Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
Foreign Secretay Jaishankar’s daylong talks in the Pakistani Capital, Islamabad with his counterpart earlier this week, officially described as part of a SAARC yatra of his own by the newly appointed topmost Indian diplomat, could well be the much awaited precursor of a long overdue Indo-Pak summit.
The Indian diplomat had meetings, apart from the one with the Pak Foreign Secretary, with the Foreign Policy Advisor to the Prime Minister, the long-serving Mr. Sartaj Aziz and with Mr. Nawaz Sharif among others.
‘Gila shikwa’ apart, including the one concerning the cancelled Foreign Secretary level talks which Prime Ministers Modi and Sharif had agreed upon during the latter’s Delhi visit the day Modi took office as Prime Minister, looked a distant memory.
For, the two were finally meeting, may be a good six months after the earlier cancelation, but meeting nevertheless. Meetings or talking, as the saying goes, is better than not meeting and talking at all.
Given my own experience spanning four decades plus, I know Indo-Pak talks at any level from Presidential and Prime Ministerial to Foreign Ministerial to senior diplomatic or even the track II variety are always a tedious business.
I have seen Indira Gandhi and Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto battling it out, trying hard to outwit each other, in Shimla, burning, literally, the midnight oil and many other such encounters including Musharraf’s, Benazir’s, Gen. Zia’s, trying their hand with their respective Indian counterparts of the time including Rajiv, Narasimha Rao and Atal Bihari Vajpayee not to mention the countless other times when the Foreign Ministers and Foreign Secretaries would spend long hours in discussions, and longer hours in placing the comas, semicolons and full stop of a joint statement at the end of each fruitless round of talks.
If anything has changed ever since, I am not aware of it. In the words of a former Kashmir Chief Minister, Syed Mir Qasim whose very apt Persian saying would say it all : we met, we talked, w e listened, we feasted and we parted. There have been times, though, when a breakthrough had seemed possible, but never really did occur.
Shimla, described as a success, has turned out to be the biggest sham. The clever, clever Z. A. Bhutto obviously had other ideas even as he signed what came to be known as the Shimla accord.
Musharraf and Vajpayee and before them Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif too had appeared to be heading towards a happy closure. But on each occasion they flattered only to deceive in the end.
Given their sharply divergent backgrounds and commitments I am half tempted to see Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif making a possible breakthrough should they soon meet, and only if the Pakistan Prime Minister is able to carry the army with him; a difficult choice to make but not impossible to achieve given the latter’s growing commitments in Afghanistan. I seem to be jumping the gun.
There are any number of issues which the two countries will have to confront before they reach knottier ones including Kashmir. Foreign Secretary Jaishankar did touch upon some of the old durables in Islamabad but the history of the never-ending Indo-Pak negotiations tells us that the namby-pambiness of the past will not do.
Strong decisions will need to be made. Of Modi one can be sure that he would like to step in to make a fresh start from where Atal Bihari Vajpayee had left it. The UPA years were sheer waste in this regard with the exception of the confidence building measures, prompted by then Chief Minister Mufti Sayeed, taken with Manmohan Singh’s concurrence.
It may not be a pure coincidence that the formal understanding in Kashmir between Modi’s BJP and Mufti Sayeed’s People’s Democratic Party came about just a couple of days (after eight weeks of negotiations) before Foreign Secretary Jaishankar travelled to Pakistan.
But Narendra Modi’s decision to send his top diplomat to Islamabad was a deft move by the Prime Minister to gauge the prospects of reviving the peace process. That this may have helped somewhat in bridging the distance between the Bharatitya Janata Party and the People’s Democratic Party in Kashmir is a certainty.
Mufti Sayeed, the Kashmir Chief Minister had throughout the Assembly poll campaign juggled with the domestic and external dimensions of the Kashmir issue, a line he had tried out with great success with Vajpayee and his NDA and which had initially served him well, during the early Manmohan years.
Borrowing from that era the BJP-PDP agreed programme of governance in Jammu and Kashmir significantly stresses the need to enhance people-to-people contacts on both sides of the line of control, encouraging civil society exchanges, taking travel, commerce, trade and business across the line of control to the next level and opening new routes across all three regions of the State to increased connectivity.
With the cease-fire along the line of control breaking down in recent years the BJP and PDP have spoken of humanitarian assistance to all those affected by the cross-fire along the LOC which is not at all unexpected.
Should the Modi dispensation be able to restore the cease-fire along this line as part of the resumed Indo-Pak talks and follow it up with more confidence building measures, even as the existing ones are further strengthened, the external factor concerning the State would change, improving the climate for bilateral talks between New Delhi and Islamabad.
While these are positive possibilities from the Indian standpoint the entire show would come unstuck should Pakistan and its civilian government be unable to deliver. My generally optimistic view of the Indo-Pak scene at the moment however gets sharply diminished by the fact that internal conditions in Pakistan are not conducive to yielding happier results. But the responsible thing to do is to keep trying.
Modi having undone his earlier decision not to let the Foreign Secretary Jaishankar visit Pakistan, albeit with a SAARC cover now in place, and his simultaneous decision to enter into a coalition with the People’s Democratic Party in Jammu and Kashmir, which his storm troopers had, during the poll campaign described as a separatist, pro-Hurriyat combination, is indicative of the Prime Minister’s readiness for a meaningful dialogue with Pakistan.
Just recall that it was the self-same Prime Minister Modi who had called off the Foreign Secretaries meeting because the Pakistan High Commissioner in New Delhi had received Kashmiri separatists before his own (Modi’s) meeting with the Pakistan Prime Minister in the Indian capital for the Indian Prime Minister’s swearing-in ceremony some ten months ago.
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