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India forced onto the back
foot
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - By offering to drop a 50-year-old
demand for an United Nations-mandated plebiscite in
Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan President General Pervez
Musharraf has again managed to do what he has always
done - steal the thunder from India in the eyes of the
international community. In one stroke, he has put
himself in a position that can only be a win-win
situation for him. In more usual parlance, it is a move
that will translate into heads he wins, tails India
loses.
And, by doing so at a time that he is due
to meet Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
during the South Asian Association for Regional
Cooperation (SAARC) summit in Pakistan early next month,
Musharraf has managed to wrest in what is described in
diplomatic parlance here and his wont - play the "nice
guy", which always gets him a standing ovation in the
eyes of the world.
Musharraf has brought back to
the center stage the one issue that he always wants to
be at the forefront of Indo-Pak relations, and that is
Kashmir. Indeed, in the blitzkrieg of the ceasefire
along the Line of Control (LoC) that divides Kashmir
between India and Pakistan, people-to-people contacts,
the feel good factors and the high rhetoric that has
been the order of Indian-Pakistan relations in the past
few months, the only way that Musharraf's pet subject to
flog India, which is Kashmir, could be brought back to
focus was by making a dramatic announcement. And he has
done precisely that.
In the past, whenever he has
had the opportunity, whether over nationally telecast
speeches to his countrymen, press conferences, previous
summits, the UN General Assembly, Musharraf has put
India on the mat on Kashmir. He has spat venom,
described the situation in Kashmir as a freedom struggle
and at the core of any thaw in the relations between
India and Pakistan. He has done an about turn yet again,
and in his usual fashion of being predictably
unpredictable (at one time he threatened to nuke India),
he has taken the wind out of India's peace initiatives,
so far. If Vajpayee was the elder statesman when he
offered the hand of friendship to Pakistan in April, a
gesture that has seen a huge forward movement in
relations between the two countries, Musharraf has tried
to play the messiah. Except that given his record,
including the brief skirmish between the countries at
Kargil in 1999 in which Musharraf was a key planner, it
is difficult to believe the general.
In the
run-up to the Agra summit in India in mid-2001, too,
Musharraf said that he did not think the UN could
contribute significantly to the resolution of the
Kashmir issue unless "the main actors" wanted it to. And
though the U-word was never used at Agra, three weeks
after the summit ended in failure, Musharraf referred to
the UN resolutions (calling for a plebiscite in Kashmir)
in a banquet speech for Lebanese president Rafik Hariri.
At the summit of non-aligned countries in February, he
invoked the resolutions, and as recently as last month,
the Pakistan foreign office reiterated their
"centrality" to the Kashmir issue.
Indeed, most
observers until now have been talking about the great
advancements that are possible in the current Indo-Pak
entente if the two countries set aside for a while the
two niggling issues that have set things back - Kashmir
for the Pakistani side and India's blaming Pakistan for
promoting cross-border terrorism. Experts have been
talking about the huge areas of progress, including the
creation of a free trade area, cooperation in health,
infrastructure development, communication, transport and
the release of prisoners of war that have the potential
to benefit both countries.
These issues, which
are the real relevant areas of cooperation, the experts
have said, have been ignored over the years due to
Pakistan's Kashmir-centric approach, as well as India's
constant griping about cross-border terrorism. While a
framework could be worked out to sort out these two
long-standing problems, they should not come in the way
of developing the other areas that could be of immense
mutual benefit. Indeed, this has been the predominant
view as the countdown to the SAARC summit has begun and
ever since the ceasefire has been in place. That is
until Musharraf's announcement on Thursday. Why this
translates into a win-win situation for him is because
of the following reasons.
For one, he can
always back out of it whenever he wants and put the
blame on India. Now that he has made the declaration and
taken the high ground, the next step would be that some
kind of talks and discussions be initiated on the
subject, if India is to be seen responding positively to
the gesture. According to a report in The Times of
India, Indian officials say that Musharraf's latest
comments echo the open tone struck by the general and
his foreign office prior to the Agra summit and are
aimed at creating the right atmosphere for a possible
one-on-one sitting with Vajpayee when the latter is in
Islamabad for the SAARC summit from January 4 to 6.
However, the officials say that the Vajpayee-Musharraf
meeting will be "more than a courtesy call, but way less
than a dialogue".
This is in consonance with
India's stand so far that no substantive talks can be
possible unless there is an end to cross-border
terrorism. If matters reach a deadend here, it is game,
set and match for Musharraf as he can announce to the
world that he did try to bring about a rapprochement,
but it is India that has played spoilsport.
Second, by making a dramatic announcement
on Kashmir he has not addressed India's problem, he has
tried to mend what is Pakistan's problem. India's
problem is cross-border terrorism. Musharraf's stand on
the subject has been nebulous so far. He has said that
beyond a point he does not have any control over jihadi
elements crossing over to the Indian part of Kashmir.
But, time and again evidence has borne out that the
Pakistan army and its Inter Services Intelligence have
been actively involved in terrorist training camps, as
well as providing them a helping hand across the border.
Just this week, Pakistan lodged a strong protest against
the fencing being erected by India along the LoC in
Jammu and Kashmir.
Third, the issue of a
plebiscite has always been a technical bone of
contention between the two countries, but is not the
actual problem. At the heart of the Kashmir issue is
that Pakistan sees the Indian-administered portion of
Kashmir as its own, while India sees the state as it own
integral part. As long as Pakistan views Kashmir through
the spectrum of the two-nation theory that the state
with a predominantly Muslim population cannot belong to
India, and India will never budge on the territorial
integrity of its nation state, there can be no progress
in talks at any level. This is precisely the reason why
the experts have been talking of putting the Kashmir
issue in the backburner for now.
The plebiscite
was the instrument that Pakistan used to browbeat India,
while the Kashmir problem cannot be solved unless there
is a change in the fundamental positions of the two
countries. A real solution would have been if Musharraf
had announced the LoC would henceforth be the
international border between the two countries. But this
could also mean the end of the road for Musharraf as
there is a huge machinery, whether in the jihadis or the
army, that thrives on Pakistan's Kashmir bashing. In
addition, giving up the demand for a plebiscite does not
mean that Pakistan has given up its oft-repeated stand
that Kashmir should secede and be part of Pakistan.
In such a situation, what could be India's
response, as well as the future path of progress to the
good work already put in the past few months? Musharraf,
in his interview, says that he has come half way on
Kashmir. In reality, he has not budged an inch. And here
is where India should refuse to take the bait. It should
be gracious about the offer, and in return initiate a
process of dialogue involving Kashmir, but insist that
this is going to be a drawn-out process, given the
complexities of the issues involved. But this should not
be at the cost of the other peace initiatives and
dialogues that are already in progress. If there can
ever emerge a solution to the Kashmir and cross-border
issue, it can only be through a continuous churning of
the positive movements between the two countries. For
once the people start reaping the benefits of such
cooperation, whether in health care or in trade, no
dictator or democratically elected government can
reverse the process.
Indeed, if at the back of
his mind, Musharraf does not intend to derail these,
using diplomatic terms, track-two developments, he could
yet be the messiah.
Siddharth
Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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