Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
For the People
M.J. Akbar
Arab News, 10/26/03
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has many virtues, but the principal one is conviction. He is not rash: by definition a successful politician cannot be rash. This is why he does not waste his convictions by spreading them too thin. In over five years of governance, there are two policy lines that are indisputably his. One is the transformation of infrastructure. No one had ever given as much priority to surface communication, and roads in particular, as Vajpayee. When he first proposed this vision, it was met by the kind of skepticism from the Congress that the left had reserved for Rajiv Gandhi when he ushered in the computer and telecommunications revolution. Manmohan Singh, finance minister for five much-lauded years, told the Rajya Sabha that the new prime minister did not know arithmetic: such vast outlays as necessary for such vision did not emerge out of budgets as he understood them. Singh’s successor, the academically undoctored Yashwant Sinha, showed precisely how a budget could produce the money for investment in life. Those roads are a reality and a vital element of the feel-good factor that has energized our economy towards 8 percent growth.
The second was a commitment toward peace with Pakistan. This obviously needed more courage. The controversy over roads was essentially insubstantial and disappeared like passing mist. The problem with Pakistan was visceral. Vajpayee had to deal with at least four incompatible elements. He belonged to a party that had been formed to distil hatred for partition into Indian votes, and was thus historically anti-Pakistan; there was a genuinely deeply held view among his senior colleagues that peace would alienate the BJP’s traditional voter; decisive elements of the Pakistan establishment, since the late eighties, had convinced themselves that a low-level insurrection in the Kashmir Valley would succeed where two full-scale wars before that had not; and years of violence had made Pakistan an unpopular idea with Indians outside the BJP matrix as well. Talk of a lose-lose situation.
Relations between India and Pakistan can be divided into two unequal patches of time and difficulty. The first lasted some 17-odd years, until 1965. Whatever the future holds, it is unlikely to equal that past of the first 17 years. The longest war between the two nations broke out within ten weeks of freedom, but strangely it did not embitter relations in the manner that future generations were to witness — perhaps because both countries could claim some kind of victory from that war. India could claim that it had successfully reversed the unexpected Pakistani offensive, and held on to the part of the valley that mattered; while Pakistan could ensure that what it held provided it with sufficient base from which to search for a future. Or maybe the memory of war was lost in the larger sea of blood that accompanied partition. In any case, the two countries honored the letter and spirit of the Nehru-Liaquat Pact: visas were easy to obtain, trade was calibrated but persisted, and the rhetoric rarely degenerated into snarling.
Everything changed with the second unexpected offensive, in the autumn of 1965. This too was reversed, but it set in motion a second partition of the subcontinent, and then a third. The second partition drew a curtain on family tourism. Indian Muslim families who had been separated in 1947 could still make an annual trip to relatives; weddings were possible within extended families. That war froze communication, and all later attempts at reheating were desultory at best. We shall never know the full truth behind Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s decision to start the 1965 war, but there is enough evidence that he wanted to exploit a perceived military weakness in India.
His judgment was surely influenced by the less than competent performance of the Indian Army in the 1962 war against China. However, Ayub was no Mao Zedong, and the Indian Army had opened its eyes after the wake-up call of 1962. Instead of marching to Delhi, the Pakistan Army was forced into rearguard action on the outskirts of Lahore. Its tacticians proved to be worse than its strategists. It even lost space in the Kashmir under Pakistan’s control.
An important political point was, however, established in the peace talks at Tashkent in January 1966. By exchanging territory captured across both the international border and the Line of Control in Kashmir, India and Pakistan gave a de facto status to the LoC as the Kashmir border by mutual treaty. No one hands over territory that it considers a legitimate part of its national space. This is why for instance India gave up the Haji Pir Pass — and Pakistan took it back, while ceding what it had gained during the 1965 war. Implicit was made explicit at Tashkent. Ayub Khan therefore suffered a double defeat. He failed totally in his attempt to wrest the Kashmir Valley from India, and then compounded this defeat at Tashkent by accepting the Line of Control as the line behind which Pakistan would live. Nothing in the rhetoric of the future would change this basic fact.
His foreign minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had been the hawk with the largest wingspan before hostilities began, realized what had happened in Tashkent. He also knew that he was complicit, but, being a politician with flexible morals, turned on his mentor when facts became nasty. When his turn came to negotiate after defeat, in 1972, he proved to be more adept than Ayub, but the substantive reality did not shift: Pakistan once again accepted the LoC as the dividing line in Kashmir. To be fair to Bhutto, in the circumstances of 1972 he had little option.
The tensions of politics and war took their toll. That heavy curtain between people became a wall. The only Indian politician who made any conscious effort to find some room through that wall was Atal Behari Vajpayee, even if he had to leave his party disappointed when not disoriented. Other politicians were either indifferent, or when they had the will, could not find a way through the system. Vajpayee reopened the visa regime when he was Morarji Desai’s foreign minister during the Janata Party rule between 1977 and 1980; and when he came to power as prime minister, his second important initiative was to try and find peace with Pakistan, through the Lahore accord. The proposals with which India has resurrected the peace momentum are linked by one thought: that people must pay as small a price as possible for the vagaries of politics, or the compulsions of policy. The prime minister understands that the bulk of those Muslims who have been divided cannot afford airfares. Hence the thought that a ferry service could start between Bombay and Karachi, making travel more accessible between the center and south of India to Pakistan and vice versa. For five decades the governments of India and Pakistan have been saying that they want to do the best for the Kashmiri people: here is a practical chance to actually help them by opening a bus route between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad. The risks in this idea are all being taken by India, because this route will be vulnerable to both political and real crossfire.
Normally, even politicians who are inclined toward peace rather than war get tentative when they see an election approaching. Vajpayee seems, paradoxically, spurred by the thought of an approaching election. He believes that while you can win on a war platform, as he did after Kargil, you can do even better on a peace ticket. This is heresy in the prevalent cynicism. Pakistan’s generals may not understand such logic, since their lives are blissfully uncomplicated by elections. But Vajpayee may be motivated by something even more heretical: he may want peace for its own sake, because it is good for India and Pakistan, because the cost of conflict is colossal, and not because it makes good or bad electoral sense. As an idea this is, alas, unusual enough to be radical. For a party like the BJP this must be positively revolutionary.
You cannot, of course, clap with one hand. Pakistan is within its rights to deliberate over a response; but it would be dismal if its response were so conditional-conventional as to sabotage this package. Indians and Pakistanis have become so weary of failure that they have stopped believing that anything sensible can happen… President Musharraf has said that the sense of dismay in Pakistan at the failure of Agra was profound. He too then heard the echo of a muted longing for peace and normalcy. Here is a chance to reawaken that oft-defeated hope. This also sets the stage for a series of steps leading to the SAARC summit in Islamabad in January. Delhi does not live in a vacuum; it knows that talks with Pakistan must resume at some point, even if cross-border terrorism does not end. Home Minister Lal Krishna Advani has lent his weight to the process by opening up the opportunity for talks with the Hurriyat. (The Hurriyat’s initial confusion is understandable; it never expected that its demand would be acceptable.)
The Vajpayee initiative, then, has been thought through. It is measured, rather than frantic. It would be a mistake if some clever strategists in Islamabad persuaded their leader that this initiative is a sign of weakness, or that American displeasure with India’s stand on Iraq can be turned to Pakistan’s advantage. The world has become more complex; such theorizing is self-delusion rather than ingenious.
Those in power are always tempted by war booty. They rarely realize that the peace dividend pays out much, much more. Civilians find it easier to appreciate this. Generals must find the mindset to understand this too.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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