Successive Indian Prime Ministers have strongly believed that talks with Pakistan is the only way to end 60 years of suspicion and hate, and Manmohan Singh is no exception. He told Parliament after the Sharm el-Sheikh talks that “dialogue and engagement is the best way forward”. His predecessor, Atal Behari Vajpayee, has said, “We cannot change our neighbours, we have to live with them”.
But the experiences of India — Pakistan engagement, at least in the first decade of the new millennium, begs the question: Talks, yes, but to what end, and at what cost?
The recently concluded foreign ministers’ talks at Islamabad has called into question Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s vision of peace with Pakistan, and exposed his government and party alike to domestic criticism. There is consternation within the foreign service, too, which has to implement policies set out by the political leadership while remaining mindful of steering clear of the bureaucratic minefield at home and diplomatic interests abroad.
There have been a flurry of ‘post-mortem’ reports in the media about whether home secretary G.K. Pillai’s remarks about the ISI’s links with 26/11 co-conspirator David Coleman Headley, made on the eve of the talks, precipitated a crisis of sorts for the two negotiating teams led respectively by external affairs minister S.M. Krishna and his Pakistan counterpart Shah Mehmood Qureshi. The reports also posed whether an intervention by the Pakistan Army derailed the talks.
But are we asking the right questions here? Perhaps, the question to be asked is not whether Pillai timed his remarks well or whether he was on a solo flight, but whether the talks themselves were ill-timed and whether the Prime Minister was flying solo with his vision of peace? Not whether Pakistan Army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani ambushed the talks. but whether he could have behaved any differently? We should ask whether India should engage the Pakistan Army and not whether the civilian government in Pakistan is capable of taking the talks forward? And then there is the larger question — Given the fluid situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, how do we recalibrate our relations with Iran, the central Asian states and even old friend Russia?
Conversations with a cross-section of Pakistan watchers and strategic analysts throw up interesting insights into the issues at hand. There is a broad consensus that the timing of the recent talks with Pakistan might not have been propitious, and there are various reasons. Afghanistan is in a state of flux, Pakistan is jockeying for influence in Afghanistan in anticipation of a withdrawal of US troops and India risks being edged out of the matrix altogether if it does not craft a suitable policy in the near term. The Marjah offensive by the US and Nato-led Forces is a failure, and the Kandahar operations have been delayed. Domestically, the situation in Pakistan is not any better. And, therefore, the conclusion is that India should wait it out.
Hostility with India is the raison d’etre for the Pakistan Army and the ISI, which manifested itself in the Mumbai attacks. Even Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and the highest-ranking officer in the US armed forces, articulated his concerns about it as recently as Saturday when he referred to Pakistan as “an extraordinarily complex country” of which the military and ISI were a big part.
“I believe the strategic approach of the ISI needs to fundamentally change,” Mullen added for good measure. His remarks acquire a salience of their own, coming as they do after the interrogation of Headley pointed to the complicity of Pakistan’s official agencies in the Mumbai attacks. However, there is a view that New Delhi should not shy away from engaging the Pakistan Army. It is argued that India did not reach out to the Army in the past in the mistaken belief that it should be seen on the side of democracy. But the reality is there is no democracy in Pakistan, only a civilian facade.
An indication of the relative power equation can be had from the fact that the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan had succeeded in stitching together a draft agreement but it was vetoed by the Army as talks between Mr Krishna and Mr Qureshi neared an end.
The events as they unfolded in Islamabad have led some of the sceptics to tentatively conclude that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh runs the risk of losing whatever goodwill there was for his Pakistan gambit if he persists with the talks without getting satisfaction from Pakistan on the issues of bringing the 26/11 perpetrators to justice, unravelling the full conspiracy behind it, and dismantling the terror infrastructure operating on Pakistani soil. However, New Delhi has defended itself against the criticism by pointing out that the Pakistan government’s acknowledgment, that progress had been made in dialogues held between 2004 and 2008 and that both sides needed to build on it, is an improvement over previous rounds of talks.
New Delhi concedes that the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan has forced it to revisit its ties with other countries in the region and beyond. The UPA-1’s preoccupation with the nuclear deal had come at the expense of the traditional ties with Iran but the Persian Gulf nation has reappeared in the Indian consciousness after New Delhi did not find itself on the same page with Washington on Afghanistan.
The Americans are concentrating on a narrow strategy in Afghanistan — to exit with their honour intact —and in the process they are exposing themselves to compromises. New Delhi has since sought to engage Tehran, and both sides now are discussing issues such as trade and connectivity. Foreign secretary Nirupama Rao is expected to travel to Moscow in a few weeks for consultations with the Russian foreign ministry on regional issues such as Afghanistan and Iran.
China, long seen as using Pakistan to keep India in check, is another foreign policy test for New Delhi. How to deal with China, is a question oft-heard in official circles. National security adviser Shivshankar Menon is understood to have conveyed to the Chinese leadership in his recent visit to Beijing that the time has come for a new construct or paradigm in Sino-Indian relationship, that is broad-based and incorporates a more intense dialogues on issues of mutual interest or concern.
As India attempts once again to resurrect the phoenix of India-Pak talks from the fires that reduced it to ashes in Islamabad, Prime Minister Singh’s challenge is to ensure that he doesn’t allow making peace with Pakistan, limit his ability to see that there are no quick fix solutions to forging peace with a nation that is still a de facto military state. One that is committed — albeit unsuccessfully — to keeping Delhi tied down to fighting divisive forces. The game of encirclement and proxy war is after all, a two way street.