by John Elliott
50. ‘China wages a quiet war of maps with its neighbors’, Washington Post, 15 February 2013 http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-wages-a-quiet-war-of-maps-with-its-neighbors/2013/02/14/d682b704-76b3-11e2-aa12-e6cf1d31106b_story.html?wpisrc=nl_cuzheads
51. Brahma Chellaney, ‘China’s Hydro-Hegemony’, 8 February 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/08/opinion/global/chinas-hydro-hegemony.html?_r=0 and http://www.chellaney.net/2013/02/08/chinas-hydro-hegemony
52. Indrani Bagchi, ‘Depsang Bulge incursion accidental, Chinese military thinktank says’, The Times of India, 15 July 2013, http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Depsang-Bulge-incursion-accidental-Chinese-military-thinktank-says/articleshow/21088756.cms
53. ‘Xi Jinping unveils 5 proposals for improving Sino-India ties’, PTI, 19 March 2013, www.indianexpress.com/news/xi-jinping-unveils-5-proposals-for-improving-sinoindia-ties/1090268/
54. http://www.ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/05/21/china-turns-friendly-with-india-but-why/
55. C. Raja Mohan, ‘With China, keep it real, Indian Express, 20 May 2013, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/with-china-keep-it-real/1117966/
56. Brahma Chellaney, ‘Singh’s Sham Water Accord, A new agreement between China and India doesn’t require Beijing to institutionalize rules-based cooperation on shared resources’, The Wall Street Journal, 31 October 2013, http://www.chellaney.net/2013/10/30/singhs-sham-water-accord/
57. Quoted in Martin Jacques, When China Rules the World, p. 180, Penguin Books, Second Edition, 2012, http://www.penguinbooksindia.com/en/content/martin-jacques
21
Pakistan and the Neighbourhood
Few Friends
India does not get on well with most of its South Asian neighbours. This is partly because of its often heavy-handed diplomacy, but also because of problems left over by history, notably the partition of Pakistan from India in 1947 and the two countries’ subsequent territorial dispute over Kashmir. The turbulent relations between the two have upset the development of South Asia as a region of trade and economic co-operation, as well as helping to blight India’s position with other neighbours.
The seven countries of the subcontinent – India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and the Maldives – have a total population of 1.7bn and share much of the brainpower and many of the other attributes and natural resources that have helped to fuel India’s economic success. Yet the India–Pakistan stand-off, and the looming and interfering presence of China, have meant that they largely fail to co-operate and share in India’s relative success. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), which was founded in 1985 to emulate South East Asia’s ASEAN trade bloc, has achieved little. The great potential that could be achieved by a unified approach to subjects like climate change, hydro power and the environment as well as counter-terrorism, trade and joint investments has not even been tackled.
India’s relations with Pakistan have greater explosive acrimony and hostility than they do with China, even though the border is less complicated because most of it is clearly defined. There is a Line of Control (LoC) along a 776 km section in Jammu and Kashmir, which is clear and is administered as a temporary arrangement, even though it is not formally accepted by either country as a permanent border, and there are exchanges of fire between the armies on either side. To the south, a 2,308-km formal border stretching down to the Indian state of Rajasthan and Pakistan’s Sindh province is undisputed and peaceful. There is only a 110 km stretch, known as the Actual Ground Position Line (AGPL), which is undefined like the LAC with China. This is around the Siachen glacier in Kashmir1 and Sir Creek. Lives are sometimes lost in the firings across the LoC (whereas none has been lost in border disputes with China since 1993) and there have been three wars and one near-war between the two countries since 1947.
The basic dispute between the two nuclear powers has existed since independence. Pakistan claims Kashmir, a predominantly Muslim area centred on the 5,2200-ft high Srinagar valley, as its territory. In response, India claims (but has never expected to get or seriously pursued) Pakistan’s Azad Kashmir, immediately to the west of the LoC, and its Northern Areas that stretch up to the border with China at the 15,400-ft high Khunjerab Pass in the Karakoram mountains.
