November 2,1998
|
|
|
|
INDO-PAK TALKS Terms of Engagement Pakistan is crumbling as a nation-state but its nuclear weapons capability and animosity towards India demand a carefully crafted strategy on negotiations. By Manoj Joshi
Coincidentally, in nearby Mirpur in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, the head of the Markaz-dawa-ul-Irshad, was regaling an audience at a seminar on "Ghazwa-e-Hind (War of Hind)" about the valour and tactics of his Lashkar-e-Taiba militants fighting the jehad against India in Kashmir. On October 17, when Pakistani officials read out their wish-list on Kashmir to the Indian delegation led by Foreign Secretary K. Raghunath, the Asian Development Bank announced that Pakistan had defaulted on a $61 million loan. On the same day, a press release stated that an IMF team scheduled to arrive in Islamabad last week to negotiate a rescheduling of Pakistan's other international loans was postponing its visit. If it had the option, India would have dealt with Pakistan the same way. But theirs is not the luxury of dealing from distant Manila and Washington with dollars and cents. India simply does not have the option of postponing or walking away from its problems with Pakistan, its troublesome western neighbour which recently tested its nuclear weapons and despite its internal problems is waging a proxy war in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Seen in this light, the talks were a success. If, as Maleeha Lodhi, former Pakistani ambassador to the US, points out, we must avoid looking at Indo-Pakistani talks in the "breakthrough or breakdown mode", then the talks made some headway. Both sides restated their views, but this was to be expected since they had not been talking seriously to each other since 1994. Mindful of the post-nuclear tests situation, both also tried to appear reasonable and restrained by putting forward a number of proposals termed confidence building measures. But that is where the similarity ended. Pakistani officials, like Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmad who accept that Kashmir is "one of the most complex issues in the world today", displayed little flexibility in addressing the subject during the formal talks. How little Pakistan was willing to offer became apparent in Pakistan Foreign Minister Sartaj Aziz's comment to India Today: "Once ... the right of self-determination of the people is recognised, the modalities can be worked out." This is a position no different from that of his predecessors who have demanded plebiscite. The most profound challenge that India confronts in negotiating with Pakistan is something that cannot be dealt with across a table. It is the issue of Pakistan's self-image as an entity equal to India, a picture that has been distorted by decades of western prompting and aid. Living in this artificial world, Pakistani officials and commentators constantly reiterate the need for Pakistan to maintain "parity" with India. This came through in the Pakistani suggestions for a "Strategic Restraint Regime" in South Asia. The basic theme was on how India, a country which is roughly four times Pakistan's size in terms of geography, economy and population, could be made to maintain "parity" with Pakistan in terms of its defence establishment. Ingenuous suggestions ranged from a "mutual and balanced force reduction" agreement to a freeze in missile development programmes. Part of the problem is geography and part history. Pakistan's security concerns are India-centric, while Delhi has been arguing, as it did in Islamabad as well, that its security concerns "go well beyond South Asia and Pakistan". One consequence of this is Pakistan giving a short-shrift to India's call for a no-first-use (NFU) pact. Pakistani defence analyst Shirin Mazari says that Pakistan with its inferior conventional forces and geography cannot accept such an arrangement. "There is a time-space problem for Pakistan," she says, "who is to decide who fired first in an Indo-Pak scenario?" Rifaat Hussain, professor of international relations at the Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, maintains that India's advocacy of nfu is designed to deny Pakistan the deterrent value of its nuclear weapons. If an Indian proposal, made at the talks, that the two sides engage each other on issues of nuclear doctrine is accepted, it would go a long way in stabilising the nuclear-related dangers. But Delhi has to do its homework on this subject as well. Pakistani officials say they are not sure what India means when it talks of a "minimum nuclear deterrence". They have a point because Delhi has yet to spell out its ideas at home, leave alone abroad. In the meantime, it has been making proposals such as the extension of the agreement on not attacking each other's nuclear installations to cover cities and economic installations. Such an arrangement would dilute India's own deterrent capabilities and are unlikely to appear credible in Islamabad. The Indian approach in dealing with its neighbour goes back to the early 90s. Its core, insistently repeated by Raghunath in Islamabad, is that India wants a "stable, secure and prosperous Pakistan" in its own national interests. It wanted to engage Pakistan in a serious and sustained dialogue to address all outstanding issues but such a process had to be grounded in realities and not "fantasies". Pakistan, Raghunath told his interlocutors in one instance, could hardly expect India to negotiate a settlement on Kashmir that undermined its own established sovereignty there. Next month, the two countries will continue with talks on six other subjects ranging from closer cultural and economic cooperation to implementing agreements on the Siachen and Sir Creek disputes. Thereafter, in February next year, they will take up the second cycle of the present round of talks. Both sides have made it clear that they do not expect quick solutions on Kashmir. But if, as Lodhi points out, there is a Pakistani expectation that there will be "simultaneity of progress and sign of movement on Kashmir", the talks may not go very far. Indian diplomats are faced with an unenviable challenge. Getting Pakistan to the negotiating table is only half the task. Steering Indo-Pakistani relations to a safer or perhaps more manageable trajectory requires considerable acumen, hard work and, considering Pakistan's crumbling edifice, plain old good luck. |
|
|
Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions | Syndication BUSINESS TODAY | INDIA TODAY PLUS | COMPUTERS TODAY © Living Media India Ltd |
 |
 |
The killings were neither related to each other nor to India, but coming when
they did they provided a bleak backdrop to the conditions in Pakistan. On the morning of
October 18, the last day of the Indo-Pakistan foreign secretary-level talks, almost within
earshot of the venue unidentified gunmen shot dead Maulana Abdullah, a religious leader
close to the fundamentalist anti-Shia group Sipah-e-Sahaba. Just a couple of hours
earlier, in Karachi unknown assassins had shot dead Hakim Mohammed Said, the respected
head of the Hamdard Foundation. 
