Why Modi sweated over getting India-Pakistan ties on track
India and Pakistan have returned to the dialogue table – once again – to the sound of imaginary bursts of popping champagne, but the big question that follows external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj’s path-breaking visit to Islamabad is: will this peace last?
The answer is, yes, simply because Prime Minister Narendra Modi is, finally, personally invested in this peace process. He is said to be determined about establishing India’s lead role in South Asia – as well as his own among the big boys (and girls) of international diplomacy – and has come to the conclusion after jet-setting across the world over the last 18 months that Delhi must reach out and bite the bullet and resolve the tension between India and Pakistan.
What accounts for Modi’s new, green leaf? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the world has been telling Modi to talk to Pakistan. For the Americans it’s a no-brainer because they are deeply enmeshed in the AfPak region and want to exit sooner than later, certainly from their military responsibilities in Afghanistan. The US has been wanting India to play a bigger role in Afghanistan for some time – and India, having stayed the course of economic aid and partnership for over a decade, is now believed to have decided that it will sell attack helicopters to Kabul – and US president Barack Obama has been wanting Modi to talk to Pakistan.
The same is true for David (Cameron), Angela (Merkel), Francois (Hollande) and Tony (Abbott), all friends of Modi – all of them call him by his last name, not his first – and all of whom believe that India’s size and economic heft is bound to play a balancing role vis-à-vis Pakistan’s all-weather friend and partner, China.
A second part of the reason is that after the debacle in Bihar, Modi knew that he had to change the storyline. What better way to do this than to extend the hand inside Parliament and outside – with the civilian government in Islamabad, and the all-powerful military in Rawalpindi?
That is exactly what Modi has done. The Paris chit-chat with Pakistan prime minister Nawaz Sharif, on the margins of the climate change conference, laid the groundwork for the meeting between the two national security advisers in Bangkok - Lt Gen Nasir Khan Janjua from Pakistan and Ajit Doval from India. Modi had realised when the NSA talks were called off in Delhi a couple of months ago that the attendant negative publicity only diminished him. He was said to have been “not happy” that the talks had been called off by Sushma Swaraj, about whom it was said at the time, that “she had exceeded her brief” by doing so.
The upshot was that India was ready to talk to Pakistan, at the NSA and other levels, whenever possible. The ground was prepared for Paris and the “accidental meeting” was anything but. Then the two NSAs met in Bangkok, for as many as eight hours. Over cigarette breaks between Doval and Janjua and Urdu couplets by both interlocutors, the all-important matter of initiating, forging and cementing a new relationship began to take shape.
What did India want? There is a simple answer to that, of course, and equally straightforward, especially since Kargil in 1999 and the Mumbai attacks in 2008. When former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee reached out to shake Nawaz Sharif’s hand in Lahore in February 1999, then army chief Pervez Musharraf responded by sending the Northern Light Infantry disguised in civilian clothes to the hilltops of Kargil; the idea being that the Pakistan army would cut off Jammu and Kashmir from the rest of India.
And when the ten Mumbai attackers laid siege to the city in 2008, then Pakistan foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi was visiting Delhi. On both occasions an incalculable breach of trust took place. You could rebuild the Taj and the Leopold Café and reinvent the Coast Guard and buy new weapons for the Mumbai Police, but how do you shake the hand of the opponent – the enemy – and look him in the eye? What are you looking for when you do that?
Trust, said former US president Ronald Reagan, trust and verify. That’s what Doval must have told Janjua in Bangkok: can we trust and verify our step-by-step return to so-called normalcy?
The bottom line is that the Pakistanis have agreed to take forward the trial of the Mumbai attackers. India has agreed to return to a comprehensive dialogue, in which discussions on the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir will, along with terrorism, will be back on the agenda. Another important item is the return of Siachen as part of the dialogue – that had been effectively dropped by the Manmohan Singh government, which had argued that after Kargil, it would be difficult to return to discussing the withdrawal of Indian troops from the heights of the Saltoro glacier in the Siachen region. (But that is another story.)
And so the all-important question: how do two countries with a history of betrayal between them, build trust?
That is what the two NSAs as well as the two foreign secretaries, S Jaishankar and Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry will now do. After all, Chaudhry could well argue that as he and Jaishankar sat on a sofa in a long and empty corridor in a Ufa hotel, soon after their two principals met, Jaishankar proposed a joint statement which had no mention of the phrase “Jammu and Kashmir” in it and he had to agree.
Chaudhry must have definitely been roasted over the coals back in Islamabad-Rawalpindi to have agreed to such a one-sided joint statement, especially as it was accompanied by Indian triumphalism in such-poor-taste. The question Chaudhry would have asked, as he sat across the table from Jaishankar in Bangkok last week: can I trust this man?
And so India and Pakistan are back at the dialogue table. The so-called composite dialogue, with its several discussions across trade and Siachen and Sir Creek and confidence building measures was first started in 1997. Its now back with another name, 18 years later as well as 18 months since Modi came to power with his own history of flip-flops vis-à-vis Pakistan.
And that brings us to the third reason Modi is personally invested in this dialogue process with Pakistan. Modi has begun to possibly realise, unlike the much more instinctive Vajpayee, that the ephemeral process of nation-building is in many ways dependent on the the confidence that minority populations repose in the government. Over the last 18 months, the Sangh Parivar’s lunatic fringe has succeeded in considerably whittling away that sense of confidence. Smoking the peace hookah with Pakistan is one roundabout way of telling your own people – hey, I’m sorry. (The much more direct and effective way is of course to impose the rule of law.)
That’s why India is back to the dialogue table with Pakistan. Will it last? Probably, and not only because Prime Minister Modi has to represent India at the SAARC summit in Islamabad in 2016 and in the 30th year of the SAARC, there is no way that India can or will opt out. Certainly it was imperative that Modi begin to walk back on his own reasons for calling off the dialogue with Pakistan over the last year.
Enough of the old. Hopefully, a new era will now begin.