Mainstream politicians on both sides recognize that the only logical settlement is to abandon their claims and accept the Line of Control as the formal border, but long-standing passions make it difficult to put this into practice. On the Pakistan side, it would be firmly resisted by the army, backed by the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which pursues an aggressive policy on India in order to justify its existence and political authority, and to extend Pakistan’s regional reach. It would probably be accepted in India, provided there was a strong government in power, though it could be difficult to gain political acceptance. There is also rivalry for influence in Afghanistan and there is a China factor – Beijing enjoys India being destabilized by uncertain borders with Pakistan.
Kashmir
For the first 35 years or so after independence, the Pakistan–India confrontation focused on the claims for Kashmir territory. Cross-border terrorism then developed in the 1980s when Pakistan trained and helped infiltrators to cross the border into India’s state of Punjab during Sikh extremists’ unsuccessful Khalistan (independence) movement, and then into Kashmir across the LoC from around 1989–90 to foment an insurgency against India. Later there were major terror attacks in other parts of India.
The internal Kashmir insurgency stemmed from demands for some form of autonomy from Delhi, with extremists wanting full independence, or to become part of Pakistan, and a majority wanting a special semi-autonomous status. India would never agree to independence or a Pakistan takeover, and there is no prospect in the foreseeable future of the semi-autonomous demands being met in any sort of settlement between Delhi and the Kashmiris. That is partly because of an unwillingness in the Indian capital to grapple with the issue, and partly because no settlement is possible without the involvement of Pakistan.
Consequently, Kashmir regularly has periods of serious unrest, as happened in 2010 when protests were driven primarily by discontented youth.2 The army was called in to quell clashes between security forces and stone-throwing and mostly young demonstrators. Kashmir seemed doomed to many more years of uncertainty, with periods of violence alternating with relative calm.3 Prospects for the state’s youth were bleak, with serious risks of them becoming increasingly militant. After two decades of trouble, generations had grown up in a stone-throwing culture where baiting and attacking security forces, and being viciously attacked and even killed in return, had become part of regular life from the age of nine or ten. This led to a declining work culture with poor job opportunities because there was no significant private sector investment.
There has been little improvement since then and some facets of the insurgency continue, with Pakistan continuing to allow and facilitate militants to cross its border into Kashmir. Despite poor performance in the official economy, however, Srinagar shows signs of growing consumerism. The city is thriving both on black money that circulates widely, much of it flowing across the LoC from Pakistan. There is also widespread corruption involving the security forces as well as the state government. This means there are strong vested interests that see no need to bring normalcy to the state.
Peace Talks
Politicians, businessmen and many others in both India and Pakistan increasingly want to move ahead and normalize relations, and to put aside the primary issue of Kashmir and the LoC that they know will not be settled in the foreseeable future. India’s two prime ministers since 1998 – Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh – both pursued the cause of peace with Pakistan, even though their efforts were disrupted by terror attacks and cross-border incidents triggered by Pakistan. Manmohan Singh spelt out the reasons for his initiatives in May 2010 at one of his rare formal press conferences in Delhi, when he stated that India ‘cannot realize its
full development potential unless we have the best possible relations with our neighbours – and Pakistan happens to be our largest neighbour’.
He missed an opportunity here to give shape and logic to his often criticized determination to have talks with Pakistan. Imagine the headlines if he had done, such as ‘Pakistan peace will boost India, to 12 per cent growth’, or ‘Singh adds econ logic to Pak peace bid’.4 There might have been one or two negative pitches such as ‘Singh tacitly admits Pakistan stunts India’s economy’, but the positive message would have won through, and Singh might have been mocked less for his (unrealizable) wish to be written into the history books as the prime minister who made peace with Pakistan. People would have begun to understand why he – and Vajpayee before him – were so keen on mounting seemingly futile bids with India’s increasingly dangerous neighbour. Peace, however, is not essential for economic success – there was strong growth in the 1990s and 2000s when there were extensive conflicts with Pakistan and cross-border terrorism.
