Berating Mani Shankar Aiyar for Pak Meeting Bad News for Track II

With a meeting on Pakistan becoming a poll issue in Gujarat, it’s the Track II dialogue that has to bear the brunt.

(Photo: Rahul Gupta/ The Quint)

The innocuous dinner meeting organised with former officials by Mani Shankar Aiyar, which Arun Jaitley says has violated the national position on talks with Pakistan, should have Track 2-wallahs like me worried.

Why then are the two NSAs periodically in conversation with each other if it is prohibited? Why are the visas issued for bilaterals, and why was one given to former Pakistan foreign minister Mahmud Kasuri, the person in the eye of the storm? He is the mother of doves and keeps his balance.

One such India-Pakistan discussion which I attended was anodyne – hardly a conspiracy to influence elections in Gujarat, as alleged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. One must not forget that it was Modi who had invited Nawaz Sharif for his swearing-in ceremony in 2014, attended a Nawaz family wedding at Lahore uninvited and impromptu in 2015, and allowed the ISI to investigate an IAF air base in 2016 at Pathankot. It is indeed surprising that Modi is now seized with Pak-paranoia!

Official Policy on Pakistan

There are questions that Prime Minister Modi should answer. There is, as far as is known, no official policy on talks with Pakistan, as is being claimed by Jaitley. The policy is normally enunciated by the foreign minister, which in this case is Sushma Swaraj. In 2016, she had said that there will be no official/structured talks till terror attacks come to an end. That is the national position but it is flexible. Every day, officials from both sides talk to each other.

Incidentally, DG Rafiq (belonging to the Pakistan Army) has denied posting any material to influence elections in Gujarat as was alleged, after a Facebook post came to light that supported the Congress party.

Dragging Pakistan into the poll campaign is a case of damage control by the BJP’s propaganda machinery. It is important to keep the channels of dialogue open with Pakistan. The gist of Kasuri’s presentation was to end the cycle of violence and seek a mutually acceptable modus-vivendi, of the kind that was nearly reached in 2007 when he was the foreign minister.

In these days of competitive nationalism, and little appetite for dialogue with Pakistan, we – the convenors of uninterrupted India-Pakistan Track II conversations – are ridiculed and even dubbed anti-national. Ask people like Ram Madhav or Ajit Doval. Even Modi referred to the P-word as an enemy during his Gujarat campaign speech. They usually say: The only thing to talk to Pakistan is about the recovery of occupied Kashmir. Like it or not, Kashmir is a disputed territory and still on the United Nations register of unresolved conflicts.

To be sure, so that none of us is subjected to the Sudheendra Kulkarni kind of treatment, our dialogue is held in a third country, the most recent one being held in Colombo last month, and it was pretty productive. I am not sure whether the current ‘embargo’ covers Track-II as well.

Colombo Meeting, Part of Track-II Dialogue

The events preceding the Colombo dialogue included Trump’s speech on South Asia and Afghanistan in August – a strong public admonishment of Pakistan’s continuing bad habit of nurturing terrorists, the risk of its loose nuclear weapons falling into wrong hands, and fulsome praise for India’s sterling work in Afghanistan.

According to our Pakistani interlocutors, Trump touched Rawalpindi’s two raw nerves: Enhanced Indian role in Kabul and insecure nukes.

Also, around the time of the Colombo meeting, Pakistan’s emerging TV gladiator Air Vice Marshal Shahzad Chaudhry had penned a nostalgic letter to a newspaper eulogising the martial law belonging to Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s era, alleging that the country’s civilian elite has made Pakistan ungovernable, citing the Panama Papers and incompetence. He conveniently omitted the reference to retired generals flourishing from the Fauji Foundation, and other enterprises who’ve wreaked havoc on democratic credentials of the country.

