India has to remain engaged with Pakistan despite provocations : Opinion - India Today
India's newest mantra is to 'Make in India', but not, it seems, either love or peace. Love is not love if the lover is Muslim, the beloved Hindu; it then becomes jihad, the making of war, not love. The loathing many Hindus harbour for India's Muslim heritage, but cannot openly express, is poured out into Pakistan, the neelkanth for this poison. With which, it seems, peace cannot be made unless there is peace.
If our national mission is to First Develop India, Pakistan seems irrelevant. It is neither a market nor a competitor, not a source of either investment or technology. As we drive ahead, Pakistan is not in our sights, not even in our rear view mirror. Not only do we have a larger territory, and therefore the strategic depth which the Pakistan Army pursues like a chimera, our population is six times as large, our economy eight times larger. And because Pakistan's economy has been stagnant for almost two decades, while India's is accelerating again after a five-year lull, the gap widens every year. Even those who propped Pakistan up as a counter-weight to India during the Cold War have long since realised that it is not. So why, we ask, do Pakistanis not see this, even when their noses are rubbed in it?
The fact is they do. Our mistake is in damning as a homogeneous glob of evil a country of 200 million people, almost all of whom simply want to get on with their lives. They may fear India, but very substantial numbers know how far Pakistan lags behind. They also accept that their problems are their own, not the result of our machinations. In Pakistan now, there is little of the open hostility towards India that there is towards Pakistan here. The educated and the business community want to engage with a resurgent India. Indians who contest this have not followed the last two elections there. There were no dire invocations of a foreign hand, no chest-thumping, no jingoism. The two major parties raised India only to pledge that they would work for peace with it.
Pakistan's political leaders have walked the talk. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's coming to his Indian counterpart's inauguration, over the opposition of his army but with the blessings of his political opponents and the media, showed how far Pakistan and its civilian leaders have changed. Before that, in 2008, President Asif Zardari set off shock waves when he told the Indian media that he "dreamed of a day when Pakistan would be a force multiplier for India". It took extraordinary courage to say what no Indian leader would of Pakistan or of any other country, but it also raised not a whisper of protest in Pakistan. That panicked its army into the extraordinary attacks it then launched through its proxies, starting with our embassy in Kabul and culminating with Mumbai.
It is this dichotomy between the interests of Pakistan's army and of its citizens that we do not recognise and factor into our decisions. We should be doing everything we can to debunk its claim that India remains a threat, against which it is a shield. Our reacting to firing across the LoC and international border by letting rip with machine guns and mortars, killing civilians in Pakistan, is precisely what the army there wants us to do. It does not inhibit or weaken the generals, it props them up. Our policy of "aggressive defence" is, like all oxymorons, sagely unwise.
So is the received wisdom in Lutyens' Delhi that terrorism out of Pakistan is the most serious threat to India's security, and that there can be no question of our exploring a normal relationship until it stops. On Pakistan, sadly, Homo Lutyens is rarely sapient. We cannot quarantine ourselves from Pakistan. Good counter-in-telligence work will reduce the number of attacks, as it has after Mumbai, but while its army remains unregenerate, these won't stop. What, then, are our options?
After the Mumbai attack, FICCI asked a panel of experts, some of whom now advise this government, to study the threats terrorism posed to India. Three of them were retired police officers, all held in very high esteem. Their recommendations ranged from deniable covert action to economic sanctions to targeted cross-border strikes. These are now again bandied about, but none is viable.
Deniable covert action means doing to Pakistan what its terrorists do to us. This would be a mistake. We would fight Pakistan's army on its terms, kill innocent Pakistanis and harry the civilian government, harming and alienating those who want peace. Economic sanctions are meaningless when we have hardly any trade with Pakistan and no investments there. Cross-border strikes against a nuclear-weapon state are so fraught with risk that even the United States, as angry as we are with Pakistan, rarely tried despite the attacks on its forces in Afghanistan. And an international crisis causes infinitely more damage to India than to Pakistan, as Operation Parakram proved in 2002. These are fantasies, not policies.
It is also mulish to tie our relations with Pakistan to the resolution of a single issue, as Pakistan did for decades, insisting that everything must wait until Kashmir was resolved. We argued then that this was nonsensical between neighbours with a host of common problems and interests. Most Pakistanis now accept that argument; we have embraced that of their army.
