Roadmap to Peace?
Agra 2001 was one of the periodic highpoints of the India-Pakistan relationship, a similar climax of expectations was Vajpayee’s Lahore bus trip in 1999. The Indians had reason to feel aggrieved because of Kargil, when they received President Pervez Musharraf with open arms in New Delhi two years later that became a moot point. Or was their welcome feigned? There was expectation and excitement in the air in Agra that morning when the agreed draft was initialled, the gloom came later when it did not see the light of day, signalling a massive relationship slide. After 9/11 the world’s catchword was “terrorism”, the Indians soon realized that Pakistan’s stupidity in supporting the Taliban regime beyond a fail-safe point was being glossed over because of Pakistan’s primarily role as a US ally in the war against terrorism. The Indians hurriedly re-drew their gameplan to emasculate Pakistan, the raison d’etre the still unexplained attack on India’s Parliament. At the end of Dec 2001 the entire Indian Armed Forces (including the formations withdrawn from facing China and Bangladesh) was stationed en bloc in an offensive posture along Pakistan’s eastern border and along the LOC in Kashmir, subsequently the Indian High Commissioner was recalled permanently and in reciprocation his Pakistani counterpart was asked to leave. There was a further low-point, the Pakistan Deputy High Commissioner was expelled because of concocted and childish allegations, subsequently proven patently false by Indian courts.
Normalisation?
Having spent 18 months on the knife-edge of a nuclear war, the result of a unilateral decision by India, for reasons that are still mind boggling, to put almost its entire Armed Forces on our doorstep, and only a week or so after Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha was advocating a pre-emptive strike against Pakistan a la Iraq, Atal Behari Vajpayee offered unconditional talks on all issues including Jammu and Kashmir. There is a “blow-hot blow-cold” situation here since Sinha’s tone and tenor remains aggressively anti-Pakistan despite the peace moves, one is rather skeptical about the very sudden sea-change of heart.
Minding his political back by neither accepting Jamali’s spontaneous invitation or rejecting it, the Indian PM reciprocated Jamali’s further initiatives by announcing resumption of full diplomatic relations (by appointment of a permanent High Commissioner) and allowing of overflights. An Indian Foreign Office spokesman went to great lengths to emphasize that “overflights” was a part and parcel of any air transit agreement. A suspicion therefore arises, could the whole objective of the Indian diplomatic overdrive be only to re-open “overflights”? The Indians had themselves suspended “overflights” in the first place, and have been economically repenting ever since. The westward operations of Air India were seriously disrupted, devastating the Indian aviation industry. SARS has caused all Air India flights to the East to now cease, a few more weeks without overflights permission from Pakistan would bankrupt the prime Indian air carrier. Indians have a habit of camouflaging their faux pas by grand gestures, can anyone forget their “generosity” last year in recalling the Indian Navy as a “goodwill measure” from the Indian Ocean where it was positioned to blockade Karachi in case of war, this had been coupled with loud talk of “quarantining” Pakistan during peace, i.e. not allowing any sea traffic to and fro our ports. The badly maintained Indian Navy took a massive beating during the storm-ridden Arabian Sea’s summer months, it takes no genius to work out why the Indians needed to get their seasick sailors (and their ships) to the relative safety and comfort of their home ports. That is why the focus on overflights in supercession to everything else among confidence-building measures (CBMs) is rather suspicious. If the Indians are serious, call their bluff by requesting Vajpayee’s presence at an overdue SAARC “Heads of State” Meeting in Islamabad.
South Asia on Edge
If exit polls in Gujerat are to be believed, BJP will win nearly a hundred seats in the Assembly compared to the 70 for the Congress Party. This is bad news not only for India but for the rest of South Asia because the BJP victory is based on blatant exploitation of Hindu chauvinism, anathema to the concept of secular India. Having lost almost all State elections since coming to power, the electoral success will not only be sweet for BJP, it will unfortunately serve as their model for future electoral campaigns. To the credit of the Congress Party they stuck to their secular stance despite pre-polls suggesting that the BJP-inspired carnage of muslims in Gujerat was in line with what voters in the State wanted. Narendra Modi, who can easily be tried in the Hague for genocide in inspiring and inciting violence against the minority muslims while being the primary authority in the State as Chief Minister, was shamelessly paraded by BJP through the electoral hustings proclaiming his “Hindutva” credentials. BJP’s victory in Gujerat is not only a disaster for India, the two muslim countries in South Asia will begin to feel the heat as BJP articulates its immediate “east” and “west” foreign policy to go with its virulent domestic anti-muslim stance.