Take up again the dialogue

By Tanvir Ahmad Khan
WHEN India and Pakistan resume the composite dialogue in the third week of May the negotiating template would be the same as when the process went into slow motion.

However, the figures clustered around the proverbial table will show considerable changes.

The new interlocutor for the Indian foreign secretary will represent continuity in calibre and content. There may be a change in style when the foreign ministers meet but the basic approach would not have lost any civility or goodwill. The Indians will naturally look beyond this professional level to see if the new political landscape in Pakistan entails a shift in the goal posts and the rules of the game.

Since the turn of the century, India has negotiated with President Musharraf, an adventurist military leader turned valued partner, putatively capable of delivering any solution to the Kashmir dispute and other contentious issues.

What India was slow to grasp is that such a window of opportunity did exist for a short period. After a tumultuous year in Pakistani politics, there is not much that Musharraf can achieve by himself though the ideas generated in his rather unconventional interventions in the peace process have a life of their own.

This is not to say that these ideas will find spontaneous ownership in the new ruling coalition if it survives its current fragility and gathers enough traction to conduct a meaningful conversation with the Indian leadership. The most reassuring aspect of the situation is that the constituent parties accept the imperative of a cooperative relationship with India. In fact, each one of them would claim to have pioneered the spirit of détente in the wake of at least three futile confrontations since the mid-1980s.

None of them put a seal of approval on Kargil. The late Benazir Bhutto had unambiguously vetoed it not only because it was militarily and politically flawed but because it was also diametrically opposed to her vision for the region. The ANP has an unblemished record of seeking a peaceful settlement of all differences between the two countries. For Mr Nawaz Sharif, Kargil was the undoing of what he had achieved with Mr Vajpayee and also of his government.

Notwithstanding the consensus on the ultimate objective, negotiators from both sides face a new situation. India has a coalition that has almost unbridgeable differences on some vital policy issues which fortunately do not include relations with Pakistan. But this advantage is partly at risk because contested areas in India may force a general election where the BJP could make relations an electoral issue rather than oppose the Indo-US nuclear deal.

Across the table this May would be a coalition that would not have as yet formulated an integrated India policy.

India and Pakistan do need a clearer framework of principles on the basis of which to organise future relations. For Pakistan, it is important to develop a policy that enables it to accommodate India’s new status as an emerging regional and global power. Nuclear deterrence stability should make it easier to establish parameters in which result-oriented diplomacy helps prevent unrestrained rivalry over conventional arms and promotes across-the-board cooperation.

For India, it would be salutary to present a set of ideas that builds on the existing compact to fight terrorism together and focus more sharply on what the two countries can do together in the years ahead.

India and Pakistan are developing at a rate that will mean an exponential increase in their consumption of energy. They have a national portfolio of mixed strategies to meet the energy crunch but they need to be inter-dependent stakeholders in joint projects for importing energy from third-country sources.

It is also time to assess the pros and cons of much freer trade and investment. Pakistan may have valid apprehensions in cooperating with an economy with a much larger manufacturing base and capital available for investment abroad. But Pakistan’s rent-seeking businessmen and entrepreneurs often exaggerate the risks and play down the advantages.

There is no theological reason for denying overland transit between India and Afghanistan forever and such complex issues should become more amenable to solutions if the two sides have a more comprehensive framework of relations than the joint statement of January 2004.

Even in the most optimistic scenario, Kashmir would emerge as a factor that casts its shadow on the rest of the agenda. On the Pakistani side, the knowledge of the progress made through the secret channel is restricted to very few individuals; former foreign minister Khurshid Kasuri famously put the figure at five.

One has generally found Indian friends to be much better briefed. Apparently, the progress is documented and India would naturally expect Pakistan to begin from its contents. The political government will have to discuss bilateral relations more earnestly in parliament and also win public support for the ‘concessions’ made by President Musharraf in random public utterances or through his trusted envoy, Tariq Aziz.

Pakistan’s political leadership may for some time experience contrary pulls from an electorate that is impatient to be informed and from powerful elements in the so-called establishment that still want to treat the major foreign and security policy of the country as the closed preserve of General Musharraf.

India would do well to remember that there is a sea change in Pakistan and the chances of implementing decisions taken in unlit corridors of arbitrary power would have only a slim chance of being endorsed by a restless nation.

One should not exaggerate expectations from the meetings in May but one hopes that the two foreign ministers will set the stage for Manmohan Singh and his principal associates and Pakistani leaders such as Mr Asif Zardari, Mr Nawaz Sharif and MrAsfandyar to sit together and address what is occasionally called ‘the vision thing’. More than a billion people await that transcendent image over the mountains and plains of South Asia. n

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com
The Dawn