Consensus on Confidence-Building Measures

The framework of such Track II dialogue has changed over a period of time. Three groups from the two sides, drawn from streams such as culture and media, economists, political analysts, security experts and social scientists work collectively to construct implementable CBMs (Confidence-Building Measures) to enhance people-to-people bonding keeping hard security – what Pakistanis refer to as core issues – on the back-burner.

Once a political breakthrough seems imminent, these CBMs can be pressed home. The fundamental challenge for both sides is to alter the behaviour of Rawalpindi-based military establishment by addressing its imagined insecurities. Given this intractable obstacle, most participants are hoping for the return of the ‘Musharraf moment’ that was missed in 2007-08.

The conference reviewed the contemporary political scene in Pakistan, with Pakistanis incensed over Trump’s Pakistan-bashing at a time when US-Pakistan relations were at the lowest ever. Worse, a fragile domestic political scene sans Nawaz Sharif made people jittery.

And R&AW’s eternal perfidies are ubiquitous. A Pakistani journalist taking advantage of poetic licence compared this situation to ‘Razia Sultana gundon ke beech ghiri hui hai (Queen Razia has been surrounded by goons from all sides)’.

While most Pakistanis counselled discretion in dealing with the temperamental Trump, a retired General known for his cockiness said: “You know, I recently told US Generals at a conference – don’t threaten us….we have nuclear weapons.” Perhaps, it’s because of this saviour avatar that people see the army as a fairy and an angel.

Rumours on the Sidelines of the Meet

The real stuff is whispered on the sidelines of the conference, like the ISI’s sinister plot in breaking up the PML(N), ramping up Imran Khan’s PTI as the lead party to prop him up as the next prime minister, and religious parties like the JuD and Tehreek-e-Labaik joining the political mainstream to weaken the PMLN in Punjab. The judiciary and the media, it seems, are going along with this plan for installing a weak government.

Despite these efforts by the establishment, many Pakistanis felt that Nawaz Sharif’s party would still emerge as the single largest party, and be able to cobble together a rump coalition government. No one was willing to give a chance to Musharraf’s All Pakistan Muslim League with many doubting whether he would return to Pakistan.

Overall the Army has further bolstered its standing as the fulcrum of governance and stability vis a vis an incompetent, corrupt and inefficient elected government.

Dialogue Must Continue

All this is bad news for democracy trying to deepen roots in Pakistan. The establishment’s capacity to manipulate the arithmetic of elections, fire from the shoulders of the judiciary, and in the words of one Pakistani journalist ‘beat reporters black and blue if they do not toe the army line’ have resulted in familiar graffiti :‘Thank you Gen Qamar Bajwa’.

In Myanmar, the army’s dominant role is enshrined in the Constitution. In Pakistan, the Army rules without being accountable through manufactured popular sentiment.

Indians were informed that while slogans like ‘Lekar rahenge Kashmir’ are quite common in Pakistan, people in Pakistan do not hate India. On the other hand, latest Pew survey suggests 63 percent of Indians are advocating use of greater military force against Pakistan, while 71 percent Indians have a very unfavourable view of Pakistan. This is an increase of nine percent over the previous year following the surgical strikes.

A Pakistani commentator reminded that while two elected governments would have completed their full term (the present government in 2018) no Prime Minister has completed his full term. Ashley Tellis from Carnegie Endowment has asserted that altering Pakistan’s military behaviour is not achievable at present or in the future, adding that the US lacks the will and the means to do it and that China won’t do it.

Under these conditions, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s dream of breakfast at Amritsar, lunch at Lahore and dinner at Kabul, is unrealisable. But still the unbanned (?) India-Pakistan track-II dialogue must go on, if necessary, for another 70 years, as again in the words of Dr Singh, ‘You can change friends, not neighbours’.

Uncharacteristically, Modi is using delusional facts to paint Pakistan as the enemy. There is something more important than winning elections.

( The author is convenor of an ongoing India-Pakistan dialogue since 2003. Major General (retd) Ashok K Mehta is a founder member of the Defence Planning Staff, the forerunner of the current Integrated Defence Staff. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)

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