India’s Dialogue with Pakistan a Trap

Kanwal Sibal, 

Dean, Centre for International Relations and Diplomacy, VIF

Our response to the killing of five Indian soldiers last week by the Pakistanis inside our Line of Control has again shown our inability to deal effectively with the dual issue of dialoguing with Pakistan and scotching the terrorist threat from it.

The issues are closely inter-linked as using the arm of terrorism against a neighbour is not how a normal state conducts itself. To believe that such a state can be persuaded through political talks to give up a lever that it uses to further its strategic goals is not realistic. It will change its conduct either if the cost of use becomes too high or if it achieves its objectives.

Pakistan will, therefore, not cease supporting terrorism unless we impose costs on it or offer it concessions. If we conclude that we cannot force Pakistan to stop terrorist activity against us and that we have no choice but to talk to it, hoping that it will control the jihadi groups in the country’s own longer-term interest, then we play into Pakistan’s hands, leaving it to decide how and when it will deal with the issue based on its internal and external calculus.

The composite dialogue is therefore a political trap for us, as Pakistan views it as a platform to constantly press us for concessions without needing to make any of its own, particularly as we appear unduly anxious politically to keep the dialogue going.

Our appeals to Pakistan to cease support to terrorism for the dialogue process to succeed lack logic. Pakistan actually believes that because we cannot handle terrorist pressure externally as well as internally because of our divided polity, we cling to the dialogue option and seek accommodation with it.

We are in confusion when we say that we can make progress in settling our differences only in an atmosphere free from violence. Are we implying that we are holding up progress in some areas because Pakistan is not suppressing terrorism as we want?

What “progress” will we offer on Kashmir to satisfy Pakistan? Will we withdraw from Siachen if Pakistan controls jihad against us? Will we accept the Pakistani position on Sir Creek? Will we accept its case on the Wullar Barrage and our hydroelectric projects on the western rivers allowed by the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT)? What progress can we offer on nuclear matters?

Contradictions

In reality, if no progress is being made on our differences it is because Pakistan is fixated on obtaining concessions from India rather than making any of its own. On Siachen, they want us to basically accept that we are occupying territory that is rightfully theirs and vacate it. Apart from lack of strategic equivalence in the scope of the withdrawals, the reality is that even what Pakistan is currently holding is strictly illegal because we consider the whole of the erstwhile state as legally ours. Pakistan should in the first instance end its cartographic aggression by showing the cease-fire line correctly as ending at NJ9842 and not extended to the Karakoram Pass. Pakistan should also be required to remove the presence of China as an intruding third party in POK, consistent with its claim that J&K is “disputed” territory.

On Sir Creek, Pakistan should accept the median line as the border in accordance with international law rather than insisting on a one-sided solution. On water related issues, it should cease to further vitiate the atmosphere by accusing India of diverting water in violation of the IWT which is in fact is exceptionally generous to it. In the nuclear field, apart from increasing its holdings at a break-neck pace, it is introducing tactical nuclear weapons in the sub-continent and dangerously lowering the threshold of their use.

On trade, Pakistan has yet not moved to grant India MFN status stalled since December last year, even though it is obliged to grant it under international trading rules. If it does so eventually, it will be because of its economic woes rather than as a goodwill political gesture. On our side, were Pakistan to cease violent activity against us, an area in which we could contribute to “progress” would be people to people contacts.

Straitjacket

It is time that we released ourselves from the diplomatic straitjacket of the composite dialogue. On all the agenda items, barring terrorism, Pakistan seeks concessions from India. We are exposing ourselves to blame for being rigid if no progress is made, with some of our own commentators joining Pakistanis in faulting us for not culling the so-called low hanging fruit such as Siachen and Sir Creek. On terrorism and trial of those responsible for the Mumbai attacks, our demands have become ritualistic through fruitless repetition and Pakistan ignores them. Worse, we have allowed

Pakistan to put us on the defensive on the issue by tagging the Samjhauta Express incident to the issue of terrorism.

Need

We had a confused response to the recent border incident because of concern that holding the Pakistan army directly responsible would have jeopardized the resumption of the composite dialogue and the meeting of our Prime Minister with his Pakistani counterpart in New York next month. We have lost our margin of manoeuvre by investing too heavily in the policy of holding a broad-based dialogue with Pakistan despite its truck with terrorism. The Pakistani premier is pressing for the composite dialogue as it serves Pakistan’s interests well, the onus of making progress having been heaped on India’s shoulders. We should reverse the burden and ask Pakistan to deliver concretely on terrorism before we resume a process that has produced virtually nothing for years.

Prime Minister Sharif should put his money where his mouth is to inspire confidence.

PM Visiting PAK Now A Bad Idea

Kanwal Sibal
Member Advisory Board, VIF

As the bigger country, India is often exhorted to be generous with Pakistan. Those advocating a sustained dialogue with Pakistan, irrespective of its conduct towards us, have such thinking, an off-shoot of which are current urgings to the Prime Minister to go to Pakistan.