So where, on a scale of threats to Indian citizens, does terrorism rank? Data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal shows that in 2009, 721 Indians were killed by terrorists, 759, 429, 252 and 304 in the next four years, and very few of these deaths could be attributed to Pakistan-159 of the 304 victims in 2013 were killed by left-wing extremists, 95 died in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nagaland, and 30 in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal; in Jammu and Kashmir, where Pakistan's terrorists mostly operate, the toll was 20. The same year, Pakistani terrorists killed 3,001 innocent Pakistanis. Pakistan is indeed the epicentre of terrorism the point from which destructive forces radiate, but which suffers the worst damage. The almost quotidian carnage in Pakistan is largely ignored in the Indian media and brushed aside by our talking heads, but the terrible outrage at Wagah has perhaps made us realise what the common citizen and the government there are dealing with.
Terrorism has a political fallout that domestic crime rarely does, but only peace will completely stop terrorism from Pakistan. In turn, this will happen if its army plays along, which it will either because a general is in power, or because a civilian government is strong enough to control it, or because it sees its interests served by peace. If a coup is unlikely, since the army does not want to be saddled with governance in Pakistan's parlous state, it is in our interest to do what we can to help the civilian leadership strengthen itself vis-Ã -vis the generals. That demands a continuous engagement, despite the provocations that the opponents of peace will throw up.
But we can also explore ways of sweetening the pill for its army. When General Pervez Musharraf persuaded his army that peace was unavoidable, Pakistanis said the proof lay in the fact that its officers bought up the land flanking the road leading from Wagah. The Pakistan Army has huge commercial and industrial interests. Its officers, who receive large land grants, farm for profit. We can, for example, buy cement from its two commercial foundations, wheat to top up our stocks, reducing the speculative hoarding in our Punjab that drives prices up, and set up plants with them in Sindh to generate power from Pakistan's enormous lignite reserves, importing the electricity without increasing our carbon footprint.
The diehards cannot be bought off but we can try to persuade the rest of Pakistan's army that peace with India has its uses. We had started to do this in the mid-2000s. Our present policy of silence and violence is ill-advised machismo that only saps the constituency for peace across the border, while bringing joy to the warmongers. Of course, we cannot let our guard down, nor will we, but neither can we intimidate the zealots in the Pakistan Army. We have to try to isolate them by engaging with the rest. This will be difficult but diplomacy is not about preaching to the converted.
Satyabrata Pal was India's high commissioner to Pakistan from 2006 to 2009
India's newest mantra is to 'Make in India', but not, it seems, either love or peace. Love is not love if the lover is Muslim, the beloved Hindu; it then becomes jihad, the making of war, not love. The loathing many Hindus harbour for India's Muslim heritage, but cannot openly express, is poured out into Pakistan, the neelkanth for this poison. With which, it seems, peace cannot be made unless there is peace.
If our national mission is to First Develop India, Pakistan seems irrelevant. It is neither a market nor a competitor, not a source of either investment or technology. As we drive ahead, Pakistan is not in our sights, not even in our rear view mirror. Not only do we have a larger territory, and therefore the strategic depth which the Pakistan Army pursues like a chimera, our population is six times as large, our economy eight times larger. And because Pakistan's economy has been stagnant for almost two decades, while India's is accelerating again after a five-year lull, the gap widens every year. Even those who propped Pakistan up as a counter-weight to India during the Cold War have long since realised that it is not. So why, we ask, do Pakistanis not see this, even when their noses are rubbed in it?
The fact is they do. Our mistake is in damning as a homogeneous glob of evil a country of 200 million people, almost all of whom simply want to get on with their lives. They may fear India, but very substantial numbers know how far Pakistan lags behind. They also accept that their problems are their own, not the result of our machinations. In Pakistan now, there is little of the open hostility towards India that there is towards Pakistan here. The educated and the business community want to engage with a resurgent India. Indians who contest this have not followed the last two elections there. There were no dire invocations of a foreign hand, no chest-thumping, no jingoism. The two major parties raised India only to pledge that they would work for peace with it.
Pakistan's political leaders have walked the talk. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's coming to his Indian counterpart's inauguration, over the opposition of his army but with the blessings of his political opponents and the media, showed how far Pakistan and its civilian leaders have changed. Before that, in 2008, President Asif Zardari set off shock waves when he told the Indian media that he "dreamed of a day when Pakistan would be a force multiplier for India". It took extraordinary courage to say what no Indian leader would of Pakistan or of any other country, but it also raised not a whisper of protest in Pakistan. That panicked its army into the extraordinary attacks it then launched through its proxies, starting with our embassy in Kabul and culminating with Mumbai.
