[sacw] Irfan Husain & Eqbal Ahmad in DAWN

[Harsh Kapoor]

=46eb 22, 1999
Posted below are 2 separate Op-Ed pieces (that appeared on the 20th & 21st
=46eb 1999) in the Pakistani Daily 'DAWN'. The first article is by Irfan
Hussain and the second by Eqbal Ahmad.
//South Asia Citizens Web//
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(1) [From: DAWN, Feb 20, 1999]

Imagine...
By Irfan Husain

FOR just a little while, imagine a scenario in which relations between
India and Pakistan were perfectly normal; that there was no Kashmir
problem; and both countries therefore did not have to pay for the
bloated defence establishments that currently hobble the two economies.

In this utopian subcontinent, things would be very different than they
are today. Quite apart from the fact that massive amounts would be
available for building the physical and social infrastructure, the
difference in attitudes would be even more marked. For instance,
politicians on both sides would no longer have each other to use as
scapegoats for everything that was wrong in the two countries, and would
hence have to focus on the hard task of delivering good governance
instead of simply mouthing jingoistic slogans.

Pakistan, in particular, would be a very different country. Without the
threat of armed conflict with our giant neighbour, the army would not
have acquired the massive influence it wields today. Indeed, we would
probably not have experienced the three crippling bouts of martial law
that stunted and deformed Pakistan's political development. Taking this
exercise in wishful thinking a step further, it can be argued that in a
non-militarized Pakistan, East Pakistanis would not have felt so
alienated and thus might have stayed on in the federation, sparing
themselves the bloodbath of the 1971 civil war that resulted in the
birth of Bangladesh.

And without Zia's attempts to seek legitimacy through his brand of
Islamization, the genie of sectarianism might still be in the bottle
instead of spreading murder and mayhem across the land. Pakistan may
have been a more forward looking and sane place instead of the madhouse
it has become. India, too, might not have witnessed the upsurge of rabid
Hindu nationalism that is eroding its secular foundations. Without the
hysteria and paranoia that surround relations between the two countries,
parties like the BJP and Shiv Sena may not have found the support that
they have been getting in recent years.

Pleasant though this dream is, it is time for a reality check. The last
52 years have seen a steady escalation of tension between the two
neighbours, punctuated by three wars. A mindless hatred now colours the
discourse between them, and powerful forces on both sides have a vested
interest in preventing normalization of relations.

The demonstrations planned by the Jamaat-i-Islami to protest against the
Indian PM's visit indicate the level of insanity that now governs
relations between India and Pakistan. This knee-jerk reaction is not
unlike Shiv Sena activists digging up a cricket pitch to prevent a
cricket match between the two national teams.

If Nawaz Sharif has been consistent in anything, it is his desire to
improve ties with India. Unfortunately, he has been frustrated by the
fact that he has been forced to use the same old cliche-ridden foreign
office briefs that have got us nowhere in the last five decades. In
addition, he has the defence establishment breathing down his neck.
Consequently, whenever he has talked about improving relations with
India, he has been obliged to repeat the self-determination mantra, and
repeat yet again the UN Security Council resolutions.

=46or any progress to be made in Indo-Pak relations, we will have to
delink Kashmir from the other elements that make up relations between
sovereign states. Trade, travel and tourism must be opened up; sports
and cultural exchanges need to be promoted; and a free flow of
information, books and newspapers should be encouraged. These measures
will reduce tension and make it easier to deal with the intractable
Kashmir issue after a period of, say, five years. After all, we have
been living with the present status quo for five decades; another five
years won't make much difference. Meanwhile, we can get on with life.
After all, it is not India that is being penalized by our "Kashmir
first" stance: our confrontationist policies are costing us much more.

Pakistanis need to wake up to the fact that in real life, possession is
nine-tenths of the law. Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of the
unending debate over Kashmir, we have to face the reality of Indian
occupation of a large part of the state while we occupy another. This
situation is not about to change, so instead of keeping up the
plebiscite drumbeat the world is deaf to, we might as well get on with
things rather than rant on about the injustice of history and geography.

And while we keep trotting out the well-worn UN resolutions calling for
a plebiscite to determine the will of the Kashmiri people, we
conveniently forget that the same resolutions called for a complete
withdrawal of Pakistani forces from all parts of the state as a
pre-condition to the vote. We never fulfilled this condition, thus
giving the Indians an excuse to back out of their commitment.
Subsequently, India made the contested state a part of the Union, thus
making the UN resolutions null and void in their books.Now we can - as
we have been doing these last fifty years - continue debating the legal
niceties of the whole question until the cows come home. The Indians are
not going to hand us their bit of Kashmir on a platter, and we have
neither the military might nor the international support needed to
change the status quo in our favour. Sooner or later, there will be an
agreement dividing the state along the present Line of Control. Reaching
this understanding sooner rather than later will save us a lot of money
and a lot of frustration.

