India, Pakistan try to thaw Siachen
ice By Tarini Unnikrishnan
NEW DELHI - As the generation that witnessed the
bloodbath of partition gradually withers away on both
sides of the subcontinent, another exhausted moment of
history is at hand. For the first time since India and
Pakistan defined the Line of Control (LoC) in 1972, an
indefinite ceasefire along the entire stretch of the
divide - across the International Boundary, the LoC and
the Actual Ground Position Line along the Siachen
Glacier - has held since last November 26.
Six
years after they last agreed to disagree, Indian and
Pakistani officials are coming face to face in New Delhi
this Thursday and Friday to discuss once again whether
their respective armies should withdraw from the snowy
wastes of Siachen and leave the glacier, between the
Karakoram and Saltoro ranges up north in the high
Himalayas, to its own devices.
It is here, up
and beyond grid reference NJ9842, that India and
Pakistan have transformed patriotism to somewhat tragic
and rather absurd ends. For the past 20 years, the
Indian tricolor has been aloft at Bana Top, on the
Saltoro heights, from where Indian soldiers have looked
down upon their Pakistani counterparts amid an
Islamic-green-crescent-encrusted flag.
In
November the two governments decided to give Siachen
another chance and ordered that the two armies stop
firing at each other on November 26, the new-moon day
celebrated as Id-ul-Fitr. Until then, on this highest
battlefield in the world (about 6,400 meters), more men
had died of pulmonary and cerebral edema than of
bullets. The indefinite ceasefire has continued to hold
for a record seven-plus months.
On Thursday in
Delhi, history was to offer both governments another
chance to redeem themselves, but it seemed already
unlikely they would seize the day. The team from
Islamabad, led by Defense Secretary Hamid Nawaz, was to
meet his Indian counterpart Ajai Vikram Singh, flanked
by a series of officials hand-picked from across
government. The gravity of the moment led to a meeting
of the Indian cabinet on the eve of this eighth round of
talks.
Under pressure from domestic opinion,
which perceives President General Pervez Musharraf of
giving in far too much to the Americans by helping with
the capture of key al-Qaeda figures, Islamabad is likely
to demand that talks can only go forward if New Delhi
agrees to "redeploy" its troops to positions that had
been agreed in a meeting in 1989.
It doesn't
seem, however, that new New Delhi is likely to take a
"risk for peace". Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's
government is still settling in and although he is
determined to end the decades of hostility that have
decidedly warped South Asia's sense of destiny, the
sense of things falling apart worldwide is having its
impact on India. The cautiousness of the bureaucracy is
beginning to weigh in, whether it is on the question of
support for Iraq or engagement with Pakistan.
Presidential elections in the United States next
November are another reason to contemplate life on the
banks of the Yamuna.
But back to Siachen's
rarefied moonscape, which is completely unforgiving of
mere mortals. Food has to be specially treated for
consumption by soldiers, toothpaste freezes in the
tubes, speech is slurred. It hasn't mattered all these
years, though, to the subcontinental cousins. In the
early 1980s, the Pakistanis began unilaterally to alter
their maps and their myths, allowing so-called
mountaineering expeditions to climb the glacier. When
the Indians figured out what was happening (evidently
they heard the Pakistanis were buying very sophisticated
mountain gear in Switzerland and wondered why), they
quickly preempted them and raced to the top of Saltoro.
They have been there since 1984, in possession
of the 74-kilometer triangle that comprises the Siachen
glacier, edged on the northeast by the Karakoram Pass -
one of the four passes into Central Asia - and on the
west by the Saltoro range. Below the glacier is NJ 9842,
the last point identified on the LoC in the Shimla
Agreement. In 1972, both countries had been content not
to delineate those nameless heights as belonging to
either side, only saying that the LoC continued, "thence
north to the glacier".
It is on these heights
that the Indians have deluded themselves they're playing
some 21st-century version of the Great Game, that if
they gave up the Saltoro, the Pakistanis would quickly
move in and draw a line northeast to the all-weather
Karakoram Pass. They would thus get yet another access
point into Central Asia as well as to China. Control of
Siachen, argued New Delhi, could enable the Pakistani
army to move southward into Kashmir and cut it off from
the rest of India.
It was an argument that may
have held during the foggy years of the Cold War, when
life came rather cheap in the name of national security,
especially since the Chinese had already built the
Karakoram Highway precisely to circumvent Indian control
and get land access to its "all-weather friend"
Pakistan.
But a decade after the end of the Cold
War, as the subcontinent tires of a cross-border
patriotism that must be the last refuge of tired
politicians and unimaginative bureaucracies, it seems
that Siachen could once again provide the key to the
56-year-old impasse between India and Pakistan. After
all, both nations had twice been within a hair's breadth
of reaching agreement in the past 15 years.
The
first act in this strange drama played out in June 1989,
when a team from New Delhi traveled to Islamabad. Rajiv
Gandhi and Benazir Bhutto were prime ministers of India
and Pakistan, Naresh Chandra and Ijlal Zaidi were its
respective defense secretaries, Generals V K Singh and
Jahangir Karamat were the two directors general of
military operations (DGMOs), while Generals Aslam Beg
and V K Sharma were the two army chiefs. Two other
actors who completed the circle were Pakistani foreign
secretary Humayun Khan and India's high commissioner to
Pakistan, S K Singh.
