With the way Pakistan has evolved as a rogue entity over the years, India should develop a multi-pronged strategy rather than deceiving itself by complete disengagement. Exploring the possibility of opening a track with the military may also not be a bad idea
The SAARC Yatra attempted by Indian Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar since March this year, in two different legs, has so far taken him to four Capitals. The most talked about from this yatra was his visit to Islamabad. Media in India and abroad looked at the initiative as Narendra Modi Government’s concealed bid to square up with Pakistan after cancellation of foreign secretary level talks scheduled in August last year.
A month later, with both relative silence along the loC, and the release of Zaki-ur-Rehman lakhvi — mastermind of the Mumbai attack — it seems the effort has had mixed results. Any prospect of meaningful engagement between the two countries seems remote. At this juncture, there is a serious need to reassess our Pakistan policy.
The lost Decades: Ad hoc and Reactive India
For the last almost seven decades, Pakistan remains the most critical security and foreign policy challenge for India. It is a matter of concern for us that all our ad hoc but cumulative efforts, ranging from ‘benign neglect’ to spurts of ‘active engagement’, have failed to dissuade Pakistan from its belligerent stance vis-à-vis India. It is well on its way to wreck India from within by adopting its all too well-known asymmetric strategy of nurturing subversive constituencies in India by playing on the communal and societal faultlines, even after attaining nuclear parity with India through its relentless pursuit of eat-grass-make-bomb policy under the shadow of Afghan Jihad in the 1980s.
What have we done all this while to deter Pakistani behaviourIJ What explains Pakistan’s implacable hostility towards IndiaIJ Do we understand Pakistan enoughIJ Do we need to develop a clear-cut policy towards itIJ let us now grapple with these questions.
Since Partition, our leadership has pursued a highly reactive and ad hoc approach towards Pakistan. Our policies have been partially guided by personal interests of the leaders rather than national interests, and characterised by unnecessary flip-flops occasioned either by unreasoned fears or circumstantial invocation of high moral principles. We have failed to stay the course even when revision of existing policies is backed by collective wisdom of the people at large. All in all, as one ex-foreign service officer once told me, our leaders have allowed themselves to flow with the current at times and swam against it when it suited them, without being able to build up a coherent strategy vis-à-vis our most troubling neighbour. Pakistan has taken full advantage of our unpredictable behaviour to evolve a consistent policy of confrontation and effective deterrence vis-à-vis us.
let us briefly analyse the behaviour of our top leadership since Independence. Jawaharlal Nehru feigned illness (or may be he was ill enough!) to avoid accompanying lord Mountbatten to attend the Joint Defence Council meeting on November 1, 1947, days after Pakistan-backed lashkar invasion of Kashmir. It displayed either his unwillingness to engage both Muhammad Ali Jinnah and liaquat Ali Khan or his escapist attitude at a moment when his absence led to strengthening the perception about either his highhandedness or fear of engagement.
His Government’s concessional engagements with Pakistan — with Mohammad Ali Bogra in 1953-55, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1962-63 — did not serve India well either. In the 1950s, his readiness to execute plebiscite in Kashmir and seeming approval of territorial exchanges during Bhutto-Swaran Singh talks in the early 1960s only ended up whetting Pakistani appetite and pitch their demands even higher, backed as they were by the Anglo-American consensus on the need to back an ally (Pakistan), rather than India, a reluctant power committed to non-alignment.
The subsequent Congress Governments in New Delhi, with the sole exception of the hard decisions that Indira Gandhi took in 1971, have followed in Nehru’s footsteps. Mrs Gandhi failed to capitalise on the 1971 war and the Simla agreement restarted rather than resolved India-Pakistan’s confrontational relationship.
Non-Congress Governments have not been any better. While Inder Kumar Gujral Government, in a post-cold war reassessment of India’s interests in the region, seemed to revamp India’s approach to the neighbourhood and offered non-reciprocal concessions to neighbouring states, he made it clear that his famous ‘Gujral doctrine’ did not apply to Pakistan. It is quite another thing that analysts in India curse him for shutting down intelligence units engaged in counter-terror operations in Pakistan.