Shivshankar Menon picked up the theme in his August 2011 lecture, saying: ‘We need to work for a peaceful periphery. We have an interest in the peace and prosperity of our neighbours, removing extremism and threats from their soil, as we are doing successfully with Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Bhutan’.5 The aim was not just to stop terrorism and cross-border insurgencies but jointly to develop South Asia.
Ironic though it may seem, the best progress on a deal in recent years came after General Pervez Musharraf, who had engineered a near-war on the LoC at Kargil in 1999 when he was Pakistan’s army chief of staff, became president. The start, though, was not auspicious. Vajpayee organized summit talks in July 2001 in Agra, the Taj Mahal tourist city, and Musharraf used his public relations skills and apparent friendliness to upstage Vajpayee with an unscheduled televised breakfast Briefing for newspaper editors. The summit ended in confusion and failure, with hardline ministers on both sides upsetting whatever the two leaders had hoped to agree. India’s BJP leaders felt it was not sellable, politically.6
This was followed by an agreement on Line of Control ‘ceasefire’ in November 2003, which dramatically reduced the cross-border clashes and general violence in Jammu and Kashmir. (official figures show that the number of incidents came down from 3,401 in 2003 when 795 civilians, 314 security forces and 1,494 militants were killed to 118 incidents in 2012 with 23 civilians, 14 security forces and 58 militants killed.7)
Vajpayee had more talks with Musharraf in 2004 and then Manmohan Singh picked up on the initiatives when he became prime minister. The solution that was being worked out would not have led to any change on the borders, but aimed to make the Line of Control irrelevant with gradual demilitarization and devolved government. There would have been a ‘soft border’ with relaxed visa restrictions, cross-border travel and trade, the reunification of divided families and friends, and liaison arrangements on economic policy and other matters. Musharraf has said that the four-point agenda was not complete, but that wide agreement had been reached despite some hitches.8 This was, however, not approved (and might never have been) by the Pakistan army, nor by hard-line lobbies in either country, and the talks faded away when Musharraf faced increasing political problems in Pakistan and was ousted from office in 2008. Such a solution is not feasible now because India could not accept a soft border when Pakistan is wracked by the uncertainties of Taliban terrorism.
Relations next seemed to improve after the appointment of a young and personable 34-year-old Pakistan foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar. Visiting Delhi in July 2011, she spoke of a ‘mindset change’ in both countries and of a new generation seeing the relationship differently from the past.9 ‘It is our desire to make the dialogue process uninterrupted and uninterruptible,’ she said. It sounded like 23 years earlier when Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi, then young prime ministers of Pakistan and India, met in 1988 and brought a fresh but short-lived focus. Would this be any different? It was not clear what weight Khar’s words carried because of power being divided in Pakistan between the government, the military and the ISI – the signals were mixed and were undermined regularly by Pakistan’s aggressive and voluble interior minister, Rehman Malik.10
Some progress was made on visas, foreign direct investment, and India potentially receiving ‘most-favoured nation’ trading status (which it had given Pakistan 15 years earlier). Bilateral trade officially totals only some $2.5bn a year, plus perhaps another $3bn in informal links, mainly routed through the Gulf. There is an official target of $6–8bn, but that is unlikely to be realized because policy decisions are rarely implemented fully or quickly and there are only two cross-border airline flights a week – a fact that illustrates the tortuous relations.
Terrorism
The perennial question in India is how and why peace initiatives should be continued when they are regularly disrupted by actions allegedly originating in Pakistan – either terror attacks or clashes on the border – and when Pakistan does not rein in terrorists such as Hafiz Saeed, who roamed freely in the country despite being held responsible (by the US among others) for organizing attacks. ‘Pakistan is determined to confront us bilaterally, regionally and internationally. It infiicts wounds on us, through jihadi terrorism, for instance,’ says Kanwal Sibal, a former Indian foreign secretary, who favours a tough line.11 ‘There is no other country that uses terrorism as an instrument of state policy towards us, or where jihadi groups openly exist and incite hatred towards India.’
