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Pakistani heavyweights take their
pitch to India
By Sultan Shahin
NEW DELHI - The
latest India-Pakistan peace process, now two years long, is
being dotted with many firsts. As the first bus
service linking the Indian- and Pakistani-controlled parts
of Kashmir began on Thursday after 57 years, in the
face of determined militant opposition, the former
prime minister of Pakistan and head of the ruling
Muslim League, Shujaat Hussain Chowdhry, added
another first to the list by bringing a
high-powered delegation of his party's leaders to
interact with India's ruling and opposition party
officials, strategists and media last week. The
delegation also met and held substantive
discussions with the president and prime minister
of India.
Among the high points of
the Pakistan Muslim League delegation's
five-day party-to-party contact tour was Chowdhry's
success in persuading Indian Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh to hold substantive talks with Pakistani
President General Pervez Musharraf during his India visit
on April 17 to watch a cricket match between the
two countries that will be played in New Delhi.
India had clearly
indicated earlier that it was not interested
in exploiting the opportunity for summit talks on
the issues on which dialogue is going on
between the two countries at various official
levels. After the failure of the Agra summit in
2001 between Musharraf and then-prime minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee, India has reason to be wary of
the grandstanding and hype that are automatically
attached to summit talks and raise undue
expectations.
Chowdhry expressed confidence
that people-to-people contact would further
improve India-Pakistan relations, and referred
to his visit and meeting with Indian leaders
as an important part of this contact, as leaders
represent millions of people. Welcoming the
Pakistani delegation, Railway Minister and Rashtriya
Janata Dal (National People's Party)
chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, an important pillar
of the coalition government, said he had visited
Pakistan at a time when relations between the two
countries were strained. "We can't forget the way
we were received by the people of Pakistan, who
poured their love and affection," he said.
Expecting greater people-to-people
contact between the two nations, the railway minister
said it had been "our dream that the two should
become one and confront all the problems".
Central ministers Mani Shankar Aiyar, Raghuvansh
Prasad, Oscar Fernandes, Sri Prakash Jaiswal and Naran
J Rathwa; former prime minister I K Gujral;
the Communist Party of India (Maoist) leaders, H
S Surjeet and Sitaram Yechury; and the Congress
Party leaders, R K Dhawan and Saifuddin Soz,
expressed similar feelings during the luncheon
interaction hosted by Yadav.
But the
Pakistani delegation's most important contribution
to the peace process came through frank and
forthright interaction with India's strategic
community. Never before had issues that have
created so much hostility been discussed at this
level so frankly and without rancor. The spirit
animating these discussions was clearly a desire
to find solutions and move further toward
normalization while stating and explaining the two
countries' official positions.
It would appear from these discussions
that Pakistan, and not just Musharraf, though he
should be commended for being the first, has finally
realized that the policy of waging a proxy war it
has pursued against India over the past 25 years is not
only futile but counter-productive. This is also
clear from the strong condemnation issued by
Pakistani government officials, including Foreign
Minister Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri and spokesman for
his ministry Jalil Abbas Jilani, after Wednesday's
terrorist strike against the Kashmiris preparing
to travel on the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus.
Despite suicide attacks by the militants,
however, in which two of them died, the coaches
carrying passengers from both sides of the divide
were flagged off by the prime minister,
chairperson of the ruling coalition Sonia Gandhi,
and the chief minister of the state of Jammu and
Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, from Srinagar and
Pakistani dignitaries from Muzaffarabad on Thursday
morning. Pakistan minced no words, for once, in
its unequivocal denunciation of the terrorists
seeking to scuttle the historic peace bus that has
become a symbol of normalization of relations
between the two nuclear-armed rivals not long
after their million-strong armies were eyeballing
each other for almost a year.
One of the
most important reasons for this realization to
have dawned on the Pakistani leadership was
explained by Senator Mushahid Hussain, secretary
general of the Muslim League, chairman of the
Pakistani Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and
former minister for information. He quoted
Musharraf as having said that Pakistan faced no
external threat, as all threats to it were
"internal", emanating from "extremism and
terrorism". Clearly, Pakistan no longer regards
India as a security threat. This is also indicated
by the fact that in recent months Pakistani
authorities have not hurled the usual accusations
against India's external intelligence agency, the
Research and Analysis Wing, for promoting unrest
and violence in Pakistan's troubled provinces,
such as Balochistan, Sindh and North Western Frontier
Province.
Hussain's formulation was
immediately contradicted by some of his
colleagues, including Senator Nisar Memon,
chairman of the Pakistan senate committee on
defense, indicating that differences of opinion
persist in Pakistan leadership over the country's
threat perception.
Memon, also a
former information minister, said Pakistanis could
not forget that India had a hand in the
"dismemberment" of Pakistan. Joining issue with
his colleague, he said there remained an "external
threat" for Pakistan.
Yet by and large the
country has clearly begun to understand the threat
to its own internal cohesion that is posed not
only by separatist tendencies in its provinces but
by religious extremism that the military
establishment had itself promoted. Pakistan's army
devised the policy of bleeding India through a
thousand cuts in its bid to avenge its spectacular
defeat in the 1971 civil war against the East
Pakistan province (now Bangladesh) in which India
sided with the latter and helped its independence.
The Pakistani army surrendered before the Indian
army and nearly 100,000 soldiers became prisoners
of war. Pakistan first supported India's Sikh
militants and separatists in the state of Punjab
during the 1980s and has been supporting Kashmiri
militants and secessionists since1989.
