Book Review – Where Borders Bleed: An insider’s account of INDO-PAK relations

Rajiv Dogra is a retired Indian Foreign Service officer and has served as a diplomat in Pakistan. His book’s subtitle, “An Insider’s Account of Indo-Pak relations” thus raises expectations of startling revelations. Unfortunately, they are completely belied by the end of the book.

Barring a couple of personal incidents from when the author was posted in Karachi, there is nothing remotely close to “insider” information in the book.

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Where Borders Bleed was triggered by Dogra’s interaction with young students at an educational institute in Delhi a couple of years ago. Their questions, mainly in the nature of what so-called nationalist trolls throw up on various social media platforms, seem to have rankled Dogra into responding. The questions are obvious: Why is India soft on Pakistan? Why do we “appease” Pakistan when it is sending terrorists across? Why don’t we get Pakistan-occupied Kashmir back by force? If India and Pakistan can never be friendly, why are we even trying?

The questions seem to have shaken his convictions about chances of Indo-Pakistan peace. Dogra provides no coherent answers. His defence, if it can be called so, is a sense of helplessness because little can be done to change the structural factors in the two countries. Questions about the origins of Pakistan, its founding ideology, the Kashmir imbroglio, the unresolved underpinnings of Pakistan’s identity, the Sino-Pakistan relationship and the anti-India mindset of the Pakistani establishment are unlikely to change any time soon. Dogra finally quotes Farzana Shaikh’s theory that “Pakistan’s struggle against India is deeply embedded in a painful awareness of its own lack of a national history” and resigns the bilateral relationship to a contestational fate.

On the Indian side, Dogra looks at a young, ambitious population which wants to break free from the shackles of the past. They are impatient to seek India’s place in the world. They seek quick and easy answers to complex questions. Alas, there are none.

The brightest points in the book pertain to Dogra’s analysis of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, an important figure in promoting an anti-India mindset in Pakistan in the first three decades after Partition. Dogra quotes extensively from Bhutto’s speeches, letters and actions to show how he constantly worked to hurt India and learnt nothing despite provoking two wars (1965 and 1971), which Pakistan lost. Dogra has a lot of sympathy and affection for his charismatic daughter, Benazir. That is perhaps also due to the personal rapport that Benazir seems to have developed with Dogra during his stint in Pakistan.

Dogra has a similar response to another famous father-daughter duo. He is critical of the “idealist” Nehru but fawns over a “strong” Indira Gandhi. The book starts with a letter written from prison in June 1978 by Bhutto to Benazir where he compares himself to Nehru and Benazir to Indira. “I have no hesitation in saying that my daughter is more than a match for the daughter of Jawahar Lal Nehru, the goddess of India…,” Bhutto writes. The rest of the book doesn’t match up to the stunning start.