| |
Need to expand track-two
diplomacy
By Navnita Chadha Behera
NEW DELHI
- Peace-making attempts between India and Pakistan have
begun in earnest. A group of Pakistani parliamentarians
set the ball rolling by crossing the Wagha border in
early June. Their message of peace was soon reciprocated
by an Indian parliamentary delegation visiting Pakistan
in the third week of June. And the resumption of the
Sada-e-Sarhad, the New-Delhi-Lahore bus service last
Friday, is likely to impart a fresh impetus to such
goodwill missions and track-two diplomacy initiatives.
Track-two diplomacy is supposed to feed into
official diplomacy by serving as a "testing ground" for
new policy initiatives and in creating a public peace
constituency. The varied range of such initiatives
trying to build bridges between India and Pakistan is
indeed impressive. These include the RIMCO (Royal
Military College) Old Boys Network and the Doon School
Old Boys Society, as well as its contemporary
incarnation in the Indian Pakistan Soldiers Initiative
for Peace, formed by retired army personnel from both
sides, in 1999.
The India-Pakistan Neemrana
initiative has served as a forum in which former
diplomats, military personnel and academics have
regularly met, twice a year, to discuss contentious
issues, ranging from Kashmir, confidence-building
measures and trade to more benign ones such as media and
cultural issues, visa and communication difficulties and
science and technology.
Other examples of
track-two diplomacy include efforts made by the
India-Pakistan Friendship Society, the Peoples Asia
Forum, the Pakistan-India Forum for Peace and Democracy,
the Women's Initiative for Peace in South Asia and the
Pakistan-India People's Solidarity Conference. In
addition, there are multilateral initiatives like the
Network of South Asian Writers, the Citizens Commission
of South Asia, the Coalition for Action on South Asian
Cooperation, the South Asia Media Association, the South
Asia Network of Economic Research Institutes and the
South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation
Chambers of Commerce and Industry in which the Indian
and the Pakistani interlocutors hog the limelight.
Yet after at least a decade of track-two
diplomacy, it has not produced any dramatic
breakthroughs on the India-Pakistan deadlock, nor has it
brought any qualitative transformation in the calculus
of bilateral cooperation. The channels of communication
between track-one (official negotiations) and track-two
(non-official dialogue) continue to be informal, ad hoc
and of a personalized nature.
It is important to
understand why these dialogues have failed to have any
kind of cumulative effect and achieve a systematic
influence on governmental thinking or realize their
larger goal of creating a broad-based peace constituency
in the region. There are two fundamental flaws in
conceptualizing the strategy and outreach, or perhaps
the vision, of such dialogues processes. The first
relates to certain erroneous assumptions about the
players, sites and dynamics of policy-making in the
India-Pakistan context.
To begin with, it is
important to understand the qualitatively different
character from, say, that of United States and
Asia-Pacific, where the idea of track-two diplomacy
first originated and has proved to be a successful
venture. In the US, there is a very large and
influential policy-making "community" outside the State
Department, that includes the Council on Foreign
Relation, the Rand Corporation, the Brookings
Institution and a vast network of think tanks. This,
along with the well established practices of frequent
and lateral traffic between academia and the government
has, over the years, put in place the necessary
infrastructure and mechanisms that can be used for
influencing policy-making processes. In Asia-Pacific,
government officials participate in such track-two
processes in their private capacities. India and
Pakistan, though, have none of these two features.
Hence it is important to understand the power
structure, the players within the establishment and its
equations with those "outside" media, academia, think
tanks and the small but prominent community of
ex-bureaucrats and ex-military officials in the specific
South Asian context. In India, the foreign policy
bureaucracy, since early days, has traditionally been
the only institution groomed in the task of foreign
policy-making. This, along with the institutional hurdle
of the absence of lateral entry into key bureaucratic
positions, has resulted in often thick and impermeable
barriers between officials and public - an iron-curtain
dividing those "inside" the establishment and those
"outside", that is, civil society. It is the same story
in Pakistan, except the character of its establishment
continues to be military-dominated.
The two live
in separate, almost self-contained worlds which operate
from fundamentally different information bases. There is
no sharing of memory, no reliance on institutional
memory, and no light thrown on the decision-making
processes. Neither Islamabad nor New Delhi has a freedom
of information act; classified documents are never made
public. Serving as well as retired government officials
point to the structural problems inherent in this
situation: the government information base remains too
narrow; and that of the non-government sources is "wide
but not well-informed", as a result, there is
considerable mutual suspicion rather than mutual
interactions.
The government often uses people
to hear what it wants to hear and those challenging the
government positions are quickly and effectively
sidelined and marginalized. Not surprisingly,
policymakers express a disinterest bordering on contempt
for involvement of outsiders, described by one senior
official as "naive meddlers and amateurs" lacking the
skills and information to manage sensitive issues.
Another official spoke of "well-intentioned people
wasting their time and ours". Their views are not
universal, but they are a recurrent refrain.
Further, there is a need to evolve a much more
inclusive conception of civil society than currently
understood in popular parlance. Track-two diplomacy
efforts are rigidly monopolized by a select group of
aging, eminent liberal citizens confined to the capital
cities of New Delhi and Islamabad. It must, as a leading
intellectual laments, explore the world outside the
"Saturday Club of the India International Center". The
tragedy of the track-two initiatives has been that by
involving people too close to the establishment; by
debating issues close to the governmental agendas and
perspectives; and trying to help the government through
backdoor channels, they, too, have reflected
governmental thinking, which is likely to encourage the
status quo. Many among the track-two professional
community remain divorced from the social realities on
the ground. It has become essentially a "managerial
approach", not a radical one that questions government
assumptions and seeks to provide any meaningful
alternative to the government's views.
This is
the second critical lacuna of track-two diplomacy, that
is, it has failed to tap the enormous potential of a
vast network of social movements at the grassroots
level. The belief that the amorphous entity of "people"
hardly has anything to do with the domain of
international politics, especially foreign policymaking
is, once again, an erroneous one. The critical inputs
for a new understanding of security are indeed emerging
from critical social movements, which are often focused
on local issues, but they are also sensitive to the
wider picture.
They also raise fundamentally
important issues about forging new solidarities, which
act in ways that transcend the physical and mental
boundaries of states. The track-two interlocutors must
seek to widen the social constituency of such
initiatives by going beyond the metropolis to smaller
towns and cities and reaching out to diverse segments of
civil society, including women's movements,
environmental movements, peace and anti-nuclear
movements, the non-government organization community,
along with social workers, school and college-going
children, doctors, scientists, information technology
professionals and the like. It's time for track-two
diplomacy to change gears and adopt a different strategy
in order to steer forward the peace process between
India and Pakistan.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times
Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com
for information on our sales and syndication policies.)
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