Similarly, Atal Bihari Vajpayee — known for his sagacity and near-Nehruvian credentials — returned to the path of engagement after a tiring mobilisation of troops along the international border following Pakistani terrorists’ attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001.
Modi Government’s flip-flop on Pakistan, therefore, is not new. After redefining the rules of engagement in terms of pure bilaterisation of the issue of Kashmir and de-recognition of Kashmiri separatists as participants in the process in any form, and calling off engagement, the Government, apparently under external pressure, has chosen to rechant the mantra of engagement. This while Pakistan has gone ahead with its policy of courting and sponsoring separatism in Kashmir. This has, in a way, made Pakistan rejoice its own strategy of needling India through low-intensity challenges and made it alive to both the finite limits of Indian anger and the infinite limits of its patience.
Against this setting, let us now turn to the argument in favour of ‘uninterrupted and uninterruptible’ engagement. It looks unexceptionable on the face of it. In fact, it does characterise the nature of interaction between India and Pakistan despite three and half wars and continued employment of terrorism as an instrument of Pakistan’s India policy. There has not been any dearth of dialogue between India and Pakistan all these years, even before this phrase was coined. As they say, the path to hell is paved with good intentions. All our good intentions backing the dialogue process have amounted to nothing at the end of the day. If we closely follow the trajectory of India-Pakistan dialogue, no two adversaries in the world have ever had such dense conversations, yet have failed to move forward and reconcile themselves to each other.
There have been minor achievements on the way, however, there have been several forks on the road and dialogues have made most outstanding issues more intractable than before, and even reopened settled issues, complicating the relationship further. The point here is not to emphasise on dialogue but to find a way of making them result-oriented.
Understand Pakistan better
This is where our failure to understand Pakistan kicks in. Our leaders have not been able to understand Pakistan as much as they should. True, they have had a whole range of issues as politicians to focus on. Pakistan appears on their radar only when there is an emergency. However, given Pakistan’s continuous quest for parity with India and its efforts to weaken India militarily, there is a need to develop a wholesome study of Pakistani behaviour.
First of all, we need to understand that there are many Pakistans within Pakistan. At the societal level, it is composed of diverse sects and ethnic groups whose interests collide rather than converge. Even if it is an Islamic country, it has a Sunni majority population. However, the Sunnis are divided into Deobandi and Barelvi sects and there is no agreed conception of Islam that would define the Islamic character of Pakistan. The domination of Punjabis is resented by the Sindhis and Balochis and to a lesser extent now by the Pathans.
As far as the power dynamics is concerned, the Army remains the most important institution wielding maximum power in Pakistan. It has capitalised on the failures of the political leadership in Pakistan, which has been utterly self-seeking and venal. In the absence of any effort to bring about socio-economic transformation in Pakistan, the highly inegalitarian class structure has perpetuated itself and led to social stagnation. Amid all this, the political class found it convenient to build unity among disparate ethnic, sectarian and social groups through active cultivation of anti-India sentiments. The military of Pakistan has propagated fear of India among the people successfully over the years and projected itself as the only reliable institution which can save Pakistan. Pakistan has remained excessively focussed on India and the insecurity induced by the military has acted as the only glue that binds Pakistan. There has, thus, been some degree of convergence of tactics by the political and military leaderships to mislead people about Indian intentions over the years.
However, there has been a marginal change in the approaches of the political and military leaderships towards India in the last one decade. Perhaps, the politicians now understand that exaggerating fear of India has led to the construction of a national security state and given disproportionate importance to the military at the cost of the civilian institutions of state.
This has in the past led to change of their rhetoric vis-à-vis India. Thus, one found Benazir Bhutto wedded to the idea of 1,000 years’ war with India to advocate peace and her husband to find traces of Indianness in every Pakistani as much as traces of Pakistaniness in every Indian. Even leaders like Nawaz Sharif, who flaunted his Kashmiri origin and initiated Kashmir Solidarity Day, to come full circle and reiterate in his famous ‘aloo gosht’ speech in August 2012 that there was no difference between the people of the two countries.
