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India: Beyond Pakistan's
army and mullahs
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - Pakistan's Information Minister
Sheikh Rashid Ahmed gave more interviews to the Indian
media - probably 100, he said - in just two days in
Delhi last week than he had given to the Pakistani media
in his entire political career spanning several decades.
And in all these interviews, not one journalist asked
him anything about developments at the SAARC (South
Asian Association of Regional Cooperation) information
ministers' conference that he had essentially come to
attend. All questions related to the possibility of
normal and peaceful bilateral ties being restored
between India and Pakistan.
And certainly, on
his return, the Pakistani media, too, took similar
interest in Sheikh Rashid's assessment of Indo-Pakistan
bilateral ties. The main question exercising the minds
of people in both countries is the possibility of
movement towards rapprochement following the likely
meeting between Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari
Vajpayee and Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf
on the sidelines of the SAARC summit to be held in
Islamabad in early January, 2004.
Such concern
is not new for the countries, which have seen troubled
relations ever since being carved into separate
independent nations in 1947 from British colonial rule.
Yet despite the majority wishes of most ordinary people
for better relations, strategic analysts tend not to put
any value on this factor. In their view, policies are
made by governments, not people, and so their desires
don't really count.
This seems particularly true
of Pakistan, where governments have routinely been run
by the army, either directly or indirectly, which has an
institutional interest in maintaining active hostility
with India. How else can it justify its size and budget
without having a real "enemy"? And while it cannot
defeat the larger and better-equipped Indian army in a
regular war, it wages proxy wars, first waged by Sikh
militants who wanted to convert the state of Punjab into
an independent Sikh region called Khalistan, and for the
past 13 years in Kashmir, where it has supported
cross-border militancy.
And yet it is the
average Pakistani citizen who seems more eager for
improvement in bilateral ties than the Indians. The
credit for this goes largely to a vibrant civil society
and sections of the independent media.
Another
factor that explains the Pakistani people's eagerness
for better ties with India is, in the words of veteran
Indian journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, "the growing
alienation of the people from the army which has
commanded awe and respect throughout the country's
checkered history". Explaining the factors behind this
disenchantment, Padgaonkar comments: "Its preponderant
role in civilian life, its excessive privileges, the
pervasive corruption in its upper echelons and its
dogged refusal to be accountable threaten to dent its
image quite beyond repair."
As Sheikh Rashid
reminded an interviewer on the private television
channel Aaj Tak, hostility with India no longer sells in
the Pakistani election market. Indeed, former and now
exiled Pakistani prime minister Nawaz Sharif went to the
people not long ago with a declared and specific agenda
of normalization of relations with India - and won a
two-thirds majority in the national assembly.
Pakistan also knows that the majority of people
of the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) state have lost
whatever little interest they may have initially had in
joining hands with Pakistan. As the most recent assembly
elections in J&K were by and large seen to be
relatively free and fair, part of the legitimate
Kashmiri grievance has already been met. The present
state government in J&K is following a policy of
winning hearts and minds that is known as the "healing
touch" policy. It hasn't gone very far and the central
government is considered partly responsible for that,
yet it has led to somewhat better governance more
satisfying to the people.
This explains the
Pakistan army's anxiety to open a dialogue with India
and create an illusion of normalcy, while continuing
with its real agenda of maintaining hostility through
encouraging jihadi infiltration in J&K. This also
explains Indian reluctance to engage in dialogue before
the cessation of what it believes now is completely
Pakistan-sponsored violence in Kashmir.
The
statements of the visiting information minister reveal
Musharraf's tactic for dealing with Vajpayee in the
coming SAARC summit - praise Vajpayee, project him as
the only hope, and sock the more recalcitrant Deputy
Prime Minister Lal Krishan Advani in the mouth, blaming
the latter for the present stalemate and trying to drive
a wedge between the two. Pursuing Musharraf's post-Agra
summit strategy, in all his interviews, Rashid hailed
Vajpayee as "a statesman, a political visionary who
alone was capable of breaking the deadlock over Kashmir"
and so on. "We in Pakistan have great hopes from Prime
Minister Vajpayee to start a new chapter of friendship
and amity between the two countries," he noted in one
statement.
On the Agra summit's failure in
August 2001, Rashid put the blame squarely on hardliners
within the Vajpayee cabinet. The reference to Advani was
unmistakable. Indian media persons pointed out that the
last-minute rethink in the Indian camp was due to the
imperatives of the cabinet system. He shot back, saying:
"Vajpayee is not a 14-year-old girl who forgot to
consult his cabinet before arriving at an agreement with
our president. The general told me that it was all over
between the time he left Vajpayee and returned from his
quarters after a change of attire."
