Negotiating in good faith

Now that the Americans are leaning on us to do what we should have the good sense to do on our own, it is but a matter of time (and face-saving) before we and the Pakistanis find ourselves at the negotiating table, with the Americans, like Banquo’s ghost, hovering over the proceedings. Whatever the brave front the Vajpayee-Jaswant-Advani trio put out about our still being a sovereign country which makes its own decisions, the minute we handed over the responsibility for containing cross-border terrorism to the United States, it followed as night the day that in restraining Pakistan on terrorism the Americans would demand that India move from the war front to the conference room. Therefore, before the American camel takes over our tent, can we not ourselves set the terms and conditions for the dialogue? Instead of shying away from dialogue with Pakistan, as the NDA government is doing, India should take the initiative in initiating talks about talks.

Talking to Pakistan is the essence of the Simla agreement. Simla took J&K out of the multilateral mode, in which it had smouldered from 1947 to 1972, and placed it squarely in the bilateral domain. Tragically, having put issues related to J&K in the bilateral mode, Indian diplomacy has wasted three decades not discussing J&K with Pakistan. That posture of ‘will not talk multilaterally-will not talk bilaterally’ was maintainable (or at least proved sustainable) till Pokhran-II/Chagai in May 1998. Since then, the UN Security Council resolution of June 1998, rapping us both on the knuckles for going nuclear, has, for the first time in 33 years, raked up the J&K question in a Security Council resolution. We have been put on notice of multilateral intervention in J&K if a bilateral process is not put in motion.

The sudden US interest in terrorism post-WTC has been used by India to focus on Pak-sponsored cross-border terrorism. The strategy has worked to the extent that Pakistan’s best friends are now asking Pakistan to at least look like a member in good standing of the international community. Pakistan has taken some cosmetic measures and might yet throw in a few substantive ones. But even before the tan starts fading from the glow of Western approbation in which Pervez Musharraf has been basking since his Washington-sponsored speech last week, he has demanded — and secured — a higher US profile on J&K. That is what brought Colin Powell yet again to New Delhi. If we do not get bilateral pretty soon, there is every danger of the UN Security Council resolution of June 1998, rather than the Simla accord of 1972, determining the nature — and, therefore, the outcome — of our engagement with Pakistan.

First things first. Dialogue does not mean summitry. Keeping the prime minister out of it is a key requirement, especially in the light of his proven naivete at Lahore (where he and his team plain forgot to write ‘cross-border terrorism’ into the Lahore Declaration) and then his being outmanoeuvred over cross-border terrorism at Agra. It is not high-sounding summit statements we should be aiming at but the structuring of a negotiating process that is uninterrupted and uninterruptable. The Vajpayee notion that a dramatic high-level spur-of-the-moment breakthrough is the only possible breakthrough in Indo-Pak relations needs to be discarded in favour of a long, long haul that will face many reverses and many moments of stagnation but must be persisted in and insulated from the inevitable ups-and-downs in India-Pakistan relations if such a process is to lead anywhere. Such an irreversible process needs to get away from semantics over whether J&K is a core issue or an incidental distraction. We have a ready-made formula to overcome such quibbling in the felicitous statement used by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao in his letter to his Pakistani counterpart, Benazir Bhutto, on her winning the elections of 1993: ‘Issues related to J&K’. Their issue is the validity of the Instrument of Accession; our issue is cross-border terrorism. Both are ‘issues related to J&K’. Both can, therefore, be covered under the rubric of the Narasimha Rao formula. Let’s get on with it.

We also need to disabuse ourselves of the curious notion that talks are best held with our forces on red alert at the frontier, holding a gun as it were to the Pak negotiator’s head. A minatory India carries little conviction with Pakistan or the world. For, as retired Pak General Durrani put it in an article in this journal last week, “Pakistan is not Afghanistan, and India is not the United States.” We cannot bully Pakistan out of anything. But we can persuade them of a great deal — provided we ourselves are reasonable and as prepared to listen as to hector. Our model should be the greatest Indian negotiator of them all — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Our negotiators should talk to their Pakistani counterparts as Gandhi did with Morley and Smuts, Irwin and Linlithgow, Wavell and the Cabinet Mission. He worked on the British to leave without ordering the Indian Navy into the English Channel.

“Ah! But what of the Pakistani military mindset?” one is continually asked. Usually by some short-service emergency commissioned officer who made it from Major to the Indian Foreign Service on the military intake quota. It is not by talking at stereotypes but by talking with real human beings that progress is possible. Diplomatic maturity demands that we recognise that there are Pakistani perceptions and Pakistani concerns and that we cannot expect Pakistan to mouth the Indian line any more than Pakistan can expect India to mouth the Pakistani line.

A dialogue is required precisely because of our differences. And a dialogue is most required when the situation is at its most tense. Moreover, because our differences run so deep and wide, time and patience — but, above all, goodwill and good faith — are required to fill the gap. We do not know where the dialogue will lead and how long it will take. For if we did, there would be no need for dialogue, we could go directly to the answers. So, let us expect the opening Pakistani position to be as hard as ours. Then let us try to understand each other and persuade each other. And out of such mutual understanding, Inshallah, reconciliation, or at least accommodation, might prove possible. But strong-arm negotiating tactics, bullying, bluster and posturing will lead nowhere — other than to the UN Security Council resolution of June 1998.

Earlier Columns