Mr Nawaz Sharif has recently given a robust and welcome statement to an Indian paper on the urgent need for building peace between Pakistan and India. It is worth quoting: “The political consensus within Pakistan is for a joint fight against terrorism and for rebuilding relations derailed by the Mumbai terror attack”. More significantly, he stated: “I know India is hurt, I admit that. Pakistan has a duty to do and it should do that duty as quickly as possible to get the peace process going by establishing the back-channel once again”. Mr Sharif would like “all parties, including the BJP, to be on board [this peace process]” and he wants to “cooperate fully with the ruling PPP in its peace efforts with New Delhi”. He appreciated the cooperative spirit of the Indian prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt last month and thought the meeting with the Pakistan prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, was a “positive step” to take the dialogue forward. He went further by welcoming the publication of Mr Jaswant Singh’s new book on Quaid-e-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Partition, wherein the author says that Mr Jinnah was a great and admirable man who was pushed into seeking a separate homeland for the Muslims of India by the intransigent and uncompromising attitude of the leadership of the Congress, in particular Jawaharlal Nehru. Mr Sharif also commended the efforts made by the former prime minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, when he visited Lahore in 1999 and went to the Minar-e-Pakistan to accept the reality of Pakistan and commit himself to bettering India-Pakistan relations.
Mr Sharif’s consistently pro-India-Pakistan peace position goes back to 1997 when he persuaded India to open secretary level talks and agreed to the old Indian demand for a “composite dialogue” to address all outstanding issues, including but not exclusively Kashmir. He was disappointed when the then Indian prime minister, Mr I K Gujral, backtracked on the Kashmir basket of the dialogue in 1998 because of impending elections, and then again when India under the BJP tested a nuclear device in May of the same year and compelled Pakistan to follow suit. But he wasn’t disheartened. Instead, he opened a back channel with India through Mr Niaz Naek, a former Pakistani foreign secretary, and the two sides took the discussion of a “Chenab Formula” for Kashmir quite far, before General Pervez Musharraf derailed everything by launching the Kargil misadventure and then seizing power in a coup in October 1999. Finally, in 2006, Mr Sharif and Ms Benazir Bhutto negotiated a Charter of Democracy in which one significant pledge related to building peace with India.
Mr Sharif’s fundamental calculation behind a policy of normalization with India is correct. He realizes that the so-called National Security State built in Pakistan by the Pakistan Army on the basis of the threat from the Indian “enemy”, whatever its original merit, has basically served to empower and legitimize the military in Pakistan to the detriment of civilians and undermined democracy. Having ruled Pakistan twice and suffered at the hands of the same military dominated establishment, he is now more than ever determined to snatch foreign policy back from the military, dismantle the ideological projection of India as Pakistan’s enemy #1 that necessitates a build up of the military through large chunks of the national budget and cripples the peoples’ quest for social welfare. So, in a significant way, Mr Sharif has arrived full circle to 1988 when democracy was ushered in half-heartedly by the military establishment and Benazir Bhutto tried unsuccessfully to build the blocks of peace with India under Rajiv Gandhi.
The best part of this concurrence of views between the PMLN – originally the military’s party – and the Pakistan Peoples Party is that it will serve to strengthen the hands of the current PPP government that is trying to secure the country’s eastern border with India while it confronts the Taliban challenge internally and on its western border with Afghanistan. No elected government in Pakistan is safe as long as strategies are formed, not predominantly on the basis of the country’s economic interests, but on how it is going to fight the next war against a more powerful neighbour. Mr Sharif gave Pakistan its nuclear weapon. But his intention was not to drop it on India. It was to enable Pakistan to move confidently forward to normalizing relations with it, as he demonstrated in 1999. The irony is that it was his nemesis, General Pervez Musharraf, who both derailed him over India policy in 1999 and then adopted the same pro-peace-with India strategy from 2003-07.
India should not ignore the historic significance of this convergence of views in the two leading parties of the country. It should stop putting conditions on the composite dialogue and get on with it. The Congress is now flushed with a great election win and doesn’t have to watch over its shoulder. Another Mumbai should not be allowed to derail the peace process. That can only be ensured by sticking to the peace process forcefully despite new threats and attempts by vested interest-terrorists rather than by succumbing to a sum zero nationalist game by enshrining cold-start doctrines.