Asked about
the list of 20 terrorists that India wanted Pakistan to
hand over, the Pakistani minister turned on Advani
again: "While raising the issue, you should remember the
FIRs [first information reports] in Karachi against your
No 2 or 3," he said. Rashid was referring to Advani's
alleged involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate
Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, in
1947-48. Advani was born in the now-Pakistani state of
Sind and was a resident of Karachi in the early years of
Pakistan as a nation.
This approach is unlikely
to work. Vajpayee may have instincts for peace; he may
even think normalization is essential for a number of
reasons, including getting votes in the coming
elections. But he is not going to give Kashmir away just
because Musharraf calls him a great statesman. In the
final analysis he is a consensus man. In any case, in
foreign policy matters, all governments and responsible
individuals pursue more or less the same policies. In
this sense, he is not very different from Musharraf. The
Pakistan president, too, has liberal instincts. But he
never allows his instincts to come in the way of
following the obscurantist and destructive policies of
the institution he represents.
Musharraf's
tactics are, therefore, only exacerbating the situation.
Advani is now blaming Pakistan even for scandal in
Mumbai in which several top politicians, bureaucrats and
policemen are involved: the police chief has been asked
to go on leave. It would appear that even the Mumbai
police chief was linked to Musharraf via a mafia figure,
Abdul Karim Telgi, an associate of Dawood Ibrahim, an
Indian-origin underworld don who has spent time in
Pakistan and whom the US recently declared a global
terrorist.
A situation is thus gradually
emerging in which India's only hope of ending the
so-called jihad in Kashmir will lie with jihadis coming
to power in Pakistan. An all-powerful Maulana Fazlur
Rehman, leader of the fundamentalist coalition called
the Muttaheda Majlis-e-Amal or his rival within the
coalition Qazi Hussain Ahmad of the Jammat-e-Islami will
have other priorities - fighting with the bigger
"satan", the United States, for instance. By bringing
them to power, the jihad in Kashmir would have served
its purpose.
But it would be myopic and
disastrous for India to pin its hopes on these
fundamentalist elements. As disastrous as was Mahatma
Gandhi supporting the crazy pro-Turkish caliphate
movement launched by the predecessors of these same
elements in order to enlist their support for his
anti-imperialist struggle in early 1920s. They remained
loyal to Gandhi and opposed the partition that created
Pakistan until the bitter end. But it was this support
from Gandhi's secular Indian National Congress party
that gave these Wahhabis respectability in the minds of
the vast majority of Muslims who were and are of the
non-exclusivist Bareilvi sect, which is akin to Sufism.
It was this flawed policy pursued for a short-term gain
that helped a handful of Wahhabis to spread their
tentacles in the entire sub-continent.
India has
already discovered that it cannot do business with the
Pakistan army. It is led by a liberal and has many
generals with individual secular and progressive agendas
who do probably want normal relations with India. But
the army has institutional interests - maintaining a
huge defense budget and an institutional memory of
humiliation in the creation of Bangladesh (1971) which
needs to be avenged - that go against normalization of
relations. Even the publication of the authoritative
Hamood-ur-Rehman report of investigation into the
debacle of 1971 that gave details of how the
Punjabi-dominated Pakistan army killed 3 million of its
own Bengali citizens to keep them from seceding from
Pakistan has not made it conscious of its own follies
that led to the independence of Bangladesh. Blaming
India alone for the same is so much more convenient, but
the Pakistani people seem to understand the situation
much better now.
So if India cannot trust and
deal with the army and fundamentalists, what should be
its strategy for Pakistan?
It should support and
pin its hopes on the real representatives of Pakistani
people coming to power, despite their bleak prospects
for the moment. As former prime minister Benazir Bhutto
said in a recent column, "The alternative to Musharraf
is not religious dictatorship, it is the people's will."
She asked the West to wake up to this. The West has not
reacted and one doesn't know what it thinks: the signals
are mixed. But if the 12 confidence-building measures
India proposed to the government of Pakistan recently
are any guide, India appears to have woken up to this
reality. From discounting the role of the people in the
same way as Indian and strategic thinkers, the
government now seems to recognize the value of
people-to-people contacts in creating an atmosphere of
goodwill.
Reducing the army's influence in
Pakistan is not beyond the powers of Pakistani people.
Someone cleverer than Sharif entrusted with a mandate
like the one he received in the past could have
performed this miracle by now. Even if this strategy
means a long wait, it is worth waiting. In the meantime,
dialogue should be initiated, institutionalized and
continued with whatever government is ruling Pakistan
for as long as it takes for the two countries to sort
out their long-standing problems. As the bigger, more
powerful and more self-confident country, India should
take the lead, as it seems to be doing now, and not
allow the generals in Pakistan to create the impression,
as visiting Pakistani minister Sheikh Rashid tried to
do, that New Delhi is shying away from dialogue.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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