Diplomacy, however, is not transacted with the currency of generosity. It is taken for granted that countries act principally in self-interest. No country will easily accept that another has been gratuitously “generous” to it; it would look for hidden motives. A country obtaining more than what it expects from another is likely to think that it succeeded because of diplomatic skills or well-applied pressure. Besides, how does one measure “generosity” and who makes the evaluation? Reciprocity, therefore, is the acceptable currency of diplomacy.

Inequity

Those asking India to be “generous” expect it to make unilateral gestures of kindness towards Pakistan, or giving it more than it gives in return. Such an accommodative approach has, in fact, been tried over the years, but without tangible results. Little political, intellectual and practical basis is therefore left for advocating such an approach today.

In 1947/48 Pakistan committed aggression against us in J&K, but instead of undoing it, we appealed to the UN, which has left Pakistan in possession of vital strategic areas in the north which gives it crucial continguity with China and denies us one with Afghanistan. In 1965 Pakistan was not punished for its second bid to wrest Kashmir as it got back the strategic Haji Pir pass from us at Tashkent. Despite Pakistan’s military defeat in 1971, we did not, in a show of statesmanship, insist on a final settlement of the Kashmir issue at Simla, besides releasing the 93,000 Pakistani POWs in our custody without any political quid pro quo. In 1999, despite a decade of Pakistani terrorist onslaught on Kashmir, Shri Vajpayee journeyed to Pakistan in friendship, but the response was Kargil, to which India reacted purely defensively.

In 2001 the Pakistani terrorists attacked our parliament. The enormity of the provocation compelled us to threaten a military strike, but we stayed our hand and eventually chose a diplomatic response by inviting General Musharraf to Agra. We discuss Kashmir with Pakistan on an unequal basis with Pakistan insisting on its territorial claims on at least the valley and we no longer asserting our claim on the whole of J&K. We have not reacted to Pakistan’s parliamentary resolution in April this year that the Kashmir issue should be resolved on the basis of UN resolutions. We tolerate Pakistani leaders meeting Kashmiri separatists on Indian soil.

We have overlooked Pakistan’s arbitrary extension of the ceasefire line in J&K beyond NJ9842 eastwards to the Karakoram Pass. On Siachen we are willing to consider demilitarization if Pakistan were to agree to delineate and demarcate the actual ground position line there, giving the latter an unwarranted locus standii in our own territory. We are diplomatically quiet on China’s involvement in development projects in POK, including the Neelum river project, even though Pakistan has raised its contestation of the Kishenganga project by the claim that it violates the Indus Waters Treaty(IWT), which we have scrupulously adhered to despite all the Pakistani provocations. We have tolerated Pakistan’s obstruction of the Wullar barrage project for years.

While Pakistan has attacked the India-US nuclear deal for undermining its interests, we have not targetted Pakistan’s nuclear cooperation with China. We have not retaliated against Pakistan’s attacks on our Embassy and other interests in Afghanistan. We have not made an issue of US arms supplies to Pakistan. On the economic front we have lived with Pakistani denial of MFN treatment to us. We have not made Pakistan pay the price for its mischief in Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka against our interests.

Terror

Our self-restraint on the issue of Pakistan’s export of terrorism to India since the mid-1980s has been exceptional. Before the Pakistani jihadi elements with official backing perpetrated the Mumbai terrorist carnage, we comforted Pakistan politically by accepting its line that it too was a victim of terrorism like us. We agreed to set up a joint anti-terrorism task force as if genuine cooperation was possible. We have now accepted Pakistan’s linkage of the Samjhauta Express to the Mumbai attack in terms of our answerability, even when the two cases cannot be compared. We are upset by Hafiz Saeed’s jihadist rantings against India, but have not allowed this to affect our dialogue.

Visit

Pakistan is violating the cease fire agreement even today, with training camps in place in POK and incidents of infiltration continuing, but we are overlooking this. While the US has begun targetting Pakistan on its duplicitous conduct on terrorism, we are not only not exploiting this to our advantage, we are actually releasing pressure on Pakistan by engaging it across the board.

By not breaking diplomatic relations despite Kargil and Mumbai attacks etc, India has kept its lines of communication open with Pakistan. We are welcoming the highest Pakistani political leaders to India and our Prime Minister is meeting the top Pakistani leaders bilaterally on the margins of international conferences as part of our bilateral engagement. If, it is felt, that the objectives of the dialogue can be durably attained only if the Indian Prime Minister visits Pakistan, there should also be recognition that the risks of durably derailing it must be removed beforehand. A visit to Pakistan by Prime Minister now will be a huge political mistake on our part as it will signal that the outstanding issue of terrorism and trial of those responsible for the Mumbai massacre has been closed.

Bitten already many times, we should be very shy.