It is this dichotomy between the interests of Pakistan's army and of its citizens that we do not recognise and factor into our decisions. We should be doing everything we can to debunk its claim that India remains a threat, against which it is a shield. Our reacting to firing across the LoC and international border by letting rip with machine guns and mortars, killing civilians in Pakistan, is precisely what the army there wants us to do. It does not inhibit or weaken the generals, it props them up. Our policy of "aggressive defence" is, like all oxymorons, sagely unwise.
So is the received wisdom in Lutyens' Delhi that terrorism out of Pakistan is the most serious threat to India's security, and that there can be no question of our exploring a normal relationship until it stops. On Pakistan, sadly, Homo Lutyens is rarely sapient. We cannot quarantine ourselves from Pakistan. Good counter-in-telligence work will reduce the number of attacks, as it has after Mumbai, but while its army remains unregenerate, these won't stop. What, then, are our options?
After the Mumbai attack, FICCI asked a panel of experts, some of whom now advise this government, to study the threats terrorism posed to India. Three of them were retired police officers, all held in very high esteem. Their recommendations ranged from deniable covert action to economic sanctions to targeted cross-border strikes. These are now again bandied about, but none is viable.
Deniable covert action means doing to Pakistan what its terrorists do to us. This would be a mistake. We would fight Pakistan's army on its terms, kill innocent Pakistanis and harry the civilian government, harming and alienating those who want peace. Economic sanctions are meaningless when we have hardly any trade with Pakistan and no investments there. Cross-border strikes against a nuclear-weapon state are so fraught with risk that even the United States, as angry as we are with Pakistan, rarely tried despite the attacks on its forces in Afghanistan. And an international crisis causes infinitely more damage to India than to Pakistan, as Operation Parakram proved in 2002. These are fantasies, not policies.
It is also mulish to tie our relations with Pakistan to the resolution of a single issue, as Pakistan did for decades, insisting that everything must wait until Kashmir was resolved. We argued then that this was nonsensical between neighbours with a host of common problems and interests. Most Pakistanis now accept that argument; we have embraced that of their army.
So where, on a scale of threats to Indian citizens, does terrorism rank? Data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal shows that in 2009, 721 Indians were killed by terrorists, 759, 429, 252 and 304 in the next four years, and very few of these deaths could be attributed to Pakistan-159 of the 304 victims in 2013 were killed by left-wing extremists, 95 died in Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya and Nagaland, and 30 in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal; in Jammu and Kashmir, where Pakistan's terrorists mostly operate, the toll was 20. The same year, Pakistani terrorists killed 3,001 innocent Pakistanis. Pakistan is indeed the epicentre of terrorism the point from which destructive forces radiate, but which suffers the worst damage. The almost quotidian carnage in Pakistan is largely ignored in the Indian media and brushed aside by our talking heads, but the terrible outrage at Wagah has perhaps made us realise what the common citizen and the government there are dealing with.
Terrorism has a political fallout that domestic crime rarely does, but only peace will completely stop terrorism from Pakistan. In turn, this will happen if its army plays along, which it will either because a general is in power, or because a civilian government is strong enough to control it, or because it sees its interests served by peace. If a coup is unlikely, since the army does not want to be saddled with governance in Pakistan's parlous state, it is in our interest to do what we can to help the civilian leadership strengthen itself vis-Ã -vis the generals. That demands a continuous engagement, despite the provocations that the opponents of peace will throw up.
But we can also explore ways of sweetening the pill for its army. When General Pervez Musharraf persuaded his army that peace was unavoidable, Pakistanis said the proof lay in the fact that its officers bought up the land flanking the road leading from Wagah. The Pakistan Army has huge commercial and industrial interests. Its officers, who receive large land grants, farm for profit. We can, for example, buy cement from its two commercial foundations, wheat to top up our stocks, reducing the speculative hoarding in our Punjab that drives prices up, and set up plants with them in Sindh to generate power from Pakistan's enormous lignite reserves, importing the electricity without increasing our carbon footprint.
The diehards cannot be bought off but we can try to persuade the rest of Pakistan's army that peace with India has its uses. We had started to do this in the mid-2000s. Our present policy of silence and violence is ill-advised machismo that only saps the constituency for peace across the border, while bringing joy to the warmongers. Of course, we cannot let our guard down, nor will we, but neither can we intimidate the zealots in the Pakistan Army. We have to try to isolate them by engaging with the rest. This will be difficult but diplomacy is not about preaching to the converted.
Satyabrata Pal was India's high commissioner to Pakistan from 2006 to 2009
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