High road to peace via Agra

SAEED NAQVI

IT might be a sobering thought on the eve of the Agra summit that we sometimes exaggerate our hawks. When the RSS mouthpiece, Panchjanya, and the Pakistani right wing daily, Jang joined hands to invite their respective readers to submit the agenda they would have Vajpayee-Musharraf discuss at Agra, one expected fire and brimstone. But when I perused the entries as one of the judges, I was actually startled: the entries were the very essence of good sense and moderation. The readers wanted an end to terrorism, continuance of talks beyond Agra, cultural and economic exchanges. Here was an instance of the people showing the way.

The difficulty with Kashmir is that every pundit is out to solve it. Not just in India and Pakistan: everywhere else I travelled. Visit any foreign office and the lazy query is: "So what are you going to give Musharraf?" I suspect the query is reworded for Pakistani journalists. Mercifully, over the past few days, this torrent has become something of a trickle.

The external publicity department has handed me a document on Indo-Pak summits. It transpires that the Vajpayee-Musharraf meet will be the 49th such summit, either bilaterally arranged or on the margins of other international meetings like SAARC, CHOGM, Davos or the UNGA. Of these 17 mini or mega summits have been held since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And, of course, Pakistan has difficulty climbing down from that minaret from where it has sustained a chant of "Kashmir, Kashmir, Kashmir". Since 1989 (the year of the Soviet departure from Afghanistan), this incantation has been accompanied by a steady injection of militancy from across the border.

It can be nobody’s case that there was no local discontent. Indian political masters of yore mistrusted the Kashmiri people when it came to elections. It were the rigged elections which ignited the fire. The fuel came from across the border. Some of these mistakes were recognised. Hence the unilateral ceasefire. But injected militancy had acquired a life of its own.

Gen. Musharraf is part of a tradition which considers Kashmir as an unfinished business of Partition. The Indian case is possibly more sophisticated. Indian secularism protects, among a billion others, the world’s second largest Muslim population and all issues, including Kashmir, must be addressed in such a way as not to rupture this tapestry.

The irony is that the unspeakable tragedy of the people of Kashmir is aggravated beyond all threshold of bearable pain by these two positions. No sensitive, feeling human being can deny the fact that Kashmir is in urgent need of the "masih" who will provide the healing touch.

Musharraf has his army, the ISI and the jehadis to mollify. They will urge him to gallop out on a charger and "solve Kashmir." This kind of rhetoric sounds good in "Firdousi." In contemporary diplomacy that grand equestrian image ends up with the rider tilting at the windmills.

Kashmir is a high-voltage issue in Musharraf’s internal politics. It is also an issue of high saliency in our internal affairs. No democratically elected government can tinker with the issue without considerable energy being expended in preparing public opinion on the issue. And it is impossible to prepare public opinion for a solution to the Kashmir issue in an atmosphere of tension. This, I dare say, should be true on the Pakistani side as well.

Since Kashmir is an urgent issue, a respected politician should be selected from both sides and provided with high-level teams. In three months the teams must agree to meet in Murree, then in Ooty and so on. Take my word, between Murree and Ooty, the Ind-Pak temperature will have dropped sufficiently to be conducive to the solution of even the most intractable issue. Vajpayee and Musharraf shall meet on the margins of the UNGC in New York in September.

Musharraf has to take a few steps towards democracy and another meeting could well be possible at the CHOGM in Brisbane in October. If Kathmandu stabilises, the SAARC summit may well be another early forum. The foreign ministers will have to accelerate the pace of their meetings.

The Lahore declaration promised intensification of efforts to "resolve all issues, including the issue of Jammu and Kashmir" and to "intensify the composite and integrated dialogue process for an early and positive outcome of the agreed agenda". Since the Pakistani purpose is not to repudiate Lahore (that would blow the summit), the "agreed bilateral agenda" is manifest in the composition of Vajpayee’s delegation: Advani, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha and Murasoli Maran. The international community will scream murder unless a separate, specialised group is set up to go comprehensively into the nuclear issue. In fact, Vajpayee himself is keen on such a group, in addition to the seven others spelt in Islamabad on October 18, 1998.

As far as the Pakistan High Commissioner’s tea party, who knows Gen Musharraf may return smelling of roses to his constituency having "braved" the opposition in India and met the Hurriyat leaders. For the Hurriyat, of course, there will be time "yet for a hundred indecisions," visions and revisions "before the taking of a toast and tea."