Granting PAK The Upper Hand

Kanwal Sibal
Member Advisory Board, VIF 

Another round of the India-Pakistan dialogue has been completed with External Affairs Minister Krishna’s visit to Islamabad on September 8. The agreement on relaxing the visa regime and holding the meeting of the Pakistan-India Joint Commission after a gap of 5 years seems consistent with our policy of making progress step-by-step in normalising our relations with Pakistan.

Dialogue

Pressing Pakistan again at Islamabad to expeditiously bring to justice those responsible for the Mumbai massacre apparently conveys that we are not relenting on this key demand for determining the pace at which our relations will move forward.

In reality, rather than this implying that India has the upper hand in dealing with Pakistan, it is actually the reverse. Pakistan has put us on the defensive, certainly vis a vis its own public opinion, by claiming that it has taken several steps to reach out to India, that it has moved away from its traditional positions in significant ways, but that it is India that is not reciprocating. This explains Pakistani Foreign Minister’s spurious talk about “serious signals”, “breaking away from many positions we have held” and “big leaps forward” and the “need to change the mindset”. The sub-text of such pronouncements is that India has entrenched attitudes.

Such claims by Pakistan are without substance. With its parliamentary resolution in April this year, Pakistan has retreated to its old mantra that the Kashmir issue should be resolved on the basis of UN resolutions. Pakistan wants us to withdraw from Siachen, it will not agree to a rational compromise on Sir Creek and it will not end its decades old opposition to the Wullar Barrage. It covers up its uwillingness to act against the anti-India jihadi groups on its territory by the phony argument that it is itself a victim of terrorism. It will not put curbs on Hafiz Saeed as sufficient evidence to arraign him in a law court is supposedly lacking. Its record of legal inaction against the perpetrators of the Mumbai carnage is there to see.

The irony is that barring India’s demands on terrorism, the agenda of normalisation rests on India satisfying Pakistan’s demands. Pakistan wants us to demonstrate our commitment to peace by conceding what it wants, failing which the “naysayers” in Pakistan will presumably continue to consider India a threat. We should ask Pakistan to act on the basis of the glib statement by Foreign Minister Khar at Islamabad that “whatever has happened today is the past”. Pakistan should, accordingly, cease making untenable territorial claims on J&K and stop calling for- in the face of India’s known position- associating the “Kashmiri people” with the Indo-Pakistan dialogue on Kashmir. One would hope that the next time she or the Pakistani Foreign Secretary comes to Delhi she will, abiding by her own sane advice, shed past habits of confabulating provocatively with Hurriyet leaders in Delhi.

The joint statement says, somewhat cryptically, that the two sides reaffirmed the importance of abiding by the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT). Pakistan would have wanted this inclusion, but India seems to have worked on the language to deflect any finger-pointing in its direction. Pakistan has created an impression amongst its public that India is depriving it of its due share of water, making the issue another focal point of hostility towards India. It is determined to prevent India from constructing run of the river projects on the Jhelum provided for by the IWT by seeking international arbitration on the Kishenganga project. Again, it is Pakistan that is objecting to what India is legally doing, not India raising contentious issues with Pakistan about its projects on the rivers allocated to it.

Terrorism

India is legitimately asking Pakistan to curb terrorism from its soil directed at India. It is right in asking Pakistan to prove the anti-terrorist credentials it claims for itself by not endlessly delaying the trial of those responsible for the Mumbai attack. It is truly astonishing that the pert Pakistani Foreign Minister should be “appalled” when told terrorism continues to be an issue, that this is “old time” stuff, that “terrorism was a mantra of the past”, not of the future and that India should view the Mumbai attack trial “realistically” and “not emotionally”. Equally extraordinarily, she spoke about terrorism as a dated issue on the day the US declared the Haqqani group sheltering in Pakistan and linked to the ISI as a terrorist outfit.

PM Visit

The disconnect at the political level in Pakistan between the reality of the country’s terrorist affiliation and any honest recognition of it is staggering. She, of course, failed to mention the word terrorism in her joint press conference with Minister Krishna, laying bare the scant regard Pakistan pays to our claim that we raise the issue at “every conceivable opportunity”.

Minister Khar’s position on terrorism hardly opens the door for PM’s visit to Pakistan, as he wants Pakistan to make credible progress on trying those guilty of Mumbai, besides some substantive results such as an agreement on Sir Creek. While the trade opening has occurred because of Pakistan’s dire economic situation and the visa regime relaxation benefits Pakistan much more, progress in both areas should be welcomed. Time is not, however, ripe for PM’s visit, as Pakistan wants to close the terrorism and Mumbai chapter without real delivery. Minister Khar’s egregious statements make this abundantly clear. Even with regard to PM’s visit, by pressing for it Pakistan has put us on the defensive. We are now squirming to explain why, despite his keenness to visit Pakistan; he cannot do so for the moment. We are both laying conditions for the visit and denying any are being laid.