Why Vajpayee’s Trip to Lahore Was a Failure

Prime Minister Vajpayee's trip to Lahore on the first Delhi-Lahore bus was the most exciting event of the year. India's glitterati and literati turned out in force to accompany him: India's journalists ran through words like "euphoria" and "historic" with abandon.

The bus carried Dev Anand, Javed Akhtar, Shatrugan Sinha, Mallika Sarabhai, Kapil Dev, Kuldip Nayyar and Arun Shourie -- to name only a few. It was tailed by Saeed Naqvi, as well as by an IAF helicopter filming the occasion. Many of these are household names in Pakistan as well as India.

Why were we so excited? And, now that it is over, what have we gained -- or lost?

First, there are very good reasons why Indians were so excited over this bus journey. Foremost among them is that everyone wants to end our enmity with Pakistan, even though no one seems to know how.

Though the figures filter only dimly into the public mind, the amount we spend on quarreling with Pakistan is truly horrific. The Siachen glacier operations alone cost us half a million dollars \\*a day\\*. One quarter of the entire Indian army (250,000 men) is tied up on internal security duty, many of them in Kashmir. Many more face off against Pakistani troops all the way from Siachen to the Rann of Kutch.

The money spent on this could go a long way towards paying for the clean drinking water, irrigation, sanitation, schools, roads, electricity, medicines, and other investment that India's millions of poor and illiterate living in wretched conditions need in order to lift the country out of the cycle of poverty.

Not only does this cost us money: it costs us security. While such a large part of the army is tied up on the Pakistan border and in Kashmir, the Army's ability to respond to other threats -- notably China, which still claims Arunachal Pradesh -- is fatally impaired.

Trade in the whole of northern India and Pakistan is hobbled by the artificial barrier to the movement of goods and people at the border. Rajasthan chief minister Gehlot has publicly asked for the rail link from Munabao to Khokraparkar, closed since 1965, to be reopened, so that travellers and exports, particularly foodgrains, can cross the border without having to travel north to Attari in Punjab. Kashmir, cut off from its traditional markets via the Peshawar road, has always been economically strangled by the closure of the borders, even before the uprising that has crippled normal life there since 1990.

For India, particularly, the quarrel with Pakistan deprives it of respect and moral standing in the world. Economically and militarily, we are not a great power as China is: and there is very little chance that we will be, so long as we are dragged down by this dispute.

The nuclear tests last year, which the Government hoped would underline India's emergence as a major power and challenge the country's marginalisation by the world powers, instead became only another India-Pakistan flashpoint, and served to weaken rather than strengthen the country's case for a seat on the Security Council.

(The world tacitly accepts the possession of of nuclear weapons by five countries which, rightly or wrongly, are seen as "responsible". The prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of India and Pakistan, which are constantly rattling swords at each other and are therefore seen as the very opposite of "responsible", terrifies people in other countries.)

For all these reasons, if India and Pakistan could settle their differences and stop their costly and pointless rivalry and arms race, the benefits to both, but particularly to India, would be immense. We would at a stroke increase our disposable income, improve our trade prospects, strengthen our military, and radically improve our image overseas.

"There is by an large a consensus in India", one editorial in the Deccan Herald ran, "that animosity with Pakistan is not in the country's own interest and therefore should be put aside".

That is the reason behind India's excitement over the Lahore bus trip.

Unfortunately, there is another side to the story -- the question of what actually was achieved by the trip.

The one person who gained anything out of the trip was Vajpayee, who comes out of it with his image as a moderate and a statesman considerably enhanced. Whether this will have any positive effect on the longevity of his government is anybody's guess.

Apart from that, the outcome of Vajpayee's bus trip can be described in one word: nothing.

The reason for this is not rocket science. It is clear to any observer. Pakistan refuses to improve relations until India climbs down from its position that Kashmir is an integral part of India. India refuses to climb down from its position. So, relations cannot be improved.

The question for India, then, is: is it worth climbing down from our positions? The benefits of peace with Pakistan are enormous. Are they worth reconsidering our long-held position on Kashmir?

To answer this, it is necessary to consider what we are gaining from Kashmir now. The answer seems to be: not much. Tourism and other revenue from Kashmir is negligible. Instead, the Kashmir state government is propped up by central funds, as is the vast military presence on internal security duty. The cost of Siachen operations (half a million dollars a day) has already been mentioned. Kashmir is a huge drain on the treasury, not a credit to it.

To add insult to injury, Indians cannot even visit Kashmir safely.

The only substantial advantage to India from holding Kashmir is the strategic advantage that the territory would confer in any future war with any of Kashmir's neighbours -- Pakistan or China. This does not preclude climbing down from our position that Kashmir is an integral part of India. It does, however, mean that any agreement we reach with Pakistan must protect India's strategic position.

There is one indication that some people in India are thinking about reconsidering India's position on Kashmir.

Shortly before the trip, journalists reportedly asked external affairs minister Jaswant Singh whether India intends to convert the Line of Control into an international border. (Singh gave a vague answer.) Later, union minister Ram Jethmalani called that proposal "one sensible solution of the problem. Former army chief Gen. VN Sharma weighed in to say that "There are many solutions [to the Kashmir problem]. Accepting the Line of Control in Kashmir can be one".

