Karamatullah K Ghori November 5, 2003

Tags: indo-pak , peace-talks

href="/tag/peace">peace or war.

It started with New Delhi making catchy headlines with its 12-points of ‘Confidence –Building Measures’ ( CBMs ) with their thrust on people-to-people contacts. This included the innovation of a bus service across the Line of Control ( LOC ) in the disputed Kashmir region, as well as a ferry service linking the ports of Mumbai and Karachi.

Of course, the package was capped off with the tentalizing offer to resume the long-delayed Cricket rivalry on the field between the two countries whose devotion to this sport is as fanatical as their politics. Old issues like the resumption of air links and over-flight rights—cut off by India in a huff in December, 2001—were also re-gurgitated. But conspicuous by its absence was any mention of a dialogue on Kashmir.

India has traditionally laid great store by people-to-people contacts. As the senior partner in the estranged equation, India, no doubt, feels more confident about this aspect of diplomacy. Experience tells it how discomfited the generals in Pakistan, whose grip on the country’s political fortunes draws a lot of sustenance from continued brinkmanship with India, feel over any prospect of increased contacts in the social domain between the two peoples.

But the malafide of intent on India’s part stood out in spades in its ‘novel’ initiative to start a bus service across the LOC. Even a layman, not to talk of the pundits of Pakistani diplomacy, could see through the mischief inherent in the Indian ‘innovation’. Criss-crossing the LOC in routine would be tantamount to its elevation to the status of a formal international boundary between the Indian and Pakistani-held parts, respectively, of Kashmir thus diluting the sting of the dispute and dealing a detah blow to Pakistan’s case regarding it.

There was, equally, an element of comical inanity in the Indian offer to treat 20 Pakistani children free of cost in Indian hospitals. This was in extremely poor taste and betrayed a tendency to denigrate Pakistan even at the risk of looking silly. Pakistan is not a dirt poor African country to need a neighbour’s largesse to treat its sick children.

Pakistan was, initially, taken a bit by surprise by India’s unanticipated diplomatic salvo. Its angst was understandable because Prime Minister Vajpayee had dismissed, in disdain, General Musharraf’s offer, in his September address at the UN General Assembly, to cool the atmospherics between the two neighbours. Besides, CBMs proposal had first been floated by Pakistan two years ago. But India, then, was riding its high horse and had dismissed Pakistan’s offer as a mere gimmick.

Once recovered from its initial surprise over the timing and implications of the Indian salvo, Pakistan rose to give it back as well as it had taken.

Pakistan had no choice but to welcome the Indian thrust because rejecting the package out of hand would have put Pakistan in the dock of international condemnation.

However, Pakistan quickly found an antidote to what it perceived as India’s mischief to seek a change in the LOC’s temporary nature. It welcomed the idea of a regular bus service between the two halves of Kshmir provided immigration duties at the LOC were assigned to the UN observes. Keeping the UN engaged in Kshmir in any manner is the crux of Pakistan’s case on this disputed territory.

On the other hand, India has been straining hard eversince the Kshmiri uprising began in 1989 to keep UN and the world out of the imbroglio. It has nauseatingly refused access to even such humanitarian agencies like ICRC, Human Rights Watch and Medicine Sans Frontiers into its controlled Kashmir. India has also strived hard to completely sideline the UN observers mission in Kashmir ( UNGOMIP ) which is the oldest military observers’ mission in the world, dating back to 1950.

Pakistan too couldn’t resist the temptation to come up with its own set of absurd and comical proposals to offset the Indian ones. It offered to treat not 20 but 30 sick Indian children free in its hospitals. To rub salt into the Indian wounds, Pakistan offered 20 scholarships to students from the Indian-held Kashmir in its professional colleges, knowing with crystal clarity that India would never let that happen.

The unkindest Pakistani cut, from the Indian perspective, is the offer to provide shelter in Pakistan for Kashmiri widows and women traumatised by rape and other inhuman practices.

It is obvious that the element of crass propaganda has been overly factored into both countries’ initiatives and counter-initiatives. Both are playing to the gallery of world opinion to score points against each other without giving away much on substance, or giving peace a genuine or realistic chance of success. This is typical of their age-old habit of brinkmanship and one-upmanship. The two countries have long behaved like two words-savvy high school debaters who are weak on substance but excel in taking pot shots at each other.

Pakistan, on its part, has for years made the totality of its relations—or lack of them—with India hostage to its ‘Kashmir-the-core-issu’ syndrome. Its attitude is akin to the mental fixation of a tired gambler who has staked everything on the last throw of the dice and is scared that if his number is not up he will have lost all.

The generals in Pakistan, who have given themselves the title to guard its physical as well as ideological frontiers, have also been overtly allergic to any proliferation of social and cultural contacts between the peoples of India and Pakistan. On their watch there is an ongoing and strenuous effort from intellectuals and informed people, at their baeck and call, to re-write the official history of South Asia in which Pakistan’s Islamic and Arab moorings must be super-imposed over those of South Asian origins.

This state of mind dictates that a free flow of peoples and ideas would swamp Pakistan with Indian culture and give an extra leverage to India in its war of nerves against Pakistan. Hence a tight grip on the means of information. Indian tv channels remain ostracised in Pakistan with this justification. Likewise, Pakistan is still dragging its feet on reciprocating the Indian initiative that granted Pakistan the status of ‘Most Favoured Nation’ in bilateral trade several years ago.

India’s roster of hypocrisy is also bulging and overflowing. It is not prepared to give any quarter to Pakistan’s insistence on the centrality of Kashmir in their bilateral context. On the contrary, its tribunes and apologists go on incessantly parroting, like a broken record, that Kashmir is its integral part and not open to argument.

India’s blatantly unaccomodating posture on Kashmir presages failure on other fronts—the so-called soft issues—where it seeks normalisation and progress. But lack of progress suits India well. It gives the chauvinistic Indian government to paint Pakistan as unhelpful and unwilling to its own people, besides portraying it as the villain before the international community. Time is definitely on the side of India. The post-9/11 world doesn’t look too kindly to liberation movements of the kind being waged in the Indian-held Kashmir. The burden of proving its innocence in the matter rests on the Pakistani shoulders.

So where does it take the much-touted CBMs? Obviously to ground zero.

Whilst the spirit of offers and counter-offers may have some merit in them the protagonists on both sides of the Great South Asian Divide are less than honest and upright. The Bonapartes of Pakistan and the revanchist BJP pugilists of India are unworthy of playing Cricket, a sport for gentlemen.