Pax Indica: India and the World of the Twenty-first Century (12 page)

Ejaz Haider, whose riposte to Aatish Taseer had sparked my initial piece, was less accommodating of my core argument, seeing it as an exercise in ‘considered perception-formation and reinforcement’. By this he seemed to imply that my article was part of a devious Indian conspiracy to affect perceptions of his country negatively; in fact he titled his column ‘It’s Not Just Mr. Tharoor!’ My fellow conspirators (on the basis of recent articles we had each written) apparently included young Taseer, the Mumbai-born American strategist Ashley Tellis and the Indian analyst Nitin Pai, who has suggested (as I have done separately)
that the United States should end its overgenerous aid to Pakistan’s military–jihadi complex. Ejaz Haider then proceeds to put words in our collective mouths to the tune that we seek ‘India’s supremacy in the region’ and the resolution of disputes only ‘on India’s terms’. None of us has made so fatuous a suggestion, but the exaggeration was, alas, necessary to demolish our case.

Then Ejaz Haider (who, it must be said, is one of Pakistan’s finest columnists, and whom I have enjoyed reading for years) got on to firmer ground. He admitted that there is a military–civilian divide in Pakistan, but argued that most of his country’s conflicts with India have originated under, or at the instigation of, civilian politicians, not military rulers. In any case, this is ‘Pakistan’s internal matter’ and acknowledging it should not imply any neglect of national security or abdication of Pakistani self-interest. And the clincher: ‘we don’t need advice from across the border’ (especially, he adds gratuitously, from pundits who ‘crawled on their bellies’ during the Emergency, a charge from which all those he was responding to are in fact exempt).

Ejaz Haider was joined in the pages of Pakistan’s
Express Tribune
by Feisal Naqvi, who found my arguments ‘cretinous in the extreme’ and ‘gratuitously smug about India’s lack of strategic ambitions’. Invective aside, Naqvi’s argument was that while Pakistanis were obsessed with India, ‘the opposite of India-obsessed is not India-submissive’ (which, again putting words into my mouth, I allegedly want them to be). Mr Naqvi also finds, somewhere between the lines of my column, something I never wrote—a rejection of the very legitimacy of Pakistan’s existence. Pakistani liberals, he asserts, are happy being Pakistani, value their military and have no desire to dismantle it. My article instead ‘delegitimizes’ them in the eyes of the Pakistani establishment. (Sigh.)

What was particularly interesting about these well-written responses is that they relied principally on refuting arguments I haven’t made. I am totally reconciled to Pakistan’s existence as an independent state, and have no desire to reintegrate it into a pre-Partition ‘Akhand Bharat’—indeed, the demographic, social and political evolution of Pakistan since 1947 makes it quite unsuitable for any such reabsorption. I do understand that Pakistan has to survive in a tough neighbourhood and it needs a
capable military. And I do not expect any Pakistani government, military or civilian, to act in anything but Pakistan’s own best interest.

But—and alas, there is a but—I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be the country whose armed forces consume the largest percentage of national income of any military in the world. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to adopt a policy of seeking ‘strategic depth’ by destabilizing its neighbours. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to try to wrest Kashmir from India by fair means or foul. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be the cradle and crucible of militant Islamist terrorism. I don’t believe it is in Pakistan’s best interest to be a country where no elected civilian government has ever served a full term. And I do believe that any Pakistani liberal worth the name (take a bow, Marvi Sirmed) should have no difficulty in agreeing with any of these propositions.

