Shifting sands or just quicksand?

In the meantime, further relaxation has been introduced to the bilateral relation, with more and more personal touches by the leaders of officials of both the countries. The scion of a ruling family from a North Indian state, the courtly external affairs minister of India profusely quoted from Faiz Ahmed, Pakistan's uncrowned poet laureate while speaking over the telephone to his Pakistani counterpart. On their part, the Pakistani interlocutors liberally cracked Punjabi jokes. Whenever the couplets of Ghalib and Faiz are brought in, jokes are frequently exchanged and moods on either side are swamped with nostalgia for the golden days of yesteryear -- these are usually the signs of ice melting in the frozen relationship.

Apart from the symbolism and rhetoric ingrained in Indo-Pakistan diplomacy, the flurry of events in the last few weeks, accompanied by extraordinary diplomatic alacrity, produced one tangible result. After about ten long years of going round and round the mulberry bush, Islamabad and Delhi have at last realised that it is time to bury the hatchet. The urge for peace and amity has never been greater between the two countries. But all the gestures so far on either side can prove illusory as they often did in the past.

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A gesture, as Menachem Begin said on the visit of Anwar Sadat to Isreal "is only a gesture. Inter-state relations have more solid foundation, based as they are on national interest." The sentiments and emotions should be accorded value and welcomed too, but they are not, and will never be, a substitute for hard-headed negotiations and results obtained therefrom. When Rajiv Gandhi became India's prime minister in 1984, President Ziaul Huq of Pakistan saw brighter prospects for Indo-Pakistan rapprochement because, to him, Rajiv belonged to the post-partition generation, and, as such, carried no prejudicial baggage. The realities however turned out to be otherwise, proving that the national interests change neither with change of personality nor with the generation one may belong to.

It also may be recalled that preparatory to the Shimla meeting in 1972, DP Dhar visited Islamabad as Indira Gandhi's emissary, and even at that time he profusely quoted Urdu couplets while guarding zealously his country's vital national interests. The Shimla agreement, for the first time, formally put the Kashmir dispute in a bilateral frame which could not henceforth broken by Pakistan. It goes substantially to DP Dhar's credit. So, the hard realities inherent in the positions held respectively by India and Pakistan can, at no point, be lost sight of. While it is obvious that some sort of dialogue, maybe even a composite one, will resume and continue, but the approach of the two sides is likely to be different, and can catalyse fresh problems. There are already hints that whatever progress was made at Lahore, Agra, and Islamabad should be set aside and the process should re-start from the Shimla Agreement of 1972.

No less formidable will be the difference in the personalities now heading the government in India. Vajpayee, a very senior leader with unquestioned popularity and stature as an Indian nationalist, was in a position to take a bold decision, and could take an unchartered path. Recently, he is on record having said that his life-long mission is to craft good relations with neighbours. Has Manmohan Singh a similar life-long mission? Can he, being from a minority community be able to assert his views on the majority community? Can he be bold enough to deviate from the beaten tracks followed by his party predecessors? How will he perform at the stumbling block of a future dialogue: the issue of Jammu and Kashmir?

During their rule lasting for almost half a century, successive Congress governments could not effectively tackle this problem. Experience shows that no Congress government has made any progress on the Kashmir issue after the signing of the Shimla Agreement which has since been stalled. In the meantime, the difference in perception on the issue of both India and Pakistan is as wide as ever, while the option for the use of force by both countries has not resolved the issue, and apparently been discarded.

A sustained dialogue may be a sane approach to the issue for the moment. The process can persist with pressure from the people and intelligentsia from both the countries, as well as the international community. But at the end of the day the differences still persist. JN Dixit, India's National Security advisor, who will exercise influence on the present government's policy making, thinks that "a solution to the Kashmir problem could be sought with some adjustment in the delineation of the line of control." But Pakistan's General Musharraf is totally dismissive of this idea, stating: "Line of control is not acceptable in future solution of the Kashmir dispute."

With such pitfalls lying ahead, how do we describe current trends in Indo-Pakistan nomalisation: shifting sands or just quicksand!

Brig ( retd) Hafiz is former DG of BIISS.