July 6, 1998

A former subaltern's advice to his erstwhile lord and master

Mani Shankar Aiyar

Having made a humungous mess of India-Pakistan relations in the past few weeks, the prime minister will be leaving for Colombo next month to unscramble the mess. The faint hope that he will succeed arises from his track record as foreign minister in Morarji Desai's government, when he gave a definitive push forward to a dialogue which appeared to have stalled. Now he is required to kickstart a process his own actions have stalled.

In the normal course, the wise thing to do when there is such a big question mark hanging over Pakistan might be to hem and haw in the hope that by the time the two heads of government next meet, the Indians would be more strongly placed. This, alas, is not an option any longer open to us because the inept handling of the diplomatic and strategic fallout of Pokhran II is undermining the Shimla process. The bilateral dialogue has been made hostage to monitoring by others, with the Security Council resolution flagging Kashmir as a question on which the UN will intervene if there is no demonstrable movement forward. The same point has been made in P-5, G-8 and EU communiqu s. Worst of all, President Bill Clinton has indicated China should be brought in to underwrite any "ultimate solution".

All this means it makes eminent sense for Pakistan to be intransigent so that the breakdown of the dialogue can be reported to the UN, thus paving the way for third-party involvement. Post-Pokhran II and Chagai, Pakistan has received the signal that Kashmir is on the verge of being restored to the international agenda. True, India has been cast the crumb that bilateralism might be maintained until Pakistan has worn down the dialogue to meaninglessness. There is, thus, an implicit US-China-Pakistan diplomatic nexus. The task before Atal Bihari Vajpayee is to spring the country from the trap of diplomatic isolation into which he has led us.

If at Colombo Vajpayee spurns dialogue, he will internationalise Kashmir more quickly and comprehensively than he has already done. If his home and defence ministers, not to mention more minor minions, continue opening their mouths wider than their minds, they will only be placing Kashmir even more in hock to the machinations of international power play. The need of the hour is maturity, restraint and statesmanship, qualities not on display these past few weeks.

Is there a way out? The easiest way out would, of course, be to topple the Vajpayee government and go back to where we were before this dreadful interregnum began in March. But that is probably not practical politics, at any rate not before Colombo. The alternative might be to advise the prime minister on the steps to take to get the dialogue restarted without endangering our long-held national interests.

This could best be done by focusing the Colombo summit on the question of how to insulate the Indo-Pakistani dialogue from the inevitable ups and downs of our bilateral relationship. Ever since Shimla a quarter century ago, the dialogue has been a stop-start affair. We begin talking, then something happens which upsets one side or the other or both. And the first victim of any such contretemps is the dialogue. It grinds to a halt. And awaits some major positive development. In the immediate past, one such major positive development was the astounding electoral victory of Nawaz Sharif in February 1997 after he had made good relations with India an election issue.

At and immediately after the last Indo-Pakistani summit in Male in May 1997, the two governments ought to have engaged in talks about talks that settled questions of venue, timing and periodicity in such a manner that no one incident could derail the process of talking. How this can be done is detailed in my book, Pakistan Papers. Instead, I.K. Gujral's government, with Sharif's, mixed up the procedural with the substantive. The question of the forum where Kashmir was to be discussed became intertwined with the question of Kashmir itself. That was quite the wrong way to go about it.

Vajpayee should tell Sharif in Colombo that their joint task is to make the dialogue uninterrupted and uninterruptable. That should be the bottom line. No one can fault us for talking till we find a solution. And no one can doubt that Indo-Pakistani relations cannot be untangled in a day.

Yet, Pakistan will be faulted if it unwarrantedly disrupts the dialogue. It won't: I derive much reassurance from the Pakistani high commissioner, my friend Ashraf Jehangir Qazi. At a seminar in which I was a principal participant, he said Pakistan recognises a solution to the Kashmir problem "might elude us for a very long time to come". That is what I consider political realism.

If, therefore, the dialogue is seen to be uninterrupted and uninterruptable, the international community might yet be dissuaded from intervening too precipitately. That will give us the time not only to repair bridges with Pakistan but also with China, the US, the EU, G-8 and others whom we have gratuitously alienated in recent weeks of highly inept diplomacy.

I followed Vajpayee's instructions when he posted me to Karachi. Twenty years on, he should follow mine.

The author is secretary, AICC. The views expressed here are his own.

Issue Contents | Write to us | Subscriptions

© Living Media India Ltd