Generals Singh and Karamat
met and agreed, after political clearance from both
sides, that both armies would withdraw (the politically
correct word used was "redeploy") to pre-Shimla
positions. When the team went to meet Benazir, a player
on the scene said, she is believed to have told them, in
words to this effect: "Gentleman, please don't talk
about this publicly. Leave it to Rajiv [Gandhi] and me.
And Ronen, who was here yesterday ..."
"Ronen"
was of course, Ronendra Sen, the all-powerful joint
secretary in the Prime Minister's Office, a very close
friend and aide of Rajiv Gandhi - and currently, India's
ambassador to the US. As the jaws of all the men in the
room dropped, it transpired that Sen had flown in on a
special aircraft to Islamabad the day before to cut the
deal on Siachen. Nobody, not even Indian high
commissioner S K Singh, knew.
Soon the Indian
team left Bhutto's house for the airport in Rawalpindi
to return to Delhi. A press release had even been
jointly prepared, in which the word "redeploy" found
much prominence. So both armies would redeploy,
including from their respective base camps. The Siachen
Glacier would become demilitarized, subject to joint
inspection from both sides. Since the Indian army
worried that it would be easier for the Pakistanis to
regain the Saltoro heights they had abandoned, they were
given assurances that that would not happen.
What happened next, an on-the-spot source said,
begs disbelief, especially since it wrecked the course
of history. At the airport, Humayun Khan told a Voice of
America correspondent that India had agreed to
"withdraw" to pre-Shimla positions. S K Singh added, "I
would like to thank the [Pakistani] foreign secretary
and endorse everything he has said." By the time the
plane reached Delhi, a crisis was already brewing. The
political leadership could not sustain the criticism in
the difference between "withdraw" and "redeploy". The
agreement fell apart.
Behind the drama, however,
the reality had been somewhat different. The Pakistani
army and the Inter-Services Intelligence began to get
worried that Benazir was "selling out" to India,
especially since it was required to redeploy from
"Position A" to "Position B". Not only was it unwilling
to authenticate "Position A", since that would have told
their public that it was the Indian army on the Saltoro
heights and not itself, the Pakistanis began to fudge
assurances about retaking the Saltoro.
Three
months later in September, the Pakistani army had
mounted the largest exercise in its history, called the
Zarb-e-Momin, which culminated in large-scale intrusions
(about 7,000 militants, according to one account) into
the Kashmir Valley by December. About the same time, the
daughter of then home minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed was
kidnapped by Kashmiri militants. India feared it could
even "lose" Kashmir, and has since dealt with the
situation, largely militarily.
Confirmation of a
Siachen deal came from none other than Rajiv Gandhi in
May 1991, shortly before his assassination. "We don't
want to sell out, we want to be friendly. I was friendly
with [former Pakistani president Mohammad] Zia [ul-Haq],
we almost signed a treaty on Siachen with Zia. The only
reason it wasn't signed was that he died [in August
1988]. At no time were we soft with Pakistan, but we got
our work done," Gandhi said.
The second time
both sides came within breathing distance of an
agreement was during the sixth India-Pakistan meeting in
New Delhi in November 1992. N N Vohra and Salim Abbas
Jilani were the two defense secretaries in India and
Pakistan and quickly reached agreement, along the lines
of the 1989 paper. Both at first agreed to eight-figure
grid maps about locations, including base camps, then
brought it down to four-figure references, then to
"nearest" positions - all because of objections by
Pakistani high commissioner to India Riaz Khokhar,
currently Pakistan's foreign secretary. Both delegations
even agreed to sign maps.
Jilani and Vohra, who
had by now become friends, agreed over a game of golf
that, given the hawkishness on both sides, this was
about the last time they could pull something off like
this. That night, when Indian prime minister P V
Narasimha Rao called foreign secretary J N Dixit
(currently national security adviser), DGMO General V R
Raghavan and Vohra to a meeting, they assumed it was to
finalize the agreement. A hand-written brief had, in
fact, even been signed by Rao. Instead, Rao is believed
to have hemmed and hawed. "I haven't even spoken to the
leader of the opposition about this," he began. "Why
don't we postpone this for a couple of months?" Afraid
of the gathering storm over the Babri Masjid - it was
pulled down a month later - Rao couldn't bring himself
to act. Once again and despite much labor, the Siachen
agreement had been stillborn.
Postscript: In
January 1994, India gave a series of non-papers to
Pakistan, including on Siachen. In November 1998, as
part of the "composite dialogue" talks, both sides held
discussions on Siachen in Delhi. The Indian side crafted
a proposal to ensure Pakistani rejection, namely a
freeze and authentication of present ground positions
and bilateral monitoring. So when then DGMO Inder Verma
began to claim incredibly that India had held the
Saltoro even before the 1971 war, the talks were doomed
to fail.
It is these decades of distrust on the
part of both sides that will have to be overcome if a
breakthrough on Siachen is actually to happen this week.
But if it does, it will perhaps be the biggest
breakthrough to date in the ongoing Pakistan-India peace
process.
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