Opinion Playing the political game

Its purpose is to seize a major sporting moment and set up a high-level political engagement between heads of government that was not on the cards. Whether such unscheduled summits produce political breakthroughs is an entirely different matter.

With only two precedents to go by,the record of Indo-Pak cricket diplomacy is even. General Zia-ul-Haq’s trip to Jaipur in 1987 was a manoeuvre at the height of military tensions between the two countries. Zia was signalling Pakistan’s self-assurance by putting his newly acquired nuclear card on the table.

In contrast,Pervez Musharraf’s visit to Delhi in April 2005 turned out to be hugely productive. Coming after a series of failed summits,the conversation between Dr Singh and General Musharraf was a game-changer,at least for a while.

The two leaders had agreed to resolve the conflicts over Siachen glacier and the Sir Creek. They also defined the broad principles of a potential settlement of the Kashmir question. More positive things happened between India and Pakistan in the two years after Musharraf’s April 2005 visit than in the previous four decades. This included an unprecedented back channel negotiation on Kashmir.

Although Dr Singh and Musharraf declared that the peace process was irreversible,it did not survive Musharraf’s loss of political control. Once Musharraf was replaced by General Ashfaq Kayani as army chief in 2007,the peace process went into a tailspin.

The second response is a technical one. It points to the fact that the two foreign secretaries had announced last month a step-by-step plan to revive the peace process and argues that the prime minister has needlessly short-circuited it.

A series of official meetings at the bureaucratic level — the first between the home secretaries is on this week — would be followed by a review of the developments by the two foreign secretaries and the foreign ministers.

Right or wrong,India’s Pakistan policy has always been driven by the gut instincts of the prime ministers rather than the carefully crafted approaches by the diplomatists. If the mood at Mohali turns out to be good,Dr Singh and Gilani might help give the dialogue at the bureaucratic level a much needed boost.

In any case,they cannot do much harm to a process that has been in the doldrums ever since the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008 and the terror outrage in Mumbai in November 2008.

The civilian leaders — PM Gilani and President Asif Ali Zardari — were neither responsible for these attacks nor can they make amends. By insisting on what they cannot deliver,India has put itself in a no-win situation.

The third response is that Dr Singh is simply playing politics at Mohali. We fervently hope this is true. For far too long,the prime minister has treated foreign policy as a technical issue,while his opponents mounted motivated political attacks against his diplomatic initiatives.

Take,for example,the historic civil nuclear initiative. The prime minister’s attempt to liberate India from three-and-a-half-decades of high technology sanctions was painted as a sell-out to the United States. Despite losing the argument in 2008,the opportunistic BJP and the ideologically blinkered Left continue to present one of India’s greatest diplomatic triumphs as some kind of treason.

Dr Singh is partly responsible for this pitiful state of affairs. He allowed opponents define the foreign policy of his government as having a single-point agenda — doing the nuclear deal with the US.

For whatever reason,Dr Singh did not publicise the bolder moves he made towards Pakistan and China in his first term as prime minister. The nuclear deal was indeed important,but it is no comparison to the courageous territorial settlements he was trying to negotiate with Islamabad and Beijing. These talks involved rethinking many of India’s traditional assumptions about its frontiers. Taken to their logical conclusion,they would have positively transformed India’s security condition and the regional order in and around the subcontinent.

Unwilling to take the nation into political confidence on the negotiations with Pakistan and China,Dr Singh allowed the BJP and CPM to join forces in their attacks on his government’s foreign policy.

If Dr Singh had missed the opportunity to triangulate the opposition on foreign policy,he can do it now. If he returns to making bold moves on Pakistan and China,he can bet that the radicals on the left will rally behind him and the hawks on the right will attack him.

If he takes a political perspective of the dialogue with Gilani,Dr Singh might find he has some room to play in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The political arrangements that came into being after Musharraf’s departure are now shaky and any political moves by India at this stage might have some influence on the evolution of the internal situation across the western border.

After Mohali,Dr Singh must now offer to visit Pakistan soon and sign off on some of the agreements he had already negotiated with Musharraf’s army. Given the deep divisions in Pakistan,there is no guarantee that he will succeed. But the very demonstration of the will to act politically on foreign policy and national security might let Dr Singh regain the initiative at home,in the region and beyond.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research,Delhi express@expressindia.com