In an interview with the Indian Express last week, prime minister Nawaz Sharif pronounced that he and his Indian counterpart Atal Behari Vajpayee could resolve all disputes, including Kashmir, bilaterally without interference from a third party. However, meeting US president Bill Clinton in Amman, Mr Sharif appealed to the Americans once again to arbitrate the Kashmir issue. This is muddle-headedness made worse by crude deception.
No one is surprised. The public reaction has been that of ridicule. The grotesqueness of the new “initiative” is not lost on the Indian Hitler, Bal Thakeray: you don’t make friendly gesture after declaring a Day of Solidarity with Kashmiri freedom-fighters during which the whole of Pakistan was shut down and supporters of the PM dragged Mr Vajpayee’s effigy through the streets, beating it with shoes before burning it.
Mr Sharif then announced that he is going to use the recently inaugurated bus service between Lahore and New Delhi to smoothie Indo-Pak relations. It would seem that Mr Vajpayee is going to ride the bus to Lahore in a gesture of goodwill, and Mr Nawaz Sharif is going to ride back with him to New Delhi, and on the way all Indo-Pak differences will be resolved in a monumental act of statesmanship. Some Pakistani newspapers announced Mr Sharif’’ great coup with glee, while others had Mian Sahib saying that he didn’t trust the Indians and he knew that nothing would come of the great bus ride with Mr Vajpayee. At the same time, a leading headline had Mr Sharif proclaiming that Kashmir would fall to Pakistan within the year.
Mr Sharif thinks he can fool the Indians and hoodwink the Pakistanis whilst gleaning kudos in Washington. This latest pantomime has not deceived observers in Pakistan who were earlier taken in by a similar spasm of “sanity” that the PM experienced in February 1997 when he first came to power. He had announced then that he would seek normalisation of relations with India for peace in the region and to give Pakistan’s crippled economy a breather.
What happened after that was the most shameful display of flip-flop. India’s “friendly” foreign minister I.K. Gujral became prime minister and tried to hold Mr Sharif to his pledge. It suddenly transpired that Mr Sharif had not consulted with Muslim League colleagues and had even forgotten to call to heel his information mastiffs indoctrinating the people with lethal anti-India propaganda on PTV. He then went through the demeaning theatrics of being snubbed by his own ministers and secretaries while discussing the sale of electricity to India with Mr Gujral at international conferences. What followed was even more bizarre. As the foreign secretaries of India and Pakistan discussed resolution of bilateral disputes, India deployed its Pakistan-specific Prithvi missile. This was followed by the most intense cross-border peacetime bombardment between the two armies ever recorded. Pakistan then left off its India-specific Ghauri missile, named provocatively after a medieval Muslim general who had invaded and conquered India. This was “normalisation” Nawaz Sharif style.
With Mr Vajpayee, Sharif’s record is even worse. The old Jan Sanghi controlled India’s Kashmir policy even while in opposition. His chauvinism is cloaked in diplomacy which he first applied to Pakistan as an ally of the Morarji Desai government in the 1980s. Immediately after coming to power, Mr Vajpayee tested India’s nuclear device and banked on Pakistan to validate it. Mr Sharif fell for the ruse and pushed Pakistan into its worst economic crisis by testing on May 28.
If Pakistan was in the IMF’s oxygen tent before May 28, it now had to be fed through a nose tube. PM Sharif blamed it all on the Indians and said insulting things about Mr Vajpayee that are still fresh in public memory. Pro-bomb hawks in Islamabad continue to believe that Pakistan has achieved parity with India and can now talk tough. The fact is that Pakistan has never been in a worse bargaining position.
Mr Sharif’s pantomime is tawdry. Even if he was not shamming, it would be impossible to negotiate anything with India given Pakistan’s internal plight. If Islamabad is full of hawks, New Delhi is littered with talons of the sharpest kind. The only difference is that while our hawks are fed on pipe dreams, Delhi’s belligerents are armed with facts and figures about Nawaz Sharif’s debilitating two-year role. Civil society in Pakistan is under threat. After the assault on the judiciary and the gagging of parliament, the press is teetering on the brink. The economy has been mishandled, ministers and professionals dealing with it have been shuffled about with abandon and replaced with the PM’s henchmen. Pakistan’s Afghan policy continues to be in shambles, taking relations with Iran and Central Asia down with it.
As India sees it, Pakistan is caught in a nutcracker situation with little leverage left in its foreign policy. If Mr Sharif’s inner sanctum is consoling itself with the thought that his latest gesture is nothing but “taking Vajpayee for a ride” which will buy the regime some more time from the Americans, it should think hard about the wisdom of taking the people of Pakistan for a ride yet again.