Another reason for a discernible change in
the Pakistani mindset is that war between nuclear
neighbors doesn't seem to be much of an option for
sorting out long-standing problems. Mushahid
Hussain said that after 1998 (when both countries
tested their nuclear weapons), war was not an
option between India and Pakistan. He said there
had been a "mindset" change in Pakistan and there
was "no political constituency" that spoke of
confrontation with India. According to him, the
Pakistani military establishment, too, was now
speaking of normalizing relations with India.
One reason in his view is that nuclear
weapons have created a balance of terror in the
subcontinent and given Pakistan the confidence to
deal with its bigger and more powerful neighbor.
Reacting to these remarks, former governor of
Jammu and Kashmir G C Saxena said that the nuclear
factor should not be used as a diplomatic tool.
Nuclear weapons are no more than a deterrent, he
said, and they should be treated as such.
Mushahid Hussain said there had been a
change in the Indian attitude, too. India was
uneasy in dealing with a military man holding the
reins of Pakistan. But now India has begun to feel
comfortable in dealing with Musharraf, despite the
fact that he had retained his uniform. Indian
leaders have come to accept Musharraf as a good
interlocutor, he added. They regard him as their
best bet at the moment.
It is a measure of
the sea-change in attitudes that during an
interaction of the Pakistani delegation with
Indian strategic thinkers in the conference room
of the Observer Research Foundation, the main
issue of contention that emerged was the dispute
over Baglihar Dam that is not even on the agenda
of the composite dialogue between the two
countries, and not the hitherto "core issue" for
Pakistan - Kashmiris' right to self-determination.
Earlier, the leader of the delegation had drawn
the attention of both the president and prime
minister of India to the need to settle the
Baglihar Dam issue to maintain the momentum of
amity and peace between the two countries.
India's attitude on the
ambitious 450-megawatt Baglihar hydro-power project in
Kashmir has become a source of anxiety, said the
Pakistanis, since New Delhi has shown little
inclination to accommodate Pakistan's legitimate
concerns. It could have at least halted the
construction on the basis of a design to which
Pakistan has objected. (Now India is studying the
technical details of a design provided by Pakistan
on Indian request.) Other confidence-building
measures (CBMs) can lose credibility if India acts
unreasonably on the vital issue of sharing of
Indus waters (the six rivers of the Indus water
basin flow through Kashmir from Tibet).
In
their view, with the Wullar barrage on the Jhelum
River - through Jammu and Kashmir - already on the
dialogue agenda, and the Kishenganga project being
mooted on the Indus, India may be preparing to put
pressure on Pakistan on the very sensitive issue
of water sharing. There is already a problem over
the availability of adequate water for irrigation
in Pakistan, and if India begins to tamper with
supplies from the rivers awarded to it, the
present atmosphere of bonhomie would deteriorate
rapidly, they said.
India's view of the
issue is largely based on the power requirements
of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. This state has
the largest power deficit of any of India's
states. Kashmiris have to suffer lengthy power
cuts on a daily basis. New Delhi feels that while
hydroelectric power generation may require
regulation, it does not reduce the flow of water
to Pakistan, which the treaty prohibits. Yet
Pakistan has frequently raised objections to power
projects. As a result, power generation remains
wholly inadequate despite the potential to
generate large quantities of energy. India and
Pakistan could benefit significantly from
cooperating in this area.
Veteran Indian
journalist B G Verghese countered Pakistani
arguments vigorously and pointed out the
following. India has not utilized so far the
storage facility allowed to it under the treaty
even to the tune of 50%. No diversion of water is
taking place. The Indian position is therefore
absolutely and totally in accordance with the
provisions of the treaty. He regretted that
Pakistani strategists had not perhaps acquainted
themselves with the treaty. He was sad that even
Pakistan's official website makes points that are
not consistent with the facts of the treaty.
Independent Pakistani journalist Nasim Zehra
countered that India had itself agreed that there
was a problem with the design of the project and
asked for Pakistani suggestions.
The
chairman of the Pakistani Senate and former acting
president of the country, Senator Waseem Sajjad, said
Pakistan had no objection to power generation for
the benefit of Kashmiris as was being made out by
India; Islamabad was only objecting to the storage
of water in violation of the Indus water treaty.
On an earlier occasion that Pakistanis now recall
with hope for a repeat, India had displayed its
goodwill by lowering the height of the Sallal Dam.
More important than the fine points of
these arguments, however, is the fact that these
are being made in an atmosphere that is going
forward in the direction of normalization, indeed
cooperation and friendship. As Zehra pointed out,
foreign policy making is generally a top-down
process, not a bottom-up, with common people
playing no significant role; but in the case of
India and Pakistan one can see a convergence of
both processes. The people of the two countries -
including Kashmiris on either side of the line of
control that divides them - are helping carry the
process forward in an unprecedented manner and
leadership is responding.
The Kashmiris traveling
between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad on
Thursday, despite the very real terrorist threat,
have carried with them the hopes and aspirations
of millions; at least one of the legacies of
partition has been obliterated. But this would
only whet the appetite for more and faster growth
of relations, as every new CBM has served to make
the process more and more people-driven.
As Senator S M Zafar, chairman of the
Pakistani Senate Committee on Human Rights, said, a
series of bold steps are required from the
leadership of both countries. All eyes are now
firmly focused on the Manmohan-Musharraf summit on
April 16, one day before the cricket match, to see
if they will be able to come up with something
that would help sustain the process and make it
irreversible.
Sultan Shahin is a
New Delhi-based writer.
(Copyright
2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.
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