Even if they come from an Indian. Ay, there’s the rub …

The same problem surfaced, in different guise, a few weeks later, when New Delhi played host to a visiting delegation of Pakistani parliamentarians, brought to India by an enterprising Islamabad NGO called PILDAT (Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency). Few things in international affairs are more agreeable, all round, than the non-official dialogues diplomats refer to as ‘Track-II’. But for all its non-official character, this was a high-powered delegation, including a vice-chairman of the Pakistani Senate, a deputy speaker, former ministers and a serving information secretary of the ruling party. On India’s side of the parliamentary border, the meeting was co-chaired, in a commendably bipartisan spirit, by a former Congress party minister, Mani Shankar Aiyar, and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s last foreign minister, Yashwant Sinha. I was, without quite intending to be it, the only dissident.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all in favour of Indo-Pak peace and bonhomie. I’ve seen a lot of it in my decades abroad—many is the time a Pakistani cab driver in New York has attempted to decline my money for the fare, saying that I was a brother (this of course always won him a bigger tip, but the spirit was genuine). Indians and Pakistanis overseas are almost always the best of friends, since being in foreign lands enhances their consciousness of what they have in common, which vastly exceeds
what divides them. I would love to see a time when Pakistanis and Indians can cross each other’s borders with the insouciance of Americans and Canadians, work in each other’s countries, trade freely with each other and contribute equally to each other’s films, music, clothing and creative lives, just as they did before 1947. I would be happy if that time came sooner rather than later. But, sadly, I am only too aware that it’s not now.

The problem with Indo-Pak Track-II dialogues of the kind I witnessed in the capital is that they are essentially built on denial. They focus on making the visitors feel welcome, emphasize the feel-good aspects of their presence in our midst, celebrate the many things we have in common and try to brush the real problems under a carpet (not a Kashmiri carpet, since that might provoke disagreeable thoughts). In other words, they are a self-fulfilling exercise in self-vindication. Their success depends on denying the very disagreements that makes such dialogues necessary in the first place.

The event began with a somewhat odd opening panel discussion, where members of the audience rounded on the moderator, News X’s Jehangir Pocha, for moderately raising some real questions, when his job had apparently been intended to be to orchestrate a paean of pious homilies to peace and brotherhood. So when I took the floor late in the next morning’s session, I had been fairly warned. But after listening to several bromides from parliamentarians of both nationalities, I felt a dose of candour was necessary. So I pointed out that there were some genuine obstacles to be overcome if the peace and love we were all affirming was in fact to take root, rather than briefly blossom in the illusory sunshine of Track II. And those obstacles all lay in Pakistan.

First, India has long been in favour of placing the Kashmir dispute on the back burner and promoting trade, travel and the rest; it is Pakistan that has taken the view that there cannot be normal relations with India until Kashmir is settled, on terms acceptable to Islamabad. So inasmuch as there is hostility that such dialogues attempt to overcome, the hostility starts with Pakistan, which wants a change in the territorial status quo, and not with India, which is perfectly content to leave things as they are. Unless the Pakistani MPs present were willing to advocate a policy of across-the-board engagement with India despite the lack of a solution to the Kashmir dispute, our words would be just so much hot air.

One example of this asymmetry is that India had given Pakistan most favoured nation (MFN) trading status as far back as 1995, and Pakistan has still not reciprocated. It remains the only example on the entire planet of a one-sided MFN; no other country has ever refused to reciprocate an offer of MFN trading status from a neighbour. (In 2011, Pakistan announced it would finally extend MFN status to India, but the enabling legislation and the necessary regulations were yet to be written twelve months after the announcement.) India continues to show its good faith time after time, persisting in the peace talks even after the Kabul embassy bombing, offering aid after natural disasters in Pakistan (in one egregious instance, aid of $25 million offered by India in the wake of severe floods in Pakistan was initially rejected by Islamabad, which finally, grudgingly said it would be glad to have the money if given through the United Nations rather than directly). In the summer of 2009, when the country was still in a boil over the prime minister’s visit to Sharm el Sheikh, the Indian team played the Pakistani team at a charity cricket match in England, with the proceeds going to the relief of displaced people from Swat in Pakistan—every penny being sent to the very country from which terrorists had attacked India just a few months previously. So the goodwill and the heart of India should not and cannot be doubted. It is unfortunately not being matched from the other side. There is no equivalent example that Pakistan can cite.

