August-September 2009 
Year 16    No.143
Breaking Barriers


Chance of a lifetime

Pakistan at a crossroads presents India with the most serious potential threat but also its greatest opportunity

BY PREM SHANKAR JHA

The storm that greeted Dr Manmohan Singh’s inclusion of Balochistan in his joint statement with the Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani in Sharm el-Sheikh reveals the gap that has developed between the government and a large part of the public and the intelligentsia over the conduct of foreign policy, especially towards Pakistan. The statement provoked an understandable concern among opinion makers in India because Balochistan had not even been hinted at before in the composite dialogue and the back channel talks. Its sudden inclusion therefore seemed a gratuitous admission that India had indeed been meddling in Balochistan.

The prime minister and his advisers could hardly have failed to anticipate the reaction that the statement would provoke. But they went ahead and accepted Pakistan’s request because while the critics of every concession to Pakistan base their arguments solely on the experience of the past, Dr Manmohan Singh’s eyes are set firmly upon the future. More than any other Indian politician, Dr Singh has understood that Pakistan is at a watershed in its development as a nation. Which way it goes will depend to a large extent on the direction in which India pushes it. Therein lies not only the most serious potential threat to our country but also its greatest opportunity.

The threat is easy to identify. Pakistan is at war with a section of its own people on its western border. The war is not popular: nine out of 10 Pakistanis say openly that they are being forced to fight America’s war. An equal number believe that America cannot even win over sections of, let alone subjugate, the Taliban. They are convinced that one day domestic public opinion will force the US and its NATO partners to leave Afghanistan. The resulting Taliban ‘victory’ will finally extinguish Pakistan’s efforts to become a moderate, democratic society and turn large parts of it into a safe haven and recruiting ground for al-Qaeda-linked Islamist groups. After November 26 (26/11), one need hardly point out that the first target of these groups will be Kashmir and the Indian state.

The opportunity, by contrast, is less easy to identify, which may be why it so diligently evades the understanding of the Pakistan specialists in Delhi’s think tanks. To see wherein it springs from we need to understand the internal struggles that have shaped Pakistan’s development as a nation state and the role India has played in this evolution. Only then can we understand how critical India’s role could prove in the future.

For Pakistan, nation building has been a thankless task from its very outset. Unlike India, it did not inherit a settled identity. It did not even inherit people bound by a settled ideology. At the beginning of 1947 the Pathans of the North-West Frontier Province were stoutly against partition; undivided Punjab was still a determinedly secular province with a government composed in equal parts of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs; the real votaries of Pakistan were still sitting in Aligarh and Deoband in the heart of ‘Hindu’ India and the only other converts to the idea of Pakistan were a thousand miles away in East Bengal.

The new state had only two ways to forge a viable political and economic union out of such motley elements. The first was to keep emphasising their Islamic unity and the threat it continued to be under from ‘Hindu’ India. The second was to build a hard state on the European model by imposing a common cultural identity and a strong centralised state.

Both met with some initial success but at an exorbitant price. The first did somewhat homogenise West Pakistan but led to the secession of Bangladesh. The second, which did more lasting and insidious damage for the pursuit of a strong centralised state, delivered the country into the hands of the army. Military rule not only throttled the development of democracy but also prevented the accommodation of diverse ethnic identities within a federal system – the only sure recipe for political stability in Pakistan as in India.

As happened elsewhere during the cold war, Pakistan’s military rulers looked to an alliance with the US to cure their insecurity at home. Although weakened and persecuted, Pakistan’s democrats were not willing to give in. So in the face of ever strengthening democratic sentiment, as the cold war waned, Pakistan’s military rulers began to look for other sources of support and legitimacy within the country. This led to their alliance with the radical religious parties and the formal installation of Islam as the state religion.

In a manner similar to the late Solomon Bandaranaike’s Faustian alliance with the Sinhala Buddhists in Sri Lanka to promote Sinhala nationalism, every facet of Pakistan’s current crisis can be traced back to the alliance of convenience forged by General Zia ul-Haq. It gave birth to the policy of creating ‘defence in depth’ against India by converting Afghanistan into Pakistan’s backyard. This made the army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) back first Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and then the Taliban. In doing so they plunged Afghanistan into an endless civil war. What followed the Taliban’s victory in 1996 is now history. Suffice it to say that Osama bin Laden’s arrival in Afghanistan started a chain reaction of events that has finally precipitated Pakistan’s long simmering crisis of identity. When the Pakistan army lost control of its erstwhile protégés and had to fight them, it had to come to terms with the failure of five decades of increasingly reckless military stratagems designed to shore up the nation’s security (and its own pre-eminence).

The development of the army’s internal crisis of confidence was paralleled by a steady growth of democratic sentiment within the country. Pakistan’s defeat in the Kargil war dented the army’s credentials as the guardians of national security. In the years that followed, as Pakistan’s economy ground to a halt under the weight of post-nuclear international sanctions and the continuing burden of financing the military, more and more politicians, businessmen and opinion makers began to refer to the 1990s as a lost decade. They pointed out that four decades of ruinous military spending had not enabled the Pakistan army to win a single war against India. With the ultimate safety granted by nuclear weapons they began to voice demands for a reduction of the military budget.

The unprecedented civil society interaction between India and Pakistan that began in 2004 allowed them to see for themselves how far India had progressed in the meantime. The warmth of these interactions further strengthened the advocates of democracy. More and more Pakistanis became convinced that a moderate, relatively secular democracy was the only sure antidote to the sectarian violence that was threatening to tear their country apart. The rise of the Taliban-linked organisations within Pakistan and the links these have developed with al-Qaeda-linked sectarian organisations already present in the country have completed the disillusionment with military proactivity.

But the transition is in its infancy. The 2008 elections did not convert strong democratic sentiment into a strong government. President Zardari’s government has therefore neither been able to resist American pressure to deepen its involvement in the Afghan war nor to prevent the Pakistan army from trying to create a confrontation with India by instigating, or assisting, terrorist attacks to avoid having to move troops from the Indian to the Afghan border.

The strengthening of democratic forces in Pakistan and the crisis of confidence in its army has provided India with a once-in-an-epoch opportunity to shape the future of the entire subcontinent. It can do this by ceasing to think of the state of Pakistan as a single undifferentiated entity, recognising that it is a very young state still struggling to be born, and avoiding actions and gestures that can adversely affect the outcome of the struggle by reinforcing the perception of threat to Pakistan from India.

Dr Manmohan Singh has been doing this ever since he became prime minister. His restraint was evident after the suicide bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul which was traced back to serving members of the ISI and even more so after 26/11 when he studiously refrained from suggesting that the Pakistani government had had any hand in it.

When radio intercepts showed that the masterminds behind the Mumbai attack had close and continuing links with the ISI, Dr Singh hardened his tone but still continued to draw a line between the army and the civilian government. He has continued to do so in his talks with Zardari and then with Prime Minister Gilani at Sharm el-Sheikh.

His decision to include Balochistan in future discussions is born out of his awareness of the need to strengthen the hands of the Zardari government in bringing the Pakistan army to accept closer cooperation with India. This is not the place to discuss whether India has indeed been aiding the Baloch insurgents. But if putting all one’s cards on the table and reassuring Islamabad on this score helps to build trust and strengthen the Zardari government’s hands in its struggle to control policy by reducing the Pakistan army’s perception of a threat from India (or depriving it of this excuse for obduracy) then the price will be a small one to pay.

(Prem Shankar Jha, a well-known columnist, is former editor of the Hindustan Times.)


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