Commentary/Mani Shankar Aiyar

An Indo-Pak dialogue will give us something to celebrate in this 50th year of our Independence

Every once in a decade or so, the opportunity comes our way of really moving forward on the India-Pakistan dialogue. The recent elections in Pakistan have provided us with yet another such opportunity. If we seize it, we might still be able to give ourselves something to celebrate in this 50th year of not only our Independence but also theirs.

We wrongly thought Benazir's first ascension to the prime ministership in 1988 was one such opportunity. The assumption that it might be an opportunity rested on the belief that as a modern, post-Partition Pakistani she might bring to bear a new mind-set on the India-Pakistan relationship. The belief was strengthened by the refreshing lack of hang-ups in the approach of her Indian counterpart, the modern-minded, post-Partition Rajiv Gandhi.

Benazir, however, proved so much her father's daughter that she remained mired in Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto's flawed vision of Pakistan as triumphant only when it triumphed over India. Ironically, she also proved most accommodating of the demands and restraints imposed on her by the assassins of her father -- the armed forces, who left her little room for manoeuvre. Also, of course, the internal situation in Kashmir so sharply deteriorated with V P Singh's take-over that Benazir could not pass up the opportunity of fishing in troubled waters.

Between Narasimha Rao and Nawaz Sharief there was personal rapport, but it could not be translated into anything historically meaningful because, first India backed away -- God knows why -- from concluding the Siachen agreement, which was all tied up, typed up and ready for signature. The Pak defence secretary, my old friend Saleem Jilani, was merely asked by his somewhat embarrassed host and counterpart, N N Vohra, to please pack his tent and depart into the night. Secondly, we still had to get a grip on terrorism in Kashmir, which made talking Kashmir with Pakistan just that much more difficult.

Narasimha Rao made a heroic effort to break out of the cul de sac in October 1993 when, in his letter of felicitations to Benazir, he offered to talk to Pakistan about Kashmir and related matters. This was a U-turn of the highest import in India's diplomatic posture. The story goes back to the Shimla Agreement of 1972.

There, it was Indira Gandhi personally who, in a last-minute one-on-one encounter with Bhutto, drafted the clause on Kashmir in the Shimla Agreement. No civil servant was involved; the foreign secretary, Tikki Kaul, having actually left Shimla for Delhi, persuaded that there would be no Shimla Agreement ! The Kashmir clause was a triumph for Indian diplomacy. For, hitherto, Pakistan had been insisting on agitating the issue in international fora.

Shimla bound the Pakistanis down to a bilateral dialogue aimed at 'a final settlement' of the J&K issue. Having secured their obligation to talk Kashmir with us bilaterally, we have spent the next 25 years not talking Kashmir to them bilaterally! And this is what passed for professionalism in the Indian Foreign Service.

In exactly the same way as Indira Gandhi at Shimla decided to take matters in her own hands, so also in October 1993 did Narasimha Rao abandon his customary (and disastrous) Doctrine of Non-Decision and make the bold move of taking up the promise of Shimla by offering to talk Kashmir to Benazir.

It is clear from a close reading of then foreign secretary J N 'Mani' Dixit's Anatomy Of A Flawed Inheritance and My South Block Years that the very absence of any reference to the prime minister's breakthrough in those books shows that it was not a foreign office draft which Rao absent-mindedly initiated, but a version that emerged full-blown from Rao's own computer.

It was a Rao initiative to retrieve the ground needlessly lost over the previous 21 years. A combination of bull-headedness on the part of the two foreign services with the highest quotient of bull-headedness in the world, the Indian and the Pakistani, stalled any progress on the ground. More damagingly, Benazir was engaged in a last-ditch (but happily doomed) effort to focus UN attention on alleged human rights violations in Kashmir. She had neither the wit nor the wisdom to balance embarrassing India at the UN with taking advantage of the breakthrough Indian offer.

We too shied away shamefully from taking up the Pakistani non-papers or even bringing the Pakistanis to a discussion on our own. The noora kushti that followed might have earned JS (Pak) his salary has not contributed one little mite to the resolution of the problems on the ground.

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