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India-Pakistan unlikely to break impasse soon: US

Analysis

A hoax called peace talks

And this nuclear madness continues to bleed the economies of the two countries. Misery, poverty and disease stalk the land.

Lal Khan

Bismarck's famous Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz, once put it like this, "War is the continuation of politics by other, violent means."
In the South Asian subcontinent, the threat of war and the process of peace is also used as a device of deception for domestic consumption. The elites of India and Pakistan have used the turbulent relationship between them, blowing hot and cold, mainly to divert social revolts in their countries. When this campaign loses steam and begins to exhaust itself, they switch over to the facade of peace and friendship. Meanwhile, in each and every situation, they continue to arm and spend extravagantly on a military build up. They have fought three and a half wars and have started peace processes more than a dozen times. But the reality of the recent period is that they can neither afford to go to war nor can they sustain durable peace.
Yet, despite this, we are once again being told that talks have begun and the stalled 'composite dialogue' is going to restart. Talks between the Indian and Pakistani rulers and bureaucrats with ossified mindsets, are like 'one for the road', and the road never ends. Ultimately, the masses find themselves in another hangover with the threat of war hanging over their heads like the sword of Damocles. It is a vicious cycle where the process of 'talking about talks' is regularly punctuated with events that heighten tensions and scar the hopes of the vast majority of ordinary people who in fact have no real enmity with their class brothers and sisters on either side of the divide.
This absurd drama begins with the first act of tit-for-tat expulsions of low ranking diplomats. Then the religious bigots start to breathe fire and soon the liberal and secular elites join in this chorus of argumentative chauvinism. It all seems to be meticulously orchestrated by those vested interests who gain billions by these tensions and the consequent military build up, but at the same time are trying to avert a full scale war between the two nuclear-armed states.
It is not just the top brass of the two militaries that benefits from these 'dangers of war' but the imperialists too have high stakes in this gimmickry of war and peace. India is now the world's largest buyer of conventional arms. The second largest importer was China, followed by South Korea and Pakistan. In GDP terms, Pakistan spends even more on weapons purchases. This arms race keeps on filling the coffers of the military-industrial complexes, especially in the US. The flagrant amount of money spent on nuclear programmes in the subcontinent, if used in a planned economy, would have been sufficient to eradicate illiteracy, disease and poverty from the region.
And this nuclear madness continues to bleed the economies of the two countries. Misery, poverty and disease stalk the land. Imperialist businesses and officials are embedded as much in India's politics as in those of Pakistan. A Guardian article reveals the brazenly mendacious and venal ruling class and its democratic farce as subservient to imperialism and a keep of the corrupt nexus of corporate power. It says, "In 2008, the aide to an old courtier of the Nehru-Gandhi family showed a US diplomat two chests containing $ 25 million in cash to bribe members of parliament into voting for an India-US nuclear deal, itself a prelude to a massive US arms sale to India...Hindu nationalist BJP are at pains to reassure American diplomats of their pro-US credentials, even dismissing their murderous Hindu nationalism as opportunism, a mere 'talking point'." Above all, throughout their existence, Indian and Pakistani politicians and generals have been the beneficiaries of hefty kickbacks from the makers of these weapons of mass destruction through 'deals'.
Diplomatic negotiations are intentionally prolonged and delayed. Some of the simplest issues like Sir Creek, Siachen and others that can be resolved in a single round of talks, are made to rankle on. Most of the negotiations are about the structure of the talks and the setting of their agendas. By the time these technicalities are decided upon, some incident or event erupts and the process of talks is cancelled or postponed. And then the whole process has to restart from scratch. This has been going on for 64 painful and tumultuous years. The Kashmir issue has been shuffled from one burner to another. The Indian and Pakistani ruling classes have wreaked havoc on the masses in Kashmir as elsewhere in the subcontinent. This wound, consciously inflicted by the British imperialists at the time of partition, continues to bleed and fester.
However, there is growing awareness amongst the youth and workers of Kashmir that within the present setup there is no solution to their woes. They are now increasingly involved in socio-economic struggles and fundamentalism has been on the retreat for quite some time now. The realization amongst the Kashmiri masses for the need to link the national liberation movement with the class struggle in the rest of the subcontinent is palpable. The increasing disputes about the allocation of water show the geographical futility of partition. These disputes are going to be aggravated in the coming period and will further destabilise the situation.
The dilemma of visas is painful for the toiling classes of the subcontinent. 'Civil society' peace processes have been limited to demanding the rulers of both countries to bring some sanity, relax the visa regime and promote friendship. How naïve! The ruling classes, the belligerent states and imperialism, all need this sort of two-pronged relationship. After all, partition took place when it became clear to the British and the local Hindu and Muslim bourgeoisies that the struggle for independence was not going to stop at the stage of national liberation but would move on to a social revolution that would abolish capitalism and put an end to imperialist plunder.
The wounds of partition are frequently pricked to provoke religious hatred. Hindu and Islamic bigotry feed upon each other and sprout venomous chauvinism to divert the class struggle. There can be no peace or friendship between the two antagonistic states within the confines of capitalism. Nor is any issue going to be durably resolved by the present ruling classes. A socialist revolution in any of these countries would transform the whole region. It is only through a voluntary socialist federation of South Asia that peace and prosperity can be achieved in this subcontinent that has 22 percent of the world's population and hosts 40 percent of the planet's poverty.


