One of the hurdle in the normalisation process is neutralising spoilers in order to control the narrative. In the run up to, during and after Ufa, the loC and the IB were kept hot which culminated in the attack on Gurdaspur
Speaking at the Centre for Peace and Progress at New Delhi last month, on the day the Gurdaspur attack occured, eminent jurist and founder of Kashmir Committee Ram Jethmalani singled out the role of spoilers in wreaking havoc on the normalisation of India-Pakistan relations — in this instance, just days after the Ufa summit. Former Foreign Minister of Pakistan KM Kasuri, who spoke before him, underlined how spoilers, without identifying their identity, have spiked previous meetings of minds. He recalled that the day before he was to visit New Delhi in 2007, Samjhauta Express was attacked but he stayed the course, fulfilling his ministerial obligations. He said the day Mumbai was struck, his successor SM Qureshi was already in New Delhi.
Member of Parliament and Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, of the ‘uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue’ fame, who was also at the meeting said that the prime ministerial meetings at Sharm-el-Sheikh and Ufa were mistakes, as sherpas were missing in preparation for the summits. “These are processes, not management of political events,” he added.
The first hurdle of the normalisation process is neutralising spoilers in order to control the narrative. In the run up to, during and after Ufa the line of Control and the International Border were kept hot accompanied by a war of words culminating in the attack on Gurdaspur. The second hurdle in the dialogue process is the minefield of Kashmir.
Unshaken by spoilers, the Modi Government, in a striking U-turn, has proposed August 23 and August 24 as the dates for meeting between the two National Security Advisors to discuss the entire gamut of issues relating to terrorism, followed by meetings at appropriate levels to restore a semblance of tranquility on the border. The attack at Dinananagar police station has been analysed at great length and no one is in any doubt that thefidayeen came from Pakistan to create mayhem and succeeded in capturing prime time on television for all of 12 hours. But for the Made-in-Pakistan gloves found with the fidayeen, deniability would have been easy.
In what appears to be a scoop if true, last Sunday, this newspaper carried a front page report, “Security agencies see imprint of ISIS outfit in Gurdaspur attack”. It elaborated that the Islamic State operatives are known to cry out Allah ho Akbar or Aud dawlah al Islamiya the Arabic name of this Salafi terror group. It adds that the war cry could have been to conceal the identity of the Pakistan terror group. The report quotes former Punjab Director General of Police KPS Gill as saying that the Gurdaspur attack was a visiting card sent by the Islamic State. No other agency has made similar attribution to the IS.
Perhaps it is too soon to nail the IS. Gurdaspur is an attempt by spoilers to test India’s tolerance threshold and the nature of its Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh’s ‘befitting reply’. From the day this Government came into office, its agni pareeksha started in Herat, Afghanistan, followed by the fidayeen attack in Samba in March. For the first time since Mumbai 2008, the scene of attack is outside Jammu & Kashmir, in Punjab. The geographical expansion of terrorism is nothing new.
After 2003, when the defences in Jammu & Kashmir were tightened, terrorism shifted to other Indian cities, culminating in the high profile strike on Mumbai. It is not difficult to identify the spoilers. They are the Inter Services Intelligence-sponsored Punjabi Talibanviz lashkar-e-Tayyeba and Jaish-e-Mohammed. Anti-India terrorism will not abate anytime soon unless there is a measured response which raises the cost for Pakistan.
Till a befitting reply is ready, we may see a creep of terrorism towards the hinterland. Clearly, suspending the dialogue is not a credible response as it plays directly into the hands of spoilers. The dialogue process has to be suitably insulated by both sides to withstand periodic spikes by spoilers. Closure must also be brought to mutual sniping and the blame game. For example, Islamabad has prepared a dossier on the Research and Analysis Wing alleging its role in destabilising Pakistan which it intends to give to the UN. Strategic distrust is so high that jokes about pigeons from Pakistan acting as spies are taken seriously.
Pakistan’s Ambassador to India Abdul Basit recounts that firing on the border, infiltration and cross border terrorism are the symptoms of the core concern of Kashmir, the mother of all issues. He has to be reminded that General Pervez Musharraf before his springing his coup in 1999, had told a Rotary Club meeting in Karachi that even if Kashmir issue is resolved, India-Pakistan relations will not be normal.
Still, it was in his regime that the three-year long back channel dialogue yielded the four-point Kashmir formula which Mr Kasuri swears by every time he is in India. An interim solution of Kashmir was almost ready in early 2007 but spoilers interrupted its realisation and killed it with the Mumbai assault soon after Gen Musharraf was eased out. Failing to clinch the Kashmir issue was a missed opportunity.
India-Pakistan relations saw their best days during the Musharraf-Vajpayee/Manmohan Singh era. An unwritten cease fire agreement in November 2003, infiltration reduced to a trickle, and no mention of Kashmir by both sides at the UN. A composite dialogue progressed quietly awaiting the formal acceptance of the four-point Kashmir formula.
Both sides blamed each other for failing to show the last lap political courage to clinch it. The rest is history. It is proven, I dare say that business between India and Pakistan is best done with a military leader in civilian clothes in Islamabad who is Chief of Army Staff and the Executive President, all rolled into one. He is able to control the narrative including the spoilers for a normalisation of India-Pakistan relations.
To bleeding heart liberals who will cry about democracy in Pakistan, one can ask how is the present civil-military power balance any different from what is being suggestedIJ Some of the underlying reasons for conflict will get resolved while some others will remain. Till the knight in shining armour returns to Pakistan or the people in Pakistan help in rebalancing civil-military relations both countries must remain engaged to defeat the spoilers. But turning the other cheek while talking to Pakistan is a bad idea. The new Government has finally made the correction on talks; now it must move beyond bluster and rhetoric to shape and deliver the befitting reply to the spoilers.