Terrorism drove the countries close to full military conflict in December 2001, when there was an attack on the Indian parliament building in Delhi, significantly (and humiliatingly in Indian eyes) just five months after Vajpayee had hosted the Agra summit. The US and UK feared in December 2001 that India would stage a retaliatory attack that could have sparked a nuclear war, and the UK advised its nationals living in Delhi to be prepared to evacuate – a move that India condemned as diplomatic pressure to make it back off from a confrontation. On 26 November 2008, in a much bigger attack, now remembered as 26/11, terrorists arrived by sea in Mumbai and shot their way into the Taj and Oberoi hotels and other targets, killing 166 people. This led to increasing pressure in India, escalated by media coverage, to respond strongly in response to such threats and terrorism.
One method has been spelt out by G. Parthasarathy, a former senior diplomat and high commissioner to Pakistan (1998–2000), who says that during the Narasimha Rao government in the mid1990s, ‘acts of terrorism in India resulted in violence in populated centres like Karachi and Lahore’. As a consequence, ‘terrorism in Indian urban centres virtually ended’.12 Benazir Bhutto, then Pakistan’s prime minister, had ended a dialogue with India, so it might have been assumed that terrorist attacks would build up again in India, says Parthasarathy, but that did not happen. ‘Pakistansponsored terrorism in Punjab ended and was virtually non-existent across India, except in Jammu and Kashmir. This was largely because of measures by Narasimha Rao to ensure that Pakistan paid a high price on its territory for sponsoring terrorism in India’. I also remember from my time in India in the 1980s that, within a few days of a major atrocity in the Indian state of Punjab, there would frequently be civil unrest and bomb attacks in the Pakistani city of Karachi that exploited local sectarian, ethnic and other divisions.
Musharraf admitted such mutual attacks in a speech in India after he had been ousted from the presidency. In characteristically bombastic but semi-jocular style, he said that the two countries had done ‘a lot of meddling’ in each other’s internal affairs.13 ‘Your RAW does exactly what the ISI does, and the ISI does exactly what RAW does,’ he said, referring to both countries’ secret services. ‘The past has been dirty the past has been bad, but don’t put the blame on Pakistan’.
A new factor for the Indian government is growing pressure from an excitable media, especially television chat show hosts who have become more strident in recent years and demand retribution rather than peace initiatives. Frequent cross-border clashes in 2013
, after a ten-year lull, led to the beheading of an Indian soldier and other deaths.14 There was a media frenzy after the beheading with the chat shows raising the tempo to such a pitch that Manmohan Singh was forced to declare that it ‘cannot be business as usual’ with Pakistan.
There has also been pressure from the parliamentary opposition and it is likely that a BJP-led government, if elected in 2014, would take a tough stance. It would probably refuse to continue talks after terror attacks and instruct the army to react more aggressively to Pakistan firing across the LoC. ‘The biggest problem in our dealing with Pakistan has been our defensive attitude, our unwillingness to retaliate against Pakistan so that a price is imposed on it for its infractions,’ says Kanwal Sibal. He also lists as part of the problem ‘our reluctance to assume risks accompanying a tougher policy, our concerns about the reaction of the international community if we acted against Pakistan, our fear that if we did that, our policy of treating our differences with Pakistan bilaterally would be compromized as the issues would get internationalised’. Pakistan is also a factor in India’s internal politics because politicians believe that moderating reactions is assumed to win votes among India’s large Muslim population and ‘denote a more “secular” and less “anti-Muslim” bias’, says Sibal.
My Missed Kargil Scoop
It is not clear how much a civilian government in Pakistan knows about what its army and the ISI are doing. There has never been any doubt that the army dominates the government, sometimes from behind the scenes and sometimes openly. This became especially pertinent when Nawaz Sharif was re-elected prime minister in June 2013 – having been ousted from an earlier period in office in October 1999 by a coup organized by General Musharraf, the then army chief of staff, who made himself president. About seven months before he removed Sharif, Musharraf staged a mini-invasion in the mountains above the Indian town of Kargil, between the Kashmir capital of Srinagar and the Buddhist region of Ladakh.15