Pakistan: India takes a myopic view

Nations need diplomacy, or they’ll be readying for war all the time; Prime Minister Narendra Modi needs megaphone diplomacy. Very few things have gone right as a result. The Prime Minister has been practising this trade from the day he was sworn in. It won him not a little applause within months of taking office, and his name rang out from Madison Square Gardens in New York to Sydney Harbour.

Not much has gone right, in spite of flashes of optimism early on that turned out to be false, with shock results emanating from Beijing and Islamabad, our largest and difficult neighbours, in response to the kindest overtures from Mr Modi’s diplomatic repertoire.

China was much advertised. Mr Modi was its darling since he had been visiting the neighbour to the north from the time he was chief minister. But when President Xi Jinping arrived in Ahmedabad to sway on the same swing in the park as the Prime Minister, his heavy-duty troops showed up with him. Men of the People’s Liberation Army swarmed into what we thought was our side of the unclear boundary and just stayed put.

With Pakistan, sari diplomacy — despatch of that elegant Indian ladies’ apparel for Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s mother — was the Indian leader’s chosen instrument to create a favourable environment for beneficial bilateralism. By now, however, in a space of just over a year, the early expectation of goodwill on both sides has evaporated, replaced by a discourse of threats.

Foolishly Pakistan’s national security adviser Sartaj Aziz has sought to let India know that his country possesses nuclear weapons. Such a tribal essay at brinkmanship, it should perhaps be said, has its roots in India’s failure to gauge that the regional dynamics have taken a new turn of late — that recent events have given Islamabad the confidence to think that a new phase in India-Pakistan relations has been struck, and that this is to its advantage. New Delhi simply failed to read the wind and continued to treat India-Pakistan relations in the business-as-usual fashion.

Two parallel frameworks have helped set the stage for a new turn in India-Pakistan relations, and India will need a wholly different toolkit to negotiate this unexpected bend in the road. The first is the field of post-US Afghanistan. America and China, in their respective self-interest, have decreed that Pakistan be given a free hand in shaping events in Afghanistan in the foreseeable future, with Washington and Beijing playing god-fairy.

The departing US special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Dan Feldman, informed an American audience not long ago that long-term stability in Afghanistan would be elusive without Pakistan’s support. This means the US takes it as an obligation to lay the gifts it possesses before Pakistan in the expectation that the Pakistan Army will be able to extract appropriate behaviour from the Taliban who have been sheltering in Pakistan since America threw them out of Kabul in 2001.

If the Pakistan Army has been buoyed by the US and Chinese interests coinciding in Pakistan’s favour in the Afghan theatre, the recent Chinese assurance of an infrastructure investment of nearly $50 billion through the so-called One Belt, One Road mechanism inside Pakistan — incidentally, a good deal of it inside the territories of Kashmir under Pakistani occupation — has lifted the Pakistani capitalist class and its political establishment, not to say anything of the Army.

Together, the pattern of twin developments have given the Pakistani ruling establishment a leg-up of the kind that has not been seen before, including when Pakistan had entered Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) as a check on communism (and India) decades ago under American tutelage and guardianship, and created a wholly new paradigm in South Asian affairs.

In this new heady atmosphere for Pakistan, the basic sutra of bilateralism in settling disputes with India, thrown up by the Simla Agreement and the Lahore Declaration, may be treated as being as good as dead. If the planned meeting of the national security advisers of the two countries did not take place on account of the freshly-fuelled Pakistani irredentism owing to a Sino-US tango working in Islamabad’s favour, it is best to accept the reality that the meeting was doomed from the start — that it was dead in the water.

In New Delhi, an appreciation of a new turn being formed in the road, the setting of a new stage in India-Pakistan ties, failed to materialise because the institutional discipline of diplomacy received short shrift in government as a maladroit Prime Minister’s Office took charge, taking itself to be the centre of the universe.