Having committed to attending the SAARC summit in Islamabad which is only months away, the Prime Minister must know that talks with Pakistan will have to resume well before that.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s sudden Christmas Day detour from Kabul to Lahore at the instance of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif appeared to be the public manifestation of a serious new approach to dealing with Pakistan. It was a breathtaking development which wasgreeted with howls of derision from the Congress. When Congress MP Anand Sharma pronounced the Prime Minister’s approach to Pakistan as “frivolous, unpredictable, and full of abrupt U-turns”, he seemed remarkably out of step because Mr. Modi had at last engendered hopes for an honest engagement; the misstep of the precondition that the Pakistanis should not be in dalliance with the Hurriyat while talking to New Delhi seemed less of an obstacle. Yet, more than a month after the Pathankot attack, it would appear that there is something to be said for that criticism after all. Consider this: the government was alive to the ever-present risks inherent in engaging Pakistan — terrorist attacks, increased firing across the Line of Control, attacks on our interests in Afghanistan, an uptick in the use of both political and armed proxies in Kashmir, as we have just seen in Pampore.
Fifteen years after the attack on the World Trade Center, there is little the world does not know about Pakistan’s Deep State and its proclivities in using terrorism as a tool of statecraft. On this Islamabad holds no surprises any more, only a strong sense of déjà vu. As surely as winter recedes, the prospect of more jihadis stirring from their hibernation awaits us. Just because the Pakistani Army chief Raheel Sharif has made it clear that he wants to retire when his term ends, and without seeking an extension, does not mean that the Army has turned over a new leaf. We do not need to wait for Pakistan’s former military ruler Pervez Musharraf to confirm that the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) trains terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM) before it becomes the gospel truth. When he was running Pakistan, Gen. Musharraf referred to such terrorists as “freedom fighters” and kept telling Indian High Commissioners in Islamabad that the work done by these “freedom fighters” was vital as it helped India focus on the need for dialogue on Kashmir.
Nothing that 26/11 plotter David Headley says through video conferencing is likely to embarrass Pakistan or Washington for that matter. Even as Islamabad brazens it out, if New Delhi keeps waiting for its neighbour to act effectively against JeM leader Maulana Masood Azhar, whom Mr.Modi’s political predecessors delivered gift-wrapped and beribboned to the Pakistan through a high-level gift-bearer, it could be a long, long wait. The “protective custody” that Pakistan’s Adviser to the Prime Minister on Foreign Affairs Sartaj Aziz claims is most likely a linguistic fudge. The question remains: what should New Delhi do in the meanwhile?
Message in a battle
The first thing to do is to read the Pathankot message properly. It is not entirely about seeking “revenge for Afzal Guru” even though his name has lately begun to pop up in the strangest of places, whether it is in snatches of a lecture given by a Pathankot attacker en route to the airbase or in bloody graffiti in Mazar-e-Sharif. The message is that such attacks will continue irrespective of whether we engage or not. The more important message is that there are serious gaps in our security that we continue to remain blind to and which still remain a serious cause of embarrassment, namely potential attackers continuing to practically jaywalk into fortified locations after it becomes known that the attack is imminent and still manage to conduct attacks at will and with impunity. It defies logic to blame Pakistan for this state of affairs.
Then there is the matter of the quality of evidence India has listed that suggest point of origin of the attacks. It is unlikely that Pakistan will be impressed with India’s forensic diplomacy, mainly because it requires more pressure than the kind New Delhi can unilaterally mount on Pakistan. India should not let itself be misled by incremental steps such as registering a first information report like Pakistan just did. This is more tokenism. The Pathankot attack, moreover, was not in the same league as some of Pakistan’s more atrocious terrorist depredations. It was a modest attack that could have ended differently had India thwarted it in time.
Staying the course
India’s international well-wishers are probably already telling the country after the usual patient hearing that the window of opportunity that was opened by Mr. Modi’s surprise visit to Lahore should not be allowed to close.Pakistan’s own investigations into the Pathankot attackare not likely to meet a fate different from that fallen on the Mumbai attacks. The world has already moved on from Pathankot. Mr. Modi should look at the sale of more F-16s to Pakistan, a major non-NATO ally, as another aspect of the reality that confronts policymakers in New Delhi: the longer India continues to remain nonplussed over Pathankot, the sooner it will find itself in an area of diminishing returns. It will also give rise to speculation that India’s Pakistan policy could well be based on whimsy. India cannot change the national interest of the U.S., for example, to suit itself, but it can always define its own national interest better.
Surely, Mr. Modi could not have initiated engagement with Pakistan on the presumption that all sections of the establishment in Pakistan want peace with India all of a sudden. He must have proceeded after due consideration, with serious intent. If there has been an interest discerned on the part of Pakistan to exploring the prospects of negotiating a durable engagement, it would make sense to test that intention fully, not half-heartedly. Ignoring Pakistan is not an option. It makes little sense to adopt an on-again-off-again strategy that smacks of ad-hocism. It would be prudent not to look upon Pathankot as yet another instance where India’s hopes have been dashed by Pakistan. There could well be temptation to pay Pakistan back in the same low intensity proxy coin. Pakistan has refined its strategy over many decades and it would take India a long time to get where its neighbour is today in the dirty tricks department and by the time its gets there, Pakistan would have gone even further ahead down the same road. That much is logical as well. It is even uncertain if that strategy will effect a desired behavioural change. At the end of it, Pakistan would have dragged India down to a level where there is a hyphen as well as a strong moral equivalence.
Mr. Modi’s outreach to Mr. Sharif was for most part welcomed, especially in the Kashmir Valley, where ironically Bharatiya Janata Party and Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are renegotiating an alliance. That there could be misgivings within the PDP is another symptom of a critical synaptic lapse. Missing in action most notably in the Prime Minister’s Pakistan policy is Kashmir. It can be argued that there is a sense of drift in the Valley that if left unaddressed would complicate matters.
Having committed to attending the SAARC summit in Islamabad which is only months away, Mr. Modi knows that talks with Pakistan will have to resume well before that. His work on Pakistan has been made easier by his predecessor Manmohan Singh, and before him, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Both worked behind the scenes to achieve greater clarity on possible ways forward on a number of outstanding issues. Mr. Modi needs to give a sustained engagement a chance and enlarge the peace constituency while he is at it. Having invoked the spirit and legacy of Mr. Vajpayee in Kashmir, he has yet to take baby steps in that direction. He might as well make a virtue out of necessity.
(email: sudarshan.v@thehindu.co.in)
