A bold Turnaround

Resuming the bus ride to Pakistan

Shekhar Gupta

A consistent foreign policy is a very peculiar Indian phenomenon. The world over, the first thing a change in government signals is a shift in the foreign policy. Note the way the US made radical shifts on China and NMD with the arrival of Bush. Or, at a more directly relevant level, how the Labour Party in London began with an activist stance on Kashmir, junking John Major’s deliberate indifference. In India, funnily, if there is one area where we take pride in not changing, it is foreign policy.

This is probably why the Vajpayee government has followed up its latest Kashmir/Pakistan initiative with defensive whisperings of ‘‘but we haven’t shifted our policy’’, instead of flaunting it as a bold new initiative, an audacious break from the past. The fact is, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra have done exactly that and for once they all seem to have consensus amongst themselves on it. This is bolder than some of the other landmark shifts in our foreign policy: Narasimha Rao’s opening to Israel, Vajpayee climbing the steps of Lahore’s Minar-i-Pakistan and Jaswant Singh’s approving note on George Bush’s NMD speech. Post-Kargil we had maintained an unrelenting posture that we won’t talk to Pervez Musharraf unless he totally ceased cross-border terrorism. Now we invite him for talks in the same breath as we order our forces to join battle, all guns blazing, with his thugs in Kashmir. Now, how would Vajpayee and his government want this policy justified, as a continuation of the old one, a minor change in nuance, or the boldest move ever by India for a final solution so the subcontinent’s future generations are not held to ransom by this dispute?

It is because of this farcical devotion to ‘‘consistency’’ in foreign policy that this government is not able to take the credit for a move that finds an affirmative echo not merely in foreign capitals but also within the political system at home. The Congress has welcomed it, so have all the coalition partners. Peaceniks are happy anyway, and if the Sangh Parivar has a problem nobody is saying so. In fact, formally, they have also welcomed it. Why, then, be shy of admitting that it is a shift, a new track, a departure from the past?

The classical Indian position on Kashmir was that it is an inseparable part of India. Whatever was happening there was our internal problem. Pakistan had no locus standi there except vacating the one-third of J&K it still occupies. This has been evolving, and changing slowly over the past half decade.

There were the initial thrust-and-parry engagements between I.K. Gujral and Nawaz Sharif where we agreed to discuss Kashmir as part of a composite dialogue. Then Vajpayee took a giant step forward by formally putting it on the negotiating table in the Lahore Declaration. Now, his invitation to a Pakistani military dictator to discuss the issue without preconditions, even while fighting continues in the Valley, is a turnaround, irrespective of what diplomatic euphemism you may choose to describe it.

The fact is, it is a good turnaround. It is not a loss of face or sacrifice of national interest. But it will deliver anything substantively positive only if it is followed up with conviction instead of the usual fears or self-doubt: have I taken a wrong turn? Am I in the wrong lane? Am I going too fast?

The foundations of India’s classical, holy national position on Kashmir were laid firmly in the Cold War paradigm. The West supported Pakistan on Kashmir because it was a Cold War ally and, for long, even a member of baby-NATOs in the East. The Soviet Union supported India for precisely the same reason and used their veto to keep the UN, and the international community in general, off our backs. But since the general international opinion was against our claims on Kashmir, we harped on bilateralism to such an extent that we traded the entire gains of a decisively won war (1971) in exchange for Bhutto’s fraudulent certification of Kashmir as a bilateral issue. The Cold War is now over, Pakistan is internationally isolated, nobody in the world wants any maps redrawn and international opinion, overwhelmingly, is in favour of burying old blood feuds. This renders our classical position entirely obsolete.

If we accept this basic argument, movement onwards becomes smoother. We have to find a final solution to Kashmir. Why, then, not exploit this new, favourable internatio- nal mood? You do not want foreign mediation, you only need goodwill and the pressure this will bring upon Pakistan to be more reasonable. But for even that to work, you have to talk to Pakistan. Which means departing from the second stage of our holy Kashmir position that it is our internal problem and we need only to talk to our fellow citizens in that state to resolve it. As our experience so far, first with the Hizbul Mujahideen and then with the Hurriyat and Shabir Shah, has shown there is no middle ground in Kashmiri politics that is not somebody’s stooge, ours or Pakistan’s. Look at the plight of poor K.C. Pant who has tried gamely to carry on with what can only be described as a dialogue of the dumb. He has lately been reduced to talking to emissaries of Shabir Shah!

This government does not tell you too much. But if you were to still give it the benefit of doubt, perhaps the ceasefire was not such an arbitrary move, nor is this one. Perhaps the expectation was that the ceasefire would test Pakistan’s intentions -- they did respond positively at least in terms of stopping shooting along the line of control -- and also start a dialogue with the Hurriyat leading on to a separate dialogue with Pakistan. The Hurriyat, in its lack of political wisdom as well as moral courage, has thrown away a great opportunity to grab the middleground mainstream from the Farooqs and the rest. So why shouldn’t India talk directly to the Pakistanis instead? The latest move, therefore, can be seen as a well thought out one, another logical step in the process set in motion pro-actively not with the Ramzan ceasefire, but with the Lahore bus ride.

Yes, this could go wrong. In fact, so dependent is this now on the good sense of Musharraf and the patience of Vajpayee, besides the behaviour of the jehadis nobody seems to control and the dynamics of the Sangh Parivar’s own internal politics, that it will take a lot of doing, and intervention of many gods, to take it to any logical conclusion. It is even possible that it will only bring us one more Kargil. But remember, when it does, this initiative could be, morally and internationally, as useful in fighting that war as the Lahore bus ride was in the summer of 1999.