The nationwide outrage at the beheading of Lance Naik
Hemraj and the mutilation of the body of Lance Naik Sudhakar Singh is
symptomatic of a collective and deep sense of angst across the country. The
brutal streets of the national capital region (NCR) and the treacherous heights
of the LoC are increasingly becoming a metaphor for a State that is unable
to provide security to its citizens. Security, in its fundamental sense, is
freedom from fear. Today, large sections of both urban and rural India are
terrified at the prospect of what the future may unfold. And because emotions
are running high, it is important for the prime minister to build a national
consensus on critical issues before another incident overwhelms us all. What is
needed, above all, is clarity of mind and sobriety of action based on
distilling the lessons of our contemporary experience and past history. Nowhere
is this clearer than in our Pakistan policy, steeped today in national
confusion.
Consider this. At the height of
the Kargil war, on June 3, 1999, the Pakistan International Airlines flight
from Delhi to Lahore and then to Islamabad carried two unusual emissaries of
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. On board were joint secretary of the
Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran division of the ministry of external affairs,
Vivek Katju, and chairman of the Observer Research Foundation, Rishi Kumar
Mishra. Katju, a brilliant Kashmiri Pandit diplomat and a known hardliner on
Pakistan, was later blamed by Pervez Musharraf for sabotaging the Agra Summit
of 2001. Mishra — a fountainhead of Brahmanical wisdom, a confidante of
Vajpayee and his ace principal secretary, Brajesh Mishra, as well as many
former PMs — had been part of the back-channel established by Vajpayee and
Nawaz Sharif at the Lahore Summit; his Pakistani counterpart was the
experienced but rather fragile former Pakistani foreign secretary Niaz Niak.
This unusual Mishra-Katju couple delivered to a shocked
Nawaz Sharif, a tape intercepted by the Research and Analysis Wing of a
conversation between General Musharraf and his chief-of-staff, Lt-Gen Aziz
Khan: incontrovertible evidence of the Pakistani army’s involvement in Kargil.
Subsequently, Mishra remained in continuous dialogue with Naik to explore ways
to find an amicable resolution to the war through bilateral means, and Katju
would get a sense of the conversation as he escorted Naik from Delhi airport,
on at least one occasion, to the Imperial Hotel. Kargil would have been settled
bilaterally, as it almost was (the Mishra-Naik plan had Nawaz Sharif stopping
briefly in New Delhi on his return from China towards the end of June, meeting
Vajpayee and issuing a joint communiqué leading to a Pakistani withdrawal) if
Nawaz Sharif had shown greater sagacity and foresight. Instead, Sharif had to
travel to Washington on July 4, to be arm-twisted by US President Bill Clinton
to declare a unilateral withdrawal of Pakistani forces from the LoC as
well as call for a ceasefire and a restoration of the Lahore Summit peace
process — precisely the terms that Mishra had communicated to Naik in a
non-paper partially drafted by Vajpayee himself.
This episode, buried in the saga
of lost opportunities, is important, however, for at least one reason. It
illustrates how even at a moment of Pakistan’s greatest perfidy, there was a
range of options, instruments, out-of-the box thinking and creativity that were
brought into play by the Indian political leadership. Not since the Bangladesh
war had the Indian military force, intelligence and diplomacy worked in such
flawless synergy in the pursuit of a clear objective. Contrast this with today
and the manner in which television, rather than South Block, seems to be
setting the national agenda on Pakistan and tapping the palpable anger on the
streets of India. Foreign policy, it is said, is too important to be left to
diplomats. And India’s Pakistan policy is far too important to be left to TV
anchors, with their wars over TRPs and their penchant to appeal, often,
to the lowest common denominator of public opinion. Indeed strident debates in
the Indian media — frightening in their Manichaean simplicity — reflect a total
lack of appreciation of the intricacies of the Gordian knot of bilateral
relations.
The reality is, as our TV anchors
must understand and appreciate, that Pakistan is not as much a foreign policy
issue as it is part of a larger sub-continental tragedy of unsettled communal
relations. That’s why the conflict between India and Pakistan may be easy to
describe in terms of events and episodes, but it is painfully difficult to
understand. When a street mechanic outside Agra describes a nearby Muslim
colony as ‘chhota’ Pakistan, you know that this relationship is about more than
just borders and border skirmishes. In reality, the India-Pakistan
relationship is — and has been — about everything that matters: history,
memory, prejudice, territory, identity, religion, sovereignty, ideology,
insecurity, trust, betrayal and much more, in a very desi way.
The tragedy is that while Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh understands Pakistan perhaps better than most scholars
in the country, he has been unable to sell his goal of a grand reconciliation
with Pakistan to a nation simmering with anger over multiple issues. And
Pakistan, unfortunately, destroys its own case by instigating outrageous acts
that seem to be almost designed to alienate Indian public opinion.
Today, there is no Indian
strategic policy towards our most troublesome neighbour, only tactics. No
long-term goals, only endless ‘debates’ over short-term gains and losses. No
national consensus over Pakistan, only national confusion. We, as a nation, are
not even clear about the kind of Pakistan that we want in the future: a stable
and prosperous country; or a fragile and failing State; or disintegrated
multiple Pakistans. While it may not be possible, as Singh stated, to have
“business as usual” with Pakistan, can we at least have a long-term ‘business’
plan?
With the Americans marching out
of Afghanistan next year, it is important to evoke the Pakistani academic
Pervez Hoodbhoy’s wise words: “Pakistan’s State is already fractured by
multiple violent ethnic and religious conflicts. Disintegration into molecular
civil war with fiefdoms and warlords is a terrible possibility. India will
find, too late, that it has created a South Asian nuclear Somalia for a
neighbour.”
(Source: Hindustan Times)
