Once again, an Indian Prime Minister has offered a chance for peace with Pakistan despite a recent history of border firings and terror strikes. When you deal with Pakistan, all you can do is to hope for a miracle
If the domestic critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s commendable initiative at the Brics and the SCO summits in Ufa in Russia to re-ignite the India-Pakistan talks sound so pessimistic, the reason is rooted in history of dialogue between the two countries.
Do we, however, need to search in history for evidence when, right from day two of the Ufa initiative, we have Pakistani officials and non-officials themselves providing the Indian critics enoughmasala to doubt the practicality of their Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s promises to his Indian counterpartIJ
Before a distinguished gathering of heads of Governments of Russia, China etc in the Russian city, Pakistan’s Prime Minister agreed with Mr Modi to start a restructured process of India-Pakistan dialogue. The two countries agreed to set free, as a gesture of mutual goodwill, fishermen for the alleged offence of crossing the maritime waterline.
Both also agreed to structure a ground-level Commanders’ meeting to avoid firings across the borders. They also agreed for more meetings between the Directors-General of Military Operations. The source of persistent irritation in their mutual relationship thus having been taken care of, the political process of high-level talks is sought to be revived, with Prime Minister Modi agreeing to visit Islamabad.
Their hosts at Ufa applaud the initiatives and gestures. Even China’s President Xi Jinping let it be known that, in his own country’s interest in the $46 billion-investment Beijing is making in building the Karakoram-Gwadar industrial and transport corridor, a climate of peace between India and Pakistan is sine qua non.
And this is despite exchanges between Prime Minister Modi and him over Beijing’s support to Pakistan over its opposition to a US move in the United Nations to seek Pakistani’s response over the release of 26/11 mastermind Zaki-ur Rehman lakhvi. On the lakhvi issue, the Pakistani Prime Minister promised his Indian counterpart to give voice samples to enable the process of trial.
Mr Sharif also agreed to expedite lakhvi’s trial in his country for the Mumbai attack, as the US is putting pressure because some US citizens were among the victims. There was applause across the globe for the initiatives.
But, before the ink dried on this agreement, Mr Sharif’s domestic critics are not his only voluble opponents in Pakistan. His own National Security Advisor Sartaj Aziz clarified that there would be no talks unless Kashmir was on the agenda. That is exactly what the Pakistani militants are saying and the Kashmiri secessionists headed by SAS Geelani want. That means a good part of the Pakistani hardline establishment does not want the talks at all.
Apparently, Mr Sharif’s silence on the issue is part of his strategy to navigate through the jungle of rival power centres in his country and get the talks going. He is aware fully why Russia and China are prodding him on to give the India-Pakistan peace a chance despite the plethora of power centres there.
Those power centres include the Pakistani military. In the past, every time talks between the two nations seemed set to succeed, you had some incident or the other at the line of Control. The climate change killed the green shoot. The current tension on the border these days is part of the same old strategy.
A number of recent books on Pakistan by foreign analysts as well as those by Pakistani intellectuals confirm the stranglehold of that country’s military and the mullahs over both foreign and domestic policies, first exposed by the country’s former diplomat Husain Haqqani in his classic, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.
It is, therefore, no surprise the Pakistani Prime Minister finds his own National Security Advisor contradicting him and bringing in Kashmir, that was not there in the joint statement issued in Ufa after the talks the two Prime Ministers had had. To ask the question, who the real authority in Islamabad is, would reveal the ignorance of the questioner.
There is also another factor: The mullahs and the many militant organisations they head and the mobs they are able to gather at a moment’s notice. If successive Pakistani Prime Ministers were exposed as prisoners of these power centres, as several analysts have found, the fundamental cause was the anti-Hindu glucose that is injected in every Pakistani vein in the madarssa literature and elsewhere.
As it happens with all hate-seekers, the venom of hatred on which the Pakistani populace is fed day in and day out by the mullahs on the one side and the anti-India diet of the military on the other, constrains the civilian power even in a civilian regime phase of Pakistani history.
The Pakistan Army promotes terror for its own purpose but the religion-based terror groups by now have acquired an independence for themselves and have run riot, bombing mosques of minority Islamic groups within the country itself.
How can any trust develop with the civilian power in such a countryIJ Pakistan’s neighbours have to contend with this reality. It’s not just India; Afghanistan is another victim of Pakistan Army’s ambition to gain ‘depth’ for itself against India and against non-Sunni Islam like Iran. For it, Afghanistan, which is experimenting with a fragile democracy and liberal Islam, is easy prey.
The Jihadi ideology of hatred against all non-Muslim entities and also against other Islamic sects, has spawned terrorism as an acceptable and indeed necessary attribute of religious life in Pakistan and in several other countries. This virus is madly proliferating in West Asia.
Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leading the first NDA Government, had taken the initiative to reconcile with Pakistan, but the military and the Inter-Services Inteliigence there replied with the Kargil attack first and then with the terrorist assault on Parliament.
Next, thejihadis struck at Mumbai in a well-planned attack under the wings of the Pakistan Army just when the Indian Prime Minister was taking the first steps for peace. Continued conspiracies to inject well-armed militants into Kashmir and tactical border firings to break every attempt either from Islamabad or New Delhi or both, have created a climate of deep suspicion.
Once again, an Indian Prime Minister has offered a chance for peace despite a recent history of border firings and terror strikes. When you have a neighbour like Pakistan, where people outside the civilian Government call the shots, there is little choice for you except take a tentative step forward, offer a hand of friendship, and hope for a miracle.