However, the military has not changed its mind yet. It is focussed on India as the number one enemy and evolving strategies to bleed India through thousand cuts. Through its influence on the vernacular media and its closely cultivated army of commentators, it has recycled the fear of India effectively and has been able to keep the anti-India temper alive. Denunciation of India comes in all shapes and sizes, starting from denouncing democracy, secularism and its policies at all levels.
In these circumstances, when Pakistan is bent on defining its identity in opposition to India in all respects, it is useless to expect Pakistan to agree to any reasonable argument in favour of resolution of all issues with India. It has all along adopted a revisionist and maximalist position, knowing fully well that it is not going to be acceptable to India at all. The net result has been negative.
This is not to deny that there have been false seasons of peace, like the one authored by a military administration during 2004-2007. This takes me back to a postulation by a seasoned diplomat of India, who served India during Zia-ul-Haq’s reign, that India must seriously attempt reconciliation with Pakistan when a strong military dictator is in power in Islamabad. Perhaps, Indian leadership inadvertently heeded his advice and pursued the path of dialogue with Pervez Musharraf. A failed adventurist, architect of Kargil intrusion, Musharraf sought some shifts in Pakistan’s approach by shelving the UN resolutions and introducing his formula of rejecting positions unacceptable to both India and Pakistan and building common ground on agreed proposals. India played ball, and the inter-Kashmir connectivity was given some impetus. His premature exit, however, put paid to all hopes of pursuing the path of change in Pakistan’s approach. The military leadership following him, in a bid to readjust to the changing power equations in Islamabad, threw the Musharraf formula out of the window. This also leads to another important lesson in Indo-Pak engagement — do not hold any position taken by any Pakistani leader on anything as conclusive. Revision of positions is the norm in Pakistani behaviour.
What are the options for India thenIJ Complete disengagement may seem alluring to some Pakistan baiters. Benign neglect with rudimentary diplomatic engagement which defines status quo is another. There is a growing family of Pakistan watchers in India who would advocate a proactive counter-terrorism strategy. As in human behaviour, so in state policies, there is no place for monochromatic approach.
Disengaging from Pakistan is offered as a punishment to Pakistan for its misconduct on promoting terror in India, and its dilly dallying on brining planner of Mumbai attack to justice. However, we must know, as one former ISI Chief told this writer, disengagement with India would rather serve Pakistan right. It can encash Indian apathy in the international market well. It may also cost India international goodwill. There is also a view now that in the post-nuclear scenario, there is a view that India should grow at a continuous pace and leave Pakistan far behind, forcing it to see reason some day. However, such an option was advocated by Nehru to begin with. In one of his letters to Sheikh Abdullah, which has a contemporary ring to it, he wrote: “We are superior to Pakistan in military and industrial power. But that superiority is not so great as to produce results quickly either in war or by fear of war. Therefore, our national interest demands that we should adopt a peaceful policy towards Pakistan and, at the same time, add to our strength. Strength ultimately comes not from the defence forces, but the industrial and economic background behind them. As we grow in strength, and we are likely to do so, Pakistan will feel less and less inclined to threaten or harass us, and a time will come when, through sheer force of circumstances, it will be in a mood to accept a settlement which we consider fair, whether in Kashmir or elsewhere.”
As history has taught us, Pakistan has not been able to forsake its pathological hatred and fear of India in spite of such policies advocated by our past leaders. Nevertheless, at a time when the space for open and even preemptive attack has shrunk for India vis-à-vis Pakistan, a policy of blissful unconcern towards Pakistan seems appealing.
However, looking at the way Pakistan has evolved as a rogue entity over the years, India needs to evolve a multi-pronged strategy rather than deceive itself by complete disengagement. Exploring the possibility of opening a track with the military may not be a bad idea. At the same time, efforts must be undertaken to initiate counter-operations, if possible, to teach the Generals the consequences of their indiscretion.
At the same time, the option of preemption may be explored to call the bluff of the low nuclear threshold that Pakistani analysts are projecting as a deterrent. While talking for talks’ sake is not a good idea, if it is aimed at engaging the peace constituency, it must be explored and sustained, factoring in the possibility of spoiler attacks to derail such a process.
The writer is a Fellow and Coordinator of South Asia Centre at Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA). The views expressed are his own