Obviously, there will be considerable resistance from the large number
of ostriches who inhabit this country. But the Nawaz Sharif government
with its huge parliamentary majority can push the deal through. So when
the two prime ministers meet over this weekend, they would be well
advised to conduct the discussions without the briefs their respective
defence and foreign affairs ministries have prepared for them. If they
really wish to break out of the rigidly sterile positions the two
countries have adhered to for decades and solve problems rather than
just repeat hackneyed cliches, they should be prepared to break fresh
ground and take risks.

Anything less will be more of the same.

=A9 DAWN Group of Newspapers, 1999
________________________________

(2) [From: DAWN, 21 Feb 1999 ]

The bus can bring a Nobel prize

By Eqbal Ahmad

MR Atal Behari Vajpayee's bus journey to Lahore is unquestionably a
historic event. Nevertheless, a question remains: will the two prime
ministers make history? If they do, they would most likely win the next
year's Nobel Prize for peace and, more importantly, will be remembered as
among the great statesmen of our time.

They make an unlikely pair of peacemakers. India's 73-year-old prime
minister has been for all his adult life an activist, then leader in the
RSS, a militant wing of the Hindu nationalist movement. Making peace with
Pakistan has never been his party's preference. Furthermore, he leads a
shaky and cantankerous coalition, a fact that renders decision making
arduous and risky.
His Pakistani counterpart too is linked to conservative constituencies.
Punjab's landed gentry has been traditionally hawkish. The military, drawn
largely from Punjab, is distrustful of India and wary of how the end of
Pakistan's hostility with it would affect the country's standing and its
own institutional future. The "national security" establishment in both
countries regard normalization of relations between the two states as
nothing short of national disaster. Even a significant portion of
Pakistan's business community, to which Mr. Sharif belongs, worries about
the costs to it of freer trade with India. Both prime ministers confront a
vocal and violent minority opposed to Indo-Pakistan detente. As against
these, logic, wisdom, and popular sentiment favour their mission.

It is not uncommon for conservative leaders to accomplish what liberal and
reputedly enlightened ones fail to do. French socialists, among them Mendes
=46rance and Guy Mollet, did not end the very savage warfare in Algeria.
Charles de Gaulle did. He was brought to power by a revolt of the
hardliners who were determined to keep Algeria French, and became the
unlikely dismantler of France's empire in Africa. Richard Nixon made his
political career as an anti-communist crusader. At one point during the
Korean war he openly advocated the use of nuclear weapons against China. As
a Congressman, then as vice-president he spewed fiery vitriol against the
Chinese government and leaders. Yet he was the first American president to
visit China and regarded the re-establishment of US relations with the
Peoples Republic as the greatest achievement of his presidency. A.B.
Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif may well be the latest among those unlikely
peacemakers.

The timing of their meeting is propitious. The nuclear tests of May 1998
have underlined the great risk in continuing hostility between neighbours
barely three minutes from Armageddon. A mutually agreed set of rules on
safety, deployment and warning is now a requirement for preventing
thermo-nuclear holocaust by accident, individual madness, or
miscalculation. Possession of nuclear capability by both countries has
yielded a security environment characterized by deterrence so that neither
side can contemplate war, a point underlined on Siachen Heights by
Pakistan's Chief of Army Staff.
But the assumption of deterrence produces new temptations and raises the
risks of miscalculating the other side's forbearance. As a new nuclear
power the United States behaved criminally once when it bombed Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. The second time it miscalculated the effectiveness of
deterrence and ordered its armed forces to cross the 38th parallel in
Korea. The miscalculation cost a milllion lives and a stalemate that
continues to this day. The third miscalculation occurred in Vietnam where
its repeated nuclear blackmail failed to break either the Vietnamese morale
or the Soviet and Chinese support for it.

In two of the three instances the US paid a high price for its
miscalculations. Washington recognized the value of "detente" only after
its Vietnam debacle. The management of deterrence demands a new logic of
caution, a limit on ambition, removal of ideological blinders, a lowering
of tension and taming of hostilities. Many commentators have emphasized the
need for a regime of nuclear restraint. Good, but not enough! As the cold
war amply showed, nuclear deterrence raises the temptation to 'low
intensity warfare', a lethal game that can spell doom in both India and
Pakistan. The bus diplomacy allows one to hope that in less than a year
after the nuclear tests Indian and Pakistani leaders are sensing the risks
which American policy makers took decades to comprehend.