As an indication of peace with Pakistan, this suggestion of making the status quo permanent is worse than useless. Converting the LoC into an international border is an old dream of Indian hawks, which would enable us to legitimise our possession of the largest and choicest part of Kashmir. There is absolutely no possibility that Pakistan would see this as a basis for dialogue, or even as a concession.

However, as an indication that there is a new willingness to reconsider our positions to achive peace with Pakistan, it is encouraging.

The actual extent of India's concessions on Kashmir is the inclusion of the phrase "the resolution of all outstanding issues, including Jammu and Kashmir, is essential" in the Lahore declaration. This is at least a minor step forward from India's refusal to even discuss Kashmir with Pakistan on the grounds that "Pakistan has no locus standi" in Kashmir.

Further, when asked "whether India was willing to accept the right to self-determination in Kashmir", Mr. Vajpayee did not answer with a definite "no" (as he might have), but said only that J&K was under discussion and, "It is difficult for me to say what will emerge". That is a clear indication that possibilities are being left open that, with vision and leadership, could open the way to a settlement.

Unfortunately, Vajpayee also denied that India and Pakistan had decided to upgrade their talks to the level of foreign ministers.

Pakistan's foreign minister Sartaz Aziz, after warning that "Pakistani public opinion cannot indefinitely sustain a dialogue process that does not record substantive progress on the core issue of Kashmir", stayed away from the Lahore festivities, and met his Chinese counterpart instead of meeting Vajpayee.

The ball is in India's court. We have, basically, two options.

1. We can choose to maintain the status quo. That is, we continue to claim Kashmir as an integral part of India, accuse Pakistan of waging a proxy war, and try to use the army to beat the Kashmiris into submission. We continue to spend vast sums of money on this strategy, and we continue to look like fools. Pakistan is angry with us, the Kashmiris hate us, and south Asia continues to be a world centre of idiocy and human misery.

2. We can choose to fundamentally re-examine our policy in terms of our own interests. That is, we make whatever concessions are necessary to arrive at a political solution to Kashmir -- even if it involves making parts of Kashmir independent or handing them over to Pakistan -- and sign military agreements (or even an alliance) with Pakistan that end the subcontinental arms race. India and Pakistan begin trading freely, stop spending their money on a sterile rivalry, and south Asia begins to claw its way out of poverty.

The fundamental failure of leadership in India up to this point has been to refuse to recognise this choice. India's politicians, as Vajpayee is doing now, have repeatedly reiterated that the Kashmir problem must be solved through "dialogue".

Unfortunately, their idea of "dialogue" consists of telling Pakistan the same things we have been saying for decades. That is not dialogue: that is two monologues.

The great freedom fighter and parliamentarian Minoo Masani, who died in Bombay in 1997 and was lauded by many Indian politicans, including prime minister Vajpayee, wrote some years ago about a secret trip that Jayaprakash Narayan made to Pakistan to visit Ayub Khan, when Lal Bahadur Shastri was Prime Minister.

According to Masani, JP came back to New Delhi with the following proposals from Ayub. 1. That Jammu and Ladakh should be integrated with India. 2. That the rest of Kashmir should become an independent state, its defence jointly guaranteed by India and Pakistan, along the lines of the joint US-Soviet guarantee of Austrian independence after World War II. Shastri, Masani says, replied to this proposal that "Yeh cheez bahot acchi hai, lekin parliament aur meri party nahin mane gi" ("This is very good, but Parliament and my party will not accept it").

As an antidote to the foolish idea currently making the rounds in India (that converting the LoC to an international border might solve the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir) this is not a bad one.

Properly negotiated, a joint India-Pakistan guarantee of Kashmir's independence could allow us ample opportunity to safeguard India's security interests through a military presence in the region, particularly on the China border. (The model of the Indian presence in Bhutan could provide some guidance to the working of such an arrangement.)

The nature of the agreement that would emerge from unconditional status talks on Kashmir involving Pakistan as well as the Kashmiris is not crucial.

What is most important is this: the idea must be jettisoned that peace and normal relations with Pakistan can be achieved without putting Kashmir's status on the negotiating table. There will be ample opportunity to bargain for advantage once that is done, and we are under no obligation to accept any agreement; but until those kinds of negotiations open, India and Pakistan will remain trapped in the current spiral of enmity, occasionally punctuated by desperate gestures of goodwill like Vajpayee's bus trip to Lahore.

The timing is unusually good for a radical change in our position. n a statement that only a year ago would have seemed unthinkable, ndonesia's president B.J. Habibie has offered independence to the region of East Timor, which has been struggling to secede from Indonesia for decades. Sudan's president Omar al-Beshir has just been quoted as saying, after fifteen years of fighting secessionists in the south, that "the option of separating the south from the north is likely".

The interests of the people of India demand that the government do what it takes to end the conflict in Kashmir in a manner that ensures good, peaceful and neighbourly relations with Pakistan.

Our hawks will undoubtedly charge any government that does this with betraying India's interests. On the contrary: to continue any longer with the disastrously expensive rivalry with Pakistan is the real betrayal of India's interests. If we want to emerge as a regional or world power, we must jettison it.

India's people surprised everyone this month with the sheer number and eagerness of the people urging peace with Pakistan. Now it is up to India's leaders to show that they have the vision and the courage to do what it takes to achieve this: not emotionally, nor grudgingly, but rather by calmly weighing the interests of the country, the region, and future generations.