facilities, or ensuring that families are not kept apart
because of absurd visa regulations. And if "real
professionals" were negotiating bilateral agreements,
perhaps India-Pakistan relations would be more stable
rather than swinging between extremes.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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