Going by The Script

Kanwal Sibal 

(Member, VIF Advisory Board)

Rehman Malik’s provocative statements imply that powerful people in Pakistan such defiance of India on the core issue of terrorism.

All those who have criticized the Indian government’s decision to invite Pakistan’s interior minister Rahman Malik to the country to operationalize the revised liberalised visa regime have missed several pertinent points. If Indian ministers of external affairs, home and commerce can visit Pakistan as part of the mutual efforts to address disagreements or expand trade between the two nations, then, there is no reason why Malik cannot visit the country.

If the argument is that Pakistan has not dealt with the issue of cross-border terrorism effectively and has not brought to justice those responsible for the Mumbai terror attacks on November 26, 2008, the responsibility for doing that lies with the Pakistan government, not exclusively with the home ministry of that country.

If the government of Pakistan can be engaged at higher levels of political responsibility -meetings between the Pakistan president and the prime minister of India and that too despite Pakistan’s unwillingness to address the terrorism issue satisfactorily- then why should there be such squeamishness in engaging with Rahman Malik? Why do we think that cold-shouldering the interior minister would have sent a message that the Pakistan government is otherwise unwilling to hear? Would the Pakistani military and the Inter-Services Intelligence have become more amenable to good neighbourly behaviour if Malik had not been invited to India?

In any case, New Delhi has long broken the link between dialogue and terrorism. The government, no doubt, reminds Pakistan periodically that we expect an expeditious trial of those accused in the Mumbai case, but then we must remember that we are appealing, not laying any pre-condition, to Pakistan. In fact, Pakistan has been given the political space to stall without much cost, on the issue of terrorism.

Malik came to India with the knowledge that he can continue to side track India’s demands with disingenuous arguments. How would being “hard” with Malik on terrorism (by denying him an India visit) have compensated for being “soft” with Pakistan on the same issue?

Even the Pakistan government understands that the bilateral relationship is sensitive, especially when to comes to the issue of terrorism. The Pakistani minister would not come here without internal consultations and adequate briefing. It would be a mistake to believe that his seemingly outlandish statements were made by a loose-tongued individual on the spur of the moment. If not the exact language, the thrust of the remarks can be taken as “approved” internal thinking on terrorism of the Pakistani establishment.

Which is why the visit has been helpful: The minister’s remarks have underlined that Pakistan is not defensive on terrorism. On the contrary it is exploring ways to put India on the back-foot. Pakistan has already created, and India has in effect indirectly conceded equivalence between 26/11 and the Samjhauta Express bombing. Both cases have been mentioned in India-Pakistan joint statements. Malik’s reference in Delhi to this bombing in connection with 2008 attacks was, therefore, predictable.

But Malik went further in obfuscating the enormity of the 2008 attacks by offensively bracketting them with the Babri Masjid issue. This again was not an off-the-cuff statement: remarks made in public and their implications are usually discussed beforehand with advisers. Malik was giving the Babri masjid episode the character of a terrorist attack by a section of the Hindus against Indian Muslims on whose behalf, Malik insidiously implied, he could speak, just as he could on behalf of the Pakistani Muslims killed in the Samjhauta Express attack.

If Malik affirms that Abu Jindal, who was extradited from Saudi Arabia for his involvement in 26/11, is an Indian national and was in touch with India’s intelligence agencies and that India and Pakistani non-state actors in Pakistan in league with a US national staged the Mumbai attacks which, he argues, Indian agencies failed to prevent, it only shows how far Pakistan can go to reject any guilt for the attacks and how much the sense of being a victim of conspiracies is ingrained in the Pakistani mindset.

We have shown our anger by refusing to issue a joint statement and have justifiably called Malik’s statement on Abu Jindal “ridiculous”. But such statements only widen the gap in our respective perspectives on Pakistan’s complicity in terrorist acts against India. This and Malik’s boast of standing up to Indian pressure on Hafiz Saeed prove that we must draw proper conclusions about Pakistan’s readiness to deal with Mumbai honestly. We should shed illusions that after the Pakistani judicial commission comes here and examines the witnesses, Pakistan will move forward rapidly on the Mumbai case, as Rahman Malik dubiously affirms.

We may think that Rahman Malik’s visit has stoked controversy and damaged the ongoing trust-building effort. But Malik would believe that he has used his visit to convey Pakistan’s perspective on Mumbai bluntly and tell the “truth” to the Indian public which he thinks our government is hiding. If through this he was raising his political stock in Pakistan, it would imply that powerful lobbies there support such defiance of India on the core issue of terrorism.

Instead of paying any price for his provocative statements, Malik returned home with a prize: a liberalized visa regime, which is based on India’s hope of greater Pakistani restraint on India-directed terrorism, the reality of which the Pakistani minister was determined to deny.

A Visit that can Wait

Kanwal SibalMember Advisory Board, VIF

The prime minister, Manmohan Singh, while publicly expressing his keenness to visit Pakistan, has also voiced his expectation several times that the outcome would be substantial. It was earlier speculated that by something “substantial” he had agreements on Siachen and Sir Creek in mind. While he still thinks Sir Creek is doable, the hope for an early resolution of the Siachen issue has receded. Although some progress was made in past talks, the issue has become complicated because of Kargil and the increased presence of China in Pakistan occupied Kashmir. Now “substantial” means some credible progress by Pakistan in bringing to justice those responsible for the Mumbai terror attack. From the facts of the prime minister making his wishes known and Pakistan ignoring them even as it continues to press for his visit, one can infer that Singh is more keen on making the visit than Pakistan is in facilitating it by giving him a minimum face-saving reason to do so.

