The hope for a change in Pakistan’s policy towards India, it seems, is now being pinned on Washington’s capacity and willingness to put pressure on Islamabad. But this is an illusion built on some false assumptions, says Girilal Jain
During the second non-official Indo-Pakistan dialogue organised by SUNDAY MAIL last week (November 21 and 22), the former Minister of External Affairs, Inder Gujral, went through the all-too-familiar exercise of explaining at some length why the Indian state, committed as it is, and has to be, to secular nationalism, cannot possibly accept the two-nation theory.
This was perhaps necessary in order once again to drive home the point that Indians regarded the stake in Kashmir high enough to accept the cost of trying to put down the Pakistan-backed terrorist movement there, and that if Pakistanis in fact want friendly relations with this country, they should be willing to end their intervention.
On the Indian side, Gujral was best placed to deliver this message in view of his reputation as a dove in Indo-Pakistan relations, his championship of the cause of Indian Muslims, both as an individual and as a Janata Dal leader, and his status as a former Minister of External Affairs. But it did not make much of an impression on the Pakistani participants.
The Pakistanis were not a monolithic group. On the contrary, each one of them spoke in a very distinct voice. The differences in their approaches were clearly visible even if, quite understandably, they did not press them. Surprising though it may appear, there was some merit in the statement by MB Naqvi, a leading Pakistani commentator, that Indian intellectuals appeared better integrated with their country’s ruling establishment than their Pakistani counterparts with theirs. But none of them was impressed by Gujral’s presentation.
Two of them may be quoted by way of illustration. Javed Jabbar, Minister of Information in the Benazir Bhutto government and a highly articulate and sophisticated individual, argued that it did not behove India to object to President Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s statement that the process of partition in 1947 was not complete since it had not only intervened effectively in East Bengal in 1971 to dismember Pakistan, but also expanded its own August 15, 1947, territory by incorporating in it Junagadh, Hyderabad and Goa.
He expressed annoyance that many Indians in high places regarded the Indo-Pakistan border as a mere line on the map and spoke of a common cultural heritage. For him, Pakistan was a distinct entity and he was at pains to emphasise that Muslims in India would evolve their own personality in conformity with their requirements, and so would Muslims in Bangladesh.
Sultan Ahmed, another well-known Pakistani commentator, was equally candid. He drew attention to the fact that Islamabad had not sought to raise the Kashmir issue at international forums between 1972, when the Shimla agreement was reached between Indira Gandhi and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, and early 1990 when the people in the Valley rose against India. It was, according to him, India’s vulnerability that had made Kashmir an issue in the domestic politics of Pakistan.
The two-nation theory, it appears from the discussions at the two seminars, is an Indian preoccupation. Pakistanis are not interested in it. They certainly do not use it justify their claim to Kashmir. This is surprisingly only a superficial view of the matter. On the contrary, it should be obvious, at least in retrospect, that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan, himself disowned the two-nation theory as soon as Pakistan was established. This is the plain implication of his address to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly on August 14, 1947, in which he said that the people in Pakistan would henceforth be Pakistani citizens with equal rights and obligations and not Muslims, Hindus, Christian Sikhs and Parsis.
It speaks for the casual manner we treat such developments that so senior a public figure as the former Prime Minister, Chandra Shekhar, should, on his own testimony, have become aware of Jinnah’s statement on recently and, even more pertinently, failed draw from it the inference that Pakistan was guided not by the two-nation theory but by considerations of realpolitik.
The same casualness has led many of us to compare Pakistan with Israel. It should have been obvious to us that Pakistan has not seen itself as a homeland for Muslims in the subcontinent, not to speak of Muslims elsewhere, as Israel has for Jews anywhere in the world. Once the transfer of population between the two Punjabs and some adjoining areas, necessitated by the orgy of violence on both sides of the new border, had taken place, Karachi closed the border to would-be immigrants from India. Its refusal to accept about 250,000 Bihari Muslims from Bangladesh can be traced back to that decision in the fifties. By contrast, some 300,000 illegal Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh are present in the Indian capital.
Pakistani participants in the two non-official dialogues doubtless referred to Indian intervention in East Bengal in 1971, but only in passing. The intention was to tell Indians that they had no right to adopt a holier-than-thou attitude in respect of Pakistan’s support for terrorists in Kashmir and Punjab and not to give expression to a deeply felt hurt and anguish. Perhaps the wound has healed. Time, as the saying goes, is a great healer. But it does appear quite wide of the mark to argue, as many Indian commentators do, that Pakistan’s intervention in Punjab and Kashmir is a belated response to the Indian action in Bangladesh two decades ago.
Indeed, it can be conclusively established that most Pakistani rulers have been believers in, and practitioners of, realpolitik. Clearly, President Zia-ul-Haq was the most thorough of them all. The recent disclosure by Lawrence Lifschultz of the manner in which he diverted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms to Iran in the eighties in collaborating with Israel without reference to his US and Saudi benefactors should clinch the issue.
Lest the Iran-Contra scam should confuse the issue, it may be noted that the clandestine sale of arms by the US government in order to raise funds for rebels in Nicaragua refused by Congress was a limited and brief affair. Israel’s supply of arms to Iran was apparently far bigger and more durable. So far, the route was not public knowledge. Now, it has been reasonably well-established by Lifschultz that Pakistan served as a conduit.
This disclosure should help dispel the illusion that Iranians can be more interested in the well-being of Shias in Pakistan than with state-to-state relations with Islamabad, and that Pakistan can be immobilised by the competition for influence between Teheran and Riyadh. Being the hard-headed practitioner of politics he was, General Zia saw an opportunity first in Punjab and then in Kashmir and seized it with both hands. In a sense, the opportunity did not arise independently of him; he partly created it.
Since Zia’s protégés are in power in Islamabad, it would be in order to draw the inference that they are not likely to let go the leverage they hold in relation to India in Punjab and Kashmir. They have no historical reason to be overly fond of Sikhs and they are not known to have any kind of respect for, or sympathy with, the people of Kashmir. But all that is irrelevant in a power game.
The hope for a change in Pakistan’s policy of bleeding this country, it seems, is now being pinned on Washington’s capacity and willingness to put pressure on Islamabad. This is an illusion built on some false assumptions. Islamabad has successfully circumvented, if not defied, Washington’s pressure on the nuclear weapons issue for a whole decade. Pakistan could do so because, in the final analysis, the American leverage on it was not all that decisive. In the struggle against the Soviet military presence in Afghanistan, Islamabad had the upper hand for the simple reason that Washington was far more keen to see the Soviets humiliated and defeated.
Once this objective had been achieved with the Soviet pull-out in February 1989, US military aid to Pakistan was bound to decline, Pressler amendment or not. The process could not have been avoided, especially after the collapse of Communist regimes in eastern and central Europe followed by the one in the Soviet Union itself. Pakistanis know it. That partly explains the firmness of their refusal to yield to US pressure on the nuclear issue.
It is doubtful that American policy-makers are sensitive to the danger Pakistan, armed with nuclear weapons and capable of continuing to destabilise India, can constitute for the world order they are trying to establish. But even if they are, there is precious little they can do to address this problem. They cannot possibly block multilateral aid to Pakistan through the World Bank and the IMF when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is far ahead of India in accepting their prescriptions for a free-market economy.
Regardless of the validity or otherwise of the concept of a unipolar world, it is not particularly relevant to Indo-Pakistan relations. Far more critical is our assessment of the future prospects and policies of China.
Sunday Mail, 1 December 1991