It could not be happening in a more deserving region. At least half of
South Asia's more than one billion people barely subsist. More than half
are illiterate and do not have access to potable water. These legatees of
great civilizations are today among the most wretched on earth. They
deserve to be given life and raised to the level of humanity. And this is
not possible without regional cooperation, without a change in priorities
from bullets to bread. At a recent international conference in Delhi
delegates from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal repeatedly remarked that
there was desperate need for open trade and regional cooperation in South
Asia, yet it was blocked by the squabble between India and Pakistan. "We
are all hostages to your hostilities", said a Nepalese scholar.

"Will the bus trip lead to peace?" many people ask in Delhi. 'Let us hope'
was all one could say. There are reasons to hope. The first is that the two
prime ministers are serious men. Occasionally, they get serious about the
wrong thing, such as Hindutva or the Fifteenth Amendment. But in this case
they appear to be seriously wanting to do the right thing. Secondly,
personal likes and dislikes matter in negotiations. Those who know them
well say that Messrs Vajpayee and Nawaz Sharif have developed a rather
great fondness for each other, are inclined to comprehend each other's
viewpoint, recognize each other's domestic constraints, and trust each
other's intentions. "I have seen both together and I have talked to each
separately", said one insider, "and found the chemistry between them to be
unusually positive." If each believes that the other is sincere about
peacemaking, they may well make progress beyond the symbolism of bus ride,
buggy ride and Moghul pomp in Lahore.
The domestic environment is also favourable in both countries. The
euphoria over the nuclear tests has worn out. Its economic costs are being
felt, and its risks have begun to be understood. Hence, the promise of
progress in Indo-Pakistan relations has caught the popular imagination.
Welcoming youths drowned out the Jamaat-i-Islami protesters against the
test run of the Delhi-Lahore bus service. Frowns and condemnations greeted
the Shiv Sena's messing up of the cricket pitch in Delhi.

The start of the test series was widely welcome. Both governments ignored
the provocations and carried on with the plans for the bus and the test
matches. The test match fans in Chennai were friendly, received an honour
lap from the visiting team, and gave the victorious Pakistanis a standing
ovation. On the eve of Mr. Vajpayee's bus trip this visitor in Delhi finds
the Indian press and people anticipating the outcome with enthusiasm and
anticipation.
In fact, hopes on both sides are high. It is significant that despite the
loud nay sayers of the right, the main opposition parties in India and
Pakistan have welcomed the Indo-Pakistan summit. Yet, if the bus diplomacy
fails to match its spectacular symbolism with a modicum of substance, it
can produce
disillusionment and reversals.

It is not realistic to expect substantive agreements on longstanding
disputes. Diplomatic summits produce processes not treaties. At best they
yield broad indications of intent, the guidelines for foreign ministers and
secretaries who negotiate the details. One hopes though that in this
instance the officials of the two countries will have done some preparatory
work to give meaning to this dramatic event. They had the material to work
with. An agreement was reached in 1992 to end the absurd military
confrontation in the Siachen Glacier area. At the last foreign secretary
level meetings, hitches were introduced to prevent a final agreement. These
could be ironed out. Similarly, broad agreements exist on the Wullar
Barrage and Sir Creek salient. Agreement on these would signal a
determination by both sides to set aside petty details for the sake of
achieving a broad peace.

A great reservoir for peace lies in the historical and cultural affinities
between the people of India and Pakistan. The prime ministers' meeting will
gain in significance to the extent that they decide to feed this reservoir.
Travel between the two countries needs to be made easier, and the
unnecessary humiliations of police reporting ought to be spared the
travellers. An agreement on reopening the Indian and Pakistani consulates
in Bombay and Karachi, and on resuming the rail link through Rajasthan will
bring much relief to millions of people. Above all, meaningful beginnings
must be made toward enlarging commerce and cultural exchanges between the
two countries. The prime ministers are not likely to announce the specifics
of such agreements. But they can draw the outlines of the map they wish the
technicians and diplomats to fill out.

The question of Kashmir will of course stand as the great obstacle to a
final peace between India and Pakistan. It is nearly impossible for Messrs.
Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee to reach an agreement over this
thorny dispute. What they can do, however, is to appreciate each other's
perspectives, try to link those with Kashmiri aspirations, and begin the
process of searching for the alternatives that lie between fixed, by now
outdated, positions.
But what will matter most is the spirit with which they lay the
foundations of future Indo-Pakistan relations. In a front page article,
India's daily The Hindu quotes Sardar Jafri's lines: Tum aao
gulshan-i-Lahore se chaman bardosh, Ham aayen subh-i-Banaras ki roshni
laykar: Phir uskay baad yeh poochcheyn key kon dushman hai! (You come
wearing the fragrance of Lahore, We bring you the warmth of the morning in
Banaras: And then let's ask "who is the enemy!")

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