The writer is the editor of Asian Marxist Review and International Secretary of Pakistan Trade Union Defence Campaign. He can be reached at ptudc@hotmail.com.
 
^^Hold one. Is India or Pakistan having peace talks with Bangladesh?
 
This article from a former ambassador explains it nicley.

Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru must have had this schism in mind when he wrote to chief ministers in 1957: “No Government in that country (Pakistan) had any policy except of fear and hatred of India and till that ceases the future is dark.” That unfortunate reality has not changed in the least since then. As a matter of fact Pakistan’s angst has multiplied, and its anger has added the dangerous dimension of terror to its tactics.

Even the otherwise pragmatic Indira Gandhi was duped by Bhutto in Simla. Since then Pakistan has used terror to wound India in multiple ways. President Pervez Musharraf, who had been invited to a cricket match in 2005, had grandly declared himself against terror. But the train bombings in Mumbai followed less than a year later and worse was to come in shape of 26/11. Over all these years Pakistan has given us no satisfaction on any of our pleas regarding those accused of committing these acts of terror. They continue to roam freely in Karachi and Lahore. In fact it seems naïve that we should be sending dossier after dossier of evidence to Pakistan in the hope that they might move it to take action against the culprits. By doing so we are only exposing our investigation techniques to them, because Pakistan has no intention of handing over anyone who had been trained by its own agencies to do the job they were assigned. Disdain to our concerns defines Pakistan’s response. Still we persist in talking to Pakistan; and every time India sits back bitterly, defeated by its own expectations.

The only agreements that have been honoured between us relate to commitments made by India. We paid Pakistan’s share of Partition’s finances in full, and continue to honour the Indus Water Treaty by depriving our population of water. But Pakistan feigns long term amnesia when it comes to its commitments. It has not paid even a single paisa of the debt it owes us. By now the value of that debt must have gone up to many thousand crores. It also refuses to extend to us the most-favoured nation (MFN) status in trade. And disregarding humanitarian pleas by the United Nations, it refused to let any Indian food and medical supply reach Afghanistan via its territory.

India cannot and should not attempt to make Pakistan either stable or prosperous. In that sense the political love fest in Mohali was questionably conceived. Since then we have read of our cricketers’ achievements on the sports pages, we are likely to hear of our political failures with Pakistan on the front page

Starting afresh with Pakistan | Indo-Pak ties | Manmohan Singh | Indian Express
 
the former ambassador is indeed orangeanised nothing else as the last time we saw India is stealing Pakistani water not honouring any agreement not even international laws

Your own experts have admitted India has not broken IWT. Stop believing Pakistani media (even though you're a part of it!!!)

---------- Post added at 09:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:36 PM ----------

the former ambassador is indeed orangeanised nothing else as the last time we saw India is stealing Pakistani water not honouring any agreement not even international laws

Your own experts have admitted India has not broken IWT. Stop believing Pakistani media (even though you're a part of it!!!)
 
^^I think those rivers originate in India. How can we steal our own water?
 
I think we should declare IOK as a free state... with india in control of defense only...... resolves siachin n sir creek ---come to the original position and solve this issue.

But thts just me.Also we cant just ignore the kashmiris.
 
India and Pakistan cannot move forward unless we grow up. That's going to take a lot of time. Till then, lets co-operate to minimize terror and violence. Innocents getting killed is very saddening.
 
I think we should declare IOK as a free state... with india in control of defense only...... resolves siachin n sir creek ---come to the original position and solve this issue.

But thts just me.Also we cant just ignore the kashmiris.

We are discussing kashmir, not only IOK. India needs reciprocal action from pakistan.
However the status quo suits us, as long as we are growing at more than 8 percent, we wont mind a few attack here and there(my personal opinion, others can differ). There will be no war. But few attacks in return will maintain status quo even better.
 
as long as the core issues remain unresolved, of course there would be an impasse

i personally see no need and absolutely no incentive to break this impasse either, as long as certain people remain in denial and the outstanding issues are not addressed
 
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