India and Pakistan have at long last agreed to set up a machinery whereby they can, if they wish, promote bilateral cooperation in specific field such as trade, scientific and cultural exchange and tourism. The joint commission, which New Delhi proposed and Islamabad has accepted, will provide such a machinery.
But it does not follow that we are about to witness the flowering of Indo-Pakistan cooperation in the above mentioned and other similar fields. Pakistan has not been interested in such cooperation because it has feared (or pretended) that it can open its doors to India only at the risk of being submerged under the flood of Indian goods, films or whatever. And the fact that it has agreed to the establishment of a joint commission does not mean that it has overcome its apprehensions, however unjustified these may be.
Islamabad has been interested in a non-aggression pact and it is precisely because India has not been willing to conclude such a treaty with it that it has accepted New Delhi’s proposal in respect of a joint commission as a halfway house. It apparently calculates that the present agreement will enable it to keep the dialogue with this country going and thus to press its no-war pact proposal.
If anything, the official-level talks in New Delhi have shown that difference between the two governments on basic issues remain as wide as ever. Pakistan has, for instance, once again refused to give an assurance that it will not concede bases or similar facilities to an external power on its territory and/or that, in conformity with the letter and spirit of the Simla agreement, it will seek a bilateral resolution of all disputes with this country. It has taken the stand that as a sovereign nation, it is free to concede bases or facilities to other countries and/ or to take any issue to an international forum. By the routine definition of sovereignty which has come to be widely accepted, Islamabad’s interpretation is valid, though that cannot enable it to violate the Simla agreement to which it is a signatory and from which it derived enormous advantages in 1972 when India returned to it over 5,000-square miles of territory and about 90,000 prisoners-of-war. Indeed, the concept of non-alignment itself has over the years been watered down to accommodate foreign bases in so-called non-aligned countries. But sovereignty in a developing country has to be defined in the context of the nationalist revolution which is the dominant characteristic of the third world. That is precisely why we in India have seen non-alignment as an expression of our sovereignty. Indeed, by this yardstick Pakistan has not been and is not today a sovereign nation. It is sovereign only in the formal sense. It wishes to retain its right to barter away its sovereignty in return for aid, military and economic. Moreover, in the process of emphasizing its Islamic identity, it has of late further watered down its concept of nationalism and, therefore, of sovereignty. Indian policy-makers should be aware of these realities as they continue, as they should, the dialogue with the Pakistanis.
There is a section of opinion in our country which believes that Pakistan has once again chosen to become an American puppet. This section would wish New Delhi to treat it as such. This proposition is at best only partially true. General Zia-ul-Haq is not a US stooge. In fact, it would have been easier for India to deal with him if he was that. He is managing to keep many balls in the air at the same time. If he is serving as a conduit for arms supply to the Afghan rebels, he is doing so as much at the behest of Saudi Arabia (and Pakistan’s own Jamaat-e- Islami) in the cause of Islam as at that of the United States. And he is taking care to regulate the flow so that he does not exhaust the patience of the Soviets. On the contrary, he is managing to maintain reasonably cordial ties with them so much so the construction of the Soviet-aided steel plant in Karachi continues. Similarly, if he allows the Americans to set up an electronic listening post somewhere near Peshawar or Islamabad as he well might, it will be as much in response to Saudi and Turkish wishes as in response to US needs. The most important feature of the Pakistani scene today is not that it is receiving highly sophisticated military hardware such, as F-16s from the United States as that the regime is continuing its search for a nuclear weapons capability. It speaks for our tendency to exaggerate the US capacity to manipulate other governments that we have not paid sufficient attention to the fact that the Reagan administration has felt obliged to ignore General Zia’s nuclear programme and to yield to his pressure to equip the F-16s for Pakistan with avionics which were not provided far in the original agreement. This is not the proper occasion to discuss US compulsions, except to say that the Reagan administration has become a prisoner of its own bloated cold war anti-Soviet rhetoric. But that is a separate issue. The pertinent point in the present context is that General Zia is pursuing a multi-faceted policy, that he has several arrows to his bow, that his search for “friendly” relations with this country is part of a complex exercise he is engaged in and, finally, that this makes it far more difficult for New Delhi to deal with him than would have been the case if he was a straightforward American puppet as perhaps some of his predecessors were. Influential Americans, including a number of senators, are apprehensive about General Zia’s intentions. They are not satisfied with his record in respect of human rights and they are not sure the regime can last. The administration can ignore them for some time but not for ever. So a dialogue with America may offer opportunities which New Delhi must not fail to foresee and grasp.