At one level, there is nothing exceptional in heads of State and government visiting one another. This is happening all the time in international diplomacy. So why so much fuss about the opportuneness of prime minister’s visit? In the case of India and Pakistan, though, the decision whether to make a visit or not has an exceptional context.

India has long suffered from terrorism at Pakistan’s hands, without this deterring it in the past to reach out to Pakistan at the prime minister’s level as Atal Bihari Vajpayee did in 1999. Kargil followed. In 2001, Vajpayee invited General Pervez Musharraf to Agra but the initiative failed because Pakistan did not offer a clear-cut commitment on terrorism. In 2004, Vajpayee went to Pakistan for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit and obtained a carefully worded commitment from Musharraf to prevent terrorism born on Pakistan’s soil from being directed against India. A spate of terrorist attacks nevertheless followed, but India did not interrupt the ongoing dialogue in the hope that Pakistan would at some stage abjure such acts in its own interest.

The dialogue collapsed, however, with the enormity of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai orchestrated by the Inter-Services Intelligence-jihadi groups nexus. Again, after a gap, India persuaded itself that the no-dialogue option was not sustainable and that the compulsions of geography — which Pakistan disregards — dictated that India begin talking to Pakistan again.

Four years have elapsed since the Mumbai attacks and two rounds of dialogue have been held, but without any tangible move by Pakistan to try those guilty of the Mumbai attack. Pakistan has used the excuse of complex legal procedures and an independent judiciary to explain the inordinate delay in doing so. 

Meanwhile, to drive home to India the futility of its demand, it allows Hafiz Saeed, the purported mastermind of the Mumbai massacre, to engage freely in his anti-India jihadi tirades. That it is unwilling to be put on the defensive on Mumbai is indicated by its insistence on drawing a parallel between a meticulously planned terrorist action by Pakistani nationals on Indian soil with official Pakistani complicity and an isolated action by local Indian terrorists on Indian soil without any official connivance.

Worse, Pakistan’s foreign minister insults reality and decency by pretending that terrorism is no longer an issue between India and Pakistan and advising us to be realistic and not emotional about the Mumbai trial. Now, if the prime minister of India says that he will go to Pakistan only if Pakistan demonstrates its sincerity by trying those responsible for Mumbai and the foreign minister of Pakistan is “appalled” that we raise the terrorism “mantra of the past”, this “old time” stuff, as she calls it, where is the meeting ground between the ways in which he and the Pakistani leadership see the issue? Our concessions to Pakistan on terrorism, so that the bilateral dialogue can continue, have unfortunately led to these scornful remarks by its foreign minister. If the prime minister were still to go, Pakistan would have diplomatically humiliated India finally on the terrorism issue.

To put the matter of the visit in perspective, our prime minister has been meeting Pakistan’s president and prime minister quite regularly in India or in third countries during international meetings, whether at Ekaterinaberg, Sharm el-Sheikh, Thimphu, New York and, most recently, Tehran. So, contact at the highest political levels is being maintained. Our expectation has been that this willingness to engage with Pakistan would encourage it to bring the pernicious and dangerous issue of terrorism to a political closure bilaterally, as terrorism has the potential to wreck the dialogue process if a Mumbai-like attack is repeated. As it happens, Pakistan has succeeded in blunting India’s case on terrorism even as the United States of America, ironically, has increasingly exposed Pakistan’s duplicity on the issue. If the prime minister were to go to Pakistan under these circumstances, we would have allowed the latter to deny us the only deliverable we seek from it.

Apart from bilateral dimensions of the terrorism issue, there is the international dimension. With religious extremism spreading in the Arab world and organizations with a violent political past acceding to power in hitherto “moderate Islamic states”, not to mention the current street frenzy against the US unleashed by a film, India has to remain vigilant about the impact of such developments on the popular spirit in the region, linked transnationally through religion and ideology with happenings beyond.

As a sign of the maturing of democracy in Pakistan and its polity outgrowing its India obsession, Pakistani commentators had noted that India had not figured as an electoral issue in the last general elections there. If so, why should the prime minister’s visit at this juncture play electorally in favour of the civilian government, especially President Asif Ali Zardari’s, in any significant way? India, in fact, has never been in a position to influence internal developments in Pakistan to suit its interests. We should discard any illusions in this regard.

While Zardari, no doubt, has relatively congenial views on India, they do not get reflected sufficiently in policymaking. Pakistan’s president, highly embattled politically, is hardly in a position to deliver on substantive issues. In any case, the civilian government cannot escape responsibility for the lack of progress on various issues that bedevil our relations, apart from trade where different dynamics are at play. Let us also not forget that it is not the military that created Pakistan but civilian politicians. Civilian politicians were fully complicit in Pakistan’s Afghanistan adventure, the unleashing of terrorism in Kashmir, the country’s clandestine nuclear and missile exchanges with North Korea and the anti-Indian thrust of the China relationship. We should not entrap ourselves into the civilian good guys versus the military bad guys equation.

Elections are due in Pakistan latest by February 2013. Before that, a caretaker government will take over. For practical reasons, the timing of a prime ministerial visit at this juncture would therefore be ill-advised. For those who advocate that he visit Nankana Sahib on November 28 and his village at Gah should remember that Guru Nanak’s jayanti will be celebrated next year too and Gah will not be effaced from the map in the years to come. So, let’s wait for Pakistan to deliver on terrorism first.