Then the Pakistani side’s tendency to equate the two countries’ experience of terrorism—‘We are bigger victims of terrorism than you are,’ one visitor said; ‘If you can cite Mumbai, we can point at Samjhauta,’ added another—omitted the basic difference that no one from India has crossed the border to inflict mayhem on Pakistan. Indians can and should sympathize with Pakistani victims of terrorism, but their tragedy is home-grown, an evil force turning on its creator; whereas Indians have died because killers from Pakistan, trained, equipped and directed by Pakistanis, have travelled to our country to kill, maim and destroy. There is no moral equivalence, and to pretend there is builds the dialogue on a platform of falsehood.

Finally, friendship has to be built on a shared perception of the danger—of a sincere acceptance by the Pakistani military establishment that those who attacked the Taj in Mumbai are just as much their enemies
as those bombing the Marriott in Islamabad. This would require more than fuzzy words from parliamentarians—it needs genuine cooperation from Pakistan, including useful information-sharing and real action to arrest, prosecute and punish the perpetrators. The Samjhauta plotters are in jail in India, while Hafiz Saeed is still at large in Pakistan, preaching hatred.

If Islamabad genuinely shared the Manmohan Singh vision that the highest strategic interest of both countries lies in development and the eradication of poverty rather than in military one-upmanship, we could cooperate across the board, most obviously in trade—which would be of immense benefit to both countries, including certainly to a Pakistan that currently pays a premium for Indian goods imported via Dubai, and which also needs to gain export access to the gigantic Indian market for everything from its surplus cement to sporting goods. (It is hard to remember, today, that six decades ago the majority of Pakistan’s trade was with India.) Normal trade relations could also be a precursor to the easing of geopolitical tensions. Until then, Track-II initiatives will feel good, but will remain on the wrong track.

What, then, is the way forward for India? It is clear that we want peace more than Pakistan does, because we have more at stake when peace is violated. To those who suggest that we should simply ignore our dysfunctional neighbours, accept the occasional terrorist blast (and prevent the ones we can), tell ourselves there is nothing we need from Pakistan and try to get on with our development free of the incubus of that benighted land, there is only one answer: we cannot grow and prosper without peace, and that is the one thing Pakistan can give us that we cannot do without. We cannot choose to be uninterested in Pakistan, because Pakistan is dangerously interested in us. By denying us the peace we crave, Pakistan can undermine our vital national interests, above all that of our own development. Investors shun war zones; traders are wary of markets that might explode at any time; tourists do not travel to hotels that might be commandeered by crazed terrorists. These are all serious hazards for a country seeking to grow and flourish in a globalizing world economy. Even
if Pakistan cannot do us much good, it can do us immense harm, and we must recognize this in formulating our policy approaches to it. Foreign policy cannot be built on a sense of betrayal any more than it can be on illusions of love. Pragmatism dictates that we work for peace with Pakistan precisely so that we can serve our own people’s needs better.

But we must do this without illusions, without deceiving ourselves about the existence of genuine partners for peace across the border, and without being taken in by the insincere press releases of the civilian rulers who are occasionally allowed to don the masks of power in Pakistan. We must accept that the very nature of the Pakistani state condemns us to facing an implacable enemy in the self-perpetuating military elite next door, for lasting peace would leave them without a raison d’être for their power and their privileges. We must not be deluded into making concessions, whether on Kashmir or any other issue, in the naive expectation that these would end the hostility of the ISI and its cohorts. We must understand that Pakistan’s fragile sense of self-worth rests on its claim to be superior to India, stronger and more valiant than India, richer and more capable than India. This is why the killers of 26/11 struck the places they did, because their objective was not only to kill and destroy, but also to pull down India’s growth, tarnish its success story and darken its lustre in the world. The more we grow and flourish in the world, the more difficult we make it for the Pakistani military to sustain its myth of superiority or even parity. There are malignant forces in Islamabad who see their future resting upon India’s failure. These are not motives we can easily overcome.