Pakistan PM’s intentions are unclear and don’t matter. His limitations do, and these are clear
Imran Khan is right to say a war between India and Pakistan is unlikely as no nuclear power would lose. It doesn’t, however, mean that peace is about to break out. It also depends on what kind of war we are talking about. War and peace between enemies who’ve fought four wars on various scales in seven decades, continue a low-intensity conflict through most of these, and have existential fears about each other is too serious and complex an issue to be analysed in terms of events and speeches. Analysts — peaceniks and warmongers — on both sides have made that error often enough in the past.
I am no exception. Over the 33 years since my first reporting visit to Pakistan (summer of 1985, to cover the trial of Sikh hijackers of an Indian Airlines plane), I have over-read the situation more than once, on the positive and the negative side. That, despite the fact that I have probably spent more time in Pakistan as a journalist than most in Indian media.
It takes you time — and patience — to appreciate the many unresolved ideological and political issues underlying our hostility. It is fashionable but juvenile to make comparisons with France and Germany. Imran is only the latest to use it, not the first. Nothing can be lazier. Neither France nor Germany was born by a division of the other. They fought many wars, but one was defeated with finality. Europe spent decades dismantling its toxic nationalism. There was America as the Big Daddy supervising this, and guaranteeing Western Europe protection. To put it brutally: That peace wasn’t reached because good sense descended on both sides. It is because one was defeated, devastated, divided and occupied by the world’s biggest powers. The first and the last opportunity for India-Pakistan peace was the Simla Agreement. We know who was insincere from the moment the agreement was signed.
This is precisely when Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (an elected, civilian leader with the vanquished Army deflated) launched Pakistan on to the path of pan-Islamisation and nuclearisation. He dissed that great Simla opportunity for permanent peace as a humiliating Treaty of Versailles and began preparing for a “thousand-year war” (his early 1970s boast, repeated about two decades later by his daughter as prime minister). Bhutto Senior wanted it to be a war Pakistan would never lose again. Hence the nukes.
That’s the reason Imran Khan can stand at a solemn religious celebration and remind the much bigger India that its conventional military power amounts to nothing.
Bhutto founded this post-1971 strategic doctrine. Let’s call it the ‘we-shall-neverlose-another-war to India’ doctrine. We could argue that Pakistan lost in Kargil. But the nukes closed India’s options. Or a provocation like that would have invited a full military response.
By the time Bhutto was done re-toxifying his country, his Army was set to reclaim power. It has gone through challenges, particularly from two full-majority governments under Nawaz Sharif. But now the template is set. An elected government is allowed as an optical necessity. Foreign, strategic, India-US-China policies, control of the nukes, temperature in Kashmir, Afghanistan are all out of the syllabus for elected governments.
In their own different ways, both Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif challenged it. One paid for it with prison, exile and life. The other with prison more than once, even with key family members, exile and disenfranchisement. Imran won’t make a pretence. Since Zia’s assassination and the return of some democracy, his is the first government elected and set up entirely with the institutional Army patronage. His party is truly the King’s Party in Pakistan’s politics. To ensure his election, the guy most likely to win was barred from contesting, campaigning, jailed with his daughter and son-in-law. The numbers Imran still fell short of were “arranged” overnight. Of course, his patrons were humane enough to free his rivals once the mission was accomplished. Imran isn’t about to make the blunder of his predecessors, and challenge the fauji-democracy template of divided powers. Or what an exasperated Nawaz Sharif described to me once as “aadha teetar, aadha bater” (half a partridge, half a quail).
Don’t be judgemental about Imran. Be realistic. On my first visit to Pakistan, eminent Pakistani lawyer, politician and activist, Aitzaz Ahsan, had described Zia’s partyless Muhammad Khan Junejo government as “bonsai democracy”. Pretty to look from outside, but never allowed to grow roots and branches outside of its little shelf-space.
Over the decades, Pakistan has cemented that template. One who challenges it, goes to jail, exile, death or all three. Imran Khan is smart. In all evidence so far, he’s Pakistan’s first volunteer bonsai. His intentions are unclear and don’t matter. His limitations do, and these are clear.
That’s the fundamental reality to remember before we get breathless over a gesture, an event, a speech, a pilgrimage.
Well begun but far from done
Kartarpur corridor is welcome, but let’s see how far it takes us
The inauguration of the Kartarpur corridor is a positive step, but whether this could be the means to the end called peace between India and Pakistan, remains an open question. Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan used an interaction with a visiting group of Indian journalists to say that it wasn’t in Pakistan’s interest to allow its soil to be used for terrorism against others. But the history of the relationship between India and Pakistan has been that of one step forward and two steps back. The first challenge is to sustain and keep the idea of the corridor alive beyond 2019, the year that coincides with the 550th birth anniversary of Sikh guru Baba Nanak Dev.
The concern among sceptics that India will not be able to control security in the 4.5-kilometre corridor doesn’t appear to be too insurmountable a challenge. Also, the chances that the opening of the corridor may lead to the revival of the Khalistan movement appear to be remote, because of a few significant reasons. One, a lot of water has flown down the Beas since the height of the Khalistan movement of the 1980s. The change is clear from the fact that the Congress government is in power in the border state again. Second, in terms of history, Pakistan has never had any claim on Punjab, unlike Kashmir, which remains an unresolved territorial dispute.
Having said this, the threat on account of Pakistan’s history has not gone away overnight. There is a strong possibility that our neighbour will stop exporting terror from its territory to India, in violation of the MoU signed in 2004 between Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. At the inauguration, Mr Khan said the Army and the PM were on the same page when it came to ties with India. While this is good news for Mr Khan, the more important requirement is for India and Pakistan to be on the same page in fighting terror. Only then can momentum be built for the popular support that is a prerequisite for any peace effort. At present, the mood in India is not in favour of a dialogue with Pakistan. With India set to go in for elections in 2019, Mr Khan’s gesture, although well meaning, appears to have come at the wrong time.