A gamble, a challenge

Bhabani Sen Gupta

It is a typical Vajpayesque gamble, it is also his biggest challenge. The prime minister may look like an old man in a hurry. A more correct interpretation of his second big initiative for peace between India and Pakistan is that in his cool deliberations, he has determined that it is now or never in his career at the summit of power in India.

The decision announced on May 23 to invite the CEO of Pakistan to Delhi for a Composite Dialogue took everyone by surprise. Though it was taken by the three top men of the NDA coalition, the two others being L K Advani, and Mr Jaswant Singh, clearly the initiative came from the prime minister himself and he had the support of the foreign minister who also happened to be defence minister. The termination of the unilateral ceasefire was an admission that it had produced little benefit in seven months. The prime minister was taking relations with Pakistan and the insurgency in Kashmir back to where they should be-his own hands and the hands of the Foreign Office.

There were at least five good reasons for the prime minister's decision. First, the two Powers that matter most at the current phase of world affairs - the United States and China - both ceased to join India and Pakistan with a hyphen and treat them merely as South Asian powers. Both now recognised India as a power that mattered for at least three other regions - Central Asia, South-East Asia and East Asia - and acquired intimations of a global power. For India to be able to play a global role, it is essential that it has peaceful, cooperative relations with its immediate neighbours. Even a working relationship with Pakistan enhances India's role as a global player.

The second reason is the evident failure of the unilateral ceasefire to justify itself. Not only terrorist militancy did not respond positively, the different militant outfits enjoyed a much larger space to project themselves as an indispensable legitimate party to negotiations relating to Kashmir. Neither the Hurriyat, nor the party of Shabir Shah actually rallied to the Indian side. The ceasefire had become an expensive diplomatic and security luxury.

The third and fourth factors that weighed heavily with the prime minister followed from the second. The unproductive unilateral ceasefire made transparent, more than ever before, Pakistan's ability to influence terrorism in Kashmir, apart from legitimising its claim to be an equal party with India in a possible solution of the Kashmir issue. It also sharply reduced the role of Mr KC Pant as the principal interlocutor between the Indian people and estranged groups in the Valley. The fifth factor that must have entered the process of Mr Vajpayee's thinking is the short time left for him to do one thing he has always wanted to do: to improve relations with Pakistan. He used his brief innings as the Janata party's foreign minister in 1978 to plant on the imagination of Pakistanis his image as a peacemaker. Within less than a year of the South Asian nuclear explosions, he took his famous bus ride to Lahore in February 1999, signed the Lahore Declaration with prime minister Nawaz Sharif, and visited the Minar-e-Pakistan shrugging off sharply raised eyebrows among his cabinet and party colleagues.

That bold diplomatic initiative. indeed the boldest in 50-odd years of Indo-Pak relations, did not succeed because it suffered from a fatal flaw. The prime minister of India did not know enough of the dynamics of Pakistan's narrow, often petrified, internal politics. More precisely, he had no adequate idea of Nawaz Sharif's ability to sell the Lahore Declaration to the Pakistan Army, which is the only effective political party in that country. Mr Vajpayee's decision to keep General Musharraf in the cold in the wake of his usurpation of power, and the Kargil war was an inevitable reaction. However, the "hard line" on Musharraf did not close Mr Vajpayee's mind about peace with Pakistan. He declared the unilateral ceasefire on November 19, 2000, and extended it twice to cover a period of seven months.

Now, in the summer of 2001, as Mr Vajpayee looks at the unfolding political scene in India, he can hardly be certain of another term as prime minister after the next national election which will probably come in 2003. General Musharraf's rule will also terminate by that time if he abides by the judgment of the Pakistan Supreme Court. Musharraf can extend his rule with the backing of the Army top brass. Mr Vajpayee cannot without a mandate from the Indian people. I am not suggesting that the prime minister's surprise second initiative for a summit with Pakistan is inspired by a need to exalt his image among the Indian people with a view to getting back to power.

I see it as Mr Vajpayee's attempt to take another chance to accomplish a task he had unilaterally set for himself as far back as 1978. If he succeeds with General Musharraf where he failed with Nawaz Sharif, Atal Behari Vajpayee will go down in history as the master peace-builder in one of the most conflictual regions of the world. And Vajpayee, politician, poet and often a maverick in diplomacy, has intimations of immortality. I don't share the cynicism that seems to have struck a majority of analysts and commentators in India about the prime minister's second diplomatic gamble.

Between October 1999 when General Musharraf seized power and early this year, I have been to Pakistan four times. I found unmistakable signs of the vast majority of the people of Pakistan genuinely desiring peace and co-operation with India. This is true of the political parties too because they realise that an essential condition for durable democracy in Pakistan is a working relationship with India. The Army, on the other hand, knows that as long as there is a perceived threat to Pakistan from India, it can always justify taking over the government. The prime minister's invitation letter to General Musharraf was profoundly phrased. It was based on three assumptions, each, in my view, correct in the context of Pakistani politics and that country's current position in the world.

The first assumption is that General Musharraf will not attach any conditions to his acceptance of the invitation, which may reach the PMO even before these lines are in print. The CEO in Pakistan is anxious to keep to Pakistan out of the US category of terrorist states, or even "states of concern." Several times has he reiterated his readiness to meet with the Indian prime minister "at any time, in any country" without preconditions imposed by either side.

He has not denounced the Lahore Declaration."On the contrary, he claims to be committed to the Lahore process. General Musharraf will not ask that the summit give high priority to Kashmir as the "core issue." In his response, he will mention Kashmir and ask that it be placed high on the agenda. He will mention the need to involve the people of Kashmir in a settlement of the future of the state. That, however, is also the position of India. The prime minister must acquire this time a fully objective picture of the restraints under which General Musharraf has to function.

The militant mujaheedin groups located both in Pakistan and Kashmir have opposed the summit, which, however, has been welcomed by the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Pakistan albeit without much warmth. The Prime Minister must be armed this time with an accurate and adequate brief about the political constituency of General Musharraf. He is described by people close to him as a liberal and modernising man. That puts him to the wavelength of the majority of the emergent middle classes in Pakistan including the business community. However, he has a love-hate relationship with the fundamentalist groups as well as the extremist factions like the Laskar-i-Tayyaba and the Jaish-i-Mohammad. It is also widely believed that there is a lot of fundamentalist influence among the middle ranks of officers in the Army. Indians may not take the General's public rhetoric too seriously; much of these will be meant for domestic consumption. He cannot alienate the fundamentalists in Pakistan or the extremists in Kashmir. As much as the prime minister has to keep his own constituency in humour as long as and as far as he can. Navigating the summit, then, will not be easy. It will call for patience and restraint from both sides.

Building the "high road to peace and prosperity in the subcontinent" will be as difficult as it has proved in the Middle East between Israel and the Palestinians. The summit which will take place in July, with the monsoon cooling tempers in Pakistan as well as India, and the prime minister cured of his knee problem, will be a success if it can set in motion a peace process between the two countries which takes into objective account both the plus and minus problems of setting up a "composite dialogue" The terrorists and fundamentalists in Pakistan and their counterparts in Kashmir cannot be wished away.

The summit will be a success if it can create a comprehensive engagement between the two capitals. General Musharraf will do well to go back to the five alternative routes to peace drawn for Pakistan by the president of China, Jiang Zemin during his visit to Islamabad in 1996. An India-Pakistan peace process will be welcomed by the entire international community, especially its leading members. (The author is Director, Centre for Studies in Global Change, New Delhi)