Three good persons from India recently came to Pakistan to help launch Daily Times, a liberal English newspaper from Lahore, Islamabad and Karachi. Narasimhan Ram is the forthright editor of Frontline, a journal of integrity. Shekhar Gupta is the expansive editor-in-chief of The Indian Express that is published in eight editions. And Arundhati Roy is the little big woman whose mesmerising prose and breathtaking vision is a source of inspiration to so many around the world. That they came at a time of heightened Indo-Pak tensions was creditable. That they chose to talk of peace when the ruling Hindu-BJP in India is obsessed with talk of war was courageous. We salute them. We also salute the thousands of Pakistanis who thronged the seminars to welcome the visitors and applaud the demand for peace.
But Indo-Pak peace is as elusive as a chameleon. Whenever it seems within our grasp, it manages to transform itself into war. The fifty-five year post-independence history of both countries is littered with lost opportunities for peace followed by outbreaks of hostility. The record of recent times is especially depressing. In late1989, Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi almost clinched an accord on Siachin. But, faced with general elections, Mr Gandhi couldn’t make it stick in India. The next six years were full of acrimony. In 1997, Nawaz Sharif and I K Gujral reached an understanding on how to tackle the full range of issues bedeviling relations, including Kashmir but not limited to it. But Mr Gujral felt compelled to backtrack when confronted with the prospect of a resurgent BJP in the 1998 elections. Then came the nuclear blasts and the “desert shook” in India while the “whole mountain turned white” in Pakistan.
Fortunately, though, the war paint was peeled off by both sides when the Lahore Summit rolled round in 1999. Nawaz Sharif agreed not to be dogmatic about Kashmir and Atal Behari Vajpayee went to the Minar-i-Pakistan to assure Pakistanis that India had no malicious or evil designs on their country. But did we bury the hatchet for all times to come? No. Pakistan’s Kargil adventure scattered the prospects of peace so carefully nurtured at Lahore a few months earlier. Two bad years followed. Then came Agra in 2001. But once again peace proved abortive when General Musharraf’s personal success proved to be Pakistan’s collective loss. The flexibility over Kashmir offered by General Musharraf was spurned by Mr Vajpayee at the altar of “cross-border” infiltration.
Since then, Mr Vajpayee has become a bit of a warmonger while General Musharraf is sounding like a peacenik. India’s army has maintained a continual and unprecedented threat along the border and innocent villagers on both sides are falling in the artillery duels between the two sides. Fresh hope was injected into the equation recently when the US stepped into the fray and tried to pry the two sides apart. This was followed by General Musharraf’s unprecedented offer of unconditional talks with India, coupled with verifiable assurances that Pakistan would do its utmost to plug cross-border infiltration into Kashmir. What more could India want?
The BJP wants to hold elections in Kashmir in September-October of this year. It says these shall be free and fair. And it doesn’t want Pakistan to interfere in the process, let alone instigate the Kashmiris to boycott them. But it refuses to concede that Kashmir is a trilateral issue which will not be “solved” by keeping Pakistan out of the loop while putting most of its eggs in the basket of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference rather than in the All Parties Hurriyat Conference. This suggests that the BJP is not sincerely interested in finding a solution to Kashmir, not even one within the ambit of India’s constitution, and is merely playing for time in order to relieve the international pressure on it.
Recent developments strengthen this perception. The Ram Jethmalani committee sponsored by New Delhi to talk the APHC into contesting the elections has recommended that the elections be postponed so that more time is available to iron out the differences and problems between the contending sides. But Mr LK Advani, India’s deputy prime minister, has not only rejected the proposal but also accused General Musharraf of pressurising the APHC to boycott the elections. So what else is new? Did he expect that General Musharraf and the APHC would roll over and play dead so that New Delhi can walk all over the Kashmiris as in the past?
Under the circumstances, we might conclude that the war in Kashmir could be part of the “solution” rather than part of the “problem” for the BJP. The more the Hindu right in India slips in popularity, the more it whips up war hysteria against Pakistan and the Muslims of India. And with elections in ten more Indian states forecast for next year, the BJP will not risk lowering the anti-Pakistan hype in the foreseeable future so that it can retain its Hindu vote-bank.
This doesn’t bode well for peace. Mr Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, is on his way to the region for the umpteenth time to try and knock sense into both countries. We wish him luck.