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Tamasha at Thimpu
Tamasha at Thimpu Managing Pakistan's failure and denuking it should preoccupy India most, says N.V.Subramanian.
7 February 2011: Can there be successful engagement between a thriving and rumbustious democracy like India and a failing jihadi state like Pakistan?
Not really.
Which is why this writer dismisses as hyperbole (or uncharacteristic cunning?) the Indian foreign secretary, Nirupama Rao's description of her Thimpu talks with her Pakistani counterpart as "successful".
Pakistan and India come to talks with mirror-opposite positions on Kashmir, the subject of Pakistan's eternal obsession. Pakistan claims it as the elusive prize of Partition.
Pakistan believes that with the possession of Kashmir, its problems of nationhood and national identity will cease. That's completely misguided.
If Pakistan had to become a nation, it would have done so in more than sixty years of independence. Kashmir is an excuse it trots out for its own failures in nation-building.
It sees Kashmir's breakaway as a catalyst to Balkanize India. It visualizes India as an artificial construct of secularism to be destroyed for its own survival.
That is one more reason why India will -- and can -- never give up Kashmir. No Central government could survive bartering away the state or changing its boundaries.
The problem for India is that it cannot not keep up the pretense of talking to Pakistan. The United States which has a handle in both countries wants talks to continue even though it is reconciled to its failure.
The US and India share fears about Pakistani nukes. The fear that those nukes will leak to the terrorists, in whole or in part, is what worries them and other responsible nuclear powers.
The crisis centres on the Pakistan army and the intelligence services. They control the deployment and security of the weapons.
Earlier, the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment nuclear-blackmailed India. Alongside, it expanded anti-India terrorism under a nuclear overhang, going all the way up to waging a "limited war" in Kargil.
It's when all this didn't deter India that it has attempted to blackmail the world about its nukes. The blackmail has taken two distinct forms.
One is that the Pakistan military must continue to be richly Western-aided so that it does not weaken against the terrorists and lose control of the nukes. Most of the aid is used to build the war-machine against India.
When Pakistan is questioned about the need for nukes, seeing it is the aggressor against India, and voices are raised to denuke it, it adopts the second distinctive form of blackmail. It lets out that the nukes will be leaked to the terrorists if it is not supported.
This vicious cycle could go on except for one thing. Pakistan is failing at a rapid pace. A terrorist takeover of Pakistan is as much a mid-term possibility as the state breaking up into its rival provinces. Don't imagine a Tunisia not to happen in Baluchistan.
For its internal failings, Pakistan must manufacture an external enemy. It is the United States and India. But for the Pakistan military and ISI, it is more often India.
Given this state of affairs, what can India do? At the most, it can keep up a fiction of talking, which is what this writer suspects the engagement with Pakistan is all about.
Nobody will admit it on the Indian side. But India is playing for time till Pakistan self-destructs.
Except for the huge problem related to the final disposal of Pakistan's nuclear weapons, nobody really cares (including the West) whether or not it survives as one state.
If Pakistani nukes can be evacuated, there will be active Western connivance to dismember it. Remember that together with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan has become the incubator of Sunni terrorism.
So do not be surprised if Indo-Pak talks are really about managing Pakistan's failure and to minimize the fallouts. To expect anything more would be unrealistic and optimistic.
A failing nuclear state is a mega threat. If it is jihadi to boot, it becomes a nightmare.
India should benchmark its success dealing with the failed state of Pakistan and seeking ways to denuke it. Nothing else matters.
